Pickard County Atlas

by Chris Harding Thornton

  “I give my boys homes and money and work. Hell, I keep the electric and water running for that cuckoo Daffy Duck wife down in town,” he said. “I provide for mine. Don’t recall your folks winning any awards in that category.”

  Harley kept his temper checked, his mouth a taut, thin-lipped line.

  “Tell me something, Jensen. I know you think my boy’s crazy. Made that clear getting him locked up that time. But you ever consider, pulling him over every ten minutes like you got no other job, that you might be the one? You ever stop to think you might come by it naturally?”

  Harley looked Dell Senior dead in the eye. Then he dropped his head to let a quarter-sized dollop of spit fall on the man’s welcome mat. He rubbed it in with the toe of his boot. “Where’s Paul?”

  Dell Senior’s eyelids tensed low behind his bifocal rims. “You got a warrant?”

  “Don’t need a warrant to ask a question.”

  “Don’t need to answer your question, neither. But I will, since I know it’ll burn your ass. On his way back from Thedford.” He looked satisfied, smiling those square white teeth. “Where he was all last night. Want proof, I got a Western Union receipt from this morning.”

  * * *

  HARLEY SPED THROUGH the blind intersection at County Road K, past his folks’ place and the Lucas drive, past the county oil and the burnt remnants of the Knudsen place. He lit a fresh cigarette off the one he finished. He crossed the wood bridge spanning the Wakonda, tapped his brakes at the four-way stop, and hung a right on Walnut. Dell Senior could eat his goddamn Western Union receipts. The money could’ve as easily been wired to the son who really was in Thedford.

  When Harley got to Virginia’s house, he put the cruiser in park but left the engine on. He walked to the door, lit cigarette in hand. He wasn’t out to impress anybody, not after last night and this morning. Not at this point in the day.

  There was no sign of her son’s F-250 as Harley pounded the door. Not a peep from inside. If Paul was in there, he wasn’t answering. Harley didn’t know why he thought Paul might. Probably more spotty judgment. But Paul was nothing if not cocksure.

  Harley leaned from the small concrete porch far enough to see the house’s far side. The burn barrel sat centered in the dead yard. That was no doubt the connection, right there, the barrel Virginia Reddick had stood before naked, burning trash. The connection to Jack Christiansen’s and Doris Luschen’s clothes being lit up in abandoned houses was no doubt plain as day. A fixation on clothes and fires passed from mother to son like a cleft chin.

  Without willing it, he pictured the bottom of a cane-seated chair and a boat of gravy in the kitchen, skin puckered around the ladle. Then Pam’s willowy legs.

  He banged on the door again. No answer. He decided he was glad. He’d had enough Reddicks today. He also liked to think people were a little more resilient than Glenn gave them credit for. Including Virginia. The last thing Harley needed was for her to open that door, prove him wrong.

  26

  RICK HAD STILL NOT SLEPT.

  In the gold of the morning, Rick sat on the floor of Mom’s living room, still seeing those streaks of light in the corners of his eyes. He could make them out better now, see they had colors and shapes. A curl of black hair streaked left. A short, striped shirtsleeve, red and blue and ivory, streaked right. Then a streak of skin like Rick’s own. Like Anna’s. A streak of skin a few shades darker than dirt.

  They were Dell Junior’s—that hair, that skin, that shirt he’d worn the morning he’d gone off and got killed. Which was weird. Rick had wondered last night if the streaks had always been there at the corners of his eyes, if he’d just never noticed them. But this should’ve been the sort of thing you’d notice and remember, Dell Junior streaking around after he got killed.

  The only thing weirder than the streaks was Rick seeing himself on the floor in front of him. Rick felt himself in his grown body, the couch at his back, but there he was, lying right there on the living room carpet, near six years old.

  It must’ve still been the morning Dell Junior died, then. That was about as weird as the streaks, but there it was. Eighteen years later, and it was still that morning.

  Rick watched himself tinker with the toy train engine. He wondered whatever happened to that toy train engine made of cold, sharp metal. Or the chrome rocket. Or the spinning top. Or Dell Junior’s stockpile of baseball cards and comic books. The picnics, Paul always said. Mom wandered off with Dell Junior’s stuff when they had those picnics at the old, dilapidated house with the front porch roof coming loose.

  Part of Paul was there in the living room, too, a streak of him kicking the bottom block in a stack he’d made, just to watch them fall. That was all there was of Paul. That foot kicking the block. Which was fine. Rick didn’t want to see the rest of Paul right now.

  Streaks of Dell Junior glided, yelled something.

  Mom shouted from the kitchen. A short honk. Not words but a honk. So she was here, too, just not all of her. Only a short honk from the kitchen, making a big deal out of something that wasn’t.

  The streaks of shirt and skin and black curl crossed the floor and the door sprang open and shut. Dell Junior’s Schwinn didn’t scrape against the clapboard like it usually did. That was where he always leaned the Schwinn. He’d been told not to. That day, he’d left it there. Months after he was gone, Rick asked about getting a bike. Mom said to use his older brother’s. It was out in the shed. Paul wound up with it when he was big enough. Rick wouldn’t ride it. Didn’t feel right about it. But Paul didn’t mind. Paul didn’t even remember Dell Junior.

  A bang at the door. Three bangs. Then the streaks were gone. The short honk was gone. Anna gave a quiet grunt behind him.

  Rick’s head spun back to look at her. He was holding her ankle too tight. He loosened his grip. She rubbed her eyes with balled fists. Rick put a finger to his lips. A shadow darkened the drape by the door.

  Three more bangs. Then the shadow shrank. It got smaller. Rick crawled to the window. He pinched and lifted a corner of the drape.

  A cop. He was leaving. But he was a cop. He might be back. Cops did that.

  Why were the cops looking for him? Rick needed to think. The pills? He didn’t need them anymore, and there were only six left. He could flush them. But he’d stolen the gas, too. And Paul’s pickup. Paul?

  Rick could call the motel. Paul’s was the last voice he wanted to hear, but Rick could feel him out, see if he’d called the cops. Rick crept across the floor toward the phone and kept low so his shadow wouldn’t bleed through the drapes. In case the cop wasn’t really gone. In case he was on a stakeout.

  Rick got the number from information and called the motel. He asked for Paul’s room.

  The clerk asked if Rick meant the kid with the van. The skinny kid with the hair. That was him, Rick said. Gone, the clerk told him. Missed him. Turned the key in already and left.

  Rick hung up. He’d thought Paul used all his money from the Wilton job to fill the pickup. That was right—they’d got paid on the Wilton job. Thirty bucks. Rick had forgotten the money in the envelope behind his wallet. He’d forgotten it before he dumped the flour container. Well, now he and Anna had a little bit more.

  Maybe Paul went out to the job, to the dead cowboy trailer in Seneca. No, Paul was worthless. He wouldn’t do any work on his own. He’d be on his way back here. Not here, not Mom’s, because he’d been too worthless for that, too. If he’d looked after Mom like he was supposed to, if he’d done the one real job he had, Mom would still be here. Would Paul go to Dad’s? No, Dad would be pissed he wasn’t at the trailer in Seneca. Then again, Dad never got too pissed at Paul.

  Pam. Paul would head right for Pam. Paul would head right for Pam and ride her like he rode that bike of Dell Junior’s.

  Rick dialed his own number. Seven rings. Eight rings. Fine. He’d let it ring.

  She answered. She sounded like the phone woke her.

  His voice came out a wordless croak. He ha
dn’t used it above a whisper in what felt like days. It might’ve been days. How long had he been awake? Three, four days? Across the way, Anna stretched.

  He cleared his throat. “What are you doing?” he asked her.

  “I’m—” she said and stopped. “I was getting ready to clean the kitchen.”

  Clean the kitchen. Her way of saying she knew he’d been there. That she knew he’d taken the money and Anna. That she knew that he knew every goddamn thing there was to know.

  But she couldn’t know. Not for sure. She just thought she knew. For all she knew, somebody could’ve come in there and stole Anna and the money. That was why you couldn’t leave the door unlocked, Pam. That was why you couldn’t go off and screw Rick’s own brother in the middle of the night and leave your baby girl alone to wake from a nightmare about werewolves and crush her windpipe on the crib rail, Pam.

  He kept his cool. “Where’s Anna?” he said.

  She was quiet. That’s right. Where’s Anna, Pam? Thought you knew, didn’t you?

  “She’s taking a nap. In her room.”

  His eyes shot to Anna. No, she was still here, sitting up on the couch. That was Anna. Were parts of her back at the trailer, too? Was that how things worked and he just never knew it? Like the streaks? Anna had to be hungry by now. Rick would find her something to eat. There had to be a can of green beans or something in the cupboard. He put his finger to his lips again.

  “How’s the work going?” Pam asked. “Be out there much longer?”

  “Shit,” he said. “Operator just came on. We’re about to get cut off.”

  “All right,” she said.

  All right, she’d said. He hung up.

  Rick needed to think. He needed to figure out why the cop was after him. The cop might come back. Rick needed to get him and Anna out of here before the cop came back. He wondered if the cops wanted him for the pills. He’d ditch the pills. But maybe it was the stolen gas. Or Paul’s truck.

  Paul. He was on his way back. Paul was on his way to Pam. Well, that was fine. That was just fine. Rick would park on the embankment where he did last night. Wait to catch that backdoor son of a bitch on Rick’s own front porch.

  27

  PAM SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, where she’d propped the Snoopy on its feet so he stood at attention instead of lay like a corpse. It was just the two of them. Anna was gone. The money was gone. Rick had just called, he was off in Thedford.

  Her brain vibrated with tiny pops and pulses she couldn’t keep track of. She wanted to make a list. She wanted to make a list to help her put things in order. But Babe always told her, unless it deals with money, don’t put it in writing. That seemed right. That seemed like the right advice right now.

  When Pam had first gotten home last night, she’d rushed inside to call Harley at the sheriff’s office. She needed to tell him somebody’d driven up behind the Jensen place before she left. Then she walked in and saw the kitchen wrecked and wanted to call him again. She stood there, looking at the bolts and nuts and phone book and flour in the sink, the ratty dish towels unfolded and thrown across the counter. She’d stopped and stood by the phone, listening for any sound in the trailer. But there was only the box fan in the window down the hall. God, she hated that goddamn box fan.

  Instead of calling anybody, she’d grabbed the wood-handled knife. The one she used for meat loaf. It wasn’t a butcher knife. She didn’t own a butcher knife. The thing was more like a machete. She didn’t know what it was for. She’d gone down the hall with it clutched in her fist. Then she’d seen the empty crib. The Snoopy.

  He lay there with his arms flat, straight at his sides like nobody ever lay on purpose. Coffin arms. He had no mouth and looked waxy. His stomach was concave, meant to hold a bar of soap. It looked scooped out, like it’d been gutted in an autopsy. Pam imagined the opening of Quincy, Jack Klugman at the crib’s edge, disemboweling the cartoon dog while a line of rookie cops went pale and dropped one by one to the floor.

  Her cheeks cramped. Her sternum quivered. She could’ve cut loose, there all by herself. She could’ve grinned broad and ghoulish and tittered away. But she hadn’t. She’d seen the open drawers in Anna’s room. The missing blanket and turtle. And she’d brought Snoopy to the table and sat while the light outside went from the white of the lamppost to the gold-pink of dawn to the scalding yellow it was right now.

  The phone hung on the wall, right above her head. There was a good, solid, practical reason not to pick up that phone and call the police. If she did, it wouldn’t take fifteen minutes for the incident at Gordon’s to fly through town, if it hadn’t already. And the man she’d screwed, only a room away from where his mother blew her head off, in the light of day, would surely have no trouble believing Pam was the kind of person who’d chuck Anna down a well. Pam would be the first and only suspect.

  And there were also less solid, less practical reasons for not calling. Reasons that might’ve been just as good but that nobody would get, much less buy.

  A drug-deprived nutcase wouldn’t break in and steal money armed with a rubber dog bath toy, and a pervert who wanted to have his way with Anna and drop her in a cistern wouldn’t have taken her clothes and a turtle and her blanket. Whoever took her wanted her. They wanted her clothed and warm and happy. Or at least content. At least entertained.

  Pam stood and walked to the sink. She grabbed the junk drawer. She put it back on its tracks, dropped the Snoopy inside, and shut it. She wouldn’t clean the mess. For one, she couldn’t feel her hands or feet. For another, she wasn’t sure it was necessary. She wasn’t sure what came next.

  She picked up the phone.

  Babe answered on the fourth ring. She sounded almost human when she answered, when she didn’t yet know who was calling. She even sounded kind. Pam held the tone tight in her chest before she spoke. She tried to make small talk, mentioned Rick was off in Thedford. She tried to quip that it was easier cleaning up after only one kid while he was gone, but then her eyes skated across the dusting of flour in the sink. Her voice halted and caught. She was no better at small talk than Babe. Pam asked where Dad was, hoping by some off chance he was there and her mother would hand the phone to him. He wasn’t, and Babe wanted to know why Pam was calling.

  “We’re in a bind,” she said, shocked at her ability to say it. Shocked at the level way it came out of her, so sturdy and clean and deep. “Lot rent’s due, and we don’t have it. Dell Senior can’t pay, I guess. Says his money’s tied up till next week.”

  Babe was a clicking silence on the line.

  “It’d be a loan till next week,” Pam said. She felt bad about that. She had no intention of being here next week. “You know I wouldn’t ask.”

  There was no softness in the words that came next. There was no softness in Babe, so far as Pam knew. But there was a neutrality to them. A sincere neutrality Pam recognized as surprise. “No,” Babe said. “I know you wouldn’t.”

  “It’s a good amount.” Pam wouldn’t push it. She wouldn’t ask for more than lot rent actually was. “We’d need fifty.”

  Babe made a short list of numbers under her breath. “Yeah, we can swing it.”

  Pam’s eyes stung at her lower lids. “I don’t like to ask.”

  “I know you don’t.” There was still no harshness, only a clipped way of putting the conversation to rest. A signal to let it go. Babe said she’d be around the house another hour. After that, she needed to run to town, take care of a few errands. “Come by now, I got a box of kids’ clothes left from the church rummage. Arlene Penke thought some might fit Anna. Looks like a few pairs of jeans she’d have to grow into, some shirts. Those might be too small already. Bring her over, try them on. What you can’t use I’ll give back next year.”

  “I think—” Pam searched for something. She saw the knife shaped like a machete on the counter. “I’ve got a meat loaf in the oven. Another forty-five minutes.”

  “You’re cooking meat loaf in the morning?”

  Pa
m spoke, hoping the right words came out. “Figured I’d get it out of the way. Before it gets too hot. Anna won’t care it’s reheated. I lucked out. She’s not too picky.” She forced a laugh. She shouldn’t have said Rick was in Thedford. She should’ve said Rick was home. If she’d said Rick was home, she could’ve gone over there and said she’d left Anna with him. She could’ve made up some excuse. She could’ve said Anna had a cold. That she was taking a nap.

  “All right,” Babe said with some of her usual impatience creeping back in. “So come by after, about noon. Wanted to get some more cabbage planted before it got too hot, but what’s another day, I suppose.”

  Pam’s head felt like the bulbed end of an antenna. Like she could feel all the signals and radio waves passing through the air at once. Everything in front of her looked too close and everything behind her eyes sank. “All right,” she managed to get out. “See you then,” she said, though she knew she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t, because she couldn’t think of one single excuse for showing up there alone. Not one single explanation for where Anna would be besides with her. She felt the receiver’s weight as she rested it in the cradle.

  28

  WHEN HARLEY WALKED IN FOR HIS SHIFT, he didn’t so much ask as loudly state, more to himself than to the somber, bald man in the portable: “Why are you here, Glenn.” Harley had been working twelve-, sometimes fourteen-hour nights going on a week straight. The one thing he expected on a Saturday evening was Glenn would be home with Miriam. Harley went to the coffee maker and grabbed the weak, day-old brew. He’d dump it in the bathroom, make new. “Carol get back with the records?” At the sink, he called out, “Could’ve left a note.”

  “Don’t need Carol or the records,” Glenn said.

  Harley stepped from the bathroom with the empty coffeepot. “What?”

  Glenn’s eyes looked faraway and glazed. “The Plymouth,” he said. “Belongs to Virginia Reddick.”