The World Made Straight. Ron Rash

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ would of stayed plumb.”

      “That sounds like a crock of shit to me,” Travis said. He lit a cigarette, felt the warm smoke fill his lungs. Smoking cigarettes was the one thing his old man didn’t nag him about. Afraid it would cut into his sales profits, Travis figured.

      “If you’d seen him shooting at the fair last year you’d not think so,” Shank said.

      Leonard walked over to Travis’s window, but he spoke to Shank.

      “Who’s this you got with you?”

      “Travis Shelton.”

      “Shelton,” Leonard said, pronouncing the name slowly as he looked at Travis. “You from the Laurel?”

      Leonard’s eyes were a deep gray, the same color as the birds old folks called mountain witch doves. Travis had once heard the best marksmen most always had gray eyes and wondered why that might be so.

      “No,” Travis said. “But my daddy grew up there.”

      Leonard nodded in a manner that seemed to say he’d figured as much. He stared at Travis a few moments before speaking, as though he’d seen Travis before and was trying to haul up in his mind exactly where.

      “You vouch for this guy?” Leonard asked Shank.

      “Hell, yeah,” Shank said. “Me and Travis been best buddies since first grade.”

      Leonard stepped back from the car.

      “I got beer and pills but just a few nickel bags if you’ve come for pot,” Leonard said. “Supplies are low until people start to harvest.”

      “Well, we come at a good time then.” Shank turned to Travis. “Let’s show Leonard what you brought him.”

      Travis and Shank got out. Travis pulled back the branches and feed sacks.

      “Where’d you get that?” Leonard asked.

      “Found it,” Travis said.

      “Found it, did you. And you figured finders keepers.”

      “Yeah,” said Travis.

      “Looks like you dragged it through every briar patch and laurel slick between here and the county line,” Leonard said.

      “There’s plenty of buds left,” Shank said, lifting one of the stalks so Leonard could see it better.

      “What you give me for it?” Travis asked.

      Leonard lifted a stalk himself, rubbed the leaves the same way Travis had seen tobacco buyers do before the market’s opening bell rang.

      “Fifty dollars.”

      “You’re trying to cheat me,” Travis said. “I’ll find somebody else to buy it.”

      As soon as he spoke he wished he hadn’t. Travis was about to say that he reckoned fifty dollars would be fine but Leonard spoke first.

      “I’ll give you sixty dollars, and I’ll give you even more if you bring me some that doesn’t look like it’s been run through a hay bine.”

      “OK,” Travis said, surprised at Leonard but more surprised at himself, how tough he’d sounded. He tried not to smile as he thought of telling guys back in Marshall that he’d called Leonard Shuler a cheater to his face and Leonard hadn’t done a damn thing about it but offer more money.

      Leonard pulled a roll of bills from his pocket, peeled off three twenties, and handed them to Travis.

      “I was figuring you might add a couple of beers, maybe some quaaludes or a joint,” Shank said.

      Leonard nodded toward the meadow’s far corner.

      “Put them over there in those tall weeds next to my tomatoes. Then come inside if you’ve got a notion to.”

      Travis and Shank lifted the plants from the truck bed and laid them where Leonard said. As they approached the door Travis watched where the Plotts had vanished under the trailer. He didn’t lift his eyes until he reached the steps. Inside, it took Travis’s vision a few moments to adjust, because the only light came from a TV screen. Strings of unlit Christmas lights ran across the walls and over door eaves like bad wiring. A dusty couch slouched against the back wall. In the corner Leonard sat in a fake-leather recliner patched with black electrician’s tape. A stereo system filled a cabinet and the music coming from the speakers didn’t have guitars or words. Beside it stood two shoddily built bookshelves teetering with albums and books. What held Travis’s attention lay on a cherrywood gun rack above the couch.

      Travis had seen a Model 70 Winchester only in catalogs. The checkering was done by hand, the walnut so polished and smooth it seemed to Travis he looked deep into the wood, almost through the wood, as he might look through a jar filled with sourwood honey. Shank saw him staring at the rifle and grinned.

      “That’s nothing like the peashooter you got, is it?” Shank said. “That’s a real rifle, a Winchester Seventy.”

      Shank turned to Leonard.

      “Let him have a look at that pistol.”

      Shank nodded at a small table next to Leonard’s chair. Behind the lamp Travis saw the tip of a barrel.

      “Let him hold that sweetheart in his hand,” Shank said.

      “I don’t think so,” Leonard said.

      “Come on, Leonard. Just let him hold it. We’re not talking about shooting.”

      Leonard looked put out with them both. He lifted the pistol from the table and emptied bullets from the cylinder into his palm, then handed it to Shank.

      Shank held the pistol a few moments and passed it to Travis. Travis knew the gun was composed of springs and screws and sheet metal, but it felt more solid than that, as if smithed from a single piece of case-hardened steel. The white grips had a rich blueing to them that looked, like the Winchester’s stock, almost liquid. The Colt of the company’s name was etched on the receiver.

      “It’s a forty-five,” Shank said. “There’s no better pistol a man can buy, is there Leonard?”

      “Show-and-tell is over for today,” Leonard said, and held his hand out for the pistol. He took the weapon and placed it back behind the lamp. Travis stepped closer to the gun rack, his eyes not on the Winchester but what lay beneath it, a long-handled piece of metal with a dinner-plate-sized disk on one end.

      “What’s that thing?” Travis asked.

      “A metal detector,” Leonard said.

      “You looking for buried treasure?”

      “No,” Leonard said. “A guy wanted some dope and came up a few bucks short. It was collateral.”

      “What do you do with it?”

      “He used it to hunt Civil War relics.”

      Travis СКАЧАТЬ