The Poacher's Son

28

When I worked at Rum Pond, the only time Brenda and I ever spent together was in the kitchen. She’d be peeling potatoes for dinner while I scrubbed out the pots from lunch. I can’t recall a single conversation we ever had. She was twelve, and I was sixteen, and, at the time, that was a pretty big gap.

My only real memory of actually conversing with her came one afternoon, just before I packed my bags and went home. I was mopping the pine floor in the dining room. After a while, I got the sense of someone watching me-that cold-breath feeling along the back of the neck. I looked up and she was standing in the kitchen door, this stick-figure girl, all braids and cheekbones, watching me with a weird expression. I can only describe it as hatred.

“I heard you’re leaving,” she said.

“Tomorrow. I’m going back to Scarborough.”

“Why?”

“My dad doesn’t really want me here. No one does.”

Her hands were balled into fists by her sides. “I hope you get in an accident,” she said, and darted back into the kitchen.

Those were the last words she spoke to me. At the time I remember finding that interchange funny. I remember shaking my head and laughing. And then I forgot all about them-and her-for eight years.

“I never thought about what it was like for you growing up here,” I said now. “Being the only female.”

“Doreen Pelletier was here until a few years ago, but you know how she was-the old witch. And there were always women guests. But puberty was no picnic, if that’s what you mean. After a while, though, you get used to the itty-bitty-titty jokes.” She was slouched in her Adirondack chair, watching me with those animal-black eyes of hers. “So now what?”

“We stay put.”

“For how long?”

“Until Charley comes back.”

“You mean we just sit here all day?”

“We don’t have to sit,” I said. “We can go over to Rum Pond and I can use the radio phone and find out what’s going on.”

She folded her arms across her breasts. “I told you I’m not going over there.”

“Then it looks like we’re staying put.” I removed the single shotgun shell from the chamber and put it in my pocket.

“What are you doing that for? If Truman shows up, he’ll kill us both.”

“If he shows up, I’ll reload it.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “You won’t have time. You’ll never hear him coming. The next thing you know you’ll be looking down at your chest wondering how that bullet hole got there.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

She let out a big laugh. “You’re such an asshole.”

“I get called that a lot. It goes with my job.” Or at least it used to, I thought.

“It has nothing to do with your job,” she said with a cockeyed grin. “You’re just an asshole personally.”

I could see how this day was going to go.

“You used to be a nice guy,” she said. “That summer you lived here, I really liked you, even though you never paid any attention to me. What happened to you?”

“Nothing happened to me.”

“Yeah, it did. How come you left that summer, anyway? It was only July and you were supposed to stay through August.”

“I was tired of being Russell’s serf.”

“You never said good-bye to me.” She finished her beer and then shook the can to see if she had missed a drop. She hadn’t. “You didn’t like me then, and you don’t like me now. I think I make you nervous.”

The sun slid out from behind a cloud and suddenly it became very bright and hot again on the porch.

“You don’t,” I said.

“It’s the thought of me and your old man doing the nasty.” The beer had given her voice a raspy edge. “It really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“We’re not going to have a conversation about this.”

She smiled as if this was the exact response she’d hoped for. “You get a picture in your head of us humping, and it freaks you out.”

“Enough, Brenda.”

“Or maybe,” she said, “it turns you on. Yeah, that’s what it is. It turns you on to think about us having sex.”

“End of conversation.”

She stood up from the Adirondack chair. “I’m getting another beer. You want one?”

“No, thanks. And I don’t think you should have one, either.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t get a vote on what I put in my body.”

She opened the screen door and disappeared into the kitchen. Charley said to watch her-as if she might try something. Did he suspect Brenda of being the killer? And why had he asked her those questions about Brodeur? The suggestion was that she and my father might somehow have conspired with the deputy. Did Charley think they’d double-crossed him after he delivered Shipman to the ambush site?

And what the hell happened with Truman that the police were now searching for him so intently? Was it really possible he and Pelletier had set my dad up?

The door banged open, as if she’d kicked it, and she came out, holding two cans of beer. “I brought you one, anyway.”

“I don’t want it.”

She came over to me and set the beer down on the railing. Then she leaned forward on her elbows and gazed past me out at the lake. She was so close I could smell her sun-warmed hair. “You really do look like him,” she said, without looking at me.

“Excuse me?”

“You look like Jack. Younger, though, and without the beard. Thinner, too.”

“What are you trying to do, Brenda?”

She gave me a look of wide-eyed innocence. “What do you mean?”

“Why are you playing games with me?”

She didn’t answer at first but turned back toward the water. “I’m bored,” she said finally. “I get bored easily.”

“Then find something to do.”

With that, she straightened up and gave me a huge smile. It was as if a beautiful idea had arrived in her head like a dove from heaven. “I’m going swimming.”

“Swimming? You’re not afraid Truman’s going to show up?”

“If he does, you’ll protect me.”

Don’t be so sure, I wanted to say.

I waited outside the cabin for Brenda to put on her bathing suit. From moment to moment she seemed either much older or much younger than her actual age of twenty. She would look at me, and there would be a sad exhaustion in her eyes that reminded me of old people I’d seen in nursing homes. Then the next minute she would become this flirty teenager. Were these sudden shifts calculated or could she just not control herself?

Pelletier said that my father loved her as he hadn’t loved anyone since my mother. The more I thought about it, the more I believed that this was the truth. Brenda was definitely attractive, and her emotions were just as volatile as my mom’s.

So why had he left her behind when he turned fugitive? If he truly loved her, as Pelletier said, why did he leave her behind at Rum Pond?

I was still trying to figure it out when the cabin door opened and she came out wearing a purple bikini top and cut-off blue jeans. Her arms and legs were tanned a deep brown and her skin was so tight across her stomach I could have traced the abdominal muscles with my finger. She had freed her black hair from its braid and now it spilled loose over her shoulders.

“Let’s go swimming.” She grabbed a towel from the clothesline that hung between two of the pine trees nearest the porch and skipped down the stairs to the water’s edge. I tucked the shotgun under my arm and followed.

She waded out until she was waist-deep, then dived headfirst into the water. I took a seat on a sun-heated granite boulder beside the canoe and waited for her to come up for air.

But she didn’t.

Half a minute passed, and then a full minute. I knew she was playing with me, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. I felt my pulse quicken in spite of myself.

Finally her head appeared, maybe fifty feet from shore. “You should come in!”

I ignored her invitation and glanced instead over at the sporting camp across the cove. I saw Pelletier’s truck parked beside the lodge door, but there was no other sign of him.

“Hey, asshole, I’m talking to you!”

Brenda began swimming toward me until she was in just over her head, treading water. For maybe a minute she was silent, her expression pure anger. Then out of nowhere a smile broke across her face. It was as if a switch got thrown somewhere.

“You’re so uptight,” she said. “What is it with you cop types?”

“Was Bill Brodeur uptight, too?”

In an instant the anger was back. “Screw you,” she spat at me, before disappearing again beneath the surface.

She swam for a while longer. Then she emerged, dried off, spread the towel across a flat patch of pebble beach, and lay down in the sun. All without a word to me.

The lake was utterly still. Not a trace of a breeze ruffled the surface. The sky between the mountains was such a deep blue I would have believed the earth’s atmosphere was burning away with each advancing hour.

Brenda rolled over onto her stomach. Her back was slick with perspiration.

“You’re going to get burned,” I said.

“You already are.”

She was right. I hadn’t used sunscreen this morning, and the skin of my face was beginning to feel tight as a mask. I tried moving back into the shade of the pines, but it was only a little less bright and just as hot. A cicada whined in the tree above me, the sound jabbing through my eardrums.

“I want to go over to the sporting camp,” I said.

She opened her eyes. “What for?”

“I want to call Charley. I’d like to know what’s happening with Truman.”

“Pelletier would’ve come over if there was anything to report.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

She propped herself up on her elbows. “I’m not going.”

I rose to my feet. “I’m not asking you, Brenda. We’re going, both of us.”

She climbed to her feet. There were little dents in her knees from the gravel on the beach. “I want to put some clothes on.”

“What the hell for?”

“It’ll just take a second.”

Before I could respond she was running up the stairs.

A few minutes passed, and she didn’t reappear. I looked up at the camp, half-hidden amid the trees on the hillside. What the hell was she up to? Did she have another firearm up there?

“Shit,” I said aloud.

I removed the single shell from my pocket and slid it into the chamber of the shotgun. Slowly I climbed the plank steps, feeling certain that she was watching me from behind one of the darkened window screens.

As my head came level with the porch I said, “Brenda?”

“In here.”

Her voice came from the cabin on the left-the one where my father slept. With the sun shining directly against the side of the building, I couldn’t see inside.

“What’s the holdup?”

“It’s all right, you can come in.”

I gripped the door handle and pulled. A beam of dusty sunlight shined ahead of me. In it I saw a chest of drawers and my father’s big iron bed, but I didn’t see Brenda. I stepped inside.

She was standing naked in the near corner of the room.

“Jesus.” I turned my head away, tried to back up, missed the door. “Put some clothes on!”

“I saw how you were looking at me.”

“You’re crazy.” I kept my head turned but I could still see her out of the corner of one eye. She took a step closer.

“I could see what you wanted to do to me.”

“I’ll be outside.” I spun away and reached for the door.

She grabbed me from behind, her arms closing around my waist. Through my T-shirt I felt her breasts against my back. “I was in love with you first.”

“Brenda,” I said, reaching down to peel her hands away.

“I want you to fuck me, Mike.”

“Stop,” I said. “Stop.”

Her breath was heavy with alcohol. “Please.”

I closed my hand about her wrist and yanked it away. The force made her cry out with pain, and when I turned around her eyes were fierce and her mouth was open, and I could see her teeth.

“No.” I squeezed her wrist. “It’s not going to happen.”

“Jack likes it rough, too.”

I pushed her away. She was surprised and nearly fell back onto the bed. She knew I meant it now and her mouth curled up on one side. “What’s wrong with you? You afraid you can’t get it up?”

“Put some clothes on,” I said, turning my back to her.

“Jack was right,” she called after me. “You are a faggot.”

The unopened can of beer she’d brought me before was still on the railing. It was warm, but I opened it and drank it down.

How many beers had she had, anyway? Sally Reynolds had said she was a regular at the bar at the Dead River Inn. I could easily believe it. With each drink she seemed to grow more aggressive: conversationally, physically, sexually. Back in Flagstaff she’d seemed so helpless, so much in need of my protection. Now all that tamped-down anger inside her was coming out.

I heard the door open behind me.

She’d put on a T-shirt and the same damp cut-off denims she’d worn on the beach. The look she gave me when our eyes met showed nothing but disdain.

“Let’s go,” I said.

She didn’t budge. She shook a cigarette out of a pack and put it between her lips and tried to light it, but the lighter wouldn’t flame. “Shit.”

Just then, I heard a single, sharp, cracking noise in the distance.

“That sounded like a gunshot.”

“It’s Pelletier hammering again. He’s been doing it all day.”

“I don’t think so.” The truth was I had been distracted and wasn’t sure what I’d heard. But I had a bad feeling. “Come on, let’s go.”

She gestured toward the kitchen. “I need to get a match.”

I removed the cigarette from her lips and dropped it on the porch. This time, she didn’t fight me.