by Neely Tucker
“Okay. That’s okay. It’s sort of beside the point.”
“Russell was wore out. There was no end in sight. It was just going to go on forever until one of them died, then the other. He looked like he was about to fall over himself. I said, ‘What you want to do, Russell? Call the police?’ And he sat down and did not say anything for a long time. He just kept looking at Terry. And then he said, ‘No.’”
“And I said, after a while, ‘Okay.’ I knew what he meant. I knew what he meant to do. They had a family plot there, in the narrow band of trees not far from the house. Mother. Father. Some others. I asked where the shovels were. I said I would help him dig but that I would not help him clean the house. He had only one shovel. I walked home and got mine and my older brother was here and I got him and we went back. Russell was already digging. The ground was not hard yet.”
Sully nodded, sat back in the chair, looked at her, looked over at Jasper. After a while, she started talking again.
“A sheet. He brought him out and laid him on the ground in a sheet. He never said nothing. He laid Terry on the ground and hugged him. Held him for the longest. Almost laid on top of him to do it. Then we laid Terry in the grave. Russell got the shovels. We finished in a few minutes. It was getting dark. I remember it was getting dark.
“Usually, we sit up with our dead, all night. People cook, bring things. There is a hut for this, a ceremonial kind of shed, at the res. I don’t know that he would have taken him there under any circumstance, people had exiled him so. But you sit up all night, that is the tradition. In the morning, when the sun rises, the spirit is thought to be free of the body. You take the body through the door that opens to the west. Then there is the burial. I think this bothered Russell, that Terry did not have this. I think he was in shock and buried him before he thought about it.
“My brother and I, we left after Terry was in the ground. Russell built a fire. He sat there with the boy, in the ground, by the fire, all night. I say that because when I came back the next morning, he was asleep on the ground, on top of the grave. He did this several times a year. I would go by to see him, bring him vegetables from our garden. And there would be a fire ring out by the plot. Sometimes smoke, sometimes not.”
“Is there a tombstone, a marker?”
“A star. A copper, silver sort of star, like a sheriff’s badge. It had no name on it. He nailed it to the nearest tree. I don’t know why. Perhaps it meant something to the boy.”
“So when Russell died last year, you were the one who found him.”
She reached in her purse, found a pack of cigarettes, brought one out, and lit it, nodding. “Russell, he had always had a problem with drinking, but much more so after Terry. He went into town less and less. The house grew up around him, almost like it was swallowing him. He wasn’t even throwing out the bottles by the end.”
“So, there’s not, like, a death certificate or anything for Terry.”
She blew out smoke and looked at him.
“It’s not really any of mine,” he said, “but you didn’t report it to the police because, because, it seemed to you punishment was already served. A father killing his son, those circumstances, out here, the isolation, Terry’s illness.”
Her silences were artful. The way she had of making her point by not making any at all, letting your statements or assumptions stand on their own. She asked for information when she needed it but not anything beyond.
“We buried him next to Terry.” That was all she said.
“And, again, no marker?”
“It was just my brother and I. The res came up with enough for a pine box. We said we would do the burial there and they said okay.” She took another long pull on the cigarette. “I nailed another star to the tree.”
Sully considered all this for a second. “Might you have another shot of bourbon?”
She got up and poured it. He said thanks and sipped and sat back.
“So,” he said, “I’ll go with you on this. I’ll say Terry isn’t the shooter in Washington. That means there’s somebody locked up in D.C. who has assumed his identity, for whatever reason, which means he had to know of Terry, his situation. He had to look at least something like him. So the res, I’m guessing, is going to know, or have an idea—”
“Terry did not look particularly like he was from Indian Country. His mother was white, like I said. Russell’s father was half white. I have some whites in the woodpile, but not like that. Terry did not look like me. The man in the picture that I saw on television, in the paper, he looked like he was playing Indian to me.”
“So, so why didn’t anyone tell this to the feds, the police, the reporters?”
“Terry was, what did you call him? The Thing in the Dark? You could have shown people a picture of a werewolf and they would have said it was him. I was, as far as I know, the last person to see Terry alive, and that was nearly eight years ago. Some things are never known. The fate of Terry. The killer of your mother.”
He leaned back from the table and polished off the drink—she had a light thumb—and picked up his plate and glasses. He went to the sink and washed his glass and put it in the rack to dry. The light in the kitchen was a bare bulb. It was harsh. It was dark outside now, the moon coming up, low and full.
“Did you tell the federals this, the police?”
“No one asked.”
“But, I mean, they had to be throwing a pretty wide net. Even if they didn’t come through the woods there, somebody had to be knocking on every door in—”
“I was not home when they came. Two FBIs. My brother was, next door. He spoke for me. He said we barely knew Russell, much less Terry.”
“They believed him?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“I was just asking.”
“My brother, he is not one to ask a lot of questions.”
“What about the locals, though, the sheriff?”
“They don’t bother us. The sheriff, he and my brothers? Not a good combination.”
“And you didn’t go volunteering this because . . .” He hunched his shoulders, held up palms to the air, inviting a response, but not wanting to put words in her mouth.
She looked back at him. “Me and the federals, also not a good combination.”
Sully sat back down at the kitchen table. Jasper roused himself, stretched, came over and leaned against Sully’s leg. The dog’s ears had been clipped.
“So the wolves can’t get them?” he said, rubbing Jasper’s head, scratching behind the ears.
“Coyotes.”
“Which reminds me. I saw two of them, strung up from a fence by the heels, on the way out from town.”
“That’s Jim’s place. He believes, like a lot of people around here, that the coyotes can smell their own dead and avoid them.” She was looking in the refrigerator for something. The open door blocked his view of her. “He’s got chickens. When he gets a coyote, he strings it up.”
“You think it works?”
“I think Jim thinks it works.”
“You know who he is, though,” he said quietly. “The man in Washington. He stabbed the congressional rep from here in the eyes. Two knives. Well, ice picks. Like Terry, with the knives.”
He said it looking out the window.
She didn’t stir from the table, didn’t look over her shoulder at him.
“There was a family,” she said. “Whites. They lived several miles down this road, that you came up. County ten thirty-two. The house is just off the res. Kept to themselves, came, left, never stayed long. They had a boy, used to come up here with Terry in the summers. Terry and that boy, they’d be wading through the creek that runs through the woods there. They would come over and ask to ride the horses.”
“Did they look alike?”
“Thirty years ago? Some? Kind of. Dark hair. Black. Like yours. Sa
me sort of build.” She shrugged. “I looked at the television, I thought about it.”
“You remember his name? This other boy?” He came back to the table now.
She stubbed out the smoke. “Thirty years.”
“Last? The family name?”
“Something with an H, maybe. Hill, Harris, Humphreys. Look, like I said.”
Jesus. Something with an H. Or maybe not. Something that sounded something like that. The number of times he’d been through this, how many interviews in how many places. Jimenez. Faris. Phillips. This was the time to push. Before he could get his lips around a re-formed question, she was pushing back her chair.
A ragged smoker’s cough and she was standing, not looking at him but across at the kitchen, the middle distance. “Well.”
His lips froze, midthought. The invitation to leave, the conversational kick in the shins, the end of the time I got for you and your questions. I gotta do these dishes, I gotta go to work, I gotta go see a man about a dog. . . . Maybe he should have made more of a show of eating, knocking back the bourbon. The spaghetti, it was only half finished on his plate, his fork sticking up in the middle like a palm tree on a desert island.
When he stood, the floor creaking underfoot, he was surprised, standing next to her. She was leaner than he’d thought. Her lined face was reserved, it wasn’t harsh. Or maybe he was just reading that into it now. Maybe it had softened with the bourbon, on her face or in his eyes. Maybe, maybe he wasn’t reading her so well. You couldn’t, you know, turn your sensors on like a magic trick. People talking about their infallible bullshit meter, that was bullshit.
“Want me to help you with these?” Sweeping his right hand to the dishes, already reaching.
“No no. Jasper lives on leftovers. I’ll put the plates in the sink for later.”
She stepped back, indicating by doing so that he should go first.
He thanked her for the supper, the hospitality. She followed him and it seemed so quiet now, he was just becoming aware of that, every footfall drawing a response from the warped flooring. There had been no radio playing, and the hulking television in the living room, so old and so big he wouldn’t be surprised to find vacuum tubes in the back, lay dark and blank, dust on the screen. The recliner in front of the television. He had to weave around that. The door creaked when it swung open and out.
Darkness had fallen. She flicked on the porch light. They walked out in the yard—people had yards out here, not lawns—Sully making a few last bits of small talk about Jasper and coyotes. There was a light on a utility pole by her brother’s house. It had come on, an orange, sodium-vapor glow that cast shadows. He thanked her once more as Jasper trotted out to his car, lifted a leg on the rear wheel, then came back to him, expectant.
“It’s like that now?” he said, shaking his head at the dog. “And here I was, thinking we were friends.”
He had made it from the yard into the road, the gravel crunching under his feet, when he heard her voice.
“Mister,” she called out.
He turned, looked. She was standing at the base of the steps.
“Don’t come back. You,” she waved her hands faintly, “you have a darkness to you. It is not my way. If you put my name in your newspaper? My brothers, they will come to Washington.”
He nodded, raising a hand, believing it down to his bones. The lady didn’t know bullshit existed. When he opened the car door, his right foot on the floorboard, the left one still on the gravel, he stopped.
He looked back—she was still watching, there beneath the porch light—and said, “I didn’t tell you they, the guy, whoever shot my mother, wasn’t caught. You said it wasn’t known, though, who did it. How, how did you know that?”
She looked at him. For a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to reply. Then she shrugged and turned to go inside. “You are here,” she said.
TWENTY
THE WATERS’ DRIVEWAY seemed longer in the dark, the rutted tracks turning off the gravel, into the weeds, the headlights raking the high grass, the lone tree looking like a spectral apparition, its fingers clawing at something just out of reach. Once the car was over the small rise and he could see the way ahead—the grass was beaten down from when he’d come by earlier—he cut the lights and switched off the ignition. After a moment, when his eyes had adjusted, he took a small flashlight from his backpack and got out.
Terry Waters, dead and in the ground? Let’s see. Let’s just fucking see.
The full moon, brilliant and unbroken by clouds, loomed above. Houses lay dotted across the prairie, lights twinkling in the wind, three quarters of a mile or more distant. Three, maybe four places, far, far down the road. Still, if those houses could be spotted at this distance, that also meant his car lights could be seen. The last thing he wanted was a rancher seeing lights at the old Waters place and coming to check it out, shotgun in hand.
A breeze came up. Sully could feel it on his skin, hear it sighing, see it ruffling the long high grass that spread for miles in front of him. Ahead, the house at the end of the driveway, the old barns, appeared as dark lumps on a silver horizon.
He kept his steps on the car tracks from earlier. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Elaine Thornton. It was that you couldn’t trust anybody. You couldn’t believe anything. Not even people’s names, their identity. Look at the mess he was in now. People put on faces for the world to see. They lied about everything, all day and particularly at night. It was a descriptive of the species.
Shadows of the house and barns deepened and took shape as he drew closer. He looked up at the cloudless sky above and pictured it looking down at him, from hundreds, thousands of feet above: the land below vague, dark, moonlight glinting off the lakes, the streets. The trees and woods filled in as darker shadows. Little winking dots of yellow—the houses, the people inside leading lives that no one would really know about or remember, just some of the human beings who had come onto the face of the Earth after the invention of electricity. Before that, the world had fallen featureless in the darkness, only the glow of fire and torches.
Now, lights of cities and towns beat back the darkness on a massive scale, hot, bright spots that showed up in the low reaches of orbit. Then his mind’s eye swept backward at some fantastic speed until the Earth was just a little blue ball bouncing in the blackness of space, receding until it was a just a pin dot of light in the sky, infinitesimal and insignificant.
That is who we are and what we are, he thought, walking through the grass.
Millions of lives teeming on the head of a pin, the universe neither concerned nor vindictive nor compassionate. It just went on and on and on because that was what it did. People—they were just one little self-regarding species on one planet. They died and the universe was indifferent. It didn’t mean anything. It was like drowning in the ocean. The ocean wasn’t trying to drown you. It was just being the ocean. You got out of the water, fine; you got eaten by sharks, fine; you drowned, fine. It didn’t matter as far as the ocean went.
That was life on Earth. It killed you without thinking.
And now he brought his gaze down to the dark house in front of him, the breeze gusting, running invisible fingers through his hair.
The house was indifferent, too. It was indifferent to the hope and lives that had been lived and ended inside it. There would have been the warmth of the days when Terry had been born, the early years. Surely there had been some good times, some nights that darkness had settled over them all, Russell and Marissa in bed and their son in his crib, the plains quiet, dark, somnolent. Russell would have dreamed the great dream of peace and quiet nights and long days of the family, here, close, quiet, the star-specked canopy of darkness hovering above them. The long cold nights of silence and breathing, safe, together, a family, the future spilling out in front of them. Russell Waters, a man who would later shoot the beautiful child asleep in the crib, would have
closed his eyes and drawn his breath slower, slower, until sleep overtook them all.
Sully stepped over the narrow concrete pavement and moved under the eaves. He moved from light to dark in the yawning maw of the door.
Silence. Not even the scurrying of rats. A pale light shone through the windows onto the warped linoleum. It fell over the kitchen sink. Shuffling his feet deeper into the darkness, the feeling came over him, rushing up his spine and over his scalp—the pulse and the feel and the rotting flesh of the place, the blast of the gun, dead voices landing in his ear, the desperate father and the deranged son, yelling, vicious, biting, trapped here for weeks and months and years. The great dream of peace, corrupted by the American nightmare of murder and blood. The comforting darkness melted into black despair.
The long hours of the night were the worst because they were exiled together in the house at the end of the road, each in his own isolation, nothing waiting for them, no hope, no wonder, no joy, no possibility of things getting better and brighter. There was only the slow augering into the earth, of waiting for the day when they would be lowered into the mud and dirt, left to decay among worms and sightless insects.
Did the gunshot that killed his son echo in Russell’s head every time he walked in the house afterward? Did he see the grotesque obscenity of his beautiful son’s body, blown open and seeping blood, lying in the hallway, every time he walked to the bedroom? Seeing his fingers trembling with their last flickers of life?
Amputees had phantom pain, arms and legs that were no longer there yet still itched. Russell Waters shot his child to death right here. Then he lived another seven years in the same house. The phantom pain of his child’s death, the loss of his embrace, of his love, and of the possibilities of what he might have become—all this melted into a pool of gore and blood on the linoleum.
If Elaine Thornton was telling the truth, leaving the police out of it but leaving Russell here was, in its own way, a prison term and a death sentence. He would have had to clean up his son’s flesh and tissue and fluids, mopping, soaking, disinfecting, then bury it all in a glop in the backyard.
