The World Made Straight (6 page)

“I'll try and remember to do that,” the big man said. His gaze returned to the road but he continued speaking. “There's probably near a million ways a man can die, but I reckon not many would outworse your throat clamping shut on you.”

They were in Marshall before either spoke again.

“You ain't forgot what you're to say?”

“No sir,” Travis said.

He felt the car turn a last time and stop, then hands eased him out of the backseat. He opened his eyes to be sure those hands did not belong to one of the Toomeys. Two men dressed in white laid him on a gurney as Carlton Toomey's face loomed over him a last time, close enough that he could smell tobacco and onion.

“See, I told you I'd get you here,” Toomey said softly. “I kept my word and you best keep yours.”

Then the gurney was rolling and Carlton Toomey's face fell away like something unlodged by a current. Rectangles of fluorescent
light passed above Travis and he felt like he was looking out a train window, a train moving away from Toomey, and because of that he could close his eyes now and not imagine a gleaming knife blade about to slit his throat.

CARLTON TOOMEY ARRIVED AT THE TRAILER JUST AS DARKNESS
made its final ascent up from the coves and ridges to the tree line. He didn't blow the horn, just cut off the engine and waited. Leonard was surprised the older man knew where he lived, for they'd always done their transactions at the Toomeys' farmhouse. I don't make house calls, Carlton had once told him.

“You caused me a whole passel of trouble today, professor,” Toomey said. The sobriquet was one Leonard had never cared for. He'd told Carlton he'd never been a professor and was not a teacher of any kind anymore, but the elder Toomey continued to use the title, always with a little extra emphasis on the word.

“What do you mean?” Leonard asked.

“Your pot supplier ain't a very good middleman. He has this interesting notion that he don't have to pay them who growed it. He just struts up on my land and picks it like it's no more than blackberries.”

Today had been the hottest of the summer, the trailer near unbearable except for the cold beers Leonard had been drinking since midafternoon, so a few moments passed as he filtered Carlton Toomey's words through the alcohol.

“I didn't know you were growing. I wouldn't have bought
from him if I'd known it was yours,” Leonard said, telling the truth, because Carlton Toomey was not a man you wanted to cross.

“And it never entered your mind to ask where he was getting it?”

Leonard's bare feet stood on ground that, like the trailer, still retained the day's heat. No moon was out, and the stars had yet to pitch their tents and spark their small fires. He could barely see Toomey though their faces were no more than a yard apart. He'd never realized how much darker night could be in the mountains until he'd left them, seen nights in the Carolina piedmont and the Midwest. It seemed as if the coal-dark core of the mountains flowed out on nights like this, rose all the way up to the floor of the sky.

Toomey laughed softly.

“I'd likely as not have asked either. Kind of like looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

A light came on as Toomey opened the glove compartment and removed a crinkled paper bag.

“Planting that crop was Hubert's idea. Young folks go out in the world and come back with all sorts of notions. Got that pot-growing idea from the hippies, like they'd know anything about how to make do in the world. Too bad that boy missed Vietnam. That would have shown him the real what's-what. Anyway, I told him we'd try our hand at growing this year and see the worth of it. I still figure us to make a profit but there's been more bother than I'd counted on. I've a mind to just stick to these pills.”

Toomey offered the paper bag to Leonard.

“Brought you some black beauties and some 747s. A hundred will cover it.”

“I haven't sold what I bought from you last week,” Leonard said.

Toomey let his elbow settle on the window's lower frame, the bag in abeyance between him and Leonard. He shook the bag, the capsules making a dry rattling sound as they clicked against each other.

“Never hurts to stock up. Besides, after buying pot stole from me I'd think you right eager to prove we're still partners. Matter of fact, if I was you I'd probably add another twenty to boot just to show it was all a misunderstanding. That or one of them Plotts. It's getting pretty damn obvious I need me a guard dog.”

Carlton shook the bag again.

“That's the sound of extra profits, professor.”

But the dry rattling sound brought to mind something else, what Leonard had heard one morning years ago in a brush pile. He'd looked closer through the tangle of sticks and spotted the triangular head and thick coiled body. What he'd heard that morning and heard again tonight was a warning. Leonard removed five twenties and two tens from his billfold, handed them to Toomey, and took the bag.

“Thank you,” Toomey said, vigilantly folding the bills before placing them in his shirt pocket. “Glad all this is behind us. The rest of these chuckleheads I deal with can't figure their way out of a one-door shithouse, so it's nice to deal with a man with some smarts about him. That's why I done business with you in the first place. Needed the intellectual stimulation. Been
good for you too. Leastways you ain't clerking in a Seven-Eleven no more.”

“Yes,” Leonard agreed. “It's been good.”

Carlton chuckled. “I'll never forget the day I come to that store to check you out. The way I was talking to them farmers you figured me for just another simple no-sense hayseed, didn't you?”

“I don't think I ever figured you for simple,” Leonard said. But he knew the older man was partly right. Others loitered in the store that day and Toomey had joined their conversation about hunting and tobacco, Carlton's diction and grammar mimicking the other men's, making it easy to believe he was no different from those men. But once the others left, Toomey had winked at Leonard conspiratorially, then talked about Jimmy Carter's economic policy fifteen minutes before offering to expand Leonard's side business to quaaludes and uppers. Carlton had refrained from using colloquial language or subject-verb errors during that conversation. Just to show you this one time that I do know the King's English, the big man had said.

Carlton placed his hands on the steering wheel and leaned his head slightly forward, as if Leonard's words had pressed a heavy weight onto his back.

“No, I sure ain't simple,” he said. “Some folks blame me for every meanness done in this county, from selling heroin to stealing kids' lollipops. Say I even killed my wife. Others say only a child of God could sing gospel the way I do. I guess I'm somewheres betwixt and between, like any another man.”

Carlton gestured toward the bills in his pocket.

“There's some fellows who'd have bowed up their backs
about a matter like this. Men like that just keep on being stupid till they get themselves in a real bad fix, like it did that boy.”

Carlton Toomey paused, seemed to be waiting for Leonard to ask about the “bad fix” Travis had gotten into. But Leonard said nothing.

The trailer's front room lit up with a gray muted glow. Voices came from the television.

“Still with you, is she,” Carlton said. “That girl's like a mule following a carrot on a stick. Show her some pills and she'll go anywhere. Of course she does put a dent in your profit margin.”

Toomey cranked the truck but let the engine idle.

“Not that I blame you. She's been rode hard but there's some pretty left in her yet. Everything has a price, I reckon.” Toomey paused. “Listen at me. I'm pontificating like I'm the teacher, not you.”

“I'm not a teacher anymore,” Leonard said.

Carlton Toomey turned on the headlights and put the truck in gear.

“It's been a damn long day. I need to get back to the house and make sure that boy of mine done what I told him. He takes after his momma in the brains department, but ain't that ever the way of it.”

Toomey backed up the truck a few feet and turned around. The pickup's taillights disappeared into the trees. Leonard stood outside a few minutes. He'd warned the boy not to go back and Travis hadn't listened. Something had happened. But whatever that something was wasn't his concern. The boy had stirred up all sorts of things deep inside Leonard that he'd
thought safely locked in the past. He'd probably never see Travis again, and that was for the best.

When he went inside, Dena was on the couch watching TV, clothed only in panties and a halter top. She'd lain out in the sun that afternoon and her skin had a pink tinge.

“You need a air conditioner for this trailer,” she said, her voice slurred by the quaaludes.

He looked at her face. Carlton Toomey had been right. There was, despite all the pills and booze, the scars and two knocked-out teeth, some pretty left in her. High cheekbones, delicate nose, and sensuous lips. The morning after he'd brought her back from the Ponderosa, Leonard had awakened to the smell of coffee. He'd walked into the kitchen where Dena had set the table with two plates and a pair of mismatched forks, paper towels as napkins. On each plate was a single piece of buttered toast. It looked like something a child might have done, a child who'd witnessed such domesticity only in a movie or a book. When he'd asked if she was ready to go home, she'd said there was no home, just a back room she rented from a quarrelsome old woman. She'd lingered at the breakfast table, then tried to coax him back into bed. The morning and her hangover accentuated her dry jaundiced pallor as though the nicotine in the cigarettes she smoked had tinted her skin. The plastic and wire where two of her front teeth should have been was more evident as well in the morning's unflinching light. Before leaving she'd taken a decade-old photograph from her billfold, one that showed a woman of undeniable beauty. Recognize me? she'd challenged, not putting the photo away until he'd nodded yes.

“You could buy us a couple of those window units, for God's sake. I got you enough new business to afford it.” Dena slumped deeper into the couch, weary from the effort of speaking two whole sentences.

“I could afford a lot more things if you weren't eating my pills like they were jellybeans,” Leonard responded. He couldn't help but wish that they did have a window unit, because hot as it was he wouldn't sleep well tonight.

“Anyway, you owe me a gift,” Dena said, her eyes still on the TV.

“How do you figure that?”

“It's our anniversary, sweetheart. This time last July's when we first met.”

Leonard retrieved another beer from the refrigerator and left her on the couch, knowing he'd find her there in the morning. He undressed and turned on the bedroom's ceiling fan, noticing the watermark on the ceiling as he did so. He went to the closet and pushed aside the thick leather-bound ledgers one at a time to reach the picture album in the far back corner. Leonard briefly contemplated taking down the 1848 ledger as well. He lay in bed, the album propped on his stomach as he turned the pages slowly, counting the pictures. Fifty-seven, and only two in Illinois.

Kera had believed they had no choice but to go. Two highschool teachers finding jobs in one county was hard enough, much less at the same school. Every morning for four years, they'd each driven thirty minutes away from their apartment in Asheville to opposite sides of the county. In Illinois they would work at the same school. There would be more time to
be with their child, with each other. Less stress as well, fewer arguments fueled by that stress. The problem was the long commutes, Kera argued, but Leonard believed the long commutes, like the sleep-deprived year when Emily's ears and lungs had been welcoming harbors for infection, had not created but revealed fissures in their marriage, fissures that would be all the more apparent in a landscape where nothing remained hidden. He'd finally agreed to go, but Kera noted his sullenness. An English teacher, she'd accused him of living in the passive voice, letting others make choices so if things went wrong he didn't have to bear the blame.

The hottest day of the year, the radio announcer had predicted as they'd started the all-day drive to Illinois. He and Kera had been up past midnight loading the U-Haul, already exhausted come daybreak as they buckled Emily in her car seat and headed north. An hour out of Asheville Leonard and Kera were already bickering, about when to stop and feed Emily, which radio station to listen to. The Ford Fairlane struggled in the higher mountains. As they approached the eastern continental divide, the orange and white trailer swayed and dragged behind them like an anchor someone forgot to raise. The temperature gauge rose, and it seemed the mountains and summer day had collaborated to keep them from getting out of North Carolina. Leonard cut off the air conditioner. They rolled windows down but Emily still whined she was hot. Kera told him to turn the air-conditioning back on, but Leonard was afraid the car would overheat. When Emily began to cry, Kera reached over and punched the
ON
button herself.

They had almost made it.
EASTERN CONTINENTAL DIVIDE,
½ MILE,
a blue-and-white sign proclaimed. The temperature indicator wavered like a compass needle in the red part of the gauge but the car kept moving, and their continued ascent seemed a small miracle that might harbinger the possibility of even greater ones. For a few moments Leonard believed luck might stroll into their lives and announce itself, that he would be wrong about the car overheating, maybe wrong about some other things as well. He was about to reach for Kera's hand when the radiator hose burst.

He'd managed to pull the car onto the shoulder, then hitch-hiked across the mountain, leaving Kera and Emily by the roadside. He returned two hours later in a tow truck. Kera and Emily waited where he'd left them, both dehydrated and sunburned. The driver chained the car and trailer to his truck, and the four of them had crammed into the front seat, crossing the divide like a family fleeing a fire or flood.