Kings of the Earth: A Novel (36 page)
Read Kings of the Earth: A Novel Online
Authors: Jon Clinch
Tags: #Fiction - General, #Brothers, #Family Life, #General, #Literary, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #Fiction, #Rural families
Once we had all that settled he called Margaret back out, and she brought some lemonade, and he told me about the international drug cartel that had been operating right in his own front yard all this time. It seems they kept to a regular schedule. He asked if I thought he’d have to testify to anything in court, and I said not if we played our cards right.
Audie
I
T WAS GOING TO BE
a pig but I turned it into a dog instead on account of that three-legged one that died. I still had it when people came around and started pulling out their wallets but I hung on to it no matter what. Sometimes I’d give it a little new paint but not anymore. I never did part with that dog. You couldn’t get me to. Nobody could. I still have it to this day.
Margaret
W
E’VE ALWAYS HAD
a double garage, because winters are hard around here and Preston is fastidious about his cars. Not that he keeps them for that long. People at the church used to joke that he’d rather sell a car than empty the ashtray. Cars have always been his great weakness.
In the afternoon he washed mine, but instead of putting it back in the garage he left it in the driveway. Late in the evening the troopers came, Del Graham and a gentleman named Myers who was much younger but very serious and terribly deferential to an old lady like me. They backed their patrol car up into the garage and put it in the empty bay and let the door down.
I made them some coffee and we all watched the late news. Then I went to bed, and I told Preston to come with me. He said no, he thought he’d sit out on the screen porch with the troopers for a while, and even though they tried very politely to discourage him, he went anyway. I may as well have stayed down there and kept them company, for all I slept.
Nick
H
E’D HAD A LITTLE BIT
to drink at the Woodshed,
that lowlife joint where Tom most pointedly did not hang out anymore
, so rather than drive around he left the Indian in the parking lot and walked to Dickie’s for a few cups of coffee and a big slice of that coconut cream pie. Between the sugar and the caffeine he’d be all right. Plus he had a couple of hours to kill. Was Dickie’s open that late? He’d find out.
Del
T
HE
V
OLKSWAGEN ARRIVED FIRST
, then the Cadillac right behind it. They killed their lights as they turned onto the dirt lane. They weren’t in any hurry, and they did their best to pretty much coast the rest of the way, that big Caddy probably never getting above an idle by the sound of it. The VW was coughing badly and it would have been quieter if the nephew had just given it a little gas now and then. He parked and the Caddy pulled up next to him. Just one or two taps on their brakes and a little red glow in the yard and everything went dark again. The dome lights didn’t even come on when they opened their doors and got out.
Preston elbowed me in the ribs to remind me that he’d kept his promise. I nodded my head whether he saw me or not, and I slid an inch or two away on the couch so that he wouldn’t be tempted to do it again.
The nephew opened the barn door and the Canadian popped his trunk. The sounds of the door latches and the trunk latch carried across the empty space between us. The Canadian had apparently unscrewed the bulb from his trunk lid, too. He lit a cigarette and stood in the dark for a minute while the nephew took care of something in the barn. I thought that lighting the cigarette was pretty bold of him, but that was fine with me. It suggested that he’d gotten used to not having company. At first he had his back to us, judging by the way the cigarette came and went, and then he turned around and leaned against the rear quarter panel of the car and the movement of the ember was in the clear. If it had been daylight we would have been looking right at each other across the barnyard and the dirt lane and Preston’s little patch of grass. Preston held his breath. We just had to wait.
Tom
T
HERE WAS NEVER
any telling how much junk he’d have to move around once he got the trapdoor open. Lumber and hay bales and feed sacks and hand tools and God knew what else. Audie and Creed had no respect for his space, that was the trouble. And Audie was the worst, with his stupid whirligigs and his lathe and his lumber set out everywhere to dry. Tonight wasn’t actually so bad. Just a shovel and a couple of planks of some sort of wood and a short-handled silage fork, the tines of which he stepped on so that it sprang up like a rake in a cartoon but not far enough or hard enough to do him any damage. He opened one door to let in whatever light there was and he cleared room for Henri’s stuff, and then he picked up an armload of his own and went back down the ladder. He kicked a clear space in the hay and horseshit and set the package down for when Henri’s trunk was empty and they could start filling it up again. Henri heard him and walked in with his arms full and a cigarette between his teeth. Tom told him to put that out, didn’t he know anything, but he just went on up the ladder. Tom got an armload himself and followed.
They took a few more loads up and they were standing in the hayloft door, breathing hard, when a motorcycle turned up from the main road.
Audie
T
HAT WAS A SOUND
I hadn’t heard for a while. Sometimes I’d go out and help those boys unload but that new man wasn’t friendly so I didn’t like to bother him. The other one, the one who used to come around before, he called me Uncle Audie just like Tom did. He was all right. I liked him pretty well and Creed did too.
Preston
I
LEANED OVER
to say this was Tom’s greaser friend, but Graham wouldn’t let me. Tom and the Canadian were in the barn somewhere, so I didn’t see any harm in whispering a little. Graham was coiled up just like a wire sitting there.
Tom
T
HE TWO MEN BACKED AWAY
from the hayloft door to watch the motorcycle come up the lane. They stood shoulder to shoulder, just out of the dim starlight, in the door shadow where Nick wouldn’t see them.
Nick pulled up out of sight in front of the barn and revved the engine a little. Under the noise of it Henri turned his head and spoke to Tom. Very rapidly, but softly and without much inflection. He said how disappointed he was to be seeing this former associate of theirs appearing from out of nowhere and sticking his nose into their business, particularly when he’d done his best to sever the relationship. Just like that.
Sever
. He suggested that Tom, on the other hand, had perhaps not been holding up his end of the bargain. He indicated that Tom might want to make that right just as soon as possible, using whatever means might be required.
He sounded just like DeAlton, only with a French accent.
Tom decided that he’d had just about enough.
Del
A
S LONG AS
the motorcycle was running I thought we ought to take advantage of the noise. Myers and I got up and stood in the shadows against the house, right near the screen door. Not Preston. Preston knew to lay low. I had put some duct tape over the latch so that when the time came we could open the door and slip out without making even that little bit of noise. We waited to see if the nephew and the Canadian would come out to see about the other fellow, but they didn’t. He leaned his bike against the wall and poked around in the trunk of the Caddy for a minute. I thought I saw him put something in his pocket but I couldn’t be sure. Then he bent over the trunk again and lifted something else out and walked it over to his bike. It looked to be about the size of a shoe box. Dope. Probably two or three bricks of it. He put it in the saddlebag, and that was fine with me. That was just about perfect. I couldn’t have asked for any more than that.
Tom
H
ENRI STEPPED FARTHER BACK
into the shadows and lit himself a cigarette, listening for Nick’s footsteps in the barn. Nick was slow in coming but the Frenchman had all the time in the world. Tom took up a post at the top of the ladder, the shovel raised over his head like a club, and when the crown of his uncle’s vague head appeared through the trapdoor he did not hesitate.
Ruth
U
P FROM THE EARTH
the water rises, bidden by the iron pump and her husband’s furious working of it, bearing into the world the earth’s own changeless temperature. Spill it on the barnyard and it will freeze into a sheet. Pour it into the pot and it will steam soon enough. Thus without complaint or will or agency of any sort it bears witness to its beginnings and makes accommodation to its ends.
Lester empties the pitcher into the pot atop the stove and stokes the fire and pumps more water which he slops into the pot as well, spilling a little in his haste and standing undaunted in the consequent cloud of vapor that blooms up white from the iron stove.
Audie
I
SAW MY FATHER
and that old red rooster in a cloud of smoke or steam or both. My father worked the pump and I was on the floor with the fish and my mother was rubbing at my brother Vernon. Rubbing at his arms and legs so he wouldn’t go on ahead. Anything but that. Anything but Vernon going on ahead of her. She cried some and she didn’t hide it and my father told her to stop so she hid it but she didn’t stop. She just put her head down so he couldn’t see, but I could see because I was down on the floor where the fish spilled. I was slid down among them just as cold and wet, and I was wiggling my legs and the fish were thawing out and I was getting colder. Vernon was sucking in the air like a fish himself but out of water and my mother was bent over him where my father couldn’t see but I could.
Ruth
S
HE WOULD RATHER DIE
herself and she says so. To her husband this sounds like a poor bargain and perhaps even a wicked one capable of calling down some limitless and untrustworthy power, and so he forbids her making it. For his part he behaves as if work will save the boy. Work alone, regardless of intent or method or object. The mere movement of the elements pursuing themselves through the world, their friction generating heat and light and life. He catches the blue boy’s shuddering breath from the corner of his eye and redoubles his efforts, working the pump like a bellows, hollering over his shoulder at Audie: “On your feet, boy. Take care of them fish.”
The boy asks how.
“Don’t make me tell you everything.” He gives off on the handle and raises the pitcher and spills water into the pot which steams on the stove but not for long. He tests it with a finger and pours some into a basin and sets the basin on the table with the dishrag. “Try that,” he says to his wife.
“I’ll need more rags,” she says. “Bigger. A towel.”
Audie has bent to gather up the thawing fish but his father stops him. “Never mind them. Fetch your mother some rags. From the barn.”
The boy runs off in a clap of cold air from the door flung wide and returns straight off with all he can carry, a double armload of wretched dusty feed sacks lately home to mice. She accepts them and without so much as shaking loose their burden of seed and chaff and shit she plunges them into the basin and is grateful. Rag by rag she wrings them out and applies their heat to her son’s pale body, and slowly he comes around.
Audie
O
NE OF THEM
came back to life. There was fish slime on the floor and water and ice melt and I bent to pick up a little one and it came right back to life just like that. Just like Vernon. The gills of it spread open and the mouth of it moved quick and I dropped it on account of how it surprised me. I never knew such a thing could happen. It slid down with the rest and when I tried to find it again I couldn’t because after that it stayed dead.
Del
O
NCE THAT OTHER FELLOW
who’d come on the motorcycle stepped into the barn, all hell broke loose. It was apparent that the nephew and the Canadian hadn’t expected him any more than we had, so while they were tangling we drew our weapons and opened the screen door and ran down through the yard in the dark. The grass was wet. Myers and I went across the dirt lane and up to the barn door, and no sooner had we gotten there than the three of them came tumbling out as if they were being chased by something. They didn’t have much to say when they realized who we were. They were a lot less trouble than I’d expected them to be, and I didn’t know why until later on. We cuffed them to the Cadillac one by one, three men and four door handles on that big old boat, and Myers pulled the barn door shut while I brought the patrol car down. There wasn’t any need to disturb the Proctor brothers. Not that I could think of. Myers asked if he should tape the door, but I said no. I said those old men would want to get their milking done before long, and they didn’t need our tape getting in their way. What was in the hayloft would stay there until morning without our help. I radioed for a team to come and secure the vehicles, and when they turned up the lane we headed out.
Preston
I
THOUGHT
I
’D BETTER TAKE
that duct tape down off the latch before it got stuck there forever. We’d had the house shut up all night, so it wasn’t until I opened the door onto the screen porch that I heard the cows down in the yard by the barn. Milking time had come and gone and nobody’d seen to them. The barn door was shut. They knew something was wrong even if nobody else did.
I put on my boots and went right straight down there in my bathrobe. You don’t want to go walking around a barnyard in your bare feet. You could pick up one of those parasites they get in Africa, and then you’d be in trouble. I had to shoulder my way through the cows to get to the barn. I don’t know how those old boys ever got that great big door open and shut every single day of their lives, except they were in the habit. Maybe there was a secret to it but I don’t think so. I guess I’ve just gone soft. Anyhow I put my weight into it and pushed it open and went on in. A barn is a pretty dark place by and large, and I walked right on past them. The two of them on the floor over by the far wall. I went straight through into the house and the bed was empty and then I went out again and I guess my eyes must have gotten a little used to the dark because there they were, asleep on the hay. Audie was asleep anyhow. Creed wasn’t going to be waking up. Not after that fall and whatever else. I checked to make sure there wasn’t any question about that and there wasn’t. He was cold. The shovel lay right there alongside his head and there was white hair on it and there was a little blood too.
Audie was behind his brother, up close like they were a couple of spoons. He had his arms around him. Maybe that’s how they always slept. Maybe it was a regular thing. I’d never thought about it and I wouldn’t know. I bent over and touched his shoulder and I said his name out loud and he opened up his eyes, the one of them clouded over and the other one not much better. I thought it was the strangest thing, how a person can go through this life and not see what you see. How he can stand right next to you and it’s all different.
I helped him up and told him to go get dressed, and I covered Creed over with a horse blanket, and then I went back home to get dressed myself. I had Margaret call the troopers, then I went back down to help Audie with the milking. Graham came straight over from his place on the West Road and there was a whole line of police cars not more than a half-mile behind him, sirens and lights going, and I told him what I’d found and how I’d found it. He said he guessed he should have gone in last night. I said I didn’t blame him for not going in. It was probably too late already. Who knows.
He said well then he should have arrested Creed back when he had the chance, and everything would have turned out different. He’d still be among the living. I said I didn’t know about that either. I said he might have saved Creed’s life just so he could die from shame in the jailhouse. It was hard to say.