Later, when Elias had washed up and gone to bed and Reid had put the boy’s clothes into a washtub to soak overnight, he went out to the truck.
It, too, was caked in mud and he told himself to wash it tomorrow morning, early.
The truck was of a size to Ephraim’s, perhaps heavier than the Dodge, but he had no way of knowing for certain. He bent down, grabbed the truck’s running board, pulled up on it. The truck rocked slightly on its suspension, but stayed put. He tried again, putting all of his strength into it, managed to lift the truck even higher, but even he—who must have outweighed Elias by a good twenty or thirty pounds—could not lift it high enough to budge it.
He tried to imagine the superhuman strength it would take to do such a thing, the thing that Elias said that he had done. Reid could not do it, but who knew what might have been possible, were he a young man fearing for his life, fearing that his own father had it within him to kill him?
Reid released the fender, went back up into the house.
—
He busied himself in the kitchen; while he worked, he thought.
He thought about the nature of death. He thought about the nature of killing.
Neither he, nor anyone he had ever known, had done such a thing. Of course, murders happened on a regular basis throughout the county; most of them were run-of-the-mill kinds of things: a jilted lover exacting revenge, an argument carried to extremes, the settling of one kind of debt or another, deeds done by accident. One read about them in the papers, shook one’s head, thanked the gods that it was something that had happened to someone else, went on to the baseball scores and Bringing Up Father.
Outside of law enforcement or the military, were there killings that were justifiable? He wanted to believe that there were. He wanted to think that Ephraim Hazlett—as much as anyone—had deserved the fate that had been visited upon him. Of course, he understood that everyone who had taken the life of another would probably claim the same thing: the victim had it coming, deserved to die, made the lives of others better for being taken out of his own.
He tried to imagine a life in which Ephraim had lived. How often would he have come to call, exacting another little bit from them, threatening them with exposure? How much would Reid have had to give him? How many thousands? And, on top of that, the fear always there, gnawing at him, at Elias: was this the day for the man to show up? What would he demand? What more of their life together would he and Elias have to ransom?
He realized that he had no answers to those questions. He stood here in a kind of twilight of morality, unable or unwilling to land on one side of the fence or the other. Any and all possibilities were arrayed before him, like a cloud, like a fog, obscuring the real future, the future he wanted to have with Elias, the future that he might have to consider abandoning.
—
In the morning, he rose early, bathed and dressed, went downstairs. It was a Sunday, a day of rest. Already he could hear, from town, the sounds of bells calling people to worship, to prostrate themselves before their maker, to plea for forgiveness and absolution.
He had never subscribed to such things, had never had to go to church on his own volition. He imagined that there were those in town who noted his absence, tried to understand it and could not.
He made a pot of coffee; when it was done, he took it out to the porch, sat in one of the rockers, wondering if Elias were still here.
—
Which question was answered, perhaps half an hour later, by the screen door opening and closing, by the motion of Elias there, settling into a chair, sipping his own coffee.
The two men sat there, saying nothing. That had often been the way of them on such mornings; they felt so close to each other, so attached, that there was little need for talk. Now, though, Reid sensed a diffidence in Elias—and perhaps in himself as well—as if neither of them wanted to start talking about the only thing they could conceivably have to talk about.
Reid favored Elias with a sidelong glance. He noticed that Elias had on the same clothing he’d worn that night, up on the ridge, when he’d come up to Reid and asked if he might accompany him. He had not worn those clothes again since he’d agreed to stay with Reid; Reid understood that they symbolized a life that Elias did not want to live any more.
“So, you’re leaving,” Reid murmured.
“How did you know?”
“Your clothing. That was what you were wearing that night.”
“It’s for the best, I think. I don’t know how I can stay, not after this.”
“If you leave, they will know that you did it. They will hunt you down and find you.”
“As they should. That’s what they have to do.”
“It was an accident, Elias.”
“Was it?” At Reid’s confusion, he went on. “I went after him, Reid. I followed him up there.”
“Self defense, then, or—”
Elias shook his head. “No. I went up there to try to stop him, Reid. I went up there because I was so goddamned… tired of the control he wanted to have over me, over us. Nobody should have to live that way. I couldn’t do that.”
Reid didn’t want to ask the next question, forced himself to do it. “What if you hadn’t, Elias?”
“Hadn’t what?”
“Run across him, up there.”
“Then I would have followed him home.”
“With the same outcome.”
“Yes. I would have tried, at least.” Elias smiled, shook his head. “Which would probably have been the end of me, I think. He would have stopped me.”
“I think we were lucky he didn’t cash that check.”
“It’s not luck, Reid.” At Reid’s puzzlement, he went on. “He doesn’t have a bank account. Nobody in their right mind will give him one, any more. He would have had to find someone to sign the check over to and have them cash it.”
“Ah.” Reid didn’t know what else to say to that.
“They’re going to find him, Reid. If they haven’t already. Somebody will be up there, somebody will see it.”
“What are they going to see, Elias? A car that made a wrong turn on a very difficult road during a rainstorm and went over the side. It’s happened before. They’re not going to… well…” He trailed off, remembering the story Elias had told him yesterday: Ephraim, trying to get his truck unstuck, had slipped and already tumbled over the edge, had fetched up—hard—against a tree, his leg and arm broken, some wound on his chest, with blood seeping through the shirt. He’d then thought himself the recipient of the most extraordinary luck when his son had shown up shortly thereafter, ostensibly to help him back up and get him patched up. What had he thought, then, as Elias had carefully picked his way down the hillside, had come up to his father, had stood there looking down upon him, had reached over only to pluck the check out of his shirt pocket? What had he thought, then, when his son had taken something—a gun, his gun—had pressed it into his palm, then taken it from him and tossed it beside him, tantalizingly just out of reach? What had he thought, then, to see Elias scrambling back up the hillside, deaf to his entreaties, then to his demands, then to his incoherent rage?
What had he thought, then, to bear witness to the most amazing—and the last—sight he would ever see? Nearly two tons of Dodge truck tumbling like an implacable juggernaut down the hill, directly toward him… and his son standing there, on the roadbed, watching it happen.
Elias turned to him. “It doesn’t matter, does it? They may even believe that that was what happened. But the fact remains, Reid. I killed my father.”
Reid thought of the patricides recounted in history, in fiction, in legend. Ones from ancient Greece and Rome and cultures far older, one of the most unforgivable of sins, one that violated every precept of every civilization from the first to the last. Oedipus and Laius, Beatrice Cenci, Pelias at the hands of his daughters, Cronus and Uranus… even an act as prosaic as that carried out by Lizzie Borden, who did for both her father and her stepmother.
“Yes, you did,” he said. There was no escaping that fact.
“And for that, I should suffer punishment.”
“You already have.” Elias looked at him, frowning; Reid went on. “Do you follow science, Elias?”
Elias’ frown deepened, telegraphing his confusion. “I… well… only in the most basic sense. Why?”
“Well, I’m thinking of cause and effect. Normally, something happens and causes something else. One leads to the other. We see it every day. A farmer forgets to lock the gate, his cattle escape. A student fails to study for a test, she ends up failing.”
“Reid, I don’t—”
“But now, we’re being told something completely different, something that makes no sense but is, somehow, possible. Effect can precede cause. It defies logic, but only because we limit ourselves to the demands inherent in our kind of logic. Underlying everything we do, everything we see, everything we experience is chaos… pure and simple. Our lives are built upon chaos. We impose order on chaos only because we have no other way of living with it.”
“I’m not sure how it applies in this case, Reid. The law won’t—”
“Oh, to hell with the law!” Reid shouted. He forced himself to calmness. “What I’m saying is this: your father spent your entire life punishing you for things you never did, only because he thought you deserved that punishment, for the simple fact of existing. You, as far as you knew, had done nothing to receive that punishment, and you couldn’t understand why he did it, why he hated you so much. But, now, it’s come full circle. Who can truly say what was cause, what was effect? All things are possible, they tell us, now. Anything and everything, all at once… with no judgment as to whether one thing is right and another wrong. It’s all right, it’s all wrong.” He knew, even as he spoke, that it made little sense, that it was bordering on gibberish, on the ravings of a desperate man.
The ghost of a smile lifted one corner of the boy’s mouth. “Try convincing a jury of that, Reid. Try convincing the lawyers, the judges.”
“It won’t come to that, Elias. Not if you won’t allow it.”
“You’re saying I should stay. That I should just stay quiet and tough it out.”
“Yes. They’re never going to know. And… well… let’s be honest, Elias. I sincerely do not believe that there is one soul in this county that will be sorry to learn that Ephraim Hazlett is dead.”
Elias’ mouth quirked. “You may have something with that.”
“I know I do!”
Elias fell silent. The day brightened around them, promising heat. Then, “Why do you care, Reid? Why do you care so much?”
Reid stared out into the hills. He realized how much a part of him this place was, how great an influence it had exacted upon him. He knew then that he would never leave this place. It was as much a part of him as his face, his limbs, his heart, his soul. He turned to Elias. “I knew what I was when I was thirteen. I knew it concretely, as concretely as if someone had taken me aside and shouted it in my face. I knew that I preferred the company of boys to that of girls. More than that, I knew that boys moved me in ways that no girl ever did, or could. I knew, deep down, that it was wrong, in one sense… well, in many senses, I suppose… but I knew also that I could see no wrongness in it. It was, to me, as pure and simple a love as any.
“For all of my adult life, ever since that day, I have waited for that understanding to catch up to the man I was becoming. I have waited for that love to find me.” He reached out, ran his fingers through Elias’ hair. “And, now, it has. On that night, up on the ridge, it found me.”
“How did you know?” Elias asked. “You thought I was going to kill you, at first.”
Reid smiled. “I did think that, until you turned around to face me and the moonlight washed across you, across your beautiful face. And I knew then that you weren’t going to hurt me, that you would never hurt me. That you couldn’t.”
Elias thumped his chest. “But it’s here, Reid. It’s inside me. The desire, the… the ability.” He shook his head. “All my life, I’ve been fighting my father. Now, it seems that I’m just the same as him.”
Reid reached out, laid a hand on Elias’ forearm. “Don’t think that, Elias. Don’t say that. You are as opposite your father as day is from night. Your father killed your sister because he could not handle the truth that she saw in him. You killed your father because you were tired of accepting those lies as truth.”