The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (15 page)

Ras played his tongue around the inside of his mouth, poking at his cheek, making a lump on the outside that pooched out and wiggled. Geraldine felt a crazy urge to laugh. She didn’t, though. The way Ras was looking at her—like she was a mouse all right, and he was a cat, about to pounce—laughing probably wouldn’t be the smartest thing she could do.

She took a paper sack out of the cabinet under the sink and laid it on a plate. That was to absorb the grease from the bacon as she transferred it from the skillet to the plate.

“All right,” she said. “What’d I do?”

“You don’t remember.”

“I remember goin’ to bed.”

“You don’t remember gittin’ up.”

She sighed. This was getting old. “I just got up twenty minutes ago. Sure I remember gittin’ up.” She brought the plate over and set it down on the table. “Now are you goin’ to tell me what I did?”

“No—
you
are gonna tell
me.
” He helped himself to a slice of bacon and munched on it thoughtfully, smiling again. “And since I don’t have a horse to train, I’ve got all day.”

Chapter 18

In Blade’s dreams, he was running along the edge of the creek that led from his daddy’s farm to the back side of the Moses place, and the briers along the path kept reaching for him—grabbing hold of his ankles and growing fast as lightning, right up his legs. He could feel them latching on with those fishhook thorns, and he wanted to get still, so the fishhooks would stop biting in deeper. But he couldn’t stop, because there was a chicken hawk flying overhead—a great big chicken hawk, he’d never seen one so huge—and it was going to get him if he slowed down even a little, probably would get him no matter how fast he ran.

Blade had never felt so small. He must be no more than the size of a rabbit.

The chicken hawk swooped down, talons stretched out like long, curved knives. Blade didn’t want to look up. Couldn’t keep from looking up. And when he looked, he saw the chicken hawk’s face. Saw it plain and clear, and wished he hadn’t.

It was his daddy.

Blade screamed, but there was no sound, just suffocating silence. He tried harder and harder, screaming from his guts, from his toes. Helpless, hopeless, exploding inside, noiselessly; rabbits can’t scream.

The chicken hawk laughed. Raw, acid laughter. Then it dove lower, and Blade screamed again, and this time there was sound. Sound all around, shredding the air.

Blade was jarred awake and sat up with a start. Heart thudding. So relieved he could cry because the dream was over—until he realized that it wasn’t over after all, it was just beginning.

Blue had waked up, too, and was lying there snuffling, clutching the pee-stained covers. Blade told him to hush and crept out of bed.

The screaming, which had been coming from the kitchen, stopped abruptly. The next sound was even worse.

Ras had Geraldine by the neck and was bending her backward over the sink, with her face under the tap. She was struggling and gurgling. Swallowing water, and sucking it into her lungs, and trying to talk, and just gurgling.

Ras jerked her upright and leaned back out of the way while she hacked and heaved and spewed.

“How’s your memory?” Ras asked.

She coughed explosively. Shook her head.

“The horse,” Ras said patiently. “What did you do with the horse?”

Blade had come into the room by now, and his legs buckled. This was about Snowman! He’d thought that
he
was the one who would be in danger. It had never once dawned on him that anyone else might catch the blame.

Geraldine had recovered enough that she was trying to wrench away from Ras. Trying to pry his fingers off her neck. Which just made Ras squeeze tighter.

“—didn’t touch—horse,” Geraldine croaked.

Ras shook her, hard.

“Didn’t touch him, but you opened the gate and let him out, didn’t you?”

Geraldine’s face was bloodred from all the coughing and wheezing she’d been doing. Her nose was running, too.

“I didn’t—” she started.

Ras forced her back over the sink and held her head under the tap, like before. She whipped her head side to side, but it didn’t help. She still had to breathe, and the water was still running into her mouth and nose. She started gurgling again.

“Stupid sow,” Ras snarled. “I never seen such a stupid sow.”

Blade couldn’t let his daddy kill his mama, and it looked as if that was about to happen. So he grabbed his daddy’s coffee mug off the table and slung it across the room. It hit Ras in the back, right between the shoulder blades.

Ras turned loose of Geraldine and whirled around, but Blade Ballenger was gone.

Grandma Calla made what she’d said stick. Nobody could go near her horse unless they’d been behaving right and helping with the chores. Swan and Noble and Bienville were so nice to each other and everybody else all day that Willadee started leaning over and sniffing them when they went past. She said any mama knows her own offspring by smell, even if they get to acting too strange to be recognizable any other way.

And work? Those children worked. They swept the porch, and weeded the flower beds, and picked a bushel of crowder peas, all by eleven-thirty. After that, the boys washed the grungy old gas pumps with soap and water and polished them up to a fare-thee-well, while Swan used vinegar and newspaper to clean every glass surface in Calla’s store. It got so shiny around there that the customers started shading their eyes against the glare when they got out of their cars.

Every once in a while the kids would go up to Grandma Calla, and gaze at her adoringly, and tell her she was the dearest
old person
in the world and they were so glad to be her grandchildren. Grandma Calla would shake her head and tell them that she didn’t know whose grandchildren they were, but she was sure glad they’d stopped by to help out with things.

By midafternoon, Willadee decided that the kids had been good long enough. It was beginning to sap her energy, watching them zip around so fast. Calla admitted that she’d been feeling right dizzy herself, plus she’d already gotten more work out of them than she’d ever dreamed was in there.

The kids were set free, but Grandma Calla warned them again to stay away from her horse. She knew how kids can’t resist the urge to climb up on anything that’s taller than them, especially if it has a mane and a tail.

“Just think how you would feel if you was in the same shape as John,” she said. “How would you like it if a bunch of young’uns got up on your back and set right square on your sore places?”

Bienville pointed out to her that they could never be in the same shape as John, they had two legs each, and he had four.

Grandma Calla didn’t appreciate the logic. “Well, you better be thankful that’s not the only difference,” she said. “That horse has took a drubbing.”

She didn’t add (as she ordinarily would) that they could all get drubbings, too, if they didn’t straighten up and fly right. They had already straightened up, they were flying like swallows, and besides, she didn’t feel like making threatening noises that day. Something about looking at that horse, at those marks someone had laid on him, laid something bare inside her soul. This John was doing something the other John had stopped doing long before he took it in his head to kill himself. This John was bringing out the tenderness in Calla Moses.

It was Noble who persuaded Grandma Calla to let them take John along with them to the Badlands. Since they’d be tracking Outlaws through Unforgiving Terrain, they’d be traveling on foot anyway. When terrain is unforgiving, you have to squat down every once in a while and squench up your eyes real narrow, and study the ground to see whether the rocks have been disturbed, or if a bootheel has left an impression in the dust. You might also see where somebody has hawked a loogie, which is a sure sign of Outlaws. A lot of Outlaws have rattling coughs. Anyway, you can’t do a good job of tracking if you’re forever getting on and off a horse. It takes the starch out of you and slows you down.

Calla didn’t see what the harm could be in letting the kids take the horse on an adventure, as long as all they did was lead him, but she said she’d better not find out they’d been on his back.

Leading him was all they planned to do, they promised. It was all they were gonna do, they
swore.

“And we’d never break our word to a sweet little old thing like you,” Swan vowed passionately.

Calla had never been called “old” so many times in one day, and she hadn’t been “little” in so long she couldn’t remember, but she let Swan’s comment go. The sooner the kids were off in the Badlands looking for Outlaws and loogies, the sooner she could sit down and think about how quiet it was.

Ras Ballenger didn’t have to wonder how that mug came to hit him between the shoulder blades. He went tearing through the house, heading straight for the boys’ room.

Blue was sitting up in bed squalling, but for once, Ras didn’t pay him any mind. He marched over to the open window and raked his eyes across the yard. There was no sign of Blade. It was when Ras leaned against the windowsill to think what to do next that he noticed the rusty smears of dried blood on the woodwork. He licked a finger and rubbed it across one of the stains, and the color came off on his skin.

“I should’ve chunked that boy to the dogs the day he was born,” Ras said.

Ras wondered how Blade had gotten cut up when he was doing his dirty work last night. Maybe he took the horse out on the road to let it go and he fell on the gravel and scraped the hide off his arms and legs. Or maybe he ran into something he couldn’t see in the dark.

Ras wasn’t convinced that Blade could have “taken” Snowman
anywhere,
but whatever he had done with Snowman, he was going to regret it. More important right now, though, was finding Odell Pritchett’s horse.

Ras took off in his truck, and he didn’t have to go far. The first place he stopped was Calvin Furlough’s, because Calvin had a reputation for knowing everybody’s business and telling everything he knew to anybody who would listen. Ras found Calvin inside his shop, popping the dents out of the hood of a Nash Rambler with a rubber mallet, and sure enough—Calvin said he’d gone down to Miz Calla’s store earlier for some Bull of the Woods and couldn’t even get waited on, because the whole family was congregated out beside the barn, all circled around a big white horse. Finally, he’d just helped himself to the chewing tobacco and left his money on the counter.

“Sheriff Meeks was there, too,” Calvin said. “Don’t ask me why.”

Early Meeks was tearing paper matches out of a matchbook and flipping them at a cottonmouth moccasin that sat coiled on the corner of his desk with its mouth wide open and its fangs exposed. Early had killed the snake in a bog behind his house a couple of years back, and had had the taxidermist fix it so that an ashtray would fit inside the coil. In case it was true what Early had heard about the fangs of poisonous snakes being just as dangerous after the snakes were dead as when they were alive, those had been painted over with a clear sealant that was turning yellow now.

The ashtray was half-full of paper matches when Ras Ballenger stormed into the office, braying indignantly that he’d had a horse stolen the night before. He said his dogs had waked him up barking, and he’d come running out of the house with his shotgun, but by that time, the thief was lighting out of there, riding the best horse he had on the place. He didn’t shoot, because he didn’t want to hit the horse.

Early leaned back in his chair and listened, the way a lawman is supposed to. He didn’t interrupt Ras once, just let the little turd hustler tell him everything without meaning to.

“That animal was in top shape when it left my place.” Ras banged his fist on Early’s desk. “And it better be in the same condition when I git it back.”

Early scratched his ear and frowned. “You don’t think
I
took the horse,” he said.

Ras coughed and spluttered explosively. “I wasn’t accusin’ you. I was reportin’ a crime!”

“I couldn’t tell. Sounded like you was saying you’re holding me responsible for anything that might’ve happened to the animal.”

“I wasn’t sayin’ anything of the kind.”

Early looked blank. Like this was all deeper than he could fathom.

“So you’re thinking—that the thief rode the horse off your place, and maybe decided he didn’t like it enough to keep it—so he hurt it some way, just for spite—and left it where I’d be able to find it?” He scratched his ear again. “Usually, a man’s gonna steal a horse, he’ll back a trailer up to the pasture and cut the fence and load the critter on, and hightail it to the next county. I never heard of anybody going afoot onto somebody else’s property, right up close to their house, walking in amongst their dogs and all—and taking a horse and riding it out, just so he could mistreat it—and then taking off on foot again. I wonder how the sonofabitch got home.”

Ras tightened up like a spring. He knew he was being messed with, but now he had no choice except to gut this out.

“All I know is, it got stole. And it’s your job to git it back for me.”

Early smiled. It was a tolerant smile that he reserved for folks he wouldn’t piss on if they were to catch fire. Then he stood up, like a ladder unfolding. Ras reacted by pulling himself up as tall as he could, which wasn’t very. Early halfway expected him to jump on top of the desk so he could be the one looking down on somebody.

“I’ll ask around,” Early said.

He didn’t let on that he knew where the horse was, and Ras didn’t let on that he knew that Early knew. They both had their little secrets.

After Ras left, Early sat back down and tore another paper match out of the matchbook, and flipped it into the ashtray that was nestled into the coil of the cottonmouth. Through the window, he could see Ras strutting across to the curb, where the red Apache waited. The summer sun played over the little man’s bronzy skin and midnight hair, making him gleam like a shiny water moccasin.

Watching Ras climb up into his truck and gun it out of there, Early couldn’t help thinking that there was a man who was overdue for killing. When the time came, he’d be more than glad to do the honors, but there was no telling who or what was going to suffer in the meantime. He kind of wished he could do it early.