WALKABOUT - Taking a Mulligan (Part 8)

43

Ty Hamilton

I had acted in self-defense. It might be hard to convince a cop or prosecuting attorney, or if it ever came to it, a jury. Especially since I had tossed the gun into the river. That would look suspicious. I figured my odds of getting off without being sent to the state pen to be about fifty-fifty at best.

As I look back on it now, hindsight being twenty-twenty, I doubt my situation was really as grim as I thought at the time. And I probably should have taken a smarter course of action than the one I was contemplating, but hell, what would you do if you’d just gone through all that I had?

I sat there, naked as the day I was born, soaked to the gills in the torrential rain, staring at the dead man. Jared Mulligan. There were so many things that I wanted to ask of him, dozens of questions whose answers would determine if the idea that was forming in my head had any merit.

How did he get here? He wasn’t wearing a flotation device. And he wasn’t dressed for a day on the river.

I remembered seeing a car in the parking lot at the launching ramp. What kind it was, and what color, I couldn’t say. Maybe he had driven to the launch ramp. But why? There were no keys in his pocket.

Once again, I asked myself, How did he know my name? And, why did he try to kill me? After I’d tried to save him. Not once, but twice. I pulled him out of the river. And he tried to kill me. I pulled him out from under a tree trunk that had fallen on him. And he tried again. I’ll say this about him: Jared Mulligan was one ungrateful son of a bitch. And, another thing—Why was he bleeding when I found him in the river? It looked like he’d been shot.

So many questions. But Jared Mulligan wasn’t talking. I was going to have to find out for myself, or forget about my idea and report his death to the authorities.

I can now see that this was the moment when I reached the proverbial fork in the road. That moment when you have to decide one way or another, and once you do, you can’t change your mind.

44

Ty Hamilton

I took the granite slate that I had used as a tray for the burning kindling over to a spot no more than thirty feet from the fire and dropped to my knees to begin digging. I kept to the task, stopping occasionally to drag another log to the fire and stand next to for a couple minutes it to warm up. I was still naked. As long as the fire was burning, it would keep my clothes dry for later. To put them on now would not be of any use. In the pouring rain, they would be soaked again in no time. I had lost all track of time, and I was totally exhausted. I had dug a hole roughly seven feet in length and two feet wide, maybe three feet deep. I kept hitting tree roots and rocks. The bottom was solid rock, and kept filling with water. I couldn’t go any deeper. The sun was coming up. This was just going to have to do.

I sat down next to the fire, and for a few minutes the rain let up a bit. I was hungry, and wished I’d bought more snacks at the convenience store. I’d finished off the last of the beef jerky just before heading back to the boat ramp. Looking around the small island, I saw nothing that looked fit to eat. Maybe in another couple of days the tree bark or earthworms might have some appeal, but for now I wasn’t that desperate.

One way or another, I needed to get off the island, the sooner the better. If I chose to stay on the island and wait for rescue, I would be the prime suspect if the body was ever found.

I stood, walked over to the dead man and removed all his clothing, along with a gold necklace and a pinky ring from his right hand, put them all together on his pants, which I wrapped up in a bundle and tied the corners off. Anything that would not decompose. Mulligan had one tattoo. The Marine Corps eagle, globe, and anchor on his left shoulder, with the words, Semper Fidelis inscribed at the top. I grabbed him by the ankles to drag him to the shallow grave. His legs and my hands were all wet, and the footing was slippery. I fell on my ass three times. I needed a better plan.

45

Ty Hamilton

After studying the situation, I decided to get behind him, hook my arms under his armpits and drag him that way. Before trying that, though, I needed to at least put on my undershorts. The idea of my uncovered genitalia making contact with any part of another man, dead or alive, dictated the decision.

It was slow going, but I managed to get him next to the pit, dropping him with a thud. The rain had resumed its intensity, and the hole was already filled with water.

I looked down at the dead man. At the watery grave. The time had come. The moment of truth. Was I really going to go through with it? Once again, the rest of my life would be determined by what I did next. That seemed to be a theme for the past few hours.

“Rest in peace,” was all I could think to offer as a eulogy for this man I’d never known. I tried to nudge him into the hole with my foot, but failed to budge him. I dropped to my knees and used both hands to push him in.

The body floated. I tried pushing it down under water with one hand and scooping mud onto it with the other, but that didn’t work. I sighed heavily. This was going to be a problem. Dawn would come soon and if there was a break in the weather there might be people out in boats or helicopters, looking for survivors to rescue. Hell, they’d probably be looking for me, considering that I’d left my truck and trailer sitting unattended on the ramp. I needed to get this job done and get off the island.

I tried weighing him down with rocks, but they just slid off him and fell. I could leave him there, and cover him up with brush. Maybe wild animals would consume the remains, scatter the bones around so that no one would notice. That of course would take weeks, months, maybe, but it could be quite some time before anyone came to the island again, after all this flooding, if anyone ever came here at all. I couldn’t envision why anyone, save a modern-day Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer would want to. I doubted there were any.  In this day of Internet video games, kids never went outside anymore.

Nonetheless, I had to operate on the assumption that someone, be it a mushroom hunter, a ginseng harvester, or some fisherman just looking for a place to take a dump, would eventually come along and discover the body. It occurred to me then that I was going to one hell of a lot of trouble to hide the body of a man that I had tried to save. I was acting more like a murderer than a would-be rescuer.

46

Ty Hamilton

The darkness was grudgingly surrendering to gloomy dawn as I dumped the contents of my toolbox into the boat. Unless I was willing to risk being seen in broad daylight, I had to work quickly. I dipped the toolbox into the river and walked to the fire. Reluctant to give up the warmth that had saved my life, I hesitated for only a second before dumping the water on the fire. I had to repeat the process perhaps a dozen times before the fire was completely out. The remaining wood in the pile was charred black, sizzling and steaming in the rain. I placed Jared Mulligan’s socks over my left hand and grabbed the burnt logs one at a time and tossed them into the river, letting the current take them away. As an extra measure, I used the flat rock to scrape up as much mud as I could and threw it over the spot where the fire had been, hoping to conceal the site of the campfire. I didn’t want to leave any evidence that I could possibly eliminate.

I knew that if I spent much time thinking about it, debating its merits, I would back out, because, let’s face it, this was a half-baked plan at best. Besides, I reminded myself, I had already tried to bury the corpse. Granted, I could probably clean up most evidence of that failed attempt, but I watch a lot of television, and even though I understand that all those CSI shows are fiction, and in real life they never solve a crime in an hour, the crime labs nowadays are in fact equipped with a lot of high-tech stuff, and I had to assume that they could detect anything I did. If I was going to have any chance at all, I had to operate under that assumption. It was frightening. And at the same time, exhilarating.

With a resolve that I hadn’t shown in anything I’d attempted in decades, I drug the body down to the shoreline and with considerable effort, placed it inside the boat.

I took the rope and anchor, wrapped the rope around the hands and feet. That didn’t look like it would work. I took the bundle with Mulligan’s clothing and personal effects, undid the belt from it before placing it in the boat.

I looped Mulligan’s belt over his left shoulder, across his torso and under his right armpit, and buckled it. I then looped the anchor rope through the belt around the body a couple of times, tied it securely, and hitched the belt buckle as snugly as I could. It was the best I could do. I turned to go back to retrieve my warm, dry clothes.

Halfway up the embankment I was aware of movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned and saw with alarm my boat sliding away, into the river. I glanced to my clothes. Warm, dry, inviting, hanging on the tree branch. Then back to the boat, now fully in the water, pivoting to the right and moving away from the island. I dove for it.

47

Ty Hamilton

I tried holding onto the boat with both hands and moving it back to the beach by kicking my feet in the water. It was useless. I was still moving backward, downstream. I had to get into the boat. I nearly capsized it as I clambered aboard and fell onto the corpse.

Ordinarily I would have been unnerved to find myself lying face to face on top of a dead body, but after the night I’d had, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. I moved slowly, careful not to tip the boat, sat up on my knees and began paddling with my hands toward the island. It took only a few seconds to conclude that the effort was futile. I was drifting away.

“I’m going to hell for this,” I said ten minutes later as I dumped the body overboard without ceremony a couple hundred yards downstream. The moment that it went over the side, I was consumed by a hot wave of emotions—guilt, remorse, but mostly fear and anxiety. What have I just done?  What was I thinking? This has no chance of working. Good Lord, if—no, when—someone finds that body, weighted down in the river, I could spend the rest of my life in prison for murder! I prayed no one would find my clothing on the island. If they did, they would certainly notice the blood stains.

I am not a murderer, I reminded myself. So, why am I acting like one? It would have been so easy to just wait for rescue, or take a chance, like I was now, of drifting to a safe place in the boat.

Maybe it can work, after all. This would be my fresh start. A second chance. A new life. A Mulligan. No turning back now. I felt my self-confidence returning, like a friend long-lost and given up for dead, for having thought of a plan on such short notice. I was calm. I was focused. I was more alive than I had been in thirty years.

Thus began the first day of the rest of my life. In nothing but my underwear.

48

Ty Hamilton

I stayed in the boat, steering as best I could by moving the lifeless motor like a rudder. A quarter mile or so downstream, I spotted an abandoned river cabin leaning precariously on rotting stilts. The windows were broken, probably by the same vandals who had spray-painted vulgarities on its exterior. I maneuvered toward the cabin, slamming into one of the stilts and expecting the entire structure to come crashing down upon me in retribution for what I had done. I hopped out into waist-high water, pushed the boat back out into the current, and waded to the bank.

The slope was slippery, and it was slow going as I made my way up the hill, grabbing onto saplings every few feet, using them to pull myself up the embankment. I was soaking wet, cold and covered with mud, clothed only in my boxer briefs.

The cabin looked as if it could collapse any moment. From the looks of it, no one had been inside for years. Beer cans littering the driveway and yard were mostly covered by vegetation. Even the graffiti was faded. I started out on the old, washed-out driveway that went for a hundred yards or so, eventually leading to a gravel road. I turned right, paralleling the river, working my way upstream along the country backroads. I had to jump into the brush a few times, scratching myself up on the thorns in order to avoid being seen whenever a car or pickup truck went by. It took nearly two hours to get back to the public boat launch, during which time, I thought about the details that I was going to be confronted with. That is, when I wasn’t thinking about my scratched up body and bare feet, now sore and bleeding from the long hike.

I knew nothing about this guy, Mulligan, other than I liked his name and it inspired me. I realize now just how dumb that sounds. Kind of like the couple I saw on the news one night back in the 70’s, shortly after the first Rocky movie came out, who were so inspired by it that they took out a second mortgage on their house and used the proceeds to purchase lottery tickets. I never heard anything more about them. Always wondered whatever became of them.

Anyway, yeah, I was inspired to start out with a new identity, but as they say, the Devil is in the details. And I knew nothing.

Like, for instance, did this guy have a family that might at this very moment be contacting the police to report him missing? Or, was he maybe a fugitive from justice?

49

The first thing I did when I got back to the launch ramp was move my truck and trailer from where I’d left them on the ramp back up the hill to a parking spot. I stopped, pondering what to do next.  I kept the engine running, with the heater on. It was still late summer, but the storm had cooled things down and I was wet. I needed to get into some dry clothes, and all I had in the truck was my security uniform. It would have to do. It was still raining, so I dressed inside the truck, slipping out of my soaking wet boxer briefs, tossing them in the back of the cab, and going commando.

A million thoughts flooded my mind as I sat there in my truck, in familiar surroundings that allowed me to think normally once more. What I had experienced during the past twelve or so hours now seemed more like a bad dream.

But it wasn’t a dream. I had done things that could never be undone. I hadn’t killed Jared Mulligan for any reason other than my own personal self-defense. Certainly not for the purpose of assuming his identity. But it had happened, and I’ll be honest with you, it unnerved me when he spoke my name. I didn’t know him from Adam. As far as I knew, we had never met, never seen one another before in our lives. So that led me to believe that his sole reason for being there was to kill me. But that made no sense.

Maybe he planned to kill me so that he could take my identity. If so, that meant he was every bit as stupid as me, because I had a family—dysfunctional though it may be—and I was drowning in debt. If so, and he had succeeded in killing me, I thought, the joke would have been on him.

50

Ty Hamilton

As I sat in my truck at the launch ramp, I wondered, had I already reached the point of no return? Was there still a chance that I could act as if I had been forced to spend the night on the island when I ran out of gas in the boat? Pretend that I hadn’t seen Mulligan? They’d be less likely to find him if they weren’t out there on the river searching for me. And if they did find him sometime later, there wouldn’t be much likelihood of my being linked to him. How do you explain that the body was found with a rope and anchor, which are both missing from your boat, Mr. Hamilton?

That’s what any reasonable person would do. That, or, better yet, not dispose of the body in the first place, like I had done. Just tell the truth about what happened. Why hadn’t I done that? Why had that possibility not even occurred to me?

I don’t think of myself as being crazy, but I have to admit, sometimes I do crazy things. I wondered if maybe I had subconsciously rejected the notion, not allowing myself to think about it at a conscious level because I wanted so desperately to just walk away from my current life and circumstances. I’m no psychologist, or psychiatrist, so all I had was questions. No answers. Anyway, you can’t unring a bell, and I couldn’t undo what I’d already done.

There was a silver Toyota Camry parked in the far corner of the lot. A tree branch had narrowly missed falling on it during the storm last night. It would have to be moved before the car could go anywhere.

I slipped on the security windbreaker and the cap, and, because the uniform I’d intended to return did not include shoes, walked to the Camry in my   bleeding bare feet.

The door was unlocked, and the keys were in the ignition. There was an envelope on the front passenger side and a hotel key card in the cup holder. I checked the glove box and the console, found a rental agreement in the name of Jared Mulligan from a rental car company at the Indianapolis airport.

I checked the envelope. It had never been sealed, and the only thing in it was a photograph. Of me. My name was scribbled on the back side. Okay, so a stranger who knows my name and has a photograph of me tries to kill me. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but even I knew, something was afoot.

I looked at the hotel key card.

Lakeview Resort,

206 E. Birch Avenue

Lassiter, Indiana

51

Ty Hamilton

I knew the Lakeview Resort. I’d gone there once, about sixteen years ago, when Dianna and I were going through rough times. It was one of those mistakes you make, and then you learn to forgive yourself and just live with it, if you know what I mean. The Lakeview Resort was nowhere near a lake, and it wasn’t anything resembling a resort. Not sixteen years ago.  And certainly not now. From the look of it, there had not been any renovations since my last visit.

The decision to come here had been an easy one to make. I needed to get Mulligan’s rental car away from the river, where his body had been dumped. It made sense to move the fallen limb out of the way and take the Camry back to the motel, where he was registered. Any search, if there was to be one, would begin there. And hopefully end there as well. I still had to figure out how to get back to my truck and what to do with it.

Years ago, all hotel rooms came with real keys, and they all had numbers engraved on them. Back then, all you had to do was look at the number on the key and you knew which room it went to. Now, it’s not so simple. Everyone gets a card with a magnetic strip, and you have to remember which room you are in, because it’s not printed on the card. Even little Mom and Pop no-tell motels like the Lakeview Resort had kept pace with the times. Sort of. The familiar sign outside said “Color TV”—like that was still a novelty—but there was no mention of WIFI. There are limits on progress.

The parking lot had only a handful of cars. A beat-up pink Cadillac circa 1973. Must have at one time belonged to a Mary Kay rep. A late-model Hyundai. And a Chevy of indeterminable vintage, painted with primer only, no rear bumper, and Tennessee license plates duct taped on the inside of the rear windshield. Despite the lack of guests using the lot, apparently there was a problem with patrons from the bowling alley next door parking here. This I surmised from the hand-painted sign that said:

PARKING FOR

MOTEL GEST’S ONLY

ALL OTHER’S

WILL BE TOAD