Life's Work (27 page)

"You boys want a drink?" he asked, when his thirst got the better of him. I could tell from his tone of voice that he didn't really want to pay our tab.

Otto shook his head.

I said, "No, but you go ahead."

Parks wet his lower lip and replied, "Well, maybe just the one."

He got up and went over to the sideboard, tipping the fifth back and studying its contents like a man studying the label of a wine. "Just let me get a glass," he said over his shoulder and walked out of the room, taking the bottle with him.

While he was gone, I walked over to the table full of trophies. They were arranged in tiers on the sideboard, like the layers of a wedding cake. The ones on the lowest level were for state wrestling championships, next higher up were weight-lifting trophies, and sitting on top was a silver punch bowl. I took a look at the inscription on its side: "Big Eight Lineman of the Year, William Parks,
1977."

He should have won the Outland in seventy-eight," Parks said as he came back into the room. "He would have, too, if he hadn't torn his knee up halfway into the season. He missed six games and still made all-Big Eight. But it cost him." He dashed the whiskey bottle into a jelly glass he was holding in his right hand. "Christ, did it cost him."

Parks took his glass and bottle back to the desk and sat down again in the ladder-back chair. I sat down across from him and watched him drink. Bluerock leaned against the sideboard. Almost at once the whiskey took effect, reddening Parks's face and clearing his eyes. His hands stopped shaking too. He poured another ounce into the jelly glass and drank it in one swallow.

"Did you ever see Billy play?" he said to me. "On TV, maybe?"

I nodded. "Many times. He was good."

"He was better than that," Lew Parks said. "He was going to be one of the great ones. If he could've gotten his mind right. I don't know how many times I've told him that you play the game up here." Parks touched the glass to his forehead. "Ask any coach worth his salt football's fifty, sixty percent mental. Of course, you gotta have the build for it, and God knows Billy's got the strength and size. But concentration, that's the key. You concentrate, you don't get hurt. Billy thinks it's all down here." He pinched his right bicep through the shirt sleeve. "That's why he popped his knee. That's why he didn't get drafted until the eighth round. Have any idea how much money that meant, getting drafted eighth round instead of first?"

"A goodly amount," I said.

"Hell, yes. A goodly amount." Parks began to cry. Just like that. Without any warning. Crying for what might have been. Crying a little bit, I thought, for all that money his son would never make. Although that might have been unfair.

I glanced at Bluerock. He was staring, shamefaced, at the carpet.

"Do you have any idea where he is, Mr. Parks," Bluerock said huskily. "It's important that we talk to him."

Parks looked up at us, tears streaming down his cheeks. He started to say something, when a voice from the hall said, "No!"

All three of us glanced at the doorway. Jewel Parks was standing there, scowling at her husband. She was a large woman, rawboned and running to fat. But unlike Parks, she wore the weight well. On him it looked sloppy; on her it added sensual appeal. A big-breasted, big-hipped woman with bobbed brown hair, a bee-stung mouth, and a fair-skinned, pretty, careworn face. She was wearing a white linen dress that crossed at her bosom and swept in thick folds around her belly. It was clear from the way she carried herself that she was used to being looked at by men, and that she liked it. She must have been something fifteen years before, I thought.

The surprising sensuousness of his wife made me reevaluate Parks. I hadn't really thought about it because of his gruffness and his booze, but he must have been a handsome, athletic kid himself, fifteen or twenty years before. He still had an athlete's frame -big shoulders and arms. But the flesh had sagged on the hanger, like an old suit with change left in the pockets. He looked ten years older than his wife and ready for middle age. He also looked as if he was aware of the difference and slightly cowed by it.

As soon as his wife came through the door he scrubbed his cheeks with his fists, as if she'd caught him doing something shameful.

"You might have offered these men a drink, Lew," she said as she swept into the room. Her voice was low and melodious, an odd complement to her husband's barking bass. "Seeing that they're whiskey drinkers like yourself."

"I did offer them a drink," Parks replied testily. "I'll offer them one again, if it suits you." She didn't answer him. Instead, she stared directly at Bluerock.

"I know you," she said, giving him a fierce, reproachful look. "I know what you want, and you won't find it here."

"I can handle this, Jewel," Parks said feebly.

"No, you can't, Lew. You can't handle anything with a bottle in your hand."

Parks rattled in his chair, exactly as if she had laid her hands on his shoulders and shaken him violently. "Watch your mouth, Jewel," he said hoarsely. "I said I could handle it."

"Just like you handled Bill," she said. "Just like you handle everything else."

"Watch your mouth, Jewel," Parks said again. "I'm warning you."

The woman glared at him. "You're warning me," she said contemptuously. "Just take your bottle, Lew, and go outside and play with the animals."

For a moment I thought he was going to hit her. But, of course, he didn't. It was a scene they must have played out time and again, although the urgency of the situation made it seem particularly ugly. Giving his wife a vicious look, he snatched the whiskey bottle up by the neck and stalked out of the room.

Once Parks was gone, jewel sat down on the corner of the desk and eyed each of us, in turn -malevolently, as if we were minions of Satan.

"Why did you come here?" she said. "What did you expect to find?"

"We want to help him, Mrs. Parks," Bluerock said.

"He's in danger," I said.

She laughed. "Danger?" She sucked her breath in sharply, as if the sight of us gave her pain. "You are the danger that my son is in. You and that awful woman who seduced him. You are the ones who led him astray. Who taught him evil habits."

"Try to understand this," I said. "Some men are coming to kill him. We have to find him, or else they will kill him."

"Lies!" she said stoutly. "He is God's perfect child, and Jesus will protect him."

"Not unless Jesus has a gun," Bluerock said under his breath.

The woman stood up suddenly and walked over to the sideboard. Bluerock leaped out of her way.

"I want you to see something," she said and pulled a framed picture off the wall. She stared at it for a second, then handed it to me.

It was a faded color picture of her and her husband taken in a prosperous year. They were standing in front of the farmhouse, which in the photo looked as solid as a castle. The woman was young and smiling, dressed in gingham, her sunlit hair blowing about her face. Lew Parks was grinning, too. He looked lean and handsome. A cap, tilted at a jaunty angle, sat on his head like a crown. Behind them the fields were tall with grass, turned yellow in the photo by age. Between them, a good-looking boy of about five or six stood smiling.

'Jesus will protect my son," she said. She pulled the picture from my hands and hugged it to her breasts. "My son," she said heavily. Her face bunched up, but she held back the tears by sheer force of will.

"Get out!" she shouted angrily. "Get out. And leave. him alone. For God's sake, leave him alone. You've done enough to him, you and your kind. You've ruined his life. At least have the mercy to let him die in peace."
 

We left jewel Parks alone in the study, clutching that sad memory to her chest. Lew Parks was sitting outside on the stoop, head bowed, the bottle of whiskey held loosely in one hand.

He didn't look up as we walked by him to the car. But as we started to drive away, he came running across the yard, waving his hands at us wildly.

"Slow down," I said to Bluerock.

Parks leaned in at my window, panting and sobbing. "He's in terrible trouble, isn't he?" he said. "My boy?"

I nodded. "The worst kind of trouble."

"You've got to help him," he said, looking desperately around him as if he were afraid she was listening in.

"We have to find him first," Bluerock said.

"He's at Mary Reno's house," he whispered. "On Big Flat." His lips trembled into a smile. "She used to be his girlfriend in high school. She's looking after him now."

"Where is Big Flat?" Bluerock said.

"Take Ninety-three back east, then turn north at Blue Mountain. Sixty-six Big Flat. It's a nice house. She's a nice girl."

Bluerock gunned the motor, leaving the man standing there in the dust of the tires.
 
 

It was completely dark by the time we got to Big Flat Road -a two-lane highway running north along the base of Blue Mountain. To our left the mountain blocked the night sky. To our right the Missoula valley stretched out beneath us -a sprinkling of white lights in the far distance. The road was tree-lined, the oaks arching over the roadway from either embankment like a canopy. About three miles north of the 93 cutoff, we started to see houses to our right, perched on the ridge overlooking the valley. They were modern-looking ranches and A-frames -a hell of a lot more elaborate and more expensive than anything I'd seen in the town. Whoever Mary Reno was, she had some money.

The houses were clustered relatively close together, a little monied enclave dotted with spruce trees and pines. The first one in the group was number 60. It was set back a dozen yards from the roadway, with a cement driveway leading up to it. There were no lights on in the house. Sixty-one and two also looked deserted. But as we got closer to sixty-six, I could see a porch light twinkling in the darkness. There was a man standing on the front stoop of Mary Reno's small redwood A-frame. There were also two cars parked in the driveway leading to the carport.

"Goddamn it," I said, half to myself, knowing already that it was them. Knowing, as well, what that meant for Parks, and for Bluerock and me.

Bluerock started to slow down as we neared the Reno house.

"Keep going!" I shouted at him.

He glanced at me nervously and pressed the accelerator.

By the time we passed sixty-six we were going at a pretty good clip. The man on the stoop watched us as we whizzed by. I could see his face clearly in the headlights. It was Mickey -big, dumb Mickey. He was holding something in his right hand. He tried to hide it as we came near him, but I got a glimpse of the rectangular barrel and the long cylindrical grip extending beneath it.

"Christ," I'said. "He's got a Mac-Ten."

"What's a Mac-10?" Bluerock said.

"A machine pistol."

"Shit," Bluerock said grimly. "A machine gun."

We kept driving for a half mile beyond Mary Reno's home. We came to a roadside turnaround, and I told Bluerock to pull over.

"This is all wrong," I said to him when we stopped. "We have no idea who's in that house or what they're packing."

"Bill's in that house," he said with anguish in his voice. "We've got to go back."

The sane part of me was saying, Wait them out. Wait until they've finished with Bill. But the sane part also knew that if Parks was in there, the girlfriend was in there too. Mary Reno. And I knew perfectly well what they would do to her, how they would arrange it to make it look as if Bill had butchered her and then killed himself. Another dead girl, like C.W. Like Laurel. I thought about that for a minute more and went cold inside. I simply couldn't let it happen again. I couldn't sit back and wait for them to finish.

I stared into Bluerock's anguished face. "I'll go back there alone," he said to me, "if I have to."

"You will, will you?" I said, smiling at his bravado.

"Yes," he said fiercely.

I took a deep breath and felt it all melt away -all logic, all constraint, all sanity. "Fuck it," I said to him. "I guess it's as good a day as any to die."

"That's the spirit," Otto said with a laugh, and pounded me on the shoulder.

We were both out of control by then. Two good buddies out on a little hunt in the big dark woods. It was suicidal madness, and yet I couldn't have stopped it if I'd wanted to. And I didn't want to.

"Are we going to kick some ass?" Bluerock said, putting on his game face.

"I guess we are," I said, putting on mine.

I reached into the back seat and got the shotguns. They were Winchester pumps. I loaded five shells in each. Took a handful of shells and stuffed them in my pants pocket. Bluerock took an ammunitiou box in his mitt and shoved it inside his shirt. I had one extra loaded clip for the .45. I stuck it in my other pants pocket. I pumped one of the shotguns, flipped the safety off, and laid it on the seat beside Bluerock. Then I cocked the other one and flipped the safety off.

"The best way to do it is to go straight through the front door," I said, fighting like hell to think straight. "If we dick around trying to find some tricky way in there, we're probably going to get killed before we get inside."