A Dark Path

by Robert E. Dunn

  I’d almost forgotten I was cuffed.

  Billy released me.

  When I turned, he was there. His eyes were waiting for mine. He had more to say. I beat him to it. “Why?”

  His expression neither asked nor answered.

  “Why did you lie about being the medic who helped me in Iraq?”

  “That wasn’t me.” Billy was not a very good liar.

  “Why?” I pressed.

  “I’m surprised,” he said. “You’re the strongest person I know. . .”

  I pulled the reins in on my need to control the conversation. I needed to see where he was going—more than I needed to hear or say—anything.

  “You don’t like so show your weaknesses. I mean. . . You don’t like to be seen weak at all.” He paused, seeming to expect a comment or question.

  It was hard for me not to jump in.

  “The medic in the back of that Humvee, saw you at your weakest. I don’t imagine you would want him to talk about that. And he, I’m sure, would never hold that moment up for scrutiny. Not anyone’s. Not even yours.”

  “Maybe it needs a little scrutiny.”

  “I bet it does.” Billy walked a few steps, creating a distance between us. He looked at stars shimmering over the black band of deep woods. “But it needs your scrutiny. Your own time. Your own place.”

  “Is that why you brought me here?”

  “I brought you here to see the stars.”

  I looked. I stared, actually letting my mind fall into the beautiful fires. I closed my eyes and the constellations were still there. “Just to see stars?” I opened my eyes.

  “No,” he shook his head without looking back at me. “I wanted to you see the place. Remember it.”

  “I do.”

  “No you don’t. Really look. Think about it.”

  “Think about what?”

  “Drunks need to see the bottom, Katrina. And this is it.”

  I’d never felt soft words hit so hard. Billy spoke gently. His voice was kind. I still felt a freight train derail in my gut.

  “You never—”

  “Do you remember the nights you sat here? Do you remember when I found you and had to take your keys and weapon? What about the time your father sat close while you cried and puked?”

  “You don’t know what happened yesterday, Billy.”

  “Then tell me.”

  I looked away—studying the stars. I didn’t even consider telling him.

  “I don’t have to know, to understand it was bad.”

  “Bad?”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Nothing’s easy, Katrina. There is no easy. Ever.” Billy, still facing away from me brushed at his eyes with the back of his hand.

  I almost asked if he was crying.

  Before I could, he turned and pointed at the dirt road. With his finger, he showed the long arc from darkness to darkness. “The road goes two ways. Go forward or go back. But sitting in the middle, with a bottle, serves no one.”

  “You’re an ass.”

  “If you show up drunk, Sheriff Benson will fire you.”

  “What? No. He’s always—”

  “Not anymore. He thinks it will be easier for him to do it. And he thinks it will make it easier for me in the election.”

  “What do you think?

  “You need to tell me what happened.”

  I did. Some of it. I told some more that simply wasn’t true. The basics were there. I told him about Clare and the unknown biker. I told him that Johnson Rath was waiting outside. After that I held back. I told him that Rath got the better of me, then sent me running.

  If there was anyone I needed to share the events of that night with, it was Billy. It wasn’t about trust. When I began talking, shame kept at my back like a whip guiding my words.

  When I finished we were sitting on the hood of Billy’s cruiser. He had tried to put an arm around me. I had tried to not to run away from it. We ended up sitting with a foot of open space between us. We were under a silent sky, but the Ozarks called noisily all around us. Cicadas buzzed endlessly. Tree frogs cried for love. I felt a little like I was suspended between the two worlds with different gravities. I had no idea which way I was going to fall.

  Without a word, Billy slipped from the hood and went to the back of the car. He opened the trunk and returned—carrying his guitar. The fact that he almost always had the guitar in his car was one of the reasons I worried about him.

  He sat beside me, again, on the hood of the car and started strumming. There was no melody. It was the musical equivalent of fidgeting.

  “You have something to say?” I asked.

  “I have a lot to say. But you’re not in a listening frame of mind.” Billy said it with a smile and a sad chord. It was hard to hold it against him. “Are you ever?”

  “That’s not true, and it’s not fair either.”

  “You know what’s not fair?” He strummed again finding the sound and melody he wanted. “Hoyt Axton wrote a song about it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve never been to Spain,” Billy started singing and plucking the strings quietly. He sounded sadder than sad. The song built. He let it come a little faster and louder. It was a strange mix I’d never heard from him. The strumming, the beat, were energetic. The words, and Billy’s voice remained mournful.

  It wasn’t until he was almost finished that I shamefully realized that I was trying to see how the song was about me. If it was, it wasn’t how I wanted.

  When he finished, Billy sat the guitar aside and looked at me.

  “Do you really want to go to Spain?” I asked. As soon as the question was out there, I felt foolish for asking.

  “I’m taking you to your uncle’s place.” His face had become like the stars over us, distant and unreadable. “You can hide out there.”

  “What makes you think I need to hide?”

  “Where’s your badge?”

  The question was another train—wrecking in my stomach.

  “Where’s your weapon?” He hit me again. “Do you want to show up at the Sheriff’s Office without them after a drunk?”

  It had become a night for hard questions.

  * * * *

  Uncle Orson was waiting at the end of the gangway when we pulled up at the dock. He had a blanket that he draped over my shoulders before ushering me in. Billy didn’t follow. Once I was with my uncle, he returned to the cruiser and took off.

  “Where’s he going?” I asked Uncle Orson.

  “You’d know that better than I would,” he answered. “Let’s get you inside before someone sees you.”

  “What’s it matter if I’m seen?”

  “You don’t want the attention. Not yet.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “You stink, Katrina.” Orson opened the shop door then followed me inside. “Your clothes are torn and dirty, you’re sweating whisky.”

  “I can smell you from here.” Clare spoke from the shadows on the far side of the shop.

  “Clarence.” I raised my arms rushing forward. The depth of my relief at seeing him was, in part, a reflection of my shame at having—not once—thought about him since I’d run through that door into the parking lot. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I told you,” Uncle Orson said. “You stink.”

  “It’s more than that.” I planted my feet and shoved off the blanket. “Did someone tell you what happened to me?”

  “We don’t know anything about that, sweetheart,” Orson said. “And you never have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “Something else happened.
” Both of the men looked down—like all the truth in the world was sitting on their feet. “Billy talked like I was going to lose my job. You two are acting like I’m a fugitive. The sheriff will be mad, but he’s always been on my side before.”

  “Did Billy tell you about Earl Turner?”

  “No.”

  “Earl called the sheriff’s office yesterday.” Uncle Orson talked to his shoes. “He said he was doing what you told him to do.”

  “What I told him?”

  “He said he was following his nephew’s phone. That you told him to. He said he couldn’t trust anyone else in the sheriff’s department so he was going to do it alone.”

  “No.” I tried to explain. “That’s not what I said. I told him not to—”

  “He’s dead.” Uncle Orson was looking up at me when he said it. “His body was found on another pile of brush—in that old graveyard.”

  “I didn’t tell him. . .” The truth was—I was not completely sure what I’d told him.

  I walked through the dark shop and out the dock side door to the houseboat. Neither my uncle nor Clare said anything, or tried to stop me.

  In the boat’s tiny shower I washed and cried until the water went cold. Even then, I kept rubbing at my skin until the tank went dry. The sun was coming up over a ragged, blazing horizon when I stepped out.

  It wasn’t until I was dressing again that I took real note of the clothes I had been wearing since that night. They were spattered with blood. Most of it, the big, smeared tracks, was what I had feebly spit out. Buttons were missing from my shirt. The placket was torn away from the thinner fabric. The drawstring of my skirt was broken. At some point I had re knotted it. On the side there was a ragged tear where the lace fabric had hooked on the car. Each bit of damage was a reminder and a blessing.

  I turned within the closet-sized bathroom and wiped the mist from the mirror. There on my skin were other, more terrible wounds—reminders were carved into my body like a railroad map of secret spurs. All lines ran to pain, and I was so lucky to have only torn clothing to show for the encounter.

  I wanted a drink.

  That’s the thing about drunks. Harsh words and good advice are no match against the need to drown the internal fires we carry within us. And there is no extinguishing them. The alcohol only banks the coals for a time. The only salvation is to find our own way to live with the flames that gnaw, but never devour us.

  Dressed in fresh clothes, jeans, and boots, I returned to the bait shop.

  The day was already inferno-bright—to match the need in my gut. There was a huge breakfast piled up in the corner booth—my uncle’s only table. My first reaction was a lurching nausea. . . then I was starving.

  “We started cooking when we heard the water running,” Uncle Orson explained.

  “You didn’t look like you were going to sleep,” Clare added.

  When he said it, I couldn’t help but imagine closing my eyes on cool sheets. It was a foolish thing to do. The nightmares were waiting, reaching for me at the mere thought of sleep.

  “No,” I admitted. “No sleep.” I took a piece of bacon and stuck it into the sun-bright-yellow center of an egg. The meat and yoke went into my mouth, and I chewed slowly, thinking. When my mouth was empty, I said, “I want to talk to my mother.”

  There was no response—not that I expected one.

  “Uncle Orson, do you know where she is?”

  He nodded, then he started piling food on his plate. “I’ll need a good breakfast first.”

  Chapter 14

  I ate only a few more bites of the huge meal, then went back to the houseboat. If there had been any more water, I would have washed again. I sat on the edge of the bunk and stared at my clasped hands. Despite the rising heat of the day, I shivered.

  When Carmen Dando, my mother, came through the door I was curled into a trembling ball on the bed and crying like the child she had left at this same dock.

  I don’t know what I wanted from her at that moment. I doubt that she could have said what she wanted from me. We had become like magnets, the same poles facing each other. We repelled each other, and I think, each longed to change. It would have been everything—if one of us could have found a way to become something else. . . something with a different charge.

  Carmen sat on the floor beside the bunk and rested a hand on mine—that was when I drifted off.

  She was still there, her hand over mine, when I woke. It was a small thing that meant a lot to me.

  “How long?” My mouth was gummy, boozy, and smelled like roadkill.

  “About an hour.”

  “Thanks for staying.”

  Carmen looked back at me with my own eyes. I wondered if I looked as sad as she did. She looked like someone with something to say. The hold-back showed in her eyes before she patted my hand. “I’ve been where you are.”

  “Where do you think I am?” I didn’t invite the distain into my voice.

  Carmen took her hand away.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You have the right.” She pulled her knees up and rocked herself gently on the floor. “You can hate me. You can blame me. I drink too, and I drink too much. Bad genes. You didn’t get that from your father.”

  I reached. Putting my hand over hers, I peeled it away from her knees. She let me bring it back to the bed beside me.

  “You’ve been where I am—but this is about more than falling head first into a high ball glass.”

  “I don’t. . .” Her hand squirmed under my own.

  “I need to talk to you about Johnson Rath.”

  She tried to pull her hand away. I didn’t let her.

  “What about. . .”

  “What he did.”

  “I don’t know. . .”

  “What he did to you all those years ago.”

  “No.”

  “What he tried to do to me.” When I said it, the fight was over. Her hand went still. It melted into passivity. I relaxed my hold. Her hand slipped away leaving only a small memory of its presence.

  “He’s a bad man.” Her gaze was pointed to some place I couldn’t see. It was her moment, a private pain. I refused to imagine it. When she turned away from the past, my mother looked at me. It was only for a heartbeat of time. She returned to staring at the floor and at something I couldn’t see. “He’s as cruel as a graveside joke.”

  I didn’t know how to proceed, or exactly where I wanted to go. I simply knew this needed talking about—for me at least. “Why do you spend so much time around him?”

  “Cherry doesn’t know.” She raised her head. Her eyes had ghosts within—and the red swelling of held tears without. “You can’t tell him.”

  “I don’t plan on telling him anything.”

  “He wanted to come here. He wanted to help Rath with that church. Cherry’s not like them. Not a racist. Not exactly. . . He’s. . . Well, he’s not a good man, but he’s good to me. Understand?”

  The first rule of interrogation is to let them talk. Silence is often better than a question or prompt for keeping the words coming. That’s what I gave my mother, blank silence. It was all she needed.

  “With Cherry, it’s always about the pay day. He’s the kind of man always chasing the treasure. It’s why we went to Alaska. We spent almost eight years there—prospecting for gold. We found some too. Put it all together, we worked ninety hours a week and probably made two dollars an hour.”

  She sat for a while, dwelling in her thoughts. I had to give her a nudge. “If it was about money, where was it coming from?”

  “Johnson has a plan. And he needed someone he could trust.”

  “Cherry?”

  “They were friends in the Navy. They met in the brig. Cherry was always in trouble. Johnson protected Cherry once when they got to drinking in the wrong bar. They backed each other up in a
hundred scrapes since then. This time’s different. Johnson is taking money from the Aryan Brotherhood to build his church and to distribute drugs—covered by religion. But he’s working with the DEA too. The idea is to short some of the packages, then make sure that shipment gets intercepted.”

  “So the AB would just consider the loss part of doing business—and not theft.”

  “Cherry has friends—out west and all the way back to Alaska. He knows a lot of oil rig workers and tanker hands. He and Johnson think they can move the drugs to those friends without getting noticed.”

  “What about Tyrell Turner?” My probing was too pointed or too excited. The spell was broken.

  “Is that really all you care about?”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m not talking to my daughter am I? I’m talking to a cop.” My mother looked stricken. “I should have known. Cherry made the brush piles to burn old bone and what was left from coffins. He had nothing to do with that kid.”

  “He tried to pass off a worthless bill of sale. He knew Tyrell.”

  “I knew Tyrell. It was me.”

  “What? How?”

  I knew the story about the Yocum dollars and his family connection.”

  “The silver is just a legend.”

  “The dollars are real. Your father had one. Orson too.”

  “I’ve never seen them.”

  “Just because you’ve never seen something—doesn’t make it impossible.”

  “Why did you. . .” I couldn’t finish. I didn’t know exactly what it was she did.

  “I was looking for a way to get Cherry away from Rath—or to mess up their plans before my husband got killed. Cherry can’t resist the idea of found money. He’ll spend his life digging worthless holes searching, but won’t take a job in air conditioning. Jobs are for suckers, he always says.”

  “How?”

  “I sent letters to the old man.”

  “Earl Turner?”

  “He didn’t answer. His nephew did. The kid had his own reasons—he was looking for his father.”