Into the Web Page 11

  Lila started to speak, but I lifted my hand.

  “A family,” I blurted out, my tone unexpectedly wounded. “Kids.”

  She stared at me with a terrible stillness. “Maybe I wanted that too,” she said. “But I couldn’t, Roy, because I knew—” She stopped suddenly.

  “Knew what?”

  I could see something rising in her, a long-caged animal clawing to get out.

  “That it couldn’t be, Roy,” she said. “Not after the murders.”

  “After the murders.”

  Three days after the murders, I’d driven to Lila’s house. By then Archie was dead and I’d come to tell her about the funeral, expecting her to join me at my brother’s grave. But Betty Cutler had met me at the door, told me that Lila had fallen ill, that she was sleeping, that I should stay away for another few days or so. Her final words rang in my ears: She’ll be all right in time.

  “What did the murders have to do with us?” I asked.

  She lifted her hand. “I can’t bear this, Roy,” she said.

  “Did you think that I—”

  “I can’t, Roy,” she repeated, then, like someone broken on the wheel, she turned and walked away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Imentioned nothing of what had happened between Lila and me as I drove my father back down the mountain road a few minutes later. Instead, I brooded mutely, playing the scene over and over in my head, the way Lila had turned away from me.

  My father watched me silently, his own mood growing steadily darker, the lightness that had touched him earlier in the day now leeching away like something fading in the sun.

  After a time, he drew a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “There ain’t much left of Betty.”

  “People get old.”

  “It ain’t just that.” He lit the cigarette, waved out the match. “She’s weighed down by how things turned out for Lila.”

  “What did she tell you about Lila?”

  He blew a column of smoke from the corner of his mouth. “Just that nothing ever worked out for her. I told her, I said, Well, Betty, fact is you can’t do nothing about what happens to your kids. You git the kids you git, and that’s what you end up with.”

  Meaning, of course, that he had ended up with me, a card dealt to him facedown.

  “That works both ways, of course,” I said curtly. “You don’t pick your parents either.”

  He didn’t respond, and in the following silence the old isolation slowly descended upon him, so that he finally assumed the stricken appearance I hadn’t seen since the night following Archie’s funeral. A rage had roared through him for days by then, one that had finally dissolved into a solitary muteness, so that he’d ceased railing against my mother and me, against Horace Kellogg and Gloria, the “puny little thing” who’d caused it all. Finally, at sunrise, he’d poured himself a whiskey, the only drink I’d ever seen him take, and sat, sipping it silently, the darkness in his eyes draining light from the dawning air.

  The same isolation gripped him now.

  “Pore old Betty,” he said. “She had a good heart. Helped me with this girl I knew once. We was going to run off. Me and this girl. Betty was gonna pick her up and bring her back up to Waylord.” He drew in a long breath, his eyes sweeping over to the granite precipice known locally as Dawson Rock. “Waited for her right around here, as a matter of fact. But her old man got wind of it somehow. I shouldn’t have waited like I done. When I seen she wasn’t coming, I should have gone and got her and took her away. Would have saved a world of trouble if I’d done that.”

  A world of trouble-meaning the whole dreary life that had come to him after that, the one he had inflicted on Archie and me.

  A fist squeezed my stomach, a wave of resentment that he’d gotten all the things I’d most deeply wanted in my life, a wife, children, but that he’d squandered it all by brooding on a teenage romance, or on the beating he’d taken for it, and thus driven away whatever love had been offered him after that.

  “Yeah, you should have gone after that girl and taken her away,” I said scathingly. “It would have saved us all a lot of trouble if you’d done that. Mama. Archie. Me.”

  He heard the angry tone in my voice, turned away, and peered at the edge of the cliff. “Nothing could have saved you trouble, Roy.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He shrugged silently.

  “What do you mean?” I demanded. “What do you mean that nothing could have saved me trouble?”

  He turned toward me sharply. “ ’Cause you like it, Roy. Being a ‘troubled’ person. Like it shows you’re smart.”

  “You’re nuts,” I snapped, honing in on my father now, stalking him like a prizefighter, pressing him toward the ropes. “You don’t know me. You’ve never tried to know me. You never did anything with me. Never even talked to me except in that insulting way of yours. Never tried to teach me anything or to—”

  “Hold it right there,” my father fired back. “Am I hearing this right? You think I never tried to teach you nothing, Roy? My God, everything I did, there was a lesson in it.”

  “What lesson?”

  “The only one there is. To do the right thing.”

  A derisive laugh broke from me. “The right thing?” I frantically sought a way to hit back hard, fell him with a single brutal punch. “That was the lesson in what you did to Scooter?” I saw the pistol pass from my father’s hand to Archie’s. “What you made Archie do to him?”

  “You don’t think there was a lesson in that?”

  “There was nothing but cruelty in it,” I said. “Cruelty, Dad. To Archie and to Scooter both.”

  “Well, you never run off again, did you?” my father demanded hotly. “You never took Archie off with you again. A boy that never had a mind of his own, was always under your thumb, would do whatever you told him to. You never led him off again after Scooter.”

  “No, I didn’t, but …”

  “That was the real lesson, Roy. That’s why I handed that pistol to Archie instead of you. Made him do it instead of you.”

  The first bullet spun through the void. Scooter’s body jerked to the right. A panicked howl split the air.

  “I was trying to teach you something by making Archie do it,” my father said.

  A second bullet. Again the spotted flanks jerked. A bloody leg buckled.

  “You know what I was trying to teach, Roy? Plenty of things.”

  The shots came one after the other in a slow, torturous rhythm. Archie squeezing the trigger each time my father commanded, Again, again, again.

  “That you need to think before you get somebody caught up in something. That you need to think of what might happen to them. Because if you don’t, that other person might get hurt. Somebody you didn’t intend to hurt. Like Archie didn’t think Scooter could get hurt because he run off with you.”

  A final shot rang out, loud, deafening, reverberating through the overhanging hills, and Scooter at last lay dead.

  “And like you didn’t think that Archie could be hurt by you running off and taking him with you. Well, they both got hurt, Roy. Scooter got kilt, and Archie was the one I made kill him. But the lesson was for you.”

  I glared at him furiously. “Bullshit.”

  “It’s the truth, Roy. The fact is Archie wasn’t smart enough to get nobody into trouble. But you was. You was the smart one. That’s why the lesson was for you. So you wouldn’t be so quick to get people took up in stuff that might get them hurt. Archie would have done anything you told him to. ’Cause he loved you, Roy. And if somebody loves you, you can hurt ’em bad. Believe me, there ain’t nobody knows that more’n me.”

  I stared into my father’s emaciated face, and suddenly knew what that whole bloody lesson had really been about.

  “It was Deidre Warren,” I said. “That’s who you hurt.” Hopper’s voice sounded in my brain: She never come back to Waylord. Nobody never seen Deidre around again. “What happened to Deidre?”
r />   My father’s eyes softened. “Never mind.”

  “She never came back to Kingdom County,” I added. “Where did she go?”

  “I told you, forget it.”

  “I don’t want to forget it.”

  My father released a weary breath. “Baltimore, if you got to know. That’s where she went. Some school up there. Cold damn day her old man took her. She was all bundled up.”

  “You saw her go?”

  “Seen Old Man Warren walk her to the car. Guess he’d already set it up to get her out of Kingdom County. She didn’t look right. Face looked bruised. Figure he must have hit her, Old Man Warren.” His voice hardened. “Porterfield was there too. Had his hand on Deidre’s shoulder. Put her right in the front seat of his car and drove off with her.”

  I saw Deidre’s scared white face peer out of the rear window of Porterfield’s car as it drew away, leaving smeared tracks in the snow.

  “Nothing I could do about it,” my father said. “Car was pulling out already. I was too banged up to run after it.” He shook his head. “Planned to go after her. Took a job there at the pulpwood factory. Figured I’d save up. But by the time I done that, it was too late.”

  “Why was it too late?”

  “ ’Cause she died,” he answered quietly, and his face took on an inexpressible tenderness. “Took sick at that school Old Man Warren sent her off to.” He pinned his eyes on the road, though he seemed to regard nothing that lay before him. “She’d still be alive if she’d stayed clear of me.”

  He said nothing else as we headed out of the hills and into the valley, a noonday heat now bearing down upon us, so that even with the car windows wide open I felt as if we were locked in a sweltering cage. And yet, I sensed that the real heat remained inside my father, a slow, destructive fire that had never stopped burning. By the time we reached home, he seemed little more than ash.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I remained in the car, and watched as my father made his way up the stairs and into the house, switching lights on and off as he moved through its steamy interior. In the kitchen he walked to the refrigerator, drew down the jar, shook it slightly, then peered inside, a Waylord scientist in his shiny pants.

  After that I pulled back onto the road and drove around for hours, replaying my last meeting with Lila, remembering the terrible sadness that had overwhelmed her after the murders. Something had gone out in her that night. On my last night in Kingdom County, we sat in my old Chevy, without touching, the passion she’d once shown me entirely drained away. And now I remembered the look in Lila’s eyes on the day my bus pulled away-all too similar to the look in Sheriff Porterfield’s, the same suspicion playing darkly in her mind.

  But why?

  The question circled insistently in my mind. I knew that Lila could not have known anything about the murders. I had told her nothing. Archie had told her nothing. She’d never spoken to Gloria again, and of course, Horace and Lavenia Kellogg were dead.

  So what did she know, I wondered, that had changed everything, destroyed all our plans, and finally caused her to write the letter I’d later thrown into the sea, I can’t marry you, Roy. Don’t come back for me.

  It was nearly eight in the evening when the pinch of hunger finally overtook my long brooding. I knew that my father had already retired to his bed, so I pulled into the Crispy Cone before returning to the house.

  It was a squat, cement building, garishly lit, with a checkered linoleum floor that blearily reflected the long fluorescent lights above it. At the counter, I ordered a hamburger, fries, and coffee, then took a seat at one of the booths that ran alongside the front window.

  My order came a few minutes later, brought by a freckled-faced boy in a wrinkled uniform, a paper cap resting uneasily on his head.

  “Three,” he said.

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “Your order number,” the boy added dully.

  I glanced at the paper receipt half crumpled in my hand. “Oh, yeah, right.”

  He placed the plate on the table before me. “Thanks for eating at Crispy Cone.”

  I ate slowly, stalling for time, dreading the moment when I would have to return, lie in the dark, turn toward the window, and see Lila’s face reflected in the glass, all memory of her, the long summer days, the times we’d made love beside Jessup Creek, all of that now stained by the grim half-light of our last encounter, sealed in the dark chamber of Lila’s cryptic words:

  Because I knew …

  I finished the sentence myself.

  … that you were there.

  The jukebox started up suddenly, and I turned toward it.

  At the far end of the room, two teenage couples jostled about playfully, the girls giggling shyly, the boys winking to each other and shifting restlessly in their seats. Twenty years before, it might have been Lila and me in that same booth, facing Archie and Gloria, all of us on yet another double date, just back from the movie house in Kingdom City.

  We’d gone out together perhaps thirty times, just four high school kids, nothing to take note of, and certainly nothing to fear.

  By then Horace Kellogg had realized that Gloria was not just dating Archie, but that she’d fallen in love with him.

  I’d first learned of the change on a chilly September night as Archie sat disconsolately on the side of his bed. “Mr. Kellogg says I got to stop seeing Gloria. Says we’re moving too fast, her and me.”

  “What does Gloria think?” I asked.

  “She says we should run away and get married and not pay no attention to what her daddy says.”

  “Where does that leave you, Arch?”

  “I don’t know, Roy. What do you think about it? Us running off, I mean.”

  I knew that Archie undoubtedly lacked the necessary skills to plan and execute anything even remotely as complicated as eloping with Horace Kellogg’s daughter, so I said, “I think Mr. Kellogg will probably simmer down after a while.”

  “No,” my brother told me. “He won’t, Roy.”

  Now, watching the boys across the room, I marveled that I had not taken my brother’s grim certainty more seriously.

  It was only an hour later, Lila now with me in the car, listening as I related what Archie had told me, that I realized just how serious the situation might become.

  “I think he’s going to do it, Roy,” she said. “I think he’s going to run off with Gloria.”

  I looked over at her and fairly swooned at how luminous her face appeared in the car’s darkened interior.

  “Once he starts it, he won’t know how to stop,” she added, her voice grave, like one who’d already glimpsed what was to come, my brother’s car lurching along the tall hedges that bordered the Kelloggs’ newly paved driveway, gray footprints in the path that led from his car to the white door, the way that door opened slowly to reveal Lavenia Kellogg’s doomed face.

  The teenagers rose and made their way out to the parking lot. There they gathered briefly beside a light blue Ford, the Crispy Cone’s flashing sign winking brightly in its shiny chrome grille.

  Through the restaurant’s window I watched them talking, the two boys still at each other playfully, bobbing and weaving, the girls giggling wildly, all of them utterly carefree and unselfconscious, youth like a blindfold wrapped around their eyes.

  They piled into the car a few minutes later, driving away quickly, tossing gravel behind the whirling tires to leave a curving trail behind them that tormented me like the one I’d left behind so long ago, two gray lines through the freshly fallen snow that had covered the road past Horace Kellogg’s house.

  “You finished?”

  I glanced toward the voice, high and reedy, of the woman who stood above me, her apron stained with ketchup, mustard, cooking oil.

  “I’ll take your plate if you’re finished,” she said, already reaching for the plate, so that the metal name tag on her uniform glinted in the cruel fluorescent light, drawing me away from what Archie had later done that night, returni
ng me to what I had done instead.

  “Porterfield,” I said.

  She looked at me quizzically. “Do I know you?” “You’re Lonnie Porterfield’s daughter, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In the red uniform, with a small paper cap pinned to her hair, she looked even younger than her years, which I guessed at about fourteen.

  “My name’s Slater. Roy Slater. Your father and I went to high school together.”

  “Oh yeah, I heard him mention you at home. You were with him when ya’ll found that dead guy in the woods. My name’s Jackie. Nice to meet you.”

  “I’ve been here a few times,” I told her. “But I’ve never seen you here before.”

  “I usually work the morning shift, that’s probably why,” Jackie said. “But Sue got sick, so I had to come in for her tonight.” She glanced about warily, as if determining if the coast was clear, then slid into the seat opposite me. “You’re the one from California, right? Been out there a long time, my daddy said.”

  “A very long time.”

  She studied me a moment. “Like I said, Daddy was talking about you. How you was helping him find out about that fellow you found dead.” Her eyes widened. “Did you see his face?”

  “Yes.”

  “All bloody?”

  “There was some blood.”

  Jackie cringed. “My daddy sees stuff like that all the time, but it makes me woozy.” One hand leisurely scratched the other, pink nails drawing white lines across her pale flesh. “I can’t look at that kind of stuff.”

  A sharp laugh broke from her. “Imagine me up there with you and Daddy. I’d have been barfing all over the place.” She glanced about the restaurant again. “I’m not supposed to talk to customers.”