Читать книгу Church of the Graveyard Saints - C. Joseph Greaves - Страница 11

2

The drive from the front gate to the main house measured half a mile, and in the sweep of the Prius’s headlights Bradley could make out a hay barn, and a riding arena, and a sleepy cluster of farm equipment. The house itself, when they’d rounded the final curve, stood backlit by a faint incandescence that seemed to emanate from atop the towering mesa behind it.

It was after midnight, and all was eerily quiet.

“Maybe we caught a break.” Addie leaned into the windshield. “Maybe we can sneak upstairs without waking him.”

“Maybe we should get a hotel room.”

“We will, don’t worry. After the funeral. Just remember, whatever you do don’t mention the Warriors. Daddy thinks climate change involves moving his cows to a higher pasture.”

Light from the porch, yellow and sudden, set a dog to barking.

“Uh-oh,” she said. “There goes the element of surprise.”

Bradley studied the house as he unlatched his seatbelt. It appeared more Evergreen Lodge than Bates Motel, and its canine guardian proved a blocky shape awkwardly navigating the four wooden steps from its front porch down to its long flagstone walkway.

“Is it true what they say? That they can actually smell fear?”

“He growls, but he doesn’t bite.”

“I wasn’t talking about the dog.”

“Neither was I.”

No sooner had they stepped from the car than Addie was set upon by the dog—a gray-muzzled Labrador that whimpered as it circled, its licorice tail lashing her shins.

“Waylon,” she cooed, bending and offering her face. “Oh, Waylon. Did you miss me?”

Bradley examined the midnight sky, vast and clear and gaudy with stars. He lifted their bags from the hatchback. Reddish dust, finer than flour, had coated the back of his car. At the house, another figure appeared in silhouette, this one nearly as tall and lean as the porch posts that flanked it.

A shrill whistle. The dog wheeled and galloped toward the sound. Addie and Bradley followed, their footsteps crunching the driveway gravel.

“Hello, Daddy. I hope we didn’t wake you. This is Bradley Sommers. You can thank him for delivering me safe and sound.”

“I was expecting you hours ago.” Logan Decker held his watch to the porch light, ignoring Bradley’s hand. “Must’ve dozed off on the couch. Come in, come in. Are you hungry? We got more food than the Safeway store.”

They settled in the great room where sprays and bouquets, incongruously festive, seemed to fill every nook and corner. Where the fire Logan had kindled sent shadows to dancing on the high raftered ceiling. Where the piñon smoke and the cloying fragrance of lily and rose blossom grappled with the yellow odor of cigarettes. The room’s décor suggested some nightmare amalgam of Ralph Lauren and Charles Addams—all Indian blankets and riveted leather and, above the stone fireplace, an elk’s head whose glass-marble eyes seemed to flutter in the firelight.

Addie sipped her tea. Logan Decker smoked and slouched with his stocking feet outstretched toward the fire. Tired but wary, self-conscious of his interloper status, Bradley watched them both from the far end of the sofa where, the pleasantries exhausted, father and daughter seemed to have reached a layer of conversational bedrock whose penetration would require new and different tools that neither had brought to the job.

Somewhere behind Bradley, a grandfather clock ticked.

“So,” Addie said. “How’s he doing?”

Her father grunted. “You know your grandpa. He ain’t the type to sull. But still.”

“What?”

Logan straightened and tilted forward, searching for words and seeming to find them, finally, somewhere in the fire.

“Remember when you were five or thereabouts and I took you up to McPhee? I was afraid you’d be too squeamish to bait a hook. Shows you what I knew. Then when we did catch ourselves a bass, I set it down there on the rocks and you talked to that fish and petted it like a housecat till the light went out of its eye. Do you remember what you said then?”

Addie shook her head.

“You said maybe that fish had a mommy in the lake and it had died of sadness from being taken away from her. Jesus Christ almighty. I haven’t thought about that for, what? Almost twenty years? But when I seen the old man’s face that morning he come in for his coffee, I knew right away. It was the light. It just seemed to of gone from out of his eyes.”

Logan slid from his chair to squat at the hearth and poke at the fire with an iron. The flames coppered his face, animating it, highlighting its creases and crags. He was lean in the manner of other alcoholics Bradley had known; dissipated men for whom food was merely an afterthought. His profile, though, belonged on a Roman coin.

“As a widower yourself,” Bradley ventured, “I’m sure you could empathize with what he was going through.”

The iron paused. Logan nodded.

“In high school,” Addie said, shifting the conversation to Bradley, “I was the class salutatorian. The only B I ever got was in Calculus my senior year. The Calculus teacher, Mr. Hoover, had a son named Grant who got the only A in the class. He was the valedictorian.”

She set her mug on the table and rearranged her legs.

“I applied to four colleges: Harvard, UCLA, Colorado State, and a local school called Fort Lewis. I was accepted at CSU and Fort Lewis, and I was rejected by Harvard. But for some reason I never heard back from UCLA.”

“Addie,” her father said.

“The registration deadline for CSU was coming up fast and the frustrating thing was, there was no one I could talk to. I mean, nobody here had ever applied to a college, and if I’d asked my guidance counselor Mrs. Melton she’d have recommended I take cosmetology classes at the community college. I think Grant and I were the only two from our class who’d even applied out of state.”

At the sound of Addie’s voice the old Labrador emerged from out of the shadows. It padded over and rested its head on her knee.

“So anyway I moped around for a few weeks pretending everything was fine. But Grandma Vivian, she could see I was troubled about something.”

“Abstracted,” Bradley said, and was rewarded with a smile.

“She asked me what was wrong, and when I told her she said when she was a girl, all the men in the county were off fighting the war in Europe, or in the Pacific, and that she and most of her friends had to quit school to work on the ranches and farms. That’s why she never got past the ninth grade. She and her mother would work until sundown doing chores outside and then they’d work until bedtime doing the baking and canning and whatnot, and then they’d wake up and start all over again. Just the two of them tending a ranch with fifty-some head of cattle, day in and day out, for something like four years straight.”

Addie rescued her mug from the dog’s swinging tail and took another sip.

“And when the men finally came home, those that did, she was already eighteen and wasn’t about to go back to high school. So what she did, she taught herself to type. She practiced for months, and then she drove into town and applied for jobs at maybe a dozen different places, but she was turned down every time. Either because she had no experience or else no diploma. So at this point in the story I’m thinking, okay Addie, your stupid college problem is a big fat nothing so quit whining and get on with it. Which is probably what I needed to hear, but that wasn’t the point she was trying to make.”

She scratched at the old dog’s ear, and its tail accelerated.

“What she finally said was, ‘Addie, don’t you be that worn-out girl with the callused hands who lets some man in a bolo tie decide her future.’ And that was better advice than any parent or teacher or guidance counselor ever gave me.”

Logan, still squatting and smoking, lowered his head. He replaced the poker in its caddy.

“So where did Grant Hoover end up?” Bradley asked, and Addie smiled.

“The Colorado School of Mines. And when he told me I thought, ‘Oh, I didn’t know he wanted to be a mime. Why would anyone want to be a mime?’”

Logan took a final drag off his cigarette and dropped it into the fire. He stood, stiff in his movements, and wiped his palms on his jeans.

“Well,” he said. “Big day tomorrow. The viewing’s at one o’clock, then the procession back here to the graveyard. Then we get ourselves pawed and clucked over by half the women in Montezuma County.” He regarded Addie where she sat. “I believe those horses could use some work in the morning, in case you was of a mind.”

She hesitated before nodding. “I’d like that.”

“All right then. You’ll find your room is right where you left it.”

Logan circled behind the sofa. “As for you,” he said to Bradley’s back, “you’ll find clean sheets on the guest bed. I’ll trust Addie to show you the way.”

* * *

Bradley lay on his back with his fingers laced over his ribs. He heard a toilet flush downstairs, then the faint and skeletal clatter of dog claws on hardwood, then quiet. In the room next door he heard drawers open and close, then the telltale squeaking of bed-springs. Other movements whose import he could only imagine. Did imagine, picturing Addie in her bra and panties, in only her panties, in nothing at all. Bending and straightening, her dark hair brushing the milky white of her shoulders. Her eyes glowing electric blue in the moonlight when she turned her face toward the window.

He waited ten minutes more, then eased to the edge of the bed.

Downstairs he heard nothing. Next door there was only silence.

The door creaked on its hinges. The hallway lay dark and empty before him. Holding his breath to listen, he heard only the quickening pulse of his own guilty heart.

He opened her door slowly. What moonlight there was cast a crooked oblong on the bed, on the wooden floor, on the otherwise dim and empty room.

“Addie?” A whisper. “Hello? Anyone home?”

He stepped inside, leaving the door behind him ajar.

The room was small and tidy and appeared to have been stripped of its personal effects. A bookshelf held a fish tank, cracked and empty. The bed was a queen, still neatly made, and thumbtacked above its iron headboard was a poster advertising some sort of equine dietary supplement. The poster depicted a cowgirl on horseback, her body leaning and her blond curls flying as they twisted, horse and rider together, around a teetering barrel.

Opposite the footboard, two pairs of cowboy boots stood by a scarred wooden dresser. Above the dresser hung a mirror and wedged in the mirror’s oval frame were three curling photographs Bradley bent to study in the meager light from the window.

The first showed Cowgirl Addie sitting horseback in fringed leather chaps and a straw cowboy hat. She appeared to be thirteen or so, with braces on her teeth and hair tumbling halfway to her waist. She beamed into the camera as a sunflower-sized ribbon was affixed to the horse’s bridle by a woman in a bright floral dress.

The next photo was of Graduation Addie, older and more familiar, standing between an elderly couple with her say-cheese smile as pure and bright as her white satin gown.

The last photo featured Prom Queen Addie: a stunning woman-child in a gown of pale organza with her hair upswept, her dark radiance eclipsing the lanky farm boy fumbling to pin an orchid corsage to her shoulder strap.

This last photo Bradley removed to examine in the light from the window. The boy was pool-hall handsome, his long hair bleached by the sun. His lips, viewed in quarter profile, offered just the faintest hint of a smile.

Bradley wondered at that smile—at what, exactly, it foretold. Cockiness? A shared joke? A kind of easy familiarity? He wondered if this had been Addie’s first lover. Or, worse somehow, was about to be. He wondered also if Addie’s father had been the photographer and if that were the case how the boy had managed even half a smile under Logan Decker’s wilting gaze.

He replaced the photo and re-crossed the room to the window. A gravel walkway bisected the lawn as it ran in back of the house, the lawn’s flat expanse ending at the bank of a narrow streambed. There, some forty yards distant, stood a modest log cabin, vaguely lopsided, the glow from its lone facing window framing in sharp cameo the two seated figures within.

One of whom, he realized, was Addie.

“Just like I figured.”

Bradley jumped, nearly banging his head on the window frame. He turned to see Logan Decker in a robe of plaid flannel filling the doorway behind him.

“I was only—”

“Saying goodnight. I know.”

The taller man advanced, hands in pockets, to join Bradley at the window. Together they watched as the two backlit silhouettes conversed across a small kitchen table.

“Well, professor. Looks like you ain’t the only one couldn’t wait until morning.”