Читать книгу How Fire Runs - Charles Dodd White - Страница 12

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KYLE SAT in front of the woodstove with a bowl of canned chili and drank one of those craft beers made down the road in Johnson City. The beer was good and dark and he drank it with deliberate pauses between sips. Otherwise it would have been hard not to get carried away and slip over into a lazy buzz. He’d been close to useless for much of the afternoon once the deputy had driven him back and he’d sent Orylnne home for the day, told her as little about what had happened as he could, though he knew she’d find out the details soon enough. He was worried about Gerald, didn’t see any way out of things getting out of hand as soon as the word got out.

He had been on the laptop chatting with a couple of the guys from the veterans group. They were trying to schedule a time when they could all meet for their next reforestation project. Kyle had already set the seedlings aside in the greenhouse, ready to be loaded up and driven to the new site up on Buckhorn Ridge, but they needed to meet once to go over the map and settle all the particulars. They were working out the best time the next morning when he glimpsed something coming through that dark, the shafts of car headlights climbing the drive. He wasn’t expecting anybody, so he went back to his bedroom to get the .380 from his bedside table, tucked it into the back of his waistband and stepped out to see who had come up this far into the country unannounced.

He had to put his hand across his face as the vehicle swung its lights around. After the truck parked the lights stayed on for a minute before they cut. The big diesel engine ceased its chatter. As soon as the door cracked open and the driver hove himself out, Kyle knew who it was.

“I think I’ve had about enough good news from you today,” Kyle said.

“Boy, it’s only getting started,” Holston said as he came up the steps, his breath coming like it cost more than he was willing to invest. “You mind if we go in and sit by the fire? Any kind of cold is tough on these arthritic bones, and it sure can’t be doing your bare feet any good.”

Kyle looked down, only then realized he’d come out without his shoes.

“Yeah, come on. Just so you know, I’m armed,” he said, turned and lifted his shirttail to expose the handgun grip at the small of his back.

Holston grinned, lifted his jacket to reveal his Colt. He said, “Don’t worry. I’m comfortable with a man who supports the Second Amendment.”

Kyle showed him to the front room and told him to have a seat if he wanted it. The sheriff backed up to the wood stove and spread his hands out behind him like he was trying to catch a gust of wind, said he was all right to stand for a while.

“Want something to drink? I can put on some water for coffee or tea. There’s a couple of beers in there too if you’re off the clock.”

“What kind of beer you got?”

“Yee-haws. Porters.”

“That’s okay. I’m a Bud man. That hippie shit does something to my stomach.”

Kyle let the fridge door shut.

“Well, now that we’ve pretended we can get along for half a minute, you want to tell me what’s got you up here? I would have figured you’ve had enough to gloat about for one day without driving to the back of beyond for just a little more.”

Holston shook his head like he was trying to get something inside his brain to come loose.

“Charming. A real country gentleman, my mama would have called you, Pettus. A real country gentleman. But I’ve come out here on what I’d like to call a mission of mutual advantage. How surprised would you be if I told you that Gerald Pickens isn’t sitting in county detention? How surprised would you be to hear that he’s sitting out there in my pickup as we live and breathe?”

“I’d say you’d developed a heart or a brain tumor, one.”

“Maybe. But it’s the truth regardless. I was closing up the last of the paperwork when Gavin Noon, the man who owns the property across the road from Pickens, came down and said he thought there was no good reason to throw an old fool in the jail for just being an old fool. Said he didn’t want the community to have an idea of him and his people as adversarial to the better desires of the county. I told him I thought that was a mighty philosophical way of looking at things, taken all in all. A little sweet talk with a DA who’s already covered up prosecuting pillheads all over Kingdom Come, and you’d be surprised what you can get to happen.”

“So you struck a deal with a Nazi? That’s pretty Christian of you.”

“Yeah, well. Sometimes the law ain’t pretty in all of its fine print.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you’ve brought him up here. I only sit down next to the man every month at the courthouse. I’ve got about as much use for him as you do.”

Holston passed a hand over his skull, stood there trying to collect himself. A man come to the end of all best intentions.

“I’m going to tell you right now, Pettus,” Holston said. “Don’t you look this kindness in the face and call it anything else. I’m trying to help you and him both, you stubborn ass. That man could very well end up the majority of his days left on this earth in a damn cage if you don’t help him. Now I need you to take him in for a little bit. Not too long. Maybe a week or two. Time enough to give things a chance to cool off. It’s a goddamn good thing he’s as good a shot as he is. If he’d slipped up and killed one of those boys this would be done before it even got started. You play your cards right, you might even be able to keep him on the commission.”

“Babysit him, huh? What’s he say to that idea?”

“He’s not too fond of it, if you want to know the truth. He said he couldn’t much stand the sight of you and that the only thing that redeemed you as far as he could tell was your politics. Then I told him that a man often hated most what he most resembled. He pretty much shut up after that.”

Kyle shook his head, went over to the coatrack, pulled on his boots and his hunting jacket.

“Come on, dammit,” he said. “Help me convince the old bastard to see to his own best interest.”

Holston smiled, said. “See, there’s that country gentlemen I was talking about. I think the school teachers call it noblesse oblige.”

“Fuck you.”

“Well, no thank you, but I appreciate the offer. I surely do.”

HE PUT Gerald in the front bedroom just down the hall from where he slept. The old man still wore his clothes from that morning and had nothing else to change into.

“Hell, it’s fine,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve slept in my clothes. If it gets bad I can always strip down to my skivvies.”

Kyle was about to show him the closet where he had some old sweatpants that might have fit, but Gerald waved him away, told him to get on and let him have a bit of earned peace. Just as Kyle stepped out the door slammed shut. A second later the bolt shot home.

Kyle went back to his bedroom and went through some pictures of Laura and him he kept in a password-protected folder on his phone. They were all self-shot, high angled and tight, context excluded from the frame. He wanted to call her, but he knew to text first. That was one of the foundations of their agreement. To never put her in a compromised position. He sent a brief message and waited for an answer in the otherwise dark room.

In a few minues: SORRY CANT TONIGHT. WILL SEE YOU TOMORROW THOUGH.;)

He placed the phone on its charger face down on the nightstand, tried to put it out of his head. After a few minutes he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep anytime soon, so he put on his slippers and went quietly to the kitchen to warm a small pan of milk. It was one of his mama’s rituals for helping his father to bed when he’d been sick with cancer and he couldn’t ever rest once the sun was down. Milk with a whole tablespoon of orange blossom honey. Sometimes Kyle could go an entire day without thinking of either one of them, gone now for so many years. Him eight and her six. But then there would be weeks at a stretch that he couldn’t get them off his mind. When he’d come back from Iraq they’d been there for him when everything else in his life had come unsprung. The drugs, the barfights, the ugly divorce from a woman he’d met at an off-base bar in Jacksonville, North Carolina. They’d seen him through all that, brought him home where he could remember who he was before he’d given mind, body, and soul to the Marine Corps. Maybe that’s what the Corps demanded, but when he earned his discharge, surely he was entitled to take back his mind even if the rest was supposed to remain.

Kyle took the milk off the stove and drank it in a steel camping cup, listened for a long time to a barred owl that often liked to take up around the back shed when he came to visit. Heard him keep shouting, “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?” until he flew off. By then, it was well past time to put head to pillow.

The next morning he was up early and made a big breakfast of biscuit and eggs and JFG coffee. He ate his own plate of food and sat there drinking two cups of the coffee until the sun was up. He had resolved overnight to make the old man feel as welcomed as he could, thought the breakfast could be a running start. Despite their differences, he knew it couldn’t have been easy to be put in the old man’s position. He thought too about what Holston had said about his similarity to Gerald. In many ways it wasn’t that hard to see. Each of them had his own way of coming to the truth of things and sticking by what they believed. It was what kept both of them on the commission. People trusted them to see to the best interests of those they represented. But they also set their teeth deep into their ideas and sometimes when others disagreed it was a hell of a lot easier to bite down harder rather than let go. People had a way of remembering things like that too.

When it had gotten to be time to go to work Gerald still wasn’t up. A hell of a thing. Kyle had long thought the old kept the same hours as roosters. His luck to have to take care of one that slept like a teenager. He scraped the eggs, wrapped the biscuits in foil, and carried out the last of his coffee in the Stanley thermos.

He had worked his way through the upper greenhouse and was cataloguing some things in the lower one when Gerald poked his head in the door.

“You got any weed growing around here?” the old man asked, scratched at his chin whiskers.

“No, Gerald. I don’t grow weed.”

“That’s a shame. I figured it might be the time to pick up a new habit.”

“There’s better habits to pick up, I imagine.”

“Yeah? Maybe so. I hear that meth is all the rage these days. They like to put it in books and movies. Preachers and teachers catching on fire when their drug labs explode. That seems like something I could get into. Seems like something that might be enough to distract a man from his immediate concerns.”

“Think so, huh?”

He showed his hands, shrugged. After a minute of staring around at the plants he stepped down and walked the neighboring aisle, peered down at the specimen tabs.

“You take a sudden interest in a botany lesson or are you out here to help?”

“Hell, I’m not above putting in a hand if you think it could be useful. Reach me that clipboard.”

They worked shoulder to shoulder for the better part of the hour, ran the inventory. Pickens took down the species and numbers they needed in terms of transfer and seed. Kyle had known him to have a strong eye for detail, had seen for years how he measured the worth of some proposal or regulation with a bottomless patience for even the most tedious points. His mind remained anchored to whatever held its attention. He never wavered or became distracted. He was serious about things because he understood that a moment’s inattention was all it took to rob you of the essence of something, to miss the subtlety that distinguished this from that. Too much noise, too many competing motives floated a political life, and a man without the ability to cut through it was no more than the people’s fool.

“What is it you think that man Noon is up to?” Kyle asked once they had run the numbers and stood there looking over the rows of plants.

“What he’s up to?”

“Why he didn’t have the DA press charges. Why he’s letting this settle as easy as he is.”

“Hell, he’s not letting a goddamn thing settle. He needs things to be quiet. Why else would you turn somebody loose you had by the short hairs? He wants to make sure nobody is paying attention. That’s what every fascist that ever came down the pike needed. Invisibility. For a little while, at least.”

“I wouldn’t call putting up a Nazi flag invisibility.”

“That’s nothing. That’s lawn decor. He figured there wouldn’t be any problems about that because of how far back he decided to settle in. Hell, what are the chances he’d run into an enlightened soul like myself way back there in the way back. Bad luck for him is all. Now he’s got to find a way to play the peacenik. He’s meaning to install himself somehow. Him forgiving me. Shit. Only forgiveness I need is from Almighty Cthulhu.”

Kyle had heard him go on these atheistic tears before. Shouting about Baptists being the modern-day equivalent of superstitious Neanderthal clans howling and beating their breasts at the sky wizard whenever their crops failed. Gerald had preferred to locate his faith in H.P. Lovecraft’s horrific mythology of the ancients, he said, because at least those stories were interesting, not mere object lessons in dullness.

Kyle told him he was headed up to wash before he ran down to the vets meeting and asked if he needed him to pick anything up while he was out. He said that he was fine, that he could do well enough with nothing here just as well as he could at his own place, then went just outside the greenhouse to take a leak. Kyle shook his head and went on.

In town Kyle stopped off at a couple of places that kept an order of his plants in their garden shops, took notes for restocking, and chatted with the proprietors. He grocery-shopped at the Food City, picked up a bottle of wine because he knew Gerald fashioned himself as a kind of misunderstood backwoods connoisseur and would appreciate the chance to indulge. Perhaps it would be enough to soften his crankiness, though he doubted it.

When he got to the library he recognized several of the vehicles that were already in the parking lot. Trey Buckner was smoking a cigarette with his car door open talking on the phone with someone. He glanced up and cast a brief wave, mouthed “In five,” while he nodded to whatever was being said into his ear. Trey was one of the earliest members of the veterans group and had been to nearly every meeting for the past six years. He ran a car repair place down around Jonesborough and had a couple of foster kids with his wife. He had been an artilleryman in the Army, which explained why he was always leaning in tight with his head dropped during a conversation, his small hearing aid pointed as close as he could get it to the speaker’s mouth.

Once inside, he saw a couple of the other guys getting coffee from the alcove and taking it back to the community room. He went on to the back office where Laura was.

“Right on time,” she said and smiled. After a quick peek to see that no one could see them, she kissed his cheek and held onto his shoulders for a few beats. Once she let him go, they went back to her desk where they could sit and talk without it seeming out of place to anyone. They’d been seeing each other like this for the past six months, and as far as they could tell they had held up innocent appearances. Still, the sneaking around had started to wear on Kyle. It had never been just a matter of fun for either one of them, but he also understood splitting up a marriage wasn’t as simple as a piece of paperwork.

“You need to make some time for me,” he told her.

She balanced her chin on her small fist, studied him through those blue Tennessee eyes. Every bit of her was something he would have loved to eat whole. When she was alone with him like this, he couldn’t help but imagine her as a fairytale damsel and him the wolf.

“You have a way of talking to me that makes me think it’s half love and half hate,” she said.

“I suspect that’s sort of how you like it.”

By her smile, he felt confident he was right.

“You go on in there and talk to the boys. Once you’re done you come back here and we’ll see what there is to see.”

By the time he got his coffee and went back to where the others had already circled up their chairs, he was just about the last one to get in. Only guy he saw missing was Turner Whist.

“Where’s Turner?”

The other men shrugged, said he’d been out of touch for the last couple of weeks as far as they knew. Turner was one of the newest members of the group. An Army Spec who had been riding in the loader’s position of an M1A2 while they were patrolling some outer suburbs of Baghdad less than a week after it had been taken in the first blitz. They’d cleared block after block and were about to head in to the assembly area when they spotted combatants on the rooftops. What appeared to be an RPG team moving in to take a shot from the corner of a near building. His tank commander had pointed the turret hard left and was about to engage with the target, but he had missed the second team getting a fix on the bottlenecked tank from the opposite building. There was the hiss and slight pop as the RPG struck the top of the turret, a munition that failed to detonate. But when Turner had turned to see if his tank commander was all right he saw that the grenade head had bounced and docked the man’s head clean from his shoulders. He did all he knew to do, slammed his hatch shut and pulled the headless body inside while screaming at the driver to reverse.

“Hell, I guess somebody better check on him,” Buckner said. “It’s not too far out of the way for me.”

“No,” Kyle said. “He’s a grown man. If we don’t hear anything between now and the planting day, I’ll go bug him just a little. Now, let’s all figure out a time when we can get these trees put in the ground.”

SHE WAS was helping a patron check out a stack of books on the Civil War when they got done with the meeting. He lingered for a while with some books under his arm, poked through the magazines until she was done and the other woman had come on for the rest of the afternoon. He didn’t need to be told to hang around outside after that.

He cranked the engine when she came out and got in her Nissan, followed her the few miles out to their regular meeting place along the road back to Dennis Cove and pulled up beside her under the shadow of the big oak at the edge of a turnaround. He wished he’d thought to bring a bottle opener so he could have opened the wine, but all he had that could be gotten into was a lukewarm six-pack of beer. He tugged out a couple of bottles from the paper sack and cracked them each open with the hard edge of his house keys by the time she had come around and slid into the passenger’s seat.

“Well,” she said, took one of the beers. “Is this as romantic as you’d hoped?”

He kissed her, arm hooked around her strong shoulders and back.

“Look at you, getting mean with me.”

“Is that what this is? Funny way of acting mean, you ask me.”

They didn’t talk for a while after that. Just tried to swim down into each other. Afterward, they sat looking at the woods, drawing breath until it seemed like it belonged in their throats. They talked of things which held little consequence for a while, worked their way by degrees toward what was always the matter between them.

“I’m guessing you still haven’t said anything to him,” Kyle said.

“No, not yet I haven’t.”

“You wouldn’t be privy to a time line on that subject, by chance?”

Kyle knew the situation well enough to explain all the minute concerns and causes, but that didn’t keep him from wanting to hear it said that she was serious, that she would leave her husband and make an effort toward something permanent with him. He knew too that it was all a case of rehearsal and idle desire on his part. She would have to do certain things on her own, and though he was dissatisfied with standing on the boundaries of her life, there was nothing else he could imagine her allowing.

“I can just go home now if that’s what you’d rather me do,” she told him.

He took a sip of his beer and told her that was the last thing in the world he wanted.

“Okay then. Quit your ugliness.”

He caught himself before an edge worked its way into his words.

“You feel like stretching your legs?” he asked. “There’s a pretty little creek up this way.”

They got out and locked the doors, went up past a lodge and hostel that serviced hikers on the Appalachian Trail and crossed over through a small campsite with a dirt path that hugged the high bank of the creek. A mockingbird flushed and screamed at them. Kyle flapped his arm and told him to go to hell. About a quarter of a mile on they found a big boulder that projected out over a calm clear pool where they could sit and see if anything stirred beneath them. Laura removed her shoes and dangled bare feet that reflected back up at them from the bottom.

“Look, I get it, okay?” she said. “Nobody said breaking up a marriage was meant for the faint of heart.”

“I don’t want you to do something you don’t want to.”

“Is that what you think I’m saying?”

“I don’t know. No. I guess not.”

She took his face in her hands, made him look at her.

“You’ve got to trust me, you know? I haven’t come this far with you for nothing. I love you, Kyle. I’m getting there as fast as I can.”

He told her that he understood, took her close to him, and pressed her against his side as though fitting a broken piece back to its whole. He glanced down. The water beneath them was cradled in ancient stone.