McFall

by Scott Nicholson

  Wow. She’s waving at me. Maybe rock-n-roll will make me a chick magnet.

  Ronnie gave a tentative wave back. Noticing, Dex said, “You better watch it, or Brett Summers will kick your ass.”

  “I’m just waving,” Ronnie said with a shrug. “Besides, Brett is dating Melanie Ward now.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Dex snorted in derision “Maybe Melanie will kick your ass, too.”

  Ronnie hid his blush. He’d thought his crush was a well-kept secret. Maybe Bobby had told on him. He tried not to picture his friend yukking it up in the halls, joking about Ronnie’s pathetic attempts to get into Melanie’s pants. No, that wasn’t Bobby’s style. Probably Dex had heard about it from one of his air-headed girlfriends, idly gossiping in the mean-spirited way of the insecure.

  “Just show me which knobs to turn,” Ronnie said. “And I’ll try not to make you sound as shitty as usual.”

  Dex smirked at that one and gave Ronnie a quick primer on the soundboard. His newly acquired role was to keep Dex’s vocals cranked to the max, mute Jimmy Dale Massingale’s screaming guitar leads as much as possible, and stand ready with a fire extinguisher in case something went up in flames. “Gladstone nixed the pyrotechnics, but we’ve got a fog machine and a little light show,” Dex said. “Louise can run that. If she’s smart enough to count to four, she can handle it.”

  After the equipment was set up, including Jimmy Dale’s amp tower and row of effects pedals, the band gathered outside the back door, near the Silverado. Louise kept a nervous watch at the door as Dex fired up a joint. Bobby and Floyd both took deep drags, but Ronnie waved it off when his turn came. He was afraid of the stuff. His thoughts were weird enough; he couldn’t imagine where they would go with a little artificial, chemically induced stimulation.

  “My first time running sound,” Ronnie said to stave off comments. “I don’t want to space out.”

  “Where’s Jimmy Dale?” Bobby muttered, holding in a lungful of smoke.

  “He’s always late,” Dex said. “But he better get his ass here pronto or we won’t have time for a sound check.”

  Couples were already arriving in the parking lot beside the football field, the guys moving awkwardly in their stiff new clothes, the girls looking fresh in summer dresses. Ronnie strained to pick out Melanie and Brett, unable to resist even though he knew it would hurt. He didn’t see them, and he wondered if they had pulled off at the bridge for a little “chat.”

  A kiss on the cheek, he thought again. How sweet.

  As Bobby took a turn with the joint and gave it to Floyd, Dex reached down and unzipped a gym bag. “Our new outfits,” he said, passing out folded bundles of cloth.

  “What the hell is this?” Bobby said, unrolling a sleeveless bowling jacket that featured the McAllister Bowling Alley logo.

  “Sponsorship, man,” Dex said. “It’s sort of like we’re making a statement on selling out while sticking it to the man. Plus, my dad wants some payback for all the gear he bought us.”

  Floyd giggled like a stoned idiot and tried on the jacket over his Black Sabbath T-shirt. “Sweet.”

  Bobby flung his to the ground. “If I wanted to sell out, I wouldn’t go this cheap.”

  “Come on, Bobby,” Louise cooed from the doorway. “It’ll show off your muscles.”

  “Yeah,” Ronnie said, hoping Melanie would think it was as dorky as he did. “It’s cool.”

  Though he still seemed less than thrilled about the bowling swag, Bobby peeled off his T-shirt, taking obvious delight in Louise’s attention and Dex’s jealousy. He wriggled into the jacket and flexed his biceps, looking like a caveman Adonis with his ripped chest—just perfect for a rock drummer.

  Just then, Jimmy Dale rumbled up on his Kawasaki motorcycle, guitar slung across his back in a soft case. He killed the engine, booted down the kickstand, and stepped off the bike like a Wild West marshal riding into town to clear out the black hats, or maybe to rape and pillage and rob the stagecoach himself. Plucking the joint from Floyd’s lips, he said, “Having all the fun without me? I thought we were a band, man.”

  “The early bird gets the buzz,” Dex said, laughing at his own ridiculous nonsense.

  Jimmy Dale made up for lost time, finishing off the joint and flipping the roach into the weeds. “Killer. Let’s rock, boys.”

  Before heading off with the others, Dex slipped Ronnie a set list, a grouping of straightforward rock standards with a few penciled-in titles he didn’t recognize. He assumed they were originals, since Bobby said The Diggers had been working on some tunes that would debut tonight. He wondered if Gladstone had approved the list ahead of time. While “Day Tripper” and “Sympathy for the Devil” were pretty inoffensive, “Californication” and “Gonna Do Ya” didn’t promise a whole lot of subtlety.

  “No Katy Perry or Lady Gaga, but no ‘Hell’s Bells’ either,” Dex said by way of explanation. “And we gave up on ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Jimmy Dale only had time to learn the first section.”

  “Sure, dude, blame it on me,” Jimmy Dale said. “We both know your balls would have popped out when you tried to hit those high notes.”

  As the band filed into the gym and took the stage, Ronnie hauled a chair over to the mixing board. Because he needed to face the speakers, he’d have his back to the crowd for the entire night. Once the lights went low, he’d practically be invisible. So much for netting some groupies.

  The band members tuned their instruments as Bobby rolled the sticks around his kit. Principal Gladstone made a big show of covering his ears, and Sgt. Morley actually left the building, shaking his head. Many of the volunteers had left after finishing their service work, and no one would be admitted until the doors opened at nine, so The Diggers’ atonal cacophony mostly played to an empty gym. By the time they broke into “Twist and Shout,” they were in a groove, Ronnie had mastered the basics of the soundboard, and even old Gladstone was involuntarily tapping a toe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “McFall’s return has been pretty good to you,” Sheriff Littlefield said, leaning over the bridge railing to gaze west, where the sun was sliding toward the mountaintops. A distant scar of red marked the road bed McFall had cut for his development, the beginning of a change that would leave the slopes covered with houses. Paired with the sprawling opulence of Riverview, the development would transform this end of the county, making it as crowded as a big city. Gas stations and support services would no doubt follow the houses.

  “How do you figure?” Cindy knelt in the dirt at the end of the bridge, examining the tire tracks from last night’s crash.

  “You’re getting a lot of carnage and death for your readers. Plus we get to see him mug for the camera once a week after he performs some magnanimous civic duty or other.”

  “I thought we’d agreed that Larkin McFall was innocent until proven guilty. Besides, this was just a wreck. There’s no connection to McFall besides the fact that Bobby works for him.”

  Littlefield shook his head, even though he knew Cindy wasn’t looking at him. He spoke to the lapping water below as much as to her. “A kid drives over the bridge fast enough to go airborne and walks away without a scratch. And he conveniently can’t remember anything. Let’s not forget that this is the same spot where he and his friends found Darnell Absher’s body.”

  The demolished Toyota had been removed by a tow truck. Littlefield hadn’t bothered to mark off the location with yellow tape—the churned mud and ruined trees showed the trajectory well enough. Littlefield had gone through the motions of measuring the skid marks, estimating the vehicle’s speed, and noting on his report that there was no indication of drug or alcohol use. No crime, no victim. Just a coincidence. An accident. Just like what had happened to Darnell Absher.

  Cindy had already published her crash photographs on the newspaper’s Web site, because the next print edition didn’t hit the streets until tomorrow. She was here this evening as Littlefield’s companion, not in her official capacity as a journalist,
but that didn’t stop her from studying the area on her own.

  “You think he got thrown from the vehicle?” she asked.

  “No way. He had to be doing at least sixty. You can’t just roll out at that speed without breaking any bones, assuming you’re lucky enough to survive. Besides, unless he climbed out the window and dove for the water, which he didn’t have time to do, he would’ve bounced off the railing.”

  Cindy touched one of the steel I-beams that supported the wooden railings. “And left quite a mess.”

  “And we know he didn’t go down with the ship. There was no blood in the cab—or on him, for that matter. He would have been toast if he stayed in the truck anyway. It was too old to have air bags, and the roof was practically peeled back to the bed.”

  “It is curious that Ronnie Day found him, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. A guy who always seems to be on the scene when things get squirrelly. And Bobby said the last thing he remembered was leaving the work site at McFall Meadows.”

  “The site of your red church stories.”

  “Let’s focus on now, not five years ago.” He didn’t mean to snap at her, but she wouldn’t leave the past alone—maybe because she was interested in hauling his past into her future.

  “So what do you think? Did he somehow rig the accident? Put a rock on the accelerator from the far end of the bridge and send it on its way?”

  “It’s possible, but I can’t make it fit. What would he stand to gain? Bobby only had liability insurance, so he wouldn’t make money if he totaled the truck. In fact, he’d be in worse shape.”

  “You said he was driving a new truck today.”

  “Yeah, a new, gas-guzzling Chevy that had a ‘McFall Meadows’ magnetic sign on the door.”

  “Sounds to me like he’s moved up in the world,” Cindy said, coming beside him to take his hand and look out over the river. “Maybe he did have something to gain.”

  “Wait a second. I thought it was your job to talk me out of McFall conspiracy theories.”

  She shrugged and leaned against him. “I have an inquisitive mind. What can I say?”

  “Yeah, I kind of noticed.” He wrapped an arm around her and wondered if this was how they’d spend their golden years, sitting on a porch somewhere, watching the world flow by as they chronicled their little aches and pains and made observations on life’s quirks and inconsistencies. But that future seemed so distant, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. “Someday” was too insubstantial, particularly with a McFall in town. The only thing solid enough for Littlefield to believe in was this woman at his side.

  “Cindy, I.…”

  Seeming to sense that he was about to say something important, she turned to face him, raising a hand to his stubbly, creased cheek. She didn’t speak but her eyes sparkled with an expectant “Yes?”

  “Maybe we should—”

  His cell phone buzzed in his uniform pocket and he pulled it out, not noticing that he’d broken into a sweat until the river breeze dried it and chilled his forehead. Cindy frowned, and then stepped away, granting him privacy in case it was official business.

  It was Perry Hoyle. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “Nothing serious.” Just me about to make the biggest leap of my life.

  “I haven’t heard anything back from the state on Cole Buchanan,” Hoyle said. “Best I can tell, though, he’s still dead.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “My professional advice is to let sleeping dogs lie. I know you got all twisted up about what happened at the red church five years ago, but I’m sticking by my reports. Those people were killed by wild animals. And these new deaths, well, they’re just a cluster of coincidences.”

  “Gee, Perry, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re more ready to retire than I am.”

  “Speaking of which, I’ll be out of town for a few days. I got a new bass boat that I’m going to break in on Watauga Lake.”

  “Bass? I thought you were a diehard trout fisherman.”

  “A man’s got to change with the times.”

  Had Littlefield heard that phrase somewhere recently? A car approached, slowing in deference to Littlefield’s uniform. He waved the vehicle across the bridge; as it passed, the young man at the wheel of the BMW gave him a wary nod. A pretty girl was in the passenger seat, her wavy auburn hair tucked back with a sky-blue ribbon. He recognized her as a waitress at the waffle house.

  Scrubbed-up young folks out on a date. There’s hope for the future, after all.

  “What’s that?” Littlefield said into the phone, realizing he had tuned out Hoyle.

  “I’ll check in with you when I get back from my trip,” Hoyle said. “Leave some room in your freezer for fish.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “And Sheriff?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Try not to let anybody die while I’m gone.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  After ringing off, Littlefield walked to the end of the bridge where Cindy waited beside his Isuzu Trooper. “What were you going to say?”

  Littlefield didn’t dare look into her eyes, because if he did, he knew he’d be lost. In his weakness he would search for salvation in her. He was a coward, and he’d spent his entire adult life dodging responsibility, living in denial, and hiding behind the badge. He’d let the McFalls’ shadow darken his days and steal away his soul away as surely as any demons or vampires or malevolent gods.

  But he wasn’t about to let that final tiny ember of hope that lived inside him snuff itself out, not while he had Cindy. Not while he had people counting on him. Not while McFall slowly turned his community into an unrecognizable place. If—when—he fully committed himself to Cindy, he wanted it to be for the right reasons.

  He looked at the yellow sign that said “NO SWIMMING JUMPING FISHING FROM BRIDGE.” Beneath the words, someone had spray-painted “No fun!!!” in uneven black letters.

  He’d been fishing, but nothing was biting. It was time to step things up a notch.

  “Want to go to a dance?” Littlefield asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Diggers were nearly through the first set, and Bobby was feeling good. He couldn’t make out the crowd in the dark, but he could sense it beyond the rows of colored lights at the foot of the stage. He smelled the nervous sweat and volcanic hormones of the seniors, and although only a few couples had been dancing at first, the vibe was building. And he was at the heart of it—pounding, pounding, pounding its beat.

  Sure, they’d had to dumb down their setlist a little so that Gladstone wouldn’t blow a fuse and pull the plug on their performance, but The Diggers were rocking. Opening with classics like “Start Me Up” and “I Can See For Miles” had gotten the crowd on their feet early. Then they’d gone contemporary with The Black Keys’ “Gold on the Ceiling,” and Bobby saw the great bobbing mass of movement as kids poured onto the dance floor. Although Dex couldn’t quite pull off a bluesy growl on vocals, Jimmy Dale tore it up on lead guitar, and the result was garage-band magic: raw, ephemeral, and opening up a kind of energetic possibility that scared them all.

  The game within the game.

  Bobby didn’t know where that thought had come from—crisp, clear, and unmistakable—because he usually fell into a trance while drumming. Fortunately, all the songs on the setlist were in basic four-beat, so Bobby’s main chore was to carry a steady tempo, add some flourishes at the build-up to choruses, and get splashy on the high hat whenever Jimmy Dale ripped into a solo. He was even digging the stupid mutilated bowling jacket. It was the first time The Diggers had all dressed alike, and although the gimmick was cheesy, it added a weird legitimacy that somehow seemed to work.

  Plus the reverberation of the drumheads against his skull helped drive out the image of the pillar of smoke and ash he’d seen on the bridge the night before.

  As the three other guys flailed at their guitars to blast out the final dying chord to “Gotta Digg It,”
Bobby launched into a drumroll and exploded out of it with a massive cymbal crash to end the set.

  “We’ll be back after a short break,” Dex bellowed into the microphone as the crowd hooted and someone shouted out “Free Bird!” Dex grabbed Louise’s hand and dragged her over to the refreshment table, where no doubt he’d bribed a friend to smuggle in a bottle. Floyd, the perfectionist of the band, checked the equipment and tuned the instruments while Jimmy Dale sat on the edge of the stage talking to a couple of girls, arms folded nonchalantly over his bowling jacket as if he were a veteran rock god instead of a kid who’d spent way too much of his youth in a basement alone with strings and machinery.

  “You guys are tearing it up,” Ronnie said as Bobby stepped off the stage, wiping his head with a towel. Now that he was out of the glare of the stage lights, Bobby realized the gym wasn’t dark at all. The lights were just dim enough to provide a sense of anonymity while not so dangerous that some spazzo might trip over his shoelaces and sue the school board.

  “Sounds good,” Bobby agreed, both to reassure himself and to compliment Ronnie’s skill at mixing the instruments. “You’ve got a knack for that.”

  Ronnie shrugged. “I just leave it alone unless somebody screws up, and then I just turn them down a little.”

  “Bobby!”

  They both turned at the sound of Melanie’s voice. She stood by the mixing board in a white dress that took Bobby’s breath away, radiant, her hair flowing out from beneath a blue ribbon in wild tangles, her eyes wide and bright with excitement. Behind her, like an unwelcome shadow on a chest X-ray, stood Brett Summers, wearing a skinny black tie and a smirk.

  “Hi,” Ronnie said, but Melanie gave him nothing more than a perfunctory smile as she zeroed in on Bobby.