by Urban Waite
“Why’s that?”
Morgan found his pack of cigarettes and thumbed one out. He replaced the pack again and began patting at his pockets once more, looking for his lighter.
“Why’s that?” Drake asked again.
Morgan stopped and looked back at his grandson. “Because technically they’re not supposed to be out of prison for the next twenty years.”
“WHY DON’T YOU call him Maury?” the girl asked.
“It’s not his name,” Patrick said. “His name is Maurice.” They were sitting on the couch in Maurice’s house. The second girl was back in the bedroom with Maurice and occasionally—over the sound of the living room television turned, still, dully on—Patrick would hear Maurice say something and then he would hear the girl laugh.
“I’d be more worried about your own name.”
“Why’s that?” Patrick asked.
The girl considered the question for a time, as if weighing the outcome of her answer. “Your name is Pat,” she said, smiling at him and putting a hand across his thigh. “Isn’t it a woman’s name?”
“It’s short for Patrick,” he said. He tried to move away on the couch, but felt the girl’s nails tuck in under the inseam of his jeans and pull him closer.
“Pat, Patty, Patricia,” the girl said.
“How old are you?” Patrick asked.
“Old enough.” The girl grinned, keeping her eyes on his. She had one leg up and over him before he thought to move. Straddling him like some beast she meant to ride. “Maury says you just got out.”
“That’s right,” Patrick said. He was looking up at her where she sat. His nerves going berserk beneath his skin and the warmth from the undersides of her thighs now pressed on his lap.
“Maury is a good guy,” the girl said. “He’s a friend of ours.” She pushed in beneath his chin and he felt her nuzzle up under his jaw and begin to kiss his neck. His eyes not seeming to focus anymore, and an anxiety for the thing that he couldn’t explain, but, at the same time, elated him.
He found his hands wrapped up behind her, reaching up the skin of her back beneath the clasp of her bra, moving one way against her skin and then retreating. Something pleasurable and animal about it all, the catch and pull of his palms against her bare skin, the dig of his fingertips as they moved over her ribs. He brought his hands around and clutched her sides, pulling her into him.
All of it feeling like something beyond his control, an act of God, a storm approaching, something there was no defense for.
He ran his hands over her back and sides, tight skin everywhere on her body that he didn’t know what to do with, but at the same time felt bound up within and committed to—a man fallen into a river, fighting against the coming falls.
He’d been with only one woman since his wife died. A woman ten years younger than him and a teacher at the local school, someone who had worked with his wife, and who, at the time, taught his son. The whole experience rushed and awkward, something sudden in the backseat of a car after a night of drinking. No words spoken or heard, just the act in its barest form. Performed and then quickly pushed away, never to be spoken of at parent-teacher meetings or when their paths crossed on the street or in the grocery store.
It had been a mistake, and Patrick had thought about it often when he’d been away in Monroe. Dreaming up other outcomes and conclusions for that night, but never truly being able to put it behind in any better light.
The girl slid off him onto the floor, her two hands gripped on his belt and pulling him lower against the couch. The cool press of her fingernails inside his waistband.
He felt bubbled inside the room, like there was no outside world, and it was only here alone that he existed. The girl between his legs as her hands worked on his belt. He heard her laugh and he felt momentary fear as she pulled his pants from his thighs and over his knees. “Guess you are a Patrick,” she said, laughing still, and then standing to take her pants down and then step out of them, one foot after the other.
In that brief second he tried to think of something to say, something he thought she might enjoy. But nothing came and he looked at her body there before him, two skinny legs, her body marked red in places by the pass of his own hands against her flesh. He sat forward and helped her with her shirt until she took it in one hand and pulled it off. So much bare skin, he thought.
“How old are you?” he asked again.
“Old enough to be your daughter, or your granddaughter,” the girl said, watching Patrick, a cruel little smile on her lips. “Whatever you like. Whatever you’re into.”
His mind suddenly wanted to be anyplace but here. A desperation fighting inside of him to just get up and walk out of the house. Though he knew he never would, and that he was already committed to how things would turn out.
He closed his eyes and he felt her legs again on top of him. Different now, as she put her hands to his shoulders and eased him back.
SHE RAN UNTIL she couldn’t feel her legs anymore. Cold as stone with the pale skin slashed red with blood from the blades of wheat. She slowed, crouching with her hands bound in front of her, fingers splayed into the earth for balance. The night air on her immediately and her own heat rising from her in a pale blue tangle of mist. Not a sound behind her but the wind working through the wheat.
The road was only fifty yards on but her thighs felt heavy on her legs already. She dropped to a knee, listening to the wheat move. No John Wesley; his footsteps faded away behind her as she ran, fading away until he wasn’t there at all. Now she didn’t know where he had gone. Whether he was behind her still or ahead of her, moving around on her as she rested.
For a full minute she waited. The cold of the night everywhere now. She looked to the road, just a matter of yards away and up a small rise. She knew it would be the easiest thing to follow.
She ran her eyes over the field one more time, left to right, watching the wheat bend in the breeze. Her heart beating in her chest and an elevated awareness to everything around. Turning, she went on, slowing four or five times as she went to look behind and listen to the wheat. In the night there was nothing to tell her which way to go, no mountains to show her the way home and the moon high overhead, fixed in the sky at its midpoint.
She came to the road almost by accident, stumbling out of the wheat into a small drainage ditch. The road raised slightly in front of her. With her two hands out in front she scrambled up the loose gravel onto the pavement. Keeping low she started to move down the road in the direction she thought they had come from.
She didn’t have any way to tell if she was going the right way and for a second she turned to study the road behind. Nothing but the lightless night behind her, going on and on, her breath curling away in front of her face before it thinned into the air. The cold felt now where the sweat had begun to show and cool her skin.
She went on, the cuts on her legs tearing at her thighs and the sweat stinging her eyes. Her only hope was to find a farmhouse or town. Anything that would offer the least bit of protection.
Up ahead she saw a pair of headlights break over a low rise in the wheat and move toward her. Sheri slowed, jogging and looking behind her at the open road. She raised both hands in the hope she would be seen. The light from the car headlights now everywhere around her.
She watched the car draw to a stop twenty feet before her and the man inside get up out of the driver’s-side door. His silhouette just visible behind the glare of the headlights. His head turned toward where Sheri stood, her arms still raised into the air.
“Thank God,” she said, trying to catch her breath. The man moving out from behind the headlights toward her as she kept speaking. “I’m—” And then she stopped short.
“Good run?” Bean asked. He was almost to her now, the gun in one hand while the other reached for her arm.
She put a foot behind her, pivoting, her head half turned, and then something heavy hit her full in the face and the last thing she remembered was the numbing heat of her ow
n skull hitting the pavement.
MORGAN CAME IN out of the cold carrying a pail of stream water in his hand. His right side burdened with the weight as he closed the door, then set the pail near the stove. At the window Drake was watching the road leading away up the hill. Morgan could see also that the boy had found the old double-barrel. The shotgun and a weathered box of bird shot there on the table behind Drake.
Morgan sat and rested on one of the dining room chairs. He picked up the box of shells and examined the cardboard. He hadn’t used the things in a while. No reason to. Not enough time or energy left in his life to sit and wait for something to chance in front of him. And no one to give the meat to if he did. The rabbits and prairie dogs enough for him in the spring and summer. In the colder months his hands had begun to hurt. His fingers not as steady and the joints often aching, making the Arctic birds fat from their summer feeding harder and harder for Morgan to shoot.
Morgan knew Drake was still angry about it all. The boy had barely spoken to him in the last hour, not since he’d told him who the men were. Or, more aptly, who they were to the best of Morgan’s knowledge. Killers through and through, and Morgan knew, too, that he should be scared of them, but he just wasn’t. They had never been unkind to him in all his dealings. They had protected Patrick. And Morgan could not deny them his gratitude.
He set the box of ammunition down on the table and pushed it away from him. He looked up at Drake where he stood at the window. “What’s this for?”
“They can come into your life just as easily as they came into mine.”
“They don’t know where I live,” Morgan said. “They don’t know about this place.”
Drake stepped away from the window and sat opposite Morgan. He picked up the shells of bird shot and fed two into the bores of the shotgun. And then he placed the gun back on the table, pushing it with his fingers toward Morgan.
“What will you do if they come here?”
Drake brought out his service weapon and showed it to the old man. He put it away at the back of his waistband almost as quickly as he brought it out, looking away from Morgan until he could find his words. “I’m angry, that’s all. I’m just angry and I have no place to go. I know almost as much now as I did this morning and that’s nothing at all.”
Morgan rested his eyes on the shotgun again but didn’t comment. After a while he asked, “You and your wife have any children?”
Drake turned and looked at his grandfather and then looked away again. After a moment he said, “No,” to the empty pane of glass.
Morgan thought to leave it, but he thought he’d see it through. “You ever wonder what it would be like?” Morgan asked.
Drake stirred but didn’t say anything.
“It replaces all there ever was in your life and all there will ever be,” Morgan said. “Even if you turn your back on them the feelings you have will still exist, knowing they’re out there, knowing something that came from you is out there in the world.”
Drake got up from the table and walked to the stove. Taking his time he turned on the propane and lit the small burner. He poured water from the pail into a pot and set it to boil. “What if you found out your child murdered someone?” Drake said. “What would you do then? Would you still love him?”
Morgan thought that over. He knew why the killers had come into his grandson’s life. He knew what they’d been promised and how it was Patrick had come to possess what they were looking for.
Money. It had existed out there in the world for many years and it would exist out there in one form or another for many more. And it meant nothing to Morgan. Not a thing. “I still love Patrick,” Morgan said.
“No matter what he’s done?”
“I don’t like what he’s done. I don’t think he was right or that many would forgive him. But, yes, it doesn’t change anything in me.”
Drake took two tin cups from beside the sink and then turned to his grandfather and gestured to the boiling water. Morgan told him where to find the tea and then Drake poured and brought the cups to the table. Both sat at the table with the hot tin between their palms. Finally Drake said, “You get lonely out here? No phone? No neighbors? No one to talk to?”
Morgan told his grandson about the woman at the post office. He told him about the meal they’d had. About the way they sat and talked through her lunch hour. He told Drake about the old veteran from Walmart and how the man—even with all he’d done in his life—had seemed dissatisfied. Like he had one eye on the past and the other on the afterlife.
“I’m worried about Sheri,” Drake said.
“I know.”
“I’m not a killer,” Drake said.
“I know that, too.”
“I’ve thought about it a lot in the last few hours. I’ve thought about what I will do when I find those men—just doing it, but I don’t know if I can.” He raised his eyes and Morgan could see the worry painted on his face. “I tried to shoot a man once,” Drake said. “He put two bullets in me and sliced up my hand. I couldn’t do it. I should have but I didn’t and I think about that a lot. Reliving how it went wrong.”
“You’ve got to let that go.”
“My father told you about that?”
“He did.”
After a while Drake asked. “Are you scared? Those men out there—you worry about what they might do when they have what they want?”
“No,” Morgan said. “I imagine they’re making their minds up about all of us, but I don’t feel threatened by it.”
“You think my father would feel the same?”
“I think if he knew you were here with me, Sheri taken by those men, he’d do something about it. I think he’d have to.”
THE GIRL WAS gone when Patrick woke. He lay on the sofa looking up at the ceiling of Maurice’s living room. Night outside and the occasional wash of headlights going past on the road. He didn’t know what time it was but didn’t think he’d slept for very long. With one hand he pressed the thin sheet Maurice had given him to his waist and swung his legs to the floor. With his other hand he searched the sofa for his underwear and then pulled them on.
In the bathroom he pissed a stream of urine that smelled of whiskey, his free hand held out on the wall for balance. From the window over the sink he could see Maurice’s red pickup still parked there in the drive. The reflection of the streetlights shining brightly on the waxed paint.
Patrick ran the faucet and then cupped the water and washed his hands and face. He didn’t know what he’d thought to accomplish coming here. He only knew that he’d needed to come, that he owed Maurice that at least.
When he was done he dried his hands and came out of the bathroom. The house dark and the clock on the stove telling him it was nearly one A.M. The door to Maurice’s room cracked and Patrick stopped just beyond. Maurice a dark shadow on the white sheets of his bed. The gray pants pulled up and no shirt to cover his chest. Patrick pushed the door open a foot. “You awake?” he asked.
Maurice shifted and then looked up. “Some night, eh?”
“Yeah.”
Maurice was smiling now, a big grin showing on his face. “You won’t want to wash that smell off for days,” he said. “There’s nothing like it. You feel me, right?”
“I came here because I thought we should talk. I’m out now. I owe you. You took care of me in Monroe. I didn’t want you to think I forgot.”
Maurice pulled a cigarette from somewhere and lit it, offering one to Patrick.
“No,” Patrick said.
“I didn’t forget, Pat. I knew you’d come by. I’m glad you did.”
“I need you to help me get the money. I need that truck out there.”
“Sure, Pat. We can go in the morning. I don’t have a problem with that. I know you came here for more than just a good time.”
“It’s a lot of money,” Patrick said.
“I know it is.”
“I just thought it would be on your mind.”
“It has.” He sm
iled again and then took a long pull off the cigarette and let the smoke roll up out of his lungs into the room. “You did have a good time, didn’t you?”
Patrick watched his old friend. He hadn’t moved but to light the cigarette and he lay there in his bed. On the nightstand beside him, Maurice’s wallet, cell phone, and keys neatly stacked one on top of the other like a cairn of rocks marking a trailhead. “Yeah, the best,” Patrick said. “Better than being in prison.”
Maurice laughed again, looking around on Patrick. Smoke escaping the line of his teeth. “You’re goddamn right,” Maurice said.
Chapter 10
JOHN WESLEY LIFTED SHERI’S head in his hand, turning her one way, then the other. In one hand he held a burning log from the fire. The flicker of light playing across one of Sheri’s cheeks while the other cheek lay in darkness like a cool, worn-away river stone waiting somewhere in the recesses of a dried-out creek.
They’d picked her up off the road and put her in the backseat of the car. Now John Wesley waited for her to wake. Their fire fifteen feet off and the car door pulled open. And he could see that if she stayed with them for a day more she’d be broken. He hadn’t meant to lift her off her feet with the punch but she was such a fragile little thing and she’d come up off her toes almost like it hadn’t been him at all.
He turned and looked to the fire. Bean waiting there and the shadow he cast stretching away behind him into the trees. With one hand John Wesley closed the door, the log in his hand smoldering now and the embers beating to the pulse of what little wind there was. He’d never taken someone from their home, though he knew Bean had, and he wondered how it would turn out for all of them. The three of them now connected in some irrevocable way.
When he came back into the firelight, Bean was waiting for him, standing in the same place he’d been before. Half there and half somewhere else entirely. “Is she going to live?” A cruel smile on Bean’s face as he said it and the lapels of his coat pushed together in one hand, while his other hand reached for the warmth of the fire.
