by Cora Brent
“You boys hungry?” Creed asked and I saw him glance at the way my fists were balled in my lap. I relaxed them, noticing that I’d forgotten to wear my wedding ring. Since the day I married Saylor I’d only ever taken it off to sleep and shower. It might sound like a small thing to forget since it was such a shit chore we were chasing but it bothered me. It bothered me a lot.
“I could eat,” yawned Chase.
It was still too early for most breakfast drive thrus to be open but Creed knew about a donut and coffee shop close to the university. He ordered two boxes of donuts and three coffees, waving away the change the cashier tried to hand him.
As I chewed I thought about how there’d been a time when a donut was a rare luxury. We’d often been hungry when we were kids and if it weren’t for the kindness of our Aunt Isobel, Deck’s mother, we likely would have suffered some serious side effects of malnutrition.
We were traveling southeast and the sky had begun to lighten. For some reason I wasn’t expecting the sun to emerge. A day of rain and clouds would have better served the mood. But when you live in a part of the world that boasts something like three hundred days of clear skies a year, odds are the sun is going to show up.
On the drive we talked about everything but the past, everything but our parents. Creed had a smile on his face as he talked about how he and Truly planned to adopt their nephew. He already loved the kid and he was excited to be a father. Then Chase cleared his throat and announced that he and Stephanie were officially, unquestionably, one hundred percent engaged.
“Took you freaking long enough,” Creed smirked and dodged the Boston Crème donut that was rifled at him from the backseat. I grabbed the donut from the dashboard and ate it.
Creed shifted his weight and glanced at me. “Hey,” he said. “I’m not arguing about whether we should be driving down there today, but what exactly are we driving down there to do?”
The truth was, I didn’t know. I just knew that we were all of the same mind as soon as we got the news. Call it closure, call it whatever the fuck you wanted. We just had to go.
“You know,” said Chase, “it’s a pretty sure thing the coroner won’t release the body yet. I’m with you guys no matter what, I just wanted to lay it out on the table. And assuming he’s out of jail, the body will be released to him, not to us.”
“Probably,” I admitted.
“So are we planning on sticking around until the funeral?”
“Not if he’s in town,” grumbled Creed. His hands tightened on the steering wheel and I imagined that he was picturing our father’s neck as his fingers squeezed. “I’m sorry but I can’t fucking do that. I can’t shake his fucking hand and pretend he’s a real father.”
“Never,” I assured him. “No one expects that.”
Creed relaxed a notch and nodded. “So what is it we’re going down there for?”
The tidy housing tracts that stretched out of Phoenix like a thousand prosperous arms were no longer in evidence. There was just road and desert and the occasional farm.
“We’re going down there to say goodbye,” I finally told him.
The barbed wire of the sprawling state prison, the signature Emblem landmark, emerged on the horizon just as my phone rang. I wasn’t at all surprised to see who the caller was. I hadn’t told him anything yet because I saw no reason to disturb him. Besides, this was our mess to handle, not his. But of course Deck had ears everywhere and some of them were attached to mouths that made it their business to tell him anything that might interest him.
“Cord,” he said and I could tell from the sound of his voice that he knew exactly what was going on.
“Hi, Deck. I should have called you.”
“Bullshit, I’m not calling now to scold you.”
“How’d you hear?”
“Doesn’t matter.
“Well, where are you?”
“About to board the first of a series of flights that will eventually land us back in Phoenix by tomorrow.”
I coughed. “You don’t have to do that, man. We’ve got this covered.”
“The hell I don’t have to fucking do it.” He sounded pissed. Then I heard him exhale thickly. “I’m sorry. She was your mother. But she meant something to me too.”
“I know.”
Actually, I’d forgotten. But yeah, Deck had always had a special kind of attachment toward Maggie. He’d known her in better days, before drugs and Benton’s violence broke her. He’d been an awestruck five-year-old kid when Benton brought his radiant young bride home to the desert. I wished I’d known her in that time. She’d been an artist. She was the reason my hands worked the way they did when I decided to create something.
On the other hand, it was probably better I had no memory of Maggie Gentry’s golden youth. If I did then today would probably be even more painful than it was.
“The boys with you, Cord?”
I glanced back at Chase. “They are.”
“Good, that’s good. You guys need each other right now. Listen, I won’t say some lame shit like ‘Give them my condolences’. We all knew this day would come. But I’m real sorry it’s here anyway.”
“So am I, Deck. So am I.”
In the background I heard the sound of Jenny’s voice but I couldn’t make out her words. Deck answered her. “Okay baby, just a minute. Listen, Cord, we’re getting ready to board now. I’ll be mostly out of reach the next twelve hours or so but I’ll see you tomorrow. If I know anything about you three I would guess you’re headed to town.”
“We’re almost there.”
He was silent for a moment. “Stay cool,” he finally said. “Watch each other’s backs.”
I knew what he meant. He was telling us to watch out for Benton. There was probably good reason for Deck to say that. I couldn’t guarantee what would happen if we ended up in the same room as our father.
“Always,” I promised.
A pause. And then a cough. “I love you guys.”
That wasn’t something Deck said lightly. I didn’t say it back lightly. “We love you too, Deck.”
Creed and Chase weren’t surprised that Deck had caught the first flight he could find. Before I’d ended the call I’d nearly said something sappy like ‘Wish you were here’. A wildly inappropriate thing to utter when you were on your way to see about your mother’s remains. But if there was such a thing as a guardian angel then the three of us had long ago been gifted with a gruff, muscled, tattooed version who came to us as a wild cousin.
The sight of Emblem made us quiet. The last time we’d been here, only a week ago, it had been dark and somehow that made the landscape seem more benign. In all fairness it wasn’t a terrible place. Most of the people who lived outside the prison were honest, hardscrabble folks just trying to make their way. But for us it symbolized misery, fear and a desperate wish to escape the stigma of our last name. People assumed Gentrys were shitty because historically most Gentrys were shitty. That’s a dark cloud to be born under. Suddenly I thought of our young cousins, Conway and Stone, wondered how much the echoes of the past had touched them. I made a mental note to track them down and look in on them as long as we were down here today. We may as well try to squeeze at least one good thing out of this.
Gaps had said that if we checked in at the police station they’d put the call out and he’d head down there to meet us. Creed hung back a little, looking uncomfortable and Chase was glancing around uneasily so I led the way.
Inside the station there wasn’t much going on. A bored-looking teenage girl sat on a plastic chair and scowled at the world. The smell of coffee and fast food assaulted the senses. And somewhere unseen a man laughed raucously. Sitting behind the long front desk in the lobby was a middle-aged woman in an Emblem PD uniform. She looked up when we walked in and her pencil-drawn eyebrows started twitching.
“I’m Cord Gentry,” I started to say. “My brothers and I are looking-“
“I know who you are,” she snapped. Then she let out a
wheezing sigh to let us know we’d just fucked up her scenery. “Go sit over there.”
“Welcome back, boys,” Chase muttered. I sat beside him and Creed grudgingly took the chair on my other side. He drummed his fingers on his knee and glared stonily ahead.
“The prodigal Gentrys return again,” I said, listening to our cheerful greeter get on the phone and call someone, presumably Gaps, to announce his ‘fucking friends’ were here.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CREED
I didn’t really give a shit what kind of grudge that idiot at the station desk was nursing. If she figured she could flare some nostrils and glare me down then she figured wrong. Probably one of my blood relations had wronged her in some petty fashion and the name Gentry had struck a sour note. But I’d never seen her before and didn’t feel like dealing with anyone’s historical anger when I was still trying to process a dead mother.
“Big C,” called Chase from two seats down. He waved to me over Cord’s head.
Cord, meanwhile, was slumped in his chair and looking grim.
But Chase was watching me with a mother hen kind of worry. What did he think I was going to do? Go ape shit in the Emblem police station? Head out on a blood hunt to sniff out Benton? I wasn’t the kind of volatile guy I used to be. I had a wife and a kid at home and they were my priorities now. This was just a sad obligation. We would fulfill it and then we would go.
“You got a restroom?” I asked the scowling wonder, who was still glowering at us from behind the desk.
“Public restroom is down the hall, first right.”
Cord blinked at me when I stood up. He must have been so lost in his head that he hadn’t heard the conversation at all. “Where you going?”
“Nature calls.”
“Oh.”
I nudged him with my foot. “You hanging in there?”
He nodded. “Yup.”
Chase and I exchanged a look and Chase reached over to pat Cord on the shoulder. Cord was usually the one who kept the balance. But getting that phone call in the middle of the night seemed to have shaken him up the most. I could tell from the second he stepped into my truck this morning that he wasn’t okay. If it was guilt he was feeling then he should know better than that. After all, a woman who would let her own children suffer in squalor and be abused for the sake of a terrible man and her own addictions couldn’t be redeemed. If it was rage at Benton, well, there was really no good place to put that either.
Not that I would mind getting my hands on him for ten minutes.
After taking a quick leak and washing my hands I lingered in front of the dirty bathroom mirror for a minute. If I allowed it, my senses could reproduce the stink of the trailer and the cold sweat of fear that broke out on my neck whenever I heard my father’s voice. There was a time when I used to drink so hard I’d black out. I had reasons. Bad reasons, but still reasons. I’d think of him and I’d have murder in my head and my heart. Drinking was the only way to dull the rage, although I’d hear from my brothers the next day how I’d gone out of my head, muttering and cussing until I vomited the pain out and lapsed into darkness.
The harsh fluorescent lighting glinted off my wedding ring and I balled my hand into a fist, holding it over my heart. The past was the past. It couldn’t be rewritten. And some things couldn’t be forgiven. But I had a life with a lot of love in it. And as soon as we were done here we’d go home and move on. We’d made it. We’d won.
I switched the light off on my way out of the bathroom. I could see Chase and Cord straight down the hall. They were standing, talking quietly to that goofball cop everyone called Gaps. He acknowledged me with a nod as I joined the group.
“Hey Creed,” he said, offering his hand for a shake. “Was just telling your brothers I was damn sorry to make that call this morning.”
He had a clammy grip. I released his hand and tried not to wipe my palm on my jeans.
“It was inevitable,” I said.
Gaps looked sad. “Damn shame nonetheless.” He glanced around and shifted his weight. “He’s still back there you know. Usually he screams bloody murder to be let out but all night he’s just been sitting in a cell staring at the floor. Not crying or nothing. Just quiet. We told him he was free to go but he’s still just sitting there. I know you guys don’t see your folks but do you want to-“
“FUCK NO!” Cord shouted and everyone in the station stopped to stare. I would have said it if he didn’t but I was surprised at his vehemence. Cord didn’t lose it too often.
Chase put a hand on Cord’s shoulder. “Think we’ll pass on the family reunion, Officer.”
Gaps looked at us each in turn with sympathy in his eyes. He was an all right guy. At least that’s what Deck had always said and I trusted Deck’s judgment as much as I trusted my own.
“Coroner finished with the autopsy,” he said. “Official results won’t be in for a while but I had an off-the-record chat with her and she said it was pretty cut and dry. There was no fresh physical trauma. Maggie passed out on her back and there was no one around to help when she started choking.”
I didn’t have anything to say about that. Neither did my brothers. We just stood there and let the image sink in.
Gaps stepped closer to us. “Do you want to see her?” he asked quietly. “I can only let you in there for a few minutes but you boys deserve the chance to say goodbye.”
The front desk demon had apparently been listening to the entire exchange. “That’s against protocol,” she bleated. “You can’t let them in to see the body without written permission from-“
“Shut up,” Gaps interrupted with a roll of his eyes. “I mean it, Darlene, or else there might be a few reasons to probe a little harder into the case of the vanishing office supplies.”
Darlene quieted down although I could practically see the steam rising from her curly hair.
“What do you say?” Gaps asked.
“Yeah,” I answered, looking at the boys. “After all, we did come down here to say goodbye, right?”
“We did,” Chase agreed, squeezing Cord’s shoulder. “Right?”
Cord closed his eyes. “Right.”
We followed Gaps outside. All the municipal buildings were in the same cluster on Main Street. He led us into a modest structure a few dozen yards away. It didn’t have a sign on it other than a simple Town of Emblem plaque over the door. I figured that inside must be where they kept bodies that were in need of some official business before they could be laid to rest.
Laid to rest.
Bullshit phrase if ever there was one.
Gaps greeted a black-haired woman who looked like she might not have seen the sunlight for at least three years. He talked to her quietly and she looked over at us.
“Come with me,” she said with a wave of her pale hand. As she tiptoed down a lime green corridor I started getting kind of a horror movie vibe. In a way it actually was a horror movie. Marching off to bid farewell to your mother’s dead body was certainly horrible.
The woman reached a closed door. “Wait here,” she ordered, and then disappeared inside, closing the door behind her.
Cord leaned against the wall, looking more or less as green as the floor tile. Chase crossed his arms and stared at the ground. They looked so lost, so much like the little boys they’d once been. I wondered if I did too.
A few minutes ticked past before the door opened again and a hushed voice told us we could enter. Neither of my brothers moved so I went inside first, knowing they would follow. An acrid chemical smell made me think of high school biology. I wrinkled my nose involuntarily and figured that smell would linger until I took a shower. In the center of the room were three long tables but only one was occupied. I would have guessed that a room like this would ordinarily be severely lit by high wattage fluorescence but instead the lighting was muted, shadowy. I wondered if the black-haired woman had done that on purpose, to spare us a clear look at what was lying on the nearest table. Just as she’d probably been th
e one to neatly tuck a gray blanket around Maggie Gentry’s shoulders and smooth her hair around her sunken face.
I’ve heard all kinds of things said about the sight of dead bodies. How they look peaceful, serene, simply sleeping. My mother just looked like a shell. The tortured person who’d live inside there for so long was gone and what was left behind was what we were looking at. I heard Chase suck in a breath and exhale shakily. Cord stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared.
“You can have a few moments alone with her,” said the black-haired woman and there was kindness in her voice. Whatever her role was in all this - coroner, body sitter, whatever - she was definitely someone who was used to the sight of death. She left us alone silently and all I could hear was the sound of my brothers breathing until Chase broke the silence.
“There were times,” he said, “when we were kids that I would wake up in the middle of the night and be sure that she was dead. I was afraid to go check and not just because Benton might wake up and thrash me. I’d just lie there on my mattress and watch sunrise approach, praying to whoever lived beyond the sky to keep her here a while longer. For a time I was convinced that if I stopped thinking that silent prayer then she wouldn’t be alive in the morning.”
