Unspeakable (40 page)

He caught himself speeding toward the sheriff's office before he remembered that he didn't belong there. He would be sitting out this storm, and all the storms to follow. Arriving at home, he heard the first rumblings of distant thunder, which underscored his dejection. The house was unnaturally dark. Switching on lights as he moved through the gloomy rooms, he went outside to the back deck and pulled the lawn furniture and Cora's prized hibiscus plants beneath the overhang for protection.

He thought about calling her to ask if they'd had any rough weather in West Texas, maybe make her feel a little guilty that she wasn't here to share a lonely, stormy evening with him. But he didn't want to expose himself to rejection again. Not yet. Eventually he would beg if he had to, make promises he probably wouldn't keep, do anything to get her to come home. But he wasn't up to it tonight.

The last time he'd called, she had rebuffed his tentative approaches toward the topic of their reconciliation. Worse, she had ignored them, stopping him cold whenever he ventured in the direction of anything personal. Instead, she had squandered his time and long-distance budget by talking about Delray Corbett's funeral and the food he should take out to Anna. He went back indoors but stared out the patio door, past his deck and beyond. Ugly storm clouds stretched across the horizon as far as he could see, bringing to mind Anna and her boy. He wondered if they would be okay out there all by themselves. Probably. Besides, if there was any trouble, her hired hand was nearby.

He went into the living room and switched on the TV. Using the latest technology, the weatherman was standing slap-dab in the middle of the state map, moving his hands over the multicolored radar pattern of storms. They spread over the entire eastern third of Texas, stretching from the Red River all the way down the Sabine, nearly to the coast. Weatherwise, it was going to be an eventful night.

Ezzy climbed aboard his Barcalounger, prepared to ride out the night in front of his television set. But for all the warnings and watches issued by the National Weather Service, the threatening storms seemed of minor importance. Free now to square off with the hypothesis he'd shared with he focused on it, viewing it from every angle, like a gladiator sizing up his opponent. And that's how he thought of it—as a silent, invisible enemy that had stalked him for years while he remained blissfully, stupidly unaware.

Not until this afternoon when this reversed possibility pounced on him with the impetus of a mountain lion and sank its claws into him had he realized why this case had haunted him. Not because he was convinced that the Herbolds were involved. But because he wasn't convinced. Maybe he'd been too close to it from the start. The discovery of the dead girl's naked body in his county had caused him to leap to a quick but logical conclusion. Maybe he had wanted the Herbold brothers to be guilty because they were a tragedy waiting to happen. It was only a matter of time before somebody tangled with them and wound up dead. Ezzy had skipped ahead a few chapters, that's all.

They'd had a fairly good alibi in that they'd been driving to Arkadelphia. They'd been photographed robbing a convenience store there early the following morning. But, presuming them to be guilty, Ezzy had massaged the facts to make them fit. Not perfectly, but pretty good. Say as good as a size eight shoe fit a woman who really wore an eight and a half. He had made it work.

But Carl's avowal of innocence had always bothered him. His vehement denial was the real grain of sand in the oyster shell of Ezzy's case. Why would Carl own up to every other wicked deed he'd ever done but adamantly deny that he had even left the Wagon Wheel with Patsy that night?

Ezzy had figured he was just being ornery. But maybe not. For once in his miserable life, maybe Carl had been telling the truth.

What was most troublesome was that if Carl and Cecil hadn't left the tavern with that girl, someone else had. Someone else had taken her to the river, used her sexually, then left her dead in the weeds. Someone else held the answers to the questions that had plagued Ezzy for almost a quarter of a century.

Had he spent his career, and a good part of his life, trying to prove that Carl and Cecil were there, when actually another man had heard Patsy McCorkle take her final breath? Had he allowed a guilty man to go scot free?

Damn him for a fool if he had.

CHAPTER FORTY

"I
t's really better this way. Right, Myron?"

"Right, Carl."

"We did what we had to do."

"Yeah."

Myron was eating Vienna sausages from the can. The packing gelatin oozed between his fingers faster than he could lick it off.

"Did I ever tell you about our stepdaddy, Myron?"

"You said he was a bastard."

"To put it mildly, Myron. To put it mildly. Our mama came home one night wagging this loser with her and announcing that he was going to be our new daddy. Fat chance of that. Right off, me and Cecil hated him and made no secret of it. From the day they got married, it was them against us. All we needed was each other. My brother and me made a good team." He sighed heavily. "But Delray ruined Cecil, is what I think. My brother must have taken some of his lectures to heart, because the older Cecil got, the more of a pussy he became. Wasn't too long before he completely lost his sense of humor and spirit of adventure. It came to a head that morning in Arkadelphia. He got spooked and left it to me to kill that off-duty policeman. Now, how's that for a brother?" he asked in disgust.

"I just couldn't trust him after that, Myron. Not even on this job. He argued with me about every single detail, didn't he? You were here. You heard." He looked across at Myron, adding earnestly, "If I had done things Cecil's way, we'd've been fucked."

"Yeah. Fucked." Myron picked at a pimple on his chin and drank from a can of beer, seemingly indifferent to the conversation and to sharing the cabin with two corpses. In many ways Carl envied Myron. He wouldn't mind temporarily slipping into Myron's vacuous universe where nothing mattered except the appeasement of whatever appetite happened to be gnawing. Just for a little while. Just long enough to get over this hump. Myron didn't seem to care, or even remember, that he had tortured Cecil into such a sad state that he was begging for death by the time Carl put the pistol to the back of his head.

When you looked at it from that standpoint, he'd done his brother a huge favor. Killing him had been an act of mercy, not murder.

Nevertheless, the incident had left a bad taste in his mouth. Sharing the cabin with the bodies wasn't helping his nerves any, either. He wished he and Myron had carted them outside, or that they would rot faster than they were so he wouldn't be forced to continue looking at them. They hadn't started stinking yet, but when they did, what then?

With no more concern than he would give two tow sacks of potatoes, Myron had dragged the bodies into a corner so they wouldn't clutter up the center of the floor. They lay exactly as he had left them, in a jumble of bloody clothing and lifeless limbs.

Apparently it didn't bother Myron to look at Cecil's death mask, or Connie's blood-streaked legs, or the necklace of dark bruises around her throat. Myron was an ardent, if artless, lover. Connie hadn't taken to his rowdy style of romance and had fought him to her last breath. But she was a whore. No great loss to anybody.

Carl tried real hard to work up some sadness over his brother's death, but all he could muster was regret that Cecil had died as he had lived—a gutless coward. If he had shown some spine, he might still be alive. Instead he had died blubbering like a baby, and that was cause for disdain, not grief.

"He never could go the distance," Carl said, speaking his private thoughts aloud. "I could give you a hundred examples of how he chickened out at the last minute. He always backed down when things got rough, and left me to do the dirty work for him. But he was my brother. I'm gonna miss him something terrible."

Although Carl doubted Myron knew shit about sibling relationships, the retard nodded agreement.

On a happier note, he said, "Your share of the money just doubled, Myron ol' boy!" Myron peeled his lips back in a wide grin.

Carl shuddered, "Jesus, Myron. Don't you know what a toothbrush—" The gunfire cracked through the cabin like a whip. He and Myron dove for cover.

***

David aimed his fingers toward the ceiling and pretended to be firing laser weapons at descending aliens. They were slimy, icky, ugly creatures with snot coming out their noses and hairy warts on their heads. They had webbed hands and a long tongue that could kill people if it touched 'em 'cause there was poison on it. Not even Rocket Rangers were safe. That's what he was. Rocket Ranger XT3. He was the leader, the bravest of all the rangers. The aliens were scared of him.

" Pskoowou! Pskoowou! " He fired his laser weapon, and it blew up the warty head of the leader of the aliens. He had killed them all.

Rocket Ranger XT3, this is base zero, zero niner. What's your position? Rocket Ranger XT3, doyou read?

David adjusted his make-believe headset. "Zero, zero niner, this is Rocket Ranger XT3. Mission accomplished."

He glanced over at his mother, who lay on her side facing away from him. She had come downstairs to get him, saying he had to take a nap. He'd put up his best arguments. He wasn't tired. Naps were for babies. Kids on TV didn't have to take naps. Rocket Rangers didn't for sure. But a Rocket Ranger didn't have a mom, either, who gave him mean looks that said he would soon be in serious trouble if he didn't obey.

So David had trudged upstairs behind her, saying words like damn and hell and butt, ugly words she couldn't hear.

That was one good thing about having a mother who was deaf. You could talk back without her knowing. And you could pretend to be asleep until she fell asleep, and then you could fire rockets and stuff and the sounds didn't wake her up 'cause she couldn't hear them. But he had killed all the attacking aliens and so now he was bored.

He counted out loud to one hundred, a new skill his mom had recently taught him. Then he tried counting backward, but he lost interest somewhere in the midseventies.

He practiced clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, seeing how loud he could do it. Whenever he'd done this around Grandpa, he would frown and tell him to cut it out, that it was rude and annoying. Jack hadn't minded, though. Jack and him had had a contest to see who could do it the loudest. Jack could do it real loud. Louder than anybody.

Thinking about Jack made him feel sad again and he sorta wanted to cry, but he didn't because that would be babyish. He rolled to his side and stared beyond the edge of the pillow into near space. Mom had said that Jack might not come back and he was afraid she was right 'cause when the police on TV took away people, they hardly ever came back. They got killed or put in jail or something.

If Jack didn't come back, nothing was going to be fun anymore. Things would go back to being the way they had been before Jack came, only Grandpa wouldn't be here either. It would be just him and Mom.

Mom was okay. She cooked good stuff to eat. She played games with him and didn't get mad if he won. When he was sick she pulled him onto her lap and rocked him even though she said he was getting almost as big as her. Or if he was scared—or just 'cause and for no special reason—it felt good to let Mom hold him and lean his head against the fat part of her chest. But Mom was a girl. She was always scared he was gonna drown or poke his eye out or break his neck or something. When she was around he couldn't pee outside. She didn't like farts, either. Girls thought farts were about the worst thing ever. At least Mom did.

Today when he was crying because Jack left, she had told him he probably wouldn't miss Jack at all when he started going to school. She said it would be exciting to go every day. Smiling so that her teeth showed, she had said. " You'll learn to read. " He had reminded her that he already knew how to read.

" You'll learn to read better. And you'll make lots of friends with boys and girls your age. " He had nursed a secret longing to have a friend. One time Mom and Grandpa had an argument about him going to preschool. He hadn't been able to follow all the signs, but most of them. He had sorta hoped his mom would win and that he could go to preschool and play with other kids. But his grandpa had said that Mom could teach him everything he needed to know at home, and that he would be in school soon enough, so he hadn't got to go.

Maybe when he got to kindergarten he could get on a T-ball team. Or soccer. He might be good. He was pretty good at running and stuff. Maybe he could go to birthday parties like the kids on TV. But he wasn't sure he would know what to do at a birthday party. The other kids might not like him. They might not want him on their T-ball team, either. They might think he was stupid or something.

He would sure feel better if Jack was around. He could talk to Jack about stuff. When he talked to Mom, she just said dumb Mom things. She said that everybody was going to like him and that he would be the teacher's favorite. But how did Mom know that?

Jack would understand. But Jack wasn't here. He had got in his truck and driven off with one of the policemen. What if he never came back? Not ever.

Wait a minute!

Jack hadn't taken his stuff! He wouldn't leave forever without his stuff! He would come back for it, wouldn't he? And then he got the best idea.

Cautiously, he looked over at his mom. She was still sleeping. Moving slowly, he inched to the edge of the bed. Watching her for signs of waking up, he eased himself off the bed until his toes touched the floor. One of the planks creaked beneath his weight and he froze, until he remembered that his mother couldn't hear it. She would only sense a vibration, so he was very careful to walk on his tippy-toes across the room. At the door, he glanced back toward the bed one last time. She hadn't moved. He pulled the door closed.