hadn’t been washed since the day it rolled off the assembly line, which may well have been true; it wore a sheen of dirt. Recently, Glen Rodz had asked him, “Don’t you think it’s about time you washed the cruiser?” and Kurt had replied, quite logically, “Why? I don’t ride on the outside.”
Kurt squealed out of the lot, not because he was in a hurry, but because the cruiser’s bald tires made more noise than purchase. The call to Belleau Wood was no great event; he’d answered many such calls over the years, when the property’s security guard, Glen Rodz, was not on duty. Belleau Wood seemed to attract Tylersville’s youth “like flies to a shit-bucket,” Chief Bard was fond of saying. Lots of teenage beer drinking, but mostly kids making out. Kurt had witnessed many flesh shows thanks to signal 7P’s. What he’d seen in the backseats of some of those cars would make John C. Holmes himself keel over.
April was bowing out now. For the first time this season, Kurt noticed that everything around him pulsated in life and vibrancy. The unsightly black-flecked snow had melted away, leaving the winding asphalt of Route 154 a cleansed, black shimmer. Trees, barren a month ago, stood straight and heavy in prominent greens. To the left, the vast square of Merkel’s cornfield glowed coppery, fecund brown, showing newly turned soil, and would soon glow green as a scape of hardy man-tall corn rows. Colors seemed sharper, more intense, the air rich with the scents of life. It was more than just the shift of nature; it was an overhaul of his soul—spring fever, and the nearing of long days, endless skies, and the warmth he feared might never come. The end of another gray Maryland winter.
Backward and hard-minded, Tylersville wasn’t a town at all, really; it was a road—State Route 154—and all on either side of that road was called Tylersville. Route 154 cut a twisting dozen-mile path through the worst of Maryland’s woods and hills and swamps, and joined the city of Bowie to the south with an extremity of Annapolis to the north. The small, sparse homes and trailers which stretched along the Route, as it was called, did not total more than one hundred, and were it not for the shopping center and the apartment complexes at the south end, there wouldn’t be population enough to even constitute a town. Tylersville had its own police force only because it happened to exist along this sensitive access as a municipality between two sizable cities. The department itself was small, yet crime was barely evident at all save for the drunks and the rednecks and the motorheads who liked to think of Route 154 as a testing track for their hot rods.
Kurt worked the four-to-midnight shift, and he assumed he’d continue to do so for the rest of his life. The work was tedious, the environment less than edifying, and the pay had never been known to urge him to jump up and down; but he supposed that the job suited him. Beyond his boredom, he found a redeeming function, slight but there. It was a job that had to be done, a job that even offered the chance to help people, and that at least seemed favorable to standing in line at the unemployment office.
Sometimes it felt as though whole shifts were spent driving the Route back and forth, from one end to the other. He had done this hundreds or perhaps thousands of times, traveling the same miles and looking at the same unremarkable scenery over and over. The bulk of police work in Tylersville wound down mainly to traffic. Speeders ran rampant along the Route, its snake-twisted turns and clean, long straightaways a pronounced challenge for the droves of fast cars which inhabited Prince George’s County; running radar was Kurt’s favorite recreational therapy. The only nontraffic-oriented crimes to occur with any regularity were the weekly weekend fights which erupted at the Anvil (a topless roadside bar) and an occasional domestic flare-up, drunk husbands beating the piss out of drunk wives, though Kurt had known it to be the other way around once or twice.
The farther north he drove, the poorer the roadside residents appeared to be—their cars older, rustier, their homes more dilapidated, a few probably worth condemning. There were some trailer homes, he knew, recessed deep off the road and in the hills, where the people didn’t even have electricity.
The road darkened toward this end, the fir and pine and poplar forest denser here and so tall that the heavy, reaching branches cut off the daylight as the sun moved steadily off. Here there were no homes on the right side of the road, the trees spireing over swamps rather than hills. A glance to the left after another mile, and Kurt saw the wildly overgrown confines of Beall Cemetery occupying a short clearing in the midst of the wood. (It struck him oddly then that so many Maryland cemeteries and funeral homes bore the cryptic name Beall.) He’d always thought the cemetery to be forgotten, but as he looked now he made out a line of cars at the shoulder, and a cluster of somberly dressed mourners standing round an open grave. And he remembered then the Drucker tragedy of a few days ago. Town drunk and crank Cody Drucker had stepped inadvertently on a croquet ball, whereupon he’d fallen down the stairs, clunking and cussing and breaking his neck in the process. No one could deduce exactly what the croquet ball had been doing on the landing, nor could anyone explain why Cody had been wearing black socks and black shoes and nothing more. It was unimportant, though; the town wouldn’t likely miss old Cody. The thin turnout at the funeral seemed an accurate reflection of his popularity.
What the town referred to as Belleau Wood consisted of several hundred acres of undisturbed woods, some ignored farmland, and a half dozen mineshafts which had been closed since the late forties. The property had deteriorated to an unimpressive estate centered around the Belleau Wood mansion, possibly the least impressive feature of all. Abruptly right, built atop the tallest hill, the “mansion” stood brooding and disconsolate, a large pillar-porched colonial farmhouse, distinctive only in its constant state of disrepair. The house and all of the Belleau Wood property was owned by one Dr. Charles Willard. No one knew what kind of doctor he was; few knew him at all, and fewer cared. Kurt supposed that years ago Belleau Wood had made a striking piece of land. Now, though, after so much neglect, it looked like real estate in hell.
This road, one of four chained entrances to the property, formed the entire length of the acreage’s southern boundary. When Kurt had followed it to the very end, he saw Lenny Stokes’s primer-gray Chevelle parked near the mouth of the first mine. This was the only shaft that had not caved in. Kurt swore, irritation slipping up; he grabbed his Kel-Lite (a twenty-two-inch metal flashlight), got out, and entered the manway of the mine.
Darkness came in stages as he stepped cautiously in. The air was stale here, and heavy with fetors of stone dust and decomposed talc. Revealed around the flashlight beam was a maze of wooden stulls, splintering, rotted, that supported the mine’s roof. Kurt realized the danger, knew that it was just a matter of time before the stulls gave way and sealed the mine shut forever.
The flashlight blazed ahead, puncturing the black void. Streaks of talc ran through the walls like abscesses in the stone. Rubble filled ancient trackbeds, overflowing; trolley rails bent up to form twisted, skeletal shapes, caution: watch for trolleys, one sign warned. In the light, others floated up: keep left, haulage line, and main shaft ahead. Hard hats lay about like empty skulls, some dented, some crushed. Kurt felt pressed down by a sudden, haunted despair; this place tilled up ghosts of his childhood. His father had worked twenty years in coalmines. “Good, hard work with a pension a man can live on, the kind of work that makes this country strong.” Twenty years in the stopes. His father had collected only a few months of pension before dying from a combination of emphysema, black lung, and cancer.
Kurt shivered out of the fading oppression, stepping on, and then he perceived hints of female laughter and unintelligible male talk. This, he knew, would be Lenny Stokes and one of his entourage of sexual accomplices. Lenny Stokes and Kurt went back a long way, enemies since grade school, polar opposites; all they had in common was their age, twenty-six. In a town full of bad-asses, Stokes held the number-one position, and he truly looked the part. Face pitted by an adolescent war with acne. Weasel eyes. Lumberjack shirt and shitkicker boots. He wore his hair long and slicked back, and had Elvis sideburns and a satanic goatee. He poached and dealt drugs for money, ran around with any available girl for fun, and beat his wife when he had nothing better to do.
Kurt came around a slant in the manway and was detected at once. Two shock-white faces peered up into
