Dead Meat (8 page)

I
WAS BRUSHING MY
teeth when I heard the voices. It sounded as if they were coming from the hallway just on the other side of the bathroom door.

“Where have you been?” It was Marge, speaking in an angry whisper. The hard emphasis was on the word “you.”

“Out.” Polly did not whisper.

“Keep your voice down,” Marge hissed.

“That’s easy. I have nothing to say.” But Polly did whisper, and her voice came through the bathroom door like a cold wind through the chinks in a drafty cabin.

“You were with him again, weren’t you?”

“Him?”

“You know who I mean.”

“No, Mother, I don’t. Tell me who you mean.”

“Gib.”

“No, I wasn’t with Gib.”

“Well…”

“I was with another man, actually. So what?”

“If you wake up your father…”

“Nothing wakes up my father. You can’t wake up my father.”

I heard the unmistakable sound of flesh smacking flesh, and I had no trouble visualizing Marge’s slap against Polly’s cheek.

“Well, now, Mother.” Polly laughed.

“Don’t talk about things you don’t know.”

Polly laughed again, a cruel bark.

“You know how we feel about—about socializing with the guests.”

“Socializing. Very nice, Mother. I like it. Socializing.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. Say what you mean.”

“Twitching your ass at them. I mean—I mean flirting with them. I mean—”

“You mean fucking them.”

I didn’t want to be where I was, a captive of this conversation that I didn’t want to hear. I couldn’t just open the door, excuse myself, and pad barefoot to my room down the hall. I thought of flushing the toilet to let them know I was there, imprisoned in the bathroom. But it was too late for that. They would know that I’d already heard.

So I dropped the lid on the toilet and sat down to wait it out.

“Is that what you were doing?” Marge’s voice had lost its anger. It sounded sorrowful.

“What if I was?”

“Oh, Polly…”

“Well? What if I was? Do we have rules about screwing the guests?”

“Honey…”

“How would you like it?” she said, her tone different now, a querulous little-girl voice. “How would you like to be me stuck up here? Nobody my age, no television. Not even a telephone.”

“I understand, Polly. It’s only for the summer.”

“It’s only for the summer,” Polly’s voice mocked. “Do you know how long a summer is? And what about you, Mother. Do the rules apply to you?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“What were you doing down on the dock?”

“Listen to me, little girl. What I was doing is none of your business.”

“It works both ways.”

“It does like hell.”

“You got something going with Brady, Mother? Hey, he’s kinda sexy. Can’t blame you. Does Daddy know?”

“That is enough.” Warning hissed in Marge’s tone.

“I didn’t want this conversation in the first place.”

“And it is ended. Just keep one thing in mind, dear daughter. If I catch you in the sack with one of the guests, I’ll…”

There was a long pause. Then I heard Polly’s whisper, soft and mocking. “Yes? You’ll what? What will you do?”

“Polly, honey…”

“I want to know what you’ll do.”

“Nothing. Never mind. Go to bed.”

“Mother?”

“What?”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell Daddy about Brady. This can be our secret. Isn’t it nice?”

“Dammit, Polly!”

“Our own little mother-daughter secret.” Polly laughed softly. I heard a door open and close, and a moment later another one. I waited a minute and then gathered up my things and tiptoed down the hall to my room. The floorboards creaked. The door to my room needed oil. And when I sat on my bed, I discovered that the bedsprings were noisy, too. So much for my efforts at discretion.

I propped myself up in bed and opened my book. I tried to concentrate on George Smiley’s efforts to root out the mole in his Circus, but after I’d read three pages, I realized I hadn’t been paying attention.

So I turned off the light and lay there in the dark, thinking about big salmon and smelling the moist piny aromas that wafted in through the open window of my room and listening to the night noises of the big Maine woods. I pondered only lightly the mysteries of parent-child relationships, but it was good enough. It put me to sleep.

The whine of an engine woke me up. Gray light seeped in through the window, and under the distant din of the engine I could hear the slow, rhythmic patter of raindrops on the roof over my head. I climbed out of bed and went to the window. It wasn’t raining, but it had been, and the thick mist in the air had settled on the tall pines that arched over the lodge, gathering into droplets that then fell from their own weight onto the roof.

I checked my watch. It was a few minutes before six. Late, for me. I tugged on my jeans, pulled on my sweatshirt, shoved my bare feet into my moccasins, and went downstairs.

A fire roared in the big fireplace. The table had already been set for breakfast. I found an urn of coffee on a side table and poured myself a mugful. The sounds of voices and the clank and clatter of pots and pans came from the kitchen. I pushed open the door and was greeted by a powerfully evocative mix of aromas. Frying bacon and baking bread dominated.

“Mornin’,” I called.

Bud Turner and Polly and Marge, each at a separate station in the big kitchen, all turned, smiled, and greeted me. Whatever had been going on between mother and daughter the previous night, they seemed cheerful enough this morning. I wondered if what I had overheard was a nightly occurrence.

I lifted my mug. “Glad to have this. When do we eat?”

“Six-thirty,” said Bud. “How you want your eggs?”

“Over easy.”

“How many?”

“That bread I smell?”

“Biscuits. Bacon, sausage, fried spuds, mince pie, too.”

“Two eggs, then. Want to save room for all the other good stuff.”

I took my coffee out onto the porch just in time to see Gib’s Cessna begin to taxi through the mist away from the dock. When he got halfway across the lake, he turned and headed uplake. The whine of the engine increased its pitch, and as the plane accelerated, I could see it begin to bounce and skip across the ruffled surface of the water. It lifted, dropped, then lifted again, and this time it stayed up. I watched it climb and then bank around behind me until the forest at my back obscured it from my sight.

I was sitting on the steps, watching the lake, when Marge came out carrying a big dinner bell. “Mind your ears,” she said, and then she clanged it several times.

“That ought to get them moving,” she said. “Tiny’s idea, the bell. He thinks it reminds the sports of summer camp, or something.” She sat beside me. “I reckon you heard more than you wanted to last night. Sorry about that.”

I shrugged. “I had hoped you wouldn’t know I was there.”

“Well, I hope you don’t feel bad. And don’t take it too seriously.”

“I’ve got a couple boys. I understand.”

Marge rolled her eyes. “You never had daughters. You’re lucky.”

“Lucky. I agree.”

“Brady…”

I turned to look at her. She was staring out at the lake. I said, “You don’t have to explain.”

“What I mean is, what Polly said. That was just, you know, talk. Her anger.”

I nodded. “Sure.”

“Tiny’s a good man.”

“The best,” I said.

She rubbed her hands on the tops of her thighs. “Looks like a good day for fishing. Soft, just a little breeze. Radio said it’d be cloudy, but the mist’s gonna dry up. You going out with Woody?”

“Woody and Frank Schatz, I guess.”

“Mr. Schatz left with Gib. That was the two of them just took off. You’ll have Woody all to yourself.”

I remembered seeing Gib and Schatz at the dock the previous evening. Mystery solved. “I didn’t know Schatz was leaving today.”

Marge shrugged. “Me, neither. Guess he wasn’t having much fun. I suppose he arranged it with Tiny. Sports’ll do that, now and then. Find this isn’t what they bargained for. Anyway, we’re bracing ourselves for Mr. Rolando. The other Mr. Rolando, that is. The brother. Gib’ll be flying him in this afternoon. I think Tiny will want you around for that. Let me get you some more coffee. It’ll be just another few minutes before breakfast.”

“Thank you,” I said, and gave her my mug.

She brought me a refill and went back inside. I sat there, sipping and smoking and nodding to the people who straggled up from their cabins to the lodge. Lew Pike and two other guides came along first. Then the two elderly couples, followed by the pedantic Mr. Fisher and his bride. Woody straggled up alone.

“You ready for some serious fishin’, Mr. Coyne?” he said.

“You bet.” I nodded, rising to follow him inside.

At the door Woody turned to me. “Maybe you can teach Mr. Schatz somethin’. I sure ain’t been able to.”

“He flew out with Gib a little while ago. It’ll be just you and me.”

Woody frowned. “Mr. Schatz left? I thought he was gonna be here a week.”

I shrugged. “Well, he’s gone.”

“Damn funny time to go. Before breakfast. It sure’n hell ain’t like Gib to miss one of Bud’s breakfasts.”

“You didn’t hear the plane? It woke me up.”

“My little cabin’s way down the end, set back from the lake. I expect the others heard it.”

“You don’t bunk with the other guides, do you?”

Woody stepped away from the door. “It’s one of them traditions, I guess you’d call it. The Indians bunk separate. I’m the last Indian. So I got my own cabin. I like it that way.”

“That’s pretty damn old-fashioned,” I observed.

He frowned. “That’s one way to look at it. Let’s eat. I got a special place I want to try, now that it’s just gonna be you and me.”

Woody and I took a broad-beamed twenty-foot canoe with a little four-horse motor up to the northern end of the lake. As Marge had predicted, the misty rain had stopped. A southerly breeze roughened the surface of the water.

A fifteen-minute run took us to the mouth of Harley’s Creek. The rains of the past several days had swollen it enough so that a café-au-lait-colored tongue of current was pushing into the lake itself. Woody killed the motor and let our momentum drift us to the edge of the eddying water. “We’ll anchor here,” he said. “Salmon should be coming from all over the lake. Lookin’ for smelts. Good place. Been savin’ it for you.”

Woody and I cast streamer flies into the currents. We let them sink for a few counts, then twitched them slowly back, and for more than an hour there was scarcely a minute when either Woody or I wasn’t tied to a salmon. They hit the flies hard and tried to run to the deep water with them. We played them against the drag of our reels. When the big fish stopped running, they would turn and begin to leap, great silver arcs over the gray face of the lake, heads shaking, tails walking on the surface of the water.

Woody kept one fish, a fat four-pounder. He rapped it once on the back of its head with his wooden priest. “Our lunch,” he said.

The rest of them we released gently by running our fingers down the leader to the spent fish where they lay finning beside the boat and carefully twisting the hooks from their jaws.

We figured we caught around a dozen salmon between us during that time, although we didn’t count them. When we had cast without a strike for half an hour, Woody reeled in and said, “That’s it for now. They’ve headed back to deep water. They’ll be back. We can go up the creek and try for trout if you want.”

“I want to save that,” I said. “I want to spend one day alone. Probably tomorrow. For my soul. Up in the creek is where I want to do it. I’ll bring my little rod and look for some beaver ponds.”

Woody nodded. I knew he’d understand and wouldn’t take offense at my desire to fish for a day without him. “Beavers’ve been workin’ up that creek. Little ponds’ll be full of trout. Good idea.”

We had lunch on the lakeshore. I gathered dry hardwood and dragged it to our campsite, where I hacked it into short chunks. Woody arranged the cooking fire. He stuck two forked sticks into the ground on either side of the depression he’d scooped out, where the coals would lie. Across the forked sticks he rested a lug pole, and from the lug pole he hung a wanigan stick. This had a nail in it on which the water pot for our coffee was suspended.

Woody grilled the salmon over the coals and fried up some potatoes and onions in a black skillet. We ate from aluminum plates.

It was, by objective standards, pretty bad. The salmon steaks could have been moister, and I would have liked a wedge of lemon to squeeze over them. The potatoes were undercooked. The onions were burned.

But sitting there on the pine needles, sniffing the wood-smoke and sipping the harsh coffee and gazing across the water with my eyes lazily unfocused, I thought it was the best meal I had had since—well, since the last time Woody had cooked for me.

“You haven’t lost your touch,” I told him.

“Mr. Schatz thought we should pack sandwiches.” Woody grinned. “And bring a thermos of martinis. But, hell, he never helped gather wood, neither. He was all for shooting a pair of partridge we came upon. Said he was sick of salmon, if you can believe it. I mighta done it, too, if I had my pistol with me.”

“You’d take a game bird out of season?”

Woody shrugged. A home-rolled cigarette hung off his lower lip. A long ash had grown onto the end of it. “It’s different up here. The city people down in Augusta make the laws, but they’re not our laws. Folks generally take what they need. No more. No less, neither. It ain’t killin’ for the fun of it. Hell, killin’ ain’t no fun, anyways. It ain’t waste. It’s what nature gives us, and we respect it. Local people, most of the guides, they’re like the Indians that way. They know how it’s supposed to be. It’s always been that way for us. You know that, Mr. Coyne. The Indians worship the animals and birds and fish that they eat. It’s all part of the big circle.”

I nodded. “But it’s poaching.”

Woody picked the cigarette off his lips and flicked off the ash. “That’s white man’s law. Indians don’t even have a word for it.”