Evil Heights, Book I: The Midnight Flyer

by Michael Swanson

  "When's he getting out?” Lee asked, and immediately wondered if this was a polite question to ask.

  Javier shook his head. “The judge, he gave my boy twenty-five years to without parole. He's never getting out. At least while I'm alive."

  "I'm sorry,” said Lee.

  Javier shrugged. “He did better than the other man."

  Whatever it was the chickens and pig were after under the porch, they must have found it. Suddenly, the pig pitched a squealing fit as the chickens squawked and flapped riotously, kicking up dust as they all fought to tear apart the prize.

  Lee and Javier watched the melee. Out of the rabble, a fat hen with a mixture of red and black feathers, scrabbled out from under the porch. She had half of an enormous night crawler in her beak and beat a hasty retreat, half running, half flying, towards the pens by the side of the house, followed by a dozen cackling pursuers. The piglet, still tied to his rope could only watch and squeal as they all disappeared.

  Javier peeled himself up from the sagging chair, balancing himself with his beer as he got to his feet. “I got to check the bar-b-que.” He ambled the few steps over to the smoking barrel. “You like bar-b-que?"

  Lee nodded. He had felt so full and lazy walking over. But now, just the smell of whatever was cooking inside the pit had him feeling hungry again.

  Javier took off his hat. When he opened the door, he stood well away from the pit, waving his hat back and forth to clear out the smoke. Lee stood up and came over to catch a glimpse of what it was that could possibly smell so delicious. Javier grabbed a long metal fork, which had been hanging from a hook, and stabbed it into the roiling gloom. He pulled out an entire animal's leg, all brown and streaked with red.

  "This is pierna del cabrito,” he said rolling his R's richly.

  The tangy, buttery smell was something Lee had never experienced. He had to swallow as his mouth had become suddenly wet.

  "That must have come off a pretty big dog,” joked Lee.

  "Dog! Dog!” Javier pulled his head out of the smoke and caught Lee's grin. “What kind of dog you ever seen that has horns and a beard and eats cans?"

  Carefully, Javier placed the leg back on the wire grill and turned it over. A large earthen crock of thick, red sauce was on the shelf attached to the front of the bar-b-que pit. Javier put down the fork and picked up the handle of a brush sticking out of the bowl. Picking up the crock, he held it next to the meat, careful to not spill even a drop. Then painting it back and forth, he liberally coated the leg from one end to the other.

  Lee's mouth wouldn't quit watering.

  Javier closed the lid. He stepped around to the end of the big split barrel and flipped open the fire door quickly so as not to be burned. With the fork he had used to stick the meat, he prodded the fire. Kneeling down, he selected a length of kindling from a wide pile against the side of the house, then shoved it in the hole, followed by two more pieces. Leaving the fire door slightly ajar to aid in the air circulation, he slowly and with obvious effort, straightened to his feet.

  "Whew. That's hot back there.” He took off his hat again, this time to fan himself.

  On his way back to the lawn chair, he stepped over to the record player. Holding his back as he bent over, he flipped the record over to the other side. Clicking the switch at the base of the turntable, the mechanical arm picked up, and then skewed over to the right, before dropping down onto the disk with a pop followed by a loud static hiss.

  A tinkle of mandolin, accompanied by a sweeping violin sped into an intro. Then the wailing began a new. Mercifully, Javier turned down the volume before half stumbling, half falling back into the old, sagging lawn chair.

  "You going to stay for some cabrito?” Javier asked, draining the last of that beer.

  Lee nodded enthusiastically. If it tasted anything like the smell, he very much wanted to stay.

  Javier plopped the empty into the beer carton and retrieved a fresh one. “You ever eat goat?"

  Lee shook his head. He had eaten deer and rabbit, pork, chicken and beef. He knew that sometimes, the colored folks who lived to the north of town ate possum and raccoon. But he never knew anyone that ate goat.

  "Do you speak any Spanish?” Javier asked out of the blue.

  "No,” replied Lee. He didn't know anyone who spoke Spanish or ate goat, until today.

  "Lastima,” said Javier. “That means it's a shame. You're missing it. This is such a beautiful song."

  Though the music had started out fast, its rhythm instrument had slowed to a lulling throb. The singer, though Lee didn't understand a word, was obviously upset about something, and his melancholy wailing was long and tremulous, sounding on the verge of tears.

  Javier translated. “It's about a man sitting alone in a bar. Everything has gone wrong for him. His woman doesn't love him anymore. So he's just sitting in the chair getting drunk and crying out his story to anyone who'll listen. It's called, ‘Estoy Sentado Aqui.’ I'm Sitting Here is what it means in English. But it means much more in Espanol."

  Lee took another great gulp from his glass and listened. It seemed after Javier's description he could almost understand the words, such was the singer's sorrow.

  "How'd you end up in Lenoir?” Lee asked, pulling himself free of the song.

  Javier shook his head, and then chuckled. “I don't know. Juana and me, we picked fruit everywhere, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina. Always we followed the crops. Sometimes, right after a baby was born we'd settle somewhere, and I'd work doing anything I could find. But, I started to get old. You'll see,” he pointed to Lee and looked down his finger at him as though squinting down the barrel of a gun. “You'll get old too, if you're lucky."

  The singer on the record was reaching the depths of his depression and was pealing off some Aha's and Ayee's so that everyone in three counties could hear. Javier joined in, chorusing with the crying wails, throwing his head back and raising his face to the sky. It was plain to Lee that Javier had a lot of practice at this sort of thing.

  Javier ceased his crying and drained the beer he had in his hand. He grabbed another, and expertly popped the top off the bottle by using the arm of the chair to catch the edge of the cap. With one quick slap of his free hand down on the wrist of the one holding the bottle secure, the cap flew away.

  Lee was impressed.

  "What about you, amigo?” Javier's Mexican accent was starting to slur. “I been in this town ten years. I lived on the north side with the Negroes ‘til I saved the money to buy this house.” He sat up and waved his bottle around expansively. “I been here a year, and I never seen you much before a week or two ago?"

  Once again, the words Javier used echoed in Lee's head. Most the white people in town called the colored people terrible names when they weren't around and Nigras or Coloreds when they were. Javier's pronunciation was “Naygrros.” Just the sound of it was almost as though this Mexican man's concept of the colored folks was something different than anything Lee had ever imagined. There was nothing racial or discriminatory. They were simply what they were. This secret idea of simple and unbiased acceptance seemed to be caught up in the smoothly sounding foreign word.

  Lee drained the last of his glass of Coke, leaning it back carefully to get the last drop, but careful to not let the ice slide down into his face. “There's not much to it,” he answered. “My grandma died and we inherited her house. I used to live in Pickford Acres before."

  "How come I never seen you when you visit your grandma?"

  Lee hated to go into this. He always wanted to start with it wasn't his fault. Instead, he just said, “My grandma didn't like my dad. You know. Like you and Juana's dad."

  Javier nodded, the beer just inches from his lips. He didn't take a drink. Instead, he took it away and said, “I know. I know. Juana's family didn't like me at all. In Mexico, the family is everything. You can't depend on anything but your family. Here though, things are different."

  Javier looked ready to burst into another round
of Aiee's, had the record been at that point in the song, he probably would have. Right then, Lee might have joined in as well.

  "What were you doing in the road the other night, when I almost run you over?” asked Javier, breaking the tension.

  Lee had tried to forget about that evening, consciously pushing it from his mind whenever the memory crept back around. He'd just been acting like a baby, he'd told himself.

  "My Mom sent me to the store to get some sugar.” He looked down at the ground instead of at Javier.

  Javier shook his head solemnly. “You walked from your house to Little's? Down that road? Alone?"

  "I ran,” said Lee.

  "I don't blame you,” Javier crossed himself using the hand holding the bottle.

  Watching this big man make this quick movement startled Lee.

  "You ever get afraid?” asked Javier.

  Lee started to lie, but the sincere concern in Javier's bloodshot eyes was real. His great black mustache sagged under its own weight, drawing a sad curve down, dragging at the corners of his mouth.

  "Well ... I...” he almost started to let it out but couldn't.

  "Me, I don't much like that any of that place.” Javier gestured with his bottle in the direction of the Ballard house. “When we worked there cutting off the limbs from those poor trees, I could feel the mal sentido, the bad feelings. I think that's why I could afford to buy this place. No one else wanted to live here. To live so close."

  Lee couldn't believe what he was hearing coming from a grown man. The Ballard place was something only the kids worried about, or so he thought.

  "I wouldn't want to be there at night,” added Javier. “You probably don't know but the Yaqees, the Indians in Old Mexico, they believe the world changes at night. I don't know if it's true everywhere, but I know for a fact it's true in some places. And that, I know, is one of those places. We had more accidents doing that job for that loco old man, Senor Ballard. One man lost his arm, chopped clean off, when the chain saw kicked back.” Javier had suddenly sat forward, leaning in towards Lee. For effect he chopped his hand down on his arm above the elbow. “Johnson, he was a good man; he was up in this one tree, just taking off the small limbs like we'd been told. That chain saw, it jumped up like another hand had grabbed it.” He held up his hand up as though to swear an oath. “I never seen nothing like it, and I been cutting trees a long time. It's like that saw just raised up and came after him."

  Lee's eyes were wide.

  "Two of my men who saw it quit, and wouldn't come back.” Javier looked Lee in the eye and shook his head slowly for effect. “I wrapped my belt tight around Johnson's arm to stop the blood. We took the arm with him to the hospital. I had to put it in my back seat. But there wasn't anything the doctors could do.” He shook his head again even more slowly this time. “That place has a bad history from way back. Most say it started with that old Indian, Osia."

  Lee leaned in closer. This was something new. Most always he loved history. Some kids claimed it was boring; but to Lee it was nothing but stories, true stories.

  "You don't know about Osia?” Javier asked a curious look passing across his face.

  Lee shook his head. For some reason he felt more comfortable using nods and head shakes with Javier, though he knew the man could understand his English.

  "I got to go check the cabrito again,” Javier said, struggling to get his feet in the right spot to heave himself out of the chair. “You wait ‘til I get back. Then I'm going to tell you about that old Indian."

  The great volume of Coke Lee had drunk was starting to weigh heavily on his bladder. “Javier, is there a bathroom I could use?"

  Javier already had the pit open and was again basting the leg with generous amounts of the thick sauce. He pulled his head out of the smoke and looked back over his shoulder, pointing with his free hand, towards the brush that surrounded the cleared area around the house. “Where ever you like."

  Lee felt a bit awkward. It's not like he had never peed outdoors. It's just he'd never had an adult tell him to. He had really expected to be told to go to a bathroom inside or at least an outhouse. Still he really needed to go. Getting up from the crate he looked to the thick bushes and scrubby grass to the side of the road. He walked over a few feet, out of what passed for Javier's yard. Turning his back to the house, he looked around once to make sure Juana hadn't just stepped outside.

  When he was done, he turned to find that Javier was just closing the lid of the record player. They met back at the lawn chair. Javier drained his beer before sagging into the chair. Lee moved his empty glass to the side and scooted the crate in closer.

  Deftly, Javier popped another bottle cap off, leaving only one beer remaining. “This one's not so cold,” he said taking a sip. “But after a few, it don't make much difference. And a warm beer is better than walking back to the house."

  Javier settled himself in, stretching his legs out and crossing his boots at the ankles, “I heard about Osia, one night not long after I had first come here around 1950. I was working with some other men clearing brush at one of the big farms way out west of town along the Yalahalla. I was the only Mexican,” he smiled at this. “The rest were ‘Naygros,’ and this one white man who called himself Porter."

  Lee noticed again how Javier had pronounced the word Negroes. As with the word cabrito, Lee let it repeat a few times, rolling over in his head.

  "This Porter, he lived in a shack somewhere back in the deep woods to the south. He was older than any of us, but you never seen any man so tough. He could outwork any ten men. And too, he looked white, but he claimed to be part Cherokee."

  Javier held up his arm for Lee to see. “He wasn't brown like me, but kind of gray, like a sick man."

  Javier put his arm down and rubbed at his skin. “We'd been working with teams of mules pulling stumps and clearing some acres where the ground is real soft and the snakes are as thick as the mosquitoes. They couldn't get any heavy equipment back in there, not even a tractor. And we were too far out to go back into town at night, so we camped out for more than a week. The rest of us would eat our meal and fall down exhausted on our blankets, but old Porter never seemed to get tired. He had this shiny harmonica that he kept special, wrapped in a red bandanna. He'd sit near the fire cross-legged, while the rest of us were too sore to move, and play that thing all night. He could play, too. Sometimes he'd make it moan so long and sad and blue, each note would cry out slow and thick, like the sap that oozes out of a pine tree, when the summer gets real hot.

  "This one night, I remember it was a Friday, ‘cause we were going to finish up on Saturday and get back to town on Sunday. One of the Naygroes, Bailey I think his name was, had found an arrowhead in the roots of a big, old cypress stump we'd pulled that afternoon. Since Porter claimed to be an Indian, Bailey showed it to him. Porter took it and cupped it in his big right hand, shaking it like a pair of dice. Back and forth he shook it, pulling his hand in and out, making circles before his chest and then over his head. Finally, he put his hand to his ear and carefully opened it, just a crack, like he was afraid it might escape and fly away. I remember all of us sitting around the fire watching the light flicker across his face. Like it must have been a hornet in there instead of that arrowhead, he threw it down on the ground just like he'd been stung, and jumped back. ‘Osia,’ was what he said."

  Javier stopped and took a drink from his beer.

  Lee almost said, “And?” He sat wringing his fingers impatiently while Javier enjoyed his long sip.

  Javier smiled, when he saw Lee's face. He took another sip, then slowly began anew. “Bailey started to pick it up, but something about how Porter had flung it down and stepped back, made him stop even as he reached down for it. Then there was this loud crack, and the groan and swoosh of a big tree breaking on its own way off somewhere deep, back in the woods, falling, dragging the smaller ones down with it as it died."

  "Have you ever heard a tree fall in the woods?” he asked Lee, suddenly look
ing more serious than drunk.

  Lee shook his head.

  "It's a scary sound. It makes you feel small and alone,” Javier's eyes wide. Lee could almost see the memories of that night moving in the dark brown circles that were the centers. “It's a sound that reminds you there's things out there you don't want to know."

  Javier looked around at the brush surrounding his house, and Lee followed suit.

  The old Mexican grinned again. “I'm telling you, everyone's eyes got big, just like yours are right now.” He laughed a little at Lee's response, but kept on. “We was all looking out into the dark, towards where we thought the sound had come from, except Porter, who kept his eye on that arrowhead. He made some kind of sign with his hand before his face, drawing his fingers from above his eyes, down along his nose, and then pointed at the thing lying in the dirt with his two fingers split wide and twitching."

  Javier traded his beer from his right to his left hand. Then he stuck out his arm, spreading his index and middle fingers wide, and let them wobble up and down.

  Lee's mouth fell open.

  "Next thing you know, ol’ Porter snatches up a stick and flicks that arrowhead into the fire. Bailey, I knew he had wanted to keep it, but he didn't say a thing. Then Porter did something none of us expected. He grabbed a stick from out of the fire, and drew the red coal at the end down along his palm where the arrowhead had touched his skin. And I'm telling you, boy, he burnt himself. You could hear it sizzle. You could smell it. Then he held the stick out towards Bailey as though he wanted him to do the same."

  "What'd Bailey do?” Lee was sitting on the edge of his crate.

  "Bailey, he jumped back, holding his hand with his other so's to protect it. So Porter just tosses the stick back in the fire and goes and sits down on his blanket without saying another word."

  "Of course, the rest of us are all half loco after seeing this,” Javier continued. “Especially Bailey, who kept looking at his hand, opening and closing it, rolling the fingers out and back, trying to see if maybe there was something there, some kind of mark."