Into the Web (14 page)

Through it all my father held his gaze on Betty Cutler, almost wistfully, as I noticed, the past pouring over him like a glistening falls.

Lila took her mother’s arm and led her over to where we stood.

“Hi, Roy,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Slater.”

“I was sorry to hear about Juanita,” my father said. “How-do, Betty.”

Mrs. Cutler squinted. “Who’s that?”

“It’s Jesse,” my father answered. “Jesse Slater.”

She looked as if she’d been hit by a ray of light. “Well, I’m born again.”

My father smiled. “How’d you like to take a little stroll, Betty?” he asked, his voice so bright and youthful, I glimpsed the vibrant young man he must once have been.

Mrs. Cutler gave no answer, but my father must have caught something in her gaze, for he stepped over briskly, took her arm, tucked it beneath his own, and drew her away from Lila and me. For a moment I watched them silently, helplessly, in admiration of my father’s way with a woman, how firm his stride was, how sure his touch, with what ease he’d drawn Betty Cutler back into the circle of his affection.

“Roy?”

It was Lila’s voice, and the sound of it was like a trumpet in my mind.

“I didn’t expect to see you again,” she said.

“My father wanted to come to Juanita’s funeral,” I told her.

“He knew Juanita?”

“Not very well. He said he came because he wanted to see your mother. Tell her good-bye.”

Lila glanced out over the cemetery to where my father and Betty Cutler had come to a halt at a small stone near the gnarled trunk of a dogwood.

“Your father always seemed so nice,” she said. “So gentle.”

We watched the old man as he knelt slowly, brushed his hand across the top of the squat gray stone, then peered up at Lila’s mother, who turned away.

“He’s not gentle. Just old and sick.”

A cloud moved across Lila’s face. For a moment, she struggled to keep silent, struggled so hard that when the words finally broke from her, I’d expected them to hit like small exploding shells. But they fell softly instead. “What’s the matter, Roy? You seem so …”

My father’s judgment burst resentfully from my mouth. “Pitiful?”

She looked as surprised by the word as the bitter tone with which I’d pronounced it.

“No, not pitiful,” she said. “Alone.”

I released a brittle laugh. “Well, that’s certainly true.” Then, before she could say more, I added, “I didn’t want that much, you know. When I was a kid. It strikes me sometimes just how little I wanted.” The words flooded
out now. “I guess I must have seemed ambitious to you. Full of big ideas. Go to college. All that. But I really didn’t want that much, Lila. Just a simple life. Nothing great, nothing grand. Just a simple life.”

Lila started to speak, but I lifted my hand.

“A family,” I blurted out, my tone unexpectedly wounded. “Kids.”

She stared at me with a terrible stillness. “Maybe I wanted that too,” she said. “But I couldn’t, Roy, because I knew—” She stopped suddenly.

“Knew what?”

I could see something rising in her, a long-caged animal clawing to get out.

“That it couldn’t be, Roy,” she said. “Not after the murders.”

“After the murders.”

Three days after the murders, I’d driven to Lila’s house. By then Archie was dead and I’d come to tell her about the funeral, expecting her to join me at my brother’s grave. But Betty Cutler had met me at the door, told me that Lila had fallen ill, that she was sleeping, that I should stay away for another few days or so. Her final words rang in my ears:
She’ll be all right in time.

“What did the murders have to do with us?” I asked.

She lifted her hand. “I can’t bear this, Roy,” she said.

“Did you think that I—”

“I can’t, Roy,” she repeated, then, like someone broken on the wheel, she turned and walked away.

Chapter Thirteen

I
mentioned nothing of what had happened between Lila and me as I drove my father back down the mountain road a few minutes later. Instead, I brooded mutely, playing the scene over and over in my head, the way Lila had turned away from me.

My father watched me silently, his own mood growing steadily darker, the lightness that had touched him earlier in the day now leeching away like something fading in the sun.

After a time, he drew a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “There ain’t much left of Betty.”

“People get old.”

“It ain’t just that.” He lit the cigarette, waved out the match. “She’s weighed down by how things turned out for Lila.”

“What did she tell you about Lila?”

He blew a column of smoke from the corner of his mouth. “Just that nothing ever worked out for her. I told her, I said, Well, Betty, fact is you can’t do nothing about what happens to your kids. You git the kids you git, and that’s what you end up with.”

Meaning, of course, that he had ended up with me, a card dealt to him facedown.

“That works both ways, of course,” I said curtly. “You don’t pick your parents either.”

He didn’t respond, and in the following silence the old isolation slowly descended upon him, so that he finally assumed the stricken appearance I hadn’t seen since the night following Archie’s funeral. A rage had roared through him for days by then, one that had finally dissolved into a solitary muteness, so that he’d ceased railing against my mother and me, against Horace Kellogg and Gloria, the “puny little thing” who’d caused it all. Finally, at sunrise, he’d poured himself a whiskey, the only drink I’d ever seen him take, and sat, sipping it silently, the darkness in his eyes draining light from the dawning air.

The same isolation gripped him now.

“Pore old Betty,” he said. “She had a good heart. Helped me with this girl I knew once. We was going to run off. Me and this girl. Betty was gonna pick her up and bring her back up to Waylord.” He drew in a long breath, his eyes sweeping over to the granite precipice known locally as Dawson Rock. “Waited for her right around here, as a matter of fact. But her old man got wind of it somehow. I shouldn’t have waited like I done. When I seen she wasn’t coming, I should have gone and
got her and took her away. Would have saved a world of trouble if I’d done that.”

A world of trouble-meaning the whole dreary life that had come to him after that, the one he had inflicted on Archie and me.

A fist squeezed my stomach, a wave of resentment that he’d gotten all the things I’d most deeply wanted in my life, a wife, children, but that he’d squandered it all by brooding on a teenage romance, or on the beating he’d taken for it, and thus driven away whatever love had been offered him after that.

“Yeah, you should have gone after that girl and taken her away,” I said scathingly. “It would have saved us all a lot of trouble if you’d done that. Mama. Archie. Me.”

He heard the angry tone in my voice, turned away, and peered at the edge of the cliff. “Nothing could have saved you trouble, Roy.”

“What do you mean by that?”

He shrugged silently.

“What do you mean?” I demanded. “What do you mean that nothing could have saved me trouble?”

He turned toward me sharply. “ ’Cause you like it, Roy. Being a ‘troubled’ person. Like it shows you’re smart.”

“You’re nuts,” I snapped, honing in on my father now, stalking him like a prizefighter, pressing him toward the ropes. “You don’t know me. You’ve never tried to know me. You never did anything with me. Never even talked to me except in that insulting way of yours. Never tried to teach me anything or to—”

“Hold it right there,” my father fired back. “Am I
hearing this right? You think I never tried to teach you nothing, Roy? My God, everything I did, there was a lesson in it.”

“What lesson?”

“The only one there is. To do the right thing.”

A derisive laugh broke from me. “The right thing?” I frantically sought a way to hit back hard, fell him with a single brutal punch. “That was the lesson in what you did to Scooter?” I saw the pistol pass from my father’s hand to Archie’s. “What you made Archie do to him?”

“You don’t think there was a lesson in that?”

“There was nothing but cruelty in it,” I said. “Cruelty, Dad. To Archie and to Scooter both.”

“Well, you never run off again, did you?” my father demanded hotly. “You never took Archie off with you again. A boy that never had a mind of his own, was always under your thumb, would do whatever you told him to. You never led him off again after Scooter.”

“No, I didn’t, but …”

“That was the real lesson, Roy. That’s why I handed that pistol to Archie instead of you. Made him do it instead of you.”

The first bullet spun through the void. Scooter’s body jerked to the right. A panicked howl split the air.

“I was trying to teach you something by making Archie do it,” my father said.

A second bullet. Again the spotted flanks jerked. A bloody leg buckled.

“You know what I was trying to teach, Roy? Plenty of things.”

The shots came one after the other in a slow, torturous
rhythm. Archie squeezing the trigger each time my father commanded,
Again, again, again.

“That you need to think before you get somebody caught up in something. That you need to think of what might happen to them. Because if you don’t, that other person might get hurt. Somebody you didn’t intend to hurt. Like Archie didn’t think Scooter could get hurt because he run off with you.”

A final shot rang out, loud, deafening, reverberating through the overhanging hills, and Scooter at last lay dead.

“And like you didn’t think that Archie could be hurt by you running off and taking him with you. Well, they both got hurt, Roy. Scooter got kilt, and Archie was the one I made kill him. But the lesson was for you.”

I glared at him furiously. “Bullshit.”

“It’s the truth, Roy. The fact is Archie wasn’t smart enough to get nobody into trouble. But you was. You was the smart one. That’s why the lesson was for you. So you wouldn’t be so quick to get people took up in stuff that might get them hurt. Archie would have done anything you told him to. ’Cause he loved you, Roy. And if somebody loves you, you can hurt ’em bad. Believe me, there ain’t nobody knows that more’n me.”

I stared into my father’s emaciated face, and suddenly knew what that whole bloody lesson had really been about.

“It was Deidre Warren,” I said. “That’s who you hurt.” Hopper’s voice sounded in my brain:
She never come back to Waylord. Nobody never seen Deidre around again.
“What happened to Deidre?”

My father’s eyes softened. “Never mind.”

“She never came back to Kingdom County,” I added. “Where did she go?”

“I told you, forget it.”

“I don’t want to forget it.”

My father released a weary breath. “Baltimore, if you got to know. That’s where she went. Some school up there. Cold damn day her old man took her. She was all bundled up.”

“You saw her go?”

“Seen Old Man Warren walk her to the car. Guess he’d already set it up to get her out of Kingdom County. She didn’t look right. Face looked bruised. Figure he must have hit her, Old Man Warren.” His voice hardened. “Porterfield was there too. Had his hand on Deidre’s shoulder. Put her right in the front seat of his car and drove off with her.”

I saw Deidre’s scared white face peer out of the rear window of Porterfield’s car as it drew away, leaving smeared tracks in the snow.

“Nothing I could do about it,” my father said. “Car was pulling out already. I was too banged up to run after it.” He shook his head. “Planned to go after her. Took a job there at the pulpwood factory. Figured I’d save up. But by the time I done that, it was too late.”

“Why was it too late?”

“ ’Cause she died,” he answered quietly, and his face took on an inexpressible tenderness. “Took sick at that school Old Man Warren sent her off to.” He pinned his eyes on the road, though he seemed to regard nothing
that lay before him. “She’d still be alive if she’d stayed clear of me.”

He said nothing else as we headed out of the hills and into the valley, a noonday heat now bearing down upon us, so that even with the car windows wide open I felt as if we were locked in a sweltering cage. And yet, I sensed that the real heat remained inside my father, a slow, destructive fire that had never stopped burning. By the time we reached home, he seemed little more than ash.

Chapter Fourteen

I
remained in the car, and watched as my father made his way up the stairs and into the house, switching lights on and off as he moved through its steamy interior. In the kitchen he walked to the refrigerator, drew down the jar, shook it slightly, then peered inside, a Waylord scientist in his shiny pants.

After that I pulled back onto the road and drove around for hours, replaying my last meeting with Lila, remembering the terrible sadness that had overwhelmed her after the murders. Something had gone out in her that night. On my last night in Kingdom County, we sat in my old Chevy, without touching, the passion she’d once shown me entirely drained away. And now I remembered the look in Lila’s eyes on the day my bus pulled away-all too similar to the look in Sheriff Porterfield’s, the same suspicion playing darkly in her mind.

But why?

The question circled insistently in my mind. I knew that Lila could not have known anything about the murders. I had told her nothing. Archie had told her nothing. She’d never spoken to Gloria again, and of course, Horace and Lavenia Kellogg were dead.

So what did she know, I wondered, that had changed everything, destroyed all our plans, and finally caused her to write the letter I’d later thrown into the sea,
I can’t marry you, Roy. Don’t come back for me.

It was nearly eight in the evening when the pinch of hunger finally overtook my long brooding. I knew that my father had already retired to his bed, so I pulled into the Crispy Cone before returning to the house.

It was a squat, cement building, garishly lit, with a checkered linoleum floor that blearily reflected the long fluorescent lights above it. At the counter, I ordered a hamburger, fries, and coffee, then took a seat at one of the booths that ran alongside the front window.