Cicada

by Eric, Laing, J.

  “So then after the shot you saw the truck and how many men?”

  “I don’t know…three…four.”

  “But you couldn’t make out any faces?”

  “It was dark. They was a ways off…through the trees….”

  “Right.”

  “But I told ya, I know’d the truck. It was that goddamned Jimbo Dillard’s.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I know. I just know. It was Dillard and that pack of rabble he runs with.”

  “But they drove off before you could see them clearly?”

  “They were gone before I was even sure what’d happened,” John said. “I didn’t realize…thought everything was okay. It wasn’t even until I got back home that….” John couldn’t finish.

  Sheriff Gladwell rubbed his bloodshot eyes and leaned in. “What were you doing way out that way so late on any account, John?”

  John bristled. “The hell does that matter?”

  “Okay, okay. No need to get riled in a knot. Just trying to piece things together here.”

  John stared off listening for any sign of Frances. He found none. Then he blurted out his lie as quick as it came to him. “I went to see Ben.”

  As soon as he’d said it, John wished he hadn’t. Just as quickly he realized he could have said he was simply out driving, blowing off steam, whatever.

  “Ben?”

  “Yeah. Ben Anderson. He’s a…my field hand. Hired him a little ways back to help out. Help with the farm. Ben Anderson.”

  “That’s right,” the Sheriff agreed, recalling his previous visit with Frances.

  John began to get up yet again. “Maybe we should bring Tim in the house? I better go….”

  “No, sir. Sit down,” the Sheriff finally snapped, clenching John by the arm and pulling him back. “I’m through telling you…the body’s not to be moved until the coroner gets here.”

  John met his anger. “Well then, by God, get his ass out here. You get that sumbitch. Get his ass out here!”

  “John, I told you twice already,” Gladwell shifted quietly, “the man’s gotta come from clear across the county. Now, he’s on his way. And until he gets here, that body stays right in the back of that truck.”

  “Body?” Frances’s pained voice drifted unexpectedly over the men from where she stood in the open arch between the living room and kitchen. Behind her Deputy Tippen stood ineffectual and at a loss.

  “Goddamn it, Tippen,” Gladwell heaved as the deputy offered his upturned palms to explain himself.

  “That’s my son, Sheriff Gladwell. Not just some…some body.”

  “I’m truly sorry, Mrs. Sayre. Franny. I didn’t mean….”

  “To hell with what you meant,” she said softly and turned back to push her way past the dumbstruck Deputy Tippen.

  “John….” The Sheriff began, but couldn’t find the words. He was thankful then as the coroner’s car horn announced the doctor’s arrival.

  …

  The weary man continued to sit motionless at the intersection in his idling truck even as the streetlight cycled from green, to yellow, to red, and then back to green again for the third time. His eyes remained intently fixed on those colorful orbs all the while, but there wasn’t any doubt that his mind was elsewhere. Although no other drivers had pulled up behind him during those long minutes, the old boys in the barbershop had taken notice, and now they were gathered in the window like slack-jawed mannequins on display.

  The barber peered over their shoulders. “Something wrong with him, you think?”

  “Oh there’s somethin’ wrong with ‘im alright,” said the man whose hair he’d been cutting.

  “That one’s always been an odd bird,” a venerable gent next to the barber at the rear of the bunch said, bovine-like dewlap flapping beneath his jowls in his headshaking disgust. With a dismissive wave he ambled back to the chair he very seldom left.

  Two vehicles came into Peter Kane’s rearview mirror as the light went yellow once more. The first was a weathered truck, the original make difficult to distinguish since it was a Frankenstein hodgepodge of salvaged body parts varying in model and color. The occupants were a black family. A young to middle-aged couple—the man behind the wheel—were crammed into the cab alongside another woman of incredible girth. She was so large that the truck visibly leaned beneath her weight to favor the passenger’s side. Two young girls, somewhere in their early elementary school years in age, rode in the back, seated opposite one another on the wheel wells. One, her glistening ebony hair pulled tight into two ponytails protruding from each side of her head and concluding with little pink, plastic balls that caught the sun, kept her arm wrapped around the neck of their mongrel dog as it madly panted away the heat.

  Directly behind the truck followed a late model sky blue Buick sedan driven by an elderly ghost of a man wearing a fedora. To the girls in the back of the truck, he appeared through the glare off his windshield to be hardly anything more than long, sallow fingers and a hat-adorned nose crouched up over the steering wheel. What remained of him beyond that simply disappeared into the folds of his black suit and the shadows of his fedora. Had the old man removed the hat, the splotchy pink of his otherwise jaundiced complexion would have suggested he was avoiding sunburn only to court heatstroke.

  All the while, Peter Kane still hadn’t noticed the truck and the car come up behind him, nor the gaggle of rubberneckers behind the streaked glass of the barbershop. John Sayre’s son had been shot. He’d heard the news minutes before in the drugstore where the gossips were abuzz. Now Peter Kane weighed that blow along with the lynching of Raymond Stout and burning cross that had been erected on his own front lawn.

  The streetlight made an audible tick-tock as the red light switched to green. Several seconds passed. The young black man offered a quizzical expression to his wife before checking the rearview mirror. With a shrug, he threw the truck into drive and swung around Peter Kane’s immobile truck. Peter finally escaped his distraction as the other truck slowly passed. He glanced over to meet the driver’s gaze. Almost as if to apologize for disturbing him, the man offered Peter a slight wave from his steering wheel. Peter returned the gesture with a nod and wave of his own after a moment’s hesitation. Then, with the truck pulling back into the lane in front of him, Peter noticed the two little girls in the back. While the one seated by herself smiled a great gap-toothed grin to Peter, the other child remained stoic, her arm locked around her dog as though it was the two of them beset by the world.

  The sudden and unexpected blare of the sky blue Buick sedan’s horn caused Peter to startle. The old man behind him had no intention of going around. He’d pulled so close that the hood of his car couldn’t be seen in Peter’s rearview, and still, Peter noticed, he was continuing to creep forward. It was as though the old man in the fedora meant to drive through him.

  “Yeah, yeah. What’re ya, late for yer own funeral?” Peter fumed and shifted into drive.

  He failed to notice that the light had gone red once more. With his eyes still focused on the rearview mirror, Peter stomped the accelerator and his truck surged into the intersection. He didn’t see Casey as the boy barreled into the intersection on his bicycle from his right, but Peter heard the boy’s terrified yelp. Speeding as he was, Casey had little choice; it was either catapult over the handle bars when he hit the side of the truck, or lay the bike down on its side and hope he didn’t go under. In truth, it wasn’t a decision reached as much as it was a reaction made in a split-second. Casey bore down back on the pedal brake while jerking the bike down on its side. His blue jeans rolled up his slender calf as the leg met the macadam and a good portion of the skin there was grated away in an instant. His right forearm quickly followed, but thankfully not to the same extent. To the few spectators who had the vantage point, the boy appeared to skip for some fifteen feet not unlike a smooth, flat stone on calm water.

  The rear tire of the truck came to a crunching halt as it rolled atop Casey’s b
icycle.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, son?” the first of the barbershop patrons hollered as the group of them spilled out onto the street. It was directed at Kane.

  Peter Kane sat in shock behind the steering wheel. He felt as though he was going to be sick, but was afraid to get out of the truck for fear of what he was going to see.

  One of the barbershop patrons rapped his palm several times on the hood of Peter’s truck to get his attention and waved him out. Still, Peter remained in the truck. The rest of the crowd surged around the side of the truck and swarmed thick as honey bees over Casey. Fortunately, the boy hadn’t slid as far as his bike, which was now mangled and pinned squarely beneath the right rear truck tire, and other than the horrible skinning of his calf and arm, Casey had escaped any serious injury. The initial shock of the accident passed and the boy began to gnash his front teeth into his bottom lip and wail like a branded calf.

  The proprietor of the barbershop, known to all as Uncle Ned, was the last to reach the scene, hobbled as he was by his advanced age and weight. He was the only one who didn’t rush to the other side of the truck to Casey, but instead went to Peter where he still sat in the driver’s seat.

  “You alright in there, Peter?”

  “I don’t know what happened. He just…out of nowhere…I didn’t see him.”

  Casey, against his conflicting protest to remain where he was, as well as to go home, was brought gently to his feet by several hands and examined twice over before one of the men took him up in his arms and carried the child away.

  “He’ll be okay,” one of the men muttered.

  “Boy’s fine,” another agreed.

  Peter stuttered on, “I didn’t, I didn’t see him, Uncle Ned.”

  “I know, son. Not your fault. These kids and their darned bikes. Don’t fret none. The boy’s okay. Just a bit ruffled up,” the barber offered in condolence, patting Peter’s shoulder through the window.

  And then Peter was startled for a third time, as the old man in the sky blue Buick, still behind him, laid heavily onto his horn once more.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Frances stood on the back porch and called for the family cat. “Rusty! Rusty, here, boy! Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!”

  Just as it had been for some time now, the cat failed to appear. She considered not leaving out this fresh dish of canned food. She’d become tired of the routine of seeing it feed only the flies and fire ants as it went bad. She bent to retrieve it, but then paused to consider the dark horizon of thunderheads coming to bear and left the dish on the porch after all.

  “If anything’s gonna drive that cat home from whatever he’s got off to, you’re the ticket,” she said to the gathering storm.

  As if in reply, a great, long rumbling of thunder rolled over the farm, echoing between the house and barns.

  “Yeah, right. Damned cat.”

  She went back inside and tried to think of something else to do. The Sheriff and his men were gone. She’d made all the phone calls to family. She was already packed, had been from the night before, but now there would be no leaving. Not for a few days, at the very least. Not until her son was laid to rest. Buckshot was dead. It didn’t seem real. This was a world of make-believe, something to wake from, a grim storybook to close.

  “If only,” she repeated to herself.

  She considered going off to a motel, but just as quickly discarded the idea and went instead to the kitchen to make lunch. She wasn’t hungry.

  “Body,” Frances caught herself muttering as she drifted down the hall.

  Upstairs in Buckshot’s room John Sayre stood quietly. The fingers of his weathered hands twitched, as though longing to be put to use, but he could find no task for them. He feared that to touch anything of his son’s would be a means for his anger to find its way out. For the time being, that rage was lost inside him; a terrible beast in a maze. He sensed its longing to be free and choked to breathe.

  The thunder shook off John’s stupor. He thought that it was someone come to call and went to the window only to realize his mistake in the discovery of the impending storm consuming the sky. The farms of Melby had been in bad need of more rain—John had even prayed for it—but now it meant nothing to him. The Sayre family farm could dry up and blow away for all he cared.

  Vitamin D, the goldfish Buckshot had kept secret from his parents, sensed the man was near. Against steep odds, the fish had recovered from the ailment Buckshot was sure would do it in, and now it was hungry. When John’s shadow fell across the surface of the coffee can’s water, Vitamin D made a small splash as it anticipated being fed. It caught John’s attention.

  “What in the world…?” His index finger gingerly tipped the can by its rim just enough for him to peer in. “Ah-ha,” he sighed. The cracked fishbowl he’d previously found out on the lawn was no longer a mystery. “Oh, Tim.” John’s tone was gentle, forgiving.

  With both hands, John brought the can from the shelf and sat down on his son’s bed to hold the fish in his lap. For a lost half hour he traced the surface of the water with his finger, luring the fish to him, where in its hunger, Vitamin D mouthed ineffectually at the pink flesh time after time.

  “You’re lucky I came along and found you, ya know? ‘Cause the person who knew to look after you is gone now. Gone and left ya all ‘lone up there. Gone,” John whispered into the still water as the can nearly slipped his grasp.

  And then it was as John Sayre had feared. The maze opened and his rage was set free.

  Joshua Lee Scott gave a silent thanks to God that he reached the Sayre’s front porch before the rain started to fall. As a few plump drops began to pelt the earth here and there, the minister nodded his approval with a supercilious smirk and winked towards what he perceived to be Heaven. He was still wrapped up in his moment of self-aggrandizing when John threw the front door open and all but tore the screen door free from its hinges as he charged out. All other details blurred as the minister’s focus fell upon the Louisville Slugger John carried.

  “Mr. Sayre, what in God’s name…?” Joshua Lee Scott pleaded. In panic, and thinking the bat was meant for him, the minister stumbled back and toppled off the porch.

  “Get the hell off my property.”

  As John came down the steps towards him, Joshua threw up an arm, cowering from the blow that never came. The only thing that struck the minister was rain, as the heavens opened up and a torrent began in earnest.

  Joshua Lee Scott was still on his backside by the time Frances rushed to the door to see John’s truck barreling for the blacktop.

  “Franny,” Joshua said, taking a far too familiar liberty with her name as he sputtered against the downpour, “I think we’d best call Sheriff Gladwell.”

  …

  Deputy Tippen had slipped out from the Sheriff’s office to get over to the Feed ‘n’ Grain as soon as he could, but it was still late in the afternoon by the time he’d gotten the chance. He’d made one call much earlier that morning to Jimbo telling him to get the boys over there, lay low, and wait for him. Jimbo pressed to know what was going on, and when Tippen told him about Timothy Sayre’s death, Jimbo had started to explain the previous night’s “accident.” Tippen was forced to hang up the phone to silence him.

  The rain had begun as Tippen pulled into the parking lot, and three of the Klan boys, Jimbo, TR, and Jeffery, stood in the open double doors of the loading platform huddled like crows on a wire.

  “Whelp, you boys really screwed the pooch last night, I guess ya know by now,” the deputy said as he trotted up and shouldered his way past them to get inside. “And get the hell out the door. You call that layin’ low? Damn.”

  As Tippen beat the water off his hat’s slip-cover onto his trousers, the three men exchanged nervous glances and did as he told them.

  “Nugget did it,” Jeffery blurted out.

  “That’s right,” Jimbo agreed.

  The deputy looked to the last of the three to see if he wanted to
add anything, but TR only avoided the deputy’s gaze.

  “Bunch a goddamned idiots,” Miles Perkins, the proprietor, said and spat into a Styrofoam cup he used as a makeshift spittoon. His dog, Mack, sensing his master’s agitation, shifted restlessly against its tethered leash. “Shut the hell up,” Miles scolded.

  “So? Where is he?” Tippen demanded, his eyes falling on each of them in turn. They shrugged dumbly. “Where’s Nugget? You call ‘im?” Tippen asked Jeffery.

  “TR did.”

  The deputy turned to TR. “Um, yeah,” he mumbled, “nobody answered.”

  “So? Did ya go out there?”

  “You didn’t tell us to. You said to come here,” Jeffery explained defensively.

  From his place off in the shadows of the warehouse, Miles Perkins guffawed in disbelief and spat again.

  “Pritchard, you shit for brains, drive out there and get that morbid fucker back over here,” Jimbo ordered. He turned to the deputy and rolled his eyes as if to say his other two companions were the problem, not him.

  “Why me?” Jeffery whined.

  “And you,” the deputy sighed to Jimbo in a hushed voice, as if fearing someone else might hear, “Get that damn rebel-flag painted piece of shit you call a truck and park it out back. How do ya think Sayre know’d it was y’all in the first place?”

  Miles Perkins couldn’t take anymore. “Better yet, why don’t the lot of ya get the hell away from my place of business altogether? I don’t need you dragging me in on this.”

  “Yes, sir,” Deputy Tippen said, followed by a round of muttered acquiescence from the rest.

  Nobody, not even the deputy, wanted to get on Miles Perkins’s bad side. He was the Klan’s Grand Dragon, after all. The four men shuffled obediently out of the warehouse doors and into the rain.

  Although it was TR who initially spotted John standing at the left end of the loading dock with his shotgun leveled at them, John ignored him and shot Deputy Tippen first. After all, the deputy was armed. Tippen had just begun to turn to John as the blast tore into his ribcage, spinning him about, snapping and splintering spine. TR screamed an incoherent guttural wail but didn’t move. Jeffery, not even sure what was happening, instinctively dove for the parking lot. Jimbo turned to run back inside after freezing in shock when the deputy spilled at his feet. It was a pause that proved fatal. As John was pumping another round into the chamber while bringing the barrel back down from the recoil, his second shot caught Jimbo Henry David Dillard in the neck and jaw. Jimbo’s all but decapitated frame was violently blown sideways into the dazed TR, who made no effort to catch the body as it thudded and sloshed onto the loading dock like a split sack of grain.