by Chuck Hogan
"Don't you think you should talk to him about it?"
Now she squinted, as though trying, really trying, but ultimately failing to see the logic. "Do you think someone who is part of the problem would accept such a radical solution?"
"Because, Val, if this is truly what you wantleaving town, starting overyou don't need me. You can go."
"Bullshit. I do need you. It has to be you. Can't you see that?"
The inflated smile was gone now, supplanted by something like panic and dying pride. He didn't want to be too sharp with her, afraid she might go off flying around his driveway like a stuck balloon. "No, I can't."
"Can you ignore the fact that you owe me?"
"Owe you?" It took him only a second. "The scholarship."
"Yes, the scholarship. Yes, that is what I'm still talking about. Poor me, right? Still clinging to thisright? Do you know what it was like? To have this whole entire town against me, for who my father was, and my freak brother? No one wanted to waste that scholarship on me. They wanted to give it to their favorite son. Somebody who'd make something of himself, who'd amount to something. Not an art student from a bad family. What's she going to bring back to Black Falls?"
"Val."
"But who wound up wasting it? Who was the one who squandered that opportunityfor the town, and yes, for himself? Only to bounce back here fifteen years later with nothing to show for it? That chance you burned, you let slip through your fingers? That was my life, Donny. That was mine. Do you deny that you could never have won that scholarship without Chief Pinty behind you? Without his hand on your shoulder? Can you deny that now?"
"It was one-tenth of a percentage point, Val."
"You don't understand. You should want this. You should want the chance to make this right. As a man. This is why you came back here in the first placedon't you know that? This is why you came here. Righting a wrong is the closest thing we have to going back in time."
Maddox thought of Ripsbaugh, what he had said about her needing a stone for her chain. "I'm sorry, Val. I am. But I don't think I'm responsible for whatever"
"Is this about the farm girl?"
"What did you say?"
"You heard me." Her face was twisted now, as though a mask had been snatched away but the adhesive still stung. "I came by here last night, or tried to. Saw a truck leave your garage. Saw her behind the wheel. You don't think she's a little young?"
"Have you been watching me?"
"Are you going away with her? Going to have babies?"
"Val." The anger in her face chilled him. "Jesus."
She shoved hair off her face so that he would have an unfettered view of her contempt. "You owe me, Donny Maddox. You owe me a chance."
Maddox felt heat coming up his neck. How quickly compassion can turn to enmity when someone forces her mania on you. When someone assigns you responsibility for her own frustrations. This came to him in his driveway like a lesson.
Val said, "You could live with yourself? Leaving me here? The same way you left your mother?"
He nodded, not in answer to her question, but in acknowledgment of her audacity in throwing down the kicker: the Queen of Spades with his mother's face on it. "That's the way to hurt me, all right."
"Hurt you? Hurt you? How can you be hurt? You're skating through life. Hands behind your back, gliding along."
"Go home, Val."
"And talk to my husband, right? Discuss? You think Kane knows me?"
"I'm sure no one knows you."
"That's exactly right."
She looked at him with the pity of a madwoman, throwing open her car door and driving away.
PART V
AN INSTRUMENT OF VENGEANCE
56
MADDOX
NEXT MORNING, WHILE waiting for his toast to come up, Maddox heard a thump. A goodly weighted noise, followed by a lesser bump, coming from the rear of his house. An unnatural thump.
The mind takes unexpecteds such as these and tries to shape them into something understandable, tries to assign them meaning.
The mental image Maddox assigned to this noise was that of Dillon Sinclair stepping onto his back deck.
So powerful was the force of this imagethe black wig and clothes, the eyebrowless eyesthat Maddox moved to his closet, getting down his holster from the top shelf. He undid the trigger lock in what seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, then moved to the sliding glass door off the serving area.
He stepped out into the wet heat, his revolver at his side. No one on the deck, the backyard empty. He scanned the trees around the yard and listened for movement. Then he saw the twisted black lump on the deck.
Closer, he made out the velvet fringe of wings. A dead crow, eyes and beak still open, its neck broken.
Maddox looked at the near trees, his mind still jumping with implicationsWho threw a dead bird onto my deck?until he realized that the thump, so solid and quick, had been this bird striking the window. The bump that followed was its dead body falling to the wood.
You want omens? he thought. We got omens. A town full of them. Deer running antler-first into your car. Crows flying full speed at your house. Nature dispatching its assassins.
He carried the revolver back inside and returned with a shovel from the garage, scooping up the dead crow and walking it to the deepest part of the yard, pitching it into the woods near the spot from where Sinclair had snapped the photograph of his house. Maddox stood there a few moments, the weight of the shovel in his hands, looking into the trees. He realized that the crow indeed had flown out of the woods to tell him something. Something important.
It was time to let Sinclair go. To give up needing to believe in his innocence. Maddox's fear of the thump reminded him that Dill was as capable of murder as any man. Whatever his father had put him through, whatever had happened to him in that house at the other end of the street: it happened to Sinclair, not to Maddox. Dill had made his own choices since then. The rest was up to Hess.
Maddox went back inside. He picked up the phone and called Tracy. "Let's talk," he said, inviting her for dinner. He could sense, in the way she so casually affected to resist him, the hurt infecting her like a cold. But she did agree to come over that evening, then hung up without saying another word.
Outside, the air was stifling, the humidity at its breaking point, and yet Maddox felt good suddenly. He felt a change in the wind.
On his way to Pinty's house, he came upon Ripsbaugh patching a pothole and pulled over. Branches waved overhead, leaves flippering behind the sweat-drenched man. "About as bad as it gets, huh?" said Maddox through his rolled-down passenger window.
Ripsbaugh bent over to see inside, shovel in hand. "You can taste the lightning coming."
"Hey, about yesterday at the cemetery. My grand theories? Just forget about all that."
"Yeah? How so?"
"It is what it is. I'm not sure why I had to try and make more of it."
Ripsbaugh looked almost suspicious. Maddox worried that he had awakened a conspiracy theory. "Just forget it altogether."
"I have."
Maddox thought about saying something to Ripsbaugh about Val's visit yesterday. But enough. Val had made her choices too, whether she could admit it or not. Maddox drove away, leaving Ripsbaugh leaning on the long handle of his shovel under the darkening sky.
Inside Pinty's house, a stillness hung like the moisture. On a desk inside the upstairs bedroom that used to be Pinty's home office, an oval-framed photograph showed a younger, bare-armed Pinty standing with his hand on the shoulder of his towheaded, ten-year-old son, Gregory.
Maddox sat down in Pinty's chair, holding the photograph. Every community, it seemed to him, lost its "innocence" on a fairly regular basis, usually once per generation. Each new age required its own poignant milestone, its pedigreed moment of loss, marking the passage of child into adult. A dividing line between the way things used to be and the way things are now. Maddox's father's murder thirty years before
at the hands of Jack Metters had been such an event. But Black Falls never recaptured its putative innocence. What followed instead was one loss after another, a decline growing more precipitous with each successive year. All tracing back to that one fatal moment in time.
Maybe the town's regenerative powers were gone for good. Maddox thought of Metters's gun blasting its way through his peacoat pocket, the rounds cutting hot into his father's chest, thudding into Pinty's hips and waistand their trajectory continuing through the years, right into today.
57
TRACY
ROSALIE WAS JITTERY, what with the wind blowing through the barn and the early darkness and thunder heralding the coming storm. Tracy had come out to the old cowshed to sit with her, to console the pregnant llama with her presence as they prepared to weather the cloudburst together. She leaned over the stable door to touch noses with Rosalie, as the females liked to do, Tracy smelling the sweet hay and the dung of Rosalie's stall and the sweaty essence of her coat, reaching up gently to stroke her long, proud neck.
What did Donny want to meet for? What could they possibly have to talk about? Hey, it was great, it was fun, let's keep in touch?
Part of her personal theory of reverse therapywhere she tore herself down instead of building herself up, the idea being to get so low that there could only be betterment aheadinvolved making short, punchy "No More" lists:
No more lazy nights together.
No more rum and Diet Cokes (negative taste association).
No more curling up with him on the sofa.
No more deep, half-remembered conversations while watching bad TV.
No more allowing herself to get silly in front of him, or anyoneever.
No more falling asleep in Donny's bed.
No more of his lips on her back and shoulders.
No more Donny.
The warm body she had once clung to like a life raft: he had been her dream of a man. No background. No past history, no baggage. No family to impress or avoid. He came perfectly shaped, and perfectly empty, to be filled up any way she liked.
Now he had a past. Now he had a history and regrets and shortcomings. Now he was real.
This was the only way it could end. His departure had been predestined, like a merman needing to return to the sea.
But really, she shouldn't be sullen. She had been warned, hadn't she? And repeatedlyevery goddamn step of the waysomething he would no doubt remind her of yet again tonight. It was temporary, it was short-term, it was going to end. Her bad for falling in love. Wish him well, and hope he remembers her fondly as he goes off on his merry journey back into the world.
She was sick of being the gracious loser. Sick of being kept back in life and expected to accept it as her lot. The farm and her mother and this land. Who else was she ever going to meet in Black Falls? Who else was going to blow into town except those already banished from the world? Who else but lepers visited this colony?
If only she were hard enough to stand him up tonight. To be as cruelly dispassionate. But she didn't even bother with retributive fantasies because, pathetic little hopeful bird that she was, she would go, she would listen, she would hope, she would let him feel better about himself, and then she would hug him good-bye as he ground his heel into her chest.
Rosalie nodded like she understood. Tracy admired the llamas; their fierce protective instincts when guarding herds of sheep, goats, cows, or horses; their tireless work ethic; the aggression they displayed when sensing a threat. They were popular guard animals because they were fearless about hurtling their three-hundred-pound bodies full speed at any predator, be it dog or coyote or wolf or even small bear, wailing a high-pitched alarm. What they lacked in grace and refinement, they more than made up for in pride and attitude and strength. Even a yearlong pregnancy never got Rosalie down. She didn't need a male companion to make her feel whole, or special, or loved.
Though she had needed one to get pregnant.
Lightning flashed on the barnyard dirt outside, Rosalie emitting a throaty groan. Tracy worried that the storm might trigger her labor. No Dr. Bolt to check her over now. Tracy was going to have to see Rosalie through this one all by her lonesome.
Rosalie got to her feet, a warble rolling in her long throat. She shuffled back and forth in the stall, jutting her head over the door. Her hooves scraped the hay-strewn flooring, Rosalie growing agitated. The same way she had been a few nights before, when the coyotes ran out of the forest and the hills, loping through town.
Tracy reached out to pat her head but Rosalie bucked away, stomping the planks. "What is it, girl?" said Tracy, looking out the open door.
Another high, cloud-smothered ripple of lightning created a shadow that appeared to retreat from the wood ramp leading outside.
Rosalie warbled and hissed.
"Mom?" Tracy said. She was not in the habit of calling out to her deaf mother, but thunder and lightning will do that to you. She walked to the doorway where the old ramp was hinged and peered around the corner. Another pulse of suffused cloud lightning moved shadows under the trees, but there was no one in sight.
She saw the sink light on in the kitchen, the stained-glass sun she had made in fourth grade hanging from a suction cup inside the window. Tracy hopped down to the dirt, needing to see if her mother was indeed inside.
She was. Blond hair marbled with streaks of white she refused to dye. Rinsing vegetables in the sink. Tracy watched her mother catch sight of herself in the mirror the interior light made of the window. Staring, just a moment, her wet hand coming up to touch her softly wrinkled neck. Then returning to her vegetables, as though nothing had happened.
Those were the moments Tracy would find most difficult to endure. The reveries that led straight to regret.
Rosalie raised another cry, lightning rippling again, but brighter this time, putting Tracy's shadow down on the dirtand another shadow, this one rising behind her. She turned just in time to see the figure emerge from beneath the ramp, long dark hair whipping in the wind as it raised some sort of weapon.
Tracy never felt the blow. She tasted dirt, a pair of hands pulling at her back as she attempted to crawl toward her mother. Then something fell on the back of Tracy's neck, and she went out.
58
PINTY
PINTY SAT UP AGAINST the many hospital bed pillows. His toes under the sheet at the end of his dead legs seemed a mile away.
Another thunderboomer outside his window, rain falling fast and hard. He watched with fascination, part of the new regard he had for all things since waking up. The perfect yellow packets of sugar that came on his meal tray. The colored pushpins in the wall. The elegant sweep of the clock's second hand. The whispering of the nurses' shoes. Everything had a place and a function and a beautiful simplicity.
It was raining in Rainfield.
Donny sat in the padded chair pulled beside the bed. He looked all right. He had been passing himself off as Pinty's son in order to gain family visiting privileges, a ruse Pinty was only too happy to support. Beautiful in its simplicity. Everything with a place and a function.
"Thank you for this," Pinty said, his walking stick lying across his lap.
He wanted to touch the smooth silver grip with his right hand. Doing so was like trying his luck at a carnival game of chance, that one where a number of identical strings are hooked, threaded, and tangled around a spoked grid in such a way that you cannot determine by sight which one to pull in order to raise the door that releases the prize. You have to guess, and then proceed by a process of elimination. Sometimes Pinty got it on the second or third string. Sometimes the strings didn't work at all.
When his hand moved, it came up quaking, fingers curled. "Twelve weeks of rehab," he said. "Just to hold a pencil steady."
Maddox said, "You'll do it in eight," and Pinty smiled at his faith. The smile came easily, without thought. First string.
Speaking was getting easier too. Like recovering from frostbite, his jaw thawing ou
t a little more every day. It was raining in Rainfield. "What was that you were asking me about?"
"The scholarship," said Donny. "I won it fair and square, right?"
"By one-tenth of one percent, as I recall. Skin of your teeth." An odd question he was asking. "Why are you wondering about that now?"
"But it was fair. I mean, I won it."
"Sure you did."
"You didn't pull any favors. Didn't shake anybody's hand too hard."
"No, no, no." Pinty didn't know what he was after here. "I may have gone around to a few of your teachers, sure, just letting them know what you had riding on your midterms, how hard you were studying. That a full scholarship for the son of a police officer killed in the line of duty was at stake. Future of the town, and all that."