“Going to Marathon.”
“Yeah, I got that much. Y’all checked that double-super secret, double-oh-seven classified list. But what we doing?”
We’d passed about a billion cactus plants. In west Texas, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a cactus. So while we passed even more, while I thought about the time I’d stumbled over a small cactus plant at the edge of a neighbor’s yard and Mama had yanked the spines out of my calf and shin, I let his question hang. “I’m looking for something.”
“Stupid as I am...even I figured that much. The pendant...mythical and legendary. But we both be knowing that ain’t what y’all really looking for.”
“What?”
“That may be what y’all’s head is tossing up, but that ain’t it.”
I growled. “Then what am I looking for?”
He shrugged. “Ain’t got no idea, ain’t in y’all’s head. Pro’ly better that way. But why we thinking y’all gonna find it in Marathon is beyond me.”
“Might be one of the other towns.”
“One of the ones y’all already visited? You doubling back now?” He shook his head while he drove. “Bad way to go, that going backward. ‘Specially as far as y’all going.”
I said nothing.
“Why you think it’s in any of ’em?”
I stared at Cope. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Driving this here motorbike.”
“Why?”
“Well, I don’t expect y’all know how to drive it.”
I shut up and let more miles passed beneath the bike’s skinny tires.
“I know the one daddy stole that necklace from the other daddy and it belonged to the mommy, who by the way you seem to talk, might be dead so she ain’t gonna care about no necklace, but maybe the one daddy does care but the other daddy might be dead, too, soooo....” His nose twitched. “Given all that, I’m wondering why ya’ll ain’t getting the fuck outta town.”
“Wonder that myself sometimes.” I paused. “She’s dead. Ten years. Cancer. Two days before she died, she gave us the necklace...well, gave it to my step-father. It’s just a piece of junk. She got it in Mexico. It was the last vacation we took together. Took a week off from my gig—I was welding at that point—and we went as a family.”
A wildly dysfunctional family.
The pendant was the last thing there was. She’d had it around her neck even at the end, in that hospital bed, after her last shred of dignity had been sucked away by the cancer and the chemo. The last few hairs on her head had blown wildly in the stale air conditioner breeze. Even then, when she should have been thinking of something else, she was talking to me about Fagan.
“Don’t call him.” Her voice was weak, surprisingly quiet. I’d had to lean forward to hear her. I remembered being ashamed that I almost covered my nose because of how the sickness and chemo made her smell. “Stay away from Fagan. He’s a shit and a liar and probably dead anyway.”
It was her last bit of advice, meant to quell my lifelong curiosity. I’d asked about him at ten years old and thirteen years old and seventeen years old and then every year and every month and sometimes every day until she died.
“Might be junk,” Cope said. “But sounds like it’s got some good love warming it up.”
I nodded. “Fagan stole it so I’m going to get it back. It’s—well, I don’t know what it is.”
“An apology to y’all’s step-daddy, ain’t no secret about that.”
“Maybe.”
“Then what?”
Deep sigh rolled through me. “Getting out of Texas, Mexico or a freighter out of Galveston. See if I can’t figure out a way to live with what I’ve done.”
“You can’t.” Cope’s voice was nearly lost in the wind.
The list—towns and banks—was in Fagan’s handwriting. Fagan had gone through some of the Barefield and Odessa banks when we were together. The others, he had said, we would get to; called it a tour of west Texas. A tour complete with chicks and booze and dope and anything else I wanted. We never had that tour and he never told me what the other towns were. So now the list was the last thing I had to go on to find the pendant. I’d have to visit each bank looking for what I now realized was a safety deposit box.
Riding a motorcycle at night was unlike anything I’d done before. I’d had a girlfriend once who was working on a degree at Texas Tech and I’d loved making the drive from Barefield to Lubbock at night. Plunged into darkness with only the dim green from the dashboard of my Buick Skyhawk to see by. Every few miles I’d see lights stretching up the sides of an oil drilling rig. Or the occasional lights at a cotton farmer’s house. Infrequently, there was a car or truck. The only other voice was the radio. I’d felt cocooned and safe. Like a young puppy with one side against Mommy and his other side against the rest of the litter.
Riding on a bike at night was different. There was nothing around me, no steel or glass, no protection from the wind or the random stink—sometimes a skunk, sometimes the stench of an oil well—or the grasshopper that smashed into my face and teeth. I was exposed. I fucking hate that. “Damn, I wish you had a windscreen over the side car. A radio’d be nice, too.”
“Y’all mean a windscreen like this big ol’ one I’m riding behind?” Cope laughed. “And I got a radio, White-Boy Darcy. Tucked right down in here.”
“Well, turn the damned thing on.” Fill up all this empty space, I didn’t say.
“I ain’t thinking so.”
“Why?”
“Radio just fuck up my thoughts...gotta keep them straight.”
“Have they ever been straight?”
The old black man grinned, then shook his head. “Not so much.” He shrugged. “’Sides, radio all sound the same anyway. Chicago to Texas, everything coming outta that box sounds the same.”
Maybe so, I thought, but I’d give pretty good chunk of change to hear Cash’s deep rumble telling him about burning in hell or going to Jackson. Or Joe Ely’s strained voice singing about Laredo.
“He worked in radio, you know,” I said.
“Who?”
“The sperm-donor.”
Mama had said Fagan was brilliant on the radio. Even as she hated everything else about him, she said he had been good at that. Always had a laugh in his voice, always got callers on the air, always had some bit of trivia about the music. He was the best friend of everyone who listened, the guy every listener wanted to have a beer or three with.
“Worked stations up and down west Texas. Country, soul, Top 40, news. He was pretty good.”
Cope raised a single eyebrow.
“Heard him on tape once, bunch of years ago. He’d worked at KCEK with a guy named Hopper. When I was seventeen, I begged Hopper to let me hear some of the old program tapes.”
“From twenty years ago?”
“Twenty-five or more.”
“That station needs an enema, clean that crap out.”
I’d been pretty damned happy they hadn’t. It had been odd though, hearing his voice after so many years of so many bad stories. It had been deep and powerful, authoritive, so unlike my own squeaky pipes. And it absolutely had not matched the few pictures I had of Fagan. Even in his early thirties, Fagan had been a skinny, pale kid.
The radio voice didn’t match the speaking voice either, at least not the one twenty-five years later. When Fagan had appeared, the voice was still that of a skinny, pale kid.
“Hopper and Fagan got in all kinds of trouble back in the day. Drinking and dope and women.”
“Married to your moms?”
“Fuck no. She was done with his ass by then. He walked out, had the balls to stay in town for a while. Hung out with Hopper.” I laughed. “Hopper got popped for possession of stolen merchandise. Went to jail for a year or something. That was right before Fagan left town.”
“Y’all’s daddy have anything to do with Hopper getting caught?”
“Of course not.”
“Sure, absolutely.
He ain’t got nothing to do with that kind of shit.”
“Hopper was still at KCEK ten years ago. I used to stop in and see him every once in a while.” I chuckled. “Even bought some smoke off him a few times. Good stuff, too.”
“He still there?”
“Who knows. Only jock I ever knew stayed at one station for any length of time.”
Cope winked, but the wind pulled the wink sideways. “Well, if he’s got some ganja, we might have to go see him. Been a while since I had some good smoke.”
***
Two hours, later, Cope said, “What a pile of shit.”
He stood on the center line in the road, his arms out wide, as though trying to grasp the entire desert horizon. His face was toward the sky. Slowly, maybe measuring his steps out by the inch, he walked the yellow line until he became part of the darkness.
“You’re going to get splattered.”
“No chance.”
There was, in fact, absolutely no chance of Cope getting run over. Because there had still been no vehicles. Nor, for that matter, any planes above. While that was a good thing, it also unnerved the crap outta me. An entire roadway as desolate as the desert through which it ran.
Barefield was filled with desert rats, people who bathed in the beauty of the desert. While I’d never understood that particular beauty, I’d also never, until this moment, been bothered by the desolation. It was nothing new; I’d grown up surrounded by it. Scrub and mesquite, cactus. The dirt was absolutely dead, brown and gritty, and it rained once a year whether it needed to or not. Except for the interstate running into and just as quickly out of town, the roads around Barefield—maybe all the roads in Zachary County—were cracked. Great fissures opened, allowing weeds and brushwood to shove their way through. The shoulders were dotted with the remains of armadillos or snakes or jack rabbits.
Mama had been one of those desert people. She reveled in its beauty. As other Barefieldians struggled against the heat and dryness to keep their middle-America yards green and perfectly manicured, Mama had chucked the whole idea of green grass and gone with xeriscaping. Native plants and grasses, none of which needed much water.
“Looks like weeds,” I’d said once.
She had smiled sweetly and patted my cheek. “Well, that’s because you’re a gardening idiot.”
“True enough. A badge of honor, thank you very much.”
She tried to force a frown across her face, but there just wasn’t room around her grin. “Get the hell off my weeds.”
“What a pile of fucking shit,” Cope said. “How y’all live in this stinking pile of crap?”
I peered into the semi-darkness, the only light from a street light mounted near a cotton farmer’s barn, until I spotted Cope a good quarter mile down the road, still standing on the yellow line, his arms still out. He resembled a cross and the reminder of the church hit me with an open-palmed slap. The slap brought tears and I stood, lost on the side of a desert road, crying for five full minutes. Great, deep, heavy sobs from miles deep inside me, where I’d believed there had never been anything.
Never been anything because I’d never cried before. Not with any emotion or attachment, not with any guts or gusto. Yeah, break an arm on the ball field and cry. Yeah, fall out of a tree and cry. But touch some spiritual point inside me and cry? Fuck that noise.
Not even the night I’d killed Fagan. Not even when I woke up, head full of noise and confusion and pain. Not when I’d thought I had a huge wallet in my back pocket except that wallet was somehow warm and wet and there was blood all over the room.
It had never happened...except once.
A random day, two weeks after killing my father, a few days after slipping out of Barefield under a darkness that had once been safe, but was now stifling and scary. Standing in front of the Valentine National Bank, on the cracked sidewalk, the sun beating hell out of my eyes.
I had cried then.
Because I had found nothing...again. Like every bank since Barefield. No records of an account, no security pictures, no security videos, damn few employees who remembered seeing Fagan.
There had been no end to the crying then. It came and it came hard and then I fell to my knees and it came harder still and when I fell on my ass it came out in painful and messy wracks and blobs and snotty strings.
“Guess y’all having a shitty day.”
Of course Cope had been on that street, as obvious and singular in his brown robe as a virgin at a Metallica concert. The old man had slipped his thin hands and arms beneath mine and lifted me up, straight up as though that robe gave him the strength of a Mr. Universe...though a bit older and slightly withered. “Take a breath and get them feet moving.”
Maybe I had tried to sit back down, tried to find a place where I could sort through it all, but Cope had kept me moving.
“Y’all blubbering like that when the fuzz get here, y’all gonna blubber in the county lock-up.”
That had shot through the snot and tears. My legs moved, my head popped up, my hand wiped bloody snot from my nose and lips.
“No cops,” I said. “The cops can’t find me.”
“Too right about that,” Cope had said. “Y’all and me, both.”
Still it was weeks later, miles out of Valentine. Still we ran and still it was from the cops. And still those tears, shed in the middle of the damn Texas desert, burned my cheek.
“The fuck y’all crying about now?” Cope asked. He stood about fifty yards off, feet planted right in the yellow dividing line. “Every time I turn around, y’all crying.”
“The priests are dead.”
“Yeah.”
“It was a stinking pile of crap,” I said.
Cope walked toward me. “The whole church or just what happened yesterday?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yeah, yesterday was a huge pile of crap. Stinking, smelling, shitting crap. Ain’t no doubt about that. Before that though, that place gave y’all what’choo needed. Put a little salve on those wounds.”
“I don’t need any salve.”
“Yeah, okay.” Cope chuckled then stood up straight, puffed his chest out. “Me either, damnit. Don’t got no wounds, don’t need no help.”
Fuck. Who was I lying to? I had tons of wounds that needed salve. They started the moment Fagan grabbed his car keys and left us and deepened into a summertime sandstorm when he came back more than thirty years later.
Showing up and introducing himself—and why was that first conversation so hazy, wasn’t it everything I’d ever wanted?—he told a few of Mama’s old stories so that he wasn’t the liar who enjoyed putting the occasional boot to his women. Then he said let’s get back those lost years.
Cope sat on the bike now and with a neat flick of his wrist, brought it to life. The engine roared and after a half hour of silence, seemed as brutally loud as springtime tornado.
“Safety deposit box, huh?” he said. “Guess y’all gotta figure out which bank.”
“Yeah.”
“Seems kinda strange.”
“What?”
“Well, you went to college, right? For a few days, anyway. Why cain’t y’all see it?”
“Say it straight, old man.”
“Stole that pendant the night he came to get you. The night of the tattoos.” Cope shrugged. “Couldn’t’a gone and put it away before he had it, could he?”
How in hell had I missed that? No way the pendant could be in the safety deposit box. Fagan had had the pendant with him that night. Which meant it was probably on his body, whatever was left of his body, when I woke up. That body was probably long since gathered by the Zachary County Medical Examiner, cut up for autopsy and released to family or dumped in a pauper’s grave.
“Then I’m done. The necklace is probably gone.”
Cope nodded. “Pro’ly. But that don’t change nothing.”
“Meaning?”
“Sperm-daddy was still looking for something, wasn’t he? Wonder what that was.”
Feeling stupid, I stared into the scrub. The first fingers of pink light were beginning to highlight it. The sun was just beginning to crack the line of the horizon and two headlights came hard out of that dawn. The deposit box faded to the background.
“Holy shit. Where’d they come from?”
“Y’all ain’t seeing too well. I seen them days ago. Why you think I got back on the bike? Don’t need to be sitting without no working wheels that turns out to be bad guys.”
“This isn’t Chicago, Cope, not everyone is a bad guy.”
“Yeah, well, ain’t too many people driving around the highways this early in the morning, pulling off the road, going up on the land and shit.”
“What?”
“I been watching him. Pull off the road, drive around for a few seconds, get back on the road. And driving real slow, too. Gotta be Five-O.”
The car slipped into the glow of the farmer’s street light. Two tall antennas on the trunk whipped back and forth.
“Texas Department of Public Safety.” My voice felt weak, something coughed out from a throat suddenly as dry as sandpaper. “Hypos.”
“Hypos?”
“Highway patrol.”
The car answered the question. Light bar, gold outline of the state on the door, 9-1-1 highlighted on the rear quarter panel, plates that said Texas exempt.
“Yep,” Cope said. “That’d be the cops, huh?”
“Just be cool.” My stomach was guitar-string tight, and ice-cold sweat bathed me. “Just be cool.”
“As the ice in your cooler, babe.”
Cope revved the engine while I climbed into the sidecar casually, as though we hadn’t left a pile of burned bodies behind us. The cop, his posture relaxed and casual, gave us a friendly wave when he drove by.
I waved back and nearly pissed myself doing it.
Kurston.
Wearing the tan uniform of the highway patrol rather than the plainclothes of a Barefield detective and what in hell was he doing working for them and even if he was why the hell was he out here in the middle of nowhere and --
“Go. Go go go.”
“Problem, White-Boy Darcy?”
“Just fucking go.”
Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2) Page 6
