20.
Red fingers of sunlight were all that remained of the day, and they clawed at the trees on the horizon. By the time we found the place described to us by the man with no front teeth, the sunset was still bleeding, but in the east the full moon was out and clearly visible and the color of fresh coconut.
The man with no front teeth was right. We had not gone far enough. Illium Moon’s place was a small cottage-style house set off the road. We recognized it by the tarp-covered stacks we presumed to be lumber and by a mailbox across from it with MOON painted on it in black letters.
To get to the house you had to go through an open gap in a barbed-wire fence and over a cattle guard and down a muddy-white sand drive. The house was white with a blue roof and shutters, and beside it was a little open carport that sheltered a very clean-looking ’65 white Ford. The yard was impeccable. Out to the far side of the house were several neat stacks of something with huge gray-green tarps pulled over them. No bookmobile was visible.
We parked by one of the stacks and got out. I took hold of the edge of the tarp closest to me and pulled it back. Underneath was lumber on treated pine pallets. The lumber on the pallets was used lumber, as the man with no teeth had said, but it was good lumber and free of nails.
We knocked on the front door and waited, and no one answered. We walked around the house and didn’t see anyone. Out back we walked a ways into a large, recently mowed pasture. The pasture smelled sweet, like a fruit drink. Off to the far left was a small, weathered-gray barn. From where we stood we could see a little brown-water pond with a big oak growing by it, and behind it, a long dark line of pine trees. The leaking sunlight visible above the trees was like a fading flare.
As we walked out to the barn, grasshoppers leaped ahead of us. The barn door was partially open and we went inside and called Illium’s name, but no one answered. Inside it was stuffy hot, and there was a tractor and some equipment and a few bales of low-quality hay. I was uncertain how much land Illium Moon owned, but I didn’t get the impression he ran livestock. Most likely he had a little cash crop of hay, and that was it.
Behind the tractor were two small piles under tarps. I looked under one. Stacks of newspapers on pallets. Under the others were neatly stacked cardboard boxes, and in the boxes were aluminum cans and plastic bottles. A few things clicked around inside my head like Morse code, but they didn’t click long, and I couldn’t decipher it.
We walked back to the house and stood on the front porch.
“No bookmobile,” I said, “and no Illium.”
“Let’s leave a note,” Leonard said. “Tell him I’m Chester’s nephew, see if he’ll get in touch.”
Leonard went out to his car and got a pad and a pencil. He came back and leaned the pad against the front door and started to write. The front door swung open under the pressure.
“Open sesame,” Leonard said.
I peeked inside. It was a very neat house. The living room furniture wasn’t new, but it was well cared for. The white walls looked to have been painted a short time ago. There was no carpet, but there were some colorful throw rugs. The blue-and-brown couch had plastic protection sleeves over the arms. There was a cardboard box on the couch.
I called out, “Illium.”
No answer.
“He ought to lock up,” I said.
“Maybe he couldn’t lock up,” Leonard said.
I let that lay, and Leonard went in the house, and I went with him.
“We could get our ass in a crack for this,” I said, but we kept right on looking.
We went through the house. Illium’s kitchen was even neater than MeMaw’s place and smelled of some sort of minty disinfectant. The bedroom was very tidy and the bed was made. The bathroom was neat except for the tub. It had a sandy ring around it and there were little hunks of damp hay. We went back to the living room.
I looked in the box on the couch. There were magazines in the box. I saw immediately by the cover of the magazine on top that it was the same sort of magazine we had found in Uncle Chester’s trunk. I picked it up. There were more magazines of the same ilk underneath. Unlike the magazines in Uncle Chester’s trunk, these magazines weren’t as aged. They looked as if they might have been damp once, but they were in pretty good condition. I said, “Uh-oh.”
Leonard was looking at them too. He said, “Yeah, uh-oh.”
Under the magazines was a pile of clothes. Pants. Shirts. Underwear. All little boys’ clothes.
“A bigger uh-oh,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “We come by and Illium ain’t here and he’s left the door unlocked and he’s got him a box of kiddie porn sitting right here on the couch with kids’ clothes. Seems awful damn convenient.”
“Nothing says he couldn’t be stupid.”
We put the stuff back like it was and went out and closed the door. I used my shirttail to wipe the door knob and wondered what all I’d touched in the house besides the magazines.
“Let’s look in the carport,” Leonard said.
We looked in the old Ford first. Nothing there.
“Must be doing the bookmobile route,” I said. I turned then, and in the corner of the carport, on shelves, were a number of large jars, and in the jars there were little cuts of paper, and even though I wasn’t close to them, I guessed what they were right away.
Leonard saw what I saw. He went over and got one of the jars and twisted the lid off and pulled some of the pieces from the jar and held a handful out for me to look at.
I’d guessed right. Coupons.
Leonard replaced the coupons and screwed the lid on the jar. “While we’re snooping,” he said, “why don’t we look under those tarps?”
We checked under all the tarps. Under some was lumber, and under others were mechanical parts of all kinds, everything from plumbing to automotive. Illium seemed to be a neat pack rat. Maybe he used the stuff to fix up his house and car, tried to be neighborly to folks like No Front Teeth down the road by sharing his goods.
And in his spare time he cut hay and sold it and worked at the church and free-lance drove the bookmobile, and in the evenings, after a hard day of public service, he read child pornography with a young boy’s underwear stretched over his head. It could happen.
We walked back to Leonard’s car and leaned on the front of it and we crossed our arms and watched the sky grow darker and the moon grow brighter. Stars were popping out. In the distance, the pond sucked up the moonlight and turned the water the color of creamed coffee.
“What the hell is it with the coupons?” Leonard said. “First, I thought Uncle Chester had gotten to be a nut shy a pecan pie, but now I’m wondering. This guy’s got the same thing going.”
“Hate to bring it up,” I said, “but another stretch of coincidence is kiddie porn showing up here as well as your uncle’s. And there’s the fact they knew each other, and were good friends. Lots of circumstantial evidence. It’s beginning to look bad for a certain good friend’s relative, and I say that with all due respect.”
Leonard was quiet for a time. He said, “Doesn’t matter. I believe in Uncle Chester. He didn’t kill anyone, not a kid anyway. Someone fucked with him, he might have killed them, but a kid, no way. And he wasn’t reading kiddie fuck lit. There’s an answer to all this, I don’t care how it looks.”
I hoped so, for Leonard’s sake. I glanced down at the ground and watched the moonlight silver the rainwater collected in a set of deep tire ruts in front of us, ruts from the bookmobile, I figured.
Where was the bookmobile? Where was Illium? Did moss really only grow on the north side of trees, and why did the Houston Oilers keep losing football games?
I took a careful look at the ruts. They ran on out across the grass and hay field. The grass and hay was pushed down, but starting to straighten slowly. That meant the grass had not been pushed down too long ago, but with the rain beating for a couple of days, it probably hadn’t had the chance to pop back up. It would have taken this warm day and this much time for it to come back to its former position. Those tracks had been made three days, four days before.
I said, “Look here.”
Leonard and I squatted down and looked more closely. The night was bright and we could see well. We also knew what we were seeing. Put us in a city and we couldn’t hail a taxi, but we’d both grown up in the woods and
