The More They Disappear (23 page)

Lewis held the spoon as if it were a tool that still had use and looked out the small window above the sink. It was the only window in the kitchen and on the wrong side of the house for sun. Opposite it a plain table with three chairs was pushed up against the wall. The table had only ever needed room for three. On Sundays, they'd eat dinner as a family. The talk was that of fathers and sons. Responsibility. Backbone. Right and wrong. His father told stories about the men he arrested, and when his mother tried to defend them, when she said circumstances could drive a man to steal, his father would down his drink and laugh. Lew Mattock had many laughs. Laughs for his own jokes. Laughs to warn someone they were close to crossing a line. Laughs to mock. Lewis's mother usually received this last kind. Afterward his father would turn to Lewis and say, “Women.” Lewis learned to laugh, too. He liked being in on the joke. At some point near the end of dinner his father might promise a ride in the squad car or a round of golf, but those promises were rarely kept; they yellowed like the paint on the kitchen wall. Lewis slammed the spoon in the sink and the clang echoed as if he were nowhere.

He walked outside where Bonito stood drinking lemonade while his mother, thin and stoop-shouldered, dug futilely into the ground. The roses had been planted and a number of tall grasses were set beside them. It looked nice. Lewis examined a small, leafless cherry tree with a half-off sticker pasted onto the container.

“Find a place for that,” his mother said.

“I wouldn't even know—”

“Anywhere is fine, Lewis. Really.”

He hefted the container onto his shoulder. The tree looked like some misshapen antler grown from his body and soil spilled down his suit jacket. When he put the tree down, his mother walked over. “This looks perfect,” she said. “What do you think, Bonito?”

“Perfecto.”
Bonito handed Lewis a shovel, the one his father had bought but never used, and Lewis pressed it into the earth with his black, shiny shoes—the same ones he'd worn to his dad's funeral not a week before.

*   *   *

After his conversation with Craycraft, Harlan decided to knock off early and clear his head. He hopped into his truck, but as he pumped the gas, the Ford sputtered and hiccupped, and when he shifted into reverse, it went dead. He banged the steering wheel and the horn sounded harmlessly.

Under the hood, Harlan found coolant running down the engine block and realized the head gasket was about to blow. He managed to get home by feathering the clutch and laying off the brake on the downhills. By the time he rolled into his driveway leaking coolant, he'd concocted a story in which his truck problems were the work of some saboteur. The smug grins of Wesley Craycraft and Trip Gaines flashed into his head. He imagined them under the hood banging away with wrenches. The thought of it was almost enough to make him laugh until he realized they wouldn't be the sort to do their own dirty work; they were the sort to pay off some country boy with a case of beer and an envelope of bills. Division of labor and all that crap.

Harlan couldn't just lie down and let Lewis win the election. He needed to fight the grinning assholes at their own game, so he trampled through the pines and cedars toward the Spanish Manor carrying a stack of yard signs. People like the ones who lived in the neighboring trailer park were his best chance to drum up votes; the town's well-to-do would all support Lewis. The problem was, to the residents of the Spanish Manor, Harlan was just an asshole with a badge, and even if he could convince them otherwise, apathy was the most common emotion come election day.

He came into view of the trailers and waded through a swath of uncut grass littered with junk. A rusted-through wheelbarrow. A bent spigot. A pile of broken windows. Somebody from New York would have taken a photo and called it art. Then they'd have taken photos of the sunken faces that eyed Harlan warily and claim those faces were some deep comment on the world.

A couple of kids raced ahead of him calling, “Po-po. Po-po.” Harlan pulled the signs tight into his armpit. The gravel roads were filled with driven-over dandelions that refused to die. At the edges dog shit moldered. The dogs themselves scampered between the trailers in packs like wolves, sniffing at trash and one another. Harlan thought he saw a woman smile in his direction and started walking toward her. “Johnny,” she called out. Harlan heard the voice of a man bark in response. “What?” The woman wore a Kentucky-blue sweat suit and her stringy blond hair went every which way. She cocked her head. Harlan turned back to the road and she called out again. “Nothing.”

A coal-colored cat heavy with pregnancy stretched itself on the gravel and yowled. “I wouldn't walk up on Maude Boone like that,” a voice said from behind him. Harlan turned. A powerfully built man in denim and dusty motorcycle boots came up and loosed a heavy, amber spit at Harlan's feet.

“What's that you said?”

“The cat. Somebody wanted to name her Daniel but she puts 'em out like the world's about to end, so some other fucker came up with the name Maude.”

“Rebecca,” Harlan said.

“What?”

“Daniel Boone. His wife's name was Rebecca.”

“Who fucking cares?” The man pointed to the signs under Harlan's arm. “My daughter put one of them in my yard.”

“Is that right?”

“Yep. She must've got a handful 'cause I put a knife through it and damned if she didn't put another one next to it.”

“I guess that means you won't be voting for me.” Harlan put out his hand to shake. “Harlan Dupee.” The man let Harlan's hand hang there until he pulled it back. “I'm guessing you're Mattie's father.”

“That's right. Henry Dawson.”

“She's a good girl. Mattie.”

Dawson kicked the ground and pulled out a back-pocket flask. “Don't lie. She's rude and ungrateful.” He twisted the top and had a taste.

“I've seen worse.”

“She adores you all of a sudden. Comes around talkin' Harlan this. Harlan that. Makes a father wonder, you know?” Dawson took a step closer and his boozy breath beat on Harlan like a drunken moth. “Why don't you go on home?” he said. “Don't nobody want what you're selling.” He was tall, an inch taller than Harlan and broader by more. When he knocked the signs from Harlan's grip, Harlan balled his fist, and Dawson said softly, “Don't do it.”

They stood like prizefighters sizing each other up before the bell. Dawson stomped one of his black boots on the signs and ground them like a cigarette butt. “I'll see that my neighbors get these, Sheriff.”

“I appreciate that, Henry.”

Dawson took another pull from his flask. “You should get going,” he said. “That badge won't do you no good over here.” From behind him, Harlan watched Mattie step out of a slanted trailer holding a brindled mutt. The front yard was littered with spent shotgun shells—bright greens and yellows and reds. Joe-Pye weed grew between them and a vine wrapped itself around the front end of an engineless Chevelle. The split campaign signs stood on lone wobbly legs like ostriches. Mattie kept shock still, but the dog let out a pitiful whine. Dawson didn't flinch.

Harlan rolled a cigarette. Took his time. Then he turned away. He walked between two trailers among the pokeweed and trash, passed a pile of eggshells and coffee grounds dropped from a kitchen window. He fought the urge to look back at the girl, kept on walking until he reached the river where he found a landing of smooth limestone and breathed deep. He felt weak and cursed himself as he clambered over the rocks upriver toward the docks of what was once the paper mill.

Under the bridge to Ohio, some ambitious tagger had spray-painted a water-lapped pylon with a gigantic phallus and some indecipherable scrawl. A signature for all the world to remember. A truck rumbled across the bridge and a cluster of small stones pitched themselves over the edge and rustled the water. A fish jumped and splashed down before Harlan could sight it. The sun had started to fall—its rays poking over the horizon like in a religious painting, like that moment right before God arrives in all his blinding glory.

Most people would say a river is something made over time, that porous, thirsty rocks slaked themselves on the rains that poured into the valley, and that the more they drank, the more they disappeared, and that before long rock gave way to water and what became Kentucky separated from what became Ohio. Others would say that some god created that river and set it there for purposes only he could divine. But Harlan, he had this image in his head of some giant, crippled god, the heel of his lame foot dragging along as he pulled himself across the earth and carved out waterways. Such a god would be easy to hunt, his path marked by that useless leg—limp like an almost dead thing. Harlan tossed a stone. Then he unzipped his pants and added to the river's level.

 

eight

Harlan's pickup grunted like a pig, coughed once, and then went dead for good, so he trudged to the shed and dug out a bent ten-speed tarnished with rust, and when he couldn't find an air pump, he stuffed his uniform in a plastic bag wrapped over the handlebars and rode flat tires to the mom-and-pop gas station down the road. The machine only took quarters and a droopy-eyed attendant made him buy something in order to break his five, claimed it was the only way to open the till. Harlan snatched a bag of pills meant to make men last longer, paid, and left them on the counter for the attendant's use. As he chunked quarters into the machine, he couldn't help wishing he lived in a time when the world didn't charge a man for air.

He guided himself gingerly along the shoulderless roads, his long legs pistoning up and down as he gasped shallow breaths. Most drivers gave him room but a couple of punks in a Dodge 1500 buzzed by and called him some less-than-polite names for homosexual. Harlan braked and managed to keep the bike upright on a slope of dirt and rock, but he couldn't make out the plates as the truck sped away. He felt the fates turning against him. Slashed signs that bore his name, a busted truck, getting run off the road: any one of these by itself might have seemed innocent enough, something born of chance, but put together they made Harlan feel as if he had a target on his back and all the world was taking aim.

When he finally steered into the office, out of breath and huffing, Holly said, “I don't want to know.”

“I don't want to say,” Harlan replied before retreating to his office. Lew's case file was open on his desk. He'd learned more about his former boss than he'd ever wanted to, but it hadn't helped him solve a thing. He checked his backlog of messages. There were a number from Stuart Simon at the
Registrar
prattling on about God knows and asking for comment but nothing from Joe O'Malley at the Silver Spoon. Harlan was tired of waiting around. He grabbed the keys to the cruiser, stepped into the lobby, and said, “I'm going to find O'Malley and make him talk.”

Holly looked up from her paperwork as a toilet flushed. A couple of seconds later, Frank came out of the bathroom holding a copy of the
Registrar
. “What do you need with that punch-drunk horse's ass?”

Harlan came up with a lie quick. “Noise complaints,” he said.

Frank tapped the newspaper. “Sounds to me like Joe's got bigger fish to fry. Says here the state is pulling some environmental protection bullshit and making the Spoon find a new home.”

“What are they protecting?” Holly asked.

“Mussels.” Frank laughed. “Apparently the docks are upriver from a breeding ground for”—he looked at the paper—“endangered bivalves.” He handed the finger-dampened paper to Harlan. “There's an article about you in here, too.”

Harlan scanned for his name and found an op-ed by Stuart Simon endorsing Lewis Mattock. Simon didn't have many kind words for him, so Harlan folded the paper and calmly handed it back to Frank. “Did y'all get anything good in Cynthiana?”

“That Mexican was a bad motherfucker. Teardrop tattoo. All scarred along his forearms. He spat on Del when we questioned him and this is after the boys in Cynthiana had worked him over.”

“And?”

“He had an alibi.”

“That you could check?”

“Turns out he was in lockup the day Lew was shot. The guys in Cynthiana let him go because their pen was full and the paperwork for an undocumented is hell.”

“I guess that was a bad decision.”

Frank shrugged.

“It was a good lead, though, Frankie,” Harlan said. “Keep working. If you find the man who killed Lew, you might just become sheriff yourself.”

Holly laughed and Frank turned to her, offended. “What?”

“Cold day in hell,” she said.

Frank waved a fat, dismissive paw at her and lumbered out to his cruiser. After he left, Holly told Harlan that Little Joe had called that morning and said he'd be happy to meet with Harlan on the boat.

“That would have been nice to know before I blabbed in front of Frank.”

Holly slammed her palm down and stapled a stack of papers. “Did you ever stop to think that you and the deputies should be working together?”

“I don't need them doubting me.”

“I wouldn't be too tough on them, Harlan. You might not have noticed but they're working their tails off—checking gun sales, rustling up the suspects you're too busy to bother with. Even Frank.”

“And you think I should be doing the same?”

“I'm just telling you they're working hard.”

Harlan promised he'd do a better job letting everyone know they were appreciated just as soon as he had the oppurtunity.

From the road, the Silver Spoon materialized like a relic left over from the century before, but once you reached the parking lot, the illusion faded. The steamship was a recent construction—fiberglass and galvanized iron manufactured in some factory overseas.