by Neely Tucker
“Okay then. You good for the night? Need anything to drink? Water?”
“No. I’m good. Sully’s got a baby refrigerator down there.”
“You know they got the bad guy, right? That it’s all okay?”
“Sure.”
“Right then. Off to bed with you.” She paused. “What are we doing after your classes tomorrow, after I get here from work?”
“I don’t know. You like horror movies? We could watch horror movies.”
“I’m a girl, so, no. But I’ll give two of them a try to see if maybe I’m wrong. Tell you what. We’ll go to Hawk and Dove—their veggie pizza kills—and then we’ll swing by Blockbuster’s on Eighth. You pick two horror flicks. If I like, we’ll do it again Tuesday. If I don’t, we’ll go back and get two of my pick. Fair?”
“Fair. Sure. Fair.”
The door to the basement squeaked on the hinges, then stopped. Josh, again, tentatively. “Hey. I ask you something? I mean, you mind?”
“No, you can’t do tequila shots at the Hawk.”
Josh laughed, soft, not forced. “No no, that’s not what I was going to ask. See, no. I was going to ask—ah, I mean—do you like Sully?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Nobody. Well. I mean, well, like, you’re staying here and so I just, not that it’s any of my business, but I—”
“You’re right,” she said lightly. “It’s none of your business. But yes. I like Sully. Most of the time. You?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice taking her tone, her inflection. “Most of the time.”
There was a fluttering and then a pop, which Sully recognized as Alexis twirling the dish towel and then snapping it.
“Hey,” Josh said.
“Think of a good movie,” Alexis said, and the kitchen light clicked off.
Sully heard her feet moving and, gently, slowly, closed the bathroom door. He turned on the shower. Other voices, other people in the house. It was different. He liked it.
When he came out, fifteen minutes later, his waist wrapped in a towel, hair still wet, she was already in bed, the lights out. He padded down the hall and across the bedroom, the streetlight outside filtering through the heavy leaves of the cherry tree in front, the blinds, the curtain. The ceiling fan spun slowly, more a thought than an actual breeze. The bed, the furniture was outlined in shadow. He could have walked it in pitch-black darkness. But he liked the pale slats of light that fell in rows across the bed, over Alexis’s stretched-out frame, lying on her side, her back toward the window, her face obscured. He dropped the towel from his waist and slipped into bed, pulling the sheets back up, scrunching up behind her, spooning. She adjusted her back, her legs, to fit into his.
He draped an arm over her side and stopped.
“Woman, what is—”
“One of your T-shirts.”
“T-shirt? More like a muumuu. Since when did you—”
“There’s a kid in the house.”
He let that sit for a minute, there in the dark, then let a hand roam. “You know, he can’t hear anything way down—”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “No stuff for you.”
“Oh, come on. I’m leaving tomorrow and—”
“Nope.”
“You, you’re serious.”
“You may cuddle.”
“Married people,” he said, “I mean, people with kids, they have sex, you know, with the kid in the house. That’s how people have two kids, three, like that.”
“We’re not married and we don’t have kids. Cuddle or the couch.”
A moment later she said, not even opening her eyes, “My ass doesn’t need cuddling, thank you. Now. Go to sleep and keep your paws off my lady parts.”
SEVENTEEN
HE WAS OUT of the house before first light, not waking anyone, on the plane at National and gone, the plane turning west, away from the sunrise, him feeling light, clean, fast, like a real reporter again.
He leaned into his window seat, watching Appalachia disappear beneath him in the reddish purple light. Then he closed the blind and pulled from his backpack the manila folder of clips about Waters, the articles that the wire services and national and regional papers had filed about his roots. Laying them out on the empty seat next to him, they filled the space with everything but information.
Eddie hadn’t been kidding. Nobody had gotten shit. Waters’s picture from, what, middle school? Notices about his father’s funeral the previous year. Quotes from tribal officials, testifying that Terry, long ago, had been a problematic and then violent child, clearly mentally ill, expelled for attacking a tenth-grade teacher with a knife.
The judge in the case—he was quoted in Elaine’s story—had been inclined to send Terry to a home for troubled youth back then, a reform school, but the father had resisted. He’d said he would take care of it if the judge would release the boy, then sixteen, to him. The judge had reluctantly agreed. Terry had rarely been seen in the two decades since.
The old man, Russell Waters, was known as a hard drinker and an itinerant worker on oil platforms in Oklahoma and Texas. Lived far out on the edges of the res, Waters the elder made it clear that visitors weren’t welcome. The place—a ramshackle brick affair in a picture in the Times—was described as down a state highway, then several miles down a gravel road, then south on a narrower gravel road, and, finally, down a half-mile drive, lined with scrub.
The old man had reportedly come into town now and again for groceries and hardware. Raised a few head of cattle. Sometimes he’d been spotted drinking at the new, sad-sack casino in Stroud. He’d once been arrested for drunk and disorderly in Tulsa. Sully couldn’t blame him. Let him live his entire life in Stroud, Oklahoma? Drunk and disorderly woulda been his hobby.
Mom, the key to Terry’s motive, was apparently long dead.
Nobody ever remembered seeing her, just that Terry was suddenly out there with his dad, hiring local women for help. The local rumor was that she’d died shortly after childbirth, that she was a hooker near one of the oilfields where the old man worked, that she was just a teen, that she was everything but the Virgin Mary. There were no records, no headstone, nothing, not even a name. No known siblings. People said they’d seen Terry in his father’s Ford F-150 on shopping trips into town over the years, but no one was really sure. It might have been a sack of feed thrown into the shotgun seat.
Russell had been dead in the house for several days when his body had been discovered the previous fall, the livestock emaciated. When police showed up, Terry was long gone.
The plane bumped down in Tulsa a little after noon, jolting him from a nap, his papers scattering between his knees and on the floor. Outside the window, the dry plains lay waiting for him, sunny and scorching and rolling, the grass already going brown.
He blew the rental down I-44, taking the outskirts at eighty miles an hour, the cement factories and the cheap motels and gas stations and then the open pastures, the great void of rural America. Lunch was at the Sonic Drive-In in Stroud, midafternoon, the car door open, the wind snapping across the prairie, talking to R.J. on the cell.
“I’m having the chicken and tater tots,” he said. “You put enough ketchup on them, they’re not bad.”
“I’ll never know,” R.J. said.
“What did we have in the paper today?”
“The same thing as the Times, give or take. The bio piece Elaine and Richard had been working on. The house at the end of the road kind of stuff. Waters went mental in high school, or thereabouts, your typical teenage-onset depression, then voices, then things with knives—”
“I was reading that on a printout,” Sully said. “The hell is that, things with knives?”
“Apparently he liked to cut things up, animals, birds, skin them, leave them around town. Guy quoted here, ran a motel, said he came to work one day, there were four squir
rels and a coyote, decapitated and gutted in front of rooms number one through five.”
“And they pegged it to Waters?”
“Not exactly, at least the sheriff here is quoted as saying, but he went out to have a talk with Terry and the old man. Things piped down for a while, then there was another incident with deer carcasses, this time at the res headquarters, and that got another visit, no fooling this time. The dad, that’s Russell, he said he would take care of it. The last time anyone quoted saw Terry.”
“How long is that?”
“Seven or eight years.”
“Jesus.”
“We quote, and the Times does as well, friends of Dad, if you can call them friends, saying they’d seen Terry when they had stopped by way back when, that Dad kept him either in a locked room or on a rope in the backyard.”
“A rope? Didn’t that like, sort of set off social welfare or something?”
“It’s on the res, so it’s Indian Country, and the res people say, basically, what do you want us to do? Where would we send him that’s better?”
Sully ate a tater tot. “You put it like that.”
“Dad was an ornery cuss himself, apparently. Dead for days before anybody found him.”
“Was he gutted?’
“Your apparent garden variety heart attack, coroner says. Sixty-three. Found on the kitchen floor, facedown, by a neighbor who’d seen the lights on three, four nights in a row.”
“And our boy Terry, long gone.”
“Like the breeze.”
“And, what, this was last year?”
“Last October, so what’s that, ten months? Yes. Ten months.”
“Terry then totally off the grid until he shows up at the door of the Capitol.”
“The guys and girls in Investigative say there’s nothing in the system on Waters. No driver’s license record, no employment history, nothing.”
“A ghost, a phantom, the mist, the fog,” Sully said. “He worked with a gun at the Capitol, though, not a knife.”
“You’re forgetting the ice picks, champ. He got more refined.”
* * *
Sully checked into the Corral Hotel, hard off the interstate, a two-story brick thing. His was a small room on the second floor, facing west, four walls of depression and low-end America that looked just right for hanging yourself from the shower rail. The afternoon and next morning he made the due diligence stops—the res administration, the sheriff’s office, the feed store, the school. Twenty-four hours after he landed, he’d gotten the same pablum as everyone else. He’d tried even the casino the first night, the lowest rung of reporting, running a tab, trying to chat up the bartender, the waitress, the guy sitting down from him.
Nobody told him shit.
He didn’t mind. He was the guy from out of town. No matter where you went on the planet, nobody who lived in little towns that had just risen to notoriety wanted to talk to the dipshits from out of town. Back home in Tula, if reporters from New York and D.C. and Chicago had shown up after his mother was murdered? Half the town would have beaten them senseless while the other half fetched torches for the bonfire.
That night he lay awake in the room, the clock ticking past one, then two, the vast, open landscape and the endless windswept vistas outside. It had broken him down enough earlier in the day that he had gotten a fifth of Maker’s at the liquor store in town. This was, technically, a violation of the promise he’d made to Alexis, during his phone call back to her and Josh, that he would not drink on the trip. But good God, a man could have one, well, two, and possibly five if anyone had to count, when stuck in a bullshit hotel like this, the night long, the diversions nonexistent, the prairie outside infinite.
So late in the second day, another night and the other half of the bottle looming in front of him, he turned the car out of town, heading down Route 99, toward Prague, headed out to the Waters’ old homestead.
The land here was wide open, trees not even close on the road, the pastures undulating to the horizon. Prefabricated tin warehouses, wooden country stores. There weren’t many turnoffs. Still, he blew right by his turn. After stopping at a concrete-block country store three miles down the road, asking directions, he came back and turned onto an unmarked gravel road that the clerk had assured him was actually Spark Road, the one he was looking for. He turned left, heading west, and reset the odometer, red dust billowing up behind him.
Once you turn west on Spark, the clerk had told him, it was six or seven miles to his next turn, which would be a left, not long after he’d passed a little wooden church. From there, that gravel road would take him another few miles, across a creek, and the first right after that would be the Waters’ driveway. It was in a clump of trees, lined with scrub, and there was no marker. You’ll know it when you get there, she said, and Sully was country enough to understand that those were the best directions you were ever going to get.
Every now and then, tooling past the open pastures, he’d see a house, set back anywhere from fifty yards to half a mile off the road. The cattle outnumbered the houses ten to one. But that wasn’t saying much, since there weren’t much more than a dozen houses before he spotted the church, in a small grove of trees, a little cemetery by its side.
The left, he didn’t even bother with the blinker, the rural habits of his youth coming back to him like cultural DNA.
Shortly before he got to the creek, he slowed, coming to a full stop. Dangling from a barbed-wire fence that ran alongside the road, corpses of two coyotes, hung upside down. Their snouts were at least a foot off the ground, their mouths gaping, their eyes open, the flies buzzing, the stench a thing to behold.
* * *
The Waters’ driveway wasn’t even gravel. Just two thin dirt tracks heading west, into the weeds. Grass had grown high in between the tracks. A sagging fence ran along either side. The tracks rose slightly from the road, over a small rise, then fell away.
The house lay in a low plain, visible shortly after he turned in the drive, open pasture around it, a concrete drive at the front of the house, leading to a shed that looked to be a one-car garage and storage space. The livestock barns were shabby wooden structures. One had a hayloft. A good wind would blow them into Kansas. A pond lay to the back and left. The tree line was maybe four hundred yards behind the house.
The house itself, now collapsing back into the earth with age and neglect, was the one-story redbrick rancher with a black slate roof that he’d seen in the photograph. It seemed to sag to the left. Two windows were broken. The weeds were knee high in the front.
Slowing as he approached, he tapped the horn twice, making sure he was announced, in case a real estate broker, or somebody else, was knocking around. No point getting shot for a lack of manners.
He parked the car a few yards in front of the house and got out. The only sound was the ticking of the motor and a light breeze, sighing through the grasses. The sun was in front of him, fading now, the first fingers of night stretching out.
“Hello,” he called, repeating it after a moment. Nothing.
“Just a reporter, dropping by,” he hollered, walking forward, notebook in hand, waving it. The house looked malignant, its black windows staring back at him, the open maw of the front door.
A screen door had fallen to the ground in front of the door. The door itself was rotting, fat with rainwater. It was half off the top hinge, giving it a drunken lean forward. Nothing inside made any noise. He slid past the door, not touching it, and stepped inside.
It was dark, darker than he expected, and he had to stop to let his eyes adjust. There was a deep stillness. He took in a full breath and let it out. The lives that had been lived inside these walls were erased and gone, just shadows and ghosts and faded voices left behind. If he stood there long enough, he would begin to hear them, the way he heard voices of the dead in the last, eyelid-fluttering moments before sleep. He
’d been stunned when Eva Harris, the prosecutor back in D.C., told him she had the same thing, the voices of the homicide victims she represented sifting down into her mind in the darkness. He’d thought he was the only one. Whatever. He wasn’t going to hang around in here long enough for it to happen to him. Terry Waters was long gone from this place.
“The physical,” he whispered to himself. “Focus on the physical.”
Rotting carpet. Bags of trash. Part of the ceiling had rotted and collapsed, spilling old insulation onto the floor. Buckets, two coffee cans. An overturned sofa. Three, five steps brought him to the kitchen, the front hall. The sink had been pulled out, the plumbing taken. A wet mattress in a bedroom, stinking like a dead thing, rat pellets everywhere, the closet door off its tracks, leaning over on the mattress. One bathroom. The toilet pulled out of the floor, the sink and the tub still there but going from brown to black with grime and dust. Bird feathers. The smell of piss and animal shit.
It closed in on him fast, the house a tomb. He walked through the kitchen and pulled open the back door, getting outside, wanting to get out of there, feel the breeze, see the last rays of light.
The backyard wasn’t really worth the name. Packed earth and a fire pit. The old livestock pens lay twenty yards off to the west. There was a stand of trees farther out to the left, past the pond.
As he was turning back to the house, movement caught his eye. There, in the distance, a woman was coming out of the tree line to the far west. Some sort of checked shirt, jeans. She had long black hair and was walking head down, arms folded across her chest.
She came out of the woods, in the light now, walking toward the house, still a good quarter mile off. He started walking in her direction, an idea forming at the back of his mind.
When she raised her head, looking first up at the sky and then back down, Sully, still walking, smiled and waved. He was in the full light of the sun. He shaded his eyes with the notebook. No way she could miss him. He waved again, smiling, then calling out a long “Hellloooo,” across the plain.
The woman stopped. Her head turned slightly and she caught sight of him. She did not acknowledge hearing him or make any movement at all.
