Farris radioed for a deputy to bring him a fresh cruiser and gave the dispatcher directions to the campground, but told her nothing further about his situation.
“Somebody smashed you up pretty good,” the Cherokee deputy said when he got a look at Farris’s car.
“Stay here and watch the car, son. I’ll send back a tow truck.”
Before the deputy could object, Farris climbed into the cruiser and left.
He drove straight away to Stillwell Branch Road, parked beside the familiar field, and took the bridge and path into the dusty basin where Margie Hornbuckle’s double-wide trailer was planted.
It was the boy’s nap time, so Farris tapped lightly on her door. Her domicile was tidy and smelled of lemon air-freshener, and she welcomed him without complaint or question.
“He’s sleeping,” she said. “And I been after him with that antiseptic like you said. But he fights me on it. Burns him something fierce, he says.”
He went into Shelley’s bedroom and looked down at the snoring boy. The light from the living room threw a slash across his face. His stubbled cheeks needed tending, but beyond that the boy seemed in decent shape.
Farris took a look back at the living room and saw Margie slouched in her recliner before the television with a can of iced tea in her hand.
In silence, Farris stooped forward and brought his face to the boy’s and hovered there only an inch away, tasting the heat and scent of his son’s spent breath. Those molecules, which had journeyed into the boy’s lungs and out again, were charged with an intoxicating fragrance.
Such intimacy with his son aroused in Farris a sense of overwhelming injustice. Although his own blood circled in the boy’s veins, and Shelley would pass into a distant future that Farris would never know, the boy would never reproduce, never send the Tribue bloodline forward into the years. In his crucial life’s work, Farris had utterly failed. He had passed on nothing to this angelic child but an empty life and a world of fruitless dreams.
Farris brought his mouth to the boy’s scalp and pressed his lips against the rough bristles, lingering there for a moment until Shelley stirred and grunted and Farris drew away.
He remained in the bedroom a moment more, recovering from the act. He listened to the ceaseless babble of the television, the nameless tune of a bird outside. He tasted again the scent of his son, which lingered like the burn of sour mash at the back of his throat. Inside his chest he felt the immensity, a blank, cold universe, starless and moonless, which stretched to the borders of his being and throbbed beyond endurance. An unspeakable yearning.
If that sensation pulsing in Farris’s breast was not what mankind defined as love, then Farris was truly damned to never know its name.
With a final look at his boy, Farris walked back into the living room and stood next to Margie’s chair.
“I’ve spoken to John Gathers at the bank,” Farris said.
A stricken look passed across Margie’s face. Fear of eviction, no doubt, an end to her life of ease.
“From this point on, you’ll receive a monthly retainer directly from the bank,” Farris said. “It should be sufficient to provide for the boy and yourself. Upon your death, the bank will select a new caretaker for my son and that person will live here where you have lived. I have asked Mr. Gathers to appoint a watchdog to make regular visits to check on my son’s health and well-being. As well as your own.”
“You going away somewhere?”
He looked at the television, then back at the room where his son slept.
“Buy the boy a drawing pad,” Farris said. “And a box of colored pencils. And those chigger bites, take care of them.”
Margie looked up at Farris and was about to reply when he turned from her and without a backward glance left the trailer.
Lucy heard his car. She heard his step. She didn’t move. By now he had seen the broken glass and knew his house had been invaded.
The TV was telling other movie lies. A John Wayne anthology—this time he was a U.S. Marine, leading his men into the teeth of machine-gun fire, taking a Pacific beach. All about him his loyal men were chewed to bits by a hail of lead, but soldiering on for John Wayne’s sake. Heroes, heroes, everywhere.
Lucy lost Farris’s tread somewhere in the house. He was moving down corridors she didn’t know. He was circling, hunting her, coming closer by slow degrees. A board creaked, hinges squealed. He was headed her way.
She didn’t take cover. Tired of all that. The hiding.
She kept her seat in the comfortable leather chair across from the dead congressman and watched John Wayne rally his grubby troops, hacking through jungle vines, his valiant Americans picked off one by one by a ruthless, invisible sniper high in the treetops.
The door swung open, but Farris was not there.
She waited, her aim fixed on the empty space.
The gray halo of the television gave her sufficient light. Since the first shot she’d ever fired, Lucy Panther had been known as a sharpshooter, better than any boy in the tribe. She propped her pistol hand on her knee to keep from tiring the muscles. Aiming for the middle of the door.
“You’re dead,” Farris called out.
“That makes two of us,” she replied.
That set him thinking for a moment. While he was distracted, she could hazard a guess about where he was standing, attempt a shot through the wall, but then again she didn’t want to waste the shells. More than that, she wanted the satisfaction of seeing him the second he went down. So she waited.
“Father!” Farris called out in a full and untroubled voice. “Father!”
“You’ll have to wait a while to talk to him. Till you join him in hell.”
The boards creaked again. Farris reacting. She couldn’t imagine how. Surely he wasn’t weeping for that old devil. Was he crouching for a dive and roll? It didn’t matter to Lucy. However it unfolded from here was fine. Glad it was almost over.
Farris had slunk away, for she could hear the creaks of his departure. Off concocting a scheme, or calling reinforcements.
For the moment she relaxed. Rocked her neck from side to side, took a peek at the marines. Airplanes flying low and strafing. Explosions, fire, the jungle burning. His men cowered, but John Wayne stood sure and tall.
God, she missed her Jacob. Her brave boy. How smart he was, how strong and loving. Only hours ago she’d watched him die, but it seemed like forever. Seemed like he’d never lived, never held her in his strong arms, comforted her. None of those years together ever happened. All of it was nothing but a movie played out to its finish and dissolved into darkness.
In a while Lucy Panther heard Farris coming back. She heard him stop outside the door, and she waited in her chair.
Seconds passed, then there was the snap and flare of a match and an odor that took her a second to give it a name.
Gasoline.
Lucy stood up and aimed at the empty doorway. The pungent smell grew stronger.
Another moment passed, then the ceramic jug rolled through the door, the rag in its mouth on fire. A gallon of explosive sloshing in its belly. The same strategy they claimed her boy had used against the banks.
Or perhaps the jug was simply filled with water, a trick to drive her from the room.
Motionless, she watched the jug roll across the floor, watched the blue flame eat up the length of cloth. Would a man like Farris destroy his own ancestral home, his father’s remains, and all he owned to kill a simple woman? From the madness she’d heard detailed tonight, she had no doubt that such a thing was possible within this family.
An inch of fabric was left as she made her hasty calculations. Death here and now in a burst of flame, or take her chances at the doorway or beyond?
The prospect of watching Farris die won her over.
Lucy Panther sprinted for the door and headed down the empty hallway toward the head of the stairs.
She made it a dozen feet before Farris heaved himself from a nook and threw his weight into her and slammed her body against the wall. A pistol fired. But she felt no pain, and then he bashed her chin and everything went soft and simple.