Kings of the Earth: A Novel (28 page)

Del

P
EOPLE TALK
. Things get out. In a perfect world it wouldn’t happen, but this isn’t a perfect world and it does. Then again, in a perfect world people wouldn’t die under mysterious circumstances.

It could be that’s just it. If the world were perfect, Vernon Proctor would pass on in his sleep exactly the way he did and nobody would give it a second thought. But we know things. We suspect things. Our brains start working on them and we can’t help it. We want it all to be perfect and it’s not perfect, it isn’t going to be, but we keep trying to make some sense of it.

A hundred years back, I don’t know. Things were different. Fifty years, even. You go to the doctor and he asks what did your grandparents die from and you realize you can’t say. People died, that’s all. When there was any record they had different words for things or they used the same words we use now but they meant something else. The words meant something that people might have been sort of unsure about, but it didn’t make any difference. It didn’t change things.

I guess we’ve come a long way. We’re all experts in everything now. We might just be the poorer for it.

Anyhow people say things who shouldn’t say things. An old fellow like Vernon dies and it wouldn’t make a ripple under normal circumstances. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. My men went out there because Creed Proctor called us. The emergency technicians went out there because of the same call. No big deal. Simple as that. An unattended death, we’d have had to look into it anyhow. We went out the next day because the medical examiner found some things and we had to see about them. A reporter can look at that from any angle he wants—it’s all there on the public record, or he could come straight to me for a statement—but until somebody in the district attorney’s office begins shooting his mouth off there’s no reason to start talking about murder. And there’s definitely no reason for everybody and his mother to know about how that poor old man signed a confession.

But you have to think it through all the same. So when I first heard about it I wondered if maybe the story had come from the night clerk at the Mobil station. The one who witnessed. The one who sold us that pizza for Audie. I thought maybe he’d gotten an idea about talking to the newspaper, but if he had they wouldn’t have said what they did about an unnamed source in the district attorney’s office. That would have been a lie. An unnecessary lie. And as little as I trust the
Courier
, I think I was starting to trust Ben Wilson’s office a little less.

Audie

T
HEY COME AT NIGHT SOMETIMES
. Tom and that friend of his. People say if you sleep the night you’re sleeping like a baby but a baby will be up crying all hours. I know that from when Creed and Donna were little. They’d be up hollering and my mother would be up with them. I guess I must sleep like a baby then. Up half the night.

The first time they came I thought it was burglars. Vernon was making that hard swallowing noise he makes and I couldn’t sleep and I heard them come. I got out of bed and I got a stick of firewood and I didn’t turn on the light since it wouldn’t do me too much good. I didn’t open the door but a crack and I slid out into the barn and they were loading. The two men. One of them had a little penlight he shined at me and somebody said hello Uncle Audie how you doing it’s just me Tom. I asked if they needed my help and they said they didn’t. I went on back to bed. It was the three of us in it. This was a while back and Vernon hadn’t gone on ahead. Not yet.

Tom

H
IS FATHER SAID
it was all about leverage. Not the mechanical kind but the financial kind, although in the end it came to the same thing. He’d put money into Tom’s crop and they’d multiply his yield by five or six times and then they’d have some leverage over that Nick. Make him into a junior partner, if that. Leverage was the only thing little creeps like him understood. Once they had Nick where they wanted him they’d take that leverage and a little more of DeAlton’s retirement money—as much as it took to get noticed—and go talk turkey with Henri up in Canada. Take it right to him on his own turf. Put their offer on the table and tell him take it or leave it if he wants to play with the big boys. They had other places they could get the low-end crap he was selling if it came to that. There was Mexico, wasn’t there. Mexico made more sense than Canada. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that. Canada, for Christ’s sake. Henri could go sell that garbage to the Eskimos if he didn’t see things their way.

In the end they’d have the Canuck selling to them at their price and Nick doing the grunt work and a happy future lined up for everybody. Everybody meaning the Poole family.

In the meantime, it was dirty work. Dirty but familiar. Back when DeAlton was barely out of short pants, he’d helped his father build an irrigation system for a newly broken field. He’d maintained that one and others pretty much like it until he’d finally grown up all the way and cut loose of his old man and gotten the hell out of the onion business, but he couldn’t deny that the experience had served him well. He prided himself on being able to help out if some old farmer he called on was having trouble with a water system. When it came to ingratiating yourself with these old-timers, by which he meant selling them a truckload of milking equipment, nothing beat a readiness to get your hands dirty. That was one lesson it wouldn’t hurt Tom to learn.

For a water source they thought about the creek back in the hills, but the slope was steep and the pressure might be too great. They didn’t want that. So they settled on hooking into an old waterline that Tom’s uncles had put in sometime back in the fifties or sixties. Who even knew what it was meant for? Maybe to pasture cows up there someplace or maybe to water the grass in the graveyard even though it was a good distance away. It was uphill of the graveyard, though, so maybe they’d had a trench. The tap was rusted open when they found it and the line was dry so it was either broken somewhere or shut off. Tom said ice had probably busted it during the winter sometime but his father said if it was busted there’d be water running wouldn’t there and there wasn’t any. Sure enough the line was just shut off at the wellhead. They wrenched it back on and all of a sudden there was plenty of water up there, as if the line had been put in just for that purpose, and since it came straight from the well there’d be no telltale bump in the water bill. You had to think these things through, DeAlton said. This was the stuff they didn’t teach you at the community college.

The spring passed and summer came on again. Tom found himself busting his ass up in the field more than he’d have liked, all alone at that, but his father had to work and to tell the truth he enjoyed the chance to be all by himself without the old man plaguing him. There was no income from the dope yet and there wouldn’t be for a while, so right now he was more or less an indentured servant to a bunch of green sprouts. A bunch of green sprouts and DeAlton Poole. His father had him wearing different shoes every day of the week and taking a different route up every time he went and looking for his own tracks as he did, and it was starting to make him a little crazy. One minute he was a dirt farmer and the next minute he was some kind of secret agent and either way there wasn’t much glamour to it. Sometimes late in the day when he’d come walking down through the pasture and see his uncles waiting for the co-op truck he’d have an impulse to embrace the three of them like brothers in arms, like they were all members of that Solidarity from over in Poland, but he never did. He’d have needed two showers, one for the dirt and one for the cow shit, and he had places to go.

Preston

I
KNEW
D
E
A
LTON’D STUCK
his nose into it. I could tell you when it happened, right down to the day.

DeAlton’s been a disappointment to me. I never knew his father all that well but I knew him enough to speak to. They were from over by Wampsville someplace, so he didn’t come in much unless he needed something that Willis didn’t have over in Canastota. He was a gentleman, I’ll tell you that. Neat in his habits and prompt in his payments and never an unkind word, not from Leon Poole. I never knew his wife. Maybe she’s to blame for how DeAlton turned out.

The old man did stink like onions though. I’ll tell you that.

Anyway Donna deserved better. She worked to get away from her beginnings and DeAlton worked to get away from his, but it wasn’t the same thing. There’s ways to get away and there’s ways to get away. And by get away I guess I mean grow up. Donna got away from a little place with a pretty narrow horizon. DeAlton got away from the onion stink but that’s as far as he got, and I’m not even sure that entirely took. Like I said there’s ways and there’s ways. There’s ways to and there’s ways from. Donna went to and DeAlton went from. But regardless of what he had in mind he never went very far.

That’s not always a bad thing. I never left my father’s lumberyard except to go to France, and even that wasn’t my idea. I stayed in that lumberyard all my life, but when I was done it was a different place than it’d been under my dad. We’d expanded into the lot next door and we’d leased the railroad yard across the tracks and we’d bought the old depot building and made it over into a little boutique for home goods. Margaret picked out every single thing in there by hand and she did a good job. My father never would’ve thought of that. Then again the depot was a going concern in his time. Six passenger trains a day when I was a boy and then down to four and then down to one in each direction and then that was the end of it. The train that brought me back from the war dropped me off at that depot and it was the same for Creed. Generations came back that way from everywhere. Generations left too.

I tried to keep an open mind when I saw DeAlton and Tom going up there with their carload of pipe and whatnot. DeAlton’s father taught him a few things and from the look of it I guess DeAlton passed a couple of them on to Tom. That irrigation system, I mean. Not that I would have put it together the way they did. They took a few shortcuts, made some compromises I wouldn’t have. Then again I wouldn’t have done it at all. So that’s how much my opinion on the subject is worth.

I was in the graveyard when I first saw them go by on the old tractor path. The one along the treeline up toward the creek. Nobody uses that path too much anymore. Not even Audie, and he does most of the tractor work. He just goes cross-lots. I was up paying my respects to Lester and Ruth and I saw them go by in Tom’s car with the back open, loaded up. I didn’t go over on account of I knew they were up to something, but I did have a look after they went home. They didn’t get much done that first day but they came back every day until they were finished, just like it was a regular job.

That first week I got more exercise than I get in a year, going up and down to check how they were doing. Margaret thought I’d gone crazy. Once or twice I thought about fixing a couple of their mistakes but I never did. It just about killed me to leave them alone, but DeAlton would have been suspicious. Tom, he probably wouldn’t have noticed a thing. Or else maybe he’d have thought they had elves.