Terry snapped his phone shut and stood with his eyes closed and one hand clapped over his head, fingers knotted in his hair as if he wanted to rip a handful of it out. He took an awkward step backward and staggered, but Crow darted forward and caught him before he fell. He helped Terry to the rail and took the phone out of his hand.
“Terry, what’s wrong?”
Terry Wolfe leaned on the rail, sucking in great lungfuls of air. “Is this never going to stop?” he asked the night. The crow in the tree cawed again, a little louder this time; then in a fractured voice he said, “Kenneth Boyd just broke into Pinelands Hospital and stole Karl Ruger’s body.”
Crow felt as if someone has just punched all of the air out of his lungs. He opened his mouth, but there was nothing in his vocabulary to respond to that, so he stared at Terry as around them both the moon opened its mocking white eye and the dark silence roared.
Interlude
The Carby Place was one of those farms that would have been a delight for a wandering Tom Joad: ramshackle and down at the heels, but honest, and it grew crops that fed the family with just enough left over to bring in a few thousand a month. Every month it was a stretch to meet the bills, pay something on the mortgage, put clothes on the kids. There were only thirty such farms left in Pine Deep, and with inflation and the blight, soon there would be none. Gaither Carby knew that and still he managed to crawl out of bed every morning, pull on his work clothes, choke down a breakfast, and then lumber out to the fields to try and fight another battle in a lost war. He could sell out, and after the mortgage was settled there would be enough equity left to maybe buy a trailer home in Bensalem, and then maybe finish out life working some shit job until he was old enough to apply for social security. Either way he looked the road went nowhere.
Gaither Carby was the great-grandson of the Carby who had bought the land and built the farm. He was fifty-eight and looked seventy, with arthritis starting in his hands and steel pins in his left knee. He had the blocky build and thick, callused fingers, and the bleak fatalism of the heavily mortgaged man who was seeing everything his family had ever owned being gobbled up by the Pine Deep Farmer’s Bank. He knew it was an old story, repeated a thousand times a week across the country, and he knew that there was nothing unique or exceptional about him or his to elicit any kind of help. No Farm Aid, no Willie Nelson and Neil Young. He was going to lose the place within two or three years, and that would simply be that.
When the workday was finished, Carby came in from the fields, showered, ate dinner, and then went back outside for a smoke. Lily didn’t let him smoke in the house, and Jilly, his sixteen-year-old, always complained it made her ill. His boy, Tyler, never bitched about it, or about anything for that matter, but Carby seldom felt like fighting the same fight every day, so he took his pipe and went outside to walk the fence and think.
Tonight he wasn’t thinking at all about his money troubles, or what it was going to cost him to replace the head gasket on his battered Ford pickup. Tonight he couldn’t have cared less about the mortgage payment due on Wednesday or the fact that the sprinkler system on the western ten acres was older than he was and needed an overhaul. He didn’t care about the heating bill, the cost of day labor, or the fact that he’d recently discovered that his sixteen-year-old daughter was taking the Pill. Tonight he was thinking about what was going on in town. Yesterday he’d had lunch with Gus and some of the boys from town, and even though everyone was all laughs and buddy-buddy, he could see in their eyes that they were scared. Even Gus was scared. Killers running around, people dying. Carby was scared, too. So scared that he had unlocked the gun cabinet and made Tyler clean, oil, and load each rifle and shotgun, and then, with the whole family trailing along, he’d taken one long gun to each bedroom in the house, wrapped it in a pillowcase, and put in between mattress and box spring.
“Any of those rat bastards break in here, I want everyone to grab the closest gun. We ain’t going to end up like Henry Guthrie, God rest him.” Carby had taught Tyler and Jilly how to shoot before they were out of single digits and by the time they were in their teens both of them could drop a pheasant at fifty yards. Lily? Well, she could fire a shotgun and anyone could hit something with a shotgun, especially an intruder in the close confines of a small farmhouse. Even so, Carby was scared for his family. He walked the fenceline with his pipe between his teeth and his own shotgun in the crook of his arm; the gun was broken open at the breech but loaded with buckshot. His dog, a big shepherd named Spooker, was back at the house with the girls and Tyler.
Life’s a bitch and then you die, he thought as he walked. He’d always loved that expression. As close to Zen as he had ever seen, with the exception of No Pain, No Gain, which he had tattooed on his left shoulder back in his wrestling days. Not pro wrestling or any of that TV comedy, but Greco-Roman during his four years at Pinelands College. Carby had studied animal husbandry and agriculture, and for the most part he hadn’t learned much beyond get your cows to screw and plant as many crops as you can.
“Yeah, life’s a bitch and then you die,” he said aloud, and that made him think of death. Not just the headline deaths out at the Guthrie place, but death closer to home. His buddy Bailey Frane had buried his mother yesterday morning. Passed in her sleep, even though she’d been healthy as a horse for all her eighty years. Carby had stood by Bailey during the funeral and had sipped kitchen whiskey with him all afternoon, the two of them growing more philosophic about life and death as the tide-line of the bottle receded.
There was a breeze coming out of the southwest and he stopped for a moment at the edge of a fallow field where he planned to grow blueberries next season. So far the blight hadn’t touched the berry crops in the region, so he thought he’d try blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and maybe some raspberries. The better berries sold pretty well in farmers’ markets or to the buyers for the store chains; the second-best always sold to the jelly companies in New Jersey.
He sniffed the wind, searching for the scents he liked—tilled earth, manure, sweetgrass—but then he frowned. There was an odd smell on the air; threaded through the earthy smell of churned soil, wood smoke, and dried corn, there were other scents, and Carby had a farmer’s nose. There was some old skunk there, but that was from roadkill over on Seven Mile Road on the other side of the Pine River, less potent than it had been a few nights ago. A whiff of gasoline, too. And something else. Sweeter, but not sweet like fruit. More like the sugar-up-your-nose stink of something left out to rot. Sweet like that. Nasty sweet. He took his pipe out of his mouth and held it at arm’s length, clearing his nose as much as possible. The breeze brought the olio of smells again, and there it was. The bad sweet smell. Only this time it was stronger. Fresher. Nearer, he thought.
Dead deer out in the woods, he thought, but the idea of something dead in the woods spooked him. What if it wasn’t a dead deer out there? What if that Boyd fellow had killed someone else and what he smelled was a dead body out in the woods?
“Balls,” he told himself and he screwed on a mocking smile. Even so, he reached over to the fence rail, tapped the coal out of his pipe, grinding it into the mud and put the warm pipe in his pocket so that he had both hands free. For a moment he stood there unconsciously holding the shotgun at port arms, sniffing the wind like Spooker. The dead-sweet smell was, if anything, stronger, and that wasn’t right. The breeze was coming out of the west, blowing across Pine River. The state forestland was north and east of his place, and Pinelands College was south and east. There were no deer woods to the west. Just farm fields and the river, and on the other side of the river was a big auto junkyard that covered more than a square mile.