Country Dark

by Chris Offutt

  He knew he was vulnerable now, cornered with one way out. Killing him would solve all Beanpole’s problems, plus save money. Tucker turned off the flashlight and walked through the black air, his left hand touching the wall for guidance. The car’s passage had stirred dust that was still settling. He felt it in his eyes and nose and throat. He sipped water. The heavy darkness softened and he withdrew his pistol. He pressed his back to the wall and sidled forward, staying inside the shadow. The opening was dark gray in the blackness. He stopped and listened and heard nothing. He moved forward, leading with his gun. He watched the trees lining the road, seeking a flash of moonlight on metal, an unnatural form, anything out of place. Satisfied that he was alone, he stepped furtively from the mine and began the long walk home. He felt a vague relief but maintained his vigilance.

  Two hours later he circled his house twice, staying inside the perimeter of woods, rousing nothing but dogs. He sat on the porch and lit a cigarette. His body was worn down to a nub, but his mind was quick, his thoughts rampant. He’d not heard an explosion but the car could have caught fire after he left. Smoke would wend through the chambers of the cave and interlocking mine shafts, making the source difficult to trace. Smoke might rise from a hole two miles from the mine. Tucker finished his cigarette and went to bed.

  Four days later Rhonda gave birth to a boy, alert and squally. His hair was so white and thin that his scalp gleamed and Tucker called him “Shiny.” As soon as Rhonda was able, he moved the family and his small amount of possessions to the new house purchased for a dollar from Beanpole. Jo had her own room and the little ones had theirs. An extra room would serve for the boy when he got older.

  The week before Tucker was slated to work the bootlegger shack, he ate as much as possible. His only culinary skill was breakfast, which he prepared four times a day, improving slightly on the biscuits. He held his infant son. No matter which way Tucker moved his head, the boy’s eyes followed him. His fingers clutched tight as bark to a tree. He stared at light and seemed to know the sound of his mother’s voice. Tucker felt gratitude of a previously unknown depth. Rhonda cried once, but it went on for hours, as if she was shedding every speck of sorrow she’d ever felt. Afterward she was lighthearted as a kitten. She and Tucker sat with Jo in the kitchen.

  “We need to name that boy,” Rhonda said. “Shiny ain’t enough for that little feller.”

  “You got a name in mind?” Tucker said.

  “After his daddy.”

  “No, I don’t hold with Juniors. I’ve knowed four and never liked them.”

  “He’s a boy so it ort to be a name in your family. The girls got mine.”

  “I know it,” he said. “But let’s start a new name.”

  “A new name, Daddy?” Jo said.

  “Maybe Cornbread,” he said. “How about Mailbox?”

  “They’re not names.” She frowned and looked at Rhonda. “Are they, Mommy?”

  “No, your daddy’s funning with you. He means a name ain’t got used by the family yet.”

  “Randall,” he said. “Randall something Tucker. You-uns pick out the middle part. Maybe Goat or Sycamore or something.”

  “Ryan,” Rhonda said. “Randy Ryan.”

  “Little Randy Ryan,” Jo said.

  Tucker nodded. The baby wanted to nurse and Tucker went outside. He sat on the porch, trying to memorize the contour of the trees against the night. He was tired of running shine and this was a good solution. Six months, then ten thousand dollars. Maybe he’d open a little general store, teach his son to help. The boy was normal, anybody could see that.

  The next day he dismantled his revolver, oiled the pieces, wrapped them in greased cloth, and put them in a sack. He pried a board free inside a closet and drove two nails into a stud. On them he hung the sack and his sheathed Ka-Bar knife. He carefully refastened the board.

  In the late afternoon he carried each of his young children to the table and they ate together. Afterward he returned them to their rooms. He and Rhonda lay in their bed with the baby between them. They didn’t talk. At dusk he rose and kissed each child, then returned to his bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed and took Rhonda’s hand.

  “Keep them babies warm,” he said.

  “Come back,” she said.

  He nodded and left the house unarmed for the first time he could remember. The bootlegger was three miles away by road, or one mile through the woods. He climbed the steep slope to his spot, scuffed aside the damp leaves, and sat on the flat rock. Sound interlaced through the woods—dove, owl, whip-poor-will, the cough of a deer, the rustle of raccoon and possum. He looked at the few stars visible between treetops. They’d be here when he returned, along with his spot and his family.

  He rose and followed a rain gully to a creek, crossed the road, and climbed the next hill. He walked the ridge until he was above the bootlegger, then descended. From the building protruded a rough wood shelf topped with a sliding panel. He rapped on it twice and the panel opened. The man jerked his head and Tucker walked behind the shack. A door opened and the man left quickly on foot. Tucker stepped inside. A bare bulb hung from a rafter. The ceiling and two walls facing wind were insulated. Three game freezers held beer. Several boxes contained half pints of whiskey and fifths of wine. Suspended on a pair of hooks below the paneled window was a sawed-off shotgun. Tucker unloaded it and sat in a chair. On a plank table were an ashtray, a cigar box full of money, and extra shells for the shotgun. One corner held a five-gallon bucket and a roll of toilet paper.

  No customers arrived, the word having gone out that the raid would occur. Tucker smoked. Three hours passed. He heard car engines outside. Red light flashed through cracks in the wall. He opened the wood panel to a pair of policemen, who told Tucker to go out the back, where two more policemen stood. Tucker underwent arrest without incident and they drove him to the Morehead jail, built from the same brown granite as his old grade school. The jailer knew him and treated him well—plenty of food, coffee, and cigarettes. On a chilly night Tucker received an extra blanket.

  A week later he stood trial. His lawyer said he’d worked at the bootlegger for a year, had no previous record, and was a decorated veteran. The judge sentenced him to eight months in a state correctional facility.

  Chapter Nine

  Tucker began his sentence at La Grange, a minimum-security penitentiary that operated as a work farm on a thousand acres. Initially he didn’t know what to do. Many cons slept. They called it “fast time” because it eradicated the hours as if they had never existed. Within a month he settled into the routines of labor, meals, and sleep. He smoked less. Daily exercise returned his body to a muscled state that years of driving had taken away. The structure of prison reminded him of army life—it provided him with clothes, food, a bed, and the constant company of men. His cellmate had been in state and federal prisons and claimed the only difference was the quality of female visitors. Federal institutions had better-looking women. Tucker took his word for it, hoping he’d never learn if it was true or not.

  Most inmates were veterans of Korea and World War II, trained for violence but not in how to control it. Tucker knew he didn’t fall into that category. Half were crazy as a soup sandwich and the rest were dumb as dirt. None had ever had two nickels to rub together and all of them blamed someone for their incarceration—a woman, a partner, a snitch, or a cop. Getting locked down was a choice Tucker had made, a fact he never told anyone. He didn’t think in terms of innocence and guilt, good and bad, or whether he deserved to be there. He regretted nothing and blamed no one. He was getting paid.

  On a cloudy Saturday during rec time in the yard, a long skinny shard of sunshine slid across the dirt and rose along a concrete wall. Tucker traced the light’s progress in advance and positioned himself where the sun would arrive, waiting for the heat against his face. A scrawny man with a dark beard stepped in front of Tucker, blocking the light, then tried to jostle him aside. Tucker held his ground. After a brief confrontation, he shoved
the man, who retaliated with a long looping right hook. Tucker leaned in and punched the man in the throat. He staggered to his knees. The shrill sound of guard whistles cut the air, scattering the inmates.

  A day later, the bearded man attacked Tucker in the chow line, slashing his shoulder with a homemade knife. Tucker deftly took the weapon, broke the man’s arm, and sat down to eat. The guards hadn’t seen the quick scuffle and Tucker denied that anything had happened. The man was a member of the Dayton Satans, an Ohio motorcycle club with three men incarcerated at La Grange. The other two bikers approached Tucker and explained that one of Beanpole’s corrupt cops had testified against them, and Tucker was a target of vengeance. The attacks would end if he agreed to move contraband within the prison. He refused.

  A blitz attack could come any time but Tucker figured the bikers would wait until Monday, when they were on work detail. He’d seen fights behind the toolhouse. If a brawl didn’t erupt, the guards let the men fight, hoping both prisoners would be out of circulation for a while. Tucker kept the weapon he’d taken from the biker under his mattress. It was the footrest of a shovel, four inches long, honed on one side. The end was squared and blunt like a straight razor. Medical tape wrapped the other end. He spent three hours bending the metal tip—first one way, then the other—using as a fulcrum a bolt that fastened his bunk to the floor. The bent metal finally snapped at an angle. His hands were sore and his knuckles bled from scraping cement but he had a tapered blade good for stabbing.

  At meals Tucker made sure to eat near the guards, refusing to shower or spend rec time with the other men, who steered clear of him, knowing he was marked. The Satans called him chicken and yellow and punk, but he ignored their scorn. He intended to fight on his terms. If they believed he was ducking them, they’d come when he gave them the opportunity. On Sunday after chapel, he traded all his cigarettes for magazines with lurid covers featuring a woman in a torn dress. The pages were printed on wood pulp paper. Originally a half inch thick, they’d been passed from cell to cell long enough to lose their bulk, some pages torn out and saved for their imagery, others stuck together and removed in disgust.

  Rising early on Monday morning, Tucker used the makeshift blade to cut his sheet into long strips, which he wrapped around his waist, tying the ends in a slipknot. He slid a magazine between the sheet and his stomach, then ran a row around his torso, overlapping them like shingles. Satisfied with their placement, he cinched the slipknot tight. He strapped two magazines to each forearm, spines facing out. His prison-issue clothes fit loose enough to hide the makeshift armor as long as he didn’t bend his body too much in any direction. The weapon fit easily up his sleeve, lodged within the pages. He removed his socks before lacing his shoes. He’d get blisters, but if blood ran down his legs, it would fill his shoes before spilling out. He’d seen men lose their lives slipping in blood on the ground.

  He ate breakfast sitting at an awkward angle to prevent the magazines from pushing against his clothes and alerting the guards. As the men left mess and headed through the doors to work in a field, Tucker made sure he was near the front of the line. Morning sun was burning away shoals of ground fog in the distance. The cons were mostly silent, feeling a generalized tension, aware of the impending violence. They walked quickly against the chill, bunched up in line at the toolhouse.

  Tucker turned around and looked for the two bikers, who stared mad-dog eyes, the bigger one drawing a forefinger across his throat in warning.

  “Hey,” Tucker said, “if you feel froggy, come around here and jump.”

  He stepped behind the toolhouse and stood several feet from the wall to give himself room to maneuver. The winner of a knife fight was the man who bled to death slowest. The big man came first, wielding a wooden clothes hanger studded on both sides with embedded razors. He swung it in a figure eight. The man had long arms, but could only slash, not stab. Tucker stepped forward and hopped back, circling to his right, as the man swung and missed, the razors flashing in the sun. Tucker repeated the feint twice, circling each time, forcing the man to attack slightly off balance. The third time, the man caught a piece of Tucker’s upper arm, the multiple razors slicing through the shirt and into his skin. The biker jerked his weapon back in a spray of blood and flesh. Tucker’s arm hurt but the pain was a separate thing, like bad weather.

  He could see the second biker coming around the toolhouse, followed by other men. Tucker feinted again and the big man slashed but Tucker parried with his forearm, the thick magazines catching the razors, trapping the weapon long enough to step inside the biker’s reach and cut him deep and hard across the belly with the sharpened footrest. The big man yanked his weapon free of the magazine pages. He tried to slash but gray intestines were spilling out of his shirt amid yellow fat and blood. His knees collapsed and he sat, clasping both arms across his stomach.

  Tucker sensed the second biker behind him and twisted his body but felt a sudden pain in his lower back. The layer of magazines had diverted the blade from his kidney, but it slid into his body below his ribs. He jerked his right elbow backward, forcing the biker to retreat. Tucker spun and lunged, but the man sidestepped and slashed Tucker’s torso, a downward motion that cut his chest, split his shirt, and sliced through the magazines. A sheaf of pages blew into the air as if Tucker were bleeding paper. He hopped back, his left arm hanging loosely, his hand red with blood dripping to the ground. The wound on his chest was not too deep.

  The biker crouched low, holding the blade underhand in front of him. He made a quick lunge at Tucker’s face, then slashed down, cutting away a section of magazine, leaving a thin red stripe along his belly. Tucker charged the man, pinning his knife arm between their bodies, ramming the man into the toolshed wall. He stabbed the man twice in the side but the makeshift blade was too short to reach the lungs. He rammed his knee between the biker’s legs, stepped back, and chopped at the man’s face, seeing part of his nose fly away in a gout of blood. Tucker felt a sudden blow to his head and turned to see a guard clubbing him. He fell, drawing his body into a protective ball, covered his head, and was beaten unconscious. He awoke in the prison infirmary.

  In his weakened state Tucker understood that he was vulnerable to further attack. At night he moved to a different bed and watched his former spot, the hard mattress and gray sheets, but nobody arrived to kill him. He was always on the verge of sleep, a middle area that provided no rest. He could nap for minutes at a time, then jerk awake. Needing more time to recuperate, he feigned remorse to the medical personnel and they sent for the chaplain, a priest. Tucker wasn’t sure what a Catholic was and lumped him in with his generalized knowledge of religion in the hills—the Lord’s touch, talking in tongues, the gyrations of people in the aisle. The priest was an old man with liquor on his breath. At times he seemed in despair and Tucker felt sorry for him. He decided to talk.

  “There was Adam and Eve,” Tucker said. “Then two boys.”

  “Yes.”

  “Cain killed Abel. Then Cain got married and had kids.”

  The priest nodded. Inmates often suggested they were sons of Cain to justify crimes, especially homicide.

  “Then,” Tucker said, “where’d Cain’s wife come from?”

  The priest never visited him again. In his absence, Tucker retreated further into himself while increasing his vigilance. He felt like a sniper on a hillside looking through the scope of a rifle—simultaneously close and far. He thought often of his wife and family. He missed Big Billy most, someone he could talk to with trust, the son who never aged. Without Big Billy’s perpetual listening ear, there was no one for him.

  After his recovery he was shuttled to the maximum-security facility at Eddyville with five years added to his sentence. The Dayton Satans sent two men for him in the showers. Tucker dispatched one with a sock filled with bars of soap, and rammed the other man’s head into a sink until an eye popped from its socket. Tucker turned on all the hot water and used the steam as cover to get back to his cell. The b
ikers left him alone after that. Everyone did. He served the rest of his time without incident, working in the laundry. At night he made plans for the ten thousand dollars waiting for him upon release.

  1971

  Chapter Ten

  Tucker stepped outside the walls of the Kentucky State Penitentiary and blinked at the vast horizon. A long broken cloud angled across the sky, its bottom edged with gray. He inhaled deeply, savoring the pungent scent of a river. Even in the exercise yard, the air was stale as if an invisible lid lay over the space. The cells were worse. At times he’d wondered if he got enough oxygen, if it was possible for hundreds of men breathing the same air to leach away its value. The gate slammed shut behind him.

  He had thirty-four dollars and clothes that didn’t fit, having gained weight from a steady diet of starch. He descended the grassless slope to the longest car he’d ever seen, red with a thin white stripe running the length of the body. The bumper reflected the sky.

  A man in his early twenties leaned against the car, smoking a cigarette cupped in his hand. He was tall but torso-shy, all the height in his legs. He wore a narrow-brimmed high-crowned hat, a white T-shirt under a partly buttoned yellow shirt, and over that a blue jean jacket.

  “You Tucker?” the man said.

  Tucker nodded.

  “I’m Jimmy. Where’s your duffel at?”

  Tucker shook his head. Jimmy tilted slightly sidewise to spit between his teeth in a way Tucker recognized as requiring hours of practice. He’d never understood people who threw so much time into something with no purpose.