by Allen Eskens
“Do you know what the argument was about?”
“I didn’t catch it all, but it was mostly name-calling. Toke was yelling something about him having no obligation. And that guy, Charlie, was calling Toke a selfish son of a bitch. It didn’t last too long before Toke got up and left.”
“Was Charlie around the night Toke died?”
“I didn’t see him again until this morning.”
“You sure?”
“He’s got a face that stands out.” Vicky gave a light chuckle. “Who’d have thought that Toke was the good-looking one in the family?”
The Hix property didn’t have what you might call a driveway. Rather, it had a large gravel turnaround that narrowed to one lane where it met the road. The house lay straight ahead, and a long, red barn stood to my right. Both buildings had yellow police tape crossing their doors. The place smelled of hay and dirt and manure, but seemed to glimmer in the evening sun. She led us around the side of the house and down a gravel trail that took us past a grain silo and a second red barn, our path becoming dotted with hoofprints.
“Toke had livestock?” I asked.
“Not for very long,” she said. “Hix raised cattle. He also raised a few horses back when Jeannie was a kid. My dad always thought that the horses were Hix’s way of spoiling his daughter.”
“Where are the cows now?”
“Toke sold them off as soon as he and Jeannie took over the place. Cattle are work, and Toke wasn’t much for farming, which is too bad because he inherited one hell of a chunk of land.”
Vicky took me to the edge of a knoll, beyond which the land sloped gently into a broad river valley, green crops stretching out to the horizon. She pointed and swept her arm from left to right. “This is your farm,” she said.
“Holy crap,” I whispered, looking out at a sea of green, where leaves of the corn rippled lightly in the breeze. On my drive to Buckley, I had passed mile upon mile of farm fields, a view that I thought might cause me to fall asleep behind the wheel, but now the sway of the crops nearly took my breath away.
“Ain’t it beautiful?”
“Gorgeous,” I said. “But I thought you said Toke wasn’t much of a farmer.”
“Oh, God, no. This ain’t Toke’s doing. He rented out the land before Hix was cold in his grave. As soon as the lawyer said the farm was going to Jeannie, Toke was on the phone getting bids. The only part of the property that ain’t under lease is the house and the horse barn.”
“How did Hix die?”
“Heart attack.”
“So, no chance that Toke might have…you know.”
“Killed Hix? It crossed our minds. Don’t get me wrong, I think Toke had it in him, but no; it was a heart attack.”
“How many acres are we talking about here?”
“Dad once told me that Hix owned about seven hundred fifty acres.”
“Seven…hundred…”
“And fifty. Yeah. But don’t quote me on that.”
I didn’t even know what an acre of land looked like, my life having been defined by city blocks, but that much land might be the kind of thing that could persuade a man like Toke to forsake his nomadic bachelorhood and start a family. I also had a better understanding of Charlie’s effort to gain guardianship of Angel. I pictured Angel in her hospital bed, clinging to life, and I suddenly felt like a jerk. Here I stood calculating angles and motivations for a land grab while this girl, who was probably my sister, lay in a coma. All around me lurked the remnants of her fallen life, the barn where both her mother and father died, the house where she tried to kill herself; I felt ashamed at how easily she had become just another chess piece in my mind.
“Did you know Angel?” I asked.
“I was ten years old when Angel was born—that age when all a girl wants to do is hang around babies. I remember Jeannie bringing her out here to the farm a couple of times. I ran across the road, and Jeannie let me hold Angel. Thinking back now, though, I don’t think Toke knew about those visits.”
“Why do you say that?”
“At the time, I didn’t think nothing of it, but when I was older, after I got the job at the Snipe’s Nest and got to know Toke a little better, I got the feeling that he controlled Jeannie, told her where she could go, who she could be friends with. And he used to say terrible things about Angel, calling her retarded and referring to her as his idiot daughter.”
“Was she…?”
“Retarded? No, just fragile. I would see her in town every once in a while—Toke and them only lived a block and a half from the bar back then. She would keep to herself, and she never answered with more than a word or two before she excused herself from the conversation and left. She reminded me of one of those scared dogs, afraid of its own shadow. Don’t get me wrong, she was sweet, but…well, fragile.”
“Where was Toke killed?”
“In the horse barn. Come on.” Vicky turned and headed back down the trail, cutting across a dirt path that led to the back door of the barn. Crime-scene tape had been stapled in two big Xs across the doorway. She pulled it free and we stepped inside.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light of the barn. It was long and narrow, with empty horse stalls down one side. The walls were filled with nails holding horse tack, gears, mower blades, and tools. The barn had a row of high, west-facing windows through which the waning sun glowed, speckled with dust.
Vicky pointed up at a thick crossbeam about three feet above our heads. “Jeannie hung herself from this beam.”
“You saw her?”
“I had just gotten home and was sitting on my porch watching the stars, when I saw Angel come out of her house. She called for Jeannie and looked around the courtyard.”
“Where was Toke?”
“He wasn’t home, so Angel wandered down to the barn and opened the front door. Next thing I knew, Angel was screaming her head off. I came over here as fast as I could. When I got here, Angel was holding Jeannie up by her legs—you know, trying to get her loose from the rope. There was a bale of hay on its side, like Jeannie had stood on the bale and kicked it over to hang herself.”
Vicky looked up at the beam as she paused in her story; then she shook her head and said, “She was dead already. There was nothing we could do.”
The barn turned quiet as I stared at that beam and pictured a woman hanging from it. My trance was broken when Vicky said, “They found Toke over here.”
She led me toward the front door, where she flipped on a light. “He was over there.” She pointed to a dark spot on the bottom of the wall about ten feet inside the barn. “He was lying on his stomach with his head pressed against the wall.”
I bent down to look at a dark stain on the lower boards of the barn wall.
“That’s blood from his head,” she said. “I heard they beat him with some kind of gear or something.”
I touched the stain of my father’s blood. This wasn’t a mug shot on a computer screen; it wasn’t the bitter stories told by my drunken mother. This was real. This was the blood from his head, and it occurred to me that if Toke Talbert turned out to be my father, this would be the closest I would ever come to touching the man who made me. I remained squatting and stared at the spot of blood.
“Are you okay?” Vicky asked.
I shrugged. “It’s just strange, I guess, knowing that this is where someone killed my father. That’s Talbert blood there, and I’m a Talbert. It’s just…I don’t know.”
“You may be a Talbert, but you ain’t nothing like the Talbert who died here.”
“Your dad doesn’t seem to agree with you,” I said. “I think he wanted to punch me when you introduced us back there.”
“Sorry about that. My father has…issues.” She didn’t need to say the word alcoholic. His appearance and actions back at her house said the word for her. She dropped her eyes as though embarrassed.
“My mother has issues like that,” I said, trying to be sympathetic. “In fact, that’s a good pa
rt of why I left home to go to college. I guess you could say that I ran away from home to go to school.”
“I could never do that,” she said. “He needs someone to take care of him, and I’m all he’s got.”
Vicky went quiet, and in that silence I remembered something that she had said back at the bar. She told me that going to college wasn’t in the cards for her. I stupidly assumed that she didn’t have the grades for it, but that wasn’t it at all.
“Is that why you didn’t go to college?” I asked. “Because of your father?”
“It sounds dumb, I know, but I can’t leave him alone. It’s more than just the alcohol. Something happened that messed him up—emotionally. It’s gotten so bad that he can hardly function anymore.”
“Does it have something to do with Toke?” I asked. “Is that why he wanted to rip my head off when you told him my name?”
Vicky nodded her head slowly and said, “It has everything to do with Toke. Your father is the reason that my mom is dead, and why my dad can’t get out of bed in the morning.”
My bewilderment must have been plain on my face because she followed with, “Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”
Chapter 15
The sun was already beginning to set when I once again got on the back of Vicky’s Tiger. Her father either didn’t hear us walk past his house or decided that he had made his point and didn’t need to come out again. Vicky drove us back in the direction of town, but when we crossed the river, she pulled the bike over to the side of the highway and parked at the top of a boat access.
We dismounted, and she walked me to the bridge to a spot where a three-foot-tall concrete wall rose up from the bridge deck. She pointed at the leading edge of the wall, where a chunk about the size of a watermelon wedge had been busted off.
“This is where my mom died.”
Vicky brushed her fingers along the damage and then stepped around the side of the bridge and started down the embankment. “Mom was coming home from work when it happened…would have been ten years ago now. Her car rolled down here and landed upside down in the river.”
At the bottom of the hill, she walked to a fallen cottonwood tree and sat on its trunk, leaving space beside her for me to join. I did. “Toke came out to the farm that night. Back then he drove this piece-of-shit Ford, the kind you see in movies from the seventies, bright red, like fire-engine red. He came out around sunset. I remember because I had plans that night, and I was waiting for the sun to go down.”
“Plans?”
Vicky smiled to herself. “I was a teenager, and in love. The boy lived on this side of town and…” Vicky pointed across the river. “See that gap in the trees over there?”
I squinted in the dying light to see it, and could just make out an opening cut to the left of the blacktop. “Yeah,” I said.
“Remember how I told you that I’ve had a bike since fourth grade? Well, I have trails all over back there.” She waved her hand at the woods across the river. “That gap in the trees is where one of my trails comes out. I could ride all the way to my boyfriend’s place and only touch the road a couple times.”
“This was ten years ago?”
“Yep.”
“Why would Toke be going out to see Hix? From what I’ve put together, Hix and Toke hated each other by then.”
“Toke was raising all kinds of hell that night. Me and Dad went to the porch to watch it all. Toke parked in the courtyard and was banging his fist on the door of the house, screaming for Hix to come out and face him. About then, Hix came out of the horse barn carrying some kind of pipe. He told Toke to get off his property. He said that if Toke didn’t leave, he’d bash his head in. That didn’t seem to scare Toke in the slightest. He jumped off the porch and squared up with Hix, making sure to stay beyond Hix’s reach.”
“What were they fighting about?”
“Jeannie—as always. That was around the time that Hix told Jeannie he was going to cut her out of his will. Jeannie must have told Toke about that because he was calling Hix a monster, and evil, and just about everything under the sun. He wanted to know what kind of a man would forsake his own daughter and granddaughter.”
“You heard all this?”
“Yeah. We had a front-row seat. Dad was ready to call the cops if things got out of control, but it never came to blows. Toke finished his tirade and told Hix that if he wanted to put his daughter and granddaughter in the poorhouse, well he could go to hell. Then Toke jumped into his truck and lit out of here like a crazy man.”
Vicky didn’t move as she spoke, her gaze locked on the murky water beyond us.
“After Toke left, I thought it was dark enough for me to sneak over to my boyfriend’s place. I rolled my minibike down through the hayfield behind my house, push starting it as I went. When I crossed the bridge, I saw the scattered parts of my mom’s car. I didn’t know what it was at first, just a bunch of busted plastic in the road. I stopped to look around and saw her taillights glowing just under the surface of the water. I ran down to see if I could help. That’s when I recognized her car.”
Vicky sniffed and folded her fingers together.
“I pulled my mother from the car and dragged her to the bank. That river may seem calm, but I promise you, there’s a powerful current out there. I almost lost my grip. After I got her on the shore, I tried mouth-to-mouth. I hit her in the chest. I did everything I could think of to get her to breathe again. No cars came by. No help. So I got on my bike and raced home to get my dad. He called the ambulance, and we came back down here.”
Vicky pointed to a small clearing near the bottom of the boat launch where the ground was fairly level. “That’s where she was lying.” Vicky wiped silent tears from her eyes. “There was nothing we could do.”
As she spoke, Vicky became small and vulnerable, no longer the hellcat who taunted death on a motorcycle, but a woman holding in her hands the broken heart of her fourteen-year-old self. I wanted to put my arm around Vicky, but there were so many reasons why that was a bad idea. Instead, I let her face the memory alone while I sat by, a voyeur to her pain.
When she seemed to come back to the present, I asked, “Toke?”
She nodded. “When they pulled Mom’s car from the river the next day, they found red paint on the side. The skid marks showed that she caught the shoulder and was trying to regain control when she ran into the bridge wall.”
“Couldn’t they match the paint to Toke’s truck?”
Vicky looked at me with a wry smile and said, “By some freakish coincidence, Toke’s truck was stolen that very night. He reported it gone before the ambulance carrying my mother even made it back to town. It’s never been found. My bet is that it’s at the bottom of the river somewhere between here and Buckley.”
“So they could never prove Toke hit your mom’s car?”
“The county attorney said that without matching the paint to Toke’s truck, all he had was speculation.”
“So that’s why your dad hates me.”
“He doesn’t need a trial to tell him what’s what. And you being Toke’s boy, well, that’s a little too much for him to take, I guess.”
“I’m sorry about your mom,” I said. “I’m sorry that my dad was such a…”
Vicky put her hand on my forearm. “Joe, I’m not like Harley—or my dad for that matter. I don’t think you carry the sins of your old man with you. You didn’t even know him.”
“But somehow, I feel guilty for being his son. I know I shouldn’t.”
“This is all on Toke. Not you. You have no responsibility for your father.”
“Like you have for yours?”
She slid her hand off of my arm and returned her gaze to the water, now black against the closing dusk. “My dad used to be something,” she said. “When I was a kid, he was my hero. I would watch him chop wood or string up a fence and think how lucky I was to have a dad like him. That all went away when Mom died. After the funeral, he took to his bed and didn�
��t get up for days. He was never one to shy away from a drink or two, but after she died, he went at it with a passion. He gave up on just about everything. The farm went to pot. We sold off a good chunk of the land.”
“And you’ve been taking care of him ever since?”
“I’m his daughter. What choice did I have?”
“He’s your father,” I said quietly. “He has no right to ask that of you.”
No sooner had those words rolled off my tongue, than I regretted saying them. Over the years, to assuage my guilt, I had convinced myself that Kathy’s downfall wasn’t my fault. I was merely an eyewitness to her undoing. I didn’t force her into addiction. I didn’t twist her thoughts and emotions into knots. She made those choices, and she had no right to use those bad choices to mess with my life. At least, that’s how I saw it.
Vicky, apparently, saw it differently.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”
She didn’t respond one way or the other; she just stared calmly into the night.
It had gotten dark enough that we could no longer see the river in front of us, although the lapping of its current filled the night air. At some point our shoulders had touched, and I could feel her leaning into me. The hairs on the back of my neck found a chill in the breeze, or maybe it was something else. Either way, I knew that the time had come to leave.
“It’s getting late,” I said
“Yeah, I should probably get you back to town.”
We rode slowly back to Buckley, the Tiger tamed as we cruised down the smooth black highway. We cut through town on the way to my motel, and as we passed the Snipe’s Nest, I spied Harley Redding standing outside of the bar talking to the same two guys he’d been sitting with earlier. Vicky had to have noticed him, although she didn’t show it. But Harley noticed us. He nudged one of the guys and pointed. As we passed by he yelled out something. I couldn’t make it out with the wind whistling past my ears.
Chapter 16
