Dead Floating Lovers (8 page)

I wasn’t happy when we got home from Detroit. I was made no happier by a call from Jackson, wondering how far I’d gotten on the chapters of his book. Going through the mail did nothing to lift my spirits: house insurance due, huge electric bill. Double because I hadn’t paid the last one. And the phone bill. The Sears bill for the tires the Jeep had required. Two more rejections of
Dead Dancing Women
.

I gave myself an hour away from everything, first going down to the lake to throw a stick for Sorrow, who joyously leaped and loped until he lay wet and exhausted at my feet with his long pink tongue hanging out. Not once, in sixty minutes, did I let myself think about the awful Dolly business. Then, with a sigh, I went back in the house and got to work. I called the Michigan State Police post at Gaylord. When I had what they would tell me, I wrote the story of the second skeleton and e-mailed it to Bill. After that I figured I had done my duty. I was going over to Crazy Harry’s to see if he wanted to play in the woods, chasing mushrooms and other edibles. I dug my mesh mushroom bag out of the pantry, put on an old denim jacket, and left, leaving Sorrow home. I was afraid Harry’s weird dogs might attack him. His indignant barking followed me up the drive to Willow Lake Road.

Harry was in the middle of skinning another of those raccoons he told me walked up to his door and died of old age. Not a pretty sight.

“Give me a couple minutes, Emily,” he said, sticking his long knife into the tall tree stump where he worked and wiping his hands carefully on the rag sticking from his pocket. He went into the house while I kept my back turned to the dogs throwing their bodies at the chainlink fence around the kennel. In a few minutes Harry came out, unfolding his huge, mesh mushroom bag so it dragged along behind him. It always threw me for a couple of minutes that Harry could wear his burying suit every day and half live in the woods but never get the suit dirty; never lose the crease in the long, skinny pants that skimmed his legs. I had the feeling Harry had more than one suit but it wasn’t the kind of thing you came out and asked. There was a dignity, and privacy, about Harry that I knew better than to try and get around. The man had lived alone most of his life. Talking didn’t come easy to him, nor telling strangers truths that could come back to haunt him.

___

Last year’s leaves didn’t crunch under our feet as I followed Harry through the woods. The ground was soft, with an old leather feel, kneaded into decomposition by heavy winter snows. All of it—the thick bed of leaves—going to feed the earth. This stuff still amazed me. Cycles. Cycles. Cycles.
Big wheel keeps on turning
. I ran it through my head, like clearing out old cobwebs. So good to be where things were dependable.

I’d never had a clue about nature before coming to live in the woods. Never saw the huge canvas around me. How could I know that such a wondrous, slow-moving security existed back when I ran too fast day after day, rarely lifted my head as I hurried to the next story, the next dinner party, or faced the next infidelity from Jackson Rinaldi. Like everyone, I’d wondered what life was about, why I was here, but I never wondered deeply enough to think there might be answers, or at least tiny signposts pointing toward what the amazing earth and I had in common.

Harry and I walked carefully. A little rain fell; a fine mist leaving my skin moist, my hair damp. I could feel and taste the wet west wind. Overhead, the trees dripped sluggish drops as we passed beneath, working our way through thickets of last year’s sumac and new stands of aspens as spindly as colt legs. We searched for fallen trees where the elusive morel liked to grow.

Every few yards Harry stopped. He would bend over in his old suit, shiny with rain, and put a finger to his grizzled lips as he studied the ground ahead—swinging his body left, then right, searching for mushrooms. I never spotted one of them. Harry would extend his arm and point—almost at my feet—to a wide circle of wrinkled, brain-like fungi blending into the brown shades of the old leaf bed. We would pick them gleefully, stuffing the mushrooms into our bags.

“Mesh drops the spores behind us,” Harry’d said once, when I’d offered plastic bags and he’d shaken his head at me. “That’s how ya get a new crop next year. Plastic kills everything it touches.”

When Harry pointed next, I crouched and pinched two fingers at the base of one spongy mushroom after another. I squeezed until the mushroom popped off, then sniffed it before putting it into my bag. Everything was caught in that smell—the woods, the soil, old trees, dead trees, tiny insects, rain … everything I loved about this place. Celebration in a single mushroom. No real ugliness in nature. No sorrow. Even the few deer corpses I’d come upon in my walks hadn’t been sad. Something about the inevitability of it all—no futile dream of immortality. Bones were bones. Soon to be a part of everything around them. Not at all like Dolly’s bones—with pain and suspicion and horror …

During the two days I’d spent with Dolly I’d been reminded that life, for human beings, wasn’t always fair. Maybe hardly ever fair, and that good people kept getting hurt, and good people tried to rationalize away all the crap that landed on them. It wasn’t right for me to get mad at Dolly’s past. But how did I not get mad at a woman who pretended to love a child who never knew love?

“Did you know Chet, Dolly’s husband?” I asked Harry as he brought a handful of mushrooms over to my bag. His old man’s arthritic hands were sweetly cupped so as not to bruise the morels. One by one he lifted a mushroom by the base and set it, with his careful, brown, ridged fingers, in on top of the others.

He looked up at me when I asked about Chet. His pale eyes, surrounded with deep wrinkles, were confused, as if he couldn’t switch so fast from mushrooms to people.

He stepped away from me, sniffed, and took a swipe at his nose with the damp, white handkerchief he pulled from a back pocket. “Why you asking?” he asked suspiciously, folding his handkerchief carefully before putting it away.

“I think they might have found his bones out in Sandy Lake.”

“The hell, you say. Thought he took off with a woman.” Harry frowned and turned his body away as if avoiding a blow.

“Maybe he did. Two skeletons in the lake.”

Harry shook his head and thought awhile, toeing the leaves at his feet with his old black shoe. When he looked back at me, his nose was aimed into the wind, sniffing. He looked slowly right then left. “Didn’t hear about no skeletons.”

“You will. They brought up the second one early this morning.”

“Then why you calling one of ’em ‘Chet’? How’d they find out so fast?”

“Dolly thinks it’s him. She found something by the body … er … bodies.”

“Ah.” He sniffed again, white and black eyebrows going up and down. “So, you want to know about him?”

I nodded.

“Won’t go saying nothing to the deputy, will you? I don’t like to get in the middle of things.” He toed the earth, then scoured the sky where patches of blue broke up the heavy clouds.

I shook my head, assuring him.

“Well now, Chet wasn’t what you’d call one of the sharpest pencils in the box. Grown boy when he came up here. From somewhere down near Detroit, I hear. Wasn’t a kid but still he acted like one. Used to get in trouble doing silly teenage stuff. Stupid things like piling a row of rocks in the street on Halloween and covering them with leaves so cars hit ’em and screeched their brakes. One time he and a few of his buddies from The Skunk made a stuffed scarecrow and dropped it down right in front of a car. Driver thought he’d hit a human being. Got in trouble for that, too. But I never knew Chet to do any real damage. Don’t think he never went to jail for anything, though I did hear one time he got caught stuffing a roll of toilet paper down his pants at the IGA. Think he just paid for it and that was that. People still laugh about it. That’s what we’re like around here. Some things’re funny. Some things not so funny.”

“Ever hear of him having a girlfriend?”

Harry thought awhile. “Just Dolly. There was somebody told me once they thought Chet was cutting out on her, but I never knew another thing about it until I heard he took off with some Indian girl. Came as a surprise. Felt sorry for Dolly then. Until she went and wrote me a ticket for no license on my car when, hell’s sakes, it’s not even registered. I stick to the back roads now. People flash their headlights at me if they see her car hanging around.”

Harry chewed over that last insult.

“Been a long time ago. I’ll still feel sorry for her if something bad happened to Chet. Be a shame, too, if that’s as far as he got with his girl friend—only out to Sandy Lake. Maybe they was having a picnic. Maybe went for a swim; didn’t come up.”

“They found him tied to a cement block. Both of them were shot through the head.”

Harry pursed his lips, shook himself a few times, and made a serious face. “A fella can’t do that to himself, you know.”

I agreed. “That’s what I thought, too.”

“So you think somebody killed Chet? And his girlfriend?”

“That’s what Dolly’s thinking. Hoped maybe you’d heard something. Anything at all about Chet and that Indian girl. Seems the Indians got interested awfully fast.”

“Yeah, well, usually they like to keep to their own. No Indian man’s going to stand still for one of his women going with a white man.”

“You think one of them might have killed them both?”

“Hard to say. Could be Dolly found out and did ’em in herself.” He bent again and put a finger to his lips. He pointed straight ahead. Dozens of morels peeking up through the leaves. A treasure trove of lovely small cones.

“Say, speaking of Indians, I forgot to tell you something.” He put an arm out to stop me before I trod on the mushrooms. “One of ’em came to see you while you was gone. I went over to your place, taking care of yer dog. There was a big, dark man standing in your driveway, looking down at yer house. Older guy, he was. I asked him what he was doing there, and he said he needed to talk to you about something he saw you do. I didn’t ask what that might’ve been ’cause it’s none of my business. But he was a real serious-looking fellow. One of those straight, dark faces. You know, like there was something big to talk about, like a peace treaty, or a pipe to smoke, or maybe you owe some money at the casino.”

“He didn’t give you his name?”

Harry shook his head and took a slow step forward. “Never saw him in Leetsville. Maybe not from around here. Say, did I ever tell you about the logging camp right down in that gully over there?”

Whatever the Indian had said to Harry, it must have made him nervous. He was in a hurry to change the subject and get back to what he knew best—the woods, mushrooms. That left me with an uneasy feeling and a lot less interest in searching for food.

I was ready to start for home but Harry motioned me forward, pointing down the steep embankment we stood on, into a thick stand of maple. It was hard to concentrate on Harry’s history lesson. I was worried about that man who’d come to see me. If it was the same guy from the lake … I told Dolly he saw what she did. But Harry said “older guy.” I was in the middle of something I didn’t understand. Darn her. Darn me. Right there in the woods I began looking over my shoulder to see if I could catch sight of a figure with dark hair blowing in the wind, following along behind.

“White man’s camp right over there.” Harry pointed ahead then turned and pointed behind us, down the other side of the embankment to where the maples weren’t as thick. “Indian lumberjack’s camp back there. No love lost between the two camps. One night one of the Indians went over and murdered a man who’d been picking on his brother, then he up and disappeared. They know how to do that, ya see. Know these woods like somebody else might know their own backyard. But that brother wasn’t so lucky. Somebody from the white man’s camp found him, done him in, and all the Indians left. But not before they got their revenge—in the white man’s terms. They turned over one of them railroad engines that was waiting to take a load of logs down to Graying. Track ran right through these woods. Men cut trees in the summer. Pulled out the logs by horse in the winter, when the logs could be skidded over the snow. Took ’em to the log dump—just through those trees there, where the train was waiting. Indians turned that engine over and dumped ’er off the trestle we’re standing on. Maybe a hundred years ago. Last I heard the engine was still down there somewhere. Couldn’t right it and get it back up, so they buried it. Time’s covered it over. That’s what time does—just like with your skeletons. Wouldn’t think of digging that engine up ’cause some things are best left buried, you know. Best left buried.”