The Breathtaker (5 page)

6

D
AKOTA ROAD
began with a good idea—Pop Okie’s Ribs—then meandered for miles past the big white grain elevators and dried-up oil wells into the distended western leg of Promise, where nobody wore designer clothes or locked their doors at night. Parking in the rutted driveway, Charlie paused to study the picture-perfect farmhouse beneath the gradually brightening sky. It was white with red shutters and a gabled roof. The power was still out on this side of town, but for the most part, his father’s property had escaped unscathed. The ’51 Loadmaster pickup truck—low to the ground and primed the color of sharkskin—was parked in front of the barn, and beyond the barn were the muddy fields where Isaac Grover had spent half his life worrying three hundred fallow acres into productive farmland.

Charlie sat shivering in his police car while the engine ticked and cooled. His arms felt heavy as rotten logs. He was still in shock about it. Triple homicide. Ritualistic murder. Right here in Oklahoma. He closed his eyes and almost instantly felt the flurry of blows, his father’s hairy-knuckled fists smashing into his face. He opened his eyes again and watched a squirrel hopping around in the front yard. This was the house they’d moved into right after the old place on Kidwell Road had burned to the ground and claimed the lives of Charlie’s mother and baby sister, Adelaide and Clara Grover. Charlie could still feel the old anger, the old sorrow, simmering just under the surface, his burn scars a constant reminder of the past. All he had to do was look down. He’d been marked by God with an enormous cattle brand: thick-ridged hypertrophic scars cascading across his left arm and chest; those raised yellow areas from the skin grafts on one buttock; the contractions in his left leg. He recalled the other kids’ taunts.
Burned-All-Over Grover. Charcoal Charlie.
He would come home from school and sit stoically on the edge of his bed, cup his palms over various parts of his body in order to measure the percentages of his third-degree burns: 1 percent for the head, 8 percent for the upper limb, 11 percent for the lower limb, 8 percent for the torso. No matter how many times he did it, it always came out to 28 percent.

Now he stepped out of the car and cautiously approached the house, that perfectly manicured lawn stretching before him like an awkward pause in conversation. The old man was so proud of that yard, always mowing, always weeding—a different man after he’d quit drinking thirty years ago. Quit drinking after their house had burned down.
That was some wake-up call, boy.
Yeah, right. Too late to do anybody else any good, Charlie thought bitterly. Now Isaac’s fellow churchgoers liked his putting-green lawn and his repentant demeanor. They’d embraced this sinner, had forgiven him too quickly. Charlie imagined he could hear the roots of all that perfect grass sucking the water out of the ground as he climbed the porch steps and knocked on the rattling screen door. “Pop?”

No answer. The house was dark and quiet. The screen door squealed on its hinges. He scuffed his feet on the doormat and entered. The front hallway smelled of wood polish. A lead weight settled in his stomach as he glanced at the mail table, a week’s worth of deliveries gathering dust. Bill after unpaid bill. His father would be asking to borrow money from him again.

“Pop? You home?” he called to a ringing silence, then scanned the dozen or so photographs lining the walls: faded pictures of himself and his family; long-ago stuff, the pain still visible in his mother’s eyes. Poor Adelaide. And baby Clara with her large love. And a younger, dark-haired Isaac smiling at the camera lens with boozy indifference, while outside the camera’s range, the wildness quickly returned to his eyes.

Forgiven him too easily.

Isaac quit drinking the day after the fire, but he’d merely traded in one addiction for another—drinking for storm-chasing. Now he went storm-chasing every chance he got. He went to church on Sundays and chased extreme weather the rest of the week, and they’d never spoken about that night ever again, father and son.

The house was neat and tidy, everything tucked away. Charlie remembered the messy, cluttered home on Kidwell Road; the fire marshal had come to the conclusion that the fire had started down in the basement where all the rags and newspapers and kerosene lanterns were, perhaps ignited by a spark from the coal furnace. His father used to go down to the basement to stoke the furnace three times a day during the wintertime. Cussing like a madman.
C’mon, you old bitch.
Upstairs in the living room, that
whoosh
of hot air coming up through the wrought-iron grate was like the devil’s breath.

“Charlie?” A coarse, familiar voice.

He spun around. “Whoa. Don’t shoot.”

Isaac lowered the barrel of his rifle, the one he used for deer-hunting. “I thought maybe I had burglars.”

“Naw, just me.”

“Go on, grab a seat outside. I’ll fetch us some root beers.” Isaac Grover was a powerfully built sixty-two-year-old with a face mapped by hardship. Tough as overcooked beef and primed for meanness, he was a notorious insomniac who stayed up late to talk on his ham radio to the only other earthlings still awake at that godless hour—the Germans or the Chinese—speaking pidgin English into the wee morning hours. He farmed three hundred acres, but his return on investment was pretty small. He had a few head of cattle, some chickens, and grew soybeans, but wheat was his main source of income. Needless to say, he wasn’t a rich man.

“I saw you yesterday,” Isaac said, his powerful hands clasped gently together. “Guess you didn’t see me, though.”

“Where was this?”

“Black Kettle Road. I was helping with the cleanup.”

Charlie frowned. “Why didn’t you come over and say hello?”

“You looked like you had your hands full. Go on, grab a seat on the porch.”

“I can’t stay long, Pop.”

“Okay, so go on. Take a load off.”

Charlie bit back his irritation. “Five minutes, then I’ve really gotta run.” He went outside and took a seat in one of the ancient wicker chairs that’d always been there, like the pyramids. He could hear the old man rooting around in the kitchen, flipping on the
Farm and Ranch Report
and rummaging through the refrigerator. He remembered his father’s long struggle with the farm. The bugs and weeds ate his crops, and the middlemen took his profits.
“If I had any money, I wouldn’t be a farmer. I’d buy me a boat and sail around the world.”
Now Isaac let the screen door slam shut behind him as he handed Charlie an ice-cold root beer, the old-fashioned glass bottles clinking together.

“Poor Mary Jo,” he said, landing in the chair opposite, its tattered wicker protesting as he settled in. He meant Mary Jo Crider, the elderly victim who’d been blown out of her house yesterday afternoon. “She used to baby-sit me and Bo-Bo, I ever tell you? This one time, she let Bo-Bo eat three cans of pork ’n’ beans. He was just mad about that ol’ gal. She wore a different sweater every day of the week.” His eyes widened at the memory. “Thrown twenty yards from her house, all twisted up in barbed wire. You believe that? My gosh. It makes you wonder.”

Charlie tasted his root beer with care. “Yesterday,” he said. “Feels like months ago.”

“Yesterday the sky fell.” Isaac gave his son a quick, assessing look. “So how’re you holdin’ up? You holdin’ up okay?”

“I’m wrestling with it, Pop,” he admitted.

“Don’t just sit on it. Tell me.”

His eyes searched his father’s face with anxious movements. Little flicks. “It was horrible.”

“Death is always horrible.”

“Yeah, well… this was a particular kind of horrible.”
Don’t tell him. Don’t tell him the truth. They’ll all know soon enough.
He was giving a news conference later that morning.

Whenever Isaac blinked, you could track the mileage on his face. He wore a rumpled jacket over a rumpled shirt, since his personal hygiene didn’t necessarily match his obsession with domestic cleanliness and a manicured lawn. He wore the same pair of shoes until they fell off, each new pair destined to die a slow, lingering death on his stinky old corn-riddled dogs. He was like some homeless guy who’d wandered into June Cleaver’s house and claimed squatter’s rights.

“You go chasing yesterday?” Charlie asked, and his father nodded.

“I drifted west on the I-10, headed north for Cradle Rock. First storm split off a left mover, so I swung back down again. Hell, I almost missed it. I went from perfect position, almost under the meso, to out of position in about ten minutes.”

“They said it was an F-3.”

He squinted at the rising sun. “That cumulus literally exploded skyward. You could see the tower rushing up. Christ, I’ve known Rob Pepper since he was this high.” He wagged his head mutely, wispy white hair shimmering in the early morning light. He grew his hair shoulder-length now, whereas it used to be military style. “I can remember Stretch Pepper tossing red-hot horseshoes into the air and catching them with a pair of tongs. Rob was his firstborn. Stretch handed out Yoo-hoos instead of cigars. That was the day Bob Schul won the five-thousand-meter.” He tapped his head. “I keep a lot of trivia up here.”

Everybody knew the Peppers were victims of yesterday’s tornado. Nobody knew what Charlie knew yet.

Isaac removed his dentures and set them on the broad wicker arm of the chair. His father had been toothless for as long as Charlie could remember. He used to scare the neighborhood kids by flipping his dentures out with his tongue. He liked to joke that his real teeth were waiting for him on the other side, with Adelaide.

“I knew Jenna Pepper’s mama, too,” Isaac said. “Celine Kulbeck. Real wildcat. Like mother, like daughter.”

“Hm?” Charlie glanced up. “What d’you mean?”

“I don’t mean nothin’. Just… you hear rumors.”

“What kind of rumors?”

He shrugged. “This and that.”

He wasn’t going to tell him. The sweet, cold drink made Charlie’s teeth ache. His father was about as tough as an old Texas boot, but today he was looking washed-out—thin and pale, without enough flesh to swell the folds of his cheeks. Charlie wondered if he was getting enough to eat.

A brisk wind blew through the poorly joined wall boards of the screened-in porch. Outside, ravens circled the sky, and the overalls, boxer shorts and skinny bath towels hanging on the line were drenched with morning dew.
What’s the sound of nothing?
A knot formed in the pit of Charlie’s stomach and wouldn’t go away. Suddenly he was propelled back to the good old days, back to those miserable years when his parents were always yelling, always throwing things.
Please make them stop…

Charlie in his attic room, listening to his parents arguing downstairs. Something crashed, and he jumped. The baby was crying. Two-year-old Clara was always bawling. She had the kind of white-blond hair and lizard-green eyes that didn’t remind his father of anybody else in the family, and this seemed to drive him crazy. “Is this baby mine? Answer me, woman!” At Charlie’s feet were his broken toys. He’d just turned seven, and there was a storm raging downstairs, a knock-down-drag-out. Please, God, make them stop, I’ll be good…

Whenever his father beat up his mother, she’d hide in her room afterward and cry until her mascara ran down her cheeks and she looked like a clown. Now his father was tromping up the attic stairs; coming for him, he knew. Charlie yelped as the stern-looking man with the big callused hands yanked him upright by the scruff of the neck and dragged him down the attic stairs, one bump at a time.
Bump, bump, bump,
all the way down to the second-story landing, where he screamed in Charlie’s face, “What’s the sound of nothing, you little bed wetter?” Over and over again, while Charlie stared, terrified. Losing patience fast, the old man unbuckled his thick leather belt and beat Charlie senseless with it. The boy covered his head and screamed while blow after blow rained down on him, everything snapping and crackling. “What’s the sound of nothing, you little bed wetter?”

Minutes later, Isaac Grover stormed out of the house. They could hear the front door slam shut and the squeal of his tires as he sped out of the driveway, burning rubber all the way down Kidwell Road. Charlie sat hunkered in a corner of the hallway, shivering and crying, waiting for comfort and release; but his mother didn’t come over and hold him the way she usually did. Instead, she just stared at him with wild, unknowing eyes and walked away.

Later that night, she forgot to kiss him good night. Alone in his attic room, Charlie lay very still in bed, so cold and scared he didn’t know what to do. Maybe they’d get lucky and there would be an accident on the way home. Maybe his father would slam headlong into that big oak tree on the corner.

But then, shortly after midnight, his father swaggered home, drunk and disorderly, singing in his big booming voice all the way up the stairs,
clomp, clomp, clomp.
Charlie could hear him banging around down there, and his mother’s fretful voice. Soon they were arguing. Then his mother screamed, just once… and an eerie silence followed. Charlie held his breath while the bedsprings in the room below began to squeak. They squeaked for a very long time, and then there was nothing but silence.

Charlie lay still as stone, blinking mechanically in the dark, his eyes tracing shadows and jagged silhouettes cast by the half-moon night. Any minute now, he knew, his father would come pounding up the attic stairs to beat him senseless. He just knew it. He could practically hear the creak of the treads every time he closed his eyes.

Eventually he smelled smoke. The air grew thick with it and hard to breathe. Smoke came pouring up the attic stairs like cream poured into coffee. He ran to the top of the landing but couldn’t see through all that black billowing smoke. “Mama!” he cried. “Mama!”

He ran to the window and looked out over the peaceful moonlit night, and it suddenly occurred to him that nobody cared. The cows didn’t care. The owls didn’t care. The half-moon sprinkling the fields with pixie dust didn’t care. Soon a fire was roaring up the attic stairs, accompanied by toxic fumes that all but crushed the air out of his lungs. Charlie leaned out the window and cried for help, but when a pale blue sheet of flame flapped across the floor and reached the balls of his feet, he jumped. He jumped in order to save his own skin; but his skin, it turned out, was only two-thirds saved.