Leonard was looking at them too. He said, “Yeah, uh-oh.”
Under the magazines was a pile of clothes. Pants. Shirts. Underwear. All little boys’ clothes.
“A bigger uh-oh,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “We come by and Illium ain’t here and he’s left the door unlocked and he’s got him a box of kiddie porn sitting right here on the couch with kids’ clothes. Seems awful damn convenient.”
“Nothing says he couldn’t be stupid.”
We put the stuff back like it was and went out and closed the door. I used my shirttail to wipe the door knob and wondered what all I’d touched in the house besides the magazines.
“Let’s look in the carport,” Leonard said.
We looked in the old Ford first. Nothing there.
“Must be doing the bookmobile route,” I said. I turned then, and in the corner of the carport, on shelves, were a number of large jars, and in the jars there were little cuts of paper, and even though I wasn’t close to them, I guessed what they were right away.
Leonard saw what I saw. He went over and got one of the jars and twisted the lid off and pulled some of the pieces from the jar and held a handful out for me to look at.
I’d guessed right. Coupons.
Leonard replaced the coupons and screwed the lid on the jar. “While we’re snooping,” he said, “why don’t we look under those tarps?”
We checked under all the tarps. Under some was lumber, and under others were mechanical parts of all kinds, everything from plumbing to automotive. Illium seemed to be a neat pack rat. Maybe he used the stuff to fix up his house and car, tried to be neighborly to folks like No Front Teeth down the road by sharing his goods.
And in his spare time he cut hay and sold it and worked at the church and free-lance drove the bookmobile, and in the evenings, after a hard day of public service, he read child pornography with a young boy’s underwear stretched over his head. It could happen.
We walked back to Leonard’s car and leaned on the front of it and we crossed our arms and watched the sky grow darker and the moon grow brighter. Stars were popping out. In the distance, the pond sucked up the moonlight and turned the water the color of creamed coffee.
“What the hell is it with the coupons?” Leonard said. “First, I thought Uncle Chester had gotten to be a nut shy a pecan pie, but now I’m wondering. This guy’s got the same thing going.”
“Hate to bring it up,” I said, “but another stretch of coincidence is kiddie porn showing up here as well as your uncle’s. And there’s the fact they knew each other, and were good friends. Lots of circumstantial evidence. It’s beginning to look bad for a certain good friend’s relative, and I say that with all due respect.”
Leonard was quiet for a time. He said, “Doesn’t matter. I believe in Uncle Chester. He didn’t kill anyone, not a kid anyway. Someone fucked with him, he might have killed them, but a kid, no way. And he wasn’t reading kiddie fuck lit. There’s an answer to all this, I don’t care how it looks.”
I hoped so, for Leonard’s sake. I glanced down at the ground and watched the moonlight silver the rainwater collected in a set of deep tire ruts in front of us, ruts from the bookmobile, I figured.
Where was the bookmobile? Where was Illium? Did moss really only grow on the north side of trees, and why did the Houston Oilers keep losing football games?
I took a careful look at the ruts. They ran on out across the grass and hay field. The grass and hay was pushed down, but starting to straighten slowly. That meant the grass had not been pushed down too long ago, but with the rain beating for a couple of days, it probably hadn’t had the chance to pop back up. It would have taken this warm day and this much time for it to come back to its former position. Those tracks had been made three days, four days before.
I said, “Look here.”
Leonard and I squatted down and looked more closely. The night was bright and we could see well. We also knew what we were seeing. Put us in a city and we couldn’t hail a taxi, but we’d both grown up in the woods and had learned to hunt and track when we were head high to a squirrel dog’s balls, so we could read sign. Animal sign, or human sign. A paw print or a tire track, it was all the same to us.
We got up and went across the grass and the mowed hay field. Another couple days and the hay stubs and the grass would spring back up completely, and there wouldn’t be any trail to see. Not unless you knew to look for it.
It didn’t take an expert in nanotechnology to figure where the ruts were leading. They played out at the lip of the pond, and there were deeper tracks in the bank where the vehicle had gone over. There were a couple of hardback books in the mud by the water, and the moon rode on the pond’s brown surface like a bright saucer. I could smell the pond, and it smelled of mud and fish and recent rain. A night bird called from a tree in the distance and something splashed in the water and rippled it, turned the floating moon wavy.
Leonard eased down the bank and got hold of one of the books and came back up with it.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “ The Old Man and the Sea.”
“No. How to Repair Your Fireplace.”
“Bound to have been a big run on that one,” I said.
I looked at the pond, then looked at Leonard. He said, “I’d go in, but I got a problem with my leg.”
“I thought it was well.”
“Sometimes it gives me trouble.”
“Like now?”
“Right.”
“That figures. Look, we know it’s there.”
“For all we know, he run an old tractor off in there, or some drunk came through the cattle guard and run out here in the pond thinking it was a parking lot.”
“Sure,” I said.
I unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it to Leonard, stood on one foot and took off a shoe and sock, switched feet, and repeated the process. I pulled off my pants and underwear. I folded the underwear and pants together and tossed them to Leonard and put the socks in the shoes.
“Aren’t you embarrassed undressing in front of a queer?” Leonard said. “All you know, I might be sizing up your butthole.”
“Just call me a tease.”
I slipped down the bank and started to go in the water.
Leonard said: “Hap, be careful, man. We haven’t finished that flooring yet.”
The water was warm on top, but three feet below it was cold. The bank sloped out and was slick. I went in feet first and slid down and under. The water flowed over me, and I looked up and could see the moonlight shining through the murk.
Going down the bank like that I had stupidly stirred up the mud, and a cloud of it, like ink from a squid, caught up with me, surged over me and frightened me. For a moment I was in complete darkness, then the mud thinned and I went down deeper, feeling for the van I knew was there.
The water, though less muddy down deep, was darker. I wondered what ever had possessed me to do this. We should have called the cops, let them look. I should never have promised Leonard I’d help him out in this matter. I should have finished college and gotten a real job. I wondered how long Florida would remember me if I drowned.
The pond was not deep, and soon I could reach down and touch bottom with my hands and feet. I crawled along like that a little ways, stirring mud, raised up and swam forward, felt myself starting to need air.
I rose up swiftly in the blackness and hit my head sharply on something solid and nearly let go of what breath I still had; it was as if the water above me had turned to stone. I swam left and hit a wall and something from the wall leapt out and touched me and I kicked out with my feet and pushed backward into another wall, and things jumped off it and touched me too. I clutched at them and they came apart in my hands.
My lungs were starting to burn, and I couldn’t go up, and I couldn’t go left or right. I pivoted and swam forward and hit a low barrier and reached above it and touched something soft. I grabbed at it, held with one hand, and my other hand touched something else.