One Summer (8 page)

“Don’t do me any favors,” he said harshly, his fingers almost bruising the soft skin at the sides of her wrist as his grip tightened. “I’m not some kind of fucking charity case.”

Before Rachel could reply, before she could even think of a reply, he made an inarticulate sound under his breath that drew her gaze to his. For a second, the longest second that she ever remembered living through, Rachel held her breath at what she saw as his eyes moved over her face. His lips parted as if he would say something else, then they abruptly clamped shut. His eyes went as blank as if a curtain had fallen behind them. Without so much as a tug on her part to free herself, he removed his hand from her wrist and straightened, turning away.

As she watched him walk away, Rachel was suddenly frighteningly conscious of the accelerated beating of her heart.

7

H
e heard the unmistakable sound of a car approaching behind him. Johnny didn’t bother to look or stick out a thumb. Who in his right mind, here in Tylerville, would give him a ride? No one, that was who. He was Johnny Harris, murderer. People gave him a wider berth than a dead skunk.

Hell, he couldn’t even eat right. The memory of his humiliation over supper made him grit his teeth. He’d always eaten with the object of getting his food down before somebody else got to it. Manners and napkins and all that stuff had never been important. But they were important to
her
. So, damn it, he would learn to do it right. It gnawed at him, being made to look small in Rachel Grant’s eyes. It bothered him, too, that she had tried to give him money. An advance on his salary, she’d called it. He called it charity, and the idea of being the recipient of it burned him up.

A new-looking red pickup whooshed past, its bright color gleaming through the deepening twilight. For a moment Johnny looked after it almost enviously. There’d been a man and a woman and a little girl and a little boy wedged into that cab. A family. He’d always imagined having a family like that. Hell, in those years in prison
he’d imagined all kinds of things—imagining was what had kept him sane.

But this was here and now, reality. He was plodding along the side of a crumbling blacktop road that led through the poorest section of the county. Tumbledown frame farmhouses with yards full of junk were interspersed with one-story shacks with yards full of more junk. Kids, barefoot and dirty, played in waist-high weeds. Fat women in house dresses sat, bare knees apart, staring at him from rickety porches. Scrawny men in tank-style undershirts scratched their armpits and eyed him as he passed. Skinny, mangy dogs of no identifiable breed rushed toward him, barking.

Welcome home.

As awful as it was, he was a part of this place, and it was a part of him. He had once been one of those kids playing, as filthy and undernourished looking as they. His mom had been every bit as fat and slovenly as the women he shrank from now. His dad had been a mean son of a bitch, quick with fists and curses, and he’d worn only an undershirt every day he’d been at home. Probably, judging from the holes and stains that had always decorated it, the same one.

These were his people. Their experience of life was his. Their bad blood was in his genes.

Once, he’d hoped to escape.

Once. Hell, once he’d hoped for a lot of things.

It was a one-story frame house, every bit as ramshackle as the worst of those he’d passed, atop a small knoll. A gravel driveway led up to it. Two rusted-out pickup trucks were parked in the drive, one, having lost its tires, propped on cement blocks. Chickens scratched in the yard. Through the open front door he could see the flicker of a television.

Someone was home. Johnny didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry.

He walked up the driveway, stepped onto the porch,
and looked through the screen door with its innumerable small holes and tears.

A man lay on a sagging couch watching TV. An old man, grizzled and thin, in a raggedy, stained tank-style undershirt, nursing a bottle of cheap beer.

The sight made Johnny’s throat close.

Home. For better or worse, he was home.

He opened the door and walked in.

Willie Harris glanced up at him, appearing momentarily startled at the intrusion. Then recognition narrowed his eyes.

“You,” he said in a voice heavy with contempt. “I knew you’d turn up sooner or later, just like a damned bad penny. Get out of the way—you’re blockin’ the TV.”

“Hello, Dad,” Johnny said softly, not moving.

“I said move your ass!”

Johnny moved. Not because he was afraid of his father or his fists any longer, but because he wanted to see the rest of the house, see what had changed. He walked into the small kitchen with its chipped white enamel counters and the card table around which they’d always eaten—when there’d been something to eat. If it wasn’t the same card table—could something so flimsy have lasted so long?—the one there now was its twin, down to the chunk missing from the center of the top. Dirty dishes were piled beside the sink, as always, only now there were just a few of them. The same pink-flowered curtains, limper and dingier than ever, hung from the same sagging yellowed rod over the sink.

There were two tiny bedrooms and a minuscule, barely functional bathroom off the hall, just as there had always been. Johnny glanced into each, wondering if the double mattress that rested on the floor in the smaller of the two bedrooms was the same one on which he and Buck and Grady had always slept. Sue Ann, being the only girl, had had the living-room couch to herself. His parents had shared the bed in the other bedroom, until his mother had
taken off for Chicago with some guy. Then his father had slept in there with whichever slut he’d been humping at the time. Sometimes one or the other of the boys—usually Buck—had humped her, too.

Home.

He stepped back into the living room and switched off the TV.

“Damn you!” his father said, his face contorting with anger as he set the beer bottle down on the floor and sat up.

“How you been, Dad?” Johnny sat down at the end of the couch just made vacant by the removal of Willie’s bare feet and kept his father from getting up to turn the television back on by gently grasping his arm.

The beery, aged smell of the old man assaulted him.

“Goddamn you, get your goddamned hand off my arm!” Willie tried to jerk his arm free, without success. Johnny smiled at him and tightened his grip. Not enough to hurt, but just enough to warn. Things had changed, and he was no longer going to put up with a fist to the mouth or the stomach whenever his old man felt like lashing out.

“You living here alone now?”

“What the hell business is it of yourn? You’re sure as hell not movin’ in!”

Ten years of absence, during which Willie had never written, called, or visited his son, had softened Johnny’s memories of the old fart. He’d actually hoped that his father might be glad to see him.

“I don’t want to move in. I’ve got an apartment in town. I just came out to see how you are.”

“I was a hell of a lot better before you showed up.”

Nothing had changed. Hell, did anything ever change around this town?

“You heard from Buck or Sue Ann lately?”

Willie snorted. “What, do you think this is the goddamned Waltons or somethin’? No, I ain’t heard from
them. Don’t care to, neither. Just like I don’t care to hear from you.”

That hurt. It shouldn’t have, but it did.

Johnny thought about just getting up, walking out the door, and never coming back. He never had to see the old bastard again.

But he couldn’t let it alone. One thing he’d learned in prison was the value of things, of people. Of relationships. Most people had them without even trying. He wanted some relationships in his life.

“Look, Dad,” he said quietly. “You hate me and I hate you, right? That’s the way it’s always been. But it doesn’t have to be like that anymore. We can change it. There are too many people in this world who don’t have anybody. You want to die alone, have nobody grievin’ at your funeral? Hell, I don’t! We’re family, man. Blood. Can’t you see that?”

His father stared at him for a minute. Then he reached down for his beer and took a long pull. Watching him, Johnny felt hope aching inside him. Maybe, just maybe, they could start anew.

Willie put the bottle down and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“Hell, sounds like prison turned you into a damned pansy. Must’ve been all those peckers drillin’ you, made you into a damned cryin’ woman. I got no time for you. Get out of my house.”

For a moment Johnny battled the almost irresistible urge to smash his fist into his father’s leering face. Then, controlling himself, he dropped the scrawny arm he held and stood up.

“I hope you rot in hell, old man,” he said unemotionally, then turned on his heel and walked out.

The banging of the screen door behind him was the only answer he got.

He walked around the side of the house past the pickup trucks and up the drive a little way to where the shed had
once been. It still stood there, listing some to one side just as it always had. From the hen perched in a glassless window and the sounds from inside, he saw it was now used as a chicken coop.

He ducked his head through the low door and went inside.

It was still there. He’d hardly dared to hope, but there it was. It was covered with chicken shit, the tires were rotted to ribbons, and a hole was pecked in the vinyl seat so that the foam rubber showed through. But it leaned against the far wall just where he’d left it: his motorcycle.

God, he’d been proud of that thing! A Yamaha 750, cherry red and silver, bought with his own money earned doing odd jobs around town and cherished like a good-looking girl. When they’d come to arrest him, he’d parked it in the shed, little knowing that it would be almost eleven years before he made it back. Didn’t look as if it had been touched except by chickens in all that time.

As far as actual usage was concerned, it was still practically brand new. New tires, maybe a tuneup, and it should run as well as it ever had. He would no longer have to depend on his feet or Rachel Grant to get him around. He’d have wheels.

There was something empowering about having wheels. He’d felt less a man without them.

A low growl from somewhere behind him made Johnny glance over his shoulder. A dog stood in the doorway, huge, stiff-legged, hackles up, teeth bared. The sound that emanated from its throat was a threat.

Moving slowly, Johnny turned to face it. It was dark outside now, and darker yet in the shed. Faint moonlight silhouetted the animal’s body. A mangy cur like all the other mangy curs, a little bigger than most. Underfed, bred for meanness, probably dangerous.

They’d always had a dog like that. Big and ugly and full of hate, and no wonder. Willie would kick it and tease it
and chain it and starve it to make it mean. As mean as the old man himself.

Only this dog wasn’t chained.

The growl deepened, intensified. The animal’s head lowered menacingly. Johnny felt his muscles tense in anticipation of an attack. Glancing around, he sought for something, a chunk of wood or anything, with which to smash the creature when it leaped.

But it didn’t leap. Instead, after another rumbling growl, its head came up, and it seemed to sniff the air. A chicken fluttered and squawked off to the right, but the animal never so much as twitched an ear in the direction of the distraction. Instead it seemed to be staring intently at Johnny.

Struck by its attitude, almost as curious now as he was afraid, Johnny stared back. As his eyes traveled over the tawny pelt, absorbing such details as the shape of the head and ears and the thickness and length of the tail, an incredible possibility occurred to him.

The dog whined softly.

“Wolf?” It couldn’t be. The dog had been four years old when he’d been arrested. That would make him—fifteen now. An incredibly advanced age for a mongrel for whom mistreatment had been the norm.

“Wolf, is that you?” He’d loved the damned dog, as stupid as that sounded. The pup had been one of a litter borne by a stray who’d taken up residence in the rotting, abandoned barn that had stood in a nearby field. With his brothers and friends, Johnny had thrown rocks at the bitch and her whelps, but at night he’d sneaked back over with pans full of food scraps. The bitch had never lost her wariness of him, but the pups had, particularly the largest one, who took to him like a duckling to its mother. One day, when the pups were about seven weeks old, he found the mother lying dead out by the road. Not knowing what else to do with them, he fetched the pups home. He should have known better. His father had promptly tossed four of
the five squirming, licking little creatures into the back of his truck and driven them off to dump them God knew where. The fifth, Wolf, had been allowed to stay because of his size and because Willie thought that he had the makings of a good watchdog. Despite Johnny’s protests, Willie had immediately chained Wolf and set about making him mean. Though Johnny had tried to protect the dog, his father had succeeded with him, to the extent that Johnny was about the only person in the world the animal had ever had any use for.