Safe Houses

by Dan Fesperman

  “I’m sorry, Willard. Give me a few seconds, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said meekly.

  Henry felt awkward being there, but couldn’t look away. He was surprised by the familial resemblance, which hadn’t been evident in newspaper photos. It was mostly their eyes, oval pools of brown, although Anna’s were more animated. There was a similar sculpting to their face, although Willard’s cheeks were flabbier.

  The guard perked up when Anna reached inside her purse, then lost interest as she withdrew a handkerchief to blow her nose. She folded it and dabbed her eyes before picking up the phone again.

  “Okay, then. Let’s talk about you, Willard. Tell me how you’re doing.”

  He shrugged.

  “I eat a lot. But there’s no chicken. No cotton candy. There’s no movies here. I sleep. They let me sleep a whole lot.” Then his face lit up, and he sat up straighter. “Can I go home with you?”

  “No, Willard. You have to stay.”

  “When can I go?”

  “I don’t know, Willard, but it might be a long time.”

  “Real long?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can you count it, count the number? How many days?”

  “No one knows yet. It depends on…” She paused, again biting her lower lip. Henry stepped forward to offer his handkerchief, which again brought the guard to attention, but she waved it away.

  “Depends on what?”

  “On what the court decides about what happened to Mom and Dad. Can you talk about that? Do you know why it happened?”

  He shrugged, as if she’d just asked why the jail wasn’t serving chicken, yet another question beyond his ability to answer. Anna’s fingers squirmed on the receiver, and her voice sharpened.

  “Tell me why it happened, Willard. Why you did that to Mom and Dad. With your rifle, I mean. Why’d you shoot them, can you tell me?”

  They stared at each other, faces rigid. Henry wondered if there was a history behind these sibling confrontations. Even between such different minds there must have been jealousies, rivalries, some fights along the way.

  Willard’s face folded in on itself and he gasped for air with a sound like a sob.

  “Those numbers!” he said, louder than he’d yet spoken. The guard on his side frowned and stood a little straighter.

  “What numbers, Willard?”

  “The numbers! Why hasn’t it happened?”

  “Why hasn’t what happened, Willard? What numbers?”

  Henry, unable to contain himself, stepped toward the glass and spoke toward the mouthpiece. “The numbers on the sign? The sign for Poston? Is that what you mean?”

  Willard looked up in surprise, recoiling at the sound of a new voice.

  “Sorry,” Henry whispered.

  “Do you mean the sign?” Anna asked, drawing her brother’s attention back to her.

  Willard nodded slowly.

  “What do the numbers mean? What was supposed to happen?”

  Willard grimaced and shook his head. He looked lost in thought. Anna repeated the question, but he remained silent. She lowered the receiver to her side.

  “This was a bad idea, the whole thing—hiring you, coming here, all of it. I’ll never know why. He’ll never even know, so how the hell will anyone else?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No. None of this is okay. I’m wasting your time, and God knows what I’m doing to my brother. When we came in he seemed fine. Now look at him.”

  Willard was slumped on the stool. He stared at the floor, his face red with frustration.

  Henry rested a hand on Anna’s shoulder.

  “Don’t give up. Too early for that.”

  Willard’s voice crackled from the receiver.

  “He said…He said that the numbers, that they would finish it.”

  The words affected them like the crack of a whip. Anna picked up the receiver and asked slowly, carefully, “Who said that, Willard? Who said the numbers would finish it?”

  Willard looked from Anna to Henry, and then back at his sister. His eyes widened and, for the first time, he looked mistrustful, maybe a little scared.

  “No!” He backed away, nearly stumbling as he stood from the stool.

  “It’s okay, Willard. You’re all right. You’re okay.”

  She placed her free hand back against the glass. Willard’s grimace softened and he slowly settled back onto the stool.

  “Are you better now? Do you feel okay?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s just one small question, Willard, that’s all. And it’s okay to answer it. Who said the numbers would finish it? Was it someone like Joey? Is that the kind of person you’re talking about?”

  Willard shook his head. His gaze returned to the floor.

  “Not Joey,” he said sullenly.

  “I know that,” she said. “I know Joey wouldn’t do that. But was it someone like Joey? You know, someone I wouldn’t be able to see?”

  He continued to stare at the floor.

  “Who was it, Willard. Who told you that?”

  When Willard looked up, his eyes seemed to be pleading for mercy, or a little understanding.

  “I can’t. I promised, Anna. I can’t.”

  “You promised him?”

  Willard nodded.

  “Promised him what, Willard?”

  “No. I can’t. I can’t, Anna, or it won’t never happen!”

  He dropped the receiver, which bounced against the partition as he again slid off the stool. He raised a hand as if to wave goodbye and then thought better of it. Then he turned and walked away, toward the back of the room where the guard stood. Anna knocked on the glass and shouted.

  “Willard. Willard!”

  He kept going, not even turning to say goodbye.

  13

  Anna was silent all the way to the parking lot. They slid onto their seats and Henry started the car. The only noise was the rush of cold air, the thrum of the tires. As they were turning onto Highway 53, Henry could wait no longer.

  “Who’s Joey?”

  “Imaginary friend. When Willard was twelve or thirteen. Lasted a whole summer.”

  “Maybe this time it’s somebody real.”

  “Or maybe that’s what I’d like it to be. It’s pretty much why I hired you, isn’t it? Find someone else to blame—anyone but my brother? Well, here’s an alternate theory: Maybe that’s what Willard is doing, too. He used Joey the same way.”

  “Like some kind of bad boy alter ego?”

  She nodded.

  “Joey was Willard’s excuse for doing pretty much anything he knew he wasn’t supposed to do, so maybe that’s what he’s doing now.”

  “Then why did he look scared?”

  “You thought he looked scared?”

  “Yes. When you were asking him for a name, anyway.”

  “I thought he looked horrified. At himself. You saw how he reacted when I told him Mom and Dad weren’t getting up. I think maybe it’s just hitting him what he’s done.”

  “Well, you know him better than I do. Still, his eyes…”

  “What?”

  “I’ve seen that look before, and I don’t think it’s horror, or self-loathing. He’s scared of something. Or somebody.”

  They drove another mile toward Poston, green fields of ripening corn and soybeans flying past them in full sunlight. Anna drummed her fingers on the dashboard.

  “Maybe you’re right. I was so upset I didn’t know what to think.” She laughed harshly. “And now I get to go meet Washam Poultry, aiding and abetting in the corporate slaughter of sixty thousand birds. You don’t have a smoke on you, do you?”

  “Sorry. Gave it up.”

  She switched on the radio, one of those classic rock stations, and
it of course just happened to be playing “Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads, which made her laugh again, harder this time. Henry reached over to switch it off but she stayed his hand.

  “No, no. Leave it on.”

  You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything. When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed.

  Then she switched it off, shook her head, and wiped her eyes.

  “Isn’t that just perfect? Like my whole fucking day, my whole fucking life. Sorry, I shouldn’t be unloading on you.”

  “At seventy-five a day I’d say you’ve earned the right.”

  “Oh, yes. I almost forgot. My big ‘investigation’!” She made quote marks in the air. Then she took a deep breath. “Oh, Willard, you poor, dumb bastard. What were you thinking?”

  She pounded the dashboard and sobbed loudly, but only once. Henry looked away as she blew her nose. The car had slowed to forty-five, and a big semi rig blew around them in the passing lane with a shriek of its air horn and a blast of grit.

  Anna reached over and pressed the horn.

  “You, too, asshole!”

  Henry waited a few beats and then, in what he hoped was a calming tone, said, “I’m guessing Willard must have had it pretty rough. Growing up, I mean.”

  “Oh, God yes.” She settled back into her seat. “Most of it started when he turned five or six, school age. I was around twelve, right when you’re starting to worry about where you fit in, right when having a brother like Willard was the worst possible thing to have on your teen résumé. So for a while I just tuned it out.”

  “Understandable. Hormones and all that.”

  “Then one Saturday when I was sleeping in I heard him crying and screaming. I looked out the window and they were chasing him right through our yard. His own damn yard. I flew out the back door in my PJs, mad as hell, the wrath of God. And from then on I had his back. Of course by the time he hit twelve I was off to college, way up north. And I’ll admit it was a relief to leave it behind. Later I felt like I’d deserted him at his greatest hour of need, but I guess I needed a life.”

  “We all do at that age.”

  “Then, after my freshman year, that was the summer of Joey. Willard probably just needed someone else to take the heat, or to do his acting up.”

  They were cruising along at sixty now. The only features on the flat horizon were a distant line of trees and a couple of chicken houses. Anna switched off the air and rolled down her window. The stench of chicken manure came in on the breeze like something you could touch.

  “Jesus, what a stink,” she said. “They use it for fertilizer. That and about a thousand chemicals. Pesticide and everything else. Maybe that’s what finally got to him.” She paused. “So you think this person might actually be real?”

  “Like I said, to me he looked scared. Imaginary friends aren’t usually scary. At the very least we might as well ask around, like you said earlier. See if anybody ever saw him with somebody else—hanging out, maybe, or hunting in the woods.”

  “Sounds so dark and sinister now, doesn’t it? The idea of Willard out there on his own with a rifle?”

  “Or not on his own.”

  She nodded, looking straight ahead.

  “You’re right, we should check.”

  They were nearing town when she practically grabbed the wheel.

  “Turn into that store up there!”

  He braked hard and swerved into the parking lot of a convenience store in a slide of gravel. She unlatched the door.

  “If we’re really going to do this, then I need cigarettes. Backsliders Anonymous. Want anything?”

  “Beer. A six of anything that isn’t light.”

  “The rye’s not enough to keep you going?”

  He smiled but didn’t answer.

  “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?”

  They hopped out of the car, and bustled off to buy their supplies.

  14

  Anna had gone quiet again by the time they reached the Shoat house. The Washam Poultry catch crew was due in half an hour, so Henry gave her some space to catch her breath. He walked down a gravel lane toward the crops, and was standing in a field of soybeans when the trucks rolled in.

  A white pickup hauling a forklift led four tractor-trailers down the long dirt road to the two chicken houses. Each house was five hundred feet long, a shed of corrugated metal with big fans and a feed silo mounted at one end. The beds of the tractor-trailers were piled with empty cages that were shedding feathers like a torn pillow.

  Henry watched from a distance as Anna greeted the foreman with a handshake. He wore a black Washam ball cap and a red flannel shirt, and handed her a clipboard with papers to sign. Nine men spilled from the cabs of the tractor-trailers, calling out to each other in Spanish.

  They were scruffy and bedraggled. They stood to one side, preparing as if for battle. Several pulled on heavy work gloves. Others covered their arms with torn panty hose, presumably for protection against beaks and talons, and donned respirators and dust masks. Some wore goggles.

  A funny place, the Eastern Shore. Less than a two-hour drive from Capitol Hill, and a frequent stopover for beachgoers on the way to Ocean City and Rehoboth. But it looked, felt, and operated more like a state in the American South. In recent decades it had turned over its scut work to thousands of new arrivals from Latin America, whose presence was now evident in bilingual signs and a boomlet of Mexican restaurants—all of this happening in small towns that had previously been about as ethnic as a jar of mayonnaise.

  Yet, in the more prosperous and picturesque waterfront villages, there was a layer of urban gentry that had silted down over the years from the better neighborhoods of Baltimore and Washington. Old money and privilege, embodied by people like Stu Wilgus, or new money and excess, which showed itself in gargantuan new houses. You didn’t have to dig beneath the surface very far to find a sediment from the power corridors of Capitol Hill, K Street, perhaps even Langley—the sort of people Rodney Bales might once have investigated. Yet another reason for Henry to stay on his toes.

  The forklift hauled a stack of cages into the end of one of the chicken houses, and the workers followed. A sudden uproar of clucks and shouts announced that their labors had begun. A cloud of dust rolled out the open door. Henry had read that the trick to this job was to grab as many as four chickens at a time with each hand, snatching them up by their feet. Even from where he stood, he could smell an ammonia stench from the drifts of wood chips and manure that covered the floors of the houses, ankle-deep.

  After a few minutes the forklift emerged, the cages now filled with a flutter of dingy white birds. Henry had expected Anna to flee at the earliest opportunity, sparing herself the sight of the carnage. Instead, she was riveted to her spot, arms folded. And he was watching her. It felt somehow appropriate to once again be twice removed from the real action, just as he’d been on his previous assignment, watching the cops and the feds as they had, in turn, watched the drug bosses and the dealers on the corners—an extra layer of detachment that had insulated him from the consequences of his actions.

  After an hour or so the crew emerged from the first house and moved into the second one. Two of the tractor-trailers had already rumbled off toward the processing plant where, within an hour, all those chickens would be headless and hanging by their feet.

  Henry saw a catcher tending to a bloody scratch on his arm. The wind was picking up, and the next gust brought a powerful whiff of ozone and rain from the west. Henry looked behind him to see dark clouds rolling closer. A gust thrashed the soybeans against his trouser legs, tickling his ankles through his socks. He glanced downward to see green leaves dusted with insecticide and fertilizer, the work of Anna’s father from only a week ago.

  Anna and the foreman headed for the shelter of a nearby shed, and Henry decided he’d better join them. The
first fat raindrop slapped his forehead as he crossed the final row of beans, and he reached the shed just as the skies opened.

  “There you are.” Anna sounded relieved. The foreman with the Washam Poultry cap nodded.

  “This is Ben Halloran,” she said. “The…I’m sorry, Ben, what did you say you were called?”

  “The live-haul manager. I come out to the catches a few times a week, to make sure the crews are up to snuff. Are you family?”

  “A friend. Henry Mattick.”

  They shook hands. Anna looked ready for the day to be over.

  “I’m real sorry we won’t be coming here no more, ma’am. It was always a pleasure working with, well…I’m assuming it was your mom and dad?”

  “Yes. It was.”

  “I was, uh…real sorry about your news.”

  “News,” she said. “Yes, I guess that’s pretty much what it was. It was news all right.”

  The poor fellow shifted his weight from one foot to another and tried to redeem himself.

  “They was good folks. Always treated our people right. Willard, too, even.” Now he was in even deeper, but it was too late to stop. “I’m kinda surprised old Merle didn’t latch on with today’s crew, given his attachment to the boy.”

  In the awkwardness that followed it took a few seconds for the words to sink in. Anna looked at Henry, who raised his eyebrows.

  “His attachment to Willard?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Rest his soul.” He actually took off his cap, as if Willard, too, had passed away.

  “How do you mean, his attachment?”

  “Well, ma’am, they always got to talking afterward, when we’d break for lunch. Your mom would put on a spread for the crew. Coca-cola and an ice bucket, sandwich fixin’s and some chips.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. If I’d known I would have—”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t mean that.”

  “But you said they’d talk, this guy Merle and my brother?”

  “That’s right. Merle always requested special to be on any crew coming to your place, so I expect they must have been pretty good pals.”