Bull Mountain(14)

CHAPTER





4




KATE BURROUGHS

2015

The digital clock from Clayton’s side of the bed showed 2:15. The glow of the numbers washed the room in a soft orange hue and seeped into Kate’s restless eyelids. Clayton normally covered the clock with a T-shirt or something to block the light, but tonight he hadn’t, and the damn thing always kept Kate awake. She was a light sleeper anyway, not that she would be getting any sleep tonight. Not after the bomb Clayton had just dropped on her. She loved him, of that there was no doubt, but she’d never once claimed to understand him. At what point in your life do you just accept a spade for being a spade and move on? Every time her husband raised a hand to help the people on this mountain he’d had it slapped away, but he always jumped at the chance to try again. It reminded her of the Peanuts cartoon where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown to kick. Everyone knows she’s going to snatch it away at the last minute and poor Charlie is going to land flat on his back; even he knows it, but he does it anyway out of sheer faith in the goodness of the world. She’d heard once that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. If that was true, then her husband was insane. Hell, maybe she was, too. After all, this whole lawman thing was her idea.

It was one of those moments in time that sneak up on you from nowhere, without warning or provocation, and change your life forever. She and Clayton had been dating for a little more than a year and he was bound and determined to prove to her, to everyone, that he wasn’t anything like his father. Even so, he still seemed lost. That might have been what initially attracted her to him in the first place. It was clear to her, by the way he cut short conversations about his childhood or took hard left turns whenever the subject came up, that he’d seen, and maybe done, things he wasn’t proud of, and it had changed him, robbed him of the things that make falling in love with a girl across a diner table enjoyable. He always acted like he didn’t deserve the good things in life that other people take for granted. He was broken, and she liked fixing broken things. She didn’t know that about herself then but she knew it now, and this close to forty, she might as well start admitting it. She also knew Clayton would have done anything for her back then. Anything. And that kind of power over a man, in the hands of a twenty-six-year-old woman, could be dangerous. She liked that, too.

They’d been sitting in Lucky’s after church—that was saying something right there. Clayton Burroughs had never stepped foot in a church before her, but there he was, hair combed and shirt tucked in, pretending to be comfortable—the two of them sharing a massive plate of cathead biscuits, peach preserves, and fresh butter. Kate had the figure for that kind of thing back then. That memory made her reach under the covers and pinch at her love handles, then cup the pudge of her belly with both hands.

The gossip in the air that morning at the diner was about Sheriff Flowers’s stepping down. Sam Flowers had been the law in McFalls County since she was a little girl, but something about a bad shooting, him being drunk or something, was forcing the old man into retirement, and the gossip hounds were out in full force. Kate remembered as if it were yesterday how she’d casually formed the words that would change both her and Clayton’s lives. She originally said it as a joke, but the look on Clayton’s face when she said it, as if she’d just solved all the world’s problems with a single sentence, was enough to wish she could freeze time and erase it from his memory.

“You should run, Clayton. You’d make a great sheriff,” she’d said, and after that there was no stopping him. Come November, they both added shiny new accessories to their nightstands—a modest diamond engagement ring for her and a silver sheriff’s badge for him. He ran unopposed and considered that a lucky break, although the whispers that coated the edges of every conversation through the election were that no one dared to run against a Burroughs—even the good one. The next decade was filled with the sleepless nights of a cop’s wife. A cop whose primary goal was to buy back the soul of a family that had grown accustomed to being soulless. And it was her fault.

Kate got out of bed, crossed the room, and laid a towel from the floor over the maddening glow of the clock. She walked to the bathroom and quietly lowered the toilet seat with mild annoyance. She sat down, letting her head fall into her hands. And after that fiasco at Buckley’s funeral? she thought. Is he out of his mind? Buckley had been completely psychotic, as far as Kate was concerned. He scared her more than Halford ever did. If Clayton was the good, and Halford was the bad, then Buckley was the ugly in spades. It didn’t surprise her or anybody else to hear he was shot to death in a gunfight with the police. Buckley was the shoot-first-think-never type, who most likely deserved everything that happened to him, but he was still Clayton’s brother. He was still family, and Clayton had the right to pay his respects, no matter what Halford and the rest of them thought.

Kate was supportive of Clayton’s attending the funeral; she even insisted on being there with him, but even she’d tried to change his mind about wearing his dress uniform. She groaned now and ran her hands from her head to the back of her neck, pressing down on the tense knot of muscle. She pictured him standing in front of the bathroom mirror, decked out in starched polyester with military creases and polished brass, wrestling with a tie for maybe the first time in his life. His well-worn hat was traded in for a stiff-brimmed sheriff’s hat she didn’t even know he owned. Standing in the doorway watching him like that, all she could think about was how this thing—this bad decision—would be the thing that got him killed. He insisted without urging that it was a way to honor his brother and in no way a massive f*ck you to Halford and his cronies, and maybe, deep down, some of that was true, but she knew better. It was Burroughs piss, spite, and ego. Only, he couldn’t see it. None of them ever could. None of them ever thought they were wrong. She could smell the whiskey on him, too, no matter how much mouthwash he swigged to cover it up. She knew if she’d searched the cabinets and drawers, she’d find at least one, if not more, drained half-pint bottles of cheap bourbon. She let it go. She always let it go.