Dead Floating Lovers by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Page B

pointing toward what the amazing earth and I had in common.
    Harry and I walked carefully. A little rain fell; a fine mist leaving my skin moist, my hair damp. I could feel and taste the wet west wind. Overhead, the trees dripped sluggish drops as we passed beneath, working our way through thickets of last year’s sumac and new stands of aspens as spindly as colt legs. We searched for fallen trees where the elusive morel liked to grow.
    Every few yards Harry stopped. He would bend over in his old suit, shiny with rain, and put a finger to his grizzled lips as he studied the ground ahead—swinging his body left, then right, searching for mushrooms. I never spotted one of them. Harry would extend his arm and point—almost at my feet—to a wide circle of wrinkled, brain-like fungi blending into the brown shades of the old leaf bed. We would pick them gleefully, stuffing the mushrooms into our bags.
    “Mesh drops the spores behind us,” Harry’d said once, when I’d offered plastic bags and he’d shaken his head at me. “That’s how ya get a new crop next year. Plastic kills everything it touches.”
    When Harry pointed next, I crouched and pinched two fingers at the base of one spongy mushroom after another. I squeezed until the mushroom popped off, then sniffed it before putting it into my bag. Everything was caught in that smell—the woods, the soil, old trees, dead trees, tiny insects, rain … everything I loved about this place. Celebration in a single mushroom. No real ugliness in nature. No sorrow. Even the few deer corpses I’d come upon in my walks hadn’t been sad. Something about the inevitability of it all—no futile dream of immortality. Bones were bones. Soon to be a part of everything around them. Not at all like Dolly’s bones—with pain and suspicion and horror …
    During the two days I’d spent with Dolly I’d been reminded that life, for human beings, wasn’t always fair. Maybe hardly ever fair, and that good people kept getting hurt, and good people tried to rationalize away all the crap that landed on them. It wasn’t right for me to get mad at Dolly’s past. But how did I not get mad at a woman who pretended to love a child who never knew love?
    “Did you know Chet, Dolly’s husband?” I asked Harry as he brought a handful of mushrooms over to my bag. His old man’s arthritic hands were sweetly cupped so as not to bruise the morels. One by one he lifted a mushroom by the base and set it, with his careful, brown, ridged fingers, in on top of the others.
    He looked up at me when I asked about Chet. His pale eyes, surrounded with deep wrinkles, were confused, as if he couldn’t switch so fast from mushrooms to people.
    He stepped away from me, sniffed, and took a swipe at his nose with the damp, white handkerchief he pulled from a back pocket. “Why you asking?” he asked suspiciously, folding his handkerchief carefully before putting it away.
    “I think they might have found his bones out in Sandy Lake.”
    “The hell, you say. Thought he took off with a woman.” Harry frowned and turned his body away as if avoiding a blow.
    “Maybe he did. Two skeletons in the lake.”
    Harry shook his head and thought awhile, toeing the leaves at his feet with his old black shoe. When he looked back at me, his nose was aimed into the wind, sniffing. He looked slowly right then left. “Didn’t hear about no skeletons.”
    “You will. They brought up the second one early this morning.”
    “Then why you calling one of ’em ‘Chet’? How’d they find out so fast?”
    “Dolly thinks it’s him. She found something by the body … er … bodies.”
    “Ah.” He sniffed again, white and black eyebrows going up and down. “So, you want to know about him?”
    I nodded.
    “Won’t go saying nothing to the deputy, will you? I don’t like to get in the middle of things.” He toed the earth, then scoured the sky where patches of blue broke up the heavy clouds.
    I shook my head, assuring