Into the Web (25 page)

“No, they’d find it in the creek if they looked hard enough. Metal detectors could find it buried too. And I figure I’d be followed if I suddenly went for a drive.”

“Where you gonna hide it, then?” my father asked.

“I have an idea,” I answered. “I got it from a short story I read a long time ago.”

“Helps you out, I guess,” my father said. “All that reading.”

He soon fell into a fitful sleep. By then it was night. I put on dark clothes, left the house, and for the next hour made my way through the woods surrounding Cantwell until I finally reached the long, wide lawn of Wallace Porterfield.

The garage wasn’t locked, and so I entered it silently, found the box that contained the Kellogg file, and placed the pistol snugly among the other evidence of Archie’s
crime. Evidence concealed as evidence, like a letter hidden among other letters, with due thanks to Mr. Poe.

Then I stole back into the darkness, through the woods, and home.

Lonnie arrived the next morning with two deputies. I met him at the door.

“I’ve come for the gun,” he said.

“And the warrant?” I asked.

He gave it to me, and I let him in.

“The gun’s in my father’s closet,” I said. “He’s sleeping in that room. Don’t wake him.”

Lonnie stomped into my father’s room, rummaged through the closet, and found the rifle. Through it all I didn’t hear my father stir.

“Is that rifle the only gun in the house?” he demanded when he returned to the front door.

“Yes, it is.”

“You don’t have a thirty-eight anywhere around? You swear that, Roy?”

I stiffened to attention, lifted my hand, mocking the stance he’d used when he deputized me two months before, and stared down at him coldly. “On my brother’s grave.”

Lonnie handed me the rifle. “One of these days I’ll be coming back,” he warned.

But he never did.

M
y father lived for three more weeks, and during that time I never left him again save for one brief trip to the library, where I checked out a book about how things work, how they are put together, everything from a spinning wheel to an electric generator. Each night I read to him from that book.

During that time, we stayed in his room together, not for minutes, but for hours, not only in the morning and the afternoon, but throughout the night, he in his bed, I seated beside it. His untroubled sleep comforted me, and my sleepless vigilance comforted him.

One night I awakened to find him staring at me silently, his face bathed in moonlight, an odd smile on his lips.

“What is it?” I asked.

One hand crawled into the other. “The balance,” he said.

I buried him on a hot, sweltering day in the middle of August. Doc Poole came to the funeral, and a few of the men who’d once welcomed my father into their circle, lifting their bottles of beer to him and clapping him softly on the back as he moved among them. A few people came down from Waylord too, people I’d never known, nor even heard of. Lila came, but her mother didn’t. “Mama died last week,” she told me.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.

She nodded softly and offered her hand. “Well, goodbye, Roy.”

I gave her no indication of what I’d learned from Mavis Wilde, but merely stood mutely at my father’s grave and watched Lila walk out of the cemetery to where her old car baked in the hot summer sun. She got in and drove down the dusty road and away, falling, falling, as it seemed to me, into the web of Waylord.

It took nearly a month to sell the house, then another week to empty it in preparation for its new owners, a young couple with their first baby on the way.

During those long days, I gathered the few things my father had left behind, sold some of them to a local furniture dealer and burned the rest in a kind of funeral pyre behind the house.

After everything was settled, I packed my car with the single suitcase I’d brought with me nearly three months before, took the road that led once again past the old ball field, then through Kingdom City, and finally to the interstate highway whose westbound route led to California. Just before reaching it, a field of wild-flowers
rose to my right, weaving white and red in the summer sun. I pulled over and stared out over the field for a time. Then I set my mind on a different course.

She was in her garden when I found her, a soft mountain breeze playing at the hem of her plain white dress. She drew off the wide bonnet as I came toward her, hung it on a tomato post like a helmet over a rifle butt.

I handed her the flowers. “I picked them on the way up the road.”

She brought them to her face. “You can smell the wildness in them. Not like the ones you buy in stores.” She lowered her face toward the flowers again, then glanced up at me. “Thanks for coming by, Roy.”

“My father thought I should have fought for you,” I said.

She shook her head. “That was a long time ago.”

“If you were willing, I’d stay around awhile. See how things work out.”

She shook her head. “Roy, it’s …”

“I know it’s not exactly like jumping off a cliff behind you, but it’s the best I can do. I’m not all that agile anymore.”

She smiled.

“Lila—I know what you did for me.”

Her smile faded, but in her eyes something wild and lovely bloomed.