Beast of the Field (15 page)

20.

So close to the river now I can see it, smell it, hear it run.

And now, at the river.  I am moving along the bank, the swaddled bundle in my arms.  It is not the big muddy waters of home, but a clean river, a soft-moving, deep blue river whose surface glistens in a sun that is too bright and the color of candy.   

She is there.  She is there! 

Can't see her but I know without a doubt she is there with me.  I make some woo-hooeing comment about the size of the fish in the river.  She hates everything about fish.  The bundle is gone from my arms and a fish has appeared and I chase her with it.  A presence there with me, waving off the silver gleaming thing I hold before me.  A gleeful laughing brimming running presence.  I am teasing her with one of them now.

She is there with me.  I am not alone.

"Hey..."

Suddenly she is across the river.
A blurred figure standing motionless on the other side of the running water, a baby in her arms.  No longer feel her close to me. 

"Wake up..."

Of a sudden I feel a child's fear.  Throat seizing terror.  I search the far bank, taking long, stretching steps as I run.  She is there, smiling but not helping, not moving.  Soon the image of her falls away save the smile.  Only the smile, but it is enough. 

She is waiting across that river for me, in a place where a man smiles.  Want to be with you!  Want to cross!  Wait for me!

There is only one way across.

"Wake up, goddamnit.  You gonna sleep the whole day?"
             

"Mm missed youm," he mumbled, blinking.  When the blur in his field of vision came into focus it was the face of Millie Donnan in front of him.  She raised one eyebrow at him.  "Where mm I?" he asked.

"Listen here, partner.  The first rule of our new partnership:  you have to make me a promise.  Lookit me..."  She turned his sore jaw so that their eyes were square on each other, twelve inches separating them.  "You don't tell nobody about what you saw in that billfold—that picture—you understand?  You don't tell nobody about Miss Flora.  Not a soul.  If you do, you're gonna regret the day you did.  You got me, brother?"

His head was full of larvae.  The skin on his face felt like old, raw chicken meat.  The side of his jaw had a handful of rusty nails shoved into it.

"You got me or not?"

"Gmmtcha."

A smile took over her face.  She said, "I think I'm going to like being your partner."

It was the first time he had seen her smile and it was enough to stop rubbing his jaw.  "You're a downright prmtty lmttle gmrl when you smile, you know that?"

She dropped his head back to the bed.  "I've had a gulletful of everyone calling me 'girl' this and 'girlie' that.  Now get up off your duff.  You stink like whisky."  She stood, disappeared into the hallway.  The slamming door brought a flare of pain up from his neck into his skull, and finally to the point on his jaw where the sheriff had punched him. 

The dream again.
  And him left with nothing again.  The feel of her sweaty cheek against his as he begged her to hold on. You can do it, he’d said, hoping.  It’s almost here, he’d said, knowing.  Hold on, Elizabeth, please hold on.  But by then she could no longer hear him, and he was left with nothing.

Sterno didn’t want to be awake, and was trying to slip away again when he felt the tongue of a dog—Jumpy—licking at the vomit on his shirtsleeve.

"Gmt the hell away," Sterno said.  He pushed the dog's head away.  Jumpy did something between a groan and a whine, settled into the floor next to him.

Sterno had to struggle to recall how he had gotten here.  He remembered the stump and the contents of the wallet—his detective brain, like wet cement in any state of mind.  He remembered almost nothing else. 
The hood of his car, for some reason.  His being draped across the hood of his car.  Or was that a dream too?  No...it was Junior.  Carried him like a sack of flour to his own car, threw him over the hood.  He tasted his mouth, smelled his cuff, remembered vomiting on the front tire of the car.

Better hope the dog licked it off.  Good luck finding a boy to wash it with the county in a drought.

The bedroom door creaked open.  It was Marnie Donnan.  She looked him over for a few seconds.  She spoke to him quietly, but not softly.  "We’re heading out to work, Mr. Sterno.  I left one of Tommy’s shirts on the dresser for you.  There’s eggs and sidemeat on the table.  A fresh pot of coffee too, I suppose you’ll need it."

*

He sat up in the bed.  The taste in his mouth and smell of his shirt was enough to nearly make him sick again.  He held strong though, stood, peeled off the dirty and stinking shirt.  On a desk by the window were a wash basin and a pitcher of water, from which he drank greedily before washing his hands and face.  Through this window he could see his car and the barn.  Braun Donnans Junior and Senior came around the back side of the barn, Junior pulling a team of two mules and the
Senior sitting in the seat of a huge hay wagon.  The mother would be in the garden, or doing the wash; the girl at her chores too.  This would be a good time for him to slip right out and get back to the hotel, clean up and get to work like a professional detective instead of whatever it was he could be called at this moment.

The shirt Marnie Donnan had left on the dresser fit him well enough, save the sleeves being too short, a problem solved quickly by rolling them up.  He tried not to look at his reflection as he buttoned the shirt, but the image in the glass called to his eyes and he had to stop and take in the miserable sight. 
Tired, sagging. Black-bruised eyes, two days’ stubble, wind-blown, dust-shot skin, and that jaw that looked like he had been hit with a sledgehammer.

Some job that sheriff did on you, he thought.  Good Christ, what a punch.

As his fingers ran over the damage his eyes came back to the photographs on the dresser.  The icy blue eyes, staring ten- twenty-fold at him from the photographs.  Little baby Tommy Donnan, Tommy Donnan after races, Tommy Donnan with his family, Tommy Donnan in costume on a stage.  Sterno went from photo to photo.  There was no photo of Tommy Donnan with the beautiful, young, blonde Florella May Greentree, the mayor’s little princess.

Sterno remembered what was in his pocket.  He fished for the
photograph, brought it to focus in his blurred vision.  He stared at it for several seconds before replacing it in his pocket.  The house was still and quiet around him, save the occasional creak of wood as the morning winds started up.  Sterno opened the top two drawers simultaneously, felt through them, found nothing.  He went to the next drawer down, then the one lower than that, then the bottom drawer, but found nothing but clothes, folded and smelling of mothballs.

He found the trunk in the closet. 
Listened for a presence in the house before opening it.  In the trunk was a heavy Shakespeare volume that looked as though it had just been dropped there; he sat this on the floor next to his knee as he continued his search.  The search of the trunk produced nothing, but what was important to Sterno was the trunk itself.  Sterno replaced the Shakespeare, stood thinking in the dark closet.

Where were you running, Tommy?

He’d wrapped the soiled sleeve of his old shirt into the rolled shirt itself and was heading for his car when he saw the door leading to another bedroom was ajar.  Listening again, he peeked in; a girl’s room.  The master bedroom was behind him, so on the other side of the banister he turned the knob to another room, looked into Junior’s room.

The bed was made in a military manner with sharp creases tucking under the corners and there was nothing on the walls save a crucifix over the bed and a framed front page from the
New
Bremen
Caller
with what looked like Junior in the end zone of a football field, arms raised and leather helmet askew. Stepping lightly across the old floorboards, Sterno went first to the closet, where he found a row of coveralls and overalls hanging from a rod, and on the other side a row of flannel shirts of barely varied colors and patterns. 

He stopped, cocked his ear to the door,
heard nothing.

He went to the dresser.  In the first drawer he opened he found a short stack of photographs, and half of them were school photographs of Flora Greentree—grade school, middle grades and high school, eight photos in all.  The top photo was a copy of the photo Sterno
carried in his pocket, the one found in Tommy’s wallet.  There was also a post card sent from Pike’s Peak, dated 1915, with Flora Greentree’s curly, girlish signature on the back.

Sterno gazed out the window. 
A woman. 

Could it be something
so old-fashioned as that?  A woman?  Three men vying for one woman, one of whom was good enough with a horse and buggy—or at least he’d thought—to try and carry her away.  Is that what you were doing, Tommy, stealing that girl from someone else?  Which one were you taking her from, Geshen Neuwald or your own brother, or was it the whole town you didn’t want having her.

In the adjacent drawer, a knick-knack drawer, among rubber bands, wooden nickels, bottle caps, pocket knives, whittled pieces of wood, military patches from the A.E.F. and a layer of silver dollars, Sterno found a lockbox.  He moved it back and forth in his hand, feeling, listening.  One item knocked around the inside walls of the box, a small but heavy-for-its-size item, the size of a man’s palm at the biggest.  Sterno was searching for a key when he heard a woman’s voice right outside the back of the house.  This was followed by the slapping of a screen door.

Sterno replaced the photos, stepped quickly to the door, shut it and was coming around the banister as Marnie Donnan came in view of the staircase.  She might have seen what direction he’d come from, she might not have; he would never know because he spoke before she could say a word.

“Good morning, ma’am, and thank you for the shirt.  If you have a minute or two, I have some questions for you,” he said.

*

From her lilac bush tunnel, Millie could see Mother’s
face, her skin pulled in and wrinkled around her eyes as she listened to Mr. Sterno.  Her eyes kept searching his face, as if by just sitting there fretting about it, she could fix it.  They sat on the front porch, each in a rocker, but neither of them rocking.  Mr. Sterno sat with his back to Millie.  This fact, plus the added fact of his busted up jaw, made understanding him almost impossible.  Millie then understood that this was why Mother was concentrating so hard on his face.

He said something to her, asked her something that caused her to straighten up in her rocker, place her coffee down on the table next to her, and sit back, gaze drifting away across the yard and over the barn.

“Why do you…?” she started but didn’t finish.

Mr. Sterno mumbled something Millie couldn’t hear.  She heard the word “questions” but that was it.

“Well,” Mother said, picking up her coffee but not drinking from it, then putting it down again.  “Well, we had gone into the cellar.  Millie had had to be dragged down there—she was so worried about Tommy.  And Junior…?”  She paused, picked up her coffee, rested it in her lap.  “Honestly…I mean, he went after a calf that had bolted when the lightning and thunder started.  He couldn’t bear anything happening to the animals.”

Mr. Sterno was speaking again, but Millie wasn’t even trying to listen any longer.  He was asking about Junior.  Why in the world was he asking about Junior?

Mother brought the coffee cup to her lips, almost drank, then put it down beside her.  “No, now that I think about it.  We didn’t see him until much later that night.  He never did find that calf.  We never saw it again.  The next morning was when…was that terrible morning, so the calf was forgotten, I suppose.”

Sterno spoke.  Millie thought back.  Junior’s shirt had been torn, his overalls and boots covered in dry mud.  He had waited out the storm in the woods, lying in the creek bed, it was assumed, until the funnel disappeared back into the clouds.  Mother was echoing Millie’s thoughts out loud to Mr. Sterno, Millie’s thoughts and much about which Millie had never thought.

“He wouldn’t go out to look at him.  He started to, then stopped.  But Mr. Sterno, he had seen so much of that in the war.  I never thought a thing of it.”

Millie went from warm to white-hot in about three seconds.  The realization about what was happening in front of her came suddenly and in full. 

“What was that…?  I can’t understand—oh, why, yes, of course I know Flora.  We are family friends…”

This from Mother had just stopped Millie from stepping out of the bush.  Now Mr. Sterno spoke.  Millie wished like hell she could understand one word he was saying.

“Flora and Braun Junior?  Well, yes, many years, but why…”  Mother had to stop and think about something.  “Mr. Sterno, what is it you are implying about Braun Junior?”

Millie had had enough.  For the first time ever, she abandoned her hiding place, right there in front of them, jeopardizing all future eavesdropping by revealing one of her spots.

“Some partner you are, you goddamned sneaky, two-faced sonbitch!”