“Hell of a clan.”
Bree snuggles agin my chest and makes a tiny fist around a fold in my shirt, and pulls the buttons.
“Cupboards full? You getting by?”
“We’re getting by.”
I look at the wall behind the television. They’s a photo of my brother Larry and Ruth with baby Mae in her arms. The side of the paper is yellow from too much sun. I know when that shot was taken—a few months after I come home for my mother’s funeral and my girl met me at the door holding baby Mae. By then Ruth’s daddy—the honorable Preston Forsyth Jackson—had booted her out and ran an ad in the paper: this soupcan of dog shit ran an ad in the paper saying the whore known as Ruth Jackson wasn’t his daughter. His wife made him pay for another ad the next day retracting the statement but how the hell you tell a town you didn’t mean that? Whole town knew it was on account of her holing up with me. But before she holed up with me she did it with Larry… so Mae sits here with a rip in her knee and three hungry kids, while her eighty-four-year-old grampa yells at the wall at the Baptist home waiting for it to say something back, and all his money sits in a vault at the Second National bank instead of buying a couple hamburgers or a fucking can of Similac, and it’s all because neither Larry or me backed off Ruth when her daddy laid down the law.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Mae says.
I fight free of two kids and a needy couch. The kitchen table looks like a floor with aluminum on the sides. The oven is clean but they’s a burner missing. I open a cabinet and it’s flat empty. So’s the next, except a bag of flour and another of rice. In the other room, Mae’s silent and Bree and Morgan sit on the sofa watching me with the same eyes that looked happy a minute ago, but now seem sunk.
I slip a hand in my pocket and feel two plastic-sheathed coins.
Chapter Nine
I walked into Mae’s and I should have known what’d happen. They ought to be a law agin mothers living in decrepitude.
Millany stands at the door, looking out. He’s got a stogie in his mouth. He steps back and I come through.
“Changed my mind on one of these coins.”
“Flaw? What? Let me see—”
“Nah. Just changed my mind.”
He hesitates. A tinge of red escapes his eyes but they’s no juice with it. He’s a little pissed is all.
“Keep your commission. I don’t give a shit. I just need more cash’n I thought.”
The red goes away.
“Ah, hell. It’s no problem. Gimme the coin.”
I flip him the maple leaf and he pulls cash from a box.
“Everything all right?”
“Fine.” I stop. Think back to October third. “Who has a white truck? Silver truck?”
“That fella with the deer rifle and the Caterpillar cap.”
“Prick.”
Walking back to Mae’s I pick up a thought I dropped earlier. All those letters I been sending to Ruth, without ever getting word back, was really just to me. I’m no better’n her old man in the Baptist home, cussing at the wall and expecting it to talk back. Coming up on Mae’s house I stop dead.
They’s an F-150 in the drive. Mae drives a Tercel.
Truck’s white.
I glance at the house. Circle for an eyeful of the tailgate, white as the rest of the truck, and shiny. Been washed recent—no dust in the rims. S’pose every kid washes his truck; it ain’t necessarily to get rid of evidence. Fact, whoever dropped off Fred that night don’t know I watched the whole thing, so whatever was glowing on the tailgate ought to still be there. ’Less it was just one part clean and the other not.
I go to my knees, brace on my hands. Oil pan’s dry. Not even a bulb saving up for a drop.
But the truck’s white, and Cory Smylie was at the dog fight.
I hesitate on the porch while feet stomp and move inside—heavy feet, boot heels. Got my hand ready to rap but I wait. She said she’d handle Cory Smylie—but I hear anything wild, I’ll tear this door down.
Whispers. A shout. Stomping gets louder. I step aside and the door flies open.
He’s three feet across the porch with his leg swung over the steps before he turns. Got money in his fist.
“Why hello, shithead.”
He does a double-take, misses the step and skids. I get a bolt of the juice real quick. “Piss off,” he says on the way to his truck.
Mae’s at the door.
“That the money I left you?”
Her face is blushed. Streaming. She nods.
I tramp after Cory and he’s already spinning tires. I swoop down for a rock the size of my fist and chuck it. Sandstone clangs on metal and the tires lock. Truck skids. Door flies open. He charges so close I can smell his breath and the hair on my forearms stands so hard it tickles.
Trickery.
I step back and his knee comes up. I kick out his other leg and he’s on the ground.
“Gimme that money. Fifty bucks. Then get the hell out of here.”
I’m ready to stomp my heel two inch through his nose. I’ve knocked the red out him. He scowls but his hand shakes. Nothing but a playground bully with a truck. He pulls the green out his pocket and throws it at me. I let it fall.
“Get the hell out of here.”
He crabs away, wobbles to his feet. Limps from the kick I give him.
“You know, it’s supposed to work the other way. You’s supposed to bring her money.”
Ten feet away, Cory finds the courage to meet my look. He climbs into his truck. “Yeah, well the word’s out about you, Creighton. You’re sixteen kinds of fucked. Stipe’s got a hardon and he’s liable to bend you over one of your own mash barrels.” He slams the door, floats me the bird at a forty-five degree angle—I guess that’s cool nowadays—and guns the engine. “Maybe I’ll see if Stipe needs a hand.”
“You stay away from Mae.”
He fishtails off, waving his middle finger out the window, though he can’t keep the angle right, and don’t look near as cosmopolitan as a minute ago.
Mae’s on the porch. Her cheek’s swollen.
“He hit you?”
She won’t nod. “He said he needed the money.”
“More’n your kids need food?” I hit the wall and wood cracks. Lucky I don’t put another hole in it. “All right, damn it.”
“Uncle Baer!”
I walk back to town. Was going to give her cash, but fuck it I’ll give her food. Let the son of a bitch steal it from her. What this town needs is one good cop, a sheriff ain’t afraid to string a hoodlum by his toenails ‘til he understands the rules. But ours’d rather watch dogs slaughter each other. Whole miserable country gone crazy. You hear the radios two hundred yards. Feel the music through your feet ’fore you hear it in your ears. No one cares. They’s good kids, expressing themselves. And someday they knock they women around just like they daddies did. Whole damn world lost its mind.
I’m at the grocery. “You do a delivery for me?”
Merle looks up. “What’s wrong with your neck?”
“Run afoul a gang of gay vampires, just south of Sutton and Main. You do a delivery?”
“Where to?”
“Up the road. Mae. You know, she rents Smotherman’s place. It’ll be a lot of grub.”
“Fit the bed of my truck?”
“If that’s the limit.”
Merle’s an affable son of a bitch and that sits good. I grab a cart and fill it. Six jars of peanut butter, six of jam. About forty pound of pork, chicken, and hamburg. Rice, noodles, potatoes. Fruit. Milk. Eggs. Cheese—six kinds. Can’t have too much cheese. Pretzels. Kool-Aid. Canned veggies, fruit, soups. Spices. Frying pan. Two.
They’s a woman with a basket comparing two can of fruit. Name’s Emmy; she works at the bank where they don’t know what money is. Her gaze drifts past her hands and she takes in my feet, then all the way up. Fairly easy on the eyes herself. She says, “Which of these would you pick?”
I take one out her hand and put it in
my cart. “You keep that one.”
She smiles.
I fill one cart and bring it to Merle at the counter. “You want to tally this while I grab another cart?”
“Sure.”
He empties items and I start again. Pass through the same aisles as last time seeking nuggets I missed. Creamed corn. How can a woman raise babies without creamed corn? Tomato soup? Fuck tomato soup. Nobody likes it. But she’ll have bread and cheese for grilled sammiches… two can of tomato soup. Formula. Diapers. Soap. Toothpaste. I don’t know about the rest of the stuff in this aisle. Lady products—she’s on her own.
“You throwing a party?” Emmy says. Her voice is a hair from self-inviting. I recall a time at the bank she looked at me from behind the counter and was batting her eyes like she had dust in em.
“No party, Emmy. Just a bunch of food.”
Her face is suspended in that cloudy water look says she don’t know what the hell to do next. She’s purty enough, but a liar lurks somewhere inside. They always is.
Finally, last, I stop in the aisle with the antacid and Tylenol. I call to Merle, “What you got that’ll put a man to sleep?”
“Melatonin in that aisle.” He points. Smiles. “Bullets behind the counter. What kind of sleep, Baer?”
“Mela… ”
“It’s the bottle with the sleeping woman on the picture, see?”
“Yeah. This work?”
“Guaranteed. Problems sleeping?”
“Sorta precaution, maybe.”
Back at the register, Merle works up a grin the size of a small motor home. “You’re already at two hundred and fourteen,” he says.
“That all?”
I unload and he scans. I pack bags and stick em in the cart. Let him ring the melatonin, and slip it in my pocket.
“Three hundred fifty-eight and thirty-two cents,” he says.
I hand over eight hundred dollars. He looks at me funny.
“Put the rest in credit for Mae Creighton. She can’t have cash. She can’t have cigarettes or liquor. She can’t spend a penny if Cory Smylie’s with her.”
“Let’s see. No liquor, no smokes, no Cory Smylie.”
“That’s right.”
“You know we don’t ordinarily do this sorta thing.”
“I can’t be coming back and buying her groceries every damn week.”
“I’ll handle it myself. Difference is four forty-one, sixty-eight.”
“Appreciate it.”
He writes the number on a slip of paper and initials it.
I say, “You send word when the money runs out. Them kids need to eat.”
“Gimme an excuse to get some of that hooch you make.” His eyes twinkle red. Fucker don’t drink.
“Running apple tonight.” I stop at the door. “And you don’t need no excuse.”
Chapter Ten
Wake from a nap. I’m in the middle the woods, waiting on dark. Shoulder’s seeping, blood and lymph trickling down my chest. Teeth punctures in my neck’re hot like to start a fire.
If it ain’t the holes I already got worrying me, it’s the ones I’ll get if somebody sneaks close with a rifle and goes to work. It don’t feel good, thinking the only reason you’s alive is nobody yet got serious about killing you. Not when you got so many flirting with it.
Even feeling like I had a set of eyeballs watching me, I brushed aside the worries and got a couple winks. Dreaming of Mae’s a wistful thing. Not some pervert thing—she put me in the mind of Ruth so strong it’s like losing thirty years.
Sun’s about done for.
I’m leaning on an oak. Got the thirty-thirty across my arm and the Smith on my hip. Looking ahead through undergrowth, I’m close to the edge of a clearing by a pond dates a hundred year. Farmhouse long gone, nothing but toppled foundation stones on the ground, arranged in a twenty-foot square. Got my back to the tree and it’s dicey every time I come.
I watch the woods ‘til I’m sure no one’s out there, but how the hell you ever really know? Not that anybody but Millany’d have a clue it was time. I recall that red glint in his eyes, and the tingle of juice.
The woods is more shadow than light.
I listen.
Chipmunks dash across leaves. Eventually a buck wanders through the meadow and grazes at the edge, not far. I’m downwind. He keeps his eyes my way. Trigger finger’s itchy but my apple mash is ready and you don’t get much window on perfection. Buck lives another day.
Wind turns and he swings his head around. Looks straight through me like I’m a hundred yards deeper in the woods. Deer eyes don’t work too good—it’s my smell he’s after. Even if we don’t communicate, eye to eye with a buck is a majestic thing. He bounds off, and like that, it’s dark. I wait ‘til the thrill’s gone and the black’s whole. Shift to the side of the tree; reach inside a two-foot rot hole; feel along the left wall.
I check the darkness behind me. No one. But I got a spooky thought—what if that buck was looking at some man staking me out, looking where I keep the metal? I wait. They’s no sound.
Inside the rotted hollow I find a nylon cord hanging from a fifty-penny nail. I lean my rifle agin the tree partway around, lift the cord one hand after the next.
It’s a strain.
Inside the tree, a metal bucket hangs eighteen inch down. Never had the nerve to check in daylight to see if a man can get the angle to see sparkles in the shadows. I grab the wire handle and hold the bucket, keeping everything inside the tree. Give it a quick shake.
Drop the gold coin from Millany’s inside.
They’s twenty-five year of gold in that tree.
Chapter Eleven
Ernie Gadwal didn’t bother to crouch. The forest was almost dark and Ernie stood four foot three. Though prone to mousy twitches and scurrying movements, he forced himself to be calm. Through the trees he watched Joe Stipe’s nemesis.
He’d been spying since learning Stipe had launched an operation weeks before. Ernie had been in the shadows across the dirt road, fidgeting with braiding three strands of dried grass when Baer Creighton found his massacred dog. He’d looked in through a window as Creighton drank shine and stitched his dog back together. When Creighton stopped at Millany’s Coin Collectory, Ernie had been enjoying a hot dog at George’s, across the street. When Baer bought groceries for his niece, Ernie had watched through the store’s giant plate-glass window from his Subaru Outback.
Ernie Gadwal was a clinger in Joe Stipe’s outer circle, one who attended fights and afterward savored the valor of the dogs, gaining spiritual enrichment from their struggles and triumphs. The fights were awesome spectacles and the man who put them on… Joe Stipe was magnetic, a dynamo. In all Buncombe County, no man save Stipe could quiet a crowd just by grunting, or with a single word banish a reveler from all he held dear.
Stipe’s circle was wide at the bottom, but narrow up top.
Ernie thought of Joe Stipe a lot.
Ernie’s small stature caused him to perennially compare himself to other men. Early in his life his mother noted his behavior and said it was the root of his mischievousness. Left with no obvious comparator, fate forced him to dissemble. His want of superiority predisposed him to deceit, and he sought the hidden qualities by which he could transcend his peers. He learned to notice minutiae. Flaws. Some men found inspiration in other men’s greatness. Ernie Gadwal drew inspiration from unearthing what haunted them.
It was a short leap to trade on these faults.
Ernie studied men like a broker and treated faults like commodities. He traded information for favor like so much specie. He hoarded secrets, ever trading up, ever seeking the exchange that would vault his stature.
By some perverse fate he earned a reputation diametric to his goal. In the overheard words of his mentor, Stipe, he was a conniving little shithead.
Yet Ernie had learned to isolate the weaknesses other men sought to fill, exposing their core motivations and the easiest levers by which to steer them. His guiding calculus was tha
t knowledge of what men craved was fungible, and in the hands of an expert trader it could make men mules. And because the void within him was great, his nature was inevitable. He could not turn from it.
Baer Creighton had been leaning against a tree trunk, dozing. Then he rose, and studied the terrain. Then he reached inside the tree and deposited something from his pocket.
Ernie wondered about that, but in a flash of realization he connected Baer’s visit to the bank and the gold dealer.
Now, looking at a tree ostensibly full of money, Ernie thought about what to do with it. He didn’t need wealth. A trust left by his grandmother provided a seventy thousand dollar per annum stipend. What Ernie craved was the standing that accompanies men of action. It wasn’t by Stipe’s dollars that he commanded respect.
What Ernie now saw would be worth something—though not to a man as wealthy as Stipe. This little nugget fit someone else’s desires far better.
Who among Ernie’s poorest acquaintances was most embarrassed by his poverty? Who dreamed of wealth? Everyone, of course. But which friend had something to offer in return? Who, by his proximity to Joe Stipe, might bolster Ernie in the hierarchy? It was a complicated strategy, but Ernie Gadwal was a complicated man.
He waited. He stepped sideways, whispered “Patience,” but his excitement grew. Would it be gold? Or silver?
While observing the enigmatic Creighton over the last few weeks, Ernie had surmised Creighton preferred solitude. He thirsted only for the company of a dog. Sure, Creighton had more than a normal man’s allotment of moxie. But Ernie wasn’t interested in getting into Baer’s good graces. Baer might be an interesting study, but a recluse had little social currency.
A deer broke cover and bounded off, not thirty yards away. Baer reached for his pistol and slowly turned, his eyes searching for some other animal that might have spooked the deer. Creighton was wily, but Ernie wasn’t afraid. He had surprise. He was unknown. He was invisible.
Baer Creighton walked away from the tree and Ernie darted to the cover of a wide hemlock. The darkness varied from shadow to shifting shadow. He cocked his ear toward the vanishing sound of Creighton’s feet on dry leaves. Ernie stepped closer.
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