Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

Shad decided to ignore it, and soon the embarrassed look slid from Jake’s face. It occasionally took folks a minute or two to realize they had nothing to feel remorseful about in front of an ex-con.

A chuckle eased from Jake, filled with a certain nastiness but not his own. “Heard about what happened to your friend Zeke Hester. I thought you said you weren’t looking to get sent back to the joint.”

“I’m not.”

“You probably shouldn’t have left a good old boy like Griff as a witness then. He hates to talk unless it’s about the Normandy Invasion or something that happened out in front of his store.”

Left a witness. Like Shad was robbing the place and should’ve used a shotgun on anybody who saw him. “All that matters is what Zeke said.”

“Zeke didn’t say anything,” Jake told him. “He sure can blubber like a little girl though.”

“Throws like one too.”

Jake’s torso trembled with silent laughter, holding it in where it belonged because one day he might have to make a choice, and Zeke Hester was always going to be his neighbor. The curl flipped over Jake’s eye one way, and the breeze hiked it back the other. He acted like he was about to tell secrets again, leaned in, but didn’t say anything for a minute. His cooler sat nearby in the hay and he gestured toward it. “Want a beer?”

“No thanks.”

“I can’t go with whiskey every day and night like the old days.”

“Anybody who tries isn’t worth much before long.”

It was the truth, but having it laid out like that took Jake back a step, as if Shad might suddenly be judging.

Maybe they were all losing their slickness. Christ, you couldn’t say any damn thing without offending somebody. He didn’t know when everyone in town had gotten so sensitive, and couldn’t decide if he’d hardened up too far to simply make regular conversation now. The things you had to worry about.

Jake squinted at him an extra second and broke into a grin. He still had every tooth in his head, so he hadn’t started down the road yet. “Jesus, you haven’t lightened up half an inch since the other night. I thought after you were home a while you’d have settled back in.”

“I’ve got too much on my mind,” Shad said. “Sorry if it puts me out of sorts. Tell me… what do you know about Luppy’s wife?”

Chickens squawked and two angry hogs roamed by searching out the fallen corn kernels. Lament whined from the passenger seat, tried to loose a bark but was still too young.

“Callie’s sharp, has a nice way about her. Young still, but mature. And I’m not only talking about her body, which is fine, you understand. She can lighten your load just by standing near you. She’s smart, and grasps exactly how to keep Joe on his best behavior. He hardly drinks anymore, and you recall what kind of a miscreant he could be when he was tappin’ the jug too much.”

Luppy used to get drunk and sit naked on the porch with an eleven-gauge pump. He’d fire into the darkness at the smallest noise and claim he was aiming at gophers. He’d wounded two of his employees that way. One lost the tip of his left pinkie, and the other took thirty stitches in the buttocks and wore the flattened shot in a locket around his neck as a kind of good luck charm.

You found providence wherever you could, even if you had to pull it out of your ass.

“You ever see my sister out this way?” Shad asked.

“Here on the farm? Mags? What in the hell would she be doing out this way?”

“Someone said she and this girl Callie were friends.”

“Not that I ever noticed.”

“They were in Preacher Dudlow’s Youth Ministry together.”

You couldn’t help but come full circle when you were dealing with such a tight circuit. It was no different than when you were making a break for the county line. No matter what back road you took, you eventually hit the river, the gorge, or the highway. You couldn’t do ninety across the hollow for more than ten minutes before you had to turn around and go back again.

Jake lit a cigarette. The fumes from the vat caught high above and a blue burst of flame scurried wildly through the air. There were men all over town whose eyebrows would never grow back. “I know Callie used to stop in there on occasion, help Mrs. Swoozie bake pies for the church sales. Go clean out some of the river shacks and sell odd goods at the parking lot flea market.”

With a whimper, Lament hopped into the driver’s seat, stuck his paws up on the steering wheel like he wanted to drop into fourth gear and rip the hell out of there. Smart dog, all right.

The pigs squealed and circled closer and closer, agitated, noticing something.

His field of vision began to narrow. He blinked but nothing changed, except the night came pushing in, pressing forward as if coming for him. The whole world began to darken. This was new. He took a deep breath and drew a trail of smoke off Jake’s cigarette into his face. He felt another presence near him, possibly even watching him from the fields.

Lament pawed the horn twice and Shad’s eyes cleared. He snapped to attention as if somebody had pressed a shiv into his kidney.

“Go on in,” Jake told him. “You know the way. She ain’t the edgy type.”

Shad walked across the yard noticing marks in the flattened grass where federal helicopters had landed this week. The other men eyed him and nodded and kept on going about their work, loading the plastic jugs into the backs of pickups, the blockers working on their engines.

If Mags had come around here, what would she have thought of all this? The heat intensified and inched across the back of his neck, and the hinges of his jaw began to ache. Was this where her death had started? Whatever had led her up Gospel Trail?

He stepped to the door of the Anson house and suddenly wanted to talk to his father, put this off for a while and get back to the old man. He didn’t know why.

Lament honked again.

Luppy’s door was always open. Shad stuck his head in, glanced around.

She was sitting at the kitchen table poring over papers, looking very much like his sister had when Megan was busy doing homework.

Eighteen or so, with willowy blond hair like layered lace adorning her shoulders. She had intense, dark eyes that drew your attention directly to them, even if she wasn’t staring at you. They shone like black gems. She wore jeans and a white cable-knit sweater that also reminded him of Mags more than it should have, but perhaps it was good to keep the dead in mind now.

Callie Anson got up and walked across the kitchen carrying a checkbook and bills, frowning as if she didn’t like the numbers she kept coming up with. She threw everything down with an aggravated huff of air.

Shad could imagine what Luppy’s bank account must look like. For years he’d followed his grandfather’s tradition of burying cash in mason jars around the farm. Luppy used to keep intricate maps drawn on graph paper, but one rainy season half his property flooded out, and he lost eighteen grand to the mud. If Luppy Joe was keeping his money in the bank now, he probably had a dozen scattered accounts, funds going in and out of them arbitrarily.

She bustled into the hall, came around toward the living room, and spotted Shad taking up space in the doorway. A breeze washed in around him and her hair whisked about her chin.

Without any show of alarm, she peered over his shoulder and saw Jake still working out there with the wooden slat, the other men crossing the yard to the barn. She was reassured that they’d let Shad through.

She drew to her full height, nearly six foot, as tall as Luppy, and asked, “Who are you?”

“My name’s Jenkins. Shad Jenkins.” He tried to give a disarming grin but wasn’t sure it was coming along the way he hoped.