The World Made Straight. Ron Rash

Carlton Toomey said, and lifted Travis’s head.

      Travis sipped until the glass was empty. Water had no taste, most folks claimed, but Travis knew if they’d been thirsty as he was they’d know that it did. Not like anything else you’d ever tasted, not like that at all, but the clear, cool tang he’d smelled in deep, mossy woods after a long rain. The water helped him think better, maybe because one bodily alarm bell had been stilled. The pain in his head and leg seemed to pull back a bit as well.

      “Hate I had to take that knife to your foot,” Toomey said, “but we got to be certain sure you don’t forget there’s a price to be paid for stealing. I’m of a mind you got off easy. There’s places in this world they’d have cut your hand off.”

      “I need to get to the doctor,” Travis said.

      Carlton nodded.

      “That’s where we’re soon enough headed. But some things got to be made clear first about what you’re going to say when we get there.”

      “You’re gonna regret this,” Hubert said. “We best put him below the falls. It ain’t too late.”

      “We’re not doing that,” Carlton Toomey said, “so shut up about it.” He turned back to Travis. “The quicker we get some things clear the sooner we go to the hospital. If we dodder around here too long that ankle likely could get infected, especially with a rusty old trap germing it up. They might have to chop that leg of yours plumb off. You hear me?”

      “Yes sir.” Travis wanted to say more but the pain made it hard to talk.

      “You’re going to tell whatever busybody wants to know that you fell climbing the falls. Not a word about that trap neither. You never was on my land and you never saw no pot plants. The only reason we showed up was you yelling for help. You understand?”

      “Yes sir,” he said again.

      Hubert stepped closer to the bed. He was a big man, though not as big as his father. His nose had been broken, maybe more than once, enough that it swerved to the right, making his whole face appear misaligned. He looked at Travis as though he were nothing more than a groundhog or possum they’d caught.

      “He ain’t going to do it, Daddy. Soon as he gets to that hospital he’ll be testifying like a damn tent-revival preacher.”

      “He’ll do like we tell him,” Carlton Toomey said. “Travis here is smart. Smart enough to outslick us twice, smart enough to keep his mouth shut now.”

      “I won’t tell,” Travis said, and he was suddenly more afraid than he’d been before, because he remembered the hawkbill’s blade, how for a moment he thought that blade was going to slit his throat. “I swear it, Mr. Toomey.”

      “Then tell it back at me what you’re going to say when we get there.”

      Travis told how he’d fallen trying to climb the falls, how the Toomeys had found him. The words came hard, and a skim of sweat covered his face when he’d finished.

      “One other thing,” Carlton Toomey said. “Who’d you sell them plants to?”

      He didn’t bother to hesitate or lie.

      “Leonard Shuler.”

      “He know where you got them from?”

      “No sir.”

      “Didn’t go out of his way to ask, I bet,” Hubert said to his father.

      Carlton nodded, his eyes on Travis.

      “Satisfied him to act like them plants fell out of the sky, and you just shackling along with nothing more to do than stretch your arms out and catch them.” Carlton turned the glass in his hand, the same way he might test a doorknob. “That seems to be more and more a problem around here,” he said, “people thinking anything they happen across is theirs for the taking.”

      Travis shifted his leg slightly.

      “My leg’s hurting bad,” he said.

      “It’s likely to hurt more when we start moving you,” Carlton said. He turned to his son. “We best get to it.”

      The two men lifted Travis from the bed and the pain returned, reverberating through his body until they laid him in the car’s backseat. He knew the men had been working on this vehicle, not the green pickup, because the hood was still up. For a few moments Travis had a terrible fear that it would not start, that the Toomeys would have to do more repairs while he waited in the backseat. But Carlton Toomey slammed the hood shut and got in.

      “Take the truck and get them plants down to Dooley,” he told his son before cranking the engine. “We’ll meet back here.”

      “What about the pills?”

      Carlton Toomey nodded at a paper bag in the floorboard.

      “I’ll take care of that,” Carlton Toomey said. “I know someone obliged to take them off our hands.”

      They bumped out of the yard and onto a dirt road leading to the two-lane.

      “It won’t be long now,” Toomey said, but it seemed forever to Travis because the fire in his leg hadn’t dimmed much since they’d laid him in the car. What Carlton Toomey had said about the bear trap’s rusty steel worried him. Old Man Jenkins had once told about a man up near Flag Pond who’d gotten lockjaw from rusty barbed wire. The man had lost his ability to swallow and drowned from a cup of water his wife poured down his throat.

      Travis raised his head slightly, spoke to the back of Toomey’s head.

      “Make sure they give me a tetanus shot,” Travis said, gasping the last word as they hit another bump.

      Carlton Toomey’s dark eyes appeared in the driver’s mirror. The eyes seemed disembodied, as if they’d slipped free from the face.

      “I’ll try and remember to do that,” the big man said. His gaze returned to the road but he continued speaking. “There’s probably near a million ways a man can die, but I reckon not many would outworse your throat clamping shut on you.”

      They were in Marshall before either spoke again.

      “You ain’t forgot what you’re to say?”

      “No sir,” Travis said.

      He felt the car turn a last time and stop, then hands eased him out of the backseat. He opened his eyes to be sure those hands did not belong to one of the Toomeys. Two men dressed in white laid him on a gurney as Carlton Toomey’s face loomed over him a last time, close enough that he could smell tobacco and onion.

      “See, I told you I’d get you here,” Toomey said softly. “I kept my word and you best keep yours.”

      Then the gurney was rolling and Carlton Toomey’s face fell away like something unlodged by a current. Rectangles of fluorescent light passed above Travis and he felt like he was looking out a train window, a train moving away from Toomey, and because of that he could close his eyes now and not imagine a gleaming knife blade about to slit his throat.

      CARLTON TOOMEY ARRIVED AT THE TRAILER JUST AS DARKNESS made its final ascent up from the coves and ridges to the tree line. He didn’t blow the horn, just cut off the engine and waited. Leonard was surprised the older man knew where he lived, for they’d always done their transactions at the Toomeys’ farmhouse. I don’t make house calls, Carlton had once told him.

      “You caused me a whole passel of trouble today, professor,” Toomey said. The sobriquet was one Leonard had never cared for. He’d told Carlton he’d never been a professor and was not a teacher of any kind anymore, but the elder Toomey continued to use the title, always with a little extra emphasis on the word.

      “What do you mean?” Leonard asked.

      “Your pot supplier ain’t a very good middleman. He has this interesting notion that he don’t have to pay them who growed it.