We were almost out of Dugan’s Dump, some fifty yards from the tree line that marked the edges of Floyd’s Bend when my guide took another fall.
“Shit!” she propped herself up, wiping her muddied palms against one another. “Goddamit,” she scowled back at the stone or wind-blown tree limb that had tripped her.
It was a limb, all right; a human limb. Like a deformed sapling, a very wet, very stiff, very dead man’s hand thrust itself up through the moist soil at the outskirts of Dugan’s Dump. Even in the dark night we could make out the form of the sapling’s hastily buried roots. I couldn’t help thinking of the dead apple tree in Kate Barnum’s yard.
The reporter’s momentum had snapped the hairy, white hand back at the wrist. It hung palm up now, fingers clamped as if to grasp. But all it held were some crumbs of mud and some cool air. One of the dead sapling’s branches wore a gold and onyx pinky ring. Already I didn’t like him.
“The shooter,” Barnum and I spoke simultaneously.
“Yeah, I bet there’s a gun buried around here too.”
She shook her head in agreement: “And I bet you it matches the one that killed your mink-coated lady friend with the mouth full of feathers.”
“Let’s get to a phone,” I started back to the landlocked Dragon Queen.
“No!” she nearly tackled me. ‘We can’t call this in.”
“Maybe we can’t,” I shrugged off her considerable grip, “but I sure as hell can.”
“Wait, goddamit. Just hear me out.”
I kept walking. She ran past me. Stopped. Grabbed my coat collar, tangled her arms with mine and spun her buttocks into my lower groin. I was up over her back, then in the air, then on my back in the mud. I didn’t slap the ground in time to break my fall and my sore, deflated lungs punished me for that sin.
“Are you okay?” my judo instructor, kneeling over me, was keen to know.
“Fuck you,” I wheezed out without much force, but lots of conviction.
“I had to get you to listen before you did anything we both might regret.” She propped me up.
“Look lady,” I was almost breathing now, “I don’t exactly know what your game is, but I’m not as dumb as I must seem.” I tried to stand and quickly stopped trying. “You wanted me to find that stiff.” I pointed at the petrified hand. “You knew right where it was.”
“I did,” Barnum admitted matter-of-factly. “I found it yesterday, Christmas Day.”
“And you didn’t call the cops?”
“Hey, if they were too lazy to look, why should I help’em?” she answered unconvincingly. “The cops should have been all over this place like stink on shit.”
“Nice turn of a phrase,” I got up and stayed up. “But the law’s laissez-faire attitude doesn’t explain away your curious, not to mention, illegal behavior.”
“Look at me, Klein,” she screamed, pulling my face to hers. “Take a close look. I’m a forty-one-year-old alcoholic. I’ve got no kids. I’ve got two broken marriages and a broken career to my credit. I don’t know if I can stop drinking. I’m not getting any younger, so kids are out. Which is bully for them. One of my marriages turned out to be six months of mutual disdain and the other ended in suicide. The only thing I’ve got that’s fixable, that’s worth fixing, that I need to fix, is my career,” Kate Barnum was crying mascara-black tears.
“Yeah, and so. .” I dropped off, not understanding the connection between her misfortune and failure to alert the local constabulary.
“God, Klein,” she wiped her ebony tear tracks, smearing them and adding forgotten mud. “Maybe you are that dumb. If I called in the law, I’d be out. You can’t write the story and be part of it. Even little town newspapers have their ethical standards.” Those last two words stuck in her throat like an open tube of Krazy Glue. “Exiled out here, I’m not going to get too many stories that can help salvage my career. I’ve got to have this story.”
“All right, I’ve been in tight spots. I’ll call it in and keep your name out of it.”
“Do you think I went through all the machinations of getting you out here just so you could do something I could’ve done anonymously twenty-four hours ago?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “No sir. I’ve got a connection at Newsday who’s willing to take a chance on me if I can deliver a special story all wrapped up like a Christmas present. This is the story. You’re going to solve it. I’m going to write it. And then I am going back to the top.”
“Lady, I’m not solving anything and the only place you’re goin’ is to Pilgrim State Psychiatric. Maybe I buy your hearts and flowers about how your life’s been a big bag of shit lately, but don’t try to bury me in it. Like I said, I’ll keep your name out of it.” I was walking again. She did not follow.
“Johnny MacClough,” she whispered at my back.
My spine went suddenly cold. The cold slowed me down, made me hesitate. She was bluffing again, grasping at straws. But was she? I stopped.
“Yeah,” I turned around, “what about him?”
“Johnny MacClough,” louder this time, “Johnny MacClough,” louder, “Johnny MacClough,” louder still. She cackled like a B-movie witch pleased by the results of her incantations.
“Look,” I grabbed her shoulders and shook, “this ain’t Shakespeare, baby. This is murder. So fuck you and fuck your precious career.” I collected her colorless hair in my left hand and yanked her head back. “Stop trying to throw parties for people who aren’t interested in coming. Leave Johnny out of this.”
“Too late,” Barnum smiled up at me, shaking her hair out of my loosened grip. “He’s already in it. He’s in deeper than Mr. Pinky Ring.”
“How?”
“No, Klein,” she stepped back, rubbing her shoulders. “I don’t think so.”
“Ah,” I shook my spinning head at her, “you’re bluffing!”
“Am I? Then go call the law,” she flapped her hands at me as if shooing off an annoying fly. “Go call the cops. He’s your friend, baby,” she mocked me, “not mine.”
I left her, but the chill followed. She had my attention and she knew it. I wasn’t about to call the cops until I did some checking of my own. She was right. Johnny was my friend, maybe the best I ever had. I told myself he had no part in this, that she was throwing his name out in desperation. But the knot in my guts called me a liar. Johnny was involved. I knew it. No, I felt it.
When I was almost back to the paved road, Kate Barnum called after me: “You know my number, Klein.” I kept walking. “Don’t forget how to dial it.”
The hike back to my car took a few minutes less than forever. My knees were sore and my head pounded in rhythm with my heart. My stomach was full of nothing. I needed to sit. I did, on the front fender of my old VW. That, like most other things I’d ever done, was a mistake. My added two hundred pounds forced the ancient bug’s tires deep into the driveway’s mud. Now, I thought, there were at least two things other than scavenged ships buried in the soil of Dugan’s Dump.
Desperate Seed
I needed a drink; a particular drink from a certain bartender.
The Rusty Scupper was busy for Christmas week. Beside the usual crowd, two incongruous Japanese men in pin strikes were furiously waving Scotch-full tumblers at selections on the jukebox and exclaiming over loudly at one another. You didn’t have to be an expert in languages of the Pacific rim to divine that one wanted to hear Little Richard and the other, Elvis. Until they resolved their dispute, we’d all hear nothing but them.
Stan Long, the gas station owner, gave me a vaguely drunken nod and went back to cleaning the grease that would never come out from under his nails. No one else turned cartwheels for me. No one ever did. I was hoping to get to the bar without MacClough’s recognition. Life would be more simple without hope. Before I’d taken my third step, Johnny was busy tapping a Black and Tan. My drink. A drink I never needed to order here.