Читать книгу A Bloom of Bones - Allen Morris Jones - Страница 12

WAKING UP ON THE third morning of her visit, taking the measure of her own humors, Chloe found anger, frustration, a bubbling, subsurface sob. She could have been in Yellowstone Park about now, maybe driving Montana’s back roads, discovering saloons, cute little historical museums. Instead, Jesus, just look at her. Sweltering at six in the morning, staring up at a yellow fly strip clotted with gnats, moths.

Singer’s poetry had emotion, energy, color, but she found the life behind that poetry curiously translucent. Thirty years spent inside this house. He said he’d been the youngest child and that made sense. He had a youngest-child’s plaintive air about him.

She was not a religious person. Not for her, the bureaucracy of -isms. But she did believe in accountability. At the end of it, her final breath floating to the ceiling, there would be a reckoning. What had she done with the days she’d been given? Last year she spent her vacation in a stone farmhouse in the Dordogne, bought tins of fois gras at the Saturday market in Sarlat. The year before, she had stretched out under mosquito netting in Kruger, listened to lions roar beyond the walls. All that time, Singer had been here.

Yesterday, they’d herded cows. “We’re shipping here in a week. You feel like helping me gather up some stragglers?” She hadn’t the first clue what he was talking about. But sure, why not.

Between her knees, a gentle, blaze-faced sorrel named Peaches. She whispered into a swiveling ear, “You and me are going places, honey.” Put the odor of horses in her nostrils and she was ten years old again. Photos from that period show the last honest smiles of her childhood. She and Peaches followed Singer down into the Breaks, Dante and Beckett trotting on either side. Singer said, “They like to hole up at the head end of these coulees, up where it’s cool.” The sky hot and pale. Their horses drank deeply at a stock pond, then dug at the water with their hooves. The dogs lay flat in an inch of muddy water, panting. Singer circled, leaning over to study the ground. “These yearlings will leave a track not a whole lot different from a cow elk.” In the timber, Chloe ducked for branches. Ahead of them five steers rolled to their feet, dull and astonished, then made a lumbering break for it. “Just let your horse there have her head. She knows what to do.” Chloe’s mare circled, shifted her weight, cut back and forth up the hill. Singer whistled to the dogs, pointing. The dogs flanked the steers, nipping. A few hours later, Chloe dismounted, rubbing her knees. “Is that the Fort Peck down there?” Ten, twelve times a day Singer would stop to scribble a note, a stub of a carpenter’s pencil tight in his fist. Then he’d look around, briefly pleased. He ignored her question about Fort Peck (too obvious?), and she said, “Is that your little poetry notebook?”

He retreated to his Skoal can, thumping it hard with a forefinger. Little. “That’s my little mind-your-own-business notebook.”

He was attracted to her. Of course he was. His eyes went to her breasts, to her hips . . . but then, nada. All the normal gestures that preceded seduction—lingering touches, hands on shoulders, quick little neck massages—they were all absent. Did he think he was too old for her? It would be sweet if it weren’t so frustrating. The gears that churn within men, the machinery that forces them after women? His were somehow all gummed up.

After a day in the saddle, woozy from wind and light and heat, she felt closer to him. He glanced at the Roman numeral count he’d written in pen on the palm of his hand, “Only three short. Pretty good day.”

“What’s for dinner there, Mr. Singer?”

Hamburgers, and a 1997 Stag’s Leap Cabernet. He tasted the wine, raised his eyebrows. “Uh huh. I see it now. I mean, yeah.” Bullshit, of course, but she appreciated the effort. They went to the couch. He had planned their first night’s entertainment—his records—but hadn’t thought so far as the second. “I got some old movies we could watch?” In a cabinet, dusty VHS versions of Lethal Weapon, Michael Keaton as Batman, Shrek. Everything you could get for five dollars at Walmart twenty years ago. She said, “How about we just sit and digest for a while.”

Singer sat stiffly on the far side of the couch, as composed as a passenger on a train. “Weather guessers are saying we could get a little rain by the end of the week.”

She slid closer to him. Gently extracted the wineglass from his fingers. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. At this distance, she could see a burst vein within the curve of his nostril. She took his hand. This wasn’t easy for her. Her fingertips on the knobs of his knuckles. Don’t talk. She brought her other hand to his cheek. To the dark stubble going gray. She put a knuckle to his chin, and turned his face toward her. Just like that, easy as tripping down stairs, she kissed him.

But his lips stayed closed, and his breathing went shallow; a slight, controlled whistle through his nose. At least he had the good grace to leave the pulling away to her.

“Well.” She sat back, nonplussed. “Well.” She willed her eyes to fill with ice and ashes. “So. You’re gay?”

He shook his head. “You really think this could work out, me and you? Montana, New York, back again? Not to mention, me being so much older?”

She took a few seconds. Okay, Chloe. Find the right tone, just the right word. “What the fuck, Singer.”

“Eh now?” He’d already been congratulating himself for his level-headedness.

“You don’t think we could work, but then, what? You were just, what, you were just waiting for me to make an ass out of myself before you mentioned it?”

“I just don’t . . . Shit.”

“Don’t what.”

“Look at you. How pretty.” He took her hand. “Then look at me.”

She was simultaneously offended and touched. What’s the right play here? What’s to be done. It took her only a second to decide. Don’t hesitate, don’t falter. They’d just opened another bottle of wine. She stood and bent for the bottle, letting him have a glimpse of freckled cleavage. “I’ll be out on the porch.”

He half stood, courteous to the end. “Chloe, listen, I’m . . .”

Kiss my ass and go fuck yourself. “Sleep well, Singer.”

So, yeah. The next morning? I’m outta here.

She woke early. Padded softly through the house toward the shower. His yellow legal pad lay open on the kitchen table. She snuck a glance. Expecting poems, sketches, doodles, she found instead one long block of script. “Nature abhors not a vacuum but a line, a square. Every bristling, Euclidian porcupine eventually decomposes into a mound. The natural state resists corners. Entropy favors a circle. For a language to be more natural, shouldn’t it aspire to this same geometry? This same shying away?” She’d hoped that he might have written something about her or her visit, but no. His last line referenced only William Stafford. “The light by the barn. More to be explored?” A few minutes later in the shower, she put her forehead against warm tile. Let the water run.

Coming out into the kitchen later, she heard the rattle of pans. Voices. Wrapped in a robe, drying her hair, she found a new face at the stove. “You must be Abe?” Short as a teenager, his skin was as wrinkled as a crumpled newspaper, as stained as a walnut. Singer’s hired hand. He’d apparently been in Miles City paying a visit to his ninety-four-year-old mother. A little Jack Russell terrier lay in a corner of the kitchen, curled nose to tail, watching her alertly. Abe raised his spatula in a salute, grinning around a shelf of cheap dentures. “Eli said you were pretty, but he didn’t say how pretty. I mean, damn.”

Singer, at the table with his pad, was amused. “Good lord, Abe. Tell her what you really think, there.”

“I aim to. Right after we introduce ourselves.” He set the spatula aside to shake hands. “I’m Abe, and you’re Chloe Barnes from New York. How do you like your eggs there, Chloe from New York?” He assessed her hips, her breasts. If she’d been a watermelon, he’d already be knocking against her hull. She wasn’t offended. Old men exist in their own netherworld of harmless flirtation.

Abe talked nonstop. Over her eggs (“Fried, thanks”), she learned that he tended the farm’s chickens and butchered the pigs. “So I cook the breakfast, ain’t that right, Eli.” He scratched at an ancient corrugation of razor burn around his wattled neck. “Had me two wives, hosted two funerals. Second wife died in childbirth. Lost the baby, too.” He said this matter-of-factly, without self-pity. “And now it’s just me and Eli here. Running the place. Just enough ranch to starve on, ain’t it, Eli?” Cowboys, both of them. The real deal.

She touched the corners of her mouth with a paper towel napkin. “When can you drive me back to Billings, Singer?”

Singer was studying his coffee. Raising it to his lips, he held her gaze, but it cost him something. “I was hoping you might stay awhile longer.”

“I don’t see how.”

Abe glanced back and forth between them, catching up.

“Just a day or two, maybe. I was thinking you could ride Peaches out again. Explore a little on your own. Give her a workout for me. It would be a favor.”

Christ, Singer. Apology meets pleading puppy. She felt a flare of power. Whatever vulnerability she’d shown by coming here, whatever measure of pride had been sacrificed by walking off that plane, things were realigning in her favor. She smelled regret, a soupçon of self-flagellation. And besides: When would she have a chance to ride a horse again?

“What do you think Abe,” she said. “Should I go for a ride?”

She had her own agenda. Of course she did. Did Singer think he could just buy her off with a horseback ride? Think again, mister. During their ride yesterday, he had pointed out Abe’s trailer. A hunched-up antique camper settled low on four flat tires. Abe ate his lunch alone, apparently. Part of his daily routine. Breakfast with Singer, dinner with Singer, but lunch and a nap back at his trailer. If she left Singer’s around ten or so, circled to the south, came around from the north, she should catch the old guy by himself.

Despite the heat, a thread of smoke rose from the stovepipe. Paths in the grass, parking pad to door. She dismounted and wrapped reins loose around a bumper. Knocked flimsy tin. “Anybody home?” The door’s aluminum handle had been repaired with a cracked porcelain knob.

Shrill barking sounded from inside, followed by a pot clattering on a stove. “Yeah, hello there. Just a minute.” The door opened. “Chloe?” He held his dog away from the door with his heel. “Help you with something?”

“Mind if I come in?”

“Um.” Abe glanced around his trailer, half-panicked. “Give me a second?”

“Sorry for just barging in.”

“Just give me a second.” He closed the door, left her standing on the stoop. Inside, the sound of cabinet doors, a rattle of a shower curtain. Five minutes later, Abe was back in the door, saying, “Get you a cup of tea or some such?”

“Sorry to barge.” She stepped past him into the trailer, noting the bath towel thrown over a sink full of dirty dishes. The wet trail of a dishcloth still glistening across his counter. A wood stove, metal coffee pot blackened on the bottom. A combination shower and restroom filled with hanging shirts. A coil of rope hung from the back of her chair. A not unpleasant smell of dogs and aged body, a sharp tang of disinfectant.

She’d imposed on him. But this thing with Singer. She had questions.

“You got to understand about Eli, I never seen a man so determined about doing the right thing.” Abe had his mug of hot tea and was squeezing in a thread of honey. “I’ve known him, what, thirty years now. I ain’t never caught him in a lie. You think about that for a minute. How many folks you know never lie? It ain’t natural, is what I’m saying. But that’s Eli Singer.”

“Everybody lies.”

“You’d think so, but no. Reason I mention it, I saw how you and him were locking horns this morning, and normally I’d say I don’t blame you.”

“Oh?”

“You heard about how Eli must be the one sending Curt Fahler all that cash, all these years now. Hell I was down in Miles City and I heard about it all the way down there. Well, just yesterday, I come right out and asked him, I said, You got any notion about how Pete Fahler came to be buried on our place? He said, Abe, he said, I don’t know the first thing about it. And you bet, sure, yeah, I believe him. Thirty years.”

“Where would I have heard about Curt Fahler’s cash money?”

He sipped tea, nonplussed. “So what’s happened between you two?”

She came back with a question of her own. “Cash money?” Tried to give it an incidental, just-passing-the-time kind of vibe. A literary agent, she had a nose for a story. For a compelling question with complications. “Curt Fahler’s, what, Pete Fahler’s son?”

Abe was a gossip to the bone. Knew he shouldn’t, but: “After Pete disappeared, these envelopes full of cash started showing up in the mailbox.” A fake regret at the absurdity of it. “First they went to Curt’s mother, then after Curt got married, they went to him and his wife. Hundred here, three or four hundred there. Whole county knew about it. We all figured, hell, Pete’s shacked up with some chippy somewheres. Feels guilty, wants to make amends. This went on for years.”

“And now it turns out that, what, Pete was buried on Singer’s ranch? All this time, right?”

“Right. So who’s been sending Curt the cash? That’s the thousand-dollar question. What everybody’s been chewing over.”

“Singer says he doesn’t know anything about it?”

“And I believe him. I do. Thirty years, never told a lie.”

Chloe thought: Bullshit. But was kind enough to let it go unsaid. Let the old man keep his illusions. “Thank you for the tea.”

“You don’t have to run off so soon?”

“Singer will be wondering where I got to.”

“He couldn’t talk about nothing else before you got here. You should know that. Two solid weeks, it was Chloe this, Chloe that. He’d ask me, you think she’d like to go for a ride? You think she’d like steaks for dinner? Pain in the ass about it, you want the truth.”

“Well.” Don’t be touched, Chloe. Don’t be swayed. “Anyway. I should get back.”

She already knew his rituals. Lying in bed, she listened to a brief spray of dishwater into the sink, the mechanical turn of a key into the grandfather clock. He brushed his teeth, spat. When she heard the toilet flush for the last time, she slipped into her robe.

She walked past the dogs asleep on the couch. His bedroom door was cracked. She pressed it open with her palm. “Singer?” He lay in the dark, facing away. In the wedge of light allowed by the door, here was his bare back, salted with a handful of flesh-colored moles. He twisted around, one arm raised against the new light. Such a white torso. She said, “I can’t sleep.”

After a long moment—she breathed, then breathed again, then sighed through her nose—he raised a corner of his bedcover, opening it for her.

They carried breakfast plates around each other with slow, coordinated courtesy. He said, “Excuse me, love.” Love, he’d said.

The sex? Decent, but not exceptional. Twelve, fifteen minutes. And he brought nothing new to the postgame. She wasn’t disappointed, not exactly. It was just . . .

They talked tattoos. Not that she wasn’t proud of her ink (expensive, Smith Street), but she wasn’t used to giving it more than a few minutes. She had Vonnegut around her ankle (“So it Goes”) and Rilke down her back. Roethke inside her thigh (“The greatest assassin of life is haste”) and Valérie on her calf. Singer traced Roethke with a fingertip. “He was Hugo’s mentor. You knew that, right?”

“What about you, Singer?”

“Me? I got no tattoos. Scars, no tattoos.” He fell back into his pillow.

“What about you and Curt Fahler.” Entitled by sex, she felt she could risk it.

He opened an eye. “Where’d you hear about Curt Fahler?”

“Around.”

“You shouldn’t listen to every goddamn rumor comes down the pike.”

“Methinks he doth protest too much.” And she did. A guy gets pissed ten minutes after he gets laid? Either he’s ashamed and hiding it, or embarrassed and dodging a bullet. If she’d been a guard dog, one lip would be curling up.

Maybe if she’d had a month in Montana, even another week, they might have had time to let this—whatever this was—settle into some kind of understandable shape and form. Was it a prelude to something larger? Or was it just a polite diversion. But they didn’t have a week. And so she found herself dwelling less on the possibilities and more on the potential catastrophes. The complications. What was the backstory?

The day before she was due to fly home, the Garfield County Sheriff came by for an interview. Singer led him into the kitchen. “Grady? This here’s Chloe. Chloe’s visiting from back east.”

When the sheriff lifted his square-crowned hat, a slab of carefully manufactured combover rose with it. He couldn’t have been more than thirty-five or so. Bummer to be going bald so young. A thick, reddish-gray mustache hid his lips. “Ma’am,” he said, and seemed reluctant to shake her hand. The way he tucked his khaki uniform blouse into his jeans said amateur, but then your eye went to the badge, the pistol. He looked around the kitchen with bland, sleepy-eyed curiosity. So many books. He nodded in her general direction. Said to Singer, “So I was hoping you and me and Abe could talk private. Apologies, ma’am.”

“That’s fine,” Chloe stood. “Excuse me, I have manuscripts to read.”

She retreated to the porch. A redwood chair splintering on the legs and arms. Drawn to the sound of the screen door, the dogs loped around the side of the house, pushed their heavy heads under her hand, eased down with theatrical sighs. The kitchen windows were open behind her. Had she planned it this way? Maybe, maybe. In any case, without trying particularly hard, she was able to catch most of the conversation, the high points, everything but words lowered out of inadvertent propriety.

Grady’s tone was slow, reasonable. He was careful of his phrasing. Laying out a case. “So yeah, Eli. You can see why folks would think Buddy’s some kind of a suspect. Only suspect, really. A body shows up on your place, and given Pete’s history with this family, with Buddy . . . I mean, you can understand it, yeah?”

“I understand it. Doesn’t mean I agree with it.”

“Plus, I mean, you see how this all reflects on you. Much as I hate to say it, who’s been sending money to Curt all these years? Has to be Eli Singer. Which means you’ve had to have known about it, been in on it. You’re complicit. I’m being honest with you now. But that’s the skinny around Jordan.”

“You got it all wrong, see I . . .”

Abe interrupted. “So is this what the taxpayers of our county are paying you for, Grady?” Abe let his voice rise. “Come out here and harass hard-working citizens? I remember when you were poaching elk in August for velvet. You didn’t think I knew about that, did you? Well I did, and so did a lot of other people. I know everything goes on in this county, and I’m telling you you’re wasting your goddamn time out here.”

“All right then, Abe. Goddamnit yourself. You tell me who I should be interviewing. I’ll go pay them a visit.”

“How about Pete’s widow over in Glasgow. If there was anybody ever had a reason to put a bullet into that lying sonofabitch, it was that poor woman.”

“So then she started sending cash to herself, then her own kid? Think about that for a second.”