by John Lutz
“It’s what I want,” Cheryl said.
“It’s what you think you want.” His own voice was high, choked, but he drew a deep breath, swallowed and knew he’d regained control at least of his vocal cords. “It’s not unusual for a woman, an attractive woman like you who’s been married a long time, to think the grass might be greener somewhere else. It’s an infatuation, a temporary infatuation that will pass within months …”
She shook her head slowly; there was anguish in her mascaraed eyes. “It’s not only an infatuation, Bill, it’s a need.”
“For Christ’s sake, a need for what? For Carl Bauer?”
“Not only for Carl Bauer. There’s a part of me that’s never come to life, that I need to give a chance. At least that’s how I feel …”
Peterson appeared puzzled, frustrated, the look of a man in a maze. “What could you possibly want within reason that you don’t have or can’t get?”
Cheryl shook her head with a serene sadness that infuriated him. “It’s nothing material. I feel I have a potential for life that I’ll never realize the way things are now.”
“Potential that needs to be realized? … What do you mean—artistic?”
“Maybe … I don’t know.”
“For Christ’s sake, you take ceramics!”
Cheryl began to laugh then. The bitter laughter came bubbling up from dark unexpected depths within her, and she could no more stop it than she could stop water bubbling from a deep well. It was subterranean laughter, alien, and it scared her.
Peterson stared at his wife, his face reddening, a faint tremor in his hands that gripped the arms of the vinyl recliner. Then he saw the expression on Cheryl’s face, the tears tracking down her cheeks, and he didn’t know if she was laughing or crying. He didn’t know what to think, didn’t know what he should feel.
“Think of Melanie,” he said.
The muted, broken sounds gradually stopped bursting from Cheryl, and she was calm again, wiping her cheeks with stiffened yet graceful long fingers. Her knuckles were gnarled, the tendons on the backs of her hands prominent. Her hands had aged before the rest of her. There was a soft sadness in her eyes, as if she realized what the hands foretold.
“Think of Melanie,” he repeated
“I am … I have.”
“You can’t do this to her on some whim, some illogical, transitory crush that will soon pass.”
“You could see her anytime you wanted, Bill, you know that.”
“Don’t you care what you’d be doing to her?”
“She was the thing I cared about most, thought about most, before I made my decision.”
He hadn’t wanted to hear that, another cold penetration to the heart. “Have you talked to her yet?” he asked.
“No, I thought we should do that together. I thought that’s how you’d want it.”
Peterson pressed his head against the soft back of the chair, closed his eyes. His face was pale. “I don’t want it at all. Eventually you’ll realize the mistake you’ve made, but by then the damage will have been done.”
“Something like this happens,” Cheryl said, “you do the best you can. That’s what I’m trying to do.” Her voice was controlled now; she’d slipped back behind her mask.
“When do you plan to leave?” Peterson asked.
“I don’t know. Soon.”
“Don’t go,” Peterson said, “please.”
“We’ve been through that.”
The flesh around his closed eyes danced as if he were in pain. “But I’m begging you now. Really begging you.”
She was surprised that he’d beg at this point, surprised also that she was embarrassed for him. “Don’t, Bill …” She recognized her growing pity for him as a weakness, fought it.
“A week,” he implored. “Give it a week before you do anything else, say anything to Melanie.”
“It won’t make any difference, Bill; we both know it won’t.”
“It might. A week … You owe us that.”
She did owe him something; at least she thought she did. “All right,” she agreed, “but I don’t see what difference seven days will make.”
“The earth was created in seven days.”
Cheryl smiled at him, sighed. “It was at that. But not by you and me.”
Melanie came into the house the back way, through the garage, slamming the door hard enough for china in the kitchen to rattle.
“A towel, Mom!”
But Cheryl was already on her way to get it.
“Nice swim?” Peterson called to his daughter.
“The water was cold, and I scraped my chin on the bottom.” Her speech came haltingly from the cool kitchen, through chattering teeth and rigid jaw muscles. He heard her thank her mother as Cheryl tossed her a bright red beach towel.
Within a few minutes he watched Melanie’s bikini-clad, gangly young form cross the family room to get to her bedroom and some warm, dry clothes.
What was the threat to his married life? Where could he direct his rage? It wouldn’t be hard for him to hate Carl Bauer, but he knew Bauer was only a symptom of the problem. Cheryl had as much as told him that. There was nothing here for a man to come to grips with, to understand and fight.
Peterson watched his wife across the room. She was absently picking up a clutter of magazines Melanie had read that afternoon, fitting them one by one into the wooden rack by the sliding glass doors to the patio.
It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.
Peterson picked up his evening newspaper, opened it full-width before him to block out his view of the room, of Cheryl.
He sought solace in the sorrows of others, in the precise black-and-white world of newsprint.
TEN
“YOU SEEN THE LATEST batch of outa town papers the mayor’s got?” old Bonifield asked Wintone from down the bar at Mully’s.
“Not yet,” Wintone said, swiveling slightly on his bar stool to turn away from Bonifield as a signal that he didn’t want to talk. What he really felt like doing was telling Bonifield what he, Wintone, wished the mayor would do with his out-of-town papers, but there was little point to that.
“They’re all interested in Colver now,” Bonifield went on. “Not long ago they never know’d we was alive, an’ now they’re askin’ how to spell our names. An’ I told plenty of ’em how to spell yours, Sheriff.”
Wintone didn’t thank him.
“I was careful not to mention nothin’ else, though. They was all interested in your personal life an’ all, how reliable an’ such you was. ‘No comment’ is what I told ’em.”
“Ain’t you got someplace else to go?” Mully asked Bonifield.
The old man curled a tobacco-darkened lip at him. “Sure, you can afford to drive off customers now.”
Mully chuckled hopelessly and shook his head. “I don’t see nobody in here but the three of us. This ain’t the kind of place tourists take to, not when they find out there’s no hard liquor.”
“Then you oughta serve hard liquor,” old Bonifield said. “Cater to ’em. This here’s your golden opportunity.”
“Opportunity for what?”
“Didn’t I say golden?”
“Nothin I need gold for.” Mully began to wipe down the bar, though it was smooth and dry. “I promised Cora there wouldn’t be no hard liquor served in here, after her brother got killed in that fight. Don’t see any reason to break that promise now.”
“That’s all been fifteen years ago!” Bonifield said in exasperation. “An’ Cora’s been gone five.”
“Don’t make no difference,” Mully said calmly, but his face seemed darker, the fine-etched lines deeper.
“Don’t you ever hear ice crackin’ under you?” Wintone asked Bonifield.
Bonifield was finished with his beer. Turned on his stool, he leaned back against the bar and bit off a chew of tobacco from a brownish mass in a wad of crumpled wax paper he’d drawn from his pocket.
“Maybe I did speak hasty,” he
said. “A man’s wife is never really dead to him, in a manner of speakin’, that is.”
Mully continued to wipe the bar, Wintone to stare into the disappearing foam of his beer.
“All I meant,” old Bonifield said to Mully, “was that maybe you oughta pretty up the place some. Maybe even get some entertainment. Then maybe folks from outa the area would take to comin’ here.”
“I got business enough to meet my needs.”
“Reserve,” Bonifield said. “I’m talkin’ about somethin’ you know you got an’ don’t have to spend. A cushion’s what I mean. Fer that rainy day folks talk about.”
“Ain’t never gonna be another rainy day around here,” Mully said.
Wintone cupped his hands around the coolness of his half-filled beer mug. “Not today, anyway. Not accordin’ to the weather bureau.”
“In the middle of a financial boom,” Bonifield said with contempt, “an’ you two’re talkin’ about the weather.”
“Lotta farmers around here ain’t havin’ a financial boom,” Wintone said. “Weather’s about all they talk about.” He wished Bonifield would leave, go to one of those prettier places he’d mentioned.
“Things other’n crops is growin’ just fine here,” Bonifield said. “Like, every business in an’ around Colver. Or ain’t you noticed?”
“It’ll calm down,” Wintone said.
“Maybe not. Maybe it ain’t even peaked out yet.”
“You want another beer before you go?” Mully asked Bonifield, by way of invitation to leave.
“Nope.” Bonifield held firm on his stool.
Wintone didn’t want to go back to his office, or outside into the heat. Earlier the heat had made him nauseous; there seemed to be a dusty, noxious film over everything in Colver that needed a steady, cool rain to wash it away. So Wintone had come here, to Mully’s, where it was cool without the sealed confinement of his small, air-conditioned office.
But in Mully’s he’d found Bonifield. Maybe the old man had sought refuge here like Wintone. Even Bonifield could get too much of the press, who were congregated mostly at the modern, air-conditioned lounges of the larger motels toward the main highway. Prettier places.
When his beer was almost finished, Wintone decided he would drive along the lake road, then up beyond Lynn Cove where woven green vines and saplings grew on dark, moist ground that sloped gradually out into the lake. There the water lay motionless and thick with algae, thick with the pungent, wild scent of dying and growing. And near the lake were steep, wooded bluffs, with bent cedar clinging to their faces, pale juttings of rock like bones forced through flesh. Two days ago a woman had been lost in that area for half a day, and just when everyone was becoming really alarmed she had stumbled onto a road by accident and followed it until she was picked up by a State Patrol car. She was found less than a hundred yards from where she had left her husband in their parked car.
It would be good to keep the patrol car and himself highly visible to the outsiders in the area, Wintone thought, to show some representation of local law.
As Wintone was walking toward the door, Frank Turper entered. His dark eyes, recessed in glistening pads of flesh, glinted dully as if he’d been drinking before his arrival at Mully’s. “You seen them outa town papers come in the mayor’s mail today?” he asked Wintone.
“Not yet.”
“You oughta see some of the drawin’s of how Bonegrinder might look. Half-lizard, half-man—that sorta thing. Give you pause to think.”
“Pausin’ to think ain’t a bad idea,” Wintone said, and walked past Turper and out the door.
Wintone got into the patrol car, quickly started the engine and turned the air conditioner on high. Absently he pulled the automatic shift lever back and drove slowly toward the beckoning green hills. Heat waves rose in shimmering vapors from the patrol car’s flat metal hood.
As he drove, Wintone noticed the surprisingly large number of people on the street despite the heat. Few of them were local. Most carried cameras, fishing equipment or picnic paraphernalia.
It will all fade away soon, Wintone assured himself. When the north shore gets rebuilt and the Bonegrinder thing becomes just another half-interesting bit of Ozark folklore. Eventually things will be as they were.
But a worm of doubt, like a restless silver thread, had begun to burrow into Wintone’s mind.
Once changed, did things ever return to the way they were?
ELEVEN
BILL PETERSON ENTERED THE kitchen through the connecting door to the garage.
He’d been bent over the long wooden bench he’d constructed along one wall, where he often went in the evenings to work out the tensions that had built in him through the day. Thinking too much about the threatened changes that might rend his life suffused him with a curious terror.
Cheryl, domestic-looking in a plain blue housedress, was just finishing wiping the kitchen table with a damp dishcloth. There was something in her domesticity that keenly aroused Peterson at times, though he didn’t know why. He liked to approach her from behind at moments like this and kiss the nape of her slender neck, to slide a hand around smoothly and quickly cup one of her breasts. This time he stood still just inside the door and waited until she’d finished wiping the table before speaking.
“It’s been four days,” he said.
She nodded, held the dishcloth beneath cold running water and wrung it with deft, practiced hands, as if dispassionately wringing the neck of some live thing. Peterson thought she was treating him exactly like the dishcloth. The vulnerability of his love depressed him.
“Has anything changed?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, draping the dishcloth over the divider between the stainless steel basins of the double sink. She began to place clean glasses two by two in a cabinet.
Peterson watched her for a long time, his breath deep and even. “I have a suggestion,” he said.
She interrupted her glass placing and turned to him, as if he’d at last said something positive.
“A fishing trip,” Peterson said.
His wife stared at him for a moment, then shook her head in refusal, but not firmly. The kitchen was so quiet that he could hear the inner mechanism of the electric clock on the stove.
“Why not?” he asked. “We haven’t been since last year. And it would give you—give us both—a chance to get out into nature and think things over clearly, get a fresh perspective.”
“It will look the same to me, Bill.”
Damn her, what was she trying to do to him? “What about Melanie? You know how she loves to go fishing with us. If nothing else, it will be one last time for her to remember the three of us together.”
Cheryl began putting away the last of the glasses, her lips pursed in consideration. Maybe she did owe him that, owe it to Melanie. It wasn’t that she felt guilty. No, there was no guilt involved, only obligation. But she was sure she wouldn’t change her mind about leaving with Carl.
She found herself thinking of Carl, strong and impetuous in a lazy, appealing way, longing for new places, new adventures, burning with an eagerness that she wanted to consume her. Carl was to Bill what blowtorch was to candle. But Bill couldn’t help it. She had to remember that. And he loved Melanie, even if he only thought he loved Melanie’s mother.
Peterson sensed her indecision and pounced on it. “I’ll call and make reservations at Lost Pines,” he said hurriedly. “All right?” He smiled at her pleadingly. How could she resist that smile?
“All right,” she said, and a weight seemed to slip from her, as if to reassure her that she’d made the right decision.
Peterson walked over to his wife and kissed her forehead. Her body tensed to stillness and she stood with her hands at her sides, as if tolerating his kiss rather than endure an argument.
“Things will work out,” he said, backing a step and looking intently down into her immobile face. “You’ll see; I promise.”
“Don’t promise that,” she said quie
tly.
Peterson disappeared into the hall where the telephone sat on a small, ornate table they had bought at a rummage sale and he’d refinished.
A few minutes later he walked back into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and poured himself half a glass of milk. He downed the milk quickly, as if appeasing a great need.
“Lost Pines burned down,” he said. “Remember the big forest fire we heard about on the news?”
“I thought it was somewhere else,” Cheryl said.
Peterson wiped his lips with the backs of his knuckles and shook his head. “No, it was at Big Water Lake, the whole north shore. I got us reservations farther south, near a place called Colver.”
TWELVE
COLVER WAS QUIET NEAR midnight. Wintone was sitting at his desk, dressed only in pants and a T-shirt, sipping a glass of ice water and wishing he could feel like sleeping. Only minutes after he’d lain on the cot in the back room, the familiar uneasiness had made him rise, pad barefoot about the office as if seeking something.
Finally he’d decided to forget about going back to bed for the time being, and he tried to do some paperwork at his desk.
That didn’t work either. He was too tired to concentrate, yet his eyes refused to close on their dry weariness. So in the shadowed soft light from the desk lamp, he’d paced about the office for a while, tending to small things that needed no tending; then he sat back down at his desk to wish for exhaustion.
Automatically, he had tuned his citizens’ band radio to emergency channel nine, and he was seated at his desk with his face buried in his large hands when the call came through.
“Breaker ten seventeen!” the voice said loudly, a surprise from the barely hissing speaker. “This is Molasses. I’m on the lake road an’ there’s somethin’ movin’ out in the water!”
An operator named Rag Man asked excitedly what the something looked like. Wintone stretched an arm and adjusted the squelch control for better reception.