The White Road-CP-4 Read Online Free PDF Page B

did to him? You think I don’t live with that guilt every day?”
    “No,” said Louis. “I don’t.”
    “Don’t do this,” said Little Tom. A hand reached out in supplication. “I’ll find a way to make up for what I did. Please.”
    “I got a way that you can make up for it,” said Louis.
    And then Little Tom Rudge was dead.
    In the car they disassembled the guns, wiping every piece down with clean rags. They scattered the remains of the weapons in fields and streams as they drove, but no words were exchanged until they were many miles from the bar.
    “How do you feel?” asked Louis.
    “Numb,” Angel replied. “Except in my back. My back hurts.”
    “How about Benson?”
    “He was the wrong man, but I killed him anyway.”
    “They deserved what they got.”
    Angel waved his assurance away as a thing without substance or meaning.
    “Don’t get me wrong. I got no problem with what we just did back there, but killing him didn’t make me feel any better, if that’s what you’re asking. He was the wrong man because when I pulled that trigger, I didn’t even see Clyde Benson. I saw the preacher. I saw Faulkner.”
    There was silence for a time. Dark fields went by, the hollow shapes of brokeback houses visible against the horizon.
    It was Angel who spoke again.
    “Bird should have killed him when he had the chance.”
    “Maybe.”
    “There’s no maybe about it. He should have burned him.”
    “He’s not like us. He feels too much, thinks too much.”
    Angel sighed deeply. “Feeling and thinking ain’t the same thing. That old fuck isn’t going away. As long as he’s alive, he’s a threat to all of us.”
    Beside him, Louis nodded silently in the darkness.
    “And he cut me, and I swore that no one would ever cut me again. No one.”
    After a time, his companion spoke softly to him.
    “We have to wait.”
    “For what?”
    “For the right time, the right opportunity.”
    “And if it doesn’t come?”
    “It will come.”
    “Don’t give me that,” said Angel, before repeating his question. “What if it doesn’t come?”
    Louis reached out and touched his partner’s face gently.
    “Then we will make it ourselves.”
    Shortly after, they drove across the state line into South Carolina just below Allendale, and nobody stopped them. They left behind the semiconscious form of Virgil Gossard and the bodies of Little Tom Rudge, Clyde Benson, and Willard Hoag, the three men who had taunted Errol Rich, who had taken him from his home, and who had hanged him from a tree to die. And out on Ada’s Field, at the northern edge where the ground sloped upward, a black oak burned, its leaves curling to brown, the sap hissing and spitting as it burst from the trunk, its branches like the bones of a flaming hand set against the star-sprinkled blackness of the night sky.
    1
    B EAR SAID THAT he had seen the dead girl.
    It was one week earlier, one week before the descent on Caina that would leave three men dead. The sunlight had fallen prey to predatory clouds, filthy and gray like the smoke from a garbage fire. There was a stillness that presaged rain. Outside, the Blythes’ mongrel dog lay uneasily on the lawn, its body flat, its head resting between its front paws, its eyes open and troubled. The Blythes lived on Dartmouth Street in Portland, overlooking Back Cove and the waters of Casco Bay. Usually, there were birds around—seagulls, ducks, teal—but nothing flew that day. It was a world painted on glass, waiting to be shattered by unseen forces. We sat in silence in the small living room. Bear, listless, glanced out of the window, as if waiting for the first drops of rain to fall and confirm some unspoken fear. No shadows moved on the polished oak floors, not even our own. I could hear the ticking of the china clock on the mantel, surrounded by photographs from happier times. I found myself staring at an image of Cassie Blythe clutching a mortarboard to her head as the wind tried to make off with