by CS DeWildt
“Won’t he buy you out?”
“That ain’t his way. Mama worked for the Skaggs, did every odd job over at their place you can imagine to get the money to set it up. Hell, she’s more responsible for the pharmacy being there than Daddy. Was Mr. Skaggs got her to set it up so she had her half. I remember the fight over it. Mama always did what Daddy said, but she stood firm on that one and Daddy finally gave in.”
“Paul Skaggs set it up? Nice of him.”
“Shit. You know he didn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart. Rich people always got themselves figured into every kind act.”
“What’s Skaggs’ angle?”
Helen shook her head. “I can’t tell.” She thought on her words for a moment and added, “I rightly don’t know.”
“And your mama left her share to you. Skaggs set that up too?”
“You know any other lawyers round here?” She dropped the piece of fish and pushed the plate forward. “Uh, I can’t eat. Thought it might calm me some, but I’m just sick.”
Neil watched her reach into her purse for her cigarettes and again he saw her in the same booth with Hoon and the admirer. Neil remembered how she crushed out that final cigarette and scooted out with Hoon behind her, how their friend still sat shredding the napkins, staring for a long while into the empty space left by Helen.
“I need to ask you something, Helen. And I don’t want you to take it wrong. Do you think your Daddy might have killed Hoon?”
“Ain’t no ‘might’ about it.” She laughed and instantly there was nothing of the screaming girl from the pharmacy. Neil saw that emotions were fleeting with this one. She was a girl of purpose. Helen took a long, hard pull from her cigarette and leaned into Neil, exhaling hard. “He plays the community pillar pretty good, but you know him like I do, he’s capable. He’s mean, spiteful. And he never liked my running around with Hoon. Didn’t like that I met him at Eddie’s, hell, didn’t like me dancing at Eddie’s anyway, and to put my chips in with one of them that come to see? No, Daddy didn’t like Hoon a bit.”
“I didn’t know you danced over there.”
“Well I never seen you there neither.” She winked. “But it paid. Then Hoon had me quit. He’s sweet, but jealous too. Like most boys I guess. He got Heidi Skaggs to give me some work.”
“What kind of work?”
She took a drink from her coke. “This and that.”
A detective’s hunch: “Helping with the pills?”
Helen shrugged.
“Your daddy told me that you and Hoon came into the pharmacy the night Hoon died. Helped yourself to the supply of Oxys. True?”
“He had to tell you somethin’. He probably did it to himself. Or maybe got one of Paul Skaggs’ guys to do it. But no. It ain’t true. He’s worried about his money. That’s all. Didn’t want Hoon to get a cent of it, not that he would.”
“But if it’s really about the money, why didn’t he kill you?”
She laughed. “I’m his daughter, Mr. Chambers. His only girl.”
“Seems to be the one thing he’s not capable of,” Neil said.
“Seems to be,” she said blowing smoke into the air above them. Neil gazed in on her smooth neck, got lost in it like some submissive offering. And he thought about the power they wielded, every beautiful girl, how they could convince a slave he was master.
“So can you help me, Mr. Chambers?”
“What do you need?”
“Need you to figure out who suicided my boyfriend. I got lots of money.”
Neil straightened up in his seat. He was seeing clearly and didn’t like it. “And if I find it’s your daddy that did it?”
“All the better,” Helen said. “I’d be tickled to death.”
CHAPTER TEN
Neil and his daddy kept up the old habit of walking the banks of the Green River nearly every day, looking for muskrats and squirrels, but it was no longer for the sake of the place, it was almost spite that kept Lester in the woods, and Neil with him, following the tiny tracks in the mud and letting Jessup the broken mutt flush them out of whatever patch of brush or cane they were hiding in, back to the river where Lester would pop off shots with the .22 until the water had sprung a red leak.
“Vermin,” Lester would say. “They’d kill you if they had the sense. Don’t feel nothin’ for them.”
Neil would nod and say “yes, Daddy” but it wasn’t in his heart, and when they got back to the house Neil would sit in the garage with Jessup and pick the ticks from the dog’s ears and neck and legs, crushing each of the flattened suckers and trying to be the killer he wanted to be, while at the same time feeling a spiritual prod, the need to offer up the ticks in sacrificial tribute to the animals his daddy had killed. He lit a small fire in a coffee can and dropped the ticks into the flame one after the other. They popped like corn kernels as their insides boiled to steam heat that cracked their hard, shining skeletons.
Some days Daddy would leave him behind. Lester never said anything those days, just walked out the front door with the .22, leaving Neil to whatever he was doing, TV or the radio or a book. Neil got curious enough to follow him once, stayed way behind, keeping the man in his sights while he skirted the edge of the woods. He followed his daddy with soft steps, preserving every twig. But his daddy made enough noise that such care probably wasn’t necessary. When they reached the bank, Neil hung back then picked up the trail of footprints from the size-twelve boots. He walked and listened to the river, something he usually didn’t hear or even notice under the Old Testament thunder of his daddy’s speeches on the world: what was wrong with Catholics, with faggots, with the general trash of the world. Neil heard these words and tried to set them aside as he watched the namesake water of the Green flow, hopping over narrow tributaries and washes that ran down the limestone hillside. He listened to the whippoorwills call in their ranks as the sun hid, tired and pink beyond the rising hills above the opposite bank.
His daddy led him farther than they went on their murderous jaunts, and he was silent save for the crashing feet, reflective or perhaps finally at ease with no audience. Neil could only speculate on the particulars, and though the boy found himself able to take in the natural world he usually missed, his daddy was still there, the gestalt of the man’s being rising up like ominous waves beyond the still waters.
Neil rounded a bend in the river and stood still. He’d entered a small glade where the wood had been shaved back, the old growth cleared, but beginning to replace itself with the stubble of succession. Neil looked over the settlement known as Rogue’s Harbor, long since abandoned and now considered haunted by the old timers and children. Clapboards sat upon stilts for times of high water, logs lay around rock lined fire pits, relics of the colony that had been there years before, before his daddy even, but there he was among the rocks and logs and homes, his daddy, sitting with his back to Neil, hunched over, sobbing, the .22 resting half on the log seat, half in the man’s hand. Neil took a step back into the cover of a stand of young paw paws. He watched his daddy sob and mutter through choking tears, uttering words in tongues that meant nothing to Neil, sadness with no context. Neil wondered if it was for his mother, ‘the whore.’ His daddy spoke of her only in anger when he did and never gave indication that he held anything but festering hate for the woman. Neil knew her now only from Lester’s rambles through the brush, she was the subject alongside the faggots and the fiery racial cleansings that dripped from the man’s mouth like saliva. And Neil tried to fight the fire that approached, burning hands in the fire, salvaging his own memories before they became his father’s truth.
Neil listened as the sobs tapered to silence. He and his daddy listened to the same sounds upon the water, the croaks of leopard frogs and the rustle of leaves and assorted detritus as the wood roaches emerged all around them under cover of dusk. Then his daddy lifted the rifle and put the barrel to his forehead, arms stretched before him with his thumbs hooked on the trigger. Neil choked on a gasp and backed away
, stumbled back through the paw paws and snapped sticks with heavy feet as he ran back the way he’d come, ran scared of whatever it was that haunted his daddy; it was so real in the clearing and now it followed.
Neil ran hard, possessed, feeling it on his heels as he ran up the rocky wash, twisting an ankle among the clattering stones, but pressing on, feeling it holding him back, growing bolder, the tether that bound him stretched to its limit.
Then Neil spilled from the tree line like a wet infant expelled from a hot womb, not into the light of the world, but into a new kind of darkness. Neil went sprawling into the empty road covered in a mix of sweat, bug bites, and the catlike scratches of the thick briar. His ankle throbbed as he limped back home to the garage. He pulled Jessup in from the back yard and sat with the mutt, rubbing its coat and searching for ticks, praying for one he had missed, a swollen form to swell and explode in the fire, pleasing himself if not the gods.
Lester returned not long after and stood in the doorway, looking into the garage from the cluttered kitchen, just watching Neil and Jessup. Neil looked back at him, waited for him to speak, wanting to clutch him and beg him to stay, but to do that was to admit he had followed, that he had disobeyed, that he knew. And Neil was afraid that would kill the man quicker than any bullet, so he remained silent, went back to Jessup’s coat for the ticks he knew were not there, an idle ritual of denial. His daddy finally went back inside, shut himself away from Neil, dead quiet but for the sound of the gun coming apart for cleaning.
One month later his, father went out the front door again and took a breath that raised Neil’s head. He looked at his daddy.
“You stay here,” he said. “You understand, Neil?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes sir.”
His daddy nodded and shut the door. Neil did not follow him and it was the last time he saw the man alive.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jaded wife, suspicious husband, incredulous insurance company, he’d developed a taste for it the night Neil and his Dad spent parked in front of mama’s place. Maybe less of a taste and more a compulsion, the same invisible push that made him follow the man into the woods. Neil had found his place behind people, felt at home there, watching their steps, making no attempt to protect them from themselves.
Statistics say that when somebody tells you they love you, that person instantly becomes more likely to kill you than anyone else. Neil was certain the words were spoken between Helen and Hoon, so he made the girl part of the investigation, see what she was really up to and if her story held. She was staying at the motel way out on Barren County Road.
Place looked closed and that’s the way the owners liked it, not many straights coming through, no tourists to the caves or Dinosaur World or seasonal truffle hunters. No, the motel was reserved for the morally bent. The locals who didn’t belong stayed away.
Neil sat in the dark lot, head hung low, resting it on the car door. Each breath was a mix of cool country air and glue fumes. The bottle slipped from Neil’s hand and fell to the cement in the red glow of the flashing “no vacancy” sign. He shifted upright, but made no move to retrieve the brown bottle.
Neil watched men enter rooms for twenty minutes at a time; a woman was swapped out for another every hour or so, sometimes traded out for girls not more than eleven or twelve, boys too. Two times since he’d arrived, bags and suitcases followed small groups of men inside for a simple swap.
Neil watched room eighteen. Helen had gone in alone and there she stayed. The bulb outside her door was busted out, jagged glass like shark teeth. Through the muslin curtain he saw the blue flicker of TV. No one came close to room eighteen until near midnight when a fat pizza delivery man tapped on the door. The door opened but Neil couldn’t see her behind the big man. He caught a glimpse of her hair as she turned away and the pizza man began to thrust his wilted pecker back and forth behind her back. He stopped and tipped his hat to her tip. He left smiling and Neil breathed deep the glue fumes, watched him with a familiar anger.
Around one o’clock, management finally noticed the occupied Cutlass sitting in the parking lot. Three men, not small, came out of a large suite adjacent to the front desk.
“What do you want?” the guy in front said. He was bald, not prematurely, but shaved, with an intentional comb over, and against all logic the look added to his menace, as if he knew how ridiculous it looked, the wispy locks dangling above the scalp like bait on the line. Instead of a hook he probably carried a piece, or a blade, or both. Neil felt for the weight of his .45 inside his shoulder holster.
“Got any rooms?” He said smiling.
“You read?” number three said, thumbing to the flashing neon. His size was more bulk, like his only, though effective, strategy would be to crush you under his girth.
“Oh, my mistake. You all think you’ll have some rooms tomorrow?”
“We’re booked,” Comb Over said.
“How about the next night? See I’m town on business and I’ve heard so many things about your place—”
“Dickhead,” Comb Over said, “beat it before you wish you had.”
The two flanks pulled out a pair of metal batons, whipped them to length with a snap. Neil snatched his piece and had it cocked and out the window before the men could take a second step.
“What you gonna do with that, honey?” Comb Over said.
“Leave,” Neil answered. He turned the key and brought his ride to life. The Cutlass began to idle, stopped short.
Neil looked Comb Over in the face. “How about where I could get a bite to eat this time of night?”
“That’s it fuck face!” He lunged for Neil’s piece, nearly got it. Neil pealed out, cut a hard left and forced the men back. Batons struck the back of the car as the three gave futile chase. Neil watched them in the rearview as they shrank to the nothings they were. He pulled into traffic, nearly got t-boned. He uncapped a fresh bottle and took a deep sniff.
***
Neil watched the pizza guy in front of the dark restaurant, next to his truck, talking to a couple of young girls in similar but cleaner, more form-fitting versions of his own polo and khakis. They all turned toward Neil as he pulled in and parked. He got out quickly and stepped toward the employees.
“Closed,” the guy said. Neil ignored him and began pulling on the locked doors, first gently then shaking and reaming them as if he might pull them off the hinges with a little more effort. Behind him, nervous laughter and then silence and then footsteps. He watched the guy approach in the glass, reached for his piece and pulled it as the meaty hand landed on his shoulder.
“I said we’re closed. If the locked doors weren’t enough of a clue.” And just like with Hoon the night before, Neil spun into the man, whipped him backhand with the .45 and then three more to the opposite side of his face, the arc of his arm following the target as the guy fell to his knees, trying to cover up. The girls stifled screams froze solid in the backs of their throats. Neil gave the guy one more on the side of the head and that sent Pizza Boy all the way down and curled him like a baby. Neil stepped over the man and the girls flinched as he raised his gun and slid it home. He left the girls to tend to the guy. Or not. Neil was gone before they thawed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Neil woke from a glue nap to a tapping on his front door. He went to the door and let Jenkins in, the smell of rain bringing his hazy brain to full wakefulness.
“You find her? Is she coming home?”
“I found her and she isn’t.”
“Where is she? You tell me where she’s at and I’ll go get her myself.” Jenkins was squeezing his hands into tight little black holes. Neil felt the pull.
“I don’t know where she is. I talked to her over at the diner and gave her your message. She doesn’t want to come back. Says you owe her some money?”
“That what she said? Ha. I thought I was done with that nonsense when Rita died. Work your whole life and they just want to take it, wome
n, all the same.”
“So why get her home? Seems you might be better off.”
Jenkins looked at Neil like he’d found a target for those tight fists. “You don’t have any young ones so you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I asked you to find her, not load me up with questions about my intentions. She’s my girl and she needn’t be running around with the Hoons of the world! She’ll get what’s coming to her, her share! When she comes home!”
Neil sat calm in his chair, thinking about what Helen had said about her daddy being able to handle himself. In all the years Neil had seen Jenkins around Brownsville, he’d never heard him raise his voice, never heard him say an unkind word to or about anyone. Something had him by the balls, something more than a rebellious daughter running with a boy her daddy didn’t approve of, a boy who was now dead of a supposed suicide. Neil nodded and said the only thing he could to diffuse Jenkins, to keep him a friend.
“I’ll keep working on her. I’ll track her down and we’ll figure this out.”
Jenkins exhaled, deflated himself. “I just. It’s not just money, Neil. I love my baby girl.” He laughed at himself as his tight muscles released him, shrank him down further until he was just Jenkins the Pharmacist. “I love her too much I suppose. Can’t let her go. Not yet.”
“I’ll take your word for it. You’re right. I don’t have any of my own.”
“Maybe you’re the lucky one then.”
“Maybe,” Neil said as Jenkins backed out the door and into the night. Like that first night, Neil followed and watched him from the balcony, watched as he crossed the street over to the Porky Pig. Neil put the glue rag back up to his face and breathed. He could almost hear Jenkins across the street, ordering a chicken-fried plate, chewing it up, licking his lips. Neil heard everything in the world as he inhaled, practically suckling on the filthy rag.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN