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First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, August 2024. Originally published in hardcover by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in October 2023.

© 2023 by Tim Johnston. All rights reserved.

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This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Johnston, Tim, [date] – author.

Title: Distant sons : a novel / Tim Johnston.

Description: First edition. | Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2023. |

Summary: “The actions of two young working men with secrets ignite the passions and violence of a small Wisconsin town still haunted by the unsolved disappearance of three boys in the 1970s” —Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023021317 | ISBN 9781643753591 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781643755465 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PS3610.O395 D57 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20230512

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021317

ISBN 978-1-64375-633-2 (paperback), 978-1-64375-546-5 (ebook)

E3-20240712-PDJ-PC-REV

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I

Chapter 1: February 2018

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5: April 1977

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10: May 1977

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13: June 1977

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16: June 1977

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21: June 1977

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Part II

Chapter 26: July 1977

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Part III

Chapter 33: July 1977

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Part IV

Chapter 42: April 2018

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Acknowledgments

Discover More

Questions for Discussion

About the Author

Also by Tim Johnston

Praise for "Distant Sons"

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ii

For Tad Michael Johnston & Randy Larson

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Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,

and curst be he yt moves my bones.

—Shakespeare’s tomb

May 1976

As the days grew longer the boys would hurry through dinner and grab up their mitts again and fly out the door—

Wait for your brother!

—back to the schoolyard, back to their places in center, at second, on the mound, the clouds they kicked up from the infield redder now, more brilliant in the dropping sun, their own shadows taller in the dirt. Stretched shadows like forecasts of their future selves, then taller still, the elongate figures crouching, adjusting ballcaps, pounding long, misshapen gloves.

The brick wall that is the back of the school, so familiar and oppressive as they slogged toward it in a weekday sunrise—Watch your brother!—is remade at sunset with bricks of gold, bathing the players in the joy of the hour—of this almost-done day near the end of May 1976. Spring of the American Bicentennial. The war in Vietnam over and gone from their living room TVs. Ms. Wheeler with her short skirt, playing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the whole thing, on her record player. And Teddy Felt still staring at them big-eyed from the announcements case.

Teddy Felt with his black-frame glasses and his parted, mother-combed black hair. Fourth grader from Roosevelt, across town, who got off the school bus one day and never came home. Just . . . gone. One year ago this spring.

Teddy Felt, whose name, spoken into a girl’s ear at close range (close enough to smell her hair, close enough almost to kiss her neck) would make her suck in her breath and cross herself.

All this and junior high in the fall—from kings to twerps in three months flat—and none of it is anywhere near their minds as they stand in the dusk, summer’s smell of glove leather in the air, smell of their own dusty, sweaty, grass-stained bodies. Their voices ringing on the golden bricks, and all of it conferring on each boy a feeling of his own greatness, his readiness, his sureness that the ball will come his way and will not get by him. Punching his mitt. Tugging the bill of his cap.

Hum batter, don’t whiff batter!

Only one of them can be right, only one boy’s sureness borne out, and the ball itself chooses—it leaps from the bat with a diving, curving life of its own and leaps again from the dirt in a fiendish sideways juke, hell-bent on the gap between second and third, a run-scoring single the moment it reaches the grass. But it never reaches the grass. It is stopped, robbed absolutely by a lunging left arm, a backhanding glove: his. Glove and boy wheeling all the way around with the flight of the ball before he halts himself, a hopping side step toward first, securing his grip on the ball and stepping into the throw, smooth as Morgan, deadly as Rose, the ball a pink moon in the dusk, the spiraling red stitches . . . the first baseman’s mitt open like a fishmouth and the ball itself snapping shut the mouth with a deep slap of leather.

End of inning. End of game.

That throw, the whooping of his teammates, still replaying in his heart as he goes among the pines, antic and happy on the needled path, heading home. The day’s last rays shooting slantwise through the trees like arrows, and the boy moving in that riddled light as in a pink netting, lobbing the ball into the air before him in mini pop flies and rushing to field them underhanded Willie Mays–style, to the amazement of the play-by-play man—Hoo boy, some catch by Milner! That voice, the soft skid of sneakers in pine needles, the quiet slap of the ball in the mitt’s webbing the only sounds in all those woods.

At the Assassin’s Bluff, a low wall of rock from which a panther or more likely the Assassin himself would pounce, the boy’s shadow lurches across the wall’s craggy face, leaping to snag a shadow ball among the shadow trees. Beyond the bluff the path dives into the Valley of Bones and here he descends in his headlong lope—here misjudges the ball, bobbles it, chases it down the path, the play-by-play man’s voice rising in urgency as the boy descends, as the runners advance, until the boy arrives breathless in the floor of the valley, that darker, colder gloom, and stops where the ball has fetched up at the foot of a tree, pocketed among knuckled roots. Gnarled roots like ghoul’s fingers tensed in the earth for just this prize, the ball so white and small and perfect. Like a lure. And the boy feeling such a chill then to the back of his neck that he turns to see what has blown on him with its cold breath.

Teddy Felt, the silence says. Like a whisper in his ear, that old game, and it’s as if the picture itself, big-eyed Teddy Felt in his black glasses, has followed him here, to these haunted woods, where it might at last become the living—or not living—boy himself.

Joey Milner, Teddy whispers, and Joey’s heart drops, the cold rushes through him and he grabs up the ball and turns and flies—just flies. Wind and breath and pounding sneakers and thudding heart all one great sound in his ears, and Teddy’s sneakers pounding too, thudding with the blood, and there’s the terror-thrill of what is just behind, of what cannot be seen: Hands. Grubby, dirty little hands, reaching—

Joey! . . . Teddy Felt calls. Joey, wait up . . . !

From the window over the sink she looks again—and there he is, springing from the dark woods like a deer, as lovely and light as that. A joy to see, but when nothing more follows him into the yard, joy turns to annoyance, then to anger. Then to something worse, climbing into her breast.

She opens the screen door and calls to the running boy: Joseph Milner, where is your brother? and the boy pulls up short, childish blooms on his cheeks, narrow ribcage heaving.

He’s here.

(Wait for your brother!)

He’s not with you? Her heart sliding. A woodenness in her legs, an emptiness.

I said he’s here.

He is certainly not here.

The boy tugs at the bill of his cap. He wanted to come home, he says.

So why didn’t you bring him home?

Because . . .

What—?

Because the game wasn’t over. I made the last—

So you sent him home by himself?

I didn’t send him home, he just went.

She looks beyond the boy, into the woods, and the name she has been fighting off breaks suddenly into her chest—Teddy Felt. Ten years old. Same age as her Duane. Teddy Felt who did nothing but get off the school bus at the wrong stop. A mother at home waiting for him . . . watching. Waiting.

He knows the way, Ma, says her own son. Her Joey. We’ve done it like a thousand times, he says, and the screen door slaps behind her as she takes her first steps in a changed world. Passing the boy, she hears as if through a wall of stones—Ma, he’s around here somewhere. He’s probably hiding.

Moving more quickly now, this mother of two, striding, not running, toward the trees and the darkness within them. Toward a possibility she’d not even allowed herself to consider one minute ago.

PART I

1.

February 2018

First the heat had quit. Then the engine light had come on. In his bleariness Sean looked long at his gauges—too long, nearly driving off I-90 at high speed and saved only by the shuddering of the rumble strip.

He could’ve stopped on the Minnesota side, town of La Crescent, but he pushed on for the Mississippi, and when he reached the other side, Wisconsin, he passed up two more exits before he began to smell the engine in the cold-blowing vents. He took the next exit, drove under the overpass, pulled over on the shoulder and shut her down quick. Popped the hood and got out, snugging down his cap in the wind. Cold, raw wind off the Mississippi blowing overland for Lake Michigan, water to water. The new day coming up in the east, the first pink bands of daylight staining the hem of blue sky, and the stars fleeing to the west in degrees of greater brightness, as if they might outrun, just this once, the advance of day.

The latch was hot but not too hot and he lifted the hood—and stepped back swatting at the cloud of acrid steam, spitting the taste of it from his mouth, “Son of a bitch.”

Under the bumper the pool was already forming: bright chemical green in the dawn, rippling with the steady drip.

He stood and looked north: the distant glowing signs of gas stations, fast food, motels.

“You could’ve made it,” he said to no one.

“Yeah, and you could’ve burnt out this engine,” he said. Voice of his father. Of using your head. Of quiet disbelief when you didn’t. “If you haven’t already.”

To the south the big rigs plowed the overpass eastward with the wind. Another two hours and he’d have made Madison. Let himself into his father’s house, hit the shower, hit that old couch. Wake up to his father coming home, looking down on him. I see my truck’s still running.

Your truck?

His father studying him. Older by a year—all of them: father, son, truck. Where you coming from?

Billings, Montana.

What was there?

Three days cladding a pole barn was there. A man named Dell Cortez he’d met just sitting at a bar drinking a beer. It happened that way sometimes. Sometimes he found something on the local Craigslist—Carpenter Needed. Handyman Needed. When they’d finished cladding the barn, Dell pulled five new hundreds from his billfold and his wife came out with a brick of banana bread still hot in its tinfoil. He’d eaten the last of it around midnight, just outside Sioux Falls.

Have you seen your mother? his father will ask.

No.

You need to see your mother, Sean.

Yeah. You know there’s no food in that kitchen, right?

There’s food. You gotta know where to look.

I looked.

Well, get up offa there, moneybags. You can buy me dinner.

And he would.

But he had to get there first.

He thought that once the engine cooled he could crawl along to a gas station, and so he moved to the lee side of the truck and lit his cigarette, and there he stood smoking it, a lean man leaning against the Chevy. A man merely taking his ease, he imagined, a man taking a break from the road, watching the new day come up. And but for the raised hood of the truck, so he might’ve been assumed to be and left alone. As it was, a white Dodge Ram with a load of cordwood rolled by, the driver slowing for a look at the Chevy, at Sean standing there, and at last pulled over. The reverse lights came on and the Dodge began backing down the shoulder.

Sean dropped his cigarette and mashed it under his boot toe.

The Dodge stopped short of the Chevy and Sean got a closer look at its load: lengths of cordwood all uniform in size and shape and stacked with great care and level across the top. As if the driver had indeed put a level to them. Sean liked him already.

The man cut his engine and stepped down from the cab and walked to the back of the Dodge. “Mornin,” he said.

“Mornin,” said Sean.

They wore canvas work jackets, the two of them, and they held each other’s eye briefly before both turned to look into the open engine bay of the Chevy.

“What happened here?” said the man. He was older than Sean by a good two decades. His father’s age, maybe. Early fifties. He wore no cap and his short silver hair stood stiffly in the wind.

“Well,” said Sean, tugging the bill of his cap, “first the heat cut out. Then the engine light came on. And now this.”

The man stepped back to see what Sean was tapping his boot at—the pool of green fluid.

“That’s not good,” he said.

“No sir,” said Sean.

The man stepped forward again and leaned in under the hood and stared at something. As if he might grab hold of it and yank it out. “You got somebody coming?”

“No sir. I don’t know anybody here.”

The man looked at him. “I meant a tow service.”

Sean looked to the north and said he thought he’d try to crawl along to one of those gas stations once the engine cooled down. The man looked too, then turned back to the engine.

“You’da been better off turning the other way,” he said. “There’s a good garage about four miles south of here.” He pushed back his jacket cuff to look at his watch. “Probably just opening up right about now.”

“I don’t think she’ll go four miles,” said Sean.

“No, probably not.” The man reached in and jiggled a dusty hose. “I were you, I’d call for a tow. Bud’s Top Line Auto. That’s the name of the garage.”

Sean got out his phone and as he was thumbing the screen he saw as in some cartoon one of the Dell Cortez hundred-dollar bills flying like a bird from his wallet, then another, and another. “Bud’s Top Line … ?”

“Auto,” said the man. “Owner’s an old buddy of mine.”

“Bud?”

“No. Bud was years ago. Larry Hines is the owner now. Larry will take care of you.”

Sean walked off a ways, leaving the man alone with the engine. After a while he came back to the Chevy.

“The wrecker’s out on another call,” he said. “Said he’d be an hour, maybe more.”

“Did you talk to Larry?”

“Yep.”

The man studied the engine. “How ’bout I just drive you on over there?” he said. “He’s got coffee and a place you can sit till the wrecker gets back.”

“You weren’t going that way,” said Sean.

The man shrugged. “Four miles,” he said.

Sean dropped the hood on the Chevy and climbed up into the cab of the Dodge and hauled the door shut behind him. The truck shook to life and the man swung it about in the road and got it up to speed going south.

The truck was not new but there was no dust, no trash, no smell in the cab other than the wood smell and the smell of shave cream, smell of coffee. No cigarette had ever been lit there.

“Hurt your leg?” the man said.

“Sorry?”

“You hurt your leg?”

Sean held his hands to the dash vent. “My knee,” he said. “Long time ago. It stiffens up on a long drive.”

The man sipped from a travel mug and returned it to the center console. “Didn’t fall off a roof, did you?”

“No sir.”

“Old carpenter buddy of mine fell off a roof one time and never did walk the same after that.”

Sean said nothing.

“I took you for a carpenter,” the man said. “With that Knaack box in the back.”

“Yes sir.”

“Finish, or frame, or—?”

“Pretty much whatever needs doing,” said Sean.

The man nodded. “I bent a few nails in my day. My younger days. I sell firewood now.”

“That’s a good load you got.”

“Taking her up to a man at Lake Neshonoc. I doubt you know where that is.”

“No sir.”

“Saw your Colorado plates,” said the firewood man.

Sean looked out at the gray new day. The gray nameless buildings. His brain was buzzing with the long drive, the lack of sleep. Nicotine.

“Family there?”

“No sir. Not anymore.”

The firewood man looked at him. “Meaning they don’t live there anymore, or—?”

“Meaning they don’t live there anymore.”

The firewood man nodded. He took another sip from the mug.

“Where were you headed? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Sean was slow to answer. “I tend to go from here to there,” he said. “Grabbing work where I can get it.”

The man nodded. “I did some of that, my younger days. Went to work on the BNSF line when I was twenty and, man, I rode those rails all over this country. Down to Brownsville, Texas on the Mexico border, on up to Winnipeg Canada. I was in Surprise, Arizona when my dad died, and the railway sent me home. 1988. Two years later Mom passed and all of a sudden I had a house, property. Met my wife. Started a family.”

Sean didn’t know what to say. It sounded like a whole life.

“You married?” said the man.

“No sir.”

“Kids?”

“Nope.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“That right?”

“Yep.”

“Thought you were older.”

They were sitting at a light. There was no cross traffic and it was a long light.

“Damn thing of it,” said the man, “was why he stopped on those tracks in the first place.”

Sean was watching the light. He turned and looked at the man. He thought he’d missed something—just blacked out for a second. Totally possible.

“My dad,” said the man. His hands loosely on the wheel. “Had him a load of apples in the back he’d been all day picking. On his way to the market and he stopped on the tracks and he wasn’t gonna leave those apples, by God. Sat there cranking at that engine, cranking at it, and the train just a-comin along.”

The light turned green and the man drove on.

Sean watched the buildings. His own father was getting up, making coffee in the little kitchen, the empty little house. His hair a mess. Looking out at the day.

“Of course, the railway said he did it on purpose,” said the firewood man. “Of course they said that.” He lifted his mug and sipped. “My mother didn’t even fight it. Said it would just make people talk. The neighbors. She couldn’t stand what the neighbors would say.”

He looked over at Sean. “How do you like this town so far? Man gives you a ride and tells you his life story. My mother is turning in her grave.”

“Was it the same railway?”

“How’s that?”

“The same railway that hit him? The BN . . .”

“BNSF. There isn’t no other railway, not around here there isn’t.” He flicked his signal. “This is Larry’s right up here.” He slowed to pull into the lot, but Bud’s Top Line Auto was a small operation, the lot was already packed with cars and trucks, and he flicked off his signal and pulled over in front.

“You don’t mind, I’m just gonna drop you. But you tell Larry hello from Lyle.”

“Hello from Lyle,” said Sean. He opened his door and began to get out.

“And your name—?”

Sean turned back. “Sean,” he said, and shook the man’s hand. “Thanks for the lift, Lyle.”

“Don’t mention it, Sean.”

Sean was turning to shut the door when the man named Lyle leaned toward him. “Tell you what, Sean.”

“What’s that.”

“I just now remembered. There’s a man lives out in the bluffs asked me a while back if I knew a carpenter. Had some kind of a job at the house out there needed doin. I told him I’d call my old carpenter buddy—guy who fell off the roof—but when I called him he said he was retired. News to me. Anyway, I don’t know if the man found somebody or not, but I could put you in touch with him, if you were interested.”

“What’s the job?”

“That I can’t tell you. He didn’t go into details. Just needed a carpenter. He sells me his deadfall, time to time, this man. Or sometimes just wants me to cord it up for him, for his own use.”

The man named Lyle waited. Watching Sean’s face. “How about I just give you his number and you can call or not call?”

“OK.”

“I’ll text it to you.”

“OK.”

They got out their phones and after a minute Sean had the text. He read it quickly and put his phone away. “Thank you.”

“Call him, don’t call him. But he’s only got the house line and you gotta let her ring. Kind of an old man. Living alone out there, just him and his dog. You can tell him Lyle sent you. He asks me, I’ll tell him the truth—I gave you a lift and you’re a carpenter looking for work. After that you’re on your own.”

“OK.”

Lyle nodded, and stayed as he was, leaning toward Sean, looking at him. Sean waited.

“I won’t tell you he’s the easiest man in the world to do business with,” Lyle said. “Somewhat set in his ways, you could say. But his money is US American, and it’s cash.”

“Cash is good.”

“Cash is good.”

Sean raised a hand. “Thanks again, Lyle. I appreciate you stopping.”

“Well,” said the firewood man, “I hate to see a man broke down on the road.”

Sean watched as the man got the Dodge turned around and up to speed again going north, then he fished up his cigarettes and lit one and stood smoking, alone in that anonymous outskirts. One-story enterprises of cinderblock and sheet metal. A brick four-story with a corporate logo and eight orange squares of sunrise in the top two floors. Smell of the river in the air, the wide Mississippi, plodding along on this morning as on all mornings since a time unimaginable, before the first men stepped foot on the land.

Wisconsin. Land of his birth and childhood.

Drifting thoughts in a tired brain. He did not stand in that unknown place contemplating how it was he ended up here—here. The chain of happenstance and accident that had led to these particular circumstances and none other; he would have time, and greater cause, to think about such things later. Just then he had the problem of the Chevy. The pool of green fluid. The hundred-dollar bills from Dell Cortez.

He got out his phone and read the text from the firewood man.

“Marion Devereaux,” he said, and wondered was it a misspelling—Marion.

“US American dollars,” he said. He took a last drag and dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. Then he turned and crossed the lot to the glass door that said office in gold sticker letters, and went on in.