Armand hunched over to turn the radio down a notch. “He snitch on you or what?”
“No, I was clean, right out of the joint with this new identity they gave me . . . Wait a minute. Shit, this is weird. You ask me what was my first time and right away I think of this guy Kevin I knew from before. But there was the guy at Terre Haute, my cellmate. Some guys wanted him taken out, so they slip me a knife and say if I don’t kill him they’re gonna kill me. So I did. But then when I was brought up I laid it on those guys, testified in court I saw the one guy cut my cellmate’s throat. He got like ninety-nine years added on to the ninety-nine he was doing and I got transferred out. Maybe by testifying I talked myself into believing it wasn’t me that cut the guy. You know what I’m saying? So I don’t remember it as my first one. Or it was ’cause I used a knife, I don’t know. Then when I got my release it was this guy Kevin I knew hired me to repossess cars and shit. This one time—listen to this—I had to go in a nursing home and repossess a wheelchair, this battery-run tri-cart, they cost just under twenty-five hundred. I have to lift this cripple woman out of it, put her in bed, she’s going ‘Oh, please, I have multiple scarosis, I can’t get around without my wheelchair.’ Man, I hated to do it, but she was three months behind. What was I suppose to do? I had car payments, rent—see, I was back with Laurie, that’s my wife, I’d hardly seen her in four years. She said it broke her heart to visit me in the joint, so she didn’t come too much.”
Armand turned the radio off, getting rid of that irritating noise. Richie looked at him and Armand said, “What about this guy Kevin?”
“I was just getting to him. See, here’s Kevin, he finds out I’m being sent up he tells me he’ll look after Laurie, if she got sick or anything, as a friend.”
“I can see it coming,” Armand said.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think nothing about it till one night me and Kevin are in this bar after work and right out of nowhere he goes, ‘I want you to know something. I never fucked Laurie while you were in prison, not once.’ I start to think, well, shit, what’d he tell me that for if he didn’t? It must mean he did.”
“Sure he did,” Armand said. “How you gonna stop him, you’re doing time.”
“I go home ask Laurie, ‘You ever go to bed with Kevin?’ Her eyes get big, she goes, no, she swears she never did. I hit her a few times, she still claims she never did, swears to it on her Bible. Okay, I’m thinking, maybe they didn’t. Couple of days later I come home, she’s gone, cleared out with all her stuff. What does that tell you?”
“We’re coming to the road where you turn, before you get to that little airport,” Armand said. “Sure, she’s scared you’re gonna find out the truth. She was betraying you.”
“And Kevin was fucking her, he musta been. I decide I’d get me a gun and settle the score with him.”
“So he was your first one,” Armand said, “as you like to see it.”
Richie didn’t say anything making the left turn onto a hard-packed gravel road, got the Daytona straightened out to head through country, past empty fields, and started to grin as he looked at Armand. “You aren’t gonna believe this. There was another one before Kevin. See, I quit my job, I didn’t want to have nothing to do with him till I got myself a gun and stuck it in his face. Man, it tore me up. Here I was working, I had a new name, I was James Dudley, I was clean. I think of it now, the only job I ever had in my life was in the repo business and what’s that but legal stealing. I said, shit, go on back to your trade, what’s the difference, you can’t trust nobody anyway. So I picked up a thirty-eight, not the one I got now, a cheap one—Detroit, you can get any kind of piece you want, buy it off a schoolkid. Okay, I’m ready to go see Kevin. I think I’m ready, but you know what? I never shot anybody before. I was gonna shoot that migrant, the one I picked up in Georgia, but I never got a chance to. I’m thinking, I want to be cool when I shoot Kevin, I want to know what’s gonna happen. See, I needed cash too, so what I did, I practiced on the guy in the grocery store I held up, little greaseball-looking guy, you seen ’em. Anyway I put three in him and I think, Hey, nothing to it. Aim and squeeze, right? I forgot what I scored, not a whole lot. So by the time I got to Kevin—I caught him in the office late, ‘Hi, Kev, how you doing?’ and put five in him to make sure—he was actually my third. Though I still think of him, I don’t know why, as my first. Weird, huh?”
Armand didn’t say anything.
This guy was crazy. Armand remembered his first one like it was yesterday, the Italian coming into the barbershop, offering them a job saying, “The Degas brothers, stick-up guys, ‘ey? Think you’re tough . . .”
They came to an intersection, a stop sign showing in the Daytona’s headlights, the crossroad dark both ways. Richie went through it without slowing down.
Armand didn’t say anything.
He was watching now for the road ahead of them to begin curving to the left, remembering the last time they drove to the ironworker’s house and Richie wouldn’t do what he was told, drove past the house to take a look and when they made the U-turn and approached from this direction, Armand remembered, he’d had the same thoughts then as he did now. That he was going to end up shooting Richie before this was over or right after. Something would come up between them . . .
“The house is just around this curve.”
“I know it.”
He knew everything in that tone he thought was cool.
“Then slow down,” Armand said.
The headlights swept over a sod field and they were close now, the ironworker’s place coming up on the left, beyond that mass of trees. Armand looked for cars as Richie braked and let the Dodge coast toward the house, Richie saying it didn’t look like anybody was home, or else they were in the sack already. Armand sat hunched close to the smoked-glass windshield. There was something in the yard he didn’t remember from the other time. He hit Richie’s arm, telling him, “Pull over.”
“Where?”
“By the house. Aim the lights at it.”
Richie cut the wheel and came to a stop, headlights shining on dark windows, and there, in the front yard, a Nelson Davies FOR SALE sign.
Armand sat back in the seat trying to think—telling himself it didn’t mean they were gone, you don’t move till you sell your house—but it was hard to think with Richie talking about the goddamn real estate man, saying there he was again, saying it was like starting all over, it was like this was where he came in, seeing that sign. Finally he shut up. It was quiet for a while in the car.
Till Richie said, “Well, shit, what do we do now, Bird?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Yeah, but they’re gone.”
“Listen to me,” Armand said. “You listening to me? Don’t worry about it.”
13
* * *
IN THE CAPE GIRARDEAU LITERATURE the Marshals Service gave them it said that “You can walk down a busy street with a smile on your face and people will speak to you, not necessarily because they know you; but, because you look like somebody they would like to know. And, if you give them the opportunity, they will take the time to know you.”
Carmen read that part and imagined a person stopping her on the street saying, “Hi, you look like a person I’d like to know. You’re new in town, aren’t you? Where are you from?” She answers, “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. We’re in the Federal Witness Security Program, hiding from some people who want to kill us.” And the person says, “Oh, uh-huh. Yeah, well, have a nice day.” She read the part to Wayne the night before they left home and he said, “Jesus Christ, you sure you want to go?”
Seven hundred miles later they had their first look at Cape Girardeau separately, Carmen in the Cutlass following Wayne’s pickup across the bridge from the Illinois side. It looked nice from this view, a picture-postcard town with church steeples, a courthouse on the hill, lots of trees. But what was that wall for, along the river? A concrete wall about twenty feet high. The wall fascinated Carmen,
adding a touch of drama to the postcard look.
They came off the bridge and into the business district, Wayne looking for a street, Carmen following, getting a feel of the place. It seemed kept up, there were new buildings and blocks of old ones that had been gentrified. The chamber of commerce literature said it was a friendly town of sixty thousand with a university campus and a big new shopping center called West Park Mall. Procter & Gamble was here, Florsheim Shoes, Lone Star Industries with a cement plant, Cape Barge Line & Drydock . . . The tallest building was the KFVS-TV Tower—there, Carmen saw it rising about twelve stories above the downtown area, a sight that might give Wayne hope. They drove past a long climb of steps leading to the courthouse and down the hill to the concrete wall that ran along Water Street.
Carmen parked at the curb behind Wayne’s pickup, the bed loaded with household stuff and covered with a tarp. She got out of the car stiff and tired. They had left Algonac at four in the morning, still dark, sneaked out with U.S. marshals escorting them to the interstate and maybe beyond, Carmen wasn’t sure. Now they were to contact a Deputy Marshal J. D. Mayer, who would show them to their new home and help them get settled. Carmen walked over to Wayne, standing with his hands shoved into the back pockets of his jeans.
“What’re we doing now?”
“Did you happen to notice Broadway?”
“I think we passed it, one block over.”
“I must’ve been looking up at all the two-story high-rises and missed it,” Wayne said. “I’ll call him, but he’s probably gone home, it’s after five.”
Carmen took off her sweater. It was at least twenty degrees warmer here than in Michigan. Wayne hadn’t moved. He was looking up at the wall, just on the other side of railroad tracks and a line of young trees, the wall’s tan surface shaded by the storefronts across Water Street.
“You know what it’s for?”
Carmen said, “I guess to keep the river out.”
“Or keep people in. It looks like a prison.”
“Well, it’s different.”
“You get a good look at the river, coming over?”
“How could you miss it?”
“Did you notice a cape?”
“I’m not sure what one looks like.”
“I don’t see why they call it the mighty Mississippi. It’s muddy, yeah, but I wouldn’t call it mighty. The St. Clair River’s wider, and it’s blue. It’s a lot better-looking. I’m glad I didn’t bring the boat.”
“Are you gonna call the marshal?”
“Right now. There’s probably nothing but catfish in that river. You like catfish?”
“I’ve never had it.”
“It’s like carp. You ever had carp?”
“Go call him, will you?”
Carmen watched him cross the street toward a restaurant decked out with a green awning. It looked nice. So far she had a good feeling about being here, in a new place. Maybe they’d love it and want to stay. Three weeks didn’t seem like enough time, not to make a major decision that could change your life. Carmen walked to the corner, to an opening in the concrete wall that was almost as wide as the street that came into it from down the hill. It could be a town in a foreign country.
She stepped into the opening. A giant metal door was hinged to the outside of the wall, where pavement sloped gradually to beds of broken rock along the banks of the river. No, the river didn’t appear especially mighty, it looked old to Carmen, about a half mile across to cottonwoods on the Illinois side. A boat pushing flat barges was coming this way from the bridge, out there in the middle not making a sound: a stubby kind of boat that resembled a tug but was much taller. Carmen had never seen one like it before. Moving all those barges, about fifteen of them, tied together three abreast and extending way out in front of the boat.
Carmen turned, looking at the wall from the riverside now, at the massive door they would swing closed when that quiet river rose over its banks, thinking, They didn’t build a wall like this for show.
She said to Wayne, coming across the street from the restaurant, “You know what this is? A floodgate. It’s my first one. You want to see how high the river rises? They have marks up there by the opening, and dates, almost to the top. I’d call that a fairly mighty river.”
Wayne looked up, but didn’t appear interested.
“The girl says Deputy Marshal J. D. Mayer isn’t in the office. I ask her where I can get in touch with him. We go back and forth, it takes about ten minutes to find out Deputy Marshal J. D. Mayer isn’t in ’cause he’s on leave of absence and the man in charge now is Deputy Marshal F. R. Britton. I said, well, then tell F. R. Britton that W. M. Colson has just come seven hundred miles to have a word with him, if he isn’t too busy. She says, after all this, he isn’t there, he’s out to the house. I ask her, you mean his house? No, he’s out to our house and we can catch him if we hurry. You believe it? Instead of telling me right away. Nine-fifty Hillglade Drive. I ask her, just where is that, please, and she says, ‘Out toward Cape Rock off Riverview,’ like, where else could it be? Off Riverview, asshole, don’t you know nothing?”
Carmen said, “Are you gonna be a grouch? If you are, let’s go home.”
She thought 950 Hillglade Drive sounded nice.
On the way there Carmen caught glimpses of the river from high up through the trees, seeing it flat gray, desolate. That’s the Mississippi? Wayne had a point, it didn’t look important enough. Still nothing on the Illinois side but trees. Maybe Missouri looked the same from over there, except it was hilly.
Street names, Carmen knew, could be deceiving. When Hillglade turned out to be a humped narrow road with ditches on both sides she said, “Oh, well,” and followed Wayne’s pickup along the road past a lonesome row of two-bedroom subdivision homes with car ports, lights on in some of the houses, bikes in the driveways, suppertime, a development that for some reason hadn’t developed, no sidewalks, not much of the land cleared, signs of a builder who’d run out of money. They came to 950 near the end of the street, off by itself in the dusk, windows dark, a red-brick ranch with white trim badly in need of paint. Carmen followed the pickup into a gravel drive sprouting weeds, turned off the engine and sat there. In the Algonac–Port Huron area the house would list for sixty-nine-nine, fixed up, and go for about sixty-seven. Landscaping would help, a new lawn and a front walk. A narrow worn path led from the slab front stoop to where a paneled door, its knob in place, lay across the ditch. Carmen told herself to stay cool.
Wayne came along the side of the pickup as she made herself move, get out of the car.
“What’re we doing, starting over? Jesus, twenty years ago at least we had a front walk, and shrubs.”
Carmen didn’t say anything.
“You want to go to a motel?”
She said, “We’re here now,” and started across the scrubby yard, Wayne saying after her, yeah, they were here, that was the goddamn problem. Where was the woods? That wasn’t a woods, it was a thicket. Carmen looked back at him as she reached the front step.
“There’s a note on the door.”
A three-by-five card held in place by the metal cover over the mail slot. She pulled it free, began to read the handwritten note, looked up and glanced at Wayne coming across the yard.
“It says, ‘Hi, welcome to Cape—‘ He seems friendly.”
“Who does?”
“F. R. Britton, Deputy Marshal. ‘I have gone to have supper. Will be back by six forty-five.’ “ Carmen glanced at Wayne again. “He seems to have an organized mind. Energetic but even-tempered. The way he connects his t and his h, with most of the words sort of printed, shows originality and intuition.”
Wayne said, “Then how come he didn’t know we’d be here? We suppose to stand around and wait?”
“It says, ‘The side door is open. Make yourselves at home. Signed F. R. Britton.’ “
With big loops, Carmen noticed, showing a certain amount of ego.
Wayne walked back to the drive and into the c
arport at the side of the house. Carmen followed, looking at the note, half written, half printed in a strong right-hand slant. She stopped in the yard, not sure about that circle dotting the i in Hi. It could indicate he was creative, but not necessarily. Her mom drew circles for i dots. The deputy marshal’s slant, on second thought, might be a little too much. She’d have to measure it on her Emotional Expression Chart. Carmen looked up, aware of Wayne coming around from the side of the house, Wayne with his grim look.
“What’s wrong?”
“You mean outside of there’s no electricity?”
Carmen made a face. “Don’t tell me that, please.”
“That’s the good part,” Wayne said. “No lights, you can’t see the bad part. The place’s a goddamn mess.”
The young guy wearing a sport coat and tie came out of a cream-colored Plymouth four-door holding up a handful of candles. He jumped the ditch and crossed the yard toward them saying, “Hey, sorry about that. You go see Union Electric tomorrow, they’ll fix you up. Or I can take you if I don’t have to be in court. Hi, I’m Deputy Marshal F. R. Britton?”
Making it sound like a question. Was it his accent, Carmen wondered, that buttery drawl, or wasn’t he sure who he was?
Saying now, “I’d prefer it if you call me Ferris. I don’t want you to think of me as your parole officer or anything like that.”
And now that stopped Carmen, already surprised by his boyish good looks, her idea of a U.S. marshal being a middle-aged man in a business suit. This one had a full head of wavy brown hair and a muscular build, thick neck and shoulders that made his tan sport coat seem too small, something he’d outgrown.
Carmen said, “Ferris? Is that right?”
“Yes, ma’am, like the wheel, and this must be Wayne Colson,” offering his hand now, “and Ms. Colson? How you folks doing, all right?” Holding Carmen’s hand he said, “I had to deliver a prisoner up to Marion, Illinois, I come back—did you see my note?”