“I gave him a few quarters,” May explained. “So I could run my errand. I didn’t think it would do any harm.”
“You know I won’t have him hanging around places like that. And this don’t exactly look like the drugstore to me,” he said, casting his eye across the front of Lana’s.
“I just ran in to get a coffee,” she said. “To go. To drink on the way home. And I saw Mr. Walker here.”
“That’s right, Timmy,” I said. “May was just-”
Timmy turned on me. “Am I talking to you right now?”
I took half a step back. “Hey, listen, back off-”
“Because I’m pretty sure I’m talking to her. When I’m talking to you, you’ll know it.”
Up the street, a horn honked. I could see Dad leaning over in the front of his truck, hitting the steering wheel.
“Daddy, stop being so rude to Mr. Walker. He just offered to buy me a coffee as a way of saying thank you for our having him and his father to dinner last night.”
“You been in there a long time being thanked,” Timmy said. “I been up and down this street twice looking for you. When you weren’t back soon, I went looking, and can you imagine what I thought when I saw my grandson standing in the doorway of a video game parlor? Can you?”
“I was just play-”
“Shut up, Jeffrey,” his grandfather said. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to your mother.”
“Honest to God, Dad,” May whispered. “We’re in public. Let’s just forget about this and go home.”
She grabbed Jeffrey’s hand out of her father’s and started down the sidewalk. She’d gone about five steps when she stopped and turned to say, “Thank you, Mr. Walker, for your kindness.”
I started to go, too, but Timmy Wickens suddenly had hold of my upper arm. His hand felt like a vise.
“Let go of me,” I said. I was full of rage, but a good part of me was rapidly turning to jelly.
With his free hand, Timmy made a fist with his index finger sticking out. “You want to talk to my daughter, you go through me.”
“Why should I do that?” I asked. I don’t know what part of my brain, exactly, made me say such a thing, when I was just as inclined to say “Okey dokey.”
“Excuse me?” Timmy said.
“She’s a grown woman. She’s got a son. Why should it be up to you who she talks to and who she doesn’t? If she doesn’t want to talk to me, she doesn’t have to.”
Timmy’s hand squeezed harder on my bicep. It hurt. He leaned in close to me, and his breath was hot and foul. His teeth were brown at the gum line, and for a moment, he reminded me of Gristle. Or maybe Bone. Or some creature that hides in the forest at night, waiting for you to walk past.
“I look out for her,” he said. “I take care of her, and I take care of her boy. And that gives me the right, way I see it.”
“Sure,” I said, deciding it might be wise to back down not for my own protection, but to mitigate whatever punishment Timmy might decide to mete out to his daughter once they all got back home. “Whatever you say.”
Timmy’s grip on my arm relaxed and he nodded slowly. “Good. Now, in the future, I think it would be best if you didn’t talk to my daughter or my grandson. That way, I think we can continue to remain good neighbors with your pa. Because I figure you’ll be going back home pretty soon, wouldn’t you say?”
“Soon as Dad’s ankle gets better, I guess I will.”
Timmy nodded agreeably. “That’s great. I bet they miss you back home. You got a wife, right, and kids?”
My mouth was getting very dry. “Yes,” I said.
“I’ll bet they want to see you just as much as you want to see them. Hey, you know what might be fun? Maybe sometime, I’ll drop by and have a coffee with them when you’re not around. Works both ways, you know.”
He let go of my arm, but not without tossing me up against the window of the café at the same time. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.” And with that he walked off in the same direction that his daughter had gone.
Lana stepped outside. “What the hell was that all about?”
“Nothing,” I said, and headed back to Dad’s truck.
I was shaken. My legs felt wobbly, my heart was pounding, things seemed to be spinning around me. I paused by the phone booth, put my hand up against the glass, but it felt papery under my hand. It was another flyer for the fall fair, taped to the glass. And below it, another one of those flyers, plastered on with duct tape, that said “Keep Our Parade Straight.”
My only purpose in coming up here had been to make sure Dad was okay. Aside from a twisted ankle, he was okay. But now I felt held here, as stuck to Braynor as those flyers were to the phone booth. Bad things had already happened up here. A man ripped to shreds in the woods. Another man fatally stabbed. A lawyer’s house burned to the ground.
A farmhouse full of nutjobs.
And a young woman and her son trying to escape.
I got to the truck without even glancing at Dad, turned the ignition, threw the gearshift into drive, and shot out of Braynor like the entire town was rigged to explode at any moment.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Dad said. “You took long enough. Where’s Leonard the Diaper King when you need him? I’m about to wet my pants.”
“I think I beat you to it,” I said.
16
THERE WERE CHORES TO BE DONE when we got back to Denny’s Cabins. Given how rattled I was, it was good to have something to do. I emptied cans of garbage, hauled a pail full of fish guts up to the pit in the woods and buried it, cut some grass on Dad’s racing tractor, taking care to go easy on the throttle. Sitting on the mower, the vibrations from the engine and the three rapidly rotating blades in the housing below my feet had a calming effect on me that was not unlike a massage. The constant buzz from the steering wheel traveled up my arms and into my shoulders like magic fingers.
I said barely a word to Dad on the drive back from town. Sometimes, I think, when I’m scared-and I’ll be totally honest with you here and tell you I was plenty scared-the things I’m afraid of seem more real if I start talking about them. I ground my teeth until we got back to the camp, bolted from the truck, forgetting to go around the other side to help Dad get out, and went about my duties.
There’d been plenty to unnerve me since arriving here earlier in the week. The shredded body of Morton Dewart. The bizarre dinner at the Wickenses. Those dogs. The murder of Tiff at the co-op, which might or might not have anything whatsoever to do with the events of the last few days.
But nothing had shaken me as much as my run-in with Timmy Wickens on the main drag of Braynor. There’d been menace in the air before, but now I felt it directed at me personally. And I am not, as you may have gathered by now, what you might call a heroic figure.
I believe the term I used in my conversation with Trixie Snelling was “weenie-like.”
It’s a terrible thing to be weenie-like and still have, at some level, some commitment to do the right thing. A moral conscience matched with physical cowardice is not a winning combination.
“How’s it going?” Bob Spooner asked, poking his head into the storeroom, where I was checking to see how the worm supply was going. Betty and Hank Wrigley had helped themselves to a couple dozen that morning while Dad and I were in town, and left a note to that effect so that we could add it to their bill.
I jumped. “Jesus, Bob, you scared me half to death.”
“What’s with you? You seem a bit on edge.”
I just waved my hand in the air in frustration. “Long story, Bob.”
“Hey,” he said. “You’ll never guess who I had on my line this morning.”