Page 54 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. V #3

The Devil Will Find You (continued from page 38)
Heights, a series of low hills leading gradually back up into a stretch of the Green Mountains. The ascent was long, with many curves in the road, which made passing dangerous, almost im- possible for many miles.
ger window. “You fucker!” he shouted, holding up his two middle fingers, like six-shooters, while his partner burned rubber up the hill.
The kid glanced to the rear again. A long serpen- tine line of cars and trucks was behind them now. Vehicles were making ever more desperate dips into the oncoming lane, looking to pass. It re- minded Benson of trout he used to catch sight of as a boy, jumping out of the water in Milo’s Pond over in Groton. The sight of them used to make his mouth water. Now his mouth felt all parched and cottony.
But Farnham gave the back of the departing Cor- vette his little nod and salute before he went on with his story. “So LaHoe and his wife, they’d have it out every day. Every night, too, prob’ly, shouting and cussing and hitting and, though he din’t say it, she prob’ly got the best of him as much as him her. Maybe more so, cause then he got to thinking of all that insurance she come from and ways to be rid of her.”
“The way Joe LaHoe described it,” Farnham went on in his high-pitched voice, his head now nearly engulfed in a haze of blue and gray smoke, “his wife was this big-boned gal what wore glasses, with a square face and tiny blue fish-eyes. He says she was always squinting down at him meanly from behind her wingtips and sassing him.”
“You mean she’d beat him up?” the kid asked, aghast.
Someone yelled from a passing tan pickup. “Get off the road, you old fart!” A bumper sticker bloomed briefly in the windshield: “Don’t Get Caught Dead Without Jesus!” it read.
“So LaHoe’s thinking of killing her now,” Benson said. “Can’t say as I blame him, exactly, seeing she’s whipping up on him like that.”
The old man just nodded politely, and tipped his cigarette hand in a kind of half-assed salute, as if he were acknowledging a friendly greeting. “She was older than him, says LaHoe,” Farnham con- tinued, “come from a clan of insurance agents in Montpe’er.”
They had reached a particularly sharp incline, where the road narrowed and the pines grew thick and tall and cut out the sun. It was like entering a tunnel. Benson watched nervously as the truck’s speedometer dropped to twenty-five, then twenty, then finally fifteen. Behind them
car horns were starting up. People were flashing their lights and sticking their heads out of the windows, shouting. The line stretched back as far as Benson could see.
“I know them types, alright,” said Benson, shaking his head.
“Ay-uh. Couldn’t plain shoot her, though, he says,” Farnham continued. “Make too much of a mess and besides, he weren’t all too sure a bullet from his thirty-ought-six would stop her, doncha know. Might just stun her, he says. So he took to think- ing and planning and worrying it.”
“Ay-yuh. The way I figure it, she had too much smairts to be marrying the likes of him, and knew it, and prob’ly let him know it.” The old man nod- ded to himself and chuckled again.
A shiny blue Corvette sailed past them, and a mustachioed young man leaned out of the passen-
Up ahead a quarter mile was a dirt turnaround, a
45
“Just ignore them, I guess,” the kid advised.
“Like I said, that’s jest a guess,” the old man re- plied. “Kinda reading between the lines, doncha know.”