Into the Web (10 page)

“No, I’m going to hang around for a while, Dad,” I told him. “Does it bother you that much, having me around?”

“Suit yourself,” he said absently, then added, “Hey, you didn’t happen to buy some cigarettes while you was out, did you?”

I sat down on the top step. “I’ll get you some in the morning.”

“In the morning, right.”

His tone instantly rankled me with its suggestion that I knew nothing of what a man needed to make it through the night.

“I’m not going back into town tonight, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I told him. “Not for cigarettes or anything else.”

“Who asked you to, Roy? I can do without ’em. Besides, if I wanted cigarettes, I’d get ’em myself.”

“I wouldn’t advise it.”

Now it was my father’s turn to bristle. “‘I wouldn’t advise it,’” he repeated prissily. “That all you learned in college, Roy? To talk that way. Like old Miss Danforth, that damn old bitch I had. ’A
kid
is a
goat,’
she used to say. ‘It
ain’t
children.’ Always strutting around. With her nose in the air like us kids stunk up the schoolhouse. ‘Can’t’ means ‘ain’t able to,’ she used to say, ‘may’ means ‘could I do it if you let me.’ Damn old bitch. Thought she was better than us. Come up from Kingdom City to teach us poor, hopeless little bastards how to talk right. You remind me of her.”

I started to reply, but he waved me into silence.

“But hell, it wouldn’t have mattered how that damn old bitch talked to me. I wouldn’t have stayed in school nohow. Didn’t have no use for it. Couldn’t see how it would do me no good.”

To break the silence that fell between us, I told him, “I stopped by the old ball field this evening. Holbrook was playing Kingdom City.”

“Be a wonder if either one of them got a single run. Squirts, far as I can see in the paper.”

“When was the last time you went to a game?”

He leaned forward and spat into the yard. “Years.”

“You came a few times back when I was a kid,” I reminded him. “To see Archie play.”

“Archie wasn’t bad,” my father said. “Hit fairly good.” A tiny smile flickered. “You ’member that night he hit that homer against Waylord?”

I was surprised that my father remembered it, although I recalled vividly how the ball had sailed upward and upward, made its high, graceful arc over center field, brought the crowd roaring to its feet as my brother rounded the bases.

“Yeah, I do.”

I’d glanced up into the bleachers as Archie loped toward second base, expecting to see my father where he’d been sitting minutes before, perhaps even thinking that he might be on his feet like everyone else, cheering madly, clapping his hands.

But the spot where he’d sat was vacant.

“That was a good night for Archie, I guess,” my father said in a tone that was unusual for him, almost wistful.

My eyes had scanned the bleachers, desperate to find my father, to reassure myself that he’d seen the ball rise,
was at that instant watching as Archie rounded the bases slowly, gracefully, soaking up the crowd’s wild praise.

“Never hit another one, Archie didn’t,” my father added now. “Never hit another homer his whole damnv life.”

I’d looked back toward the field in time to see Archie touch third base, by then merely prancing along, his own eyes searching the bleachers for the spot where he’d seen our father moments before, empty now, hollow, my brother’s triumphant smile fading slowly, until, at home plate, it had vanished altogether.

My father casually scratched the gray stubble on the side of his face. “Just lost interest in playing ball, I guess. Archie did.”

It was only then, after Archie had scored, that I’d caught sight again of my father. He’d left the bleachers and was now standing beside a woman, full-figured in a satiny blue dress, blond hair bobbed, glancing over her shoulder to reveal glistening red lips, a blush at her cheek, the younger version of an older face I’d not seen again until years later, after I’d found my way up to Waylord, where she had greeted me at the door,
Well, now, you must be Roy Slater. Lila’s not quite ready.

“Betty Cutler was at that game,” I said.

“That right?” My father seemed hardly to recognize the name.

“You don’t remember talking to her?”

“Why would I remember that?”

“Last night you mentioned that you knew each other. Betty-and-Deidre, remember?”

“I knew a lot of people up in Waylord way back when.”

“I just thought that—”

“Talked to a lot of people at them games too.”

“Well, actually, you didn’t,” I said. “You sat off by yourself. I don’t remember ever seeing you talk to anybody but—”

“What difference does it make who I talked to at them games?”

“It’s just an observation, Dad.”

A brief silence, then he said, “You see Lila today?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she have to say?”

“Nothing much.”

He shrugged. “If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so.”

“We talked about the old days,” I said. “High school. She didn’t have much to say.”

But my father no longer seemed interested in my conversation with Lila. His mind was now focused on a gloomier terrain. “Death clams people up. Did that to your mother.”

He was talking about Archie, of course, the way his death had sent my mother into the murky bedroom for the rest of her days. But I wondered if he were not also talking about others who’d suffered the same devastation, the process by which a child’s death closes around a parent’s world, becomes the dark prism through which all life passes after that.

“Lonnie Porterfield should just leave Lila alone.” His eyes snapped over to me. “If Lila don’t want to talk, it ain’t none of his business to make her.”

“He asked me to help him.” I drew out the badge Lonnie had issued me. “He even made it official.”

As if I’d pulled a rattlesnake from my pocket, my father recoiled physically. “You ain’t got no business carrying that thing.”

“Why not? Lonnie made me a deputy.”

Even as I spoke, it seemed perverse to me that in some boyish way I still wanted to impress my father.

“A sheriff’s deputy ain’t nothing but a gun-thug with a badge.” The mining wars flared in his eyes. “Bought and sold by the mine owners.”

“County deputies don’t work for mine owners anymore,” I said, now sorry that I’d bothered to display the badge.

“What do you know about what deputies do or don’t do around here, Roy?”

“I know that things have changed, Dad.”

“Things don’t never change. People neither. Especially them Porterfields. You take off the muzzle, and Lonnie’ll come at you just like his old man come at me.”

“What did Wallace Porterfield ever do to you?”

My father waved his hand. “You don’t know a thing, Roy. All that learning, them books you read, and you still don’t know one goddamn thing.”

I glanced at his hands and couldn’t help but admire how steady they remained.

“Tell me something then,” I challenged. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

His eyes blazed. “All right, I will. Here’s something you don’t know. Blood is blood. What’s in the blood is there for good. You can’t get shed of it.”

I stared at him silently.

“Well?” he asked after a moment.

“That’s it? That’s the thing I don’t know?”

“Damn right it is. ’Cause if you knew it, you wouldn’t be carrying no badge Lonnie Porterfield give you.” He snorted harshly. “But you’re going to learn a lesson soon enough, by God.” His voice rang with a maddening certainty that made all further argument superfluous. “The fact is, Lonnie’s just using you, Roy. Getting you to do something ’Cause he don’t want to do it hisself. Just like his daddy used people. Give them little tin badges and got them to go against their own kind. They come up like they owned Waylord and everybody in it. Come up in them big cars from Kingdom City. In them fine clothes they wore. Like they could beat us at anything. Whip us and make us give in to ’em.”

His eyes were like flares in the darkness, and in that instant I knew why he’d come to the playing field at night all those many years ago, why he’d come only when the boys of Waylord played the boys of Kingdom City, the hills against the valley. He had come to see them beat us, beat to a pulp the Kingdom City team, shame and humiliate it, trample it beneath their bare callused feet. He had despised the sons of the valley that much … or that much loved the sons of those he’d left behind.

“Hell, I figure the only reason Lonnie wants you around is ’Cause he thinks it’s exciting.” he said offhandedly.

“Why would Lonnie find having me around exciting, Dad?”

“Why do you have to keep at things, Roy? Bite and scratch. Bite and scratch. Just like that old mangy dog.”

That old dog. Scooter.

Then I knew.

“Because of Archie,” I said. “You think Lonnie finds it exciting to have me around because of the murders?”

I waited for him to answer, feeling strangely accused while I waited, but he only leaned forward abruptly, drew a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, thumped one out, and grabbed it with his teeth.

“I thought you were out of cigarettes,” I said.

“I never said I was out.” He plucked a match from the same pocket and raked it across the bottom of his shoe. “Will be by morning though.”

He brought the match to the cigarette, and in the light that washed up from it, I noticed the first hint of yellow in the whites of his eyes, a sign, according to Doc Poole, that his liver had begun to fail.

“Glad I didn’t go with you,” he said, his face now clothed in darkness once again. “That last night. Glad I didn’t go see him that last time.”

He was talking about Archie again.

“Didn’t want to go with you that night. Didn’t see no reason to after the way he got to sputtering the time I seen him. Figured maybe I caused it. All that sputtering. Didn’t want him to get all upset like that again.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “So I didn’t go.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said quietly.

“ ’Cause of the way he acted the time I visited him,” my father said, now returning to the one and only time he’d visited Archie in jail. “Didn’t want to see that again.”

It had been a cold, rainy night in January, muddy roads until we reached the main highway, my mother in her Sunday clothes, a black dress with a little pillbox hat, her face covered with black netting, clutching a tattered
Bible. Archie had been arrested at just after dawn that same morning, and was now to spend his first night in the county jail. Even so, my father had resisted the idea of visiting him—
Don’t want to see him behind bars—
but had finally agreed to accompany us to Kingdom City, where he’d balked again, refusing to go into the sheriff’s office, relenting in his refusal only after my mother had made a tearful plea.

“Wished I’d stayed at home.” He tossed the match out into the yard. “Didn’t want to see Archie like that. Crying and sputtering.”

“It was his first night in jail.”

“Whining like he done. Telling Wallace Porterfield how sorry he was. Messing his pants.”

“Messing his pants? What are you talking about, Dad? Archie didn’t mess his pants.”

“Figured he did. Before. When Porterfield went at him. Wanting to know what happened. Threatening him. Scaring him.”

“What makes you think Sheriff Porterfield did anything like that?”

“The old lady never said a word,” my father blurted out, his mind now whipsawing away from Archie. “Never one word about what Archie done to hisself after ya’ll left him there that last time.”

Instead, she’d taken to her bed, where she remained, balled up beneath the quilt, hour after hour, day after day, sinking ever deeper into the religious mania that would consume her mind during the few weeks that remained to her.

“Just went right to bed after she found out about it,”
my father said. “Didn’t say one damn word. Just went to the bedroom.”

Did I have any clear memory of my mother ever coming out of that room again? Ever joining my father and me at the table? No, never at her sewing again, or her crocheting, gone within a few weeks, gone forever, gone to Jesus.

“She couldn’t take Archie’s death,” I said.

I glanced over to where my father sat in stony silence, lost in thought, until he finally said, “Never could figure out why he done it. Hung hisself like that. With nothing but a bedsheet to do it with. Wanting to die that bad. Wanting to get out of it. Not giving nobody no reason for it. Couldn’t see Archie doing that.”

“Well, he did,” I said firmly, trying to get past such fruitless speculation, the image it called up in my brain, Archie hanging from the top of his bunk, eyes popped, tongue black and swollen.

“The old lady always mothered him,” my father said. “You too. Always mothering Archie. Day and night. Telling him what to do.”

“We had to, Dad. Archie needed—”

“Archie needed to be a man. To die like a man. Not apologizing to everybody, whining about how sorry he was, how he didn’t mean it, how it was something just come over him. A miserable thing, sniveling like a baby, apologizing to the whole goddamn world.” He drew in a long, smoldering breath. “Porterfield standing there, grinning the whole time.”

“Archie just wanted people to understand that he hadn’t meant to do it,” I said. “That he’d just … that it was … a mistake.”

My father peered out into the blackness. “All for Horace Kellogg’s daughter.”

Horace Kellogg’s daughter.

It was the only name my father had ever called Gloria.

She’d lived in a big house a mile or so from town, the oldest child of Horace and Lavenia Kellogg, merchant pillars of our community, a slight, willowy girl with dark blue eyes and pale white skin. At times she’d seemed fixed in a dark anticipation, a mood Archie had worked to lift, bringing his face very near hers, staring eye to eye, cocking his head playfully, grinning,
Come out of it now, Gloria. Don’t stay holed up in there.

“He loved Gloria,” I said.

“Then he should have took her and been done with it.”

“He tried, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did,” my father said, suddenly growing curiously meditative. “He did try.” He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and threw it onto the ground. “Surprised me that he did. I mean, all by hisself like that.”