Damaged Goods (12 page)

“Divine?”

“Heavenly.”

She waved him off, grinning, and stepped down from the porch, heading toward the crowd of men at the picnic tables. There weren’t many children in this group, and Carl knew that was a bad sign. The presence of families always served to keep the peace. There was less drinking, less swearing, and fewer racial slurs shot in his direction when they brought their children.

Carl watched Yolanda’s broad hips swish from side to side. She had a fluidity about her that defied her abundance. He wanted to call her back, invite her into his home, and touch that warm dark skin.

Hershel pulled his coat on and trudged across the spongy ground to his pickup. He felt like a stranger in his own home, and he
cussed himself for bringing the girl there. How could he ask her to leave now? He’d be an asshole of monumental proportions if he put her out on the street after what she’d told him.

He went to the sale barn, standing on the cement stoop in the dull light, trying key after key. When he found the correct one he held it up, staring at its contours, its color. Why couldn’t he recognize this simple key when he needed it? He shoved the wad back into his pocket and stomped inside, slamming the door closed behind him. He turned on the overhead lights and squinted against the sudden, painful glare.

This place had once been a source of immense satisfaction for him. From the outside it didn’t look like much. The casual observer wouldn’t appraise this business very highly, and that was beautiful. He’d found ways to make money—lots of money—without the appearance of money. But now it represented the ugly words people called him. Their sentiments echoed between the walls long after they’d gone. Who was this man they valued only for what he could sell them? This person they seemed so wary of?

Hershel stood in the doorway of the cashier’s booth and let his eyes roam the cramped space. There had to be clues here to who he once was and to his relationship with Kyrellis. He stepped in and pawed through a stack of dog-eared papers—advertisements from past sales, old calendars, and handwritten notes. Bidding numbers turned in, new ones ready to go for the next sale. He pulled open the drawer and examined the mismatched pens and pencils. A pack of chewing gum so ancient it was calcified. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he was certain he wouldn’t find it here. He sat back in the squeaky chair. Had it been a sale item, too? Of course it had. He wandered into the concession stand, running his fingers over the torn vinyl of the twin bar stools on his way past. Five dollars for the pair he’d paid, because they didn’t need to be attractive. The popcorn machine, secondhand from the liquidation of the Fox theater in some nameless town. Twenty-two dollars. Had he cleared a nest of mice
from the grease pan? The idea seemed too real not to be true, and that soured his stomach a little.

He had no particular destination in mind as he pulled out of the gravel lot onto Highway 219. He’d just roam around awhile, think about things. Try to figure out what to do about Silvie. He’d been through the scenario too many times now, and he couldn’t see how she would take any amount of money for her loss. She was afraid, and fear changed the value of things. Her price, if one could be reached, would be too high—higher than Hershel was willing to pay, anyway. It was Kyrellis he needed to focus on if he was going to get this box back and get rid of the girl.

These weren’t his photos. And if anyone discovered that he’d paid for them he’d go to prison as a sex offender. He let out an irritated growl. Was he really responsible here? He’d sold her car. But he’d also taken her in. Where did things balance out and his obligation end? He should just give her a couple of hundred dollars and drop her off in Lincoln City as she’d asked him to. Let her worry about Kyrellis. Wash his hands of the whole thing.

“That’s what I’ll do,” he said. “Fuck ’em both. I don’t need this.”

Darkness had overtaken the landscape, leaving only the moist pavement with its faded yellow stripe to unfold before him. The overcast sky hid what stars he might have seen. And the farms along that stretch of Washington County were set back away from the road, tiny yellow dots in a sea of black.

He wound along southward on 219, its curves coming fast and sharp, the engine straining against the steep grade. He drove faster than he’d done since the accident. How things change, he thought, remembering the way he’d raced his Charger down back roads at speeds of up to a hundred miles an hour in places. Finally, he topped the summit of Chehalem Mountain and dropped into Yamhill County. He took the hairpin turns on the other side a little
slower, the city of Newberg twinkling up from the valley through leafless trees and blackberry thickets.

He cruised into town, past George Fox University, then left on First Street. Downtown was quiet, and he picked up 219 again south of Newberg. He headed toward the tiny hamlet of St. Paul, not because he had business there but because that’s where the road led. As he neared the site of his accident he slowed and looked for signs of that terrible night, but everything had been restored. Even in the dark, he could see that the fence he took out had been rebuilt, the grass he’d gouged up grown anew. The mile-post marker that had skewered his radiator had been replaced, too. The car behind him flashed its lights impatiently, and Hershel resumed his speed. He took a left at the turnoff to Champoeg State Park, mostly to rid himself of the growing line of traffic trailing him. The road twisted ahead, running between dairy farms and nurseries, through mossy creek beds and up onto the smooth straightaway of French Prairie. Where was he coming from that night? Kyrellis’s question had simply echoed his own maddening query of what he could not remember.

After a time, the rancid odor of pigs reached him, and he had a fleeting memory of staring down into a muddy sty filled with enormous dark hogs. He struggled to piece the memory together, but it was fractured, the way so much of his past was. He hadn’t raised pigs as a kid, or kept them as an adult. Where did this random image come from, and why did it carry such an overwhelming sense of foreboding?

Silvie crept downstairs a few minutes after midnight, sleepless and thirsty. She peered out the kitchen window to the spot where Hershel had parked his truck that afternoon, but it wasn’t there. She looked around, pondering how long he’d been gone. What small comfort she had found there evaporated with the knowledge
that she was alone. Hershel’s presence, though not warm, at least provided a sense of security. She needed the shelter he offered, and she’d come downstairs prepared to show him that she could be warm, friendly … whatever he needed her to be.

She filled a glass at the tap and took a slow sip. Oregon well water tasted coppery and sharp compared with the water in Wyoming, and she liked it. She finished the glass and refilled it, then made a quiet inventory of the windows and doors. She tried the sash on the living-room window, but it wouldn’t budge. She checked the front door and found it secured with a dead bolt and a chain.

When she returned the glass to the kitchen she found Hershel’s cellphone plugged into an outlet near the refrigerator. She glanced around, double-checking that she was alone, then scrolled through the contacts. When she found Kyrellis, her hand suddenly shook. She set the phone down abruptly and stared at it as if it were a poisonous snake. But it held the only connection to the man who had Jacob’s pictures. She took it up again and quickly pressed the call button before she lost her nerve. It rang only twice before he answered.

“Swift. ’Bout time you called. You finally figure out what that girl is hiding?”

“Th-this is Silvie,” she stammered. “You have my box.”

“Silvie,” he said softly, as if committing her name to memory. “What a beautiful name.”

“Just give it back. Please.”

“I can see why you don’t want anyone to see these pictures.” He spoke softly into the phone, a sympathetic, fatherly tone. “Who took them?”

“You have no idea what kind of trouble this will bring,” she said.

“Yes … yes, you could be right.” He paused over the idea. “Was he kind to you, the man who took these? Even a little?”

Her mind swam with conflicting answers. “He’ll come after you for them.” Silvie knew what Jacob was capable of, because she’d once witnessed his confrontation with a man behind the out-houses
at the Hanley reservoir. It was dark, but she caught the flash of silver in the beam of the headlight before the man collapsed at Jacob’s feet. When he returned to the truck, wiping the blade of a knife with his handkerchief, he eyed her balefully.

“He should have done as I asked,” he said matter-of-factly. The next morning, the sheriff was called out to investigate a murder at the reservoir.

“Who will come after me?” Kyrellis asked. “Who is the man in this photo where you’re—” He paused a long moment. “Well, I don’t need to say exactly. I’m sure you know which one I mean.” He sounded sad.

She flushed, imagining precisely which picture Kyrellis held.

“That’s a fine-looking house—what I can see of it. He has some money, this man. Doesn’t he, sweetheart?”

“He’ll kill me,” she pleaded.

“Listen, my dear, he may have told you he would kill you if you told anyone, but men like that are not murderers. You’re not in as much danger as you’ve been led to believe.”

“What do you want for them?”

“I hate to admit it, but that is the question, isn’t it? How about the name of the man in the picture?”

“He
will
kill me. He’ll kill you, too. You don’t know him.”

“No, I don’t know this specific man. But I know men
like
him. Tell me his name and I’ll make sure he never bothers you again.”

Silvie hung up the phone and stood in the dark kitchen, exhausted. She had no way of knowing how far Kyrellis would go. There was something approaching kindness in his voice, and it confused her. Maybe he had a soft spot that she could appeal to. He wouldn’t go as far as Jacob; she was certain of that.

She wiped the sweat and oil from Hershel’s phone and returned it to the exact place where she’d found it. She went back upstairs to the bedroom and sat with the light on, trying to forget the memory of Jacob Castor slicing down a man with all the concern of someone ridding himself of a rabid dog, or the things he’d made her do afterward.

Carl was nearly to the highway when a white van pulled onto the rutty road leading into Campo Rojo. The driver slowed to a stop and leaned out the window.

“You the landlord here?”

“Nope.” Carl pointed to where the road forked to the left and disappeared into a stand of noble firs once intended for Christmas trees but long overgrown. “Jimmy Arndt owns the place. He lives back there.”

“He got anyone that speaks English down at Camp Rojo to tell me which units get satellite TV?” He pronounced the name phonetically, with a
j
instead of an h.

“No idea,” Carl said. “Just don’t put one on unit five. That’s mine, and I’m not paying for it.”

The man scrutinized Carl as if he were joking. It was a common response, as if no white man would truly be living in a migrant camp. And it always put the short hairs on the back of Carl’s neck straight up like a mean dog’s. When Carl didn’t smile, the man drove on, taking the left fork into Arndt’s driveway. Carl trudged onto the highway and turned south toward the auction barn, shaking his head. How did these people expect to save money if they spent it on television? He knew from experience that when
he returned home that evening every cabin in camp, with the exception of his and Yolanda’s, would sport a satellite dish directed at the southern sky, each like a proud American status symbol.

A car whizzed past, spraying an icy mist across him. He zipped his jacket and picked up the pace. In the summer the mile-and-a-half walk past berry fields and filbert orchards to the sale barn was pleasant. The old houses in Scholls proper—a short strip of road that started at Groner Elementary and ended at the South Store—were a sight to behold in spring. Hundred-year-old magnolia trees, wisteria, rhododendrons, and generations of wild daffodils brought a charm to the place that new money couldn’t. The mini-mansions that had sprouted up along the ridgeline of Chehalem Mountain looked garish and self-important in the steely drizzle of winter. This time of year, the walk was simply a chore to be gotten done with.