Murder in the Rough

by Otto Penzler

  We would arrive at the barn some days cold sober. There would be dead animals in our wake, spent cartridges smoking in the grass, our rifles left leaning against the outside wall. We would jump and grab the jutting boards and nails and skirt along the walls and fall into the spirits’ chairs, and we would each open a bottle of Jack Daniel’s or Evan Williams or Jim Beam or whoever Luna was buying that week, and we would swig deeply, like old men, belching from the pits of our stomachs, and then we would race around the walls with the ground a blur beneath us, tossing back great belts of the sweet whiskey each time we passed the spirits’ chairs, becoming drunker as the barn spun around us and we it, stopping only to pick splinters from our fingers with our teeth and to pour the stinging alcohol on the drop of blood that appeared like something summoned.

  Sometimes we would collapse in one of the haylofts and sleep eighteen hours, rising only to throw up or piss from the doors, or we would pass out in the chairs, not even stirring if one of our feet slipped from our fetal curl onto the floor where the glass was, but waking to the cold stiffness of the blood in the morning, the pain.

  Nights were a blur. We went to Mr. D. L.’s house, the lights there Las Vegas-like as drapes were ripped down by toppling drunks and fires swayed like cobras from dropped cigarettes or joints. We came in dirty from our crusades across the course, stinking of whiskey and sometimes bloody, with headaches and upset stomachs, and Luna would pounce squealing across the room with her boobs flying out of her gown to embrace us.

  “Hair of the dog,” she would say, raising a bottle high above her head.

  One night I got drunker than usual and ate some mushrooms I’d found growing in a patch of vomit in one of the upstairs sinks. Taking Luna’s limp hand, I led her from the party smoke into another of the bathrooms. A man I’d never seen was passed out in the hot tub. Tears were streaming down my face. I looked into her eyes and said, “I love you, Luna. Will you marry me?”

  “You’re dead,” T-Bob said. He was standing in the door.

  We fought viciously through the house and out into the woods. It was dark. You could hear sounds from inside, music, whooping: Luna laughing. Bark split from a tree over my head and I heard the shot. T-Bob was good with a rifle, even at night. I aimed at where I thought his bullet had come from and emptied the chamber of my .30-30, working the lever action out of a bright instinct, my eyes suddenly clear, all sound fading from around me as if my blood flowed only through my head, where it was most needed. I hated Luna’s whoredom, her drinking, her body odor, her stubbly legs and armpits. Why couldn’t we get married?

  I was out of bullets in no time but kept clicking the hammer on an empty chamber, snap, snap, snap. The blood oozed back through my body, to the places it usually went. I could breathe again.

  “Luna,” I said.

  “No,” T-Bob said.

  He put the barrel of his .30-06 against my forehead.

  He said, “I could kill you.”

  I said, “She’s a whore.”

  He said, “I know it.”

  I said, “I love her.”

  He said, “You didn’t hit nowhere near me.”

  He left me there and I felt my way into the woods. I knew them well enough, after all the times we’d slipped through them after the golfers. It used to be a game with us, in those good days, trying to keep quiet and listen to their adult conversation. We would catch green snakes in hedge bushes and sling them toward the golfers and watch them cringe. They would whip pistols from their holsters and fire into a snake’s jumping body. They’d high-five each other and then lift the dead snake with a stick and drape it across the nearest flag.

  But on the night of the mushrooms I got lost in the woods, for the woods are different after you lose your best friend. Mr. D. L. owned thousands of acres and I kept walking. The moon was high, shining and almost white through breaks in the dark cragged limbs, but clouds were massing. Something ran.

  “Just a deer,” I said, and stopped. I looked up and saw nothing except the blackness, not even the form of anything; even the moon was gone.

  In the morning I came upon the gravel pit and climbed the butte. Hole 94 was there, full of rainwater and dead frogs. The flagpole lying flat. I was thinking how T-Bob and I used to run from hole to hole looking for frogs that had fallen in by accident. We’d gotten into the habit of carrying golf clubs with us, sometimes pretending they were swords, sticking them in our belts and drawing them, saying en garde, and fighting. If one got bent we’d get another out of Mr. D. L.’s den, where there were dozens of expensive clubs still in boxes. We would roam those woods and hills, sending great sticky mushrooms into puffy clouds with one swing. Sometimes we would obliterate the frogs from the holes, grinning at the thwack they made when they popped. We would charge barefoot through the grass when that golf course was in its heyday, hearing the occasional crack of a .22 when some golfer shot a timber rattler sunning on a rock, or the laughter of a hole in one.

  But that morning when I was fifteen, after being lost all night, I climbed that butte and sat in the dirt and watched the sun come up, the white haze of trees in the morning fog, the ground damp from the night’s dew, a rooster crowing from somewhere, gold rimming the horizon.

  Summer ended.

  T-Bob ignored me at school and I ate at the table with the colored boys, who ignored me too. I can report almost nothing about those days. I have no memory until the September evening when my old man came home from work and said he’d heard Mr. D. L. had come back. Unlocking the padlock on the Deepfreeze, where he kept his rum, he said they were leaving that very night, for New York.

  “What about Luna?” I asked, rising from the table.

  “He’s leaving her here. Says he’ll send for her later. Just him and the boys is going.”

  My fork clattered in my plate.

  “Hey,” the old man called.

  I ran all the way over, leaping into the briars when their big Oldsmobile 98 shot past, heading the other way. At their house I ran through the tall grass and fell going up the porch steps.

  Inside, Luna wore a housecoat. She was standing in the middle of the floor with her face red from crying. She had a pistol in her hand.

  “They left me,” she said.

  “Luna,” I said, running to her and hugging her against me. I tried to kiss her, even though she smelled like whiskey and cigarettes and body odor. I took the gun out of her hand and ejected the clip and led her into the big master bathroom and while the tub filled I put her head in my lap and whispered how much I loved her. She sat up as if I wasn’t there and filled a bong with a big bud and lit it and inhaled, the green water inside gurgling. Her eyes grew dreamy and she smoked more, then let me unbutton her housecoat. Underneath, she was naked. I led her to the tub and helped her in. There was a bottle of suds on the floor that I poured in. I couldn’t find soap so I used shampoo to wash her.

  From the medicine cabinet I found a toothbrush and toothpaste. I brushed my mouth into a foamy lather, then kissed Luna on the lips, licking her teeth. I brushed them for her. Washed her hair and face. We kissed. She stood dripping and I dried her with a clean towel.

  “I love you,” I told her. “Will you marry me one day?”

  Her head moved. I told myself it was a nod. She fell asleep soon and I lay beside her, awake all night.

  In the morning I began to clean the house, which took two days. I mowed the grass and drove Luna to Grove Hill and we bought groceries on Mr. D. L.’s charge account. She didn’t say anything, just let me lead her among the aisles. She had a pipe that she kept hitting. In Wal-Mart we charged a VCR with one of Mr. D. L.’s credit cards and got a membership to a movie club in a drugstore. We rented nine movies and watched them together in the water bed.

  Weeks passed. We watched every movie in that store, we ate in bed. Sometimes people from the old days of partying came by but we didn’t let them in. The deputies came and asked me if Luna was okay.

  “She’s fine,” I said.

&nbs
p; “Can we see her?”

  “No,” I said. “She’s got the morning sickness.”

  They looked at each other. “Is she… pregnant?” they asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Who’s the father?”

  “You’re looking at him,” I said.

  The vice-principal called once, to see if anybody had heard from T-Bob or me. “No,” I said, disguising my voice. “They’re gone.”

  Lastly I heard from the old man. He called late one night to see where we kept the bacon grease.

  After that it was just Luna and me, for a good long time.

  October.

  One morning before it got too cold I packed the camping gear I’d charged at the hardware store and Luna and I started hiking the course. She didn’t want to but I lied and told her I knew where Jimmy Younger’s pot patch was. The paths were grown so that we could barely follow them, kudzu everywhere, streaming up the flags and covering the snake skins as we walked through the tall trees. Most of the course’s holes were full of dirt and water, and we kept walking, coming to a new hole every half hour or so, stopping there. We frightened a doe once and watched her bound away, through the foliage.

  “Where is it?” she asked me.

  “Not too far,” I kept saying.

  We came to the gravel pit and walked over the red clay, looking up at the butte. We camped on top of it, raising our pup tent and building a fire to heat our cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. After the sun dipped beyond the tree line we heard a coyote howling.

  The next night we camped next to one of the ponds.

  “How old you think I am?” asked Luna. It was the first thing she’d said all day.

  “It don’t matter,” I said. “Love can’t count. Love missed that day in school.”

  “You think they’ll ever come back?” she asked me.

  My heart was a fire stampeded by horses. “You want them to?”

  She didn’t answer. She said, “Did I ever tell you how I met Daniel Lester?”

  I’d never heard what Mr. D. L.’s initials stood for. I said, “No.”

  “I was working in New Orleans. Hustling. These wealthy guys who’d used me before said they had a fellow they wanted me to treat right. Said whatever he wants, no matter how weird, I’m to give it to him. I’d been with lots of men, see, but nobody ever treated me like Daniel Lester. When I first saw him I didn’t know what to think. This little bitty weird guy. These sideburns. But he was polite and gentlemanly. Took my coat. Mixed me a margarita.

  “So after we, well, you know, after, we’re watching TV and he asked me what I want out of life, and I go, ‘I want some shrimp,’ and he calls down to room service and they send up these giant shrimp cocktails. Then I say, ‘How ’bout some champagne?’ and he orders it. I see what he’s doing, so I keep asking for things, and he keeps getting them. Finally—there’s golf on TV—I look at the screen and go, ‘I always wanted to learn to play golf.’ ‘That’ll take a little time,’ he says, but by that time he was ready to go again.”

  “Do you feel pregnant?” I asked.

  Luna looked at me over her shoulder. “Do I feel what?”

  In the pond a great catfish rolled. They would come to life at night, rising to the surface and showing their white bellies to the moon. Luna turned away from me and I crawled out of the tent, my fishing rod rigged. I put calf’s liver on my treble hook and threw it into the water, sat waiting for the tug that meant breakfast. In the tent I could hear Luna crying softly.

  “I’m forty-four,” she called, “you fucking weirdo.”

  After I took Luna home I went to the barn where the tractor was and got it running and taught myself the use of Lucius’s bushhog and, wearing a cowboy hat and a .44 Magnum on my belt, began cutting the weeds that had overtaken the course. I cut for a month, dawn to dusk. When I finished the grass, I rode the tractor to Grove Hill and picked up the two hundred flags I’d ordered. The old dude behind the counter didn’t want to give them to me until I paid some on the charge account, but I said Luna would take care of it soon.

  On the corner I ran into some guys from school, guys who’d once come to Luna’s parties. They avoided me.

  I took the flags home. Got a posthole digger and spent a week fixing the decrepit holes, digging out the tiny, delicate frog bones, the water, the grass. I weeded the bunkers, the southern states. I put up the new flags and, using a hand mower with a vacuum attachment, neatly trimmed the sod around the holes. Growing wild and watering from all the rain had benefited the sod—it was flowing and beautiful like grass over a septic tank and, cut back, looked as good as any course you saw on TV. I cleaned out Jimmy’s guard shack and repainted the walls, left a small combination lock hanging on the door.

  The sun was tanning my skin dark brown; I hadn’t had a haircut or shave in months. I jogged, my legs growing muscular, my lungs expanding. I swam the catfish ponds, full of water now from the rain we’d been having. I teased the aging, ornery bull with a red towel, easily sidestepping as he lunged for me with his dull horns. I led the last living cow back to Mr. D. L.’s house and paid a black man to slaughter it, storing the meat in Mr. D. L.’s freezer. Luna and I sat on the sofa at night watching ESPN: baseball, soccer, racing, golf. She was drinking again and smoking and would throw up in the mornings as I dressed for my day’s work.

  I turned sixteen.

  I found some of Mr. D. L.’s blank checks in a drawer and forged Luna’s name on one to a man for several head of cattle. The truck driver backed his rig to the gate behind the guardhouse. We shooed the fat beef cows down the ramp and out into the fields for the old bull to mount and further our herd. The truck driver talked me into buying a horse and I wrote another check and he delivered the big paint the next day and threw in a free saddle and I taught myself to ride.

  I called the horse Big Steve. I set tees with dusty golf balls from Mr. D. L.’s den and played polo from horseback. Riding at a dead run, I would hang over his side and with a wood try to send the teed golf balls shooting away like bullets.

  I rode Big Steve to the place where colored people lived, shacks on blocks behind dead trees, dogs asleep in the dirt road, fancy cars with chrome. A thin black girl braiding her grandmother’s hair on a porch. Children gathered around Big Steve with their eyes round and their faces shiny from sweat. Their fingers touched Big Steve’s flank gingerly, with respect.

  “Any y’all know a man ain’t scared of snakes?” I asked the faces.

  “Mr. Haskew ain’t,” one said.

  “Where’s he live?”

  They pointed me to a house across the road, an old colored man with wrinkled skin rocking on his porch. He wore a suit and hat despite the heat, suspenders. A cane rested across his lap.

  I nudged Big Steve over the road and through the dirt of his yard. “Mr. Haskew?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you know Lucius, that used to work for Mr. D. L.?”

  Mr. Haskew nodded.

  “Would you like that job now? I’ll pay you five thousand dollars a year and you can pick any of those old barns for living quarters. I’ll supply you with a tractor and you’ll bushhog all day.”

  “Six,” he said.

  “Seven,” I said, and wrote him a check.

  He nodded and stood. He was taller than Lucius had been, his eyes yellow and watery.

  “Get your things,” I told him.

  He went in and a few minutes later came out carrying a cardboard suitcase and an umbrella and was followed by a girl called Inez, his daughter or stepdaughter. They walked behind Big Steve and me, Mr. Haskew leaning on his cane. When the road forked I told them to keep going toward Dickinson and I’d catch up with them. Then I galloped off toward where Jimmy Younger lived.

  I started spending nights on the butte. As the sun went down I sighted the surrounding area in my scope. I pegged a box turtle at one hundred yards as it moped across the cracked clay, saw its shell explode in a mist of red. I built a lean-to on the butte and took a g
as grill up there for cooking. It was starting to get chilly, the leaves changing color, wrinkling, drifting to the ground.

  Each day I rode out to talk with Jimmy Younger, listened to his stories of the James-Younger gang. How Jesse didn’t really get shot, that he and Bob Ford had rigged the whole thing and killed a gambler who looked like Jesse and turned that man in for burial, how Jesse lived to be a ripe old age of a hundred one, that the history books were wrong, how Jesse went straight.

  The last thing I’d tell Jimmy before I rode off was, “Don’t let anybody in. You only let people out.” Then I’d put a ten-dollar bill in his tip jar.

  He’d say, “That’s a big ten-four.”

  I’d gallop over to the barn where Inez was hanging out laundry. It wasn’t Lucius’s barn, for Mr. Haskew and Inez were afraid to stay near those spirits’ chairs. Across the Negro community had gone stories of what came to sit and rest there at night, so they stayed in a littler barn, but Inez had given it a woman’s touch: drapes, pieces of carpet she found somewhere, flowers in pots. When I stopped she had always done something new, put up a birdbath made from an old hubcap, a wreath woven from buzzard and turkey and owl feathers. Most of her teeth were missing and one of her eyes strayed. I stretched my legs in the saddle and looked proudly about the hills, the distant tree line, the soaring hawks, the dumb cows, the half-blind bull, thinking how fertile the land was. Then I’d ask Inez where Mr. Haskew was working today, and she would point.

  Tipping my hat, I’d spur Big Steve into a run and we’d soon hear the buzz of Mr. Haskew’s tractor. We’d ride out so he could see us; if he needed something he’d kill the tractor and I’d go over, but most of the time he just nodded or waved his cane.