The Bramble and the Rose

by Tom Bouman

  Paycheck was one of a pack of hounds bred and trained by a husband-and-wife team, Jimmy and Amy Bernard, who lived on about thirty acres up in that area. Their place was surrounded by woods. We came to a stop in the front yard of a log cabin.

  “Well, I better see if I can find that dog.” Jackson walked around the side of the house, toward the kennels. I could hear the hounds bellowing from somewhere behind the house. He came back around with Paycheck, who was running himself around in circles at the end of his leash and flinging spit. Jackson opened the other rear door.

  “I’m not staying back here with him,” I said.

  “Henry, come on.”

  “No fuckin way, man. You can’t put me back here with the dog.”

  Jackson sighed, pulled Paycheck back a couple paces, and let me out of the car. I could have run right then. I got in the front seat. Pulled my handcuffs out of my belt. Jackson got in the car, buckled himself, and put a hand on the steering wheel. As he turned his head to talk to the dog where it pawed in the backseat, I handcuffed Jackson to the steering wheel, the right hand. He swung at me with his left, and I leaned out of the way. He swung again and I pressed his arm across his body, then took the keys out of the ignition.

  “Henry, goddamn it, what the fuck.”

  “Hey, man. I’m sorry.” I opened the passenger door, flung the shotgun away, and put a foot out into the free world.

  Jackson reached his left hand across his body to his right hip, where his pistol was holstered. I took his wrist and felt the anger in him. I helped him remove his gun and put it in his glove box. “Henry, come on. Henry.”

  “Drive yourself to my station. Get John to find the spare key, it’s in the middle drawer of my desk. He’ll let you out. I didn’t kill anybody and my nephew’s gone.” With my Maglite, I did the best I could to pulverize his radio where it was bolted on the dash.

  “You’re making this hard. You can’t come back.”

  “I got to find the kid and then we’ll see,” I said.

  “We’re going to find you, you know.”

  “Yeah.” I got out then. An orange jet of pepper spray followed me out of the vehicle, over my shoulder, and past my face. It felt like fire.

  “Come on, man,” I said, wiping my blazing eyes, coughing, and rocketing snot out of my nose. “Did you have to?”

  Jackson too was drawing his sleeve across his eyes and had opened the driver-side door to let air through. He said nothing.

  “Okay,” I choked out, my throat closing. “See you later.” I walked to the woods, ducked under a few branches, and went on my way.

  I RAN THROUGH the woods with eyes that hardly saw. My uniform was soaked through and my side was twisted in a knot. I couldn’t draw enough breath. All my life, out of one trap and into another. A vine dangled over the quicksand to pull myself out, into another mess. From junior high to high school was a blessing, and then a curse; the inmates made all the rules, and changed them every day. From high school to the Tenth Mountain Division, and the army pulled me free of childhood, of fading beliefs, of a house that couldn’t afford me and didn’t want me. Then, after an adventure overseas, how to shake loose the army and its discipline? I had no ideas and a lot of training. I was tired to death of not being free and I wanted to make the rules. Being nothing and making no money felling trees all day wasn’t freedom. A cop, I’d thought: that would put me over top for good. It took more school, more fluorescent lights and waiting around.

  There was one shining moment in the Wind River Range, in Wyoming, where I’d met my first wife. Polly was no dream. But she died before we’d had a chance to live the life we imagined. Now Shelly was gone, whoever she’d been to me. I hated to think of what was on the horizon next, and didn’t dare call Miss Julie’s face to mind, didn’t dare think of our baby.

  A series of traps, and things ripped from me that I couldn’t live without. That was the pattern fate made in my life. I’d have changed it if I could. But a small-town cop has no power over how things are deep down. I always felt that what set us police apart was not power or a badge, but a point of view about fate. The people we serve are tangled in it, the ultimate trap in life. Our understanding of its workings, the way we tried to find patterns in it, the way we could laugh at its jokes—that was something we got to wear like a uniform. The people we collared were surprised. A man pulsing with drugs and drink is marched past his neighbors in restraints, naked but for a look of wonderment on his face. How did this come to be? You, you fucked up. But we, we saw it coming for miles.

  As I was slipping around peoples’ homes and setting their dogs barking, I wouldn’t have put this into words. I’m telling you now. Then, I felt it as a lack of outs, a spike of fear. Fate had closed in on me. With all that I knew, I hadn’t seen it in time. I would never feel completely like a policeman again.

  I waited in the green shadows beneath the hemlocks that grew behind Mike and Roberta Stiobhard’s house, unsure that Julie had brought the message. Out front their dog was restless. At one point, Bobbie came out back and raked some leaves, whistling. No sign of Danny or Jennie Lyn, and of course no trace of Alan. By now, citizens would be searching for my nephew around Aunt Medbh’s house and the cottage on Walker Lake, probably doing as good a job as the state police, and getting under their feet into the bargain. When night fell, I’d be able to move more freely. Until then, I could not be seen by the wrong people.

  When I looked next, Bobbie had gone back into the house, but she’d left something hanging on a tree by the edge of the woods. I crept up and found a camouflage coat and a small green backpack. The coat had to be twenty years old, soft and faded. In the bag: cans of pineapple juice, sandwiches of precooked bacon, a bunch of bananas, and many apples. A jar of preserved venison. Also, an entire package of cookies. A hunting knife and a black .38 revolver. A handwritten note that gave me the name of a place I knew and could get to on foot.

  A couple times, I dropped to the ground to avoid passing cars. Once I took a long way around a field that was being brush-hogged late in the season. Behind a double-wide trailer, a shaggy pony was tethered and had eaten the grass to stubble in a perfect circle.

  I blamed Shelly for getting killed—for being the kind of person who that happened to, for getting in the way of my life at every turn. She was dead and I was angry. I didn’t have time to be anything else. Later, I would remind myself that anger was nothing but confusion. I watched my feet, followed the deer paths, and kept silent.

  The farther down off the ridge I got, the closer together the houses were. I heard the chain saw’s roar over the hill, and crept around the edge of a little bog and up the slope to where a lone man had felled about an acre of trees behind a small house. I recognized Danny Stiobhard’s flatbed truck, fitted with slats to make a bed, where he’d loaded some firewood. Danny was bent over a tree, chain saw at full roar, bucking the trunk into pieces. Every now and then he straightened up, quickly scanned the woods, and went back to his work. I got close. I was never sure that he saw me, but after some time he switched the saw off, took off his ear protection, and walked to the edge of the trees not far from where I crouched. He stood as if taking a leak, whistled a bit, and said, “There’s an old fella in the house. He likes to supervise. We got one chance; you’ll see it.”

  Danny returned to the truck, heaved armloads of firewood into the back, and got in. He backed the truck way up the tree line. I ran low and climbed into the bed as he was pulling forward. Danny had left a narrow channel in the firewood where I was meant to lie. I took off my glasses, pulled some logs over me, and protected my head with my arms. Soon I was pinned on all sides by a pile of sharp, split wood that smelled like the weekend. The truck shook itself awake and moved out of the yard and to the road. As we picked up speed and made a few turns, I tried to get some sense of where we were, but couldn’t. There was a heavy bounce as we hit a pothole somewhere and everything in the bed floated for a second and fell; a corner of firewood knocked between my elbows, a
nd busted my upper lip. I felt around my teeth with my tongue, and nothing was missing. Pepper oil residue from Jackson’s spray can got in the cut. Soon, though, the fall air rushing through the gaps in the logs cooled me.

  The truck turned onto a dirt driveway and swayed up a long winding course, idled for too long, then backed into a structure. Firewood was lifted, and I sat up and saw four silent, curious animal faces craning to look at me: llamas raised by Lee Hillendale and his wife Greta on a farm northeast of Fitzmorris. The animals gathered at the far end of a horse barn that had been refitted to house them.

  Lee Hillendale was there in his shirtsleeves. Hillendale was Holebrook County’s best criminal defense attorney; he’d crossed me on some cases and made me look a fool, but it wasn’t personal. We liked each other, and the more I knew of him and Greta, the more I liked. Contrary to outward appearances they were devoted hippies, living life their way in the Endless Mountains. Either Lee or Greta was rumored to be wealthy. If not, it was unclear how he could make a living defending DUIs and assaults for degenerate clients who mostly couldn’t pay.

  “You look terrible,” Lee said. “You want some water or something?”

  I removed my shirt, found a slop sink in the barn, and washed my face and beard, then dried myself on a blanket that smelled like llama. “What do you hear in town?”

  “Nothing. I took a turn past the courthouse and it’s quiet. Nothing on the news.”

  “They’ll come after me,” I said. “I need you to take a record of what happened.” I glanced at Danny.

  Lee held up a hand. “Danny, Henry’s too polite to tell you to leave. I’ll buy this load of wood. Two hundred?” Danny said nothing. “You can pile it out in the woodlot.”

  Danny turned to me.

  “Thank you, brother,” I said.

  He said, “Oh, you’re mighty welcome, sir, I’m just the fuckin … field hand around here.” He pulled the truck out of the barn.

  “If I can help, I will,” Lee said. He rolled up his sleeves. “Julie didn’t say much, but by the way you got here, you have an issue with the law.”

  “I do. And I’d pay you to clear me, somehow, even after … If I get killed, I want my people to have the story. I wish I knew who to trust.” I put on my shirt.

  Lee locked eyes with me, and said with absolute kindness, “Hey, I’ve been doing this a long time. I don’t talk to cops, man. No offense to the cop in the room. But whether you did it or you didn’t, I’ll need three hundred an hour in the end.”

  “You don’t need money now, a what, retainer?” Miss Julie’s people would have whatever money Hillendale needed up-front, but I hated to ask.

  “No, you’re fine. We’ve got a relationship.”

  The field was calling me back, but I knew I had to take enough time to give Lee the outlines of what I knew and what I had done. As I said it aloud, an understanding of the worst kind dawned on me: as long as I was alive, they’d have a harder time fitting me into their frame. Once I was dead, they could say what they wanted. If I was dead, I had done it.

  When I finished, Lee shook his head and said, “We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery. And you …” he said, standing, thinking. “You’re out of your mind. Turn yourself in, babycakes.”

  “I need someone to keep an eye on Julie,” I said. “I asked her to go to her parents’ place, but she—”

  Across the dooryard, I heard a familiar whistle approximating the tail end of a bobolink’s song, sailing across the dooryard, a Stiobhard signal. I took my bag and stepped into the nearest stall in the barn and sank out of sight. The llama in the stall with me shied into the far corner with fear and disgust on its strange face. In that far corner lay a gawky baby llama, its legs tucked up under it. When I didn’t move, the mama craned her neck down and bit me, catching mostly my coat, but some of my arm. Then she retreated to the corner and her baby. I’d heard no car coming up the drive, but in a moment Sheriff Dally was in the doorway of the barn, greeting Lee.

  “Sheriff,” Lee said loudly, “what brings you here?”

  “Oh, business. The things I deal with anymore. I’ve got a headache you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Have you tried working your pressure points? There’s one right between your thumb and pointer. Just go like this—”

  “Any word from Henry Farrell today?”

  “Why do you need him?”

  “He’s … he’d do well to come down to the courthouse and talk.” I heard the sheriff take a few steps into the barn, unsettling the llamas. My stall-mate had craned her head out to gawk at the newcomer. “The animals look healthy. But what would I know.”

  “I’m not sure why you’re here.”

  The sheriff took a few more steps. I heard Lee keep pace with him, slowing him down. The borrowed .38 was in my hand.

  “Julie Meagher Farrell was seen going into your office earlier today. And here you are, in the middle of the day, in a shirt and tie. Your animals look fine.”

  “Sometimes I miss them during the day. That’s the beauty of a solo practice. I can do what I want.”

  “I see you’ve got Danny Stiobhard out there. He working off some fees?”

  “If I see Henry, I’ll tell him you’d like to speak with him. What’s it about?”

  “He’ll know.” Dally’s voice, though quiet, bounced off of the barn walls. “He needs to see me first. That’s important. He can come to my house if he has to.”

  “All right. If I see him. I don’t know why I would. Now, Sheriff, let me tell you something.” The footsteps stopped. “It’s none of your business who comes to my office, or why. It’s certainly none of your business what I do with my day. And one more thing: leave my fucking llamas out of it.”

  Both men laughed in the end. As the sheriff left, Mama craned her head down, gently took my arm in first her weird lips, and then her huge teeth, and clamped down so tight the world went red. I was happy to give her and the baby the run of the stall, and moved into the shadows of the barn away from the door. Lee caressed the animal’s neck and puttered around the barn as if I weren’t there at all.

  Danny Stiobhard came back in. “He may be watching the place,” he said.

  “I can’t ask more than what you’ve done,” I told him.

  “I ain’t doing it because you asked.”

  Lee said, “However you get Henry out of here, I don’t want to know. I’m heading in for a sandwich, and then over to the courthouse.”

  “Stay safe,” I said.

  After the lawyer left, I told Danny to take me to Red Pine Road. He grabbed a couple hay bales and a blue tarp and threw them in front of the barn door. I crept on my belly around the side of the barn and to where the distance to the tree line was shortest. I waited, waited, then slunk low to the woods and made my way to the roadside a few hundred yards north of Lee’s driveway. I saw no sign of the sheriff, and neither did Danny, because he slowed down for me where I could swing into the truck’s bed and under the tarp.

  IF THE SHERIFF’S people were out looking for me, then they stood a chance of finding my nephew, too. And they’d be keeping an eye on my family up by Aunt Medbh’s. I could have stayed hidden if I wanted. It was a risk, visiting Carrianne Ceallaigh. She didn’t like me and had no reason to talk, except that Shelly Bray had been her friend. State police might have people down by the Freefall at any time. I had Danny drop me off at the other side of the swamp down there, and wasted no time getting through the woods to the Ceallaighs’ rear property line. Nobody was out there.

  I brushed off my clothing and gave myself a sniff—nothing I could do about it. I crept to the front of the house. A mid-sized black car with PA plates was parked in the driveway. A look inside told me it was a personal vehicle, so I risked a knock on the Ceallaighs’ front door.

  Carrianne appeared and told me it was not a good time. Looking at me, she must have known something was off. For her part, she was harried, and her eyes were red.

  “It’s i
mportant,” I said. “It’s about Shelly.”

  “Hold on.”

  She closed the door and I waited there a moment, down at the dirt track that wound through their land. The door opened once again. “Come on in,” she said.

  Too late, I caught something wrong in her tone. A stocky woman with dark hair and glasses stood inside, with a hand reaching into her blazer. I put my hands up, and forced my eyes to move slowly around the interior of the house.

  “Don’t run,” the woman said. “You know me. Allie DeCosta, AG’s office—”

  I turned to the door where I’d just come in, but Carrianne blocked my way. I bolted through the house to the kitchen, where I knew there was a back door. I slammed through that and was free, but looked down to find the Ceallaigh kids looking up at me from the yard in wonderment. Then I felt DeCosta’s weapon touch behind my ear, where the kids couldn’t see. We went back inside.

  “Goddamn it, sit down,” DeCosta told me, pointing to a nice-looking sofa in the living room. “What’re we going to do with you.”

  “Nice meeting you, but I can’t stay,” I said.

  “All right, let me just call the detectives, then, let them know where to find you,” said DeCosta.

  “They can try.” I scanned the room again.

  “Okay, calm. We’re both here to help, you and me,” DeCosta said, sending me a message with her eyes.

  I stayed on high alert, but stopped my mind racing toward flight. “Yes,” I said. I pointed to a chair where I could see out of windows on two sides of the house. “I’m just going to move over there.”

  “Sure,” said DeCosta.

  I did so. All this while, Carrianne sat silent across the room, her head in her hands.

  “I’m sorry about Shelly,” I said carefully. “But I didn’t kill her and I don’t have time. My nephew’s gone missing. Nothing comes before that. I came here in the first place because Shelly told me she had some information I was supposed to know. Carrianne,” I said, “you two were friends. I’m wondering if you had any idea what she had to tell me. We could just … tell somebody that, and clear this all up, and I can do what I have to do.”