by David Wiltse
"it didn't sound good, Aural," Rae said. "He laughed when he said it, but he wasn't joking. I think he's up to something. You best be careful."
"My anti-fan? Sugar, I don't know what that means, but unless it's got a couple of heads, I'm not too worried." Aural patted her boot, and when Rae wrinkled her brow in puzzlement, Aural showed her the knife for the first time. She pulled it loose from the Velcro strip and held it in her palm.
"Honey, what is that for?" Rae asked, shocked.
"Whatever is necessary," Aural said. "You can imagine."
"Well, no, I can't."
"What world have you been living in?" Aural demanded. "You mean to say you don't carry anything to defend yourself with?"
"Defend myself from what?"
"Well, the Reverend Tommy, for starters."
"Honey, the Reverend and I are getting on real well, thanks to you."
"Sure-now. That don't never last. What do you expect to do if he takes it into his mind to beat on you?"
Rae paused, considering her loyalties in the matter. It was not a fierce struggle. "He has done that from time to time. But only when he was upset."
"Figures. And what did you do about it?"
"What was I supposed to do?"
"There's lots of options. What did you do, Rae?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing? Just let him beat on you?"
"I asked him to stop."
"Rae, in my opinion doing nothing is not an option."
She held up the knife. "This is an option."
"I couldn't."
"He don't have to know that. Make him wonder. You never know, it might just add a little spice."
"He's so much stronger..
"He's got to sleep sometimes, don't he? Just remind him about the lady who cut her husband's dick off and threw it in the vacant lot."
"She didn't."
"Bless her heart, she did. It was all over the papers and teevee. You didn't see that? It just naturally perked up every woman I know. I tell you what, the good Reverend has heard about it even if you ain't. You can just bet them old boys is whispering to each other all across the country, 'Guard your pecker at night-and for God's sake don't get 'em mad!"
"
Rae tittered. "Aural, you sure do have your very own outlook on life."
"I know men," Aural said. She returned the knife to her boot and closed the Velcro strap over it. "Bring on this anti-fan. If he has balls, I know how to deal with him.
Cooper awoke to barking. A savage-looking dog, part Doberman, part mutt, stood just outside the car door, feet planted solidly as if to give full purchase for barks, as if the sheer volume of its noise would send it scooting across the ground like a loose cannon if it didn't brace itself. The dog retreated a step when Cooper's head appeared in the window, then held its ground once more and unleashed a fresh volley of yaps.
It took Cooper a moment to realize where he was and what was going on.
Last night he had parked the car in the lot behind the Dairy Queen so he would be there as soon as the girl showed up. The dog had found him and taken offense at his presence-they always did. Cooper didn't trust animals and they returned the sentiment, dogs in particular. They howled at him as if he were an invading wolf come for the sheep in their care, following him on the street, snarling and barking, sometimes lunging at his leg. Cooper had seen other people calm strange dogs with a word, watched with amazement as they knelt before the snapping beasts and offered a hand to smell and then petted them as easily as if the preceding frenzy of aversion had just been a charade. Cooper could not believe it, it was as if they had something magic to say to the dogs that Cooper could never hear. People had told him that dogs could hear things that humans couldn't, and he wondered if some people knew how to speak in that language. Whatever the trick, Cooper didn't know it and the dogs knew he didn't know it. He would yell at them to leave him alone if they got too close, and when that didn't work, he would kick at them. Sometimes, when the dogs were large and unusually insistent, he would run from them, but that never worked as it seemed to make them all the more furious at him.
Cooper was hungry and he wanted some breakfast but he was afraid to get out of the car as long as the dog was there. He lay back down on the seat, hiding, but the animal continued to bark and bark. It took a long time for Cooper to realize he could just drive away.
In the late afternoon Cooper returned to the Dairy Queen and parked in the same spot where he had spent the night. The dog started barking as soon as he got out of the car, but this time the sound was distant and Cooper realized the dog was fenced-in now in some neighboring yard.
The girl was working behind the counter, and Cooper waited until she was finished with her customer, standing by the video games and pretending to play. Two animated characters on the screen were kicking and punching each other and although they fell down, neither seemed to get hurt. That did not accord with Cooper's experience of violence. When he hit someone they got hurt, they didn't bounce up again. They stayed down and begged him to stop and sometimes they cried. The characters in the video game wore bandanas on their heads the way a lot of brothers did in Springville, but the characters weren't brothers.
Cooper couldn't figure out what they were supposed to be.
When the girl was free, Cooper stepped up to the counter.
She smiled at him, a real friendly smile, showing her gums.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"I need help," Cooper said. He knew she was just asking about his order, but he hoped she could help him anyway.
Yes, sir?"
He stood there for a moment, not certain what it was he wanted to say to her.
"I have a car," he said at last.
She blinked but she didn't stop smiling.
"Can I take your order, sir?"
"I want you to come in my car," Cooper said.
"Pardon me?"
"Come in my car."
The girl looked at him curiously, tilting her head to one side like a bird. "Sir, I'm working. Did you want to place' an order?"
Cooper did not know how to explain what he needed.
He knew he was doing it wrong, but he couldn't think of a better way.
"I want to show you something," he said. "In the car."
The girl turned around, looking for someone.
"Dwayne? Could you come out here. This gentleman needs some help."
Cooper shook his head. Now she had it all wrong. He didn't need anything from anyone named Dwayne. He needed help from her. He needed her.
"Just come on," he said. He reached over the counter and took hold of her arm and when she started to protest he grabbed her other arm and lifted her over the counter.
"Dwayne! Help!"
Dwayne came running from the kitchen, took one look at the size of the man who had hold of Sybil, and stopped in his tracks. He let them go out the door before he called for the police.
But the police were already there. A cop stood next to Mayvis's Oldsmobile, peering inside. He straightened up when he saw Cooper advancing towards him, half carrying and half dragging a girl.
"Is this your car, sir?" the cop asked, trying to figure out just what was going on between the man and the girl.
He was always reluctant to involve himself in domestic disputes, but this one seemed awfully one-sided.
The man kept coming straight at him, not slowing down at all, holding the girl with just one arm now.
"You can't drive around with your rear end like that," the cop said, knowing even as he said it that he was too late to help himself.
Cooper grabbed the cop's neck and pushed his head into the side of the car. He did it twice more until the cop went limp and then he kicked him once for good measure as he fell.
The girl was kneeling over the fallen policeman, making wailing noises and Cooper got into the car and was about to leave when he remembered why he was there in the first place. He grabbed the girl and yanked her into the car and drove off.
Pegeen made the call hoping Deputy Crist would be away from her desk, too busy to talk, out of communication, anything but there so that Pegeen would not have to speak to her directly. If she wasn't around, Pegeen could fax the information and be done with it. She remembered the baleful stare which Karen had given her at their last encounter and had no illusions that the other woman would have forgotten who she was. She was the nitwit who had sat around in the motel bedroom while the Deputy Director's man took an unscheduled, spontaneous, and poorly explained shower in the other room.
No one believed in the innocence of the occasion and Pegeen didn't blame them, but the men who knew of it were assuming the guilt was Becker's.
Karen Crist, however, blamed Pegeen, and she did so because she saw the guilt in Pegeen's face. You couldn't hide that from another woman, although men, God knows, were as clueless as stumps about such things.
It's not that I actually did anything, Pegeen thought defensively, it's not that anything actually happened I didn't even towel him off. He came out of the bathroom fully dressed and we left. But of course the facts were beside the point in Karen Crist's mind-it was what Pegeen felt about John Becker that mattered, and Pegeen knew that. And agreed. She was just as guilty in her own mind as she was in Crist's. The difference was that in her own mind being guilty didn't make her bad.
To her dismay, the Bureau in New York put her call straight through.
"Director Crist, this is Special Agent Pegeen Haddad from the Nashville office."
Yes.
She remembers me all right, Pegeen thought. Thank God it's not a television phone. "There's been a development in the Darnell Cooper case, and we have instructions to keep you posted personally..
"Yes."
Like talking point-blank to a glacier. All that came back was a blast of cold air.
"We have a report of a stolen car. The suspect was working at a fast-food restaurant under the name of Darnell Cooper. He was also wanted for questioning about a purse snatching that took place on the highway three days earlier. He's also suspected of being involved in a robbery and assault with a motor vehicle at a service station."
"Yes?"
"He is also believed to have been involved in an assault on a police officer and the abduction of a young woman just outside of Chattanooga."
"Not exactly covering his tracks. Where is he now?"
"Local and state police are in pursuit, but he has eluded them so far."
Pegeen could not remember ever saying I eluded" aloud before. Get any stiffer and you'll be catatonic, kid.
"Kidnapping is a federal offense," Pegeen said, having trouble believing that she was hearing herself correctly.
"It falls under our jurisdiction."
She probably didn't know that, Pegeen, you halfwit.
Good of you to enlighten her, she'll appreciate it.:'I see," Karen said.
'So we're entering the case directly," Pegeen continued. She could feel the waves of hostility pouring through the phone and straight into her ear.
"Good. Was there anything else?"
"Well…" How about if I drive a spike through my head, will that make you happy? Pegeen thought. "No."
Pegeen felt that she should say something more, but she didn't know what it should be. It didn't seem that an agent in her position should be the one to terminate a conversation with an assistant deputy director, however.
Surely that prerogative belonged to the senior agent.
Karen did not oblige her, however, and the silence between them grew and expanded uncomfortably and the longer it stretched the more it seemed to fill with the unspoken. Becker. Pegeen had sat silently with a mute telephone to her ear before, but only with boys, only with romantic interests when the silence had been filled with unspeakable longing, never with another woman. An FBI agent, her superior, a tough-assed careerist federal officer.
It gave her the creeps.
Pegeen cleared her throat discreetly.
"One thing," Karen said.
"Yes?"
"Watch your ass."
The phone line went dead and Pegeen replaced the receiver as if it were something unclean. Watch my ass?
Meaning, be careful in your pursuit of Cooper? Or meaning, stay away from my man or I'll feed your giblets to the cats? Was this the way an assistant deputy director normally spoke to other agents? Watch my ass?
I won't have to, Pegeen thought. She'll be watching it for me.
It was only later, as she replayed the conversation in her mind for the hundredth time while driving towards Chattanooga, that her own thought about driving a spike through her head reminded her of Becker's comment about how to kill a werewolf. Why had he referred to himself like that?
Did he really think of himself that way?
Why did he perceive himself as a bad man when Pegeen could see so clearly that he wasn't? The man needed help and understanding, and it was obvious he wasn't going to get it from Crist, the frost queen. Some men were salvageable and some were not. She had pretty well come to the conclusion that Eddie, the man she was seeingsort of-fell into the category of irretrievable junk goods.
After six months he had proved to be as receptive to improvements as a shack made of wet cardboard. There was simply very little adjusting the structure could handle.
Also, Eddie had broken up with her twice already. She wasn't entirely certain that they weren't broken up right at the moment. Eddy was nonattentive as he was at the best of times, it was hard to tell.
It might be time to give up on Eddie, she thought. There were times when a girl wanted to feel that she was free to explore other opportunities.
Karen Crist couldn't hate her that much without some good reason.
The girl was worse than useless to him. Every time he took his hand from her mouth she started crying again, and the crying soon built into wailing, no matter how many times he told her to shut up. When Cooper asked her to help him, all she did was wail some more, so he hit her because he didn't know what else to do. He hurt his knuckle on her head, hurt it badly and he had to drive with that hand pressed against his lips while she continued to cry, moaning now along with it. It was driving him crazy.
She made so much noise that he didn't,hear the police sirens as soon as he usually would have and he almost didn't make the turn into the woods in time. The police went speeding past the access road, and Cooper drove as far as he could on the rutted path until it seemed to stop of its own accord at the base of a hill where two small streams joined together.
Cooper could hear sirens u ulating in the distance as the cop car bounced on the narrow path. He grabbed the girl with his left hand because one knuckle on his right was now hugely swollen and very painful. She clung to the steering wheel, howling, and Cooper was forced to squeeze her throat until she let go. She was still after that and he tossed her over his shoulder and started up the hill. Her silence was such a relief.
The hill was steep and Cooper's knuckle throbbed painfully with every step. Running down the other side was even worse, as each step jolted his legs and ran straight through his arm. The terrain changed on the far side of the hill and the clay soil of the woods gave way to a sandy loam that grew wetter with each step. He had gone only a few hundred yards before his shoes sank up to his ankles in muck, and each stride was accompanied by a loud sucking sound.
Cooper was well into the swamp before he realized that he could no longer hear the sirens behind him. He paused, listening to hear if he was being pursued, but it took him several moments before he could hear anything over his strained breathing. After a time he could discern voices, several people, yelling at each other, but they were too far away for him to make out what they were saying.
He continued, using the voices as a guide, heading away from them.
Otherwise there was nothing to serve as a landmark, no way to tell where to go, just funny-looking trees and weird grass that looked solid but wasn't.
Sometimes his legs sunk as deep as his calv
es and sometimes they barely dipped below the surface at all and there was no way to tell which it would be ahead of time.
He sucked on his knuckle as he trudged ahead, trying to remember what someone had told him once about telling direction by the sun. He could find the sun all right, but he didn't understand what it was supposed to be telling him. He decided the best thing would be to just head straight for it. He changed his course, veering towards the sun, and noticed that he was walking straight into the shadows. They were drawn as straight as lines, like arrows showing him the way. Cooper realized he had discovered the secret. He would simply follow the shadows and the sun would take him away from his pursuers and towards safety.
His shoes had been sucked off by the mud long since and when he lifted his knuckle to his mouth he noticed that his entire right hand was blown up to twice its size.
It hurt anywhere he touched it and it even pained him when he waved it in the air to aid his balance. He stumbled crossing a small pond and fell to one knee and the girl's body slid off his shoulder and into the water. Cooper was surprised to see her; he had forgotten about her, forgotten the added weight on his back. He studied her for a moment, trying to remember why he had brought her with him. He had wanted her to help him, but he couldn't see how she could help him now.
She wasn't so pretty now with her face and hair wet and muddy and the big, darkening bruise on the side of her forehead. One eye was swollen shut with a lump that reminded Cooper of his own hand. She was the reason he hurt himself, he realized with sudden anger. It was her fault that he couldn't use his hand. It was her fault that the police were chasing him. He ought to kill her, he ought to yank her head right off.
He ought to push her under the water and leave her there, stick her head right down into the mud with her feet in the air like a fence post.
He reached for her throat with both hands before he realized what he was doing, and the pain in his right hand was so great that he dropped to his knees again. He cradled his bad hand across his chest and rocked back and forth, moaning. In the distance, but closer than before, he heard the voices calling to each other. Cooper lurched to his feet and marched in the direction the shadows showed him.