The World Made Straight

by Ron Rash

  Leonard walked straight toward him, put his hand on the barrel, and lifted the rifle from Travis’s hands. The .22 felt light and flimsy compared to his Winchester, and it struck Leonard as nothing short of remarkable that such a shoddy piece of wood and steel could send lead deep enough into a man to kill him. For a few moments he held the rifle loose in his hands, thinking how the barrel was like a compass needle he could point in all sorts of directions.

  “You better give that rifle to me,” Carlton said.

  That was easily enough done, everything back to where it had been just minutes earlier, back to what Leonard had decided an hour ago on the trailer’s steps. But things were different now. He remembered words written during the Civil War, not by his ancestor but by a Union private the morning of the battle of Cold Harbor. The man’s entry was one line: June 3, Cold Harbor. I was killed. The soldier had indeed died that day, the bloodstained diary found in his pocket after the battle. Terrible to know you were going to die, but a kind of freedom as well, Leonard believed, because you decided it before anyone or anything else could. Your life became something more than just a life, a kind of embodied language with no present or future tense.

  “I’ll keep it,” Leonard said, and pointed the rifle at Carlton. He turned to Travis, speaking soft so the Toomeys could not overhear.

  “Get Dena and drive to the nearest house. Don’t call the sheriff. Call the Highway Patrol and tell them to get up here. Not Crockett, the Highway Patrol. Then take Dena straight to the bus station. Get her on a bus.”

  Leonard pulled out his billfold. He looked briefly at the Toomeys, who leaned against their truck, waiting. “Here,” Leonard said, handing him what bills were inside. “It’s enough to get her to Greensboro.”

  “I don’t want to leave you here with them,” Travis said.

  “I’m fine,” Leonard said. “I’m the one who’s got the rifle.”

  Travis helped Dena into the truck and they left. Leonard knew an hour could pass before the Highway Patrol arrived. Even then they might defer to Sheriff Crockett, figure it his affair more than theirs. Nothing short of murder would force Crockett to do anything besides shrug his shoulders and look the other way. Leonard stepped a few feet into the meadow. The safety was off and six bullets filled the clip.

  Carlton leaned against the truck, as if he and Leonard were friends who had stopped to banter. Hubert raised a handkerchief to his cheek and dabbed blood oozing from the slashes. The three of them stood there in silence, their hair matted, faces streaked with rain. Leonard felt goose bumps prickle his skin. The older Toomey crossed his arms, his fingers rubbing the backs of his biceps. Cold as well, Leonard knew, but not wanting to show it. Hubert alone seemed comfortable, the rain sliding off his nylon jacket.

  “We got us a real fix now, ain’t we, and there’s no easy setting it right,” Carlton said. “Though I figure giving me that rifle would be a good start.”

  Carlton took a pack of Camels from his pocket and a silver lighter. He shielded the flame from the rain and lit his cigarette.

  “Killing a man is no easy thing,” Carlton said. “If we was to rush you I doubt you’d get both of us, especially with that twenty-two.”

  Hubert stuffed the handkerchief in his front pocket, his eyes on Leonard now.

  “You won’t get away with murdering,” Hubert said.

  “I figure as much,” Leonard said.

  “A man no bigger than you would have a time of it in prison,” Hubert said. “You’d likely not last six months.”

  Leonard said nothing, just stood there with the rifle pretending he could shoot them. He wondered how long it would take for Carlton Toomey or his son to realize he was bluffing.

  “Neither of them is nowhere near worth it,” Carlton said. “I had every right to kill that boy last summer.”

  Carlton shifted his body so he no longer touched the truck. The tee-shirt was soaked now, white skin visible under the material. Carlton’s body was succumbing to gravity, Leonard realized, belly leaning over his pants like a short apron, breasts sagging. The water dripping down his flesh heightened the effect, as though his body were melting away like a candle. Except in the arms. There the muscles remained firm.

  “Don’t move,” Leonard said, and trained the rifle on Carlton’s chest.

  “I’m just standing up,” Carlton said, hands at his sides and open-palmed as if to show he hid no weapons.

  Russian farmers still unearthed cartloads of bones in their fields each spring, bones planted outside Stalingrad in the winter of 1942. Blood-rich ground, good for growing crops. Here too, Leonard supposed. He imagined the broom sedge in this meadow the summer after the massacre, how it would have been taller and thicker, tinged a deeper gold. And now more blood to be spilled in this meadow. At least fifteen minutes had passed, a good enough head start for Dena and Travis.

  “She tore into you good, boy,” Leonard said to Hubert. “Your face will look like a baseball by the time they’re through stitching you up.” Leonard smiled. “How does it feel to have a hundred-pound woman kick your ass? I wouldn’t know so I’m kind of curious.”

  “If you weren’t holding that rifle I’d kill you,” Hubert said.

  “You haven’t got the guts to kill anybody,” Leonard said.

  “Give me half a chance,” Hubert said softly. “Put that rifle on the ground. Just so you’ll have to pick it up before you can shoot. That’s all I ask.”

  “I’ll do better than that,” Leonard said. “I’ll throw it on the ground between us.”

  “He’s baiting you, son,” Carlton said. “Trying to set up some kind of self-defense.”

  “No, I’m not,” Leonard said, “I’m just seeing if your boy’s all talk.”

  Leonard tossed the rifle out before him, the gun was still in the air when Hubert broke for it. Leonard didn’t move. He let Hubert pick it up, raise the rifle and fire. The bullet clipped his arm, just enough to draw blood. Leonard stood still as Hubert took more careful aim, but Carlton jerked the barrel downward just as his son squeezed the trigger. The second bullet made a spitting sound as it struck the soggy earth at Leonard’s feet.

  Carlton wrested the rifle from his son.

  “Can’t you see the son-of-a-bitch wants you to kill him?”

  The elder Toomey settled his eyes on Leonard.

  “I know what you’re doing, and I wouldn’t mind obliging you. But not right now.” Carlton paused. “Where’s that boy taking her?”

  Leonard didn’t say anything.

  Carlton flicked the safety on, held the rifle in front of him as he stepped closer to Leonard. When he spoke his voice was weary.

  “We’re back to where we started this morning. Not a damn thing has changed except I’m more pissed off. I’m figuring you-all put Dena on the bus or the train. Get her to where we can’t find her. But that boy’s going to still be around. So like I said. We’re back where we started.”

  Carlton shifted his grip so that both hands were under the gun, as if about to return the rifle to Leonard.

  “Crockett ain’t going to let us get away with out and out murder. But there’s accidents that don’t need much snooping around about, and I’d say someone lucky as that boy’s been of late might be due for one.”

  “I’m betting they’re at the bus station,” Hubert said.

  “Is that where they are, professor?” Carlton asked.

  Leonard raised his gaze to meet Toomey’s.

  “I don’t know.”

  The big man stepped closer to Leonard. “You know.”

  Leonard seemed to hear the crack of the rifle butt against his jaw before he saw its brown blur. Then he was on the ground, his face blossoming in pain. Blood filled his mouth but his jaw hurt so terribly he swallowed the blood instead of trying to unhinge his mouth. What he couldn’t swallow oozed from his lips. A piece of tooth settled on his tongue and Leonard swallowed it as well. Carlton Toomey jerked him to his feet.

  “So. Are they at the bus station o
r not?”

  Leonard nodded.

  “Amazing how a good pop to the head loosens up a man’s recallings,” Carlton said. “I’ll do it again if you get feisty with us.”

  The elder Toomey guided Leonard toward the truck and shoved him in. Hubert cranked the engine as Carlton pulled off his soggy tee-shirt and threw it on the floorboard. Toomey’s bared flesh reminded Leonard of an infant’s skin—pink-tinged, loose, as if not grown into yet. The smoothness as well, smooth as polished marble, no welts or ragged stitching like Dena’s. The skin of a victimizer, not a victim.

  Carlton leaned forward and turned on the heater.

  “Told you to wear a jacket,” Hubert said.

  “I didn’t figure to be standing in the rain a damn hour,” Carlton replied.

  They drove south, past the church and then fields where tobacco had begun its slow rise toward September, the bright green glinting with rainwater. Leonard still swallowed blood but as long as he kept his lips pressed together the pain dimmed. He began to feel better, not just the jaw but something opening inside himself. His nose inhaled the fresh-turned earth so deeply he could taste its stored richness, taste in it the soaking rain as well. The black soil between the tobacco rows was almost tactile, as if his fingers rooted inside that cool earth.

  They passed the store and Hubert turned right, but not before idling at the stop sign a moment. Tobacco rose mere feet from the road, and Leonard saw a bead of rain hanging tenderly on a leaf tip. Leonard knew there was a scientific explanation for how it could remain round, hang as it did on the leaf, but that had nothing to do with the wonder of this one drop on this one leaf, the further wonder that he was alive in the world to see it.

  The creek widened gradually as the road began its long plunge toward Marshall, rain pooling on the roadsides now, the wipers ticktocking as they peeled water off the glass. Carlton shifted his body and his left hand flicked upward, the knuckles bone to bone against Leonard’s chin. Pain surged through Leonard’s jaw. The world receded beyond the cab’s glass and metal.

  “That’s just a love tap,” Carlton said. “If they ain’t at that bus station, we’re going to beat on you bad.” Carlton placed his clenched left hand on Leonard’s knee. “You telling us the truth, right?”

  Leonard felt the weight of the fist through his jeans. He nodded.

  “Good,” Carlton said, and lifted his hand.

  The road veered again, no guardrails for any vehicle that didn’t stay on the asphalt, nothing beyond but an emptiness like some geometric line pointed toward infinity. Pointed toward the other way to end this. Hubert took the curve fast, and Leonard slid against Carlton, then back against Hubert.

  “Don’t be trying to cuddle up next to me,” the elder Toomey said, then laughed.

  The stream passed under the road and reappeared on the right. As the road straightened briefly, a Highway Patrol car flashed by, no siren but its blue light on. Behind it came a county police car. Leonard glimpsed enough of the driver to see Crockett’s deputy, Ardy Metcalf, not Crockett himself, was the car’s sole occupant. Neither vehicle slowed to turn around.

  “Guess this hasn’t worked out quite the way you planned it, professor,” Carlton said. “But it’s near over now. We got you and Dena and that boy out on a limb you can’t jump off of. Like my daddy used to say, it’s time to piss on the fire and call in the dogs.”

  The road leveled out for a quarter mile, then began the last long curve before they left Shelton Laurel. Carlton took the roll of bills from his pocket and counted them out loud. The road narrowed, cut into the mountain, the stream so far down it didn’t appear to be moving, just a white ribbon draped around boulders.

  They were halfway through the curve when the pickup hydroplaned, two wheels sliding off the blacktop and onto the gravel shoulder. Leonard locked his hand on Hubert’s wrist and jerked down. The truck went off the shoulder and for a moment hung above the gorge, stalled midair like a ferris wheel at its apex. Hubert’s hands gripped the wheel as if the vehicle might yet be steered back onto the road. Then they were falling. Leonard let go of Hubert’s wrist and crouched so he’d hit the dash instead of the windshield. His last thought was that he’d never know if the truck would have gone off the cliff anyway.

  He came to wedged between the seat and floorboard, the sound of water close by. Each breath was a drawer of knives prodding his right side. Broken ribs, three, maybe four of them. Something behind those ribs, spleen or stomach, was also damaged. Damaged bad. The jaw didn’t hurt now, as though his body had made a choice of which pain to focus on and chose the ribs. He knew he was hurt in other places but nothing else seemed broken. He was thirsty, thirsty as he’d ever been in his life.

  Leonard could see nothing but the underside of the dash. He listened, trying to hear a moan or the exhale and inhale of breath. He heard nothing but the stream. He had to know if the Toomeys were still alive, and to do that he would have to move, and to move meant pain. Leonard slowly reached for the seat, using only his hands and arms, holding the rest of himself still because it felt as if any jarring movement or deep breath would cause the broken ribs to shatter apart like glass. The truck angled downward, making it harder to raise himself.

  Leonard waited a few minutes for the pain jagging into his side to lessen, but it didn’t. Moving couldn’t make the pain much worse, he finally decided, and though he was wrong about that, Leonard did not stop until he’d gotten himself out from under the dash. He was turned toward the driver’s side, and as he raised his head he found Hubert Toomey’s legs looming before him. They were not moving and as he held his breath and lifted himself onto the seat he saw why. Hubert’s shoulders and torso were inside the cab but his head broke through the windshield. Blood streaked the glass beneath his neck.

  Carlton Toomey was not in the cab at all. The passenger door was flung open. Leonard turned and the broken ribs probed deeper and found more pain. He tasted blood, but this time it was not from his mouth but his stomach. A drink of water, think about that, he told himself. Don’t think of anything else, just how good a palmful of water will taste once you get out of the truck. He inched across the floorboard to where the passenger door yawned open. The distance between him and the creek wasn’t as far as he feared. He eased his legs off the running board, his left hand grasping the door hinge until water swirled around his feet. He let go of the metal and the drawer of knives in his side realigned. For a few moments he believed the effort to stand had taken everything he had left. But soon his legs steadied beneath him. He worked his way around the passenger door to the hood.

  Hubert’s head stuck through the windshield like the masthead on a ship’s prow. Blood matted his hair but much more had spilled where glass shunted the neck, sourced the rivulet dripping down the windshield and pooling on the smashed hood. The elder Toomey lay ten yards downstream, sprawled face up in the shallows. Carlton’s eyes were open and his massive chest rose and fell with each slow taxing breath. The water was no more than three or four inches deep and it swirled around Carlton Toomey’s body as if he were just another rock or fallen tree. He wasn’t bleeding much, but something, maybe a broken back or shattered leg, pinned him to the streambed, kept his eyes focused on the sky.

  Leonard moved through the shallows and then onto the bank. Toomey heard him coming and the big man’s eyes shifted, revealing more white as he strained to see Leonard. Toomey’s legs trembled as he slowly folded them, pushed his head and torso enough to get his head onto the sand. But that was all Carlton could do before his legs buckled, lay heavy and still as waterlogged timber.

  Leonard stepped closer. When he stood directly above Carlton he saw it was the arms, both of them shattered at the elbow. On the right one a jagged bone broke the skin. The left elbow was swelled to the size of a cantaloupe. Both arms were crazy angled, like bent blades on a machine. Toomey’s right hand still clutched the money.

  “Hubert alive?” Toomey asked. His lips were tinged blue and he spoke through clinched teeth
. Leonard thought Toomey’s jaw as well as arms had been shattered, but then the teeth parted and began to chatter. Toomey clamped the teeth tight again.

  Leonard shook his head.

  “Figured as much,” Carlton said.

  The world blurred for a moment and Leonard’s legs almost gave way. The feeling passed but he knew he couldn’t stand much longer. He bent slowly, his right palm flat as he half leaned, half fell at the stream’s edge. His stomach lurched and bright-red blood dribbled from his mouth. Arterial blood, Leonard knew.

  “You ain’t faring much better than me,” Carlton Toomey said. Toomey’s teeth chattered uncontrollably now, making the words sound not so much flowing off the tongue as bitten off in syllables. Toomey shifted his eyes toward his right hand. “Held on to the money.”

  Leonard dipped his hand into a stream so cold it shocked like a live fence wire, his cupped hand reddening from the cold. The fractured jaw kept him from opening his mouth very wide, so half the water dribbled down his chin.

  “You better drag me out of this creek,” Toomey stammered. “I’m freezing to death. Then go flag somebody down.” The big man clamped his mouth shut a few moments to stop the chattering. He tried to raise his knees but they buckled again. “If you’ll help stand me up I’ll get to the road if you can’t manage. We could be down here a long while if you don’t.”

  Leonard kept drinking, his pursed lips sucking palmfuls of water as if through a straw, his hand going numb but too thirsty to care.

  “Get me out and I’ll give you your money and leave you be,” Carlton said. Not just his voice but his torso shuddered now, his legs rippling the shallows. “I’ll leave Dena and that boy alone too.”

  Toomey took a deep breath and released it, his chest and belly not so much rising as billowing, as though the stream’s current ran through him now. The big man shook again, more violently this time, as if having a seizure. The shattered arms were now tinged blue as his lips. “Go over there to Hubert,” Toomey said when his body quieted. “Get some of his blood. I’ll swear it on my own son’s blood.”