It was almost like Dad thought he was living alone.
Maybe that was it. Maybe, in his head, he had already parted from his son. And, if so, what was going to happen to Stephen? Would he disappear like his mother?
Who would notice? Did anyone in this place even know he existed? Probably not. He wasn’t registered in school, and there was no trace of his presence on earth that wouldn’t fill a suitcase. A suitcase like his mother’s.
A man and his son live four months in one town, off by themselves, and then take to the road for God alone knew where. In the new town the son is almost invisible. Who would inquire if he vanished?
In the week that followed, Stephen began to grow really frightened. He felt as if he could see his grave being dug, as if he could hear the hiss of the shovel as it sliced into the dirt.
Dad hadn’t started bringing home the local newspapers yet, and there were no books in the house. There was, however, a television set. All the stations seemed to be broadcasting from across the river in Memphis. There were the networks, a couple of movie channels, traffic, some cooking shows and a station that ran the local news on a constantly repeating basis.
On the Monday after Stephen’s birthday, there was a story about the nude body of an unidentified woman found in a refuse bin behind the Walmart on Elvis Presley Boulevard. The police were offering no details but were treating it as a homicide. On Wednesday morning a captain of inspectors read a statement that the woman had been identified but that her identity would not be released pending notification of her family. By four o’clock that afternoon the local news was running the photograph, obviously somebody’s snapshot, of a reasonably attractive blonde named Tiffany Klaff, age thirty-one.
Tuesday evening, when he came home from the condo site, Dad brought a couple of the Memphis papers with him. He was still reading them at the kitchen table when Stephen went to bed.
Two days later the story made it to the networks when the coroner released his preliminary report. Tiffany Klaff had been systematically beaten to death. She was discovered with duct tape over her mouth, and her arms, knees and lower back had all been broken, apparently before she died of a blunt instrument trauma to the head. The coroner described her injuries as “particularly savage.”
For several days, Stephen found it difficult to sleep. He found he had to take a nap in the middle of the day, when he was alone in the house. For the first time that he could remember, he was afraid of the dark.
And then, over the next three or four weeks, things began returning to their normal pattern. Dad started keeping food in the house. One night he even took Stephen into West Memphis for a pizza. Once he read aloud from a newspaper review of a book about the history of mathematics.
“That sounds like it would be right up your street,” he said, as if he had just arrived at an important conclusion. “You ought to get that one out of the library.”
“The library is six or seven miles from here.”
“Is that a fact? Well, maybe I can drive you in before I go to work tomorrow.”
The next morning he left early, having apparently forgotten all about the library. But that wasn’t surprising. He usually forgot things like that. What was surprising was that he had thought of it in the first place.
Gradually, Stephen began to relax.
As fear subsided, so did suspicion. After all, he told himself, he was barely twelve years old. How could he really understand what had happened between his parents? The adult world was a foreign country to him. Maybe his father had simply put his mother on a bus back to Ohio. Maybe she had just left stuff behind.
A part of him even began to believe it.
The Tiffany Klaff investigation disappeared from television and was mentioned only briefly in the newspapers Dad brought home.
His mind had been playing tricks on him, he decided. He was bored and needed a distraction.
Then he remembered the book review Dad had read him. A History of Mathematics. The library in West Memphis might have a copy. Anyway, it would be something to do.
The next morning, as soon as his father had left for work, Stephen set out on his expedition. He arrived slightly after ten and inquired at the front desk. Klem’s History of Mathematics was not in the catalog, but they might be able to get it through interlibrary loan. For that, he was told, he would need a library card. Did he have a library card? No. The nice lady told him to come back with a parent. The cards were free to all residents of Crittenden County and his would be mailed to his home address.
“Okay. Thank you. But today can I just look around?”
“Of course you can. You just won’t be able to check anything out.”
In the stacks there was a small mathematics section, consisting mainly of high school and college textbooks. No Klem. Stephen took down a thick volume titled Calculus I. Sitting in a chair in the main reading room, he worked his way quickly through the first ten or so pages.
I can do this, he thought to himself. He was reasonably sure he could have the whole book completed by the end of the summer.
The problem was, there was no chance of getting a library card. If he asked Dad to take him in to get one, Dad would say “sure” and then forget all about it. If then Stephen tried to remind him, he would just get angry, then agree, then forget about it all over again. Stephen wasn’t going to get him inside the library. That wasn’t the way it worked.
So he would do it here, in the library, which was air-conditioned and comfortable and full of people.
For the next several days, Stephen’s mind was happily occupied with slope theory, integrals and chain rules. The librarian, when she figured out what he was doing, didn’t ask any awkward questions but kept him supplied with paper and pencils and found him a small table to use as a writing desk.
“You understand this stuff?” she asked him once.
“Yes. It’s not difficult.”
“How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
She went away, shaking her head.
At three in the afternoon, he would give the calculus book and his scribbled-over pages to the librarian, who put them on a shelf in the back room, then he would walk back to Mound City. He had studied a map and figured out a short route, so the walk both ways only took him about two and a half hours. Usually he got home before his father returned from work.
One time he didn’t. Dad was in the kitchen, drinking a beer and reading the newspaper.
“Where you been?” he asked, without looking up. “I got home an hour ago.”
“I was at the library in West Memphis. I’m learning calculus.”
Dad raised his head. “They got teachers there?”
“No. I’m learning it out of a book.”
“Okay.”
The subject, apparently, was closed, and for a quarter of an hour neither of them spoke. Stephen went to the refrigerator and got out a Coke.
“You feel like some fried chicken for dinner? They got a KFC up in Marion.”
“Okay.”
His father seemed pleased, so he threw in a bonus.
“On the way I’ll show you the job site,” he said. “It’s comin’ along pretty good.”
It was one of the happiest times Stephen could remember. The future Crittenden Gables was still little more than a series of wooden skeletons, but the floors were laid and in several places the wiring already wound up from floor to floor like exposed nerve fibers. They walked around together, and Dad explained all the stages of construction while his son listened proudly. His father, he was quite sure, could have built the whole place by himself.
Then they went to the KFC and had fried chicken and biscuits. It was dark before they got home.
* * *
About ten days later, Dad didn’t come home Friday evening. It was late Saturday when the van pulled up and parked in the garage by the side of the house. Stephen watched through his bedroom window. His father came back outside. He staggered slightly and there was what looked like a
bottle clutched in his left hand. He walked toward the front of the house. He had forgotten to close the garage door.
Stephen went downstairs.
“Hi.”
Dad hardly seemed to have heard him, or to have noticed his presence. He went into the kitchen and collapsed into a chair, setting a pint bottle of Southern Comfort down on the table in front of him. The whiskey in the bottle was about a third of the way down.
He looked up and saw his son. It seemed to take a few seconds before he recognized him.
“Go to bed, Steve,” he said, in a toneless voice. He was pretty well boiled.
“Okay. ’Night, Dad.”
“Get me a glass first.”
“Sure.”
Stephen opened the cupboard and took down a water glass, setting it on the table next to the bottle. Then he turned and left the room.
In his bedroom he switched off the light, being careful to leave the door open about an inch. When his father came up, Stephen wanted him to think he had gone to bed.
Something was going on. Aside from a few beers, Dad wasn’t much of a drinker. Once in a great while he would come home under the influence, but Stephen had never seen him like this.
He had to wait almost an hour before he heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. His father’s room was directly across from his, at the top of the landing. He heard muffled sounds and then the loud, protesting squeak of bedsprings. His father’s light was still on. After a few minutes Stephen thought he heard a gentle snoring.
In his stocking feet, he went across the landing. Dad was belly-down on the bed, in his underwear.
Stephen switched off the light and went back to his own room to fetch his shoes.
On his way down the stairs, he told himself that he was just going out to close the garage door, but he knew that wasn’t quite the truth. Something was wrong and nothing in his previous experience of his father could tell him what. Right now, the only place he could go to look for an answer was the van.
Standing in front of the open garage, he looked up at the house. His father’s room was on the other side. Even if Dad was broad awake, he wouldn’t be able to see a light from the garage.
Still, without turning on the overhead, Stephen put his hand on the driver-side door handle. He pressed the button and the door opened. Not surprisingly, Dad had forgotten to lock it.
Almost the instant he opened the door, he was assailed by a faint odor, like raw hamburger gone bad—but really like nothing he could have described.
The interior light had popped on and he could see that there was nothing in the front compartment to account for the smell.
That left the cargo space.
Stephen closed the door, and he was left once again in darkness. He turned on the overhead light in the garage. Somehow he didn’t want to open the back of the van in the dark.
He pulled on the rear door handle and the interior light came on again.
At first he didn’t realize what he was looking at. Just an object wrapped in the clear plastic drop cloths that painters use. And then he realized that it was a face.
A woman’s face, staring out at him through the clouded plastic. Her eyes were open, and her mouth. She seemed to be screaming.
Of course there was no sound, because she was dead.
Stephen stared at her in fascinated horror. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
But the smell was much stronger, the smell of a corpse beginning to putrefy.
Suddenly his stomach clenched and he experienced a wave of nausea. He couldn’t help himself. He bent over and vomited.
When he stopped gagging he understood at once the significance of what had happened. His vomit, yellow and thick, was on the garage floor and all over the back of the van. It was on his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers. There was no point in trying to clean it up—the smell would linger for days.
And Dad would know, couldn’t help knowing, that his son had come down here at night and found a dead body in the back of the van.
And Dad would surely kill him. Just as he had killed Stephen’s mother. The fact that he would be murdering his son, his own blood, would not restrain him.
Stephen closed the rear door of the van and turned off the overhead garage light. He stepped out onto the driveway and looked at the house, which was dark.
And he realized that he could never enter that house again, not if he wanted to live. His one chance was to run.
And so he ran.
13
And by running, he entered into a life of desperate fear. Somehow it never occurred to him to turn his father in to the police. His only hope was flight.
All of the crucial decisions were made that first night. His father was a restless sleeper, almost an insomniac. He would wake up in a few hours and go downstairs to make himself a cup of tea. It would probably occur to him that he had forgotten to close the garage and, given what was in the back of the van, he would almost certainly go outside to correct that error. Then he would know everything.
The next step would be to get rid of the body. Then he would start hunting.
Stephen tried to think like his father. What would Dad expect him to do? To head into town probably. Or to try to hitch a ride. He would know that his son had no money, had nothing but the clothes he was wearing.
So Stephen made up his mind to stay off the roads and to head north, away from West Memphis. But if he just wandered around he would quickly become lost. Then someone would find him and call the police. And the police, eventually, would call his father.
He could imagine how that would go. By then the body in the van would have been left for the animals on some stretch of waste ground. Dad knew how to cover his tracks.
“The kid’s crazy,” he would say. “He’s been a problem ever since his mother died.”
And the police would nod and grin and turn Stephen over to his father’s vengeance.
So, instead, he would follow the railroad tracks. He picked them up about two miles from the house and walked the tracks all night.
By dawn he was hungry and exhausted. He stopped by a shack, windowless, deserted and locked, about twenty feet from the rail line. He sat down, leaned back against a wall where he could not be seen from the tracks and instantly fell asleep.
He was awakened by a train whistle. What seemed like an endless line of freight cars began moving slowly past the shack. Stephen lay on the ground, concealed in the high grass, and watched. Just ahead there was a sharp curve in the tracks and the train slowed to walking pace in order to make the turn. He noticed that there were iron ladders on the sides of the freight cars, almost at the end.
Could he reach one of those ladders, without being seen, and climb up on the roof of the car? He might be able to hitch a ride for thirty or forty miles before one of the crew even noticed he was there.
He decided to try it.
It was easy. He just ran alongside, grabbed a rung of the ladder and swung himself up. He was on top of the car in maybe fifteen seconds.
On the roof he lay flat, expecting any moment someone would come and throw him off. No one came.
He rode all the way to Blytheville, a distance of some sixty miles, where the train stopped to unload a couple of cars. It was just past noon. Stephen climbed down and headed into town. He had to get some food somehow.
Blytheville was his baptism in crime. He walked into a convenience store, took a package of beef jerky, a box of cookies and a bottle of ginger ale, started toward the counter as if he had every intention in the world of buying them, and then bolted for the door. He was around the corner and lost from sight before the clerk behind the counter even realized what was happening.
Interestingly, there was no pursuit. There were several customers in the store and perhaps the clerk was afraid to leave.
Stephen found an alley doorway and sat down to feed. He ate until he was almost ready to burst. Then he stood up, took a huge pee behind a trash bin and headed back to the railroad yard.
<
br /> For the next three months he lived a vagrant life, dodging the police and the welfare authorities. He bathed and washed his threadbare clothes in any stretch of deserted river he could find. He took odd jobs when he could and stole when he couldn’t. He was running for his life, so he put shame and conscience aside.
By October he had gotten as far north as Ohio. Ohio was as good a goal as any. He remembered the address on his mother’s driver’s license.
Hitching the rail lines took him to Circleville. It was a walk of slightly more than half a mile to Route 9.
The house at 1380 was no palace. The lot was enclosed by a picket fence and the house itself probably hadn’t been painted any time in the last five or six years. But the grass in the yard was freshly cut and there were clay planters full of ferns on either side of the front door. The place had a general air of struggling respectability.
Stephen knocked on the door, which after about a minute was opened by a woman who could have been anywhere between fifty and sixty. She was small and thin, and her face looked oddly familiar.
“Are you Mrs. Dabney?” he asked, his heart beating so loud he could hear it in his ears.
“Yes, I’m Mrs. Dabney,” the woman answered. “Do I know you?”
“No.” Stephen shook his head, as if the admission grieved him.
“Then what can I do for you?”
“Did you have a daughter named Elizabeth?”
Mrs. Dabney looked stricken. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.
“Yes, I did.”
“How long since you’ve heard from her?”
Taking a handkerchief out of a pocket in her apron, Mrs. Dabney wiped her eyes.
“A long time,” she said. “Almost thirteen years—thirteen years next month.”
“Then she must be dead. I’m her son.”
There was a long silence, after which Mrs. Dabney said, “I think you better come inside, young man.”
* * *
The first thing she did was phone her husband. Stephen could hear snippets of the conversation from where he sat in the kitchen.
“Yes, I believe him, Phil.… You should see him.”
Blood Ties Page 12