Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Darkness had fallen. She flicked on the porch light. They walked out in the yard-people had yards out here, not lawns-Sully making a few last bits of small talk about Jasper and coyotes. There was a light on a utility pole by her brother’s house. It had come on, an orange, sodium-vapor glow that cast shadows. He thanked her once more as Jasper trotted out to his car, lifted a leg on the rear wheel, then came back to him, expectant.

“It’s like that now?” he said, shaking his head at the dog. “And here I was, thinking we were friends.”

He had made it from the yard into the road, the gravel crunching under his feet, when he heard her voice.

“Mister,” she called out.

He turned, looked. She was standing at the base of the steps.

“Don’t come back. You,” she waved her hands faintly, “you have a darkness to you. It is not my way. If you put my name in your newspaper? My brothers, they will come to Washington.”

He nodded, raising a hand, believing it down to his bones. The lady didn’t know bullshit existed. When he opened the car door, his right foot on the floorboard, the left one still on the gravel, he stopped.

He looked back-she was still watching, there beneath the porch light-and said, “I didn’t tell you they, the guy, whoever shot my mother, wasn’t caught. You said it wasn’t known, though, who did it. How, how did you know that?”

She looked at him. For a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to reply. Then she shrugged and turned to go inside. “You are here,” she said.

THE WATERS’ DRIVEWAYseemed longer in the dark, the rutted tracks turning off the gravel, into the weeds, the headlights raking the high grass, the lone tree looking like a spectral apparition, its fingers clawing at something just out of reach. Once the car was over the small rise and he could see the way ahead-the grass was beaten down from when he’d come by earlier-he cut the lights and switched off the ignition. After a moment, when his eyes had adjusted, he took a small flashlight from his backpack and got out.

Terry Waters, dead and in the ground? Let’s see. Let’s just fucking see.

The full moon, brilliant and unbroken by clouds, loomed above. Houses lay dotted across the prairie, lights twinkling in the wind, three quarters of a mile or more distant. Three, maybe four places, far, far down the road. Still, if those houses could be spotted at this distance, that also meant his car lights could be seen. The last thing he wanted was a rancher seeing lights at the old Waters place and coming to check it out, shotgun in hand.

A breeze came up. Sully could feel it on his skin, hear it sighing, see it ruffling the long high grass that spread for miles in front of him. Ahead, the house at the end of the driveway, the old barns, appeared as dark lumps on a silver horizon.

He kept his steps on the car tracks from earlier. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Elaine Thornton. It was that you couldn’t trust anybody. You couldn’t believe anything. Not even people’s names, their identity. Look at the mess he was in now. People put on faces for the world to see. They lied about everything, all day and particularly at night. It was a descriptive of the species.

Shadows of the house and barns deepened and took shape as he drew closer. He looked up at the cloudless sky above and pictured it looking down at him, from hundreds, thousands of feet above: the land below vague, dark, moonlight glinting off the lakes, the streets. The trees and woods filled in as darker shadows. Little winking dots of yellow-the houses, the people inside leading lives that no one would really know about or remember, just some of the human beings who had come onto the face of the Earth after the invention of electricity. Before that, the world had fallen featureless in the darkness, only the glow of fire and torches.

Now, lights of cities and towns beat back the darkness on a massive scale, hot, bright spots that showed up in the low reaches of orbit. Then his mind’s eye swept backward at some fantastic speed until the Earth was just a little blue ball bouncing in the blackness of space, receding until it was a just a pin dot of light in the sky, infinitesimal and insignificant.

That is who we are and what we are , he thought, walking through the grass.

Millions of lives teeming on the head of a pin, the universe neither concerned nor vindictive nor compassionate. It just went on and on and on because that was what it did. People-they were just one little self-regarding species on one planet. They died and the universe was indifferent. It didn’t mean anything. It was like drowning in the ocean. The ocean wasn’t trying to drown you. It was just being the ocean. You got out of the water, fine; you got eaten by sharks, fine; you drowned, fine. It didn’t matter as far as the ocean went.

That was life on Earth. It killed you without thinking.

And now he brought his gaze down to the dark house in front of him, the breeze gusting, running invisible fingers through his hair.

The house was indifferent, too. It was indifferent to the hope and lives that had been lived and ended inside it. There would have been the warmth of the days when Terry had been born, the early years. Surely there had been some good times, some nights that darkness had settled over them all, Russell and Marissa in bed and their son in his crib, the plains quiet, dark, somnolent. Russell would have dreamed the great dream of peace and quiet nights and long days of the family, here, close, quiet, the star-specked canopy of darkness hovering above them. The long cold nights of silence and breathing, safe, together, a family, the future spilling out in front of them. Russell Waters, a man who would later shoot the beautiful child asleep in the crib, would have closed his eyes and drawn his breath slower, slower, until sleep overtook them all.

Sully stepped over the narrow concrete pavement and moved under the eaves. He moved from light to dark in the yawning maw of the door.

Silence. Not even the scurrying of rats. A pale light shone through the windows onto the warped linoleum. It fell over the kitchen sink. Shuffling his feet deeper into the darkness, the feeling came over him, rushing up his spine and over his scalp-the pulse and the feel and the rotting flesh of the place, the blast of the gun, dead voices landing in his ear, the desperate father and the deranged son, yelling, vicious, biting, trapped here for weeks and months and years. The great dream of peace, corrupted by the American nightmare of murder and blood. The comforting darkness melted into black despair.

The long hours of the night were the worst because they were exiled together in the house at the end of the road, each in his own isolation, nothing waiting for them, no hope, no wonder, no joy, no possibility of things getting better and brighter. There was only the slow augering into the earth, of waiting for the day when they would be lowered into the mud and dirt, left to decay among worms and sightless insects.

Did the gunshot that killed his son echo in Russell’s head every time he walked in the house afterward? Did he see the grotesque obscenity of his beautiful son’s body, blown open and seeping blood, lying in the hallway, every time he walked to the bedroom? Seeing his fingers trembling with their last flickers of life?

Amputees had phantom pain, arms and legs that were no longer there yet still itched. Russell Waters shot his child to death right here. Then he lived another seven years in the same house. The phantom pain of his child’s death, the loss of his embrace, of his love, and of the possibilities of what he might have become-all this melted into a pool of gore and blood on the linoleum.

If Elaine Thornton was telling the truth, leaving the police out of it but leaving Russell here was, in its own way, a prison term and a death sentence. He would have had to clean up his son’s flesh and tissue and fluids, mopping, soaking, disinfecting, then bury it all in a glop in the backyard.