For a long time after his marriage came apart Driscoll had wondered if they’d ever been happy, his wife, his daughter, him. Or maybe they’d never been happy and he just thought of them that way because it was easier for him to deal with. His wife and daughter like something out of a dream, half remembered the next morning, slipping slowly away with the coming light of day.
But the thought was too painful and when the bartender came by Driscoll ordered another drink. Driscoll had no fucking clue and he knew it.
MORGAN SET THE log and then hefted the ax, bringing the blade down into the wood and sinking the metal deep as the handle. He raised the log in this way and brought it down again, listening to the tear as the two sides came apart and fell aside. The work had been waiting for a week now and he went after it, breathing hard, while sweat beaded on his forehead and the back of his shirt grew wet with perspiration between his shoulder blades. He bent and hefted the two sides of the split to the pile nearby and set another. Pausing to wipe a sleeve across his forehead and look to the cabin.
He knew he was being a coward. He’d never set out to hide anything from his grandson, and now that’s what he was doing. Patrick had abandoned them both and now Morgan was left trying to set it all straight. He thought of Patrick again. Where was he? What was he doing? Did he have any idea what was going on?
For a time Morgan just stood there with the ax in his hand, wondering about a great many things, and thinking about Bobby inside his house, back at the table with the letters, reading every page as if it was going to reveal some great secret, though Morgan knew there was nothing like that to be found, and the things that his grandson searched for were not so easily located.
After splitting the next log Morgan paused to sit. He ran his hand down into his jacket for his cigarettes. He brought out his pack and shook a smoke out. Placing it to his lips and then feeling the weight of the pack in his hand, he thought better of it, took the cigarette from his mouth, and then slipped the pack back inside his pocket. He smoked too much but it hadn’t hurt him much till a year or so before. Whether it was old age or some cancer growing inside him, he couldn’t tell, but he thought it was probably both, and he went on through his days with the weight of it over his shoulders like a lead harness, pulling god-knows-what behind.
He wiped a sleeve across his forehead again and looked at his grandson in there at the table. Sheri was missing and he didn’t know what he could do about that, but he knew he had to try. “Well,” he said, leaning one hand to the seat and angling himself up. “I guess I’m old enough.”
He came up the stairs and stood on the porch looking in through the front window. He didn’t know what he was protecting anymore. “Old,” Morgan said, in a whisper only audible to him, “and now I’ve begun to talk to myself.” He put a hand out and turned the doorknob. “What’s new about that?” he said, answering his own voice.
Drake looked up at him as he came into the cabin. “I don’t know if it will help but I want to tell you something about those men who took your wife,” Morgan said. “I know them and they know me. The skinnier one is named Bean and the bigger one is John Wesley. They looked out for Patrick while he was inside. And for a long time I helped them by bringing whatever they needed from the outside.”
Chapter 8
BEAN CHECKED THE SIGNAL on the prepaid phone, the green light of the display open in his palm. A primordial glow showing on the lines of his face before he closed the thing in his palm and took a step away into the night. The day gone behind the mountains and the light from the fire barely visible through the small thicket of trees. He paused to take it all in, the country road a mile off but no car seen or heard for over an hour now. The place he’d picked for them close to a drainage stream, no bigger than a creek, the trees grown tall and thick around the water’s edge.
He stood there looking it all over, the creek heard from time to time, and the wind shifting and moving the branches overhead. Smoke pulled one way from the fire and then another, gray as it rose, and then turned black, all of it lit from beneath and then fading away into the night sky above. At the fire Bean could see where John Wesley stood with a slender branch of willow in his hand, tending to the coals with his eyes fixed downward into the flames, and Drake’s wife sitting there with her hands still taped together in front of her.
They hadn’t talked more than to offer her some food. Cans of chili they ate cold with their fingertips. A few apples they’d stolen from Drake’s kitchen. They ate and threw the empty tins into the shadows of the thicket. Only letting Sheri eat when they had finished.
Now Bean stood beyond the fire wearing the black suit, his legs knee-deep in the wheat field. The lapels of his jacket turned up to ward off the cold and the black material scuffed with dirt in places from the few days of work he’d used it for. He pulled the lapels closer around his neck and walked a few more feet through the grass, holding the lapels of his jacket to his skin and watching the empty space in the wheat fields a mile off where the road came through.
In his other hand he depressed the power button on the phone and listened to the music play and then when he was satisfied he turned the phone back on and watched the display light again. The same signal as before.
Chapter 9
THE BAR MAURICE TOOK him to was a small neighborhood spot a few blocks up. Dimly lit with blue and purple neon lights all down the wall, and the windows tinted almost black. It was unlike any place Patrick had ever been, low ceilinged with a pearly light of neon on every surface. The beer was mostly in bottles and the liquor in plastic jugs. The customers a mix of the young taking shots at the bar—their heads tipped back and their nostrils flared with each progressive slug of alcohol—and the older crowd closer to Patrick’s and Maurice’s age. Mostly single men who looked to have come in after work for a cheap beer and a view of the younger crowd.
It wasn’t the type of place Patrick had been expecting. Nothing like the Buck Blind back in Silver Lake, where he could grab a beer and have a discussion. Maurice’s bar was loud and dirty. Patrick wanting nothing to do with it as he looked around the crowded room for the nearest exits while music pumped like an artery in his ears.
Still, Patrick tried to talk to Maurice about why he was there, but the music was too loud and the man simply nodded at everything Patrick said, watching the crowd behind them in the mirror. Every once in a while taking sips from a glass of whiskey. The place so crowded that Patrick hadn’t noticed the girls behind them until Maurice turned to talk to them. Maurice introduced them each in turn, telling Patrick how he knew them. Patrick struggling to hear above the music, but the girls not seeming to care as they danced in place to the rhythm.
SHERI WORE ONLY a set of sleeping shorts and a tank top and she squatted next to the fire feeling the heat on her skin. She extended her bound hands toward the flames, feeling the fire on her palms. The night cold behind her and the frozen feel of her clothes any time they touched the skin. She was shivering with her teeth chattering and the tremors rolling up her spine almost as constant as the wind that came over the wheat fields.
Opposite, John Wesley sat on a log and watched the fire. He was at least a foot taller than her and weighed close to three hundred pounds. He looked slow and cumbersome in the padded flannel he wore. His jeans too tight and the bulge of his stomach showing where it came over the waistline and protruded pink and hairy from beneath his shirt.