Back at the store, Burt Hornbeck came out on the front loading platform and eyed him narrowly.
“Didn’t I see you gassing up that truck at Gurney’s this morning?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Earl said.
“Well, how come? You ever know Gurney to buy anything from this store?”
“No.”
“You bet ‘no’. What Gurney buys, he buys at Ortman’s. Next time, gas it up at Cooper’s, like I told you. Coop buys here, and so I buy from Coop. Got it?”
“The tires needed air,” Earl said. “Coop hasn’t got any air hose.”
“Never mind the air hose. After this, gas that truck up at Coop’s. I’m beginning to wonder how many times I got to tell you.”
Not too many times, Earl thought as he walked back to the washroom to throw cold water on his face. Another couple or three weeks, a month at the most, and he’d be buying gas for a sassy red sports car, not a battered old delivery truck.
The whiskey had begun to churn in his stomach a little. But it would be all right, he knew. From now on, everything would be all right. For a man with thousands of dollars everything had to be. That was the way of the world.
When he came back out to the loading platform, Sheriff Stratton’s car was there, and the sheriff was talking with a fair-sized knot of men. The sheriff was sitting on the old kitchen chair Hornbeck kept out on the platform, his enormous bulk dwarfing it, making it seem like something from a child’s playroom.
Trust the fat slob not to stand up when he can sit down, Earl thought as he edged a bit closer. The laziest man in the county, if not in the state. If Stratton was on one side of the street and wanted to get to the other, he would climb in his car, drive to the corner, make a U-turn, and come back, all to save walking a lousy forty feet. And talk about fat. The county could save money by buying a tub of lard and nailing a star on it. They’d have just as good a sheriff, and it wouldn’t cost them a fraction of what they had to pay Stratton.
“What happened?” Earl asked George Dill, who had wandered over from his grocery store.
“It’s old Charlie Tate,” George said. “He’s done took poison.”
“He what?” Earl said.
“Poison,” George said. “He killed himself.”
The sheriff glanced up at Earl and nodded. “Howdy, Earl,” he said, making about six syllables out of it. “Yes, that’s what he did, all right. Lord only knows why, but he did.” Beneath his immaculate white Stetson, the sheriff’s round, pink-skinned face was troubled, and the small, almost effeminate hands drummed nervously on his knees.
“He — poisoned himself?” Earl said.
“I always said he was crazy, and now I know it,” Norm Hightower, who owned the creamery, said. “He’d have to be.”
There were a dozen questions Earl wanted to ask, but he could ask none of them. He wet his lips and waited.
The sheriff took a small ivory-colored envelope from the breast pocket of his shirt, looked at it, shook his head wonderingly, and slipped it back into his pocket.
“Charlie gave me that about half an hour before I found him dead,” he said. “He told me not to open it until after supper. But there was something about the way he said it that bothered me. He tried to make it sound like maybe he was playing a little joke on somebody, maybe me. But he didn’t bring it off. I had this feeling, and so as soon as I got around the corner I stopped the car and read it.”
“And it said he was going to kill himself?” Joe Kirk, who carried the Rural Route One, said.
“That’s what it said, all right,” the sheriff said.
“But he didn’t say why?” Frank Dorn, the barber, asked.
“No,” Stratton said. “All he said was, he was going to do it, and what with.” He reached into his righthand trouser pocket and drew out a small blue-and-yellow tin about the size of a package of cigarettes. “And that’s another thing I can’t understand, boys. It’s bad enough he would want to kill himself. But why would he do it with a thing like this?”
“What is it?” Sam Collins, from the lumber yard, asked.
“Trioxide of arsenic,” the sheriff said, putting the tin back in his pocket. “I found it on the floor beneath the table.”
“How’s that again, Sheriff?” Sam Collins asked.
“Ratsbane, Sam,” Stratton said. “Arsenic. I reckon there isn’t a more horrible death in this world than that. It must be the worst agony there is.”
“Why’d he want to take such a thing, then?” Jim Ryerson, the mechanic from Meckle’s Garage, asked.
“It’s like I told you,” Norm Hightower said. “He was crazy. I always said go, and now I know it.”
The sheriff got to his feet, ponderously, looking at the now badly-sprung kitchen chair regretfully, as if he hated to leave it. “Well,” he drawled in that slow, slow singsong of his, “I reckon maybe I’d better call the coroner and the others. At least Charlie didn’t have any kin. It seems like kinfolks just can’t stand the idea of somebody killing himself. They always carry on something fierce. I’ve even had them try to get me to make out they died a natural death or got killed somehow. Anything but suicide. They can’t stand it at all.”
“I fed arsenic to some rats once,” Tom Martin, the druggist, said. “I’d never do it again. When I saw what it did to those rats, I... well, I’d never do it again. Even rats don’t deserve to die like that. It was the most awful thing I ever saw.”
“Like I said before,” the sheriff said. “I just can’t understand old Charlie killing himself that way.”
“Maybe he didn’t know exactly what it would do to him,” Tom Martin said.
“Maybe not,” the sheriff said. “I don’t see how he could know, and still take half a box of ratsbane and dump it in a bottle of whiskey and drain almost half of it. There must have been enough arsenic in that bottle to kill everybody here and half the other folks in town besides.” He moved off slowly in the direction of his car, picking his way carefully, as if to complete the short trip in the fewest steps possible. “I’d better be seeing about those phone calls.” he said. “There’s always a big to-do with a thing like this. Of course, Charlie’s not having any kin is a help, but there’ll still be a lot of work.”
On the loading platform, Earl Munger tried to fight back the mounting terror inside him. No wonder the sheriff had taken one look at Charlie Tate lying there on the floor and thought he had died of poison. Why should he have looked for wounds or anything else? And how long would it be, Earl wondered, before the ratsbane really did to him what the sheriff had thought it had done to Charlie Tate? It was already killing him, he knew; he would feel the first horrible clutch of agony at any moment.
He forced himself to walk with reasonable steadiness to the truck, and although the door felt as heavy as the door of a bank vault, he managed to open it somehow and get in and drive away slowly.
Once on the highway that led to Belleville, he mashed the gas pedal to the floorboard and kept it there. He had to get to a doctor, and in this forsaken area doctors were few and very far between. The nearest was Doc Whittaker, four miles this side of Belleville. Whittaker might be a drunk, but he knew his business, at least when he was sober.
But when he reached Whittaker’s place, Mrs. Whittaker told him her husband was out on a house call. He half ran back to the truck, already stabbing with the ignition key as he jumped inside, and took off with a scorch of rubber that left Mrs. Whittaker staring after him with amazement.
The next nearest doctor was Courtney Hampton, six miles east of Belleville on Coachman Road.
He was beginning to feel it now, the first stab of pain deep in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t like the other pains, the ones he had felt earlier when he was scared; it wasn’t as acute, but it was growing stronger, and it was deep, deep inside him. It was the arsenic, and it was going to kill him.