Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

“I know.”

“Okay then. You good for the night? Need anything to drink? Water?”

“No. I’m good. Sully’s got a baby refrigerator down there.”

“You know they got the bad guy, right? That it’s all okay?”

“Sure.”

“Right then. Off to bed with you.” She paused. “What are we doing after your classes tomorrow, after I get here from work?”

“I don’t know. You like horror movies? We could watch horror movies.”

“I’m a girl, so, no. But I’ll give two of them a try to see if maybe I’m wrong. Tell you what. We’ll go to Hawk and Dove-their veggie pizza kills -and then we’ll swing by Blockbuster’s on Eighth. You pick two horror flicks. If I like, we’ll do it again Tuesday. If I don’t, we’ll go back and get two of my pick. Fair?”

“Fair. Sure. Fair.”

The door to the basement squeaked on the hinges, then stopped. Josh, again, tentatively. “Hey. I ask you something? I mean, you mind?”

“No, you can’t do tequila shots at the Hawk.”

Josh laughed, soft, not forced. “No no, that’s not what I was going to ask. See, no. I was going to ask-ah, I mean-do you like Sully?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Nobody. Well. I mean, well, like, you’re staying here and so I just, not that it’s any of my business, but I-”

“You’re right,” she said lightly. “It’s none of your business. But yes. I like Sully. Most of the time. You?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice taking her tone, her inflection. “Most of the time.”

There was a fluttering and then a pop, which Sully recognized as Alexis twirling the dish towel and then snapping it.

“Hey,” Josh said.

“Think of a good movie,” Alexis said, and the kitchen light clicked off.

Sully heard her feet moving and, gently, slowly, closed the bathroom door. He turned on the shower. Other voices, other people in the house. It was different. He liked it.

When he came out, fifteen minutes later, his waist wrapped in a towel, hair still wet, she was already in bed, the lights out. He padded down the hall and across the bedroom, the streetlight outside filtering through the heavy leaves of the cherry tree in front, the blinds, the curtain. The ceiling fan spun slowly, more a thought than an actual breeze. The bed, the furniture was outlined in shadow. He could have walked it in pitch-black darkness. But he liked the pale slats of light that fell in rows across the bed, over Alexis’s stretched-out frame, lying on her side, her back toward the window, her face obscured. He dropped the towel from his waist and slipped into bed, pulling the sheets back up, scrunching up behind her, spooning. She adjusted her back, her legs, to fit into his.

He draped an arm over her side and stopped.

“Woman, what is-”

“One of your T-shirts.”

“ T- shirt? More like a muumuu. Since when did you-”

“There’s a kid in the house.”

He let that sit for a minute, there in the dark, then let a hand roam. “You know, he can’t hear anything way down-”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “No stuff for you.”

“Oh, come on. I’m leaving tomorrow and-”

“Nope.”

“You, you’re serious.”

“You may cuddle.”

“Married people,” he said, “I mean, people with kids, they have sex, you know, with the kid in the house. That’s how people have two kids, three, like that.”

“We’re not married and we don’t have kids. Cuddle or the couch.”

A moment later she said, not even opening her eyes, “My ass doesn’t need cuddling, thank you. Now. Go to sleep and keep your paws off my lady parts.”

HE WAS OUTof the house before first light, not waking anyone, on the plane at National and gone, the plane turning west, away from the sunrise, him feeling light, clean, fast, like a real reporter again.

He leaned into his window seat, watching Appalachia disappear beneath him in the reddish purple light. Then he closed the blind and pulled from his backpack the manila folder of clips about Waters, the articles that the wire services and national and regional papers had filed about his roots. Laying them out on the empty seat next to him, they filled the space with everything but information.

Eddie hadn’t been kidding. Nobody had gotten shit. Waters’s picture from, what, middle school? Notices about his father’s funeral the previous year. Quotes from tribal officials, testifying that Terry, long ago, had been a problematic and then violent child, clearly mentally ill, expelled for attacking a tenth-grade teacher with a knife.

The judge in the case-he was quoted in Elaine’s story-had been inclined to send Terry to a home for troubled youth back then, a reform school, but the father had resisted. He’d said he would take care of it if the judge would release the boy, then sixteen, to him. The judge had reluctantly agreed. Terry had rarely been seen in the two decades since.

The old man, Russell Waters, was known as a hard drinker and an itinerant worker on oil platforms in Oklahoma and Texas. Lived far out on the edges of the res, Waters the elder made it clear that visitors weren’t welcome. The place-a ramshackle brick affair in a picture in the Times -was described as down a state highway, then several miles down a gravel road, then south on a narrower gravel road, and, finally, down a half-mile drive, lined with scrub.

The old man had reportedly come into town now and again for groceries and hardware. Raised a few head of cattle. Sometimes he’d been spotted drinking at the new, sad-sack casino in Stroud. He’d once been arrested for drunk and disorderly in Tulsa. Sully couldn’t blame him. Let him live his entire life in Stroud, Oklahoma? Drunk and disorderly woulda been his hobby.

Mom, the key to Terry’s motive, was apparently long dead.

Nobody ever remembered seeing her, just that Terry was suddenly out there with his dad, hiring local women for help. The local rumor was that she’d died shortly after childbirth, that she was a hooker near one of the oilfields where the old man worked, that she was just a teen, that she was everything but the Virgin Mary. There were no records, no headstone, nothing, not even a name. No known siblings. People said they’d seen Terry in his father’s Ford F-150 on shopping trips into town over the years, but no one was really sure. It might have been a sack of feed thrown into the shotgun seat.

Russell had been dead in the house for several days when his body had been discovered the previous fall, the livestock emaciated. When police showed up, Terry was long gone.

The plane bumped down in Tulsa a little after noon, jolting him from a nap, his papers scattering between his knees and on the floor. Outside the window, the dry plains lay waiting for him, sunny and scorching and rolling, the grass already going brown.

He blew the rental down I-44, taking the outskirts at eighty miles an hour, the cement factories and the cheap motels and gas stations and then the open pastures, the great void of rural America. Lunch was at the Sonic Drive-In in Stroud, midafternoon, the car door open, the wind snapping across the prairie, talking to R.J. on the cell.

“I’m having the chicken and tater tots,” he said. “You put enough ketchup on them, they’re not bad.”

“I’ll never know,” R.J. said.

“What did we have in the paper today?”

“The same thing as the Times , give or take. The bio piece Elaine and Richard had been working on. The house at the end of the road kind of stuff. Waters went mental in high school, or thereabouts, your typical teenage-onset depression, then voices, then things with knives-”

“I was reading that on a printout,” Sully said. “The hell is that, things with knives?”