The Big Finish (17 page)

There was an inflamed knot on the side of his throat, a sore.

“I saw the dead fish, and I was asking about them.”

“Way it starts is algae blooms. You heard of those?”

“I have,” Thorn said. “We got some of that where I’m from. Nitrates from fertilizer and runoffs feed the algae and it eats up the oxygen.”

“And where would that be, where you from?”

“South Florida, the Keys.”

“They raise hogs down there?”

“No, no hogs.”

“Yeah, well, you got it right. The chemistry of it. And when that algae’s been blooming a while everything in the river comes crawling up onto the shore trying to pump water through their gills. Next morning everything’s dead, crab, shrimp, eels, bass, catfish.”

The girl said, “That’s what we call a fish jubilee. ’Cause you can just wade right in and scoop up all the free food you can eat.”

“Scoop it till it begins to rot,” said the father. “A day or two then it’s done. River’s empty. Takes months before you see a single fish again. Been doing that for years. We get people down here writing for the papers, doing studies with their test tubes, taking photos, and we got a string of politicians talking to TV cameras, they drive off, put a bill in the state house, and their bill gets crushed ’cause it’s the pig farmers got the money in this state. A billion dollars always beats out test tubes and newspaper stories. Seen it happen over and again.”

“My son is with an outlaw group. They’re trying to attack this in a different way. Civil disobedience.”

“I might’ve heard of ’em. The elves. That their name?”

“ELF, yeah, elves.”

“Your son mixed up with those people?”

“He is. That’s what I’m here to find out.”

The man nodded and looked off toward the river.

“Well, good luck to you then.”

“You know something.”

The man shook his head, keeping his back to Thorn.

“What do you know?” Thorn said.

He came around slowly, turn his head, and spit dark juice into the grass.

“Heard there’s been a skirmish. Elves against some folks didn’t take kindly to them stirring things up, talking shit about their business.”

“A skirmish.”

“Shots fired, people hurt, maybe worse. Just people talking maybe.”

“Where’d this happen?”

“Where you’re headed, seems like. Up that road a bit.”

“Pine Haven,” Thorn said.

He hummed a noncommittal note.

“That would be Webb Dobbins’s town.”

The man shook his head as if Thorn had uttered a curse.

“You be careful, mister. You say the things in Pine Haven you been saying to me, it won’t go so smooth. You need to keep your head down, don’t make a ruckus.”

Thorn smiled his thanks.

“Though I look at you, you look like a man enjoys himself a ruckus.”

“Can’t say I enjoy them, but I do seem to attract them.”

The man half smiled, turned away, and walked over to his son and set about helping him untangle a bird nest snarl in his fishing line.

SEVENTEEN

BACK IN THE CAR, DRIVING
slowly, he gazed off at the Neuse, its gray water, its slow steady flow. A long way from a picture postcard river.

Thorn’s son had come marching into this godforsaken region to do righteous combat against another despoiler of the land, the hog shit farmers. He’d won battles elsewhere in equally deprived areas, and seemed undeterred in his commitment to protect those who lacked the means or will to protect themselves. No doubt in the year he’d been fighting this war he’d faced plenty of the hostility and backlash any do-gooding outsider would experience. So on the face of it, his Pine Haven mission was simply another version of Marsh Fork, Kentucky, and the others Thorn had read about in his postcard research.

Except it wasn’t.

He followed Reb Parker’s directions and in another half hour he was cruising down the four-block main drag of Pine Haven. Two pool halls, a bar, a diner, a pawnshop, and a barbecue place, and on the east end, a decrepit hotel. Looked like an inviting place to start a ruckus. But before he got to that, he decided to take a few defensive steps.

He headed west, out of town, passing through a residential area, a couple of blocks of two-story wood homes with wraparound porches and shade trees, and within a half mile he was in the countryside again, scattered houses, big empty fields, then the road deteriorated abruptly and he came upon a cluster of wood shacks with bare yards studded with abandoned appliances.

He turned off the main road and wandered for a while through the dusty maze of streets in the shantytown. When he found an isolated stretch of road, he stopped, got out, went to the trunk, and dug through the duffel. He peeled off a layer of fifty-dollar bills from one of the stacks. Did a quick count and stuffed the seven hundred in his back pocket and continued to wander the neighborhood.

In a minute or two he came upon a two-story structure that seemed to be the hub of local social life. There was a Coke machine on the front porch, shelves of food visible through the window. The neighborhood grocery and hangout. A table and chairs were set up out in the yard and it was covered with an array of liquor bottles and vending machine food. Charlie Parker was playing his sax on a speaker inside the grocery, “The Way You Look Tonight.”

Some black men were gathered around an old Chevrolet with its hood up, a gray-haired man leaning into the engine compartment with a wrench in one hand, a rag in the other. Nearby a fifty-gallon oil drum was rigged as a barbecue pit with a half dozen men standing around it watching it smoke, drinking beer, a couple of women in bright summer dresses and sweaters buttoned up against the brisk afternoon. The temperature was in the mid-fifties with a clear blue sky. In a nearby field some children were playing tag and a big hound was loping after them.

Not so different than the weekend scene in Hibiscus Park back in Key Largo, a district of the island that Thorn frequented as a kid to hang with Sugar and practice his skills at horseshoes and half-court basketball. The meat grilling on the barbecue pit in Hibiscus Park was usually fresh grouper or grunt, not the slab of pork whose savory scent was filling the air in this neighborhood, but otherwise it was the same make-do housing, the same bare-bones decorations, a flashy chrome hubcap propped up here, a pot of colorful flowers standing there, some shabby Christmas wreaths hanging on doors, the same stalwart crew of men and women gathered in a perpetual block party, same kids playing their games with an abandon that appeared unencumbered by the crush of deprivation and hardship around them.

Thorn pulled up alongside the aging Chevrolet and got out.

A couple of the men watched him draw near. But most seemed to be studiously ignoring his presence.

He stood at the front fender of the old Chevy, near the mechanic, who raised up to see who was casting a shadow over his work.

“I’m looking to buy a car,” Thorn said. “Know of anything for sale?”

The men looked beyond Thorn at the Cutlass Supreme.

“Looks to me you already got a car,” one of the men said. “A big one.”

“Too big and too hot,” Thorn said. “I’ll be happy to leave it if anyone wants it. It’s yours. I’m paying cash for the right car.”

The men glanced at one another but were silent.

“Three hundred,” Thorn said. “I’ll go higher for one that runs good.”

“Got this here car,” the mechanic said. “Valves are knocking, and it burns a mite bit of oil, but it’ll get you from here to there.”

“How far is that, here to there?”

“Down the road a ways, you treat her good.”

“And that’s all that’s wrong with it? Valves?”

“Smells like a rat died in the glove box. Other than that.”

“What’re you doing to it now?”

“Tuning the carb.”

“Let me hear it run.”

The mechanic waved at a gawky kid in jeans and an old army shirt.

“Turn her over for the gentleman.”

When it started a cloud of blue smoke erupted from the tailpipe and the engine knocked for a minute then smoothed out and the clatter went away. Thorn made a shut-it-off motion to the kid at the wheel.

“Got anything else?”

“All this one needs is some forty-weight oil, it’s good as new.”

“That’s not valves, that’s a rod knocking,” Thorn said. “Oil pump is working well enough because after a few second it circulates the oil and suppresses the knock. But that engine is about ten miles away from throwing a rod. It needs to be rebuilt. It’s not worth driving to the junkyard. I’ll go as high as five hundred for a decent car.”

“I told you it was a rod knocking,” the kid in the army shirt said.

“Shut your mouth, boy.”

Thorn looked around at the rest of the men. Nobody stepping forward.

“I could even rent something short term. I’ll pay the three hundred and bring the car back in a few days. The three hundred’s yours.”

“A minute ago you were saying five hundred,” a bald man said. He stepped away from his friends. An older gentleman, two decades past Thorn.

“You got a car, sir?”

“Taurus,” he said. “Runs a hell of a lot better than this piece of crap.”

“Five hundred for a few days.”

“How many days we talking about?”

“Can’t be sure. Soon as I settle my business here in Pine Haven.”

“I baby that car. Ain’t got no scratches on the body, mats are clean, change the oil every five thousand miles. I want it back same way it goes out.”

“I can’t promise that,” Thorn said.

“Why not?”

The mechanic said, “’Cause he’s looking to get into some kind of trouble, Eddie. Can’t you see it? Look at this man.”

The others took the opportunity to give Thorn closer scrutiny, weighing his potential for danger to Eddie’s car. Thorn tried to imagine what they were seeing, a scruffy, sleep-deprived white guy, his sandy hair grown shaggy, a three-day beard. Big through the chest and long-limbed. A scar on his cheek, another that intersected an eyebrow, his nose bent a few degrees out of line, not quite a thug, but definitely a brawler, a man who’d gone into the ring more than once and hadn’t always held his own. All in all, if Thorn had been estimating his own potential for damaging the man’s well-kept car, he would’ve said no way.

“Two thousand,” Eddie said.

The others chuckled at his audacity, but Thorn said, “All right, two’s fair. I’ll do my best to bring it back safe and sound. If I can’t manage that, the two thousand should get you into a pretty good replacement vehicle.”

“Let’s see the money,” Eddie said.

As Thorn was walking over to the Olds, a younger man came striding around the corner of the grocery. Well built, clear eyed, a tight white T-shirt and dark jeans. A cigarette tucked in the corner of his lips. The men made way for him and he could see them whispering to him, no doubt bringing him up to date on the negotiations that were taking place.

Thorn popped the trunk, kept his back to the men, concealing the duffel as he counted out more cash. When he closed the trunk, the man was standing beside him.

“Ladarius Washington,” he said. “That’s mine. What’s yours?”

Thorn told him his name.

“That first or last?”

“Works for either.”

“What’s your business around here? Besides buying a car.”

For the last hour of his drive he’d been playing around with various cover stories though none of them seemed to stand out as more credible than the others. So he decided to shade things as close to the truth as possible.

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Are you now? Here in Pine Haven?”

“That’s right.”

“Who would that be?”

“Are you the mayor here, the sheriff?”

“As close to either as this broken-down neighborhood will ever get.”

“The person I’m looking for is a young man. He’s not from around here. He might be hiding out, might be camped in the woods, I don’t know. He travels with a group of his friends. He resembles me a little bit.”

“You’re his father, are you?”

“I am.”

“What makes you think he’s hiding out around these parts?”

“I heard something along the way.”

“Heard something, did you?”

“I don’t know where he is. I’m simply asking whoever I meet.”

“Not a smart approach.”

“It’s the only approach I have. Now if you’ll excuse me, Mr. Washington, I’m in the middle of a transaction.”

Ladarius said, “You didn’t ask me if I knew anything about this man.”

“Do you?”

Ladarius held Thorn’s eyes for several seconds as if taking the measure of his secret self. He must’ve gotten a poor reading, for he turned his head away from Thorn, giving him nothing more than permission to pass.

“Twenty dollars for a shovel,” Thorn said to the gathering.

Eddie stepped forward.

“A hundred,” he said. Thorn, the easy mark.

“I got an old pressure cooker works good,” one large woman said to laughter. “I’d take fifty.”

“Fifty for the shovel,” Thorn said. “I have no need for a pressure cooker.”

After Ladarius drifted away, he asked a few of the men if they’d heard anything about some kids protesting the hog farms. But no one was talking, not one of them would even meet his eyes.

Once he had the luggage transferred to the Taurus, he headed south toward the highway and when he reached it, he pulled into the side yard of the house he’d been told belonged to Ladarius Washington. It faced the highway and was no better or worse than those around it. He mounted the front porch and was about to tap on the door when a young girl appeared behind the screen. She was holding a stuffed animal against her chest and was peering out at Thorn with a curious smile, as if she’d never seen his species up close before.

“What’s its name?” Thorn nodded at the stuffed creature.

“Leo,” she said.

“It’s a lion?”

“A giraffe,” she said. “Long neck, see.”

She gripped the giraffe’s head and swung it from side to side.

“Does it get dizzy when you swing it around like that?”

She tittered at the thought.

“Yes, it’s dizzy. It’s dizzy and can’t walk. It falls over on its head.”