Desperation Road

by Michael Farris Smith

  “What happened, Russell? You can either tell me now or tell me later.”

  Russell lit another cigarette. “Went to my house and Larry was in there. Had a woman with me and he hit her with a crowbar or something. Thinking it was me. Then me and him got into it and I got hold of my gun and shot his ass.”

  “Cops been here yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  Boyd walked a small circle. Hands on his hips. “So. Who was she?”

  “Just a woman.”

  “It bad?”

  “Guess so. Fucking crowbar to the side of the head.”

  Boyd walked another circle. Wanted Russell to come out and say who she was without having to ask again but it didn’t seem to be coming.

  “Who was it?” he asked in a dead tone.

  Russell held his head back and blew smoke into the air. Wiped at the blood on his shirt. Then he pointed at the cruiser and said, “You got some gas in that thing?”

  “I got some.”

  “Then come on. Let’s go for a ride.”

  Russell started for the car and Boyd followed him and they got in and left the hospital parking lot, passing a police car pulling in. Boyd said which way and Russell told him to go out to the lake. They rode through and out of town in silence. The radio called out a wreck on the highway but they didn’t need everybody and Boyd told them he was checking on something at a tractor place out near Pricedale. At the lake Boyd drove slowly and waited on Russell to give him another direction and finally Russell did as he guided him to his favorite spot. The cruiser eased down the dirt road and squeezed between the trees. They stopped at the water’s edge.

  “Kill it,” Russell said. Boyd turned off the lights and the ignition. Russell got out of the car and sat on the hood and Boyd sat down next to him. He folded his arms and waited. Russell finished his cigarette and he stepped to the water and tossed it into the lake. He didn’t want to go back. He could still smell it. He could hear the shouts and threats and promises that would come his way when he returned. There were so many fights left to fight but he knew that he could take it better than she could.

  He turned and faced Boyd.

  “Got to trust each other. Told us that every day for four years, didn’t he?” Russell said. “I bet Coach Noland’s still saying it to whoever will listen. Got to trust each other.”

  “Got sick of hearing it,” Boyd said.

  “Everybody can tackle. Everybody can run fast. Everybody lifts weights. Everybody works hard. That ain’t it. Got to trust each other. Got to do your job. Do your shit. Let the other ten guys believe you’re there doing it. Believe they’re doing their job while you’re doing yours. That’s the difference.”

  “Seemed like it worked. Won a helluva lot more than we lost. And we weren’t the biggest and strongest most times.”

  “Nope.”

  “But we gave a damn. Probably more than most.”

  “Probably.”

  “But I’m guessing we ain’t out here to tell war stories.”

  “No,” Russell said. “We ain’t.”

  “Then what are we out here for?”

  Russell sat down again on the hood. Crossed his legs. Pointed out toward the water. “Right out there,” he said. “Your boy’s pistol is right out there.”

  “What you mean my boy’s pistol?”

  “You know what I mean, Boyd.”

  Boyd wiped at his mouth. Rubbed his eyes. “Shit, Russell,” he said.

  “Yeah. Shit.”

  The water lapped lazily against the bank. Boyd slapped away a mosquito. An owl hooted and something screeched.

  “And now it’s your turn,” Russell finally said.

  “How so?”

  “It’s your turn. To trust me.”

  “Don’t start with that.”

  “I’m not starting anything. I want you to listen. I mean it. Listen. You got to trust that I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I’m gonna try.”

  “Not try,” Russell said.

  “I ain’t giving you some bullshit oath, Russell. I can’t do that. You know it and I know it.”

  “Fine. Just do your best and let me finish. And don’t listen like a lawman.”

  “Then what you want me to listen like?”

  “Listen like you’re you and I’m me and that’s it.”

  “You got a shitload of rules for somebody who just pointed out where the one damn thing is that everybody in this county is looking for.”

  “You know I didn’t kill him. Damn well better know.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Nobody who shouldn’t have.”

  Russell stood again. Walked out in front of Boyd. Looked at him in the dark, at the wide silhouette of what he hoped was still a friend.

  And then he started talking.

  He told Boyd that the woman in the hospital was Maben but I’m guessing you got that figured out. Yeah the same Maben. And then he told him how he came across her. How Maben had held the pistol on him as he came out of the Armadillo and told him to drive. How she hurried the child into the truck and how shaky she was with the pistol in her hand. So shaky that I reached right over and took it away. How they had driven through the night and that was where I was on the night you kept on asking me about. Then he told him how the deputy had taken Maben from the truck stop and driven her out away from everything and what he had made her do. How when she thought it was finally over he told her it wasn’t over. Company was coming and keep your damn mouth shut. And how she panicked about Annalee left behind in the motel room and how she wasn’t going to let it end this way for them and the next thing she knew she had the pistol pointed at him and then he was down and dead and she was running.

  And then he told Boyd that she was convinced nobody would believe her and that’s why she was running and I told her she was right. Nobody would believe her. Except that he believed her and he didn’t know why or maybe he did know why but he felt like he was supposed to help her. I brought us here. All of us. Maben to running with that pistol and me and you sitting here right now. My road is the road that brought us all here led by what hand I don’t know. But here we are and I can’t let this go. It’s just her and the child and it’ll get worse and worse and some of us can take it but some of us can’t and some aren’t supposed to have to. She’s a small child. But got a long look. Like Maben. They’ve been up and down the road, Boyd. God knows where and back again. If you heard her tell it you couldn’t help but believe her either. And so I took them out to my daddy’s place and let them get some food and some rest and Sunday night we rode out here right to this spot and I took the pistol and threw it right out there. Far as I could. And I hoped that was that. But apparently it ain’t. I was putting her on a bus tonight and we were going over to my house to get her some money and that crazy motherfucker might have killed her. She’s had it, Boyd. She’s had it. And I’m telling you all this so you’ll understand right now when I ask you to leave her alone. I ain’t telling you. I’m asking you. Leave her alone. He got what he got. Let it fall.

  Boyd had sat still and quiet as he listened to Russell. And he sat still and quiet as he thought about what Russell had asked him to do.

  “It’s not so simple,” Boyd said.

  “Yeah. It is.”

  “No. It’s not. Not even. You know who’s sleeping in my house right this damn minute? A wife and two damn kids. That’s who.”

  “I know.”

  “Then don’t tell me it’s simple.”

  Boyd stood up from the hood and walked to the edge of the water. He bent down and picked up a stick and tossed it out into the lake. “I imagine there’s some people want to talk to you about now,” he said.

  “I imagine so,” Russell said.

  “How far out there is it?” Boyd asked.

  “Far enough.”

  Boyd tugged at his gun belt. Adjusted his pants. “Come on,” he said and he turned and walked to the cruiser. Russell followed him and got in.

&nbs
p; “Say something,” Russell said. “I know you got something else to say.”

  “Not right now,” he answered without looking at him and he shifted the cruiser into reverse. He backed up carefully, cutting it between two trees and then putting it in drive and they moved off the dirt road and looped back around the lake. Lights from the cabins shined on the far shore and a houseboat sat still in the middle of the lake in the windless night. They drove back to the hospital without talking and Boyd didn’t pull into the parking lot but instead stopped at the curb. Two police cars were parked next to the emergency room entrance.

  “Go on,” Boyd said. “But you listen to me now. I ain’t making you no promises and I ain’t making no deal. I heard you and that’s all. I heard you. Wish to God I hadn’t.”

  “That’s all I want. You to hear.”

  “That’s not all you want. Jesus. You got no idea what you’re asking me to do. I know you been living by a different set of rules for a while and I get it but goddamn. You got the easy part now.”

  “There’s no easy part.”

  “There might not be an easy part but I’ll be damned if we both don’t have a lot to lose. I’m thinking I got more.”

  “You might be right.”

  “I know I’m right. You think it was hell on you in Parchman? Let them throw a deputy sheriff out in that yard and see how nasty it gets. I’m guessing it’d make your time look like a cakewalk at a junior high fundraiser. Guessing you wouldn’t wish it on nobody. And that’s what’s out there at the end of all this.”

  Russell sat still and didn’t answer. He looked over at Boyd who stared at the top of the steering wheel. He didn’t know what else to say. Didn’t want to push anymore. It was out there and whatever was going to happen was going to happen.

  “Go on in there,” Boyd said.

  Russell nodded and then he got out and walked toward the emergency room. Tired now and dragging. Tender in the places where Larry had gotten him. Behind him he heard the cruiser shift into gear and drive away. He wished for a place to sit down and be alone though he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He entered the emergency room and standing at the desk were two policemen. They greeted him with the news that Larry was dead and that Maben was alive. And then they turned him around and cuffed his wrists and marched him outside. They stuffed him into the back of one of the cop cars and drove him to the station where he sat in a room with a square table and hard chairs and a cigarette and an ashtray and explained how he’d come to shoot Larry.

  50

  BOYD DROVE PAST HIS HOUSE AND ALL THE LIGHTS WERE OFF EXCEPT for the floodlight on the corner of the garage which shined onto the driveway and Lacey’s car. The small pickup that he had bought for the boys to get around in was parked along the street in front of the house. A trailer hitched to the pickup carried a riding mower and a push mower and a weed eater and a rake.

  He drove on by the house and along the street. A sprinkler left running in a front yard. A tricycle on the sidewalk and trash cans next to the curb and the feeling that there was peace in all their dreams.

  In his fifteen years as a deputy he had come to accept the fact that people did filthy, unspeakable things to one another. To those weaker than them. Smaller than them. Defenseless against them. Unspeakable things that made him sit next to the beds of his boys when they were small children. Home late and them already asleep and the knowledge of these things on his mind and sitting there in the dark listening to them breathe. Their bodies and their minds at the mercy of what was outside the door and the fact that he couldn’t walk with them every step of the way gnawing at him as he watched them sleep. Sitting there in the dark and praying that the things he had seen wouldn’t find his children and trying hard to understand a God that would allow the weakness of innocence and the strength of evil. He kept the ugliest of what he knew to himself. Unwilling to tell Lacey because he did not want her to lie awake at night and share his fears. There in the dark as he sat next to the beds of his children he could only hope and he had continued to hope over the course of the years and as the cruiser passed through the sleeping streets of his neighborhood he was reminded of this hope. The hope that there was a good out there and that it quietly protected when no one else was around to help. He was reminded of this undetectable good and how much was left to its mercy and he wondered if perhaps that mercy hadn’t presented itself on the night that the deputy was murdered. If there really was such a thing that he had always imagined there to be.

  He drove out of his neighborhood and along Delaware Avenue and he crossed over the interstate and drove out into the emptiness of those beloved back roads where so much happened. There was beauty in the depth of the sky and the black of the trees and the stillness of the empty acres. He turned off his radio and unbuckled his gun belt. Unsnapped the holster and pulled out the pistol and set it on the seat next to him. He pushed a button on the armrest and his seat leaned back and he turned off the air conditioner and rolled down the windows and the warm wind wrapped around him like the arms of a good friend. He drove farther and farther out until the random lights were gone and there was only the man and the land and the night. Safe from any approaching cars he slowed down and turned off his headlights and coasted along with only the orange glow of the parking lights leading him as if the cruiser were some alien craft examining a foreign terrain.

  He thought again of his sons. Thought of how quickly they were becoming men and he hoped they would become good ones and he wished that he had a better understanding of what that meant. He thought he had that understanding until tonight. Thought he could sit down with them in the living room and tell them what a good man was and how to become one and maybe he still could but he knew that whatever he decided to do about that pistol and that murder would somehow taint his definition of a good man. Knew that whatever he decided to do there would remain an uncertainty that would walk with him and sleep with him and go with him to ball games and cook out with him in the backyard and grow old with him.

  He had always liked the badge and the law because it gave him what was right and what was wrong and he was adrift between that by no fault of his own but it didn’t matter. He was there anyway. He held his arm out the window with his palm facing forward and he felt the wind through his fingers, hoping to get a grasp of that undetectable thing that would give him an answer and then protect him from the things that came with that answer but nothing wrapped itself around his fingers and nothing crept out of the darkness and past the orange glow and into the cruiser and nestled beside him. He held his arm out and he held his hand open and then he slowed and came to a stop. He turned off the ignition. Turned off the orange lights. Silent black in front of him and behind him and all around him. He rubbed his hands together. Rubbed them on his face. Lay his head back on the headrest. And he sat there in a daze under the weight of the crown that had been given to him.

  51

  OCTOBER. THE THICKNESS OF SUMMER GONE AND REPLACED WITH the relief of the autumn air. Russell sat in his truck in the parking lot across the street from the elementary school and watched the first falling leaves spin and scatter across the playground. He rubbed at his face and felt the softness of his beard. Thicker and fuller as if it could soften a blow if it had to. He looked in the rearview mirror and picked specks of paint out of it and then he picked at the paint on his hands and fingernails and he tried to figure out how much longer it would take him to get done with the house he was working on so that he could get paid. He needed to line up another job soon. In a couple of short months the easy fall weather would be gone and he needed to find as much work as he could before the cold and rain of winter. A child’s workbook sat on the seat next to him and he opened it and looked at her capital letters. Some of them were successes. Some had a ways to go. She has a lot of catching up to do they kept saying and he knew that even by saying this they were being nice.

  The bell rang and the double doors opened and children filed out in lines with teachers leading the way and some l
oaded onto buses and others crossed the street and made their way home along the sidewalks. Other children walked to the end of the breezeway to where the cars were lined up and one by one they disappeared into backseats. Every day he had to wait for Annalee to appear. She told him that she didn’t like going out with everyone else. That she wanted to wait until they were gone. When the crowd thinned and the cars and buses moved out into the street the double doors opened again and a woman with glasses held the door while Annalee walked out with her arms folded and her steps careful. She looked up and down the breezeway and when she was satisfied she looked across the street and Russell waved to her and then he cranked the truck and drove over to pick her up.

  She tossed her backpack in first and then she climbed in and he said hey and she asked if they could go get a milk shake. They drove down Delaware Avenue and stopped at the Star Drive-In and she got banana and he got chocolate and then they drove out to Mitchell’s where he planned to let her out and then use every minute of daylight to paint as much as he could. Mitchell and Consuela and Maben were sitting in chairs in the backyard shucking corn and dropping the husks into silver bins. He looked out into the backyard and noticed that the statue of the Virgin Mary was draped in a white sheet and he asked her what that was about. It’s a ghost, she said. A big white ghost. For Halloween. Consuela tied two sheets together. You mean sewed two sheets together, he said. Sewed, she repeated. He nodded and told her he’d be back later and she got out of the truck with her milk shake and she shut the door. She ran a few steps but then she stopped and turned around and waved at Russell.