Thankfully he didn’t get a “whoopin’” for that, however. Actually, Frances was too upset at the site of her little boy’s swollen arms to think of causing him any more pain. And John, well, the remembrance of his brother Walter, covered in similar welts, compelled him to leave the dinner table early. Without a word he went straight out to the barn, found the jars of ants, and took them out back where he poured kerosene on them and set them ablaze.
Buckshot watched from his upstairs bedroom window. It didn’t make him too upset to lose those pets, however. They’d already worn out their welcome with the boy, actually.
“We gotta think of a good place to keep ya, Vitamin D.”
He first thought just to keep the bowl hidden under the bed.
“Naw…that’d be stupid. Mama is always lookin’ under the bed.”
The great thing about a goldfish—the reason he’d settled on the idea almost as soon as he’d learned of the new exotic pet store—was that goldfish don’t sting and bite, and they most certainly didn’t gnaw through their bowls and run loose in the house. The bad thing about keeping a secret goldfish was the bowl full of water; hardly inconspicuous.
“Yeah!” Buckshot whispered in exhalation as he hit upon what he considered a brilliant solution to his dilemma.
A short while later Vitamin D was transplanted in his new home, a Maxwell House coffee can that Buckshot had kept his marbles in. Buckshot opened his bedroom window and winced as he gently tossed the bowl out. Thankfully, from the sound of its thud off onto the dark lawn below, he didn’t think it broke. He’d hide it in the barn tomorrow morning when he did his chores, he decided. Maybe later, once he managed to convince his parents to let him have a fish, he’d retrieve it. After all, he’d paid good money for that bowl, and Vitamin D was much more fun to watch in a glass bowl than in the coffee can.
Buckshot was quite satisfied with things as he turned off the light and climbed into bed with his flashlight and several comic books. School was over and the entire summer lay ahead. He had his fish—finally—and perfectly hidden away at that. Even better, because of what had happened with his finding the body of Raymond Stout, his father had hardly given him any of the chores he’d been expecting around the farm. But best of all, more than any one of those things—or perhaps even better than all of them put together—his mother and father weren’t fighting for the first time in weeks. Granted, they weren’t speaking, or speaking very little if they did, but at least they weren’t arguing and yelling.
Buckshot didn’t know what had brought on the change. How could he? Frances hadn’t shared the discovery of the letter with John, deciding instead to go cold and silent. For his part, John was simply thankful not to spend another night sparring with her, dancing around the truth of his indiscretions while she lobbed her faulty accusations. In his innocence, Buckshot misread all of this and concluded that the quiet meant things were going to be better.
…
While John Sayre spent another night downstairs on the living room couch, inexplicably finding sleep with little trouble, such peace eluded Wes Nugget Crocker.
Nugget would have liked to have been able to blame the heat for his insomnia.
“Lord knows this goddamned house is hot ‘nough to bake taters!” his stepfather, Earl, moaned again.
“Quit yer bitchin’,” was his wife’s repeated reply.
Nugget could hear them complain to each other back and forth over the television screaming in the next room. He would have liked to blame it or them for his restlessness as well, but that was just as much a feeble excuse to avoid the truth as any other. The sound of another can of beer popping open didn’t help matters either. It was like a little demon whispering, “Pisst!” into Nugget’s ear. Nugget squeezed his eyes shut tight but he still saw the bottles hurtling through black air to strike Raymond Stout, pelting the dead man over and over just as in the nightmares that kept him too afraid to sleep. Nugget had heard the term ‘night terrors’ tossed about by his aunt on many occasions, but until recently he’d always considered such to be hyperbole, more of what his uncle called her “hissy-onics.”
Nugget gave in and clicked on the lamp on his nightstand. The light from the bare bulb washed over the little room revealing the spartan furnishings. He took the New Testament from the drawer of the nightstand. It and the Old Testament were the only books his parents permitted him. He’d been allowed others as a boy, but with each passing year his questions had become too much for the simple woman and her third husband to bear. When Nugget’s curiosity took their religious beliefs to task, Nugget’s stepfather whipped him and burned his school books in a fit of drunken rage. There would be no more talk of evolution or other nonsense such as Schrödinger’s cat. Not in the Crocker household. To be certain of this, Earl had gone so far as to approach the science teacher who’d fed Nugget the textbooks to begin with. Actually he did more than approach the man. He bloodied his nose and chipped one of his front dentures.
“Now tell my boy we come from the goddamned monkeys again, you smarmy pants Yankee mother fucker!”
Three weeks later the well-intentioned science teacher packed his things and wisely put Melby behind him.
Nugget yelped with fright when he paused in his reading and noticed Raymond Stout seated in the chair in the corner. The man was as Nugget last saw him, eyes and tongue protruding grotesquely. Nugget convulsed in terror and threw himself back against the headboard to escape the vision.
“Please go ‘way,” he whimpered.
From the living room the sound of more fussing rose above the television’s din to assure Nugget that they were unaware of his dilemma.
“Please….”
And then he felt the hand around his throat. He desperately tried to fight back but his arms were lead, refusing to move. His breath was cut short and so he was unable to cry for help. Then, as suddenly as the apparition had appeared, it was gone. Nugget broke from the dream he had faded into with a thrash that sent the lamp careening off the nightstand, shattering the bulb with a ‘pop’ against the floor. That and his waking scream did get his parents’ attention.
“What the hell is wrong with you, you nutty bitch?” Earl yelled from the living room.
Nugget curled into a ball and wept quietly in the dark.
…
John awoke early the next morning before sunrise. He’d been doing that more and more lately, since he’d begun spending his nights on the couch. Even though he caught little sleep—and what he did was mostly restless—he would rise upon his first awakening of the morning if the hour was any time past 5:00. Skipping the morning shower that had been routine all his life, more often than not he’d dress in the same clothes he’d worn the day before, and sometimes even the day before that. If he had been working his farm as he should, such hygienic disregard would have quickly rendered him intolerable. For the past few weeks, however, Ben was almost single handedly seeing to the daily operations of the Sayre farm. Even Buckshot was managing in all the confusion of that trying time to elude the work that for so many months had been promised him.
Out between the house and the main barn the family dog followed John, as was its habit. The man strode through the dew speckled grass leaving a trail of disturbance that could just be made out in the gloom. John’s path was straight and with purpose, while the dog’s was a meandering serpentine, crisscrossing back and forth, thin and erratic, over his master’s wake. The air was still and the world was serene. It wasn’t quite time for the birds to rise, and the other myriad of nocturnal creatures were done with their shadowy skirmishes, settled down now wherever they planned to sleep through the day’s coming swelter.
John’s mind was almost, but not completely, a blank, something like a sloppily erased blackboard. Here and there, half thoughts lingered, unrealized but still discernable like ghost figures and letters of the previous day’s all but forgotten lesson.
The dog noticed the goldfish bowl first. It broke away from its master and trotted acros
s the lawn to investigate.
“Here, now, c’mon,” John said. Then he noticed it as well. “What in the world?”
The dog had its nose all the way inside the bowl by the time John had gotten to it. He shooed the animal off and crouched down to consider the bowl more closely. It hadn’t really survived the fall as Buckshot had hoped. The lip had chipped and a thin spider web of a crack had shot through it from there. John didn’t touch it at first, but from where he crouched he looked up to his son’s second story bedroom window, the only explanation for the fishbowl’s mysterious origin.
“What gets in that boy’s head?”
The dog eased alongside to press its muzzle into John’s hip. In turn he scratched it behind an ear and snatched the bowl up, careful to avoid the sharp edge. The portion of the lip that’d broken away would have been about the size of a man’s thumb, so John began surveying the surrounding lawn for it. It was still plenty dark, however, and so he gave up that futility rather quickly and resumed his march to the barn.
He threw both the barn doors wide and abandoned the fishbowl on his workbench. His intention had been to tinker with the tractor to see if he might determine the latest cause of its sputtering. He’d told Ben the day before to park it here instead of its usual place in the utility barn for just that reason. But this morning John never even got as far as switching on the row of bare light bulbs strung overhead. He leaned against the doorjamb instead and peered out across the darkened fields. He stayed that way for a long while as the dog pestered him for the attention it wouldn’t get. Eventually it gave up on him. John didn’t notice when it left the barn to seek out nothing in particular.
What’s that boy thinking to be up to something behind his and Franny’s back? John thought as he remained at the barn door. He looked over to the fishbowl and remembered the mason jars of ants. He shook his head and let go a sigh. What would it take to teach the boy that he couldn’t just do whatever he wanted?
“Boy is always up to somethin’.”
John’s chest tightened and he mindlessly tugged at his belt buckle with the thought that his son’s foolishness would probably lead to another whipping. Hate to punish the boy, he told himself. He really did. But how else was he going to teach his son how to respect his father? A sudden idea came to him then that made him even more frustrated. What if Franny knew about the fishbowl? What if the two of them conspired against him to let the boy bring more pets into the house? More damn pets after he had strictly forbid them.
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
The thought of his wife disobeying his wishes made John spit and kick the earth.
As the light of the Morning star began to falter with the coming dawn, John pulled the doors shut behind him, closing himself off in the dark to brood a little while longer.
Chapter Seventeen
Rusty was so sick he had stopped fighting for life and instead was looking for a place to die. The Sayre family cat was old, very old. Between that, the stifling heat, and the steady diet of cicadas the feline had been foolishly consuming, his time was at hand. Even the mocking birds—the mated pair that had spent so much effort attempting to drive the cat off—knew that Rusty was no longer a concern. To watch them, as they in turn watched the cat, one might suspect they even pitied poor Rusty. They perched on the fence cocking their heads to watch as the cat finally rose from where he’d hidden in a little copse of scrub oak and hobbled across the yard to seek his final resting place beneath the porch. Rusty paused long enough to cast one final look of despise to his foes, but they didn’t assault him as he’d come to expect. The male held open his beak to stave off the heat and the female simply pranced a bit along the fence rail. Satisfied to be finished with them, Rusty drug himself into the shadows and that was the last the two would ever see of him.
The mockingbirds were still perched on the rail when the Sheriff’s cruiser arrived. The slam of the car door grabbed Frances’s attention. She finished with the sheet she’d been pinning to the line before letting fall the remaining clothespins from her hands and mouth. Two of the three managed to land in the basket. She paused to wipe her brow with her forearm and ran her fingers through her hair before beginning her way around the house to see who’d pulled up front. Although she wasn’t expecting anyone, she wasn’t curious or concerned in the least. For the past several weeks she’d stepped into a dull state, like a drowning horse, once strong, but given in to the thick pull of the water.
“Afternoon, Franny.”
His name was Gladwell. It was a wonderfully ironic name for a man that usually only showed up on a family’s doorstep bearing the news no one wanted—the hunting accident, the late night report of two cars tangled together like fighting dogs.
“Sheriff.”
Frances blew twice on the sweat-laden curl of hair determined to stay in her face and then gave up on it. They studied one another a moment longer as Sheriff Gladwell kept his tongue. He couldn’t help but speculate why Frances Sayre, a woman who was normally very friendly with him, seemed this day to be defiant if not even downright confrontational. It was a look he knew all too well. He’d seen it in the occasional domestic disputes between other couples; the most common trouble that punctuated the doldrums of his office.
“Hope I ain’t come by at a bad time.”
The engine of his patrol car ticked with escaping heat as the drone of the cicada picked up to fill their awkward silence.
“Well…I was hangin’ laundry.” She threw a thumb back over her shoulder, clenching visibly and nodding as if there was no need to say more.
“Yes ma’am, this heat…hot ain’t in it, my daddy used to say,” he said and then, “See now, sorry to trouble y’all but is John here about?”
Frances just regarded him coldly. A scarecrow meant to see him shooed off, he thought.
“That him?” the Sheriff asked, throwing up a hand to the brim of his hat to further shield his eyes as he looked out to the tractor chugging in the distance.
“No, ‘fraid to say. That’d be Ben.”
“Ben?”
“Mm-hmm. John hired on.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll tell John you stopped by.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’d appreciate that, really would. Thank you much, an’ you have yourself a good day now.”
Frances nodded once more. The Sheriff couldn’t help but grimace to think that all she needed was a shotgun to be any friendlier. He offered a small, two fingered salute from behind the wheel and left her to watch him depart with an expression that told him far more than she’d ever said.
Once he was down the road a little way, closer to the tractor he’d seen from the yard, but far enough from Frances’s stern gaze, Sheriff Gladwell stopped his patrol car to watch Ben while the man plowed. The Sheriff couldn’t be sure if Ben was aware of him. The tractor was loud and Ben had his back to the Sheriff and seemed focused on the task set before him.
Sheriff Gladwell’s mind wandered and he couldn’t help but be bothered with Frances’s strange behavior. After a moment of frustrated thought that got him much of nowhere he let the matter go.
Clipped onto a clipboard on the passenger seat the Sheriff kept a little notepad. He liked to refer to the clipboard as his desk, and called the notepad his secretary, in the same jocular vein. He clicked open a ballpoint pen from his front pocket considering to jot a note. He flipped to the page where he’d begun a short list of five names, but once there he couldn’t find a clear enough thought to dictate. Beside the name of John Sayre—smudged by last night’s spill of bourbon—Sheriff Gladwell satisfied his frustration with three question marks rewritten one on top of another until they looked like a thick twist of snakes. He might have made yet another, but a spat of sweat dripped onto the page from his nose to commingle with the previously dry amber stain of whiskey.
“Ah, Christ….”
He made a mental note of the next name on the list and tossed the clipboard back onto the passenger seat. The Sheriff gave B
en one last look. The man was a ways off now, glimmering specter-like in the heat mirage and dust that his work kicked up.
“We’ll see,” the Sheriff mumbled, thinking aloud, and shifted the cruiser back into drive. With the accelerator pushed much more than needed, the patrol car fishtailed in its departure. He’d come back in a day or two after he’d finished up, the Sheriff resigned. The bottom of the problems out at the Sayre farm would not go unfathomed.
It was a short enough drive to the Kane farm. On his way there the Sheriff passed an errant cow that was grazing beside the road. Normally that was the day to day business of the Sheriff’s office.
He grabbed his handset. “Madeline, tell Tippen we got a fifty-four Charlie two miles south of the Kane place out here on route nine,” he barked into the radio.
After a momentary hiss the dispatcher came back, “Will do, Sheriff. But he’s just with Dennis Hart at the moment.”
“Hart? There a problem?”
“Nothing too urgent I don’t suppose. The two of ‘em been talking in your office. Don’t know what about.”
“Well, see he gets the message.”
“Roger that, Sheriff.”
Why in the world would Dennis Hart, the cemetery caretaker, be over to the courthouse? Gladwell wondered and then let it go.
Damn kids must be drinkin’ out there again. Best not be no grave’s being damaged. He glanced up to check the cow in his rearview mirror and pressed on.
As if to confirm the Sheriff’s disdain for some of Melby’s more unruly teenaged citizens, the Sheriff found Peter Kane at the roadside where his farm’s quarter mile dirt drive met the blacktop. Kane was hard at it with a pair of posthole diggers reestablishing his vandalized mailbox, recently torn down.
“Pete,” the Sheriff greeted as he pulled alongside.
“Sheriff.”
“Well now if school was still in session that’d make my life a little easier. Run over there and rouse a few of the regular pains in both our backsides,” he said, getting out of the car.
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