Authors: Robin Wasserman
The chief sighed, sounding put-upon. What he did not do, to Daniel’s horror, was slap the cuffs on Coach Hart and drag him away. Nor did he offer the coach’s wife something to wear.
“What do you want us to do?” the chief asked, as if honestly curious.
The coach shrugged. “I always liked that part in church when they talk about stoning the wicked. Figured as long as we’re changing things around here…”
“You don’t think we have enough to deal with these days, Sal? You want us to start
stoning
people? For adultery?” He shook his head. “It’s a man’s job to tend to his wife, says so right there in the Bible – maybe you weren’t listening to that part in church.”
The coach looked suitably chastened.
“You want her stoned, you’re going to have to do it yourself. And next time, don’t come down here to bother my men unless you’ve got a real problem for us to handle.”
“But, sir,” one of the younger cops piped up. “We’re just going to… send him home? That’s it?”
The chief laughed. “You’re right, Jackson. I almost forgot. Can’t have people thinking we’ve gone soft around here. The new regime wouldn’t like that much. Write him a ticket for… oh, let’s say making a public nuisance of himself. And another for improper disposal of garbage. Pretty sure leaving a body sitting around on a porch can’t be exactly hygienic. That sound all right to you, Sal?”
“Fair enough,” Sal said. “I’ll get out of your hair now, if these men will be so kind as to lower their weapons.”
The men did. Coach Hart – grip on his wife never slipping – waited for them to scrawl out his tickets, then steered his wife out of the station and into the bright afternoon.
“What are you looking at, kid?” the chief asked, catching Daniel gaping at the scene. “You here to visit your girlfriend again? Better hurry – you know what they say: act now, supplies running out!” The room broke into laughter. Daniel had a very difficult time suppressing his urge to run – not just out of the building, but all the way to the edge of town, to throw himself on the mercy of the soldiers who stood posted on the border, to drop to his knees and beg, if necessary, to let him the hell out.
He had not run away. He had descended into the basement, where they kept Cass locked up. The dark row of cells was familiar to him – he’d been there enough times to bail his father out of trouble – but no matter how many times he tramped down those stairs, his chest still seized when he hit the bottom. There was something about the place, the way sounds echoed off concrete, the stench of drying piss and puke, the scuttle of small creatures in the dark, the shadowed figures that peered out from other cells, shouting at him or at their god, or moaning, or crying, or arguing with the voices in their heads. Maybe it was the cells themselves, always so many of them empty, as if waiting for him. As if he belonged in one, and the jail was just biding its time, waiting until he crossed the wrong line and it could swallow him up. That day, after what he’d seen, it was harder than ever to walk down those stairs – hard to believe he’d be allowed back up. But he forced himself to go to her. He tried not to stare at her bruises – she didn’t like that, had refused to answer his questions about what they’d done to her, about whether it hurt. Of course it hurt. Instead, as usual, he dug up something trivial to talk to her about, stories of a happier past. He couldn’t even remember now what they had talked about, had barely been aware of it at the time, his mouth running on autopilot while his brain worked the problem, thinking through possible escape routes, none of them possible. He just wasn’t the kind of person who planned jailbreaks.
He’d gotten out of there as quickly as he could without letting her know that anything was amiss and, half afraid it was a mistake, hiked out to Jeremiah West’s place. The football player had helped Cass out once already, and as a potential ally, he came with some serious advantages, not least of them muscle bulk and a proximity to Baz, whose father surely had access to the cell keys. But West wasn’t there, and his parents hadn’t even let Daniel in the door. He’d met the Wests before, pushing pies at school bake sales and manning the dunk tank at the spring carnival, and they’d always been farm friendly, all too willing to offer a welcoming hug to anyone even tangentially related to their son. This time, Mrs. West would open the door only a crack, and as Daniel peered through, he caught a glimpse of Mr. West pacing in the background, holding what looked to be a rifle.
So he had gone home.
Only to find his father in the backyard, with Milo, teaching him how to shoot a semiautomatic.
It was the first time since Cass’s capture that Daniel had seen Milo smile.
“Put down the gun,” Daniel said.
Calm,
he thought.
Careful.
“You kidding?” Milo shook his head. “It’s an
M16.
They use it in the
army.
”
The Preacher ruffled his younger son’s hair. “And now we’ll use it in ours.”
Milo grinned.
Daniel didn’t know how he was going to keep his brother from finding out what the town had in store for her, or how he’d face Milo if he couldn’t find a way to stop it. The kid had been inconsolable when they came for Cass. For some reason that he refused to explain, he blamed himself. He’d cried for two days straight, and even after Daniel bribed him out of his room with the promise of a junk-food binge, he hadn’t managed a real smile. Not like this.
There was almost nothing he wouldn’t do to cheer Milo up. Father-son gunplay, however, wasn’t on the list.
“Put down the gun and go in the house.”
“You don’t want your little brother to burn in the hellfire, do you?” the Preacher said. “Now, Milo, it’s important you aim for the head, because —”
“Milo!”
The boy flinched. The gun fired. Twenty feet away, bark exploded from a tree, and a bird squawked into the sky.
“You nuts?” the Preacher roared. “Shouting at a little boy holding a gun?”
“Milo, please,” Daniel said to his brother, whose face had gone pale and pinched. He looked back and forth between his father and his brother, then solemnly placed the rifle into his father’s hands.
“Permission for a pee break, sir,” he said.
“Permission granted.” The Preacher saluted, and Milo returned it with a shy smile, then ran into the house.
“You want to tell me what the hell that was all about?” the Preacher said. “You still grouchy about that girl they’re going to light on fire?”
Daniel had never been this angry, or this terrified. “Stay away from him.”
“My son? I think not.”
“No more guns,” Daniel said. “No more army talk.”
“I’m his father. I think I know what’s best for him a little better than you do.”
The Preacher’s eyes were clearer than usual. He was, against all odds, sober. For a long time, Daniel had harbored a secret hope, only allowing himself to creep toward it in the dark, when he was on the verge of sleep, and he could be trusted to forget it by morning. If, someday, the Preacher stopped drinking – if he cleaned himself up, finally moved on from the death of his wife, remembered he had children to care for, threw away the bottles, got himself to a meeting and then another one, if he went stone-cold sober – then he’d be himself again. He’d be the father Daniel could barely remember, gruff and occasionally cruel, but a
father
nonetheless, who’d hugged him and cooked him franks ’n’ beans and told him bloody bedtime stories that made them both shudder and laugh. If darkness could fall, surely it could also lift – wasn’t Cass proof of that?
But now the Preacher had gotten rid of the liquor, and it wasn’t Daniel’s father who’d been left behind. It was madness.
If it could happen to his father, surely it could happen to Daniel. Darkness could fall on anyone – Cass was proof of that, too. The whole town was proof of that.
Daniel had waited until night came. He couldn’t persuade the Preacher back to rationality; he couldn’t take Milo out of town; he couldn’t let things continue, and leave Milo prey to the Preacher’s delusions, and his guns. He waited until night, not because he was hoping a better solution would present itself, but because it would be easier in the dark.
There was a bottle of Vicodin in the bottom drawer of his nightstand, left over from when his father had had his wisdom teeth removed many years before. Saved for a rainy day. Daniel counted out four of the pills, ground them into powder, and poured them into a cup of tea. His father preferred that now to whiskey, and accepted Daniel’s peace offering as if it were his due. He drank up.
It took a long time to lug the Preacher’s limp body out to the shed. But once Daniel had made it, and caught his breath, and wiped off his sweat, it was easy enough to gather an armful of rope and bungee cord and truss up his father with the knots he’d recently helped Milo learn for a Cub Scout badge. He didn’t let himself think about what he’d done, or what he was doing. He stretched a piece of duct tape across his father’s mouth, so that in the morning, he couldn’t wake Milo with his screams.
Topping the list of things he wouldn’t let himself think about: Milo, and what would happen if he found out. What he would think of Daniel then.
What his father would do when Daniel set him free. If Daniel set him free.
They were just knots, Daniel told himself, concentrating on the ropes. They would hold for as long as they needed to, and then he would figure something out. Reef knot. Sheet knot. Double sheet bend. Clove hitch. He was good at knots.
His father was still breathing.
That was good.
Jule had intended to throw rocks at his window, if she could figure out which one it was. Or maybe just throw caution to the wind and ring the doorbell, even if it meant waking his crazy father. But when she arrived at the Ghent house, Daniel was standing in his bedroom window, watching the night. Jule, one hand still clasped around the knife she had shoved in the wide pocket of her fleece, raised her other hand and waved. Moments later, he came to the door.
“You going to let me in, or what?” Jule said when he’d stood there dumbly for several seconds.
“It’s five o’clock.”
“Yes.”
“In the morning.”
“Were you in the middle of something?”
She didn’t know how much longer she could keep from crying. She wondered if she looked upset; she wondered if she looked high, and if she still was. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” she said, breaking.
He took her bag and brought her inside. He didn’t ask questions.
“Your father?” she said.
Daniel hesitated. “Upstairs. Out cold.”
Could he smell it on her? Jule wondered. Could he see it in her darting eyes and widened pupils? The knife fit perfectly in the pocket of her fleece, like it belonged there. She wondered what Scott would think when he woke up to find it missing, along with his niece.
No one stole from Scott Prevette.
The room Daniel brought her into had no posters of punk bands or swimsuit models and no pools of dirty socks or fraying T-shirts spreading on the floor. But there were enough clues – the neat stack of sci-fi paperbacks on the card-table desk, the framed photo of a very young Milo opening Christmas presents, the map of the world tacked over his bed with
ANYWHERE
BUT
HERE
scrawled in thick black letters across the entire American Midwest – to indicate ownership. Jule shook her head and started backing out. “I don’t know what you thought, but —”
“Oh, this isn’t a booty call?” Daniel pressed his hand to his chest. “How will my poor, broken heart ever survive?”
Under other circumstances, Jule might have observed that lack of sleep had made him feisty, and he should consider staying up all night more often. But she could say nothing; the night had been too hard, and too long. She was done.
“Hey, are you okay?”
She nodded furiously, lips clamped together until she could control what spilled out of them. Her face heated up with alarming speed, and her clothes were suddenly entirely too heavy and too tight. It was like one of those hot flashes that middle-aged women on TV were always complaining about, and it made her want to fling open the window and heave lungfuls of the night air – to climb out, if necessary, just to be out of this room and out from under Daniel’s stare. She was done with being watched.
“Jule, you’re shaking,” Daniel said, approaching her, and she slipped her hand into her pocket and touched the knife. He stopped short of touching her. “What is it? What happened?”
“I…” She held her breath, cutting off a sob before it could slip out. That had been too soon. She took a deep, measured breath. She could hold off the tears, no problem. But the trembling was out of her control.
It was humiliating. But Daniel pretended it wasn’t happening, which helped. “You can have my bed,” he told her, in a voice that nearly approximated friendly, unconcerned chatter. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’ll stay in Milo’s room. Sheets are… well, clean enough, I guess, and if you want to borrow a T-shirt or something, they’re in the bottom drawer.”
She shook her head, already undoing her boots and climbing into the bed fully clothed, pulling the covers up around her. The hot flash faded nearly as quickly as it had arrived, and now she was almost cold, but pleasurably so. The sheets were scratchy, but warm, and smelled like him.
“Or I guess you could just sleep in that,” he said. “Bathroom’s right next door, and Milo’s is the second door down. If you need me, I mean. Not that you’ll – well, you know what I mean.”
“You don’t have to go yet,” she said quietly. Holding it together. “I mean, don’t go. Yet. Okay?”
“Uh…”
“You can hang out for a while,” she said. Then quickly added, “On the
floor.
”
He smiled, and she found herself joining him.
“Of course,” he said. “On the floor.”
He flicked out the light and sat down beside the bed.
“You got your brother back,” she said. Talking was easier in the dark.