Cicada (19 page)

“Right o’er there, man,” TR said, excitedly patting the seat between them while stabbing an index finger off to their right.

“I thee ‘im, I thee ‘im, ya vagabond.”Jimbo crunched the transmission into park before he’d thought to cease their idling crawl with the brake.

“Damn, Jimbo.
Jesus Christ on a cross
!” Jeffery Pritchard, the third of the four men sotto hissed from back in the truck bed where he hunkered alongside Wes Nugget Crocker.

They were still a good hundred yards from the Anderson home, but other little wood frame houses dotted here and there even closer at hand. Still, nothing seemed to stir at the Klan boys’ clumsy intrusion.

“Let’s light us a fire,” Jimbo said.

He eased from the truck cabin hefting the Remington rifle his father had handed down to him as he did. He’d never succeeded in bringing down the big, magnificent bucks his father had; mostly because the old man’s lessons of good patience remained even more elusive than the game. That, and the thought of killing something—seeing it flitting down the end of the barrel moments from death—made his hands shake with excitement.

Jimbo shouldered the rifle and leaned across the hood of the truck as he began to search for the little house’s one lit window in his scope. Sweat beaded from the heat and nervousness of the moment. Drops ran into his squinted eye and over his slack-jawed lips. His eye stung and his otherwise parched mouth caught the taste of his own salts.

“Damn,” he cursed quietly, and leaned back away from the weapon. Looking about, his angry gaze fell on Nugget where the man hunkered down in the truck bed, eyes darting back and forth between the house and Jimbo. “Hey,” Jimbo said as he sidled up to the rear of the truck. “Thoot out that window, ya hear?” He held the rifle out to Nugget who refused silently to take it.

All too eager, Jeffery blurted out, “I’ll do it,” and reached over.

Jimbo shoved him back. “And I thaid I want Nugget to do it. Thit yer ass down. Nugget, take the goddamned gun. Don’t make me tell you a thecond time.”

Nearly the last thing Nugget wanted to do in that moment was to take up the rifle as the man ordered. Unfortunately, however, trumping that, the very last thing he wanted was for Jimbo to drag him out of the back of the truck and beat him silly, which was what the man was likely to do if Nugget refused him again.

Nugget’s subconscious quickly processed the memories of the last two times Jimbo had viciously assaulted him. Details such as the gritty tone of Jimbo’s voice and the stale stench of his beer and cigarette-tainted breath pressing in close were the same now as they’d been during those other unwanted encounters. Nugget took the rifle.

“Thoot that window,” Jimbo told him, his voice lilting a bit in his excitement.

At first, Nugget did as Jimbo directed, crouching on the truck bed and bracing the rifle over its side. Through the scope, the bright window of the Anderson home sprang to life and suddenly Nugget could make out the print of the sheer curtains that obscured what lay beyond. Against a fabric of the faintest sky blue a repeating series of three scarlet ibises each poised in flight above the suggestion of calm waters.
Or those might be clouds
, Nugget considered.

“Whatdaya see?” Jeffery asked.

“Ibis,” Nugget whispered back.

“What?” Jimbo said and leaned in as if from where he was, through some feat of mysticism, he still might be able to steal a peek right through Nugget’s overly large cranium.

“They’re a big bird. Like a crane,” Nugget explained. “On the drapes. Real pretty.”

“
Crane
?” Nugget heard one of them ask incredulously. He wasn’t sure who’d spoken, though, since he felt a bit as if he were no longer quite there.

“Just thoot, goddamn you.”

Oh yeah, it was Jimbo
, he told himself.

Wes Nugget Crocker’s index finger nervously played along the trigger and he tried to will his eye to find some proof that there was nothing beyond those sacred birds that might come to harm through his actions. Unfortunately he had no such power. All he could discern was the blazing bright blue sky full of ibises.

And then it seemed the flock had sprung to life. Nugget gasped.

“What? What is it?” he heard another near at hand demand of him.

But the birds were not taking flight as his imagination had played. No, someone had merely rustled the curtains, he realized, as a shadow from within swam across them. With that dark silhouette, for a brief moment it was as though a great host of storm clouds rushed in from the horizon to sweep away the ibises. Then the sky of blue returned and the blood red birds were unthreatened and at peace once more.

“Nugget, you morbid mother fucker. You best start thootin’, son. I ain’t tellin’ ya a third time.” To emphasize his point, Jimbo threw his foot onto the rear tire and pretended he was going to climb up into the truck bed.

Nugget’s resistance gave way then, and he played the only gambit he could find.

A small flash lit up the night as the rifle cracked with such a report that TR audibly yelped, followed by a great whooping of success from Jimbo. None of the Klan boys had believed Nugget would do it. He’d fired a single shot into the back of John Sayre’s truck, where it was parked in the Anderson’s front yard, not even realizing that John and Cicada were seated inside it.

The way Timothy was crouched hidden, there was no chance for Nugget to have seen the boy. So the shot fired into the back of John’s truck failed to pass without harmful consequence as Nugget had intended.

Piercing the side of the truck bed easily, the bullet bit into Timothy David Sayre at the hollow near the base of his neck just where his collarbone rose. The slug dove deep into the boy, a darting metal minnow madly swimming down through his right lung until its migration finally ceased—its sleek form settling mushroomed—drowned in the thick of his liver. Timothy stiffened and rose slightly, gasping as his vision filled with the firework light of a host of synapses igniting all at once, and then he collapsed face-down with a quiet heave onto the truck bed, still with death.

A course of thick, dark blood surged from the angry little pucker where the bullet had found the boy, while, inside the cab of the truck, John Sayre was oblivious to his only child’s passing.

Even as it seemed the intrusion of the shot was still reverberating upon the air, John cursed and instinctively stomped his foot in search of the brake pedal in panic. In the same flash, desperation and confusion caught him up, a marionette pawing, fanning the air, tangling his lines, uncertain of what to do. He reached back for his shotgun but then turned to hold Cicada down even as he fumbled to start his truck.

In the same instant, Cicada screamed, and before John could act to stop her, she scrambled from the vehicle, tearing loose a fingernail on the door handle without even realizing it in her mad bolt for the house.

The bare bulb of the porch light suddenly blazed to life, a beacon to guide her way, and just as she reached the steps Ben erupted from the front door, shotgun held high. All in those same fleeting seconds, John turned the ignition of the truck three times. His efforts caused the engine to wretch, but not turn over. He was at once at a loss and lost, wincing as he waited for the next shot he was sure would come. Thankfully, it never did.

John stepped from the truck with a long pause before the second foot followed the first. His shoulders slouched and his chin was pulled into his chest. Weary as he was with what had transpired, he was even more beat down for what he’d yet to face inside. He quietly shut the cab door and leaned against it to procrastinate against the inevitable. The dog trotted up from somewhere out of the dark, as it was wont to do, and stopped briefly to consider him. He ignored it.

The dog eased past John and a moment later the man heard a whimper and scratching behind him. He turned to see the animal was on its hinds with one forepaw pawing at the truck.

“Git down off a there!” he scolded in a hushed rasp.

The dog drooped, ducking its head to shy away, but was helpless to obey the command. That’s when John noticed that it had one toenail of its right front paw inexplicably caught on the side of the truck. Peering closer he suddenly realized the dog was hung up on the bullet hole where the truck had been shot.

“Summabitches,” he muttered. “Hol’ still.” He took the dog’s limb in his hand to try and free it. As he did, he discovered what had brought the dog to its predicament in the first place. “Wha’ in the?” And then he recognized his son. “Timothy? Tim?” Being a hunter, and knowing the scent all too well, John would later recall having smelled the blood before he saw it. “Tim!” John reached in and his hand found the boy’s bloodied shoulder. With that he roughly shoved the dog away. It howled pathetically as its toenail was nearly yanked loose in its violent emancipation.

“Tim, Tim…Oh, God no, Tim,” John cried as he clambered into the back of the truck to join his son. He turned the boy over gently and knew immediately that Buckshot was gone. “Walt…,” John whispered, pulling Timothy into his chest and giving in to despair. From across the lawn the long silhouette of the dog tending to its wounded paw became a prominent shadow as the front door swung open and a golden column of light cleaved the dark.

…

The sun was just cresting the treetops marking the far off border of the east field. Like so many days, its radiance gave the silhouette the appearance of a great, dark, roiling wave coming to sweep over the green shore of pearl millet spread out before it.

But this morning was different. This morning was silenced of its usual sounds. No birds warbled, no barn doors clattered with the comings and goings of John, Buckshot, or Ben. The tractor kept still at its station in the barn.

Still, the Sayre farm was far from quiet. On the porch, the dog, its food bowl unattended, paced and whined for attention, limping and nosing up hopefully to each thigh of a seemingly never-ending parade of strangers, uniformed men moving back and forth between the house and front lawn. Also there was the ubiquitous drone of conversation carried out between those newcomers. Most was merely muffled reverence filled with many of the same sentiments repeated over and over; words such as, “pity,” “shame,” “how,” and most often, “why.” More than once, the Lord’s name was taken in vain, and they each shook their heads in teary-eyed confusion.

But by far, the loudest and most unsettling sound, blanketing all else, emanated from within the house. It was the very disturbance that had driven and kept the morning birds at bay. It was the anguish of Frances as she railed and pleaded against heaven and earth for the loss of her Timothy.

Out in front of the house, two deputies stood watch over John’s truck and the shroud in the back; a simple bed sheet that concealed Timothy’s small corpse. Something like twins, they smoked with pinched and pained expressions and spoke very little, each quietly wishing for the moment when the woman might find either peace or exhaustion.

“Poor thing,” one finally remarked, and dropped his spent cigarette butt to the ground only to fetch another from his pocket.

“Yeah,” his partner agreed, even though he wasn’t sure if the comment was directed towards Frances or her son.

John kept his right hand clenched in his front dungarees pocket while the fingers of his left hand thrummed a steady cadence on the slick Formica of the kitchen table. For the third time in as many minutes he started to rise and go into the living room in response to Frances’s grieving.

Sheriff Gladwell rested a hand on John’s forearm to guide him back into the chair beside him. “John, please,” he intoned softly.

“Sheriff….” John stretched out beseechingly towards the other room.

“Let’s just get through this now,” Sheriff Gladwell said.

With a weak sigh, John went limp and settled back. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

For reasons the men could not know, but were nonetheless thankful for, from the living room, Frances grew quiet as well.

“So then after the shot you saw the truck and how many men?”

“I don’t know…three…four.”

“But you couldn’t make out any faces?”

“It was dark. They was a ways off…through the trees….”

“Right.”

“But I told ya, I know’d the truck. It was that goddamned Jimbo Dillard’s.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I know. I just know. It was Dillard and that pack of rabble he runs with.”

“But they drove off before you could see them clearly?”

“They were gone before I was even sure what’d happened,” John said. “I didn’t realize…thought everything was okay. It wasn’t even until I got back home that….” John couldn’t finish.

Sheriff Gladwell rubbed his bloodshot eyes and leaned in. “What were you doing way out that way so late on any account, John?”

John bristled. “The hell does that matter?”

“Okay, okay. No need to get riled in a knot. Just trying to piece things together here.”

John stared off listening for any sign of Frances. He found none. Then he blurted out his lie as quick as it came to him. “I went to see Ben.”

As soon as he’d said it, John wished he hadn’t. Just as quickly he realized he could have said he was simply out driving, blowing off steam, whatever.

“Ben?”

“Yeah. Ben Anderson. He’s a…my field hand. Hired him a little ways back to help out. Help with the farm. Ben Anderson.”

“That’s right,” the Sheriff agreed, recalling his previous visit with Frances.

John began to get up yet again. “Maybe we should bring Tim in the house? I better go….”

“No, sir. Sit down,” the Sheriff finally snapped, clenching John by the arm and pulling him back. “I’m through telling you…the body’s not to be moved until the coroner gets here.”

John met his anger. “Well then, by God, get his ass out here. You get that sumbitch. Get his ass out here!”

“John, I told you twice already,” Gladwell shifted quietly, “the man’s gotta come from clear across the county. Now, he’s on his way. And until he gets here, that body stays right in the back of that truck.”