Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  It was past nine by the time Sheridan and the two brothers left the motel and made their way into Phoenix itself. Clay Luckman had never seen such a place. Seemed more people were crammed into a block of the city than he’d seen in his whole life.

  Clay walked breathless, amazed. Though Digger said nothing, a single look at his expression told Clay that he was experiencing the very same thing. It was a different world, could have been a different planet for the resemblance it bore to anything they had seen before. The clothes, the vehicles, the sheer quantity of everything that assaulted their senses. Sights, sounds, smells … hell, even the sky looked different to the one that would hang over them when they dug ditches and conspired to steal root beer.

  Earl walked them to a diner. Had he not directed the way both Clay and Digger would have just stood wide-eyed and wondering in the street. He told them they looked like a couple of dumbass farmhands.

  “Jesus Christ, anyone’d think you pair had never seen a real town in your lives …”

  Earl was on the money, but neither boy replied.

  Once in the diner, they sat in back in a booth, Earl closest to the window, watching the car, Chester Bartlett’s sidearm tucked into the waistband of his pants.

  A young man approached them, had on an apron, had a pencil and a pad of paper in his hand.

  “Kinda steak you got?” Earl asked him.

  “Only one kind.”

  “Kind is that?”

  “Kind you eat.”

  Earl smiled. “That’ll do, then. We’ll have three of them. Eggs, potatoes too. Coffee for me. Ice water for the boys here.”

  Digger asked for coffee.

  “Get what you’re given and shut your fuckin’ mouth,” Earl said. “Be happy you’re eating anything, boy.”

  Digger shut his mouth. He did not act offended. He acted respectful. Clay could see it in his eyes, in his demeanor, the awkward language of his body when Earl addressed him. The poisonous words appeared to be taking hold. Digger was now aspiring to be a contemporary of Earl’s. A man had to have aspirations. Clay also knew that Digger could be mighty stubborn when the mood took him, no more so than when Clay lectured him on the rights and wrongs of things. There had been occasions when Digger had defied plain common sense, and for no other reason than to challenge Clay. Digger wanted to be right, and the greater part of being right was the refusal to admit when you were wrong.

  They ate in near silence for a while, and then Earl punctuated that silence with more of his road-worn and ragged wisdom.

  “Best food you’ll ever eat is paid for with someone else’s dollar,” he said. Once more, he shared a few sentiments about his father. “Wasn’t nothin’ but a raggedy-ass son of a bitch. If half the ideas he’d had were only half useful he’d still only be a quarter of the man I am.” Another pearl: “Don’t get why folks read newspapers. All stuff that’s already happened? Couldn’t fathom it. Now a newspaper that told you what was going to happen? That would sure be a doozy.” His words were clear and concise, but the mind behind them was not.

  Later, a good deal later, Clay would think about those hours—the latter part of Saturday night and into Sunday, the things that happened that day and the following morning, and he would question why he didn’t run. Perhaps he could have convinced Digger to go with him, perhaps not. Hindsight, ever the cruelest and most astute adviser, would tell him that the smartest damned thing he could have done was to have grabbed the gun from Earl, shot him dead center in the forehead, and then marched Digger out of the diner at gunpoint and turned themselves both over to whatever authority was the first to come along. If Clay had run alone, then there was always the good chance that Earl would have hunted him down and shot him. Digger could have done nothing to stop him. He didn’t stand a chance. He knew that. But it was more than that. Earl Sheridan was car-crash-fascinating. Clay stayed—not because he feared for his own life, but because he feared for the lives of others, Digger’s primarily, and if not his physical well-being, then surely his mental and spiritual salvation. Association with a man such as Earl Sheridan, especially by someone who seemed to possess such an impressionable mind as Digger Danziger, would require an exorcism. It would take a good while of talking and listening, of explaining, of patience and reorientation, to weed those evil thoughts out of Digger’s head. And perhaps Clay thought he could do something to keep the body count down. Perhaps he believed that by hanging in there he could do something to ensure that there were no more Bethany Olsons.

  Clay Luckman’s responsibility was misplaced, his appreciation of the situation misconceived and ill advised, but he believed what he believed, and he believed he could do something.

  Earl ate his breakfast. Digger watched in silence, almost as if he was waiting to hang on the very next word that Earl might utter. Clay felt sick to his stomach but forced down a number of mouthfuls. A time would come when he would need his strength.

  They were out and on the road before ten.

  It was past Phoenix, on the I-10 on the far-side of Casa Grande, that Earl saw the mercantile. That’s what it was called—Pinal County Mercantile. Perhaps it was the name that caught Earl’s eye, pronounced it penal, and laughed some at the irony. It advertised Feed-Seed-Tires-Tractor-Parts-Provisions-Boots-Dairy-Bakery-Etc. It was a good-sized place, and Earl pulled over and tugged out the few dollars that he still possessed.

  “We are low and then some,” he said. “We’re gonna go get ourselves a Coke and scope out this place.”

  The man behind the counter had a belly out ahead of him like a bay window. Maybe fifty, fifty-five, he was all smiles and welcomes. Earl got him talking, asked about the place, about Casa Grande.

  “Sprang up in the late eighteen hundreds with the mining boom,” the man told him. “And it’s now the spring training camp for the San Francisco Giants.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Sure is. Had the first exhibition game here in sixty-one. Willie Mays done hit a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-foot home run.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “I do, sir, I do.”

  Digger went in back and put a couple of things in his pockets. Clay saw him; he scowled and shook his head. They had never been thieves. Had reason enough to steal things, but had never done so. Clay figured Digger was acting up simply to impress Earl.

  Earl kept the man talking. He was the owner. His name was Lester Cabot. He’d owned the place near on twenty years, him and his wife. Had three sons, all of them lit out for bigger and better places, all of them still calling home for money. Earl was all ears and smiles.

  “Surprised to find you trading on a Sunday.”

  “Well, son, we started opening on a Sunday as a result of a number of things. Lot of folks around here ain’t much for churchgoing. Isn’t the way it was ten and twenty years ago. And the bills keep coming, you know? And if I didn’t provide what folks wanted they’d soon enough head someplace else. New stores opening up all over Casa Grande and a fancy-ass place in Florence, too. Gotta do what you must to keep the show on the road.”

  Earl asked about how busy Lester was. Lot of custom? Did he need a hand anytime?

  “Well, son, it could be better, but it could be worse. We’re doing okay here. Making enough money to keep the wheels on the wagon, so to speak.”

  And then Earl was buying another Coke, a couple of bags of corn chips, and he was telling Lester some joke about a woman with an ass as wide as a bumper. They laughed together—Lester and Earl—and Clay knew that Lester believed Earl a good feller, a sociable feller, the kind of man to pitch in and help out, a feller you could lend a couple of bucks to and never need to chase it up.

  Once in the car Digger turned out his pockets, showed Earl what he’d scored. A couple of packets of chewing gum, some candy bars, a cheap pocket watch.

  Earl slapped the back of Digger’s head, told him he was a halfwitted useless fucker.

  “What if he’d seen you? What if you’d gotten caught, eh? Would’ve wrecked
any chance of turning the place over. Jesus, kid, you got some balls, I’ll give you that, but you ain’t got no brains to speak of.”

  Digger looked sheepish.

  “What candy bars you got there?”

  Digger showed him.

  Earl took one, tore the wrapper off with his teeth, and ate the chocolate.

  “Dumbass motherfucker,” he said as he pulled away from the edge of the road.

  Clay looked sideways at Digger, watched him open up his own candy bar and start to eating. He didn’t offer one to Clay. Clay was right there beside him, and yet it was as if Digger didn’t see him. Clay was intensely aware of his brother however, and also aware of his own anger, his fear, his profound concern that with every passing hour he was losing Digger to the influence of Earl Sheridan. And what could he say? Nothing. And what could he do? Even less. Who was he—the younger brother, the weak one, the smart one with all the answers but no fists to back them up—against this mighty figure of a man, Earl Sheridan, killer, rapist and—if Digger had been asked—the all-American hero?

  It was like watching someone float ever farther into the sea, and no matter how much you shouted for them to come on back, and no matter how far you stretched your hand out to pull them in, they were just fading away. Soon Digger would be nothing more than a ghost of something on the horizon, and then he would be gone forever.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Earl told them. “Sign on the door says they open up at six. We’re going in there the moment the door opens, before they’ve had a chance to take any money to the bank. The whole weekend’s takings. The busiest time I’ll guarantee, and we’re gonna help ourselves.” Earl looked at Clay. “We are gonna sleep in the car, you pair tied together because I don’t trust you worth shit. I’m gonna tie you the fuck up and then me and Digger here is gonna go in there and do the thing first thing in the morning.”

  That was all he said.

  Digger didn’t say a word.

  Clay knew it was done then. He knew that Earl had chosen Digger, and he and Digger were going to do some terrible thing together, and tonight—perhaps, as Earl slept—would be Clay’s last chance to rescue his own brother from whatever madness Earl was intent on selling.

  Clay knew that if Lester Cabot opened his mouth in protest, if he tried to do anything, then Earl Sheridan was going to kill him. If he did that then he and Digger would be accomplices. Truth was that Clay figured Earl Sheridan was going to kill Lester Cabot regardless. Clay’s emotions came all at once: a herd of wild things spooked into stampede. He could hear the Catholic Confiteor. Had heard it every Sunday at Barstow. “I have sinned through my own fault in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do.” And then the echo: “Through my fault, through my fault, through my own grievous fault.”

  Clay knew that his battle with Digger’s conscience would more than likely be lost. Clay knew also that he would fail Lester come morning. He appreciated that if he tried anything then he would be dead in a ditch someplace and Lester would get smoked anyhow.

  Earl gunned the engine, kicked a cloud of dust off the edge of the highway, and took off.

  They passed a church. Outside it was a sign: Jesus is the rock that doesn’t roll.

  “That’s funny,” Earl said. “Smartass motherfuckers. Fuckin’ church people. Me? I don’t go to church. Only time you’ll get me in there is on the shoulders of six strong men.”

  Digger laughed. He looked at Clay, expecting to see his younger brother laughing too. Clay didn’t crack a smile. His mind was a million miles away. There was a resentful shadow in Digger’s expression, and Clay saw it good.

  “Gonna make our own rock ’n’ roll,” Earl said quietly. “Better to burn out than fade away.”

  Later, parked in some field beyond the outskirts of the town, Earl tied Clay and Digger together, and they slept all in a knot of arms and legs. Digger snored, Earl snored louder, and there was no chance of waking Digger without waking Earl. Clay knew then that his brother was more than likely lost, and again he questioned the woof and warp of all things. He wondered how their lives would have been had their mother survived. He wondered about a great many things, as was his nature, and—as always—there was scant understanding to be had of any of it.

  In the cool half-light of a coming dawn, he shivered with the cold, he shivered with fear, and he knew he would likely never be so afraid as he was right then.

  DAY FOUR

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It had been a mess of things before the get-go. Even as the sun rose, even as Clay strained his way out of awkward and restless sleep, he had a feeling that it would all go bad. He knew it as he listened to Earl’s bluff and bravado; he knew it as he watched Digger watching Earl, the light in his eyes, the small sense of awe that now seemed present in his expression.

  Clay knew it most of all when Earl and Digger left him in the car, when Earl told him to stay put, to do nothing, not to even think of taking off.

  Earl had leaned close, his face inches from Clay’s, his breath rank and fetid like high-summer road kill.

  “Digger here is my boy,” he said. “Digger an’ me don’t have a great deal of use for you, but I ain’t of a mind to kill you right yet.” He was doing his utmost to sound threatening, and it was working. “We’re gonna go in there, do what we have to do, and we’re gonna come out real soon. Ain’t gonna be more than three or four minutes all told. Like I said before, you can run only so far, and I’m gonna come after you and I’m going to cut you in a straight line from your throat to your dick, and then we’re gonna throw your guts all around the place for the coyotes and the buzzards. That’s if you run.”

  Behind Earl, Clay could see Digger looking at him. There was something in his eyes that he hadn’t seen before. He looked awkward, sure, but he was still defensive, almost as if Clay was the only one that now stood between him and his destiny. Digger had made a decision somewhere, perhaps while he slept, there in the dark recesses of his subconscious, he had manufactured some convoluted rationale for what he now intended to do. Clay had never doubted his brother. Of course, there had been moments of anger and spite and hatred, but they had always been transient, based somewhere in petty jealousies or ill-founded assumptions. But now everything was different. Earl Sheridan appeared to have activated some sleeping gene, some dormant aspect of Digger’s personality that Clay had never seen before. Until that point Clay had always been afraid for Digger, how the world saw him, how the world would treat him as he became an adult.

  Looking into his eyes then—flinty and hard like gray, river-washed stones—Clay Luckman was afraid of him.

  “So you make the decision, boy,” Earl went on. “You hang in with us for a little while longer and we’ll let you out someplace safe, or you can take a chance and run for it. Believe me when I tell you that I will come after you … I will hunt you down like a dog and kill you stone-dead in a dirt ditch if it’s the last thing I do on this earth.”

  Clay believed him. Earl had a look on his face like he was about to do something he’d been wanting to do for the longest time. Only the night before he’d said something that gave Clay an appreciation of how left of center Earl Sheridan really was.

  “God has a plan, sure,” he’d said. “I’m just as much a part of that plan as everyone else. Someone crosses my path and I end up killing them, well, that must be part of the plan, see? It ain’t complicated, it’s just inevitable. Who’s gonna be next, and why? Well, I have no better idea of that than they do. That’s what makes the whole thing so fucking magical. He moves in mysterious ways, and it seems to me I must be one of them ways.”

  He’d said that, and it was those words that Clay Luckman could hear as he looked into Earl Sheridan’s eyes and smelled his roadkill breath.

  Maybe that now applied to Digger too. Maybe God did have a plan, and everything that had happened to date had merely been a precursor to the coincidence in time and space of Earl and Digger. No more Eldorado, at least not for
Digger. The dream of what Eldorado might bring them, the life they would enjoy together, seemed a million, million miles away. Farther even than the dark star beneath which both of them had been born.

  Clay Luckman looked at his half brother, and wondered what half they shared. Surely only their mother’s half. This other half of Digger was now something Clay did not recognize. Did not want to recognize. He believed that the half of his brother that he loved, cared for, respected, and admired, had left. So scared had Clay been, so wound up in his own thoughts about what would happen to them, that he had failed to see that departure. But it had happened. No question about it.