The loud shrill of a chair scooting across the kitchen floor and the gradual increase in volume on the scanner woke me up from a dream that had me pitching a tent and humping a pillow. I started to just get up and close the door, but I needed a drink of water.
There were no lights on in the kitchen, but my eyes were settled to the dark and I could make out a shadow hunkered over the table with its head held sideways toward the speaker. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a carton of orange juice that Josephine liked to mix with vodka and peach schnapps. The refrigerator light flicked on and off, and scintillated a broken view of my father at the table.
“Where are they?”
“Shut the fuck up.” Daddy’s head stayed tilted, his ear chewing on every morsel that came out of the scanner, and he looked right at me with eyes that settled on some far-off place through me, through the refrigerator, outside.
I shut the refrigerator door and took the carton of orange juice with me to the sink, turned on a small tube light so that I could see Daddy sitting there. I took the chair across from him, drank a long swig, and turned my head opposite of his so that I could focus all of the sound into one side like him.
“Charlie-Two, County. I’m going to need you to send another unit this way.”
“Ten-four, Charlie-Two. Can you offer any update on the nature?”
“Subject has been unresponsive to voice commands, County, and has a knife.”
“Charlie-Two, are you able to see the subject from your location?”
“Ten-four, County. Subject is moving from the porch into the house and I’m waiting for backup.”
“Ten-four, Charlie-Two. There’s a unit headed your way.”
There was a long pause of silence with only a few blips of static making their way over the airwaves, and Daddy leaned back in his chair.
“Where are they?”
“At your fucking crazy-ass mama’s house.”
“What for?”
“Ain’t real clear, but the way it sounded at first was like she called the goddamn law on herself. Said she’d reported somebody outside of her house.”
“Reckon anybody was?”
“Hell no, Jacob. That shit’s got her all goony. Ain’t nobody after her. Nobody would want her sorry ass. You know that.”
It took the other deputy a good fifteen or twenty minutes to make it up the mountain, with only one officer usually working this territory per shift. David-One checked on scene and Daddy and I listened for a long while to snippets of a story that never revealed enough to paint any sort of real picture. When it was all said and done, it was Charlie-Two who had more than he could stand and drew his Taser to probe about fifty thousand volts through her. Any bit of fight she’d had must’ve left awfully fast after that, because the weapon was secured and before too long they were checking en route.
“Charlie-Two, County. We’re going to have the subject in custody on a 10-73 and will be coming down the mountain.”
“Ten-four, Charlie-Two.”
—
I WAS ALMOST dozed off again when Daddy screamed.
“Goddamn it, they’re coming up here now! That fucking bitch, that dumb fucking bitch!”
His bare feet nearly stomped holes in the hardwood as he made his way from his room to mine. The lights came on and I was blinded for a second or two, that brightness just eating at my eyes before it settled.
“Get the fuck up! Come on!” Daddy was at the edge of my bed and slapped my feet beneath the covers. “Jacob, the goddamn law is coming up here and you need to get up quick. Get anything you got put up. Bud, pills, I don’t give a shit, just hide it.”
I didn’t have anything more than stems and a little bit of shake, and that Xanax bar I’d taken had emptied the bottle. As far as real dope, there wasn’t anything in the house that needed hiding anymore, but that type of GO-GO-GO at the first sign of blue lights and badges was something ingrained in Daddy long ago. It had kept him out of trouble many times, so he made it a commandment.
I don’t really know why I went with him. I guess in case he needed help with an alibi or something, but by the time I’d put on a pair of shorts and slid untied boots over my feet, Daddy was in the kitchen peering out of the window to where headlights lit the side field yellow.
“Thought I’d go with you.”
“What for? Use your fucking head.” Daddy thumped against my forehead with his fist like he was knocking on a door. “You know as well as I do they’re looking for me.”
“Thought you might want somebody to back up your story.”
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch if that ain’t a good idea, Jacob. Damn good idea.” Daddy shut the blinds and I followed him to the front door. “Get all your shit put up?”
“It’s up.”
The moon lit the yard a funny kind of blue, even the trails cut by the running of hounds that usually showed red in sunlight had a robin-egg kind of color about them. It was early summer on The Creek, but the night air still held a chill. The hounds barked like they always did and Daddy led the way to the headlights. He was the only person I knew that never had to memorize that dance to escape snarls and teeth. As Daddy walked, the hounds parted like Moses had thrown his hands over them, and even the meanest one, Kayla, cowered back as far as the lead would let her. I followed him closely, and the dogs paid me little mind.
The bull was already out of the SUV and leaned up against the front driver-side fender. His body cast a wide shadow in the moonlight. Neither of us could tell who it was, and neither of us spoke, but the fact that he wasn’t driving the standard black-and-white pinned him for ranked. Then, as we got within talking distance, the bull flicked a Zippo down his britches leg and held the flame close to his face to light a smoke. It was Lieutenant Rogers, the friend of the family, as Daddy said.
Rogers was a thick brute, even thicker now that he spent most of his time behind a desk. He didn’t wear the tan button-down shirt and creased slacks that deputies wore. He fastened his badge to his belt alongside his cuffs and gun. After years of night shifts and a résumé filled with what went for big busts in a place like Jackson County, Rogers had worked his way up to comfortable polo shirts and loose-fitting cargo pants. Those years on the road had taken his hair, and the years behind the desk had added a bit more pooch around the middle, but he was still strong. Toughness never wore out of men born with it.
“Hell fire, Jessup, you piling up in here like that at this hour had me all sketched out.”
“Shit, Charlie, I don’t reckon I’ve ever seen you on edge.” Lieutenant Rogers held the cigarette between his teeth, rocked his gun, cuffs, and magazines on his belt, and leaned back about as far as he could without falling onto the hood of the Expedition.
“What the fuck brings you up here?”
“That’s the thing, Charlie. Had a call over at your old lady’s house earlier in the evening. She was strung out all to hell and called the law up there. Said you were outside of her house wanting to kill her. Said you’d been peeking through the windows all night. Now, you and I both know that’s a bunch of bullshit, but the thing is it was one of those new boys who got the call. Thing is she told him a lot of details as they were riding down the mountain and your name got mentioned an awful lot. I told them she was out of her fucking mind, but to keep them little peckerheads happy, I said I’d come up here personally and see if your story checked out.”
“I appreciate that, Jessup. I really do. Pays to have friends, don’t it?”
“Friends, hell. Just business, Charlie.” Rogers squinted his eyes as smoke rose over his face, and took another long drag from his cigarette.
“So what in the fuck did you ride all the way up here for? You afraid of telephones?”
“Well, I guess because I thought you ought to know that the little lady was throwing your name around.”
“I can’t have that.” Daddy pulled a pack of cigarettes from his side pocket and lit a smoke.
“No, you can’t have that.”
I stood there in silence and tried my damnedest to stay just a sliver more than a shadow.
“Well, Jessup, as you can see, me and the boy are right here safe and sound. Not a whole lot more that I can tell you other than that.”
“Just so I got something to tell them boys to let them sleep a little easier, were y’all here all evening?”
“I’ll do you one better. I’ll give you the whole goddamn day.” Daddy folded his arms across his chest, making his muscles defined in moonlight. “Woke up this morning and cooked myself some bacon and eggs. Then I did my best to get this pussy-ass boy of mine feeling better after he let his body get a little in front of his head last night. After that I headed over to Josephine’s this afternoon to get my pecker wet. And then I guess me and the boy fried up some cube steak and hit the hay.”
“So when’s the last time you saw Laura?”
“You mean the bitch?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I’ve just been calling her the bitch for so long I’d almost forgotten she had a real God-given name.” Daddy smirked, and the way he talked about her, the way he always talked about her, got me riled. But I never had the gall to say anything about it. “Aw, she came over wanting to borrow some money about two or three months back, but other than that, I don’t have shit to do with her.”
“So neither one of you has had any type of contact with her?”
“No.”
I don’t know if it was my way of speaking up after holding back for all those years, or if I’d just grown tired of listening to those two ramble on, but I stepped out of Daddy’s shadow for the first time in my life and looked Lieutenant Rogers dead where that cigarette kept his face aglow. “I saw her yesterday.”
Daddy turned with eyes that looked as if they’d just been hit with a drip torch. We never mentioned her, and if her name ever got brought up, he dogged her and expected me to keep quiet. “The fuck you did.”
I tried to look at Daddy, but the way he stared turned me coward. “I went by there yesterday.”
It was eating at him that after all these years I’d went to see her the day before. His fists clenched and his jaw pulsed. I thought he was going to hit me.
“Say you saw her yesterday, son?” Rogers asked.
“Yes.”
“And was she on the dope then?”
“She was just getting started, I reckon.”
Rogers straightened himself off of the Expedition and folded his arms just like my father. “Now I know the two of you are well aware of what type of life she’s come to lead, and I know the two of you was around to witness it. But I’m going to tell you that the place she’s at right this second is a place that very few ever get to. There are folks going on weeklong vacations with dope crammed plumb up into their brains, and those folks start seeing shit and talking to things that just ain’t there. That comes with the territory. But where she’s at, where she’s at after all these years, is a place long gone from ever getting back from.”
“The boy here’s just too fucking stupid, Jessup.” Daddy still had that meanness lighting him afire, and I kept my mouth shut and didn’t look at him.
“We took her tonight and didn’t charge her. We committed her, you see, and they’ll keep her in there for a week or two if the beds are empty, but probably less, and then she’ll be right back there doing it all again. I’m saying this more for you, boy, than anything else.” Rogers pulled the cigarette from between his teeth and fixed his eyes onto me. “Don’t go latching your feet into stirrups on a horse that’s run lame. It ain’t going to get you anywhere.”
It wasn’t like he was telling me something I hadn’t known my whole life, but at the same time I appreciated the fact that he’d said it. Rogers was tough as piss oak, but he had a heart. I reckon if my daddy had ever been much of a father, that would have been the type of thing he would have carried, some blend of toughness and compassion. But if he had it at all it was something I’d seldom witnessed.
“Thing is, son, a woman like that is just waiting around to die,” Lieutenant Rogers finally said.
Rogers was trying hard to offer some sort of insight into a reality that he knew led to hurt. But I’d known it since I was a kid. That was my reality: the hurt, the shame, and everything else entailed. So, waiting around to die was something I’d known for a long time, and it wasn’t the dying part that ate at me. It was the waiting.