Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  I’m momentarily deaf. When Shiflett shot me in the foot, the .22 didn’t make enough noise to wake up his next-door neighbor. This was loud enough to wake up the folks in Hollywood Cemetery, a block away.

  The rest of the door opens, and I’m looking up, through the haze, at the face of Philippe Ducharme.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  He walks down the steps, taking his time. He’s light on his feet for a big man. I hear a groan and realize that Shiflett is still alive.

  “Well, well,” he says, looking at me. “Imagine finding you here. All my troubles in one place.”

  He goes over and catches Shiflett with his foot, turning him over, gives him a kick. The hole that the sawed-off shotgun made in the door made an impressive one in him, too. He’s gut-shot, moaning on the floor.

  “Say hello,” he says as Shiflett looks up, “to an old friend. You wanted me, white trash. You have me. Or rather, I have you.”

  He laughs. It’s kind of an I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-happens next laugh.

  “There’s a kind of symmetry, don’t you think? I kill your white-trash father, and forty years later, I kill you.”

  Valentine Chadwick IV stands over Shiflett, who is trying to scream, but it’s kind of muffled and gurgled.

  Chadwick pulls some electrical tape from a pocket of the baggy pants he’s wearing.

  “Thought of everything,” he says, covering Shiflett’s mouth. “There. I’d rather hear you beg me to finish you off, but this way it will last longer.”

  I’m hoping the shotgun blast woke up the old biddy next door, or somebody, and that the cavalry is on the way.

  Chadwick turns to me again.

  “When you told me his name,” he says, “I knew. I knew that he knew. Why else? The only thing to do was to come down here and finish it.”

  He sees the PBR can lying on the floor. He goes over to the beer fridge and opens it. He kind of sniffs as he looks inside.

  “You have deplorable taste in beer,” he says to Shiflett, wideeyed and gagging on the floor, bleeding to death. He takes one anyhow.

  “I worked forty years to get past this,” he says. I’m still listening, wishing for sirens. “Then, this piece of Oregon Hill merde somehow finds me.”

  He’s standing over Shiflett.

  “If I were able to torture you to the brink of death a thousand times,” he says, “and then bring you back and do it all over again, with every instrument ever dreamed up in the Inquisition, I wouldn’t be able to make it even.

  “But, I do the best I can.”

  There’s a gasoline can in the corner of the basement, next to the lawn mower. Shiflett is still alive enough to beg him through the tape.

  “I doubt if I will be able to get away with this,” Chadwick says, almost to himself. “I’m not sure it matters.”

  He’s dousing Shiflett while he talks, mostly to me.

  “You’re lucky, and unlucky. You get to hear a story not even my wife has heard, at least not all of it. But you won’t be able to tell it to anyone else. I know how you people love to tell a good story, but this one you will have to take with you. To hell.”

  Lucky me. I get to hear two astounding stories in one night. What a break. Come on, dammit. Somebody must have heard that shotgun blast. Even on the Hill, that had to get somebody’s attention.

  “I felt a bit sorry about what happened to his father. He was a scumbag, though, and sometimes you have to take out the garbage. As they used to say down here, he besmirched my honor.”

  He laughs.

  “After they found me guilty, and that lawyer was able to get me out of jail temporarily, my father took me aside.”

  He looks across the room, at something only he can see.

  “My father, he was what you would call ‘a piece of work.’ He was old school. He didn’t believe in much of anything that had happened since the 1860s, except making money and looking out for what was his—his money and his name. He ingrained in us a sense of who we were. He always told us we were better than other people, meant to rule.”

  He says “wuh” instead of “were,” as if he’s slowly shedding the skin of Philippe Ducharme.

  “He called me into his study. He told me that I had brought shame on the family, which was not allowed. But then he sighed, and he looked directly at me, the way he did when I was bad as a little boy. That look could make you piss your pants. I think I was more afraid of him than of prison.

  “ ‘I can’t let this happen,’ he told me. ‘I can’t let a Chadwick go to prison.’ And then he spelled it all out. My father knew people everywhere, who were able to do just about anything. He’d already arranged for the boat that would pick me up, and was well on the way to arranging everything on the other side.

  “He had powerful friends in France, some of whom were not what you would call ‘legitimate.’ I came ashore at Marseille and was given my new life.”

  He takes a sip of the beer and grimaces, but drinks again.

  “I’ve been waiting in that damned car for four hours,” he says. “And I drove almost ten before that. I’m a little thirsty. When I saw him pull the car around back and saw the light come on in the basement, I waited half an hour more. If I had waited longer, I might have fallen asleep.

  “How nice that Mr. Shiflett is so trusting as to leave his door unlocked.”

  He leans down and pulls Shiflett’s head up by yanking on his hair from behind.

  “Try to hang on a bit longer. I want you to hear just how badly we fucked you. Before your final act. Your grand finale.”

  Unlike Shiflett, he doesn’t offer me a sip, or take off my gag.

  “So,” he continues, “I knew a good bit of French and learned more pretty quickly. My schooling was paid for, and everything worked out. I wish my father had lived long enough to see what a fine job I did with my second chance, but he died after managing to visit only one time, when I was still in graduate school. He did send me letters on a regular basis, mostly about business but also emphasizing, over and over, how I could never come back, that some would never stop looking.”

  Chadwick laughs.

  “I guess he was right. Like the song says, ‘Old times dar am not forgotten.’ I never should have come back, and I never should have let Isabel come here to school.”

  He seems to choke a little on his late daughter’s name.

  “But she was so close to her grandmother, and she was such a self-contained girl. She could keep a secret. She begged me to let her come here so she could be near her grandmother, even though she could have gotten into much better schools. She promised me that she would only go see her once a month, and that they never would be seen together.

  “And my mother wanted it, too, even though she knew far more than Isabel did what a risk it was. How could I deny them both so much?”

  He rubs his eyes.

  “It was hard, not being able to be with my family, only seeing my mother once or twice a year. When she dies, I won’t be at her funeral. When my daughter died, I had to hide like a frightened rabbit. The way I see it, I have ‘done my time,’ as they say, forty years of it.

  “It’s time to stop hiding, I suppose.”

  Chadwick is looking for matches. He sees the pack of Camels in my shirt pocket.

  “Disgusting habit,” he says as he searches my pants pockets and finds the cigarette lighter.

  He takes a piece of paper and lights it. I see that it’s a page from the newspaper. How fucking ironic, I might have said.

  As it starts to burn, I hear Shiflett whimpering.

  “I probably won’t get away,” Chadwick says, “but, what the hell, I’ll give it a try. Maybe everyone will be so mesmerized by this appalling structure burning down that they won’t notice as I drive off. Maybe you actually didn’t know why this . . . thing butchered my only child. But, with DNA and all the new technology, I am not optimistic.

  “Still, one must try.”

  As he says it, he throws the paper, almost burned do
wn to his finger now, on Shiflett, who explodes into flames. He reminds me of a worm I saw once, after a boy on the Hill set fire to it just to see it squirm.

  “Look at him,” Chadwick says. “He looks like—what was the expression? Ah, yes. He’s shaking like, like a dog shitting peach pits.”

  He repeats it, amused that he has remembered this piece of scatological humor from his youth.

  “Well,” he says, heading for the door leading upstairs as the smoke starts to rise, “I must be going.”

  I can’t free myself from the last chair I’ll ever sit in. I think maybe I can push the damn thing as far as the back door, but it’s hopeless.

  Chadwick is going up the stairs, barely visible through the haze now. He seems to be savoring every last possible second of David Shiflett’s agony. I now know what burning human flesh smells like, and my last, pitiful hope is that the smoke gets me before the fire does.

  Then, I hear something else. Footsteps coming across the floor upstairs. Chadwick doesn’t seem to notice them until he pushes open what’s left of the door and comes face-to-face with something I can only see in silhouette through the smoke.

  Chadwick has left the sawed-off shotgun down here with Shiflett and me, no doubt sure that it can’t be traced. He backs down the stairs quickly, a few steps ahead of the silhouette.

  “Willie!” Les Hacker says, looking puzzled but not especially scared. “What the fuck?”

  Val Chadwick has backed over to where the gun is. As he picks it up, I try to scream something to Les. My lungs are burning. Even without the gag, I probably couldn’t talk.

  Chadwick picks up the gun. Les continues to move toward us. He seems more intent on saving me than nabbing Chadwick, and he doesn’t appear to care a damn about being shot. In my delirium, I imagine that Les Hacker has super powers.

  Chadwick sits in a chair. The fire is starting to take hold, and it won’t be more than a very few minutes before this ancient piece of kindling goes up like a Roman candle. It’s the kind of excitement I’d have relished for a year when I was a kid.

  Les tries to undo me but can’t, so he picks me up, chair and all. He’s moving toward the door when I see that Chadwick has propped the gun against the seat, with the barrel next to his mouth.

  Why he doesn’t shoot us and run, I’ll never know, I guess. Maybe it was the sirens. I notice them now, getting louder, maybe only a block away. I hope it’s fire trucks and not just cops.

  At any rate, Valentine Chadwick IV looks at us and seems to shrug just before he eats his gun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  October 29

  If Les Hacker has all his marbles, maybe I’m not telling this story.

  He said he “guesses” he was sitting on the roof nine nights ago, when he saw David Shiflett come up the alleyway and back his car to the basement door, then haul a large bundle inside. He couldn’t make out what it was from a block and a half away.

  Les and Peggy had gone to bed early, and when Les woke up, he must have slipped into wacko mode again. The next thing he knows, he’s on that well-trodden roof. From there, he’s got a good view of what’s going on below. The tree in Jerry Cannady’s yard was blown down when that hurricane came through a few years back, and the cheap bastard never replaced it, so it’s a clear shot down Laurel Street. Les’s eyes work a lot better than his mind.

  He must have zoned-out up there, because the next thing he remembers is seeing the guy he’d noticed earlier, who’d been sitting in the car with Massachusetts plates, get out and go toward the same house.

  It was almost midnight when he heard the shotgun blast, the one that helped turn Shiflett into kindling. It must have snapped Les out of his roofing dementia.

  “I didn’t know what to think,” he said, “but it didn’t sound good.”

  So he climbed down off the roof and walked up Laurel Street to see what all the fuss was about. When he got to Shiflett’s, he opened the door, and smoke was everywhere. He said that, when he went down the stairs, he didn’t really notice Val Chadwick and his big gun. Mostly, all he saw was me tied to a chair with David Shiflett frying at my feet.

  “The gun kind of spooked me, when it went off.”

  That would have been Chadwick splattering major parts of his head into the cinder-block wall behind him.

  Somehow, Les got me and the chair out the back door and into the yard. From there, we saw the place really catch, just as the police, followed closely by the fire trucks, got there.

  Peggy found us out there in the yard. I was untied by then, and we were back in the alleyway with the rest of the crowd. The rescue squad hadn’t discovered us yet. We were both coughing pretty impressively, and one guy offered us a beer each, which we took. He had a cooler with him, like it was a NASCAR race or something.

  Peggy was addled the way people who go to sleep stoned sometimes are, and she couldn’t seem to shake the impression that I had saved Les, rather than the other way around.

  “You dumbass,” she said to him at least three times. “Now you’re setting fires.”

  Les just looked at me and smiled.

  I probably wasn’t smiling back. The foot was really starting to get my attention. By the time the EMTs found us, they didn’t know whether to treat me for smoke inhalation or a gunshot wound first. The guy with the beer had given me a cigarette, too, so I had a Miller in one hand and a Camel in the other when they found us.

  They took us both down to MCV. Les is fine. The doctor said I had the lungs of a moderately healthy eighty-year-old. I asked him if he had any smokes on him.

  I’ll be walking with a limp for a little bit, but things worked out about as well as they could have, under the circumstances. You put yourself in that much harm’s way and get off with one night in the hospital, you need to think about changing your name to Lucky.

  The funny thing is, Peggy says Les hasn’t climbed up on the roof since that night. Who knows why? Maybe the whole experience was like electroshock therapy without the voltage.

  The newspaper is still the same clusterfuck it was before. The only good news, from the what-about-my-needs front, is that I might not be on the A-list for elimination, at least for now.

  With our crappy deadlines, we didn’t get anything into Wednesday’s paper. Baer put some stuff online and got to write the big piece for Thursday. Son of a bitch. If this stuff ever does win a major award, he’s managed to worm himself into the story enough that I’ll have to share. He even wanted to interview me. I told him he could read it in the paper like everybody else.

  I came back to the office on Thursday. Some asshole left a fire extinguisher on my desk.

  Everybody gathered around, hoping for the kind of stories we sometimes tell each other but can’t print. I gave them enough to keep them happy.

  Jackson was already back. He walked over to me and sniffed.

  “You smell like smoke.”

  He seems to have accepted his new role on the night copydesk. I told him that he and I were way behind on our pints at Penny Lane, and that now we’d be able to catch up without me having to buy. That seemed to cheer him up a little.

  “I still can’t figure out why they called me back,” he said, and I told him they probably came to their senses. He nodded and shook my hand. I don’t think he ever did that before.

  “Now I’ll be able to take a chain saw to some of that crap you write.”

  Sarah Goodnight gave me a big hug and seconded the motion that I smelled like smoke.

  “We need to get fucked-up,” she said, and I concurred with her assessment. I just hope she doesn’t bring Baer along.

  I was “invited” up to Grubby’s office that afternoon. Sandy McCool wrinkled her nose but was too polite to mention anything about smoke.

  “It’s good to have you back, Willie.” She said it like she meant it.

  On balance, it is good to be back, in spite of everything. This is what I do. I’m sure I can get some kind of job that doesn’t involve newsprint, but this is what
I do. Even with the wheels falling off, it’s a better way of paying the bills than anything else I know of. Everybody in the newsroom, or at least everybody with a soul, fantasizes about telling Grubby and Wheelie and maybe the suits across the street to go fuck themselves hard and deep, but nobody seems to do it. We all wait for the call, hoping it doesn’t come or at least that the severance package is enough to give us a running start.

  Like Charlton Heston’s rifle, I guess they’ll have to tear this pitiful job from my cold, dead hands.

  I waited a few minutes. Grubby probably was ready for me before I got here, but mind games are part of what they teach you when you’re swapping your soul for an MBA.

  “Willie,” he said, holding out his hand. “Welcome back.”

  Neither of us mentioned that I had sat in this same chair two days ago, next to Leon, while Grubby tried to terminate me. I resisted the urge to jump across the desk and strangle him, and he’d probably convinced himself that it never happened.

  What he wanted, he explained, was a tick-tock. He waved his hands a little too much for my Oregon Hill sensibilities. He looked like he’d lost even more weight and color in the previous two days.

  He wanted, he said, for me to tell the whole story, beginning to end.

  “We can run it as a series, starting Sunday.”

  Like blind squirrels, even publishers can find an acorn now and then. If we ran whatever Baer got from the cops for the next two days, we could keep the readers hanging on. Richmond isn’t that big a town; it seemed like half the people here knew, or thought they knew, what happened on Laurel Street that Tuesday night.

  “Then,” Grubby said, “boom! You hit ’em with the good stuff on Sunday.”

  He almost sounded like a newspaperman.

  He wanted to know the whole story, but I demurred. He could read it, I told him, when I was through writing it. Don’t want to jinx it.

  I threw him enough of a tidbit, though, to tide him over.