by Jim Brown
Dean nodded and went back to cleaning the countertop.
Seven fifty-eight P.M.
Judy Pinbrow worked next door at Helen’s Cards and Gifts and her Saturday – night shift ended promptly at eight. In recent weeks it had become her custom to stop by the restaurant after work and order a strawberry sundae with extra nuts, then sit near the front counter swinging her legs and talking to whoever was in the store. Dean would always make idle chitchat – ask her about movies she had seen, books she had read – but nothing more.
He envied her step-brother. John the fearless. Nothing scared John, nothing intimidated him. John Evans could do anything. Talk to a strange girl – no problem. Fix a busted clutch – give him a wrench and get out of his way. Set a broken bone – he had done it for himself. John could mend, cut, saw, hammer, paste, plaster or punch any problem into submission.
All Dean could do was math in his head and tell you what time it was without looking at his watch.
“Just ask her out,” John had told him. “I know she likes you. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen?”
She could laugh at me, call her friends over and have them laugh at me, put my picture on a light pole so everyone in town could laugh at me, and then, the worst of the worst, she could say no.
Nevertheless, the Saturday before last Dean had almost done it, had almost summoned his courage. But the words had hung on his tongue like dew on a flower petal: “Judy, would you like to go out with me sometime?”
Then Whitey Dobbs had entered the diner.
“How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean?” he had asked, then laughed, a sound that caused Dean’s flesh to crawl.
The moment was gone, lost like a child’s balloon released from a sticky grip.
How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean? Always the same inane joke. But Dean had laughed, as he always did. Whitey Dobbs was the kind of person you went along with and hoped would leave without hurting you.
Judy wasn’t in school the following Monday or Tuesday. And when he saw her in the cafeteria on Wednesday, she had been uncommonly quiet, avoiding eye contact. Now Dean had the sinking feeling that he missed his best chance. Hopelessness caught him by the throat.
Last Saturday she hadn’t shown up at all.
His best chance blown because of a distraction, because of Whitey Dobbs.
“How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean?”
Whitey Dobbs. It wasn’t just the knife, or the rumors, or even the white hair. It was the way he walked, the way he carried himself, the way he looked at you with those dark, deep eyes, like twin tunnels to hell.
Scary.
He had been particularly scary that night, though Dean would be hard-pressed to pinpoint why.
How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean?
Eight P.M.
Judy’s shift was over, Dean thought.
The cash register pinged.
“Aha,” the manager cried in victory. “Working again.”
Now that he thought about it, there had been something else strange about that Saturday. Dobbs had hung around for a long time, almost to closing. When he left, Dean had spoken the customary farewell: “See you later, alligator.”
But Dobbs hadn’t replied with his usual “After a while crocodile”. Instead his face split into a bone-numbing grin. He leaned across the counter, so close that Dean could smell alcohol on his breath, and in a whispered sneer replied, “Ninety-nine Einstein.”
Ninety-nine Einstein?
What the hell did that mean?
Then Dobbs had laughed, that god-awful, high-pitched cackle that put Dean in mind of angry crows on a tombstone.
Ninety-nine Einstein?
Odd. Whitey Dobbs was still laughing when he walked out the door.
Three minutes after eight.
Judy was late. The heavens rumbled. The lights flickered, holding on to darkness a second longer than the time before. The cash register pinged. The manager cursed.
Dean Truman frowned.
Ninety-nine Einstein?
Suck air.
In the box under the earth Whitey Dobbs inhaled from a stiff plastic mask. The air tank was a comfort and a burden, increasing the time he could safely spend buried, decreasing the space he had to spend it in. To make room for the tank, he had to double up his legs and change positions to keep the blood circulating.
What if the preppy boys were wrong about how much oxygen he had? What if he ran out of air, or worse? Oxygen tanks were tricky things. Turn the knob too much, a spark, and – kaboom – he’d be applesauce.
In addition to the oxygen tank, Mason Evans had mounted a small transistor radio to the interior side of the coffin. The radio, as much as the oxygen tank, was Dobbs’s lifeline, keeping him informed of the time, allowing him to calculate how long he had left. He had been underground for thirty-eight minutes.
Twenty-two minutes to go. Piece of cake.
With six feet of earth above him, Whitey was surprised the radio worked at all. Still, it could pick up only one station KDLY – “All country . . . all the time.” In some ways that was worse than being buried alive.
Buried alive.
“I can do this.” Twenty-two minutes. Nothing to it. Nothing. Hell, was this the harshest thing they could come up with?
“We’ve seen you around. You’re not like the rest of the wussies in this piss-ass town. You’ve got an edge. I like people with an edge.” John Evans had told him. “We’re sort of making our own fraternity, want to know if you’re interested.”
Ordinarily Whitey Dobbs couldn’t care less what anyone thought. But John Evans was different. He was the only person in this butthole town who might actually hold his own in a fight, and as a result, the only person Dobbs really respected.
“So, what’s the catch?” he had asked. Dobbs had never had friends before and he was surprised how much the idea appealed to him.
“There’s an initiation. We’ve got to know if you have the stones or not.”
That had pissed Dobbs off. He had almost pulled his knife on the big guy, but something in John Evans’s eyes caused him to pause, some innate animal sense that told him if they fought, one of them would die.
“Give it your best shot,” Dobbs had answered.
John nodded, then in a flat, even voice asked. “Are you afraid of the dark?”
Suck air.
The Dobbs family, or what was left of it, had moved to Black Valley eleven months ago, shortly after Whitey’s father died.
For Whitey, Black Valley had one and only one attraction - Aunt Gerty, his mother’s timeworn older sister. While working in the sawmill, her husband had sliced his arm off at the elbow and bled to death before his coworkers could get him to the hospital. It was his own fault – everybody said so, even Aunt Gerty. But the plant had paid up nicely, leaving Gerty set for life with enough left over to take care of the poor baby sister and her vagabond family.
Whitey’s older sister, Mary Jean, the bitch, ran off with a trucker less than a month after they arrived. The last anyone had heard from her, she was living in sunny frickin’ Florida.
So long, loser.
Soon after that, Whitey’s mother discovered the comfort contained in a quart of Jack Daniel’s. She moved into the bottle, and Whitey Dobbs was on his own.
“Just the way I like it,” he said, grinning in the dark.
If the hicks in this dinky-ass town had seen him in Baltimore, they wouldn’t have known him. Back then everyone knew him by his real name: Melvin. He was just another teenager, with moss-brown hair, acne, wet dreams, and a father who occasionally mistook him for a punching bag.
A good beating will make you a man, his piece-of-shit father used to say. Apparently, he was also trying to make a man out of Whitey’s mother; she wore black eyes like other women wore new dresses. But Mary Jean, the bitch, got off without a sw
at. No, that wasn’t true, not entirely. Whitey had heard the sounds coming from her bedroom whenever his father declared it was time to “feed the snake . . .”
And she had been doing just that since she was twelve years old.
But not Tandy. Whitey’s ten-year-old sister had always been special: smart, attractive, self-confident - a fluke, a unique splash in the Dobbs family gene pool.
“When I grow up, you and me are going to move to California,” she would say to Whitey.
“California? Why California?”
“‘Cause that’s where all the magic lives. I’ve seen it on TV. They’ve got palm trees, the Pacific Ocean, and sunshine, always sunshine. It never rains in California. That’s a fact – they even wrote a song about it.”
You and me. You and me.
Poor, sweet little Tandy.
Seemed like she had been fighting off the old man’s advances from the crib. As a result, it was Tandy who received the harshest beatings – worse than Mama, worse than Whitey.
Worse.
But she never gave in. Never.
Click.
Flip.
Click.
Flip.
Dobbs worked the switchblade in the dark. He had found the knife in an alley shortly before it happened. One motion and zing, the blade danced in the air, reflecting unseen light and feeling alive in his hand. It was his first real taste of power, his first friend, and two weeks later he gave it its first meal.
The old man had beaten him badly that night, breaking his nose and a couple of ribs. Whitey’s eyes were so swollen he could hardly see. Turned out he would have rather been blind.
They were all at home when it happened: Mama huddled in a corner, semiconscious, face red from the beating; Mary Jean on the couch crying, watching.
That was when Daddy started on Tandy, right there in the living room. Whitey had tried to stop him. All he got for his efforts was a sound thrashing that left him whimpering on the floor, seeing through almost closed and mostly blurred eyes, almost blind, but not blind enough, lying there worried, worthless, and watching.
Don’t remember. Don’t remember. Tandy fought, fought hard – too hard.
Then his father screamed.
It was the sound of time screeching to a halt. That was followed by a quieter, subtle sound, just a snap, like a bug crushed beneath a boot, a twig snapped by a transgressor – the sound of Tandy’s neck breaking.
Then the true silence, the pure and evil silence -- his fiery baby sister a dead thing, a rag doll on the floor.
As the reality of what he was seeing clawed into Whitey’s denying brain, it got worse.
That was when Whitey Dobbs went crazy.
2
“KDLY time is ten minutes on the flip side of nine. I’m Larry Pepperdine and this is Hank Williams Jr . . . “
How much longer?
Suck air.
Fifteen minutes. The twangy country music filled the box like cold, wet mud. Whitey Dobbs rubbed the handle of his knife; he tentatively touched the blade. It felt warm. What if they forget?
Suck air.
No, don’t think about it; this is a piece of cake. He wasn’t afraid of the coffin, or even of being buried, it was just that with all that time in the dark, alone with nothing but memories, scenes began to play across his useless eyes without invitation.
Suck air.
The police said it was self-defense. His sister’s dead body and Whitey’s own beaten face left little doubt. But there were still questions. He overheard a policeman talking with a nurse outside his hospital room.
“. . .like something out of a nightmare, the big guy filleted and gutted like a prized fish. And the blood, God Almighty, it looked like the kid had bathed in it . . . hell, looked like the whole damn room had been painted with it. Twenty-two years on the beat and I ain’t ever seen nothing like it. And,” the cop concluded with incredulity, “he’s only fifteen years old.”
“What about his hair?” the nurse asked.
“Brown, until yesterday. Now it’s as white as cotton. Every hair, down to the root, white as a ghost.”
Four months later, after the investigation had been closed and the newspapers had grown weary of the story, the Dobbs family left Baltimore for Oregon. Amazingly, the police returned the knife. Whitey vowed it would never leave his side again. Never.
Suck air.
“KDLY weather, it’s fifty-eight degrees outside, and your local news is next . . . ”
Black Valley wasn’t Baltimore, but that was okay because he wasn’t Melvin anymore; by then everyone, including his mother, had taken to calling him Whitey.
Despite his hatred of the old man, Whitey had inherited his father’s violent streak – and his urges.
Feeding the snake, his father called it.
Whitey Dobbs had lost his virginity behind the high school band room on a Friday afternoon. The girl had been resistant.
Click.
Flip.
The knife had been persuasive.
It had been less than six hours since he had murdered his aunt. And it was the memory of smothering her with a pillow that kept him excited.
The police said his aunt died in her sleep. There was a small inheritance plus the house, which meant his mother could pretty much go to drinking full-time, leaving Whitey to his own devices.
Pocket money and most of his fun came from night jobs. Every few weeks or so Whitey would pick a house, sometimes in Black Valley, most often in other towns, then slip in when the residents were away or asleep, taking just those items that he could fence in Eugene. Sometimes he would pick out a woman, too, if she lived alone or her father or husband was away. There had been eight by his reckoning since that day behind the band room, eight different women and not one report. The knife could be very persuasive.
“For service dependability and friendly financial help, come to the Farmers and Timber Bank, serving Black Valley for thirty-five years . . . “ the radio crackled.
Not much longer.
Suck air.
The giggles returned. If this was the toughest thing they could think of, they really were wimps.
So what if they buried him alive on the crown of the Hill. Hell, they left him with an air tank and a radio, for God’s sake. Easier than a ten-dollar hooker on a twenty-dollar date.
Hawkins Hill.
Was that supposed to scare him?
He had heard the stories. High above the city, encrusted with trees, save a bald crown where only pale grass grew, Hawkins Hill was the source of rumor and legend. Spoiled land, spirits dancing, haunted hill.
Yeah, right.
On the radio Larry Pepperdine was giving the local news, something about a city council meeting, then some accident out in the county.
Suck air.
Hawkins Hill.
Something cold touched his leg. Whitey Dobbs yelped into his air mask.
What the hell? His mind raved, his cool forgotten. Rats? Snakes? Worse? Could something have gotten into the closed coffin? Using his left hand, he felt his leg. Water, just a few drops. He felt along the seal of the lid – wet. The coffin was leaking!
“Got to remember to complain to Perkins Funeral Home.” He laughed, the momentary panic forgotten. “ It must be raining like a mother for water to soak down to here.” Funny, the radio hadn’t said anything about rain. The news was over: Dolly Parton was singing a song that was far too perky for the words.
What if the coffin continued to leak? What if it began to fill with water?
Suck air.
He closed the blade, then sprang it open again.
Click.
Flip.
The feel and the sound reassured him.
No, there was nothing to worry about. His time was almost up, and besides, he had air. Even if th
e stupid coffin filled with water, he could still breathe. He had an oxygen tank.
Whitey giggled into the mask.
On the radio the music stopped.
“This is Larry Pepperdine with a KDLY news update. There is new information now on that River Road accident. . .”
Time’s almost up, I can take it.
“Oregon State Police now confirm that four people are dead after their car was hit by a train at Junction Crossing, west of the city. . .”
Suck air.
“the dead have been identified as . . .”
Suck air.
“Mason Evans,”
The muscles in his arms began to twitch.
“Clyde Watkins,”
A sharp, jagged shiver carved its way up his spine.
“Nathan Perkins,”
He caught his breath in quick hysterical jerks.
“and John Evans . . .”
His heart froze between beats.
“All four were pronounced dead at the scene. Police say the accident appears to have occurred after the boys ignored the train-crossing lights . . .”
The radio continued, but Whitey was no longer listening.
The only people who knew where he was, the only people who could free him, were dead.
His brain seemed to shrivel. Logic was gone, understanding was gone, control was gone. The world had been reduced to a single, all-consuming focal point: the lid.
He dropped the knife. He pushed against the top of the coffin with both hands, pushing with every ounce of strength in his body, pushing till his arms throbbed and the joints felt ready to burst.
The lid remained steady.
Suck air.
“There’s an initiation, we’ve got to know,” John Evans had said. “If you have the stones or not.”
And now John was dead, Mason Evans was dead, Clyde Watkins was dead, Nathan Perkins was dead. No one knew where Whitey Dobbs was. No one knew he had been buried alive on top of Hawkins Hill.
And soon Whitey Dobbs would be dead.
The blood came with the speed and fury of a storm. Gena Lynn Blackmoore put her hand to her nose in a futile attempt to stop the tempest. Her hand filled to overflowing with crimson.