Redemption Mountain (10 page)

The small house was cool and dark. The front parlor and dining room were neat and spotless, as always. The kitchen was cleaner than Natty had ever seen it. Usually, she had to spend the first few minutes at Birdie's washing up several days' worth of dishes and silverware. Today the sink was empty, and the countertop and even the floor shined from a recent scrubbing.

There was a slightly acrid smell in the house, noticeable even as a steady breeze wafted through the screened windows. Natty could make out the sound of soft music. She could see down the hallway to Birdie's bedroom, but the door was closed, which was also odd. That was where she knew she would find Birdie. Natty noticed the old rotary phone on the hall table, and wondered if she should just call the sheriff's office first.…
No, look pretty stupid if Birdie is just off visiting for a few days.

But she wasn't off visiting. Birdie Merkely was lying faceup in the middle of the bed, her quilt pulled up to her waist. There was an unmistakable odor of death in the room, but not yet overpowering. Moving closer, Natty touched the old woman's forehead, then her cheek. She felt briefly for Birdie's pulse, knowing it wouldn't be there.

Birdie was dressed in her favorite blue silk dress. Her gray hair had recently been set in tight curls, and her face carefully made up with red lipstick, a faint smear of rouge on her soft, wrinkled cheeks, and even mascara. She wore a simple strand of yellowing pearls and scalloped gold earrings. The makeup and jewelry made her look much younger than seventy-six and revealed a woman Natty had never known, a woman who had once enjoyed life, before loneliness and constant pain defined her existence.

Under Birdie's clasped hands, in the fingers gnarled by years of crippling arthritis, Natty could see the serrated edges and yellowing back of an old photograph. She gently pulled it out to see a young couple seated on a park bench. Behind the bench was an iron railing, and in the distance was a stretch of sandy beach and then the blue-green ocean. A young Birdie Merkely leaned seductively against the young man seated next to her, her bright eyes focused on his face. He was a skinny boy wearing a military uniform, his billed cap pushed back jauntily, a khaki tie loose at his neck.

They both had a look of spontaneous laughter, as if they were responding to a funny comment by someone, maybe the photographer. In the bottom border of the picture,
Pensacola, Fla. 1946
was written in faded blue ink. Natty recognized the young man as Everett Merkely from pictures on the living room wall.

On the table next to the bed, Natty saw a familiar-looking plastic prescription bottle. She knew without reading the label that it was Birdie's Darvocet, a sixty-day supply, more than usually prescribed, because of her remote location. Next to the bottle was an empty wineglass with a trace of dried residue at the bottom. Natty walked over to the old Victrola, which was playing the Mozart Clarinet Concerto that Birdie loved. Natty turned it off.

In the hall she called the sheriff's department and told the dispatcher what she'd found. “Do you know which officer will be coming up?” Natty asked.

After a short pause the dispatcher replied. “That would be Officer Lester, Wayne Lester, ma'am.”

“Great. Thanks.” Natty couldn't hide her disappointment. The one deputy sheriff she didn't want to deal with. She'd known Lester since high school, where he was an obnoxious, overweight pervert who liked to cruise the halls, feeling girls' backs and announcing a “bra check.” For a short time he'd focused his attentions on Natty, assuming that, due to her undeveloped appearance and lack of boyfriends, she'd be more receptive than the other girls. He didn't take rejection by the
flat-chested little hillbilly
too well.

Lester's disdain for Natty intensified after her marriage to Buck. His long-standing hatred for Buck was rooted in the unmerciful beating that Buck had administered to the bigger boy one summer afternoon when they were in their early teens. It was one of many fights that Buck soon forgot about. But Lester carried the painful memory of being embarrassed in front of a large gang of cheering kids, as Buck's superior boxing skills, strength, and innate instinct for cruelty turned Lester into a bloody, staggering hulk.

For years the memory and the desire for revenge smoldered, until one night Lester and another deputy got the call to respond to a domestic disturbance in Oakes Hollow. It was the day of the big announcement about the new power plant in Red Bone. The day the helicopters came. It wasn't clear from the call who was beating whom, but Wayne Lester knew who it would be as he opened the trunk of his patrol car to get his heavy lead-filled riot stick.

Drunk and out of control, Buck could be counted on to resist arrest, especially with a little provocation from Lester. The darkness provided sufficient cover for Lester to administer some solid shots to Buck's rib cage and a few to his calves and kneecaps, but it wasn't until they got Buck to the jail's underground garage that Lester went to work with a vengeance. Buck ended up with several broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a broken nose and jaw, and a fractured tibia. He was in the hospital two weeks longer than Natty was.

When Natty turned on the lamp in the darkening parlor, her attention was drawn to several framed photographs that decorated the sparsely furnished room. There was a pastel-tinted wedding picture of Birdie and Everett, looking young and scared. The largest picture on the wall was a grainy black-and-white photograph of a group of coal miners. Behind the men, a sign identified the mine as
U.S. STEEL NUMBER 9.
In the foreground of the picture,
November 1954, Everett, 2nd row, #4
was written in white marker.

Natty knew all about Everett Merkely, even though he had died in 1985, five years after retiring from thirty-three years in the mines. Everett was Birdie's singular interest in life while he was alive and her number-one topic of conversation afterward. Her husband had come out of the mines with emphysema and black lung. His last years with Birdie were not pleasant, as he slowly suffocated in his own fluids.

Natty thought about the photo that Birdie had chosen to hold as she died and tried to recall the few pictures she had of Buck and her together. None revealed anything like the love and pure joy experienced by the couple in Pensacola. She went back into Birdie's bedroom and sat in a tall straight-backed wooden chair, awaiting Wayne Lester. Natty put her head back, folded her arms in front of her chest, and gave in to the exhaustion of a long day.

A booming voice startled her out of half sleep. “Well, if it ain't Natty
De
-nit-
Witt,
sleeping on the job!”

She looked up to see the hulking figure of Deputy Sheriff Wayne Lester filling the doorway of the bedroom. Six-four and closing in on three hundred pounds, Lester was an intimidating figure. Hooked onto his shirt pocket was a pair of aviator sunglasses. A pencil-thin black mustache adorned his pockmarked face. He wiggled a toothpick between his crooked teeth as he alternately eyed Natty and the figure on the bed.

Natty resisted the urge to come back with a
Lester the Molester
crack and decided to be civil so she could get out of the house and back home. “Hey, Wayne, how you been?”

“I'm fine, Nat, just fine.” He was clearly encouraged by Natty's tone. “I see you running down the road real early sometimes, when I'm going through Red Bone headed up to Eve's for breakfast. You lookin' good these days, Nat,
real
good. Lookin' like a real woman now.”

Maybe it was always a mistake to be civil to a slug like Lester
. Natty smiled. “Thanks for noticing, Wayne.”

Lester turned and walked toward the bed. “So what have we got here, then?
Bye Bye Birdie,
like the movie, right?” He chuckled as he leaned over for a closer look. “What do you think happened here, Nat?”

What happened here? God, what do you think happened here, Lester?
Natty just wanted to go home. She didn't want to talk about Birdie, but she knew she'd be able to leave quicker if she helped him do his job.

“What
happened
here, Lester,” Natty snapped a little too brusquely before catching herself, “is that Birdie got tired of always feeling the pain from her arthritis, tired of limping and hurting on her bad hip and using a walker.” Natty's voice became softer as she looked at her friend on the bed. “And she got tired of being alone, having nobody to do things for, nobody to share things with, no one to love. And no one to love her.” Natty paused for a moment. “So she went out and got her hair done, came home and gave her house a good cleaning, made herself up pretty as she could, put on her best dress, turned on her favorite music, lay down on the bed with her nice soft quilt, and had a glass of wine and a bottle of Darvocet pills.”

Lester bent over to look at the label on the pill bottle. “She don't smell too bad, though. Not like that big nigger we found last summer, dead in his shed a couple weeks. Stunk so bad they had to burn that shed—”

“Lester, don't use that kind of talk around me. I mean it. Now, can I go? I need to get home.”

“Well, not so fast there, Nat. Why don't you sit on the sofa for a bit, while I do my investigation? Then I'll come out and you can give me your statement.” Lester put his fleshy palm to Natty's back and gently pushed her toward the doorway, taking his hand away with a subtle sideways rub.

After a few minutes, Lester came out of the bedroom and wandered into the kitchen. Natty saw him take off his equipment belt and lay it over the back of a chair. “Looks like the old bird left some groceries here on the table before she kicked off,” Lester called out to Natty.

“I bought that stuff, Lester, for Birdie, and she owes me fifteen dollars. You think if we found her purse, I could see if she had some money and—”

Coming back into the parlor, Lester cut her off. “No can do, Nat. Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head. “Cannot remove
any
property, especially monetary funds, from the scene.”

“Aw, cut the shit, Lester, I need the money for gas. I spent my last dollar on them groceries, and I ain't got even a quarter on me.”

“That's okay, Nat, maybe I'll give you some money for gas later on.” Lester took off his beaked cap and dropped it on one of the rocking chairs. He put a spiral notepad and his pocket tape recorder on the table as he sat down on the couch right next to Natty.

She started to stand up, but Lester shot his right arm around her and pulled her back down. “Now, hold on there, Nat. Don't be getting jumpy. I'm just going to take your statement.” He edged a little closer and turned so that his left leg now blocked her escape.

Natty realized the predicament she was in, alone in an isolated cabin with a man like Wayne Lester. “Lester, you can get my statement at the kitchen table. Why're you doing this?” she pleaded, once again trying to get off the couch.

The policeman tightened his grip with his right arm and slid his left hand up Natty's thigh. Her white poplin pants were still damp from the rain. “You ought to take off these wet clothes, Nat, and let 'em dry. We got more than an hour before the M.E. gets up here.” He pulled Natty closer. Her left hand tried to push his hand away, with no effect.

Lester leaned in toward Natty's face and did his best to affect a soft, intimate tone. “And I know you could use a little lovin', Nat, stuck with that shit-heel wife-beating husband of yours.”

“Lester, stop this right now!” Natty yelled.

He nuzzled her neck as Natty turned away. “How is old
Bucko
these days? I hear he's back to visitin' that big gal up in Northfork again. Just can't stay away from her, I guess. You hear that, Nat?”

Natty stopped struggling. Lester had given her the means to escape. “Lester, you take this
any
further than it's already gone, then I'm going to have to go home and tell my husband everything that's happened here. And what do you think Buck Oakes will do after I tell him Wayne Lester tried to rape his wife?” She could feel a slight relaxing of his grip on her shoulder.

“Aw, fuck you, Natty.” Lester got off the couch. “I ain't afraid of Buck.” But Lester didn't sound convincing as he gathered up his notebook and tape recorder. “Plus, he's still on probation. Get in big trouble, assaultin' a law enforcement officer,” he added. “But I guess I made a mistake here. Just takin' a shot, Nat, you know, hoping that … Well, you can take off now.”

“Okay, Lester, that's good. You made a little misjudgment is all,” Natty offered, as she straightened out her clothes.

The deputy looked relieved. “Thanks, Nat. Got a little carried away for a minute. You're lookin' real good these days, Nat, so I was just hoping, you know.”

Natty smiled, trying to ease the large man's embarrassment. “Thanks, Lester. But I
am
a married woman.” She was relieved the episode was over. Buck didn't need any trouble with Wayne Lester. And she didn't need any trouble with him, either, as he served on the county's youth sports coaches board, which supervised the soccer coaches.

Natty walked past Lester into the bedroom and said goodbye to her friend Birdie. She squeezed Birdie's hand, then picked up the Pensacola picture and stuffed it into her pocket. She wanted a remembrance of Birdie, and her friend's last image of life on earth seemed as fitting as anything else.

In the hallway, she stopped to pick up her equipment bag. “Now I got to go, Lester. Take care of Birdie for me.” She left the grocery bag where it was on the counter and went out the front door. He followed her onto the porch.

“So, we're okay, Nat, right? You ain't going to say nothin' about … You ain't saying nothing to Buck?”

Natty turned her head to reply as she walked to her car. “We're okay, Lester. Take care of Birdie. I'll see you.” She put her case in the backseat. But there was something else hanging over her now, something she couldn't leave without knowing. She stood with her hands on the top of the open door and looked back at Lester. “Wayne, what you said in there, about that woman in Northfork. You just bringing up old news, or you knowin' something?”