He took 6 south toward Houston, then I-10 east. He drove the sun up and exited for the fishing hamlet of Anahuac. He passed oil fields and a wildlife refuge, took a road along Galveston Bay, and turned down Poncho Street, where the road ended at a grass-spattered lot of saw palms, live oaks, and palmettos. Near the water’s edge was a house on stilts, where an old man like Reader—tall, gray-haired, and of the law—sat waiting on a screened wraparound porch in shorts and a silk button-up shirt, a Bloody Mary on a rattan table beside him. He lifted a hand as Reader got out of the truck and stretched. “You want a drink?” he hollered down.
“I came to fish,” Reader hollered back.
“Well,” the man said. He plucked an olive from his glass and ate it. “Let’s get to it.”
Fuller had done all right for himself as a judge, Reader thought, as the two of them went walking down the pier to where the Skipjack was moored, beyond it the brown bay of Galveston churning up the scents of fish and salt and mud. They took the boat into the bay, where they weighed anchor and fished for whiting with spinner rods, the eyelets of which winked in the morning sun. For a while they roamed the deck at opposite ends, not speaking, assuming the old postures they had known since before the war, though of late, time had separated them more than distance.
By lunch, they hadn’t caught much.
They sat on Igloo coolers of ice in the shade of the flybridge awning and ate potted meat on saltines and drank cheap Texas beer out of bottles.
“She’s a fine boat,” Reader said.
“A boat is a hole a man throws money in just to watch it sink,” Fuller said. “If I’d spent half the money I’ve put into this thing on a woman, I’d be far richer than I am.”
“You’ve done all right.”
“Not saying I haven’t. But we can always do better.”
“You keep in touch with anyone besides me?”
“What, from the corps?”
“Corps, division. Those JAG fellas.”
“A few.” Fuller sealed his lunch in a plastic bag and tucked it back into the cooler he sat on. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, raised an eyebrow. “This the favor you mentioned when you called?”
Reader spread the last of his potted meat on a cracker with the flat of his Old Timer. “You knew one or two judges sat on those tribunals, didn’t you?”
“You mean My Lai, that horror show?”
“No.”
Fuller stared at Reader for a moment. “Oh,” he said. He looked out of the shade into the sun and got up, bottle in hand. “You mean that shit,” Fuller said. He took a long drink from his beer. “That shit never made it to court. Where’s this headed, John?”
Reader chewed, swallowed. “Those boys were out there almost two years, weren’t they?”
“Nineteen months.”
“What’d they call themselves?” Reader asked, though he thought he knew. He remembered the conversation he and Fuller had once had, years back, on a fishing trip not so different from this one, only further inland, along the bayous, where alligators had watched the boat cruise past, their low flat heads like mines in the water. He and Fuller had been drunk, and Fuller had talked. He had talked more than he should have, and Reader had known it then and hadn’t stopped him, because he had not understood his rich lawyer friend in so long, not since the days when they had set boots on the ground in Britain, France, Algeria, and in these places they had been companions and shared in the nature of their work because their work was staying alive. Reader supposed he had wanted to share some secret knowledge to echo the bonds they had once known, friend telling friend the truth of it all, how it was. They had camped that night in the bayou, and by firelight Fuller, drunk on several pulls from a bottle of Old Forester, had sketched out with a stick in the soft moist earth the shape that one of his fellow judges had shown him pictures of, burned and carved into soldiers’ arms in the year 1968.
“The Wolf’s Head,” Fuller said now, the Skipjack swaying beneath them. He rubbed the back of his neck where it was blistering in the sun. “Yeah, I knew a few boys who investigated that. Why are you asking?”
“I got a boy killing women,” Reader said. “Has a Wolf’s Head mark.”
Fuller bent over the stern, put his weight on his knuckles. “Christ,” he said. After a moment, he stood upright.
“How many boys was in that outfit? Thirty, forty?”
“If that. Only a dozen came out alive.”
“They ever bring charges?”
“Shit. You think they’d ever admit it if they didn’t have to?”
Reader said nothing.
“Nineteen months with no command. Just a crazy firebug and some idiot boys who followed.” Fuller shook his head. “There wasn’t much advocate left in me after I heard about that, let me tell you. Only thing left was judge.” He tossed his bottle in the cooler. “You want another?”
“May as well.”
“Connie keeping you sober?”
“Best she can.” Reader took the beer and drank.
Fuller sat back down in the shade of the canvas awning.
Somewhere on the bay they heard the sounds of a motor, laughter.
Reader reached into the pocket of his chinos and took out the photocopy of Cecil’s sketch and handed it to Fuller, who sat looking at it.
“Your friends have access to sealed records,” Reader said. “Things that, anyone ever asked, likely burned up in that fire in St. Louis back in seventy-three.”
“You want a name,” Fuller said.
“I want a name. Three letters are all I’ve got. T. R. A. First or middle, most likely.”
Fuller sighed. He ran a hand through his silver hair, which was close and curled tightly by the humidity in the air. “They seal this shit for a reason, John. It’s just like I never told my wife I slept with that old girl out in Tempe, Arizona. You remember her?”
“I do.”
“You don’t tell secrets cause secrets hurt people.”
“That girl you were unfaithful with, she was twenty-seven, eight?”
“So?”
“These women, they’re about that age. About the age my own daughter would have been, had she ever been born.”
“You and Connie never recovered from that, did you,” Fuller said.
“Don’t change the subject,” Reader said. “Besides, it don’t cripple you, loss like that. It becomes a part of who you are.” He drank a swallow of beer. “Makes you stronger,” he said. He hesitated, then drank another.
“Sorry, John, I didn’t mean—”
Reader waved it away. “Truth is, friend, I wish I had the luxury of being disillusioned enough to move my wife out to Galveston Bay and leave it to others to fight the good fight. Most days I wake up thinking something’s coming one day I won’t be able to fight, and I wonder, is today the day.”
Fuller looked at Reader for a while. He picked up his rod and went and stood at the stern, where he cast the line out over the water. He made the motions of fishing and reeled in. Over his shoulder, he said, “T-R-A?”
“First or middle.”
“Just a name?”
“Just a name.”
Fuller cast out again.
Reader watched the line sail thinly through the air, shining like the strands of a web.
“You know it’s always good to see you, buddy,” Fuller said. “Really.”
Dusk. The day’s work not yet begun. Travis sat in the cafe, two legs of fried chicken and a heap of mashed potatoes cooling before him. The chicken legs were greasy and the white gravy had congealed atop the potatoes. He nudged it all with his fork, thinking that he had no blood to waste in secret upon the ground tonight. He sat un-swaddled, as he had the past two nights, strips of T-shirt washed and hung up to dry like curing meat on lengths of twine inside his camper. His legs and arms and head and back were stiff and worn with the slow, dull fatigue of hunger. His belt was cinched two notches tighter, and his hat sat like a bucket on his head. His skin was d
ry and flaking, his lower lip split. He itched all over. He had slept the day through only to wake exhausted. He had not seen the boy at all this evening and suspected, from the woman’s silence, that she and Sandy were still fighting.
After she had finished stacking chairs, the Gaskin woman came and sat at his table. “You look scoured,” she said to him. “Like a man who’s been lost out there for weeks.” She nodded at the garage doors, the desert night beyond.
Travis thought she looked decades older than she was tonight. She looked like the pictures of those dust-bowl women they had published in magazines, he thought.
“My boy did wrong yesterday,” she said. She spoke deliberately and looked him in the eye, and it made him look down at his untouched plate. “He says you told him how to make another boy wish he was dead. Is that true?”
The way she spoke made Travis feel like a child himself. “Your boy has a hard time of it,” was what he said.
“He does. We do. But hurtin people ain’t the way we make ourselves feel better. What kind of a thing is that to teach a boy, to make another boy wish he was dead?”
“We’re all made to wish it, one time or another.”
Her eyes glistened and she had to wipe them.
Travis put his fork down and stood, the scrape of his chair on the floor loud and careless. Hat in hand, he said, “My old man never gave a lick of good advice. It was wrong of me to think I could give it to your boy.”
The Gaskin woman pushed up from the table and stood facing him and said, “I know you meant well. But it ain’t our way.” She took his plate and fork away to the kitchen, and he heard her scraping food into the garbage.
Travis imagined, briefly, going to her. Touching her. Curving his palm around the small knob of her shoulder where she stood, fiercely scraping, feeling the soft cotton of the dress she wore, the tiny clusters of purple flowers printed there, long faded by washings and sun upon the line. It would be like touching a smooth river stone, he thought. Pleasing and worn and hard. But when he imagined his fingertips close enough to feel the gentle warmth of her body through her dress, like the low pleasant heat that comes off grass in the summer, he felt his mouth fill with saliva and he remembered the sensation of the rabbit’s beating heart beneath his palm. He saw the things that he—
we
—would do to this woman, a rush of horrors.
Travis dropped one hand to his gut and took a step back, then turned and went quickly out of the cafe into the dark.
He grabbed the evening’s tasks from the little clip outside the office and went down the boardwalk to the farthest cabin and went inside with a master key and sat on a bed. First on the slip of notepaper was the toilet in this room, which had not filled upon flushing for years.
Travis crumpled the paper and dropped it on the floor.
He looked up and saw his reflection in the mirror above the bureau.
The room was dark, and the thing that stared back at him had yellow eyes.
Don’t be afraid, Rue said. Tonight, her voice was not soft or pleasant but like the scraping of stones over stones.
He saw her reflection, too. Like a dark creature unfurling misshapen wings, she sat behind him on her knees and wrapped her arms around him. Travis knew, of course, that she was not really here. These last long days and hungry nights, Rue lay huddled in the storage cabinet beneath the berth. Watching him like a beast from the shadows, doll-black eyes pleading. All her blood emptied into him, like a swarm of bees smoked from a hive into an airless jar, and now that blood was dying inside him for want of more. It grew slow and sluggish in his veins. He could feel it.
You know how to be the thing you are.
He thought of the meat at the grocery counter. He touched his dry, swollen tongue to his lips. His teeth were loose in their sockets. They wiggled.
Be it soon, love.
He put two fingers in his mouth and seized one of his teeth and pulled it free of the gum. It came out easily, like a loosened bolt.
He thought of the rabbits.
Yes, she said.
He held his tooth in the glow of the sodium light shining through the window. He remembered swimming in the river Brazos when he was a boy, how he had lost a tooth that day in his father’s long boat, had plucked it from its socket after biting an apple. This same tooth he now held had grown in its place, and now the tooth was in his hand. In his memory, the water of the Brazos was blood, and fish floated dead and silver atop the surface. He dove in from the boat and dove deep. The water black and thick. He opened his mouth in the dark and swallowed. He swallowed until the blood filled his lungs.
Yes, Rue said. Oh, yes.
Annabelle stared at the door long after the bell above it had fallen silent. She looked out at the night and sensed, like a presence beyond the glass, that a great mystery had just withdrawn from the cafe. A wave had come crashing upon her shores, and she had been standing just far enough back to be safe from its lapping reach.
Sunday
October 12
The boy came to the shed after church and found both rabbit cages open and empty. The little wooden pegs that were locks had been snapped off and lay on the dirt floor. Sandy searched inside and outside the shed. He ran to the farmhouse and told his mother, and together they went out into the field of mesquite and scrub and looked for the rabbits, both still wearing their church clothes.
Sandy searched around the whole of the place and saw only the farmhouse cat, perched on the hood of the cowboy’s pickup, staring up at the sleeper window. The boy watched the cat, thinking, then went back to the field, where his mother was rustling scrub with a stick.
They found no scat, no tracks, no sign.
The rabbits were gone.
Tuesday
October 14
Fuller called Reader with the name that morning. Reader thanked him. “For what?” Fuller said, and hung up. Reader sat with the phone to his ear, listening to the silence until the dial tone kicked in. He hung up and buzzed Mary, asked her to run a name through DPS and NCIC. “Need a last known address, driver’s license, whatever you can find.”
He was about to hang up when he heard Mary say, “Hon? What’s the name?”
“Didn’t I say?”
“No, you didn’t.”
He could tell by the tone in her voice that her patience was strained.
“Sorry. Last name Stillwell. First name Travis.”
“Too much fun in the sun this weekend down in Galveston?”
“Something like that,” he said, but she had already hung up.
The rangers crossed the Brazos and cruised into Grandview. At first blush it was a pretty town, pretty in that Texas way: a single strip of shops and old brick buildings that jutted from corners like the prows of ancient ships, making it easy to imagine the dust and horses and carriages of olden times. And with these things, Reader thought, perhaps, an older way of life. Not always easy. Not always fair.
Cecil circled the Cole County courthouse twice, craning his neck. “She’s a beauty, ain’t she?”
Reader thought she was: three stories of glittering limestone topped by a clock tower that added two more. “She’s an edifice to justice if ever,” he said. “Shame she ain’t better served by the men inside her.”
From the town square they headed south through neighborhoods of little clapboard houses, gas stations, a hamburger stand, and a drive-in picture show. The river coiled bright green behind them. They took a narrow highway southwest and the houses quickly disappeared, leaving only the sprawling grass fields stitched with train tracks. Low groves of hardwood ranged beneath a cloud-studded sky. Cecil signaled right onto a narrow paved road, and soon the trees gave way on either side to trailers and shacks.
“Here,” Reader said.
“I see the mailbox,” Cecil said. “N. Stillwell. That the father?”
“Reckon so.”
They drew up and parked along the shoulder.
The childhood home of Travis Stillwell was
a low-slung ranch set back from the road, overtaken by thorny vines creeping up the brick. A big mimosa grew wild in the front yard.
The rangers got out of the cruiser and looked around. The only other house in sight stood across the street, at the edge of the woods. Its porch sagged. A man in a white undershirt gone yellow stood there, watching. He lifted his arm, the flesh under it a wattle.
Cecil lifted a hand back. “Reckon I’ll mosey over,” he said. “Ask some questions.”
“Go right on ahead,” Reader said.
He watched Cecil go, heard him say “Hidey” to the old man across the street, then turned and walked up the dirt drive and around the Stillwell house. The backyard was shaped by the woods on either side, which had grown close and thick. At the back of the lot stood an oak tree that had once been struck by lightning. A tire swing hung from the tree’s lowest branch, which had grown around the rope. Behind the tree was an old tool shed and beyond this the overgrown yard became hardpan and sloped up to a set of train tracks. Reader could see heat shimmering above the rails.
He passed the corner of the house and heard something shuffle behind him. Reader smelled the sudden reek of unwashed skin and piss and turned and saw a vagrant slumped against the wall of the house, beside him a small white mutt with a coat like a dirty mop. The man was old, wearing an army coat two sizes too big and clutching a bottle of something cheap against him. He had no teeth and his nose was the size of a knob of cauliflower and shot through with burst capillaries. The dog was thick with fleas. Reader could see them roiling in the matted coat. It lay by the old man’s side in a pile of rags, eyes wet and rheumy.
“We wish to sell,” the vagrant said. He pulled his bottle and his dog close. His hands shook. “Too many spics. Spics and niggers.”
Reader reached into his wallet with a hand as steady as he could muster and came up with a ten-dollar bill. “Reckon I ought to have a look around first,” he said. He pointed at the dog. “He won’t mind, will he?”
In Valley of the Sun Page 13