Murder Takes a Break

by Bill Crider

  "We're about to have dinner," Floyd said. "Come sit. We set a place for you."

  So Parks went into the kitchen and stood at the foot of the table where he'd taken his meals for the first twenty years of his life. He felt an odd tension as his head slowly crowded with mixed memories. Not of the house or his family, but instead all the reviews, the pitches, starlets, agents, and executive meetings. This life could swallow your entire future, all your ambitions and expectations, if you let it. You had to hold on to whatever gave any kind of definition and meaning to your existence. It's what got him writing screenplays and fooling around with a video camera in the first place.

  The Brooms carefully seated themselves around the table. Parks thought if he blinked too fast they might all converge into the one kid. He kept waiting for chatter but there wasn't any. Floyd made no introductions and Parks took the last remaining empty chair. Of course, his brother had set his place in the same seat where he'd eaten all those years before. Telling Parks, in a sly way, welcome back. You thought you were out but you can never really leave.

  They poured gallons of fresh milk, straight out of the cow. The Brooms gave him the occasional glance but nothing more. They ate in silence and Parks decided to do the same. He kept clenching and unclenching his hands. It felt like he had a touch of arthritis himself.

  Despite the trouble he knew was coming, he still had an appetite. In other circumstances, the meal would've been wonderful. He hadn't eaten like this since he moved out to the west coast, where everybody was a vegan or bulimic or counting their carbs or getting their gastric bypass surgery.

  Mounds of steak, mashed potatoes, fresh bread, and a number of vegetable dishes passed into his hands. You had to pay four hundred bucks at Spago's to eat a third as well. The American heartland. He hated everything about it except the food.

  They worked the plates across the table with the well-practiced actions of a fire bucket brigade. As they were finally winding down, Floyd asked him, "Hey, you think you can help me with my pickup tomorrow? I got to overhaul the engine. Got my tools out on the porch, we can give it a crack before lunch."

  "I don't know much about cars, Floyd," Parks said. Christ, this could get out of hand very soon.

  "You don't need to in order to help somebody out."

  "That's true enough. Give me a minute here, okay? I'll be right back."

  "Seein' the man about a mule, eh?"

  Something like that. Parks headed down the hall and past the bathroom to the gun rack on the wall. Père Hull watched him but said nothing, the needles little more than a blur. Parks drew the bolts from the two rifles and stuck them in his back pocket.

  He did a quick search of the house, checking all the usual spots. A loaded double-barrel shotgun rested upright in back of the hall closet. Parks broke it open and emptied it, scrounged around on the shelf until he found a box with only six shells it. He pocketed them all. He didn't think Floyd would have any handguns around, but it would be best to check.

  Père began to laugh quietly, the sound coming from deep in his chest, and whispered, "Figured you came home for somethin' that'd drive your brother out of his skull."

  "Quiet, Gramp."

  "He could still pick up a butcher knife. Whatever you tell him, make sure you're on the far side of the room."

  Parks eased into the master bedroom and riffled the dressers, closet, and night stands. He was wrong. Floyd still owned their father's old Colt revolver, hidden off to the side of the bottom drawer, behind the family bible. The pistol hadn't been cleaned in years and had no bullets.

  The eleven year old Broom came over and stared at him with sorrowful eyes. "Ma and Pa thought you was sick. Maybe 'cause you ate so much. I'm supposed to look in on you."

  Even after hearing the voice, he couldn't tell if the kid was a boy or a girl. "No, I'm fine."

  "You're my uncle?"

  "Yes."

  "You used to live here?" Broom asked.

  "In this very house. In the far bedroom upstairs at the end of the hall."

  "That's mine now." Gauging Parks' expression, Broom seemed to struggle for something else to say, and decided to take a chance. "I don't like that room."

  "Why?"

  "'Cause'a the trees outside the window."

  Parks sucked air through his teeth and fought back a groan. "So what?"

  "The crows. They always in the tree. They talk to me."

  A couple of the bad childhood memories slid through and prodded him in the soft places. Man, he really had given up all his cool, everything about this place was beginning to unsettle him all over again.

  Broom was waiting expectantly, all wide eyes and pink cheeks and pouting lips. The tremendous weight of daily anxiety and foreboding had already begun to take its toll. He could see it now in the folds of the kid's face.

  So, nothing really had changed after he'd left. Sometimes the insanity you leave behind just settles in and waits for a new ear to crawl into. He looked down and said, "They used to talk to me too."

  "Really, that so?" Startled, but kind of happy to hear it.

  "Yeah."

  "They tell me to do things. Wrong things."

  "With scissors?"

  Broom's features twisted into an expression of adorable surprise. "They did talk to you. You heard them."

  "Yes," Parks said, and realized his scalp was crawling with sweat. His hackles were up. That hadn't happened since the test screening of his second movie, when people were yelling back at the picture and walking out.

  "Pa don't believe us."

  "Your father never believed me either, when I told him about it back when we were children. I couldn't sleep most nights and could hardly do my chores. He always thought I was lying and used to whip the hell out of me because it meant he had more work some days. Père Hull knows the truth though."

  "He don't like to listen. Says he's too old. Says if you cut him open at the wrist, his blood is dried up into powder. He won't hear nothing we say."

  "It reminds him of bad things that happened a long time ago."

  "To his baby sis?"

  "Yes," Parks admitted, surprised the kid knew about that. "And others."

  "They want me to take the scissors out of the drawer and–"

  He took Broom by the shoulders, gave a little shake. "Don't listen to them. You don't do anything they tell you. You're stronger than they are."

  "Sometimes it don't feel that way. They don't shut up. All day long, and every night too. Right outside the window."

  "It used to help me when I turned the TV up really loud. Or the radio."

  "Mama won't let us do that," Broom said with an edge of anguish. "She gets the migraines and has to go lie down in the dark. Almost every day."

  He took out his wallet and drew two twenties from it, handed them to the kid. "Get yourself a Walkman with headphones. Pass it around to your brothers and sisters. Turn up the music when the crows get inside your head."

  "Do they ever stop making noise?"

  "When you get a little older they won't be so bad, and then they eventually stop."

  "That so?" A touch of hopefulness, then the hard glint of reality. "When's that gonna be?"

  There wasn't any answer. "I don't know. A couple more years, probably."

  "That's too long," Broom said in a pained hush, and followed him back to the kitchen, where Myrtle was serving homemade blueberry pie. Two of the other Brooms were helping, scooping out fresh whipped cream, reaching up for the cupboard. One dropped a dish on the floor and said, "Broom!"

  Parks sat again in the seat of his childhood, waited for a full count of sixty, glanced at his brother and told him, "I'm going to sell my parcel of the farm."

  Floyd had a forkful of pie halfway to his mouth. It stuck in the air as if it had hit a brick wall. "What's this? Eh? How's that?"

  Jesus Christ, Parks had still sprung it too fast. Floyd really hadn't heard him, hadn't entirely caught it. A man like Floyd could close himself off to a lot of whatever he
didn't want to hear. It was a gift, really, when you got down to it. One that Parks didn't have.

  He had to repeat himself. "I'm selling my half of the farm."

  Now came the death-glare, the red overwhelming rage flooding into Floyd's face until the veins stood out thickly in his forehead and neck, exactly the way it used to happen to their father. "You can't do that. There's no way you can do that. This ain't your land."

  "Yes, it is. Half of it is. I'm selling it."

  The fork was still frozen three inches from Floyd's lips, his arm like rusted iron. "You said, before you left for Hollywood, you told me the farm was mine. You said I could have the dust and the groundhogs and the field mice, you said. The bats in the barn. The skeeters and the droughts and the winters with six feet of snow. You were laughing. You were goddamn dancing, as I recall."

  "I'd just sold my first script then," Parks said. It was an admission as much as an explanation. That day, in all likelihood, had been the happiest of his life. He'd caught the first plane to LAX and hadn't even called back home until last week. It hurt like hell facing up to his own failures, but there was nothing else to do now. "But we never made it legal. I never signed anything over to you. The land is still mine."

  "The hell you need it for out there in Los Angeles? In Hollywood?"

  Here it came, when you could wrap up your biggest mistakes in only a few words. "I botched my career. The studios won't work with me anymore." For a long time he thought it would take a lot longer to explain, but no, there it was.

  Floyd pushed his seat back, got up and left the kitchen. The Brooms finished their pie as if nothing was occurring, as though nothing had ever happened in this place before.

  "The hell did you do to my rifles, you son of a bitch!" Floyd screamed from the other room.

  Parks tried to address Myrtle, whose passive facade still hadn't altered. "I need enough cash to give me a small stake. It won't be a lot but it'll be enough for me to start shooting an indie project. I have to start over."

  Myrtle blinked and asked, "You goin' to Indiana?"

  "Independent," Parks said. "If I put in enough money up front, I'll find financing along the way to finish and get a distributor. I can make a second chance work."

  "This is our home," Myrtle said. Her voice was utterly without tone or emotion.

  "It's mine too. As long as I've been away from here, it's still my home."

  Parks couldn't believe he was stooping to this kind of low, saying these lies. He was definitely Hollywood material. They'd be buying him rounds at the Viper Room for this kind of shit. They never should've given him the boot, he was the kind of belly-crawler they should've embraced forever.

  She'd taken on just a hint of animation, a curious but aimless expression pressing the corners of her face like somebody's thumbs working cookie dough. It tugged the angles of her face into a perplexed frown, and she gazed around, perhaps a bit surprised by her surroundings. "No, it's not. It takes a heap o' livin'. Didn't you never hear that before?"

  "No."

  "A heap o' livin' to make a house a home. A heap o' sun an' shadder. You ain't got no light nor shadows neither around here no more."

  Parks felt his blood suddenly alive in his wrists and throat, his pulse kicking up hard. He glared at Myrtle and said, "More than you'd think."

  "Where's my cartridges, you snake?" Floyd shouted, flinging stuff into walls. "How the hell you gonna go stealin' a man's shotgun shells?"

  The Brooms had finished with their meal and sat quietly staring, waiting.

  Floyd stood in the kitchen doorway, sneering and fuming, but underneath it all Parks thought he saw a little relief in his brother's face. How he must hate the land for its arrogant dust and weeds and erosion, the constant fretting over rain and heat and the price of crops. The bats, the snow, the tractor sticking in the mud. In one swoop, Parks had just unloaded half his brother's burden.

  But a man had to walk his track and play out his entire string. Floyd would make the effort to cross Parks up, if only to hold onto his minimal pride. He held Papa's gun out and pointed it at Parks. "You kids go on now. Find somethin' to do."

  "Yes, Pa," three or four of the Brooms said. They all paraded from the kitchen in size order, the years wearing thinner and thinner behind them, being erased as the line continued on, but their souls seeming so archaic trapped between participants of ancient battles, until the shortest Broom wandered out without a word. Myrtle showed no life and didn't move, except she had begun to slowly, softly rub at the back of her skull.

  It had been bad drama from the beginning, but Parks bundled his hopes on it. He had no choice but to follow through on this course, finish out the hand he'd dealt himself. He'd caused his brother enough trouble, and he didn't need to make it worse by having the man feel even more ineffectual and stupid. They'd both had enough of that.

  Parks gave a strained bark and came up out of his seat as if he was terrified. He made a flustered grab for the pistol like he was actually afraid it might go off, like he was fighting for his life. He clipped Floyd on the chin, and knocked him backwards over the corner of the table. Parks stuck the Colt in his belt.

  "You rotten little bastard," Floyd said.

  "Once the movie hits, I'll buy the land back for you," Parks said. "Whatever it costs. Or get you another farm, if you prefer. Or set you up in a different business."

  "I saw a review for your last movie," Floyd told him, getting to his feet and folding himself into a chair. "In the paper."

  "Yeah, you did?" He was genuinely impressed that his brother actually looked at a paper. He figured a long time ago that Floyd was willfully illiterate.

  "Called you pretentious, they did."

  "Yes, quite a few of them."

  "And cryptic."

  A word that Parks once liked, but now didn't. At first he thought it would help him achieve cult status, that the underground would come to his aid. That the flick might have a new run at life on DVD, but none of it had happened. "That's right."

  "Artsy fartsy."

  Parks settled back on his heels. So maybe his brother really couldn't read. None of the print reviews had used the term artsy fartsy, but some wiseass critic on a major network had, holding up a balloon and letting the air out slowly, so it sounded like it was breaking wind. You just had to love stuff like that.

  He focused again on Floyd's gray lips. "That so?"

  "Said you had little girls in there. With their tops off. Showing off their pink buds. Got in trouble with all them civic watch groups. Good church-goin' people protesting."

  "It wasn't quite like that," Parks said without much conviction.

  The girls were young and did flash some skin, but the worst part of it came later. A sixteen year old started claiming he'd promised her a part in the film in exchange for sex. Her mother started making some noise to the tabloids. Before the papers completely exploded, she took a payoff, but on her heels came another girl making the same allegation. The studio execs now had him pegged as both a pretentious prick and a liability. You could be one but not the other. The fact that both girls made up their stories didn't even come into play. All that mattered was he'd been stupid enough to leave himself vulnerable. It had taught him an important lesson just a little too late.

  But he also knew that nothing mattered more than cash. If he could prove himself with another hit, nobody would care about past folly or blunders. It was the penance he'd pay, learning to toe the corporate line. He didn't give a damn anymore about art, he just wanted to get back into the action. He'd been going crazy ever since he had to give up his parking space at the studio.

  But why take it out on Floyd? Just like his father, his brother never had a chance in this world and accepted the truth of the matter, and kept right on moving through life without letting the regret break his will. Parks had gotten there, been at the top for all of two years or so, and now kept falling off the big edge without any bottom in sight.

  "My head," Myrtle said, and began to li
mp forward. "I need to go lie down."

  Floyd touched her elbow as she went by but made no other effort to help. He scowled at Parks and again the relief seemed to smooth out the rugged creased in his features, as if he was glad the fight was finally over and it wasn't his fault for losing. "You can stay the night. Not because you're my blood but because I don't set any man out of my house once I've invited him in. I might shoot you, but I won't kick you into the dark. That's how a man acts. I get up at dawn. That's five thirty, case you don't remember, and I'm sure you don't. Don't be here when I rise."

  "I won't."

  They walked into the living room together, side by side, and in his brother's shadow he felt small and feeble again. Strange it should hit him all at once like that. None of the children were in sight, and the house felt very much the same way it did when Parks was a kid–empty, impeded, and mute with unvoiced rage and fear.

  "You're a damn heartless fool," Floyd said, but there was an instant before he moved off where he might have wanted to reach out, make contact again. It was too much, after all this time. They both shrugged away in opposite directions, and Floyd went to his bedroom where Myrtle waited with a wet washcloth draped around the back of her neck, and closed the door.

  Parks found a jug of moonshine under the sink and poured himself four fingers. The first taste of it made him want to vomit, but after that it was like water. A subtle warmth pervaded him but the band around his chest kept on contracting. Maybe he'd go through all this just to get back to L.A. and go toes up from a heart attack. That might get somebody interested in the movies again, cryptic or not.

  He finished the liquor and still wanted more. Jesus, it was amazing how quickly your old tastes came back, how easily you slipped back into your shoddy boots. Your past was always waiting around the corner with a net, ready to yank you back. He poured another half glass and returned the jug, walked out to sit with his grandfather.