Into the Web (11 page)

I heard my brother’s voice.
Will you go with me, Roy?

My father stared out into the darkness. “It was Horace Kellogg that caused it. Putting that daughter of his through all kinds of hell. Telling her she was just trash for running around with such as Archie. Archie knew what Kellogg was like. That’s why he took that gun. ’cause he knowed that bastard wouldn’t never have set there and let his girl go off with the likes of Archie.”

“How would Archie have known that? I don’t think he ever so much as spoke to Horace Kellogg.”

“Everybody knows what Horace Kellogg is like, Roy.
Horace Kellogg and Wallace Porterfield. They’re one and the same.”

“In what way?”

“In that they ain’t got no use for a boy like Archie. You think for one minute Horace Kellogg would have stood by and let Archie marry that puny little daughter of his? No, sir, he wouldn’t have put up with that. But I still wouldn’t have told Archie to let her go, like you done Lila Cutler.”

My father seemed to realize that he’d reached some kind of line in me and dropped the subject.

“Well, I think I’ll turn in.” He struggled to his feet with a groan. “Good night, Roy.”

“Good night,” I said crisply, then watched as he headed for the door, moving toward it unsteadily, like a leaking boat.

Every instinct demanded that I let him go, and yet a small question nagged at me, the sort that, if left unanswered, pursues us through the years, becomes a ghostly whisper, a rumor carried by the rain, about something we don’t know and yet suspect must have in secrecy and stealth deranged and finally undone our lives.

And so I said, “You think I told Archie to let Gloria go? When would I have done that, Dad?”

“That night.”

“What makes you think I saw Archie that night?”

“ ’Cause Porterfield come asking. The next morning. When he come to tell the old lady about the killings and how he had Archie in jail over in Kingdom City.”

“Where was I when he came here?”

“You’d already gone to work, like me,” my father answered. “At the drugstore.”

I recalled that morning, Saturday, the night’s snow long melted away by a warm morning sun, leaving the streets of Kingdom City slick and gleaming.

“What did the sheriff want to know?” I asked.

“Where you’d been,” my father answered. “When Archie done it. She told him you was probably up in Waylord. That you’d been out with Lila that night.”

In my mind I saw Porterfield stride past the window of Clark’s Drugs as he had that morning, his eyes leveled upon me as I stood, wiping glasses, behind the soda fountain.

“Porterfield saw me that morning,” I said. “In the drugstore. But he didn’t come in. He never asked me anything about where I was that night.”

I remembered how, two days later, when Porterfield had led me silently down the corridor to Archie’s cell for what turned out to be our last time together, he had wheeled and walked back to his office without so much as a word, the sound of dangling keys the only ones I’d heard.

“And when I went to visit Archie, he never asked me one question about the murders.”

My father nodded. “Archie wasn’t a bad boy. Just too much like me, that’s all. Had the same bad luck.”

Chapter Ten

A
s I made his morning coffee, I knew he was awake just beyond his bedroom door, waiting for me to leave so he could enjoy the only thing he seemed really capable of enjoying, his granite solitude.

I tapped at the closed door, waited, then called, “Your coffee’s ready.” When no answer came, I placed his brown mug on the kitchen table. “It’ll be cold in five minutes,” I added.

With that I considered my morning obligations done and headed into town, driven by some priggish sense of duty to report to Lonnie.

Lonnie didn’t appear at all surprised to see me. “Well, I let Lila go like I said I would,” he told me with a friendly wink. “You two hook up later?”

He saw the expression on my face and laughed a
crudely insinuating laugh that reminded me of the sliminess that had always been a part of his character. “You didn’t?” he said. “I figured you’d have cashed in by now. You know, got a little something for that favor you did her.”

I heard my father’s warning,
Blood is blood. Them Porterfields just use people
, and considered the dark world they suggested, all of us bound to the stake of our birthright, anchored in the deep sludge of the generations, not at all born into a wide, bright world, but carelessly tossed into the web.

“The fact is, it wasn’t doing any good to keep her here anyway,” Lonnie added now. “I released Clayton’s body too. No reason to keep it.”

“Well, I found out that Clayton Spivey was—”

“Dying?” Lonnie interrupted with a triumphant grin.

“Yes.”

“I found out before you did, I bet,” he said. “Doc Poole finished the autopsy just after you left.”

He looked surprised when I picked up the report from his desk.

“Natural causes, according to Doc Poole,” he said. “Old Clayton just spit blood and died.”

“Byssinosis,” I said, then continued to scan the report, noting the basic facts Doc Poole had recorded in it. He’d written “none” in the space provided for next of kin.

“So that’s it, Roy,” Lonnie said when I handed him back the report. “Case closed.”

“Have you told Lila?” I asked.

Lonnie shook his head. “Nope.”

“Mind if I do it?”

A grin slithered onto his lips. “Why, you old dog, you,” he said, an answer I took to be yes.

I turned toward the door, but Lonnie called me back. “That badge,” he said. “I better get that back from you now.”

I plucked the badge from my pocket and placed it on Lonnie’s desk.

“Remember now, Roy, you’re not going to be acting in an official capacity anymore,” Lonnie said with a leering wink. “I mean, in whatever you have in mind for your old girlfriend up in Waylord.”

“What would I have in mind, Lonnie?”

A broad smile crossed Lonnie’s face. “Maybe offering a little comfort,” he said. “Nothing wrong in that.”

I pulled into Lila’s driveway a few minutes later.

At the top of the stairs, I hesitated outside the door, feeling intensely foolish now, a middle-aged man mired in a high-school romance. So foolish in fact that I might have turned and fled had Lila not come upon me suddenly.

“Roy.” She stood at the corner of the house, a basket of vegetables in her hand. “I just came from the garden.

“Mama’s sleeping.” She nodded toward the house.

“She’s not really able to take care of herself anymore.”

“Doc Poole gave Lonnie his report,” I told her. “Clayton Spivey died of black lung. The case is closed as far as Lonnie’s concerned.”

She straightened herself abruptly. “I don’t care what Lonnie Porterfield does. I’m trash to him. Always have been.”

It had been a hot summer night, Lila and I walking beside the road together, holding hands, a pickup truck roaring past, a load of valley boys in the back, waving bottles, yelling drunkenly, Lonnie in the midst of them, louder than the rest, taunting as he went by,
Be careful, Roy, Waylord girls ain’t never fresh.

“He was drunk,” I told her, repeating the same excuse for Lonnie I’d offered my father only a day before. “He was young.”

“Yes, he was,” Lila replied. “Anyway, I knew what he thought about me after that. The same way his father felt. That the girls up here are just something to be used. Something to be played with.”

“You sound like my father. The way he hates the Porterfields.”

“Maybe I am like your father, Roy.”

“You’re not in the least like him.”

She smiled. “You didn’t look at me like other boys.”

“I was shy,” I said.

She grew still beneath my gaze.

“I would have come back, you know. After college. I would have come back for you if you hadn’t …”

“None of that matters now,” Lila said.

It was then I suddenly glimpsed Lila’s life as I thought she had come to see it, as something that had flowed grimly out of our teenage romance, a stream that should have been bright and glittering but had grown dark and murky.

“Lila … I …”

A voice from inside the house called her name.

“My mother,” Lila said hastily. “I’ve got to go.”

I reached for her arm. “Lila …”

Our eyes locked for an instant, then the screen door creaked open and a thin, rawboned woman emerged from the darkened house, a mere shadow of the woman I’d first glimpsed in a metallic blue dress in the bleachers.

“Who’s that?” she called.

“We have company,” Lila told her. “A gentleman caller, you might say.” She moved past me, her eyes fixed on her mother. “Do you remember him, Mama?”

Betty Cutler leaned forward, now squinting so hard, her eyes were mere slits. The name that broke from her lips chilled me to the bone.

“Jesse,” she whispered.

“No, Mama.” Lila took her mother’s arm. “This is Roy. Roy Slater. Not Jesse.”

The old woman drew away from me instantly.

“He’s just come up to visit.” Lila tugged her mother back toward the door. “Isn’t that nice?”

The old woman’s hand fell limply to her side. Something in her eyes grew dark and accusatory. “You ain’t the man your daddy was.”

“Mama!” Lila blurted out. “You be quiet now.”

The old woman’s voice hardened. “Jesse wouldn’t have took it.”

“Mama, stop it,” Lila said sharply.

But Mrs. Cutler didn’t stop. “Jesse would have done something about it.”

“Let’s go back in the house, Mama,” Lila pleaded.

Mrs. Cutler’s eyes remained level upon mine. “Even after what they done to him at the Waylord mine.”

I stared at her helplessly. “The Waylord mine?”

“Come on now, Mama,” Lila snapped, firmly turning
the old woman away from me, whispering, “Sorry, Roy, sorry,” as she ushered her toward the door.

I waited in the yard, all but reeling from so disturbing a remark, the sound of it echoing through my brain. Through the window I could see Lila guide her mother hastily toward a wooden rocker, scolding her gently all the way.

In response, the old woman muttered something I couldn’t understand.

“Mama just says things, Roy,” Lila told me when she returned to me.

“What was she talking about?” I pressed.

“I don’t know,” Lila said. “She gets things confused. One memory floats into another one. Things whirl around.”

She knew that I’d seen it, the lie in her eyes. “I better get back inside,” she said quietly. “Good-bye, Roy.”

She backed away from me, her smile soft, almost fragrant, like a small pale flower on her lips. “I always knew you’d be a good man,” she said in words she clearly considered to be the last she would ever say to me. “Nothing could change that … nothing.”

Chapter Eleven

O
n the way back to the valley, I spotted the road that had once led to the Waylord mine and the coal-blackened company town that surrounded it. A wooden sign had been nailed to a tree at the entrance to the road, reminding everyone that although the mine itself had long been shut down, both the mine and the town remained the private property of the Waylord Mining Company.

For all the times I’d swept up the road toward Lila’s house, I’d never once turned off it, but Betty Cutler’s words suddenly cut through me,
Even after what they done to him at the Waylord mine
, and fired a need in me to discover what had shaped my father, perhaps twisted him, but had, by some transforming means, made him the man she seemed to think I was but the shadow of.

The road into the town was overgrown now, little
more than parallel ruts through a snarl of weed, but still maneuverable. Peering down its twisted path, I wondered what it was in my father that Mrs. Cutler so admired, and what had buried it so deeply, I’d never had the slightest glimpse of it for all the years I’d lived within my father’s house.

I reached Waylord a few minutes later, got out of my car. A crescent-shaped line of buildings curved around a broad street. The mine lay at the eastern tip of the crescent, a square maw dug out of the hillside. It had been abandoned long ago, of course, along with the company offices and stores.

Just behind the unpainted wooden gate that now blocked the mouth of the mine, I could see the supporting timbers, thick and black, along with the steel roof bolts that held them in place. It was not hard for me to imagine the years during which the mine had been active, the clang of the bell calling the miners to and from the mine, the shuffle of their feet as they passed each other in long lines, clothed in denim coveralls, their heads decked out in plastic helmets and carbide lights.

My father had worked in the Waylord mine from the day he was nine years old, scrambling into the rickety wooden elevator, no doubt peering upward, as miners often do on the descent, drinking in a last greedy gulp of sun before the night engulfed them.

The august offices of the Waylord Mining Company sat on a slight incline, shoved up against the hillside, its wide deck lifted on high wooden stilts. From there, the owners had been able to survey their pinched domain, their mine, their stores, the gray masses who toiled beneath them. I could imagine my father glancing
toward them as he filed past, swinging his metal lunch bucket and muttering curses or making jokes at the expense of the rich men who loomed above him, smoking cigars, their thumbs hitched in their suspenders.

“Can I help you with something, mister?”

He wore no uniform, but an unbridled and menacing authority dripped from every pore. Even without the shotgun that hung in the crook of his arm, he would have given off the smoldering sense of what he was. Here standing before me was the mythical gun-thug of my father’s grim boyhood, unsmiling, wielding a lawless power to hurt and kill, able to strike terror in all but the strongest hearts.

“This is private property, you know. Posted.”

I felt a pinch of fear. “Yes, I know.”

“So you saw that sign, did you? Out by the road?”

“I saw it.”

He took a step toward me. “Well, in that case, you better be on your way. Like I say. This here land is posted.”