“Hey!” Neely called.
Casey ignored him. He needed to sit. He needed to eat. This would be the longest half mile he could ever remember, but he wasn’t about to stop to rest. Not now. Or stop to have a conversation with a drunk.
“Hey!”
He would sleep hard and long tonight. Tomorrow he would decide what he would do about the Teagues. Since the sheriff obviously wasn’t going to do anything on his own, Casey had to make up his mind how far he was going to push this. Make the complaint and force the law into at least making a show of caring? Wait a couple of days and maybe do a little peace-keeping of his own? Forget the whole damn thing and hope there wasn’t a recurrence?
“Hey, I’m ... I’m talking to you!”
Whittaker Hull wanted to know what he knew, but he didn’t think he knew anything. What was there to know? What did it matter to him anyway? Did he really give a damn?
“The horses, goddamnit!”
He stopped.
“I want to ... I want to know if you was listening for them damn horses again!”
Ah ... hell, he thought; oh ... hell.
But when he looked back, Dub Neely was gone, nothing at the end of the trail but a faint glow from the water, and a darkness that looked all too much like a wall.
* * * *
2
By the time he reached the edge of the woodland, twilight had turned to dusk, and he had used up all the curses he knew, aimed at the stupidity for walking so far so soon after he’d left his sickbed. His breath came in short gasps, pockets of sweat gave him shuddering chills, and his eyes weren’t working quite the way they were supposed to. As if he had to walk through a world just out of focus enough to give him a headache if he looked at it too long.
Slowly, unsteadily, he passed between two of Cutler’s rental houses and grinned at the sight of Midway Road. Nothing spectacular, it hadn’t been miraculously paved while he’d been gone, but it meant that, if he had to, he could crawl the rest of the way home and not lose too much skin in the process.
A bonus, then, when he saw Rick Jordan’s truck parked at the shoulder in front of his own place. Jordan himself sat on the lowered tailgate, legs swinging lazily, cigarette in one hand, his head drooped low as though he might be napping.
“Rick,” he called, and winced at how weak he sounded.
Jordan dropped to the ground, arms slightly away from his sides as he searched for the voice. Nodded when Casey called him again, and wandered over, a hand in his hip pocket, the other flicking the cigarette away.
“No answer,” he said, nodding toward the house. “I thought maybe you got yourself snatched or something, and holy shit, Chisholm, where the hell have you been, you look like holy hell.”
Casey shrugged nonchalantly. “Just went for a walk on the beach.”
“The beach?” Jordan stared at the houses, the trees beyond, measuring the distance. “You out of your mind?”
“Yes,” Casey said, and laughed. “Come on inside, I have to sit, and sit fast. You can tell me—”
“Can’t,” Jordan said. “I have a date with Ronnie, and if I don’t get cleaned up in a hurry, she’ll sink me in the marsh.”
They stopped at the pickup’s hood, Casey resting a hip against it.
“So?”
“So, I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to, Rick. Not yet anyway. Did you find out?”
Jordan pulled a bottle of pills from his jacket pocket and handed it over. “Supposed to be antibiotics and painkillers and stuff, right?”
“Right. That’s what...” He scratched under his chin. “Alloway? Yeah. That’s what Alloway said.”
Jordan took off his cap, slapped it lightly against his leg before jamming it back on. “Now I really don’t get it.”
Casey looked at him hard.
Jordan flinched apologetically. “Hey, sorry.” He pointed at the bottle. “Valium.”
“What?”
“That’s what the man said. Valium. You know, it—”
“I know what it is, Rick,” he said sharply. “What I don’t know is how it did what it did.”
“Hell, that’s easy. There’s enough there to make you stupid for the rest of your life. Kind of.” He shook his head, kicked lightly at a tire with a heel. “Man, I didn’t know half of what the guy was talking about. I always thought it was, you know, what shrinks gave you to calm you down. You know, nervous rich lady stuff. I didn’t know it helped if you were having a fit or something, things like that.”
Casey turned the bottle over and over in his hand. “Neither did I, Rick. Neither did I.”
“That dose there, though, it’s enough to ...” He laughed shortly. “Hell, I already said that, didn’t I? So how come, huh? Why’d the man lie to you?”
Casey didn’t know.
Jordan started for the truck door, stopped, and shook his head. “You really don’t know?”
“Nope.”
“You find out, you tell me? I have to admit, I’m awfully curious.”
“You and me both, Rick. You and me both.” He tucked the bottle into a palm, rolled it back and forth. “And thanks. Thanks for doing this. I owe you one.”
“Nah. No sweat.” Jordan opened the door and climbed in, then stuck his head out the window. “You might want to move over there, Casey. You don’t need being run over on top of everything else.”
Casey moved, but slowly.
More questions, and he was getting angry because he was too exhausted to think them through.
“Something else,” Jordan said after he started the engine.
“What?”
Jordan pointed up the road.
Casey turned and saw, almost hidden in the dusk, a car parked at the bend.
“They came to see you,” Jordan explained. “From the looks of them, they got themselves beat up pretty good, too.”
“Who are they?” he demanded. “Rick, who—”
But Jordan had already pulled the truck into a tight U-turn, the engine and muffler too loud for talk. A hand waved over the roof, and the pickup was gone. Casey stared after it, the pill bottle tight in his hand, then stared at the car until a door opened, and a man slid out.
“Casey?”
He couldn’t see clearly, didn’t recognize the voice. Too tired to be tense, too confused and suspicious to answer. The only thing he was sure of was that Rick wouldn’t have left him if there was any threat.
He hoped.
Then he heard another voice: “Casey? Reverend Chisholm?”
Oh my Lord, he thought; oh my sweet Lord.
He reached out with his free hand for something to hold on to. All it found was air, and it was still fumbling when Cora Bowes exploded from the car and ran toward him, crying, hands and arms flapping, until she fell against his chest and he had no choice but to hold her.
“Cora,” he said, his voice deep and husky. “My God ... Cora.”
* * * *
a lifetime ago in a world dead and buried, three kids pulling a prank, and he’d caught them and lectured them and laughed and sent them on their way and one was dead and two were ...
two belonged to a lifetime ago
in a world dead and buried.
* * * *
He held her tightly, too stunned to speak, too many things abruptly awakened. Anger and joy and despair and the realization that he was about to fall. He held her more tightly, looked over her head, and saw someone hurrying toward him, arm in a sling tight to his chest.
His eyes widened.
He grinned despite the wail of failure that begged for his attention.
“I’ll be damned, Reed?”
Reed Turner, heedless of his injury and ignoring Cora, fell against him too, clumsily, his good arm trying to encircle the larger man’s back. He wasn’t crying, but he couldn’t speak.
Too much, Casey thought; this is too much, I don’t... dear God, I can’t—
“Casey, it’s good to see you again.”
The
man was tall, lank, and once he was close enough and Casey could see his face and that jumble of hair, he squeezed Reed and Cora so tightly they gasped and squirmed and squeezed him back.
“John,” he said flatly, no emotion left in him.
Bannock nodded, almost sheepishly. A half turn to indicate the woman waiting hesitantly near the car. “That’s Lisse Montgomery, Casey. She and I... well, we kind of had an adventure. We, uh ... we ... you were right, you know. When you called that time? You were ... hey, are you okay?”
He wasn’t, and he wasn’t about to play the role.
“The house,” he said, blinking heavily. “I think you guys had better help me to the house.”
* * * *
4
O
n a mountaintop in Tennessee he sits on the great black and scowls at the twinkling lights of a large town spread across the far horizon, at the lighted roads that lead to it. He pushes at the brim of his hat until the hat rests above his forehead. His old-leather gloved hands are folded over the saddle horn. Leather creaks when he shifts. The bridle sings when the black bobs its head.
Beside him the long white car idles almost silently.
The driver’s window is down.
The passenger window is down, and Joey, his hat off, sticks his head out and frowns.
“I felt something,” he says.
Red nods. “Yep.”
“It didn’t work, huh?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“How can it not work?”
Red brushes a thumb over the pale stubble on his cheek. “Sometimes it just don’t.”
“That’s stupid.” And Joey yelps when Eula smacks him across the back of his head, yanks him back inside, and forces him to change seats with her.
“I apologize for the child,” she says.
Red nods. Just once.
“Still, it seems ... odd, don’t you think?”
A gentle criticism that makes him swing his head around. There is no expression on his face, and she looks straight ahead, hands in her lap. Waiting for an explanation.
The black stamps a hoof and backs up until Red and Eula are even.
“We’ve been doing this a long time,” he says.
She nods. Just once.
“Maybe ... don’t rightly know, but maybe we’ve kind of had it a little easy.”
No reaction.
Joey whimpers.
“Maybe... maybe we tend to forget we are what we are. We ain’t no more than that.”
She looks at him for a long time before, at last, she nods, reluctantly, the possible truth of it.
“Maybe,” he says quietly, “I was wrong.”
No response.
None at all.
Then Susan says, “Together.”
The black shies.
emerald sparks and scarlet fire
“No more trying to even the odds, okay? because there aren’t any odds, Red. There’s only us. There’s only them.”
He takes a slow deep breath, and when he exhales fog is born on the ground, curls around the black’s hooves, rises in patches and puffs above the white car’s tires, spreads down the mountainside and soon smothers all the lights of the city and the roads.
“Yep,” he says, and pulls his hat down. “Yep.”
“Good.”
He smiles. Not quick now; it lasts.
And Joey scrambles over Eula’s lap, looks up at him, and says, solemnly, “I want to play.”
When Red laughs ...
... down in the city, a thousand people scream.
* * * *
5
1
E
arly Wednesday afternoon, Lyman Baylor stands in the center aisle of his church, imagining the pews filled for Friday’s Christmas as they had been on Thanksgiving, imagining himself up there in the pulpit, his words of such force and conviction that no eye is left dry, no soul left lost, no lips left without a smile.
So what do you think, Dad? he thought; you think I’m throwing it all away now?
The sun has reached the front of the building, slips into the nave from a small round window over the choir gallery, taking his shadow and stretching it toward the large cross hanging from the ceiling. There is little warmth left; the church is damp and chilled, but he’s used to it, that’s part of the building’s character—no matter how hard the furnace works, there’s always someplace that doesn’t quite get the heat.
Behind him the front door opens.
“Ly?”
“Here,” he answers.
Kitra, in a light topcoat that matches her red scarf, comes up beside him, takes his hand. A scan of the empty pews, and she chuckles, hugs his arm, sweeps her free hand across the nave. “You remember?”
He does.
The wedding had been a disaster. Not content with being scornful of his mission, neither had his family been silent about his choice of mates. Too beautiful, they said; turn too many heads, they said, and you know that means temptation; too stubborn, they warned, too sure of herself; her mind doesn’t think the way yours does, son, and she’ll have you in grief before the honeymoon is over.
They said.
As a result, his side of the aisle had been sparsely attended, while hers was hardly attended at all. Her family, although they liked him well enough, couldn’t see the winner of an important beauty pageant spending the rest of her life tending to the needs of a cleric and his charges. And a Methodist, for God’s sake, her despairing father had said; couldn’t he at least, her mother said, couldn’t he at least be one of those rich Episcopalians?
The outdoor reception had been rained on.
The honeymoon reservations in Bermuda had been lost, and it took two of their six days before they were able to regain their room without threat of having to move somewhere else.
And he had gotten so sunburned on the beach that he couldn’t lie on his back for almost a week.
He squeezes her hand. “They’re right, dear. It can’t last. I’m sorry.”
“I know.” She kisses his cheek. “What a pity.”
“So where are you off to?”
“I’m going to drop in on Mr. Chisholm. I can’t believe he sent everyone away like that. How will he manage?”
Lyman looked at her, frowning. “You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“He has company.”
She steps back, a hand to the flat of her chest, and he wonders why she’s gone ever so slightly pale.
“Company? Who?”
“I don’t know, not exactly. Whittaker told me that Ronnie told him that....” He laughs. “Sounds like a game of telephone, doesn’t it?”
Kitra’s smile is so clearly forced he can’t help but wonder again.
“Anyway, I think there are four of them. Two couples. Rick Jordan met them on the causeway and brought them in. And that,” he says with spread hands, “is all I know, dear. Torture won’t get you anywhere.”
There is a moment, a heartbeat long, when the silence is too loud. Then she takes his elbow and says, “Well, then, I guess you’ll just have to take me to dinner, Ly. I’m all dressed up with no place to go.”
“You,” he tells her fondly, “are strange.”
A swift kiss, which makes him look guiltily toward the altar, and they walk side by side to the door.
“I think I’ll talk about friendship on Sunday.”
“Yes?”
“Sure. This time of year, so many feel so despondent, so alone, as if they don’t have any friends, and they always forget the best friend they ever had.”
Kitra hugs his waist. “You’re amazing, Lyman.”
“Not really.”
But he’s pleased. Very pleased that the color is back in her cheeks.
“I’ll meet you at the car,” he tells her on the stoop. “I just have to lock up.”
Riders in the Sky - [Millennium Quartet 04] Page 26
