by Jack Ketchum
‘We knew he had a problem with lying. He was always making up things. Told us once he’d seen a dead man down by the bank of the stream behind the house here. This was when he was just a young boy, maybe seven or eight. But we took him serious enough. And of course there was nothing there.
‘He dropped out of school when they kept him back junior year. Went to work at Clover’s Hardware here in town. Got to work late half the time, stayed out nights. Made up lies about why. We were too easy on him, Mary and I, but there was always this way about him, it was like he couldn’t help himself. Everybody gave him leeway. Old man Clover too. But they had to fire him after a while.
‘I got this idea into my head that he might work things out for himself in the service, get some discipline into his life, you know? It’d worked for me. And maybe he wanted to get out of the house by then anyway because it was one of the few times he listened to me and did what I told him to do. He joined the Navy. Nine months later he was out on a section eight. You know what that is?’
She nodded. ‘Mentally unstable.’
‘I think unfit is the word they use. Anyhow, I made the mistake of taking him in again. I think we both knew it was wrong at the time. But the boy was unfit You’d think about what it was he could do in the world, be in the world – and you’d come up bone dry. He did odd jobs for a while, went to work for a filling station out on highway 202, got fired from that for stealing parts for his old Buick which he never did admit to stealing. We think he may have broken into Tom Hardin’s house one night. There was no way to prove it. But the house was broken into all right and all of a sudden Billy had money in his pocket. Said he won it in a card game. I didn’t believe him.’
‘God. Terrific. How’d you deal with all this?’
‘Me? Badly. Hell, I’d have thrown him out half a dozen times if it hadn’t been for Mary. He was her first-born, she couldn’t see us doing that. But there was more shouting than talking going on in this house back then. It didn’t make a damn bit of difference to Billy. He’d just lie in your face and stare you down. Like he believed the lie himself. And I think probably half the time he did.
‘I think he was living mostly in a fantasy world by then. He’d got himself involved with a local girl, Cathy Lee Stutz, who was crazy as he was. They’d drive up to Portland and come back with all these books about black magic, the occult, whatever. Wore chains around their necks, burned black candles in his room. I don’t know where they got the money to buy it all. He wasn’t working. Tom Bridgewater told me later he’d heard she was turning tricks up there in Portland. I didn’t disbelieve him.
‘But with the Stutz girl around at least Billy wasn’t here so much. Mostly he was staying out at her place. I came in one afternoon and they were sitting in the middle of a white chalk circle they’d drawn out there on the living-room floor. I told them to take their nonsense elsewhere and they did. So after that at least there was a little peace and quiet around here for a while. You want a glass of water?’
‘I’ll get you one.’
‘No, I’ll get it.’
He got up and walked naked into the kitchen, a little surprised that he wasn’t embarrassed doing that in front of her, thinking that he could almost feel the moonlight through the window cool against his skin, bluing the walls, filling the shadows with its dark cool color. He ran water from the tap and filled his glass, drank some and filled it again and carried it into the bedroom. She was sitting where he’d left her. His shorts were beside her on the bed. She reached out to him for the glass, changing her mind. He handed it to her. He pulled on his shorts and watched her drink. She smiled at him and handed back the glass, his thumb grazing hers.
‘You have to get back real soon?’ he said.
‘Soon. Not just yet.’
‘Don’t take this wrong. Lord knows I’m not complaining. But what are you doing here, Carrie? With a man like me?’
‘You mean with an old man like you. With a man old enough to be my father.’
‘And then some.’
‘When I could be with a much, much younger man. Any man I wanted, right?’
‘Probably you could be, yes.’
She laughed and shook her head. ‘Av, the only problem with a man your age is that sometimes he starts thinking just like a young fool again.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Never mind. Sit down. Tell me the rest.’
Despite what he’d said to her this was what he didn’t like to speak about even now, so many years later. What had happened was a weight upon his heart from the very beginning and it was one that would never go away no matter how many times he told it or how long he refused to tell it. The words had a weight of their own. You only found out how heavy it was going to be this time around as you went along.
He sat down on the bed beside her.
‘Cathy Lee, this girlfriend of his, started seeing somebody else after a while. I guess it was somebody with more money than Billy because after that he was always after money. For a while he even went back to work for it. Everything he made went right back into Cathy Lee. To take her places, buy her things.
‘I was with Bill Prine over at the store the night it happened, taking our six-month inventory. Allie was with us too. She’d always had a good head for figures and she liked helping us out come inventory time. It was dead of winter. Tim was home asleep in the bedroom upstairs. Mary was reading in the kitchen. It was about eleven thirty by the time we finished up the inventory.
‘We hadn’t seen Billy in a few days.’
He drank what was left of the water and set the glass on the windowsill behind her. He felt her breath on his cheek, smelled her hair. She was leaning close. He didn’t want to look at her. Not now.
‘When he told the story later, he’d lie. But it was confused lying. Not what he usually did. He’d he about one thing and then maybe he’d tell the truth about that and lie about something else and then tell the truth about whatever the hell that was and then go back and lie about the first thing again, or something completely different. It just went on that way.
‘But how we pieced it together was that Billy had come around the house earlier that night looking for some money. Mary told him no, that if he wanted money he’d have to come down to the store and talk to me. Well, he knew he wasn’t going to get anything out of me. I’d had it by then. So they argued. Eventually he left.
‘Then just before eleven he came back to the house again. He still wanted money and Mary told him no again.
‘I don’t know why, but he locked Red up in the bedroom here. Here in this room. Maybe he was barking. I don’t know.
‘Then he came back out to the kitchen and started hitting her, beating her. Maybe he thought he’d get money out of her that way or maybe it was just one of his crazy rages. But he hurt her. He hurt her so bad I guess he thought he’d killed her. Because then he . . . he decided . . . jesus!’
‘It’s all right, Av.’ She took his hand again.
He could see it all. Everything he’d come home to that night.
He gripped her hand.
‘He decided he’d have to cover it up. He went out to the woodshed. He got the can of fuel for the Coleman lantern I used to keep out there and then he went up to the attic bedroom and threw the lantern oil all over Tim. All over my son, who was sleeping.
‘He lit a match and threw it and closed the bedroom door and locked it behind him. He burned Tim to death. Up there in his bedroom.
‘But oil doesn’t burn as hot as kerosine or gasoline. He’d killed Tim all right. He was saturated with the stuff. But all that burned up there was my boy and the mattress he was lying on. Not even the drapes caught fire.
‘He waited outside the attic door until my son stopped screaming. Until it was quiet.
‘Then he went downstairs. He threw the oil over Mary lying there on the kitchen floor and then he lit another match and threw that on her and then he got into his car and drove away.
‘But . . . she . . . m
y wife wasn’t dead. She was still alive. He’d beaten her but he hadn’t killed her. He was wrong. Wrong about that. Like he was wrong about the oil burning the house down and covering up what he did. He was wrong on everything. All of it . . . it was all for nothing.
‘I guess the pain woke her.
‘She got outside somehow and rolled across the ground, in the dirt, on the grass, till the flames were out. And then she still had enough left in her to crawl back into the house and dial nine-one-one.
‘They found her on the stairs halfway up to Tim’s bedroom. Red was in a panic. The robe she was wearing had been burned right into her body. I wonder sometimes if she knew Tim was dead back there at the end. If that was what stopped her.
‘She lived for five more days. Never came out of the coma. I think that was a blessing. The burns were so bad they wouldn’t even let me hold her.
‘In the end, I did anyway.’
He got up and walked to the dresser and opened the bottom drawer. He took out a picture in a wooden frame. He handed it to her.
‘That was Tim,’ he said. ‘That was my son.’
She held the picture in her lap and looked down at it awhile and when she looked up at him again he saw there were tears in her eyes.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘My god, Av. How can you go on living in this place? With what happened here?’
He sat down beside her.
‘The walls are painted over,’ he said. ‘The floors are all sanded. You’d never know there was any fire here. Not in the kitchen and not up in the attic. But I can still see the fires, the marks they left I know their exact shape and size. I see them every day.
‘But this was our place. Mary’s and mine. Allie’s. Tim’s. They grew up here. Hell, it was even Red’s place. I won’t let him take that away from me too.’
They sat quiet for a while.
‘So what happened to him?’ she said. ‘To Billy, I mean.’
He sighed. ‘Oh, he tried to say it was another boy. Friend of his. Even that it was Cathy Lee Stutz. Never would admit to it. But by then he’d gone ahead and said so much that they had a case against him. They had his prints all over the Coleman can.
‘I said I’d stand by him even after what he did if he’d just admit it and stop his damn lying and tell me why he did it, why he had to go and kill them. That he was flesh and blood and I’d do what I could for him. But he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t stop lying. His lawyer convinced him to take a guilty plea but as soon as he did he started right in again, saying he never did it, that it was just a plea, that it meant nothing. To this day he tries to convince Allie of that whatever she calls him, even though she damn well knows better. I washed my hands of him. Years ago. He got two consecutive sentences of thirty years to life each.
‘It’s not enough.’
She nodded. ‘So you have no son.’
‘That’s right I lost him that night too, I guess.’
She gazed down at the photo of Tim again.
‘What a handsome boy,’ she said.
‘He was a happy boy.’
She handed the photo back to him.
‘You feel guilty, don’t you, because you weren’t there?’
‘I don’t know what I feel.’
He turned and put the photo back inside the drawer and closed it.
‘You have to go to work tomorrow, don’t you?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘You have time for a beer before you go?’
‘Sure I do.’
‘I’ll get us some from the kitchen.’
He walked out and there beside the table climbing the kitchen wall like streaks of black lightning were the scars which only he could see to mark where she had fallen.
Fourteen
At noon the next day he was at the store. Business was slow because of the rain. Sam Berry called.
‘This McCormack son of a bitch has got one long reach. Or maybe it’s his lawyer, I don’t know. But Phelps is still declining to prosecute and I can’t shake him. I got the call this morning.’
‘Despite the story.’
‘Despite the story.’
‘The rock through my window? The note?’
‘No prints on either of them. You can’t identify the thrower or the car. Anybody could have done it.’
‘Nobody else had reason to.’
‘I know that and you know that. The court’s a different story. I’m sorry.’
‘So am I, Sam.’
Through the misted rain-flecked window he saw a car pull into his lot, a new white Lincoln Continental, low beams on and windshield wipers moving fast as the car sat on idle. He couldn’t see inside.
‘You want to go ahead with the lawsuit?’
‘Of course I do,’ he said.
He thought it was probably the first time he’d lied to Sam about anything.
The car door opened and a woman stepped outside. She wore a brown belted raincoat pulled tight around a trim figure and a clear plastic scarf over her head. Her face was obscured by the window. The woman stood by the open car door a moment looking in at the store and then quickly got back into the Lincoln again and closed the door.
‘I’ll get things started then,’ Sam said. ‘You know that I can’t do this for free, Av. But I’ll try to keep costs down. I know you’re not made of money.’
‘That’s fine, Sam. You do what you have to do.’
‘I’ll be in touch.’
‘Thanks, Sam.’
He put down the phone and stared out through the window watching the Lincoln pull out of the parking lot into the rain and thought how dry the summer had been and how they could use this, the grass and trees all comfortably drinking in the light warm rain that would not wash away the topsoil or drown the vegetation but instead would get things growing again, a boost to the soul of the land as last night the woman Carrie had been to his own soul.
There were ways to go about this other than a lawsuit. Sam said that despite McCormack’s money he was just a good ol’ boy at heart. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Good ol’ boys could be pushed. Wolves could be made to snap.
It was time he started pushing.
Fifteen
‘Don’t tell me,’ McCormack said smiling. He was sitting in the study this time in one of the plush leather chairs facing the fireplace. There was a newspaper open on his lap. Behind him mounted on the wall which Ludlow had not been able to see on his first visit here were a five-point white-tail buck, a coyote, a timberwolf and a small black bear.
The crippled maid had shown him in and now he was standing there.
‘Don’t tell me. You’ve thought about it. You want to sell the place,’ he said.
‘No,’ Ludlow said. ‘The store’s fine as is.’
‘You should think about it. You don’t take much out of it.’
‘Enough for me.’
McCormack sighed, the smile fading and folded the paper neatly and reached over and set it down on the red leather couch.
‘I hear you’re suing me.’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘I don’t know why you’d want to bother. It won’t be worth either your time or your money.’
‘I don’t suppose it would be about money.’
‘What, then?’
‘I guess it would be about word getting around as to what the boy did and what you’re doing.’
‘What am I doing?’
‘I’ll tell you what you’re not doing. You’re not setting him straight about this. I bet he’s still got the gun, doesn’t he? I bet you haven’t even taken the damn thing away from him.’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘I saw him over at the high school day before yesterday. Drove by, and there he was. I didn’t see any bruises on him. None that I could notice. I don’t suppose you strapped his butt instead?’
‘We don’t go in for that, Ludlow. I don’t know where you come from. But it doesn’t happen here.’
> ‘It doesn’t.’
‘No.’
‘I guess you’re more civilized than me.’
‘I guess that’s a possibility.’
Ludlow turned and looked at the mounted heads on the wall and then looked back at McCormack.
‘You shoot these all by yourself, did you?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You figure you’re a good shot, Mr McCormack?’
‘Damned right I am.’
‘I guess you learned in the service, then. You look to be about the right age for Vietnam.’
‘I never went. Just lucky I guess. No, I learned to shoot on my own. What’s this got to do with anything?’
‘I was in Korea myself. They call that one The Forgotten War. Though I don’t think anybody who was there forgot much about it. Or their families. When I came home my daddy threw me a party. Invited half the town. He was proud of me. Hard to say why. I didn’t do anything special over there but he was proud anyhow.
‘I’m wondering if you’re proud of Daniel, Mr McCormack, because if you’re not then something’s wrong between you and the boy. Something maybe you can still do something about if you care to. While he’s still here with you. Before he goes out on his own to do god knows what to who. Instead of just hiring your lawyers and covering up for him.’
McCormack stood and reached in his pocket for a cigarette and lit it with a heavy silver lighter from the table. Ludlow was aware of the smoke and wondered if they ever used the fireplace because there was no woodsmoke smell in the room, only the smell of tobacco now.
‘Look,’ McCormack said. ‘I don’t need any lectures from you. My boys are my boys and I’ll handle them any damn way I see fit. The bottom line is this. You go ahead and sue if you want to. It might cause me a little embarrassment in some places but not very much, I promise you. Because you can’t win. I promise you that too. And even if you could, Ludlow, what would you get out of it? The value of the dog. A goddamn dog from the goddamn dog pound. Even if you did win, which you won’t, I couldn’t care less. Do you understand that?’