by Neely Tucker
Sully doubted there was a way back from that.
* * *
Outside, he watched his shadow as he walked, moving through the grass, his feet snapping stems. No need for the flashlight. Her directions had been approximate but there was so little out here in the way of landmarks that he should still be able to find the family plot.
The moonlight glittered on the pond. He walked past it, a good twenty yards off, the water flat, save for a snake making its way, the head the only thing visible above the surface, leaving a narrow ripple in its wake. Sully, skittish, looked behind himself, but there was no one, nothing. Just the wind. Just him.
By the time he reached the copse of trees, he was beginning to chide himself. Elaine, what, she put on her serious Indian Woman Face and gave him bollocks about native burial rituals and shotguns and dead sons. Hokum story for the White Man from Elsewhere. Selling it to him to see if he’d print it and then laugh her ass off the next day at work, White folks will believe anything. How! Shoulda sold him dream catcher for big wampum.
But when he walked into the trees, into the shadows, when he flicked on the flashlight, the fallen-to-the-side tombstones were in front of him in a small clearing just like she had said, granite stumps in a world of dirt and wood.
“Ah, man,” he said, the voice escaping his lips.
He knelt in front of the first, then the second. The engraving had faded. Nothing, just gray and mottled and spots of moss. Switching the flashlight to his right hand, he opened his left hand like a fan, tracing all five fingers over the face of the marker, as if communing with the dead underneath. The rough touch of the stone, the lines and circles and dots that had been chiseled into it, gave themselves up to his fingertips, but not in any shape or pattern. Was that a “B”? An “8”? No way to tell. The names and dates and Beloveds were lost, gone, too faint to be read except perhaps by Braille, by etching on paper.
“Dust to dust,” he said softly. “Granite be damned.”
He swung the flashlight this way and that, slowly. Five, six headstones. None more than two feet high. One had cracked and was falling forward. The others canted backward, as if beseeching God above for a second chance, or sideways, as if they were in some slow-motion midstupor stumble.
Pushing himself up, he stood. Okay, stars. Copper stars, iron stars, some kind of metal stars, nailed onto tree trunks. Where were these? He flicked the light from trunk to trunk, up and down, too rapidly at first, but he was jumpy—standing on top of dead people gave him the creeps—and it took effort to slow it to a methodical search.
The wind stirred. It moved the leaves above him in a restless fluttering. They rose on the wind and then fell without it. His footsteps were loud. Then, without even looking, he caught a glint off to the right. He snapped the light back to it. There. The side of an oak.
Two steps and his left hand was on the rough edges of the bark. A five-pointed metal star, big as his palm, nailed deeply into the tree, waist high. He bent to look at it. The bark was growing over the edges, the metal mostly black and corroded, hard and rough under his fingers. No writing, nothing at all, at least that could be seen now. He looked down at his feet. Was one of them, father or son, buried just below? Couldn’t be. The roots would have been too thick to dig through. But a few feet away? Yes. There was an opening between trees, almost in the clearing with the gravestones.
“Well, blow me sideways,” he said softly, the wind taking the words away.
The second star. Now. Was there a second star?
Twisting the ring at the top end of the flashlight, he expanded the beam from narrow to wide. The clearing emerged in a slow arc, following the beam. The orb of light illuminated branches heavy with thick green leaves, scrubs trying to take hold. The clearing was roughly circular. When he finished the circuit, there was nothing. Back again. Then he started going trunk to trunk, skipping the undergrowth and the saplings, looking out for snakes at each step now, the wooded, grassy thatch at his feet.
“Come on, come on.” The urgency was at the base of the neck, in his fingers. How long ago had he parked the car? He’d forgotten to check his watch, and now time seemed to be an amorphous thing. It could have been anything from twenty minutes to an hour. How long had he stood in the house, outside, looking—
Glinting, a small flash in the darkness.
—wait, take the light back—his fingers swept along the bark of another oak, not as big as the first but still sturdy, and here, at belt-buckle height, was another star. Not as deeply nailed in. Shinier. Not so rusted. Not as old. Hammered in last year, at Russell’s death. His palm covered nearly all of it.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “Elaine, forgive me, for I have doubted.”
The words had no more left his lips than footsteps came from deeper in the trees. The steps were light but hurried.
Adrenaline shot down his spine. He dropped to one knee and swept his arm forward, the beam going to the right, trees and limbs and bramble flashing across his vision and then two red glimmering dots appeared thirty feet to his right.
He swung the light back to it. He saw the snout and the laid-back ears of a coyote. The teeth were bared and the beast lowered its head toward the ground. The fur was matted and dense.
Exhale, exhale, he thought. Bulbs of sweat popped out of the pores along his scalp, his spine. He palmed his left hand across his forehead and down his face.
“Fucking asshole,” he said, then shouted “HA!”
He leapt forward. Before the word was out of his mouth the animal flicked to his left and was gone, through the woods and across the open field, sprinting, its back bunching and elongating with each gathered and released stride, galloping until it was just another shadow moving across the grass.
Sully clicked off the light. He leaned over, putting both hands on his knees. Pulling on his lungs for a full breath, heart trip-hammering. His hands shook now that it was over. Goddamn. Goddamn.
“Nerves,” he said. “Got to do something with the nerves.” The image of his half-empty fifth back at the hotel danced across his mind. Time to go. Time to get the fuck out of here.
He came out of the stand of trees and looked back toward the house and there was the car, a hundred yards beyond. Moonlight reflected off the hood. Its low curves and confident mechanics looked modern, polished, secure, like civilization, and not at all like dead bodies buried beneath bronze-age metal stars nailed into trees. He started walking that way. He put a quicker hitch in his giddyup, trying not to break into a run, but feeling some desperation to get away from the bodies of Terry and Russell Waters sleeping their eternal sleep beneath the plains of their ancestors.
While he was walking, he looked up at the sky once more. If we are all so insignificant, he thought, why did settling the accounts of the dead matter so much?
TWENTY-ONE
“YOU WANT ME to go dig up Terry and the old man?” Sully, flat on his back in the hotel, tossing his pillow up in the air and catching it, the lights off but not the television, a bourbon on ice next to him on the nightstand. His second. Could be the third. “I mean, you think she made it up on the spot? That’s a hell of a story to dream up when you see a white man pull up in front of your country-ass house.”
R.J. was taking the call at home, flat-footed. Elwood, his partner, was talking in the background. Sully couldn’t tell if it was on another line or if there was someone else there. A little after eleven on his clock, a little after midnight in D.C.
“But why,” R.J. harrumphed, “why would some psycho pretend to be a paranoid schizophrenic Indian from the plains?”
The pillow came down and he caught it.
“I don’t have to know that. Because he’s crazy, too? He’s Bruce Wayne, he’s Batman, he’s concealing his true identity. We don’t have to know why. We just have to know.”
“So she, this trailer-park broad, this Oracle of the Plains, she
didn’t have any idea who Waters’s friend was, that kid was from way back when?”
“Not other than maybe some white folks who used to live down the road, maybe with a last name starting with H.”
“Jesus. So how did Waters, I mean that Waters out there, how did his mother die?”
“Unknown, but she was unknown, too. Well. Marissa. Her name. Our total bio at this point is that she was some hustler the old man knocked up while working at an oil rig down in, I think, Odessa. We poke around, I’m giving eight-to-five we’re going to find they were never married. She came up to play house with Daddy Waters once or twice, cut out for good when it appeared little Terry wasn’t going to be breaking any of Jim Thorpe’s old records.”
“This is incredibly fucked up, I want to tell you.”
“I had put that together all by myself.”
Sitting up now, a sip of the bourbon, rattling in a plastic cup from the bathroom. Baseball highlights on the screen, the sound off. He was in boxers and a wifebeater. He ran a finger along one of the long, hairless scars on his right knee, not so much purple anymore as just discolored. It itched. Scars itched. Nobody told you scars itched.
“We can’t even correct our story,” R.J. was saying. “What would we write, ‘According to one unnamed source who didn’t offer a shred of evidence, other than two metal stars nailed into two oak trees, in the middle of Bumfuck, Oklahoma, we now retract everything we’ve written about Terry Running Waters being a psychopathic, eye-stabbing Capitol Hill killer. Mr. Waters is, in fact, dead, and has been the entire Clinton administration. The paper regrets the error. The multiple errors. Pardon as we pick up our dick.’”
“Like I say, we can go dig ’em up, you want. Apparently we can buy the place out of probate on the cheap.”
“But now, you see this? We have major, major problems going forward using the name Terry Waters as the perp. I mean, we have serious reason to believe that’s false, but it doesn’t rise to a level of fact we can print.”
“Knowledge is a burden. I think that’s what God was trying to tell Adam.”
“You’re drinking, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You’re rattling the ice in your cup. You always do. I just heard it.”
“It’s Coke.”
“Mixed with what, Jim Beam?”
“None but a savage pours Coke into bourbon. I won’t say what type of individual drinks Beam.”
“That’s a nondenial denial.”
“Are you worried about me or the shooter?”
“Okay, so okay. I got to call Eddie. I can only imagine his joy.”
Sully stood, batting the pillow to the side of the bed. “Am I the bearer of bad news? I’m turning the nation’s number one news story on its head in a mind-numbing exclusive. A thank you, a little bonus, that’d be nice to hear about.”
“Get all the tater tots at Sonic you want.”
“Holy cow.”
“Look,” R.J. said, “this may pan out, but right now it’s just a giant pain in the ass. So what’s the plan? What do I tell Eddie you’re doing?”
Sully flopped back on the bed, looking back at the ceiling and its water stains. The best news in his life: the NFL preseason was underway. Maybe he could get Alexis to the Dome for a Saints game this year. Stay in Uptown for a few days. October was always a good time to go. He was, he realized, starving. He never ate enough. The spaghetti, he should have done more than pick at it.
“When the doors open in the morning, I’ll be at the county land records office, maybe the tax assessor’s,” he said, then yawned loudly in R.J.’s ear, just for that tater-tots bit. “Wherever they keep the real estate records around here. Those, we get those, that’ll show land ownership, past and present. People tend to have acreage out this way. So likely not that big of a list. I mean, this lady, Elaine, she pointed down the road. Can’t be that many farms in that direction, the next several miles, whatever the last name. I look for something with an H and we see what we get.”
“Then what? Let me blue-sky this. Let’s say you find a guy with an H. How do we know that paleface is the shooter locked up in St. E’s?”
“We don’t. But, Christ, whoever the Capitol Killer is, he knows Terry Waters. That we know. And he knows something else nobody around here does, and that’s that Terry Waters has been worm food for a long time. How big is that universe of people? I’m thinking five or six, tops.”
“The lady you just talked to said both she and her brother knew.”
“They’re not homicidal maniacs, so I don’t know they count.”
“Apparently her brother might be.”
“If it was her brother doing the killing,” Sully said, “I’d be in the dirt next to Terry right about now. These people don’t fuck around.”
R.J. thought about it. “That’s actually true, Sullivan. You irritate almost everyone.”
“The county records, then school records, yearbooks, maybe the Census, that’s what I hit. The Census, if the family answered it, would be spectacular. But we’re looking for a white guy, possibly last name H, who would now be roughly forty years old. That would put him in middle or high school, what, twenty-five years ago. That’s a graduation date in the late nineteen seventies, a DOB ’round about nineteen sixtyish.”
There was a long quiet.
“Sullivan.”
“Yes, boss?”
“I’m going to prolong all of our lives and tell Eddie that this won’t take you more than a day or two. Because the longer we keep printing ‘Terry Waters,’ the more moronic we look with each usage if you’re actually right about this.”
“Not as much as the other guys, when we break this.”
“If,” R.J. said. “If, not ‘when.’ Your enthusiasm is as touching as it isn’t contagious.”
Sully signed off, standing there in his boxers, turning the television off. There was stubble on his cheeks—he had forgotten to shave. Hadn’t taken a shower before heading out this morning. This might be a good time for that. He started the water, decided to make it a bath so he could soak and sip, then sat on the edge of the tub. He called his house, popping his neck, then leaned over, stretching out his back, looking down at his bare toes while the phone rang.
“Hello, stranger,” Alexis said, her voice warm, a little sleepy. “How’s life on the investigative trail?”
He sat back upright, rattling the ice in the cup. “You ain’t gonna believe this shit.”
“You’re drinking,” she said. “Don’t even try to bullshit me.”
TWENTY-TWO
THE HANGOVER WAS a thing of beauty. The headache banged on the front edge of his skull. Rolling to his right in the bed—it took him a moment to place the anonymous curtains, the pale white walls, the lone painting of a prairie sunset . . . where was—and then he lay back in the sheets.
Reassuring, that’s what it almost felt like, rubbing a palm over his forehead, his closed eyes, yawing. Familiar. Something he knew.
A rat’s-ass cup of coffee from the lobby downstairs and a complimentary doughnut, plus twenty minutes of driving around in the early light (behind sunglasses) brought him the realization that the county seat was in Chandler, a dozen or so miles west.
He banged on the steering wheel the entire way. Didn’t Stroud at least have the pride to be the county seat? This drive necessitated a stop at a way-too-brightly-lit gas station for two bottles of water, and he was walking along the narrow aisle, gum, chocolate, cough drops, little frosted white doughnuts, motor oil, cold medicine . . . where was the Goody’s? Didn’t they have a Goody’s for a man’s headache? He asked and the clerk said “What?” and he said never mind, grabbing a tiny plastic bottle of ibuprofen. Fucking apostates.
He popped three in his mouth while he was paying and then chugged them back with one of the water bottles, nearly draining it, standing bolt uprigh
t at the counter, nobody behind him. Had to beat back the dry mouth, the dehydration that was shrinking his skull.
The Lincoln County Courthouse turned out to be a one-story thing, set in the middle of a way-too-wide-open square, far back from the street. Half hidden by a gaggle of trees, it looked like the low bid on a contract nobody wanted.
The main drag of town, Manvel, was part of old Route 66. The charm, if there was any left, was lost on Sully, him scuffing across both lanes, looking left and then right, still blinking in the early light, looking along the storefronts for an honest-to-God coffee shop. . . . Bail bondsman, flooring center, bank, hardware store, an old movie theater . . . no diner. Maybe on the far side of the blockwide square, but he couldn’t see over there for the courthouse, and it was too far to walk just to see. Every town square had to have a café, a diner, some half-assed place to eat, didn’t it?
He decided Oklahoma wasn’t shit.
The sidewalk took him up to the courthouse. Inside, down a lusterless hallway, set against a wall, there was a framed rectangular guide to offices, the kind where you could move the individual lettering and kids were immediately drawn or dared to rearrange the letters to form “dick” or “ass” or whatever.
County assessor’s office, county tax office, commissioners . . . following the directions, Sully walked on and made a left and found himself at the county records office.
It was bathed in a dim, windowless, fluorescent glow, rows of files extending into the back, where the light was dimmer. The tiniest wave of claustrophobia swept over his spine. This wasn’t going to help the hangover. Besides, what if these deeds went all the way back to the land rush days? His enthusiasm, so bright and so bold and confident last night, had burned down to a dim little bulb in a dark room.
A clerk set him up at a desk, bringing out several of the plats books. Each was the size of a Chevrolet. Air-conditioning thrummed through the vents. It was as quiet as church. By a quarter of eleven, he had nothing to show. He flipped the last fat book shut and lugged it back to the counter dividing the public space from the clerks’ work area. He set it down with a plop and a sigh.
