Twilight (29 page)

He awoke to a dull throb in his temple and to music. Singing and some rhythmic accompaniment. A jouncing over rutted roads and the roar of an automobile engine.

…and I wound up her little ball of yarn, the voice sang.

A radio then. The Grand Ole Opry perhaps.

It was just two weeks from this I went out to take a piss,
And I found myself a burden of great pain,
For it had been to my mishaps I had caught a dose of claps,
And I’ll never wind that little ball again.

Not The Grand Ole Opry then. The voice went on singing. The song seemed to have an infinite number of verses in an ascending order of obscenity and the voice seemed to know all of them. Not the Grand Ole Opry. Then it all came back to him. He remembered Sutter, and it was Sutter himself singingat the top of his voice with brush slapping the rockerpanels rhythmically. This son of a bitch is driving in the woods, he thought in wonder. His face lay against the cold glass of the window, and he didn’t know how close Sutter was watching him, but he chanced opening one eye and all there was was the dark
boles of trees streaking by on both sides of a logroad snaking into deeper timber.

His jaw hurt and an incisor lay on its side in a position it had never been before. It hurt when he worried it with his tongue but he couldn’t stop worrying it. He wondered if Sutter had brought the rifle. If he had more than likely it was in the back seat. Maybe there was a chance he could whirl suddenly and grab the gun and twist the door handle and just jump. There was an even better chance that when he whirled for the gun Sutter would coldcock him with a fist as hard and big as the end of a locust fencepost, and if there was any way around it he didn’t want hit again. Then he remembered the gun didn’t work anyway, and he debated just jumping. He thought when the timber thinned sufficiently he’d make a leap for it and try to land on his feet and just keep on hauling. With an eye toward this, his right hand crept on his right thigh toward where he knew the doorhandle was. An inch, no more. Again. Creepmouse, creepmouse.

Don’t even think about it, Sutter said. Move it agin and I’ll leave you a bloody stub to jack off with.

He knotted his hand into a fist and it just lay on his thigh.

Sutter went back to singing. The wreck on the highway. Whiskey and blood run together, but I didn’t hear nobody pray, sweet Jesus, I didn’t hear nobody pray. He had a tuneless monotone of a voice and the whipping of the brush did not match this song as well. Where are we going?

Sutter stopped singing. Far enough so’s there ain’t no busybodies around. He resumed singing.

Tyler turned. To his surprise Sutter still wore the gray dress. He had removed the tortoiseshell specs but the bonnet was
still there, rakishly askew and tied demurely under his horselike chin.

You ought to get that radio fixed.

We’ll see how smart your mouth is here directly.

At length the road seemed to just vanish, to fade into heavier and heavier timber, but Sutter seemed not to notice. He was driving over wristsize saplings that caused the car to lurch sickeningly and the engine to labor harder, and he drove it until he reached a veritable wall of timber with no give to it. When he cut the switch something gave under the hood with a soft whoosh and a rising curtain of steam enveloped the car. Sutter’s hands were at untying the bonnet.

Where’d you come by that getup?

Sutter studied him. Folks in this world are always just walkin off somewheres else and providin me with what I need. Do you honestly want to know?

Tyler thought about it. No, he said.

I thought not. Now I looked you over pretty good back there at the tieyard. While you was dozed off. You ain’t got no pictures. Now what I want to know is where they are and how we get to em.

Tyler was prodding his tooth with his tongue when it gave with a soft cracking he actually heard inside his skull and his mouth was filling with warm blood. He started to open the door then thought better of it and leant forward and spat a mouthful of blood into the floorboard between his feet. Damn, boy, ain’t you had no raisin? This car probably belongs to a doctor or a lawyer or somethin.

Tyler sat staring at the tooth. A dull anger seized him. He had been run halfway across three counties by some madman
he had done nothing to, barely knew, had only heard rumored. Folks who had befriended him were in peril. Perhaps dead. And now the son of a bitch had knocked out a perfectly good tooth, one that would have served him all his days, one that lay worse than useless in a stringy gout of blood. And. And. And a thought that he had been trying to keep stuffed down into the darkness, that kept skittering out playfully and showing glimpses of itself. His sister was dead.

You remember that day in town when me and you had that talk? Sutter asked.

Yes, he said. It seemed a long time ago but it was not. He tried to remember everything about the day. The way the light fell, what his sister had been wearing when he came in that night, what de Vries had said about the roof.

You see how all I warned you’s come to pass? You see how I tried to tell you right. You see what meanness you’ve brought on everbody, and all that’s happened might never have been. It was your choice, and ever bit of it is on your head. There’s people been killed over your stubbornness, and probably more to come. I told you to imagine the worst thing that could happen and it would be.

Tyler didn’t say anything. He was staring past the glass. Where the brush ended a sedgefield tumbled steeply downhill in a stony tapestry toward a hollow so deep and distant it looked blue. Above the horizon a hawk dipped and rose on the updrafts of wind with soundless grace, and he wondered how it would feel to be there, to be watching all this throughthe arrogant yellow eyes of a hawk.

It’s just business to me. Just money. But more money than a man makes in ten years, just handed to me all at once in a
paper sack. And the only holdup is you.

I’m not going to give them to you. The only man that’ll get them from me is Bellwether.

You’ll give em to me. Oh, yes. When I’m through with you, you’ll be beggin me to take em. You’ll say, Please, Mr. Sutter, take these nasty things and be done with em. You’ll pray to whatever god it is you hold dear for me to reach out and take em out of your hot little hand. Now get your ass out.

He got out into the cold. A wind with a taste of ice in it was looping up from the hollow, and snowbirds flew among the bare trees foraging.

Fixin to snow, Sutter said, studying the onecolor sky, curious weatherman in grandmother drag. Me and you got to get to them pictures and get the hell out of Dodge before the snow flies.

This last was muffled by the dress being pulled over his head, and this more than anything else showed Tyler the contempt Sutter held him in. The rifle was gone, he was threatless, a small viper with his teeth pulled. He came around the car looking for some form of weapon and not finding one, but Sutter’s arms were pinned by the dress and he leapt upon him flailing with both fists and kicking even before Sutter hit the ground. Sutter was trying to roll away from the kicks and trying to get up and simultaneously trying to get the rest of the dress over his head when Tyler stumbled over a windfall whiteoak branch. Sutter was screaming and cursing in rage as if Tyler was not fighting fair and some obscure code of ethics had been broached. You blindsidin son of a bitch, he was saying when Tyler hit him alongside the head with the length of whiteoak. Chunks of rotten wood flew and Sutter fell sidewise. Tyler hit him again. Sutter’s head was sliding through the collar of the dress like some malevolent demon being born head foremost, and his nose was bleeding. When I get up you’re graveyard dead,
he said.

But Tyler would not let him up. By now he was sobbing with rage and frustration and swinging the club as hard as he could. Sutter was on his hands and knees and seemed halfdazed and he kept trying to crawl away but Tyler would not let him. He headed Sutter at the edge of the woods and hit him on the back of the head, and Sutter fell facedown in the leaves and could only rise to his elbows. He had his hands clasped over the back of his head with his elbows still snared in the dress and Tyler was beating him about the fingers and blood was soaking through the hair and running down Sutter’s wrists. The branch broke and he looked about for another then took up the longest section of the one he’d had. Sutter was struggling sluggishly like some gross insect halfcrushed. A passerby would have been given pause by these demented-looking strugglers.

Tyler hit him a time or two and then he ceased and just watched Sutter with a dull loathing. He squatted on the earth with the club across his knees. His breath was ragged in his chest and his lungs hurt. He sat like a laborer at rest from some curious task. Goddamn you, why won’t you die? he asked.

But Sutter would not die. His face was just something you’d unwrap from bloody butcher’s paper and the skin was beaten off his fingers and the backs of his hands, and Tylerrealized sickeningly that he was just going to have to go on and on until Sutter’s head was crushed to bloody jelly and he didn’t have the heart for it. Sutter was just going to keep trying to get up. He had had no doubt that he would be able, given the chance, to cheerfully kill Sutter with whatever fell to hand, and selfanger brought tears of rage to his eyes.

Why won’t you just leave me the hell alone? he asked.
Sutter just lay breathing heavily. The whiteoak branch had broken his mouth, and bloody froth bubbled as he breathed.

Maybe by God you’ll lay here and die directly, Tyler said.

He threw the stick away and went around the car and got in under the steering wheel. He sat for a time just staring out through the windshield at the woods. He turned the key and the motor turned over sluggishly but would not hit. He kept on until the starter turned slower and slower and ultimately there was only a dry clicking sound. He turned. The gun wasn’t in the back but there was a folded blanket and he took it up and got out of the car. The day was turning colder and he draped the blanket about his shoulders like a shawl. He struck out the way they’d come but he walked only a few paces before he stopped. The pictures lay the other way, and by now he felt he’d bought and paid for them. He didn’t want to think about how dear the price had been. He went toward deeper timber. It had begun to sleet. The windbrought pellets of ice stung his face and sang off in the leaves like birdshot.

It continued colder and by midafternoon pellets of sleet lay cupped in grails of winter leaves and the ground was beginning to whiten with ice and he moved through the sleet’s softsteady hissing in the trees. He hoped he was bearing southeast toward Bookbinder’s farm but he wondered if he’d been in the Harrikin long enough to have acquired a sense of direction. He suspected that if he possessed a compass it would not point as advertised but at some anomolaic magnetic north of the Harrikin’s own.

He topped out on a hill and some alteration in the sound of the trees fetched him up short. He stopped to listen. He couldn’t hear the sleet anymore. He looked up and great
snowflakes were listing out of the heavens, gray against the pale steely gray of the sky, enormous feathers of snow descending from heights he couldn’t reckon, and something of the child he’d been stood in bemused wonder listening to the almostsound in the trees and watching the snow drift down from far and far, falling sheer and plumb in the windless silence.

At the hill’s summit he stopped to rest a moment. Beating folks with treelimbs is heavy work, he thought. Looking back the way he’d come below the hillside a flat valley lay spread out, merging into a row of cedars, then a slope began, already whitening, and he couldn’t believe what he saw. A man was coming down the slope, tiny and dark and furiously animate against the pale field, a dark malevolent stain bleeding down a Currier & Ives winterscape. A dark shifting cloud of birds came out of the woods. A cardinal arced from tree to tree like a bright drop of blood.

He went on. After a while the snow was deep enough so that he was leaving tracks but it didn’t seem to matter. He had come to feel that Sutter trailed him by some means that neither of them understood, some curious duality of their natures that enabled Sutter to intercept his thoughts and anticipatehis movements.

By dusk the thickly falling snow had drifted against the dark bottoms of treetrunks and filled shadowy stumpholes and stumps wore hats of pale phosphorescence and he was moving through a world of eerie beauty.

By midafternoon thirty or forty men were grouped loosely about the courthouse steps in Ackerman’s Field. They were armed to the last man. Squirrel rifles, shotguns, old pistols brought home from the wars, many with weaponry that would have been more at home on the walls of an antique shop and weaponry designed to slay beasts long extinct. They carried sacks or lunchbuckets and some of them had thermos bottles of coffee and a search would have yielded up more than a few halfpints of whiskey. They hunkered or milled about in loose groups talking among themselves and chewing and smoking, and there was about them an air of excitement restrained, the air of men setting off on an adventure whose outcome is very much a matter of conjecture.

After a while a man in neatly pressed khakis came out of the courthouse and stood on the top step facing them. The door closed behind him on its pneumatic closer and the man dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. The high sheriff of Ackerman’s Field had pale, nearcolorless eyes and wavy hair going prematurely gray.

Gentlemen, he said.

The door opened and a deputy came out. He as well in khakis. He stood slightly behind Bellwether, and there was something of deference in his manner. We’ve got two trucks with sideboards, Bellwether said. There’s no point in taking more vehicles than necessary. Deputy Garrison and I will go in the county car, and the Holt brothers will bring you all behind us in their trucks. We’ve got a bunch of flashlights in the trucks. Everybody make sure you get a light and make sure it works.

What about the state?

For right now they’re just manning roadblocks. Every road leading out of Ackerman’s Field and every road out of Centre will be secured.