Easy Death (24 page)

“This is Mister None-Of-Your-Damn-Business, mister, that’s who it is,” Andy huffed. Which only got the reporter more interested in me.

“I’m Ned Nathan from the
Bootheville Daily
.” The reporter stepped closer. “Can I get your name for the story, sir?”

Behind him, the music played,

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep,

God is not dead, nor doth he sleep,

The wrong shall fail, the right prevail…

And I don’t think I ever saw a man walk so close to getting his face tore off with a shotgun as right then; I was just that near to doing it. But I leaned into him and half-whispered, “Meet me at the station. You won’t believe this!”

His eyes didn’t quite goggle at me—he’d been too long a reporter for that, I guess. But his jaw almost dropped and he started, “Hey, aren’t you the guy—?”

I shushed him, trying to look subtle about it. The same like I had with Drapp, like I was letting him in on a secret. I flashed him the badge and held it out there long enough for him to get a good look—because I knew he couldn’t see it in the dark.

“Wait till you hear it,” I half-whispered. “At the station.”

And it worked. He was on to a sharp angle on this big story, he figured, and that was enough to shut him up and keep him happy.

Next thing, we were all three of us in the front seat: me, Walter and Andy, and Andy was backing us out of that parking lot, driving slow because the streets still looked like trouble. While he did it, I jacked a round into the chamber of that shotgun and flipped the safety.

“Da-yam,” Andy said, and he grinned at me but kept his eyes on the road, “you must be expecting trouble!”

“Well you never can tell.” I smiled back at him. “Can you?”

“Guess not.” He let the clutch out, felt the wheels slide then bite into the slush as we headed out onto the snowplowed street. “So, whatcha doing for Christmas?”

July 14, 1981

Eddie

But all that’s starting to be a long time ago.

Walter and me, we got the money to Brother Sweetie, and he paid us off on the spot. Always a sunuvabitch but a good man to do business with, that was Brother Sweetie. I worked with guys in my time—back when I was doing work like that, I mean—worked with guys you oughta split the loot up first thing, ’cause if you waited till later you had to go to all the trouble of splitting them off your share. Not Brother Sweetie; he was always honest in his ways, or he was till some dope fiend blew his stomach out about ten years back, which is getting off the subject.

So like I said, we got our money, and I done the next couple weeks taking care of Walter till his hands and feet got better. Of course we were nowhere close to Willisburg or Bootheville by then; we was short in those towns, and we’d moved a couple good states away, but I kept checking the out-of-town newspaper stand, and funny thing was, there was plenty of news in the papers from Willisburg and Bootheville about the big armored-car robbery, but nothing about what went on that night in the hospital. Not one word. So I guess somebody owed that reporter a favor. Or maybe he owed them. Anyway, they hushed it all up about how I got away with the money, and that suited me just fine. Just after Christmas there was something about how the cops had put out warrants for arrest in the case, but when I read the story it was about how nobody had seen Slimmy Johnson and Boxer Healey, two local characters, it said, ever since the day of the robbery. I guess the cops figured them leaving town right after the armored car shed all that weight, well, they figured the two things might tie in together. But a couple months later when the weather got warm, there was another story about how those two had spent the winter in the trunk of Boxer’s car, sitting in a crowded parking lot. They might not have found them even then, but some guy who made his living breaking into cars turned them up and then went and told the cops about it. The papers said they let him go—the guy who found them I mean, they let him go—which was probably a bad thing, to let someone that dumb out walking the streets, but that’s none of my business.

Anyway we got along pretty good, Walter and me, while he was healing up, I mean, and I talked him around to coming up to Akron with me when I bought into that gas station. From what he said, I figured Walter to be a good man with a hook, so we went in on buying a tow-truck together and with him towing wrecks and break-downs for me to fix up, it brought in more business. Come to it, work got pretty steady there. I even put up a sign that said,

WE OFFER WORK THAT IS
CHEAP
FAST
RELIABLE
YOU CAN HAVE ANY TWO

And we did pretty good. An honest mechanic gets good word of mouth pretty quick, and I was fairly honest, for a mechanic. Not like in the old days. That was all behind me then. It had to be.

After a while, Walter and me went down south a ways to someplace about fifty miles uphill from Absolutely Nowhere and Walter picked up his brother’s wife—Gypsy, her name was—and her kids, and moved them up to Akron with us. I think he married her, but I never knew for sure. He raised those kids like they was his own, though, that much I know. They always called him Popaw.

Me, I got married a couple times, but it never took. Funny, both of them told me the same thing when they left: said it was like I was keeping something back from them, something important-like and they never could get me to share it.

Well yeah, I guess so.

I mean, do you marry a decent woman, you don’t just go telling her how you got your start in business by robbing and killing, and shot some guy’s ear off once. And I sure wouldn’t marry some tramp. Walter’s woman put it good: Him and me was sipping a beer in his kitchen right after the second one left me, and Gypsy up and says, “Trouble with you, you don’t want any woman that would have a man like you for a husband, that’s all.”

And I guess she got it right.

But there was something else besides, which was that I never got Callie off my mind: that big ugly ranger-lady back in the park there. Maybe it was how she saved my life that kept me thinking at her—it sure wasn’t sex appeal. You know how you look back on something bad and years later on it don’t seem as awful as it did right at the time. Like I still remembered the sight of all those Germans, back at Bastogne, running up the hill at us, but it didn’t seem as scary anymore as it did back then. But when I thought back on Callie she still looked ugly enough to stampede buffalo. So I can’t figure why sometimes I’d just get to wondering whatever become of her, and I couldn’t put it out my mind.

I mean, she didn’t die or nothing. That was the first thing I looked for in the papers, and when I read they had her listed in satisfactory condition, I felt pretty good about it. And I felt better when I read some further about how she said she couldn’t remember nothing about what happened that day on account of she’d lost so much blood.

That left the cops trying to figure out what Captain Scranton had to do with everything; trying to see how him getting burned all to hell tied in with the truck I stole off that farmer and left there in the park. And how all that ended up with some part-time cop nobody knew nothing about—how he dropped off the money and a black man, and then everything disappeared and Healey and Johnson climbed into the trunk of a car for the winter….

Well it was kind of a mess, what with them getting that description from the armored-car guards, looking for two guys in an ambulance, and I’m not surprised they never did hit the bottom of it.

I always kind of wondered though, did Callie really not remember what happened or was she maybe covering for me?

Never did find out.

So like I say it kind of stuck in my mind some, and then last year Walter fell over dead. Damnedest thing. He’d just come up towing somebody’s Mustang and he bent over the switch to lower the hook and just kept bending over till I found him like that and the doctor said it was a massive coronary and he likely never knew he was dying till he looked down from Heaven and saw he was dead. Damnedest thing. And boy did they carry on at his funeral.

Well, that got me thinking at my own health, and why I was coughing all the time lately. So I looked up a good doctor, and he sent me to another doctor, and that one sent me for some X-rays and when I come back he told me I had a cancer growing in my chest. No surprise, considering I’d smoked a pack of Luckies every day since I was twelve. Didn’t figure to stop, either. I just thanked the doctor for his time and checked out.

And the next thing I was on a plane to Willisburg Airport and then rented a car and drove out to Boothe National Park.

It was on one of those days that’s just fine for going to the park; not too hot but plenty of sun. The ranger station was a brand new thing, which shouldn’t have surprised me since the old knotty-pine office would have been food for the termites by now, but I got kind of a funny feeling when I walked in the big, square-shiny Formica-and-plastic ranger office and asked did anyone remember Calpurnia Nixon.

Well, the ranger I asked, he was a young guy—they pretty much all are, anymore. He had an Army crew-cut and a know-everything look on him, and he just smiled a crooked kind of smile and said, “You’re a month too late, man.”

I looked at him, and something in my face sobered him up and he looked behind him and said, “Jennie, this guy wants to know about Captain Callie.”

Up pops a smart-looking young lady and she’s dressed in a uniform that hasn’t changed much since the last time I saw one.

“Did you know Captain Nixon?” she asked.

It wasn’t funny anymore to find a woman in a job like this, but just seeing her there in that uniform like that, well it really took me back.

“Met her once,” I said. “She guided me through the park here and…and I guess that’s all there is to it. Just wondered was she still around, but the way you put it I guess she ain’t.”

“Her ashes are,” she said. “We scattered them in the woods here last month.”

Oh.

Well, that shut me up while the ranger told me how Callie worked there these last thirty years, and it was always kind of her park, and she looked to see it was the best park she could make it. Like the trees and animals there was something special to her. Then one day she just told Jennie here she was going away and Jennie should mind things, and then she went up a trail into the woods.

“We found her the next morning,” Jennie told me, “lying under a tree. She had such a peaceful look on her face, and the animals hadn’t touched her at all. It was like she sat down there to rest and just went away. Like she said.”

“An easy death,” I said.

“Funny you should say that.” The young girl gave me the look she likely got out and showed to all the old fossils. “It was an expression she used a lot: an easy death.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s funny,” I said. “Is there a marker anyplace?”

“She wouldn’t have one,” the girl said. “That was very clear in her will. She just wanted her ashes scattered around the park where she’d spent her life, so that’s what we did.”

“You know,” I said, looking through one of the big windows out at the woods beyond, “back when she first started to work here, it wasn’t easy for a woman to get a job like this.”

“I’ve read about things like that.” She smiled. “I took a course on Women’s Issues in college.”

Well, that made me feel like I’d just stepped out of a Civil War photograph.

“So there’s no marker?” I asked again, just to make myself feel a little less dead.

The guy behind her spoke up. “The only marker in the park is a big old granite thing up by where the lookout tower used to be,” he said. “And it’s for some guy no one remembers.”

* * *

It was well into afternoon by the time I got out to that marker where the ranger tower had been, so long ago. There was nothing there now but a big, stone-block thing, the kind of monument they used to think was impressive back in the 1950s, and on it they’d put up a brass plaque:

TO THE MEMORY
OF
CAPTAIN ALVIN P. SCRANTON
JUNE 3, 1921 – DEC. 20, 1951
WHO GAVE HIS LIFE IN THIS PARK

I tried to figure on it some: This guy Scranton, I guess I never got to know him good except he was a crazy-mean sunuvabitch who’d kick a man when he was down, and never took his job serious except that it give him his chance to shoot animals easier—and he didn’t mind the notion of setting me on fire, either. And here they’d put up this big monument to his life or something.

Callie, she was the kind of woman that stayed in your mind, ugly as she was, and that was in a good way, and I figured she’d worked pretty hard at doing whatever you do to a place like this, but there wasn’t any marker over her at all. Nothing to show she’d ever been there except maybe the park itself and the great-great grand-puppies of some dumb animals she’d kept from getting killed.

Time to come, everybody’d likely forget about her, but they’d always see this big stone marker for the guy I killed.

* * *

That means something, but I just don’t figure it.