The Listener

by Robert R. McCammon

  He followed behind Ginger along the muddy shore. Their lights searched the darkness ahead, as about seventy yards in front of them Nilla had had to slow down for Little Jack to keep up.

  “Can’t keep runnin’, Nilla,” her brother said. “My leg’s hurtin’. I’m sorry.”

  “All right,” she told him. “We’re—” She stopped, because in front of them she could make out a shape blocking their way. In another moment, as they neared it, the shape became the wreck of a small boat turned on its side with a gaping hole torn in the hull. They went around it, through a little tangle of thicket, and there was another boat—at least the front part of it—half buried in the mud. Something else stood on the shore beyond the second boat, and in the darkness it looked like the broken remnants of an ancient castle rearing up against the stars. Pieces of splintered wood littered the ground. As they got closer to the structure, Nilla almost walked into part of a sign that had been nailed up between a pair of timbers. She could make out the lettering on the part that had not been torn away, black against white but ravaged by the elements: HEAD MARINA.

  A wooden staircase with a few missing risers rose up ten feet into the ruin, which appeared to have been built upon wharf pilings. She looked back and saw the lights just coming around the first wrecked boat. It occurred to her that she and Little Jack were going to be caught before they could get past this structure, but maybe there was a place inside it that they could winnow into and hide. “Up the stairs!” she said, and she waited for Little Jack to hobble up before she came. The staircase swayed beneath them, tortured nails squealed and one of the battered risers that was rotten and as soft as butter gave way under Little Jack’s feet, but then they were up on what maybe had once been a screened-in porch, the rain-soaked planks of the floor tilted to the right and the roof torn off. The black rectangle of a doorway led back into…what? A room with no floor? One more step, and they could plunge down onto jagged pieces of boards, broken glass and nails.

  Nilla focused her mind on Curtis, and he might not hear her but she had to try.

  :Curtis!: she sent out. :We’re at a marina! It’s all broken up…something Head Marina! Can you hear me?:

  A few terrible seconds passed, and then he came back to her. :I hear you.:

  :We’re gonna try to—: She had to break off, because she could see the lights down at the bottom of the stairs and the beams swept upward.

  ****

  :Try to what?: he asked, but he got nothing back.

  He was pedalling the bicycle down the second road he’d found; the first had ended at a pier and a pair of darkened cabins, no cars around. The second road was the same, another pier and another cabin…but there looked to be a little fishing boat tied up at the pier, and beside the cabin was an old car…surely not a rich man’s car, but a car all the same. Was there a light in the cabin? Yes…he caught a glint of it, moving past a window. Then a door opened at the back and a figure emerged carrying a flashlight and something else, Curtis couldn’t tell what. The person trudged slowly down toward the pier…an early morning fisherman, Curtis thought. Going out to fish after the rain.

  Did he dare to chance this? He had to.

  He pedalled forward to get between the fisherman and the pier. As soon as the bike’s chain clattered in its sprockets the fisherman spun around and aimed the light at Curtis.

  “Who’s there?” It was a woman’s voice, tense with fright.

  Curtis got off the bicycle, let it fall, and lifted his hands up over his head. He started walking toward the woman. The light jabbed him in the eyes.

  “Stay where you are!” she ordered. “Don’t you come no closer!”

  He stopped and lowered his hands. He tried to speak, but pain wrenched his throat and what came out sounded like a groan.

  “Sweet Jesus!” the woman said. “Who’s been dancin’ on your face, boy?”

  He put a hand to his throat and shook his head.

  “What? You can’t talk?”

  Again, Curtis shook his head.

  “You need a doctor! Hospital, I’m thinkin’!” She approached him, but cautiously.

  “God A’mighty, how are you walkin’?” She stopped a few feet away and lowered the light.

  With his good eye, Curtis could make out that she was a thin but wiry-looking Negro woman maybe up in her sixties, wearing overalls and a tobacco-brown blouse with a red-checked neckerchief. White hair boiled out around a much-worn brown cap with a badge on it that displayed a red winged horse and the words Magnolia Petroleum. He noted uneasily that in addition to the flashlight she was carrying in her left hand a five-foot-long shaft of wood with a sharpened iron speartip on the end. Around her waist was a leather belt that held a bone-handled knife in its sheath.

  He pointed at her knife.

  “What? You want that?”

  He nodded.

  “You crazy, or drunk?”

  He shook his head and made a motion with the fingers of his right hand for her to hurry and comply.

  “I ain’t givin’ you my knife! You’re out of your damn mind!”

  Curtis offered his left thumb and with the index finger of his other hand made a short cutting motion across it.

  “What? You wantin’ to cut your thumb off?”

  Another shake of the head. He kept doing the cutting motion.

  “Hell, no!” she said.

  He abruptly spat blood into his left palm. It was watery, but red enough. He stretched out the tail of his t-shirt, dipped his index finger into the little bloodpool and wrote HELP ME on the white cotton.

  Then she knew what he was getting at, but she said, “You been beat near crazy, boy, but I’ll tell you…I can get you with my gator sticker faster’n you can stick me, so stamp that on your brainpot.” She lifted the knife from its sheath and gave it to him, handle first.

  Curtis did not hesitate. He clenched the teeth he had left and cut a groove across his left thumb. The pain wasn’t much, compared to what he’d already endured. Red blood welled out. He gave the knife back to her and, using his index finger as a pen dipped into the gory inkpot, he began to write on the tail of his t-shirt.

  HEAD MARINA?

  “Head to a marina? That’s what you mean?”

  He shook his head and pointed at the raggedly-scrawled word HEAD. Then he aimed his bloody finger toward the west.

  “Boar’s Head marina?”

  Curtis gave a vigorous nod. That must be the place Nilla and Little Jack had reached.

  “Nothin’ there but a wreck. Storm took it nearly all down couple’a summers ago.”

  He pointed at himself, at her, and toward the boat, which he could now see had a small outboard motor. Then he made a jabbing motion to the west again.

  “You want to go to Boar’s Head marina? Why?”

  He squeezed blood from his thumb and underlined the HELP ME once, twice and a third time.

  Then he wrote POLICE and he put a fist to his ear in emulation of a telephone.

  “Call the police?”

  A nod answered that question.

  “Ain’t got no telephone. The nearest p’lice station is back a ways toward Metairie. What you got y’self into?” She realized he was unable to answer that one. “Damn,” she said quietly. She looked from him to her boat and back again. “You needin’ to get there quick?”

  He tried his hardest to speak. It came out as a raspy and mangled “Kik.”

  “I know a way through the marsh, take us maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Jesus, sonny! This is some mighty strange shit right here you’re askin’, and me not knowin’…” She let it go. “Well,” she said, “you can tell ’em at the nuthouse that this was Fay Ripp’s good deed for the year. Or maybe it’s a bad deed. Come on, then, get in the boat.”

  ****

  “Brains before beauty,” Ginger said as they played their lights up t
he stairs. “Go on, I got a fuckin’ rock in my shoe.” She bent down to take care of it.

  Pearly started up. The risers were spongy underfoot. He wanted to get this done and rub lake mud in the faces of those damn brats, for all this trouble. He would remember this moment, with all the muck on his shoes, when he was lying on the beach in Mexico with a hundred and seven thousand, five hundred dollars in a box under the bed in his house up on the hill…or, at least, however much money he had left after he bought the house. Then he would be set, and never again would he hear shit like Mama, don’t give this man no—

  It happened very fast.

  He’d been stretching to get over a missing step, and when he put his foot down the next riser seemed to melt away, his weight shifted and he dropped his lantern to grab for the railing and the riser he had his other foot on broke loose like a rotten tooth and he fell through, just like that.

  He landed hard on a chunk of debris, broken boards, glass and the tree stump that had been there at the lake’s edge since the Boar’s Head marina was cobbled together. He had an instant of realizing that a section of the floor inside the place had collapsed and slid into a muddy pocket below the stairs, and then the pain in his right knee seared through his leg and he nearly bit his tongue all the way through.

  “Mercy,” he heard Ginger say. “I was kinda thinkin’ those stairs wouldn’t take much weight.”

  His lantern was still lit and was lying somewhere off to his left. It was shining in his face. He tried to sit up and a nail went through the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. The bull’s-eye lantern’s beam left his face; she had leaned down to pick it up.

  “Shit!” he said, through the blood in his mouth. “Hurt my fuckin’ knee.”

  “Ouch,” she answered.

  “I think I can crawl outta here. Damn, that hurts!”

  “Well,” she told him, “just lie there a minute and catch your breath.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We got those kids trapped now.”

  “Trapped,” Ginger said. “Yep. Sure are.”

  He heard the easy lilt of her voice and he didn’t like it. There was something terribly cold about it, and it reminded him of the way she’d spoken to Doc Honeycutt there in the woods outside Stonefield, just before—

  “Help me outta here,” he told her. “Come on, gimme a hand.” He tried to start crawling on his own, and the pain shot through his knee on a path down to his foot. When he put his hand there where the pain was the worst, he found what he guessed was four inches of sharp-edged wood sticking out of the cloth of his trouser leg. It had gone in behind his knee like a knife’s blade. He brought his hand back up and looked numbly at the blood on his fingers, which Ginger was also looking at by the lantern’s beam.

  “That’s not good, is it?” she asked.

  “I can walk, once I stand up. You gonna help me, or not?”

  “Well…you probably couldn’t make it back to the car, could you?”

  “Hell yes, I could!” Did he hear himself whine? He did, and it shamed him.

  “Come on, then. If you can crawl out on your own you ought to be able to walk.”

  He tried again, furiously, by pushing both legs against the tangle he was caught in, but the pain was so bad he broke into a cold sweat and he feared his knee must be broken as well as pierced by the wooden dagger. “Shit!” he said, both terrified and enraged. “All right, stop fuckin’ around and help me!”

  “Hm,” she answered. “Pearly,” she said after a few seconds of silence, “you don’t know Ginger too well, do you?”

  “Huh? What?”

  “Ginger always, always, always…helps Ginger. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”

  “What shit are you spewin’?”

  “You can’t make it back to the car. Oh, I guess I could half-carry you, but who’s gonna keep the kid from runnin’ off again?”

  “The kid? Huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I only need one. The other one I’m gonna take care of soon as I get myself in there…and thank you for lettin’ me know how weak those steps are. Figure I’m gonna have to find another way in.”

  “Are you crazy?” he asked, and instantly regretted it. “You need me! You can’t just leave me here!”

  “True,” she said.

  Pearly heard the click of the .45’s hammer going back. His hand started to go for his shoulder holster but he knew he couldn’t get the pistol out in time and she would shoot him dead as soon as he moved.

  “Listen,” he said, and his voice trembled. “Please. We’ve been through a lot together. I did everythin’ you asked. I took care of things. I did things right, Ginger. Without me, you couldn’t have pulled this off. You know that’s the truth! Listen…I’m gonna crawl out of here on my own…I’ll stand up, I’ll make myself walk…we’ll get the kid…whichever one you want…and we’ll be on the way to Mexico. Hear me?” As he spoke, his left leg pushed at the debris but the right one had gone dead. He felt tears burn at the corners of his eyes, and he thought—and feared to think—that she’d been patiently waiting for a chance to kill him just as she’d been waiting to finish off the old doc. You fit the bill and the time was right, she’d said to him what seemed a very long time ago.

  Now he realized he no longer fit, and his time had run out.

  “Mexico, Ginger!” he whined desperately. “That’s where we’re goin’, with all the money anybody could dream of! Mexico…out of all this shit, that’s where we’re goin’!”

  “Here’s your Mexico,” she said quietly, and she pulled the trigger.

  Pearly saw the flame leap from the .45’s muzzle. In the instant before the brains were blown out of the back of his skull by the bullet that entered his forehead he smelled not the tang of gunpowder, but the sad odor of rotten peaches.

  The woman he had known as Ginger LaFrance spent a moment crawling in under the broken stairs and retrieving the .38 from the dead man’s shoulder holster. Her face with its champagne-colored eyes was without expression. She tossed the .45 away, since it was out of bullets and would just be extra weight. Then she crawled back out, stood up and with the bull’s-eye lantern regarded the treacherous stairs. There was a huge hole nearly in the middle of it where the recently deceased had fallen through. She decided there must be another way in, and she backed away from the stairs and went to the left up over more timbers and sheets of tin roof that had blown off, heading around to the other side.

  She had to climb up a small rise. At the top her light found a cleared-off dirt area that must’ve been a parking lot, but here the ground was level with the marina building. A large section of the roof had slid down nearly to the ground and hung half-suspended over the building where another door ought to be. There were two rectangular windows up toward the roofline, on either side of where the door would be, and both were glassless but too narrow for even the bodies of children to climb through. The light picked out an Enjoy Coca-Cola sign on the wall that had survived the blow, along with a mounted thermometer that showed the painted picture of a hooked fish jumping, and from the few dozen bullet holes it was a popular place for target practice.

  She pulled aside the tin roofing, careful it didn’t come sliding down on her head, and exposed an opening where a door had been. She shone the light within and saw the room was mostly still held together though the floor and walls were all buckled, black with mildew, and dripping wet from the rain that had slammed through the space where the roof used to be. Her light couldn’t find the children, but she was sure they were still in the building somewhere. She imagined she could smell their fear, like the pungency of bitter wine.

  Her eyes glinted above the lantern’s beam. When she stepped into the room she felt the weakened and diseased boards give beneath her weight. She held her gun down at her side, but ready when she needed it.

  “All right, kiddies,” she said, with a tight ha
lf-smile. “Come to mama.”

  Twenty-Five.

  “Nilla,” Little Jack whispered, “there’s somethin’ crawlin’ on my neck!”

  She shushed him. Whatever it was, it could not be any worse than what had just crawled into that other room and said to come to mama.

  They were hiding in a bathroom the size of a broom closet at their house. They had found the door to it when they’d carefully followed their hands along the walls of that first room they’d entered off the porch and realized that half the floor had collapsed, leaving a rim of broken planks. Part of the bathroom’s ceiling had been torn open to expose the night sky and the floor was sloppy with standing water.

  The door was warped but Nilla had been able to close it using the strength of her shoulder. With the tips of her fingers she had pushed the latch into its socket. Then she’d told Little Jack to sit down on the floor under the sink and she had taken a position with her back against the toilet and both feet up against the door with her knees bent.

  They’d heard a single gunshot. What that meant they didn’t know…but they knew the woman was in the building with them, and that was bad enough.

  Nilla thought the woman must be able to hear her heartbeat, it was so loud in her own ears.

  :I’m comin’,: Curtis suddenly sent to her. :Mizz Ripp says we’ll be there in ’bout five minutes.: