“She’s gonna be all right,” his father told him, but he had the same look on his face he got on those days when the wind was high and the clouds above their farm were black and mean and boiling and ready to send whirling devils down to tear their place asunder. “You just sit quiet now. We’ll bring her to the Doc’s. He’ll fix her up.”
“Think he’ll be able to save her?”
Instead of responding, the old man reached out a withered hand and jabbed at the radio. Low twangy music and his father’s long low sigh infiltrated the silence. A moment later, the sickly sweet aroma of burning tobacco filled the cab as his father touched a flame to the tip of a crumpled hand-rolled cigarette. It was a smell that comforted Pete, a familiar scent that always seemed to drift through his skull and stroke some sense into the wild dog of his thoughts. He smiled slightly and went back to looking out the window.
He didn’t care if the wounded girl wasn’t pretty under all that blood and other stuff. He wasn’t much to look at either and didn’t think it fair to judge others by standards he didn’t meet himself. And he’d had a bad heart since birth, which he figured maybe explained why he was always so quick to hope that whatever wounded bird he encountered would view him as her savior and love him accordingly. Repairing his flawed heart was not a job he would ever be able to do on his own, which, in a town like Elkwood—comprised mostly of hard-faced, hardworking men—meant his chances of dying young were better than average.
He wasn’t afraid to die.
He was afraid to die alone.
At one time, Valerie Vaughn down at the grocery store had been the object of his fixation. She’d always been kind to him, and for a time, he might have loved her, until he summoned up the courage to confess as much and she’d folded in on herself like a deckchair with a bad leg, told him that was “nice” then went to great lengths to avoid ever having to talk to him again.
There were others, of course, all highly unlikely to ever give him the time of day, or stay around Elkwood long enough to see him as anything other than a not-so-bright farm boy with aspirations that didn’t stretch farther than the town’s borders.
Valerie had left, bound for Birmingham.
After that he’d quickly grown tired and discouraged by the amount of polite refusals or horrified rejections, the gleeful mockery and cruel teasing, and instead had taken his father’s advice and focused on work at the farm.
And now they’d found an outsider—hurt, lost, and in desperate need of help. Help he could give her if she let him.
A nervous flutter in his stomach reminded him that all he was doing was setting himself up for more disappointment, more heartbreak, more blows to his fragile heart. She’s a stranger. She’s prob’ly got a guy in some big city somewheres. She’s prob’ly hitched. You’re bein’ a damn fool.
As always, however, hope gave him the strength to ignore those warnings, and whatever reason or sense might have inveigled its way into them.
He smiled.
This one would stay.
He could feel it.
-3-
Luke knew there were three kinds of silence. There was the ordinary kind—when there was no one around to make a sound, like when he wandered down to the junkyard a half-mile from his home, where they flattened and crumpled up the cars they decided they had no use for, after flattening and crumpling up their owners. That was where he went for peace and quiet, to gather his thoughts, sometimes to pray.
Then there was the kind of silence you heard when it only looked like you were alone, when someone was watching you, hidden and holding their breath. That silence was different, heavier because it was unnatural, forced. And it never lasted long. Luke had long ago learned that no matter how clever, or scared they were, people were not good at staying quiet, even if it meant the difference between life and death. He had no idea how many of their victims might have gotten away, even for a little while, if they’d just held their breath a moment longer, or choked back a whimper or a sob, or watched where they were going.
The third kind of silence was when you were surrounded by people, all of them staring without seeming to breathe, none of them moving or saying a word because what they had to say was written in their eyes, and that message was not good. This was the worst kind of silence, the most dangerous kind.
This was the one Luke found himself faced with when he finally made it home.
A light rain had started as he’d crested the hill and started down the slope toward the house, as if God himself had chosen a side, and it wasn’t Luke’s. From his elevated position, he’d been able to see that the rain had not discouraged his brothers. Joshua, Isaac and Aaron were standing in a ragged semicircle in front of the house, facing him. Matt was a dark bundle lying in the mud before them, and there was no doubt that he was dead. He was on his back, shirt soaked with blood, eyes glassy and open, staring unblinkingly up at the rain coming down. Luke stopped a few feet away from him. “When?” he asked, as though it mattered. He was speaking merely to break the silence, which had already begun to coil like morning mist around him.
“Soon’s you was gone,” Aaron told him eventually, a hard edge to his voice. No grief at all, but plenty of swallowed pain. “Where’s the girl at?”
Luke shook his head, unable to meet his brother’s eyes. He did not want to see in them the disgust, the fear, and the relief that Aaron was not likely to suffer the same degree of punishment for letting the girl escape as he would. He almost expected his brothers to ask how she’d evaded him and where he thought she might have gone, but of course they didn’t. It didn’t matter now. Very soon they would have to uproot themselves and find someplace else to settle down, a task that, despite Momma-In-Bed’s insistence that they not tie themselves to anything or indulge in luxuries they couldn’t move at a moment’s notice, would not be easy. It would mean a lot of hard work done quickly, all the time looking over their shoulders and listening for the sound of sirens. It would mean a new kind of silence for their family: an absolute absence of sound that might at any moment be broken by the enemy, by the Men of the World, as Papa called them, threatening the only world they knew.
“Momma-In-Bed wants to see you,” Aaron said. “Tole me to tell you soon’s you got back. ‘Straight away,’ she said. ‘Don’t even stop to make water. I want ’im in my room, soon as you see his face,’ she said.”
Luke finally looked up, and his younger brother’s long narrow ashen face, made longer by the close cut of his dark hair, was grim. He couldn’t tell if Aaron was getting any satisfaction from being the bearer of such a message, nor did he thank him for it, for they were not given to gratitude. Acknowledging it only risked opening themselves up to empathy for their victims, who were so often uncannily good at trying to evoke it from them.
“I’ll go see her then,” Luke answered, and took one last look at Matt, lying there looking perfectly at ease with his death, the picture of calm marred only by the small rusty-red puddles forming in the mud around his body, the deep dark puncture wound in his chest, and the scarlet rivulets meandering their way toward where Luke stood watching. “You boys go start the fire.”
The twelve-year-old twins—Joshua, who could speak just fine but seldom did, and Isaac, who’d had his tongue cut out when he was nine years old for cussing at Papa-In-Grey—both nodded dutifully and hurried off toward the barn where they kept the stacks of old wood, a fragment of which the girl had used to end their brother’s life. In the rain, they were going to need kerosene to get the fire to catch, so Luke mumbled instructions to this effect to Aaron and watched his brother lumber off, shoulders hunched, toward the small ramshackle shed with walls of badly rusted corrugated iron where they’d hung and skinned one of the girl’s friends.
Then, with a shuddering sigh, he knelt briefly in a puddle of Matt’s blood, and said a short prayer, intended not solely for the dear departed, but for himself too. He asked for forgiveness, and courage, but didn’t wait to find out if either had been bestowed on him. Someho
w he doubted it. Far too much had gone wrong for him to expect any mercy from God or anyone else.
Luke rose up and started up the steps into the house.
* * *
After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, Doc Wellman finally emerged from the bedroom he had once shared with his wife until her death in ’92. Nowadays he slept on a tattered sofa in his living room, and always with the TV on and the volume turned low. He couldn’t sleep without it. It was all he had for company. That, and the few patients willing to travel thirty miles outside of town to see him. He had witnessed much in his lifetime, not the least of which was the slow and painful decay of his wife in those endlessly long weeks before the cancer finally took her, but it was clear from the deathly pallor on his face as he stood before the old black man and his boy, that he had never seen anything quite like this.
Driven by equal parts excitement and impatience, Pete stood first, leaving his father sitting alone on the small wicker bench in the hall. “She alive?” the boy asked, searching but not finding the answer in the aged doctor’s expression.
Wellman was so thin his limbs were like broom handles snapped over someone’s knee, his chest a deflated accordion topped by a long face writhing with wrinkles in which small blue eyes, magnified by a pair of rimless spectacles, shone with surprising alertness. Those eyes looked troubled now as they found the boy’s face. Pete had expected to be ignored, that whatever the doctor said would be directed toward his father, and so was pleasantly surprised to find the doctor addressing him directly. “Yes,” he said in a quiet voice. “She is, but barely.”
“Will she make it?” Pete persisted.
“I think so, though she’s lost quite a bit of blood.”
The boy let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Who did this to her?” Wellman asked, frowning. “I can’t imagine anyone…” He trailed off, and put a hand to his mouth as if censoring a line of thought that would yield answers he preferred not to hear.
“Animals,” Pete’s father said again, as if he’d been programmed to give that response whenever the question was put to him.
The doctor dropped his gaze from the boy to his father. “Not unless we got animals in this state can work a knife, Jack.”
Pete looked to his father to see how this news had affected him. It hadn’t, or if it did, he was doing a fine job of hiding the fact. In the dull gray light through the windows in the hall, all he saw on the old man’s face were shadows.
“No,” Wellman said, “Wasn’t animals did this. Poor girl’s been cut up something terrible. Beaten too. She’s got a concussion, multiple fractures, and a couple of busted ribs. Whoever took a blade to her used it to take out one of her eyes and lop off a few of her fingers and toes. If it was an animal, the wounds would be ragged, Jack. No.” He sounded as if he didn’t believe it was possible or didn’t want to believe it, but knew there was no other explanation. “Someone real angry wanted her to die, and die slow.” He shook his head and touched a pair of trembling fingers to the small silver crucifix that hung around his neck. Then he sighed and stepped away from the boy. “Either one of you called the Sheriff?”
Pete shook his head. “I guess we wanted to get her here ’fore it was too late.”
“Well that was the right thing to do, but we’d best give Hal a call now. Need to tell him he’s got some kind of lunatic out there running around chopping up women.” He started to move down the hall, but Jack stood and put a hand on his arm. Wellman looked at it like it was a strange species of exotic spider that had just dropped from the ceiling.
With a pained expression on his face, Pete’s father leaned in close to the doctor and said in a low voice, “You can’t. Not ’less you want more people in that room of yours tonight.”
Puzzled, Wellman slowly withdrew his arm from the man’s grip. “You know something I don’t?”
Jack licked his lips and nodded slowly. “I do, but might be better if you didn’t hear it.” His gaze, which Pete was shocked to see was one of fear, dropped to the floor. “Now if you’re sayin’ that girl’s gonna make it, I reckon me and Pete’s done about all we can and we’ll just head on home and leave her to you.”
Wellman studied Jack’s face. “What’s going on?”
“Leave it, Doc. Please. It’s the best thing to do.”
“The hell it is, Jack. Someone’s gonna be missing that girl and I don’t know where to start. That’s Sheriff’s work right there, and how’s he gonna help if he don’t know about it?” He glanced at Pete and a funny look passed over his face. “You boys didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?”
Pete felt as if he’d been punched. “Hell no, Doc. We found her just like that, honest we did. She was on the road, throwin’ up blood. I reckon if we hadn’t come along she’d be roadkill right now, or cooked in the sun. Me and Dad loaded her up and came right here, ain’t that right?”
“That’s right,” Jack said, his gaze still directed at the floor as if something down there was of fierce interest to him. “This wasn’t our doin’.”
“But you know whose doing it was?”
Jack said nothing for a moment, then raised his head and looked hard at his son. “Go on out to the truck.”
“But I want—”
“Now.”
Pete knew it would be unwise to argue. He’d been on the receiving end of the back of his father’s hand for less. But before he obeyed, he asked Wellman, “Can I come back’n see her?”
“If it’s all right with your Pa.”
“We’ll see,” Jack said, which Pete knew was as good as a “no”, and stepped aside to indicate the boy needed to get moving.
“Thanks for patchin’ her up,” Pete said to the doctor.
The old man nodded. “Wouldn’t have been a whole lot I could’ve done if you boys hadn’t picked her up. You saved her life, I reckon.”
“Will you tell her we was the ones brought her in?”
“Sure, son.”
Reluctantly, the boy did as he was told, passing between the men and through an invisible cloud of their intermingled scents: sweat, tobacco, and disinfectant. Once clear of them, however, he took his time making his way to the door, pretending to admire the sparsely furnished interior of the doctor’s house, hoping to hear just what it was his father knew, but they said nothing, obviously aware he was still within earshot. Aggravated by questions unanswered, he opened the front door and stepped out into the rain.
* * *
“You know I’ve got to report this, Jack.”
“I know.”
“Then you’d best give me a hell of a good reason why I shouldn’t or that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”
Jack was afraid. Good sense had abandoned him over the past few hours and all because he’d had the boy in the truck with him. If he’d just left Pete at home, he could have done what reason and common goddamn sense had suggested and just kept driving when he saw the girl in the road. Sure, the guilt would have weighed heavily on him later, but that was what whiskey was for, and it wouldn’t be the first round of it he’d had to deal with. After sixty-one years of hard living, he’d gotten pretty good at sweeping things under the rug and stomping them down until they were easier to walk over than study. But he knew the boy wouldn’t have let it go. He was too simple, too unaware that there was a great big gray area between right and wrong, especially when it meant putting yourself in harm’s way. He had not yet been educated on the kind of monsters who preyed on Samaritans.
Jack had spotted the girl before Pete, but had kept his mouth shut, even tried to distract the boy so he might miss it, told him it looked like a storm if those thunderheads coming over the hills to the left of them were anything to go by. He should have known the boy would catch on. He rarely said two words to his son unless he had to— in all his years he’d never truly learned how—and certainly wasn’t given to idle banter, so instead of looking out his window at the clouds, and away from the girl, Pete
frowned and looked at his father instead. And from there, his eyes had drifted to the crumpled form at the side of the road. Even so, even when Pete had grabbed Jack’s arm hard and pointed at the girl, he’d considered just stepping on the gas and telling the boy what he was telling the doctor now.
“It’s just…trouble, Doc.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Jack searched for a way to say what he wanted without saying too much, but his mind was a jumble of unfinished thoughts and burgeoning panic. It needed numbing. He ran a hand through his hair and looked beseechingly at Wellman. “You got somethin’ to drink?”
The doctor nodded. “Come on into the kitchen.”
-4-
In the strained light of the ageing day, Pete inspected the rust-colored stains on his fingers, then held them out to the rain. It was strange to have her blood on his skin, something she would not have shared with him had the choice been hers. A secret she was not yet aware he’d been let in on, a part of her she might not yet know was missing. When they were wet enough, he withdrew his hands and rubbed them together, then wiped them on his jeans. It made him feel a little sad, almost disrespectful, as if her blood was of little consequence to him, like dirt he was anxious to be rid of. Nothing could be further from the truth. As he lingered before Doctor Wellman’s door, still hoping to overhear something of the discussion inside, but thus far unable to make out much over the grumbling of distant thunder and the hiss of the rain, he wished he were inside. Not with the men and their whispering, but in the girl’s room, if only so she would have someone there when she woke up. He hated the thought of her being alone, as she had been alone when they’d come upon her, as she must have felt when her attacker had done those horrible things to her. Alone, helpless, lost. It made his heart hurt to think of her that way.
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