Strong Cold Dead (10 page)

Rawls drew the soap-stuffed sock back overhead when Candy kept whimpering, tightening herself into a protective ball. He felt the rage over her refusal to respond simmering inside him, the sock in motion again before he even realized what he was doing.

Whop!

It impacted with a sound like a shovel digging deep into a hard-packed pile of dirt. Cray Rawls smelled lavender from the broken pieces of the stale soap, his mind taking him back to the sweet scent of pecan trees in the summer, when he'd spend the night outside while his mother's “regulars” paid a visit.

“I grew up not far from here,” Rawls heard himself tell Candy. “I did my best to erase it from my memory, did my best to make some good of it. But now I'm back, my life in the hands of some pissant jury. And you know what, Candy?”

Whop!

He struck her again when she refused to acknowledge him, the broken soap bars splintering into smaller chunks.

“I don't care if they find me guilty. Let the system take its best shot, throw everything it's got at me. 'Cause you know the ultimate power in the universe? Not giving a shit. When you don't give a shit, nobody can scare you, nobody can hurt you. Do you give a shit, Candy?”

When she failed to answer him, Rawls hit her again, twice. Her breathing had gone shallow and raspy, coming so fast it mostly swallowed her whimpers and sobs.

“What's it feel like?” he demanded, glowering over her. “Tell me, so I know. Tell me, so I can know my mother.”

Whop!

Rawls's thin sock exploded on impact this time, shedding soap fragments that clacked against the nearest wall. He almost told Candy how he'd taken up boxing, only to find he had no talent for the sport other than to be everyone else's punching bag. Which suited him just fine. He liked getting hurt, battered, pummeled into oblivion until he hit the mat and surrendered to the world, the same way sleep had come to him as a little boy, to spare him the grunts and groans coming from his mother's bedroom. And when he couldn't sleep, he'd scratch at his skin with a fingernail, and later a roofing nail, to make himself hurt, because somehow that deadened the real pain.

Rawls reached down to grab hold of Candy, but he found himself crouching over her and then lowering his knees to the cheap, mite-infested rug before he could find purchase. Felt himself yanking her pants down past her hips, just enough, and then pushing himself inside her.

Candy gasped, something that started as a scream blowing hot, moist breath up onto Rawls as he thrust himself in and out, in and out, in and out … knowing the muffled sounds that came out of her, all too well.

The sounds of his mother, coming from the next room.

But beneath him now.

“What does it feel like?” Rawls heard himself demand. “Tell me what it feels like!”

Candy didn't, so he kept up with his thrusting, her head ping-ponging lightly against the wall with each entry. She'd gone slack, limp, resignation and shock claiming her features, making Rawls think she really was a department store mannequin that his mind had turned real. He imagined she smelled like plastic instead of musty clothes and stale perfume. Imagined taking a match to her and smelling burning plastic as she melted beneath him.

Then Candy's face morphed into his mother's, and Cray Rawls kept thrusting anyway, hurting her as all those men had, the two of them sharing all that pain.

“How does it feel?” he heard himself ask. “How does it feel?”

Tomorrow a jury thought it would be deciding Rawls's fate, with no idea what he had going a thousand miles away. What he'd lucked into that would make him richer than all the sons of bitches whose asses he'd had to kiss, who had left him with the same feeling that getting pummeled in the ring did. Leaving their offices or private dining rooms as dazed as he was when somebody had to help him up from the mat. He welcomed that direct form of combat, as opposed to the more subtle brand practiced in the boardroom, even though he'd never left a conference table with his nose busted.

But all that was about to change, regardless of the verdict that came down tomorrow. He was about to be the force doing the pummeling, shooting the bird to his wretched past, his mother, and everything else.

“How does it feel?” he asked Candy again, pulling out of her for the last time.

Rawls stood up, yanking up his pants and peeling hundred-dollar bills from the wad in his pocket.

“Because it feels great to me.”

 

18

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“That all you have to say, Cort Wesley?” Caitlin asked him.

Cort Wesley pressed the phone against his ear, his truck's headlights digging through the first of the night. “No, besides thanks for keeping me out of jail.”

“You've got Captain Tepper to thank for that.”

“I don't know, maybe I should've let things be. Maybe getting hit by an ax handle would knock some sense into Dylan.”

“How many of the workers you take down?”

“I didn't keep count. However many it was won't be working anytime soon. Likely be filing for workman's comp tomorrow.”

“They're probably not eligible.”

“You're breaking my heart.”

“What'd you break of theirs?”

An uneasy silence settled between them, but Cort Wesley felt a smile push itself through it. He pulled a hand from the steering wheel to feel around the bruise left by one of the cops pushing his face into the ground. But he had trouble driving the truck with the hand left to that task. It was tough to close the fingers that had swelled up at the knuckles from the blows he'd struck against the workmen.

“The attack was planned, Ranger, not random. Like those construction workers got word from somebody to take the offensive.”

“What's your point?”

Cort Wesley started to take a deep breath but stopped. “What time did your meeting wrap up in Houston?”

“Five o'clock. What makes you ask?”

“Because fifteen minutes later, the trouble here all started. You think that was a coincidence, Ranger, or somebody sending a message?”

*   *   *

Cort Wesley wished he had some ice to wrap around his swollen hand. Funny how he never remembered them hurting after he got into scrapes years back; they probably did, just not as much—or maybe he was just too young and stupid to pay attention. Like his sons, who were young and not stupid at all, although you wouldn't know it sometimes.

Looks like I'm not going to win father of the year …

Not with Luke ready to quit his fancy prep school because he couldn't room with his ex-boyfriend, while Dylan had dropped out of Brown University to protest oil drilling on his Indian girlfriend's reservation.

“That's ‘Native American' these days, bubba,”
the spectral shape of Leroy Epps said from the passenger seat, tipping the neck of a root beer bottle back against his lips.

 

19

B
OERNE,
T
EXAS

“Was I talking to you, champ?”

“Think, talk—same thing from where I be. I heard you thinking that, just like I heard you wishing you could ice your sore hand.”
Leroy flashed the root beer bottle. Cort Wesley was able to see through him in parts, as clear as through the glass.
“Guess you forgot about your cooler. Hope you don't mind me taking your last one.”

“I've developed a taste for the stuff, thanks to you.”

“Notice you only buy real Hires, flavored with genuine sarsaparilla. I'd take my hat off to you if I wore one.
” The ghost of his old friend watched Cort Wesley trying to flex the life back into his swollen fingers.
“In my day, we had to box once a month instead of a year. Know how I'd heal my hands fast? Go out and catch as many bees as I could hold and squeeze until they stung me.
”

“I'll give it a try.”

“Don't crack wise with me, bubba.”

Cort Wesley found himself thinking about old Leroy's funeral, which prison officials had let Cort attend, in a potter's field for inmates who didn't have any relatives left to claim the body. He'd been the only one standing at the graveside, besides the prison chaplain, when Mexican laborers had lowered the plank coffin into the ground. Cort Wesley tried to remember what he'd been thinking that day, but it was hard because he'd done his best to erase those years not just from his memory but also from his very being. One thing he did remember was that the service was the first time he'd smelled the talcum powder Leroy Epps had used to hide the stench of the festering sores caused by the diabetes that ultimately killed him.

Cort Wesley looked back toward the passenger seat, half expecting Leroy to be gone. But he was still there, sipping from the bottle of root beer clasped in a thin, liver-spotted hand. His lips were pale pink and crinkled with dryness. The thin light radiating from the truck's dashboard cast his brown skin in a yellowish tint. The diabetes that had planted him in the ground had turned Leroy's eyes bloodshot and had numbed his limbs years before the sores and infections set in. As a boxer, Leroy had fought for the middleweight crown on three different occasions. He'd been knocked out once and had the belt stolen from him through paid-off judges' scorecards two other times. He'd been busted for killing a white man in self-defense and had died three years into Cort Wesley's four-year incarceration, but ever since he always seemed to show up when he was needed the most. Whether a ghostly specter or a figment of Cort Wesley's imagination, Cort Wesley had given up trying to figure out. He just accepted the fact of Leroy's presence and was grateful that Leroy kept coming around to help him out of one scrape after another.

“As I was saying
,” old Leroy resumed,
“you sure know how to pick 'em
.
”

“As in…”

“Fights, bubba. I don't know what was more fun, watching you mix it up with that principal lady at your youngest's school or frying the grits of those side busters fixing to turn your oldest into mashed potatoes.”

“You sure have a way with words, champ.”

“What do you expect, you being the only live person I'm on a speaking basis with and all? No different now than it was back in the Walls, I suppose, the thing being a man's gotta know when it's time to choose his words carefully.”

“There a message in there somewhere meant for me?”

Cort Wesley watched old Leroy swirl the remnants of his root beer about the bottom of the bottle, wanting to savor the last sips.
“Not of my making, bubba. But now that you mention it…”

“Oh boy…”

“I find myself agreeing with you.”

“About what?”

“What you told the Ranger lady, about something spurring those workmen to action when it did. Men like that don't do nothing unless somebody's telling them to do it.”

“Any more pearls of wisdom to cover the price of the Hires, champ?”

“I apologize for drinking your last one, bubba
,
”
Epps said, swirling the last of the root beer about the bottle again as he fixed his gaze out the windshield.
“Always darkest where the road bends, like it's hiding what's around the next curve. What do you think it'd be like for a man if he could see around those curves instead of just straight ahead?”

“I imagine he'd be prepared for anything.”

“'Cepting that goes against the grain of nature on both sides of the plane, bubba. See, I can tell you where it's darkest, but I can't see through the paint no better than you can.”

“Is there a point in there somewhere?”

“Just this: what happens when you shine your high beams into a Texas fog bank?”

“The light bounces back at you.”

“Meaning…?”

“You've got to make do with whatever path your headlights can carve.”

“There you go, then.”

“I do?”

Leroy Epps drained the rest of the Hires and blew air into the bottle to make a wind sound.
“You wanna know what's coming, when the best you can do is slow down and be ready when it gets here.”

“You talking about my boys, champ?”

“We travel a winding road, bubba, not a straightaway,”
he resumed.
“Best we can do is keep those we love from straying onto the pavement and getting turned into roadkill.”

Cort Wesley took his eyes off the ghost to refocus on the road. When he looked back, Leroy was gone.

Cort Wesley realized that watching his old friend enjoying his root beer had worked up his own thirst. He reached behind him to the backseat floor, popped open his cooler, and felt about for the third of the root beer bottles he thought he'd stored for the ride up to Houston and the Village School. His fingers came up empty.

“Damn,” Cort Wesley uttered, shaking his head. “Son of a bitch really did drink my last one.”

 

20

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

“Who'd you say we're meeting?” Dylan asked Ela Nocona, as they made their way to the back end of the Comanche reservation, nestled against the edge of the nature preserve, where the flatter lands gave way to sloping hills.

“My grandfather. Sort of,” she told him.

“What do you mean, ‘sort of'?”

“Long story.”

“You say that a lot.”

“What?”

“‘Long story.' Give me the short version. Either he's your grandfather or he's not.”

She flashed Dylan the look she used when she was playing around, soft and tough at the same time. It set something deep inside him fluttering and briefly stole his breath. Brought him back to the first time he'd seen her, when she squeezed by and took the seat next to him in Brown University's Salomon Center. Her hair smelled like jasmine and the rest of her like the outdoors itself.