Pickard County Atlas

by Chris Harding Thornton

  At the front door, he snatched up the gun and headed outside.

  Gas. There’d be no place open to buy gas this late.

  Their hose sat coiled around the side of the trailer. He’d never used it for anything but spraying mud off his boots. He’d never had other cause to use it. He’d never put down sod or seed for a yard. Just as well.

  He laid down the shotgun and the mound of Anna’s things in the weeds and took out his buck knife. He worked the blade against the hose. He cut a length of tube he could run from a gas tank.

  From this side of the trailer, he wouldn’t see Pam pull up. In his head, he pictured what he wouldn’t see. The Nova swinging into the empty space, her slipping into her sandals and crossing the dirt and crabgrass, looking disappointed. Disappointed Paul was a no-show, wherever they usually met. She’d walk inside and down the hall and lie on the bed—Rick’s bed. Rick’s mattress. Rick’s sheets. She wouldn’t even see Anna was gone. Pam would go straight to the bed and bury her head in his pillow that stank of Paul. She’d breathe deep.

  He pictured her knuckles braced on the edge of the mattress. Paul’s sickly pale white ass rising and falling on top of her. Rick pictured it again. And again. Not because he couldn’t not. He did it because each time he saw it, the sink in his stomach set solid and deadened. He did it because it was like saying a word too many times. Till it didn’t mean anything anymore. He knew it’d all flood back when she got here, when the Nova pulled in. It’d flood back till he felt his skin would split. But for now he let it play in his head and numb him as he sawed the hose. He’d already cut the length for siphoning. Now he was cutting to cut. To do something with his hands.

  A hum. From the highway. It grew deeper and louder. He heard the engine, the roll of radials on the trailer court’s main road. He squatted where he was, buck knife in his grip.

  He checked himself. He folded the blunt side of the blade against the thigh of his jeans and slid the knife into its sheath. His head beat with his heart like his ear was pressed against a pillow. A pillow that now stank of Brut and sweat.

  The blood rushed hot to his ears so they rang with it. The car idled high before the engine cut. He ground his teeth against the sound of each step she made toward the trailer. His chest seized once at the screen door opening, and again with the slap when it closed.

  He listened for scurrying. Scuffling. A scream when she saw Anna wasn’t where she’d left her. He listened for the frenzied patter of footfalls. Another slap of the screen door.

  Rick listened. But nothing came.

  * * *

  THE DRIVE INTO Madson was like sleep and waking. Spaces of time gone like pavement between yellow dashes. In his head, in the hollows above his eyes, gasoline wafted. He’d tried the hose on Evelyn Mueller’s Mercury and a shitty Datsun before he finally managed to pull some from Les Bowman’s Dodge Ram. The gas barely hit the tip of his tongue, and he’d spit. He’d opened a beer and swished it, but the fumes were still there. He supposed gas was better than Brut.

  In case Paul got out of Thedford and came looking for his pickup, Rick parked in the gravel alley northwest of Mom’s place, on the far side of McKinney’s. The mechanic’s sprawling graveyard of cars and trucks and buses blocked any view of the pickup.

  Rick carried Anna toward the locust trees that ringed Mom’s place. When he came close, he saw something wasn’t right. About the house.

  The lamp didn’t shine red through the drapes. The lamp that was always on. Always. Day and night.

  When he carried Anna inside, the darkness was too thick. He remembered the overhead. They’d never used it. Mom always used the lamp. He swept his arm up and down the wall till he felt the switch and flipped it.

  The light blinded. It sparked off the vinyl recliner and the end table and the Zenith. It lit the red drapes too red. He switched it off. He squeezed his eyes shut. Anna was awake now and wriggling. He was clutching her too close. He loosened his grip and opened his eyes to the dark. He stood still and blinked till he could see.

  Somebody’d switched the lamp off. The only person who should’ve been here was Paul. But Paul wouldn’t have switched the lamp off. Paul said to keep shit normal. That lamp being on was normal. Mom? Maybe Mom was here and went back to sleeping in her room again.

  He settled Anna in on the couch with her wad of things. He pulled out the turtle and handed it to her. She rubbed her eyes with her fists, then curled up against the arm of the couch. He ruffled her hair before he walked down the hall.

  The house stank like rotten vegetables. Like old books and wet cigarettes. He walked through, checking and rechecking all the rooms till a streak of light in the corner of his vision stopped him in the hall. The picture hung there. Behind the glass, Dell Junior straddled the Schwinn in the yard. The frame was old. Oak. After the cops called off the search, she’d taken out a yellowed picture of stiff, unsmiling dead relatives and put in Dell Junior. Dell Junior, swapped in for dead people Dell Junior never knew.

  Maybe that explained Mom up and disappearing. Maybe she was somehow swapping herself in with Dell Junior, too. Mom wasn’t anywhere, and Dell Junior wasn’t anywhere. Rick didn’t know what it could’ve meant. But the thought itched through him.

  The thought itched through him until it radiated. Until it glowed. Then Rick knew.

  The knowing shimmered like light. Like the streaks. They were in the same place, Mom and Dell Junior. The same place that wasn’t anywhere. The thought settled him. The thought somehow made sense. It was somehow all right.

  He turned the switch on the living room lamp. The bulb was shot. Rick supposed that made sense, too.

  Instead of digging around for a new bulb, he sat on the floor by the couch in the dark. He sat by where Anna held Mr. Turtle. Rick wouldn’t sleep. He didn’t need to anymore, of course, but he also knew he couldn’t. Even if it was good Mom and Dell Junior were together, wherever it was that wasn’t anywhere, he didn’t want Anna wandering off there, too. Not without him, anyway. Not alone.

  He reached back to hold her ankle. To keep it there. He held her ankle in the dark.

  25

  HARLEY WAS PARKED ALONGSIDE the drive of the Knudsen homestead. He’d left room for fire trucks passing to and from the highway. The volunteer crews from Madson and Wilton both worked to keep the blaze contained to the house and windbreak. Leaning against the cruiser in the dark, he watched the flames wave up in short-lived streaks. Above, smoke billowed white like fast-moving clouds, though Harley knew the smoke couldn’t have been white. It’d been a trick of contrast, the black night sky above the red glow. Through the plumes and above, against the dark, embers shot up, glimmered, and died out like meteorites. Shooting stars headed the wrong direction.

  When it came, morning was hazy in the blackened ruins. They steamed. He was thankful for the way the vapor softened the edges of day, made the morning look like fall instead of summer’s peak. He could imagine this was some fall morning far away from the jarring, competing pictures in his head: the pale haze of her hips rising from the floor, then gray dirt on the soles of feet. Some fall morning months from now, there’d be routine again.

  The Wilton crew had left, but a few of Madson’s boys were still inside. They clomped around in their heavy rubber suits and yelled to each other in voices just as weighed down. Whatever they said was tired and winded, deadened by what was left of the walls. They were checking for hot spots, ensuring the place was soggy enough it wouldn’t flare up again.

  While they worked, he passed the brooder house. The building was still dead-bolted, still sealed up tight. He went to the horse barn with the stalls stripped out to see what he’d see, kill time before he could get inside the farmhouse and find what he knew he would: buttons, snaps, zippers. Ashes of newsprint and the stink of gasoline. Empty booze bottles filled with cigarette butts.

  Something was different. In the horse barn. Something was off. From where he stood in the open doorway, he made out the tops of the molded bales and the ge
nerator in the loft. He stood and stared but couldn’t place what was different.

  He walked to the bigger hay barn and pushed aside one of the doors.

  The Plymouth was gone. He hadn’t taken down the plates. He hadn’t thought to. He’d figured it for an auction buy.

  Who knew how long it’d take to track plates from ’60? They’d need to dig through file boxes, sift through the paperwork for all the Plymouth Savoys. On his way to the cruiser, where he’d radio Carol, ask her to start digging, he passed the smaller horse barn again and glanced, still nagged by what was different.

  The ladder to the loft. It was gone. He wondered if it’d been here last he checked, hours before. Tracks from the posts ran across the dirt and hay and disappeared in the grass at his feet. There were enough tracks he wondered if some of them hadn’t been here the other day. If they were, he should’ve noticed. His eyes fell to trace them.

  Nestled in the sparse hay, something orange shone like colored glass. He walked to it and squatted. A prescription bottle. He rolled the cylinder to see the script. Quaaludes, thirty count with two left. Made out to Virginia Reddick.

  Pam said the brothers were both in Thedford. Before a vision of her hip bones rising from the dimness could flash in Harley’s head, he replayed the moment he’d yelled up to her. When he’d told her to get home. She’d stared back blank, unknowing. She hadn’t been covering for anybody, hadn’t lied to him about Paul’s whereabouts. At least not on purpose. She’d really thought Paul was in Thedford. She’d just thought wrong. Paul no doubt drove back after Pam talked to her husband on the phone. Paul drove back knowing he had a reliable story for where he was.

  Harley walked, tracing the ladder trails around to the back of the house, where the rock foundation rose to the stairless entrance. The door above was open. He called up, asked the fire crew how it looked.

  One of them, the oldest Braasch boy, who wasn’t a boy at all but a huge, nearly middle-aged man, poked his face around the doorway. His skin was stained with char and smoke. “If you can float, come on in. But I wouldn’t trust what floor’s left. Pretty much gone in front. We’re tiptoeing joist to joist like big ballerinas.”

  “Anything left of an old barn ladder? Wood? Round rungs?”

  “Yeah, right here across the floor,” he said, like it was nothing notable. “This whole thing’ll come down in the first stiff wind. Penke’s gonna need to raze it quick.” He rubbed his forehead with the thumb of a thick glove. The ash smeared in a streak. “It’s out, though. Best we can tell.”

  Harley thanked him, told him and the boys to be careful in there.

  * * *

  AT THE STATION, Glenn didn’t have a sheen. If anything, he looked too dry. And pale. He needed to goddamn retire, was what he needed to do.

  Harley asked if Carol had called with the records on the Plymouth.

  Glenn shook his head. She’d called, he said, but no luck yet. He stared absently at his desk calendar, at the chicken-scratch notes there.

  “Paul Reddick. Been into his mother’s ludes again.” Harley tossed the prescription bottle onto Glenn’s desk. He told Glenn what he knew, about the ladder, about the front door being bolted the other day. Paul must’ve used the ladder to go in back and pulled it up after him. Then he must’ve set the fire and gone out the front. Looked like he’d been there multiple times, given the tracks.

  “Harley.” Glenn was grave. “You and me need to talk.”

  “Don’t say I’m jumping to conclusions.”

  “You didn’t mention you picked him up, night before last.”

  “You want the truth?” Harley said, then realized he couldn’t tell it. Not the truth about Pam. Not if it could be avoided. She was a married woman with a kid. He couldn’t tell a sheriff, even if the sheriff was Glenn, that he’d given Pam’s husband grounds for divorce. While on duty. And if he couldn’t tell Glenn about Pam, all the rest would sound insane—Paul following him on patrol, Paul setting the fire in the burn barrel at the home place, Paul getting thrown in the drunk tank on purpose. “You looked like you were about to die. Doris Luschen’s place’d just got hit.” He went to his desk and flipped open the phone book. “Check Carol’s log if you want. I got a call to take him in, I took him in. Put him in the drunk tank. Turned him loose the next morning. In plenty of time to steal Doris’s clothes.”

  Glenn turned the pill bottle with a finger, distracted. Slow and quiet, he said, “Pills don’t put him at Doris’s. Don’t even put him at the Knudsen place.” He slid open the pen drawer of his desk. He dropped the bottle into it. “Besides, it’s Virginia’s name on the prescription.”

  “Sounds like some weird wishful thinking on your part,” Harley said. “Why is that, Glenn?”

  “Paul Reddick’s got a Ford.” He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his bald hairline, like he was rubbing away an ache, his eyes closed. “You’re looking for somebody drives a Plymouth.”

  Harley flipped the phone book on his desk to the Rs. There were three listings for Reddicks. Dell Senior, Rick, and Virginia. Rick. Harley scribbled the trailer park addresses in his notepad. He’d drive out to Fall Meadows first, see if Paul was at his dad’s or brother’s. Harley tore loose the paper. He tucked it behind his cigarettes.

  * * *

  HE PULLED UP to the end of Pam’s block. There was no red F-250, but the Nova sat outside the trailer. He wanted to stop. He had a good enough excuse. But it wasn’t the brightest idea. Not with the places out here being so packed together. Not given neighbors’ tendency to talk. He wondered if even considering it meant his judgment was getting spotty. He needed some downtime. He needed to get some space from the pictures that flashed in his head like slides in a projector wheel. One moment was the thin, downy hair on her skin. The next was the bottom of a cane-seated chair blown over. So much for afterglow.

  Harley drove across the court to Dell Senior’s. Paul’s truck wasn’t there, either. Harley pulled up anyway and parked.

  The place was a double-wide version of a grand estate, propped on a bright green hill of yard twice the size of the surrounding lots. Harley strode up the turf grass, walked by a concrete fountain where a fat and naked boy stood at the center of a scallop-edged bowl, pissing.

  The most time Harley had spent in close proximity to Dell Senior was in that district courtroom after the water tower. He’d had the same glad-handy grin he wore in his Midwest Speedway bulletin ads for trailer repair and sales. In the flyer for stock car races and demolition derbies, he smiled a set of hard, white, squared-off teeth below a thin Douglas Fairbanks mustache. The judge ate it up. Dell Senior could’ve charmed him into buying half of Fall Meadows if he’d wanted to.

  Harley pulled open the screen door and saw a brass knocker, a lion’s head with a ring in its mouth. He rapped his knuckles three times on the wood below and waited.

  Rumor had it Dell Senior was a drinker and a son of a bitch. Harley didn’t like him, but he took rumor with a grain of salt. There’d been plenty of talk about the Jensens, too. Affairs, alcoholism. Whispers about Dad beating her. A theory she’d had a miscarriage. That she’d gone crazy from menopause. None of it was true, but people needed it to be. Otherwise it was a problem, that somebody no different from themselves could go and do what she did. And problems have solutions. Questions have answers. So people rooted around till they found one to settle on. What they never got was there was never any problem or question to begin with. Just an event. Same thing with Dell Senior, probably. One of the man’s kids was killed. People couldn’t abide something so senseless. They needed to believe he’d somehow earned it.

  Dell Senior wasn’t answering, though his well-waxed Lincoln sat beneath the carport. Harley glared at the lion’s head, took a breath for patience, and used the brass ring to knock. The clack was quieter than his knuckles, but steps thudded behind the door. There was silence before it opened.

  The man’s eyes looked a touch glassy, a little red. Evidently, it was true he was a drinker. “Ah,” h
e said, with a force behind it. A force that made his chest pop up and out a hair. He was shy of Harley’s height by an inch or two. “Jensen. Suspect you’re looking for Paul, as usual.”

  “Got any idea where he is?”

  “You know, I had this other one I asked you people to find, oh, about twenty years back.” He smoothed his mustache, though it wasn’t going anywhere. “Ran into Glenn last week, week before. Good people, Glenn. Shit sheriff, but good people. Told him maybe his deputy was confused about which boy I meant.”

  Harley wondered if the conversation accounted for Glenn’s wishful thinking.

  “See,” Dell Senior said with an easy laugh, “you keep finding the one that ain’t missing. And as for the other, well—” He took on a mock note of triumph that rang of Paul. “You can call off the search! Had the funeral without him.”

  Harley stayed even, neutral. “I heard.”

  He shot back, “Oh, did you heard?”

  Harley’s jaw tightened. He hooked his thumb through his belt loop.

  “Hell of a thing, way it works. You can be dead eighteen years, but it ain’t official till somebody signs a form.” He leaned in a bit so his head poked from the doorway, and he shifted his glassy eyes left to right. “You hear we did it to collect insurance?” He held the back of his hand to the edge of his mouth, like he was telling Harley a secret. He whispered, “I heard that, too.”

  “Any idea where Paul was last night?”

  Dell Senior took a measured pause before he spoke. “Maybe you don’t mean to come across the way you do, Jensen. But chasing my son, searching him, throwing him in the drunk tank, the loony bin—makes me think you doubt his raising. How he was reared. Is that it? Think I don’t deserve Father of the Year?”

  Harley said nothing. He gripped the belt loop with one hand, the cheap storm doorframe with the other.