“You fat, flappy bitch,” he swore.
That was a big mistake.
She kicked him in mid-bitch.
If she’d been wearing shoes he’d have wound up grinning out of a mouth full of picket fence. As it was, his lower lip jammed against the gap in his teeth and tore wide open.
“Chrith,” he lisped.
“Get up and get gone,” Lily ordered. “I’m slamming the door and calling Chief Wilfred. You don’t want to be here if I open it again.”
“Call him and be damned, flappy fatty. He might arretht me for a day, but you’ll be fat forever.”
Near to tears, Lily slammed the door.
Marvin picked himself up.
Damn.
She’d got dirt all over his fresh uniform.
He dusted himself off as best he could.
Damn.
The fat bitch had to be frigid, or a dyke. Maybe both. There wasn’t no other explanation.
He tried to picture Lily with another woman.
Hell.
He giggled thickly.
They wouldn’t need bed sheets.
He thought about that and it kept him going long enough to scoop the useless flyers and head up over the hill towards Vic and Maddy Harker’s farmhouse.
He turned back to the van. He’d better change his uniform first. It wouldn’t do for a postal official to be seen with mud stains on his ass. He had a headache where Lily hit him. It felt like a ten-pound hammer driving down a nine-inch nail.
In the distance he heard the baying of a hound.
The baying didn’t help his headache none.
CHAPTER 7
Homegrown Two-By-Four Golgotha
* 1 *
Wilfred stared at Clavis, perched atop a tall three-legged stool that canted to the left like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The two-by-four cross, spiked into the church siding, loomed above him. Sticklets of glue dribbled from midjoint.
Clavis stood posed, as if waiting for a photographer to immortalize his rummage-sale Golgotha. In his left hand he clutched a single spike. In his right wobbled a carpenter’s claw hammer.
The unwanted vision of Emma swung before Wilfred’s imagination.
The way he’d found her three weeks ago, dangled by the freezer, with that damned extension cord noosed as neatly about her neck as her favorite Sunday go-to-church scarf.
Aw, Christ.
He forced himself to focus on Clavis’s hammer. It was one of those big framing hammers – the kind of hammer that a carpenter grabs when he really wants to whack the shit out of something. Clavis gave a tentative swing, and Wilfred winced. The stool wobbled, nearly bringing the whole operation to a halt.
You’re going to give yourself such a whack, Wilfred thought.
He ought to talk to him. He ought to use Clavis’s name and talk him down before he hurts himself.
Damn it.
A cigarette would be good right now. No, that might startle him.
The stool wobbled again.
Open your mouth, damn it.
“If you whack your thumb with that framing hammer, they’ll hear you singing in heaven for sure,” Wilfred said.
That wasn’t bad for starters.
Clavis kept waggling the hammer.
Wilfred kept on talking.
“I hit my thumb like that once. It hurt like a bastard. The nail went black and fell off. It took nearly a half-year for the damn thing to grow back.”
Clavis widened his eyes like Wilfred had touched a nerve.
“Some things grow back faster than nails,” Clavis said, with his eyes rolled like bingo balls. “Especially damned things.”
Wilfred leaned forward, trying to inch himself closer.
“Clavis, put that hammer down.”
He took a half step closer.
“I’m about the Lord’s work, today,” Clavis said. “Just stand back while I tend to it.”
“What sort of work would that be?” Wilfred asked. “I thought the Lord gave up on carpentry a couple thousand years ago.”
Clavis shook his head so hard looked like it might roll off his shoulders.
“He still works in wood,” Clavis said. “Wood and straw and dirt. I have seen him do it.”
Wilfred nudged closer, determined to get his hands on that hammer. He should have run Clavis out of the old church back when it closed; but hell, everybody’s got to live somewhere. It wasn’t Clavis’s fault that the preacher had gone and hung himself.
Shit.
There was Emma again, dangling on the end of that fuck-suckish electric cord.
Wilfred did his best to head-shake that memory free.
He inched a little closer.
“Easy, Clavis.”
It was his own fault for not doing anything when Clavis first started dressing up preacherly. That would have the time to do something. Face it, he should have run the loon into a rubber room a long time back.
“I had a dream,” Clavis said. “I had a wild and wonderful dream.”
“What kind of dream, Clavis? Were there any pretty ladies in it?”
Keep talking to him, using his name, trying to distract him from that damn hammer.
“You mock me if you want to. The Lord and me will have the last laugh. A dream told me that everyone is coming back.”
“I didn’t even know they were gone,” Wilfred said, buying time.
“Just you wait,” Clavis went on. “Forget about your fire. The second day is coming in wood and straw and dirt.”
Closer.
Just a thin, slickery cunt hair closer.
“You don’t say, Clavis?” Wilfred said. “So what’s he look like, this God fellow? Seeing as you’ve seen him and all.”
Clavis shook his head.
Wilfred used the head shake to ease a little bit closer.
“I said he spoke to me,” Clavis said. “I never said I saw him.”
All of this talking made Wilfred dry for a smoke.
“He spoke to you? Damn. I thought he’d died, some years past.”
He reached for a cigarette and kept on talking.
“I’m gonna have me a smoke, if it’s all right with you.”
He reached a cigarette out of the pack and poked it in his mouth.
Damn it.
He’d left his matches sitting at home on the coffee table.
It didn’t matter.
He kept on talking, the unlit cigarette bobbing restlessly between his lips.
“God’s dead, Clavis. There’s nothing left of the old boy but a high-hatted, besteepled coffin.”
“God ain’t dead.” Clavis sulked.
That’s it. Get angry. Think about throwing that hammer at me.
“It’s true,” Wilfred went on. “I read in the paper, a few years back. He passed on. You ought to read the obituaries more often. You can learn things from death.”
“God ain’t dead.”
“It’s a goddamn shame, too. He seemed like a nice enough fellow, once you got past the hellfire and damnation.”
Wilfred took off his hat, while he was talking about hellfire. He used the distraction of the hat to change the subject. “So how do you figure on driving that second nail, once you get the first one banged home? I sure hope you don’t figure I’m doing it for you. I don’t even have a carpenter’s permit.”
Clavis looked smug.
“I already got that figured out.”
He motioned with the hammer to the left arm of the cross. Wilfred saw what he’d overlooked before. Sticking from the far end of the cross, just within arm-swinging range, was the nasty end of a nail, point outwards.
“I’ll knock the first one in, and on the back stroke I’ll swing my hand against the nail. That ought to turn the trick for sure.”
“I guess you got everything crucifixed up right,” Wilfred grinned. “Where there’s a will, there surely is a way.”
Clavis nodded proudly. The stool rocked in midnod. Wilfred nudged closer in the middle of that rocking no
d.
“You’d think God would spare an angel to hang onto that stool while you swing that hammer, wouldn’t you?”
Clavis did his best to ignore Wilfred’s comment.
He cocked the hammer, but the stool wobbled again, throwing his aim just a little.
“Maybe you ought to shim up that stool, Clavis?” Wilfred helpfully suggested. “I mean, you wouldn’t want to go breaking your neck before you got crucified and all.”
Wobble.
Creep.
Wilfred leaned closer, giving the stool an appraising glance.
“Then again, a shim might slip. No sir, what you need is someone hanging on to that there stool. It might be I could steady that for you, if you didn’t mind.”
Go for it.
Wilfred leaned in quick and caught hold of the stool.
“There, Clavis. That’s a lot steadier, isn’t it?”
Then he let go of the stool and grabbed for Clavis.
Only Clavis was quicker.
He swung the hammer, hard and fast, taking just enough time to give Wilfred a half second to brace for Clavis’s scream as the hammer slammed against his thumbnail.
Only Clavis didn’t miss.
* 2 *
Maddy damn near jumped out of her skin as the dog licked her bare foot. She slipped backwards, snagging the door knob on the way down, just before her tailbone hit the floor with a thump.
Zigger stared blindly up at her, looking so stupid she just couldn’t get mad.
“You’ve got a hell of a career as a doorstop ahead of you,” Maddy said.
She could have sworn the old bastard grinned at her. His cataracts glinted like puddles of soured milk. He gave her foot another sticky loving lick.
“You damned old hydrant chaser,” Maddy grumbled. “Never you mind trying to make nice with me.”
Hell. It wasn’t his fault. He was older than dust and blind as Saul these two summers past. He stank like a mile of dead rats on a good day and this wasn’t one of them.
The truth was, a hole in the dirt half a thousand watered stumps ago would have been a blessed mercy for the poor old hound.
Zigger panted happily.
Maddy remembered the first night Vic brought the dog home. She never cared for Bluetick hounds. Daddy always swore they smelled sin, which was why police used them to track convicts. Yet when she saw the pup cradled in a basket of straw with a couple of field daisies tucked in its collar, she just couldn’t resist.
Vic named him Zigger, for the way he ran.
The dog was the closest they came to a child. Vic had never wanted kids. He said he didn’t want things to change between them.
“No kids, no crowds,” he’d told her a hundred times. “And no complications.”
No competition was more like it.
Vic just wanted her to himself.
No witnesses.
Maddy knew that.
Hell, she’d gone along with it, for the sake of the marriage.
Vic had won the dog in a card game. He’d probably cheated. It was his style, all along. That man was crooked as a barrel of rusty fish hooks.
“Crooked and dead.” Maddy grinned fiercely. “Cheat your way out of that hole you been spaded into, ace.”
She’d killed him.
She still couldn’t believe it.
She kept expecting him to walk through the door, any moment.
Zigger padded over and scraped the front door like he could read her thoughts. When she didn’t open it, he raised his head and bayed like he’d died and gone to fox heaven.
Bowooo.
“Is there something out there, boy?”
She moved to the door, pushing past the old dog. She parted the curtain half an inch. It was Sunday, but you couldn’t be too careful. Especially with a fresh-buried husband, and a kitchen full of red-handed evidence.
If nothing else, that bastard Marvin Pusser was apt to be playing sneak-a-peek at the kitchen window. That was all she needed, a nosey, perverted gossip of a postman getting an eyeful of what was left of Vic’s remains.
She stared down the road.
Nothing.
Bowooo.
“Do you smell a cat, maybe?”
Bowooo.
She cracked the door open. The dog shoved his muzzle through, pushed and ran to the edge of the deck and pointed his muzzle towards the field. He ran directly out to where she’d buried Vic.
Bowooo.
Like he knew his master was out there.
Hell, it wasn’t any great mystery. He had watched her dig the grave. It was only natural that the hound would grieve. Vic was his Daddy, for Christ sake.
Bowooo.
The dog stood there, hunting nothing in a field full of empty, baying blindly.
It gave her the slow creeps.
“You shut up now. Daddy’s gone. You go waking him I’ll put you in the ground with him myself.”
Bowooo.
“I’ll make a houndstooth jacket from your hide,” she warned.
Bowooo.
She might as well have told the wind to stop blowing. The dog wasn’t scared. Not of her, anyway. She slid the catch on the screen door piston and left it tilted slightly open.
“I know what’ll shut you up.”
She found a tin of dog food in the cupboard. None of that dry crap Vic fed him. Shit, the old hound had barely half a rotted tooth to crunch with. She dumped half a can in the dog’s dish.
Shit.
It looked nearly good enough to eat.
“I lied last night when I said we had no dog food,” she confided. “The truth was I just wanted to teach Vic a lesson, feeding you his pork chops.”
She’d taught him something, all right.
Like magic, the old dog lumped through the doorway. He pattered to the dish following his nose. He shoved his snout in and noisily guzzled the wet smelly mess.
Just listening to him made her hungry.
She didn’t feel up to the salami.
She peanut-buttered a couple of slices of bread and sluiced them down with a glass of milk, just like a kid.
Fuck it.
If she wanted to eat lollipops for supper, daydreams for dinner, and deep fried Mars Bars for breakfast, that was her own look out. She was the boss now. She liked the feel of that.
“Well, boss,” she told herself. “Maybe you ought to clean the kitchen.”
She looked at the mess around her. What was left of Vic’s brains had soaked into the grain of the pine table. She might have to burn the damn thing.
Maybe she could paint it.
There was paint in the barn workroom.
She could get it after breakfast.
She swallowed another glass of milk, wolfing an apple from the fridge. She ignored the salami. She hated the shit. She only bought it for Vic. He liked it with his beer and whatever sport was on the cable. Beer and salami. He’d come to bed stinking like something dead had crawled up his asshole and died again.
Then he’d laugh about it.
“Not no more.”
She giggled.
She checked for Bluedaddy.
There was no sign of him.
Maybe he was just a crazy dream.
She went to the bedroom. She skinned off her dirty clothes and slid into a fresh pair of jeans. It felt good to put something clean on her skin.
Her stomach growled while she was socking her feet.
“Damn it. I’m hungry enough to eat a horse; hooves, asshole and all.”
Fuck.
That reminded her of the horses.
She had forgotten to feed them.
“You’re falling to pieces, girl,” she told herself. “You’ll be forgetting to breathe if you don’t stop and think.”
She thought she ought to go out there. She ought to hay them down and find the paint and brushes.
What if Zigger got up on the table, while she was in the barn?
She shivered at the thought of the old hound lapping his master’s brains
.
“Hell,” she said. “What would it hurt if he did? It’s not like it’d make him any smarter.”
Still, she didn’t want the old brute getting a taste for anything like that.
She dumped the rest of the dog food in his dish. If she filled him up, he’d doze for hours. Yet as she turned for the barn, he followed her out to the deck.
Bowooo.
He started baying at the field like he’d caught wind of the Devil himself.
And maybe he had.
* 3 *
The thing that used to call itself Vic heard the hound baying.
It wished the beast could come close enough to grab, only the dog would have to dig down to reach him.
Yeah.
That’s it.
Come on and dig up a bone, old boy, a bone that’ll bite you back.
Vic smelled the blood brooding thickly through the ancient hound’s carcass. He heard the lungs, juicy, pumping that great baying throat, bowooo, bowooo.
It sounded like a dinner bell.
If Vic had a mouth left, he would have salivated.
Vic was hungry. That bit of Maddy’s blood that he’d sucked through the root was tasty, but wasn’t enough.
Not by half.
So he fed on whatever he could reach – worms, beetles, grubs and dead leaves. A thousand juicy ants and the fig-like carcass of a tiny dead vole. Bit by bit the body rebuilt itself. He felt it growing, like the itch of a phantom limb. He couldn’t touch it, couldn’t scratch it, but it was there.
It was there and it was growing.
The body sewed itself up with slow, mulchy precision.
Patchwork reconstruction, making do with whatever it could find.
A bit of bone. A chunk of wood. Straw. Dirt. The mucilage of spilled blood. His veins wove about his broken bones, tying them in whatever knots they could manage.
Meat cobbled onto bone.
Organs were unnecessary.
He felt the daisy roots, barely awake from winter slumber, tickling amongst his rib cage. With a hungry flex he sucked the roots in to himself. He didn’t know why he was doing any of this.
It just seemed to be the thing to do.
He felt the call of the three-hundred-year-old broom, buried less than a shinbone’s length away.
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