Wild Horses (37 page)

“The way I figure it, it’s like having a third eye. It might work out great, but it isn’t anything I actually desire.”

While he supposed he meant it, Boyd wondered if, even more, this wasn’t something that Krystal truly needed to hear from him right now — assurance that they were both okay being who and what they were. That they weren’t missing anything they couldn’t have anytime they wanted.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, relieved. “And if I ever decide I want things to be, like, more normal, I know I’ll be all the better for coming to it later in life. Like, I’ll be bringing in so many more experiences I can draw from. Maybe that way I can be more understanding and not so scared, or judgmental. Isn’t that the way you look at it?”

“Absolutely,” he declared. “Say life is like a library. How can you know what you want until you’ve stolen enough books?”

She squeezed his hand and stared at the boy on the tricycle again, smiling to herself, or at some piece of herself she’d only just recognized. For a pensive moment of his own, Boyd wished she had never brought it up. Wishing, too, he could see the future, all possible futures, the lives in those alternate universes he’d been thinking about the other night. It would make decisions so much easier.

They walked up the steps to the Wainrights’ porch. He pushed the button and they could hear its insolent buzz inside the door. When neither voice nor footstep responded, he pressed again, and finally the conclusion was inescapable:

“Free lunch.” Boyd waggled his eyebrows.

“That’s a relief. I’m not the most comfortable person when it comes to lying and keeping it all straight.”

“Nothing to it, really.” He opened the screen door, gripped the knob of the inner door, gave it a twist. “It’s primarily an organizational skill. And mnemonics can help.” The knob turned easily. “What’d I tell you? I cannot express how heartening it is to still find trust in this cynical age.”

Boyd led the way in, Krystal shutting the door behind them as they stood in the high-ceilinged entry hall. He called out in case Constance had missed the buzzer, or was slow to answer, but his voice fell on deaf walls. The air smelled of old plaster and wood polish, potpourri and children. He pointed directly ahead, where just past a cross hall a wide wooden stairway with carpeted runner led upstairs. It turned in right angles at two separate landings, the newel posts as blocky as railroad ties.

“We’ll forget the upstairs for now,” Boyd said. “We’ll start looking in corners and closets, like that — anyplace out of the way, but handy.”

There was nothing inside the coat closet to their right, so Boyd steered them ahead and to the left, into the family room, where he’d seen the flickering television last night. He noticed an oddly haphazard layout to the furniture, as though most of it had been cleared out of the middle, then neglected before it was in place again, on the bare wooden floor.

“I think she might benefit from a course in
feng shui
,” said Krystal. “You know — the Chinese art of arranging your surroundings to maximize the harmony they bring you. She could use that.”

Boyd glanced over his shoulder. “Maybe you can leave her a note.”

Another doorway looked like it might lead through a short hall and back to the kitchen, and Boyd was moving for it when he realized why the family room appeared so off-kilter. It looked as though someone had taken up a rug, one of those heavy wall-to-wall designs that some people preferred over carpeting.

When he reached the hallway and peered back, Boyd halted, everything going hinky. The rug lay across the kitchen floor in a lumpy, uneven roll. The sight itself was unexpected enough without the head protruding from the end of the carpet.

From this angle, Boyd could clearly see the top of the head and its early onset of male-pattern baldness. The face, looking off toward the right, appeared loose, jowly, although given the damage sustained, it would be tough to say where jowls ended and swelling began. This face could easily have belonged to the potbellied silhouette seen in the window last night. Nickel- and dime-sized spatterings of blood congealed on the linoleum beneath him. Jefferson Wainright? Probably so. Somebody had given him a severe workover, then rolled him up like a tamale.

“Oh shit,” Boyd whispered as he felt Krystal’s chin craning over his shoulder to see. She made a tiny squeaking noise deep in her throat. “I think we’ve really stepped in it this time.”

From behind, the arresting metallic click-clack of a pump shotgun. When he turned, the only thing that surprised him was spiky black hair where the other day there had been blond.

“I love that fucking sound,” Gunther said. “The way it just grabs your attention by the ‘nads and won’t let go? I love that. Sounds like … truculence.”

That word again. How this guy must love that word. Boyd began to feel ill. Too much champagne, too much codeine. And Gunther looked to be in no mood to play cards.

“About a half-hour or so ago, that cousin of Allison’s? She happened to mention to Madeline that some numbnuts’d been calling all day, asking for Lars.” When Gunther slowly leveled the shotgun at his middle, Boyd felt all sphincters contract. “Maddy
knew
that had to be you. Said it was just your style.”

He took a couple steps toward them, curdling with fury and deranged anticipation. The sweaty, bottle-black hair began to leak blue-gray trickles down around his head. Between that and the giant suckered abrasion on his face, Gunther looked as though he’d just wrestled a squid.

“See these bruises? See this bloodshot eye?” He angled to show them the colors. “These became extremely motivational over the past few days. Oh, you got no fucking idea. ‘I’m gonna see him again,’ is what I told Madeline. ‘Someday I’m gonna see him again. And when I do, I’m gonna be on him like a pit bull on a baby.’”

Then, for some reason that Boyd suspected would make sense in the end, Gunther began singing the first lines of “Mr. Sandman.”

CHAPTER 22

When they left Willoughby’s house, they left with no fingers pointed at them by the neighbors, and Tom thought that maybe this hateful house was strong enough to protect for a change, rather than imprison. They retraced the two sweltering blocks back to the van, while clouds continued to gather and seal off the eternal sky from those insignificant and bloody goings-on beneath it.

“You know I can’t go right on to my cousin’s now, don’t you,” said Allison. “And I’d just as soon not stay anywhere else in town either. Not for tonight.”

To the city limits and beyond. A dozen and a half miles east lay the interstate, and when midway between they came to a fork in the highway they chose the southern branch. It led them to a motel struggling through its last inferior years, designed like cabins in a chain, surrounded by willow and pine. Tom asked for the room farthest from the road, and when they carried in their bags it felt as if the days had been turned back, that he and Allison had slipped once more into their roles as total strangers. He did not know her. He did not know himself.

Fathers left behind much more than sorrow when they vanished and took their meager love with them. They left behind unanswered questions that could wait years before they were even asked. They left behind riddles and doubts and guilty hatreds.

Too restless to sit around just yet, Tom took the van back to the tiny hamlet of Benton, where he bought a bottle of rum, and bread and cheese and the makings of sandwiches for later if they wanted.

The thunderheads had nearly caught up to them, banking low over the woodlands and fields. Along the horizon, blue-white jags of lightning leaped from cloud to cloud, or turned to ignite them from within, and they would flicker from black to a sentient gray, as though suddenly alive and cognizant of their own evil.

Allison was lying curled on the bed when he returned. She’d unpacked nothing in his absence, except for her tape player and the cassettes that lay scattered before it on the scarred dresser. One of her early blues tapes was playing now, stark and primeval, as haunted as this land that had inspired such a resonant sound, where the only things once grown in more abundance than cotton were misery and the will to survive.

He fetched ice from the office, brought glasses from the bathroom, broke the seal on the rum. Filled one glass for himself and when he looked at Allison, she nodded, so he made it two.

They sat at the table and drank, listening to the soft earthy gliss of slide guitar. The rain came down in a hard, steady wash, pecking at the roof like handfuls of gravel while the sun-beaten blacktop steamed. And when at last they spoke, they spoke of small things that needed no thought, as though the sound of their voices was all that either of them truly wanted.

Willoughby had played each of them like a pro, in the ancient game of divide and conquer, his instincts honed shrewd and cunning and malicious. As rum burned its way down and simple words slipped from his mouth, Tom told himself that all the old man had wanted was to rob them of everything he could.

Maybe Willoughby had known that Allison really would have pulled the trigger in the end, and forced Tom’s hand instead to deny his daughter that last violent redemption. Or maybe he’d known she couldn’t, but was ready to die anyway. Or maybe, given the chance and a faster hand, he’d have shot them both.

Only one thing did Tom know for sure: Willoughby had taken him from a man who’d hoped to spare a life and turned him into the one who had taken it. Nothing else was quite so clear.

“It was self-defense,” Allison finally said, as if she’d had her fill of trivialities, “wasn’t it? It was self-defense.”

Tom laced his fingers around the glass. “That’d be hard to claim. I mean, when you walk into a man’s house the way we did…”

The rain beat down and the steam rose up. For an instant he imagined that Willoughby and the devil might be laughing so hard by now that they had to hold each other upright. The devil, being the father of lies, would surely appreciate the joke.

Allison and I, we can’t be related.
This he told himself more than once. That Willoughby wanted to poison their future, if they had one at all. That Willoughby was only trying to get to the gun.

As daylight dimmed and every minute brought a new shadow, Allison sat contained and pensive in her chair. He hunted for some telltale feature in her face that he’d worn all his life. Knowing that if he saw it, he would argue it away as a trick of dying light. And then watch for the next. And the next.

“Tomorrow,” he said, when he’d had rum enough to say it, “after you see your cousin … do we keep going?”

“Going where?”

“The rest of the way.”

He couldn’t look at her, terrified of what might be there to see. The wrong kind of familiarity would surely breed contempt. And if she looked upon him with love, could he ever be certain it wasn’t for who he was, rather, because down in some deep and unacknowledged cleft inside her, he reminded her of her father?

“How many of us,” he tried again, “are going on to Florida?”

She waited for the thunder, a low, rolling grumble.

“How many of us
are
there, inside?” Allison said, and pushed her hair back from her bruised but healing face.

She left the table then, crossing the room to their luggage and taking from it that travel-worn monument to failure that he’d carried for so many miles. She carried it to the bed, where she lay on her side and opened it — the small, flat box filled with small, flat books. When she’d held them long enough, Allison began to weep over them, in painful, racking sobs.

And if happily-ever-afters were more elusive than the books would lead you to believe, perhaps the possibility of them was enough, so long as you were willing to turn another page.

*

She came violently awake in the night, spit forth from dreams like Jonah spit from the whale’s mouth. Her father’s friends had been waiting for her again, as they so often had over the years, sleep the only doorway through which they now walked.

A creaking hinge and a silhouette in the doorway: familiar, but not as instantly familiar as the man of the house. A pungent smell of smoke and spirits, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed with a sanctioned hand clamping hard on her coltish thigh. The world was ending again, and it would do no good to keep her knees locked, her mouth shut. There was always a threat, a loss of house and home that she alone could forestall by making it easy on all concerned and keeping their secrets. Only one had ever threatened to hurt her personally.

“It’s all right, sugar, I’m a friend of your daddy’s, and he told me how much you want to help the family,” said this visitor, and when he leaned forward into moonlight she could see that she’d been fooled again. Because this time it was Tom.

Awake. Awake in the dark and the cool, dripping calm after the storm. Allison wondering if they would leave her alone if she tried hard next time to dream herself a clear conscience and a loaded gun.

Tom lay sleeping on his side, nothing of him to see but his shoulders and the back of his head. Not the enemy, yet she felt overwhelmed by his thievery. She surged onto her knees and seized his arm, shaking him roughly, and when he rolled onto his back in confusion, she battered her fists down upon his chest and screamed that the man had been hers and hers alone to kill, no one else’s, and damn you to hell for stealing that from me.