Phantom Nights (23 page)

"Two men possibly. Two vehicles, one of which might have been a pickup truck. But again, what could have been the motive for moving her?"

"They weren't wild dogs. They were somebody's dogs that got loose and attacked Mally. Matter of liability then."

"Who keeps dogs with the potential for attacking human beings?"

"Who doesn't? Even good dogs penned up long enough can turn savage if they're running free and something provokes them. Like a scared woman on the run herself."

"From the dogs? Or from men?"

"You have a reason to suggest that?" Bobby said sharply. Ramses had put down his cigar; his face, his expression, was no longer readable in the darkness.

"No. Not yet."

"Maybe I need to get over to Mally's place first thing, have a look around."

"I should go with you. There will be effects to dispose of. I believe Mally owned the house, which will be a matter for probate."

"Where did you plan to spend the night?"

"Eddie Paradise Galphin kindly offered accommodations while I must be in Evening Shade."

"Oh, he did? His mother's house? Passel of half-grown kids using up the accommodations there, a mattress on the porch is the best you'd get. In your condition . . . Anyway, I'm liking you to stay away from Eddie for a couple days. I don't trust his ambition."

"I suppose I could beg shelter for the night from one of our local preachers?"

"Uh-huh."

"I'm not a religious man. I would find it difficult to accept a preacher's hospitality and have to participate in rituals from a 'sacred' text made up of equal parts of myth, superstition, and wishful thinking. Are you a religious man, Bobby?"

"Off and on. And don't be calling me 'Bobby' anywhere there's a possibility somebody else might hear you."

"I thought we had settled a little something between us with this bottle of good sipping whiskey."

"Well, yes and no." He had the sense that Ramses was smiling. "I drink with any man anytime and anywhere I please, and that's nobody's business. I respect you as a man and I'm sorry for your loss even if you don't realize yet how much you've lost, and I'm sorry for—"

"My fate?" Ramses suggested.

"That too. Just respect me for who I am and need to be." Bobby took another drink. "My daddy was sheriff twenty-three years and they called my daddy Robert. Goddamn it, they call me Bobby."

"I understand."

"The mattresses are thin down to the jail, but it's quiet Sunday nights."

"Is that where you want me to go now, Bobby? To spend a night in jail?" There was no denying the amusement in Ramses's voice.

"No," Bobby said. "Tell the truth, I just don't know what to do about you."

B
obby sneaked into the conjugal bed hoping Cecily wouldn't wake up, but she rolled over and put the back of a lax hand against his cheek, a caressing moment.

"Thought I heard you talking to somebody."

"You did. We have company. Just for the night."

"Oh. Who?"

"Ramses Valjean. He didn't have any place else to go."

After a few seconds Cecily said, "That was good of you, Bobby." She sniffed his hair. "Cigar?"

"Uh-huh."

"Your breath. Not drunk are you?"

"I've been worse."

"You only drink hard liquor when something's really troubling you. Is it our money?"

"No. I'll get a game together down at the jail in a day or two."

"Bobby, do you ever lose at poker?"

"Try not to." He closed his eyes, getting comfortable next to her skin. "Has to do with Mally Shaw."

"Is there a problem about what happened to her?" Cecily said. She could be prescient lying with him late at night in that twilight of near-sleep where psychic nerve endings were adrift like jellyfish in a tame sea.

"Shaping up to be a big problem, and I don't know how to handle it."

Cecily breathed deeply and after a minute or so he thought she'd gone back to sleep snuggled against him, nightgown hiked above the ivory beauty of her little rump.

"How would Luther handle it if he was here?"

"Luther? He'd sit tight until the problem went away."

"Will it go away eventually, Bobby?"

"I think so."

"Then maybe that's all you need to do. Sit tight and wait."

Fresh Magic

A Vacant Man

Nighttime on the
Black Serpent Express

A
lex woke up in a macramé hammock in the gazebo behind the two-story brick Colonial house when Francie Swift gave the hammock a push. She was wearing jodhpurs and her second-best riding boots and a short-sleeved blue-and-white-check gingham shirt. There was a riding helmet and leather crop under her left arm.

"Did you spend the night here?" she said, unsurprised, as if she found half-wild children around the place all the time.

Alex yawned, then nodded. The sun had been up for half an hour, hot spots on his face and long, tanned legs from light streaming through the morning-glory-covered latticework.

"Why? Do you have a problem at home?"

Francie had an old dog with her, snow white muzzle and a low growl in his throat when Alex sat up and put his bare feet on the gazebo floor. He was semihard in his shorts. If Francie noticed, it wasn't a novelty: She had three brothers. At fourteen her own sexuality was awake but as still as a hiding rabbit.

Alex looked up at her with the agreeable heartshock of the charmed. Francie had shoulder-length hair, summer-paled. Her oval face was overlaid with tiny freckles, as if she had been cola-spritzed through screenwire. He longed to tell her everything. But words that had come effortlessly to his tongue only hours ago failed to show up. Strangled sounds instead of speech; he had left the fresh magic of language behind him as well when he turned his back on

Mally at Cole's Crossing. He slumped in disappointment and bit his sore lip, a failure again, unable to look at Francie now.

Francie reached down to silence her dog with a couple of taps of her forefinger on the bony muzzle.

"My folks are in Bowling Green. They won't be back until tomorrow afternoon late. You can use the shower in the tack room. I'll fix you some breakfast. You won't get so many skeeter bites if you sleep on the porch tonight. Unless you decide to go on home."

Alex shook his head.

"I'm schooling Tigertown this morning. If you want to watch. Probably it would be boring for you. Do you ride?"

No
.

"We're shorthanded this week. So if you wanted to help there's stalls to muck out. Plenty pairs of boots around here; you ought to be able to find some that'll fit you."

He looked up again. Francie gave a toss of her head. She wore her hair in two blonde wings from a center part as straight as if she'd drawn it with a ruler. Pale eyes swam with sun-motes. There was humor in her glance.

"Don't think I'm going to give you breakfast if you're allergic to work. Now get going, son. Wash up." She pretended she was going to stamp his toes with her boot. Alex shot up from the hammock and gave Francie his sidelong disdainful look while slipping into his moccasins. She pointed businesslike to the center of his chest with her riding crop. Both of them about to smile. Alex feigned alarm and ran across the gazebo and straight down, a six-foot drop, landed gracefully on all fours and took off in a sprint. Halfway to the barn he threw in a difficult running somersault in the air, added a cartwheel to amuse Francie. He figured she would still be watching.

R
amses Valjean was about to begin brushing his teeth when the bathroom door opened and Bernice Clauson started in, sleep still fogging her eyes, the hem of her sheer blue nightgown swirling around her ankles. She was carrying a glass of water in her left hand.

With her other hand on the doorknob, Bernice drew up tautly at the sight of Ramses in his undershirt and trousers with red suspenders dangling, hunched over the basin. She might not have been as surprised to find a six-foot alligator there.

"Good morning," Ramses said. "You must be Mrs. Clauson."

Bernie dropped the tumbler, which had her upper plate in solution, on the tile floor. Her hand flew up to cover her open mouth in its gummy vacancy, muffling a cry of horror. She backpedaled into the hall, pulling the door shut.

Ramses looked at the pearly set of dentures in shattered glass on the blue floor. He put his toothbrush down, gripped the basin with both hands, and shook from suppressed laughter until his efforts provoked a coughing fit instead.

O
n the way to Mally Shaw's house in his prowler, Bobby received a message from Dispatch.

"Bobby, Francie Swift called and said Alex spent the night at their place, but she didn't know until she got up this morning or she would have called sooner."

"He there now?"

"Francie said to tell you he's had breakfast, he's doing some work around the stables and he's fine, you shouldn't worry about him."

"Thanks, Deb."

Ramses was looking at him. Bobby said, "Alex is being a pain in the butt. Right now we're not seeing eye to eye about him going away to a school in Louisville where they could help him. He'll be fourteen in a couple of months, but he doesn't want to grow up. Probably I spoiled him. Our folks died in a fire. I mention that last night? Anyway he's too dependent on me, and I don't know how to handle it."

"I would be the last one to give advice about being a parent, or a surrogate parent. Mally always made it easy, forgiving me for the neglect I showed her. I wonder why?"

"She had a good heart. Maybe she always believed you'd be around when she needed you most. You never hurt her on purpose, what you've told me."

"Willful absence can be the most hurtful thing of all. Emotional silence. Your brother is unable to speak, but he is wild to be understood. He writes very well, by the way. Does he keep a diary?"

"Wouldn't know. I don't poke around in his room. Sometimes he shows me stories. Shoot-'em-ups mostly. Maybe that's his way of getting some of the hurtful things out of his system."

"I hope to meet Alex, now that I've slept in his bed and experienced through his possessions and the imprint of his soul what it must be like to be a boy. I was born into hard labor on my father's farm, a slave as surely as if I'd been dragged off a ship in chains a century ago. Born with an old man's spite and iron will. My father was subversive in black society; he had earned his portion and his mules by being a white man's nigger. I was always ashamed of him."

The radio again. A Negro in his forties had been found dead in a ditch. Natural causes, apparently. Cocaine in his snuff box. His name was Lindell Jones.

"Natural causes." Ramses said.

"Around here cocaine and 'shine go down as natural causes."

"Should it happen to be a man of color. Or a woman."

"The tonks are full of cocaine. Lots of it coming down from the north since the war. Not much we can do."

"Just another form of slavery." Ramses fell silent, looking out the window.

"Look, if there's money in it for Luther, I don't know about it or want to know."

Ramses looked at Bobby again.

"You don't care for law enforcement, do you?"

"What I care about is the law. That's what I bust my butt going to night school for."

At the boarded-up rib shack Bobby turned right off Route 19 and was greeted by the sight of Eddie Paradise Galphin lounging against his dusty red roadster.

"Goddamn it."

"I do have to admire his tenacity."

"You stepping out of the front seat of my prowler, Eddie'll think you've got a hoodoo on me."

"Behave as if I know my place. Count on me, Boss."

"You'll be gone from here in a couple of days."

"Although not as far as Eternity's Gates—"

"You can joke about the damnedest things."

"It's a matter of keeping some perspective on the unimaginable."

"I have to go on dealing with my people, and I can't afford to get a leery eye from any man."

"I fully understand, Boss."

"Why when you say 'Boss' does it sound sort of like 'shithead'."

"Takes years of practice," Ramses acknowledged.

Ramses smiled and Bobby smiled too, slightly, then put on a different face getting out of the prowler to deal with Eddie Paradise Galphin.

"I'm wearing you like a bad suit, Eddie."

"Just wanting to be of some service in Dr. Valjean's time of tribulation," Eddie said with hand-wringing sincerity.

"What happened to you last night, Doctor? I was waiting up 'til half past—"