The Winter Family (33 page)

“Is that right?” Tom said. “I’m sorry, Bobby. I truly am.”

“Where is he, Sheriff?” Bobby asked.

“Bobby, if what Kendron says is true, and I don’t doubt his word for a minute, then you don’t have to worry much about the trial. But we have to do it. You understand that, don’t you? It’s things like trials that stop men like Lukas Shakespeare.”

“A bullet stopped Lukas Shakespeare,” Kendron said.

“No,” Tom said. “Shooting ’em just lets ’em decide how the world works. Makes us live by their rules, or lack thereof. Okay? Matty killing Lukas didn’t set us free of him. It’s what we do after. It’s what we do right now.”

Bobby slid off his horse. He still had the pistol in one hand.

“Sheriff,” Kendron said, “for god’s sake.”

“Don’t come any closer, Bobby,” Tom said. “Please don’t.”

“That was a nice speech,” Bobby said. “But you didn’t say anything about my Jenny. She’s still dead. Tell that to your laws. Tell them that. Only they won’t say anything, they’re not real.”

“If laws ain’t real,” Tom said, “then it’s men like Lukas Shakespeare who truly understand the way the world works. And I can’t accept that. I can’t. So get back on your horse, Bobby. Just do it.”

A gun fired, from behind Tom, and Kendron’s head came apart.

Tom whipped around, his heart pounding in his chest, and raised
his rifle. Something smashed into his forehead. Stars blazed in front of his eyes, as if they were exploding, growing a thousand times more brilliant, and then they went out, and all was darkness.

The Shakespeare residence was a mile and a half from the sheriff’s office, to the north and the west. Matt and Austin had about an acre of land abutting the canal and a small single-story home. The whole place was going to seed. The vegetable gardens were overrun with weeds and the walls sagged inward. Some windows were cracked. The paint peeled. You could smell a faint musty odor in the back of your mind just looking at the place.

Matt felt his throat tighten when he saw that there was no light on inside, no smoke rising from the chimney. Inside the front door he used the jack to pull off his boots, and then he called out, “Austin? Austin?”

There was a lamp on a small table by the front door and he took the matches out of the drawer and lit it.

What would you expect of two young men living together, without a mother to take care of them? It was a mess, with muddy boots scattered around the door, jackets and shirts carelessly thrown over the backs of chairs, and a pile of dirty dishes sitting on the kitchen table. The cupboards were bare and columns of ants trooped boldly across the floor.

“Austin?” Matt called.

He checked their bedroom, shining the lamp around. A set of bunk beds where Matt and Austin slept. Luke’s bed was on the other side of the room, neatly made.

Next Matt walked down the hall to his mother’s old room, with its large bed and mirror, the glass jars and pots on the vanity, the huge closet of clothes and costumes, and the piano in the corner.

Not here, Matt thought. Did he go back to town?

He returned to the kitchen and set the lamp down on the table and then took a half-empty bottle of whiskey down from the shelf. He drank without using a glass and as his gaze wandered the room it
happened to fall upon a framed picture hung just to one side above the fireplace.

It was a charcoal sketch of Lukas that had been done when he was around fifteen. In it, Lukas was wearing a huge hat and a neat new suit. He was grinning hugely, showing off a large gap between his teeth, and resting a hand on a pistol at each hip.

It was the grin that broke your heart. Luke had been a bad seed. Matt had always known it, even if his mother and Austin had tried to pretend they did not. But there was no doubt that the men Lukas had run with had changed him. Luke had always been laughing and smiling about something, even if it was something mean. When he’d returned he’d been different. Hard, unsmiling, bitter, and closed off. That attitude he’d learned from them, for sure. Like laughing was weakness and coldness was strength. For all his talk about starting a gang with his brothers he’d had no patience for them any longer. Especially Austin. Austin never could have become cold like that.

Matt looked at the picture a little longer. The anonymous artist had worked roughly and quickly and not caught much detail. But he had captured some piece of the young Luke’s unspoken essence. You could feel his confidence, his wildness, his sense of humor, his capacity for violence.

Matt realized then that his younger brother had run off south with Sheriff Favorite, and a little cold worm of fear wriggled between his ribs and into his heart.

“Shit,” Matt said. “Shit, shit.”

He jogged back outside, pausing only briefly to snatch up his rifle from the gun rack by the door.

The first thing Sheriff Tom Favorite noticed was the smell. How bad it was. As bad as it could get.

His eyes were fluttering, trying to open, trying to see. They felt heavy and sticky. There was a pain, he realized, a terrible pain in his head.

An image started to come into focus. A ghost. A skull. No. No. It was getting clearer all the time, coming together, taking shape.

It was a coyote. A dead one. Rotting. The fur curling up like mold, the flesh bubbling away from the bones. Decomposing eyeballs yellowing and collapsing in on themselves. Flies circling over the body.

And ants. There were ants. Two kinds of ants. Red and black. They were marching all over the dead coyote and … were they fighting?

Tom Favorite blinked and saw that they were. The red ants and the black ants were biting one another with their enormous mandibles and struggling back and forth, wrestling over the top of the dead animal.

And then as he moved his head a little, setting off a fresh wave of pain, he thought groggily, What am I doing here?

Laughter. No, not laughter. Giggling. High-pitched and rapid, like a child’s. But not a child. He became cognizant of the strong hands that held the collar of his shirt and the back of his belt, and that these hands were holding him over the rotting carcass, and then a mouth pressed into his right ear, and he jerked away, making his head throb in pain again.

“The devil made this world,” Homer De Plessey whispered. “And God is dead or sleeping.”

Tom struggled. He couldn’t move his hands or his legs. He’d been hog-tied.

Homer De Plessey kept giggling, but now he lifted Tom up (effortlessly, it seemed) and threw him across the back of a horse.

Tom tried to turn his head to see where they were going, but it was dark and there was nothing around them but desert. He was still trying to catch his breath and say something when Homer mounted his own horse and cracked the reins and they galloped off into the dark.

The moon had come up over the mountain to the east and lit up the desert and made the stars dimmer in comparison. Every now and then a sharp and short breath of wind kicked up the sand.

The men stood around and argued about what to do. They would
fall silent, and the silence would drag out, and it would seem obvious that there was nothing to do but swallow the bitter injustice of it and head back to Phoenix. But they couldn’t bear it, and someone would say something, to break the spell, and they would start bickering again, blaming one another, proposing theories, discussing plans of action, anything to make it seem like they were in control.

Dick heard the rider and turned to the north, thinking it was one of the stragglers from their group. And then he saw who it was, riding up on them like the avatar of vengeance, and he said, “Oh hell.”

The others stopped talking at the sound of his voice and looked too.

“Who is it?” one of them asked.

“It’s Shakespeare,” Dick said.

“What do we do?” Hank asked. “What’d we do, Deputy?”

Dick spat. “Well, don’t make any sudden moves, for starters.”

When Matt saw them all standing there, looking at him with their stupid moon faces, some of them holding their hats, backing away from him, opening up a path, that’s when he knew. And it was like a bitter taste high up in the back of his throat, a painful sensation, burning, like he was choking on tears waiting to get born. That’s how it felt knowing his little brother was dead.

He hauled on the reins and his horse stopped gratefully, instantly, and then trembled and whooped its breath in and out. Matt took up his rifle and dropped to the ground. None of them met his gaze for more than a second. One of them stepped a little farther back, all the way off the road, and Matt saw the bodies at his feet.

Bobby and Kendron had been shot. Kendron in the face, right under his right eye. Bobby in the arm, the leg, dozens of times in the torso. They were both splattered with blood. Farther up the road he could see, in the moonlight, the dark patches where they’d fallen.

Austin hadn’t been shot. Instead a dark band of bruises was around his neck, dotted with little spots of unblemished flesh.

“The chain,” Matt said. “Choked him with the chain.”

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, lifting the rifle to do so.

“Where’re the sheriff and the confectioner at, Dick?” Matt asked.

Eventually Dick replied, “We don’t know.”

“What’d you mean you don’t know?”

“Well, Bobby and Kendron, they rode ahead. When we caught up, there was just these three.”

“I see,” Matt said.

Matt’s voice was steady but he was crying hard. Tears streaming down his face, nose running. His brother’s hair was a mess and he had this urge to lean down and fix it, but that urge was useless now. There was no purpose to feeling like that anymore.

“Well,” Matt said. “Nice work, fellas.”

“Go to hell,” Hank said. “This is all your fault.”

“My fault?” Matt said, blinking back tears.

He turned around with his hands on the rifle, keeping the barrel down. All the men flinched back.

“How’s it my fault, Hank?”

“Settle down, both of you,” Dick said.

“It’s your fucking fault,” Hank said, emboldened by Matt’s tears, by the numerical advantage, and frustrated by the appalling failure the night had become. “You and the fucking sheriff took that—”

The rifle came up and fired once, and Hank’s hat flew off his head and up in the air. Matt pumped the rifle and shot the hat again, knocking it higher and farther away, before Hank had time to raise his hands to his head.

It was unnatural, that kind of speed and accuracy. It didn’t seem to be skill, but rather prestidigitation, or luck. It was impossible to believe the weapon itself could be so accurate, at any speed, let alone one so quick, no matter who was wielding it.

“Fuck it,” Matt said, walking after his startled horse. “Fuck all of it.”

“Matt,” Dick said, jogging up to him. “Come on now, Matt. We all want the same thing.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Come on, stay with us, help us track this son of a bitch down.”

“How’s that been going for you so far, Deputy?” Matt said. “Fuck that degenerate and fuck the sheriff. And fuck all you too.”

“Come on now,” Dick said. “We could use you.”

“Oh, I heard that before. And it led me to shooting one of my brothers to save the other.”

Matt caught his shying horse by the bit and stepped into the stirrup and vaulted back up into the saddle. He turned south, away from Phoenix, and gave his horse a kick to set it in motion, but when it slowed from a disjointed lope back to a trot and then finally a walk, Matt didn’t kick it again. After all, there wasn’t any rush to go anywhere, anymore.

For someone who’d always seemed rather reserved, the confectioner certainly did love to talk, when you got to know him.

“I couldn’t tell you precisely why it is that I love to kill children,” Homer said in his musical voice. “I suppose none of us know why we really like anything. Why do you like beer, or chocolate, or music? You just do. If someone asks why, you can make up a reason. But it’s as mysterious to you as it is to anyone else.”

They were already at the foot of the San Tan Mountain. It loomed over them, craggy and indifferent, as the horses carefully picked their way through the scrub and the cacti. The moon was beaming down with its very white, very pale light, making everything clear and distinct and colorless.

“Do you know why you do the things you do?” Homer asked Tom, glancing over his shoulder to the horse he was pulling behind him. “Do you really? You told a nice story to Bobby, didn’t you? About bummers and the Klan and your dead brother. But are you really sure that’s where the feeling came from? Or did you just do what felt right?”

Tom, of course, didn’t answer. He was thirsty and his head hurt terribly and he could not believe, simply could not believe, that this was happening.

There was the sound, very faint, of one gunshot, and then another. Homer started, his eyes glowing briefly with the moonlight.

“Hmm,” Homer said. “I do believe they’re still back at the road. I wonder what they’re shooting at.”

Tom turned his head the way they had come and wondered whether it was worth starting to holler. But they’d been riding for half an hour at least. No one would hear a thing.

His hands and feet were completely numb. The pain was beating in his head like a drum:
thump, thump, thump
.

“Why children, you might ask? Why not grown men? Wouldn’t that pose more of a challenge? Wouldn’t it be more satisfying? I’m a strong man, and I can use a gun as well as the next fellow. Not very sporting to murder children. All I can say is it’s not about sport. It’s about that … feeling.”

The confectioner’s voice became a little slower, dreamy.

“The weakness of children, their helplessness, well. It makes you shiver. I think it’s because children can still feel just one thing at a time. Once you’ve grown old your feelings become complicated. But a child can be rendered perfectly happy by the present of something as simple as a licorice whip. And then she can be totally terrified. Completely and utterly. The feeling is so perfect.”