Shallow Graves (18 page)

“Damn, what a woman. You ever fire it?”

“What good’s a gun unless you fire it? But try getting the black powder smell out of your silk undies.”

“Not a problem I have.”

“Sam and I take it out to the range sometimes. Hard to find ammo, of course.”

“That’s what I wanted to borrow.”

“Ammunition?”

“Your son.”

“The bomb expedition?” She nodded.

“Yep. It okay?”

Meg said, “You ever known any parent to mind when somebody says he’ll take your child off your hands for a few hours?” She called Sam then turned back to Pellam. “Oh, before I forget . . . The Apple Festival is Saturday afternoon. You interested in seeing it?”

“I guess. You’ll be there?”

“It’s a family thing.”

What was that supposed to mean?
You’ll be there it’s a family thing.
He waited a second for more messages; when he got none, he said, “Sure. Look forward to it.”

Sam appeared. “Hey, Mr. Pellam, we gonna look at bombs?”

“You bet, Sam.”

“All right! Can we go in the camper?”

“That’s the only wheels I got.”

“Can I, Mom?”

“Sure, just be back by six for dinner.”

“Mr. Pellam, this place is the greatest. They got red ones and green ones and they got mortar shells that Dad says they don’t have powder in them anymore and hand grenades. . . .”

“Do not, under any circumstances, buy him anything.”

Pellam laughed, “Yes, ma’am.”

They got into the camper.

“Hey, Sam, you know, one thing’d be fun?”

“What, Mr. Pellam?”

“Why don’t you bring your metal detector along?”

“My metal detector?”

“I have this collection?” Pellam said. “And whenever I’m in a new town I like to add to it.”

“I collect dinosaurs. And baseball cards. And pro-wrestling cards, of course.” Sam jumped down out of the Winnebago and ran into the house.

Energy. Where do they get it?

He was back in two minutes.

“You need batteries?”

“Nope. They’re recharged. I used nicads. What do you collect, Mr. Pellam? Coins?”

He said, “Bullet casings.”

Sam said, “Wow.”

AS IT TURNED
out, Pellam liked the bombs as much as Sam did.

This particular junkyard was a lot classier than R&W. He remembered it from the poker boys’ list. It sold mostly what the name promised: army surplus, which seemed to be in pretty good supply despite what Bobby (or Billy) had said. Vehicle parts, cartridge boxes, portable latrines, tools, tents, flashlights. All solid, olive-drab, functional. A lot of things that you couldn’t use for much other than paperweights: bombsights and old altimeters and doughboy helmets that wouldn’t even make good planters.

But the bombs, yeah, they were great. All different colors. Different shapes. Some pointed like rockets, some rounded like old-time airplane bombs. Jesus, they were huge. Pellam cautiously tapped one. Hollow.

Sam said, “They’re just practice bombs. You don’t have to worry.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Pellam said.

“You looked like you were afraid it was going to go off.”

“Ha, ha.”

Sam showed him mortar shells, concussion grenades and bayonets, mean-looking things with deep blood grooves up the side. Most of the knives were still wrapped in sticky creosote.

Despite what Meg had told him, he wanted to buy the kid a bomb. They were only fifty bucks. Then he admitted he really wanted one for himself. One of the
deep blue ones. He wanted to mount it on the front of the Winnebago.

No—what he really wanted was to buy one and mail it, C.O.D., to Alan Lefkowitz, c/o Big Mountain Studios, Santa Monica Boulevard, Century City, California. . . .

Then Sam decided it was time to look for bullet casings. They climbed back into the camper and drove ten minutes out of town, parked and started hiking.

They walked through the woods, following what was a pretty clearly marked trail. The boy had a box over his shoulder and carried a short metal rod with a disk attached. He had a headset around his neck. They were by themselves. The day was very quiet. Sam kept looking up at Pellam as if he expected him to say something brilliant.

“You think you’re going to find bullets here?” the boy asked.

“You never know.”

“Like from hunters?”

“Right.”

“You hunt, Mr. Pellam?”

“Yep. Haven’t for a while. My father and I used to go out all the time.”

“Where’s he live?”

Pellam glanced at him. “He died few years ago.”

“Like Grandpa Wold.”

“That’s your mother’s name? Wold?”

“Un-huh. She’s got a gun, my mom. Grandpa gave it to her. It’s an old one. Mom and me shoot it sometimes down by the river. Wow, it makes this totally loud noise, really loud. And it knocked me over nearly.”

He set down the metal detector and illustrated shooting the gun and falling backwards. He lay on the ground, still.

Pellam looked down at him, alarmed. “Hey, you okay? Are you all right?”

“Sure!” He jumped up. “My dad doesn’t hunt much. We go fishing sometimes. What’d you hunt?”

“Pheasant, duck, geese.”

Sam asked, “You like football?”

“I used to play.”

“Yeah, I knew it! Where? Pro, I’ll bet.”

He laughed loud. “Pro? I’m about a hundred pounds light for that. Naw, just in high school.”

“Quarterback, right?”

“Receiver. I figured it was better to get jumped by one or two big guys instead of four or five.”

“What’s it like to score a TD? Running over the line. I like the way, you know, how they run over the line and then drop the ball like it’s nothing to them. That’s so neat! What’s it like?”

“I didn’t score that many. I wasn’t that good.”

“Sure you were!” the boy countered. “I’ll bet you saved the team. When was that? A couple years ago?”

“More like twenty.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Holy cow, you’re older than my mom. You don’t look old.”

Pellam laughed. He’d forgotten how completely kids nuked your careful adult delusions.

“Hey, Mr. Pellam, can we like practice passing sometime? My mom tries but she’s a girl and all, you know. Maybe you and me could practice, you could give me some tips. My dad, well, he’s busy a lot of the time. All he cares about is his job.”

Pellam knew enough not to get into that one. He said, “We’ll see.”

“My mom’d like it if you stayed around for a while. She likes you, I can tell.”

Or into that one either.

They came to a ridge that overlooked the parking lot where Marty had died. The lot was about three hundred yards away. There was only one other high point that Pellam could see that had a view of the lot and that one was five hundred yards. Not an impossible shot with a good scope but this would be the more likely spot for a sniper. Also, this faced the rear of the parking lot, and, if Marty had parked head in, would offer the car’s gas tank as a target.

Still, it’d be a bitch of a shot in any kind of breeze, and on a warm day—as that day had been—heat waves from the valley beneath would have blurred the line of sight.

“Okay, Sam, go to work. Find me what you can.”

The boy wandered back and forth for ten minutes, retrieving two mashed Coors cans and a quarter (“It’s yours, son”). Suddenly he shrieked and ran up to Pellam with a .22 long rifle cartridge in his hand.

“Nope, too small. I’m looking for centerfire. You know the difference?”

“No, sir.”

“Firing pin hits a .22 on the rim of the shell. So they’re called rimfire. Bigger calibers hit the percussion cap in the center. They’re called centerfire.”

“Wow, that’s neat.”

“Come here, I’ll show you.” Sam frowned, then his eyes went wide, as Pellam opened his jacket and
pulled a gun from his waistband. It was an 1876 Colt, steel with dark rosewood grips.

“Wow,” the boy whispered.

Pellam kept the gun pointed at the ground. “Always pretend a gun is loaded, even if you know it isn’t, and always pretend that it could go off at any minute. So you never point it at anything unless you’re prepared to shoot it. Got it?”

“I got it. That’s a cowboy gun.”

“It’s a Colt Peacemaker, a .45.” He opened the thumb cover and with the ejector rod eased the shell out. He held the end up for the boy to see. “There, that’s the cap in the center. The pin on the hammer hits the cap and that sets off the powder.”

“Can you take me shooting, Mr. Pellam? Please?”

“Let’s talk to your parents about it. Maybe.”

“Shoot something. Will you?”

“Not now, Sam. It’s not a toy.” He put the gun back in his waistband. “Let’s find me my cartridges.”

With even more enthusiasm the boy swept the detector over the ground. Pellam wasn’t paying much attention to him, he was looking at the dark patch of plowed-over earth in the distance, the parking lot, where Marty’d died a horrible death. He didn’t notice the boy stoop down and pick up something then come racing over to him.

“Look what I found, Mr. Pellam. Look!”

Sam dropped the two cartridges into his hand. They were .30 caliber, though the length was odd, stubbier than a .30-30 or .30-06, bigger than a Garand.

“Good job, Sam.” He patted the beaming boy on his shoulders. “Just what I’m looking for.” He dropped the cartridges into his pocket.

“You show me your collection someday, Mr. Pellam?”

“You bet, Sam. Time to get home.”

“Aw . . .”

Together they walked down the mountain, swapping fishing stories.

THAT NIGHT, SAM
upstairs, and Keith still at the company, Meg Torrens ate a turkey sandwich with cold cranberry sauce and drank a glass of white wine, reading the headlines and the first paragraphs of all the stories in the
New York Times.

She heard the clicks and tiny pops of the hundred-year-old house, the muffled roar of the furnace coming on—something reassuring about the way its simple brain kicked the machinery on and coursed hot water through the pipes. It would shut off and there’d be moments of complete, muffled silence.

She finished the Arts section, dropped the paper and walked upstairs to Sam’s room.

“Hi, Mommy.”

She walked to his computer.

“Tell me again. You dial, then what do you say?” Meg looked at the computer.

“Aw, Mom,” Sam said. He was tired, it was nearly nine. “It’s a modem. Nobody says anything. You just get a tone. That means you’re on-line.”

“Show me.” In the master bedroom the clock radio played a sad country-western tune, an old Patsy Cline song.

Sam bent over the keyboard and typed rapidly. Meg and Keith spent thirty dollars a month for access to a current events database, which Sam had learned
contained a sports submenu; they’d ended up with huge overages one month when he’d printed out the starting lineups of every baseball team since 1956.

He picked up the phone, dialed, his mouth twisted with exasperation, though Meg knew he was tickled to show off this esoteric knowledge. A squeal came from the phone. He held it toward her like a ray gun. “Zap, zap, zap!” And pressed a button on a small box. The computer screen came to life.

“You’re on-line, Mom. What do you want to look up?”

“A name. I want to look up a man’s name.”

She typed in some characters. The response come back in five seconds. Meg scrolled through the text. “How do I print it?”

“You either do a screen dump or download the whole file.”

Where did they learn this stuff?

“Just tell me what to push.”

“Here.” Sam happily hit a button, and the raspy matrix printer began its satisfying sound.

Reminded her of the Polaroid.

Bzzzzt.

The sound lasted for some time. There was a lot to print.

APPLES.

A thousand apples, a hundred thousand. A million.

Pellam’d never seen so many apples in his life. And in so many forms. Apple pies, fritters, turnovers, apple butter, jelly, pickled apples and candied apples. You could dunk for them. You could buy them fresh by the bushel, buy them dried and painted and glued together into wreaths and wall hangings shaped like geese and pigs.

There were girls dressed up like apples. All the boys seemed to have round, rouge cheeks.

A woman tried to sell him a chance to win a Dutch apple pie by tossing a ring onto a board with apples nailed onto it.

“I don’t really care for apples,” he told her.

The football field was filled with more than a thousand people, milling through the booths, playing the games and examining the junk for sale—sweaters, wooden trinket boxes, clocks made from driftwood, ceramic, macrame. Janine had a jewelry booth. Pellam had homed in on it right away, waited until she was busy making a sale, and did the obligatory appearance.
All she had time to say was “Dinner tomorrow, remember?”

He nodded.

“At four. Don’t you forget, lover boy.” She winked and blew him a kiss, her face glowing.

Pellam estimated half the crowd was tourists, half was locals. No one older than seventeen seemed exactly sure why they were there. The tourists were catching the tail of some indigenous upstate experience—
the country, the country!
—and holding on for a while, buying vases, jewelry, decorations, food to take back to their Manhattan apartments. The Cleary moms and dads were gossiping and doing some serious eating. The kids, of course, were the only ones really enjoying themselves because for them it was nothing more than tons of apples. And who needed more than that on a nice fall day?

No more ’Roids. He’d left the camera in the camper. Now, he was just another tourist scoping out the leaves, the booths, the scenery.

The Toyota showed up five minutes later, racing through the parking lot and skidding to a stop on the crumbling asphalt. Meg saw him right away and waved. Keith wasn’t with her but Sam was. The boy waved energetically. He wondered if Sam had said anything about Pellam’s tendency to collect lethal weapons.

Like the other night at dinner, she looked ten years younger than the upstate matron who’d visited him in the clinic. Her hair wasn’t teased and stiff but was tied back in a ponytail. She wore tight jeans and a dark paisley high-necked blouse under a suede jacket. A silver antique pin was at her throat.