Her coffee turned tepid. The sun touched her shins. Singer emerged in yesterday’s jeans and a fresh shirt.
“Just think,” she said, “twenty-four hours ago I was calling a car for JFK.”
“The thing about jet travel. It takes our souls a few days to catch up.”
She liked him least of all like this—when he was aware of himself as a poet, when he played to the crowd. She gestured with her mug back toward the house. “Company?”
“Grady Fisk,” he said. Discomfited, he pulled out his snoose can. “Guess you’d call him county sheriff. He’s the coroner, too. Just a kid, basically. I knew him back when.” He shrugged, maneuvering tobacco around in his lip. “Anyway.”
“Sheriff?”
He looked at the pond. “It’s bow season. You know that, right? Early September?”
“I think so?”
“Bow season for elk. Well, we had a couple hunters trespassing down on the south side a while back. Turns out, they found a body. This old guy just eroding straight out of the hillside. Damnedest thing.”
He was so dismissive, so . . . flippant. It took her a moment. “I’m sorry . . . A body?”
“Back in seventy-nine, one of our neighbors went missing. Everybody figured he just kind of skipped out on alimony. Pete was such a massive sonofabitch, would have been typical. But now they’re saying this is likely him. Dental records and whatnot.” He watched her try to do the math. “I was twelve.”
“Huh.”
“They got a chunk of my ground all roped off with that police tape.”
“So do they know who killed him?”
“This guy, Pete. Biggest liar in the world. My old stepdad used to say Pete would rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. Guy was despised pretty much up and down the county. Could have been about anybody.”
“So they don’t know who killed him?”
“I don’t guess.”
“Is that what the sheriff wants to talk about?”
“What I’d want to talk about if I was him.”
She flashed back to the grocery store, to the old couple’s shunning of Singer. “People think you might have had something to do with it?”
He tongued at his chew, glanced away. “We moved here when I was twelve. You knew that, right?”
“I didn’t, no.”
“I’ve lived here most of my life, but I’m still from Billings.”
“I don’t . . .”
“I’m not from here. That’s the crux of it. Pete Fahler—sonofabitch that he was—he was a homegrown kind of sonofabitch. They’ll want to think I had something to do with it. Even if I didn’t.”
“So did you?”
He’d drifted away. “Eh? What now?”
“Have something to do with it?”
“Of course not. Hell no.”
Sipping a perfectly civilized cup of coffee, she indulged in a moment of romantic decoupling, a little self-conscious reverie. Chloe on the frontier. Her best friend in New York, Helen, recently divorced, had lately taken to browsing through her men like shirts spinning on a rack. “A little advice, Chloe? Keep the numbers on your phone. You need to know whose call you’re dodging.” They were precise opposites. Chloe knew her pantsuits and had earned her promotions. Helen was a squash player and aesthete of bottled waters. Her money was old. She knew how to cross her legs on a barstool. In high school, Helen had trailed fistfights and flowers; an English teacher had been fired for making advances. She had a carelessness common to beautiful women. She expected to be indulged. “So you think I’m crazy?” Chloe had asked her. “Going off to Montana like this?”
“Absolutely.” Helen had Singer’s chapbook, and was flipping back and forth between the poems and the author photo. They sat in City Hall Park, by the fountain. “But sweetie, for this man?” She held up the book. “If you don’t get on that plane, I will.”
“I know, right? But what is it.”
“Me, I like complicated men. Remember Ronnie? Good lord god, no, don’t remind me. Anyway, whoever wrote this? I wouldn’t want to pay his therapy bills, but he’s got more going on than fantasy football.”
A few days from now they were due to have drinks at a favorite Scotch bar in the East Village. Concrete floors and a chalkboard drink menu. It would be a chance for Helen to slum it with Village Voice freelancers. Chloe had hoped to walk into that bar with the slight swagger that comes from having been pursued and caught. But maybe this was better. A body! Chloe, here in the midst of her own little spaghetti western. Let’s hum a lonesome tune. “Quite the vacation you’re giving me here, Mr. Singer.”
He touched her hand. Those blue eyes. Were they piercing? Why not. “We can get the horses out later, if you want. Go for a ride.”
At the beginning of Singer’s second book of poems, he had a line: “I want to write about how the knife can turn in your hand.” In three volumes, he’d written 192 poems, 2,145 lines. His first chapbook, An Ax to Earth (published on cheap newsprint under a truly dogshit cover: wheat stems and a cowboy hat) contained poetry good enough to sporadically astonish. The title poem, a reconsideration of cultural culpability and inherited sin, took the square peg of Günter Grass and pounded him into a western hole.
Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickock, Custer,
idolized by toddlers with plastic pistols
disparaged by mothers, but me and you, all
of us, we’re still rooted in soil fed under their
festering wounds.
She supposed, but wasn’t entirely sure, that he was arguing that children can be morally culpable for the sins of their fathers.
In preparing for their ride, she found him out in the round corral, cleaning hooves. His head was bare, and as he bent over, she could see sun damage through the start of a bald spot. He worked with the confidence of familiarity.
She mentioned the poem by name, said, “That one kicked me in the balls, I got to be honest. How do you even start with a poem like that? Did you know, for instance, that you were writing a great poem?”
“If it weren’t for that book, you wouldn’t be here.”
“How so?”
“I self-published that one.” He straightened, grimacing and touching his lower back, moved over to the next hoof. “Got hold of this little outfit out of Portland. Found them in Poets and Writers. Anyway, guy there knew Jim Harrison, and sent him a copy. Jim, he liked a few of the poems, sent the book to Sam Hamill at Copper Canyon. Sam, he liked a couple of them. Especially that one you just mentioned. Volunteered to publish the next one, which ended up being Heartwood. Which is how Leslie found me, which is how you and me got introduced.” He spat. “Big accident, really. Me being a poet.”
“Lucky me.”
He touched his forehead with the back of his work glove. Half grinned. “Hope so.”