Smugglers Notch Page 21

  St. Germain drove two miles more and then turned to Brownfield. “Cabot County’s finest,” he said.

  13

  DRIVING HOME, MCCALLUM COULDN’T get his mind off the services at St. Mark’s. A new pastor had taken over the congregation, an earnest young man concerned about pornography and Nicaragua, although somewhat weak on Scripture. During the sermon he had seemed to be staring at McCallum as he explained that if God did not see fit to provide earthly rewards, you might as well kiss your portion of heaven good-bye. McCallum, feeling damned in the wood-paneled Buick station wagon that he had been babying for the better part of a decade, had been passed by the new pastor in a factory-fresh BMW. There was a jeweled stud in the young man’s ear and a curious silver cross on a chain around his neck. When the light hit it a certain way, the cross looked almost like a small spoon.

  After church McCallum had dozed while his daughter went around in a hat that cost what he used to bring home from a month at the plant. The egg hunt had to be canceled when the children refused to go out on the wet grass. Back at his daughter’s, Jason, the youngest, came down with a tummy ache (no surprise, so did McCallum) and someone had to find a doctor, so Ruth volunteered to do the dishes. And now, if they were lucky, they would make Manchester Depot by 1:00 A.M. Next year, God willing he was still around, he would trade off with one of the younger guys and work on Easter.

  Ruth said, “Please slow down, dear. What’s your hurry?”

  “My hurry is I would like to use my own bathroom and sleep in my own bed tonight.” He clutched at his stomach. “Die there, too.”

  Ruth tittered. For the life of him, he couldn’t see why she liked being talked to that way. He gave the car gas, and then they must have been back in Vermont because they were climbing into the Monadnocks. “Where are we?” Ruth asked. “I don’t know this road.”

  “This is quicker, runs into 7,” McCallum said, wondering if he could be right.

  The blacktop leveled and he came quickly off the accelerator and flashed his brights. “What is it?” Ruth asked.

  He pointed with his chin. “Looks like some kind of trouble.”

  A blue panel truck was stalled on a curve. Beside it a girl with long blond hair was pacing on a short rein.

  “You’re not going to stop for her,” Ruth said. “It’s getting on to midnight.”

  “It is,” McCallum said. “And I am.” As he brought the station wagon to a halt, he saw a birch sapling across the road in front of the van. He leaned out his window. “Can’t you drive over that?”

  The girl shook her head, kept tossing it as if once she got it moving she couldn’t stop it on her own.

  “What a strange child,” Ruth said. “Why doesn’t she say something? And if her truck won’t go over the tree, she should pull around and go back the way she came instead of waiting like a dummy for an even bigger dummy like you.”

  But McCallum was already out of the station wagon, sizing up the downed log. “I don’t see how this landed all the way out here,” he said to the girl. He stood away from the branches and bent his knees the way his doctor had taught him to lift heavy objects. “Now you grab ahold, miss. It can’t be heavy.”

  The girl didn’t say anything, just looked at him, still swinging her head. McCallum heard steps behind him and turned to see a boy in a T-shirt and jeans walking around the curve. “Well, this must be your fellow. We shouldn’t have any trouble moving it now.”

  “No trouble at all, old man,” the boy said.

  McCallum took an instant dislike to the boy. He backed off toward the station wagon. “… So I’ll just let him take over.”

  “Hey, old man, not so fast.”

  The boy had produced a revolver and was pushing shells into the cylinder. McCallum saw two other men, one of them hobbling, leaning on his companion for support. A fourth man in a red baseball jacket dropped out of the van, carrying a tool chest and a sheaf of maps.

  “That’s a nice station wagon you have there,” the boy said.

  McCallum wasn’t sure what was coming, but he knew it was bad, bad for him and for Ruth. He found himself looking toward the blond girl, starting to understand.

  “I’d like to buy it from you.”

  McCallum said, “What do you want, my money? I only have a few dollars.”

  “Just the wagon,” the boy said. “And I’ll pay, name your price.” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “Anybody have a pen?”

  McCallum slid his new Papermate Deluxe Powerpoint out of his shirt. Then he raised his hands over his head.

  “Tell you what, old man. If you promise you won’t go for your gun, you can put your hands down. But only if you promise. … We got a deal?”

  McCallum dropped his arms. One of the other men began to beat his hands against his sides. “Put a move on, Paul. How about it?”

  Paul looked up, in no mood to be rushed. He printed a few words and gave the paper to McCallum, who held it inches from his face. “What is this? My glasses are in the—”

  “It’s my IOU,” the boy said. “Says I’ll pay five thousand for your station wagon next time I run into you. That’s fair, isn’t it? Who else would give you so much for that old gas guzzler?”

  “It’s a woody,” McCallum said.

  “What?”

  “A woody. That’s real simulated wood paneling on the doors. It’s worth more than five thousand.”

  “Will you stop playing games?” One of the others said to the boy. “We’re freezing.”

  “Well, five thousand’s all I’m paying. Now tell your mom to get out.”

  McCallum had been thinking again about St. Mark’s, fairly certain of the message the new pastor would read into his one earthly pleasure being taken from him. Only now did he start to feel real anger toward the boy. “Ruth is my wife,” he snapped.

  “Tell her to shake her ass anyhow. She’s got it parked in my wagon.”

  McCallum went back to the Buick and opened the passenger’s door. He was trying to slide in over Ruth, reaching for the wheel, when he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, and one of the other men, the big one with the bad hip, pulled him onto the road. Ruth slid out without having to be asked, and the boy lined them up against the van.

  “What do you want from us?” Ruth asked.

  “We already got that. You should be asking what we’re going to do with you.”

  “What are—”

  “Nothing, nothing you should worry about,” the boy said.

  He was laughing, trying to reassure them with a big grin. McCallum thought it was the ghastliest smile he ever had seen.

  “We’re going to Canada. Want to come?”

  McCallum stood closer to his wife, digging in his heels.

  “No? Well, we can’t leave you in the middle of nowhere, couple of senior citizens like yourselves.” The boy snapped his fingers and then looked up suddenly, as if the sound had startled him. “Say,” he said, “what about this, what if we tie you up and you can, you know, work yourselves free and take off after we’re gone?”

  He reached into his pants and Ruth recoiled against the truck. “No opinion?” he said, and gave McCallum back his pen. “I’m going to take it for a yes. … Someone see if we’ve got any rope in the van.”

  Mel tossed a coil of nylon twine out the back, and Conklin put his arm through and slid it over his shoulder. Without having to touch his gun he prodded the couple into the darkness. “Don’t look so down,” he said. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  They marched through the trees in single file, McCallum in the lead, reaching back for his wife’s hand. The woman stumbled over a moss-covered rock, and as Conklin steadied her she began to mutter, “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no—’”

  “You folks Christians?” the boy said.

  “We attended Easter services this morning, if that’s so amusing.” McCallum sniffed.

  “What denomination?”

 
“Congregational.”

  “I’m a Baptist myself. Where’s your church?”

  “We were visiting our daughter in Williamstown, Massachusetts,” McCallum boasted. “Her husband’s a professor at the college there. French literature.” McCallum allowed himself an inner smile. If they could reach the boy, appeal to whatever religious convictions he seemed sure to have, he might forget about leaving them there, even drive them home if they found enough good things to say about the Baptists. “Ruth, that’s Mrs. McCallum, had bypass surgery last autumn and—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “… And I’m sure you understand the stress this is putting on her. It’s getting cold, and if we have to stay out very long—”

  “Good thing you mentioned it,” the boy said. “How about we stop right here, you won’t have so far to walk out of the woods? Pick any tree you like and I’ll put the rope around you nice and loose. You’ll probably beat me back to the road.”

  The way McCallum surveyed the forest, he could have been visiting a Christmas tree farm. Then he brought his wife to an oak that had lost its crown to lightning and they stood on opposite sides of the trunk. Though McCallum couldn’t see his face, he had the uneasy feeling that the boy was grinning.

  “Now turn around like you’re hugging the tree.”

  McCallum did as he was told, his fingers finding Ruth’s and linking with them. He heard her inhaling through her mouth, deep breaths, not letting herself get too worked up. Expecting to feel the rope, he looked over his shoulder—and then he wanted to laugh, to drop to his knees and thank God for the first true miracle he had witnessed. The boy was rewinding the twine. “Didn’t you bring enough?” McCallum asked as if it was an old joke between them.

  “This piece is plenty long. Problem is, it’s all I have.” The boy winked at him. “And you never can tell when you’re going to need rope.”

  As McCallum was whispering his prayer of thanks, the boy drew the gun out of his waistband, put it to the back of Ruth’s head and shot her once, McCallum wondering what the new pastor of St. Mark’s would make of it as the bullet exited above her ear and splintered the rough bark of the oak. The smell of singed hair was in his nostrils before Ruth toppled across the roots. The boy blew smoke from the muzzle, though McCallum was certain there was no smoke, and then turned the gun on him. “I really can’t spare the rope.”

  When Conklin walked out of the woods, the others were waiting outside the van. Stark stood closest to the girl, who had begun to cry again. Conklin tossed a blood-spattered jacket at Walker, and the weightlifter draped it around his shoulders. Then Conklin finished coiling the rope and gave it to his brother. “I won’t be needing this after all,” he said.

  “Are they—”

  Conklin nodded. “With Him,” he said, and put new shells in the .32. “We got everything we want in the wagon?”

  Mel leered at the girl. “Except her.”

  “Then put her there and let’s get.” He started up the van, backed it around the station wagon, and drove it into the trees along the same track he had brought the old couple. When he was out of sight of the road, he flung away the keys and trudged back with his chin against his chest.

  “You all right?” his brother asked.

  “I didn’t think I’d feel so bad about it, but getting rid of the truck … it was like ditching an old friend.” He motioned his brother into the station wagon. “I’ll drive. I can use the practice.”

  “It’s what I was afraid of,” Stark whispered to the girl.

  “Who said that?”

  “Move,” Walker said. “This is no time to be getting touchy.”

  Conklin put the wagon in gear and they glided around the curve. In the twenty-five minutes they had been there they hadn’t seen another vehicle; now the lights from a small convoy beamed down on them. Two cars trooped over the summit of a bald hill behind a Dodge truck with a bug screen over the grille and a U-haul hitched to the rear. Conklin relaxed and pushed the Buick to sixty. “Nice pickup,” he said. “No wonder those Congregationalists liked woodies.”

  “Where we headed now?” Walker asked.

  “If the cops find the van, they’ve got to figure we’re following 7.” The words came quickly, as though he had thought it out well in advance. “What we’ll do is swing east around the mountains and take 100 to Canada. If we run into troopers I know a road that … well, it isn’t important ’cause we’re not going to run into any.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Long as we keep out of cities, we shouldn’t see a single cop. And 100 stays in the country all the way to Waterbury.”

  They turned onto a road no busier than the one they were leaving. They picked up Route 9 again on the other side of Bennington and followed alongside the Roaring Branch where the stream sent brown meltwater over its bank. The Buick’s high beams reflected off a sign that read, MOLLY STARK TRAIL, and Conklin said, “One of your exes, Jeff?”

  Stark said, “Huh?” and everybody laughed, everybody but the girl. They climbed past Woodford and the blue chairs of the Prospect Mountain ski area swaying over barren slopes. At Wilmington Conklin waited five minutes for the red light in the center of town and then aimed the station wagon north on 100.

  “Three, four hours tops, and we should be at the border,” Conklin announced.

  “And they’ll let us in just like that?” Walker said. “You don’t think someone’ll want to know what we’re doing coming into their country without luggage, or two shirts between us?”

  “All they’re interested in is if we’re bringing money. When I show them what we have, they’ll sell us their shirts.”

  “What about Brenda? What if she tells them where we got it from?”

  Conklin looked in the mirror, made eye contact with the girl, who quickly looked away. “Take it up with her,” he said.

  Wilmington dissolved into a strip of motels with German-sounding names that extended past the Haystack Mountain lifts to Mount Snow. The highway ran between hardscrabble farms where uncapped silos towered above the fields like giant rain gauges. They rode for an hour with nothing to write home about, and then 100 spilled over the Sherburne Pass into the White River Valley, Mel dozing through the granite canyon of Granville Gulf. North of Warren the small towns came one on the heels of another, and Conklin slowed to forty.

  Mel yawned, licked the sleep off his lips. “Where are we?”

  “Coming into Waterbury. It’s the one stretch I don’t feel great about.”

  The highway traced deserted streets toward brick buildings on three sides of a grassy campus. “There’s the laughing academy,” Conklin said. “Had me there for thirty days.”

  Stark said, “I did sixty.”

  “’Cause you’re twice as nuts as me.” Conklin glanced around the wagon as if he expected applause. When he checked the road again, the city was already behind them. He put his foot down harder on the gas but switched quickly to the brake.

  Walker braced against the seat. “You trying to get us killed?”

  “Trying not to. There’s flashing lights up ahead. Could be troopers.”

  “We’d better turn around,” Stark said, reaching for the girl.

  “And go where?” Conklin placed the .32 across his lap. “I don’t see this being anything we can’t handle.”

  The Buick came up on a Washington County sheriff’s cruiser. It was idling next to a tow truck whose hook was baited for a red Corvette wrapped neatly around a utility pole. An ambulance from a Stowe hospital seemed ready for a tug of war over the sports car. Washington deputies kept traffic away from a dark-haired man and a blond in a tan uniform kneeling over two bodies covered by sheets. Conklin slowed and squinted into the glare.

  “Get a move on,” Walker said. “This is no time to be rubbernecking.”

  Conklin stopped the wagon. “Mel,” he said, “you see that big guy working on the stiff?”

  Mel brought his hand over his eyes and looked out the driver’s window.
“I see the back of his head. And his ear. Why?”

  “They look familiar to you?”

  “I … nope, can’t say they do. Who do you think it is?”

  Conklin shrugged. He skirted the accident and brought the Buick to full speed. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m hallucinating is all.”

  The girl swiveled around, watching the deputies as if her future were receding with them. She tried to crawl into the rear of the wagon, but Stark brought her back with his hand over her mouth. She bit at his palm, ground the web of skin between his forefinger and thumb, and he pulled away and let her yell. Mel switched on the radio. An easy listening station came on, and he made a face as pained as the girl’s.

  Conklin said, “See if you can get the news, find out what we’re up to.” He laughed at his own joke, kept it up as he began to pound his fist on the dash.

  “What now?” his brother asked.

  Conklin pointed at red and blue beams canvasing the highway. “Must be another fender bender.”

  The Buick’s high beams washed away the colored lights. Instead of the crash scene Conklin anticipated, there were two police cars in the northbound lanes. A big officer with a cigar in his teeth, almost as big as the blonde at Colbyville, waved them into the narrow space between the cruisers and studied their license plate with his hand playing against his gun butt.

  In the mirror Conklin saw Stark wrestle the girl across his lap and hold her there with a handkerchief stuffed inside her mouth. He rolled his window down an inch. “Some kind of accident?” he called out to the big officer. “We just saw a bad wreck down to—”

  “I want you all to open your doors and step out of the car.”

  “Why, Officer?”

  “Don’t ask questions. Do it.”

  A second deputy walked up behind the big man. The cigar in his mouth was unlit and he took it out and cupped it in his hand. “I don’t understand,” Conklin said. He was eyeing the officers’ guns in their holsters, trying not to stare. “Can’t you tell us why?”

  The second deputy whispered to his partner, who nodded as he came around to Conklin’s door. “Now I’m ordering you—”