Toughing It Read online

  I was going to go talk to the mountain man. Just talk to him, I kept telling myself, because that was what I had promised Monica. But I needed the gun in case he tried to hurt me, didn’t I? In case he tried to kill me the way he had killed Dillon.

  6

  In the morning I got up, got my shower, changed the bandages on my face for smaller ones, got dressed for school, had breakfast with Pen, all real calm. Pen watched me over his coffee, the way he always did. “The viewing’s at seven tonight,” he said.

  I just nodded, all the time knowing I wouldn’t be there—I would be either on the run or in jail. That meant I wouldn’t make it to the funeral tomorrow, either. Dillon was dead, and dead people don’t care, I told myself. Or, if he was looking down from somewhere, he would understand. I felt bad, telling myself that, and now I understand why: The truth was, I was chicken. I couldn’t face what I had to do, which was put Dillon in a grave. But at the time I just told myself it was more important to get the killer.

  “You know your mother’s going to be there,” Pen said.

  The bitch. I felt the anger coiling and stinging inside me, hidden in my chest, as I nodded again.

  “She’s going to need you to stand by her. Can you do that?”

  “I can do what I have to,” I said, which was the next best thing to a whopping lie. I stood up. It was time for the school bus to come. “See ya,” I told Pen, knowing maybe I wouldn’t see him again, maybe he wouldn’t want to let me in his house again once he found out what I had done. Anger helped keep my shoulders hard. I picked up my new jacket and slung it on as I went out the door. I didn’t look back.

  All the way to school, I could feel the gun riding in my pocket, heavy and solid and secret.

  When the bus pulled up to the front of the building, I got off with the others. I even went in. But then I walked straight on through and went out the back doors and kept walking.

  It was a hike to Sid’s Mountain from school, but not as far as it would have been to walk all the way from Dam Shame. I could have saved myself the hike and some waiting by taking Pen’s car in the night, but the cops would have been after me the minute he found out. This way I would have some time. Pen would think I was in school, and the school would think I was home getting ready for my brother’s funeral. Nobody would know where I was or what I was doing. Afterward, they would find out—but I didn’t care about afterward. I couldn’t feel any real interest in what was left of my life.

  I got to Sid’s Mountain before noon. But then it took me awhile to find the cabin, coming at it from a different direction than I was used to, through all that rough country. Moving quietly in case anybody was around, I got there by following the rock formation till I saw a thread of smoke. Yeah, there was smoke coming out of the chimney again.

  I stood behind the closest angle of rock, unzipped my pocket and pulled out my gun, checked again to be sure it was loaded, and put it back in my pocket, with the zipper open this time.

  I went to the door and knocked.

  No answer.

  Knocked some more.

  No answer.

  There’s something about being shut out, locked out, that drives me psycho. I started to swear, and I kicked the door, and for a minute I decided I was going to break it down the way the cops do on TV. But then I got a little sense and went around the place to look at the windows instead. And for crying out loud, one of them was propped open. Not even a screen in it.

  I swung myself up and bellied through the opening, already knowing that nobody was home. If the mountain man was there, I would have had a rifle barrel poked in my face by then.

  Just the same, I looked around real careful when I got inside. The place was all one room. Not even a john. The guy must go in the woods someplace. No running water—covered buckets instead, and plastic milk jugs—probably brought the water in from a spring. A wood stove served for heat and cooking—there was a little fire going in it right now. There was a cot, a hickory chair, and a square table. I saw rabbit skins and some other kinds of skins stretched on boards that leaned against the walls. There wasn’t much else to look at.

  I sat in the chair, took out my gun and held it in my lap, and waited.

  Hours went past, I’m not sure how many. I didn’t have a watch.

  Then—I never heard him coming, but the door opened and there he was.

  We both jumped and went, “Aaaaa!”

  He’d startled me as bad as I’d startled him, and I’d been expecting him—but knock me silly, he was worse than I would have thought even from hearing kids talk about him. The stink, for one thing—I should have smelled him coming, even if I didn’t hear him—and the rags letting big bony patches of him show through. And the beard hanging down him the way brown hairy stuff hangs down a tree sometimes. And the way he was holding a bloody hunk of meat in his hand, and the freaky eyes staring out of all that beard. His eyes scooted from my face to my gun to my face again, wild and scared.

  I was glad I had the pistol, but I didn’t lift it or point it at him. He didn’t have any weapon that I could see—maybe there was a hunting knife on him somewhere, but he was nowhere near close enough to me to use it, and his hunting rifle was hanging on the wall behind me. He was across the room from it and from me.

  No shotgun.

  Maybe he had owned a shotgun and it was missing. Maybe he had wired it to a tree. Maybe the cops had it now.

  I said, “Hi. Uh, I’m Shawn. Shawn Lacey.”

  He dropped the meat on the floor and didn’t answer.

  “What’s your name?”

  His eyes went even crazier, and he didn’t say a word.

  I said, “Okay, then I’ll call you Mountain Man. That’s what everybody calls you, right?” No answer. “Listen, I just want to talk to you about something. It’s about my brother Dillon.” The mountain man was staring like a gonzo person, and I kept making what I said simpler and simpler, because I couldn’t tell how much he understood. “He got killed, Dillon got killed. Up the mountain. Up above the rocks, on the dirt road. Somebody put up a shotgun wired to go off. He ran into the string and got killed. You know about that?”

  He stared.

  I asked again, “You know about that?”

  His beard moved. He was nodding.

  “You do?” My heart pounded with excitement, I was so sure he could tell me something. I stood up with the gun in my hand hanging down by my side. He took a step back from me, jamming himself against the closed door. “Listen,” I told him, “I just want to talk. I need to know who did it. Can you talk to me? Can you tell me who did it?”

  His mouth came open and closed again, soft and round, like a fish drowning. He had bad teeth, long and brown. He was stepping on the meat he had been carrying. His hands were red with blood.

  I asked him, “Did you have anything to do with it?”

  Then his face changed. And when I saw it, when I saw the guilt in his face, the rage hit like—forget lightning, it was worse. Wildfire. A firestorm.

  I started to shake with fury. My hand came up, shaking, and pointed the gun at him, because his face was curled up with guilt and I knew, I just knew, he had done it. The son of a bitch had killed my brother. He had killed Dillon.

  I whispered, “You.” I was so crazy mad my voice wasn’t working right. I couldn’t even curse him properly. “You bastard.” And I didn’t have a shotgun to kill him with. But I could not wait. The pistol was the next best thing. Bullets would make holes and he would bleed—it was good enough. I panted at him, “Out the door. Move!”

  His face was curled up with terror now, and he stumbled outside.

  I wanted to kill him where Dillon had died. If I had been thinking, I would not have tried it, because once we got in the woods he could have made a run for it. But I wasn’t thinking—I was nuts. I headed him up the mountain and stayed close behind him, and he didn’t try to get away. It was like he thought he deserved what he was going to get.

  When we got there, the yellow polic
e line was gone. I took him right to where it had happened, beside the tree with the wire scars on it, and I stopped him there and made him turn around and face me. It was late in the day and the shadows were long. “Why?” I asked him, with my gun pointing at his heart.

  He was shaking and panting and making small whimpering noises deep in his throat. They made me angrier.

  “I want to know why you did it!” I yelled at him. “Why?”

  No answer.

  “Goddammit. Didn’t you even do it for a reason?”

  He shook his head. I wanted to kill him that moment. Blow him away. But I had to wait, I had to do this right.

  “Kneel,” I told him.

  He didn’t move. He was looking past me.

  By my side a quiet voice said, “Shawn, stop. You don’t know he did anything.”

  Penrose Leppo.

  Where the hell did he come from? I jumped about three feet sideward, away from him. “Get out of here!” I screamed at him.

  Real flat, he said, “Why? You thinking of doing something wrong?”

  I kept the gun up, aimed at the mountain man. I was so mad I could barely talk. “Just go away.”

  “Sure, and let you ruin your life. Shoot an innocent man.”

  “He’s not innocent! He—killed…” I couldn’t say it. My gun hand was throbbing, pounding like my heart. I wanted to pull the trigger.

  Pen stood there solid and quiet and said, “You think he killed Dillon? Can you prove anything?”

  “I know he did it! He’s guilty as hell. Look at him!”

  Pen said, “You don’t know a thing. You don’t even know who this is, but I do. His name is Al Quigg, and he was a high school classmate of mine. Right, Quiggie?”

  The guy opened his mouth and struggled with air a minute. “P-P-P-Penrose,” he said. “H-how you b-b-been?”

  Pen smiled at him and nodded and kept talking to me. “Quiggie was on the basketball team,” he said. “He was a real sports star. All the girls liked him back then, before he got so shaggy. And—this is something you might want to consider—it’s very possible he is your father. I sure as hell know I am not.”

  I wouldn’t have thought anything could hit me harder than the firestorm of anger taking me over, but that did. It hit like a brick wall landing on my chest. I could barely breathe. The gun sagged down to my side. I swung around and gawked at Pen, but I couldn’t talk.

  He said very quiet, “Your ma and I never—I was never her boyfriend, Shawn. But Quiggie was. Isn’t that true, Quiggie? You remember Candy Lacey?”

  I swear to God he smiled. “C-C-Candy,” he said. “Oh yeah.”

  “Those babies she had when she was still a kid, one of them could have been yours?”

  “M-maybe. I d-d-dunno, I was in p-p-p-prison—”

  “But they could have been.”

  “M-m-mine? B-b-but sh-she don’t know that. Sh-she don’t know who their f-f-fathers was. Sh-she had l-l-lots of d-d-d-different—”

  “Shut up!” I screamed at him. I couldn’t stand listening to him sputter and stutter. I couldn’t stand hearing what he was saying. I wanted to blow him away. I brought the pistol up and took aim at him.

  “Okay, Tuff stuff,” Pen said to me, sounding tired and bored. “I’m not trying to stop you. You want to be a murderer? Go ahead, do it if you’re going to.”

  And he stood there.

  And Quiggie stood there whimpering in his throat again, and I stood there with the gun shaking in my hand.

  And I couldn’t do it.

  It wasn’t because Pen was watching or because I knew I would go to jail, maybe even get a death sentence. I honest to God didn’t care what happened to me. And it wasn’t because this twitchy, stuttering, stinky weirdo, Al Quigg, might have been my father. I couldn’t really believe that. And it wasn’t because I had no proof he did anything to Dillon. I still thought he was the one.

  It was just that—I couldn’t kill him.

  I was still red-hot blind with rage and pain, more now than ever, since Pen was talking to me so hard and cold, since he said he was not my father. And I still wanted to kill the mountain man. But something in me would not let me pull the trigger. I’d never really known before, but—I wasn’t the kind of person who could kill people, not even for Dillon. He had raised me too good. I just was not a killer.

  I guess Pen knew.

  It was no use standing there. I could stand there all day, pointing the gun at the mountain man, my hand shaking, and not get anywhere. I couldn’t hurt him. I had to let him go.

  I closed my eyes and let my arm ease down to my side.

  There was a loud bang. At the same time something hit me, knocking me to the ground.

  Somewhere close by a gun had gone off, and it wasn’t mine.

  7

  Another few shots whistled over us as I lay there facedown in the dirt with Pen on top of me. It wasn’t a bullet that had hit me. It was him, knocking me down to save my life. Again.

  Somebody was shooting at us, and it sure as hell was not Al Quigg, the mountain man, because there he was lying right beside me, whimpering to himself.

  “Shawn, the pistol,” Pen said in my ear. “Quick, give me the gun!”

  I slipped it to him and grabbed the extra ammo out of my pocket and gave him that, too. “Stay flat on the ground,” he said. “Get behind a tree or something.” Then he rolled off me and did the opposite himself, getting up enough to run bent over toward the nearest rock. About three shots cracked at once—it was more than one person shooting at us. Pen landed on his gut, and I panicked, I thought he was hit.

  “Pen!”

  God, no, if I lost him, too, I would die—but he swiveled around and motioned at me to get down. He was okay, it was just that he had dived for cover. He had a quick look past the side of his rock, poked his pistol out, and pulled off three shots.

  I don’t think he hit anything. They shot back at him and chips of rock flew up where the bullets hit. Pen reached up and squeezed off a few more shots, but there’s not much a guy with a handgun can do against goons with rifles. All Pen was doing was keeping them busy, drawing their attention away from Quiggie and me while we crawled behind a couple of trees.

  “G-G-Green Beret,” Quiggie stuttered to me proudly. “P-P-P-Pen was.”

  God. My little pudgy father was a Green Beret?

  Only—he said he wasn’t my father.

  I couldn’t answer Quiggie or show that I heard what he said. I was so shot to hell, I couldn’t talk. I should have been doing something to help Pen, but I couldn’t think what. Too—scared, yeah, but mostly I didn’t care if I died. When was I ever going to stop hurting? Dillon was dead, and my mother didn’t care, and my father—I couldn’t bear to think about it.

  I never want to feel like that again, so flattened. The guns cracked and popped, and I just lay there a few feet from where Dillon had been killed, waiting for it to be over.

  “Police!” blared a megaphone voice out of nowhere. “Throw down your weapons!”

  Pen dropped his. The other guys did not. They shot at the cops. The cops returned fire. Now there were bullets flying over us from a different angle than before. Quiggie gave up whimpering and just plain wailed. I grabbed him by the waist and pulled him closer to me, where he had more shelter. God, he stank like a hound dog that’s been eating roadkill, and he kept howling like one, too.

  I put my head down and waited some more, just hanging on. Don’t ask me how long it took, but after a while the gunfire moved off up the mountain somewhere, and neither of us had been hit. Pen, either—I could see him sitting up, and he looked okay.

  Quiggie stopped his noise, staggered up, and made a run for it, scuttling to his cabin. What a day for him. Shot at, kidnapped by me—God, I was a jerk. I closed my eyes and lay where I was.

  “I thought I told you to stay the hell away from here!” somebody yelled, standing over me. Detective Mohatt. I recognized his voice, but I didn’t move or open my eyes or look up at him.<
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  “He has a right to be here.” The quiet voice was Pen’s. “It’s state land.”

  “Somebody seems to think it’s a shooting range, in case you haven’t noticed, Leppo. Get him out of here.” Mohatt stomped off.

  Pen hunkered down beside me. “Tuff, come on.” His hands were gentle on my shoulders.

  I started crying.

  I couldn’t help it. There was nothing else to do. I clenched my fists against the earth but anger was no use—I couldn’t kill Quiggie or anybody else, all I was left with was the goddamn awful pain and no place to go with it. Dillon, my brother—I wanted him so bad, and there was not a frigging thing I could do that would ever bring him back. No miracles for me. No father could make it all right, either, even if I knew who my father was, which I did not know and I never would.

  I shook all over with sobbing. Pen sat down on the ground beside me and pulled me up into his arms so that I was crying against his chest instead of lying with my face in the dirt. He held me and cradled my head with his hands and didn’t try to say anything, just hugged me. I should have been embarrassed, I guess, with him holding me like a baby, but I was too far gone. Anyway, there was something about Pen.

  “We’ve got to get you out of here,” he muttered finally, and his voice was husky. I sat up and saw there were tears on his face, too.

  The next few hours were pretty blurry. I couldn’t stop crying, but it was dusk and Pen had to get me off Sid’s Mountain before night fell or Mohatt came back, or the guys with the guns. I just barely remember walking down, then being in the car with him, pressing my face against the window glass, trying to stop the tears. Pen took me home—to his place, I mean—and cleaned me up, and I guess I shouldn’t say this but when the sobbing kept coming back he gave me a shot of whiskey. He didn’t try to talk to me or anything, he knew I couldn’t take it, but I still kept coming apart. It was late by the time I got even halfway calmed down, too late to go to the viewing.

  Late, and somebody rapped on the door. Pen went and opened it.

  “Saw your light was still on,” grumped a voice I knew. Detective Mohatt came in, looking rumpled and tired.