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CHAPTER 1
I killed John Henry.
Dan Parrish stood in a cloud of dust and waved to the driver of the departing pickup, then slackened his shoulder and dropped his duffel in a heap on the side of the road. Sweat ran down his face and the back of his neck and into the lining of his shirt.
He was used to discomfort, though. He was used to a lot of things most folks weren't used to.
I killed John Henry.
In Kansas, during the last days of August there is a relentless heat that comes in subtle increments, introducing itself a degree at a time through white afternoons of cloudless skies. So when the little Ford pickup slowed and stopped to deposit Dan, the taciturn old farmer had been almost apologetic as he turned and nodded to him.
"This is fine," Dan Parrish had said. "Thanks for the ride. I'll just get off here."
As if here was anywhere.
But he recognized it. He knew the landscape — the washed-out colors and the broken fences and the miles and miles of sameness. He could smell the land and feel the grit between his teeth and inside his socks. He was in wheat country. Amber waves as far as the eye could see. He closed his eyes and sighed.
I killed John Henry.
There was a dilapidated billboard in the near distance with a utopian image of a farmer standing in front of a silo. On the top right there was a sun-bleached outline of the United States, with a star superimposed on the spot near where he was standing, 'Lebanon, Kansas, Center of the Continental U.S.' Someone had put a ragged cluster of twenty-two rounds into the sign, no doubt aiming, without success, for the star.
If Dan were to look at a real map of the United States and work out the exact center of everything, he knew that the actual location of that spot on the grid would be here or maybe a nearby field. The town of Lebanon, Kansas, should not be faulted for boasting its location with a billboard. A lot of Kansas could be labeled and filed away — Bleak City or Hoxie or Hope or Last Laugh, or a hundred other tiny dots on the dusty, dun colored prairie covered in grass and grain and littered with too many broken dreams.
So Dan Parrish wasn't just standing in the middle of nowhere. He was standing in the middle of somewhere.
The heart of the Heartland.
He squinted into the dust and wiped his face. Road grit had worked its way into his eyes and he dug at it with a thumb and forefinger. He was not a kid anymore — thirty-six and counting — but blessed with the same chiseled, athletic frame that he'd had as a youngster. He'd been notable for his physical talents back then, and the evidence was still there. Except now, part of the reason for the strong legs and the shoulders that rolled and swelled was not because of his Kansas history or his genes, but because of personal circumstances. His jaw was square beneath his beard, too, and his teeth were white, his nose straight and his flaxen hair was thick and long, hanging in a rope to the middle of his back. His eyes were as blue as the ocean he'd never seen and more troubled than he ever imagined they'd be.
Everybody knows I did it.
He stepped to the sandy berm, bent down and picked up a handful of rocks. He began throwing them at targets as vague and unfocused as watercolor shadows, something he'd done since he was a kid.
The day was getting on, the heat turning the soles of his old Chuck Taylor's sticky. The laces were so rotten he'd had to double them and use a square knot to keep them on his feet. His jeans were pretty sad, too, and his Sears chambray shirt had faded to a whitish shade of lilac. He hadn't worn any of these clothes in years. Now they were all he had.
The whole town knows.
He picked up another handful of rocks and threw them one at a time at a beer can thirty yards distant. The sun was overhead, so it was at least noon now, maybe later. With the last rock, he hit the can then looked up into a sky that hadn't seen a cloud in days. He wiped his hands on his pants then bent and opened his duffel bag and searched the insides for his water bottle. When he found it there was only enough for a swallow, so he sipped, replaced it and sealed things up and stacked the baggage on the berm. It was an old bag, older than the clothes he wore, labeled with his father's name: SGT. CARL PARRISH, in faded black stencil across the top. Below that, DA NANG. It was a possession he was proud of.
There was barely a breeze at this time of day. The only sound came from the wheat fields crackling and hissing in the dry heat. He continued throwing stones gathered from beside the road. He flung a stone at an imaginary opponent. He saw movement in the brush and fired. He stood in the middle of the road and scanned the nearby area for more targets. There were always targets. Always. A jackrabbit. A Hackberry tree. Prairie chickens. Everything. Anything. He threw. Then threw some more. And continued to throw for the better part of an hour. Finally he dropped his handful of rocks and looked away into the distance.
I shouldn't go back.
Two hours later a speck appeared on the horizon, warped by the heat radiating off the pavement. When Dan stuck his thumb out, the driver downshifted and the air breaks engaged. The tractor-trailer stopped right beside him. The driver was no doubt breaking company rules about hitchhikers. Dan opened the door. Before he climbed in, he reached down and grabbed a last rock, oval, like an egg. He rolled it around in his hand, took aim, and flung it at a green roadside mileage sign sixty yards away, a sign that gave material substance to middle-America Kansas — PHILLIPSBURG, NORTON, ATWOOD, ECHO — all small towns on the prairie. The rock landed with a loud metallic twang on the name ECHO. A sixty-yard shot, easy.
Dan Parrish climbed up onto the seat and shut the door.
"Nice arm," said the driver.
"Thanks," said Dan.
The air breaks hissed, the truck and its cargo began to move.
It's crazy to go back. Suicide, they said. I was warned.
But there's something I have to do.
CHAPTER 2
Hours later on that same August date, a Lincoln Town Car made its way down a rural road, stopping in the weed-choked entrance to a sharecropper farmhouse set back amidst a copse of stunted oaks. The driver killed the headlights and the world was suddenly black as tar. Only an outline of the dilapidated shack was visible, a post-and-beam, tin-roofed relic of small farming, leaning in on itself, held together by the dry friction of time. A single light glimmered from a kitchen window, failing to penetrate the night.
Inside the Lincoln, behind the wheel, sat a man whose hair glistened with pomade. He was in his thirties and displayed the handsome-if-unctuous mien of someone with money. His suit was Italian silk and his boots were made from the skins of caimans. He wore a bolo tie in a clasp studded with diamonds, and clamped in his teeth was a diamond-headed, gold toothpick bequeathed to him by his father. When his dash-installed police scanner burst into life, spewing cop data, he coolly reached over and silenced it. Outside, a cadre of lightning bugs swirled like embers. A mournful whippoorwill pleaded its case.
The man removed his toothpick and tucked it away in a top pocket. He took a flask from his coat and tilted it to his lips. Then he screwed the lid back on and slipped it back beneath the flap.
"So, we all set?" He wiped his mouth with his forefinger.
There was a pause, too long, before an answer floated out of the darkness, angry and defiant. "Yeah. We all set."
In the passenger seat Brenda Price, nineteen and simmering with rage, sat in her pink, secondhand dress and matching pink rubber flip flops, shrouded in the dark. Another silent moment passed. The clouds parted and the moon appeared, revealing her high cheekbones, close-cropped Afro, full lips and fierce, clear eyes. Despite her clenched teeth she was beautiful.
The man must have expected her to leave but she didn't. He sighed and took out his wallet and removed some crisp C-notes, offering them to the girl. She slapped them to the car seat in a sudden, violent movement. Her nostrils flared with quick, heavy breaths.
The man shook his head. He picked up the bills and tucked them away. He retrieved his gold toothpick and stuck it in his mouth, trying not to snort his derision.
"You people ..." he said, not finishing the sentence, but allowing it to hang in the air like a malodorous cloud.
The girl still did not move, so he leaned his shoulder and arm across her chest and threw her door open. He sat back, eyes straight ahead, fixed on nothing but the darkness that had retaken the night. He surely felt her eyes on him, but refused to acknowledge it. He looked at his watch. His hands were narrow and clean, with perfect nails.
Brenda turned away and put her feet on the ground and stood herself out of the car. She could have slapped the man, clawed his face, screamed. But she didn't do any of that, not here in Punch Town. Not to a boss from across the tracks. She stepped back and slammed the car door shut as hard as she could. The dogs began to bay, and she stepped backward, turning and stumbling over a root, falling to her knees in the mud. Brenda Price rose up then, but she'd lost a shoe and had to go back down to find it. Her dress was covered in dirt. She could have cried, but saw him looking at her, taking aim with his lidded eyes, disgusted. He wasn't going to get out of the car, but still she was frightened by the look: white-on-black mean.
He threw the Lincoln into gear and gunned it, racking gravel, dust and mud onto her. He rocketed up the road, back the way he had come. The police scanner came back on, spewing voices into the night.
Brenda clutched her belly and stifled a sob, refusing to cry. She watched the car disappear into the darkness, red taillights like living things, demon eyes growing smaller, blurring through the glyph of tears. Her dress was a mess. Her glistening skin now covered in a fine layer of dirt. Her life had shrunk once more into the sterile obscurity of the Punch Town people.
She brushed herself off as best she could. Her father would have questions. He would be mad at her. She could make out his profile in the kitchen window.
Yet as she wiped away the grime, she listened, and from far away she could hear the car's big V-8 accelerate, back towards town, across the railroad tracks, away from the squalor. And she made a promise to herself.
A promise she would keep.
CHAPTER 3
Sometimes when the quiet man closes his eyes he can see it. He can see the body lying on the ground, the blood on the clothes, the look of shock and even sorrow in the dead stare. He sees it all.
He glanced down at Puck in the passenger seat. "Let's take a break, boy," he said, reaching over and patting his little dog on the head. A minute later the quiet man pulled over and parked his Ford Focus in front of the blinking VACANCY sign. He'd been driving for hours, but now the rain had caught up with him, a hard, late-summer storm that had come over the Cascades, lightning flashing, illuminating the peaks and dells, thunder booming. The highway was plagued with switchbacks and long straightaways that were filling with flumes of rushing water, which meant his tires were losing traction. He had a thousand miles to go, at least, but night driving was impossible in weather like this. He pushed his hat back and sat, waiting for a lull in the storm. When it came, he jumped from the car and ran under the awning.
He rang the buzzer.
Ten minutes later he and Puck sat on the bed in his little room. He unpacked his new pistol, a Glock 9mm semi-automatic, and held it up, feeling the weight of it. The dealer at the gun store said it was a good personal protection weapon, easy to master, with three safeties, so there was little chance of an accident. The dealer sold him three fifteen-round clips, too, and four boxes of ammunition. Together, he and the dealer loaded one of the clips and seated it into the weapon, then released it. Over and over, putting a bullet into the chamber each time, then ejecting the bullet. Over and over.
He would need to practice with his new gun. That's what the man said. Maybe he'd find a gun range tomorrow or the next day. God knows they were everywhere. He would have to teach himself a few basic things before he got to Kansas.
The dog began to whine. He'd been cooped up in the car all day and needed a walk.
The quiet man got out the leash took Puck out into the surrounding woods as the rain slanted down, soaking them both. After a hundred yards or so, he stopped near a cluster of Sequoias. Puck looked up at him expectantly. The quiet man waited for another peal of thunder then pulled the trigger.
It wasn't his dog anyway.
Dan Parrish thanked the truck driver and waved goodbye to the back of the rig as it powered up and disappeared. He stretched his body this way and that, working the kinks out. He would have arrived earlier but the driver had run out of hours on his time sheet and had to stop and eat and then sleep. So rather than take his chances on the lone stretch of highway in the wee hours of the night, Dan decided to stay and listen to the guy's asthmatic snoring for hours.
He scanned the near horizon. Across the highway was a large, rustic wooden sign atop hand-stacked-and-mortared boulders. The sign said: WELCOME TO ECHO and beneath it a smaller WELCOME TO ECHO and then a third, even smaller, WELCOME TO ECHO ...
Dan smiled in spite of himself. Years ago someone with over-inflated expectations had insisted the sign be placed here. They extended the city limits, too, ostensibly so that rabbits and prairie dogs could have a post office box in town. He picked up his duffel bag and walked to the back corner of the sign and stared down at the cornerstone. He stood there for a minute, remembering things past, and shot a quick look around. There were no cars on the road and the sun was dying. Nobody would see him.
He quickly dropped to his knees and tugged on the stone, pulling away a loose chink of mortar. The rock came away and he placed it off to the side. He reached into the hollow and felt around for the package, his heart racing. The hole was smaller than he remembered and now filled with insect dirt and debris. He stabbed his hand in deeper. When he wiggled his fingers he got a hit, a flap of plastic sticking out from the rest of the detritus. He drew the little Ziploc out of its cave, his treasure, ignored all these years.
Dan Parrish opened the baggie and retrieved his class ring, awarded to him in 1998. It was engraved with the Echo High School monogram, the words 'State Champs' emblazoned over the stone in the middle. He shirt-shined it then slipped it on his finger. It fit perfectly.
He fumbled in the Ziploc bag and pulled out a faded photograph. He raised himself to his feet then drew a deep breath. He examined the photo, the first time in eighteen years. The image drew him in, a blow to the solar plexus. For a moment he forgot to exhale.
She was everything — long, dark hair and slightly crooked nose and expressive blue eyes. A body that defied gravity. A smile that took my soul and carried it away.
Katy looked out from the old picture, posing in her cheerleader outfit. And he knew the smile was just for him.
Everything she did back then was just for him.
Dan wiped the photo on his shirt and pocketed it. He stood and slung his duffel over his shoulder and began walking.
Outside of town, at an old cemetery called God's Little Acre, Dan set his bundle down. The sun was dipping below the tree line and stars were beginning to emerge, making ready for the Kansas night. Dan stood outside the rusty gate. He could smell flowers. Someone had put gardenias on one of the graves close by. The heady scent reminded him of a long dead past, a vague recollection of his mother in the backyard garden.
The lightning bugs would soon emerge, and the still night air would begin to dance with their tiny industry. The cicadas would make a racket. The bats would appear and begin to hunt. It had been so long since he'd seen the place, and it hadn't looked like this eighteen years ago. It seemed larger back then, and less encumbered. Death had taken its toll. He retrieved his bag and opened the gate and entered, dropping the bag inside. He made his way to the back of the lot, passing tombstones marked with names he hadn't thought about since he was a boy. There were some that had been around since the 1800s, many his father and grandfather had known. He wondered if he would be buried here.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Splinter City"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Shawn Corridan and Gary Waid.
Excerpted by permission of Down & Out Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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