1
DEEP IN THE LATE JULY NIGHT, the headlamps of Harley Jensen’s cruiser carved a tunnel of light above Highway 28. They lit the thin tar-and-chip road and the bunchgrass whose shoots ate its crumbling edges. The glare blotted out all else. North-central Nebraska, the spot where sand met loam, rose and fell around him, cast black against the shadow of sky.
Each night on patrol, Harley absently ticked off names of passing tracts like reading a plat map in an old atlas. Convention out here held that pastures and fields were named for the living who owned them. Homes and outbuildings huddled within windbreaks, their yards lit by single lampposts, were named for their builders. The only exception was Harley’s folks’ place, the abandoned farmhouse he now approached and intended to speed right by. Once the windbreak’s trees cut a dark mound against the horizon, he’d pass the barn and glance to see the front door still shut. Then he’d sink the gas with the sole of his roper.
The Jensen place had been built by a Braasch, and a Braasch owned it now. Before Harley was born there forty-seven years back, other families had lived in the silent two-story, but Jensen was the name that took. Which meant there were two systems for naming, Harley supposed. Industry or infamy. Whichever stuck.
A chrome glint flickered in the overgrown yard and tightened his neck. Somebody was parked down by the barn.
He passed the house and let the incline slow him to a coast. He made a left on the gravel of County Road K and stopped. Elbow propped on the window frame, he took a last long drag of the smoke that kept him awake and flicked a shred of tobacco from his tongue. He brushed a knuckle against a sideburn and debated whether or not to keep driving. Pretend he hadn’t seen anything.
The legal drinking age was nineteen, old enough that high school kids gathered in broken-down homesteads dotting the hillsides. Granted, they were generally bright enough to pick a place without highway frontage, certainly one without ties to a deputy who patrolled half the night. But then Harley supposed nothing drew drunk, horny kids so much as a little seediness, some grisly bit of trivia they could spin into full-fledged lore. He wondered what they’d come up with. In his day, rumor had it in the thick cottonwoods lining the quarry, a compound of naked cannibal albinos waited for couples to park on moonlit nights. It’d be tough to beat that.
He threw the Fury in reverse, punched the gas to clear the blind intersection quick, and weaved into the house’s drive. The tracks were little more than two slight dips in the knee-high grass. Ahead, his low beams caught a snatch of tailgate. Above the wild rye and volunteer ash saplings hovered the dusty bumper of a red F-250.
Paul Reddick.
Harley gripped the handset where it clipped to the radio. He held the button, not pressing but resting. Protocol was to radio in whenever he pulled someone over. Technically, he supposed he wasn’t pulling anyone over. He let the handset go.
He grabbed the flashlight from the bench seat and tensed at the pop of the door hinge he kept forgetting to WD-40. He stood in the brush and trained the beam on the pickup’s back window. The old twelve-gauge Winchester lay in the rack behind Paul’s dirt-colored hair, which hung well past his shoulders. From the open driver’s-side window, a tan and veined forearm jutted like it was signaling a right-hand turn. Its fist flipped Harley the bird.
“Reddick,” Harley acknowledged.
Paul dropped the middle finger and let his arm dangle from the window. “Jensen,” floated back just as how-do-you-do.
That how-do-you-do-ness, that unshakable calm, made Harley’s teeth grit. It wasn’t composure, and it wasn’t reserve. Harley knew a good bit about composure and reserve himself. What Paul had was the hostile indifference of a person who valued nothing. The kind of rarefied spite that came from never having known a single thing he’d mind losing.
It no doubt stemmed from a brother dying eighteen years back, when Paul was surely too young to even remember him. In Paul’s case, Harley thought not remembering was probably worse. All Paul would’ve known was the wake of it.
Dell Junior, the oldest of three Reddick boys, was seven when he was killed by a farmhand named Rollie Asher. Dell Junior caught Rollie off guard while he was shoveling dirt into a collapsed cellar at the old Lucas place. Rollie hadn’t been right since Korea. He caved in the boy’s skull, called the sheriff to say he’d done it, then blew a load of buckshot through his own. All Rollie neglected to mention was where he put the body. The summer of ’60, Harley and the department searched every vacant building, scoured every grain of dirt in the fields and ditches. Never found him. They’d found the spade, matted with hair and skin. They’d found a spot of earth soaked in more blood than Harley knew could course through a seven-year-old boy. Just no body.
Sometimes Harley suspected if the department had found that body, the Reddicks might’ve fared better. Maybe the mother, Virginia, wouldn’t have become a shut-in. Maybe Dell Senior wouldn’t have moved out and left the two young boys as her caretakers. If the department had just found that body, maybe Paul’s sense of the size and gravity of things, of knowing how and when to be fazed, would’ve been halfway normal. As it stood, not a whole hell of a lot qualified.
Harley’s boots moved forward, flattening the grass and grinding the dirt till a movement in the cab stopped him. He rubbed the holster’s thumb-break. Another head, this one covered in long, crumpled blond curls, surfaced from the seat. A pair of eyes sleepily squinted back at him. A girl, sixteen maybe. Paul had to be bordering twenty-two by now. It was worth a check.
At the open window, Harley trained his light on Paul, who didn’t squint. Instead his head tilted back, as if he were studying the glare through a pair of bifocals. The angle made his hard-set jaw look more square than it already was. His silver-gray eyes held steady, unblinking.
“Sightseeing?” Harley asked.
“Getting a little air.” The words seemed a touch too loud, an effect of the pitch, not the volume. Paul’s voice was clear and low. “While I’m still on the right side of the sod.”
It was a quip old men would exchange at a feed store. But then, the only thing young about Paul was the age on his license. The hairline cracks at the edges of his eyes, lines from working in the sun and wind, resembled crow’s feet.
“Time being, at least,” Harley said.
“Sounds pretty foreboding.” Paul glanced away easily, without a trace of readable meaning, toward the house. In profile, his bones were thick, prominent. So much so, they seemed ready to surface and split the skin. The flashlight shadowed the dark hollows below Paul’s deep-set eyes, between his cheekbone and jaw.
“Kindly step from the vehicle.”
Paul looked down in his lap and busied himself with his hands. Harley nudged his holster break with a snap. The rasp of a zipper’s teeth filtered from the cab in reply.
The pickup door opened, and Harley watched for Paul to blink at the dome light stuttering on. Nothing. Paul slipped his hands in the pockets of his too-tight jeans and strolled through the knee-high grass toward the house. His threadbare black T-shirt faded into the night’s darkness, a whiff of Brut aftershave lingering on the air behind him.
Harley gripped the wheel and used the running board to hoist himself into the driver’s seat. He turned the beam on the girl, although the overhead made her clear enough.
She was wide-eyed, pinching her bottom lip between her thumb and forefinger.
“You here of your own volition?” he asked her.
She sat there, dumb and dazed as a sleepwalker.
“I said, you out here on purpose?”
The girl said nothing.
He shifted the light from pupil to pupil. They worked fine. Harley reached across the cab and pressed the button on the glove box. The compartment fell open with a thud.
“Ain’t nothing in there,” Paul called out, more or less jovially.
There probably wasn’t. Once, there’d been a half bottle of quaaludes prescribed to Paul’s mother, but Glenn, the sheriff, flushed them. Glenn told Harley to forget it, that poor woman had enough problems. What exactly those problems were was a matter of small-town speculation, since she never came out of her house.
There was nothing in the glove box besides the registration and some coarse paper napkins. Rifling through Paul Reddick’s F-250 always felt about as productive as clipping off the lit end of a fuse. Even if it put the spark out, Harley sensed the fuse getting shorter each time.
Across the way, Paul swung a foot, not kicking but swiping his worn motorcycle boot through the grass, like he was searching halfheartedly between the blades. “Stop by for old times’ sake?” he asked.
“Saw your pickup,” Harley told him, running his flashlight beam over the dash, the floor, the seat. “Thought I’d make sure nobody lost a foot or got brained on a rock yet.”
Copyright © 2021 by Chris Harding Thornton
