(2008) Down Where My Love Lives

by Charles Martin

  Amos pulled off his T-shirt and finally spoke. "Need to work on my tan. Been pushing too many pencils lately." He pulled his Kimber and holster out from behind his belt and laid them on the raft. After he finished his sandwich, he lay back and pulled his baseball cap down over his eyes.

  We spent an hour in quiet.

  AS THE CICADAS AND TREE FROGS TUNED UP THE PSYCHEdelic afternoon, Amos spoke. "We're taking 'Manda to and from work. She doesn't leave the house without one of us going with her. We've rented the house across the street, and some of my guys stare out the windows toward us at night."

  I stared at him.

  "No, she doesn't know that, but short of leaving town, it's the best we can do." He shook his head. "I've never staked out myself before."

  Amos was pretty good at giving me only what I needed when I needed it. He was both friend and brother, but I needed more. I looked across the raft. "Amos, tell me about these guys. I want the whole story."

  "As Pastor John told you, he got mixed up in some pretty bad stuff. Started out as petty theft in and around Charleston, but given time, and their appetites, it went up and out from there. They had warehouses all over the state stuffed with everything from diamond rings to classic cars. They were smart." He shrugged. "At least they started out that way. Like most criminals who can't keep a secret and love showing off how cool they are, they got greedy and sloppy. Really sloppy.

  "They were hitting a jewelry store. Pastor John was the inside man. The other three were parked outside in a car, doping it up and waiting on the signal from John, when an offduty police officer stumbled onto them. He smelled the dope, knocked on the window, and the driver, a fellow named James Whittaker III, self-proclaimed leader, rolled down the window, stuck a 9mm in the cop's chest, and pulled the trigger. John ran to the window, saw the car leaving pretty fast and a man lying in the street surrounded in streetlight-red. Our guys, having just pulled over a DUI about two blocks up, got there within a few seconds. When they arrived, they found a dead friend, the wiped-down Glock that the bullet had come from, and John Lovett crawling out the jewelry store window carrying a bag worth about a quarter of a million dollars."

  I gulped.

  "It gets better from there. While John Lovett was trying to explain to investigators how the dead police officer ended up in the street, the other three were feeling their oats. They crossed the state line into Georgia and went out boozing. James, along with two brothers named Antonio and Felix, started buying drinks all around and soon caught the ear of an FBI agent who happened to be in the bar trying to cheat on his wife. An hour or so later, another shooting occurred. This one is a little fuzzy, but according to witnesses, James wrestled the Bureau guy's .40 out of his hand, shot him, then shot the bartender 'cause he wasn't bringing the drinks fast enough. One of the brothers grabbed a bat from behind the bar and started swinging it at people. When the shouting stopped, three more people were dead, and the Three Musketeers drove off into the night.

  "They ran out of gas an hour or so later on some forgotten two-lane. Too drunk to walk, they evidently got into a wrestling match, and all three passed out in or near the car. When daylight came, a soccer mom reported the car, along with the three guys sprawled around it, and an hour later they were booked in Georgia.

  "It didn't take too long for investigators to put it all together. And while John was very much guilty of grand theft, he was not guilty of murder, nor was he an accessory. During the trial, the prosecution cut a deal, giving him a lesser sentence if he would simply state what happened that night. He did." Amos paused. "He also told them about the warehouses."

  Therein lay the problem. Amos had told me several times that criminals don't forget, and they certainly don't forgive.

  "When John identified his buddies as the three in the car, along with the locations of their warehouses, he received seven years, serving only four for, oddly enough, good behavior."

  Amos dipped his hands in the river, washed his face, and then stood, letting the droplets cascade down his neck and shoulders. "Antonio and Felix got eighteen years, serving eighteen. James got life and served up until last month when his case was brought up for review by an ethics board. They were investigating the activities of the officers, who they thought were too bent on revenge and not justice for the death of their fellow officer, which they say colored the trial proceedings.

  "The day you and Maggie saw us leaving the courthouse, we'd been watching video footage of the proceedings. It showed James marking on the table with his fingers, writing `promises' to John Lovett and family. Seems James isn't too happy about having spent two decades in prison."

  Amos pulled out the Oreos and offered them to me. I shook my head. He popped the lid on one, licked off the white center, and then ate the two chocolate sides. He did that for about eight cookies and then fed one to Blue, who was inching across the raft.

  "And another thing," Amos said, "prison `law' dictates that when someone rats on you, what they have becomes yours. That includes people."

  After Blue and Amos polished off the Oreos, Amos tore open the wrapper and laid it in front of Blue, who chased it around the raft, wagging his tail and licking the plastic clean.

  I looked at my watch and knew I needed to check on Maggie.

  Amos put his arm on mine. "'Manda's at the house. Brought some dinner. She'll be okay."

  I lay back down and watched the clouds roll overhead.

  Amos stared down the river, then at me. "You gonna be okay?"

  I shrugged.

  "What's the doc say?"

  "Says it might take some time."

  "How much?"

  "Who knows? Technically, we're waiting to see if her other ovary can do the work of two. When he closed her up, he wasn't too sure, so in a sense we're just waiting for her next cycle." I tossed a twig into the river. "If it happens, we'll know it's working. If not, Frank says she'll have to substitute with oral hormones. We'll know in two, maybe three weeks, give or take."

  Amos nodded and popped another root beer. "Can you make it that long?"

  I thought quietly. A month ago, we were crying at the sight of blood. Now we were hoping for it.

  "Don't know."

  Amos shook his head and then turned toward me as if he were afraid to ask. "What happened to her hair?"

  I shrugged. I held out my hand, palm up. "Right now, life feels like it's just sand sifting through my fingers."

  We walked back to the house in the twilight. When we got there, Pinky was grunting at me from inside the barn, so I dropped a bucket of corn in her trough and tried to rub her behind the ears. She rolled in the mud, shook her ears, and rubbed her four hundred-plus pounds against me. It was more of a shove than a love-rub. She wedged me against the stall, ground her muddy haunches against me, and snotted me. She was raising her leg when I hopped out of the stall.

  Amos raised an eyebrow. "I thought you two had reached an agreement."

  I brushed myself off. "That ended when we sold the piglets. Now she's back to being the devil."

  "Can't say that I blame her."

  "Feeding pigs ain't cheap."

  I crept up the stairs, cracked the door, and peered into our bedroom. Maggie lay in bed, cocooned inside the sheets and sleeping. A pillow covered her head. I leaned my forehead against the doorjamb.

  "Maggs, I'm taking Amos home. I'll be right back."

  I heard a shuffle beneath the sheets, a creak of the bed, but no verbal response.

  Amos loaded into the van for a ride home while I walked across to the house and grabbed the keys off the kitchen counter. The kitchen had been cleaned-Amanda, no doubt-but the nursery door was shut, as it had been since we got home.

  Blue met me on the porch, and I pointed to the barn. "Stay." He whined and looked at the van. I knelt down and rubbed his muzzle and neck. "I know, buddy. Me too. But she needs you right now. You hang out here and keep an eye on things." Blue circled, curled into a ball, and kept an eye on the barn.

  The r
ide to Pastor John's house was quiet. Amos said little, and I said nothing at all. I pulled up; he hopped out and leaned against the door.

  "Next week, at the station house, we're having a boil. Pastor John wants to thank all the guys. You two are invited."

  I nodded. Amos patted the top of the van, shut the door, and walked inside, where Amanda met him at the door with L.D. perched on her hip. Amos lifted him up. L.D.'s face lit up like a floodlight, and I drove off into the night. Alone.

  I drove home the long way. Twenty minutes later, I pulled into Digger's outdoor amphitheater and cracked the gate. I walked down the aisle toward a seat in the middle. Clouds covered the moon, and the darkness blanketed me, so I bumped my knee on a few seat backs and tripped over a cup brimming with old rainwater. I tried to see the stage, but only the outline appeared. I sat a long time, listening, but I heard no pipes.

  Toward midnight, I climbed back up the hill and cranked the van-a sound I had yet to grow accustomed to. I needed to go home, but I didn't. I drove past the church, but the bulldozer had already been there. Only the foundation remained.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled into Bryce's drive and walked up the hill. I smelled the remains of a burnt-out trash fire, but when I prodded the coals, they were cold. I walked to the film house and checked the door. It was unlocked. I read the titles, grabbed a film canister, and loaded it into the machine. I hit the power switch, turned on the reel, and walked to the center of the field in front of the screen, where I leaned against an iron pole, the microphone just above my head.

  I have a hard time watching John Wayne movies in which John Wayne dies. As a result, I don't usually watch The Cowboys, The Green Berets, The Alamo, or the one now rolling on the screen, The Shootist.

  It's a simple story really. It was also the Duke's last. He plays a famed gunfighter named J. B. Books who rides into Carson City in 1901 to visit his old friend Doc E. W. Hostetler (Jimmy Stewart) in the last days of his life. Books is trying to hang up his pistols after he discovers he's dying of cancer, but like Poncho and Lefty, gunfighters aren't allowed to grow old. Only their legends do. Occupational hazard, I suppose.

  I lay in the grass, my head resting against the pole, and watched as J. B. checked into the boardinghouse where the proprietor, an attractive widow named Bon Rogers (Lauren Bacall), and her son Gillom (Ron Howard) keep their distance and listen to the rumors surfacing about town. As the cancer eats at his body and the thought of a long, slow death eats at his soul, a few of the next generation of killers seek him out for a final fight. Then and now, what made watching more difficult was knowing that the Duke himself actually had cancer while filming, and it would be that same cancer that killed him soon after.

  The movie continued through scenes of doctors' visits in which the Duke refills his prescription for laudanum to the scene at the barbershop in which the barber saves hair clippings to sell and then to conversations in which we learn that the undertaker plans to exhibit his corpse.

  I lay on the grass and watched as the Duke walked into the bar. Even then, I wanted to scream like Gillom, "No!" The Duke bellied up to the bar, saw the flash of metal in the window's reflection, turned, and stood heroic one last time.

  When my grandfather and I first watched this movie on television in the late seventies, I could not understand why the Duke turned his back on the bartender. I knew that he knew the shotgun was under the bar. There's always a shotgun under the bar. As a kid, I jumped up off the floor and screamed at the television, "The shotgun under the bar!" But the Duke did not hear me, and he did not hear Gillom.

  As I grew older, I understood. It was for that very reason he'd chosen the bar. The gunfighters couldn't get him; he was too good, and he knew it. But he also knew that if he turned his back, there'd be no way the bartender could miss. And he didn't.

  Maybe death by shotgun was better than death by cancer. Maybe it still is. When the Duke fell against the bar, I jumped up off the ground and turned my back on the screen, walking down the drive while Gillom finished off the bartender and the end of the reel slapped the machine.

  WHEN I GOT HOME IT WAS NEARLY THREE THIRTY IN the morning. All but the barn spotlights were out, and Maggie had left the sprinkler on. I walked around back, turned the spigot off, and in the dim light saw them a second time. Footprints.

  I pulled a flashlight from the van, pinched it between my teeth, and crawled on my hands and knees alongside the house. There weren't as many this time, but they were there. And since Maggie had turned on the sprinkler after I'd left, the prints had been made sometime between when I left to take Amos home and just a few minutes ago.

  I heard a stick crack in the pasture not forty yards from me and froze. Then I heard it again, followed by a shuffling and another crack.

  I slid up onto the porch, unlocked the front door, and crept down the hallway to my writing closet. I unlocked it, slid my shotgun off the floor, and quietly worked the action, sliding a shell into the chamber. I grabbed my larger Maglite, like the kind Amos keeps in his undercover truck, and crept back outside. I belly-crawled off the porch, along the azaleas next to the spigot, and out over the grass next to our house.

  When I neared the edge of the pasture, my heart was pounding so hard inside my chest that I thought it would explode out the front. Slowly I stood, holding the flashlight snug against the barrel and pointed in the same direction. I had yet to click it on, but I could with a flick of my thumb. The sound of cracking twigs had moved, maybe another forty yards closer to the river. It was slighter now, not so loud, and when I stepped into the rows of corn, it stopped altogether. With the wind at my back and rustling the leaves of the cornstalks that were two feet above my head, I stood and waited. I heard another shuffling, as if someone were crawling more quickly now, and still the sound was moving away from me toward the river. If he got to the river, he'd be gone. If I could head him off, or get to him first, I had a chance.

  I stepped out of the cornfield and circled, the shotgun on my hip and the flashlight and barrel in my hand. The more quickly I moved, the more rapidly the sound out in front of me began moving through the corn. We were mirroring each other. The edge of the corn narrowed like a triangle toward the river, so given our current path, if I took off running right this second, we'd meet at the river. The moon had popped out from behind the clouds and threw my shadow on the dark grass before me. Trying to quiet my heart, I took a deep breath, gripped the shotgun more tightly, and took off running down the side of the corn rows.

  Whoever I was chasing did the same, crashing through the corn like a bulldozer, trying desperately to get out the other side. The river was now just a hundred yards off, and based on the sound moving toward me from my left, he'd get there before me. I tried to run faster, but the grass was knee-high, and I'm not a very good sprinter in cowboy boots. He increased his speed, smashing through the corn, and every few seconds I could hear him breathing. Within forty yards of the river, I pulled up, the oaks on my right, corn on my left, and a small field of grass spread out before me and rolling down into the river.

  North of me was Old Man McCutcheon's property, south of me a few hundred yards lay my son's grave, beyond that a couple of miles sat the church property, and sitting at a dead stop not ten yards from me in the corn, breathing heavily and sounding winded, sat someone who'd been peeping in my windows. I clicked off the safety, shouldered the shotgun, and placed my finger on the flashlight button. Unable to control either my breathing or my pounding heart, I stood and waited.

  The barrel of the shotgun was moving wildly around the sight picture. I stared off into the darkness, trying to see the movement of outlines or images. Then a dark flash caught my eye. Followed by another. I looked straight at it and lost it entirely, so I looked at it out of the corner of my eye and saw the huge form crawling on his hands and knees out of the corn. He crawled out into the grass, trying to hide in the darkness, and when I was certain he had cleared the corn, I fired a shot into the air. The shot rang out and echoed acros
s the river, turning me momentarily deaf, and the smell of burned gunpowder stung my nose and eyes. I quickly and loudly chambered another round, aimed at the shape, shouted, "Stop!" and clicked on the light.

  Standing broadside, in all her corn-fed porcine glory, stood Pinky, a half-eaten corncob wedged between her teeth. She eyed me, sniffed the air, grunted, and ambled back into the corn, her big ears flopping happily alongside her. I watched her curlicue tail disappear into the corn, sat down on the ground, and breathed for the first time in five minutes.

  I clicked on the safety, flipped off the flashlight, and lay down in the grass before I fell over. A couple of minutes later, I sat up, dusted myself off, and laid the shotgun across my shoulder. Then I stood, turned toward home, and ran square into the chest of a rock-solid man.

  I dropped the shotgun, the light, and half my bladder before Bryce reached out and grabbed my shoulder. His face was painted in black and green stripes, and into his clothes he had tucked parts of cornstalks. He looked into my eyes, stared over my shoulder, sniffed me, and placed his .45 back into its shoulder holster beneath his left arm.

  I picked up the flashlight and clicked it on, waving it wildly around the night and finally centering it on Bryce. The most striking feature was not the clothing, the cornstalks, the face paint, the sidearm, or the old scope dangling from twine around his neck, but rather his feet. His bare feet. I shone down, up, and down again. When I finished involuntarily emptying my bladder, I clicked off the light and said, "Bryce?"

  He blinked. His voice was quiet and calm. "Dylan."

  I stepped closer. Not smelling the fumes of alcohol I'd come to expect, I said, "You okay?"

  Bryce nodded, checked the position of the safety without even looking, and handed it to me. The pungent smell of warm urine reached my nose and, evidently, Bryce's, because he grabbed the light, shone it on the front of my pants, and then clicked it off. He handed it back. "You?"

  I took a deep breath, sat down again in the grass, and collapsed onto my back. Just then I heard the barn door slam and saw Maggie walk beneath the fluorescent glow of the light from the telephone pole that lit the yard between the barn and the house. Wrapped in a blanket, she strained her eyes, looking toward us.