by Larry Brown
In the room she put the pistol under one of the pillows and used the bathroom. There was a memo pad and a pen with the hotel’s name on it and she put both of them into her purse. Then she went back down to the El Camino. When she got it cranked, the first thing she did was check to see how much gas it had in it.
She kept it on fifty and most cars passed her. By the time she was five miles out of town she had gotten the hang of dimming her lights for oncoming cars and watching for traffic in the rearview mirror. She thought she remembered where the turnoff was and she kept looking ahead for it, passing familiar houses and road signs, things they had driven by together so many times. What if he was home? What would she say to him now? Would she be able to look him in the face and would he be able to tell just by looking at her that she’d been with another man? And what would he say about Alesandra? All she wanted was a chance to explain.
The brown signs announcing the location of the state park showed up in her headlights soon enough and she slowed down some, looking ahead for the turnoff, lots of cars and trucks passing her now. There it was, just up ahead. She put her blinker on and touched her foot to the brake, steering with both hands, the wind coming in the window to make her hair flutter around her face. The pipes rumbled when she let off the gas and turned onto the lake road, and then they rumbled again with that low and throaty bellow when she stepped back on the gas. It hadn’t been hard to get him to bring her back.
In three or four minutes she was turning onto the road Sam lived on, and she saw the mailbox with its faded and flaking paint and turned in beside it. She stopped off the road for a minute to think. She never had gone down the driveway by herself and she went slowly, the headlights picking out the shapes of the pine trees and lighting the dark curves ahead, nosing ever lower into the forest and then straightening and climbing the hill. And then the headlights swept the side of the house and turned on the cruiser sitting there, the stripes down the sides glowing. The truck was gone. The house was black inside except for a dim glow somewhere in the kitchen. She took a deep breath and went to open her door, then stopped and put the gearshift into reverse and backed the El Camino up where the headlights would shine on the steps. She put it up in park and got out.
The night wind was warm and she lifted her face to see it move through the big pines around the house. She climbed the steps and leaned her face close to the door to look inside. That dim glow she had seen was the light in the vent hood over the stove, and she couldn’t see another light on anywhere. She knocked several times, knowing it was hopeless, knowing he wasn’t there. She leaned her forehead into the door glass and put both hands up beside her face. How long could Aaron sit there and drink before he noticed that she’d been gone too long? She had counted on Sam being here. He could have taken care of everything. They could have done something, figured something out. He could have told her what had happened since she’d been gone, if it was safe for her to come back. But now she couldn’t do anything. Nothing except leave him a note maybe.
And this little piece of paper in her purse, where would she put it and what if the wind came along hard and blew it away? Or what if Sam had been made to tell the other cops her name and one of them came along here to see Sam while he was gone and found the note? And crazy she knew to think up all this stuff but wasn’t there someplace she could put it where maybe nobody but him would see it? And she looked down the steps to the cruiser.
The damn pen wouldn’t write.
“Son of a bitch!” she said, and threw it down. She looked in her purse, knowing she didn’t have anything else. She was standing next to the cruiser and she wouldn’t be able to hear anybody coming with the El Camino idling there, those pipes. What the hell could she do? She wondered if maybe there was something she could use to write with in his car. Same damn one he’d brought her home in. She opened the driver’s door and the light came on.
There was a clipboard on the front seat and it had a bunch of pens clipped to it, one real fat pen. She leaned over and got it. The memo pad from the Holiday Inn was so small.
There was a beer carton in the back of the El Camino. She ripped off a big piece of it and wrote on the back:
Sam, I’m in Pass Christian. Across from the boats. Please come get me if it’s safe.
She looked at what she had written. It didn’t seem enough somehow. She needed to look into his eyes. The headlights shone on her and she added something else.
I love you. Be careful.
She signed her name to it and put it where he sat. She closed the door and the light went off. Then she hurried, hurried, trying to get back before it was too late.
THERE WERE ONLY three of them waiting for him. He was glad he hadn’t been drinking. David Hall was sitting behind his desk and Tony McCollum was leaning against the wall in a room full of stark bright light. The sheriff’s office was not made for comfort, just his desk and a few cheap chairs and two file cabinets. Grayton was in the corner, and he wasn’t saying anything. Their talk had ceased as he’d stepped into the room. But David came out from around the desk and shook hands with him and got him in a chair and then went back behind his desk and sat down. He cleared his throat.
“Autopsy reports, Sam,” he said, and nudged some papers on his desk as if he’d push them across, but he didn’t. “We need to know what you know about this woman they found.”
He looked at his chief, who looked pretty pissed. And he knew that he was walking on dangerous ground. If they were going to get him by the short hairs, this was where they would grab him.
“Why don’t you ask him about that girl who was at his wife’s funeral, David?”
McCollum had his arms folded and he was in civvies, boots and jeans and a pullover V-neck, but he hadn’t forgotten his pistol. It was a little one in one of those little holsters. Looked like it would be good for shooting chipmunks up close or other small varmints.
“I reckon I can handle this, Tony.”
The sheriff had one finger at the corner of his mouth. Sam had heard about the day he had jumped into a frozen pond, breaking ice to get to a little girl who had fallen in. But she died soon after he pulled her out. There was one gray streak in his black hair and he still looked like a boy. McCollum shut up.
He tried to relax. He had to remember that he hadn’t done anything to get Alesandra killed except take up with Fay. After he’d taken up with Alesandra.
“I told Tony …” He started again. “I told Tony that morning I didn’t know anything about it. I told Chief Grayton too. And that’s the truth.”
Then David acted like he didn’t want to look at him and he thought he might be in trouble. He glanced at Grayton, who seemed to be turning to stone.
“We ain’t got a single suspect, Sam.” David was nodding to himself, assuring himself that this was so. “Do you know anybody or can you think of anybody who’da had cause to do her harm?”
“Nobody,” he said. “I don’t know of anybody who would have killed her.”
Well, he’d said that. Now later if they found out about Fay they might make something of it. He had to keep her name out of it.
David cut his eyes toward Tony.
“I was told there was a girl with you at your wife’s funeral. Which I want to say I was sorry to miss. I was up in Michigan.”
“I know you were,” Sam said. He was afraid his heart was going to fail him because it felt weak in his chest and he could almost feel a hammer coming down.
“Who was that?”
“It was a friend of ours.”
It got deadly quiet. He kept his eyes on David.
“The dead woman was your friend?”
“Yes.”
“Lover,” Tony said.
“Why don’t you keep your fucking mouth shut?” Sam said.
McCollum came off the wall.
“Why don’t you fucking make me?”
Sam started out of his seat and David stood up.
“Quit it,” he said. “Go get some coffee, Tony.�
�
McCollum relaxed and walked by Sam with a smirk. He went out and his boot steps faded up the hall.
“Where’s this girl now?” David said, and he knew they had him. It was payment somehow. He never had cried for Alesandra. Had hardly mourned her. Now by God he’d pay.
“She’s gone,” he said, had to say. “She only lived with us for a while.”
“How old is this girl?” Grayton said.
He didn’t want to look at him. He had to.
“I think she’s seventeen.”
“Was she still living with you after your wife died?”
He just nodded. And Grayton’s face began to blush a deep red. He got up.
“The state of Mississippi don’t put up with this shit. I want you in my office. In the morning. Ten o’clock.”
“Yes sir,” he said, and Grayton went out. He heard him speak to McCollum out there. He looked back at David. They were going to find out now. They already knew. They were going to pull his life open and put it in the paper.
AGAIN SHE WOKE alone in a strange place. She was almost getting used to it. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark, but she could see the mess on the table from where they had eaten the hamburgers she’d picked up on the west side of town. Napkins and foil-backed wrappers were scattered on the plastic surface, the empty paper cups of Coke.
She pushed the covers back and sat up. Her head was hurting even though she hadn’t drunk anything. She wouldn’t have thought he’d be up and gone somewhere but he was. The sex had been rough and he had hurt her. She felt raw and chafed between her legs. He hadn’t even finished but had passed out lying on top of her. It had been all she could do to push him off and away from her, and she remembered that his head had hit the table beside the bed, although he hadn’t seemed to feel it.
She got up and turned on a lamp and went to the bathroom and sat down on the commode and put her face into her hands while she peed. After she’d finished she went to the sink and ran some cold water over her face and looked at herself in the mirror. She had to get to a doctor. She had to. And he’d probably be hungover now, and in a bad mood.
She found some underwear and clothes and put them on without taking a shower. All she wanted right now was some coffee. She saw her sandals on the floor beside the bed and slipped her feet into them. The room key was lying in the middle of the hamburger mess and she put it in her pocket and got her sunglasses and went out the door. For a moment she stopped at the rail and looked down at the pool and there he was, swimming lazy laps, his coffee cup and cigarettes on a table behind him. She watched him. His long muscled arms stroked through the water and his feet kicked small splashes behind him. The pool was not very big and he had to keep turning. Why couldn’t she just pack her stuff right now and walk on down the street and hide somewhere for a while? She could hitchhike back out to Sam’s and wait for him. He’d have to come back to the cruiser sometime. He’d have to go back to work sometime. But she was scared of what she didn’t know. The police. Alesandra had probably been in the papers.
He might be in trouble. It was too big a chance to take, to try and see him again. It might not even be safe to walk down the street here. She’d seen those movies where cops got people in a room and made them confess to their crimes. There was no way to know yet what might have happened. So what was she going to do? Stay with Aaron? Have this baby down there? And then do what? What if he got tired of her? Or decided he didn’t want to be around a baby? Look where Reena had wound up. Living in that little tin box.
Maybe she shouldn’t have left the note in his car like that. It wasn’t even a note. It was like a sign telling anybody who wanted to look in that window where she was and now it was a whole new thing to worry about. They might have been able to work something out, the two of them, together. They might even could have called it self-defense. She’d seen that on the movies, too. If he guessed what happened, and tried to cover up for her, it might cost him his job. She’d heard him say he was getting pretty close to retirement because he’d started so young. All those years. All that time he’d put in working before she came along. Some of it even before she was born.
It didn’t look like there was anything else to do right now but just go on back down to the coast with him, and try to make the best of it. But no matter if he was in a bad mood or not, she had to talk to him about going to a doctor. She couldn’t put it off any longer. Wasn’t going to.
He was still swimming. She went down the walk above the parking lot and turned the corner and walked down the stairs and over to the pool. When he saw her coming he stopped swimming and climbed up the aluminum ladder and pulled himself out of the water. He reached for a towel and wiped droplets from his face. He didn’t seem to want to look her in the eye. Maybe he was vaguely remembering being so rough with her in the bed. By the time she got over to him he had sat down in a chair beneath a poolside umbrella that was opened over the table and was sipping at the rest of his coffee.
“Hey,” she said, standing in the sunshine.
“Hey. You sleep good?”
“I reckon so. Where’d you find that coffee?”
He nodded toward the front and reached for his smokes.
“Up front in there past the desk. They got some doughnuts and stuff if you want some. You wouldn’t want to bring me another cup, would you?”
“I reckon I would,” she said. “Up there where you went in to get the room?”
“Yeah. Those double glass doors up there.”
She left him there and went across the parking lot and under the shade of the building, walking past the bumpers of cars with out-of-state tags, pickups with camper beds, the back ends filled with luggage and junk. It was cool inside the lobby and she smiled at the desk clerk and saw the table set up against the far wall. She found the cups and poured two of them and stirred sugar and milk into them and carried them down to the end of the table where pastries and doughnuts were. She got a napkin and wrapped one doughnut in it and found some tops for the coffee and got it all up in her hands and pushed against the double glass doors with her back and pushed her way outside.
He was leaned back in the chair with his eyes closed when she set the stuff on the table. She pulled the other chair under the shade of the umbrella and sat down. She looked at him. He was just reclining there. She pulled the top off her coffee and sipped at it. The glare was bright off the water and she was glad for the sunglasses.
“There’s your coffee,” she said.
“Yeah, thanks.” He didn’t open his eyes and she wondered if he was going to say anything about last night, how he’d been in the bed. For one frightening moment she had been reminded of her daddy and then she had made herself shut it out of her mind. She remembered his breath, the smell of the liquor that had been on it: both of them.
She drank some more of her coffee and lit a cigarette.
“I guess I got a little drunk last night, huh?”
She leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs. A fly lit on her knee and she brushed it away.
“More’n a little, I’d say. I’m surprised you’re even up this early.”
“I had to get up,” he said. “I felt so damn bad I had to get in this pool and sweat some of that poison out of me. Always makes me feel better.”
“I don’t know how you could sweat in a pool,” she said.
“Tell me again what took you so long to get back with the food,” he said, and then he sat up and opened his eyes and reached for his coffee. He slipped his shades on and drank from the cup. His other big hand hung loose and unflexed from the arm of the chair.
“I told you,” she said. “I didn’t know where I was and I got turned around. I had a hard time findin a place that was open.”
“Mm hm,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her and he was making her nervous. “Bartender was hollering last call when you finally got back. That’s midnight in Oxford. I thought you left close to ten-thirty.”
“I don’t know what time it wa
s exactly,” she said quickly, because she didn’t want him to say what she suddenly knew he was going to say.
“I thought maybe you drove out to see your old boyfriend since we’s in the neighborhood.”
“Why would I do that?” she said automatically.
He turned his head to her. “You tell me. Bartender told me it wouldn’t take you twenty minutes to go get something to eat and come back.”
“Well he knows where everything is around here,” she said. “I didn’t now where nothin was. And I was nervous drivin. I told you I didn’t have no driver’s license.”
“But your boyfriend showed you how to drive. Right?”
It was quiet out there. She could feel the heat from the concrete rising onto her legs.
“A little,” she said. “He showed me a little.”
He raised his sunglasses from his eyes and stared at her like that first night.
“Let me tell you something, Fay.”
His gaze disheartened her and she had to look down.
“What?” she said. She was scared to look at him at all now.
“Don’t you ever lie to me. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Don’t you never lie to me.”
She didn’t say anything, couldn’t think of what to say.
“Are we straight on that?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Yes, I’m sure.”
