Well? Pettijohn said.
Well what?
I appreciate all this news coverage or whatever it is. But I can’t help wondering what makes me important enough for the high sheriff to drive out and report the result of an inquest.
The truth is, I wanted to talk to you some more. It occurred to me you might have remembered something. Seeing him pass your house, hearing a shot, anything.
No. I told you. I’m not here all the time. I have to make a living. Some folks can’t drive around the county asking questions and get paid for it. My wife’s here all the time. You could ask her.
Actually, I figured she told you I was out here Monday morning. And if there’s a soul on this round earth that knows less about Randy Waters than you do, you’re married to her.
Pettijohn was silent.
Oh well, it’s a small thing anyway, Roller said. It just sticks in my craw, where he was. How he got there.
He came in on those log roads. The way you got him out.
The problem for me is no vehicle. Did somebody let him out to hunt, and if they did, why don’t they speak up? He lived in Ackerman’s Field. Did he tote that shotgun all the way from town just looking for enough privacy to shoot himself? Now, what gets me about them woods is what he was doing there in the first place.
Hunting. Scouting a place to put up a deer stand. You hear gunfire back in there every weekend, when deer season opens.
I don’t know. Maybe. Like I said, it’s a small thing. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation don’t care. He shot himself. His wife has no idea why. I just have a fondness for stories, and that’s not a story. It might be a beginning, or an end, but it’s damn sure not a story.
Maybe he didn’t even kill himself. Maybe somebody blew him away and hauled him back in there and dumped him out and went about their business.
Roller eased the car into reverse, stopped it with a foot on the brake. The pitch of the engine changed.
Oh, I’m satisfied he did it. Our boy Waters had problems. He’d tried it all and none of it worked. Drugs, booze, women. Did I say he tried it a few years back? His folks or whoever got him up and carried him to old Doc Epley. There had been a bad car wreck over by Mormon Springs and Epley had blood all the way to his elbows and he was busy as a one-legged man in a ass-kickin contest. “Put him over on that cot and I’ll get to him when I can,” Epley told them. “I got folks here tryin to live.” There’d been a kid in that wreck and Epley done everything he could and then it died anyway. After he got Waters patched up, he got a tube of lipstick off his nurse’s desk and drew a big X right over Waters’ heart. “There, by God,” he told him. “You ever try it again, there’s you a map to go by.”
God Almighty.
It might have been harsh, but it did the trick. He didn’t have no trouble findin it this time.
WOODS HERE SOMBER and ancient. Pettijohn passed under great live oaks and cypresses and beeches with distended groping arms like gothic trees in a fairy-tale wood. The glade was sepulchral. Light came falling through the latticework of branches and it had the quality of light filtered through stained glass. It stood in greengold columns, shimmered with the movement of the trees.
Dark oval of earth, so stained with the body’s seepings. So unhallowed a resting place. In the nights, the beasts would quarrel and contest territorial rights, how’d a body sleep? By day the sun would sear the flesh and scald the blind eyes, vultures tilt on the updrafts and glitter in the sun like some hybrid of flesh and chrome.
He sat on the windfall beech and smoked cigarettes and thought about things. As if by placing himself where Waters had been and echoing his motions he’d gain some insight into the workings of his mind. There were clues could he but find them. A story could he but read it. It sticks in my craw, too, Roller, he thought. And I like a story as well as the next one.
He arose and toed the cigarette out in the dirt and looked about. Directly, he wound through the winter huckleberries following a path so faint it might have been a ghost path, a dream of a footpath. He moved along with confidence for he now knew where he was going: They were his woods. The ground began to climb gently in an earth bulwark and leveled out, and he came through a spinney of sassafras onto the rim of the abandoned pond.
There seemed clues in abundance here. What to make of all this? Two old lawn chairs tilted by the wind. Nestled in the roots of an elm half a liter of a red wine called Tokay rosé and in the brush a folded blanket, still sodden and mildewed from the fall rains. An empty plastic bottle that had contained suntan lotion. A glint of the sun off metal drew him farther, to where a tiny gold crucifix lay half buried in the packed clay. He dipped it in the water and wiped it clean on the tail of his shirt. An earring. He dropped it into a shirt pocket and stood up. He remembered what Reuben had said about haunted woods and he grinned a rueful grin and figured him right. He reckoned these woods haunted, but he could not have said by what.
♦ ♦ ♦
SHE WAS SITTING on the sofa with a book open on her lap, and she had her legs stretched out across the coffee table. He leaned and laid the crucifix between her smooth tan calves. You must have lost an earring, he said.
She leaned forward and picked it up. Thanks, she said. You gave me those. Where was it?
He had no way of knowing what look he had on his face, but when she looked up at him hers went opaque and guarded, as if a curtain had fallen behind her eyes.
He went into the kitchen and made a glass of iced coffee. He held the cold glass against his forehead. He had a headache he seemed to have been born with, and the ice seemed to help it.
She went with her book through the doorway to the bedroom. When he’d drunk half the coffee, he followed her into the room. Her book lay on the night table, a torn strip of paper to mark her place, and she had a suitcase open on the bed and she was stacking clothes in it. He could see his reflection in the mirror across. His image was dark and warped looking in the faulted glass.
Don’t start, she said.
I’m not going to start. I just want to know one thing.
She turned. She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. No, she said. You never want to know just one thing. You have to know it all. That’s what’s the matter with you, and it’s been the ruin of you.
The ruin of me? What about you? You knew all the goddamn time he was out there. There in the brush with the dogs fighting over him, pulling him apart. What made him do it? Did he get in over his head and you brushed him off? Did he break it off and you were about to tell his wife? Or did you shoot him yourself?
She went on serenely packing clothes. By my count, that’s way more than one thing, she said. She glanced up at him and smiled. Besides, I sort of got the impression that that sheriff thought you knew a lot more than you were saying. Perhaps you did it yourself.
All right. Forget all that. It doesn’t matter who killed him. The only thing I want to know is what you thought about.
What I thought about?
After all he’d been to you. Lying on that blanket with you. Nights when you were in bed with me and he was lying out there with things crawling over his face, what did you think about?
She gave him a slight frown of incomprehension. I never did think of that at all, she said.
He had crossed the room before he knew what he was doing. Perhaps he’d meant to strike her, but the motion that started as a blow ended with a hand laid gently on her shoulder. His thumb could feel the small knob of bone beneath the flesh. The hand subsided, dropped uselessly to his side. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He went back and leaned against the wall and watched her.
After a time, she went out with the suitcase. As she went through the doorway, she picked up the book from the night table. The screen door slapped to on its keeper spring. The Ford cranked. He heard it turning in the driveway, retreating down the hill. Everything grew very quiet. The house seemed to be listening intently. It seemed to be waiting for him to make the next move.