by Alex Taylor
“That’s most likely where he’s keeping his money.”
“I don’t want to.”
Clem put his hands on the boat railings. “You already killed him, Beam. Get that straight. You already killed him so stealing ain’t near the worst thing you’ve done.”
Beam curled his fists up. His stomach tossed around. He felt a bruised sleep coming on, and he knew he’d have to move to stay awake, and so he went and squatted beside the dead man. This close, he smelled the whisky again, and the manure and mud, and something older and stronger, and then he knew what he smelled was blood.
He slid the man’s wallet free from his jeans. He wiped his hands clean against the man’s chest, his fingers leaving a black trident of bloodstain on the man’s shirt. The wallet smelled rough and dusty like the inside of a barn.
“Twenty dollars,” Beam said, plucking a bill out. He turned and showed Clem the money.
“Keep it,” he said, jerking his chin. “He got a license in there?”
Beam paused. “Why are we taking his money? Won’t that look strange to the cops?”
“We’re not calling the cops.”
“But it’s self-defense. They can’t fault me none for that. He was trying to rob me.” Beam’s voice pitched high and windy and he was about to speak again when Clem gave him a look so hot and wild it silenced him.
“You do like I say,” he said. “Now put that money in your pocket and see if there’s anything else in his wallet.”
Beam stuffed the money into his jeans and searched the wallet. A rubber, some coins, an address in St. Louis scrawled on a piece of hotel stationery. This was all.
“Nothing?” asked Clem.
Beam shook his head.
He coughed and stood and moved back onto the deck beside his father. Both of them looked at the body lying there, each wordless and stalled, hearing the river and the night buzz around them, the small shaft of light from Clem’s lantern falling sheer and clean against the dead man’s limp cheeks.
“What are we going to do?” Beam asked. He raked the hair back over his head and swallowed.
“I’m still thinking,” said Clem.
Beam felt his stomach go sour. “You say you don’t know him?”
“I don’t believe so.” Clem went to the body again, dropping the light flush into the man’s face.
“I don’t know what to do,” Beam muttered. “I don’t know what to do.”
Clem stood up calmly and it seemed he hadn’t heard his son. He kept his head bowed, staring at the body before him, as if a man attending services grave and doom-kindled, and his own shadow leapt out into the light like some crepuscular rake jarred up with nethering prayers.
Slowly, he said, “You got to leave this place and you got to go tonight.”
II
WEDNESDAY
A damp morning. Rain had begun in the deep of the night and fallen steadily until dawn and at sunrise scraps of mist lay in the bottom country like shorn husks. The Gasping flowed quick and sudsy, its brown churned waters carrying driftwood and other debris downstream, crossties and bridge timbers, stray john boats and car doors, milk jugs and paint cans. There were strange catches in the locust trees, tires and saddle blankets and other such garbage, and a lacy negligee like a bawdy ghost dripped from a thorn bough and from some lowland grave a rosewood casket unearthed by the deluge floated downstream and spun in an eddy before the current took it on, and in the darker woods beyond the roar of the river was the slow ping and drip of water so that this world seemed cold and cavernous and in unceasing plummet.
Sheriff Elvis Dunne drove the cruiser slowly along the river road, the brake discs steaming as the tires pushed through the ponded rainwater. He was a small man with clean hands. In middle age, his face had acquired the grooved, vaguely scuffed look of old furniture, though his hair had grown to a dark chestnut brown that gave credence to the rumor that he had it dyed. However, he was otherwise known as a man without vanity.
He was fond of antiques, a collector. Those who called on him at home usually found him stowed in a room of urns and carafes, tapestries and gilt mirrors, his hands working linseed oil into the stained wood of a footstool, and though he had a fondness for the aged and dusty, he wasn’t a man opposed to progress.
“In ten years,” he said to his passengers, “I’d like to see all the county paved.”
The two riding beside him were state troopers by the names of Donaldson and Pretshue. Water dripped from the clear plastic rain ponchos they wore. Both men kept still and quiet, giving each other brief sideways glances at the lilting rasp of the sheriff’s voice.
“Ten years,” Elvis said. “There won’t be any gravel roads left around here by then. No more washouts and hang-ups. People will have a lot easier time of it then.”
Donaldson pushed a cigarette between his lips and lit it with the cruiser’s lighter. Beyond the windshield, the world was a dim smear. On the north side of the road were bottoms filled with white cattle, some standing belly-deep in sedge grass. On the south side was the Gasping River.
“That’s all fine and good, Elvis,” Donaldson said. “But what I want to know is when you plan to fix people from winding up drowned in your rivers. Believe this is the third one this year.”
Elvis kept his eyes on the road. The wipers squelched over the dirty windshield. “I’ll guess we’ll fix that long about the time the boys down at Eddyville figure out how to keep their cons from going AWOL,” he said.
Donaldson gnawed the butt of his Winston and chuckled, but Pretshue said nothing.
“There’s not much way to fix folks doing each other in,” said Elvis. “What I’ve found anyway. I talk to a lot of these old timers around here and they say it’s worse now than before, but I don’t believe it. Ask me, they’re all just sorry they can’t get out and do awful like they used to.” He wiped a finger over his teeth, scratched the plaque away with his thumbnail, then wiped his finger against his trouser leg. “They just don’t like being benchwarmers,” he said. “That’s all it is.”
“Old timers,” Donaldson said, slinging water from the brim of his hat. “You’re about to be one yourself aren’t you, Elvis?”
“If I live long enough.”
“Old timers,” repeated Pretshue. “What the fuck do they know?”
Elvis cracked his window and the rain flitted in. “One thing I do know is how much I hate this weather,” he said.
The cruiser topped a rise and Elvis let it coast to the bottom before pulling under a stand of cottonwoods where several other cruisers were parked already. An ambulance idled there also, as well as the county coroner’s burgundy Buick. Beyond the trees, the Gasping rolled by, its waters swollen from the recent rain. Men stood on the shore. Elvis’ deputies, shrinkwrapped in raincoats. At their feet, a body bound with logging chain.
“Reckon that’s our boy wrapped up in those?” Donaldson asked.
“I hope to hell it is,” said Pretshue. “That fucker has been trouble and I hope he’s drowned. That’d solve my headaches.”
All three men exited the cruiser. Elvis went first down the steep bank, followed closely by the two troopers. The deputies nodded to him as he approached, but only gave cold glares to Donaldson and Pretshue.
When Elvis reached the river bank, he squatted beside the body. The fishes and turtles had been at it and some of its fingers were missing and a wet reek like carpet left too long in a cellar hung in the air.
“Whoever did it, Elvis, they weighed him down with this.” The coroner toed a three foot section of railroad track lying in the mud. He was a tall thin man with a dark complexion and under the blank sky he seemed like a streak of ink running out of the clouds. He spoke with a deep wet croak. “It wasn’t enough,” he said. “Two old boys out running trot lines come on him this morning. Just floating. I’d say he’s been under for a day at the most and probably not even that long.” The coroner propped his boot on the section of track and wiped both hands against his trousers and th
en through his hair. He wore no raincoat. “What I mean is, I’d wager he was put in there last night.”
Elvis nodded and scraped at his chin. “Looks like somebody gave him a swat to the head there,” he said, pointing to the puckered wound on the dead man’s brow. “This your boy, Donaldson?”
The trooper stepped closer and leaned in, stowing his hands on his knees.
“I don’t know. Hard to tell from what the river’s done to him.” Donaldson stood up, running a thumbnail over his belt. “I thought you would know him, Elvis.”
“Me? Why would I know him?”
“Well, this is your county. You run him in when he had the wreck and killed that woman. I thought you’d know him.”
Elvis sighed. He dragged his hat lower on his brow. “That,” he said, “was nine years ago.”
Pretshue pushed his hands into his pockets. The plastic poncho rattled around him, and his nostrils flared as a green tint rose under his cheekbones. “Hell,” he said. “If you don’t know him, then who does?”
Elvis stood up and looked at the covey of deputies. “Where are those old boys at that found him?”
Someone pointed downstream.
Under a red gum stood two men, each dressed in ball caps and shiny rubber hip-waders. They drank coffee from Styrofoam cups. Their johnboat was hitched to a sycamore root jutting from the bank, and they watched it closely as if it were a nervous horse they expected to bolt at any moment.
“He was out there,” one of them said when Elvis and the troopers approached. The man raised his coffee cup and pointed to the river with his pinky, but the world before his finger was unmarkable and without definite origin, an empty spill before windbraided trees, and he might have meant any place in all that wide coursing surge. “We brung him to shore then called you boys down.” He looked past Elvis at the body lying in the sandy mud. “Dead as a drownt cow.”
“Yes.” Elvis nodded. He took a small steno pad and pen from his shirt pocket and began running the pen nervously over the notebook wires. “He is.”
The man who’d spoken snuffled and drew a sleeve under his nose. His friend, features honed like a hatchet blade, put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his boot heels. “You know who it is, don’t you?” he asked.
Elvis flipped the steno pad open, holding the white page under his hat out of the rain. “No. Do you?”
“Course. That’s Paul Duncan. The one stole that car and hit that Cliver lady about ten years back. The same one busted out of Eddyville a few days ago.” The man drained his coffee cup and swallowed. “That’s Loat’s boy.”
III
WEDNESDAY
From his porch, Loat watched the cruiser slip under the awning of hackberry boughs and then climb the slight rise of his driveway, rocking over the washed out ruts in the gravel before it came to a stop in the muddy yard. He held a neon orange hardhat in his lap and sat spooning soggy cornflakes out of it, milk slipping off his chin onto the porch boards. As the sheriff and two state troopers came through the yard, he stowed the makeshift cereal bowl under his chair, folded his hands over his belly and snorted. Behind him, Presto Geary came through the screen door. His weight made the wooden floor groan, and Loat smelled his stink, a mixture of underarm and motor oil.
“What do they want?” Presto asked.
Loat leaned back in the nylon camp chair he was sitting in. “Same thing they been wanting all week, I’d guess,” he said.
Elvis and the two officers crossed through the yard’s scant grass. When they reached the porch, the sheriff put a boot on the bottom step and looked up at Loat and Presto as they were paired under the slanted roof of the house with its peeling blue paint, their faces creased and turned by the early gray light to a hard bruised color.
“Morning,” said Loat.
Elvis nodded, then gestured to the men behind him. “Loat, this is Officer Donaldson and Officer Pretshue,” he said. “State boys.”
“I can see what kind of uniforms they’re wearing.” Loat wiped a hand over his mouth and snorted again. “Y’all come looking for that one you lost out of Eddyville, the story’s same now as it’s ever going to be. He’s not been here and I ain’t heard a thing from him.”
Elvis scraped the water from his cheeks and dried his hand against his trousers. “We think we found him,” he said. “In the river.”
Loat leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. His light gray hair was spackled like grout to his forehead and he brushed it back over his scalp and sat drawing thin breaths through the tiny slits of his nostrils. Many had remarked on the smallness of his nose, which was no more than a pink bump beneath his putty-colored eyes, and at times it caused his breath to emit a high adenoidal whistle that sounded like the grate and squeak of old water piping. Now, as he sat staring at the sheriff, his nostrils dilated and flexed as if he’d caught the aroma of something unpleasant in the air.
“You think you found Paul?” he asked.
Elvis nodded. “Just this morning.” He rested a hand on the stoop railing, the sleeve of his poncho dripping strings of water over the wet footstones.
With his poncho and flushed cheeks, Loat thought the man resembled a shrink-wrapped cut of butcher’s work. “Y’all come on up here out of the weather,” he said. “Then you can tell me the rest of it.”
Elvis moved on up the stoop and the two troopers followed and they all clustered under the eaves. The water dripping from them made a dark halo on the porch boards.
Loat studied the troopers closely, as he’d not seen either of them before. The one named Donaldson was older and once on the porch he lit a cigarette and stood smoking, his rheumy eyes watching the rain spit and shatter in the yard weeds. He seemed almost drowsy, and Loat figured him not far from retirement. Pretshue was younger and kept staring at Loat as if in direct challenge, his chapped lips pressed tightly against his teeth, which Loat imagined were quite straight and white. He pictured the man with all his teeth smashed out by a ball-peen hammer, his mouth only a bleeding hole, and winked at him. The trooper blinked and his lips jerked oddly before he composed himself and resumed his staring.
“Say you found Paul?” Loat asked, turning to Elvis.
Elvis nodded. “We need you to come down to the morgue, make an I.D. on the body.”
Loat resettled the hardhat in his lap and looked at the three policemen. Wrapped in their plastic raingear, they appeared hapless and bungling, and he felt a bit embarrassed for them. Especially Elvis, whom Loat had known for years, ever since his election to county sheriff. He’d always struck Loat as a dainty kind of fellow not suited for the rough work of law enforcement.
Whatever shame he felt for these lawmen and their ineptitude soon grew into ripe disgust, though, and he raised his leg and let a long loose fart ripple out.
The lawmen gazed at him in mute shock. None of them moved or spoke.
“You hear something?” Loat said, turning to Presto, who was leaning against the front door of the house with his arms folded over his chest. Presto’s wide gray lips broke into a flabby grin and he slowly swayed back and forth, scratching his back against the wooden doorframe.
Loat turned back to the lawmen. “I believe I heard something,” he said. Again, he farted, the bottom of the camp chair flapping beneath him. “There it went again,” he said, in mock surprise. “What the hell is that?” He looked about him as if searching for the source of the noise and then put his eyes back on the lawmen. “Whatever it is, it stinks,” he said.
“Smells like genuine pig shit, don’t it?” said Presto.
“I believe you’re right,” Loat said, staring coldly at the three men. “I believe there’s been a few pigs rooting around and shitting on the place here lately.”
Elvis took a step back and rested his hands on his hips. Donaldson and Pretshue exchanged brief glances until Pretshue came forward, slinging his poncho aside so that Loat could see the revolver that rode his hip. “Listen,” he said, “if all you’re going to do is sit up here
and fart all day then we need to be getting on. But if you want to come to town and identify the body of your son, then we’ll give you a ride.”
Loat stared at Pretshue. His cheeks were ashen, which likely meant he was afraid, but Loat knew he was also young enough to call the fear something else and not recognize it for what it truly was, and this made him dangerous. Paul had had the same careless streak in him. If tempered by age and circumstance, Loat knew it made a man into a lethal being who strode over the earth at will and brooked no compromise because none was required. Left unchecked, it usually led one down a dim path of ruin.
“I bet you still remember what your mama’s titty tastes like, don’t you?” Loat said.
Pretshue’s spine straightened as if he’d just be struck in the face. His cheeks flushed and he was about to offer some kind of retort when Donaldson stepped forward and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Go easy on us, Loat,” the older man said. “We ain’t here to arrest you. All we want is you to come down to the morgue and tell us whether or not it’s your son we pulled out of the river.”
Loat sighed and placed the hardhat beneath his chair once more. Then he stood and brushed the front of his shirt and looked past the men at the rain.
“Do you want a poncho?” Elvis asked.
Loat looked at the sheriff as if he were a bit touched. “I don’t mind getting wet,” he said. He turned to Presto standing behind him. “Mind the dogs,” he said. Then he walked down the stoop and out into the rain, moving through the muddy yard toward the idling cruiser, Elvis and the two troopers following behind him.
IV
WEDNESDAY
They woke late to the baying of hounds in the nighttime. The howls of the dogs rolled against the windows, then fled down the chimney, ceaseless and somehow resolute against the darkness through which they came until the sound seemed to have neither source nor limit but grew to be the very rage and roar of the night itself.
When Clem looked out the bedroom window, one finger pulling at a gauzy curtain, he saw the pale blue Cadillac parked in the yard and his chest tightened.