I’d been fooling myself all these years. A leopard can’t change his spots except maybe for prison stripes. Fate had finally caught up to me, was about to make me pay for all the bad things I did when I was younger.
“Wump?” Sister Dymphna leaned over me, her voice cutting through the cobwebs. “Leo told me what happened. Are you all right?” Leo was behind her, talking to himself. Car doors squeaked open then thudded closed.
I was sitting on my duff next to a maple tree on the orphanage side of the river, picking blades of grass, lifting my head every few seconds to get another look. The fully clothed skeleton of Rolf Volkheimer, Mrs. V’s husband, was just inside the overhang of the footbridge, seated upright on the bottom floor after having dropped a full flight from the bridge’s attic storage. His skull was ten feet from his body, on the lip of the grass. There was a hole in the skull where a hole shouldn’t have been, between his lower teeth and chin. He’d been sitting there in front of the window with a spyglass, his snuffbox in his lap, when the bullet hit him. I hadn’t touched a thing.
Two bullets, the plainclothes cop said from a stepladder, correcting himself. They’d entered the side planking from ground level and to the left of the window, or so it appeared, the way he had a pencil angled through one of the holes. It knocked out a large divot of wood as it passed through.
Two bullets shot from a gun powerful enough to penetrate the wood, and from a fairly close range.
Two shots, he said. One missed, one didn’t.
I remembered them shots. They came from a rifle.
…I leaned back against a tree beside the footbridge, away from the bridge entrance, watched the sun creep up over the ridge behind Rolf Volkheimer’s house. I crammed my hands into my coat pockets; jeepers, was it cold. Only good thing about days cold as this was what they did to the dog shit, which was freeze it up so solid it made it easier to handle, except for when we had to use our penknives to separate it from the hardened turf.
My tater sack was on the ground in front of me, the top twisted shut. Heinie’s haul wasn’t near as good today, so he took off to scavenge the lower part of the Volkheimer property just across the bridge, the other side of the river.
Voices from the path behind me made me stiffen up. Men’s voices, low and laughing, coughing, spitting, complaining in German about the cold. I nudged my sack out of sight, pulled it flush with me against the tree trunk, took small breaths. Too deep a breath in frigid air like this would give me away. The men were headed into the woods outside of town, to hunt for deer, rabbit, squirrel, any meat that could be used for a meal, or stock for a soup. I took tiny, sneaky steps around the tree trunk, keeping the tree between me and the voices; I didn’t need to make no false moves around men with guns. The hunters stayed on the path. Their voices faded.
Whew; that was better.
“Got you, you filthy little bastard.”
A large hand closed on my chest and pulled me away from the tree trunk, snapping me to my toes. It drew me up to the straggler’s pockmarked cheeks, into his foggy breath.
“Agghh! Herr Zerhoffer!”
His face had welts, around the eyes and forehead, from the day I belt-whaled him, the same day his frostbit son nearly died. He sprayed me with spit as he talked. “Thought you could strap a man und get away with it, did you? I got news for you, boy.”
“Owww. Lemme go.”
“Now you’ll pay for what you did to my face, und for what that meddling nun of yours is trying to do to my family.”
Zerhoffer slung his rifle off his shoulder, lowered it behind him. With his free hand, he slid the belt away from his long wool overcoat and bunched the leather up so the metal of its large square buckle was at its tip.
“The Church,” Zerhoffer said through gritted teeth, “took my first son, God rest his infant soul. They won’t never catch me being so obedient again.” He gave my chest another hard shake. “I don’t much care for your Sister Irene throwing her weight around neither. Und her horseshit animal cruelty laws won’t never make me give up my second boy, just so he can end up with the likes of you.”
I caught my breath with a shift in his weight and quick got to swinging and kicking, my boots connecting hard against his shin. He winced, then the hand on my chest retightened and lifted, and I was helpless again, digging my nails into Zerhoffer’s thick, factory-scarred knuckles. He slapped his belt once against his thigh, narrowed his eyes, then brought the leather back, readying for the first strike.
“Time for the strapping of your life, you little motherless sonova—”
Whap!
Zerhoffer’s hand left my throat and went to the side of his head to stem the sudden pain. He spun around, groaning through a string of curses.
Whap! went Heinie’s shit-filled tater sack again, hitting Zerhoffer flush in the face, the frozen dog turds whacking his nose bone with the force of a gunstock. A second later Zerhoffer’s mouth and chin and neutral overcoat were a scarlet red, the blood gushing from his nostrils. He stumbled back, away from us, and Heinie readied the sack for a third blow. He got a running start, followed Zerhoffer around the corner of the bridge toward the tunnel entrance. I turned the corner. Zerhoffer was holding one hand up to his own nose and the other around Heinie’s neck. Heinie’s sack was spilled over, his hands both pulling at Zerhoffer’s fingers as they tightened around his throat.
“Let him go!” I yelled but it didn’t make no difference. Zerhoffer stepped toward me, dragging Heinie with him, Heinie’s eyes now rolling to the top of his head. The prick bastard was squeezing the life out of my best friend…I had to do something—
Zerhoffer suddenly stopped short. Heinie’s eyes were closing, but Zerhoffer’s were now open real wide.
I steadied the man’s hunting rifle, trained it on his chest. “Let him go. Now.”
Zerhoffer released his grip. Heinie dropped to his knees in a coughing fit.
“Put the gun down, boy,” Zerhoffer said, pleading into a hand-cupped mouthful of blood. “You don’t want to shoot me—”
Oh, but I did.
“How’s it feel to be really scared, you prick of a father, you?” I lifted the heavy gun to my shoulder, pulled the barrel up so it was eye level to him. “Put your hands up. Now!” His arms went up, the blood from his nose now dripping from his chin. I leaned my head in close to the rifle, Zerhoffer still bitching in between curses. I squinted into the rifle’s sight.
“How ’bout I just shoot off some of your fingers? Then you’ll know what it’ll be like for your boy because of the frostbite he got. How ’bout I do that?”
Zerhoffer backed up closer to the bridge’s tunnel entrance. I lifted the rifle barrel up higher, at his raised hand, tightened my finger around the trigger.
“No. Stop! Have mercy, boy—”
Crack! I fired the rifle and the bullet zipped past him, into the wood of the bridge. I steadied the gun again, making sure my second shot was raised high enough.
Crack! The shot clipped his pinky finger, and he slapped one hand inside the other, blood flowing from his knuckle like it was an open tap on a beer keg. He squealed then lunged at us. We stumbled out of his reach, scattered into the tunnel and across the bridge, one after the other. On the other side of the river I flung the rifle out onto the middle of the ice. The gun skittered and slid until it slipped through a hole near a rock, disappearing into the river.
“Both bullets had nowhere to go other than into the second story of this bridge,” I told the police officer. “1911 was the year. Same year Rolf Volkheimer went missing. And he went missing because a careless kid shot him. That careless kid was me.”
Poor Mrs. V. What would she think of me? What would they all think of me now?
Hearing everyone talking about this, the police, Sister Dymphna and all, this was going to make the papers for sure. Finding the skeleton of a man people thought had been kidnapped—on his own property—as wealthy as Rolf Volkheimer was back then, this would definitely be a news story. Poor Viola. And poor, poor Mrs. Volkheimer.
Kerm the Coroner waddled out of the bridge entrance, headed in my direction. He waved a police officer away. “I think we’re about done here, Wump,” he said. “You can leave now.”
“What? You’re letting me go?”
“Yes. Go home. Get some rest. You’ve been through enough today.”
“But I killed Mr. Volkheimer. Weren’t no kidnappers like they thought. It was me. Aren’t you going to arrest me or something?”
“Listen to me,” Kerm said, raising his eyebrows. A quick flick of his lighter and he was inhaling another cigarette. Now his other hand was on my shoulder and he was leading me away from the group, back to the maple tree, the one I hid behind the day I shot this man.
“They did find a slug sitting loose under the victim’s coat collar. They’ll check it out against what they can research on firearms from back then. And there do appear to be two bullet holes in the wood siding to the left of the window, both of them painted over. So yes, a slug from the rifle you shot could have put the hole in this man’s skull. But what I’m hearing you describe here was an accident, and you were what, eleven or twelve years old? The DA won’t be pressing charges. Not against an old-timer for an accidental death he may or may not have caused when he was a juvenile.”
He pointed his cigarette hand at me, then at my truck on the other side of the river. “Look at it this way. You and your young friend here closed out what was probably the oldest unsolved crime on record in Three Bridges. Relax, get in your truck, and go.”
Relax, hell. The more I learned about myself, the more I understood why the first part of my life was so hard. It was the anger. It kept me alive as a kid, and it made me a survivor, but I expect it guaranteed I stayed an orphan for as long as I had, too. Angry at being an orphan, and an orphan because I was angry. A sad waste of a childhood.
One last comment from Kerm after he flicked his cigarette butt into the river: “I almost forgot. About the wastewater from the cave-in of that sewer wall. You wanted to know what was in it.”
“Sure do,” I said. “Loaded up with harmful chemicals, right, Doc?”
“Well, yes, some chemicals were found. Sulfuric acid was one.”
Damn straight. Rotted out iron pipes faster than road salt rusted car fenders.
“TCE, and PERC…”
I knew them abbreviations. They’re short for hazardous solvents some factories used to dissolve grease and oil caked on heavy machinery.
“…and a copper sulfate called Blue Vitriol.”
Another out-and-out, skull-and-crossbones poison. No industry upstream other than the Volkheimer tannery, and I used all them acids to clean the machinery when I worked there back in my twenties. So I knew. I fucking knew.
Wait. “What do you mean ‘some,’ Kerm?”
“Traces, is what they said. Not enough parts per million to get the authorities riled up. They’re not looking into it any further.”
“Jesus, Kerm, c’mon. You were at the restaurant site, just like I was.” I felt my face flush. “You saw what the water looked like. That shit is making people sick. Kids. Adults. Unborn children, for Christ sake. What you saw came from the sewers, but it’s in the well water, too.”
Kerm gave me a sympathy shrug and shook his head. “Sorry, Wump. I have to go by what the authorities said.”
That irresponsible, disease-causing, motherfucker Hughie Volkheimer. The bastard paid somebody off.
A commotion came from inside the covered bridge, a repeated ranting in Leo’s excited, high-pitched voice. He hurdled the dust-covered jumble of snapped ceiling planks at the bridge’s entrance, galloped outside and down the river bank, screaming and pointing into the center of the surging water, then skipping and screaming and pointing some more. Something bobbed to the dark water’s rippled surface then went under again. Kerm and the cops who came with him started quickly toward the bank, tracing Leo’s footsteps.
Relax, fellas. More floating sticks was all it was.
No. Wait.
“Look!” Leo shouted, pointing nervously at something that had just gone underwater twenty feet out. “Out there. I saw sumpin’ float under the bridge. Look! There it is!”
A cop stripped off his jacket and holster and entered a river still rowdy from the extra flow of dam water. He waded up to his waist before the current slowed him down. When he was in as far as his shoulders he took a bead on what Leo spotted. The cop’s head dropped below the surface. Another cop waded in. Fifteen to twenty seconds later the first one resurfaced. He raised a twig-snagged bundle of blanket eye level, above the water.
The first cop cleared his mouth. “It’s a baby,” he shouted, his shoulder leaning into the current. The second cop pushed ahead, rushed out to take the bundle then pushed his way back to the bank with it, handing it out of the water to a third cop. With each step closer to Kerm, the cop peeled more of the blanket out of the way.
I got a crush of terror so sudden it made my legs weak.
A skull, inside the blanket bundle. It was going to be bones and a tiny skull with moving lips, same as what me and Heinie fished out of the river more than fifty years ago, and in damn near the same spot. The fucking nightmares I had. Screaming, decomposing babies, soulless eyes, all hovering, groping, pleading. I’d be having them all over again. Please, God, no…
The cop handed the baby to Kerm. Kerm unraveled the rest of the blanket.
“His face and body, Doc,” the cop pleaded, “they’re already blue. He got a chance?”
The officer first into the river lifted his waterlogged legs onto the grassy bank. He doubled over at the waist, hands on his knees, coughing, spitting, then looked hopefully over at Kerm in time to see Kerm answer the other cop’s question with a shake of his head no.
I let out a grateful sigh and hoped no one noticed, ashamed my prayer had been answered.