Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  ***

  Tobias stood there for a moment looking at the money-slop and the rest of it, and I guess that included Sharon and I guess he had to look surprised and then he had to look angry, because he just bolted upstairs. I mean, he spun around and he was pounding up the steps and the next thing I heard was his heavy boots thumping across the floor above and the meat-sounding smack of his close-fisted blows to the old man.

  “You stupid, worthless piece of shit.” Tobias’s voice, though muffled, was clear and the space between each word was filled with the sound of another blow. “You insane piece of fuck shit.” He was repeating himself, but I suppose he thought it worth the emphasis.

  It was a lot of stuff like that. I couldn’t hear much of anything specifically from the old man, but that was not in any way unusual. I can’t remember the last full sentence I heard him speak aloud and I’d stopped reading his little notes years ago. They didn’t make sense anyway when I did read them. “Cancer dog at the back door,” I remember one of them said; “Claws and beaks are all you eat,” was another one. They were like fucked-up fortune-cookie fortunes from the chinky-dink take-out joint they run in town, Ho Ho Palace or something. Like one of those. Maybe I’m repeating myself. Maybe I’m just looking through time and space.

  So, I just stood there in the basement leaning on my shovel, listening to my brother beat the crap out of our father, and staring at all that ruined money and the skeletonized remains of one of my childhood classmates from the days I went to school to sit in a classroom feeling like the worst kind of hillbilly I am. Sharon Lebanon disappeared when we were in the 8th grade, her folks moved away a few years later, and she slipped away from my memory. But I instantly recognized her sweater; it was not a particularly noteworthy sweater other than that I remembered it as hers. A cardigan thing with a belt, it had a geometrical pattern in gray and cream colors. I remember she’d been proud of that sweater, she’d seen ones like it worn by Hollywood movie stars in those magazines I suddenly remembered she’d always seemed to carry, how she always seemed to be pouring herself over the pictures, the pictures, the pictures of what she’d known she’d never be. She’d saved up her lunch money for a solid year and ordered it from the Sears Roebuck, and I could see her wearing it while she waited at the bus stop in the morning, steam from her warm breath pluming away from her mouth, could see her wearing it on warm spring mornings when nobody needed a jacket or a sweater, could see her wearing it as she walked the dirt trace to town in the summer, hot and sweaty and just like a picture in a magazine except the sweater was dirty by then and getting ragged in its hems. Obviously synthetic, it hadn’t deteriorated much in eleven years. Sharon had, but the sweater hadn’t.

  Toby came stomping down the stairs from behind me.

  “Asshole cocksucker,” he announced. “Fucking useless perverted toothless piece a shit.”

  He was talking about the old man.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked Tobias.

  “Fucking bleeding, man,” Tobias answered. “Sitting there in his fucking Laz-E-Boy recliner, crying like a bitch, and bleeding.”

  “Did he say anything that made sense?” I asked.

  “How the fuck should Ah know?” He answered my question with a question and I hate that.

  “Did yah know about any of this?” I asked him.

  “About the money or about Sharon?” Again with the question for a question.

  I gently poked her ribcage under the sweater with the blade of my shovel.

  “Any of it.”

  “No,” he said with his voice rising like that way people’s voices rise up when they’re lying.

  I poked a little bit more.

  “Then why’d yah ask? How’d yah know her name?” I wanted to know.

  “Why did Ah ask what?” Tobias asked in that way people ask when they’re trying to think up the lie they’re going to tell next. Tobias was having trouble answering me straight on. “Know whose name?”

  “Ah asked yah if yah knew about any of this,” I explained to him. “Then, yah asked me, ‘About the money or about Sharon?’ If yah didn’t know about this, if yah didn’t know about her, why’d yah ask me which one?”

  “Why’d Ah ask which one what?” This was getting painful. It was going to get even more painful.

  “Why’d you ask me which one—Sharon or the money?”

  Tobias just stood there, blinking and thinking, while he tried to figure out what to say next. He already knew it was too late and the shovel in my hands was connecting with his nose, splitting it open with a gush of crimson, before he could frame his next stupid question. Toby sat down hard on his ass on the basement floor next to the pile of worthless cash and what was left of Sharon Lebanon.

  “Yah fuck,” I told him. “Yah fuckin’ knew. Didn’t yah?”

  “Glub?” Toby answered through his already blackening, swelling lump of a nose and the gush of bright blood. “Glub glum glub?”

  “Stop answerin’ my questions with more questions, you peckerwood asshole,” I told him and smacked the top of his head with the flat blade of my shovel. It made a dull ringing sound and vibrated in my hands, kind of like a bell if a bell was a shovel.

  “Ooowww,” Toby moaned and at least that sounded like a statement. My family had suddenly gotten very big on beating up on each other. Again. Some more.

  ***

  I’m the big one, the overgrown and overlarge one. The old man says its my Whateley blood showing, but I have no idea what that means. Tobias is the the little one, kind of goggle-eyed and him with a receding chin like that, it’s a shame, really, to be so ugly, but the old man says it’s just the Innsmouth Look, that the blood of the Deep Old Ones will always tell the tell, but neither of us, Tobias and me, know what that means. The old man says it’s all in The Book, and we just have to take his word for it. It sounded to us like the old man spent a lot more time with Yankees than he’d mentioned outright.

  The old man wasn’t always a toothless, meth-addicted, alcoholic. There was a time, I remember, when he was just old. He’d swagger off on one of his adventures and come home with a jug and a bunch of fellows from someplace, say maybe the Ku Klux Klan. They’d drink from the jug and holler, shot guns at targets or just up into the trees. They’d build a bonfire at night and try to grill some meats and someone would always have a cooler or two brought up from the town. They were always slapping the old man on the back, urging him to drink, telling him what a right kind of guy he was. And the old man would believe them and he would dovetail their kind of childish, dress-up hatred into the doctrine of The Book, and he would begin to preach. The general drunken, homo-erotic gunplay and grab-ass would die down until all were gathered by the flames of the bonfire, until all anyone was hearing was the snapping of the bonfire and the old man, up on some milk crate or beer cooler or some such, preaching the gospels of The Great Old Ones, the ones who wait in the spaces between the worlds, the ones who were here so very long ago and who long for a day precipitous for The Return, that salvation lay in giving up all hope, in abject hopelessness, in the certainty of ash and dust.

  That would kill the party—the old man up there in firelight preaching the end of the world in fire and water and tentacles, the Klansmen packing up their Klan shit and driving their Stars & Bars pickup trucks out into the night, an orgy of tail-lights in the darkness for those who watched them leave. Even then, I knew. If you were too crazy for the Klan, you were crazy like nobody’s business.

  Same thing happened with the American Nazis. And a whole mess of biker gangs whenever a newish club passed through the Gap, he’d be there slinging his racial hatred thing gleaned from The Book, that after The Return in furious indifference, the god-things would begin The Clearing. He’d start in on blood this and blood that, and that was usually all it took. Those types, those Klansmen and Nazis and uber-patriotic motor-cyclers, the bass fishermen and the serial killers, the already damned, the eager to be damned, and the innocent, always took the old man to be tal
king racism and eugenics and the science of white superiority. They acted shocked and betrayed when they finally understood the old man’s philosophies of purity and annihilation. A lot of times, they’d call him a Satanist or a devil-worshiper, and in his own, even patient way, he’d try to explain that all that Iron Maiden, Alister Crowley, Manson Family crap was crap, that true Satanists were as wrong-headed as Christians in their worship and abjection to just another bunch of fairy tales and boogey men who just didn’t exist and neither did their heaven full of fluffy clouds, speed boats, and magic wings, nor their hell of flame and pitchforks and devil-men with horns and pencil mustaches who would somehow punish everyone not like them forever. No, the old man was talking about a judgment, yes all right, The Biggest Judgment of them all, but it was from beings beyond comprehension, beyond their Jesus and their Book of Revelation, entities unto gods themselves who cared nothing for anything except themselves. If they, the old man’s Elder Gods and Ancient Things, even if they did that, cared only for themselves, they did so in a way beyond the human mind to understand. What to us might seem like senseless torture, degradation, anguish, pain, and suffering might to Them be a most trivial but necessary scientific experiment. Or not. We could not, were not equipped, to know such things.

  Among the old man’s pantheon were those who cared not even for themselves, for there was also great and humanly inconceivable madness and imbecility among these most high, those nonetheless still omniscient, omniscient and oblivious, oblivious and, if not, malevolent toward mankind in the way mankind was malevolent toward the cockroach and the ant, then completely unconcerned by or, occasionally, delighted by the carnage and the havoc that followed them, the terrible dreams they inspired, the loathsome behaviors they evoked. In the grand scheme of things, there was no grand scheme, and none of it, none of the delight or the pain, the triumph or the fall, the innocent or the perverted would matter in the least.

  The old man preached Cassandra-predictions, Cthulhu got the Pacific, Dagon got the Atlantic, the Black Goat in the Woods with Ten Thousand Young had been bleating since the birth of cruelty, and we were all, all all all of us destined to die die die in their frolic for no good reason and there were nothing anybody could do about it ever. Forever.

  The old man preached that Heaven, if it ever even noticed we were alive beneath its awesome arc, that Heaven itself hated us with the kind of hatred people could work up over any number of things, insects and other races being examples, perhaps not equal in human eyes, but anyone who followed him, followed the old man, followed The Book, wouldn’t want or need eyes for The Clearing or The Aftermath. We’d, he’d, they’d be screaming with the joy of the skinned-alive, the gratefully tortured for unknown reasons toward unknowable goals.

  If someone is too crazy for alcoholic, drug-addicted, leather-wearing, violent, racist, sexist, homophobic, patriotic, America-First outlaw bikers, that person is too damn crazy. The old man actually scared folk like that, scared their women with their unwise clothing choices, scared the babies the women held in their arms to screaming for no reason and placated by no bottle or song or threat of a beating.

  Children of all ages screamed and ran from the old man, and he pretended they didn’t exist. At best, if forced to, if compelled by some social circumstance to acknowledge the presence of a child, the old man treated it, boy or girl, toddler or teenager, as if it were an imperfect adult, a simple man or a simple woman who did not yet understand enough of the world to understand their own understanding to be a falsehood and a chasm of lies. The old man treated children as he treated everyone with his certainty they were doomed. Too crazy. It’s the way he raised us, so I guess we were used to it.

  ***

  I’m leaning on my shovel only now I’m in the kitchen and maybe that’s something The Book does to you over the years. There’s this looping that goes with knowing what’s in The Book or at least what the old man says in The Book. Nobody got to read The Book but him, but hearing him talk about it or preach about it or watching him work the smudgy science that comes from The Book was enough to scare most everybody from even wanting to want to know The Book or to have The Book know the reader.

  But, it’s the looping thing, the way my thoughts or actions will seem to have a specific goal or object clearly visible, how that goal or object becomes cloudy, until I will find myself almost precisely at the beginning. That is most disturbing. I’d begin a bedtime meditation on the world behind the world, the places where numbers are, at best, suggestions; where integers and square roots become colors; where all angles curve and where all curves have malicious intent; that place in mathematics where the Hounds hunt, composed of sentient numbers and hungry; but then I’d be back in my bed again, no wiser for having actually seen non-Euclidian geometry, damned, perhaps, to see the world behind the world and not only survive, but retain my sanity. Of course, the question of sanity had to asked and in some way answered, especially after we, Tobias and I, had grown, had lumbered and skittered toward our manhoods, and it was time to put some cards on the table, and the first card we wanted to play was “Are We Crazy?”

  “Crazy?” the old man cackled and it didn’t help his case. “We’s the ones ain’t crazy. We’s the ones know the truth of this world and the next world and The Book. Yah ken see that, cain’t ya? With yer own two eyes, cain’t yah see that? Them’re the ones what’re blind. Them’re the ones runnin’ from the truth of the world and the truth inna Book. Yah can see that, cain’t yah?”

  But, some mornings my mail-order underwear would be inside out, and I’d know that when I was sleep-thinking about the world on numbers and angles, when I was sleeping and thinking and seeing how to tear this world apart, someone was messing with my privates—my weird, messed-up privates. Was it crazy to consider that fair trade? That insight and knowledge cost molestation and degradation? It fit with the teachings of The Book. What was I to make of all that?

  By 9th grade, the schools around here have something called gym and gym is different than Physical Education, often called PE. In PE, which I now understand to be for little kids, we, the children, wore our school clothes and sneakers, if we had them. Since Tobias and I never had them, we wore our regular shoes, but it didn’t matter really for each of us was both terrible and hopeless at games and sports. Still, in gym, we were required to wear a gym uniform of jockstrap, gym shorts, t-shirt, white socks, and sneakers. No Substitutions Were Allowed. In that gym class, the boys all had to sit on wooden benches and take off all of their clothes and take showers. That meant that every boy could see how clean or dirty every other boy’s underwear might be, what kind of crust had grown in this boy’s and that’s boy’s white briefs gone gray and brown, elastic sprung to nothing, just a rag, really, wrapped around a prepubescent groin to hide the shameful, shaming things grown overlarge and ragged there.

  So, it being 9th grade and all, I dropped out of school. Tobias, never one to put off the inevitable no matter if it was a beating or the last drop of lemon-lime soda in a 2-liter plastic bottle, Tobias dropped out of school, too. Technically, him being only a 6th grader and everything, he wasn’t allowed, but, considering that I already had made my intentions clear and considering that no one really wanted Tobias cluttering up the public education system for another two to three years, they accepted that we two backwoods brothers were finished with school.

  And here I stand with the shovel in my hands in the kitchen of my house and I’ve looped all the way back to the moment here, and I don’t know if a minute has passed or if it has been hours; that is the nature of The Book and the looping thing. I don’t feel violated. Yet.

  So, every Saturday night and Sunday night at midnight, the old man would drag Tobias and the mother and me down to the basement for services. We didn’t get to go to regular church, to tent revival church, to church-sponsored events like summer camps, ski trips to god-knows-wherever-there-was-snow, sock hops, cake-walks, skate night, “Baptism and Basketball,” or before or after school prayer groups.
Beside sports, religion was the only way to meet girls in our school, town, county, and for all I knew the country. All we had was The Book. There was no point to girlfriends in The Book and no potluck suppers to meet them.

  “Them’s that gots their ways’ll stick to ’em,” he told us. “Them’s that got diff’ernt ways keeps diff’ernt ways. This here family been blest and curst in ways them’s with those ways an’t never unerstan’ nor care ta. It’s we’s with our ways and Our Book gotta keep the day unholy in our devotion to them what’s been here an’ them what’s comin’ back,” he told us.

  And, every one of those nights we had to kill something. Something small, like a rabbit or a woodchuck, or something big, like a dog or some neighbor’s stolen goat. We had to drink the warm blood, smear the blood on the walls according to his directions and extra-careful not to smear any of those clown paintings all the while he kept mumbling and grumbling stuff he said he was reading from The Book. He made us dance. It was all in The Book. A million billion trillion angry insects would buzz in our ears, what sounded like a million billion trillion angry corpses got inside our heads tearing each other apart, trying to tear us apart, a million billion trillion maggots, each one gone long mad, and the million billion trillion parasites that each maggot carried in its soft body. All insane, all buzzing, all trying to drag us down into their bedlam. That, also, was apparently in The Book.