Country Dark

by Chris Offutt

  “Honey,” Tucker said.

  “Say it again. You ain’t called me that in a long while.”

  “Honey pie. Honey cake.”

  “I missed you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry I was gone so long.”

  “Why were you?”

  “Had some trouble inside,” he said.

  “What kind?”

  “You seen them scars on my chest and back?”

  Rhonda nodded.

  “That kind,” he said.

  “Couldn’t you let it go?”

  “In the pen, there ain’t nowhere to let stuff go to. I’m back now.”

  “I’m glad of it,” she said. “I wish I had my babies back, too.”

  “I been thinking on it. We can try.”

  “How?”

  “Build an extra room on the side. Buy some fancy hospital beds. Get whatever it is they say we’re needing for the kids. Medicine and whatnot.”

  “You really think so?” she said.

  “Got to go see Beanpole first.”

  “About the money.”

  “Yep. Ten thousand bucks.”

  “Think it’ll be enough?”

  “With plenty extra.”

  Tree frogs made a chorus in the woods. A barn owl called, then another, as if in conversation. Orion lay sideways in the sky. Behind it the far stars blurred together like woven mist.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Beanpole’s foray into snake-killing dogs had ended when a copperhead with a particularly potent poison bit the eight best dogs. Four died and he shot all the snakes. The next day he gave away the rest of the dogs. It was the lowest point of Beanpole’s life. Disconsolate for weeks, he drank beer and ate cupcakes.

  He watched the TV news every night. Politicians sent more and more soldiers to Vietnam, which cut into his bootlegging business. Some of the younger men liked marijuana, and he thought it was worth looking into. During World War II the government had grown hemp in Kentucky due to the ideal soil. That presented another problem—he wasn’t a farmer but he wasn’t much of a snake dog breeder either. Planting seeds had to be easier.

  Every week Beanpole’s sisters criticized him for not helping Jimmy more. It seemed to Beanpole that half his life happened when he wasn’t around—family getting mad at him no matter where he was. He was afraid of women—of disappointing them and receiving their subsequent ire. A woman’s anger made him feel worthless. The best strategy was to stay outdoors and give them whatever they wanted. The problem was he didn’t know what they wanted. The only technique that always worked was offering sympathy and aspirin.

  Jimmy was more trouble than snake dogs, with no reward in sight. He clamored to “move up” as he put it, like bootlegging was a grocery store where you started out as stock boy and eventually became the manager. Every time Beanpole gave him a hand, Jimmy grabbed a foot. His report on Tucker didn’t help. Beanpole knew the two of them wouldn’t get along but was surprised by Jimmy’s outrage. He’d hoped that some time spent with Tucker would benefit the boy, provide him with a better example than his no-count daddy. Instead, it invigorated Jimmy’s ambitions.

  Beanpole considered giving him a task he was guaranteed to fail—maybe a run to Ohio along a route that was well known to the law. He could put Jimmy in the bootlegger shack, then pay the sheriff to arrest him. Beanpole chuckled to himself. He and the sheriff had been friends since childhood, and he relished the idea of bribing the sheriff to raid the very place he’d bribed him not to raid. They’d have a good laugh over that. But word would get out, and Beanpole would look bad—as if he couldn’t protect his own nephew. Another option was waiting for Jimmy to follow his own path toward trouble, but that might take a while. With any luck Jimmy would get drafted. Maybe Beanpole would suggest he volunteer for Vietnam.

  That afternoon Beanpole heard the sound of an unfamiliar vehicle coming around the ridge. The car came into view, listing to one side like a boat taking in water, moving steadily. Its back end rose in the air with every revolution of the wheels, indicating a spare tire that didn’t match the rest. The driver honked the horn and stepped out. Beanpole set aside the shotgun and walked onto the porch.

  Tucker approached slowly, surprised at the lack of dogs. The house was brick and clapboard with a wide porch that wrapped around the side facing over the hill. That area was screened and held a swing, a round metal table, and a few chairs. Beanpole stood at the top of the brick steps.

  “Hidy,” Beanpole said. “Come on up and set a spell.”

  Tucker nodded and climbed the steps and sat in a metal chair.

  “You look good,” Beanpole said.

  Tucker nodded.

  “Me,” Beanpole said, “I got bigger. I know this looks like my belly but it ain’t. It’s table muscle.”

  He laughed, cutting it short when Tucker didn’t change expression.

  “Your wife home?” Tucker said.

  “No, she’s off running the roads to see her grandbabies.”

  “Quiet without them dogs,” Tucker said.

  “Didn’t work out,” Beanpole said. “I did get me an idea here lately. A snake bites you and it swells up, then goes back down, right?”

  Tucker nodded.

  “I been thinking the same thing might happen with a stick of wood. You trick a snake into biting it. The stick swells up and you cut it up fast and build a shed. When the swelling goes away, the wood’ll shrink. You got you the best birdhouse in the world. Man could make good money selling them.”

  Tucker lit a cigarette and smoked it left-handed to keep his gun hand free. A lot could happen in five years and Beanpole might have gone softheaded. A butterfly drifted the hawkweed that speckled the edge of the yard.

  “Jimmy said he brought you home,” Beanpole said.

  “Talks too much.”

  “He can drive.”

  “That boy couldn’t drive a wedge up a goat’s ass.”

  “Don’t reckon you’d care to take him under your wing, teach him a few things, would you.”

  “Why would I do that?” Tucker said.

  “Save me some trouble. Maybe save him some big trouble.”

  “He’ll kill somebody or get killed, one.”

  “He’d be all right if a man was to stretch a cow pussy over his head and let a bull fuck some sense into him.”

  “Be pretty tough on the cow.”

  “It ain’t about the cow,” Beanpole said. “I’m talking about Jimmy.”

  “What you ain’t talking about is money.”

  Beanpole’s tension eased off now that he didn’t have to bring up what promised to be a hard conversation. The best way was direct and pragmatic. Tucker was too smart to be hoodwinked. Beanpole knew what happened to men who underestimated Tucker.

  “Heard you had some trouble in the pen,” Beanpole said.

  “Motor-sickle gang out of Dayton.”

  “Them Satans ain’t nobody to fool with. They’ll carry a grudge.”

  “I found that out.”

  “You square it with them?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then how’d you leave it?”

  “Gave them more grudges than they wanted to carry.”

  Beanpole laughed. The sound trickled away in the still air. A woodpecker battered a tree, and the first cicada of the day began its distant sound.

  “What I heard,” Beanpole said, “you put them bikers down and got extra time tacked on for it.”

  “That’s about right,” Tucker said.

  “I know it’s tough inside.”

  “No, you don’t. You pay men to find out for you.”

  “Them extra months was your doing, not mine.”

  “The Satans knew your name. They knew I run shine for you. Said you were the reason they came at me. One of your men up in Ohio snitched five or six of them out. They was trying to get back at you through me.”

  “You believed a bunch of buckeye bikers?” Beanpole said.

  “I did after they tried to
kill me three times.”

  “Three times?”

  “La Grange and Eddyville, both.”

  “Satans locked up everywhere, I guess.”

  “They ain’t why I’m here.”

  Beanpole waited for him to continue but Tucker sat in the chair, his off-colored eyes steady, never blinking. He could have been a lizard for all the lack of motion. Beanpole understood that Tucker could outwait him. He’d had years of practice.

  “Your wife,” Beanpole said, “got forty dollars a week. Like we agreed. Never missed once. Angela dropped it off.”

  “Rhonda told me.”

  “Five and half years I done that. Forty bucks a week is eleven thousand, four hundred and forty dollars.”

  “I don’t need you to cipher numbers for me.”

  “I’m trying to lay it all out so we both know what we’re talking about.”

  Tucker could see where this was headed. When it came to money, Beanpole was tight as the end of a woodpile. The air stilled and a swift rain arrived, the drops making clumps of fescue quiver in the yard. It passed fast. The slab of sky lightened between the hills. Rain released the scent of cedar drifting from the tree line.

  “How much did you make selling my house?” Tucker said.

  “Ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

  “It was my house.”

  “You sold it to me. What I done with it is my business. You can sell my old one if you’ve a mind to. Don’t bother me one whit.”

  “I might do that, but I ain’t got a place to live if I do.”

  “Nothing’s easy.”

  “Living in the pen ain’t either.”

  “You’re out. Your family got took care of.”

  “I got a record now,” Tucker said. “Ain’t a whole lot of places will hire me.”

  “What kind of job you aiming to get?”

  “The kind where a man gets paid what he’s owed.”

  Beanpole didn’t think Tucker would do anything at his house, but he’d seen men get pretzeled up from prison. Nobody came out better off.

  “Way I see it,” Beanpole said, “that extra time ate up the ten thousand and then some. But I’m game to let that go.”

  “Let what go?”

  “You don’t owe me the extra.”

  “What extra is that?”

  “Fourteen hundred and forty dollars.”

  “I got arrested and went away for you. I lost my house, a car, and four of my kids. Now you’re saying I owe you money?”

  “I’m sorry about those kids. But that ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

  “If I’d been there,” Tucker said, “it would have gone different.”

  “If you’d been there, you might’ve done something that got you put in prison.”

  “You’re saying being inside kept me from getting locked up?”

  “That’s why you agreed in the first place. So the cops couldn’t get you on that Salt Lick thing. I helped you then. I helped your wife when I didn’t have to.”

  “Did she ask for help? No. Did I ask you? No. We made a deal. I want my ten thousand. I aim to get my kids back with it.”

  “The state don’t work that way. Ain’t like prison where they get out and go home. You’ll not get those kids back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My wife’s second cousin had a kid got took by the state. I gave her money for lawyers, run her up to Frankfort, and went to court. Did everything we could. Judge said the kid was better off. Maybe yours are, too.”

  Tucker felt separate from himself, as if he were watching the two of them talk on the porch. Time was moving slowly, the way it had during combat in Korea and the knife fight at LaGrange. He recognized it as a bad sign, especially here on Beanpole’s porch in daylight with his car parked in the yard and Beanpole’s wife coming home any time. He stood, his movement slow and torpid as a snake in spring.

  Beanpole understood that he had no advantage whatsoever. Tucker was the most dangerous when he appeared benign, moving like a man stunned by heat. He’d made an error that might cost him everything. He shouldn’t have mentioned Tucker’s kids.

  “Don’t run off,” Beanpole said. “Let’s talk this through.”

  “We done did.”

  “Now, no. There’s a way out.”

  “My babies got took while I was serving time for you. And you sit there saying they’re better off for it.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Beanpole said. “I’m trying to help you.”

  “I never asked for help my whole life. I want what I’m owed.”

  “We can work something out.”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  Beanpole didn’t move or speak. Tucker walked down the steps. At his car he turned and looked at Beanpole for a long time, then lifted his hand. He drove out the ridge and off the hill, wondering why he’d waved. It was instinctive, as if something had ended, a farewell to everything that had happened between them for the past sixteen years.

  Beanpole watched the dust settle onto low-hanging leaves, heard the engine whining in first gear down the slope. He was disappointed with himself and the result. He’d figured on offering five thousand cash and calling it even, but things got out of hand too fast. The air turned quiet.

  Now he had two problems—Jimmy and Tucker. They couldn’t be more different as men, but they presented the same difficulty. Neither was controllable. Beanpole sat without moving for an hour, examining options, sorting through potential outcomes and further problems. Every approach was flawed and led circuitously back to the primary situation: Tucker had transformed into an enemy and Jimmy was a liability. An hour later he figured out what to do.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next day Tucker removed his weapons from the closet where he’d hidden them six years before. On the porch he cleaned the pistol and reassembled it, thinking about the conversation with Beanpole. It didn’t go the way Tucker wanted, and he doubted that Beanpole had liked it either. He could see both perspectives but it didn’t matter anymore. Beanpole would send a man to kill him. The smart move would be to bring someone in from Dayton and pin the murder on the motorcycle gang. That would take a couple of weeks to set up and Tucker didn’t believe Beanpole would wait. He’d want to kill Tucker soon, before Tucker came after him.

  He was sharpening the Ka-Bar knife when Rhonda joined him.

  “Shiny got in them hornets again,” she said. “I can’t make him quit.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “He won’t listen.”

  “I didn’t either when I was a kid. You know what my mother said about me and my brothers? One boy is a boy. Two is half a boy. And three ain’t a boy at all.”

  “What does that mean?” Rhonda said.

  “I don’t know. She said it is all.”

  She watched him whet the knife on the stone. He spat on his arm for lather and shaved a patch of hair, then went back to sharpening. He crossed his legs and stropped the blade on his boot heel.

  “Ain’t seen that knife in a while,” Rhonda said.

  “I got one last little bit of trouble to take care of.”

  “With Beanpole?”

  He didn’t answer. He’d done enough to muddy her life and he needed to walk the mud hole dry, not make it deeper. The more she knew, the worse she’d worry. War and prison had taught him that sides didn’t really exist, that everyone was eventually caught in the middle of something. At least he could put off Rhonda’s turn for a while.

  “Where’s that hornet nest at?” he said.

  “Up the hill past the blackberry bushes. Watch yourself. It’s bad to be snaky in there.”

  “I don’t mind snakes.”

  “I remember you eating one once.”

  “Yep,” he said. “Breakfast the day I met you.”

  “Let’s lay down a minute.”

  They went inside and rested in their bedroom. The midday light slid through the window. Tucker watched it, thinking about the thousands of ho
urs he’d spent in a cell with no window. He wondered if this had been Beanpole’s bedroom, if he’d lain here watching the same light.

  He touched Rhonda’s shoulder and spoke.

  “Ever miss our old house?”

  “Every day.”

  “It was littler.”

  “It was ours,” she said. “It’s where the kids were born.”

  “Maybe we can buy it back.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Later, Tucker sharpened a bucksaw and put it in a gunnysack along with several strands of wire, work gloves, and a roll of duct tape. He wore two sets of clothes with a loose layer on the outside, his pants tucked into his boots. Armed with pistol and knife, he walked down the hill at an angle. Milkweed swayed along the edge of a rain gully. Tucker sweated heavily inside his double layer of clothing. He circled the blackberry bushes, squatted, and waited, listening intently. Twice he stood to relieve the ache in his knees, and settled back to his patient crouch.

  He heard the hornet before he saw it, then watched it circle and land. It was nearly an inch long with white and black markings on its face. The hornet rose from a blossom and flew low through the woods. Tucker followed its direct path up the slanting land to a blue beech. Hanging beneath a low bough was a nest the shape of a giant lightbulb. He watched four hornets come out of a hole near the bottom of the nest and fly into the woods. Another one buzzed close, veering away and returning in tight aerial arcs.

  Tucker opened the gunnysack and removed the bucksaw and duct tape. He tore off a short piece of tape and fastened a corner to his left sleeve, leaving most of the sticky side free. He slid the gloves over his hands and hung the bucksaw on the crook of his elbow. A hornet landed on his leg and another on his arm but he ignored them. He approached the nest slowly to avoid disturbing the air, and in one quick motion sealed the entry hole with the strip of duct tape. He lifted the gunnysack around the nest and tied it to the branch. Disturbed, the trapped hornets increased their buzzing until the gunnysack seemed to vibrate. He used the bucksaw to cut the limb off the tree. He lowered the bag to the ground, looped wire around the cloth, and tightened it around the sawed branch.

  Tucker walked swiftly down the hill, using the branch as a handle to carry the enclosed nest. A few hornets followed him. One found the exposed skin of his neck and he slapped at it, feeling the sharp sting just before killing the hornet. Safely away from the tree, he stopped and killed three more. His neck felt burned by fire. He removed his gloves and prodded the swollen area, resisting the urge to scratch. He carried the nest up the hill, seeking a ridge path at the top. His plan was to tie it to a tree beside the old fire road built by the Forest Service. Hornets had a right to live.