The Covenant

by Jeff Crook

  “… that far,” he finished.

  I pushed him away.

  He leaned over me, tall, taller even than Deacon, black and featureless and two-dimensional, like a silhouette. “Roof sent me.”

  “You saved me from the fire.”

  “Yessum.”

  “You stole my car.”

  “Yessum.”

  “Why?”

  “Roof sent me,” he repeated, but his voice had grown distant, not in space but in time. A memory of a voice. A memory of hands on my body, of flesh against flesh and the memory of a moment of purity that consumed its fuel in one incandescent flash and was gone. Not even my memory. His memory and Ruth’s memory.

  I saw him move across the water with the trees limned like clouds in the moonlight behind him. Then he was no longer there. He didn’t disappear. He was just gone, as though he had never been.

  But Nathan was still out there.

  50

  I COULDN’T WALK ON water. I was still too tied to the world to let go entirely. So I swam, gliding out quietly on my back so I could watch the shore behind me. The water was arctic-cold. A summer of unseasonable heat had done nothing to warm it. My muscles stiffened around my bones and threatened to cramp from exhaustion, but the lake wasn’t deeper than my shoulders at its deepest point.

  Nathan appeared under the trees. I stopped and felt the sandy bottom under my feet, sank down until the water was just under my nose, then submerged as he lifted the shotgun to his shoulder. The report was like distant thunder heard under the covers. Pellets sleeted across the water above my head like a handful of gravel thrown by a sissy.

  I kicked off and glided along the moon-striped bottom, a curious, nightmarish feeling of heavy flight through water clear as air or air thick as water, while load after impotent load of steel buckshot pocketed the surface and sank bubbling around me. I swam until it was too shallow to swim, then stood up and climbed out onto the bank, hidden by the shadow of the trees.

  I lay in the leaves looking up at the dim stars, listening to Nathan thrash through the woods rather than make that swim. What had sounded before like incoherent roars of rage I now recognized as screams of frustration. “Go away! Leave me alone!” Every time he spoke, a ripple of taunting childish laughter spread through the woods. Wire, briar, limber, lock. He fired his shotgun into the darkened woods, but they continued to sing. Three old geese in a flock. One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

  It would take him a while to circumnavigate the lake, time I badly needed to rest and ease my legs. I’d never felt so tired in my life. I shivered uncontrollably, my breath painfully cold in my nose, heart kicking like a mule so that my pulse shook the leaves. The cold spring water helped slow the flow of blood from my wounds. Slow, but not stop entirely. Even an idiot like Nathan could follow my trail, and in these woods he was no idiot.

  I had to go on. I followed the bed of the dry creek, leading him away from the lake. I passed the stone where the slaves used to wash Marse Stirling’s linens. My sopping clothes dripped where their sweat had fallen, my blood spattered the gravel where they had walked. I couldn’t go home. Nathan would have to kill Jenny, too. He couldn’t take any chances now. I’d have to stop him, or at the very least keep him busy until help arrived. If help arrived. I hoped someone would hear the shots and call the police, but out here in East Bumfuck, a few shots even in the dark of night might not rouse any interest.

  I hoped Doris Dye was wearing her hearing aids.

  I crossed under the log footbridge and continued down the creek another twenty yards, then climbed up the steep bank and doubled back. I crouched down at the end of the log among blackberry brambles and waited. I didn’t think about dying. I was past dying. I just wanted one shot at him, the shot I was owed.

  Nathan moved tactical-fashion up the creek bed, his Benelli M1014 combat 12-gauge in a constant state of readiness, the flashlight mounted under the barrel scanning every bush and twig. He’d spent some of his considerable money on some kind of urban-warfare course, probably in preparation for the race war he and his ilk asked Santa for Christmas every year. He was dressed in full camo with a black ski mask and black gloves, black combat boots crunching the gravel. Enough buckshot slung on his bandolier to fight a small war in a third-world country. It must have been hot as Texas Dick’s balls in that ski mask, but it probably kept the mosquitoes from sucking him dry.

  He stopped just below the bridge and pointed the beam of his flash down at a splatter of my blood decorating a rock beside his boot. “Cunt,” he whispered, switched instantly back to ready position. “Got that cunt. Got her,” he reassured himself nervously. He was so scared he could barely move, but one sound out of me and he’d swap my face for a fistful of steel. I was close enough to piss on his head, too close for him to miss this time.

  A girl’s voice said behind him, “What are you thinking about?” He spun and I jumped. He must have heard the crack of wood as my weight left the log because he dropped the gun to his hip and let off a charge that smashed the log to splinters.

  My knee snapped his collarbone as I rode him to the ground. He broke my fall nicely, soft as a pile of mattresses, but God must have been looking out for him because I’d been aiming to break his neck. I snatched his gun away and caved in his face with the butt. “Hello, sport,” I said as I staggered to my feet. “How’s it feel?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said through bloody teeth. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  The wail of sirens sounded through the trees and I heard the distant thump-thump-thump of an approaching helicopter. Sorry bastards, just when I didn’t need their help. Now, I only had a couple of minutes to work. “You think you can say you’re sorry and everything will be OK? Did you kill Sam?”

  He dragged the ski mask off his head, screaming in agony as the splintered ends of his collarbone ground together. “I didn’t! I swear, I never killed anybody in my life.”

  “Until now.” His lips looked like hamburger, but his nose was still as straight as a catalogue model’s. I bent it for him. He fell back in the gravel with a groan, his eyes rolling in his head. “Pal, you just killed a cop. I could dust you right here and Sheriff Stegall would shake my hand. Senator Mickelson himself would pin a medal to my tit.”

  “Please don’t kill me,” he sobbed. “I’m so sorry.” He lay on his back, hands waving weakly in front of his face, waiting for the next blow.

  I kicked his arms out of the way and ground my bare foot into his broken collarbone. When he screamed, I shoved the barrel past his last good tooth and said, “Suck on this.” I pulled the trigger but the action was fouled with sand. I squeezed with everything I had left, but it wouldn’t budge.

  I flung the gun away. A spotlight hit the lake from above and began a grid-pattern search up the creek toward us, the bright beam shining weirdly through the trees. The wash from the chopper blades began to swirl up dust and leaves. Nathan blinked up at it, his mouth a gaping bloody hole in his face.

  I said, “God’s looking out for you, sport. A good-looking short-eyes like you, they’ll love your cherry ass down on the farm. You’ll be their favorite.”

  “Thank you,” he wept. He grabbed my ankle and tried to kiss it. You’d have thought I just saved his life.

  51

  JENNY PICKED ME UP AT THE hospital. I didn’t have insurance so they didn’t give me a room, just picked the buckshot out of my ass and stitched up the holes that would give my butt that desirable cellulite look despite my heroin junkie body, and pushed me out the emergency room door.

  As we pulled into the driveway, she noted with a sharp, disgusted suck of her teeth the promiscuous ruin of her stately home. “God, look at this place.” The hedges surrounding the property had grown huge and shaggy over the summer, some of the ancient pecan trees were entirely barren of leaves, the flowerbeds hip-deep in weeds.

  The June bugs were already up and whirring
in the trees, their noise the very voice of August itself, as though August were a living thing composed of biscuit-colored dust and rainless moist heat and the mirage shimmering above the road. It was not yet eight in the morning. She helped me to the door even though I didn’t need help, ducking under a rosebush gone wild and running up the porch trellis almost to the second-story windows.

  She made me breakfast and I told her about Sam and Reece and Nathan, how Sam had hidden what Nathan had done to Reece, how he had taken Luther’s money. I told her how Sam broke it off when he found out Nathan was sniffing around Cassie. I told her how I’d discovered the whole thing, from the photos in the suitcase to the website where Nathan sold pattycake pictures of her daughters. I told her how Luther had tried to buy me off, and how I had refused, and what Luther had promised to do her, to us both.

  Nathan’s lawyer was already denying the whole thing. He claimed he’d shot Lorio by accident. Lorio had just got off work when he met me on the levee and he was still wearing his vest. It saved his life, and Nathan’s, too, because if he had killed a cop, the State of Tennessee would have strapped him to a gurney no matter how many senators his daddy owned. I was happy Lorio survived. He held my hand in the emergency room, even though he looked like a mummy with his head wrapped in a couple hundred feet of bandages. He was a good Joe. Having him survive was the first really lucky thing that had happened to me in a long time. He’d woke up on the levee with his scalp hanging over his face like a bad wig, heard the shots in the woods, and radioed it in.

  Nathan claimed that after he’d accidentally shot Lorio, I’d gone berserk and attacked him, and he’d only shot me in self-defense. If you ignored the fact that all my wounds were in my backside, it made perfect sense. A guy like Luther could probably find a lawyer and a judge who would rule my injuries inadmissible while using Nathan’s to prove the savagery of my attack. Stegall hadn’t arrested me yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time before I was staring down the barrel of an attempted murder charge.

  I honestly didn’t give a flying fuck-all what they did to me. I was glad to be alive. Nathan was still lying in a hospital bed with his shoulder in a cast and eating his breakfast through a straw, while I was sitting by a pool dining on poached eggs and margaritas at nine o’clock in the morning. Best of all, Nathan’s days of seducing teenage girls were over. I’d dropped his male-model looks into a wood chipper. His face was a bowl of moldy prunes. Maybe one day the doctors would be able to put it back together well enough to recognize him by his driver’s license picture. If only that gun hadn’t fouled, I could have solved both our troubles. Like they used to say in the old days, I’d have swung for it, and gladly.

  Jenny listened to my tale to its unsatisfactory conclusion without saying a word. Then she got up and went inside and I didn’t see her until three in the afternoon. I found her in the den, pulling on her stockings. A warm, moist wind billowed the curtains in the open window. Her white dress was borderline conservative—just a little high at the thigh, just a bit low and open at the breast, trimmed in black, with a fat double strand of pearls hanging around her neck.

  “Where are you headed?” I asked. I was just going to make another pitcher of margaritas.

  “I’m going to see Luther,” she said.

  I knew she was doing the right thing, but I still felt a little let down. She still had two kids to provide for. She knew that in this town, our chances of obtaining justice were in the house’s favor. Nobody had died yet, and Luther’s grasp upon the strings of power were as strong as ever.

  I didn’t want her to think I disapproved of her choice. “Do you want me to go with you?” I asked.

  She smoothed the stocking on her leg. She had better legs than me, and she was going to need every inch of them. “I was hoping you would.”

  * * *

  We found Luther propped up in bed, dressed in pale blue pajamas with half-dollar buttons, his foot wound in a huge white bandage, like a gout patient. Adonis the Butler let us in the room. Luther shooed his nurse out and invited us to sit. His bed had four posts wide enough to kick a football through, and a headboard like a library wall, shelves piled six deep with books, a couple of neat drawers in which to hide liquor bottles and porno magazines and whatever else an old retired preacher needed to keep him warm and safe on winter nights.

  Jenny chose the love seat by the window, picked up a throw pillow and rested it in her lap, crossed her legs. I sat in a high-backed chair that was still warm from the nurse’s ass.

  “Nathan shot me,” Luther explained, pointing at his bandaged foot, “when I tried to stop him from taking the gun. I’m so very sorry, Mrs. Lyons.”

  “Miss,” I corrected habitually. “I’ll survive. That’s not why we’re here.”

  “I see.” He glanced at Jenny then back at me, his eyebrows a question mark. I nodded. “I see,” he repeated.

  “Jenny had a right to know,” I said.

  “Of course she does.” He turned his patronizing smile upon her and repeated himself again. “Of course she does. She must make her own decisions regarding her family. As do we all.”

  “I just want to know one thing,” Jenny said, forcing the words through the catch in her voice.

  “Yes?”

  She came up off the couch and flung the pillow at Luther. “How could you?” The pillow bounced off his foot, eliciting a choked sob of pain.

  “Nathan is my son. I had to protect him.”

  “Reece was my daughter!” Jenny shrieked.

  The nurse opened the door a crack and stuck her head through. “Everything OK, Brother Vardry?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She closed the door. He mopped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his blue pajamas. “Sam and I tried to take care of this delicate matter within our two families rather than draw in outsiders, people who wouldn’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand, Luther.”

  I picked up the pillow where it had fallen to the floor, in case Jenny got the crazy idea to murder him with it.

  He eyed me nervously. “If there is a dispute between church members, the Bible tells us to settle it within the church. In his first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says, ‘If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints?’”

  That was his stock answer. I tossed the pillow in the air and caught it, but not before Luther had crawled halfway up the headboard. I pitched it to Jenny, then picked up his cell phone from where he’d left it on the covers. I’d noticed he was texting somebody when we came in the room. I thought maybe he’d been calling the police, but I noticed his last text was to Holly, telling her to stay in her room.

  Jenny shouted, “This wasn’t some theological dispute, Luther. Or a fight over parking spaces or loud parties or how often somebody mows their lawn. Nathan is a predator. He abuses little girls, my little girls!”

  “If he were your son, wouldn’t you try to protect him?”

  “Not from this!”

  “You can’t understand,” he said. “You’re not one of us. You were never one of us, Jenny.”

  “Looks like you’ve raised yourself quite a pair of monsters, Mr. Vardry,” I said. I’d heard the clatter of heels on the parquet outside his door. It opened. It wasn’t the nurse this time.

  “Daddy?”

  “Holly!” Luther snapped. “I thought I told you…”

  “Change of plans.” I set his phone on the nightstand. “Come on in, Holly.”

  She slunk into the room and cringed up to his bed. I wondered if there were a time of day that she didn’t wear heels. She probably even wore them to bed, but only for the right sort of people.

  “Pair of monsters?” Jenny asked. She never missed a thing.

  “Ask Luther,” I said. He stared at me blankly, little dots of perspiration lined up like birds on the wire of his mustache. “If he won’t tell you, ask Eugene Kitchen. Ask him who killed Sam.”

&
nbsp; “I thought…” She paused, looking from me to Luther to Holly. “Nathan?”

  “Nathan’s no killer.” I turned so that only Holly could see my face, shot her a wink that made her ankles give under her. She wobbled on her heels and sank to Luther’s bed, hugged one of the posts. “I shouldn’t be standing here right now. As much as Nathan wanted me dead, he didn’t have what it took to finish me off. I saw him, not five feet away, close his eyes when he pulled the trigger. He also shot low at Officer Lorio. And he hit you in the foot, Luther.”

  Luther began to laugh to hide his nerves. “You’re not seriously suggesting that Eugene Kitchen killed Sam.”

  “Not at all. Just that he knows who did.”

  The man had no choice now but to brass it out. “And who, pray tell, is that?”

  I walked to the window and looked out over the lake, at the roof of Jenny’s house and the window of Reece’s room, and the figure moving slowly across the levee, his hands in his jacket pockets, his head sunk to his chest. “The medical examiner in Memphis concluded that Sam was killed by two blows to the head from a blunt, rounded object.”

  “A rock.” Luther reached across the bed and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. “That’s exactly what our coroner ruled. I’m calling the police.”

  “Actually, two rocks,” I said as he dialed. “And your local boy said Sam drowned. Memphis disagrees.” The figure on the levee stopped and turned, waved to someone behind him and waited a moment.

  “Two rocks, thrown from close range, by someone who knew how to throw them.” Luther stopped dialing, while the figure on the levee turned suddenly as though to run, but instead staggered forward. “Someone Sam knew closely and never suspected, someone he would wave to when she shouted his name, let her get close enough to kill him.”

  Jenny whispered, “Holly.”