BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (8 page)

When Clara and Winnie came out to the pueblo
in February, three days of unremitting wind stirred up whirls of
dust, and Winnie developed a cough that kept her confined to the
tent. I gave up on my plan to spend the weekend at a cabin on the
upper Pecos River, where it rolls over ice-covered rocks as it
comes out of the mountains.

Instead we read books by the fireplace in the
mess tent, and in the evenings my whiskey bottle found a home
beside my chair leg. I noticed that Clara seemed a bit preoccupied
and distant, and I attributed it to her concern about Winnie's
health. She had little to say about recent goings on in Santa Fe,
which wasn't like her, since working at the library kept her at the
crossroads of local news and gossip. And while Winnie's presence
meant that I hadn't expected a free-wheeling conjugal circus,
neither had I expected complete abstinence. An empty tent and cot
were available for the taking, but I felt lucky to even make eye
contact with Clara before she and Winnie were ready to go home.

In mid-March I rejoined them in Santa Fe for
a few days. Back in sheltered surroundings, Winnie had overcome her
cough, and she seemed happy to see me. After she came home from
school, we went sledding on a hill near Fort Marcy, and on Sunday
we took a carriage ride up Canyon Road.

But I could tell that some kind of fissure
was forming between Clara and me. Until recently, my sojourns in
Santa Fe had been celebratory affairs. They began with getting
reacquainted in bed, and then proceeded through ritual events like
a hot shave and haircut on De Vargas Street, a welcome-home lunch
of eggs and elk sausage, and Clara's inevitable presentation of a
new shirt, jacket, or pair of gloves. Before Winnie was born, we
would occasionally hire a car and drive with another couple to
Jemez Springs for a few days of soaking in the thermal pools.

Six weeks ago, none of that awaited me when I
came home from Pecos. Instead our conversations seemed perfunctory
and practical, and more than once I felt Clara's appraising eyes on
the back of my neck. It had been a raw winter, and I realized that
I might have looked a bit more weathered than usual, but I was
otherwise unprepared for the chill I encountered.

"Owen, what's wrong with your hand?" Clara
said as she watched me attempt to fill a teaspoon with sugar for my
coffee on my first morning home. My fingers had been trembling for
the last few months when I asked them to perform small-bore tasks
in the morning. I knew that a gulp or two of whiskey would
immediately steady them, but I decided that such a gesture at
breakfast might trigger alarm.

"Nothing serious," I said. "Just a passing
tremor. I sometimes get those from steering-wheel vibrations." I
was pleased with this answer, since I had in fact caught a ride
from Pecos with another worker and had shared the responsibility
for driving the rutted road to Santa Fe.

Clara squinted at me. "It's not just your
hand," she said. "What about your eyes? They look like bloodstains!
And the skin underneath them is dark and hollowed out."

"It's the wind," I said. "Remember how
relentless it was when you were there in January? It blew like that
again the last few days, and I noticed a small hemorrhage in my
left eye yesterday. It's not lasting damage – they clear up after a
week or so."

"Owen, it's not the wind," Clara said. "And
it's not the steering wheel. It's the whiskey – and it's you.
You're turning into someone I don't recognize anymore. Someone I'm
not even sure I want to recognize."

I winced and squinted back, unable to reply
for a few moments. She sounded serious, and I hadn't seen this
coming. She'd waited for Winnie to finish breakfast and retreat to
her room before confronting me. My uncooperative fingers drummed
the side of my chair.

"Clara, I haven't been myself lately. I know
that. I went through that stretch where I couldn't sleep and had
nightmares every night, but I'm getting better now. For a while I
kept remembering the night Drew died, and I think I was still
blaming myself. The whiskey helped me forget and start living in
the present again. So I don't think I'll need it as much from now
on." Even as I uttered these last two sentences, they sounded
fraudulent to me. "Things will get back to normal for us. I think
that's happening already."

For the next two days and nights, Clara
seemed to be giving me the benefit of the doubt. I split wood,
cleared fallen branches from the roof, replaced a broken riser on
the front steps, and left the bottle on the shelf until after
Winnie went to bed. We didn't talk again about my bloodshot eyes or
other shortcomings. But on the fourth morning I woke up in my chair
with my boots extended toward the ashes in the fireplace and the
empty bottle capsized beneath my legs. Winnie was jostling my
shoulder and asking me about a car and whether I was going with
them. When I turned my head and saw Clara standing in the open
doorway across the room, I could tell she was already gone.

***

The brief note Clara left on my bedside table
said that she and Winnie were taking the train to Amarillo to stay
with her sister Julia and her family for a while. I'm sure Julia
has already offered an opinion on whether Clara should move back to
Austin (where she was working at the university library when we
met) or give me more time to exorcise my demons. By the time I
received a letter the following week from Clara confirming that she
and Winnie had settled in at Julia's ranch, I had already decided
that my life was unraveling, and that something had to change.

In my studies at Austin, my subsequent
fieldwork in Colorado and New Mexico, and my family life with Clara
and Winnie, I had slowly and carefully built a world that protected
me from the psychic wounds I suffered the night Drew died. The
bright skies and open spaces of my sagebrush-and-adobe surroundings
covered those wounds like a bandage, and was one reason I rarely
returned to visit my parents in Cabin John during my twenty-two
years out west.

But the wounds beneath the bandage had never
really healed, and now my nightmares and Clara's departure had
ripped the bandage off. Nothing I could do in New Mexico would
change anything. To absolve myself of the guilt I felt for Drew's
death, I had to find out what happened at Garrett's cabin. And that
meant I had to find and confront Henry Zimmerman.

So two weeks ago I told Ted Kidder I needed
to leave Pecos for a month. Then I boarded the Atchison, Topeka and
Santa Fe Railway in Santa Fe and rolled past Colorado's Spanish
Peaks, en route to Wichita and Kansas City. Another AT&SF train
took me to Chicago, where I caught the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad to Washington, D.C. via Wheeling and Cumberland. And from
Washington, the familiar trolley out along the river to Glen Echo
and Cabin John.

I got off at the end of the line, carried my
valise across the bridge, then stopped for an illicit drink in the
basement of the Bridge Hotel before completing my journey with the
short walk to our house on Tomlinson Avenue. My father died six
years ago but my mother lives there still, visited often by my
sister Cornelia (who lives in Georgetown with her family) and
occasionally by Penny in Frederick. My mother is in her late
seventies now and was happy to hear I would be visiting, but she
doesn't know why I'm here.

And right now "here" is a dark, unplowed
field that marks the end of the road to Sandy Landing. Whatever
lost connection to the river inspired that name is meaningless now.
A footpath continues along the trickling stream into the trees,
where a narrow drainage winds down through the woods to what's left
of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, four weeks after a cataclysmic
flood on the Potomac destroyed it.

In the half-hour since I left Drew's grave
I've barely stopped walking, so I pause to remove my hat and feel
the chill against my temples. Dots of sweat on my forehead. I
urinate a long stream into the gulch, draw a sip from the flask,
pull out the pistol, and test its weight in my hand. I hope it
stays in my coat pocket tonight, but I can't predict how Henry
Zimmerman will react when he learns who I am and why I want to see
him. And I can't afford to let him walk away without telling me
what happened on that night in 1902. If I don't interrogate him
tonight, I know I'll never get another chance.

I follow the path into the trees.

Chapter 8

Below Swains Lock, the C&O Canal runs
southeast for a thousand yards or more and the woods ascend steeply
from the canal. Then the river and canal swing clockwise at Sandy
Landing, beginning a long straight shot to Great Falls, and a level
bank of wooded terrain emerges between the canal and the hillside.
This is a place where things wash up during floods, and it's where
I spot the silhouette of the scow.

It had reportedly been tied up at Swains
without a crew when the flood struck on March 30. As the river
engulfed the canal, the scow pulled its mooring-post free and
washed down to this bend, where it fetched up against a sycamore
and a swamp oak. The flood passed, and multiple breaks drained most
of the canal's water down into the river. Thanks to its flat bottom
and the level tree-studded berm, the scow was left upright, with
its stern lodged on the muddied bank and its bow skewed toward the
hillside.

I stand amidst debris on the berm and study
it through the ambient light. It's shaped like the repair scows
that typically work the canal – ten feet wide and maybe forty feet
long, with five feet from the deck hatches to the bottom. Two
cube-like cabins protrude from the deck: a windowless one near the
bow that serves as a stable for the mules, and another near the
stern.

This aft cabin is seven feet long, seven feet
high, and the full width of the scow, with a single window on each
side. If it's like the quarters on most canal boats, half its
entryway is below deck, and you descend a few steps to reach it. As
I approach, a dim yellow light illuminates the starboard window
from within.

Avoiding the window, I reach the dirt-stained
hull of the scow near the anchoring sycamore. Someone has hacked a
foothold wedge from its trunk, and the triangle of fresh wood glows
in the dim light. I place both hands on the rail, lift my boot into
the wedge, and push myself up onto the deck, then stand still for a
few seconds to orient myself.

As it had appeared from the berm, the scow
feels level, and while covered with decaying buds and flowers from
the trees, the hatch underfoot seems solid and undamaged. The light
in the window implies Zimmerman is here, so I walk across the deck
and back to let him hear my footsteps. Then I follow the race plank
along the rail back to the stern, where three steps descend to the
cabin door. Heart pounding, I push it open and step into the warmer
air inside.

Like the rest of the scow, the cabin wasn't
damaged by the flood. I survey its cramped interior. Directly in
front of me, in the right corner of the forward wall, stands a
blackened rectangular coal stove with a vent pipe that runs up
through the ceiling. The stove door is ajar and the coals within
are orange. The wall is centered by a freestanding cupboard whose
open doors reveal shelves holding a few old cups and an oil lamp
that lights the room. The scow has been here for a month, and
scavengers must have taken whatever provisions its crew had
stocked.

On my immediate left is a drop-leaf table
that folds down from the cabin's aft wall and projects its free end
into the cabin. It's lowered, and a pair of scarred wooden stools
face each other across the table top. Past the table two narrow
bunks are built into the port-side wall, one at knee level and one
just below the rib-high window. Rumpled blankets suggest both have
been recently used. Zimmerman sits on the edge of the lower bunk,
forearms resting on his knees and hands dangling toward the
floor.

"Welcome, my friend," he says, looking up at
me with a lopsided smile. His prominent eyes stand out against the
sunken skin around them. If they were quick and blue thirty-one
years ago when he pulled me from the mine, they're now a watery
shade of pale as they pan slowly in the lamplight. Gray strands
sweep back across his age-spotted scalp, but most of his hair is
gone. I'm thirty-eight and he's Drew's age, which would make him
forty-nine. He looks much older. Heroin, I think, and probably
opium or morphine. And twenty-two years of uneasy miles since that
night in 1902.

"I hope you come alone, Mr. Owens." His voice
has lost depth but retains the nasal notes and cadences of his
hill-country roots. "Your niece gave me a name I trust. The problem
is, she don’t know him. And she says you don’t know him. So maybe
you can tell me the missing piece.”

I pull the nearest stool out and sit down,
facing him with my hands on the table. My heart thumps hard but
slower, seeking its normal rhythm, as the pistol pulls my coat
pocket toward the floor. I don’t know the name he’s referring to or
how Isabelle came up with it. She lives in the area and knows a few
questionable characters. But Zimmerman is admitting that he doesn’t
know the connection to the name he trusts either.

“Clay Austin,” I answer. “A war hero from New
York, moved to California.” Hoping this pedigree leaves enough
possibilities open, I pluck the flask from my other pocket and
place it on the table. "Maybe you'll join me for a drink to friends
of friends."

Zimmerman manages a wheezy laugh, then stands
up abruptly without using his hands. I reassess his condition; he's
weathered but not old or frail. He retrieves two battered tin cups
from the cupboard. Between the cupboard and the bunk is a counter
built into the cabin wall, under which sits a five-gallon cask that
I hadn't previously noticed. Zimmerman picks it up and deposits it
on the counter, then twists the tap open and fills each cup
halfway.