I was thinkin about her today when she was a little girl.
She hasn’t been a little girl for a long time, Rabon said, shutting it off, closing another door to something he didn’t want to talk about.
PAST MIDNIGHT Scribner was lying on top of the covers, misshapen squares of moonlight thrown across him by the windowpanes. He had been thinking about Karen when he remembered shouting, crying, blood. When he pulled her hands away from her face they came away bloody and her mouth was smashed with an incisor cocked at a crazy angle and blood dripping off her chin. One side of her jaw was already swelling.
Where is he?
I don’t know, she said. He’s left me. He drove away. No telling where he’s gone.
Wherever it is I doubt it’s far enough, he said, already leaving, his mind already suggesting and discarding places where Pulley might be.
Don’t hurt him.
He gave her a long, level glance but he didn’t say if he would or he wouldn’t. Crossing the yard toward his truck he stepped on an aluminum baseball bat that belonged to Alton. He stooped and picked it up and went on to the truck, swinging it along in his hands, and threw it onto the floorboard.
He wasn’t in any of his usual haunts. Not the Snowwhite Café, the pool hall. In Skully’s City Café the old man drank a beer and bought one for a crippled drunk in a wheelchair.
Where’s your runnih mate, Hudgins?
Bonedaddy? He was in here a while ago. He bought a case of beer and I reckon he’s gone down to that cabin he’s got on the Tennessee River.
Why ain’t you with him? The old man did not even seem angry. A terrible calm had settled over him. You couldn’t rattle him with a jackhammer.
He’s pissed about somethin, said he didn’t have time to fool with me. I know he’s gone to the river though, he had that little snake pistol he takes.
The night was far progressed before he found the right cabin. It set back against a bluff and there was a wavering campfire on the riverbank and Bonedaddy sat before it drinking beer. When Scribner approached the fire, Bonedaddy glanced at the bat and took the nickel-plated pistol out of his pocket and laid it between his feet.
Snake huntin? the old man asked.
These cottonmouth hides ain’t worth nothin, Bonedaddy said. Nobody wants a belt made out of em. Too muddy-lookin and no pattern to speak of. I mostly shoot copperheads and rattlesnakes. Once in a while just whatever varmint wanders up to the fire.
Scribner was watching Bonedaddy s right hand. The left clasped a beer bottle but the right never strayed far from the pistol. The hand was big and heavy-knuckled and he couldn’t avoid thinking of it slamming into Karen’s mouth.
You knocked her around pretty good, he said. You probably ain’t more than twice her size.
She ought not called me a son of a bitch. Anybody calls me that needs to have size and all such as that into consideration before they open their mouth.
The old man didn’t reply. He hunkered, watching, the stippled water, the farther shore that was just a land in darkness, anybody’s guess, a world up for grabs. He listened to the river sucking at the banks like an animal trying to find its way in. He saw that people lived their own lives, went their own way. They grew up and lived lives that did not take him into consideration.
I don’t want to argue, Bonedaddy said, patient as a teacher explaining something to a pupil who was a little slow. Matter of fact I come down here to avoid it. But there’s catfish in this river six or eight feet long, what they tell me. And if you don’t think I’ll shoot you and feed you to them then you need to say so right now.
The hand had taken up the pistol. When it started around its arc was interrupted by Scribner swinging the ball bat. He swung from the ground up as hard as he could, like a batter trying desperately for the outfield wall. The pistol fired once and went skittering away. Bonedaddy made some sort of muffled grunt and crumpled in the leaves. The old man looked at the bat in his hands, at Bonedaddy lying on his back. Bonedaddy’s hands were flexing. Loosening, clasping. They loosened nor would they clasp again. His head looked like something a truck had run over. Scribner glanced at the bat in mild surprise, then turned and threw it in the river. Somewhere off in the milk-white fog the throaty horn of a barge sounded, lights arced through the murk vague as lights seen in the muddy depths of the river.
He dragged Bonedaddy to the cabin then up the steps and inside. There was a five-gallon can of kerosene and he soaked the floors with it, hurled it at the walls. He lit it with a torch from the campfire. With another he searched for blood in the leaves. Bonedaddy’s half-drunk beer was propped against a weathered husk of stump, and for a reason he couldn’t name Scribner picked it up and drank it and slung the bottle into the river.
He stayed to see that everything burned. When the roof caught, an enormous cedar lowering onto it burst into flames and burned white-hot as a magnesium flare, sparks rushing skyward in the roaring updraft, like a pillar of fire God had inexplicably set against the wet black bluff.
Hey, he said, trying to shake Rabon awake.
Rabon came awake reluctantly, his hands trying to fend the old man away. Scribner kept shaking him roughly. Get up, he said. Rabon sat up in bed rubbing his eyes. What is it? What’s the matter?
I killed a feller, Scribner said.
Rabon was instantly alert. What the hell are you talking about? He was looking all about the room as if he might see some outstretched burglar run afoul of the old man.
A feller named Willard Pulley. Folks called him Bonedaddy. I killed him with Alton’s baseball bat and set him afire. Must be twenty years ago. He had a shifty little pistol he kept wavin in my face.
Are you crazy? You had a bad dream, you never killed anybody. Go back to sleep.
I ain’t been asleep, Scribner said.
Rabon was looking at his watch. It’s two o’clock in the morning, he said, as if it were the deadline for something. The old man was watching Rabon’s eyes. Something had flickered there when he had mentioned Willard Pulley but he couldn’t put a name to what he had seen: anger, apprehension, fear. Then it all smoothed into irritation, an expression Scribner was so accustomed to seeing that he had no difficulty interpreting it.
You know who I’m talkin about?
Of course I know who you’re talking about. You must have had a nightmare about him because we were talking about Karen. He did once live with Karen, but nobody killed him, nobody set him afire, as you put it. He was just a young drunk and now he’s an old drunk. It hasn’t been a week since I saw him lounging against the front of the City Café, the way he’s done for twentyfive years. You were dreaming.
I ain’t been asleep, Scribner said, but he had grown uncertain even about this. His mind had gone over to the other side where the enemy camped, truth that had once been hard-edged as stone had turned ephemeral and evasive. Subject to gravity, it ran through the cracks and pooled on the floorboards like quicksilver. He was reduced to studying people’s eyes for the reaction to something he had said, trying to mirror truth in other people’s faces.
IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING, a dull rage possessed him. Nor would it abate. He felt ravaged, violated. Somewhere along the line his life had been stolen. Some hand furtive as a pickpocket’s had taken everything worth taking and he hadn’t even missed it. Ellen and his children and a house that was his own had fallen by the wayside. He was left bereft and impotent, dependent upon the whims and machinations of others. Faceless women prodded him with needles, spooned tasteless food into him, continually downloaded an endless supply of pills even horses couldn’t swallow. The pills kept coming, as if these women were connected directly to their source, so that no matter how many he ingested there was always a full tray waiting atop the bureau. He pondered upon all this and eventually the pickpocket had a face as well as a hand. The puppeteer controlling all these strings was Rabon.