Easy Death

by Daniel Boyd

  Officer Drapp

  “But I do beg your pardon.” She said it like she’d spilled tea on a laid-out doily. “I seem to have been going on about myself.”

  On the other side of the windshield, the snow was still beating us to death, and gusts of wind hit the square sides of that Jeep till it rocked. I had on big leather gloves with knit-wool glove liners under them, and the leather strained across my knuckles, I was clutching the wheel that tight as we moved maybe fifteen miles an hour along the park road. The tracks of the getaway car had faded into the snow, but I told myself I didn’t need tracks now; there was only one way through the park and we were on it.

  “That’s okay.” You learn that you get a person talking, they’ll sooner or later get around to what you need to find out. So I tried not to clench my teeth when I said it. “Sounds like you’ve had an interesting time.”

  Well I’d got her to talking all right.

  Or maybe she just got lonely sometimes, working out in the woods like that. Whatever it was, in the last half-hour I’d heard all about the life and times of Calpurnia Nixon. How her dad owned umpty-ump acres of forest out west where she used to play. Then college at some place called Barnard, but they didn’t have the kind of courses she wanted, so she spent summers working at parks and lumber camps—I tried to figure what she’d be doing in a lumber camp, but nothing pretty came to mind. And then when the war came and able-bodied men were scarce, she’d got a hitch as a sure-enough Park Ranger.

  “That’s when I knew this was my life,” she said. “Those years living in the park and looking after the woods. It seemed as if I were supposed to be here.”

  She paused, like she was swallowing something hard. Or maybe just stopped to take a breath, then went on. “But after the war they didn’t see much need for women to be park rangers anymore.”

  “They fired you?”

  “Colonel Powell—he was my commanding officer at the time—was quite straightforward about it,” she said. “He said now the men were coming back for the jobs, well, I was taking a job away from a man who needed it and it was time I got married and raised a family.” She made that noise again, like she was swallowing something hard just thinking about it. “Well, I had no plans for anything like that and I told him as much, and I’m afraid I may have been a bit vituperative. At any rate, he insisted I had to go, and that’s when I found that having a cousin in politics wasn’t such a bad thing.”

  “Yeah, I guess not.” Funny, her voice was kind of pretty, and listening to her talk was almost restful. Just about took my mind off what was really going on here, and the way it was, driving in the snow and wind like this. Just listening to her helped ease the strain.

  But she still hadn’t got around to what I wanted to hear about.

  “So with my Cousin Richard’s help, I stayed in the National Parks,” she said, “but they have ways of getting back at one…” She stopped talking. Just trailed off like when you pull the plug on a record player. And I needed her talking.

  “Seems to me you done a pretty good job here.” I tried to sound like all those trees covered up in snow was something real special just to look at.

  “Well, it’s a work in progress,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “A park, a forest, is a work in progress. It keeps growing and changing—that is, if it’s managed properly—and it never stops. That’s the wonder of it.”

  “I think I see what you mean.”

  Actually, only thing I saw was more trees and more snow, but I figured now I’d got her relaxed, it was time to find out what it was she’d been shying away from saying since I’d met up with her. Time to use those careful, subtle questioning cop techniques you see in the movies.

  “What is it you’re not telling me?” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “There’s something about this situation with your Captain out at the watchtower, and you’ve been dancing around it this last half-hour. Now, was there something you don’t want to say, that’s fine, but I get to thinking maybe we’re driving into something I ought to know about, and if there is, well…maybe you ought to come out with it.”

  “You’re probably correct.” The tone in her voice sounded like she really wanted to come out with it. “But first I wonder if you could satisfy my curiosity?”

  “About what?”

  “How does a police officer happen to be driving around in a pick-up truck full of hay bales?” she asked. “And back at the ranger station, why didn’t you call for more officers?”

  “That’s easy,” I said, trying to think of an answer.

  Chapter 18

  Thirty Minutes After the Robbery

  December 20, 1951

  9:30 AM

  Walter and Eddie

  As the car that looked a little like a police car went through another patch of woods, the drifts eased up, the driving got better, and Walter felt he ought to speak what was on his mind.

  “You think he meant that?” he said suddenly.

  “Who meant what, do I think?”

  “You think that guard, the dumb one, meant what he said about them losing their jobs because of this? Because we robbed them?”

  “Hell, no.” Eddie moved around on the seat, still trying to get comfortable in the long, heavy police coat and still not getting there. “Guy takes a wound like that protecting somebody else’s money, he’s a hero.”

  “You think that?”

  “Sure. Guy gets his ear shot off, how’s it gonna look do they fire him for it?”

  “That’d be a damn shame, getting fired right at Christmas.” Walter gripped the wheel a little tighter as they passed a plowed field and the wind coming across it tried to whip the car broadside, then eased a little as the road cut through a strip of woods.

  “Well, I don’t figure them to fire either one of those guards. One of them gets shot up and the other one puts bandages on him and saves his life…they’ll be heroes and get their pictures in the papers is what’ll happen. And maybe someday they’ll make a movie about Vincent Van Gogh, and that dumb guard, he’ll play the lead.”

  “Movie about who?”

  “Vincent Van Gogh.” Eddie watched the woods grow thicker around them again, hoping it would keep some of the falling snow off the road, or maybe just keep it from drifting as much.

  “Who’s Vincent Van Gogh?”

  “He was a painter. He painted pictures, I mean. He was French or something, and he lived a hundred years back maybe, long time back in the days like you see in movies when everybody wrote with feathers.”

  “And what about him?”

  “Well, he only had one ear.”

  “No kidding? Born like that with just one ear?”

  “Naah.” Eddie decided the woods weren’t helping much. “He fell hard for some gal and I guess she always got mad at him or something because everybody thought his paintings stunk, so one time when she got mad at him, he cut off his ear and sent it to her to show her he was sorry.”

  “Damn! No joke?”

  “No joke.”

  “He cut off his ear?”

  “Yep.”

  “And sends it to his girlfriend?”

  “That’s what he done. Just to show he was sorry.”

  “Damn.”

  “I couldn’t say it better myself.”

  “He must of been awful sorry.”

  “Well, that’s how come he to have only one ear, and I figure maybe sometime they’ll make a movie about him and start looking around for actors who got just one ear, and then they don’t find any so they come to this guy and they make him a big movie star or something.”

  “Yeah.” Walter studied the road ahead and shifted hands on the steering wheel. “How come you to know about this Vincent Van Gogh?”

  “That stretch I did give me plenty of time to read.”

  “I guess so.” Walter sounded awkward about bringing it up.

  “It wasn’t so bad, I guess.” Eddie sound
ed unconvinced by his own words. “I read a lot and learned card tricks—”

  “You can do card tricks?”

  “It ain’t hard. Like selling something. Mostly it’s getting the other guy to look where you want him to look. And like I say, I got to read a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

  “My brother,” Walter said, “he was a big one for reading.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh yeah.” Walter crawled the heavy car around a gentle curve, easing the clutch in and out, moving the gearshift up and back with the efficiency of long practice. “Most of us, if we got a book some way, we just used it for toilet paper or to roll cigarettes, but my brother, he loved to read.”

  “That’s the one you’re going to visit?”

  “Going to visit his wife. And the kids. He dead.”

  “That’s right.” Eddie tried to sound solemn talking about the dead. “You said it was a long time back?”

  “Few years back,” Walter said tonelessly. “They burned him up.”

  “Burned him up? He burned to death, your brother?”

  “They burned him,” Walter repeated. “Kids out of high school or not much older. Used to tear around the county that summer, making wild, driving reckless up and down the back roads, just going crazy ’cause they wasn’t in school no more, and making trouble.”

  “And they set fire to your brother?”

  “He hadn’t done nothing. And nobody ever said for sure they did it. It was just they had the chance, and I guess they wanted to see how it felt like to do a thing like that. Like they’d heard about folks doing back in the day.”

  “They go to jail for it?” Eddie knew the answer already but he asked anyway. “Anybody ever arrest them?”

  “Nobody never tried,” Walter said patiently. “His wife, she talked to the sheriff and the chief of police, but nobody took them to law. Never got the chance, maybe they would have, but it didn’t look like they was going to.”

  “Never got the chance?”

  “Those boys, they got cracked up in that car of theirs. They used to go tearing up and down the same old back roads late at night, like I said, and one night they run smack into a car somebody had stole and left it over a hill where they couldn’t see it till too late to stop. Run smack into it. Catch fire, sure did.”

  “Killed them all?” Again, Eddie thought he knew the answer.

  “None of them lived,” Walter said simply.

  “Nice work.”

  “Yeah, but I had to beat feet out of there, and sudden, too. Would’ve liked to take my brother’s wife and the kids with me, but no time for that.”

  “That’s when you come North?”

  “And ended up working for Brother Sweetie, yeah.”

  “Probably better for a black man up here anyway.”

  “You reckon like that?” Walter worked the clutch again, on a sharper curve this time, and both men held their breath as the rear wheels slid, then bit back at the snow, regaining control.

  Eddie gave a silent sigh of relief. Then,

  “You mean it ain’t?” he asked. “It ain’t any easier for a black man up here than down South?”

  “It’s different, some, but—” Walter squinted, and Eddie couldn’t tell if he was groping for the right words or just trying to see better through the pummeling snow. “Well, it’s like down South they got signs up, Whites Only, No Blacks Allowed. Like that. I don’t read maybe, but I learn to know those signs quick enough. They got places a black man don’t go and they say it plain. Up here, they don’t got the signs maybe, but they got the same places where a black man don’t go, and they got ways of saying it. Just different, that’s all. And no signs. You got to just look at a place and try to figure if—”

  He stopped. Stared straight ahead.

  From the side of the road, a massive, grey-brown buck with antlers like a hat rack rose up from cover that couldn’t have hid a rabbit and walked out into the road in front of them.

  And then just stood there in front of the oncoming car.

  “Oh hell. Hell!” Walter slammed in the clutch, fanned the brakes and spun the wheel. The heavy car slid sideways, cross-ways, backwards, and past the buck, who gave it a wide-eyed stare and disappeared again.

  “Damn, Eddie, I’m sorry!” Walter just had time to shout it as the car kept sliding in slow motion, off the road and into a drain-ditch.

  Chapter 19

  Three Hours and Fifteen Minutes After the Robbery

  December 20, 1951

  12:15 PM

  Slimmy and the Cop

  Slimmy sat in the back of the patrol car, contemplating his tragic fate and reflecting on the unfairness of life in general.

  “Snot fair,” he sniffed.

  The officer in front concentrated on driving in the heavy snow, and thus missed his chance for a philosophical discussion on the meaning of it all.

  “Snot fair!” Slimmy yelled, prompting the officer to enter the debate.

  “Quiet back there, I gotta drive in this crap.”

  “You can’t arrest me.”

  “Oh.”

  “You can’t arrest me ’cause I wasn’t driving, ya stupid son of a—” Slimmy stopped himself before he said something plumb-dumb.

  The officer appreciated it. “I’m not arresting you for driving drunk,” he said patiently. “There’s a law against being in control of a motor vehicle when you’re drunk; that’s what I’m arresting you for. I told you that already. Twice.”

  “But I wasn’t driving!” Slimmy told himself he’d run rings around the officer’s logic, but saw it wasn’t getting him anywhere, so he tried another approach to the question at hand.

  “Well, they left me to sit and rot.” He looked around the tiny back seat of the patrol car and tried to remember the point he was trying to make. “And now, they just going to leave me to sit and rot some more!”

  “You don’t have to yell about it.” Something was coming over the radio and the officer strained to hear it.

  “But you don’t get it, you don’t understand it.” Now Slimmy felt he’d touched a kindred spirit, one who could see the unfairness of his life. “Those guys, they rob folks! They lie and they cheatya and they rob and then… ” What was he thinking? Oh yeah—“They rob and they—they’re all gonna get off scot-free! And I’m just gonna sit and rot! They’re the ones who rob and take stuff, and the only one going to jail is me, dammit! And they done the robbing!”

  “I said quiet.” The officer pulled off the snowy road as much as he dared and reached under the dashboard to turn up the radio. Listened close, trying to shut out the whining from the back seat.

  “…any car in the vicinity of Highway 12 and the Willisburg Cut-off,” the tinny voice repeated, “come in, please. Any car in the vicinity of Highway 12 and the Willisburg Cut-off—come in. Over.”

  “Car Three-Six,” he keyed the mike, “I’m close to Piketon Point and Highway 12. Over.”

  “Car Three-Six,” the voice inside the radio came back at him, “sounds like you’re the closest. Need you to check the Willisburg Cut-off. The Ajax Truck didn’t show up on time. Over.”

  Behind him, he heard wicked laughter.

  “Car Three-Six,” he said into the mike, “I’m not surprised they’re running late in this snow—”

  “Running late?” the booze-soaked voice behind him sneered. “They ain’t never going to get to Willisburg, mister!”

  “Maybe they ran off the road or something.” The officer tried to tune out the drunk in the back and concentrate. “Haven’t they called in? Over.”

  “No they ain’t called in.” Slimmy for once in his life felt smug and superior to the dumb cop who just happened, he reasoned, by some quirk of fate, to have him handcuffed in the back of a car. “And they ain’t going to call! I know all about that Ajax Truck, mister, and they ain’t never going to get there at all!”

  “…Chief wants it checked,” the radio was saying, “and it sounds like you’re the only one clos
e. Over.”

  “I got a D-D in here in the back,” the officer argued, “I was just bringing him in. Over.”

  “Bringing me in,” Slimmy added his opinion from the back, “and letting those bastards go! When they done the robbing and then left me to sit and rot!”

  A new voice came over the radio. One used to being obeyed. “Listen up, Three-Six.” It was Chief Hannon himself. “We know it’s snowing here; we’re not blind. Get rid of the D-D and get to looking for the Ajax Truck. Do you read me? Over.”

  The voice from the back seat kept yammering: “I can tell you all about that truck, and it ain’t never getting to Willisburg…” But the officer driving had just heard the word of God, or something close to it, and he wasn’t listening to anything else.

  “Yessir,” he said quickly. “Over and out.”

  Chapter 20

  The Getaway

  December 20, 1951

  9:42 AM

  Walter and Eddie

  “Looks like we got us a job of work getting out of here.” Walter felt the snow turn his pants legs cold and wet as he stood outside and looked down at the car in the ditch. The two passenger-side wheels were sunk deep and the front driver-side wheel damn near as much, but they still had one back wheel over the road. Walter studied it, then peered into the woods around them. “Ain’t gonna be easy, though. Let’s find us a tree.”

  Standing next to Walter, blowing on his gloved hands for warmth, Eddie looked at the woods around them too. “Should be a tree around here someplace,” he said. “Which one you want?”

  “We want us a dead-fallen tree.” Walter walked the wood-line at the edge of the road, legs sinking nearly knee-deep into the snow as he peered into the bare edge of the forest. “Dead but not rotted. Long but not too heavy. And not a lot of big branches on it—too hard to move.”

  They left the road and plodded into the woods.

  “I can’t say it enough,” Walter said again, “I’m sorry, Eddie. I shoulda just run right into that damn animal. It was automatic, you know, just to hit the brakes and spin out like that.”

  “Times like that your feet do the thinking,” Eddie said, “I’d of done it myself.”