“Come on inside,” she said, stepping back. She closed the door behind her. “Sit down and tell me about it.”
Alan did sit down, on the sofa, with his hands clasped between his knees. “I’ve been having these dreams,” he said. “I had one last night. This, I don’t know, this thing was after a man. It got into him somehow inside him, and he was in a cage or something and couldn’t get away — ” the words tumbled out.
“Alan,” Ann said, “it was just a dream.”
“He killed himself,” he muttered. “With his teeth.”
“Oh, Alan.” Her tone was faintly reproachful — It’s that theater, she thought at once; it’s that horror show — before, like two roads converging, Sheriff Quarles’s words met Alan’s in her mind.
Another killing. He killed himself. This one worse than the other one. With his teeth. In a cage.
In the damn jail.
7
Harmon Presley had just about had it with William Henry Resaca. When he was called in on Monday afternoon — Labor Day! He was supposed to be off that night! — it was just about the last straw. He came in boiling.
Fortunately, Officer Ort intercepted him. “You better take it easy, Harm. Billy’s dead. Everybody in the world is in Sam’s office.”
Presley frowned. “Dead? What the hell do you mean?”
“Killed hisself, is what I mean. I told ’em they shouldn’t of left him up there by hisself. You remember I told ’em that.” Ort shook his head. “Anyhow, Quarles wants you in his office, soon as he gets rid of Billy’s mama and daddy.” Ort leaned across his desk, away from his switchboard. “You oughta go up and see it, Harm. They’ll be takin’ him off before long.”
Partly out of a vague desire for revenge — Labor Day! His day off! — Presley got Eb Stuart to take him up. The two of them stood outside the cell. Eb looked on in stolid indifference, Presley in astonished shock. “Great God almighty,” he breathed. “How did he do it?”
“Teeth,” Eb said laconically.
Billy Resaca had eaten his arms.
At least, that’s what it looked like at first glance: both forearms, both hands, mangled, shredded, bone showing through torn flesh, three fingers missing, scattered in the slick blood on the floor. But even Harmon could see that the flesh was still there, in gobbets and chunks and shreds, littering the floor, clinging to the walls in places. He took a deep breath, exhaled it unsteadily. “Let’s go,” he said. Labor Day didn’t seem as important here.
Presley sat on the hard wooden bench outside Quarles’s office for a quarter of an hour or so before the sheriff ushered a slight, elderly black man and a stouter, gray-haired black woman out. The woman was crying; the man had his face set in stony anger. Quarles saw them to the entryway, then came back to nod Presley in.
The sheriff’s office was small, green-walled, with a desk, a bookshelf, a floor lamp, and four chairs, not counting Quarles’s swivel chair. Built into the wall behind the desk was a rifle rack, and to the right of that the single window looked out toward town, about a mile and a half to the southwest, and toward Rainey Hill beyond. A rawboned middle-aged man in a dark blue suit stood there looking out. Presley recognized him as Clay Sawyer, an assistant district attorney. Sawyer turned and nodded as Presley sat down and Quarles slipped into his swivel chair.
“What a mess.” Quarles sighed.
Sawyer shook his head in commiseration, turned from the window, and sat in one of the chairs. “Well. Let’s see what we can do about closing this case. Mr. Presley, I understand you found the woman's body.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me about it.”
Harmon Presley shifted his weight and told about Sunday morning a week ago, a bare-bones account but complete. Sawyer interrupted once: “Now, Resaca actually ran away from you, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, sir, he sure did. Like to have got away.”
“Go on.”
When Presley had finished his story, Sawyer turned to Quarles. “What else have you learned?”
Quarles leaned back in the chair. “Resaca refused to make a statement one way or the other. We talked to the neighbors. They hadn’t lived in the house long, Resaca and the woman, just since July, end of the month. Neighbors didn’t much like them. They fussed and fought a lot. That’s why they had to move from the last place they rented — landlady lived in the next house, got tired of their racket, and kicked ’em out. Anyhow, while they were livin’ in their old place, down on Moccasin, we had two calls for domestic disturbance, both from the landlady. Mollie wouldn’t swear out a warrant either time. Once it looked like she’d been beat up pretty bad before the car got there.”
Quarles straightened up, picked up a sheaf of papers, leafed through them, and resumed: “There were knives in the house that could have been the murder weapon, including a deer knife that looked like it had been recently cleaned. Mollie’s purse had a knife in it, too, a kitchen knife, a paring knife. It had traces of blood on it, AB negative. That’s Mollie’s type.”
Sawyer interrupted: “I’ve read the autopsy report. Could a paring knife have done all that?”
Quarles tossed the papers onto his desk. “I don’t know. Maybe it was used for part of the damage, another knife for the rest.”
“How about the blood? There wasn’t enough, the doc says.”
The sheriff shook his head. “Can’t explain that, either. Doc thinks she may have been killed somewhere else, then dumped there.”
“And the killer put the knife in her own purse?”
“I just don’t know,” Quarles repeated.
Sawyer got up, went back to the window. With his back to them, he said, “This is what we’ve got. Mollie Avery lived with William Resaca for upward of four years. Resaca’s got a criminal record of petty theft and public drunkenness. We know he used to beat her. She was found dead thirty yards or so from the house they shared. When Deputy Presley went to the house to investigate, Resaca climbed out a window, made a break for it, and resisted arrest. Resaca refused to make a statement. Now he’s taken his own life.”
The lawyer turned, silhouetted against the venetian blinds. “Sheriff, what would you say?”
Quarles took a deep breath. “Close the case.”
After a moment, Sawyer nodded. “I agree.”
“Me, too,” Presley said. The other two men looked at him in frank surprise, as if they had totally forgotten his presence.
8
The night before school started, Johnny Williams dreamed of his little dog, Tuxedo.
In the dream, the dog, though mangled and buried, was not dead. Beneath the suffocating mud of Cherokee Creek bottom, in his cardboard box, he whimpered and stirred and started to dig.
It seemed to take him an eternity to break through the wet cardboard, to claw desperately upward through clinging red clay, to burst free at last into the night air.
And then, in Johnny’s dream, Tuxedo came home. He trotted up the porch steps, sat looking up at the door, decided it was too late. He went around behind the house, found a cellar window tilted out, and got in that way. He trotted up the cellar steps, tail wagging, nails tick-ticking on the wood.
Johnny moaned in his sleep.
Tuxedo came all the way up, nosed the door open, and was in the kitchen. His dish was not in its accustomed spot on the linoleum. The dog headed up to Johnny’s room.
Tuxedo pushed at the bedroom door. The lock didn’t work anymore, and the doorknob was a little loose. Tuxedo had learned that if he butted the door patiently enough, it would swing open after a while.
The door opened. Tuxedo came to the bed, reared on his hind legs, and put his front paws on the sheet — his muddy paws.
Johnny woke up staring at the ceiling, sweating. He was crying, because he knew it was only a dream. Dawn lightened the window, and he could dimly see.
A foul odor, a dead odor, washed over him.
He turned his head on the pillow.
Tuxedo stared blindly at him,
through eye sockets filled with writhing white maggots.
When Mr. and Mrs. Williams came in, Johnny had tumbled off the bed, had crouched in the corner, and was screaming helplessly. They tried to soothe him, tried to reason with him. They showed him that there was no trace of muddy paw prints on the floor, on the sheet. They told him it was only a dream.
But Johnny Williams was too shaken, that day, to go to school.
Seven
1
Friday evening John Kirby observed, “It might pay me to keep the shop open nights, now that the theater’s opened.”
Alan looked up. He was more than a hundred words into his “What I Did During Summer Vacation” paper, and he sprawled in the floor of the living room, under the warm glow of the table lamp. His father sat on the sofa, nearly hidden behind the Atlanta evening newspaper. FOUR NABBED, FREED BY ARKANSAS GUARD the title of one story read. Alan asked, “Wouldn’t you have to hire somebody?”
His dad folded the paper and looked down, the lamplight reflecting off his glasses and making them momentarily opaque. “I don’t know. I could probably start by staying open Fridays and Saturdays until, oh, maybe nine. If I had enough customers, Julie Finchley would be glad of the overtime.” Julie, a fat, dowdy woman of thirty-five, came in to clerk in the store after Thanksgiving every year and stayed through New Year’s. She also ran the place during John’s rare fishing days and vacations. Alan did not much care for Julie Finchley — she had a habit of pinching his cheeks hard enough to bring water to his eyes.
His father tossed a section of the paper to him. “Comics if you want to read them.”
“Thanks.” He chewed the eraser of his pencil and turned back to his composition. Miss Viola Ulrich had not yet grabbed him by the shoulders and shaken him, though Reese Donalds had fallen victim to her early on. Reese, back in the eighth grade for his second go-round, had come in ten minutes late on Wednesday morning. Miss Ulrich had called him to the front of the room, had asked him what he meant coming to school at that time of day, and with no further ceremony had grasped his bony shoulders and literally rattled his teeth. Reese, upon her letting go, staggered back to his seat. He was on time on Thursday and again on Friday.
“Daddy, what did I do this summer?” he asked.
John Kirby laughed. “When are you going to learn, son? Every year you have to write that composition. One summer you’ll just have to do something adventurous, that’s all.”
“Won’t have to write it next year. Be in high school.”
“So you will.”
Alan rolled over on his back. His father, the lamplight making the left side of his face sharp and clear, the right side shadowed, smiled at him. “What’s wrong?” Alan asked.
Kirby shook his head. “Nothing, son.”
“You’re lookin’ at me kind of funny.”
“I was thinking about growing up. Growing old.”
“You’re not old.”
“No.”
“Well, you’re not.”
“I said no. Don’t push it too much.”
Alan puffed out his cheeks. “When do the Bulldogs start?”
“They play the Longhorns in a couple of weeks. The twenty-first, I think.”
“First day of fall.”
“That’s right. Years go faster and faster.”
“Daddy.”
“What?”
Alan got up and sat on the sofa beside his father. “Why didn’t you finish college?”
“You know why. The war came along.”
“No, I mean after.”
Kirby folded the paper. Like Alan, he was obsessively neat about some things. Alan, coming across a newspaper in the house, could never tell whether his father had read it or not. “That’s hard to say. I had married your mother by then, and you had come along. Takes money to raise a boy.”
“But you could’ve gone on the GI Bill.”
“Maybe I could have. Maybe.”
“So why didn’t you go back?”
For a long time Kirby was silent. At last he said, “I think it was because college didn’t seem to mean anything to me after the war, after all the things I had seen. It took a long time to get used to some of them. After that, well, I was working for your grandfather and gradually buying him out, and it just seemed too late.”
“What did you see? In the war?”
“Lots of things.”
“But you never talk about it.”
“There’s a reason.”
Alan was stubbornly silent for a long time. “I’m big enough,” he said at last.
His father brushed a hand back through his thinning, graying auburn hair. “Maybe you are at that,” he said. He looked at the floor, his spectacles in profile concealing his eye from Alan. “Let me tell you a little. Then maybe you can understand.”
He was silent for so long that Alan believed he had had second thoughts, but finally he started to speak: “By the spring of forty-five I was a sergeant. I was in the signal corps, technically, but I had been assigned to an infantry outfit. It was toward the end of April that we came to a place called Dachau.”
His father compressed his lips. “I remember the stench. You could smell the place before you could see it. A gray day, still cold, and on the air that smell. Like a farmyard, and something else. An evil smell.
“It was the concentration camp, you see. A kind of prison compound. Our men had already liberated the camp when I got there. It was a big place, but too small for the number of prisoners. Thirty thousand of them, we found out later, crowded into thirty barracks.” He shook his head. “The camp was surrounded by a strip of grass, then a concrete ditch, then a fence. I remember there was water in the ditch, not more than ankle-deep. There was a crowd behind the fence, at the edge of the ditch, and down in the ditch, barefoot, a bald man in a prisoner’s uniform was wading. Just going back and forth, back and forth.
“There was only one entrance. You went through this archway, and to your left were the barracks, and to your right were the camp buildings, the kitchen, the laundry. The shower rooms. And the prisoners, all looking a hundred years old, all of them shaved bald, even the women, all of them like skeletons, they would walk up and touch you. Not say anything, not — not embrace you, or — they’d touch your sleeve, or your face. And they looked so bad, so emaciated, that you cringed inside from them. You didn’t mean to, you didn’t want to, but it was hard to let them touch like that....”
“Daddy — ”
“Something like thirty thousand people died there, son. Six thousand prisoners of war were taken out to the Schiessplatz, the rifle range, and killed. There was a crematorium outside the camp, where they burned the bodies. Brick ovens, with arched doorways, like bakers’ ovens I had seen in France.
“Well. I was assigned to a detail to administer the camp, and later to gather evidence for a trial the Allies had. We found that they had built a gas chamber, had it all ready to use. They took prisoners, you see, to another place, a place called Hartheim, and there they executed them. But they never used the Dachau chamber, as far as we could tell. It was disguised as a shower room, so the prisoners wouldn’t know what was going to happen.
“But we learned other things. There was an experimental medical station in the infirmary, in Block Five. The Nazi doctors performed experiments there on living human beings. I gathered some of the documentation, some of the photographs.”
Again his father fell silent. After a long interval, very slowly, he said, “We excavated a mass grave at one of the camps surrounding Dachau. The bodies hadn’t been there long. There were more than seven thousand.” He turned to look into Alan’s eyes. “I’d seen death before, son, but not like that, not in that quantity. I don’t know what happened to me. Until I was discharged in forty-six, it was like I was in a daze. As if I had looked into the future and seen every human being dead, their bodies all tumbled into a ditch big as the Grand Canyon, filling it full. As if I could see their dead eyes saying, ‘This is what it comes to
in the end, friend. And we don’t even care anymore.’” He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “I had filled up on death. It took me a long time after I got home to see life again, to care again. College, well, college seemed irrelevant to me.” He laughed, just once. “Listen to me. I’m talkin’ like a Philadelphia lawyer. Well. You asked.”
Alan waited until his father was silent. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”
John Kirby put an arm around Alan’s shoulder. “You brought me out of it, son. You and your mother. Over there all I could see was the evil, the death. You and your mother showed me the goodness, showed me life. And at first you were like two little candles in the dark, and when I left home, it was as if I were going out into black night, and, God, how I wanted to come back in and warm my hands and light my eyes. But it got better. When your mother left us — when she died — I saw it differently then. And I could go on. I don’t know what I would have done if she had died while I was overseas. I guess I’d be dead now, too.”
“Daddy — ”
“What, son?”
The words, so long unspoken, stuck in Alan’s throat. “Aw, you know.”
“I know, son. I love you, too.”
2
Jimmy Jenkins chewed his cigarette and glared at Tom Davies. “Tell me why. That’s all I’m asking you,” the red-faced editor of the Advocate said.
The photographer shook his head. “I’m moving, that’s why. I’m done here. I’m not gonna take any more pictures, I’m not gonna write any more stories. That’s it. That’s all. Give me my check.”
The editor’s fat jowls quivered in indignation. “Who in the hell am I gonna get to take pictures? I need somebody out at the dedication of the new Legion building in two hours. I need — ”
“The camera’s on my desk. Take the pictures yourself.”
Jenkins scowled, scratched his gray hair just above his left ear. “Shit. Look, is it the money? You know I pay you what I can. Next year when we go daily — ”
“It’s not the money.”
“ — maybe I can talk to you then about a real raise, but maybe in the meantime I could give you another five a week.”
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