South of Shiloh (17 page)

19

C’MON RANE, DO THE TRICKS.

Triage, compartmentalize; bring on that reliable mental body armor to protect you from the unexpected…

…so you can function in tight spots, man…

Except his gimmicks weren’t working, because he kept looking at his hands and right now Molly was in his hands and he couldn’t get her out. So he tried to concentrate on the road going by as the Somali driver piloted the cab back to St. Paul.

For one instant, a string of negatives—blacks and whites reversed—streamed in back of his eyes. Bulging dark eyes wrapped in a desert Shemagh headdress…Just a flash that was quickly gone. He had taken thousands of pictures. Only seven of them stayed perfectly preserved…

Suddenly he became very thirsty and asked the driver to pull off the freeway at a gas station. Rane went in and bought a liter of water and returned to the cab.

As the car entered his neighborhood, a gut instinct told him he should get out and walk, so he had the cab drop him three blocks from his house. Rane tried walking. A trio of kids raced by on bikes. There was enough chill in the afternoon air to float their breath like exuberant scarves.

Walking didn’t work. Now his gut told him he should eat. He arrived home and spent indecisive minutes walking his small yard. He’d dated a woman once who talked him into planting perennials. After she’d given up on him, he made an attempt to keep up with the plants. Now every spring only a few obstinate hostas peeked up through the weeds, like stealthy, knife-edged periscopes.

He ran his hand along the bubbling, peeling paint on his wood siding, searching for a seam in time that would allow him to find his way back to the moment before Jenny knocked on his door…

Kept seeing Molly sitting on the couch, locked up; heard Jenny’s angry, grieving accusation.

You’re involved, goddamn it!

John Rane never got involved. He kept a crisp 200-millimeter lens between him and other people’s problems.

He went inside, sat down at his kitchen table, and stared at the front door. Heard the frustration in that Southern cop’s voice.
If it was an accident?

What the hell did that mean?

He got up, went into his bedroom, and emptied his pockets. As he dumped his change and a fold of bills on his dresser top, he stared at his keys. A quarter was fixed to the snap ring by a chain inserted through a drilled hole. A bigger, jagged-edged puncture about the diameter of a pencil ripped George Washington’s head wide open. He nudged the pierced coin back and forth with his finger.

C’mon, Rane. Do something.

And finally he was back to food and understood his impulse to eat. His uncle Mike had schooled him in the tricks; pointing out how certain people needed survival tactics. People, say, who had too much baggage and could go off half-cocked and make bad decisions and wind up back on the bus to hell. Mike had struggled through a rocky transition from legendary hellion to responsible husband to Aunt Karen. One of the main tricks Mike used to air out tension was cooking.

Rane snatched his wallet and keys off the dresser. What you had to do was go shopping. Stay busy. Create some space to think in.

He drove to the nearest grocery store, went in, and roamed brightly lit aisles. Mike was a big advocate of one-pot meals: venison chili, stew, spaghetti, cabbage soup. The cabbage soup sounded like a good antidote to the gray weather, so he dropped carrots, celery, onions, and a large head of cabbage into his cart. Then he added some Italian sausage and onion soup mix. On the way out of the store, he stopped at the convenience counter and bought two packs of American Spirits.

Back home, he loaded his coffeemaker with the concentration of a monk performing a Zen ritual: a filter, some water, and the heady French roast. As the machine brewed, he wiped down his kitchen counter, set a large pot on the stove, laid out his ingredients, and withdrew a knife from the wall rack. His thumb flicked along the edge of the blade, testing the sharpness. Midway through slicing vegetables and sausage, he collided with the very thought he was working to avoid. He’d regularly tucked money away in an education account. Always assumed he’d meet his daughter when she was more grown—which was a way of putting it off.

Should have been there from the beginning. Should have been paying child support, something. Tried to call that one time. Jenny froze him out.

He shook olive oil into the pot and turned on the gas burner. When the oil started to sizzle, he shoveled in the sectioned sausage, then he dusted the browning meat with paprika and added a pinch of pepper. He tipped in the bowl of sliced onions, carrots, and celery. Keep busy. Stir the pot. Now measure the water and add the soup mix. Finishing up, he sectioned the head of cabbage and dumped in shredded handfuls. There. Let it simmer. He washed his hands, poured a cup of coffee, and lit a cigarette.

But the taste of caffeine and nicotine inside these four walls took him straight back to the last tense face-to-face conversation he’d had with Jenny, eleven years ago, right out in the living room. He found himself there now, pacing up and down in front of the couch, smoking to cover a twinge of nerves, just like on that day long ago.

A young Jenny Hatton had leaned forward, her color up, her eyes bright; expectant in all ways. So she came at him all straight-ahead righteous, like a figurehead on a war galley. And, of course, he could imagine all the jetsam in her wake: the diapers, the mortgage, the deadening cadence of the mallet setting the pace for the galley slaves. But that wasn’t it.

“I’m going to keep the baby,” she’d said.

“I’m not ready for this” was all Rane could honestly say.

So she’d called him a coward and said if that was his answer she never wanted to see him again. No half-measures. No calls, no child support. Nothing. Then she stood up and walked out of his life, carrying his baby in her belly.

Rane stood in the empty living room a long time, until the cigarette built up an inch of ash.

“Coward” still hurt.

So he told himself he was a pragmatic man who didn’t waste time with imprecise notions like irony. He dumped the cigarette in the kitchen sink, left the coffee cup, and walked into the bedroom.

Do the exercise.

He opened the closet, reached behind the hangers, and found the long leather case. He placed the gun case on the bed, unzipped it, and eased out the old 30.06 Remington with the battered Redfield scope. The date of manufacture was stamped on the breech: 1942.

Mike had taught him to hunt with the old rifle; had started him shooting with a .22 when he was twelve.

Rane fired the rifle ceremonially every November, when he accompanied Mike to hunt whitetail in Northern Wisconsin. His uncle’s eyes were graying with cataracts and Rane would patiently work the tree lines and thickets to find a fat buck for Mike and Karen’s freezer. But he kept the rifle scrupulously clean year-round; the pitted wood stock stayed shiny from the oils of his hands. He opened the blinds to the bedroom window, raised the rifle, and wrapped his elbow into the sling. Mike had taught him to shoot using an offhand formula: no sense shooting supported. You ain’t gonna have a bench to lean on when you jump the whitetail.

The late afternoon light was hazy, failing, but he could still make out the knothole in a telephone pole exactly a hundred ten yards down the alley. He knew every whirl and twist of that knothole better than the faces of his few acquaintances. He acquired the tiny, puckered wood genie in the scope and tickled it with the crosshairs.

Dry-firing was an exercise in holding on a target and trigger pull. Rane used it as a form of meditation half an hour most days. His Nikon had shutter speeds that could take multiple shots per second. But you still had to intuit the precise nanosecond to pull the trigger.

Composition. Tempo. The piano flowed into the camera and they both informed the rifle. He exhaled, attuned to the pulse in his hands as he let the crosshairs float in a tightening figure eight. Pattern of timing, a felt thing. In between heartbeats, he brought the trigger pressure and sight picture into balance.

He smelled the cabbage soup simmering in the kitchen. He saw Molly’s eyes the moment the fact of sudden death was shoved in her face.

Gently, he pressed the trigger straight back with the tip of his finger.

In the crisp metal snap of bolt on steel he heard the minor key rhythm of his life: a simple, elegantly designed machine clicking on an empty chamber.

20

MITCH LOST TRACK.

He’d been pushed and dragged through thickets, forced to crouch down in the bushes, and stuffed into the front seat of a vehicle that sounded like a truck. Then the truck door opened and he was slung over his attacker’s shoulder and hauled into someplace tight, because his feet kept hitting the sides.

He passed out again.

When he woke up, the tape wrapping his eyes was mashed over his ears and made it hard to hear, so the voices sounded far off, garbled, like underwater, but angry.

“What the hell is he doing dressed like
that
?
He’s supposed to be in Memphis.
” And that was one mad woman.

“When I saw him he was hiding up the woods, shooting toward the reenactors. Check the bag. He’s got real rounds in those cartridges.”

Same voice from the woods. The black guy.

“Christ. You know what happened down there?” the woman yelled, and when she hit the shrill high notes it sounded like Ellie.

Then the voices were lower and he couldn’t hear.

Shit.

Panting, blind, he realized they’d removed the tape from his mouth. He could breathe better and taste the air, which was close and musty with mineral damp.

He kept his eyes shut tight behind the sticky tape. Aware of his body now, huddled in a fetal cringe, he realized his hands were free, so he moved his fingers and felt raw earth. His left hand hurt something fierce. Okay. It’s gonna be bad. How do you open your eyes on something real bad when you can’t remember…

“Take off the tape,” the woman ordered, the voice getting more familiar with every syllable.

“Shoulda left him in the woods, fucker pulled a pistol on me,” said the black guy, breathing heavily from exertion. Some of it was coming back now.

With an excruciating jerk, the tape ripped off his eyes, tearing his hair and eyebrows.

“Ow damn.”

The strong hand gripped his shoulder, shook him. “C’mon, Mitch, wake up, you dumb motherfucker.”

Mitch cringed deeper into himself, keeping his eyes clamped shut, shying away from the patient hostility in that voice. Like a nightmare. Keep your eyes shut. Maybe it’ll pass. Worked sometimes. The hand released his shoulder. A moment later, a slap jarred his left cheek. Hey.

The blow unstuck his eyelids. And it hadda be a bad dream, because he was staring at LaSalle Ector’s blacker ’an shit face just inches from his own. A grime of sweat, dirt, and bits of brush stuck to LaSalle’s cheeks, neck, and shoulders. The debris formed a pattern with the wormy purple scars streaking his face and neck.

So it was Ellie’s paid boy who jumped him in the woods. Damn.

Mitch grimaced, trying to make sense of it. LaSalle stood up and stepped back and the dream got worse, because Ellie was standing there next to him, looking madder than he’d ever seen her, with eyes glittering as hard as ball bearings. She wore Levi’s and a peasant blouse and hiking shoes, and her freckles blazed in the bad light like copper nails pounded into her long face.

“You sonofabitch,” she seethed. “This is the last time you lie to me.”

Mitch avoided her eyes, looked around to get oriented. He was sprawled on a dirt floor in a narrow chamber of raw, sloping limestone. A wide, urn-shaped chamber pot gleamed in the emergency harshness of a heavy-duty utility light wedged up in a rock crevasse. A long extension cord snaked off into the gloom.

Jesus, special-effects weird? They had him back in some kinda cave.

When he tried to shift his weight, he heard a rattle. This rusty iron cuff surrounded his ankle, clamped over his trousers. A shiny Yale lock pinned the cuff’s eyelets together.

The shackle was attached to an ancient chain, the other end cemented in the stone wall. Several of these long, anchored chains coiled in a rusty jumble on the dirt floor, like a pile of snakes.

“His hand’s cut pretty bad. Should I see to it?” LaSalle asked.

“Go ahead,” she said.

A plastic flicker appeared in LaSalle’s hand, a water bottle. He unscrewed the cap and thrust the bottle at Mitch. “You should drink some water.” Mitch craned his neck and drank greedily. Then LaSalle dribbled water on Mitch’s injured left hand to see the gash better. “I need to clean that up,” he said.

LaSalle had a medical bag; he pulled the Velcro flap and selected a bottle of disinfectant, gauze, a tube of ointment, and tape. Mitch’s eyes now bulged, sheer animal alert. Still, it took several heartbeats to notice that LaSalle had frozen in mid-motion.

LaSalle went around six one. One ninety. Real black, smoky black, cold reserve black; like his people got the haughty North African features on the other side and kept them pure.

He was lithe-muscled. Had all that graceful shit going. Like he kept up basketball. Weights.

But right now his hands fluttered in the air and his serious brown eyes blinked. Like he’d become stuck and appeared to be momentarily confused by the simple first-aid items he had laid out on the bag just inches from his fingers.

“Are you all right?” Ellie said, coming closer, and Mitch marked the concern in her voice, so suddenly off her anger.

Something funny here?

LaSalle shook his head and refocused. “I’m good. You stay back from him. Let me tend to this.” Now his fingers flew, certain, as he cleaned the wound with orange stinging Betadine, dabbed on the ointment, and taped on a bandage.

“I want to talk to him, alone,” Ellie said emphatically.

“You sure?” LaSalle said.

“I’m sure,” she said.

“Okay. Just stay back by this line I marked in the dirt. Be out of his reach that way.” Then LaSalle placed the water bottle next to Mitch’s leg, turned, and retreated down the crypt-like chamber to another pool of light.

Mitch grabbed the bottle, drank, gagged, kept it down. Drank some more. The water helped some. Squinting, getting used to the light, he saw the rifle leaning against the cave wall along with his haversack, leathers, and the holstered Colt. Flashed on the shot, the smoke and confusion.

They know something? What?

Ellie stooped to the haversack, removed the pack of Pall Malls and the lighter, and tossed them to Mitch. He plucked them up, got one going, and took a drag. And that helped more than the water. What was this, bad cop, good cop?

Ellie put her toes on the line marked in the dirt, watched him for several seconds, then said, “Mitchell Lee, you got some explaining to do.”

Mitch gritted his teeth and scooted on his side, got his knees under him, then shifted over on his butt and leaned his back against the cool stone.

“Where am I?” he asked, rattling the chain on his foot.

“Looks like you finally made it to the big time; like you always wanted,” Ellie said. Her voice was more under control now. Her eyes were still pretty terrible.

Mitch chewed his lip. What you had to do with Ellie was first get her calmed down. “I mean where exactly?”

“The old potting shed down by the lake, built into the caves. The caves go deeper than most people know. This part was walled off.”

Mitch shook his head. “The hell…”

Ellie smiled tightly. “LaSalle knocked down the wall and strung electric in from the shed. This is the old slave quarters from back in like 1820; before the family bought the place. I originally thought the Black Historical Society in town might want a look in here.”

Mitch took a shaky pull on the cigarette, exhaled, then shook his leg chain, indignant. He blinked several times and attempted to fathom her, standing there, her eyes getting harder and harder. “You let that sonofabitch put me in these?”

“Watch your mouth. It’s a miracle he managed to drag you in here during all the confusion.”

“Confusion?”

“Yes, Mitchell Lee. The confusion still going on outside, along Kirby Creek after that Union boy got shot in the neck.”

Shit.

Mitch slumped back against the wall, shut his eyes, tried to work it back. Not now. Think. He opened his eyes and said, “No idea what you’re talking about.”

“Really,” Ellie said. She turned, scooped up the leather cartridge box, and opened the flap. She fingered one of the cartridges and felt the bulk and weight. She pinched the weighted end, peeling it open. For a moment she held the lead bullet and the black powder in her open palm, then she turned her hand and let them fall to the dirt floor.

Then she pointed to the rifle leaning down the passage. Out of the case. “You’re supposed to be in Memphis but you were carrying Daddy’s Enfield when LaSalle found you in the woods. The barrel is fouled. It’s been fired, Mitchell Lee.”

“Bullshit. I been attacked. You’re making this up,” Mitch said.

Ellie planted her hands on her hips. “Am I? That boy died before the ambulance even got to him. They have all the police in two counties out there, questioning the reenactors, looking through the woods.”

How, Mitch wondered? I was dead on Beeman. Dead on.

He took a moment to order his thoughts, then wondered, “So if you know so much, how come I’m not out there? Why am I wearing leg irons in a hole in the ground?”

“Because I’m not sure what to do with you until I get an answer.”

Infuriated, Mitch lurched to his knees. “Fuck me dead, Ellender Jane!
What is the question?
”

She clenched her arms across her chest. “LaSalle said, just after he took you down you received a call on your cell. He answered the call.” She reached down and withdrew his cell phone from the haversack. “LaSalle said the person who called said you ‘missed Beeman.’” She cocked her head. “So you were trying to shoot Bee and now I want to know why. All of it. Exactly.”

Mitch mimicked her voice contemptuously. “
‘LaSalle said.’
C’mon Ellie, you gonna believe LaSalle? What I heard his head is mush from getting blowed up.” Mitch knew he should button up. But this was Ellie and he just might be able to talk her down. Worked before.

“So what about the cell phone call?” she insisted.

“Weren’t no cell phone call,” Mitch muttered. He glanced past her to where LaSalle was stooped in a narrow part of passage, sorting through what looked like a pile of bricks. Lowering his voice, he leaned forward and hissed, “That’s a lyin’ nigger you got workin’ for you is what.”

“Listen to you,” she said with a disgusted curl to her lower lip. “You’re regressing to Theo.”

Situation like this, you gotta think positive. Reason with her. Mitch set the cigarette aside, slowly rose to his feet, and took a moment to order his thoughts. He tested his balance, estimated the length of chain.

He cleared his throat. Gave her the smile, then the voice. “C’mon, Ellie, somebody’s got to be the adult here. How’s it gonna look? One minute I’m in my motel room in Memphis, the next I’m chained up in a hole underground. No idea how I got into these clothes. Who’re people going to believe, me or him? Shit, everybody knows they wouldn’t let him back on the ambulance. That’s why you got him out here doing manual labor.”

Mitch edged forward, uncoiling the chain. Encouraged by Ellie’s frown, he pressed on, improvising, “Think, Ellie, how’s it going to look when Billie Watts gets through tearing LaSalle a new asshole in court. Gonna look like he staged all this.” He tugged at a dirty gray woolen sleeve. “How do you know he didn’t steal this getup and the rifle and take a shot at Beeman. Shit, I’ll bet Beeman arrested him back before he cleaned up.” Mitch paused for effect, then said, “And here you are aiding and abetting.”

Ellie was unimpressed. “Forget Billie Watts,” she said, jaw set. “This is between you, me, and LaSalle. Courts got nothing to do with it.” She showed her perfect piranha teeth in a demure snarl. “What do folks say on your side of the county? State-line rules.”

Mitch grimaced and tried to get his mind around what she was saying. Just you, huh? Tell you what.

If he could just get his hands around her skinny neck, then they’d let him go.

With a growl he leaped forward, thrusting his arms, clawing for her throat. Just before the slack ran taut on the leg chain, she skipped back almost casually, upper body steady, arms folded.

Mitch gasped when the chain caught him, and for a fraction of a second he was jerked, his rear leg extended straight back, torso and arms stretched forward, balanced on his unshackled foot. His fingers stopped just inches from the cold, merry anger in her eyes.

“Why Mitchell Lee,” Ellie purred, studying his extended posture. “I believe you’ve performed a yoga position called Warrior Two.”

“Fuckin’ bitch,” he snarled, losing his balance, toppling sideways, and falling heavily to the dirt floor.

Ellie raised a hand to quiet LaSalle, who had started back down the corridor. “Listen up, Mitchell Lee,” she said. “Much as I like Bee, and bad as I feel about that poor Yankee boy, that is not where we’re at, you and me.”

She paused and then Mitch heard her icy voice echo along the stone.

“You better tell me the whole truth, you hear? If you don’t it’s going to be like that Edgar Allan Poe story we read in high school.”

Mitch hated it; sprawled in the dirt, looking up, seeing her draw herself erect and clamp her damn Kirby jaw and point down the passage to the narrow part where LaSalle stood watching in his pile of rubble.

“As God is my witness, Mitchell Lee, I will brick you up in here with my own hands and leave you to the dark.”