Prodigal Blues (33 page)

Still, I stared at that sheer drop.
 
"You've never driven this road before, have you?"

"Nope," said Christopher.
 
"But I've driven some damned dangerous ones, so don't worry—I'm not about to send us sailing over the side."

"Could I have that in writing?"

"Enjoy the view, why don't you?"

"I'm trying."

"Try harder."

Eventually, and about as suddenly as a roller coaster, the road plummeted to a short steel bridge that rattled and shook like a bag of bones as we crossed it.
 
Then I remembered that we had an actual bag of bones in here with us and heard the dead men screaming and felt sick and sad all over again.

Through the windshield I saw the shear side of a mountain—a rock face—then the road hung a 90-degree to the left, pointing us through yet another set of hills lined on either side with yet more thick firs and pines.
 
A family of deer stood among the trees nibbling at the grass; they lifted their heads and looked at us as we lumbered past.
 
I felt like we were intruding.

The road narrowed down to a single rutted lane here, and I occasionally spotted old, rusted railroad rails scattered among the trees, as well skeletons of homemade chairs, what looked like blankets, and swear I once spotted the remains of a log cabin.

Here and there, up on the mountainsides in the distance, shelves of rock hovered over what looked like shallow caves.

I pointed up toward one.
 
"Are those caves or something else?"

Christopher looked in the direction I was pointing.
 
"That's a cave—if it was a mine, you'd see timber propping the entrance."

"You know about mining?"

"You bet.
 
My grandfather worked these mines.
 
He used to talk about it a lot after he got sick and came to stay with us.

"All these mountains you're looking at, they're limestone with seams of coal. Sometimes the seam goes straight into the mountain, but usually it sort of just
angles
in and the coal shaft follows the seams.
 
The shafts are propped with timbers, and generally slate lies above the coal.
 
You take out enough of the coal and that slate—
wham!
—it'll come crashing down right on top of your head."

"Even if there are timbers propping it up?"

"Hell, yes.
 
Timber gets soaked over the years, it weakens, doesn't take much to make it snap.
 
Limestone is really porous, so there's always ground water.
 
In those days, when my grandpa worked the mines, if a miner hit a narrow seam, he had to lie on his back in the water—can you imagine what that must be like?
 
There you are, God-only-knows how deep down, in the dark, on your back in water, between all these rocks, pushing shovels backward over your shoulder to draw out loose coal."

"I'll stick with cleaning toilets and doing windows, thank you."

"Yeah… I wish Grandpa would have done something else.
 
Goddamn mines killed him.
 
Turned his lungs into blackened Swiss cheese and twisted up his back so bad he couldn't stand up straight.
 
He had to use a walker to move around, and even then me and Paul had to help."

I look ahead into the road.
 
The canopy formed by the tree limbs grew lower and thicker the wetter it was made by rain, and soon Christopher had to turn on his headlights.

"How much longer until we get to our first stop?" I asked.

"About that," he said.
 
"There's been a change in plan."
 
He looked at me.
 
"If you don't mind, I want to stop by my family's place first.
 
I've been thinking about what you said, about how I'm above it now, better than him"—he gestured with his head back toward the trailer—"and I've decided that this has to end now.
 
You talk to my folks, do your Mr. U.S. Marshal number, then I'll show myself and we'll call the cops and they can take him and do whatever they want."

"What about the bodies in there with him?"

Christopher paused, blinked.
 
"Think the police will believe it was self-defense?"

"I honestly don't know—but after what you've been through, I doubt any judge is going to want to put you in prison."

He nodded.
 
"Well… I'll guess we'll see, won't we?"

"You realize that I have no idea what your last name is?"

He laughed.
 
"I guess it didn't come up, did it?
 
It's Matthews."

I held out my hand.
 
"Pleased to meet you, Christopher Matthews."

He shook it.
 
"A pleasure, sir."

I sat back, checked myself in the mirror—the black eyes were so dark I looked like a raccoon—then patted down my hair and said, "My grandmother treated my dad like garbage his entire life."

"
Now
we get to it."

"You told me about your Grandpa, I'm going to tell you about my grandmother—unless you interrupt me again."

He mimed zipping closed his mouth.

"Look, the list of things she did to him when he was a kid—let alone what she did to him as an adult—would go on forever and depress the shit of you, so I'm just going to skip to thing that made me write her off permanently, okay?

"The last Christmas before Dad retired, money was a little tight—hell, money had always been tight, but this year it was even tighter than usual, right?
 
Dad only had sixteen dollars to buy Grandma a present, so the day before Christmas, he puts on his best coat and best boots and walks downtown because he doesn't want to waste money on a cab—no, my folks didn't drive, either one of them.
 
I mean, they used to, but both their eyesight was going and, besides, they could always call Tanya or me.
 
Anyway, he walks downtown—we're talking three, four miles in the middle of winter, ten degrees and snowing, a sixty-three-year-old man who's still recovering from radiation treatments from the first bout of cancer—he walks down and goes through all the stores, looking for something nice he can buy her with his sixteen dollars, and eventually he finds this really, really nice scarf, gloves, and perfume boxed set, thirteen bucks.
 
He shoots the other three bucks to have them gift wrap it because Grandma is supposed to come over and pick up her gifts that night.
 
Then
he walks all the way back home in snow that's getting wetter and heavier.

"Grandma never showed up that Christmas Eve, she didn't show up on Christmas Day, or the day after, or the day after, not for New Year's… that present sat in their house for six fucking months before she got it—and even then she sent one of her other grandkids to get it,
then
went out of her way to call and tell him that she already had plenty of gloves and scarves but maybe she could use the perfume.
 
It broke his heart.
 
By then he was getting sick again—that little Christmas Eve stroll left him with walking pneumonia, and it was while he was being treated for it that his doctor discovered the cancer was back.

"Flash forward.
 
Both Mom and Dad are dead and buried—she didn't come to the either funeral, by the way, she had a little touch of the flu both times.
 
She decides to move down to Kansas to be near her sisters and sets about looking up my sister, who's living down there with her husband, and trying to 'make amends.'
 
My sister, by the way, made the drive all the way to Ohio and back for both funerals, and she was sicker than hell both times.

"Okay, so Grandma tries to make all nicey-nice with Gayle, and Gayle's too polite to tell her to go to hell—we both knew she was just an old woman trying to get into Heaven any way she could.
 
Grandma would call me sometimes to see how I was doing and reminisce about Mom and Dad like she ever gave a shit for either one of them.
 
I tell her that I got nothing to say to her and hang up.
 
So she sets about making Gayle her new, last best friend.
 

"When Grandma died, she left a
lot
of money—well, what I consider to be a lot.
 
It was divided up among her sisters and living children and grandchildren—but Gayle and me, she left us a real nice chunk of change, over ten thousand dollars.
 
I didn't want her goddamn money, not after the way she'd treated Dad, and I told her lawyer as much.
 
Well, Grandma must have suspected I was going to say that, because she left a codicil in her will that if I refused my inheritance, it was all to go to Gayle—provided that I signed all the necessary papers.
 
By this time my sister has divorced her redneck hubby and wants to get the hell out of Dodge—or, rather, Topeka—as soon as possible, so she calls and asks me if I'd drive down to Kansas and sign the papers because if I did the money would be released to her
that day
.
 
How the hell could I say no?
 
I took the time off work, drove down, signed the papers, loaded up what Gayle wanted me to bring back, put her and the kids on a plane, and then had car trouble just outside Jefferson City.
 
You were around for everything else, so now I think we're up to date."

Christopher mimed unzipping his mouth.
 
"You really loved your folks a lot, didn't you?'

"Yes, I did—screw that past tense—I
do
.
 
Just because they're not here any longer doesn't mean I don't still love and miss them."

"I hope my folks have missed me half that much."

"I'm sure they have."

"Yeah…?"

"Count on it."

He looked at me and smiled.
 
"I realize this is going to sound incredibly stupid, all things considered, but
man
am I glad we grabbed you and not that other guy."

It took a second for that to fully register.
 
"
What
other guy?"

"Huh?
 
Oh—there was a dude about four miles behind you at a rest stop with a couple of flat tires.
 
I don't know what he ran over but it chewed the hell of them.
 
We were doubling back to get him when Denise spotted you.
 
She thought you looked nicer."

"Oh."

"I didn't mention that before?"

"Must have slipped your mind."

"Oh."

I imagined this guy now all safe and sound at home, kissing his wife, hugging his kids, petting the dog, bitching about the bills, and said:
 
"I hope the son-of-a-bitch is still stuck there."

We looked at one another, then burst out laughing.

The road dipped slightly, we went over another steel bridge—this one more stable than the last—and emerged onto a smooth and seemingly freshly-paved stretch of asphalt.
 
The trees thinned out near the road but were just as thick in the distance, and the sheer rock face on either side of us had obviously been blasted and smoothed by human hands.

"It'll be coming up on the right in a couple of miles," said Christopher.
 
"You need to make yourself presentable—there's a light jacket in the black duffel bag back there.
 
You should put it on to cover the blood on your shirt."

I moved to the back, grabbed the duffel bag, pulled it open, and immediately shrieked as the skulls grinned up at me.

"I said the
black
duffel bag."

"Yeah… uh… sorry."
 
I knelt there for a few moments, shaking, eyes closed, my heart pounding against my ribs, then took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and closed up the bag of bones.
 
"Sorry, Randy," I whispered to the top skull.
 
They'd be home soon, as well, to weeping families and waiting graves.

I found the lightweight camouflage green jacket—it was a little tight across the chest and the sleeves were a bit short, but I'd deal with it.

"Looks good on you," said Christopher as I climbed back into the passenger seat.

"It covers up the blood."

"Yeah, I know, but it looks good is what I'm saying.
 
Looks like something a real U.S. Marshal might wear."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

I took a deep breath, released it.
 
"So how do you want to work this?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean am I going inside, are you going to stay out in the bus and listen with the magic dish, am I using the phone first, what?"

He signaled for a semi to pass us, which it did with all the grace and subtlety of an elephant on a
tightwire
, then rubbed his eyes and said:
 
"You go inside and do your voodoo like with Thomas's folks; I'll wait out here until you signal me."
 
He shook his head.
 
"I won't listen in on you this time."
 
He looked at me.
 
"No need."