Cold in July (8 page)

I must have been out only fractions of a second, because by
the time I got up and wobbled after Russel, he had only made it halfway to
Jordan’s bed, and I could see Jordan sitting up with his back against the
headboard, looking at Russel.

I leaped on Russel’s back and landed with my legs wrapped
around his waist and my arms around his throat. He stumbled, then ran back,
smashing me against the wall so violently I felt as if my spine were being
pushed out through my chest. The breath went out of me and my legs and arms
wouldn’t hold and I let go of him and slid down the wall like a dying slug.

But now Ann was on him, almost in the same position I had
occupied, and she was clawing at his face, and he was spinning in pain, trying
to toss her off, but it was like trying to fling off a sheet wet with glue.

Finally he reached over his shoulder and got hold of her
hair and jerked and bent forward at the same time and she slammed against the
wall next to me and crumpled in a twist of arms and legs.

I tried to get up, but there was nothing left in me. It was
as if someone had opened up a valve and let the life out of me. My breath
wouldn’t come. I couldn’t even gasp; my lungs were jammed between a breath and
an outburst. The room tilted. Russel reached the bed and Jordan screamed
“Daddy” again. Russel grabbed Jordan by his pajama shirt, and with his other
hand he produced from his back pocket a black shape that with a flick of his
wrist sprouted a blade like a beetle showing a silver wing.

My breath came and I coiled my legs beneath me and I was
moving. But I knew I was too late. Nothing could stop the thrust of that knife.

Except Russel. He froze with Jordan’s pajama shirt bunched
in one huge fist, the knife poised in the other like a scorpion’s stinger.
“Damn,” he screamed, and he threw the knife hard into the headboard of the bed
and let go of Jordan and I hit him like a hammer securing a nail, threw my
shoulder against him and we both went flying across the room. He got his hands
around my neck and stood up and my feet dangled off the floor. I tried to kick
as I hung there, but I couldn’t get any power in my kicks; my legs slapped at
him like wet noodles.

He shoved me against the bed and kicked me in the groin and
it felt as if my balls were in my ears. Then he had me on the floor, his thumbs
locking behind my windpipe, and he was slamming my head against the carpet
yelling, “I couldn’t do it, you sonofabitch, couldn’t do it you goddamn
murdering bastard.” He let go of me with one hand, and still pinning me to the
floor with the other, he rained knuckles on my head. In the dim light from the
hallway his teeth looked like jammed machinery gears and there were tears in
his eyes big as pearls and they fell on my face hot as fresh asphalt. His blows
became weaker and weaker and he kept repeating breathlessly, “you sonofabitch,”
and I struggled uselessly against him, flailing my fists at his side, and then
Ann hit him with Jordan’s Little Sprout lamp and he collapsed on top of me.

Ann stood over me, looking like a Valkyrie in her nightgown,
holding a lamp in place of a sword. She looked as if she badly wanted to hit
Russel again.

At first I thought my head was ringing, but it was the world
coming back into focus, sight and sound. It was the alarm. The police had set
it off. I could hear them wrecking the front door. They had most likely been
after it ever since the shotgun had gone off. The entire battle with Russel,
though it seemed longer, had taken only a few minutes.

I rolled out from beneath Russel, and Jordan ran to me. I
hugged and kissed him. “It’s okay,” I said. “Go to your mother.”

Jordan grabbed her leg and held her tight and Ann kept the
lamp cocked, ready to bash Russel should he so much as fart.

I went to the front just as the police tossed aside the door
and were about to shoot a riot gun into the lock on the grill.

“It’s all right,” I said. “He’s down,” and thought, bless
his black heart, he couldn’t do it. I got the key to the alarm and the grillwork
and let the police in. They handcuffed Russel and he came to enough for them to
walk him out. As he passed me, he turned and said, “I think I knew all along I
couldn’t do it.”

“That’s a big comfort to them,” Price said. “Let’s go.” Two
policemen took Russel out to a cop car that had appeared seemingly out of
nowhere, and they drove him away.

Price and another officer got Kevin awake and onto the couch
to look him over.

“You need to work on your stepover toe-hold,” the officer
told him.

“That old bastard is as strong as God,” Kevin said.

An ambulance was called out, and a doctor came and looked at
Kevin and me and my family. He clucked some, applied a bandage or two and gave
us an aspirin. A cop took the knife from Jordan’s headboard and Price said he’d
see the front door got nailed up for the night somehow, and that tomorrow
morning early he’d send a carpenter out to fix it, at the city’s expense. He
shook my hand and went away. Someone put the door up and there was some banging
and I went over and sat on the couch with Ann and Jordan, put my arms around
them, and as if by secret signal, the three of us began to cry.

15

That night Jordan went back to bed with us and I lay there
thinking about Russel. After all that had happened, the thing that kept coming
back to me was that he had hands like my father and he had had them around my
neck. It was like my old man had come back from the grave to choke me for
something I had done. I could never quite get it out of my mind—in spite of
what I knew about my mother—that I had been in some way responsible for him
eating the barrel of his Winchester.

I eventually gave up trying to sleep and went into the
kitchen and put some strong coffee on. While that was brewing I went into
Jordan’s room and turned on the light and looked around. The Little Sprout
lamp, which had been beside his bed on the nightstand before Ann used it to hit
Russel, lay on the floor where she had dropped it when the cops came in. There
was a mark in the headboard of the bed where Russel had thrown the knife, but
other than that, everything looked normal.

I walked around the room touching toys and books, assuring
myself that things were as they had been and that they would coast along
properly from here on out. It was a lie I very much wanted to believe.

I put the lamp where it belonged and sat down on Jordan’s
bed, and while I was sitting there, I saw something dark sticking out from
beneath Jordan’s battered toy box. Getting down on my hands and knees, I pulled
it out and saw that it was a wallet. Without opening it, I knew it was Russel’s
and that it had slid under there during the fight.

The thing to do was to give it to the cops, but I couldn’t
resist a peek inside first. The first thing I saw was a photograph encased in
one of those plastic windows. Russel was a young man in the picture and he
looked handsome, strong and happy. He was down on his knee and he had his arm
around a little blond-haired boy holding a BB gun. The boy looked about
Jordan’s age. On the back of the photograph was written: Freddy and Dad.

There was a photograph behind that one, and it was of a
young man in his early twenties. He was blond, blue-eyed, and handsome, if
slightly thick in the chin. On the back of the photograph in the same
handwriting was Freddy.

I thought about Freddy the night I shot him, and tried to
match his face with this one. The burglar had had brown hair sticking out from
beneath his cap and the eye that wasn’t a wound had been brown. His chin had
been narrow, and never in his life had he been handsome or even passably
attractive.

If this was a photograph of Freddy Russel, then the man I
shot wasn’t him.

16

I went to the bedroom and found some clothes in the dark and
managed to get out of my pajamas and put them on without waking Ann or Jordan.
In the kitchen I wrote Ann a note, then slipped out quietly and drove to town.

When I got to the police station I sat in the lot for a time
and leaned on the steering wheel, trying to decide if I was making a mistake. I
got Russel’s wallet out of my shirt pocket and opened the car door so I’d have
the overhead light and looked at the photographs again and the writing on the
backs of each. I must have looked at those wrinkled photographs a dozen times
each, but no matter how I turned them or held them to the light, the face of
the burglar I had killed was not to be found in them.

I put the wallet in the glove box of my car and got out.

Inside the station I told the dispatcher that I had come to
see Price.

“He’s home, sir,” she said. “I can take a message.”

“I think you better call him at home,” I said. Then I told
her who I was and what had happened and that something very important had come
up. I told her I wouldn’t tell anyone about it but Price, and it was something
he would want to know.

“Very well,” she said, and she called him, frowning at me
all the while she was doing it. I found a chair and sat down and a few moments
later she leaned her head out of the dispatcher’s office and called to me.
“He’ll be here in a few minutes. He said for you to go to the assembly room and
have a cup of coffee if you like.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Certainly,” she said, but she didn’t look like she meant
it.

I went back through the door that led down the hallway to
the assembly room and found the coffee machine. I didn’t really want the
coffee, but it was something to do. I thought about backing out more than once,
but that didn’t happen. I just sat there with my paper coffee cup warming my
hands, staring off into space.

Two cops came in laughing and looked at me in that
suspicious way they look at everyone. They got coffee and sat down at the far
end of the table and talked quietly and looked at me and finally got up and
went out, taking their coffee with them.

I was about finished with my coffee when Price showed up. As
usual, he looked perfect. He looked as if he had already had a good night’s
rest. His face was unlined and his black hair was combed neatly. His suit was
tan and very fashionable. He had on a light blue shirt and a thin blue and tan
tie and the shoes still had that blinding shoe shine.

“Problem?” he said.

“Sort of. I want you to let Russel go.”

He stared at me a moment, then went over to the coffee
machine and got a cup and came to sit down near me. “Why?” he said.

“He didn’t really hurt anyone. He couldn’t kill my son, he
just thought he could.”

He gave me the kind of smile nut ward attendants reserve for
their patients who think they can fly. “He hurt an officer of mine. He hurt
you. That wasn’t exactly a tumbling act you folks were doing in there before we
came in.”

“No. He was trying to hurt me, all right, but he was out of
his head. He wouldn’t do it again. He’s spent. He’s had his shot and he
couldn’t do it and he didn’t want to do it.”

“So you’re saying you don’t want to press charges?”

“I am.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Mr. Dane. You don’t have to
press charges. We caught him in the act. He hurt one of my men. We don’t need
for you to press charges.”

“I think you do.”

“It would make it easier if you did, but we don’t need you.”

“The officer was hurt because he was in my house at your
request.”

“And at your agreement.”

“Yes, but I was wrong about that.”

“Come on, what’s with you, Dane? Just a few hours ago you
were wrestling this nut around your house, and just before that you were giving
me hell for not going after him before he even tried anything.”

“I know.”

“Then what gives?”

I thought about the photographs in the glove box of my car,
but I didn’t say anything. Not yet. Something was going on here, and I was sure
Price knew what it was. Or at least the department knew. And I wasn’t ready to
play my hole cards. I had to put Price to the test.

“I’ll bring a lawyer in on this if I have to. I don’t want
to press charges. I want to forgive and forget, and I have a feeling Russel does
too.”

“Forgive and forget,” Price said. “That’s cute.”

“It’s what I want.”

“I feel sorry for you,” Price said. “One moment you’re a
fucking Nazi right-winger wanting me to get this bastard off your ass, and now
you’re a bleeding-heart liberal leaking blood all over the goddamn floor.
You’re schizo. You don’t know what you’re asking. This man is dangerous. He
tried to kill your son because you had to kill his. He tried to kill you and
your wife and he injured one of my men. If I were you, I wouldn’t take that
lightly. I’d leave the turn-the-other-cheek stuff to the Sunday school lessons
and the five year olds. We’re living in the real world here, Dane, and Jesus
wouldn’t last five fucking minutes in it. No one would bother to crucify his
passive ass. Takes too long. They’d run him over with a car or cut his guts out
with a rusty can opener.”

“I don’t need a lecture.”

“You need something, Dane. Hell, man, you can’t be serious.
Think about what you’re asking.”

“I’ve been thinking about it. I want Russel let go. I don’t
want to press charges, and if I don’t get what I want, I’m going to bring a
lawyer in on this. I promise you that. I want him out now, where I can see him
set free, and I want charges dropped. I just want to get on with my life and
let him get on with his.”

“You really think I can do that?”

“I think you better.”

He sat and looked at me and tore his empty coffee cup apart
and then tore it into smaller pieces. Finished, he put both hands on the table
and kept his eyes on me.