Go With Me (11 page)

Lester reached for the beer pitcher and motioned with it toward Murdock’s glass. “On us,” he told Murdock.

“You’re fucking-A right it’s on you,” said Murdock. “I didn’t ask you to come over here. What do you want?”

Lester raised the pitcher and poured a quick glass, less than full, for each of them and Murdock. He set the pitcher, still threequarters full, on the table to his right.

Murdock looked at his glass.

“Jesus,” he said, “what are you saving it for? Pour it out.”

“Plenty of time,” said Lester.

“For what?” Murdock asked.

“Well,” said Lester, “we’re looking for Blackway.”

“Blackway?” said Murdock. “Who’s Blackway?”

Lester laughed. “We went by the High Line,” he said. “They said he might be here.”

“You see he ain’t,” said Murdock.

“Maybe he’s at his place up in the Towns?” Lester asked.

“Maybe he is,” said Murdock. “Maybe he ain’t. Why? What do you want with Blackway?”

Lillian looked from Lester to Murdock as they went back and forth. She waited for Lester and Nate to start a routine about why they were looking for Blackway, but Lester only said, “He’s been making trouble for the lady.”

“Lady?” Murdock asked. “You mean her? I heard about her. Blackway’s fucking her. She’s your idea of a lady?”

“He ain’t, either,” said Nate. Lester gave him a sharp look, but Murdock went on.

“If he ain’t, he will be,” said Murdock. “Listen: Blackway gets what he wants. He wants her, he’s got her. She wouldn’t be the first. She won’t be the last.”

“No?” said Lester.

“No,” said Murdock. “I seen all kinds of Blackway’s ladies.
Ladies.
” He leaned forward and spat on the table between him and Lillian. Nate began to move to his left to get out of the booth, but Lester put his hand on his arm to stop him. Nate sat back, watching Murdock.

Lester chuckled. “Well,” he said, “there’s ladies and ladies. You and Blackway know each other pretty well, I guess.”

Murdock didn’t answer him. He drank his beer.

“Go back a long way, I guess,” Lester said.

“We do,” said Murdock.

“’Course, it’s got to be tough, too,” said Lester. “Coming from where you’ve been.”

“Where I’ve been?”

“Well, you know,” said Lester. “You know: the place?”

Murdock looked at Lester for a moment. His eyes grew wide. Then he shook his head and seemed almost to smile. “You know who you’re talking to?” he asked.

“Has to be tough,” Lester went on. “In the place. All the stuff goes on in there. Then you get out, you go looking for your friends. What do you find?”

“What?” Murdock asked him.

But Lester only shook his head sympathetically and drained his glass of beer. “We heard Blackway’s up in the Towns,” said Lester. “If he is, up there, would he be alone, about now?”

“How would I know?” said Murdock.

Lester nodded. “Well, then,” he said, but he made no move to leave his seat at the end of the table. Instead he reached for the beer pitcher and got ready to give himself another round.

“Why don’t you ask her?” Murdock said. “Don’t ask me. Ask her. Your lady. Ask the lady where Blackway is. He’s fucking her, ain’t he? It’s her Blackway’s fucking, it ain’t me.”

Lester chuckled again.

“Ain’t it?” Lester asked.

Murdock, who had been looking at Lillian, slowly blinked his eyes one time. He turned to Lester.

“What was that?” he asked.

Nate moved again to leave the booth.

“What was that you just said?” Murdock asked Lester.

Nate was on his feet. Murdock turned toward him, struggling to get out of the booth, bumping the table with his knees as he tried to rise. Lillian looked from one to the other of them, but it was Lester she should have been watching.

Still sitting at the end of the table, Lester picked up the nearly full beer pitcher by its handle and swung it up off the table and around behind him to his right. A little beer spilled on the table. Lester brought the heavy glass pitcher around in a long sidearm arc, accelerating, and landed it on the left side of Murdock’s head. The pitcher exploded with a loud, hollow bang, and a pink plume of glass, foam, beer, and blood sprayed over the back of the booth, the floor, and the nearby tables.

“Go,” said Lester to Nate. “Go ahead, now.”

Nate pulled Lillian out of the booth and steered her across the room toward the exit. Nobody tried to stop them. The men at the bar hadn’t moved. The men at the tables hadn’t moved. The bartender had disappeared.

At the door with Nate, Lillian looked back for Lester. He was still at the booth. Murdock had been knocked partly out of the booth and lay half on the seat, half on the floor beside the booth. He was unconscious if he wasn’t dead, and Lillian could see blood covering the side of his face and running freely onto the floor. Lillian saw Lester take Murdock by the back of his collar and drag him out of the booth. He dumped Murdock onto the floor and stood over him. Lillian watched Lester raise his foot and drive his boot down onto Murdock’s knee, jumping on it with all his weight. The bone gave, making a pop that Lillian could hear as Nate hurried her out the door—the last thing she heard that afternoon at Fort Bob.

Nate started the engine. Lester came out of the Fort and got in beside Lillian. They drove out of the parking lot and onto the road.

“You killed that guy,” said Lillian.

“You mean Murdock?” Lester said. “’Course I didn’t. He’ll be fine. Might need a few stitches.”

“Fine?” said Lillian. “There was blood all over the room.”

“I was ready to take him,” Nate said, “soon as I got clear of that table.”

“I know you were,” said Lester. “I could see you were getting ready for him.”

“I saw you stomp on him,” Lillian told Lester. “I saw you do that. He was down. Why did you have to smash his leg?”

“You wouldn’t have done that, I guess?” Lester said.

“He was on the floor,” said Lillian. “He was out of it.”

“I guess you’d rather he’d get up off the floor and come after us,” said Lester. “I fixed it so that won’t happen.”

Lillian was silent.

“You wanted a fight,” said Lester. “You got one.”

“I didn’t want that,” said Lillian. “I saw him lying on the floor. I saw the blood. If you didn’t kill him, you came close. And you’re telling me he’ll be good as new?”

“Not quite,” said Lester. “Look here.”

He held out on the palm of his hand a brown, flat object that might have been a cookie — held it out toward Nate and Lillian.

“Look at that,” said Lester.

“What is it?” Lillian asked. “Oh,” she said.

Lester was showing them Murdock’s left ear, or at any rate most of it;
some of the lobe hadn’t come away with the rest.

“It got thrown clear across the room, you know?” Lester told them. “I picked it up off the floor going out.”

“Oh,” said Lillian.

“That’s a clean cut,” said Lester.

“What are we going to do with it?” Nate asked.

“I guess we could give it back to Murdock,” said Lester. “You want to?” he asked Lillian.

Lillian shook her head.

“I guess not,” said Lester, and he flicked his wrist and sailed the severed ear out the window. “Left up here,” he told Nate.

“Where are we going?” Lillian asked.

“Where everybody’s been telling us to go,” said Lester. “The Towns.”

14

THE LOST TOWNS

Loggers, hunters, campers, hikers had gone into the Lost Towns and never been seen again. More than a few, over the years. Ten or twelve men and women had simply disappeared up there.

It wouldn’t have been hard to do. The Towns were a big piece of real estate: a hundred square miles of nothing but woods, ravines, beaver ponds, and silent little brooks that made their hidden ways under the dark and tangled branches of the firs. In the entire tract, there was one road, no village, no structure bigger than a hunting camp and no more than two or three of those.

The district took in the whole of two townships and parts of five others. At one time there had been some settlement in the principal towns, there had been a few farms, but they had been given up decades, generations since. The populations of those two towns today stood, the one at two, the other at zero; and as for who exactly the two might be and where exactly they might dwell, nobody knew.

The only livelihood that had endured in the Lost Towns was the timber business. If you made your living from trees, then you still had a use for the Towns. Loggers had cut their way through the area time and time again, leaving trails and tracks that wound over the hills, going this way and that, going nowhere, soon vanishing in the returning forest.

That forest, green, shadowed, quickly claimed and reclaimed everything in the Towns, every foot of them, except here and there where the timber companies had made more permanent marks in the form of vast sawmill tailings or piles. The bigger operators would set up camp in the woods and bring in their own mill to saw the logs on the spot. When these camps got done with their work, and were broken down and taken away, they left behind them brown and yellow hills, beaches, dunes of sawdust in which nothing could grow. Those sawdust wastes, some of them decades old and several acres in extent, were left here and there throughout the Towns like pocket deserts of infertility, sunbaked amid the vast green surround.

It was at one of those sawdust deserts, or near it, that the Lost Towns’ best remembered and least explained disappearance had occurred. The timber company, owned at the time by Fitzgerald’s father, had had a crew of choppers up in the heart of the Towns since January: four men from Quebec and a log skidder. Sometime in early April one of the company’s scalers had hiked in on snowshoes to rate their cut. The four had been living in a kind of cabin in the woods, put up out of two-by-fours, plywood, and tar paper, that the company had provided as a bunkhouse. The scaler found the cabin, he found the men’s clothes and other gear, their supplies. He found dried-out food on the table. He found the skidder parked nearby. But of the four Frenchmen he found no trace, nor did anybody else, ever.

State police, officers of the fish and game department, and volunteers from the timber company went over the area looking for any sign of the missing men or of what had become of them, but they didn’t keep at it very long. The police had brought a dog handler with them. His dogs, a pair of bloodhounds, could do nothing, and their owner absolutely refused to keep them in the Towns overnight. The other searchers didn’t argue with him. If you find a French chopper, then a French chopper is all you’ve found; but if in the process you lose a bloodhound, then you’ve lost a valuable animal.

“Great big things,” Lester said. “Bigger than a shepherd. And crazy for the scent, just crazy for it. You ever seen one of those dogs work?”

“What dogs?” said Nate.

Lester had been with the timber company’s men looking for the loggers that early-spring day in the Towns.

“They cast all around,” he said. “‘Cast,’ they call it. They’re looking for a scent line. They’re strong. They about pulled the guy off his feet.”

“What happened?” Lillian asked. “What did they find?”

“Nothing,” said Lester. “They found nothing.”

“Come on,” said Lillian.

“I’m telling you,” said Lester. “I was there. They reckoned nobody had been in the camp for at least three, four weeks, might have been more. And it was still winter up there. April? There must have been a couple, three feet of snow on the ground.”

“Well, then, they left,” said Lillian. “Didn’t they?”

“They didn’t leave,” said Lester.

“Come on,” said Lillian. “What are you saying? Are you saying somebody came in and did something to them? That’s a fairy tale.”

“A fairy tale?” said Lester. “Well, maybe it is a fairy tale. I’ll tell you one thing, though: If somebody did come in and took on those choppers, it was no fairy. Whoever did that had to been made of some serious stuff. Those French guys were no joke. None of them was much over five feet high, but tough? Didn’t speak a word of English, jabbered away at each other all day long, they never shut up. But they knew how to work, and they knew how to fight. Fight’s what they did when they weren’t working: fight with themselves. They arm wrestled, fought with their fists, their feet, sticks, even knives, even axes. They’d fight with their god damned axes. They were all crazy. The company used to bring them down every year from Canada.”

“They went home,” said Lillian.

“And left all their stuff?” Lester asked her. “Their clothes? Never got paid? Besides, the cops asked. Their people, where they came from, never saw them. The company ended up paying their families — oh, I don’t remember — five thousand, was it? A lot, at the time. Fitz’s old man was pissed.”

“Okay,” said Lillian. “What do you think happened to them, then?”

“I don’t know,” said Lester. “You don’t know what happened up there. But I don’t rule nothing out. The Towns are a funny old place. You’re a long way off the road up there.”

“Fairy tales,” said Lillian.

“Pull it over up ahead,” Lester said to Nate.

They had left the highway and gone north on the road that went into the Lost Towns. For three or four miles it was a good road, then it wasn’t. They bumped hard across washouts, in and out of holes, over rocks. At last Nate brought the truck into a turnout and parked. The four of them sat. All around them were woods full of the midafternoon light and shadow, dense woods that didn’t let you see more than a few yards into them. So quiet: no birdcalls, no noise. The only sound was from an airplane passing somewhere high overhead — that, and the ticking of the truck’s engine as it cooled.

For a minute none of them spoke. Then Lillian asked,“How far is Blackway’s?”

“Another mile, two miles, on this,” said Lester. “Then there’s a log road goes left, up the mountain. Another mile on that.”

“Walking?” Lillian asked.

“That’s right,” said Lester.

“Why?” Lillian asked. “Can’t we make it in this?”

“We could, you know it?” Nate said to Lester.