Читать книгу How Fire Runs - Charles Dodd White - Страница 17

8

HARRISON PAID THE MAN AT THE MARINA FORTY DOLLARS TO RENT the jon boat for the day. Said he didn’t need rods or reels because he’d brought his own, though he loaded up only two small coolers and a backpack before he and Delilah climbed aboard and cast off from the dock.

He piloted slowly around a few pontoon boats and a small sailboat riding at anchor before he opened up the throttle and bounced over Watauga Lake, headed away from the swimming area and toward the distant shore with its pines, deadfall, and steep banks. The wind was strong on his face and it dried the sweat as soon as it rose to his skin. He turned his head to see Delilah leaned back in her chair, elbows struck out wide so that her chest rolled forward under the thin wedge of her black bikini top. She saw him looking and smiled.

The first time they’d met in person she smiled like that. Like she withheld something of value beyond estimation. It had worried him then as much as now. Six weeks before they met her brother had been killed after he’d gotten Jesus and decided he didn’t need the other whites inside prison. And then she had turned up to see him, to meet the man who had been nothing more than a signature on a piece of paper. It scared Harrison to think what kind of woman did that. But he realized even then that the things that scared him were exactly what he would need once he was free.

They swung around the back of a scorched-looking island with a line of footprints and a burnt campfire circle and slowed as the lake narrowed into little more than a dark stream, coins of light slotting through the breaks of overarching evergreens. The wind was blocked by the land and now there was a new and immediate world surrounding them. Something spooked from the near bank and Harrison turned to see a beaver slipping from its perch, the water closing over its totemic head. He slowed the engine further so that they made as little noise as possible. He wanted the music of what belonged here, wanted to study it as you would a foreign language.

“You sure you remember how to get where we’re going, baby?” Delilah asked. She trailed one languid hand in the water, carved a slender second wake.

“Yeah, just on a bit further.”

They passed out of the narrow cut and the sun caught them as if they’d been struck. He throttled up and they cleared the next broad opening, passed only a rowboat with a pair of old men fishing and a young woman sitting on a paddleboard watching them. They then entered a second narrowing where the water began to shoal and clouds of minnows attacked their passage. Once he had to push off a bar with the end of a paddle before the water deepened into a clear pool that continued to the backside of the island with its small but empty beach.

Delilah splashed over the side as soon as he cut the engine and ran the bow up on the shore. When she stood near him he could feel the metallic coolness of the lake.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“No. Pretty thirsty though.”

He slid one of the coolers open and handed her a can of Coors Light. He got a bottle of water for himself and laid out two beach towels a few feet up from where the waterline lapped. They stretched out alongside one another on their stomachs, their ears pressed to the warm ground.

“Why’s it taken you this long to bring me out here? You know how much I like sitting in the sun,” she said.

“It hasn’t been long.”

“Seems like it to me. Just sitting around that creepy place all the time.”

“There’s no reason you can’t get out if you want to.”

“There’s plenty of reasons. A couple of them even got names.”

He didn’t like the way she was tending, knew it shaped toward no good end.

“Hey, you’re getting pink around the shoulders,” he told her. “I’m going to put some sunscreen on you.”

He got the tube from the cooler and warmed the cream in his hands before straddling her. She relaxed somewhat under his hands. Behaved in that animal way he knew she thought was attractive. And even now as she gently flexed her tan legs beneath him he could feel the muscles of her ass ride into his pelvis and he began to harden. He rolled off and washed his hands in the chill lake.

“Why you stopping? It was just starting to get interesting.”

“We haven’t got time for that. This is a business trip, remember?”

“Hell, we got half an hour, don’t we? That’s plenty of time for what I’ve got in mind.”

He didn’t let her catch his eye. Instead, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from the backpack and lit one. He didn’t like to smoke anything aside from weed, but he had learned the convenience of tobacco in prison, knew it had a way of carving a segment of space, gave you a place to occupy. He just needed a little time to think, to sift things out.

Too much had happened too quickly. Only eight months earlier he’d been sitting in the correctional facility computer lab, checking job postings open to ex-cons through the state-sponsored release program. And then one of the Aryan brothers, he’d shown him how to bypass the browser’s security settings, directed him to the Storm Front discussion threads. A new world opened with a single mouse click. There were men on the outside who needed help establishing new communities, who were willing and able to set people like him up on the outside, who saw their convict status not as a stain but as an asset. Inside, he had no choice but to belong among the whites, with their swastikas, sieg heils, and Ghost Face Gangsters. It was simply membership and a matter of protection within those walls. He hadn’t felt himself change when he joined, not his truest self. How would it be any different on the outside?

It was different, of course. He soon realized that. Gavin Noon had not been what he expected. At first, he had been unable to determine what bothered him about this man who was offering him a chance at a new life. But then it became clear. He was not a man of violence, not in the way the others were. Gavin was a coordinator, a theorist. His interests were conceptual and measured, attached to ideas rather than memories, and Harrison could think of nothing more dangerous than that.

Delilah sunk her empty beer can in the water and went to the cooler to get another.

“You want one?”

“Yeah, reach me a can out.”

She placed it in the sand beside him, let her hand stray to the back of his neck. Her palm remained there like it was something she meant to grow in place. He wanted to say something to her, something that she could carry away and understand, but he knew that was impossible. Unlike Gavin, Delilah was full of the hurt that had brought her here. Hurt from when her brother had been killed in prison and hurt again when she’d found what was supposed to be a sanctuary in this fantasy of Little Europe. She had been drawn to him because she’d thought him strong. He had needed her to think that, so he’d done his best to make it true, though he had learned that what was true yielded so quickly to what was not.

He heard the approach of jet skis and walked out to the wooded point of the island to see them coming on, a pair of men with women tightly hugging their backs as they raced across the placid green water. They swung around and entered the channel, their engines going silent as they neared the beach. The man in the lead, short but muscled in bright orange board shorts and Oakley sunglasses, swung a leg over the side and came within a few feet of Delilah, stood over her, dripping.

“Howdy, darling. You wouldn’t know a man by the name of Harrison now, would you?”

“I might.”

He laughed, wiped his forearm across his jaw.

“He must favor a smartass then, if you’re any indication. He here or not?”

Harrison came forward from the tree line.

“He is. He may even have a set of ears on him.”

“Glad to hear it. I was worried you’d gotten shy on me.”

“Nope. Looks like you’re missing something in your hand though.”

The man laughed again, went back out to the jet ski where his blonde girlfriend handed him a bulky envelope sealed in a Ziploc bag. He opened the seal and counted out five hundred-dollar bills, laid them there on the beach towel next to Delilah’s feet.

“A gift for your little redneck mermaid then.”

Delilah picked up the cash and folded it into the cleavage of her top. Harrison fished the weed out of the backpack and set it on the beach.

“That’s a pile of fun right there,” the man said as he sat down in the sand and slit a Case knife blade up the plastic seam. “Come on, everbody. A party of one ain’t no party at all.”

The other three came out of the water and joined him. The other man from the jet ski had a small glass pipe. He was fat and had a permanent scowl. His woman giggled when she plopped down so hard it looked like it hurt. She grabbed the pipe, packed it and they each took a hit.

“Pretty fucking solid, brother. I’ll have to say I didn’t really know what to expect. You mind sharing some of those beers? We’re fresh out.”

“Sure. We’re about to leave anyhow.”

“Come on now,” the man said. “Why is it I get the feeling you two think we smell bad? We just come up here and dropped half a grand and you don’t even want to spend a little fellowship. That seems decidedly uncharitable.”

Harrison had already seen the shape of a revolver tucked in between the man’s shorts and life vest. He gathered the beers and handed them over.

“Get yourself a couple,” the man told him. “You and the mermaid both. Maybe she’ll loosen up a little bit with a touch of lubricant in her.”

The girls tittered.

“She’s fine. I told you that we’re both fine.”

“Boy, the way you say it seems more like you’re telling me to go fuck myself. What do you think, Taylor? Am I imagining it or does it sound like this wayfaring stranger is telling me to fuck myself?”

The one called Taylor grunted, pawed at the sand. Harrison picked a beer for himself and squatted a few feet away from the others, sipped and waited.

“That’s better. I feel relaxed now. I don’t feel like I’m being rushed. A terrible thing for a man to feel his leisure is rushed.”

The man took a deep toke from the pipe before passing it along. Harrison wondered how long the man had stood in front of a mirror working on his hardboiled personality. Every gesture and word like something he’d gathered from a pulp paperback. He’d seen what happened to men like that, men who acted as though the force of their bluster would make up for their lack of attention, their failure of intelligence.

“I’ve noticed something about you,” the man said.

“You have?”

“Yessir. I’ve noticed your eyes. They don’t look like the eyes of someone who lets much get by him.” He reached down and patted the grip of the pistol. “I saw that you noticed the old hog leg here just as soon as I stepped up on the beach. But you acted like you didn’t notice it. Didn’t want me to know that you knew. I find that pretty interesting. I find it interesting that you’d still stand there and act like you were the one in charge of how things were going to transpire despite the fact that you knew I was holding the cards that mattered. That tells me you’re pretty confident. Tells me you think you don’t have too much in this world that gives you any concerns. And I’ll tell you, that makes me think you’re a dangerous man. The kind of man that makes me think it was a prudent idea to come out here toting a piece in the first place.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, sounds like.”

The man smiled, shifted so that he could draw the handgun from his waist and set it in the sand beside him.

“I don’t mean nothing by that,” the man said. “I just want to sit here and be comfortable. I hope you don’t mind?”

“I’m just sitting here.”

“That’s true. You are just sitting here. Not a troubled thought in the world, I’ll bet. You look like somebody who may have spent plenty of time sitting and waiting. Probably know the inside of a small room pretty well, huh?”

“You got a point you want to make?”

“I’m just getting to know my friendly drug dealer. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? I’m a friend to the working man. There’s no reason why people can’t discover common ground across class lines.”

The man showed a small file of hygienic teeth.

Harrison cut his eyes to Delilah, told her to get their stuff in the boat. She bunched the towels and began to load the remaining cooler. Harrison slipped the backpack over his shoulder and turned to go. He was already walking when he heard the footsteps of the man behind him, heard him exclaim, “Now hold on, you goddamn dumb redneck . . .”

Harrison pivoted and grabbed the man’s wrist above the pistol, twisted down sharply so that the gunman lurched over Harrison’s planted foot. They went to the ground hard with Harrison on top, the pistol kicked loose. Delilah was there within a moment, holding the gun on the others who were mute with shock. Harrison pinned the man between his legs and rained down half a dozen quick punches on the man’s unguarded face. The man’s eyes went distant and sleepy with concussion. Harrison stopped when his hands began to register hurt, sat there over the unmoving lump while he leveled his breath.

“Was this worth it? Was this fun for you all?” Harrison shouted to the others. Though they did not answer, he took their silence to mean they thought it was not. He grabbed the pistol from Delilah and tossed the remaining cooler into the boat, started the engine and wheeled out of the channel and around to the island’s point. As they passed he could see that Taylor and the two women remained sitting where they were, looking at the fallen man but afraid to approach him, as if his condition was somehow communicable. Harrison tossed the handgun in the water and throttled up. The bow rose.

“You could have killed him,” Delilah said into his ear so she could be heard above the noise of the engine.

He nodded.

She kissed him at the back of his neck, put her hand over his sun-cooked thigh.

“I wish you would have.”

WHEN THEY returned to the compound some of the men had dragged a big Weber grill around to the side and were grilling ribeyes and tight cylinders of corn in aluminum foil. The smoke moved over the big back lot. Jonathan stood sweating over the flames with a long fork, stabbing the cuts and flipping them over every few seconds.

“That smells good,” Delilah said.

“You go ahead and get you some,” Harrison told her.

“You don’t want to eat?”

“I’m going to go lay down for a while. You’re hungry, though. I’ll be down there in a little bit, don’t worry.”

Harrison kissed her briefly and went up to their room. He could feel her watching his back as he left.

He stripped out of his clothes and washed himself with a cloth and a bowl of water that had been left out on the pine dresser. Pulled on a clean T-shirt and a pair of torn but laundered jeans. He took out the two hundred he needed, folded it into his hip pocket and returned the rest to the envelope he would take to Gavin. Somebody had turned a radio on outside and he heard Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson singing about their many reincarnations and lawless deeds. He went to the window and looked down. Delilah had moved in among the circle of others, one hand on her hip, the other holding a can of Bud. She seemed to fit there as exactly as though she had been cut to form.

He lay down and closed his eyes, let his mind reel free. Before he realized it he was asleep and dreaming of a kinder life.