Down River (11 page)

   I found Dolf on the porch, rolling a cigarette. “Morning,” I said, and stood against the rail, watching his deft and busy fingers. He studied me as he licked the paper and ran the cigarette between his fingers one last time. He took a match from his shirt pocket, struck it with a thumbnail. His eyes settled on the pistol still tucked under my belt. He blew out the match.

“That mine?” he asked.

I pulled out the pistol and set it on the table. The sweet tobacco smell surrounded me as I bent, and his face looked etched in the sharp light. “Sorry,” I said.

He picked up the gun and sniffed the barrel; then he laid it back down. “No harm done.” He leaned back in the chair and it creaked beneath him. “Five years is a long time,” he said casually.

“Yep.”

“Guess you came home for a reason. Want to tell me about it?”

“No.”

“Maybe I can help you.”

It was a good offer. He meant it. “Not this time, Dolf.”

He gestured downriver. “I smelled the fire. Thought maybe I could see the glow, too.”

He wanted to talk about it, wanted to know, and I didn’t blame him.

“Sound travels down the river.” He took a drag. “I can smell the smoke on you.”

I sat in the rocker next to his and put my feet up on the rail. I looked once again at the gun and then at Dolf’s coffee cup. I thought of my mother and of the white deer.

“Somebody’s hunting the property,” I said.

He rocked slowly. “It’s your father.”

“He’s hunting again? I thought that he’d sworn it off.”

“Sort of.”

“What does that mean?”

“There’s a pack of wild dogs hanging around. They showed up after the first of the cattle was shot. They smell blood from miles off. Find the carcasses at night. They’ve got a taste for it now. We can’t seem to drive them off. Your father is determined to kill every last one of them. It’s his new religion.”

“I thought that cattle had been shot at only once.”

“That’s all we reported to the sheriff. It’s more like seven or eight times now.”

“What kind of dogs?” I asked.

“Hell, I don’t know. Big ones. Little ones. Dirty, skulking bastards. They’re all mean as hell. But the leader—damn—now he’s something else. Looks like a cross between a German shepherd and a Doberman. Hundred pounds, maybe. Black. Fast. Smart as hell. Doesn’t matter where your father comes from, how quiet he is, that black one always sees him first. Fades away. Your old man can’t get a shot. Says that dog’s the devil himself.”

“How many in the pack?”

“Maybe a dozen at first. Your old man killed two or three. It’s down to five or six now.”

“Who killed the others?”

“That black one, I think. We found ’em with their throats torn out. All males. Rivals, I guess.”

“Jesus.”

“Yep.”

“Why aren’t you reporting the shootings?”

“Because the sheriff is useless. He was useless five years ago and he’s found no reason to change, far as I can tell. First time we called him, he walked once around the carcass, then suggested that it might be best for all concerned if your father just sold. That about settled it for your dad and me.”

“Is anybody still at the hospital?”

“They won’t let us see her, so no point hanging around. We came home a few hours ago.”

I stood up, walked to the corner of the porch. The sun was rising above the treetops. I debated how much to tell Dolf, decided he ought to know everything. “It was Zebulon Faith,” I said. “Him or Danny. They’re the ones that did it.”

Dolf was silent for a long moment. I heard his chair creak again and felt his footsteps on the old floor. He stood next to me and put his hands on the rail, looked out to where a low mist was rising from the river.

“Wasn’t Zebulon Faith,” he said.

I turned, not sure what to think; he picked a piece of tobacco off of his tongue as I waited for him to explain. He took his time about it.

“He’s mean enough to do it, I reckon, but he went in for prostate cancer three years ago.” He looked at me. “The old boy can’t get it up anymore. He’s impotent. No lead left in the pencil.”

“How can you know that?” I asked.

Dolf sighed, kept his eyes on the river. “We had the same doctor, got diagnosed about the same time; we went through it together. Not like we were friends or anything, but we talked once or twice.” He shrugged. “Just one of those things.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty much.”

I thought about Dolf fighting off a cancer while I struggled for meaning in some faraway city I had no business being in. “I’m sorry, Dolf.”

He spit out another piece of tobacco, shrugged off my sympathy. “What makes you think it was one of them?” he asked.

I told him everything I knew: Danny’s ring, the fire, my fight with Zebulon Faith.

“Maybe a good thing you didn’t kill him,” Dolf said.

“I wanted to.”

“Don’t blame you.”

“Could have been Danny that did it.”

Dolf thought about it, spoke with reluctance. “Most people have a dark streak in them somewhere. Danny is a good enough kid in a lot of ways, but his streak is closer to the surface than most.”

“What do you mean?”

He studied me. “I spent a lot of years watching you swing at shadows, Adam. Lashing out. Untouchable in a lot of ways. It killed me to see you like that, but I could understand it. You saw things no boy should see.” He paused and I looked away. “When you’d come home bloodied up, or when your dad and I bailed you out, there was always a sadness in you, a quietness. Damn, son, you’d look all but lost. That’s a hard thing for me to say to you, but there it is. Now Danny, he was different. He’d have this look of barely restrained glee. That boy, he got in fights because he enjoyed it. Big damn difference.”

I didn’t argue. In a lot of ways, Danny’s dark streak formed the bedrock of our friendship. I’d met him six months after my mother killed herself. I was already fighting, cutting school. Most of my friends had pulled away from me. They didn’t know how to handle me, had no idea what to say to a boy whose mother blew her own head off. That hurt, too, but I didn’t whine about it. I pulled deeper into myself, gave up on everybody. Danny came into my life like a brother. He had no money, bad grades, and an abusive father. He hadn’t seen his mother or a square meal in two years.

Consequence meant nothing to Danny. He flat-out did not give a shit.

I wanted to feel like he did.

We hit it off. If I got into a fight, he backed me up. I did the same. Older kids. Kids our age. It didn’t matter. Once, in the eighth grade, we stole the principal’s car and parked it in plain view at the massage parlor by the interstate. Danny went down for that: expelled for two weeks, juvenile record. He never mentioned my name.

But he was a grown man now, and his father stood to make a pile of money. I had to wonder how deep that dark streak ran.

Seven figures, Robin had said.

Deep enough, I guessed.

“You think he could have done it?” I asked. “Attacked Grace?”

Dolf thought about the question. “Maybe, but I doubt it. He’s made some mistakes, but I still say he’s a good enough kid. Are the police looking for him?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Guess we’ll see then.”

“There was a woman with Grace before she was attacked.”

“What woman?” Dolf asked.

“In a blue canoe, one of the old wooden ones like you never see anymore. She had white hair, but looked too young for that, somehow. They were talking.”

“Were they?” His eyebrows came together.

“Do you know her?”

“I do.”

“Who is she?”

“Did you tell the police about her?”

“I did.”

He spit over the rail. “Sarah Yates. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Who is she?”

“I haven’t spoken to Sarah in a long time. She lives across the river.”

“You can do better than that,” I said.

“That’s really all that I can tell you, Adam. Now come here. I’ll show you something.”

I let it go, followed him off of the porch and into the yard. He led me to the barn and put a hand on the old MG that sat on blocks in the center of it. “You know, until this car, Grace has never asked me for a single thing. She’d wear the seat out of her pants before she complained of a draft.” He rubbed his hand on the car’s fender. “This is the cheapest convertible she could find. It’s temperamental and undependable, but she wouldn’t trade it for the world.” He studied me again. “Do those words describe anything else in this barn? Temperamental. Undependable.”

I knew what he meant.

“She loves you, Adam; even though you left, and even though the leaving damn near killed her. She wouldn’t trade you for anything else.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because she’s going to need you now more than ever.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Don’t leave again. That’s what I’m telling you.”

I stepped back, so that his hand fell away; and for a moment there was a twitch in his gnarled fingers. “That’s never been up to me, Dolf.”

“Your dad’s a good man who’s made mistakes. That’s all he is. Just like you. Just like me.”

“And last night?” I asked. “When he threatened to kill me?”

“It’s like I said. Violent and more than a little blind. The two of you. Just the same.”

“It’s not the same,” I said.

Dolf straightened and turned up his lips in the most forced smile I’d ever seen. “Ah, forget it. You know your own mind well enough. Let’s go eat some breakfast.” He turned and walked away.

“That’s the second time you’ve lectured me about my father in the past twelve hours. He doesn’t need you fighting his battles.”

“It’s not supposed to be a battle,” he said, and kept walking.

I looked at the sky, then at the barn, but in the end I had nowhere else to go. We returned to the house, and I sat at his kitchen table and watched as he poured two coffees and took bacon and eggs out of the refrigerator. He cracked six eggs into a bowl, added some milk, and whipped it all with a fork. He put the bowl aside and opened the bacon.

It took a few minutes for us both to calm down.

“Dolf,” I finally said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.” His voice was as calm as could be.

“What’s the longest you’ve ever heard of a deer living?”

“A whitetail?”

“Yes.”

Dolf dropped half the side of bacon into the pan. “Ten years in the wild, longer in captivity.”

“You ever heard of one living twenty years?”

Dolf put the pan on the stove, and the bacon began to snap and sizzle. “Not a normal one.”

Light fingered through the window to place a pale square on the near black wood. When I looked up, he was studying me with open curiosity. “Do you remember the last time my father took me hunting?” I asked. “That white buck I shot at and missed?”

“It’s one of your old man’s favorite stories. He says that the two of you reached an understanding out there in the woods. A thing unspoken, he’d call it. A commitment to life in the shadow of death, or something like that. Damn poetic, I always thought.”

I thought of the photograph my father kept in his study, the one taken on the day we saw the white deer. It was taken in the driveway after a long, silent walk back from the deep woods. My father thought it was a new beginning. I was just trying not to cry.

“He was wrong, you know. There was no commitment.”

“What do you mean?” Dolf asked.

“I wanted to kill that deer.”

“I don’t understand.”

I looked up at Dolf and felt the same overwhelming emotions I’d felt in the woods. Comfort. Pain. “My father said that deer was a sign. He meant that it was a sign from her.”

“Adam—”

“That’s why I wanted to hurt it.” I squeezed my hands, feeling pain as the bones ground together. “That’s why I wanted to kill it. I was angry. I was furious.”

“But why?”

“Because I knew it was over.”

“What was?”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. “Everything good.”

Dolf did not speak, but I understood. What could he possibly say? She’d left me, and I did not even know why.

“I saw a deer this morning,” I said. “A white one.”

Dolf sat down on the other side of the table. “And you think that maybe it’s the same?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe. I used to dream about the first one.”

“Do you want it to be the same?”

I did not answer him directly. “I read up on white deer a few years back, the mythology of white deer. There’s quite a bit of it, going back a thousand years. They’re very rare.”

“What kind of mythology?”

“Christians talk of a white stag that carried a vision of Christ between his antlers. They believe it’s a sign of impending salvation.”

“That sounds nice.”

“There are legends that go back much further. The ancient Celts believed something entirely different. Their legends speak of white deer leading travelers deep into the secret parts of the forest. They say a white deer can lead a man to new understanding.”

“That’s not too bad, either.”

I looked up. “They say it’s a messenger from the dead.”

   We ate in silence. Dolf left and I got myself cleaned up. In the mirror, I looked haggard, my eyes somehow older than the rest of me. I pulled on jeans and a linen shirt, then I walked back outside, where I found Robin sitting on the picnic table holding part of a carburetor. She stood when she saw me. I stopped on the porch.

“Nobody answered when I knocked,” she said. “I heard the water running and decided to wait.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I came to apologize.”

“If it’s about earlier—”

“It’s not,” she said.

“What then?”

A shadow crossed her face. “It was Grantham’s call.” She looked down and her shoulders drew in. “But that’s no excuse. I should not have let it go this far.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If this had been in the city, or in some crowded place, he probably would not have felt the need—”