One Simple Thing

by Warren Read

  His father had actually taken him fishing with the lure Rodney had found that day at the lake. He had been waiting for Rodney at the house, after school, the doors to his Impala wide open and waiting like two arms. Rodney threw his school bag up onto the porch and the two of them went to the same lake, and Rodney watched as his father baited the hook and clipped the little red and white ball to the line and cast it out onto the glassy surface in an artful, high arc, snapping the reel in place.

  “Now keep your eye on the bobber,” he said. “If it drops below the water, give it a little tug.” He unfolded two lawn chairs and they sat together until the mosquitoes found them, and Rodney’s stomach started to poke from the inside. They didn’t catch any fish, but the lure was baitless when he reeled it in. He had forgotten all about that.

  The roadway veered to the left and Rodney could see the slope of the hillside as it swept out onto the flatlands, where the highway ran free in either direction. Far into the distance he could make out the tiniest dots of white light and while he wasn’t entirely sure, they seemed to be moving.

  34

  They came up to the house and right away, Lester hollered for Rodney to come up onto the porch, wherever he was. The porch lamp breathed yellow and brought up the low, draping pine branches against the railings. Lester moved closer to its halo, his face oil-slick and his eyes dancing like he was following hummingbirds.

  “Where the hell is that kid?”

  “Lester,” Nadine said.

  He stared back at her, his mouth slack and his brow collapsed in layers. “What Nadine?” he said, rolling his hand at her impatiently, aggravated. “I don’t have time to try and be a goddamned mind reader.”

  She didn’t care now, not anymore. “What the hell was that all about?” she said. “Throwing that man down the hole. We could have taken his body into town. We didn’t have anything to do with what happened to him.”

  Lester let a puff of air out through his teeth. “I don’t want a single thread connecting me to that sonofabitch,” he said. “I want this place wiped clean of him and the kid.” And with that, he hollered for Rodney again.

  “Oh come on,” Nadine said. “He’s harmless.” She felt her voice losing its steadiness.

  He walked up onto the porch and leaned out over the railing. “Where’d that little fucker run off to?”

  She stared out into the direction of the outhouse, to the van and the trees beyond, and when there was nothing to see she melted into the warm embrace of relief. “I’m sure he’s just scared out of his mind. He’s a kid, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re too soft, Nadine,” he said. “That kid’s a hell of a lot tougher than you give him credit for. Look at who he showed up with. I wouldn’t put it past him to have taken out poor old Otis all by himself.”

  Nadine laughed at that, a laugh that nearly sent Lester off the ledge.

  “Keep on with that,” he snapped. “See how funny you think it is doing the long walk in handcuffs and leg irons.” With no response from her, he grunted and stomped away into the dark, down the path toward Otis’s Bonneville. She watched as the dome light flickered on and he crawled inside.

  “Lester!” she called out. “Lester, what are you doing?”

  He moved from the back seat to the front, flipping the visors, popping open the glove compartment. Then he reached up behind him and fiddled with the ceiling, and the interior space fell into darkness.

  “Lester!” she shouted again.

  “Go to the garage and get my toolbox,” he yelled.

  She didn’t like the sound of his voice. It was too leveled, too calm. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Get my tools,” he repeated. “Damn thing’s busted.”

  Reluctantly, she turned and went into the house, to the mudroom in the back where she knew his toolbox sat against the wall. If there was something to be fixed, she told herself, it would take time, and attention. She could stall if she needed, give Rodney time to do whatever it was he was doing to get the hell away from there.

  She had just come from the mudroom when a bank of headlights swept over the windows.

  “Oh no,” she said, dropping the metal box in its place and running out onto the porch, just in time to see the taillights of Otis’s Bonneville flickering down the drive toward the highway.

  35

  There were moments when he broke into a run, partly out of fear, partly due to gravity. The slope of the drive dipped more in some places than others, and before he realized it was happening, the cover of trees dwindled, the groves of pine and fir giving way to solitary stands, piles of salal and, like everywhere else around, the pungent scent of sage. Stripes of light blinked over the ground and Rodney knew that he was coming after him, the crackle of tires on gravel and finally the bellowing of Lester’s voice.

  “Rodney!”

  His name, catapulted out, like the blocky, dripping letters of a comic book panel. Oof! Plack! In almost every issue he’d ever bought, or stolen, nobody got away.

  “Come on back, kid! It’s dangerous out here!”

  Rodney thumbed the switch on the flashlight and gave into the moonlight. He felt his way through the sparse brush, to a cluster of salal and the skeletal trunk of a fallen tree. As the white sheet of headlamps swept over his vast world, Rodney sank down to the ground, surrendering himself completely to the landscape. Invisible.

  “You better look out for snakes!” Lester yelled. “This place is riddled with ’em and they don’t take kindly to being woken up!”

  Rodney held himself still as that log, the rocks beneath his body seeming to melt into the wood as Lester rolled on past, the Bonneville creaking over ruts, the engine thrumming, congested, winding down that last hundred yards or so to where the highway lay. The taillights glowing like two angry red eyes as the car waited there, the cloud of smoke tumbling blue. Then the engine howled and the car lurched to the right, kicking into a sharp whine as it charged out onto the open highway, disappearing around a bend and reappearing half a minute later, the headlights almost a breath of yellow now.

  Rodney lay there with the skin of the dead tree brushing his face, the scent of pine and dirt and his stale breath, listening for Lester’s return, which happened in short order, the Bonneville navigating the drive with a lot less care and intention than it had on its way down, a clanging, boneless surrender as it headed past Rodney, homeward.

  36

  Louis moved through the kitchen as if Vinnie might be just on the other side of the wall, sound asleep in his bedroom. But the door was wide open, and the bed made, the old checkered quilt smoothed over and folded down at the head, just as he had left it. As Hattie had left it, rather. Vinnie hadn’t made a bed since the days when their mother was there to stand guard over him.

  He ran a mug of yesterday’s coffee through the microwave, then went on into the front room to watch for Mitchell’s arrival. It was just after six in the morning, and the sun was already creeping up over the east slope. Not much of anything else seemed to be awake out there. Cars waited empty in their driveways up and down the block, porch steps dotted with the morning newspapers, still rolled, banded and uncollected. At his lawn’s edge, a single crow waddled along with its head scanning from one side to the other, looking like a man who’d had lost his keys the night before.

  It had taken some time for Louis to readjust to Vinnie not being there, to put things right-side-up again. Beyond a thankful silence, it was the small things that snagged him: the random appearance of drinking glasses on window sills, or a pair of nail clippers, unfolded and sitting behind the television. A jar of mustard in the freezer. Whispered clues showing the remnant road-map of what had been Vinnie’s day-to-day existence.

  At the end of the block Mitchell’s cruiser came into view, headlights flickering as he steered into the driveway. Louis gave him a wave through the window and drank down the last of the smoky, day-old brew, a layer of grit settling in his throat on its way down.

  “You sleep
all right?” Mitch asked as Louis eased himself down the porch steps.

  “Fine,” he lied. In fact, it had been a rough night. Waking up every couple of hours, straining to make sense of the quiet. He had been riddled with nightmares the last couple of nights, though he could not remember a single detail about them once he was up and holding familiar to the space around him. It had seemed so real, though, the spiraling and screaming, the sensation of something sharp raking at his sides. And then the sudden kick into consciousness as his arm would claw at the air, desperate to catch himself before falling.

  “Must be glad to have your place back,” Mitch said.

  “It’s quieter, that’s for sure.”

  Mitch said, “You sure you’re all right? You look like you were up watching the late movie.”

  “Lester Fanning,” Louis said, changing the subject. “We’re just gonna talk to him, okay? Keep an eye out for anything obvious.”

  “Louis, we talked about all this already,” Mitch reminded him.

  The initial plan had been for Louis to make the drive to Whiskey Hill on his own, but Mitchell put his foot down hard against it. What they already knew about Lester was reason enough for caution. What they didn’t know could well end up with a bullet in the back of both their heads. “And,” Mitch added, “if it turns out he needs his ass brought in, you’ll want a second pair of cuffs.”

  They walked through a half-dozen scenarios before finally getting into their cars and driving out onto Highway 16, Louis’s cruiser in front, the breaking sun intruding through the passenger window and blinding out his periphery. He leaned over and flipped the visor across the window and laid onto the gas. They’d spent way too much time at the house going over everything in too much detail just for the sake of repetition. The last thing he wanted was to give Lester the benefit of the morning.

  There were rigs passing from the north now, and movement in the distance, black spots of cattle grazing in the grassland against the low hills. It was like this when Louis had come to Stevens County for the first time, the sun hovering low like a giant dandelion flower, and an emerald sea of wheat fields that rolled on forever. Something so simple as a blown front tire had brought a half-dozen offers of help within twenty minutes. An off-duty smokejumper guided him to the nearest garage while the man’s pretty young wife gave Louis a warm bottle of 7Up from the back seat and told him she’d pray for him, though he was not sure why. Not up until then—nor since—had he experienced such generosity in his life.

  “Watch out up ahead.” Mitchell’s voice crackled on the radio. Some hundred yards in front of him a figure moved on the shoulder, loping from the pavement to the shoulder, at one point almost disappearing in the line of fence posts.

  Louis took the mic in his hand. “I see him,” he said. He let off the gas, hit the lights, and began to steer carefully toward the shoulder. As he got closer, the figure seemed to shrink deeper into the fence line, finally ducking down into a mound of sage at the base of a leaning post.

  “I think it’s a kid,” Louis said. He pulled off the road and shut off the engine.

  Mitchell was already out and walking up the shoulder when Louis climbed out of his car. The kid—a boy, it looked like—came up from the brush now and held to the fence post as if it were the only thing holding him up. Louis figured he was about eleven or twelve and a sad thing for sure, his bare arms scratched up, blue jeans streaked with dirt and his hair in good need of a heavy comb, or a clipper.

  Louis stood against the front wheel well, looking past the boy down to the nearly endless belt of highway, to where the road finally disappeared between a set of little twin hills.

  “You’re out in the middle of nothing, aren’t you?” Louis said.

  The boy nodded. His dirty face showed patches of clean under his eyes, wiped over his cheeks to his ears.

  “You hurt?”

  He shrugged, and looked down at his own body, reviewing his condition, maybe, before answering. “I guess not,” he said finally, his voice like baked mud.

  Mitch said, “What’s your name?”

  The boy looked between the men, from one to the other. “Rodney,” he said. “Rodney Culver.” And then he pulled back just slightly, as if he half-expected they would know just who he was.

  “Where’d you come from, Rodney?” Louis asked.

  “Wyoming.”

  “You’re a long way from Wyoming, son.” Louis looked back to Mitch, who cocked his head in acknowledgement. “You didn’t come all the way to Washington by yourself, did you?”

  Rodney shook his head, then stared down at his dirty shoes.

  “You hurt, son?”

  Again, a shake of the head.

  “Where might your other half be, then?”

  Rodney looked up from his shoes. His eyes were welled up now. He looked ready to break up.

  As usual, Mitch was one step ahead. “I’ll bring him back with me,” he said, and then he went on over to his cruiser and reached in through the window for the handset.

  Louis said to Rodney, “You’ll head on back with my deputy,” and when the boy’s shoulders sunk, Louis added, “He’s a nice man, has a little kid of his own. He’ll drive you into town and see if he can’t figure all this out for you, get you where you need to be.”

  Mitch came back and said, “We’re all set. I’ll run him to the station and get things situated there, and then come right back if I can. In the meantime, you can go on up to Tiny’s, or head back to the The Blue Plate and wait for me. Have a cup of coffee.”

  Louis said, “I don’t need any more coffee.”

  Mitch leaned into him. “I don’t want you going up there on your own, Lou,” he said. “I want you to promise you’ll wait to hear from me.” The boy was at Mitch’s car now, standing with his hand on the passenger door.

  “If he’s that Wyoming kid,” Louis said, changing the subject, “and that fella brought him across state lines as a fugitive, the feds are gonna have to come in to sort it all out.”

  Mitch stood there for a moment, looking at Louis. Waiting for an answer he wasn’t going to get, Louis supposed. Finally he went on back to his car and got in, then hooked a U-turn and sped off back in the direction of Boone, the little pale face of the boy staring out at Louis through the passenger window as he circled back. As soon as Mitch disappeared around the bend, Louis climbed back into his car and fired it up. He drummed his fingers on the dashboard and considered the distance to Tiny’s Roadhouse, and back to The Blue Plate, where the service was always slow and the coffee disappointing. It was already past seven o’clock. Out to the west, a tawny cloud lifted into the sky.

  “To hell with this,” Louis said, tossing his hat onto the passenger seat and knocking the car into gear.

  It was just under a mile past the substation, marked by a big green transformer box right there at the highway. The dirt road broke left and snaked up to the northwest, through the low-lying firs and white oaks, up to where the line of pine trees began, where weekend hunters and anglers tended to wander. There were enough tributaries in there to lose a man for days, but Louis steered on in anyway, keeping himself to the right, driving past the NO TRESPASSING signs, the warnings of guard dogs and stenciled pictures of shotguns.

  He kept to a crawl, giving himself a quiet trail of dust and ample opportunity to make sense of the view that spread out in front of him. At last the road leveled out and he came upon an injured-looking wooden gate, the planks cracked and warped by the weather. The drive dipped to a swale before rising up into a thicket of Ponderosas and larches. Through an opening near the top he could see the rough-hewn siding of a house, and the front end of a familiar sedan peeking out from behind the trees.

  He brought his cruiser to a stop next to the Buick, and got out of the car, his thumb hooked over his belt, near his holster. There were vehicles here to rival the U-Pick, rusted-out sedans with sprays of grass reaching out of open hoods, pickup trucks on cinderblocks, a paneled van with half-drawn curtains in i
ts windows. At the front end of the Buick sat a good-sized stack of boxes, a heap of clothes piled over the top. Men’s flannel, denim and such.

  Halfway between the Buick and a vine-choked Volkswagen Beetle, a slick-looking green Bonneville sat with its windows rolled down and its rear driver’s side door swung wide open. Wyoming plates, in fact.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Louis said aloud. If the circumstances were different he might have knocked the car in reverse, and slipped back down the mountain. Waited for Mitch after all. But there was the tired sound of a weathered screen and Louis turned to the front doorway, where Lester Fanning stood gaping, his mouth slack and stupid, a cardboard box the size of a television balanced in his arms. He wore a duck-billed cap on his head, pushed back like a yokel, eyes ticking from Louis to his cruiser, to the Buick and the Bonneville.

  “Lester.”

  “You here to check on my taillight?” Lester gave a throaty laugh and took a step forward, raising the box to his chin. “Mind if I set this down?” he said. “It’s heavy as a sonofabitch.”

  Louis nodded.

  “I would not want to spook you,” Lester said, lowering the box to the porch. “End up shot on my own porch.”

  Louis said, “I appreciate the consideration.” He unsnapped his holster, just the same. “Looks like you’re headed somewhere urgent.”

  “Just clearing out some clutter,” he said, walking toward Louis. “Getting an early start before the sun starts punishing us.”

  “It will do that,” Louis said. He fought the urge to look back over to the Bonneville, but gave in to a quick scan over the area. The myriad of rusted-out cars, the pine-cloaked shed in the distance, its orange, mossed roof poking above the smaller trees. One thing at a time, Louis.