Murder in Little Egypt (13 page)

“Let him have it!” Marian shouted. “Let Kevin have that bike! What is the matter with you? Where is it?”

“Let it sink in!” Kevin heard Dale’s piercing voice. “I don’t want that kid thinking he can get something just for the asking. He’s got to learn. Let it sink in!”

“Let him have it! He hasn’t done anything!”

When Kevin finally got his bike, he could hardly bear to ride it. That his mother had bought it and had stood up for him did little to lift his spirit. His father had made him feel unworthy one minute, resentful the next—it was no use trying to enjoy the bike now. Why would his dad begrudge him?

Kevin failed to discover a way to please Dale. He liked school, especially science, but Dale refused to help him with his homework, dismissing him with some slogan or other: He should spend three hours per week per class, that was how his father had made a success of himself in school, that and brains, which he either had or did not have; you never learned anything except by getting it yourself; did Kevin believe for one minute that his father had succeeded by leaning on his parents?

It was the same with Mark: Kevin could take a cold kind of comfort that Dale paid no attention to Mark’s studies or school activities either. If anything, Dale was more indifferent to Mark than to Kevin, avoiding even the presence of his eldest as if Mark were deformed or diseased. Mark made the high school football team, but Dale never attended the games. “Why should I waste my valuable time watching my kid sit on the bench?” Dale would dismiss Marian when she said it would mean a lot to Mark to have his father there. When Mark joined the Thespians and won the lead role—he was only a sophomore—in the school play,
Harvey
, he spent weeks memorizing his many lines. He was in almost every scene, but Dale did not show up to see a performance that everybody said would have given Jimmy Stewart a run for his money. Nor did Dale see Mark steal the show in the annual musical revue when he danced and sang “Eleanor Rigby.”

“Did you know your son can really
sing
?” Marian said afterward, but Dale changed the subject.

Marian tried. She nagged. She cajoled until the boys were embarrassed by her pleading with Dale to do something with them, take them somewhere on his own, they needed him. One Saturday he gave in. He told the boys to get in the car, they were going off to work on a project together. Marian packed a lunch.

Dale drove them to Galatia, to some property he had bought there near Lake Harrisburg. He marched them into the woods and told them to start hacking down branches with machetes he had brought along.

“What’re we doing?” Mark wanted to know.

“You’re building a lean-to,” Dale said. “We can use a lean-to out here.”

The boys worked through part of the afternoon. They were not sure what a lean-to was or what its purpose would be, but they were having fun; it was an adventure with Dad. Dale showed them how to secure stakes in the ground and bind them with twine. The lean-to looked almost half finished when Dale said that was enough, they would come back and complete the job tomorrow. They never did. The half-built lean-to collapsed with the first snow.

Grandpa Peck made up for some of Dale’s indifference. Grandpa was always taking Mark and Kevin hunting and fishing. He would show up in his old car with his two dogs, saying “Let’s go get us some squirrels!” To haunt the creeks with Grandpa, learning how to hold your breath and lean against a handy tree trunk, rock-steady for a shot, hearing the soft pop of the .22 as you squeezed one off and watched the fat little thing tumble out of a tree and hit the ground with a smack—that was Kevin’s idea of a perfect day. His most treasured possession was the rifle Peck had given him. Always so quiet and calm, Grandpa showed him how to clean the squirrels right away so they wouldn’t get rank and gamey when Noma fried and served them with her fluffy dumplings: Marian prepared quail but drew the line at squirrel.

Kevin relished too the regular Sunday dinners at his grandparents’ house, the rattle of the pressure cooker, comforting smells, the heaps of meat and potatoes, biscuits and rolls, and always the peach cobbler or some other special dessert. Marian was usually there for the Sunday get-togethers, Dale rarely. Kevin would not have traded these times with his grandparents for anything, except maybe for a few outings with his dad. Once in a while Dale let Mark and Kevin trail along hunting, but he went out with Pat Sullivan and Pat’s son Greg far more often than with his own sons. He was always giving Greg Sullivan, who was Mark’s age, expensive gifts—a hunting vest, even a beautiful Browning shotgun one year, brand-new. Mark and Kevin got the castoffs.

Nearly every time Dale was with his own, he blew up about something or did something to unnerve everybody. One summer afternoon at Shawneetown the boys were swinging themselves Tarzan-like into the river from a stout, long rope hung from a tree that bent over the bank. No other adults were doing it but Dale decided to show that he could swing out higher and farther than anyone else. As he climbed the ladder, rough boards nailed to the tree trunk, he ripped open the sole of his foot on a nail. Kevin, watching from below, could see the blood start, but Dale hardly paused, reached the top and grabbed at the rope. Kevin gasped as he saw that his father had taken hold of the rope too far down, leaving slack above. When he jumped it was a free-fall for the first eight to ten feet, and then the rope snapped taut and Dale lost his grip, splashing with a dull thud into the muddy shallows about three feet from shore.

He gathered himself and swam out to the small houseboat, decorated with potted trees, that acted as a floating dock. He scrambled aboard. Blood poured from under a nasty flap of torn flesh on his sole. He called for scissors; someone produced a rusty pair from a tackle box and, as everyone watched in wincing awe of his machismo, Dale snipped away the skin and dived back in.

In the car later the foot oozed blood. Kevin thought he could see a bit of tendon protruding and expressed concern, but Dale told him to quit acting like a sissy.

The next morning Dale could not get his foot into a shoe; he was off to the hospital wearing a bedroom slipper, the foot wrapped in gauze but otherwise untreated. That day, as nurses told Marian, he fed himself antibiotics and nearly fainted while delivering a baby. But he had made his point: He was tougher than his sons could ever hope to be. If he did get injured or sick, he could take care of himself. It was just like the time two of Mark’s friends, teenaged sisters, wanted their ears pierced. Dale offered to do the job, but when the girls flinched, he took the needle and shoved it right through his upper lip. He laughed and grinned with the needle sticking out. The girls postponed their operation.

With the income from his practice growing, Dale began buying up property all over Little Egypt, including two farms, one the Galatia property, the other a five-hundred-and-sixty-acre place called Hickory Handle, near the village of Herod in the hills south of Harrisburg. He started a cattle-breeding operation, specializing in exotic breeds noted for their immense size, and announced that one day he would produce a unique beast, a perfect black Limousin bull. He would cull the herd to that end, he said, gradually darkening the animals from their normal oxblood or deep-tan color. He understood genetics, he said, and someday his cattle would be worth a fortune. Ordinary dumb-ass farmers were too ignorant of science to understand what they were doing. They’d be stuck with their little bitty Herefords when he’d be laughing all the way to the bank with his Simmental and Charolais and Limousin.

He had Mark and Kevin working on the farms on weekends and during the summers, although they were never sure what they were supposed to do besides digging postholes and mending barbed wire. When they inquired about their chores, he would turn away or bark something engimatic: “A man doesn’t ask somebody what to do, he gets it done”; or “By God, what are you, some kind of a jackass, you have to be told what to do on a farm?” “I want results, not excuses” was one of his favorites. “That’s your inheritance out there, eating grass,” he proclaimed, pointing to a cow. “Just what do you intend to do about it? Suck around?”

Kevin and Mark tried to look busy. Kevin did not enjoy working on the farms. He did not know what to do, and the hired hands resented him, he could tell, and preferred bullshitting and drinking with Dale to supervising kids. Dale ran wilder out there than in town and could lose his temper in a flash, with no Marian around to object. Something would strike him wrong and he would reach for the nearest object to give the boys a whipping. He picked up a good stout board near the barn one day and broke it across Mark’s rear end: As usual in the country, Dale was drunk. He always had a bottle with him out there.

One afternoon after a few snorts Dale ran his new Ford pickup into a mudhole and got stuck. He floored the thing, rocked it back and forth, cussed it, but the wheels spun and sank deeper. Dale would not give up. He kept gunning it till the radiator blew. He climbed down from the truck and slogged through the mud over to a bulldozer and drove the bulldozer up behind the truck and bashed into the rear. The truck still would not move. So Dale backed up the bulldozer and made a run at it, crashing into the rear and collapsing it halfway up the truck bed, gasoline pouring out from the ruptured tank. At length he managed to shove the truck’s remains onto high ground. It was a total loss.

The hired hands laughed at this outburst, urging Dale on, but Kevin, even with his kid’s love of noise and destruction, found it frightening. He watched his father tip up a vodka bottle afterward.

Drink must have had something to do, Kevin figured, with another expensive show of temper one July afternoon at Hickory Handle. Kevin watched as Dale and a couple of the men attempted to load a Limousin bull onto a trailer. This particular bull, enormous and nearly black, was the pride of the herd and had just won first prize at the Saline County Fair. He weighed over two thousand pounds and was said to be worth a good ten thousand dollars.

And he was stubborn. Dale and the two hands were having a hell of a time getting the bull to walk up the chute to the trailer. They pulled and shoved; they used the electric prods on him. Nothing worked. The air was hot and close. Everyone was in a sweat.

Dale began to scream at the beast and whack him with his fists. The bull still would not budge. He strained against the ropes and looked ready to charge right through the trailer if they ever got him into it.

“Son of a bitch!” Dale yelled with a fierceness that made Kevin retreat to a safe distance—discreetly, so that his father would not notice his fear. He watched Dale turn and rush to his car and pull from it the .357 magnum revolver that he always kept loaded in the glove compartment. Everyone fell back as Dale strode toward the bull with the nickel-plated pistol flashing in his hand.

He came within a couple of feet of the animal, drew back the pin, and pointed the gun at an eye, holding it with both hands, combat-style.

“Okay! You’re hamburger!” Dale said.

He fired. Even out there in the open the magnum exploded with an ear-ringing crack.

Kevin looked away. He heard the bull bellow and fall dead on the chute. It sounded like a building collapsing.

When his fright subsided, Kevin felt sorry for the bull. He had been proud and beautiful in his big, ugly way. Now, it was true, he was just hamburger.

It took the rest of the afternoon for Dale and the men to haul the dead bull up the chute into the trailer so he could be taken away and sold for meat. Everyone was drinking beer and Dale had his bottle. By the time he was ready to go home, Dale was staggering. He told Kevin, who was still shy of his twelfth birthday, to drive.

“I can’t,” Kevin said. “I don’t know how.”

“What do you mean, you can’t? Don’t ever say you can’t. Just do.”

Kevin protested that he was afraid to drive his father’s new Olds 98, so Dale said they would take one of the hands’ cars.

They got into a battered Pontiac Silver Streak. Dale leaned over to turn the key, showed which was the accelerator and which the brake, dropped the gearshift into drive, and said steering would be just like riding a bike. Kevin lurched ahead. At least the old Pontiac was an automatic.

It was dusk, and Dale told him how to turn on the lights. The farm road was not so difficult, but out on Route 34 Kevin was scared. He pointed his toes to reach the pedals and peered through the steering wheel. He kept touching the brakes to make sure he could stop. Because he could barely see over the hood, he tried to cling to the side of the road when he saw oncoming headlights. At the end of the hood was a plastic Indian-head ornament that lit up with the headlights, a tiny beacon that led the way, or so Kevin imagined. He hoped that the Indian could see better than he could. He jerked the wheel from side to side, to line up the side of the road with that glowing, red-orange head; but he kept running onto the shoulder and swerving back.

“Step on it,” his father said. “You’re driving like an old woman.” Then Dale passed out.

The lights on the dash were dead except for another Indian head, a little red one that glowed in the center of the speedometer to mark the sixty-miles-an-hour point. Kevin kept glancing down at that little red Indian head: When the needle crept up to it, blotting it out, he slowed, then sped up until the head disappeared again. He was watching the red Indian when he drifted over the lip at the edge of the concrete road. The car rocked as he lurched it back over the lip, banging his father’s head against the window. Dale woke up, mumbled something, and passed out again.

Kevin prayed all the way to Eldorado that he would not end up like the bull.

Kevin accepted his father’s ways. He had never known Dale to be different, could not imagine him acting anything but strong and loud and cold. He wished that Dale would be more like other dads, able to spend much more time with their sons, without being so critical of them. After Sean was born, Dale was around even less and exploded even more. Marian was no longer able to calm him or make him go away when he worked himself into a lather, although he still more or less behaved himself when outsiders were present. Jewel Kinnear, the lady who did housekeeping and baby-sitting for the Cavanesses, had the knack of cooling Dale off. Kevin felt safer when Jewel was near. She talked back to Dale, held him in check, and could even get him to break into a grin instead of the sneer he adopted when he was riled. When all else failed, Jewel could convince him to leave the house when he started to lose his temper. She was a widow and one of her sons had been shot to death at Cahokia Downs race track by three punks who robbed him of fifteen dollars. Nothing fazed Jewel. She chain-smoked Camels, drank her coffee black, and could handle the boys with her mixture of toughness and affection. They loved her.