Midnight Haul (20 page)

“Daddy, where are you?”

“Stay where you are, Billy!” Patrick yelled. “Daddy will be there in a second.” He looked at Crane. “Won’t I, Crane?” Softly.

Crane lowered the gun.

Patrick got up. Dusted the snow off him. “I’m going inside to be with my son, now, Crane.”

Crane said nothing.

Patrick went.

Crane walked back to the motel room and sat on the bed. He sat there for two hours.

Then he got up and went into the bathroom and saw himself in the mirror: he was wearing a loose-fitting green jacket, a dirty T-shirt, dirty jeans; he was unshaven; his hands were bandaged; he had several bandages on his forehead. He took his clothes off and the bandages too and had a long hot bath.

Then he got out and sat naked on the edge of the bed and dialed the hospital in Fair View to see how Boone was. Today was the first day since he’d gotten back that he hadn’t been to see her. It took a while, but finally he got the doctor and the doctor said her condition was unchanged.

He dialed Roger Beatty, in Iowa City, but there was no answer.

He called his parents. It was an hour earlier back there. His father answered.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Son? It’s good to hear your voice. We’ve been so worried about you. Your mother is so worried….”

“Is she home?”

“No, bridge club. She should be home any time. She’ll be so upset she missed you. Son, please. You have to explain what this is all about. We’ve got your letter, here, saying you’ll be in touch with us, to explain, but…”

“Dad. Don’t worry about it.”

“I… don’t want to sound like a father, but we’re not very happy you dropped out of school. It’s your money, of course, and your life, but…”

“Dad. I can’t talk about that now. Don’t worry about that.”

“Well. We’re not very happy about it, son. Your mother’s not very happy.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t really call to talk about that, Dad. I just called to let you and Mom know I miss you both.”

“Well, we miss you, son. Can you give us an address? A phone number?”

“Tell Mom I love her, Dad. And I love you, too.”

He hung up.

He sat naked on the edge of the bed.

He was sitting there with the gun in his hand, finger on the trigger, looking down into the barrel, when somebody knocked on the door.

Patrick.

Standing in the doorway of the motel room in a light tan corduroy jacket that wasn’t warm enough for this weather, hands in jacket pockets, shivering, his wire frames fogging up.

“Can I come in, Crane?”

Crane was standing there in jeans he’d pulled on, his chest bare, the gun in one hand.

Patrick noticed the gun. “That… that isn’t necessary, is it, Crane?”

He wasn’t exactly pointing it at Patrick, but to make him feel better, Crane tossed it over on the bed, where it made a thud, and said, “Come in.”

Patrick shut the door behind him, took off the wire frames and tried to polish the fog away with his shirt front.

“What do you want, Patrick?”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You seem kind of…”

“I’m fine, Patrick. What do you want?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Can I sit down or something?”

Crane shrugged. He sat on the edge of the bed and waited for Patrick to do something. Patrick glanced around, saw the chair by the dresser and pulled it over and sat across from Crane. He
leaned forward, hands clasped together, draped down between his legs; he looked nervous. Disturbed.

“What do you want, Patrick?”

“I may know something.”

Crane didn’t say anything.

“I may know who set the fire at the house,” Patrick said. It was like a child admitting he’d been in his mother’s purse.

Crane’s hands tightened into fists; he didn’t ask them to, they just did. “Who?”

“I don’t know their names or anything…”

“
Who
, Patrick?”

“A couple of truck drivers. Some of the neighbors told the police they saw two men, that morning, walking around with ski masks on. Dressed like hunters, is how my one neighbor described them.”

“How else did she describe them?”

“One was a tall skinny man. The other was shorter but huskier.”

Crane nodded.

“You
know
them?” Patrick asked.

“Sort of. They’re the ones that buried me.”

“Crane… what are you talking about? You said that before, what do you mean,
buried
you?”

Crane told him the story; it didn’t take long.

Patrick rubbed his forehead, held the wire frames away from his face as if he didn’t really want to see things clearly.

“I… don’t think they were trying to kill you,” he said. “They were just… trying to scare you off, I’m… sure.”

“Wouldn’t a beating have sufficed?”

“I think they must’ve thought that if they… stopped just short of killing you… really put you through the wringer… you’d give up. You’d go home. A simple beating might just spur you on. Convince you you’re on the right track.”

“What track is that, Patrick?”

“I don’t know! I’m speculating. Crane, I’m not really involved in this.”

“That’s an interesting way to look at it.”

“I don’t even know if I’m right. But… from what you say about what happened to you… the burial and all… I’m afraid I am. Right, I mean.”

“What are you getting at, Patrick?”

He let out the heaviest sigh Crane ever heard. Said, “I think these are the same guys who did some hauling for Kemco, awhile back. I paid them. Cash. All very
sub-rosa
, you know? But that’s the extent of my involvement. I had nothing to do with what they did to you. Do you think I’d have my own house burned? Risk my son’s life? Or Annie’s?”

“Neither one was home, at the time, conveniently enough. And it
wasn’t
your house, not till Boone tried to…”

“Tried to
what
, Crane? Don’t tell me you’ve come to believe she
did
try to commit suicide? What’s changed your mind all of a sudden?”

Crane said, “Who are they, Patrick?”

“I don’t even know their names,” Patrick said, lifting his shoulders, a pathetic, almost helpless expression on his face. He really
was
trying. “All I know is they work for an outfit called Chemical Disposal Works.”

Crane sat up. “In Elizabeth?”

That surprised Patrick. “That’s right,” he said. “They got in some trouble with the state awhile back, and that’s why we had to go under the table with paying them while they were still doing work for us.”

“Are they hauling for Kemco, now?”

“Yeah. Right now, in fact. They picked up a load tonight. It might even be those same two truckers, for all I know. It’s not a big company.”

Crane got up and went to the door and opened it; the cold air rushed in like a wave.

“Thank you, Patrick,” Crane said.

Patrick got up slowly, went to the door and said to Crane, “Yeah, well, I should be getting back to Billy. I don’t like leaving him alone.”

He went out, and as Crane was closing the door, Patrick glanced back and said, “What are you going to do?”

“Change my plans,” Crane said.

He had nearly two hours to himself, in the car, on the drive to Elizabeth. It was about midnight when he started out, and there wasn’t much traffic on the turnpike; he was in Laurie’s car, the Buick she’d been driving him around in, taking him daily to see Boone at the hospital.

When she saw him at the door, Laurie had been momentarily excited, thinking there was some news about Boone; not happy, not frightened, just excited: any news about someone who’s been in a coma for a period of time is big news. But that wasn’t why he had come; he was there because he needed her car. She started to ask why, but apparently something in his manner had stopped her. She’d merely said, “Of course you can borrow the car,” and went and got the keys.

He’d made sure she didn’t see the gun; he had it stuffed in his belt, under his jacket, the same jacket the hospital gave him earlier that day, an oversize thing that hung on him like he’d been sick and lost weight.

Now the gun was on the seat next to him.

He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do with it. Maybe protect himself. Maybe something else. He didn’t have it thought out. He didn’t think about what he was going to do when he got there. He just drove. He was aware of something on his face that might have seemed like a smile, to an observer. He wasn’t sure
what it was himself, when he glimpsed it in the rearview mirror; but it wasn’t a smile.

And he wasn’t sure what he would do when he faced those two truckers. He just knew he was going to face them.

He wasn’t thinking about killing them. The thought surfaced a few times that this was what he might do, but that was as far as his thought processes went. The idea of killing someone would’ve seemed absurd, impossible to Crane a month ago. A day ago. But now he was different. He had sat on the edge of the abyss and looked in.

By the time he was driving down that industrial stretch, with buildings and machinery and hovering UFO-like gas tanks on either side of him, the night giving all of it an unreal look, like an amusement park, he could hear someone laughing in the car, softly. He was a little surprised to find out it was him.

There were a couple of outdoor lights on poles near the warehouse, but otherwise Chemical Disposal Works was dark. The light from the industrial row Chemical Disposal Works was at the dead-end of, on a little peninsula reaching into an inlet of the Elizabeth River, was enough to let him see the vast city of barrels, stacked four high, at the center of which, like City Hall, was the warehouse with its windows painted out black.

He left the Buick alongside the road, half a block away, gun stuck in his waistband, and soon was walking down the cinder drive he and Boone had come down not long ago, barrels on either side, many of them corroded, leaking; he stepped in a thick puddle of something not unlike molasses in consistency, oozing from the base of one. Up ahead he could see that same tan station wagon parked to the right of the loading-dock area; next to it was a battered, dusty pick-up truck. The pick-up was the one Crane rode in the back of, in a barrel, the night before.

The other truck, the flatbed, wasn’t here, unless it was pulled inside.

He didn’t think so. It was early yet. Like Crane, the truckers wouldn’t have started out till about midnight, and, unless they were going to add to the thirty or so thousand barrels piled in Chemical Disposal’s yard, would have to dump their cargo elsewhere. Pennsylvania, maybe. But eventually, he hoped, that truck and the truckers would come home. Home to this graveyard of chemical waste.

He climbed up on the wall of barrels that ended where the side of the building, and the loading-dock area, started. He sat on a barrel with the gun in his hand, resting in his lap, and waited. It was cold, and the hospital hand-me-down jacket, loose fitting as it was, did little to keep the cold out; but Crane didn’t mind. He liked it.

He counted stars: there weren’t many to count. A piece of the moon floated half-heartedly in a sky streaked by smoke from nearby industrial chimneys. He could smell more of the river, tonight, than during his daytime visit; but the sickly perfume laced with rubber was still thick. Boone had explained to him that this was an odor characteristic of dump sites.

He thought about her. He thought about her as long as he could do it without seeing her in a coma; when that image came into his mind, he forced it out.

He counted barrels.

He’d been sitting there perhaps an hour when headlights stretched down the cinder drive, a truck rumbling after.

It was the same flatbed truck, its sides built up, its tarp flapping, that he and Boone had seen at Kemco that time. Even from here he could see two men in the cab.

He hopped off the barrels, landed hard, and caught himself with the hand that didn’t have the gun in it.

Then he walked out in the path of the truck, stopped in front of it, and it stopped, too, abruptly, brakes squealing, a good two car lengths between them, but he could see their faces behind
the windshield, clearly. They were faces he’d never seen close-up before, not without ski masks in the way, but that the driver was the tall skinny man and the rider the stocky one was apparent. So was the look of fear on their faces, as he pointed the gun at them.

The stocky one looked a bit like his friend Roger, which threw him a little, and the skinny one had a long, roughly handsome face and dark curly hair and was young, about Crane’s age, and that threw him, too: he was so used to a faceless enemy, it shocked him to be confronted by two people, that it should all boil down to two young men as scared at this moment as he was.

Because his finger was squeezing the trigger, but he couldn’t make it squeeze hard enough—in his mind, he could hear their cries of pain and surprise, but he couldn’t seem to make his finger turn those mental images and sounds into reality.

Something cold crawled into his stomach; something colder crawled into his mind: he couldn’t kill these people. He’d forced this confrontation and he didn’t know what to do with it.

“Get out!” he yelled. “Get out of that goddamn truck!”

The doors on either side swung open, but neither man hopped out.

Crane heard a door open behind him, at his left, and he turned halfway and saw the man in the quilted jacket with the bushy black streaks for eyebrows who had given him that beating not so long ago. The man did not seem to be armed, though he probably wished he was. He was standing frozen in the doorway by the loading dock, looking at the gun, which Crane was now pointing his way.

“Take it easy, kid,” the man was saying.

Whether or not he recognized Crane, Crane couldn’t tell; he did recognize the gun, however, and kept on saying “Take it easy, take it the fuck easy, okay?” like a litany.

Crane heard the truck’s doors slam shut. The distraction had been just enough to give the truckers what they saw as an
opportunity: the vehicle was moving, the driver aimed its prow right at Crane, the vehicle shifting noisily as it bore down on him.