Strange Weather by Joe Hill
His first thought was that George would hear all about it. Holly had e-mailed a couple days before to say that George never missed the local news now, watched the morning show before school and the evening show at dinner to see what they were going to say about his father today. Now George would hear that the army had thrown his father out because he couldn’t control his temper. George would hear that his father wasn’t good enough to serve his country. It had been all Kellaway could do to maintain his composure during the Bill O’Reilly taping.
The parking lot in front of the local studio was a wide expanse of brand-new blacktop, soft in the lingering heat of the day. The sun was still up, but it was impossible to see it. The horizon was an ocher thunderhead of smoke. Lanternglass held her phone out to record their conversation, stabbing it at Kellaway like a knife.
“Mr. Kellaway, it’s been almost a week since the shooting. I think what most of our readers want to know is—how are you doing?”
“Just fine. No trouble sleeping. Ready to go back to work.”
“When do you think that might be?”
“Mall’s opening tomorrow. I’ll be there for the first shift.”
“That’s dedication.”
“It’s called a work ethic,” he said.
“I wonder if you’ve had a chance to speak with the families of the bereaved. Have you been in touch with Mr. Haswar, Yasmin’s husband? Or Bob Lutz’s parents?”
“Why would I do that? Just to say I’m sorry I didn’t save the people you love?” Biting off his words a little.
Jay Rickles patted his shoulder. “There’ll be a time to reach out to them, for sure. Maybe after they’ve had a chance to begin the healing process—and after Mr. Kellaway has had a chance to heal himself.”
Kellaway thought there was something cautionary in the way Rickles was petting him like a dog. Down, boy. He shrugged so Rickles would stop doing it.
“I’m sure after what you’ve been through, your own family has been a source of strength,” Lanternglass said. “You have a son, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And he lives with his mother? Where is that? I’d love to know a little more about your family situation. I gather you’re separated. Are you seeking a divorce? I checked the county records—”
“Did you? Looking around for a little dirt? Who told you to start digging into the separation?”
The little girl, over on the hood of the car, lifted her chin and stared at them, her attention drawn by Kellaway’s raised voice.
“No one. We always talk to the family after something like this.”
“Not this time. Stay away from my wife and my boy.”
“Mom?” asked the little girl sitting on the Passat, her voice querulous and uneasy.
Lanternglass darted a look back at her, waved. “Just another minute, Dorothy.” She regarded Kellaway again, smiling in a puzzled sort of way, and said softly, “Hey. We’re all pals here. Let’s not upset my kid with a lot of shouting.”
“Did you worry you might upset my kid when you smeared my military record in your article this morning? Did that thought ever cross your mind?”
Rickles wasn’t smiling anymore. He patted Kellaway’s shoulder again and said, “All right, now. All right. Rand has been under a lot of strain. Aisha, I’m going to ask you to show some consideration and go easy on him."
She nodded, took a step back. She wasn’t smiling anymore either. “Okay. Sorry. I know it’s been an exhausting week. Jay, have your office call me. We’ll make an appointment to talk about the police response.”
“Will do,” Rickles said. He had Kellaway by the arm now, gripping him just above the elbow, and began to steer him toward the truck.
“Oh, hey,” Lanternglass said. “One more thing, while I’ve got you. The security department at Miracle Falls Mall isn’t supplied with guns. Was your firearm your own personal weapon?”
Kellaway knew a trap when he heard it, knew she wanted him on record admitting he owned a firearm in defiance of the restraining order.
“Wouldn’t you like it if it was?”
His stomach hurt like cancer.
As the two men drove out of the parking lot, they passed Lanternglass, sitting on the hood of her Passat, rubbing her daughter’s back and staring at the truck. Eyes narrowed in speculation. Rickles pulled out so fast the rear tires spit pebbles. He accelerated north up the highway, toward St. Possenti.
“The hell was all that about, partner?” Rickles said. For the first time ever, he sounded clipped and a little cross.
“My kid watches the news morning, noon, and night to hear the latest about his old man. She made it sound like I left the army in disgrace, and he’s going to hear that.”
“He’s also going to hear about you getting made special deputy soon enough. Lanternglass is a rinky-dink reporter for a rinky-dink local paper. Most of what she writes is there to fill space between ads and wedding announcements. But you go making a lot of smoke, she’s going to think there’s fire. Speaking of,” he said, scowling. They drove into a thick, fluffy cloud of it. The smoke burned Kellaway’s eyes.
They drove another half a mile, and then Rickles said, “Is there anything I need to know about that gun?”
“Yeah,” Kellaway said. “If I didn’t have it, there’d be a whole lot more people dead.”
Rickles didn’t reply. They went on in an uncomfortable silence for one minute, and then two, and finally Rickles said something obscene under his breath and turned on the radio. They listened to news the rest of the way back, didn’t say a word to each other. Bombs in Iraq. Sanctions against Iran. And in bad news for the firefighters trying to tamp down the Ocala blaze, the wind was shifting toward the east. With moderate gales expected, the fire now endangered homes and businesses on the western edge of St. Possenti.
More on that story, the anchor promised, as it developed.
6:27 P.M.
“Are we going?” Dorothy asked. “Or are we just going to sit here?”
“Just sit here for a minute,” Lanternglass said. “Mama might need to make a call.”
They idled in the car in front of the TV station with the windows down and the music low. Lanternglass went over it again in her mind, playing back what Kellaway had said and how he’d said it.
Kellaway hadn’t wanted to look at her, but when he did—when he met her eyes—she’d felt him hating her. She had wanted to fuck with him, wanted to see how he’d respond. Now she knew.
What he made her think of was a gun: a big cocked pistol, the kind of thing Wyatt Earp carried around. In her mind Lanternglass pictured this enormous cannon with the hammer pulled back, resting on the passenger seat of a car as the vehicle sped along a bumpy, rutted dirt road. When the car jolted, the gun shimmied and slid a little farther across the seat, toward the edge. Any fool could see what would happen if it was knocked down. It would go off. She had the nasty idea that if Kellaway were knocked down, he would go off, too.
She’d asked if it was his gun, and he’d said, Wouldn’t you like it if it was? Why would she like it?
“Mom! I have to pee!”
“You always have to pee. You got a bladder about the size of a walnut,” Lanternglass said, and she picked up her phone and dialed Richard Watkins at the state police.
Watkins answered on the second ring, “Flagler County Sheriff’s Department, this is Richard Watkins, Victim Services, how can I help you?”
“Richard Watkins! It’s Aisha Lanternglass, St. Possenti Digest.”
She had done a piece on Watkins the year before, after he started a trauma support group for children, busing the kids to Orlando so they could swim with dolphins. Aisha thought it was sweet (and big-time clickbait), but Dorothy disapproved, said the dolphins probably needed a trauma support group of their own, since they were prisoners who had to entertain tourists if they wanted to eat.
“Hey,” Watkins said. “If you’re calling about the mall shooting, you wanna stick to St. Possenti PD. That one is t
“No shit?” she asked.
“No shit.”
“Ugh.”
Dorothy kicked the back of her seat. “Mom!”
Lanternglass said, “Hey, Watkins, I’m actually calling to see if you know who at the sheriff’s department serves papers. Divorce, subpoenas, that kind of thing.”
“We got a few people do that, but Lauren Acosta is our head process server. If you want to find out about someone who had papers served on them, either she did it herself or she can tell you who did.”
“That’s great. Can I talk to her?”
“I can give you her cell. I don’t know if she’ll answer. She’s in Alaska. She’s doing a cruise with her sisters. They’re taking pictures of icebergs and reindeer and other shit you could get frostbite from just thinking about. She’s got a North Pole fetish. In December she goes out to deliver subpoenas wearing a Santa cap.”
“Wow,” Lanternglass said. “Nothing gets a guy into the Christmas spirit like a woman in a Santa cap handing him divorce papers. Yeah, please, let me have her number. I just want to have a quick word if she has a minute.”
Dorothy kicked the back of her mother’s seat again just as she thanked Watkins and hung up.
“You want to cut it out?” Lanternglass said.
“You want me to pee all over the backseat?”
“There’s a McDonald’s up the road. We can use the restroom there.” She put the Passat in gear and made a 180 so the car was pointed toward the street.
“Somewhere else,” Dorothy said. She plucked at one ear of her kitten cap. “McDonald’s falls short of my ethical standards. Meat is murder.”
“You want to learn about murder,” Lanternglass said, “kick the back of my seat one more time.”
8:11 P.M.
Rickles took them to his hacienda on Kiwi Boulevard, where Kellaway had left his car. The police chief told Kellaway to swing back by the house tomorrow, just before eleven, and they could go to the mall together.
“I can meet you there,” Kellaway said. “That’d be easier.”
He dropped out of the truck, his shoes crunching on crushed shells.
“We better go together. For the candle-lighting ceremony. The newspeople want to photograph your return to the mall.” There was going to be a candle-lighting ceremony in the food court out in front of the carousel, to honor the fallen. Afterward the mall was celebrating a special Day of Remembrance, with 20 to 40 percent off selected items in every store.
“Who cares what the newspeople want?” Kellaway stood in the courtyard, peering up into Rickles’s truck.
Rickles slung one arm over the steering wheel and leaned across the passenger seat toward Kellaway. He was smiling, but his eyes were cool, almost unfriendly. “You ought to. Lanternglass is a tiresome little race activist, kind of person who believes every cop can’t wait to take a fire hose to a crowd of black people. But she’s nobody’s fool, and you just about begged her to go poking around in your past. I don’t know what kind of embarrassing shit you’ve done, but I’m sure I’ll be reading all about it by the end of the week, if not sooner. You got any sense at all, you’ll give yourself a good shave first thing tomorrow morning, slap on your best cologne, and be ready to light candles with me at eleven A.M. The press is lazy. If you give them a feel-good story on a silver platter, they’ll eat it. And you want to keep them well fed. Otherwise they might turn their forks and knives on you, capisce?”
Kellaway didn’t want to go back to the mall with Rickles. He wanted to get there ahead of him, ahead of everyone, early enough to visit the little employees’ bathroom behind Lids. He wanted to argue, to say—truthfully—that he had never once arrived at work as late as 11:00 A.M. But then he observed again the icy way Rickles was watching him, above a thin, no-longer-friendly smile, and he nodded.
“Sounds good,” he said, and slammed the door of the truck.
He pulled out of the driveway in his Prius, hooked left when he should’ve turned right. He didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to see the TV vans parked out front, didn’t want the TV people to see him. Instead he turned the car out of town, nosing into the smoke and gathering night.
Jim Hirst’s farmhouse was dark, an angular arrangement of black boxes against a sky the color of cinders. The only light in the whole place was the television. It cast a sickly blue glow, visible through the holes where the windows were missing on the western side of the house. The big sheets of plastic draped over that end of the building rippled in the gusting wind, making slow, heavy, ominous slapping sounds.
Kellaway got out of his car and stood beside it and listened to the tidal shush of the wind. He couldn’t hear the TV. Sound had to be off.
He started toward the house, his feet crunching in the gravel—and then stopped moving, froze to listen. He had heard footsteps, he was almost sure of it. It seemed to him there was a man on the other side of his car. He could see him in his peripheral vision. Kellaway found he was afraid to look at him directly, couldn’t will himself to turn his head.
It was Jim Hirst—Jim, who had not walked for more than a decade. Jim walking easy in the night, ten feet away, on the other side of the car. He would know Jim anywhere, knew him by the way his arms hung at his sides. He recognized the curve of his bare skull against the smoky night.
“Jim!” Kellaway cried, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. “Jim, that you?”
Jim took a slow, heavy step toward him, and Kellaway had to shut his eyes, could not bear to see the man in the darkness at the edge of the road. His fear drove the breath out of him. He had not been half as scared when he’d crawled into Devotion Diamonds toward a woman with a gun.
He heard Jim take another step toward him and forced himself to open his eyes.
His eyes had adjusted to the dark by then, and he saw in a moment that what he’d taken for a man was a stunted black mangrove. The curve he’d imagined to be Jim Hirst’s bare skull was nothing more than a smooth knob where a branch had broken away long ago.
The plastic hanging off the house flapped heavily again, sounding like a man taking slow, heavy steps.
Kellaway exhaled. A crazy thing to think, that Jim was walking with him in the dark. And yet even as he continued toward the house, he could not quite escape the feeling of having company. The night was in restless motion, branches flinging themselves frantically back and forth. The grass hissed. The wind was rising.
He rapped at the doorframe and called for Jim, called for Mary, but he was not surprised when no one answered him. For some reason he had not expected a reply. He let himself in.
Beneath the campfire smell that was on everything, Kellaway caught the odor of stale, flat beer and urine. He flicked on the light in the foyer.
“Hello?”
He looked into the living room. Monster trucks were racing on the TV, lunging over great muddy hills. No one there.
“Jim?” he called again. He peeked into the kitchen. Empty.
By then he knew what he was going to find before he found it. He could not have said why. Maybe he’d even known out in the driveway, when he sensed Jim close to him in the darkness. He did not want to look into the master bedroom but couldn’t help himself.
The lights were off. Jim was lying on the bed, his wheelchair parked beside it. Kellaway clicked on the light, but only for a moment. He didn’t want to look. He flipped the switch, and it was dark again.
After a moment Kellaway walked over to the bed and sat down in the wheelchair. The room was fragrant with the sharp copper reek of blood. It was a filthy place to die: diapers stuffed into a plastic trash pail, beer cans on the floor, orange pill bottles and pornographic magazines on the bedside table. Just a few feet from the bed was a closet. Kellaway switched on the closet light. That made i
Jim Hirst with a .44 in his mouth and his brains sprayed all over the headboard.
He’d died with some of his birthday scotch left, the bottle still a quarter full. Jim had set it on the pillow next to him, as if he knew Kellaway would be by later and wanted to return it to him. He’d clothed himself in the jacket of his dress uniform, his Purple Heart pinned to his breast. He hadn’t bothered with a shirt, though, and the sheets were pulled up to just below the big slope of his belly.
When Kellaway reached across Jim’s body for the scotch, his sleeve brushed a sheet of ruled paper. He caught it, sat back, held it up to read it by the closet light. He was not at all surprised to see that the note was addressed to him.
Rand—
Hey, brother. If you’re the one who finds me—and I hope you are—I’m sorry about the mess. I just couldn’t hang in there anymore.
About three months ago, I dropped in on my doc for a routine checkup, and he didn’t like the sound of my chest. The X-ray spotted a shadow in my right lung. He said we should follow up. I said I’d think about it.
And I did think about it, and what I thought is: Fuck it. I can’t stand the smell of my own piss anymore, there’s nothing good on TV, and Mary’s gone. In a way she’s been gone for almost a year. She was still spending the days here, so she could look after me, but she’d take off at bedtime to visit a guy she met at work. She spends most nights with him, and when she comes home, I can smell it on her. I can smell she’s been fucking him. Couple of days ago, she made it official, told me it was time for her to move out.
No one ought to live this way. Sometimes I put the gun in my mouth and I’m surprised how good it feels. How much I like the taste. I’ve eaten Mary’s pussy a thousand times, and I’ll tell you what, I’d rather go down on a .44.
It’s like that joke for teasing vegetarians: If God didn’t want us to eat animals, he shouldn’t of made ’em so tasty. If Colt didn’t want us to eat a pistol, they shouldn’t of made gun oil so tasty.