by Farris, John
Yesterday he had idly solicited her birth date and hour, intending to present her with a horoscope delineation in lieu of the breakfast or lunch tips he could not afford. He had not yet got around to casting the horoscope, but he knew without a doubt, staring at the silken web and the twinkling implications of violent death stretched between the trees, whose nativity it was. Even the time of death was apparent to him, and the motive—
Sacrifice.
So that was the Occurrence, the seizure he could no longer remember, the cause of the disordered vibrations all around him! Hero sank slowly to his knees even as the angle of the sun was shifting, the pattern of the cosmic wheel dimming to his eyes. Poor girl, poor girl—a vision of Taryn Melwood came to mind simultaneously with the onset of another, uncontrollable Occurrence. There was pity in her eves, pity for him, as she turned to the eastern source of the light that was about to consume her. Taryn pointed—telling him—yes—what, what, Taryn? But she was quickly gone, and nothing remained in his mind but the sere whiteness, a sort of blazing Eternity toward which his soul drifted while his body convulsed on the ground.
• 4 •
The Red-Haired Messenger
Gaynell Bazemore was awake not long after the roosters, sitting up with a cigarette and looking at her snoring husband in the bed beside her. All in all she didn’t feel too bad about their most recent dustup—her ribs were sore where he’d popped her one, but she’d gotten him back: he had a humungous lower lip, and there was a little raw patch where she’d pulled another hank from his already-thinning hairline. After a brief slugfest they’d settled down to working it out in bed, their usual method for putting grievances behind them.
By now Gaynell had forgiven Nealy for slipping around, apportioning blame between herself (a little) and Taryn Melwood (a lot). A woman was a fool not to accept the fact that men were just going to go after pussy if it was available; and that little bitch Taryn was always available. Plenty of women found Nealy attractive, and why shouldn’t they? In the ten years they’d been married, Nealy had never missed a day’s work, or got drunk and hit her in front of the kids. He kept their house in good repair and was always nice to Gaynell’s mother. Gaynell didn’t have a single woman friend whose husband could compare. She had a lot to be grateful for; she just hadn’t paid enough attention to Nealy lately. Made up for it pretty good last night, though. If it was pussy he was wanting, then b God she’d keep so much pussy in his face the next week or so he wouldn’t be about to go whiffing the honey in another woman’s hive.
The snoring stopped abruptly, and Nealy turned over against Gaynell’s bare hip. His nostrils twitched as he smelled her cigarette.
Without opening his eyes Nealy muttered, “You awake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s Saturday morning, Gaynell.”
“I just got to missing the kids, so I thought I’d run over to Mama’s early and maybe take everybody to the waffle house for breakfast. That sound good to you?”
“Well, reckon I ought to get old Hitler down to the vet’s first thing, have Doc look at that torn dewclaw.”
“Want to give me a little sugar first?” Gaynell said teasingly.
“Whoa, honey, I just don’t know if I got my strength back yet. Maybe I need to go back to sleep another half hour, you wake me up before you’re gone on, hear?”
Gaynell got up and showered, brewed coffee, looked for her car keys but couldn’t find them. That didn’t bother her, she was always forgetting where she’d put them, but when she went outside with the spare ignition key they kept in a vase on the mantel and found her car missing, she needed about three seconds to get up a head of steam equal to her anger at seeing her husband buck-naked with a distant female cousin flaunting herself in a pair of lime-green panties.
“That does it, goddamn it, I’m calling the Sheriff and she’s going straight to jail!”
Nealy scrambled up in bed, wide-eyed.
“Huh? What’s matter?”
“She done took off in my Camaro, that’s what’s the matter!”
Nealy licked his sore and swollen underlip. “Taryn?”
“Just who the hell you think I’m talking about? Helped herself to my keys and drove right off! She thinks she can just help herself to anything she wants around here, but she’s got another—”
“Hey, hold on, now, Gaynell. It was kind of late, and Taryn didn’t have no way to get home—”
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing from you! Too goddamn bad she didn’t have a way to get home! What was she doing here in the first place?”
Nealy held up a hand. Gaynell heeded the warning and backed off to look for cigarettes. When she had one going she said, “Are you aiming to do something about this, or do I have to do it? I want my Camaro back, Nealy.” She turned and went down the hall. Nealy hopped out of bed.
“Where you headed, Gaynell?”
“Call the Sheriff. Have her arrested for car stealing.”
“Bull shit. Just give me a minute, we’ll go and get your car back. No harm done.”
Gaynell paused in the living room, hand on the telephone. “Oh. You know where she’s living these days?”
“Walking Ford Trailer Park.”
“Just how many times you been over there to see her, Nealy?”
“There’s no need to get cranked up again. Let me pull my pants on and we’ll fetch the car. If she’s the one that took it.”
“She done took it, all right.” Gaynell frowned and then, unexpectedly, she laughed, snorting smoke out of her nostrils.
“What’s so funny?”
“What’s funny is I made it the last twenty miles home on the fumes. She couldn’t’ve got far. Maybe three or four miles down the pike.”
“Okay,” Nealy grumbled. “I’m up now. We’ll get a move on.”
“You sure I’m not putting you out none?”
“Jesus, Gaynell.”
Gaynell laughed again. “Bet you she had to walk some after all. I would like to seen her face when that tank run dry. I hope she had the good sense to leave my car where nobody could crash into it.”
They drove south on the Etowah Pike toward Mt. Pisgah cemetery and the *Star-Light* Drive-In, Gaynell at the wheel of the Subaru pickup and Nealy sullen by her side sipping from a mug of coffee, still not fully awake. The sun was just up when they spotted the Camaro. Gaynell pulled up behind it and leaned on the horn, as if she expected Taryn to pop up out of the back seat. To Nealy’s relief the Camaro was empty; apparently she’d hitched a ride.
She’d also taken the keys with her. Nealy got out the five-gallon jerry can of gas he’d brought with them, Gaynell looked the Camaro over to see if Taryn had done any damage or removed something that didn’t belong to her.
“Hey! Hey!”
Gaynell backed out of the Camaro and glanced at Nealy, who was putting gas in the tank.
“Who’s that?”
“Hey! Help!”
“Kids,” Nealy muttered, looking around to see where the voice was coming from. “There they are, down by the Drive-In.”
“What do you reckon’s the matter?”
“Don’t know. Here comes one of them.”
The boy, a redhead about twelve years of age, was running up the blacktop drive toward the pike.
“Sure enough in a hurry about something.”
“Nealy, that little kid’s got him a gun, honey.”
“Lever-action .22, looks like. They’re just out doing a little shooting, hope they didn’t shoot one of their own by accident.”
“Hey, mister!”
“What’s the problem?” Nealy yelled back, but he had a bad feeling just then, a visceral coldness he couldn’t explain.
“We got to get help!”
“What happened?” Gaynell called, but she had a look on her face, of unrealized terror, that must have matched Nealy’s own expression. She’d always been a little afraid of red-haired children. In her scheme of things they were like black cats and one-eyed gra
nny women: certified hoodoos.
“There’s somebody dead in the drive-in! She’s dead, all right! You got to get help!”
Nealy put the gas can down and took a step to Gaynell’s side. She grabbed him around his waist and hung on for dear life.
“Oh! My! God!” Gaynell said, her throat locking after each word.
Nealy squinted at the red-haired boy coming up to the pike, and at the other boy, who was standing just outside the gates of the *Star-Light* Drive-In with his own rifle over one shoulder and a thumb hooked inside his belt.
“She’s dead! She’s lying there dead! Somebody done stabbed her all over! Get help! Get help!”
“Oh, shit,” Gaynell moaned. “Nealy, is he putting us on?”
“I don’t think so. I might better go find out.”
“Nealy—ohhh, Christ. I am not believing this! It can’t be her—!”
“Shut up!” Nealy snapped. His color had gone bad. “Sit in the pickup. I’ll follow the boy, and he just better be telling the God’s own truth. If you see me in a little while down there by them gates waving my arms, you know to get on the CB and fetch the Sheriff out here.”
“Oh, God!” Gaynell wailed, backing away from the Camaro as if it now represented everything that had ever gone wrong in her life. “Why didn’t I have the good sense to stay in Columbus?”
• 5 •
The Set-Up
Lieutenant Bob D. Grange of the Carver County Sheriff’s Department knocked on the boss’s door and then after five seconds had passed, he let himself in. The Sheriff was sitting behind his desk with his face in his hands. He was still wearing the fisherman’s vest, decorated with colorful little puffs of hand-tied flies, he’d had on when summoned to the office. Saturdays he always went fishing, so they’d known where to locate him in a hurry. He was listening, on tape, to what Nealy and Gaynell Bazemore had had to say an hour ago in Grange’s own office. The Sheriff neither moved nor spoke to acknowledge the Lieutenant’s presence.
When the tape was finished, he turned off the machine and looked abstractedly out the windows at the market-day traffic on West Fourth Street in the heart of the Carverstown business district. Sheriff John Stone was a tall man with bright blue eyes and an unusually large, leonine head that made his frame seem insubstantial.
“Bob,” he said, “all my life I’ve tried to keep that little girl out of trouble. I tried my best, and I just don’t understand how this could have happened.”
“You know how sorry I am.”
Still staring out the window, Stone reached into a desk drawer and fumbled for a small photo album. He held it in his lap and thumbed through the mylar photo protectors until he came to a snapshot of a woman with a head not unlike his own, a shoulder-length mane of blond hair and piercing eyes.
“Caddie and me never got along so good when we were kids. But I swore to her on her deathbed I’d look after Taryn.”
“I know you done your best.”
“I don’t think she was ever a bad girl, even though she didn’t show good judgment when it come to picking her friends. Like that woman she was renting from down there at the trailer park.”
“The one that was busted for hooking two years ago in Chattanooga?”
“When Taryn turned eighteen, there wasn’t much more I could do. She would have been just nineteen,, come October.” Stone swiveled his chair away from the window, looked up at Grange. Two deep brackets on either side of his mouth lengthened his face, saddened it. “What all have you got?”
“M.E.’s preliminary report just come over.”
“Sexual assault?”
“Don’t appear to have been rape.”
“What else?”
“Taryn was—” Grange lowered his voice, as if that would make the brutal facts easier to bear. “Well, there was just a multitude of stab wounds. Any one of at least a dozen could’ve been fatal to her. Also she was beaten. Stomped hard enough to break some bones.”
Sheriff John Stone’s eyes went out of focus and he lowered his large head in an attitude of pain and sorrow.
“Have the body taken over to Daimler’s when they’re through with it. I’ll talk to Ike Daimler later about arrangements.”
“Yes, sir. The two boys that found her are in Arby’s office, and the Bazemores are in mine.”
“Let the kids go, they’ve told us all they can.” The Sheriff got up. “I want to talk to the Bazemores. Give me about ten minutes, then we’ll take another statement from them.” Grange nodded. “I didn’t think too highly of what they was telling us the first time,” he said, and followed the Sheriff out of the office.
In Grange’s office Nealy and Gaynell Bazemore were sitting in a couple of thinly upholstered chairs pushed back against one wall. Gaynell, a caffeine addict, was on the fourth cup of coffee she’d had since arriving at the Sheriff’s station. Her eyes were red and dry. Nealy twisted his hands slowly and chewed aspirin.
“Morning, Nealy,” Stone said. “Keeping you all busy down there at Lockheed?”
“Yes, sir, they are for a fact.”
“Gaynell, how are the kids?”
“Oh, Curtis is just growing like a weed since he had his tonsils out, and Kipper’s the same old booger bear.”
“Your mama making it okay?”
“Well, you know, her sciatica’s acting up, but Mama’s always been the bravest soul. You can’t keep her down—you know Mama.”
“I ought to. Best-looking woman I never married.” He said this with an attempt at a smile, then sat on the edge of Lieutenant Grange’s desk and sipped at the mug of coffee he’d brought in with him, which had Garfield the cat in a Santa Claus suit on the side. Stone looked at the Bazemores, mildly but with a slight air of disapproval that soon had Nealy so ill at ease he couldn’t find the right attitude for his body in the straight-backed chair. The phone rang, but Stone ignored it.
Gaynell burst out, “I want you to know we’re just heartbroken about this!”
Stone sipped coffee and continued to stare at them.
“Do you know who did it?” Nealy mumbled, keeping his head down and his eyes on the scuffed black-and-white tile floor.
“No.” Stone put his mug down. “You know, I took Taryn into my own house when she had no place to go. It was that or the county shelter, nobody else in the family could do a thing with her. She was, what, barely ten years old? By then I reckon it was already too late. Now, Roberta, if she hadn’t of been bedfast, might have been a powerful influence, but it was all just too much for me to cope.”
“Well, God bless you for trying to help her!” Gaynell said passionately.
“Nealy, are you fixing to be sick?” Stone inquired of the squirming man.
“No.” Nealy cleared his raspy throat. “Reckon there ain’t a thing left on my stomach to heave up.”
“You’re welcome to go out and use the bathroom, then come back.”
“No, I appreciate it, Sheriff, but I think I’ll be okay.”
“Why don’t you go on out anyway, take a turn down the hall, have you a drink of water, let your head clear, if you know what I mean. So you’ll be ready to tell me the complete truth when you get back in here. Otherwise the two of you just might be sitting right where you are for the next couple days, and I ain’t crapping you negative.”
Gaynell looked appalled. Nealy stared steadfastly at the floor, his clenched hands between his knees. The phone rang again. Gaynell, Mrs. Coffee Nerves, jumped slightly.
Stone smiled bleakly at her. Gaynell’s mouth turned down at the corners, and she looked hatefully at her husband.
Stone said, “Folks, I have been in law enforcement for thirty-three years. Set here thisaway the Lord knows how many thousand times and heard all the stories there is to tell. You want to know how many people have lied to me in thirty-three years? It’s a simple computation.” He leaned forward to emphasize his point. “They all lied. They lied a little, or they lied a lot, at least to begin with. Now, I hope you’re only lying a litt
le, Nealy. And that you honestly didn’t have anything to do with Taryn’s death.”
Gaynell drew a breath through her teeth as if she’d put a hand to something red hot.
“How could you say a thing like that? Nealy was with me the whole night, Sheriff, and that ain’t a word of a lie! I’ll swear it on my daddy’s—”
“The whole night, Gaynell?”
“Well—”
“Where were you when Nealy was getting it on with Taryn earlier in the evening? Out bowling?”
Nealy’s head came up. “Sheriff,” he said hoarsely, “we never got it on!”
“The autopsy’ll find that out beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, then. You’re the one that took her to Six Flags to see George Strait, which is where Taryn’s roommate said she was going?”
“Yes, sir, I did. I, uh, left that out when we was talking to—”
“And Gaynell, you weren’t home when Nealy and Taryn got there?”
“No, I was on my way back from Columbus.”
“What time did you get to the house?”
“I reckon it must have been about two-fifteen.”
“Where were Nealy and Taryn?”
“They was ... in our bedroom.”
“I guess you pitched a fit.”
“That’s right, I surely did.”
“Mad enough to kill her, Gaynell?”
“I was, but I didn’t,” Gaynell said, and she broke down sobbing.
Stone let her carry on, staring at Nealy all the while. “Then what happened?”
Nealy said hoarsely, “Taryn got her clothes back on and took off.”
“You didn’t give her the loan of the Camaro, then, so she could get herself home?”
“She sort of borrowed it off of us without asking.”
