"Boy's Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

“Handcuffed,” Sheriff Amory said, in his quiet voice. He had thick dark eyebrows over deep-set eyes the color of coal, and the pallor of his flesh suggested he had an affinity to the night. “You’re sure about that, Tom? And about the wire, too?”
“I’m sure. Whoever strangled that fella did a hell of a job. Near about took his head off.”
“Handcuffed,” the sheriff said again. “That was so he wouldn’t float out, I reckon.” He tapped his lower lip with a forefinger. “Well,” he said at last, “I believe we’ve got a murder on our hands, don’t you?”
“If it wasn’t, I don’t know what murder is.”
As they talked, I got out of the milk truck and wandered over to where I thought I’d seen that person watching me. There was nothing but weeds, rocks, and dirt where he’d been standing. If it had been a man, I thought. Could it have been a woman? I hadn’t seen long hair, but then again I hadn’t seen much of anything but a coat swirling in the wind. I walked back and forth along the line of trees. Beyond it, the woods deepened and swampy ground took over. I found nothing.
“Better come on to the office and let me write it up,” the sheriff told my father. “If you want to go home and get some dry clothes on, that’d be fine.”
My dad nodded. “I’ve got to finish my deliveries and get Cory to school, too.”
“Okay. Seems to me we can’t do much for that fella at the bottom, anyhow.” He grunted, his hands in his pockets. “A murder. Last murder we had in Zephyr was in 1961. You remember when Bo Kallagan beat his wife to death with a bowlin’ trophy?”
I returned to the milk truck and waited for my dad. The sun was up good and proper now, lighting the world. Or, at least, the world I knew. But things weighed heavy on my mind. It seemed to me that there were two worlds: one before the sun, and one after. And if that were true, then maybe there were people who were citizens of those different worlds as well. Some moved easily through the landscape of night, and others clung to the bright hours. Maybe I had seen one of those darktime citizens, in the world before the sun. And—a chilling thought—maybe he had seen me seeing him, too.
I realized I had brought mud back into the milk truck. It was smeared all over my Keds.
I looked at the soles, and the earth I had collected.
On the bottom of my left Ked was a small green feather.


2
Down in the Dark


THE GREEN FEATHER WENT INTO MY POCKET. FROM THERE IT found its way into a White Owl cigar box in my room, along with my collection of old keys and dried-up insects. I closed the box lid, placed the box in one of the seven mystic drawers, and slid the drawer shut.
And that was how I forgot about it.
The more I thought about seeing that figure at the edge of the woods, the more I thought I’d been wrong, that my eyes had been scared from seeing Dad sink underwater as the car went down. Several times I started to tell Dad about it, but something else got in the way. Mom threw a gut-busting fit when she found out he’d jumped into the lake. She was so mad at him she sobbed as she yelled, and Dad had to sit her down at the kitchen table and explain to her calmly why he had done it. “There was a man at the wheel,” Dad said. “I didn’t know he was already dead, I thought he was knocked cold. If I’d stood there without doing anything, what would I have thought of myself after it was over?”
“You could’ve drowned!” she fired at him, tears on her cheeks. “You could’ve hit your head on a rock and drowned!”
“I didn’t drown. I didn’t hit my head on a rock. I did what I had to do.” He gave her a paper napkin, and she used it to blot her eyes. A last salvo came out of her: “That lake’s full of cottonmouths! You could’ve swum right into a nest of ’em!”
“I didn’t,” he said, and she sighed and shook her head as if she lived with the craziest fool ever born.
“You’d better get out of those damp clothes,” she told him at last, and her voice was under control again. “I just thank God it’s not your body down at the bottom of the lake, too.” She stood up and helped him unbutton his soggy shirt. “Do you know who it was?”
“Never saw him before.”
“Who would do such a thing to another human being?”
“That’s for J.T. to find out.” He peeled his shirt off, and Mom took it from him with two fingers as if the lake’s water carried leprosy. “I’ve got to go over to his office to help him write it up. I’ll tell you, Rebecca, when I looked into that dead man’s face my heart almost stopped. I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I hope to God I never see such a thing again, either.”
“Lord,” Mom said. “What if you’d had a heart attack? Who would’ve saved you?”
Worrying was my mother’s way. She fretted about the weather, the cost of groceries, the washing machine breaking down, the Tecumseh River being dirtied by the paper mill in Adams Valley, the price of new clothes, and everything under the sun. To my mother, the world was a vast quilt whose stitches were always coming undone. Her worrying somehow worked like a needle, tightening those dangerous seams. If she could imagine events through to their worst tragedy, then she seemed to have some kind of control over them. As I said, it was her way. My father could throw up a fistful of dice to make a decision, but my mother had an agony for every hour. I guess they balanced, as two people who love each other should.
My mother’s parents, Grand Austin and Nana Alice, lived about twelve miles south in a town called Waxahatchee, on the edge of Robbins Air Force Base. Nana Alice was even worse a worrier than Mom; something in her soul craved tragic manna, whereas Grand Austin—who had been a logger and had a wooden leg to show for the slip of a band saw—warned her he would unscrew his leg and whop her upside the head with it if she didn’t pipe down and give him peace. He called his wooden leg his “peace pipe,” but as far as I know he never used it for any purpose except that for which it was carved. My mother had an older brother and sister, but my father was an only child.
Anyway, I went to school that day and at the first opportunity told Davy Ray Callan, Johnny Wilson, and Ben Sears what had happened. By the time the school bell rang and I walked home, the news was moving across Zephyr like a crackling wildfire. Murder was the word of the hour. My parents were fighting off the phone calls. Everybody wanted to know the grisly details. I went outside to ride my rusted old bike and lead Rebel for a chase in the woods, and it came to me that maybe one of those people who called already knew the details. Maybe one of them was just trying to find out if he’d been seen, or what Sheriff Amory knew.
I realized then, as I pedaled my bike through the forest and Rebel ran at my heels, that somebody in my hometown might be a killer.
The days passed, warming into the heart of spring. A week after Dad had jumped into Saxon’s Lake, this was the story: Sheriff Amory had found no one missing from Zephyr or from any of the surrounding communities. A front-page article in the weekly Adams Valley Journal brought forth no new information. Sheriff Amory and two of his deputies, some of the firemen, and a half dozen volunteers got out on the lake in rowboats and dragged nets back and forth, but they only came up with an angry catch of snapping turtles and cottonmouths.
Saxon’s Lake used to be Saxon’s Quarry back in the twenties, before the steam shovels had broken into an underground river that would not be capped or shunted aside. Estimates of its depth ranged from three hundred to five hundred feet. There wasn’t a net on earth that could scoop that sunken car back to the surface.
The sheriff came by one evening for a talk with Dad and Mom, and they let me sit in on it. “Whoever did it,” Sheriff Amory explained, his hat in his lap and his nose throwing a shadow, “must’ve backed that car onto the dirt road facin’ the lake. We found the tire marks, but the footprints were all scuffed over. The killer must’ve had somethin’ wedged against the gas pedal. Just before you rounded the bend, he released the hand brake, slammed the door, and jumped back, and the car took off across Route Ten. He didn’t know you were gonna be there, of course. If you hadn’t been, the car would’ve gone on into the lake, sunk, and nobody would ever have known it happened.” He shrugged. “That’s the best I can come up with.”
“You talked to Marty Barklee?”
“Yeah, I did. Marty didn’t see anything. The way that dirt road sits, you can drive right past it at a reasonable clip and never even know it’s there.”
“So where does that leave us?”
The sheriff pondered my dad’s question, the silver star on his hat catching the lamplight. Outside, Rebel was barking and other dogs picked up the tribal call across Zephyr. The sheriff spread his big hands out and looked at his fingers. “Tom,” he said, “we have a real strange situation here. We’ve got tire marks but no car. You say you saw a dead man handcuffed to the wheel and a wire around his throat, but we don’t have a body and we’re not likely to recover one. Nobody’s missin’ from town. Nobody’s missin’ in the whole area, except a teenaged girl whose mother thinks she ran off with her boyfriend to Nashville. And the boy don’t have a tattoo, by the way. I can’t find anybody who’s seen a fella with a tattoo like the one you described.” Sheriff Amory looked at me, then my mother, and then back to my dad with his coal-black eyes. “You know that riddle, Tom? The one about a tree fallin’ in the woods, and if there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a noise? Well, if there’s no body and no one’s missin’ anywhere that I can tell, was there a murder or not?”
“I know what I saw,” Dad said. “Are you doubtin’ my word, J.T.?”
“No, I didn’t say that. I’m only sayin’ I can’t do anything more until we get a murder victim. I need a name, Tom. I need a face. Without an identification, I don’t even know where to start.”
“So in the meantime somebody who killed another man is walkin’ around as free as you please and doesn’t have to be scared of gettin’ caught anytime soon. Is that it?”
“Yep,” the sheriff admitted. “That about sums it up.”
Of course Sheriff Amory promised he’d keep working on it, and that he’d call around the state for information on missing persons. Sooner or later, he said, somebody would have to ask after the man who had gone down in the lake. When the sheriff had gone, my father went out to sit on the front porch by himself with the light off, and he sat there alone past the time Mom told me to get ready for bed.
That was the night my father’s cry awakened me in the dark.
I sat up in bed, my nerves jangled. I could hear Mom talking to Dad through the wall. “It’s all right,” she was saying. “It was a bad dream, just a bad dream, everything’s all right.”
Dad was quiet for a long time. I heard water running in the bathroom. Then the squeak of their bedsprings. “You want to tell me about it?” Mom asked him.
“No. God, no.”
“It was just a bad dream.”