Читать книгу Among the Dead and Dreaming - Samuel Ligon - Страница 16

9

Burke

I didn’t want to believe she done it and didn’t believe it, but the suspicion would creep up on me, the guiding hand turning my head to something I didn’t want to look at, things she said or how she said them, like the fact that there wasn’t no Oak Bluff, Illinois, at least not according to Rand McNally, though maybe I heard it wrong, because I knew she loved him and would love me, too, especially with him gone and me the person most like him in the world. But then it seemed like she just wanted to push me away—maybe because she was still so hurt, I couldn’t tell. And I didn’t know how to test it without pushing her further, which I didn’t want to do. She was all I had and wanted in the world.

I told her that a few days later, that she was all I had and wanted in the world, and she said, “You don’t know me,” and I said, “I know you,” and she said, “But you don’t. And I can’t keep talking like this. I’ve got work to do.”

Knowing how much they loved one another, it didn’t make sense that she wouldn’t want to rekindle it. That she’d deny me. “I just want to share memories,” I said. “Of Cash and the two of y’all together.”

She held her tongue.

“It’ll help the both of us,” I said, and she said, “I want to get past all that.”

I couldn’t half believe she’d deny him now, everything they’d been through, everything I’d been through for them. Didn’t she realize she never could have had him in the first place if it wasn’t for me doing his time? I knew there’d been trouble between them, sure, but there was two sides to all that lovesick talk in his address book. And pictures don’t lie, the way they’d moon over one another.

“You’d be surprised how alike we are,” I said. “But, remember, I’m the older, so you’ll come to realize, looking back, that it was always me you was seeing in him. You’ll come to realize I was always the one—”

“I can’t do this,” she said. “I just can’t do it,” and she hung up the phone!

I called her back and she said it again, that she couldn’t do it, and I said, “What about my hurt?” and she said she knew, she knew, but she couldn’t help me now.

“How about I call back in a few days,” I said, and she said, no, no, she didn’t want to talk. She needed space. She was hurting too much.

“When then?” I said.

Nothing but her scratchy breathing.

“I got to see you,” I said.

“No,” she said.

I felt her slipping the same way Cash felt her slipping—how easy it was for her to disappear—and I said, “How come you never talked to the cops about what happened? How come they didn’t track you down?”

“How would I know?” she said.

“How come you didn’t go to them then?”

“I don’t have to answer to you,” she said. “Or anyone. I’m sure Cash told you that, too—that I don’t answer to anyone—so if you think for one goddamn minute. . . .”

I pulled the phone from my face, her awful sounds coming through the receiver into the air of my mother’s kitchen. I think that’s what sealed it more than anything, just the mouth on her—that queen bitch tone—like I was less than nothing, and she’d just been putting up with me in my time of pain and suffering. That goddamn filthy mouth on her.

I lowered my mother’s phone to the cradle, holding everything tight, and stood from the table, pouring myself a cup of coffee with Jack on top. I walked my mother’s house and tried to hold myself together.

The way she pretended not to know me, not to know Cash, fed this burning in me, hot and fast. But I didn’t want to believe, even though I could feel how off she was in her voice. I didn’t want to know, even though the guiding hand was trying to show me. So I fought it, the last time I fought it, because of what it proved to me over the next few hours and days, and then I never fought it again.

I knew the only way was to test her. And if she was true and it hurt her, we’d get over the hurt together and I’d make everything right. But if she wasn’t true . . . I knew I’d feel so stupid for not knowing all along—what I learned at Huntsville—that it’s almost always somebody close that’ll kill you, my wasted worry nearly blinding me, the way she could turn on me after all my sorrow.

I poured another drink and dialed again. She answered and I sprung the test, because there was no other way to know for sure. “I know you killed Cash,” I told her with gravel in my voice, praying it wasn’t true as I placed the phone on the cradle, still trying to hold everything in.

I took a drink and then another, trying to calm myself. I still didn’t know anything, even as I was starting to know in my heart, everything she took from him and me, everything clear and burning, shown by the hand. It was all too sloppy to be a Mexican drug gang. They would have made goddamn good and sure he was dead. The fact that she never went to the cops, never went to the funeral. All the lovesick talk in his address book. How she was probably using my sorrow against me. That was the worst of it.

I called again, praying I was wrong, but finishing what I started, already two steps ahead of myself, because if she was involved, I’d have to learn her level of fear—if she’d go to the cops, if she had a man who’d try to track me.

“I’ve been in prison fifteen years,” I told her, “thinking about you. Cash told me who to look for.”

She tried to interrupt and I told her to shut up. “I don’t care for the cops,” I told her, “but I’ll go to them if I have to. I’ll call them right now. I know you killed him.”

I listened to her breathe, a sort of hiss, like air from a tire, and I waited, letting out rope in the silence.

“What is it you want exactly?” she finally said in this muted, broken voice.

I felt the beginning of my release, every muscle in my body settling, even as I felt the burning.

“Is it money?” she said, the guiding hand of fate fingering her once and for all and forever as the killer.

I was blind for a second before everything became red ringed and perfectly clear in the center.

“What is it you want?” she kept whispering. “What is it you want?”

“What do you got?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” she said, crying and sniffling, but trying to stay quiet, trying to hide it.

“I guess you’d rather talk to the Austin police,” I said. “Or the Rangers.”

“No,” she said, and then: “Ten thousand.”

As if there’d never been a thing between us.

I hung up on her. Called back.

“Twenty thousand,” she said. “Please.”

I hung up and let her stew. Days passed as the hand worked out what would become of her.

“Let’s start with an even fifty,” I finally told her.

But money would never be enough. There’d have to be other payment too, worked out by the hand. I looked at her pictures in the Goat at night—waking up, it felt like, coming back to life after all my wasted years. I gave Billy one week notice and bought a plane ticket to John F. Kennedy airport, figuring I’d wing it until I spent some time with her. Now that I knew what she’d done to Cash, her betrayal and denial, I felt good doing right by him and our mother. It was like I could finally breathe on the outside free—a pure, true instrument of the hand.