The rain that had started the day before continued through the night, so that by morning the jobsite was slopped. Forecasts showed the weather breaking up by evening, but it would be a day or two before they could get back to work. For once, Calvin Hooper didn’t mind. There’d been so much going on that he’d gotten behind on everything at home: the woodpile, sealing a mouse hole in the cupboard, changing the oil in his rig.
An open outbuilding his grandfather’d built from warped pine planks and rusted tin he salvaged from a derelict barn stood behind the house. The old man had used the place to keep rain off his tractor, but nowadays Calvin used the cover to work on cars. He had his white Ford Super Duty up on a set of rhino ramps. Lying flat on the packed dirt floor, he pulled the pin on an oil drain valve he’d installed on the pan after stripping the old plug with a cheap socket set he bought from a man on the side of the highway. The valve made the job easier and cut down on the mess fifteen quarts of 15W-40 could make. He opened the valve and the oil ran a black line into the container. While he waited, he stretched his hands and listened to the rain beat against the tin.
Someone came into the shed and as he rolled to look he could see two sets of feet: a pair of men’s slacks covered the necks of black ankle-high boots that zipped up the sides, and two heavyset, liver-spotted legs, black leather flats scuffed and worn down to nothing. Calvin scooted out from under the truck, and Michael Stillwell offered his hand to help him from the ground. Sharon Moody stood behind Stillwell in a black T-shirt and a wool skirt with a plastic grocery bag tied over her head to shield her hair from the rain. Calvin stared at her, at how her face contorted into something halfway between smiling and crying. He pushed himself to his feet, dusted the dirt from his pants and his shoulders, then reached for a shop towel to wipe his hands.
Darl’s mother came forward, and before Calvin could warn her he was dirty she had her arms wrapped around him and her face buried in his chest like he was the last thing in the world to hold on to. Only five days had passed since she laid her son in the ground, almost a week more since she’d gotten word of how Calvin found him. Calvin put his arms around her, careful not to get oil on the back of her shirt, and the two of them stood there for a long time tilting back and forth like they were slow dancing. Stillwell seemed like he was trying to read what was happening and that ate Calvin up. If Darl’s mother weren’t right there in his arms, he would’ve clobbered that boy right in his fucking nose.
Calvin felt her relax against him and Mrs. Moody pulled back and wiped the sides of her eyes with her fist. She grinned flatly and reached up with an open hand to pat the side of Calvin’s face. The pain and loss was written in her eyes like words on a wall. Seeing it and knowing there was nothing to be said or done to change it twisted Calvin’s heart and he had to look away to hold his composure. The light was gray outside and the rain made the house seem to shake behind it, and he watched the rain come down until the feeling passed.
“What are y’all doing here?”
“Michael came by the house this morning,” Mrs. Moody said. “He mentioned he was on his way to drop something off at Coon Coward’s and I told him I’d been meaning to get over there since his sister passed. Figured I might as well get out of the house for a bit. I need to get out of that house.” She shook her head and squeezed at the bridge of her nose. “I keep going through all of Darl’s stuff, going through pictures. I’m driving myself crazy, Calvin. I needed to get out of that house. So I told him if it was all right I’d like to ride with him.”
Calvin waited on Stillwell to answer.
“I was planning on coming to see you afterward and Mrs. Moody said that it was all right to come by here first, to just go on and stop in.”
“There’s something about seeing you that makes it a little better,” Mrs. Moody said. “Sitting in that house all day, all I keep thinking is how alone I am. Marla’s come by with the kids and that’s been nice, but I needed to get out of there. Seeing folks helps. And I haven’t had a chance to thank you. I know how hard that was. What I asked.” Her voice broke off. “I know how hard that must’ve been, but it’s like it’s always been here. You carry your own. Darl and you, the two of you might as well have been brothers.”
Calvin wiped his hands on the shop towel again and tossed it onto a small shelf that ran the wall to the left, the wood scattered with tools and spent quarts of oil and a small black radio with its silver antenna stretched toward the rafters. The smell of rain filled the shed. He looked at Mrs. Moody and saw the same strength she’d always carried, a strength that hardened into something almost impenetrable after her husband passed. For as tough as the men were in these mountains, the women had always been stone. They were used to loss, accustomed to never having enough. They were fit for the harshness of this world. Calvin could feel all of that in her right then and he was almost jealous of her for that. He turned to Stillwell to focus. “So what brings you by?”
“The reason I’ve got to go by Mr. Coward’s is that he brought me some pictures off a game camera he had out in the woods, and now that I’ve had the chance to look through them I needed to return the card.”
“All right.”
“Mr. Coward was out of town for a little over a week after his sister passed, and when he came back he checked the camera and there were some pictures on there of Darl going in and out every evening,” Stillwell said. “He thought they might be helpful.”
“I don’t know how that’d be helpful, but okay.”
“There were two pictures there at the end of someone going into the woods with Darl and helping him carry something out, and when I got to looking, it was you.”
Calvin didn’t know what to say, but he nodded his head in agreement.
“I thought you might be able to tell me what y’all were doing?”
Calvin glanced over at Mrs. Moody and she was looking at him the same way she’d done when he and Darl were kids, and he’d never been able to lie to her then and it was hard to imagine deceiving her now. He turned to the detective. “Darl was in there hunting.”
“Okay.”
“He knew Coon was out of town, I guess, and there’s this buck he’s seen going in and out of there for years and I reckon he figured it was as good a chance as he’d ever have. But like I said, I don’t know how in the world that’s helpful.”
“So, is that what y’all were carrying out of there? That buck?”
“No,” Calvin said. He shook his head. “I don’t guess Darl ever did see that deer. But he shot a good doe way back in a cove at the far end of Coon’s land, and he asked me to help him drag.”
“That don’t sound like Darl,” Mrs. Moody said.
Calvin looked at her and could see the disappointment smeared across her face, and seeing that made him hate Stillwell for bringing her there, hate him for making her think one sour thing about her son. She’d had enough pain in her life already, and Darl had only been in the ground five days.
“Going in there while Coon was out of town. That don’t sound like Darl.”
“Yeah, it does,” Calvin said. He looked at her and tried to smile to get her to realize that Darl going in there was perfectly in character. “You know as good as I do how much he loved hunting. Hell, that’s all he ever thought about. Every winter it was playing around with those rabbit boxes and come spring it was turkeys. All summer it was chasing speckleds, and as soon as there came a bite in the air he wanted to be up in a treestand. God he loved hunting deer. I think he’d have lived in the woods like an Indian if he could’ve.” Calvin chortled and watched her expression ease. “He’d been after that deer a long time, Mrs. Moody. Way he told it, it was the biggest thing he’d ever seen come out of Jackson County. And you know him, one way or another he was going to do his damnedest to get him. That’s just how he was. Whatever he was after had to be the biggest and the baddest or it didn’t interest him.”
Mrs. Moody nodded her head and grinned solemnly. They all stood there for a few moments without saying a word and in time something seemed to change on her face, as if her question was answered.
“When you going to ask that girl in there to marry you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Calvin said. He looked at the ground and kicked at the dust with the toe of his boot before meeting her eyes.
“She’s a keeper,” Mrs. Moody said.
Calvin put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and nodded.
“Was that her mama and daddy that was standing behind you at the service?”
“It was.”
“That’s what I thought,” Mrs. Moody said. “Says an awful lot about how highly they think of you that they were there. That ought to mean something to you, Calvin. It means something to me.”
She eyed him seriously and he found it hard to look at her right then.
“You know Marla’s going to have another one,” Mrs. Moody said. “Another little girl. Next April. That’ll make five.” She shook her head and came as close to smiling as her heart would allow. “Raising a brood, I’m telling you. It was bad enough with them three boys. Winking, Blinking, and Nod, that’s what I call them, like those little birds Opie raised that time on Andy Griffith. Hellions is what they are. Don’t know if they’re keeping me young or killing me. A few more and I’ll open up a daycare.”
“You ought to go in there and see Angie before you leave.” He looked through the rain at a small screened-in porch off the back of the house. Mrs. Moody came forward and pulled down on his shoulder and he lowered his head and let her kiss him on the cheek the way she had every time they said goodbye since he was five or six years old.
“You come by the house and see me,” she said. “I’ve got some things I want to give you. Some things I think you might like to have.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Calvin said. “I will.”
When she walked into the rain, there was no hurry in her step. She held her hands against her head to keep the plastic tight over her hair, and when she was up the back steps, Calvin turned to Stillwell.
“You got a lot of nerve bringing her over here.”
“She told you. She wanted to ride over to Mr. Coward’s with me. That’s it.”
“That’s horse shit. They don’t live two miles apart. You had to pass his house to get here. So don’t tell me this is about giving her a lift over there.”
“Then what is it, Calvin?”
“You brought her over here to see if you could get a rise out of me.”
“And did I?”
“Fuck you, Michael.” Calvin stepped face-to-face with him and prodded his finger into Stillwell’s chest to punctuate his words. Calvin was a few inches shorter and he tilted his head up so they were eye to eye. “If you didn’t have that badge on your belt right now, I’d whoop your ass. I’m telling you, if it wasn’t for the badge, I’d bust your nose like when we was kids.”
In their glory days at Smoky Mountain High, he and Stillwell had both asked Carla Mathis to prom and she said yes to Calvin. That afternoon on the baseball field, Stillwell beaned him once at batting practice and Calvin let it slide. But when Stillwell clipped his legs out from under him with a fastball as he dug back into the box, Calvin stormed the mound and beat him senseless, the coaches rushing out to pull them apart like dogs.
“Your eye’s healed up,” Stillwell said.
Calvin didn’t answer.
“You know the blood came back from the house,” Stillwell said. “It was Darl’s.”
“And who the hell else’s would it have been?”
“Didn’t know.”
“Look, if you’ve got something you want to ask me, then come right out and ask it. That’s the least you can do. Come over here and ask.” Calvin backed away and snatched an oil filter wrench from the shelf. “But don’t you put no more on that woman there than she’s already got. Her son ain’t been in the ground a week. You hear me?”
Stillwell didn’t nod or speak.
“That woman’s carried a lot more than her share in her lifetime and I be damned if I sit back and watch some son of a bitch like you shovel more on her. You do it again, and I’ll go to the sheriff,” Calvin said. “Him and my daddy’s been friends a long time, and when I tell him you brought her over here like you did, you know that ain’t going to sit well with him.”
Silence held between them and Calvin widened his eyes to demand an answer. Finally, Stillwell nodded. Calvin started to climb back under the truck to get back to work.
“You know Dwayne Brewer?”
“What?”
“Dwayne Brewer.”
“No, I heard you,” Calvin said. “I’m just trying to figure out why you’re asking me if I know him.”
“Well, do you?”
“Of course I do,” Calvin said. “Most everybody in this county knows him, or knows of him. We went to school with his brother. You know that.”
Calvin could tell Stillwell was trying to read his reaction, but he didn’t say another word, didn’t offer a hint of why he asked that question.
“What are you saying? You think Dwayne Brewer did it?”
“It was just a question.” Stillwell scratched at the back of his head and took a can of dip from his pocket. He shoved his lip full of tobacco and brushed what fell from the front of his gray polo. “I don’t have a whole lot to go on here. There’s been a whole lot of crazy things happen in this county through the years, but the one thing that always seems to hold true is that the one who winds up guilty was usually close. Around here a man’s a whole lot more likely to kill his cousin than he is to wander down the road and kill somebody he don’t know.”
“So what are you saying?” Calvin sat on the ground with arms draped over his knees.
“I’m saying if you think of anything, you give me a call, all right?”
“All right,” Calvin said. He lay on his back and scooted under the truck.
“You got my number.”
Stillwell walked out of the shed and into the rain. He splashed through puddles in the yard and up the back steps, the screen door slapping shut behind him. Calvin took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled against the undercarriage. Hearing that name had almost dropped him to his knees. He was scared to death knowing how close Stillwell was, but there was nothing he could do. What hung over his head could come crashing down any minute. There was no way to know when it all might fall to pieces.