Tumbleweeds (14 page)

“Oh, my gosh. I hope it’s not ptomaine.”

“It might be.”

John rolled his eyes and looked out the window.

By the time they were at their lockers, Trey had convinced a worried Cathy that something he’d eaten at Bennie’s had made him sick. “Don’t you feel queasy, too, Tiger?”

“Yeah, but not from something I ate at Bennie’s.”

The rest of the day worked according to Trey’s calculations, and he and John arrived at the Harbisons’ farmhouse about the time their English class was discussing the third chapter of
Wuthering Heights
.

“A piece of cake,” Trey pronounced, and indeed the place looked theirs for the taking. It was a still autumn afternoon, blue and golden, only a whisper of wind blowing. All they could hear was the crunch of leaves under their feet as they walked around to the back of the house.

They spotted the pen at once and the small ram eating from his
trough. He looked up with trusting eyes and bleated—a cute little guy, John thought. “Now be gentle, TD,” he said.

“I will.” Trey took the hoop off the gate, the battery-operated razor in his hand. “You hold him real tight, John.”

Then two things happened simultaneously that John registered in a blur of confusion. First Trey dropped the razor and took some kind of large cat’s paw from his jacket pocket, and next John heard the slam of the screened back door. They whirled in surprise to see Donny Harbison, a skinny kid three-fourths their size, running toward them brandishing a rolling pin.

“Get away from that gate, Trey Hall!” the boy yelled.

John looked at Trey, shocked. He recognized the foreleg as belonging to a stuffed bobcat stored in Aunt Mabel’s attic. “I thought you said nobody would be home.”

“Well, I was wrong.”

It was over before they knew what had happened. Enraged, Donny Harbison brought the rolling pin down hard on Trey’s shoulder, and he dropped the cat’s paw, which John snatched up and threw away before Trey could use it against Donny. Then everything went crazy with Trey trying to dodge the blows of the rolling pin.

“Get the pin before he busts my arm, John!” Trey yelled, finally grabbing Donny’s throat and digging in while the boy fought to free himself, the two of them going round and round in a mad, furious dance.

“Trey, let go!” John cried, pulling at his arms, terrified by the sound of Donny’s strangled gasps, finally driving his shoulder into Trey’s knee. Trey grunted and released his hold, and all three went down. There was a crack as somebody’s head hit the picnic table.

John got up first, then Trey. John shook his head to clear his vision; Trey rubbed his shoulder. “Damn, he could have put me out of commission, John.”

“You’d have deserved it, TD.” He reached a hand down to Donny.
“Here, I’ll help you up,” he said, and then his breath caught. “Oh, God…”

“What’s wrong, John?”

“He’s not moving.”

The two of them dropped down beside the motionless body of Donny Harbison. “Hey, man,” Trey said, patting the boy’s cheek. “Stop fooling around. We’re sorry, but come on now, say something!”

Donny stared up out of perfectly still eyes.

In a stupor of dread, John felt the boy’s neck for a pulse and put an ear to his mouth. Nothing. In horror, John drew up and gaped into the boy’s dead eyes. A coldness like a plunge into ice water swept over him. “He—he’s not breathing, TD.”

Trey’s face turned caliche white. “But he has to be. He’s only unconscious. Please, please wake up,” he pleaded, pulling the boy up by his shirt collar.

John grabbed Trey’s hands, a roll of cold sweat running down his back. “Don’t do that, TD. It’s not going to help. I—I think he’s dead.”

“He’s just passed out. I don’t see any blood. Nothing looks broken—”

“Well, it is. Inside, where you can’t see it.”

“He can’t be dead. He’s just… he’s just knocked out.” Trey began to cry, smoothing the boy’s shirt as if the gesture might restore him to life. “How can he be dead?”

“He hit his head on the picnic table.”

Trey cast an accusing look at the concrete offender. “Oh, God, John. I didn’t mean this to happen. He wasn’t supposed to be home. What are we going to do?”

John mumbled between stiff lips, “I don’t know. Call an ambulance, I guess.” Chills were sweeping his body.

Trey moaned and covered his face with his hands. “Oh no. Oh no…”

“Or maybe Sheriff Tyson.”

Trey took his hands away. “He’ll arrest me, won’t he, put me in jail?”

“No, no. This was an accident.”

“How’ll we explain why we were here?”

John could not answer. His jaws had locked.

Trey lowered his catatonic gaze to the body. “Look at him, John. My finger marks are beginning to show around his throat. How will we explain those? Look at his shirt. There’s a button off, and the ground’s scuffed. Sheriff Tyson will know there was a fight. I’ll be charged with—with murder.”

“No, Trey, not if you tell him the truth. You were defending yourself. I’ll testify to it.”

“What if they don’t believe us? Oh, God, John—”

Trey, charged with murder?
John pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. He couldn’t think. His head felt as if a block of wood had been wedged into his brain, but some part of it told him that Trey could be right. The police might not believe them, but they couldn’t go off and leave Donny Harbison like this. Somebody else could be blamed for his death.

“Could we—could we make it look like something else happened?” Trey said. “Like… maybe he hanged himself?”

John’s brain cleared as suddenly as if wax had been flushed from his ears. “No, TD. No way!
No way!
Donny’s a Catholic. Catholics believe you go straight to hell if you take your own life. We can’t have his parents believe that’s where Donny is spending eternity.”

“What else can we do, John?” Trey sounded as if he had a crushed larynx. “They might not call it murder, but they could see it as manslaughter—‘the crime of killing a human being without malice.’ Remember that definition from civics class? We were trespassing. We came to do mischief. That’s the way they’ll look at it, Mrs. Harbison especially. She doesn’t like me, and she’ll try to get ’em to throw the book at me. Not you. You’re off the hook. This was my idea, so it’s all on me, but I could go to jail.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Can you tell me for sure it wouldn’t happen?”

John couldn’t. Trey’s panic was justified. There were likely to be charges brought against him. He was seventeen. In Texas, they held seventeen-year-olds accountable for their criminal acts.

John couldn’t see his best friend—like a brother to him—hauled off to jail. The image of Trey behind bars, his future wrecked, his life ruined, brought up a taste of something so vile John had to spit before he gagged. It would kill Cathy. Besides, if he hadn’t tried to break up the fight, Donny might not have fallen and hit his head. Trey hadn’t reminded him of that. He wouldn’t. John squeezed his eyes shut, remembering an incident from the summer they were nine years old. A bull had charged after him as he and Trey were crossing a pasture. Trey had yelled and screamed and thrown rocks to divert the bull, and he had changed course to storm after him. Trey had made the fence just as the bull’s horns grazed the seat of his jeans. It had always been that way with Trey…. He would have attacked a cave of bears for John.

The little ram bleated mournfully. He had braved the threat in the yard to come out to investigate and was peering at his keeper lying on the ground. John’s stomach turned over. Donny was dead…. There was no bringing him back, but Trey was alive.
God forgive me for what I’m about to suggest.
He gazed dully at Trey. “What about… what about that—that kinky method of masturbation Gil Baker was showing us in that magazine, the one where you get off by choking yourself?”

“Auto… erotic… asphyxia?” Trey stumbled over the word. John was referring to the magazine Gil had waved about in the locker room demonstrating the technique. It featured pictures of people in the act of hanging themselves to cut off oxygen to the brain in order to intensify an orgasm. John and Trey had thought the pictures and the whole idea obscene and disgusting. John hadn’t touched the
magazine, but locker checks were being conducted at school, and Gil had pushed it and several others of the same sexually explicit contents onto Trey to keep in his car until Gil could find a new place to hide them from his mother. They were in his Mustang right now, hidden under the seat.

“That’s it,” John said, sick with repugnance at the thought of the boy’s parents finding him in such a condition. “That way it looks like their son didn’t intend to die. He just wanted a sexual high.”

Trey got to his feet, brushing at his wet eyes. “That would cover up the bruises…. Oh, God, John, you’re a genius.”

Solemnly but quickly, fighting to keep their lunch down, they carried the lifeless form into the barn. Trey took the boy’s shirt with him when he ran to his Mustang to get the illicit magazines, and, following instructions, they made a ligature from an extension cord, removed Donny’s clothes, and hoisted the body to a position that simulated death by autoerotic asphyxia. Trey spread the magazines around the suspended feet of the body, leaving one open to the instruction page, while John arranged the boy’s boots, underwear, jeans, and belt on a chair.

When they were through, John said, “Trey, we have to take a minute,” and indicated the symbol of his and the boy’s faith looking down upon them, a crucifix nailed to a rafter.

Trey nodded, and they clasped cold, clammy hands and bowed their heads. John made the sign of the cross. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, we commend the body of Donny Harbison to You, Father, and may You forgive us for what we have done.”

“Amen,” Trey said. John turned quickly to go, Trey still clutching his hand. “One other thing, John.” Trey tugged him to a stop. In the filtered light of the barn Trey’s eyes looked like dark fragments of broken glass. “We can’t ever tell anybody—for sure not Cathy—what happened here today. Agreed? We have to keep it our secret always—forever and ever—or we will be in big trouble.”

John hesitated. Forever meant… forever. The boy’s parents would live the rest of their lives never knowing how their son really died, but he was bound to Trey. He would never tell. “Agreed,” he said.

Trey gave his hand a hard squeeze. “You’re my man, John.”

The sunlight had waned, and they knew football practice had begun. At the last hurried moment they thought of raking the ground, deciding to leave the hoop where it fell to allow the ram to get out and eat grass from the yard. They retrieved the razor and button and took the rolling pin with them, not having a better idea what to do with it, and remembered only when they were halfway home that they’d left the bobcat’s leg behind.

F
our days later, Deke Tyson, sheriff of Kersey County, had just sat down to a late supper when the telephone rang. His wife answered, motioning him to continue eating when he heard the call was for him. Her husband was off duty, she explained pleasantly, and suggested the caller telephone the sheriff’s department for assistance. After a few bites, Deke could tell from his wife’s tone that whoever was on the other end was not to be put off and held out his hand for the receiver.

Irritated, Paula handed it to him. “The voice is familiar, but he won’t say who he is. The idea, bothering you at home after you’ve had such a long day.” She pitched her complaint loud enough for the person on the other end to hear. “You haven’t even had a chance to change out of your uniform.”

Deke gave her a placating pat on the cheek and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Sheriff Tyson. How may I help you?”

The nature of the call must have shown on his face, for when he hung up, Paula’s hands were on her hips. “No, don’t tell me. You have to go out again.”

“Could you cut a piece of that pot roast and put it between a couple slices of bread for me, honey? It’s going to be a long night.”

“Deke…”

“Please, just do it, Paula.”

The call had come from Lou Harbison. He’d asked that Deke come alone to his house without a deputy and that he not tell anyone the nature of their brief conversation. Lou and his wife, Betty, had returned from a few days’ visit to Amarillo and found their seventeen-year-old son’s body in the barn. He had hanged himself. Lou had not called the sheriff’s department because he wanted no law officer but Deke to view the body first. There was something Lou and Betty wanted to keep private from the public and the rest of their family if at all possible. Deke would see when he got there.

Hitting the highway, the sheriff kept hearing Lou’s anguished voice and could think only of his own children—a nineteen-year-old son off at Texas Tech and a daughter, a high school senior, now at band rehearsal for the halftime show of Friday’s big game—and how such a tragedy would affect him and his wife. Paula loved their daughter, but the sun rose and set on their son. Paula would never get over a loss like Betty’s. Deke suspected Betty wouldn’t, either.

Biting into his sandwich, he recalled what little he knew of the family, since they were from the other town in the county. He knew they lived in a rambling farmhouse on a good-sized piece of property just outside the city limits. The house and land had come to them by way of Betty’s father when he died. Lou Harbison worked as an engineer for City Public Service, and Betty was a housewife who sold eggs and vegetables on the side. They’d both lived in the county all their lives. They had two children, one a daughter, Cindy, now living in Amarillo and married to somebody from Oklahoma City. Their son, Donny, had come along a bit unexpectedly, about six or seven years after Cindy. Deke’s daughter, Melissa, had mentioned meeting him at band camp last summer. She’d thought he was cute but held out no hope they’d ever get together since he was from Kersey High’s chief school rival.