26
When Blake hears footsteps running in the direction of the gazebo, he is sure he’s waited too long, that he should have sprung from his hiding place and made a leap for the gun as soon as the terrible screams stopped. But he was too dazed by the sudden, silent departure of the vines that held him prisoner only seconds before, the way they branched off in two different directions, separating from each other cleanly, without the tearing of skin or the snapping of stalks, moving soundlessly into the soil, leaving him with the undeniable impression that the energy animating this life-form didn’t obey the physical laws of this world as much as it indulged them.
Still flat on his back in what is now an empty, muddy hole in the earth, Blake reaches up with one hand to grab the nearest loose board he can reach without revealing himself. He draws it to his chest in both hands. Only then does he realize the long gash across his chest has healed almost entirely from the vine’s patient suckling. Inside the tear in his polo shirt is a vague rosy scar that looks months old.
The footsteps crunch past the gazebo in the direction of the house, past the spot where Nova dropped the gun. Blake leaps to his feet, board raised like a baseball bat, and sees the silhouette of a man racing toward the house’s kitchen door. There is nothing tensed or predatory about the man’s pose as he runs. It’s too dark to see if he’s armed, but he doesn’t hold his arms in front of him as if he’s aiming a gun. He’s just running like hell.
Blake sees the gun right where Nova said it would be. By the time he has it in hand, the man has disappeared into the house.
I’m not chasing him… yet. But something is.
Inside the grand and deeply shadowed house, he hears thundering footsteps on the staircase, someone so desperate to get distance between himself and the ground he doesn’t care who hears his noisy ascent. The footsteps get louder when he hits the second floor. Doors are being thrown open. He’s trying to get higher… The widow’s walk.
By the time Blake reaches the second-floor landing, the man is racing up the short wooden staircase to the small platform atop the house’s roof, the door swinging open behind him. Blake tears through it, taking the steps at an angle so he can keep his balance without lowering the gun.
And then, in an instant, he’s reached the top, and now it’s just him and the crazed, mud-smeared stranger under a star-filled sky. The roof feels like a raft floating on a sea of oak trees. Beyond the canopy of huge branches covering the front drive, River Road is a ribbon of black hugging the base of the earthen levee yards away, and just beyond the levee’s dark swell, the blazing lights of a containership glide by on the river.
The man spins in place, gasping. Blake wouldn’t be surprised if he waved his arms at the ship for help. But instead he searches the roof, which slopes gently away from them on all sides. There is no angle from which he does not fear an attack; Blake and Blake’s new gun appear to be the least of his concerns.
He looks vaguely familiar, this wheezing, terrified stranger, much in the same way Mike Simmons was. Blake sees football team photos hanging on the walls of his high school. Rows of little faux gladiators down on one knee, clad in brilliant-white practice jerseys and pretentious scowls. They have been close before, he and this man, Blake is sure of it. Within inches of each other, in fact, during an encounter in the dark on another, more distant levee, this one on the shore of a massive lake, a spot where the prayers and intimate whispers of two frightened but very much in love young men named Blake and John lingered.
“Are you doing this to us?” the man rasps.
Blake doesn’t answer.
“Can they… can they get me up here?”
“I don’t know,” Blake says, because it’s the truth. “Kyle… Your name’s Kyle Austin. You broke your leg outside the cafeteria during lunch. You and your friends had a skateboard, and you were goofing off before the teacher caught you, and you…” What Blake wants to say is that when Kyle rolled over all those years ago, leg twisted at an impossible angle, he wore the same contorted, agonized expression he wears now. But Blake doesn’t want it to sound like he’s just now remembering who Kyle is. He wants Kyle to believe this was planned. He wants Kyle to feel trapped, because people who are trapped are more likely to talk. Just like Mike Simmons started talking to Caitlin after she shot him.
“What happened down there?”
“Scott went off…” As Kyle slows himself to catch the breath needed to explain, the sobs start: hiccuping, pathetic. “We were supposed to meet… She called, said she had Mike… . said she wanted to make a deal, but if we didn’t come tonight, she’d show everyone the tape—”
“What’s on the tape?”
“Us. It’s a side-street view, close to the levee. It’s got us parking, putting the hoods on. Then it’s got us running for it after we—after… Can they get up here? Those things. Can they get up…”
“I know how to use this gun, Kyle. I learned after what you guys did to me. Keep talking or I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.”
Kyle lets out a strangled half laugh, half sob. “We came through the back way to surprise her, but when Scott saw you, he freaked. He thought she was giving you the tape and the whole thing was a setup and we’d walked into a trap…”
“You did.”
As if a nest of wasps has been kicked over inside his skull, Kyle bends at the waist and brings his fists to his temples and screams, “What are those things?”
Blake doesn’t answer. He doesn’t say, I don’t know. Doesn’t say, I just know how they move, and what they like to drink.
Instead he just asks, “Why?” Blake raises his voice to be heard over a fresh round of pathetic sobs. “Why did you kill him?”
“We didn’t! We weren’t—we were just supposed to scare you guys. He knew you guys met there, and he thought if we roughed you up a little bit that you’d stop… He was our coach, I mean. We just thought… But we all knew Simmons was crazy about gay shit. Coach must’ve thought that made him right for the job, but I thought it made him wrong. Dead fucking wrong! But I didn’t say anything. I should have said—”
“Coach?”
“Coach Fuller. But he didn’t ask for a pipe. He didn’t ask for a fucking pipe for God’s sake. Simmons is on that fucking tape, stepping out of the car and swinging the thing around like he’s some goddamn Viking. And nobody… nobody wanted…”
Vernon Fuller.
Blake sees the SUV parked across from the entrance to the emergency room where he works, sees the taillights as it speeds off in the milky predawn light, and now he realizes Vernon Fuller is making a last-minute escape from the living evidence of his crime. He sees Vernon Fuller, reeking of bourbon, turning in on himself in the pew at his own son’s funeral, quitting his job as athletic director, leaving their school’s winning football team without a coach, then divorcing his wife shortly thereafter, not even showing up at the hospital or her funeral after she got sick with cancer a decade later. Not grief-stricken. Guilt-ridden. Shattered.
Responsible.
“It’s not fair…,” Kyle wheezes.
“Fair?” Blake asks him.
“He should be here too.”
When the floorboards creak behind him, Blake spins his head, without turning his back on Kyle. Caitlin has mounted the steps to the widow’s walk, her hair hastily pushed back from her forehead, but more clotted with dirt and blood than before.
“Why?” Blake asks.
“I told you. He wanted us to scare—”