“When I dust that phone for prints, am I going to find yours?”
I eased up so he got his wind. He shook, said nothing.
“I asked you a question.”
He shook his head.
“Where’d you call from?”
His eyeballs twisted toward the house.
“So you killed these boys and went to the house and called from there?”
I let him go. He stooped, hands on knees, and breathed raspy breaths. “No, Sheriff! I didn’t kill ’em! I found ’em!”
“Odum, go look around the house. You remember how to dust a print?”
“Yes. Yes, Sheriff.”
“Then do it. I need to talk with Brady another minute.”
I circled Brady and slapped him into handcuffs before he heard them jingle.
“Aw, shit, Sheriff. I didn’t do these boys. They was good to me.”
I stood him up and walked him toward the bay door, and glanced inside Marshall’s side of the station wagon. The floor caught my eye. Rusty and flat, not contoured like you’d expect.
“Stand here,” I said, releasing his elbow. “You run, I shoot. Crime solved. Savvy?”
He nodded jerkily.
The Pounder boys had welded a sheet of half-inch steel under the seats that extended all the way up the foot well. The inside panel of the door was loose. Pulling it back, I saw they’d welded half-inch steel inside.
“Brady,” I said. I pulled my piece. Cocked it. “I think you’re trying to escape right now.”
“No, sir. Shit!”
“What were they doing with this car?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, have mercy!”
“He can’t hear you. Don’t want to listen. You better answer my goddamn question.”
“They called it a war-car, is all I know. That’s all. I swear.”
“Well, your word’s good with me. Just one more thing—and if I think you’re lying I’m going to blow your fuckin’ head off. Where’d you stash what you took from the house?”
Brady trembled and a wet spot swelled between his legs and down the inside of his right thigh.
“Blue mustang, below the spruce. Couple guns. Little cash. Fifty bucks. That’s all.”
“Keep talkin’.”
“That’s it. I came here and found them just like that. Went to the house, scrounged a bit. Got scared. I only took a couple things for safekeeping. Then I called.”
“I’m havin’ trouble with that.” I pointed my piece at his head. Closed one eye and greeted him over the sights with the other.
“Look at them!” Brady said. “You saw them. Their faces wouldn’t turn dark in just a couple hours, would they?”
Odum came out of the Pounder house shaking his head. Stowed the print case in the Bronco and joined Brady and me. As he approached, Odum watched my suspect, and his eyes followed Brady’s arm to the cuffs. “He do it?”
“There’s no work release on Sunday!” Brady said. “Couldn’t have been me.”
“How long can a car idle on sixteen gallons of gas?” I say.
“Not that long!”
“Half-gallon an hour,” Odum said.
“Thirty-two hours,” I said. “Was you here Saturday?”
“No work release on Saturday either.”
I faced Odum. “He didn’t do it. But he robbed them.”
“Didn’t see anything missing in the house.”
“I didn’t expect you would.”
When we got the Pounder brothers out of the vehicle, neither had a mark—almost as if they’d made a suicide pact but forgot to leave a note. They’d been dead since the night before. Their faces were black and their eyes bulged. The gas tank was empty and the ignition was on. The car had idled until it ran out of gas, filling the air with a cloud of carbon monoxide that didn’t dissipate until Brady opened all three garage doors. Engine must have run all night and only stalled shortly before Brady arrived.
I uncuffed Brady. Told him to fetch whatever he’d taken and put it back in the house. He watched me and walked backward the first few yards, jumpy as a fart on a griddle. Like facing me would stop a bullet, midair.
“Go ahead,” I said. “But you remember this. I want you out of this state the day you get released. Y’hear?”
He picked up his pace.
After the Pounder boys killed themselves, things were different at the Lodge. The same suck-asses brought me beer and talked mindless shit, but the group’s militiamen kept away. They stayed away from Burt, too.
It bothered me a little, the Pounders dying without any holes or bruises, until one day I overheard talk of the Militia losing track of a couple items. A gas mask, among other things. Burt lifted his brows at that. It wasn’t hard to guess from there. I figure he held the Pounders at gunpoint and watched through half-fogged lenses while they got dizzy and passed out. Then he left.
Something about the way Burt done them kind of tickled me. If I’d have turned out bad and not good, I’d have been one of the cleverest killers ever. Like Burt. But there’s nothing clever about Gale G’Wain. His blood is cold and he’s got the brains of a cement block.
Councilmen I’d kept loyal for thirty years made new friends, new alignments. By the time Deputy Travis’s daddy, the Mason, predicted the town council would find the money to fund another slot, so long as it went to Travis, I knew the fix was around the bend.
I’m accustomed to folks knowing who wears the brass ring. They don’t have to kiss it, but they damn well need to know who wears it. My family’s been prominent since my great granddaddy named Bittersmith after himself. Then these yahoos get gumption.
Odum’s been with the Masons a few years now, and three of the four on the town council are brothers in the Masonic sense. And Travis’s daddy was one of the crew that aligned against Burt after the Pounders died.
Long story short, I don’t trust nobody.
* * *
Full of dread, I crest the knoll. Ahead, between trunks and bowed, snow-covered limbs, Cooper kneels.
He’s in a bowl beside an ice-age boulder, and with no trees immediately above, the snow falls straight on him. His back is to me, but the wind goes out of me as I study his posture. His shoulders are curved, and from this angle, he looks like a man who has taken a fist to the gut.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I had a knot on my head and a three-inch ache beneath it. If anything, I bet Cal walloped me with a rolling pin. But I wasn’t thinking about that with Burt dragging me by my boots, getting snow up my back. The cover was only a couple inches and plenty of rocks poked through. My time spent blacked-out let my temper cool, so I wasn’t inspired to rip Burt’s head from his shoulders anymore. I figured he’d tire and drop my legs, and if I skedaddled, there was no way he’d have the strength to chase me.
It was funny, letting him drag me without a fight. Every minute, him wearing himself out and me getting stronger. I’d have let him drag me all night, but having spent the fall working in those fields, I knew my location almost from the slope of the terrain. His direction would have me at the edge of the woods soon. Burt was big, not huge, but a life of farm work will make an average fellow’s muscles tough as steel. Burt must have already dragged me a half mile, and I took that as the measure of jealous fury.
There were a dozen ways he could have gotten me from his house to the woods. He could have thrown me over his shoulder and carried me, and it would have been less work. Or even tied me to a tractor. I think he wanted to drag me.
He mixed guttural sounds with curses. It took a lot of strength to lift my head high enough to see exactly where he was taking me. He hadn’t bothered with a coat or hat. He had my ankles in the crook of one arm, and used the other to lock his elbow. He dragged me through a depression. Coming out the other side, he slowed and his grunts were strained.
We’d be at the woods in a few seconds, and I bet he’d rest before trying the scrap wood and briars. A few years ago, he’d cut the timber at the edge of the field and let it lay,
and came by when he had spare time to saw the half-dried trees into firewood. In a moment we’d arrive where there was a lot of brush and short branches lying around. He’d have to switch to carrying me, or brain me there.
Burt dropped my legs and bent over, supported his weight with his hands on his knees. His breath came out like from a blacksmith’s bellow.
I reared back and kicked. Caught his behind and sent him face-first into the snow. I flipped to my belly and jumped to my feet. The knot on my head made me woozy and it took five or six steps to the right just to get my balance. In that time Burt rolled to his feet, and my advantage was gone.
He gulped air, and I thought if I could sprint thirty yards, there was no way he’d have the lungs to catch me. But I stood there. If I took off, he’d have a few steps to grab me, but with my balance off and all my blood in my head from being upside down for fifteen minutes, my legs didn’t have any confidence.
He lunged and I sidestepped. Lost my balance again while he came at me. I was at the edge of the woods. We squared off. His arms hung like a knuckle-dragger’s and though his eyes were feral, his mouth curved in a smile. It was a frozen moment, him looking at me, me looking at him, and I figured the longer I waited the better shot I had at feeling normal, but I couldn’t wait too long because he’d get his strength back, too.
“Does Missus Haudesert mind you fucking Gwen?” I said. “Or does Cal visit his mother while you’re with your daughter?”
His eyes remained glazed but the corners of his mouth were like a wave that had crested and now sought the other extreme. He hadn’t shaved for Christmas. He crept sideways, still stooped, arms spread wide, like those National Geographic tribesmen who can catch rabbits by leaping to one side and it’s fifty-fifty whether they guess right. Burt and I moved partway in a circle, only five feet apart.
“You know there’s a special place in hell for men like you,” I said.
He smiled.
I swooped to a maple shaft sticking through the snow, the end of a branch cleaned from a limb, but it was frozen to the ground. Burt didn’t move, only grinned, and his eyes worked sideways.
“I’m going to leave you for the wild dogs,” he said. “The coyotes.”
I bolted into the woods. The first couple steps were awkward, on someone else’s legs, but I got my stride, and after twenty steps, I hadn’t heard a sound but my footfalls on snow-covered leaves, and I glanced backward quick. Burt was still there at the edge of the field, hunched, grinning.
“I’m going to find you at Haynes’s, boy! An’ run you through a grinder!”
I ran until my lungs burned and I had to stop to get my bearings. I’d never been in that neck of the woods before, and though I knew there was a lake somewhere, and I was headed roughly toward town when I set out, the woods jumbled my cardinal directions and I stopped to find the sun. There was no sound save my breathing and I thought about Burt’s threat to find me at Haynes’s and all the havoc a madman could wreak with a meat-cutting bandsaw and a couple of cleavers—but in the end, if two men go at it in the butcher shop, you just want to avoid being the one who dies first. Same as anyplace else.
The other thing I thought while I caught my breath was that Burt would take his frustrations out on Gwen. Maybe that afternoon, maybe that night. He’d tell her I was gone forever; he might hint I was dead.
Sometimes a man has to trust that the person he can’t communicate with knows his heart, and that he’ll come through. She’d already told me to leave once, and instead, I came for her with a ring. She was cool enough to keep her mouth shut and weather whatever storm came her way. I just hoped her heart was strong enough to remember that I wouldn’t abandon her. I don’t know how it works when a girl is abused, whether she gets stronger or weaker. I bet some go stark raving mad. I had to trust that for Gwen, her trials had made her tougher.
After I had my wind and a good sense of location, I made a line for Haynes’s. If Burt was there waiting, I’d face him, but meantime there was no sense in thinking about it. I had to consider my next move: rescuing Gwen.
I decided I’d gather what little I owned, carry it back to the woods, and wait for nightfall. Then I’d rouse her at her window, and if she wanted to take off, we’d leave right then. If not, I’d do what she asked. If winter was too forbidding and she didn’t want to head to town and catch a bus with barely enough money to cross a couple states in style, we’d wait. But it was going to be her choice. She was the one that was suffering because I’d felt obliged to ask Burt’s permission.
Haynes’s shed used to be for tools and general mechanical repair purposes. It came furnished with a workbench I’d cleared off for a hotplate and some things I’d accumulated. Below was a canvas bag stuffed with wrenches that smelled of old oil, rust, dirt, and some kind of hardy mildew. I emptied the corroded tools and turned the bag inside out and knocked the dirt from it. I had a couple extra sets of underclothes, and a copy of Bartleby that I’d picked up for a nickel a few weeks before. I rolled them into a blanket and stuffed it into the bag. If Gwen was desperate enough to run under these circumstances, then I was desperate enough to go with her, and even steal a satchel, but it wouldn’t be me doing the providing. You can’t put yourself in a situation that bad and not bank on a little help from the Almighty.
Whether He’ll ante up is the thing you never know.
I cooked some side meat and filled up on that and a can of pork and beans. Everybody knows there’s no pork with the beans. I thought afterward maybe I should have thought of a different meal. If Gwen went with me, she’d soon second-guess herself on account of my smell. But deep down I figured she wouldn’t go with me into the cold. She wouldn’t want to leave everything she knew, bad as it was.
Leaving was more difficult than I’d have imagined just a year ago. Of course, when I learned about my father, I was ready to go find him.
I was nineteen years old. Mister Sharps told me he’d been waiting for me to go. He wasn’t quite so blunt. I’d been helping out around the Youth Home, and Mister Sharps had become my father like he was father to fifty or sixty other boys. Though he took interest in my welfare, his love was assailed every day by dozens of greedy boys who would improvise attention-getting tricks. Toby habitually killed frogs and planted them throughout the schoolhouse where their stink would generate the most frustration and remain longest hidden—heating vents, or behind a teacher’s desk drawers, so that every time she sought a pencil or tape, she about gagged. That was Toby. George, a small fellow, started fights. His motto was to attack, and while he started out getting licked all the time, he became a dangerous foe, from sheer practice and meanness. Another boy, Eddy, was a master nose-picker. The rumor was that the Guinness Book of World Records had a two-inch booger in it, and Eddy sought fame as the mucus-mining boy who could top it. Dried evidence of his dedication decorated the bottoms of several school desks, the restroom, and the chain-link fence outside the play area. He kept a pint Ball jar on hand to preserve any boogers he thought might earn a place in Guinness’s hallowed pages.
Rarely would a family come to Mister Sharps and request a boy, and when they did, it was the youngest that went. Most of us grew up without hope and without needing it but nonetheless hungry to feel something we’d only been able to imagine. It was toughest for the boys who arrived after family misfortune. One, Henry, arrived shortly before I left. He’d lost his arm and his parents in an automobile accident when he was ten and lived with his grandmother until she died. At twelve, he joined us. He sat in the play yard and brooded over an open book. I watched. He never turned the pages. Being older and somewhat in charge, I sat beside him, and eventually, since I didn’t say anything, he said to me, “How old were you when you came here?”
“Zero,” I said. “My mother gave me to Mister Sharps directly.”
“If someone cut your arm off, you’d know it.” I thought he was getting fresh but before I put him in check, he continued. “You don’t know what to miss.”
�
�I got an idea,” I said.
“That isn’t the same.”
He turned the page of his book. I patted his shoulder and left, but what he’d said stayed with me.
Mister Sharps gave me the idea of what I’d missed.
He taught me to shoot a .22 caliber rifle and showed me how to bag a gray squirrel or rabbit every time I drew a bead. He relied on me to bring in game, and graduated me to hunting deer with a .308. But I only hunted what was in season and meticulously stayed within the bag limits. Mister Sharps didn’t have a shotgun, so he taught me to hunt grouse and ringneck with the .22 short. I was never so proficient that I took a bird on the wing with every shot. But one out of three? Maybe.
Not entirely bad, Sharps said.
He also taught me to drive his car, but never in an official capacity, or with a license. Since I was useful around the Youth Home, bringing in a steady stream of game and doing other chores, and being a cooling influence on the younger boys, and also because I kept out of trouble, Sharps let me linger long after the usual age for boys to go. At seventeen, many joined the military. By eighteen, most every one had finished school and wanted a job, and a few even went to college by way of scholarships. Sharps encouraged me to apply to the finest universities, said it would be the greatest waste of a brain he’d ever seen to have me hunt animals and read library books the rest of my life—and besides, there wasn’t a book left in the orphanage I hadn’t read other than that blessed Moby Dick. He said a man owed his best achievements to himself first, and if he didn’t have any personal ambition, ought to be productive to improve society—and if neither compelled him, he was useless as goose poop on a pump handle, and there was nothing to be done for him.
Finally, Sharps sat me down in his office one day last summer and said, “Gale, it’s time for you to make your life. It’s time for you to go.”
“I want to know about my mother,” I said.
Sharps removed his glasses. Pinched the bridge of his nose, but I saw the frown behind his hand. “Is that really important, Gale? When you have your whole life ahead of you?”
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