Full Dark, No Stars, Page 9

  The singularly cold little smile with which he greeted this--just a twitch of the lips and a momentary appearance of dimples at the corners of his mouth--said a great deal about how little hope he held out for that.

  "I know you're not rich, but you still need to step up and take your share of the responsibility. Her time at the home--the sisters call it pre-natal care--is going to cost me 300 dollars. Sister Camilla called it a donation when I talked to her on the phone, but I know a fee when I hear one."

  "If you're going to ask me to split it with you--"

  "I know you can't lay your hands on 150 dollars, but you better be able to lay them on 75, because that's what the tutor's going to cost. The one who's going to help her keep up with her lessons."

  "I can't do that. Arlette cleaned me out when she left." But for the first time I found myself wondering if she might've socked a little something away. That business about the 200 she was supposed to have taken when she ran off had been a pure lie, but even pin-and-ribbon money would help in this situation. I made a mental note to check the cupboards and the canisters in the kitchen.

  "Take another shortie loan from the bank," he said. "You paid the last one back, I hear."

  Of course he heard. Such things are supposed to be private, but men like Harlan Cotterie have long ears. I felt a fresh wave of dislike for him. He had loaned me the use of his corn harvester and only taken 20 dollars for the use of it? So what? He was asking for that and more, as though his precious daughter had never spread her legs and said come on in and paint the walls.

  "I had crop money to pay it back with," I said. "Now I don't. I've got my land and my house and that's pretty much it."

  "You find a way," he said. "Mortgage the house, if that's what it takes. 75 dollars is your share, and compared to having your boy changing didies at the age of 15, I think you're getting off cheap."

  He stood up. I did, too. "And if I can't find a way? What then, Harl? You send the Sheriff ?"

  His lips curled in an expression of contempt that turned my dislike of him to hate. It happened in an instant, and I still feel that hate today, when so many other feelings have been burned out of my heart. "I'd never go to law on a thing like this. But if you don't take your share of the responsibility, you and me's done." He squinted into the declining daylight. "I'm going. Got to, if I want to get back before dark. I won't need the 75 for a couple of weeks, so you got that long. And I won't come dunning you for it. If you don't, you don't. Just don't say you can't, because I know better. You should have let her sell that acreage to Farrington, Wilf. If you'd done that, she'd still be here and you'd have some money in hand. And my daughter might not be in the fam'ly way."

  In my mind, I pushed him off the porch and jumped on his hard round belly with both feet when he tried to get up. Then I got my hand-scythe out of the barn and put it through one of his eyes. In reality, I stood with one hand on the railing and watched him trudge down the steps.

  "Do you want to talk to Henry?" I asked. "I can call him. He feels as bad about this as I do."

  Harlan didn't break stride. "She was clean and your boy filthied her up. If you hauled him out here, I might knock him down. I might not be able to help myself."

  I wondered about that. Henry was getting his growth, he was strong, and perhaps most important of all, he knew about murder. Harl Cotterie didn't.

  He didn't need to crank the Nash but only push a button. Being prosperous was nice in all sorts of ways. "75 is what I need to close this business," he called over the punch and blat of the engine. Then he whirled around the chopping block, sending George and his retinue flying, and headed back to his farm with its big generator and indoor plumbing.

  When I turned around, Henry was standing beside me, looking sallow and furious. "They can't send her away like that."

  So he had been listening. I can't say I was surprised.

  "Can and will," I said. "And if you try something stupid and headstrong, you'll only make a bad situation worse."

  "We could run away. We wouldn't get caught. If we could get away with... with what we did... then I guess I could get away with eloping off to Colorado with my gal."

  "You couldn't," I said, "because you'd have no money. Money fixes everything, he says. Well, this is what I say: no money spoils everything. I know it, and Shannon will, too. She's got her baby to watch out for now--"

  "Not if they make her give it away!"

  "That doesn't change how a woman feels when she's got the chap in her belly. A chap makes them wise in ways men don't understand. I haven't lost any respect for you or her just because she's going to have a baby--you two aren't the first, and you won't be the last, even if Mr. High and Mighty had the idea she was only going to use what's between her legs in the water-closet. But if you asked a five-months-pregnant girl to run off with you... and she agreed... I'd lose respect for both of you."

  "What do you know?" he asked with infinite contempt. "You couldn't even cut a throat without making a mess of it."

  I was speechless. He saw it, and left me that way.

  He went off to school the next day without any argument even though his sweetie was no longer there. Probably because I let him take the truck. A boy will take any excuse to drive a truck when driving's new. But of course the new wears off. The new wears off everything, and it usually doesn't take long. What's beneath is gray and shabby, more often than not. Like a rat's hide.

  Once he was gone, I went into the kitchen. I poured the sugar, flour, and salt out of their tin canisters and stirred through them. There was nothing. I went into the bedroom and searched her clothes. There was nothing. I looked in her shoes and there was nothing. But each time I found nothing, I became more sure there was something.

  I had chores in the garden, but instead of doing them, I went out back of the barn to where the old well had been. Weeds were growing on it now: witchgrass and scraggly fall goldenrod. Elphis was down there, and Arlette was, too. Arlette with her face cocked to the side. Arlette with her clown's grin. Arlette in her snood.

  "Where is it, you contrary bitch?" I asked her. "Where did you hide it?"

  I tried to empty my mind, which was what my father advised me to do when I'd misplaced a tool or one of my few precious books. After a little while I went back into the house, back into the bedroom, back into the closet. There were two hatboxes on the top shelf. In the first one I found nothing but a hat--the white one she wore to church (when she could trouble herself to go, which was about once a month). The hat in the other box was red, and I'd never seen her wear it. It looked like a whore's hat to me. Tucked into the satin inner band, folded into tiny squares no bigger than pills, were two 20-dollar bills. I tell you now, sitting here in this cheap hotel room and listening to the rats scuttering and scampering in the walls (yes, my old friends are here), that those two 20-dollar bills were the seal on my damnation.

  Because they weren't enough. You see that, don't you? Of course you do. One doesn't need to be an expert in triggeronomy to know that one needs to add 35 to 40 to make 75. Doesn't sound like much, does it? But in those days you could buy two months' worth of groceries for 35 dollars, or a good used harness at Lars Olsen's smithy. You could buy a train ticket all the way to Sacramento... which I sometimes wish I had done.

  35.

  And sometimes when I lie in bed at night, I can actually see that number. It flashes red, like a warning not to cross a road because a train is coming. I tried to cross anyway, and the train ran me down. If each of us has a Conniving Man inside, each of us also has a Lunatic. And on those nights when I can't sleep because the flashing number won't let me sleep, my Lunatic says it was a conspiracy: that Cotterie, Stoppenhauser, and the Farrington shyster were all in it together. I know better, of course (at least in daylight). Cotterie and Mr. Attorney Lester might have had a talk with Stoppenhauser later on--after I did what I did--but it was surely innocent to begin with; Stoppenhauser was actually trying to help me out... and do a little business for Home Bank &
Trust, of course. But when Harlan or Lester--or both of them together--saw an opportunity, they took it. The Conniving Man out-connived: how do you like that? By then I hardly cared, because by then I had lost my son, but do you know who I really blame?

  Arlette.

  Yes.

  Because it was she who left those two bills inside her red whore's hat for me to find. And do you see how fiendishly clever she was? Because it wasn't the 40 that did me in; it was the money between that and what Cotterie demanded for his pregnant daughter's tutor; what he wanted so she could study Latin and keep up with her triggeronomy.

  35, 35, 35.

  I thought about the money he wanted for the tutor all the rest of that week, and over the weekend, too. Sometimes I took out those two bills--I had unfolded them but the creases still remained--and studied at them. On Sunday night I made my decision. I told Henry that he'd have to take the Model T to school on Monday; I had to go to Hemingford Home and see Mr. Stoppenhauser at the bank about a shortie loan. A small one. Just 35 dollars.

  "What for?" Henry was sitting at the window and looking moodily out at the darkening West Field.

  I told him. I thought it would start another argument about Shannon, and in a way, I wanted that. He'd said nothing about her all week, although I knew Shan was gone. Mert Donovan had told me when he came by for a load of seed corn. "Went off to some fancy school back in Omaha," he said. "Well, more power to her, that's what I think. If they're gonna vote, they better learn. Although," he added after a moment's cogitation, "mine does what I tell her. She better, if she knows what's good for her."

  If I knew she was gone, Henry also knew, and probably before I did--schoolchildren are enthusiastic gossips. But he had said nothing. I suppose I was trying to give him a reason to let out all the hurt and recrimination. It wouldn't be pleasant, but in the long run it might be beneficial. Neither a sore on the forehead or in the brain behind the forehead should be allowed to fester. If they do, the infection is likely to spread.

  But he only grunted at the news, so I decided to poke a little harder.

  "You and I are going to split the payback," I said. "It's apt to come to no more than 38 dollars if we retire the loan by Christmas. That's 19 apiece. I'll take yours out of your choring money."

  Surely, I thought, this would result in a flood of anger... but it brought only another surly little grunt. He didn't even argue about having to take the Model T to school, although he said the other kids made fun of it, calling it "Hank's ass-breaker."

  "Son?"

  "What."

  "Are you all right?"

  He turned to me and smiled--his lips moved around, at least. "I'm fine. Good luck at the bank tomorrow, Poppa. I'm going to bed."

  As he stood up, I said: "Will you give me a little kiss?"

  He kissed my cheek. It was the last one.

  He took the T to school and I drove the truck to Hemingford Home, where Mr. Stoppenhauser brought me into his office after a mere five-minute wait. I explained what I needed, but declined to say what I needed it for, only citing personal reasons. I thought for such a piddling amount I would not need to be more specific, and I was right. But when I'd finished, he folded his hands on his desk blotter and gave me a look of almost fatherly sternness. In the corner, the Regulator clock ticked away quiet slices of time. On the street--considerably louder--came the blat of an engine. It stopped, there was silence, and then another engine started up. Was that my son, first arriving in the Model T and then stealing my truck? There's no way I can know for sure, but I think it was.

  "Wilf," Mr. Stoppenhauser said, "you've had a little time to get over your wife leaving the way she did--pardon me for bringing up a painful subject, but it seems pertinent, and besides, a banker's office is a little like a priest's confessional--so I'm going to talk to you like a Dutch uncle. Which is only fitting, since that's where my mother and father came from."

  I had heard this one before--as had, I imagine, most visitors to that office--and I gave it the dutiful smile it was meant to elicit.

  "Will Home Bank & Trust loan you 35 dollars? You bet. I'm tempted to put it on a man-to-man basis and do the deal out of my own wallet, except I never carry more than what it takes to pay for my lunch at the Splendid Diner and a shoe-shine at the barber shop. Too much money's a constant temptation, even for a wily old cuss like me, and besides, business is business. But!" He raised his finger. "You don't need 35 dollars."

  "Sad to say, I do." I wondered if he knew why. He might have; he was indeed a wily old cuss. But so was Harl Cotterie, and Harl was also a shamed old cuss that fall.

  "No; you don't. You need 750, that's what you need, and you could have it today. Either bank it or walk out with it in your pocket, all the same to me either way. You paid off the mortgage on your place 3 years ago. It's free and clear. So there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't turn around and take out another mortgage. It's done all the time, my boy, and by the best people. You'd be surprised at some of the paper we're carrying. All the best people. Yessir."

  "I thank you very kindly, Mr. Stoppenhauser, but I don't think so. That mortgage was like a gray cloud over my head the whole time it was in force, and--"

  "Wilf, that's the point!" The finger went up again. This time it wagged back and forth, like the pendulum of the Regulator. "That is exactly the rootin'-tootin', cowboy-shootin' point! It's the fellows who take out a mortgage and then feel like they're always walking around in sunshine who end up defaulting and losing their valuable property! Fellows like you, who carry that bank-paper like a barrowload of rocks on a gloomy day, are the fellows who always pay back! And do you want to tell me that there aren't improvements you could make? A roof to fix? A little more livestock?" He gave me a sly and roguish look. "Maybe even indoor plumbing, like your neighbor down the road? Such things pay for themselves, you know. You could end up with improvements that far outweigh the cost of a mortgage. Value for money, Wilf! Value for money!"

  I thought it over. At last I said, "I'm very tempted, sir. I won't lie about that--"

  "No need to. A banker's office, the priest's confessional--very little difference. The best men in this county have sat in that chair, Wilf. The very best."

  "But I only came in for a shortie loan--which you have kindly granted--and this new proposal needs a little thinking about." A new idea occurred to me, one that was surprisingly pleasant. "And I ought to talk it over with my boy, Henry--Hank, as he likes to be called now. He's getting to an age where he needs to be consulted, because what I've got will be his someday."

  "Understood, completely understood. But it's the right thing to do, believe me." He got to his feet and stuck out his hand. I got to mine and shook it. "You came in here to buy a fish, Wilf. I'm offering to sell you a pole. Much better deal."

  "Thank you." And, leaving the bank, I thought: I'll talk it over with my son. It was a good thought. A warm thought in a heart that had been chilly for months.

  The mind is a funny thing, isn't it? Preoccupied as I was by Mr. Stoppenhauser's unsolicited offer of a mortgage, I never noticed that the vehicle I'd come in had been replaced by the one Henry had taken to school. I'm not sure I would have noticed right away even if I'd had less weighty matters on my mind. They were both familiar to me, after all; they were both mine. I only realized when I was leaning in to get the crank and saw a folded piece of paper, held down by a rock, on the driving seat.

  I just stood there for a moment, half in and half out of the T, one hand on the side of the cab, the other reaching under the seat, which was where we kept the crank. I suppose I knew why Henry had left school and made this swap even before I pulled his note from beneath the makeshift paperweight and unfolded it. The truck was more reliable on a long trip. A trip to Omaha, for instance.

  Poppa,

  I have taken the truck. I guess you know where I am going. Leave me alone. I know you can send Sheriff Jones after me to bring me back, but if you do I will tell everything. You might think I'd change my mind b
ecause I am "just a kid," BUT I WONT. Without Shan I dont care about nothing. I love you Poppa even if I don't know why, since everything we did has brought me mizzery.

  Your Loving Son,

  Henry "Hank" James

  I drove back to the farm in a daze. I think some people waved to me--I think even Sallie Cotterie, who was minding the Cotteries' roadside vegetable stand, waved to me--and I probably waved back, but I've no memory of doing so. For the first time since Sheriff Jones had come out to the farm, asking his cheerful, no-answers-needed questions and looking at everything with his cold inquisitive eyes, the electric chair seemed like a real possibility to me, so real I could almost feel the buckles on my skin as the leather straps were tightened on my wrists and above my elbows.

  He would be caught whether I kept my mouth shut or not. That seemed inevitable to me. He had no money, not even six bits to fill the truck's gas tank, so he'd be walking long before he even got to Elkhorn. If he managed to steal some gas, he'd be caught when he approached the place where she was now living (Henry assumed as a prisoner; it had never crossed his unfinished mind that she might be a willing guest). Surely Harlan had given the person in charge--Sister Camilla--Henry's description. Even if he hadn't considered the possibility of the outraged swain making an appearance at the site of his lady-love's durance vile, Sister Camilla would have. In her business, she had surely dealt with outraged swains before.

  My only hope was that, once accosted by the authorities, Henry would keep silent long enough to realize that he'd been snared by his own foolishly romantic notions rather than by my interference. Hoping for a teenage boy to come to his senses is like betting on a long shot at the horse track, but what else did I have?

  As I drove into the dooryard, a wild thought crossed my mind: leave the T running, pack a bag, and take off for Colorado. The idea lived for no more than two seconds. I had money--75 dollars, in fact--but the T would die long before I crossed the state line at Julesburg. And that wasn't the important thing; if it had been, I could always have driven as far as Lincoln and then traded the T and 60 of my dollars for a reliable car. No, it was the place. The home place. My home place. I had murdered my wife to keep it, and I wasn't going to leave it now because my foolish and immature accomplice had gotten it into his head to take off on a romantic quest. If I left the farm, it wouldn't be for Colorado; it would be for state prison. And I would be taken there in chains.