The World Made Straight (28 page)

“We're back to where we started this morning. Not a damn thing has changed except I'm more pissed off. I'm figuring you-all put Dena on the bus or the train. Get her to where we
can't find her. But that boy's going to still be around. So like I said. We're back where we started.”

Carlton shifted his grip so that both hands were under the gun, as if about to return the rifle to Leonard.

“Crockett ain't going to let us get away with out and out murder. But there's accidents that don't need much snooping around about, and I'd say someone lucky as that boy's been of late might be due for one.”

“I'm betting they're at the bus station,” Hubert said.

“Is that where they are, professor?” Carlton asked.

Leonard raised his gaze to meet Toomey's.

“I don't know.”

The big man stepped closer to Leonard. “You know.”

Leonard seemed to hear the crack of the rifle butt against his jaw before he saw its brown blur. Then he was on the ground, his face blossoming in pain. Blood filled his mouth but his jaw hurt so terribly he swallowed the blood instead of trying to unhinge his mouth. What he couldn't swallow oozed from his lips. A piece of tooth settled on his tongue and Leonard swallowed it as well. Carlton Toomey jerked him to his feet.

“So. Are they at the bus station or not?”

Leonard nodded.

“Amazing how a good pop to the head loosens up a man's recallings,” Carlton said. “I'll do it again if you get feisty with us.”

The elder Toomey guided Leonard toward the truck and shoved him in. Hubert cranked the engine as Carlton pulled off his soggy tee-shirt and threw it on the floorboard. Toomey's bared flesh reminded Leonard of an infant's skin—pink-tinged,
loose, as if not grown into yet. The smoothness as well, smooth as polished marble, no welts or ragged stitching like Dena's. The skin of a victimizer, not a victim.

Carlton leaned forward and turned on the heater.

“Told you to wear a jacket,” Hubert said.

“I didn't figure to be standing in the rain a damn hour,” Carlton replied.

They drove south, past the church and then fields where tobacco had begun its slow rise toward September, the bright green glinting with rainwater. Leonard still swallowed blood but as long as he kept his lips pressed together the pain dimmed. He began to feel better, not just the jaw but something opening inside himself. His nose inhaled the fresh-turned earth so deeply he could taste its stored richness, taste in it the soaking rain as well. The black soil between the tobacco rows was almost tactile, as if his fingers rooted inside that cool earth.

They passed the store and Hubert turned right, but not before idling at the stop sign a moment. Tobacco rose mere feet from the road, and Leonard saw a bead of rain hanging tenderly on a leaf tip. Leonard knew there was a scientific explanation for how it could remain round, hang as it did on the leaf, but that had nothing to do with the wonder of this one drop on this one leaf, the further wonder that he was alive in the world to see it.

The creek widened gradually as the road began its long plunge toward Marshall, rain pooling on the roadsides now, the wipers ticktocking as they peeled water off the glass. Carlton shifted his body and his left hand flicked upward, the
knuckles bone to bone against Leonard's chin. Pain surged through Leonard's jaw. The world receded beyond the cab's glass and metal.

“That's just a love tap,” Carlton said. “If they ain't at that bus station, we're going to beat on you bad.” Carlton placed his clenched left hand on Leonard's knee. “You telling us the truth, right?”

Leonard felt the weight of the fist through his jeans. He nodded.

“Good,” Carlton said, and lifted his hand.

The road veered again, no guardrails for any vehicle that didn't stay on the asphalt, nothing beyond but an emptiness like some geometric line pointed toward infinity. Pointed toward the other way to end this. Hubert took the curve fast, and Leonard slid against Carlton, then back against Hubert.

“Don't be trying to cuddle up next to me,” the elder Toomey said, then laughed.

The stream passed under the road and reappeared on the right. As the road straightened briefly, a Highway Patrol car flashed by, no siren but its blue light on. Behind it came a county police car. Leonard glimpsed enough of the driver to see Crockett's deputy, Ardy Metcalf, not Crockett himself, was the car's sole occupant. Neither vehicle slowed to turn around.

“Guess this hasn't worked out quite the way you planned it, professor,” Carlton said. “But it's near over now. We got you and Dena and that boy out on a limb you can't jump off of. Like my daddy used to say, it's time to piss on the fire and call in the dogs.”

The road leveled out for a quarter mile, then began the last long curve before they left Shelton Laurel. Carlton took the roll of bills from his pocket and counted them out loud. The road narrowed, cut into the mountain, the stream so far down it didn't appear to be moving, just a white ribbon draped around boulders.

They were halfway through the curve when the pickup hydroplaned, two wheels sliding off the blacktop and onto the gravel shoulder. Leonard locked his hand on Hubert's wrist and jerked down. The truck went off the shoulder and for a moment hung above the gorge, stalled midair like a ferris wheel at its apex. Hubert's hands gripped the wheel as if the vehicle might yet be steered back onto the road. Then they were falling. Leonard let go of Hubert's wrist and crouched so he'd hit the dash instead of the windshield. His last thought was that he'd never know if the truck would have gone off the cliff anyway.

He came to wedged between the seat and floorboard, the sound of water close by. Each breath was a drawer of knives prodding his right side. Broken ribs, three, maybe four of them. Something behind those ribs, spleen or stomach, was also damaged. Damaged bad. The jaw didn't hurt now, as though his body had made a choice of which pain to focus on and chose the ribs. He knew he was hurt in other places but nothing else seemed broken. He was thirsty, thirsty as he'd ever been in his life.

Leonard could see nothing but the underside of the dash. He listened, trying to hear a moan or the exhale and inhale of breath. He heard nothing but the stream. He had to know if the
Toomeys were still alive, and to do that he would have to move, and to move meant pain. Leonard slowly reached for the seat, using only his hands and arms, holding the rest of himself still because it felt as if any jarring movement or deep breath would cause the broken ribs to shatter apart like glass. The truck angled downward, making it harder to raise himself.

Leonard waited a few minutes for the pain jagging into his side to lessen, but it didn't. Moving couldn't make the pain much worse, he finally decided, and though he was wrong about that, Leonard did not stop until he'd gotten himself out from under the dash. He was turned toward the driver's side, and as he raised his head he found Hubert Toomey's legs looming before him. They were not moving and as he held his breath and lifted himself onto the seat he saw why. Hubert's shoulders and torso were inside the cab but his head broke through the windshield. Blood streaked the glass beneath his neck.

Carlton Toomey was not in the cab at all. The passenger door was flung open. Leonard turned and the broken ribs probed deeper and found more pain. He tasted blood, but this time it was not from his mouth but his stomach. A drink of water, think about that, he told himself. Don't think of anything else, just how good a palmful of water will taste once you get out of the truck. He inched across the floorboard to where the passenger door yawned open. The distance between him and the creek wasn't as far as he feared. He eased his legs off the running board, his left hand grasping the door hinge until water swirled around his feet. He let go of the metal and the drawer of knives in his side realigned. For a few moments he believed the effort to stand had taken everything he had left.
But soon his legs steadied beneath him. He worked his way around the passenger door to the hood.

Hubert's head stuck through the windshield like the masthead on a ship's prow. Blood matted his hair but much more had spilled where glass shunted the neck, sourced the rivulet dripping down the windshield and pooling on the smashed hood. The elder Toomey lay ten yards downstream, sprawled face up in the shallows. Carlton's eyes were open and his massive chest rose and fell with each slow taxing breath. The water was no more than three or four inches deep and it swirled around Carlton Toomey's body as if he were just another rock or fallen tree. He wasn't bleeding much, but something, maybe a broken back or shattered leg, pinned him to the streambed, kept his eyes focused on the sky.

Leonard moved through the shallows and then onto the bank. Toomey heard him coming and the big man's eyes shifted, revealing more white as he strained to see Leonard. Toomey's legs trembled as he slowly folded them, pushed his head and torso enough to get his head onto the sand. But that was all Carlton could do before his legs buckled, lay heavy and still as waterlogged timber.

Leonard stepped closer. When he stood directly above Carlton he saw it was the arms, both of them shattered at the elbow. On the right one a jagged bone broke the skin. The left elbow was swelled to the size of a cantaloupe. Both arms were crazy angled, like bent blades on a machine. Toomey's right hand still clutched the money.

“Hubert alive?” Toomey asked. His lips were tinged blue and he spoke through clinched teeth. Leonard thought Toomey's
jaw as well as arms had been shattered, but then the teeth parted and began to chatter. Toomey clamped the teeth tight again.

Leonard shook his head.

“Figured as much,” Carlton said.

The world blurred for a moment and Leonard's legs almost gave way. The feeling passed but he knew he couldn't stand much longer. He bent slowly, his right palm flat as he half leaned, half fell at the stream's edge. His stomach lurched and bright-red blood dribbled from his mouth. Arterial blood, Leonard knew.

“You ain't faring much better than me,” Carlton Toomey said. Toomey's teeth chattered uncontrollably now, making the words sound not so much flowing off the tongue as bitten off in syllables. Toomey shifted his eyes toward his right hand. “Held on to the money.”

Leonard dipped his hand into a stream so cold it shocked like a live fence wire, his cupped hand reddening from the cold. The fractured jaw kept him from opening his mouth very wide, so half the water dribbled down his chin.

“You better drag me out of this creek,” Toomey stammered. “I'm freezing to death. Then go flag somebody down.” The big man clamped his mouth shut a few moments to stop the chattering. He tried to raise his knees but they buckled again. “If you'll help stand me up I'll get to the road if you can't manage. We could be down here a long while if you don't.”

Leonard kept drinking, his pursed lips sucking palmfuls of water as if through a straw, his hand going numb but too thirsty to care.

“Get me out and I'll give you your money and leave you be,” Carlton said. Not just his voice but his torso shuddered now, his legs rippling the shallows. “I'll leave Dena and that boy alone too.”

Toomey took a deep breath and released it, his chest and belly not so much rising as billowing, as though the stream's current ran through him now. The big man shook again, more violently this time, as if having a seizure. The shattered arms were now tinged blue as his lips. “Go over there to Hubert,” Toomey said when his body quieted. “Get some of his blood. I'll swear it on my own son's blood.”

Leonard coughed and a thick warmth rose again in his throat. Rain fell harder now, the fog thickening. He looked up and couldn't see where the gorge and road met. He wanted the fog to thicken even more, wrap around him like a cocoon, a warm swaddling cocoon where he could rest awhile.

After a few more minutes Toomey spoke again.

“I'm warming up,” the big man said groggily, the rise and fall of his chest perceptively slower. “I'll be OK here. Just get up to the road and flag somebody down. Take some of this money and flash it. That'll make them stop.”

Carlton Toomey closed his eyes and began humming “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown.” Soon the tune was barely intelligible. Then there was no sound at all, nothing but the slightest movement of lips. Finally not even that, the chest as still as the mouth.

Leonard cupped his hand and sipped again, his hand now so numb he had to watch it dip into the water and rise. He looked at the huge still body of Carlton Toomey and remembered
how in the meadow Toomey had said that killing a person wasn't an easy thing to do. But killing someone was easier than a whole lot of other things in life. Appealing in its finality as well, because it only had to be done right once. Easier than love or happiness or making money or raising a child. So easy you could do it with no more than one finger pressing a small curve of metal or the jerk of a wrist. Or simply doing nothing at all, Leonard thought, just being there and letting it happen.

Easier than healing.

Joshua Candler had made the choice to side with the shooters that January morning. The journal had made clear the doctor's feelings afterward, but what of his feelings those moments after Colonel Keith slashed the air with his sword? Leonard believed he knew now. He understood why the page was blank.

What light filtered through the rain and fog dimmed briefly for a few moments and then came back. Leonard assumed a cloud had passed over the sun, then realized that the sun wouldn't be out if it was raining. He remembered how radiant the tobacco leaves had been, so green it was like something you could not only see but hear, a kind of verdant hum like the vibration of a tuning fork. He wished tobacco were on this bank, or some dogwood trees, something that could brighten like that as it held a bead of water on a leaf.

Leonard lay down on the sand, head pillowed by his right arm. Swaths of fog began overlapping. The unhurried, delicate movements reminded him of something he'd seen before, but the fog seemed to have worked into his mind, making everything harder to find. Minutes passed before he remembered Professor Heddon's last class at Chapel Hill, the motion
of his teacher's maimed hand as it followed the music. The fog thickened until there were no more swirls, just one vast silence, white and depthless.