Twilight (30 page)

Shit, somebody in the crowd said. Roads ain’t nothin to Granville. He can be in Alabama and never come out of the woods cept to steal somethin to eat.

Where we goin? another man called.

Last place we know for sure he was at was Claude Calvert’s place. That’s where the wagonload of bodies came from. I reckon you all know about that. We can get to there fairly easy with trucks. From there we’ll just have to play it by ear.

It’s a waste of time, the man said. It’s three or four hundred square miles in there. What are we lookin for, clues? Fingerprints? He’s long gone from there.

He may well be, Bellwether said. But all the same it’s got to be done. You understand this is purely a voluntary thing. Nobody has to come don’t want to.

I never said nothin about not goin, the man said, but what about Fenton Breece?

What about him?

What all Sandy told about the way he done them dead folks. About diggin up some graves.

Well, Bellwether said, right now it’s first things first. I meanno disrespect for the dead when I say it’s the live folks I got to worry about right now.

I hear some folks in Centre got that under control, another said and laughed.

Hey, Bellwether, Old Tippydo over in Centre knows the
Harrikin better than anybody else. You sent for him?

Bellwether smiled a small smile. I tried, but it didn’t do any good, he said. Tippydo’s done been dead two years, and I couldn’t find a volunteer to go after him.

Sutter quit worrying about keeping to Tyler’s trail for he had divined that he meant to get back to Bookbinder’s. That’s all right, he told himself. Two fish in a barrel ain’t much harder than one fish in a barrel. He was crazed all over with dried blood and his body ached with soreness but he kept pushing himself on through the snow. It was falling harder now and the woods were filling up and it was heavy going, but he knew where he was bound.

Once after dark he stopped to rest and smoke a cigarette, and far off on the hillside he saw a long line of lights moving in a slow curve around the face of the hill. The lights were disembodied and seemingly sourceless. Distant and silent and stately as a wending line of torchbearers making pilgrimage to some obscure god. All in silence as if all this was preordained and speech could neither help nor hinder its outcome. They scattered and regrouped and spread again like a curious ballet of fireflies or St. Elmo’s fire roiled and swirling in the depths of the sea. He watched them for a time in bewilderment then he put out his cigarette in the snow and took uphis rifle and went on.

It was some time before it occurred to Sutter that they were looking for him.

That boy was all right. He was kind of curious turned, but to tell you the truth I sort of liked him. He’d speak to you. Not like some of these young fellers thinks the world didn’t start till the doctor slapped em on the ass.

There is about these old men who have arranged themselves about the coal stove in Patton’s store a curious air of waiting, of time in suspension, as if they had already achieved some remove from the world, the eldest among them awaiting death as calmly as someone waiting on a bus. Beyond them through the plateglass window it is snowing hard and when cars pass to and fro the sound is muted and cloistral and the lights look blurred and unreal, a dream of carlights.

I notice you keep sayin was, another man said. I reckon you done wrote him off, then.

When he run crossways of Sutter I reckon he wrote hisself off. I always thought of that myself as one of the more unpleasant ways you commit suicide.

The old man shook his head. You can say what you want to about him, but if I was able I’d be out there with Bellwether and them scouring the woods.

Leastways some good will come of this. Sutter’s done it
this time. The son of a bitch is finally gone way over the line.

A man named Junior Raymer was whittling something unrecognizable but vaguely obscene from soft red cedar. He sat on his upended Coke crate a time studying his creationthen he rose and opened the stove door and tossed it inside. He stirred the fire with the poker and showers of sparks cascaded outward. He spat into them then slammed the door.

Don’t you bet on it, he said. He’s rolled through the cracks before, and he’s fixin to do it again. You mark my words. He’ll be gone like a lost ball in the high weeds.

Talkin about that Tyler boy, the old man said, they must be more to him than meets the eye. Some said that schoolteacher of his worked around and got him a scholarship in a college. Up to Knoxville, they said.

He’ll work, Junior agreed. That’s more than anybody could ever have said about old Moose. Less you count totin sacks of sugar up them hollers back in there. He’d do that. That boy come up hard, him and his sister, too. I used to drink some back when they was little, and I used to lay drunk out there.

Raymer took out a pipe and began to tamp it with roughcut applesmelling tobacco. Someone got up to peer out the window at the snow blanketing the road. The day had waned
and the glass had gone a surreal and unearthly gray against whose cold slick surface flakes list and slide with the faintest of ghostsounds and beyond them there is a faint and sourceless fluorescence.

Raymer struck a match on the side of the potbellied heater and lit his pipe. You know, they used to have cockfights in the Harrikin back then. Moose, he fooled with it some. Raised some of them game roosters. Anything there was money in and the work took out of you’d find Moose in it somehow, and don’t nothing draw loafers and lowlifes like a cockfight will. Moose had him one he was real proud of. It was silvercolored and had these little coldlookin eyes like a damn cottonmouthmoccasin. It didn’t look like no chicken I ever seen. It looked like some kind of a weapon.

Anyhow, this boy y’all speakin of was about seven years old. He had this lit old dominecker rooster he raised from a chick. It used to foller him around the way a dog would. That Sunday Moose was about drunk and the boy’s rooster done somethin to piss him off. Messed the porch, I reckon. Young Tyler seen the way things was headin and grabbed that rooster up and hugged it to him. He made to run off, and Moose grabbed him and jerked that rooster away from him. He looked around and spied that silver chicken and set the dominecker down in front of it. He grabbed em and rubbed their heads together, and that game jumped straight up and hung the dominecker through the head and that quick it was deadern hell. It was the beat of anything I ever seen. His own boy’s pet. That boy was takin on and talkin to that dead chicken, and I learnt somethin right
then and there. I was learnin it late, but I reckon that’s better than never. There’s folks you just don’t need. You’re better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain’t in it. Moose was the first I cut loose, but I cut him clean and I never went out there no more.

When the phone rang Fenton Breece answered it in tones of sepulchral dignity, but there did not seem to be anyone there or, more properly, anyone with anything to say, for all he could hear was a labored catarrhal breathing. This went on for a few seconds and then there was a mechanical click when the phone was hung up, and he thought, They know I’m here. He was sitting at his desk. He was wearing a burgundy silk lounging robe and matching houseshoes and silverrimmed reading glasses on a cord about his neck. He put aside the funeral director’s journal he’d been reading when the phone interrupted and opened the drawer of the desk and took out a German Luger he’d taken to carrying of late. He laid the weapon on the ink blotter before him and sat studying it: there was something sinister about its symmetry, something lethal in its craftsmanship. Something efficient, but he’d read somewhere the Germans were like that: when the death factories were running fulltilt three shifts a day, they’d had cost efficiency reports on the systematic extinction of the Jewish people figured to the last mark. His father had told him once he’d taken the pistol from an officer in the Luftwaffe, but Breece had always figured he’d just bought it like he did everything else.

Past the window the street was a blur of blowing snow,
and a vague anger touched him. He ought to be feeling cozy and Badgerlike with the exquisite feeling of being snowed in and the world snowed out, but he was not. He ought to be sitting before the fire with the Tyler girl against his shoulder and a demitasse of Cognac in his hand and soft music adding ambience to the room, but he was not that either. He was drifting in the icechoked backwaters of paranoia, and he could feel them, cold and black, rising about his upper thighs. He’d been navigating these perilous seas for some time, and every knock was a man in khakis with a warrant in his hand, every phone call the IRS auditing him for the last twenty-five years, every letter in the mailbox a note saying flee, all is discovered. I’ve just got to put it out of my mind, he thought. Either that or I’ve got to do something. He adjusted the reading glasses back on his nose, and he had read two paragraphs when someone began to pound on the front door. He rose. He hesitated and then remembered the slick streets: it’s been a bad wreck, two or three dead, he told himself comfortingly. But he took up the Luger anyway and shoved it into the pocket of his dressing gown before he went to answer the door.

The oak door was latched with a security chain that he left in place, opening the door a scant three inches.

A motley crew indeed. Twelve or fifteen felthatted and overalled men bundled against the cold assembled with the stoop full and more aligned tense and silent about them. Young or old, they all had in common the set anger in their faces and the utter implacability of their manner. Jaws knotted with lumps of chewing tobacco, and they all seemed to be armed, some clutching rifles and others just sticks, and he thought he saw a ballbat or two. The foremost, who seemed the leader, opened his mouth to speak, and for an insane moment Breece thought he might break into song, for save the fierce outrage of their
eyes, they looked not unlike perverse and rustic carolers come to herald the yuletide.

He didn’t know from where the strength to speak came, but it did. I’ll be right with you, he said brightly. He smiled, gestured toward the robe. I’m not dressed to receive company.

He slammed the door to and threw the deadbolt and went in an awkward fat man’s run through the foyer and lounge, behind him he heard the impact of shoulders slamming against the door. He went down a hall into the back. He locked that door behind him and ran past gleaming tables bloodgrooved like the sacrificial tables of ancient pagans andpast bizarre tubeappended contraptions like the props to a madman’s dreams and through one last door to the garage bay where the hearse sat waiting. He pushed a red button mounted on the wall and the bay door rose electrically to the snow blowing slantwise in the streetlamps. He climbed hastily into the hearse and cranked the engine and had already rolled four or five feet when he abruptly slammed on the brakes and cut the switch. He pounded his forehead hard with a fist. Sweet Jesus, he said. He clambered back out and went back into the embalming area.

He’d taken to carrying the girl with him to work and driving her home at night, and she was here today. He uncovered her where she napped on the couch and caught her up, half-carrying and half-dragging her toward the hearse. It was hard going for she was slack and lolled loosely and he was breathing hard. Hurry, hurry, he kept telling her. He opened the door on the passenger side and shoved her in. Her head swung bonelessly and she sat erect a moment then her upper torso dropped and she slid onto the steering wheel. The door slammed hard on her ankle. Jesus, baby, he said, contrite. I’m so sorry. He tried to move the foot but each time he moved it it slid back before he could get the door closed.

Goddamn it, he screamed at her. What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t you see I’m in a hurry here? Can’t you do anything for yourself? Can you not do so simple a thing as pick up your foot?

He left with the tires smoking bluely and her ankle still dangling from the door, steering lefthanded and holding her about the shoulders with his right. When the hearse hit the icy pavement it slewed sickeningly broadside but miraculously pointed the way he intended going, and he floored the accelerator and shot past the front of the funeral home. He glanced toward it. They had the door battered down until it hung crazily on one hinge, and their heads all turned as one when he streaked past, and they were running yelling to their cars.

He ran the stop sign at the intersection but he had to brake to make the left turn at the next block and when he did he could see already a faint wash of light approaching through the snow. He kept fumbling for the windshield wipers. He chanced releasing her long enough to steady the wheel with his right hand and turn on the lights and windshield wipers and grab her again before she slid out the flapping door.

Coming off the Centre hill he was going over seventy miles an hour and snow was coming so hard he could barely see the road. Telephone poles were coming like pickets in a fence when the dead girl suddenly folded forward into the steering wheel. When he jerked her back the steering wheel cocked and the hearse went drifting across the ice in a caterwauling of protesting rubber. It went over the embankment in a sudden eerie silence save the small explosions of sumac branches splintering then struck a utility pole. There was a simultaneous
sound of splintering pine he felt in his solar plexus and folding wrenching metal and all the glass going and tortured wire pulled tight as a catapult, then the swinging upper half of the utility pole, sharp end first, slammed into and through the hood.

He leapt out into the brush and immediately pitched forward onto the earth. Something was wrong with his left leg, it accordioned somehow beneath him and he could not rise. He crawled around the front through a frozen field of last year’s cornstalks and to the other side and grasped the dead girl andpulled her out into the snow. Already he could see the play of lights and hear men yelling, and the first of them were slamming cardoors and starting down the embankment. Above the hearse two electrical wires were touching and shorting out, and they kept snapping and sending arcs of bright blue fire off into the night. He locked his left elbow about her throat and began to drag her into the frozen field.