The Witch Tree, page 21
He’d insisted on carrying it, so he could use it, if it came to that.
On the bank opposite, there was a limestone bluff, pine and scrub oak dotted across it, there paths going in all directions. He canvassed the face of the bluff for the tell-tale flash of a camera lens.
Eli turned to him suddenly, his eyes baleful.
“I talked to Lester,” he said, “about paying him back. Jen thought it was the right thing to do, too.” Buck glanced over at him, and when he saw Eli was serious, he let go a laugh.
“What,” he said, “you’re gonna… sell vacuum cleaners door to door to come up with what you stole from him? Like your old man, Joe? Pay Lester in S & H Green Stamps?”
“I can still… work this all out, if you go – along. Okay?” Eli insisted. “So could you just do that?”
“Sure, Eli, this is your rodeo, you ride that horse you came in on,” he replied, not meaning a word of it.
49
When they drove down, Lester’s Olds and a brand new Mercedes were parked alongside the depot, nose out and side-by-side, Lester perched on the hood of the Olds, smoking.
“Far end,” he said, and Eli backed in, too.
They stepped out and shut their doors, which, in the quiet, made two decisive-thunks.
An oily, chemical breeze tossed the leaves in the trees, wafted up from the remains of the depot, the wall behind them covered with graffiti, hearts and initials and epithets.
Just in front of the depot, the bridge loomed over the river, skeletal, a sign dangling from a chain at the mouth. Closed.
Swinging a jack handle at his hip, Dr. Miller strode now, as if casually, from behind the depot.
“Eli. Michael,” he said, almost jauntily, “good you could take the time to come out.”
He whistled through his teeth, and Lester rose from the Olds, as if unfolding himself from it, a mantis.
“Where’s Vern and Cleve?” Eli asked.
“They’ll be along,” Miller replied, “but until then, we’ve got our little business to take care of, right?”
Lester, his hands set on his hips, took his place in front of the cars so as to make running impossible.
“You gave your word–” Eli said, addressing Lester, and he cut in, “And I told you you’d have a chance to make things right. So–” with a nod, he motioned to Dr. Miller “–say what you have to say.”
“I can get you the money, and all of it,” Eli said, “if you’ll let me. Isn’t that what you want?”
Miller ran his hand over his head, a disarmingly avuncular gesture, as if he were only perplexed.
“Now,” he said, and glanced up, “if it were only that, maybe we could work something out. But you and your big-mouthed brother, Bear, have caused me a great, great deal of trouble.”
He whistled, “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.” Swung the jack handle around, as if he were winding some spring, bent to sweep up a piece of gravel and studied it. He smiled, then tossed the gravel into the air. Swung the jack handle into it, sent it, with a metallic “PLINK!” into the dark.
“All gone,” he said, in a mock-sentimental voice, “what you and Ruben took from me.
“And how do I know?” Dr. Miller crossed the distance, thrust his face in Eli’s. “Because your pal, Ruben, told me. Everything. And Bear, he never did know when to shut up.”
Crouching, Dr. Miller mimicked fielding a ball with one hand, then pointed to Buck with the jack handle.
“You know, I saw you pitch that no hitter in Chicago. In fact, I saw more than a few of your games. Impressive,” he said. “Batter up!” he sang, and tossed the jack handle at him.
Buck caught it in his left hand, and his right was jerked from his pocket, so Eli’s .38 dropped onto the gravel. He reached for it, and a boot stomped on his hand, and whoever it was behind him swept the gun up.
A fist, knotted in his hair, his head was wrenched up, the barrel of Eli’s .38 pressed under his ear.
“I’ll take that, thanks!” Miller said, and he snatched the jack handle from Buck and stepped back.
“Hold him, Vern,” he added, and Vern did that, the doctor striding to Eli and Lester.
“So, come on, you know how it is, we can still work this out,” Eli said, “can’t we?”
“Well,” Miller chuckled, “no, we can’t.”
“If we don’t,” Eli threatened, “the copies of what you had in that briefcase’ll go to the police.”
Dr. Miller laughed. “And, now, who would do that for you? Because, there isn’t going to be any ‘mailing’. You just got all that printed off, at that place over by the university.
“Vern here followed you, and you haven’t been anywhere near a post office since – if you had, we’d have been on you.
“And you don’t have copies, because Vern talked to the clerk there. That was a one off deal.”
“My girl’ll do it,” Eli said, “go to the police.”
“Ah, your girl,” Miller said. “Who, even as we speak, is at The Evergreens courting Cleve. Isn’t that right, Vern?”
“He can be very persuasive,” Vern said, “and he never leaves no witnesses, neither.”
“So, you see,” Miller said, and here he winked, “you no longer have what you got from us. Vern has it. And, so, so sorry, I’m sure you kept it for just this moment, didn’t you.
“Which leaves…” Miller turned to Buck, then back to Eli and smiled, “all that you gave Ruben, doesn’t it.”
Vern twisted Buck’s head around, so that he and Eli regarded each other across the gravel. “Nigger pigger, how do you figger,” Vern cajoled in a sing song voice. “You feel smart now?”
Miller prodded Eli’s stomach with the jack handle. “How are those insides doing? Stitches holding together?”
“Don’t,” Eli said.
“So, where is it,” Miller said, enjoying himself, “what you and Ruben skimmed from me?”
“Call Cleve off,” Eli said, “and I’ll get it.”
Miller prodded Eli with the jack handle again, and Eli said, a cry in his voice, “Stop it!”
“‘Stop it!’” Vern mimicked, his voice pitched high like a girl’s. “Stop it! You’re hurting me!
“’n that’s what your girl’s sayin’ ‘bout now, too. ‘Stop, stop please!’”
Dr. Miller nodded, and Vern pressed the gun to Buck’s temple. “How ‘bout I blow his brains out?”
Buck held his eyes on Eli’s – Eli staring – pointed with his chin, which meant “no.”
A night bird called, and the river gurgled behind them. The peepers were out here, too, a chorus of them.
“Well,” Miller said, guffawing, “I see there’s not a lot of lost love between you two, is there?”
He turned, swung the tire iron into Eli’s side so hard it resounded, hollowly, like a drum. When Eli managed to get to his knees, the doctor hit him again, and he went down a second time.
“Like that?” Miller said, and he reared back to hit Eli a third time, and Eli toppled onto his side, clutching his middle.
“You hit him again, and it just might kill him,” Buck said, “and what will that get you?”
“Good point,” Miller said. “We’ll just have to find something… less invasive but more motivating.”
He prodded Eli with his shoe, like you might garbage, and Eli got to his knees again.
“Did you ever notice those ‘funny’ lights Lester has on his car?” Miller asked. “Bring it over here, Les, will you?”
Lester got in the car, swung it around to stop behind them, so it faced the depot, the motor rumbling.
“Hit it,” Miller said.
A blindingly blue white light struck them, on the brick wall behind them penumbral, skeletal shadows, theirs. Miller set the tire iron on the hood of Lester’s car, took a notepad from his pocket, then tore a sheet of paper loose and held it inches from one of the headlights.
“Watch, and learn,” he said.
The paper, like a white tongue, curled, turned brown, and with an airy pop burst into flame.
“Aircraft landing lights,” Miller said. “A million candle power each. Pretty useful for seeing in the dark, right?
“And just so in time to shed some light on all this… business of yours and Ruben’s, isn’t it?”
Miller reached for Eli’s hand, held it up in the light, turned it this way and that as if examining it. In the landing lights, it glowed translucent, blood red, as if in some colored x-ray.
“Once upon a time, someone did a poor job of stitching your hand, didn’t they….”
Glancing down at Eli, he winked, then jammed Eli’s hand into a landing light and Eli screamed.
When he’d stopped flailing, Miller got down on one knee alongside him, as would an old friend. “So, would you like to tell me what you did with my things… now?” he asked.
“Christ!” Eli blubbered, “you burned my hand!?”
Miller patted him on the shoulder, Eli clutching his hand to his stomach, his eyes baleful.
“Not to worry,” Miller said, “if you don’t tell me what I want to know, why, we’re not going to burn you anymore.”
A look of incomprehension crossed Eli’s face, but in it, too, was a foreboding, a terror.
“No,” Miller said, “we’re not going to burn you, we’re going to blind you. Just like we did, Ruben.”
“Fuckin’ timber nigger,” Vern said behind Buck, and laughed. “He cried, just like a little pussy girl.”
Eli was blubbering in the dirt, and Miller stooped over him, a hand set at either hip.
“You know,” he said, “I learned one, certain thing my two years in Germany.” He nodded, to Lester. “Everybody breaks. And the breaking takes very little – when the thing someone can’t lose is at stake.
“So,” he said, and there was a new, and vicious, tone to his voice, “what’s it going to be?
“You give us our things, and your girl walks. Or? It’s not too late to call Cleve off, you can do it.”
Eli lifted his head, glared at Dr. Miller. “You – sick – SON OF A BITCH!” he spat.
With a swagger in him, Dr. Miller marched behind Eli, took the tire iron from the hood of Lester’s car.
He lifted it over his head; he was really going to do it, even though Eli hadn’t given in.
“STOP!” Buck called out. He staggered toward Eli, Vern pressing Eli’s .38 into his neck. “I can make him tell me,” he said, “but you’ve got to let me talk to him, and alone, like you said.”
Miller frowned. He nodded, and Lester kicked Eli, sent him scrambling in Buck’s direction.
“Go on,” Miller told Vern, “you let him go now.”
“You sure?”
“Ambrose’s got us covered,” Lester replied, and Buck lurched toward Eli, where he was curled in the gravel.
He got his arm around him, dragged him up the rutted drive to the bridge, then onto it.
“Hey, Bill,” Lester called from behind them. “You want them out there like that?”
On the bridge, he held Eli against the guard rail. The rank, oily breeze blew up from the river, like the end of things. They were between pilings, in the middle, and it was a long, plummeting way down.
“See that?” Buck pointed to the fast moving, black water under them. “Remember what I said about swimming?”
“Awww, Jesus,” Eli cried. “I can’t swim now! The fuckin’ skin’s come off my hand and I think I’m gonna be sick!”
Buck shook him. “Don’t,” he said. He lifted Eli by his jacket. “Turn your head up, like you’re talking to me. Like you’re tellin’ me all of it. Come on, you can do it,” he said.
Eli gave a convulsive jerk in his arms, retching, and Buck boxed his ears. “I said ‘Don’t,’” he said.
Then he was sick, anyway, gasping. He peered up into Buck’s face, as if, just now, astounded. “You, of all people, how could you not know it was never about the money?!
“I was buying us a future!”
“Don’t, Eli–” Buck said, he wasn’t having it. Anything about excuses, or reasons now.
The doctor and Lester were marching toward them, their arms swinging at their sides.
Buck drew Eli to him, then cradling him, Eli’s back pinned to his chest, he said into his ear, “Well, brother, this is it.”
Eli nodded; his legs all but buckling. It was all too awful. Buck lifted him, waist high to the railing.
“It’s under the spare, what they want,” Eli said, “his business, on paper, but the money – we can still get it if–”
He reached down into his boot, cut the tape around his ankle with the shard of Jenny’s glass and pulled out the nickel-plated pawnshop pistol. Turned to face Miller and Lester.
“Stay back,” he warned, and fired a shot into the sign onto the bridge and the sign, struck, rattled on its chain.
He bent Eli over the railing, felt, with his bruised hand, what he hoped was one of the marks he’d filed on the cylinder, set the barrel of the gun under Eli’s chin – Eli sobbing, “Ah, Jesus! Not you, Buck!? Anybody but you–” and pulled the trigger. Flash of white, Eli’s head jerking back, struck, and he knocked Eli’s feet out from under him, heaved him over the railing.
Falling – his arms and legs outstretched – he grew smaller, then smaller yet to hit the water with a hard, wet slap.
He sprinted across the bridge. Scaled the bank, the limestone loose under his feet, and Vern fired on him, then again. There was a path, and on higher ground broad-bottomed pines. The path branched and he went to his left, traversed a distance to a tree and its low-hanging branches.
“Lester!” Miller shouted, coming up the hill. “Find him! And RIGHT- FUCKING- NOW!”
“Told you we should’ve had Cleve along,” Vern said, that sing-song in his voice. “He’d’ve covered our asses.”
“Zip it, you,” Lester shot back, “I don’t pay you to open your mouth.”
It was a steep climb, and they were all breathing hard when they passed the tree where he was hiding. The branches came down like a skirt, and he could nearly touch their feet.
“I’m gonna kill that fuckin’ timber nigger when I get my hands on him,” Vern said.
They went around to the right, all three, and Buck scrabbled up the bluff, through sumac and oat grass.
A piece of scree rattled past him to crash into the river. Definitely somebody above him, and Lester and Vern calling to each other, in clicks and whistles and hisses, circling.
“Ambrose!” Lester shouted. “Ambrose?!”
“Lester!” Ambrose called back, just to his left. “He got by me; he’s running up river!”
He broke over the top, and Ambrose emerged from the trees, thrust the roll of film into his hand.
“Stay mobile,” he said, “because, they’ll be comin’ for you, and soon as they know you’re gone.”
With the Ka-Bar he slashed the tires on the cars, two quick jabs each, Lester’s, then Miller’s. Which left Ambrose’s. Which was – as had been the plan – parked out of sight.
Off and on, they were calling to each other, moving up the bluff, and Ambrose keeping them busy.
He got Eli’s Goat started. Pulled out onto the highway. Hit the gas and it leaped ahead, the trees tearing by in a ragged blur.
Blocks from Miller’s at the Moto Foto, he reclined on the hood of the Goat, one boot set atop the other, as if he were watching the stars, bored and pacing the dome of the sky.
All of it for the technician, whom he’d alarmed. In the Moto Foto, rubber gloves up to his elbows, he worked now at his machine, caught in some private argument with himself.
Buck had slipped him the film under the slot in the window, followed it with a twenty. When he got an archly raised eyebrow and the tech said, “Hey, I jump the queue for you, pal, I could lose my job, all right?” he shoved a second bill under, a Franklin, and replied, “Just do it.”
At the bar, to his left, patrons were sitting out in the night calm under heaters, their laughter carrying over.
He glanced up at the clock, where the rooflines of the booth intersected, the face an artificial moon.
1:30.
Come on, come on, come on, he said under his breath.
At Miller’s door, the photos in an envelope clutched in his hand, he reached for the bell. Pressed it, summoning Carol. He would show her the kindness she had shown him. He would try.
The peephole darkened, and there was the rattle of the safety chain. “Michael,” Carol said through the crack in the door, holding her hand to her neck. She’d thrown on slippers and a housecoat, drawn the sash tightly around her middle, her calves strangely white and vulnerable.
“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it, “to trouble you like this.”
“Is it Bill?”
He nodded. “Could I come in?”
She held the door open, and he stepped inside. She touched her hair, which was like a blond helmet.
“I am so, so sorry about your brother, you have my condolences,” she said, and stood twisting her hands.
That she’d thought to say it – it had to be bad, she knew, whatever he had to tell her – touched him.
At the kitchen table, they sat, the single, shaded light casting patterns of flowers on the wall. Something in the everydayness of it, the sunflower mats, yellow and green, trying to be cheerful, and the curtains over the windows a matching floral pattern, and the plates set – a too bright yellow – for two, and just so. As if against chaos, or trouble, or now – disaster.
The clock tolled the hour, two, and he said, “Do you know where Dr. Miller is, Carol?”
“Well,” she replied, “he’s away on business. In Des Moines. He drove down earlier morning, to one of the clinics he runs. Something to do with…. It burned, and there was… or… were things to take care of.”
He undid the clasp on the envelope. Shook the photos out, then spread them on the table like playing cards. Tapped his index finger over the time stamp in the lower right corner of the first, and slid it over.
Miller pressing Eli’s hand into the landing light, smoke – or was it steam, or both? – shooting from it.
“Earlier tonight,” he said.
Carol held her fist to her mouth. At first shocked, then trying to catch her breath. He showed her the others.
