Wild Horses (35 page)

“Hey Daddy,” said Allison, flat and neutral.

He stared. “Well, girl. I always did expect you’d find your way back one day.” Then he turned his head to one side and spat what might have been a fleck of tobacco. “But I’ll give you this much: I always expected you’d be alone and crawling.”

“That’s two more things you got wrong, isn’t it? Maybe you’d better give up on trying to figure me out.”

Willoughby started to laugh, a liquid rumbling in his chest, and the seams of his face pulled back taut. They already drooped in such a way as to give him a look as sour as curdled milk. He must’ve been around Dwight’s age, but in all the worst ways, with the latter-day bearing of a man who’d been as stout as hickory in his prime. He still had the arms, the shoulders, and if he carried himself now with a stoop, he would apologize to no one for it. His hair was a dirty white, thinned well back along his crown, and hadn’t seen a comb since morning. When he stepped back from the door to let them in, Tom saw the plastic pouch hanging low from beneath his thread-worn shirt.

A mean old man holding his colostomy bag,
Tom thought.
I’m going to hell for sure.

Allison waited for the door to latch behind her and her father to back out of the entry hall, then drew the revolver from her purse. Tom shut his eyes until he realized she wasn’t going to shoot first thing.

“Well Lord have mercy, what’s this?” Willoughby stared at the gun pointed at his chest. He seemed more amused than anything, as if this were some game of bluff and bravado, love and hate, that only fathers and daughters could understand.

“One bullet for you,” she said in a small voice, “and four more for each of those friends of yours you whored me out to.”

He’d
sold
her? Tom felt a sick plunge in his gut and heart and soul. No idea. He’d had no idea any man could slither so low as this.

“That’s five,” Willoughby said with fresh contempt. “Who’s the last one for — you, or your witness here?”

Allison gave it a moment’s thought. With smug satisfaction she spun at the hip and put a bullet through the center of the old man’s television. His face went slack as noxious smoke leaked from the hole and drifted to the ceiling.

“Aw hell,” he moaned, genuinely saddened. Then he turned for the dining room, through a double-width hardwood doorway. An aged oblong table stood there on carved gryphon’s feet. “Well, I’m going to sit. You can shoot me in the back if you can’t wait for me to properly situate myself.”

He moved more slowly than he actually seemed to require. The air in the dining room felt warmer by ten degrees from the chill of the living room, where a Cool King window unit strained with all it had left. The faint underlying stink became more noticeable back here where it was warmer.

“Connie told me your insides had started to rot away,” said Allison. “It does a lot for the air around here.”

“Ever since I got my satchel here they’ve had me taking these chlorophyll tablets so my shit won’t stink. But I guess you can only smell so fresh.” As he settled into his chair, he peeled the colostomy bag from his side and slung it by its aperture from one of the chair-back’s spindles. Willoughby gave Tom a once-over. “Now where are your manners, girl? Who’s your fella?”

“His name’s Thomas St. John,” she said as they joined him at the table. “And he’s almost restored my faith that men don’t have to be made of what’s leaking out of you into that little bag you drag around.”

Willoughby snorted. “Leaves your face looking like that and still he’s your own Sir Lancelot? Now that
is
a wonder.”

“He’s not the one who did this. Tom’s never laid so much as an unkind finger on me in all the time we’ve known each other.”

“Congratulations, sir.” The old man winked and thrust his hand across the table for a shake. Tom let it pass, dwelling on the bag, dangling beside Willoughby’s shoulder like a trophy. “Ain’t she something? Now most girls, they’d get a man stirred up to do their killing for them, but not this one, no sir. She’ll dirty her own hands, won’t you, princess?”

“You shut up, Daddy. You don’t think I’ll do it?”

He waved her down but kept his eye on Tom, a shrewd old poker player who refused to be bluffed. “How about you, Thomas St. John? Could you put a bullet through the chest of your poor old daddy? Right there at his own supper table?”

“I’d have to track him down first.” He was trying his best to stand hard, not let Allison see pity and disgust get the better of him. He feared that if she saw that, she’d toughen up for the both of them, and there would be no turning her back. “Then? Who knows?”

“Ran rabbit on you, did he?” Willoughby mused. “Bet he took off on you when you were just a little bitty sprout, didn’t he?”

“If he was anything like you,” Allison said, “that was doing Tom a favor.”

“Well now, maybe that could be true, but you still can’t stop wondering about him … can you, son?” The old man smirked with his seamed face and his crinkled viper’s eyes. “Maybe he just wasn’t ready to be a father yet. Had a few wild oats yet to sow. Got that business took care of, then who knows, maybe he started over like young Tommy St. John never even drew breath at all.”

Allison’s whisper was a whipcrack:
“Shut up, Daddy.”

Willoughby scowled at her. “Now what’d I teach you, girl? You don’t go interrupting a couple of gentlemen trying to get to the bottom of a matter.” Another wink for Tom. “How about you, Tom St. John? Any young whelps wondering where you’ve got off to this fine evening?”

“I wouldn’t be here looking at you if there were.”

Willoughby reeled in his chair. “Not a single one? You don’t say!” As he hunkered forward again, Tom could feel the man drawing him in, seeking someplace bare and raw to hook into. “Not any problem, is there? Lordy, I’d sure hate to think of that dogging you around for life, and the reason I ask, Tom, looks to be gray in your hair already, and it does make a man look some long in the tooth for not even being started in his family ways—”

He was actually glad when Allison pulled the trigger. The old man jumped as, behind him, a brown fan splattered across the faded wallpaper, ran in rivulets toward the baseboard. Willoughby gazed upon the dripping ruin of his colostomy bag.

“Now that hurt,” he said. He wrinkled his nose. “See what I mean about them chlorophyll tablets? They don’t work miracles.”

Two shots so far — might the neighbors have heard? There were no sirens yet, drawn by the first. At least the windows were down, for the air conditioner. And these old houses were built solid, to hold their secrets. Maybe it could contain this one last one.

Willoughby had gone a shade paler, his wrinkles and wattles tightened up as he understood he might have misjudged his daughter. Tom suspected that he’d not taken her seriously until this moment.

“I expect I must appear quite the joke to you now,” he said, newly humble. “Carrying ‘round this sack of my own slops.”

“Joke? A
joke
?” Allison steadied the gun in both hands, lean brown arms outstretched and her cascade of hair sweaty damp. “Do you see me laughing, Daddy? Did you ever see me laugh? I always thought I’d start laughing again once I could stand over your grave, but I can’t wait anymore for you to die on your own.”

“God’s own time, princess.”

She brandished the revolver. “This is all the god you need to concern yourself with now.” Allison took a deep breath and gagged, choked it down. Glanced toward the front door. “Do you still do it? Are there any little neighborhood girls you coax in here?”

“No. It was … just you.”

“Don’t you lie to me, Daddy. I know what you did to Constance that day we went picking peaches.”

“Just the one time, princess. Just the once. Because Connie wasn’t you.” His eyes grew misty, one hand creeping forward across the table, as though he were groping for some beautiful thing that lived now only in his mind, or in his dark and malignant heart. “There was never any other but for you.”

Allison’s head began shaking, tiny movements as she slumped in her chair. She still loved him, Tom realized, or a sliver of her did, some resilient ember burning inside her that Willoughby and his friends, for all their snuffling animal grunts, had never managed to extinguish.

Tom was past knowing whether this was good news or bad.

“Daddy,” she groaned, and turned to Tom, forcing the gun into his hands. “Just hold it on him,” she said, then fled her chair. Allison went scrambling down a hallway, to disappear behind a slammed door. He could barely hear her getting explosively sick.

“The girl often did have a tender stomach,” Willoughby noted, “even as a little bitty thing. Carsick a lot.” He stared at Tom with strange eyes, as if ready to burst with laughter at a joke that only he had understood all along. “Now as I recall,
you
were never that way. Good settled stomach on little Tom-Tom.”

“…what…?”

“No need to play ignorant for my sake, son. Allison’s busy, she can’t hear us.” He shook an admiring head. “Yes sir, I believe most men would surely let surprise get the best of them, walk in ready to blast an old man and who do they see but their
own
old man, more than thirty years gone. You have yourself some jim-dandy self-control, I’ll give you that.”

Tom couldn’t believe what he was hearing. A ploy so desperate it was beyond pathetic. “I thought I’d heard some bullshit stories before, but you just took first prize.”

“Oh, I’ll admit maybe I didn’t do so right by you either, Tom-Tom, but is that any way to talk to me now?” And the old man smiled, chuckling as Tom had often imagined his own father would: so superior, a callous man who’d take his family’s love and flick it aside with no more thought than he would give a cigarette butt. “Look, a man can move to Mississippi and call himself Willoughby, as easy as he can call himself St. John. Though I don’t believe he ever under any circumstances expects to see his young ones find each other purely by chance. What are the odds of that, I wonder?”

In challenge, Tom stared into his face, searching for any trace of flesh or bone that could be matched with some old picture he’d not seen for more years than he could remember. Or something that could be aligned with what he saw in the mirror … and there was nothing. Although he’d always tended to favor his mother, and if Allison did likewise—

No. No, this just could not be. To entertain for one moment this contemptible ploy was to play the old sadist’s game.

Willoughby narrowed his rattler’s eyes. “Don’t know what your intentions are with the girl, but unless you’ve got her good and fooled as to what a fine man you are … why Tom, you might want to rethink them. Especially if you’re having thoughts of family going through your head. How do you think it’d affect the poor girl, she finds out her own half-brother’s sired her a fat little mongoloid baby? Can’t even sit up on its own, why, what a pitiful thing that would be.” He ogled down the hall at a dim sound of retching. “I don’t believe she’d bear up so well, myself.”

It felt as if the house were contracting around him, like a vast stomach that digested the hopes and promise out of anyone who walked in. Astounding that Allison had made it out alive at all.

“I don’t believe one word of this,” Tom said. And a small whisper within:
But what if…?

Willoughby shrugged. “Face value, I wouldn’t expect so. Hell no, these are some long odds. But if it’s proof you’re needing, well, son, see that Bible on that shelf over there? Hand it over and we’ll get down to some proofing business.”

It looked very old; an heirloom, maybe. A leather-bound Bible with a strap buckling it shut, fat enough to gag a crocodile.

“Swear on a Bible, you think that’ll prove anything to me?”

Willoughby sneered. “What kind of idjit did you grow up into, boy? You’re telling me you never heard of a Bible’s got a family tree wrote up in the middle of it? Folded up in there between the Testaments? Why would I even bring it up at all if I couldn’t show it to you right there in black and white?”

Tom looked at it again, dusty and waiting to be cracked open, its secrets of life and death and birth revealed. He could have left it there and always doubted. But always wondered. Yet what if he saw his own name, thirty-six-year-old ink scratched in by Willoughby’s terrible hand? The old man would know that as long as they never checked, Tom could never truly rest.

He stepped over to the shelf, revolver in hand; brought the Bible back and slid it across the table. Willoughby’s mouth curled into a simpering grin as his fingers worked at the leather strap.

“I’m calling your bluff.”

Willoughby nodded, as with some diseased paternal pride. “I’d never expect any less a gamble from any son of mine.”

He propped the Bible against the table’s edge, canted at a preacher’s angle, then cracked the thick cover back. He stroked one knotty hand down the pages, then brought it back up, and of all the surprises Tom never expected the book to yield, a pistol was at the top of the list.

He wasn’t even thinking as he scuttled backward in the chair, wood scraping across wood, and swung Allison’s gun up level. But Willoughby’s quick-draw days, if ever he’d lived any at all, were behind him. Tom fired twice across the table into his chest, then clenched the revolver in both hands, shaking like a man with feverish chills…