Black Valley

by Jim Brown

  “Now, perhaps you would like to tell us your real name,” John said.

  “I did, I do, and I will again,” the man said.

  Jerry clicked the cuffs another notch. The metal bit into the already puckered skin. The prisoner gritted his teeth. Then offered another smile.

  “Mr.” – John paused – “Elijah, Deputy Niles tells me you had a .forty-five Magnum tucked in the waistband of your pants. You mind telling me what that was for?”

  “What can I say? It makes me feel pretty.”

  Another click of the cuffs. The prisoner groaned. A thin line of blood appeared on the back of the man’s left wrist.

  John ignored the comment. “He also tells me that you don’t have a license for it. Possession of a concealed weapon. That’s our holding charge.”

  Coye Cheevers remained outside the cell, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

  “Now, you can save us all a lot of trouble by cooperating.”

  “Just like it says over the urinal, ‘I aim to please, so please aim.’”

  Outside the cell Cheevers chuckled. John silenced him with a look.

  “Where’s the victim?”

  “You’re looking at him.”

  John was four inches taller than the stranger, but he loomed over him as if he were twice that size. His bearing was imposing. He took a step closer, so close that a breeze would have to turn sideways to squeeze between them. He looked down on the stranger, breathing so hard that each time he exhaled, the long, loose hair on the suspect’s head fluttered. John held steady, letting the discomfort of the moment linger like the stench of fear.

  “You cut off a man’s hand on Friday. The doctors tell me the victim was alive when the amputation took place. Now I want to know where that victim is.”

  The stranger bit his lower lip, chewed on it a moment. “Aw, I gotcha. I know what you’re talking about.”

  John took a step back but remained tense, shoulders up, alert.

  “I don’t know where that victim is because that’s not why I’m here.”

  John and Jerry exchanged a look.

  Jerry raised an eyebrow. “It’s not?”

  “No, sir.”

  John crossed his arms; they looked like two pylons forming the letter x. “In that case, mind telling us why you are here?”

  The stranger grinned, a flat, long smile that curled at each end like a wood shaving. “I’m here for Dr. Dean T. Truman.”

  Jerry dumped the contents of a Jones Grocery envelope onto the table. Yellow and crumpled, the newspaper clippings fluttered down to the top of the table. “I found these in his pocket.”

  “Twenty-two in all. Each one from the Black Valley Register. All detailing some tragedy, accidental death, missing persons case, odd weather systems. Weird stuff. I can’t make out a pattern yet.”

  The sheriff fingered a clipping about the small tornado in ‘74. The fact that he had just been thinking about it made him decidedly uneasy. They had moved up to John’s office after the stranger’s pronouncement, ostensibly to look at the evidence but also to regain control. John wasn’t sure he could have contained his anger much longer.

  I’m here for Dr. Dean T. Truman.

  Was that some kind of a threat? Or just more gibberish?

  The sheriff sifted through the clippings, isolating a small obituary. Under the picture was the name Judy Truman, beloved wife of Dean Truman. John felt the anger building in him, a hot river of emotion suddenly put under massive pressure. But there was something else, too.

  Fear. John was worried. Was this one man behind it all? And if he was, how? And if he was responsible for all that was happening, could John and a few cell bars actually stop him?

  “About Dr. Truman,” Jerry said. “Elijah mentioned something like that on the way over here.”

  The sheriff took a deep breath. A wrinkle formed between his eyes. “What? That he wanted to see Dean?”

  Jerry shook his head. “That’s just it. It was odd. He didn’t say he wanted to see Dr. Truman. He said he wanted Dr. Truman to see him.”

  Dean walked down the narrow hallway leading to the holding cells like a man walking the final ten yards to the electric chair. His throat was dry and his fingers itched. How do you scratch your fingers?

  “Sure you’re up for this?” John asked.

  Dean dry-swallowed, gave a moment’s thought to how nice a cup of hot tea would be, then nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just fine.”

  Dean and Piper had waited at John’s request while he questioned the suspect. By the time the sheriff returned, Piper had become increasingly agitated. Her eyes remained normal, but her nerves seemed stripped raw. She said she had a severe headache and went to lie down on the couch in the waiting area.

  The holding room was a utilitarian facility. Two small cells occupied the left side. The floor was concrete and painted gray; the walls, cinder block and dirty beige. There were no windows in either cell, only a wire-framed cot and a stainless-steel toilet.

  The stranger, Elijah, was in the second cell, sitting on the edge of the thin cot, arms resting on his legs, humming.

  Humming?

  Dean had prepared himself for many things, humming, however, had not been one of them. And what was the tune? Almost recognizable.

  Seeing them, Elijah jumped to his feet. Literally jumped. He was spry and younger than he looked. He’s not what he seems, John had said. He had an athlete’s body. Strong. Strong enough to cut a person to pieces?

  “Dr. Dean T. Truman. It is most definitely an honor to see you again.”

  John cocked his head, a questioning look. Dean shrugged. There was no recognition on his part. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

  The prisoner smiled, revealing a row of even, ivory teeth surrounded by a scruffy and spiky beard. Like a keyboard in a briar bush, Dean thought.

  “Once,” Elijah said, the smile growing. “Well, almost.”

  Dean frowned.

  The stranger in the cell seemed practically jubilant. Was this some kind of game for him? Some twisted, perverted contest?

  Elijah turned his head and studied Dean from the corner of his eyes. “How much do you know?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I said, ‘how much do you know’?”

  Dean anxiously gummed his lower lip. “About what?”

  The stranger’s shoulders slumped; the keyboard smile vanished. “Not much, huh?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Elijah, I’ve already told Johnny here.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Dean could see the sheriff visibly stiffen. Dean held a hand out to dissuade his old friend from acting. Then to Elijah; “Why did you want to see me?”

  “No, no. Not see you. Been there, done that. I wanted you to see me.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” Beside him Dean could hear John breathing heavily, his frustrations and anxieties building toward eruption.

  Elijah held up a finger. “Okay, first things first. Number one, you’re not crazy.”

  That makes one of us.

  “And number two: Pay attention to everything. That’s important, Doc. Pay attention to everything that happens to you, around you, and near you. It’s all important. Sometimes the little things are really the big things, know what I mean?”

  Dean opened his mouth to say he didn’t, but stopped when the stranger snapped up straight and hooped his hands on his hips. The keyboard smile was back. “Hey, Doc, watch this.”

  The stranger stood up perfectly straight and began to hum. Then he jumped a half foot to the left, hummed a bit more, and took a step back to the right.

  Dean stared, speechless.

  Elijah then put his hands on his hips and squatted, humming all the time.

  John leaned over to Dean. “What’s he doing?”

  �
�I think he’s dancing?”

  He finished with a series of energetic pelvic thrusts, then smiled and asked, “Get it?”

  Dean shrugged.

  Elijah shook his head, looking mildly, miffed like a parent with a frustrating child. “Here, I’ll do it again.” He repeated the process.

  “I think he’s crazy,” John said.

  Dean nodded in agreement. If this was their killer, then he was doing a great job of laying the groundwork for an insanity defense.

  “Let’s get out of here,” John said.

  “Get it, Doc? Get it?”

  They turned to leave, but the stranger was fast. He was at the cell door in two steps. He reached through the bars, grabbing Dean by the coat sleeve. John was almost as fast, turning around and knocking his hand away with a powerful blow.

  Elijah yelped. He pulled his arm back through the bars and cradled it like a baby. “Damn, that hurt. Forgot what a tough son of a bitch you are, Sheriff.”

  John’s hand went to his sidearm. The stranger appeared not to notice, his attention remained on Dean. “You have to get it, Doc. You have to ‘cause – well, damn. I can’t tell you why. It doesn’t work that way.”

  John took Dean, who had remained motionless through the whole thing, by the shoulder and led him down the hall to the door.

  “Just pay attention, Doc,” called the stranger. “Everything and anything. Everything and any – ”

  The door closed, clipping his words.

  A deep fatigue settled over Dean. Any effects of his earlier medication had long since been burned off. But now weariness hurried in to fill the cavity left by the ebb of excitement.

  Questions, questions, questions – usually the scientist’s divining rod, each leading to a new line of reasoning, each answer standing like a signpost to mark his passage and subsequently guide others who may follow in his path. But so far it had been all questions and no solid answers.

  Was it just coincidence that Mason had a hallucination about Whitey Dobbs on the day after someone carved Dobbs old taunt in the dust-laden blackboard? Or that Nathan said his wife was attacked by a man with white hair? Or that Dean himself had hallucinated, seeing Dobbs not only in a photograph, but winking?

  No. The odds were mathematically staggering.

  But so far a reasonable solution had eluded him. Showers of glass, severed hands, flaming trucks falling from the sky. Too many questions.

  It was impossible – hell, all of it was impossible. Where had the damn truck come from in the first place? No. Dean refused to give in to that sort of thinking. Unusual, yes unprecedented, certainly; but impossible - no. He had seen it happen. Now, he had to understand how it had happened.

  And how Piper had known it was going to.

  Could she be part of some elaborate plot? No. There had to be another answer. She had claimed to have had an equally powerful feeling less than an hour ago in the sheriff’s department, but nothing had come of that.

  “Too much,” she had said, “Too much is happening. It’s suddenly all a jumble in my head.”

  Was he to believe that Piper Blackmoore possessed some power, some super-sense that allowed her to predict the future? His own words came back to haunt him. Magic is just science we haven’t discovered yet. Twenty-five years ago the thought of a palm size box with more computing power than NASA used to go to the moon in the ‘60s was science fiction – total Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty. Now it was commonplace. Fifty years ago computers were the size of rooms; now you could carry them like notebooks. His multi-functional geek watch contained more sheer computing power than those first massive machines.

  Magic. The devil’s work. Or even the hand of God.

  “You don’t believe any of this, do you?” Piper asked, breaking the silence between them.

  As if she read my mind. No, she read my face. He looked out the window as her truck crunched through frozen, snow thick roads.

  “I can tell you what I know. I know a woman was shredded in a shower of glass. I know Clyde was murdered. And someone tried to make it look like a severed hand was the murder weapon.”

  He took a breath. The truck’s powerful heater roared. The engine ticked. “I also know a flaming truck fell out of the sky and destroyed the Willamette Bridge, and I know that somehow . . . ” He rubbed his hand across his mouth, as if looking for a way to pull the words from his throat. “I know somehow you knew it was going to happen. Another thing. You’re not the only one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember what you told me about Coye Cheevers? What he said he had seen in the sky a couple of mornings ago? Only his didn’t hit anything. Appeared and vanished, just like that.”

  Piper carefully turned onto Flint Street. She was driving slowly; nonetheless, the big machine shuddered, the rear end slid to the left. She patiently regained control.

  “But you don’t believe it can happen.” Her eyes were pinched. From the headache or her own search for words; he couldn’t tell. “Even though you’ve seen it yourself, you still don’t believe. You don’t really believe what I feel.”

  The truck tried to slide again. She manhandled it back in line.

  “I believe you believe. The mind is – ”

  She threw her hands in the air, temporally freeing the truck to pursue its own course and causing Dean’s heart to miss a beat.

  “Here we go again,” she said. “It’s all a hallucination. The product of a powerful imagination in connection with an inquisitive, intuitive mind. I know, I know. You’ve said it all before.”

  She reclaimed the steering wheel. The engine groaned like a circus cat caught sneaking from its pen. “But that truck. The bodies. Those things are real. Those things are not products of my imagination. Do you still believe it’s science?”

  Dean was silent.

  They turned onto Beaker Street, leading to his house. The street lamps cast yellow rings on the virgin-white snow.

  “Can I ask you something?” Piper glanced in his direction. “Is it true that you, the sheriff, and the mayor used to be in a gang?”

  “A gang?” Dean asked, genuinely surprised, then his face softened. “Ah, you mean Flash Five. Who told you about that?”

  “Nathan. He’s quite proud of it.”

  Dean laughed out loud. “Well, don’t let him fool you. We weren’t in the hood or anything. I mean, this is Black Valley. The only hoods here are on the front of cars. We were just a group of friends. Flash Five was just sort of our nickname.”

  “Odd nickname,” she pressed. “What’s it mean?”

  His smile broadened. “Depends on who you ask. Everyone’s got a different story.”

  “And yours is?”

  “Embarrassing. But the truth.”

  She grinned. “Those are the best kind.”

  “We were just kids, really – eleven or twelve – and the high school football team was having its best season ever. In fact, they were only one game from the state finals. But that one game was with Oakridge.”

  “Oakridge,” Piper said solemnly. “Our arch rivals.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, someone came up with the bright idea that it would be really funny if we waited down by the Willamette Bridge and – when we saw the Oakridge bus – turn our backs and dropped our pants.”

  Piper put a hand to her mouth and snickered. “Oh, God, you mooned the Oakridge football team?”

  “No. We tried to moon the Oakridge football team. As I recall, Nathan was our lookout. . .”

  “Him? With his thick glasses?”

  “Bingo. So, he gives the word, we turn, drop our pants, and are laughing like fools with our little white butts hanging out in the air. Then the bus passes and I see written on the back: BLACK VALLEY FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. We flashed the choir. I can still see M
rs. Abercromby’s face, pressed against the glass, eyes wide, jaw somewhere around the floor.”

  “The organist?” Piper gasped.

  “The seventy-two-year-old organist,” he added. “It was the preacher who first called us Flash Five.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes as she laughed.

  After a moment Dean’s smile faded. “Flash Five, stay alive. Flash Four, group no more,” he muttered.

  “Dean?”

  “Something Clyde used to say, and now – ”

  They sat in silence.

  “So, do you think the stranger’s behind all this?” Piper asked.

  “Elijah? He’s certainly crazy enough.”

  “Why did he want to see you? What did he say?”

  Dean smiled.

  “What?” she demanded. She had noted his smile.

  Intuition, that’s how she does it, Dean assured himself. Piper was in tune to the world around her, extraordinarily observant, albeit on a subconscious level, to even the slightest changes.

  “Spill it, Doc. What did he say?”

  Dean shrugged. “Nothing really. Just that I should pay attention. That I wasn’t crazy . . .”

  “Jury’s still out on that one,” she said with a snicker.

  “And then he, well . . .”

  She turned and looked at him, her face alit with a child’s anticipation. “What?”

  “Then he, well, he . . . sort of, did a little dance.”

  Her gaze hung on him for a disturbingly long time. The truck appeared to be on autopilot. A smile creased her face, then she exploded in laughter.

  “A dance – he did a little dance?” she asked, gasping for breath. “What kind of dance?”

  The laughter was infectious. Dean tried unsuccessfully to the keep the merriment out of his voice. “I don’t know. A sort of two-step. The hokeypokey, something silly like that.”

  This only fueled her spasmodic laughter. It was a cleansing laugh. After a day and night of piano-wire tension, it was the laugh of relief.

  “Remember that movie, Doctor Dolittle?” she asked, catching her breath.

  “With Rex Harrison?”

  “No, the other one, with Eddie Murphy. The one with the guinea pig.” She let go of the steering wheel and churned her hands as if stirring a giant pot, then, in a dead-on impression of the gravely-voiced Chris Rock, she sang, “Get down tonight.”