Bag of Bones Read online

  Barring a miracle. Sometimes blind people fall down, knock their heads, and regain their sight. Sometimes maybe cripples are able to throw their crutches away when they get to the top of the church steps. I had eight or nine months before Harold and Debra started really bugging me for the next novel. I decided to spend the time at Sara Laughs. It would take me a little while to tie things up in Derry, and awhile for Bill Dean to get the house on the lake ready for a year-round resident, but I could be down there by the Fourth of July, easily. I decided that was a good date to shoot for, not just the birthday of our country, but pretty much the end of bug season in western Maine. By the day I packed up my vacation gear (the John D. MacDonald paperbacks I left for the cabin’s next inhabitant), shaved a week’s worth of stubble off a face so tanned it no longer looked like my own to me, and flew back to Maine, I was decided: I’d go back to the place my subconscious mind had identified as shelter against the deepening dark; I’d go back even though my mind had also suggested that doing so would not be without risks. I would not go back expecting Sara to be Lourdes… but I would allow myself to hope, and when I saw the evening star peeping out over the lake for the first time, I would allow myself to wish on it.

  Only one thing didn’t fit into my neat deconstruction of the Sara dreams, and because I couldn’t explain it, I tried to ignore it. I didn’t have much luck, though; part of me was still a writer, I guess, and a writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave. It was the cut on the back of my hand. That cut had been in all the dreams, I would swear it had… and then it had actually appeared. You didn’t get that sort of shit in the works of Dr. Freud; stuff like that was strictly for the Psychic Friends hotline. It was a coincidence, that’s all, I thought as my plane started its descent. I was in seat A-2 (the nice thing about flying up front is that if the plane goes down, you’re first to the crash site) and looking at pine forests as we slipped along the glidepath toward Bangor International Airport. The snow was gone for another year; I had vacationed it to death. Only coincidence. How many times have you cut your hands? I mean, they’re always out front, aren’t they, waving themselves around? Practically begging for it. All that should have rung true, and yet somehow it didn’t, quite. It should have, but… well… It was the boys in the basement. They were the ones who didn’t buy it. The boys in the basement didn’t buy it at all. At that point there was a thump as the 737 touched down, and I put the whole line of thought out of my mind.

  One afternoon shortly after arriving back home, I rummaged the closets until I found the shoeboxes containing Jo’s old photographs. I sorted them, then studied my way through the ones of Dark Score Lake. There were a staggering number of these, but because Johanna was the shutterbug, there weren’t many with her in them. I found one, though, that I remembered taking in 1990 or ’91. Sometimes even an untalented photographer can take a good picture—if seven hundred monkeys spent seven hundred years bashing away at seven hundred typewriters, and all that—and this was good. In it Jo was standing on the float with the sun going down red-gold behind her.

  She was just out of the water, dripping wet, wearing a two-piece swimming suit, gray with red piping. I had caught her laughing and brushing her soaked hair back from her forehead and temples. Her nipples were very prominent against the cups of her halter. She looked like an actress on a movie poster for one of those guilty-pleasure B-pictures about monsters at Party Beach or a serial killer stalking the campus. I was sucker-punched by a sudden powerful lust for her. I wanted her upstairs just as she was in that photograph, with strands of her hair pasted to her cheeks and that wet bathing suit clinging to her. I wanted to suck her nipples through the halter top, taste the cloth and feel their hardness through it. I wanted to suck water out of the cotton like milk, then yank the bottom of her suit off and fuck her until we both exploded. Hands shaking a little, I put the photograph aside, with some others I liked (although there were no others I liked in quite that same way). I had a huge hard-on, one of those ones that feel like stone covered with skin. Get one of those and until it goes away you are good for nothing. The quickest way to solve a problem like that when there’s no woman around willing to help you solve it is to masturbate, but that time the idea never even crossed my mind. Instead I walked restlessly through the upstairs rooms of my house with my fists opening and closing and what looked like a hood ornament stuffed down the front of my jeans.

  Anger may be a normal stage of the grieving process—I’ve read that it is—but I was never angry at Johanna in the wake of her death until the day I found that picture. Then, wow. There I was, walking around with a boner that just wouldn’t quit, furious with her. Stupid bitch, why had she been running on one of the hottest days of the year? Stupid, inconsiderate bitch to leave me alone like this, not even able to work.

  I sat down on the stairs and wondered what I should do. A drink was what I should do, I decided, and then maybe another drink to scratch the first one’s back. I actually got up before deciding that wasn’t a very good idea at all. I went into my office instead, turned on the computer, and did a crossword puzzle. That night when I went to bed, I thought of looking at the picture of Jo in her bathing suit again. I decided that was almost as bad an idea as a few drinks when I was feeling angry and depressed. But I’ll have the dream tonight, I thought as I turned off the light. I’ll have the dreamier sure. I didn’t, though. My dreams of Sara Laughs seemed to be finished.

  A week’s thought made the idea of at least summering at the lake seem better than ever. So, on a Saturday afternoon in early May when I calculated that any self-respecting Maine caretaker would be home watching the Red Sox, I called Bill Dean and told him I’d be at my lake place from the Fourth of July or so. . and that if things went as I hoped, I’d be spending the fall and winter there as well. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “That’s real good news. A lot of folks down here’ve missed you, Mike. Quite a few that want to condole with you about your wife, don’t you know.” Was there the faintest note of reproach in his voice, or was that just my imagination? Certainly Jo and I had cast a shadow in the area; we had made significant contributions to the little library which served the Motton-Kashwakamak-Castle View area, and Jo had headed the successful fund drive to get an area bookmobile up and running. In addition to that, she had been part of a ladies’ sewing circle (afghans were her specialty), and a member in good standing of the Castle County Crafts Co-op. Visits to the sick… helping out with the annual volunteer fire department blood drive… womaning a booth during Summerfest in Castle Rock… and stuff like that was only where she had started. She didn’t do it in any ostentatious Lady Bountiful way, either, but unobtrusively and humbly, with her head lowered (often to hide a rather sharp smile, I should add—my Jo had a Biercean sense of humor). Christ, I thought, maybe old Bill had a right to sound reproachful. “People miss her,” I said. “Ayuh, they do.”

  “I still miss her a lot myself. I think that’s why I’ve stayed away from the lake.

  That’s where a lot of our good times were.”

  “I s’pose so. But it’ll be damned good to see you down this way. I’ll get busy. The place is all right—you could move into it this afternoon, if you was a mind—but when a house has stood empty the way Sara has, it gets stale.”

  “I know.”

  “TII get Brenda Meserve to clean the whole shebang from top to bottom. Same gal you always had, don’t you know.”

  “Brenda’s a little old for comprehensive spring cleaning, isn’t she?”

  The lady in question was about sixty-five, stout, kind, and gleefully vulgar. She was especially fond of jokes about the travelling salesman who spent the night like a rabbit, jumping from hole to hole. No Mrs. Dan-vets she. “Ladies like Brenda Meserve never get too old to oversee the festivities,” Bill said. “She’ll get two or three girls to do the vacuuming and heavy lifting. Set you back maybe three hundred dollars.

  Sound all right?”

  “Like a bargain.”

  �
��The well needs to be tested, and the gennie, too, although I’m sure both ofem’s okay. I seen a hornet’s nest by Jo’s old studio that I want to smoke before the woods get dry.

  Oh, and the roof of the old house—you know, the middle piece—needs to be reshingled. I shoulda talked to you about that last year, but with you not using the place, I let her slide. You stand good for that, too?”

  “Yes, up to ten grand. Beyond that, call me.”

  “If we have to go over ten, I’ll smile and kiss a pig.”

  “Try to have it all done before I get down there, okay?”

  “Coss. You’ll want your privacy, I know that. . just so long’s you know you won’t get any right away. We was shocked when she went so young; all of us were. Shocked and sad. She was a dear.” From a Yankee mouth, that word rhymes with Leah. “Thank you, Bill.” I felt tears prickle my eyes. Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug. “Thanks for saying.”

  “You’ll get your share of carrot-cakes, chummy.” He laughed, but a little doubtfully, as if afraid he was committing an impropriety. “I can eat a lot of carrot-cake,” I said, “and if folks overdo it, well, hasn’t Kenny Auster still got that big Irish wolfhound?”

  “Yuh, that thing’d eat cake til he busted!” Bill cried in high good humor. He cackled until he was coughing. I waited, smiling a little myself. “Blueberry, he calls that dog, damned if I know why. Ain’t he the gormiest thing!” I assumed he meant the dog and not the dog’s master. Kenny Auster, not much more than five feet tall and neatly made, was the opposite of gormy, that peculiar Maine adjective that means clumsy, awkward, and clay-footed. I suddenly realized that I missed these people—Bill and Brenda and Buddy Jellison and Kenny Auster and all the others who lived year-round at the lake. I even missed Blueberry, the Irish wolfhound, who trotted everywhere with his head up just as if he had half a brain in it and long strands of saliva depending from his jaws. “I’ve also got to get down there and clean up the winter blowdown,” Bill said. He sounded embarrassed. “It ain’t bad this year—that last big storm was all snow over our way, thank God—but there’s still a fair amount of happy crappy I ain’t got to yet. I shoulda put it behind me long before now. You not using the place ain’t an excuse. I been cashing your checks.” There was something amusing about listening to the grizzled old fart beating his breast; Jo would have kicked her feet and giggled, I’m quite sure. “If everything’s right and running by July Fourth, Bill, I’ll be happy.”

  “You’ll be happy as a clam in a mudflat, then. That’s a promise.” Bill sounded as happy as a clam in a mudflat himself, and I was glad. “Going-ter come down and write a book by the water? Like in the old days? Not that the last couple ain’t been fine, my wife couldn’t put that last one down, but—”

  “I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. And then an idea struck me.

  “Bill, would you do me a favor before you clean up the driveway and turn Brenda Meserve loose?”

  “Happy to if I can,” he said, so I told him what I wanted.

  Four days later, I got a little package with this laconic return address: DEN/GEN DELV/Tg-90 (DAVA scoa0. I opened it and shook out twenty photographs which had been taken with one of those little cameras you use once and then throw away.

  Bill had filled out the roll with various views of the house, most conveying that subtle air of neglect a place gets when it’s not used enough… even a place that’s caretook (to use Bill’s word) gets that neglected feel after awhile. I barely glanced at these. The first four were the ones I wanted, and I lined them up on the kitchen table, where the strong sunlight would fall directly on them. Bill had taken these from the top of the driveway, pointing the disposable camera down at the sprawl of Sara Laughs. I could see the moss which had grown not only on south wings, as well. I could see the litter of fallen branches and the drifts of pine needles on the driveway. Bill must have been tempted to clear all that away before taking his snaps, but he hadn’t. I’d told him exactly what I wanted—"warts and all” was the phrase I had used—and Bill had given it to me. The bushes on either side of the driveway had thickened a lot since Jo and I had spent any significant amount of time at the lake; they hadn’t exactly run wild, but yes, some of the longer branches did seem to yearn toward each other across the asphalt like separated lovers. Yet what my eye came back to again and again was the stoop at the foot of the driveway. The other resemblances between the photographs and my dreams of Sara Laughs might only be coincidental (or the writer’s often surprisingly practical imagination at work), but I could explain the sunflowers growing out through the boards of the stoop no more than I had been able to explain the cut on the back of my hand.

  I turned one of the photos over. On the back, in a spidery script, Bill had written: These jgllows are way early… and trespassing. I flipped back to the picture side. Three sunflowers, growing up through the boards of the stoop. Not two, not four, but three large sunflowers with faces like searchlights. Just like the ones in my dream.

  On July 3rd of 1998, I threw two suitcases and my Powerbook in the trunk of my mid-sized Chevrolet, started to back down the driveway, then stopped and went into the house again. It felt empty and somehow forlorn, like a faithful lover who has been dropped and cannot understand why. The furniture wasn’t covered and the power was still on (I understood that The Great Lake Experiment might turn out to be a swift and total failure), but 14 Benton Street felt deserted, all the same. Rooms too full of furniture to echo still did when I walked through them, and everywhere there seemed to be too much dusty light. In my study, the VDT was hooded like an executioner against the dust. I knelt before it and opened one of the desk drawers. Inside were four reams of paper. I took one, started away with it under my arm, then had a second thought and turned back. I had put that provocative photo of Jo in her swimsuit in the wide center drawer. Now I took it, tore the paper wrapping from the end of the ream of paper, and slid the photo halfway in, like a bookmark. if I did perchance begin to write again, and if the writing marched, I would meet Johanna right around page two hundred and fifty.

  I left the house, locked the back door, got into my car, and drove away.

  I have never been back.

  I’d been tempted to go down to the lake and check out the work—which turned out to be quite a bit more extensive than Bill Dean had originally expected—on several occasions. What kept me away was a feeling, never quite articulated by my conscious mind but still very powerful, that I wasn’t supposed to do it that way; that when I next came to Sara, it should be to unpack and stay.

  Bill hired out Kenny Auster to shingle the roof, and got Kenny’s cousin, Timmy Larribee, to “scrape the old girl down,” a cleansing process akin to pot-scrubbing that is sometimes employed with log homes. Bill also had a plumber in to check out the pipes, and got my okay to replace some of the older plumbing and the well-pump.

  Bill fussed about all these expenses over the telephone; I let him. When it comes to fifth- or sixth-generation Yankees and the expenditure of money, you might as well just stand back and let them get it out of their systems. Laying out the green just seems wrong to a Yankee, somehow, like petting in public. As for myself, I didn’t mind the outgo a bit. I live frugally, for the most part, not out of any moral code but because my imagination, very lively in most other respects, doesn’t work very well on the subject of money. My idea of a spree is three days in Boston, a Red Sox game, a trip to Tower Records and Video, plus a visit to the Wordsworth bookstore in Cambridge. Living like that doesn’t make much of a dent in the interest, let alone the principal; I had a good money manager down in Waterville, and on the day I locked the door of the Derry house and headed west to TR-90, I was worth slightly over five million dollars. Not much compared to Bill Gates, but big numbers for this area, and I could afford to be cheerful about the high cost of house repairs.

  That was a strange late spring and early summer for me. What I did mostly was wait, close up my town affair
s, talk to Bill Dean when he called with the latest round of problems, and try not to think. I did the Publishers Ig3ekly interview, and when the interviewer asked me if I’d had any trouble getting back to work “in the wake of my bereavement,” I said no with an absolutely straight face. Why not? It was true. My troubles hadn’t started until I’d finished All the yfrom the bp; until then, I had been going on like gangbusters.

  In mid-June, I met Frank Arlen for lunch at the Starlite Cafe. The Starlite is in Lewiston, which is the geographical midpoint between his town and mine. Over dessert (the Starlite’s famous strawberry shortcake), Frank asked if I was seeing anyone. I looked at him with surprise.

  “What are you gaping at?” he asked, his face registering one of the nine hundred unnamed emotions—this one of those somewhere between amusement and irritation. “I certainly wouldn’t think of it as two-timing Jo. She’ll have been dead four years come August.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not seeing anybody.”

  He looked at me silently. I looked back for a few seconds, then started fiddling my spoon through the whipped cream on top of my shortcake. The biscuits were still warm from the oven, and the cream was melting. It made me think of that silly old song about how someone left the cake out in the rain.

  “Have you seen anybody, Mike?”

  “I’m not sure that’s any business of yours.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake. On your vacation? Did you—”