The World Made Straight (18 page)

Leonard remembered how the Fairlane had faltered that last half mile before crossing over the Eastern Continental Divide, the mountains ensuring his return to Bloody Madison, to a run-down trailer where he sheltered a boy whose last name was Shelton. Then the glasses literally rising up out of the past. And now the yellowhammer feather. He had come in last week, and there it was on the coffee table. When Leonard mentioned that during the Civil War Alabama soldiers called themselves yellowhammers and wore such feathers in their hats, Travis had said all he knew was they made good trout flies.

The merry-go-round's music began to wind down and
Leonard turned to see the bolder children already sliding off their mounts. Dena stayed on her horse until the next group of riders stepped onto the platform.

“I always wanted to ride one,” she said as they walked on up the midway.

“Disappointed?” Leonard asked.

“No,” Dena said. “It's a real good feeling. Kind of like floating just above the earth but never quite touching.”

They walked on to the far end of the midway and entered a makeshift arcade. Dena spent two dollars maneuvering toy cranes that rooted sand for prizes, cursing when a watch slipped repeatedly from the dull steel teeth. Leonard threw rings and won a fake-silver bracelet. The booth operator engraved Dena's name on the bracelet's plate.

“Keep you from forgetting who you are,” the carny said, a comment that struck Leonard as sinister. The man laughed harshly, exposing yellow teeth crooked and gapped. The teeth reminded Leonard of gravestones in a derelict cemetery.

“All the magazines say giving her jewelry means a man's got serious intentions about a woman,” Dena said. She clasped the bracelet on her wrist, the bright metal clicking as it locked. “So I reckon long as I'm wearing this we're honest to God sweethearts.” She held out her arm so he could see the bracelet better. “This means you'll have to take care of me,” she said, “for better or for worse.”

Out on the shadowy grass beyond the midway, a guitarist, bass player and drummer crowded a wooden stage so small and rickety it swayed each time the musicians moved. From where Leonard stood, the three men appeared to be performing on a
waterborne raft. They were older men, probably in their sixties, and played the staples, “Your Cheating Heart,” “Long Black Veil,” “Wolverton Mountain.” Leonard checked a passerby's watch.

“Let's go over and listen,” Leonard said. “We still have half an hour.”

“Not me,” Dena said. “If I want to listen to that hillbilly yowling I can turn on the radio.”

“Meet me at the arena then.”

“You got a couple dollars I can borrow?”

Leonard gave her two ones. She clinched the bills in her hand and walked back into the arcade.

Leonard sat down near the front of the stage. A good-sized audience filled the aluminum bleachers but no one Travis and Lori's age. That didn't surprise him. When Leonard was growing up, his family's radio was on dawn till bedtime, always tuned to a country station. But he rarely listened. Country music had seemed too depressing, most lyrics a litany of yearning and regret. He'd preferred the energy of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, later the bliss and magnificence of classical music. But country music had a rough-hewn honesty Leonard had come to appreciate. He remembered something a Nashville songwriter had once said, that a great country song was nothing but three chords and the truth.

As the musicians played the last verse of “Long Black Veil,” the bass player turned to the guitarist and nodded at the far bleacher. Leonard leaned to get a better look and saw the person being gestured toward was Carlton Toomey.

As a child, Leonard had heard the stories about Toomey
and seen him often enough on the streets of Marshall. He remembered a big man who wore short-sleeve tee-shirts even in winter, displaying meaty upper arms that appeared ready to split the cloth, his thick black hair swept back in a pompadour. That hair was gray now, the face more furrowed. One morning last March Leonard had sold out quicker than anticipated and driven over to the Toomeys' farmhouse. Carlton sat at the kitchen table with a sharp-dressed dealer from Atlanta. Leonard joined them at the table, waited for the two men to finish their transaction.

It had been like watching an actor give a flawless performance. Toomey's accent was thick, his grammar mangled. He'd slouched in the chair, head tilted back and slack-jawed. The one thing Carlton could not conceal was the quickness in his eyes, studying the dealer as if an opponent in a poker game who might reveal his hand with some small gesture. The Atlantan had been abrasive, downright insulting, but Carlton had ignored the slights, calmly restated what he'd pay, and gotten the price he wanted. As Leonard watched that morning, he came to believe much of what he'd heard about Toomey was hyperbole, like Leonard's own criminal acts in Illinois.

But what Carlton had done to Travis changed that belief, not just the act itself but its cool deliberateness. If killing the boy was in Toomey's own best interest, he would have raked his knife across Travis's windpipe with no more regret than slicing an apple.

Carlton's forearms rested on his knees, hands clasped, back and head leaning forward, listening so intently he didn't notice the men's gestures. He appeared mesmerized by the music.
The song ended and the bass player stepped to the edge of the stage and spoke. The big man shook his head. The guitarist leaned toward the microphone.

“Help me get him up here,” the guitarist said, “and you'll hear a voice so pretty you'll wish you could put a bow around it and give it to your sweetheart.” People clapped and cheered until Carlton left his seat, the boards sagging perilously as he stepped onto the stage and positioned himself behind the microphone. He did not speak to the musicians or the crowd, just leaned closer to the mic and began singing “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” The musicians did not join in. They kept their hands at their sides, deferring to the power of Carlton Toomey's voice.

It was his delicacy that Leonard found most disconcerting. The big man sang softly, the words easing from his mouth with the gentlest of phrasing. Toomey's eyes were closed, hands clasped to his stomach like a man concealing some private wound. The midway's rambunctiousness became more distant as the people on the front row leaned slightly forward. Leonard wondered what Professor Heddon would make of this performance, especially if he knew what had been done to Travis. Tears streamed down the face of the woman who sat next to Leonard as Carlton Toomey sang of crossing Jordan.

Leonard got up and walked back to the midway, Toomey's voice soon lost amid other sounds. He found Dena at the arcade, maneuvering the same toy crane toward the same watch. Leonard watched the crane's jaws hover, then fall, dull steel teeth dribbling colored pebbles as the crane raised up. She put in another quarter. The crane dropped, grazed the watch, and rose.

“We need to get to the arena,” he told her.

“I had it one time,” Dena said. “I really did. But it slipped out at the last moment.”

Since he'd won the last three years, Leonard went last. He had shot against all the men before and knew his only serious competition was Harold Watkins, a former Green Beret from Spillcorn Creek. Watkins shot fifth and his Ruger placed three rounds in the bull's-eye. As the next-to-last shooter stepped to the line, Leonard took the clip out of the Colt and six wadcutters from the cardboard box. He held the bullets in his fist a few moments. Despite being metal they had a waxy feel as they rolled in his palm. He loaded the clip and pushed it into the magazine.

“Your turn,” the man in charge of the contest said.

Leonard stepped to the line and set his feet, drew in a breath and closed his left eye. He squeezed the trigger and didn't hear the shot.

“Bull's-eye!” Travis shouted from the stands.

Leonard did the same four more times.

They walked back down the midway afterward, the hundred dollars stashed in Leonard's billfold. Travis carried the trophy, and Leonard knew the boy wanted the people they passed to think he'd won it. Many of the booths and tents had shut down for the night, and the wind blew steady as though summoned to fill the void left by the now-absent crowd. Loose tent flaps made a dense slapping sound. Tension ropes creaked. Like walking through a ghost town, Leonard thought, and wondered, as he had in a Midwest farmhouse years earlier, if a place could feel truly lonely only if humans had once been present.

TWO NIGHTS LATER THE TOOMEYS SHOWED UP AT THE TRAILER.
Dena drove back from the Ponderosa and a pickup followed, its high beams aimed at the front window as the vehicle idled. The Plotts made a few perfunctory barks before returning to the trailer's warmer underbelly. As Dena climbed the steps, Leonard heard a deeper male voice behind her. She came in laughing harshly, her pink blouse unbuttoned. A few moments later Carlton Toomey filled the doorway. The big man smiled when he saw Travis.

“Didn't know you and Leonard had a guest tonight,” he said to Dena.

“He ain't no guest,” Dena said. “He lives here.”

“Lives here, does he. That kind of explains a few things,” Carlton said, then nodded toward the back room. “Go get what you come for and don't be all night about it.”

Dena walked unsteadily down the hallway, knocking a book off the shelf as she passed. Carlton Toomey resettled his eyes on Travis. There was something disturbing in how he stared at the boy, the absolute blankness of the gaze, the way Leonard imagined a shark's eyes would be.

“How's that leg of yours?” Carlton asked.

“It's OK,” Travis muttered, looking at the floor as he answered.

“I reckon you learned your lesson about climbing waterfalls.”

The truck revved outside, followed by three quick blasts of the horn.

“Young people,” Toomey said, speaking to Leonard now. “They got no patience. They want something never a second later than right now. Most times the sooner a body gets something the sooner it's gone.”

Carlton stayed in the doorway, as if unsure the trailer's floor would support him. Leonard wondered exactly how big the man was, at least six-two and three hundred pounds. If Carlton Toomey wished, he could keep everyone in the trailer the rest of the night. There was no way Leonard and Travis could have moved him from the doorway.

“It's sort of like this young coon dog I had,” Carlton Toomey continued. “Ran him with a couple of older dogs but paid no mind to them. That whelp was always out ahead, like as not rushing right past where the coon was. One night them dogs got after an old sow coon, ran it all the way into the river. The old dogs knew what that was about, but that young one went in after her. That coon got out midriver and let the pup get good and tired. Then she just swum over and tapped his head with her paw, that head going down for a second and then popping back up like a fish cork. Just kept doing it till one time that head didn't come back up.”

Carlton Toomey looked at Travis and smiled.

“If that dog had got away he'd have known better than to do it again, don't you reckon? I bet he'd have paid more mind to them older dogs.”

Dena rejoined them in the front room. She'd smeared more lipstick on, more paint dabbed on her nails as well, but her blouse remained unbuttoned. Surrendering, Leonard thought, the same way an animal losing a fight bares its belly. In her
hand she carried a battered yellow suitcase, its cloth covering torn in the upper right corner. The suitcase had been lived out of, opened and closed enough that now only one of the snaps shut.

She walked past Leonard to the door. Her high heels clacked on the linoleum, each drunken step careful as though maintaining her balance on a foot log. Carlton stepped inside the doorway so she could slip by.

“Don't worry,” Carlton said. “We just want her for the weekend.”

He lingered in the doorway a few moments longer, his eyes on Leonard.

“This boy and me are square, provided he keeps his mouth shut to the law. You know what I'm talking about, right?”

“Yes,” Leonard said.

“Figured you'd know.”

Carlton Toomey opened his massive right hand and revealed the car keys. “She won't need your car no more tonight,” he said, and tossed the keys to Leonard. The truck horn blew again but Toomey ignored it. He looked the room over, let his gaze settle on the stereo.

“I saw you at the fair, professor. From the look on your face you hadn't reckoned I could sing that good.” Carlton settled his eyes on Leonard. “There's some who said I should have tried to make a go of it in Nashville, but it seemed too doubtful a way to make a living. I never was much for taking risks.” Carlton paused. His voice became more contemplative. “I'd not do it for money anyway. A few things in life ought to be
done just to lighten folks' loads, and there ain't nothing that'll do that better than a good gospel song.”