The Bone Orchard: A Novel

Kathy arrived to pick me up at dawn. She’d brought us both tall cups of coffee from the store at the base of Appleton Ridge. Sarah made us pose in front of Kathy’s green patrol truck.

“Say ‘yoga,’” Sarah said.

“Why not ‘cheese’?” Kathy asked.

“‘Yoga’ makes your mouth smile more naturally.”

Kathy and I set off on patrol. It was supposed to be a day of checking fishing licenses and boating registrations—nothing too serious.

Around ten o’clock, the radio crackled and Kathy’s call numbers were recited. The dispatcher reported a 10-42. A possibly rabid dog had attacked a young girl playing in a trailer park nearby. The EMTs were on the scene. In my mind, the call properly belonged with an animal control officer, but we were the nearest unit. I was depressed to begin my new career as a glorified dogcatcher.

Kathy turned the wheel in the direction of the hamlet of double-wides. Some of the mobile homes were neat little residences with welcome mats and window boxes of chrysanthemums. Others looked liked derelict boxcars with plywood doors and barrels out front filled with empty beer bottles. The older people tended to live in the nice trailers; their sons and daughters inhabited the others, along with their chosen f*ck buddies and assorted offspring.

As we entered the park, a skinny shirtless guy with a billy-goat beard waved us down. “It’s at the pool, man! Cujo!”

The ambulance was parked near a chained-in rectangle of ragweed, under a bright and cloudless summer sky. Along the horizon stood the serrated treetops. It was the municipal center of the trailer park. There was a crowded cluster of bodies, young and old, but mostly young, inside a mesh fence that the local boys had nearly succeeded at kicking in. The mob had brought with it stones and bottles to throw.

I hopped out of the truck and nearly collided with a shiny-faced paramedic emerging from the rear of the ambulance.

“How is she?” I asked the EMT.

His expression was grim. “Depends on the plastic surgeon. We’re gonna haul ass getting her to the hospital if it’s all right by you.”

“Go for it.”

“By the way, some guy shot it for you with a crossbow.”

“Is it dead?”

“No,” he said. “Unfortunately.”

Kathy appeared beside me. She had brought her shotgun from the truck. It was the old Mossberg 500—subsequently replaced by the combat-tested Mossberg 590A1 as the Warden Service has become more heavily militarized. She handed me the heavy weapon.

We shouldered through the mob. “Game wardens!” Kathy shouted.

When she wanted, she could make her voice as deep as man’s, although it wasn’t naturally that way.

The Red Sea parted. I angled my way through the pool gate and across the cracked tile of the patio, feeling the surging kids around my thighs. A heavy, sweaty man in cutoff cargo pants and an odiferous wifebeater T-shirt was trying to aim a crossbow into the pool bottom.

“Hey, Robin Hood,” said Kathy. “Drop the bow.”

He let fly another arrow.

“I said knock it off!”

I found myself staring into a concrete hole in the ground. A shallow green pond had formed at the bottom. Beer bottles and cans floated in the water, along with grass clippings and a yellow dusting of pine pollen. You could practically hear the sound of hatching mosquitoes rising in swarms from the stagnant reservoir.

As the crowd grew quiet, the dog’s whining seemed to grow louder. Occasionally, it let out a yap and snarled up at us before turning in circles, trying to snap at the crossbow quarrel buried in its bloody haunches. Its brownish fur was coated with some sort of lather, maybe from having licked its ribs with its foaming mouth. The animal was starving, fleck-mouthed. No question it was rabid. I guessed it to be a rottweiler-Lab mix, although it no longer resembled anyone’s pet.

The people of the park had been hurling stones and bottles down on its head before the flabby-armed joker thought to bring out the crossbow.

“Shoot it!” one of the adult women said.

“Would everyone back away!” I said. “It’s for your own safety!”

Kathy leaned close to me and I smelled the Avon Skin So Soft that she used as her own personal bug repellent. “Do you want me to do this?”

“I’ve got to do it sometime.”

“Doesn’t have to be today, Grasshopper.”

I hefted the twelve-gauge. “What have you got in this? A slug or buckshot?”

“Buckshot.”

I fired directly at the poor suffering dog’s head. My hands didn’t flinch. It was, in fact, a fantastic shot. The dog’s brains flew out, and it dropped dead.

The sound of the explosion deafened me for a moment; I should have inserted the foam earplugs I carried in my chest pocket.

When my ears cleared, I heard clapping. I looked around and saw that several of the youngish adults—overweight girls pushing strollers; whip-thin men with pants falling down—putting their hands together. Then the children imitated them. I was receiving applause.

I slung the shotgun over my shoulder. Somehow, I kept my feet as I slid down the slick sides of the pool. The water wasn’t much more than a yard deep. I removed a pair of latex gloves from a pouch in my belt and snapped them on like a doctor preparing for surgery. Then I carefully lifted the dead animal in my arms—its bones might have been as hollow as a bird’s—and waded through the muck to the steps at the shallow end.

I heard the jangling of dog tags on its collar and saw one shaped something like a bone with the name GOOFUS stamped into the blue metal. There was a phone number and address on it. I would need to call the owners and tell them what I’d been forced to do their family pet. How did the dog contract rabies? I wondered. Any mammal could carry the virus.

“Hey, Sergeant, can you bring me a tarp?” I shouted.

But Kathy was already there with one of the same body bags the state provided us for human corpses. I placed Goofus atop the plastic liner and zipped it up.

“Hydrophobia,” I mumbled, shaking off my algae-green arms.

“That’s the Latin name for rabies,” Kathy said. “Fear of water.”

“So we both studied Latin,” I said. “Cave canem.”

“‘Beware of the dog.’ For whatever it’s worth, the first month I was a warden, I had to shoot a person.”

“What happened?”

She took a deep breath and looked me in the eyes. “This guy, Decoster, was beating his wife. She’d called the police about him a bunch of times before, but somehow he always talked himself out of being arrested. I guess he was drinking buddies with the local cops. But here I was, a rookie and a woman. I didn’t know this a*shole, and I wasn’t going to give him another free pass on beating up his wife. He went apeshit when I tried to put him into cuffs. He grabbed a knife from the table and turned on me. I’d never been that scared in my life.”

I steadied myself against the Mossberg. “Jesus.”

“Afterward, the woman was a crying mess. She kept saying she didn’t mean for me to kill him. And there’s this fat little kid bawling his eyes out in the corner. Jason didn’t know what the hell was going on. I thought I’d f*cked up big time. Sometimes I still wonder if I did.” Kathy reached down and touched the plastic bag, almost as if she was petting the dead dog inside of it. “I know you must be feeling like shit right now, Mike, but if this is as bad as it gets for a while, consider yourself fortunate.”

I appreciated the confession, but more because my new sergeant had opened up to me than because it soothed my guilt.

* * *

The alcohol dropped me down a well but didn’t keep me asleep very long. I awoke after a few hours, dry-mouthed and unsure where I was because the room was so dark. I flopped onto my back and lay with my eyes open until the blackness of the room faded and I could make out the fuzzy shapes of the big-screen TV and the head of the eight-point buck Kathy had shot the first morning she’d ever gone bow hunting.

After a while, I heard floorboards creaking overhead; Kurt was awake and roaming around. The footsteps continued down the hall until they came to the top of the stairs. I reached for the gun under my pillow and sat up. There was no lamp within easy reach of the sofa, or I would have turned on a light.

The footsteps stopped midway down the stairs, and I thought I heard an in-drawn breath. The next sound was heavier. I had the impression Kurt Eklund had just collapsed on the staircase.

The next thing I knew, he was sobbing.

I swung my legs off the sofa and rose to my feet, tucking the revolver into my pants at the small of my back. I padded across the thick carpet until I came to the foyer and poked my head around the corner.

Kurt was indeed seated on one of the steps. He was holding onto a baluster as if for support and staring down at the dark stain on the floor.

I snapped on the overhead light.

“Kurt?”

He blinked down at me, half-blinded by both the sudden illumination and his own streaming tears. His hair was the color of a golden retriever, I realized.

“That’s her blood?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then it wasn’t just a nightmare.”

“No.”

“Is she going to be OK?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

He let loose of the baluster and buried his wet face in his hands. “It’s all my fault.”