She pointed behind the truck, toward Rolling Hills. "Old friend?"
"Yeah," I pointed, `Judge Faulkner. Got me out of a bind one time." I knew this was lying, but it was half-true. I just wasn't ready to tell the whole truth. "He's a quadriplegic, no family, nobody to talk to. I check on him from time to time. His mind is good, but his body's not."
"He like cigars?"
I smelled my shirt and asked, "That bad, huh?"
"Pretty bad."
"Sorry, he has a thing for Cubans and I'm the only one that'll hold it for him. I try to make it through here when I'm in town." I let it go and said nothing about Rex.
She took off her shoes and propped her feet up on the dashboard, staring out the passenger window. A BandAid wrapped around the back of her ankle. "Cut yourself shaving?"
"Yeah." She pulled it back and checked the cut. "I'm lucky I didn't sever an artery. I went through two razors cutting through a rain forest." The ability to poke fun at herself-that sounded like Katie.
Minutes passed with me keeping my eyes on the road and my mind elsewhere. She started twirling her hair and leaned her head back against the headrest. I didn't ask, but if I had to guess, I'd say she was thinking about Trevor and just how long it would take him to find the Volvo. As we drove into Jacksonville, the sun came up through the windshield.
Due to a wreck, traffic was backed up to 1-295. Katie had to make a stop at the rest area, so I pulled over and let her run in. Jase was still sleeping soundly in the backseat, curled up inside the plaid fleece blanket with his stable of stuffed animals. I sat in silence, waiting on Katie, tapping the steering wheel, glancing back at Jase, and wondering how long it'd been since I slept that soundly.
Katie walked around the secrecy wall and headed for the truck via the soda machine. With a Diet Coke in her hand, she sat sideways in the seat, slid one leg underneath the other, and said, "You were going to tell me about your dad."
"My dad?"
Katie nodded.
"Oh yes, my dad."
She pointed to her eye and said, "I know a little bit about people who lie to themselves when their loved ones are violent."
I took a deep breath, checked to make sure Jase was still sleeping, and wondered how much of this story to tell. "You know some of the story. He was still pretty rough on us after you left." I rubbed my chin. "Miss Ella used to say his vigor was in his liquor, and when he got to the bottom of about his fifth glass, he found it. And usually a lot of it."
Another glance at Jase and I continued. "Mutt got hit on his bicycle riding home one day. Rex found out about it and showed up at the house that night. He was in a bad place. Woke Miss Ella, and by the time Mutt and I heard the screaming and could get to her, he had already beat her unconscious and left. She was lying on her front porch, her nightgown was spotted red, mostly from her face, and her mouth was all cut up 'cause he had broken about eight of her teeth. He walked off and left her there, so we ran around the back of the house and waited until he got inside. Then we drug her off the porch and into her house. The sight of the whole thing really got to Mutt. He kept looking at her mouth and turning his head because her face was swelling pretty bad. I phoned Mose, he came running, and she woke up a few minutes later. She was in a lot of pain but tried not to let us know it. Rex had also broken a few of her ribs, which we found out later. When the swelling had gone down, the dentist took out most of her front teeth because the breaks were too high and too many." I shook my head. "Her dentures arrived about two weeks later. She never liked them, but they were better than the alternative.
"Mose kept a pretty close watch on Miss Ella, and for eight years, Rex didn't lay a hand on her. When I was a senior, I came home from baseball practice, grabbed the milk jug out of the fridge, and heard Rex scream and glass break upstairs. Nobody needed to tell me. I remember feeling my metal baseball spikes digging deep grooves in the wood as I ran across the wooden floor of the kitchen. I threw open the closet door and grabbed the first thing I saw. A gold-inlaid, field-grade Greener, twelvegauge. Rex's favorite. I picked two high-brass number fives out of a box, broke open the barrel, and flew up the stairs, three at a time. I hit the landing, ran down to Rex's room, and found him down on one knee just beating her, over and over and ..." I swallowed and breathed deeply. `Blood, cuts, and teeth covered his fist. She was long-since unconscious and just hanging from his hand like a rag doll. He'd cock his right hand and then, well ... I remember hearing her cheekbone crack when lie hit her. Rex's face was beet red, the veins in his neck were about to burst, and his eyes had been bloodshot for a week. He was screaming something about her being an ignorant ..." I faded off. A minute passed. "She lay crumpled on the floor below him, one eye disfigured and her dentures scattered in pieces on the floor.
"Rex saw me and smiled his glazed-over, twelve-hour, unfocused smirk. I took three steps, grabbed him by the throat, picked him up on his toes, and shoved that barrel six inches down his throat. When I did, his front teeth just shattered and. . . "
I looked far down the road, beyond where my headlights lit it. Katie sat quietly beside me. I glanced back at Jase to make sure he was still sleeping and continued with my story. "For the first time in my life, I saw something I had never seen before. Rex was afraid of me."
I took a deep breath, noticed my white knuckles, and eased my grip on the steering wheel. "My left hand was around his throat, cutting off his air supply, and the short eighteen-inch barrel sticking out of my right was blocking it. `Go ahead, pull it,' he managed around the blood and steel. I slipped my finger inside the trigger guard and felt a tug on my ankle. Miss Ella had crawled over, the floor behind her smeared red. `Tucker, he's not worth it.' She choked and I heard a gurgle deep within her chest. `Evil won't die when you pull the trigger. It'll wander the earth and settle on you, snuffing out your light forever.'
"I rammed the barrel in further, cutting off his air supply completely. Rex's face turned blue, his hands gripped the red velvet chair, and his eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his head. That's when I started screaming ..." I glanced at Jase again and dropped my voice to a low whisper. "`I love that woman! I love her more than you love your liquor. More than life itself. You ever touch her again ... and I'll pull this blasted trigger.' Either from the liquor or the lack of oxygen, Rex passed out. I let go, threw him against the wall, and he crumpled against the baseboard. I broke the breech, threw the shells across the room, and tossed the shotgun on the bed.
"Miss Ella got up on her knees, and it was then that I saw what he had really done. Her right eye was cut. Straight across the cornea. Rex had done it with a piece of glass. It was oozing, deflated, and looked real bad. I tried to help her stand, but she was too badly bruised. She fell back on her knees, and I heard her say, `Lord, let not my enemies triumph over me.' She couldn't walk, so I knelt to pick her up, and that's when I felt the scissors. In her apron pocket was a pair of eight-inch scissors and two crochet needles. I just looked at her and said, `Why didn't you use them?' She shook her head, and blood bubbled out her mouth. `I don't want my light to go out either.'
"`But, Miss Ella ...'
"She shook her head, her eyes tired, and said, `What's been done to me ain't nothing when compared to what happened in three hours on a single Friday afternoon."'
I sat in the quiet for a minute, remembering the picture of her-on her knees and yet towering above me. "When I got to the hospital, Mose met me and consulted with the doctors, but after one look, he already knew what they'd tell him. They eviscerated her eye and three weeks later fit her for a prosthetic. Once they got her to a room, taped with a fat white patch over her eye, she grabbed my hand and said, `Go find your brother.' I left her about three in the morning and walked back into the house, where I found Rex sleeping against the bar with an empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black in his hand.
"In the corner stood my Louisville Slugger. I gripped the bat, sticky with pine tar, stepped up next to him, extended it, and tapped him on the forehead. No resp
onse. I tapped him again and his head rocked back and forth like Jello. I stood there for several minutes imagining the bat crushing his skull.
"Sometime before daylight I returned to Miss Ella's bedside and helped her swallow two more aspirin. `Where have you been?' she whispered. I gave her another sip of water and said, `The house.' She pushed the cup away and mumbled, `You repay evil with evil?' I shook my head. `No ma'am.' She squeezed my hand harder. `You look me in the eye and tell me that.' She had seen it in my eyes when I had that barrel stuffed down Rex's throat. She was making sure. `No ma'am.' She drifted off to sleep and I drove back to the house about 9:00 a.m., but Rex was gone. Cleared out. Car was gone, suitcase, everything. Even a few bottles. That meant he wasn't coming back anytime soon. I found Mutt a few hours later. Curled up around the cross he had given Miss Ella for her birthday. I tried to get him in the house or to the hospital, but he just shook his head. He didn't want to go see her and didn't want to go anywhere near the house."
Katie's forehead wrinkled as she turned the empty can in her hands. "Few folks knew about the fake eye because she learned to compensate, but Miss Ella died with a glass eye. I think that bothered her more than her teeth. She became real self-conscious and often turned her face so people didn't have to look at it, especially when the skin started to droop around it and makeup wouldn't cover it. I caught her looking in the mirror a few weeks later. She tried to shrug it off by saying, `I've been ugly my whole life, but he sure didn't help any."' I studied the road again. "Miss Ella was the most beautiful person God ever made. And if it hadn't been for her tugging on my ankle, I'd have pulled the trigger." I shook my head and fidgeted in my seat. "I didn't see him for about two years."
Katie checked on Jase and whispered, "What about Mutt?"
"Mutt and I took two different roads. I had an outlet. Baseball. Every time a pitch came across the plate or out of the machine, I slowed it down in my mind and envisioned Rex's face between the laces. Any pitch, no matter where it was, if I saw Rex's face on it, I hit it. So I retreated to batting practice and wore myself out. Somewhere in there, I lost the meaning of baseball."
I leaned forward, stretched, and downshifted out of overdrive to match the speed of traffic. "After my back injury, I just substituted one drug for another. Every time I squeezed the shutter, I burned a new picture into my mind and replaced the one of Rex that had been branded on the backs of my eyelids since that night."
I fell quiet for a few miles. "Even today, it's the same. But some images ... don't go away." I shifted again. "Miss Ella said love conquers all, but ..." I shrugged and held up the Canon. "Baseball and then photography became my narcotic."
I pushed my hair out of my face and took a deep breath. "I don't know all the details on Mutt, but he wandered a good bit. I know he took to riding more trains. Became a true hobo. He worked on a shrimp boat out of Charleston, a coal mine in West Virginia, the orange groves in Florida and Texas, and to this day, I don't really know how he found out about Miss Ella's death. How he ever showed up for the funeral is beyond me. Since then he's been down here, and Gibby"-I pointed in front of the truck"Dr. Wagemaker, has been feeding him a cocktail of all kinds of drugs. To be honest, I don't even know if I'll recognize him."
We rode in silence as the skyline of Jacksonville came into view. When the tear fell down my cheek and off my chin, I was too lost in the memory to realize it. Katie reached across the seat and dabbed at it with her sleeve.
We dropped down the bridge and turned south on San Marco Boulevard. "As for Rex, Miss Ella told me, `The devil got a hold of him long ago, so hate the devil, not Rex."' I shook my head and shrugged. "I didn't do very well."
We drove through San Marco, and Jase pulled the covers off his face, wiped his eyes, and said, "Mama, Donnamackles?"
I looked at Katie, the question written across my face. She didn't answer, so Jase pulled on my shirtsleeve and said, "Unca Tuck, can we go to Donnamackles?"
Katie rubbed her eyes and said, "You know, that sounds pretty good, Jase." She looked at me and said, "How about an Egg McMuffin?"
"Oh." I nodded. "McDonald's."
A few minutes later, I bit into a sausage biscuit and sipped my coffee. Jase sat across the backseat, eating his second Egg McMuffin. Katie was picking around the edges of an egg biscuit. She had been quiet since the drive-through. "You look like you want to say something," I said. She thought a moment and then shook her head.
Nobody said a word as I drove south on State Road 13 through historic San Jose and eventually through Mandarin toward Julington Creek. When we stopped at a red light, Jase tugged me on the shirtsleeve and said, "Unca Tuck?"
I rubbed my eyes, looked out at the rising sun, and realized that kid had just tugged on more than my shirtsleeve. "Yeah, buddy."
"Was your dad real mean?"
"Well"-I looked for a way to soften it-"let's just say he really licked the red off my lollipop."
Jase thought for a minute and then said with confidence, "Unca Tuck, I'm just like you."
"Oh yeah, partner, how's that?"
"My daddy hit me too."
Chapter 20
AT 7:00 A.M. WE PULLED INTO SPIRALING OAKS AND Gibby walked out to meet us. He hadn't aged a bit. Still the same scraggly, unkempt, goofy-looking man I had remembered meeting seven years earlier. Then and now, he'd have made a great picture.
"Hello, Tucker," he said, extending his hand.
"Hey, Gibby. I'd like for you to meet ... two friends of mine. This is Katie Withers, and"-I knelt down-"this little cowboy is Jase."
Gibby bent over, shook Jase's hand, and then Katie's. We didn't waste much time on small talk. Gibby's tone told me we could catch up later. We sat down in Gibby's office, and he said, "Tuck, here's what I know. If Mutt is true to the last seven years, he is soon to cycle through one of his more obsessive periods. I knew he was growing restless, more compulsive, double-checking more, but I didn't see this coming. I admit, if I have made a mistake lately in my professional career, it may be this. About thirty-six hours ago, a nurse came to check on Mutt after dinner and found his window open, dinner flushed down the toilet, and Mutt gone. Apparently, he'd taken his chess set, a few bars of soap, and my fly-tying vise."
"Soap?" I asked.
"The progression of his illness. Mutt obsesses, and one of his more recent is the cleanliness of his hands, of everything." I nodded. "He has been having a difficult time getting to sleep, and once asleep, he would wake often. In the last few months, he began to doubt his nurses and, I suspect, feared they were plotting against him. For years, he has believed people are staring at him everywhere he goes, and you know about the voices. The change since you saw him last is the volume of those voices-I believe it is almost deafening. When they're really talking, you can see it on his face. The voices have also begun to accuse him, threaten him, and argue with him.
"Mutt has no stable relationships, a growing paranoia, delusional thinking, auditory hallucinations worse than ever, and lately, he has complained of being bothered by his dreams. Specifically, he dreams of being frozen, paralyzed, unable to help a loved one in need. Until now, he's never been combative or suicidal, but I do believe he is quite possibly the most tormented man I've ever met. No matter what I give him, or how much I give him, no intervention-chemical, electric, or otherwise-is able to root out whatever is the cause of his illness. And in my professional opinion, whereas my other patients are truly insane, Mutt's insanity is a by-product of some issue he can never overcome. Some demon buried deep in his past that no exorcism can vanquish."
I wasn't sure what I expected, but it wasn't what I was hearing. Gibby continued. "Mutt's obsessions, his eccentricities if you want to be polite, are many. He washes his hands three times during any meal, holds his sandwich or a utensil with a napkin, and then throws away the napkin after every bite. He wears rubber gloves 90 percent of the time; his room is clouded with cleaning bottles; he even washes the bar of soap to get the germs off the soap. If we buy him liquid so
ap, he sprays the top of the squeeze nozzle with disinfectant while wearing rubber gloves. The doorknobs in his room have no brass because it's been polished off. He keeps hand sanitizer in his pockets at all times and clips his fingernails constantly. Without a doubt he is the cleanest, most germ-free human being I've ever met."
I looked out the window and let my eyes float to the river. The thought of Mutt being somehow less than what he was when I dropped him off touched a deep pain inside. Like somebody had gripped the sword by the hilt, stabbed it into my back, and turned it like a corkscrew. If I thought my people place hurt before I got here, it throbbed when Gibby finished talking. "Any ideas where he went?"
Gibby stood and walked to the window, and I followed his finger across the creek to Clark's. Behind me, Katie held Jase on her knee. I couldn't tell what she was thinking, but whatever it was, she was wrapped pretty far inside it. Jase was sucking on a Tootsie Pop and looking at Gibby's fly rods and reels, oblivious to the weight of the conversation. Gibby pointed to Clark's. "He ate dinner over there, apparently a good bit of food, and disappeared among the other people on the dock."
With his knowledge of the rail system, Mutt could be in North Dakota by now. I walked to the window, saw Clark's, let my eyes follow the waterline, and noticed the marina. "Has he ever been to that marina?"
"On a few occasions, the staff have rented canoes and taken some of the patients up creek a few hundred yards. Nothing out of sight of the dock though."
"Did Mutt go on any of those excursions?"
"Every time they were offered."
"How well do you know the owner?"
"Well enough to rent a boat."
"Let's go see him."
Gibby stopped me as we walked toward the door. "One more thing. I told you on the phone, he's a ticking time bomb."