Pickard County Atlas

by Chris Harding Thornton

  While the cops were still looking, while they dredged the creeks and drained the quarry, she kept saying: Check the houses. Check the houses. Check the houses. It made sense. Old empty houses had the most nooks and crannies. But Rick tried to tell her. They checked the houses first, Mom. That’s where they started. Then, after they quit looking, once in a while she’d say she knew right where he was. Rick thought he heard her wrong the first time. The second time, he asked. Check the houses, she said. They checked the houses first, Mom, he told her again.

  “For chrissake,” Rick said. “If she knew where he was, don’t you think she would’ve said by now? She gets hammered and says all kinds of shit.”

  “All kinds of crazy shit? That what you’re insinuating?”

  “Paul.” Rick wanted to say yes. Yes, she got hammered and said all kinds of crazy shit, and that was why she couldn’t be left out wandering around.

  “That’s Dell Senior talking,” Paul said. “I’d take his assessments of our mother’s mental fitness with a shaker of salt.”

  There was no use fighting about it again. All Paul knew was after. After was normal to Paul. “She’ll get killed looking.” Rick thought of her wandering and muttering. Combing the ditches and fields. Crawling under a house and getting crushed in a chimney collapse. Meanwhile, here was Paul, coating a roof like any other day, any other job. “Bullshit.” Rick dropped the mop handle and headed for the ladder.

  Paul called out, loud and hard and even, “What’s your plan there, buddy? Go tell the old man?”

  Rick stopped at the roof’s edge and eyed the ladder.

  “He wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire.”

  Rick stared down at the cracked dirt and patches of crabgrass.

  “Real idea man, Dell Senior,” Paul said. “Planting a headstone that says where he’s not.”

  “He meant well.”

  Behind him, Paul dunked his mop, then slapped it across the roof. “He might’ve meant well with that bucket of ash. I won’t speculate about that. This time, though, he meant to save face while turning a profit. That and piss her off, decreeing an end to it. Again. Worked great the first time, didn’t it.”

  It wasn’t a bucket. “It was a tin,” Rick said. “You don’t even remember.”

  The day they called off the search—suspended it, they’d said—Mom changed into some old jeans and a flannel shirt and walked out without a word, without looking at him or Paul in the front room. Paul was stacking blocks so he could kick the bottom out and watch the rest fall.

  Near dark, she was still gone and Dad was in the yard. He scooped ashes from the burn barrel into an old hinge-lidded tin for cookies or cakes. Rick didn’t know where it came from, the tin. Likely something Dad salvaged from a trailer. He held up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from the boys’ dresser. He lit the shirt, let it flame, then stomped it out. He did the same with the jeans. He threw the charred scraps in the tin.

  She was gone two nights. Both nights, Rick watched the moon through the porch screens. It was the boys’ room, the back porch.

  She came home in daylight, muddied and scraped, flannel shirt torn. Her pile of blond curls was dark from dust and soot and fell so it clung to her shoulders. She passed Rick and Paul again without looking and weaved into the kitchen. She weaved like she was treading air. Like the floor couldn’t hold her to it. She stopped at the sink and stared out the window. Her fingers locked on the counter like she could’ve floated away.

  When Dad came in, it was too fast. The speed of him churned in Rick’s stomach. He followed her through the kitchen’s open entryway.

  He’s—she breathed.

  Dad slammed the tin on the counter with a scrape and a puff of dust. There, he said. There. They found him and here’s what was left of him. So get the hell on with it.

  She stared at him. She stared at him stunned, like somebody in a movie who’d been slapped out of some panicked, ranting fit. When she did come to, she stared at Dad harder than Rick had ever seen her stare. Harder than Rick had ever seen anyone stare. She pulled a Salem from her breast pocket and lit it.

  No more of this shit, Dad said. Dell isn’t your only anymore, he told her. He might’ve been once, but now he isn’t. So you’d best get the hell on with it.

  She looked at the tin, picked up the swatch of burnt collar, and squinted through strands of smoke. She thumbed what was left of the label. She coughed a short, crackling laugh and let it fall to the floor. She grabbed the bottle of scotch and a tumbler from the cabinet, went to the front-room recliner, and clicked on the Zenith.

  Nothing else to say, then? Dad said.

  Nothing that can’t wait, she said. If she ever elaborated, if she ever spoke another word to him, Rick never heard it.

  Dad charged back outside.

  Rick crept to the kitchen and looked at the label. The shirt was one of his own. A hand-me-down. Dell Junior hadn’t been that size for a year. Dad must’ve not known the difference.

  In the front room, Paul was collecting the blocks and stacking them like nothing had happened. Rick had wondered, right then, what Paul would remember—if all Paul would ever know would come after.

  “He’s a goddamn jackass,” Paul said now.

  “He lost a kid, too, you know.”

  “You just focus on keeping shit normal,” Paul said. “Copacetic,” he added because he was a little prick. “Go doing something out of the ordinary, he finds out Mom’s gone, he’ll throw her shit in a dumpster, sell the house. Keep claiming her on his taxes like he tried with Dell Junior. Last I checked, you got two people besides yourself you’re on the hook for, and they’re barely dangling. Dell Senior catches wind of this, you’ll be screwing her, too.”

  “And you.” Like Dad said, Paul was living on Dad’s dime.

  Paul stopped again and pressed the mop head to the roof. One of his eyebrows tucked up, like Dad’s mustache had earlier, like Rick had said something funny. “Yeah. I’m living the life of Riley.” He dunked the mop and slopped it across the roof. “I suspect I’d figure something else out. Any rate, I’ll take care of it. Always do.”

  “Seems like you’re in a big hurry.”

  “Even a feral cat’s got a right to be where it wants to be, brother. It’s called personal autonomy. Liberty,” he said. “Besides, I already had one run-in with Jensen over it. Best to proceed delicately.”

  “The cops know she’s gone?”

  “Sure. I went straight to the cops. Love cops. Use your fucking head. Everybody in town thinks she’s nuts. Dell Senior says so to anybody who’ll listen. They’d throw her in a padded room. I’d sooner take her out back like Old Yeller.” Paul pulled the belly of his T-shirt up to wipe the sweat from his eyes. “Shit, they probably wouldn’t even bother looking. Just read me my rights and wait for a body to turn up.”

  The thought of Old Yeller, the thought of a body—Mom’s body—made Rick’s own move forward. A boot stepped into the fresh sealant.

  Paul casually lifted the mop so it stuck out from his side like a lance. It reminded Rick of the statue at Dad’s. Paul was wirier and full-scale. “What’d I say about overreacting?”

  Rick stood his ground a breath, then stepped back.

  Paul lowered the mop.

  He was right about the cops. They had it in for him. They’d trained their sights on Paul since the night Jeannie Ferguson died at the quarry. Or earlier, even, when Vern Sawyer flipped that Chevelle. Like both were Paul’s fault, just by his being there.

  Christ, that meant they couldn’t even go to the cops, for all the good the cops had ever been. A slow panic twitched through Rick’s veins. “You’re supposed to take care of her, Paul.”

  “Never haven’t.” He dunked the mop and dripped thick clouds over the stretch he’d already coated.

  The sun pressed into the back of Rick’s neck like the tines of a wire brush. They finished the job in silence. When they were done, Rick told him to load the ladders, buckets, and rollers. Rick said he needed to t
ell the lady who lived there they were done.

  Paul didn’t question it.

  Rick slipped around the front of the van to Paul’s pickup. He reached through the driver’s-side window and nudged the horn pad. Beneath the plastic strip, Rick felt two wads of cigarette cellophane. He pulled them out. Each was stuffed with off-white, partly crushed tablets and sealed with Scotch tape.

  He listened for Paul. An aluminum ladder screeched against the van bed.

  It wasn’t just for Mom’s sake. It was for Paul’s own good, too. Sooner or later he’d understand.

  Rick hid the crinkling plastic mounds in his fists and rounded the van again. He opened the door and stashed the pills beneath the driver’s seat.

  * * *

  IT WAS NEARLY seven by the time Rick got a chance to talk to Pam. She’d cleaned while he’d downed a pair of beers and watched TV without taking any of it in. Anna had drifted off beside him on the couch. Last winter, when he wasn’t still pulling hail-dimpled siding off mobile homes out west, the whole of her fit on his chest. She’d had to pull her knees up to fit, but she’d sleep like that. Drawn up like a little egg on his chest while he watched Johnny Carson. He supposed it was good, that she was growing.

  It was probably too early, but he carried her to the crib she was getting too big for.

  He went to his and Pam’s room and sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled off his boots, which didn’t breathe for shit. He peeled away the soaked socks that left his skin pale, water-bloated, and split. He scraped the soles of his feet over the ridges of the heat register. Pam would be pissed. He always left ribbons of dead skin to be vacuumed up. But he was tired, and it felt good when the skin sloughed off. Like a deep itch and a scratch at the same time.

  She walked in as he was doing it, a stack of folded laundry propped in her arms. She stopped cold by the dresser, looked down at his feet, then turned her back. She yanked and pushed drawers, put clothes away.

  “Just don’t mess with it,” he said. “I’ll vacuum tomorrow.”

  “You’ll be in goddamn Arnold tomorrow.”

  Speaking of which, he told her he got some money from Dad, to get to and from.

  Her back expanded and contracted with a breath. “That’ll help.”

  He tried to think of a way to ease into what was going on, but there wasn’t one. So he came out and said it. “Mom’s missing. She took off.”

  Pam turned to look at him and squinted like he’d spoken gibberish. He wasn’t sure if she hadn’t heard or if she’d drifted off in her thoughts or if he’d really said something that made no sense. Then it seemed to register. She looked tired around the eyes. Pale and clammy. It struck him that he was glad Anna got his coloring. His coloring took the sun better. It wasn’t so delicate.

  Pam sat cockeyed at the end of the bed so her side was to him. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Morbid,” she said under her breath. “Just goddamn morbid.”

  “You got a headache?” he asked her.

  She didn’t answer.

  He told her everything Paul had said about Mom leaving, about why he wouldn’t go to the cops for help.

  She was quiet for a time. She braced her palms on her knees and looked straight ahead at the wall. “He’s right, you know.” She said it more to the wall than to him, which made him uneasy. It made him think of Mom muttering curses into her scotch. Trilling along to George Jones on the Zenith.

  “I suppose. Cops’ll either lock her up or not do shit. Go right for Paul, thinking he did something to her.”

  “No,” she said. “About how she’s got a right. About letting her go.”

  He watched her. Pam was thinking. That was rarely good news for either of them. “Can’t exactly let her go wandering around and expect her to come back. She ain’t all there.”

  Her eyes focused, aimed at some knot in the wood-grain paneling. She looked like she was putting something together. Figuring something out. Rick watched her think. He pictured popped fuses. Melted wires.

  “You’re tired,” he said. “I shouldn’t have laid all this on you tonight.”

  “Come back to what?” She looked at him then. Her cheeks went reddish. She looked like she was about to smile, though she didn’t. “What’s her life, Rick?”

  He scooted down the mattress edge and put a hand on her back.

  It’d all turn out fine, he told her. She was tired. She just needed some sleep, was all.

  4

  THAT EVENING, HARLEY WOKE and rolled up to sit on the sofa. He polished off what was left in the tumbler, a swallow of mostly melted cubes, caramel-colored by the morning’s bourbon. The couch was shot. He’d bought it in ’68, shortly after the divorce and his switch to nights. The burgundy upholstery was some kind of polyfiber rougher than wool, the cushions chintzy. But in ten years he’d never grown used to sleeping in a bed through daylight. Dozing off to the black-and-white set on the end table felt more natural.

  He lit a cigarette and came to in a haze of tiredness and smoke. Every other hour, a spring had dug into his kidney, and each time he woke, he rehashed the brush with Reddick, wondering how it related to the death declaration.

  When Harley reached the station, Miriam Cox’s Studebaker was in the gravel lot. He girded himself before opening the door, then breathed relief to see Glenn alone in the portable, no sign of his wife. He was working late, which wasn’t unusual. He did more often than not, though Miriam drew the line on weekends. “Still no cruiser?” Harley asked him.

  “Carburetor rebuild.” Glenn was pink and shining. There was nothing worse to wake up to than Glenn’s sheen. “Get some sleep?”

  “Not to speak of.” Harley sat at his desk and stretched an elbow above his head to work out a kink.

  “Don’t get comfy, it was a pleasantry. June Christiansen called. Jack’s widow. Somebody broke in during the damn funeral.”

  Harley released a surprised breath, a sound like shoe.

  “Yeah, it ain’t all.” Glenn dropped the volume, though no one was there to overhear. “They stole Jack’s clothes.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody waited till his just-widowed wife was out burying her husband, broke in, and stole the man’s damn clothes.”

  It was a hell of a violation, all right, burglary during a funeral. And the clothes deal was just weird. But Harley tried to curb Glenn’s impulse to jump straight to some worst-case scenario. He had a tendency. “Only the clothes,” Harley said.

  “Jewelry, TV, hi-fi—all there.”

  “So maybe somebody was trying to help. I don’t know. Get things packed up.”

  Glenn stood and plucked the flat-brimmed Stetson from his paper tray. He said everybody helping out was at the cemetery. June dug around in Jack’s closet before she left, looking for a different tie to bury him in. Everything was there then.

  Since his cruiser was at the shop, Glenn needed Harley to drive. The two men made the short trip across town.

  The gravel road that reined in Madson’s southernmost edge passed Virginia Reddick’s house. Paul lived there with his mother. Harley slowed only enough that Glenn wouldn’t notice. Between the low-hanging limbs of locust trees, there was no sign of Paul’s F-250.

  The slim road veered left like it was eager to avoid that shroud of locust trees. Harley pulled to a stop at the third house and cut the cruiser’s engine. Past Glenn’s window, the narrow alley’s edge dropped off in a deep ditch before a field of puny corn swelled to meet the sky.

  The Fury’s door opened with its loud pop. Glenn flinched. “Need some WD-40 for that thing.” The man nudged and puffed his way across the bench seat, said he’d get out on Harley’s side rather than take his chances with the ditch.

  The steep slope of the Christiansens’ yard made the clapboard one-story look taller than it was. The round porch, topped by a dome and ringed in pillars, resembled a child’s playhouse. The houses in Madson’s oldest addition were miniatures of the Victorians near Main. Only the years evened thi
ngs out, put the same wear on roofs and paint.

  As the men mounted the stairs, June Christiansen appeared in the doorway, draped in a quilted pink housecoat, hair a thinning mass of white. Her smile was tight-lipped, the eyes behind her horn-rims rheumy. She invited them in.

  Glenn asked how she was doing, voice so thick with sympathy it clung to the air like a recent downpour.

  “Been better,” she said flatly. She had a reedy voice, vowels that came pinched from her throat. With a pained, lopsided gait, she led the men through the living and dining rooms, into a short hallway that ended in a bedroom. Light through the sheers caught motes above the quilt. Harley once heard dust came from a person’s skin. He briefly wondered how much of Jack Christiansen was in the motes, here in what was his room just a few days ago.

  Glenn stepped to the scene of the crime, the open closet door. Bare hangers lined the wood rail. He asked if she’d noticed anything else missing since she called. She pulled open a dresser drawer. Harley was closest. He peered over to see it empty.

  “Underwear and socks,” she said.

  “The man’s underwear and socks.” Glenn’s forehead wrinkled like an old fruit.

  Even the holey stuff, she said. And that damn, ratty DeKalb hat she’d threatened to throw out a hundred times, because, evidently, he couldn’t remember the things were free. Her breaths were heavy as she hobbled across the room. Meanwhile, she said, there was forty bucks sitting right in the nightstand. She snatched open and slammed shut the small compartment like she was insulted to see the cash still there.

  Glenn looked crestfallen. “Makes you wonder what the world’s coming to.”

  June squinted at him, suspicious at the borderline emotional outpouring. Harley bit back a smile. She tempered Glenn’s dismay with a quick, “No harm done.” She said she wouldn’t have bothered to call if the whole thing hadn’t been so weird.

  “Any sign of how they got in?” Glenn asked her.