One Monday We Killed Them All Read Free

boredom for a little while. The government trucks come to the villages once a month, bringing food that’s mostlystarch, and when they collect it they try to make jokes about it, and the laughter is dutiful, and flat as the jokes. It’s shine country, stomping country, old car country, a stale place left behind when the world moved on some place else, and the things most alive in the hills are the crows and the berry bushes, and, for a shorter time than seems fair to them, the young girls. Dwight and Meg came out of the hills, came from a village named Keepsafe, a small place now empty of people, with the road washed out and gone. I was born and raised in Brook City. With every year of my life it’s gotten a little smaller, an old woman shrinking with the years, sighing at nothing at all, running out of time and size and money and hope.
    Fifteen miles out of town I got stuck behind an ancient wildcat rig grinding in low-low up three miles of curves, overloaded with stolen coal, and when I finally passed it I caught a glimpse of the driver, a fat faded woman wearing a baseball cap. It didn’t bother me to lose the time. I wished I could drive through the rain all the rest of my life and never get to Harpersburg. You can always tell when there’s some part of your life that hasn’t a chance of working out. It’s like taking your cancer to the doctor a little too late. You wish you were somebody else entirely.
    At the prison I went through gate security and was taken to the plywood office of Deputy Warden Boo Hudson.
    “Fenn Hillyer, by God!” he said, pretending a vast, glad surprise. Way back, when I still wore a harness, he was Sheriff of Brook County and I knew him then, and it was always the same. If you had seen him twenty minutes before, the greeting was always the same. It had been over a year since I had seen him in the lobby of the Christopher Hotel at some time of political dealings, and he was unchanged, a sagging, flabby old man with a sourness of flesh and breath, hound-dog eyes the color of creek mud, seed-corn teeth, hair dyed anthracite black and oiled in flat strings across his baldness. He bulked heavy there in an oak chair, soiled and sweaty, the office thick with the scent of him, endlessly smiling, working hard at the effort of pumping the stale air in and out of his lungs.
    Boo Hudson was Sheriff for twenty-two years until the signals got crossed somehow and he didn’t get ample warning of a Federal raid on some of the back county stills inwhich he had some substantial interest. People talked and records were found, but over the years he had tied himself so closely to the men who run our state, and knew so much about so many existing arrangements, the worst they could do to him was force him not to run again after serving the last few months of the term of office. That was almost seven years ago, and two days after elections that year the State Prison Commission appointed him Deputy Warden at Harpersburg. We all knew it wasn’t because he needed the money. During his years in office Boo Hudson had picked up bits and pieces of this and that, some leased warehouses and a beer franchise and that sort of thing, and we could assume there was some cash money here and there, where no court order could touch it, probably rolled tight in sealed fruit jars and tucked below the frost line as is the custom among our elected officials.
    “Set and tell me how you been,” Boo said.
    I sat in a chair further from him than the one he indicated. “Nothing new,” I said.
    “Hear Larry Brint still ain’t closed up Division Street and the women still yammering at him. Guess Brook City don’t change, Fenn.”
    “It’s the only way we can operate, Boo. We got a two-hundred-cop town and a hundred-and-twenty-cop budget, so we keep all the trouble in one place instead of getting it so spread out we lose track. They give Larry eighty more cops and twenty more cars, we’ll close up Division Street right