Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home

One

Thaddeus Gale wakes to his cat Benjamin meowing plaintively in his ear at six o'clock on a Saturday morning. He swats the cat gently away from his face and blinks his eyes open at his bedroom ceiling; the beams are starting to look a little eaten through, this shabby chic thing he's got in terms of cabin decor going a bit too far. He hopes it's not termites, but considering the amount of wood in his house, it probably is. Benjamin meows again, pawing at Thaddeus's shoulder, claws pricking his t-shirt. He sounds frantic, but Thaddeus knows he's just hungry. He throws back the comforter and hauls his legs out of bed, telling the cat,

"All right, I'm getting up, breakfast is coming."

He puts Cole Porter on the record player as he passes, filling the cabin with horns and piano. He turns it up as loud as he can stand; his nearest neighbor is three miles away, there's no one around to complain about the noise, so he indulges himself. He remembers seeing Cole Porter in a jazz club in the 20s, how he filled the room with sound, how the floors shook with the force of it. Now it fills his little cabin with nostalgia and shakes his heart apart.

The phone rings while he's setting down Benjamin's bowl and Thaddeus stops; he looks up towards his phone, hanging on the wall, a bright yellow machine that he doesn't know why he even has. No one has his phone number, he's unlisted, and he has no friends. Thaddeus Gale is utterly alone in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and he likes it that way. He's always been that way, he thinks; he likes his cat, and slow, grey days, and his Blues Traveler records, and his solitude. His one goal for the year is to read Ulysses all the way through for the first time. He shops at Trader Joe's, and he's never had a nickname. He owns one windbreaker that he wears everywhere, and his thick brown hair is constantly sticking up in the front. He wears khakis, for god's sake. Thaddeus Gale does not get phone calls. He stares at the phone while it rings, not quite sure what to do with it. He doesn't have an answering machine, he won't know if it's important or not unless he picks it up.

"Hell-o?" Thaddeus stutters when he answers after the sixth ring.

"Thaddeus, is that you?" replies a bubbly, staticky voice on the other line, and Thaddeus recognizes it immediately and rolls his eyes, lets his shoulders droop: Eliza Byrd from the Monongahela Forest Rangers.

A note on Eliza Byrd: Eliza likes to have wine parties with her girlfriends, but she also talks to plants like people so Thaddeus has always been a little confused by her over the five years they've known each other; admittedly, a relatively large chunk of time, but to Thaddeus it feels quick like the bat of an eyelash. What Thaddeus knows about Eliza is that she's excitable, and supportive, and they were friends, once, before Thaddeus moved away from Blackwater Falls. She was there for him when he took up jogging, and when he learned 18th-century candle making, and when he decided he wanted to dye his hair red (he ended up not doing this, mainly because Eliza was there to talk him out of it). The long and short of it is, Thaddeus considered Eliza a good friend, at one point in time.

"What do you want?"

"That is no way to talk to the person who stopped you from looking like Ronald McDonald three years ago," says Eliza, because she always remembers and never lets Thaddeus forget it.

"Sorry," says Thaddeus. "What do you want, please?"

"I need you to come back to Blackwater Falls," Eliza says in a rush, sounding breathless, and Thaddeus knows when she's scared because he's heard it before this; meeting a six-hundred pound grizzly during a routine night patrol will put the fear of god into anyone, and Eliza sounds now like she did that night, holed up in the ranger station after making themselves look big and yelling at the bear, feeling terrified and foolish, hands shaking around a Styrofoam cup of coffee. I've been working here for ten years, she'd said, you'd think I'd be used to bears. Now she says,

"There's been a weird murder in Monongahela and I need your help."