Boot Tracks Page 5

  For a panicky moment he feared whoever was on his ass would follow him into the drive; halfway to the residence, though, he saw the vehicle’s lights pass by on the road below him. He switched off the Mazda’s headlights and carefully backed down the incline; at the drive’s bottom, he put his headlights back on; in their beam he saw on a mailbox directly in front of him, #202.

  Four houses from his destination.

  Adrenaline surged through his brain. His heart beat faster. He thought, what the hell am I doing here? The reality hit him that from this point on he had, really, no plan, only a firm intent, and a sketchy idea of how to carry it out. He corrected himself that he did too have a plan, that it called for him to be flexible, to react to the lay of the thing, to get it done however the situation called for, to not be married to some grand scheme—never mind The Mechanic, the guy was a joke—that maybe sounded all right in theory but in practice could as well turn to shit.

  Or had he feared by running through the thing too thoroughly beforehand he’d have dissuaded himself from actually doing it?

  Pushing the last thought out of his mind he resumed driving.

  In less than a hundred yards he passed a single lane road diverting left off the main drag at where another country club sign aimed at a dull halo of light in the trees; Rankin glimpsed through the woods out his window a lighted parking lot containing a handful of cars before a cluster of white stucco buildings. He pictured a smattering of River Run Country Club fat cats getting blitzed on six dollar shots. His mind’s eye showed him a big pot holding all the world’s money amid people pushing and shoving to get at it and he thought starting at the back of that mess you need snatch what bills you can from the air or from the hands of the people in front of you because from hell to Christmas you’ll never shoulder your way ahead enough to as much as see the pot.

  He took to counting houses.

  On the left, one; two. He ignored one to his right, figuring on the normal numbering pattern that aligned odd and even digits on opposite sides of a street. A third to his left (he could make out only its drive). A few hundred feet farther on, if he’d tallied right, bingo; he saw no mailbox, just a faintly glowing, two-story shape at the top of a snaking, tree-lined drive; then he was by it. A long sedan, making a diesel engine’s tinny knock, passed him going toward the country club. Rankin let out a slow breath, watching the car’s taillights disappear. He reminded himself again of how smart he was and to keep counting driveways. The road made a big bend. Sputtering how it was he felt as if the Mazda had a huge sign on it and that if another vehicle came up behind him he’d have to re-think the advisability of getting the thing done tonight. He started eyeing the woods for a turn-off into an empty lot or whatnot. The severity of the curve he was in suggested to him he was following the rim of a big horseshoe back to the highway. The Mazda’s lights as he came through the bend fell upon what looked to be a dirt path through the trees left of him.

  He immediately downshifted, steered onto the path, and stopped the Mazda; its headlights showed him a rutted, puddle-filled trail, wider than the Mazda, running in an unwavering line fifty or so feet through a thin stand of hardwoods.

  He slapped off the headlights.

  The sky offered not a shard of light. His surroundings darkened as if he’d closed his eyes. Without knowing more about what lay beyond the hardwoods he didn’t dare switch back on his headlights; at where it was, though, the Mazda was a sitting duck to the lights of any passing traffic. Easing out its clutch, he started inching the car forward, thinking to bring it up to where the trees ended, then to get out and have a look around. He’d scarcely begun moving when a vehicle was heard approaching from the direction of the club. Hoping his eyes hadn’t deceived him about the straightness of the path Rankin released completely the clutch. The Mazda lurched ahead into the blackness. As it rounded the turn, the nearing vehicle’s lights danced in the trees across the road. Rankin pushed his foot down slightly on the accelerator. The car’s undercarriage scraped and banged on the ground; its front end dropped down, as if it had plunged into a pothole, and didn’t come up; Rankin stomped hard on the gas, causing the Mazda to shoot forward, out of the hardwoods, a moment before the other vehicle passed by to its rear.

  He hit the brakes on the edge of an open field.

  To his immediate right loomed the outline of a building he feared was a house; then he was pretty sure it was too small to be. He put the Mazda in park, got from his gymbag Florence’s flashlight, and stepped out. Angling the light toward the ground, he switched it on, and walked stealthily at the building. Three large tractor-mowers were parked under a metal awning on the side of the structure facing him; dozens of metal poles attached to numbered flags lay on the ground against it; “Maintenance Personnel Only” was posted in white letters across a padlocked bay door behind the middle tractor. Rankin played the light out into the field. In the ground a few yards from him stood a widely spaced line of wooden stakes. Past the stakes lay a wide fairway, then more trees. Maybe eighty yards to the east, in the woods left of and above the fairway, could be seen the faint glow of a light shining outside the house nearest to him on Viner Lane.

  He slowly backed the Mazda behind the building and parked it facing the path, hidden to everything but the fairway. He slipped the .38 into his pants-waist, replaced the watch cap on his head with the ski mask, and rolled up the mask so that, as the watch cap had, it covered everything above his eyes.

  Holding the unlit flashlight in his right hand, he headed down the rough bordering the fairway, hoping each of the five places between him and number #210 would be as easy to make out as was the first one.

  * * *

  Chester Rhimes going to beat him shitless unless he shut up, him then not uttering a word all week, Chester Rhimes, who’d not even been his legal stepfather, then going to pound him pissless unless he cut the dumb act, Rankin making across his mother’s dinner table a mute’s hand signals to Chester Rhimes, Chester Rhimes bringing it on with a weightlifter’s belt, his mother screaming to Rankin that his stubbornness would kill him, Rankin making though not a peep through it all, never again allowing his mother or Chester Rhimes or whoever would be her next Chester Rhimes the sound of his voice.

  Faraway hooing, a tomcat’s randy screech, his measured breathing, his crunching footfalls on the half-frozen turf.

  Feeling in his wordlessness more powerful than he’d ever felt while inwardly laughing—howling—at Chester Rhimes’s intensifying fury, which had ended with Chester Rhimes having to lie on the couch with heart palpitations suffered in his failure to pound a voice, to pound even a living sound beyond a grunt, out of a fourteen-year-old boy.

  Concealed creatures all around him silently hunkered down in nests, dens, half-million dollar houses.

  Unable to recollect if in that week before he’d left his mother’s life for good he’d willed himself to be mute or if he had, in fact, lost the power of speech and if he had lost it why had he and by what mystery had it returned to him.

  House number five appeared atop the hill before him as a short, skewed stack of giant boxes burning a dull light.

  If, though, he had fucked up the count—here or out on the road—how would he know it before he was inside the wrong building?

  The Mechanic wouldn’t have had to worry about counting; the mechanic would have had the entire operation figured out ahead of time.

  The Mechanic, you mean, who stood around on crowded street corners openly watching his marks through binoculars, snapping their pictures, scribbling for just anybody to see his observations of them into a notepad? The Mechanic who smoked a pipe and drank expensive wine in a world where the only policemen were second-rate actors? Do not mention the asshole mechanic again.

  A dog bark up the hill made him realize he’d not thought much about the possibility of a guard dog either. Nor about the likelihood of a burglar alarm. He’d not thought a lot about home security at all because in the back of his mind, he now understood, lu
rked a picture of himself boldly knocking on the front door of #210. He could see how, even at this hour, that might be the way to go.

  He could also see where it might not be the way to go.

  Suddenly he had a vision of himself underwater, swimming straight up, blind to everything not immediately ahead of him, toward the hope of air. He stepped directly on a set of fresh footprints crisscrossing his own; not dog footprints, not any four-legged animal’s footprints, the tracks, in the icing of wet snow past the fifth house, zigzagged out from the trees into the fairway.

  The darkness that consumed them showed nothing to him.

  Rankin inclined an ear at the field.

  He heard the owl’s mournful hooing; a shriek of human laughter; footfalls against the soggy ground, coming at him. The thought of a lone person laughing aloud, yards from him, in that impenetrable blackness spooked him. He quietly made his way to the tree line. He squatted behind a large white oak tree. He put his gravity knife in one hand. He remembered as a kid not giving a rat’s ass for Bat Man, Superman, Spider Man. He’d wanted only to be Poof Man; able with a snap of his fingers to become thin air, with a second snap to reappear in a whole different place. The outline of an upright figure moving, thirty of so feet parallel to him, toward the hillside materialized. The smallish figure made an abrupt motion in his direction. Rankin ducked. An object landed loudly in the brush near him. More laughter. A kid, comprehended Rankin, blindly throwing slushballs, laughing at the joy of it. A few seconds later, he heard one of the balls enter the woods farther down. Another peal of laughter. The kid slowly melted into the darkness hiding the hillside, leaving Rankin uncertain he’d seen a figure at all or, anyway, if he had seen one, it had been more than a kid’s ghost.

  He started walking again, hugging the tree line.

  The crack of frozen branches; sighs from the traumatized earth; a fluttering of wings so close by he felt, or imagined he did, the wind they’d disturbed against his face. He thought of the Buddha, having nothing to spend all his dough on but illegal prison perks—gourmet foods, wine, books, a laptop computer, even a Viagra hit and a whore now and then though Buddha and the whores had to go at it standing up in the middle of the night in a laundry room stinking of detergent—and payback for the grudges he’d brought with him from the outside world that, with his health and age, William Pettigrew like as not (even the Buddha made his odds of breathing free air again one in three) had seen the last of. Rankin guessed people were what they were till they died unless ahead of dying they got religion and were reborn in better versions of themselves as he’d heard Hank Congel, after forty years of being a worthless bastard, supposedly had been. Before seeing it he nearly walked into a body of water.

  Standing at its edge he couldn’t tell how big it was; a fingernail-thin sheen of ice covered the small part of the liquefied body he could see. He started walking parallel to it. In twenty-five or so yards the rough ended, where the fairway began. Though it was pitch dark he felt exposed this far out in the open. Diagonally across the water from him, at the top of the hill, stood the house he’d pegged as #210, shining more lights— two downstairs, one up—than any of the others he’d passed. Fearing eyes were gazing his way out of darkened windows he didn’t dare switch on his flashlight. He pictured in the quiet night countless creatures holding their breaths inches from him. The disturbing sensation struck him that he was blindly stumbling at an abyss; or into a behemoth set of open jaws. An obscured view of hell as a monster’s foul belly appeared to him.

  He heard three distinct splashes.

  In his mind three birds, in mid-flight, fell dead in the water.

  He collided with the wooden rampway to a narrow bridge. The splashes, he realized, had resulted from clumps of half-frozen snow dropping from the bridge into the water it spanned. He stepped onto the ramp, then onto the bridge; he slipped on its iced-over floor and had to grab the railing so not to go over the edge. He looked down and couldn’t see the water for the dark. He looked up and saw the same nothingness he’d stared into every night of the last four years and for however many nights before that. He looked behind him and envisioned his boot tracks in the snow going back to the Mazda and from there all the way back to whatever rented, man-stinking mattress in whatever flea-bitten room she’d dropped him on.

  Another drawn out, hellish screech from the tom.

  He pictured the big son of a bitch with its teeth in a she-cat’s neck; hooked into her good; back claws digging in the snow for purchase; daring even the devil to stop him from having his way with her.

  Gripping tight the rails he crossed the bridge to another fairway or to the other side of the one he was coming from. He thought given a chance he might have been a good golfer, a good athlete of any kind because he had coordination and could run and climb like a monkey. Though he’d never participated in a single organized sport, people—a few anyway— said as how he could have excelled in any one he’d tried; on top of which he just knew he could have, same as he knew that when his mind wasn’t all cluttered up with weird thoughts, as it had been when he was with that girl Florence, he could do for a woman in a way that she wouldn’t feel shortchanged after, in a way that she’d feel even grateful.

  He cut back across the fairway to the rough, toward the woods, aware suddenly of the sound of his own breathing; each breath like a rip in a canopy of silence. Buddha had said every living thing had a preordained niche and it wasn’t always the one they’d hoped for. A turtle, he’d said, didn’t choose to walk around, slower than about any creature on earth, carrying a shell on its back any more than Attila the Hun chose to be a barbarian or John Wilkes Booth chose to be the killer of our greatest president. The Buddha sometimes just talked to talk. A lot of what he said didn’t amount to shit if you just listened to the words. But it was more than what he said that swayed you, it was how he said it, how he looked at you when he did, how he touched you on the face or shoulder with those fluttery little fingers, how he made you feel as if you were a diamond the whole world but him had missed and your niche a little jewelry box he was going to make you more comfortable in.

  At the edge of the trees he stopped. The pulpy stench of saturated earth, of decaying leaves reached him. He felt fractured all of a sudden, as if he were at once standing there at the base of the darkened embankment and standing to his own rear, watching with detached interest himself standing several feet in front of him. Ice-laden branches creaked, groaned, whined under their burdens. Exhaled from the hillside, a dank mist enveloped him in its ghostly shape. A blurred light marked the house, where it sat in a clearing atop the hill like a slightly tilted hat on an immense head. The thought struck him that this person standing before him was a bad bet at this game, that he was the sort to balk at putting down even an animal; at the same time he was telling himself when that door opens, Charlie, bingo-bango. One’s resolve, according to the Buddha, was always in doubt, even to one’s self, until the crucial moment, when the tiniest hesitation was like a missed stitch that could cause a whole sweater to unravel. He strode forward. In the woods internal blackness he stopped again.

  Not even his feet were visible to him.

  To lessen the chances of it being spotted by someone looking out from the house, he placed the splayed fingers of his left hand over the bulb of Florence’s flashlight before he turned it on. He directed the beam at the ground in front of him. The muted light revealed a sinkhole, a clogged portion of a drainage ditch running next to the field, half-filled with stagnant water his next step would have plunged him into. A rusted lunch pail, a bra, a drowned or all but drowned fox that must have stumbled into the hole and then couldn’t get out of it floated in the water. Rankin, inclining at the motionless animal, recalled Buddha telling him, in answer to why he was in prison, that everything was where it was because in being there it foreclosed its being anywhere else.

  Maybe he should have just taken the money and run.

  He could still take it and run.

  He detect
ed a slight movement from the fox. He placed the bulb end of the light against it. It released a pathetic whimper to his ears.

  The half-Cherokee one two ahead of Chester Rhimes, missing two fingers on his left hand—Rankin couldn’t even remember his name—calling him a faggot pussy for curling up and sniveling over a few whacks with the flat end of a coal shovel; his mother telling him, why you always gotta get him started, Charlie? You know how he is.

  He looked at the sinkhole’s partially collapsed banks where the fox had tried to claw its way free.

  He abruptly pushed the animal under the water with the flashlight.

  The submerged yellow shaft exposed at the hole’s mud bottom beer cans, a couple of golf balls. He felt the fox faintly struggling. The knowledge struck him that he was here only because Buddha was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that above anyone he could have hired to be here Rankin would not take William Pettigrew’s money and run; that he’d do the job. He reached down, grasped the fox by the back of its neck and, suddenly thinking to save it, lifted it out of the hole. He lay it on the bank. He felt duped. The body looked to him now as if it had been dead for days, weeks.

  Looking in the mirror—maybe he’d been twelve—and seeing in it no one he’d ever seen before; wondering, with a twinge of remorse for little, sniveling Charlie, if dying meant waking up one day to a stranger’s face.