by Neely Tucker
“And the way he’d tell it, this was seventy-two, seventy-three, right along in there. The Harpers, they weren’t here that much. The old man worked oil in the panhandle. They’d come here on your weekends, your holidays. Older couple. You’d see ’em out on the boat on the reservoir, people said. But they kept off to theyselves.
“So this one day, mid-July, the phone rings down to the sheriff’s. It’s Mr. and Mrs. Harper’s grandson. He’s powerful upset. Says his grandma hurt herself and the granddad’s been gone for two days down to Texas. Sheriff Lewis says, ‘Well, how you mean, hurt herself?’ Boy says, ‘With a knife.’ Sheriff says, ‘What, in the kitchen?’ Boy says, ‘No, she went in the bathroom, locked the door, and cut herself open.’ Sheriff says, ‘Well, how you know if the door’s locked?’ Who believes kids? Boy says, ‘’Cause there’s blood running out from under the door and she’s screaming.’ That lit a fire under the sheriff. He jumped up fast like, telling the boy to sit still and he was a-coming. He tells Bo—that was the deputy then, Bo Thompson—to call the hospital and he come out here, lights and siren blazing, ninety miles an hour. He comes running up these steps, right where we standing, barges in the door. And there’s the boy, right there in the hallway, slumped up against the door right behind you, right outside the kitchen.”
“You mean that washroom, the half bath?”
“I do. Boy was sitting there. Pool of blood. A lake and getting bigger by the minute. Boy looks up and says, ‘She’s dead.’ That’s the full business of it, whole and entire. ‘She’s dead.’
“The sheriff asks, like any man would, what, you looked in on her? Boy shakes his head. ‘She stopped screaming,’ he said. Well, the sheriff has to move the boy outta the way. He calls out to the missus a couple of times and then tries to shoulder the door open. But this is when they made things that lasted, and the door wasn’t no joke. Besides, the floor was too slick with blood to get any sort of head start. He tried to lean back and kick it open and damn near busted his ass. So he pulls out his gun and tells the boy to look the other way and cover his eyes, and he shoots the handle, blew it right apart.
“Now. The door swings open, he pushes it back. There’s Missus Harper. She’s sitting on the toilet seat, but with the lid down, it wasn’t like she was using the thing. Slumped up against the wall, right below the window ledge. Blood everywhere. Her right hand, it was still at her throat, the fingers up under the skin. The knife was still in her left hand. This butcher knife from the kitchen. Silver and sharp as shit. She had a death grip sort of thing on it. She’d been slicing at her neck, little cuts, like she was working up the nerve to go for the gusher. She’d finally hit it, though. Front of her dress was drenched, it had sprayed over on the wall, run down on the floor, a river right out into the hall.”
“Good God,” Sully said.
“But look here—she ain’t dead yet. Sheriff shoots the lock out, bang, door bounces, all that brings her back to. She, swear to Christ, opens her eyes at the sheriff, sort of waves the knife around in a little circle, but she can’t raise it up. And then—this is the goddamndest thing—she pulls her right hand off her throat and pulls her dress back down below her knees. It had gotten pushed up, what with all the thrashing, I reckon, and it was high up on her hips. So she pulled it back down. That’s what was on her mind. Her knees. She didn’t want the sheriff to see her knees. ’Course, she pulled her hand away from her throat? All this blood comes gushing. She makes this weird little noise, like she’s gargling, waves that knife around in a little circle at the sheriff, like, go away. So he comes over, real careful like, and gets the knife away from her, then, there ain’t a towel or nothing, so he takes off his shirt real quick, whips off his T-shirt and gets that placed up against her neck. Pulls his shirt halfway back on, grabs her up, trying to keep her head from lolling back, and carries her out to the car, drives like hell for the hospital. She died on the way. DOA.”
Sully looked at him. The day had gone hot, stifling, airless. Sweat poured down him. He felt it mass on his stomach, pool in his crotch.
“The thing of it all was,” the deputy said, with another brown jet of juice, “that’s not the hell of it. The hell of it was the boy.”
“The grandson?”
“Yeah. See, the ambulance had never gotten out there by then, and the sheriff, he had to decide whether to leave the boy by hisself or bring him. A helluva thing either way. But he lays Missus Harper in the backseat, stands back, and there’s the boy, standing there with the butcher knife. Sheriff said he damn near jumped outta his skin. ‘I thought you might need this,’ the boy says. Holds it out. Just covered in blood. Well, good God, the sheriff gets it away from him. The boy commences to caterwauling and jumps in the backseat with his grandma before the sheriff can stop him and he’s all but laying on top of her, screaming ‘Granny, Granny,’ and the sheriff, he ain’t got the time, he just slams the door and takes off. Boy sat in the backseat, blood everywhere, laying up against his grandma, holding her hand, the sheriff hollering into the radio, the whole entire way. It was a helluva thing. Helluva thing.”
“You don’t remember the boy’s name,” Sully asked, all but holding his breath, closing his eyes against the heat. “By any chance.”
“I do. George. Sheriff said he had to keep hollering, ‘George, is she with us? George, is she with us?’ the whole way to the hospital. It was something stuck in his mind ever after that.”
TWENTY-THREE
OF COURSE THERE was no cell coverage. None. He was driving north on the gravel road just up from the house, barely moving, holding the phone outside the window, upside down, sideways. He even stopped, making sure the deputy hadn’t doubled back from the highway to follow him, and stood on top of the rental, holding the phone as high as he could. Not a single bar.
“Piece of shit,” he said. He looked around from his car-top perch. Nothing. Just a few trees in the distance, dying of loneliness.
Susan in News Research, that’s who he needed. Someone with her skills digging through the computerized databases, LexisNexis, Accurint, Accutrack, tracking down Tex-Oil, Willliam Harper and his grandson George, the family or business in Texas. People didn’t walk off the face of the Earth. They left traces, fingerprints, property, financial transactions. What had Faulkner called it? A scratch mark on the face of oblivion?
Somewhere out there, Harper’s family had left their scratch mark. Somewhere out there, there was some record, some document, somebody, that could tell him what happened to the boy in the back of the car. Somewhere out there, there was something that would confirm in print what he already knew to the deep recesses of his marrow: George in the back of the sheriff’s car was the killer on Capitol Hill.
The problem was finding those traces, his mind spinning, stuck out here, nowheresville, on a gravel road, in the place where they strung up coyotes by their feet. Who would have pieces of them, where? He was looking for people who had left here twenty-five, nearly thirty years ago. What time was it . . . ? Coming up on two. That gave him three hours till the county offices closed at five, and he was a good twenty or thirty minutes away. The schools, that would be good. Maybe young George had gone to school for a year or two up here. The land records for who owned it now. Didn’t the deputy say something about an absentee landlord? Christ, why hadn’t he thought to ask him that while he was standing there?
In the car, he put his foot to the floor and the rear end spun, fishtailing until he got it straightened out. Muttering under his breath now, “C’mon, c’mon.”
The next driveway turned out to be a mile up the road. He pulled in, a trailer on blocks and a dog in the yard. One truck parked beside it. Clothes on the line, a barn thirty yards behind the trailer but no livestock to be seen. The dog, a country mutt, was loud but not fierce. “Hey dog,” Sully said, loping out of the car, walking to the wooden steps leading to the door. The dog, following, head lowered, sniffing, but he wasn’t growling.
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br /> “Helllooo,” Sully called out, then rapped on the door gently. “Not a salesman, just a reporter.” He stepped back and leaned against the railing, holding his notebook in one hand, a pen in the other, as nonthreatening a stance as he could manage. He looked down at his shoes, in case anyone was eyeing him through the door, so that they couldn’t see his scars right away. No cars came by. There was no sound from inside. He was broiling, wide swatches of sweat dampening his light blue shirt, turning it navy in irregular blots. Rapping again, five knocks this time, he fished his press ID out of his pocket and slung the lanyard around his neck, letting the badge dangle. It couldn’t hurt. You wanted people to think you were a reporter nebbish, look like one.
He was halfway back to the car, holding his shirt by the top button, flapping it away from his chest, when he heard the door open behind him. A woman, wearing a pale T-shirt and brown yoga pants, bed head, her eyes puffy, looked out through the narrow opening. The dog went beside her into the house. She looked out, not saying anything, yawning. Sully, staying put, introduced himself, said he was just looking for anyone who might know the Harpers, who had lived next door a long time ago.
The woman pinched the bridge between her eyes, then sneezed. It made her hair flop over her forehead. “We ain’t been living here but two years,” she said.
“The people who had it before you, they—”
“They went off to Florida.”
“Okay. Any other neighbors what might be long timers?”
She just shook her head, brushing the brown hair back from her eyes, now holding a palm flat out from her forehead, a temporary visor from the sun.
“And ma’am, just in case there might be an owner who’s been around awhile, do you own this land out here, or do y’all rent?”
“Own,” she said. “Two years now. Thank you.”
She latched the screen door before closing the other. Even in the yard, Sully could hear the bolt turn.
When he got into town, things didn’t get any better.
Jo-Ellen had left for the day, and the lady at the clerk’s office, about fifteen minutes from retirement, harrumphed and hawed and heaved out a records book or two and confirmed the place had gone into probate, been divided up and sold off by the county in chunks. A man named Mitchell, Ross Mitchell, in San Francisco, he owned the Harper house and surrounding five acres. He’d been buying up derelict property around the county for ages, nobody really knew why. He paid the taxes by check and that was all he had to do, so. There wasn’t a phone number for him. She closed the book and looked at Sully.
He nodded, stealing a glance at the clock on the wall behind her before she could. Twenty till five.
“Ma’am,” he said, “not to hurry you any at all, but could you tell me the name of the funeral home in town?”
* * *
“You’re asking a mean thing,” Mr. Larrington was saying, looking down at Sully’s business card, the air in the room as dead as the clientele.
“Yes, sir, I know it.”
“But what on Earth for? A reporter from a fancy newspaper in D.C. shows up just before closing time, asking about a client we had nearly thirty years ago. This doesn’t happen a lot out here . . . Mr. Carter.” He said this, looking down at the card in his hand.
“I suppose not.” Sully, wearing down some now, fighting to keep the momentum, his eyes adjusting from the glare outside to the gloom here. The amber lighting in the office was professional, he realized, not happenstance. The darkest day in January, the brightest July afternoon, a client would be comforted by the dim yellow air falling over their skin, not casting too harsh a glare on their grief-ravaged faces. If they wept, there were tissues and shadows. The management of grief. You were Mr. Larrington, you needed to manage that grief into the $6,345 Eternal Comfort package, versus the velvet-lined $3,995 Peaceful Slumbers. It made Sully wonder, briefly, what his father had chosen for his mother. Or, for that matter, what his aunt had chosen for his father. Nadia, there weren’t options. They were burying people in modified bookcases in Sarajevo by then.
“I came out here on this Waters thing, like everybody else,” he said. Mr. Larrington, the man with the fleshy jowls and the kind face, looking back across the walnut desk at him. Not a single paper on the desk. Nothing but full attention for the client. “And then I came across this, this family tragedy. It’s just a feature story, about the county, when Terry Waters was growing up out here. The places that form people, that sort of thing. I wonder if George, the Harpers’ boy, knew Terry.”
Mr. Larrington cleared his throat and tapped Sully’s card on the well-carved edge of the desk. Sully had the idea Mr. Larrington cleared his throat every time before he spoke to clients in this room, to make sure he had just the right baritone edge.
“I wouldn’t know, of course. I was in my early thirties then. My father, he was aging out of the business. Things were quite busy. You wouldn’t think it, coming from where you do, but they were. We don’t rush things out this way, particularly the passing of loved ones.” He paused, to give the observation the proper gravitas. “But of course I remember the day they brought Mrs. Harper in. No one would forget that. I remember Sheriff had to put a new backseat in the patrol car. There just wasn’t nothing else for it.”
“The boy, with her that day. Helluva thing.” Stealing the deputy’s line.
“Of course. I remember the day, but little of him. This is a funeral home, not a hospital. He was a sprite of a thing. Sat with his grandfather the next morning when arrangements were made. My father, he was handling the transaction, but wanted me to witness it, to learn how to handle death in trauma.”
“The boy’s mother didn’t come to fetch him? His father?”
“I have no idea. But not by the next day, apparently. The father, I remember being told, was not in the picture, and the mother wasn’t available.”
Sully looked up from his notebook, and Mr. Larrington was already holding up a hand. “I don’t know what ‘not available’ means, either. The mother, she was the Harpers’ daughter. For all I know, she was on vacation in Niagara Falls. Or in a dry-out tank in Los Angeles. Families in grief are odd things. It’s not our business to question.”
“Of course.”
“The boy, carrying her name, and not the father’s, suggested they were never married.”
“Of course.”
“Still, it was odd. The grandfather and the little boy, selecting a burial package for a wife, grandmother, and a suicide. The overwhelming impression I have of the time, however, is not the boy, but the grandfather. Mr. Harper. Sternest, most humorless man you’d want to meet. Does it carry weight that an undertaker says a man is humorless, void of feelings, possessed of a robotic presence? Yes or no, well then. I see many a decent people at their worst, penny-pinching moment in life—‘Do I spend the extra three thousand for mother’s coffin that no one will ever see, or do I take the wife to Hawaii for a week?’—and Mr. Harper was not a decent person.”
“I see.”
“He said he worked outside, on rigs and in the fields, but was pale as a ghost. Denim jeans, denim jacket. Looked like he had donated two quarts of blood and had a hangover besides. Touched the brim of his hat to my father. Didn’t speak to the boy at all, who sat there on the floor, back against the wall, as his grandfather sought to spend the least amount of money possible to put his beloved wife in the eternal dirt.”
Sully shifted in his seat. “So, not a lot of negotiations there.”
Mr. Larrington bristled. “I would say not. It’s not that we negotiate. He kept asking about the most economical thing we had, and my father, he really couldn’t believe it, that this man would so dishonor his wife this way. So my father kept asking, ‘Economical how?’ as if he understood Mr. Harper to be talking about a minimalist casket, something about the design, until Mr. Harper grew impatient and said, ‘I mean the cheapest.’ Which is pretty
much a pine box. There’s lots of poor people around here and there’s a lot of people who have little in the way of book learning and there isn’t any reason to pretend there isn’t. But Mr. Harper wasn’t either of the two. Pardon my French, but it was just a sorry goddamn thing to witness. Mr. Harper, he arranged to have his wife buried in the city cemetery and did not stay for the services.”
Sully, scribbling in his notebook, the pen scratching the page, stopped and looked up to see Mr. Larrington looking at him. “He didn’t attend his own wife’s funeral?”
Mr. Larrington shook his head, pleased his point had been received. “Paid cash money for the site, picked out the granite. Just a flat dash marker.”
“I’m sorry. A ‘dash marker’?”
“Yes. The year of birth, year of death, and the dash in between. Your entire life, distilled to a horizontal blip between eight numbers.”
“Ah.”
“He didn’t so much as spring for ‘beloved.’”
“Well, that’s just common.”
“He picked out a spot in the cemetery and told us to do it at the first opportunity. Gave my father half up front and said he’d send us the rest when we sent him a picture. And he stood up, put his hat back on, touched the brim again to my father, and was gone, with the boy in the truck.”
The words floated out in the room like one of the eulogies spoken in the adjacent chapel, the final summing up, the last echo fading away.
“Did you ever see him, the boy, again?”
“No. There was no funeral. The interment was just me and the pastor. The grounds staff was a few yards off, leaning on shovels, waiting for us to finish up.”
“Hunh.” Sully was back to writing in his notebook, more to give himself time to think than to record every word, and, without looking up, said, “Did Mr. Harper pay the rest? And any chance you might still have that address where you mailed the picture?”
