Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories Page 27

  And to have some fucking peace, goddammit.

  The force of what he was feeling could not be contained. It had to go outward. He let out a screech of rage and started kicking at the dead boy’s body, driving the toe of his shoe into his wounded side again and again. Unused to seeing his owner so enraged, Harley started whining. It was the sound of the dog’s distress that eventually brought Luke back to earth, shame displacing his fading anger. He stood there bent over for a few moments, breathing heavily with his hands braced on his knees.

  He stood there and stared at the body a few moments longer, his brain abuzz with too many half-formed thoughts and ideas, none of which showed any promise of slowing down and coalescing into something coherent. A temporary change of scenery was needed. He turned away from the body and started back toward his trailer, whistling at Harley to follow him, which he did after a final sniff at the corpse.

  Jasper went a little haywire when he saw them emerge from the woods, yelping and jumping at the end of his lead. Despite his manic behavior, the dog was clearly relieved to see his owner and canine buddy again. Luke gave him a little extra attention for a minute, then unclipped the dog from his lead and beckoned for both of them to follow him into the trailer. It would be some time before he would feel safe leaving them outside again. Hell, they might even become permanent indoor residents. They could just as easily alert him to the presence of intruders from in there.

  Back in the trailer, he snapped on the lights and grabbed a cold can of Old Milwaukee from the fridge. He took a long swallow from it, heaved a sigh, and sat in a folding chair at the little card table in the tiny kitchen. His dogs plopped down on the linoleum floor and looked up at him with big grins. He smiled at them and felt his eyes water as he thought of how close he had come to losing at least one of them.

  The noise in his head began to recede as he sat there and drank more of his beer. The front section of yesterday morning’s Tennessean newspaper soon drew his attention. Anxious to distract himself from the crisis at hand—even if just for a few moments—he drew it close and read that day’s big story, which was more about the Iran-Contra mess. Reagan’s boys had screwed the pooch big time on that one. He hadn’t had a chance to get down to town to pick up today’s paper, but he knew it would just be more of the same. He didn’t actually give a shit one way or the other. The top guys on both sides of the political aisle were always out to screw the little guy, regardless of their stated intentions. This was a point of view he’d inherited from his asshole father. Even now, long after their violent falling out, Luke still thought this was a remarkably sensible way of looking at things.

  But reading the story did its job. By the time he pushed the paper away and finished off his beer, he was a lot calmer and was thinking much more clearly. He saw only one way out of the predicament Stump Wilhoite’s idiot son had created for him. It meant becoming for real the bad guy everybody thought he was. It was a bitter thing, a very hard thing to accept, but there was no way around it, not if he meant to resume some semblance of his normal life. And he did, by God, he did.

  After tossing the empty beer can in the trash, he went to the closet in his bedroom and retrieved the box of ammo for the .357 he kept on the top shelf. With the dogs following him from room to room, he carried the box into the kitchen and filled the gun’s empty chambers with fresh slugs. He shoved a few extras into his jeans before returning the box to the closet. While in there, he grabbed a pair of winter gloves. He hadn’t imagined he’d be donning them again for months to come, but they were necessary for his purposes tonight. That done, he cleaned Calvin’s blood off his torso, put on a shirt, grabbed everything he needed, and departed after giving his boys a final affectionate nuzzle behind the ears.

  There was a little creek about ten minutes into the woods. Dragging the body along with him, Luke followed the stream of peacefully trickling water down to a narrow dirt access road primarily used by hunters. That was where he found Calvin’s Ford pickup. Huffing and puffing from the exertion, he got the dead kid’s body loaded into the back. An examination of his wallet gave him his home address, which luckily was in a part of town Luke knew well. He could get there easily enough. A further search of Calvin’s pockets turned up his keys, which was a damn good thing. If the kid had dropped them out there in the woods, Luke’s plan would have been dead on arrival.

  After covering the body with a dirty plastic tarp, he slid in behind the wheel of the truck and jammed the key in the ignition slot. He had a bad moment where it seemed like the engine wasn’t going to turn over, but then it did finally sputter to life. Some kind of heavy metal noise issued from the truck’s tinny speakers. Luke didn’t recognize it. The only rock and roll he liked was from his own youth in the sixties. The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, Hendrix, etc. Even Jimi’s famous six-string histrionics had been very different from all this modern-day screaming and yelling over guitars that sounded like they were being tortured. He was more of a Hank Williams and Merle Haggard kind of guy these days, anyway. After silencing the radio, he got the truck turned around and started toward town.

  The access road was a couple of long, curving miles of bumpy, rock-strewn dirt. Luke had to go slow and keep the high beams on to avoid collisions with trees. The narrow road eventually petered out and fed into a stretch of two-lane blacktop. From there it was a mostly uneventful eight-mile ride to the outskirts of Murfreesboro. At about the midway point of the journey there was one briefly tense moment when a patrol car from the sheriff’s department went speeding past him in the opposite direction. Luke glanced at the rearview mirror and gulped as he saw the cruiser’s brake lights come on. He had been sure the cruiser would turn around and come after him, even though he was observing the speed limit. It was a late hour in a small town and hardly anyone was out driving around. The lawmen around these parts had a deserved reputation for stopping people for no reason other than sheer boredom.

  But the brake lights winked out again after a ball-shriveling couple seconds, and the cruiser kept heading away from him. This came as a massive relief to Luke, whose gloved right hand had been curled around the grip of his .357 during those seconds. He let go of the gun and listened to the heavy thumping of his heart, wondering how it would have gone down if the sheriff’s deputy had come after him. He saw only two realistic scenarios. Either he would have taken his own life or he would have been forced to kill the deputy. Both possibilities were equally appalling. He didn’t want to die and he had no desire to risk a gunfight with a cop. The only other possibility would have been arrest and he had already decided against letting that happen. Hell, it was the whole reason he’d embarked upon this crazy course of action.

  A few miles after passing a sign welcoming visitors to Murfreesboro, he took a left at Compton Road, experiencing another brief period of uneasiness as he continued down past the VA hospital, where he’d spent some time after his return from Vietnam in 1972. The building was the site of some deeply unpleasant memories, and he didn’t fully appreciate how tense its proximity made him until he had to forcibly unclench his teeth.

  But then the facility was behind him and he was fully focused on the present again. Ten minutes later he took a right at Church Street and shortly thereafter found himself in the heart of Murfreesboro. He was jittery and his nerves kept yelling at him to go faster and get this over with, but he kept a lid on his fear and mostly stuck to the posted speed limits. Occasionally he went a little faster than that, especially on side streets, where the posted limits were often absurdly low. The key here was in not doing anything to arouse the suspicion of any law enforcement types. Yeah, speeding was a bad idea, but if you went too slow in certain areas you could get mistaken for an overly cautious drunk driver.

  Luke navigated his way through a maze of familiar streets and neighborhoods, bittersweet memories from a lifetime ago assailing him in the process. He had grown up here. Driving through the area in the dead of night—something he hadn’t done in a very long time—was a strange
experience. It was like traveling through a haunted museum of the past. His mind easily conjured images of his youthful self flying down these streets on his Schwinn. The memory was so vivid he could almost hear the flapping sound made by the baseball cards wedged into the spokes of his bicycle’s wheels.

  The Wilhoite home was at the end of a quiet street in one of the town’s older residential areas. The houses here were mainly one-story ranch-style houses built many decades earlier. Many of the families who lived in the neighborhood had been entrenched here for generations. Luke cut the truck’s headlights and slowed down as he neared the house, approaching it with an abundance of caution. He heaved a sigh of relief when he realized there were no lights on inside, making it likely no one was up awaiting young Calvin’s return. It also meant Calvin’s excursion to his place tonight had probably been a lone-wolf act on his part unsanctioned by Stump or anyone else in the family. It would make doing what he had to do a lot easier.

  He pulled into the gravel driveway, eased the door shut after getting out of the truck, and let himself into the house with Calvin’s key. Once he was inside, he snapped the flashlight beam on and performed a careful search of the premises. It didn’t take long. He found Stump Wilhoite and Wilma, his wife, sound asleep in the master bedroom. They were the only people in the house. Everything was falling into place with such shocking ease it was almost possible to believe it was all preordained. Like it was God’s will. It was an idea he seized upon with pathetic desperation. These people had unjustly persecuted him for a thing he hadn’t done for a long, long time. Looked at in that light, this was just a regrettably brutal way of setting things right again.

  Stump began to stir as Luke came into the room, making sleepy, half-aware sounds without coming to full consciousness. Luke shoved the flashlight into the waistband of his jeans, jerked the pillow out from under Stump’s head, and jammed it down over his face. The old man did wake up then, uttering a startled, muffled shriek from beneath the pillow. Luke pressed the barrel of the gun against the pillow and said, “You did this. You made it happen.”

  He squeezed the trigger.

  Stump stopped moving.

  Wilma came awake then and sat up with a terrified gasp. Luke climbed onto the bed and drilled a gloved fist straight into the center of her face. Her nose broke with an audible snap and she flopped backward as blood erupted from her nostrils. Luke grabbed her pillow and pressed it down over her face. Rather than firing the gun again, he straddled her and held the pillow down until she stopped moving. He then tossed the pillow aside and checked her pulse. When he was satisfied that she was truly dead, he went back out to the living room and peered out at the front yard through a parted curtain. Nothing was happening out there. He nonetheless stood there an additional several minutes to be certain police weren’t on the way.

  When he was sure no one had called in a report of the single shot he had fired, Luke went out to the truck and removed Calvin’s body from the back. This time he carried the body in his arms. This required a tremendous, back-straining physical effort, but Luke didn’t want to leave evidence of a body being dragged into the house. It was a warm summer night and the sweat was rolling off him in rivers and stinging his eyes before he was able to get back inside. Once he was back inside, he carried Calvin into the master bedroom and set about trying to stage the scene.

  Like most of his firearms—of which he had several—Luke’s .357 was unregistered. He didn’t like the idea of anyone in any kind of official capacity having an accurate idea of his self-defense capability. This was a product of the deep paranoia that had taken root within him in the aftermath of his trial. He didn’t trust anyone in general, a mindset that absolutely included anyone wearing any kind of uniform. Hell, especially those assholes. After thoroughly wiping it down, he wrapped Calvin’s dead fingers around the grip of the gun, threading his forefinger through the trigger guard.

  What he had in mind was pretty straightforward. Calvin was obviously a troubled kid. He’d had some kind of heated dispute with his parents. Things got out of hand and he wound up killing them in their sleep. In the wake of this act, the reality of what he had done hit the boy hard and, understandably distraught, he wound up taking his own life with the very gun he’d used to murder his father. No one would bat an eye over the unregistered gun. Such things weren’t unusual. There would be nothing at all to connect Luke to any of it.

  Satisfied he’d done his best to set the scene, Luke got to his feet and headed out of the bedroom. A sudden thought made him halt in his tracks in the hallway. His face contorted with frustration and disgust as he realized he’d overlooked a potentially crucial detail. He went back into the bedroom, knelt next to Calvin’s body, and rolled it onto its side in order to aim the flashlight beam at his back. And there it was—the exit wound.

  Fucking hell.

  The .357 slug had passed through his body. The damn thing was still out there in the woods behind his trailer. Luke was no forensics expert, but he knew the investigation would need to turn up the bullet that killed the boy.

  Or at least the one that had apparently killed him.

  Luke curled his hand around Calvin’s fingers and used them to press the barrel of the gun against his abdomen, lining it up with the original entry wound. This was risky. He didn’t like the idea of having to fire a second shot. Luck had been on his side the first time, but doing it a second time would really be pushing it. And yet, what other choice did he have?

  None at all, that’s what.

  So he did it.

  And then he got the hell out of that house.

  The house where he had grown up was just three streets over. He kept his head down and walked at a brisk pace in that direction. Along the way, he passed just one house where someone appeared to be awake. There was a single dim light on at a window in the back. He eyed the window carefully as he continued on past the house, but he detected no signs of movement. Dogs on chains or in fenced-in yards barked as he hurriedly passed through their territory. This didn’t concern Luke much. A nighttime canine chorus wasn’t unusual in this kind of neighborhood. Dogs got bored and started talking to each other. For the most part, no one paid it any mind.

  The lights were on at 3366 Montgomery Street. The place was lit up like the fourth of goddamn July. Of course. Josh Benson was a retired union man with a generous pension. He was always up all hours of the night, or at least that was how it’d been back when Luke still came around semi-regularly. At first glance, it looked like nothing had changed. He had been counting on that. Josh was his way back home. They had their differences. Big ones. There had been some violent episodes. But when it came down to it, blood was blood and still meant something. His father would help him, he was sure of it.

  Luke climbed the porch steps and rapped hard on the front door. Minutes passed and no one answered, but he knew someone was awake in there because he could hear the faint strains of a scratchy C&W record playing on the turntable. “I’m Walking The Floor Over You” by Ernest Tubb. It was one of his pop’s favorites. He played it whenever he was in a particularly maudlin mood, which didn’t bode well for any interaction they might have here. The song ended and another Tubb tune—“Drivin’ Nails In My Coffin”—began moments later. Maybe he was passed out drunk in there and really couldn’t hear him knocking. Much more likely, however, was the possibility that he was opting to ignore the late-night caller at his door.

  Luke couldn’t blame the man. He hated the ornery old bastard, but this reaction was nothing but plain common sense. An unexpected knock on your door at this hour could only mean bad news or trouble of some kind. Still, Luke was in a hell of a bind and had no choice but to continue pressing the issue.

  So he banged harder on the door and pitched his voice above the sound of the music. “Pop! It’s me, Luke! I need your help!”

  A few more moments passed and Luke was on the verge of giving up when he detected the sound of booted feet approaching from the other side of the door, makin
g the hardwood floor inside the foyer creak. The door came open and Josh Benson stood framed in the doorway, a scowl twisting a face flushed a bright shade of red. “Son? What in blue blazes brings you out here at this hour?”

  “I’m in trouble.”

  The old man’s scowl faded and he stared at his son with an unreadable expression for maybe a full minute. His breath reeked of cheap beer. Probably Old Style, his favorite going back at least to the 50s. Finally, he shook his head and stepped away from the door. “Come on in, then.”

  Luke followed him into the house, shutting the door behind him. The living room was directly adjacent to the little foyer. Stepping into it again triggered that impression of traveling back in time. He hadn’t been in this room for going on a decade, but it still looked much as he remembered. The furniture—all of it stuff his late mother had purchased new in the early 60s—was all the same, albeit more weathered-looking now. The same framed family photos still hung from the walls. Younger versions of Luke appeared in several of them. He was even smiling in a few of them. Seeing the mostly black and white images now was weird, like looking at pictures of strangers. No, on further reflection, it was weirder than that. The life depicted in those pictures was completely alien to him now. They were like glimpses of life on another planet. A late-night movie was playing with the sound turned down on a big Zenith television opposite the dusty sofa, some old gangster thing with Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart. The TV was one of the boxy old-fashioned kind with legs on the bottom.

  Josh walked over to the stereo system and lifted the needle off the record, silencing Ernest Tubb with a nasty scratch of vinyl. “Sit down, son. I’ll get us both a beer.”

  Luke stood there while his father walked out of the room. He was too wound up to sit down so instead he crossed the room to examine more framed photos that lined the shelves of a bookcase. He gnawed on his bottom lip and frowned at more pictures of smiling aliens.