Into the Web (8 page)

I shrugged. “I’m a schoolteacher, Lonnie, not a policeman. I don’t know how to go about this sort of thing.”

“It’s just a little snooping around, that’s all,” Lonnie replied dismissively. “But I can make it official if you want me to.” He pulled out the top drawer of his desk and plucked something from among a scattering of pads, pencils, and paper clips.

“Here you go,” he said as he handed a badge to me.

I didn’t take it. “I haven’t agreed to this,” I said.

“Look, Roy, you’d be doing a favor for Lila. Because if you go up there and ask a few questions, then I won’t need to keep her down here with me anymore.”

Lila’s voice sounded in my ear, reminding me of the
plunge I’d once been willing to take for her, along with her certainty that I would never do such a thing again.

I glanced at the badge. “You’d let her go now?”

“I sure would,” Lonnie said. He smiled. “Now raise your right hand.”

When I’d finished, he shook my hand. “Congratulations, Deputy Slater,” he said with a laugh. “And welcome to the exciting world of law enforcement.”

O
ne thing was certain: I had no idea how to investigate anything. But I’d read a few detective stories over the years, and so I merely imitated what I thought a fictional sleuth would do, and went back to the place where Clayton Spivey’s body had been found, in the hope that I might stumble upon something Lonnie had failed to notice.

The deeply shaded ground still bore the imprint of the body’s dead weight, but nothing else. Lonnie had already collected whatever evidence he could find-the rifle, the shells, the rectangular cardboard box that had contained them.

Glancing here and there, I noticed nothing at all, until suddenly I glimpsed a second body.

It lay near the bank of the creek, and as I moved
closer, I saw that it was a dove, its head shot off, the decaying body swarming with black ants.

Not far above, in a fork among the limbs, its nest rested, fully exposed, in dappled light.

The nest was empty now, but for a moment I imagined the dove curled inside its frail circle of twigs, peering down at Clayton Spivey, watching as he opened the ammunition box, drew out a single shell. I could see where one bullet had grazed the nest’s supporting limb. Another had left a neat round hole in a gently swaying leaf. A third had actually penetrated the left side of the nest, through barely, merely grazing it enough to blow away a few twigs.

Through it all the dove had sat, strapped down by instinct, motionless, unable to take flight as is always the case with nesting doves, and waited for Spivey finally to steady his aim enough to put a bullet through its head.

“Afternoon, mister.”

I turned and saw an old man a few feet away. He was clothed in overalls and a flannel shirt, both coated with the region’s red dust. He’d tugged his hat from his head before speaking to me, and now held it with both hands, a gesture common to the people of Waylord.

“Name’s Crenshaw,” the man said. “Nate Crenshaw. I live up the creek a ways.”

He was not threatening in any way and yet a threat seemed to rest between us like a pistol on a gaming table.

“You the law?” he asked.

It struck me with some relief that in fact I was. I took out the badge. “Roy Slater.” I nodded toward where the
body had lain. “It was Clayton Spivey we found here. I guess you heard about that.”

Crenshaw continued to watch me warily. “Yeah, I heard about it.”

“Did you know him?”

The old man shook his head. “Not much, no. He sure run into a patch of bad luck, didn’t he?”

Bad luck.

It was the same phrase my father had always used to gather into one pile a vast array of disasters. Children drowned because of bad luck. Babies died of whooping cough and meningitis for the same reason. When men went to prison or were crushed in collapsing mines, bad luck was the culprit. Women dead in childbirth, or ground down by labor. Bad luck. Once, when I’d asked my father why he’d left Waylord, he’d simply shrugged and said, “Too much bad luck up there.”

“I seen Clayton sometimes,” Crenshaw added. “Not too often though. He wasn’t too sociable. Lived out in the woods. By hisself.”

“How’d he make a living?”

Crenshaw shrugged. “He swapped things. He wasn’t in good enough shape to work regular.” “Did he have any friends?”

“He visited Lila Cutler from time to time. She let him stay in that little shack on her land. Felt sorry for him, I guess.”

“Was that their only connection?” I asked. “That he lived on her property?”

Crenshaw nodded. “Far as I know. Never heard Lila say there was anything else to it. ’course, Lila’s quiet.”

But the girl I remembered sang along with the band
when we danced, hummed continually, called loudly to me from her seat in a darkened theater or the crowded assembly hall at school or one of the wooden bleachers that lined the football field, her arm in the air, waving energetically.
Over here, Roy.

“She was lively when I knew her,” I said. “In high school.”

“Maybe so,” Crenshaw said. He eyed the stream briefly, turning something over in his mind. “Clayton was out hunting, I guess,” he said, nodding toward the dove’s body.

“I suppose he was.”

Crenshaw walked to the edge of the creek, picked up a stick, and dipped it gently into the water. “Hunting like a feller that’s hungry.”

He drew the stick from the water, considered its wet tip, then lowered it back into the stream, moving its tip in ever-tightening circles over the surface of the water.

“Like a feller that ain’t got time to wait for a deer or a rabbit. Because he’s hungry. Needs whatever he can get.”

“Was Clayton Spivey that poor?” I asked.

Crenshaw tossed the stick into the creek. “Must have been, or he wouldn’t have been shooting at no dove.” His eyes drifted up toward the shattered nest. “A dove won’t fly, you know. Just sets there till you shoot it.” He continued to peer at the nest, looking more and more puzzled as the seconds passed. Finally he shook his head slowly, as if giving in to the mystery of things. “Maybe that’s why Clayton was after it. ’Cause he was too weak to go after nothing else.”

I looked at the dove, her bloodied feathers alive with ants. “Lila told me that he was sick. Was he dying?”

“Heard he was, yes, sir.”

“What of?”

“Black lung.”

Then I knew exactly what had happened to Clayton Spivey, the sudden seizure that had overtaken him, driving him first to his knees, then forward, pressing his face against the ground, blood rising like a geyser in his throat.

“Ain’t no cure once you got it,” Crenshaw added.

No cure, and nothing to do but wait until the moment comes for you to drown in your own blood.

And, I thought, case closed.

I was almost halfway down the mountain when I saw another house sweep into view, one Lila had taken me to many years before and which I associated with her so powerfully, she seemed almost to appear in my car as I neared the building once again, a red-haired girl sitting at my side as she had that day. “Pull in there, Roy,” she’d said, pointing to a rutted driveway, “I want you to meet my second mother.”

Her name was Juanita Her-Many-Horses, and I’d thought her ancient, though she’d certainly been no more than forty-five at that time, her skin still smooth and brown, with deep-set eyes that shone darkly, like her hair, her features as Indian as her last name.

“You’re a good-looking boy,” she’d said when I came to a halt before her. “You and Lila going steady now?”

“Yes, ma’am, we are.”

More than twenty years had passed since that day, and I suppose I could easily have continued on past the old house. I’d done it only the day before, when Lonnie and I had made our way up to Lila’s home. But now the past was a rope stretched out to me, tugging me back toward those long-forgotten days.

“Don’t want no Bibles,” she called as I got out of my car. “Got all the Bibles I need already.”

“I’m not selling Bibles,” I called back.

“Don’t want no medicines neither.”

“I’m not selling anything,” I assured her, then made my way toward where she sat beneath the shade of a large elm, cooling herself with a paper fan that bore a figure of Jesus in flowing robes.

She dug in her lap for a pair of glasses. “You come from down around, I bet.”

Down around.
The name she’d always given to the valley that lay below her.

“You don’t remember me, Juanita? I’m Roy Slater.”

Her eyes flashed in recognition. “You the one from down around. Went with Lila way back when.”

“Yes.”

She smiled widely, revealing gaps in her teeth. “You come plenty of times that summer.”

A bright hot summer, the cool streams our only relief, Lila in her cutoff jeans and a white blouse knotted at the waist. I’d come so often, Lila such a fire in my mind, that Archie had teased me about it.
Speeding the way you do, that girl will be the death of you, Roy.
By then he’d been hardly less smitten than I was, his passionate attention so firmly settled upon Gloria Kellogg, he’d seemed unable to think of anything else.

Juanita Her-Many-Horses nodded thoughtfully. “You the one that went off to school. And never come back for Lila.”

“She told me not to,” I said softly.

Juanita glanced over to where a pigsty rested in a dense cloud of stink a hundred yards away. Near its center, an enormous sow lay in the steamy mud, swarms of greenflies rising each time it shifted or twitched its flanks, then descending again, to feed on the muck that surrounded it.

“Call him Amos and Andy,” Juanita said with a laugh when she noticed me looking at the pig. “ ’Cause he done already big enough for two. Call him Amos for short.”

I nodded toward a stack of cinder blocks opposite her. “Mind if I sit with you a few minutes?”

“Don’t mind, no,” Juanita said. “You seen Lila since you been back?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Seen her go down the road this morning.” “She went to Kingdom City. She should be back soon.”

“How come she went down there?”

“To identify a body,” I answered. “Clayton Spivey. He died over on Jessup Creek. They found him in the woods yesterday.”

Juanita considered this for a moment. “Guess they’ll be burying him right soon. Can’t go to the funeral though. Ain’t got the energy for it. You come to help Lila some way?”

“No, I was just on my way back down the mountain. I came up to check a few things out. For the sheriff.”

Juanita grimaced. “Don’t like that sheriff.”

“No one up here does,” I said.

“ ’Cause of his daddy,” Juanita said. “The old sheriff. ’Cause of the way he done people way back when. Always going up and down the road in that big car of his.”

I turned toward the road and saw Wallace Porterfield as I thought Juanita Her-Many-Horses must have seen him years before, huge and weighty behind the wheel of his cruiser, prowling the roads of Waylord like a ravenous wolf. “Always looking for bad things on people. You must of heard that.”

“Why would I have heard it?”

“ ’Cause he was looking for dirt on Lila’s mama.”

“When was this?”

“That summer you was coming up to see Lila. Done it all summer. All fall. Didn’t stop till winter. Guess he figured he couldn’t find nothing on her, so he just give up.” She looked at me shrewdly. “Or maybe he just figured she already had trouble enough. What with Lila going through all that trouble, you know, because of your brother. Them killings.”

The dark hedge that bordered County Road surfaced in my mind, the lights from my car cruising down it until they reached Archie’s old Ford.

“Anyway, the sheriff never asked me about Betty after that. Just let her be, didn’t come asking no more.”

“He never came again after the murders?”

“Not to me, he didn’t,” Juanita said. “Guess he got what he was after. Or figured he never would.”

I
t was only midday when I reached the outskirts of Kingdom City, my mind now focused on the abruptly foreshortened lives that my conversation with Juanita Her-Many-Horses had conjured up again. Archie’s, of course, but also the two people who’d been murdered on that catastrophic night, a man and woman who’d seemed old to me then, already halfway to the grave despite the fact that at the time of their deaths Horace and Lavenia Kellogg had been scarcely older than I was now.

I knew that Mrs. Kellogg had had no time to consider her death as the bullet pierced the back of her skull. Only her husband, shot repeatedly, might have glimpsed the years that were being blasted from him as the bullets struck his arm, his leg, the small of his back.

There were hours to kill before sunset, and I had no idea how to kill them. I might stroll through town, of
course, chat with the few people who still recognized me from the old days. But those chance meetings had always left me with a lingering unease. Even in the warmest smiles, or couched within the most casual exchanges, I saw and heard a question that went unasked, the one about Archie:
Why did he do it, Roy?

And so I didn’t go back to Kingdom City that afternoon. Instead, I revisited the old fishing spots and swimming holes to which Archie and I had so often gone.

At Calvin Pond I remembered Archie in his blond innocence, able to pluck dragonflies from the air as if they floated on it languidly, like feathers. He would hold them by the wings, turn them slowly, studying the shifting iridescent colors of their bodies in the sunlight,
See how they go rainbow.

On Fulton Creek, I recalled him with a cane pole, a cork bobbing in the water. He’d always claimed that a “big one” lurked along the shadowy embankment, named the trout Cecil, and sworn that one day he’d yank it from the water, then hunker down and eat it raw, “like bobcats do.”

Late in the afternoon, I stood alone on Saddle Rock, the huge granite slab where Archie and I had made camp on the night we’d finally run away. By sundown we’d gotten no more than five miles from home. As darkness fell, we climbed onto the rock, then plopped down on the single blanket we called our “bedroll,” and prepared to wait out the night.