Dogwood (27 page)

During the early 1970s, my one foray into the outside world had been through the CB radio. I had a base station in my room and installed a radio in our car. My father, not wanting to waste anything, had transferred it to this vehicle. I flipped it on and cycled through the channels as my mother and I hit Route 60, choosing to drive west rather than east. I’d heard from a friend in Clarkston that people fleeing police have a better chance at escape by going straight rather than weaving through back streets and alleys. There aren’t that many in Dogwood anyway.

My old haunt was channel 4. I could only imagine what those people thought when they discovered the kid they had talked with all those years ago was in prison.

“. . . was supposed to be back last night, but he got his rig hung up in Missouri and he probably won’t make it until late tonight.”

I waited until the drawling lady stopped and keyed the mic. “Hey, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I need some help. This is Will Hatfield, and I’m being chased by the Dogwood police chief and some of his thugs.” I let go and listened to the static, my mind swirling.

“Will, they’re behind us,” Mama said.

We hit a straight stretch that ran past the radio station and got the car up to eighty. The left front tire began to wobble, and I had to back off the accelerator. “I need somebody to call the sheriff. Or the state police.”

My mother unbuckled and tipped her seat, struggling to roll into the back.

“You ought to pull over, Will,” a man said. I recognized the voice of Coyote, one of the grizzled crew that made channel 4 so much fun to join. I didn’t know the identities of these people. They were just voices on the radio.

“Coyote, I need your help. Eddie Buret killed Elvis—Arron Spurlock. He knew something about some stolen money. Eddie and his crew kidnapped me but I got away. I need somebody to help me.”

“Hit the window lock,” Mama said from the backseat.

I released the microphone and hit the lock.

“Who is that?” Coyote said.

“My mother. I couldn’t leave her there. This guy is catching up with me in a cruiser. If you’re gonna help me, I need you to do it now.”

Another long pause. Then a woman’s voice. “I hope he does catch up with you, you murdering jerk.”

A bullet crashed through the back window, shattering the glass, and I ducked.

“You all right, Mama?”

“These people are playing for keeps,” she said.

Through the rearview mirror I watched her pound the rifle barrel against the window, making a small hole through the glass. She took aim and fired, missing badly.

“You’d better get down,” I yelled.

Mama fired twice, and the left headlight on the cruiser went dark. She whooped. “I got one!”

“Aim a little higher,” I said.

Another shot pinged off our roof, and the side mirror shattered. I swerved into the oncoming lane, then back to the right.

“Hold it still.” She fired five shots with the .22, one right after another. The fourth one hit the windshield. Immediately the cruiser slowed.

“You did it!” I shouted, approaching the corner and the flea market that lay below us. I slowed enough to make the corner and keyed the mic again. “Coyote, he’s shooting at us. He’s trying to get rid of the evidence, which is me.”

“You know who that is, don’t you?” Mama said. “Coyote is Judge Henderson.”

He came back on the radio. “I talked with dispatch. They’re saying you’re armed and dangerous. That shots are being fired from your automobile.”

“Sir, my mother and I are defending ourselves. Please. You have to help us.”

“Let him rot,” somebody else said. Then a flurry of voices echoed the same sentiment.

Finally, Coyote spoke. “You need to pull over now. There’s a sheriff’s deputy dispatched, but you have to surrender to the authorities.”

“If I surrender, we’re dead,” I said.

“Son, you’re in violation of your parole if you have a firearm. Don’t make it worse.”

I tossed the mic away and mashed the accelerator to the floor.

All my life my mother had been the one to play things safely. When my father had a chance to buy more land for next to nothing, she had said they had enough. When he wanted to quit his job and farm full-time, she had said they needed a steady income and health insurance. Now, faced with the most dire circumstances of our lives, she was rising to the occasion and becoming a lot less safe than I had ever imagined.

“Daddy would love to see you like this,” I shouted through the noise and wind.

We passed the Family Dollar and Pizza Hut doing seventy-five, and the funeral home came up on the right. There was only one stoplight in town, and just as we approached, it turned yellow, then red.

“Hang on,” I said. “We’re not stopping.”

I slowed to about forty, and when I saw no cars nearing the intersection, I sped up, heading straight for the site of our old school. The Sabre was all lit up, waiting like an old friend. “We make it past here and we might meet that deputy coming the other way,” I said.

I saw the Dogwood police cruiser too late to react. It was behind the plane, and when it flashed its lights, I was distracted and didn’t see the spike strip.

All four tires blew and we swerved left. Our momentum kept us going, but I smelled burning rubber and felt the clunk of the rims on pavement. Sparks flew, showering up beside us, and my mother threw her hands over her head. Swirling lights lit the darkened field ahead, and instead of braking, I pushed the accelerator to the floor.

It took both hands to control the wheel even though we had slowed now to about thirty-five. The grinding worsened, and over the grating and groaning of the wheels came the warbling siren. I drove in the middle of the narrow road so the cruiser couldn’t pull beside me and approached the Bridge Closed sign and the orange and yellow horses.

“That bridge will never hold this car,” Mama yelled from the back.

“You bring your swimsuit?” I said.

“No, just my gun.”

I would have laughed, but the situation was just too bleak.

The car crawled up the incline to the bridge and pushed the
horses away. One of them stuck underneath the right wheel, and we clattered onto the bridge and over the ancient boards that had been meant for horse-drawn carriages. The car lunged left, then came to a violent halt as it plunged through the rotted wood. All I could hear was the hiss of the engine and the rushing water beneath us.

“You okay?” I said.

Mama mumbled something.

“Put your hands up and get out of the vehicle!” the officer shouted behind us.

Mama put something in her nightgown and struggled to sit up, looking out the back window and squinting. “Is that you, Bobby Ray?”

The officer held his gun in front of him, partially blocked by the open door. I couldn’t see his face, but I did see the gun barrel rise slightly. “Mrs. Hatfield?”

“That’s right, and unless you’re mixed up with Eddie and his bunch, you better let us get out of here.”

He seemed confused, and I figured it was the perfect time to confuse him more. I opened the door and stepped out, letting the gun I had fall to the bridge. “Hand me the rifle, Mama,” I said, thinking that in a million years I would not have guessed I would utter such a phrase, but there it was.

She put the gun through the window and I let it fall, then helped her out of the car. “We’re unarmed now. We’re not a threat to you.”

“Lie facedown on the bridge,” he called.

“Bobby Ray, I’ve known you since you were this high,” my mother said. She turned to me. “Taught him in second-grade Sunday school.” Then, to Bobby Ray, “I don’t think you’re mixed up with these people, but if you are, you’d better ask God to forgive you right now because judgment is coming.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I want you two to just get down so we won’t have any more trouble.”

A car screeched around the corner, and one headlight sped toward us.

I grabbed my mother’s hand and pulled her to the middle of the bridge. “Stay down. I don’t think Bobby Ray’ll shoot his Sunday school teacher.”

There were holes in the wood, and a couple of times I thought we would both fall through, but we made it to the far end of the bridge as Eddie pulled up beside Bobby Ray. He said something and Bobby Ray pointed to us. Eddie ran toward our car and bent down beside it.

“What’s he doing?” Mama said.

Eddie picked up the handgun I had dropped and examined it. He took a few steps back and surveyed the area. The front of the bridge was illuminated by one fluorescent light.

When he retreated toward the police cruiser, I faced Mama. “Walk straight up this hill and get to somebody’s house. Hurry.”

“But what’s he doing?”

“Go!”

Before she could move, the Glock exploded on the other side of the bridge.

“Mercy!” My mother knelt on the soft shoulder and covered her mouth as the boy she’d taught in Sunday school slumped to the ground in the circling lights of the cruiser.

I stood at the end of the bridge, in plain sight, as Eddie turned and walked toward me.

“He shot him,” Mama said, her voice trembling. “He just killed Bobby Ray.”

“Mama, you have to get up.”

“I’m not leaving you.” She put out a hand, as if trying to grab a railing, and her eyes were misty. “Honey, I could never bear to go to the trial and watch. It tore me up inside. I hope you can forgive me because—”

“I never blamed you. I wouldn’t have been there if I could have helped it.”

“End of the line, Will,” Eddie said, stepping around our car. “It would have been better if you’d have stayed in Clarkston instead of coming back here. Mrs. Hatfield, stay right where you are.”

“It’s fitting we should be here—don’t you think?” I said. “Last time we were on this bridge, you lost a tooth or two.”

“What are you talking about?” Eddie said.

“Remember Karin? Remember coming out here with her? Thinking you were alone? When a girl says no, she means it.”

He disappeared into the darkness of the bridge, silhouetted by the spinning lights. “So that was you, huh? I should have known you’d take up for that no-account. She wasn’t worth all the trouble she caused.”

“And this is where you got rid of Elvis.”

“What goes around comes around,” Eddie said.

The bridge creaked and groaned, and a rail split above him. Eddie jumped to the walkway as our car fell through—halfway at first, just touching the water, and then it plunged all the way in with a splintering crash.

“Now old Elvis will have him something to drive.” Eddie laughed. “And you’re going to join him.”

“You’re gonna shoot me with my own gun?” I said. “That won’t make much sense in the report.”

“You shot Bobby Ray with it, didn’t you? When I cornered you, you turned it on yourself.” Eddie walked closer, as I knew he would, and the river flowed below, swollen and muddy, carrying debris downstream. “And before you turned the gun on yourself, you took care of the skank who birthed you.”

Of all the scenarios I’d thought of as a kid, of all the robbers and terrorists I had saved my church and school from, it had never crossed my mind that I would be defending my mother from the
chief of police. I stood my ground and stepped to my right, blocking his aim. “You’re not going to hurt my mother.”

Eddie smiled. “Fine.” He moved closer to the railing and looked me in the eye. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”

People wonder what they will think of in the moments before they die. Children. Things left unsaid. Forgiveness. God.

I thought of Karin in the moment before the gunshot—the distant, otherworldly explosion. I thought of the house on the hill and the view of the valley and the trees in fall. A panoramic, maudlin rehearsal of my life. I thought of all the times Karin and I would
not
have together, the children we’d never have, the love we wouldn’t make. The songs left on pause in the soundtrack of our lives.

The strange thing was, the gunshot didn’t hurt. I realized why when I saw the blood in Eddie’s mouth, running down his cheek, and the way his eyes rolled up as he drifted sideways, stumbling. And the railing on the bridge giving way, his body tumbling into the surging river, and the thin trail of smoke coming from Bobby Ray’s gun as he staggered on the other side of the bridge.

Then, as if the world had seen enough, the whole thing collapsed. Boards that had been there since the Civil War washed away and broke in pieces, like a life splintering.

More lights swirled near the town, and my mother spoke over the wail of the siren. “You all right, Bobby Ray?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He rubbed his chest and stumbled to his cruiser, grabbing the radio.