Summer of Night (47 page)

"Put it away," ordered Mike, his voice flat.

" "Eat snot and die," said Harlen. But he put the pistol away and said to Dale, "You bet your ass it's real. We should all have something like it. The other side's playing for real. I think…"

"We'll talk about it later," whispered Mike. He handed the binoculars back to Kevin. "Go ahead, Dale. We'll watch."

It was a long twenty yards from the field to the house. Dale couldn't see the pickup in the lot or part of the barnyard that was now visible, but all the way across the yard and driveway he had the feeling he was being watched.

He knocked on the back door just as he had the dozens of times he'd come out to visit Duane. He half expected to hear Wittgenstein barking from the garage, then hobbling quickly forward, his tail wagging as he got Dale's scent. Then Duane would step out of the house, hitching up his corduroys and adjusting his glasses.

No one answered. The door was unlocked. Dale hesitated a second and then opened the screen, cringing at the squeak it let out.

The kitchen was dark but not cool; the heat filled the little space. There was the smell of stale air and heated garbage. Dale could see dirty dishes in the sink, spilling across the counter. The table was cluttered.

Dale moved as softly as he could across the room, walking on the toes of his sneakers. The house had a silent and abandoned feel to it, bolstering his confidence that Duane's father wasn't home. He stopped to look into the dining room before going downstairs to where Duane had slept.

A dark form was sitting in a chair near the workbench that had been the dining room table. He was holding something. Dale could see a shotgun barrel aimed in his direction.

Dale froze, still on his tiptoes, his heart stopping, then giving a thud, then stopping again.

"What do you want, boy?"

It was Mr. McBride's voice-slow, slurred, strangely without emphasis, but definitely his voice.

"I'm sorry," managed Dale, feeling his heart go thud and stop again. "I thought you were gone. I mean, I knocked…" He could see the man now as his eyes adapted to the dark. Mr. McBride sat in his undershirt and a dark pair of work pants. His shoulders sagged as if there were a great weight on them. There were bottles across the tabletop and on the floor. The gun was a pump shotgun and the muzzle did not waver an inch.

"What do you want, boy?"

Dale considered various lies and discarded them. "I came to see if Duane left a notebook."

"Why?"

Dale felt a great ache in his chest as his heart strained, lurched, and then began to race. He wanted to raise his hands like in the movies, but he was afraid to make any move. "I think Duane had some information that'd help us find out who… who killed him," he said.

"Who's us?" asked the shadow.

–' "Other kids. Friends of his," managed Dale. He could see Mr. McBride's face now. It looked terrible, worse even than when Dale's family had brought the food out a couple of weeks earlier. The gray stubble made Duane's dad look like an old man, and his cheeks and nose were reddened with burst capillaries. The eyes were almost invisible they were so deep in their sockets. Dale could smell the sweat-and-whiskey stink of the man.

"You think somebody killed my Duane?" It was a challenge. The shotgun remained trained on Dale's face.

"Yeah," said Dale. His knees felt funny, as if they couldn't hold him up much longer.

Mr. McBride lowered the shotgun. "Boy, you're the only one who thinks that, besides me." He took a drink from one of the bottles on the table. "I told that sonofabitch constable, told the Oak Hill police, told the State Patrol… told everybody'd who'd listen. Only no one would." He lifted the bottle high, emptied it, then tossed it onto the floor. He belched. "I told 'em to ask that miserable fuck Congden… he stole Art's car, took the door off so we couldn't see the paint…" Dale had no idea what Mr. McBride was talking about, but he had no intention of interrupting to ask a question.

"Told 'em to ask Congden who killed my boy…" Duane's father fumbled through the bottles until he found one that wasn't empty. He drank deeply. "Told 'em Congden knows something about who killed my boy… they said my boy wasn't in his right mind 'cause of Art's death… Did you know my brother died, boy?" "Yessir," breathed Dale.

"They killed him, too. Killed him first. Then they killed my boy. They killed Duane." He raised the shotgun as if he'd forgotten it was on his lap, set it back, patted it, and squinted at Dale.

"What's your name, boy?" Dale told him.

"Oh, yeah. You've been out here before to play with Duanie, haven't you?"

"Yessir," said Dale and thought Duanie? "Do you know who killed my boy?" "No sir," said Dale. Not for sure. Not until I see Duane's notebooks.

Mr. McBride drained another bottle. "I told 'em, ask that fuck Congden, that fake justice of the peace. They say Cong-den's been missin' since the day after my Duanie died and what did I know about it? They think I killed him? Dumb sonsofbitches.” He fumbled on the table, knocking over more bottles, but could not find one with anything left in it. McBride stood up, staggered to a couch against one wall, brushed some junk from it, and collapsed there, still holding the shotgun across his legs. "I should've killed him. Should've made him tell who did this to Art and my boy, then killed him…" He sat up suddenly. "What'd you say you wanted, boy? Duane isn't here."

Dale felt a chill go down his back. "Yessir. I know that. I came to find a notebook Duane kept. Maybe more than one. He had something in it for me."

Mr. McBride shook his head, then grabbed the back of the couch to steady himself. "Uh-uh. He just kept his story ideas in his notebooks, boy. Not for you. Not for me…" He lowered his head to the arm of the couch and closed his eyes. "Maybe I shouldn't've kept his funeral to myself the way I did," he whispered. "It was easy to forget that he had his own friends."

"Yessir," whispered Dale.

"I wasn't sure where to spread his ashes," mumbled Mr. McBride, as if talking in his sleep. "They call 'em ashes, but there're still bits of bone in there. Did you know that, boy?"

"No, sir."

The man on the couch continued mumbling. "So I sprinkled some of them in the river where Art's went… Duanie'd like that, I think… and spread the rest out in the field where he and the dog used to play. Where the dog's buried." Mr. McBride opened his eyes and fixed them on Dale. "You think I did wrong splittin' it up like that, boy?"

Dale swallowed. His throat ached and it was difficult to speak. "No sir," he whispered.

"Me neither," whispered Duane's father and closed his eyes again.

"Could I look at them, sir?" asked Dale.

"What, boy?" It was a sleepy, distracted voice.

"Duane's notebooks. The ones we were talking about."

"Couldn't find 'em," said Mr. McBride, his eyes still shut. "Looked downstairs… everywhere… couldn't find Duanie's notebooks. Like the fucking door of the Cadillac…" His voice trailed off.

Dale waited a full minute, heard the man's breathing turn into a snore, and then he took a step toward the basement stairs.

Mr. McBride pumped the action on the shotgun. "Go away, boy," he mumbled. "Go on now. Get far away from here."

Dale glanced at the stairway-so close-and then said, "Yessir," and went back out through the kitchen door.

The light was very bright. Dale walked a hundred feet down the driveway, feeling his t-shirt plastered to his skin, and then ducked behind the Chinese elms and into the cornfield. He didn't think that Mr. McBride had gone into the kitchen to watch him leave. He cut back through the tight rows of corn until he almost stumbled over Mike and the others still waiting there.

"Jesus," hissed Harlen,"what kept you in there?"

Dale told them.

Mike sighed and rolled over onto his back, squinting up through the cornstalks at the blazing sky. "That does it for today. He probably won't go into town until he wakes up tonight.”

"Uh-uh," said Dale. "I'm going back in."

The window had been skinnier than Dale had guessed. He'd ripped his t-shirt and taken some skin off getting in.

There was another worktable under the window-the damn house seemed full of them-and Dale had placed his feet carefully and lowered himself onto it, hearing the trestles creak under him.

The basement was much cooler than outside and smelled like a basement: faint odors of mildew, laundry detergent, backed-up drainpipes, sawdust, cement, and ozone, probably from all the radios and electronic kits that lay around on every surface.

Dale had visited Duane's basement room before, and he knew that he'd come into the back part of the basement where the shower and laundry stuff was. Duane's 'bedroom' corner was near the stairs. Great. Where the man upstairs can hear me. And where I can't get to this window to wave.

He tiptoed across the back room, pausing at the open door to listen. No noise from the stairway or the upper floors. Dale wished that the doorway to the stairs had been closed.

It was darker in this room; there were no windows here. No way out. There were various lights-a hanging cord for an overhead bulb, a lamp next to the dark mass of a bed, an artist's type of suspensor light on the big table near the bed-but Dale couldn't turn one of them on, the light would reflect up the staircase. He won't see it if he's asleep. A less foolhardy part of Dale's mind reminded him that the man with the shotgun would see it if he were awake. Even the sound might tip him off.

Dale was having trouble breathing as he crouched near the bed, waiting for his eyes to adapt to the near blackness. What if something comes out from under the bed… a white arm… Duane! Duane's face all bloated and dead like Tubby's was, of course… shredded and torn the way Digger said that he…

Dale forced himself to stop it. The bed was neatly made and as Dale's eyes adapted, he could see the faint furrows and ridges on the spread. Nothing came out from under the bed.

There were books everywhere. Books in homemade bookcases, stacks of books on furniture beyond the bed, rows of books on the desktop and windowsill, cartons of books under the desk, even long rows of paperbacks on the cement ledges that ran around the basement. The only thing that competed with books was the number of radios: clock radios and table-top models, old radios in Art Deco Bakelite curves and naked radios made from kits, tiny transistor radios and one full-size Atwater Kent console job between Duane's bed and his desk that stood at least four feet tall.

Dale started looking along the shelves, in the cartons of books. He remembered what Duane's notebooks looked like: little spiral jobs, some as large as a school notebook, but most of them smaller. They must be somewhere.

The desk had yellow legal pads, cups filled with pencils and pens, even a stack of typewriter paper and an old Smith Corona typewriter, but no notebooks. Dale tiptoed to the bed, felt under the mattress, tossed the pillows. Nothing. He had moved to the makeshift closet and was patting down Duane's few flannel shirts and carefully folded corduroy pants there, feeling weirder and weirder about going through his dead friend's stuff, when his knee brushed one of the low tables by the bed and a stack of books tumbled to the floor. Dale froze.

"Who's there!" Mr. McBride's voice was filled with phlegm and confusion, but it seemed to be just up the stairs.

"Who's down there, goddamn it?" Heavy footsteps moved overhead, going from the dining room to the short hall by the kitchen where the stairway was.

Dale looked across the long room, through the open doorway, at the glint of light from the small window on the far wall. He'd never make it to the window, much less through it. Mr. McBride had just awakened from his drunken sleep-he probably didn't even remember Dale's visit-and Dale would just be a dark shape scrambling in the basement. His back itched at the thought of buckshot blowing his spine out through the front of his body.

Footsteps in the hall. "I'm comin' down, goddamn you. I've got you."

Dale heard the shotgun being pumped again. The shell Mr. McBride had chambered earlier skittered across the floor above. Then footsteps on the top stairs.

Under the bed, thought Dale. No, it'd be the first place the man looked. He had about ten seconds before McBrkle reached the bottom of the stairs, turned into the room itself.

Dale remembered the way they screwed around sometimes with the empty console-radio shell in Mike's chickenhouse. The bootsteps were halfway down the stairs as he bounced over the bed, pulled the Atwater Kent away from the wall, crouched behind it, and pulled it back just as the heavy footsteps reached the bottom.

"I see you, goddamn it!" It was a fierce cry. "Think you're gonna get me the way you did my brother and my boy?"

Footsteps staggered into the center of the room. There was a clothesline hanging there and Dale could hear something striking it-the barrel of the shotgun perhaps-then the sound of the line being ripped down.

"Come out of there, goddamn you!"

The radio had its working parts there, but there was just room for Dale to curl up at the bottom of the console. He covered his face with his forearms, trying not to whimper but imagining the shotgun aimed at him from eight feet away. Dale had fired his father's pump-action 12-gauge and his own.410 over-and-under. He knew the flimsy wood wouldn't shelter him for a second. He would have cried out then…" called a surrender as if they were two kids playing hide-and-seek… but his voice would not work. He panted to keep from screaming.