by Warren Read
“As long as you’re loading things up,” he said, “I wondered if I might take a look at that trunk of yours. Once more.”
“You came all the way out here for that?” Lester laughed and shook his head. “Seems like a long drive just to get a second look but come on then.”
Louis followed him to the rear of the car, standing back as Lester popped the trunk open. It was like he’d remembered. The red and green wool blanket, folded like a gift over the bottom. Jumper cables and jack, tucked against the side. The wires to the taillight were secure.
“You want me to take all this out?” Lester asked.
Louis shook his head and leaned against the fender, running his hand over the length of the open trunk door. The paint was smooth, unblemished all along the edge. “I guess I’m just curious is all.”
“Curious, you say? What about exactly?”
“I’m curious why you swapped out the old one,” Louis said. “The old trunk lid.”
“That’s it?” Lester asked with a laugh. “You want to know about the old trunk? That’s easy. The old one, it got all dented up when I was in town one day. One afternoon. Some kids playing ball. Kids’ stuff is all.”
“In Boone?”
“Naw, I was up in Colville. Stopped off at the park to eat some takeout. Some Indian kids. They were playing is all. No real harm.”
Louis thought of the old trunk lid there at the U-Pick, and all the divots that had poked up from below, from the inside. He would come back to that.
“You’ve got quite a collection of rigs here,” he said.
“One of my vices,” Lester said. “I bring ’em in but can’t seem to take ’em back out.” He laughed again, that sickly crackle from deep in his throat.
Louis thumbed his holster and looked back over to the Bonneville, at the door that lay open like an invitation. Lester’s breathing heavy, clipped. Beyond them, the drone of Louis’s radio carried on inside that car, the windows rolled up tight. He should go and see what the chatter was about, to check in with Mitch. But he could not stand in two places at once. Lester stood there smiling at him, like some little schoolboy standing for a portrait.
“Out of curiosity, what else do you bring in, Lester?”
“Excuse me?”
“What else do you bring in? You ever bring in guests here? People looking for a quick stopover on their way to somewhere else?”
“Ain’t that what guests do? Stop over?” When Louis didn’t answer, Lester stepped back on his heels, his lips tightening over his teeth. “I don’t know what you’re sniffing at,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Louis finally said. “I meant family. Old friends.” He gave a pause then, just enough to draw out the question.
Lester’s face shifted a slight bit, a single bead of sweat rolling down his temple like rain on glass. Louis took out the little red booklet from his trouser pocket and slapped it against his leg. Lester looked down and locked onto it, and Louis was struck by his face in that moment, how he seemed to go through a half-dozen thoughts in the blink of an eye.
The creak of the screen hinges from behind snapped Louis’s attention from Lester and the Buick, and the green Bonneville, and Wyoming, from the radio still crackling in his cruiser. A woman came out onto the porch, a cardboard box in her arms, the tangle of cords spilling over the edges like tendrils. She held in place, the screen door resting against her shoulder, her mouth in an O.
Louis told her Good morning, and it was when he took a single step toward her that she reached out her hands to him, the box slipping from her cradle, tipping outward, the contents of radio and clock, and glass jar—a vase, maybe—blue as a peacock, the white of the sunlight catching its rim as the thing tumbled end over end to the ground.
37
The room smelled of bleach and coffee and suspicion. The deputy named Mitch had the seat opposite Rodney, the chair turned backward between his legs. Like Rodney’s father had done that night, those suitcases of his sitting at his feet, the wash of surrender all down his face.
“Do we have any food in here, Holly?” Mitch asked.
“I could scare up something,” she said. She walked off to a back room and came back with a package of little donuts, laying them carefully on Rodney’s knee. She grinned back at him as he devoured them, those round apple cheeks of hers, her yellow hair—too yellow, really—piled on her head like a sleeping bird.
Mitch took the papers and rolled them up in his hand, picking at the edges, staring down at it as if he could read through the layers. It was Holly who had produced these, when Mitch had told her Rodney’s name.
“That’s you,” she’d said to Rodney. “Parents, Rose and Gilbert?” A question, testing him. The APB itself had gone missing, she explained to the deputy, lost under a handful of fresh Most Wanted bills, drug runners who were probably already halfway to Mexico by now. The kid should have stayed on top, she told him.
Mitch told her not to blame herself, that he was where he needed to be now. He unfurled the stack and began to thumb through them, his eyes clicking between Rodney and the papers. “What can you tell me about Otis Dell?”
The name was still rot, and it floated in the air as the sick stench that it was. Rodney felt himself melt into his chair, his head spinning with the downward slide. And then there came a flutter of images, of Otis walking away from him and folding over the ground, and falling from Lester down into the earth, legs tumbling like a rag doll’s. And there was the smell, the rotten stench from deep below, from where Otis now lay all alone in the dark, so far from the living.
Holly said, “I’ll go put a call into Wyoming.”
Mitch put a hand up. “Before you do that, check in with Lou.” he said. “Tell him I said Lester Fanning can wait till tomorrow.”
Rodney had not expected to hear Lester’s name like that, not there in that room, with these people. Not yet. And he had not expected the power it would have over him, safe as he was now, Lester on that mountain or wherever he was. His gut bobbed like a log in the water, and he leaned over his knees and gave up those donuts in one yellow heave, all over the linoleum floor.
Oh lord, Holly gasped, jumping back. She ran off down the hallway and back again, a fistful of paper towels waving in her hand like it was a fan. Taking the seat next to him, she pressed the towels to his mouth until he took them from her, and as he moved them over his face, she rested her hand on his back, moving it in little circles.
Mitch said, “Well, now. Something isn’t setting right with you. And I’m willing to bet it ain’t the donuts.”
Rodney wiped at his mouth once more and bunched the paper into his fist.
“Rodney,” the deputy said. “Tell me about Lester.”
“It’s okay, honey,” Holly said.
Rodney flashed on the hillside and the yellow spotlights that fell through the trees, and the smell of Otis as his body swung like a sack between Lester and Nadine. The way Lester swore at him and snatched that flashlight out of his hand like he might beat him with it. How he told him to move closer to the well. The sound of his voice calling from Otis’s Bonneville, the wash of light over the ground. Rodney, invisible.
“Lester,” he said, “put Otis down the hole.”
Mitchell looked to Holly, who swooped round the counter as if a starting gun had fired off, snatching the handset from the radio.
38
When the sheriff stepped toward her, Nadine didn’t have time to think, much less do anything as Lester swung the iron over his head like it was a fly swatter, and that was when Nadine let go of everything, dumping the whole box onto the porch as she sucked in a day’s worth of that wicked air.
The iron landed hard, and the sheriff’s eyes squeezed shut as he reached back with his hand, a reflex no doubt, since of course there was no way he could know what had just happened to him. He grabbed hold of his head, the wash of blood seeping through his fingers and spilling down his forearm. He staggered forward, each step pulling him closer to the ground
until he finally fell to his knees, the blood painting the crabgrass below his face with tiny red specks.
Nadine leaned back hard against the screen, her hands pressed to her teeth. The sickness in her pushed at her throat and she knew that any second it would be all over, over the porch, her clothes, everywhere. Lester paced the sheriff from head to foot, hovering down at him like he was a deer shot out of season. “Oh, Lester,” she cried. “You’ve lost your mind.”
“Damn it, Nadine.” He drew the tire iron far behind him and hurled it overhead, launching it into the forest in an unexpectedly long arc. “Don’t you turn on me now.”
For a moment she felt like she was lifting from the floorboards, like she might float right over the railings and be carried off by the breeze. She took hold of the post and then came down the porch steps to get a better look at the sheriff, to see what Lester had done to him. His eyes were open just slightly, though she had no idea if he was seeing anything out of them. His chest rose and fell in broken, random waves, the tiny blades of grass at his face quivering with each breath.
“We need to call someone,” she said.
“Go get the wheelbarrow from behind the garage,” Lester said. He circled around the sheriff’s body and went to the passenger side of the Skylark, swinging the door open and climbing inside. “Load up as many bags of quicklime as you can get in there!” he shouted.
Nadine stumbled back and felt the porch step dig into her ankle. She would not move up those stairs again, and she would not go to him. She would not answer him, or even look at him. She just couldn’t do it.
“Nadine,” Lester said, standing up and slamming the car door behind him. “You hear what I’m saying to you?” Something moved at his side, the metal catching the sun just so as he drummed it against his leg. He was doing that on purpose, she knew. All for her.
“Why do you got the gun, Lester,” she asked. “It’s just you and me here, now.”
“I don’t know who’s coming,” he said, walking back to her. “And to be honest, baby, I don’t know what kind of shit you might pull from one minute to the next.”
“Oh come on, now,” she said, taking hold of the porch railing and forcing a smile. “It’s me.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
He followed behind her to the garage, where he watched as she piled the bags of quicklime into the wheelbarrow. He didn’t hold the gun on her, like she was some kind of prisoner, but he didn’t tuck it away, either. He held it there at his side, slapping the barrel against his thigh like it was something he had to do in order to keep from going to sleep or something.
She gritted her teeth until the ache reached up into her head. “This is crazy, Lester,” she said. “I don’t need to be any part of this.”
He took two steps toward her. “You were there when them China people came through here, right?” he said. “You fed ’em, made up their bed. You lived off the money I made from it. You’re just as much a part of this as I am.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Push me far enough and find out how much I care about fair.
He took the red passport from his pocket and flung it at her, sending it ricocheting off her chest. She bent down to pick it up, thumbing to the little square photo inside. The man looked to be Lester’s age or thereabouts, fat teabags under his eyes, waves of curly hair crashing from either side of his head. There was not an ounce of happiness in that face.
“It’s Russian?” The print was a kind she had seen somewhere before, maybe in the movies, or one of her magazines.
Lester moved back from her, leaned against the side of the garage and gave a jittery nod, a single drop of sweat holding onto the tip of his nose. “It just happened,” he said. His arms fell loose at his sides now and his body slouched, as if some imaginary plug had been pulled and drained half of Lester onto the ground.
The possibilities settled in her gut like a coil of snakes. “What just happened?” She took a step toward him, as if the conversation should be more private than it was. “What did you do to this man?”
He swiped his hand over his face, then brushed it down over his trousers, leaving a dark, damp patch against the denim. “If you’d of hustled your ass to get there when I called you, I wouldn’t of been stuck in that jail all night, would I?” He held the pistol at his side now, and Nadine noticed then a rub of blood over the flannel of his shirt. The old sheriff’s blood.
“By the time we got back to the car it was a fucking oven inside there,” he said.
“The trunk,” Nadine said.
“He should of only been in there for an hour, hour and a half, tops. It should of been fine.”
“Oh, Lester.” Nadine felt the sick coming on again.
Lester looked at her so coolly, so resigned. “Let’s get a move on,” he snapped. “Before half the police in the state show up on this drive.”
Just as she could see that the plywood had already been pulled back, the miasma of decomposition enveloped her, fruity and thick. Nadine navigated the wheelbarrow as best she could, the bucket top-heavy with quicklime and rocking like a boat, all the while Lester paced beside her, the pistol now tucked into his waistband. In each hand he held a black plastic garbage bag, swinging them at his sides like he was ringing bells.
“What are we doing with all this?”
He ignored her, instead pitching one garbage bag into the well, and then the other, both in a gloriously high arc.
She set down the wheelbarrow and went to pick up a bag of lime from the top.
“Hold on,” Lester said. He looked at her hard, and she knew in an instant what was working inside that head of his. His eyes twitched as they held onto her gaze, almost vibrating, and it was only when she glanced up the hill toward the house that he gave her the slightest nod of his chin.
“No,” she said.
“Nadine.”
“I said no, Lester. The man’s not even dead.”
“You don’t know that. And if he’s not now, he sure as hell will be soon enough.” He reached out and took hold of her arm, and she snapped it back from him. “Nadine,” he said.
“Don’t you dare touch me,” she said, glancing down at the pistol tucked there against his belly.
He paused for the shortest of moments, a snapshot, really. Eyebrows raised in surprise. Lower lip sunk like a caught fish. Shock, maybe, that she should stand her ground like that. But just as suddenly the moment was gone and he came at her—his hands out at his sides, the fingers curled like roots.
“Woman,” he hissed, reaching for the gun, “I’m gonna make you wish I never picked you up that day.”
It all happened so quickly, quicker than the sheriff and the tire iron, and absolutely a hell of a lot quicker than it had to have been for that poor Russian. Nadine’s arms left her sides like they’d been attached to springs, launching out in front of her before she even knew what she had done. She struck him squarely in his stomach, the blow against flannel like pressing on a baby’s blanket, so soft and peculiarly warm against her bare hands. It all gave way so easily. What had pulled at Lester’s face only seconds earlier let go of him, his mouth dropped slack, his eyes as wide as they had ever been. He took three or four steps back to keep his balance, to regain control over what his body was doing, thanks to her. Unfortunately for him, they were only two steps from the well.
With the exception of a single, primal howl, he dropped as easily as Otis had, though there was a good deal more from Lester in the way he carried on, the windmill of arms, a futile effort to grab hold of what was not there. Within a blink, he disappeared into the blackness and it was only when the sharp cry rose up, like a dog’s yelp, that Nadine finally had a sense of how deep things were down there.
“Don’t tell me what to wish for,” she said, spitting into the black pit. “You son of a bitch.”
She took up the wheelbarrow and dumped it and all five bags of quicklime into the opening. There was the sharp, momentary echo of the metal’s impact a
nd that was it. Taking the corner of the plywood, Nadine slid it over the opening. And as she walked back up the hill to the house, she paused every few steps or so to look over her shoulder, to remind herself of how quickly that spot hid itself once you got a certain distance from it.
39
It was Hattie’s laugh that woke him up, the sound of a chicken cackling, really. She cozied up by the corner window, her hand holding a leaking cigarette through the open wedge. Vinnie sat in the lounge seat next to her, his legs stretched out, almost touching the end of Louis’s bed.
“Welcome back.”
Louis lolled his head to the side, an iron grip over his scalp. Mitch straddled a stick chair, his arms folded over the seatback, a radiator grin stretching from sideburn to sideburn.
“I guess I got my bell rung pretty good,” Louis said, reaching to touch the back of his head.
“That you did,” Mitch said.
Louis pushed himself up from the mattress, the tug of a needle pinching at his forearm. Mitch leaned forward and took the little control box sitting on the bunched blankets, handing it over so Louis could fumble with it, giving himself a couple false starts before riding the drawbridge up.
“How long have I been out?”
“Better part of a couple days, give or take.”
“Give or take a day?”
“Give or take out,” Mitch laughed. “Holly’s been beside herself.”
Vinnie called out from his corner, “We thought you might be a goner for a while there. Son of a bitch got you a good one.” He took up the TV remote and clicked at the screen, scrolling channels like dealing cards, round one end and down the other, never settling on any one station long enough to decide if it was worth watching or not.
Louis looked to Mitchell. “I’m supposing it was Fanning who did the honors.”
“I kind of hoped you’d be able to shed a little light on that. But yeah, that’s my guess.”
“You got him in custody?”
“In a sense,” he said. “It’s kind of an ugly discovery. They’re gonna be up there for a while, sifting through it all. Looks like Lester’s been up to no good for quite some time.”