Pickard County Atlas

by Chris Harding Thornton

  “I know it’s too bad somebody didn’t torch the old home place instead. Maybe then you could shake it.”

  “Shake what?” Harley said, not so much asking as daring Paul to say what he had in mind.

  “Same old deal.” The shelf creaked beneath his weight. “Same old deal you took so personal out at the water tower.”

  The goddamn water tower.

  About the time Paul should’ve graduated high school but didn’t, he climbed up the tower and teetered around drunk and buck-naked. In itself, there was nothing notable about that. Kids scaled and spray-painted it seasonally. Usually they’d mark it with their initials, proclaim some undying love, though in Junco some numb nuts once painted a swastika. They did it backward, of course, like everything else in Junco.

  Harley had been driving past and saw Paul’s truck, saw somebody naked on the catwalk, and radioed Wilton for an ambulance. The Ferguson girl had been dead two months. Calling an ambulance wasn’t an overabundance of caution. It was a matter of precedent.

  The cruiser crept up the long service road to the base of the tower till Harley made sense of what he was seeing. Paul was alone and apparently had nothing to proclaim with a can of spray paint. He’d disrobed, climbed up, and then hung upside down, knees hooked over the catwalk rail. Not swinging, not seemingly having a good time, just dangling, his twig and berries aimed toward the dirt. The only thing not aimed toward the dirt was his twelve-gauge Winchester.

  Harley had gripped the handset where it clipped to the radio again, but he didn’t slide it from the cradle. He didn’t call for backup. That was protocol—an armed suspect in a standoff, you called for backup. But Harley didn’t.

  The twelve-gauge was the same one Paul still kept in the rack, a Model 24, double-barrel side-by-side. Not exactly a sniper rifle. The thing was for potshots. It could do some damage, but Paul had it propped one-armed in the crook of his elbow, butt against his ribs. He was also upside down and drunk. Harley was less worried about where the shot landed than where Paul would. The kick alone might’ve dropped him headfirst. And if he kept hanging upside down, he was surely going that way anyway.

  Harley parked at the base of the tower, sidearm out and aimed for precaution. He yelled from behind the cruiser door. He told Paul to slide the gun onto the catwalk. “Come on down, kid,” Harley told him. “Feet first.”

  Paul said no thanks. “How good a shot are you?”

  “Fair to middling.”

  Paul drifted the barrels closer, in the direction of Harley’s voice.

  Harley realized then, by the drift of the barrels, Paul couldn’t make him out. Not past the flood lamps.

  Paul closed his eyes. He smiled out at the night air. His naked chest expanded with a deep breath. Harley yelled again for him to slide the gun onto the catwalk.

  “I’m not dropping it, Harley. But you go ahead and ask one more time. I believe that’s protocol, right? Three?”

  It came clear then, what Paul was after. The implication felt like a hardened seed or kernel lodged at the base of Harley’s sternum. It swelled like heat behind his ribs till it broke open. It flooded through bone and muscle and skin.

  “You want to die, Paul? Let go.”

  Paul opened his eyes to the night and blinding flood lamps. The smile stayed. It broadened like he was glad Harley understood. “I thought it’d be poetic. Bad taste?”

  The distant whine of the ambulance siren floated from the highway.

  Paul heaved a loud, irritated stage breath. He slid the shotgun onto the catwalk. Then he swung himself upright like he’d been hanging from a set of playground monkey bars. When he climbed down, it was easy and nonchalant, and when his feet were planted on the dirt, he didn’t resist. Harley didn’t even bother to cuff him.

  After the ambulance loaded up Paul and his clothes and left, Harley climbed the tower for the gun. The safety was on. He slid the lever and broke open the breech. The barrels were empty. He’d pulled Paul over dozens of times. He’d opened the breech nearly as many. There was nothing illegal about a loaded gun in the rack, and Paul was always one to exercise his liberties.

  Harley climbed down, Winchester in his grip. Then he walked to the Ford and slid the shotgun back in the rack.

  The shelf in the cell creaked again, and Harley glanced up. Paul was situating, adjusting the wool blanket. “‘Feet first,’ you said. ‘Come down feet first.’ I’d say that indicates a fixation.”

  “‘Fixation.’ Overnight in a psych ward teach you that?”

  “Beg your pardon—it was two nights.”

  Two nights. Then they transferred him to North-Central Juvenile Services till his court date. Harley testified that the nakedness and Paul’s dangling from the catwalk qualified as erratic suicidal behavior. The judge was unconvinced. He issued a ticket for trespassing, deemed no further evaluations necessary, and released Paul into parental custody.

  “Middle initial,” Harley said. He needed it for the report.

  “Come on, Harley. You know by now. D. For Dell. My brother’s middle name, too. The live one, of course. Not the one you Keystone Kops never found. You know my brother?”

  Harley didn’t. Harley didn’t even know the other brother’s name.

  “He’s got a kid, pretty young wife—” Paul stopped, like he was waiting for Harley to cut him off.

  Paul was no doubt trying to fill the air, eat away time, which likely meant Harley needed to be someplace else, preventing something Paul didn’t want prevented.

  “He’s why I ran into you tonight,” Paul said. “My brother likes to see the good in people, bless his heart, and he thinks maybe you’ve been looking out for me. Looking out for my best interests. Is that it, Harley? Is that why you flushed those ludes?” He gave a dramatic pause. He had a flair. Then, as if it’d just struck him, though it surely hadn’t, he said, “Is that why you put the shotgun back? Never told another soul about it? Half-assed the report and testimony that could’ve put me in prison? Am I just the son you never had?”

  “Nope.” Harley slapped the clipboard against the desk and walked to the open cell. He pulled the door shut.

  It wasn’t generosity that kept him from calling for backup that night. It was because Harley knew what prison did to somebody like Paul. If he was dangerous going in, rest assured he’d be worse coming out.

  Harley didn’t report the standoff because the whole world’s best-case scenario for Paul, Paul included, was a psych ward. Or at least juvie. Once you called an ambulance for something like that, juvenile court got involved. In juvie, there was at least half a chance somebody’d realize Paul could benefit from a goddamn psych ward. Harley had suspected as much before the standoff. After, he knew it.

  “Something I said?” Paul called through the door’s metal strips.

  Harley left for patrol.

  * * *

  JUST SHY OF two in the morning, after tracing a fair portion of the county road grid, one-mile-by-one-mile squares, Harley was back at Highway 28. He parked in the Lucas drive and dialed through AM hiss for a station that’d already signed on or never signed off. He found one out of Vermillion. He kept it low enough he could hear Carol over the radio if he needed to. He sat there through Hank Snow and Connie Smith and an old Ray Price song, through a station ID and a weather report and the droning of grain futures. One truck passed in that time, slowing to the speed limit when the driver must’ve seen the cruiser parked on the hilltop.

  She never showed. Which was just as well. He was no doubt a fool for waiting.

  * * *

  WHEN HE CAME back to the courthouse, Harley opened the cell door to silence. The wool blanket was wadded up between the wall and Paul, who slept on his back. His rib cage barely rose and fell beneath his thin T-shirt. Harley now saw it bore the white outline of a naked, sexless angel, either soaring upward or plummeting, wings outstretched. He made out the words above and below it, LED-ZEPPELIN and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1977.

  Eyes closed and expression washed
from his face, he looked younger. His mouth had fallen open in an O that resembled a figurine Harley’s aunt Mae had. A Hummel, he thought. Her boy had sent it home from Germany.

  Shortly after dawn, Harley heard a stretching grunt from inside the cell. He told Paul to come out when he needed to make his call.

  Harley paged through a copy of the supplement he’d found upstairs by the DMV window. He avoided the second-to-last page but could still picture Doris Luschen’s smiling teeth there.

  A pair of boots brushed the concrete floor of the cell, and Paul emerged, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Harley pushed the rotary phone toward the desk’s edge. The movement clanged the ringer.

  He listened as Paul made his call. “Rick take off already?” A voice murmured in response, a woman’s voice. “Nah, down in Madson.” She said something. “Jail,” he said. “Listen, I know you got your hands full with Anna, but my pickup’s in Wilton.” He looked to Harley and winked for seemingly no good reason. There was silence, then a mumble on the other end. “No, no bail. Need a ride is all.” Another pause, then something curt, inaudible. Paul hung up.

  “Figure something out?”

  “Yeah, my sister-in-law.” Paul yawned, grasping toward the ceiling like the angel on his chest. “She’ll be down in a bit,” he said cheerfully. Then he walked back to his cell and lay down on the shelf to wait.

  17

  OUTSIDE THE REAR ENTRANCE of the courthouse, a tear of sweat tickled the back of Pam’s neck. She gouged at it with her chewed-down nails.

  Paul said there wasn’t any bail. If there wasn’t any bail, she didn’t see why she needed to go in. Maybe he’d hear if she honked. She honked.

  She’d spent last night trapped in the trailer with Rick, who’d lost his best quality, his ability to sleep. He’d pinned her in place again, though he hadn’t needed to. She’d felt too weighted down to move since Babe’s phone call. The prospect of Helen Nelson running her mouth about that day at Gordon’s was nothing. What people thought of Pam, what people thought of her as a mother or a wife, might’ve mattered to Babe, but Pam didn’t give two shits about that. What sank her was the rest of it.

  Babe was right. Anna didn’t ask to be, just like Pam didn’t, just like Babe didn’t, just like nobody in the history of the world ever had. Which was really something. Because people kept doing it, didn’t they? Making more people who didn’t ask to be and who, often as not, didn’t want to be. And Babe was right that Pam didn’t deserve better. After doing a thing like that, Pam deserved a hell of a lot worse than she’d ever get, given in the end everybody got the same goddamn thing.

  In the passenger seat, Anna knocked the soles of her sandals together with a dull thud, over and over and over.

  Harley probably wasn’t even here. On TV, jails always had bailiffs. Fat men dressed in khaki who guarded cells and didn’t get any lines except when they yelled at prisoners making a ruckus. Sometimes you never even saw their faces. Sometimes all you saw was their fat backs as they opened and closed the cells or ran their batons across the bars.

  She honked again.

  He could’ve been off work by now. It was daylight, and she couldn’t imagine him in daylight. She couldn’t imagine him any other way than how she’d seen him, black-and-white in the trophy case photo or tinted gray by night or lit up red by the Zippo flame.

  Leave it to that fuckup Paul. Leave it to another Reddick. They were all hell-bent on ruining her life. Though she supposed she’d done a decent job herself.

  “Wait here,” she told Anna.

  No, Anna said, it was too hot. She was right. It was too hot. She grunted and pulled at the chrome door handle. When it wouldn’t pop open, she leaned back to mess with the lock plunger, which was already up.

  Pam walked around to Anna’s side and lifted her out. “I’ll carry you.” If Pam had to go in there, she’d at least make it quick.

  No, Anna said, she wanted to walk.

  Pam set her down, took Anna’s balled fist, and crossed the gravel lot to the back door. It was marked by a plain, painted sign on a stake: JAIL ENTRANCE. No need to dress it up, Pam guessed.

  They took the stairs to the basement one at a time, the most Anna’s legs could manage. When they reached the bottom third of the staircase, in the space beneath the sloping overhead wall, Pam saw. Beneath the glow of the fluorescents, his black boot was planted on the concrete floor. It was the boot that ground out the burning cigarettes the other night. Another pair of steps, and she saw the other boot propped on his knee. She scooped up Anna.

  No, Anna said.

  Pam looked at her. At the way her thin brows drew together in little puckers above the bridge of her nose, not like a child anymore but like a tiny old woman. For an instant, Pam missed that wide-eyed look of alarm. Now it was almost as if Anna knew everything that had gone on and was bent on punishing Pam for it. Making her go through this whole thing in slow motion.

  Anna arched and pushed away, but Pam clasped the squirming body to her side. She took a breath that tingled in her hands. The air was cold and damp and she wished she was back outside where the heat already hung thick in the air. She took the last step.

  At first he didn’t seem to recognize her. Like being someplace other than out in the country, out in the dark, made her somebody else. Maybe one of her sisters. Another one of Red’s girls. But then she saw it. His lids dropped a bit. The thin lines of his forehead flattened. His eyes sharpened to a warmer brown. They were brown, she now saw, and she realized she couldn’t have known before. He looked at the girl propped heavy and squirming on her hip. The corner of his mouth rose in something like amusement. He shook his head. He looked away.

  “Reddick,” he said.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. He meant Paul.

  Who of course took his sweet-ass time. Even in the cold air, beads of sweat formed at the backs of her knees. Somewhere beyond the open cell door, he scuffled. She reached toward Harley’s shirtsleeve, felt Anna watching, and pulled back. He didn’t look at her. His pen tip sat motionless in a crossword puzzle square.

  Paul emerged and sauntered out, smiling big and broad. He reached for Anna. Pam struggled against the pull of Anna’s weight before giving in. “Take her,” Pam said, handing her off, then wishing she hadn’t. She wished she had something to do with her empty arms. “Need me to sign anything, sir?” He could’ve at least looked at her.

  “Nope. We’re good.” He scribbled some note in the margin of the newspaper. She eyed the thin loops of his writing, wondering what it said.

  “There’s no bail?” In the periphery, Paul bounced Anna on his hip. He wrapped Anna’s small fingers around one of his own.

  “Nope,” Harley said.

  “So? Is that just it, then?” The strain in her voice was like a thin, tense thread yanked out of her.

  Harley finally looked, one brow cocked to say she was a twit for asking. She felt like one of those dead butterflies on a board, pinned by the blacks of his eyes. She bit the insides of her cheeks.

  “Yeah. That’ll be it, then.” He went back to his crossword.

  “I guess we’re through here,” Paul said. Too chipper. He bounced Anna on his hip. “Ain’t we,” he said. “Ain’t we done here, Anna.”

  * * *

  PAUL SAT WITH Anna in his lap while Pam drove. She held the wheel and kept her face blank as they passed the Jensen house and the blind intersection. She needed to keep Paul where she could see him. Till she knew if he suspected anything. Till she knew what came next if he did.

  “How’d you get arrested?” she asked him.

  “Easier than you think when a cop’s got it out for you,” he said. “Just a few well-plotted antics.”

  Her eyes darted at him, then back at the road. “You did it on purpose?”

  “Enough about me,” he said. “How long you two known each other?”

  “What?”

  “Chemistry’s thick. Palpable.”

  Pam pulled a strand of whipping hai
r from her eye and tossed it back where the rest flew through the open window. “You’re messed up,” she said. She wouldn’t acknowledge it. Any of it. “Probably eating pills again like candy.”

  Anna asked about candy.

  “No. No candy,” Pam said. The wind, the tires’ roll on the pavement filled her head so she couldn’t think. She’d change the subject. “Don’t suppose you found your mother yet. Rick says you’re really giving it your all. Says you’d just as soon let her wander around drunk, batshit crazy and yammering.”

  “She’s got a right,” he said matter-of-factly. “And she ain’t crazy.” He pursed his lips and squinted like he was pondering. “Unless real, real, justifiably pissed is crazy.” He seemed to mull it over. “I guess a certain degree of justifiably pissed could be crazy. But so could a certain degree of happy or stupid, then. You go parsing that sort of thing, meaning just falls apart, don’t it?”

  While Pam had wondered, too, recently, if Virginia was the sanest of them all for bolting, she tried to keep Paul on goddamn track. “You know, Rick’s scared she’ll die out there, drunk in the heat.”

  “She’ll die somewhere at some point. Not sure it matters if she’s indoors.”

  It seemed like a fair point.

  “And for the record, I’ve been looking. Maybe not searching, per se. More like watching.” His focus was out the window, on the passing pasture grass. “I was watching out at the Jensen place, for example. Night before last.”

  Pam’s breath went shallow, like the open window sucked the air from her chest.

  “Pam, I’m no paragon of morality.” Paul cupped his hands around Anna’s ears. She tried to pull them away, but he held them there and lowered his voice. “People fuck up. All I’m saying is don’t fuck up with Harley. Specifically. Not now that he’s connecting dots. Whatever you feel about my brother, he does his best.” He let his hands drop from Anna’s head. “He does his own idiot best better than anybody I know. And if anybody can stumble good-intentioned into cross fire, it’s that jackass.”