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
Ruth
S
HE SITS ON THE PORCH
alongside Audie and she watches her other son go. Dressed in his khakis. Marching off into the oncoming storm with the dog limping along behind him. Stopping down where the dirt lane gives onto the main road and hollering something at the dog and going on. He’s never even said good-bye. She pictures him lightning-struck and dying by the roadside in a puddle of mud with raindrops pattering and no good-byes said whatsoever and she calls out even though she knows he will never hear her and he does not.
Audie looks up from his work and mutters something and she says probably some girl. Some girl from town, the way he’s been spending his money. Creed Proctor, the third of her sons and the first to take this route.
Audie grins down at his knife work as if he might like to take that route himself if ever granted the opportunity.
She asks what he is carving, is it a cow or a pig she can’t tell yet.
He points toward a place in the yard where he has planted one of his whirligigs just a week or two earlier, this one in the shape of a pig, painted up in the conventional pink.
Oh, she says, the mate of that one, and he nods.
He sits and carves on, chips flying. She asks if he will need to do some turning on this one and he points with his beak nose toward the one in the yard with its turned screw of a tail and she says just so. I see. Silly of me to ask.
Even the pigs have mates, she thinks, even the wooden ones, and she remembers her long-gone Lester and she stifles a coughing fit and she wonders how her son Creed is getting on with whatever lady friend he is most surely courting. Hoping that he does not get wet before he crosses her threshold.
Creed
T
HE STORM HELD OFF
and I got in before the rain come down. Where I usually sit was empty and two or three places on either side of it were empty too. There were enough people in there though. It was a Friday. I remember it like I put it on a calendar. Friday means payday so there were enough people there and folks looked at me like they never seen a soldier in the Dineraunt before. That’s the way they always did even though I come there regular enough and there was plenty of soldiers everyplace in them days. Soldiers was always coming and going.
I had the meat loaf. She brung it and she brung the ketchup I always liked with it since she knew me and she knew how I like to eat my supper. I didn’t have to ask. The ketchup weren’t extra, they just give it to you if you asked for it to go with your meat loaf. I set quiet and ate my supper and people come in and people went out. In from the rain and out into it. She didn’t have too much time for me since it was so busy but she checked up on me now and then the way she would.
I never usually had the dessert but that time I did. It got dark outside and you could see yourself in the glass window. People give up coming in so much. I was getting nervous. Not nervous like Audie but almost. I wanted more people to finish up their suppers and go out so I could ask her and not worry. So I had the dessert. It was a white cake and I had coffee with it and I took my time working on it. More people finished and paid up and left and I was still working. The white cake had frosting and little red flower decorations like for a birthday. I took some on my fork and I told her I guess somebody’s always got a birthday at the Dineraunt and she laughed. She was laughing and mopping at the counter with a rag right there next to me and I leaned over where she was working and told her how I killed a few men right up close when I was in Korea. She left off mopping. I said I thought you ought to know about that, Wilma, and she said Velma. She said Velma and she told me I ought to finish up now and go on home. I said I thought you ought to know what I done before I seen if you want to go to the movies with me sometime and she said she didn’t care what I done and she didn’t care for the movies either. Not with me. Then she went in the kitchen and this feller in a white apron come out and give me my check himself. I think he was the boss. All of us over there in Korea done it like I said but it weren’t the kind of thing you talked about.
Audie
T
HE DOG DIDN’T COME BACK
so I whistled for him but he didn’t come back then either. I went to the road to see about him. It looked like rain. The wind whipped up and there was thunder but it wasn’t too close. My mother said not to go but I went anyhow. She said he’d come back or else maybe he’d stuck with Creed but I didn’t know about that. I didn’t think so. He wasn’t dead when I found him but he was hurt bad. Some car. He didn’t have but three legs when he went down there and when I found him he didn’t have that many. I’ve seen animals cut up but this was different. What kept him alive I don’t know. I picked him up and the rain started and I brought him back to the barn. My mother saw me coming and she called Vernon and he came too. The dog was awful slippery. I won’t ever forget the sound he was making but I can’t make it myself. My mother took one look and went in the house. Vernon got a feed sack and he doubled it over and he wrapped it around the dog’s nose and held on. The dog didn’t fight. He didn’t have any fight left. When a dog passes on I don’t know if he goes on ahead like a man does or if he just passes on and that’s the end of it. If it goes that way it doesn’t seem fair to dogs. Vernon put the dog in a wheelbarrow for later and I put the feed sack over top and then we had to do the milking. Creed wasn’t around to help with any part of it.
Tom
T
HE FIRST TIME
that Henri came to the barn was early in January, and DeAlton had a devil of a time convincing his son that they had the date right.
“We said the tenth,” Tom said, “but if it’s not till two in the morning, then that makes it the eleventh. Right?”
“You want to go on the tenth at two in the morning, you’ll be in for a long wait. Like twenty-four hours.”
“Still. If we say
always be here on the tenth of the month
and he always shows up on the eleventh, why don’t we just call it the eleventh?”
“That’d make it the twelfth, if we said the eleventh.” DeAlton leaned on the windowsill of his son’s VW and spat onto the ground. “It’d be the twelfth, and you’d be a day late.”
“All right,” said Tom.
“Just be out there tomorrow night, you’ll be fine.”
Tom lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window into the frigid morning, past his father. “It was different when we had Nick.”
“If you can’t carry a few bricks of dope up and down a ladder, you’re getting too soft to be of any use to yourself.”
“It’s not that.”
“Use the block and tackle.”
“I never used a block and tackle.”
“Then get the Canuck to do it for you.”
“I doubt he knows how either.”
“I mean get him to carry it. Up the ladder. He’s got to be good for something.”
“I don’t know.” Tom started the car and a little plume of gray smoke blew out the tailpipe. “We’ll see.”
DeAlton took his hands off the sill and whacked the roof of the car with the flat of his gloved hand. It rang like a kettle drum. “Manage it, boy,” he said. “Take charge. Show us what you’re made of.” Then he stepped away from the car and went back inside the house. He was going to be spending the whole day in his little office down at Dobson’s, filling in order sheets and figuring out the December expense report which Dobson was about to kill him for not having done already, and he had just enough time for one last cup of coffee before he went.
Preston
I
T GOT SO THAT
it was a circus over there nights. That mean-looking greaser friend of Tom’s quit coming toward the tail end of eighty-nine but that wasn’t the last of it, not by any means. I’d still see him ride past on the main road now and then, slow down and give the place the fuzzy eyeball. Like he was keeping tabs on things. I guess they’d had a falling-out.
And then once a month this big black Eldorado with Canadian plates on it would come by like clockwork, I mean like the milkman or the mail train or something, and Tom would be waiting to meet it. It was always in the middle of the night. Two, maybe three o’clock in the morning. Right in between there. Only an old man with urinary troubles would have been out of bed to know about it, but I knew about it all right. The way things turned out, I wasn’t the only one having that kind of trouble during those days. That was probably why Vernon would stick his head out the barn door sometimes and give them a hand hauling bundles from the trunk of the Caddy and vice versa. I figure he’d probably gotten up to take a leak. You could see who it was in the light from the house door, if he thought to put it on. Tom and the Canadian never once put on a light. This was back in the springtime. Vernon was still alive but he wouldn’t be for long.
Nick
H
E’D PRETTY MUCH DECIDED
that there wasn’t any goddamned decency left in the world. A workingman builds a little something up for himself, and the next thing he knows some asshole comes along and takes it away. The same asshole who screws his little sister while he’s at it and then gives up on her too, even though to hear her tell the story it might have gone in the other direction on account of she decided he was a Grade A loser and gave him the old heave-ho, but who cares. It wasn’t right either way. Loser or not, he had the best dope in the county and a private line to the Canuck and where did that leave old Nick. The Canuck wouldn’t even take his calls anymore. Wouldn’t even let that French chef of his pick up the phone. They must have gotten Caller ID just for him. It rang and rang.
Del
M
Y MOTHER’S HOUSE
is the very same way. Not very much has changed in it since Kennedy was in office or before.
Margaret Hatch kept a display of those little old-fashioned mustard pots on her kitchen shelves. All sorts of them. Crystal and china and pewter. What the old folks used to call milk glass. I don’t know why you’d decide to collect mustard pots or why you’d give any shelf space to milk glass, but people are all different.
Preston was upstairs, so his wife and I chatted in the kitchen for a while waiting. But rather than go into the living room when he came down I said why don’t we just talk out on the screen porch. I showed my pant legs, which were still a little damp even though I’d managed to keep my shoes and socks dry, and they agreed that it would be a good idea. So we went out onto the porch, where they had some castoff furniture that I wouldn’t ruin.
Neither one of them looked surprised when I mentioned the marijuana field. I made it clear from the start that I didn’t believe the two brothers had anything to do with it, and I think I’d developed sufficient credibility with Preston that he saw I wasn’t trying to mislead him in any way. He said if those two were raising that big a cash crop they’d probably eat better. Dress better too. Maybe drive something other than a tractor when they had an errand to run, something with doors and a roof. He went on about the implications for a while as if I still might need convincing. I said I guessed he was right about all that, and he let it go.
Since it wasn’t Creed and Audie growing dope up there in the woods, I asked if they had any ideas as to who might be doing it. I didn’t say that I thought it might be the nephew. I left it open. Preston asked Margaret if she’d go in the house for a while. She said she didn’t need to. She said she knew what he was going to say because he’d been talking about nothing else for the better part of the year. He scowled at her and said no that wasn’t it. He had things to talk about with me was all. Different things. Things she didn’t need to put her nose into. He wasn’t polite about it in the least, which surprised me. But she stood up and smoothed her dress down and went on into the house. Just like that. They come from a different time, those two. Their ways will die with that generation.
Once she was gone, Preston’s demeanor changed. He actually went quiet for a minute, as if he were having second thoughts as to what he was about to tell me. Then he looked out the screen and remarked on the heat and the lack of rain and the condition of the grass in the pasture next door.
I said how about you tell me about who’s growing that marijuana.
He said there was more to it than that.
I asked what he meant.
He said the marijuana crop up in those woods was worth an awful lot. The crop and the people involved with it.
I said there was no denying that.
Margaret was opening and closing cabinets in the kitchen, so he cleared his throat and got up and shut the door. Then he sat down and looked at me. He cleared his throat again and he asked how certain I was about Creed. About the confession he’d signed.
I said a confession was a confession and my opinion of it was immaterial. I said how about we talk about that marijuana field instead. But he didn’t give up.
He asked if my interview with Audie had changed anything as to my feelings about Creed, and I said
what interview
. I said it like it was a joke and I shook my head and smiled a little so as to encourage him to laugh, to help him be more forthcoming. I guess it helped, because he quit beating around the bush. He asked if there was any chance that I could influence what the district attorney might do about Creed, particularly given that there was more to the marijuana business than anybody guessed as of yet, and his testimony might well unveil what he called
a drug cartel of international proportions
.
I told him I was as sympathetic to his neighbors as anybody, perhaps more, but the law was the law and this marijuana business was an entirely different case. We’d eventually find out who was raising that crop and who was buying it. We’d find out one way or another. I told him he could choose to help or not, however he saw fit, but I’d sure appreciate it if he would give us a hand. I think he was a little embarrassed, and he certainly didn’t have the willpower to push it any further. I don’t know that anybody would, except in the movies or on the television. He’d made a pretty good try, though.