Scare Tactics (17 page)

Layne said, “Virg is still around? I thought he disappeared, too, after they turned him out of the pen a few years ago.”

“No, I’ve seen him in town on occasion.”

Toot said, “He’s a recluse. Lives in a shack at the back end of that junkyard his uncle owns.” Toot put his elbows on the table again and clenched his hands in an effort to stop trembling. He’d tried AA twice and Jesus once, Layne knew; but there was no influence that could slow him down for long. “I’m not saying anything against anybody, even Virg. I just don’t
know,
damn it. But it’s got me—I can’t stop thinking, why? Who’s next?”

“And you’ve got this notion in the back of your head, that my moving back had something to do with three of our buddies taking off? Like I’m some kind of guru? A Jim Jones—type who can persuade men to abandon their careers and wives and kids and make fresh starts somewhere else? Listen, Toot. I’ve been around the world a few times, that was my job. But there’s nothing glamorous about being an itinerant engineer, no matter where the big jobs take you. My work cost me my first wife, and after I married Angela I promised her and I promised myself I’d settle down when the chance came, raise my kids, live a nice steady uneventful life where I grew up. I’m happy as hell in Cromartie. I’ll tell you something else: none of those three guys ever said anything to give me the impression they weren’t happy, that they wanted—”

“That’s just it! They were all successful, their marriages were ... okay, I reckon, and hell I know they doted on their kids. So Skip and Herb and Ollie didn’t just pull a vanishing act. They were—”

Toot put his face in his hands and then, unexpectedly, began to sob. “They must have been killed! And whoever, whatever it is, we’re all in danger.”

Papa John snorted hard enough to riffle the hairs of his beard.

“Toot,” Layne said, “you’re going off the deep end. That’s booze talking. Why don’t you—”

Toot got up suddenly, tilting the small table back in Layne’s lap. Layne grabbed the Michelob bottle in time.

“You son of a bitch!” Toot said, pointing a trembling finger. The half-dozen other patrons in the Cozy were all watching the unscheduled floor show. “You know! You must know! Because the rest of us, the West End Bunch, we were doing just fine until you moved back. So it’s you, Layne, it’s got something to do with
you
—”

“Partner,” Papa John said, getting up and putting a firm hand on Toot, “I love you and I always have, but this is the last place in town that’ll serve you a drink, and by God, I ain’t about to be letting you in here neither if you can’t control yourself. I believe as how you’re owing Layne an apology; then I’ll get one of my boys to drive you home.”

Toot glared at him. “I c-can drive myself.”

“No you can’t, son, because if you get in a wreck and kill somebody, then I’m liable, under the laws of this state, for serving you. Now I said I think you got something more to tell Layne.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Layne said to both of them. He put a twenty on the table. “Time for me to head on home. Toot, take care, and we’ll try to get in a golf game soon as you’re feeling up to par.”

—

While driving home Layne regretted the misspent evening; but he’d been ducking Toot for several weeks because of his drinking problem, and that had made him feel guilty. Even though he knew all about bad drunks: dry them out and they often turned psychotic on you. Beth Embry had moved out of the house with the kids and around the corner to her parents’ home. She swore she had given Toot his last chance. Toot could still function well enough to sell used cars and earn a living, but for how long? Maybe if the Bunch all got together, they could come up with something that would help get Toot straightened out—but three of them were gone.

Unexpectedly Layne took a chill, thinking about the disappearances. Hell, he didn’t want to think about his missing friends anymore; it was all the rest of them talked about when they got together. He took a couple of deep breaths, but his skin continued to prickle.

The window of his pickup was down. It was a warm summer evening, and at this hour there was almost no traffic on the hilly residential streets of the West End. A right on Forestdale, three blocks to Summerlake ... Layne slowed when his headlights picked up someone running in the middle of the street. He flicked on his brights as the kid glanced over one shoulder. Six or seven years old. Too young to be out at this time of the night. Something furtive about the way he looked back, hesitated, then took off at another angle to the sidewalk and ducked through a hole in a hedge.

Did he have something in his hand? Layne couldn’t be sure.

Slowing a little more, Layne switched on his side-mounted spotlight, aimed it at the hedge as he approached the Beechmans’ place. They had lived in the small Colonial house on Summerlake for as long as Layne could remember. Their own children were grown and long gone from Cromartie. Then who was the boy, a visiting grandchild? No, both of the Beechmans were ailing, too old to look after kids anymore.

Closer to the house, Layne saw other children. A boy and a girl. Not hiding, exactly. But they were standing, watchfully, well up on the Beechmans’ dark front lawn. When he put the light on them, Layne recognized Toot Embry’s oldest girl. Patty. She was going on fourteen. Tall, pigtail, pretty oval face; her pale eyes in the light from the truck seemed transparent as glass. She had that look some of them get during the metamorphosis of puberty. Distrustful, haughty, contemptuous of adults. Probably Toot’s alcoholism, the wretched family scene, were to blame for Patty’s attitude.

As he drove by he counted at least seven more kids, some very young, here and there on the lawn of the unlighted house. They were all having ice cream, as if a birthday party was just ending. But he was aware of something clandestine about the gathering. They were too quiet; they looked prepared to scatter at any challenge. He’d seen kids with faces, with eyes like that in Cambodia, in Belfast. Very damn obvious they’d been up to something—but that was foolish, he thought. There were no delinquency problems in Cromartie, Tennessee, particularly in the all-white West End. They were good kids. Layne wondered if he should stop and say something, chide them about being out so close to midnight. He decided it wasn’t his place to do so: they had parents. His own two were enough for him to worry about. He wasn’t the neighborhood cop.

But a glimpse of one face in particular distressed him. Jeremy Stockwell was a good friend of Layne’s son. For the most part the two had been inseparable, until Jeremy’s father disappeared while on his business trip. There was such sadness and desperation in Jeremy’s face that Layne’s throat closed in sympathy. For an instant he imagined that Jeremy, recognizing him, wanted to run toward Layne’s truck, climb in with him. But Patty Embry had the little boy by the hand; she seemed to be holding him back.

Layne turned the spotlight off and continued to his own street.

One-oh-one Oak Hill, the house his father had built, largely by himself, more than forty years ago. It was the last house on the left at the base of the hill where the street ended at a whitewashed wooden barricade. A short corduroy bridge across the stream that meandered through four acres, then up a willow-lined drive of river rock to the detached garage at the side of the two-story frame house. The outside lights were on, one of them above the garage doors.

He parked his Silverado truck beside Angela’s hatchback in the drive and got out. There was a flash of cottontail alongside the sturdy wire fence he’d strung around Angela’s vegetable plot, and Layne grinned.
No carrots tonight, pal.
He heard the noise of the air-conditioning unit in a window of the master bedroom and thought of cool sheets, Angela’s sleeping face on her pillow. He paused, as he often did in the peace of night, to admire the lines of the house he’d inherited, the handsomely gabled roof and white brick chimneys. More than just shelter to him, the house was the center of his new life.

Layne’s father had come home from World War II with a total disability pension, unable to speak, suffering from vicious headaches—there were tiny chits of shrapnel everywhere in his brain. But he’d designed and then built the house, and there was nothing that Layne, with his degrees and superior expertise, would’ve changed. He was gratified that Angela loved it here as much as he did.

Layne was taking the steps to the back porch two at a time when he recognized a three-note tune, musical but as loud as an alarm clock (and loud enough to startle him), coming from the street.

It was a sound he knew he hadn’t heard since he was ten years old: it could only be the Cheer-i-o Ice Cream man, but who had resurrected that antique of a truck? And where was the profit in coming around to the neighborhood when most kids were—should have been—long asleep in their beds?

Layne hesitated with his hand on the knob of the screen door, looking up Oak Hill with an almost Pavlovian anticipation, a pang of greed fresh from childhood. A good many memories of the early 1950s had revived on his return to the neighborhood less than a year ago, but this was the first time Layne had given a thought to Buster Dockins and his circusy freezer truck. Painted in what would later be called “psychedelic” colors, swirls and exuberant rainbows of purple, pink, and yellow, with a mock ice-cream cone mounted on top. Smoky exhaust, bad tires, often overheating in high summer, the truck was a treasure to the kids of the West End, where Buster did most of his business.

And Buster Dockins—well, it wasn’t hard to be nostalgic about Buster now, but the fact was almost all of the kids had been cruel to him. Buster was, as their parents put it, “a little slow.” He had a natural clown’s face—wiry red hair in a billowy cloud, an outstandingly bulbous nose, fat purple lips. “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream,” Buster babbled happily as the kids clamored around, thrusting coins at him, each demanding to be served first. He’d bite his tongue while counting out change, and if the matter of making change was particularly difficult, as on those occasions when he was given a one- or five-dollar bill, spit bubbles would form at the corners of his mouth. They imitated his labial incontinence, they copied his high-pitched voice, his ungainly, tippy-toe walk. The older, bolder boys, like Virgil Constable, tricked and stole him blind.

But it hadn’t been Virgil who was responsible for Buster Dockins’s death....

Cheerio. Cheerio. CheercheercheerCHEERRRRRR-IIIIII-OOOOOOOO.

Layne heard the piping tune again. Oak Hill was well lighted, he could see up the street as far as the two-story New Orleans-style house where Glenda Battle, his on-again, off-again girlfriend during high school, had lived. But he didn’t see the ice-cream truck coming, and he didn’t hear the familiar tune again. The new Cheer-i-o entrepreneur, possibly as hapless as Buster had been, must have given up for the night.

He looked from the street to the nearly full moon overhead, and suddenly felt very tired. He wondered why he had lingered on the porch for a glimpse of a past he really didn’t care that much about. Cheer-i-o Ice Cream wouldn’t be the same without Buster to dispense it. Buster’s entertainment value had been just as important as the frozen treat.

He let himself into the house, paused in the kitchen to draw a glass of water and rinse his mouth, popped a Cloret to chase any residual beer taint (Angela was a teetotaler), then went upstairs, where he heard voices from MaryLyn’s room.

She was having a sleep-over. Layne knocked discreetly, then opened the door to sounds of girls rustling deeper into the sheets and pretending they’d been asleep for hours. The light from the upper hall fell across twin beds and the eight-year-old girls spending the night with his daughter. He felt a certain tension at his presence, as if he’d interrupted an intense and weighty discussion. What did eight-year-olds gossip about, anyway? Layne smiled and took a turn around the room, strewn with toys and clothing. He lowered the level of the air-conditioner.

When he closed MaryLyn’s door behind him he encountered five-year-old Toby in the hall, rubbing his eyes. He had a Paddington Bear in one arm.

“Sorry if I woke you up,” Layne said, giving him a kiss and guiding him back to his own room. Toby’s right hand was clenched. Layne lifted him into bed and touched the boy’s small fist.

“What’ve you got there?”

Toby opened his hand on a sweaty dime.

“For the ice-cream man. They said I could go, too, if I had my own money.”

“Who said?”

“MaryLyn and Aggie Burke.”

“Nobody’s going anywhere tonight, Toby. And you can’t buy ice cream for a dime anywhere. Those were the good old days, when I was your—”

“Can too! It’s what Aggie said. You can get a
big
drumstick with chocolate and nuts, and you can get—”

“Whoa, son, I don’t want to argue with you. It’s time to close your eyes and—”

“But I’ll miss him, Dad!”

“I’ll take you and MaryLyn for ice cream tomorrow after supper. Baskin-Robbins, how’s that sound?”

“No,” Toby said, with that stubborn bunching of the chin that was purely Angela. “I want to get ice cream from the man in the truck! ’Cause it’s the
best
ice cream in the world! Aggie says—”

“I don’t care what Aggie says. Good night, slugger, and don’t get out of bed again.”

Angela rolled over against him without opening her eyes when he got into their bed.