by Jay Nadal
25
Charlie Biggs sank into the recliner, which occupied the lion’s share of space in the living room of his apartment. It was above the store and took up the whole width of the building. A narrow hallway ran the length of the store and connected to the stairs and the two partitioned rooms at the front which served as bedrooms, though most nights Charlie fell asleep in his beat-up old recliner. A comforter lay folded on the sofa, a permanent fixture in the room. These days he found he didn’t sleep through the night, and it was a damn sight easier getting out of the recliner than out of bed.
The windows in front of him looked out over the backyard and the town beyond. How many hours had he spent in this chair, looking out through that window? How many nights? It tired him. He didn’t know when it had happened, but at some point, his body had started to fail. It was a fact of life, but somehow it had taken him by surprise. There had been a point when he was a much younger man when he realized he couldn’t run as fast, couldn’t lift as much, or work as hard as he once could.
It was as though he had gone from being in his twenties to being in his sixties without any intervening years. His eyes wandered to the sideboard to one side of the window. It was covered in framed pictures. Isobel was the first. Always the first. Black-and-white pictures of a young woman with round cheeks, corkscrew curls, and a smile that Charlie could still almost feel on his face like sunlight. Then color pictures. Her hair, bright blonde. Eyes, jade green. Lips pink and always smiling.
Charlie smiled back.
“Girl. I’m glad you’re not here to see what a silly old man I’ve turned into.”
He immediately regretted the words, and the smile washed from his face. He would never be glad about that. His drooping eyes wandered over the pictures of Isobel and himself. Him with a flat stomach and jet-black hair, wearing shorts made by Isobel by cutting up his old jeans. He stood up to his knees in water, posing like an idiot with a big grin on his face. They had been on vacation at Echo Lake with friends. In another, the same dumb young grin; he was the anchor in a tug-of-war match. It had been at the County Fair in 1965, Burford versus Flint.
He named the others pictured. There was Don Maynes, a butcher, and Pete Harmon, who had a cattle farm down on the Grey River. And Pull Gillespie, who worked with Charlie at Shell’s Ridge. And Mitch Holcombe, who had built his own gas station down at the Weaver Bridge. Got an architect to design it and everything. Everyone in town thought he was about the richest man they knew. That’d been right. But he was generous, too.
Good people. And it had been a good town. There had been some bad apples. Like the Dexters. Like that two-faced sneak Joseph. He had been a rotten one even back then. Who would have thought he would get elected chief of police? But there always were rotten ones in every town. It didn’t matter because they couldn’t touch the town. Everyone helped each other. They stood by their neighbors.
When had that gone wrong? In those days, Jimmy Dexter and his gang wouldn’t have gotten away with it. The next time they showed up for their protection money, they would have found half the men of the town waiting for them. Now, nobody wanted to stick their neck out. Everyone was looking out for themselves. The Collinses had tried, God knows they had tried.
In the beginning, when Beth realized they weren’t the only ones the Dexters were threatening, she had tried to get everyone together. Tried to make them stand up to Jimmy Dexter. She met with the same reaction from all of them. No one trusted that the others would stand with them if they stood up to Jimmy. Everyone had someone they had to protect, wives, kids. Someone. It scared everyone. And one by one, they told her not to call. Told her they couldn’t afford to lose everything they had by being a hero. And the Dexters won. They got rich, and everyone else got poor.
It stunk. Stunk to high heaven. The whole town was rotten. Not for the first time, he thought about leaving, selling his place to Pa Dexter and getting on a bus. Anywhere. But he didn’t have enough left to start again somewhere else. And at his age, he didn’t have the energy. The store had been his retirement. He and Isobel had spent their entire lives saving for that rainy day that never seemed to come.
When he retired and Isobel had already gone, he had bought the store from Oscar Jones, who had run it for the previous thirty years. There had been a Jones’ Store on Robinson Street for close to fifty years. Oscar had no kids to leave the family business to, and Charlie had promised not to change the name.
He liked that he had bought himself a place to run in his retirement and kept a Burford landmark alive. And for what? The room was dimming around him. Streetlights were orange stars, blotting out the real night sky. He often forgot about the lights when alone. He could walk about the apartment with his eyes closed. There was no clutter or mess. Air Force training had stayed with him for his entire life. He still rose at five every morning; Isobel couldn’t understand how he did it. And the apartment was always immaculate. Nothing to trip over. Saved money on electricity, anyway.
A sudden blaring of music came from somewhere outside, somewhere close by—a car radio maybe. From Fox Street, which the back of the store overlooked. He couldn’t see who it was because of the high walls that separated the backyards. But he could see across the street. There were no cars. He stood to close the window and shut out the noise of the inconsiderate asshole down there that didn’t care how loud they were. Some kid. It always was these days. As he slammed down the windowpane, he saw the hooded figure drop over the wall and into the backyard.
He wore one of those hoodie things that the kids slouched around in, the hood up, hiding his face in shadow. Charlie didn’t have time to shout before he disappeared. Charlie ran, as well as he was able, for the bedrooms at the front of the house. He thought he had heard the tinkle of broken glass, but over the music blaring from outside, he couldn’t be sure. Charlie’s heart thudded in his chest. Fear was the prime mover, though once upon a time it would have been anger. He knew who that shadowy figure would most likely be.
The hallway had never seemed so long. He fumbled his phone out of his pocket and through the locked screen. Didn’t matter how long he had the phone, or how many times he used it, nothing about it would ever be second nature to him. It took an age to unlock. It forced him to stop and stand still to hit the right icon to bring up the phone options. All the time, he expected that hooded figure to step into view from the top of the stairs. But there was nothing, and no sound on the staircase.
Charlie brought up Cade’s number and dialed. It beeped a busy signal. He made his slippered feet keep moving, breathing ragged and fast. He was nearing the top of the stairs now, and there were sounds coming from downstairs. The sound of objects being moved. Objects being broken. Something that sounded like a giggle. Charlie reached the end of the wall that separated the hallway from the staircase. He forced himself to peer around the corner and look down the stairs. A figure stepped into view at the bottom, its features lost to the darkness.
For a long moment, the dark figure and the old man stood still, watching each other. Then it moved with the speed of a striking cobra. Charlie ran for the door to the bedroom. He kept his shotgun in an old guitar case under the bed. He slammed the bedroom door shut and turned the lock just as the figure ran into it. The door rattled on its hinges, and Charlie shamed himself by letting out a yelp. He fell to his knees, reaching for the box. Leaden fingers failed to master the clasps holding the case shut, and the door rattled again.
“Charlie Biggs. Charlie Biggs. Come on out, Charlie Biggs,” Bobby Dexter called in a singsong voice.
The clasps on the guitar case popped open. Charlie lifted the oiled double-barreled shotgun out. He hit the box of shells hard against the bare wooden floor of his room, breaking the cardboard open. The cartridges spilled across the room, but he grabbed two, breaking the shotgun and trying to load them with shaking, stiff fingers. The door had stopped rattling. The giggling subsided, and Charlie heard footsteps going down the hall. A particular floorboard just inside the livin
g room door groaned.
The gun loaded, Charlie took a moment to gather himself, listening for any sound that Bobby was coming back. Something broke. Glass. Probably a photo frame. He could get a replacement. A louder sound. The clatter of several objects hitting the floor. Charlie tried not to think what it could be. He could live without a TV, a radio, and a toaster. But he couldn’t live without his stuff. That’s what Isobel and he had called the pictures and other memorabilia he had accrued over the years. They were as precious to him as ancient artifacts were to explorers. He refused to part with any of it.
“Bobby Dexter! You better get yourself out of my place, or you’ll regret it!” he called. “You hear me? I’m armed.”
He thought he heard a giggle. The boy wasn’t right. He was crazy, always laughing like that. Footsteps came back down the hallway. Charlie got to his feet, snapping the gun together and pulling back the heavy hammers. Bobby thumped on the door, laughing. Then he headed down the stairs again. This time the sounds of destruction came from the store.
“No!” Charlie ran for the door, unlocked it, and flung it open.
His stuff was one thing. But the stock downstairs was his livelihood. If he lost that, he couldn’t eat. He stopped at the top of the stairs. Darkness lurked down there. The stairs let out into the back stockroom. The room seemed full of the night, as though filled with solid matter which oozed into every space like some viscous fluid. His hesitation only lasted for a moment before the sound of more breakage started his feet moving.
He crept down the stairs. At the bottom, he raised the gun, lifting the barrels to the ceiling as he peered around the wall. He couldn’t see anything in the room beyond. A pool of light spilled in from the broken window. Another, from the coolers, fell across the doorway leading into the store itself. Bobby must have kicked the door in to get access.
More sounds of shelves being emptied onto the floor. Jars and bottles breaking. Boxes and packets being thrown against walls.
“Charlie Biggs, come on down!” Bobby yelled, giggling between each word. “Come on out, old man. I wanna play.”
Charlie moved into the stockroom as quietly as he could, lowering the shotgun to lead the way. He raised the gun to his shoulder, pulling the stock in tight against the kick. He prayed his old bones would stand it and not just shatter on impact. If he was hospitalized for a few days, Bobby might as well have burned the store to the ground.
“I hear you in there. Come on out.”
Charlie reached the door from the stockroom into the store. He couldn’t take another step. Fear had locked his knees, refusing to let him confront the monster inside. He berated himself for his cowardice. He had flown planes through hails of anti-aircraft fire, had made an aircraft dive and swerve to avoid enemy fire. And he couldn’t make himself confront a single man. Back in the day, the noise of a break-in would have prompted his neighbors to investigate. Sam Mortenson, who used to run the bakery that had stood a few doors down, would have been at the door in his pajamas with his old Louisville slugger.
But he couldn’t expect any help this day. People would close their windows, turning up their TVs or just plain ignoring the noise. It meant trouble, and no one wanted any. There was only him. Screwing up his courage, Charlie dashed for the door. He yelled at the top of his voice as he came into the store and swung the gun around, looking for a target. Most of the shelves had been knocked over. Those that stood had been cleared. The floor was a mess of foodstuffs and household goods.
A head and shoulders popped up from behind a shelf still standing. Charlie reacted quickly, bringing the gun to bear and pulled one of the triggers. The shot passed through the space where Bobby had been standing to explode against the wall behind it. Another movement, running. Charlie fired again. The window of the store took the hit. It shattered. Charlie wailed, as though the shot had struck his own body.
“You bastard, Dexter. You lousy, no good son of a bitch! You want money. You want my money, then just take it. Open the register and take it!”
“I will,” said Bobby, standing up from behind the counter on which the cash register stood. “But that’s not what we wanted from you. This is a message from Jimmy not to interfere in stuff that don’t concern you.”
Charlie’s chest felt tight. Pain pulsed in waves up and down his left arm. He took medication for high blood pressure, and right now he could feel every thud of his heart as it seemed to want to break free of his body. Bobby walked toward him. He hadn’t brought the rest of the shells downstairs with him, and his old body just wasn’t up to a dash back up those stairs with Bobby in pursuit.
The kid’s face silhouetted in the light from the coolers. He was smiling, and his eyes were twinkling.
“I get the message, Bobby. You’ve trashed my store. You beat me, okay. Just go on now. Get outta here.”
Bobby reached out for the gun. He twisted it out of Charlie’s hands with ease. From somewhere, Charlie found a last spark of courage. He saw an intact juice bottle on the floor, and he grabbed for it. He swung it wildly, and it connected with Bobby’s shoulder. The younger man dropped the gun and hunched instinctively as the glass shattered around him. Charlie followed up with a punch, putting everything he had into the swing that took Bobby in the right eye, knocking him to his knees.
Pain stabbed into Charlie’s chest. Steel bands tightened around him, cutting off his breath. He cried out hoarsely as he fell to his knees. His left arm tingled. The pain in his chest felt as though someone were reaching in to pluck out his heart.
The last thing he saw was Bobby, murder in his eyes, grabbing the gun by the barrel and lifting it above his head.
26
Cade stood before Flint County General Hospital. It was a red brick building, roofed in blue metal and rising several stories in receding tiers. Spokes radiated outward, with the upper stories concentrated into a central block. Each protruding wing seemed to house a different specialty. After finding a parking space, Cade walked around the outside of the building, passing the ER and maternity wings before reaching the main entrance. Then he had stopped, unable to take another step.
As a cop, he had been into hospitals hundreds of times, sometimes with prisoners, injured while arrested or prior, sometimes to interview victims, other times to visit the morgue. None of it had bothered him. As a cop, he’d learned to stayed detached from his environment. His uniform had been his shield. It wasn’t there any longer. Now the circumstances touched him directly. This was the first time since Momma had died.
The Texas sun was a slap about the head. As Tommy crossed the tar of the parking lot, it cooked the soles of his feet through his thin sneakers. A thin shimmer of haze made the ground ahead look slick with water. Beth walked with Grandma’s arm around her shoulders. Beth’s thin arm was around the old woman’s waist, and she leaned into her. Pops walked next to him and occasionally patted his shoulder.
Tommy was seventeen, Beth fifteen. They were making their last visit to Momma in the hospital. The doctor had phoned and suggested they come. The cancer had been growing in her for a long time before the doctors discovered it. It was ironic that no sooner had Momma been given a new lease on life, being freed of Donnie Martins, than it was all taken away from her.
Tommy and Beth had been staying with Pops and Grandma again. Or rather Beth had. Tommy had spent as little time as possible there. He spent as little time as possible in Liberty, preferring to haunt the pool halls and bars in Midland, or Odessa if he could get a ride. He had made money for himself running errands for men who wouldn’t take the risk of getting caught carrying what they gave him to carry. Tommy didn’t care. There wasn’t much he cared about anymore. The world was a shithouse and, as far as he could see, you had to pull yourself up out of the shit even if you had to walk on other people to do it.
But he had been “home” when the doctor called, lying low after some trouble with the Midland police. He hadn’t objected when Pops told him they needed to go to the hospital.
To
say goodbye.
They were shown into Momma’s room. Tommy hadn’t seen it before. She had been here for six weeks, and he hadn’t been to see her once. He didn’t want to think about her. Didn’t want to think about her not being here. Momma lay on a bed of crisp white sheets folded down over a sky-blue blanket. She seemed to sink into that bed. She lay at the bottom of a soft crater of pillows and linen. Her head was bald, her eyes dark-rimmed and sunken into her face. Her skin and lips were all one color, bloodless.
Beth ran to her, tears flooding from her with sobs of “Momma.” Beth hadn’t learned yet the secret of surviving this world, making yourself hard and not letting anything through that shell. Otherwise there were plenty of people out there who would put a knife in you, in one way or another. Momma opened her eyes. They were faded, too. She slowly lifted an emaciated hand to cradle Beth’s head. Her lips moved, but Tommy couldn’t hear what she was saying. Those dying eyes turned from Beth to Tommy. He saw her lips form his name. And he ran.
He hadn’t been there when his mother died. Hadn’t been there with Beth. Tommy Cade had run. Or rather Tommy Martins had run. He and Beth had taken their mother’s name later. Now he forced himself to go on, through the doors. The smell was the first thing that hit him. Disinfectant. The air seemed thick with it. The walls were gray, the floors dark blue. Signs hung everywhere. The place made him feel small, lost. Reception was an open area beneath a glass ceiling high above. It seemed the only part of the building touched by natural light.
For a moment, he stood looking at the bewildering array of signage and instructions and then approached the reception desk. Ten minutes later he had moved up several floors, taken a few wrong turns, and then found the Intensive Care Unit. The doors were secured. He pressed a buzzer and gave his own name and Brandon’s. Beth appeared a few seconds later, pressing a button on the wall, and the doors opened.