by Gale Massey
Loyal sloshed some water on his face and spit in the sink. He rubbed his head hard, the gray hairs standing up on end. “Toby’s strong, but he’s got no guts,” he said in a low voice, then pointed at her. “And you goddamn owe me.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “I’ll put some coffee on.”
“No time for that. Keating needs help. Needs it right now.” Loyal started pulling on his boots. “If you want a chance to get out from under your debt, you got it tonight.”
“Doing what?”
“Everything I tell you till sunup. But you play by my rules.”
Right there she knew that whatever he needed help with couldn’t be good.
He stepped closer and towered over her.
Her jaw clenched, knowing she had no choice, but it was a chance to get back on her plan to leave this fucked-up town.
“And you don’t ask questions. You keep your mouth shut and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. Understand?”
She glanced down the hallway.
He lowered his voice. “And Toby can’t know.” He grabbed his keys. “Get your jacket and come on.”
“Okay,” she said, and pulled her boots on. “Where are we going?”
“Keating’s place and that’s the last question you ask,” he said. “You see any cars come up on us, you get down on that floorboard, you hear? The fewer people knowing our business, the better.”
* * *
They looped north on the county road to avoid Main Street. It was after hours but there were a few cars at Crowley’s Pub, likely Eddie and some of the servers kicking back with a nightcap or two.
On the other side of town, the houses on Keating’s street were dark and silent. Loyal turned into the driveway beneath a row of sagging elms and pulled around to the back of the house. A porch light spread yellow over the backyard. The door to the freestanding garage was propped open with a metal bucket, a thin light on inside. Keating came out from the garage carrying a folded blue tarp, the yellow porch light like a stain across his hands. He dropped it in front of the truck when Loyal cut the engine.
“The hell you bring her for?”
“What? You going to help me? You skinny bag of bones.”
“It’s a one-man job.”
“The hell it is. That man’s huge.”
Keating climbed the few steps to the back door. “It’s not her damn business.”
Jamie got out of the truck. A light in the upstairs window backlit a familiar silhouette.
Loyal picked up the tarp and carried it inside. He pushed Jamie’s shoulder as if to wake her from a dream. “Stop staring. Back the truck up to the porch and drop the tailgate.” He followed Keating inside.
She looked back up at the window. The curtains shifted slightly and the light went out.
Fifteen minutes later, the men reappeared at the back door dragging the tarp, bundled and wrapped with twine, their breathing labored and fogging the cold night air. The tailgate of the truck sat a good six inches above the level of the porch and transferring it into the truck bed took everything they had. Loyal climbed out of the flatbed and straightened his back stiffly. He rubbed his left shoulder and slammed the tailgate shut. Keating waved toward Jamie. “What about her?”
“You got big enough problems. Leave the girl to me.”
Keating grumbled something and spit on the ground, but he went inside and closed the door behind him.
“Get in,” Loyal said, but Jamie just stood next to the truck, staring at the tarp.
“I’m not getting in there.” She turned for the woods. She’d rather hike alone at night than help dig a grave.
Loyal caught her near the garage and grabbed the wrist he’d twisted the night before. White light shot behind her eyes and her knees nearly buckled.
“You are getting in this truck.”
“That’s a dead man and this is a felony.”
“Just being here puts you in over your head. You best come along.”
“Seeing is not the same as participating.”
“Damn it, girl. I had a choice and I chose you. I could’ve had Toby help me with this, but I gave you a chance to get square. Besides, you think he’ll get into the Army if this thing comes to light and he helped? You really want to drag your little brother into this? You made your bed when you took what didn’t belong to you.”
He took her by the back of her neck and steered her to the passenger door. “That man is dead and there’s nothing going to fix that, but if you play this thing smart you might improve your situation.”
The way he put it, she had no choice. It was horrible and gross, but she’d never dump this on Toby. And if Loyal was willing to cut her a deal, she might be able to pay him back in one night. She opened the door and got inside.
He climbed in behind the wheel and handed her the flask. “Take some whiskey if it helps, but get down on that floor.”
CHAPTER
13
JAMIE SAT ON the passenger side floorboard staring up at her uncle and the truck’s dashboard lights reflected in the window beside his head. It was stupid, having to hide like this. She could jump up, yank the door handle down, and roll out backward, but she kept quiet and thought about her brother. Everyone thought he was such a bully, but she knew better. That first year after Phoebe left, he’d barely slept through the night without waking up crying. Something like this would scar him forever and he’d already been scarred too much. If she bailed now, Loyal would drag him out of bed and into this nightmare.
She pushed her back against the door and bent her knees to her chin. Loyal cracked his window and lit a cigarette, driving slowly and making so many turns that she lost her sense of direction. Each time he opened his flask, the smell of whiskey cut the night air. He passed it to her and she took it. The whiskey bit at the back of her throat but warmed her chest. They hit a pothole and the load in the flatbed bounced and thudded with a sickening sound. She took another sip and passed it back to Loyal.
The truck veered left and her body leaned into the curve of what she guessed was the highway. They were quiet now, driving straight and fast. She wondered what her uncle was thinking, if he’d done this kind of thing before, moved bodies wrapped in tarps in the middle of the night. Whoever it was inside that tarp was so big they’d had to bend his legs and angle his body to fit him between the toolbox bolted to the truck’s cab and the tailgate.
Loyal threw the cigarette out the window and lit another one. “I saw her in the window. It’s bad she was there,” he said. “Complicates everything.”
Jamie felt an unexpected need to defend her mother and took another drink. He stared straight out the windshield as if racing toward a house fire.
“She won’t talk, you know.” The whiskey slowed her tongue and slurred her words. “She won’t say anything that might get her in trouble.” Talking helped, helped keep the image of the tarp, and the body wrapped inside it, from taking complete possession of her brain. “What’s it matter?” she asked, just to keep the conversation going.
“The more people know about a problem like this, the more likely something gets out.”
“Huh,” she said, considering the numbers. That the problem had a mathematical equation reassured her, though anyone could see that four people were three too many.
He took another sip. “You see her much?”
“No. Some. Now and then. Toby’s crazy for her.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. They passed a lighted billboard and the inside of the cab flashed bright green. He held the cigarette and the wheel with one hand, capped the flask with the other. “Boys love their mothers, no matter what.”
Flashes of light swiped the interior of the cab as they passed another billboard and then a third and she realized they were headed toward Mimawa. She expected to feel the truck lift as it climbed the ramp to the freeway but was surprised by the echo of a roar: the engine inside a tunnel. He’d taken the underpass.
“What are we going to do with him?”
She tried to guess where, but there were abandoned farms and hunting reserves all over the county. The underpass told her they were moving north, but she hadn’t been out this way in years, not since they’d gone hunting that one time. Maybe she was safer not knowing.
He let the truck slow to a crawl, then turned left onto an unpaved road that dropped off sharply, weeds slapping at the fenders. He stopped once and backed the truck up at an angle and stopped again, looked out each window, switched off the engine, told her to get out.
When he cut the lights, the woods fell black all around them, trees looming on every side high enough to block the sky. A gully dropped off at her feet. Beyond that, the sharp line of a tin roof caught a fraction of moonlight. Some old barn.
They slid the tarp out of the truck bed and it landed hard on the frozen ground. Something cracked within the bundle and the sound was nauseating. Jamie thought about another sip of whiskey but leaned against the truck instead while Loyal grabbed the edge of the tarp in his big fists and pulled.
“We’ll leave him down there,” he said, nodding toward the ravine.
But the ground was dirt and rock and they could barely budge him. Jamie grabbed one corner of the tarp and together they moved him about an inch before she landed on her ass, the tarp damp with the night air and slipping out of her hands.
“Let’s roll him,” Loyal said, his breath jagged with exertion.
Jamie got on her knees for leverage, and together they rolled the tarp to the edge of the embankment where the ground sloped away and gravity kicked in. The bundle slid at first, then tumbled and gained momentum with a series of nauseating thuds. The corner of the tarp snagged on a branch of a fallen tree limb and tore loose, unwinding, but the body kept falling, gaining speed, and rolling freely to the bottom of the ditch, a shoe flying off, a hand waving absurdly, then stopping where the ground leveled out. It came to an awkward rest, face up, the legs twisted, one arm bent all wrong, the mouth open and slack-jawed, and the face unbelievably pale with blank eyes staring at the star-filled night. Jamie had seen that dead-man stare once before and the memory of her father’s corpse filled her brain before she could stop it.
Loyal switched on his flashlight and scanned the beam down the ravine. “Jesus,” he said, “he still has his watch on.”
She sat at the top of the ditch staring at the man’s vaguely familiar face, his blood-soaked shirt, the grotesque and distorted posture. “Who is that?” She’d never seen a man so big and from that alone knew he wasn’t from Blind River.
Loyal skidded halfway down the graveled embankment, grabbed the tarp, and slid the rest of the way to the body. “No one you know.”
He searched the man’s jacket and trousers, fished out a wallet and a set of keys. “Damn Keating. Didn’t even go through his pockets.”
Jamie sat on the ridge, unable to look away. “That stare. Do they all look like that?”
“What?” Loyal looked up at Jamie. He threw the tarp over the man’s face and started tucking it underneath his body. “No. Get down here and start bringing me rocks.”
She was relieved that he’d covered the man’s face, but the tarp was still in the shape of a corpse. Or a mummy. She tried not to dwell on it, grateful that her uncle seemed to know what to do next and for the simple chore of finding stones and small boulders and carrying them to him so that he could begin to build a fortress, a wall of sorts, something that would stand between them and this unholy thing they were doing. She thought about the dams beavers built and how this was similar but not really because there was no purpose in this dam, no water in this ditch, just an embankment left over from what she guessed used to be a working farm, and how ridiculous her thoughts were considering there was a dead man lying at her feet. Loyal placed the stones around the tarp, then on top of the tarp, building a pile, and she worried briefly that the rocks would settle and drop and crush the body, guts and all.
She gathered rocks for what seemed an hour, ignoring the dirt gathering beneath her fingernails, the split nail that tore deeper as she dug another rock from its place in the frozen ground, the sting from another and then another until all her fingers bled. She accepted the pain, the split fingernails, and the cold cracked cuticles because this little bit of blood made the thing they were doing seem almost sacred.
They dragged brush from the woods and threw it over the pile and eventually it began to look less like a burial mound and more like a landslide. She imagined setting it on fire—it only seemed fitting—but overhead the black night began lifting to purple, and her uncle, tossing the last of the brush on the pile, rubbed his hands against his trousers and told her to go start the engine. A fire would attract attention and lead authorities to the body, identifiable in so many ways. Jamie climbed up out of the ditch, sick at what she’d taken part in but relieved to be done and to be finally going home.
In the truck, she shivered and sipped some whiskey, certain that one day she’d need to find her way back here. It seemed they weren’t that far out of town but she never came out this way.
They bounced over the uneven ground back toward the road. The whiskey sloshed in her belly and threatened to come back up. She gripped the armrest and swallowed hard.
At the road he told her to get back down on the floorboard.
She folded her body in half and hunkered there, rubbing her hands, impatient for the engine to warm. Her tailbone smacked against the floorboard each time they hit a pothole. She sucked at her fingernails, the sting worsening as they warmed, and wished for the cold again. Even though she knew Loyal wouldn’t say, she asked, “You gonna tell me where we were just now?”
He lit a cigarette. “Private property, and that’s the last time you ask. Some things you’re better-off not knowing.”
She saw the logic there, but made note of the lights she’d seen on the drive, the sudden drop of the pavement, the moonlight on the tin roof in the distance. There’d come a time, she felt sure, she’d need to remember all this and more.
He offered her the flask again, but the heater was blasting in her face and she waved it away.
The truck slowed and then climbed a small rise. Now they were back on the highway and the road smoothed out. In the sallow light of the cab, the stubble on Loyal’s face seemed wolfish, his eyes eerie with the backlight from the dashboard. They passed the casino billboards again, the green neon blinking on the windshield. The wheels whined against the highway, the heater blasted. South. She could tell that much. She rested her head on the seat cushion and almost passed out but wouldn’t give herself the relief, not yet.
“We square now?” she asked, lifting her head.
“No. Not square.” He set the flask between his knees and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But, if you want, I’ll give you a route and double your pay.”
She closed her eyes and tried to count backward from a hundred to empty her mind.
“You listening?”
“I’m listening,” she said. But the words left her mouth like oblong echoes.
“Tomorrow, you make the rounds. Collect the money from the cashboxes and take it to Jack’s. Same as always.”
Jack. She hadn’t thought of him all night.
“I’ll leave you a list and a set of keys for the machines and you can keep using this truck. I’ll buy the gas. Make sure it gets cleaned, though, first thing in the morning. You got that?” His voice was hollow and distant.
“Okay.” She closed her eyes and had the sensation of standing on the edge of a cliff, of something vast and dark spreading like a shadow beneath her feet.
“You help me, I help you. But make no mistake; one word gets out about tonight and all deals are off.”
Sweat dripped down her back. The whiskey had turned her brain to lead. Darkness crept up the back of her skull and she saw that man’s face again. She opened her eyes and shook it off.
“There’s one more thi
ng you should know. Things change, maybe I disappear, you got something on Keating. Keep that in your back pocket.”
“But I don’t know where we were.”
“If need be, I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
The truck turned abruptly, its wheels crunching over gravel, and they stopped in front of the trailer. Loyal turned off the engine and opened his door, told her to go get some sleep.
The cold air was a relief. She stumbled out of the truck, stared dully at the gray haze of dawn rising in the field behind the house, and went inside.
On his cot, Toby opened his eyes at her for a moment then turned toward the wall. A draft lifted the curtains at the window as she burrowed beneath her blankets, fighting the image of that dead man’s face, forcing herself to think instead of the many stones she’d carried.
CHAPTER
14
THE NEXT MORNING Toby stood next to Jamie’s cot and watched her sleep. He said good morning three times in an increasingly louder voice and poked her in the cheek when she didn’t respond. After an eternity of winter gloom, the sun had finally come out, busting through the window and slanting across her eyes, but that didn’t wake her either. When she groaned and rolled toward the wall, he pulled on his boots and jacket, stuck the box with the necklace in it deep in the front pocket of his jeans, and left for town. He was already late for first period but it was just study hall and who cared anyway? It was his mom’s first birthday since she’d come home and he had a present for her.
If he walked fast he could get to the diner in twenty minutes. She worked the breakfast shift every morning, and unless she’d taken it off for her birthday, she’d pour him a cup of coffee like he was one of her regulars and he’d drink it while she shuffled plates of scrambled eggs and toast to her customers. He’d wait for things to get quiet, even if that meant missing his morning classes, and surprise her with the necklace. The scene played out in his head, her surprise, the happy tears in her eyes. He passed on his usual breakfast of two Snickers and a Monster from the 7-Eleven and cut straight through the woods to Main Street.