Bonegrinder (8 page)

“In the middle of a financial boom,” Bonifield said with contempt, “an’ you two’re talkin’ about the weather.”

“Lotta farmers around here ain’t havin’ a financial boom,” Wintone said. “Weather’s about all they talk about.” He wished Bonifield would leave, go to one of those prettier places he’d mentioned.

“Things other’n crops is growin’ just fine here,” Bonifield said. “Like, every business in an’ around Colver. Or ain’t you noticed?”

“It’ll calm down,” Wintone said.

“Maybe not. Maybe it ain’t even peaked out yet.”

“You want another beer before you go?” Mully asked Bonifield, by way of invitation to leave.

“Nope.” Bonifield held firm on his stool.

Wintone didn’t want to go back to his office, or outside into the heat. Earlier the heat had made him nauseous; there seemed to be a dusty, noxious film over everything in Colver that needed a steady, cool rain to wash it away. So Wintone had come here, to Mully’s, where it was cool without the sealed confinement of his small, air-conditioned office.

But in Mully’s he’d found Bonifield. Maybe the old man had sought refuge here like Wintone. Even Bonifield could get too much of the press, who were congregated mostly at the modern, air-conditioned lounges of the larger motels toward the main highway. Prettier places.

When his beer was almost finished, Wintone decided he would drive along the lake road, then up beyond Lynn Cove where woven green vines and saplings grew on dark, moist ground that sloped gradually out into the lake. There the water lay motionless and thick with algae, thick with the pungent, wild scent of dying and growing. And near the lake were steep, wooded bluffs, with bent cedar clinging to their faces, pale juttings of rock like bones forced through flesh. Two days ago a woman had been lost in that area for half a day, and just when everyone was becoming really alarmed she had stumbled onto a road by accident and followed it until she was picked up by a State Patrol car. She was found less than a hundred yards from where she had left her husband in their parked car.

It would be good to keep the patrol car and himself highly visible to the outsiders in the area, Wintone thought, to show some representation of local law.

As Wintone was walking toward the door, Frank Turper entered. His dark eyes, recessed in glistening pads of flesh, glinted dully as if he’d been drinking before his arrival at Mully’s. “You seen them outa town papers come in the mayor’s mail today?” he asked Wintone.

“Not yet.”

“You oughta see some of the drawin’s of how Bonegrinder might look. Half-lizard, half-man—that sorta thing. Give you pause to think.”

“Pausin’ to think ain’t a bad idea,” Wintone said, and walked past Turper and out the door.

Wintone got into the patrol car, quickly started the engine and turned the air conditioner on high. Absently he pulled the automatic shift lever back and drove slowly toward the beckoning green hills. Heat waves rose in shimmering vapors from the patrol car’s flat metal hood.

As he drove, Wintone noticed the surprisingly large number of people on the street despite the heat. Few of them were local. Most carried cameras, fishing equipment or picnic paraphernalia.

It will all fade away soon, Wintone assured himself. When the north shore gets rebuilt and the Bonegrinder thing becomes just another half-interesting bit of Ozark folklore. Eventually things will be as they were.

But a worm of doubt, like a restless silver thread, had begun to burrow into Wintone’s mind.

Once changed, did things ever return to the way they were?

B
ILL
P
ETERSON ENTERED THE
kitchen through the connecting door to the garage.

He’d been bent over the long wooden bench he’d constructed along one wall, where he often went in the evenings to work out the tensions that had built in him through the day. Thinking too much about the threatened changes that might rend his life suffused him with a curious terror.

Cheryl, domestic-looking in a plain blue housedress, was just finishing wiping the kitchen table with a damp dishcloth. There was something in her domesticity that keenly aroused Peterson at times, though he didn’t know why. He liked to approach her from behind at moments like this and kiss the nape of her slender neck, to slide a hand around smoothly and quickly cup one of her breasts. This time he stood still just inside the door and waited until she’d finished wiping the table before speaking.

“It’s been four days,” he said.

She nodded, held the dishcloth beneath cold running water and wrung it with deft, practiced hands, as if dispassionately wringing the neck of some live thing. Peterson thought she was treating him exactly like the dishcloth. The vulnerability of his love depressed him.

“Has anything changed?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said, draping the dishcloth over the divider between the stainless steel basins of the double sink. She began to place clean glasses two by two in a cabinet.

Peterson watched her for a long time, his breath deep and even. “I have a suggestion,” he said.

She interrupted her glass placing and turned to him, as if he’d at last said something positive.

“A fishing trip,” Peterson said.

His wife stared at him for a moment, then shook her head in refusal, but not firmly. The kitchen was so quiet that he could hear the inner mechanism of the electric clock on the stove.

“Why not?” he asked. “We haven’t been since last year. And it would give you—give us both—a chance to get out into nature and think things over clearly, get a fresh perspective.”

“It will look the same to me, Bill.”

Damn her, what was she trying to do to him? “What about Melanie? You know how she loves to go fishing with us. If nothing else, it will be one last time for her to remember the three of us together.”

Cheryl began putting away the last of the glasses, her lips pursed in consideration. Maybe she did owe him that, owe it to Melanie. It wasn’t that she felt guilty. No, there was no guilt involved, only obligation. But she was sure she wouldn’t change her mind about leaving with Carl.

She found herself thinking of Carl, strong and impetuous in a lazy, appealing way, longing for new places, new adventures, burning with an eagerness that she wanted to consume her. Carl was to Bill what blowtorch was to candle. But Bill couldn’t help it. She had to remember that. And he loved Melanie, even if he only thought he loved Melanie’s mother.

Peterson sensed her indecision and pounced on it. “I’ll call and make reservations at Lost Pines,” he said hurriedly. “All right?” He smiled at her pleadingly. How could she resist that smile?

“All right,” she said, and a weight seemed to slip from her, as if to reassure her that she’d made the right decision.

Peterson walked over to his wife and kissed her forehead. Her body tensed to stillness and she stood with her hands at her sides, as if tolerating his kiss rather than endure an argument.

“Things will work out,” he said, backing a step and looking intently down into her immobile face. “You’ll see; I promise.”

“Don’t promise that,” she said quietly.

Peterson disappeared into the hall where the telephone sat on a small, ornate table they had bought at a rummage sale and he’d refinished.

A few minutes later he walked back into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and poured himself half a glass of milk. He downed the milk quickly, as if appeasing a great need.

“Lost Pines burned down,” he said. “Remember the big forest fire we heard about on the news?”

“I thought it was somewhere else,” Cheryl said.

Peterson wiped his lips with the backs of his knuckles and shook his head. “No, it was at Big Water Lake, the whole north shore. I got us reservations farther south, near a place called Colver.”

C
OLVER WAS QUIET NEAR
midnight. Wintone was sitting at his desk, dressed only in pants and a T-shirt, sipping a glass of ice water and wishing he could feel like sleeping. Only minutes after he’d lain on the cot in the back room, the familiar uneasiness had made him rise, pad barefoot about the office as if seeking something.

Finally he’d decided to forget about going back to bed for the time being, and he tried to do some paperwork at his desk.

That didn’t work either. He was too tired to concentrate, yet his eyes refused to close on their dry weariness. So in the shadowed soft light from the desk lamp, he’d paced about the office for a while, tending to small things that needed no tending; then he sat back down at his desk to wish for exhaustion.

Automatically, he had tuned his citizens’ band radio to emergency channel nine, and he was seated at his desk with his face buried in his large hands when the call came through.

“Breaker ten seventeen!” the voice said loudly, a surprise from the barely hissing speaker. “This is Molasses. I’m on the lake road an’ there’s somethin’ movin’ out in the water!”

An operator named Rag Man asked excitedly what the something looked like. Wintone stretched an arm and adjusted the squelch control for better reception.

“It’s dark an’ big, movin’ some hundred feet out along the bank. I’m followin’, but the road curves an’ sometimes I lose sight through the trees. Ten twenty-three.”

Wintone was sitting at his desk attentively now, leaning forward. He knew who Molasses was: Cal Horton, a sawmill employee who drove an old tan pickup truck equipped with a CB radio. Horton was a reliable sort, a big, redheaded man, practical as he had to be with a wife and five kids.

The speaker crackled. Wintone wished he had a transmitter so he could talk to Horton, but he had only the receiver and no CB unit in the patrol car. All he could do was sit, listen and agonize.

“Breaker,” a new voice, a tenor, said. “Give us your ten twenty, Molasses.”

“I’m on the lake road a half-mile or so south of Lynn Cove, headed away from the cove.”

“Ten four, Molasses. This is Lancelot—we’ll try to join you.”

“I’m tryin’ to stay with this thing, truckin’ along on this lovin’ bumpy road …”

“Breaker, this is Rag Man—”

“Ten six, Rag Man, I’m busy right now tryin’ to keep this buckin’ truck on the road while I take a hill. I lost sight of the blasted thing … if it weren’t for the moonlight … there it is!”

Wintone stood up from the desk chair, inserted the tips of his fingers into his hip pockets and began to pace. He was glad Molasses was the type to use good sense. Horton would consider his wife and kids before rushing into anything. At least Wintone hoped he would.

“I wish to Hades I could make out what it looked like,” Horton said. “It’s too far out, but it’s movin’ in a line right along the bank. Lost it again! Damn wheel went off the road—back on now.”

“Breaker, Lancelot here. What’s your exact location now, Molasses? Ten twenty-three.”

“I ain’t sure now. I been fightin’ to keep this heap on the road an’ not lose sight—”

“Breaker, this is Rag Man. I’m on the lake road, Molasses—”

“Ten six, Rag Man. Stand by, stand by, I’m busy …”

Through the speaker Wintone could hear the roar and rattle of Horton’s ancient, laboring pickup truck.

“The road bends away from the lake here,” Horton said. “I’m gonna lose sight of the thing behind a rise … can’t see it now. I’m parkin’ where the road starts to curve away an’ I’m gonna cut through the trees on foot to get closer. Ten twenty-three.”

“Ten four, Molasses. You be careful, hear?”

Don’t leave your truck,
Wintone almost said aloud. He stood over the radio, rested a hand on it. The speaker was silent but for a soft, staticky hissing, like escaping air. Wintone looked at his watch: twelve twenty-seven.

What had Horton seen? The man was far from a fool, and he’d been raised near Colver, spent his life here. He’d know anything in Big Water Lake. And he must have seen something. Again Wintone heard the words of the veteran reporter McKenna: “Something killed the boy.”

Twelve thirty-one.

“Molasses, this is Lancelot. You out there? Ten ten.”

“Lancelot, this is Rag Man. He said he was leavin’—”

“I know, I know,” Lancelot broke in with his high, tremulous voice, forgetting radio procedure.

The silent speaker hissed.

Twelve thirty-five.

Wintone walked in a circle, away from the glowing dial of the receiver, then back. He thought about getting in the patrol car, racing to the lake road. But it wouldn’t be easy to locate Horton’s truck immediately, and by the time Wintone could reach the spot he’d be too late one way or the other. Here, at least, he knew what was happening as well as anyone except Horton.

The silence from the speaker seemed to spread, seemed to displace the air in the office. Wintone stepped off another perfect circle on the hardwood floor.

“Breaker, this is Molasses,” a breathless voice said at twelve thirty-eight. “I lost sight of it, but I got a closer look. Only thing I could tell about it was that it was big—bigger’n I thought at first—an’ it was movin’ fast through the water along the bank. I couldn’t keep up through the trees an’ heavy brush, an’ it just disappeared off into the darkness.”

Wintone walked back to his desk, sat down.

He was exhausted now, but further than ever from sleep. He reached for the phone, dialed the number of Cal Horton’s home, and told a sleepy and wondering Beth Horton that he wanted to talk to her husband when he returned home. Wintone assured her that Cal wasn’t in any kind of trouble, and she agreed fuzzily to give him Wintone’s message when he returned.

Then the sheriff sat back and listened to the CB enthusiasts chatter harmlessly about Cal Horton’s adventure.

Bonegrinder had been seen. Substance was added to speculation.

Not that Cal Horton had seen much, but the press was trying mightily to make much of it.

Horton could only tell the press what he’d told Wintone: that whatever he’d spotted in the lake was very large, but that he hadn’t seen it next to anything to really compare size, and of course he’d only seen the part above water. It was black, or at least a very dark color, and it seemed to move smoothly through the water, from what Horton could make out from his bucking pickup truck or while running along the bank to keep it in sight. And he wasn’t sure, but he thought it might have made a sound, a low kind of groan like he’d never heard before. Or the sound might have been something else. Or he might have imagined that.