Into the Web

by Thomas H. Cook

  I had always been the most fully relieved at my father’s departure. More than our mother, and far more than Archie, I’d sensed the explosive charge buried deep within him. Perhaps what I’d felt was the sheer, horrific potential of my father for some sudden, annihilating violence, the fact that each day, each hour, seemed to exhaust him in the containment of it. Even in his silence, perhaps most of all in his silence, I sensed a dreadful peril, so that I often felt a wave of relief wash over me when he finally spoke, especially if his words were harsh. When he called me a sissy if I complained about some chore, marveled that I didn’t have to “set down” when I peed, or barked “Get off the rag, Roy” to shut me up, at all those times, no matter how stinging the rebuke, his words always came to me like a stay of execution.

  But it wasn’t my father’s long anger that returned to me most vividly as I resumed my boyhood chores that rainy morning. It was Archie, who had always been so much his opposite, a kind, sweet, gentle boy who’d wanted so little from life and gotten so much less.

  While I swept and cleaned, he seemed near me, his schoolbooks held together by a worn leather belt as he headed for the yellow school bus on the road, the very bus on which, one bright September morning, he’d sat down next to a shy, slender girl with long blond hair, a girl who’d smiled at him as no girl ever had before, introduced herself, Hi, my name is Gloria.

  She’d just entered the high school that autumn and she must have seen Archie, tall and slender in his sixteenth year, as a worldly, experienced boy, one who knew the mysterious ways of Kingdom County High School, a boy bound for a diploma, while most all the others had dropped out of school as soon as the law allowed, and after that assumed the lives of their fathers as timbermen, quarrymen, haulers of pulpwood and scrap metal.

  To such encouraging prospects, Archie had added his crooning and guitar picking, neither particularly good, but no doubt wondrous to such a girl as Gloria, sheltered as she had always been, crushed beneath the weight of her father’s low regard. “Before Archie saw her,” Lila said to me one night, “Gloria was invisible.”

  But once seen, she rose like a comet in my brother’s eyes. For a moment I imagined a different fate than the one that had followed. What if Archie had never met Gloria? Or what if he’d met her but things had never gone so terribly awry? What if, on that snowy night, I had not seen my brother’s car parked beside the dark hedge, then pulled up beside it?

  “You made coffee yet?” my father called from behind the closed door of his bedroom, his voice like a hook, jerking me back to the present.

  I poured the coffee into a mug and took it to him.

  He was sitting in a chair covered with a ragged patchwork quilt. His hair shimmered in the morning light, curiously soft against the unforgiving features of his face.

  “You hear that dog. Barked all damn night.” He took a greedy gulp, wiped his mouth. “Just like that old dog Archie had.”

  In my mind I saw Scooter tied to a fence post at the edge of the pasture, his long tongue lolling in the morning heat, my father’s shadow flowing darkly over the grass, Archie and I following at his side. We’re going hunting, boys.

  “Gimme my gun,” he said now.

  “You don’t have that gun anymore,” I said, remembering the old pistol he’d once had but which I knew must be locked in some storage area now, tagged and marked Kellogg Murders.

  “Sure I got a gun. Twenty-two rifle. In the closet there. Bought it a few months back. Gimme it.”

  I didn’t move. “What do you want with it?”

  “What do you think I want with it? I ain’t gonna put up with that barking no more.”

  I shook my head. “You’re not going to kill that dog,” I told him flatly.

  No more than a month before, my father might well have risen from his chair, pushed me aside, and seized the gun himself. Now he glared at me threateningly, then the threat faded away. “Hell, I don’t like to sleep anyway. Waste of time. Your mother was always sleeping. Every chance she got. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Always running to the bedroom. Couldn’t face nothing. Especially that business with Archie. Couldn’t face that, remember?”

  I remembered it well. Toward the end she’d balled up under the covers, her bed little different from her grave.

  My father glanced toward the window, let his gaze linger on the dusty road. “So, what plans you got today, Roy?”

  “I don’t have any plans.”

  “Not expecting to get ‘caught up’ in nothing?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  He gulped the last of the coffee, then thrust the cup toward where I stood beside his bed with such sudden force, I stepped back quickly.

  “You act like you seen a rattlesnake.” He shook his head. “Jumpy. How come you’re always so jumpy, Roy?”

  When I gave no answer, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about Lila.”

  “You’re not going to bring that up again, are you?”

  “Not what we talked about last night, no. Just that I knowed Lila’s brother. The one that died. Named Malcolm. Pale as a sheet most of the time. People called him Puker. ’Cause he was always throwing up. At work. In church. Hell, nobody would sit next to him. TB, people said. TB got him. This was before Lila was born, of course. Speaking of dying, what happened to that man up there? That Spivey feller?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  He looked at me doubtfully. “You ain’t got no idea at all?”

  “There was a gun next to him. And there was blood on his face and mouth.”

  He suddenly grew very still. “Lila know him?”

  “I suppose she did. He lived on her land.”

  “They wasn’t related, was they?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then how come you went up to her house?” “That was Lonnie’s idea.”

  The mention of his name seemed to fill my father’s mind with an odd suspicion. “What’d he say? About going up to Lila’s house?”

  “Just that Spivey lived alone. On Lila’s land and so she—”

  “-Must have something to do with that feller being dead.”

  I shook my head. “Lonnie didn’t give any indication of—”

  “Snooping after dirt,” my father interrupted. “His old man was always up in Waylord doing the same thing. Snooping for dirt on people just like Lonnie’s trying to get dirt on Lila.”

  “Why would Lonnie want to ‘get dirt’ on Lila?” I asked.

  “Them Porterfields don’t need a reason to go after somebody.”

  “He was just doing his job, Dad,” I said, eager to drop the subject and thereby sidestep the enmity that seemed the very bedrock of my father’s life.

  “Lonnie’s going after Lila,” my father said with absolute certainty. “You better go see Lila. Let her know what Porterfield’s up to.”

  “You don’t have any evidence that Lonnie’s up to anything,” I reminded him.

  “Maybe so, Roy, but it wouldn’t hurt, you going up to have a word with Lila.”

  “What’s on your mind, Dad? What’s this business of me going up to see Lila all about?”

  He appeared to search for a lie into which he could retreat but found none, and so perhaps answered with the truth. “I just figured maybe you two could start up again. You’d like to do that, wouldn’t you, Roy? I mean, you ain’t never really give up on her, have you?”

  What had never ceased to amaze me was how right my father could be, how clearly he could see the mark, hit it with a word or look. He had read a thought I’d barely perceived myself, that I’d never wholly given up on Lila. But I’d also learned that fruitless love is just another added ache, and so I’d learned to think of Lila like a character in a book, distant and unreal. In an instant, my father had seen all of that, how carefully I had worked to rid myself of Lila, and how fully I had failed to do it.

  “It ain’t too late for you or her to … get together,” he said.

  “Yes, it is, Dad. I’m not going
to get involved with Lila Cutler. I’m not going to marry her somewhere down the line. I’m going to teach school in California, live alone in a small apartment. That’s my future. I know you don’t like it, but you might as well accept it.”

  My father’s eyes lowered slightly, and he released a soft breath. “Okay,” he said. “I just figured she probably still loved you, that’s all. In that way, I mean, that you do just once.”

  “I’m not sure she ever loved me like that.”

  “Seemed to,” my father said. “From the way she looked at you.”

  He meant the night I’d brought her to meet him, the only time he’d ever seen us together.

  “Bet she cried her eyes out when you left for college,” he added now.

  “Why can’t you let this go, Dad? About Lila and me.”

  He looked vaguely insulted by my question. “Because I’m your father, and it’s my job to make a difference. To maybe say that you don’t have to live the way you do, Roy. That maybe it ain’t too late for you and Lila to—”

  “Why are you so intent on Lila being the one I should marry, the mother of my children, and all that?”

  “ ’Cause I know she’d be a good one. Wife and mother. Comes from good stock.”

  “Good stock? She’s not a heifer, Dad.”

  “Don’t answer me in that smart way, Roy.”

  “You know the point I’m making.”

  “Well, here’s my point,” my father said. “I know Lila comes from good folks. ’Cause I knew her mother back in the old days. Betty Cutler. She was the best friend of another girl I knew. Girl I used to squire around a little. Deidre, her name was. Deidre Warren. And, like I said, Betty was her best friend. Always together, them two. People used to say it like it was one name, like they was just one person. ‘Here comes Betty-and-Deidre,’ they’d say. And sure enough, there they’d be. Betty-and-Deidre out for a stroll. Betty-and-Deidre having ice cream at the company store.”

  “So this was when you worked at the mine?”

  “That’s right. Betty was a miner’s daughter. A miner I worked with back then. Harry was his name. Big feller. Cussed all the time.” His eyes lowered to his hands again, the mangled fingers that he couldn’t shape into a fist. “When you started going up to see Lila, I knew who she was. Knew she was Betty Cutler’s girl. From good stock, like I said. Salt of the earth.” He nursed his thoughts briefly, then added, “I guess this thing with Spivey, him living on Lila’s land, I guess that brought it all back. Them old days up in Waylord.”

  During the long summer of our courtship, he’d never said a single word against Lila. The reason had always seemed obvious to me. Lila was a girl from the hills, from fabled Waylord, a girl whose family name my father had instantly recognized. A pretty girl. A smart, lively girl. From the first glimpse of her, he’d given every evidence of being pleased to see her, even honored by the fact that I’d presented her to him, though even then he might well have guessed why I’d done it. That it had come from my need to show him that I’d won a girl more beautiful than my mother had ever been, a smarter girl, more ambitious. I’d waved Lila like a red cape in my father’s face. Take that, I’d thought as I’d drawn Lila beneath my arm, Take that, old man.

  She’d worn a dark green dress that night, her long hair falling to her shoulders. My father had risen from his chair to greet her.

  “So you’re Lila,” he said. He drew the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, slapped a bit of tobacco from his taut belly. “Excuse my appearance. I wasn’t expecting Roy to bring nobody by.”

  “That’s okay, Mr. Slater,” Lila said gently.

  “You’re mighty pretty.” His gaze was oddly wistful.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  A light burned softly behind his eyes. “Take care of her, Roy. You only get one chance.”

  “He seemed nice,” Lila said later.

  Even as she’d uttered the word, I’d seen his shadow like a stain on the grass as he’d handed Archie the pistol, Scooter barking madly now, twisting about, his tail wagging furiously, a memory that had sent a poison through my nerves.

  And so I’d told Lila the story of how, several years before, Archie and I had run away, then related the gruesome details of what my father had done about it, the terrible punishment he had devised. “Nice?” I’d repeated starkly at the end of it. “Believe me, Lila, you don’t know him.”

  Nor had I ever known him either, I thought now, watching as he withdrew back into himself, lighting his first cigarette of the day, waving out the match.

  “Leave me be now,” he said.

  I nodded and left the room, and with it the old mystery of my father, the coal-black stone from which he had been formed.

  Chapter Six

  I was sitting in the living room, trying to close out the steady drone of the television in my father’s bedroom while I read one of the books I’d brought with me from California, when the phone rang.

  I knew that my father would make no effort to answer it, and so I walked into the living room and answered it myself.

  “Morning, Roy.”

  “Morning, Lonnie.”

  “Your daddy get through the night okay?”

  “Some dog kept him up.”

  I could tell by Lonnie’s voice that he hadn’t called to check on my father. Something else was on his mind.

  “Listen, Roy,” he said, “I’m at my office here in Kingdom City. I got Lila Cutler down here.”

  I pictured her as she’d looked the last time I’d seen her, in that white dress with the long blue sash, eighteen years old, with dark red hair that hung over her shoulders, a crinkle in her nose when she smiled.

  “She’s not saying much,” Lonnie went on. “Won’t tell me anything about Clayton. That’s why I’m calling. I thought you might drop by this morning, talk to her a little bit.”

  Before I could protest, he added, “Look, Roy, I let something slip. To Lila, I mean. When I was talking to her this morning. I let slip that you were back in Kingdom County. When I told her the story about Ezra finding the body, then going up to Jessup Creek. It just slipped out that you happened to come along. And the thing is, it had an effect on her.”

  “Lonnie, I—”

  “No harm in you coming by, right? Talking to her?”

  I could have gotten out of it, simply told Lonnie that too much time had passed, but something fired in me, perhaps no more than the odd, inexplicable need we sometimes feel to open that book we’d long ago shoved into a corner of the closet, gaze at that one photograph again.

  “All right,” I said, giving no hint of what had actually determined my decision.

  “Thanks, Roy. See you in a few minutes.”

  My father gave every intention of being entirely captured by an episode of Petticoat Junction when I walked into his room.

  “I’m going out for a while,” I told him.

  His eyes stayed fixed on the screen.

  “You need anything before I go?”

  His gaze fell to his hands. His fingers uncurled, then curled again. “Listen here, Roy,” he muttered. “I’d like for you to stay gone awhile. I just want to be by myself.”

  “All right, Dad. If you’re sure you won’t need me.”

  “Dead sure,” he said.

  Though it served as the county seat, Kingdom City was little more than a street along which shops and offices had been built, most of plain red brick. There was a barbershop complete with a twirling barber pole, the only sign in town that actually moved. The rest were made of tin or wood, with a smattering of pink or pale blue neon. Mr. Clark still had the drugstore I’d worked in as a boy, but Billings Hardware, where Archie had worked, sorting nails, stacking paint, mopping the floor, was now in other hands. I could still recall Mr. Billings’s face in the days following Archie’s arrest, how baffled he’d looked that the boy who’d worked for him, meekly obeyed a thousand petty orders, could explode so suddenly.

  But it wasn’t Archie I thought about that
morning. It was Lila as I remembered her, a girl who’d seemed to take life as a dare.

  You don’t believe me, Roy? You don’t believe I’ll do it?

  At first I’d thought her reckless, but it was really a fierce certainty that she could triumph over anything that drove her forward. I couldn’t help but wonder what the woman would be like now.

  Lonnie was outside his office when I arrived, propped back in a metal folding chair, a red Coca-Cola machine humming softly at his right. His cruiser stood freshly polished and gleaming a few feet away, the words “Sheriff Only” stenciled in bright yellow on the asphalt pavement beneath its rear bumper.

  “I should be doing some paperwork, but it’s just too damned hot inside,” he said as I came toward him. “I been trying to get the county to buy me an air conditioner, but they won’t do it.” He tipped forward in his chair. “Thanks for coming in, Roy. I appreciate it. I really do.”

  “I doubt I can be of much help.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Lonnie said. He grinned. “Seemed to me like I caught a little spark there, buddy. A little spark still burning for you.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Where is she?”

  “First cell on your right.”

  “She’s in the jail?”

  Lonnie chuckled. “No, ’course not. I mean, she is, but the cell’s not locked. Just a place for her to sit until she goes back home.”

  “So she can go home anytime she wants?”

  “Well … no … not exactly. It’s a protective-custody sort of thing. ’Cause she wouldn’t say anything. About Spivey, I mean. She identified the body, but she wouldn’t answer any questions about him. Not one. And no matter how you look at it, Clayton Spivey died under mysterious circumstances, which means that until Doc Poole takes a close look at the body, I got to assume there could have been foul play.”

  “What does any of this have to do with keeping Lila in a jail cell?”

  “Like I told you, Roy, it’s not locked. Of course, if you prefer, I could arrest her.”