The River Burns (27 page)

“I'm trying to give them a chance. I don't think they like me.”

Skootch laughed. “Women, eh?” he said. He put his head back and hooted. “Woo-wee! The games they play! Imagine that. Playing hard to get in this day and age. You show them, Jake. You've got it in you. I see what you're doing now, what's your plan, and I have to tell you that I am relieved.”

“My plan,” Jake said.

“Yeah, letting them think you've got something on the side, back in town. That'll get them thinking. They'll fret and get wet. Are you loyal, Jake?”

“What? Yeah. Sure.”

“You won't make a grand a day, I can't allow it for your sake or mine, but especially yours. Are you damn loyal anyway?”

“I said yes. Yeah.”

This time when Skootch put his hand on his shoulder the fingers worked into his muscles, hurting him. He noticeably recoiled.

“Because if you're not loyal I'll slice your earlobes off right here, right now. They're a little large.”

“With what?” Jake asked, and he smiled. He thought he was making a joke, rare for him, although his jokes had a habit of going awry.

“With this,” Skootch said, and he produced an impressive hunting knife in his opposite hand. He placed the blade gently under Jake's chin and Jake fell back farther and lay flat on the ground, panting, searching about. They had run through the woods, over streams and up hills, and Skootch, close to naked in his thong and his sandals, wasn't carrying a knife. Now he did, and Jake Withers was desperately afraid of him.

“Skootch. Come on.”

He leaned over him. He smiled as Jake's breathing grew erratic.

“Are you loyal, Jake, my boy? Are you now?”

Jake nodded in the affirmative.

“Yeah? You'll do what you're told? You'll make your rounds? You won't cheat me out of so much as a dime? I've got a ton of mouths to feed, Jake. You're going to stick your dick into some of those mouths I'm feeding. I don't want you to rip me off.”

“I won't, Skootch. Come on. I'm loyal.”

“Yeah? So I can stick my dick into you anytime I want? In your mouth? Up your ass slowly?”

“Come on. Don't talk to me like that.”

“Don't tell me what to do or say, Jake.”

“You're not that way.”

Skootch laughed. “You don't have any clue what way I am, Jake. No clue.” He removed the blade from the young man's skin but he did not move away from him or let him up. “Relax. I'm talking in metaphors, man. Don't you know metaphor? So, metaphorically, Jake, will you take it up the ass for me or not? I'm asking you that in a friendly manner. I really want an answer, though.”

Jake did not want to reply but he knew that he should. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

“You will, yeah?”

“Metaphorically, yeah. Of course. I'm loyal.”

Pulling away from him finally, letting him sit up, Skootch sat on a patch of grass himself. “Some people think I'm a hard-ass, Jake. But am I really? I want my people to be loyal to the man who makes them rich and who takes good care of them around the clock. Honestly, do I ask so much?”

Jake chose to brush twigs and dirt off his sweaty skin.

“Do I now?”

“Course not. We're loyal, Skootch. That's not too much to ask.”

He nodded to indicate that he was satisfied, and stuck the knife upright in the ground.

“Where'd you get that?” Jake asked him.

Skootch looked at the knife. The intensity went out of him, and he seemed abruptly disinterested in their circumstances.

“Sporting goods store. Hunting section. Why? Do you want it?”

“Yeah? No, I mean, where'd it come from out here? You didn't leave the camp with that.”

“We haven't left our camp, Jake.” He looked at the young man, then with his chin inscribed a broader territory. “What you see around you, the whole of the forest, this is our home. It's our divine encampment, Jake.”

Jake nodded, and he wondered about a variety of things, and he wanted this day to end soon.

“Come on. Catch your breath. I'll show you something.”

Skootch left the knife in the ground. Jake found that strange and looked back several times as they walked on through a thicket when there seemed to be many easy routes to follow. Then they broke out onto a small clearing that was surrounded by the thicket, but here a rock outcropping restricted the vegetation and Jake gazed at a rectangular wood box with a lid.

“Open it,” Skootch instructed him.

He was flapping his hands at mosquitoes tormenting his neck and a deer fly trying to land in his hair. But he opened the box, which was about a foot deep and fourteen inches wide and about two and a half feet long. Inside were rags, empty bottles, and jars filled with liquid.

“When you come out here, bring matches. You got the fixings for Molotov cocktails. Do you know what they are, Jake?”

He nodded. “I don't get it,” Jake said.

“Go back and get the knife,” Skootch told him.

“The knife? I don't know if I can find it.”

“Try.”

Jake went back through the thicket the way they came and picked up a route that seemed familiar. When he came out to the area where they were sitting earlier he couldn't find the knife, although he saw where it had stabbed the earth. Skootch came up behind him, having leisurely followed along behind.

“I don't get it,” Jake said.

“We didn't come alone,” Skootch informed him. “Come with me.”

They walked. This time he took an easy route, but the farther they went along the quicker became the pace. Skootch could walk so quickly that Jake needed to break into a trot from time to time to keep up. They emerged onto a gravel road, and Skootch walked along it for a while and then returned to the forest. He stopped, and they waited in the bush.

“Have you been listening?” Skootch asked him.

“To what?” Jake asked.

“That's my point,” Skootch said, and he tore off across the road, bent over like a soldier hoping to elude gunfire. Jake did the same.

They walked through another section of standing timber and this time they came out to an area where a young woman whom Jake recognized was looking away from them through a set of binoculars. She was a very rounded girl who seemed athletic for her ample size. Something in the way she stood and sweated in the sunlight caused Jake to think that. Her hair was pulled straight back to a ponytail and she squinted quite severely when she turned and looked at them, holding the binoculars high in both hands. She wore shorts. Her white tank top with broad shoulder straps was damp with sweat and Jake could make out the ring of her left aureole very clearly and the soft jut of the nipple. She raised the binoculars again, which pushed up her ample cleavage, as he and Skootch came alongside her.

“No trucks?” Skootch asked.

“Nary a one. Anywhere.”

“I never heard a single diesel today.”

“What's the deal?” she asked.

“They've moved their operations. Probably to Maniwaki. They've got a smaller job site up there.”

“There's a few pickups around. That's about all they left behind.”

Skootch appeared to be thinking.

“No, let's stick to Plan A. We'll be patient. They have to come back here. They can no more abandon these woods than we can. Jake?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know Belinda well?”

“Yeah. Hi, Belinda.”

“Hi.”

“What I mean is, do you really know her? She likes you. Did you know that or did that skip your notice?”

He was embarrassed. He hoped that Skootch wasn't going to humiliate him in front of her. He noticed that Belinda was smiling sweetly, that she was not embarrassed by this, and then he accidentally glanced at her nipple. Her breasts were so large. He'd never been with a big woman. He steered clear. He was thinking that it might be interesting in the right circumstances, if she liked him well enough.

“I'm going to leave you two lovebirds alone,” Skootch informed them. “We'll pick this up later, Jake. When you're done with him, Belinda, guide him home. The poor boy will only get lost out here.”

“No problem,” she said. Then, just as he was leaving, she passed him the knife. Skootch was about to take it when he changed his mind. “Put it back where you found it.” He held his hand up high to Jake. They hooked their thumbs together and clasped hands. “Loyalty, Jake,” Skootch breathed in his ear. “Loyalty is its own reward. You'll see.”

“Loyalty,” the younger man repeated, then he was suddenly alone with Belinda as Skootch disappeared into the woods.

She laughed.

“What?” Jake asked.

“You look really weird in that loincloth thingy. Not to mention the fucking war paint. What've you been doing? Playing Tarzan?”

“It's what Skootch wears,” he protested.

“Yeah. Skootch. Consider the source, man.”

Jake managed to smile. “Yeah. I guess. Tarzan. Something like that.” He didn't want any attention on his loincloth, but Melinda was looking and then she stopped smiling and lifted her shirt right up and over her head. She wore nothing underneath and her breasts he saw were large and plump and so big and really sweaty. He stared. Her nipples were huge. She placed her left hand under one large breast and raised it up.

“Why don't you just take that silly thing off?” she suggested.

Jake found nothing to say. The size of her nipples impressed him. The one grew as she kneaded herself.

“The loincloth,” she added.

“Here?” Jake wondered.

“You know a better place?”

Her right hand started to slide underneath the cloth while he flinched and considered what to do.

“Good lump,” she noted.

■   ■   ■

Ryan O'Farrell booked off, but
he did not drive the squad car home, a privilege afforded him by his rank, and he did not change out of his uniform. Instead, he drove up to his brother's house, parked on the street rather than the driveway, crossed the lawn, and knocked on the screen door. The wood door behind it was wide open. He could hear his nephews' voices rise from the backyard, and the next time he knocked he banged the door louder.

Valérie was coming to see who was there. He knew it was her, but looking through the screen into the dimness of the house he could not evaluate her expression or attitude. She wasn't really paying attention and had only the screen to open, but as she did so she was surprised to see Ryan.

“Hi, Val.” Quietly.

She looked at him, then looked across her lawn at the squad car, then she chose to step outside and let the door slap shut behind her. She was carrying a dish towel.

“The front door, Ry?”

He looked sheepish for only a moment before he gathered his resolve. “I need to talk to Denny. Maybe it's better that we don't have that conversation in front of the kids.”

“So you're being considerate.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“Do you see his truck in the driveway?”

Ryan didn't need to look. “I do.”

“Then he's home.” She folded her arms across her chest, the dish towel dangling from a hand. She scrutinized him with some degree of venom but Ryan did not relent, then suddenly she did. “Ry. Talk to me first.”

“Sure.” He shrugged.

She stepped to the edge of the small porch. “How bad does this get?”

What he took to be venom, he saw now, was that but also a mixture of hurt, worry, anger, bewilderment, and fear.

“You're not saying he did it, are you?” Although he asked a question, he continued very quickly so that she wouldn't have a chance to answer. “Because I don't want you to say that, no matter what. Especially to me, but not to anybody, ever. Not even, and this is important, not even to Denny.”

“What are you saying?”

“Because you'll have to convince yourself otherwise if you expect to have a chance here.”

“Ry—”

“Do you want to keep your husband home, looking after you and the kids, or do you want him in jail?”

“I want him home!” she burst out. “What a stupid question. Ryan!” But she wanted to say a lot more besides that, only Ryan wouldn't let her.

“Then listen to me. Think differently and in a hurry. It's about the only chance you've got.”

“Are you going to arrest him?”

Ryan looked down at the porch deck, then away, then back at her. “Val. It's not going to be me.”

She held his gaze awhile. Her eldest was calling for her from the backyard when they both heard Denny's voice demand his silence.

“SQ,” she said, meaning the provincial police, la Sûreté du Québec.

The skin on Ryan's chin flinched, as if to confirm this.

Val exhaled, nodded, then did her best to get across a smile. “Good. Good. Okay. I didn't want Denny to have to deal with you.”

“They're not going to give him a free pass.”

She smiled, and opened the door. “It doesn't matter who they send,” she told him. “Whoever it is won't be smart like you, or tough like you. Thanks for chatting. I'll get Denny away from the barbecue. And thanks.”

“For what?”

“The front door.”

Ryan paced the porch awhile, and finally sat on a railing with one foot on the floor and the other raised. He heard Denny's boots coming down the hall but he didn't look up until they went still. Denny remained inside the house, looking at him through the screen.

“Officer,” Denny said.

“Denny.”

“What can I do for you today?”

“I'd like you to answer a few questions.”

“You can't ask me a few questions while I'm looking after the barbecue? You can't ask me a few questions over dinner? We have to be out here? We're having Atlantic salmon tonight, Ry. I know you prefer Pacific but it was the best we could find on short notice.”