Wild Horses (34 page)

“And I wouldn’t blame them one bit,” Boyd said. “We all miss her around here. And the children? Inconsolable for days! Finally we had to start putting Prozac in their afternoon milk. I’m joking of course. Well, fine, I’ll not keep you any longer.”

He tried to get away and found she wouldn’t let him, that he had made a friend. For life, apparently, which seemed to be the scope of the story she launched into, something about growing up a couple years behind Allison and wanting to be just like her, and how she wished Allison would get over her rambling and settle down one day, and something else about when they were girls, ambushing Jeff with crabapples, and had it not been for Allison she might not have met the future father of her children. Finally Boyd had to tell her about the urgent call on the other line.

“I get the feeling she doesn’t get a chance to talk to adults much these days,” Boyd said once the call was finished and they were a block away.

“So we get a motel for now?” Krystal sounded relieved.

“And the biggest bed they offer.” He whooped and clapped his hands, drummed them on his knees. “Allison shipped boxes ahead of her. Bet you that’s why we turned up one big goose egg back at her trailer. Those disks were never there in the first place. Our karma holds out, we won’t have to wait for Allison and deal with her grudges at all.”

“So tomorrow we … do what, exactly?”

“Who knows, we’ll figure something out.” His brain was taxed for one day. “Keep a close watch on your side, there’s got to be a liquor store still open somewhere.” One bottle of Dom left, and with this festive mood he was in, just one wasn’t going to cut it.

“You don’t really plan very far ahead, do you, sweetie?”

“It’s basically an energy-saving tactic,” he explained. “I don’t like to clutter my thoughts with a lot of alternatives for situations that never come up. That way, I’m always open to the moment.”

“Wow,” said Krystal, with admiration. “So you apply Taoist philosophy to your life, too.”

“I do?”

“Sure. Having no plan?” She sounded positively tutorial. “‘To know, and not be knowing. To do, and not be doing.’ I really wish I had your discipline.”

“Well,” he admitted, very modest, “it’s a way of life, and a state of mind.” Then, as long as he was on a metaphysical roll: “And later on, when we hit the sheets? You think we could try doing it without the rocks for a change?”

CHAPTER 20

When the sun came up on Wednesday, it shone hot and searing, as it should on any day of reckoning, and burned the dew off the meadows in a haze of mist and birdsongs.

Breakfast was a grave and silent affair. If Dwight didn’t know already that Allison had spent the night in the bunkhouse, Tom felt certain that nothing at the table was going to give it away. They might just as well have eaten in separate shifts.

“You’re welcome to stay longer, you know that,” Dwight told him later, “but I’m not so sure you don’t need reminding. Might do you some good, one more day.”

Too tempting, Dwight’s invitation. Tom could’ve gone to the van and brought back his bag, done it with relief, because some grim inevitability had been postponed another day.

“Whenever I’m here, it shouldn’t be for any other reason than I want to be. Not because I need you to hide me from something.” And poor Dwight nodded, not even knowing everything there was to hide from. Patricide, wasn’t it called?

Tom looked down toward the corral, where Allison was spending her last minutes with the roan. She was wearing the hat again.

“I don’t completely know what I’ve gotten myself into. But right now I think the best thing for me to do is see it through.”

“I’ll be here,” Dwight told him, “if you have any need to pass through one more time. For any reason. For however long.” He turned an unsettled look toward the corral. “That goes for either of you. I expect you’ll make sure she gets the message.”

Tom promised he would, making good on it as he and Allison rode away after a night that should have left everything new and different, but instead made it just that much more strained. Without last night, he’d never have known what she was planning.

“He’s a good man, Dwight is,” she said. “It wouldn’t be fair to involve him in something like this. After it’s done and can’t be taken back. I couldn’t do that to him. Or to the horses.” Allison frowned. “Yeah, I know, Tom. I went and involved you. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I didn’t intend to.”

“It’s worse for me now than it is you, at least where that pair from the diner are concerned. You, they’ve lost track of. Me … they won’t have any trouble finding me at home or at work.”

Allison shook her head. “You don’t have anything they want.”

“I’ve got blood, don’t I?”

They
would
come, if they weren’t caught along the way. He’d called his offices this morning and asked Lianna Murphy to put the word out among the other St. John’s employees. Describing Gunther and Madeline, telling her if they saw anyone like that around the shop, to call the law immediately. He’d placed a second anonymous call to the Panama City police, tipping them off to Gunther and Madeline’s possible arrival.

“Did you ever figure out what it was they wanted from you?”

“Yeah. I think so,” she said. “Saturday morning when you came to pick me up? Boyd was inside. I’d just taped him to a chair so he’d stay put. He showed up looking for something — something I didn’t even remember until he started to remind me. Even then it took some time, because…” Allison stopped for a moment, shifting gears. “I’d just wanted to hurt him. At least make him stop and think about the way he and Madeline had hurt me earlier that day.”

She filled him in on the rest, as much as she knew or could deduce. Had there not been so much blood, he would have laughed at how ridiculous it was. Six of them, squabbling across the country over an embezzled prize that was rather paltry, as fortunes went, and not even tangible. Just binary code on a disk of magnetic oxide that could fit in the palm of his hand.

“Madeline and Gunther, you couldn’t help involving me there, because you didn’t know,” he said. “But what about your father? You had to have a reason for telling me. Did you want me to run? Did you think it’d be the easiest way to scare me off? Or was it just your final test, to see how far I’m willing to go for you?”

“I never asked you for anything other than a ride. Anytime you want, you can decide when I’ve ridden far enough.”

“You don’t want that any more than I do.”

“Maybe not, but I could live with it. I’ve lived with worse. Besides,” she said, beginning to soften, “you left one out.”

“What’s that?”

“Maybe I told you because I want you to talk me out of it.”

He wondered if, when Allison looked at him now, she saw a man so desperate to save lives in atonement for others he’d lost that he would let a stranger gut him in the smoke and the garish neon luster. How easily a man like that could be manipulated.

“I don’t think you really want to be talked out of anything,” he said, “because you know one day you’d never be able to forgive whoever did the talking.”

“So drive,” she murmured, and he did, wondering how many hours were left for him to give it a try, regardless.

*

They stopped for gas and the state of the world. Tom bought newspapers while she bought three candy bars, rationing them the way a convict might ration cigarettes: one for now, one for later, and one for hard times.

She watched over his shoulder as he spread the first paper for news of fugitives, followed his finger as it settled on a photograph and a drawing, side by side. The article filled in the rest of the swath they’d been cutting since Nevada.

Gunther was wanted in Arizona as a suspect in the Saturday kidnapping of a Yavapai County sheriff’s deputy, who’d been found Monday in the desert just north of Phoenix, dead of exposure and scorched by the sun, his eyes burned out by some caustic chemical. Gunther was also suspected in the execution-style shooting of an unnamed Las Vegas apartment building manager.

Doug.
She nearly began to cry, then swallowed it down like a sickness, and watched the miles accumulate in white line hypnosis, trying to goad her conscience into showing its useless little head so she could poke at it again, perhaps kill it once and for all.

Oh, my Daddy,
she thought, sending it like a prayer into the eastern sky, to precede her,
you have so much to answer for, what a shame you have only one life.

*

In Mississippi, they rode the last miles through shadows and valleys. The sun burned through leafy treetop lattices; kudzu vines choked the land below. Everywhere the eye turned was a rich green, but their mood was the gray of old barns fallen to rot, and the weathered signs in lawns hawking boiled peanuts by the pound. Little towns simmering in their own dark secrets watched them pass, for one never knows when another’s secret may go public.

Allison was going through with it, and nothing he could say made any difference. She rode holding the gun in her lap as though it were the one telling both of them what to do, where to go.

Everything, he supposed, but how to live with it tomorrow.

Now and then they would roll past a bus station or a shady inviting curb, and he would wonder why he didn’t save himself and what remained of all he held dear. Put her out to finish the trip on her own. Mississippi, after all; his promise had been kept. His answer to himself was pure fool’s logic — that as the voice of reason, only his presence could dissuade her in the end.

They crossed over a ribbon of muddy brown river, where down on the banks, two thin black boys held fishing poles. Only when he saw the sign did he realize that this was the river for which her home was named, and how close they were. And that he should have asked himself long before now if his desire to see her get away afterward was worth being an accessory to murder.

He tried to see the justice. She’d provided no details, which made it easier for him to imagine what her father had done. Silent as a totem, staring from her bedroom doorway until she could sense him over her shoulder, or from the other side of sleep, feeling the force of his compelling hunger long before she felt the press of his hands. The closer the little river town grew, the deeper it ached. Men in love, or approaching love, must have a burning need to torture themselves with what they know of a woman’s past. Even on the best days, love and pain were never very far apart.

They reached the house when shadows were beginning to stretch and good Baptist families would be sitting down to dinner. It was an unassuming place, two stories of clapboard and peeling white paint and loose shutters, behind disinterested elms. Allison had him circle the block once, rigid in her seat, assailed by the reek of memory.

“How long has it been?” he asked.

“Fourteen years. I ran away a couple months after I turned seventeen. And never been back since. Not even when Mama died.”

“But you’re sure he’s still here?”

“My cousin would’ve told me if he’d left. He’s there. By now he should have at least two bottles of Dixie emptied and the
TV Guide
folded back to tonight’s shows.”

Well,
thought Tom,
sounds like a man who needs killing.

So the van wouldn’t be seen in front of the house, he parked around the corner and another two blocks up, in the shadow of an outbuilding behind a vacant house. As they backtracked on foot, the first swollen thunderheads darkened the sky. A neighborhood at peace, it was scented with magnolia and eucalyptus and meals on stoves, and gardens thrived under a blanket of wet heat.

“You don’t think it’ll look suspicious to your cousin,” Tom said, “the day you come back, your father turns up dead?”

“Sure it’ll look suspicious. I never claimed to be planning a perfect crime.” She hiked her purse strap higher on one shoulder. “But deep down inside I know she’ll be glad. He did her once, too. Once that I know about — there could’ve been more. She pretends it never happened, so I quit bringing it up. But she remembers.”

“Where was your mother while these things went on?”

“You mean when she wasn’t cracking the backs of our hands for telling hateful lies?”

They came upon her old house from behind, along an overgrown path and through a wet smell of moss and old flagstones striped with glistening slug trails. Tom hoped that the years hadn’t been kind to her father. That he would open his door, and just the sight of a withered man would be enough to appease her. That she would see what he’d become and realize that time would always be far more relentlessly vindictive than she.

Porch steps creaked like screaming souls, and she banged on the screen door as bold as Saint Paul could preach.

Tom heard the scrape of the knob and watched the heavy inner door swing open, heard the chatter of the TV before seeing the man standing there trying to make sense of them: two strangers, maybe, or one stranger standing beside Willoughby’s own problematic and haunting ghost, returned to flesh after fourteen years.