Bonepile

BONEPILE

Gaylord Dold

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Bonepile

Copyright © 1988 by Gaylord Dold

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

ISBN-0-8041-0233-3

eISBN 978-1-938582-76-9

Smashwords Edition

Published by Premier Digital Publishing

www.PremierDigitalPublishing.com

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-92138

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

There, I've Said it Again, Words and Music by Redd Evans and Dave Mann. Copyrights © 1941 (Renewed) Jefferson Music Co. Inc. Copyrights assigned 1985 to Music Sales Corp., (ASCAP) New York. International Copyright Secured.

Outside the car, evening wrapped in a mesh of purple.

St. Louis had the Dodgers by the throat and were shaking. I could almost taste cold beer and I was dreaming of third base when the first blast roared.

The Fairlane shuddered and the wheels dropped from the blacktop. The tires squealed and caught and we were on the concrete again, weaving. I caught the Mercury in the mirror.

Get down, I said. Get down.

Clara crouched in the seat. I shoved the pedal to the floor and the Fairlane lurched forward. The Mercury sped ahead.

What is it? Clara asked.

A guy with a shotgun, I said.

Mitch Roberts is a breath of fresh air, and a welcome change from the mordantly cynical private eyes we've come to expect as the norm in crime fiction.

Rave Reviews

Fiction by Gaylord Dold

Crime Novels

The Nickel Jolt

Same Old Sun, Same Old Moon

The Swarming Stage

Storm 33 (Originally titled, The Last Man in Berlin)

Six White Horses

The Devil to Pay

Schedule Two

Bay of Sorrows

The Mitch Roberts Series

The Wichita Mysteries

Samedi’s Knapsack

The World Beat

Rude Boys

A Penny for the Old Guy

Disheveled City

Muscle and Blood

Bonepile

Cold Cash

Snake Eyes

Hot Summer, Cold Murder

The good things in this book

were written in memory of my grandmothers,

Arizona Dold and Josephine Sawyer.

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Afterword

About the Author

ONE

It was a cockeyed, Krazy Kat June. It was a wild, lush, dropsical June choked with bumblebees, clacking bugs, and red, red roses. On June's first Monday a doctor unwired my jaw.

Then, for the first time in three weeks, I tasted cold beer with no hint of blood, iron, or rust. On those first few unwired days I rocked on the front porch, my feet plopped implacably on the rickety rail, watching as blue afternoons tailed mysteriously into windy, purple evenings. Those evenings entered the city like sleep, seeming to doze unseen in the elms, snoring shyly beneath the eaves of all the Old Victorians on Sycamore Street, a hushed presence, gentle and innocent as sleep itself. I would wiggle my jaws as if they were bruised toes.

There were storms that rose fretfully westward, behind the old house. There would be the sound of wooden slats creaking against the board floor, a sound steady as an oar in water. The wind would rise south and west to meet advancing shadows that blossomed beneath the ballpark's left field wall. The sky would redden like a woman's cheek and then take on a tincture of opalescence. The elms and trellis roses groaned until finally the rain flew and fell down and snarled on the brick streets. After the rain an otherworldly orchestra of cicadas pulsed. I played chess and read books and broiled steaks and ignored my clients.

As the nights collapsed around the city, drawing folds around the dance halls and drugstores, I opened the window and drew out my old radio and tuned in some faraway ballroom to listen in the soft air to Jo Stafford or Nat Cole. Later, the ballpark breathed and rumbled from applause. I watched the moths encircle the light standards, and in the late innings, after the ticket takers closed their shutters, I ambled through the open gates to watch, perched meekly on a bench seat in deepest left. Beers were two bits, and I always spent a dollar.

On June's second Tuesday a doctor unwrapped my bruised ribs, and for the first time in four weeks I tied my own shoes. That same night I rocked on the porch in a pool of lambent yellow, my shod feet up on the rail. Beyond them lay city hall and its ornate, rococo clock tower; an orange Southern Pacific boxcar; a painted Wichita Indian smiling from a baseball; a Dairy Queen. Later, while I drowsed there above a volume of Rubenstein's chess masterpieces, I heard Mrs. Thompson scuffle past the rose trellis and watched as, with a delicate deliberation that consumed her concentration and her strength, she climbed the steps and stopped. She spied my shoes and smiled.

Mrs. Thompson resided in the upstairs half of my Victorian, and it had fallen to her to tie my shoes, morning and night. During those weeks of my need, we would rock together, she, clasping and unclasping her wrinkled hands rhythmically as I sipped beer and pushed rooks and queens around a teak board. She was old and enduring as a river. I was stiff and determined as a club fighter.

My last case had been a beautiful child grown willful. It was a tommy-gun-toting cherub of a case, leaving me finally with a broken jaw, a golf bag of bruised ribs, and a decent bank account. I'd had enough of private detection, enough to last Sherlock Holmes two centuries; enough skulking around dark alleys, enough spying on bad husbands and wayward wives, enough repossessions of cars and couches and TVs, enough missing adolescents to fill Proust's notebooks to overflowing. I was worn as an old leather belt, and I had decided to leave the city and go off to fish and sleep and eat fried okra until my memories zipped shut and slumbered still as a turtle in a December creek.

So, on one brilliant, baby-blue Thursday, I shut the office. I swept the floor, scoured the icebox, and unplugged the lamps. I latched the screen and locked the back door and turned off the coffeepot. I shut the windows. Every scrap, each bill, notice, demand, and foreclosure tumbled wildly into the trash; every glass was stacked; every butt pinched; every phone message read and immediately forgotten. I wrote a note to the landlord and payed him three months’ rent and pulled down the shades. I stood then in the dark afternoon and studied the oak desk, my black captain's chair, and the black, arching phone; I inspected the foggy glass divider, the white Naugahyde couch, and the icebox as it chugged; I gazed on the striped shadow of a sign—MITCH ROBERTS INVESTIGATIONS—seeing the shadows fall and spread like tar across the cold linoleum floor. In the dusky silence I smelled lilac from the barbershop next door.

Then I went outside and locked the door. I flipped the key into the air. It twirled and dropped in western sunlight like a goldfish. Jake the barber was leaning against the door to his shop. He was fat and bald and wrapped in a white smock. I loved him like a brother. He smelled of HA Hair Arranger.

This looks final, Jake said. He raised a pair of scissors and snipped them meaningfully.

Not like death, I answered. More like marriage.

Jake smiled. We were neighbors and men who'd fought the war and come home to war. I handed Jake the key. He handled the key with his free hand, then snared it with the scissors.

You coming back? he asked.

I must be. I just paid the rent for three more months. If that nosy rat of a landlord comes snooping, tell him to get lost.

Thanks a lot, Jake said. Where you headed?

Probably to the farm to rest. You know this last case nearly did me in. It was true. I hadn't died. But I felt hollow and unloved and creaky in all the places that should slide smoothly along. It was a feeling born of too much freedom and too little responsibility. Too much independence, too little trial. The world about me jousted endlessly with marriage, employment, and kids; I fenced mirages. My bones and skin, my hands and back and neck and fingernails cried for an affection that never came, and so I drank and crawled the nights and shot pool. In the first years after the war I'd been hired and fired and dragged through a dozen aimless jobs, each more tiresome and desperate than the one before. With luck and a loan from another veteran, I'd established a small agency that existed on assignments from snotty vice presidents and scary lawyers. The work was small and steady as a molar cavity.

Lately though, I'd floored a couple of Wichita's major bad boys and had been rewarded by money and a dollop of notoriety. Still, I'd seen the hollow spots and the underbellies, the places where roaches and spiders breed. It had been a recognizable shock. I knew now in my heart of hearts that money wasn't enough, that all the money in the world wouldn't get me the affection, wouldn't buy me hope. It was a comical discovery, but nobody laughed.

So, goddamnit, Jake said. Where are you going?

I'll stay with Grandma for a month, help her with the garden, read, do some fishing. Maybe I'll go up to Montana and see what's there.

Sky, Jake said. We got plenty of that here.

Keep an eye on the office.

Jake nodded. I thought we'd fish this summer. See some ball games. Jake lowered his eyes. He had the wife and the children, and I knew he loved our evenings on the pond or at the ballpark.

I'll be back for the pennant race, I said.

Then I drove the Fairlane to an appliance store on Hydraulic Street and there paid cash for a blond Raytheon television. An old mechanic in ball cap and dungarees loaded the Raytheon in the trunk, and together we hitched the trunk lid and the television together with spools of rope and twine. I cruised the Ford slowly along Douglas, south on Sycamore, and into the alley behind the house. I parked beside the rabbit hutch. Two speckled rabbits scurried as I shut down the motor. Mrs. Thompson was bent above a hoe, hacking a hill of squash. Each summer we planted together: tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, melons, and morning glories. Each fall we canned and made pickles and applesauce.

I led Mrs. Thompson into my rooms. A fibrous sunset quivered on the burnished wood floor. The place smelled of Latakia, gun oil, and leather; everywhere there were chess books, pipes, and gallons of wine.

Mrs. Thompson was deaf as a pumpkin. She'd been alone so long it seemed forever. For me, the loneliness had lasted forever in actuality. Because of this we twined our needs and bound ourselves together, our mutual silences embracing like lovers.

I walked to a nightstand and switched on a brass lamp. While Mrs. Thompson watched, I wrote a message in the glow:

I AM GOING TO LEAVE TOWN FOR ABOUT TWO MONTHS. IT MAY TURN OUT TO BE LONGER, BUT I WANT YOU TO WATCH OVER MY PLACE WHILE I AM GONE. TAKE CARE OF THE GARDEN AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. PLEASE DON'T WORRY AS I AM FINE AND HEALED. MY JAW IS UNWIRED AND MY RIBS UNWRAPPED. THE RENT IS PAID SO DON'T LET THE LANDLORD FOOL ANYONE. I WILL BE BACK IN AUGUST TO HELP WITH THE GARDEN AND WITH THE CANNING. I WANT YOU TO KEEP MY KEY AND PLEASE COME INTO THE HOUSE AND WATER THE CACTUS ONCE IN A WHILE. ABOVE ALL, DON'T WORRY AS I WILL BE BACK. JUST CARE FOR THE RABBITS AND THE GARDEN AND WAIT FOR ME. REMEMBER, I LOVE YOU.

Mrs. Thompson cocked her ears as if to listen for the words of the message. I handed her the note and she read it slowly, straining above each letter, each word, like a surgeon. Across the street cheers crescendoed from the ballpark. A look of fear crossed the old woman's face.

That night I packed—jeans and boots and fishing gear, binoculars and Red Wing boots. I oiled the Browning automatic and wrapped the gun in a cloth. I stocked a pasteboard box with chess books, paper and pencils, a Field Guide to Western Birds, and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Beneath the pale rays of a blue gibbous moon, I placed the clothes and the box and the fishing gear in the Fairlane and added six quarts of Old Grand Dad and two gallons of muscatel, each bottle wrapped meticulously in brown paper.

That night, discordant dreams fouled my sleep. I dreamed of fiery lakes full of gorgons and bulldogs. I dreamed of foggy days in Normandy, the sound of gunfire drifting in the dreamy forest air. When morning finally wrapped itself around me like a dull sheet, drops of dark rain splotched the window panes, and tufts of wind raised dust in the street.

I showered, dressed, locked the doors, and left the key with Mrs. Thompson. As I backed the Fairlane into the alley, past the greening garden and the rabbit hutch, past the crusty catalpa tree and the lilacs bleeding purple, Mrs. Thompson, standing on her lofty veranda, waved goodbye.

I put the gun in the glove compartment.

TWO

South Kansas tips gently eastward into a sea of bluestem grass. The Flint Hills rise into an abundant sky, a great, rolling, grassy expanse verging clean to Texas in one undulant, treeless thrust. There are few roads and fewer towns, and in the unfenced wilds Angus cows, quarter horses, and white-tailed deer share space. It is a beautiful and oracular prairie where only wind slices the empty regions.

I chose country roads, gravel country lanes, avoiding the few highways in favor of a slow pace, which would allow me to catch and trace the Flint rivers that rise as streams and creeks and fall narrowly into growing channels: the Walnut, Caney, Grouse, Elk, Fall, and Verdigris. At Winfield I stopped at a roadside café, ate two hunks of fresh blueberry pie, chugged four cups of chicory coffee, and tipped the blond nymph behind the counter one whole dollar. From Winfield I ran east into open country where the whole sky opened like a palm and sank into emerald grassland. The gravel roads bumped over WPA bridges built like iron spider's webs. As the parishes changed, the white churches appeared in their copses of planted red cedars and pin oaks.

The sun arched in a rascal cumulus pack and I rolled down the windows of the car. I stubbed my last cigarette and tacked into a steady south wind that blew the rippling grass. I wove south and east and south again, following my nose through the towns and villages that form the graceful southeast Kansas landscape; landscape that leans gradually into a hardscrabble eastern land of coal mines and, eventually, the Ozark mountains. The villages sang: Altoona, Liberty, Neodesha, Fredonia, New Albany, Montana, Valeda, Oswego, Cherryvale, and Vilas.

Each cluster of board houses and redbrick buildings formed a crisp nucleus about the courthouse, the iron statues, the bandstands. Like giddy electrons, the drugstores, hardware stores, and catalog outlets, and finally, feed and seed stores, garages, and car lots revolved in a steady symbiosis. And then on the verges, in the purlieus of waving Johnson grass, lay the big, white grain elevators, the first green cornfields, and the milky-green spring wheat. The sky was blue as a robin's egg. My body embraced the fresh air and relaxed. For a minute I felt like dumping the whiskey.

The backroads resurfaced at Mound Valley. I honked at some school kids and fell on a level stretch of blacktop running north into Dennis, Kansas. Beside the blacktop ran deep ditches jammed with wet cattails and blackbirds. Herds of paints and Arabians browsed the open pastures, lolling in expanses of prairie hay and wildflowers. Everywhere sunflowers danced in the wind, and when the wind died the sun drew behind a bank of cloud. The shadows progressed across the land, and I followed them until I spotted the spire of my grandma's Evangelical church stuck hopefully into the sky. I cruised past the tractor repair garage run by old man Taylor and detoured by the church. In the churchyard a lettered sign behind glass announced: NEXT SUNDAY: IT’s SIMPLE TO BE GOOD. Then the first shacks and outbuildings of Dennis appeared.

In the village of Dennis, Kansas, live three hundred souls. These souls are mostly old, widowed, or sick, though a redbrick elementary houses two or three dozen urchins in overalls learning to