The Witch Tree, page 20
“Yes?” Dr. Miller said.
Carol, her voice faint in the background, asked, “Who is it, Bill? Who’s calling at this hour?”
“Tell her it’s Michael Fineday,” Buck replied. “Or, tell her it’s fucking Howdy Doody for all I care.”
“It’s business,” Dr. Miller called back to her, his palm over the receiver. “I’ll take it in my office.”
Moments passed, and another phone was picked up, the first set down with a clatter.
“So, to what do I owe the honor of this call?”
“You have a little problem, and not just with my brother, Eli,” Buck said, “and I need money.” When the doctor didn’t answer, he threw another pitch, a curve ball. “What you want, I’ll get you, Saturday. Because Eli knows where it is – he’s just holding out.”
He could hear Miller breathing on the other end. Either this would be the end of it or–
“And what do you want?”
“Six figures – even.”
“And Eli?”
“He’s dead to me,” Buck said. “And the way it’ll work is like this: You give me my space, let me play him, and I can find out where Ruben put your things, and not just the money, hey?
“I’ll get you all of it.”
“You are just one piece of work, aren’t you,” Miller said, an inky darkness in his voice.
“So,” he said, “we good?”
Moments later, on the phone, Ambrose was livid. “You did what?!”
He repeated what he’d said to Miller, and Ambrose swore, a string of blue invective.
“I should… fucking… take you in myself,” he threatened. “And you want me to do what?”
“Take pictures,” he replied. “You’re the FBI guy with the fancy camera. And you’ll be out there anyway, won’t you?”
There was a long silence on the line, Ambrose, on the other end, considering what to say.
“And I’m supposed to get all this to you how?” he said. “These… photos I’m gonna shoot?”
“On my way out. Playin’ enforcer, you’ll see it all. Come out where I can get to you. So, will you do it, or are you going to fuck this up?”
46
Sally
“Daddy?” Sally said, from the booth outside Colonel Sanders on Lake and Dupont. “Are you there?”
Always, it was her father who answered the phone. “Princess,” her father said. His pet name for her.
“Daddy?”
“We’ve been worried sick about you. Your mother’s been half out of her mind. Where are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
With the index finger of her right hand, she traced the aluminum molding of the glass facing Lake Street.
“Can you put mom on?”
She heard her father call out to her mother, but he stayed on the phone – she could hear him breathing, as if right down her goddamn neck – and her mother got on the other line.
“Are you all right, honey?” she said. “Do you need anything? Dr. Lerner’s been worried sick about you. He said he couldn’t be responsible for what could happen if, you… you know…”
“You should be working your program,” her father said, “being out there isn’t any place for you.”
“Jack,” her mother warned. “We talked about this.”
“Daddy–” something in it absolutely sickened her, now, just saying it. But she couldn’t say “Father,” and Dad didn’t sit right. That was different. When had that happened?
“Mom? I need to talk with you both. And I’m not going to do it on the phone. So, if–”
“Come to the house,” her father told her. “It’s Saturday, so I’m off. We’ll both be here.
“Do you need help?”
“Yes. But I’ll only come if you promise you won’t do anything. And I can leave when I want.”
Palms held over receivers, their voices came to her as if from a great distance, but her father snapping at her mother.
“Mom?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Can you promise, really?”
“Yes, you have my promise.”
“Dad?”
“You heard your mother. So, when?”
It was a short drive west on Highway 12, but there was heavy traffic and it slowed her. Then, turning onto Highway 100 and driving south, here was her old neighborhood, something suffocating in it, looming up at her. Split level houses, ranch, and modular. Ticky tacky houses, all in a row.
Home, here, meant meat loaf, and tater-tots, and Del Monte canned green beans and Jell-O salads, but most of all keeping your mouth shut about what was going on behind all those closed doors.
She stopped back of the house, there a long, curving drive up to it. Waist high reflectors ran the length of the drive, put there by her father, to keep her mother off the lawn.
“Your goddamned mother can’t see fit to stay on the pavement,” her father was always saying, “that’s why they’re there.”
She parked behind a hedge of yews, one that bordered a children’s park, where, as a girl, she’d played. Studied the house. No car was in the driveway, so, it would be just her and her parents. And, maybe, as her mother’d told her, and too many times, it had just been that she and her father butted heads. And poor Stephen?
Trying to protect her that one, awful night, he’d made the mistake of getting between them.
Stephen, after, had sent a card every Christmas, addressed only to her, but which had always been opened, and at the bottom of each:
There’s a place out here for you, Sally, if it starts up all over again between you and Dad. Love, Stevie.
She took another long look at the house, then got out of the car and flung the door shut, marched around the yews and went up the drive. At the front door, she rang the bell. She could hear them moving inside, thumps and footsteps, and she zipped her jacket up, as if against the cold.
Moments later, her father’s eye appeared at the peephole, and he threw the door open.
“My little girl!” he said. Same old dad, button down navy cardigan, gray slacks, shiny black loafers.
“I’m here,” she said, brightly, and stepped inside and her father locked the door behind her.
“Is that Sally?!” her mother called from the living room, and Sally called back, “Yes, mom, it’s me!”
She scuffed her feet on the mat and, her father’s big arm around her, steering her, she moved into the living room, where her mother sprang from the couch and embraced her.
In voluminous pastel pinks and a white sweater, she smiled a pained smile, said, in a voice dripping with resentment, “Well, you’re thinner. All too pretty again, like you used to be….”
“Mom,” Sally said, disliking the conciliatory tone in her voice, “it’s the meds, I’ve told you that. The meds make you…” but she wouldn’t say it, fat, since her mother was, and worse, her father’d been on her about it forever, and cruelly, it being an issue, and the house ruled by her mother’s diets and binging.
“Daddy? I’m sorry I took your car,” she said. “It’s…. I’ll pay for it, when I get a better job. Okay?”
Her father shook his head. “We only want the best for our little girl; you know that, don’t you?”
She thought she heard something in another part of the house, but recalled her mother’s cat, Suzie, this time of day, usually went out. She was at the back door, most likely.
They talked about the weather, the recent snow, and the neighbors, while she waited for the right moment to bring up her tuition.
She’d even said, “There’s something I need to talk to you about,” but now the door bell rang, and her father went to answer it.
“How about that? What a coincidence!” her father called from the foyer. “Come in, Rene, Sally’s here.”
A pained, shy look on her face, her once-friend Rene shuffled into the living room, wringing her hands in front of her. She was wearing a cranberry scarf, and a blue coat, on it enormous, white buttons.
“Hello, Sally,” she said, and finger waved. “It’s good to see you, how are you doing?”
Sally’s aunt came in from the kitchen now, too, beaming, and her mother held her eyes on the floor.
“Mom?!” Sally said, shocked.
She turned to the front door, and what looked like a security guard stepped in front of it.
“You need… help, Princess,” her father said, “and we’re going to get it for you, all right? Isn’t that why you came home?”
Her mother looked up at her from where she was perched on the couch, a hopeful expression on her face.
“Sally,” she said, “it’ll all be for the best, you’ll see.”
Dr. Lerner, a dark man in a gray sweater and navy slacks, came around the divider. He had his bag with him, which he’d used the last time she’d gone off to St. Mary’s.
“Sally,” he said, “let’s get you back on the road to your recovery, can we do that?”
In a heartbeat, she saw how it would go – she’d dash for the back door, they’d converge on her, and knock her down. Dr. Lerner would give her the needle, and she’d come to at St. Mary’s, her mind thick as cotton.
Save yourself, she thought, a white hot fury in her. At all of them. Lie, she thought.
She put a wan smile on her face, the most pathetic she could muster, then let her head hang.
“Thank you,” she said, though she was thinking she could kill them, each and every one. “Thank you all for caring,” she said, that other Sally acting now, the one she’d once been, “for… taking the time to… help me, because, well…. It’s just been…. I can’t say how horrible it’s been, really.”
She looked from her father, to her mother, to her aunt and old friend, even forced a tear.
“I’ve been living in the car, and… I guess it shows. I’m filthy. Can I just wash up before we go? Can you let me do that?”
Dr. Lerner consented, and another rent-a-cop, or whatever he was, stood on the second floor landing.
She trudged up the stairs to the bathroom, where she saw, at a glance, they’d proofed it. She pulled the door shut. The cabinets were empty, and they’d removed the shower curtain. Even set out a hospital smock, in that sickening, toothpaste green. The rent-a-cop coughed outside the door, to let her know he was there, and she turned on the shower.
Trying to calm herself, she stood just outside it, and the room filled with an enveloping steam.
Stephen had showed her how he’d rigged the window, to get out nights, even though it was padlocked, and she pulled back the length of coat hanger in the side track now, hoping the lock bolt, as it had before, would come up. Which it did. And just as she reached down to lift the window open, she was struck by the scent of soap, her father’s, there on a lanyard, and that black thing perched on her head, and she was silently screaming, loud and long, until she thought, Go ahead, kill me, and she let it come, the darkness she’d been running from, and in it a memory:
Her father had been helping her with her bath right here and, toweling her off, had set her on his lap. Tearing something in her.
In one, searing realization – it came to her, took her breath away, filled her head with fire. What it was.
And in it, the whole sick history of their years long secret.
She lifted the window, stepped out onto the roof, high and over the street, a gibbering fury in her.
On her rear, she scooted over the rough shingles and, where there was a gap to the neighbors’ roof, she leapt. Ran to the elm that abutted the house, then slid down it to the driveway. Sprinted to the hedge, got the car started, then tore onto Highway 100, her foot all but pressed to the floor.
She glanced into the rear view mirror, time, and time again, until she was sure no one was behind her, then she punched the headliner and screamed. And screamed. And screamed.
In her usual spot on Dupont, she killed the engine, then lay across the front seat, her knees pulled up to her chest. Exhausted, she angled the rear view mirror, so she could see out the back window.
And like that she waited.
Tall and rangy, he appeared just after dark, came up the walk, glancing suspiciously from side to side. He turned a full circle, made certain no one was watching, then shot around the back.
Sally keyed the car, hit the gas and crashed into the van behind her, missing him, and he leapt onto the trunk and she threw the car into drive, put the pedal to the floor, struck the sedan in front of her, threw whoever it was off, the car caroming sideways into the street.
But – to her shock – going nowhere.
She’d killed the engine. And while he got to his feet, a hammer in one hand a the rope in the other, came at her, head cocked and a lopsided sick grin on his face, she got the car into park, and keyed it.
Shrieked, “START! GOD FUCKING GOD DAMMIT! GOD DAMN CAR I HATE MY FUCKING FATHER, I’LL KILL YOU YOU SON OF A BITCH!” the starter whirring, and whirring, and whirring–
– until the engine coughed, then roared, and Sally yanked the shift lever into drive, and the car shot forward.
47
Buck
He leaned against the refrigerator drinking a glass of water, having just come in. The apartment had a terrible, tight feeling, as though it might burst, something going on between Eli and Jenny.
He’d gone out for groceries, but, really, to escape them.
“Lester call yet?” he asked, knowing full well that by now Lester had contacted Eli.
“No,” Eli said.
He followed Buck into the living room, thumped down on the sofa alongside Jenny.
“Remember what I said about lurking?” she asked, and glanced up at Buck from her magazine.
He pulled out a chair from the table and sat. Outside the window, perched on his box, the bird looked in, hungry.
Eli, as if sensing it there, craned his head around, and the look on his face was killing.
That he didn’t feed the jay made his heart fall.
In his room, he taped the doctored .38 low on his right calf. The tape was of a kind used for wrapping packages. It was strong until it was perforated, but then it tore like nothing.
He held his foot out. If he reached into the boot to get the gun out, it could go off.
He held the other foot out, wrapped a sock around his ankle, and spun a layer of tape over it. Pulled both boots on and felt where the upper, fancy portion of the boots met the lower.
Good, he thought. It was the same on both sides, no one would suspect the thickness on the right.
He reached into his pocket for his knife, the Ka-Bar. When it all went bad – and it would – they might frisk him for it, which could make cutting the gun free, in his boot, impossible.
He stuffed the second gun, Eli’s, into his jacket pocket and checked his reflection in the window. His Indians jacket was shiny, and it made Eli’s gun that bulged in his pocket as big as a sign. GUN HERE.
Perfect.
On the Tonight Show, Carson was yakking it up with Ed McMahon, McMahon in his obsequious way guffawing, haw, haw, haw. Buck got up and switched off the television.
Eli, on the sofa, glanced at his watch. He was a veritable show of ticks now, scratched his neck, his elbow, his ear. Buck sat opposite him, each too-long minute an agony.
He reached, once more, into his boot to touch the grooves he’d filed in the revolver’s carriage.
Frowning, Eli glanced over at him. “And just what the hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Scratching my ankle,” he said, “that okay with you?”
Jenny went into the kitchen and ran the tap. “You’re making things worse,” she said, “sniping at each other.”
She stepped into the living room, a glass in her hand, and Eli met her halfway. He lifted the glass, a little too roughly, then went into the kitchen with it, Jen following on his heels. Tossed it in the sink, the glass shattering.
“Since we’re being so honest and all here,” Eli said, “just take a drink if you want one so bad, all right?!”
“Christ,” she said, “you son of a bitch!”
Just after midnight, Lester called. Eli and Buck were to meet him at an old railroad depot outside Monticello, forty miles north. “The truck’s coming to us, and it’ll be on time,” Lester said. “So don’t you be late.”
Eli scribbled the directions on a pink Post It, then listened, hunched over the phone.
“Got it,” he said, and hung up.
They took their jackets from the rack, and Eli went up the hallway to the bedroom, and Buck to the kitchen, where he set a knife on the counter, just so. And, thinking, Maybe, he swept up a piece of the broken glass from the sink and dropped it into his pocket.
Eli was at his bedroom door, his forehead set against it, his hand pressed plaintively to the wall.
“Jen,” he said, a hopeful tone in his voice. “Don’t you want to come out? Say good-bye?”
It was like watching a car wreck, and he knew it wasn’t for him to wait for Eli in the hallway, but he did.
“Go away,” she cried, her voice muffled by the door.
In a low voice, Eli said, “Just stay put, Jen, no matter what, okay? Sweetheart? You just stay put now.”
And when no answer came, Eli looked up the hallway, then shrugged, and they went out.
48
They parked on a bank of the Mississippi, over the old railroad depot where they were to meet. The depot was a squat, brick building, the roof caving in and the windows boarded up. Behind the depot the Mississippi shone, a bridge across it, one suspended by girders and cables.
Even from a distance, in the full moon, you could see the current was slow, which made the water there deep, he hoped.
“You can still swim, can’t you?” he said.
Eli’s eyes narrowed. “Swim? Of course I can swim. What kind of question is that?”
He studied the lay of it: The old depot surrounded by scrub willow and the river behind. The bridge crossing the river. If you jumped from the bridge, you could miss the pilings, he thought. But if you simply fell? Maybe not. He patted his pocket, Eli’s gun there.
