Summitt

Chapter Twenty

Neighbors in Little Tenn brought covered dishes to Casper Gideen’s trailer, noodle and hamburger casseroles, meat loaves and pans of biscuits. A man whose left hand had been ground to a stump in a sawmill accident forty years ago came by to dicker for the coon hounds.

Gideen’s sons were in the kitchen of the trailer with a TV glowing silently. A sleeting rain struck the windows. In the kennel run, the redbones were barking.

Lori Gideen sat in the front room near a squat iron stove backed by aluminum panels. Rows of brick formed a hearthstone. Maple logs were stacked beside it, short and thick and tinder-dry. It was the careful way Casper had done everything, Selby thought, the logs cut to fit the stove exactly, and aged so long that starting a fire was no more trouble for Lori than striking the match.

She had called after Sergeant Ritter. “State Police claim it was an accident,” she told him. “Gun wasn’t on safe, and went off under his chin. He must have tripped on something in the dark.”

Lori Gideen was tall and thin with a solemn girlish face and red-knuckled hands now lying open on her knees.

She said, “Casper set a store by you, Mr. Selby. He’d be pleased you’d come by.”

“I tried to get in touch with him these past few days.”

“I know. He wasn’t here.”

“When did you talk to him last?”

She hesitated and wiped her flushed cheeks. Her eyes were dry but strangely enlarged, as if she were straining to see everything very clearly. “I talked to him yesterday, Mr. Selby, after breakfast, it was, Casper called from a gas station.”

“He wasn’t staying here?”

“Stayed where he pleased, you know that.”

“Lori, your husband and I were friends. Can you tell me what he was worried about?”

“That was his business. Didn’t do to ask. You know how Casper was, you better’n most maybe. Didn’t believe in explaining.”

One of Gideen’s sons came into the living room, Eli, who was sixteen, with wide shoulders and thick blond hair. “My ma is worn out now, Mr. Selby.” Selby remembered that Shana had once made Eli a woolen skating cap for Christmas. “We’d just as soon be with our own selves now.”

“I understand, I’ll be going, Eli. But your father didn’t trip over a shotgun like some goddamn fool out with a gun for the first time. Anybody who says he wouldn’t put his gun on safe before climbing a fence is a liar. His death wasn’t an accident, Eli.”

Lori’s hands were locked together now, the knuckles strained and white.

Eli Gideen said, “We’re obliged to you for coming by, Mr. Selby.”

“Mrs. Gideen,” Selby said, “if I can be of any help at all...”

“Thank you kindly for that.”

“I flooded my car,” Selby said, “so I’ll have to let the engine dry out for a while. I’m parked on Fairlee. If I can’t get it started, I’d appreciate it if I could come back and use the phone.”

“Phone is here,” Eli said.

The station wagon was cold, the windows steamed, and the sleeting rain making a metallic clatter on the roof and fenders. Selby started the car and turned on the heater and wipers. The blacktop materialized as the rubber blades swept the windshield clean. The road curved through ground mists toward Pyle’s Corners and Muhlenburg.

“Casper’s boys won’t talk to anyone.” Selby turned and looked at Dorcas Brett. She wore a brown wool coat with caped shoulders. Her face was white with the cold except for sharp points of color in her cheeks.

“Will Mrs. Gideen talk to us?”

“She knows I’m waiting. Maybe she’s angry enough and hurt enough to tell us whatever she knows.”

The hum of the motor mingled with the slap of the windshield wipers. The white scar on Selby’s cheek caught a reflected light as he glanced at the rear-view mirror.

They had made progress during the last ten days, finding links that raised further questions. General Taggart who owned Vinegar Hill also commanded Camp Saliaris, the chemical corps installation near Summitt City. Lieutenant General Adam Taggart, from an old Pennsylvania family, had once owned the hundreds of acres along the river which had been developed into the exclusive community known as Brandywine Lakes. The general had sold the land to a holding company a dozen years before.

Sergeant Burt Wilger had got hold of several curricula programs and relevant yearbooks from Rockland College. (He had persuaded a local librarian to request the material from the school as an “aid to the library’s educational reference program.”) Derek Taggart’s class photograph was on the same page as Earl Thomson’s. A handsome young man, nineteen or twenty then, young Taggart had a challenging, mocking smile. Derek was the general’s son. He had been an editor of the school paper, and nicknamed “Ace” during his years at Rockland.

They waited for ten or fifteen minutes in the station wagon. Occasionally, Selby glanced at the rear-view mirror.

“That wasn’t easy for you, was it?” Brett said.

“It wasn’t easy for Lori Gideen, either.”

“I understand that... I was thinking of you.”

Selby shrugged and rubbed the steam from the rear-view mirror. He remembered Gideen when they’d been together at the kennel run, Casper talking about this dying pear tree, its last extravagant death crop and then the swift, final decline...

Selby said, “If Casper trusted you and thought he owed you, he’d cut off his arm for you before you could ask. He wanted to help me.” He rubbed the mirror again. “Yes, it was hard, talking to Lori and Casper’s sons.”

She pulled off her glove and put a hand against his face, then traced the scar on his cheek. “That hurt badly when it happened, Harry. You told me it did...”

Selby moved her hand away from his face.

“Do you mind that?”

“No, but I think you’ve got a point to make.”

“It healed over, Harry, it doesn’t hurt anymore. That happens.”

“And has everything in your past healed over?” he asked her. “We all go through things, marriages, break-ups with friends, the ice cream cone falling in the gutter.”

“I’m all right, I think.”

“That scene at the college swimming pool, that must have stuck with you over the years. If I’m saying something you don’t want me to, I’ll shut up. But it was more than imagining piranha fish in the water that night. That’s what Davey thinks, by the way.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said carefully. “I was frightened, all right, but I’m over it. I’d just as soon leave it at that, Harry.”

“Okay. We’ll leave it at that.”

Lori Gideen appeared in the rear-view mirror then, hurrying toward them with one of Casper’s old hunting jackets pulled around her shoulders. She climbed into the rear of the station wagon and when Selby introduced her to Brett, nodded shyly.

“The boys is worse than Casper ever was...” Her voice was low, impersonal. “Casper was my husband, ma’am. He and Mr. Selby went hunting a lot. They was good friends. He used to say that Mr. Selby here had enough sense to listen.”

Looking steadily at Selby, the rain on her girlish face mingled with her tears. “The boys don’t want me to talk to anybody, they think any stranger could be the devil, just like Casper did. But I’m going to talk ’cause you’ll listen, Mr. Selby. Casper knew Goldie Boy and Barby Kane’s momma was together that night your little girl got hurt. That’s what started the talk. Others knew about it but wasn’t saying, him being a preacher.”

“Did Casper know where they were?”

“It was what he was trying to find out. But two nights ago, Barby Kane and her momma, Coralee, they up and left Little Tenn. A big car came for them in the middle of the night. Two in the morning, didn’t even take all their clothes, and Barby’s cat, it’s whining around everywhere for food.”

“Casper knew where they went?”

“The car took ’em to the airport in Philadelphia. He found out that much. The same night they left, Casper packed some food and his shotgun in the truck and drove off. Told me not to pay any mind if anybody came around asking for him. Just to say he’d gone hunting, even if it was the police. He wasn’t afraid, you know Casper, Mr. Selby, but he didn’t want anyone bothering me or his boys.”

She pushed open the door, letting in a spray of wind and rain. “He’s gone, but he set a store by you, and he’d want me to tell you all this, never mind the boys. I thank you again for coming around, Mr. Selby.”

Lori Gideen ran clumsily through the mud toward the entrance to Little Tenn, slipping occasionally in her heavy rubber boots. The trailers had their lights, the small windows gleaming with forlorn cheer through the gathering darkness.

Selby drove on through the rain into Muhlenburg. Turning at Pyle’s Corners, he parked a half block from Goldie Boy Jessup’s storefront church. The name was spelled out in gilt letters on the glass window — “Tabernacle of the Golden Flame.” A large room beyond the ornate sign was brightly illuminated, crowded with men and women huddled on benches facing Goldie Boy, who stood above them gesturing and shouting from a raised platform. Speakers carried his voice to an adjoining parking lot. Cars and trucks lined up there, dogs in the rear of pickups, howling at the pounding rain and Goldie’s amplified voice.

A spotlight glowed behind his head, framing him in a yellow haze. The preacher wore a blue shirt with a buttoned-up collar and khaki work trousers.

His eyes were large and clear with tiny blue pupils and whites as milky and soft-looking as the whites of eggs. When Goldie Boy preached, shouting and swinging his arms around his head, the eyes became blank and glazed, like empty globes in his pale face.

Selby rolled down his window; it was like turning on a blaring radio. Goldie Boy’s voice surged around them.

“Do you know what the Lord Jesus wants from us? What our Lord Jesus wants from you and me? Tell me you know what Jesus, the Lamb of God, wants!”

In the trucks and cars, the drivers leaned on their horns. The dogs barked furiously.

“You know what He wants! The Lord Jesus wants us to share His sweet, holy spirit, share His love — He doesn’t want us to keep His blessed love only for ourselves — He wants us to share that love with even the worst sinners — with whores and thieves and jades, even the bitch in red with her fragrant thighs clasped in lust about the flanks of the white beast of the Apocalypse...”

Goldie Boy’s voice rose with the pure anger of conviction. “The lewd, the immoral, the perverted — we must share the Lord Jesus with them. Jezebels, devil’s whores with painted faces, seductive women and yes, children, thrusting themselves at God-fearing family men, inflaming them with their exposed and perfumed flesh...”

Selby cranked up the window, but they could still hear the horns and dogs.

“Praise the good Lord,” Brett said wearily, “for saving those nice men from those little fiends.” She lit a cigarette. “Do you know Freud’s phrase, the polymorphic perverse?”

Selby studied the buildings on all sides of Pyle’s Corners. “No,” he said. “Afraid it wasn’t in our play book.”

“What?... oh, I get it... well, anyway, Sigmund believed and wrote that women have a genetic tendency toward victimization, that their universal desire is to be roughly and forcefully handled in, you should forgive the expression, acts of sexual congress. I’m quoting Freud, Harry. I’m quoting.” She ground out her cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. “End of speech. His and mine. Let’s get a cup of coffee.”

“I heard you... I also noticed something.” He pointed to the Tabernacle of the Golden Flame. “Anyone at those windows would have a clear view of Earl Thomson and Shana that night.”

“But the church was dark,” she reminded him. “There were no services. The only witness was Mrs. Swabel across the street and she only saw Shana.”

“I know,” Selby said, “but the preacher’s church is the best seat in the house. Casper Gideen was checking out the preacher. And Casper’s got his head blown off.”

Later that night, Selby looked again through his father’s pictures and diaries, the familiar yellowing pages and snapshots, “The chief and the major,” his father had written, “they run things, they say jump. But we’ll pay for it.” He felt a fresh pang at the look of his father in his army uniform, tall and strong, a powerful, scowling young man, so very damn young at the beginning...

Selby heard Blazer barking in the pen beside his doghouse. He picked up a leather lead and went outside. As he walked toward Blazer’s barking, he thought of Claud Lissard. He wondered why. Maybe because Brett had touched his scarred cheek, except she did it as a reminder that things healed, that pain diminished, in time. Coincidentally Selby paid off the Frenchman the same summer evening the long distance phone call had come in from the recruiters at Penn. (“You cut it, son, or they cut you. It’s as simple as that. You get four years of the best coaching anywhere, pro sets and game plans, a shot at the national championship, then post-season bowl games.”) That call triggered the explosion, which in turn made Selby realize how much his grandfather had needed someone like Claud Lissard to discipline — no, to punish and humiliate his daughter’s bastard son...

Blazer stood stiff-legged and bristling, barking at something beyond the trees that bordered Fairlee Road. Snapping the lead to the big shepherd’s collar, Selby started down the trail toward the fence line.

As Blazer jerked and pulled him along, the strain on Selby’s arm reminded him again of Lissard... The Frenchman was round and fat, but his big, sagging stomach was deceptive; it was, in fact, hard as a board. The challenge Claud offered Harry, and which his grandfather always put aside his newspaper to watch, was simple enough; the Frenchman would order Harry to take a two-handed grip on his wide belt, after which Claud would swell his stomach muscles until Harry’s hands were clamped helplessly between hard leather and muscled flesh. The object was to pull free, but while a young Harry Selby struggled, the Frenchman would dance about the room, hopping from one foot to the other like a trained bear, swinging the boy from side to side until his arms were almost jerked from their sockets. There was no humor in this game, and never had been, in spite of the booming laughter that filled out Claud’s cheeks. The last time they played, Harry had tried to settle for a standoff; Claud was older then, almost forty, and not as powerful as he had been in his younger days. But he muttered under his breath about Selby’s leaving for college, saying, “You think you’re too good for us, but I’ll show you, like I always...”

Selby’s own anger, which was deeper than he realized, began to rise as he thought of the hot sun on the spur track and the fight he’d had to keep the name Selby and the way his grandfather stressed the name when he had to use it with strangers — Sel-by, two spaced syllables, the last one emphasized and always attended by a mildly sardonic question mark. “And here’s little Harry — Harry Sel-by...?”...

Harry had spun Claud Lissard around in dizzying circles that last night, finally hurling him into the adjoining parlor, where Lissard crashed into the ancient upright piano. That ended it forever with the Frenchman, and with his life in Davenport, Selby realized, because his grandfather had stared down at his own pale, freckled hands for a moment, his expression oddly wistful, withdrawn, and then had deliberately returned to his paper without another glance at his tall grandson. In those moments Harry had looked at his own hands, young, strong, and suddenly felt he could take care of himself with the bullies of the world. He had never before loved his father so much. It was a damn good feeling...

There were two cars parked on Fairlee Road, and Selby saw their lights and heard men’s voices through the trees. He walked through the woods to the fence, but they must have heard Blazer’s growling challenge because the cars started up and drove off, leaving behind only the acrid smell of exhaust fumes.

Selby examined the shoulders of Fairlee Road with his flashlight. This was where Shana had been struck by Thomson’s car, and someone had been at work with a rake; the heavy grass was combed for dozens of yards on both sides of the road and deep grooves furrowed the hard ground.

Selby stood with a hand on the panting dog’s collar, wondering who it was who’d been searching around here in the dark at the scene of Shana’s accident. Which wasn’t the important question, he decided, walking back through the woods. The real question was — what had they been looking for?