Bitch Creek (6 page)

He got up from his chair, took down the 12-gauge Remington autoloader from its pegs beside the door, switched on the floodlights, and went out onto the porch.

Kate was climbing out of her Blazer. She made a visor with her hand and squinted up at him. “You're not gonna shoot me, are you?”

“I was thinking of it,” he said.

She was wearing an ankle-length white dress with a scooped neck and sandals with thin leather straps decorated with silver studs. Silver earrings dangled from her ears and a big leather bag hung on her shoulder. He had never before seen her in anything except jeans or shorts and T-shirts or men's flannel shirts. He liked how she looked in shorts. In a dress, she was just spectacular, and he stood there staring at her.

“Are you going ask me in,” she said, “or are you just going to stand there with your face hanging out?”

“Come on in, I guess.”

He held the door for her. She stood inside the doorway, and Calhoun saw his place as she probably did—the comfortable, messy home of a single man, one big open room with dirty dishes piled in the sink, walls hung with fishing and hunting prints, secondhand leather couch and chair, cheap braided rug on the pine-plank floor, fly-tying desk strewn with hackle necks and bucktails and scissors and bobbins, aluminum rod tubes stacked in one corner and a glass-fronted gun case in another, neoprene chest waders sprawled on the kitchen floor.

He returned the shotgun to its pegs, then went over to the stereo and turned down the volume.

“Place needs a dog,” Kate said.

“I've been thinking of that,” he said.

“Don't suppose a girl might have a glass of whiskey?”

He smiled. “I don't keep liquor. Can't drink.”

She reached into her bag and took out a pint of Old Grandad. “All I need is the glass,” she said.

He found a tumbler, rinsed it out, and put it on the round table in front of the big kitchen window. She sat down and poured a slug of bourbon. He sat across from her.

She lifted her glass to him, held his eyes with hers for a moment, then took a sip. She wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist, then smiled. “I thought I had this all planned out,” she said softly.

Calhoun just sat there looking at her.

She took another sip. “Okay,” she said. “Here it is, Stoney. We've got to talk.”

“Sure.”

She stared at the tabletop, shaking her head. “Shit,” she mumbled. She looked up at him. “You aren't making this easy.”

He shrugged. “I don't know what you want me to say.”

“You could tell me I'm pretty.”

He smiled. “Jesus, ma'am.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I wish I could drink. You suck the breath right out of me, and that's the truth.”

“Maybe I was mistaken, but I had the idea you might . . .” She took a sip from her glass, put it down, looked into it. “I guess I shouldn't have come here,” she mumbled.

“Why don't you just spit it out,” said Calhoun.

She looked up at him. “I'm trying, dammit.” She nodded. “Okay. I guess I was wondering if—if you were feeling . . .” She shook her head.

“Feeling what, ma'am?”

“I wondered if you liked me.”

“Hell, of course I like you.”

“That's not what I mean.”

He just looked at her.

She laughed softly. “Stoney,” she said, “what I'm trying to say is, do you
love
me?”

He shook his head. “Truthfully, I'm trying very hard not to, ma'am. But I'm not having much luck at it.” He smiled at her. “You know I love you.”

She nodded. “Yes. I feel the same.” She took another sip from her glass, then gazed down into it. “And for Christ's sake, will you stop calling me ‘ma'am'?”

He nodded.

She looked up at him. “How would you feel about us being lovers, Stoney?”

“What?”

“I didn't say I wanted to make love with you,” she said softly. “I mean, I do. But that's not it. I want you and me . . .”

“I know what it means,” he said, “being lovers.”

She cocked her head and held his eyes.

“I don't think so, Kate,” he said.

She nodded. “Well, hell, that's all right.” She let out a long breath, then lifted her glass and took a long swig. “I figured I might as well ask.”

“You're married,” he said.

“Yes, I am.”

He shook his head. “I'm not into adultery.”

“Me neither.”

“Believe me,” said Calhoun, “it's not that I wouldn't . . .”

“Wouldn't what?”

He shrugged.

She reached across the table and put her hand over his. “Listen to me, Stoney. They diagnosed Walter's MS four years ago this coming January. He hasn't touched me, or even hardly looked at me or said anything sweet, since that day. He resents my good health, resents the fact that I'm continuing to live my life, resents the shop. I'm not saying that I don't understand, because I do. And it's not that I don't still love him. I
do
love him. But he's stuck in that wheelchair just waiting to die, and I'm—”

Calhoun was shaking his head. “Doesn't matter,” he said. “Just because he's sick and grouchy and you're not getting along—”

“What if I weren't married?”

“That's a dumb question,” he said. “You're about the most—the most beautiful, the smartest, the most desirable damn woman I've ever known.”

She smiled. “Can I tell you my idea, then?”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“Usually,” she said, “when a married woman has herself a—a lover—not her husband—everybody knows it except him. Everybody except the husband. They sneak around, and I suppose part of the excitement is that sneaking around, worrying about getting caught, worrying that the husband's going to find out.” She shook her head. “I'm not into excitement, Stoney. At least not that kind. I love you and I want to be with you, and I don't want it to be sneaky and dirty. I was hoping we could do it the other way around.”

“Are you saying you want to ask Walter's permission?”

“No,” she said. “I just want to tell him. I want him to know. I want him to be the
only
one who knows. I want you to come over to the house, meet him, and I want the two of us to tell him we're going to be lovers. I want to assure him that we'll be lovers only here, in your house in the woods, and I want to assure him that nobody else will ever know about us.”

“What if he says no?”

“I'm not saying to ask him. We'll tell him. You and I. It's got to be the two of us. I just want to be sure he understands. I mean, if you want.”

Calhoun frowned. “This sounds cruel, Kate. It sounds like torturing the poor guy.”

“You don't know Walter,” she said. “You don't know how we are. He and I. We've always told each other the truth. It's the only way. It's how he'd want it.”

“Then we ask him,” Calhoun said. “We don't tell him. IfWalter says no, then it's no.”

Kate smiled. “I knew you'd say that. I guess if I didn't know you'd say that, I wouldn't . . . love you. Most men . . .”

Calhoun squeezed her hand. “When do you want us to talk to Walter.”

Her dark eyes were solemn. “Tomorrow after we close up. Okay?”

“I've got one request,” said Calhoun.

“What's that?”

“Don't ever dress like that around the shop.”

“I thought you liked how I look.”

“I do, ma'am. That's just it.”

A wheelchair ramp led from the driveway to the side door of Kate's square brick house on the outskirts of South Portland. “He doesn't use it,” she'd told Calhoun as she led him inside the night after her first visit to his place. “He never leaves the house anymore. He just sits in there watching TV, observing himself shrivel up, waiting to die.”

The front room was dark except for the flickering blue light of the television. Walter was sitting in a wheelchair with a plaid blanket over his knees, and when Kate and Calhoun went in, he glanced up, nodded, then turned back to the television.

“Walter,” said Kate, “this is Stoney.”

Walter had dark, thinning hair and a sharp hatchet face. It looked as if his skin was stretched so tight over his bones that it might crack open if he smiled. “I figured,” he mumbled, barely moving his mouth.

“We brought pizza,” she said. “Turn that thing off and come eat.”

Walter drank three beers and ate half of a pizza slice. Kate talked about the shop, about how the stripers were mostly gone for the season,about putting together a catalog and starting up some mail-order business, about how Stoney was trying to negotiate some advertising with Umpqua and Loomis, about how she was looking to hire on a couple more guides for next year.

Walter kept sipping his beer. He said nothing.

Then Kate cleared her throat and said, “Walter, Stoney and I, we need to talk to you.”

Walter lifted his eyes and looked at Calhoun. “You're fucking my wife.”

“No, sir,” said Calhoun. “But I do love her.”

“Of course you do.”

“But we're not—”

“Why not?” said Walter.

“Kate's not that kind of woman.”

“No, I don't suppose she is. What about you?”

“I'm not that kind of man, either.”

Walter nodded. “Good.”

“We wanted to ask you first,” said Calhoun.

He looked at Kate. She gave him a little nod. He turned back to Walter. “We're asking your permission, sir. We want you to know how it would be. Sometimes your wife would come to my house back in the woods in Dublin, and she'd sleep with me and wake up with me and have coffee with me on the deck when the morning sun's on it. I'd share my little spring creek with her, and I'd like to show her where it bubbles out of the hillside up behind my house. Kate and I, we'd fish together and walk in the woods together and listen to music together and talk about books. And we'd make love.”

Walter stared at Calhoun without expression for a long minute. Then he said, “Don't call me ‘sir.' ”

Calhoun nodded.

“It's Walter,” he said.

“Okay.”

Walter turned to Kate. “I worry about you,” he said.

She began to speak. He lifted his hand off the table. “Let me finish,” he said. “I sit around here all day, and maybe you think I spend all my time feeling sorry for myself. Well, I do. But I also feel sorry for you. I know what I am. I know what you've been living with.” He turned to Calhoun. “I admire what you're doing.”

“If it was up to me,” said Kate, “I would've just told you. I wouldn't have asked.”

“You think I'd say no?”

She shrugged. “I don't know.”

“How could you know?” said Walter. “You've got this bitter, shrunken-up invalid on your hands, never says anything nice to you.” He looked at Calhoun, then back at Kate. “Do me one favor, will you?”

“What?” she said.

“If anyone finds out about the two of you, you make sure they understand that I know, that I said it was okay by me, that”—he turned to Calhoun—“that I like this man. I don't want anybody thinking bad things about either of you.”

Calhoun never knew when Kate would come to him. They didn't plan it or discuss it in advance, and he learned never to expect her. Not a night passed that he didn't wish she was with him.

But usually she wasn't. Sometimes several weeks elapsed between her visits. Sometimes she showed up two or three nights in a row. When she arrived, Kate poured herself some bourbon from the bottle she kept over Calhoun's refrigerator, and he had a Coke. They sat at the kitchen table, or, in the summer, out on the deck, where they could hear the creek gurgling and the nightbirds singing. They touched hands tentatively, were silent for long minutes, getting used to each other again.

Finally Kate would tip her glass until the ice cubes clinked against her teeth. Then she'd smile. “I'm kinda tired, Stoney,” she'd say, and she'd stand up, hold out her hand, and lead him into the bedroom, where they'd lie together, their naked bodies pressed together, talking softly in the dark until they drifted off to sleep.

“I guess you've got no news on Lyle,” murmured Kate. Her cheek lay on his bare chest and one of her long naked legs was sprawled over both of his.

He stroked her hair. “Sheriff Dickman came by after you left,” he said. “And I called the house again. No news.”

“I'm worried.”

“Me, too.”

She wiggled against him. “Hang onto me, Stoney,” she said. “I want to be sure you're right here when I wake up.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. “I'm not going anywhere, honey.”

Ralph's bark awakened him. He didn't need to check his clock to know that the sun had not yet come up. Silvery predawn light oozed in through the windows, and somewhere out in the woods a gang of crows were having an argument.

“What's going on?” murmured Kate.

“Somebody's here.”

He slid out of bed, pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt, took the Remington off its pegs, and opened the front door.

Sheriff Dickman was leaning against his Explorer, tapping his Stetson against his leg.

“Want some coffee?” said Calhoun.

“Wouldn't mind.”

“Well, come on in.”

Dickman jerked his head at Kate's Blazer. “Don't mean to intrude.”

“Too late now.”

Calhoun went back inside. The sheriff followed.

Kate, wearing one of Calhoun's flannel shirts and a pair of his baggy sweatpants, was padding barefoot around the kitchen, loading the coffeepot. She looked at Dickman with her eyebrows arched.

“I've got some news,” he said.

“Lyle?”

He nodded. “They found his truck.”