Jay Lake - Rocket Science

He picked up his coffee and slurped at it, collecting his thoughts. “That’s theft, Vernon. Felonious assault. Probably half a dozen other charges I can’t think of right now. But somebody will. Look, I’m not saying it was you and I’m not saying it wasn’t, but there’s only one blue Cadillac convertible in Augusta.”

The walls were closing in on me, but I had to try. That Ollie had come out here, on his own apparently, to speak to me unofficially, meant I had a chance of persuading him.

“Ollie…” How to make him believe me? The truth had become so complicated that I didn’t understand it myself any more. “Doc Milliken gave the car to me, told me to keep it for the weekend, right after you and Deputy Truefield left his house last night. I needed it because you had impounded my Hudson for evidence.”

Ollie shook his head. “Sheriff Hauptmann took your Hudson right before dark. He had me sign it over to him, said he was going to return it to you.”

Before dark? That was before he showed up at Doc Milliken’s house. How could Hauptmann have even known about the Hudson being impounded unless he was involved in the attack on Dad? Ollie might have called him before coming after me, but I doubted it.

Not if he thought Dad’s life was in danger. Which it had been.

The evidence was hardly airtight, but I was beginning to have a pretty good idea why Dad disappeared on the way to Wichita. I’d bet good money that Truefield never even left town with Dad. Either Dad was dead, or they’d hidden him somewhere in Butler County under Hauptmann’s jurisdiction. Butler County was the biggest county in Kansas, so that covered a lot of ground.

“Vernon,” Ollie said. “Are you going to say anything in your defense? Please give me something I can use. Something I can check out on my own and show to Chief Davis.”

Mr. Bellamy shook his head at me, but I thought I could trust Ollie. He seemed so square, so willing to help. And I’d known him for years — not as long as the Bellamys, but Ollie was a lot more on the level than they were right now. Mr. Neville’s angry glare told me all I needed to know about how level the Bellamys were. Or maybe had ever been.

“I ran over Captain Markowicz in Doc Milliken’s Cadillac. I thought he was—” I stopped as Mr. Neville coughed, while Mr. Bellamy tried to glare me into silence. What did Ollie know about the Nazis?

“Thought he was what?” asked Ollie gently.

It was hard to figure out what I could say, especially in front of Mr. Bellamy and Mr. Neville. I’d already admitted to assaulting a military officer. “I thought he was trying to kill me,” I said.

It sounded weak, even to my ears. Ollie obviously didn’t buy it. “Vernon, there’s something strange going on.”

That was a masterful understatement.

Ollie went on. “Running over a crippled guy with a car — that just doesn’t sound like you.”

“Crippled? There was nothing wrong with him until I hit him with the Cadillac.”

“Vernon, Captain Markowicz has a broken arm. I mean, he had it before he met you.”

That broken arm again. “I think there might be two Captain Markowiczes around. The one I ran over didn’t have a broken arm — no sling, no cast, and he was waving his hands like crazy when he bounced off the hood.” Good Lord, I sounded like a thug. “Sheriff Hauptmann said the guy with the broken arm isn’t the real Captain Markowicz.”

Of course, Hauptmann also said the real Captain Markowicz was dead in Kansas City. Either Hauptmann was lying, which I was perfectly willing to believe at this point, or the red-haired man I mowed down with the Cadillac had experienced a miraculous recovery from his broken arm. A third alternative was that he was a second impostor.

But he had been worried about a search warrant. That sounded like a real cop to me.

Ollie frowned. “The Markowicz I talked to was wearing a sling… and I thought he had a cast. What did the fellow you ran over look like?”

“That’s enough boys,” interrupted Mr. Bellamy. “I think its time for Ollie to be leaving. Vernon’s tired, and there’s a lot to think about. Floyd, please show Ollie to the door.”

Ollie stood up without saying anything more. He stared at me for a moment. I felt ashamed, never realizing how much I’d valued Ollie’s good opinion of me. And I didn’t know why Mr. Bellamy had cut us off, beyond an obvious distrust of cops on the part of an old moonshiner. He’d brought the gang in, so there was more than met the eye here, too. As I mused, Floyd took Ollie’s arm and walked him out through the living room.

“What was that all about?” I asked, turning to Mr. Bellamy.

“Don’t you worry,” he said. “This’ll all get squared away. You need some rest.” He was still holding his shotgun. I took his point.

It was obvious I wasn’t going to get any answers out of Mr. Bellamy. Whoever he’d become, or more to the point, gone back to being, was someone I didn’t like. That made me sad. At the same time, I wondered how he had kept this side of himself hidden from me all these years.

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll get cleaned up and go back to sleep.” It was time for another trip to the outhouse, before full dark. Armed men on the roof or not, I figured I could lay in bed and try to figure a way to find Dad and get us both out of this whole mess.

I went into the kitchen and grabbed a candle, because I don’t like to do my business in the dark. I lit it off a safety match and headed for the back door. That was when it struck me that the pig’s blood had been cleaned this morning without any help from me. That was one chore Floyd hadn’t managed to pawn off. I smiled at the thought of Floyd actually doing work. It was so unlike him.

The sheer ordinariness of it all made me feel a little better about the Bellamys, even in the face of all of today’s weirdness.

Outside it was twilight. The crickets stirred in the fields, and one of the heifers was lowing. Before I went into the outhouse, I turned to look at the farmhouse again. The man on the roof was in silhouette. It looked like he was watching me, but in the near-darkness I wasn’t sure which way he was pointing. I didn’t wave. Neither did he.

Inside the outhouse, my candle guttered in the draft from the cracks in the door and the walls. This place was hellish in the winter, I knew from bitter experience. I’d actually chapped my butt cheeks staying out here one weekend back in primary school.

In the flickering candlelight, the seat looked dirty. I didn’t want to think about which old man had come down here with his colitis or whatever it was. “The Bellamy Gang strikes again,” I muttered as I tore off another page of Sears and wiped down the edge of the board. As I dropped the page through the hole, I noticed something big and pale in the pool beneath.

Pork fat, I told myself, strips taken from the hog. But who threw pork fat in the cesspool? You could make cracklings, feed it to the chickens or the pigs, render it down for soap. I was jumpy every way there was from Sunday, nothing going the way it should. I wasn’t about to hang my bottom over a hole with something mysterious in it.

Breathing through my wide-open mouth, I got down on my knees and stuck the candle through the wooden seat, pressing my face up the rim. My forearms crushed my ear, and the stench of cesspool literally made me flinch. The smell was everything I had come to know and love about a Kansas outhouse, and worse.

I peered down at the pool. The candle wavered as I tried not to let the flame get too close to my face, casting wide shadows on the clay walls of the pit and across the turgid dampness below. It was hard to see, but there was definitely something tall and pale rising out of the brown liquid. Whatever it was, it was big. The entire hog?