by Rob Riggan
Winthrop slithered off into the bedroom on his belly. Oh, God! I’m about to die!
XXXVIII
Dugan
Lizzie looked lost sitting against the wall, her father and mother hovering on either side, her mother’s arm around her, her father staring straight out over a proud chin through all the bedlam and the foot-thick concrete wall right into the holding tank, or so it seemed. There, Winthrop Reedy, in protective custody, sat abjectly on the steel bench swung down from the bars with chains, wearing only a pair of pants, no belt because they’d taken that, an unbuttoned shirt and no shoes, because he never found them. He never had time and couldn’t have located them in the dark anyhow, the power box having almost been blown off the pole. But of course, neither he nor Lizzie’s father could see each other.
They think she’s come home, Dugan realized, looking out at Lizzie’s parents from his office. His gaze moved on around the main room, crowded with deputies, city cops, prisoners, members of families and the bail bondsman. All the ingredients of a rousing weekend. The thought was depressing. God protect little girls, especially from life.
He checked his watch: 1:17 A.M., Saturday October 7. What a night! And now he was down two deputies: Stamey Kibler’s wife had gone into labor, and he was over at the hospital, and Reggie Tetrault had called in sick. Dugan bowed his head a moment, then looked up to see Eddie, who had been getting some information from Fillmore, start back across the room. Eddie looked as dapper and unflappable as ever, saying hello to just about everybody, including the prisoners. He couldn’t have come back to the job without Eddie. It wasn’t just efficiency; something like an aura of clarity flowed around the man. Dugan felt himself flush at the wonder of Eddie’s friendship and support.
Eddie stopped in front of Lizzie and said something to her. She reached out a hand, and he held it for a moment while her mother and father suddenly looked lost, the mask of parental assuredness slipping a bit. Then the father signaled Eddie, who bent and listened to him a moment, too.
“Lizzie’s father wants to talk to Winthrop, wants to try to understand,” Eddie said as he entered the office.
“Aren’t four near-killings enough understanding for one night?”
“I told him I’d ask. She sure blew the hell out of that trailer.”
“What are they waiting for?”
“The bondsman.”
“Oh, hell, she’s not going anywhere. Release her on her own recognizance and get them out of here.”
“Four assaults with intent to kill, malicious damage to property in excess—”
“Yes, yes.”
“Anyhow, Lizzie wants to talk to you,” Eddie said.
“Who’re the fill-ins for Stamey and Tetrault?”
“Junior volunteered—who else? He’s so keyed up with all his heroics—one whore, one brawl, one wino—he said he wouldn’t sleep anyhow.”
“How’s his head?”
“My opinion or his? No, I know. He says he’s all right, but him and J. B. are doubling up just in case. Unless they get called elsewhere, they plan to stake out Puma’s place again, something restful.”
“Any sign of Skinner or that Grady fellow?”
“No. My guess, you’ll never see Grady Snipes or that Peanut again.”
“That’s just fine with me.”
“But Skinner isn’t going anywhere, Charlie.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Do I have to tell you?”
“So if I hadn’t told him to clear out …?” Dugan rubbed his face and sighed, then looked up at his deputy. Thinking about Skinner—back to that night at the fair and again at the resurrection, back to July and all the anger that had been building—made him reflect on Pemberton. He’d sure been appreciating the reprieve the slow judicial process was providing. Even the Carvers were quiet, satisfied for the moment while the wheels of justice ground on. He’d be surprised if it went to trial before spring, if then, and had told the Carvers so. He was even beginning to think he might breeze through the election, in which case Pemberton wouldn’t be a problem for four years. At least now he understood the pressure, could see Pemberton’s leverage and was clear why it had driven him crazy. Reelected, he could take whatever happened with Pemberton’s case. The leverage would be gone. Maybe he could start believing again like he once did. Or maybe he’d just be wiser.
“She wants to talk to you,” Eddie reminded him.
Dugan came to. “Send her in. Oh, and close the door, will you, Eddie?”
When the door opened again, he looked up and saw Lizzie, and that she was furious. In the next moment, he saw why, as her mother and father crowded in behind her. She turned and confronted her mother. “I’d really like to talk to Sheriff Dugan alone,” she said, barely holding her temper.
“Now, you listen to your mother,” her father admonished, his patience sounding thin, too. “Quite enough has happened to you for one night, young lady.” He’s still looking over his chin, Dugan decided as he pushed himself to his feet to greet them. “You need to calm down, let your head clear, Lizzie,” her father added, nodding to Dugan. “Doesn’t she, sheriff?”
“What’s on your mind, Liz?” Dugan asked, meeting her gaze, the impatience and determination blazing out at him. Calling her Lizzie wasn’t going to work anymore, he’d already decided. Thinking back on that mobile home as he’d found it, he was impressed all over again.
“Can we speak alone?” She lifted her head, and he felt the defiance, too, not just against her parents but against everything that had gone wrong, everything that was telling her she was in the wrong, and would have to admit it in order to return to the fold, to be nurtured again until something good could be found for her. Suddenly Dugan really admired her.
“Sheriff, now …,” her father began.
“Bob, it’s been a long night for all of us, and I got a longer one still. Give me some time with Liz, let me hear what she has to say, okay?”
It wasn’t a request, and they all knew it, but he’d made it gently, so once again he saw the parental mask slip slightly, doubt flare up at the edges.
“You doing better, Liz?” he asked when the door had closed. Her ponytail was still all in pieces, hair hanging down the side of her face, her face yet a bit blotchy with all the spent emotion, spent except for the defiance; that was stronger now, though not against him.
She nodded, then blushed deeply at this new, startling behavior in herself and the subsequent tendency toward shame that always seemed to accompany such moments. Seeing her struggle brought the memory on him again, his arrival at the trailer with its shattered doors and windows, a hole right into the living room, the metal siding ragged like a bullet through a tin can, the interior dark and ominous and volatile beyond the ragged glass, the only sound inside dripping water, like the building had been gutted. Three highway patrol cars were already there, along with his deputies and his cars. The small crowd of people shifting through the headlights and spotlights surrounding the trailer made it look like a stage set, phony somehow, an attempt to draw them into some different reality. “She’s still in there, sheriff,” one of his deputies, pistol drawn, had said. “And that’s double-ought she’s using. We think there’s someone else in there, too, someone moaning. People say there were even more than that. What are we going to do?”
“Liz, you in there?” he’d called. “This is Charlie Dugan.” Another deputy ran up with a bullhorn, but Dugan pushed it aside. “Liz, I’m coming over there. My hands are up here, where you can see them. I expect you’ve had enough for one night.” With that, he started to walk across the tiny lawn, stepped over some mangled flowers onto a walkway and found himself at the foot of the steps to the trailer. Smelling gasoline, he looked quickly beyond the end of the trailer and saw the front end of Skinner’s convertible, a headlight and the grill and windshield all blown to hell. A big motorcycle was lying on its side, gasoline dripping from its tank. Hearing the crunch of glass, he tensed, then turned to watch a figure in dar
k slacks and turtleneck push through the remains of some curtains into the blasted doorway. Hair hanging down, face gaunt and pale, shotgun held loosely, expertly, in one hand, the tip of its barrel dangling just above the floor, she looked like some Hollywood fantasy.
“They ruined our car, sheriff,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“It wasn’t these people was it?” he asked gently, climbing one step and reaching for her hand.
“No, sir.” She looked down at the gun like she’d just discovered it. “I expect you want this.”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “I honestly don’t recall where I got it, though it must be Winn’s. I must have gone home and fetched it.” She looked up. “Can you believe that, Sheriff Dugan?”
“Yes.” He knew she wasn’t making it up.
“I saw him with her!” Watching her look darken with the recollection, he shifted his weight, ready to spring as she lifted the gun from her side. He heard the taut shuffle of the armed men behind him. Looking at the floor, she almost dreamily turned the butt of the shotgun toward Dugan. He reached up and took it, then put his other hand back out for her.
Moments later, her hot face had been buried in his chest. A deputy had stepped up and relieved him of the shotgun. “Oh, sheriff, those sonsuvbitches! Just look at my life! And Winthrop! She had it in her mouth, him saying, ‘Lizzie, baby!’ ” He had felt her fingernails dig into his skin. “I’ll kill him! I would have killed them all. Good God, look at me!”
He had held her tighter, held her as she broke down. Finally she had grown quiet and could go, and he had handed her over.
“I’m going to need a lawyer, I guess,” she said now. She was sitting in a chair across the desk. “Can you tell me someone good?”
“Your mama and papa there want to help.” She shook her head. She’s tough. “I’m not supposed to make recommendations, Liz.”
“I understand.” She bit her lip.
He pulled open a drawer in his desk, withdrew a telephone book, then listened to the distant ringing of a phone. His hand over the mouthpiece, he studied the young woman, knowing nothing would ever be the same for her again, not nearly so new and exciting. He heard a muffled voice. “Elmore? Sorry to wake you. This here’s Charlie Dugan.”
XXXIX
Eddie
Dozing at the kitchen table, his hand wrapped around a beer can, Eddie dreamed of a hush coming over a late afternoon. Like the breeze playing over the warm sun on his face, it whispered of a repose from which he’d never wake. And that was okay. He was in Willow Run, and the lush, unreal-green grass smelled oppressively of heat and earth, obliterating everything but the faintest memories of the trailers and little walkways bordered by flowers that had once been there, right under his window. Lost dreams, too, those trailers, flowers and walkways, he thought in his dream. Someday even those faint memories will vanish.
The cicadas beckoned, the essence of all the summers he’d ever known. Elmore Willis, dim and indistinct, stirred behind him, a last thread in an unraveling string, soon to be irrelevant, too, because Eddie was tired and there wasn’t enough to hold him there anymore. He missed Charlie and the din of a life that, much as he’d loved it, would be a pain in the ass to begin over. He didn’t have the energy anymore.
Waking, Eddie found himself in mind of the morning he came home and knew his wife would never be with him again. How long ago was that, fifteen years? For all people made of it, he’d never believed in the great reward and life everlasting. These days, though, he was haunted by dreams of endless winds and dust seeping through walls, bleached grass beyond a solitary window. We are born into light, and then the light simply goes out, he thought. The light is swallowed by an endless, incomprehensible darkness, a darkness so vast that in a moment there is no longer even a hint of the light we were. The darkness isn’t good or evil. It simply is. But how senseless her death had seemed to him. How much he’d missed her, and still did! One day, he’d be gone, too, and then her darkness would be complete.
He gave his head a shake, trying to dislodge the mood, which like the dream itself felt like it might never release him. Finally he stood up from the table and went to the refrigerator to grab another beer. But he found himself thinking that memories are like threads in a rug; finally you look back and see patterns, the shape of things. Most memories grow threadbare when you keep going over the same ground. You lose the surprise and wonder of comprehension, of the pain or joy you know is there. Some memories, however—like when Skinner buried that kid at the fair, and when old Red and Puma mixed it up—would never leave him. And maybe the highest on that list: Friday night, October 6, 1972, and all that followed, especially with the election right around the corner. “The wise man and the fool die the same death.” Ecclesiastes. Lord, spare me these thoughts!
But still he looked back, as he’d been doing for days, back to that afternoon of October 6, going right into the wee hours of the following morning. Never in all his years in law enforcement had he encountered the likes of it; it had just gone on and on. All that stuff with Turner Mull, then young Reedy and his wife. And oh, Peanut! My stars!
But at last it had appeared to settle down, and Charlie, who had hung in there since eight Friday morning, went home. Junior and J. B. Fisher, looking a lot more beat than they wanted to let on, had gone off to stake out Puma, so after a while the office had cleared out. Everybody had gone except the radio operator—Ranny had just relieved Fillmore—and Winthrop, broken nose and all, sitting in the cell in the next room, looking more dazed than miserable because the shock hadn’t begun to wear off. It was not like Charlie neglected his duty, as some now claimed—he’d been on the job for almost eighteen hours that day, and it was going on half past two Saturday morning when he finally left. A man’s got to rest sometime, not to mention he had to be on duty again that next afternoon. Moreover, the way things were set up in the department and had been for generations, what finally happened was pretty much beyond Charlie’s control, if not responsibility. A whole lot of trust went into who got hired and what they did after they were.
When he finally headed home that night, Eddie had heard a little alarm go off: Junior Trainor, J. B. Fisher, Ranny Hollar. Now, why’s that troubling me? For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. The three of them talking together? What about? No, there had to be an end to that night! The light changed, and he’d driven on.
He’d called Charlie the next afternoon—that was Saturday, October 7—as soon as he found Trainor’s report about a monster out in Jessup. He told Charlie that Harlan, who had sent a reporter over, was kind of ripped because the paper had to get its local news—about a monster, no less—off the AP wire, not from the department.
“Did you see the wire copy?” Charlie had asked.
“It was about two sentences. The state museum in Raleigh allegedly may investigate the footprints. Couple of papers carried it, buried. No one’s called.”
“Then I’m not too concerned.”
“What about Harlan?”
“He knows Fisher, Trainor and Hollar. He won’t buy that monster stuff.”
Had Eddie heard a touch of doubt? He spoke his thoughts into the phone: “Charlie, he sure didn’t sound too pleased about getting that off the wire.”
Nothing would ever be regular again, Eddie suspected. He had moved from the kitchen table and was now ensconced in a chair on the front porch watching the sun go down, his dream state fairly well cleared up. At least it would never be regular on Charlie’s watch, he thought. But then it hadn’t been regular, really, ever since the Carvers got blown off the road in April. It was like the river had decided to take a different course, and while everyone else had been trying to push it back in the old one, Charlie had known better.
Since Pemberton was bound over, a sitzkrieg had developed—Europe before World War II—only Eddie didn’t believe Charlie was fooled about that either. When Charlie came back from Alabama, Eddie had seen the calm settling in him again like the o
ld Charlie, which was why he went back to work for him. Only now, from the luxury of his front porch, he supposed you really couldn’t go back to where you’d been. Something was different, something deep had changed in Charlie, some knowledge had occurred. Probably in both of them. The clue was when Eddie told him he ought to get rid of Trainor, and he told Eddie he didn’t have cause, that he was in enough trouble as it was. Of course, Eddie had agreed that was a fact, but Eddie hadn’t asked him what he really meant by it, like he might once have. He’d been too damned relieved just to have him back. He believed in Charlie; by that time, he’d needed to believe in him.
Now, sitting on that porch, he guessed he should have asked.
Appearing across the entire top of the front page of the Monday, October 9, Damascus Gazette & Reformer had been a headline in letters about two inches high, war-headline size: “Deputies Spot Monster.” Then a smaller headline over a couple of columns: “Jessup Woolybooger Said ‘Terrifying,’ State Officials Called To Investigate.” Right underneath the big headline, in the middle of the page, was a picture of what Deputies J. B. Fisher and Junior Trainor said they’d seen. It was a large picture, a blown-up drawing actually, signed by the reporter who wrote the story. It showed a huge, big-clawed, furry-looking creature caught in headlights, a cross between Smokey Bear and a saber-toothed tiger with eyeteeth about eight inches long, its arms raised to attack.
“Oh, hell,” Charlie had said when Eddie gently tapped the paper under his nose.
Part Seven
XL
Dugan
Eight years ago, the day after his first election, he’d stood on Eddie’s front porch, excited and a little overwhelmed, wondering how he was going to do it. He’d believed that his desire to create a more equitable justice for everybody in Blackstone County, regardless of where they lived and how wealthy they were, might be achieved—it was in his soul. He’d practiced it all he could as a deputy, and before that as a trooper in Alabama. It was what brought him to Eddie’s door. What had been until that time dreams shared only with Dru became an act of faith as well as possibility. At the root of his faith was his constituency. He’d known his constituency. He still did, even though it had dissolved in laughter.