Bonegrinder (7 page)

What was beginning to bother Wintone was, with the continuing influx of people throughout the area, the chances that someone else might be killed kept increasing.

And every day brought more people, from farther away.

T
HE
P
ETERSONS LIVED IN
Saint Louis, over three hundred miles northeast of Colver. They made their home in a low, gray, brick-and-frame ranch house with an attached two-car garage, centered on a quarter-acre of weedless, mowed green punctuated by small trees and square-trimmed shrubbery. They had a tomboyish ten-year-old daughter named Melanie who wore glasses, and they had a Ford station wagon and a dented Toyota. Their house was in a sprawling subdivision that for a hundred dollars a year provided them membership in a club that made accessible a swimming pool, tennis courts, yearly club parties and a small playground which Melanie had outgrown.

Bill Peterson was a draftsman for an aircraft design company. He was thirty-nine, a year older than his wife Cheryl, who stayed home to tend house and child. In the past few years Cheryl had acquired a worn-at-the-edges sort of prettiness that made her more attractive, in Bill’s mind, than when he had married her.

The Petersons spent much of their free time entertaining neighbors on their patio, working in the yard, going to movies, PTA meetings and grocery shopping together. They were unhappy.

Lately the low, gray ranch house had been the scene of desperate discussion.

“You’re the one messing things up,” Bill said with uncomprehending bitterness as he sat at the Spanish-styled dinette set after dinner. He’d had an unusually troublesome day at work and didn’t know if he really wanted the argument he was instigating. But he couldn’t restrain himself; it was as if some pressure were being exerted on a nerve that brought about an automatic response.

“No one’s messed up anything,” Cheryl said patiently, with a resignation that showed plainly she thought she’d never be able to make her husband understand. “Things just got messed up by themselves. Nobody’s to blame.”

“Maybe that’s your way of justifying what you’re considering.” Peterson studied his wife with careful objectivity as he spoke. She was still an attractive woman, with a lean, supple figure, small in the bust but with perfect long legs. Impending middle age had given her sallow-cheeked face, framed by still grayless black hair, a vaguely noble beauty. Peterson was hurt, physically hurt, by the possiblity of losing her. The only person he wanted even more to hold onto was Melanie. And if he lost Cheryl …

Cheryl poured herself another cup of coffee, drank it standing up as she began to gather the dishes. She drank more and more coffee lately, black coffee, as if to maintain a state of nervous superalertness.

Peterson gave up waiting for her to answer him, sat and watched her as he smoked a cigarette. Contrasting her quick, sure movements refined by time and thousands of tables cleared after thousands of meals, her face was tranquil and unreadable, the face of a woman who masked things.

It all made Peterson wonder what had gone wrong. He was still not a bad-looking guy, with most of his hair and the same clean-cut, squarish features; gone a little to overweight, but who the hell hadn’t? He was faithful, reliable, and had given Cheryl more than she had a right to expect. And until recently their sex life had been more than satisfactory—at least he’d thought so. He still was, in most respects, the same man Cheryl had chosen to marry.

It occurred to him that maybe that was the problem; she had changed and he hadn’t. He snubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the saucer she’d left him for an ashtray, listening to the dying ember hiss briefly in the muddy brown residue of coffee.

Damn it, she
hadn’t
changed! Not gradually, anyway. Not until the last few months, when words between them became forced, and her features had taken on the cast of a stranger’s.

Stranger though she’d become, Cheryl was candid with Peterson. She had told him about Carl Bauer, even though he hadn’t remotely suspected anything was going on behind his back. Carl Bauer, his ex-drinking partner, ex-fishing buddy, ex-friend. They had more than ever in common now. It disturbed Peterson that he couldn’t work up the proper fury toward Bauer. He knew that was because he believed Cheryl when she’d told him she had initiated the affair. Carl was a few years younger than Peterson, divorced, ruggedly handsome and an unabashed fun-lover. No surprise that a bored woman would choose him, and that he wouldn’t resist that choice. If it weren’t with me, it would be with someone else, was the old rationale. There was truth to it.

Carl was basically a shallow person, unstable, not Cheryl’s type. Eventually the infatuation would pass, Peterson knew, and Cheryl would be his again, maybe more firmly than ever. The pain was in the waiting.

“Where’s Melanie?” Cheryl asked when the dishes were cleared and the chugging, watery labor of the dishwasher sounded faintly from the kitchen.

“She’s swimming,” Peterson answered.

He touched his lighter flame to another cigarette, got up from the table and moved toward the family room, aware that Cheryl was following him. He no longer felt like arguing, wanted only to settle into his recliner chair and read the newspaper, read about other people’s problems. The newspaper was becoming an increasingly frequent escape for him.

“I’ve decided to go away with Carl,” Cheryl said.

How simply and matter-of-factly she spoke the words that drove the breath from Peterson. There was no quaver of uncertainty in her voice, making the blow all the more lethal. Peterson didn’t answer her right away, couldn’t. He settled into the vinyl recliner chair quickly because he had to.

“It’s what I want,” Cheryl said.

“It’s what you think you want.” His own voice was high, choked, but he drew a deep breath, swallowed and knew he’d regained control at least of his vocal cords. “It’s not unusual for a woman, an attractive woman like you who’s been married a long time, to think the grass might be greener somewhere else. It’s an infatuation, a temporary infatuation that will pass within months …”

She shook her head slowly; there was anguish in her mascaraed eyes. “It’s not only an infatuation, Bill, it’s a need.”

“For Christ’s sake, a need for
what?
For Carl Bauer?”

“Not only for Carl Bauer. There’s a part of me that’s never come to life, that I need to give a chance. At least that’s how I feel …”

Peterson appeared puzzled, frustrated, the look of a man in a maze. “What could you possibly want within reason that you don’t have or can’t get?”

Cheryl shook her head with a serene sadness that infuriated him. “It’s nothing material. I feel I have a potential for life that I’ll never realize the way things are now.”

“Potential that needs to be realized? … What do you mean—artistic?”

“Maybe … I don’t know.”

“For Christ’s sake, you take ceramics!”

Cheryl began to laugh then. The bitter laughter came bubbling up from dark unexpected depths within her, and she could no more stop it than she could stop water bubbling from a deep well. It was subterranean laughter, alien, and it scared her.

Peterson stared at his wife, his face reddening, a faint tremor in his hands that gripped the arms of the vinyl recliner. Then he saw the expression on Cheryl’s face, the tears tracking down her cheeks, and he didn’t know if she was laughing or crying. He didn’t know what to think, didn’t know what he should feel.

“Think of Melanie,” he said.

The muted, broken sounds gradually stopped bursting from Cheryl, and she was calm again, wiping her cheeks with stiffened yet graceful long fingers. Her knuckles were gnarled, the tendons on the backs of her hands prominent. Her hands had aged before the rest of her. There was a soft sadness in her eyes, as if she realized what the hands foretold.

“Think of Melanie,” he repeated

“I am … I have.”

“You can’t do this to her on some whim, some illogical, transitory crush that will soon pass.”

“You could see her anytime you wanted, Bill, you know that.”

“Don’t you care what you’d be doing to her?”

“She was the thing I cared about most, thought about most, before I made my decision.”

He hadn’t wanted to hear that, another cold penetration to the heart. “Have you talked to her yet?” he asked.

“No, I thought we should do that together. I thought that’s how you’d want it.”

Peterson pressed his head against the soft back of the chair, closed his eyes. His face was pale. “I don’t want it at all. Eventually you’ll realize the mistake you’ve made, but by then the damage will have been done.”

“Something like this happens,” Cheryl said, “you do the best you can. That’s what I’m trying to do.” Her voice was controlled now; she’d slipped back behind her mask.

“When do you plan to leave?” Peterson asked.

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“Don’t go,” Peterson said, “please.”

“We’ve been through that.”

The flesh around his closed eyes danced as if he were in pain. “But I’m begging you now. Really begging you.”

She was surprised that he’d beg at this point, surprised also that she was embarrassed for him. “Don’t, Bill …” She recognized her growing pity for him as a weakness, fought it.

“A week,” he implored. “Give it a week before you do anything else, say anything to Melanie.”

“It won’t make any difference, Bill; we both know it won’t.”

“It might. A week … You owe us that.”

She did owe him something; at least she thought she did. “All right,” she agreed, “but I don’t see what difference seven days will make.”

“The earth was created in seven days.”

Cheryl smiled at him, sighed. “It was at that. But not by you and me.”

Melanie came into the house the back way, through the garage, slamming the door hard enough for china in the kitchen to rattle.

“A towel, Mom!”

But Cheryl was already on her way to get it.

“Nice swim?” Peterson called to his daughter.

“The water was cold, and I scraped my chin on the bottom.” Her speech came haltingly from the cool kitchen, through chattering teeth and rigid jaw muscles. He heard her thank her mother as Cheryl tossed her a bright red beach towel.

Within a few minutes he watched Melanie’s bikini-clad, gangly young form cross the family room to get to her bedroom and some warm, dry clothes.

What was the threat to his married life? Where could he direct his rage? It wouldn’t be hard for him to hate Carl Bauer, but he knew Bauer was only a symptom of the problem. Cheryl had as much as told him that. There was nothing here for a man to come to grips with, to understand and fight.

Peterson watched his wife across the room. She was absently picking up a clutter of magazines Melanie had read that afternoon, fitting them one by one into the wooden rack by the sliding glass doors to the patio.

It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

Peterson picked up his evening newspaper, opened it full-width before him to block out his view of the room, of Cheryl.

He sought solace in the sorrows of others, in the precise black-and-white world of newsprint.

“Y
OU SEEN THE LATEST
batch of outa town papers the mayor’s got?” old Bonifield asked Wintone from down the bar at Mully’s.

“Not yet,” Wintone said, swiveling slightly on his bar stool to turn away from Bonifield as a signal that he didn’t want to talk. What he really felt like doing was telling Bonifield what he, Wintone, wished the mayor would do with his out-of-town papers, but there was little point to that.

“They’re all interested in Colver now,” Bonifield went on. “Not long ago they never know’d we was alive, an’ now they’re askin’ how to spell our names. An’ I told plenty of ’em how to spell yours, Sheriff.”

Wintone didn’t thank him.

“I was careful not to mention nothin’ else, though. They was all interested in your personal life an’ all, how reliable an’ such you was. ‘No comment’ is what I told ’em.”

“Ain’t you got someplace else to go?” Mully asked Bonifield.

The old man curled a tobacco-darkened lip at him. “Sure, you can afford to drive off customers now.”

Mully chuckled hopelessly and shook his head. “I don’t see nobody in here but the three of us. This ain’t the kind of place tourists take to, not when they find out there’s no hard liquor.”

“Then you oughta serve hard liquor,” old Bonifield said. “Cater to ’em. This here’s your golden opportunity.”

“Opportunity for what?”

“Didn’t I say golden?”

“Nothin I need gold for.” Mully began to wipe down the bar, though it was smooth and dry. “I promised Cora there wouldn’t be no hard liquor served in here, after her brother got killed in that fight. Don’t see any reason to break that promise now.”

“That’s all been fifteen years ago!” Bonifield said in exasperation. “An’ Cora’s been gone five.”

“Don’t make no difference,” Mully said calmly, but his face seemed darker, the fine-etched lines deeper.

“Don’t you ever hear ice crackin’ under you?” Wintone asked Bonifield.

Bonifield was finished with his beer. Turned on his stool, he leaned back against the bar and bit off a chew of tobacco from a brownish mass in a wad of crumpled wax paper he’d drawn from his pocket.

“Maybe I did speak hasty,” he said. “A man’s wife is never really dead to him, in a manner of speakin’, that is.”

Mully continued to wipe the bar, Wintone to stare into the disappearing foam of his beer.

“All I meant,” old Bonifield said to Mully, “was that maybe you oughta pretty up the place some. Maybe even get some entertainment. Then maybe folks from outa the area would take to comin’ here.”

“I got business enough to meet my needs.”

“Reserve,” Bonifield said. “I’m talkin’ about somethin’ you know you got an’ don’t have to spend. A cushion’s what I mean. Fer that rainy day folks talk about.”

“Ain’t never gonna be another rainy day around here,” Mully said.

Wintone cupped his hands around the coolness of his half-filled beer mug. “Not today, anyway. Not accordin’ to the weather bureau.”