Fatal Obsession Read online

  With his final word Waiters gunned the engine and the tractor leaped forward, belching a puff of defiant smoke toward the blue dome above us. I watched Waiters cross the road, then walked up the hill toward Sally over a strange soft street, threats and memories and an Indian Summer sun behind me.

  Ten

  Sally was waiting for me at the top of the hill, her skirt speckled with burrs and thistle, her forehead glistening from the sweat of her climb. “Look at this,” she said, lifting a shoe. “I’ve worn these exactly twice.”

  I looked. She had stepped squarely on a cow pie, and its moderately fresh filling rimmed her loafer like flakes of chocolate pastry. “Farming is not a pretty business,” I said, drawing the smile I sought from her. “I’m going over to the next ridge,” I continued. “Billy lived out here somewhere and I’m going to try to find out where. You want to come or stay here?”

  “I think I’ll go back to the car,” Sally said. “Take off my sweater and soak up some sun. I’m not exactly dressed for hiking, as you may have noticed.” She took two steps and looked back. “There really aren’t any snakes out here, are there, Marsh?”

  “Take off more than your sweater, and they won’t do anything but leer.”

  Sally shook her head. “Sex fiend,” she said, and tromped back down the hill. I matched her stride going the other way, over the crest and down toward the creek that wound through the little valley on the other side, beneath a lid of crenulated leaves.

  To my right, three white-faced heifers grazed lethargically, ripping dry grass away from its bed with thoughtless twists of their heavy heads. High above me a pair of hawks glided easily on the wind. Bursts of breeze sprinkled me with leaves. Somewhere a woodpecker rattled a tree. The high grass I waded through could have been just weeds or could have been the prairie grass that WILD wanted to preserve, a thin and final link to what the earth had been before man gouged it.

  The little creek was almost dry, its water lying still in stagnant pools, its bed pitted by the hooves of thirsty beef. I skipped across it on the decaying trunk of a fallen tree. When I reached the other side I turned back, trying to spot the ring of rocks where we had built our picnic fires, but it was gone, like most of the people who had stoked the flames. I kicked a rock and tossed a stick and watched a squirrel scamper toward the dark clump of his nest, then climbed toward the top of the next ridge and plunged onward toward the next. When I reached it I could see nothing but the same rough nature I had come through. I walked on, and finally noticed something built by man.

  They were curved pipes, two of them, emerging from the top of a hillock to my left, apropos of nothing I could see. I walked toward them, still mystified. Even when I was close enough to touch them I couldn’t tell what they were for. I looked around. Below the rise on which I stood I saw some tools and firewood and other signs of life. I went down to where they were and finally saw what it was that Billy had done.

  It was an underground house, cut deeply into the hillside, three of its sides and its top nothing but thick expanses of earth and sod. The pipes I had seen were vents for air and smoke. The front wall was built of heavy slabs of cedar, carefully wrought, the cracks between the boards laboriously chinked with clay. The only opening was a wide doorway completely draped with cloth. Warm in winter, cool in summer, hidden from prying eyes, Billy had fashioned a home that met his needs.

  I called out and banged my fist on the rough frame of the curtained doorway. Through a gap in the curtain I could see the flicker of a lantern in the center of the room, but nothing else. I yelled again and a hand drew back the fabric that separated me from the aromatic darkness within the buried house.

  She squinted in the sunlight, then raised her other hand to shield her eyes. She was naked except for some hand-sewn shorts that were bunched around her waist by a knotted length of twine, and she was pregnant, many months along, so much so that her breasts swelled blue and tight with milk and seemed about to burst. Veins ran across her great belly in fine blue channels, like the marks of a careless scrivener. Her skin was red from the heat of her lantern or the magic of her fertility.

  She beat me to speech. “You the man Billy went to see?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Which man is that?”

  She shrugged, dribbling her fat breasts. “Just a man.”

  “What did Billy want to see him for?”

  “Who knows?”

  “What was his name?”

  She shrugged again, and said nothing further. She was thin everywhere but around her middle. Straight brown hair hung from the crown of her head and from the pits beneath her arms as well. Here eyes were large, as bright and brown as belt leather. Barefoot, she almost matched my height. “I’m Marsh Tanner,” I said finally. “I’m Billy’s uncle. From San Francisco.”

  She nodded. “I think I heard him say something about you once. Aren’t you into something weird?” Her blatant question startled me.

  “You mean being a detective?” I asked.

  “That’s it. A detective. Like Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Roughly.”

  She nodded again. “San Francisco. I wish I lived there, sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a groovy place to say you’re from, I guess.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you your name?” I asked.

  “Starbright.”

  I looked again at the arrogant expanse of stomach. “Is Billy the father of your child?”

  “Sure,” she said simply. “Billy’s not around, though. Been gone since yesterday. Not that you have to leave or anything.”

  The invitation wasn’t flirtatious, it was just fact. I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to. A common definition of freedom, and a meaningless one. “How long have you lived out here?” I asked.

  She frowned, no friend of time. “I don’t know. Three winters, I guess.”

  “Anyone else live here but you and Billy?”

  She glanced down. “Not yet.”

  “Are you okay? I mean, is the pregnancy going all right? No complications?”

  “I’m real fine. Billy made me a birthing stool and everything. We’re all ready for him.”

  “Him?”

  “Giap. The baby. It’s going to be a boy. Definitely. You can tell from the color of the urine.”

  “Whose urine?”

  “Mine, silly.” She giggled and plucked some strands of her hair from her mouth.

  “What’s his name again?”

  “Giap,” she said, and spelled it. “Billy named him. After someone he knew in the war, I think.”

  The someone was the commanding general of the North Vietnamese Army, the architect of their victory over the South and us. Starbright didn’t know that, but Billy had.

  Starbright reached into the darkness behind her and brought out a bowl, shaped from thick red clay, irregular in form and not attractive. “Billy made this. Fired it himself. For the placenta.”

  “What?”

  “The placenta. The afterbirth, You cook it and feed some to the baby and eat the rest yourself. Prevents cancer.”

  I looked into her eyes and saw no sign of wit, though some sign of strayed intelligence. She was one of those who will spend most of their lives believing nonsense, perhaps because she was raised on it.

  “Do you have any friends in Chaldea?” I asked, after the image of french fried placenta had evaporated, or almost.

  “Not here on the farm. I know some people at WILD.”

  “The environmental group?”

  She nodded.

  “Can you go into town and stay with them for a while?”

  “Why would I want to do that? Billy will be back tonight for sure. Or tomorrow. I’m all right here. No one bothers me, no one would dare, that knows Billy. Besides, Billy doesn’t like me to go to WILD anymore.”

  I didn’t want to tell her what I knew, but I couldn’t leave her the way she was, so I blurted it out. “Billy’s dead,” I said. “He die
d last night.”

  Her eyes stopped fluttering and found my face and searched it. When she saw I had told the truth she wrapped her arms across her breasts and nodded. “I just didn’t think it would happen so soon,” she said calmly. “We thought he’d have more time.”

  Eleven

  Her apathy drove me from her like a shove. “You sound as though you knew he was going to die,” I said.

  “I did,” Starbright answered simply. “Billy did, too.”

  “Are you saying it was suicide?”

  She shook her head quickly. “Billy would never do that. Not with the baby coming.”

  “Then why did he die?”

  “He was sick. Sick so bad we knew it was going to kill him, eventually. But we thought it would be later.”

  Billy hadn’t died from anything that medicine could treat, but I didn’t tell Starbright that. Instead, I asked her how long Billy had been sick.

  “Since the war, is what he said. Ever since I knew him, for sure.”

  “What exactly was wrong with him?”

  “All kinds of things. He was weak, mostly; weaker all the time. Couldn’t sleep; had these terrible nightmares. And there was, like, this rash all down his legs, even on his cock. Blisters and everything. I wouldn’t give him head, finally, it got so bad. I mean, he understood, you know; it was just too gross.”

  “Anything else wrong with him?”

  “Only everything. His chest hurt, like a heart attack, only that wasn’t it. Plus, he couldn’t breathe right, and got nosebleeds all the time. And stomach cramps. He was wiped out, and it made him mad, so he was always raging out about something or other. He even hit me once, but he was real sorry afterward.”

  “Did he see a doctor?” I asked, after the catalogue of doom had ended.

  “Once. The doctor couldn’t figure it out, either. Gave Billy penicillin and Valium and told him to come back if they didn’t help. They didn’t help, but Billy didn’t go back.”

  “Which doctor?”

  She shrugged absently. I decided to shift gears. “Did Billy have any enemies?” I asked. “Anyone he fought or argued with recently?”

  She thought a moment. “Not really. I mean, Billy pissed lots of people off. He said what was on his mind, you know? He wouldn’t take any shit, and sometimes, well, it seemed like he just had to let off steam, let his temper go before he blew himself up. He got in lots of fights, but I wouldn’t say he had enemies.”

  “Did he have any fights recently?”

  “Not that I heard of. Why?”

  I took a deep breath. “Whatever sickness Billy had, he didn’t die from it, Starbright. They found him hanging from a tree with a rope around his neck. He either hung himself or someone did it to him.”

  “A tree? Billy was hanging from a tree?” For the first time a gap of dismay occupied her face. She hugged her stomach as though to shield its occupant from knowledge.

  “That’s what happened,” I said. “Do you think Billy hung himself? Do you think maybe the sickness got so bad he couldn’t take it anymore?”

  Starbright shook her head, her long hair lashing her bare shoulders. “He wouldn’t do that to himself. Not that way; not alone. If he wanted to die, I would have helped him. He knew I would. We talked about it once.”

  “What brought it up, the talk of dying?”

  “The sickness.”

  “Then maybe that’s what it was. It was just too much for him to handle.”

  “No. No. That wasn’t it. All that kind of talk was before the baby. He wanted to see his baby in the worst way. Nothing could have kept him from doing that, nothing. You don’t know Billy.” Her words were shrieks.

  It made sense, as much as anything does when it comes to flipping a coin between life and death. “Did you ever hear Billy talk about something called Agent Orange?” I asked after Starbright seemed calm.

  “What?”

  “Agent Orange. Or dioxin? Did he talk about anything like that?”

  “Is that some kind of organic fruit? We buy lots of stuff like that from a place down in Missouri.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not important.”

  It wasn’t important, not now, because Billy was dead and because the government that had sprayed Agent Orange over its own soldiers and caused thousands of them to suffer exactly the kinds of things that Starbright had said Billy suffered from, that same government was denying responsibility for any of it. It was refusing to pay for the suffering or the treatment, even though the spray it had used to kill all that jungle foliage was full of dioxin, one of the most toxic substances known to man. But there were hearings going on, and studies, and lawsuits, and maybe someday it would be different, treatment would be rendered, compensation paid, and if so, someone should know that Billy was a victim. I made a note to find out who had treated Billy, then looked again at Starbright.

  She looked helpless, confused, the whites of her eyes twin badges of uncertainty. “I think I should take you into town,” I said to her. “To stay with your friends for a while. Till you get used to Billy being gone.”

  She thought it over quietly, then nodded. “I’ll have to get some things,” she said.

  “I’ll wait here.” She ducked out of sight into the cabin, carrying within her a baby who, if Billy had the disease I thought he had, might be born without toes or fingers, arms or legs, might be born a freak.

  I kicked at the nearest thing to me and walked up a path that led to the top of the next hill, anxious to get my mind off Billy and his family and onto something less damned, planning a return to the house in Starbright’s absence to see what Billy might have had that would lead me to his killer. Because Starbright had convinced me that’s what it had been. A killing. The murder of a boy named Tanner.

  I was still thinking of Billy as I walked, and of other boys I knew for whom there had been no difference between war and peace, who had returned from Vietnam so scarred within and without that they couldn’t fit into the society they’d been sent to defend, boys wounded more by sights and deeds than bullets. At the top of the hill I sat beneath a sycamore and stared idly across the next valley at the trees and scrub brush on the opposite slope, my thoughts on the folly and inevitability of war. Then, gradually, something about the scene jarred me.

  The vegetation was wrong, somehow. There were not only trees and grass and weeds and brush but an undergrowth of some kind, a crop, in fact, staked and tended and arranged in rows that snaked around the trees that rose above it. As I looked more closely at the stalks and their oddly tropical leaves I knew with certainty what they were, and added another possible cause of Billy’s death to my list.

  The marijuana was carefully cultivated. The stalks were as thick as broomsticks, rising eight feet or more, replete with the pointed leaves of dopers’ joy. There were at least a hundred plants, many times too much for Billy’s personal use, so it was a cash crop, raised for profit, ready for harvest. I wasn’t current on drug prices in the Midwest, but I guessed the street value of the leaves and seeds arrayed before me would approach a hundred thousand bucks or maybe more.

  From the lay of the ground and the health of the plants, this wasn’t the first such crop grown in this lost valley. Which meant Billy could have died in a drug sale that went sour, in one of those seamy little infamies that mean nothing to anyone, just another victim of the stampede to avoid the way we were. I suddenly felt a little less damaged by what had been done to the nephew I had so seldom seen.

  I got up and followed the path back to the cabin. Starbright hadn’t emerged, so she didn’t know I had discovered their new system of crop rotation. I decided not to mention it just yet.

  When Starbright came outside she wore a loose peasant blouse and a long skirt and carried a bulging bag of clothes and shoes and jars and stuff. She still seemed serene, as though untouched or at least undaunted by Billy’s death. It was a natural way to react for anyone who believes, as many profess to, that a more exalted form of existence begins on the oth
er side of death, but it is uncommon all the same. As uncommon as true belief. I took Starbright’s arm and her bag and helped her up the hill.

  Along the way she told me she had grown up in Dubuque, as a cheerleading, churchgoing Catholic, and at the first chance had run off to a commune in Taos with the bass player in a rock band called Hemp. She’d lived around Taos for five years, moving out on the bass player and in with a one-legged potter, then returned to Dubuque after a scary experience with LSD. She waited tables and wrote poems for two years after that, living at home with disapproving parents, waiting for something to happen that would change her life.

  What happened was Billy. She met him at a Led Zeppelin concert and come back with him to Chaldea and eventually conceived his child. She was into natural foods and herbs, was a vegetarian and a sort-of Sufi. When we got to the car I introduced her to Sally.

  They were as opposite as coal and diamonds. Both at first drew back from presumed attack. But Starbright’s swollen belly and Sally’s rumpled attire were common bonds sufficient to unite them for the time it took to drive back to town. By the time I stopped in front of a dilapidated bungalow on West Elm Street, Sally had passed on a few tips on childbirth and care and Starbright in return had counseled Sally on the regenerative powers of tofu.

  The bungalow was ostensibly the headquarters of WILD, but it looked like just another blighted residence to me, on a street where they grew like dandelions. The house was square and battered and featureless except for the shiny Cyclone fence that circled both the house and the scraggly lawn around it. The windows were masked with black curtains, the chimney had collapsed atop the roof in heavy hunks of brick. The van in the driveway was painted with a portrait of a wild-eyed warrior mounted on a fire-breathing steed that had carried him to the clouds. Beside the door someone had painted the word WILD in red block letters and decorated them with lacy vines. Other than the acrylic vines and warrior there was no sign of life about the place.

  Starbright thanked me for the ride and shouldered her bag and started to leave the car. I asked her to wait. “Who runs this WILD organization?” I asked her.