Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016

All That Dark Water Moving by Tim L. Williams

Since 2005, when his work first appeared in EQMM, Tim L. Williams has twice won the International Thriller Award for work published in our pages; he is also an Edgar nominee and a multiple Shamus Award nominee for EQMM stories. In a recent review of his story collection Skull Fragments, reviewer Jon L. Breen said: “For style, structure, suspense, and sheer narrative mastery, this is one of the finest collections of short stories I’ve ever read.”

Three or four times a week Ezell slipped away from the house where his son, Miller, kept him like a book on a dusty library shelf and hiked through canebrakes and briar-choked bottoms to a finger-shaped, sandstone ledge that jutted over a bend in the Green River. He was certain this spot or the small fishing cabin visible through the branches of weather-bare trees had been the site of a great tragedy. And although the particulars of that tragedy es-caped him, he came back again and again to watch the river and to steal glances at the pine cabin and the people who lived there as if the shadows over his memory were no more than a fleck in his eye which might yet be blinked away.

On smothering summer afternoons, the river moved as sluggishly as bathwater seeping through a partially clogged drain, its surface black and sheened with sludge from the Paradise Mine. But this was November, cold, drizzling, windy. The water pounded its banks like an enraged lover banging on a bedroom door. Ezell shivered in a wind gust and then pulled out the crumpled pack of Camel Lights he’d stolen from the hatchet-faced girl they sent to feed him his lunch when Miller didn’t want to drag himself home from the Harps County Public Library. He patted his pockets until he found a pink Bic lighter. He supposed he must have taken it from the hatchet-faced woman the same as he had the cigarettes, but he couldn’t say for sure. For all he knew, it might have materialized out of thin air.

He’d smoked his cigarette nearly to its butt when he heard heavy, branch-breaking footsteps in the woods and was sure they belonged to his son. He had always been as graceful as an elephant rampaging through a circus tent. When Miller was a boy, Ezell had taken him hunting on a few occasions, but he had whined and moaned and finally refused to go at all. A sour, bookish boy, Miller had grown into a sour, bookish man.

Now Ezell flicked away his cigarette, glanced up at the gray sky. Once he’d worn a heavy silver wrist watch, but like nearly everything else he’d had — home, wife, family — he’d lost it over the years. Even so, he knew it wasn’t much past two in the afternoon. Miller would be furious he’d been dragged from behind his librarian’s desk. Ezell had had enough of his son’s eye rolls, harsh words, and exasperated glances to last him through this life and on into the one that was yet to come. Thinking about the way Miller mocked him made his stomach churn with anger, and he sprung to his feet, hands balled into fists, shoulders squared. Deep into his seventies, he still had the broad chest, the muscled stomach, and the thick arms of the forty-year-old logger he’d once been. Now he determined that if Miller didn’t watch his tongue he might have to learn a hard lesson he should have remembered from when he was a boy.

Another thought occurred to him. What if it wasn’t Miller who was stomping his way towards him, but somebody else, maybe the same someone who caused whatever tragedy it was that drew him here? His heartbeat stuttered; a hard shiver rattled his teeth. For the first time in God knew how long, he was scared of something other than the darkness that had settled upon his memory. But then a wisp of a girl in a ratty sweater and dirty jeans stepped through a strand of blighted dogwood and sassafras.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. She spoke as if they had at least a passing acquaintance, but he couldn’t get a hold of how that might be. “What do you have treed out here anyway?” she asked.

He couldn’t figure who she was or how he knew her, and he was afraid he might weep in frustration. “Girl,” he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You come here so often I figured you must have something treed,” she said. “That was one of my daddy’s sayings.”

The image of this girl getting out of a small, boxy car with primer-coated fenders jumped into his head, and the shadows burned away. “You belong in that cabin, don’t you?”

“It’s not ours. We’re renting it.”

“You live with your daddy.”

She gave him a shy, embarrassed grin, shook her head. “That’s my boyfriend. He’s a little older, is all. And I’m nineteen, so I can live with whoever I want. I keep telling my momma that, but she doesn’t listen.”

“Mommas can be stubborn that way.”

“You’re telling me,” she said. “Do you got a cigarette? I thought I smelled one.”

He wasn’t sure one way or the other. But when he reached into his coat pocket, he felt the crumpled Camel Lights.

“You’re a lifesaver,” she said. “I ran out like an hour ago, and I’m feeling a little too hazy to go into town.” She lit her cigarette and then pulled a strand of hair from her eyes. “So why do you come out here all the time?”

It wasn’t her question that knocked him off balance but the fact that she’d asked it at all. To Ezell it seemed as if it had been years since anyone had cared why he did anything.

“It’s somewhere to go, I guess. I was a logger for a time and then hauled lumber after that. I’m used to being outdoors or on the road. I get restless sitting around the house.”

Instead of rolling her eyes or acting as if listening to him was a painful ordeal, she smiled and said she knew exactly what he meant. Well, not about the logging or truck driving but about getting away from the house.

“My boyfriend gets in moods when he’s tweaking. Quick tempered, you know? Sometimes I just walk around until I figure he’s run off somewhere or else passed out.”

“He sounds like an asshole.”

“Naw.” She shrugged, gave him a crooked grin. “Maybe.”

“He beat you?”

“Christ, mister,” she said. “That’s not any of your business.”

“My daughter had a boyfriend who beat her once. Hurt her pretty bad,” he said. “His name was Watkins, I think, or could be it was Watson. A piece of crap like that ain’t worth remembering anyway.”

“Yeah? So what happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I suspect somebody killed him. Hell, I might have.”

She grinned again. “I meant with your daughter. Is she all right now?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Her name is Sarah. I remember that.”

“That’s a pretty name,” she said. “I need to get back to the house. If he ain’t passed out or run off, he’ll come looking for me.” She stared at Ezell as if she were debating whether or not to reveal a secret, then said, “Listen. I don’t care if you come out here. But be careful. Josh and a couple of his friends have got something going in a little trailer not far from here. They see you creeping around, they might mistake you for the law. He can get pretty mean when someone riles him.”

“That so?” he asked. “Well, I’ve been known to get mean a time or two myself.”

“Just be careful. That’s all I’m saying.”

She was heading back into the woods when an image jumped into his mind. He saw a blond woman, naked and bleeding while a little boy stood in a corner clutching a rumpled bedsheet and staring wide-eyed at what was happening.

“You know anything about a woman who got hurt around here?” Ezell asked.

“Huh?”

“Bad hurt, maybe killed?”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” she said.

He was ready to accuse her of lying, but then in his memory, he smelled exhaust fumes, saw a black ’55 Mercury, and heard a Patsy Cline song playing on its radio. “It was before your time, I reckon.”

“Was she a friend or something?”

The image of the woman, the car, the terrified little boy slipped away, and he shook his head. “I can’t quite say who she was.”

Miller and his fat schoolteacher wife fed him bland meatloaf, lumpy potatoes, watery green beans, and acted as if they were bestowing a great blessing when they heaped the mess on his plate. There was no bread, no seasoning, and only lukewarm milk to wash the slop from his mouth. Disgusted, Ezell smacked his lips and slurped his milk just to watch the irritation flicker across the lady schoolteacher’s expression.

“Wipe your mouth,” Miller said.

“What?” Ezell asked.

“There are mashed potatoes smeared across your chin,” the schoolteacher said in the careful, patient tone that usually meant she wanted to scratch out his eyes.

Ezell touched his chin and then the haze settled upon him. He couldn’t remember what it was he needed to clean his face. He looked around, desperate, ashamed that such a thing was happening.

“The paper towel,” Miller said. “It’s right there beside your plate, for God’s sake.”

Ezell grabbed the napkin and scrubbed at his face. “Thank you for telling me what I could see with my own eyes.”

Miller looked as if he wanted to speak sharp, but the schoolteacher warned him off with a shake of her elephant’s head. Ezell didn’t know what she had going for her, but he figured it must be as sweet as honey the way she jerked Miller around like a small dog on a leash. He remembered an army buddy saying that big girls were the best when it came to putting the love on you. This buddy, Thomas Stamps, had theories about all manner of things. A few of them even made sense.

“Say?” Ezell asked. “Did I ever tell you about this buddy of mine from Minnesota?”

“Only about fifty times in the last week,” Miller said.

“Miller, hon,” the schoolteacher said. “There’s no need to be impatient.”

Her saying that was worse than Miller’s hatefulness. He didn’t need a schoolteacher to stick up for him, and he didn’t have any respect for a son who would let his wife rebuke him as if he were a child.

“Ah, hell,” Ezell said. “There ain’t much worth telling about him no way.”

He forked in a mouthful of lumpy, unsalted potatoes and kept his eyes on his plate while Miller and the schoolteacher went back to their blather about the doings at the library and the school. The town council was squeezing the library’s budget again; a new book catalogue had come in this morning, and Miller’s heart was broken because there were at least a dozen good titles he wouldn’t be able to order. A little girl had come to school with lice for the third time this year. Principal Taylor let the new English teacher know miniskirts and scoop-necked sweaters were not acceptable attire at North Harps Junior High. It was the biggest pile of cow crud Ezell had ever heard, but the schoolteacher and his son hung onto each other’s words, cooing and commenting as if this discussion was so interesting it was a shame no one had thought to broadcast it on the television. Ezell frowned at his green beans and let his mind wander, just as he’d once done on long stretches of highway. My name is Ezell, he thought. I once cut trees for a living and then I started driving a truck. I had a house somewhere not far from here, a wife I called Becca and a daughter named Sarah to go along with this here boy.

He remembered the stickiness of wood pulp and the drumming of tires on pavement, the crackle of a CB radio and the taste of truck-stop coffee. Most of all, he remembered a waitress with sharp little teeth and dark hair who came to him while the truck’s engine rumbled, and the smell of diesel filled the air. After a moment, his thoughts left her and rambled back to Thomas Stamps and then took a sharp turn to a white-tailed deer he’d spotted this very morning. He found himself thinking of his wife and daughter again, and he whispered their names to himself in the hope that saying them would help him remember when those pit-black shadows began to seep in. Closing his eyes, he saw Becca in her coffin, prematurely gray, bloated from the diabetes that had killed her — a woman three years his junior but one strangers believed was his mother, not his wife.

He dropped his fork and met Miller’s eyes. “Whatever happened to your sister? Sarah, I mean. What become of her?”

Miller and the schoolteacher gave each other a long look. “She died, Pop,” Miller said.

“That’s a shame,” Ezell said. “What happened to her?”

“Something went wrong inside her, and she died. Leave it at that.”

“It’s why you live here now,” the schoolteacher said. “That’s why we get to have you with us.”

“And I bet you all are just thrilled about that,” Ezell said.

“Miller drove all the way to Arkansas to get you and bring you back,” she said with that phony sweetness that hurt his ears. “Arkansas was where you and Sarah were living.”

He closed his eyes, saw cotton fields and an old gray barn, smelled frying bacon, tasted the sharpness of a beer. “I remember that,” he said. “But say, that Watkins or Watson fellow didn’t hurt her, did he? That ain’t what happened to my Sarah, is it? Don’t lie to me now.”

“No one ever hurt Sarah but herself,” Miller said. “She wouldn’t stop drinking and popping pills, chasing ex-cons and married men. She was just like you. Stubborn, never willing to hear a thing anyone said.”

“Honey,” the schoolteacher said.

For once Miller didn’t listen. “No,” he told her. “This needs to be said. Everything was a joke to her. But she quit laughing when the police kicked in her door, found her pills and her boyfriend’s meth, and charged both of them with trafficking. As soon as her friends scrounged her bail, she drove to the end of a dirt road and put a bullet in her head. And your Sarah cared so much for you that she didn’t leave a note or call anyone to say you were alone in her house. You were six days fending for yourself before they called me to come get you.”

“Miller,” the schoolteacher said. “That’s enough.”

Miller spoke again, and the schoolteacher spoke right back to him, but Ezell stopped paying attention. His mind wandered back to Thomas Stamps and his ideas about big women. Ezell studied the schoolteacher’s cleavage. When he looked up, he realized Miller was watching him, eyebrow arched, waiting for the answer to a question that Ezell hadn’t heard.

“What?”

“I want to hear what you think now that the truth is out.”

Ezell wasn’t sure what truth Miller was talking about and didn’t really care one way or the other. But he knew if he didn’t answer, it would be one more thing for Miller to hold against him.

“Well,” he said after a time. “It seems to me no matter her failings, your sister had enough sense to put salt and pepper on the table at suppertime.”

He dozed in bed, watching reruns of a sitcom he vaguely remembered from a lifetime ago and then woke in the flickering dark with his heart racing. The room was warm, and the heat clouded his head so that he wasn’t sure where he was or how he had gotten here. The idea came upon him that he’d awoken in a prison cell — that he’d been locked up for a crime he couldn’t remember and most surely hadn’t committed. Then he focused on the television screen where Felix and Oscar were engaged in an argument over a dripping umbrella.

“I am in my bedroom in my son’s house. My son’s name is Miller. Mine is Ezell. That’s The Odd Couple playing on the television,” he said to confirm his knowledge.

He felt around on his nightstand, knocked over a glass, finally found the remote control. He put an end to Felix and Oscar’s argument and caught the sound of another coming from the bedroom down the hall.

“You can’t react like that,” the schoolteacher was saying in her schoolteacher’s voice. “You can’t let him goad you. Dr. Vincent said...”

“I know what he said.”

“He provokes you to give himself a sense of control. You can’t blame him for feeling helpless. I know I would. But when he makes you react, it feeds the illusion he’s still in charge of things, and that makes it harder for you and for him and for everyone else.”

“I know what the doctor said, Pam. But he doesn’t know that old man and you don’t know either. You think you do, but you have no idea what he was like before he became whatever the hell he is now.” There was a short pause, and then Miller went on, speaking softer, so Ezell had to strain to hear. “He wasn’t mean, not exactly. Not to me or my mom or Sarah, at least not in an obvious way. He was just distant, closed off. When he was home, which wasn’t that often, he was like an actor trapped in a part he never wanted to play. The real him, the man he was and wanted to be, was inside his head, watching, mocking us, marking time until he could get out. It sounds crazy, I guess.”

“No, it doesn’t,” the schoolteacher said in that too-sweet tone that meant she believed Miller was ready for the loony bin. “But it also doesn’t change the here and now. Whatever he was, he isn’t that anymore. Now he’s just an old man who is sick and in need of help. I’m not sure we’re the ones who can give it to him...”

“We’ve been through this. There’s no way we can afford it right now.”

“I understand,” she said. “But that means we have to do things right. Letting him provoke you into old arguments... well, that doesn’t do anyone any good.”

Miller said, “I know you’re right. I know.”

Ezell couldn’t make sense of it all. The fact they didn’t want him here came as much of a surprise as snow at the North Pole. But he’d always figured Miller was just a sour man and ungrateful son. He had never imagined himself as anything but a loving husband and a good father, and he’d been certain his family had been happy. On the occasions he tried to summon those bygone days, he saw Sarah as a chubby-faced little girl with a Tootsie Roll stuck in her mouth, remembered the smell of his wife’s Saturday-night perfume, and heard the wind whisper through the grove of maple trees at the back of the house. Now he wasn’t sure about anything other than those maple trees. How happy could their lives truly have been if Miller turned out the way he had and little Sarah had killed herself? He puzzled it for some time, trying to fit the now with the then that he wanted to remember, but he couldn’t bring the two together. In the end, he decided it didn’t matter. Happy or unhappy, his family was gone. Now they were just figments, no more to him than characters in a storybook he’d read long ago.

The river was a different matter. Something terrible had happened, and he felt as compelled to remember the details as an alcoholic feels to take a drink. The memory was close. He could almost reach out and snatch it from the shadows, but every time he tried, it scurried deeper into darkness. Thinking about it made him cold and tired, so he crawled beneath the blankets and fell asleep, that half-formed knowledge taunting him from the shadows that darkened his memory.

Two days later he went back to the river, hunkered on the sandstone lip, and watched the water roll on and on. He’d forgotten his coat, and he was bone-chilled and weary. The last few hours had been lost in a haze as thick as plasma. During the worst of it, he’d forgotten his name, how to feed himself, that the full feeling in his bladder meant he needed to relieve himself.

“Good days and bad days,” a voice had whispered from a deep pit. “Sometimes he’ll seem ready for the nursing home, and others, he’ll be just like his old self.” The voice had grown stronger, and Ezell recognized it as belonging to a doctor, although he could not say who this doctor was or why he had seen him. “But make no mistake,” this doctor had said. “Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease. The good days will get fewer until they are gone.”

Ezell wasn’t ready to say so long to the good days just yet. This spot on the river had been the clearest in his memory, and so he’d fled the house and let his feet lead his clouded head.

Now he stared at the rushing water while the wind whipped his face and snow flurries watered his eyes. Gradually the blond woman took shape in his memory. Large breasts, brownish nipples, narrow waist, flared hips. He closed his eyes and let it come to him, saw her clear and true. Her hair was matted, sticky with blood. She was screaming. A small boy clutched a bedsheet and screamed right along with her. He was a handsome child, not more than five, with dark, wavy hair and blue eyes.

“That was me,” Ezell whispered.

The sound of an engine dragged him from the memory, and he glanced through branches, saw a little foreign car pull into the gravel drive beside the cabin. A girl got out, clutching a baby tightly against the wind. She seemed familiar. Ezell’s memory stuttered, misfired, finally caught. They’d talked not long ago right near this very spot. He didn’t remember what they’d talked about, but knew that she’d been nice to him.

A man with a gray beard and salt-and-pepper hair opened the cabin’s door and stepped into the yard. He wore dungarees and a short-sleeved shirt and shivered in the wind. He said something. The girl shook her head, clutched her baby tighter. When she made to move past him, he grabbed her and punched her upside the head. She staggered, went to one knee, but managed to hold onto the baby and stumble on inside the cabin.

The haze burned away from Ezell’s memory. He saw Sarah in a hospital bed, wrapped like a mummy with tubes stuck in her nose and mouth. He flashed on another image — a man lying in the dirt with his heels kicking and his hands clamped to his throat while blood spurted through his grimy fingers.

Then the sound of a little boy’s shrieking rose in his head and knocked him off balance, and the blond woman flashed in his mind. Ezell’s knees gave way, and he hit the cold ground.

Sometime later, he stood on shaky legs and staggered into the woods. In his hurry, he caught his foot on a downed limb and fell again. He was halfway to his feet when a boot stepped on his aching, cold-raw fingers.

“What are you up to, old man?” Mr. Salt-and-pepper asked, grinding his boot heels into Ezell’s hand. “You’ve been creeping around here too much for my liking.”

“I’m lost,” Ezell said.

“That’s right. And you ain’t likely to be found.”

Salt-and-pepper pulled a gun from his waistband, stuck the barrel to Ezell’s forehead. It was a.38 snub-nose, some kind of Smith & Wesson knockoff. Ezell was proud he remembered what all of those things meant.

“Give me a reason I shouldn’t kill you,” Salt-and-pepper said.

Instinct brought a knife-edged certainty to Ezell’s mind. He did not need to think. His muscles knew the answer. He just had to get out of their way and let them do what they’d done before.

“Because you’re slow and because you’re stupid,” he said. “But most of all, because you’re weak.”

“You got some brass, old man. It’s about to get you...”

Ezell didn’t wait for him to finish. He clamped his right hand onto Salt-and-pepper’s wrist, lunged forward, and drove his weight into the man’s knees. Salt-and-pepper stumbled; Ezell yanked and found the gun in his hand. It was that easy.

He pulled himself to his feet, straightened his back, and felt his full height for the first time in years. “Now you give me a reason,” he said. “But keep in mind, I ain’t slow, stupid, or weak, so you got to come up with one of your own.”

“Listen,” the man said. “You don’t need to do nothing crazy. I was just trying to scare you. And now you’ve scared me pretty bad. That makes us even, don’t it?”

“We ain’t ever been even or equals or anything like that,” Ezell said. “You shouldn’t have hit that girl. She ain’t nothing like the schoolteacher.”

Salt-and-pepper seemed confused by that but kept his confusion to himself. “Look,” he said. “I know what you’re saying. You don’t have to tell me. I get a little drunk or I’m coming down from crank, and she gets mouthy. You know how it is. The way my daddy told it, guys you-all’s age never put up with nothing from your women. Come on, now. Just between us. You never gave your old lady a smack or two?”

“I don’t exactly remember,” Ezell said. “Probably I did. But the big difference between me and you is, there ain’t nobody killed me for it yet.”

The man’s nerve broke. “I got a son,” he said, blubbering. “Maybe you saw him? He’s just a baby.”

“You ain’t the first that’s begged,” Ezell said and knew this to be true as soon as the words were spoken. “I don’t reckon it did them any good either.”

His finger tightened on the trigger, but he couldn’t squeeze it. He wasn’t the kind of man to shoot someone in cold blood. He wasn’t now, and he had never been. Sure, it was possible his temper had gotten away from him on occasion, and it was likely that Watkins or Watson, or whatever his name was, ended up dead on one of those occasions, but that wasn’t who Ezell had been, not in his heart, not where it really mattered.

“Shut up your moaning,” Ezell said. “I ain’t going to kill you.”

It would have ended there, but Mr. Salt-and-pepper wiped his nose on his coat sleeve and smirked up at him. Seeing it clenched Ezell’s jaw and set his teeth on edge. He palmed the gun, slammed it hard into the man’s nose, heard the bone shatter. The spurting blood and his anger about the girl, about Sarah, about time and old age, about Miller and his school-teaching wife was too much for him to resist. He swung the gun again. He didn’t stop until Salt-and-pepper was writhing and groaning, his heels kicking and his blood streaming on the frozen ground.

That night Ezell went to his room early. He lay on his bed with the television flickering and tried to make sense of everything that he had done.

He’d hurt that fellow pretty good. He hadn’t killed him; he was sure of that. But he’d done him some real damage. By the time Ezell had made it home from the river, his legs were weak, his thoughts chaotic. He’d been standing in the kitchen, cursing Miller because he didn’t have the good sense to keep beer in the fridge, when he realized he still had the.38 in his hand. Exhausted, he went back outside, removed the ventilation grid, and hid the gun beneath a strip of fallen insulation. Then he had realized his shirt cuffs were soaked with blood, so he stripped down and washed his clothes and his body in the freezing water from an outdoor faucet.

Now he grew tired of staring at the television screen, lay back on his pillows, shut his eyes. Ravens called to him from somewhere deep in the cavern of his memory, and he followed them to the edge of sleep, so that he was unsure if the sights he witnessed and the voices he heard came from his dream or his memory.

The blond woman waited for him, blood-soaked and terrified. “Not here,” she was saying over and over. “Not in front of my boy.”

The child’s shape came clear. He stood in the corner of a small living room, wearing flannel pajamas and clutching a bedsheet in his hand.

“Send him outside,” the woman sobbed. “Please.”

Then a scarred hand splotched with freckles reached down to grab her matted hair. Ezell sat up in bed, his heart racing and misfiring until he feared it would give out. He blinked his eyes into focus. The Adam West version of Batman was on the television, and Ezell’s heart settled. He’d never liked Batman or any of that superhero nonsense, but right now, he counted Adam West as one of his best friends. Miller had loved comic books when he was a boy. On the few occasions he actually spoke at the dinner table, he’d bored Ezell to tears by rehashing the ridiculous plot lines. Now Ezell remembered that Bruce Wayne’s parents had been murdered and that he’d become an avenger, taking out his loss on the criminals of Gotham City. It struck him that although his mind had discarded most of his memories like yesterday’s newspaper, it had clung to those facts about a funny book character, so they must have been important to him for some reason. He just didn’t know why. Then he thought of the woman and the little boy with the dazed blue eyes. And it all became clear.

Ezell sprung from bed, banged his knee on his dresser but ignored the pain, and rushed to the bedroom at the end of the hall. “This ain’t no time to sleep,” he said. “I know what happened at the river.”

A bedside lamp flared on, and Miller blinked at him, molelike, confused. The schoolteacher flopped around on the bed and clutched a sheet to her bosom.

“What’s wrong?” Miller asked. “What time is it?”

“It don’t matter what time it is,” Ezell said. “I’m Batman.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” the schoolteacher said.

“Dad,” Miller said. “What are you talking about?”

“That was me. I was the little boy.”

“What little boy?”

“Jesus Christ,” the schoolteacher said.

“They killed my momma. Somebody did. I was the little boy with the blue eyes. I saw it all.”

Miller groaned. “You were dreaming.”

“I wish I was,” Ezell said. “I saw some awful things.”

“Go back to bed,” Miller said.

“They killed my momma. You expect me to sleep after that?”

“Grandma Louise was nearly eighty when she passed. She had a stroke and died at the Greenview Community Hospital. Now go back to bed.”

“That ain’t right,” Ezell said. “Why are you lying?”

And of course the schoolteacher had to chime in. “Listen, Ezell. You just had a bad dream. No one killed your mother. I know nightmares can seem real, but it’s over now.” She sat up in bed so she could work up some more syrup in her voice, but then squinted at him, and her fat face turned as red as a Beef Heart tomato. “Oh my God!” she screamed. “Get him out of here!”

“What?” Miller asked. “What’s happening?”

“Look at your father. Really look at him.”

She yanked the sheet up to her double chin and set to cursing and yapping, bleating like a sheep. Miller blinked some more.

“Oh Jesus,” he finally said.

“Right now!” the schoolteacher yelled. “I mean it!”

Miller nearly leapt out of bed. “For God’s sakes, cover yourself.”

“Cover my what?” Ezell asked.

Then Miller had him by the arm and was pulling him down the hall. Ezell was so confused and off balance, he let his son yank him like a misbehaving four-year-old. But when they reached the threshold to Ezell’s room, he bucked up and stood his ground. Miller shoved, but he wasn’t able to move him more than half an inch.

“You come into our bedroom like that one more time and you’ll be in a nursing home so fast it will make your head swim,” Miller said.

Before Ezell could form the words to ask what it was that had Miller and his schoolteacher so worked up, he glanced down at the gaping fly of his boxers. He shrugged and tucked himself back in.

“There you go,” he said. “It wasn’t nothing for your schoolteacher to carry on about.”

Miller took a deep breath, let it out in that nose-whistling way of his. “Stay in your room. The only way I want to see you out of here again is if the house is on fire, and I’m not a hundred percent sure I want to see you then.”

Ezell studied his son’s face. “What does she got on you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What’s she holding over you to make you turn against your own kin?”

“Keep talking,” Miller said. “You just go ahead and keep at it. See if I don’t have them carry you off before the sun comes up.”

“You don’t even care what happened to your grandma, do you?”

“Go to bed,” Miller said. “You were dreaming. Can’t you get that through your head?”

“I know what I saw. You can lie all you want, but that don’t change it one damn bit.”

Miller ran his hand through his thinning hair. “When was it?” he asked. “Never mind I know for a fact she died when she was an old lady, because I was in the waiting room at Greenview Community when you came out and told us. Hell, maybe I’m the one who’s crazy, and you’re the one who knows what he’s talking about. So when was it that all of this happened?”

The question robbed Ezell of his certainty. “I don’t really know,” he admitted. He tried to conjure the memory. “There was a ’fifty-five Mercury parked out front. I can see it as clearly as I see you standing here. Black as sin with whitewall tires. I always liked a Mercury, and that one was a beauty. Newish but not brand new, so I guess it had to be somewhere around then.”

Miller smiled his now-I’ve-got-you-on-my-dusty-shelf smile. “So nineteen fifty-six or fifty-seven? You would have been nineteen or twenty. You and Mom were married or at least close to it by then. Either way, you weren’t a little boy. Now go to bed and forget all this nonsense.”

When Miller left, Ezell tried to work it out. It seemed to him he could remember a late-night phone call from the hospital saying his mother had had a stroke. He could remember the drive to the emergency room and see the ground fog that had risen from the bottoms and clung to the weed fields like wisps of cotton candy. He rubbed his eyes and caught the memory of his mother lying gray-haired and waxy in an overpriced coffin. But he also knew what he’d seen and what he’d felt at the spot on the river. He could hear the blond woman’s screams, see the little boy’s wide, glassy eyes.

He tried to reconcile the memories, but he couldn’t make sense of any of it. Every time he felt close, Miller and the schoolteacher’s voices intruded.

“I’ve tried and tried. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but this is too much, Miller,” the schoolteacher was saying. “I swear to God I understand now why your sister killed herself. If he’s here much longer, I might jump on that bandwagon.”

“I know,” Miller said. “I know.”

“He has to go. Tomorrow.”

“I have to work in the morning. We’re starting inventory, and I’ve got to be there.”

“You have a phone, don’t you? Call around until you find a place for him.”

“It’s going to cost a fortune,” Miller said, his voice miserable.

“We’ll take a second mortgage on the house if we have to.”

“Jesus,” Miller said. “What a mess.”

They kept talking on and on into the night, but Ezell lost interest. He lay atop his covers and shut his eyes, but his mind would not stay still. He remembered his momma in her casket, but he also remembered being a small child clutching a bedsheet while she begged for mercy from an unseen man.

Desperate, he tried to summon another memory of his mother and after an eternity of struggling finally brought her whole and breathing into his mind. She stood at a cook-stove, stirring a pot of pinto beans and yelling that he was to get his mongrel dog out of the house right now and at this very minute. The beans were steaming. Wisps of her hair had fallen from the bun she wore spring, summer, fall, and winter, and that hair was as dark as a raven’s wing.

None of it fit. He could not make it whole. His mind was like a jigsaw puzzle that had been flung across the room by a spoiled child, its pieces scattered, a few lost forever.

“They had hair coloring,” he whispered. “Even back then, they did. Maybe she dyed it.”

But he knew a lie when he heard one. Not long after the first gray light of morning seeped through his window, the truth finally spoke in his head. He turned on the bedside lamp and lifted his hands. He studied the scars on his knuckles and the splotches of freckles that ran from his wrist to fingers. And finally everything made sense.

Long before he heard their chirpy alarm, he had finished his preparations and lay on his bed, willing time to move faster. Finally, Miller left for work, and as she usually did on Saturdays, the schoolteacher went back to bed. But Ezell’s vigil was not over. He forced himself to sit still, to count minutes, to wait for the sound of her snores.

It was torture. After years of hibernation, his hunger had reawakened, and he felt like a half-starved man led to a feast but forced to check his appetite until grace was said. Then finally he caught the sound of the schoolteacher’s puffing snores, and his heart trilled in anticipation. He pulled the carving knife he’d taken from the kitchen from beneath his pillow and trailed a finger across the blade. It wasn’t as sharp as he would have liked it, but it would serve his purpose, and touching the blade was a comfort. He remembered the blond woman’s pleading, the screams of the little boy.

“My first,” he said aloud.

He opened his nightstand drawer, lifted the roll of duct tape he’d taken from Miller’s garage. At one time, he’d worn gloves, but that was when he was younger — when he still cared about little things like fingerprints. Back then he had been careful, and he’d gotten away with more than his share. He couldn’t recall the exact number, but he knew the numbers didn’t really matter.

He slipped from his bedroom, moved quietly down the hall, and paused at the schoolteacher’s door. Her snores were deep and rumbling, as regular as a ticking clock.

She lay sprawled across the bed, arms flung out, covers kicked off her dimpled white legs. He watched her breasts rise and fall until his hunger was unbearable.

When he finished, he posed her on the bed, took the time to admire his work, and smiled when he imagined Miller’s reaction to finding this.

“Stick that in one of your precious books,” he said aloud.

Then he shut the bedroom door.

He was bone-weary and aching, but he trudged on to the river. Before he’d left Miller’s house, he’d showered away most of the schoolteacher’s blood and dressed in khakis and a flannel shirt, but he’d become confused and misplaced the wool socks he’d intended to wear. The idea that his rediscovered identity might just melt away had raced his heart and left him trembling in frustration. He’d hurried outside to retrieve the revolver and headed into the woods.

Now he emerged from the thickets into a clearing, crossed a small gravel drive, and knocked on the fishing cabin’s door. The girl answered, her baby slung on her hip, her eyes red and puffy as if she’d been grieving over what was yet to come.

“Who the hell is it?” Mr. Salt-and-pepper slurred in a drug-thick voice.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the girl said.

Ezell pushed her aside and spotted Salt-and-pepper sprawled on the sofa. He looked like a man who should have been in a hospital, but a trip to the doctor would have meant that the law would come around asking questions about what had happened and exactly what old Salt-and-pepper was up to out there in the woods.

Ezell raised the revolver. Salt-and-pepper lunged for a small lady’s gun lying on the coffee table, but he was slow and drug-clumsy. Ezell shot him in mid lunge, watched him kick and shudder, and then squeezed the trigger again.

“You killed him,” the girl said. “Why did you do that?”

Then she began shrieking and the snot-nosed baby joined right in with her. Ezell cocked the snub-nose’s hammer, gave her a second to realize that he was pointing the barrel at her baby’s head.

“Sit down and keep quiet,” he said. “If you don’t, you ain’t going to like what happens next.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“Right now that don’t matter one way or the other. Not to you, it doesn’t. You got to worry about shutting your mouth and stopping that baby from squalling.”

She sniveled some, but sucked it up and walked wooden-legged to a ratty armchair. He admired her self-control. Shoot, she wasn’t much more than a girl, but she was a tough one. The schoolteacher had wailed and blubbered on right up to the end. The girl’s eyes darted to the little automatic on the coffee table. Gumption, Ezell thought. Then he grabbed the pistol and dropped it in his pocket.

It was warm in the cabin and the heat clouded his thoughts the way it always did. For a second, he felt staggered. The baby’s caterwauling was like an ax blade driven through the back of his head.

“Make him stop,” Ezell said.

“He’s hungry,” she said.

“Well, hell, girl, feed him or smother him one. I’ve had about all of it I can stand.”

She nodded and worked loose the buttons on her denim blouse. Ezell closed his eyes and heard a little girl squealing as she rode a tire swing higher and higher into the branches of a sugar-maple tree. Sarah. The name made him smile. He remembered how greedy she’d been for the breast, whereas Miller had always been mewling and finicky.

“He eats good,” he said now.

The girl smiled over the baby’s head as if even in this situation, she couldn’t help but be grateful for praise directed at her son. Ezell liked her. She’d been nice to him, had spoken to him as if he was a real person instead of a nuisance to be avoided or a burden that there was no choice but to bear. It was why he’d come here in the cold when all he wanted was to rest.

The warmth in the cabin and the work he’d done on the schoolteacher had drained his energy. He made his way to the sofa before his legs gave out from beneath him. Grunting from the effort, he rolled Salt-and-pepper’s corpse from the couch, heard his head thwack off the coffee table, and then dropped down on the cleanest cushion he could find.

The girl stared at her boyfriend’s body and then stroked her son’s head. “Why did you kill him?” she asked. “What’s wrong with you? I don’t understand why you had to do this.”

Her words came in a tumble and then she fell quiet again, her mouth quivering a little. Ezell frowned at the question.

“He shouldn’t beat on you,” he finally said. “A thing like that ain’t right. I got a daughter. A man did the same thing to her once.” He gestured down at Salt-and-pepper’s corpse. “This one here got off easy.”

“You killed him because of me?” she asked, her voice cracking at the end. “You didn’t do that, did you? Not because of me.”

“I did it for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I wanted to, I guess.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t know. I just don’t.”

There was a half pack of USA Gold on the coffee table. Ezell shook out a cigarette, leaned forward, and patted the dead man’s pockets until he found a lighter. He breathed smoke deep into his lungs and held it until his eyes watered, enjoying the bite of the tobacco. He was almost ready to begin.

“You got any beer in the fridge? It don’t matter what kind as long as it’s cold.”

She stared at him, open-mouthed, but finally said, “There’s a six-pack, I think.”

“Bring me a couple, hon.” He gestured toward the baby with the tip of his cigarette. “But you leave that one lying on the chair.”

“Don’t hurt him, okay?”

“He’ll be fine as long as you don’t do nothing but bring me those beers.”

She worked herself free from the baby’s mouth, but he was too full and sleepy to put up a protest. When she laid him on the chair, he kicked his legs and cooed a little, burped of his own accord, and fell silent. All in all he seemed like a pretty good baby, the kind, Ezell thought, that Sarah would have had.

When the girl came back, she stood by the arm of the couch, a sixteen-ounce can of Milwaukee’s Best in each hand. Her eyes were as shell-shocked as if she’d been dragged from a battlefield.

“Just give them to me and sit back down,” Ezell said. “It’s all right. Just do what I tell you.” He cracked open one of the beers and took a long, deep drink and let out his breath in a satisfied rush. “I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve tasted a beer.”

The girl picked up her baby, clutched him to her chest, and sat back down. “What do you want from us?” she asked. “I don’t know why you’re here.”

“Just give me a second to get it all together in my head.”

“What does that mean?” she asked. “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m going to tell you who I am, what I’ve done. You got to know everything about all of it or at least all of it I can remember.”

“I’m not sure I want to listen.”

“Doesn’t matter what you want. I’m the one with the gun in his hand,” he said. “And you have to hold onto it. I ain’t got much mind left. That’s what the doctors say, and I reckon they’re right.” He shook his head. “You know, it took me three times to remember how to tie my boots, and me a grown man. I been tying my shoes since I was five years old, but now I can hardly remember how to work the laces. That’s why you got to hold onto all this. You’re the only one who will know once them shadows overtake me.”

He spoke of himself as a boy, of things he’d done, thoughts he’d had. He told her of the blond woman and the child who had died in this very cabin. He spoke of hitchhikers and truck-stop waitresses, of bodies dumped in rivers and landfills. He told her everything he could remember. Then he fell silent. His exhaustion, the heat, and the beer made him drowsy. His muscles relaxed, his chin sank to his chest.

Later, he woke alone to the distant sound of sirens and wiped at the tingling in his face with the back of his hand. He found himself in a strange room in an uncertain place. It felt familiar, but he couldn’t say why. He knew he didn’t live here. He stood on aching legs and made his way to the door.

When he stepped outside, a blast of cold air burned his lungs, and he trembled. The sirens were growing louder, but he couldn’t think of what that might mean or why he should care. He looked to the river, felt a sliver of recognition. Something terrible had happened here. He didn’t know what it was or when it had occurred, but he was sure there had been some sort of tragedy. He felt the pull of the water and thought of walking to its edge in the hope it would clear his clouded head, but it was cold, and he was tired. None of it seemed worth the effort, so he sat on a small back stoop and hugged himself against the chill.

A couple of minutes later, he saw red and blue lights through the bare tree branches, but looking at them hurt his head, so he turned his attention back to the river. He thought of all that dark water moving from here to somewhere else. Somehow he found it a comfort. He studied the chop and the whitecaps as if their very motion held an answer to a question he hadn’t known to ask. The sirens and the flashing lights were nearly on him now. Something had happened here. He knew that for sure, but he couldn’t remember what it was or why he’d ever thought it was a tragedy.