فصل 14 - بخش 04

14

At four o’clock that afternoon, an old Dodge pickup rattled along a ranch road fifteen miles south of Flint City, pulling up a rooster-tail of dust. It passed an abandoned windmill with broken vanes, a deserted ranchhouse with glaring holes where the windows had been, a long-abandoned cemetery locally known as the Cowboy Graveyard, a boulder with TRUMP MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN TRUMP painted on the side in fading letters. Galvanized milk cans rolled around in the truckbed and banged off the sides. Behind the wheel was a seventeen-year-old boy named Dougie Elfman. He kept checking his cell phone as he drove. By the time he got to Highway 79, he had two bars, and reckoned that would be enough. He stopped at the crossing, got out, and looked behind him. Nothing. Of course there was nothing. And still, he was relieved. He called his daddy. Clark Elfman answered on the second ring.

‘Were those cans out there in that barn?’

‘Yuh,’ Dougie said. ‘I got two dozen, but they’ll have to be warshed out. Still smell like clabbered milk.’

‘What about the hoss-tack?’

‘All gone, Daddy.’

‘Well, that ain’t the best news of the week, but no more than what I expected. What you callin for, son? And where are you? Sound like you’re on the dark side of the moon.’

‘I’m out at 79. Listen, Daddy, somebody been stayin out there.’

‘What? You mean like hobos or hippies?’

‘It ain’t that. There’s no mess – beercans or wrappers or liquor bottles – and no sign anyone took a dump anywhere, unless they walked a quarter of a mile to the nearest bushes. No campfire sign, either.’

‘Thank Christ for that,’ Elfman said, ‘dry as it’s been. What did you find? Not that I guess it matters, nothing left to steal and them old buildings half fallen down and not worth pea-turkey.’

Dougie kept looking back. The road looked empty, all right, but he wished the dust would settle faster.

‘I found a pair of bluejeans that look new, and Jockey underpants that look new, and some expensive sneakers, them with the gel insides, that also look new. Only they’re all stained with something, and so’s the hay they was lyin in.’

‘Blood?’

‘No, it ain’t blood. Turned the hay black, whatever it was.’

‘Oil? Motor oil? Somethin like ’at?’

‘No, the stuff wasn’t black, just the hay it got on. I don’t know what it was.’

But he knew what those stiff patches on the jeans and underpants looked like; he had been masturbating three and sometimes four times a day since he turned fourteen, using an old piece of towel to shoot his spunk into, and then using the backyard tap to rinse it out when his parents were gone. Sometimes he forgot, though, and that piece of toweling got pretty crusty.

Only there had been a lot of that stuff, a lot, and really, who would jizz off on a brand-new pair of Adipowers, high-class kicks that cost upward of a hundred and forty dollars, even at Wally World? Dougie might have thought about taking them for himself under other circumstances, but not with that crap on them, and not with the other thing he’d noticed.

‘Well, let it go and just come on home,’ Elfman said. ‘You got those cans, at least.’

‘No, Daddy, you need to get the police out. There was a belt in them jeans, and it’s got a shiny silver buckle in the shape of a horse’s head.’

‘That means nothing to me, son, but I guess it does to you.’

‘On the news, they said that Terry Maitland was wearing a buckle like that when he was seen at the train station in Dubrow. After he killed that little boy.’

‘They said that?’

‘Yes, Daddy.’

‘Well, shit. You wait there at the crossing until I call you back, but I guess the cops will want to come. I’ll come, too.’

‘Tell them I’ll meet them at Biddle’s store.’

‘Biddle’s … Dougie, that’s five miles back toward Flint!’

‘I know. But I don’t want to stay here.’ The dust had settled now, and there was nothing to be seen, but Dougie still didn’t feel right. Not a single car had passed on the main road since he started talking to his father, and he wanted to be where there were people.

‘What’s wrong, son?’

‘When I was in that barn where I found the clothes – I’d already got the cans by then, and was lookin for that tack you said might be out there – I started to feel all wrong. Like someone was watchin me.’

‘You just got the creeps. The man who killed that boy is dead as dirt.’

‘I know, but tell the cops I’ll meet em at Biddle’s, and I’ll take em out there, but I’m not staying here by myself.’ He ended the call before his father could argue with him.