Country Hardball (2 page)

I was sixteen. Sitting in my room. Not bothering anyone. Put on some Blue Oyster Cult. Dropped a couple tabs of pumpkinhead. An hour later my mom busted into my room. My dad had been having kidney trouble a while and had passed out. She didn’t want to wait for an ambulance because we were out in the country. And she hated ambulances. Said they were a rip-off. So she loaded my dad into the back seat of the Impala and I was supposed to drive them to the ER. Yeah. Funny story. I thought the oncoming headlights were calling to me. Calling me home. So we all made it to the ER in ambulances. Of course, my mom and dad didn’t need ambulances by the time they got there.

I was locked up for a while. Full of the empty darkness he was killed.

Yeah, I’d had problems. But that was then. All I wanted in my new life was no trouble.

Now I’m working for the county, driving around handing out paperwork, trying to live whatever a normal life is when you’re someone with my record, my past. As if anyone is normal.

“I’m here for the county, Mr. Greer.” I held the paperwork out for him. “I need to talk to you about your outbuildings. They’re not up to code.”

He set the gun down on the table and sat back down in his chair, pulled a buck knife from his shirt pocket, and started cutting chunks out of an apple.

He had the same kind of metal lawn chairs we’d had at our house. Light green. Kind of a clamshell. Iron bars folded underneath so you could rock back and forth, humming a little tune to make you think of something else.

“How long you been working for the government?” he asked me.

“Started at the building office last week,” I said, still a little nervous looking at the gun, the violence within reach. I had three more visits to make before lunch, so I couldn’t waste the whole day here. And I had to get back for a birthday party at the office. I hadn’t been a free man for long and this job was the biggest piece of normal I had. My big hope for getting back on track, for keeping the darkness away. “I just need to give you a copy of this report and schedule a time for you to come by the office, Mr. Greer.”

“Sit down, son.”

“Thank you for the invite, sir, but I need to get moving.”

He reached for the gun, then turned it on me, again. “Maybe my polite tone confused you, asshole. Sit the fuck down. I wasn’t asking.”

I sat down.

Mr. Greer set the shotgun in his lap. Then he ate an apple piece from his blade.

“Wanna tell me how you ended up here?” he asked.

I looked down at the paper, like I was reading something. “We got a call. Tip. Said you were breaking the zoning ordinance.”

He shook his head, spit out part of the apple. “Not that, you dipshit. I know that. I made the call. I mean how you got here.” He emphasized the last word, looked around the property.

He made the call? Why would he make the call? “I’m sorry, Mr. Greer. I don’t understand.”

“Here. How did you end up here? Where you are now?”

Ten seconds or so went by. Felt like longer. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I figured I had to say something. “Google Maps. Took 79 through Emerson. Turned a couple miles out, down that a ways until I hit what I guess was a logging road. You’re all alone back here.”

“Yeah. I’m all alone.” He folded his knife back into his shirt pocket and stood. He looked up to his outbuildings at the back of his property. Maybe things would work out h. “‘We live as we dream—alone.’ That’s from a book, son.” He grabbed the shotgun and walked over to me. When I started to stand he put the barrels of the gun against my chest. “I was asking how you got here. Walking around like a free man. After you killed your parents that night. After you killed my daughter.”

My arms were at my sides and I wasn’t even close to ready when the butt of the gun hit my jaw and knocked me cold.

I’d given up drinking a few years ago. Drugs a year before that when I was back behind bars. And I tried not to cuss. Tried not to speed. Tried to live a good life now. Make up for what I’d done.

“No reason you should know me,” Mr. Greer was saying. Mid-conversation. Like he’d been talking for a while. But I was just coming back around. I rubbed my jaw where he’d hit me. Scratched through my beard. Something was flaking there. Blood. Dirt. I blinked. Rubbed my eyes with my hands, which were tied together. “She kept saying how it was so sad, such darkness.” He was running a sharpening wheel, sparks flying off the knife blade. I looked out through the windows but only saw sky. I was pretty sure we were in one of the outbuildings I’d come to complain about. Yeah. Another funny story. “You know anything about darkness, shithead?”

Yeah. I had some ideas. Some ideas I tried to stay away from. “I didn’t kill your daughter.”

“The hell you didn’t,” he said. “You kill everything, don’t you? People like you? You’re a curse. A blight. A bringer of darkness.”

For what must have been the twentieth time in the past however long I’d been at his place, I had no idea what he was talking about. “I didn’t kill your daughter.”

Looking through the windows, I could see the sun at the top of the sky. Guess I’d been out a little while, but not too long.

He stopped sharpening the knife and turned around to face me. “Maybe you should stop talking about my daughter right about now.”

I’d wanted this job. I’d wanted to work outside. Drive around, listening to Drive-By Truckers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Little Feat, all windows-down and fields full of sunshine. Sounds like a great day, back roads through Columbia County, grabbing a sandwich at the gas station, being your own boss in a sense. Staying away from trouble. Living a normal life.

Yeah, I’d done things I wasn’t proud of. The accident with my parents. A few other things that ended up with people dying. Put a man down in self-defense. Finished a fight I hadn’t started. The neck is a fragile twig. But I’d served my time for some of that and that was behind me. Someone else’s life. Not who I’d wanted to be, who I’d become. I knew that if I lived clean from here on out, woke up every morning in the light, things would be fine. I was starting from scratch. Only this point on counts. A good job. Coworkers. Friends. The sunlight. The glare from the road. The summer brightness of things not yet destroyed.

He had me up, blade at the back of my neck, pushing me out the door to the edge of a ravine behind his field. He hit me in the shoulder with the hilt of the knife, and I dropped to my knees.

“My girl was impressionable,” he said. “Young. Innocent.” He sounded like he was going to cry, sniffling a little. But he didn’t. Just stood there looking out at the ravine. “What you did to your parents sent her over the edge. S a couple of drunk Mexicans.J2 said, he was young. Troubled. Artistic. Like her mother.” He pointed the knife at one of the other sheds. Another cinderblock box that brought me out here in the first place. I was sluggish from the head shots, but I focused where he pointed.

“That one there,” he said. “With the lock on the door. Full of her paintings.” I wasn’t talking, so he kept on. “She did thirty-seven paintings of you and your mommy and daddy. The car crash. Locked herself in her room and painted. And screamed and cried. And painted. All ’cause of you and your goddamned fool life. Broke her soul.”

“I didn’t kill your daughter.”

“Damn sure did.” He walked to the edge of the ravine and looked down. “She couldn’t take it. The emptiness. The darkness. Whatever it is these kids feel. I just tried to get her through it after her mother died. Just hoping she’d be okay. Hope.” He spit. “Damn hope.”

“I’m sorry about your daughter, but I didn’t kill her. I’ve done a lot of bad things, but I didn’t kill her.” Back here was dark, muddy, seeping through the knees of my pants.

“I been watching you. Waiting for you. Thought I was gonna have to come after you. Then I hear you’re working for the county now that you’re a free man. Made a call. And here you are. Come to deliver paperwork. Just like the social services people when they took Lily away. They take your daughter and give you forms. Then they come back and tell you she ate a bottle of pills. And then there’s all that other paperwork to bury her.” He walked up to me, put the point of the knife to my neck. “You killed her. Sent her over the edge.”

I tried to hold my head still as I talked. “Not my fault.”

I could carry the blame for a lot of stuff. But not this. All I wanted was a new start. Fresh on the job. A blank slate.

He put the heel of his boot into my chest, my breath falling in sputters on the ground. “You took my daughter from me, you piece of shit. After all those years. The past is the past. But you never get out of it. You can let it go all you want, boy, but it ain’t up to you. It don’t let go of you.”

I thought he was talking about me. What I’d done. My parents. The time I’d spent in juvie. The week I was free before I’d been pushed around enough and went out looking for a fight and found it. The year and a half I went inside for the stabbing. Trouble inside. More trouble outside. Six months at Haven House, then on my own.

I was facedown on the ground, trying to push myself up. “Trouble’s a dog, son. A goddamned fucking dog. It gets your scent and hunts you down.” I thought he was talking about me.

He wasn’t.

“Yeah, I did some shit I ain’t proud of. Some ‘fucked-up, repugnant shit.’ That’s from a movie, son.” I was still struggling to get up, and he kicked my arms out from under me. I fell back into the dirt, hit the side of my head on a rock, something hidden just below the dark ground. “I thought I was clear. That I’d left it behind. Then Claudia, that’s my wife, she gets sick and leaves. Then Lily gets depressed because of your stupid shit. Says there ain’t no point anymore.” He looked at the buildings that held her paintings. “She got artistic. Woman at her school said that was good. An outlet.” He spit. “Outlet, my ass.”

He?” Caskey askedan H walked over to me. He was close enough that I could snap his neck, but I was past that. I was good now. I could get through this without violence. Let him talk. Let him free himself. Let him come through the pain, the broken glass in the belly like I had. Just let him talk.

“You understand what I’m saying to you?” He leaned into my ear. “Can you hear me?”

He turned his back on me, but I didn’t have the strength to get up. My eye was covered in dirt and blood. My head was liquid, moving around, looking for balance.

Five years ago I could have taken out his knee in a couple of seconds, sent an elbow into his Adam’s apple. Five years ago that is what I did. What sent me back inside. I didn’t want to go back inside. And I didn’t want that, that darkness he was talking about, back inside of me. If you’ve never felt it, then you don’t know what I’m talking about. The darkness that fills in from the edges. You think you can hold it back, but it seeps through like mud through door cracks.

He turned around to look at me. Take the knife, then I could settle him down. Talk to him. I didn’t want to have to break him. I didn’t want that life back.

“Claudia gone. Lily gone. All payback, son. For the shit I’d done when I was a young man.” He shook his head. “It comes after you. Takes a while, but it finds you.” He kneeled down near my face. “Like I found you. And that’s what I’m gonna do. You see, some people get bit by a dog and they get scared of dogs. They run and hide. Wet their pants when a dog barks.” He spit. “And some people, well, son, some people get mad at the fucking dog. Some people get real fuckin’ pissed at the dog. And some people find that dog and carve a fuckin’ hole in that piece of shit’s head to clean out the darkness.”

He aimed the knife at me, reached back into his belt for a pistol in the other hand. “You’re not the first piece of shit I’ve had to settle a score with.” He looked at me, then down to the bottom of the ravine. “You know how many bodies they’ve found down there?”

I didn’t say anything, kept my eyes on his. Tried to fight the desire to send my head into his jaw.

He said it again. “You know how many bodies they’ve found down there?” He leaned down into my face. “Not a goddamned one.”

I stood up, heart beating, filling my ears with thumps and blood. I was good now. The pressure coming back, again. I’d given up drugs. Pressing against the inside of my skull. I didn’t even cuss anymore. Pushing and pulling. Filling me. I could feel the blood moving out from my chest into my arms, my thighs. “I didn’t kill your daughter.”

My hands were still tied, which was fine. I didn’t need much freedom anymore.

• • •

I got back to the office in time for lunch. A birthday cake was there for Shirley. Her fortieth, so it was all black with balloons here and there in the office.

When I walked in through the side door, everyone stopped and looked up at me. The mud on my pants, dark stains on my arms. The painting I was holding. A ravine filled with text/css" href

“What are you making?” I asked my grandmother that afternoon. The heat outside was like a layer of the sun pressing down on us, and we’d picked purple hull peas until we’d filled all the baskets we had.

We’d walked across the fields back to her house, climbed up the cement steps, and used our elbows and chins to open the thin-metal screen door. A sprig from a dying nandina bush had gotten caught in the door. I’d reached back, snapped the branch like a finger, then closed the door behind me.

My grandmother had gotten old, bleach-stained sheets from the back room, the one my mother grew up in, the room she kept sealed like a tomb now, and spread the sheets on the floor. She’d picked up some cross-stitch from the seat as she sat down into her chair. “A little Christmas sampler for Ettie May,” she said. Then she pressed a button and the chair lowered her to a sitting position. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Maybe said a little prayer.

We shelled purple hull peas for an hour, popping the peas out of their shells, staining my fingers purple. She didn’t talk about the car crash that had killed my parents so many years ago. How it had been my fault. How she missed them every day. She didn’t talk about how we’d gone fifteen years after the funeral without seeing each other. How this was the fifth weekend in a row we’d been together, making up for lost time since I was trying to put things right, trying to fix what that one night had sent to pieces.