1974, Weston County
Delby abruptly stopped working, wavered a moment, and then with head down, fell on top of his shovel. The rest of the prisoners awkwardly slowed their work as the now irritated Officer Bevis came sauntering across the road. Delby laid in the dirt, his legs still in the ditch he and the others were digging. Bevis kicked him hard in his left leg.
“Get your ass up, Delby. Knock this shit off.”
Delby was known as the person who pulled pranks. As guards would walk by his cell, they would feel warm liquid stream across their pant cuffs and into their shoes. Infuriated, they would turn to see Delby’s child grin, a stream of water and spit being squirted between the inbred gap in his teeth.
“Delby, get up!”
The officer rolled the fallen man onto his back. Blood smeared the right half of his face, a dark line of it streaming out his crumpled nose. The rest of the men stopped working.
“Dumbass wun’t supposed to go an’ fall on his shovel”, Syl muttered as he and the three other inmates watched Officer Bevis and another, younger officer load the still unconscious Delby into the back of Bevis’ cruiser. They could hear Bevis, frustrated and gesturing to the younger officer. The younger officer sat in the backseat with Delby and propped his body up, making him look invalid, incapable of sitting by his own power anymore. Bevis took off his round Stetson hat and marched over to the inmates. He pointed.
“Parish, get your ass over in my car. You’re holdin up Delby’s head so he don’t go and drown in his own damn blood. I’m takin him to the hospital and Deputy Edmond is stayin here with you two. Now Syl, Holloway, you finish out this damn ditch. We ain’t comin back here again, not after all this.”
Holloway shifted his eyes to Deputy Edmond who was already staring back at him, Delby’s head slumped over his shoulder.
“That clear? I don’t wanna hear about any bullshit. I’m talkin to you, Syl. You understand me, boy? I swear to the Lord, anymore fuckin’ around from you an’ I’ll personally flog the skin off your back. Understood?”
“Yes’r”, Syl said.
“I’ll be back here, an’ I’m aimin’ for it to be soon. C’mon, Parish.”
Parish, the largest man of them, leaned his shovel toward Holloway who took it from him as he walked out of the ditch and crossed the road to Officer Bevis’ car. The Deputy and Parish clumsily switched places, Delby’s head lolled from side to side as he was transferred to leaning against Parish’s back. Bevis turned on the siren, steered the car back onto the road, and sped off leaving dirt to swirl in the humid air.
Holloway turned his back on Deputy Edmond and laid down Parish’s shovel. He began to dig again while Syl stood, grimy hands atop his shovel handle, and watched the deputy approach.
“Deputy-sir, y’know the time?” Syl said.
“What do you care?”, Edmond said, hands rested in his pockets, eyes on Holloway. “You’re not leaving till the ditch is done.”
“Well, I knowed that, but –”
“Back to work.”
Syl’s smile slit quietly open across his face as he pushed back his long, partially graying hair.
“Yes’r” he said.
Holloway continued as he always did, doggedly leading the dig or the cleanup or the breaking of stumps. Whatever work the county allowed to certain prisoners, the men who likely would not hurt anyone but still couldn’t be left to their own devices. Holloway was rarely told much, other than to stop. As other inmates would doddle about, being overly finicky and slow in their selection of shovels, Holloway would be breaking ground.
Edmond’s shadow poured thinly over Holloway’s work. The deputy stood there as Holloway sunk his spade in, followed it with his foot, and heaved the dirt away. Holloway did not look up, but imagined Edmond’s eyes in the part of the shadow shaped like his head. Edmond stepped over the ditch and walked down to the embankment the prisoners were digging toward. It was a drainage ditch being made to lead in to the stream running beneath a small bridge, now only about ten feet away from Syl and Holloway’s digging.
“He shore is a sweet lil daddy’s boy, ain’t he?” Syl asked in a whiny pitched, mocking voice.
“I’m surprised he’s even let around a couple’a good for nothin prisoners. Right? Figured Mayor would let’m sit around with his thumb up his ass and pay’em to sniff it.”
Syl cackled at his own words, then spat, and continued digging. Holloway glanced back up to see Edmond by the stream. He strode lightly, tipping rocks into the slow current with the toes of his boots. His hands remained in his pockets and his half smirk worn the same way it was when Holloway was invited by him out to his father’s property. The same day Holloway had beaten a tall blonde boy who called his family “dirt money” behind the cafeteria of the only private school in the county. He had taken to smoking there during the lunch hour, eating alone. The blonde boy and his friends had come out to take turns with a joint and the blonde remarked that Holloway was nothing to worry about. He was nothing. As he marched away, knuckles bloodied, someone whistled behind him. He turned to see Charles Edmond, the Sheriff’s son, walking casually toward him, smiling, looking like someone who combed their hair the way they thought a president should. He could not remember being specifically invited anywhere before that day.
He was asked to meet him at six, down the road from Duncan’s fill station. He found Edmond waiting off the dirt road, loosely holding a Remington rifle, and looking out over a grubby, ill kept field. Holloway, only fifteen at the time, walked cautiously down the path. Edmond stood in only the pants and button up shirt of his school uniform, sleeves rolled up; Holloway had kept the school’s blazer on. Edmond, a year older than him, spoke before he could say hello.
“What you dressed up for?”
Holloway shrugged. “What’re we doin?”
“You shoot guns, right, Bob?”
“I’ve shot before, yeah.”
Charles Edmond put his cigarette back in his mouth and swung the rifle up by its barrel, holding it out to Robert Holloway.
“Take it.”
The cigarette rolled to the corner of Edmond’s smile as Holloway took the rifle into his hands and was unsure about it, as if it could cut him. Edmond dragged off his cigarette, then removed it and gestured toward a line of trees, his watch glinting in the last of the sun.
“My dad owns all this land up to those trees. He wants to own that too, but a bunch of lowlifes and trash live on it.”
“Why do you come out here?” Holloway said.
“To give’em something to be scared of.” Edmond dropped his lucky strike and and heeled it into the dirt. “See if you can hit that tree.”
“Why?”
“C’mon, Bob, I just wanna see how good you are. You can hit that.”
Holloway eyed the tall evergreens that stood guarding a dilapidated house, a small adjacent trailer, and a tin roofed outhouse. The overgrown field, with its primordial rows, looked to have once held crops, but they now succumbed to the weeds, the thick and worthless tall grasses. Holloway looked at Edmond again, still smiling, his light brown eyes fixated on him as if he were a true contender for some high position. He lifted the rifle and fired. A loud thuck took a chunk out of one of the old pines.
“Nice shot”, Edmond said.
A door slam echoed from the small, sagging house. Edmond laughed and lit another cigarette.
A heavy brown car came roaring down the road. It revved furiously as it passed the prisoners. Syl stopped shoveling and followed it with his eyes till it was past view. He looked over his shoulder to see Deputy Edmond strolling up the embankment towards them. Syl shook his head, brought up his shirt to wipe sweat from his face, revealing the dark blue eagle tattoo on his stomach, and set back to digging. Holloway had never paused, head down, making forceful headway in the ditch, leaving Syl to simply even out the dirt walls behind him. He didn’t notice Edmond drag over a section of a cut down tree, and place it by the ditch as his chair.
“How are you these days, Bob?”
Holloway said nothing, kept his head down.
“I wouldn’t of thought you two known eachother,” Syl said.
“Used to. Did I ask you about it?” said Edmond.
“No sir” Syl said, glancing not at Edmond but down the road the brown car went. Edmond leaned from his wooden perch above Holloway, taking out his pack of Lucky Strikes.
“I gotta admit, it’s good seein’ you again.”
The two prisoners kept digging as the tips of the surrounding pines began to win out against the sun and the light slowly became a bluish orange shadow. As they made progress, Edmond would get off his block of wood, move it down a few feet so as to stay alongside Holloway, and sit again. They were within five feet of the embankment.
“So, Bob,” Edmond said, “you ever wonder why you’re in this ditch while I’m up here sitting? It’s a pretty nice arrangement for me. Coulda’ been for you too. But y’know why you’re there, right? Because you pity people like him.” Edmond pointed to Syl with his cigarette. Syl paused his work and smiled just wide enough to see the glistening tips of his yellowed teeth.
“Mighty kind’a ya, Deputy. Say, can I bum a smoke off ye?”
“You certainly can, why not?” Edmond said, passing the older, wiry man a cigarette. “I like how people like you can keep a smile up, even when you’re doing shit work in a hole.” Edmond leaned over and gave the prisoner a light. Syl took a long drag.
“Boy, Holloway, your boy here’s right kind. Why don’t ye tell us how you know eachother? Seems bit odd the mayor’s boy knows some trash like me or you.” Holloway continued to dig.
“Well shoot Syl – what’s that short for, Sylvester?”
“Yes’r, it is.” Syl replied, digging again.
“Well shoot Sylvester, I’d have thought Bob here would have told you our association. Far as I know, talking to me was the closest he ever got to doing anything with his life.”
It was true that Holloway’s father started out as a simple road worker. In the late thirties, as a young man, he was employed in a work project paving new roads and stayed on to become a manager. Though he started out mixing tar, digging ditches, and laying pipe he eventually owned his own construction company and employed several road crews. Robert Holloway never met his mother, and did not have any siblings and was used to making breakfasts for his father and watching his headlights pull out of their driveway and pass through the trees at five in the morning.
His father had enough money by the time Holloway was thirteen to put him in a private high school. He stood with his soon and proudly looked over the school uniform his life had finally afforded. He brushed the lint off his son’s blazer and shook his hand as he dropped him off for the first day. Do well, he had said. But his father said nothing as Holloway walked by and out the front door, rifle in hand. As long as he went to the expensive private school everyday and as long as he did not stay out all night, his father was rarely suspicious.
“Good to see you, Bob” Edmond said. Holloway walked the path down to the field that stretched to the extent of the Edmond property. He could hear the shots ringing out even when he was still a mile out. Edmond pulled back the bolt on his rifle, ejecting the spent shell. Edmond smiled, looking at him again with the same expression that kept him coming back
“Nice to see you got your own this time. What’s the caliber?”
“It’s a 30-06, my dad hunts deer with it. Lets me use it for practice when I want”, Holloway said.
“You kill any deer?” Edmond asked.
“No. Not yet.”
“Me neither”, Edmond said. He started pushing new bullets down into the chamber of his own rifle. Holloway looked past him to the old house, nearly every tree in front of it so heavily pockmarked with bullet holes it looked as if the final stand of the Confederacy concluded inside that home.
“You sure have been shootin’ up this place”, Holloway said.
“Yeah. These assholes won’t get off the land. My dad’s offered them double what it’s worth, but people like that like to stay in their little holes.”
Edmond swung up the rifle and fired. Immediately after the loud echo of the gun and the side of another tree exploding, they noticed a small boy walking toward them from the house. Edmond pulled back the bolt and began walking to meet the boy in the middle of his small dirt road. The small boy had an old, placid face and seemed completely unfazed by the rifle shot that had just gone over him. He was barefoot, thumbs in his greasy overalls darkened by dirt and eying Edmond intently. Holloway walked slower, lingering as the boy and the sheriff’s son came within just a few feet. Edmond smiled.
“Hi.”
“Ya’ll th’ folks shot our cat?”, the boy asked. Edmond laughed.
“Yeah, I shot a cat. Looked like an ol’ mangy bastard too.”
The boy shifted his eyes to Holloway who instantly felt hideous under his gaze. The boy’s eyes trailed down down to their shoes and stayed there for a moment.
“You and your pa and ma and whatever other brothers and sisters you have need to leave that house.”
The boy’s expression was carved, unchanged.
“You best stop shootin round our house”, he said.
“Wesley!”, a man yelled from the house. He came running down the path, calling the boy’s name. His gait was awkward, hunched, the way a man runs after years of bending and lifting, after a life of dealing only in heavy things.
“Wesley, y’get back inside, right now. I told you, you ain’t sposed to leave that house. Didn’ I tell you?”
The boy turned and walked back to his home, but looked over his shoulder as he walked, wishing he was older.
“You’re Sheriff Edmond’s boy ain’t ye? Listen, I done told your father I ain’t leavin’ this house. I built it. It’s mine. This here land it’s on, mine. I ain’t wantin’ to cause you no harm, but I ain’t leavin.”
Edmond, still smiling, slung his rifle across the back of his neck and shoulders, draping his hands over the top of it, and walked away. Holloway stood there with the man whose skin had been made brown leather from the sun. The man looked him up and down with tired eyes, he squinted at the boy in front of him in a button up shirt and pressed pants. The man’s mouth trembled as if to say something, but instead he wiped his face with his hand turned to stiffly walk away. Holloway had never had an older man look that way at him. He felt as if he had the power to help, the power to refuse help. His stomach twisted up. Edmond had stopped ahead in the dirt road and waited for him. He knew Holloway would follow
Syl and Holloway were within two feet of the embankment. Edmond remained nearby on his perch. Holloway abruptly broke the silence.
“Your dad ever get that land?”
“Nope. State bought it up, they’re gonna make a park or a preserve out of it or some bullshit. Never hurt to try though, right?”
Holloway stopped for the first time in hours. His palms reverberated pain up to his elbows, some of the blisters sticky with blood. He closed his eyes.
“Struck a nerve, did I?” Edmond said.
Holloway began to dig again.
“I din’ know you was that Holloway’s boy, Holloway”, Syl said. “So both you boys is from money. Thas’ damn interesting”.
“Holloway might be from dirt money, but it’s money all the same, itn’t that right, Bob?”
“Y’know, you boys up at that private school squabble and bicker and hav’ yer politcs an’ all that, but me and my people, we know whats really goin on” Syl said, again looking over his shoulder down the road.
“Oh yeah? How’s that?” Edmond asked.
“You boys is so worried bout thrivin, that you done and forgot just how to survive. Thas how.
Edmond laughed. “That’s pretty good, Syl, somethin close to clever even.”
Syl nodded, smiling. He then paused, and walked over toward the front of the ditch where Holloway was digging.
“Oh deputy, wait a minute. We’re gonna need that pickaxe for this last bit. It ain’t gon drain unless we can bust this here rock at the front of this ditch.”
Holloway looked at Syl. Syl winked his thin eye.
“You don’t need a damn pickaxe, finish it out”, Edmond said.
“I’m tellin’ you, we’d be here till mornin’ tryin to get around or bust through this rock with shovels. Can you please get it for us? Sir?”
Edmond stood up, hand on his revolver, and looked at the spot Syl was concerned with. Syl looked down the road again.
“Please, sir? I wanna finish this up and get some damn shuteye. Hell, I know you don’t wan be out here with us.”
Edmond looked over at his cruiser parked opposite their side of the road, the spare shovels and pickaxe leaned against it.
“Keep workin’” Edmond said.
“Yes’r.”
Syl only stood and watched Edmond walk across the street. The headlights of the brown car came over the rise. Edmond moved the shovels and grabbed the pickaxe.
“Alright, now you better –”
The brown car slammed into the police cruiser with speed enough to hurtle it off it’s back tires. The back end of the cruiser swung into in Edmond as he tried to jump out of the way, clipping his legs. The cruiser careened front first off the embankment into the stream below. The heavy brown car flipped end over end smash landing upside down in the stream. Edmond was screaming and trying to stand up.
Holloway’s father had never talked to him the way he did that morning. It was a week after the dingy little house adjacent the Edmond’s property burned down. The police investigation was quick and ruled out any foul play or possibility of arson from the outset. It was deemed an electrical fire. The only casualty was Elmer Greene, the man of the house. He had managed to crawl outside the house, but succumbed to his injuries. The bits of burned rope by his wrists and ankles were disregarded. The trauma to his head, ignored.
“I knew Elmer for years”, Holloway’s father said as Holloway was handing him his breakfast in a brown paper bag. “He was just a workin man. People called him a drunk, but he never hurt anyone. I think he only drank for his ownself. Never hurt anybody. Did you ever meet him, son?”
“No,” Holloway said.
Do it, he could still hear Edmond saying. You can do it.
“He was a good man. I dunno how many miles of ditches we dug and road we laid down alongside eachother. I spent years workin’ next to him. He was a good man”, Holloway’s father said, still sitting at their kitchen table, becoming late for work.
Do it, Edmond had said. And then Holloway pulled back the bolt and aimed.
Syl and Holloway were at the brown car, the man inside was screaming.
“Randall!” Syl screamed.
“You know him?”, Holloway asked. Syl ignored him, he kicked the passenger window out. The car was leaned in a way that it was crushing its driver, the man now tangled inside.
“Stop!” Edmond screamed. He was leaning against the embankment, half hobbling, half sliding down, legs bleeding.
“The man in this car is dying”, said Holloway.
“I don’t give a shit, don’t move!”
The brown car shifted, sliding further down the embankment. Edmond also lost his footing, slipping down the embankment and dropping his gun. The door of the brown car cracked open from the weight of the crushing frame and a revolver tumbled out onto the rocks of the stream. Edmond saw it the same time Holloway did and froze. Holloway slowly bent down and picked up the revolver. The man in the car was making less noise, barely groaning. Holloway moved, silhouetted against the shining headlights of the upside down car and walked to where the deputy’s gun lay.
“Robert”, Edmond said softly.
With both guns in hand, Holloway turned and stood over Edmond, his uniform now soaked in water and blood as he tried to drag himself by his elbows. Holloway was still. He then popped each chamber of the guns and emptied the bullets into the stream. He heaved each gun into the woods, one at a time.
“I don’t know if my dad knew, but he never looked at me the same again. After I dropped out, I didn’t really give a shit about much. I robbed a place I should’ve known better than to rob and wound up back in this county. I’ve served three years of this sentence, only two more to go. You’re not worth it to me.”
Holloway sat down. The man in the car had long since stopped making noise. Long before any backup officers came, Syl had moved quietly around the beams of the car’s light, slipped into the darkness of the woods beyond and was gone.
polysyndeton 