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CHAPTER ONE
TRUMAN
The
phone call came while I was in the duck blind waiting for the sun to rise.
I suppose that made sense. Brian Ride had died sometime last
night, and everyone in Cinnabar knew I turned in early. They would know, as a
newly born “wild man of the woods,” I’d be getting up before the eastern glow
in the sky was bright enough to see your hand by.
They were right. I’d shouldered my shotgun and set out from
my cabin with Orson, my brown Newfoundland, a sunny, grinning dog with not a
care in the world, unlike me. Orson padded soundlessly through the unseen
underbrush, a marauding bear on the prowl, while I followed not so quietly,
although I’d gone the extra mile toward becoming a mountain man and had
buckskin pants on under my waders.
I knew approximately where the lake was and Orson guided me
the rest of the way. It had snowed once or twice since I’d been there, and in
November it stuck to the ground when I emerged from the alpine cover. Now my
feet crunched in that baking soda way, but Orson danced quietly ahead. I could
see his fur rippling, his tongue peeking from his giant mouth, his eyes merry
as if to say “hurry! All the ducks will be gone if you keep lollygagging.”
So I did hurry, because I wanted to eat some duck, and have
some to give my friends who owned the cabin. Last month I’d harvested a buck,
enough red meat to satisfy me through the winter months I planned on being in
the cabin, praying and meditating on my painful situation. I was grappling with
a huge moral dilemma, and there seemed to be no way out of it other than to run
away. Which I’d proceeded to do with such finesse and alacrity you’d think I’d
been born to it.
I sighed deeply as I crawled into the sanctity of the duck
blind I’d built earlier that month. Orson entered at the same time, shouldering
me aside with not a care in the world, taking the best spot. I didn’t have the
heart to move him, so I got on all fours and raised my glasses. The decoys
bobbed like kid’s toys, rippled by a slight predawn wind, carrying the faint
aroma of a passing skunk—or someone’s marijuana crop. That was common up there
in Trinity County, California, but I knew my friends kept their grows away from
their cabins, anxious for the final legalization laws to be passed.
I settled down and waited for the mallards to start flying.
I put my gloved hands in the pockets of my camo jacket, my breath icy. A group
of moths passed overhead, looking like pale morning glories. The sheltering
forest fringing the lake was still. All I heard was Orson’s soft panting. I’d
easily hear the mallards flying in.
Orson seemed to be telling me that existence was good—our
life was ours for the taking, if we wanted to relish it. Only unenlightened
people repeated the story that man had taken wild dogs and made them his fallen
slave. They utterly failed to see how important dog is to man. I gave worship
to Orson in many of my spare moments. Sometimes I thought he was the only thing
preventing me from falling into a much darker place than I already was. He had
let me into his life, not the other way around.
Alone, with the faint whooshing of water and Orson’s
satisfied panting, I had no choice but to reflect on my fall from grace.
I still couldn’t come to terms with the loose woman my wife
Jessica had become during our marriage. I’d never be able to move on unless I
somehow came to accept that. Was it me and my boring, pious life that had
driven her to it? I couldn’t wrap my head around the betrayal. No matter which
way I looked at it—from a duck blind, in the cabin drinking whiskey, on my
Harley canyon-carving the back roads of the Trinity Alps—there remained a
red-hot ball of rage in the pit of my stomach.
She had cuckolded me, plain and simple, carrying on with a
local pot farmer, no less. How long that had been going on behind my back while
the citizens of Cinnabar laughing at me was anyone’s guess. I was naive and in
love, and wrapped up in my work. I just didn’t think Jessica capable of
anything like that. I’d been so blindsided when a snarky gas station owner had
said to me, “And you know…your wife and that pot farmer are making a spectacle
of themselves.”
“What?” I’d stupidly said.
His face had turned all ferret-like, his skull shaped like a
nut. “You mean you don’t know about her and Paul Staples? Everyone in Cinnabar
knows, Truman.”
Paul Staples, Paul Staples…Pot farmers rarely came to town
because it was always this season, that season. There was always some excuse
not to attend church services, but the same excuses didn’t hold when it came
time for a party. So I vaguely knew Paul Staples, and I could picture him
around Jessica. At the supermarket. The farmer’s market. The annual Humane
Society charity dinner. Yes. Paul Staples always seemed to be there.
My heart thudded, then stopped. The gas station owner was
clearly taking pleasure in seeing my distress. “Hits close to home, don’t it?”
he leered. “Maybe you need to practice what you preach. Or maybe your wife
does.”
I seriously wanted to punch him, and of course I couldn’t.
Mallards flew in then, interrupting my enraged reverie.
Dozens of beating wings were like a whispering waterfall, or a distant train’s
babbling wheels. I popped up from the blind, my pump action shotgun at the
ready. I squeezed the trigger, but couldn’t be sure in the dim light if I hit
anything. Orson seemed to know, though, and bounded off like a giant, floppy
jackrabbit.
I smiled when he hit the water. From an uncouth, lumbering
Bigfoot, he became a sleek eel when he swam. I knew his wide, webbed feet were
working underwater as he steered right for the dead duck. Without breaking
stride, he hit it with his open mouth, careful not to break the skin. My eyes
were adjusting now to the oncoming light, and I moved out of the blind,
encouraging Orson.
“Good boy! Get duck!”
It was a good-sized drake, its iridescent emerald green head
glowing as if lit from within. I decided to move to the next blind I’d set up
last week, the ducks already being skittish at this one, having winged away to
the next inlet, churning up the lake. We had to walk fast to capture the ducks’
sunrise innocence, before they could see, smell, and become skeptical of man
and beast.
I inhaled swampy earth and decomposing reeds, skirting the
thorny blackberry bushes. Crunching crispy miner’s lettuce and lemony hedge
nettle under my soles, I ducked beneath pine branches, swinging the recently
demised drake by his warm neck. Jessica’s character had reflected on me, and
ultimately the gossip and shame of living in Cinnabar got to be too much for
me. The things I had loved about working in a small town had come back to bite
me in the ass. So I ran.
My friends, the Anker-Santos brothers, had generously
offered me their cabin. They spent most of their time at their plantations
anyway, and the one bedroom log affair was perfectly fine for me, a man
accustomed to sparse lodgings. It gave me time to reflect on what my next step
would be, and I still hadn’t come to any sort of conclusion. I figured solitude
was a traditional spiritual discipline. Moses, Elijah, and Jacob met with God
when alone. “Be still, and know that I am God.”
I was struggling with that.
When I tried to meditate, images of Jessica’s insipid
grinning face haunted my visions. She’d had no explanation for her straying.
She claimed to still love me. But she couldn’t cut it off with the weed farmer.
So she loved him, too? My lifestyle was too restrictive for her, she said. In
the end, my agony started affecting my work. How could a priest whose faith was
being tested lead his flock with honor? I had to leave.
A sturdy wind whipped up satiny waves on the lake. Orson
frisked beside me across a sandy beach, and then we were at the blind. I placed
the drake on the straw and reloaded my shotgun. “Orson. Hold.” He eased onto
his stomach, folded his paws, and uttered a purr of discontent. He didn’t like
holding.
When I peeked over the edge of the blind, my phone rang. Or,
rather, lit up with a call from Woodrow Muir, the priest-in-charge at St.
John’s in Cinnabar. He was the only one who’d call me this early in the
morning, and I’d promised him I’d be available for questions after I dumped the
entire load of my position on him.
“Truman.” He sounded out of breath. Would he be jogging this
early in the morning? Must have. “Hate to bother you so early—”
“That’s okay. I’m up hunting.”
“—but Brian Ride killed himself.”
“Shit.”
“Yes, his wife Vickie was out with friends last night and
came home around one and found him. It was foul, Truman. My heart goes out to
Vickie.”
“Yes, of course.” I wondered what he wanted me to do about
it. “You want to know if suicide is a mortal sin. Well, first of all, he was
obviously in a very dark place to have contemplated that at all.”
“No, that’s really not my question, although we should
discuss it at a later date because I could find no literature on it. No, Vickie
doesn’t think it was a suicide. A gun was in his hand, but, ah, she doesn’t
think—”
Suddenly Vickie grabbed the phone from Woody. I wasn’t
prepared for her. Her voice was raspy and strangled, beyond the one pack plus
of cigarettes she must’ve smoked every day. “We need you,
Father Burgess. Come back, please. You know Brian would
never have killed himself. I suspect foul play.”
I didn’t know anyone actually said “foul play.” In all my
years in Cinnabar, I’d never dealt with a murder. “Well, Vickie, what makes you
say he couldn’t have killed himself? Sometimes depression is kept well hidden
even from family members—”
Vickie drew in a ragged breath and let it out all at once. “I know he wouldn’t have killed himself because he was having an affair.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. Oh.
Of course, a general confession was part of my liturgy, and if someone didn’t
feel that was enough, they could come to me in private for absolution. Brian
had never done anything of the sort, and to be frank, he didn’t have that
guilty, sneaky look I’d grown accustomed to in adulterers. But I couldn’t blow
off Vickie’s feelings. “Would you like absolution? Because I can give it from
here—”
“No. We need you to come back, Father
Burgess. Now. You need to see Brian for yourself before
they move him.” Indeed, I heard commotion in the background, a quiet sort of
contemplative hubbub. The sort cops make.
“Are you at home, Vickie?”
“Yes, and we need you, father. It’s not
just Brian. Susan Rechy’s son was just diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and
talk about suicide, she’s at the end of her rope. No one’s ashamed of you for
divorcing that slut Jessica.” In her grief, she had become unfettered,
unfiltered. “In fact, Trisha St. Elmo specifically requested a sermon on
divorce. Maybe she’s heading for it, I don’t know. But we’re all falling apart
around here without you. No offense, Truman. We don’t want some outlander
busting in and taking charge.”
I really didn’t want to leave the sanctity of my Walden
Pond. But of course, I had to think of what was best for Vickie, the
congregation. “I’m two hours away, up by Weaverville. I’ll have to drop Orson
off with Father Muir. Do you think you can stop them from moving Brian until
then?”
“Yes, oh yes, father!” The relief in her voice was palpable.
Sometimes I wondered at my motivation for having taken vows. Was it all about
ego, the pride one gets when one is relied upon to a large extent? My work
should have been without gratification—work for work’s sake. Maybe I just loved
to be needed. “Yes, come as fast as you can! You remember
where I live.”
Indeed I did. I remembered where everyone lived. Everyone
I’d visited in time of need, sickness, emotional distress. That was my job, my
work, and I’d cut it short because pride had made me slink away from Cinnabar
in shame. “Yes, Vickie. I’ll be there as soon as I drop off Orson.”
I blew a sigh of relief after hanging up. I used to thrive
on that sort of drama, and now I just dreaded it. As I slung my shotgun over my
shoulder and once again grabbed the drake, I realized how cozy I’d become in my
little cabin, even thinking of it as “mine.” Solitude was cleansing, and I was
in a place where Jessica could never reach me with her infidelities, her
taunting, her rubbing my face in her sins. I was separate now, truly a divorced
man, pure.
Orson’s fur flowed elegantly, already dry, as we started
back up the hill. Were we master and slave, as some people claimed? Sometimes I
thought I was Orson’s slave. Allegedly, dog gave up his wild birthright when he
surrendered to man’s domestication. Man, who originally tamed the wild cur to
prove his own superior ego, keeps owning them to groom his own vanity.
Orson’s kind, gentle eyes told me otherwise. He was just
here because he happened to like me, happened to like duck hunting, happened to
like the food I gave him. He’d be out of there in a hot minute if he stopped
liking me—if a sexy, fertile woman came along.
He was as fickle and as temporary as any wife.
I had no time for dressing the duck, so I hung it in the
pantry to age. But I did make time to stuff my pipe with some long-flowering
indica and take a few flavorful puffs.
I would miss this solitary cabin, even if I was only gone a
few days. I’d been re-reading my favorite book Pan.
“I love three things,” I then say. “I love a
dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth.”
“And which do you love best?”
“The dream.”
It was hard to disagree with him.