Into the Web (3 page)

Don’t say nothing, Roy.
A quick wink.
I’ll see you in the blackberry patch.
Those had been Archie’s last words to me, uttered as I’d reached the door of his prison cell.

Since that night I’d added other details I may or may not actually have noticed at the time, the play of Archie’s fingers in his lap, the shadow of the bars across his face, the plain white T-shirt beneath the orange jailhouse jumpsuit. Still, more than anything, it was his voice I remembered, quiet, calm, assuring me that somehow, in some other world, all the murderous terror of that snowy night on County Road would be put behind us.

He’s like a little puppy, Roy, so you have to keep an eye on him
, my mother used to say.
So he don’t run in front of a car or just trot off with a stranger.

Even as a boy I’d recognized Archie’s guileless nature and lack of foresight. I’d been so much the leader of our small pack that at times he’d seemed paralyzed without me. My father had stated the fact of the matter with his typical brutality:
Murder was the only thing that boy ever done without you, Roy
, a line that burned into my mind each time my father said it, made me see again the headlights of my old Chevy mount the hill at 1411 County Road, glint on the rear bumper of Archie’s black Ford as it rested beside the high green hedge, Archie hunched behind the wheel, tense, baffled, poised to act, but unable to do so, his question whispering always in my mind,
Will you come with me, Roy?

I still knew a great many people in the area around Cantwell, of course, but the first person I recognized as I drove around that morning was Lonnie Porterfield, the son of the old sheriff who’d presided over Kingdom County like a medieval lord.

We’d been acquaintances in high school, Lonnie and
I, then gone our separate ways, he for a tour in Vietnam, where he’d been wounded seriously enough to win a Purple Heart, then returned home the county’s conquering hero.

A few years after his return, Wallace Porterfield had retired as sheriff of Kingdom County with the clear understanding that Lonnie, who’d worked as his deputy until then, would take over the job. Even so, an election was necessary, and during the campaign Lonnie had used his military service to good advantage, run for the office as much on his war record as on whatever experience he’d gained working for the old sheriff. He’d been elected by a wide margin and had held the job ever since.

Normally, I wouldn’t have stopped at Lonnie’s house, but after three dreary weeks back in Kingdom County, the prospect of talking to someone other than my father-if our tense exchanges could be called talk at all-was too enticing to resist.

Lonnie was leaning back in a lawn chair in his front yard, when I pulled into his driveway. His black-and-white cruiser sat in the front yard, gleaming in the sunlight. A golden five-pointed star adorned the side doors.

“Roy Slater, well, I’ll be damned,” Lonnie said as I got out of my car. “I heard you were back in town.”

I noticed a red plastic bucket beside his chair, suds boiling up over the rim, a wet rag hung over the side.

“Washing the car on Sunday,” I scolded. “Isn’t there a law against that in Kingdom County?”

“I’m the law in Kingdom County,” Lonnie said, using the very words he’d no doubt heard his father say a thousand times. “Besides, Sunday’s the only time I got to do it. How long you been back, Roy?”

“Couple of weeks.”

“Have a seat. As you can see, I’m taking a break.”

I dropped into the chair beside him. “I can’t stay long.”

“I heard your daddy wasn’t doing too good.”

“He’s still able to get around, but I don’t know how much longer that will last. Doc Poole gave him about three months, but that was some time back. He has less now.”

“Hard thing, watching your daddy die,” Lonnie said.

I nodded, though it struck me as more inconvenient than hard.

“I dread facing it,” Lonnie added, then chuckled. “Of course, my old man’s just about indestructible.”

The image of Wallace Porterfield rose into my mind, his massive figure forever poised outside my brother’s cell, staring down at Archie as if he were a bug he could, at will, either squash or spare.

Lonnie cooled himself with a cardboard fan emblazoned with a picture of the Lawson Funeral Home, Kingdom City, W.V. “Hot as hell today. Bet you spent the morning like me, under that big shade tree in your front yard.”

“It’s not there anymore,” I said. “My father cut it down.”

“When?”

“Few years ago. He said it blocked his view.”

“Of what?”

I shrugged.

“That doesn’t make much sense, Roy. Why does he do things like that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he just likes destroying things.”

“He’s a pisser, your old man,” Lonnie said with a short laugh. “You’ll miss him.”

The lie came effortlessly. “Yeah.”

Lonnie had quickly gone on to other subjects, and we’d been idly talking politics a few minutes later when Ezra Loggins pulled up in a dusty pickup.

“Morning, Sheriff,” Ezra said as he got out of his truck.

Lonnie nodded.

Ezra yanked a baseball cap from his head and raked back his long brown hair as he lumbered toward us. “I come up on something I think you ought to know about, Sheriff.”

“What’s that?”

Ezra balled the cap up in his large hands. “A body. Up near Jessup Creek.”

Lonnie’s eyes cut over to me. Then back to Ezra. “So, tell me more.”

“Well, I went over to it, of course. But the way it was fixed, I couldn’t see much. The face was pressed into the dirt. Couldn’t make out a thing ’cept it’s a man. I could tell that much from the clothes and the hair cut short. That’s all I can say.” He shrugged. “Looked like he maybe keeled over dead right there by the creek.”

“Was it an old man?” Lonnie asked.

“Didn’t look all that old. Didn’t notice no white hair or nothing.”

“See anybody else around?”

“Not a soul, far as I could tell.”

Lonnie leaned forward, thinking, rubbing his hands together. “You didn’t touch the body, did you, Ezra?” he asked.

“Nope.”

Lonnie got to his feet. “All right. Let’s go see about it.” He looked at me. “Want to come along, Roy?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that Lonnie would ask, but anything seemed better than an early return to my father’s house, the thud of wrestlers on the mat, the smell of Vicks.

“When will we be back?” I asked.

“Why, you got something pressing?”

I’d told my father that I’d be back soon, but I recalled the way he’d dismissed my leaving.

“No, I don’t have any reason to get back right away,” I said.

Lonnie waved me forward. “Let’s go, then.”

We’d already started for the car when the screen door of the house screeched.

“Where you going, boy?”

He stood in the doorway like a huge gray stone, Wallace Porterfield in all his forbidding majesty.

As a child I’d seen him often, usually outside the sheriff’s office, his right hand resting on a pearl-handled pistol. He’d worn a large black hat in those days, with a white band and a small red feather. No man had ever looked more in command of other men. But it was only after the murders that I’d felt the heavy hand of Sheriff Porterfield’s presence in Kingdom County, the weight of his eyes as they followed me down the corridor to the cell that imprisoned my brother. More than twenty years had passed since then, but I had little doubt that the old sheriff still remembered Archie sitting dazed in his old Ford, a world of carnage behind the white polished door of the house on the hill above him.

“You finish washing the car, Lonnie?” he asked gruffly.

Lonnie seemed almost to shrink before his father’s towering figure, wither beneath the hard light of his relentless gaze. “I didn’t quite finish it,” he said.

“When you planning to do it, then?”

“When I get back,” Lonnie replied.

Wallace Porterfield stepped onto the porch. The boards creaked softly beneath his weight. His hair had gone entirely white. It was cut short and stood on end, the crowning glory of a body that seemed to erupt, dark and volcanic, from the earth. “People don’t respect a lawman that drives a dirty car.”

“I know,” Lonnie answered. “But I’ve got to attend to something.”

“What?”

“Some kind of trouble up around Waylord.”

Porterfield laughed, but there was no mirth in his laughter. “Hell, there’s always trouble in Waylord.”

“Looks like a fellow dropped dead over round Jessup Creek.”

Porterfield’s eyes suddenly cut over to me. “Do I know you?”

“Roy Slater,” I told him.

He said nothing, but I could see the grim pictures playing in his mind, a body tumbling down a flight of stairs, another curled into a corner.

“You arrested my brother, Archie,” I said.

As he turned back to Lonnie, he gave no hint that he’d ever heard of my brother. “You better plan on getting back before sundown. We ain’t popular up there in the hills.”

Not popular, no. In fact, I doubted that there’d ever been a man more hated by the people who occupied the hills surrounding Kingdom City. He’d ruled by terror and was said to have pocketed large sums given him by the mine owners or their agents, though it was hard for me to see where all that money could have gone, save into the large house he’d built about a mile from Cantwell.

Porterfield glanced at me again, as he might have glanced at a bird on a limb. Then he eased his enormous frame back toward the house. At the door he stopped, his huge head rotating on the thick folds of his neck until he looked me square in the eye. “You going up there too?” he asked.

I nodded.

He appeared indifferent to whether I went or stayed.

“Take a shotgun,” he said, returning his attention to Lonnie. “Nothing stops a man like a shotgun.”

W
aylord was a whorl of hills and gaps that lay in the far northeastern corner of Kingdom County. As a boy, I’d known it only as a remote and mysterious place where there was no electricity, no phones, no radios, nor much of anything else that couldn’t have been found in the same houses a hundred years before. The people who lived there drew water from wells, cooked on wood-stoves, washed their clothes in the same metal tubs they used to bathe their children and themselves. In summer the women wore broad, bright-colored bonnets to shield their faces from the sun, tended their gardens in dresses made from feed sacks or bolts of cloth chosen from mail order catalogues.

My father had come from Waylord, and so, all my life, I’d thought of it as a primitive place, rocked by bloody feuds and mining wars, peopled by a race of
Highland warriors whose fallen progeny now dug out a living from the hardscrabble soil, fished, hunted, made their own whiskey, and sometimes their own laws.

And yet, despite the deep roots his family had sunk in Waylord, my father had never spoken of it fondly. In fact, his opinion of it had differed little from Wallace Porterfield’s. “Nothing worth a damn up there,” he’d say at first mention of the place, then quickly go on to another, less bitter subject.

But while my father appeared genuinely hostile to Waylord, Lonnie was merely irritated by it.

“I’ll have to wash the whole car over again, dammit,” he muttered as we swung off the main road and onto the unpaved one that led up to Ezra Loggins’s farm. He eyed the film of dust that had already begun to gather on the hood and shook his head. “I try my best to stay out the hills. But just like Daddy says, these damn people up here are always getting into something.” He glanced out over the withered fields. “If you ask me, good sense stops at Bishop’s Gap. After that, pure craziness takes over.”

It took forty minutes of plowing through the thick undergrowth, circling around patches of poison oak and brier bushes, slapping at gnats and plucking thorns from our trousers as we walked, before we finally reached the body. And yet, for all the difficulty of the trip, it was the wildflowers I noticed, swirls of white and red that brought back a sweeter time of life, years when things had seemed easier than they did now, the route to happiness less plagued by pits and snares. A voice returned to me, though I scarcely dared give it a face,
We’re going to make it, aren’t we, Roy.

“There it is.” Ezra pointed to a mound in the distance. A shallow culvert lay just beyond it, Jessup Creek ran through it. “Looks like a pile of rags, don’t it, Sheriff? Just like I said.”

The corpse lay curled over, knees folded beneath the trunk, buttocks raised, so that it looked as if it had simply tumbled headfirst off the stump just behind it. Dappled sunlight played on a blue flannel shirt. The jeans had the faded look of old denim, the soles of the brown leather boots were cracked and dusty.

“You notice the gun before?” Lonnie pointed to a single-shot twenty-two rifle that lay, half covered with leaves, a few feet from the body.

Ezra shook his head. “I didn’t look at things too close.”

Lonnie circled the dead man, studying the ground. He stopped to gather other things Ezra hadn’t noticed: a box of cartridges, several empty casings. Something else caught his eye. He lifted the head from the ground. A gummy swath of blood covered the face.

“Damned if I can tell who it is,” he said as he let the head fall forward again.

A wallet bulged from the back pocket of the dead man’s jeans. Lonnie pulled it out, flipped it open, took out the driver’s license. “Clayton Spivey.”

“Who’s Clayton Spivey?” I asked.

“Ah, just some guy lives up here,” Lonnie said. He looked at Ezra. “How does he make do anyway?”

Ezra shrugged.

“Does he make whiskey?”

“I don’t think so, Sheriff.”

“Where does he live exactly?”

Ezra nodded toward the woods that stretched northward along the creek. “Up that way, I think. About three miles.”

“Three miles,” Lonnie repeated. His eyes shifted over to me. “Well, that ought to make it interesting for you, Roy.”

“For me?” I asked. “Why?”

He looked at me wonderingly. “Well, think about it. Three miles up Jessup Creek. You know what that means, don’t you?”