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Evil Grows & Other Thrilling Tales Page 10
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Antonio said, “A fellow has a right to inspect his possessions from time to time. What’s this, another masterpiece?” Before Umberto could stop him he reached out and pulled-off the tarpaulin.
For a moment the beauty of the thing struck even Antonio. But he recovered himself quickly. “That’s real gold in the trimming!” he complained. “What good will that do anyone when it’s in the ground? What did I tell you about throwing money away on materials we don’t need?”
“My money, not yours. The materials came out of my savings.”
“And whose time did you spend on it? I heard you were turning down business, but I didn’t believe it until now. That’s the family crest on the lid. What were you going to do, enter it in some fool exhibition put on by those graveworms you call your colleagues?”
Umberto made no reply. In a twinkling, his nephew’s manner went from hot to cold. “We’ll talk about this later. I came down here to tell you I’m selling the shop.”
“Selling!” The old man pronounced it as if it were an unfamiliar word.
“Lock, stock, and casket. I’m liquidating the inventory and putting the building and property on the open market. That includes your little project here. It should bring several thousand once we scrape off the engraving.”
“We have been in this business for–”
“Too long,” Antonio interrupted. “It’s called moving with the times. No one does business with independents anymore. They go to the big supply houses, where they can get machine-made models for a fraction of what you charge. This is a prime location for a parking lot. Of course, that means tearing down the building, but that shouldn’t cost too much. A swift kick will do it. I’ll make a killing.”
“And me, Antonio?”
“Tony,” snapped the other.
“Will you tear me down too, or sell me along with the inventory?”
His nephew smiled - a mortician’s smile, blandly obsequious. “Certainly not, Uncle. You’ve worked hard all your life; you’ve earned a rest. I’ve made arrangements with the Waning Years Retirement Home. You move in next week.”
“But I don’t want to retire!”
“What you want or don’t want is not an issue. As your only living relative, I can have you declared incapable of caring for yourself and commit you to a state institution. Instead I’ve elected to place you in private hands. You should be grateful.”
“I’ll fight you! I’ll hire a lawyer.”
“And what will you use to pay him? You don’t even own these tools - which, by the way, I have a buyer for, if you can provide a list of what you have here. If you can’t, I’ll just make one.” He produced a pad and pencil.
“I have rights.”
“Not if you’re senile, and that’s what I’ll prove in court if you insist upon making things difficult. This is a young man’s world, Uncle Umberto. If you hadn’t been so busy making your pretty boxes you’d know that. Now, try to stay out of my way while I inventory this equipment.” He started counting the braces and bits on the wall behind the lathe, tallying them into his pad.
Umberto glared at his nephew’s back. Then his eyes fell to his masterpiece’s unfinished crest, and as always when he contemplated a project, all other cares receded. He picked up the No.-5 hammer he had been using, thought better of it, exchanged it for a heavier No. 3 with a shiny Neoprine grip, and brought it down with all his might squarely into the center of Antonio’s fashionable hairstyle.
The Fugurello sanity hearing is in the records for anyone who cares to review it. Following conflicting testimonies by the psychiatrists who had examined the defendant, a harried judge ruled him legally insane and unfit for trial and committed him to the state mental institution for treatment. This failed to cheer Umberto, who was depressed by his inability to attend his nephew’s celebrated funeral.
The centerpiece was the talk of his profession for weeks. Under a rose-colored spot, the casket’s eggshell finish threw off a high gleam that put the flowers to shame. Everyone agreed that Antonio had never looked better, and when the service was over and the top half of the lid was lowered, exposing the ornate crest, the guests were moved in spite of the solemnity of the occasion to applaud.
After eighteen months, authorities at the institution agreed that Umberto could be trusted with tools once again, and he was granted permission to do light work in the shop. These were happy days for Umberto, who had been cheered by his colleagues’ letters and telegrams of congratulation upon his masterpiece; doing work he loved, he no longer thought about death or its proximity. The doctors had in fact given him a clean bill of health, which he attributed to freedom from the responsibility of earning a living.
Then came the untimely passing of the institution’s director and a special request for Umberto to craft a vessel for the remains. Material posed a problem in the face of bureaucratic cutbacks, but with effort he managed to obtain some good cedar and recycled brass for the handles and fittings. Making something worthwhile out of such second-class stock was a challenge he welcomed.
He rubbed the last irregularity from the surface and stood back to survey his workmanship. The trimming glittered like gold against the deep red-brown of the wood. He frowned appreciably at his reflection in the finish. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was still good craftsmanship, and that was something money couldn’t buy.
Bad Blood
Light spread gray through the sycamores, igniting billions of hanging droplets with the black trunks standing among them looking not fixed to the earth but suspended from above like stalactites. A mockingbird awoke to release its complex scan into the sopping air. There was no answer and the song was not repeated. Leaves crackled, drying.
The man was already awake, a tense silhouette against a yellowing sun louvered by vertical tree shafts, a knee on the ground, the other drawn up to his chest and one fist wrapped around a rifle with its butt planted in the moist earth. His profile was sharp, with a pointed nose like a check mark, the angle dramatized by a long stiff bill tilting down from a green cap with JOHN DEERE embossed in block letters on a patch on the front of the crown. His shirt was coarse and blue under a red and black checked jacket with darns on the elbows. His jeans had been blue but were now earth-colored, like his boots under their cake of silver clay. He had been there in that position since an hour before dawn.
From where he was crouched, the ground fell off forty-five degrees to a berry thicket that girdled the mountain. The thicket had been transplanted by his great-grandfather from a nearby bog and allowed to grow wild until it resembled the tangled barbed wire in which the great-grandfather’s son would snare himself thirty years later and wait for the sun to rise and the Germans to discover him in a muddy place called Ypres. This natural barrier had trapped a number of local men the same way, to wait like the soldier and, now, like the soldier’s grandson for the dawn and what the dawn would bring. The slope bristled with leafed trees and cedars and twisted jackpines, heirs to the great towering monarchs that had fallen to the timber boom of another century, whose black stumps still dotted the mountainside like rotted teeth.
A third of the way down the slope, a hundred feet below him and two hundred feet above the thicket, stood his own shack. It had been built of logs when James Monroe was president, but a later ancestor had nailed clapboard over the logs to make it resemble a proper house. A four-paned window that had been covered with oiled paper before the coming of the railroad now reflected sunlight from three panes, emphasizing the blank space where a bullet had shattered the glass.
Now, as the sun lifted, its light struck sparks off tiny fragments on his jeans. He flicked them away carefully. Before tumbling out of the shack he had made sure to remove his wristwatch and anything else that might catch light and betray him.
He knew who had fired the bullet. Inside the shack, its cracked black cover freshly nicked by that same projectile, lay a Bible as thick as a man’s thigh, its cream flyleaves scribbled over in old brown ink with names of his forebears
and the dates of their lives and deaths going back to 1789, when an indentured servant from Cornwall bought the book secondhand in London and recorded the birth of a son named Jotham. Four generations of names followed before the simple entry: “Eben Candler, murdered by Ezekiel Finlayson, Hawkins County, Kentucky, May 11, 1882. His will be done.” Eighteen similar notations appeared on succeeding pages, in differing hands, until the survivors wearied of keeping count. The final line, “Jotham Edward Candler, born September 8, 1951,” written in his father’s formal script, commemorated his own birth. Finlayson losses were not included.
No one remembered the specifics of that first encounter between a Candler and a Finlayson, although it had something to do with the ownership of forty acres of bottom land in Unico County. Only the casualties were remembered. Jotham’s own coming of age had been marked by a daily catechism in which he was expected to recite, in what ever order asked, the names of the Candler slain, their murderers, and the dates of their deaths as they had been recorded in the big Bible; and when he was strong enough to lift a squirrel rifle, he had been taught to think of his small, furry targets not as squirrels, but as Finlaysons.
It did not matter that no one knew who held title to those forty acres—that was as gone as the bottomland itself, seized by the bank during the depression of 1893—or that the fecundity of the Candler and Finlayson women had led to considerable interbreeding between the two families during the long truces. Hatred was an inheritance as solid and treasured as the old Bible and Great Grandmother Candler’s homely samplers, their red embroidery and white linen gone the same dead-skin brown on the walls of the tiny shack. Jotham, with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and three years in Vietnam behind him, was growing marijuana on plots that had supported his father’s stills, and the Finlaysons had sold Ezekiel’s ferrier’s shop to buy a funeral home and the first of a chain of hardware stores, but aside from that little had changed. Bad blood was bad always.
As the sun cleared the mountain, its light turned leafy green coming down through the branches. Creatures stirred in the dry-shuck mattress of last year’s leaves, and the last wisp of woodsmoke left the shack’s chimney in a bit of shredded tissue that vanished into the thatch of fog now treetop-high as it lifted and broke apart. Jotham’s assailant would know by that that he was no longer inside. The waiting was almost ended.
Jotham was the last Candler to bear that surname. His sisters were married and his only brother had died in Korea before Jotham was old enough to remember him. He would carry the name to the grave with him because of what the army’s defoliants had done to his genes in Da Nang. In view of that temptation—the opportunity to wipe out by one death the long line of Candlers—young Bertram Finlayson’s attempt to kill him in his sleep that morning seemed long overdue.
For he had no doubt it was Bertram.
Eight years Jotham’s junior, he had been too young to serve in Vietnam, and had spent that frustration in turkey shoots across the state, winning a caseful of trophies to display under the antlered heads on the walls of his fine house in town. His arsenal was a legend among collectors of firearms and he often boasted that he had used them to kill every kind of animal that lived in the county but one. He was the only Finlayson young enough and mean enough to bother about a fight that most had thought was buried with Jotham’s father.
Several times since Jotham had returned from college, Bertram had tried to draw him into something in town, from which Jotham had always walked away. Witnesses said it was because he had had enough of killing in Asia. But those who said that were thinking of other wars, did not understand that the object of his had been to stay alive; killing came secondary, if at all. And now here he was, twelve years and ten thousand miles later, trying to stay alive in another jungle.
A squirrel began chattering, a high-pitched coughing noise like a small engine trying to start. Something was annoying it. Not him; the squirrel was too far away, high in an ash on the other side of the shack. He spotted its humped profile on the side of the trunk sixty feet up and scanned the ground at the base. A treefall twenty yards down the slope looked promising. He raised the 30.06 and lined up the iron sights and sent a bullet into the center of the fall. Something jumped, startled. Dead leaves rattled on the inert branches.
The echo of his first report was still snarling in the distance when he fired again, into those moving leaves. Almost instantly, a section of bark on a cedar a foot to Jotham’s right exploded in a cloud of splinters, followed quickly by the crack of a .30-30. He hurled himself and his weapon headlong down the slope, rolling and coming up on the other side of a clump of suckers grown up around a pine stump. The squirrel had stopped chattering.
Bertram was a cooler hand than he’d thought. After the first shot he had waited, then fired at Jotham’s second muzzle flash.
Again the waiting began.
Once, after exchanging fire with a Cong he had never seen, Jotham had waited for eleven hours in a fog of mosquitoes and heavy air, unmoving, his survival dependent upon his either killing the guerrilla or boring him into moving on. At the end the Cong had lost patience first, and when he rose from cover to investigate, Jotham had taken his head off with a burst from his M-16. How to wait was the hardest lesson of all. He settled himself on his other knee to give that haunch a rest.
The sun climbed into a thin sheeting of clouds that parted from time to time, changing the light as in an ancient motion picture. The air warmed, grew hot and thick. Twice he was attacked by wood ticks, once on the back of a hand, the other time, very painfully, on his neck. He did not move to brush them away.
When the sun was directly overhead, he knew a terrible urge to get up and find out if Bertram was still there. More than the heat it made the sweat stand out in burrs on his forehead and greased his armpits and crotch. It must have been what the Cong felt just before he committed suicide.
But Jotham held his position and it subsided.
No one came up the mountain. In other years, uninvited visitors had met moon-shiners’ buckshot, and now even the authorities counseled against wandering the hills and chancing the protective wrath of marijuana growers and mad survivalists.
Around midafternoon the sky darkened and big drops pattered the leaves on the ground and rolled along the edge of the bill of Jotham’s cap and hung quivering before falling to his raised thigh with loud plops. He swung the rifle horizontal to keep moisture out of the barrel. But the rain passed swiftly. A rainbow arched over the shack and melted away.
The air cooled toward dusk. Bertram would have to move soon. Jotham’s new knowledge of his enemy’s instincts told him that he would not again risk darkness in the woods with an experienced jungle fighter. Jotham reversed legs again, working the stiffness out of the long muscles in his thighs.
The woods to the west were catching fire in the lowering sun when a buck muledeer that Jotham had never heard went crashing off through the woods on the opposite side of the shack, blatting a warning to others of its kind. At that moment the treefall shook and a pair of bull shoulders with a hatless head nestled in between reared against a sky striped with tree trunks. Light sheared along something long and shiny.
Jotham raised his rifle without aiming, trusting to the barrel to find its mark because he could no longer see the front sight, and touched the trigger. The butt pulsed against his shoulder, but he did not hear the blast. It had been that way when he’d killed the Cong. In roaring silence the bull shoulders hunched and the hatless head went back and the silhouette crumpled in on itself like a balloon deflating. The long and shiny thing flashed, falling.
Jotham let the sun slip to a red crescent before rising. In gray light he approached the treefall, lifting his feet clear of the old stumps more from memory than from sight, his eyes fixed on the dark thing draped over the treefall with the .30-30 on the ground in front of it. Carefully he used a foot to slide the rifle further out of the reach of the dangling hands, then took another step and grasped a handful of straw-colored
hair and raised a slack face with open eyes and mouth into the last ray of light. It was Bertram Finlayson.
He let the face drop and started down the mountain toward town to tell his sister Lucy that she was a widow.
STATE OF GRACE
“Ralph? This is Lyla.”
“Who the hell is Lyla?”
“Lyla Dane. I live in the apartment above you, for chrissake. We see each other every day.”
“The hooker.”
“You live over a dirty bookstore. What do you want for a neighbor, a freaking rocket scientist?”
Ralph Poteet sat up in bed and rumpled his mouse-colored hair. He fumbled the alarm clock off the night table and held it very close to his good eye. He laid it facedown and scowled at the receiver in his hand. “It’s two-thirty ayem.”
“Thanks. My watch stopped and I knew if I called you you’d tell me what time it is. Listen, you’re like a cop, right?”
“Not at two-thirty ayem.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars to come up here now.” He blew his nose on the sheet. “Ain’t that supposed to be the other way around?”
“You coming up or not? You’re not the only dick in town. I just called you because you’re handy.”
“What’s the squeal?”
“I got a dead priest in my bed.”
He said he was on his way and hung up. A square gin bottle slid off the blanket. He caught it before it hit the floor, but it was empty and he dropped it. He put on his Tyrolean hat with a feather in the band, found his suitpants on the floor half under the bed, and pulled them on over his pajamas. He stuck bare feet into his loafers and because it was October he pulled on his suitcoat, grunting with the effort. He was forty-three years old and forty pounds overweight. He looked for his gun just because it was 2:30 a.m., couldn’t find it, and went out.
Lyla Dane was just five feet and ninety pounds in a pink kimono and slippers with carnations on the toes. She wore her black hair in a pageboy like Anna May Wong, but the Oriental effect fell short of her round Occidental face. “You look like crap,” she told Ralph at the door.