Summer of Night (18 page)

Dale tried bribery. Congden took the Twinkies and lunch money and beat the shit out of Dale anyway. Dale tried being a follower, even going so far as to try to slouch around the playground as part of the bully's entourage of toadies. Congden kicked the hell out of him at least once a week on general principles.

What made matters worse, was that Congden's one legitimate sidekick-Archie Kreck-was in Dale's class. Archie would have been the town bully himself if Congden hadn't existed: he affected the same wardrobe, had cleats on his boots, was short and stocky and mean, looked a bit like Mickey Rooney's evil twin, and had a glass eye.

No one knew how Archie had lost his real eye… word on the playground was that C. J. Congden had dug it out with a penknife as part of some bizarre initiation when Archie was only six or seven… but the glass eye, his left, was used to good effect. Sometimes when Mrs. Howe was droning on in a geography lesson, Archie would pop out the eye, set it in the pencil trough at the front of his desk, and pretend to doze off while his eye kept watch.

Dale had laughed the first time he'd seen this, but Archie had waited after the principal was through with him and jumped Dale on the way to the boys' (or boy's as it was marked in Old Central) John. Archie had held Dale's face in the urinal for five flushes while urging him to laugh again. After school that day, Archie and C.J. were both waiting at the edge of the playground. Dale had never run so fast-scooting down the alley behind Mrs. Moon's house, crashing through Mike's chickenhouse, cutting back through Grayson's garden, and then sprinting across the street to his own house, slamming through the front door two seconds in front of the two human Dobermans in engineer boots.

They'd caught up to him two days later and kicked the shit out of him. Despite what fathers say and mothers don't understand, there's no escaping bullies. And these two were world class.

Dale was pleased to be past the Congden place: C.J. didn't have his own car, and his old man wouldn't let him drive the souped-up Chevy, but Dale had seen him driving a lot of his 'friends' ' cars. It was wonderful when the town bully began driving; it got him off the streets.

Harlen's house was three doors down, just a hundred yards from the old depot. Dale slid his bike to a stop by the front stoop and rapped on the door, but the house looked closed and silent and no one came to the door. Still glancing down the street to make sure that C.J. and Archie didn't suddenly show up, Dale walked his bike down the street. His dad's leather binocular case bounced against his chest as he walked.

There were two ways to get to Cordie Cooke's house: push the bike over the railroad embankment and through the weeds to the gravel road that ran back to the dump; or leave his bike somewhere and walk the tracks.

Dale didn't like to leave his bike in this part of town-once Lawrence's bike had ended up missing for two weeks until Harlen found it in the orchard behind Congden's house-but he also remembered Duane's game of tag with the truck.

Dale stowed the bike in the weeds behind the depot, pulling branches to camouflage it completely, and-scanning with the binoculars to make sure that C.J. wasn't lurking around somewhere-moved cautiously down the west side of the embankment until he was out past the grain elevator. Then he picked up a branch and walked the right rail, whistling and hitting pebbles into the fields. He wasn't worried about trains: the line was rarely used-sometimes weeks went by between freights, according to Harlen, who lived close to the tracks.

Beyond Catton Road, the trees disappeared except for the cottonwoods by the stream and occasional patches of timber between the fields. Dale began wondering what he was going to do. What if someone caught him peeking at the Cookes' house with binoculars? Wasn't there a law against doing that? What if Cordie's drunken father caught him… or he ran into one of the other creepos that lived out by the dump? What if the binoculars got broken?

Dale tossed the stick into the weeds and walked along, one hand on the leather case.

This is nuts.

He saw the roof of the tallow plant off to the left, but no red Rendering Truck came charging out of the bushes to squash him. Then he smelled the dump and saw Cordie's place through the trees.

Dale got off the embankment and slipped down through marshy grass, staying where the trees were thickest. It was almost a hundred yards to the house itself, so he felt fairly safe here in the woods. No one could see him from the dump road or from the tracks behind him. It'd be hard to sneak up on him because of all the dry sticks lying around. He settled back in an enclosed area between two trees and a thick bush, focused the binoculars on Cordie's house, and waited.

Cordie's house was a mess. It was so small that it was hard to believe that four adults-a couple of her uncles lived there-and a bunch of kids could inhabit the place. The house made Daysinger's shack and Congden's rattrap look like palaces.

Three old homes lay in the hollow near the gate to the dump. Cordie's place was the worst, and they were all awful. All the houses were set on cinderblocks, but her place looked like it'd fallen off in the back and actually slanted like some boat beached after a storm. Grass grew thick and green along the edge of the woods and beside the stream thirty yards behind the house, but the yard was packed dirt relieved only by deep mud puddles. Junk was strewn everywhere.

Like most guys, Dale liked junk. If the dump didn't have so many mean rats and neighbors like the Cookes and the Congdens, he and the other boys would be out here playing, digging, exploring, and retrieving all the time. As it was, the Bike Patrol spent more time checking out things being thrown away along the town's alleys and streets on pickup day than in any other activity. Junk was neat. People threw away the neatest things. Once Dale and Lawrence had found an actual tank helmet-some sort of cushioned thing with real leather and German writing on the inside-and Lawrence had used it in his one-against-ten football games ever since. Another time, Dale and Mike had found a great sink that they'd carried all the way back to Mike's chickenhouse before Mr. O'Rourke screamed at them to take it back. Junk was neat.

But not this junk. Behind Cordie's house there were rusted springs, broken toilets-although Dale was sure that Cordie'd said once that they had an outhouse-car windshields with shards of broken glass slanting up through chokeweeds, rusted auto parts that looked like the organs of some monster robot, hundreds of rusty old cans with their sharp lids raised like buzzsaw blades, broken tricycles that looked like they'd been smashed by a truck driving back and forth over them, discarded dolls with mold on their pink plastic flesh and dead eyes staring skyward. Dale spent at least ten minutes inspecting the junkyard behind Cordie's house before lowering the glasses and rubbing his eyes. What the heck do they do with all that crap?

Spying was boring business, Dale discovered. Within a half an hour his legs felt cramped, bugs were crawling on him, the heat was making his head hurt, and all he'd seen was Cordie's mother out back pulling wash off the line-the sheets looked gray and spotted-and shouting at the two grimy little Cooke kids who sat splashing each other in the deepest mud puddle, while picking their noses and wiping it on their shorts.

No sign of Cordie. No sign of whatever he was looking for. What was he looking for? Hell, let Mike come out and do this if he wanted to check out Cordie Cooke.

Dale was about ready to call it a day when he heard footsteps on the cinders along the railroad embankment. He crouched down, shielding the glasses, so sun wouldn't glint off the lenses, and tried to catch a glimpse of who it was. He saw corduroy pants through the leaves, legs walking in a familiar waddle.

What the heck is Duane doing over here?

Dale ran to a different position, making noise in the underbrush as he did so, but the railbed curved out of sight a hundred feet north, and by the time Dale got where he could see something, there wasn't anything left to see.

He started walking back to his observation post, but a movement of gray in the trees ahead of him made him take cover and use the glasses.

Cordie was striding purposefully through the woods, heading for the tracks. She was carrying a double-barreled shotgun.

Dale felt his knees go sort of weak. What if she'd seen him? Cordie was crazy-that wasn't an insult, just a fact. The year before, in fifth grade, there was a new music teacher she didn't like-Mr. Aleo from Chicago-and Cordie sent him a letter saying that she was going to sic her dogs on him and have them tear his arms and legs and other stuff off. She'd read the letter to the class on the playground before going in to give it to him.

It was the line about the 'other stuff being torn off that probably had gotten her suspended. Mr. Aleo gave up on Elm Haven and went back to Evansville before the school year was over. Cordie was crazy. Fact. If she'd seen Dale, she could easily be hunting him with murder on her mind.

Dale flattened himself in the weeds, trying not to breathe, trying not even to think, since he had a theory that crazy people were telepathic.

Cordie did not look right or left as she strode through the woods, climbed the embankment about fifty feet south of where Dale had come down, and began walking toward town. The gun was bigger than she was and she carried it over one shoulder like some midget soldier.

Dale waited until she was out of sight, and then he began to follow, being careful not to show himself. They were halfway back to town, between the tallow plant and the abandoned grain elevator, and Cordie was still a couple of hundred feet ahead-never looking back, never looking from side to side, marching from railroad tie to railroad tie like a windup toy in a grungy gray dress-when suddenly he came around a turn and she was gone.

Dale hesitated, scanned the railbed and woodline ahead with the glasses, and cautiously poked his head up to see if she'd gone into the woods on the east side of the tracks.

A familiar voice behind him said, "Hey, it's the fucking Stewart kid. You lost, punk?"

Dale turned slowly, still holding his dad's binoculars. C. J. and Archie were both there, not ten feet behind him. He'd been so careful not to let Cordie see or hear him that he'd never checked his tail.

Archie was shirtless, a red bandanna tied around his forehead. Greasy hair stuck out above it. His fat face was flushed and the glass eye glinted in the late-morning light. C. J. was standing with one foot up on the rail, the other boot on the cinder right-of-way. The pose made Dale think of some sort of acned white hunter on safari. It was perfect right down to the rifle C. J. held in the crook of his arm.

Jesus Christ, thought Dale. His legs suddenly were so weak that he didn't think he could run if he got the chance. What is this, National Gun Day? He imagined saying that aloud, as dumb as it sounded. He imagined C. J. and Archie laughing, maybe one of them clapping him on the back, and then the two of them turning around and heading back to the dump to shoot rats.

"What the fuck are you smiling at, punk?" snapped C. J. Congden, only son of Elm Haven's justice of the peace.

He raised the rifle and pointed it directly at Dale's face from ten feet away. There was a click of a safety being slid off, or maybe the hammer being lifted.

Dale tried to close his eyes but couldn't even manage that. He realized that he was shielding the binoculars so that the bullet wouldn't smash them when it passed through his chest. He felt the urge to hide behind something so strongly it was like the need to urinate when you just couldn't stand it any longer… but the only thing to hide behind was himself.

Dale's right leg began vibrating slightly. His heart was pounding so wildly that it seemed to have ruined his hearing; C. J. was saying something, but no sound came through.

Congden took two steps and set the muzzle against Dale Stewart's throat.

Duane McBride found Jim Harlen's room easily enough. It was a double room, but the curtain was pulled back and the second bed was empty. Rich June light filled the window and painted a white rectangle on the tile floor.

Harlen was sleeping. Duane checked the empty corridor and pulled the door shut just as the squeak of a nurse's shoes approached the corner.

Duane stepped closer and hesitated. He hadn't been sure what to expect-Harlen in an oxygen tent, perhaps, features distorted by clear plastic, all but surrounded by tall oxygen bottles the way Duane's granddad had looked just before he'd died two years ago-but Jim was sleeping peacefully enough under a starched sheet and a thin blanket, with only the thick cast on his left arm and the white crown of bandages around his head testifying to his injuries. Duane stood there until the squeak of shoes in the corridor went past, and then he stepped closer to the bed.

Harlen opened his eyes quickly, like an owl waking up, and said, "Hey, McBride."

Duane almost jumped backward. He blinked and said, "Hey, Harlen. You OK?"

Harlen tried to smile and Duane noticed how thin and bloodless the other boy's lips looked. "Yeah, I'm OK," Harlan said. "I woke up here with this terrible damn headache and my arm all torn and smashed to shit. Other than that, I'm great."

Duane nodded. "We thought you were…"He paused, not wanting to say 'in a coma."

"Dead?" said Harlen.

Duane shook his head. "Unconscious."

Harlen's eyes fluttered as if he were sliding back into a coma. He opened them wide and frowned as if trying to focus. "I guess I was. Unconscious, I mean. I woke up a few hours ago with this stinking lousy headache to find my mom sitting on the edge of the bed. I thought it was Sunday morning for a while. Shit, I didn't even know where I was for a few minutes." He looked around as if he still was not sure where he was.