The Will

by Reed Arvin

  Raymond put a foot down on the gravel and swung his leg around, his bag barely hanging on his shoulder. She pushed him with all her might, and he fell out awkwardly onto the roadside. She slammed the car into gear, and was gone.

  Roger set the gun on the ground and shook his arm; his hand was cramping, and he was starting to sweat in spite of the cool evening. He wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. Then he looked up, and saw headlights coming down the highway toward the graveyard. He crouched down behind his father’s headstone, watching the car pass by and begin slowing for the entrance. It was Ellen’s car.

  Frank Hesston watched the rain beginning outside his window. The droplets were still small, and he watched them make tiny, crystalline explosions on his window ledge as they fell to earth. The light was fading, and he let himself feel hypnotized there, watching the raindrops die. He didn’t want to hear what Carl Durand, who had just arrived, had said to him. So he just watched the raindrops, his eyes focusing and unfocusing, and time for one blessed moment stood still. Then he heard the sound of Durand downing another drink, and he was thrust back into the real world. “You’ve talked to Ellen, haven’t you?” he said quietly.

  “I didn’t say a word to that whore.”

  “Then it was Boyd,” he said. “God, Carl, if you did anything to him they’ll be on us like flies on horseshit.”

  “I didn’t do anything to him either.”

  “I know you’ve done something, Carl,” Hesston said. “I know you couldn’t leave well enough alone. I know you went outside the plan.”

  “Well enough?” Durand spat derisively. “If things had been going well enough, I would have been glad to lay low and let you handle them. But they aren’t well enough, Frank. They’re going very badly.”

  “So what did you do, Carl? Tell me what you did.”

  “I talked to Roger,” Durand said with a shrug. “I wanted things covered.”

  Comprehension came into Hesston’s eyes. “What did you say to him, Carl?” he asked intently. “Tell me what you said to Roger.”

  “I told him to go fuck himself.”

  Hesston got up from behind his desk, all squat muscle and finely focused hatred. Durand started to rise to face him, but the booze weighed him down. Before he could move, Hesston was on him, placing his thumb on Durand’s Adam’s apple. “You’ll tell me right now what you told Roger, Carl. Now.”

  Durand, paralyzed, felt the pressure on his throat and opened his mouth. For a moment, he couldn’t speak. Hesston eased up very slightly, and Durand sputtered, “I told him that if Ellen didn’t play ball there had to be a backup plan. I couldn’t leave it to you anymore, damn it. Too much has gone down. It has to stop.”

  The pressure on Durand’s throat increased, if anything. “What was the backup plan, Carl?”

  “Do Ellen. Make it look like Boyd did it. Turn the thing into a murder-suicide.”

  Hesston increased the pressure, and Durand raised his arm to strike in desperation. But before he could do so Hesston had spun away in disgust. He fixed Durand in a malevolent glare. “You don’t have any sense of balance,” he hissed. “You shove when you only need to push. Roger! Roger couldn’t shoot a man, much less a woman. Ellen’s just as likely to get the gun away from him and kill him.”

  Durand stared. He was fed up. He had been on a straight path to the governor’s mansion, and this was not a stop on that street. He was sick of Hesston’s condescension, of his perfectly pressed suits and smug, self-satisfied attitude. No matter what happened in this mess, it was time to think about the future, about a time without Frank Hesston in his life. “Listen, you little bastard . . .” he began, but at that moment the door to Hesston’s office blew open and Roger strode in, soaking wet.

  “It didn’t go down,” he said, out of breath.

  “What part?” Durand said.

  Roger looked cautiously at Hesston, and Durand said, “He knows about it. What the hell happened?”

  “None of it went down.”

  Hesston looked dumbfounded. “She didn’t show up? I can’t believe that. I had her in my office last night and she was primed.”

  “She showed. But Boyd didn’t.”

  “Why not?” Hesston demanded.

  “She let him go.”

  Durand catapulted out of his chair. “Why did she do that?”

  Hesston groaned, rubbing his temples. “You don’t have to tell me. The whore had an attack of conscience. God, who would have dreamed?”

  Durand whirled on Hesston. “Fuck your plan,” he said between clenched teeth. “I’m taking care of this once and for all.”

  For once, Hesston didn’t try to stop him.

  The rain began falling in earnest around seven, just after sunset. It took an hour for Raymond to walk back to his house, and another to make his way down Route 12 to where he now stood under the darkening sky, his face upturned to the falling drops. His grizzled beard and parched lips were covered with rainwater when he lowered his head to stare down the highway. The Flinthills spread out north and east before him, a great languishing of earth that sloped away and then rose into the black at the horizon. The clouds were moving with the storm wind; gray shapes swept silently across the sky, revealing patches of stars. Boyd pulled his old cloak around his shoulders, but the threadbare fabric did little to protect him from the rain. He pulled his tattered duffel bag off his shoulder; he had checked the bag many times over the past hour, sometimes as often as every fifty yards. A disturbing idea crawled across his brain, irresistible and growing: the contents were somehow escaping the bag, dissolving through the canvas and turning to mist. Again and again he rummaged through the satchel, fingering the items for reassurance: a long emergency flare, an old wrench, large and rusty with disuse, a bundle of old rags. Everything is still here, he said out loud. The wind and rain swept around him, muting his voice. Judgment is coming.

  He had been walking in the ditch by the highway, but now with the cover of darkness he moved up along the gravel side of the road. The weather was keeping traffic down, and it was good to get out of the mud. If a car did come, the approaching headlights would give him plenty of time to crouch down in the tall, wet bluestem that filled the ditch. He settled the bag on his shoulder and pushed off north up the road. He walked steadily, the rain dripping down off the edges of his hat.

  Only occasionally was he forced to hide. At those moments he would sit quiet in the bluestem and let the rain fall on his upturned face until the car was past. Then he would clamber to his feet and trudge onward. Fields of barley and alfalfa stretched out to his left for thousands of yards, little furrows of green life beginning to ripen. He liked to see them, little green soldiers growing mindlessly and with perfect order. He wished he could be one of those plants, growing and turning color with thousands, millions of others. His shape would be like all the other little soldiers, safe and uniform. To his right range grass grew, unbroken and fallow. The fields were comfortingly familiar to him; much had changed during his solitary seasons at Custer’s Elm, but the dark, plowed earth and ripening crops looked just as they had twenty-five years earlier.

  An hour later he stopped. The rain was falling harder on him now. The moon rose pale and defiant, a crescent still below the clouds and behind him, casting a white shine on the black, wet pavement. He looked right; far in the distance he could make out the looming shape of three oil wells slowly pumping in the darkness. A sheet of rain swept past him and then the sky opened in earnest, beating on him like tiny hammers and forcing him into a slouch. He peered from underneath his hat and saw a great flash of lightning high and to the east; a second later, the ground shook with thunder. He held his arms out wide, his ragged clothes soaked. Calling out in a loud voice to the wind, he cried, Here is rain, ye who rip and tear! He shook his bag at the wells. Soon is sulfur and lightning! Without waiting he splashed through the gathering water in the ditch, climbed the fence into the Crandall ranch, and headed toward the creaking pumps.

  “Come in
out of the rain, Henry.”

  “That’s all right, Sarah. I’m looking for Roger. Is he here?”

  Sarah’s eyes searched him. “No. What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just looking for him. How long has he been gone?”

  “Come in, Henry. Please. You’ll get soaked.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got to find your brother.”

  “Tell me what’s going on, Henry,” Sarah said earnestly. “All night I’ve felt like something bad was happening.”

  He moved up the steps, then reached out and gently took her arm. “It won’t help to worry. Look, if Roger’s not here, I can’t stay. How long did you say he’s been gone? Did he give you any idea where he was headed?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, a couple of hours, I suppose. But I can’t be sure. I just noticed he was gone at some point. He didn’t say goodbye.”

  “All right. I’ll call the second I know something. And tell Roger to call me if he comes in.” He turned and walked rapidly through the rain toward his car. He had just opened the door when he saw headlights pulling down the Crandall driveway. He shut the door and sprinted back under the porch, letting the car come into focus; it was Roger, gravel flying from underneath the Eldorado.

  Roger got out of the car and stared, oblivious to the rain. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m looking for Raymond,” Henry said. “I want to know if you’ve seen him.”

  Roger laughed derisively as he came in under the porch’s overhang. “You figure he’s out here? Yeah, we invited the bastard for dinner.”

  “Where have you been, Roger?” Henry asked intently. “Raymond’s missing. No one’s seen him for hours.” Roger stuck his hand in his pocket and fingered the pills. It was all right; Boyd had never showed at the cemetery. There hadn’t been any real contact between them. He had nothing to fear. “I don’t know where the freak is,” he said. “Hopefully, somebody’s putting him out of his misery.”

  Sarah groaned. “Don’t say that, Roger. It’s not right.”

  Henry looked at Roger’s face. He was drunk, his expression that of a scared, intoxicated bully. It was utterly repellent to Henry. His own nerves were frayed, and he felt his patience leave him. He moved between Roger and his sister, his anger rising. “If you’ve hurt him, Roger, I’m going to take you apart, and it won’t be in a court of law.”

  Roger sneered, listing slightly to the side. The booze was singing through him, and he was feeling brave. “Take your best shot, city boy.”

  Henry turned to leave in contempt, but suddenly wheeled around in anger and gave Roger a roundhouse shot to the jaw, dropping him backward several feet. Roger stumbled over the gravel’s unsure footing and landed hard on his backside, his face contorted with pain. Henry looked down at him, all pity gone, feeling simple disgust. “There, Roger,” he said. “Sue me.”

  Henry’s shot and the booze turned Roger’s vision black for a moment, and he leaned back, dropping his head onto the gravel. The rain fell on his face, dripping off him onto the driveway. Sarah began to cry softly, and Henry turned to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just couldn’t take any more of him. Go take care of your mother, now. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Raymond stood still sixty feet away from the well. Dark thunderclouds had now covered the sky, making the well a dark, vague shape of shadow. But he could hear it; a low graunching sound came from under the earth as the stomach of the field was pumped, black bile rising under forced pressure. Aboveground the metal parts squealed in protest, long overdue for lubrication. Boyd stood for a long moment, listening and staring into the shadows. Then lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating the field. The hulking shape of the well exploded in the light, Boyd’s figure erect before it. He raised his fist in the air, shaking it in fury and anger. “Plague and bloodshed! he cried. My sword drinks its fill in the heavens, it descends in judgment! Ain’t that right, Junior Henry? Rain and sulfur and fire from the heavens!”

  Boyd dropped his bag and spilled the contents out onto the muddy ground. He picked up the big wrench and rags and walked toward the well. The mud and oil residue had combined beneath his feet into a sticky glue, and he sank into the bog as he walked. As he approached, the protest of metal on metal grew louder and more abrasive; in his brain it was the sound of robots screaming for death.

  He laboriously shut the well down. When he was finished, he took the rags and rubbed them over the pipes for several minutes, eventually soaking them in oil. He then took his wrench and placed the mouth on a large pipe fitting where two lines split off from the wellhead. He pulled down on the wrench; solid from years of disuse, the fitting refused to move. He tried for several seconds, with the same result, and at last lifted his body up by the wrench handle, hanging on it over the concrete encasing at ground level. He bounced up and down and felt the wrench move slightly. Regaining his feet, he bent his knees and pulled; the fitting unscrewed a half inch, and Boyd heard a powerful hissing sound coming from under the wrench. “Now sulfur and fire,” he said out loud. He bounded away from the well.

  Thirty feet downwind he pushed the big truck flare deep into the ground, the spike moving easily through the sodden bog. When a foot and a half remained above ground level he pulled the cap off and wrapped the oily rags around the base. He looked back through the pelting rain at the well. Absolution. Let there be absolution. He pulled back the self-igniters on the flare, and the smell of burning magnesium filled the air. A flame burst up from the thin cylinder, showering sparks into the night. The heat of two thousand degrees evaporated the rain twenty feet above the flame. Boyd picked up his bag and began running to the empty highway.

  As Raymond hit the highway, the flare was burning down at the well. By the time it reached the ground the rags were already smoldering, ignited by the sparks of the magnesium fire. When the heat of the flare reached the rags, the oil-soaked fabric exploded into flame, burning blue and red. The flame instantly traced outward from the flare across the ground, racing across the oily earth toward the well. In less than three seconds it had covered the sixty feet to the wellhead. Flame danced for a moment at the base of the well, sweeping in a great circle. It crept up the center shaft to the pipe fittings, and soon the entire base of the well was glowing, the blustering wind sending thick black smoke across the field and into the dark sky. When the flame licked near the opening that Boyd had cracked, the threads burned yellow for an instant; then with terrific force the entire casing of the well shaft exploded into thousands of metal pieces, disintegrating the concrete and sending iron fragments hundreds of feet into the air. The concussion splintered the limbs of scrub trees fifty yards away, their instantly superheated leaves bursting into flame in defiance of the rain. A column of screaming fire hurled itself a hundred and fifty feet high—clear and invisible at the bottom, then yellow, then orange, with startling, electric-blue tips at the top. The smell of sulfur filled the air as the flame roared upward for several seconds; then, suddenly, it began to ignite downward into the well, and the air was rent with the sound of a frantic, high-pitched, burning train.

  Frank Hesston sat alone in his office, pondering how so much time and effort had been risked in such a damnably short time. He went over his approaches, relived his decisions, searching for mistakes. He had made none, he decided. Each choice was made for a reason, and each alternative would have posed a different, more substantial threat. But the fact remained that he was hanging by a thin thread that was now unquestionably spinning out of his direct control.

  He alone knew the real reason why Tyler had changed his will. All that talk about guilt or growing up the boy was irrelevant nonsense, a mile wide of the mark. Hesston closed his eyes, playing over one of his last conversations with Tyler before his death. Insurance, he thought grimly. Insurance to keep Carl and me honest. Anything happens to me, Crandall had said, and all hell breaks loose. Hesston had pressed him, but Tyler had given him a dark look and ref
used to say another word.

  Certainly Carl had brought up moving Tyler out of the loop. We don’t need him anymore, he had said. With Tyler out of the way we keep right on running, except the split goes two ways instead of three. He had a point; the difference would have been in the millions. But as usual, Carl’s answer to everything was the strong-arm or the shotgun. Hesston had stopped him in his tracks, before he could spook Crandall. It was too late; Tyler had already grown suspicious, sensing something shifting in Durand’s demeanor. It was Crandall’s gift, smelling danger before any of the others. Toward the end, he had grown guarded, cautious. That was the thing about crime: you knew you were dealing with crooks. Anyway, Tyler could add numbers as well as anybody else, and must have realized he was vulnerable. So you change your will and turn Boyd into a threat. And I let you do it. I knew I could control Carl, and we only needed a few more years and it would have all been over anyway. And then you go and die. At fifty-six. With no warning, like the hand of God just plucked you off the earth. And you leave a mess that could take us all down with you.

  He flicked on his computer, the screen bathing his face with a cool light. Using an encrypted E-mail address, he sent a message to the private banking office of the Banque Suisse, instructing them to have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars sent to their branch on Grand Bahama Island. If and when things became untenable, a prepaid plane ticket to Miami would put him on his boat, Litigation III. An overnight cruise would put him in the Bahamas, with no traceable record of his leaving the country. He would be just another part of the flotilla that traveled daily between Miami and the islands. Once in the Bahamas, he could contemplate at his leisure how to spend the millions he had amassed during a very fruitful run. But all that was mere contingency, the kind of careful planning that had made him rich and kept him safe so far. To walk out too early was as stupid as waiting too late; there were millions more in the ground, millions worth a reasonable risk.