11

I barreled into the stalks like a drunk, falling and getting back up and then falling again. Sharp husks cut my arms and hands. I dropped my flashlight. Picked it up and remembered I’d never retrieved my gun. I crashed back out and grabbed it. It was only then when I remembered my phone. I tried to call Mary only to find that I had no signal.

I plunged into the corn again, trying to find a path, but there was something dizzying about the strange silence that greeted me. I broke it, calling Mary’s name.

My voice fell flat, a dead bird crashing into another wall of stalks. I aimed my flashlight ahead of me, but its glow seemed to be swallowed alive by the layers of dark so thick there was no end to them.

I reached out to steady myself on the cornstalks, and my hands touched corn silk like spiderwebs, woven by the relentless September wind.

The moon was a thick thumbnail in the pearl black sky.

As I moved deeper into the cornfield, I tried to keep the moon on my right, so that I knew I was heading in the direction I hoped I’d find Mary. Or Ronnie. Just thinking the name filled me with anger. Why had he not met us?

This was his fault. His motherfuck—

Relax. Just take it easy. She’s okay. You’re panicking.

But why hadn’t he shown up to meet us? I couldn’t think of one adequate explanation.

After a time, the wind picked up, bending cornstalks until they were nearly parallel to the ground. Voices rode the tail of the wind, soft, hurried. They were off to my right, and I immediately changed directions, even though there was a part of me that worried about getting too far away from “ground zero” so to speak. But I had to see what it was, who it was.

When I heard the voices again, they sounded like they were coming from my left. I stopped to listen, but then either the wind shifted or I’d been confused, because now the sounds were directly in front of me. I plunged forward, breaking stalks as I barreled blindly into the dark, desperate to find a way forward, a path.

A shadow passed overhead, and when I looked up, I saw it rising through the sky, a dark kite. Bats, hundreds of them, eclipsing the cold moon shard and then vanishing into the empty spaces between the stars.

I slowed down again, tried to think.

I attempted a second call to Mary. This time I had service, but it went straight to her voicemail. Which meant her phone was dead or didn’t have service. We were way out, and I was a little surprised I’d even been able to get through. I tried one more time to be sure, but when I got the same result, I put my phone away and focused on getting my bearings.

Gradually, I realized my eyes had adjusted and I could see better. The problem was the stalks again. It was almost as if someone had flown an airplane over this patch of land and dropped the seeds, scattering them to the wind, letting them land randomly, in a maze-like pattern instead of in the neat rows one usually imagined when thinking of a cornfield.

Sometime later, still moving doggedly deeper into the cornfield, I saw a series of lights dancing in the small cracks between the stalks. I parted them with my hands, and glimpsed three men standing in a clearing with flashlights.

One of the flashlights jumped. There was a shout, and then the light bobbed toward me.

“Don’t move!” a voice said, and the flashlight was bright in my eyes.

I covered my face with the arm holding the flashlight. “Where is she?”

“Hold it, boys. I know this man.”

The voice belonged to Ronnie Thrash. The light moved out of my eyes. I blinked several times, trying to get my bearings.

“I’m sorry about this,” Ronnie said.

My eyes locked on Ronnie. He was standing about ten yards away, holding a shotgun pointed at the ground. I looked at the other two men. One held the large flashlight, and the other a rifle trained on my head.

“You set this up?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like then?” Despite the rifle that was a muscle twitch from putting a bullet in my head, I stepped forward, too angry to care.

“Can we talk about this somewhere else?” he said, holding his hands up.

I moved closer.

“Stay back,” the man with the rifle said.

“Don’t shoot him.” Ronnie had dropped his own shotgun.

“I don’t take orders from you,” the man with the rifle said. He fired and I hit the ground, belly first. I reached for my gun.

“That was a warning,” he said. “Put your gun down, or the next one will be in your mouth.”

I let go of my 9mm and held my hands up.

“This is Earl Marcus,” Ronnie said. “The one whose daddy was RJ?”

Both men were silent.

“Hell, you sure was excited when I told you about him the other day.”

“What’s he doing here?” the man holding the light said.

Before Ronnie could answer, I rose to my knees. “I’m looking for my girlfriend.”

“She a black girl?” the man with the rifle said.

“Yes.”

“Johnny’s done taken her to Mr. Jefferson’s.”

I looked at Ronnie. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I can explain.” Ronnie held a hand out to his friend with the rifle. “If you’ll just lower that, Justin.”

Justin lowered the gun.

“Goddamn, you want to shoot somebody, don’t you?” Ronnie said. He walked over, holding out his hand as if to make an apology. I waited until he was very close before throwing the punch. It hit him square in the jaw, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say it lifted him off the ground. Either way, he crumpled like a piece of loose leaf paper. The man holding the flashlight whistled appreciatively. For a second, I didn’t think Ronnie was going to get back up, but then he lifted an unsteady hand.

“I reckon I deserved that, but Jesus, Earl, did you have to make it so damned hard?”

I reached down and grabbed him under his arm, dragging him back to his feet. “You’re going to take me to her right now.”

“Sure, sure…” He tried to put an arm around me, but I shrugged him off. “She’s fine, Earl. I promise you that. I made him promise me he wouldn’t hurt her. He just wanted to scare her.”

I almost hit him again and would have if I didn’t need him to take me to Mary.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Okay, okay. Boys,” he said, turning to the other two men, “pray for me.”

*   *   *

“He told me if I didn’t get both of you here, he was going to hurt Virginia.”

“Who?”

“Virginia, my niece.”

“Who was going to hurt her?”

“Lane. He would do it too. Hell, he probably already has. He’s a real piece of shit. The only reason Wanda ever got hooked up with him was because of his money. And the access to drugs. But, I told him I’d only do it if he promised not to hurt her.”

“Do you even hear yourself?” I said. “You’re not making a lick of damned sense.”

“I know it looks bad, but it’s going to be okay. We’ll just head up to the house and…”

“What does he want with Mary?”

“I’m not sure, but he promised he wasn’t going to hurt her. He said he just wanted to teach her a lesson.”

I was beyond bewildered. First, why in the hell would Ronnie believe that Lane Jefferson wasn’t going to hurt Mary? And second, how did this asshole even know Mary or anything about her?

I was about to ask him one of these when Ronnie pointed at a fork in the corn ahead. “Stay left,” he said. “Here’s the deal. Lane ain’t got no pot fields. At least none that I know about. He has me and some other boys watch the corn at night to make sure nobody comes snooping around. He said he wanted us to get Mary and take her to him. He was going to embarrass her and then let her go. He knew she was a cop. He was going to try to make it a story or something about her snooping around, looking for pot. Hell, I don’t know. It sounded like it was a stupid-ass plan to me, so I figured my best choice was to go along.”

“You’re so dumb it makes my head hurt,” I said. “None of that even makes sense.”

He stopped. “Look, I know you think I’m a degenerate, pothead, whatever. And maybe that’s true. I won’t argue with it. But I care about those damn kids. And Lane threatened Virginia. I did what I had to do.”

“You care about them so much, you tried to rob their mother.”

“Shit, Earl, she owed me that money.”

“You’re a piece of shit, and you had better hope Mary’s okay. If she’s not, I may kill you.”

That made him go quiet. It made me quiet too. The scary part wasn’t that I’d said it. The scary part was that I meant it.

We worked our way through the thick corn in silence. It was a torturously slow journey. On more than one occasion, Ronnie led us down a path only to realize it was a dead end. Two other times, he stopped, admitting he was confused. Eventually, we found a relatively wide path and followed it for a while.

“How much farther?” I asked.

“Once we get out of the cornfield, it’s like a mile or so.”

“Shit. Walk faster.”

“Let me get a smoke. Hold on.” He stopped and pulled out a cigarette.

I slapped the cigarette out of his hand. “Forget the damned smoke. Walk.”

“I ain’t never seen you like this, Earl,” Ronnie said. “Jesus. You must really love that girl.”

“Just get me there.”

“Sure, but I don’t see why a cigarette is gonna hurt.”

I glared at him, and he got moving again.

“You should come by the house for a barbeque some time, so we could hang out when things ain’t so tense. I got a new grill and some really nice pot.”

“That’s not gonna happen, Ronnie. You lied to me. You put Mary in danger. Can’t you see that?”

“Can’t you see that I didn’t have no choice?”

I didn’t know what to say. Even if it was true that he had no choice, I was too angry at the moment to care.

“’Cause it ain’t like we don’t go way back, you know? Hell, me and you’ve shared secrets I’ll bet you ain’t told nobody before.”

I let that go and was pleased to see trees up ahead instead of more corn.

The ground sloped gradually upward as we walked, and I realized we’d walked so far that we were getting close to the base of Summer Mountain.

From somewhere on my left, I heard the distant shriek of a train whistle.

“What’s he trying to protect anyway?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Jefferson. You said he’d hired you to watch the cornfield. What’s to protect? Is he expecting somebody to steal the corn?”

“Hell if I know. He just pays by the head.”

“By the head?”

“Two hundred for whites, four hundred for blacks.”

I stopped. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“He pays more for blacks? Why?”

“Earl, you ain’t ever been hard up for work, have you?”

“Sure I have.”

“Maybe you think you have, but when you’re really hard up for work, you don’t ask but one question: How much? That’s all I know: two hundred for whites, four hundred for blacks.”

“How many have you caught? Before Mary.”

He shook his head. “We ain’t been at it very long. This is just the third night we’ve been out. We almost caught a kid last night, but the little fucker was fast.”

I still didn’t quite follow the logic of paying more for blacks, but I decided to let it go. Hell, one way or another, Sheriff Patterson would be hearing about this. Lane Jefferson might not be growing pot, but he was doing something out here that wasn’t legal. I was sure of it.

We kept moving, reaching the tracks just in time to see the tail end of the freight train blasting by, breaking the night into slabs of hot air and dense sound.

Once it was gone, we stepped across the tracks, and Ronnie pointed at a little trail I would have certainly missed without him. It was overgrown and took us into the heart of the deep woods.

We walked for another ten or fifteen minutes on the trail, before the trees fell away and I saw the farmhouse, dark and huge against the starry sky. A smaller garden to the right of the house rippled in the breeze, and beyond them both, a silent highway made a snaking scar across the landscape. Far away, I saw headlights moving along the road. I looked around. To the right were the Fingers, where I lived. To my left, I saw the lights of what had to be Sommerville Chase, high atop Summer Mountain.

“Is anybody home?” I said.

“I ain’t sure,” Ronnie said.

“I swear, if he’s not here, if Mary’s not here, I’m going to…” I trailed off. The fact was, I wasn’t going to do anything except fall into despair. My anger was already fading away. Ronnie was stupid, sure, but I honestly believed this hadn’t been malicious.

“Let’s go knock on the door,” he said.

We stood on the covered porch and rang the bell. I couldn’t help but remember how, a few days ago, Lane had thrown Wanda and her kids’ belongings into the yard.

“Look,” Ronnie said.

“What?”

He nodded at the hardwood floor of the porch. A cigarette butt lay near the welcome mat. “That’s Johnny’s. He’s been here.”

“Ring it again,” I said.

Ronnie rang the bell, and I banged hard on it with my fist.

We waited. No one came.

I tried the door handle, but it was locked.

“Where else would he take her? Was there a plan B if this guy isn’t home?”

Ronnie shrugged. “Maybe out to the road?”

I looked around. The road was empty. Somewhere, far away, a car downshifted, and it sounded like a lonely groan at the end of the world.

“I’m calling the sheriff,” I said.

“Hold your horses, now, Earl. That ain’t necessary. You know I got priors.”

“Fuck your priors.” I turned on my phone and dialed the number. It rang once before my phone died. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What?”

“It died. Let me use yours.”

“Left it in my truck. It don’t get no service out here. Where you going?”

I’d stepped off the porch and was looking around the yard. “I need a brick or a stick or something.”

“Why?”

“Going to break a window and get to a phone.”

“Shit, Earl. I need this job.”

I ignored him and ranged out across the backyard, looking for something I could use. When I didn’t find anything, I walked back toward the woods we’d come from, with the intention of breaking a branch off, but something stopped me.

There on the ground, still hot, was another cigarette butt.

I waved Ronnie off the porch. “Another cigarette.”

He came over and stood beside me. “That’s his,” he said. “And look at this. There’s a little trail here. God knows, I wouldn’t have ever seen it.”

I didn’t respond. I was already following the trail, moving sideways through the thick tree limbs before breaking into a run.