“Shit,” the boy said. “What do you think friends are? Friends do this to one another?” He shifted and grabbed his belt loop and waggled it.
“I wouldn’t know,” Travis said.
“Ain’t you got any friends?”
He shook his head, thinking of the men he had known in the war, their names, their ways. They had not been friends. He thought of the girl he had once ridden a Ferris wheel with. She had said they were friends, but he had not believed her.
“Well, Roscoe Jenkins ain’t no friend of mine. He picks on me.”
“Boys used to take after me in school, too,” Travis said.
“How’d you handle it?”
“My old man said I ought to stand up for myself. He thought most things were solved that way. But I never could manage it. So I just quit school.”
“I’m ten years old,” the boy said. “How the hell am I gonna quit school?”
“You cuss a lot,” Travis said.
“Your daddy a nice man?”
“He was a man,” Travis said. “No better or worse than most.”
“My daddy killed people in Vietnam,” the boy said. “Never good people, though. Just the enemy. Was you in the war?”
“I was.”
“What was it like?”
“Loud,” Travis said. He ran his hand over the rabbit’s fur.
“You ever kill anybody?”
Travis held the small, warm life in his hands, no bigger than a woman’s breast.
“I don’t reckon God would punish my daddy for killing people deserved it, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Momma just got saved. I got saved a while back. Preacher told this story about a wee little man called Zaccheus. Said he climbed up in a tree to see Jesus and Jesus said, ‘I’m eating at your house.’ I think if Jesus came to eat at my house, I’d shit. Anyway, that’s how I got saved. You ever been saved?”
Travis swallowed. “Not yet,” he said.
“What’s wrong with your face?” the boy asked one last time.
“I’m allergic,” Travis said. “Just like your momma says.”
“Allergic to what?”
But he did not answer. Instead, he turned the rabbit out of his hands and watched it scamper away into a corner behind a shovel, where it huddled and dropped a pile of little round turds.
“That’s funny,” the boy said. “She ain’t normally so skittish.”
From the air, the derricks northwest of Abilene reminded Reader of a carrion field. They stretched three miles square, the newer wells plunging and rearing like giant birds tearing at the land. Reader circled twice before setting the helicopter down about a tenth of a mile outside the rigs. When the dust settled and the rotors were still, he and Cecil got out, Cecil carrying Dale Freelander’s thick Cole County file, and they were met halfway to the office by a man in a windbreaker and hard hat who introduced himself as Leland, the foreman. Leland brought the two rangers to a ring of picnic tables at the edge of a vast flat wilderness of wells. “We call this the cafeteria,” the foreman said. He laughed and pointed at the hand-lettered sign on a post that said as much.
“How about that,” Reader said without much humor.
Leland left to fetch Freelander off a north rig.
Fifteen minutes passed, wherein Reader stood and smoked and Cecil flipped through the file.
“Three counts of aggravated assault,” he read. “Two juvie offenses. Third was against Ms. Leeds. Sliced her lip with a straight razor.”
Reader looked out across the fields and saw Leland and a man in grease-stained coveralls approaching. The man was big and muscled. He sat down at the picnic table across from Cecil and opened a metal lunchbox and cracked a hardboiled egg right on the table. He rolled the egg under his palm. When it was in pieces, he ate it with his fingers. One eyelid hung like a half-pulled shade.
“I’ll leave you boys to it,” Leland said, and he went away.
No one spoke for a while. The rangers watched Dale Freelander eat.
“What happened to that eye?” Reader finally said.
“Used to box bare knuckle. Like that movie with Clint Eastwood. You know the one, with the monkey. Hey, you two remind me a them.”
“Eye like that probably got you a nice 4-F pass,” Cecil said.
Freelander chewed the last of his egg and stared hard at Cecil. He swallowed, wiped his hands on his coveralls. He said, “Y’all here for Barb, or just here to give me shit?”
“How well’d you know her?” Reader said.
Freelander looked from Cecil to Reader. “I knew her well enough.”
“Well enough to cut her face,” Cecil said.
“That ain’t no secret. I did my stretch.”
“Half a year on a work gang up in Goree?” Cecil laughed. “What’d they have you doing, growing tomatoes? Boys up there get fresh flowers in their cells ever day.”
“You don’t know a hell of a lot, do you,” Freelander said.
“We know about you,” Reader said. “We know you was rough-housin with Ms. Leeds before you and the cowboy got into it.”
Freelander laughed. “‘Ms. Leeds’?” he said. “I wouldn’t call it rough-housin. I’m a grabber’s all. Some girls like it.”
Cecil said, “I’d say she didn’t care for it. After all, she didn’t leave with you, did she.”
Freelander smiled, shook his head. He put a big, wide hand on the table and swiped eggshell from it. “Thing about Barb, she liked it hard.” He brushed a few last crumbs. “Girls like her don’t take after a face like this less they got a thing for trouble. She liked her dolls and pretty shit like any other gal. But it wasn’t the first time she’d ditched me.” He looked off toward the horizon, where iron wells churned the earth. “I swear fore God I didn’t figure it for the last.”
“How long those Cole County boys go at you?” Reader said.
“Bout six, seven hours.”
“What about this fella you tangled with?”
“Like I told those county boys, he couldn’t hit for shit. His shirt had these roses here and here. Seemed kind of fruity, I don’t know. He looked tough enough, like a goddamn yardbird. Maybe he was just holdin back.”
“They ask much else about him?”
Freelander shook his head. “They didn’t care about him. Just me.”
“What’d you do to get em so sweet on you, Dale?” Cecil asked.
“Plenty.” He grinned. “Reckon I broke the camel’s back when I took a fuck at that sheriff’s step-daughter bout nine months ago. You know what I mean?”
“You said he was holding back,” Reader said. “How’s that?”
“Man gets into it, he usually got a reason, right? Specially if he’s taking an ass-whoopin.”
“So?” Cecil said.
“So he took it, but he didn’t have no reason I could see. I mean, he didn’t know Barbara. Nobody went and insulted this boy’s honor or called him out. He just walked right up while me and Barb was dancing and grabbed my arm and yanked me away from her. Figure he had to have a reason.”
Reader said, “So you think it was all show? He gets beat up, earns a little pity from a pretty gal, she takes him in like some stray?”
“You boys wear them stars, not me.”
“So you beat the piss out of him,” Cecil said. “Then what?”
“Then that bitch raked her fingernails down my face. So I called em both the crazy fucks they was and got in my truck and left. That’s what. I tried to tell them sheriff’s jackoffs. They said they’d look into it, but they was hellbent I’d strangled her myself. Tried for hours to make me say it. I said shit, I’d wanted to choke that bitch half a dozen times, just never got round to it.”
“What’d he look like?” Reader asked.
Cecil took a small notepad from his hip pocket and opened it and set his pencil to paper.
“I told them deputies.”
Reader and Cecil exchanged a glance.
“I guess they le
ft that part out of their report,” Freelander said.
“Describe him,” Reader said.
Cecil drew as Freelander talked, and the face took shape: young and gaunt, dark circles under the eyes. Short dark hair. Long neck. A crooked nose. Reader watched over Cecil’s shoulder. “He have any other features you might remember?” Cecil asked. “Scars? Tattoo maybe?”
“Yeah. He had a tattoo.”
“You remember it?” Reader asked.
“Couldn’t forget it. I saw it when he grabbed me on the dance floor. Saw it again outside when I knocked his ass flat. It was right here, on his arm. Looked like one of those things fellas do in the joint, you know. Cut hot metal into you. Not a real tattoo. It had this X going like this.” Freelander made an x with his arms. “In front of that,” he said, “it looked like a wolf’s head.”
“A wolf?” Reader snatched Cecil’s notepad and pencil. He flipped a page, made a quick sketch. Held it up. “Look like this?”
“That’s it.”
“And you didn’t say anything about this to them sheriff’s boys?”
“Shit,” Freelander said. “They didn’t even ask.”
Reader nodded. He looked off to where the wells churned along the horizon, a veil of haze over the land.
“He’s ex-military,” Reader said to Cecil as they walked back across the field to the helicopter. Cecil lagged a step behind. Reader was tall and Cecil had to make big strides to keep pace. “I heard tell of boys, wore a thing like that.”
“Like a patch?”
“No. Not a patch. I need to do some digging.”
“We best go over what Cole County did with a fine-toothed comb, too,” Cecil said. “Check and re-check. Sloppy’s one thing, but malfeasance? That’s a different-colored horse.”
They climbed into the helicopter.
The glass cockpit was warm.
Reader took off his hat and fanned himself.
“Say our boy’s roundabout thirty,” Cecil was saying, “which is likely, given the ages of these gals, figure by sixty-six or seven he’s enlisted or drafted. Standard tour, assuming your basic infantry, is twelve months, say three, four tours max, he’s home by what, seventy, seventy-one?”
Reader sucked his teeth. “Could be.”
“What is it, boss?”
Reader put his hat back on. “I reckon I need to go buy me a fishin rod, Cecil.”
“Fishin rod,” Cecil said. He put his headset on and pulled his hat down over it. He buckled himself in and gazed out through the cockpit glass at the oil fields. “Okay,” he finally said.
Reader fired up the rotors and the helicopter lifted in a storm of grass and wind and angled southeast, back toward Waco.
Friday
October 10
The evening star was fixed and shining. Travis, face unwrapped beneath his Bullhide, sat on a cinder block between the motel and his pickup, tinkering with the whirligig from the cabinet beneath his berth. It was missing a washer, and one of the roadrunner’s pressboard wings had snapped. Travis turned the blade of his knife in a screw that held the wing in place and thought about the Rue-thing inside his cabover, how she had watched him, listlessly, from behind a fall of straggly hair, as he had reached into the cabinet to remove the toy. Her eyes dark and sunken, their red glitter gone. Her breathing slow and wheezy. Like a sick animal, she had rolled away from him, and so he had closed the pressboard door.
He fiddled weakly with the bird. His clothes hung from his frame. His muscles were sore and tight. He found himself wondering, idly, if he could starve her to death. Would she die first, or would he? Sometimes his thoughts ran like this and sometimes he entertained horrible visions of what he might do to the Gaskin woman and the boy, a flood of black thoughts that were not his own, he told himself, but hers. Still, every day he stayed, the danger to the boy and his mother grew. He had Rue’s sickness, and it was simple in its needs and the path to satisfaction was as straight and barren as the roads he had traveled to get here.
The orange cat sat at attention on the hood of his pickup, its nub of a tail twitching as it stared up at the cracked sleeper window of the camper.
“You see something, cat?” Travis said, slipping the roadrunner’s wing free of its axle.
The cat eyes were slits. It turned its gaze back to the sleeper window.
Up on the farmhouse porch, the screen door banged open and the boy came running from the house.
The cat leapt to the ground and slunk beneath the truck.
The Gaskin woman stepped out after the boy and went as far as the porch steps, where she leaned against a post and crossed her arms.
“What’s your all-fired hurry?” Travis asked the boy when he ran up, near breathless.
The boy picked up a stick and a couple of rocks and swung the stick at the rocks as if they were baseballs and the stick a bat. “I got in it with Momma,” the boy said.
His mother paced back and forth on the porch, her hair done up in a red rag. She wore no shoes to come after the boy.
Travis’s stomach gave out a long, low grouse.
“Damn,” the boy said and laughed.
Travis held the knife in one hand, the whirligig in the other. “How come you got into it?”
“I wouldn’t eat no peas,” the boy said.
“What you got against peas?”
“Nothing.”
“Then what’s at issue?”
“Momma’s pissed cause I got suspended from school. She done let me have it three times since they sent me home, and I told her one more time going over the same old same old and I wouldn’t finish my supper cause she was making me sick to my stomach.”
“You ought not speak to her like that,” Travis said.
The boy just swung his stick at a rock he had tossed in the air. The stick connected and the rock struck the big metal Lennox behind the restaurant.
“How come you got suspended?” Travis asked.
“In a fight,” the boy said. He nodded at the whirligig. “What’s that?”
“Just another old thing I can’t fix,” Travis said.
“I seen those before. My daddy took me over to the Trade Days at Canton once, and they had those.”
“I don’t know where this one come from,” Travis said.
“Looks like it’s got a busted wing.”
“Looks like,” Travis said and he set the wooden toy on the ground. His stomach burned. “Broke as me.”
The sky had darkened to a deep midnight blue. Travis stood up and put his knife in its scabbard. He looked up at the boy’s mother, still on the porch, watching them. The boy paid him no mind, swinging his stick at the air.
“You win that fight?” he asked the boy.
“Ms. Lopez the principal says no one who fights wins.”
“Then Ms. Lopez ain’t never been in a fight,” he said. He lifted a hand to the boy’s mother.
She did not wave back. She sat down on the steps.
“I guess you been in plenty of fights,” Sandy said.
“I been in a few.”
“I bet you always won.”
“I lost my share. You fight that other boy, Roscoe?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t kill him, did you, like you said you was?”
“No. But I thought about it. If I’d had me a knife like yours, I might have.”
“Reckon maybe you oughta go pet them rabbits a while?”
“Fuck them rabbits,” the boy said. He took a swing at another rock. It struck the motel wall just shy of a window.
Travis looked away and thought, He’s alone. He’s got a mother but she’s up there and he’s down here, and down here, he’s alone. Travis touched the hilt of his knife. He drew his Ka-Bar from its scabbard and turned the blade. There was a dark thing in the boy, born in a dark shed, a sadness too big for one so small. Travis remembered the lonely smell of moldering canvas in his own father’s shed. Gasoline and grease. He wondered if one day the boy would ever look in a mirror and se
e a stranger staring back.
Sandy lowered his stick and watched Travis, who looked up to the porch one last time and saw Annabelle Gaskin watching them both. Studying them hard, Travis thought.
He sheathed his knife.
“Reckon you don’t need a blade to get the job done. You want, I can show you how to put a man down so he won’t get back up.”
“How’s that better’n killin him?”
“Kill a man, he don’t know he’s hurtin.”
Sandy thought about this for a while, then said, “What I gotta do?”
Travis unhooked his scabbard and knife and set them on the hood of his pickup. He spread his legs and arms and bent his knees and hunched forward, wincing as pain traveled the length of him like a fuse. He moved sideways. “All right now,” he said. “You just pretend I’m you and you’re that Roscoe and you run at me and just try to hit me.”
Sandy shifted from one foot to the other. “This gone hurt?”
Travis lowered his arms. “I ain’t gone hurt you,” he said.
All around the yard, the sodium lamps that studded the property flickered to life.
Sandy ran at Travis, and Travis found one last measure of strength in hands and arms and legs, prized up from some small, forgotten corner, where the light was dim and the earth had not yet been disturbed.
Saturday
October 11
Reader woke long before first light. He didn’t shower, just pulled a madras shirt over his nightshirt and slipped into a pair of old chinos and canvas shoes. He was careful not to wake Connie. Downstairs, he made toast and ate it while standing by the sink, watching the oak in the backyard sway in the breeze. He put his bowl in the sink. From the table, Reader picked up the photocopy of Cecil’s sketch he had made at headquarters the day before. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. In the garage, he took an old, heavy tackle box out of a cabinet and checked to make sure he had everything he needed for the day. He set the box on the floor of his Chevy and put a brand-new spinner rod in the bed of the truck. Reader backed slowly down the drive and cruised through the empty, dark streets, feeling, as he always did when waking in the early a.m. hours, that the world did not belong to men but was somehow its own keeper, and he was but one small part in some greater mystery, and the silence of everything was but a solemn hush before it.
In Valley of the Sun Page 12