A Living Grave

by Robert E. Dunn

  “People—good people—good names get dragged through the papers and that stink don’t come off once it sticks to your family. People don’t know, but they think they do.”

  “Mrs. Owens, no one is saying anything about your family.” I tried hard to sound calm and reassuring.

  She stopped for a moment and looked at me like I had just appeared before her in a flash of light. Then she put her fingers—thin with big, red knuckles—up to smooth her tousled hair. “Why would they?” she asked quietly. The smoothing became a kind of nervous tugging. “What’s there to say about a good family?”

  “It would really help if I could talk with Carrie, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Owens hissed at me like you would to shoo a cat, then she said, “We don’t need your talk. We are private people. Private stays in family.”

  “Ma’ am—”

  “You go,” she hissed again.

  I tried to give her another card and ask her to call, but she shoved it back and told me to stay out of her family’s life. Not out of her daughter’s life, out of her family’s life. Under the circumstances it wasn’t an odd choice of words and certainly not strange for the woman hissing her distrust at me, but still . . .

  I thought about it as I walked back toward the parked SUV. When I glanced back I saw Carrie looking out a window at me. Her face was carved and motionless. When I smiled and raised my hand to wave, she lifted her middle finger, flipping me off without the smallest trace of feeling.

  I used the radio in the unit to call into Darlene. I requested a family services visit to the Owens home and I asked for a unit to park out front for the rest of the day and keep an eye out for Riley Pruitt. I also requested a search of the system for Pruitt so it would be waiting when I got into the office. Once off the radio, I called the sheriff’s cell. He didn’t pick up, so I left a message telling him about the situation. Then I called back and told him that I thought there was something more going on with Danny and Carrie.

  Once I was finished, I considered taking Mrs. Owens in for a more formal interrogation. It only took a second to talk myself out of it. Honestly, I didn’t think I would learn anything more. Besides, the last thing I wanted was to further disturb what little home life Carrie had. The image of the boat Nelson had painted flashed in my mind. It floated, untethered, in a confused light. I understood it a little better.

  Dave Briscoe came out of his house before I started the SUV. His face was as hard and lifeless as Carrie’s had been, but in a different way. Her face was a mask hiding feelings. His was feeling carved in place.

  “We heard about what you did,” he said. “We appreciate you getting him.”

  If he had it in him to wink, I think he would have. What I did, in his book, was to beat the kid that hurt his daughter. How could I say to him that it wasn’t about his daughter? It was my own weakness.

  The last thing Dave Briscoe cared about was my weakness or my guilt. He pointed over at the Owens’s house and said, “We used to let that girl come over and stay with Angela because we felt sorry for her. We even took her to church.”

  “Why did you feel sorry for her?” I asked even though I was sure I knew.

  “That family. The mother’s a hair-trigger lunatic and the father is one of those sad sacks who never seem to get it right but always thinks he knows the answers. He has someone to blame for everything you can bring up.”

  “I don’t guess he was home.”

  “He’s never home. His job is something about oil-well equipment. He travels a lot to sell it or fix it, I don’t know. But it was better before affirmative action, he’ll let you know that. To hear him tell it, no white, Christian man ever got a fair shake.”

  “I wonder if you know his feelings about discipline.”

  Briscoe looked at me. His face remained hard and still, but his eyes flashed a trace of feeling before he said, “No, I don’t exactly. But I’ve always had my suspicions.”

  Chapter 14

  The sheriff called back late that night and agreed with my decision not to pull Carrie’s mother in. He chatted distractedly for a bit about the cases. We were in agreement that the overlap between Angela Briscoe and bootlegging was a bizarre coincidence. He kept on talking long after he’d exhausted his purpose and I was about to ask him what was wrong. Before I could, he said, “You cancelled a therapy appointment.”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “I made a new one for you. Tomorrow morning.”

  “But—”

  “Same time, same place,” he said. “Be there or don’t sign back in.”

  What could I say to that?

  * * *

  Therapy day. For the first time I was almost looking forward to it. Not because I needed help. What I needed was a break from a case and a life that seemed to have imploded on me.

  I had spent the night before with Nelson on the houseboat. I had gotten closer and wanted more, but there had come a moment that teetered between bliss and terror. I had seen in his eyes and the soft look in his face what he was going to say.

  It should have been a warm moment. A hot one, even, when the passion spilled over from joy. What I felt was a cold wind. Nelson had the word love on his lips and I stopped him with a kiss. One of us had to be sane. His feelings were the result of desperation more than of me. It was a sad thought and maybe not very generous to either one of us. Love at first sight happens in movies and when people are thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Those circumstances are usually intense and short-lived. So are the feelings.

  I covered his mouth with mine and pushed my tongue inside, forcing another kind of heat into the passion. My own desperation.

  It worked. I kept his mouth too busy to speak until he was exhausted and drifting off on the pillow beside me. Yes, I had used sex to distract and manipulate. Yes, as I went to sleep beside him, I felt pretty good about it. Nelson wouldn’t complain. I worried about the morning, though.

  As it happened, there was no reason to worry. The sheriff had lied. Maybe not a lie, but he was wrong, at least. Darlene called to let me know that my appointment wasn’t at the same time. Since I was being fit in, it was in the late afternoon, not the morning. That gave me an excuse to get in and to work, avoiding the possibility of a declaration of love over breakfast. It turned out it wouldn’t have mattered. Nelson said he had another appointment with his lawyer and was seeing a new doctor in the afternoon. At that point the whole thing turned around on me. Ignoring the sheriff’s threat, I offered to skip my therapy session to go with him to the doctor. It was Nelson who squirmed out.

  So I got what I wanted, which was not the therapy but time to plow through documents about Moonshines and the growing pile of arrest sheets on the Ozarks Nightriders. On top of that pile was Riley Pruitt. He’d done time for distribution—mostly meth—interstate trafficking of controlled substances, extortion, weapons charges, and domestic violence. It turned out that he was the founding member of the Nightriders.

  To finish things at the desk, I made a call and followed up with e-mail to the Branson police department requesting to be copied on all material relating to the shooting at Moonshines. The city detective sent a few pages right away and promised more when he had them typed out. I took what he had and went to find the witnesses and ask some of my own questions.

  The interviews were useless. The witnesses had seen Cotton Lambert push Middleton aside and heard the shot. No one admitted to seeing the shooter.

  It was quick work, so afterward I stopped at the county courthouse. Since I had not yet gotten the materials I’d requested on Moonshines and the arrangement they had to distill whiskey, I thought I’d do some digging of my own. It only took a few minutes to understand why I’d not gotten a quick response. There were hundreds of pages. That was just the county. There had to be similar bundles registered with the City of Branson and the State of Missouri.

  I filled the rest of the workday with the normal grind of investigation. I read until I was bleary eyed. With each page I a
lternately cursed lawyers and wished I had one to guide me. I was grateful to stop and start the trip up to Springfield and my appointment.

  Driving there was great, just what I needed: Clean, rushing air thick with the scent of summer growth combined with the smooth speed of the truck and the oldies station to take me on a ride that was more unknowing my problems than forgetting them.

  The problem with rides is that they always come to an end. Sometimes that end brings you to a smug, humorless woman with a lot of letters after her name who flicks her high heels and purses her perfectly colored lips as if to tell you how a real woman should look while she dissects and orders your life into neat rows of scribbles on her notepad. Not that her amazing shoes and expensive skirts have ever made me feel less than happy with my jeans and boots lifestyle.

  She always asks me why I think violence will solve my problems. I always tell her it doesn’t, it solves other people’s. That day though, she didn’t ask me about anything at first. She told me that she had been notified by the sheriff about my additional requirements. Everyone knew what happened to bring that about, I imagined, so I didn’t volunteer anything.

  “You seem more annoyed than usual to be here,” she said.

  “No more. No less,” I said.

  “Tell me about your week.” That was how she often started and just as often ended. I hated the question and the implication that there were telling events secreted away in my life in the week since I had last seen her. All my problems were obvious, even to me. And they all happened years ago. All she ever wanted to talk about was now.

  That time I let her have it. I spilled everything. Without holding back, I put it all out there and every word carried me a little deeper into my anger. By anyone’s standards I figured it was a pretty eventful week. Honestly, it was chafing me a little that she wasn’t acting the least bit impressed. At the end of outlining my week I was pretty heated. If life were a Warner Bros. cartoon, my head would have turned into a thermometer that went up and up until the mercury boiled, then burst.

  “So that’s my life since we last talked,” I said with a bit of the dramatic to punctuate my thoughts on the subject. “That’s what I had going on and pulling me six different directions. Seven, if you count having to come here to spill it all to you.”

  “You’re angry.”

  “Is it any wonder? Every time I get a little peace, every time I feel like I’m close to dealing with the problems in my life, someone or something brings it all back. I can’t escape.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

  “You’re here because the sheriff’s department required it.”

  “All of a sudden you have a sense of humor?” I asked.

  “All of a sudden you don’t?”

  I swear the corner of her perfectly red lips flicked up into a smile.

  “You’re pushing,” I said. “Why? Why today?”

  She pointed her nose back down into the notebook and read to me, “Every time I feel like I’m close to dealing with the problems in my life, someone or something brings it all back.” Then she turned her face back up to me and finished. “I can’t escape.”

  It felt like an accusation even though she read it with the kind of feeling usually reserved for stock quotes. I didn’t know how to respond or even if I should, so I sat there looking at her, waiting for the other immaculate high heel to drop.

  She waited too, but she was better at it or at least not feeling put on the spot. Either way, it was me who broke and asked, “What are you trying to say? Because I know you’re saying something.”

  That time she didn’t look into the book to repeat the words. She kept her gaze locked on me. “Every time I feel like I’m close to dealing with the problems in my life . . .” She waited again and I squirmed. Then she asked me, “Have you ever really dealt with anything in your life?”

  “What the hell?” I said. “Of course I do. You know I do. It’s why I’m here. It’s why—everything. I deal with it every day. I live with it every day.”

  “See that’s the thing,” she said in that infuriating, quiet voice. “I don’t think you do. I don’t think you deal with it and I know you don’t live with it.”

  “Kiss my ass,” I said in a quiet voice of my own. I don’t think she heard me.

  “You live it. Not with it. There is a big difference.”

  “What would you know about it?”

  “Enough to know when someone is lying to herself and loving the lie.”

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest and gave her the kind of look that warns most people off. She set aside the notebook and gazed back at me with the kind of look that I think was intended to draw me in. She gave up first.

  “You told me all about your week. All the events and people and transitions, fear, violence, romance—it’s been like a movie and then you complain about how all that has gotten in the way of dealing with your life.”

  The arms in front of my chest felt heavy.

  “Your life.” She said it in a way that I could hear the period and the dismissal of it at the same time. “You’ve made your whole life one episode. You wallow in it. You wrap yourself up in it like a blanket that you hide under when the storms come. Maybe you do that because if you live in that pain, nothing will ever hurt like that again.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Oprah,” I said, but my arms were no longer crossed and I wasn’t feeling quite so righteous in my anger. “So why are you telling me this now?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ve told you a hundred times. What’s different now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe this time you have another life worth living. Something worth giving up the pain for.”

  I hated her. I hated that woman and her perfect clothes, her perfect makeup, and quiet voice. I hated her so much that morning that I didn’t go see Dad or go to breakfast. I just drove. With the windows down and hot wind in my hair I traveled through green landscapes and broken roads to find moments of yesterdays—the time before. What I really hated her for was planting the seed that made me feel guilty for feeling so bad. Ever since the moment two men dragged me from a tent and spent the night, then morning, raping me and carving my skin, I have hated, and blamed, and feared, and cried, and lived in that shadow. I knew what she was saying. I just rejected it. Or I wanted to reject it.

  Rice and Ahrens did those things to me.

  They had created the pain and the harm.

  The shadow after it—

  Could the shadow of dust-choked winds be something I did?

  I drove and I hated and I cried.

  When I didn’t call in or show up, Darlene called me. I told her I wasn’t coming in. I didn’t give a reason or ask if it would be a problem, nor did I say thank you when she marked me down as having called in sick. I simply crawled deeper inward and drove.

  * * *

  So many roads and thoughts passed under the tires of my truck that I lost track of everything but the soothing motion. I didn’t want to eat but I did want to drink. Because of that, I kept going. If I stopped for gas or food I would end up drunk and fired or dead. Maybe more crying. That thought was worse than any of the others. I was cried out and angered out.

  Numb.

  Numb was good. Feeling was tiring. Thinking was worse. Hours and miles melded into an undefinable passage that took me nowhere and gave nothing back. It simply passed. Shadows lengthened and I noticed in the same way I noticed road signs that warned of curves ahead. Under the trees, dark solidified much quicker than it did in the sky, but all was dark before I noticed.

  The road ahead was so black that it was as if I existed only within the reach of my headlights. Anything beyond their reach was void. It was almost a comfort. My window was still open and the wind, with occasional cool fingers, blew over my face, even sliding up my sleeve and billowing under my shirt. It was a little like being touched by an old lover eager to reacquaint himself with my
body. I didn’t want to think about love or lovers, I told myself. I didn’t want to think anymore. It was good just to exist in my bubble of light flying through the void of night.

  Occasionally an animal, an opossum or raccoon, would be caught at the edge of my lights. When it happened their eyes would reflect back, unblinking green questions I ignored.

  I didn’t want it. I didn’t search it out. Still, the desert and dust came into my bubble and drew me away into its. Darkness became light like a negative of a photograph. Moving foliage swirled into clouds of razor-edged grit. The moment. My eternal moment.

  All my color bleeding away.

  Did I cry when they ripped the clothes from me? Did I beg? I couldn’t recall, but I believed I must have. Afterward, in the back of a Humvee, the corpsman’s eyes were wide with fear and embarrassment. He had never worked on a woman before and certainly never one so intimately harmed. He looked all of nineteen.

  Working as quickly as he could, he followed the lines of cuts on my body and filled them with hemostatic powder. When he cut my pants off and spread my naked legs to pack those wounds, his eyes rimmed with tears. While he touched me and bound the lacerations that could be bound, he talked. Mostly he said everything would be all right. He said it like a mantra more for himself than me.

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “We’ll take care of you.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get you to the field hospital and they’ll take good care of you.”

  “Everything will be all right.”

  He wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

  Outside, the thick, hard rubber of the Humvee’s tires roared loudly on cratered asphalt. The machine itself groaned and squeaked almost as loudly. It was strong but unhappy with the loads it carried.

  So many of the bad things in life come from the actions we choose. Genetics or environment—take your pick—seem to prime some of us for becoming the victims of our own destructive natures. Fate. I don’t believe in it. Whenever fate rears its ugly head you can be sure that there is some bit of unpredictable, random circumstance that had been looking for an accomplice. Every life has its own roulette. Fortunada spins her great wheel of chance, every number a land mine of vicious delight. She celebrates the mayhem.