The cough had gone, but the skin across his chest was sore. Needle pricks raced up and down beneath his shirt. He’d had two stiff drinks, then a third.
It seemed strange how peaceful and safe the ground looked from up in the air. He’d always been a little scared of heights; he would have thought the ground would frighten him as the plane passed over at an angle. He would have thought he’d be thinking of the ground rushing up to meet the plane and tearing it apart. But looking at the ground from this distance, it was hard to imagine anything untoward occurring within those stretches of rolling green, those luxurious swatches of trees. Several times he thought he’d caught a glimpse of the Big Andy Mountain above Simpson Creeks, but he knew that wasn’t possible—he was much too far away. But there were ridges in the distance, crags and rough places, that seemed to hold latent within them the resting-animal shape of Big Andy. Some said a bear, others a muskrat or a beaver or a deer lying down. Uncle Ben used to say the mountain was named by an early settler who thought the mountain looked like his Uncle Andrew lying down, and Ben would kid Reed about when he was going to go out and find a mountain to name Big Ben.
It suddenly occurred to Reed that he might not have any place to stay once he got to the Creeks. He had no idea if his uncle still lived there, or if he lived at all, for that matter. Inez Pierce had had a boarding house and hotel, but that had been years ago, and it might not have survived the flood.
They hit an air pocket and Reed suddenly broke out into a heavy, chilling sweat. His chest seemed to collapse in on him; his eyes burned. He thought he was going to throw up. The place was drawing him on—he could feel it—something like an open, sucking wound. Who had called? Who had started all this? Someone who hated him, but as far as he knew he had no enemies anywhere.
The mountains darkened around him, the lights of the towns coming up, and off in the distance there was the lone light of a coke oven. He wondered if that was the Nole Company mine, he wondered if families were gathering for dinner on the hillsides beneath that light, he wondered if they knew, if they were waiting for him. But the light had begun to blur, and the pain in his chest had at last begun to subside.
The turbulent descent into Louisville jostled Reed out of his sleep, and from a dream he imagined must have turned bad as soon as he crossed the state line. His father was screaming at him—for one of the usual infractions, although he couldn’t visualize it specifically—his father’s face red in that way that had always frightened him, like a cherry red balloon so full of air it was finally going to explode, leaving pieces of skin and bone all over Reed’s face.
His father’s mouth opened so wide he could see the back of the mouth, the gold-filled molars, the pink and vibrant uvula like a fetus in spasm. And for a brief moment, fantastically, Reed knew that this was no human being’s mouth. His father was going to eat him alive.
Reed opened his eyes wide and stared out the window at the dark sky. The plane tilted sharply as it made its approach, until suddenly it seemed as if Reed were staring straight down into the lights of the city. Two red lights, almost beacons, near the city’s center transfixed him. Like eyes. The luminous twin spaghetti trails of traffic curved beneath his window like a feral grin. He traced the grin on the cool glass with his fingers and chilled. He would be catching the train in an hour, and even then he would be several hours away from Simpson Greeks, probably not arriving until well after dark. But the Creeks would be a familiar smile, he told himself, albeit a lazy one. Nothing ever changed in the Creeks; nothing ever happened there.
Charlie’s Ford almost stalled heading up the hill into town. He had no doubt he was going to make it—the old Ford came within a hair of stalling on that hill every morning—but it was embarrassing, and as he did every morning he checked over his shoulder and looked past the first bridge toward the boarding house to see if Joe Manors was out there on the road laughing at him. He wasn’t, but he’d be out there any minute. But when Charlie gunned the engine the truck shot up the hill, and his pride was secured for another morning.
The town proper had been moved up on this little ridge eighty years ago. It used to be down by the Creeks, only a little ways past the bridge that led to the Pierce place. But that site had proved to be too prone to minor flooding from the Creeks, and so some of the merchants had decided to move it a little higher. The old site was pastureland now, although a curious spirit could still find a lot of the area’s history just by digging into the soil around there. Charlie had done it himself once upon a time, finding old tools and brass buttons, even a cracked glass picture. But the picture was faded; water had near erased it.
Then a couple of kids had been scared real bad down there—Charlie had never been quite sure what it had all been about; from the way they’d described it, it had sounded like a patch of shifting earth, or a bog. “The ground came alive!” one of them had shouted, near to sobbing. There were small bogs here and there all through those mountains, he’d told them. But they’d been real scared—everybody could see that. Then something similar had happened with Ames Nickles’s elder brother. He’d died of a heart attack two hours after being scared there. And Inez herself had claimed seeing lights out there. So nobody went down to the old town site anymore, or excavated much anywhere around the ridge.
And Charlie didn’t either. He thought the fear a bit foolish, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to go down there just the same. “Everything finally comes to life in these hills,” his daddy used to say, and supposedly he’d heard that from his grandaddy. And Charlie Simpson did believe that, he surely did.
Before they moved the town, they built a big slab out of rocks and bricks and mortar—whatever they could find—on the upslope part of the townsite. Then they rebuilt the stores on top of that. The story was this was meant to provide a good foundation—the front part made a sidewalk almost a foot off the roadbed—and in case of heavy rains the muds wouldn’t push out the foundations or rot the wood.
The other, big reason, Charlie thought, was that way they wouldn’t have to dig into that ridge, or even level off any rough spots. Profoundly lazy folk, his forebears. Of course, maybe even then they had qualms about digging down under the Simpson Creeks dirt. You heard about strange things happening—people disappearing or going crazy or two-headed calves being born—all over these hills, as if they were a magnet for anything outside your everyday limits.
In any case the road had sunk some over the years, making the sidewalk pretty high to climb up onto comfortably, so they’d added steps here and there. And the slab itself had been so piecemeal it was getting bad cracks. Jake Parkey had the first house on the left as you went into town—butted up right against the end of that slab—and his wife Doris was always complaining that there were things living inside the slab. Half-crazy, she seemed most of the time. It was too bad; when Jake had married her twenty years ago she was thought to be the prettiest woman around. Women seemed to age quickly in the mountains; the hills took something from them, a little more each year. Doris’s beautiful blonde hair had turned the color of a mud creek stained yellow with mine acid.
She said she could hear them scratching around in there at night. Nobody else could hear them, although during the day you might see a mouse or a harmless black snake crawling into one of the cracks. Doris kept saying that the reason no one else heard them was because they only made noise at night and their house was closest to the slab and besides her Jake slept too soundly to hear anything short of the heavens busting open and the Angel Gabriel coming down into their bedroom. They had a roomer, Mr. Emmanuel, a mining inspector with the Nole Company Mines, but he was gone a great deal of the time.
The Nole Company was responsible not only for the flood of years back, but for the gray- and rust-colored backdrop to the town: row upon row of two- and three-room shacks stacked up the sides of the ridge all the way to the Nole’s hills of mine waste sitting above the town. These cabins had been for the miners when the Nole Company was booming; now all but a few wer
e empty.
As Charlie Simpson drove into town he always took a long look at the Parkey place, seeing if that Mr. Emmanuel was around. He’d never trusted that Emmanuel fellow; he was an odd bird. Dressed like someone from the city, even when he was working. Dark skin and a too-neat mustache, tight corduroy pants, and always a tweed or a corduroy coat. He’d even seen the man wearing one of those two coats with his jeans. The other reason he looked at the Parkey place, of course, was to avoid looking at the two abandoned buildings across the street. First one was the old Simpson Hotel, pretty elegant for those parts, a Victorian structure run by his grandfather and now boarded up, the entire second and third stories a tangle of charcoal and the harder support beams that had escaped the ‘38 fire. The other was just an empty storefront, container for a variety of businesses over the years, from a furniture maker’s to an old lady’s confectionery. It made him sad to look at them; they hadn’t been occupied in years, making them sure signs that all growth in the Creeks had stopped and wasn’t likely to continue. He thought about them the same way he thought about headstones.
The first building up on the slab, right next to the Parkey place, was Ben Taylor’s Feed Store. He had a house about fifty feet behind it, on a plot his daddy’d dug out of the slope there. The Taylors always had a hard time of it; they had never been too well off, and during the flood Ben’s brother Alec and his family had all been drowned, most of the property washed away. All but Alec’s boy Reed, Charlie reminded himself. Reed had run away a few years before and hadn’t been heard from since. Charlie had heard Alec Taylor had been a big man with a whip, and most people seemed to think Reed had made the right decision. Ben Taylor was another case entirely—a large, strong man, but there wasn’t a gentler soul ever born. Charlie had always been impressed by the kind way Ben handled Doris Parkey’s goings on. Doris would be in Ben’s store most everyday asking him if he had heard things under the slab. Ben would always scratch his head with one of those great big hands of his, and you could see his face getting soft as dough as he’d say, “Well, now there might have been something a few days ago, Missus Parkey, but I’ve been so busy I didn’t really notice. But I suspect you’re much more knowledgeable about them things than I am.” Then he would always promise to try to notice better next time.
Charlie was wondering if Buck was getting hungry about now. First place he’d gotten a glimpse of the old hound had been on the walk in front of Taylor’s store. The dog had been limping up the slab, turning his head this way and that to sniff, and so slowly it seemed to take him five minutes to check each direction. Charlie had been standing in the doorway of his own store talking to Ben Taylor. Buck had ambled right past him, paying no attention whatsoever, as if he were blind. He crept slowly to the potbellied stove and collapsed there, sound asleep. Charlie had had him ever since, almost ten years. He was an incredibly old dog. And how Charlie loved that dog…
Across the street from Ben Taylor’s store there was a small cafe open three days a week, owned by somebody from out of town but run by Doris Parkey’s younger sister, Audra Larson. Some of the miners ate their breakfasts there, and Charlie tried to get in one day a week for some coffee just to be sociable.
At the end of town on that side of the street there was a small railway and freight station. The train came in every three days, just after dark. Charlie realized there was one due in that evening, and for some reason thinking about it made him nervous. Of course, that meant there’d be more goods to put on the shelves the next day, and he supposed that was what he was anticipating. Seemed like there were always several things wrong with his order, and he’d have items he’d never even heard of before and no idea what they were good for. It was too much trouble to send them back, and they’d usually end up in one of those boxes on the shelves in his storage room. He was too old for such aggravation.
Last store on the slab was his own, with the little building he used as the town post office hanging awkwardly on its left side like a black sheep on its mother’s teat. The post office certainly looked that part; although his store was finished in fine old red brick, the little post office was covered front, back, top, and sides with coal black tar paper. Charlie’s daddy had been Simpson Creeks’ first postmaster and had built the post office with what he had on hand. Charlie had always intended to improve it some, but he’d never had the funds. He had a deal with the postmaster up at the capital; they didn’t get rid of the Simpson Creeks office in favor of some larger office a hundred miles away, and he didn’t ask them for any money.
Charlie usually had the store swept out, the shelves and counters straightened, and the lids off the apple barrels in time to open at eight A.M. But the first thing he had to do before he unlocked the door was to feed Buck, who should have been sleeping out by the shed in back of the store as a kind of honorary watchdog. Some watchdog; Charlie grinned. Buck was so old and toothless…if he had arms and hands he’d carry an armload of Charlie’s merchandise down to any halfway friendly burglar’s automobile. Happily there’d never been a crime in the Creeks aside from husbands and wives—and once two brothers—killing each other.
Buck didn’t come to greet Charlie when he rattled the dog’s water can by the store’s back steps.
“Hey, lazy! Water, boy!” But there wasn’t the usual answering bark, the lumbering of crooked legs trying to maneuver faster than they could manage.
Charlie walked slowly out to the shed. The dog was old, he reminded himself. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
Then he saw where the fence had been torn down, and the streaks of blood here and there on the bright green grass. Buck had always perked up when Charlie had worked on the lawn here, fertilizing it, weeding it. Buck would sit under the big shade tree by the shed, with his head up, as if listening. Eyes gleaming. The most animated Charlie had ever seen the old dog.
He followed the trail of strewn blood, crushed grass, and broken boards around the side of the shed, and even in his apprehension he felt amazed. Incredibly, all evidence showed that the old dog had really put up a fight. Charlie never would have guessed.
The old dog’s thin flanks were pressed against the fence that ran behind the shed. Half-buried by the weeds. Charlie got down on his knees slowly. Another massive hole had been torn in the board fence here. He gazed through it, up the trail of smashed weeds and bushes that led up the slope to Nickles’ Lumberyard on top of the hill. It was the only other business in the community, just outside town; you followed the gravel road as it curled around the hill to its top, and the road ended there in Nickles’ yard. Charlie hadn’t seen old man Nickles in weeks; he kept pretty much to himself. Charlie gazed at the slope for a long time. He could not remember the last time he had cried.
After awhile he turned to his old pet. He wanted to carry him back to the shed, look into the old wrinkled face once more. But he searched for the dog’s head in vain.
Chapter 10
Joe Manors didn’t have to work that day—the Nole mine was on a three-day shift now for those without the seniority—and he was at a loss about what to do with himself. The mine’s troubles weren’t his fault, but he still felt so embarrassed about not working, so out of sorts about it, that he wouldn’t talk to anyone about his work schedule, and had stayed hidden up in his room on his days off. Christ…they all knew he didn’t have the seniority, so who was he trying to fool?
So today was his day to go up to the town, sit around Charlie Simpson’s store and talk, maybe check into some odd jobs. It was time he did something with those free days.
Besides, it had gotten bad around Miss Pierce’s place since old Hector went off his beam this last time. Inez was always snapping at you for dirtying her carpet with your boots or getting fingerprints on her towels or talking too loud or having bad table manners, most everything, and she’d never done that before. In fact, you couldn’t have asked to meet a more agreeable soul. But lately she was treating most everybody like the devil himself.
He’d always been a
bit clumsy in nice houses. Too wide-shouldered, too narrow-hipped. It made him awkward when he walked. With his short black hair and red face he made a funny picture, he knew, not fitting in hardly anywhere. Except in the cab of a dozer—he felt right at home there.
He really couldn’t blame Inez for being so irritable; Hector had made a frightening sight this last time: what little hair he had all twisted around his head, his hands groping through the water and mud of the creek bank, his face muddy, his eyes wild, and garbling the worst gobbledygook Joe’d ever heard. Crazy as a half-drowned cat. Yelling about a woman with bright red hair. It had made Inez blush. Joe’d had to hide his face to keep her from seeing him laughing. He’d liked to have died.
But then the old man had started talking about “bloody teeth” and things beginning to “rip apart in the night for that young boy” and it had scared Joe Manors, scared him bad. The wild look in the old man’s eyes as they carried him up to bed and the way he spit when he cried out all that garbage.
Joe Manors’ daddy used to say there was enough out in the woods and out in the animals that could terrify a man right out of his wits without the men themselves getting so scary. All that craziness comes from nature, his daddy used to say, and Joe Manors was beginning to agree. Things were busy out there in the dark; if you were real quiet yourself you could sense it. And when you did sense it, you could feel it clutching at your heart, your breath, all the juices that kept you alive and going.
When Joe Manors turned onto the street running through the Creeks he stopped, the hair bristling on his arms. Something had happened. Charlie Simpson was sitting out in front of his store with his head in his hands. Ben Taylor was crouched down beside him, talking low.
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