Bitch Creek (14 page)

If something had come up and she couldn't make it, she'd call.

But if something happened to her, nobody would know enough to call him.

She was right. It was better when he didn't know she was coming, when she surprised him. He couldn't worry about her that way.

Lyle was dead, and it made Calhoun realize that you couldn't depend on anything. If Lyle could die, anything could happen to anybody.

He had about decided to go inside and call Walter, find out what time Kate had left, when he saw the flash of headlights bobbing and jiggling down the driveway through the trees. Then he heard the grumble of her busted tailpipe.

He climbed down off the deck and stood beside his truck, and when the headlights appeared in front of him he stepped aside so she could pull in.

He went around to the door of her Blazer and opened it. She stepped out, clamped her arms around his neck, and pressed herself against him. She tucked her face into the crook of his neck, and he felt her shuddering. He held her, stroking her back and shoulders, smoothing her hair against the back of her head, touching her face, feeling the tears well up in his own eyes.

After a minute she stepped away from him and looked into his face. “Please, Stoney,” she said. “I don't want to talk.

He knuckled the tears off her cheeks. “Suits me,” he said.

She tried a smile, touched his face, moved her fingertips over his eyes, his nose, his lips. Then she moved against him again and brushed his mouth with hers. He held her face in both of his hands and kissed her softly.

They held it for a long moment. Then she broke it off. “Come on,” she whispered, and she took his hand and led him directly to the bedroom.

The night after they'd talked to Walter five years ago, when they'd asked his permission to become lovers and he gave them his blessing, Calhoun had waited for Kate to come to him. But she didn't. He'd wanted to talk with her about it the next day at the shop, try to clarify their situation, but her body language told him not to say anything. This is separate, she was saying without words. At the shop, it's business. We don't mix the two things.

She hadn't come the next night, or the night after that, either. He'd kept expecting her, and she'd kept not showing up and then not saying anything about it at the shop the next day.

After a few miserable evenings of waiting and anticipating, he'd stopped expecting her.

Then, close to midnight almost two weeks later, he heard her Blazer pull into the yard. He'd wanted to run outside. But he didn't. He went over to his comfortable chair, sat down, and opened his anthology on his lap. When she came in, he looked up, said, “Oh, hi, Kate,” marked his place in the book, and put it on the table beside him.

She'd stood there smiling at him, and he knew by that smile that she knew how he'd been expecting her and then gradually had decided it was better not to expect her, and that she'd intended it that way.

She went over, sat on his lap, snuggled there with a little satisfied sigh, and he'd held her for the first time ever. He cupped her face in both his hands and moved his fingertips over the planes of her forehead, the curves of her cheekbones, the edges of her ears, the outline of her lips, memorizing her face with his fingers. He traced her eyebrows with the balls of his thumbs as he looked into her eyes. They were solemn, gazing evenly back into his.

When she tucked her face into the hollow of his throat, he began to move his hands over her body, learning her bones and muscles through her soft cotton dress, running his hand over her hip, up along her side, brushing her breast, down over the back of her leg, then easing up the hem of her dress, stroking the soft secret skin along the back of her knee and over her thigh, and she kept her arms locked tight around his neck.

Finally she'd lifted her mouth to him, brushed his lips with hers, touched them with the tip of her tongue, and then a little “Oh!” came from deep in her throat and she'd pressed her mouth hard onto his, her butt wiggling in his lap, her arms tight around him, her tongue prodding and probing, her lips and teeth trying to consume him. It was the first time they'd kissed. Calhoun felt as if it was the first time he'd ever been kissed by a woman.

Then Kate had slipped off his lap. “Come on, Stoney.” She held both hands to him.

He stood up and let her lead him into the bedroom. They'd undressed each other slowly, taking their time, laying aside the articles of clothing carefully, seeing each other's bodies for the first time. When they finally slithered under the covers, they just held onto each other, touching and caressing, not saying much, getting used to the feel of their bodies together.

When she touched the puckered skin of the scar on the back of his left shoulder, she said, “What's this?”

“Long story, honey.”

“We got all night.”

He'd rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “Thing is,” he said slowly, “I don't know the whole story. That scar is where I got hit by lightning.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You got hit by lightning?”

“Yes.”

“That's so—so random.”

“Actually,” he said, “it's not that uncommon. They told me that about a thousand people in the United States get hit by lightning every year.”

“Do they—I mean, are they all . . . like you?”

He laughed. “Like me? No, honey. Everybody's different. Depends on where they get hit, I guess. Some people end up chronically depressed, or have panic attacks. Some are paralyzed or have heart problems. Some lose their short-term memory. Some can't remember how to spell or multiply. Me, I guess I was lucky. I've just got these holes in my memory, can't hear anything out of my left ear, can't drink alcohol. That's why I spent eighteen damn months in a hospital. Because they needed to get my head working right again. It's still not working that well, as you know.”

“I like the way it works,” she said. She rolled him onto his side facing away from her, traced with her fingertips the jagged edges of the scar that ran from the top of his shoulder blade halfway down his back. Then she bent to him and touched his scar with her lips and her tongue. “I didn't know people could get hit by lightning and survive,” she said.

“Actually, about ninety percent of them don't die. The guy I was with got me breathing and my heart beating again, carried me off the mountain.”

“What was it like, Stoney?”

“I don't know. I don't remember anything about it. Oh, I get these little flashes in my head, especially when I hear thunder or smell the rain, but they come and go so quick I can't pin them down. I don't know what I was doing up there on a mountain, and I don't know who it was that saved my life. I kept asking at the hospital, but either they didn't know or they wouldn't tell me. There's a man out there somewhere, and I owe him, big-time.”

When she'd asked him what he did remember, he tried to explain about the big holes in his mind, the odd clarities that came to him sometimes, the characters that flitted like ghosts into and out of his consciousness, people he'd once known whom he'd forgotten except when they dropped unexpectedly into his mind and who refused to stay around long enough to get reacquainted. He told her about his dreams, and how he knew they came out of what he thought of as his Life Before Memory, before ten thousand volts of electricity had zapped him on a mountain somewhere. He didn't mention the phantoms that came to him when he was awake, the naked bodies that appeared in rivers and in the woods when his eyes were open, how they seemed real even after they'd disappeared. He wasn't ready to tell her about them yet.

“You know Frankenstein,” he'd said to Kate that first night in bed. “Well, that's how I feel. Like some kind of monster that got killed and then brought back to life with a big jolt of electricity.”

“I don't think you're a monster,” she said. “What about your family? Didn't they help you remember?”

“I guess I don't have a family,” he said. “The folks at the hospital tried to fill me in. Told me some facts, which feel to me like they might as well've been about somebody else. Like somebody else's biography. My parents aren't alive. I know I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina. I get flash-pictures of Beaufort sometimes. My mother's name was Libby—Elizabeth—and my father was Daniel. I had a wife, they told me, but she divorced me some time before I got zapped. Nobody came to see me at the hospital except doctors and shrinks, who were all pretty interested in my case, but not necessarily interested in me, if you know what I'm saying. I guess if I'd had any close family, they would've come to see me in eighteen months.”

She had pushed him onto his back, slid a leg over his, and laid her cheek on his chest. “I feel bad for you, Stoney,” she said.

“Don't feel sorry for me, honey. It's not so bad. The way I look at it, I've probably forgotten more bad stuff than good. Anyway, things keep coming back to me, and I'm getting some of it sorted out.”

“Sure,” she said. “I guess one day you'll probably wake up and suddenly remember there's a woman somewhere who you love.”

He'd stroked her hair and urged her mouth down to his. They held a long kiss, and then he peered into her eyes in the darkness of the bedroom. “I'm awake right now,” he'd said, “and I know exactly who that woman is and where she is and what she tastes like. And I know I'll never forget any of that.”

And in the five years since that first night, he'd never doubted that Kate Balaban was the first true love of his life.

Shortly after sunrise, after a night when he didn't sleep much, thinking about Lyle, Calhoun was sitting on the rocks beside Bitch Creek with Kate and Ralph, drinking coffee and watching three nice trout sipping March Brown spinners in the pool below the washed-out bridge. The biggest of the three—Calhoun guessed he'd go close to fourteen inches—had set up in a tricky eddy against the opposite bank. “You watch close,” he said to Kate. “See how he seems to be facing downstream? That's because the current's twisted around, bringing the food up to him. You try to stand downstream to cast to him, he'll see you. Problem is, if you stand upstream and cast down into that eddy, the main current'll drag your fly away from him. You need to make a quick mend in your line while it's still in the air, throw a lot of slack into your tippet, and lay that fly about a foot from his nose . . .”

He glanced at her. She was grinning at him.

“What?” he said. “What's so funny?”

“You love that, don't you?”

“Love what?”

“Problems. The harder they are, the better you like 'em. You'd ignore those two other trout there along the seam of the main current, because they'd be easy to catch. You'd just go for that tricky one.”

“The point of fishing isn't catching 'em, honey.”

She hooked her arm through his and leaned her head against his shoulder. “What is it, then?”

He shrugged. “Trying something you don't know if you can succeed at. Working at it till you get it.”

“And suppose you don't get it?”

“That's good. That's what keeps you coming back.”

“You're a strange man, Stonewall Jackson Calhoun,” she said. She tilted up her face, and he kissed her softly.

Suddenly Ralph, who had been sitting there watching the fish, jerked himself to his feet, perked up his ears, looked back toward the house, and growled.

“Shut up,” Calhoun said. He turned, shielded his eyes, and followed Ralph's gaze.

“I heard a car pulling in,” said Kate.

Calhoun heard a door slam, and a moment later Sheriff Dickman appeared at the top of the slope. He waved and came down to them. “How they bitin'?” he said.

“They're pretty fussy this morning,” said Calhoun. “You just dropping in for coffee?”

Dickman squatted down beside them. “Wish I was,” he said. He looked at Kate, then back at Calhoun. “Afraid I've got some news.”

“Lyle?” said Calhoun.

Dickman nodded. “Somebody shot him, Stoney.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Kate. She groped for Calhoun's hand and gripped it hard.

“What happened?” said Calhoun.

“Well, of course, what happened is what we got to figure out, and I'm going to need some help with that.” He took off his hat and ran his hand over his bald head, smoothing back his imaginary hair. “I convinced Doc Pritchard to come in last night, give us a quick autopsy. It didn't fit, drowning there in that little pond, big strong young man like that.” Dickman poked himself in the solar plexus with his forefinger. “Had a hole in him right here. Perfect center shot. Doc dug a twenty-two long-rifle slug out of him.”

“So he didn't drown,” said Calhoun.

“Actually,” said the sheriff, “he did drown. That little slug tumbled around in there, tore him up some, and there was a good deal of bleeding. It accounts for why he didn't get to shore. Poor bugger had to 've been in a lot of misery. But what killed him was drowning, all right.”

“I carried him out of there,” said Calhoun. “I didn't see any bullet hole.”

Dickman shrugged. “A twenty-two makes a little hole less than a quarter of an inch in diameter. Not a hole you'd notice in a man's fishing shirt. I guess any blood would've been washed away in the pond.”

Calhoun nodded. “Fred Green,” he said.

“Guess so,” said the sheriff. “We've got to find him, Stoney. The quicker the better. You're the only one who saw that man.”

Calhoun stood up and helped Kate to her feet. “Let's go up to the house,” he said.

The three of them sat at the kitchen table sipping coffee. “I need a good description of Mr. Green,” said the sheriff.

Calhoun closed his eyes. “I can see him perfectly.” He looked up at Kate.“Honey, reach behind you, hand me that pad of paper and a pencil.”