"So why didn't he?"
"Well. I guess because…" He didn't—or wouldn't—finish the thought.
"Because he didn't know that was the plan," Big Joe guessed.
"No sir. See, he kept insisting on comin' along, I couldn't talk 'im out of it! But I knew if I brought 'im with me, and you guys refused to give me the money, well… somebody was gonna get hurt."
Joe stopped pacing. He pointed a giant finger at Bad Dog's face, glaring at him the way a Hatfield would glare at a McCoy, and said, "Somebody's gonna get hurt, all right. You were damn sure right about that!"
"Joe," I said, "take it easy, now."
"In fact, somebody's gonna get hurt right now, right this minute, unless they get the hell out of my sight by the time I count to three! One, two—"
"Joe!"
Bad Dog didn't bother saying good-bye. I felt a rush of wind behind me, heard the screen door of our cabin slam shut, and he was gone.
Had Joe decided to chase after him, I would've been glad to let him go, but he didn't. He just stood where he was and waited for his anger to dissipate, checking his no doubt accelerated pulse rate as he did so.
"Joe," I said calmly, almost demurely. "I wish you hadn't done that."
He scowled at me, unrepentant. "Yeah? Why?"
I smiled. "Because we still don't know why someone left a dead white man in our bathroom yesterday. Do we?"
My husband's chin fell to his chest, and his head began to turn from side to side in a dance of pure despair.
"Aw—"
"I know, baby. Jeez Looweez," I said.
5
We had to hear him say "I don't know" a hundred times before we were sure, but later that afternoon Big Joe and I came to be convinced that Bad Dog really didn't have the slightest idea why a corpse had turned up inside our trailer home on the same fateful day as he. His story was just too unwavering to be fake; Dog could always tell a lie well, but only if he didn't have to repeat it more than once or twice. Apparently, he'd discovered the late Geoffry Lamar Bettis in our bathroom just as he'd always insisted, and had never laid eyes on the poor man beforehand. Furthermore, it seemed, he had no idea what connection there could possibly be between Bettis and Dozer Meadows, short of the fact that Meadows had ostensibly come to the Grand Canyon hoping to commit a murder, and Bettis had already become the victim of one. We asked Dog if he thought his friend "the Doze" was deranged enough to have killed an innocent white man in his stead, just for the kick of watching Dog's parents freak out over finding a strange cadaver in their bathroom, but Dog said no, he didn't think so. The Doze, he said, was generally that sadistic only on Sunday afternoons, when such bloodletting had a direct effect upon the National Football League's AFC Western Division standings.
Big Joe and I were relieved to have reached the common conclusion that our son was not a murderer, of course, but that isn't to say that either one of us was satisfied that he had told us everything he knew. We both knew better than that. Because getting the truth out of Dog—even for me—is a lot like drawing water from an old, rusty pump: you never get more than a thimbleful at one time. And sometimes, the more you pump, the less you get. Joe and I shared a strong suspicion that there were parts of the whole truth that Bad Dog was still not telling, but after some discussion, we agreed that it probably had little or nothing to do with the actual circumstances of Bettis's death, so we decided not to worry about it. Experience had taught us that we'd find out what it was soon enough, in any case. All we had to do was watch the boy and wait.
It was a tactic I had more patience for than Joe, as you might expect, but that was just too bad. I hadn't brought Dog and his four siblings into this world alone, I reminded my husband; I had help. So Joe got to play our son's shadow first. I kicked him and Dog out of our hotel cabin only minutes after Dog's second interrogation of the day and told them both not to come back for at least two hours, so that I could nap in relative peace. I hadn't treated myself to a decent midday snooze in over three days, and exhaustion was catching up with me. I collected Joe's key to our room, tossed a handful of guidebooks and sightseeing brochures in his direction, and closed the door on all his and Dog's objections.
Two minutes later, I was asleep.
Less than ten minutes after that, however, I was awake again.
Somebody was knocking on the door, lightly but incessantly. Making a very polite nuisance of themselves. I thought it might be Joe, until I realized the knocking had been going on for some time now, and the door was still on its hinges. And I knew it couldn't be Bad Dog, because I had yet to hear a single "Yo, Moms! Wake up in there!"
So I got up to see who it was.
There was no peephole in the cabin door, but by peeking through the drapes at one of the windows flanking it, I was able to see two men standing out on the porch, young, well-dressed white men I did not recognize. One appeared to have a camera dangling from his neck.
"Who is it?" I called out, trying to sound like an angry grizzly roused from hibernation.
They both turned toward the window at the sound of my voice, and instinctively I withdrew from it. One of them actually came over to the window and pressed his face to the screen, trying to get a look at me, but when he realized he couldn't, he quickly backed away again.
"Mrs. Loudermilk?" someone asked tentatively.
"I asked, who is it?" I said again, turning up the grizzly in my voice.
"We're reporters, Mrs. Loudermilk. We'd like to ask you and your husband a few questions, if we could. Would that be all right?"
Reporters. Of course.
Ever since the news of Geoffry Bettis's death had begun to circulate about the Canyon's trailer park two days ago, Bad Dog, Big Joe, and I had been besieged by an army of these bloodthirsty, soulless media creatures. In the beginning, we accommodated each and every one of them as best we could, answering what questions we had the answers to and graciously declining the rest. We saw no harm in it; what did we have to hide? But then the questions became more and more invasive and crude, and all the attention we were receiving began to lose its charm. When one of the local papers finally ran a story on us with a headline that read, "CANYON MYSTERY COUPLE LIED TO AUTHORITIES"—making a federal case out of the fact that I had told Detectives Crowe and Bollinger I was fifty-one, and Joe had told them he once played varsity basketball with Elgin Baylor back in high school—that was it. We all stopped talking to reporters altogether.
(Oh, and by the way—Joe's lie was more outrageous than mine, and by a wide margin. He and Baylor shared the same graduating class in high school, all right, but Joe was cut from the junior varsity basketball team after only three practices. The closest he ever came to actually playing with Baylor was, in his later role as the team's locker room attendant, flipping Baylor a towel in the shower room.)
Anyway, after a while of getting the Loudermilk cold shoulder, the vultures got the message and stopped circling about us. I figured our celebrity status had worn off for good.
But no. Here they were again. Two fresh new faces, at least, but insidious newshounds just the same. I knew that if I talked to these jokers, they would ask nothing but embarrassing questions, and distort my answers to those questions, and generally just make a mockery of what I had to say in tomorrow's morning paper.
So why did I go to the cabin door and open it? you ask. Because I liked having reporters scurry after me like paparazzi chasing down Liz Taylor—that's why. What did you think?
"My husband I have nothing to say," I said, confident that neither man would take me at all seriously.
"Mrs. Loudermilk?" the one without the camera asked.
They were both dressed to the nines. That struck me right away. Perfectly tailored Armani suits in a matching charcoal gray, razor-cut silk ties, and high-gloss wing-tipped shoes—the full GQ treatment, everything first-class. Cub reporters, these guys weren't.
"I told you my husband and I have nothing to say," I said again.
"Mrs. Loudermilk, please.
This will only take a moment, I promise you." It was the one without the camera again. He was the taller of the two, and the more handsome, though neither man looked like anything a bright girl would shove off the love seat in the family parlor. "My name is Ray, and this is Phil." He extended his hand, amber eyes sparkling. "Phil and I are doing a story on the Geoffry Bettis murder case. But I imagine you already guessed that."
I shook his hand, but only indifferently. "That's an Instamatic camera," I said, staring at the tiny little thing tethered to the neck of the one just introduced to me as Phil.
Both men followed my gaze before Phil looked up and shrugged his wide shoulders, apologizing. "My Nikon's in the shop, ma'am," he said.
"You gentlemen are from a newspaper?"
"Yes ma'am," Ray said.
"The Sentinel," Phil said.
"Aren't you kind of late?" I asked them. "I mean, all the other papers talked to Joe and me two days ago."
"Yes ma'am," Ray said. "That's true. But that's because Phil and I are doing a different kind of story than the other papers. We're doing what's called in the trade a 'follow-up.' "
"A follow-up," Phil agreed, nodding.
"A follow-up's a more in-depth look at the people involved in a story. A more personal look, if you will."
"More personal," I repeated.
"Yes ma'am. In other words, we don't so much want to know what happened as we want to know why and how it happened. It's the human drama we're after here, not just the cold, hard facts."
"The human drama. Exactly," Phil reiterated, head bobbing up and down.
"For instance," Ray went on, "we'd like to know what exactly was the nature of your relationship with Mr. Bettis before his death. Were you and your husband friends of his? Old business acquaintances? What?"
"We didn't have a relationship with Mr. Bettis," I said impatiently. "We'd never even heard of the man until the day we found his body in our bathroom."
"I see."
Ray fell silent, trying to find a tactful way to pose his next question. After a moment, he said, "I hope you'll forgive me if this sounds disrespectful, Mrs. Loudermilk, but I find that rather difficult to believe. I mean, this is a big park." He swept his right hand in a wide arc before him to illustrate the point. "Mr. Bettis could have been killed in a thousand and one different places. But he was killed in your trailer. Sitting on your private commode. Now, there has to be a reason for that, don't you think?"
"There may be a reason for it," I said, "but if there is, neither my husband nor I know what it is."
I watched him toy with the idea of pushing me even further on the subject for a brief moment, before he said, "Okay. Stranger things have been known to happen, of course. We'll move on to our next question: What did Mr. Bettis say to you or your husband before he died? Anything?"
"Mr. Bettis was already dead when we found him. Haven't you read your own newspaper?"
"Please don't misunderstand, Mrs. Loudermilk. We don't mean to imply that you or your husband have been anything but honest with the press or the authorities regarding Mr. Bettis's death. In fact, we're certain you've both been entirely truthful in the matter. However… you've now had two days to think about what happened to review things in your mind, if you will—and we just thought you may have remembered a few things that you'd forgotten or overlooked initially. You see?"
"You think we're senile," I said.
"No, no, no! Absolutely not!"
"Absolutely not," Phil said, shaking his head at the absurdity of the thought.
"You're not taking any pictures," I told him, suddenly getting a little worried.
"Huh?" He looked down at the little black plastic camera resting against his chest, appearing to have completely forgotten it was there, and said, "Oh. Well. I was waiting for your husband. We 'want to get the two of you together."
"Is he here, by the way?" Ray asked, taking a step toward me and the cabin door.
"Yes. But he's asleep," I said, moving to further block the open doorway with my body.
"What about your son? Theodore, is it? Is he here?"
"Yes. But he's asleep too."
"Ah. What a shame."
He tried to make an innocent gesture out of it, but as he straightened the knot on his tie, Ray took a quick look around, clearly making sure the three of us were alone. I had seen very unreporterlike muscles bulge beneath his coat sleeve when his arm moved. "Look, Mrs. Loudermilk," he said, showing me his perfect teeth again. "I get the sense that you don't trust us. So you're holding back on us a little bit. Is that possible?"
He took another small step forward, and this time his friend Phil the Photo Hound followed suit.
"I think I've said all I'm going to say to you gentlemen," I said nervously, backing slowly into the cabin. ''I'm sorry."
But they had both advanced upon me yet another step, when someone behind them said, "Yo, what's up?" to freeze them in place.
It was Bad Dog, drenched in sweat and covered with dust, his hair as wild as a four-year-old Brillo pad and his clothes a disheveled, ill-fitting mess. He looked like a psychopath on holiday.
In other words, he was beautiful.
He stepped up on the cabin's porch, placing himself right where I hoped he would—between me and my two visitors—and, grinning, asked, "Everything okay?"
Ray and Phil shot a glance at each other, wondering how I was going to answer that.
"Everything is fine, Theodore," I said, smiling at the two alleged reporters before me with the smug overconfidence of a don in the company of his hoods. "This is Ray and Phil. They're reporters from the Sentinel."
Ray and Phil nodded at my son officiously.
"That's an Instamatic camera," Bad Dog said, staring at Phil.
"His Canon's in the shop," I said. "Or did you say it was a Minolta?"
Phil didn't say anything.
"It's a Nikon," Ray answered for him, no longer finding it necessary to smile.
"I thought we weren't talking to reporters anymore," Bad Dog reminded me.
"We're not. In fact, that's exactly what Iwas explaining to these two when you walked up." I turned to Ray. "Wasn't I?"
Ray paused a moment, then reverted to the electric smile. The snake who lured Eve into sampling the apple could not have had a better one. "Yes ma'am. You certainly were." He lowered his head in Phil's direction, and the two fashion plates stepped down off the porch. Looking back one last time, he said, "I'm sorry you chose not to talk with us, Mrs. Loudermilk. It would have made our job so much more painless if you had. Believe me."
I was going to say, "I'm sorry too," but he and his partner were walking away by the time I could get my mouth to move. I wasn't sure, but it seemed to me I had just been presented with a thinly disguised threat.
Only when the pair had completely disappeared from view did I turn to my son and give him a big, smothering hug.
"What was that for?" Dog asked when I finally released him.
"For being my son. Is there anything wrong with that?"
"For being your son? I've been your son all my life, and it's never turned you mushy before. Unless you were bailing me out of jail, or somethin'."
"Let's just say having a dead ringer for the Antichrist in the family sometimes comes in handy, and leave it at that. All right?" I looked out expectantly in the direction from which Dog had come. "Now. Where is your father?"
Dog shrugged. "Still down there somewhere, I guess. He's comin'." He started to enter the cabin, but I put a hand on his chest to stop him and turn him around.
" 'Still down there somewhere'? Down where, Theodore?"
"You know. In the Canyon."
"In the Canyon?"
"Yes ma'am." He tried again to go inside, but my hand went right back to his chest to halt him in his tracks.
"You left your father down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Theodore?"
"He's not at the bottom, Moms. He's about three quarters of the way down. That's as far as he would go before de
mandin' we turn around and head back up."
"And you just left him there?"
"I didn't mean to. But see, there was this mule team on its way down, and I went around it, but he wouldn't. 'Cause, see, the trail's really narrow in places, and he got spooked once when he almost slipped, so—"
"Go back and get him, Theodore. Right this minute!"
"But—"
"Boy, if you're still standing here when I get this shoe off, you and me are gonna be in the news all over again. You understand what I'm saying?"
I started pulling the shoe off my right foot.
"Okay, okay! Damn!"
Bad Dog scurried off.
"And take him down some water!" I called after him, waving my shoe at his back. When I was sure he was doing as he'd been told, I started back into the cabin, yawning, and kicked my other shoe off, once more drawn inexorably toward my afternoon nap.
Until, that is, I remembered Ray and Phil.
Dog hadn't taken three steps down the trail into the Canyon when I caught up with him.
* * * *
Several hours later, as I was soothing Big Joe's furrowed brow with a freshly dampened washcloth, I asked him what he thought.
"I'll tell you what I think," he said, trying mightily to raise his weary head from the pillow on the bed. "I think he thinks there's money to be made in my demise, that's what I think! I think he thinks he's got some kind of inheritance coming when I kick the bucket! But he's in for a rude surprise!"
"Joe, I'm not talking about Theodore."
"You hear me, boy? There ain't no profit in killing me, all right? Makin' a widow out of your mother ain't gonna make you so much as one thin dime!"
Glued as usual to the television set, Bad Dog just sat on the floor at the foot of the bed and said nothing, either too big or too dense to be insulted by his father's accusations. He knew as well as I did that Joe was just blowing off steam. Joe had been tired and dirty when we'd come upon him less than a quarter mile from the top of the Canyon trail, but other than that, he'd been no closer to death than I was. He was in too fine a shape for that. Still, he had been furious, and I for one fully understood why.
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