Only the Hunted Run (13 page)

Sully sat back down at the kitchen table. Jasper roused himself, stretched, came over and leaned against Sully's leg. The dog's ears had been clipped.

“So the wolves can't get them?” he said, rubbing Jasper's head, scratching behind the ears.

“Coyotes.”

“Which reminds me. I saw two of them, strung up from a fence by the heels, on the way out from town.”

“That's Jim's place. He believes, like a lot of people around here, that the coyotes can smell their own dead and avoid them.” She was looking in the refrigerator for something. The open door blocked his view of her. “He's got chickens. When he gets a coyote, he strings it up.”

“You think it works?”

“I think Jim thinks it works.”

“You know who he is, though,” he said quietly. “The man in Washington. He stabbed the congressional rep from here in the eyes. Two knives. Well, ice picks. Like Terry, with the knives.”

He said it looking out the window.

She didn't stir from the table, didn't look over her shoulder at him.

“There was a family,” she said. “Whites. They lived several miles down this road, that you came up. County ten thirty-two. The house is just off the res. Kept to themselves, came, left, never stayed long. They had a boy, used to come up here with Terry in the summers. Terry and that boy, they'd be wading through the creek that runs through the woods there. They would come over and ask to ride the horses.”

“Did they look alike?”

“Thirty years ago? Some? Kind of. Dark hair. Black. Like yours. Same sort of build.” She shrugged. “I looked at the television, I thought about it.”

“You remember his name? This other boy?” He came back to the table now.

She stubbed out the smoke. “Thirty years.”

“Last? The family name?”

“Something with an H, maybe. Hill, Harris, Humphreys. Look, like I said.”

Jesus. Something with an H. Or maybe not. Something that sounded something like that. The number of times he'd been through this, how many interviews in how many places. Jimenez. Faris. Phillips. This was the time to push. Before he could get his lips around a re-formed question, she was pushing back her chair.

A ragged smoker's cough and she was standing, not looking at him but across at the kitchen, the middle distance. “Well.”

His lips froze, midthought. The invitation to leave, the conversational kick in the shins, the end of the time I got for you and your questions.
I gotta do these dishes, I gotta go to work, I gotta go see a man about a dog. . . .
Maybe he should have made more of a show of eating, knocking back the bourbon. The spaghetti, it was only half finished on his plate, his fork sticking up in the middle like a palm tree on a desert island.

When he stood, the floor creaking underfoot, he was surprised, standing next to her. She was leaner than he'd thought. Her lined face was reserved, it wasn't harsh. Or maybe he was just reading that into it now. Maybe it had softened with the bourbon, on her face or in his eyes. Maybe, maybe he wasn't reading her so well. You couldn't, you know, turn your sensors on like a magic trick. People talking about their infallible bullshit meter,
that
was bullshit.

“Want me to help you with these?” Sweeping his right hand to the dishes, already reaching.

“No no. Jasper lives on leftovers. I'll put the plates in the sink for later.”

She stepped back, indicating by doing so that he should go first.

He thanked her for the supper, the hospitality. She followed him and it seemed so quiet now, he was just becoming aware of that, every footfall drawing a response from the warped flooring. There had been no radio playing, and the hulking television in the living room, so old and so big he wouldn't be surprised to find vacuum tubes in the back, lay dark and blank, dust on the screen. The recliner in front of the television. He had to weave around that. The door creaked when it swung open and out.

Darkness had fallen. She flicked on the porch light. They walked out in the yard—people had yards out here, not lawns—Sully making a few last bits of small talk about Jasper and coyotes. There was a light on a utility pole by her brother's house. It had come on, an orange, sodium-vapor glow that cast shadows. He thanked her once more as Jasper trotted out to his car, lifted a leg on the rear wheel, then came back to him, expectant.

“It's like that now?” he said, shaking his head at the dog. “And here I was, thinking we were friends.”

He had made it from the yard into the road, the gravel crunching under his feet, when he heard her voice.

“Mister,” she called out.

He turned, looked. She was standing at the base of the steps.

“Don't come back. You,” she waved her hands faintly, “you have a darkness to you. It is not my way. If you put my name in your newspaper? My brothers, they will come to Washington.”

He nodded, raising a hand, believing it down to his bones. The lady didn't know bullshit existed. When he opened the car door, his right foot on the floorboard, the left one still on the gravel, he stopped.

He looked back—she was still watching, there beneath the porch light—and said, “I didn't tell you they, the guy, whoever shot my mother, wasn't caught. You said it wasn't known, though, who did it. How, how did you know that?”

She looked at him. For a moment, he thought she wasn't going to reply. Then she shrugged and turned to go inside. “You are here,” she said.

THE WATERS' DRIVEWAY
seemed longer in the dark, the rutted tracks turning off the gravel, into the weeds, the headlights raking the high grass, the lone tree looking like a spectral apparition, its fingers clawing at something just out of reach. Once the car was over the small rise and he could see the way ahead—the grass was beaten down from when he'd come by earlier—he cut the lights and switched off the ignition. After a moment, when his eyes had adjusted, he took a small flashlight from his backpack and got out.

Terry Waters, dead and in the ground? Let's see. Let's just fucking see.

The full moon, brilliant and unbroken by clouds, loomed above. Houses lay dotted across the prairie, lights twinkling in the wind, three quarters of a mile or more distant. Three, maybe four places, far, far down the road. Still, if those houses could be spotted at this distance, that also meant his car lights could be seen. The last thing he wanted was a rancher seeing lights at the old Waters place and coming to check it out, shotgun in hand.

A breeze came up. Sully could feel it on his skin, hear it sighing, see it ruffling the long high grass that spread for miles in front of him. Ahead, the house at the end of the driveway, the old barns, appeared as dark lumps on a silver horizon.

He kept his steps on the car tracks from earlier. It wasn't that he didn't trust Elaine Thornton. It was that you couldn't trust anybody. You couldn't believe anything. Not even people's names, their identity. Look at the mess he was in now. People put on faces for the world to see. They lied about everything, all day and particularly at night. It was a descriptive of the species.

Shadows of the house and barns deepened and took shape as he drew closer. He looked up at the cloudless sky above and pictured it looking down at him, from hundreds, thousands of feet above: the land below vague, dark, moonlight glinting off the lakes, the streets. The trees and woods filled in as darker shadows. Little winking dots of yellow—the houses, the people inside leading lives that no one would really know about or remember, just some of the human beings who had come onto the face of the Earth after the invention of electricity. Before that, the world had fallen featureless in the darkness, only the glow of fire and torches.

Now, lights of cities and towns beat back the darkness on a massive scale, hot, bright spots that showed up in the low reaches of orbit. Then his mind's eye swept backward at some fantastic speed until the Earth was just a little blue ball bouncing in the blackness of space, receding until it was a just a pin dot of light in the sky, infinitesimal and insignificant.

That is who we are and what we are
, he thought, walking through the grass.

Millions of lives teeming on the head of a pin, the universe neither concerned nor vindictive nor compassionate. It just went on and on and on because that was what it did. People—they were just one little self-regarding species on one planet. They died and the universe was indifferent. It didn't mean anything. It was like drowning in the ocean. The ocean wasn't trying to drown you. It was just being the ocean. You got out of the water, fine; you got eaten by sharks, fine; you drowned, fine. It didn't matter as far as the ocean went.

That was life on Earth. It killed you without thinking.

And now he brought his gaze down to the dark house in front of him, the breeze gusting, running invisible fingers through his hair.

The house was indifferent, too. It was indifferent to the hope and lives that had been lived and ended inside it. There would have been the warmth of the days when Terry had been born, the early years. Surely there had been some good times, some nights that darkness had settled over them all, Russell and Marissa in bed and their son in his crib, the plains quiet, dark, somnolent. Russell would have dreamed the great dream of peace and quiet nights and long days of the family, here, close, quiet, the star-specked canopy of darkness hovering above them. The long cold nights of silence and breathing, safe, together, a family, the future spilling out in front of them. Russell Waters, a man who would later shoot the beautiful child asleep in the crib, would have closed his eyes and drawn his breath slower, slower, until sleep overtook them all.

Sully stepped over the narrow concrete pavement and moved under the eaves. He moved from light to dark in the yawning maw of the door.

Silence. Not even the scurrying of rats. A pale light shone through the windows onto the warped linoleum. It fell over the kitchen sink. Shuffling his feet deeper into the darkness, the feeling came over him, rushing up his spine and over his scalp—the pulse and the feel and the rotting flesh of the place, the blast of the gun, dead voices landing in his ear, the desperate father and the deranged son, yelling, vicious, biting, trapped here for weeks and months and years. The great dream of peace, corrupted by the American nightmare of murder and blood. The comforting darkness melted into black despair.

The long hours of the night were the worst because they were exiled together in the house at the end of the road, each in his own isolation, nothing waiting for them, no hope, no wonder, no joy, no possibility of things getting better and brighter. There was only the slow augering into the earth, of waiting for the day when they would be lowered into the mud and dirt, left to decay among worms and sightless insects.

Did the gunshot that killed his son echo in Russell's head every time he walked in the house afterward? Did he see the grotesque obscenity of his beautiful son's body, blown open and seeping blood, lying in the hallway, every time he walked to the bedroom? Seeing his fingers trembling with their last flickers of life?

Amputees had phantom pain, arms and legs that were no longer there yet still itched. Russell Waters shot his child to death right here. Then he lived another seven years in the same house. The phantom pain of his child's death, the loss of his embrace, of his love, and of the possibilities of what he might have become—all this melted into a pool of gore and blood on the linoleum.

If Elaine Thornton was telling the truth, leaving the police out of it but leaving Russell here was, in its own way, a prison term and a death sentence. He would have had to clean up his son's flesh and tissue and fluids, mopping, soaking, disinfecting, then bury it all in a glop in the backyard.

Sully doubted there was a way back from that.

*  *  *

Outside, he watched his shadow as he walked, moving through the grass, his feet snapping stems. No need for the flashlight. Her directions had been approximate but there was so little out here in the way of landmarks that he should still be able to find the family plot.

The moonlight glittered on the pond. He walked past it, a good twenty yards off, the water flat, save for a snake making its way, the head the only thing visible above the surface, leaving a narrow ripple in its wake. Sully, skittish, looked behind himself, but there was no one, nothing. Just the wind. Just him.

By the time he reached the copse of trees, he was beginning to chide himself. Elaine, what, she put on her serious Indian Woman Face and gave him bollocks about native burial rituals and shotguns and dead sons. Hokum story for the White Man from Elsewhere. Selling it to him
to see if he'd print it and then laugh her ass off the next day at work,
White folks will believe anything. How! Shoulda sold him dream catcher for big wampum.

But when he walked into the trees, into the shadows, when he flicked on the flashlight, the fallen-to-the-side tombstones were in front of him in a small clearing just like she had said, granite stumps in a world of dirt and wood.

“Ah, man,” he said, the voice escaping his lips.

He knelt in front of the first, then the second. The engraving had faded. Nothing, just gray and mottled and spots of moss. Switching the flashlight to his right hand, he opened his left hand like a fan, tracing all five fingers over the face of the marker, as if communing with the dead underneath. The rough touch of the stone, the lines and circles and dots that had been chiseled into it, gave themselves up to his fingertips, but not in any shape or pattern. Was that a “B”? An “8”? No way to tell. The names and dates and
Beloved
s were lost, gone, too faint to be read except perhaps by Braille, by etching on paper.

“Dust to dust,” he said softly. “Granite be damned.”

He swung the flashlight this way and that, slowly. Five, six headstones. None more than two feet high. One had cracked and was falling forward. The others canted backward, as if beseeching God above for a second chance, or sideways, as if they were in some slow-motion midstupor stumble.

Pushing himself up, he stood. Okay, stars. Copper stars, iron stars, some kind of metal stars, nailed onto tree trunks. Where were these? He flicked the light from trunk to trunk, up and down, too rapidly at first, but he was jumpy—standing on top of dead people gave him the creeps—and it took effort to slow it to a methodical search.

The wind stirred. It moved the leaves above him in a restless fluttering. They rose on the wind and then fell without it. His footsteps were loud. Then, without even looking, he caught a glint off to the right. He snapped the light back to it. There. The side of an oak.

Two steps and his left hand was on the rough edges of the bark. A five-pointed metal star, big as his palm, nailed deeply into the tree, waist high. He bent to look at it. The bark was growing over the edges, the metal mostly black and corroded, hard and rough under his fingers. No writing, nothing at all, at least that could be seen now. He looked down at his feet. Was one of them, father or son, buried just below? Couldn't be. The roots would have been too thick to dig through. But a few feet away? Yes. There was an opening between trees, almost in the clearing with the gravestones.

“Well, blow me sideways,” he said softly, the wind taking the words away.

The second star. Now. Was there a second star?

Twisting the ring at the top end of the flashlight, he expanded the beam from narrow to wide. The clearing emerged in a slow arc, following the beam. The orb of light illuminated branches heavy with thick green leaves, scrubs trying to take hold. The clearing was roughly circular. When he finished the circuit, there was nothing. Back again. Then he started going trunk to trunk, skipping the undergrowth and the saplings, looking out for snakes at each step now, the wooded, grassy thatch at his feet.

“Come on, come on.” The urgency was at the base of the neck, in his fingers. How long ago had he parked the car? He'd forgotten to check his watch, and now time seemed to be an amorphous thing. It could have been anything from twenty minutes to an hour. How long had he stood in the house, outside, looking—

Glinting, a small flash in the darkness.

—wait, take the light back—his fingers swept along the bark of another oak, not as big as the first but still sturdy, and here, at belt-buckle height, was another star. Not as deeply nailed in. Shinier. Not so rusted. Not as old. Hammered in last year, at Russell's death. His palm covered nearly all of it.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “Elaine, forgive me, for I have doubted.”

The words had no more left his lips than footsteps came from deeper in the trees. The steps were light but hurried.

Adrenaline shot down his spine. He dropped to one knee and swept his arm forward, the beam going to the right, trees and limbs and bramble flashing across his vision and then two red glimmering dots appeared thirty feet to his right.

He swung the light back to it. He saw the snout and the laid-back ears of a coyote. The teeth were bared and the beast lowered its head toward the ground. The fur was matted and dense.

Exhale, exhale
, he thought. Bulbs of sweat popped out of the pores along his scalp, his spine. He palmed his left hand across his forehead and down his face.

“Fucking asshole,” he said, then shouted “HA!”

He leapt forward. Before the word was out of his mouth the animal flicked to his left and was gone, through the woods and across the open field, sprinting, its back bunching and elongating with each gathered and released stride, galloping until it was just another shadow moving across the grass.

Sully clicked off the light. He leaned over, putting both hands on his knees. Pulling on his lungs for a full breath, heart trip-hammering. His hands shook now that it was over.
Goddamn. Goddamn
.

“Nerves,” he said. “Got to do something with the nerves.” The image of his half-empty fifth back at the hotel danced across his mind. Time to go. Time to get the fuck out of here.

He came out of the stand of trees and looked back toward the house and there was the car, a hundred yards beyond. Moonlight reflected off the hood. Its low curves and confident mechanics looked modern, polished, secure, like civilization, and not at all like dead bodies buried beneath bronze-age metal stars nailed into trees. He started walking that
way. He put a quicker hitch in his giddyup, trying not to break into a run, but feeling some desperation to get away from the bodies of Terry and Russell Waters sleeping their eternal sleep beneath the plains of their ancestors.

While he was walking, he looked up at the sky once more.
If we are all so insignificant
, he thought,
why did settling the accounts of the dead matter so much?