Into the Web

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Lonnie Porterfield should just leave Lila alone.” His eyes snapped over to me. “If Lila don’t want to talk, it ain’t none of his business to make her.”

  “He asked me to help him.” I drew out the badge Lonnie had issued me. “He even made it official.”

  As if I’d pulled a rattlesnake from my pocket, my father recoiled physically. “You ain’t got no business carrying that thing.”

  “Why not? Lonnie made me a deputy.”

  Even as I spoke, it seemed perverse to me that in some boyish way I still wanted to impress my father.

  “A sheriff’s deputy ain’t nothing but a gun-thug with a badge.” The mining wars flared in his eyes. “Bought and sold by the mine owners.”

  “County deputies don’t work for mine owners anymore,” I said, now sorry that I’d bothered to display the badge.

  “What do you know about what deputies do or don’t do around here, Roy?”

  “I know that things have changed, Dad.”

  “Things don’t never change. People neither. Especially them Porterfields. You take off the muzzle, and Lonnie’ll come at you just like his old man come at me.”

  “What did Wallace Porterfield ever do to you?”

  My father waved his hand. “You don’t know a thing, Roy. All that learning, them books you read, and you still don’t know one goddamn thing.”

  I glanced at his hands and couldn’t help but admire how steady they remained.

  “Tell me something then,” I challenged. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  His eyes blazed. “All right, I will. Here’s something you don’t know. Blood is blood. What’s in the blood is there for good. You can’t get shed of it.”

  I stared at him silently.

  “Well?” he asked after a moment.

  “That’s it? That’s the thing I don’t know?”

  “Damn right it is. ’Cause if you knew it, you wouldn’t be carrying no badge Lonnie Porterfield give you.” He snorted harshly. “But you’re going to learn a lesson soon enough, by God.” His voice rang with a maddening certainty that made all further argument superfluous. “The fact is, Lonnie’s just using you, Roy. Getting you to do something ’Cause he don’t want to do it hisself. Just like his daddy used people. Give them little tin badges and got them to go against their own kind. They come up like they owned Waylord and everybody in it. Come up in them big cars from Kingdom City. In them fine clothes they wore. Like they could beat us at anything. Whip us and make us give in to ’em.”

  His eyes were like flares in the darkness, and in that instant I knew why he’d come to the playing field at night all those many years ago, why he’d come only when the boys of Waylord played the boys of Kingdom City, the hills against the valley. He had come to see them beat us, beat to a pulp the Kingdom City team, shame and humiliate it, trample it beneath their bare callused feet. He had despised the sons of the valley that much … or that much loved the sons of those he’d left behind.

  “Hell, I figure the only reason Lonnie wants you around is ’Cause he thinks it’s exciting.” he said offhandedly.

  “Why would Lonnie find having me around exciting, Dad?”

  “Why do you have to keep at things, Roy? Bite and scratch. Bite and scratch. Just like that old mangy dog.”

  That old dog. Scooter.

  Then I knew.

  “Because of Archie,” I said. “You think Lonnie finds it exciting to have me around because of the murders?”

  I waited for him to answer, feeling strangely accused while I waited, but he only leaned forward abruptly, drew a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, thumped one out, and grabbed it with his teeth.

  “I thought you were out of cigarettes,” I said.

  “I never said I was out.” He plucked a match from the same pocket and raked it across the bottom of his shoe. “Will be by morning though.”

  He brought the match to the cigarette, and in the light that washed up from it, I noticed the first hint of yellow in the whites of his eyes, a sign, according to Doc Poole, that his liver had begun to fail.

  “Glad I didn’t go with you,” he said, his face now clothed in darkness once again. “That last night. Glad I didn’t go see him that last time.”

  He was talking about Archie again.

  “Didn’t want to go with you that night. Didn’t see no reason to after the way he got to sputtering the time I seen him. Figured maybe I caused it. All that sputtering. Didn’t want him to get all upset like that again.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “So I didn’t go.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said quietly.

  “ ’Cause of the way he acted the time I visited him,” my father said, now returning to the one and only time he’d visited Archie in jail. “Didn’t want to see that again.”

  It had been a cold, rainy night in January, muddy roads until we reached the main highway, my mother in her Sunday clothes, a black dress with a little pillbox hat, her face covered with black netting, clutching a tattered Bible. Archie had been arrested at just after dawn that same morning, and was now to spend his first night in the county jail. Even so, my father had resisted the idea of visiting him—Don’t want to see him behind bars—but had finally agreed to accompany us to Kingdom City, where he’d balked again, refusing to go into the sheriff’s office, relenting in his refusal only after my mother had made a tearful plea.

  “Wished I’d stayed at home.” He tossed the match out into the yard. “Didn’t want to see Archie like that. Crying and sputtering.”

  “It was his first night in jail.”

  “Whining like he done. Telling Wallace Porterfield how sorry he was. Messing his pants.”

  “Messing his pants? What are you talking about, Dad? Archie didn’t mess his pants.”

  “Figured he did. Before. When Porterfield went at him. Wanting to know what happened. Threatening him. Scaring him.”

  “What makes you think Sheriff Porterfield did anything like that?”

  “The old lady never said a word,” my father blurted out, his mind now whipsawing away from Archie. “Never one word about what Archie done to hisself after ya’ll left him there that last time.”

  Instead, she’d taken to her bed, where she remained, balled up beneath the quilt, hour after hour, day after day, sinking ever deeper into the religious mania that would consume her mind during the few weeks that remained to her.

  “Just went right to bed after she found out about it,” my father said. “Didn’t say one damn word. Just went to the bedroom.”

  Did I have any clear memory of my mother ever coming out of that room again? Ever joining my father and me at the table? No, never at her sewing again, or her crocheting, gone within a few weeks, gone forever, gone to Jesus.

  “She couldn’t take Archie’s death,” I said.

  I glanced over to where my father sat in stony silence, lost in thought, until he finally said, “Never could figure out why he done it. Hung hisself like that. With nothing but a bedsheet to do it with. Wanting to die that bad. Wanting to get out of it. Not giving nobody no reason for it. Couldn’t see Archie doing that.”

  “Well, he did,” I said firmly, trying to get past such fruitless speculation, the image it called up in my brain, Archie hanging from the top of his bunk, eyes popped, tongue black and swollen.

  “The old lady always mothered him,” my father said. “You too. Always mothering Archie. Day and night. Telling him what to do.”

  “We had to, Dad. Archie needed—”

  “Archie needed to be a man. To die like a man. Not apologizing to everybody, whining about how sorry he was, how he didn’t mean it, how it was something just come over him. A miserable thing, sniveling like a baby, apologizing to the whole goddamn world.” He drew in a long, smoldering breath. “Porterfield standing there, grinning the whole time.”

  “Archie just wanted people to understand that he hadn’t meant to do it,” I said. “That he’d just … that it was … a mistake.”


  My father peered out into the blackness. “All for Horace Kellogg’s daughter.”

  Horace Kellogg’s daughter.

  It was the only name my father had ever called Gloria.

  She’d lived in a big house a mile or so from town, the oldest child of Horace and Lavenia Kellogg, merchant pillars of our community, a slight, willowy girl with dark blue eyes and pale white skin. At times she’d seemed fixed in a dark anticipation, a mood Archie had worked to lift, bringing his face very near hers, staring eye to eye, cocking his head playfully, grinning, Come out of it now, Gloria. Don’t stay holed up in there.

  “He loved Gloria,” I said.

  “Then he should have took her and been done with it.”

  “He tried, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did,” my father said, suddenly growing curiously meditative. “He did try.” He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and threw it onto the ground. “Surprised me that he did. I mean, all by hisself like that.”

  I heard my brother’s voice. Will you go with me, Roy?

  My father stared out into the darkness. “It was Horace Kellogg that caused it. Putting that daughter of his through all kinds of hell. Telling her she was just trash for running around with such as Archie. Archie knew what Kellogg was like. That’s why he took that gun. ’cause he knowed that bastard wouldn’t never have set there and let his girl go off with the likes of Archie.”

  “How would Archie have known that? I don’t think he ever so much as spoke to Horace Kellogg.”

  “Everybody knows what Horace Kellogg is like, Roy. Horace Kellogg and Wallace Porterfield. They’re one and the same.”

  “In what way?”

  “In that they ain’t got no use for a boy like Archie. You think for one minute Horace Kellogg would have stood by and let Archie marry that puny little daughter of his? No, sir, he wouldn’t have put up with that. But I still wouldn’t have told Archie to let her go, like you done Lila Cutler.”

  My father seemed to realize that he’d reached some kind of line in me and dropped the subject.

  “Well, I think I’ll turn in.” He struggled to his feet with a groan. “Good night, Roy.”

  “Good night,” I said crisply, then watched as he headed for the door, moving toward it unsteadily, like a leaking boat.

  Every instinct demanded that I let him go, and yet a small question nagged at me, the sort that, if left unanswered, pursues us through the years, becomes a ghostly whisper, a rumor carried by the rain, about something we don’t know and yet suspect must have in secrecy and stealth deranged and finally undone our lives.

  And so I said, “You think I told Archie to let Gloria go? When would I have done that, Dad?”

  “That night.”

  “What makes you think I saw Archie that night?”

  “ ’Cause Porterfield come asking. The next morning. When he come to tell the old lady about the killings and how he had Archie in jail over in Kingdom City.”

  “Where was I when he came here?”

  “You’d already gone to work, like me,” my father answered. “At the drugstore.”

  I recalled that morning, Saturday, the night’s snow long melted away by a warm morning sun, leaving the streets of Kingdom City slick and gleaming.

  “What did the sheriff want to know?” I asked.

  “Where you’d been,” my father answered. “When Archie done it. She told him you was probably up in Waylord. That you’d been out with Lila that night.”

  In my mind I saw Porterfield stride past the window of Clark’s Drugs as he had that morning, his eyes leveled upon me as I stood, wiping glasses, behind the soda fountain.

  “Porterfield saw me that morning,” I said. “In the drugstore. But he didn’t come in. He never asked me anything about where I was that night.”

  I remembered how, two days later, when Porterfield had led me silently down the corridor to Archie’s cell for what turned out to be our last time together, he had wheeled and walked back to his office without so much as a word, the sound of dangling keys the only ones I’d heard.

  “And when I went to visit Archie, he never asked me one question about the murders.”

  My father nodded. “Archie wasn’t a bad boy. Just too much like me, that’s all. Had the same bad luck.”

  Chapter Ten

  As I made his morning coffee, I knew he was awake just beyond his bedroom door, waiting for me to leave so he could enjoy the only thing he seemed really capable of enjoying, his granite solitude.

  I tapped at the closed door, waited, then called, “Your coffee’s ready.” When no answer came, I placed his brown mug on the kitchen table. “It’ll be cold in five minutes,” I added.

  With that I considered my morning obligations done and headed into town, driven by some priggish sense of duty to report to Lonnie.

  Lonnie didn’t appear at all surprised to see me. “Well, I let Lila go like I said I would,” he told me with a friendly wink. “You two hook up later?”

  He saw the expression on my face and laughed a crudely insinuating laugh that reminded me of the sliminess that had always been a part of his character. “You didn’t?” he said. “I figured you’d have cashed in by now. You know, got a little something for that favor you did her.”

  I heard my father’s warning, Blood is blood. Them Porterfields just use people, and considered the dark world they suggested, all of us bound to the stake of our birthright, anchored in the deep sludge of the generations, not at all born into a wide, bright world, but carelessly tossed into the web.

  “The fact is, it wasn’t doing any good to keep her here anyway,” Lonnie added now. “I released Clayton’s body too. No reason to keep it.”

  “Well, I found out that Clayton Spivey was—”

  “Dying?” Lonnie interrupted with a triumphant grin.

  “Yes.”

  “I found out before you did, I bet,” he said. “Doc Poole finished the autopsy just after you left.”

  He looked surprised when I picked up the report from his desk.

  “Natural causes, according to Doc Poole,” he said. “Old Clayton just spit blood and died.”

  “Byssinosis,” I said, then continued to scan the report, noting the basic facts Doc Poole had recorded in it. He’d written “none” in the space provided for next of kin.

  “So that’s it, Roy,” Lonnie said when I handed him back the report. “Case closed.”

  “Have you told Lila?” I asked.

  Lonnie shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Mind if I do it?”

  A grin slithered onto his lips. “Why, you old dog, you,” he said, an answer I took to be yes.

  I turned toward the door, but Lonnie called me back. “That badge,” he said. “I better get that back from you now.”

  I plucked the badge from my pocket and placed it on Lonnie’s desk.

  “Remember now, Roy, you’re not going to be acting in an official capacity anymore,” Lonnie said with a leering wink. “I mean, in whatever you have in mind for your old girlfriend up in Waylord.”

  “What would I have in mind, Lonnie?”

  A broad smile crossed Lonnie’s face. “Maybe offering a little comfort,” he said. “Nothing wrong in that.”

  I pulled into Lila’s driveway a few minutes later.

  At the top of the stairs, I hesitated outside the door, feeling intensely foolish now, a middle-aged man mired in a high-school romance. So foolish in fact that I might have turned and fled had Lila not come upon me suddenly.

  “Roy.” She stood at the corner of the house, a basket of vegetables in her hand. “I just came from the garden.

  “Mama’s sleeping.” She nodded toward the house.

  “She’s not really able to take care of herself anymore.”

  “Doc Poole gave Lonnie his report,” I told her. “Clayton Spivey died of black lung. The case is closed as far as Lonnie’s concerned.”

  She straightened herself abruptly. “I don’t care what Lonnie
Porterfield does. I’m trash to him. Always have been.”

  It had been a hot summer night, Lila and I walking beside the road together, holding hands, a pickup truck roaring past, a load of valley boys in the back, waving bottles, yelling drunkenly, Lonnie in the midst of them, louder than the rest, taunting as he went by, Be careful, Roy, Waylord girls ain’t never fresh.

  “He was drunk,” I told her, repeating the same excuse for Lonnie I’d offered my father only a day before. “He was young.”

  “Yes, he was,” Lila replied. “Anyway, I knew what he thought about me after that. The same way his father felt. That the girls up here are just something to be used. Something to be played with.”

  “You sound like my father. The way he hates the Porterfields.”

  “Maybe I am like your father, Roy.”

  “You’re not in the least like him.”

  She smiled. “You didn’t look at me like other boys.”

  “I was shy,” I said.

  She grew still beneath my gaze.

  “I would have come back, you know. After college. I would have come back for you if you hadn’t …”

  “None of that matters now,” Lila said.

  It was then I suddenly glimpsed Lila’s life as I thought she had come to see it, as something that had flowed grimly out of our teenage romance, a stream that should have been bright and glittering but had grown dark and murky.

  “Lila … I …”

  A voice from inside the house called her name.

  “My mother,” Lila said hastily. “I’ve got to go.”

  I reached for her arm. “Lila …”

  Our eyes locked for an instant, then the screen door creaked open and a thin, rawboned woman emerged from the darkened house, a mere shadow of the woman I’d first glimpsed in a metallic blue dress in the bleachers.

  “Who’s that?” she called.

  “We have company,” Lila told her. “A gentleman caller, you might say.” She moved past me, her eyes fixed on her mother. “Do you remember him, Mama?”

  Betty Cutler leaned forward, now squinting so hard, her eyes were mere slits. The name that broke from her lips chilled me to the bone.

  “Jesse,” she whispered.