Sorrow's Crown (13 page)

"I have heard him. I like listening to it. He mixes in fragments of the truth, sometimes. Bits and pieces."

"Maybe. Sometimes. But can you tell the differences?”

“On occasion something sings out."

"If that's singing, it must be a Wagnerian opera. Along the lines of 'Twilight of the Gods.'”

It impressed me that he knew Wagner, and I could hear a soft, angry rattle in his throat because he knew I was impressed. Listening to that rattle coming from him made my scalp prickle. It became startlingly clear to me that one of these days Lowell would probably beat the shit out of me over something like this.

"Do you think he did it?" I asked.

"I'm not convinced he didn't," Lowell said. "You're not either. Either way, something else is going on.
Crummler
may have had cause, but that will never come out."

The guilt had been hanging on my back since I'd first raised my hand to
Crummler
. I had to make a choice.

There are times when the hedging is over and you must make a decision despite confusion. You've seen blood and sharpness coming up at your face, and you react without thought, and the rest follows the way it must, with the shadows already cast.

If I'd handled it differently, if I hadn't struck first but in-stead danced with
Crummler
for a little while, calming and reassuring him, I might know who was dead and who had committed murder. My fear had forced my hand.

I had to put my faith back in him. I couldn't effectively work to free him if I didn't wholeheartedly believe he was innocent.

"
Crummler
didn't do it," I said.

"You just keep telling yourself that, Jonny Kendrick."

And that was it; there wasn't a sound on the other end but I could hear Lowell shut down completely and pull away. He hadn't gone this far out for no reason. He knew how it looked to the outside eye, and how it would play out in front of a judge and jury.
Crummler
would be buried in court, incapable of even giving his own testimony. Nick
Crummler
had been right, the system just couldn't wait to get a hold of a man like his brother.

"By the way," Lowell said. "We got a complaint on you.”

“On me? From who?"

"Alice Conway."

I guessed that Brian Frost put her up to it, and wondered what that meant.

I pulled up in front of
Devington's
house.

Watched her
.

"Yeah, well, you're about to get another one."

~ * ~

Some folks, when they retire, take up a perch in their front windows and wait with the stony patience of the Sphinx for something to happen. Mrs.
Devington
was such a person, set like a guardian over a king's crypt, with only her diligent, scornful face visible through the parted velour drapes. She spotted me and her eyes filled with expectation and excitement. She drew back and her bottom lip began to quiver.

She was already freaking me out, this lady.

The drapes folded shut and she ran through the house shouting for
Arnie
. I waited on the front lawn and glanced around at the overgrown bushes and untrimmed trees, the dilapidated garage that looked like it would fall over any second. A rusted tool shed with a corrugated metal door appeared eager to slice a finger off anyone stupid enough to try to get inside. There were a lot of shingles scattered across the grass, and a sizable amount of mold and ivy crept up the brick and crumbling gingerbread trim.

Last I'd heard,
Arnie
had gotten married and relocated to the Midwest for a couple of years, then returned after a bad divorce and moved back into his parents' house just before his father died. The old man had apparently taken with him whatever love for the place there'd ever been.
Arnie's
disdain for his home was evident. Perhaps its poor condition proved a testament to his laziness, or merely confirmed his self-disdain.

Mrs.
Devington
burst from the door in such a flurry of motion that I nearly dove for cover.

Arnie
came charging out on her heels and pleaded with her for a minute, trying to get a hold of a skirt the way a five-year-old would. He'd gone even further to fat than I'd thought, with male pattern baldness leaving him with only a horseshoe of fluff that he let grow too long so he could feel something dangling down the back of his neck. "Ma, go on inside, I'll handle this. C'mon, go on back inside."

Rounding in at about two-eighty, I thought
Arnie's
mother could thrash me and
Arnie
both without breaking a sweat. If she were a thin woman, one might've noticed the rabbit teeth first, but with so much ballast to her and a nose like a dollop of wet clay, she was more like an enraged wild boar. I wished Oscar
Kinion
were here with one of his high caliber rifles.

"You!" she shrieked, pointing at me. "You always been trouble from the first, now get off our land!"

She said "land" like we were out on the Ponderosa and I was trying to rustle a hundred head of cattle, instead of standing on a quarter-acre of crabgrass covered with wind-blown trash and
uncleared
brush.

"Sure," I said. "Right after your son and I discuss the finer points of civil conduct."

"What's that? What'd you say?" She made a face I don't think I've ever seen on a human being before, and doubted I'd ever see again. A few beads of cold sweat rolled down my back. "You, always thinking you're so superior to everyone else."

Arnie
kept trying to get a grip on the situation, alternately scowling at me and working hard to calm his mother. He put his hands on her broad shoulders and tried to shove her back up on the porch. She wobbled a bit, and the meat under her beefy arms swung back and forth. Eventually she decided to just stand and glare, and my old football teammate
Arnie
Devington
stomped on over.

Devington's
younger sister, Kristin, pushed through the screen door and pressed past their mother. I'd dated her a couple of times in high school, and had even taken her to her junior prom. Margaret Gallagher, Katie's aunt who'd owned the flower shop before her, had let me go a few bucks on the corsage and boutonniere.

Though Kristin and I had never really connected I'd always enjoyed her company. There was something about her I found solemn and intriguing, even after that final game when her whole clan had come after me like crazy hill folk. She'd badmouthed me a little for a couple of years but eventually let it drop. I knew she did it more out of some loyalty to her family than any real deep-seated hostility on her part.

She watched us both closely now and I could see the way she worried her bottom lip. She worked the makeup counter at
McGreary's
discount store and used an attractive vermilion on her mouth. She'd missed out on nearly all her mother's physical characteristics, but I could see some of the same fleshiness in her face, the softening of her chin. On her it almost looked good, though, the gentle humanity rising in her eyes as she watched me and
Arnie
on the lawn, each of us harboring resentments that went back to a decade-old football game, knowing something was about to end completely and something else might get kick-started back into motion. She'd root for him, I thought, but I had no real trouble with it.

He said, "Get the hell off my property, you shit heel."

"I accept your offer of the olive branch."

"The hell you talking about, you bastard?"

"
Arnie
," I said. "You can growl and glower at me all you like, I really don't mind. But if you bother my girl again we will no longer be able to remain amicable."

My peripheral vision filled with the wide shadow of his mother stalking closer again.

"Ain't you done enough?"
Arnie
asked.

"Enough? Good Christ. I dropped a pass, I didn't back over your legs with a cement mixer!"

"You might as well have. I could have been with the Dolphins."

"
Arnie
, scouts from Miami don't come to iceberg towns like ours without a reason, and even Lowell wasn't good enough. It was just a rumor. You've been stewing in your juices for ten years over nothing."

"I could've been with the Dolphins."

"You couldn't have been water boy for the Dolphins,
Arnie
. You were a scrub, we all know it. I wasn't much better, but it's time to—"

Not like I didn't know it was coming. You call an unstable, hypersensitive, borderline psychopathic wretch a "scrub" when his days are built into a shrine for his glory years—which consisted of three seasons spent mostly on the bench and a couple of flounders and fumbles in the mud—and you can pretty much count on him lunging.

His footwork was about the same. He came at me with his shoulders low, throwing a bad block, looking for a tackle by keeping his eyes on my face instead of my hips. I wondered if he'd raise his fist, knee me, or do anything you might do in a real fight, but he wasn't interested in punching me out anymore. In his head he wanted to knock the ball out of my hand, recover it, run it down to score in the last ten seconds, invite the scout from Miami home for some of his mother's beef stew, talk about the color of the car he wanted, five-speed, fuel-injected, cherry red.

I set myself, wondering if he really thought he'd find salvation in knocking me down in the dirt and crabgrass of his yard. For a second I felt a great sympathy for him, watching his lumbering charge, his mother's eyes wide with anticipation and pride, hoping he'd find himself again over something as small as dropping me on my ass, letting all the venom pour out of him in some cathartic moment when he might finally jump-start his thoroughly wasted life.

Then I thought, fuck that.

We hit the way we had in a hundred practices on the high school field, grunting shoulder-to-shoulder. He'd gone to pot but he had a lot more weight behind him, and the ground was still wet and slippery in spots. He slammed into me like a charging ... sea lion, maybe ... and his forearms came together hard on my collarbone. It hurt and a red blaze filled my head as we clung together and grappled. I drove hard into his barrel-chest, digging my feet in and working him back one step at a time.

A sharp stab of pain pierced my back and a loud crack like snapping bone twisted me around. I wondered if the old lady had actually stabbed or shot me. I turned and saw Kristin holding half a broom handle, the other splintered piece lying at my feet. She screamed, "Leave my brother alone!”

“Kristin…"

There was a lot more in her face than anger and worry. She spoke under her breath out the side of her mouth. "Sorry, Jonny, she was gonna bash you with a wrench."

"Oh," I said. "Okay, thanks."

"You should go now."

"Your brother hasn't quite seen the error of his ways.”

“Have you seen yours?"

Arnie
lumbered to his feet, set himself and started to grunt and growl. His hands were bleeding and tiny shards of brown glass stuck to his palms. The yard was in worse shape than I'd thought, a couple years' worth of broken beer bottles scattered in with the rest of the refuse.

I told him, "If you ever cared this much when we were in high school and didn't always quit after half-time,
Arnie
, we would've won more games too."

It drove him berserk and he howled in rage, lunging for me again as if the quarterback had just shouted "Hike!" He kept his head too low, the way he'd always done, so that he couldn't properly judge speed and position. He caught me low but not low enough to actually shove me back, and his ham-hock fists worked ineffectually against my thighs as he tried to find my kidneys. Mrs.
Devington
shrieked some more, urging him on. This was not exactly the
t`ete-`a-t`ete
I was hoping for.

I rolled out from between his meaty arms and wove aside a few paces. "Don't look at the ground,
Arnie
, I'm up here. You always used to do that, go for a guy's knees, that's why they could always dodge you."

He worked his lips as if he wanted to chew them off and spit them out at me. His cheeks inflated and deflated like a blowfish until he managed to yell, "You screwed me!"

"I did not screw you."

"You did!" his mother chimed in.

"I dropped the ball. In one game. Ten years ago. You people need a serious reality check, you're both a couple of quarts low."

Kristin groaned loudly and rolled her eyes at me. I shrugged.

Arnie
was catching his breath, and starting to feel good again, his mouth working into a pretty ugly parody of a smile. "I should've taken care of you a long time ago."

"How many articles did you ever clip out of the
Gazette's
sports section,
Arnie
, huh? How many times were you singled out for ever winning a game? For Christ's sake, get over it. Have you really been like this for ten years? Or did you need me to be the scapegoat again when your marriage fell through?"