“He’s still asleep,” Luke said.
“Listen. I don’t want to leave him alone as he is, so you’re going to stay here as I hike up to the main house. About a mile through those trees.” His father went back to the storage cubby. “Come up if he wakes. Otherwise I’ll be back soon enough.”
His father studied him. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. If you sense trouble, just beep the horn twice and long.” Luke squared his shoulders and nodded. His father clipped him on the forearm. “I’m trusting you as a man, now. Prove you can handle it.”
“Yes, sir,” Luke said. He watched his father cross the water, forging the current in his rubber overalls. When he disappeared completely, Luke switched off the lights and opened the windows.
The forest throbbed with insect noises. Luke listened for approaching footfalls or shouts, but only discerned the occasional nightingale medley or barred owl monkey-screech. The moon capped the near ridge to spotlight a winged frenzy above: bats, hundreds of them, feasted on a glittering swarm of bugs.
“Breach born, all of them,” Manglevine said, his voice as if into a cave.
Luke startled. “What?” Turning to Manglevine, Luke became aware of Manglevine’s ancient wooden smell. “How long have you been awake?”
He pointed to the moonlit ravaging. “Bats. They’re born tailfirst or they’ll die.”
“Okay.”
“Do you believe me?”
“I don’t understand.” Luke cracked open the passenger door so that the dome light came on.
“You need to believe me.”
“Why?”
“At first I thought your daddy would see my side, but he’s ate too long on the lie. Just five minutes with him proved that. But you coming along was a sign. The second I saw you looking out your window, I knew we’d be having this conversation.”
“What?”
“You’re young, unmuddied. I can work with you.” Manglevine took out a cigaret and lit it. Smoke filled the cab, drifting in leathery billows under the light.
“Daddy doesn’t let people smoke in his truck.”
Manglevine smiled. “Okay,” he said and, after one last drag, flicked the cigarette out the window.
“We should go up now.”
“In a minute,” Manglevine said as he searched for his boots on the floorboard. “Ask me a question.”
“We should go meet my father.”
“Ask me a question, and we will. I’ll speak the truth.”
Luke glanced at the horn. “Are you married to all those women?”
“Is that what you want to ask?”
“I guess,” Luke said, but Manglevine studied him for so long it felt like Manglevine might have fallen asleep with his eyes open.
The insect throb escalated outside, drawing Manglevine and the confines of the cab closer. They were the only two people on earth, hemmed in by the leafy din. Luke fought a sudden impulse to run his fingers over the scarlike furrows in Manglevine’s beard. Instead, he reached into the right hip pocket of his slicker and clenched his keychain so that the keys spiked between his fingers. He held them that way for another second or two.
“Marriage means ownership,” Manglevine said. “We own nothing. For many years, we never felt apart.”
“Apart from what?”
“Each other. But I was the first to see. Hank and Mary began to privilege each other. Then it was Chuck and Delilah and Jeanette. I stopped with Lucinda. Only I had the will to sleep alone.”
Luke opened the door a crack further, letting his boot dangle against the step rail. A fine, rainlike mist fell, forming tiny runnels on the windshield. The insect noise subsided as fat drops began to trickle down leaf by leaf, the treetops plopping all over like a crazy clock.
“They were poisoning themselves. I had to convince Chuck of that. With him on my side, we could’ve turned the rest. No TV. No books. My mind is clean.”
“You’re nuts,” Luke said. He reached to beep the horn, but Manglevine’s words caught him midway.
“But I ain’t a killer like your daddy.”
Luke’s slicker rubbed against the seat as he twisted around. “My daddy never killed anyone.”
“Sure he did. He shot James Polity in the face. I saw it.”
“Then he must’ve deserved it.”
Manglevine took a breath that didn’t seem to make it down his throat. “James wanted to kill Alamo Bond,” he said. “Alamo got drunk and ran over James’s brother. Your daddy tracked Alamo down from the scene of the accident to a speakeasy I worked at outside Frenchburg. But then James got word and showed up swearing he’d shoot Alamo right there in the lot. Things got rough pretty quick, and your daddy opened James’s face with a shotgun. The bones of his skull whiter than his teeth. James never fired a shot.”
As he spoke, Manglevine peered out the window. When he finished he turned to fix his eyes on Luke. “Do you believe me now?”
Luke had heard very little about his father’s time heading the department, and in an instant, all the shootouts and countywide pursuits he had conjured as a boy were totally eclipsed by the faceless pulp of a man named James Polity. It was as if the empty house that stood inside his father had suddenly been painted and filled with furniture. He killed a man. The news fit. Luke tried to listen to the treetop noises to center his mind on something else, anything. The trickle-down clock in the treetops dissipated as the rain stopped.
“If my daddy’s so awful, why did you come to him?”
“Because I thought he’d know the difference. I’ve got nothing to cover up. I’m no murderer.”
“Is somebody dead?”
“My mind is clear.”
The insect din picked up again outside. Luke shook his head. “What?”
“I know you hear what’s out there, I see you listening. Like on the porch earlier, remember?” Manglevine reached out his lanky arm and repeated that same sweeping gesture that seemed to connect one end of the earth to the other. “That’s the sound of millions and millions of years of life without names or laws. I’m that clear in my mind.” Manglevine brought his hands together, palm to palm, and pointed. “Do you think your daddy sleeps easier at night thinking the law was on his side?”
Then the ridge came alive with the bouncing bulbs of a half-dozen flashlights. Luke poked the horn twice and blinked the headlights. Manglevine watched the bobbing lights swarm down. Luke snatched the keys from the ignition and ran out to the gravel bar, calling out to his father across the water. Without breaking stride, his father marched across the current and drew his revolver. He checked his son for signs of harm, remaining mindful to keep his gun aimed at the cabin of the truck. Luke spotted the other members of the commune across the rushing water. A starved and ragged troupe, they scurried along the opposite bank.
Manglevine hobbled out of the back and went down to his knees. He placed his hands on the back of his head and waited to be handcuffed. His prisoner secured, Luke’s father went to hit Manglevine with the butt of his revolver, but Luke called out. Stunned, his father glanced back at Luke before returning his attention to his prisoner.
“You son of a bitch,” his father said. “You should’ve told me what I was walking into. A man dead and hanging in your closet. A man dead.”
“He did it to spite me,” Manglevine said.
Luke’s father holstered his .38 and spat. “Bullshit,” he said. Creek water dripped down his rubber overalls as the bats still feasted above. “These people think you talked Chuck McCracken into killing himself. They say his diary proves it.”
“Proves it how?” Manglevine glanced at Luke. “It’s not like I put a shotgun in his face and fired.”
The words popped his father like a balloon. All the sturdiness Luke had ever felt in him gave way. When Luke’s father turned to him — remembering he was there, watching — he swelled back up again. “Keep quiet now,” he said. “You know nothing about that.”