The Bond

Chapter 7: Poppies

Chapter 7: PoppiesHot shower, cold skin, the endless belief that I was still caught in spider-web dreams where shadows and the rank stench of wet fur and scabbed flesh infiltrated my senses, yet there was the shampoo bottle, the soap, handmade by my mother with last year’s herbs. I remembered those days spent in the kitchen, Antonia by her side as my mother plucked herbs, told stories and made fun of my feeble attempts to help.

There was the sound of the water hitting the shower floor, steam rising, scrubbing my skin, washing my face, using copious amounts of soap, as I attempted to pry the horrible stench from my nostrils. Soap stung my eyes. Blinking brought green light, jagged like lightning, irritating like floaters etched in your eyes, imperfections of age. Everyone had them, a doctor had told me after examining my eyes.

Strange couldn’t describe the otherness I experienced in the shower. I sat on the edge of the tub, letting water pound my face until the sound drummed thought from my skull and soap grit from my eyes.

Out of the shower, dried and aching for rest untouched by nightmares, I dragged myself to bed.

The green light sweeping, like the beam of a New England lighthouse behind my closed eyes, killed any remote chance I had of peaceful slumber.

I stared at the ceiling until the sound of the toilet flushing signaled that Antonia was awake. Morning. I rushed to get her breakfast ready.

Antonia didn’t mention Adam’s absence. I’d kept her distracted with questions about her day and making sure she had everything she needed. Despite my best efforts, Antonia didn’t fall for it.

“Daddy, are you sad?”

“No.” I answered. “Just tired, kid.”

By the time she got on the bus, I’m pretty sure she pitied me. Even her, “Bye, Daddy. I love you,” sounded empathetic.

I waved as the bus departed, even trying a goofy face when she peered out of the window. She half waved back. It hadn’t worked. Never being one to patronize a child, my clumsy attempts at distraction had failed.

I’d tell her tonight. I didn’t have a choice. She’d stare at Adam’s empty seat and have questions.

I hoped she wouldn’t worry. The Bad Father of the Year award goes to…

Self-pity has no place on a farm. Farming teaches cruel lessons; nature is indifferent to torment.

It was October and the sky couldn’t have been more miserable. A slim ray of sun would have been too much to ask for. Searching the dismal sky for any source of blue or gold was depressing. I ducked inside and made a pot of coffee.

Staring at it while it brewed, its faint gurgling, the only sound besides the ticking of the kitchen clock, echoed. Emptiness crept along my spine. I grabbed a mug and poured coffee before the pot had finished brewing.

A splash of cream and I sipped, savoring the warmth. Exhaling, I slumped against the counter. I’m not sure if I dozed off or went into a trance, but twenty minutes later I was startled by a knock on the door. The coffee had gone cold.

“Decco? It’s Officer O’Keefe.”

Worried about Antonia, I spilled coffee as I lurched from the table.

“Right there!” I passed from kitchen to foyer, then porch.

Ori O’Keefe stood there in full uniform, staring at something unseen.

I opened the screen door. “What’s up?” I asked hoping he was collecting for another police department fundraiser.

Ori removed his sunglasses. “Birds,” he continued scanning the sky. “You notice ‘em?”

“What?” I stepped outside, bumping into him.

“There,” he pointed past the trees to the sky above the fields.

“Pumpkin harvest,” I said. “We leave the spoiled pumpkins for the animals, which includes birds.”

“Never seen so many at one time.”

“A murder,” I said, staring at the distant bird-dark sky.

“What did you say?” He turned, knocking his sunglasses off his shirt.

“A murder of crows, a large grouping of—” I stopped. “Why are you here?”

He bent, picking his glasses off the ground.

A sudden tightness gripped my chest.

“The school…”

He wiped his glasses on his sleeve. “School?”

“Antonia…Is everything all right at school?” Lack of sleep made it difficult to disguise my impatience.

Ori peered into his glasses then into the gray light. “Oh, yeah. No…all’s good at school.” He hooked the glasses back on his shirt. “Not a scratch.”

Relaxing, I opened the door. “It’s cold. Can we talk inside?”

His cheap, piney aftershave tickled my nostrils. His father wore the same s**t. Ori O’Keefe’s parents had been close friends to mine until they’d retired to Florida the previous year.

I followed him into the dining room. “The folks enjoying Florida?”

“I guess. Haven’t been yet.”

“You’ll get more use out of those shades there,” I said, gesturing at his sunglasses.

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” I said, offering him a seat.

He declined. Several seconds passed. Ori stared at the floor until his radio went off, making him jump.

“Declan…” He paused. “Decco,” he said, as though using my nickname might soften whatever bomb he was about to drop. “Your friend…” He swallowed. “The guy who lived here…”

“Adam?”

“Yeah. There’s a situation.”

Ori’s radio went off again. He was sweating. The scent of his aftershave intensified.

“What situation?”

“A situation,” he repeated, adjusting the handcuffs on his belt.

“He in jail?” I asked.

Ori shook his head.

“DUI?”

Ori stayed quiet, head still shaking.

“If we’re gonna play fifty questions, let me put on another pot of coffee.”

“Accident,” Ori mumbled. “He’s dead, we think.”

“What?”

“I think he’s dead. No one could have survived the crash…and the coyotes.”

The image of the creatures swarming my front yard flashed before me. A headache clawed the sides of my head. “Coyotes?”

“There’s no body, nothing.”

Shocked, I found myself fighting the bizarre urge to laugh.

“You all right?” Ori asked, sitting.

It took a minute, a swallow of acid bile and somewhere between a guffaw and a gasp before I said, “No.”

Dead…Adam’s dead.

The words circled but didn’t land. Nothing would land again. I couldn’t be sure if I was on the ground, awake or asleep.

“There’s something else.”

His pale face suffused with an unattractive shade of pink. He leaned close. “Are you dealing heroin?”

Those words landed with a bone-crunching thud.

The ticking of the clock in the other room sounded thunderous. You never know the moment your life is going to derail. So few are the times you can pinpoint s**t hitting the fan, when the other shoe will drop, etc.

A cop I’d known since before I had body hair was asking if I dealt heroin…

“What?”

“Decco—”

I envisioned the coyotes, Adam’s touch, our s*x—and the strange green light clouded my vision. I couldn’t see anything. In place of sight, I heard coyotes howling and my pulse pounding. The green light deepened and lessened, as though matching my heartbeat.

Then as quickly, cruelly, as it had arrived, it vanished.

“You didn’t find a body?” I asked, blinking.

Unraveling like a spool of thread knocked from a high table, I laughed because there were no words. My life was unraveling again and I imagined the spool of thread hitting the floor.

Silence wouldn’t do the situation justice and words were inadequate. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“It’s not funny. I know you know things,” Ori said, his voice raised.

“Yeah?” I managed. “What do I know?” I took a few deep breaths and wiped my face a couple of times. Adam was dead. Dead, dead, dead.

The word turned into a children’s singsong verse in my head. To my horror, it was Antonia singing, “Adam’s dead, went to bed, woke up dead, dead, dead, dead, dead…”

It turned into the coyotes howling, jaws clicking out the song.

“About plants, herbal s**t and how to grow,” he gestured at the gourds, Indian corn and tiny pumpkins Antonia amassed, decorating our dining room table.

“I’m a farmer. It’s what I do,” I said. I kept seeing Antonia swinging on her tree swing while Adam’s decaying body rotted beneath her feet. I went to the window. The swing, attached to Old Jed trembled in the morning breeze.

Adam’s dead, bumped his head, went to bed…

“What?” Ori had come behind me.

“Do you remember how we camped in your back yard? How scared you were of earwigs? You thought they crawled inside your ear and made a nest?” I closed my eyes and gripped the windowsill so tight that paint scraped beneath my nails. “You were scared. You slept close and kept trying to touch my dick.” I let go with one hand and wiped my face. The swing stopped swaying, a car passed and I wished it were warm enough to open the window and diffuse Ori’s shitty aftershave and the clock’s relentless ticking.

“You’re crazy,” Ori said.

I grabbed the bandana from my back pocket and blew my nose. “You want coffee?”

“I wanna know if you’re dealing f*****g drugs.”

“I wanna know how you know Adam’s dead if there wasn’t a body.”

“We’re on it.”

“I bet,” I said.

We stared at each other until his radio went off. Turning his back, he walked into the other room.

I poured coffee. My hands needed something to do.

“I’m not a drug dealer,” I said, offering Ori a cup when he returned. This time he took it and went for the sugar.

He looked in the bowl. “Why’s it brown?”

“It’s raw sugar. It’s not meth.”

He dumped the spoon into his coffee. “Not funny.”

I skipped the sugar and went for the cream.

“He ran off the road and hit a tree,” Ori said. He shook his leg and studied his coffee, avoiding my gaze. “From the look of the wreck, he must have been flying.”

Thinking of Adam’s face smashed into a tree, I imagined the moment he’d lost control, the screeching brakes and the sound of shattering glass. He was a f*****g mechanic!

Ori’s slurping shook me from the nightmare.

“Coyote…There was a dead coyote…” He gulped. “He must have hit it before smashing into the tree. There’s evidence that another coyote, or animal, might have gotten at Adam.”

The use of the phrase gotten at made my stomach turn.

“You think an animal ate him?” The words sounded hollow, trite, as though I were acting a scene in a long, overdrawn play. “I don’t believe it.” I hoped to see some semblance of a joke on his face.

“I don’t care what you believe,” Ori replied, before refilling his cup. “What I do care about are the bags of dried poppy pods, seeds and I don’t know what else rolling around in the back of his truck.”

“I don’t know—”

“He got the stuff from you.”

“What stuff? There’s no heroin here.”

“It’s illegal to grow opium poppies and your boyfriend had been living with you.”

He said boyfriend as though that were the criminal act. I sat back and ran my hands through my hair.

“I remember your mother giving my mom something for the chemo side effects.” Ori sounded as though he were struggling to remember, hoping to find a piece of evidence in our long history.

“Yup,” I said, helping, “but it was belladonna. She made the tea to ease your mother’s pain, a lot of plants have medicinal properties.”

Fucking Adam! I shouldn’t have told him about the poppies. I tried remembering how much I had stored—seeds, pods and stems. I wondered if he’d been smart enough to take the jars of poppy milk.

“What if your kid had gotten into the stash?” Ori sat and stirred more sugar into his cup.

“It’s not a stash! My great-great-great-grandparents brought seeds with them decades ago and we’ve grown some as a matter of preserving a legacy. My daughter isn’t stupid, and I’m not making heroin.”

Ori shook his head. “I warned your folks to stop with the home remedies.”

The terrible need to laugh crept back into my gut. “Am I being arrested?”

“Not yet,” Ori said. “There’s no proof it came from here and I haven’t written my report…but if there is anything hidden—” he craned his neck as though there might be a pot plant hiding in the corner “—I’d get rid of it.” He stood. “I’m way out of line warning you, but—”

“But you know I’m not doing anything illegal. I sell the pods as decoration. Hell, my mother puts dried poppy pods in her wreaths every autumn.”

“I don’t care about your faggoty wreaths! You’d better get your s**t in order real quick.” He polished off his cup, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I’m being nice. When I come back, there better not be anything to make me act not nice.”

I stared at him but stayed quiet.

“And I never touched your d**k!”

He left, slamming the door.

I listened until his cruiser peeled out of my driveway.

Adam is dead.

Dead.

Gone.

In some other world, my phone buzzed.

“Decco?”

I knew this voice; soothing, comforting. Chester.

I couldn’t speak.

Adam’s dead.

Wanting to scream but being unable to is the worst feeling.

My mouth moved, my tongue touched my teeth, but still there was no sound.

“I’ll be right there,” Chester said.