“Thank you for your help, ma’am,” Reader said. He hung up and sat on the weak-springed bed. Whenever he closed his eyes he saw the girl on the cold steel slab, not yet cut open for the official autopsy, but crooked and wrong, like a bird that had flown into a pane of glass. And yet not. No lividity. The blood still moving in her veins? Had it been? How alive yet not-alive she had seemed. Walking. Breathing. Licking the doctor’s blood from her fingers.
Inhuman, Alvarez had said.
Reader took a quick shower and got into bed in his undershirt and boxers. He lay atop the covers, staring at the ceiling where stains made shapes like places on a map. Expecting sleep not to come.
No comfort to be had in any truth here, the sheriff of Crockett County said.
He closed his eyes.
Sleep came, but it was not pleasant.
Sandy lay on his stomach in bed, propped up on his elbows, and watched the square of light shining out from the motel cafe. The night breeze carried the faint sound of the jukebox through his window and his curtains seemed to sway in time with the songs. The lights out by the pool were dark and the sign was off and it was just that one square of warm yellow light in all the world.
Annabelle and Calhoun came out of the cafe and Annabelle locked the door behind them. She kissed the big man on the lips. He put his arms around her. Held her. Kissed her ear. Annabelle pushed Calhoun away, turning her head, smiling. Sandy watched the way his mother walked on her way back up the hill, as if the music were still playing but only she could hear it. She waved at Calhoun as his truck passed on the highway and stopped, suddenly, when it was gone. Like a deer, Sandy thought, scenting trouble. She wrung her hands and looked back to the motel, but her posture relaxed and she touched the side of her ear, where Calhoun had kissed her, and she seemed to Sandy at that moment so light, so airy, that she could have been a dandelion in danger of blowing away across the plains. He pushed back from the window and rolled over to stare up at the ceiling until she had come into the house and settled. He heard the toilet flush. The shower run. Her bedroom door close. He counted to one hundred and got out of bed.
He drew the scabbard and knife from beneath his mattress and threaded an old Indian bead belt through the holes. He pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans and buckled the belt around his waist and slipped out of his room in socked feet, carrying his boots. The knife was heavy on his hip. He liked the weight of it, the way it made him feel anchored, safe. In the hallway, his mother’s bedroom door was shut, though her reading light shone through the crack beneath. Moving quietly, he set his boots down and eased open the linen closet and took out a folded white pillowcase that smelled of fabric softener. He picked up his boots and slipped out the back door at the end of the hallway, being careful to shut the screen silently. There, on the stoop, he sat and tugged on his boots.
By moonlight, Sandy went down the hill and crossed the parking lot to the ditch, where the turtle lay in the weeds. He took out the Ka-Bar knife and used it to turn the turtle over and was not surprised to see that carpenter ants were already swarming. Holding the turtle by its tail, he carried it into a pool of blue lamplight, where he lay it on the ground and brushed the last few ants from the legs and belly. He held it up to the light and looked into what was left of its head. One eye, like a gold button, seemed to watch him with a wide, terrified expression. He eased the turtle into the pillowcase and wrapped it several times.
Carrying the turtle in his arms, he walked up the hill and into the shed.
The shed was dark, but he knew it well enough he could move about inside without a light. He set the pillowcase on the dirt floor and dropped to his knees and began to dig with the knife. He dug in the corner until the dirt was loosened enough that he could scoop handfuls out, and when the hole was deep enough, he unfolded the pillowcase and reached inside and took the turtle out and lay it in the hole. He said a silent prayer for all small things that toiled beneath the sun, including himself and his mother.
After he had filled in the hole, Sandy went back to the house and put the pillowcase in the laundry hamper, washed his hands, took off the knife, and went to bed.
Travis built a fire in the iron fire pit of his campsite and sat hunkered on a rock beside it. He felt the heat from the flames but it did little to warm him. He wore his heavy, fleece-lined coat. He thought of his father and his mother and Rue and the Gaskin woman and her boy all that long night, his timeline of pain and killing, loss and desire, shot through his heart like an Indian arrow.
That day, in the camper, Travis had moved in and out of sleep, uneasy in his dreams and hunger. He woke near dusk, in his mouth the taste of dirt, the clack and whisper of beetles between his teeth, a whole hive of creatures living in his guts like mice in a wall. Now, by the fire, he held his ribs and rocked back and forth and listened to the desert wind knock bamboo chimes in a tree. The hunger was stripping him, baring him naked and vulnerable to the raw fact of what he had become, the inevitable truth that he must be this creature. His insides turning upon themselves, as they had before, his new teeth loosening again in their sockets. Soon, the only imperative he would know would be this wild cat sewn into the bag of his guts.
He remembered his dream of the wolf caught in the trap, its jaws bloody with its own flesh. He rolled up his sleeve and looked at his arm where the tattoo had once been, no sign of it now. Old flesh peeled, new flesh grown. What did it mean?
He took up a stick and poked the fire, and a school of sparks swam away into the dark.
He thought of Annabelle and Sandy, a tableau he had seen through the farmhouse window after the boy’s fight with Roscoe Jenkins. At twilight Travis had gone up to oil the blades of the windmill behind the house. He had climbed fifteen feet and done his work and, as the stars came out, he had hung there listening to the crickets sing from the fields, the blades of the wind-pump turning slowly, silently. When he passed by the farmhouse porch and saw Annabelle working the pedal of an old sewing machine in a corner of the living room, he stopped. Sandy stood beside her, one small hand making a slow, gentle motion up and down her back as she stitched his jeans. Travis recognized the scene at once, though he had never known anything like it: a reconciliation. They stood with their backs to him. A window and a porch and a universe between them. He stood watching until the boy turned and saw him, and he quickly turned away and walked back down the hill.
He thought of Rue. A dried rose dropping brittle petals.
She offered nothing so tender, so forgiving, as the love he had seen of an evening through a window in the Gaskins’ farmhouse.
We have to eat, she urged him. We have to, you stupid boy.
He jabbed the stick into the coals and watched it catch fire.
Monday
October 20
In the morning, Reader left the helicopter in the grass field behind the Crockett County sheriff’s office, checked out an unmarked cruiser, and drove to Cielo Rojo, to the address of the dead girl’s family. He pulled along the curb and put the cruiser in park and let it idle. The driveway of the little ranch house was full of cars. There were pink plastic flamingos staked in the aloe beds out front. Grackles sang out from the post oak trees. Reader sat and listened and watched people come and go along the flagstone walk. They were dressed in black and carried food in covered glass containers. Reader sat with his hands gripping the wheel. When he put them in his lap, they were shaking. They looked to him like the hands of a very old, wasted man. The hands of a corpse. A dead man walking. Or sitting. A dead man sitting.
Nothing to do.
The sheriff had said it again, in the car in the parking lot of the Saguero Arms, the windshield awash with neon pinks and blues. “Fella from the state police said so himself,” the sheriff said, working a toothpick beneath his mustache. “Just let the family grieve, says I. They don’t need to know a thing. She’ll be buried, closed casket, and that will be the end of this whole miserable ordeal. We’ll talk to doc when he pulls through. He’ll understand. He’s
a good man. Hell, I imagine he’ll want to put all this craziness behind him, too.”
“If he pulls through,” Reader had said.
“Pray he will.”
“It happened in broad daylight.”
“People saw a girl.” The sheriff shrugged. “Not the girl whose pretty face will run in the obits a few days from now, if it even runs in our papers here. No, what they all saw was just a thing they’re already trying to forget, I warrant you.”
The people came and went in twos and threes. Husbands and wives. Friends of the family. Young men and women in high school letter jackets worn over dark shirts and dresses.
Reader took the folded, faxed photo of the girl from his shirt pocket, the one the police had given him to show in his inquiries. She had dark hair pulled back behind small ears, a smile that dazzled. He listened to the grackles scream and whistle and heard the cold snick of his revolver as he thumbed back the hammer, heard the crunch of her neck bone beneath his boot as he stepped on her, how she gave like a hollow log.
The radio squawked.
He snagged it. Tried to keep his voice from shaking. “Go, Mary.”
“Your wife called, John. Over.”
He waited.
“She wants to know if you’re coming home or did you run off with someone younger and prettier.”
He held the radio in his hand and watched the people come and go up and down the flagstone walk.
“You ain’t checked in since yesterday. Over.”
He pressed the transmit button and said, “There’s something wrong, Mary.”
He let go of the button.
“John, what’s wrong? Everything okay there? Over.”
He opened his mouth to speak—
she was dead, I had to kill her but I was supposed to protect her, all my life I’ve believed in the law and have never given much thought to the question of God, not since Connie lost the baby and everything changed but that was so long ago, such a long damn time ago, Mary, and ever since I’ve held fast to the truth that nature is the only absolute, no good, no evil, just the biological imperative that corrupts us, that we must rise above through law and civilization, the containment of chaos, but last night I saw something so horrible, it tore a hole in everything and the bottom fell out of the world like the guts of a skinned animal, because I turned my gun on the corpse of a girl whose right to life I was sworn to defend, and the law cannot account for such things, and the sheriff of Crockett-fucking-County is right, there is no comfort to be had in a truth like that, not now not ever, and no, Mary, no, everything is not okay here
—and when he had said these things he looked down at his hands, his old and trembling hands, and the radio lay in his lap and his hands were empty and he had not even pressed the button.
“John? Over?”
He triggered the transmit button and said, “Tell her I’ll be there when I get there, Mary. Tell her no one’s prettier. Over and out.”
He hooked the radio and started the car and drove to a liquor store near a grocery he had passed on the way into town. He took his badge and gun off and left them in the car and went inside and bought two large bottles of whiskey and got back in the car and drove out of town. He remembered a little motel just off the road, about ten minutes east. That will be good, he thought. A place to think. A place to get his head together. I just need time, he thought. Time.
Soon, he saw the sign ahead.
The Sundowner.
Your Home Away From Home.
“It’ll do,” he said, and slowed to turn.
The sign in the office window said the inn was closed, and no one came when Reader knocked. The door was locked. The little cafe, an old garage by the look of it, was dark, too. A sign beneath a phone on the outer office wall gave instructions where to call if checking in after hours. The time of day was not yet ten in the morning, and for a moment Reader thought seriously of abandoning his intentions and driving back to Tyson and flying the Bell right back to Waco. But he had no idea what he would say to Cecil, to his superiors. To the blank page of the report that demanded only the truth: that a dead girl had gotten up and walked. A dead girl he had shot twice in full public view. When the truth was told, those above him would call the Crockett County Sheriff’s and the lie would be spun out of that office to contradict the truth, and the captain of Company F would give Reader a leave of absence. Go home and see your wife, the man would say, and it would not be bad advice.
Reader called the motel’s after-hours number per the instructions, then hung up and waited. It occurred to him, as he stood beneath the vast blue October sky, that he had not thought of Travis Stillwell in almost twenty-four hours.
It wasn’t long before a pretty young woman in jeans and a red blouse and a matching kerchief came down the hill from the farmhouse and unlocked the office. She made apologies for her lateness. “We had a party last night,” she said. “Decided to take the day.”
“We all need a little time off, ever now and then,” Reader said.
The woman showed him to his room, cabin six.
He thanked her. After she left, he went back to his car and fetched his overnight bag from the trunk. He also took the brown paper bag that held the two bottles of whiskey. Once in the room, his bag on the bureau, he sat on the edge of the bed and popped the cap on the first bottle. He loosened his tie and drank straight from the bottle. He noticed the drapes were open and the window looked out on the gravel parking lot and the sunny day. He drew them. He sat on the bed and opened a nightstand drawer, took out the Gideon Bible. He thumbed through it but found no answers there.
Reader put the book away and made the necessary call to Connie, who asked questions to which he had no answers. He imagined her sitting in the winged-back chair in the living room, one foot tucked beneath her, the phone against her ear, the fresh clean scent of her hair and skin. He closed his eyes and in the darkness could not know what was real and what was false. It was no better when he opened them again, so he said, “Just talk to me some. Let me hear your voice.”
There was a long pause—he could hear her swallowing at the other end of the line—before she began to speak. She spoke in English and Spanish. She talked about her morning trip to the H-E-B to buy a roast to cook as soon as he got back. She told him what funny things the cat had done. She told him that no woman had ever loved another man as she loved him, not even the likes of Anthony and Cleopatra.
He said “I love you” when they said goodbye.
“I love you, too,” she said.
He hesitated.
“John?”
“Everything’s fine.” And, again, he said, “I do love you.”
“I do love you, old man,” she said.
He hung up.
As the sun rose and rode over the sky on high, white clouds, Travis dreamed. Not of rivers of red or lakes of blood. Not of his mother or the old songs, the rain on the wall, the mimosa in the yard. Not of his father. Not of the shed in back of the house or the planes that roared overhead or beetles or flies or any such thing.
He dreamed, instead, of the boy and the woman.
In his dream they stood hand in hand on the brown grassy slope in front of their farmhouse. The stars were twinkling in the violet sky.
“These are the lights,” the woman said, nodding toward them. “The Gates of Light. Ain’t they pretty. Ain’t they fine.”
Standing far down the slope and looking up at the house and woman and boy and sky, he saw the stars begin to fade, like new wounds healing. The gates were closing, one by one. And then he saw himself, tall and lonely Travis, from far above, as though his gaze were the gaze of God illumining how small he was, here at the foot of the grassy brown hill, waiting for the boy and his mother to join him. He needed only to extend his hand, he knew, and they would come.
Quick now, he thought in the dream, before them gates close, all the lights go.
He reached out.
He woke.
Faint sunlight the color
of amber, bleeding through the camper window.
Shh, Rue whispered weakly, curled against the length of him. Shh. A bad dream. Go back to sleep.
There were red stains on his pillow where he had wept.
He buried his face in his arms and thought of his mother, an apparition, a mirage. All these years a vapor he had chased from horizon to horizon. Spilling blood in pursuit of her. And yet this dream just now had seemed as real and solid as the Gaskins’ motel, the farmhouse itself: a place where he had found shelter and purpose. And love? What had love ever been to Travis but harsh peals of laughter, a glare of hate from behind a cigarette, held in hands with sharp red nails? But these things, he understood now, did not matter. The past was dead. The present, too. All that mattered now were the endless years that stretched before him like the miles of highway he had left behind. He had become the mirage.
A hand in his, closing about his fingers. That would be real.
The boy’s hand. Annabelle’s. A life he had never had the chance to live, made flesh in them.
Rue stirred beside him, moaning. Restless.
But they are gone, he thought. I cannot have them now.
He reached one arm to the empty air of his cabover, opened his fingers.
Remembered the dream.
Saw the boy’s hand reaching for his.
No, he thought. No. That’s done.
Reader woke and realized, with sudden horror, that his life had become a round black hole falling away into nothing. He had forgotten who he was, where he was, and why he was. He saw only a dark line stitched like crooked thread across a spackled ceiling. The line was moving and not moving. It began near the window and stretched up the wall and across the ceiling and down the opposite wall and disappeared through the door. The bedroom door. His bedroom door. He heard the soft snoring of his wife beside him, and he remembered. He remembered everything. A black wave of loss broke over him and washed him up on the shores of consciousness, gasping for air.
In Valley of the Sun Page 24