Night & Demons (59 page)

“Morning!” Ribaud called as he unlatched the door.

There were shelves on both long walls of the store’s interior, and another row of displays down the axis divided the floor into two narrow aisles.

Parry sat at the front behind his cash register. He was a fat, clean-shaven man of forty-five or so who spent most of his time in the store now that his sons were grown.

“Morning,” he replied, his eyes fixed frankly on Ribaud’s face. He touched the closed cabinet behind his swivel chair. “That pint not hold you?”

Ribaud glanced around. He and the owner were alone in the store. “I might pick up another at that,” he said. “But what I really had in mind was some information.”

Parry said nothing.

“What I wanted to know,” Ribaud went on, “was if you knew a fellow maybe five-foot eight or thereabout, heavy set. I’d judge his age about thirty-five or so. He’s got black hair, thick and curly in front, but the back of his head’s all scarred.”

The storekeeper’s face was no longer friendly, even in a disinterested way. His tones were clipped as he said, “I might know somewhat of that. Whereabouts did you hear of this feller?”

Ribaud licked his lips, a little taken aback by the obvious hostility. He looked around the empty store again before saying, “Well, I . . .”

His mind stumbled over the phrasing. “I thought I saw him around my cabin this morning. I was just curious, you see.”

“I’ll thank you to take your jokes back out onto the highway,” Parry snapped. “I don’t know whose idea this was but you can tell them not to try it on me again.”

“For God’s sake!” Ribaud blurted. “Nobody told me a thing. I was up at the spring clearing my water filter half a hour ago, and I saw this fellow come out of my cabin. He didn’t take anything—I just want to know who he is.”

Parry squinted. There was still suspicion in his look but he said, “This feller, what was he wearing?”

“A flannel shirt and jeans—or some kind of dark blue trousers,” Ribaud answered promptly. “No hat, and I didn’t pay any attention to his shoes.”

“Well, that’s the way he looked the last time I saw him too,” Parry said. “With the hair that way, it couldn’t be anybody but Jack Cutshall noways. He got burnt on Saipan when a gas dump blew up.”

“Umm,” Ribaud murmured, uncertain about what to say next.

Parry leaned back in his chair and added, “Yeah, it’s going on twenty years now that we buried Jack. I reckon somebody’s funnin’ with you, son.”

The door jangled open to admit two youths in jeans and T-shirts. Ribaud stood silent while they gathered up bread, soft drinks, and a carton of cigarettes; paid; and thundered away in a new-looking pickup truck.

With the store quiet again, he said to Parry, “Don’t I remember the real estate agent saying the cabin I’m in belongs to a Cutshall?”

“Un-huh,” the storekeeper agreed, “That’d be Myra, old Jack’s daughter. She lives down to Asheville. Did when Jack got killed, too, her mother’d had about enough of Jack and she’d left him. Marion —Jack’s wife she was—she died herself some two, three years back, I’m told.”

“What, ah . . .” Ribaud said. “What happened to Cutshall?”

Parry rubbed his neck and looked around the store while he made up his mind. At last he said, “Well, I don’t see it can do any harm to say now. There’s been talk, you know, but I guess if you’re gonna be a son of a bitch all your life like Sam Barnard has, you get used to people talking about you.”

Ribaud took a handful of change out of his pocket and walked over to the soft drink machine. “Have something?” he asked the storekeeper.

“A Coke, mebbe,” Parry answered. While Ribaud fed the machine, Parry went on, “Well, the thing to remember is both Jack and Sam were meaner’n snakes. They were blockading together for a while—makin’ white liquor. Had their still set up right on the Tennessee line so they could carry it either way if ever the state law come up one side or the other.

“They was doing all right but Jack, he never had a civil tongue. I don’t know he was playing with a full deck ever since his hair got blowed off. Left him deaf as a post, that did, too. Never wore his hearing aid, just talked all the more. Jack was a marine, you see, and he was always and forever saying that the army never had a man in it with the guts to make a marine.”

Ribaud handed him a bottle. The storekeeper drank deeply, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“He knew damn well,” Parry continued, “that Sam Barnard had been in the army and he didn’t take kindly to that sort of talk. One thing led to another, and before long, the two of them’d split up. The rest of us set around makin’ bets on which one was gonna kill the other.”

“You mean you knew there was going to be a murder before it even happened?” Ribaud said in disbelief. “Didn’t somebody do something?”

“Son, around here, you always know about a murder ahead of time,” Parry replied calmly. He drained the rest of his soda in a great swallow. “That don’t mean it’s healthy to mix in another man’s quarrel.”

He belched.

“Well, anyhow,” the storekeeper continued, “Sam got in first. He’s a cold-codded bastid, but nobody ever said he couldn’t shoot. Jack lived down the road the same place you’re in yourself, now. One Sunday morning—”

Parry paused. Two dump trucks passed outside, shaking the frame building and filling it with their roar.

“One Sunday,” he resumed, “Dace Rowan come tearin’ in here yelling he’d heard two shots when he was going by the Cutshall place and how ’bout a few of us riding back up there with him. He was a deppity shurrif, you see, but he wasn’t in too big a hurry to go busting into Sam’s doings alone. There’d already been words passed between them two over the whiskey business.”

“My God,” Ribaud muttered. He refused the cigarette Parry offered him and waited, half-sitting on the check-out counter while the storekeeper smoked a few puffs.

“There was three or four of us in the store,” Parry continued, “so I just locked up and we all went over in Dace’s car to take a look. Sure ’nough, there was Jack layin’ out in front of his cabin, dead as dead, and a hole you could stick your fist into through the center of his chest.”

Ribaud’s eyes narrowed. His tongue trembled over describing what he had seen this morning. Instead, he asked, “Barnard was convicted, then?”

“No, can’t say he was,” the storekeeper admitted with a frown. “Tell the truth, they never tried him, even. No evidence, you see. Course, everybody knew Sam’d done it, but the s’licitor says that wan’t proof and he didn’t have a damn thing more to go on.”

He shrugged. “So that’s where it ended, some talk and Sam leavin’ the county for a few years. He’s back now, but I don’t guess he was missed.”

“But they had bullets to match, didn’t they?” Ribaud protested, dredging up notions of police procedure from mystery novels. “Had, ah, Barnard gotten rid of the gun or something?”

Parry laughed with the amused tolerance of a mountaineer for a man who had never fired a gun in his life. “You see, son,” he explained, “Sam had himself a .222, ’bout the first one in the county. It don’t have a big bullet, but it pushes it along pretty
god
dam fast. If it hits something solid, why, thet bullet
blows
up.”

He pursed his lips. “Leastways, that’s what the bullet what hit Jack done. Bruk his spine and nigh tore his breastbone outa him. I don’t guess there was a scrap of thet bullet left bigger ’n a pinhead. They sent what they could find to Raleigh, but hell, them folk back there couldn’t even say what kinda gun had shot it. Course, we
knew
that.”

“Oh,” Ribaud said. It was as if he had been told that ice sinks in water.

“Matter of fact,” the storekeeper continued, “there was people what said Sam never did it neither.”

He opened the front door and tossed his cigarette butt out onto the gravel drive. “Mostly Sam’s kin, a course, but they had some others with ’em. Said Dace had heard two shots plain. Jack’s gun was still in the cabin, so the other shot wan’t him—and there wan’t no way Sam Barnard was gonna miss a man clean at a hundert yards.”

“A hundred yards?” Ribaud echoed weakly.

“Yeah, we figger whoever done it was up in that clump of pine by the spring —”

“I know the one you mean.” Ribaud’s mouth was beginning to feel sticky. He wished he had not just drunk the Coke. He was pretty sure Parry would not let him drink anything stronger in the store while he was open for business.

“We didn’t find much up there when we looked,” Parry went on. “Some needles mussed, but pinestraw don’t take tracks. Sam musta hiked over the mountain, leavin’ his car on one of the back roads. Nobody chanced on the car not that it would’ve proved much if they had. I don’t know what Sam did with the other shot neither, but I guess we all of us miss once or twice in our lives.”

“Umm,” said Ribaud. He drew a five-dollar bill from his wallet. “Well. Look, maybe I will take another pint if you have one handy.”

Parry glanced out the door, then slipped a pint of Bourbon Supreme from the cabinet behind him and quickly sheathed it in two paper bags. Ribaud took the bottle and pocketed his two quarters change. Nodding to Parry, he left the store.

Ribaud took a quick swig of the liquor before starting his car, and another drink when he parked the Mustang beside his cabin.

Everything in the cabin was just as he had left it.

On Thursday Ribaud dropped into Parry’s again. He caught sight of his face in the glass of the door. He was looking drawn.

A lanky, gray-haired man wearing a stained suede jacket stood at the back of the store, mulling over the display of fishing rods. Parry nodded hello as Ribaud walked in, but he shook his head when the writer pointed his thumb at the Coke machine. Ribaud got himself an orange soda and began toying with the nail-clipper/key-chains on display beside the cash register.

A dump truck rumbled by the store, backfiring as the driver changed down.

“Naw, I’ll let you keep what you got there till you come down on the price,” called the man looking at fishing tackle. “Reckon I could get the same rig five dollar cheaper in Asheville.”

“So go to Asheville, Sam,” the storekeeper replied without concern.

“Reckon I may,” the other man said with a snort.

He turned around and walked toward the front of the store. He was about Ribaud’s height and looked to be in his mid-50s. The checked shirt beneath his jacket had, like his jeans, been too long since the last washing.

The man’s face was merely sour for a moment; then his eyes, as gray as concrete, focused on Ribaud. The man halted. All the hard lines went out of his visage, leaving behind a slackness all the more shocking for being unexpected on a face that harsh.

“What in hell bit you, Sam?” Parry asked callously. The only exit from the store was through the front, where Ribaud stood in the aisle beside Parry.

“Who are you?” Sam asked in a savage whisper.

Color rushed back into his face. His right hand eased toward his sagging jacket pocket.

The cash register clanged as Parry hit the “No Sale” key. “None of that!” the fat man snapped in a tone of authority. “Have you gone crazy, Sam Barnard?”

The lanky man cursed and darted for the door. Ribaud jumped aside to let him pass.

When the door slammed shut, Parry gave a sigh of relief. He replaced the worn revolver he had taken from the cash drawer.

Ribaud tried to set down his soft drink bottle. It banged on the edge of the counter and spilled across the Formica.

“Jesus God!” the storekeeper breathed. He reached down for an old undershirt to serve as a wiping rag. “What have you been saying to Sam Barnard? I’ve seen him with federal marshals after him and never lookin’ that petered out!”

“I never saw him before,” Ribaud croaked. He clasped his hands tight together, but the sickly trembling inside would not stop. He felt something walking over his grave.

An engine roared in the parking strip. An old Buick shot away from the store. Barnard was hunched over its wheel like a frightened harpy.

“Well, he seen
you
before, son,” Parry stated needlessly. He looked sharply at the writer. “Say,” he continued, “you wouldn’t a been talking to anybody about what you asked me Sunday, would you?”

“Not a soul,” Ribaud insisted. “Hell, I don’t know—”

The brakes of a dump truck squealed. The high-pitched sound continued for what seemed to be minutes, long after the beginning of the hideous rending crash of the track’s front bumper crushing the Buick which had slid into its path in Barnard’s haste to leave.

The truck stopped just short of the steel guardrail. The Buick continued on, bouncing and clanging for a hundred and fifty feet into the bed of the stream beneath.

Parry shook his head. He draped the rag on the edge of the wastebasket to dry.

“Well,” he said, “I was wrong. I always figgered Sam Barnard’d die with somebody’s bullet in him.”

On Sunday Ribaud found himself awake before dawn. For an hour or so he lay in bed, trying to get back to sleep. At last he got up and made coffee.

It was chilly in the cabin, even after Ribaud had built up the fire in the stove.

After half an hour of indecision, Ribaud abandoned the still-blank piece of paper in his typewriter. He got into his car and drove to the store.

Parry’s Ford was parked in the lot. Parry, as expected, was seated comfortably beside the doorway. His face took on a guarded expression when he saw Ribaud.

“How’s it going, Parry?” the writer asked.

“Not so bad up here.” The storekeeper scratched his head, then added, “You know, son, there’s been some talk about you. How you start asking questions about Sam Barnard and then he lights out lookin’ as close to scared as anybody ever seed him. Like you might be some kinda law. Eh?”

“I’m not,” Ribaud said.

He tried to laugh, but the sound did not come out the way he would have wished. He had seen Parry’s gun, and he did not want to learn whether the storekeeper would use it to keep from being arrested on liquor law violations.

“Besides,” Ribaud went on, “I wasn’t asking about Barnard, I was asking about my cabin. Maybe whoever was fooling around there called on Barnard, too.”