Darkness the Color of Snow (17 page)

The irony of their reversal of the conventional didn't escape him. The thrill of protecting, even possessing in courtship, turned against him as he became the vulnerable one, kept. When, on rare occasion, he made love to both Pam and Bonita in the same day, he began to despair that Pam didn't care what he did when he wasn't around her. He took refuge where he could, in drinking.

Did the affair lead to the drinking, or the drinking to the affair? He'd never been able to decide, knowing just that it was a time of being lost, walking in circles, trying to find a way out among an infinity of ways that led nowhere. And it was only when Pam cut him loose, tired of the drinking and moping, that he was able to right himself, quit drinking, and work his way back to something that seemed, to him, normal.

And considering this now—­the feeling of being lost, the inability to choose any particular direction—­Gordy realizes that he's lost. Not metaphorically, but literally lost. He has wandered from the ruts and into some smaller trail, likely a deer trail that is beginning to get smaller and smaller.

The only thing to do is to go back and walk carefully, feeling the way with his feet until he hits the ruts of the old logging road again, and then head either out or back to Pam's and his cruiser. The logging road isn't far. He comes on it in a matter of only a few minutes. But once back to the logging road, he has to decide whether he needs to turn right or left to make it out to Town Pound Road. There's not enough sunlight through the solid gray clouds to indicate direction. He curses himself for not paying more attention as he came down the road. To wander off a logging road is pretty hard to do, and to lose one's direction is just plain stupid, but he has, and now he has to make a decision. Only he doesn't. If he turns the correct way, he will walk on to Town Pound Road. If he goes the wrong way, he will be back at Pam's and his cruiser. He turns left and starts walking, and he walks until he comes up to the broken brush that lead to the white Lexus, and, beyond that, to Pam's little farm.

“You forget something?” she asks as he walks back between the goat pens.

“No, not really.”

“Got lost, huh?”

“Yeah. I guess I did.”

“It's all right. The logging road comes out just a quarter mile beyond Bird Creek. Can't really miss it if you're paying attention.”

“And why didn't you tell me this earlier?”

“You seemed set on a walk through the woods. I wasn't going to spoil that for you.”

“Well, thanks for that. I think I'll just get in the cruiser and head back to the station. We'll have someone out here to get the car off the property.”

“Gordy, when you get to the end of River Rock Road, turn left.”

“I haven't forgotten.”

“Could have fooled me.”

R
ONNY
F
ORBERT STAYS
in bed after he wakes. He goes back over the whole scene in his mind. Why didn't he give Matt Laferiere a field sobriety test? He tried, but Matt refused. Is that right? Is that true? Did he try? He thinks he did. He's pretty sure of it. He got Laferiere into position, legs spread, hands on top of car.

He took one hand down. Right? Left? Right. Cuffed it. Pulled the other hand down. That's when it all started. Laferiere spun to his left and tried to grab him by the back. He spun around himself, grabbing Laferiere by the front of his jacket. They spun together and Laferiere slipped. Or did he slip? He slipped. Laferiere came across his body and thumped against Ronny's leg. He went down and sprawled into the road, which lit up with the headlights of the car. Did he put his leg out to trip Laferiere? No. Yes? He can't remember.

He gets up, starts the coffee, goes back into the bedroom, and gets down on the floor. He stretches his hamstrings, quads, and lats. He does one hundred crunches, a hundred reverse crunches, then forty push-­ups. He struggles with the last four or five of the push-­ups. How long has it been since he's been in the gym? He had better get in there today. He is starting to feel the deterioration already.

While he showers, he goes through it all in his mind again. The leg. That's what really bothers him. His leg. Did he deliberately try to trip Matt? Did he do it accidentally? Did he do it at all? He feels the thump of Matt's leg against his just as Matt lurches out onto the road. But this is new. He didn't remember that earlier. Is it coming clear in his mind, or is he making this up?

Out of the shower and dressed, he calls Nessa, and this time she picks up.

“Hi. You have time to get some breakfast, before class?” he asks.

“No. I'm afraid not. I have a final this morning at eleven. I don't feel at all prepared for it. I need to study.”

“How about after? Lunch? Dinner?”

“No. I'm so sorry. Tomorrow I have two more finals. I'm going to be studying for those right up to the last minute. And one more the next day. Then I'm done. No more. I can do whatever I want, and I want to be with you. Is that OK? I know this is a really bad time for you. I know you need some company and some talk, and that I'm letting you down. I feel bad. This really makes me feel awful. Can you hang in there?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I can hang in. You hang in, too. I remember what finals are like. But I need to see you. Soon. It's kind of a rough time.”

“I know it is. I'll see you soon. Very soon. Promise. Call me whenever you want.”

“It's OK. It really is. I'm OK.” He hangs up and sighs. He's trying to be understanding. He really is, but he's finding it difficult. He remembers finals in college. It was a bad time, and he always tries to give her plenty of room to take care of her studies, even though it probably means losing her sometime after graduation to a job in some other place. What will happen then, he doesn't know. In the meantime, he's going to respect her plans. He isn't the fool that Matt Laferiere was.

But it's the isolation that gets to him. He's been alone most of his life, but he has never felt so alone as he does now. He's living inside his head, and he needs to get out of it. The whole thing just keeps replaying and replaying, and he can't stop it.

He needs to get out of his apartment, but he has nowhere to go. He can't go to the station, and he can't see Nessa.

And that bothers him. It's as if he and Matt Laferiere are in a battle for Nessa, and he's losing to a dead guy. He's never been able to completely believe that Nessa is his girlfriend. Somehow, somewhere he has always sensed Matt's presence in his relationship with her, as if one or the other of them has never quite let go of Matt, though both of them should have, and they both claim to have let go long ago.

He wonders sometimes if Nessa is with him just to spite Matt Laferiere for the many slights he gave her. And in the past few days, he has started to wonder if he is with Nessa to get back at Matt for turning his back on him after the fire. Now Matt is dead, but he doesn't seem to want to stay dead, mocking him, even when Ronny wins, even when Matt is dead.

He's always had the feeling that he has lucked into his relationship with Vanessa Woodridge. Looked at from nearly any angle, it would seem that she is out of his league. She's attractive and self-­possessed, as if nothing in Lydell actually sticks to her. She is, by his standards, rich, though she denies it. Her mother teaches and her father is a lawyer, albeit a small-­town one, one who has served on the town council and now represents the town in legal matters. She was popular in high school, though not of cheerleader caliber, and smart, though she has chosen to go to community college in Warrentown, rather than one of the universities.

And Ronny is neither rich nor popular, and though smart enough, he's never been ambitious enough to push that. He has gone to the same college Vanessa attends, but in criminal justice while working as a patrolman. They seem to have little in common, except Lydell and Matt Laferiere.

H
E HAD BEEN
a probationary patrolman, getting ready to go through the academy, on the first assignment of his career—­directing traffic around a construction site on Route 78. It was late June, and he wore a fluorescent-­yellow nylon safety vest over his summer white shirt and dark pants. The shirt was already soaked with sweat, and his pants were beginning to chafe.

One hundred yards up the road was Vanessa Woodridge, who had been Matt Laferiere's girl up until six months ago. The argument had seemed to be over Vanessa's decision to go to college after graduation from high school. Ronny wasn't sure about that, but Matt seemed plenty pissed off that she was set on doing it. It didn't seem to Ronny that it was the sort of thing you broke up over, but then he had never had a real girlfriend, only hookups and fumblings in the dark. The whole thing seemed odd to him.

Vanessa was the construction company's official director of traffic. She carried an orange stop sign on a short stick. She wore a yellow safety vest, too, but underneath she wore a white T-­shirt and cutoff jeans rolled up, and heavy work boots on her feet. It was a pretty good look, Ronny thought. Her hair was tucked under a yellow hard hat, but it was already coming down in long, sweated strands. He had never seen her this way, sweated and wearing cutoffs. The clothes surprised him and made her seem more complicated and mysterious than she had ever seemed before.

A giant Caterpillar excavator was tearing chunks of pavement out of Route 78. It would roll onto the highway, the bucket would come down, the huge teeth on the bucket tearing, buckling, then breaking the asphalt, and pulling up the dirt and gravel under it. Then the bucket would rise, and the excavator would back up, turn, drop the load into a pile in a dump truck, and come back into the road.

When the excavator came onto the pavement, Vanessa would stop the traffic until the excavator had bitten again and taken its load away. Then she would let the traffic through, one lane at a time. Ronny stood by cruiser four, the worst heap of a car he had ever driven, to take the other direction if they needed to stop traffic in both lanes, and as a backup in case some impatient driver tried to do something stupid and ignore the woman with the sign.

He checked his watch. It was two fourteen. The work crew was on until four thirty, and so was he. He heard Vanessa yell. He looked up and saw the excavator lumbering toward a blue Camry in its path. Vanessa was waving the stop sign in front of the Camry, which stopped and backed up. Crisis avoided. There was nothing interesting here.

Then the driver of the excavator, a guy he barely knew from school a few years earlier, leaned out of his cab and yelled something at Vanessa that Ronny couldn't hear. She shook her head and raised her hands up in bewilderment. The car was out of the way, Vanessa was back off the road, and the excavator came the rest of the way forward, took its chunk of pavement, and backed off. Vanessa reversed the sign for the Camry from Stop to Slow.

And then it happened again. The excavator, still fully loaded, jerked forward and came toward the Camry. Vanessa yelled and the excavator stopped, inched forward again, then stopped and backed up. Vanessa watched as the excavator backed up farther, then waved the Camry through. The excavator lurched forward, stopped, then backed up again.

Ronny walked over to Vanessa, who was turning her head rapidly from the Camry to the excavator, which had now turned in preparation for dumping his load into the truck. “What's going on?” he asked Vanessa.

“I don't know. He's being an asshole. He's not paying attention to me, like he can't read the signals. I don't know what's going on. Ask him.” She turned away in obvious disgust.

Ronny nodded like he knew a cop should, then turned and walked back to where the excavator was dropping the rest of its load. He walked up to the side of it and knocked on the window glass. “Is there a problem?”

“Hey, man,” the driver said. “No problem. No problem at all.”

“You scared the hell out of the guy in the Camry. Her, too.”

The driver smiled. “It's all good, man.”

“You two need to be in better sync.”

“I'd like to sync with her. That's a sweet little ass there. Think she's going to pee her pants?”

“I think you guys better get back to work and quit fucking around.”

The driver grinned again and saluted.

T
HE NEXT TRIP
to the road was uneventful, but on the one after that, the excavator started to back off then lurched forward toward a white F-­150 that had just started to cross the site. Again, Vanessa yelled. Ronny moved forward and pointed back, telling the driver to get the excavator out of the way. He could see the driver grinning at him.

Fifteen minutes later it happened again. This time the excavator went right at Vanessa, causing her to turn and run. Ronny ran back to the site. “I saw that,” he said.

“Me, too. Love it when she turns around, though her front isn't bad, either.”

“Quit fucking around,” Ronny said. “Get back and do your job. Leave her alone.”

“I'm just fucking with her. No harm. Just playing. This job is boring as shit.”

You should try my job, Ronny thought. “Quit fucking with her. Quit fucking with me. Quit fucking with the traffic. Now. I'm telling you.”

“Or what?”

He hesitated. He remembered this guy from high school, though he was older than Ronny. He had something of the reputation of a badass back then. A slight tremor of fear rose from his memory. “Or you're going to jail. Public endangerment.”

“Oh, fuck. Get real. Stop being a hard-­ass. It's just a little fun on a hot afternoon.”

“I mean it. You do it again, and you're going to jail.”

“Yeah? What then? The job gets shut down, everyone loses money, and it's all your fault.”

“No, not my fault. Your fault. You've been warned. That's all you get. One warning. I want this stopped right now.”

The driver scowled and put the excavator into reverse. It lurched backward.