A Song of Crickets Read online

came back to me caressing its head with her index finger as though it had been born to be her pet. It wasn’t long before I saw myself the same way. We were married by the end of the summer.

  This afternoon, when I opened the door to our room to get some ice and suddenly saw Raycraft in the parking lot, standing with his back to me, we had already swapped cars and signed in under an alias, making sure to pay with cash, as we had done wherever we stopped, so it was more than likely blind luck that drew him to the same motel we were at but I couldn’t help but suspect that it was something more, something akin to the nature of a bloodhound, a natural and extraordinary sense for following a trail, for following prey.

  When we fled Arizona both of us had been shot. She took one in the leg, and I, in the forearm. Fortunately both bullets had passed through flesh and exited without doing fatal damage so we nursed each other in the motel room, cleaning and bandaging our wounds with alcohol, Neosporin, one of the bed sheets compliments of Charley’s Villa, and a couple of rolls of duct tape. The rest of the brandy had to make do for the pain. And just when we thought we could finally breathe a little easier, here he was, standing right in the motel parking lot, quiet and still, like he was studying something or just listening real close for anything. I shut the door to the room like somebody might close the cover of a box containing a sleeping rattlesnake and let Dannie know that we had to act fast. I told her I was going to steal another car and drive past Raycraft, making sure that he saw me and got on my tail. Then I gave her the keys to the old Cutlass that we’d borrowed from some poor kid that had left his car running as he ran in to pay for his gas, and her daddy’s sawed off Mossberg that we’d vigilantly kept within arm’s reach like another couple, a normal couple driving across the states, would keep their precious infant in sight at all times.

  Once I had Raycraft following me from the motel I told her to wait ten minutes and then head back down the highway the other direction and to not stop moving until she reached a relative, one that Sol wouldn’t know about, one that wouldn’t mind taking you in for a spell. She cried and begged but I was firm. I always did my best not to yell at her but I had to this time so she understood that there wasn’t going to be an argument.

  My only consolation now that I was tied to this chair, helpless in front of Raycraft, knowing that the scent of death was already in that motel room, was that she was long gone, far from this soulless man.

  “She have any relatives that she might seek out?”

  “She has no living kin.”

  “You’re just going to continue lying to me, Junior. Determined and stubborn. I’m sure I would do the same if I loved the woman. I guess that sometimes it’s just got to be this way. A shame though – that you’re going to have to suffer so much tonight. Eventually, when you’re so torn up that your body starts shutting down you won’t even know that you are talking to me – might even believe you’re in some extraordinarily realistic nightmare, then, when you’re no longer able to guard your secrets, no longer responsible really for giving up your woman, then you’ll let me in, tell me everything I need to know and everything you endured will amount to nothing but an inconvenience to me and a horrible and completely unnecessary way to die for you. A pure shame that it has to be this way.” Raycraft held his cigar up, watching smoke drift toward the cheap drop ceiling and the flickering fluorescent tubes overhead. He took a long deep drag which caused the cherry to brighten brake light-red. He moved the business end of the cigar toward my eye but then quickly dropped it to the back of my hand. The flesh sizzled and the room began to stink. I heard myself whimper but it sounded like it came from someone else. “You never start with the eyes, Junior. You work up to them. I would’ve taught you that if you’d had the stomach for this type of work. You know, nobody grows up planning to be a mortician either but somebody always ends up taking that job too. It’s just the way the world works.

  The thought that made Raycraft so terrifying as he prowled my mind the last three days while I anticipated this horrific but inevitable encounter was his complete detachment from the horrible things he would do to me. He had a strange discipline, an uncommon work ethic. No matter how long Dannie and I ran or how far away from him we managed to get, he would never stop searching for us. Never. Of that I was certain. Raycraft wasn’t insane or sadistic. He was simply professional. Every morning he woke up, laced his shoes, and went to work, and that would never change until his heart stopped beating. Structure defined him. What strange series of events could have led him to this profession? Maybe it was just like he said; someone had to take the job. In a better world Raycraft would’ve been just another electrician working a nine to five with comfortable boots and a durable work shirt.

  A couple of months before all of this, Dannie had told me she was pregnant through a veil of tears, demanding to know how we were going to support a baby when we could barely support ourselves. I just held her tight and told her that it was going to be okay. Immediately, I thought of how easy it had been to steal cars and move drugs for Sol – quick money, good money, but I thought of my stay in jail nearly as quickly, the time I’d spent away from her, and there was no way I was going back. I had to stay clean, stay away from Sol, keep my job at the restaurant. But we sure needed money. Dannie started in on me one day, telling me that she was going to work for Sol, that her friend Arlene made real good money working for Sol in a low risk job. I argued with her but I’ve never tried to be one of those guys that thought he controlled his wife. Eventually she did as she wanted and there was nothing I could do about it.

  A couple of months after she’d taken the job, Dannie came home, frightened and exhilarated.

  “I stole it! Both the money and the delivery!”

  My heart sank.

  “No! Dannie, what were you thinking? They’ll know it was you!”

  Sol had a dry-cleaning business where he laundered a lot more than clothing and drapes. He had no way of knowing that Dannie was a recovering drug abuser when his cousin Arlene told him to hire her. Dannie’s drug of choice was cocaine, which was also Sol’s main product. I worried about her around that cocaine but she always said, “If you don’t trust me to do the right thing, how can I trust myself?” I guess that made some kind of sense to me because like I said, I didn’t find a way to stop her from working there. Then again, maybe I told myself that because I already knew how well Sol paid his people and we really did need the money.

  Local gangs and motorcycle clubs dropped off packages of money and picked up packages of cocaine. The money was locked up in a safe hidden behind one of the dry-cleaning machines. That night, the night three days ago that Dannie had returned from work early, wild eyed, high, and loaded with Sol’s money, there had been two transactions scheduled. The first went just as they had for the past eight weeks, but then the night took a turn for the worse. There’s a reason that drug addicts are never considered cured. Dannie stole a snort from the second package of cocaine that was scheduled for pickup and then fueled by the drug became superman and wrapped her cape around the brick of cocaine and the package of cash that she was supposed to deposit and flew out of there faster than a speeding cokehead can leap a poppy field.

  She held up the money. “Don’t you see? This is our future, baby. I had to.” Tears began to run down her face. “For us and the baby.”

  I tried to keep focused as I ordered her to pack lightly and quickly because we needed to get out of there immediately. I grabbed her father’s shotgun from the back of the upstairs closet and kept it close as I struggled to concentrate on what else we needed to bring. She started crying and told me that she’d tell them that the package was never delivered. I just kept telling her to pack, just pack, and do it quickly, always making certain not to scream at her like her father had always done. We couldn’t afford her having an emotional breakdown. Time was precious. We had to be focused.

  Raycraft got up from the chair and stretched his back as though he’d been crunching numbers at a desk all day. “Havi
ng a bad back is just a son of a bitch to live with. You’re young and it doesn’t look like you’re ever going to have to worry about that now so you’ll just have to trust me on this one – a real son of a bitch.” He ran his fist back and forth across the small of his spine and leaned forward, then back. “She still has the money, right? You didn’t do anything stupid like leave it hidden in one of these hotels or pull over real quick and bury it, did you?”

  We never even made it out the door of our house before one of Sol’s men burst through the door firing away like a luckless, grave-hungry thug in an old shoot’em up. Fortunately his gun was small caliber, nine millimeter, or we never would’ve made it out of there alive. It only took one blast from Dannie’s father’s shotgun and the man flew through the front window and out on to the lawn with a softball-sized hole in his stomach and a look of confusion and horror on his face. Covered in broken glass, blood, and remorse, he went in to shock, asking me to call him a cab as we ran past him. We raced out the back door stumbling along like some wounded Siamese beast, coloring everything we touched crimson.

  “Don’t make this into an