Buddy Through The Woods (Revised June 17)

                                        Buddy Through the Woods

After a dinner of a cheeseburger, potato salad and corn niblets, Buddy sits on the grass beneath a front door with no steps. He twists the seal on the cap of his last mini-bottle of Fireball and downs half of it.

Dusk is thickening and soon he won’t be able to see through his binoculars to the white side door of Richie and Tammy’s long red barn. It’s time for her to check on the horses and the goats, in their own shed up against the barn. Sometimes when it’s hot, she comes out wearing shorty pajamas and Buddy turns the binoculars away for privacy.

 He pans the binoculars from the small parcel he left for her at the barn door across the yard to the house. She pauses on the landing beneath the overhead light to pull her dark ponytail through the back of her black ballcap, and for a second yellow light falls over her head and shoulders. She marches down the pathway to the barn, her ponytail jouncing. She crouches at the door, picks up the package, shields her eyes from the light above the door and waves in Buddy’s general direction. She tucks his package under her arm and unlocks the door. It sticks, she shoves it open and reaches inside and turns on a light. It spreads faintly over a line of hooks draped with bridles, their silver bits glinting. She closes the door.
Buddy shakes down the rest of the Fireball, gets up from the grass and walks to the back of the house. He takes two steps up to the sagging porch where five cats - including a black and white one on three legs - gobble dark brown pellets from green bowls. He spins the combination lock to his room his father had added at the end of the porch shortly after Buddy was born.

He sits on the black leather seat that he took from a wrecked limo after a day’s work, gutting cars at Cosmello’s junkyard. He leans back and re-reads the opening chapter of the paperback book Tammy had given him two months earlier for his 50th birthday along with a chocolate-frosted cupcake, a blue candle stuck on top. Tammy signed Richie’s name on the card. 

  Tammy said she thought Buddy might  like the book, considering that “you let it slip that you’d read all your father’s detective novels. Don’t worry, I can keep a secret.” 

She bought the book at a flea market along with an old Life magazine with the famous race horse, Secretariat, on the cover, that she hung in the barn. The book was called “A Tan and Sandy Silence.” Buddy looked it up. It was written a long time ago by John D. MacDonald, who wrote a series of 21 novels about square-jawed hero Travis McGee, a kind of private investigator living on a houseboat in a Florida marina packed with party boats and women in bikinis. McGee exacts brutal revenge on those who have been cheated out of money or otherwise mistreated.

“You kinda remind me of Travis McGee,” she said, when she gave  him the book, splashing him with her smile that always warmed him all over, like a Fireball for breakfast.

Buddy mailed away for the rest of the series, each book a color in its title - Nightmare in Pink, The Deep Blue Goodbye,The Turquoise Lament. Every two weeks he leaves her a new one in front of the barn door and after she’s read it she leaves it in Buddy’s mailbox. 

 He rereads the gruesome last sentence of the “Tan and Sandy Silence,” that Tammy had double underlined, adding an exclamation point and a smiley face. Buddy puts the book back in its place on the shelf, watches a monster truck mashup race on YouTube before shutting down the ancient computer Willie gave him.

He’s planning to ride his quad about seven miles through the woods up the hill and behind his house to the Flying J truck stop where she might be.

It’s always at least 10 degrees colder in the woods - even colder when wind comes through the path cut between trees for trucks to load slabs of bluestone from the quarry. So he pulls a black sweatshirt over his head, tugs up thick tan pants, slips into its matching jacket and sets a white vinyl cowboy hat on his head, broken black plastic stitches sticking up from the crown. All of it bought at a near giveaway price at the Flying J because someone had boxcutter-sliced the Double XX Carhartt outfit and the hat had been catching dust for two years. His mother sewed up the jacket and pants. When Buddy is standing near someone he always tries to angle himself so the stitches don’t show.

On the way out of his room, he stops at his chest of drawers and stares at the array of plastic dinosaurs he got for his seventh birthday. He closes his eyes and rearranges them. Eyes still closed, he turns his head away, opening them as he steps toward the door. When he comes back, the dinosaurs will look as if they’d moved on their own. …. (to be continued.)