Murder in Little Egypt (12 page)

Dale managed to get the owl into an empty game bag. Once it was covered, it stopped moving, inert as a heap of potatoes in the bottom of the bag.

“Cardiac arrest,” Dale said with a laugh.

It was time to celebrate the end of the hunt. At the guide’s house, they presented his wife with pheasant to clean and roast for dinner. What they did not eat they would store in the big freezer along with birds from the other days’ shooting, already cleaned to take home. As agreed, Dale told the wife that he had shot an owl by mistake. The question was what to do with it now.

Dale peered into the game bag. He saw the owl’s head move.

“I don’t believe it,” Dale said. “The damn thing is still alive! Can you beat it? By God,” he nodded toward the freezer, “we’ll freeze his ass in there. I got to hand it to him. I tried to wring his goddamned neck. Look at him. He’s some fighter. So long, friend.”

He opened the freezer chest, swung the bag in and dropped the lid.

The men went off to a bar. The guide’s wife said that she would phone when dinner was on. They were ordering their second round when the waitress told the guide that his wife was on the phone.

“That was quick,” Dale said. “She must’ve cooked ’em feathers and all. I’m going to finish this drink. I may have another.”

When the guide came back to the table he said that he didn’t know whether to believe what his wife had told him. She might be pulling his leg. She said that she had heard a noise in the freezer. She had opened it up, and there was that damn owl. It was not only alive, it was pecking at some steaks she had stored in there. It had torn right through the wrapping and was pecking at the frozen meat.

The men rushed back to the house. The wife had not lied. There was the owl with its yellow-bright eyes. It had ignored the pheasant and gone for the steaks.

“It must’ve liked it in there,” the guide said. “They live in the arctic. The cold must’ve revived it.”

Pat Sullivan suggested that maybe the bird had earned a stay of execution, but Dale picked it up and carried it out the back door. They heard one screech as Dale gripped it by the feet and knocked its head against the concrete steps.

7

KEVIN CAVANESS WAS NEVER ABLE TO FORGET HIS EARLIEST memory of his father. The scene came back to him, if only for a second, nearly every time he found himself alone in the dark.

On a weekday morning, when Kevin was about four years old, he was at his father’s knee at the breakfast table, envying his cup of coffee and trying to catch his eye from around the newspaper. Kevin was at the age when every little boy stumbles along in his father’s wake, following him around the house and wanting to be like him.

He trailed his father upstairs to watch him shave. He stood entranced by the ritual, inhaling the soapy smell. He knew the routine by heart. After cleaning off the remaining specks of lather with the soapy cloth, his dad would turn and step into the bathroom closet for the shaving lotion and splash it on his face with quick slaps as he looked once more into the mirror.

This morning Kevin decided to play a game. As his father opened the closet door and stepped inside, Kevin rushed in beside him and pressed himself against the sheets and towels stacked at the back. He could not help giggling. He figured his dad would think that was pretty funny, too, finding Kevin in the closet like Jiminy Cricket.

But Dale backed out quickly, slammed the door and turned the lock.

In the dark Kevin sucked in his breath. He heard his father’s footsteps clomping out of the bathroom and down the hall. He did not mean to leave me in here, Kevin thought. Did he mean to leave me in here? Did he see me?

“Dad? Dad? Here I am!”

But there was only silence. The dark. Kevin began to wail. He pounded on the door and rattled the handle. He sobbed and called out for his father again and again. It seemed a very long time before he heard footsteps.

Dale unlocked the closet door and opened it. Kevin ran into his father’s arms, crying.

“Hey,” his father said, picking him up and staring into his wet face, “what’s the matter with you? What’s wrong with you, Kev? You didn’t have to be afraid. You shouldn’t be afraid of the dark, see? What’re you afraid of? You better learn that. You don’t want to be a crybaby, do you? You some kind of scaredy-cat? You better learn sooner or later. You better stop that crying.”

As Kevin grew up, he often thought of that dark closet, with the sound of the lock clicking and his father’s footsteps fading down the hall. And then his father’s voice: disappointed in him and full of warning.

In his earliest days Kevin had more trouble with Mark than with Dale. Like many older brothers, Mark made Kevin’s life as miserable as he could, stealing his toys and tripping him up and sneaking in a punch or two to make him cry and irritate the grown-ups. Mark was also adept at escaping just in time to let Kevin take the blame, as when they threw oranges over the fence into the Chevrolet lot, or set fire to a bag of manure on somebody’s porch, or tossed matches down the sewer to make the blue flames flare up until, finally, the sewer exploded with a tremendous boom and knocked an old lady off the toilet in a house across the street.

It was easy to get in Dutch in Eldorado, because there wasn’t much to do. They could hang around Herpel’s arcade or the blacksmith’s shop, where the man who everybody said was older than dirt would let them heat some iron and pound it on the anvil—that passed the time. They could run over and taunt old Cokey who sat on his front porch all day and would grab his shotgun from behind the door and shout, “I’m gonna getcha! I’m gonna getcha!” They could break into the city-hall basement through the coal chute or toss a baseball across the street trying to see how close they could come to the windshields of people driving past, until they’d hit one and the driver would light out after them.

If Mark wasn’t letting Kevin take the heat for these pranks, he was finding ways to get at Kevin straight on. Kevin was playing with poster paints one day and Mark grabbed him, held him down and painted him green all over and left him bawling in the yard—and still managed to make it look as if Kevin had spilled the paint on himself.

But Kevin never questioned that Mark loved him—the rest was just the way a brother was, and nobody in Little Egypt minded roughhousing: It was what made boys grow up, as Peck had taught Dale. As often as they fought, Kevin and Mark could also play together, get away with schemes together, talk into the night with one another in their upstairs room. And Kevin looked up to Mark, who was such a handsome, outgoing kid, with a way of charming everyone. Kevin was sturdy, chunky and quiet, a listener who watched everything and everyone from behind his glasses. Kevin said little, but he remembered.

And most of the memories he gathered about his dad were dark ones. How unalike his parents were! Mom was always there, forgiving and loving, cheering everyone up. She had her breaking point, but you knew where it was, and any dispute with her ended up forgotten in her trills of laughter and her hugs. The only annoying thing about Mom was that she was always after you to do your homework and clean your room and mind your manners. Dad, when he was around, which was not very much, was the rule-giver, the one who doled out the serious punishment and the one who knew the answers to everything. That would have been all right, not so different from most of the other fathers Kevin knew, except that Dale was as unpredictable as winter. He could be kidding you one minute and whipping you the next; what you thought was a joke could turn sour in a second. When he got angry, his voice rose to a frightening, piercing pitch that could summon the dead and be heard for a mile, until Marian intervened, or tried to, and Dale stormed out of the house, and things were quiet again.

Kevin figured out that it was better to keep your distance from Dad until you could gauge his mood; but he could not help himself from wanting to be around Dale, trying to attract his attention or just watching him. Kevin always found himself spontaneously happy on the rare evenings when Dale made it home for dinner—“Dad’s home!”—and he liked to help his father prepare for hunting trips. He watched Dale heat the lead for bullets in the furnace in the summer house, mold them and oil the guns. Everyone would be up to see Dad off at dawn.

But just when Kevin thought he was being helpful, his dad might snap and bark at him and tell him to get lost. Marian said that Dale had a lot on his mind, so many sick people depended on him.

One evening Dale was reading the newspaper in the family room. Kevin was eleven years old, Mark thirteen, and Sean, who was out that evening with his mother visiting the Sullivans, was only four. As usual Sean had left some of his toys in the family room, hollow octagonal plastic blocks that snapped together to form multicolored strings. As Dale sat in his easy chair reading, Mark and Kevin passed the time tossing blocks back and forth to one another across the length of the room, making them whistle as they sailed. The game had gone on for about five minutes when Dale, not looking up, said:

“One more of those things, and you’re gonna get it. My sack is getting full.”

It was always a bad sign when Dale said that his sack was getting full. It meant that he had been storing up grievances, maybe for days. He would put one offense after another into his sack, until it was full. You had better watch out. That sack might have things in it you had forgotten about or had not even noticed; it could fill up at any moment.

Kevin was prepared to stop tossing the blocks, but Mark, the bold one, decided to chance one more. He whistled a red one over to Kevin.

Kevin waited. He did not wish to risk his father’s wrath, but he did not want Mark to outdo him, either. Maybe the sack had room for one more. Dale continued reading. Kevin tossed the red block back. It whistled nicely that time.

“Okay, that’s it,” Dale said, throwing down the paper.

Kevin cursed himself for having miscalculated. He hoped that all his father would do would be to send them both to bed. There was no way of knowing.

Dale got up and went into the kitchen. He came back holding a metal spatula. He stood over Mark.

“Get those pants down.” Dale always hit the boys bare butt. Kevin watched as his father went to work on Mark’s bottom. He flailed away, grunting, three, four, five, six, harder and harder, until the head of the spatula bent and broke off.

Dale returned to the kitchen. He came back this time with a big wooden spoon. It made a solid smacking sound as Dale whacked it against Mark’s reddening bottom. Mark began to cry.

“You want to bawl? You’re going to high school and you want to cry? You some kind of pansy? You’re a no-good little mama’s boy, aren’t you!” Whack. “Aren’t you! Men don’t cry. You want to be a baby? I’ll give you something to cry about!”

Watching, Kevin prayed that his father would wear himself out on Mark. But energy was something Dale never lacked. It was Kevin’s turn.

“Get them down. I warned you.”

Kevin bent over with his jeans and underpants around his ankles. He heard the spoon swish and a hot burning stinging blow made him clench his teeth and dig his toes into the carpet and drove scalding tears into his eyes. With his head between his knees, the tears filled up under his eyes and burned. He knew that crying out loud would only make the beating worse. You got whipped again for crying, that was Dale’s policy. You also got whipped for losing a fight at school, if Dale found out about it.

Mark was still whimpering in the corner.

“Why don’t you learn to take it like your brother?” Dale said between whacks. He reared back and gave Kevin a really smart smack with the spoon. “See that? He doesn’t cry. What’s the matter with you? By God, you’ve got plenty to learn, my friend, let me tell you. You bet your sweet ass.”

Finally Dale was winded. The boys crawled up to their room for the night. That had been a bad one, they agreed. A real downer. Just yelling at them would have been enough to get them to stop throwing the blocks. They should have stopped right away, but then you never knew, especially when you were alone with Dale: If Marian had been there he would never have whipped them so hard, might not have whipped them at all. The safest thing was to steer clear of Dad when he was on his own.

Dale had seemed to want to make an example of Mark that time, and he was usually tougher on Mark and angrier with him than with Kevin, but it could be the other way around. One Christmas Kevin asked for a special bicycle, a Stingray with fat tires, butterfly handlebars and a banana seat, just the thing for flying jumps from curbs and off-road tearing around, a bike that was supposed to be well-nigh indestructible and was the next best thing to a motorcycle. Kevin went to sleep on Christmas Eve willing the bike to be there.

When Mark and Kevin went downstairs early the next morning, there was the bike under the tree. But the card dangling from the handlebars said “For Mark.” That seemed peculiar; Mark had not even asked for a bike. Maybe the cards had been put on the wrong presents.

Dale was crouched beside the fireplace arranging logs, saying nothing. Mark, standing beside the bike, asked if it was really his. Dale nodded, yes.

“Where’s mine?” Kevin said to his dad. “Mine’s here somewhere, isn’t it?”

“Your what?” Dale said. “What makes you think you deserve anything? You think you get something just by whining about it? You think you earned it?”

Kevin rushed back upstairs and fell on his bed in tears. His father’s words tore through him like shrapnel. What had he done? He had not even seen Dale for days. Mark had not asked for the bike, had not even wanted one. The unfairness of it weighed Kevin down until he did not have the strength to cry anymore.

He had been lying there for what seemed like half an hour when Marian came in and asked what was wrong. She had been out in the summer house wrapping a few last presents. Of course he had a bike, Marian said. Wasn’t it under the tree with Mark’s? She had bought one for Mark only so he would not be jealous of Kevin’s. That was an afterthought. She had bought Kevin’s first.

Marian went back downstairs. Through his door Kevin could hear his parents.