by Neil Mcmahon
“But I’ve still got to come up with the twenty-five bills now?” I said.
“That’s about the size of it. But you don’t stand to gain anything by waiting till Monday. If the judge drops the bail, you’ll get the difference back. If he doesn’t, you got to come up with the twenty-five hundred anyway. Either that or stay here till your trial, and the way the docket’s looking, that ain’t going to be for a couple months. So if I was you, I’d pony up and get the hell out of here.”
That made perfect sense, except I could no more come up with twenty-five hundred bucks than I could with twenty-five thousand. I didn’t have a credit card. My crew got paid every other Friday, and yesterday had been the off one. That left me with about seven hundred in my checking account. I had some folding money stashed at home, that I’d been rat-holing whenever I had a twenty or two that wasn’t immediately spoken for. It didn’t amount to much over fifteen hundred, if that. My next, and final, paycheck wouldn’t come until next Friday.
Then I remembered that Bill LaTray had a sideline as a pawnbroker—his shop was conveniently located close to the jail. I had a couple of guns that I could hock to him to make up the extra few hundred. He probably picked up a lot of business that way.
“I can do it, but I need to get to my place,” I said. “If you guys will drive me—”
Gary shook his head. “Sorry, we can’t let you out until the bail’s posted. I don’t make the rules, Hugh. That’s just the way it is.”
I ran my hand over my hair, trying to see a way through this. My forehead was still caked with dried sweat and grime.
I could have called Madbird to get my guns and the bank money from an ATM, but the cash at my place was hidden, and it would have been damned near impossible to explain where. The only other choice I could see was to borrow it. I hated the thought, but I started going through a list of names in my head.
My parents were passed on, my sisters had long since moved away, and no other family was left around here except a couple of shirttail relatives I hardly knew. Elmer would have helped me and so would some other older family friends and men I’d worked with, but I couldn’t bear the thought of asking them. Most of my own friends weren’t any better off than me. There were only two people I could think of who probably had that kind of cash available.
Tom Dierdorff was one. But while I didn’t mind asking him to talk to Balcomb—that was the kind of favor where it was understood that I’d insist on paying Tom, he’d tell me he’d send me a bill but never do it, and somewhere down the line he’d get me to come to his place and make some minor repair and he’d slip a check into my coat pocket that I’d tear up when I found it—tapping him for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar loan to boot would be pushing the envelope. I might have done it anyway, except he spent most weekends helping out on his family’s ranch up near Augusta, about eighty miles away, and I sure wasn’t going to ask him to make that drive.
That left one more.
“I guess I’ll need a phone call,” I said.
“We’ll have to make it for you. Those damn rules, you know.” Gary waited inquiringly while I ran it through my head once more.
“Sarah Lynn Olsen,” I said.
His eyebrows rose just a twitch. Sarah Lynn and I had a lot of history together, and he knew it.
He pushed off the wall and unhooked his keys from his belt.
“I’ve got to lock you in again,” he said. “Sorry, but—”
“Let me guess. Just the rules.”
He smiled slightly. “I’ll try to get hold of her.”
Then he paused and fixed me with that pale steady gaze.
“You sure there’s nothing more to this, Hugh?”
It was a perfect opening to blow the whistle about those horses and try to turn this around on Balcomb. I thought highly of Gary and I trusted him a long way. But my unease had kept on deepening. I wouldn’t have believed that old Judge Roy Harris would set a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bail even for an ax murderer just because he was annoyed about his poker game being interrupted. It smelled of Balcomb’s influence, and there was no telling how far that went.
I decided to wait until I saw the judge on Monday. If it cost me a couple of hundred bucks to get this bullshit over with, I’d take it lying down. If he stood pat, I was going to have to think real hard about whether I was twenty-five hundred dollars worth of scared.
“If there is, Gary, I can’t think what,” I said.
He nodded and closed the door.
It wasn’t the first time I hadn’t told Gary Varna everything I knew.
TEN
By the end of the summer that Celia was living here, she’d succeeded in getting Pete Pettyjohn’s attention in a big way. Gary Varna had been a young deputy then, and Celia was the reason that he and I first got acquainted. Seeing him always jogged my memory back to those times.
But oddly, the association that tended to hit me first was of an incident from before I’d met him. Some superstitious part of me had come to believe that I’d seen an eerie hint of what was coming—that it was the moment when the wheels had started turning in that direction.
It happened on one of my last afternoons working at the ranch that summer. The older hands were sitting around the shop drinking beer like they always did on Fridays. I’d become sort of a mascot, the tall skinny kid who both exasperated and amused them. But I’d gotten to where I could handle eighty-pound hay bales all day and be reasonably useful doing other chores, and to those men, that kind of help was worth a lot. They pretended not to notice when I sneaked a beer out of their cooler.
I walked off by myself to one of the other buildings, a small house where family members stayed when they came to visit, and sat on the steps. I hung out there quite a bit when the place wasn’t being used. The view was long and clear, good for watching what was going on around the ranch, or staring at the mountains beyond.
The only person moving around just then was Reuben Pettyjohn, the ranch’s owner, and father of Pete and Kirk. He was doing something I’d seen him do a lot—taking a slow walk that seemed aimless, but really he was checking things out. He’d stroll through the used equipment yard and stop to tap an old engine block with his boot toe, then he’d hook his thumbs in his belt and move on, pausing again to scan some cattle waiting to be shipped off. He was always looking for ways to use or improve things, and probably he was thinking about much more than that.
Reuben was in his mid-forties, bull-shouldered and physically formidable. His beak nose and clipped mustache added to the effect. When I started taking college literature classes years later and saw a photo of William Faulkner, Reuben’s face came immediately to my mind. His presence was striking, too, a dense aura that you could feel. He was genial, but tough and shrewd—the epitome of a cowboy businessman, and a state legislator for several terms. You’d see him downtown or at the capitol, carrying a briefcase and wearing a big white Stetson and a western-cut suit with that rolled piping that looked like it was made of Naugahyde. But he was just as likely to be on the ranch, working cattle with the hands.
I sat there on the steps for a few minutes, slipping into daydreams. The afternoon was hot and I was thirsty. I went through my beer pretty fast and started working up my nerve to go score another one.
Then Celia and Pete appeared, walking from the stables toward his pickup truck, probably on their way to town to party. She was striding along playfully, almost skipping, bumping her hip against him. Everybody knew they were an item by now, but they seemed to be having one of those boy-girl wars about public affection. She wanted to advertise it, and she was always trying to hold his hand or drape herself over him. He still tried to act like there wasn’t really anything going on, but you’d have had to be blind not to see them up against a fence or shed, groping and dry-humping. I suspected that they’d also been going swimming at the waterfall, and that Pete had gotten treated to repeat performances of the show she’d put on for me. I’d been staying away from there, and from him in
general.
Celia looked electric, wearing a halter top and cutoffs, with her auburn hair gleaming and tossing as she danced along. They passed within plain sight of Reuben, but they were too wrapped up in each other to notice him. He watched them go by, with that same thoughtful attention he paid to the other things that caught his eye.
Then behind me, I heard the door of the guesthouse open. I jumped up, trying to hide the beer behind my back.
Reuben’s wife, Beatrice, was standing there with her arms folded and her eyes narrowed. Beatrice was another person I tried to avoid, even when I wasn’t caught red-handed drinking pilfered beer. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d be inside the house. She must have been cleaning up or getting ready for some visitors, although with her, you never knew. Years later, she would be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and she was already starting to act in ways that didn’t add up.
But back then she was a handsome, accomplished woman who came from another landed family and considered herself aristocracy. By her lights, Pete was destined for much bigger things than poor-girl Celia, and she seemed to blame me for bringing that bad influence into his life. She was also oddly sexless, even prudish—one of the camp who’d have much preferred it if children never found out that roughly half the people on the planet were anatomically different from the other half. I had the feeling that she’d borne her first son out of a sense of duty, and then Kirk because having only one didn’t look socially proper. Otherwise, she’d wanted nothing to do with that undignified business. Besides her other quirky behavior, she’d taken on an accusing air, especially toward young people—maybe because she figured, correctly, that they were obsessed with getting their hands on each other.
My worries about the beer vaporized with her first words.
“Don’t you sit there oogling that little slut, too,” she said coldly.
I mumbled, “Sorry, ma’am,” and retreated down the porch steps, too skewered by her spear of guilt to defend myself.
Then she spoke again, but this time it was like I wasn’t there—she was gazing past me at Celia.
“If you think you’re getting into this family on your back, you’re in for a big surprise.” Her tone was calm, definite, not so much challenging as pronouncing judgment.
It turned out to be accurate and swift. Several weeks later, on October 27, Celia was killed on the Pettyjohn Ranch. She’d been alone and tried to ride a young, still half-wild stallion that she’d been warned against. He’d thrown her into the corral fence, and she’d fractured her skull against a post.
The investigation was a rubber-stamp formality, and there was never any autopsy. The sheriff at the time, Burt Simms, was a crony of Reuben’s. The Pettyjohn family quietly made their condolences to Celia’s parents in the form of a generous check. Officially, that was as far as it went.
Gary Varna was one of the deputies involved in the case, and while he never really questioned me, I could tell he sensed that I knew something I wasn’t letting on. After things settled down, I started running into him a lot, just by chance, it seemed. We’d chat and the talk would always get around to Celia. Eventually, I came to realize that he was already on the path to what he would become, and he wanted to know what was under all the rocks—not to make waves, but because that kind of knowledge gave him satisfaction and power.
Gary was a cop right down to his bones, but he treated me well—never forgot that I was a kid who’d lost somebody dear, never tried to bully me, and presented a genuine friendliness. I’d grown to respect him and, moreover, to like him, and I still did. But I never gave up my secret.
What I knew was this: a few weeks before she died, Celia had stayed out late on a Saturday night date with Pete. All the rest of us in the family went to sleep before she got home. She must have come in quietly—nobody else woke up. I did only because she sat down on my bed.
I was half dopey with sleep, but startled. She’d never done anything like that before. The only thing I could think was that she was going to tell me some news that was too exciting to keep till morning.
In a way, she did, and my surprise jumped to amazement. She lay down with her back to me, took my hand, and slid it inside her blouse, pressing it against her bare belly.
There was a slight but definite swell to it that hadn’t been there when I’d seen her naked at the creek. Naive as I was, I knew what that meant.
After a minute or so, she got up and left. She hadn’t said a word and she never gave any sign afterward that it had even happened.
The reason I’d kept that to myself through the years since then wasn’t anything noble like wanting to keep her memory pure. On the contrary, my motives were outright selfish. For that one minute, she had entrusted me with the deepest part of her. It erased all the times and ways she’d hurt me, and still remained the most intense intimacy I’d ever felt.
I was goddamned if I was going to share it with anyone else.
But there were probably others who’d known or suspected that she was pregnant. Her boyfriend, Pete Pettyjohn, for one. The mental unbalance he already had—maybe inherited from his mother—got worse over the next couple of months, and so did his drinking, to the point where his old man started locking the liquor cabinet.
That Christmas eve, Pete broke into it, holed up alone with the bottles he took, and ended up shooting himself in the head.
ELEVEN
Sarah Lynn Olsen and I had been sweethearts in high school and until my last year in college. Since then we’d both been married to, and divorced from, other people. I didn’t see her often these days—just when we’d run into each other on the street or in a bar. But she was always warmly friendly, and she was a partner in her family’s real estate business, which owned things like shopping malls. I figured those were the best odds I was going to get for a loan, although I wouldn’t have blamed her a bit if she’d decided that a phone call from jail didn’t fit her Saturday night plans.
But Gary came back to say she was on her way, and he took me out to the visiting room. She must have jumped into her car as soon as they’d finished talking, because she was there within ten minutes.
Sarah Lynn was very attractive, with a sort of earth mother quality—buxom figure, long wheat-colored hair, and a sweetness that sometimes came across as drifty. Old friends called her by her initials, Slo. But right now she looked a little exotic, wearing an expensive black dress that was just short and clingy enough to turn the jailers’ heads.
Not surprisingly, she seemed nervous. It didn’t help that we were talking on phones with a thick Plexiglas window between us, and everything had the kind of greasy feel you didn’t like touching your skin. But I also suspected that I’d interrupted her getting ready to go out, and now she was running late.
“Aw, Huey,” she sighed. “Gary didn’t tell me anything except you’d asked to see me. What’d you do?”
“Pissed somebody off.”
Her eyes widened in fake disbelief. “No!”
“My bail’s twenty-five thousand bucks, Slo.”
She sat back a little—maybe at the amount, maybe because it suggested a serious crime.
“I need twenty-five hundred, cash, or else I stay here,” I said. “I can pay you back most of it as soon as I get out, and the rest within a few days.”
“I’m not worried about that, honey. I’m worried about what kind of trouble you’re in. Of course I’ll help you.”
I closed my eyes briefly in relief.
“I’ll buy you a drink and tell you all about it,” I said.
“Deal.”
“You’re an angel, Slo. I’m sorry to wreck your Saturday night.”
Her mouth twisted in a quick wry smile. “My Saturday night’s a bottle of white wine and whatever trash is on TV.”
“You look like maybe you had a hot date.”
She glanced down at her outfit.
“Oh, that’s left over from this afternoon. Once in a while I decide I’m going to go out and do something wild and exc
iting. I usually end up shopping.”
Then she looked at me straight on. Her eyes were a deeper blue than Gary’s and usually seemed dreamy, but right now, they were very focused.
“Thanks for noticing,” she said.
“It was easy.”
She stood up, still holding the phone, and smoothed her skirt with her other hand.
“I’ll have to go to the office safe to get the money, so it’ll take a few minutes,” she said. “What then?”
I told her about Bill LaTray’s bargain basement option. She said she’d make sure he agreed to it, and I knew she would. She might have been dreamy in some ways, but she had a good business head, like most people who’d grown up in that world.
She stalked out, looking like a million bucks.
I spent most of another dreary hour back in my cell before a jailer led me to the main desk, where I signed away my immortal soul to Bill’s Bail Bonds. Bill was there, with his hit-man leather coat and stony face. He didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to. We both knew that the last thing in the world I wanted was him on my ass.
The desk sergeant told me to show up first thing on Monday—the judge would see me as soon as he had time. A clerk got my truck keys and my plastic sack of clothes from a storage room.
When I put them on, I imagined I could still smell those horses.
I didn’t see Gary Varna again. Sarah Lynn had come in along with Bill LaTray, but she’d disappeared by the time I finished dealing with the paperwork. I thought she’d probably slipped outside for a cigarette.
But when I walked out onto the worn stone steps of the courthouse, she was gone, too.
I sat down and threaded the laces into my boots. The afternoon had turned into a luscious September evening, with the sky a shimmering blue that deepened every minute and the mountainsides going from green to purple. The air was taking on the crisp chill it did that time of year, after the warm days suckered you into thinking it was still summer.