“And how exactly do you know this?”
Gene’s father was leaning against the wall watching his son with sullen, bloodshot eyes. The boy could smell the Wild Irish Rose wafting off his old man clear across the room. Carl Dinwoodie wasn’t too bad if he stuck to beer, but when he got on the wine, he could be downright dangerous. This might come back to bite me in the ass if I’m not careful, Gene thought. His mother went to the same church as the Russell bunch. His father would kick the shit out of him all over again if he heard he’d been harassing that little Lenora bitch. “I could be wrong,” Gene said.
“Why did you say the Russell boy did it then?” the sheriff said.
“I don’t know. Maybe I dreamed it.”
Over in the corner, Gene’s father made a sound like a dog retching, then said, “Nineteen years old and still in school. What you think about that, Sheriff? Worthless as tits on a boar hog, ain’t he?”
“Who we talking about?” the sheriff said, a puzzled look on his face.
“That no-account thing laying right there in that bed, that’s who,” Carl said, then turned and staggered out the door.
The sheriff looked back to the boy. “Well, any idea why whoever did do it put them sacks over your head like that?”
“No,” Gene said. “Not a clue.”
21
“WHAT YOU GOT THERE?” Earskell said, as Arvin stepped up onto the porch. “I heard you over in there shooting that pop gun.” His cataracts were getting worse every week, like dirty curtains being slowly pulled shut in an already dim room. A couple more months and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to drive anymore. Getting old was next to the worst goddamn thing that had ever happened to him. Lately, he’d been thinking about Alice Louise Berry more and more. They had both missed out on a lot, her dying so young.
Arvin held up three red squirrels. He had his father’s pistol stuck in the waistband of his pants. “We’ll eat good tonight,” he said. Emma had served nothing but beans and fried potatoes for four days now. Things always got lean toward the end of the month, before her pension check came. Both he and the old man were starving for some meat.
Earskell leaned forward in his chair. “You surely didn’t get those with that German piece of shit, did you?” Secretly, he was proud of the way the boy could handle the Luger, but he still didn’t think much of handguns. He’d rather have a pepper gun or a rifle any day.
“It ain’t a bad gun,” Arvin said. “You just got to know how to shoot it.” It was the first time the old man had ridiculed the pistol in quite a while.
Earskell laid down the implement catalog he’d been peering through all morning and pulled his penknife out of his pocket. “Well, go fetch us something to put ’em in, and I’ll help you clean ’em.”
Arvin pulled the skins off the squirrels while the old man held them by their front legs. They gutted the carcasses on a sheet of newspaper and cut the heads and feet off and laid the bloody meat in a pan of salted water. After they finished, Arvin folded up the mess in the paper and carried it out to the edge of the yard. Earskell waited until he came back up on the porch, then pulled a pint out of his pocket and took a drink. Emma had asked him to talk to the boy. She was at her wit’s end after hearing about the latest incident. He wiped his mouth and said, “Played cards over at Elder Stubb’s garage last night.”
“So did you win?”
“No, not really,” Earskell said. He stretched his legs out, looked down at his battered shoes. He was going to have to try mending them again. “Saw Carl Dinwoodie there.”
“Yeah?”
“He wasn’t none too happy.”
Arvin sat down on the other side of his great-uncle in a creaky cast-off kitchen chair held together with baling wire. He studied the gray woods across the road and chewed at the inside of his mouth for a minute. “He pissed off about Gene?” he asked. It had been over a week since he’d bagged the sonofabitch.
“A little maybe, but I think he’s more ticked off about the hospital bill he’s gonna have to pay.” Earskell looked down at the squirrels floating in the pan. “So what happened?”
Though Arvin didn’t ever see the point of offering up any details to his grandmother for beating the shit out of someone, mostly because he didn’t want to upset her, he knew the old man wouldn’t be satisfied with anything other than the facts. “He’s been teasing Lenora, him and a couple of his candy-ass buddies,” he said. “Calling her names, shit like that. So I fixed his wagon for him.”
“What about the others?”
“Them, too.”
Earskell heaved a long sigh, scratched at the whiskers on his neck. “You think maybe you should have held back just a little bit? Boy, I understand what you’re saying, but still, you can’t go sending people to the hospital over some name-calling. Puttin’ a couple knots on his head is one thing, but from what I hear, you hurt him pretty bad.”
“I don’t like bullies.”
“Jesus Christ, Arvin, you going to meet lots of people you might not take a liking to.”
“Maybe so, but I bet he won’t pick on Lenora anymore.”
“Look, I want you to do me a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Stick that Luger away in a drawer and forget about it for now.”
“Why?”
“Handguns ain’t made for hunting. They’re for killin’ people.”
“But I didn’t shoot the bastard,” Arvin said. “I beat him up.”
“Yeah, I know. This time anyway.”
“What about them squirrels? I hit every one of them in the head. You can’t do that with no shotgun.”
“Just put it up for a while, okay? Use the rifle if you want to go after some game.”
The boy studied the floor of the porch for a moment, then looked up at the old man with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “He get mouthy with you?”
“You mean Carl?” Earskell asked. “No, he knows better than that.” He didn’t see any sense in telling Arvin that he had drawn a royal flush on the last and biggest pot of the night, or that he had folded so that Carl could take the money home with two pissy pair. Though he knew it had been the right thing to do, it still made him half sick thinking about it. There must have been two hundred dollars in that kitty. He just hoped the boy’s doctor got a chunk of it.
22
ARVIN WAS LEANING AGAINST THE ROUGH RAIL of the porch late on a clear Saturday night in March looking at the stars hanging over the hills in all their distant mystery and solemn brilliance. He and Hobart Finley and Daryl Kuhn, his two closest friends, had bought a jug earlier that evening from Slot Machine, a one-armed bootlegger who operated over on Hungry Holler, and he was still sipping on it. The wind had a bite to it, but the whiskey kept him warm enough. He heard Earskell inside the house moan and mutter something in his sleep. In the good weather, the old man slept in a drafty lean-to he had nailed on the back of his sister’s house when he moved in a few years ago, but once it turned cold out, he lay on the floor next to the wood stove on a pallet made up of scratchy, homespun blankets that smelled like kerosene and mothballs. Down the hill, parked in the pull-off behind Earskell’s Ford was Arvin’s prized possession, a blue 1954 Chevy Bel Air with a loose transmission. It had taken him four years doing whatever kind of work he could get — chopping firewood, building fence, picking apples, slopping hogs — to save enough money to buy it.
Earlier that day, Arvin had driven Lenora to the cemetery to visit her mother’s grave. Though he would never admit it, the only reason he went to the graveyard with her now was because he hoped she might recall some buried memory about her daddy or the cripple he ran with. He had become fascinated with the riddle of their disappearance. Although Emma and many others in Greenbrier County seemed convinced that the two were alive and well, Arvin found it hard to believe that two bastards as nutty as Roy and Theodore were purported to be could have vanished into thin air and never be heard from again. If it was that easy, he figured a lot more people would do it. He’d wished many times that his father had taken that route.