Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

She looked at him, her eyes moving over his scars, returning to his.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

She piled pasta, then spooned some ground beef in a thick red sauce over it, onto one plate, then another, set them both on the table, produced silverware, tore off paper towels and handed one to him, a napkin. She sat, a hand flicking her hair back over her shoulders.

“Then you know. He was a mess. I asked Russell what happened. He had, he had been taking care of Terry since forever. Marissa, that was the mother, she wasn’t shit.”

“Nobody else seems to know anything about her, even her name.”

“I saw her. Twice, I think it was.”

“Do you know what happened to her? Terry-this guy in D.C.-said somebody killed her.”

“That’s some happy horseshit. I don’t know and Terry didn’t neither. She lived down in Texas. She was white. Maybe from the panhandle. You can like the panhandle if you want but I say it ain’t shit. Russell worked at an oil rig down there for a spell. Something was wrong with Terry from the get-go. Marissa cut bait when he wasn’t but a pup. Russell brought him up here. By the first grade, second, he was clearly off. Schizophrenic, you ask me in my professional sense. People in Stroud, though, they’ve told you and the others about what he’d do to animals.”

“Yes.”

“So Russell brought him back home after all the trouble in town. What else could he do? Send him to the state? Abandon him? Cuss Russell, but the man wasn’t a quitter. Blood was blood. He kept that boy, difficult as he was. People in town, they will tell you that Russell never brought Terry into town.”

“I heard that.”

She blew air through her nose, not quite a snort, twirling her fork around the spaghetti. “They won’t tell you that they told him not to bring him into town, warned him. I don’t know if it’s better somewhere else, but people here, they’re scared of mental sickness. Terry frightened people. People told stories. Kids. Legends. Anytime animals turned up dead, Terry was said to have done it. The talk, you wouldn’t believe. He was a shape-shifter, he walked with the spirits, he drank human blood, he ran with the wolves.”

“He was the Thing in the Dark.”

She looked at him again, appraising. “Yes. The thing. The bogie man. The thing that moves in darkness. The terror of the night. So Russell wound up staying home with him. He’d take the odd day job every now and then. That’s why he had the fence around the house, did you know that? He’d let Terry keep the door open and he could go out or not. He’d have me look in on him. I stayed over there a handful of times while Russell worked out of state. Can’t imagine what it must have been like, the years going on like that, the two of them alone.”

“There’s a story,” Sully said, forcing himself to eat, his mind reeling, trying to keep the story straight for later, “that Russell kept him tied up with a rope.”

“Fairy tales,” she said softly. “There wasn’t no rope. There was that fence, a pen, attached to the back of the house.”

“But medication,” Sully said. “You said you thought it was schizophrenia. There’s Thorazine, there’s newer stuff. You’re a nurse. You would have told him about that.”

“Told isn’t convincing. Russell didn’t understand what was wrong with Terry any more than anyone else. I got a psychiatrist from the hospital to come out to the house one time. He prescribed him something, I don’t know, and Terry took about three of them and went berserk and Russell dropped it.”

Sully, carefully watching Elaine, was making sure to eat as much as she did, and at the same pace, more or less. People got touchy about hospitality.

“But, whatever it was that last day,” she said, “Terry tried to stab Russell. He got a knife and came after him. Russell dodged him and knocked the knife out of his hand, or so he told me, standing there in the hallway of his house, Terry dead on the floor. They fought and rolled over and Russell got away from him to get the shotgun in the bedroom. He came out and Terry had the knife again and came at him. So he shot him.”

She stopped talking, as abruptly as she’d started. She went back to her spaghetti. Sully was getting used to her conversational style, if that was the word. No wedding ring. He surmised that was one of her brothers’ trailers next door. That led to an educated guess that she had never married rather than divorced. That would be one tough hombre if there had been a husband.

“Russell, he have any cuts on him, like that?”

She didn’t look up. “You think Russell, he was lying? That he shot Terry to be rid of him?”

“It’s not what I said.”

“It’s what you meant.”

He hitched his shoulders slightly, letting the question hang.

She swallowed her bite of spaghetti and finished the rest of the bourbon. Ten seconds went by, fifteen. “Russell wasn’t bleeding, if that’s what you’re asking, least not that I could tell. The house was so turned upside down and Russell so, so staggered that it didn’t occur to me. Still don’t. He didn’t say Terry cut him and he didn’t say he didn’t. He said he came at him with a knife.”

“Okay. That’s okay. It’s sort of beside the point.”

“Russell was wore out. There was no end in sight. It was just going to go on forever until one of them died, then the other. He looked like he was about to fall over himself. I said, ‘What you want to do, Russell? Call the police?’ And he sat down and did not say anything for a long time. He just kept looking at Terry. And then he said, ‘No.’”

“And I said, after a while, ‘Okay.’ I knew what he meant. I knew what he meant to do. They had a family plot there, in the narrow band of trees not far from the house. Mother. Father. Some others. I asked where the shovels were. I said I would help him dig but that I would not help him clean the house. He had only one shovel. I walked home and got mine and my older brother was here and I got him and we went back. Russell was already digging. The ground was not hard yet.”

Sully nodded, sat back in the chair, looked at her, looked over at Jasper. After a while, she started talking again.

“A sheet. He brought him out and laid him on the ground in a sheet. He never said nothing. He laid Terry on the ground and hugged him. Held him for the longest. Almost laid on top of him to do it. Then we laid Terry in the grave. Russell got the shovels. We finished in a few minutes. It was getting dark. I remember it was getting dark.

“Usually, we sit up with our dead, all night. People cook, bring things. There is a hut for this, a ceremonial kind of shed, at the res. I don’t know that he would have taken him there under any circumstance, people had exiled him so. But you sit up all night, that is the tradition. In the morning, when the sun rises, the spirit is thought to be free of the body. You take the body through the door that opens to the west. Then there is the burial. I think this bothered Russell, that Terry did not have this. I think he was in shock and buried him before he thought about it.

“My brother and I, we left after Terry was in the ground. Russell built a fire. He sat there with the boy, in the ground, by the fire, all night. I say that because when I came back the next morning, he was asleep on the ground, on top of the grave. He did this several times a year. I would go by to see him, bring him vegetables from our garden. And there would be a fire ring out by the plot. Sometimes smoke, sometimes not.”

“Is there a tombstone, a marker?”

“A star. A copper, silver sort of star, like a sheriff’s badge. It had no name on it. He nailed it to the nearest tree. I don’t know why. Perhaps it meant something to the boy.”