He drove to the liquor store, bought a pint of Jack Daniel’s. Then he stopped at the White Cow to get a coffee to go. Everybody quit talking when he walked in. As he turned to leave, he thought maybe he should say something, about how they were doing everything possible to catch the killer, but he didn’t. He poured some whiskey in his coffee and drove to the old dump on Reub Hill Road. Opening the trunk, he took the shoe box of photographs out and looked through them one more time. He counted twenty-six different men. There were at least a couple hundred different shots, maybe more, bundled together with rubber bands. Setting the box on the ground, he tore a few stained and crinkled pages from a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog he found in the trash pile and stuffed them down in the box. Then he dropped the three film canisters on top and lit a match. Standing there in the hot sun, he drank the rest of his coffee and watched the pictures turn to ashes. When the last of them burned up, he took an Ithaca 37 from the trunk. He checked to make sure the shotgun was loaded and laid it on the backseat. He could smell last night’s booze coming out of his skin. He ran a hand over his beard. It was the first morning he’d forgotten to shave since his army days.
When Hank saw the cruiser pull in the gravel lot, he folded the newspaper and set it on the counter. He watched Bodecker tip up a bottle. The last time Hank could recall seeing the sheriff in Knockemstiff was the evening he handed out wormy apples in front of the church to the kids on Halloween when he was running for election. He reached over and turned down his radio. The last few notes of Sonny James’s “You’re the Only World I Know” ended just as the sheriff came in the screen door. “I was hoping you’d still be around,” he said to Hank.
“Why’s that?” the storekeeper asked.
“You recall the time that crazy Russell bastard killed himself up in the woods behind here? You had his boy with you that night. Arvin was his name.”
“I remember.”
“That boy come through here maybe last night or this morning?”
Hank looked down at the counter. “I was sorry to hear about your sister.”
“I asked you a question, goddamn it.”
“What did he do? Get in some trouble?”
“You might say that,” Bodecker said. He grabbed the newspaper off the counter, held the front page up in front of Hank’s face.
The storekeeper’s brow wrinkled as he read the black headlines once again. “He ain’t the one done that, is he?”
Bodecker dropped the paper on the floor and pulled out his revolver, pointed it at the storekeeper. “I ain’t got time to fuck around, you dumb bastard. Have you seen him?”
Hank swallowed and turned his eyes toward the window, watched Talbert Johnson’s hot rod slow down as it passed the store. “What you gonna do, shoot me?”
“Don’t think I won’t,” Bodecker said. “After I splatter your little bit of brains all over the candy case, I’ll put that butcher knife in your hand you got laying over there by your scroungy meat slicer. It’ll be an easy self-defense. Judge, the crazy sonofabitch was trying to protect a killer.” He cocked the gun. “Do yourself a favor. It’s my sister we’re talking about.”
“Yeah, I seen him,” Hank said reluctantly. “He was in here a little while ago. Bought a bottle of pop and some cigarettes.”
“What was he driving?”
“I didn’t see no car.”
“So he was walking?”
“He might have been, I guess.”
“Which way did he go when he left here?”
“I don’t know,” Hank said. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Don’t lie to me. What did he have to say?”
Hank looked over at the pop case where the boy had stood and drank the root beer. “He mentioned something about the old house where he used to live, that’s all.”
Bodecker put the gun back in his holster. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?” He started out the door. “You’ll make a good little rat someday.”
Hank watched him get in the cruiser and pull out onto Black Run Road. He placed both hands flat on the counter and bowed his head. Behind him, in a voice faint as a whisper, the radio announcer sent out another heartfelt request.
53
AT THE TOP OF THE FLATS, ARVIN STARTED SOUTH. The brush was thicker now along the edge of the woods, but it took him only a couple of minutes to find the deer path that he and his father had walked on their way to the prayer log. He could see the metal roof of the barn, and he hurried on. The house was gone, just like the storekeeper had said. He set his bag down and walked in where the back door used to be. He continued on through the kitchen and down the hall to the room where his mother had died. He kicked at black cinders and charred pieces of lumber, hoping to find some relic of hers or one of the little treasures he had kept in his bedroom window. But except for a rusty doorknob and his memories, there was nothing left. Some empty beer bottles were arranged in a neat row on one corner of the rock foundation where someone had sat and drank for an evening.
The barn was nothing now but a shell. All the wood siding had been torn off. The roof was rusted through in spots, the red paint faded and peeled away by the weather. Arvin stepped inside out of the sun, and there in a corner lay the feed bucket in which Willard had once carried his precious blood. He moved it over to a spot near the front and used it as a seat while he ate his lunch. He watched a red-tailed hawk make lazy circles in the sky. Then he took out the photograph of the woman with the dead man. Why would people do something like this? And how, he wondered again, did her bullet miss him when she wasn’t more than five or six feet away? In the quiet, he could hear his father’s voice: “There’s a sign here, son. Better pay attention.” He put the picture in his pocket and hid the bucket behind a bale of moldy straw. Then he started back across the field.
He found the deer path again and soon arrived at the clearing that Willard had worked so hard on. It was mostly grown over now with snakeroot and wild fern, but the prayer log was still there. Five of the crosses stood as well, streaked a dull red with rust from the nails. The other four lay on the ground, orange-flowered trumpet vines curled around them. His heart caught just for a second when he saw some of the remains of the dog still hanging from the first cross his father had ever raised. He leaned against a tree, thought about the days leading up to his mother’s death, how Willard wanted so much for her to live. He would have done anything for her; fuck the blood and the stink and the insects and the heat. Anything, Arvin said to himself. And suddenly he realized, as he stood once again in his father’s church, that Willard had needed to go wherever Charlotte went, so that he could keep on looking after her. All these years, Arvin had despised him for what he’d done, as if he didn’t give a damn what happened to his boy after she died. Then he thought about the ride back from the cemetery, and Willard’s talk about visiting Emma in Coal Creek. It had never occurred to him before, but that was as close as his father could get to telling him that he was leaving, too, and that he was sorry. “Maybe stay for a while,” Willard had said that day. “You’ll like it there.”
He wiped some tears from his eyes and set his gym bag down on top of the log, then walked around and knelt at the dog’s cross. He moved away some dead leaves. The skull was half buried in loam, the small hole from the.22 rifle still visible between the empty eye sockets. He found the moldy collar, a small clump of hair still stuck to the leather around the rusty metal buckle. “You were a good dog, Jack,” he said. He gathered up all the remains he could find on the ground — the thin ribs, the hipbones, a single paw — and pulled off the brittle pieces still attached to the cross. He laid them gently in a small pile. With the sharp end of a tree branch and his hands, he dug a hole in the moist, black dirt at the foot of the cross. He went down a foot or so, arranged everything carefully in the bottom of the grave. Then he went over to his bag and got the painting of the crucifixion that he’d taken from the motel and hung it on one of the nails in the cross.