by Glenn Taylor
Harold was at the wheel of the blue Short Bus, tucked by a hedge in an abandoned lot. He signaled back with the headlights.
Erm watched the Packard drive east. He stepped down off the porch and walked to the back of the house, flashlight in hand. He lit up Mack, who was sitting in a broken wrought-iron chair, his toolbox at his feet. “Ten, maybe twenty minutes,” Erm said.
Mack nodded. “Did you get that?” Erm asked loud. “Got it,” Dimple answered. He and Wimpy crouched behind a rhododendron bush.
“Good. You other three come with me.” Erm came back in the house with Herchel, Jerry, and Fury behind him. Each carried a short-barreled shotgun. “Get in position,” Erm told them.
Jerry climbed the staircase and turned a corner. He put his back against the hallway wall and tried to breathe normal. The air stunk of wallpaper glue. He could hear the television from behind a closed door.
Herchel and Fury sat down behind the old couch in the living room. Dust bunnies gave way. The two of them tucked tight and stared at the old cookstove against the wall.
When Erm walked into the kitchen, Ledford stepped away from Charlie Ball. He kept the .45 aimed at his head.
“Charlie,” Erm said. “Look at me.”
Charlie looked at him.
“If you do what I tell you to do, you’ll walk out of here alive.”
SHORTY HAD INSISTED on driving with the headlights off. “No tellin’ who’s out lookin,” he’d said. He’d gone three times to the pint of bourbon under his seat.
Noah braced his arm against the dash around turns. His feet were planted hard on the floor.
They rounded dead man’s curve at twenty miles an hour. Something caught Shorty’s eye. When they’d passed, he asked, “You see that?”
“What?”
“I thought I seen something over there. A little orange light.”
“I didn’t see anything.” Noah’s nerves were shot. He was ready for all this to end.
Shorty came up the straight stretch in blackness. He coasted quiet onto the Rays’ gravel drive, one hand on the wheel, the other on his sidearm. He saw Charlie’s Impala in the yard. “He’s here all right,” Shorty said.
They parked next to the Impala and got out slow. Crickets sang in unison, a deafening call. The porchlight was on.
“W.D.,” Shorty said, his pistol drawn.
The old man stuck his head from an upstairs window, and Shorty aimed at him. W.D. swallowed hard and said, “I’ll be down presently. Got a case of fire trots I’m afraid. Charlie’s in the kitchen.”
Noah looked at Shorty, who kept his gun drawn and walked slow onto the porch. He looked through the window slats before going in. “Charlie?” he called from the doorway.
“In the kitchen,” Charlie hollered.
They walked through the dark living room. Floorboards whined below their feet. At the kitchen doorway, Shorty raised his gun. He saw Charlie’s wingtips and stepped over the threshold. “Why are you sitting like that?” Shorty asked. He holstered his gun.
“Like what?” Charlie stared at the icebox. There was a pencil drawing taped there, and in it, a bearded man in the sky extended his arms wide. Lightning bolts erupted from his hands, and below him, stick-figure people ran about.
“Like a statue,” Shorty said.
Noah gripped the doorjamb and frowned. Something wasn’t right with his cousin.
Ledford and Erm stepped from the walk-in pantry with their guns leveled at Shorty Maynard’s head. “Keep that pistol holstered,” Erm said.
Noah thought about running but didn’t. “Hands up high,” Erm said.
They did as they were told. “Now,” Erm said. He held his .38 in a manner bespeaking seriousness. “Everything is going to be fine. Ledford’s going to take your revolver, pat you down, that’s it.”
Ledford pulled Shorty’s gun from its holster and stepped back. He put his own weapon in his waistband and emptied Shorty’s of its rounds, which he dropped in his pants pocket. He returned the gun to its holster and patted both men down. “Just that one,” he said.
“Okay fellas,” Erm called.
In the living room, Fury and Herchel stood from behind the couch. They rested their shotgun barrels on its back. Jerry stepped from the landing and stuck his through the stair rail.
“Step in there and have a seat,” Erm said.
Outside, Mack cut through the sideyard in a quiet crouch. He set his toolbox down by the squad car’s front tire. He put his creeper board at the bumper and lay down. There was a small dent in the grille, and Mack thought of Orb. He rolled under, switched on the flashlight tucked in his armpit, and located things. Axle. Fuel line. Brake line.
Ledford and Erm were by the front door. They glanced to the yard once in a while, where the Bonecutter brothers stood guard. None spoke a word until Mack rolled out and nodded.
Charlie, Noah, and Shorty sat in a row on the couch, shotguns at the base of their necks, another one staring from the stairs.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Erm said.
Noah Ball couldn’t take it. The silence had gotten him. “Please,” he said. He wore a pathetic look. “I was just in the car. I wanted to go back and check on the boy, but it happened so fast—”
“Shut your mouth,” Ledford said.
Charlie Ball was numb to it all. He sat as he had in the kitchen. Statue straight.
Shorty shook his head in disgust at Noah, who clasped his hands and bowed his head and prayed in a whisper. It was hard to make out, all “dear Gods” and “thank you Lords.”
Erm didn’t like all the movement. He didn’t like the look on Shorty Maynard’s face. “You might want to pray like your friend here,” he said.
Shorty looked from Erm to Ledford. His eyes were dead. He clasped his hands and looked at the ceiling. “Thank you God,” he said. “For everything. But thank you most of all for James Earl Ray.” He put his hands back in his lap, snorted, and spat on the crooked coffee table.
Ledford only blinked at him. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Erm said again. “You three are going to get in that police car out front, and you’re going to drive out of here alive. You’re going to go to Huntington and turn yourselves in at the station on Fifth Avenue. Ledford and I are going to follow you in Charlie’s Impala to make sure you get there safe. Understand?”
They didn’t understand. But when they were told to get up and move, they did so.
At gunpoint, they walked outside in a line, where there were further guns pointed, these in the hands of the Bonecutter brothers, whose stares were something to behold. As the three men stepped into the cruiser, Dimple whistled the tune to Gene Autry’s “Jingle Jangle Jingle.”
Shorty turned the key. “Why are they letting us go?” Noah asked from the backseat. He got no answer.
Out on Knob Drop, headlights lit up the road. The Packard pulled from the gravel patch and drove the same direction it had before. Willy and Stretch would drive a quarter mile and block the road from the east.
The Short Bus pulled out at an angle and stopped. It blocked the west.
Shorty put the car in gear and watched. “Keep us from runnin, I guess,” he said. “Box us in.” He could hardly keep from smiling. No one knew Knob Drop like he did. There were four dirt turnoffs between the Rays’ place and Route 52, and neither Charlie’s Impala nor the Packard had tires for any of them.
Shorty was glad they’d driven his car.
He pulled onto the main road and checked his rearview. The Impala was riding him close. “Let’s see what they got,” Shorty said. He laid the pedal to the floor.
They hit fifty quick on the straight stretch, and Shorty didn’t touch the brake pedal until dead man’s curve was thirty yards ahead. When he did, nothing happened. He looked down at his feet and mashed it again and again. He tried to cut the wheel, but it was no use. Charlie pressed his fingers to the roof and Noah grabbed the headrest, and when they hit the guardrail, it may as well have been made of tinfoil.
Stretch’s blowtorch had done its job.
Erm slowed the Impala and for a moment, they watched the car soar. It rode solid ground, then it rode nothing, and then it was gone. No squeal, no crunch, no siren. Gone.
Ledford said, “Pull up close to the edge.”
He shined the flashlight there. It looked natural enough, a section of guardrail missing, jagged-edged. Long lag bolts glimmered in the beam, pulled from the wood embankment where Willy had wrenched them loose. Ledford tossed the flashlight to the floor. “Let’s go get the boys up the road,” he said.
Back at the Ray place, Erm wiped the Impala down with a rag, inside and out. He left the keys in the ignition, the car on the lawn. “Remember,” he told W.D., “when they ask, you tell em all three men left here in the squad car at midnight, drunk as rummies.”
W.D. nodded. “And I can phone Sheriff Maynard,” he said, “tell him it’s done?”
“You got it,” Erm answered. “He’s expecting the call.”
He and Ledford got in the Packard. The rest had already walked to the Short Bus where it waited on the road. Mack turned it around in the gravel patch, and they all drove home to Marrowbone. No one spoke a word on the way.
They parked in the lot and walked up the Cut in a pack. Dimple and Wimpy watched them go. They were tired, and there was no one left to guard against.
Erm wanted one last meeting at the chapel. He said you could never be too thorough, too prepared for questions.
Ledford stopped at the bottom of the chapel stairs and watched the rest of them climb. “Go on and start without me,” he said.
Willy looked back at him. “Where you going?”
Ledford beheld the face of his oldest boy, lit by the yellow bulb above the door. Land of Canaan Congregational it read. It stopped his breathing, seeing Willy like that. He was hard beyond his years. He’d become what Ledford had feared he would become. “I’ve got to check something up at the factory,” he told him.
Ledford had known for some time that he’d already run his last batch of marbles. The place was a blight on the earth, the ugly side of Marrowbone. He watched the smoke billow as he walked. It sabotaged the sky, put a film over the stars.
Inside the factory, he kicked over buckets of cullet, blue and green and red and yellow glass scattering on the floor like minnows. There were wheelbarrows full of glass. He dumped those too.
In the corner, he pulled the tarp from the mountain of newspapers. He stared at all those words on paper, piled chest high. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match on the pile. It fizzled. He lit another and tossed again. This one took, and the paper blossomed, and the words began to disappear.
Ledford stepped away as the roar came in earnest. He walked to his workbench where the pictures hung. In one of them, Orb crouched at the Ringer circle, his knees muddied, a look of determination on his face. In the picture glass, Ledford watched the growing fire’s reflection. It danced up the wall and across the ceiling. It stuck to everything.
He stepped to the furnace and stared at the glow inside the square. He thought of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and he wondered if he could put his hand inside and pull it out unscorched. If the lives he’d ended were meant to be ended. He stared into the furnace fire until his peripherals went white. He stepped again toward the opening, and its heat singed his arm hair. He closed his eyes and watched the little swirls dance across the black stage of his eyelids. There was a bird in flight. Something sickening in its movements. It was after a thing he could not see, its beak open and pointed and foul. And then, on the backs of his eyelids, there formed two pinpoints. They were the color of the sun, and they grew outward. For a moment, Ledford thought that if he opened his eyes, he’d be back on the swingshift at Mann Glass. There was a rumble beneath his boots. His knees gave, and he pitched forward, bending at the waist. He put a hand out to steady himself. He opened his eyes to see his fingertips catch fire inside the furnace square. The nails turned to ash, the flesh dripped as wax, and white bone went black as the fire crept high to his knuckles. Ledford felt nothing. His sight ceased to be, and he dropped to the floor.
The factory door opened.
Fury and Harold ran past the growing flames in the corner. They got to Ledford and hooked him by the arms and dragged him outside to the grass. The fingers on his right hand were gone. A black stump smoldered, red cracks wisping white smoke.
The rest had come running by then. Willy stared at his daddy’s hand, mostly gone. Bones jutted, sharp. The color of ash. “God oh God,” Willy said.
At the water station, Jerry unrolled the hose. Mack knelt to the ground and opened a heavy door by its latch. Inside was the gas line’s shutoff valve. As the factory windows exploded and the flames licked the roof, Mack reached inside the hole. He grabbed the black knob and turned it.
DECEMBER 1968
A TWENTY-FOOT RED SPRUCE tree stood in the middle of the community center. Dimple and Wimpy had cut it down the day before. Its base they’d fashioned from cinderblocks, and it stood straight with help from fishing line lashed to basketball rims. From a stepladder, Lizzie had thrown lead foil icicles over its wild branches. Mary had strung popcorn and encircled the circumference in loops. There were ten long lengths of bubble lights, blue and red and yellow and green, pointy-topped bulbs filling empty spaces.
It was their last Christmas Eve at Marrowbone.
The top doors on the RCA Victor were wide open, and on the phonograph, Nat Cole spun. Harold turned the volume knob high for “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” As a boy, he’d thought the song was about him.
Outside, it had gotten dark and cold. The sky was cloudless. Ledford looked up at the moon. Its edges were crisp. He blew his cigarette smoke at it, took a last drag. He held the cigarette in his hooks, stubbed it out against the bottom of his boot. His physical therapist liked the phrase “shift in handedness,” but he’d be damned if he smoked with his left. The hooks pinched a square just fine.
He leaned against the siding and scratched his back. The harness straps were itching him again. They formed a figure eight across his spine and held the prosthesis tight to his stump. The doctor had taken the hand off at the wrist, replaced it with steel and rubber.
Ledford made sure the cherry on his cigarette was out. Then he stuck the hooks in his pocket and opened them, dropped the butt inside.
He watched Orb run a circle on the lawn, Tug at his heels. Since he’d come home from the hospital, the dog had not left his side. Orb liked to run, and his physical therapist said it was good for him. He and Ledford had overlapped in their respective recuperations. Physical, occupational. Both had exceeded expectations. But Orb wore a perpetual look of nothingness. He had not spoken a word, and the doctors said he likely never would.
The boy had surprised everyone when he squeezed his mother’s hand one hot August night. Rachel was watching the hospital television. On the screen, Chicago policemen teargassed a crowd of protesters, and Orb squeezed her fingers. She’d looked at him, and he’d looked back.
Ledford whistled, and Tug came running. Orb followed. “Let’s get inside where it’s warm,” Ledford said. He held the door for them, then followed.
The ceiling lights were shut off, and for a moment everyone stood in darkness. Then Mack plugged in the tree lights, and faces were lit in hues of yellow, uniformly looking up at the blown-glass star. It threw blue lines across the ceiling beams, and Ledford pulled Rachel close, her back against his chest, his chin on her head. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
The steel hooks were cold through her sweater. She smiled, cried a little. Thought of the new home they were building at Beech Fork. It was big, and when the dam was built and the lake came, their yard would back up to the water. Ledford said he’d build a boat dock.
Nat Cole’s “Silent Night” ended, and the record crackled before going quiet.
Orb ran a circle around the base of the big tree. Chester approached and stood in his path. Orb stopped and stared. “Here you
go Orb,” Chester said. He handed his friend a gift. The wrapping paper was silver-and-gold striped. Orb just looked at it. “I’ll open it for you,” Chester said, and he did. The paper dropped to the floor in strips. Chester held up a wood-framed photograph of the two of them. Mary had taken it on the day the Woodson Center opened. It was black and white. It froze in time a moment at the junk-strewn yard of the secondhand plumbing store. In the photograph, Orb peeked over the edge of a clawfoot tub, and behind him, eight feet up, Chester rotated backwards through the air, a blur of hands and knees and feet. “I carved the frame myself,” Chester said. Wimpy had taught him how.
Orb stared at the photograph. Then he looked right through his friend and kept on running around the tree.
Ledford walked over to Chester. “That’s the best kind of gift there is,” he said. He patted the boy on the back. He was glad Chester was staying. Not many were, but there would be enough. Up at the new grounds, they’d plant and harvest next to a two-thousand-acre lake that never flooded. No factory, no televisions, no post office box with the name of a newspaper on the side.
Ledford looked closer at the picture. Chester’s blur reminded him of a photograph he’d once seen of his own father. Six years old, swinging on a rope. “Mary take this picture?” he asked.
“She’s good, isn’t she?” Chester said.
“Yes she is. That reminds me.” He stepped to the tree and pulled a box from underneath. It was wrapped sloppy in old paper—he’d done it himself, hooks and all. He called Mary over and she opened it. Inside was a new Bolex 16mm movie camera.
She didn’t know what to say. “I thought maybe you could get film of the whole place before it winds up underwater,” Ledford said. “Moving pictures of Marrowbone.”
Mary nodded.
In the corner, Herb Wells ran a bow across his fiddle. Jerry tuned the big Stella twelve-string, and Herchel plucked the clothesline on his gas-tank bass.