Haunted: Dark Delicacies® III

by Del Howison

  Maybe one good bounce before the ball catches me, I duck low. There, the rotted trunk of a cottonwood has busted and fallen, and I stuff the heavy jar deep into the boggy center of the roots, the mud cave where the tree’s pulled out from the ground on one side. The gold, my gold, hidden. The ball probably doesn’t see because it keeps after me as I run faster, jumping and crashing my way through blackberry vines and saplings, stomping up sprays of muddy water until I hit the gravel of Turner Road. My shoes chew up the gravel, my every long jump shakes the water from my clothes. The cemetery sprinkler water replaced by dog piss replaced by Skinners Creek replaced by me sweating, the legs of my jeans rub me, the denim stiff with stuck-on dust. Me, panting so hard I’m ready to blow both lungs out my mouth, turned inside out, my innards puked out like pink bubble-gum bubbles.

  Midway between one running step and the next, the moment both my legs are stretched out, one in front and the other in back of me, in midair, something slams me in the back. Stumbling forward, I recover, but this something smacks me again, square in my backbone between my shoulder blades. Just as hard, arching my back, something hits me, a third go-round. It hits the back of my head, hard as a foul ball or a bunt in softball. Fast as a line drive fresh off the sweet spot of a Louisville Slugger, slamming you dead-on, this something hits me another time. The stink of crankcase oil. Shooting stars and comets swimming in my eyes, I pitch forward, still on my feet, running full tilt.

  I’m winded, sucking air, and blinded with sweat; my feet tangle together, the something wings me one more time, beaning the top of my skull, and I go down. The bare skin of my elbows plow the gravel. My knees and face dive into the dust of my landing. My teeth grit together with the dirt in my mouth, and my eyes squeeze shut. The mystery something punches my ribs, slugs my kidneys as I squirm on the road. This something bounces, hard, to break my arms. It keeps bouncing, piledriving its massive impact, drilling me in my gut, slugging my ears while I curl tight to protect my nuts.

  Past the moment I could still walk back and show the ball where the gold’s hidden, almost to the total black of being knocked out, I’m pounded. Beat on. Until a gigantic honk wakes me up. A second honk saves me, so loud it echoes back from the nowhere over the horizon, all the bottomland cottonwoods and tall weeds all around me filled with Hank’s loud car horn. Hank’s whitewall tires skid to a stop.

  Jenny’s voice says, “Don’t make him pissed off.” She says, “Just get in the car.”

  I pop open my eyes, glued with blood and dust, and the ball just sits next to me in the road. Hank’s pulled up, idling his engine. Under the car hood the engine revs, the pushrods banging and cams knocking.

  Looking up at Jenny, I spit blood. Pink drool leaks out, running down my chin, and my tongue can feel my chipped teeth. One eye almost swelled shut, I say, “Jenny?” I say, “Will you marry me?”

  The filthy tennis ball, waiting. Jenny’s dog, panting in the backseat of the car. The jar filled with gold, hidden where only I can find it.

  My ears glow hot and raw. My lips split and bleeding, I say, “If I can beat Hank Richardson just one game in tennis, will you marry me?”

  Spitting blood, I say, “If I lose, I’ll buy you a car. I swear.” I say, “Brand-new with electric windows, power steering, a stereo, the works …”

  The tennis ball sits, nested in the gravel, listening. Behind his steering wheel, Hank shakes his head side to side. “Deal,” Hank says. “Hell, yeah, she’ll marry you.”

  Sitting shotgun, her face framed in the car window, Jenny says, “It’s your funeral.” She says, “Now climb in.”

  Getting to my feet, standing, I stoop over and grab the tennis ball. For now, just something rubber filled with air. Not alive, in my hand the ball just feels wet with the creek water, soft with a layer of gravel dust. We drive to the tennis courts behind the high school, where nobody plays and the white lines look faded. The chain-link fences flake red rust, they were built so long ago. Weeds grow through the cracked concrete, and the tennis net sags in the middle.

  Jenny flips a quarter, and Hanks gets to serve first.

  His racquet whacks the ball, faster than I can see, into a corner where I could never reach, and Hank gets the first point. The same with his second point. The same with the whole first game.

  When the serve comes to me, I hold the tennis ball close by my lips and whisper my deal. My bargain. If the ball helps me win the match—to win Jenny—I’ll help with the gold. But if I lose to Hank, it can pound me dead and I’ll never tell where the gold is hidden.

  “Serve, already!” Hank yells. He says, “Stop kissing the damned ball….”

  My first serve drills Hank, ka-pow, in his nuts. My second takes out his left eye. Hank returns my third serve, fast and low, but the tennis ball slows to almost a stop and bounces right in front of me. With my every serve, the ball flies faster than I could ever hit it and knocks another tooth out of Hank’s stupid mouth. Any returns, the ball swerves to me, slows, and bounces where I can hit it back.

  No surprise, but I win.

  Even crippled as I look, Hank looks worse, his eyes almost swollen shut. His knuckles puffed up and scabbed over. Hank’s limping from so many drives straight to his crotch. Jenny helps him lie down in the backseat of his car so she can drive him home.

  I tell her, “Even if I won, you don’t have to go out with me….”

  And Jenny says, “Good.”

  I ask if it would make any difference if I was rich. Really super rich.

  And Jenny says, “Are you?”

  Sitting alone on the cracked tennis court, the ball looks red, stained with Hank’s blood. It rolls, making looping blood-red handwriting that reads, “Forget her.”

  I wait and wait, then shake my head. “No. I’m not rich.”

  After they drive away, I pick up the tennis ball and head back toward Skinners Creek. From under the roots of the downed cottonwood tree, I lift out the Mason jar heavy with gold coins. Carrying the jar, I drop the ball. As it rolls away, I follow. Rolling uphill, violating every law of gravity, the ball rolls all afternoon. Rolling through weeds and sand, the ball rolls into the twilight. All this time, I follow behind, lugging that jar of gold treasure. Down Turner Road, down Millers Road, north along the old highway, then westbound along dirt roads with no name.

  A bump rides the horizon, the sun setting behind it. As we get closer, the bump grows into a lump. A shack. From closer up, the shack is a house sitting in a nest of paint curls peeled off its wood by the weather and fallen to make a ring around its brick foundation. The same way dead skin peels off a sunburn. The bare wood siding curves and warps. On the roof, the tar paper shingles buckle and ripple. Stapled to the front door, a sheet of yellow-color paper says, “Condemned.”

  The yellow paper, turned more yellow by the sunset. The gold in the Mason jar, shining even deeper gold in the yellow light.

  The tennis ball rolls up the road, up the dirt driveway. It bounces up the brick steps, hitting the front door with a hollow sound. Bouncing off the porch, the ball beats the door again. From inside the house come footsteps, creaking and echoing on bare wood. From behind the closed door, the “Condemned” sign, a voice says, “Hello?”

  A witch voice, cracked and brittle as the warped wood siding. A voice faint as the faded colors of paint flaked on the ground.

  I knock, saying, “I have a delivery, I think….”

  The jar of gold, stretching my arm muscles into thin wire, into my bones almost breaking.

  The tennis ball bounces off the door, again, beating one drumbeat.

  The witch’s voice says, “Go away, please.”

  The ball bounces against the wood door, only now the sound is metal. A clack of metal. A clank. Across the bottom of the door stretches a slot framed in gold-colored metal with the word “Letters” written under it.

  Crouching down, then kneeling, I unscrew the Mason jar. Twisting off the cap, I put the lip of the jar against the “Letters” slot and tip the jar, s
haking it to loosen up the coins inside. Kneeling there on the front porch, I pour the gold through the slot in the door. The coins rattle and ring, tumbling inside and rolling across the bare floor. A jackpot spilling out where I can’t see. When the glass jar is empty, I leave it on the porch and start down the steps. Behind me, the doorknob pops, the snap of a lock turning, a deadbolt sliding open. The hinges creak, and a crack of inside darkness appears along one edge of the frame.

  From that inside darkness, the witch voice says, “My husband’s coin collection …”

  The tennis ball, sticky with Hank’s blood, coated with dirt, rolls along at my heels, following me the way Jenny’s dog follows her. Tagging along the way I used to follow Jenny.

  The witch voice says, “How did you find them?”

  From the porch, the voice says, “Did you know my husband?”

  The voice shouts, “Who are you?”

  But me, I only keep walking away.

  THE ARCHITECTURE OF SNOW

  DAVID MORRELL

  ON THE FIRST Monday in October, Samuel Carver, who was seventy-two and suddenly unemployed, stepped in front of a fast-moving bus. Carver was an editor for Edwin March & Sons, until recently one of the last privately owned publishing houses in New York.

  “To describe Carver as an editor is an understatement,” I said in his eulogy. Having indirectly caused his death, March & Sons, now a division of Gladstone International, sent me to represent the company at his funeral. “He was a legend. To find someone with his reputation, you need to go back to the nineteen twenties, to Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. It was Perkins who massaged Hemingway’s ego, helped Fitzgerald recover from hangovers, and realized that the two feet of manuscript Wolfe lugged into his office could be divided into several novels.”

  Standing next to Carver’s coffin at the front of a Presbyterian church in lower Manhattan, I counted ten mourners. “Carver followed that example,” I went on. “For much of the past five decades, he discovered an amazing number of major authors. He nurtured them through writer’s block and discouraging reviews. He lent them money. He promoted them tirelessly. He made them realize the scope of their creative powers. R. J. Wentworth’s classic about childhood and stolen innocence, The Sand Castle. Carol Fabin’s verse novel, Wagon Mound. Roger Kilpatrick’s Vietnam war novel, The Disinherited. Eventual recipients of Pulitzer Prizes, these were buried in piles of unsolicited manuscripts that Carver loved to search through.”

  Ten mourners. Many of the authors Carver had championed were dead. Others had progressed to huge advances at bigger publishers and seemed to have forgotten their debt to him. A few retired editors paid their respects. Publishers Weekly sent someone who took a few notes. Carver’s wife had died seven years earlier. They didn’t have children. The church echoed coldly. So much for being a legend.

  The official explanation was that Carver stumbled in front of the bus, but I had no doubt he committed suicide. Despite my praise about the past five decades, he hadn’t been a creative presence since his wife’s death. Age, ill health, and grief wore him down. At the same time, the book business changed so drastically that his instincts didn’t fit. He was a lover of long shots, with the patience to give talent a chance to develop. But in the profit-obsessed climate of modern publishing, manuscripts needed to survive the focus groups of the marketing department. If the books weren’t trendy and easily promotable, they didn’t get accepted. For the past seven years, George March, the grandson of the company’s founder, had loyally postponed forcing Carver into retirement, paying him a token amount to come to the office two days a week. The elderly gentleman had a desk in a corner where he studied unsolicited manuscripts and read newspapers. He also functioned as a corporate memory, although it was hard to imagine how stories about the good old days could help an editor survive in contemporary publishing. Not that it mattered—I was one of the few who asked him anything.

  Eventually, March & Sons succumbed to a conglomerate. Gladstone International hoped to strengthen its film-and-broadcast division by acquiring a publisher and ordering it to focus on novels suited for movies and TV series. The trade buzzword for this is “synergy.” As usually happens when a conglomerate takes over a business, the first thing the new owner did was downsize the staff, and Carver was an obvious target for elimination. Maybe he had felt that his former contributions made him immune. That would account for his stunned reaction when he came to work that Monday morning and got the bad news.

  “What am I going to do?” I heard the old man murmur. His liver-spotted hands shook as he packed framed photographs into a flimsy box. “How will I manage? How will I fill the time?” Evidently, he decided that he wouldn’t. The box in one hand, his umbrella in the other, he went outside and let the bus solve his problems.

  Because Carver and I seemed to be friends, the new CEO put me in charge of whatever projects Carver was trying to develop. Mostly, that meant sending a few polite rejection letters. Also, I removed some items Carver forgot in his desk drawer: cough drops, chewing gum, and a packet of Kleenex.

  * * *

  “Mr. Neal?”

  “Mmmm?” I glanced up from one of the hundreds of e-mails I received each day.

  My assistant stood in my office doorway. His black turtleneck and sports coat gave him the appearance of authority. Young, tall, thin, and ambitious, he held a book mailer.

  “This arrived for Mr. Carver. No return address. Should I handle it for you?”

  In theory, it was an innocent suggestion. But in the new corporate climate, I doubted there was any such thing as an innocent suggestion. When my assistant offered to take one of my duties, I wondered if it was the first step in assuming all of my duties. After Carver was fired, three other editors, each over fifty, got termination notices. I’m forty-six. Mr. Carver. Mr. Neal. I often asked my assistant to call me Tom. He never complied. “Mister” isn’t only a term of respect—it’s also a way of depersonalizing the competition.

  “Thanks, but I’ll take care of it.”

  Determined to stake out my territory, I carried the package home. But I forgot about it until Sunday afternoon after I had worked through several gut-busting boxes of submissions that included two serial-killer novels and a romantic saga about California’s wine country. The time-demanding tyranny of those manuscripts is one reason my wife had moved out years earlier. She said she lived as if she were single, so she might as well be single. Most days, I don’t blame her.

  A Yankees game was on television. I opened a beer, noticed the package on a side table, and decided to flip though its contents during commercials. When I tore it open, I found a manuscript. It was typed. Double-spaced in professional format. With unsolicited manuscripts, you can’t count on that. It didn’t reek of cigarette smoke or food odors, and that, too, was encouraging. Still, I was bothered not to find an introductory letter and return postage.

  The manuscript didn’t have the uniform typeface that word processors and printers create. Some letters were faint, others dark. Some were slightly above or below others. The author had actually put this through a typewriter, I realized in amazement. It was a novel called The Architecture of Snow. An evocative title, I decided, although the marketing department would claim that bookstore clerks would mistakenly put it in the arts-and-architecture section. The writer’s name was Peter Thomas. Bland. The marketing department preferred last names that had easily remembered concrete nouns like “King,” “Bond,” or “Steele.”

  With zero expectation, I started to read. Hardly any time seemed to pass before the baseball game ended. My beer glass was empty, but I didn’t remember drinking its contents. Surprised, I noticed the darkness outside my apartment’s windows. I glanced at my watch. Ten o’clock? Another fifty pages to go. Eager to proceed, I made a sandwich, opened another beer, shut off the TV, and finished one of the best novels I’d read in years.

  You dream about something like that. An absolutely p
erfect manuscript. Nothing to correct. Just a wonderful combination of hypnotic tone, powerful emotion, palpable vividness, beautiful sentences, and characters you never want to leave. The story was about a ten-year-old boy living alone with his divorced father on a farm in Vermont. In the middle of January, a blizzard hits the area. It knocks down electricity and telephone lines. It disables cell phone relays. It blocks roads and imprisons the boy and his father.

  * * *

  “The father starts throwing up,” I told the marketing/editorial committee. “He gets a high fever. His lower right abdomen’s in terrific pain. There’s a medical book in the house, and it doesn’t take them long to realize the father has appendicitis. But they can’t telephone for help, and the father’s too sick to drive. Even if he could, his truck would never get through the massive drifts. Meanwhile, with the power off, their furnace doesn’t work. The temperature in the house drops to zero. When the boy isn’t trying to do something for his father, he works to keep a fire going in the living room, where they retreat. Plus, the animals in the barn need food, the cows need milking. The boy has to struggle through the storm to reach the barn and keep them alive. With the pipes frozen, he can’t get water from the well. He melts snow in pots near the fire. He heats canned soup for his dad, but the man’s too sick to keep it down. Finally, the boy hears a snowplow on a nearby road. In desperation, he dresses as warmly as he can. He fights through drifts to try to reach the road.”

  “So basically it’s a young adult book,” the head of marketing interrupted without enthusiasm. Young adult is trade jargon for kid’s story.

  “A child might read it as an adventure, but an adult will see far more than that,” I explained. “The emotions carry a world of meaning.”