Authors: Andrew Coburn
“A husband knows, a son don’t.”
Clement wore an expression of purpose, necessity, but it began to crumble of its own weight. He broke off a fern frond and ran his thumb and index finger down the length of it, against the grain, stripping it of its growth. “Junior never shot that woman, Papa. You did.”
Papa was cool. “You been listenin’ to lies.”
“No, I’ve been listening to myself. Junior doesn’t have it in him to shoot anybody. But you do.”
Papa’s cool was intact, with something like pride added to it. “You was always smart.”
“Why did you do it?”
“For Junior. Someone treats him like shit, it’s the same as treatin’ me that way. It tells you what they think of all of us.”
“So you tried to take MacGregor’s girl out and hit the mother instead.”
“She got in the way.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“Then I ain’t gonna argue it.”
“For whatever god-damn reason you did it, why did you involve Junior? Why the hell did you bring him along?”
“Guess you ain’t so smart.” Papa’s color rose high, only partly from the heat. “ ‘Case something went wrong afterward. Me, they’d fry. Junior they’d only put in a home or someplace. He might even be better off there. I ain’t gonna live forever, and you ain’t gonna want him in your fancy life.”
“Junior was the hedge to save your own ass.”
“Look at it how you want.”
“When I go back to Florida,” Clement said evenly, “I’m taking him with me. I’ll let you and the chief fight it out. That is, if he’s still chief. He might not be.”
A muscle jerked in Papa’s face. “You want Junior, take him, but he ain’t likely to go. He don’t know how to spit without me.
Clement said, “I’ll teach him.”
• • •
Chief Morgan, anxious to return to Paget’s Pond to negotiate the following day with the divers, slipped out of the station and hustled into the parking lot as a Rolls Royce crashed through a haze of heat and ground to a stop. Morgan recognized the car and the driver and said, “Not now. Sweet Jesus, not now.” A door flew open, and Crack Alexander, quite tall, came out of the Rolls in a crouch. Morgan was six feet; Crack, erect, was five inches taller. His voice was bigger.
“Where do you wanna talk, Chief? You wanna talk here, or someplace else?”
Morgan gave a quick scan of the back of the town hall. No faces were in any of the windows, which dismayed him. He wanted the protection of witnesses. “Here’s all right,” he said.
“You’re a cop, how come you don’t wear a gun? First time you came to the house, you didn’t have one then either. I was cuffing the wife around, remember?”
“I remember,” Morgan said.
“That’s when you first met me. And Sissy. Right?”
“Right.”
“That’s when it began, you and her. Right?”
Morgan said nothing. The space between him and Crack was negligible. He could see the fillings in the big fellow’s teeth and the hair in his nose.
“Don’t deny it, she’s told me everything.”
Told him everything? Did that include the hours he never laid a hand on her but simply sat close while she related her life in a girl’s voice? Did it include the few times he did make love to her and she invariably called him Crack? The time she said,
Crack likes to do it this way
? He murmured, “What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to look at me.”
He
was
looking at him, but they were within a circle too tightly closed. He was seeing large pores, an old scar over one eye and crow’s feet beneath it.
“What do you see?”
The longer he looked the less intimidating he found him. Gone was the muscularity that had suggested barbells and metal stretching devices. In its place was a vague bigness.
“What you see is a has-been. It took you and Sissy to tell me something I wouldn’t admit to myself. How old are you, Chief?”
“Forty-five,” Morgan said, knocking off a year.
“I’m thirty-seven. In baseball that’s two years past retirement.”
“Don’t tell Nolan Ryan that,” the chief ventured.
“Nolan Ryan’s a pitcher playing with an artificial arm, like Tommy John did. I’m a hitter. They don’t give hitters artificial eyes. Wade Boggs, he’s got the eyes I had. ‘Course, he’s a lousy singles hitter. I always stroked the big ones. Shit, I was young, they compared me to Williams.”
Morgan sensed the circle widening. Air blew in. The Rolls had been left running. The throb of the fine-tuned motor could have been the hum of a human heart.
“Fact is, I can afford to retire. Kind of money I made, I got nothing to worry about.”
Morgan said, “I’m sure you don’t.”
Crack’s squared shoulders gave in a little. The aggressive stance sank into a lesser attitude. “When I found out about you and Sissy, I was gonna beat her to a pulp, but the strength went out of me. It was like she wasn’t really there but gone from me. I didn’t want to lose her.”
“I can understand that.”
Crack gave him a knowing look. “Forget what you two did together, I don’t care. All the gals I had, they didn’t mean anything to me, and you didn’t mean anything to her. I got her word for that.”
“She’s all gold,” Morgan said, which Crack took the wrong way, with pride.
“She’s a real blonde, not one of those others. But I’ll tell you something more important you didn’t know. I might be going out of the bigs, but I’ll always be her hero.”
Morgan wanted to say something, but his brain stuck. Then it unstuck, and he said, “Any chance of getting one of those autographed balls like you gave my sergeant?”
Crack grinned wide and, stepping back, reached into the Rolls. “Here, have two.” Then he gave a sweeping wave to the town hall. In each window was a face.
• • •
Tish Hopkins’s square-cut gray hair bobbed in the sun. The heat did not bother her. She was a tough old bird, perhaps a little younger than she looked, and still lean as cable wire. With the death of her husband, too many years ago for her to think about, she had lost one of the deeper meanings of her life, but her essential self prevailed. The farm was not all that it once was, but she had steadfastly refused to sell so much as an acre, which put her on the wrong side of Randolph Jackson when he was selling his woodland to a developer and wanted to work her acreage into the deal. All the cows were gone except an old thing not worth the bother, but she kept it for sentimental reasons and for the manure, which she could still shovel with strength and enjoyment. With the same enjoyment she fed her hens, prime layers, and gathered their eggs, frequently placing one against her cheek as if it were precious. That was what she intended to do now, gather eggs from one of the coops, but a shadow near the woodshed snared her eye and proved to be alive.
“Who’s there?” she said, and Junior Rayball sidled into the open with a sheepish smile. Her eyes crinkled and narrowed. “I haven’t seen you in ages,” she said. “I could say you’ve grown but you haven’t.”
He shuffled closer, wearing a cap with stitching on the front, and scuffed up some dust. She remembered him sitting on a shitpile and eating sultana raisins from the box, a treat from her cupboard.
“What are you doing here, Junior? You come to give me a visit after all these years?”
“I’d’ve come a long time ago,” he said, “but I didn’t think you’d want to see me.”
“Not want to see you? I’ve missed you, boy, didn’t you know a simple thing like that?” She watched him beam the way he had when she had praised his handling of a pitchfork, awkward as it was, and she remembered his looking at her with the eyes of a pup caught peeing on the rug the time he had tried to go home with an egg in his pants and it broke in his pocket.
Don’t have to steal, all you have to do is ask.
“You come for anything special or just to say hi?”
“I might go to Florida,” he said.
“That so? Who’s going to take you, you go?”
“Clement.”
“I heard your brother was back.”
“He came back to see me.”
“He was always a good boy. Quiet, always quiet, I remember that. Florida sounds nice, Junior.”
“I might not go. Depends.”
“Depends on what?” she asked and was aware of the sudden tenseness in his posture, as if he had another egg in his pocket.
“On if you might let me come back to work for you like I used to,” he said.
“I got a boy working for me, part-time. One of the Wetherfields, Floyd, you know him? He’s putting himself through community college.” She watched Junior’s face begin to flatten into itself, and quickly she said, “He’s not smart like you were when it comes to chores. You were the best.”
“I just thought I’d ask,” he said, “in case.”
“Never any harm in asking. You want to come in for a drink of something cold?” she said, but he was already backing off, raising dust, perhaps feeling the heat of the sun, which would have been in his eyes had it not been for the visor of the cap.
“I gotta go.”
She watched him break into a trot and then into a run, and she wondered whether she’d been wrong not to have found something for him to do. Poor bugger, he had always gotten in the way, the short time she’d had him.
• • •
Reverend Stottle got himself out of bed and waited for Matt MacGregor on a piece of wrought-iron garden furniture. Mrs. Stottle’s garden shrilled too many colors. The reds, of which there were many, screamed. The oranges blared, and the several varieties of yellows whined. The music, he noted with melancholy, had been in the irises, cool blues and touches of bishop’s purple, and in the sweet William, pinks and whites, which were gone or nearly gone.
Mrs. Stottle called from a window. “Would you like me to serve something when Matthew comes?”
“No, dear, I don’t think he’ll be staying long,” he answered back with a slight cough. A jay flew toward a treetop as if on a secret errand — or perhaps for an assignation, a supposition that added to his apprehension. The possibility that MacGregor was coming to redeem his former girlfriend’s honor had grown into a certainty.
When MacGregor arrived he felt an instant flood of relief, for the young man’s face revealed no murderous intent. On the contrary, it bore the mark of a choirboy in need of guidance, of a father’s firm hand, which made the reverend’s world seem right and proper again. God was good.
“Nice of you to see me, Reverend.”
“You didn’t give me much choice,” he said with a smile to show he held no ill feelings but was there to serve.
MacGregor sat down hard on metal, framing himself against roses that looked preoccupied with their own overly red beauty. He was shaved, which he had not been the last time Reverend Stottle had seen him, and he was dressed neatly in casual clothes. Only his voice was haggard. “Do you know what it is to love a woman?”
“Mrs. Stottle and I have been married an appreciable number of years. I do believe I know what it is to love a woman.”
“Love her so much you’d do anything to keep her?”
Reverend Stottle pictured Mrs. Stottle with a suitcase in hand at the open door and himself on his knees begging her to stay, which he had been prepared to do the night before. Thank God the chief was a brick and spared him such nonsense. “Yes, Matthew, I believe I do.”
“That’s how I was with Lydia.”
“She may not be all you thought she was,” he said, recalling her cold anger with not a word spoken as the chief hustled him out. A tic in MacGregor’s face alerted him, and swiftly he added, “But I can’t think of a finer woman, with the possible exception of Mrs. Stottle.”
“I thought afterwards, after the thing, she would need me more than ever.”
“Yes, the terrible thing,” he said. “And I would have thought the same, indeed I would.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Indeed.” But the intensity of the young man’s eyes caused him to avert his, briefly, for a splurge of scarlet phlox got on his nerves. Mrs. Stottle had a green thumb but no eye for coordinating colors.
“I knew one was enough. The key was the mother. All I had to do was twist it.”
He felt that he had missed something, but it did not matter. The boy was spouting wind and relieving his innards. A good minister, he had been told in Bible college, must learn when to hold his tongue, at times even to bite it, lessons in his salad days he had been slow to learn, his rash, eager lips more likely to issue a solecism than a kindness. What was the unpleasing nickname his colleagues had given him? He’d rather not remember.
MacGregor said, “I knew the father had a bad heart, and I knew how close he was to the mother. I knew he wouldn’t last long after she went. What surprised me was he didn’t wait a minute.”
Reverend Stottle perked up. “I spoke those very words, more or less. If you had been in church Sunday, you’d have heard them.”
“It went better than it was supposed to. Rayball never knew he’d be popping one, but I’d be getting two.”
He realized he was missing more than he thought. It was the damn flowers. Those acid yellows had no business in the garden. And Rayball. What did Rayball have to do with the price of sugar?
MacGregor said, “Her mom and dad gone, I should’ve had her in my arms that night, crying her heart out. Mine forever. Instead she’s shacking up with the chief.” He stopped himself, as if some things he could not think about. His breath went in. “Last minute I wanted to stop it, I called to warn her, but nobody answered. It was too late.”
“What was too late?”
He looked deep into Reverend Stottle’s face. “You
don’t
know what I’m talking about.”
“Not entirely,” the reverend conceded, though the reference to Chief Morgan was certainly clear.
“Best laid plans, Reverend. You know what they say.”
“Yes, I do, but I still don’t understand.”
MacGregor rose with a lightness he had lacked until now. “You think about it, Reverend. It’ll come to you.”
With a mild sense of relief Reverend Stottle watched him leave and then strode from the garden, glad to leave it, pleased he had done his duty. As he opened the side door to his house he remembered, with distaste, the nickname: Shit-for-Brains.
• • •