One Monday We Killed Them All (2 page)

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When you can count the time you have left in big numbers, count it in years; whole weeks can go by when you never think of it. But it dwindles down, and as the time gets shorter it seems to go faster. It came down to months, and then weeks, and suddenly it was time for me to go up to Harpersburg, up to the big maximum security prison and get my wife’s half-brother and bring him home.

As the time got shorter I could see Meg tightening up. She’d look beyond me when I was talking to her, and I’d have to repeat what I’d said. She was short with the kids, impatient and abrupt.

“Five years out of the prettiest part of his life,” she would say. “From twenty-five to thirty, all that good time lost and gone.”

“It could have been more,” I told her.

“What’s he going to be like, honey? What’s he going to act like?”

“You’ve seen him once a month for five years, Meg. You tell me.”

She turned away. “We talk through the wire. I do most of the talking. He listens and sometimes he smiles. I don’t know how he’ll be. I’m—I’m scared of how he’ll be.”

I told her he would be fine, but I didn’t believe it. I went with her to visit him the first time. He told me not to come back. He meant it. So I’d drive her up there when I could, and wait in the car across the road from the big wall and try to pretend to myself they were never going to let Dwight McAran out of the cage. She would always come out looking as if they’d whipped her, walking heavy, her face dull, and half the eighty miles home would go by before she’d begin to act like herself.

“I should go with you to bring him back,” Meg told me.

“He made it plain in the letter. If we want to get him started right, we better do it the way he wants, honey. Maybe—maybe he just doesn’t want to see you anywhere near those walls again.”

“Maybe that’s it.” But her voice was dubious, her eyes uncertain.

And I wouldn’t know why he made that request until he told me. With men like Dwight McAran it’s little use trying to guess why they do things. We judge others by our own patterns. When a man doesn’t fit anywhere into the pattern of most people, you might as well try guessing how high a bird will fly on Tuesday.

Down at the station they knew I was going to drive up and get him. There’s more gossip in a place like that than any bridge club you ever saw. They’d even found out Meg wasn’t going with me. It isn’t very often a cop has a brother-in-law to bring on home from state prison. It would have been a rougher ride if I hadn’t made Detective Lieutenant, but the rank kept most of the boys off my neck.

The bad situation, the one I knew was going to be bad, was with Alfie Peters. He marched through the squad room and into my office the afternoon of the day before I had to go get Dwight. We started rookie the same year and he’d thought of every reason in the world why he got a little bit left behind, except the right reason, he’s too quick with his hands and his mouth. But he was the one who made the collar on Dwight all by himself, which is more than any one man should have tried or could have gotten away with, unhurt. All Alfie got was a dislocated thumb and a torn ear. Peters is a big man, quick and meaty.

He came in and stared at me and said, “The best thing you can do, Fenn, is drive him the other direction and leave him off some place.”

“If you got to yell, Alfie, go down in the park and holler up at my window.”

“You heard what McAran yelled at me in court.”

“I was there.”

“You give him a message from me. If I come across him any place at all in Brook City, and I don’t like the look on his face, I’m going to hammer on it until I get a look I do like. He doesn’t scare me a damn bit.”

I stared at Alfie until he began to look uneasy. “If you have reason to arrest him, bring him in. If he resists arrest, you can take the necessary steps to subdue him. If it’s a false arrest, I’ll do everything I can to make the charge against you stick. He’s not on parole, Peters. He served full time. There will be no arrests for loitering, for acting
suspicious, for overtime parking. I’ve cleared that with the Chief. You’re not putting the roust on McAran, and you’re not working him over. And pickup order on him has to be cleared with the Chief.”

“Nice,” he said. “Real nice. Who gives him the keys to the city? The Chief or the mayor, or maybe we should invite the governor down?”

“Just handle yourself with a lot of care, Alfie.”

“The picture is clear. That son of a bitch gets the special deal. The brother-in-law of Lieutenant Fenn Hillyer gets every break in the book. Is it on account he’s a college man? He killed Mildred Hanaman and everybody knows it. You must be nuts to let him come back here.”

I leaned back in the chair. I smiled at him, even. “I don’t make the laws. He was arrested and charged and he stood trial and got five years for manslaughter. Now get out of here, Alfie.”

He hesitated, turned on his heel and walked out. It certainly wasn’t
my
idea Dwight should come back to Brook City. It was his, and Meg backed him up. She had some glamorized idea of Dwight becoming such a solid and dependable citizen everybody would realize they’d misjudged him. Personally, it had always astonished me he had gotten to the age of twenty-five without killing anybody. But what can you do when the woman you love is just using that natural warmth and heart which make you love her? She’s two years older than Dwight. They had a miserable childhood. She did her best to protect him. She’s never stopped trying. He’s the only blood relation she has, and she has enough love left over for forty.

Chief of Police Larry Brint caught me in the corridor as I was leaving. He’s sixty, a mild, worn man with a school teacher look, but with a deep and lasting toughness which makes Alfie’s bluster look like a comedian’s routine. He has made it known to me, without even putting it in so many words, that he wants me to have his job when he quits.

He fell in step beside me and we walked slowly toward the rear exit of our wing of City Hall. “Settle Peters down?” he asked.

“I hope so.”

“This can be a rough thing. You’ve got to handle it just right, Fenn. McAran could make you look pretty bad.”

“I realize that.”

“If there’s any slip, we can’t afford an ounce of mercy. Does Meg understand that?”

“She claims she does. I don’t know if she really does.”

“How long is he going to stay with you?”

“Nobody knows. I don’t know what his plans are.”

We stopped in the shelter of the entrance roof. It had begun to rain again. Larry Brint studied me for a moment. “All prison ever does for most men like McAran is prime them and fuse them like a bomb. You won’t know where or how that bomb is going to go off.”

“Just watch and wait, I guess.”

“Damn the rain.” He started out into it and turned back. “Fenn, you try to get to him on that ride back. You try to tell him how it’s going to be around here. He won’t do Meg any favor trying to stay on here.”

“Would that matter to him, Larry?”

“Guess not.” He frowned and looked puzzled. It was a rare expression for him to wear. “Getting old, I guess. Thinking too much. Nearly every man I’ve ever known has been a mixture of good and evil, so it’s mostly luck pushing them one way or another, and it’s fair the law should give them equal rights and equal justice. But in my life there’s been just seven I can remember that shouldn’t come under the rules. There should be a special license for those, Fenn. A man should be able to lead them out back and kill them like a snake. Dwight McAran is the last one of those seven I’ve run into. God grant I never meet up with another. You be careful!”

He fixed me with a stern blue eye and walked off through the rain.

It was still raining when I left the house the next morning for the eighty-mile drive to Harpersburg, a cold pale dreary rain coming down through low gray clouds that nudged the tops of the hills. Brook City is in the middle of dying country. It’s just dying a little slower than the hill country around it. They came a long time ago and pulled the guts up out of the earth and took what they wanted and went away, leaving the slag and the tipples and the sidings that are rusting away. There’s nothing left in the hills but the scrabbly farms and the empty faces and the hard violent ways of living. Violence lifts the climate of despair and boredom for a little while. The government trucks come to the villages once a month, bringing food that’s mostly
starch, and when they collect it they try to make jokes about it, and the laughter is dutiful, and flat as the jokes. It’s shine country, stomping country, old car country, a stale place left behind when the world moved on some place else, and the things most alive in the hills are the crows and the berry bushes, and, for a shorter time than seems fair to them, the young girls. Dwight and Meg came out of the hills, came from a village named Keepsafe, a small place now empty of people, with the road washed out and gone. I was born and raised in Brook City. With every year of my life it’s gotten a little smaller, an old woman shrinking with the years, sighing at nothing at all, running out of time and size and money and hope.

Fifteen miles out of town I got stuck behind an ancient wildcat rig grinding in low-low up three miles of curves, overloaded with stolen coal, and when I finally passed it I caught a glimpse of the driver, a fat faded woman wearing a baseball cap. It didn’t bother me to lose the time. I wished I could drive through the rain all the rest of my life and never get to Harpersburg. You can always tell when there’s some part of your life that hasn’t a chance of working out. It’s like taking your cancer to the doctor a little too late. You wish you were somebody else entirely.

At the prison I went through gate security and was taken to the plywood office of Deputy Warden Boo Hudson.

“Fenn Hillyer, by God!” he said, pretending a vast, glad surprise. Way back, when I still wore a harness, he was Sheriff of Brook County and I knew him then, and it was always the same. If you had seen him twenty minutes before, the greeting was always the same. It had been over a year since I had seen him in the lobby of the Christopher Hotel at some time of political dealings, and he was unchanged, a sagging, flabby old man with a sourness of flesh and breath, hound-dog eyes the color of creek mud, seed-corn teeth, hair dyed anthracite black and oiled in flat strings across his baldness. He bulked heavy there in an oak chair, soiled and sweaty, the office thick with the scent of him, endlessly smiling, working hard at the effort of pumping the stale air in and out of his lungs.

Boo Hudson was Sheriff for twenty-two years until the signals got crossed somehow and he didn’t get ample warning of a Federal raid on some of the back county stills in
which he had some substantial interest. People talked and records were found, but over the years he had tied himself so closely to the men who run our state, and knew so much about so many existing arrangements, the worst they could do to him was force him not to run again after serving the last few months of the term of office. That was almost seven years ago, and two days after elections that year the State Prison Commission appointed him Deputy Warden at Harpersburg. We all knew it wasn’t because he needed the money. During his years in office Boo Hudson had picked up bits and pieces of this and that, some leased warehouses and a beer franchise and that sort of thing, and we could assume there was some cash money here and there, where no court order could touch it, probably rolled tight in sealed fruit jars and tucked below the frost line as is the custom among our elected officials.

“Set and tell me how you been,” Boo said.

I sat in a chair further from him than the one he indicated. “Nothing new,” I said.

“Hear Larry Brint still ain’t closed up Division Street and the women still yammering at him. Guess Brook City don’t change, Fenn.”

“It’s the only way we can operate, Boo. We got a two-hundred-cop town and a hundred-and-twenty-cop budget, so we keep all the trouble in one place instead of getting it so spread out we lose track. They give Larry eighty more cops and twenty more cars, we’ll close up Division Street right now.”

He sighed, belched and said, “Sure, sure. I tell you, we’re glad to see you around here. We’re glad to be shut of McAran. Warden Waley, he says in twenty-eight years of penol—penology, he never see a con with absolutely no way to get to him. Nearly everybody, you can work them around with the food, or solitary or the work assignment or privileges, or some damn thing, and the ones left, those you can bust them up a little until they get the news. But a guy like McAran in a place like this, he turns into some kind of hero, and it gives a lot of punks the wrong ideas, and the whole setup gets harder to run.”

Hudson chuckled in a phlegmy way. “The way you take him home, Fenn, you stop alongside the road where it’s quiet, and blow the top of his head off, and then take what’s left back to Brook City.”

“When can I have him?”

“I gave orders that when you come in somebody should go get him straightened away for leaving, so he should be brought in here any minute now.”

Hudson had just started to talk about Brook County when a guard brought Dwight McAran in.

He gave me one quick identifying glance and stood at ease, staring at the wall behind Boo Hudson, with all the massive patience of a work animal. I hadn’t seen him since that first visit. Any last trace of boyishness had been gone for a long time. His face was a visible record of rebellion, the tissues brutally thickened, white scars shiny against the dull gray of prison flesh. His coppery hair was cropped close to his scalp. It was thinning on top and turning to gray at the temples.

He was dressed in the expensive clothing he had worn when they had admitted him. But such clothing no longer looked right on him. The jacket was too tight across the brute span of shoulders, and too slack at the waist. The huge stained hands, horny with callous, hung incongruously from tailored sleeves, curled into the shape of hard labor.

“He get everything back he brang in and sign the paper on it, Joey?” Hudson asked.

“Yes, and he got the cash money balance back from commissary, a little over fourteen dollars, Boo, and signed that paper too.”