Read Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) for Free Online Page A

was an organizer or a bureaucrat or a thug, depending on whom you asked, and I hated him and was afraid of him. He was tall and skinny like I was becoming and had slightly stooped shoulders and a hawkish nose on an angular face. His eyes were gray and his hair graying prematurely. He looked at us now without expression and stepped smartly to my mother and took the gun from her.
    He said, “You’ll hurt somebody,” but he might have been chiding her for being careless with a potato peeler.
    My mother said, “There was a person here.”
    â€œA person?”
    â€œA man. A big man. He had red hair and a mark on his cheek. Like a birthmark.”
    My father said, “His name is Deaton. He’s a company goon. What did he want?”
    â€œJust to say hello,” she said. “And that he knew us. He wanted us to know that he knew us. He said the girls’ names.”
    My father nodded slowly and then turned and walked further into the house with the gun, and that was the last that was said of any of it, at least in front of us. We were in the midst of a strike that year, a monster that had stretched on since early in the winter, and my father was leading the local UMWA. His friends had been beaten. His truck had been set on fire. But no one had ever come to the house before. No one had ever said my sisters’ names. In another few weeks, the strike had ended—quietly, the way those things always seemed to end—but it wasn’t until late summer that I happened to hear a news report on the radio, the discovery of a body in the waters of the Hog Thief, shot full of bullets. The man had been missing since sometime in the spring, and his name was Deaton.
    U ntil further notice, I had been reassigned to my current task: finder of missing photographers. I’ll be honest: as career changes go, it was jarring. I left the Knight Hawk around twelve-thirty and headed south and east along the IL-13/127 corridor. The thinking was, I should at least talk to Luster’s daughter and get some sense of this Guy Beckett and what he might have been working on and where he might have gone. Way I saw it, the most likely explanation for Mays’s murder and Beckett’s sudden disappearance was that Beckett’s committing the former—for whatever motive—had necessitated the latter. I had a feeling that the cops were probably thinking the same thing. I had a secondfeeling that Luster and Jonathan were maybe thinking the same thing, too, but neither had said so. We can get as advanced as we want as a species, but something in us will never let go of the idea that giving voice to an unpleasant possibility will somehow make it real.
    I rolled the bike past Grubbs, Vergennes, and Grange Hall. Like a lot of rural places, southern Illinois is basically a bunch of small towns knit together, a Babel’s Tower mix of rednecks, rubes, freaks, tweakers, gun nuts, and aging hippies––real hippies, not the newfangled crunchy kids they’re turning out these days––who’d fled into the dark-licked hills sometime during the bloodiest days of a war that wouldn’t stop shaping their lives and had never come out. The land they occupy is low farmland, or river basin, or rock-clotted hill country, evidence of the Illinois glacial advance of some two hundred thousand years ago.
    It’s a pretty place, too, at least it is when it’s not turning itself into a mudhole. By the time I reached Spillway Road, the clouds had rolled over to show their dark bellies, and the rain was coming down in sideways sheets, sucking little plumes of white smoke from the asphalt. The wind picked up and snakes of gray water slithered across the paved ribbon of highway. I tell you, at this point, I started seriously regretting my decision to ride to work. I soaked down to the skivvies in seconds, and the rain buffeted the bike across the lane and nearly off into the woodsy roadside. Somehow I