Unspeakable (33 page)

"How do you know he wasn't?"

"Just a feeling," Cecil replied. "He had that edge, you know? They might've been afraid you would show up there after your breakout, stationed somebody there to keep an eye out."

"FBI?"

"Don't know. Maybe a federal marshal. He followed me out of town, but I gave him no reason to be suspicious, so he turned around and slunk back to Blewer. I swear to God, Carl, we've got nothing to worry about."

Carl forced himself to relax. "Seems like you're right, Cec. Sorry I blew a gasket." Cecil relaxed with a soft chuckle. "We're all a little nervous and uptight, but you've got to get a better grip on that temper of yours, baby brother."

Carl grinned disarmingly. "Never have mastered that. Not to this day."

"So, okay, can I continue outlining our route?"

"I'm all ears."

Cecil went over his plan again. "Once we leave here, we'll have two days of hard driving. Max."

"Two days max."

Confidence again in place, Cecil reached across the table and playfully socked Carl's shoulder.

"Mexico ain't going anywhere, I promise."

More than anything, Carl hated to be talked down to. It was doubly insulting coming from a dyed-in-the-wool chickenshit like Cecil. But he forced a smile.

Believing he had a concession, Cecil stretched expansively. "Until then, relax and enjoy being out of prison. We've got all the comforts of home right here."

He placed his arm around Connie and drew her close to his side. Giving Carl another sly look, she snuggled against Cecil and slid her hand down the front of his shirt to his belt. The purple fingernails flirtatiously tapped his belt buckle before slipping beneath it. Cecil blushed, then excused them and they went outside.

Watching them go, Carl muttered, "You've got all the comforts of home, big brother."

CHAPTER THIRTY–THREE

J
ack reread what Anna had typed onto the computer screen. "A favor?" She had designated a personal favor. She wasn't asking him to perform a chore that just any hired hand could do. The adjective placed her request in another category. It conjured up all sorts of activities of an intimate nature. He cleared his throat. "Well, sure, I'll help you out any way I can."

She clacked the keyboard keys. Jack read, "I'd like to photograph you." He released a small laugh of relief. Or disappointment. He wasn't sure which. "You want to take my picture? Why? What for?"

She left her chair and brought an album down from the bookcase, but not the same one she had shown him before. Placing it in front of him, she waited expectantly as he opened the leather cover.

Mounted on black paper, the first photo was of a group of children playing with total abandon in a lawn sprinkler. Sunlight shone through the jetting streams of water and was reflected in the puddles in which the children splashed. As in her other photographs, the arresting quality was the contrast between light and dark. The technique captured the unfettered joy that can only be found in the very young, while the troubles awaiting them in adulthood loomed. The background of the next photo was a rough clapboard wall. In front of it sat two old men facing each other across an upturned barrel, on which they were playing dominoes. The white dots stood out sharply against the black dominoes. One of the players was a black man, the other was white.

Next, a worker's hands. Only his hands. In close-up. Covered with dirt. Dark soil packed beneath the jagged fingernails and collected in the creases of his callused knuckles. Those hands cradling one perfect white rose.

A woman seated in a wooden rocking chair silhouetted in front of an open window. Sheer curtains billowing into the room. At her breast a nursing infant. Head bent. Dark hair concealing her face and falling over her pale breast. Anna's hair. Anna's baby. Anna's breast.

"Lord, Anna. Why do you... Why have you..." Jack shook his head, at a loss for words. "Why don't you do this professionally? I don't know a damn thing about pictures, but these are good. Aren't they? Have you ever shown them to someone who could do something with them?" He turned the pages of the album, studying each photograph a second time. "They're editorials. Each one says something. Something important, and... and identifiable. They're too good to hide in albums. They should be seen and enjoyed."

Obviously pleased by his comments, she returned to the computer. "I thought about selling them for posters. Greeting cards. Things like that."

"Yes. Why haven't you? What happened?"

She smiled ruefully and gave a small shrug as she typed. "Circumstances. Dean's illness. Then David. Then—"

Jack laid his hands on top of hers, stilling them on the keys. "Delray didn't encourage you, so you stored your camera in the attic and tried to forget about it."

" Yes, " she signed. Typing, she told him, "I tried to forget about it, but I couldn't. It's still in here." She pressed a closed fist against her heart. "Maybe if I weren't deaf and could express myself some other way, I wouldn't love it so much. But I have much to say, and this is the best way I know how. I want to start again. This time I'd like to try and sell my work. At least share it."

"Go for it."

"First I need a larger collection. It may take me months, perhaps a year, to put together a collection that will interest a buyer. That picture of David and me was the last one I took. That was five years ago. I need lots of practice. It won't be easy, but if I'm ever going to do it I must start now. Will you let me start with you?"

"I agree with everything you're saying. There's no time like today to start over. And you've got talent. That's obvious. It'll be wasted if you don't jump in with both feet. But since this collection is so important, why in hell would you want pictures of me in it?"

"You have an interesting face," she typed.

"So does the bearded lady at the circus. You don't want pictures of her, too, do you?"

"I'm serious!" she typed. "Your face says so much." He laughed. "It says you need to have your eyes checked."

But she continued staring at him, peering closely into his face. Soon he stopped laughing. He even stopped smiling. Because she turned in her chair and scooted forward to the very edge of the seat. Then, raising her hands, she placed them on either side of his face. Her touch was so light that her skin was barely even making contact with his, but she might just as well have pressed sizzling branding irons against his cheeks.

He followed the movement of her eyes as they surveyed the individual features of his face. As she angled her head to one side or the other, her hair whisked across the back of his hands. His fingers were gripping the back of his chair so tightly that they were numb; his knuckles must surely be white, but he didn't look down to see. He didn't move for fear of breaking some magic spell that had caused her to want to touch him. He could see himself reflected in her pupils and wondered what in hell she saw in his mug that was so damn captivating.

But he let her look her fill. He didn't say anything. He didn't pull away. He remained motionless. He wouldn't have moved if Elvis had materialized out of the wall behind her. Inching closer still, until her hips were barely balanced on the edge of the chair seat, she extended her fingers up to his eyes. Beginning with the spidery lines that radiated from the corners of them, she explored with her fingertips. When they finished with his eyebrows and the vertical cleft between them, they tiptoed across his prominent cheekbones. Her index finger traced the length of his nose from bridge to tip.

Her hands cupped his jaw as before, but now they applied pressure to the rigid bone. Her thumbs met at the center of his chin just below his lower lip. One stroked outward, then the other, then they met in the center again, and remained only briefly before she withdrew her hands, which she closed into fists and tucked beneath her chin like a child who'd been caught doing something naughty.

Jack's heart was beating double-time. Not because unique erotic experiences were new to him. They weren't. He'd lost his virginity in junior high with the class slut up against a locker bank during the one and only school dance he had ever attended. During a slow dance she had dragged him from a gymnasium festooned with crepe-paper carnations and streamers. They'd found a deserted, darkened hallway and, by the time the Bee Gees had finished singing about nobody getting too much heaven no more, Jack had been there and back.

Once while tending bar at a debutante ball in Fort Worth, he'd been sucked off by a multimillionaire's daughter who could have taken a gold medal if fellatio were an Olympic event. In Kansas City during a Pink Floyd laser show, a girl he'd never seen before or since had unbuttoned his jeans and fondled him to climax with one hand, while smoking a potent joint with the other.

In Billings he'd fulfilled a barrel racer's fantasy of doing it on horseback during a snowfall. These events stood out in his memory because they were slightly bizarre, at least in comparison to his other encounters. Mostly he took his sex straight and simple, with ordinary women with whom he had two things in common: loneliness and physical need.

But none of his experiences—consummated sex or mild flirtations—were as erotic as Anna's touching his face. Because she had done it with intense curiosity, and genuine interest, and maybe just a tad of caring.

Jack Sawyer hadn't known much caring in his lifetime. Oh, he'd had people extend him courtesies, but those rare kindnesses usually came from people who were nice to everybody. No one had ever really cared for him.

Not his mother, who had kept him only to use as leverage against the man who had spurned her for many others. Not his daddy, who talked a good line but had never really given two shits about anybody except himself.

But Anna... She had cared enough to share with him her dreams, which she'd been unable to share with Delray, and possibly even her husband. She had trusted his judgment or she wouldn't have asked his advice about the timber contract. She had cared enough to make herself pretty before inviting him to supper. She had cared enough to invite him.

Several seconds had passed since she took her hands away, but her eyes were still on his mouth, not like she was looking to read his lips, but like she wanted to kiss him. She lowered her hands from beneath her chin and placed them over his, where they still gripped the back of the chair like it was the only handhold keeping him on the planet. She raised her eyes to his in a silent but stirring invitation, then dropped them to his mouth again.

Whispering her name, he moved his head a fraction of an inch closer, half afraid that she would bolt, more afraid that she wouldn't.

She tilted her head. Her lips parted receptively.

Lord help me, he thought as he leaned down, in his mind already feeling her lips and tongue, tasting her kiss.

***

Ezzy felt like a damn fool. He almost hoped she wasn't home so he could leave without being forced into conversation, but with his conscience clear.

Since no one responded immediately to the doorbell, he took two steps to his right and peeped through the window of the living room. The TV was tuned to a sitcom. Only Delray's grandson was watching it, although upon closer inspection Ezzy saw that the boy was actually sleeping. The doorbell hadn't roused him.

Hearing footfalls approaching, he moved back into place directly beneath the porch light so she could easily see and identify him. The door opened a crack and Anna Corbett's face appeared in the narrow space.

Ezzy couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her, but it must've been a spell. He'd forgotten how pretty she was, especially now with her cheeks flushed. He recalled Anna as a schoolgirl, with long skinny legs and big blue eyes. Her eyes were still big and blue, but her legs were no longer skinny.

"Evenin', Mrs. Corbett," he said, tipping his hat.

Recognizing him, she opened the door all the way, inviting him in by stepping aside.

"Thanks." Ezzy stepped into the entryway and removed his hat while balancing a casserole dish on the palm of his other hand. "Mrs. Hardge and me were sure sorry to hear about Delray. We wanted you to know."

She nodded and mouthed "Thank you" as she also signed it.

"I'm sorry I couldn't attend the service this morning. I had business to attend to." Devastated by Foster's rejection, depressed by the emptiness of his house, which so closely mirrored his life, he had punished himself further by returning to the place where Patsy McCorkle had died.

Same heat, same biting bugs, same sluggish river, same frustration. He'd sat on the hollowed trunk of the fallen tree for a long time, swatting at ants and mosquitoes, sipping Dr Peppers that grew tepid in his hand, and wishing he could roll back the clock twenty-two years. He wanted to know what happened to the girl. Just that. That's all.

He didn't wish to exact punishment on whoever had killed her. Maybe punishment wasn't even called for. Maybe her death had been accidental. He wasn't motivated by revenge. The toll the incident had taken on him and his family was grounds for vengeance, he supposed, but he would gladly sacrifice retribution just to know the circumstances under which she had died and who was ultimately responsible.

He wanted only to know, so he could die in peace.

"Anyhow," he said now to Anna Corbett, "I brought you this lasagna." Awkwardly, he handed her the dish. "My wife would have come herself, only she's at her sister's out in Abilene. She sends you and the boy her condolences."