Читать книгу How Fire Runs - Charles Dodd White - Страница 15

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KYLE CHECKED IN ON GERALD EVERY COUPLE OF DAYS ONCE HE’D LET him cool off for a week and then taken him back to his place across from Gavin Noon and his followers. He took no particular pleasure in the roles of spy and nursemaid, but didn’t care to entertain the possibility of another of the old man’s ideas about ammunition and its application to ideological difference. Kyle had made him promise to get him on the phone if he felt any risky impulses coming on. He had him hand over all of his rifles for the next couple of months too, though there was no depriving him of his pistols. That would have been like pulling a man’s healthy teeth, Gerald had said, and Kyle knew he was lucky to have gotten the concession he had.

After he was satisfied the old man was well disposed, he drove the truckload of seedlings to Buckhorn Ridge where the rest of the veterans group was meeting him. Trey Buckner helped him unload while a few of the others started digging where they were told. This was the tail end of the project on the ridge, and Kyle was proud to see it working as well as it did, as much for the men as the countryside. Orlynne had been the one to come up with the plan—having the veterans work through their trauma by putting their hands in the ground.

“One thing I’ve learned about menfolk,” she had said, “is that the only way they ever give a damn for another’s hurting is if they work together a little while. Realize they have that little bit of suffering in common before they get into anything more. Stubborn sonsabitches to a one.”

It hadn’t taken much convincing the next time the group met. The bad counterfeit of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting had begun to wear on nearly every one of them. So Kyle had advanced the project to the county commissioner board in order to get access to the reforestation initiative that was coordinated with the state. Surveying the marked rows of small trees going all the way back to the newest seedlings that were being planted, he could see the time up here had been put to good use. The other men agreed.

A little before noon they put the last of the seedlings in and dug into Kyle’s Yeti cooler for a cold can of either beer or Coke.

“Looking pretty damn snazzy, you ask me,” Trey said, surveying the bristling ranks.

“It’ll be an awful nice place to picnic up here in a few years,” Kyle agreed. “Deer are going to love it too. Good way to run down to the valley and still keep cover.”

Trey bottomed his can of soda, crushed it under his foot and tossed the disc in the truck bed.

“You noticed who was missing out here today, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “I did. I’ll run out that way to check on him. Due diligence and all.”

“I don’t mind going out there with you. Turner can be a special kind of pain in the ass at times.”

“No, that’s fine,” Kyle said. “Special kinds of pain in the ass seem to have become my specialty lately.”

TURNER WHIST lived at the back end of a family hollow that could have been split up and sold to a real estate developer for a couple of million dollars, but unlike so many the Whists had kept the property together even if family relations had run as thin as the drought-starved creek you had to cross when you went over the bridge.

Kyle drove up past Turner’s oldest brother’s place and then past some of the cabins tenanted by his cousins and other distantly connected kin. At each bend, the walls of the mountains nudged in a bit closer, closed much of what was left of the sun, so that by the time he could see Turner’s doublewide set back in the deepest pocket, everything in sight lay in a muted blue shadow.

He got out and talked to the geriatric Plott hound that came and licked his hand before it settled back under the house that lacked an underpinning. The dog’s ribs were as plain as an anatomical diagram. No one came to the porch to see who had come even though he waited a good couple of minutes before he knocked hard enough to rattle the door in its frame.

Turner’s wife Melanie finally answered. She had her boy on her hip. Too big to be carried around like that, Kyle knew.

“Hey, Kyle.”

“Hey yourself.”

She was a good decade younger than Turner, which meant she couldn’t have been much past legal drinking age. Short yellow hair and skin that looked like it had been pulled too tight for too long. The kind of face that might have been called handsome a generation ago but now would most likely be considered hard. A face that held no happy future.

“I think you’ve got something I’ve been missing,” he said.

“Missing, huh?”

“Yeah, that husband of yours. Is he around?”

“Guess that depends on what you mean by around. He’s here, though.”

“You mind if I step inside and talk to him a minute?”

She watched him for a while, said nothing. Her boy stared on with empty eyes.

“Shit,” she said. “What could it hurt?”

She went back to the couch with the boy and let Kyle close the door himself. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light he could see the domestic congestion—the dirty laundry, the chldren’s toys, the erratic scrum of everything else.

“He’s back in the bedroom if you’re sure you want to talk to him.”

Kyle said that he did and went back, stood at the end of the hall listening for anything on the other side of the thin door. He tapped lightly, spoke Turner’s name. When he heard an answer he stepped in.

The room, like the rest of the house, had no electric light. Turner was a vague shape sitting atop the unmade bed, limned by the soft strokes of lingering daylight through the blinds. Kyle’s hand instinctively went to the light switch but the bulb didn’t burn though he flipped it up and down a couple of times.

“Shut off a couple of weeks ago,” Turner told him.

Kyle found a place on a recliner that faced him, wedged in between low piles of sour-smelling clothes.

“She tell you about the job?”

“No,” Kyle said. “She hadn’t told me anything. I just came up here to check on you. The rest of the group, they’ve been missing you.”

“Missing me? I kind of find that hard to believe. Most of them can’t stand the sight of me.”

“That’s not true. You don’t know what other people think of you. No one ever really does.”

If he accepted that point of wisdom, he did so without comment.

“How long you been closed up in here in the dark like this, Turner?”

“Been a while.”

“Couple of days?”

“More than that.”

“A week?”

Turner’s shoulders made some kind of movement that Kyle took to be a shrug.

“You got a weapon in the house?”

“Yeah. I got a couple of deer rifles in the closet.”

“That all?”

He hesitated before he reached a handgun out from beneath the pillow he was sitting against, placed it on a wadded sheet.

“I’m going to come take that from you now, okay?”

“Yeah.”

Kyle took the handgun and slipped it into his waistband at the small of his back, then knocked around in the closet until he’d collected both of the rifles.

“Be careful,” Turner said. “They’re loaded.”

“Nothing else in here I need to be concerned about, is there?”

“No, not now.”

“I’ll be back here in a minute, okay?”

“Yeah.”

Kyle left the bedroom door ajar before he went back to the front of the house. His voice was shaking despite his trying to keep it quiet when he talked to Melanie.

“Don’t you think you could have called somebody?” he said hoarsely.

“With what?” she spat back. “Telephone bills don’t pay themselves. Nothing around here does. There’s not enough gas in the tank to get as far as the highway.”

“You all live right out here with another half a dozen families in walking distance.”

“Yeah, well, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I go to any of them uppity motherfuckers playing white trash.”

“They’re his family, for Christ’s sake.”

Her laugh was even and mean.

“You don’t understand shit, do you?”

“No,” he said, “I guess maybe I don’t.”

HE CALLED and got the deputies out to execute the welfare check and have Turner transported to the hospital psychiatric unit for twenty-four hours observation. After that, they’d just have to play it by ear, but maybe changing up his meds would help. He hoped to God so. He asked Turner if he could come by and check in with him once he got settled. Turner said that that would be fine before the deputies took him out of the hollow in the back of their car.

Melanie cussed at him for a while after her husband had been taken, but when Kyle told her he would give her a ride to somewhere she might be able to stay until things were all right she told him to wait while she packed a few things. She had a sister over in Kingsport she wouldn’t mind seeing.

It was dark by the time he got home. Dark but the house was not empty. As he topped the final rise of the drive he saw Laura’s car parked down by the greenhouse. When he pulled in beside he saw her walk down from the front porch.

“I’d about given up on you,” she told him, encircled his neck with her arms.

“What are you doing here?”

“You want me to leave?”

“I didn’t say that.”

They kissed. The night paused.

“I can’t stay, you know. He expects me back.”

“You got time for a drink?”

“A glass of wine if you’ve got any.”

He told her she was in luck and led her to the house. She sat in the living room thumbing through a couple of Oxford American magazines while he uncorked a Côte du Rhône and poured it out in a pair of water tumblers. As they drank they sat there listening to the ticking of the old tall clock. She got up to study it.

“Did you grow up with this?” she asked.

“I did. It was a wedding gift to my parents. My father’s mother gave it to them. Hell of a gift to give somebody considering they didn’t have a house to put it in at the time. But there it was. Had to haul it around from three different places that weren’t much more than shacks before he finally got the money to build this place.”

“I like the sound it lends to a house,” she said. “Makes things seem more permanent. When I was growing up everything was just drywall and shag carpet. Seemed like we were being moved around like luggage through our own lives. I could see how it wore my mama down. I did. My dad didn’t, but I did. He never cared about a house. To him it was just a place you went when you were done working selling tires. I think that’s why I was in such a hurry to get out on my own. I love my parents, but by god I think I’d lose my mind if I ever became them.”

He came up behind her and held her shoulders. She eased beneath the weight of his hands. Together they listened to the steadfast sound of what had once been unwanted.