by Alex Taylor
Clem went on with the knife. “Throttle stuck on me the other night. Run her into the landing.”
Elvis whistled through his teeth. “It’s dangerous work out here on the Gasping, ain’t it?” He noticed that Clem’s hands trembled some as he worked to patch the boat.
Clem gave the sheriff a brief glance, then continued peeling the patches from the hull.
“Stopped by your house before I came down here,” said Elvis. “Derna’s not home. How’s she doing?”
“As well as can be expected. She was gone a few hours yesterday. I don’t know where she went. Driving around I guess.” Clem picked up a square of hard grit sandpaper and began smoothing the repairs flush against the bottom.
“Probably good for her to get out of the house.”
“I suppose.”
Done with his work, Clem laid the putty knife on the ground and walked off the landing into the vetch and pig weeds growing up from the mud. On a dead ironwood branch, he’d tied a stringer of Falls City in the river to cool. He pulled the cans up and they jangled together like chimes as he tore one free and then he let the remaining beers bob down into the water again.
“Care to let me have one of those?” Elvis asked.
Clem looked at him for a moment, then fetched another can out of the river. He walked out of the weeds to the landing where the sheriff stood and passed the beer to him.
“Didn’t know you drank on the job?”
“I’m not on the job.” Elvis threw his arm out and checked his watch. “Not until thirty minutes ago.” He opened the beer and drank. “I’m clocking in late today. Which means whatever passes between us is off the record.”
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
Elvis nodded and looked across the water toward the far shore where bitterns scratched at the sandy soil in search of grubs, their buffed tawny wings ruffling in the breeze.
“How are you holding up, Clem?”
Clem slugged at his beer. “Helluva thing to ask,” he answered.
Elvis propped his arms over the top of the ferry and looked at Clem. His eyes were strained and bore the hollowed look of lost sleep, the whites a bit jaundiced and cloudy.
“Reason I come out here,” the sheriff said, “was to tell you a few things I thought you should be aware of.” Elvis took a few more sips of beer, then set the can on top of the ferry. “Main one being that Paul had help getting out.” He watched Clem closely for any sign of a reaction, but he only lifted the sandpaper from the ground and began scraping the hull and keel again.
“As you know,” Elvis continued, “he was a trusty down there at Eddyville. They had him on yard duty picking up candy wrappers and sweeping cigarette butts and that’s when he cut the wires. Had to cut through three sets before he reached the outside and not a soul claims to have seen him do it. That strike you as odd?”
“I don’t know.”
“It strikes me as odd. Where’d Paul get the bolt cutters? And nobody claims to have seen him? Those guards at Eddyville are trigger-friendly. They set up there in those towers all day just waiting for somebody to try and escape, but not a one of them saw a thing?”
Clem stroked the sandpaper over the hull over and over again, the grit making a lean rasping sound against the metal.
Elvis propped his shoe on one of the engine hoists and straightened the crease in his pants. “He had to have been helped,” he said. “There’s no way he could have gotten out of there so clear and easy unless somebody paid off those guards. And then he comes down here and gets knocked in the head and put in the river. Now that’s a pretty blatant mystery, don’t you think?”
Clem stopped scraping the sandpaper over the hull. “Blatant?” he asked.
“Sorry. I use too many words. My sister bought me some of these tapes that’s supposed to increase your vocabulary. Guess she thinks it’ll keep my mind occupied. The word for today is ‘blatant.’ It means apparent, or obvious.”
Clem pushed his tongue into the side of his mouth. “If it’s obvious, how can it be a mystery?” he asked.
Elvis stared at Clem for a moment, then smiled. “I can see your point,” he said.
“That’s why I made it. It’s blatant.”
Elvis broadened his smile, but Clem remained stoic and immobile. “If you’re looking for whoever sprung Paul out of Eddyville,” he said, “I’d start with Loat Duncan.”
“I’ve already thought about Loat. I’m still thinking about him. But I wanted to come down here and get your take on it. Why would Loat go through the trouble of bribing those tower guards just for Paul’s sake? Way I understand, the two of them weren’t ever on very good terms.”
Clem spat onto the landing. “I don’t try and figure out why Loat does anything,” he said. “Whatever he does, he does it out of some store of reasons that wouldn’t never cross the minds of most folks.”
Elvis picked up the can, took another swig of beer, and poured the rest onto the landing, the yellow foam flowing down the slanted pavement into the river. He dropped the empty can on the ground, flattened it with one of his bright black shoes, then kicked it into the mud beside the ferry ramp.
“What about Beam?” he asked.
Clem crumpled the sandpaper in his fist. “He ain’t here right now.”
“Where’s he gone off to?”
“Couldn’t tell you.” Clem shook his head. “Beam is nineteen and full of bull piss. You know how they are at that age. They just want to go every chance they get.”
Elvis knew most young men were of the type Clem had described, restless and hungry for the night and the going and the wandering, searching out the fumes of girls and the smoky craze of wild life, but Beam had never struck him as this kind.
“Well, maybe he’ll be back around here shortly. I’d appreciate you calling me when he shows up.”
Clem took a long sip of his beer and stared at the sheriff. “What for?” he asked.
“I’d just like to talk to him. Paul’s body was found just a few miles downstream from here. I thought maybe Beam might’ve seen something strange one of these nights he was running the ferry.”
“I’ll call you if he turns up.”
Without another word, Elvis turned and walked back to the cruiser. Once seated behind the wheel, he picked his black revolver off the passenger seat and shucked it into the holster on his hip. He then took his hat off and laid it on the car’s center console. Cranking the engine, he drove up the landing ramp and passed out of the bottoms, the river winking brightly in his rearview mirror until the dust rose behind him to veil it away.
Elvis parked in front of the courthouse. He sat in his cruiser for a time, wondering if the ladies at the front desk would be able to smell the beer on his breath. Then he wondered at Clem drinking so early in the day. The man had looked worried. And then there was the ferry, which he claimed to have run aground because of a stuck throttle. Maybe that was the truth, but Elvis had his doubts.
He searched through his glove box for a roll of Certs or a stick of Doublemint, but there was none, so he exited the cruiser and walked up the granite steps of the courthouse, breathing into a cupped hand. Walking with his head down, Elvis didn’t see the man dressed in the navy blue suit astraddle the defunct artillery gun on the courthouse lawn.
“Hot morning, ain’t it?” the man said. He dismounted the gun and walked across the grass, then up the steps.
“It is a hot one,” Elvis responded, looking the man over. His long yellow hair hung over his shoulders in loose damp strands, and the blazer he wore was smudged and dirty. Elvis caught a whiff of him; he smelled foul, as though he had been sleeping out of doors of late. “Can I help you?”
The man put his hands into his pockets and crossed his feet. “I need a spell of talk with you,” he said, smiling.
“Well, that might can be arranged. Come on in here and make an appointment with one of the secretaries.” Elvis moved to ascend the steps into the courthouse, but stopped when he realized the ma
n wasn’t following him. “You coming inside?”
“Now see, I just don’t make appointments,” the man answered. His smile broadened and he swayed a bit lazily on his feet.
“I do,” said Elvis. “That’s the only way you get a spell of talk with me.”
The man shook his head. “What I have to say needs no appointing. I have information on a certain person of interest. A young man who’s gone missing. Goes by the name Beam Sheetmire.”
A wind ghosted out of the alleyway across the street and ruffled the lapels of the man’s suit and charmed the hair up about his head.
“I didn’t know Beam was missing,” Elvis said.
“He is.” The man nodded. “Missing and lost.”
Elvis ran a thumb along his belt. “Then I guess you’d better come inside,” he said.
“I guess I better had.”
Elvis straightened a few files on his desk and placed a rusted muskrat trap he used for a paperweight on top of them. Then he turned on an oscillating table fan, which fluttered pendular and sadly disaffirming, throwing a warm draft through the room that smelled of underarm and evergreen air freshener.
The man in the suit took a chair in front of the desk. Elvis remained standing, leaning against a filing cabinet. The man claimed his name was Browning, but Elvis figured this a lie. He’d learned long ago that most things people told him in this office were lies.
“Now see, Beam was over at Daryl’s bar yesterday afternoon,” the man began. “I know because I gave him a ride there. Picked him up on the side of the Natcher Road. He changed the tire on my rig, so I give him a ride. I thought we were being real chummy, but once we got to Daryl’s, I had to beat him with my boot.”
“Why did you do that?”
“He come at me.” The man slung the hair from his face and grinned. “Claimed I’d took some money from him, but that weren’t the case. He sure thought it was the case, though. That’s why he come at me and why I had to beat him with my boot. I guess I would’ve killed him if Daryl hadn’t stopped me. Once he got a good look at Beam he claimed he knew him and that this other fellow, man named Loat Duncan, knew him, too. And I guess they were all some mad at Beam for one reason or another and likely would have killed him themselves if this old coot with a shotgun hadn’t come in.”
“And what did this old man with the shotgun do?”
The man’s head rolled between his shoulders as if he were fighting off a fit of laughter. “Why, he plucked that Beam child off the floor and led him away into the world.”
Elvis stroked the edge of the filing cabinet. Despite the fan, a steady heat had risen in the office, and he felt the sweat dribbling down his ribs and into his pants. “And you didn’t know this man with the shotgun?” he asked.
The man shook his head. “Now see, I’m strange to this country and only passing through. Don’t know anyone. But I heard Daryl call him Pete Daugherty. All I can say beyond that is he was some peculiar.”
“How so?”
“Well, it’s some strange for a man that age to come and rescue a boy he doesn’t know.” The man leaned forward and stared up at the sheriff from beneath his eyebrows. “Don’t you think?”
Elvis took a handkerchief from his pocket. “What is odd is a man coming to me, a man I’ve never set eyes on before and who is wearing a suit telling me these things,” he said. “That’s what I think is peculiar.” He opened the filing cabinet and took out a small spritzer bottle of water and sprayed his handkerchief and then daubed it over his hands and the back of his neck.
“That’s just what I know,” the man said. “Take it for what it is worth to you.”
Elvis sat the spritzer bottle back in the cabinet and then leaned against the corner of his desk. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked. “There’s no reward.”
A sheepish grin of joy crossed the man’s face. “Say, Sheriff. A citizen has to be concerned, don’t he? If you got folks walking around not caring about the law, well, you don’t really have citizens, do you?”
“You care about the law?”
“I do.”
“I don’t believe you, Mr. Browning. I think there’s some other reason you’re here telling these things to me right now and I don’t think it has anything to do with the law.”
The man swiveled in his chair, which made a rusty squeak beneath him. His eyes went narrow. “Maybe not your law,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“You might find it hard to believe, but there’s an order out of your reach. You don’t figure in with it. Stand next to that law and you’d be as small as a speck of dirt under my fingernail.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the way you can maintain what you’ve got here.” The man waved his hand through the air. “Your little office. Your desk. Your cap pistol. You can keep all that and trickle on down to retirement and be all right. But you have to stand out of the way of the bigger rule.”
Elvis leaned over his desk. “I don’t understand anything you’re telling me right now,” he said. “Now, what you told me about Beam might be true. At least some of it. But I don’t like you. I think you should know that. I don’t like the things you say and I don’t like the way you’re sitting in my chair. I don’t like the way you smell and I don’t like the fact that you’re wearing a suit. It makes me nervous and I don’t never like to be nervous.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it, sheriff?” the man asked.
Elvis opened a desk drawer and took out a form and slapped it down. He began penning something down on the paper. “I’m going to arrest you.”
“Oh?” the man said, expectantly. “And what are you going to charge me with?”
“Misuse of public property.” Elvis pointed out the window with his pen. “That gun you were sitting on out there is a World War I monument, not a park bench. I’ll charge you with vagrancy too unless you can provide a valid address.” Elvis bent his head down and continued filling out the form. “What do you think about that?”
Only the squeak of the chair answered.
Elvis lifted his eyes. The man had disappeared.
Elvis dropped his pen and drew his revolver and ran to the doorway, but the hall was only glistening tile. He rushed down the empty corridor, past the shocked covey of secretaries at the front desk and out the door and onto the courthouse lawn, looking everywhere for the man who called himself Browning, but he was gone. As if he never had been. A few cigarette butts and Styrofoam cups blew over the pavement. That was all.
XII
FRIDAY
Clem sat at the kitchen table paring bits of tar from beneath his fingernails with a hawkbill knife. He didn’t stop when Derna walked through the back door, her shoes sighing crisply over the unswept linoleum, her form shifting through the window light to flick an ashy scatter of shadow over him as she pulled a chair out for herself and sat down. She placed her purse on the table top and folded her hands in her lap, and yet he still continued working the knife under his fingernails, drawing the blade beneath them carefully and then rubbing it clean on his Wranglers.
“I want to know why you sent Beam off the way you did,” she said, suddenly.
Clem’s knife went on, his eyes steady on his work. “And I want to know where it is you been going in my truck these past couple days,” he said.
The cords of Derna’s throat tightened and she swallowed. “I’ve been looking for him,” she said.
Clem finished with the knife and raked a few dried crumbs of tar from the table into the floor. He looked at Derna. “Ain’t had no luck, have you?”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
“No. I don’t. I only sent him off. I didn’t give him no directions other than to get away from here.”
Derna placed her hands on the table, pressing her fingertips into the bright Formica until her knuckles whitened. “Why would you do such a thing?”
Clem leaned toward her. “Out on the river,” he said. “He killed Paul. He didn’t know who he was, but he did it and that’s why I sent him off.”
Derna felt the room flow away from her as if she’d suddenly dropped through a trap in the floor.
“Paul tried to take the till and Beam hit him with a wrench and killed him,” said Clem. “So I give him a change of clothes and showed him the highway. It was the best thing I knew to do. It didn’t matter if it was self-defense because Loat will still be looking to kill him.”
Derna shook her head. “You’re lying,” she said.
“No, Derna. I ain’t.”
“No. There’s no reason why Paul would be at the ferry.”
Clem sighed and drew a hand over the tabletop. “I don’t know why it come to happen. I don’t know why or how anything ever came to happen in life. But I’m telling you the truth. Paul showed up to the ferry and Beam killed him.”
Derna stood up and walked over to the kitchen sink. She looked out the window at the locust trees along the river as they trembled in the wind, the muddy water below them raked and riffled by the breeze.
“He didn’t know who he was,” said Clem. “Beam didn’t know it was Paul he’d killed and I didn’t tell him. I think the whole thing was just a bad accident. I don’t know if that helps or not, but that’s the way it happened.”
“You shouldn’t have sent Beam away,” Derna said.
“I wanted to help him. It’s the one thing I could do that might.”
“If you’d wanted to help him, you should have sent him away years ago.”
“You don’t need to say that, Derna.”
“No, but I do say it and you shouldn’t be surprised.” She turned quickly from the window, a black streak of hair leaping across her forehead so she appeared as a consecrated penitent. “My oldest is dead and you tell me you’ve sent my youngest off for killing him. You think I’m just going to sit back and keep all the blame for myself? I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”
Clem’s eyes tightened. “You’re riding me,” he snarled, whipping a hand through the air.