The World Made Straight

by Ron Rash

  “What happened?” Leonard finally asked, and Travis told him, including what he’d done to the Toomeys’ vehicles and pot plants. When he finished Leonard looked not at Travis or Dena but at the mountains rising beyond the trees. Some of the oldest mountains in the world, geologists claimed, older than the Alps or Andes or even the Himalayas. Leonard had an almost consoling thought—that in one hundred years, a mere blink in geologic time, whatever happened in the next few hours would not matter at all, that everyone involved would be little more than dust.

  “I don’t want them finding you before I settle this,” he told Travis. “Go up to Shelton Laurel. They wouldn’t think to look for you there. I’ll come get you when it’s safe.”

  “What about Dena?”

  “Take her with you.”

  “I ought to help settle it,” the boy said. “It’s my doing.”

  You’re sure as hell right about that, Leonard thought, but it seemed useless to say so aloud.

  “Go,” Leonard said.

  “We got to get these clothes off first,” Travis said. “It’s making us both sick just smelling ourselves.”

  “Take them off right here,” Leonard said. “Use the hose and do it quick. I’ll get you something clean to wear.”

  Leonard expected the boy or Dena to say it was too cold, but when he came back out Travis had stripped, shivering as the hose sprayed water over his hair and body, dripping like a dog as Leonard handed him a towel. Travis dressed quickly, teeth chattering as he yanked jeans on, slid his long arms into a plaid flannel shirt.

  “Crank your truck and get some heat on you,” Leonard told him. “I’ll take care of Dena.”

  He helped her undress, letting the clothes puddle on the grass where they fell. The bracelet he’d won at the fair clinked softly. She had lost weight and the metal dangled loosely on her bony wrist. Loose like a handcuff, Leonard thought. The cold water waked her, Dena’s eyes blinking before narrowing into focus.

  “No more,” she said, her teeth chattering like Travis’s. Leonard threw down the hose, patted her torso and limbs with the towel. He had come to believe her incapable of crying, but now tears streaked her face.

  “Just get me to the bus station in Marshall,” she said.

  “I will, but not just yet,” Leonard said.

  “Don’t tell them where my sister lives.” She clutched his arm now, her long fingernails digging in, leaving half-moons. “Promise me that.”

  Finally, he thought, believing this was what Dena had searched for much of her life, degradation even she could feel was undeserved.

  “I won’t tell them,” he said.

  “We got to get to the bus station quick,” she said, still clinging to him.

  “You can’t go that way,” Leonard told her. “You’d run right into them.” He helped her into the sweatshirt and pants, but it was a slow matching of limbs and openings, clumsily accomplished, like dressing a child. She shook violently. Leonard got her in the cab and turned the vents so they blew directly on her.

  “You have to go with Travis,” he said, draping his coat over her shoulders. “I’ll get up there soon as I can. When I do we’ll get you to Asheville.”

  “What are you going to do?” Travis asked.

  “Settle this in a way nobody gets hurt,” Leonard said. “Go on. I’ll come soon as I can.”

  Travis cranked the engine and the truck disappeared into the woods. Soon Leonard heard the pickup on the main road, gears downshifting as it rose toward the higher mountains.

  He sat down on the steps and waited for the Toomeys. Fog clung to the trees, moving serpentine in the wood’s understory, laying down a low smolder across the pasture. Rain by noon, lasting the rest of the day, the radio announcer had said, but rain was already settling in, letting the fog come first, transforming the landscape into a vast blank whiteness. Bringing with it what it always brought, a quietness like no other, every sound muted, more distant. Almost as though the fog loosened the world at its seams, made everything drift farther apart.

  The kind of day the dampness seeped straight into your bones, Leonard thought. Scawmy was the word the old people used to describe this weather, and many believed that on such days the dead got restless and roamed the living world. Leonard’s grandmother had seen her decade-dead husband on a morning like this. She’d looked out her kitchen window and seen him standing by the barn, dressed in the clothes he’d been buried in, the fog like a shroud unfurling around him.

  Billy Revis had returned to Madison County in May of 1865 barefoot and near starved, bringing with him only a haversack and what rags of butternut still clung to his skin. But before he had set foot in his own house, he had stood on Doctor Candler’s front porch. When Emily Candler came to the door, he’d opened the haversack and removed the ledger he’d carried with him for two years. He’d handed it to her and spoken a few words before leaving the porch for his cabin on Spillcorn Creek. Leonard knew there had been plenty of times the ledger could have started a much-needed fire, or perhaps been bartered for food, or simply left behind to lighten that final monthlong walk from Virginia. But Revis had brought it back, a final act of friendship for the man he’d helped bury in Tennessee.

  The wooden cross Revis had placed on Doctor Candler’s grave was long gone. The coffin rotted away as well, if there’d even been one, for Revis had told the widow only about the cross and where her husband was buried. Maybe a few brass buttons left. Some shards of bone. Leonard’s grandfather had gone to Tennessee late in his life to visit the cemetery. He’d found only a clearing in the woods, had known at first it was a graveyard only because, as in so many old cemeteries, periwinkle skeined green and glossy over much of the ground. Nothing else remained but a few lichened creek stones smothered in a sprawl of briars and scrub pine, whatever had been scratched into the stones long ago worn into anonymity by wind and rain.

  LEONARD HEARD THE TOOMEYS’ TRUCK BEFORE HE SAW IT, coming fast up Highway 25 before bouncing and swerving up the washout to the trailer. Hubert drove and didn’t brake until he was only a few yards from the trailer. Leonard did not move as the truck’s front wheels bumped the lower step and halted, the two men’s faces looming large behind the windshield as though suspended in water.

  “Stay put,” Carlton Toomey told his son, then got out. He wore only a white V-neck tee-shirt, faded gray pants, and work boots.

  “We can settle this here and now,” Leonard said, standing up.

  “Can we?” Carlton said. “My car’s down at the bridge, but I don’t see that little pissant that slashed my tire and rooted up my money crop.”

  “I’d say five hundred for a slashed tire and the bother of replanting is fair,” Leonard said.

  “That’s your figuring, is it?” Carlton replied. “Must be some of that new math they’re teaching in schools these days, for it don’t buck up to the price I’d calculate.”

  The trailer door was open and Leonard pointed behind him at the gun rack. “The Winchester and scope are worth two hundred easy and I got a Colt pistol worth two hundred. I’ll add the five hundred cash to that.”

  Carlton stared carefully at the fingernails of his left hand, as if they held some information he needed to consider before answering. Then he looked back up, his face expressionless.

  “OK,” he said. “Just don’t be all day about it.”

  Leonard paused, expecting Carlton to follow him into the trailer.

  “Go ahead,” Carlton said. “Like I said before, you’re smart. I know you ain’t about to try nothing.”

  Leonard got the guns, emptying the clips before he went back outside. As Carlton put the guns in the cab, Leonard crouched and pulled a cinder block out from behind the trailer steps. He took from its hollow center a tight-wrapped plastic grocery bag, inside a roll of bills thick as a fist.

  “I don’t have much truck with banks neither, professor,” Carlton said, “but that’s near the sorriest place to hide money I’ve ever seen.”

  Leonard stri
pped off five hundred-dollar bills from the roll and placed the rest back in the plastic bag.

  “That’s a good start,” Carlton said as he took the bills. “Now where’s Dena?”

  “She’s gone,” Leonard said.

  “Gone,” Carlton said, placing his boot on the second step. “You best hope that’s a lie.”

  “You don’t own her.”

  “Yes, I do. I own her body and soul till she pays me the fourteen hundred dollars she owes me.”

  Carlton Toomey tilted his head slightly to the right, as though wanting to see Leonard from a different angle. He looked at Leonard the same way he might some strange creature he couldn’t quite believe existed.

  “You know something, Shuler. It ain’t like I went out hunting for all this bother. That boy came on my land to take from me. Not just once but four times now. Dena done the same. She came because she wanted my pills. The difference between you and me is that she’s going to by God pay for what she took from me.”

  Leonard motioned toward the Plotts.

  “I’ll give you them as well. They’re worth a thousand easy.”

  Carlton Toomey snorted.

  “They might of been before you turned them into pets instead of bear dogs. Now if you was to talk some real money, say the rest of what you got in that bag, we might could do us some business.”

  Leonard said nothing.

  “I figured as much,” Carlton said. “You’re just like Dena and that boy, expecting something for free. But there ain’t nothing in this world for free. Nothing.”

  He stepped closer to Leonard. Though Toomey stood on the step below they were eye to eye, making Leonard feel even smaller, as if the big man had lifted him like a child and set him on the step. Last night’s whiskey soured Carlton Toomey’s breath.

  “Look professor, this ain’t no hard thing to figure. Even if she’s on a bus or train, that boy ain’t. He’s got nowhere to go and I’ll make it my business to find him. Your choice, the boy or Dena.”

  One of the Plotts rattled its chain and whined. The dogs were hungry, but that would have to wait. The chain rattled again. Leonard remembered the carny telling Dena her name on the bracelet would keep her from forgetting who she was. The Toomeys had taken so much else, even her bridge, but they hadn’t taken the bracelet. Leonard wished they’d taken everything, the bracelet, her name, her life. Put it all in a hole in the woods and covered it with dirt and leaves.

  “OK,” Leonard said. “Follow me and I’ll take you to her.”

  “No,” Carlton said, “you ride with us.” His right hand latched onto Leonard’s wrist, held it firm while his left took the bag. Toomey stuffed the roll of bills in his front pocket, gave the empty bag back to Leonard.

  “I rechecked my math and realized I’d forgot to add a surcharge for the pain in the ass this has all been,” Carlton said. “And one more thing. You make damn sure that boy never threatens to put the law on me again, because if he does I will kill him.”

  Leonard got in the truck, the Toomeys’ wide shoulders hemming him in as they drove down to the blacktop. The windshield wipers had worn off their rubber coating, and they made a steady rasping that reminded Leonard of another sound he could not immediately place. Then he knew—a knife blade being stroked across a whetstone. Hubert turned left and downshifted as they began the climb toward Shelton Laurel.

  “Think we ought to try and replant?” Hubert asked.

  “No. That pot’s more trouble than it’s worth,” Carlton replied. “We’ll make do with the pills.”

  The road steepened and curved, wrapped itself tighter to the mountain, the drop-offs like falling off the world. A soft steady rain smudged the windshield, rain that was in no hurry. They turned left on White Rock Road. A car pulled out in front of them and Hubert slowed. They rode the car’s bumper until the blacktop straightened. Hubert pulled into the other lane, halfway around the car before he saw a gray pickup coming from the other direction. Hubert swerved in front of the car, forcing it to brake. The pickup blared its horn.

  “Damn, boy,” Carlton said. “You about laid us out in our coffins for sure.”

  “The truck was hard to see,” Hubert said. “It blended right in with the fog.”

  The road fishhooked left before straightening again. They drove past the house where Leonard had parked in January, beside it a freshly planted cornfield. A scarecrow, ragged black coat billowed by the wind, appeared to levitate above the broken soil. They followed the blacktop another mile until it looped back and ran beside the meadow. Hubert stopped next to the historical marker, directly behind Travis’s truck.

  Dena jumped out of the truck and ran toward the creek. Hubert jerked the pickup back into gear and drove into the meadow. He reached through the open window, grabbed Dena’s hair, not letting go until she fell to the ground, leaving a hank of hair in his hand. Hubert braked the truck and got out as Dena slowly rose to her feet. She didn’t try to run but waited in a half crouch.

  When Hubert got close, Dena’s right hand slashed out. The nail on her index finger broke the skin on his neck, then the necklace. A small shattered rainbow spilled off the thread. Hubert grabbed her right arm and Dena raked her left hand’s nails across his face, four reddening furrows opening in his left cheek. One nail broke off, embedded in the younger Toomey’s cheek like a sliver of glass.

  Leonard got out of the cab and watched as Travis ran into the meadow to help her. Carlton pulled the hawkbill from his pocket, let the boy see the blade.

  “Come any closer and I’ll cut on you some more,” he said.

  Dena kept slashing at Hubert until he slapped her hard enough to knock her to the ground. She tucked her knees to her chest and did not move.

  Hubert prodded her with his boot.

  “Get up,” he said. “We’re going home.”

  But she didn’t rise, remained instead tightly curled, letting her weight be a last resistance as the Toomeys dragged her to the truck as if she were nothing more than a feed sack.

  “You lied to us,” Travis shouted as he walked toward Leonard. “You said we’d be safe here.”

  Leonard saw that Travis had grown an inch since summer, fleshed out some as well in the shoulders and chest. His face had assumed a squarer, fuller shape. No longer a boy but a man. Leonard wondered how he hadn’t noticed until this moment.

  “Why did you lie?” Travis said when he stood directly in front of Leonard. “Why don’t you do something?”

  Because I never have any other time in my life, Leonard almost replied.

  The Toomeys lifted Dena into the passenger side of the cab, then came around to where Leonard and Travis stood. The right side of Hubert’s face was a red smear, several of the slashes deep enough to need stitches. Hubert touched his face and looked at the blood on his fingers as if unsure it had really happened.

  Carlton closed the hawkbill and stuck it in his pocket. His eyes settled on Travis.

  “You keep getting yourself ass deep in trouble and then wait for somebody else to save you. You probably figure yourself to be a cat with nine lives. Well, messing with me you’ve done used up eight of them.”

  “Let’s go ahead and be done with them both,” Hubert said.

  “Damned if I’d need much persuading,” Carlton said. “But you pretending to be Richard Petty made sure everybody in this valley noticed our truck, and piece of shit that it is they’d likely figure it to be us.” Carlton Toomey shook his head. “There’ll be another time. These two can’t seem to help themselves.”

  Travis’s eyes remained on Leonard as the Toomeys spoke. The boy was shivering, his eyes wide and wild. Leonard stepped closer, reached out his right hand, and let it rest on Travis’s shoulder.

  “It wouldn’t end up any different for her,” Leonard said gently. “Only a different place, different people.”

  For a few moments Travis just stared at him, then broke free of Leonard’s grasp and ran to his pickup. He reached behind the seat and brought out the .22. As he
walked toward them, he thumbed back the safety.

  “You ain’t about to make it easy on yourself, are you, boy,” Carlton said.

  “Give me the rifle, Travis,” Leonard said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were a Candler?” Travis shouted. The rifle had been aimed at the gap between Leonard and Carlton, but now it pointed in Leonard’s direction.

  “Because it doesn’t matter.”

  “If that was true you wouldn’t have hidden it from me,” Travis said, his voice almost a sob. The rifle trembled in his hands.

  “Damned if it don’t look like he’s going to shoot the whole covey of us,” Carlton said to his son. The two men laughed.

  “Because it would have changed things between us,” Leonard said. “It shouldn’t. You and I weren’t here when the killing happened. But it would have.”

  “Take that popgun away from him, Hubert,” Carlton said. “I’m tired of standing in the rain like some barnyard rooster.”

  Travis aimed the rifle at Hubert.

  “You little prick,” Hubert said. “If it had been up to me I’d of killed you last summer.”

  “Damned if I haven’t come around to your way of thinking on that, son.” Carlton turned to Leonard. “A nit always makes a louse, right professor?”

  Leonard stared at Carlton Toomey. For a few moments no one spoke or moved, as if each awaited some cue from the others as to what to do next. The rain fell harder, a pale curtain that blurred everything outside the meadow.

  Leonard stepped between Hubert and Travis.

  “Get out of my way,” Travis said, aiming the barrel at Leonard’s chest.