The Witch Tree, page 24
Up ahead, the road cut through a bluff, more clouds there, lighting forking blue white out of them. On a steep slope he brought the car up to one hundred. Railroad tracks shone in the moonlight alongside them. A train came around the bluff, headed in the opposite direction.
He glanced at the odometer again, then the car behind. It had gained on them by a good mile.
“It’s what’s in that box, isn’t it,” Sally said.
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t,” he replied, and checked the mirror again. “And the rest of it, you don’t want to know.”
Rain began to fall, drops as big as marbles, then it came in a downpour, a silver-gray wall of it.
“Get my duffle,” he said.
Sally flung herself over the seat, then had the duffle propped between her knees. The road had gotten slippery, and the car hydroplaned.
“Take out the map,” he told her, and she did that, too. He leaned across the seat. “There,” he said, and pointed.
“Where?”
“What’s that exit?”
Sally snapped on the overhead. “243. It’s around this bend,” she said, “it goes to a… gas station.”
Moments later, he veered off the exit, headed down the ramp, past motley mobile homes in sun and wind worn pastels, to a gas station with a big Skelly sign in front, on it a flying horse. He spun the car around to a stop in front of the pumps.
Bent into the windshield, taking in the station, the wipers tocking crazily against the rain.
“Go!” Sally shrieked. She was on her knees on the seat, looking through the rear window.
He pulled Sally from the car, slung her, kicking, to the front door and inside. The kid behind the register, face spotted with acne and dark, greasy hair, looked up from the comic book he’d been reading, and when he lay the big, nickel-plated revolver on the counter, the kid’s eyes went wide.
“You watch out for her,” he told him. “They come through the door, you shoot. Got it?
“You lock up now, you hear?”
Outside, he got the duffle from the car and took the shotgun from it. Gripped the barrel stock and, with a practiced up-down motion, jacked up a slug.
They sizzled down the ramp, Lester and Miller in front, Vern in back between them, his face a haunting, lurid moon. Lurched to a stop behind Sally’s Cadillac and peered out into the dark.
Buck stepped from behind a pump, blew out the windshield, then racked up another shell and Lester rolled out from behind the wheel, sprinted for the pumps, where Buck led him and fired. Grazed his shoulder, spinning him to the ground, after which he loped, like something not human, behind the station.
Miller was out of the car now, too. He’d thrown open the passenger door, but had gone – where?
The shot gun at his waist and the rain coming down so heavily it dimpled the pavement, he backed away. Kept backing up, past the rainwater gushing in the slough bordering the entrance.
Until he felt a finger of cold steel at the back of his head. “Hello, old Mike,” Miller said, behind him.
He whistled through his teeth, one sharp, ascending note, and Vern trod out of the dark. Under the fluorescent lights, his blue eye was a lurid cobalt, the other a white, blighted halo.
“Drop it,” Miller said, and Buck lay the shotgun at his feet, and Miller kicked it, so it skittered across the wet cement.
He tore Buck’s knife, the Ka-Bar, from his jacket pocket, then shouted to Vern, who’d thrown the rear door of Sally’s Cadillac open,
“Is it there?”
“It’s here, Doc!” Vern called back, a delight in his voice, “Ruben’s box he done stashed away.”
Lester came from behind the building; from his shoulder, blood ran in streaks down his jacket.
“Get the girl,” Miller told him. “And you be sure to take care of the register monkey.”
Lester turned to the door. It was locked. The kid behind the register, big eyed, pointed the gun at him, and he swept up a length of iron rod from the trash can alongside the stoop.
“I can take out the glass,” Lester said.
“We’ll get him after,” Miller replied, and Lester stepped in front of Buck, Vern stepping in behind him.
Miller kneed the back of his legs so he dropped to the wet pavement. Pressed the gun into his ear.
“So, where is it, fucker?” he said, “what you got from Carol. Tell me, and the girl won’t suffer.”
Over his shoulder, Buck said, “The kid’s called the cops by now, don’t you think?”
“Lester cut the line, and long before you got here. So, no. I’m pretty sure no one’s coming.
“So, where is it,” Miller said, “what you got from Carol, and what Eli had stashed away?” Lester hit him, and he went down.
When Buck got up, he glared. “How much do you want it?” he replied, and Miller hit him again.
“You… shit,” he said, and tossed Vern the Ka-bar, then added, “all yours,” and ducked under the pump canopy out of the rain.
Grinning meanly, Vern stepped shoulder to shoulder alongside Lester and snapped the blade open.
“Oh, for what you done to my brother, I’m gonna enjoy cuttin’ on you,” he drawled, “‘for I fuck your girl, that is.”
The Cadillac coughed, and Sally popped up behind the wheel. The engine roared and, tires shrieking, she came flying at them, hit Vern and Lester with a meaty ca-whump! the two of them tumbling end over end into the slough and Sally skidding to a stop.
Buck lunged for the shot gun and, rolling to his feet, brought it to his shoulder, but Miller had gotten Sally by her neck. He wrenched her from the car, as if she were some puppet.
Shook her, squeezing her neck so hard her eyes, for a second, rolled back in her head.
“You think, for one second,” Miller said, his mouth now of a show of too-white teeth, “I wasn’t on to you?! I didn’t play you to get what your thieving brother stole from me?”
“And, no, you didn’t have a chance to hide what you got from Carol, any of it, so where is it?!”
Sally, pinned to Miller’s chest, was looking right at Buck, something so certain in it, it didn’t need to be said.
“So?!” Miller said. “Where is it, Fucker?! And you get it, and get it now. Or I’ll kill her.”
“Trunk,” he said, just that.
Miller wrenched Sally around in the direction of the Cadillac, keeping her pinned to him. The Cadillac running, and the lights making bright, dappled cones of yellow in the rain.
Miller moved with a ragged assurance now, sure Buck couldn’t shoot, not with a shot gun.
His hand gripping Sally’s neck, he bent her, obscenely, into the car for the keys, muttering to himself “–goddamn you, you… dirty cunt, you shitty little–” then dragged her to the trunk, apoplectic with rage and trying to keep her pinned to him while he got the keys into the trunk lock.
Popped it. The lid coming up, and the trunk light flashing on.
“So, was it worth it, Bill?” he called to him, and Dr. Miller, unable to resist, turned to face him.
“Worth it?”
“What you did. Was it worth it?”
Miller sneered. “You do what’s necessary,” he replied, and Buck nodded, and Sally dropped like a stone, Miller couldn’t stop her, and he swept the pump to his shoulder.
Blew Miller’s head off, his body bouncing off the pump behind him to fall on the wet pavement.
Sally got to her feet, her arms at her sides, stood blinking, her face a mask of blood spray.
There was a clear, bell-like ringing in the air. When it had faded into nothing, Buck said,
“You okay?”
60
Early morning, they got out of the car and stood on the shoulder to stretch. It had rained all night, and they’d driven through it. Here, now, there was that after-an-electrical-storm ozone in the air, but too, in it sage, and the landscape lunar, in every direction purgations of volcanic stone.
They’d passed through Casper. It had been raining so heavily he’d been unable to see much of anything.
There was a sign up and to the right of the car, Craters of the Moon National Monument.
“To the Moon, Alice!” Sally laughed, almost hysterically, and her voice trailed off.
He smoked, his back to the car, patted his breast pocket, where he kept his cigarettes.
“So, how are you?” he asked. “And I mean, really.”
“What? Do I look funny?”
She’d put on dry clothes, was pretty again, and in a way that touched him. Something was different about her, and he wasn’t going to press her to tell him what it was.
“Do you want to talk about it, what happened back there?” he asked. Her not talking about it had him worried.
They’d left the station, Buck taking his gun, and Sally, witness to it, saying nothing.
“I know, and all too well,” she said, “what kind of people they were. If that’s what you mean.”
“You didn’t fall apart back there, and that was as bad as it ever gets,” he said, wanting it to stick. “You can get through that, darling,” he said, “and you can get through anything.”
And at that, Sally smiled – and it was, he thought, the smile of a woman who knew things.
In Soda Springs, a desolate little town, they stopped at a gas station, a big green brontosaurus on the roof. A pump jock in a blue outfit with the name Dean on the pocket checked the oil.
“You’re low,” he said.
Buck waved him back, anxious to get moving. “Gonna ruin your motor,” the pump jock warned.
“All right, fill it then,” Buck told him, for Sally.
On the main thoroughfare traffic, what of it there was, and it was mostly pickups, was moving briskly. While he’d been busy with the car, Sally’d gone to the pay phone, her and her brother having quite a conversation.
She nodded enthusiastically, held her hand over her face, a fingered visor to shield her eyes from the sun.
The pump jock threw the hood down with a clang, and he dug into his pocket. Got out his wallet, now thicker with bills. All tens, he saw. No doubt, when he’d left the wallet on the dashboard, earlier, Sally’d slipped the bills in, two of which he used now to pay the pump jock.
While she was there on the phone, he jammed, from the box, six packets of hundreds into the glove compartment.
Finally, Sally hung up. She bounded around to the driver’s door and slipped into the car.
“Ta da!” she said. “It’s all set up.”
“Is it?”
“It’s just a day’s drive, right? I’ll take you all the way up to–” he turned the map for her, and her hand shook a little tracing the blue line of I 30 “–Twin Falls, How’s that?”
“Good,” he said, only it didn’t feel that way.
61
On the north end of Twin Falls there was a visitors’ area that overlooked the Snake River Canyon, and Sally pulled off into it, and they both got out, as if to just stretch their legs.
They perched at the rim, as if birds on a wire.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Sally said, the two of them at the railing as if clinging to it.
There was a concessions stand, and parents marshaled kids, drinks in hand, from it to peer over the railing, and the pull of the canyon so strong, the great, gaping void of it, he and Sally stood, shoulders touching, as if against an all but overwhelming force of nature, each moment ballooning into the next and there being nothing to say.
“Listen,” Sally said, finally, and looked up into his eyes, mustering everything she had in her. “I’ve got to go.
“I don’t want to drive in the dark any more than I have to, okay? Will you think of me?”
He put his hand out, and when she took it, he pulled her to him and held her, her shoulders blades under his hands like little wings, and Sally crying, and trying so hard not to.
“You’ll be all right,” he told her, and she nodded, and like that he let her go, and she stepped out of his arms, forever.
Whistling, to console himself, he strode up the highway, his bag slung over his shoulder and the box under his arm.
He took what he’d been whistling up under his breath, then sang it, that old warrior’s song, his thumb out, and belonging just then nowhere, so, as Seraphim had once told him, belonging everywhere.
A ghost again.
62
Up the road was a Post Office, Old Glory flying from a flagpole, the halyard ringing against it like a summons.
He paused, at the front door, taking the measure of the sun. Dropped his Stetson again the glare. Still early, plenty of time for this, he told himself, and was tempted all over again to do otherwise than what he’d promised himself he would. He’d counted the money. Even after what he’d given Sally, there was well over a million dollars in the box. For himself, he’d taken just enough for a month or two, until he got back on his feet.
At which thought, getting back on his feet, he opened the Post Office door and strode purposefully to the counter.
The clerk, a graying woman in a smart blue uniform, was busy cleaning. She scrubbed at something that had spilled there, turning her rag in circles, then saw him and stepped back.
Her eyes raking him, she frowned, wondering, no doubt, what the likes of him had been up to.
“Heard you been having nice weather lately, that right?” he asked, and slid the box onto the counter.
“You fishing?”
“How’d you guess”
“Well,” she said, her fist, the rag in it, on her hip, “says ‘Camping Gear’ on your box, and you asked about the weather. You a guide?”
He told her he was, “Only, after a week in the rough, we’re car camping–” he winked “–if they can decide where.”
“Well, if you go east, you got easy access in American Falls,” she said, “or you could fish off a tributary of the Salmon.”
He took an envelope and an embossed sheet of paper from the rack on the wall, then lifted the pen from its stand, the chain the pen was attached to forcing him to step to his left.
He bent, unable to think how to put it, then laughed at what occurred to him. Life had a way like that.
Please store what this box contains for Eli, he wrote. You are to dispense to him what he needs, given he has decided to further his education – or in the event he invests in a business, one hiring locals, such as a lodge. Eli tells me Sabaskong Bay is up for sale again.
The remainder of the contents are to be used at your discretion, for whatever continuing good work you see fit.
Your son,
And he had to think on it – and when he’d thought too long, and the clerk was giving him looks, he signed it:
Michael
He stood back from the counter, folded the letter in thirds and slipped it into the envelope.
On the face of the envelope he penned an address, then wrote, over it:
Care of: O. Fineday
“Canada,” the clerk said, taking the box from him, and there was all that with the postage.
He strode across the Post Office lot, his bag slung over his shoulder, and a spring in his step. The sun hung bright over the mountains to the west and, in a ditch alongside the road, where cattails grew, red-winged blackbirds sang. He’d only gotten a mile or so up the road, had his thumb out again and was walking backwards, feeling his way along the pebbled shoulder, when a truck loaded with building supplies roared over a rise behind, bearing down on him.
There was the sound of metal on metal, braking, and the skid of tires.
The driver, a heavy, silver-haired rancher in khaki, called out through the passenger window, “Goin’ as far as Ketchum.”
They drove along a narrow winding road, in low hills, a smudge of bluish purple ahead, mountains there.
They passed through a small, rough-looking town, off to their left an immense red sign, one which made him think of Moby’s. Merc Mart.
“Hailey isn’t much to look at,” the driver confided, “but up the road here, you’ll see….”
The mountains rose on both sides, dwarfing the truck, and kept rising, higher, then higher yet, to tower over them. A distance farther on, the road opened onto a valley, one broad and green, a creek meandering through it, aspens there, their leaves waxy mirrors catching the sun.
Taken aback, he put his head between the dash and windshield, craning his head up.
“Here’s where I was headed,” the driver said.
They screeched to a halt at a construction site, a fieldstone foundation, elaborate, and many tiered. The driver – Wes, he’d told him – began unloading the lumber in the bed, and Buck went around back. The wood was freshly cut pine and tacky with dots of sweet-smelling pitch.
“You can just take off,” Wes said, setting his hands on his hips, “no need to put yourself out.”
“That’s all right,” Buck told him, getting his arms around a raft of boards and lifting them.
They carried the lumber to the foundation, and when they were finished, they moved fieldstone, for the fireplace, Wes informed him, and sheetrock, from a stack in the graveled drive, and in that way they spent the entire afternoon, working into the early evening.
Done, they stood looking at each other, dirty and sweaty. Wes drew a hand across his forehead, wiped it edgewise against his pants, then held it out, having decided something.
“I’m gonna need some help, and I know a good man when I see one. And I owe you for today, anyway. Can you swing a hammer?”
“It’s outside work, right?”
“Rain or shine.”
Buck nodded. “I’d like that,” he said.
They drove into town, then turned up a wooded canyon, the road rising, and the air redolent with the scent of fir, but now, too, lupine. Vast purple reaches of it on the mountainsides, smelling of – summer, and life, and everything beautiful and right and true, and he thought of Sally, coming into Seattle.
Ojeeg Anung, The Fisher, his name meant, The Summer Maker, he should have told her.
At the end of the road was a cabin, creosote-stained logs and a green-shingled roof. Windows set just so, and the frames painted a cheerful orange. A woman’s touch, but she was gone.
