Where All Light Tends to Go (10 page)
The road back into The Creek bent and curved for what seemed forever, split off one way toward Walnut Gap and cut off another toward Yellow Mountain. That forever is part of what gave the place its lore. Folks that far removed had seldom associated law and justice with badges. The old-time stories told tales riddled with bootleggers and murder, stories of copper stills on the fingers and branches of cold mountain streams, heads bashed in and buried before the blood had time to cool. I reckon it was a fitting place as any for men like the Cabes to eke out an existence.
I parked the pickup at the fire station, a four-bay aluminum garage that seldom saw firemen aside from the occasional chimney fire. A muddied rag I used for checking oil was thrown behind the seat, and I rolled that rag up into the driver-side window to make my pickup look like nothing more than a breakdown to anyone who cared. It was a short hike up the road, but what I’d packed into that black garbage bag wasn’t anything I wanted to be questioned about should a bull pull up and offer a lift. So I didn’t take the road. Instead, I hiked through a tangled briar thicket fit for rabbits and sparrows, but little else. Besides keeping me hidden, that thicket could offer a damn good excuse should the law pass: “Hunting blackberries,” I’d say, and those bulls would take me at my word rather than risk the thorns and chiggers.
Briars scratched my arms and left red lines that itched more than stung. Walking was slow. I had to pinch vines between my fingers so as not to press into prickers, and then move those vines out of the way to pass, but I was hidden. Tunnels were cut through the low sections as I bent down and crawled under a thick tangle, tunnels that had been cut by cottontails that knew the ins and outs of that thicket in a way that only small creatures could. I wasn’t so small and the briars hung in my britches and ripped a long hole in the plastic bag I carried. Robbie’s flannel shirt poked out of the tear, plugged that hole so nothing else could leak, and before long I was out of the thicket without too much blood to show for it.
A tall hillside stretched up to the Cabe brothers’ trailer, a hillside not so steep as to scare a man on foot but steep enough to frighten hell out of a man on a tractor. The bush hog had mangled the hillside just a few weeks prior, the grass and brush trimmed low except uneven lines left between passes. I was in the open now and exposed, and none of that sat easy with me. I didn’t see any patrol cars parked at the top by the trailer, though, and anyone making their way up the drive would have to come up the gravel along that thicket before the field opened up and they could spot me. I knew I would hear gravel crunching under tires and low gears revving high if someone came, so I tried not to worry too much. Still I walked fast, made it up that hill and to the trailer in no time flat.
Bobtail, mitten-paw strays that folks kept for barn cats, were as common as crows, and the Cabe brothers had kept a whole mess of them around their trailer. Every cat I could see held the same gray tabby coat and stood taller than average housecats. A few lay on the grass, basked in the sun, and inspected me as I came close. One of the two didn’t seem to care, blinked slowly in the sunlight, and bathed itself with long strokes of its tongue. The other proved skittish and fired off into the woods when I neared.
Another cat seemed a statue on the wooden steps of the front porch, the lines of its coat camouflaging it against the grayed wood. A pair of yellow eyes peered from a dark opening cut in the skirt around the trailer, and those eyes never let off, never came into the light. There were five I counted from where I stood, the fifth a stringy, young cat wrestling a chipmunk that could barely crawl a few inches before claws stabbed again. I didn’t know what in the world would drive someone to keep after all those cats, but the Cabe brothers must’ve kept them all fed for so many to stick around.
The cat on the front steps stretched in a tall arch when I got close. Purring wildly, the cat rammed its face into my britches leg and ran the length of its body against my shin. The cat’s face pressed so hard into my leg that its lips turned back along teeth and the purring grew louder. I crouched to pet that old tabby, sure that those last few days had proven awfully lonely with no kibble to fatten its gut. As my hand neared, its ears lowered, hairs raised, and the cat hissed and clawed till I got my boot into its flank and kicked it from the porch. That’s why I’d always hated those sneaky fucking animals.
The front door was locked and I peered through a clouded window beside the door to get a view inside. No lights were on, just rectangles of sunlight through the windows on the far wall. A box fan was propped in an open window on the back side of the trailer, the fan blades still and dusty. That was where I’d enter.
The Cabe brothers’ trailer was a good bit longer than that rusted sardine can Robbie Douglas called home. Though it wasn’t really anything to which a man might attach a word like nice, the paint was still fairly fresh on the aluminum and red mud hadn’t dirtied the skirt too awful much. Around back the hillside jutted up fast and ragged-barked locusts towered above. The hillside was steep enough that, reaching just right, I had no need for a bucket to stand on in order to touch that window and slide the box fan to the ground. With those leather gloves fitted over my hands, I yanked once, the box fan came loose, and as it did, the window slammed down hard on the seal a few seconds shy of broken fingers. A short section of two-by-four was on the ground. Stood on end, it held the window propped enough for me to shimmy my way inside belly first onto stained carpet.
The sun hung low behind the locusts now and the only light to be had shone through clouded windowpanes. That hazy light wasn’t fit for seeing, so I pulled the bead-chain cord of a table lamp that rested beside the open window to take a look around. The main living space was broken like most single-wides with a larger section meant for a living room running into a tight kitchen area, only the shift from ratty carpet to peeling laminate marking the divide. A leather sectional sofa and matching chair that might have been nice when it was new overfilled the living room. The leather had started off black but had been shredded in every place that held cushion, and the tears that proved too big to leave had been patched with shoddy X’s of duct tape. There was no question they’d salvaged that fine suite from the rusted bins at the recycling center. Those were always treasured finds greeted with shit-eating grins for folks like the Cabes.
A bedroom capped each end of the trailer, and I took the one nearest me to nose through first. I dropped the black plastic bag by the window and tromped into the bedroom, even light footsteps thudding loud on a floor stretched thin as hide on a bass drum.
The room was kept tidy for the most part, even the window being cleaner than any other in the trailer, clear enough to let evening light the room golden. Only a deep rut in the mattress gave any clue to which brother it belonged. It’d take a man Gerald’s size to rub that kind of waller into a mattress. Planting Robbie’s belongings was something I planned to do in the main room, but a bedroom left this neat didn’t suit a man who’d shot off on the lam. A man in a hurry would’ve roughed the place up a bit to speed things along, so that’s what I’d do.
I drew the drawers loose from a dresser by the door and spread the clothes over the bed and floor in a layered mess that looked rushed. I split the folding doors on the closet and lifted one heap of shirts on hangers from the rod, spread that armful out across the bed like a hand of cards. A lack of anything dressy meant Gerald kept a long line of empty hangers, and I tossed those hangers every which way to make it look like they’d held something and what they’d held had been taken. As I stepped back into the narrow closet, my boot crackled against something on the floor. It was too dark to make out what lay bunched at my feet, but I nudged it with the tip of my boot until a corner flipped into yellow sunlight.
The second I saw that blue tarp, my mind shot back to the night I stood with the Cabe brothers on the edge of the bluff and how Robbie Douglas had rolled with arms and legs flailing till he found that place on the rock. I remembered how Gerald had folded the tarp we used to drag the body so carefully, bending and tucking that tarp just so like he was folding a flag. Couldn’t be, I thought. That son of a bitch couldn’t be so dumb as to save it.
I tugged the leather gloves tightly against my hands and pulled the crumpled tarp out into the room. The tarp had a smell about it, a smell that usually reserved itself for things on the roadside, bodies that swelled in the heat and shrunk back with the coolness night brought, that rising and falling bringing life to something long since dead. I unfolded the tarp and was startled by the stains, the places where blood had dried dark brown. Skin still held from where it had peeled off of Robbie’s face, that skin thin and yellowed, flaking like fish slime dried on a rag. Near those scabs of skin the tarp was warped and burnt from the acid, and that smell caught me again. Only a fear of leaving anything of myself behind kept me from spilling over onto the floor. He couldn’t have been that stupid, I thought. But it wasn’t really about being stupid or smart. A man who’d save something like that did so out of pure meanness. That meanness was what I lacked, and that lacking was why I’d never be able to do the types of things men like the Cabe brothers or my father could do. I was soft in Daddy’s eyes. I’d always been a pussy. But if this was what it took to be hard, then that type of hardness was something I would never know. I dragged the tarp out into the living room and left it unfolded and sagging off the edge of the couch.
Jeremy’s bedroom was what I expected to find: a living, breathing mess that seemed to crawl across the floor. The metal walls were dented in places, four knuckles distinctly nudging just a little bit deeper in each one of the impressions. The marks were a testament to his quick temper, an alcohol-fueled rage that used to boil him over out of nowhere. A game trail was cut to the bed. No sheets were on the mattress, only the rose patterns printed across polyester ticking and a broad brown stain that looked like it had been wiped and spread many times without lightening in color. An alarm clock set on top of a closed trunk flashed red numbers beside the bed. Jeremy’s two best friends in the world, Jack and Ginger, made residence alongside the alarm. The fifth of Jack Daniel’s still held a few strong slugs, though the top wasn’t screwed on and fruit flies buzzed about the mouth. A two-liter of Canada Dry was all but gone, the bottle squashed and creased in the middle, held in that angle since the top had been screwed tight.
I squatted down to pull clothes pressed flat by footsteps from underneath the pile, and that’s when I saw the bottle beneath the window. It was a glass jug shaped like a jimmy-john that might have been used to hold cider or moonshine, with a large white-and-black sticker wrapping around the belly. “DANGER! CORROSIVE!” it read, with an image of liquid pouring from a test tube, squiggly lines rising from the hand where it fell. “
SULFURIC ACID (H
2
SO
4
).
” I picked up the jug and swashed the clear liquid around like I was proofing beads on a gallon of corn whiskey. The oily fluid swirled, hung to the sides of the glass, and dripped down slow. The jug was still nearly full with only a pint or two missing, a pint or two that I’d seen splash and fizz.
If I had known, I wouldn’t have come. Those Cabe brothers had their necks wrung and feathers plucked before I ever climbed through the window of their trailer. I reckon if they’d still been alive it wouldn’t have mattered too much. They could’ve hid it all when the time came. But the fact they were fish now, and all that was left to tell their story was spread out across that trailer thick as cow pies, left little wondering. A name like Robbie Douglas tasted sour in a man’s mouth. Soon as Daddy planted that name in the deputy’s mind, it was left there to fester. All that was left was to bring that festering to a head, so I set the jimmy-john of acid by the recliner, spread Robbie’s shirt right next to the tarp, and placed the bills and Douglas family Bible on the coffee table like tabloids.
I was just about to make my exit through the window when I heard tires spinning gravel into a crackly racket up the drive. Through the front window I could barely see through the clouded glass, but there wasn’t any mistaking the blue light bar running across the top of the car. I stood still as stone till the patrol car parked where the gravel ended and sparse grass began. A glare on the window kept me from making out who was inside, but the deputy kept the car running and didn’t step out. The cats circled the patrol car and I backed away from the window long enough to ease my escape route closed and cut the only lamp giving light. There was no way out now aside from the front door, but I couldn’t have that bull notice a window left open, couldn’t have him catching whiff of anything awry.
Back at the glass, I saw the deputy step out of the car. It was the bull who’d taken the report, that pepper-haired, no-nonsense bull that liked to keep which way he looked hidden behind sunglasses. He wore those shades now, though the sunlight was all but gone, night bugs already starting to chatter from the woods. The glaring of cats spiraled around his ankles and he made the same mistake I had. The cocky bull took all that purring and rubbing as a sign of civility, like some other living, breathing thing might have loved him, until he leaned down and jerked back, hand slit where claws sliced.
My first fears were relieved by the lack of papers in his hands and the lack of backup for inventory. I’d seen my fair share of searches in eighteen years as the son of Charles McNeely, and two things always rang true: there were always at least two badges, and one of them always carried papers. My second fear, though, was standing right there in front of me. A deputy was at the trailer, and I was inside.
The bull copied something back to county through the radio on his chest before resituating his belt and walking toward the door. I didn’t see what came next. By the time his first foot took a step, I was lying flat behind the leather couch. I heard the boards creak under his weight as he came onto the porch. Then the first knocks pounded
boom-boom-boom
in a thunderous manner that almost took the locked door off its hinges. “Sheriff’s Department,” he shouted. Then another
boom-boom-boom
just as hard as the first.
