The Northwoods Chronicles (5 page)

“Your . . . father? Grandfather?”

“Looney old fart,” she said. “Don’t know who he
is. Calls me Myra. My name’s Cindy.”

“Hi, Cindy,” she said. “I’m Sadie
Katherine.”

“Want coffee?” she asked, and Sadie Katherine
was touched that this woman who had nothing was still willing to
share.

“Sure,” she said, and sat down on an unstable
chair. The little boy detached himself from her and went to the
crib. The baby stopped crying and they both stared at their visitor
with big eyes while their mom poured coffee. “So he doesn’t live
here?” Sadie Katherine asked casually, curious but trying not to
pry.

“Don’t know that he lives at all,” Cindy said as
she put a steaming mug on the plywood table. “Can’t seem to get rid
of him.” She swept crumbs from one end of the table and sat down.
“Don’t know if I want to.”

The rain started up again, spraying cold mist
right through the cracks in the wall, and beyond the wind, beyond
the creaking of the cabin, came the sputtering of a car. An old
Ford. Cindy met Sadie Katherine’s eyes and raised an eyebrow. The
toddler took a step back into the shadow behind the crib.

“Myra?” a voice called from outside. The door
opened and he came in, impossibly dry, a lilt to his frail step,
one earflap cocked up on his hat, a plastic grocery bag in his
hand. “Hi, Myra!” He looked at Sadie Katherine. “Charlie! Long
time, buddy.”

Sadie Katherine looked at Cindy, who just
shrugged.

“Amazing catch last night.” He held up the bag
with proud enthusiasm. “Fish couldn’t wait to jump into the boat.”
He set the bag down in the sink. “I think it was the calm
moon.”

He looked at the place on his skinny, freckled
wrist where a watch could be but wasn’t, and said, “I’m late for
Rotary.” He kissed Cindy on the head, shook Sadie Katherine’s hand
and shuffled out the door, letting it bang behind him. The
rattletrap Pinto sputtered off into the distance.

He came and went so fast, Sadie Katherine barely
had time to register all of his idiosyncrasies, but it seemed as if
one of them was a gentle transparency.

The two women just looked at each other. Then
they both jumped up and Cindy led the way to the sink.

She upended the bag and out fell a rock, a hunk
of seaweed, a flattened juice bottle, an empty motor oil can, a
rusted fishing reel, and a fine, firm, fresh rainbow trout.

“Stay for breakfast?” she asked.

Kimberly paced her little living room, biting
the flesh around her thumbnail. Every once in a while she’d pause
and look down at the body of her husband, prison-thin, in new jeans
and white T-shirt, with her brand-new Gingher sewing shears
protruding primly from his right eye. She wanted to kick him, he
made her so mad, but that would be useless. She didn’t want to
touch him. Ever again.

So she paced, and waited for Natasha. This was
the second time today she’d paced, waiting for someone to show up,
and she was damn tired of it. First, it was waiting for Cousins to
arrive on the Greyhound. She must have burned up a million calories
pacing that one off. She didn’t want him back. It had been ten
years, she’d carved out a nice little life for herself in White
Pines Junction and if there were going to be any changes in the way
she lived, it wasn’t going to be with a drunken, ex-con idiot at
her side. But she didn’t know how to tell him that. He’d been gone
ten years, and had written her faithfully every month, long
letters, pining for her and his life in the northwoods.

And he finally did arrive, swinging down from
that bus with a light step, and a much older face. He grabbed her
up like they do in the movies, and swung her around and said, “You
and me babe,” then gave her a hard kiss on the mouth that bruised
her lips. He had only a little carry-on, like a vinyl gym bag,
which he threw in the backseat of the car. He took the keys from
her hand, and jumped into the driver’s seat. “Point me the
way.”

Against her will, she directed him to her little
lakeside cottage, the one she had worked hard to buy and pay for,
no thanks to him. On the way home he declared his intentions: A
thick steak, a cold beer and a good fuck. In that order. Well, he
could get the first two at Margie’s if he brought his own beer, but
the rest of it would be over her dead body.

Or his, as it turned out.

As it turned out, he didn’t want just one cold
beer, he wanted a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And then he didn’t
want anything to eat, he just wanted her. She dodged him until he
grabbed her, boozy prison breath in her face, and with desperate
strength she never knew she had, she fought her way over to her
sewing table, pulled on the fabric that was draped over it, until
those gleaming silver plated Ginghers fell right into her hand. The
next few minutes were blurred in her memory, but she remembered not
being able to breathe, and him saying something about “this is the
way it’s done around here, and if you don’t fight, you won’t get
hurt.” She swung her arm just as he turned her over and leaned
back, and instead of getting him in the back, like she thought she
would, those scissors went right into his eye.

God.

She kicked him off of her, stood up, hiccupped a
few times, quietly shrieked a few times, stomped and paced and
freaked out for a moment, had a deep swig of that Jack herself,
took a deep breath, straightened her clothes, and then sat down to
contemplate her next move.

All her options were ugly. She could see nothing
but going to prison herself for the rest of her life, writing long
letters back to Natasha every month, pining for her little
lakefront cottage. So she called Natasha, asked her to come over,
“It’s
very
important,” she said, and then began to pace
again, waiting.

“Jesus god!” Natasha’s hand covered her mouth,
her eyes wide. “What the fuck?”

“I know, I know,” Kimberly said, and she wanted
nothing more than to put her arms around Natasha and comfort her,
which in itself would be comforting. But that was not to be. No
arms around Natasha, not after all these years, and not for all the
years to come. “Can you help me? I don’t know what to do.”

Natasha surveyed the scene, then went directly
for the bottle on the coffee table. She took a swig, passed the
bottle back to Kimberly, then sat down on the sofa. “Jesus,” she
said. “You’ve got to call Sheriff Withens.”

“I’ll go to prison.”

“Self defense. You got bruises?”

Kimberly shrugged. “Isn’t there another
way?”

“Like what? Bury him in the garden? Make
fertilizer for your bamboo plants? Listen, Kim, nobody is going to
have a hard time believing this was self-defense. Nobody liked
Cousins, especially not Sheriff Withens.”

“You’re the only one who knew he was coming
home.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow and took another sip
of Jack.

Kimberly took that as a good sign, and
enthusiasm lit a fire in her. “We can do this, Nat. We’ll haul him
out to the boat and row him out to that bog on the island. You know
the one? We can push him down under. The turtles will eat him in a
week, and nobody will ever know.”

“I’ve got to admit it has a touch of poetic
justice.”

“Me rotting in prison does not.”

“I will not be an accomplice, Kimberly. If we do
this, you have done it by yourself. You must respect me enough to
never bring my name into this.”

“Okay.”

“We will never discuss it again. I’ll tell Mort
we played cards.”

“Okay.”

“All right.” Natasha took a deep breath and
another swig. “Jesus, I can’t believe we’re going to do this. Go
get a sturdy bamboo pole and something to bind his wrists and
heels.”

Kimberly ran out the kitchen door, and into the
greenhouse, its moist, earthy smell like a perfume. She grew bamboo
in this greenhouse; was up to two hundred and four varieties of the
fascinating stuff. Alongside one edge was a drying rack, and she
picked out a piece of timber bamboo that was about three inches in
diameter and eight feet long. It should work perfectly.

She brought the pole into the living room, and
saw that Natasha had pulled all the draperies and turned out the
porch light. She’d salvaged the shears and was in the process of
cutting Cousins’ pants off. Kimberly got a length of bulky-spun
yarn from her basket and worked at tying his wrists together, and
then his ankles. They threaded the pole between and hoisted him
onto their shoulders like a hunted-down pig. Which he was. He was a
pathetic figure, hanging naked between them, skinny ass and
all.

They marched him through the kitchen door and
down the path to the pier and swung him into the little boat
Kimberly kept tied up there. She ran back up to the house, grabbed
jackets for the two of them, then pulled the blanket out of the
dog’s house and threw it over Cousins’ gleaming whiteness.

Kimberly started the little outboard, Natasha
cast off the bowline and they headed across the lake.

Now that action was being taken, Kimberly felt
calmer, although she was shivering inside her down coat. It was
cool on the lake in the night, but not cold enough to make her
shiver. Delayed nerves, she told herself, but it didn’t help. The
trusty little outboard putted its way across the dark and silent
lake and just as they reached the island, a big moon came up over
the trees, and the world went black and silver.

The island was marshy, with no beach. Kimberly
nosed the boat into the weeds, and Natasha jumped out with the
bowline into water up to her knees. She tied the line to a tree
stump. The boat wasn’t going anywhere. They ended up dumping
Cousins out into the water and dragging him across the marsh,
because the weight of him on their shoulders made them sink too
deeply into the marsh to walk.

Kimberly and Natasha had discovered the bog on
the island last summer when they were looking for a private place
to sunbathe nude. They’d taken Kim’s boat out to this island, sure
to be vacant, since all it really was, was marsh. Not likely any
families water-skiing from it, and no fishermen would come ashore
there. The marsh solidified about fifty feet in, and there they put
their towels and opened the wine and had themselves a fun day and
an allover tan. Not that Natasha needed a tan, but she seemed to
enjoy being naked as much as Kimberly enjoyed Natasha being naked.
Anyway, as they were exploring the small island, they found a hole
in the middle of it, and inside was a deep well of blackish-green
slime. Stagnant bog. Natasha, who owned the motel with her husband,
and heard all the fishing stories, said that the bog was thick and
mucky. And when Kimberly thought of a place to stash Cousins’ body,
she thought immediately of thick and mucky. It was perfect.

Once they were again on solid footing, they
threaded the pole through Cousins’ bound ankles and wrists, and
hoisted him back up on their shoulders.

“Tell me again why he went to jail?” Natasha
asked.

“Robbed the mini mart and made his getaway on
his snowmobile. Left tracks right to our apartment.”

“Too stupid to live.”

Kimberly agreed. She slowed down as they neared
the bog. She could sense it. She could smell it. She did not want
to fall into it. Natasha said it was like quicksand; the more you
moved, the deeper it sucked you down. They lowered Cousins to the
ground, then Natasha picked up the bamboo pole and probed the
ground in front of them. But when they got to the bog, they could
see it. It was dark black in the night, as if it sucked the
struggling moonlight right down to be eaten by turtles, too.

They went back and dragged Cousins as near to
the edge as either one of them wanted to step, and then Kimberly
picked up the pole and began shoving his body closer.

“Want to say a few words?”

Count on Natasha to sense gravity in the absurd
situation.

“We could have been a family, Cousins, if you’d
have been a little smarter,” Kimberly said. “And it’s mostly my
fault for making a bad choice. I wish you well on your journey
through the afterlife, and God have mercy on all our souls.”

Natasha nodded. “Amen,” she said.

Kimberly pushed until Cousins began to disappear
into the muck. The back of his head and his shoulders floated like
polished ivory in the moonlight.

“Push him under the edge,” Natasha said. “His
body has to go under the island.”

Together they maneuvered Cousins’ remains to the
far side of the bog, and then poked at him until he completely
disappeared under the grass.

When he was gone and didn’t come back up,
Kimberly’s knees gave out and she sat down hard and began to
cry.

“Do that at home,” Natasha said. “I’ve got to
wash my clothes and get cleaned up before I go home to Mort. I
smell like bog.”

Kimberly put her fears and broken heart and
emotional exhaustion on hold for one last trip across the lake. She
promised herself that once she got home, she could break down and
it could last a while.

But, in the morning, she realized she had to act
completely normal, so she got up, showered and dressed, and opened
up the dress shop like she always did. Nothing could look out of
the ordinary.

She figured two weeks with the turtles and
crayfish and she’d be home free. If Cousins didn’t emerge within
two weeks, if some fisherman needing an emergency field toilet
didn’t come upon him within two weeks, she would be fine.

It was going to be a long two weeks.

By the end of the day, she hardly believed it
had happened. She had decent receipts with all the tourist ladies
in town, keeping themselves busy spending money while their
husbands spent their days on the water. She was dog tired by the
time she locked the front door and turned the
Open
sign to
Closed
and went about straightening the shop and doing the
cash report. Just as she was ready to leave, there came a knock on
the front door.