Desperation Road(73)

Boyd had sat still and quiet as he listened to Russell. And he sat still and quiet as he thought about what Russell had asked him to do.

“It’s not so simple,” Boyd said.

“Yeah. It is.”

“No. It’s not. Not even. You know who’s sleeping in my house right this damn minute? A wife and two damn kids. That’s who.”

“I know.”

“Then don’t tell me it’s simple.”

Boyd stood up from the hood and walked to the edge of the water. He bent down and picked up a stick and tossed it out into the lake. “I imagine there’s some people want to talk to you about now,” he said.

“I imagine so,” Russell said.

“How far out there is it?” Boyd asked.

“Far enough.”

Boyd tugged at his gun belt. Adjusted his pants. “Come on,” he said and he turned and walked to the cruiser. Russell followed him and got in.

“Say something,” Russell said. “I know you got something else to say.”

“Not right now,” he answered without looking at him and he shifted the cruiser into reverse. He backed up carefully, cutting it between two trees and then putting it in drive and they moved off the dirt road and looped back around the lake. Lights from the cabins shined on the far shore and a houseboat sat still in the middle of the lake in the windless night. They drove back to the hospital without talking and Boyd didn’t pull into the parking lot but instead stopped at the curb. Two police cars were parked next to the emergency room entrance.

“Go on,” Boyd said. “But you listen to me now. I ain’t making you no promises and I ain’t making no deal. I heard you and that’s all. I heard you. Wish to God I hadn’t.”

“That’s all I want. You to hear.”

“That’s not all you want. Jesus. You got no idea what you’re asking me to do. I know you been living by a different set of rules for a while and I get it but goddamn. You got the easy part now.”

“There’s no easy part.”

“There might not be an easy part but I’ll be damned if we both don’t have a lot to lose. I’m thinking I got more.”

“You might be right.”

“I know I’m right. You think it was hell on you in Parchman? Let them throw a deputy sheriff out in that yard and see how nasty it gets. I’m guessing it’d make your time look like a cakewalk at a junior high fundraiser. Guessing you wouldn’t wish it on nobody. And that’s what’s out there at the end of all this.”

Russell sat still and didn’t answer. He looked over at Boyd who stared at the top of the steering wheel. He didn’t know what else to say. Didn’t want to push anymore. It was out there and whatever was going to happen was going to happen.

“Go on in there,” Boyd said.

Russell nodded and then he got out and walked toward the emergency room. Tired now and dragging. Tender in the places where Larry had gotten him. Behind him he heard the cruiser shift into gear and drive away. He wished for a place to sit down and be alone though he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He entered the emergency room and standing at the desk were two policemen. They greeted him with the news that Larry was dead and that Maben was alive. And then they turned him around and cuffed his wrists and marched him outside. They stuffed him into the back of one of the cop cars and drove him to the station where he sat in a room with a square table and hard chairs and a cigarette and an ashtray and explained how he’d come to shoot Larry.





50


BOYD DROVE PAST HIS HOUSE AND ALL THE LIGHTS WERE OFF EXCEPT for the floodlight on the corner of the garage which shined onto the driveway and Lacey’s car. The small pickup that he had bought for the boys to get around in was parked along the street in front of the house. A trailer hitched to the pickup carried a riding mower and a push mower and a weed eater and a rake.

He drove on by the house and along the street. A sprinkler left running in a front yard. A tricycle on the sidewalk and trash cans next to the curb and the feeling that there was peace in all their dreams.

In his fifteen years as a deputy he had come to accept the fact that people did filthy, unspeakable things to one another. To those weaker than them. Smaller than them. Defenseless against them. Unspeakable things that made him sit next to the beds of his boys when they were small children. Home late and them already asleep and the knowledge of these things on his mind and sitting there in the dark listening to them breathe. Their bodies and their minds at the mercy of what was outside the door and the fact that he couldn’t walk with them every step of the way gnawing at him as he watched them sleep. Sitting there in the dark and praying that the things he had seen wouldn’t find his children and trying hard to understand a God that would allow the weakness of innocence and the strength of evil. He kept the ugliest of what he knew to himself. Unwilling to tell Lacey because he did not want her to lie awake at night and share his fears. There in the dark as he sat next to the beds of his children he could only hope and he had continued to hope over the course of the years and as the cruiser passed through the sleeping streets of his neighborhood he was reminded of this hope. The hope that there was a good out there and that it quietly protected when no one else was around to help. He was reminded of this undetectable good and how much was left to its mercy and he wondered if perhaps that mercy hadn’t presented itself on the night that the deputy was murdered. If there really was such a thing that he had always imagined there to be.