Bonegrinder (2 page)

“And with good reason,” Mully said. “If you don’t get lost or snakebit, you’ll drop your hook in an’ all you’ll bring up is weed or slime. Lynn Cove an’ the bank down near the dock are the only decent fishin’ spots on the shore.”

“City fishermen are funny sorts,” Higgins said. “They’ll go someplace where nobody’s set foot just to get their lines tangled.”

“So’s they have to buy new line,” Turper said.

“Which the Colver General Merchandise store’ll sell ’em,” old Bonifield said, raising his beer mug to Wintone.

“Still,” Wintone said, “this water ain’t clear like off the north shore, an’ it’s too overgrown and shallow for a boat to get around for some hundred yards off the bank. A little shallower and it’d damn near be swamp.”

“Sheriff’d bitch if you hung him with a new rope,” old Bonifield said, lifting his mug again. “He oughta be glad prosperity’s come to Colver.”

“Amen,” Higgins said.

“Mayor Boemer might not like you talkin’ like that, Sheriff,” Frank Turper said with the burlesque of righteous indignation that was all he could muster after five beers.

Wintone shrugged. “Piss on the mayor. He’s lucky I don’t arrest him in his office for loitering.”

“Ain’t you techy,” old Bonifield said. “Been techy on to … six months or so.”

Wintone’s fingers whitened on the dark beer bottle as he poured.

“I will say the sheriff didn’t arrest me when I got glorious jug-bit last Saturday a week,” old Bonifield went on. “I will say he ain’t that techy, to arrest a man drunk but not so drunk as to be a nuisance.”

“You’re a nuisance sober,” Wintone said.

“A nuisance,” old Bonifield said, “ain’t exactly a menace …”

“Sheriff’s right about this end of the lake, though,” Mully said at the right time, as was his way. “Ain’t nothin’ but miles of bad water, wild growth an’ copperhead snakes. We fish this part of it ’cause we live here an’ we’re used to it.”

“Fish is a fish,” Bonifield said with a shrug of his thin shoulders.

“If mudcat, crawdad an’ bony carp are your fare.”

“Good eatin’ if you know how to cook ’em!” Bonifield snapped.

“Tourists don’t know,” Wintone said calmly.

“Them that don’t know comes to my restaurant,” Frank Turper said.

Bonifield cackled.

Wintone saw that the talk was caught in a circle, a hoop-snake conversation bound to bite its own tail. He finished his beer, slid off his stool and walked out into the brightness and heat of midday.

He crossed the hot street slowly and walked toward his office, thinking of Lil Higgins renting cabins and making money while Luke sat in Mully’s. Thinking of Velda, the henna-haired waitress at Turper’s Grill, dealing out hamburgers to the ring of the cash register. The hordes of tourists that had invaded the south shores of Big Water Lake meant added business for most everybody, and Wintone knew that sooner or later he’d get his rightful share of business. Only he was likely the solitary one who didn’t want it.

Wintone waved to Web Hooper, passing in his red pickup, then he opened the door in the frame street-front building that used to be a sweets store but some twenty-five years ago had been converted into the sheriff’s office and “temporary” jail. Wintone remembered the sweets store from when he was a boy, the taffy in the winter, still hot, that would steam some if you dropped it in the snow and taste all the better after you dug it out. He was just turned forty-one now, and that time seemed long, long past, only a dream more vivid than most.

In fact, it seemed years since Etty had died, but old Bonifield had set the time right: six months and nine days. The sheriff could tack on the hours and minutes, if you wanted, to a hair.

Wintone shut the door behind him quickly so the old window air conditioner wouldn’t have to strain to catch up. The office itself was small; scarred wooden desk, green file cabinets on one wall, a few hickory chairs with seat cushions on them, a cork bulletin board with the usual curled and yellowed memorandums and wanted notices attached like mounted long-dead butterflies that had faded. The back room, where Wintone had a cot, was larger than the office and held most of the furniture, and beyond that was the room containing the three eight-by-eight cells, most often empty.

Wintone ran the back of his wrist across his forehead and slumped in the swivel chair behind his paper-strewn desk. The office was the coolest room right now, but if Wintone decided to spend the night here he’d set up a small fan to blow the coolness from the air conditioner into the back room. It worked. Cool air pretty much went where it was pushed, and where it was pushed was cooler than the small set of rooms Wintone leased from the Lalprin family, who had left the rest of the house empty two years ago to move to Springfield.

Etty regarded Wintone from her portrait on his desk corner, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in her mid-thirties, with beauty but no hint of mystery in her slight smile. The smile was simply something that belonged about the generous lips; the thing about Etty that stayed strongest with Win-tone was the smile.

Wintone leaned back in the wood swivel chair, a big man, nearly big enough to be called huge, with a barrel chest, oak-trunk thighs and large hands that were surprisingly quick and dexterous. He had angular, fine-chiseled, almost haughty features and a boyish thatch of curly, brown, unruly hair that looked too innocent for the face below. When he moved, it was with a lightness and balance and a deceptively lazy cast to his eyes. With a certain sadness, he knew from occasional shortnesses of breath, from lapses of reflex and aches in the mornings that he wasn’t near the man he’d been at thirty-five. He was a man beginning to feel the burden of time.

That was what made the thing about Etty all the more persistent. If only they’d had some few years together instead of the few months…. He remembered Etty’s father, Henry Card, a hard Baptist rock of a man, and his endless biblical philosophizing after the accident.

Wintone tilted back his head and stared up at the finely cracked ceiling. “The Lord taketh away.” The Lord had taken Etty and her softness from Wintone, taken what had given a joyous pattern to his life, taken the only future that meant anything. On Route 44 the Lord had been an over-the-road tractor-trailer with diesel stacks; on Route 44 the Lord had slammed down His fist like a sledgehammer. On Etty, not Wintone.

As in a relentless TV news film he was forced to watch, Wintone again saw the flames, again heard the screams that had meant so little to him at the time as he stumbled about the highway shoulder. An intersection collision, impossible to say whose fault. A hand, an arm, supporting him; Malloby, a state trooper he vaguely knew; Malloby staring hard into his face. “Listen, Billy, I ain’t gonna ask you …” And Wintone had been drinking before the accident; Wintone and nobody else knew that for a provable fact, and nobody including Wintone knew if he’d been drunk enough for it to affect his driving. He had nodded numbly, hadn’t had to take the inhalator test to determine if he was legally drunk, legally and morally responsible for Etty’s death. “Jesus …” the dazed truck driver had repeated over and over, “Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …” And a county sheriff hadn’t had to take the test that any other driver would have been required to take, that would have fixed responsibility or innocence; and Wintone wished to Jesus now that he had taken the test, wished now that he could know one way or the other, so eventually he might forget.

Wintone hadn’t seen or talked to his father-in-law since the funeral.

The swivel chair squealed as the sheriff dropped his weight forward, rested his elbows on the scarred desk top. What he’d had the crazy urge to do after the funeral was to take his shotgun, knife and fishing gear and disappear into the deep woods along Big Water Lake, simply disappear, from himself, from everyone. There were dark places there, shady and cool, where nothing in this world could find him. But he hadn’t done that; he wasn’t a man to surrender to senseless impulse.

So Wintone sought his escape in sleep; he dreamed less often now. He lowered his head into the cradle of his folded arms on the desk, and in the morning he awoke on the cot in the next room, neither remembering nor caring how he’d got there.

The cedar frame of the cot groaned like something dying as Wintone rolled onto his side and sat up, raking his fingers lightly over his sleep-swollen features as if to check for changes. After a brief, cold shower and a quick shave, Wintone felt better. He felt good enough to put on a fresh uniform and to walk down to Turper’s Grill and have scrambled eggs and gravy biscuits for breakfast.

There were several fishermen breakfasting at the counter at Turper’s, dressed in expensive city-bought outdoors clothing and talking about the insurance business. A vacationing family—man, wife and teen-age daughter—sat in one of the booths by the window, eating in silence. The place where Wintone customarily sat at the counter was taken, so he ate at one of the small tables near the door. From time to time he’d look up and watch Velda’s bubblelike henna hairdo moving back and forth behind the tall serving-shelf from the kitchen, much like a balled-up artificial animal in a shooting gallery.

It was nine o’clock when Wintone ordered a cup of black coffee to go and carried it back to his office.

Things to do. Nate Graham had claimed some city fishermen had trespassed to fish his private lake, and after he’d chased them off in none too friendly a fashion one of his milk cows had turned up dead of a bullet wound. He’d managed to find out the name of one of one of the fishermen, and though they’d gone back to Saint Joseph the next day, Graham had filed charges. Paperwork for the state, enough to keep Wintone occupied for over an hour hunt-and-pecking on his old Royal typewriter.

After that Rufe Davis, proprietor of Colver General Merchandise and Colver’s postmaster, came by with the day’s mail and sat for a long chat, talking mostly about how his business had picked up and how hellish hot it was getting outside. When he was gone, Wintone leisurely opened his mail with his pocketknife and scanned the various colorful ads and form letters with disinterest. He had no need for a new anything, really. The tools of his trade were basic.

It was just past noon when old Bonifield crossed the street toward the sheriff’s office with his curiously agile, limping gait. Sweat had streaked his grizzled, lean face and he was walking fast, bent slightly forward, nervously shifting his usual large wad of chewing tobacco from cheek to cheek behind set lips.

He threw open the office door with a suddenness that startled and momentarily angered Wintone.

W
INTONE SAT AND LISTENED.
Craziness here. What old Bonifield was yammering about couldn’t be true. The sheriff decided to let the old man talk until he ran down.

Lazily rubbing a forefinger along the side of his nose, Wintone speculated that maybe it was the combination of afternoon heat and morning alcohol that had ignited old Bonifield’s imagination.

Quite a story he was telling, about a boy who’d been attacked at the lake by something that sounded as if it came right out of a late-night horror movie. Wintone had heard this sort of almost incoherent ranting before from Bonifield when the old man had been drinking hard. What did worry the sheriff was that a boy might have been hurt badly somewhere in some other fashion. Though even that part of Bonifield’s tale was probably so much wind.

“It be true, Sheriff!” Bonifield shouted, sensing Wintone’s doubt.

“Ain’t always easy to know what’s true,” Wintone said.

“You’ll be knowin’ when you see the body.” Bonifield opened the front door for a moment, rattling the blinds against the window, and spat an amber arc of chewing tobacco into the street.

Wintone resented him letting the heat in against the hardworking air conditioner. “I wish you’d left the body,” he said, not knowing himself if he was trying to humor old Bonifield. “…Make things easier.”

“He were still alive when we found him, I told you, screamin’ on about what come up outa the lake an’ attacked him. When he quit screamin’ an’ closed his eyes we didn’t know if he be dead or not, so we figured we oughta bring him on in to Doc Amis.”

“Uh-hm. If he’s as tore up as you say and wasn’t dead at the lake,” Wintone said, “he’s bound to be now after the ride over rough road in Joe James’s pickup truck. You shoulda sent somebody in to get the doc.”

What passed over old Bonifield’s lined face unsettled Wintone. A kind of fear and shame that suggested that maybe none of the men had had the courage to stay at the scene of whatever had or hadn’t happened to the boy. And Wintone knew that none of them were cowards. Old Bonifield’s wild story, in those few seconds, gained a certain chilling credibility.

Brakes squealed outside and a tinny-sounding door slammed. Through the slanted blinds Wintone saw the dented black roof of Joe James’s rusty pickup truck. Car doors slammed. Old Bonifield had already shuffled his stooped, whipcord figure out the door, leaving it hanging open for Wintone like an unfriendly invitation.

As he stepped outside, the heat hit Wintone like a soft hammer that continued to press. He was reminded again that he was forty-one and tilting to overweight.

“See here now, Sheriff!”

Bonifield was leaning over the bed of the old pickup and pointing, a look of triumph on his creased and stubbled face, a glint of wildness in his surprisingly alert blue eyes.

Joe James, a heavyset man with a red face and no eyebrows, stepped aside for Wintone to move in close. “He were dead when we hoisted him into the truck, Sheriff,” James said with a sad tension. “Figured it best to stop here first.”

“Figured right,” Wintone said, staring at what was in the bed of the pickup. Wintone had seen a lot. He looked away. Bonifield had said the boy’s eyes were closed. The eyes of the dead thing in the pickup bed were open. Maybe the jarring ride had done that.

“Boy about twelve,” Sonny Tibbet said. He had been in the truck cab with Joe James and was with him when the screams had led the men to discover the boy on the bank of Big Water Lake. “Wonder what did that to him, did all that an’ took his leg near off? …”