by Strnad, Jan
So he'd broken it off with her in a stammering, stumbling way that tried to suggest the reason for the break-up without trampling her self-esteem, which failed miserably on every conceivable level. She'd run for her house trailing tears, feeling boring and stupid and used and useless, and they'd barely spoken since.
After that, Tom had spent more time with the guys, all of whom shared his disdain for Anderson and his longing to be anywhere but.
"I've got to get out," he said aloud, to no one.
"I hear that," replied a voice behind him. Tom jumped. He'd known that Galen Ganger was there. They'd been passing a joint around only minutes earlier. But Tom's thoughts had led him to the edges of the Blacklands, a barren place inside his skull where he was the only occupant. Galen's sudden intrusion snapped him back to reality. "Anderson sucks." Galen punctuated his observation with a resonant belch fueled by a belly full of Coors.
The other boys muttered their agreement.
Darren, Buzzy and Kent sat on the hood of Darren's '66 Plymouth Satellite swigging beer. Darren figured he had about three thousand bucks invested in the Satellite, starting with the thousand dollars he'd paid for the body sans motor and transmission, then adding another couple thousand in swap meet parts, a '68 Chrysler engine, and fifty bucks worth of paint that he sprayed himself. He liked his car but he wasn't fussy about it the way Galen was about his '68 Charger with the overbored 440.
Buzzy drove a '74 Vega with a 454 big-block Chevy engine that, when it wasn't sitting in pieces in his father's garage as it was now, would give Galen's Charger a run for its money. Kent's taste ran to his '72 Super Beetle in which he was installing Weber dual carbs. He'd gotten as far as removing the old carburetor and opening the package from Fast Freddy's, but he didn't have the 12mm socket he needed and he wasn't too sure about relocating the coil to clear the linkage, so the project languished and Kent had been, for the last three months, without wheels.
Tom Culler rode a motorcycle, a used Honda he'd bought to dispel his egghead image and to keep from having to share a ride with Galen, Darren or Buzzy. Motorcycles were dangerous, but riding with any of his friends was pure suicide.
Car talk dominated the boys' conversation. Sex came in a close second. Everything else squeaked in around the edges.
Sitting on the fender, Darren blew a fart that rattled the sheet metal and prompted a lot of arm waving. Kent commented that it was lucky they weren't still smoking or they'd all have gone up in flames.
"That really happens to some people," Buzzy said. "They just go on fire for no reason."
"Bullshit," Galen said.
"No, it's true. They call it something."
"Spontaneous human combustion," Tom said.
"Bullshit. People don't just explode."
"Tell him about it, Tom," Buzzy said. "You know this shit."
All eyes turned to Tom, the former honors student. He sighed. It seemed like he was always playing Mr. Wizard for his friends.
"The human body's a controlled chemical reaction. We burn calories for fuel. That's why we have a temperature...ninety-eight point six, more or less. Only some people's thermostat goes haywire and their temperature goes up and up and doesn't stop. Eventually they literally burst into flame."
Galen stared at Tom. He cast his gaze around the group of boys, fixing each one for a moment before returning to Tom. "You're shittin' me," he said.
Tom shook his head. "It's the truth."
Galen considered for a moment, then he raised his beer can high and grinned. "To spontaneous human fucking combustion!" he yelled. The boys clinked their cans together and drank.
Galen sidled up next to Tom, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Just one thing," he said.
Galen's arm whipped out and locked around Tom's neck. He bent Tom double and squeezed hard enough to show he wasn't kidding around. The other boys stiffened, but they didn't intervene. They'd learned better.
"If I find out you were shittin' me," Galen hissed through clenched teeth, "I'll break your fucking neck, you get me?" He squeezed harder, and Tom protested.
"I wasn't shitting you!"
Galen let Tom go. Tom backed away, saying, "Jesus, Galen!"
Galen took several animal steps around the small group, glaring a warning to each of them in turn, breathing hard through his nose. "And that goes for the rest of you, too," he said. The boys studied the ground intently.
The night grew quiet. You never knew what would set Galen off. These rages would just come over him and there was nothing to do but ride it out. Galen drained his Coors and threw the can in the water.
"Let's wake some people up," he said.
Darren and Buzzy got into Darren's Satellite, Galen and Kent rode in Galen's Charger. The engines roared to life and the cars peeled out, spraying dirt.
Tom, still smarting from his humiliation, kick-started the Honda and followed, wondering what in the hell he was doing but, at this moment in time, not really giving a good goddamn.
***
Annie Culler, five years old, lay in the hospital bed. Her eyes were closed as if she were asleep. They had been closed for eight months. Her face had become gaunt, her eye sockets sunken and gray.
The exuberant, teasing, giggling, willful little girl she had been was gone, and only the shell that had contained her spirit remained. But still the body lived. Doc Milford called it a "persistent vegetative state," but even that term couldn't capture the languor of her being. A vegetable was aware of the sun and the earth and the water and air. A plant could turn its face to the sunlight, could reach out limbs to gather the bounty of life, could seek and aspire and attain.
Annie did none of these things. She had not done them for eight months and was not likely to ever do them again.
The nurse's aide wadded Annie's old, soiled linen into a ball. She muttered to the orderly she glimpsed standing in the doorway.
"Hopeless," she said. "Waste of hospital resources. Ought to just pull the plug and be done with it."
"Not everyone considers her case hopeless," came the reply.
The nurse's aide looked up, startled. The uniformed figure in the doorway was not the orderly but was Peg Culler, still dressed in her waitressing outfit and destroying her with a look of perfect detestation.
"If you think you're wasting your time here," Peg continued, "maybe you should be the waitress and I should be the nurse."
Reddening, the nurse's aide hurried from the room clinging to the dirty bedclothes as if to a life preserver. She felt Peg's eyes on her neck as she stuffed the sheets into the basket and wheeled it away.
Peg's face softened as she looked on her daughter, her baby. Her precious. She walked over and brushed the hair off Annie's forehead.
"Hi, sweetie," she said.
Annie gave no sign that she heard the words or felt the warm kiss on her cool skin or sensed in any way her mother's presence. But still Peg pulled the plastic chair up close to the bed and withdrew the book from her purse, and, in her clearest voice, began to read.
***
Madge Duffy had turned herself in around two o'clock, announcing to Sheriff Clark that she'd murdered her husband.
She'd actually done the deed an hour before. But whereas it had taken her only a moment to decide to open his neck with the filet knife, it took longer to figure out what to do next.
Madge did not want to be one of those people who blamed everything on the Negroes. She didn't want to concoct a black-skinned killer who fought with her husband and fled, though that was her first instinct. If they found her out later to be a murderess, she didn't want them heaping the name "racist" on her, too.
She worked on the problem as she picked things up and did a little dusting. The air seemed musty, so she opened a window. She knew that you weren't supposed to touch anything after a murder but she didn't want the place to be a total mess when strangers started tramping through gathering evidence and drawing outlines around things in chalk.
The sofa where John ha
d fallen asleep, dead drunk, and the carpet in front of it were total losses because of all the blood so she didn't even bother with those.
She finished the dishes and left them in the drainer. By then she'd pretty well decided to make a clean breast of everything and just take her punishment. It was her first offense so maybe they'd go easy on her. She was barely forty so even if she got fifteen years and served, say, eight of them, she could return to society (if not to Anderson) and live out her remaining twenty or thirty years knowing she'd paid her debt.
What were eight years, anyway? She'd been married to John for twenty, and they'd just flown. It didn't seem so at the time but looking back, the years whizzed by in a gray blur with very few high points to mark their passing.
Surely women's prison wouldn't be any worse than being married to a man who argued with her over every little thing and took his fists to her when he was drunk. She imagined prison as a kind of church social where she'd meet women of a like mind. They'd sit at folding tables and talk about their lives. The only difference would be that they'd wear uniforms, and she imagined that most women in prison smoked. She might even take it up herself, just to fit in.
She put on a fresh dress, worked on her hair a little, and then phoned Sheriff Clark.
"I've murdered John," she said. "I expect you'll want me to come in."
The Sheriff had told her to just stay put and he'd come to her. He showed up a few minutes later. She met him at the door and escorted him to the scene of the crime.
The Sheriff's mood had been black that day, he didn't know why. Staring at John Duffy's body swarming now with flies, he felt strangely unmoved. He knew that Duffy beat his wife and that she never had and never would press charges for fear of reprisals. The law couldn't have held onto Duffy for long, and a restraining order wouldn't mean squat to him once he got some booze in his belly. If she'd run off, he'd have gone after her and that would've been unpleasant, too. It could easily have been Madge Duffy lying somewhere dead instead of John.
He also knew that Madge's mother had committed suicide when Madge was a teenager in order to escape an abusive domestic situation. Apparently Madge had decided not to follow her mother's example. Madge was a decent if limited woman who'd married wrong, and she'd dealt with the problem the only way she knew how. Too bad she had to pay such a stiff penalty for it.
"Are you sure you did this?" the Sheriff asked. "Are you sure it wasn't a prowler, maybe? Somebody John caught in the act of burglary?"
Madge shook her head "no."
"I did it. There's the knife. I expect my prints are all over it."
Well, what could you do with somebody like that? Sheriff Clark handcuffed her according to the rules and took her to the jail. From there he called Doc Milford and Jedediah Grimm.
Now the dark had settled in. Madge Duffy lay asleep in the cell. She'd been understanding when the Sheriff told her no, she couldn't have her knitting supplies. He'd loaned her a book but the type was small and the light in the cell was no good and so she'd gone to bed early. He'd made a special trip back to the house for an extra blanket and her special pillow, the one she slept on for her neck, and she seemed comfortable enough. She didn't cry, which struck Sheriff Clark as odd.
Odd, too, was the feeling in the air. The Sheriff couldn't give it a name but it gave him the shivers. Something was going to happen tonight, he was sure of it. He'd even sent his deputy out to patrol the streets despite his protests that it was a waste of manpower.
Which it probably was. Probably, nothing would happen. Even if something did happen, Deputy Haws probably couldn't cope with it. The deputy wasn't good for much, but the job paid poorly and the Sheriff hadn't been flooded with applicants. Haws was a uniform on the street, at least.
Sheriff Clark was pouring water into the coffee pot when he heard the siren in the distance. It was drawing closer. He went to the door and stepped out in time to see the Ganger boy's souped-up old Charger tear down the street, followed by Darren Coombs' Satellite, both cars honking and the boys yelling out the windows. Tom Culler came next, quiet but riding hard, practically laying the Honda down as he rounded the corner.
Deputy Haws was in hot pursuit, the lights flashing and siren blaring.
Sheriff Clark considered joining the chase but remembered Madge Duffy in the cell. Besides, he could see Clyde Dunwiddey staggering drunkenly toward the office. He went back inside to put sheets on the cot in the second cell and the old soup pot beside the bed in case Clyde had to vomit in the middle of the night.
As he made up the cot, he prayed fervently that Deputy Haws didn't do anything stupid.
Three
Deputy Harold Haws sat in the consarned patrol vehicle for no consarned reason he could determine.
Yes, it was Friday night, but so what? Friday nights in Anderson were not that much different from Tuesday nights or Wednesday nights or any night but Sunday which was so quiet you could hear a sparrow fart.
The Rialto was open on Friday and Saturday nights but that didn't mean much. Merle Tippert, the owner and operator, refused to show anything more rambunctious than PG so that limited his audience to a pretty docile bunch. The lights on the marquee were off already and the crowd—if fourteen people could be considered a "crowd"—was halfway home by now. They never stayed out late, the last show being at nine o'clock since Tippert liked to be home in time to complain at the eleven o'clock news.
Haws couldn't get his mind around what Sheriff Clark had said earlier in the evening, when he sent Haws out on patrol. Clark was a good lawman but his talk about a "bad feeling" and a "tightening in his scrotum" didn't cut much mustard with the deputy. Maybe Clark did have some kind of intuition slipping him warning signs, but it could just as easy have been that John Duffy's murder had left him with a case of the heebie-jeebies.
Now here was Haws, trying to fill his growling belly with the burrito he'd packed earlier in the day and not even able to heat it up because the consarned microwave was back at the consarned office. The steering wheel got in his way as he was raising the tortilla to his mouth and he bumped his elbow and that caused him to squeeze the thing a little too hard and salsa squooshed out the bottom and dribbled on his shirt. When he tried to wipe it off with a paper napkin it only spread and made it look like he'd been stomach shot.
And now here came Clyde Dunwiddey, drunk as a skunk as usual. Clyde stumbled up to the police car and leaned on it like an old friend.
"H'lo, Deputy," Clyde said. His breath was flammable.
Deputy Haws made a face and waved a portly hand in the air. "Hoo, Clyde—you on your way to the station?"
"Yep. Headed for the hoosegow. How about a lift?"
"This ain't no taxi service, Clyde. Even drunk as you are, I figure your legs know the way by habit."
That's when the young hellions roared past in their muscle cars, whooping and hollering, stereos blasting rock music loud enough to deafen everybody in town, their tailpipes popping as if not one of them had the word "muffler" in his dictionary.
Haws shoved his half-eaten burrito at Clyde, who went another shade greener at the sight.
"Out of the way, Clyde. I've got work to do."
Clyde took a step back and inertia carried him a couple more. Deputy Haws hit the flashers and siren and gave chase.
Haws didn't like these boys. The Ganger kid in particular was a bad egg, and even the best of them, Tom Culler, was a wiseass. They reminded Haws of the bullies who used to torment him in high school because he carried a few extra pounds and because his slightly upturned nose called attention to his nostrils. The kids had called him "Hawg" of course, and that's why, once he graduated, he took the job as deputy. The uniform and badge gave him status. Now, at least, they had to call him "Hawg" behind his back instead of to his face.
That face was tight with determination as he chased the boys through the middle of town. Galen and Kent led, followed by Darren and Buzzy. Tom pulled up the rear with Haws hot on his tail.
Galen sa
w the flashing lights in his rear view mirror and mashed the pedal to the floor. Kent dug between the cushions for the seat belt that wasn't there. Galen called him a pussy and screeched around the corner that put them on the road to the highway.
Tom cut that same corner and jumped his Honda over a drainage ditch and onto the access road. He swerved into the far lane and nearly lost it on the turn, but the bike didn't fall and there was no opposing traffic so he twisted the throttle and kicked the gear shift and slid in ahead of Darren and Buzzy.
Tom had no specific plan but he knew he had to close the distance between himself and Galen. He wanted to somehow defuse the volatile situation that was brewing. Galen and Haws were like matter and anti-matter. If they collided, there'd be hell to pay.
Now Darren had Deputy Haws on his ass and he didn't like it one bit. Surely Haws recognized his car even if he didn't get a good look at the driver, and surely Haws knew it was Galen leading the chase. Darren's mind could work fast when it had to and he made a decision. He whipped the wheel over to the right and hit the brakes, nearly catapulting Buzzy through the windshield as the Satellite screeched to a halt.
"What're you doin', man?" Buzzy yelled, bracing himself against the dash.
"Hawg doesn't want us. He wants to nail Galen."
Sure enough, the police car screamed past them and kept going. Haws had bigger fish to fry.
Darren wanted to turn around right then and go home but that would be chickenshit. Instead he waited until the flashing lights had vanished over the hill and then he crept forward. He'd watch the action from a distance, parking in the windbreak if he had to, so he could be there if anything happened. It was possible that Galen would reach the county line and escape the deputy's jurisdiction, but it was also possible that Haws would stop him first.
