Louis Youngman laid his Stetson on the counter beside him and scratched out a few more details in his report. The duty nurse had given him the only spare room, two little chairs and a low, papered cot. He leaned against the wall and wrote against his arm while the couple simmered in their seats. Next door, the racket from their son had finally quieted down.
The boy’s father had thought it would be fun to have fireworks for his birthday.
“I tried to tell him,” the mother said before turning to her husband. “I tried to tell you, Ronny. A six-year-old’s party is loud enough without throwing explosions into the mix. And anyways where in God’s name did you think you’d find safe fireworks in the middle of April?”
“At the rez,” the father said between sips of his coffee. “They sell ’em year-round out there. You know they do that, right, Sheriff?”
Louis said, “Yes I know that.”
They sat in that little room, the three of them surrounded by framed cartoon illustrations of people’s innards, while the doctor finished up with the boy next door. The youngster, he’d reassured the parents, would retain almost all of what he’d started the day with.
“He’s six,” the mother said, wiping at her face with her sleeve. She was a petite thing, probably barely a hundred pounds after a casino buffet. “You should of seen how he held up the number the second he woke up this morning—five fingers on one hand, one on the other,” she cried. “The sixth one is the most important, you know. It’s the pointer,” she sniffed. “The steeple.”
“Things were fine,” the father said, his eyes pooling and red. There was alcohol on his breath, though he was lucid and fairly articulate. “We had a piñata. About ten people showed up, only three of ’em with presents. Things kind of went south from there.”
“Soon as that damn lighter came out of your pocket,” the woman said.
Louis tapped his notepad against his knee and closed the cover. It was an unfortunate situation, but there was nothing more he needed to do here. He’d put a call into child protective, maybe write a citation for the illegal fireworks. The finger was punishment enough, and both parents seemed plenty broken up about the whole thing. There was no need to break up the family over it.
“Are there any more explosives?”
“God no,” the woman said, shaking her head so hard her body rocked from side to side. “I threw every last one of ’em out the window on the way here.” She pulled back then, as if she’d just thrown herself into a citation for littering.
The father gave a bit of a laugh, a short cough that he grabbed hold of almost too late. “I guess I didn’t notice that before,” he said, motioning to Louis’s name tag.
Louis snapped the plastic tag with this finger. He’d heard it more times lately than seemed possible.
“Youngman,” the man went on. “Old guy with the last name of Youngman. That’s pretty damned funny.”
“Oh Ronny, Jesus Christ,” the woman said. “I’m sorry, Sheriff. Some days I swear he gets out of bed and just leaves his brain there on the pillow.”
Louis eased himself back into his cruiser and laid the Stetson beside him on the passenger seat. He drew his seatbelt over his chest and readjusted the side mirror before pulling out onto the highway, steering himself back in the direction of Colville. He went on past acres upon acres of ribbed, parched dirt, the dust having found its way over the road surface in occasional red patches. Up ahead, the white-paneled barns of the old Grauman farm continued to molt out there in the open fields, the gleaming lone silo catching the sun against a cloudless sky, blue as a robin’s egg. Everything from here to the Canadian border was kindling dry and itching to go up with the slightest spark. There was no business having fireworks out there, a kid’s finger only one of many good arguments against it.
Right around the point at which Blue Creek Road branched off from the 395, his radio crackled awake.
“Sheriff?” It was Holly. “You out there?”
He picked up the handset and held it to his face. He pressed it close and spoke quietly, as if, even in the emptiness of his car, someone else might hear him.
“I’m here,” he said. “What’s the situation?”
“The situation at the moment, I hate to tell you, is Vinnie,” she said. She cleared her throat into the radio. “I’m sorry to complicate your day.”
Louis loosened the seatbelt against his stomach. Jesus, he said to himself. He’d rather deal with a kid missing his whole hand than have to grapple with anything related to his brother. His patience for this nonsense had run out long ago. Lately, it seemed, he was barely subsisting on fumes.
“You there, Sheriff?”
“I’m here.”
“Honey, I know this is the last thing you need, but we’ve got him down here at the station. Back in holding.”
Louis looked up ahead at the roadway as it bent from the pine-riddled hill. The grayed, split rail fencing stretched away from him in dips and rises beneath a lone telephone line that seemed to go on forever.
“What now?”
“Shoplifting,” she said. “There’s a couple folks who left callback numbers for you.” She went silent for a moment, and Louis pulled off the highway and steered the car into a U-turn, pausing to let a big horse trailer pass by before punching the gas. A white cloud of dust spun behind him as he directed himself back toward Boone.
When they brought him out and sat him in the chair opposite Louis, Vinnie would not look his brother in the eye. His hair was a windswept snowdrift, and a wine-colored crescent lay stamped over his dark forehead like a brand. He kept his head down, his whiskered chin almost disappearing into his shirt collar, the skin hanging beneath his eyes like teabags. He inspected his newly-returned wallet, fingering with chalky nails through the photos and plastic cards and crumpled dollar bills.
“I had a twenty in here.” he said to no one in particular.
“Vinnie.”
“Where’s my goddamned twenty?”
Louis said nothing, sliding forward instead to the edge of his chair.
Vinnie shook his head and stuffed the wallet into his front pocket. He scanned the perimeter of the room, pausing here and there as if he were making a note of each item: the black-and-white wall clock; the bulletin board, layered with yellowed papers; the overhead fluorescent, vibrating like a hive of honeybees. When he had made the entire journey, he gave a slight nod of satisfaction, and only then did he let his eyes rest on his brother.
“Here you are,” he said in a near whisper. He moved his wallet from his front to his back pocket and got up from his chair, turning to the front door. “Sure as shit took long enough.”
Louis steered his cruiser through town, taking the side streets that formed the grid outside the courthouse square rather than the main arterials. Passing through the neighborhoods had a way of refocusing him, of providing a kind of “reset” when he needed one. Simple, yet determined, the houses on these streets were siblings of the houses on his own street, which were the houses you could find anywhere, in whatever dried-up place you happened to land in Eastern Washington, on the sunrise side of the mountains, be it Boone or Springdale or Ford or any other farm-grown town. Cockeyed chimneys, sagging porches and overgrown lawns, and garages with side-mounted wood doors that never quite shut all the way. No different, and that made Louis feel both relieved and exhausted at once.
“Are you going to tell me what you did this time?” he asked. He gripped the wheel from below, just as their father had done. “How you got that cut on your head?”
Vinnie put a hand to his temple. He looked out the side window and shrugged his shoulders. “Like you don’t already know,” he groused. “Want to make me say it like I’m some little kid.”
Louis had spoken to Hal Donagan, the store manager, who did not have a great deal to add about the whole thing.
“You’re acting like a little kid,” he said to his brother. “Impulsive. Stupid.”
“To hell with you.” Vinnie opened up the glove compartment and began rifling through the stacks of service envelopes and road maps, digging his bony fingers into the recesses.
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
Louis jammed his thumb against the cigarette lighter for no reason other than to give himself something to punch that wasn’t attached to his older brother. He was through the letter streets now and was just coming out onto McMahon Street.
Vinnie shut the compartment door and began calling out the makes and models of the cars passing by. “There’s a Desoto,” he said, pointing a knuckled finger across the dashboard. “I had one of those. Used to pile all the kids in the back of it and drive up to Glacier Lake for the weekend. Remember? Weighed that thing down so much the engine was practically on fire by the time we got there.”
Louis tried to recall this. The Desoto, the lake. Vinnie’s wife and kids, and the days before Lucy finally packed up the girls and left for good. It was all so muddy and distant. “Who cuffed you upside the head, Vin?” he asked, nodding his chin at his brother. “Was it the security guard? At the Safeway?”
Vinnie rubbed his finger over the swelling bruise.
“Did someone in the jail clock you?”
“If they did, I need to know. We can’t be having that kind of thing going on.”
“No,” Vinnie finally snapped. “None of that.”
They turned off McMahon and wound through Cherry Grove, the neighborhood of stucco bungalows and hard-packed, powdery yards with empty swingsets, and half-filled soccer balls littering the edges of curbs. A rust-stained pickup truck crowded the driveway of a corner house, its hood raised, an overall-clad fellow hunched over the grill and almost swallowed by the engine compartment.
“You made me look like a damned fool back there, Vin,” he said, “Again, I might add.”
“I’m the one who got knocked on his ass.”
Lou felt a blooming warmth under his shirt. He cracked the window some, and let the outside spill in, to mix with all the nonsense that hovered in the space around them. “You don’t get it, do you?”
Vinnie stiffened, his words barely pressing through clenched teeth. “I get it just fine.”
“Do you?” And then Louis said, “So who the hell beat you up?”
“Nobody beat me up, for Christ’s sake!” Vinnie said this as if he had wadded the words into his fist and thrown them across the dashboard. “I ran out of that store with a half dozen cashiers and box boys on my ass. Goddamned parking stalls all marked up for those little Jap cars, you couldn’t get a real vehicle in there if you tried.”
He glared at Louis as if he had been the one to cause it all to happen. The contraband. The chase scene through the parking lot. The skinny parking spaces.
“I cut between a couple rigs and ran head-on into the side mirror of a goddamned pickup truck.” He shrugged and looked out the window, toward the rows of cherry trees that pushed back from the road’s edge. “They’d of caught me anyhow,” he said. “The mirror just made it easier.”
Louis turned to get a gander at his brother, at this shiner of his that was suddenly more than just a worry, or a sad embarrassment. He bit down on his lip, holding the laugh fighting to push its way out. Serves you right, he thought. Old sonofabitch.
They traveled the last distance in silence, down the road as it veered gently to the north, and the Polk Street sign peeked out from a clump of overgrown rosebushes. Louis made a hard right, following the parched lawns and sun-beaten pickets to the clapboard rambler shaded by a big, weeping willow, three blocks in.
A little boy pedaled his bicycle on the sidewalk toward them, a boy Louis recognized from a family of Mexicans who’d moved in down the street a month or so earlier. White tassels swished from the bike’s handlebars, a big shiny, pink basket right there in the front, coming straight at them. Vinnie tracked him as they drove by.
“That girl looks like a boy,” he said.
“It is a boy.”
“What’s he doing on a girl’s bike, then?” Vinnie wasn’t laughing at him. He sounded sweetly concerned.
“It’s probably the only one he’s got,” Louis said.
“Someone ought to get him a boy’s bike.”
Louis looked at his brother, at the ridiculous worry lines over his eyes. “What do you care, Vinnie? It’s got wheels and a seat. He’s a little kid, for Christ’s sake.”
Louis pulled on into the driveway and killed the engine. He had originally chosen the bungalow on Polk Street so he could be under the streetlights; the lack of prying eyes up in the hills outside of town—for a man who could sometimes be a target for others—was fuel for insomnia. He’d lived alone by choice, the feeling of “shared space” never really allowing the sense of stability he craved. He’d tried this a couple times in his life. Sharing his life with another person. It only ever ended with a litany of regretful words and an ego scattered in pieces at his feet. With Vinnie, it was no different.
The two of them sat there for a bit, just staring at the paneled garage door in front of them. Bits of dried grass spilled out of the gutter like unkempt hair.
“What are we doing?” Vinnie finally said. “Ain’t you taking me back to the center?”
“What center?”
“Cedar Glen. The center.”
“Vinnie. Come on, already.” Louis leaned back and rubbed his fingers into his forehead, felt the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed slowly. “You don’t live there anymore,” he said. “Remember? They put you out months ago.”
His brother pushed a breath of air through his teeth. “Yeah, I know.” And yet he stared at Louis confused, those teabag eyes pulling down like a hound. “Bastards.”
“There’s no one left in this town that wants you under their watch,” he said. “Delores Jackson—she’s done.”
“The hell she is.”
Louis said it once more. “Delores Jackson is done with you. I guess you finally got what you wanted on that front, so congratulations.”
Vinnie looked down at his hands, spreading them out over his lap as if he were examining the cause of every problem he’d ever had in his life. “I guess I don’t know what to say to that,” he said.
Finally. The man was without words.
They spent the rest of the evening avoiding one another, Vinnie keeping mostly to his room and Louis cleaning out the weed patch behind the garage and listening to the voices of a batch of kids from down the street, trying to put together in his head what was supposed to happen next. He hadn’t heard back from home support and he wouldn’t be surprised if they left him and Vinnie to fend for themselves, not that he could blame them. How much punishment did one person have to take?
He slept in fits and starts all night, at one point awakening with the feeling of a great weight pressing against his chest, as though two stony fists were forcing his body deep into the mattress. He shook his mind loose and pulled himself up on his elbows and felt his T-shirt snap from his back, soaked and warm, then quickly cooling to ice in the willful draft of the open window. He took in his breath and counted the beats in his chest and they were like the ticking of a clock, and in time everything seemed to settle back to where it should be.
He lay back down and listened to the sound of Vinnie’s snores in the next room, and gazed at the wash of the ceiling as it slowly began to fill with the breaking daylight. Now and then there was the bell-like chirrup of a thrasher somewhere outside. Like him, an early riser but a hell of a lot more optimistic about the day, he imagined.
It was just shy of ten years prior that Louis had gotten the first call about his brother, when things really started to kick up. Vinnie had been wandering through the parking lot of the South Town Plaza in Colville, looking for his car. He was nearly seventy then; Louis was just three years younger and even he forgot where he parked his car sometimes. No, what made this tough was that Vinnie was searching for his old Studebaker—a rig he hadn’t seen in almost twenty years.
It was after he’d called the operator to report it as stolen, and the local police had come to take a report, that Vinnie mentioned his kid brother being the sheriff. When Louis showed up and walked Vinnie through the situation, reminding him that he’d put the truck in a ditch back in ’52, his brother had tried to laugh it off as the stains of a whiskey hangover. But Louis could tell he was pretty stirred up—the shaking, the circle of sweat that ran from his underarms to his waist.
From then on, every few weeks or so, it was one thing or another with him. Somebody had come into his apartment and moved things around. There was gas missing from his tank. He’d forgotten to pay for the pint bottle found in his coat pocket. After a while the Colville dispatch just started running those calls directly to Louis. After he walked off with some woman’s poodle, and then took a swing at her when she came after him, Louis arranged to have him moved into the Cedar Glen home. It was a situation that held up less than six months.
It was still an hour before his alarm would sound, but Louis crawled from the bedclothes anyway and peeled off his sweat-logged T-shirt, slapping the thing onto the floor. Before he could fish a new one from his bureau drawer, before he could put together what this new day was going to resemble for him and his brother, the air was cleaved by the sharp ring of the telephone.
“Hope I didn’t wake you, Sheriff.” It was Holly, down at dispatch. Was there a time she was not at that station?
“Us and the birds,” she said.
“So I hear.” He waited. There was the sound of tapping on the other end. A pen against the desk, probably.
“So the thing is,” she said, “I just got a call from the ranger up at Twelvemile Ridge. She’s a young gal, pretty new on the job I think. I haven’t talked to her before.”
“And?”
“Said she came across a body up off Ferry Creek Road. Mitchell’s on his way up there now.”
“You called Mitch first?”
“Mitch was here when she called.”
Louis sat down on the bed and took a pen from the night-stand and listened as Holly threw out one detail after another: the rattle in the ranger’s voice, the lousy connection wherever she had called from, the way Holly had calmed the gal down by telling her she was sending the best guys in the county her way. Once Louis was satisfied that he’d written down the most important items from what she had to tell him, he thanked her and hung up the phone, and went to wake his brother.
“I might be tied up the whole day,” Louis said. “I’ll find someone to come by and check on you later.”
“I don’t need some stranger to come check on me, goddamn it,” Vinnie said, rubbing his hand over his face. “I ain’t a baby.”
“This is not negotiable, Vin.”
Vinnie rolled over onto his side and faced away from his kid brother. “I’ll give Hattie a call,” he grumbled. “She can come keep me company.”
Louis shook his head, slow and heavy. “I don’t want Hattie in this house,” he said. “Not when I’m gone.”
“I have a file downtown that suggests otherwise,” Louis said. “I don’t want her here.” Vinnie said nothing to that.
Louis knew that the woman would be there by noon.
It was a ten-mile drive over a back-crushing forest service road of ruts and tilled rock before he reached the site. The sun was already out and the dust he brought with him billowed like smoke over Mitchell’s cruiser and the ranger’s pickup, both vehicles crowded together in a flattened turnout. Mitch stood with his back to Louis about twenty yards off the roadway, stick-like arms moving back and forth, pointing out different places situated among a small grove of Ponderosas. And that sculpted hair of his was always something worth a minute or two. Brylcreem or mineral oil or whatnot, catching the overhead sun like the whole top of his head was shellacked. Louis brought his cruiser to a stop in the middle of the road and the deputy turned only briefly, giving a quick, three-fingered greeting.
The air was thick with the familiar smell of turning flesh and feces, and the curious sweetness lacing through it all. It was an assault on the senses that Louis had learned to stand, even if he had never been able to explain it. In his forty-plus years of law enforcement, he had come upon a human corpse six times and each time the scent was almost the same, no matter if the person was young or old, broad or gangly.
The ranger stood facing the deputy, her arms folded across her chest, nodding to him and glancing uneasily at Louis as he walked to them. Mitch turned to the sheriff.
“Morning, Lou,” he said. “This here is Jackie. She’s from the station down at Twelvemile.”
Louis had been by Twelvemile many times but had not met this ranger. Like Holly had figured, she was a young gal, probably not yet thirty, her hair kept in a long, red ponytail, like a teenager. Too young to be seeing things like this.
“Nice to meet you, Sheriff.” She dropped her arms and stepped toward him. Her smile was one of regret, twisted, as if they had all been dropped into an unfortunate situation that she was somehow responsible for.
Louis took her outstretched hand, then turned to Mitchell. “We can take it from here,” he said.
“Are you sure?” she asked. Now, disappointment.
“What are we looking at?” He turned back to his deputy.
“It’s an odd thing,” he said. “I’d be more interested to get your take.”
Mitchell King had been Louis’s deputy for ten years now and even though he probably knew Mitch better than anyone, there were moments when Louis didn’t want to let go of the label completely. That Mitch was part Alaskan native, and even though he never dwelled on it, Louis still found himself wishing for the kind of thing that might show up in a pulpy cowboy story or an old B movie. The listening for spirits and feeling the lick of wind in your hair and holding the sorrow of the earth in your hands as you squatted next to the bloated, ashen body of some lonely old man who had collapsed in his garden days before. The truth was, Mitch was just a guy—a solid lawman and loyal as any fellow could hope for, and there would be no cryptic chants or the waving of smoldering sage, or wise, mystical theories hummed in from the netherworlds. But damn; it would make things a hell of a lot easier if there were.
“I’ll just write up my statement and then head on out.” Jackie stepped away from the men and walked back to the rear of her pickup, using the dropped tailgate as a desk where she scratched away at a notepad. From where he stood, Louis could see a cloud of flies and the dark mound of something just behind a stand of lodgepoles.
He began to walk toward the site. “Who found it?”
“She did,” said Mitch. “Heading to the sunrise, windows down. Caught the smell. She had smelled deer before. She knew this was not deer.”
The body was fully clothed and intact so that Louis could easily see it was a male, white, though hard to tell the fellow’s age or how long he’d been there. The hair was a dirty brown, shocks of gray on the sides with a face full and round, though it was likely that some of it was because of swelling. Louis was not a forensic expert, but he’d learned plenty in his years, the complications of altitude and climate and humidity on the decomposition of flesh. Two bodies could be dropped at the same time, in the same county, and look entirely different in a month’s time.
“What did you find in the way of tracks?” Louis asked.
Mitch shook his head. “What’s there is hers, from what I can tell. Straight shot between her truck and the body.”
The men gloved up and Mitchell walked the perimeter of the site with his 35mm, the shutter snapping away as he peered down on the body from above and then beside it, squatting close to the ground, gently moving branches and brush to allow the light in.
With the exception of the chalky residue of evaporated sweat around his collar, and under his arms, almost everything about the corpse was tidy: the way the arms lay close to the sides, the shirt buttons secured. Even the trouser cuffs fell neatly over the boot laces. In all, the man could have easily been mistaken for someone who’d simply fallen asleep in the shadow of the Ponderosa and never gotten up.
It was another hour before Orly Downs arrived from Colville in his paneled wagon. Louis had been in Orly’s company a half dozen or so times over the years, always in the presence of a corpse—at the base of a staircase, over a tub of cloudy bathwater, at the side of the road at night, air thick with gasoline and whiskey. The first thing Orly always did was reach down and press the eyelids closed, and this time was no different.
Today, Orly was as old as he’d ever been, and he moved as if every minute of his life was a precious commodity not to be wasted. Talk was spare and intentional, and no physical act was without purpose. He lowered himself to his knees and rolled the body from the shoulder, gently, then laid it back down onto the dirt. He ran a bony finger along the collar and tugged it down below the knobby Adam’s apple. He reached down and drew up the forearm by the shirt cuff, then paused, as if the dead man was signaling a question.
“Look at this,” Orly said, pointing at the fellow’s fingers. There was a curious rawness to them, the knuckles chafed, as if they’d been scraped over pavement.
Louis squatted down and leaned in. “That is something,” he said, nodding to Mitch. The deputy bent down with his camera and snapped a shot. Louis reached across and took hold of the other wrist, lifting it to get a look at the hand.
“Same,” Mitch said. “Maybe a fight?”
“Could be,” Louis said. “With a brick wall.”
Beyond that, any evidence that had been present was sparse, the man’s pockets empty, nothing onsite that would indicate he died where he was found. Somewhere, Louis wondered, there might be a clearer story that existed over a cluster of sagebrush or stretch of concrete, or some cheap motel carpet or, perhaps even, the upholstery of somebody’s car. But for now, it was a man lying under a lone pine tree with no wounds other than a little scuff on his fingers.
“Pig in a poke?” Mitch said.
Louis shrugged. They would wait. Wait to see what Orly Downs had to say after he got the fellow back to Colville, to pore over the clothing and cut it from the body and wash it all down, look over every square inch of what was left. Sometimes, as Louis found, there could be surprises.
It was almost one when Louis turned onto his street, only to see Hattie Walton’s brown Fairmont with the mashed rear fender parked comfortably against the curb of his house. The front picture window drapes were drawn.
He pulled to a stop behind the wreck of a car and tapped his horn twice before getting out and shutting the door behind him. The boy on the pink bike rounded the corner and pedaled his way toward Louis, and as he got closer, Louis thought of the fireworks kid with the stubbed pointer. They were about the same age, he figured.
“Hey.” The kid had waved at Louis before but had never said anything to him.
“Hello to you. What’s your name?” The rich smell of cedar and iron-rich dirt hung in the air, and everything seemed so dry and parched, he could not recall when he had set out the sprinkler last. It was a miracle he had a single blade of grass still alive.
“Luis,” the boy said.
“You don’t say.” He looked down at the basket, at the collection of little toy cars and trucks piled inside. “Your sister lets you use her bike to carry your cars around?”
The boy squinted up at him. “I don’t got a sister,” he said. “This is my bike.”
Louis nodded. “Fair enough.” And then the boy said, “I gotta go now,” and Louis gave a little salute to him as he rode off, those crazy tassels swinging back and forth as he pedaled away.
And then he finally walked up the front pathway and took hold of the porch rail, making his way slowly up the steps, planting his feet heavy on the boards before opening the door and stepping inside.