Kings of the Earth: A Novel (22 page)

Audie

I
THOUGHT SHE WAS DYING
. I thought I’d done it. I thought I’d brought it on.

Ruth

V
ERNON DOESN’T KNOW
which of them to care for first. The woman or the man. His mother choking on sour vomit in her bedclothes or his brother gasping and aquiver on the floor. He calls out for Creed but Creed does not answer. Perhaps he does not hear. He cannot know the extent of this, and so Vernon does not blame him either way. The cigarette still burns on the bed linen and he squashes it out in a pool that looks like egg white. The fallen match has gone dead on the floorboards but he grinds it out with his toe for good measure and glares down at it and then grinds it out all over again. It is something he can be sure of. His mother doubles over and vomits once more, emptily this time but with no less force than prior, and then she brings herself erect. With an arm to each side she steadies herself against the effort and pulls in a crippled half-lungful of air. He pats her on the back and utters some apology or promise and goes to his brother, calling for Creed again as he steps around the foot of the bed. He kneels and wraps himself around his quivering brother Audie and enfolds him there upon the cold board floor and they lie together a moment like Union soldiers spooning. Audie calms a little. His breathing steadies. One leg thumps the bedstead in a doglike rhythm and Vernon reaches to suppress its beating. His mother speaks or merely gasps but either way it is the sound of some vengeful haunt making its ragged accusation. So Vernon rises to his knees and goes to her again, telling Audie to get up if he possibly can and go fetch Creed.

Del

I
SENT THE PAPERWORK
to Ben Wilson’s office early the next morning. It was my interview and it was my confession and I sent it over myself. It was going to be a busy day around the district attorney’s office, and I thought even as I was sending it over that it would end up on the bottom of somebody’s in-basket just by default. If only for a little while. They were expecting the final report from the medical examiner too. I thought that that would be of some interest. I didn’t expect there would be anything there to contradict the confession and it turned out that there wasn’t. There were some developments I hadn’t thought about or even imagined—the semen, mainly, which suggested I’m not sure what to this day, maybe nothing—but there wasn’t anything to contradict the story as Creed had laid it out. I didn’t think there would be. I was confident that we’d done a thorough job. I thought he had explained it all pretty well.

You try to understand how another person’s mind works. I think that’s the hardest thing. It surprises you sometimes. But unless you understand how another person’s mind works you can’t necessarily make sense of the evidence in front of you. Take that bed. Take those men. Two of them left alive and one of them dead. Whatever evidence is left on the bed is so ephemeral as to be useless. It tells one story as well as it tells another. If you weren’t there you couldn’t be sure. Reading it is like trying to hear a tune somebody whistled last week. You can’t do it.

There’s evidence on the body, but it might mean anything. What I first took for a sunburn turned out to be something different, burst blood vessels, maybe a sign of strangulation. What looked like a cancerous growth in the neck wasn’t, not according to the pathology report. So the thing you thought might have killed a man becomes a thing that couldn’t possibly have killed him, considering that it wasn’t cancerous. On the other hand if a person believes he’s got cancer and he’s dying from it and everybody around him thinks the same thing, then just the idea might kill him one way or another. It might help. It might contribute to the circumstances and aid the process.

So you try to understand how people think, and sometimes it surprises you. People don’t always see things the same way you see them. But if you listen carefully enough—respectfully enough—and if you pay attention to the things that matter to people, sometimes you’ll hear a story that not only explains things you already know, like the burst blood vessels and the urine in the bed, but things you haven’t even heard about yet, like Vernon Proctor’s not having had cancer in the first place. And how he might die from it anyhow.

When those things start coming together, you start thinking maybe you know. At least to the extent that you can ever know anything. Which I suppose is why they invented the courts.

Preston

I
GOT SO WORKED UP
I came off without my change, so Margaret had to fish around in her purse for money to put in the photocopy machine. She drove us for that same reason. I forgot my keys and my wallet. Plus I just kept on reading and rereading that paper the whole way. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was just one fabrication after another, with some mark at the bottom that was supposed to say
Creed Proctor
. You could tell just from that. Just from that mark. There were two signatures down there that mattered and the only one of them that suited the words typed out underneath it was Del Graham’s. He had handwriting like a schoolboy, every letter of it just so. Creed’s was only a scribble. He might have made that scribble but I don’t guess he ever said those words.

In a nutshell the paper said he killed his own brother. It said Vernon was out stone cold and he’d wet the bed as usual and that woke Creed up. It said Vernon was snoring up a storm from the lump in his throat. The lump that had him sucking on horehound drops all day and started him smoking marijuana even though there wasn’t anything on the paper about that little transgression, thank God for small favors. According to the paper he was making a racket and Creed had finally had enough of it and he couldn’t go back to sleep and he couldn’t abide the sound of his own beloved brother suffering anymore and wetting the bed every goddamned night in the bargain and so he pinched Vernon’s nose and mouth shut and put him out of his misery. Just like that. Put him out of his misery. And Audie never even knew a thing about it until the morning. That’s what it said on the paper, over a scrawl that meant
My name is Creed Proctor and I said this
.

I know Creed Proctor. He never said that. He never even read it.

Tom

H
E CAME DOWN
the outside stairs with his teeth brushed and his hair combed back wet and a cold beer concealed in a foam jacket advertising Byrne Dairy. When he was growing up Byrne Dairy had delivered milk from door to door, but they didn’t do that these days. Now they ran convenience stores like everybody else. Come to think of it he didn’t know if they were even in the dairy business anymore, with cows and everything, although his father would certainly have known. Not that Tom cared. Fuck Byrne Dairy. Like everybody else they’d given up on production and gone straight into merchandising. Like everybody else but him, anyway. He was still stuck hammering nails and hoeing weeds. His life was an argument against evolution if there ever was one. Fuck Byrne Dairy and all they stood for.

With the beer in his hand he walked toward town and the beach. Past Harpoon Gary’s and the Clam Shack and Dickie’s, where the line for tables was already out the door. Summer people in sandals and beach cover-ups alternating with old folks dressed up for church. His head hurt, and if it weren’t high noon and no shade in sight he would have stuck to the shady side of the street. Not even the Fourth of July yet, and all these people. All this heat. He skirted the beach and went into the amusement park and watched the rides for a while. Old Man Coletti grinned at him from behind the grating of the ticket booth and hoisted a foam-jacketed can in a kind of conspiratorial toast. A few girls about Shelly’s age came sailing through and bought tickets and got on the carousel, all candy-apple mouths and pale winter skin. They looked like children. He followed Old Man Coletti’s eyes as he watched them get on the carousel, and it made him kind of want to punch somebody. He wasn’t sure who.

The Woodshed wasn’t open yet and he walked on past, over the bridge and toward the beat-up playground equipment and along the old docks. Only a handful of boats were in, a couple of them looking like they had been there all winter. Sitting low, probably full of water. He didn’t know anything about boats, but that couldn’t be good. He finished his beer and stripped the foam jacket from it and jammed it in his back pocket and threw the empty can into one of the boats from where he stood. Two points. Past the boats was the campground, and it got him thinking.

He was sitting on the front porch when Nick came home, just one more telltale difference between Nick’s half of that little split house and the nicer half. Drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette on the old Naugahyde couch that took up most of the disreputable side. Shelly rode in on the back of Nick’s motorcycle. She looked happy to see him but from the way she came up the steps she was either a little drunk or a little high or maybe both. She went on in the house and didn’t come back out. Nick took a seat on the couch next to Tom and Tom blew smoke and looked at him from behind the screen of it as if Nick had done something terrible to his own sister, which was kind of turning the tables. Maybe now they were even.

Nick pulled out a cigarette and took Tom’s to light it. He still had on his mirrored sunglasses. The ash broke off Tom’s cigarette before the other one caught and it fell down between Nick’s knees and melted through the Naugahyde in a heartbeat. Just like that. Right through and down into the stuffing. Tom had the presence of mind to slosh a little beer down the hole after it, and Nick laughed and pulled out his own lighter. He seemed a little drunk or high too.

Tom asked if maybe he’d been using some good stuff for a change instead of that crap from Henri and he said yes, as a matter of fact he had. He and his sister and a couple of their cousins had recently partaken of a Baggie of Panama Red that he’d obtained from an old hippie dude in Whitesboro. The one who used to have that psychedelic bus out back of his barn but didn’t have it anymore. You couldn’t get weed anywhere near that good from Henri. The old hippie was Tiffany’s and Henri was Kmart. Tom had seen the stuff they’d loaded into his car that night, hadn’t he? Strictly mass-market. You could tell just by looking.

Tom was a little hurt and he asked why Nick hadn’t come to him if he’d wanted something better than his usual. Nick said he probably would have, but since it was for Shelly’s graduation and Tom wasn’t even invited it didn’t seem right. Tom didn’t get any less hurt and he started to ask how come he wasn’t invited until he realized it was probably a stupid question. Then he raised the idea he’d come over to talk about, which tied right in to everything, now that he thought about it. How would Nick like to start selling a better class of merchandise?

Nick said his regular customers couldn’t afford a much better class of merchandise, and what was he talking about anyhow?

Tom said he was talking about diversifying. He said he was talking about putting together a partnership that would, as he put it, enable them to capitalize on each other’s strengths. His own in supply, and Nick’s in distribution.

Nick looked down at the smoldering hole between his knees. Inside the house, the toilet flushed and water ran.

Tom said what he meant was that they ought to go into business together. He had a strong crop of the good stuff coming on and Nick had a list of regular customers who might be interested in it. He had the hayloft of his uncle’s barn, while Nick had been crazy enough to keep the stuff in his own bedroom. He had that nice roomy VW fastback with folding rear seats while Nick was still jamming dope into the saddlebags of that useless Indian motorcycle.

Nick said hey don’t make fun of his ride, and Tom said he wasn’t making fun of it. He said he was thinking about the night Nick himself had just mentioned, when they’d had to use the VW to haul a ton of weed back from the beach. So much for the mighty Indian.

Nick said OK, he had to grant him that but what about Henri. He and Henri went way back. They had an arrangement.

Tom said he wasn’t talking about replacing Henri’s stuff but adding his own on top of it as a little something special. For customers who appreciated a Michelob instead of a Genny every now and then. Nick knew customers like that, didn’t he? Guys who’d recognize the difference between that Canadian crap and something made in America?

Nick said Henri’s stuff wasn’t from Canada, it just came through there.

Tom said he knew that but he was just saying Canada to differentiate.

Nick said he didn’t know if they even
grew
dope in Canada, on account of it was pretty cold up there.

Tom said it didn’t matter.

Nick said he supposed it didn’t. What mattered, now that he thought of it, was how much cash Tom planned on putting up. Tom said no cash, and Nick glared at him. Tom said hey wait a minute. Hadn’t it occurred to Nick that this high-quality locally grown weed would sell for twice as much as Henri’s did and was therefore tons better than cash? Plus he was throwing in the aforementioned transportation and warehousing. They’d keep careful records and split everything fair and square. He’d taken a bookkeeping course in college.

Nick nodded and looked either bewildered or thoughtful. After a while he said maybe Tom was right but he’d have to advise Henri when he came down with a carload next month, let him know who was who and what was what and who was doing what to whom, and Tom said maybe it would be better if they just kept it between themselves for right now.