Walking the Bones Read online

  “Now you’re insulting me,” she told him.

  “He’s not a sociable man, Jayme. You surely know that by now.”

  She sat with her eyes down, lower lip pouting. Then said, “And what if he decides he wants to take off somewhere?”

  “You talk him out of it.”

  “That’s the thing, though. I think it might be the best thing for him. Get him away from that dark little cave full of bad memories.”

  “The cave is in his head,” he told her.

  She sat motionless for a few moments, then put her hands on her knees and stood. “This conversation is getting us nowhere.”

  He shrugged. “Let me know if you come up with something better.”

  FOURTEEN

  Jayme had to wait until Saturday, after dinner, after lovemaking, and halfway through The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada on Cinemax, to hear about DeMarco’s conversation with Kyle Bowen the previous Thursday. They lay scrunched pleasantly together under a faux fur blanket on DeMarco’s La-Z-Boy, DeMarco in boxers, a T-shirt, and clean white socks, Jayme naked but for her freckles.

  “So Kyle thinks I should use up some of my sick leave before officially retiring.”

  “Really?” she said. “You could do that?”

  “Apparently I can sell back two hundred days of sick leave. I have two-hundred ninety-three.”

  “Wow. That sounds like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Medical leave. It kind of feels like cheating.”

  On the TV screen Tommy Lee Jones as Pete was talking with a blind old man who wanted Pete to shoot him. The old man was alone in a desolate land, with no one to take care of him. He wanted to die but did not want to offend God by committing suicide. Pete did not want to offend God by committing murder.

  Only when Pete and his prisoner were riding away with the decaying corpse of Melquiades Estrada did Jayme and DeMarco return to their conversation. Jayme said, “Would it really be cheating, though? I mean…I know you’re still sort of struggling with everything that happened. Though I’m assuming that everything went fine with the psychiatrist.”

  “Super fine. We’re bosom buddies now.”

  “Uh-oh. What did you say to him?”

  “It’s in my personnel file if you want to read it.”

  “I would never ask to do that.”

  His hand, resting under her thigh, squeezed lightly. “He recommended continuing cognitive behavioral therapy and stress reduction training. Both in the form of sex. As frequently as possible.”

  She chuckled. “Okay. So are you getting enough of that?”

  “For now,” he said. “I might need some more after the movie’s over.”

  She turned her head against his shoulder, her mouth to his T-shirt. He felt the warmth of her breath going into him.

  “Thing is,” he told her, “my health insurance would stay active.”

  “That’s a good thing,” she said. “So you think you’ll do it? Take the medical leave?”

  “It’s hard for me, you know?”

  “In what way?”

  “It’s like admitting that I…I don’t know. Can’t handle things.”

  She was glad he couldn’t see her face just then. She tried to keep her breathing steady.

  “I don’t think it’s like that at all,” she said. “Medical leave just gives you a little extra time to handle things. You can handle anything. You always have.”

  DeMarco watched the television screen. “Tommy Lee Jones certainly can. Was this movie before or after No Country for Old Men?”

  “I’m not sure. He looks younger in this one.”

  “You know he went to Harvard? He was Al Gore’s roommate.”

  “Seriously?”

  “He was an English major. And an All-Ivy guard on the football team.”

  “You’re making this up, right?”

  “His father started out as a Texas cowboy, ended up working in the oil fields.”

  “You must admire him to know so much about him.”

  DeMarco watched the screen a while. Then he said, “I was twenty-four years old when I saw him in The Fugitive. That’s when I decided I wanted a career in law enforcement.”

  “Twenty-four,” she said. “And before that?”

  “Nothing significant. Graduated high school by the skin of my teeth. Then a year and a half of drinking, fighting, working in a steel mill in Youngstown. Then I beat the crap out of a guy for insulting a girl I was with, and that got me arrested. The judge gave me the choice of a year in prison or a hitch in the military.”

  “Where did you serve?”

  “Five months in Panama, one tour in Iraq. The rest of it stateside. Then back home to nothing and nobody. I spent the first day home alone in the movie theater.”

  “The Fugitive.”

  “The U.S. Marshals program required a college degree. So did the FBI. That left the state police. I didn’t want to end up arresting any of my old acquaintances, so I moved thirty miles east.”

  “And here you are,” she said.

  “In the arms of a beautiful woman.”

  They held each other close and did not speak for a while. Telling her about his past, spontaneously and without coercion, was not something he had expected to do, but now, having done it, he felt both relieved and embarrassed.

  Then he asked, as the credits rolled, “You want me to rewind the last half of the movie? I apologize for talking so much.”

  “You’re better than any movie,” she told him.

  He smiled. “Even Apocalypse Now?”

  “Except for Marlon Brando’s death scene,” she said. “That’s pretty hard to top.”

  He pulled her against him, his mouth to her ear, and whispered, in his best Marlon Brando voice, “The horror…the horror…”

  FIFTEEN

  Sometimes when they were making love she would think about the very first time with DeMarco, and how, when it was transpiring, she had thought, This is just like my very first time when I was fifteen.

  The first time with DeMarco had been more than a year earlier, before his final break with his wife, Laraine, before the terrible shock of the death of Thomas Huston and his family. Had she left that night up to DeMarco, the date would have ended with a peck on the cheek in the restaurant’s parking lot. Instead, she followed him home not secretly but playfully, never trying to hide her car from his rearview mirror. Then, at his garage, after he pulled inside, she had blocked the door with her car and climbed out. When he came walking up to her looking puzzled, she took his hand and said, I want to see where you live, but was thinking how you live, because she wanted to know everything she could about him and was afraid he would never make himself available to her again.

  Inside the house he poured a short drink of whiskey for each of them, carried them into the living room and put her glass on the coffee table in front of the sofa, then carried his glass to the La-Z-Boy where he sat down. This is it, he’d said as if there was nothing more to his house or to him. At the restaurant he had been funny and attentive but now inside his house with only a dim kitchen light on behind them he was serious again. So she picked up her glass and sipping from it she did a slow dance over to his chair, then straddled his knees and sat down.

  He looked surprised but otherwise did not move or speak, and it was just like her first time when she was barely fifteen and seduced an older man. Back then she had tickled the man’s ribs and he had laughed uncomfortably and said, Aren’t you a little big to be sitting on me like this? And now she touched her glass to DeMarco’s cheek and he said, Maybe this isn’t a good idea, Jayme. She knew both times that they wanted her but didn’t want to want her, and that only made her want them more. It made her want to make it happen whether they were willing or not. To make it happen even though they were fighting their own desires
and she was the object of those desires. No matter how they protested she just kept smiling and touching them until there was no way she would give up or agree to their denials.

  That first time, she was only guessing when it came to blowjobs. All she knew about them was from the older girl next door who, before she was killed, showed Jayme on her arm how to give what she called the perfect blowjob. But with DeMarco, Jayme had no doubts that she was doing it right and in both cases it got her into their beds and into their heads and their hearts, where she wanted and needed to be.

  After the first time when she was fifteen they had not stopped for the next seven years, meeting whenever and wherever they could and even choosing her college so they could be close enough to get together for weekends. It only stopped because he could not believe it wasn’t wrong and he always hated himself for it afterward, he said. With DeMarco the first time wasn’t pleasant afterward because he hated himself for past deeds and hated having good feelings for anybody else.

  But then a year later he relented for a reason she still could not understand and now they were together. She did not feel bad about any of it and refused to admit any wrongdoing, either the first time or with DeMarco. She knew he was hurting himself by wanting her but the desire must have been stronger than the pain because she was with him always now and his hunger for her was as real and tangible as hers for him. Both hungers came from a place she didn’t fully understand and told herself she didn’t need to understand. But there was nothing wrong with love and she would never agree that any kind of love could ever be wrong.

  SIXTEEN

  Sunday morning. DeMarco was at the sink, scrubbing out the skillet in which he had made their huevos DeMarco—scrambled eggs seasoned with adobo, then mixed with chopped poblano pepper, chopped onion, and sweet Italian sausage, topped with melted provolone, salsa verde, and a dash of hot sauce, and served on half a toasted everything bagel. Jayme was seated at the small table near the window, sipping coffee.

  “I’ve made an observation,” she said.

  He looked over his shoulder. “It’s about my butt, isn’t it?”

  “Your butt and the rest of you,” she said. “You’re a contradiction.”

  He smiled. “We’re putting our master’s in psychology to work, are we?”

  “On one hand you’re a creature of routine,” she told him. “You rely on old habits and routines to get you through six days of every week.”

  “You being the seventh day?”

  “Correct,” she said. “Which only shows that you can be adaptive when necessary.”

  “Or when properly motivated.”

  “Every Sunday morning you make breakfast for me. And, by all appearances, you enjoy doing so.”

  “I do enjoy it,” he said, and rinsed the skillet under the tap.

  “Invariably you start with some established recipe, such as huevos rancheros, and then you…”

  “Screw it up?”

  “Improvise. You look in the refrigerator, you look in the cupboard, and then, twenty minutes later, huevos DeMarco. Now tell me the truth. Have you ever made that dish before this morning?”

  He placed the skillet in the drying rack, dried his hands on a dish towel, then turned to face her. “With precisely those same ingredients? I honestly don’t remember.”

  “Most times you like to present yourself as a stodgy old curmudgeon. But you’re not stodgy and you’re not old.”

  He crossed to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat across from her. “I’m still waiting for you to say I’m not a curmudgeon.”

  “Oh, you can be curmudgeonly. But you’re not a curmudgeon.”

  “I’m still in training,” he said with a smile.

  “Have you really thought about how you will fill those five and a half days of former routine if you retire? You’re not even fifty yet, Ryan. What will you do with all those empty hours? Go sit beside somebody’s grave?”

  DeMarco flinched. He sat back in his chair. “Don’t pull any punches on my account,” he said.

  “I care about you.”

  “And I care about you.”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “Does the word love frighten you?”

  He felt an urge to stand, get up and walk away. But he forced himself to remain sitting. “It’s not a word I take lightly.”

  “Is that why you won’t use it with me? Because you don’t love me?”

  Without thinking, he laid a fist against his chest. Suddenly he was having trouble breathing. “Why does it have to be said? Don’t I show how I feel about you?”

  “Every Saturday afternoon through Sunday afternoon, yes.”

  When he offered no response, she said, “You’ve made me a part of your routine, that’s all. My question is, what happens when you have no routine? What happens to us? And more importantly, Ryan, what happens to you?”

  It took him a long time to answer. “I’ll adapt,” he said. “We’ll adapt.”

  She smiled and reached out her hand, laid it atop his. “In other words, my love, you have no clue what you’re going to do when you retire. Or what will happen to us. Do you?”

  He turned his hand beneath hers, fitted their fingers together. “I’m going to take the medical leave,” he told her. “Ninety-three days. After that, what happens happens.”

  “Que será, será.”

  “Something like that.”

  She held his hand a little tighter. “And what if you had a companion for those ninety-three days? How would you feel about that?”

  “I have been thinking about getting a dog.”

  “Asshole,” she said as she gave his hand a jerk. “What if I go on leave too? A three-month sabbatical with you? We can travel. We can stay in bed all day. You can create a hundred new egg dishes. And we will have all three of those months to figure out what this relationship of ours is going to be. Because I can tell you what it’s not going to be. It’s not going to be a Saturday night and Sunday morning–only relationship.”

  He wanted to do two things then. First, to tap his fist against his chest so as to get more air into his lungs. Second, to slowly reclaim his other hand, stand up, and slink away. He did neither. He said, as evenly as he could, “Why would you do that, Jayme? You have twelve, thirteen years in. A few more and you can be the admiral on that ship of fools.”

  “So I take a little time off. No big deal.”

  “I’m not even sure the department will allow it.”

  “If I can, I will. If I can’t, I won’t. What are you afraid of?”

  He said, “What are you afraid of?”

  “Unlike you,” she told him, “I’m not afraid to answer that question. What frightens me is you sitting around in this dark little cave of yours all day. Doing what? Brooding over your tragic past? One big pity party for the rest of your life?”

  “Jayme,” he said.

  “Uh-uh. Just stuff it, Ryan. I’m going to take some time off, and—”

  “I can’t let you—”

  “What? You can’t what? Since when do you make my decisions for me?”

  He reclaimed his hand then, but only to hold up both hands in surrender.

  SEVENTEEN

  That same Sunday morning, six hundred forty-nine miles away in Illinois, Hoyle, behind the wheel of his parked Ford Bronco, watched parishioners filing through the front door of Evansville’s huge Resurrection Baptist Church, the women in heels and colorful dresses, the men in crisp suits of every imaginable style and hue.

  “By my estimate,” he said to his companions, “at least a thousand so far.”

  “Seating capacity in the sanctuary is fifteen hundred,” Vicente said. “Times three services every Sunday.” He attempted to speak without moving his lips, remaining very still in the backseat as Rosemary applied
glue for his mustache and shaggy beard.

  “Times an average contribution of…to be conservative,” said Hoyle, “ten dollars per capita.”

  “At least,” Vicente said.

  Rosemary told him, “You’re going to get this in your mouth if you don’t stop talking.”

  “Amounting to, at a minimum,” Hoyle said, “forty-five thousand per week exempt from federal income tax. Most impressive.”

  Vicente waited until Rosemary had pressed first the mustache, then the muttonchops and matching beard, into place. “Impressive in a despicable way,” he said. “The very thought that a man like him should profit from the spiritual desperation of—”

  “Did you turn off your phone?” Rosemary interrupted. She had heard his incipient tirade too many times already. She did not disagree with his sentiments regarding Pastor Eli Royce, but neither did she wish to be subjected to them yet again.

  Vicente reached into his trousers, took out the cell phone, silenced the ringer and vibration. She handed him his wig, the same dirty gray as the beard and mustache. He set it atop his head, she repositioned it, then handed him a battered brown leather Ben Hogan–style cap. He set it low on his forehead, then removed a pair of sunglasses from his coat pocket and put them on. The orange-tinted polarized lenses, perfect for fishing and driving at night, gave the sunny morning a sharp but jaundiced pallor.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  She leaned away, studied the overall effect. Cracked leather golf cap, orange lenses, unkempt hair and beard, vintage brown pin-striped suit, scuffed brown loafers. “Like a half-blind wino,” she answered. “I’ll be surprised if they let you through the door.”

  “It’s a church,” he told her. “They have a moral obligation to serve my spiritual needs.”

  Hoyle swung a heavy arm over the back of his seat. Between finger and thumb he held a small black box, half an inch wide by an inch long, and wrapped in a thin cellophane film.