"Boyd."
The big man was on the bank with a beer bottle in one hand. He had a G.I. flashlight in his other, and when he spun about, its beam jerked up, assuring Sherburne he had managed surprise. For some reason, the limp cigarette visible between his lips made Sherburne's muscles tense.
"What the hell you doing here, old man? If you're messing with me, I'mo screw you up something bad.” He was leaning down, probably to feel for a stick, when Sherburne's instep caught him in the crotch. It was a forceful kick, meant to be decisive, as he knew Boyd was stronger, and in a tussle along rough, dark ground, strength might play a roll he couldn't risk.
Half of him wanted to repeat the technique, catch him under the chin this time and end it, but he had to say his piece, as if an abbreviated trial were required in some fine print deep in the book of revenge.
"Is this too rough for you, Boyd? Rougher than you handled my daughter?"
Boyd was gasping for breath, and under the sound of moving water, his voice was scarcely audible.
"Say again."
Boyd reached forward with his right hand, setting it on the ground before him, perhaps to steady himself, perhaps to seize a stone. Sherburne rested his heel on the back of the hand and pressed.
"Talk to me, Boyd. You beat her, beat her bad sometimes, over and again. She couldn't admit it, but it got so bad she couldn't hide it. This is no time to run from the truth. You beat her when she was carrying the baby, isn't that right ... son?” He ground his heel a little harder.
"Yeah ... no, wait....” He was catching his breath but sobbing, probably stalling to weigh his chances. “I mean, we fought. She could be rough, too, you know. Wasn't no frail thing. It got outa hand. She could drink, too, and you know...” weighing again, “you know how it gets for cops, the anger, and they bring it home, but not with the baby. I never, ever. That was when we was going to fix everything. I swear I was going to get help...."
"And when she was sick. That last day, when she packed up her truck and came back home for keeps. You'd been at her then."
"No. I swear it. I tried to get her calmed. I shook her a little, but nothing bad.” Boyd was sobbing hard, straining to get control over his frightened body.
"Boyd, if I can't get the truth out of you, I'm going to kill you tonight. You understand?"
A mistake to warn him, to impress him with the urgency of his situation. The water was flashing by behind Boyd, and there were cicadas starting up in the pines, their song a separate current. Sherburne's muscles suddenly went slack on him, his breath audible and quick through his nostrils. He was wavering, something inside him was fraying. Find out, that was all he really needed. The confession should be enough. There was still law. He suddenly felt he wasn't going to be up to it after all.
That was when Boyd rose in one gathered, calculated motion and made his rush.
Sherburne let him come, swung his left leg in an arc, letting his body follow. It was almost a matador's move, his hands barely touching the lurching attacker, guiding him into the sycamore as if offering graceful assistance. When Boyd's head struck the trunk, its bark whitish even in the dark, the crack was loud, and Sherburne would have bet the farm right there it was a lethal blow, despite the low, almost sleepy sound that came from Boyd's mouth. His body gave one full spasm, like a hoed snake, then a couple of quiet twitches before it slumped. As the old man knelt by the body to feel the neck for a heartbeat, he could hear only the stream, which was surging, and then Levi snorting up the hill. No pulse, and he drew in a long breath and said, “Well."
The rest was just business, a policeman working his standard procedures in reverse. He needed to get Boyd's truck downstream a piece, his body upstream, then open the weirs to let the trapped water flow over the site of the struggle. With his flashlight, he saw there was almost no blood, so the gambit was simple: create a scene for Boyd's fish business below the killing ground, then get the body into one of the shallow caverns upstream. Weight him and wedge him. He would need to use the horse and lariat to pull some big stones over, then clear up the tracks with water and brush. If he did it with craft and thoroughness, it would just be a mysterious disappearance, foul play suspected but the questions remaining unanswered. Boyd had plenty of enemies, and narrowing the field would be no small task. Now, he would need an hour, hour and a half. And he had the time, so long as nobody happened along, so long as luck was on his side.
As he went back for the horse, he realized he was not feeling anything, not about Boyd or Ree or the law, certainly not about the status of his soul. It was a series of tasks to be done by the numbers, and though he was sweating in the cool night, it was just labor, he thought, the body cooling itself. There would be time to reckon the meaning later. He stood the body up, then knelt to swing it over his shoulder. Boyd's wrist where he was holding it was like ice. The owl shirred its call, closer this time, and though it sounded like the beginning of his name, he didn't mind.
Covering the horse's trail back to the truck took longer than he'd expected, but by the time he got Levi tied in and the rig turned around on the tarmac, the first taps of rain struck the dusk on the windscreen, and he knew somebody must be looking out for him. As he'd expected, he didn't pass a single vehicle on the way home.
* * * *
Watching McCall's dust diminish in the distance, he strides over and ducks between two strands of wire, thinking to free the bird from its cell, but his approach agitates the creature so much its flailing wings knock the ribcage further to the side, and it flaps, waddles and shucks free, then rises, moving low across the field, cawing what might be either relief or protest.
What is proper penance? he wonders. All those years, and only one killing in the line of duty, a moonshiner named Suggs, in unquestioned self-defense. Not even an inquest, but now he has this shame to bear and no real life to carry it. Nothing but the heat and need for more rain.
Inside again, he gathers his shaving gear and brings it to the bench under the front window. Razor snug in its ivory handle, strop, frayed towel, the basin and ewer of water, tin of soap powder, the wide shard of mirror, which he props on the window sill. Lathered up, he looks hard into the glass, which is losing back-silver. When he locates his eyes clearly between the flecks, he finds them foreign, no more truthful than Boyd's. Eye for an eye.
He has not dared to look this hard in weeks, and what he sees is less than he had hoped but about what he expected: an old man, cheeks growing hollow, tracks around the eyes as long as an adult crow's splayed feet, lips full, as if swollen from lying. He has not wept since the last day at the grave, and he knows he will shed no tears now. As he brings the razor up, he sees his eyes even more clearly in the stainless blade that has been in the family at least three generations. “Bright as a star,” he thinks, and a wave passes through him, a shiver. The sun is on his neck, but he is cold, seeing himself in the two surfaces, two selves that refuse to resolve.
Hell, he thinks, I might's well do it. Outside here would be best. Not so much mess to clean up. He should telephone Sawyer down at the office and just tell him, “Something out here you need to see, pronto.” And McCall could handle it. He's not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he's steady, strong in his way. And he couldn't be sure how people would read it, though simple grief over Ree would be ample explanation. Likely they'd never uncover Boyd's body, or if somebody did someday, when the creek turned or developers came to throw up vacation bungalows, it would all be ancient history. The consequences he was suffering right now were his sentence, and if it wasn't exactly remorse, it was regret. So where did his duty lie now? To the name, the office, Ree's memory? He could just turn himself in. The boys in the force would arrange for him to enjoy the best treatment possible, and Cree Dunlop would see to it that any trials, appeals, would drag out. Plead his record, his sorrow. The quarrel in the toilet would come out, and the struggle at the creek would become another scuffle, another case of self-defense. His only real crime would be the cover-up, and that would not c
ost him so much, the Sherburne name less deeply stained. Everyone would sympathize.
Make the call, then pull the Sheffield blade across his carotid and watch the first blood spurt at the patchy face in the mirror? Or make the call and get dressed to wait for his old friends to come haul him off?
He cannot see the vertical stone on the cemetery rise from here, but he can feel it, and he can remember the day she admitted that Boyd was not kind to her, that he'd gone over the line. She was lying back in the La-Z-Boy, looking stronger than usual, though she'd just finished her weekly round of poisons. Before the full effect would usually hit her, about midnight, she'd have a few hours of something like her old self.
"I'd kill for a cigarette, Daddy."
"You just about have."
"Yeah, I guess. You must not have smoked them right, unstruck as you are by tobacco. You'd think I'd have inherited that along with the appetite."
He wondered if she meant to make him ashamed, or if this was just twilight banter.
"You got your mother's gumption, Honeyree, and her kindly ways, but I expect her frailness was hidden somewhere down in you, too."
"One more smoke won't kill me."
"I won't kill you either, Ree. You know that. And you know I don't trust myself to even keep them in the house, so I couldn't give you one if I was weak enough to try.” He could feel a sob forming inside him, and he turned to the window where the day's last streak of light lingered.
"Maybe it's my only way out of the Boyd situation, this whole breakdown. These last few years, life has been, I don't know ... not even the job or the horses.... I never thought I'd let it happen to me. Other things, too, things you don't know."
He kneeled beside the chair and extended the glass of Canada Dry in his hands. Instead of looking at her eyes, he looked at the bubbling surface and the fizzing spray above it.
"What exactly? Tell me what he did."
"You know already, Daddy. And you know I appreciate you not taking a hand at it. This was mine, run or stumble, and I botched it. I fell, and it's my fall. It's my doing and my undoing, fair enough. The cancer, it's just a footnote."
"No connection, Honeyree. And you ran faster, stronger than anybody. You are a hell of a woman.” He could see the desperation in her eyes until she turned them down to look at the soda, then lifted it to her lips. He knew better than to offer false encouragement. Dr. Phipps had said just the past Friday, “Days, maybe, weeks at best. See to her comfort, and encourage her to order her soul."
"Her soul's not your business, Henry. Nobody's. Best you get your bag and go bother some other ailing ... soul."
"Might be a pack in the truck's glove box, Daddy. Stale probably, but dry, that's for sure.” She managed a smile.
When he returned with the Camels, she was asleep, and he crushed the pack in his hands, listening to the wrap crinkle like a small fire. It was the last real conversation they'd have without morphine playing a major role, and in ten days she was gone. “Run or stumble” was what stuck with him, and “my fall."
But he'd broken the understanding, the “contract,” her training would obligate her to say. “Breached.” And his contracts with the law and his blood, so there are two kinds of calls he can make, or he can just buck up and live with it, play the hand he's dealt. He thinks, I've lived with plenty already.
He shaves precisely, carefully, listening to the emery sound of steel on stubble—rasp across cheek, along the jawline, the little wattle under his chin. Squinting and angling to keep the sun out of his eyes, he flicks suds off the blade and into the withered grass, and when he's done, he wipes himself dry and throws the towel and strop over his shoulder, then pitches the contents of the basin. The sudsy water slashes in the sun and slaps the flagstone, and he turns to fold the razor, then carefully draws it across his thumb, where the blood is at first a rosebud, then a seam of scarlet, which he licks, only to discover that the numbness has left his tongue. The man in the mirror is a version of himself, a remnant. He says simply, “Yes. For now, yes. Bear it."
The freed buzzard, or some other—too high now to be certain—is riding a thermal above him, and he thinks, Rid myself of that horse skeleton before the sun sets, get it where it belongs, as he steps over the threshold and enters the house again, turning to cast a long look across the fence and over the bleak field. Ever so gently, first with his elbow, then his hip, he shuts the door.
© Copyright 2009 by R. T. Smith
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Fiction: WHAT THE MONSTER SAW by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Last year's Readers Award winner, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, will probably remember 2008 as a banner year, for she also received the Readers Award of our sister publication, Asimov'sScience Fiction. Ms. Rusch uses the pseudonym Kris Nelscott for novels featuring her P.I. Smokey Dalton. Dalton's 2006 outing, Days of Rage, was nominated for the Shamus Award and won the Spotted Owl Award for Best Northwest Mystery.
She might have vanished forever if it weren't for a haphazard glance by Kyle Worthington. He was walking past the alley on 63rd, his cell phone in his left hand as he showed his friends Mason and Devin the one-touch video feature his dad had forbidden him to use.
It was eighty-six degrees in October and the streets reeked of piss and garbage. Kyle had tied his woolen school jacket around his waist, rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, and loosened his tie. He didn't dare pull it off because he'd never get it tied again; somehow he couldn't learn the over-and-under pattern, and his dad had forbidden his mom from tying it for him. No way he was going to ask his buddies to do it. With them, he wasn't Kyle Worthington, the good-for-nothing only son of Jackson Worthington, he was the Big K, the kid who'd seen the inside of half a dozen impossible-to-get-into private schools and lived to tell about it.
The Big K knew stuff that hardly anyone else knew. He had the latest, coolest gadget before anyone else, and he could chat up the prettiest girls because he was indifferent to dating any of them. Rumor had it that he didn't date in high school because he had his pick of the college girls that filled the city.
He liked the rumor. It kept the attention off him, and allowed his shyness to manifest itself as an intense need for privacy instead of the nearly pathological aversion to close companionship that had him going to counselors since he was six.
He'd learned, thanks to one very driven therapist and all those private schools, how to make casual conversation with almost anyone. He'd also learned how attract hangers-on and the occasional groupie just by letting the rumors swirl. Kids cared as long as he didn't seem to, an attitude he blew big time as he swung his cell toward the alley on that hot October afternoon.
"Christ!” he said, and took a step back.
There was a girl in the garbage. Her eyes were closed, her long black hair flowing around her. Her features were delicate, and her mouth small.
But her face wasn't what caught him. What caught him were her hands, curved into fists and flopped beside that sea of hair, and her bare arms, bruised and covered with blood.
It took him a second to realize that what he'd initially taken for a black garbage bag tossed over her torso was a mat of drying blood. And weirdly, horribly, he couldn't see her legs at all.
"Dude, what the hell?” Mason stopped beside him, looking up at him, as Mason always did.
Kyle couldn't say anything. He was frozen, one arm up, clutching his cell. He wasn't looking at her anymore—he couldn't—but he was searching through the piles of black bags for a sign that he was staring at more than the upper half of what had once been a living, breathing human being.
"Crap, man,” Devin said, and promptly vomited all over the sidewalk.
Mason stepped back, but Kyle didn't move. He was staring at the image on the cell now, the one he'd inadvertently captured. The girl's face in closeup—those delicate features oddly familiar.
He knew her. Well, he didn't really know her, but he recognized her.
She was the Breck Girl. That wasn't her real n
ame. That was the nickname one of the male teachers gave her after he'd caught some of the boys looking at her online.
Kyle had downloaded her YouTube video six months before, and had bookmarked her Web site, www.tallystipsforhair.com. It was a video blog all about hairstyling because, she'd said with a twinkle in her eye, no matter what they claimed, guys looked at a girl's hair first.
He'd always meant to e-mail her and tell her she was wrong. Guys looked at tits first or a really fine ass. But he had never been able to bring himself to write the letter. It was just a little too crass, and he'd always had hope of meeting her, even though he hadn't known, until now, that she lived anywhere near New York City.
"What do we do, man?” Mason asked.
The question snapped Kyle back to the alley, which now reeked of vomit as well as garbage and blood. He pressed Save with his thumb. Then he dialed 911, and braced himself for the long, lost afternoon ahead.
* * * *
It was midnight before he was alone with his computer. He sat in the dim glow from the monitor, his heart pounding.
Months ago, he had put blackout fabric over his door and pulled the shades down on his windows, but he still felt watched. He had finally gone to the spy shop near Ground Zero and bought a bug zapper. He had brought it home and found half a dozen bugs all over his room, as well as two hidden cameras.
He had pulled the bugs out of his phone and off the lamp bases. Then he had brought them to his mother.
"I think Dad forgot these,” he had said, and she had flushed. He had no idea what she had done with them, but he knew she hadn't confronted his father about them.
She never confronted his father, not even this evening when his dad ripped him a new one for bringing the Worthington name into such a sordid affair as a murder, as if Kyle had killed the girl himself.
EQMM, July 2009 Page 11