Caller unknown, p.8
Caller Unknown, page 8
Against his better judgment he said, “OK. Just wouldn’t want to take your money if the kid ain’t interested.”
“He’ll be here the Sunday after the holiday then.”
“Alright.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
At 7 a.m. on the Sunday after July Fourth, Jim was sitting in a camp chair out on his dock staring at the lake mist burning off. If the kid didn’t turn up he decided he’d just slob around all day drinking whiskey. He’d been busy enough recently. The week before there had been boats racing all over, fireworks in the night sky, stoned teenagers driving trucks at breakneck speed around the road. No human fatalities, thank the Lord. One of their dogs got run down. Glad they hadn’t called on him to put it out of its misery. One of the city folk had the brass to shoot it. Maybe they weren’t all soft.
Today all was quiet. Some of the summer people had already started packing up and heading to the cities. He could hear the distant drone of their trucks on the Three Mile Road.
Yup, today there was a feeling of entropy, of falling away, even the hint of fall in the mist burning off on the lake. Laramie pricked up his ears and now Jim heard it too, the squeaking of unoiled pedals on a bike. He turned and there down the unpaved road to the store came the Constance kid, wearing some blue denim overalls and a check shirt underneath. Perhaps Bettie had thought this was a kind of standard fishing garb. But even on a bike the kid had to be different. Not riding like a normal boy with somewhere fast to get to, legs pumping like fury, ass up in the air, but pedaling slow and reluctantly, like a Victorian gent out on a penny-farthing. He squeaked up to the store sidings and deposited the bike against the wooden wall.
Jim rose slowly. “Mornin’,” he said.
The kid didn’t answer but was patting down his pockets as if looking for something.
“You lost somethin’?” Jim asked.
Finally, the kid found what he was looking for in the bib pocket of his overalls and pulled out a small roll of cash held by an elastic band. He barely looked up through the mop of his hair as he thrust the roll toward Jim. “Here, my pa told me to give you this.” His voice was a hoarse whisper.
Jim stared at him for a beat. “Keep the cash, kid,” he said. “You pay after. If you don’t take to fishin’ we’ll be back in an hour.”
The kid’s shoulders were slumped as if he already knew he was going to be a failure at it. Jim wanted to shout at him to brace up and stand straight but a better angel prevailed.
“OK, help me get fixed up,” he said, pointing at the rods and bait pail and the cooler for the catch on the dock. The kid stuffed the money back into his dungarees without making eye contact as Jim climbed down the short ladder to the boat and took the equipment off the kid. He still didn’t utter a word, nor did he show any inclination to follow Jim.
“OK, kid, you comin’?” Jim asked.
“What about the dog?”
Jim stared, surprised the kid had volunteered a question. “The dog minds the store.”
“Can’t he come?” Somehow knowing he was the subject of discussion, Laramie looked between Jim and the boy, ears pricked, tail working, pink tongue hanging out.
“Well, OK, then, he ain’t no bother,” Jim said.
Ed picked up Laramie somewhat awkwardly and handed him down to Jim and the collie circled his tail once or twice before going to the prow and taking up position as lookout. The kid climbed down quickly as Jim yanked the starter cord. The outboard cover of the engine might be rusty but the Yamaha fired first time and Jim threw off the painter, twisted the tiller around and gunned the throttle. The boat described a wide arc away from the pier.
The kid had taken up position next to Laramie at the prow thwart and was rubbing his ears. “You fond of dogs, kid?” Jim asked, raising his voice over the outboard.
“Never had one.” The kid was mumbling, but Jim could just make out his reply.
“Oh?” Jim said.
“Asked for one on my birthday, never got one.”
“Your birthday was on the fourth?”
Ed didn’t answer straightaway. “It’s not my real birthday. No one knows when that is. The judge just chose it because it’s a holiday near the date I was found.” He glanced at Jim. “You know about that, I guess?”
“Sure. In ’70.” Jim left it at that. There was silence between them. Jim opened up the throttle and they crossed the lake to a lonely cove with a sandy banked area, lake reeds waving in the gentle ripples, the last of the mist hanging on the water but the July sun rising higher and already beginning to burn their necks.
Jim threw down the anchor with a dull plop and it caught on the bottom.
The kid was looking at him when he turned around. “Were you here in ’70?” he asked.
“No, I was in Vietnam,” Jim said.
This seemed to get Ed’s attention. “You were in the army?”
“Marines. Part of the navy.”
“You volunteered?”
Jim fixed him with a stare. The kid had sure opened up and he wasn’t certain he liked it as much as the silent version. “They got me in the draft.”
“You fought?”
“Some.”
“Shot people?”
“Some.”
“Dead?”
Time to change the subject. “This is a good place,” Jim declared. “See the bottom?” The kid dutifully looked over the side.
“Sand. The bass love that, change their scale color to match it so they’re well camouflaged. Plenty of critters flying around in the air and minnows in the shallows too.” And, indeed, the boy could see the cranes and dragonflies flitting between the reed heads and below, in the golden, rippling light, the pulsing forms of small fish.
“Two ways of catching bass,” Jim continued. “One on the fly, but that’s for streams and running water, and then there’s this. OK, let’s set up. We’ll have a rod either side. If you get a bite I’ll come and show you what to do.”
Jim opened the bait bucket and shooed Laramie away as he put his snout into it. He pulled out a wriggling pink worm and held it up so Ed could see it. “First things first—this is how we bait the line.” He took the worm between one calloused thumb and finger and assertively thrust the wriggling body through the barbs on the end of the hook.
Ed was suddenly very pale. A tremor went through him.
“You OK, kid?” Jim asked.
“Y-you have to do that?”
“Sure. Can’t have the worm slipping off. Got to get it well through the hook lest the fish just takes the worm and not the hook.” He took another hook from his fishing vest and picked out another worm. “Here, you try.”
But Ed didn’t reach for the worm and hook. “It’s still alive.”
“Has to wriggle to attract the fish.”
The kid still didn’t make a move. “Here, this time I’ll do it for you,” Jim said. “Bit squeamish, ain’t ya?”
Ed swallowed hard, his hands clenched, then his eyes rolled up and showed their whites.
Jim dropped the bait and hook and grabbed Ed by the wrists.
“Kid, what’s wrong?”
Gradually the kid’s pupils came back into view and his eyes came into focus.
“Jeez, sorry, Mr. Dove. Just got a bit lost there.” He was panting.
“It’s OK, kid, just take some breaths.” Ed did so. His eyes still looked blank. The thousand-yard stare. Jim had seen it enough in Nam.
“Maybe we should get back,” he said.
Ed shook himself, as if trying to slough something off. “I’m OK, really. It’s just the worms…” He paused.
“What about them?” Jim asked.
“Just reminds me of something, is all.”
Jim paused. “What, kid?”
Ed swallowed again and looked away over the lake. “I dunno. Just stuff from dreams I have.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Bad stuff. I guess like you and the army.”
“Marines, kid.”
“OK…” Ed swallowed before he went on. “Anyway, what happened when I was a kid… Sometimes it comes up, like with the worm.”
“You don’t have to talk about it, kid,” Jim said, hoping to kill the conversation there and then.
Ed looked over the lake again. “Hits me sometimes. A picture, some words—when you’re least expecting it…” He paused again.
Jim guessed this was more than Ed had said for months, if not years.
The kid took a deep breath. “Like now, I see that worm. It’s hooked right through, wriggling in agony. Then the worm turns and looks at me, and it has my face.”
Jim had packed some sandwiches and Cokes for the trip, not that he was expecting to be out there on the water for lunch, but just in case they got peckish, particularly if the kid skipped breakfast as customers sometimes did. He opened up the pail, took out one of the Coke bottles, banged the cap off on a thwart and thrust it at Ed. “Here, drink this—you’ll feel better.”
Ed stared at the Coke, then tilted his head back and chugged it, his Adam’s apple working. He let out a sigh, whether because of the sugar rush or the release of tension Jim could not tell. Whatever, he had no intention of provoking another trip down the kid’s memory lane. He detached the hooked worm and threw it back in the pail, shut the lid and pulled out one of the sandwiches instead.
“See, kid, no need to use worms. We can bait with bread and some of this corned beef. We’ll use these hooks with lures. They flip about in the current. Attract the bass.” He broke off some bread and meat, took another hook from his fishing vest and showed Ed how to bait the line. The kid seemed to calm a little now the worms were out of sight.
They settled with their rods, one on each side of the boat. Silence fell. The kid was staring north.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” Jim asked eventually.
“Just thinking, Mr. Dove, about Highway 11. My pa says it’s more than two hundred miles away. But it feels like it’s just over that mountain.”
Jim followed his gaze. “Heard you were found over to Presque Isle. Far enough not to dwell on.”
The conversation lapsed there. There was a tug on Jim’s line and he reeled it in. In an hour each of them caught a medium-sized bass. Unusually, Jim let the two go, declaring them to be marginal-sized for eating. He certainly would have taken them home if he’d been alone, but there was something that made him think the kid wouldn’t take well to witnessing him killing and gutting the fish.
They headed back when the sun was high and the fish would be at the bottom of the lake. Laramie and the kid sat together, the collie with his tongue hanging out, Ed staring north across the lake’s expanse to where the distant white outline of the Sun Mountain Hotel sat under the lowering brow of Nakuset. He had fallen silent again and Jim couldn’t read his thoughts about his morning out.
When they had moored by the dock, Ed shyly handed over the money. He shook his head and refused to take some back when Jim offered a rebate because of their lack of success. His brow furrowed. “We caught a couple. My pa said you should take it all, Mr. Dove—no refusal.”
Jim eyed him for a moment. Good, the kid had an assertive streak after all. “OK, obliged then,” he said.
Ed turned. “You know, you’re kind of an odd kid,” Jim said despite himself.
And then Ed looked back and smiled for the first time that day and said: “No odder than you, Mr. Dove.” And with that he took the bike from where it leaned against the side of the bait store and, without a glance back, went his slow, squeaky way down the track toward Brantwood.
Assertive and lippy, Jim thought. The bike needed some oil; best to lay some aside for when the kid next came in for groceries. He wasn’t really expecting to see him again for fishing.
But on Tuesday Stu was back in the store. “Say, Jim, Ed really enjoyed Sunday.”
“He did?” Jim answered.
Stu smiled. “I guess he didn’t say much. That’s his way. But when he got back he was quite excited—well, excited for him. Bettie and I were wondering if you’d take him again.”
“Didn’t catch much.”
“No matter, it’s just the experience. My money’s good, ain’t it?”
It couldn’t be denied the money was good.
“OK then,’ Jim said. “Next Sunday. And here you go, some 3-in-One. That kid’s bike needs some oilin’.”
There was no more church for Ed. For the rest of that summer and the few summers after, he went out on the lake with Jim. And after the lake, it was the woods or helping out around the store. The Constances barely saw their adopted son for the two months they spent each year at the cabin. Perhaps both were relieved at the kid’s long absences.
Unknown to them, he changed—changed beyond recognition in practical terms. The bookish introvert was still there, but now there was a connection to the outdoors, and, with it, a self-reliance. The kid proved himself an able backwoodsman. In time he could shoot the whiskers off a rabbit at 100 yards, was a better shot than Jim. The worm incident was forgotten for now. Dying and death were not triggers, yet… His first kill. He saw with equanimity the light ebbing in the buck’s eyes as it bled out from his shot. The skinned and quartered carcass hung from a tree in a clearing held no terror for him. At Jim’s instruction he painted the creature’s blood on his forehead.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the summer of 1979, after graduating from high school, Ed came up to Tranquility alone. Bettie had fallen ill and started chemo. Her illness had driven his father into a perpetual gloom. Stu was glad to wave his adopted son away. Ed was delighted to be free of the funereal air of Brookline. He spent the summer working at the store, gassing boats, serving in the shop.
By now, in addition to the fishing and shooting, he could bait and trap, use a knife and an axe, start a fire with a bowline, process an animal from head to toe, build a shelter, use bark and berries as natural remedies.
In time, he shunned even Jim’s company. He trekked into the wilderness and camped out alone. He did it almost as a dare. There was no hiding in the forest. Everything was stripped bare, elemental. If the past should come, it would come to him here, he was sure.
The last trip had begun innocently enough. He headed to the northwest of the lake, down game trails untrod by man for years, if not decades. Occasionally there would be signs of vanished humanity: a spent shell casing, orange with age; a blackened ring where a campfire had been set; a brick standing on a rock in the middle of a stream. Otherwise, his kind had been erased from the green canvas through which he went. The only sounds were his hiking boots on the bed of pine needles.
In an unnamed clearing in an unnamed part of the forest he set up his pup tent and watched as the sun set at half past ten. The light held for another hour or so and the stars came out. It was the time of year when he thought of the Lot. Nine years had gone and none of its questions had ever been answered.
He looked to the north. Two hundred miles and change, but it felt so close. What was he? What was he doing out here? What waited for him here that he could find nowhere else? He sensed he was both far from and near danger. The darkness was in him—indelible. He had come here alone because he was the danger.
Sometime in the night he must have slept.
The cold woke him. It was yellow dawn. He was naked and shivering. He was not in his tent but lying on some long grass. The grass was damp, just like in that awakening on Highway 11 all those years before. But the light was that of the sun, not the stutter lights of emergency vehicles.
He was shivering. He sat up. He was in a forest clearing and the dawn chorus was loud in the trees. Sparrows, warblers, robins, and phoebes: a mazing cross-meshing of songs and calls sounded all around, warning of an intruder. The sound was all directed at him. He was the intruder. He did not know where he was, but wherever it was, it was far from his tent. He looked down at himself, bewildered. How had he come here?
His hunting knife was in one hand and something soft and sticky in his other. He opened his fist and saw that it was a heart: he stared at it, fascinated and disgusted. He tasted the iron of dried blood on his mouth. He forced himself to look at the object again: it looked like a deer heart. He felt a strange relief. Did it touch him then, like a cold finger to his own heart, the conviction that he was a killer?
He rose, stiff and white, like a corpse reborn. There was a spotting of blood on the grass of the clearing. The crimson on the emerald burned into his eyes. He looked up: the blood trail vanished into the pines. He followed it. After a quarter-mile he reached another clearing. There was no birdsong here. Nothing stirred.
A brown and white dappled mound lay in the middle of the open space. He approached and saw it was a ravaged doe carcass, its chest savagely cut open. He knelt in the tacky pool of blood by the deer. An impulse rose in him and he dropped his knife and with two hands placed the heart back into the gaping chest cavity, as if life might then return. A Bible story came to him: Solomon’s lion. If bees could nest in a lion carcass and bring forth honey, could not the same come from this dead doe? But the doe’s staring pupils spoke otherwise. Death was death.
After another hour he found his tent. His clothes were shucked off by his sleeping roll as if whatever had arisen in him in the night had unpeeled itself from the cocoon of Edward Burns Constance and left his shadow-self behind. A killer was what he was: naked, primal, deadly.
Not until the very end did he trek into the wilderness alone. Not until that day when all that was left to him was this killer inside. He had learned: nature held no darkness, only him.
On July 4, he used the phone at the bait store to call Stu to receive the obligatory birthday wishes, but his father didn’t answer and he wondered if Bettie’s condition had worsened. Jim had no use for him that day—the store was closed for the holiday. His boss was no doubt spending the day with a bottle of Beam.
Birthdays had always been uncomfortable days. He thought of the four stranger kids who, like him, would be celebrating this state-appointed anniversary. David, Carl, Catrine, and Shannon. All he knew of them was their names. He knew he had some special connection to Shannon; but what she had been, what any of them had been, was unknown.
