Twilight (12 page)

It might be fun to look.

How much is he paying you, anyway? Sutter considered a moment. A thousand dollars, he said.

They’re worth a lot more than that. Me and Kenneth’ll give you five thousand and all you got to do is leave us alone.

He just looked at her.

Half, then.

It’s a hard fact that half of nothin is nothin, too. That’s what you’ve got and what you’re goin to wind up with.

He grasped her shirt, a hand to each side of her collar. When he yanked buttons spun off and she stood with the shirt hanging open. When she made to hold it together, he slapped her. He unpocketed the knife and pressed a button on its mother-of-pearl side, and the blade snicked out. He slid the blade between her breasts, dull side in. Let’s see what’s under here, he said. When he pulled the knife outward, the narrow edge of cold steel sliced the strap between the brassiere cups. He uncovered
her breasts, studied them clinically. No pictures here, he said. Nothin here but titties.

She was crying. You’re going to pay for this, you son of a bitch.

She could hear the truck laboring up the hill. He heard it too, stood in an attitude of listening, the knife still clenched in his fist. A moment later and the walls moved with the shadows of treebranches, the fence, sliding along the wall like illusory images propelled by some enormous wind.

He got a gun in that truck?

I don’t know what he’s got.

You holler and I swear I’ll kill you. I’ll cut your throat, then hide behind the door and cut his.

Crazy, she said, so softly she might have been talking about herself.

Footsteps crossed the porch, and the door opened. Tylerstood for a moment framed darkly against the paler dark outside. He held a thermos bottle in one hand; a toolbelt dangled from the other. His eyes grew wide and seemed to take in the whole room at once. His mouth opened but he didn’t say anything.

Everything looked harsh and surreal: What he saw was Sutter standing slightly behind her holding her left arm twisted between her shoulder blades. The blade of the knife lay across her throat. She was attempting to hold the shirt closed but her right breast was exposed. She had her eyes clenched shut, and her face was twisted in pain.

I don’t believe you thought I was serious, Sutter said.

He released the girl and stepped away from her. He closed and pocketed the knife. Fix them clothes, he told the girl. He
grinned at Tyler. She can’t keep her clothes on. Somethin about me affects women that way. She’d’a had mine off, you hadn’t of showed up when you did.

Sooner or later I am fixing to kill you, Tyler said. If you don’t kill me first. You had no business going after my sister any such chickenshit way as this. You already told me. I thought you’d be man enough to come after me.

Sutter shrugged. Whatever works, he said.

He watched intent form in Tyler’s eyes, and when Tyler threw the thermos he sidestepped and heard it smash against the wall somewhere behind him. When Tyler came for him he just feinted left and slammed Tyler in the side of the head with his fist. Tyler staggered and swung the toolbelt hard but Sutter caught it onehanded and jerked and when Tyler came stumbling into range Sutter drove a fist into Tyler’s abdomen and the boy’s breath exploded outward in a harsh whoosh and he sat down hard and rolled over. By the time he got upSutter was sitting on the couch with the rifle across his lap. Now get out the memory box and let’s look at them old family pictures, he said.

I don’t have them, Tyler said. Someone’s keeping them for me.

Sure they are. You just handed them over for somebody to keep a few days. You think I just fell off the haywagon? Shit, Tyler, you can do better than that.

I went to the law with them. Sheriff Odel’s got them. I told them the whole thing, and they’re going to be looking for you. You better not touch my sister again.

Fact is, I know you went to the law. But you went with some cock-and-bull story about me and your sister. Odel done talked to me about it. We had a laugh and a little drink, and he
left thinking you was either a troublemaker or kind of light in the head. A blackmailer runnin to the law is one of the stupider things I ever heard of.

There is just no way you can get away with this.

Watch me. We’re in the process of me getting away with it right now.

Tyler was silent a time. He glanced at his sister. Don’t tell him, she said, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

They’re in the truck, Tyler said at length.

Sutter rose from the couch. We’ll see if they are, he said. You go first. Little Sister stays with me. I’ve got a knife on her, and you try anything even approachin what you done awhile ago, she gets another slit cut in a place where she’s got no use for one.

The truck sat facing the house. Tyler was wishing he’d left it pointed outward bound. A cool wind was looping up through the pines. They sighed softly. A three-quarter moon the colorof bone hung suspended over them, and the truck gleamed dully.

Where in the truck?

They’re taped under the dash. If you want them, you’ll have to get them out.

Not in a million fuckin years.

Tyler opened the truck door and lay back across the seat. Hands behind his head and fumbling under the dashboard. A myriad of wires here. He felt the tobacco can ducttaped behind the radio.

Hell, it’s gone, he said.

Involuntarily Sutter leant forward as if he’d look too. Tyler kicked him in the chest as hard as he could with both booted feet and before Sutter struck the ground he was immediately scrambling to get under the steering wheel. He was already
cranking the truck when Sutter dropped the rifle and went stumbling backward and fell. Get the hell in here, Tyler was yelling. Move it.

She jumped in and sat holding the door handle. When the engine caught Tyler popped the clutch and spun it backward in the gravel not knowing or caring where Sutter was or even if he was under the wheels. He slammed the shift lever into low and went sidewise out of the driveway with the rear wheels fishtailing onto the road. Shut the door, he said, but she just sat there. She seemed not to know where she was. She was very pale. He glanced back once, but he didn’t see Sutter, which was just as well, for there was an explosion behind them, and both windshields erupted in flying pellets of safety glass. What the hell do we do now? he asked aloud, but he was already doing all there was to do. Get down, he told her. Shut that door and lay down in the seat. She slidobediently down in the seat but left the door flopping and when Tyler reached an arm across her to close it they were already going too fast for the curve.

He was trying to correct the skid the truck was in but the rear tires were already schoolhopping along on the packed chert when there was a dull boom and a tire went and the truck spun with the windshield opening an elongated frieze of fleeing trees and inexplicably the house itself sliding toward the edge of the world. The truck was riding eerily sideways on the embankment with brush whipping the rocker panels and headlights lost in the halfgrown pines they were riding over. He was afraid to break the truck’s momentum by slowing and he had some halfcrazed idea he might get back on the road where the curve ended if he could just keep the truck from flipping. The right side of the truck was topmost and it kept defying gravity and
bouncing playfully upward then returning to the ground again. Her weight had slid against him and the door kept banging. If he’d continued downward he might have made it but where his course intersected the road he cut right and when he did the right side of the truck lifted and would not settle back. It stood eerily balanced for a moment like a carnival trickrider then rolled upward and over in a cacophony of rending metal and breaking glass and the grating shriek of steel sliding across stone. She’d slid away from him when the truck rolled and when it slid again she was gone.

The truck righted pointed downhill with headlights cocked into the onrushing trees that were just a whirlpool of light he was driving into. He was in the floorboard when the truck slammed into a tree and ceased in a final outrage of breaking glass and he was out immediately to find her. His next thought was for the cover of the trees, he wanted it desperately.

He could not feel anything broken but something had peeled the skin from his shin and he was bleeding into his boot. All the while he was feeling for broken bones he was looking wildly about for her and he could hear brush popping somewhere and he knew that Sutter was already coming at a run.

A white body strewn on the homemade road they’d constructed. He leapt deadfalls of broken pine skinned bonewhite in the moonlight to where she was sprawled and caught her up under the armpits and dragged her toward the truck. She seemed slack and unwilled as a sack of grain and he kept talking to her but she didn’t answer.

At the truck he dragged the rifle from behind the seat. He untaped the Prince Albert can from beneath the dash. His hands were shaking and it seemed to take him forever. Something kept
dripping out of the truck and onto the leaves, drip, drip, some vital fluid, his truck was bleeding to death. He shoved the can in his hip pocket and caught her up again and started for the woods. All the breath he had was just a ragged sob in his throat. He won’t shoot, he was thinking; he don’t know for sure where the pictures are. To show what he’d learned of Sutter the moon rode from behind a skiff of ragged clouds and a bullet thocked solidly to earth, sending chunks of dirt skittering away across the girl, and another sang off somewhere in the treebranches.

He’d stopped stockstill, mindless of the bullets, just staring at her. She lay with her head pillowed facedown on her breast. Arms outflung defenselessly. As if the world was coming at her at a blinding rate of speed and she’d thrown up her hands to thwart it. All he could see was the dishwaterblonde of the back of her head and when he gently righted it it moved without resistance like something moving underwater. Her eyes were open with the exposed whites rolled upward and he could see the dark freckles against her colorless face and her pale breasts bared without shame and her hair all caught with leaves and sticks like some luckless soul drowned and beached here by a receding tide.

He’d begun to cry. Keening some inarticulate grief over her broken body. All the cruel things said and done, the kind ones saved for later. Could I but do it over.

He lowered her head gently and closed her eyes and took up the gun. He’d thought when he made the woods he might lie up in the brush and kill Sutter but the light was chancy at best and what he wanted most right now was to hear her voice, for things to be the way they had been scant minutes before with her weight against his shoulder but the clockhands would not roll
backward. What he needed was distance. There was a hellhound on the trail and when the dark sanctuary of trees swallowed him he just kept on going.

Yet sometime past midnight he came cautiously back through the timber again, and the field was alive with activity. He watched with an almost dispassionate bemusement varicolored lights flickering like spirit lamps, dark folk moving about the field. Disembodied voices almost surreal in this clockless hour drifted to him without clarity or coherence. The staccato static of a scanner like a dispassionate chorus commenting on the depths his life had fallen to. An ambulance backed out onto the roadway and tires slewed on gravel and it sped offtoward town. He waited for a siren but there was none forthcoming. It vanished in silence and he sat watching its lights wind up into the hills. A bitter grief lay in him like a stone.

Another vehicle backed around and its headlights swept the field and ceased and he could see black figures moving about in the light. A wrecker with its revolving strobe. A figure at the wrecker was paying out cable across the field toward Tyler’s truck.

He sat getting his courage up. His story straight. At length he rose and started to enter the field and then he stopped. There was a dread familiarity about one of the figures. The angular unmistakable shape of Sutter. Shouting something back from where Tyler’s truck sat canted against the tree. Instructions, directions, who knew? Overseeing all this perhaps. The world
had turned strange and seemed to proceed without logic, or any logic he could follow. Even as he watched the cable tautened and the wrecker backed further into the field to provide more slack, and Sutter hooked the cable and shouted. Once more the cable grew tight and the creaking winch slowly drew Tyler’s wrecked truck back into the field.

He hunkered at the edge of the wood and watched this shabby tableau. A wind stirred, clashed in the drying leaves. Leaves drifted about him but he did not notice. The wrecker was leaving with the pickup, climbing the steep embankment to the roadbed, its lights canted upward briefly limning moving trees then the clouds absorbed them and there was only a faint glow like some celestial light flaring behind them and the wrecker cut into the road with the headlights clearing out its path. Other engines cranked; all this seemed to be drawing to a close. One by one the other cars followed the wrecker likemourners in a funeral procession. Then the field lay dark and revenantial and silent and there came the cry of an owl.