The Hour of Lead

by Bruce Holbert

  As he rose to depart, she grasped his hand. A cataract clouded one eye, but the other set on him like a weight. He gazed into it. The years had unraveled the woman, and she saw her own hand responsible. Blaming others was a simple track, though it went round and round and round. Laying it on yourself at least gave you peace from the chase.

  “You must go, I know,” she said.

  He felt tired. He decided he’d sleep in tomorrow, sleep till noon if it suited him. It would strengthen his resolve.

  But that night he did not sleep. He reclined in the tiny bed and listened to the radio playing country music. The street lamp outside shone through the curtains, a reddish kind of light, the same as when he closed his eyes and stared into the lids. His head hurt.

  Early morning, he woke the clerk and bummed two aspirin, then pocketed his badge and drove to the police station. An hour in the basement and he discovered the file on Jarms’s death along with several others. The murders appeared a killing spree, but absent motive, weapon, or bodies. The name on the report was the current sheriff’s father.

  Lucky climbed the storeroom stairs and inquired directions from a deputy, who turned out the old man’s grandson. He thanked the boy and wrote the address on a paper scrap. Bertrand Heitvelt napped on a porch swing, the steps to it lined with tulips and gladiolas. Their scent lingered on the stoop. Under the swing, a cur pup raised its head and sidled through the propped screen door into the house. Lucky heard a food bowl. He kicked Heitvelt’s foot and the man started.

  “I’m from Lincoln County. I’m the sheriff up there.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Lucky nodded. “I’m examining a case, a murder with no weapon, no motive, and no body. You want to tell me how that can be.”

  Heitvelt squinted. Lucky showed him a list of names. “I don’t have to tell you nothing,” the man said.

  “You ever heard that in your travels? A lawman hears that, he knows to quit looking, doesn’t he?” Lucky leaned against the porch rail. “I guess I could ask your boy about this. Maybe his police work’s better. Maybe his conscience is, too.”

  Heitvelt sat for a long time. The dog waddled out the screen door and licked Heitvelt’s hand. When he didn’t pet it, it tried Lucky, who kicked it across the yard.

  “I never saw it. Garrett told me.”

  “You believed him?”

  “It seemed prudent,” Heitvelt said. He looked at Lucky’s face the way a cop does, trying to remember enough about you for the next time.

  “They really dead?”

  “I believe so.”

  “The hired man do it, this Lawson?”

  “He worked there a few years. Lived and worked. They treated him like kin and he seemed to feel similar. I don’t know what happened out there, but he’d be on the second page of any list I made.” The old man coaxed the dog. It circled wide of Lucky and returned to him, and dropped its head into his lap.

  “You’re a damned sorry policeman,” Lucky said.

  “My boy is better,” Heitvelt said.

  •

  LUCKY WAITED AT JARMS’S DRIVEWAY until dark and Garrett’s truck lights bounced on the washboarded road.

  “Lawson killed no one, including your brother,” Lucky said. “Why are you putting me on a wild goose chase? In fact, why are you chasing the same bird?”

  “Because if Lawson had listened to reason, he could have saved them all,” Garrett said.

  “Your reasons.”

  “Does it matter whose if it rescues lives?”

  “I got a feeling lives don’t mean much to you.”

  Garrett looked off to where the black sky met the blacker earth. “Most don’t, I admit. Some did. Horace was my only kin, the rest were just blood. Lawson didn’t kill him, but he forced my hand on the matter.”

  “You killed your brother. That’s why you’re packing this grudge.”

  “No more than Lawson did.”

  “No less, though.”

  “That’s true,” Garrett said. “I suppose you’re going to quit me.”

  “I’m not employed by the people any longer. Seems to me who did what to who is someone else’s business.”

  “That’s so. I hired you to get Lawson. You got some reason yourself.”

  “That’s where you’re mistaken. The man is in a photograph with my mother forty years ago. That’s not enough reason for murder, even for one inclined toward blood.”

  “I’ll add five thousand,” Garrett said.

  “That might wet my whistle.” Lucky told him.

  Garrett wrote out a check and passed it to Lucky. Lucky examined it. “Just so you know,” Lucky said. “I’d’ve hunted him for free.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Love,” Lucky said.

  “That’s a word I did not expect was in your vocabulary,” Garrett told him.

  “That remark might offend me if it hadn’t come from a man with the mark of Cain all over him.”

  “Fair enough,” Garrett replied. He dug a paper from his pants and offered it to Lucky. It was a paycheck stub from the Grand Coulee project.

  33

  A WHOLE BOOK OF HISTORY passed in the next five years. FDR’s heart clogged, Hitler and his minions ate a handful of poison, Truman melted Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a nuclear sunrise, and the Soviets turned Europe into a chessboard and cut loose the queen in Eastern Europe.

  None of this was more than newspaper clippings to Wendy Lawson. What occupied her remained within a few miles of her, and most within hearing. She thought it a woman’s lot to tend first those around her, and if those like her herded nations the newspapers might write more about swap meets and less about armies.

  Wendy was more interested in the boundaries in her home than those in Berlin. She had once thought Angel the balance between herself and Matt. As the time for the new child approached, however, the girl alternated from distant to clinging. After Luke split her womb, Wendy was slow to mend. It was June before she could resume their park ritual. Pushing the pram tired her and required both hands so, on their walks, Angel was permitted to wander. The girl, a kindergardener now, closed her eyes and ordered Wendy to direct her. Occasionally, Wendy would fool her into a sprinkler or a puddle, which tickled them both. Wendy encountered Ardith at the park, where they continued to talk books and children. Ardith spoke of her husband, Ray, at length, though Wendy wasn’t inclined to do the same.

  Evenings, Angel asked Matt questions while Wendy prepared meals or cleaned them up in the trailerhouse they could finally afford. She didn’t hear their words, just their sound. Matt scooped her into the chair beside him and pressed his finger to her lips. He set his head across her little chest. His huge head in her arms rocked like he heard music inside her. His eyes closed, and when they opened, she knew they would see nothing but the child. Morning, she’d turn to him gazing at her the same way. It broke her heart, that kind of seeing.

  As Luke grew to crawl then toddle, Angel trailed him across hill or dale, and if she didn’t the boy would grow confused and howl for her. At first, Wendy considered Angel’s devotion to Luke nothing curious. The oldest looked after the babies, especially girls. She’d done so herself. Later, though, she recognized more in Angel’s constancy. Wendy had always thought Luke’s sleep steady, until one morning she woke before dawn and discovered him in Angel’s bed. He visited almost every night, Angel admitted, returning to his room at first light. He never cried, just wrestled into the place Angel made for him. Angel recognized Wendy’s distance, even concerning the child of her blood, and she saw the boy’s fears and put herself between them. Wendy knew it should have shamed her, but all she felt was gratitude.

  She began to leave for long evening walks after dinner, not gambols or meanders. Shoulders forward, her forehead leading her like the prow of a ship, she hiked to distant points and returned, sometimes marching through rock-choked canyons or arid brush if it provided a direct path. Occasionally, her route would pass Ardith’s home and they would exc
hange a few words, but Wendy soon pressed on. Her thoughts stacked in her mind like cordwood, rounded, split, and quartered, too much to clear if she had ten winters to burn through. And her thoughts required flame, a conflagration, though she had no idea how to strike a match and ignite the blaze. Instead each step the pile grew. She considered the bullet she put into Matt and her years laboring on the Lawson ranch in penance and deliberated on her parents and sisters, as well; she had no idea where they had emigrated after the grocery’s drowning. She pondered Linda Jefferson in a cave and Lucky half-naked next to her, neither able to move—more fodder for remorse. Though she did not regret their inaction, she reproached herself for what led to it. She worried over how Angel had come about and worried that it mattered to her. She became angry and then was angry at her anger. She feared Matt and feared his absence. Once she put the pistol into her purse and carried it with her a week. The weight finally annoyed her. Her walks were slow-burned, and upon her return she would be more fueled than when she departed. She added her miles to four or five, barely reaching home before the children retired. Finally she lit into Matt.

  “You know you never once inquired about my day?” she told him. “If it went well or poorly?”

  “How was your day then?” Matt asked.

  She laughed.

  “That isn’t what you want?”

  “No. Tomorrow you’ll ask and it won’t matter. If I asked for flowers and bows the house would be filled with them and it still wouldn’t be what I want, because it will mean nothing.”

  “You mean nothing like before.”

  “Yes, nothing like before. That was when you knew how to give to me that way.”

  “Maybe it was then when you made me feel welcome to,” he said.

  Wendy found the bourbon bottle in a cabinet and uncorked it. “We are going to get drunk,” she said.

  “I’ve got to work tomorrow.” He had been rehired and promoted by the Bureau.

  “I’ll call you in sick.” She brought two glasses to the table and filled them. Wendy nodded at his glass. He sipped at the bourbon she’d poured him. She drank down half her glass, sighed and waited for the numbness to reach her.

  “Why did you send me that letter?” Wendy asked.

  Matt shrugged and put his chin in one of his huge hands. With the other he lifted the glass and peered at the light through it.

  “Was it because Angel needed a mother?”

  “No,” Matt said. He closed his eyes.

  “Was it to make me happy?”

  “Well, I’d hoped it might.”

  “But that wasn’t the reason? I mean the main reason?”

  “No,” Matt said. “Should it have been?”

  Wendy finished her glass and poured another. “It doesn’t matter what should or shouldn’t be. I want to know what your reason was, not what you think it should be.”

  “I didn’t ever figure on anything but you and me or me by myself.”

  “So you married me just because I was first?”

  “You were only.”

  “What if I wouldn’t take you?”

  “I’d have been in a fix.”

  “Nobody ever meant anything to you besides me?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then how did you end up with a daughter?”

  Wendy concluded her drink in one swallow. Matt said nothing, just watched her refill her glass.

  “I’m raising the child. I’ve got a right to know what happened.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Do you know how many men must say that to women?”

  Matt said. “I’m not other men.”

  He went to the sink and filled his glass with water. He wolfed that down and poured himself more and broke ice from a tray to cool it. He set a chunk in her drink. She watched it turn waves in the brown, oily liquor.

  “Why’d you marry me, then?” he asked.

  She’d come to believe their coupling was an old, poorly conceived plan that each of them followed out of stubbornness or lack of another.

  “I waited,” she said. “I waited all those years.”

  “You happy you did?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He nodded. “At least that’s honest.”

  He rose and stretched; his great muscles rolled like ground moving. It didn’t often strike her anymore, his size. It was the last thing she took into account. He was who he was every day, simple and injured and firm in will toward what he would not name, just as she’d remembered him.

  “You forgive her?” Matt asked.

  “Who?”

  “Angel.”

  Wendy considered the question. She drank again, but remained clearheaded. She stared at the bottle and envied the time when it did more for her.

  “I try,” she said finally.

  “That’s too bad,” Matt said. “She hasn’t done nothing wrong.”

  •

  THE SUMMER BEFORE ANGEL ENTERED fourth grade the park service finished Spring Canyon Park. Each morning, Wendy delivered Matt to work, then, after Angel and the boy performed morning chores, boxed cold chicken or lunch meat, potato salad and fruit left from Matt’s lunches and drove them to the reservoir where they lunched and swam. Angel devoured classwork. She was ready for good books, Twain, Steinbeck, and Willa Cather. On a blanket reading with Wendy, she felt as if she had some gravity in this world.

  For Wendy reading had turned desperate; she grazed popular mysteries and frilly romances along with the classics, then the Old Testament, where she remained. She studied how its people responded to crisis or victory and the boredom between. She held little regard for deity or philosophy. No matter which was true, you were at the mercy of a tale. She had come from such stories, though her parents’ strongest wishes—like all parents—were likely that the narrative stop with them, that their children, liberated from stories, would know real freedom. As for herself, she didn’t want to know more; ignorance in Wendy’s life had been her only bliss.

  She gazed at Angel next to her. Her dark hair was long and straight and parted in the middle, and her face had begun to take on the angles a young lady’s does. Her high cheekbones belonged to her grandmother, and her full lips, Wendy could only guess, were her mother’s. She’d been silent a long while, looking out over the water, farther than the children now, toward the canyons and ridges and rockfill left from the dam’s construction. Wendy tipped her head back on the blanket and closed her eyes. She enjoyed resting in the sun, seeing the red light through her lids.

  “He doesn’t talk to you,” Angel said.

  Wendy glanced at the girl’s face. It was still as a porcelain doll’s.

  “He doesn’t talk much to anyone.”

  “I know,” Angel said. “But with me it’s different. He is sure of me.”

  “Talking about your dad like that,” Wendy said. “I’m not accustomed to it.”

  “I do wish he’d say more to you,” Angel said.

  “Why don’t you tell him so?”

  “It would hurt his feelings.”

  “It would,” Wendy agreed. “There are things he doesn’t want to say, and it seems they outnumber the ones he does.”

  “He’s a donkey,” Angel said.

  Wendy laughed. “Why’s that?”

  “It’s something we want and he doesn’t, so he makes it hard.”

  Wendy combed her hand through the girl’s hair and stroked the little bones that made her mouth move. Angel turned her face into the warmth of Wendy’s palm and Wendy embraced her. “I never thought I’d end up like this with you,” Wendy said. She recalled fairy tales from her youth. Fathers broke their children’s hearts with stepmothers. She could recall not one that fared well.

  Wendy picked a stray thread from Angel’s T-shirt and wound it around her forefinger. It looked like pictures she’d seen on catalogs reminding you to remember to order. The oddity of it struck her cold. In school, memory was all they touted: dates and spelling words and the Const
itution’s Preamble. They taught it all wrong. Forgetting was more useful. “I figured I’d make you this way or that. You’d be my child, then.”

  “But I am your child,” Angel said.

  “No,” Wendy said. “Though I’d love it so if you were.” The girl blinked, but her face was still. “You mean I love Daddy more?”

  “It’s natural, I always considered it so anyway. You’re his.”

  “But I’m yours, too.”

  Wendy shook her head.

  The girl stood, then bolted for the shower rooms. Wendy followed, but Angel refused to speak, and when Wendy made another pass at explaining, she began humming to drown her words. Wendy remained outside the door, not willing to leave her. When Matt arrived, it was near sunset. He’d paid the town taxi.

  Wendy nodded to the bathroom. “She won’t come out.”

  Matt glanced at the word on the door. “Are you by yourself in there?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Can I come in, please?”

  Angel cracked the door. Matt unfolded his wallet and put money for the taxi in Wendy’s hand and she handed him the car’s keys. He went in. Wendy returned herself and Luke to the trailer where she fed the boy but couldn’t stomach food herself. Near ten, she heard Matt’s steps on the metal porch. The door opened and Matt carried Angel, asleep, to her bedroom.

  When he returned to the front room, he was shaking. She took a step toward him, and when he didn’t rear up, another. She crossed the room and took his elbow awkwardly, and he looked at it in her hand.

  “Can we sit outside?” he asked. She nodded and they opened lawn chairs. The bugs were bad, so they switched the light off. In the dark, she could hear sprinklers tick and the crickets scratching. He shifted, preparing to speak. She ought to love him more, she thought. She ought to love them all more. It was all she wanted to be able to do.