Face on the Wall (38 page)

It was Homer's turn to spend the night in the tent at Fortress Annie. After a long day of grading the final papers of the forty-nine undergraduates in his Thoreau class, he had stopped on the way home to buy buckets of Chinese food; he had brought them home to Annie's and heated them up in the microwave, and then the three of them had played gin rummy all evening. At last, after gaping at the television image of Flimnap standing on his hands beside Annie, Homer crawled into the tent, emotionally exhausted, and fell asleep at once.

At the sudden noise, he jerked awake and sat up. It had sounded like a gunshot, a loud blast followed by sharp crackling echoes. Did the hunting season begin in June? Homer didn't know. Should he get up and look around?

He lay down to think it over.

Annie too heard the shot. With her heart in her mouth she scrambled out of her sleeping bag, went to the door and looked out. For a moment she could hear a car moving away along Concord Road, and then there was only the soft sighing of the trees.

Had Flimnap been shot by some murdering bastard, up there in the woods where he parked his pickup? Was he mortally hurt, was he bleeding to death? Annie grabbed her coat, snatched up her flashlight, and began running up the hill. Flimnap's ravenous kisses had aroused a trembling fervor. Following the spot of light, stumbling on the stony driveway, she tripped and fell, then scrambled up to run again, and tripped again, and staggered to her feet.

Halfway up the hill she found a track leading off to the left through a low thicket of fern and blueberry. Annie followed it for a hundred yards as it wound its way among pines and hemlocks, until suddenly—there it was—Flimnap's pickup, a bulky shape looming up in the dark.

The wooden structure that had once formed the back of the truck was gone, Flimnap's gypsy caravan. He had rebuilt it inside Annie's ruined house as a bulwark against the collapse of the roof. Now the back of the pickup was open to the sky. Annie's flashlight explored the empty sleeping bag, the boxes of gear, the duffel bag.

Then, fearing what she might see, she aimed it through the window of the cab, but the wobbling cone of light revealed only the shiny vinyl of the seat.

“Hey,” said Homer Kelly, groping his way into the woods, following the glimmer, “is that you, Annie?”

Feeling for him clumsily in the dark, Annie clutched his arm and said in a tense whisper, “That noise, Uncle Homer! What was that terrible noise?”

He patted her back and put his arm around her. “I don't know,” he said uneasily. “Probably just a backfire, out there on Concord Road.”

But he was lying. They both knew he was lying.

Chapter 57

The road to the forest led him to the gallows.

The Brothers Grimm, “The Two Travelers”

“G
et in my car.” Small gestured with his handgun. “The other side. You're driving.”

Small's cartridge had nearly missed its target, but not quite. It left a bloody crease along one side of Joe's head. He felt no pain. Raging at himself for the careless stupidity that had allowed him to take his time, he climbed in behind the wheel of Small's big van.

There was no arguing with an AK-47 backed up by a Beretta with fifteen rounds nestled in its little magazine.

In the van the rifle was an awkward size. Small laid it in his lap and sat sideways with his left elbow on the back of the seat. He held the Beretta to Joe's head and said, “Okay, you bastard, head for Southtown.”

In the dawnlight the ninety-nine acres of Songsparrow Estates was a bald tract of graded dirt. Joe cursed silently as the van plunged along the Pig Road. The feeding platforms had been extracted like bad teeth, and every one of Pearl's trees had been bulldozed and uprooted, every one of her infant hemlocks and birches, her red cedars and pasture junipers, her bushy little white pines.

The road came to an end at the chain-link fence. Beyond the fence the tops of the rusty scalping towers were bright orange in the morning sun. Joe stopped the car and turned off the engine, thinking swiftly, trying to guess what would happen next.

Small had been talking incessantly. His voice was soft and cheerful and his rabbit eyes were lustrous, as he blamed Joe and Pearl for everything that had happened since the beginning of time. Joe had long since stopped listening. Now Small said, “Get out!” His cheerfulness had vanished. He lowered himself carefully from the van, keeping his eyes on Joe and lifting the rifle to the roof of the car.

Joe slid out from behind the wheel, noting that it was to be the rifle from now on. The Beretta had disappeared. From somewhere Small produced a key to the padlock on the gate of the fence, swung it open, and urged Joe through.

The gravel pit opened below them. At the edge of the cliff a set of steps led to a ramp that rose all the way to the top of the tower. “Up,” said Small, gesturing with the rifle. “Go ahead, go on up.”

Joe climbed the steps slowly, guessing at once the nature of Frederick Small's grand overarching plan. Since the discovery of a bullet-ridden body might lead to awkward questions, Joe's death was to be a freakish misadventure. Small would simply shove him off the top of the tower. Sooner or later people would find his flattened carcass, and then they would tut-tut and call it an accident. After all, any fool who neglected the “No Trespassing” sign and joked around at the top of a dangerous tower deserved whatever he got.

Joe's fear subsided. He grasped the railings firmly, his deft hands flexing and relaxing, his feet nimble on the ramp, which quivered and bounced under his weight.

Small could not keep up. He was out of breath. He grunted at Joe to stop. Obligingly Joe stopped climbing and looked back at him serenely. At last Small nodded, frowning, and they went on climbing.

At the top of the third ramp they stepped off onto a metal platform. “Wait,” gasped Small, struggling to recover his breath.

Joe waited, glancing around at the descending conveyor belts, the sorting screens, the rock crushers, the tilted bin with its gigantic screws, the hoppers on their heavy metal legs. The floor of the quarry was heaped with conical mounds of sand.

Small was breathing normally now, aiming the rifle steadily, staring at Joe. Then, for an instant, his eyes flickered away. The fingers of his left hand moved over a panel and found a switch.

At once the long belt-driven conveyors began to shiver and hum. Some hurried up, others hastened down. They vibrated and shook, climbing and descending steeply. In the slanted bin below the platform the gigantic screws turned slowly, overlapping, meshing smoothly together.

“Okay, now, just stand right over there.” Small did not look at Joe. Nervously he pointed with the AK-47 at the edge of the platform, high above the uppermost descending belt of the system of interlocking conveyors that had for so many years sent millions of tons of rock rattling and thundering down from one belt to another, dropping them at last into the hoppers, and then into an endless procession of trucks to be carried away, far away, supplying armies of highway engineers with the raw material for a thousand miles of highway.

Smiling, Joe looked down, hardly seeing the inexorable descent of the conveyors, thinking instead of the old story by the Brothers Grimm, thinking of Gretel, clever Gretel, who had refused so craftily to crawl into the fiery oven of the wicked witch. Small's intention was so crude!
Just creep in and see if it is hot!

“I don't get it,” Joe said stupidly. “What do you mean?”
I don't know how. Show me!

Small glowered at him, and hissed, “Asshole.” Fussily, like a grumpy governess, he tramped across the platform and stamped his foot. “Right over here, you fathead. Stand on this spot right here.”

But Frederick Small had never turned a dozen handsprings one after another, he had never balanced upside down on six superimposed chairs, he had never found an egg in anyone's ear. Now when Joe threw out his arm it was exactly like the tossing of his wooden top. And like the turning top unwinding from its string, Small was whirled downward through the air, landing face down on the moving belt of the conveyor. Screaming, clinging to his rifle, he clawed with his free hand at the railing, but the belt carried him down like a load of gravel. Falling, plummeting, pawing at the railing, he jerked convulsively on the trigger of the gun and Bred off a wild rattle of shots. One streaked past Joe's head and slammed into the panel of switches, which exploded in a burst of fireworks and set off a series of insane commands. Joe dodged sideways as an overhead bin discharged its load, and a slurry mix of water and rock began flowing down the chute. In a couple of seconds it caught up with Small and flowed over and around him, blinding him, battering his body, dumping him at last into the hopper below the moving conveyor, burying him under one and a half tons of three-quarter-inch gravel.

Joe sat down on the metal grille of the platform and put his head between his knees, trying to control the churning of his stomach and an overpowering impulse to weep. Then he stopped trying and let the sobs come. When the spasm passed, he stood up shakily and wiped his face with his sleeve. The wound along the side of his head had at last begun to throb. Wincing, Joe pulled a bandanna kerchief out of his pocket, twisted it into a narrow band and tied it around his head, Indian-fashion. Then he did several things very carefully, thinking them out slowly, one at a time.

That afternoon, after school, a couple of thirteen-year-old boys from the Meadowlark housing development approached the chain-link fence. Usually they climbed over it, sticking the toes of their sneakers into the diamond-shaped spaces between the links, grasping with their fists the sharp twisted wires at the top. But this time the gate was wide open, and they walked right in.

As usual they had been attracted by the sign that said “No Trespassing,” and by the weird towers with their long slanting ramps. It wasn't the first time they had trespassed on the gravel pit. It was a great place for smoking joints and telling dirty stories.

At once they saw the legs sticking up out of the heaped-up gravel in one of the hoppers, and they ran down the steep slope, skidding and sliding, to take a closer look. Clasping one of the hopper's metal supports with their arms and wrapping their legs around it, they shinnied up and clambered over the metal wall. Then, moving cautiously over the surface of the gravel, they reached the broken and asphyxiated body of Frederick Small, hauled it out, heaved it over the side, and let it fall to the ground. Then they climbed down after it, examined it with horrified delight, and scrambled up the steep slope to telephone the cops.

As they ran through the gate of the chain-link fence, a crow flapped down from a tree, settled on Frederick Small's dead face, and began pecking at his wide shining eyes.