“He still helping out heisters?”
“I don’t think so,” Wes said, shrugging. “But I don’t really know.”
Chub had won Kimmy’s heart. He had stuck by her. He had fathered a child. He’d stood firm where I’d failed.
But if he was still plotting getaways he’d eventually be taken down. I pictured Chub on the six o’clock news, dead or in chains, Kimmy alone again, a kid in her arms waiting for a daddy who might never come home. The guy had to have gone straight, I thought, he wouldn’t risk Kimmy and a baby for anything. But I wanted to be certain.
6
I stood on the front porch and listened to my family talking over breakfast. They were in a good mood. My father said something that had the quality of an anecdote and the others yapped comebacks. My mother allowed herself a strained but genuine kI dfor ll ri straightind of singsong laughter.
I needed a hot shower and a little more time to brace myself. I slipped off the porch and around the side of the house and in through the back door. I took the stairs three at a time, grabbed some fresh clothes, and hit the upstairs bathroom.
My head was louder than the steaming water blasting down. I shut my eyes as the past broke against me- snippets of old conversations, whispers in the dark. Flashes of Kimmy’s face seen as dawn muscled through the curtains, sunlight catching the stray downy hair beneath her ear. I thought of Chub on top of her. Imagined her screaming in labor with Chub crouched next to the doctor, waiting for his baby to crown. Collie’s victims turned their eyes on me. I scrubbed until my stomach burned from tasting too much soap and my skin felt raw. I tried to remember anything about life on the ranch and came up empty.
I got dressed and realized I didn’t want to see anyone except Collie. He’d known his story would get under my skin, that I wouldn’t be able to hide from it.
I stared in the mirror and wondered who the hell he might be talking about. My eyes were shot with red and I checked the cabinet for drops. There weren’t any.
I stood at the top of the stairs and listened to my family talk. I wanted to run again but I didn’t know where. I sat on the top step and looked down through the railings, which gave me a view of the living room and the kitchen.
My father was leaning against the screen-door jamb, having a smoke. He stood silhouetted in the sun, as dark and powerful as he had been last night in the rain.
Mal and Grey were at the table, practicing their card grifts and cross chatter. I knew what to look for and I could still barely see when they pulled five-card lifts and bottom- or third-card deals. They’d played half a million hands of poker but never tired of the game.
Grey still had his ladies’-man looks. He projected a boyish charm, smiling with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of first-rate dentistry, his head cocked and his perfectly combed silver hair falling just right. He always put on a show even when no one was watching. He’d had hundreds of women, owned them, cared for them even, but the one he truly loved had left him at the altar when he was seventeen and he’d never gotten over it. There was the faintest glint of regret in his eyes, which made him even more attractive to women who liked that sad puppy-dog look.
Mal had the hard appearance of a stone killer. There was no softness in his face at all. It looked like it had been sandblasted out of rock and then pounded at by storms for centuries-craggy, coarse, and crudely fashioned. He had a generous laugh and a warm, beaming expression, but his teeth were yellowed by years of smoking Churchill stogies. It hadn’t only been JFK that made Wes and his boys too afraid to bust in and take him on. Mal looked vicious enough to ice a pregnant schoolteacher.
But so far as I knew, he’d never even thrown a punch. When I was a kid he used to take me to the park and we’d feed the ducks in the lake. On the occasional weekend he’d lead me around town until we found some children’s party somewhere and crashed it. We’d load up on cake and ice cream and watch clowns, magicians, and puppet shows. He’d sometimes even work the grill and barbecue for the kids and their parents. No one ever dared ask him who he was or what he was doing there. They either knew he was a Rand or they took one look at his face and decided to shut the hell esst the helup and stick to the other side of the yard and hide behind the toolshed.
Grey took little notice of me until I hit twelve or so. Then he was the one who showed me the correct way to shave, how to dress, how to tie a tie. I’d already been given the birds-and-the-bees speech by my father a few years earlier. It had mostly scared the hell out of me. Grey reinterpreted the information for me and made me realize it sounded sort of fun. He told me, “The next couple of years you’re really going to learn what it means to sting and burn, kid. I envy you getting to go through it for the first time, but I wouldn’t trade places with you for anything.”
Mal and Grey’s banter at the kitchen table was quick and fun but with a slight angry undertone, the way the best long green chatter is played out. No one suspects that two people who sound as if they don’t like each other might be working together. It was already getting on my nerves. I wondered how my parents could live with that noise day in and out. I wondered how I’d lived with it for so long.
My father turned from the front door and called to Grey, “Your girlfriend’s back.”
“Taking a beautiful woman out for a night of dancing doesn’t make her my girlfriend,” Grey said.
“Maybe not,” my father admitted. He drew deeply on his cigarette and exhaled smoke as he spoke. “But what about the three, four weeks of courtship that have followed?”
“That’s not courtship, Pinscher, it’s infiltrating the enemy.”
“That what they calling it nowadays?” Mal put in. “Infiltration? You write that on the notes you leave on her pillow? ‘Before you, my life was an unfinished poem. You complete me. I shall always remember our wondrous night of love and song, what with all that infiltration of your sexy bits.’ Now it makes sense why she keeps coming around. She can’t live without the romance.” Mal grinned. If anything, it made his features seem even more brutal.
“And what did all your spy work lead to?” my father asked.
“Exclusive rights to my life story,” Grey said.
“So she wants her money’s worth.”
“Or her money back,” Mal said.
I realized they were talking about the pretty reporter my father had mentioned, the one who stuck a microphone in his face and asked him how he felt now that his son was about to be executed. He stood at the door watching her now, defending the house. Grey sat thinking of his time in bed with her even while he dipped into the cards and tried to give himself a straight flush. Mal slipped aces out of the deck and I thought behind his open expression he must still be jealous of his brother, staring into that handsome face every day knowing he had the power in his fists to crush all the beauty from it.
A young woman I didn’t know was washing dishes with my mother. She moved with a kind of gentle swaying, as if dancing to music only she could hear. I tilted my head to get a better look.
She said, “I can go give a statement. They’ll take a few photos and screw up my comments but at least it’ll move them along for a little while.” Her voice stopped me. She was the woman who had phoned me at the ranch and told me that Collie wanted me to visit him. I looked harder and saw it was my younger sister, Dale, who’d been only ten when I left. I had spoken to her and hadn’t even known it.
“No, I don’t want you talking to them,” my mother said.
“I don’t mind.”
“I know you don’t, but I don’t like the way they
“It’s their job.”
“That’s not their job. This deathwatch isn’t their job.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Ma. It is.”
“It shouldn’t be.” Dale shrugged.
“Grey, can you get your girlfriend out of here?”
