A Brilliant Death (13 page)

And we limped into the night.

CHAPTER TWELVE

We sat in the bunker for a long while. I fished in the cooler for a couple handfuls of ice and stuffed them into my bloody T-shirt, then twisted the cloth around the ice like a tourniquet and applied it to Travis’s cuts. “You’re the best mom ever,” he said, forcing a short laugh. I held an unopened bottle of RC Cola against my lip as I sat with legs splayed on a rock, trying to provide relief to my aching privates.

When Travis appeared to have regained his equilibrium enough to walk, we packed up the gear and started the trek home over Tarr’s Dome, which was no small task in the dark of night. By the time we reached my house, the faintest crease of morning light was creeping over the West Virginia hills to the east. The ice had melted in the T-shirt, but Travis was still holding the soggy cloth to his head. He looked like a soldier straggling home after a battle. We stripped down to our undershorts behind the grape arbor and turned on the garden hose, holding it over our heads to remove the blood, grime, and cinders. The swelling and split flesh remained.

In the glow of the streetlight, I got a better look at Travis’s cuts. The gash at his hairline was deep and wide, and I could see his skull when I put my thumbs on either side of the wound and gently moved it apart. The one above the brow was deep but was a cleaner cut. “Good God, Trav, we’ve got to get you to a doctor. Those are some nasty cuts.”

“Mitch, just get that out of your head. I’m not going to the doctor. Get me some butterfly bandages. I’ll be fine.”

“You might have a concussion.”

“Yeah, you know what they give you for a concussion? A couple of aspirin and tell you to take it easy. So grab me some aspirin, the butterflies, and I’ll take it easy.”

The bathroom light was on upstairs. Dad was up and getting ready for work. I waited for the kitchen light to go on, the sign that Mom was up and making coffee and packing Dad’s lunch. It startled her when the back door opened. “You scared me half to death,” she said. “What are you doing home so early?”

“Oh, the place where we usually camp was all flooded and the mosquitoes were eatin’ us alive, so we just came back here and slept in the yard.” I was lisping around the swollen lip, and she stopped me at the sink.

“What happened to your lip?”

“Fell. Coming down Tarr’s Dome. It would be funny if it didn’t hurt so bad.”

She held her hand to my face and winced. “That looks horrible.”

“It hurt when it happened, but it doesn’t feel so bad now.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Where’s your shirt?”

“Outside. It was hot in the sleeping bag.” Independently, both statements were true, though not the least bit interrelated. However, it seemed to pacify her and I went to the medicine cabinet in the utility room and shoved a handful of butterfly bandages into my pocket, then opened the aspirin bottle and tapped three tablets into my hand. “I’ve got to get Travis a couple of aspirin; he’s got a thumper of a headache.”

Travis washed down the aspirin with a tepid RC Cola and gnawed on a pretzel rod while I applied the bandages to the cuts. I pulled the skin tight and applied one side of the bandage, then pushed the wound together before pressing the bandage down on the other side. The brow injury was a little tricky, as I had to adhere the bandage to his nose and the corner of his swollen eye. I stepped back and admired my handiwork. I said, “Everything considered, it’s a fine job of doctoring by a sixteen-year-old without any formal medical training.”

“Thank you, doc.”

The aroma of bacon was wafting through the backyard as Travis gathered up his camping gear and headed for home. I’m sure he wanted breakfast, but he didn’t want my mom to see the swollen side of his face. “I’ve got to book. I’ll call you later,” he said. I watched him as he walked down the alley, his sleeping bag tucked under his right arm, his left hand fingering the tender wounds.

“Where’s Travis?” Mom asked when I walked back into the house.

“He said he had to get home. Big Frank has some work for him to do around the house today.”

“He couldn’t stay ten minutes for breakfast?” I shrugged. “Where’s that shirt?”

I looked around like I was trying to find it in the kitchen. “I don’t know. Travis must have accidentally put it in with his stuff.”

Sensing that something wasn’t quite right, she stared at my Adam’s apple the entire time I spoke.

Travis called that night. He said his eye was swollen shut and it looked like someone had shoved a tennis ball under his eyelid. When he showed up at my house two days later, the eye was infected and looked like a spoiled cauliflower, a grotesque shade of black, blue, green, and yellow. Pus was dribbling from the outside corner, and it smelled like roadkill. “Travis, you’ve
got
to get that looked at,” I said.

Apparently he realized a needle and Big Frank’s wrath were better than losing an eye. “Okay,” he said.

“Mom, would you come here for a minute, please?”

My mom walked into the upstairs bathroom and immediately both hands flew up and covered her mouth. “Oh, dear God! Travis, what have you done?”

“I cut it a little,” he said.

“A little!”

Big Frank was somewhere on the road, so Mom loaded us into the car and drove to Doc Puncheon’s at the north end of town. He had been an army physician in Korea, but the sight of Travis’s eye made him wince. “Marabelle, you know I need his father’s permission to treat him.”

“His father is God-only-knows-where. If there are any problems, I’ll take responsibility and pay the bill. Clean him up before he loses that eye.”

Doc cleaned it with a cotton swab and rinsed it with a solution that he dispensed from a device that looked like a turkey baster. He gave Mom a prescription for some antibiotics. “When was the last time you had a tetanus shot?” he asked Travis.

“I don’t want a . . .”

Marabelle Malone slapped Travis across his back. She was in no mood. “Give him the shot,” she told Doc, never taking her eyes off Travis. “For someone who gets straight As, you act like you don’t have a nickel’s worth of common sense.”

As he prepared the needle, Doc Puncheon asked, “You know, if you’d have come in right after you did that, you wouldn’t be left with such a nasty scar there at the top of your forehead. How did you say you did this?”

“Mitchell and I were out camping. I fell on our camping lantern.”

The needle on Marabelle Malone’s bullshit meter flew deep into the red zone. The needle extending from the syringe in Doc Puncheon’s hand sank into the meaty pad below Travis’s shoulder. Travis was grateful for the injection, which hurt so bad that it gave him an excuse to avert his eyes from my mother’s glare. She looked at me and frowned. I had tried to dismiss my swollen lip and bowlegged walk as the result of a fall, too. She sensed lies of titanic proportions and questioned me for several days before finally dropping the subject, unconvinced that we were telling the truth but without tangible evidence to the contrary. After a couple of days, the swelling subsided to where you could see a sliver of his eyeball. That weekend, Travis systematically walked the streets of Brilliant, taking into account the age and physical dimensions of the men living in each house. He came up with a list of five possible suspects for the mystery man. Then, on the following Wednesday night—trash collection eve in Brilliant—he rifled the trash cans of the suspects for a single black wingtip. He was chased off by a dog at one house and an irate owner of the trash at another. I thought this was a first-rate piece of detective work. But amid all the trash he found not a single shoe—black wingtip or otherwise.

As the weeks of summer passed and his eye returned to something that resembled human, the near miss in the cemetery became even more disheartening for Travis. He replayed the botched mission over and over in his mind. Long before our night in the cemetery, Travis had convinced himself that the mystery man was, indeed, his mother’s companion on the boat. Who else, he reasoned, but a secret lover with a guilty conscience would continue to make clandestine visits to a graveyard fifteen years after her death? Now, the opportunity was lost forever, since the mystery man certainly would never return.

Looking back, it was easy to find flaws with our plan. The frontal assault had been a disaster. Why, we reasoned later, hadn’t we simply hidden amid the tombstones, then doubled behind him? We could have been sitting on the hood of his car when he returned. It was such a simple plan. We could have let the air out of his tires and demanded an explanation. Even if we didn’t recognize the mystery man, we could have gotten the license plate number and it would have been easy enough to track him down.

If Travis Baron was anything, he was resilient, and after two weeks of flogging himself for the failed mission, he turned his attention back to Chase Tornik. We returned to the library and searched for follow-up stories on the homicide investigation that we might have missed during the first visit. There were none.

“It’s a dead end,” Travis said.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Let’s track down this Tornik guy and find out what he knows.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In late July, Travis was ramping up his training for that fall’s cross country season. He hated running cross country, which he called a sport for the brain-dead, but did it to keep himself in shape for wrestling, which was his favorite sport. Unfortunately, on many days he insisted that I run with him. He said it would get me in shape for football and provide him with company.

I hated running. In part, because I wasn’t any good at it. I ran with all the grace of an albatross on take-off—arms and legs flying in every direction. I was slow and, according to Travis, “clunky.” Travis was a smooth runner and he glided, each step effortless. Travis would stop by my house by seven a.m. and pick me up. We ran a three-and-a-half-mile route that wrapped up at the intersection at Main and Labelle streets. The danger in running this particular circuit was that at the corner of Main and Labelle was the neat—very, very neat—red brick home of Captain Troy Mathews, head of the United States Marine Corps recruiting office in Steubenville. The country was still at war in Vietnam, and Brilliant males approaching draft age avoided Captain Mathews like he was . . . well, like he was the head of the local Marine recruiting office. Nothing cleared the halls at Brilliant High School like the crew-cut sight of Captain Troy Mathews, USMC.

You couldn’t ask Mr. Mathews for the time without him launching into a sermon extolling the virtues of a career in the Marine Corps. At skit day at the high school two years earlier, the seniors did a skit in which a student portraying Captain Mathews was approached by a panic-stricken teenage boy seeking help because he and his girlfriend had just been involved in a terrible automobile accident. The boy, dazed and bleeding profusely from the head, stood before “Captain Mathews” and pleaded for help for his girlfriend, who was seriously injured and still in the car. To this, “Captain Mathews” responded, “I’m sure the medics will do a fine job trying to save her life, Billy, but if she doesn’t survive and you become overwhelmed with guilt and loneliness, perhaps you should consider an exciting career in today’s Marine Corps.”

We were finishing a run on a muggy July morning when Travis made an unprecedented move for a Brilliant male, stopping at the Mathews’s home while the captain was edging the grass along his sidewalk.

Captain Mathews had half-inch-long graying hair that stood at attention like a landing strip on the top of his head. He was dressed in olive work pants—never, ever shorts—and a pressed white T-shirt that stretched across a pair of solid shoulders, which remained erect even while he was doing yard work. I was bent at the waist, sucking for air.

Captain Mathews looked at Travis and said, “You seem to be in a lot better shape than your friend.”

“Yes, sir. I am. He’s not much of a runner.”

He flicked Travis’s abs twice with the back of his fingers. “Boot camp would be a breeze for someone in your kind of shape.”

Travis smiled. It had taken Captain Mathews all of five seconds to put on his recruiting cap. “I can’t imagine that Marine boot camp would be a breeze for anyone, sir, no matter how good of shape they’re in.” Sweat rolled down Travis’s face and dripped off his nose. His T-shirt was dark gray with perspiration and tacked to his skin.

“The Marines make men out of boys,” Captain Mathews said, bending back down to his chore. “What’s on your mind, son?”

“What makes you think there’s something on my mind, sir?”

The captain looked up, the thinnest of smiles across his lips. “I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Travis, but I know this isn’t a social call. Most boys your age avoid me like the plague. So you either want to join the Corps, or you’ve got something on your mind. Which is it?”

Travis said, “I was wondering if you’re still a sheriff’s deputy.”

“Yes, I’m still in the auxiliary.”

“Do you remember a detective at the sheriff’s department named Chase Tornik?”

The captain looked up from his work. It was, I imagined, the same icy stare that some North Korean saw before getting a belly full of bayonet. “I knew Tornik,” he said. “Once upon a time he was a terrific detective.”