IN THE VALLEY, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF WESLEY FILLMORE was the cause of little distress and indeed of considerable rejoicing. Wesley figured as a sort of local hero in reverse. His absence compounded negatively, you might have said, for the good of the community. Scale is everything. Where in a larger setting conspicuous saints and sinners, however rare proportionally, may be numerous in absolute terms, in the valley their numbers, like everything else, were small. Therefore, as Taft, pouring himself a light Sir Walter Scott and shaking out the Brattleboro newspaper, remarked to Eli, the same names kept coming up.
“Court filings,” said Taft. “The police report. Car wrecks, DUIs, break-ins, drug deals, domestic disputes, fights, assaults. The same half-dozen people must make seventy-five percent of the trouble. The same names, over and over. It’s like Shakespeare, isn’t it, old sport?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Eli. “Who have we got today?”
Taft returned to the paper. He read. “Well, for example,” he said, “here’s Katie Harding, twenty-nine. Arrested for fighting with some guy—boyfriend?—doesn’t give a name, at the bridge, the swimming place there. She hit him over the head with an ironing board.”
“An ironing board?” asked Eli. “What did they have an ironing board for at the swimming hole?”
“Ask Katie. Alcohol was involved, needless to say. As for the ironing board, it might not be the weapon you or I would choose, but Katie made it work. She put the guy in the ER.”
“Whatever comes to your hand, I guess,” said Eli.
“Then a couple of days later,” Taft went on, “here’s Katie again, stopped on Route 10 for speeding, DUI, and had a carful of dope. She took a swing at the arresting officer. She and her male companion, both in the lockup.”
“Not the same fellow, though, this time, probably,” said Eli. “The ironing board fellow?”
“I hope not. But, point is: twice in the same paper? Same girl? I doubt this is her maiden voyage, either.”
“I know it isn’t,” said Eli. “Katie’s a frequent flyer. There are others. Look at Wes Fillmore.”
“Who?”
“Wesley Fillmore. Don’t know Wes? Keep reading the paper, and you will. Jack of all trades, Wes is. Breaking and entering, weed, pills. Mainly, though, Wes is a beater.”
“A beater of what?”
“Well, of anything that’s within reach, I guess,” said Eli. “You know: dogs, cats, horses, other livestock. But specializing in women. Wives, girlfriends, cousins, nieces, sisters. Wes loves to beat up his women. The girls like it, too, it seems. At least, they keep coming back for more. And it’s not as if they don’t know what they’re dealing with. All those boys and girls, Wes, Katie, the others—everybody knows about them. How wouldn’t they? It’s like you say: those guys are in the paper more than the governor.”
“Habitual offenders,” said Taft. “It’s a demimonde, but it’s a little demimonde, a demi-demimonde. When you think about it, that ought to make things easier. Everybody knows who the troublemakers are, everybody knows where they live. Look here, old man: if you could only organize a kind of low-lifes’ picnic, and then manage a lightning strike, you could clean the whole plate. You could do a lot of good hereabouts.”
“Come on,” said Eli. “You’re dreaming. You’re not going to knock out the whole demitasse in one shot. Won’t happen.”
“Say it won’t. Say you can only knock out one. Even then, you’re having an effect. That’s what I’m saying: consider the leverage. Look, if you’ve got a thousand rats in your barn and you shoot one? So what? If you’ve got three rats in your barn and you shoot one, you’ve done a good day’s work.”
“Maybe,” said Eli, “but that would be—what do you call it? You can’t do it. That’s what the courts are for. What about the courts?”
“Have the picnic on a weekend. Courts are closed.”
“But still, it’s … what’s the word?”
“The word is vigilantism.”
“That’s it. It’s vigilantism, there. You can’t do that. Everybody being his own law? Can’t do it.”
“But if you could, old sport …” said Taft.
• • •
Wes didn’t like stupid people. He didn’t like people who clocked in, did their hours, clocked out, and went home. People who let themselves be taken, hired, used. Dumb fucks who never made a move, never stood up. They made Wes laugh, and they made him mad. The thing about them, Wes said, was that either they didn’t know what they wanted, or they didn’t want anything. Same difference: dumb fucks, either way.
Wes also didn’t like Afros, Jews (he didn’t know for sure what one was), Asians, Arabs (he’d never seen one), homos, the rich, the poor, cops—especially cops. Not that Wes was a bigot. As far as Afros, for example, Wes said he didn’t have anything against them, he guessed, but they seemed to be a pain in the ass: to want and get a lot from everybody else, to be angry all the time. That was Wes’s impression of Afros, anyway. He’d admit he didn’t know for sure. The fact is, there were few or none of them to be seen in Wes’s world, in the valley, and so Wes couldn’t really say.
No, there were no Afros in the valley, Wes knew, and so it was a little odd that tonight he should find himself riding in the rear seat of a police cruiser on his way to he had no idea where, with an enormous uniformed Afro trooper beside him and another driving.
Half an hour earlier, Wes had come off the interstate and headed toward the valley, with a thousand pink ones under his floor mat. Somewhere out in the middle of the woods near Dead River he’d come around a bend to find the cruiser parked across the road with its flashers going. “Oh man?” said Wes. He slowed. Could he turn around and fade back the way he’d come? No chance. The trooper, in Wes’s headlights, was motioning for him to pull over. Wes did. The trooper approached. Wes got a look at him, looked again. The trooper was black. Black, and fucking huge: six and a half feet, nearer seven, and two-fifty, two-seventy-five, shaved-headed, a little gold earring in his right ear, the buttons practically popping off the trooper uniform stretched across his massive chest, and a big .45 Colt on his right hip. No question, Wes was impressed.
“Turn off your engine, please, sir,” the trooper said. Wes did.
“Exit the vehicle, please, sir,” said somebody on Wes’s other side. He turned to his right. At the passenger’s-side window was another trooper, also black, also enormous: same size, same build, same uniform, same earring, same sidearm. Wes got out of the truck. He waited for the troopers to bring out their breath machine, but,
“This way, sir,” said the first trooper.
“Wait a minute,” said Wes, but the other trooper took him by his upper arm, pulled him out of his truck, and frog-walked him to the cruiser. He got in the rear with Wes, the first trooper drove, and the three of them set out into the darkness, leaving Wes’s truck beside the road.
“Where fuck are we going?” Wes asked.
“Court,” said the trooper beside him. “You got a court date.”
“Bullshit, court,” said Wes. “At three a.m.? No court’s on at three a.m.”
“This one is,” said the trooper.
“This one’s night court,” said the driver. “Hee-hee.”
“Heh-heh,” said the trooper in the rear.
Presently, the cruiser turned into a lane and stopped before a large old house with one light on in a room downstairs. Wes knew the house. He’d broken into it once. Got zip. No guns, no cash, no cameras, no TV, nothing but a case of Scotch that Wes tried to sell to Rusty MacLeod for his stupid haggis parties, but Rusty didn’t want the stuff, said it was a shit brand. Dry fucking hole, then, for Wes. He thought he’d better act as if the place was strange to him.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Taft’s,” said the driver. “You know. You been here.”
“Not me,” said Wes. “I’ve never seen the place.”
The driver turned slowly in his seat. He didn’t speak, but he fixed Wes with a long, wide, unblinking gaze.
“I might have driven by,” said Wes.
“You been here, and you taken the man’s liquor,” said the driver. “Must be you forgot? Did you forget?”
“I forgot,” said Wes.
“Same way you forgot what you got in your ride under the mat, there, right?” asked the trooper at Wes’s side.
“Huh?”
“Same way you forgot what—”
“That’s not mine,” Wes began, but the driver turned off the cruiser’s engine. “It don’t matter now,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The trooper at Wes’s side opened the door, and the three of them left the car and went to the house, the two gorillas tightly flanking Wes.
They went into a room in the front, a kind of office. There was dim yellow light from a lamp in a corner. Across the room, a desk, with a straight chair in front of it. One of Wes’s guards went to the desk and switched on another lamp. He nodded toward the chair, indicating Wes should take it. Wes didn’t think so. He’d been pushed around enough tonight. He stood his ground. Then the trooper on his right took him by his right arm, and the other came around and took him by his left, and they lifted him off his feet. Wes hadn’t been pushed around enough, after all, it looked like. The troopers moved him to the chair and sat him down, hard.
One of the troopers went to a door in the wall behind and to one side of the desk and knocked. Then he came back to Wes. Wes sat in the visitor’s chair facing the desk, with a trooper at each shoulder and slightly behind him.
The door opened. Langdon Taft stepped into the room and went to the desk. He sat. He looked at Wes and his guards. “Alright,” he said, and the men took a couple of steps backward, away from Wes in his chair, but not far. Taft looked at Wes. He nodded.
Langdon Taft, a man for whom Wes had no respect. Sure, he knew him. Had been a schoolteacher, wasn’t even that any more. A famous drunk. An old fool, a pussy, a little like a rich man, with a rich man’s name, a rich man’s talk, but having no money (teachers got paid squat), drove an old beater truck, had that whole big house and nothing in it worth stealing, and was therefore, to Wes, no better than another dumb fuck.
Wes had no use for Langdon Taft, and ordinarily he would have let him know it. He would have stood up where he was, whipped it out, and pissed all over Taft’s antique desk. But with those two black linebackers at his rear, he didn’t. Plus, he’d admit, Taft had him a little spooked. Taft was supposed to be a drinker. He was supposed to be shit-face drunk twenty-four/seven. He didn’t look drunk to Wes, not tonight. He looked stone sober now. He was looking at Wes steadily, wordlessly, across the desk, a look calm, patient, but very level. Very fucking level, cold, as though he, Taft, knew the score here, and so did the others. Only Wes did not. Only Wes didn’t know what all this was about.
“What’s all this about?” he asked Taft.
Ask him what he thinks it’s about, Dangerfield whispered. He had slipped into the room after Taft. Now he stood in the shadows. He was got up in full antique judicial style: white powdered wig, long black robes that swept the floor at his heels as he moved to take his station behind Taft’s chair. A high-court judge. Ask him, whispered Dangerfield.
“What do you think it’s about?” Taft asked Wes.
“Fuck if I know,” said Wes. “I didn’t ask to be here. All I know, I’m driving home, minding my own business—and here are these two big fuckers. These fucking troopers.”
“They aren’t troopers,” said Taft.
“Well,” said Wes, “if they ain’t troopers, what are they, then?”
“Meet BZ and Ash,” said Taft. “They’re officers of the court.”
You might call them bailiffs, muttered Dangerfield.
“You might call them bailiffs,” Taft told Wes.
“What’s that?” Wes asked.
Taft didn’t answer him. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a folder. He took a pair of half-glasses from his pocket, put them on, and made a business of leafing through the papers in the folder. He looked over his glasses at Wes.
“Couple of matters here,” he said. “Quite a few, in fact.”
“What matters? What the fuck matters?”
Taft referred to the folder again. He turned pages. “Matter of Karin VanBuren Fillmore, for one. Your wife.”
“Ex-wife,” said Wes. “I haven’t seen that skank in years.”
“Matter of Brytney Arthur,” Taft went on. “Matter of two different restraining orders she filed on you.”
“That dumb slut,” said Wes. “So, okay, we had a fight. Didn’t I tell her? I told her thirty plants, max. Not twenty-nine, not thirty-one. So somebody tips them, and they come out, and they pull up thirty-five plants. She’s too dumb to count to thirty. But who goes down? The slut? No. Me. I do. So, yes, we had a little disagreement about that. I already took the hit for that. That’s over.”
“Cherie Monroe,” Taft read on.
“That bitch.”
“Broken jaw, multiple contusions. Another restraining order.”
“So, I caught her in the rack with my little brother. Kid’s thirteen. What was I supposed to do, give her a Teacher of the Year prize?”
“Valerie Cleveland,” Taft read.
“Whore,” said Wes.
He’s repetitious, sighed Dangerfield.
“Krystyn Garfield.”
“Bitch.”
Very repetitious.
“You’re repetitious,” said Taft.
“Say what?” Wes asked him.
“You repeat yourself. You already had one bitch.”
“Buddy, I’ve had bitches all over the state.”
“He doesn’t get it,” said Taft. Dangerfield only shook his head.
“You know what?” cried Wes. “Fuck you. Who do you think you fucking are, you know? I know my rights. What is this? Is this a trial?”
“That’s right,” said Taft.
“Bullshit,” said Wes. “I don’t see no judge. I don’t see no lawyers. I don’t see no jury. What kind of a trial is that?”
“The new kind,” said Taft.
The old kind, muttered Dangerfield in Taft’s ear.
“Hee-hee,” said the bailiff to Wes’s right.
“Heh-heh,” said the bailiff to his left.
“The old kind,” said Taft. “It’s the kind of trial you don’t see much any more. It’s a one-man show. Me. I’m the judge. I’m the lawyers. I’m the jury.”
Wes tried to rise. He grasped the arms of the chair he sat on and tried to raise himself, but the bailiff on his left put a heavy hand on his left shoulder, and the bailiff on his right put a heavy hand on his right shoulder, and they held Wes down. He struggled briefly, then gave up.
“Okay,” he said to Taft. “Okay, okay. I’m cool. You and your big nigger buddies. You got them, you’re pretty tough, ain’t you? I’d like to see how you’d do without them. I’d like to see that.”
Show him, whispered Dangerfield.
Taft nodded to the two standing behind Wes’s chair. They withdrew.
Tell him to come ahead.
“Come ahead,” said Taft.
Wes glanced over his shoulder. His guards had stepped back. He tensed in his chair.
He’s going to jump now, murmured Dangerfield. When he does, take him down.
“What do you mean, take him down? Take him down, how?”
With the Talents, said Dangerfield. Like this. He made a little flicking motion with his fingers, as though he brushed a stray thread off the sleeve of his robe. Try it, he said.
Now Wes started to spring from his chair at Taft. Awkwardly, Taft made the little brush-away motion in imitation of Dangerfield. Wes leapt to his feet—and collapsed on the carpet in front of Taft’s desk, simply, abruptly crumpled, as though his legs and knees had turned to tissue paper and folded up beneath him. He hit the floor and sprawled on the carpet.
Oops, said Dangerfield.
Wes tried to get up, and fell back to the floor, his body below the waist quite useless, the legs dragging like the cotton legs of an unstrung marionette. He tried to raise himself on his arms, but his upper body now seemed to have the weight of a stone ledge. He was sweating. He regarded Taft. “Who are you?” he asked.
Tell him.
“You tell him,” said Taft.
“What?” asked Wes.
He can’t hear me.
“You’re crazy, you know that?” Wes told Taft. “You are a fucking nutjob. Talking to yourself. Talking to nobody. You think I’m scared of you? Of a dumb fuck, of a retard? You think I’m scared of your apes? Fuck them. Fuck them, and fuck you.”
“That’s the stuff,” said Taft. “Show a little spirit. Show us you’d rather die on your feet than live on your knees.”
“Fucking-A right, I would,” said Wes.
“Show us you’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven,” said Taft.
“Huh?”
“Show us what a ball of fire you are,” said Taft, “a rebel angel.”
Him? muttered Dangerfield. This twerp? No chance.
“A regular woodchuck Lucifer,” Taft went on.
Not even close, hissed Dangerfield.
Taft nodded, and the two bailiffs took Wes by the arms and picked him up off the floor. They returned him to his seat. Wes slumped in the chair. He felt his legs. They had been paper; now they were wood. They felt like sticks tied to his trunk with string. Whatever force he’d had a minute ago was gone. He looked at Taft.
“All those women,” said Taft. “Those poor dumb women. All that trouble. Your trouble. What about that?”
Wes was panting like a dog. He was panting out of fear.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I know I got a terrible temper. I go apeshit. More than I should. So, that’s just me, you know? I don’t mean nothing. I know I’ve hurt people. I’m sorry for that. Okay?”
“What does counsel have to say?” asked Taft.
The bailiff on Wes’s left spoke up. Was he the one Taft had called BZ, or was he the other, the one called Ash? “Your honor,” he said, “this brother never had a chance. Way he was raised up himself? Daddy beat on mama, grandpa beat on granny. You see that at home, you do the same. That’s all it is.”
“You’re saying he’s not responsible?” Taft asked the bailiff.
“Did I say that, your honor? Damn straight, he’s responsible. He did what he did, didn’t he?”
Taft turned to the bailiff on Wes’s right.
“Youngblood just told you he’s sorry,” the bailiff said. “He’s repentant. He’s remorseful. Ain’t you?” He put his broad, heavy hand on Wes’s shoulder and pressed him down further in his chair.
“I am,” cried Wes. “I swear to God, I am. I swear to Christ!”
That’ll do, snapped Dangerfield.
“He won’t never do it again, your honor,” said the bailiff. “Nothing like he did. It won’t happen again, none of it, ever.”
He’s got that right, at least.
“He’s got that right,” said Taft.
“Wait!” said Wes. “Oh, God, wait a minute!”
The bailiff on his left tried one last time. “Your honor,” he said to Taft. “Can you ignore this brother’s remorse? Don’t it matter to you that he repents, that he’s contrite, that he promises to reform? Can’t there be no mercy in this court?”
Not that kind of court, is it? purred Dangerfield. You want mercy, well, you might try the competition, I suppose. We don’t stock it. Taft merely shook his head and busied himself with his folder of papers relating to Wesley Fillmore. Briskly, all business now, he squared the papers up and let the folder drop on his desk with a slap.
“Alright,” said Taft. The bailiffs took Wes and raised him out of his chair. They looked at Taft. Taft nodded, and the two turned Wes toward the door of the study, toward the shadows in the recesses of the room. Wes’s toes dragged behind him over the carpet.
“Wait,” squeaked Wes.
Lose this creep, said Dangerfield.
Again, as though he brushed a fly off the surface of his desk, Taft flicked his hand toward the door. The bailiffs, with Wes captive between them, led him to the door and out of the room. The door shut behind them.
Taft and Dangerfield sat silently. After a moment, “Where will they take him?” Taft asked.
You know where, Chief.
“I guess I do,” said Taft.
You feel badly for him?
“Maybe.”
You want him back?
“No. I don’t. Though, come to that, I suppose I might be seeing him one of these days, where he’s going.”
Not likely, said Dangerfield.
“Oh? Why not?”
Big place, where he’s going.
“Long trip?”
He’s already there, Chief.
• • •
“Just gone,” said Eli.
“Is that right, old boy?” Taft asked.
“His place?” said Eli. “Door’s not even locked. His stuff’s all there, clothes, food in the fridge, his stash. His truck’s parked out in the boonies—not far from you, matter of fact. Unlocked, pretty good payload of painkillers hidden in the cab. No Wes. Nobody’s seen him for, what, a week?”
“Well,” said Taft, “from what you said, he won’t be missed. Can I pour you one?”
“Just a short one,” said Eli. “No, he won’t,” he went on. “Sheriff’s tickled. Best he can think, Wes and some of his friends had a disagreement, and it didn’t end well for Wes. But you wouldn’t expect that to mean Wes would be gone for good. He and his friends don’t usually take things that far.”
“So you think he’ll be back someday?”
“It’s possible,” said Eli. “Sheriff’s cautiously optimistic. But it’s almost too good to be true, isn’t it? Fellows like Wes? They’re always there, aren’t they? You never really get rid of them.”
“Mmm.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” Eli went on, “how we were talking about Wes just the other day?”
“Mmm.”
“We were saying how if Wes were to go away, just go away, that wouldn’t be a bad thing,” said Eli.
“Were we, old sport?”