Dark Places(87)

“There’s stuff in the glove compartment,” Trey said, and Diondra popped it open and began rifling through it. She pulled out an oversized pipe crammed with leaves, the pot spilling everywhere, Trey saying easy now, and then she lit it and toked in, passed it to Trey. Ben reached up a hand—he was almost sick now, so shaky from lack of food, dizzy from the streetlights fluttering—but he wasn’t going to be left out. Trey kept it from him. “Don’t know if you want this, buddy. This is me and Diondra’s thing. Hard-ass weed. I’m serious, Diondra, it may be tonight, I need the power in me, I haven’t felt it in too long. It may have to happen.”

Diondra kept looking up ahead, the snow dizzying.

“Ben might need it too,” Trey pushed.

“Fine, let’s do it then. Take a left up here,” Diondra said.

And when Ben asked what was going on, they both just smiled.





Libby Day





NOW





The sky was an unnatural purple when I left the Lidgerwood bar, bouncing on backroads toward the Superfund site. I wondered what it said about me, that my own father was living at a toxic waste dump and until now I’d neither known nor cared. Grasshopper bait. Bran and molasses and arsenic to help end the grasshopper plague back in the ’30s, and when folks didn’t need it anymore, they just buried it, bags and bags, open-grave-style. Then people got sick.

I wished I had someone with me. Lyle fidgeting in the seat next to me in one of his shrunken jackets. I should have phoned him. In my nervous rush to get down here, I hadn’t told anyone where I was, hadn’t used a credit card since filling up in Kansas City. If anything went wrong, no one would miss me for days. Those guys at the bar would have the only clue to where I’d be, and they didn’t seem like good citizens.

This is ridiculous, I said out loud so I knew it. I shivered when I thought of the reason I was looking for Runner: a goodly amount of people believed he killed the Days. But I still couldn’t make it work in my head, even without the alibi. I had trouble picturing Runner using the axe, in truth. I could see him grabbing a shotgun in a temper— raise, cock, pow—but the axe didn’t fit. Too much work. Plus, he was found at home, asleep and still wasted, the next morning. Runner would have gotten drunk after killing his family, yes. But he wouldn’t have had the discipline to stay put. He’d have gone on the lam, accidentally announcing his guilt to everyone.

The dump site was marked off by cheap metal fencing, jagged holes cut into it. Waist-high weeds grew everywhere like prairie grass, and tiny bonfires flashed in the distance. I drove along the perimeter of the fence, the weeds and loose gravel rattling against the undercarriage of my car more and more insistently until I came to a stop. I closed the car door with a quiet tamp, my eyes on those distant flames. It’d be about a ten-minute tromp to reach the camp. I slipped easily through a wire-snipped hole in the fence to my right, started walking, foxtail swatting my legs. The sky was draining quickly now, the horizon just a cuticle of pink. I realized I was humming “Uncle John’s Band” to myself for no good reason.

Scraggly trees stood in the distance, but for the first few hundred yards it was all rolling, waist-high weeds. Again I was reminded of my childhood, the safe feeling of all that grass grazing your ears and wrists and the insides of your calves, like the plants were trying to soothe you. I took a few loose strides and jammed the point of my boot into a woman’s ribs, actually feeling the bones part as the leather tip slid between them. She had been curled on the ground in a puddle of piss, her arms wrapped around a label-less bottle of liquor. She sat halfway up, groggy, the side of her face and hair caked with mud. She hissed at me with a withered face and beautiful teeth. “Get off me, get off me!”

“What the hell?” I yelled back, taking a scurry of steps away from her, my arms up in the air like I was worried about touching her. I walked briskly on, trying to pretend it hadn’t happened, hoping the woman would pass out again, but she kept yelling after me, between gulps off the bottle: Getoffmegetoffmegetoffme, the screams turning into song turning into weeping.

The woman’s cries aroused the interest of three men, whose faces appeared from behind the crooked copse of trees I was walking toward. Two of them glared at me, belligerent, and the youngest one, a skeletal man maybe in his forties, shot out, running toward me full bore bearing a stick he’d lit on fire. I took two steps back and planted myself.

“Who is it? Who is it?” he yelled. The thin flame of his torch weakened in a gust of wind and blew out as he neared me. The man trotted the last few steps, then stood in front of me, staring limply at the ember and smoke, his machismo turned to sulking with the loss of the fire. “What do you want, you shouldn’t be here, you have to have permission to be here, it’s not OK.” The man was goggle-eyed, smudged everywhere, but his hair was glowing yellow, like a cap, as if it was the one thing he took care of. “It’s not OK,” he said again, more toward the trees than me. I wished then that I’d brought my Colt and wondered when I’d stop being so goddam stupid.

“I’m trying to find a guy by the name of Runner Day.” I didn’t know if my dad had bothered with an alias, but I assumed even if he had, he’d have forgotten by his third or eighth beer. I was right.

“Runner? What do you want with Runner? He steal something from you? What’d he take? He took my watch and he won’t give it back.” The man slouched into himself like a child, picked at a loose button at the bottom of his shirt.