Big Moon
Mid-afternoon, mid-week, Indian Summer. Business was slow in the Adirondack Taproom, most of the boats having long since been hauled out of Big Moon Lake and safely docked in backyards and driveways well down the Northway. At the middle of the bar—a long, varnished slab of wood, the bark still affixed to the front edge—a cluster of regulars, year-rounders, sat chatting and drinking. Claude Giroux sat at the far end, apart from the others. Between snatches of conversation, the buzz of an aimless bee could be heard bumbling overhead among the rafters of the high board ceiling.
Hazel had just poured Claude a fresh beer when the stranger walked in.
He sat at the end of the bar nearest the door, away from the others, and he smiled when Hazel came to take his order. He was handsome. Dimples in his cheeks, a head that was proudly bald, a golden globe. If anything gave her pause at all, it might be his safari jacket. There were precious few safaris here in the heart of the Adirondacks.
“What’s your pleasure?” Hazel said. Not her standard opener.
He took off his aviator shades, his blue eyes doing a little dance. “Cuba Libre. Bacardi.” Though it was none too bright inside the bar, he slipped his shades back on, the better to watch her walk away. Just as she suspected: a gentleman.
The Bacardi was at Claude’s end of the bar. Watching her mix the drink, he scratched the stubble on his chin. The frayed bill of his cap—a bear pawprint logo on the front—kept his bulbous eyes in shadow, his thick gray mustache drooping ragged toward the bar. “Haze,” he grumbled, “what’s that he’s drinking?”
“What, are you writing a book?”
“You can tell a lot about a man by what he drinks.”
“It’s called a Cuba Libre.”
He watched, consternation on his withered old face. “Looks to me like a damned old rum and coke,” he said.
“That’s what it is, Claude, a damned old rum and coke.”
“Tell you what, Haze,” he said. “Any man shaves his head like that and calls a rum and coke a Cuba-lubra has got to be a solid, gold-plated asshole.”
“Let me look into it,” she said, winking. “I’ll get back to you.”
Shaking his head, Claude watched her walk back down toward the stranger.
“Here you go,” she said. “Waiting for someone?”
“Nope,” he said. “All alone am I.”
“I get off around eight.”
The dimples in his cheeks came out of hiding. They were invisible until he smiled or smirked, though it wasn’t easy to tell which was which, a smile or a smirk. “All righty,” he said. “Look for me around eight.”
“Silly boy. My shift is over at seven.”
“You said… Ah,” he said, the lightbulb clicking on. “Please forgive my obtusity.”
“No problem,” she said. “But I don’t know about using a pretentious fucking word like ‘obtusity.’ I’m not sure I can forgive that.”
She was two years old when her grandfather’s two Rottweilers escaped their pen as she and her grandmother were picnicking by the edge of the woods. The dogs set upon the little girl, nearly mauling her to death before the screams attracted her grandfather, and they managed to pull them off. A sizable chunk of Hazel Morley’s left ear ended up in the belly of one of the beasts, and to this day she always tied her hair back, often with a blue bandana with white polka dots, to show off her souvenir of the skirmish. A conversation piece. A war wound. Proof she was no one to fuck with.
Though the rest of her face was spared, there were other scars, her right side, her left arm, both her thighs and her gorgeous bottom, but she’d overcome those as well, blossoming into a beautiful woman: midnight black hair with streaks of moonlight, creamy complexion, rose-colored cheeks. And her figure: tall, classic, statuesque, glorious. The scars she viewed as her own unique body art, her tattoos, etched instead of inked, tasteful and artistic, if abstract.
The cost was high: her parents’ marriage. Even though she was too young to remember the attack, it seemed to her as though she could. She realized her mind had fashioned a false memory out of her imagination, and articles she’d read, what she’d seen and heard of similar attacks, and out of descriptions friends and relatives let slip—particularly her mother and father, heedless of little ears and careless about their choice of words in the heat of their bitter quarrels. Just how could his father have been so careless as to let the dogs escape? Why was he keeping those beasts in the first place? It was indefensible. Did he see the blood? Did he look at the blood on those snarling muzzles? On his mother’s apron, on her face? The puddles of blood on the ferns?
On their little girl? Did he see their little girl torn to pieces?
Sooner or later they asked about her ear. Almost all of them did. She dismissed the few who didn’t—it betrayed a fatal lack of curiosity. This one asked, as she knew he would.
“I caught it in the blender,” she said. “I was making a Bloody Mary.” Sometimes it had been caught in the pickle-slicer, sometimes shot off at Pork Chop Hill, sometimes lost in a knife fight in the Bowery. For a while, Mike Tyson had bitten it off.
When eventually she told him the real story, he said, “You’re one lucky lady.”
“I suppose. They did do their best to devour me.”
“I meant for all the money you save in earrings alone.”
She smiled. Brushed an imaginary speck from his bald pate. “Probably no more than you save in shampoo.”
His room in the Big Moon Lodge was in the second floor rear, the side overlooking the parking lot, the inexpensive side. Not that he was too cheap for a lake-view suite, he assured her, just that he preferred the peace and quiet of having no neighbors; this time of the year there were none. He had work to do. On the small table in the corner of the room sat his laptop, a stack of books, notepads and a folder full of newspaper and magazine clippings. The drapes were open wide. The sky was deep blue in the twilight, a fingernail moon emerging in the upper left corner of the window.
“How about this one?” He traced a finger on the scar on her thigh. “The dogs?”
Sometimes she told them it was from when she’d fought off a shark while surfing in Oahu, but she’d dropped that line—the scar too closely resembled a real shark bite.
Pushing his hand away, she raised herself to her elbow to look him in the face. “What, are you writing a book?” she said.
“Actually, yes.” The dimples in his cheeks jumped out of hiding. “I am writing a book. That’s why I’m here. I’m researching it.”
“Well, skip that chapter.”
“It’s not a book about beautiful female bartenders and their battle scars. Although it is about an Adirondack legend. I write books about Adirondack legends, so maybe I should write one about you.”
“This is your idea of pillow talk, is it?”
“Yeah. Sort of. I guess.”
“Isn’t pillow talk usually reserved for after you’re finished fucking?”
He lifted his pale eyebrows.
“I’m not finished yet,” she said.
Sometimes she wondered where it all came from. Sometimes she suspected she’d received an infusion of testosterone at the time of the mauling, directly from the Rottweilers’ slobber into her bloodstream. Not that she was complaining, mind you. It was one of the ways she’d won.
When she left two hours later, he was too wilted to see her to the door. She paused and turned. “What was your name again?”
“What,” he said, flat on his back, “are you writing a book?”
“No. But I might want to read one.”
“Kutz,” he said. “Howard Kutz.”
“Never heard of you,” she said.
Hazel was taking the chairs down from the tables, the barstools from the bar, when Claude showed up next morning. Many mornings he was there, waiting in his mud-splattered pickup when she arrived to ready the place for opening. When she’d started the job in the spring he might have shown up early once a week, but by now, late September, it was nearly every day. She let him smoke at the bar with his coffee and Old Crow until the first customer showed up, then she’d spirit away the saucer he’d been using as an ashtray, wave away the smoke.
She was fond of the old guy. He was lonely. Memories were all he had left. Reminiscences. One of his favorites—he’d told her about it more than once—was the day Jimmy Stewart had come into the taproom, just him and his wife, no entourage, just like a regular guy. Claude had made him laugh with some quip—he was oh so proud of having made Jimmy Stewart laugh. He’d told Hazel what the quip was, but she couldn’t recall it. It hadn’t seemed all that funny.
Claude walked behind the bar and started the coffee. “Well, Haze,” he said after he’d poured a cup and perched on his barstool down at the end. “What’s the verdict? Was he or wasn’t he?”
“Was or wasn’t who what?”
“That city boy. Was he a gold-plated asshole? My money says he was.”
“What do you have against city boys, Claude? Don’t be a hick. Or a dick.”
“Most of ’em’s dumber’n a bag of pinecones. Hell, back when I was in the guide business I couldn’t find one out of a hundred with a nickel’s worth of common sense. I remember this one guy seen a bear cub up through the woods and wanted to go take a damn selfie with it. Said his grandkids’d get a kick out seeing him with a real live teddy bear.”
“They’re called ‘tourists,’ Claude. Without ’em I wouldn’t have a job and you wouldn’t have a place to come in out of the rain.”
“It ain’t raining, Haze.”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“Whatever it is. So was he or wasn’t he?”
“He was all right. He’s got some good points. He’s got some bad points.”
“Hell, I seen his bad points. He’s an asshole. What’s his good ones?”
“He’s not bad in the sack, for one.” She paused over the stool she’d just put down, tucked a loose strand of hair back beneath the blue bandana and studied Claude for a moment, wondering if his feelings had been hurt. Under the shadow of the bearpaw on his cap his eyelids fluttered over his bulging eyes as if in the face of a strong breeze. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but she wouldn’t lie to him either. He couldn’t be jealous. He was big boy enough to know they were just friends. Big boy enough to know that sex between the two of them was as likely as sex between a horse and a trout.
“For another one, he might be interesting,” she said. “He’s not your usual tourist, Claude. He’s up here working. He’s a writer. Doing research for a book.”
“Is that a fact?” Claude said.
He’d published two books, Adirondack books, The Man Who Owned the Mountains; a Biography of Paul Smith, and Sasquatch and Me. He was a reporter with the Albany Times Union. He’d taken a leave of absence to work on his next book, in which he intended to unravel the real story behind the legend of the mysterious T. Price and his illicit lost fortune. After Kutz had told her about himself and his books, she’d Googled him when she’d gotten home to see how big a liar he might be.
She was from Clarington, a small village in western Pennsylvania. It was where she was born, where she was nearly eaten by dogs and where she remembered the hot smell of roasting peanuts, the smeared front window of the storefront where they waited for the bus, her mother sitting on the overstuffed suitcase, cigarette butts on the sidewalk. The smell of bus fumes. The bus took them to Dayton, Ohio, where they lived with her Grandma Howe, her mother’s mother, a rosy-cheeked woman who loved snuff and soap operas and who doted on her granddaughter, raising her when her mother quit waitressing and went back to nursing school. Hazel left Dayton for the University of Akron, where she met and married a jock in a torrent of hormones that dried up just as quickly. She left him to his gym and his balls and mirrors in Paramus, New Jersey, where he’d gone to pursue his career as a bouncer with a Bachelor’s Degree, and she moved on, mastering the art of bartending, living for a while in Baltimore before deciding to give the Adirondacks a shot.
Sasquatch, Big Foot, she’d heard of, maybe Paul Smith too. T. Price, not so much.
The Gospel according to Google: Albany, New York, October 14, 1970 (UPI) – No trace has been found today of T. Price, the Irish Republican Army member who skyjacked a British Airways 727 Tuesday and bailed out yesterday into a black sky over the Adirondack Mountains with half a million dollars cash ransom. New York State Police officials said the jump site could not be narrowed down to less than a 200-square-mile corridor of rugged, wooded, sparsely populated terrain. Price, or the ransom, was never found. Theories abounded. Sightings were as frequent, and as unconfirmed, as those of Sasquatch himself.
The Village of Big Moon was in the heart of the 200-square-mile corridor.
“That’s a fact, Jack,” Hazel said. “He’s researching some guy, T. Price, hijacked an airplane and jumped out somewhere over the Adirondacks. You ever hear about that?”
Claude peered at her suspiciously from under his bearpaw, as if she were trying to pull a fast one on him. “Ancient history. That was what, fifty years ago? I just barely remember hearing about it, bailed out or something, something about a ransom. That was a long time ago. Nobody else is gonna remember nothing, either. So what’s that fool looking to find?”
He was looking to find something. That was the thing. Hazel was not naïve enough to think that Howard Kutz was necessarily looking to find something as noble as the truth. She suspected he was hoping to find fame, glory, riches, self-aggrandizement. But looking to find something was more than Claude was doing with his life (what was left of it), more than Eddie Gilday or Jack Palmateer, or any of the other regulars she’d gotten to know in her six months at the Adirondack Taproom, all content living day to day, beer to beer, were doing with theirs.
More than she was doing with hers, for that matter. Of course, she was merely on hiatus. That’s what she told herself. A gap year. Or two. Clearing her mind for the next phase. She would find something soon enough. She was toying with the idea of going to culinary school and becoming a baker—her chocolate chip cookies were famous, and she’d always dreamed of having her own bakery, of creating deliciousness every day. Or maybe picking up her Master’s in education, molding little minds. Especially little girls’ minds which, in her estimation, were in need of much firmer molding.
Might the something she would find include a man? Maybe. Maybe not. She wasn’t concerned. She was content to graze. The more she thought about it, the more intriguing she found this Howard Kutz and his mysteries to be.
“Come into my parlor,” he said, opening his door, stepping aside, dimples springing forth on his cheeks. She stared directly into his dancing blue eyes—she was as tall as him, just under six feet.
She lifted the heavy bag in her hand like the head of John the Baptist. “I bring Gatorade,” she said. “To keep your fluids replenished.”
Afterwards, they took their pillow-talk up the mountain. In his Cherokee he drove her halfway around the lake, turning onto a narrow blacktop road by a little abandoned country church, then onto a set of tracks over hard-packed dirt and rocks, up, always up, until he came to a wide spot where the trail dead-ended at an overlook.
The setting sun cast long shadows across the vista of blazing trees—the foliage was nearing peak—golds, browns, russets and yellows, and the brilliant greens of trees that hadn’t yet started to change.
She clutched the door handle, nearly vertiginous. “How did you find this place?”
“Research. Simple.”
His smugness was annoying her a little less, or maybe it was mitigated by the breath-taking view, by her satisfied body, by a growing fondness for the man. “Research,” she said. “You are meticulous, I’ll give you that.”
“That’s all investigative reporting is. Meticulousness. Drudgery.” The mountains ringing the horizon were a deep blue. He pointed at a peak toward the north. “See that?” he said. “That’s Bald Eagle Mountain.” He pointed south. “That one’s Indian Peak.” Then he swept his arm between the two. “This is the exact route British Airways Flight 862 was traveling. Somewhere along that line, somewhere between Bald Eagle Mountain and Albany, T. Price bailed out with a knapsack full of cash.”
The mountainside forests below her stretched endlessly toward the horizon. “A needle in a fucking haystack.”
“A fucking haystack? Is that all you ever think about?”
“No,” she said, folding her hands primly in her lap. “There’s oral. There’s anal. There’s masturbation too.”
“Always good to broaden your horizons.”
She took a deep breath, scanning the view. “Speaking of broad horizons.”
They watched a hawk swooped down through the valley.
“What can you possibly hope to find?” she said. “After fifty years. How can you even begin to narrow it down?”
“Radar,” he said.
He waited for her to ask, pleased with himself. For a moment Hazel said nothing. The vastness of the view was making her feel small and helpless. She said, “And you probably have a very glib explanation to go along with that.”
“Sure do,” he said, irrepressible dimples undaunted, “Allow me to share my modus operandi.” First step, he said, was to pinpoint every village and town along the target corridor of Flight 862, and visit each in turn, the village of Big Moon being the latest. He first visited the newspaper offices and libraries in each—if they had newspapers and libraries, which was not always the case—the town halls and law enforcement offices, to conduct traditional research. But the best research was done in the barrooms and general stores and farm markets and hunting lodges, anywhere a congregation of elderly locals might be found, front porches and parlors included. Word of mouth, unguarded memories, long-forgotten recollections, these were his best and richest source material. It was there he could pick up tidbits, clues, that could not be found in second-hand material, stories and books and articles about the hijacking that had already been published. Somebody somewhere knew something was his working theory. Based on frequency and freshness and immediacy of individual memories revealed through chance remarks and carefully charted, he was narrowing down the target zone. This was his radar system.
Take the crow with the fifty-dollar bill, for example, an item unmentioned in any published source. He’d gleaned four independent mentions of it—three, actually, as one old man recalled it to be a squirrel, not a crow, having been spotted with a moldy old fifty.
Giving new meaning, Kutz added, to the term nest egg.
“I’m going to need your help approaching the old-timers at your place,” he said. “There’s lots of potential around here, around Big Moon.”
“You’re right about that, about needing my help. They don’t like you very much.”
“Yokels seldom do. Not until I turn on the charm.” He turned on the charm, displaying his dimples again. A shake of her head, a roll of her eyes. The sun had dipped below the horizon leaving a fiery streak in the west; specks of stars were beginning to emerge in the deep purple of the eastern sky.
“I’ve been here six months, and I haven’t heard a word about it.”
“You wouldn’t. It was fifty years ago. You wouldn’t hear anything unless you started poking around.”
“I suppose. I wonder if Claude remembers anything about it. He’s been around longest, I think. Claude, you know which one I mean? My buddy, the one that sits by himself down at the end of the bar? It’s kind of odd, actually. How he sits down there, by himself, away from the others. From what I gather, they’ve all been hanging out at the taproom for years.”
“Does he use deodorant?”
She ignored the quip. “Maybe it has something to do with his wife. She just died, in the spring, not long before I got here. Nobody seems to have liked her much. Rose.”
She’d been younger than him, a skeletal, stringy-haired creature according to most accounts, who’d clung to Claude like a drunk to a lamppost. She seldom smiled. She’d been fond, very fond it seemed, of her namesake whiskey, Four Roses. Hazel had found it difficult to detect much affection for Claude’s lost wife—nor, come to think of it, for Claude himself. More than once, one of the regulars—Eddie Gilday a couple of times, Jack Palmateer once or twice, even the owner, Fat Willie Weaver—had taken her aside when Claude wasn’t around, and told her it wasn’t her job to babysit him. Claude was big enough to take care of himself.
Howard said, “How’d she die?”
“Some kind of a freak accident. She was younger than him, but I get the impression she was a little whacko. A bubble or two off plumb, as they say up here.”
“What kind of a freak accident?”
“From what I understand, she was trying to repair the roof of their chicken coop—Claude’s too old to get up there anymore. They think she was tying a rope around herself in case she slipped, when she slipped. The rope wasn’t in place yet—it got caught around her neck. Claude came home to find her dangling from the chicken coop roof.”
When Kutz didn’t respond, Hazel looked and, seeing the red strain on his face, thought for a moment he was going to cry. She thought so right up until he let loose a howl of laughter.
“It’s not funny,” she managed, but a snot bubble gave her away. “It’s not funny at all.”
“Natural selection!” he howled, and they clutched at each other, overcome by shameful, heady peals of glee.
*
Hazel sighed next morning when Claude came in. Seeing the kindly, grumpy, whiskered old face, she almost felt ashamed of the mindless mirth at the expense of his poor dead Rose. Kutz’s fault, of course. A bad influence. If he wasn’t such a good fuck, she’d have nothing more to do with him.
The chairs were down, and she was pouring a bucket of ice into the bin. Claude hoisted himself onto his stool in the corner and lit a cigarette. Hazel brought his cup of coffee in one hand, the bottle of Old Crow in the other, poured him a splashing big dollop. He licked his lip under his raggedy gray mustache. “How you making out with that city boy?” he said.
How? She couldn’t imagine troubling Claude with the how of it, as some of the contortions and acrobatics involved might trouble or tax an elderly, rural mind. She said, “He sends his regards, Claude. Matter of fact, he wants to talk to you about that research he’s doing, that hijacking. He wants to talk to you and the others, the old-timers.”
Claude shook his head, tapped the ash off his cigarette, grunted. “Told you, I don’t remember nothing about it.”
“So tell him that.”
“I told you nobody else is gonna remember nothing either.”
“So let them tell him that.”
The gray stubble on his chin bristled. “City slickers. That fella when I was a guide wanted to pick that bear cub up—I should of let him. Serve him right, got no more sense than that. That mama bear would of taught him some real fast.”
“Claude, don’t be a dick.”
He looked at her, a frown on his withered old face. “Always poking their noses in where they don’t belong. This one looked like a pain from day one. Most city boys you just ignore ’em and they go away, but not this one here. No sir. You could tell he was too slick by half the minute he walked in the door. They must of had a picture of him in mind when they came up with the word city-slicker. All smooth and polished to a shine. Looks like he ain’t got a hair on his ass.”
“He’s got a hair on his ass, Claude.”
He laid a parched hand on Hazel’s and gave it a squeeze. “Be careful, Haze,” he said. “I sure hope you ain’t falling for that phony.”
Hazel smiled, tucked a strand of hair back into her bandana over her mutilated ear. “Claude, you’re the only man for me.”
“Maybe a hundred years ago,” he said, though it did puff him up a bit.
Eddie Gilday and his wife came in for lunch. He eased himself down onto a stool near the middle of the bar, while Paula hopped up onto hers. He was a tall man, narrow-shouldered, pot-bellied, a bowling pin in suspenders and blue jeans, his wife tiny and scowling. There were a couple of couples down the bar, a man by himself, a couple of families at tables, not regulars, not tourists, folks just passing through. Claude, having finished the word search and jumble, had left just a few minutes before. It was not the first time such timing had occurred, but the first time Hazel thought about it, wondering if it was only coincidence.
She pulled two drafts without asking. Eddie smiled his smile with the thinly veiled leer. Hazel didn’t mind. Boys will be boys. Sure, he was a pig, but a decent-tipping, harmless-enough pig. Paula stared evenly at Hazel, on the verge of either warm sympathy or open hostility, Hazel wasn’t sure which.
“Menus?” she said.
“What’s good today?” said Eddie.
“Claude was just in,” she said. “He had the chowder, seemed to like it.”
Eddie glanced at his wife. “Let’s have a look at the menu,” he said.
Hazel noticed in the mirror behind the bar Eddie savoring a good long look at her backside as she walked away to fetch the menus, saw too Paula glaring up at him. When she handed them the menus she said, “You remember that guy that’s been in here, the guy I’ve been talking to? Usually sits up there by the door?”
“Yeah, sure,” Eddie said. “The slick one. The big-game hunter.”
“The cute one,” Paula said with a little tight smile.
“A little bit, yeah, a little bit cute.” She returned Paula’s tight smile, a fleeting comradery, transitory sisters-in-arms. “Anyhow, he wants to talk to you. He’s doing some research for this book he’s writing, and he wants to interview people who’ve been around here a long time.”
“About that hijacking,” Eddie said.
Hazel was surprised. She shouldn’t have been. Small town. “Yeah, that hijacking.”
“We’ll be happy to talk to him, won’t we, honey?” Eddie said.
“You bet. I can’t hardly wait.”
“I just love it,” Eddie said, a gleeful grin to prove it. “These jokers come up from the city, sit down and talk to somebody for ten minutes, think they know it all then. Write it up, put it in the paper, and suddenly they’re an expert on the Adirondacks. Know everything there is to know about it and then some. Bring him on. Let him do his damnedest.”
“He loves you too, Eddie,” Hazel said.
“Smart-ass, know-it-all city-slickers,” said Eddie.
*
She was alone in Kutz’s bed in the Big Moon Lodge, waiting. His laptop was there. His books and clippings, scattered across the table and bureau and chair. His suspicions. His notepad wasn’t there, he’d brought it with him to the taproom—a role reversal, her at the lodge, him at the bar—doing his research, conducting his interviews. A couple of the locals he planned to visit at their homes. The television was on, PBS, a documentary about sea turtles to which she paid not the slightest attention. All she could think about, here, now, was Kutz and his quest. Gradually, the foundation began to shift.
All her life, with her maimed ear and her scars, Hazel had been the object of stares, the object of curiosity. The outsider. Sometimes she couldn’t shake a niggling feeling that everyone else was in on it. They all knew what had happened, knew perfectly well why the dogs had attacked her, why she’d been the victim of a conspiracy in which they were all complicit, all in the know—all except her. Her grandfather had shot the dogs, taken them out into the woods behind the farmhouse and dispatched them with his deer rifle the same afternoon, saving the law the trouble. Or so she’d been told. She’d had to take their word for it. Her grandfather never mentioned it, never talked about the attack, about killing the dogs, never said much at all. She remembered him only vaguely, an old sagging face full of spots and wrinkles and whiskers, a face—she only now made the connection—not unlike Claude Giroux’s.
Reluctant to look in her eyes. Hiding something from her. What Claude had said: I barely remember hearing about it, something about a ransom, his eyes ducking for cover. Curious. How the words had rolled out of his mouth. …nobody else is gonna remember nothing, either. How could he be so sure? How could he know?
It was after eleven when she heard Kutz’s card in the door, saw him come in high and hot, flushed, sweating and feverish—whether from discovery, revelation, lust or a mystical combination she couldn’t tell. The thrill of being on the scent of something big unleashed the animal in him. She caught it. Suspicions were shelved, shunted aside. Hardly a word was spoken before they were fucking, hard, long and with purpose.
Afterwards. Heartbeats simmering down on dampened sheets. A little while later, on the verge of sleep, he said, “There’s something happening here.”
“Yeah,” she murmured. “What it is ain’t exactly clear.”
He ignored the lyric. It hadn’t been his idea. “Every damn one of these hayseeds says the same thing. Can’t remember a thing. Just what I read in the papers. Awful long time ago. Never heard nothing. If anything happened around here, I’d have known about it. It’s too universal. Sounds like a Greek chorus. Almost like the lines have been rehearsed.”
“Yeah. I’ve been getting a little of that too.”
“And this one: Nobody else around here knows nothing, either. That’s the one that gets me the most.”
They were quiet, drifting off. A little while later he murmured, “A confederacy of yokels. They’re hiding something. It’s a fucking conspiracy.”
A few seconds later, she mustered up energy enough for a quiet response. “A fucking conspiracy? Is that all you ever think about?”
Too little, too late. She heard a smug little snore.
Normally she didn’t sleep till she was home. Or, if they were at her place, till after she’d kicked him out. Normally she wasn’t much for cuddling. When she woke up early—around five, judging by the pink smear low in the sky beyond the window—he was holding her, his breath warm on her shoulder. She wriggled closer. It was not how she normally awoke, but it touched a vein, something familiar, far-off and long-buried yet familiar, a distant memory from childhood. Being cared for, surrendering to it, allowing it. Nestling in it.
His phone buzzed on the stand by the bed.
“Don’t answer it,” she whispered.
“Might be my wife,” he said hoarsely.
A loon called out on the lake. He picked up the phone. “I thought you might call,” he said. She heard him say more, but nothing of substance, some yeahs and okays, and one final I’ll see you there.
He rolled back, reaching for her, but she was sitting on the edge of the bed, out of reach. She looked over her shoulder at him, the shadows of the room dark behind him. “You’re married?”
“Yeah. Why? Is that a big deal?”
“Not at all.” It wasn’t. Marital status was not her concern. Big boys and girls did not need her help to define their marriages. His head sank back to the pillow. “Where’s your ring?”
“I never wear it when I’m in the field doing research.”
“Why not?”
“Why do you think? You’re a bright girl.”
“It’s hard to get laid with a ring on?”
“Bingo.”
“But easy to get laid with a hard on,” she added. He didn’t answer. That was better. Now, all was right with the world. Things were as they were supposed to be. He watched her dressing without a word.
“Who called?” she said.
“One of our local hicks. He’s got something he wants to show me. Something I’ll want to see, he says.”
He waited for her to ask. He wasn’t going to volunteer it. He was going to make her ask. Fuck him and the smug horse he rode in on. She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction.
“I knew he’d call,” he said. “I knew someone would. After what I told them, they couldn’t just ignore it. I might have stretched the truth a bit, but, hey, it worked. This is what I’ve been waiting for.”
Now she’d have to ask. How could she not?
“Well, have fun,” she said. “Good luck.”
As she opened the door he said, “Will I see you tonight? I can fill you in then—no pun intended,” and there it was, a trace of desperation, something quite the opposite of smug.
A smug little smile of her own. My work here is done, she thought.
Claude didn’t come in for his coffee and Old Crow the next morning. Nor for lunch. Nor did Eddie Gilday, or Tom Palmateer, any of the regulars. By happy hour, it was unusual. Someone, a pair, a few, a dozen, always came in for happy hour. Hazel began to wonder.
Kutz didn’t stop in either, nor did he call. He didn’t answer her calls, but that wasn’t unusual, reception being so spotty in the great north woods.
After work she went to his room again, letting herself in with his spare card. She hated to give him the satisfaction, but curiosity won the day. She figured he’d suffered long enough.
He wasn’t there.
The room was clean, the bed made up. The table bare. His clippings, his notes, his laptop, were gone. In the bathroom, his toiletries were lined up like little soldiers beneath the mirror. He hadn’t checked out. Must have taken his work with him in his backpack to see what it was, what big thing his anonymous hayseed was so certain he’d want to see.
She turned on the television and waited, niggling worries beginning. Around eleven she wondered if he’d gone back to the bar. More interviews.
The parking lot was empty. Odd. She pulled in, got out. The Adirondack Taproom was dark. She wasn’t sure what to make of it. It wasn’t like Matilda to close up this early. Across the road, beyond the service station, through the trees, the waters of the lake breathed restlessly in the light of a quarter moon.
Driving down Main Street toward home, she saw a familiar figure lurching past the general store. She pulled up. “Claude,” she called, “Claude! Need a lift?”
It took him a moment before he realized someone was calling. He looked this way and that. He bent two or three times, nearly toppling, and finally spotted her sitting there. Wobbling unsteadily to the car, he grasped the door to steady himself, leaning down gingerly.
“Haze?” he said. “Haze—z’at you?”
“Who else would be driving my car, Claude?”
“Haze,” he said. “Haze. Listen up.” Mysterious things seemed to be clinging to the scraggly whiskers of his chin. His eyes—barely visible beneath the bill of his hat—blinked, unfocused, as if he’d forgotten what he wanted to say. “Haze,” he said, at last. “Don’t say nothing. Keep your mouth shut.”
“Claude, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Just don’t say nothing.”
“Nothing about what? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t say nothing ’bout nothing.”
“You know you’re not making any sense? How drunk are you?”
“Drunk enough to know better. Drunk enough to keep my mouth shut. Look at Rose, Rosie. Rose, she couldn’t keep her mouth shut if you paid her to. And look what happened. Look what happened to her.” With that, he hiccupped loudly, wobbled once, wambled off.
“Claude, what the hell are you talking about? Claude?”
The specter of a drunken Claude Giroux staggered roughshod through her head, keeping her awake most of the night, and when she finally did sleep, the fabled old nightmare returned: the slashing, ripping teeth, the bloody fangs, the snarling and growling, the flying spittle, the vicious hot plumes of breath.
She woke in a sweat.
Claude didn’t come in next morning. Not a surprise. Kutz didn’t answer his phone. No surprise there either. Business was slower than usual. Hazel fretted, paced, wiped down the bar again and again, polished glass after glass, bottle after bottle. Around lunchtime Jack Palmateer, his thick glasses as opaque as a dusty mirror, strolled in with his plump wife, Mary Lou, then, a few minutes later, the Gildays, Paula and Eddie.
Other locals straggled in, the elders, the oldest of the old-timers. Fat Willie hobbled in with Matilda—unusual, as they seldom came in when they were off duty. Of course Matilda, having closed up early last night, would be well-rested. They were cordial, the crowd of them, respectful, polite, ordering beers and sandwiches with pleases and thank-yous and quiet good cheer. Oddly cordial. Strangely polite.
She waited until she couldn’t. “Has anybody seen Kutz?” she said, finally, addressing the bar in general. “That guy, Howard Kutz? Has anyone seen him?”
“Kutz?” said Jack Palmateer from behind his thick dusty glasses. “Who?”
“Wait a minute,” said Eddie Gilday. “Is he that city-slicker that was in a few days ago? The one with the polished head?”
“I certainly ain’t seen him,” said Matilda. “I’d remember a polished head if I seen one.”
A general grumbling of agreement.
“So he didn’t talk to you? Didn’t talk to any of you? Didn’t interview anybody?”
Shaking heads up and down the bar, a rolling tide of shaking heads.
The noon news came on the television behind the bar and a picture of a man filled the screen, a glowing head, dimpled smile, blue eyes. Hazel slipped from behind the bar and sat on Claude’s vacant stool. Everyone was watching the screen, sandwiches, bottles, glasses, cups, poised in mid-air. The bumblebee buzzed overhead. Mauled to death, she heard, near a cave in the woods in the vicinity of Big Moon. Howard Kutz, she heard. Obvious signs of bear activity, but the victim, from Albany, had no knowledge of the backwoods, or of bears.
No one looked her way. Everyone was watching her.
Later, after her shift, she headed straight home through the nearly empty streets of Big Moon to her little apartment, and the first thing she did, barely through the door, barely to the sofa, was masturbate feverishly. When she was finished, she thought of him there, Kutz, Kutz on the mountaintop, his face going red just before the howl of laughter.
And she heard him then: Natural selection!
She successfully stifled a giggle, for the moment. But not for long. Not funny, she thought, but a snot bubble gave her away. Not funny at all.
Dennis McFadden, a retired project manager, lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His collection Jimtown Road, won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and his first collection, Hart’s Grove, was published by Colgate University Press in 2010; another collection, Lafferty, Looking for Love, was longlisted for Regal House Publishing’s 2021 W.S. Porter Prize. His novel, Old Grimes Is Dead, received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and was selected by their editors as one of their Best Indie Books of 2022. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications including The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Crazyhorse, The Antioch Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Best American Mystery Stories (3x) and in the inaugural volume of the new series, The Best Mystery Stories the Year 2021. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he was awarded a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in 2018.
