One Monday We Killed Them All Read online

  Chief of Police Larry Brint caught me in the corridor as I was leaving. He’s sixty, a mild, worn man with a school teacher look, but with a deep and lasting toughness which makes Alfie’s bluster look like a comedian’s routine. He has made it known to me, without even putting it in so many words, that he wants me to have his job when he quits.

  He fell in step beside me and we walked slowly toward the rear exit of our wing of City Hall. “Settle Peters down?” he asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “This can be a rough thing. You’ve got to handle it just right, Fenn. McAran could make you look pretty bad.”

  “I realize that.”

  “If there’s any slip, we can’t afford an ounce of mercy. Does Meg understand that?”

  “She claims she does. I don’t know if she really does.”

  “How long is he going to stay with you?”

  “Nobody knows. I don’t know what his plans are.”

  We stopped in the shelter of the entrance roof. It had begun to rain again. Larry Brint studied me for a moment. “All prison ever does for most men like McAran is prime them and fuse them like a bomb. You won’t know where or how that bomb is going to go off.”

  “Just watch and wait, I guess.”

  “Damn the rain.” He started out into it and turned back. “Fenn, you try to get to him on that ride back. You try to tell him how it’s going to be around here. He won’t do Meg any favor trying to stay on here.”

  “Would that matter to him, Larry?”

  “Guess not.” He frowned and looked puzzled. It was a rare expression for him to wear. “Getting old, I guess. Thinking too much. Nearly every man I’ve ever known has been a mixture of good and evil, so it’s mostly luck pushing them one way or another, and it’s fair the law should give them equal rights and equal justice. But in my life there’s been just seven I can remember that shouldn’t come under the rules. There should be a special license for those, Fenn. A man should be able to lead them out back and kill them like a snake. Dwight McAran is the last one of those seven I’ve run into. God grant I never meet up with another. You be careful!”

  He fixed me with a stern blue eye and walked off through the rain.

  It was still raining when I left the house the next morning for the eighty-mile drive to Harpersburg, a cold pale dreary rain coming down through low gray clouds that nudged the tops of the hills. Brook City is in the middle of dying country. It’s just dying a little slower than the hill country around it. They came a long time ago and pulled the guts up out of the earth and took what they wanted and went away, leaving the slag and the tipples and the sidings that are rusting away. There’s nothing left in the hills but the scrabbly farms and the empty faces and the hard violent ways of living. Violence lifts the climate of despair and boredom for a little while. The government trucks come to the villages once a month, bringing food that’s mostly starch, and when they collect it they try to make jokes about it, and the laughter is dutiful, and flat as the jokes. It’s shine country, stomping country, old car country, a stale place left behind when the world moved on some place else, and the things most alive in the hills are the crows and the berry bushes, and, for a shorter time than seems fair to them, the young girls. Dwight and Meg came out of the hills, came from a village named Keepsafe, a small place now empty of people, with the road washed out and gone. I was born and raised in Brook City. With every year of my life it’s gotten a little smaller, an old woman shrinking with the years, sighing at nothing at all, running out of time and size and money and hope.

  Fifteen miles out of town I got stuck behind an ancient wildcat rig grinding in low-low up three miles of curves, overloaded with stolen coal, and when I finally passed it I caught a glimpse of the driver, a fat faded woman wearing a baseball cap. It didn’t bother me to lose the time. I wished I could drive through the rain all the rest of my life and never get to Harpersburg. You can always tell when there’s some part of your life that hasn’t a chance of working out. It’s like taking your cancer to the doctor a little too late. You wish you were somebody else entirely.

  At the prison I went through gate security and was taken to the plywood office of Deputy Warden Boo Hudson.

  “Fenn Hillyer, by God!” he said, pretending a vast, glad surprise. Way back, when I still wore a harness, he was Sheriff of Brook County and I knew him then, and it was always the same. If you had seen him twenty minutes before, the greeting was always the same. It had been over a year since I had seen him in the lobby of the Christopher Hotel at some time of political dealings, and he was unchanged, a sagging, flabby old man with a sourness of flesh and breath, hound-dog eyes the color of creek mud, seed-corn teeth, hair dyed anthracite black and oiled in flat strings across his baldness. He bulked heavy there in an oak chair, soiled and sweaty, the office thick with the scent of him, endlessly smiling, working hard at the effort of pumping the stale air in and out of his lungs.

  Boo Hudson was Sheriff for twenty-two years until the signals got crossed somehow and he didn’t get ample warning of a Federal raid on some of the back county stills in which he had some substantial interest. People talked and records were found, but over the years he had tied himself so closely to the men who run our state, and knew so much about so many existing arrangements, the worst they could do to him was force him not to run again after serving the last few months of the term of office. That was almost seven years ago, and two days after elections that year the State Prison Commission appointed him Deputy Warden at Harpersburg. We all knew it wasn’t because he needed the money. During his years in office Boo Hudson had picked up bits and pieces of this and that, some leased warehouses and a beer franchise and that sort of thing, and we could assume there was some cash money here and there, where no court order could touch it, probably rolled tight in sealed fruit jars and tucked below the frost line as is the custom among our elected officials.

  “Set and tell me how you been,” Boo said.

  I sat in a chair further from him than the one he indicated. “Nothing new,” I said.

  “Hear Larry Brint still ain’t closed up Division Street and the women still yammering at him. Guess Brook City don’t change, Fenn.”

  “It’s the only way we can operate, Boo. We got a two-hundred-cop town and a hundred-and-twenty-cop budget, so we keep all the trouble in one place instead of getting it so spread out we lose track. They give Larry eighty more cops and twenty more cars, we’ll close up Division Street right now.”

  He sighed, belched and said, “Sure, sure. I tell you, we’re glad to see you around here. We’re glad to be shut of McAran. Warden Waley, he says in twenty-eight years of penol—penology, he never see a con with absolutely no way to get to him. Nearly everybody, you can work them around with the food, or solitary or the work assignment or privileges, or some damn thing, and the ones left, those you can bust them up a little until they get the news. But a guy like McAran in a place like this, he turns into some kind of hero, and it gives a lot of punks the wrong ideas, and the whole setup gets harder to run.”

  Hudson chuckled in a phlegmy way. “The way you take him home, Fenn, you stop alongside the road where it’s quiet, and blow the top of his head off, and then take what’s left back to Brook City.”

  “When can I have him?”

  “I gave orders that when you come in somebody should go get him straightened away for leaving, so he should be brought in here any minute now.”

  Hudson had just started to talk about Brook County when a guard brought Dwight McAran in.

  He gave me one quick identifying glance and stood at ease, staring at the wall behind Boo Hudson, with all the massive patience of a work animal. I hadn’t seen him since that first visit. Any last trace of boyishness had been gone for a long time. His face was a visible record of rebellion, the tissues brutally thickened, white scars shiny against the dull gray of prison flesh. His coppery hair was cropped close to his scalp. It was thinning on top and turning to gray at the temples.

&nbs
p; He was dressed in the expensive clothing he had worn when they had admitted him. But such clothing no longer looked right on him. The jacket was too tight across the brute span of shoulders, and too slack at the waist. The huge stained hands, horny with callous, hung incongruously from tailored sleeves, curled into the shape of hard labor.

  “He get everything back he brang in and sign the paper on it, Joey?” Hudson asked.

  “Yes, and he got the cash money balance back from commissary, a little over fourteen dollars, Boo, and signed that paper too.”

  “He got any personal stuff out the cell?”

  “He give what little he had to the guys on his row, Boo.”

  “Thanks, Joey. You get on back to work now.”

  Joey left. Boo Hudson put an envelope on the edge of the desk where Dwight could reach it. “In there, McAran, is your gate pass to go out, and the twenty dollars we got to give you by state law, and the three dollars and six cents which would be our cost on a bus ticket from Harpersburg to Brook City. Sign this here receipt saying you got it.”

  McAran hesitated, picked up the envelope and with an insulting thoroughness counted the money it contained. He put the bills into an alligator wallet with gold edges, flipped the nickel and the penny into Hudson’s metal wastebasket. There was no trace of expression on his face.

  Boo Hudson colored and said, “I hope that pleasured you, McAran. I hope it pleasured you the same way you bitched yourself outa getting not one day of good time took off your sentence. If you’d come in here with the right attitude, you could have been walking free a year and a half ago, and you would have come off parole today.”

  Dwight turned toward me. He spoke with a minimum of lip movement. His voice was huskier than I remembered. “Is the sentence over now? Can I leave right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would happen to me if I picked up this fat bag of ignorant garbage and ruptured it a little?”

  “Now you hold on!” Boo Hudson said, his voice rising to a squeak.

  “He’d probably have his people stomp you up a little and throw you out the gate, Dwight.”

  McAran turned and stared at Boo Hudson. “Not worth it,” he said. “Too bad. Why don’t you die a little faster, Hudson, instead of just rotting away and smelling up the world? Put your mind on it and you could be dead in a month.”

  “You’ll be back in here!” Boo yelled. “You’ll be back in here, by God, and I’ll break you the next time, I swear. I’ll have you begging and screaming like a girl. I’ll tell them what to do to you, you—”

  “Let’s go,” said Dwight McAran, and I followed him out of the office. We were escorted across an angle of the yard through the drizzle to the gate. The gate guards made a phone check on the exit pass, then gave the coded signal to the tower to lift the outer gate. We crossed the road to the parking lot. I suddenly realized he wasn’t beside me. I stopped and looked back. He was standing under an elm tree with his fists on his hips, staring up at the rain-wet leaves. A small boy pedaled down the road on his bicycle. McAran followed the boy with a slow turning of his head. Then he gave a curious contortion of his body, a sort of massive shuddering shrug. Perhaps in that moment he threw off some of the hopeless weight of the prison years. At any rate, when he turned and walked toward me his stride was subtly changed, and his clothing seemed more suitable to him.

  ii

  When McAran got into the car with me, he was as casual as though I were giving him a lift from his home to the grocery store.

  As we left the lot, he said, “Not much miles on this for a six-year-old car.”

  “It didn’t have much on it when we bought it. Maybe it was turned back. We took one trip in it. Except for running up here once a month, it just gets used around town, and most of that by Meg.”

  “There was sixteen times she came up when she couldn’t get to see me. Hudson could have let her know.”

  “At least she could bring you stuff those times and leave it off. That was something she felt good about doing, even when she couldn’t see you.”

  “Stop where I can buy cigarettes, will you?”

  I pulled into a gas station. When we were on the road again, I glanced over at him from time to time. Awkward silences can be created only between individuals who are aware of each other. Dwight McAran was so totally indifferent to any impression he might be making, he could have been sitting entirely alone. I glanced at him. In the line of the thickened brow, in the weight and placement of his pale green eyes, in the curve of the broken mouth, I could see a remote echo of the contours of the face of my beloved wife. It seemed a savage paradox that this could be true. It was as if someone had defiled a picture of her. His face was not a suitable place for this inference of warmth and sensitivity.

  He is one of those men who do not seem particularly big until you notice some small detail, such as the great thickness of wrist. When you realize he is all in proportion to that dimension, he begins to look increasingly massive and indestructible. They comb our hills looking for these boys, knowing their merciless toughness, and, as in the case of Dwight, they give them football scholarships and keep them eligible to play as long as possible before losing them to the pro leagues. McAran was an All-State fullback. After a knee injury slowed him one step, the University converted him to offensive guard. He had time for one pro season as a rookie linebacker with the Bears before he killed Mildred Hanaman.

  “You wanted me to come alone to pick you up,” I said.

  “So you can tell me what it’ll be like before I get there. Maybe what you want to say, you couldn’t say it in front of her.”

  “Why do you want to come back to Brook City?”

  “To have a nice visit with my loving sister.”

  “Are you going to stay long?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  I went into my speech. I hoped it didn’t sound as carefully planned as it was. “Dwight, I can forget about Meg and look at it from the cop point of view. You killed Paul Hanaman’s only daughter. You hadn’t made yourself what anybody would call popular around town even before it happened. It wasn’t like killing the daughter of—a mill worker.”

  “Wasn’t it? Are you trying to tell me, Lieutenant Hillyer, everybody isn’t equal in the eyes of the law?”

  “Come off it, Dwight. Paul Hanaman is still publisher of the Brook City Daily Press. He’s still a director of Merchant’s Bank and Trust. He’s still powerful in the party. None of that has changed. Neither he nor young Paul want you around town, reminding them of what happened to Mildred. With the kind of pressure they can put on people, how do you expect to get a job?”

  “I won’t need a job for a while, brother-in-law. I’ve got some money stashed.”

  I stifled the impulse to yell at him, and went back to my reasonable speech, delivered in a reasonable way. “I don’t blame you for wanting to make—this kind of a gesture, Dwight.”

  “Gesture? Brook City took something away from me. I want it back.”

  “You can’t get five years back.”

  “They took my freedom, and the way I earn a living, and eighteen hundred and twenty-six nights out of my life.”

  “Revenge isn’t a very—”

  “Revenge? On who, Lieutenant? I killed Mildred, didn’t I? She was a sloppy pig with a bad temper, but you can’t go around killing people because they have bad manners. It’s antisocial.”

  “I guess I can’t keep you out of town.”

  “Not legally. And you’ve got a lot of respect for the law.”

  “But I can tell you it isn’t going to be smart to—to be conspicuous. There was an article yesterday in the Press. An editorial with a black border around it. It was called ‘Rehabilitation, Modern Style.’ It wasn’t pretty.”

  “Should I sue?”

  “Too many people don’t want you to come back. If they get the idea they can’t chase you away, they’ll see if they can stick you back in Harpersburg.”

  “It’s about like I thought i
t would be.”

  “It won’t be smart to hang around too long.”

  “It’s just the way I want it to be, Fenn. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Hell, who can touch me? My sweet sister married the police force. She keeps telling me what a dedicated officer you are.”

  “But I won’t be able to—help you very much.”

  “Are you trying to tell me there are nasty people in Brook City who would twist the law to suit their own purposes? Why, if they can do that, Lieutenant, what the hell are you dedicated to? Free apples and free coffee?”

  “There are practical considerations you just can’t—”

  He slipped readily into the slurred nasality of hill country speech. “Law man can’t protect his own kin? Ev’body watchin’ you, make sure you don’t protect me too much, maybe? What they sayin’, boy? Pore ’Tenant Hillyer, got him a killer for a brother-in-law, but that Fenn, he smart enough to think him up some law duty over in the next county when we come around to stomp that ball-face killer face foremost into the mud.” He chuckled and resumed in his acquired diction, “You’re hung up right between Meg and your call of duty.”

  “I didn’t ask for it.”

  “It’s a handy thing Meg didn’t marry a milk man. There’d be more money in the house, but it wouldn’t have been so useful to me.”

  “It must be a nice simple way to live, Dwight, to think of people only in what way you can use them. You’ve used Meg all your life. You’ve used everybody who ever came within reach.”

  “You know, Fenn, that’s my great trouble, and I’m grateful to you for lifting the veil from my eyes. Now I realize I should concentrate on what I can give instead of what I can take. True happiness lies in that direction. Service, unselfishness, devotion, humility. Yes sir, the meek will inherit the earth.”