A Living Grave (12 page)

I left the building feeling both better and worse than when I'd gone in. It was a weird emotional confusion that I didn't bother trying to work out. As much as I hated my life being put on display, the sheriff was behind me, and I'd actually gotten quite a bit of work done. So far the day was a win.

When I pulled up to one of my favorite cafés, there was a familiar truck parked in front. I decided to join Clare Bolin and see what the special was.

Clare was indeed having the special: three eggs, country ham, what would probably total half-a-dozen potatoes' worth of hash browns, along with biscuits covered in sausage gravy, and coffee, black and strong. I would not have wanted to be his heart. I chose just a short stack instead. We talked a while and I learned quite a bit about his illegal hobby. The one thing I learned that seemed to have real meaning was that Clare was not the only one being muscled. All of the other guys he knew who were making and selling had been visited by one of the Nightriders. Unfortunately, what I didn't learn was why anyone would want to cut in on such small operators.

I enlisted his help in making a survey of local producers, people he knew and the people they knew. It put me in the ethical dilemma of making a promise not to use the information against anyone whose name showed up. Knowing that I was promising on the sheriff's behalf, as well as my own, doubled my ethical issues.

When I left the café, Clare was still sitting there working on the biscuits and pouring down another steaming mug of coffee. Behind Clare's truck was the white sedan. Major Reach was crossing the street with a smug look on his dark face.

“What is your problem with me?” I asked even before he had finished crossing the street. I didn't quite yell.

“I'm just a man doing my job,” he answered and, I thought, doubling the level of smug.

“We've been over the you-doing-your-job thing,” I said.

“Nice eye.”

“Yeah. Real police work is hands-on.”

“Oh, I'm taking a good, hard look at your hands-on work, Hurricane. Don't you worry.”

A city sidewalk is not the best place for a confrontation, especially if you're a public official, but I was past caring. Framed in the window of the Taneycomo Café for a full audience, I stood toe to toe with Major John Reach and told him, “If I thought you the least bit competent, or believed you had the slightest integrity, I might worry. But if you were those things you wouldn't be here, would you?”

Reach leaned in even closer and put his gaze even with mine. “Former Lieutenant Williams,” he said. His voice was as narrow and focused as his eyes. “You shamed the United States Army and yourself. You brought charges against superior officers without proof or witnesses, a court-martial offence, and when you lost, you took the law into your own hands. You will spend the rest of your life worrying.”

“Is everything okay here?” It was Clare asking from behind Reach's shoulder. “You need help, Hurricane?”

Reach turned quickly and said, “What's a fat-ass redneck going to do to help? Huh? She needs you to shut up and keep walking, fat man. And so do I.”

God bless him, Clarence Bolin just smiled. He gave a friendly nod to the insignia on the major's collar and said, “I wore that uniform too. In sixty-five, when some whites were still angry about sharing bunks and meals with blacks. I was at Ia Drang and I didn't care that the man I pulled off the field was a black kid from Philly any more than I cared that the guy who pulled me out was another black kid from Mississippi. I wore the uniform with guys who had it a hell of a lot harder than you and they made it look better than you ever could.”

Clare turned away from us without waiting for a response and then crossed the street to his truck and climbed in. Once behind the wheel he rolled the window down and yelled, “Hey Major.” With a wide grin spreading over his face, he gave Reach the middle-finger salute and backed the lifted truck up over the hood of the white sedan.

“Are you going to do something about that?” Reach yelled at me as Clare drove away, still flipping the bird.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn't catch the license number.”

* * *

When they left the pavement, my tires raised a cloud of dust that billowed and swirled behind the truck, then into my open window when I slowed down. I had called the dock with no answer, so I went with another whim and drove out to where Angela had been killed. Pulled off into the grass not far from where I had first seen Clare was Danny Barnes's car.

It was only the two of them, Carrie and Danny. For good reason. They were on the ground right where Angela had been lying. Carrie's shirt was open and her loose bra was up around her throat. Danny was kneeling between her legs with his pants open. There was something in his hand and he flicked it away. They were a pair of white panties.

For the past several years, brown has been the refuge color for my rage. Soft, bled-out colors, all from Iraq, have followed my inner turmoil projecting themselves out into the world with my anger, hatred, and pain. At that place and moment everything was different. Red—thick, rich, red spurted at the edges of my vision like the rush of arterial spray into strong wind.

A hurricane
.

White, thin, and filmy as the young girl's panties, flitted like a sheer banner to which I reacted with rage.

The two colors swirled in the dark chamber behind my eyes. They didn't mix. They whipped by, filling my vision with streaks of blood and delicate fabric.

Then there was the screaming as Carrie was crying and pleading. The impact of each blow triggered more anger, driving my lust for the kill up my weapon and into my arms, communicating red and white into my heart. I can't remember pulling my automatic, but I had. It fit in my hand as comforting as the rage that had settled in my chest.

A hand gripped my arm and pulled. Someone screamed at my ear. It didn't match my violence. It was not the screaming of rage but of fear. More. Terror.

The words came to me as if shouted from a great distance and into the wind.

“Please.”

I struck again.

“Please,” she said. Carrie. She was pleading. She was begging me. “Stop. Don't hurt him anymore.”

My voice swam up through fluid, a river of blood and white satin. I barely heard it say, “He won't hurt you again.”

“He didn't,” she cried. “He wasn't hurting me. I let him. Please.”

When I broke the surface of the river I felt the colors, like physical currents flowing away, down my shoulders and off my body. I held Danny by the collar and my weapon in my hand. Both were bloody.

“Please. We were just fooling around.”

* * *

The sheriff held my service weapon dangling from a finger in the trigger guard as the ambulance pulled away. All lights and the siren were on.

“Tell me again,” he said.

I did. From the moment I had pulled up to the moment I had called in for EMTs and backup was laid out like a series of film frames whose sum were so much more devastating than any individual image. The sound of my own voice was hollow. But even the cotton batting I seemed to be hearing through allowed the shame into my ears.

I told him how I had found the two in the woods and right on top of the still bloody leaves where Angela Briscoe had been murdered. I told him also of the girl's bare breasts and disheveled clothing, Danny's open pants and the panties, tossed aside. My belief that Carrie Owens was being raped and would be murdered, just as Angela had, sounded foolish to me in the retelling. By the third time I related the story it sounded like lunacy.

Sheriff Benson asked if I was all right. He spoke in the same kind of voice I imagined him using to speak to the Briscoe family.

I nodded. I was tired of talking. But there was still something left unsaid. I could feel it in the sheriff's posture. A weight that he despaired of hanging on me. Was I primed by experience to expect rape when there was none? Was my judgment impaired? Was I dangerous?

The weight remained on his shoulders and the questions stayed unasked. I was grateful for that. Officially, though, he had to place me on suspension.

When everyone had gone, I stayed there standing in the dirt road leaning against the fender of my truck. It should have been one of those moments of evaluation and reevaluation, what my grandparents had called “a come to Jesus moment.” It might even have been. If it was, I didn't remember it. When I leaned up against the truck it was late morning and the next time I looked up it was afternoon. The sun had shifted in the sky and shadows had begun to appear like rot under the day. I had the feeling that my thoughts had been deep and memories had played over bare nerves, but that was it. A feeling.

Since I couldn't conjure the memories I decided to kill the feeling.

The tailgate of the truck made a perfect spot to sit and sip from the jar of Clare's whiskey. I wish I could say I sipped.

Once again, time disappeared. When it returned it was carried on the soft, almost silent, tread of the sheriff's road tires, not the ground-gnawing rubber of Humvees. He stopped but remained in the SUV as my father got out. When Dad had my keys in hand he waved and the sheriff went the way he had come.

The jar beside me was well on the way to half gone. Sun and shadows had shifted again. My father poured the whiskey out onto the road and then sat beside me, allowing more time to pass while I cried. Then he drove me back to the dock, taking a very long way around and going slow while I slept.

* * *

The day had shifted into early evening by the time we got back to the dock. I was all cried out but still drunk and sleepy. We pulled up and parked well away from the dock gate so as not to disturb Nelson, who was seated on a kitchen chair in the middle of the parking lot painting. He smiled at me and rose when I melted out of the truck, but sat again when my father held up his hand and took me under his arm. Half guiding me and half shoving, he got me onto the dock, through the shop, and onto the houseboat without a word. Once he had me in the bunk he removed my boots and covered me.

“Thank you, Daddy,” I said. “I love you.”

“I love you too, candy corn.” The nickname always made me smile. He had called me that one Halloween, saying I was the sweetest and silliest thing. Then he said, “I'm sorry about everything, but we'll make it right.”

The next I knew, it was dark. Not completely: It was the point of the evening where the day had given way, but the night was not yet strong enough to hold the world on its own. Uncle Orson used to say, If the day was a pig, this time was the curl. I always liked the thought that the birth of night could be the curly tail of a pig going over a fence.

Outside the boat's cabin, coming from the picnic table inside the shop, were voices and the sound of a meal. They sounded happy. I opened a window and sat very still in the darkness beside it to listen. It was a bad idea. Not only the sounds came through but the smell of the fish they had cooked.

The simple and sane thing would have been to bolt outside and throw up into the lake that was only feet from the door. I went to the sink and banged my head on the cabinet in the process. At least no one got to witness that bit of indignity.

That pig's tail slipped beyond the horizon, leaving true night behind as I put myself back into bed and drifted away again. In the night I woke and heard my father and Nelson talking. I only heard voices and not words, but the conversation was friendly—warm, even. Nelson was a hard man not to like and my father was quick to take to people. I knew only that they were sitting outside under the dock's awning, talking. It had to be about me. I felt vaguely ashamed as I went back into sleep.

The next time I awoke it was because Nelson was in the room with me. He was trying to be quiet but he was coughing. When I sat up he said, “I brought you some water.”

I took it but didn't say anything. Sips, just enough to wet my mouth were all I allowed myself. He offered aspirin and a wet cloth for my head, but I declined. Before he left I was out again.

The dreams came after that. Desaturated in color, flowing and unpredictable in movement, images churned like old movies projected onto a quick-moving river. Behind the wall I bled and watched the dust come. First like snakes, excellent in their animal camouflage, looking like the burnished earth and slithering one at a time, searching me out. Then many at once, so many they joined into a tide of misty dirt to cover me. At times I watched myself in the grave as dust piled up, both covering and filling me, until my bleeding was dust into dust. Other times I watched, a third-person omnipotent viewer, as the living dust came to me-but-not-me. I was Angela Briscoe, motionless and accepting. I was also Carrie Owens in displaced underthings, pulling the rain of dirt onto myself, participating in my own burial.

Again, I awoke and I cried. My father was there. He had brought in a lawn chair and sat beside my bed. Another cycle of sleep and dreaming to awake and cry followed to find Nelson sitting in the chair. He was there the next time too, painting on his small easel in full daylight. If I was grateful for anything, it was that he didn't try to make me talk. His presence was an invitation, not a demand. For a little while I watched him paint. Every so often he took his gaze from the art board to look at me. At one point I had the horrifying thought that he was painting me sweating and mouth breathing—looking like the creature from the booze lagoon.

Without saying anything to Nelson I flipped over, turning my back on him. He continued working without a pause. I hoped that meant I wasn't the subject. The sound of his work soothed me then, little scrapes on the board, the small clatter brushes made when dropped in the tray, quiet movements.