The Devil Walks in Mattingly

by Billy Coffey

  I showered for the first time since Friday night and thought of the blood and stink the hot water could wash off and the memories it could not. I dressed and found Kate alone at the kitchen table. The room smelled of simmering beans and baking cornbread. The coffee maker gurgled on the counter. The newspaper lay open on the kitchen table, propped at an angle by something I could not see. Kate’s eyes were puffy and red, as though she’d caught a nasty case of pinkeye.

  “Where’s Zach?” I asked.

  “Sent him out to play.” She turned the newspaper to the front page and slid it to me. “Don’t think you’ll want to read what that skinny little nut job wrote, but I guess you should anyway.”

  I pulled out a chair and smiled. “That’s no way to talk about a man who’s pined for you since kindergarten.”

  Kate smirked. I read through the front page article, pleased that Trevor had stuck to the facts. Even the subtitle—SHOCKING ACT LEAVES OWNER HOSPITALIZED—seemed appropriate. But then I turned to the op-ed in back, and for a terrifying moment I thought Trevor had come to the sheriff’s office the night before looking for a story and instead found everything I’d tried for years to hide away.

  “Can you believe that man?” Kate asked. She sniffed and reached into the pocket of her faded Wranglers for a tissue. “Stooping so low as to say Taylor Hathcock’s the devil? That we’re the ones responsible for what’s happened? How can he say such things?”

  “I don’t know.” I stared at the article again,

  (One can only hope our elected sheriff will rise to the occasion because he’s coming, Jake, and I’m coming too)

  our newspaperman’s words mixing with Phillip’s own, until my tired mind couldn’t tell if I was reading or hearing. I took Kate’s hand and said, “You know this has nothing to do with you. Tell me you know that’s right.”

  But Kate’s swollen eyes and the creases in her face told me she knew no such thing. And there was the fact that from my seat I could see the newspaper had been supported by Kate’s notebook. If I’d been a few minutes later out of the shower, I would have no doubt found her thumbing through those worn pages of names, trying to prove Trevor (and herself) wrong. I folded the newspaper and slid it across the table as far away from us as I could.

  “I told Trevor to keep it to the who, what, when, and where,” I said. “Guess he couldn’t help going to the why. Thought I could . . . I don’t know.”

  “What?” Kate asked. “Threaten him?”

  I shrugged.

  Kate patted my hand and smiled as she dried her cheeks. “Wrong Barnett, honey. You’re not what your father was, and that’s why I love you.”

  We were quiet. From outside came the sharp report of Zach’s cap gun, followed by a yell to “Stop!” and “Freeze!” as he battled some invisible evil.

  “Did you sleep last night?” she asked.

  “Hard to get comfortable knowing a man died in the next room.”

  Kate said, “I can imagine.” And then she raised the same question that had welcomed me to the past thirty-odd mornings, one she’d offered with a tone of hopefulness in the beginning, but lately tinged with dread. “Did you dream?” she asked, and I knew what would come next was her asking what those dreams were and what was haunting me. “White butterflies,” I would say, and Kate would sigh and smile and say, “Yes, it’s like my dandelions, isn’t it?” but it wasn’t. It was not like that at all. Already the start to that conversation was upon my lips, but whether it was the sight of Kate’s breaking heart or the feeling of Trevor’s stinging words, what I uttered was, “I dreamed I was in the Holler.”

  Kate bunched her eyebrows. “Happy Holler? Why are you dreaming of that?”

  My shoulders slumped as the smell of dinner wafted over me. How long had it been since I’d eaten? I wiped the sleep from my eyes and couldn’t remember.

  “I went there once,” I told her. “Back in high school.”

  Kate looked at me, her mind temporarily drawn away from Trevor’s accusation (which I knew she believed had been aimed right at her; memories were long in a small town, and Phillip’s death was something no one would forget). Her sad eyes brightened. She slapped my hand and chuckled.

  “You took the walk, didn’t you? You really took the walk? I thought that was all a bunch of bull.”

  “It is mostly,” I said. “Every man I’ve ever known’s gone to the gate as a boy. Trevor. Bobby Barnes. Joey and Frankie went together because they were too afraid to go alone. Even Hollis, Big Jim, and Justus went back in the day.” I paused, trying to decide how much I could say. What came next was more whisper than talk: “But you know what? None of them actually do it. It’s bad enough to stand there and take the time to carve your name. But to walk in?” I shook my head. “A lot of that place might be campfire talk, but you can’t go there without thinking something’s watching you. Something dark and big. They all say they take the walk, but all they really do is run, and in the other direction. Except for me. I walked the Holler. All the way past Indian Hill.”

  Kate sat silent and studied my eyes. Her smile was still there, but it had melted a bit into a look of worry. “You’ve never told me any of that.”

  I shrugged. “We all spend our lives trying to prove something. Back then I wanted to prove to Daddy that I was a man. Figured if I could show that to him, I could show it to myself. I wanted to find out who I was.”

  “So your name’s on the gate?”

  “No.”

  Kate leaned forward and placed her chin in the hollow of her hand. What she asked were two words—“What happened?” Nothing so different from what she asked every day when I returned from my rounds or from lunch at the diner. Yet sitting there in the quiet of the kitchen, a part of my resolve crumbled. Had I not read Trevor’s article, I would’ve given Kate the same sort of vague answer I’d offered about my dreams—I don’t remember, maybe, or Nothing happened at all. But that was a lie and another leg on that big hairy spider, and I felt the truth I’d locked inside forcing its way upward from my heart to my tongue, where it gathered in a bitter taste. It was as if Kate had cracked a frozen spigot inside me and it was all about to rush forth with no concern for the life we’d built or the son we had. It was only those last two things, the twin pillars that supported my sad world, that gave me the will to hold the truth silent yet again.

  “What happened in the Holler that day, Jake?” she asked again.

  I said all that was needed—“I found out who I was.”

  6

  Everything was different, everything was the same. That’s what Lucy thought as she parked at the end of the drive and plodded up the walk. The house, the empty front porch, the view of the town—just as it had always been. And yet everything had also been altered in a way she could not define. She stood there on the sidewalk, touching the spikes and cowlicks of her hair, wanting to understand. Then Lucy lit upon the answer as though she’d found a lost treasure in a dark room.

  The change hadn’t been in the world. It had been in her.

  She walked upstairs and found the knapsack she carried to school, emptied it of books and tardy slips, and filled it with as many clothes as she could find. Whether the shirts she chose matched the shorts and jeans she packed didn’t matter, nor did Lucy make room for the array of lipsticks and eye shadows and hairspray stacked upon the large vanity by her bed. Taylor didn’t seem the sort of man who cared about appearances. That was good as far as Lucy was concerned. Maybe now she could finally stop trying to be pretty.

  She paused at the bathroom on her way back down the stairs. Chunks of hair still covered the tiled floor. Lucy left this as well. On the coffee table downstairs was the fifty dollars and change her father had left. Lucy shoved the money into her pocket and heard the crinkle of the paper Kate Barnett had given her.

  The open door beckoned. Lucy paused there and turned for a final look at her old life as the knowledge of what was happening dawned over her. This was good-bye, nothing less. A farewell to all she k
new in glad exchange for what Taylor had shown her. She had scoffed at the notion that nothing around her was real, had even clung to those doubts when confronted by Taylor’s hole in the world. But standing there in the foyer of her home, Lucy believed that not only was such a notion possible, it explained so much.

  People had always been powerless in their dreams. They were victims of monsters and decaying teeth and high floors that gave way. But it had not been Lucy’s nights that always haunted her, it had been her days. It was the monster of her father and his drink and the decaying teeth of her slippery hold on someone—anyone—who would stay and not leave. It was the swaying floor of all her questions of what was true and what was false and why she’d always felt such hurt and lonliness. Now, finally, Lucy perhaps had found that answer.

  Because she was sleeping. She’d been sleeping all this while.

  She dropped her bag and stepped into the living room. Johnny’s shiny wrapper stared up from the floor. Lucy paid this no mind. What she focused on instead were the pictures on the mantle, pictures of Lucy smiling and her father smiling. Her mother smiling. All those teeth flashing for the camera, all of them so happy and so peaceful until one took the time to notice the empty eyes behind those grins. Only her mother seemed truly delighted. In many ways, that hurt Lucy the most.

  She reached for the lamp by the sofa and tore away the shade, yanking away the brown cord connecting it to the wall. She gripped the top just below the bulb and swung, crashing the heavy base against moments remembered and moments never known, splintering them into jagged pieces of glass that flew against the walls and into the shag of the carpet. Lucy plunged the lamp into the flat-screen television, shattering its face into a wavy scowl. She sent the coffee table flying. Cushions and chairs were torn and tossed. The books were next—Lucy’s precious pages of answers that only begged more questions and big words that offered little truths. She rent the pages and ripped the spines, the wisdom of man falling like hay against the truth that lay in a hidden Hollow grove.

  The kitchen was next. Lucy flung open the cabinets beneath the kitchen sink and pulled out every mason jar she could find. She stacked them into a shiny, smelly pyramid and smashed these as well, vowing vengeance upon the evil soul who had filled them and emptied her father. Only then did Lucy leave. To her it was a proper good-bye. She charged back down the lane, windows wide and music blaring, and drove for town.

  She didn’t know whether to look for Charlie or Kate first, then decided they would likely be in the same place. Two county police cars passed her on the way into downtown, driven by angry-looking men glowering from behind mirrored Ray-Bans. Aside from them, the streets were barren. Houses looked abandoned, their shades pulled tight and their front porches unoccupied. Downtown was no different. Cobbled streets gleamed empty in the afternoon sun. Storefronts lay shuttered and closed. Even the park, normally alive with activity in this weather, slumbered.

  Lucy drove Main Street and tried to make sense of the nothing she saw. She passed the church on one side and the newspaper box on the other, then pushed down on the brake and reversed when she saw the headline.

  TWO DEAD, ONE SOUGHT IN GAS STATION ROBBERY

  She knew who the one sought was. She did not know the two dead. For a fleeting moment, Lucy considered the possibility that Taylor had killed someone

  (“I woke that boy, I woke him up because that’s where I was led”)

  and wondered what it meant if that was true. She parked along the curb and found four quarters in the money her father had left. The paper in the box’s window was the only copy left. Lucy pulled it free and read the front page, her mind not bothering to speak up and say she had left her car behind and was now drifting toward downtown on foot. She followed the note at the end of the article to Trevor’s op-ed.

  Dead. Charlie Givens was dead. And so was a boy named Eric.

  The bliss that had coursed through Lucy as she’d driven from her house upon the hill was replaced by a weight that settled over her lungs. Her legs kept a slow, staggering gait toward the town’s center as her mind tottered between one thought and its opposite.

  Taylor was a madman, he was a prophet.

  The boy was dead, the boy was awake.

  Kate was a murderer, Kate was not.

  This was all real, this was all a dream.

  Lucy felt the world go wobbly and off center, as though she were moving through a fun house of mirrors rather than downtown. She closed her eyes and searched for a center that could hold her steady and found the memory of Taylor’s hole—not her own center (Or is it? came the thought), but maybe the center of the world. The center of everything. That calmed her when nothing else could, so much so that even if Lucy Seekins was unsure of so many things, she was certain of one: she would stand in front of that Hole again. She would do that if she did nothing else.

  She heard a thumping sound, a soft plonk! that was there and then not and then there again. Lucy looked up, confused to find that she’d traveled nearly three blocks and somehow found the only person on Mattingly’s streets that day. The small boy pitched a grimy tennis ball against the steps of the sheriff’s office. It caught the lip and—plonk!—shot skyward in a long arc that ended in his hands.

  He stopped when he saw her, his arm drawn back. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Lucy said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lucy.”

  “My name’s Zach.”

  There was no one nearby; the town square was barren, the only sound the grinding of the clock tower. The nothingness was surreal. Like a dream. The door above the steps opened and Lucy thought yes, a dream.

  And then she felt the floor beneath her life give way when Kate asked, “Lucy?”

  7

  Kate didn’t know who it was at first, didn’t even know if the person standing by the steps with Zach was a boy or a girl. It was only when she opened the door that she recognized Lucy, and only then because of the shorts. It was the same pair Lucy had worn the day before, only now they were covered with splotches of dried mud and what looked like ash. The back pocket was still turned out. Bruises and dried cuts ringed her knees. But it was Lucy’s hair that took Kate’s breath. It was like some evil prankster had shorn her head and left behind just enough to shock and pity.

  “Hi,” Lucy said.

  She gave Kate an apprehensive look and took a small step away from Zach, who stood watching them both.

  “What happened?” Kate asked. She moved from the doorway and took the first step down.

  Lucy matched it with a step away. Her eyes blinked and blinked again. She licked her lips as though thirsty.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.” Lucy nodded so hard and with a speed that convinced Kate that everything wasn’t. She held the newspaper up in one hand. The other ran through what was left of her hair and stopped at a bald patch just above her left ear. “I just read this. It can’t be true.”

  Kate took another step down. Lucy watched but didn’t move.

  “That’s what we’re all thinking, but I guess all the thinking in the world can’t change things. You didn’t know?”

  Lucy shook her head. “Where is everyone?”

  “Hiding, mostly. Scared out of their minds by what the paper says. Don’t let that bother you, Lucy. You can’t take what Trevor Morgan writes as anything near truth. Why don’t you come in?”

  Kate took the rest of the steps, meaning to guide Lucy into the office, but her closeness sent Lucy backward off the sidewalk and into the street. Zach took a step toward his mother, unsure of the situation. His arm cocked back, ready. Kate looked at him. That he held only an old tennis ball rather than Bessie didn’t seem to matter.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” Lucy said. “I really don’t know you, Mrs. Barnett. First you come in my house, now you’re trying to get me inside. I’m just gonna go.” She took another step back. “I don’t think I like you very much.”

  “Hey
,” Zach said. He wound his arm and stretched it out behind him. “Everybody likes my momma.”

  “Zach,” Kate said, hushing him. She looked at Lucy and said, “Wait. Okay? Just wait.” She didn’t move, thinking that even a step away would be enough to send Lucy running. At that moment, all Kate wanted to do was keep her there. She didn’t know what had happened to this little girl, but something had. Something horrible. “You don’t have to come inside. I’m just gonna go over and sit on the steps, okay? You can stay right there if you want. I won’t move an inch. You just look like you could use someone to talk to, Lucy. That’s all.”

  Lucy said nothing. Kate turned her head and stepped slow and easy, the way a person would walk so as not to spook an animal. Zach eyed her and moved closer, putting himself between them.

  Kate touched his shoulders and said, “Why don’t you go throw your ball against the wall for a bit, Zach. Me and Lucy need a word.”

  Zach didn’t nod but he stepped away, keeping the strange girl square in his sights. He walked the ten feet or so to the long blank wall on the other side of the steps. His tosses were slow and deliberate. Each time the ball bounced back, he caught it and glanced at Lucy.

  “You didn’t see anything from your house last night?” Kate asked.

  Lucy said no. Her expression was flat and still, like frozen water. Kate remembered the smile Lucy had offered the day before from the Seekins’s living room sofa and how it had unsettled her. Now Kate wished she could see that grin once more.

  “I should have checked on you last night, after everything,” Kate said. “It was all just so sudden. Timmy got hurt and Jake had to leave. I had to get here and call the state police. I should have thought of you up there all alone in that big old house, right there where those two men were. I’m sorry, Lucy.”

  A sound escaped Lucy’s mouth that was midway between gasp and snort. She shook her head. “Your brother got beat up, and you’re apologizing to me?”