 |
Study no. 3
The first thing that I noticed when I opened my eyes was that the fog hadn't dissipated. The bed in Mrs. Orris's spare room was perpendicular to the window and butted right up beneath the sill, so I found myself straining to make out the vague shape of the eaves of the house through the glass. This wasn't any way to begin a morning.
I dressed and put on my jacket and went downstairs. The old house was quiet, and each step I took echoed off of the worn walls. The hardwood floors were old and uncared-for, and dust had gathered in the seams. I walked through the old structure, searching for Mrs. Orris, who wasn't answering my calls. She wasn't around, and I was reluctant to enter her bedroom, the only room I hadn't investigated.
Outside the fog formed a close, moist second skin around me. It felt vaguely uncomfortable. I closed the door to Mrs. Orris's house behind me and followed the smell of bacon through the clouds to Janine's.
Unlike the night before, the restaurant was full. At least thirty or forty people were crammed into the narrow front room, parked at tables. They all seemed to be sweating, but it was cool inside. The bell over the door jangled when I pushed inside, and the small sea of faces turned slowly toward me. Mrs. Orris's face was among them. A quiet murmur began. I felt like I'd just stumbled into a town meeting.
I found Harris at the bar, where he had been nursing a sobering cup of coffee just twelve hours ago. "Don't you ever move?" I asked, expecting more of his good-naturedness. But when he glanced up at me his skin was slick and drained of blood.
I asked if he was okay. Janine deposited a cup of coffee in front of me and planted both hands on the counter. She leaned in close. "We're all a little shaken right now, if you don't mind, Mr. Madison. And if I can say so, I don't think this is the best place for you to be right now."
"I don't understand," I said.
Harris spoke as quietly and somberly as he could. "This is a very small town, Jimmy," he explained. "Bad things happen in a small town, first person the people turn on is the outsider."
"Something happened," I said.
The door to the restaurant opened, and again everyone turned. The man who stood there wore a windbreaker and the sort of hat a state trooper usually wears. The hat stood out simply because it didn't fit in with his wet jeans and cowboy boots. His face was young, and he wore a mustache that seemed so heavy his skin was drawn tight around the eyes. He raised both hands. "Alright, everybody, now listen up," he said loudly.
The sound of people turning their chairs around to face the door was sudden, like the thump and squeal of a hundred pigs struck by a semi. Only Harris didn't turn.
"Who's this guy?" I whispered.
Harris sighed. "That's Boyd Owens," he said.
Boyd, satisfied that everyone was listening, made a point of giving me the hardest stare his boyish wide eyes could manage. I held the stare for a moment, keeping my face loose and free of expression. Then he inhaled sharply and addressed the people.
"As most of you probably know already, Papa Joe found -- well, he found the bodies of Courtney and her little boy this morning." Though everyone surely knew this, a collective gasp rippled through them.
I snapped to my right. "Someone's dead?"
Harris nodded slowly. "Courtney was the sweetest girl you ever saw," he said, almost to himself. "Couldn't pass on that little one, either. Good boy."
Boyd continued. "Any of you got kids with you, maybe you want to go in the back for a minute." When nobody moved, he went on. "When Papa Joe saw what he saw, he came and got me, and, from the looks, told everyone else in town. So since everything's in the public domain, you might as well know what happened." Boyd stopped. "Janine, can I have some water, you think?"
When she brought him a glass, he drank deeply. He emptied the glass and gave it back to Janine, and then the air went out of him. Boyd looked up at the expectant crowd. His eyes were damp. His voice choked when he spoke.
"The back door was busted in," he said. "I went in and...and..."
The young man's emotions collapsed, and Janine rushed to him and wrapped him up in a thick-armed bear hug. "It's alright, Boyd," she said gently. "It's alright. We're all hurtin right now."
"Is he a cop?" I asked Harris.
Harris shook his head. "He tested once, for the state troopers. Didn't pass on account of he lost part of his right trigger finger in an accident in training." The old man's tone darkened. "Comes back here and plays cop. You know we got no cops here, gotta wait for the state boys to get out here."
The "state boys" were going to throw Boyd Owens in jail when they finally arrived and found out this local boy had contaminated their crime scene playing detective. I sipped tentatively at my coffee, wondering how anyone could be so stupid.
Boyd composed himself. "I'm sorry," he said in the most serious voice he could muster. "You all know that Courtney and me, we..."
And he broke again. Janine smothered him again in her large chest. The murmur started again, and abruptly stopped as a hefty man of at least seventy lumbered to his feet at the back of the crowd.
"Papa Joe," Harris supplied before I could ask. I noticed that Harris turned his stool so he faced Papa Joe.
"What Boyd's tryin to say is that we found somethin terrible," Papa Joe said, both hands crammed deep into his jacket pockets. "Miss Courtney, she...well, there's no nice way to put it, so I'm just gonna say it. Miss Courtney was tied to the radiator in her bedroom, and...and it looked to me like someone maybe cut her. Here," he said, tracing his finger weakly across his neck. A woman in a booth fainted, and the man beside her caught her as she slipped from her seat.
"Barry," Papa Joe went on, "was...sweet Jesus, whoever done this strung him up from the ceiling like he weren't no more than a slab of meat. The poor boy, he --"
Boyd had found his voice by now, encouraged by Papa Joe's hesitant honesty. "Based on what I saw, it looks to me like...Court...was tied up and forced to watch them kill little Barry, and then, well --"
A slim woman in glasses stood up quickly. "Stop it!" she screamed. "Stop it! Stop it! Don't you have any respect, don't you have any..." She folded as quickly as she had stood, and Janine, who seemed to be the matronly peacekeeper among the townspeople, left Boyd to his own and dashed to the woman.
Harris leaned toward me now. "It's about to get ugly, Jimmy. Listen, you should know I don't think anything that happened was your doing. Courtney, she was a good girl, so people gotta get riled. You'd do worse than to leave right now."
But I sat there and watched the inhabitants of a small town, a place isolated from the brutality of day-to-day life, crumble upon themselves like paper dolls. I saw who was strong and who was weak. These people were so very vulnerable. They saw Old Man as utopian where others might see it as backwards. And I realized then: the writer in me saw a story, and to leave now would be the cardinal sin any writer could commit.
"Harris," I said, aware that people were noticing my presence again, as if for the first time. "Harris, could I possibly --"
"You don't mind helping me move some old furniture, yeah, you can. You're not leaving, then."
I shook my head.
"Think maybe I should get a dog, then," he said. "Maybe gonna need one."
"I don't want to put you out or anything," I said. "If this is going to be bad for you --"
"No," he replied. "Helen Orris'll surely give somebody the key to your room there. Anyway, I could use the company. You know how to cook?"
| |
