Boot Tracks

  The water cup fell from the woman’s hand to the floor.

  “My girlfriend says anybody with a good soul would be happier locked up for life knowing they’d done right finally than running loose knowing they never had, but she ain’t ever been locked up.”

  “You could ask her—your girlfriend—to stand at the bottom of the drive and flag down the police when they come.”

  “He didn’t mean to do what he did to you. He mixed you up with someone else or he mixed up who he was with who he is. You see I’m confused, don’t you?”

  The woman didn’t say.

  “And that he can’t be trusted?”

  The woman tightly intertwined her fingers, then pushed them firmly into her lap as if implanting them in soil.

  “That he’ll turn on you in a heartbeat and what all he does after will be only a dream to Charlie Rankin?”

  Little Charlie shoving his thumbs and index fingers into soft flesh, poppingfrom their sockets, like snap peas from their shells, those eyes that wouldn’t stop recognizing him.

  “I ain’t ate nothing all day,” said Rankin.

  He pulled the .22 from his belt.

  “’Fore long it don’t bother you not to.” He watched the woman’s hands shaking in her lap, her thighs quivering beneath her robe and felt as bad for her as he had for the deer he’d once accidentally run down with his car and then, sitting on the side of the road, watched slowly die. “If somebody put a steak in front of me now I’d sooner drop dead than eat it.”

  “I’m going to stand up,” the woman whispered to the spot on the wall, “walk to the phone, call the police, and tell them what’s happened here.”

  Rankin flicked off the .22’s safety. “Can you have more babies?”

  The woman’s head moved mechanically up and down as if it were on a string being manipulated by an unseen hand.

  “I wish I was the one you’d been carrying,” said Rankin. “Then he’d never been born.”

  The woman’s whole body was shaking. “You’re going to have to help me.”

  “What?”

  “Make it to my feet.”

  Rankin lay the .22 in her lap. “You ain’t got to get to your feet.”

  “There is nothing you or Him or anyone,” the woman told the wall in her toneless whisper, “can do to me anymore that frightens me.”

  “I don’t want to frighten you.”

  “Help me up then. I can’t make it up alone. He—I’m hurt too badly—can’t you see that?”

  Rankin picked up the woman’s right hand and fit it around the gun and her index finger into the trigger guard. “You sit where you are. Save your strength.” He placed her hand with the gun in it into her lap. “If you hear somebody after I leave walking at you through that door and not saying nothing”— Rankin tapped the woman’s fingers on the gun—”aim this at the sound and pull the trigger and keep pulling it until you hear whoever it is fall and quit moving.”

  He got to his feet. “The safety’s off. The clip’s full.”

  The woman sounded to him at once as far away as a voice in a half-remembered dream and as near by as a mother nursing him. “Are you going to call them—the police—again?”

  “I’m going to call them—I didn’t before—from out in the big room,” he told her, “and tell them exactly where to come and to come fast as hell and to bring with them an ambulance and to talk plenty loud on their way in here to rescue you.”

  “And then you’re going to come back and wait for them with me?”

  “That’s the one part of it my girlfriend got wrong. That life inside ain’t no life at all.”

  “They’ll catch you. I’ll make sure they do.”

  “Shoot me now, you’ll know they will.”

  “Then you couldn’t call them. And I’d likely die before a real human being found me.”

  Rankin started for the door.

  “Why’d you come back?” the woman hissed at him.

  Rankin quit walking. “To kill Maynard Cass,” he said, not turning around.

  “Why him? Why us, for God’s sake?”

  “I fucked up killing him last night by coming here instead. I musta counted houses wrong.”

  “All this—it was a mistake?”

  Rankin wondered how Little Charlie last night, even with all they’d done to him, could have gotten enraged enough at his mother to take out her eyes. Hadn’t she given him love? Hadn’t she sung songs just to him? Hadn’t she made him his own special omelets?

  “William Pettigrew says there ain’t no mistakes.”

  “I’d almost rather shoot you dead and die myself then let a monster like you walk away.” The woman, cradling the gun atop her legs, refaced the wall; she whispered to it, “And I don’t forgive you—not in this lifetime.”

  “Neither do I,” said Rankin.

  * * *

  He told the 911 dispatcher he and a kid named Charlie had committed the carnage the police would find in the house when they arrived, but that Rankin was mostly to blame for it because he’d brought the kid there knowing the kid had a history in tight spots of getting all mixed up and going off on strangers to him as if they weren’t strangers to him and things last night had gotten that kind of tight and the kid had gone off on these people something awful.

  “Where’s Charlie now?”

  “You ain’t got to worry about that.”

  “Why don’t I have to worry about it?”

  “I got him under control. He won’t hurt nobody else.”

  “He’s still there—in the house?”

  “He’s someplace you’ll never find him at. Don’t waste your time on it.”

  “Okay. Fine. We’ll come back to Charlie. The lady though— she’s breathing all right? She’s okay?”

  “She won’t be you don’t get somebody here quick.”

  “A squad car and an ambulance are about set to leave here. They’ll be to you in fifteen, twenty minutes tops. Now, the man—”

  “Forget him.”

  “No chance, at all, he isn’t dead? You checked for vital signs?”

  “Just tell them—the ones coming—the fifth house on the right after the golf course road.”

  “I got that. I wrote it down already.”

  “There’ll be a Trans Am parked a few yards up the drive and a woman tied up in it.”

  “The injured woman?”

  “No. Another woman. My girlfriend. She ain’t a part of this.”

  “Does she need medical assistance?”

  “She needs to be untied is all. She’s my girlfriend.”

  “You said that. But you didn’t say why she’s tied up.”

  “I didn’t want her seeing this.”

  “Seeing what.”

  “These people. What he did to them. She thinks she could handle knowing him but she couldn’t.”

  “I’ll make sure they—the officers—know to look for her.”

  “Just remember she had nothing to do with it. She’s the one got me back here tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  “If not for her I wouldn’t be on the phone with you now. I wouldn’t be in this house again—understand?”

  “I understand. So tell me about you—what can I call you first off? What’s your name?”

  “Don’t even bother with that shit.”

  “It’s just easier knowing who I’m talking to, that’s all. I’m Ed.”

  “That don’t matter a shit to me. Tell them, when they get here, to look straight off in the baby’s crib for the woman’s eyes.

  “Did you say for them to look for her eyes?”

  “Maybe the doctors can put them back in their sockets— like how they can sew peoples fingers back on their hands—let her see again.”

  “Did someone—Christ—did one of you—what are you telling me?”

  “I remember him staring into the crib, thinking what happened to the baby?—then her eyes turning on him that way and him thinking no you don’t blame me for it—then I f
ind her tonight in a blindfold and neither of us wanting to take it off and me feeling afraid to look in the crib from a terrible feeling I know what’s in it.”

  The dispatcher cleared his throat. “Charlie did this? You’re telling me that Charlie—he did what exactly?”

  Rankin didn’t say anything.

  The dispatcher cleared his throat again. “Is there a baby in that house?”

  “No.”

  “You mentioned a baby’s crib.”

  “It never got born.”

  “So in the house right now is just you, the dead man, and the injured woman?”

  “Eight.”

  “No baby.”

  “I got from what she said she lost it a good while ‘fore all this happened to her.”

  “And no Charlie.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Wait, now just—you’ll be there when they—the officers and medical personnel—arrive?”

  “I know it won’t mean nothing much to anybody but I’m sorry as hell for what Charlie and me done here.”

  “We don’t want any trouble, is all. We just want to help who’s injured, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re not armed?”

  “I ain’t armed.”

  Rankin hung up the phone.

  He strode down the hallway to the room containing the crib and, saying nothing, entered the room and made straight for the woman. The first bullet got him in the right shoulder blade. The next one in the belly, above his belt. He sagged forward, still moving. Two bullets entered the wall left of him; he heard another one splinter the ceiling, before a stinging sensation in his chest right of his heart took away his wind. He fell to his knees, even as he realized he’d been shot in one of them. He crawled ahead. A bullet hit him in the Adam’s apple. He collapsed onto his belly and slithered at the woman. Her blindfold was off and she was eyeing him down the .22’s barrel and Rankin tried to laugh from joy upon discovering that Little Charlie had had enough good left inside of him to spare his poor mother her sight, but only a gasp came out of him. He stopped moving inches from the woman’s feet. She dropped the gun. He heard her whisper at the wall or at him, “Now, we’ll wait.”

  About the Author

  Matthew F. Jones is the author of the novels Deepwater, The Elements of Hitting, A Single Shot, Blind Pursuit, and The Cooter Farm, each critically acclaimed. His novel Deepwater, named by critics as one of the best novels of 1999, has recently been made into a film starring Lucas Black, Peter Coyote and Lesley Ann Warren. Jones was born in Boston and raised in rural upstate New York. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.