Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

“What the hell, Billy?”

He squinted into the light. “I saved one for you.” He raised the last beer in the six-pack as if it were a peace offering.

“Thanks but no thanks. What are you doing here?”

“I came to apologize for being a turd the other day.”

I glanced around my dooryard, realizing for the first time that the only other vehicle present besides my patrol truck was the Bronco. “Wait a minute. Where’s your pickup?”

“I walked here.”

“You live seven miles away!”

“Needed to think about a few things.”

I snapped off the light, plunging us both into darkness. “But you decided to stop for beers?”

“Figured you could use a few pops. But I’ve been waiting here awhile. Expected you to be home sooner.” He spoke in his usual decibel range, without slurring his words. I’d seen Billy drink prodigious quantities of alcohol on occasion, but he never displayed a hint of intoxication. When I didn’t accept the can from him, he popped the top and took a sip. “I heard about Briar.”

I reached down to collect the five empty cans. I arranged them in a row along the edge of the porch. “What did you hear?”

“She ran her sports car into a tree. Folks say someone was chasing her.”

I think he expected me to sit down next to him, but I remained on my feet. “Folks are right.”

“That fucking sucks.”

“Yes, it does.” I gave up and sat down beside him on the plank steps. “Is that why you decided to get wasted tonight?”

“It takes more than a few beers for that to happen,” he said. “It’s a shame about Briar. She was a crazy girl. She came on to me the first night we met at the lodge, but I didn’t do nothing, on account of Aimee. After that, she was kind of bitchy, to tell the truth. She bossed me around worse than her mom. I don’t think she was used to men telling her to keep her pants on.” He took a long drink of beer. “Do you know who it was who chased her?”

“Bilodeau thinks it was your buddy Karl Khristian.”

“Yeah, I heard you guys arrested him.”

I was always amazed at how quickly news traveled in the Maine woods. People might live miles apart, but when a barn went up in flames or a car skidded off the road, everyone seemed to know about it within a matter of minutes.

I rubbed my bare hands together against the cold. “It looks like your hunch about KKK was right.”

“Looks like it,” he said. “So I guess that means there’s no more reward.”

The thought of Betty Morse’s twenty thousand dollars hadn’t crossed my mind since my last conversation with Billy, but it was clear that my friend had been thinking of little else.

“There’s ballistic evidence linking Khristian to the shooting at Morse’s house, but I don’t think Bilodeau has anything yet linking him to those moose. Technically, I suppose that means there’s still a reward.”

He finished the beer and crushed the can in his big hand. Then he flung it away into the darkness.

I jumped after it. The half-frozen leaves crackled beneath my feet. “Come on, Billy, this is my yard.”

“Oh fuck,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m not thinking straight these days. My head feels like it’s full of spiders.”

I held on to the crushed can. “When I feel that way, it usually means I have a guilty conscience.”

He rose slowly to his feet and towered over me. In the moonlight, his face had the hardness of welded metal. “What do you mean?”

I wasn’t sure what I meant, other than that my friend was continuing to behave in odd ways, and I wanted to let him know that I’d taken notice. “If you walked here, you probably didn’t hear the news that Chubby LeClair killed himself.”

His response was to grunt. “Fucking child molester.”

I waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, I continued. “There was a Passamaquoddy kid named Marky Parker with him in his camper. The boy is dead, too.”

“Did Chub kill him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There was a shoot-out at the camper, and the boy was injured.”

“What kind of shoot-out?”

“Jeremy Bard says Chubby fired at him from the Airstream. The boy was probably caught in the cross fire.”

“Bard?” Billy gathered his pale hair in one big fist and twisted it into a knot. “Now that’s interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

He smiled at me; I could actually see his teeth shining in the moonlight. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a suspicious motherfucker?”

I leaned forward, trying to catch his eyes. “What do you know, Billy?”

He turned his shoulder and took a step away from me. “I know it’s time for me to go home to my wife and family.”

“Let me give you a ride,” I said.

“No thanks. I can find my way.”

“It’s seven miles,” I couldn’t help repeating.

“Yeah, but it’s a beautiful night.”

“I’m going to call Aimee and tell her where you are.” My tone sounded more threatening than I’d intended.

He paused at the edge of the clearing. I could barely make out his looming shape in the blackness beneath the evergreens. “If you do, you’ll only worry her. She’s used to me going off like this when there’s something on my mind. She calls them my ‘walkabouts.’ Says it’s an Australian word for walking and thinking. I’m sorry I drank the last beer, Mike.”

And with that, Billy Cronk melted as quietly as a deer into the forest.

Whoever had built my cabin had used logs from the same spruce and fir trees that stood as sentinels around it. Sometimes I fancied that I lived in a house of bones. Tonight was one of those occasions.

Cluster flies buzzed along the dusty sills. I would open the window to let one swarm out and then discover that another swarm had appeared on the inside of the glass the next morning. I had no clue where the big gray insects came from or how they got in, but their incessant buzzing was like static inside my brain.

I dumped the empty beer cans into a milk crate I used for recycling and sat down at the table with a glass of milk. Of all the mysteries in my life at the moment, Billy Cronk had to be the most frustrating. I’d convinced myself that the hardened face he showed the world was just a mask he’d forged during tours of duty in distant war zones. I would watch him play with his ragamuffin kids or stare adoringly at his sweet wife, and I would decide that he really was a kind and gentle man, someone with whom I could be friends. Then he would look at me with those frost-colored eyes, and I would have a vision of him manning an observation post in Afghanistan, firing M240 machine-gun rounds into the bodies of advancing Taliban fighters, and I would begin to distrust my instincts.

Time after time in my life, I’d come to the conclusion that human beings are essentially unknowable. I’d been betrayed enough that I should have stopped trying to figure other people out and accept them for the enigmas they were. And yet, some stubborn, foolish part of me refused to go through life that way. I wanted to believe in Billy. More than that, I needed to.

After I’d eaten my usual unhealthy dinner-burritos that went mushy in the microwave and were made palatable only with a slathering of Tabasco-I checked in on my mother’s progress.

“Hello, Michael,” my stepfather said when I reached him on his cell.

“Hey, Neil,” I said. “I just wanted to check in and see how she was doing.”

“Fine, fine.” He sounded distracted. “She’s sleeping again.”

Despite the autumnal darkness, it was still pretty early. My mom seemed to be sleeping a great deal, but for all I knew, fatigue was a side effect of the chemotherapy. I figured having your bloodstream filled with tumor-killing chemicals must be exhausting.