“Okay,” Berry said, seemingly satisfied. He flipped forward a couple of pages in the report. “Let’s turn to the actual scene of the mutilation, along the railroad tracks. I know you’ve already covered this in your report. But I’d like you to go back and search your memory one more time, trying to recall if you saw any sort of debris or litter or any other man-made junk lying around on the ground there.”
“Well, as I said in the report, that area is used by a lot of kids who go there to drink beer and smoke pot,” Clyde said. “So there’s always a lot of litter strewn around the area. It’s very difficult sometimes to tell ten-minute-old litter apart from the litter that’s been there a few days.”
“You know that the horse was hobbled?”
“Hobbled?”
“Yes. The veterinarians found marks around its legs.”
“I didn’t examine the horse that carefully. But now that you mention it, it stands to reason.”
“Did you see any straps on the ground?” Berry said. Then he added, “Or anything else that might have been used to hobble a horse?”
“Well,” Clyde said, “which is it?”
“Say again?”
“Was it straps, or something else?”
“I’m asking you,” Berry said.
“You said that there were marks on the legs of the horse. Were they strap marks, or some other kinds of marks?”
Berry shifted uncomfortably. Clyde had trapped him without really meaning to. Berry had given away information that was supposed to remain secret.
“I didn’t see any straps on the ground,” Clyde finally said, “or anything else that might have been used to hobble a horse.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Families like the Bankses passed objects like ropes and tarps down through the generations the way other families did houses or silver. Clyde knew that the Big Black Tarp had been acquired by Ebenezer around the time of the War and that it had originally been used to cover Manhattan Project machinery that had rolled into town on a flatbed truck in the middle of the night in 1944. He knew that the Little Brown Tarp had been purchased by his father from a surplus store around the time of the Korean War and used to cover the family’s possessions when they’d moved to Illinois and back. In the oral tradition of male Bankses, each of the tarps was as storied as a tapestry or handmade quilt, and when Clyde noticed a bent grommet or a patched tear or an oil stain, he needed only think about it for a few moments to remember which camping trip, move, natural disaster, or construction project had occasioned it.
To Desiree they were just dark, dirty things that lurked in the garage reeking with an ominous, gunlike odor, and so as Clyde used the Big Black Tarp to cover up Desiree’s possessions in the back of the pickup truck, he found himself worrying about what would become of the tarp when she reached her new home in Fort Riley, Kansas. It would be like her to drag the tarp over to a Dumpster and leave it there as if it were nothing more than a sheet of plastic from the hardware store. Fort Riley must be crawling with new arrivals now, most of whom had a more practical bent than Desiree, and some sharp-eyed master sergeant would surely snap it up within minutes, dry it out in his driveway, and store it lovingly in his garage.
Clyde worked late into the night, worrying about his tarp. Desiree kept bringing more things out; she brought out her sewing machine so that she could sew things for Maggie. She had insisted, quite rightly, that she drive the truck and not the station wagon; the wagon was the family car, a much safer and cleaner vehicle for Maggie to be squired around in, and the truck was the right vehicle to take to war.
Clyde was worried about the truck, so he changed the oil and checked all the other fluids and rehearsed Desiree on how to change a flat tire. He was worried that rain would get in and destroy her things, so he laid the Big Black Tarp out on the empty bed of the truck, loaded her things on top of it, then folded the tarp over the top when she had promised—insisted—that she had brought out the last of her things. Shiny luggage, clothes in white garbage bags, shoe boxes filled with family photographs, framed photographs stashed in glossy department-store bags, the sewing machine, a couple of spare pillows in bright flowered pillowcases, a disconnected telephone with its cord wound around it, the garment bag containing Desiree’s full-dress uniform, a stack of novels and magazines, all vanished beneath the oily shroud of the Big Black Tarp.
It started to move, seemingly of its own accord. Clyde looked up, startled, and saw Dick Dhont. Dick had pulled up and parked on the street, come up the driveway without saying a word, and grabbed an errant corner of the tarp. It was about a quarter to one in the morning.