Reed Coleman: Little Easter

“Walk!” I stepped back. “My appetite’s just fine. Floyd’s Bend is five miles from-”

“Two miles and I know a shortcut. Please.”

“Fine. Fine,” I relented grudgingly.

She kissed me again. This time it was soft and close-eyed and encouraging. “Thanks, Klein,” she opened the door. “Walking helps curb my thirst and I don’t want to drink around you. Not tonight, anyhow.”

The walking wasn’t bad, especially when we stuck to the blacktop. Kate Barnum surprised me with her relative silence. Oh, every now and then my guide would point out odd features of “The Dump.” There were the vaguely visible ruts the wheels of ship transports had left. She showed me where two of the bungalows had ship names still showing on outer walls. We even passed a shack Jackson Pollack had rented for awhile before heading farther east.

“Swede Thorson, the landlord, tossed Pollack out on his ass for ruining the floors. Dumb schmuck had the floors sanded and refinished,” Barnum put on a face of sad resignation and shook it. “Not much good comes out of ‘The Dump’ and stays out. Any good gets sucked right back in. It’s like our own little Dain Curse.”

I took that last bit of proud self-pity as a reference to her fall. I’d have to ask her about that fall. And speaking of asking; she wasn’t doing any. That didn’t fit. I’d pretty much figured this little trek of ours was a ploy on her part to get me alone, off balance and on unfamiliar ground. Lord knows, when we finally turned off the paved portion of our route, the ground became very unfamiliar. I waited for questions about the Christmas killing, about what had really been spoken between the dead Jane Doe and myself. My wait was in vain.

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.”