The World Made Straight (26 page)

He went back and knelt beside the pickup, cutting into the rubber with his pocketknife until the tire hissed and slowly sagged. Not much more meanness I can do to them, Travis thought as he closed the knife, knowing it was a good thing for the Toomeys that Shank's matches weren't in his pocket.

When he got in the car, Dena moaned softly and leaned her head against his shoulder. His hand was on the key but he didn't turn it. For all he knew the car might not start at all. Two tries, he told himself, then I make a run for the creek.

But the engine started. He turned the car around and headed down the drive, a gray sunless dawn already seeping in through the trees. He looked in the rearview mirror and did not see the front door fling open and he reckoned the Toomeys drunk as Dena had said. He drove toward the river, glancing nervously in the rearview mirror.

His truck was at the bridge, keys on the right front tire
where Shank said they'd be. Travis got Dena inside, then stepped up to the bridge railing. He smelled the creosote on the thick pine beams that held him above the water, the same smell as railroad cross ties. He threw Carlton Toomey's key into the creek. For a few moments he stared at where the key had splashed, then let his eyes follow the stream to where it disappeared into a stand of white oak and poplar. In the oaks mistletoe floated among the limbs like green snagged balloons. A gust of wind shook a flock of sparrows from the tallest poplar like an instantaneous unleafing, the birds quickly regathering in midair and flying away. Travis wondered if they were lucky enough to know where they were headed or if it was just something decided by what weather or field or big tree they encountered.

“Where we going?” Dena asked when he got in, her eyes closed as she spoke.

He turned the ignition and pressed the gas so the engine might stammer and catch hold, but he did not reach for the gearshift.

“I don't know,” Travis said. “I didn't figure us to get this far.”

For a few moments he thought he might not go anywhere, just wait for the Toomeys to come, go ahead and get whatever they would do to him over and done with.

“Go to Leonard's,” Dena said.

“OK,” he said, because he could think of no alternative.

My frend Joshua Candler passed this evening neer suppertime. I
witnessed his final mortal breaths. His aggitation was lessoned
neer the end, a good death. Burried here at Big Creek Gap with
all Cristian writes. If it be the Lord's faver to have me die I pray
you who find this leger get it to his wife Mrs. Emily Candler in
Marshall North Carlina.

When Travis had not come back by 6
A.M.
, Leonard was unsure what he should do, being neither parent nor guardian. He called the hospital but there had been no overnight casualties from car wrecks. There seemed nothing else to do after that but stay put in case Travis, or someone calling about Travis, telephoned.

When the pickup finally appeared, Leonard chided himself for getting so worried. Then Travis and Dena got out and stood before him. Both reeked of vomit and alcohol. Travis's face was chalk white, his usually clear eyes webbed with red veins as if all the blood had drained from the rest of his face to pool there. Dena looked worse, hair greasy and matted, face bruised. A full minute passed as Leonard waited for Dena or Travis to speak, to begin to explain. The surrounding woods seemed to listen as well, no raucous crows or chattering squirrels, even the spring peepers silent.

“What happened?” Leonard finally asked, and Travis told him, including what he'd done to the Toomeys' vehicles and pot plants. When he finished Leonard looked not at Travis or Dena but at the mountains rising beyond the trees. Some of the oldest mountains in the world, geologists claimed, older than the Alps or Andes or even the Himalayas. Leonard had an almost consoling thought—that in one hundred years, a mere blink in geologic time, whatever happened in the next few hours would not matter at all, that everyone involved would be little more than dust.

“I don't want them finding you before I settle this,” he told Travis. “Go up to Shelton Laurel. They wouldn't think to look for you there. I'll come get you when it's safe.”

“What about Dena?”

“Take her with you.”

“I ought to help settle it,” the boy said. “It's my doing.”

You're sure as hell right about that, Leonard thought, but it seemed useless to say so aloud.

“Go,” Leonard said.

“We got to get these clothes off first,” Travis said. “It's making us both sick just smelling ourselves.”

“Take them off right here,” Leonard said. “Use the hose and do it quick. I'll get you something clean to wear.”

Leonard expected the boy or Dena to say it was too cold, but when he came back out Travis had stripped, shivering as the hose sprayed water over his hair and body, dripping like a dog as Leonard handed him a towel. Travis dressed quickly, teeth chattering as he yanked jeans on, slid his long arms into a plaid flannel shirt.

“Crank your truck and get some heat on you,” Leonard told him. “I'll take care of Dena.”

He helped her undress, letting the clothes puddle on the grass where they fell. The bracelet he'd won at the fair clinked softly. She had lost weight and the metal dangled loosely on her bony wrist. Loose like a handcuff, Leonard thought. The cold water waked her, Dena's eyes blinking before narrowing into focus.

“No more,” she said, her teeth chattering like Travis's. Leonard threw down the hose, patted her torso and limbs with the towel. He had come to believe her incapable of crying, but now tears streaked her face.

“Just get me to the bus station in Marshall,” she said.

“I will, but not just yet,” Leonard said.

“Don't tell them where my sister lives.” She clutched his arm now, her long fingernails digging in, leaving half-moons. “Promise me that.”

Finally, he thought, believing this was what Dena had searched for much of her life, degradation even she could feel was undeserved.

“I won't tell them,” he said.

“We got to get to the bus station quick,” she said, still clinging to him.

“You can't go that way,” Leonard told her. “You'd run right into them.” He helped her into the sweatshirt and pants, but it was a slow matching of limbs and openings, clumsily accomplished, like dressing a child. She shook violently. Leonard got her in the cab and turned the vents so they blew directly on her.

“You have to go with Travis,” he said, draping his coat over
her shoulders. “I'll get up there soon as I can. When I do we'll get you to Asheville.”

“What are you going to do?” Travis asked.

“Settle this in a way nobody gets hurt,” Leonard said. “Go on. I'll come soon as I can.”

Travis cranked the engine and the truck disappeared into the woods. Soon Leonard heard the pickup on the main road, gears downshifting as it rose toward the higher mountains.

He sat down on the steps and waited for the Toomeys. Fog clung to the trees, moving serpentine in the wood's understory, laying down a low smolder across the pasture. Rain by noon, lasting the rest of the day, the radio announcer had said, but rain was already settling in, letting the fog come first, transforming the landscape into a vast blank whiteness. Bringing with it what it always brought, a quietness like no other, every sound muted, more distant. Almost as though the fog loosened the world at its seams, made everything drift farther apart.

The kind of day the dampness seeped straight into your bones, Leonard thought.
Scawmy
was the word the old people used to describe this weather, and many believed that on such days the dead got restless and roamed the living world. Leonard's grandmother had seen her decade-dead husband on a morning like this. She'd looked out her kitchen window and seen him standing by the barn, dressed in the clothes he'd been buried in, the fog like a shroud unfurling around him.

Billy Revis had returned to Madison County in May of 1865 barefoot and near starved, bringing with him only a haversack and what rags of butternut still clung to his skin. But before he
had set foot in his own house, he had stood on Doctor Candler's front porch. When Emily Candler came to the door, he'd opened the haversack and removed the ledger he'd carried with him for two years. He'd handed it to her and spoken a few words before leaving the porch for his cabin on Spillcorn Creek. Leonard knew there had been plenty of times the ledger could have started a much-needed fire, or perhaps been bartered for food, or simply left behind to lighten that final monthlong walk from Virginia. But Revis had brought it back, a final act of friendship for the man he'd helped bury in Tennessee.

The wooden cross Revis had placed on Doctor Candler's grave was long gone. The coffin rotted away as well, if there'd even been one, for Revis had told the widow only about the cross and where her husband was buried. Maybe a few brass buttons left. Some shards of bone. Leonard's grandfather had gone to Tennessee late in his life to visit the cemetery. He'd found only a clearing in the woods, had known at first it was a graveyard only because, as in so many old cemeteries, periwinkle skeined green and glossy over much of the ground. Nothing else remained but a few lichened creek stones smothered in a sprawl of briars and scrub pine, whatever had been scratched into the stones long ago worn into anonymity by wind and rain.

LEONARD HEARD THE TOOMEYS' TRUCK BEFORE HE SAW IT
, coming fast up Highway 25 before bouncing and swerving up the washout to the trailer. Hubert drove and didn't brake until
he was only a few yards from the trailer. Leonard did not move as the truck's front wheels bumped the lower step and halted, the two men's faces looming large behind the windshield as though suspended in water.

“Stay put,” Carlton Toomey told his son, then got out. He wore only a white V-neck tee-shirt, faded gray pants, and work boots.

“We can settle this here and now,” Leonard said, standing up.

“Can we?” Carlton said. “My car's down at the bridge, but I don't see that little pissant that slashed my tire and rooted up my money crop.”

“I'd say five hundred for a slashed tire and the bother of replanting is fair,” Leonard said.

“That's your figuring, is it?” Carlton replied. “Must be some of that new math they're teaching in schools these days, for it don't buck up to the price I'd calculate.”

The trailer door was open and Leonard pointed behind him at the gun rack. “The Winchester and scope are worth two hundred easy and I got a Colt pistol worth two hundred. I'll add the five hundred cash to that.”

Carlton stared carefully at the fingernails of his left hand, as if they held some information he needed to consider before answering. Then he looked back up, his face expressionless.

“OK,” he said. “Just don't be all day about it.”

Leonard paused, expecting Carlton to follow him into the trailer.

“Go ahead,” Carlton said. “Like I said before, you're smart. I know you ain't about to try nothing.”

Leonard got the guns, emptying the clips before he went
back outside. As Carlton put the guns in the cab, Leonard crouched and pulled a cinder block out from behind the trailer steps. He took from its hollow center a tight-wrapped plastic grocery bag, inside a roll of bills thick as a fist.

“I don't have much truck with banks neither, professor,” Carlton said, “but that's near the sorriest place to hide money I've ever seen.”

Leonard stripped off five hundred-dollar bills from the roll and placed the rest back in the plastic bag.

“That's a good start,” Carlton said as he took the bills. “Now where's Dena?”

“She's gone,” Leonard said.

“Gone,” Carlton said, placing his boot on the second step. “You best hope that's a lie.”

“You don't own her.”

“Yes, I do. I own her body and soul till she pays me the fourteen hundred dollars she owes me.”

Carlton Toomey tilted his head slightly to the right, as though wanting to see Leonard from a different angle. He looked at Leonard the same way he might some strange creature he couldn't quite believe existed.

“You know something, Shuler. It ain't like I went out hunting for all this bother. That boy came on my land to take from me. Not just once but four times now. Dena done the same. She came because she wanted my pills. The difference between you and me is that she's going to by God pay for what she took from me.”

Leonard motioned toward the Plotts.

“I'll give you them as well. They're worth a thousand easy.”

Carlton Toomey snorted.

“They might of been before you turned them into pets instead of bear dogs. Now if you was to talk some real money, say the rest of what you got in that bag, we might could do us some business.”

Leonard said nothing.

“I figured as much,” Carlton said. “You're just like Dena and that boy, expecting something for free. But there ain't nothing in this world for free. Nothing.”

He stepped closer to Leonard. Though Toomey stood on the step below they were eye to eye, making Leonard feel even smaller, as if the big man had lifted him like a child and set him on the step. Last night's whiskey soured Carlton Toomey's breath.

“Look professor, this ain't no hard thing to figure. Even if she's on a bus or train, that boy ain't. He's got nowhere to go and I'll make it my business to find him. Your choice, the boy or Dena.”

One of the Plotts rattled its chain and whined. The dogs were hungry, but that would have to wait. The chain rattled again. Leonard remembered the carny telling Dena her name on the bracelet would keep her from forgetting who she was. The Toomeys had taken so much else, even her bridge, but they hadn't taken the bracelet. Leonard wished they'd taken everything, the bracelet, her name, her life. Put it all in a hole in the woods and covered it with dirt and leaves.