by Jack Ketchum
“RED IS A DAMN FINE BOOK.”
—BENTLEY LITTLE
THE REASON FOR IT ALL
“Where is he, Mrs. McCormack?” Ludlow asked.
“Right here,” McCormack said.
They stepped through the doorway behind her, McCormack first and then his two sons. Ludlow could see Pete Daoust in the shadows behind them. Daniel held a pistol in his hand. From the look of it a .38 revolver.
His father had a pistol too, only McCormack’s was a .44 magnum. Ludlow had fired one once. It could take down a bear.
This was a family, he thought, that liked its guns.
“You’re a goddamn lunatic,” McCormack said. “Coming here.”
“Maybe.”
“My friend, there aren’t any maybes about it.”
“Sometimes the only way to know a thing is to know it firsthand, Mr. McCormack. See it. Taste it. Smell it. Then you know it. Somebody burned my store down last night. A few nights back somebody put a rock through my window. But I’m not here about any of that. I’m here about this.”
He set the body down gently on the porch in front of them and unfolded the blankets. . . .
Other books by Jack Ketchum:
THE LOST
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Red copyright © 1995 by Dallas Mayr
“The Passenger” copyright © 2001 by Dallas Mayr
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781477833414
ISBN-10: 1477833412
For Neil, Aggie, Beast, Vinni and Zoe – furry friends past and present. Daily tutors in the art of caring. And for the real Red, gone now, who saved my Uncle’s life as Sam Berry’s dog does here.
This title was previously published by Dorchester Publishing; this version has been reproduced from the Dorchester book archive files.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First, thanks to Gavin Ziegler for his keen eyes and nose for a potential Ketchum story. Then to Paula White, as usual, for her wise editorial readings and to my editor, Mike Bailey, for standing by me on this one – not to mention his concerned and gentlemanly treatment of us writers in general. Many, many thanks to Alice Martell and Stephen King for getting me to the UK in the first place. I’m gratefully indebted to Lowell ‘Chip’ Woodman for sharing with me his compassionate understanding of Maine law and federal law as regards the rights of animals – or lack of them – in this country, to Bill Tracy for the good fishing tips, and to Fred Christ for all the wacky true stories he’s collected for me over the years. Finally, thanks to Neal and Victoria McPheeters. They know why.
‘To ache is human, not polite.’
Emily Dickinson
‘Here I am, Lord, I’m
Knocking at your place of business . . .
I know I got no business here . . .’
Paul Simon
TABLE OF CONTENTS
RED
THE PASSENGER
Part One
LUDLOW
One
The old man looked at the dog looking at him, watching his hands as they threaded the hook through the brown plastic worm to its bright orange tail, the old dog lying on the riverbank in a patch of late afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees. After all this time the dog was still curious about him and especially curious about his hands. It was as though, to the dog, the hands and what the hands could do were what made them different from one creature to another and that was all.
He heard the boys long before he saw them and so did the dog, knew that someone was approaching and that there were more than one of them cutting down through the woods along the narrow dirt and gravel path from the clearing where the old man had left his pickup, the same way he and the dog had come.
He could hear their feet scuffling the earth and gravel and the crack of branches over the songs of birds and the sounds of the slow-moving river.
The dog’s ears rolled forward and up and he turned his big brown scruffy head in the direction of the sounds and then looked back to the old man. The old man said nothing so the dog just sighed and settled in.
The river had been productive for the old man ever since ice-out but now in late June it was almost too easy – he’d been standing on the bank only thirty or forty minutes, no more. And already he had two out of his three-fish legal limit lying headless and gutted in his cooler, both of them four-pounders.
The river flowed wide and deep here. The old man had only to pick a rock or a stump or a fallen tree as he did now – anything the smallmouth could use for cover – and then cast his worm and let it drop. He would retrieve the line in a series of jerks so that down in the brown cloudy water the worm would surge forward and upward and then settle back to the bottom again. Today three or four jerks was all it took and he could feel the tap on the line that told him the fish was interested. He would point the rod at the fish so that the line went slack and the fish could begin to feed on the plastic worm the old man had scented with his spit. Then he would slowly reel the slack back in and when that was finished and he judged the line was tight enough he’d set the hook, pulling the rod up hard over his head, freeing the hook from its swindle of a worm and piercing the fish’s mouth.
The bass would want to fight like a demon but the old man wouldn’t let him fight, not any more than he had to anyway in order to reel him in.
This was about a fish on his plate and two in the freezer and that was all it was about. His taste for blood sports had fled somewhere between his daughter Alice’s wedding and Mary’s death. It had never returned.
But he did love the good firm white meat of the fish and so did the dog. Though the dog would eat just about anything, Mary’d said. And over the years since her death he’d found that in this, as in most things his wife chose to speak on, she was right.
He saw the dog raise his head again, his scarred black nose scenting the air.
The old man smelled it too, before the dog in fact. The dog was not what he used to be. When the old man looked at him he could still see the pup inside him the same way he could still see the boy inside himself. But the dog moved much more slowly now, which was probably the onset of arthritis and his eyes were starting to cloud over.
Though there was enough left in him for him to go off chasing Emma Siddon’s black mongrel bitch whenever she was in season. He’d caught him at that again just a week ago in the field behind his house. The old man smiling, the dog leaping through the goldenrod stirring up the bees like he was still young and strong.
Still the old man smelled it first.
Gun oil.
Faint, upwind of him, coming off the trail.
The scent of an amateur, the old man thought. Any good hunter would have known to swab it down a whole lot better than this one had. Game would be moving away from them for miles around. Even if they hadn’t been coming down the trail as noisy as a herd of goats.
He brought the rod up quickly to just past the vertical and then down hard to the near-horizontal and felt the line whip hissing toward him and then out past him, shooting away across the river to the same half-sunk tree where he’d pulled the first one, the bigger of the two bass, only to the far side of the tree this time where he knew the water was deeper. He let it drift to the bottom and then gave the line a tug.
The dog’s head was up again and the old man saw them out of the corner of his eye and turned to gla
nce at them as they stumbled down the hill and then he turned his attention back to the line and tugged once again.
Kids. Seventeen, eighteen maybe.
One shotgun between them carried by the taller of the three, slung over his shoulder like it was a stick or a bat, not a firearm.
‘Gettin’ any?’
The old man turned to see who was talking to him. It was the one with the shotgun, tall and good-looking and probably aware of that, hair cut short the way they used to cut the old man’s hair back in the service, jeans and a teeshirt that read STOLEN FROM MABEL’S WHOREHOUSE, with a drawing of a big-breasted woman in a cowboy hat standing outside some western-style bar.
The boy looked lean, hard, not like the other two. The other two wore jeans and teeshirts as well, one red and one a faded yellow, the kind with pockets cut for cigarettes, but their hair was medium length and brown, not blond and short like the other boy’s. The kid in the red shirt had a belly on him.
‘Two in the cooler,’ he said. ‘Have a look if you want’
The boy in the yellow shirt whose body was just a skinny young boy’s body, not a man’s yet like the one with the gun, leaned down and flipped the lid of the cooler. He studied the fish a moment, hands dug into the pockets of his jeans so that his shoulders hunched and then stood up again.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Good size.’
The old man grinned. ‘You can pull ’em five pounds or more out of here now and then.’ He tugged the line. ‘These’ll do though.’
The heavy-set boy in red was scuffling rocks and gravel with his sneakers. Idle, something sloppy about him that always seemed to go with a boy too heavyset for his own good. A fish yards away underwater could hear what was happening on the land and the old man wished he’d cut it out.
‘This your dog?’ said the one with the shotgun.
The old man looked over at the dog and saw that the dog was looking at the boy the way he did sometimes. The dog was getting cranky in his old age and you could tell when he’d taken it into his head to dislike somebody because he got this kind of fixed look in his eyes like he wasn’t going to blink or take his eyes off that person for a goddamn second until that person proved he or she could be trusted to the dog’s complete satisfaction.
The problem with the dog was that you could buy his trust with a dog biscuit.
He thought about that and thinking about how easy the dog was made him smile.
‘He’s mine all right. No need to bother yourself about him, though. He won’t bite.’
Some people were funny about dogs, he thought. Always figured a dog would want to bite. Whereas damn few dogs in his experience had ever bitten anybody unless there was major provocation to push the dog and rarely even then. What dogs wanted from people was just the opposite. A dog wanted not to bite. To never have reason to bite because they were fed and warm at night with nobody tormenting them and plenty of time to sleep in the sun and run and chase and plenty of room to do the chasing.
‘Pretty old, isn’t he?’ said the boy in red.
He nodded. ‘We go back a ways.’
The old man tugged the line. Nothing was biting now. Maybe it was the talk spooking the fish or maybe it was the heavyset boy still kicking up the gravel.
‘How old’s a dog like that?’
The old man had to think. Mary had given him the dog for his fifty-third birthday when the dog was six or seven weeks old. That was the year before she died. She’d died in ’83.
‘Thirteen, fourteen.’
‘Raggedy old fella.’
The old man had nothing to say to that. He didn’t much like the boy’s tone, though. He gathered that the boy didn’t have much use for animals.
He began reeling in his line.
‘What kind of bait you using?’ The skinny boy in yellow was looking in his tackle box.
‘Worm.’
‘Live worm?’
‘Plastic. Giving it a try. So far, so good.’
‘I like the buzz bait. Ever try that?’
‘I never used one. Jitterbug sometimes, hula popper. Generally I like a worm though.’
‘Jesus. Cut the crap, Harold,’ said the boy with the shotgun. ‘Old man, set down your goddamn rig.’
The old man looked at the boys as the boy took two steps forward along the gravel.
The shotgun was levelled at him, pointed at his belt. Now what the hell was this about?
The boy flicked off the safety.
The dog was growling, moving to get up.
‘Easy,’ he said to the dog. ‘Take it easy.’
He held out his hand. The dog could be counted on to heed what the hand had to say even if all his instincts told him not to. He sat back on his haunches again. Growling so low you might have missed it if you didn’t know to listen. Right now the dog wanted more than anything to stand up fighting, old and arthritic or not.
‘He better take it easy,’ said the boy. ‘Now set down your goddamn rig.’
Talk sense to him, the old man thought. Keep him rational even if what he was doing wasn’t rational at all.
‘I set it down I could lose it,’ he said. ‘Suppose I get a strike out there? They’ve been biting good today.’
The boy looked at him like he was crazy, then smiled and shook his head.
‘Yeah. Shit. All right, reel her in. Then set her down.’
The old man did as he was told. He could see the boy enjoyed holding the shotgun on him a lot more than he ought to. He didn’t want to provoke him.
‘Gimme your wallet,’ said the boy.
The old man shook his head.
‘Wallet’s in my pickup. In the glove compartment. You passed it coming down here. Green Chevy pickup, sitting in the clearing.’
‘Bullshit,’ said the heavyset boy in red.
‘It’s true. I don’t take it with me. I never do. There’s not much use for cash down here and if I have to go in after a snagged line or go in to haul out the bass most likely my wallet’ll get wet. Or else I have to remember to toss it in the tackle box. Half the time you forget. So I keep it locked up in the glove compartment. There’s twenty, thirty dollars in there and I won’t say you’re welcome to it but I’m not going to argue with a shotgun either. Take it.’
He reached slowly into his pocket.
‘You’ll want my keys,’ he said.
‘What’s his rig worth?’ the boy with the shotgun said to the youngest, the one he’d called Harold.
‘Ah, it’s pretty old stuff. A couple nice flies. But nothing . . . I mean, nothing really worth bothering with.’
It wasn’t an honest appraisal if the boy knew anything about fishing and the old man sensed that he did. The flies were all hand-tied, a good collection. They could have fetched a tidy sum. If the boy saw that, he wasn’t saying.
He wondered why.
‘Any credit cards in that wallet, old man?’
‘I don’t use any.’
The boy laughed and shook his head and took a step closer and the old man could see that the shotgun was a Browning Auto-5 12 Gauge, brand new and expensive and he could smell the oil strong as a new-car smell as he dug out his keys and held them out to him. The boy kept laughing but there was no humor In it, only a kind of growing meanness.
As though the laughter was leading the boy on to something.
The old man saw that his face was deeply lined for a boy his age and that the belt he wore was made of very good leather and his jeans were some kind of designer jeans, not Levis, and that the other boys were wearing them too.
They didn’t need money. They just wanted it.
Well, they could have it.
He hoped to hell that was all they wanted.
‘Here,’ he said, holding out the keys. ‘Smallest one opens the dash. Wallet’s inside.’
Take them and get, he thought.
The boy was still grinning at him, shaking his head.
‘You got a beat-up old pickup and a wallet with twenty bucks in it and a rig
that’s not worth jack-shit. You got a couple of fish and a goddamn dog. What the hell you got, mister?’
The old man didn’t answer. There wasn’t any answer. The boy didn’t want one.
‘You don’t have shit.’
There was always the chance that the boy wouldn’t fire if he moved on him and tried to take the gun away but he doubted it was a good chance because there was a coldness in his voice he hadn’t liked right from the very beginning but now it had gone from cold to cold as ice. He glanced at the heavyset boy and saw no help in the bland silly smirk the boy was wearing and then at the youngest one in yellow and saw that this one was scared silent now. And that was not help to him either.
Though the boy’s being scared might explain the lie about his rig.
He heard the water behind him and the wind in the trees.
He held out the keys.
He waited. Nobody moved.
The boy was building up to something. Calling it off or not, he couldn’t tell.
You could die right here, he thought. You ready for that?
He had no answer for that one either.
‘What’s his name?’ said the boy.
‘Whose name?’
‘The dog. What’s his name?’
To the old man the dog was mostly just the dog. He came at a whistle and obeyed the old man’s hands, a clap or a wave or a snap of his fingers and probably he hadn’t had reason to use the dog’s true name in months. But he and Mary had named him as a pup, something simple for his color.
‘Red,’ he said.
The boy stared at him unsmiling, nodding as though taking this in and for a moment the cold meanness in his eyes jittered in the light reflecting off the river.
‘That’s good,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s real good. Red.’
The boy took a deep breath and blew it out and seemed calmer and the old man thought it was possible that the storm in the boy was passing though he didn’t understand why that should be with just the knowing of a name and then the boy whirled and the dog was getting up out of his crouch, so much slower than he would have just a year ago when he was only that much younger, sensing something beyond the old man’s staying hand or his power over events and the boy took one step toward him and the shotgun tore deep through the peace of the river and forest and sunny June day and the peace that had been the life of the old man up to then. And there wasn’t even a yelp or a cry because the top of the dog’s head wasn’t there anymore nor the quick brown eyes nor the cat-scarred nose, all of them blasted into the brush behind the dog like a sudden rain of familiar flesh, the very look of the dog a sudden memory.