The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  I couldn't have been entirely wrong about Bannion. Even small town cops have a parochial sense of honor, a small spot of sentimentality. And I was guessing that Porky was smack in the center of Red's conscience. I was also guessing that Porky wasn't a part of Red's scam, and that Red didn't want him to know how he'd been moonlighting. I guessed right, because Bannion clicked down on the chair and peered at me over the rims of his glasses.

  “You're lying,” he said in a tough, steady voice.

  I leaned back against the wall. “Right after I got through with the Jellicoes, Red. He knows all about you.”

  Bannion juggled the gun. “Rafe!” he shouted.

  A second later, the black bounded through the door.

  “Take this son-of-a-bitch out back and kill him. I'm going back to town.”

  “Yessuh,” he said. “Whatchu want me to do with the body?”

  “In the lime pit, Rafe. I'll be back out here tomorrow, early.”

  He started for the door. “Work him over a little, Rafe, before you shoot him,” he said over his shoulder. “That boy needs to be taught to respect his elders ‘fore he dies.”

  He stepped out the door and off the porch. And, in a minute, the woodland silence was broken by the sound of the engine.

  Rafe watched me while the sound of the car faded through the trees. His face was dull-eyed and vicious and I could see the muscles in his forearms flexing a little. He had a pistol tucked in his belt. I looked down at it, and he smiled.

  “Why don' you try?” he said impartially. “You big enough.”

  I showed him the cuffs.

  He shook his head. “Not yet. Git over to the table.”

  I walked over and sat down.

  “You wanna drink, maybe?” He walked over to a carton in the corner beside the door and fished a bottle out of it. Rafe moved with a boxer's rolling gait. He bounced on his feet and strutted in front of me. He was enjoying it—making me wait until he was ready. He cracked the seal on the whiskey bottle, tilted it to his lips, and took a long drink. His dull brown eyes never left me for a second.

  Like most old boxers, Rafe had something soft and childlike in his face. I was hoping it was stupidity and not simply scar tissue. He didn't move stupidly, that was sure. He was quick and lithe and agile. One of those rare men who are absolutely confident about their bodies. He was about my height, maybe ten or fifteen pounds heavier.

  He had a gold tooth in the back of his mouth and, when he smiled suddenly—his thick yellow lips opening in animal rictus and his fat yellow nose splaying against his cheeks—it glittered in the lamp light. Rafe dangled the bottle at his side, walked over to my chair and, in one swift movement, broke the bottle across the back of my skull.

  I fell out of the chair to the floor, and he kicked me hard in the chest.

  I didn't know where to try to reach first. I could feel the glass shards in my scalp, and my chest was burning. I doubled up in the fetal position. He walked around me a few times, kicking me at his leisure. Hard, swift kicks. When he got to my groin, I passed out.

  ******

  When I came out of it, I was still on the floor, curled up like a baby. It was late. I could hear the night humming outside the cabin windows.

  He'd built a fire in the chimney and the room flickered in the firelight. He'd turned the hurricane lamp down. It was glowing softly on the table.

  I wet my lips. They worked.

  It's hard to describe what the rest of me felt like. There might have been a spot or two on my torso that didn't burn with a bruise. I couldn't tell. I'd been worked over before, but this was the worst I'd taken. I ached inside and out. And I knew, at once, that I couldn't take any more—that if he slugged me again I would hemorrhage all to hell on the inside and drown in my own blood. It hurt to take a breath.

  “I see you comin' around.”

  He was sitting at the table above me. There was another bottle in his hand. Something bright and terrifying was glittering beside the lamp.

  I tried to roll over and groaned.

  “H'm,” he said. “That was jus' round one, honey. Y'all goin' to hate round two.”

  He stood over me and grabbed me by the handcuffs and dragged me to the second chair, which he'd set across from his at the table.

  “Git up!” he roared and yanked me to my feet.

  For a second, I thought I was going to pass out again. He plopped me on the chair and sat down across from me.

  He picked up the razor and teased it with his thumb.

  “Please,” I said. “Shoot me.”

  He laughed—a truly terrifying laugh and stared madly at my face.

  “No, honey. That's round three.”

  “Why?” I swallowed some blood and made my eyes focus on him.

  “Like the man said, I don't like you. When I was in ‘Nam, had me a boy like you in the outfit. Man you should have seen what I did to that po' soul.”

  “What outfit?” I said stupidly.

  “LURPs,” he said. “Y'all in ‘Nam?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned back and gazed at me. “Maybe we skip round two,” he said.

  I had gotten a bit of body sense back. I knew which way I was facing. And I could move my right arm. Given another few minutes, I could stand. I wanted those minutes.

  “I was with a Cav patrol got wiped out in Ia Drang valley,” he said. “You go back that far?”

  “‘65,” I said.

  “That's it!” He slapped the table. “Charley killed every last soul in my outfit, 'cept me. Had to hide under the bodies whilst they stuck 'em to make sure we was dead.” I looked over at his face. It was mournful and remote. “Some'n happen to me after that. My mind ain't never been right since then. Then when Tommy got hisself killed.” He looked up at me. “Man, you a mess.”

  “I feel like a mess.”

  “I ain't goin' to whittle on you none. You had you beating. Kin you walk?”

  I could, now. But I could never run. Whatever I tried, I'd have to try it in that room. And quickly. “No,” I said.

  “Take you a swig of this.”

  He picked up the bottle and I flinched.

  Rafe laughed heartily. “I ain't goin' to hurt you no more. Go ahaid. Drink.”

  I showed him the handcuffs and he dug in his pocket for the key. “Goin' to be all right,” he said, unlocking the cuffs. He held out the bottle again, and I reached for it shakily. He was directly in front of me. The hurricane lamp was a foot to my right. There was nothing else on the table. He'd pocketed the razor.

  I took the bottle by the neck and started carrying it toward my lips. He was watching me, one arm on the table, urging me with his eyes.

  “Go on,” he said, leaning forward a bit.

  I brought the bottle up to my lips, then jabbed it straight back in a stabbing motion, right into Rafe's forehead.

  It broke instantly and Rafe shouted, “Jesus!” as the blood sprang out.

  He grabbed his head, red with blood and whiskey. And I lunged for the lamp, burning my hands on the glass chimney, and sent it hurtling into his face. It shattered in my hands, and then Rafe's face just exploded in flame.

  He threw himself backward off the chair, shrieking, and rolled across the floor, clawing at his flesh. His T-shirt had started up, too. And, for half a minute, his whole upper body was jacketed in blue alcohol fire.

  I would have helped him if I could have. But it took me over a minute to get to my feet; and, by then, he'd stopped shrieking and skittering across the floor like a dying moth and was lying on his back about ten feet from the table, his knees up and his arms spread on the floor. One side of his face looked like bubbling brown sugar, and there were smoking patches of charred flesh on his chest, his arms and his belly. The smell was hellish.

  I was leaning on the table—barely standing.

  Rafe was on the floor—lying still.

  And then, he got up.

  The dead, smouldering son-of-a-bitch got up!

  At first I cou
ldn't believe it—watching him turn and heave and groan and lift again, pushing himself off the floor as if he were doing a push-up with one blackened arm. I screamed when I saw him half-standing. And, with a strength born of sheer terror, I grabbed the chair beside me and swung it at his head.

  It caught him across his chest and he crashed to the floor, as if he'd gone down on wet ice. I pounced on him and dug the pistol from his belt and held it to his head and pulled the trigger. The gun snapped viciously, and Rafe's head cracked like an egg. A gurgle of trapped gas came from his throat.

  I pawed and lunged my way back to the table. And just sat there, gun pointed at his corpse, waiting for him to get up again. I just couldn't believe he was dead—on the floor of that nightmarish cabin, flickering with red firelight. I must have held the gun on him for twenty minutes before I realized that, this time, he wasn't going to get back on his feet.

  27

  THERE WAS a third bottle of whiskey in that carton beside the door. And that's how I spent the rest of the night, drinking at the table in the dying firelight and dreaming, eyes open, of Rafe, as his face exploded in flame—exploded like a wad of crumpled newspaper, fattening with it, feeding on it as if it were something black and rich and bloating. The smell in the cabin was horrible. And the only reason I didn't go outside until first light was that I couldn't move my legs again until first light and, then, only with stomach-turning pain. I went outside on the porch and threw up.

  I sat there on the railing—one hand against the house to steady me and the other crooked around the whiskey bottle—and watched it grow light in the east. It's Thursday, I told myself. I looked at my watch. It's Thursday at 6:30 in the morning. And the temperature is...I could feel it coming and I didn't try to stop it. I just sat there, as the sky purpled and went white, and wept. For Hugo and Cindy Ann and Jo and me, who had killed that thing lying in the cabin like a dead fire.

  The birds began to call among the trees. Jays and robins and the dark hoarse caw of a crow. I sat and waited. My eyes on the gravel road that wound through the trees. Waiting to hear the sound of the engine. To see the sun glint off those bull's horns. I held the pistol in my hand as I waited. Not a thought in my head. Too exhausted to think or plan.

  At nine-ten I heard it. Heard it before I could see it through the trees. And I walked off the porch, swinging the whiskey bottle and the gun in either hand, and crouched down beside the east wall of the cabin, out of sight of the road.

  The car was closer now. The tires scudding through the gravel, making a loose, sodden sound. And then the engine was so loud I wanted to hold my ears against it. And then it stopped.

  The car door cracked open. And I could hear his feet on the dry ground.

  “Rafe?” he called from below the porch. “Rafe?”

  He started up the porch stairs and, suddenly, his foot turned to stone. The stair creaked as if he were rocking on it.

  “Harry?” he said softly. “Boy, you in there?”

  He had his gun out now.

  “I'm comin' in,” he shouted.

  I crouched lower against the house, the white morning sunlight blazing in my eyes and the parsley curl of ailanthus cushioning my haunches and my back where the weed crawled among the struts beneath the cabin and up the cabin wall. I heard his footsteps on the porch, each one more tentative than the one before it, as he paced there in front of the door—his gun in one hand and the other hovering at the knob.

  “Rafe?” he called again.

  I edged closer to the porch, until I was below it, among the ailanthus and the sun-burst dandelions. Forcing myself to move at a crouch, biting my lips against the pain and the insane desire to shriek out to him, “Here, Red! Here I am!”

  The planking above me creaked as he leaned toward the door. It wouldn't take him long, once he'd seen it. He'd be out again in a second, down the steps, and across the hard dirt yard to where the Cadillac sat winking in the sun. I waited for the sound of the door.

  And, finally, it opened with a groan of splintering wood.

  I pulled myself up, so that I was standing before the railing. I put the whiskey bottle down on the planks, braced myself with one arm, and extended my gun hand through the spindles—aiming at the open doorway.

  There was a ghastly sound—as if the house itself were expelling its fetid breath. And I knew he'd seen him. Perhaps not believing what he'd seen at first. Not sure it was a human body. Then, walking over to it, as I had walked over to Preston LaForge's corpse—his own body electric with adrenalin. And when he'd seen it from close by, he'd gasped in horror and in the certainty that I was out there somewhere, waiting for him.

  “Come on out, Red,” I called from the porch. “Come on out, old man.”

  There wasn't a sound from inside the house.

  “Come on out!” I screamed at the gaping door.

  My own voice frightened me. I wasn't sure how much longer I could hold onto that ledge sanity, without blacking out or losing my grip entirely. Part of me already wanted to run screaming into the cabin, firing wildly as I ran.

  But I made myself think of him, instead of me. I made myself picture him as he stood there beside Rafe. A light sweat on his creased face and in the prickle of hair upon his skull. Thinking as he would be thinking—that methodical cop's mind, sorting and discarding alternatives. He must have known I was hurt. How badly he couldn't tell. But he must have been wondering if he could wait me out. Just stand there until I keeled over in the sun. He'd heard my voice, heard the pain.

  I had to do something to make him commit himself or he could wait me out, just as he was planning to do. I rubbed my hands across the rough porch planking and it came to me as if it were the one and only element in the universe.

  The whole damn lodge was like a box of kindling. One spark and the wind would carry flames across the porch. Slowly, at first, maybe five minutes to get the fire going in earnest. Then the cabin would explode like ignited wood dust and take whatever was inside it up in a hot breathless gust.

  I picked up the whiskey bottle and spilled what was left of the liquor on the planks. Then I lit my lighter and tossed it on the wood. A blue pool of fire swept the porch beneath the east railing, driving me back from the heat.

  “You're going to burn, Red.” I watched the flames creep along the boards, eating them away inch by inch. “You hear me? You're going to burn just like Rafe!”

  The fire crackled and black smoke began to fill the overhang.

  I stood back ten feet from the stoop and waited. He must have seen it by now. He had to have. The smoke was drifting through the doorway.

  And then he called out. “Harry. I'm coming out. Hold your fire, son.”

  He pitched a revolver through the door, and it clattered down the steps.

  “Don't shoot me, son. I ain't armed.”

  I raised the gun toward the door.

  Out he came, swiping at the black smoke with his left hand and squinting against the heat. When he spotted me in the yard, his right arm jerked up. And I fired.

  Red grabbed his chest with his left arm and fell back against the door jamb, another gun clutched tightly in his right fist.

  “Sweet Jesus!” he cried out. “You done killed me.”

  He slid slowly down the door jamb until he was sitting on the porch—his face was white, his chest overspread with blood, his gun lying in his hand. He breathed heavily.

  Then he saw the flames as the fire swept toward him.

  “Harry!” he shrieked, holding out a bloody hand. “Help me, son.”

  I just stood there and watched him watching the fire. It was up the north wall now, its yellow tongue licking at the door in which Bannion was lying.

  “Harry!” he screamed again. “I'll burn alive!”

  He looked at me—his face terrible in the smoke and the bright cast of the flames.

  “Oh, my God!” he cried out.

  He tried to move his legs, but they wouldn't work any more. He looked at me again, desperately and, wit
h terrific effort, brought the gun in his right hand to his lips. Then pulled the trigger.

  28

  DOWN THOSE stone steps in a little glen is where they found all that was left of Cindy Ann Evans. A piece of cloth with a blood stain on it, turned brown in the weather. And, in a lime pit, the shape of a smile, beside a shed used to store gear for men in the hunting lodge, her fleshless bones. Everything else burned away by the corrosive magnesium; and, with it, all that had fastened her to this world. All love and loyalty. All life.

  The highway patrolmen found her. I wasn't there. Although I was well enough by then to go back out to the gutted cabin.

  I had legitimate excuses—two broken ribs, my blistered hand, the place on my left cheek that had taken ten stitches to close, and the part of my skull that was concussed by that whiskey bottle and lacerated with glass. For five days I was one of the walking wounded. And for five days I had sat alone in a small county hospital north of Louisville, thinking of Jo. She never came. They called her when they brought me in to St. George's. I asked them to. But the days passed and I roamed the halls, scaring nurses with my bruised face—more than ever the face of a busted statue—and sitting in on card games with the invalided patients. Rummy and pinochle and cribbage. And she never came. They told me she called once on the first day, to make sure I was going to live. And, when, on the fifth day, with no pride left to swallow, I called the Busy Bee, Hank Greenberg told me she was gone.

  “Where?” I asked him.

  “I don't know, Harry. She called in on Saturday and said she was quitting. One of the girls drove by her place and the landlady told her that she'd left town.”

  “No forwarding address?”

  “None.”

  And, so, on the sixth day, when they asked me if I wanted to go out to Corinth—which was the name of the little hamlet outside which the hunting lodge had been set—I begged off.

  But all afternoon, in the slow heat of the white hospital corridors, I could see that lime pit in my mind's eye. And a part of me felt as if it, too, had plunged in and burnt away and, with it, a part of what held me to earth. I'd find her again, I told myself. After all, that's what I did for a living. Find things for people who'd lost them. I have a talent for it, like I'd said to her. Only sometimes things don't want to be found. People hide them away or destroy them. Then they're gone forever. And all that can be found is the place they once occupied, like those spaces in the magma at Pompeii where the hot lava settled around a tool or a dish and burned it away and then cooled so quickly that it took on the shape of the thing it destroyed. The thing itself . . . gone forever.