by Glenn Trust
“Yeah. Things are pretty bad I guess,” she ventured as an opening.
Clay waited.
“Things are bad enough,” she continued. “Me and my daddy had a fight. I guess we always have a fight goin’.”
“You hurt?” Clay asked. He looked at her hand holding the cuff of her shirt tight.
“Not bad,” she replied softly.
“Can I see?” Clay asked. “You might need a doctor.”
“No, it’s just a bruise,” she replied, never looking up.
He reached over and slid the arm of her shirt up a ways. Lyn continued to look down at her lap. When she didn’t resist, he pulled the sleeve up to her elbow.
The purple bruise on her forearm looked as if she had put it up to fend off a blow from someone much larger. He gently slid the shirt back down.
Cy missed nothing, but kept his peace. Clay knew it bothered him that he was showing an interest in the girl.
Cy was sympathetic and would never stand for anyone hurting a girl, but he was focused on the business. Drop the girl off and get to work. Anything else was a distraction they didn’t need right now, and he could tell that this was turning into a distraction for his brother.
“Your daddy gave you that bruise?” Clay asked.
“I guess he did…he swung at me and…well, I got the bruise.” She shrugged. “It ain’t nothin’.”
“That ain’t right you know. What your daddy did ain’t right.” Clay looked down at Lyn who continued to avoid eye contact by staring at her lap or out of the window.
“It ain’t nothin’,” she repeated. “He just been drinkin’. Drinks a lot. He don’t mean no harm, it just happens sometimes.”
“Well, he ought to think of you and your mama some.” Clay felt a small, growing pit of anger inside at the man who had abused this girl.
“I know, but he tries. He does,” Lyn said, puzzled as to why she felt the need to defend her father. “He just gets so angry sometimes. I don’t think he even knows why. He just gets to drinkin’. It’s like he’s lost, and the drinkin’ is the only way to find his way out. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “He don’t like me, and I knew I couldn’t stay no more. Mama wouldn’t let me stay, was afraid for me. So I left.”
She stopped speaking, wondering at all she had just said, letting things out. It was the most she had ever said to anyone about her troubled family.
The brothers soaked it all in. Hard as life had been without their father, it had never been abusive. It was hard to get their minds around the concept of beating a young girl.
“So where you goin’?” Clay decided to return to Cy’s question.
Lyn said nothing and tugged at her cuff.
“C’mon,” Clay urged. “Where you headed to?”
She looked up at him for the first time. “You promise not to laugh?”
Clay nodded and waited.
“I’m goin’ to Canada.”
“Canada? You got family there?
Lyn shook her head. “No. No family,” she replied a little embarrassed.
“Well, then why go there? Why not someplace you know about?”
Lyn shrugged and gave a little laugh. “I don’t know. It’s a place my brother, Sam, and me always talked about goin’ to get away. You know, kind of a place to start over. Different.” She ended with another shrug. She knew it must sound crazy to him. At this thought, she looked up at him and added, “I’m not crazy you know. I know what I’m doin’.”
Clay was quick to reply, “Never said you were crazy. Just tryin’ to get it in my head. Canada, really?”
“Canada, really,” she replied firmly with a touch of defiance in her voice. Maybe it was crazy, but she didn’t have to put up with questions from this boy, who probably wasn’t any older than she was.
He thought for a minute then asked, “So have you thought of goin’ anywhere else? Some place closer.”
She shrugged again, looked down and said, “Don’t have nowhere else to go. Canada seems right.”
What exploded from him next surprised him as much as his brother.
“You could stay with us.” He saw Cy looking hard at him and added, “Us and Mama.”
The pickup swerved onto the shoulder and then back onto the road as Cy turned in his seat. He wanted to ask Clay what the hell he thought he was doing, but Clay returned his brother’s angry look with a face that was hard and determined.
It was a look he knew all too well. Cy shook his head and leaned forward gripping the truck’s steering wheel tightly. He focused on his driving, not wanting to hear anything else his brother might say to the girl.
Lyn, unaware of the silent interaction between the brothers, sat there in shock. No one had ever said such a thing to her or ever made such an offer. Why would this stranger make it?
“Now who’s crazy? You don’t even know me.” The words blurted from her the way Clay’s offer had exploded from him. It was unreal. Too much. The look on his face made her temper them a bit. “No,” she went on. “That wouldn’t be right. Besides, it was always Canada. It’s always been in my head. It was the place. The place for Sam and me. I have to do it. Go there.”
Having opened the door, Clay couldn’t let it just slam shut. “But what are you gonna do? How will you live?”
“I got a little money to get there. Then I’ll get a job. I can work,” she answered.
“How much money?”
“Enough.” Lyn was wondering just how far she would get on her two hundred fifty-two dollars, and suspected that it would not be nearly enough, although she would not admit that to this young man. Doing so would call into doubt her judgment in the matter, and the last thing she could tolerate right now was another man interfering in her life and her dream.
“It might not be so easy. You might not find work right off. They might not let you work up there. You won’t have anyone there. Besides you need a passport if you’re gonna go legal. You got a passport?”
Having no idea what a passport was she simply replied, “I’ll get one, “ and then added “I have to try.” Her voice broke in a choking sob. “It’s the place we were gonna go to be safe.” A tear rolled slowly down her cheek.
Not knowing what else to do and feeling like a jackass, Clay moved as far away from her in the seat as he could, trying to give her what little privacy he could. The brothers exchanged glances again over the girl’s head. This time the older brother’s face was resigned. What the hell, he shook his head.
24. A Heavy Thud
The faded, old car pulled slowly from in front of the motel room door. The baggage had been loaded in the trunk, and the driver sipped a cup of made-in-the-room coffee. It was still dark, maybe an hour before sunrise. He noticed that the parking lot of the StarLite Motel was now empty. Apparently, the owners of the cars he had seen earlier did not require a room for the entire night.
Across the road, Pete’s Place was lit brightly and glowed in the early morning mist. Business seemed to be thriving although it was well past the mandatory two a.m. last call and closing. Such minor details did not seem to apply in Roydon, at least not when the entire sheriff’s department and all the state troopers within fifty miles were tied up at the scene of a murder.
Some old black guy in a church lot off the Jax Highway got knifed, the bartender advised his customers after hearing the news from one of his contacts with connections to the sheriff’s department. The staff of Pete’s Place kept tabs on the movement of the law around Pickham County. Such information was important in Roydon.
The patrons of Pete’s Place were duly grateful for the information and contributed generously to the bartender’s tip jar. No one at the bar paid any attention to the old car pulling away from the StarLite across the road.
Turning west away from the dusty, old motel, Roydon faded in the car’s rearview mirror. Ahead, a quiet, empty two lane highway stretched into the darkness. He followed it a few miles, able to see only a couple hundred feet in front and the shoulder of the roa
d. The rest was black.
The dark, predawn hour suited him. He knew he was surrounded by farmland and woods, and he knew what he was looking for. It was just a matter of finding it before the daylight exposed him.
The car proceeded at a steady pace, not so slow as to attract attention or so fast that he would outdrive the headlight beams…searching. Five miles down the two lane road, he spotted a smaller country road and turned right, north. Then he saw another road, this time an unpaved dirt road leading off to the west again.
It looked right. He made the turn, cut the headlights, and crept slowly forward for about half a mile. Pulling as far to the right as the gravel shoulder of the road would allow, he put the car in park and left the engine running.
Opening the door silently, he stood and scanned in all directions for lights or other signs of houses and people. There weren’t any.
He heard only the sounds of the night, insects humming, and the rustling of small animals in the brush along the road. Somewhere a rooster crowed.
There was no remote button on the old car, but he was practiced and had no problem inserting the key into the trunk lock in the dark and opening the lid. It took a little more effort to get his arms under the heavy, wrapped bundle so that he could lift it out.
The early morning predawn glow could now be seen off to the east, although he still stood in blackness on the small, dirt road. The night was waning.
Moving more quickly now, he hefted the bundle over his shoulder and walked about ten paces into the roadside brush. Beyond that, the vegetation was much thicker, and it would have been difficult to push through with his load. Besides, he could hear live things scurrying in the brush near him. There was no need to take a chance and possibly step on a snake.
He let the bundle fall from his shoulder. It hit the ground with a heavy thud.
Walking quickly back to his car, he gently closed the trunk lid with a barely audible click. He gave a final look around, got into the driver’s seat and pulled across the road, reversed, pulled forward again, successfully turning the car on the narrow road, heading back the way he had come.
Fifteen minutes later, the car was passing through Roydon. The eastern sky ahead was lit with a cherry glow. In the soft, early morning light, Roydon was almost a pretty little hamlet. Almost.
The screen door of Pete’s Place slammed as the old car passed by heading towards the interstate. Two large bikers stood outside blinking in the dim morning light after pulling an all-nighter. They talked animatedly for a few seconds, fist bumped, and climbed on their Harleys.
His gray eyes snapped up to the rearview mirror as he passed by, watching the bikers cross the road with a roar into the parking lot of the StarLite Motel. Smiling, he wondered if they wanted a room for the whole day, and if it would be the one he had occupied so recently. He was pretty sure the StarLite didn’t promise patrons clean sheets.
25. A Sense of Well-being
A quarter mile farther up the dirt road from where the old car had stopped, Tom Ridley, who had lived in his small, frame house all of his life, was up for the day.
He had just walked outside to pee in the yard. His wife hated it when he did that, but early in the morning like this, she wasn’t up and about yet. This was his private time, and that included peeing in the yard if he wanted. That’s how they had done it when he was growing up, and it suited him fine. Besides, there was a sense of well-being and freedom, standing in the fresh morning air doing what nature called him to do with no one around.
As Tom was finishing his morning ritual, he thought he heard a small click. At first, he thought it was just the last few drops hitting the ground. A moment later though, he could clearly hear in the quiet morning air the sound of tires moving and turning and what sounded like a car backing up and then going forward, changing from drive to reverse and back to drive.
Probably Deputy Mackey sleeping out his night shift on the deserted dirt road and now heading home, he thought. He didn’t blame him much. All them sheriff’s boys had two or three part-time jobs. If they needed to catch a little shut-eye on his dirt road before going home, he was fine with that. He did the same himself sometimes out behind the chicken barns where he worked. A little nap in the middle of the workday made things seem right. They got it right down south of the border. Siesta. The older he got, the more he appreciated the concept.
Tom stretched, scratched, and pulled one strap of his overalls up over his shoulder. The night was beginning to fade. A light breeze came up, thick with the smells of the earth. He watched as the sky lightened.
To the east, down the little dirt road, Tom Ridley’s road, the sun cast a reddish glow up over the horizon. The red glow lit the side of their small frame house in a way he never tired of seeing. It seemed that of all the houses in the world, the sun had chosen to spotlight his little house. The one where they had raised their boy, lived their lives, and most likely, where they would die. But not today, Tom smiled inwardly.
“Margaret, you up?” he hollered at the house.
A moment later, the rusty screen creaked and then clattered shut as his wife shuffled in her slippers onto the back porch.
“I’m up. I’m up. What you hollerin’ about.”
The plump woman in a worn robe and slippers lifted her eyes to the sunrise as she lifted a coffee cup to her lips. She smiled.
“That’s a nice one, Tom. Real nice.”
They stood quietly watching the world wake up for a few minutes.
“Here,” she said. “Come get your coffee… and have you been peeing in the yard again?”
She shook her head and went back through the screen door. Tom Ridley thumped up the old porch steps and grabbed the screen door before it closed, casting one last rearward glance down the road towards the rising sun. The rightness of the scene made him smile.
26. The Crack
The whine of the car’s tires hitting the rumble strip on the edge of the asphalt forced his eyes open. George Mackey was fatigued.
By this point in the night, the adrenaline had faded, and although Mrs. Sims’ admonition to catch the person who had murdered her husband still echoed in his ears, he found his head nodding and eyes closing as he drove. The radio chatter from the units, state and local, responding to the murder scene at the church had faded into the early morning silence so familiar on this shift.
Directed by the sheriff that he had no further duties at the crime scene, he had made a wandering patrol of the county. When he nearly put the truck into a roadside ditch, George decided it was time to head for one of his ‘cracks’.
A crack was a place where others usually did not go, and a deputy could fairly safely pull over and sit undetected and watch, or doze as was the case this night. All deputies had their favorite crack. George headed to his now.
It was an old rest area on a state highway. Not one of the big, fancy rest areas on the interstate, it was just a dirt pull-off from the two lane highway with a couple of picnic tables surrounded by large trees. The state maintained it, such as it was, because it was on a stretch of state highway that crossed southern Georgia from east to west, skirting the Okefenokee Swamp.
Backing his vehicle as far as possible to the rear of the rest area, George stopped amidst the trees and brush, and cut the engine. The brown sheriff’s pickup was invisible in the dark and shadows.
Rolling the window down, he gave a knob on the radio a quick twist to turn the volume up and pulled his jacket tight around him. A minute later, his eyes fluttered closed.
It wasn’t long before the tire and engine sounds of the approaching car had roused him. The noise increased in pitch as the car approached.
George sat motionless, head back against the headrest, bundled in his jacket, arms folded across his chest. His eyes were slit open and peering over the steering wheel as the car passed, the Doppler effect causing the engine noise to decrease in pitch as it moved away from the deputy’s position. From habit, George noted the car, registering it in his subconsc
ious.
Older model car, maybe a Chevrolet or Pontiac or some other GM model. Color was uncertain, maybe gray or faded brown. Very plain looking.
It was a little early for traffic to be out, but not unheard of. Probably a car traveling from the west across the state, headed to one of the coastal towns or barrier islands. George was not aware that the car had already passed this way heading west, not more than fifteen minutes before George had pulled into the rest area.
No big deal anyway, farmers around here all drove old cars. Normally, they rose and slept with the sun. While this was a bit early for them to be out, sometimes the old ones couldn’t sleep like normal people and would be up and fidgety at ungodly hours for no apparent reason, checking on livestock or a vegetable garden or the chicken barns or some such farm stuff.
They couldn’t wait until daylight. It was just their nature. He knew it because he had come up on a farm not far from here, and he had made up his mind not to live that life.
George Mackey shifted in his seat a bit, pulled his jacket tighter around his neck and waited for daybreak so that he could call the dispatcher and tell her he was going off duty. The old car’s taillights faded out of sight. Dumb farmer, he thought.
27. Lylee
Leyland Torkman…he actually went by the nickname Lylee…was completely unaware of Tom’s morning ritual or George’s secret napping spot. Having retraced his route in the old Chevy back to the StarLite Motel and onto I-95, he relaxed a bit and scanned the interstate for danger…and opportunities.
The sobriquet of Lylee was one used by those who knew him, not because they were friends and on intimate terms. It would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to find someone who actually called him ‘friend’. People who knew him just learned to call him by the name his mother had used when he was a child because it was the name he used for himself.
He had not adopted the name through any attachment to his mother. The innocent, childlike sound of it suited his purpose. It was another form of camouflage. Others might have snickered at the childish name, but that was between them, and not within the hearing of Leyland Torkman.