Kings of the Earth: A Novel (14 page)
Read Kings of the Earth: A Novel Online
Authors: Jon Clinch
Tags: #Fiction - General, #Brothers, #Family Life, #General, #Literary, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #Fiction, #Rural families
“Like ants,” said one of the troopers. He looked like he was about to tell her something he’d learned on the Discovery Channel and then he looked like he’d thought better of it.
She went on undisturbed. “What one of them thinks of doing the other one does. Especially with Vernon and Audie. They were always that way.”
They asked her about Audie’s troubles, because one of them had seen him on the porch that first day. He’d arrived with the emergency technicians and he’d taken note of Audie on the porch with his head tilted back and his eyes glazed over, listening to his whirligigs turning in the wind from over the fields. Donna said he had always been that way but had never been diagnosed. What was the point. They asked about his eyesight and she said he had been going blind for some years. As for his speech, you had to know him. They asked how she guessed he would get along without Vernon since they’d always been especially close and she said she didn’t know. He was strong as an ox physically, but otherwise he had always been what she called fragile.
Speaking of health, they inquired as to Vernon’s. She said he’d seen Dr. Franklin a few years ago but nothing had ever come of it. They asked about access to his medical records and she said don’t bother. She said they were free to look at them and if they needed her to sign anything as next of kin she would, but in her professional opinion it would be an utter waste of time. One of the troopers said that was all right, it probably wouldn’t be necessary on account of the autopsy and all. Then he went a little bit pale and apologized to her again.
Del
I
ASKED
C
REED
how long Vernon had been having that bladder difficulty he’d mentioned. I asked if he’d had any trouble breathing. If he’d snored heavily in the night and so forth. I don’t know what the medical examiner could have done to corroborate something on that order as a cause of death—sleep apnea or what have you—but at that early a stage I don’t think it pays to exclude anything. You listen and you ask questions and you see where the answers take you.
Creed reported that his brother’s bladder trouble had grown more frequent over the last several years, he couldn’t say how many, and that it was only recently that it had gotten out of hand. His brother didn’t snore, he said. Audie was the one who snored. He demonstrated a variety of the noises that Audie makes in the night. Creed is a voluble individual once you get him going. I think he has a lot stored up. He likes to talk, and contrary to what you might think, he’s quite able to make himself understood in great detail. He enjoys conversation.
I made notes as we went along. I asked his permission to do so and he granted it. After a while I called one of the other fellows to come in and help. Burnes. He took notes and he listened but he didn’t put in much. The conversation stayed between Creed and myself. At one point Creed went back and did a little snoring for Burnes’s sake, just to catch him up, and Burnes got a kick out of that.
Their mother died of cancer, and Creed was persuaded that cancer had been about to kill Vernon too. Not that he’d been diagnosed. Medical care was unheard of out there. If you want to see what happens to a human body under pretty harsh conditions and without the benefits of modern medicine, you could do worse than look at those men. They’re a case study.
Burnes got everything down.
Margaret
I
T WAS GETTING DARK
, and there were no lights on in the house. No lights at all. I don’t mean to suggest that they usually kept the place lit up like a Christmas tree, but they didn’t go around in the dark either. At the very least they’d have the television going. Preston and I had been out all day. I don’t even remember where we’d been, although you’d think I would, there was so much going on. But we’d been gone for the better part of the day, and we came back after supper and there were no lights on. We decided that they must all be gone. Not
all
, I mean.
Both
. It takes time to adjust your manner of speaking after a person passes away.
The tractor was in the yard, so Preston said they couldn’t have gone very far. He thought maybe they’d taken a walk up to where they kept that still of theirs, perhaps to have a drink in honor of Vernon. Their father always liked his liquor. He was a wicked man. I didn’t know him well. So Preston put on his work boots and took a flashlight and went up. I think he might have been looking forward to having a taste of their whiskey himself, if they’d asked. I don’t know that he’d ever drunk any of it, but I believe he’d always been curious.
Creed
D
EL
G
RAHAM BROUGHT
in this other one named Burnes but he stayed quiet. They was nice boys. Nice fellers. It was awful good to set with that breeze blowing across and no work. I felt like I was on vacation and I told them so and they laughed about that. It weren’t a vacation for them I guess. They always had it that way. Indoor work and a pot of coffee and all the McDonald’s you want. That ain’t hard to take and I said so.
We talked about how Vernon died. Del Graham thought he might of snored himself to death but I said no. I never heard of a person doing that. I didn’t know you could. Audie ain’t done it yet but maybe he will.
It got later and I used the bathroom and Burnes come along with me. I guess he had to go too. I don’t know when I ever drunk so much coffee. I asked Burnes if we was about done and would he take me back home and he said it was up to Del Graham. Del Graham was the man in charge.
Del Graham said if Vernon didn’t snore himself to death then he wondered how it happened. I told him it was the cancer but he said it weren’t big enough. I said cancer don’t need to be big it just needs to be cancer. I said I never heard of a big cancer or a small. I didn’t know it come in sizes.
Del Graham said maybe Vernon had some help besides the cancer. He said maybe it wouldn’t take much. Just a pillow or a hand while he was asleep.
Burnes wrote everything down steady. My belly started to growl and I said how about some more of them hamburgers if they were still buying.
Del
B
URNES WENT AND WROTE UP
the confession while we had our supper. I believe he got it right or I wouldn’t have asked Creed to sign it. I wouldn’t have expected him to.
Tom
A
FTER A COUPLE OF HOURS
he tipped the cooler out into the sand and he put the lid back on the top of it and said he ought to take her home.
“We were just there,” she said. “I’m happy down here by the water.”
“Not
my
place,” he said. “Yours. You know.
Home.”
She must think he was a hermit or something. Maybe a sex maniac, wanting to go right back in the middle of the day, for crying out loud. Then again once she’d seen that he was talking about her place instead, she’d probably think that he’d had enough of her. It was always a tightrope. He wouldn’t have even brought it up except they’d kind of run out of conversation and the wall clock on the snack bar showed close to noon and if he left now he could drop her off and make it to Utica by the end of the lunch break. Pick up an afternoon’s work and stay however late it went. They sorted out the full bottles from the empties and put the empties in a wire mesh basket in the sand by the snack bar, a couple of young mothers in bathing suits and cover-ups keeping an eye on their kids from a bench and looking at the two of them like they were derelicts. Like they were scavengers taking something out instead of putting it in. Then they put the full bottles back in the cooler and went and got in the car.
Her brother’s place was half a house in a little neighborhood that ran up against the edge of a black muck onion farm. Driving Shelly there, he wondered if maybe they were passing by the place where his own father grew up. They were always going out to his uncles’ farm in Carversville, but they hadn’t been to his grandfather Poole’s place in years. He’d pretty much forgotten how you got there. It was as if this part of DeAlton’s life had never even existed. He thought his father had the right idea about that.
He pulled up to the curb and she got out and asked was he coming. He said he didn’t think so. He thought he’d go over to the job site and put in some time. He didn’t know how much value she put on a guy keeping it together like that, doing the solid-citizen thing, but there it was. She could take it or leave it. Beer and dope didn’t grow on trees last time he looked.
She said that was all right. She wrung her hands together behind her back and he thought she looked like a little kid standing there. He could imagine how it had been, growing up on this dead-end street with the air full of onion stink. Maybe riding a bike up and down if she had a bike. Then he remembered that this was just her brother’s place and she’d grown up somewhere else and he should quit being such a sap.
Preston
V
ERNON WOULD SIT
on the porch and smoke his marijuana, big as life and twice as foolish. I was over there once or twice while he was at it. He said Tom had told him not to do it in the yard but he figured the porch would be all right.
A man’s home is his castle
, he said.
What a man does in his own home is nobody’s business
. His brothers nodded their heads to that like a bunch of old sages. The Three Wise Men. We sat out there one afternoon I remember and one night. It was late but there was a breeze still. Vernon wound up a little cigarette and Creed put a chaw of Red Man in his cheek and Audie asked for a little of the Red Man too rather than be left out. They were all of them going at it. Audie was whittling too, even though it was too dark to see. His vision was going anyway. You could hear the knife.
They say a marijuana cigarette smells like rope but I think it smells more like a muskmelon, kind of sweet and mossy but with a little spike to it. It’s a nice enough smell, if I’m allowed to say that. Not that I’d ever think of taking it up myself. After a little while I asked Vernon if he’d started seeing things yet and he laughed at me. He said you don’t see things. He said it wasn’t like that. He kept on laughing like he had one over on old Preston Hatch, and I guess he did. He was the expert. He was a regular Timothy Leary in that crowd.
It did seem to relax him some and make him talk a little more. He didn’t suck on those horehound drops when he was smoking it. Maybe his throat didn’t bother him so much. We sat there in the dark and he started humming something. I couldn’t believe my ears. I don’t think I ever heard a note of music out of those boys. Not so much as a whistle. I used to play a little tenor banjo myself, but in the Proctor house music wasn’t a useful enough thing to waste your time on. I heard Vernon kind of humming now, though, in spite of that catch he had way down in his throat. The catch in his throat made it buzz a little. What he was humming sounded like a lullaby, something I suppose he’d have learned from Ruth. I guess he had to go that far back to come up with something. You use what you have. We all sat quiet. Audie stopped scraping his knife. There were headlights out on the main road. The whirligigs turned in the little wind from across the pasture.
Tom
H
E HAD HER NUMBER
and he called it that night from the phone in his uncles’ house. He’d been up by the still tending his plants by flashlight. He’d hated like hell to be up there advertising himself, but tomorrow was Saturday and it was supposed to be a nice hot sunny day and he hoped maybe Shelly would want to go to the beach with him again, and if she did he had to get the plants tended while he had the chance. Plus with the overtime and a few beers with Fazio and some of the other guys afterward he hadn’t finished in Utica until practically nine. He’d parked and gone around the back of the barn and straight up into the woods because he thought he’d seen his uncles on the porch and he didn’t want to waste time jawboning with those old men. He had work to do if they didn’t mind.
In the morning he drove out to her place past onion farms crawling all over with tractors. He didn’t think at all about his uncles, surely finished with the milking by now and on to something else, out in fields of their own with their noses aimed at the ground. It was Saturday. He parked in front of the house and got out. It was one of those double houses whose owners hated each other and didn’t care who knew it. Each side was a different color. One porch was screened in and the other wasn’t. There was a paved driveway on one side and a dirt track on the other. Even the roofs were different. He guessed that the side with the peeling paint and the unscreened porch and the blowing dirt was where Shelly called home, and he wasn’t wrong.
The brother hollered from inside when he rang the bell. The screen door was rusted out and Tom could see him through it a little, filtered by the disintegrating squares of it, sitting in a chair watching the television. Some kind of cartoon. It had his attention and he looked like he didn’t want to get up but after a second he did and he came toward the door. He was maybe three quarters as big as Tom, and Tom wasn’t big. He looked like he was put together out of spring steel and leather belting. He had on black jeans and a black motorcycle vest with a little fringe. “I don’t know where she got to,” he said through the screen.
“I’ll wait.”
“All right.” He made no move to open the screen door. He just stood there behind it, a cigarette burning in one hand and ash dribbling onto the rug.
“You’re Nick.”
“You got that right.”
Tom smiled big, his father’s son. “She mentioned you.”
Unmoved, the brother turned back toward the television and started to drift in that direction like a man in a trance. “You can stand there all day or you can come on in.”
Tom went in. He sat down on the couch and looked at Bugs Bunny for a few minutes, until a commercial came on and the brother barked his sister’s name—loud—without anything other than his jaw moving. It was like a trick. He had the dark, deep-set eyes of a maniac or a hypnotist and he sat there fixed on a Cocoa Puffs commercial with a cigarette burning in his right hand, and then suddenly his mouth dropped open wide and that was it. Tom thought he looked like the mechanical dummy in the glass box that told fortunes in the arcade. He’d never cared for that dummy. He didn’t trust it. Whatever it had to say to him he’d rather find out on his own.
After a minute the show came back on and the brother pulled hard on his cigarette and said that he understood he and Tom had a mutual interest. It took Tom a second to realize that he was talking about dope.