Thing With Feathers (9781616634704)

by Sweazy-kulju, Anne

  “I assure you these incidents did occur. I was there. I settled matters each time myself.”

  “Yes, Mr. Marshall. You covered for him. And in doing so, you covered up any evidence you would otherwise have.”

  “I had to. The boy is scared to death of the preacher. He’s a terribly abusive man. He abused his own daughter, and I’ve no doubt he beats daylight out of my son.”

  “Again, where’s the proof? You have nothing to support the abuse of his daughter and nothing to prove he would beat his, or your son. He never has, has he?”

  “Victor told me he beats him where it does not show.”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Marshall. I believe you. But I’m afraid the wheels of justice don’t turn on understanding and righteous belief. It takes evidence to grease those wheels. Until you can get me some evidence, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  Sean snatched his cap from his back pocket and placed it on his head as he made his way to the door. With one hand on the door handle, Sean turned back to the attorney. “You’re afraid. You’re afraid to risk losing a case, afraid of tarnishing that sterling reputation you enjoy so much, afraid because the man I accuse is a preacher. I’ll tell you something, sir. I didn’t become the man I am by shying away from the difficult. I’m a man who takes on wrongdoing, be it easy or hard. And when I go to bed at night, I have no trouble sleeping with myself. Do you, Reynolds, after telling clients they should allow the abuse of their child just so they can get proper evidence to make your job easier? Do you feel good about yourself when you go home and take off your successful lawyer suit?”

  “You’re getting upset, Mr. Marshall.” He stood to show his visitor out. “There’s no call for getting personal about this. If you truly believe you can find an attorney who can make a case for you without any evidence, then I would hire that man. For the record, I like you, Marshall. I wish I could help you. And if you should obtain something on this preacher that I can use against him, I promise you I wouldn’t let his backward collar get in my way. I studied law to rid the world of muck like him, or at least my little corner of the world. Get me something I can use and I’ll give the man a dose of Hades on earth.”

  Sean nodded, a little ashamed of his behavior. His disappointment was just so great. He shook the lawyer’s hand and made his way out.

  Chapter 62

  July, 1941

  Grand Ronde Indian Reservation, Oregon

  Tiny and Victor brewed their own trouble at the roadhouse on the Indian Reservation. The two teenagers had tapped a pony keg for themselves and a couple of drifters, who had told the boys that they enjoyed playing poker even if they weren’t much good at it. By seven that night, Victor was thoroughly drunk, sick with a pounding headache, and he was two hundred and forty dollars in debt to the man they called Cleff. And Cleff wanted his money.

  Tiny, Victor’s fair-weather pal, was a chubby coward with a slight foot impediment, compliments of Mr. Abelbaum’s roof. “Uh, I gotta go, Victor. See ya around.” And he ducked out the door.

  Victor had one cheek pressed to the cool wood of the table, his arms stretched out pathetically across the table, half of a beer sitting beside his elbow. “It’s okay, you guys,” he slurred comically. “I gotta rich uncle, sort of.”

  “Well now, is he a rich uncle or is he a rich uncle sort of?” Cleff breathed into Victor’s face with breath foul enough to kill a blackberry bush.

  Victor heaved all over Cleff’s boots.

  The man jumped to his feet and looked down with disgust at his boots. “That’s two hundred and forty-six bucks you owe me now, you little puke!”

  Victor just lolled his head on the table and laughed senselessly. The two men grabbed an arm each and relocated the drunken lad between them in the front seat of their truck. The bartender, Young Bear Johnson, went about his business of washing mugs and shot glasses. He wasn’t gonna step into a mess like that for Victor Bowman. That kid was nothing but trouble.

  At least Victor was sobering up enough to realize how extremely lucky he was. His grandfather was away again. Victor had long ago stopped wondering or caring where the old man went so often and stayed the entire night. He was just glad that that night was one of the old man’s trips. He sat on the couch, feeling miserable, a hustler on each side of him. The man named Cleff picked the preacher’s new black phone up off the floor again and held it in front of Victor’s nose.

  “Try it again, kid.”

  Victor dialed the number again. And again, it rang several times. He was just about to hang up when a woman answered, sounding out of breath.

  “Oh, hiya,” Victor said lazily. “Lemme talk to my dad,” he mumbled. His head lolled sideways to give Cleff a goofy smile.

  Cleff wanted to smash the kid’s face in. But he wanted his money more. He shoved Victor’s face away from him.

  “Victor?” came a worried voice over the wire.

  “Dad! Guess what? I’m in some trouble.” He giggled.

  “Victor, you’ve been drinking again?”

  Victor didn’t like the condemnation he heard in Sean’s voice. “Hey, man! You said I should call when I need help. I need some help!”

  Sean took a deep breath. “What kind of trouble are you in, son?”

  “I owe some money.”

  “You mean you’ve been gambling again? I thought we agreed you wouldn’t play cards anymore.”

  Victor was getting aggravated. “You said so, not me. Are you gonna help me or not? I got people waitin’.”

  “No, Victor, I’m not. Not this time.”

  “But you have to!” He was sobering now. “I owe these guys two hundred and forty dollars!”

  “Two hundred and forty six,” Cleff growled and pointed to his boots.

  “No, not this time, Victor. You got yourself in to this mess, and you can get yourself out of it. Tell your friends you’ll have to get a job and pay them back because I’m not handing you that kind of money. You don’t respect it. And I think you’re taking advantage of our relationship.”

  “Buggers, you say! I need the money, man! Hey! These guys aren’t my friends! They’ll—”

  But his fury was wasted. Sean had already hung up.

  From their end of the conversation, it didn’t sound to Cleff like he was going to get his money. The little punk didn’t have any rich uncle. He didn’t have squat. The two drifters looked around the ramshackle cabin with disgust. Even they were accustomed to better living conditions than that rubbish heap of a shack. Still, he had invested an entire day and ample gasoline harvesting that kid, and he wasn’t about to give up now.

  “Ya know, I’m going to do you a favor, kid.”

  “Yeah?” Victor looked hopeful, and dopey.

  “Yeah. I’m going to give you a couple days to get me my money before I kill you.”

  “Oh.” Even through his beer-colored fog, Victor realized the threat.

  “You got two days. Then my friend and I are coming back for my money. If you don’t have it, we’re gonna make fish food out of ya.” He grabbed a fistful of Victor’s hair and wrenched his head back to look him in the eye. “Understand?”

  “Uh huh.” He had no money and no means of getting any money. He was fish food.

  “In the meantime, we’ll need a little down payment. Sorry, kid, but you wanted to play with the big boys.”

  “Whaddya mean?” Victor looked left and right quickly.

  The drifters stood. The big dumb one grabbed him by the collar. Then the blows came, one after another.

  The hike up to Tiny’s was a marathon. He felt awful, and the sun was beating down on his aching head. Every muscle in his body smarted, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he had a few bones broken in the bargain.

  Victor was on the last switchback. He stopped just before the inclining ingres
s to the Welbys’ property so he could remove an annoying pebble from his boot. From where he was resting, he could hear the Welbys’ dogs carrying on. Good thing they lived so far out that they had no neighbors. Every time Victor visited the place, the nonstop racket from untold numbers of animals drove him nuts.

  Now he was approaching the, what, house? They called it a ‘yurt’. The Welby’s sheltered their children in something bigger than a tree house but a bit more rustic. It was comprised of old tires, scrap timber and board, and a canvas tarp for a roof, tied like a circus tent around a huge spruce for a center pole. The place had no running water, no indoor water closet, no telephone. The surrounding area was inches deep in mud since the dense forest blocked out any sun that would dry up the rain water. Wallowing in all that mud were an ornery goat named Gable, who liked to piss on himself and had the longest, sharpest horns Victor had ever seen, as well as several female pygmy goats who worshipped Gable, chickens, ducks, and angry geese—oh, and five big danged dogs that Mr. Welby kept locked up in a small fenced area until he needed them for security. Victor thought the animals acted like they had hydrophobia, but Tiny said they were mean because his dad wanted them that way. He kept the dogs a little skinny.

  Overall, the smell was awful. It was some disgusting mixture of animal dung, unwashed bodies, and the fermenting corn in heavily bunged cast iron bathtubs lying around everywhere.

  “Whoa! What happened to you?” Tiny asked when he saw his pal.

  “Remember the two guys we played poker with?”

  “Oh yeah.” Tiny looked ashamed for about a fraction of a second. “So that’s what I missed by leaving early, huh?”

  “Yeah. By the way, thanks a heap.” He paused. “They’re coming back for me, Tiny.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “I mean they told me if I don’t pay them the whole wad I owe ‘em in two days, they’re gonna kill me. They’re gonna nail my knees to the floor, pour gasoline over my head and light a match. Then they’re gonna feed my ashes to the fish. It’s what they said, I’m not kidding. You gotta help me, man.”

  “Whoa. Victor, be serious, pal. I ain’t got no two hundred dollars.”

  “I know, I know. But you gotta help me think of some way to get it by tomorrow.”

  “I don’t even know anyone with that kind of money.”

  “I do. But he turned me down flat. Couldn’t believe it. I called old man Marshall and told him I was in trouble bad, and the old coot hung up on me.”

  “That’s low. You try the dad routine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm. Well, sometimes a man’s gotta take what he wants. I mean, look, you’re his only son, right? And he’s old and sick. So, all that money’s gonna be yours someday anyway. I say we go over there tonight and take what you need.”

  “You mean, like, hustle him?”

  “No! Heck, no. I mean steal it or beat him ‘til he coughs it up.”

  Victor didn’t like the sounds of it. “I ain’t beatin’ up anyone. Maybe we could break in and just, you know, take it. But we’d have to be quiet, ’cause he’s got a nurse and his brother’s there, too. I don’t wanna mess with Will Marshall.” He could feel someone watching him and turned around quickly. Sure enough, there was Nedra, Tiny’s younger sister, staring at him out a flap in the cordoned off area that sufficed as her bedroom. She smiled and then let the curtain fall back down.

  Nedra was a weird girl. Victor called her the goat-girl, and pronounced her name as if he were a billy goat naying, “Neeeeh-dra”, because she was always with those filthy goats. Nedra’s mother was always stumbling around the place, bottle of swill in hand, but she didn’t seem to have a bone to pick over her daughter’s choice of bed partners. Sometimes Victor felt sorry for goat-girl.

  Nedra never wore under-drawers. For one shiny quarter, she’d lift her dress and let Tiny’s friends look at her private for as long as they wanted. Victor had paid her money plenty of times for a look-see. Just lately, she’d grown a little hair down there, and that made it more interesting. Twice, she let Victor get so close that he could have reached out and touched it if he’d wanted. But then she’d have to pay him a quarter, as dirty as she was.

  “My brat sister,” Tiny grumbled. Then he pulled Victor’s ear real close to his mouth. “Know what? She let me rut on her the other day.”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Swear it to that God of yours, pal. She’d let you too if you asked. She likes it, man. Nedra likes you, too. I can tell.”

  “How much does she want for it?”

  “A quarter, man. She let me do it for that. Swear to God.” He crossed his chest. “Just lies right down and spreads ‘em wide. That’s why she keeps looking at you, Victor. She likes you, man. She wants it.”

  “Maybe,” he said cautiously. “Anyhow, how am I gonna pay these guys off, Tiny? They’re gonna kill me! Then I ain’t gonna be ruttin’ on goat-girl or anybody else. I’m fish food.”

  Tiny put his pudgy arm around his pal’s shoulder. “Like I told ya, pal. We go over there tonight and we jus’ take it. It’ll be your money soon enough anyway.”

  “But is has to be tonight. And it’s two hundred and forty-six dollars—and twenty-five cents.” He stole a look back toward the flap.

  “Sure thing, pal. Old dairy-farmin’ guys like them probably turn in when it gets dark, and it’s getting dark these days around ten. We’ll go around ten-thirty.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? Hey, man, I’m giving you the only way to save your butt.” He punched Victor’s upper arm and Victor howled. “Sorry. Sore, huh? Hey, you got a baseball bat?”

  “I think so. Why?”

  “Bring it with you, dodo. Geez. Do I gotta think of everything?”

  Chapter 63

  July, 1941

  Chicago, Illinois

  “Blair?” Wendell’s hushed voice called.

  “Come in.”

  Wendell had a briefcase with him, which he carried protectively under his arm. He stepped from the foyer into the main room and saw her standing on the far side, in front of a bank of windows. She turned and flashed him a brilliant smile. Instantly Blair noticed the pained expression that fleeted across Wendell’s plainly honest face, before he could hide it from her. Blair’s heartstrings tweaked for her friend. But Wendell was adept at shrinking all of his sorrows into a single flash of dispiritedness, just before he squared his shoulders and returned her smile.

  She’d broken his heart when she’d had to tell him the truth: Cindy was gone. She had never really existed at all, but inside Blair’s own head. Blair had been mentally ill for many years, her doctors told them. She had suffered some fracture of her psyche early on, from repeated abuses upon her as a child. The trauma she’d suffered at the hands of Chester Lasley had shocked so deeply, it managed to reach those dark malicious pockets of insanity and root them out. Her psyche had fused together again during her ten comatose months. Her psychologist at the sanitarium, where she’d been residing ever since her release from the hospital almost a year earlier, told her she was healed. Her prognosis was sanity restored. Blair thought her doctors were absolutely spot on about her diagnosis. She prayed they were right about her prognosis. She had not heard Cindy’s voice since she’d descended into a coma a year and ten months earlier.

  Wendell had confessed his love for Blair when she was still in the hospital. He was crestfallen when he learned that Cindy, an alias for Blair, was married to another man and had a child with him. Until he’d learned that, Wendell admitted to her, he had harbored a secret hope that someday Cindy Marshall might consent to marry him.

  In the intervening months since he’d discovered the inscription on the backside of Cindy’s Lady Racine timepiece, the only item she had taken with her on her attempted suicide, the item that was clutched frightfully tight in her fist, he
had recited aloud the poem for her. He did this over and over, many times each visit, which he made at the end of every workday, and every Saturday and Sunday. He knew it by heart, of course. Inevitably, he had come to adopt the verse as his own mantra, and it had helped him to keep his own secret hope alive. It had taken the passage of twelve months, the time since ‘Cindy’ awoke to the world as Blair Bowman Marshall, to dull the sharp pain of Wendell’s new reality.

  Blair watched as he swallowed a sigh and she knew what he was mourning; it was the death of hope. On his last visit, Wendell assured her he coping with his ‘disappointment’, that being the unfavorable recognizance that he would not be spending his remaining years with the only woman he had ever loved. He’d admitted to being heartbroken, but promised to have come to terms with the limits of his relationship with Cindy—now Blair. He professed to be and always remain her closest friend.

  Blair used her crutches to meet him at an empty table in the middle of the room. “How’s the leg, Cin—I’m so sorry…Blair?” he asked.

  “It’s getting stronger. I have walked all over this facility, for lack of something more entertaining to do. The doctor said this morning all the walking is indeed speeding my recovery. Tomorrow, I can begin walking Lake Shore Avenue to the Dock Street Navy Pier entrance, with my nurse and, of course, my very fashionable cane. If my leg can stand that distance, I may be able to leave here by summer’s end. That would be the best birthday gift I could possibly give to myself, Wendell. I’d almost lost hope of ever seeing my son again before I die.” She wrapped her fingers around her timepiece protectively.

  “Does the leg still hurt bad?” Wendell worried.

  “Oh my goodness, yes. But I have chosen to lie to myself and say it does not hurt too badly at all.”

  “The easiest person in the world to lie to is oneself,” Wendell said absently as he rummaged through papers. He must have realized how morose he’d sounded and quickly looked up and winked at her. “Before I forget, I must give you these…” Wendell pulled two bars of soap from his briefcase pocket. “Of course, I have told my mother all about you—she did wonder where I went for an hour every day for the past two years and—” Crimson began to rise in Wendell’s cheeks as he realized he was babbling. “Uh, but, she insisted I give you these.” He nodded to the soap bars he held in his hands, his smile wide.