The Devil's Only Friend (7 page)

Of course I was useless as far as this went, even more useless than I had been during my brief time as a police detective. After leaving my mother's house on Holy Saturday, I had simply shown up at Lloyd's gate. Lloyd could not have known I would ever show up there. How had I even known that he was staying with his son there on the east side? I must have read it somewhere in the paper. Why would I even believe what was printed in the daily rags? Yet every indication was that Lloyd had been waiting for me; he had been thinking of me all along. It was possible, I knew, that Lloyd might have been stringing along any number of palookas over the years, and he had only to wait for the unluckiest to show up at his door when something messy needed to be fixed again. But there was an odd feel to it; why should Walker's sister be involved? I had never given a specific word to anyone but Hank Chew.

I was startled by Ray Federle's sharp rap at my window. I could see his wide-eyed face peering in from the outer stairs, his palms pressed to the glass, a cigarette held to the side between his lips. As I lifted the window to let him in, I realized that it would be possible for anyone to enter my little room this way.

“Hiya,” he said.

“You could use the door.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm funny sometimes.” He was in his shirtsleeves, and he was rubbing his arms from the cold. “I wanted to apologize for my wife. I heard she really gave it to you.”

“I've been smacked up by plenty of women.”

“She worries about the girls,” he said. “I was gone for so long, and now—”

“Next time I'll know,” I said. “She won't get a drop on me. Kids or no kids, she gets the hard ticket out.”

He smiled an empty smile, sucked a drag from his butt, and laughed the smoke out dryly. “It's only fair,” he said. “It's only right. She won't give you no more trouble. She's sorry.” He glanced around my place, and I could see that he had an interest in the papers on my little table.

“I'm about to hit the hay,” I told him, though the night was still young. “If that's all you had to say.”

“Okay! I only wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”

“It's nothing.”

“She's a good woman,” said Federle. “She deserves to have a good life.”

“Well, I don't stand in the way, so long as she keeps her hands to herself.”

“Sure, sure.” Federle tried to grin again, and this time it came out with a bit of feeling. “I'll tell her you're not mad. Is that all right?”

“Tell her what you want to.”

“Okay, Pete.” He made his way back to the window and hoisted a leg up on the sill. “I don't have a key to get back in my door,” he said.

I could see that it was hard for him to move through the window and out onto the stairs. He was still young enough to have a spring in his step, but when he moved, something held him back. It seemed likely that he had taken some injury in the fighting. He would not have been sent home unless he couldn't go on.
Maybe he's got a wooden leg,
I thought.
Or two wooden legs.
But for the time I didn't care to ask him about it. If he had to tell me, I knew he wouldn't be able to keep it corked up.

After he was gone, I closed the window and turned the latch to lock it. I'm sure I did. While Ray Federle was still clanging up the metal stairs, I pulled down the shade and tried to think of a place to stash Lloyd's papers. I began to get thirsty for a drink.

*   *   *

I went better than two hundred pounds, even if some of it had turned to lard by then. I told myself that they must have come into my room at two or three in the morning—it's the only part of the night when my sleep gets so deep. To soothe my conscience, I told myself that they must have clobbered me in my bed right away, or maybe it was ether or chloroform. Either way, sure, I had the welts to show they didn't want me squawking while I went. If I ever looked closely at the little room I kept, at the way my building was set up, it might not have seemed possible that they could have carried me out without rousting the whole place given the size of me and the general cheapness of the lumber that went into the walls and floor. What a story! In my shorts they took me out and carried me to a car or a truck and drove me some distance across town.
They must have,
I thought,
they must have—or else I sleepwalked into it, and that doesn't seem likely.

How could they have done it without anyone hearing?
First thing I remember after lying down to bed is my feet in the water. It felt like swimming up out of a deep sleep, struggling to wake yourself up inside that darker world because your dream or your nightmare in some way matches up with the real world. If someone's knocking hard at your door in real life, you might dream about chopping down a tree with a hatchet. Because my feet were wet, I remember thinking that I was set to pee the bed, and so I forced myself to come to my senses.

My head got clear pretty quick.

Not much light came into the room, but I saw right off I wasn't anymore in Kansas. My heart threw an enormous heave of panic because I could not move. I was in a big room with an old wood-beamed ceiling. Some hard guys were there—one stood to either side of the long tank of water beneath me.
An electroplating tank?
They had me strapped faceup to a board, a sizable piece of lumber. My belly was lashed hard to the board with a cord tight up under my rib cage and another just at the top of my hips, my chest was lashed under my armpits, and my hands were roped together on the underside of the board. I couldn't move or even feel my elbows, either, but my legs were loose. I gave a start and my eye danced around the room.

They dunked me under the water for a few seconds and then brought me up.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “What is it?”

“You're a guilty man, Caudill.”

I didn't say anything because I figured I'd need my breath.

“A dirty man.”

I could not tell which of the two thugs spoke because each had a kerchief over his mouth and nose. They were close enough to touch—if my hands had been free.

Down I went again, not far, but far enough to keep my face under water. I could turn my head, crane toward the surface, but I could not move enough to let my mouth break into the air. How many seconds it lasted I couldn't say. Before my lungs burst, though, they brought me up again.

They waited for me to stop retching.

“Mr. Lloyd's troubles don't concern you.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Or do they?”

Again I chose to keep my breath.

“You're not talking, Caudill.”

It seemed that they were switching off in their speech like a vaudeville act.
How many?
I thought.
One or two?
Even their voices seemed the same, if my ears hadn't been fouled with water. They had the timing of a comedy team. Both men had blue eyes, and I could see that they had muscles enough because they were naked from the waist up. But the real beef was at the other end of the long board. A pair of oxen, jumbo-sized boys, leaned their elbows on the board like a lever to keep me above water. I couldn't seem to make out their faces either.
Two big guys and two bigger guys.

“You'll talk plenty before we're through.”

“You'll sing like a bluebird.”

“More like a blue jay.”

It didn't seem funny to me.

“We'd like you to tell us about Jasper Lloyd.”

I could see there wasn't any point in trying to be hard. But still—

“We're not bad men.”

“Not too bad.”

“We're all Americans here.”

“In the service of our country.”

If they were giving a signal to the lever men, I didn't see it. My eye was blinking furiously from the filthy water. When I went under, I kept still long enough to see the smaller pair wavering over me, looking down into the water. Then the thrashing started. You can't keep from thrashing. Sooner than the cords would ever break or come loose, my shoulders would pop out of their sockets. I knew it, but it didn't stop me from thrashing. My heart started whacking and my head cracked back on the board and my teeth were grinding. My only eye was burning like a welding torch in the socket, and I was sure that I'd be blinded entirely. But that was only a flash of worry.

Coppers? T-men? Some of Lloyd's own goons?

I guess I was racking all over the board before I finally sucked in water. If there was a certain moment when I gave up living and decided to suck water into my lungs, I can't say. I only remember how I retched up water and vomit after they finally lifted me out again. All that bile and filthy water washed out of my mouth and nose and fell warmly over my neck. My ears roared. I might as well have been dead—I was dead enough. The heaving and coughing I had to do was tearing and popping my muscles and my lungs because I was lashed down so tight to the board.

The masked men had stepped back to avoid the spatter, but now they moved back toward me. They didn't seem to be in any particular rush to get someplace else.

“Why don't you be friendly, Caudill?”

“Why don't you like us?”

“We like you.”

I was coughing and spitting and cranking my head around to see what I could see. Even though I knew it just meant that they'd dunk me again, I sucked in as much air as I could, trying to live a little longer. If you don't have time to think about it and you have make a choice about living on for a little while or dying right away—you'll pick to live a little longer.

“Whyn't you just talk to us a little?”

“Don't be standoffish.”

“It's a waste of my breath to talk,” I said, gurgling slimy liquid through my voice box to make the sound.
Isn't that funny?
I thought.

“We'll be nice now.”

“We promise.”

Something like electricity it must be. Your brain flashes even if there's no light. You blink on, you blink off. You maybe can or maybe can't remember what happens to you. Your brain keeps sending the juice down the spinal cord even after your sense is gone; it makes your legs flail and your muscles pull even though it's tearing your skin off your flesh, pulling flesh from bone. Your brain wants to go on living even after it's not worthwhile.

What did I tell them? Maybe I told them everything I had learned from Lloyd, a bunch of nothing. Maybe I told them about Jane Hardiman, about my brother Tommy, about the nigger boy I had killed accidentally so many years ago. Maybe I wept for my father, for my eye, for my lost fingers. If I told them how I thumbtacked Lloyd's papers up under my kitchen countertop, over my silver drawer, if I blabbed or cried or begged for my life, it was out of my hands. The only thing I can bear to remember out of it all is how sick with disgust I was that my own life could be so small as to end like that.

CHAPTER 7

Sunday, April 9

She was standing over me with a silvery trowel in her hand. I thought that she might have kicked me to wake me up or to see if I was dead. Green grass with twinkling frost or dew obscured part of what I saw. She stood so close to me that I could see partway up her skirt when I began to be able to move my eye. She wore heavy stockings. When I began to stir, she turned away toward a bed of budding flowers and neat shrubs.

“Such a life of misery for you, Mr. Caudill,” she said. “More and more pitiful with the passage of every day.”

I thought I knew Estelle Hardiman's practiced voice, despite the tinny ringing that was constant in my ears. Though it required some effort to position myself to get a better look at her, I managed to twist my head and shoulders. I was sprawled out on the thick grass of a big estate. The house stood at what seemed a great distance.
It's so green, so green,
I thought. I had been dumped toward the back of the Hardiman property, near the service road. It was in that house that I first met Roger and Estelle Hardiman, first came to really feel the sting of what I could not ever have.

She had dropped to her knees a short distance away and now puttered along the edge of the grass with her trowel. Her fanny was toward me. Though she was a thin woman, the flesh at the back of her legs sagged sadly down toward her knees. I watched her working for a few moments, unable to move. She stabbed her trowel into the dirt, twisted nimbly to her feet, and turned to gaze down at me. The warm light of the sun, low over the lake, lit up her face and her glittering eyes.

“You've made me a widow, Mr. Caudill. I don't blame you, exactly, but you'll pay nonetheless.”

She left a decent pause for my response, but I could not speak. The breeze over the open grass chilled the wetness in my bare eyehole.

She stepped closer to me and stood glowing with the promise of vengeance. “Do you remember the first time we met? That was the night I learned that my daughter Jane had been murdered. As I recall, you offered not the merest gesture of condolence.”

I thought,
I'm sorry, I'm so sorry,
but I said not a word. I could not bear to look at her, and so I rolled my bitter eye to watch the slow progress of a horribly old servant as he made his way toward us from the house.

“It's a pity you couldn't have had more feeling for Jane. She was really … She was becoming a remarkable young woman. You should have known her. She of all people could never have deserved what happened to her.”

I knew her. I did know her.

“A surly man you are, Mr. Caudill, surly, backward, and rude. This lack of civility is the plague and bane of modern life, and again you are
emblematic
of this
tragic … discourtesy.
To present yourself in such a way—near to naked on a lady's lawn, and so early in the morning …
on the morning of Easter Sunday.
But you'll see that I am a woman of great resilience.”