Rock of Ages (29 page)

Phil liked to watch the fights on TV. He even got me to watch, in horrified fascination, and this flashes through my addled brain now: I feel like I'm not going to be knocked out, carried off feet first in the sixth round. I think I can go the distance, in hopes of at least a split decision.

A policeman came by this afternoon, a detective I think.

They let him ask me questions for about five minutes. He was an earnest-seeming young man with short black hair and, incongruously, an earring. He seemed to be confused about some of the details, and I told him I was, too.

He asked me about how Pooh got shot, and I told him about the Ladysmith.

“But I don't think I killed him,” I said. “It just seemed to piss him off.” I giggled and apologized for my language.

“Ma'am,” the detective said, “it wasn't the Ladysmith I was wondering about. It was the .38. I don't reckon you know what a mess … what a hole … how much damage that .38 did.

“I need to know. It's OK, either way. Hell, we want to give you a medal. But did you kill Pooh Blackwell?”

I told him I certainly didn't think so, that the last thing I remembered was lying across that picnic table, tied down, waiting to die. And being raped by a madman, I wanted to say but didn't for fear of bruising the young detective's tender sensibilities.

And then, talking about it, I remembered the other thing.

“I heard a really loud noise, like a cannon going off. I think that might have been what revived me.”

“A loud noise,” he repeated, tugging slightly on the earring and frowning. “Yes, ma'am, that .38 would make a right loud noise, I expect.”

The thing was, he explained, it was hard to see how Pooh had managed to do that to himself.

I allowed that it was hard for me to imagine that, too. Pooh seemed like the type who would rather inflict pain on other people than himself.

The detective said the way he figured it, I would have had to reach behind Pooh and shoot him in the back of the head, while my own head was turned away from him, “on account of the blood and … and all.”

He also wanted to know, of course, why they found Pooh's truck parked a hundred yards or so from his empty driveway. They wanted to know how and where I got abducted.

I had enough of my wits about me at this point to tell him I had gone over to talk to Pooh about what really happened to Jenny McLaurin, that I still had my doubts. I had gone up to the front door and knocked, and that was the last I remembered. He must have hit me from behind about then.

“So you went out there by yourself, at night?”

I didn't try to defend it, couldn't think of a good answer, just nodded my head.

“Well,” the detective said, “maybe he sneaked up on you or something.”

He didn't look convinced. Who would have been? I had the feeling, though, that nobody was too surprised it had turned out this way. They just couldn't fathom what role I played in Pooh Blackwell's demise. It was supposed to happen in some barroom brawl, something with knives, or a horrific wreck, probably involving an innocent victim.

“Well,” he told me, “if you think of anything, let me know. I might be back later.”

I'm pretty sure he will be. It wouldn't take Columbo to find some holes in my story. At some point, I know, it will be necessary to tell Wade Hairr or one of his worthless minions that I did indeed walk uninvited into Pooh Blackwell's house and take something that didn't belong to me.

Today, though, is not that day.

When Kenny came by a little later, I asked him if he had retrieved my belongings.

He said he had.

“Including the purse?”

“Including the purse.”

“Were there some, ah, notebooks in there?”

There were. I don't suppose either Pooh or the police had any interest in going through my possessions.

I told him to hang on to them, maybe keep them at his place for a while.

Kenny has been so sweet, so considerate, so wracked with guilt.

I'm the all-time league leader in guilt, I told him. I know guilt. If somebody sneaks out in the middle of the night, lies about where they're going, and if that person is well into middle age and allegedly of sound mind, you've done about all you can for that person.

“And,” I added, beckoning him to move closer, “that person is absolutely crazy about you.”

He said he knew, that he felt the same way, and I said I was glad.

H turned his face from me and squeezed my arm until the pain forced me to stop him.

“You did your best,” I told him. “You gave me a gun and taught me how to shoot it. It isn't your fault that I couldn't hit that sack of garbage at point-blank range.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

December 24

The nurses finally convince Kenny and the women of Geddie Presbyterian Church that Georgia is able to stay unattended in her private room.

“You'd better take good care of her,” Forsythia Crumpler told the head nurse, a woman whose force of character was nearly equal to her own. “You all had better not let anything happen to that lady.”

She said this outside the door, at a time when the patient was supposed to be napping. Georgia could think of nothing she had done to deserve such care.

The flowers have almost taken over the room, several poinsettias among them to remind her that she is missing Christmas. The doctor has told her she may be able to go home early next week and start physical therapy, but she will definitely be opening her presents in Room 202 of the Campbell Valley Medical Center.

Justin has not been by today. Kenny told her that he was staying close to Leeza. The baby could come at any time.

Kenny left just half an hour ago to get something to eat. Georgia wonders how he can bear to look at her. The one fleeting glimpse she got in the mirror when they were helping her to the bathroom was horrifying. She wonders how much she can ever recover of her already-fading looks.

She knows this shouldn't be a priority, that she should be worrying about getting to the point that all her body parts function, and all her memory returns. She still has blank spots. There are old friends whose names she tries but fails to remember.

Kenny, though, seems not to see this new, damaged Georgia at all. Or, he does a good job of hiding it. He looks after her, even helps her to the bathroom. She thinks of how much she hated having to do that with her own mother, when she was dying of pancreatic cancer. She can only draw one conclusion: He's a better person than she is.

Maybe, she thinks, it's part of opposites attracting. Nurturing, giving people are naturally drawn to the self-absorbed.

He has assured her that he will help her get through this, whatever it takes.

When he leaned over and kissed her cheek—just about the only part of her head that didn't hurt—she was inclined to believe him.

Now, the night creeps past. She can't sleep but is trying not to ask for more painkillers. The same drugs she was so fond of three days ago, she now sees as the enemy. If intelligence is her strong card, she thinks, she doesn't want to intentionally reduce her IQ 20 points if she can bear the pain at all.

Still, she is about to buzz for a nurse, anticipating the usual half-hour wait, when she hears footsteps out in the hall. Someone is wearing shoes too heavy and stepping too loudly on the terrazzo floor to be staff.

Her door is cracked open just enough to let a thin sword of light in; she has never been fond of total darkness. Whoever is outside has interrupted the beam, and then she sees the door open a couple of feet.

At first, she sees only a bulky shadow, and she wonders what visitor might be coming at this time of night, after the nurses have banished everyone else.

And then she knows. Some combination of the work shoes, the smell, the gleam of pomaded hair.

“William.”

She has allowed for the possibility that the Blackwells might get it in their heads that she is responsible for their son's death, but until this moment, she hasn't really given it serious consideration. Kenny has told her that, from what he hears and knows, Pooh's siblings—while being “mean as blacksnakes”—do not share their late brother's untreated insanity.

But now, William Blackwell is hovering over her bed, looking as if he hasn't slept in the nearly six days since a deputy knocked on his door at 2 AM and informed him of his oldest son's death.

Georgia thinks about buzzing for a nurse, but the movement required to do so would be hard to disguise and easy to intercept by a healthy person. Besides, William could hack her up and haul her away in little plastic bags before one of the nurses answered her call.

“I'm sorry.” It's all she can think to say. She is not in the least sorry that Pooh Blackwell is dead and buried in the family cemetery. Looking at his father, though, she is sincere in her condolences. Nobody, she thinks, ought to have to bury their children, no matter what kind of monsters they grow up to be.

William is silent for half a minute. Then, he eases himself into the chair beside her and sighs.

“I'm sorry, too.”

He doesn't say anything else for what seems like a very long time. Georgia, who can't turn her head well enough to see him straight on, wonders if he has fallen asleep.

Finally, he leans forward. He is speaking almost in a whisper.

“I'm kind of surprised they let me in here,” he says, and he almost laughs. “I figured somebody'd stop me, but I had to try. Nurse out there looked like she was sleeping.

“I had to get this out, tell somebody.”

He sighs again, and if Georgia didn't know better, she would have sworn that the meanest boy in Geddie High School, who grew into one of the meanest men in eastern Scots County by all accounts, was silently crying.

He speaks again after a couple of minutes.

“I should have done it a long time ago,” he says. “There wasn't no other solution for it.

“They sent him to that therapy, that anger-management shit and all the classes about treating women right and all, but it didn't take. I knew that. It was up to me. You clean up your own mess.

“Hell, I don't know,” he says, after a pause, “maybe it's just who he is—was. Who he was. Just another damn mean-ass Blackwell.”

William seems to be talking to himself more than her, and then he appears to suddenly remember she's there, who she is and why he made this late-night Christmas Eve visit.

“Georgia,” he says, “do you want to hear a real sad story?”

When William Blackwell was a boy, his father, Bartholemew Bullard Blackwell, owned 22 acres of land alongside Route 47. The big farm they were working then was north of town. The land outside Geddie was for corn mostly, which they used to feed themselves and their livestock.

But then the Averitts, who owned just about everything, overextended themselves, and the Blackwells came into possession of some of the best black dirt in the area at a price so agreeable that they were rumored to have stolen it, flat-out. No one ever proved that, although many a local farmer bemoaned the fact that the land was sold before he had a chance to match the Black-wells' offer.

Their land, formerly a strip along the highway, now extended almost to the edge of the swamp itself.

Tol Blackwell moved his family to this new acreage, which was far better than what they were working before (although he kept the old spread and employed a black tenant farmer). He built a house far off the highway, because he had gotten so sick of people throwing trash in his yard as they drove by the old place. The road leading to it remained a rut path until it was paved five years ago. Even now, it is no more than a rude, sandy trail after it passes the last modular home and goes on into the swamp. There, it picks up the route of the old tram rail line that was used to haul pines out of Kinlaw's Hell long ago.

It runs out on the north shore of Maxwell's Millpond.

The night of the 18
^th
, William Blackwell had been walking around his back yard, checking things. He liked to check things, liked to be on top of the situation. He wanted to inspect the pump house, make sure the pipes were wrapped snugly enough to avoid freezing. He wondered if his feckless daughter and son-in-law had put antifreeze in their car yet, or if they were going to have a repeat of what happened last winter.

He liked to be outdoors anyhow, even on a cold night like that. You learned things being outdoors, and you stayed tough. The last time he took two of his grandchildren camping, they whined about being too hot when they went to bed, then whined about being too cold when they awakened at 2 AM. Indoor living made you soft, and he took pride that, no matter what else people might say, they would never say the Blackwells were soft.

If he had stayed indoors, he wouldn't have seen the red truck come past. You couldn't have heard it inside, in the back room with the TV on.

He thought at first Pooh was coming to visit one of his siblings, which would have been a good sign, as relations had been somewhat strained lately. It was one reason William was so glad things worked out as they had with the old McLaurin house. Pooh, he realized, needed some space. And they needed some between him and them.

But the truck bounced along past the last dwelling, until the final glimmer of light disappeared into the swamp.

Even then, he could have just let it pass, could have told himself that whatever his oldest son was up to, let him be up to it and leave the rest of them the hell alone.

William Blackwell wasn't like that, though. Whatever he had gotten in life had been attained by always having an ear to the ground, always being willing to deal head-on with life's little surprises. It gave you an edge. If something troubled you, you didn't turn your back and hope it would just go away, because it wouldn't, not in William Blackwell's experience.

And so, he walked over and eased into his wife's little Toyota, because it was the one farthest away from the house and least likely to be heard. There was no sense in letting everybody know your business if you didn't have to.