by Max Wilde
When Gene and Skye had been taken in by the sheriff and his barren wife—sister to their dead mother—there had been no hint that the couple, then in late middle-age, had enjoyed vividly carnal pleasures behind the closed door of this very bedroom.
But Gene sat, stoic. He owed Lavender this vigil, owed it to the uncle who had mentored him and taught him all there was to know about good and evil and the strengths and weaknesses of men.
It was only natural that Gene had joined the sheriff’s department when he graduated from high school and for years it was understood that when Lavender hung up his badge Gene would succeed him.
Before, Gene would’ve assumed this position as his right, determined to continue the work of his uncle. Now it was tainted and he wished he had a God out there to pray to for a miracle. That the rampaging cancer would go into remission and Milton Lavender would rise up and continue with his duties, leaving Gene in the comfortable role of understudy.
But there was no God and there would be no miracles. The old man would die and Gene would run for sheriff. It was so ordained. And Gene, to protect himself and his foundling sister, would become the pawn of Dellbert Drum, allowing the toxic fruits of Drum’s and Tincup’s labors safe passage through his county to the interstate and the city.
It was the price he had to pay, he understood, for the lies he’d told. For the secret that had made him silent and inward. For allowing himself to believe those lies. Believing the thing that had happened that one night would never happen again.
The vibration of the cell phone in Gene’s pocket released him from the bedside and he passed the old woman, dressed in head-to-toe black like no nurse he had ever known, who hovering in the shadows like the very angel of death.
When Gene saw the babysitter’s name flashing on caller ID he felt dread take him low.
“What’s wrong, Maria? Is it Timmy?”
He’d called her on his way over here, told her to keep the doors locked. Told her to call him if Skye came home early.
“No, no, Mr. Martindale. Timmy is sleeping. It is just my mother, she is sick and there is nobody with her—”
“I’m on my way,” he said killing the call.
Gene stood a moment, staring into the darkened bedroom that had once been his, thinking of death and loss, and his son’s sleeping face came to him, all he had left of the woman he’d loved with such a consuming passion that when he lost her he’d become unhinged.
Gene sighed away these memories and returned to the doorway of Lavender’s room. The old woman looked up at Gene as she calibrated the morphine dripping into the sheriff’s shrunken arm. Gene had exchanged nothing more than nods and grunts with her in the week since she’d stepped from the rear of the ambulance that had ferried Lavender home to die from the hospital in the state capital up north, but he found her constant, mute, presence reassuring.
He nodded again and she may have dipped her head in reply. He retrieved his hat from the stand by the front door, hanging beside Lavender’s finger-shaped old Stetson. Gene took just a moment to set his hat in the glass of a faded family portrait and let himself out, unconsciously adjusting the hang of his sidearm as he walked across to the cruiser, ready to face the thing he’d once called his sister.
For the first few miles it was demonic energy that drove Skye across the desert, her eyes unnaturally sharp, her enhanced night vision turning the rutted landscape to a silvery version of daylight. Then, as she ran off The Other, she felt fatigue and slowed her pace until she was walking, darkness crowding her, taking care with her footing on the rocky plain.
But enough of The Other still coursed through her veins to allow Timmy to come her. Not in a memory, not in her imagination. He was there, with her, screaming and calling her name.
Adrenaline kicked in and Skye ran through her fatigue, toward the double row of streetlights that flanked the dirt road like a landing strip, leading her home. Late in the last century their ranch was subdivided and sold off to developers for a suburb that had died on the drawing board, the bankrupt speculators disappearing before Gene saw a dime, these fizzing and blinking lampposts all that remained.
She got home at the same time as her brother did, parking his cruiser under the basketball hoop, staring at her as she came up the driveway sweating and panting, his eyes on her torn T-shirt.
“Is Timmy okay?” she asked, standing with her hands on her knees, drinking air.
“Sure. I spoke to Maria a few minutes ago. Why?”
“I need to check,” she said, heading toward the front door.
“Stay here,” he said, blocking her with an outstretched arm, and she knew it wasn’t because he was protecting her from any danger. He was protecting his son from her.
Gene ran for the stairs and Skye stood in the living room as Maria gathered her knitting and her DVDs, not hearing a word of the girl’s chatter. Only knew the babysitter had gone when the room was quiet. Skye caught her reflection in the ornate mirror that hung above the fireplace, her hair was wild and she had a smear of something that could only be blood on her cheek.
Hearing Gene’s boots on the stairs she rubbed at her face with the hem of her T-shirt, hoping, as she turned to him, that the blood was gone.
“He’s fine. Sleeping,” Gene said. “What got you so panicked?”
She shook her head. “Just a feeling. Nothing. I was being stupid.”
He stared at her, then nodded and sat down on one of the blue and white striped chairs his wife had bought not long after they were married.
“Sit,” he said.
She sat facing him. His eyes were sunken in his head, the creases in his face deeper than she had ever seen them. He looked nearer fifty than thirty.
“What happened last night, with those men?” he said.
“I told you.”
He shook his head. “This is no time for your lies.”
“I’m not lying, Gene.”
“You know what I was doing with Dellbert Drum earlier?” She didn’t reply. “He was at that crime scene last night. He found your eyeglasses.”
She felt as if she was about to choke. Forced herself to breathe. “What’s he going to do with them?”
“Nothing. If I co-operate.”
Gene closed his eyes for a second and Skye saw how close he was to breaking. She reached forward and took his hand. He pulled it away as if he’d touched flame.
“I’m asking again, Skye. What happened?”
“I can’t remember it all. Just bits.”
“Then tell me what you can remember.”
She told him about the men in the diner. About them following her in the car and surrounding her in the desert.
Then she shook her head. “After that I don’t remember anything until I got home. Covered in blood.”
He nodded, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger.
“What did I do to them, Gene?” she asked.
He looked at her, his eyes blank. “Tore them apart. Decapitated them. Dismembered them. Ate their flesh and their innards.”
She started to shake, put her hands to her face. Felt the tears on her skin.
“The night Ma and Pa died, there weren’t no drifters, were there?”
“No.”
“I did that?”
“To Pa, yes. He’d already killed Ma.”
“Why did you lie, Gene? About what I did?”
“You saved my life and you were my sister. I loved you.” His use of the past tense like a blow to her. “I wanted to believe that it would never happen again.”
“But it did.”
“Yes.”
“What am I, Gene?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you are.” He looked at her, then his gaze drifted out toward the darkness. When his eyes returned to her, they were cold. “What I do know is that I can’t have you in this house no more. Can’t have you near Timmy.”
“I wouldn’t hurt him. I love him.”
“M
aybe you do, but the other thing . . .” He shook his head. “I want you to leave town. Get the bus to the city in the morning. It’ll be best for all of us.”
“And you’re going to carry on with your lies about me?”
“You saved my life. I owe you that.”
“And this thing with Drum?”
“Everything has a price, Skye. That’s the price of my silence and my lies.”
“When do you want me to go?”
“Now. Pack a bag and call Minty. Tell her we’ve had a falling out. Hell, tell her I’m a bastard and you can’t be under the same roof as me. But just go.”
She stood, suddenly dizzy, and had to catch herself with a hand on the back of the chair. “Can I say goodbye to Timmy?”
“No.”
“What’ll you tell him?”
“I’ll think of something. That’s not your concern.”
She wanted to fall at his feet and beg him, make all sorts of promises. But she knew he was right. And she understood why she’d heard Timmy, crying, terrified. He was in danger. In danger from her. He hadn’t been calling her, he’d been screaming her name in fear.
She turned and walked up the stairs and didn’t look at Timmy’s door, even when something seized her heart and tore it from her chest, just as she’d torn out the hearts of those men in the desert.
17
As Reverend Jimmy Tincup lay on his back on the bed in his room at the motel, naked, watching his penis—until seconds before lying useless and slug-like across his slack belly, the way it had these last months—rear up, the foreskin gradually retracting to reveal the throbbing mauve hood, he felt his faith restored. The hydraulic effect of the blood pumping into his manhood brought with it a commensurate swelling of his belief in his maker. And a sense of his own omnipotence.
Whether it was the effect of the baby-blue pill he had swallowed with mescal straight from the bottle (forcing away the all-to-obvious resemblance between the shriveled worm floating in the piss-colored liquid and his unresponsive cock) or the jolt of lust he felt as Marisol applied paint to the face of the child whore, was of no concern to him. He was hard. The weeks of flaccidity and frustration were over.
The lack of power in his penis a mirror of the lassitude and torpor that had swamped him. He’d felt like a sailing ship becalmed on some endless yellow ocean, and wondered if he would ever emerge from this depression. If the years of insults and slights, the loss of his flock and his reputation (Tincup reduced to a meth-cooking whoremonger in this desolate borderland) had finally overwhelmed him. Even the comparisons with Moses in the desert that he’d drawn to cheer himself had no effect, and his prayers had increasingly come to feel like a conversation with himself.
Then Drum—the venal Goliath—had brought forth a sign. A message. The Martindale girl’s eyeglasses winking at Tincup on the porch, signaling that his banishment here in the desert was drawing to an end.
What she was he did not know, nor did he care to know. Even if she was the very Devil incarnate, she was a boon. A gift. Nothing less than a blessing. And his mind, more agile than it had been in years, was already formulating a strategy to win back the prestige and riches he had lost. With that knowledge came desire, and as Tincup stared over his fat penis at the reflection of the child’s face in the mirror, he felt his full powers restored.
A faint cloud of bluish smoke hovered around the bedside lamp that was the only light in the room. A glass meth pipe, a sugary little trail of white powder and a Milky Way matchbook (printed back in the optimistic 1950s, showing a cartoon rocket against an acne-burst of stars) were evidence of the drug Marisol had fed to the child.
The girl had coughed and retched after the first puff, and Marisol had taken her from Tincup’s sight lest she offend him and douse his arousal. Taken her to the bathroom, where he’d heard water running and the toilet flushing, before they’d returned and Marisol seated the stunned girl at the make-up mirror.
Marisol had filled another pipe and sat beside Tincup on the bed as she smoked it—he never touched his product—sucking so hard on the glass that her cheeks kissed. She held the smoke in her lungs, little tendrils escaping her nose and pursed lips, before she leaned back, her black hair falling almost to the bed, closed her eyes and opened her mouth, releasing a boiling cloud of smoke that left her face invisible for a few seconds. When the smoke cleared Marisol sat slumped, staring at the wallpaper inches from her nose—interlocking atomic-age geometric shapes—that peeled from the plaster. Then she smiled and said something in Spanish that Tincup, occupied with his own medication, didn’t catch.
Energized, Marisol had busied herself with painting the child. Pink lips. Blue eye shadow. Rouge accentuating the flat plains of the girl’s peasant face.
Marisol nodded and said “Bueno” and then, “Bueno! Bueno!” when she looked across at the blood-engorged man.
Tincup raised his arms wide, palms to the heavens, and said, “Come to me.”
Marisol eased the child to her feet, the girl unsteady, her dark eyes unfocused, and lifted the dress over her head, revealing the flat boyish body beneath. Then she untied her own robe and let it fall, heavy breasts asway as she led the child to the preacher man on the bed.
18
“What men just plain won’t accept is that we’re driven by the same urges they are,” Minty said. Skye didn’t reply, lulled almost to sleep by Minty’s hand stroking her hair. “And those desires you have, girl, they’re one hunnerd percent natural.”
Oh no they’re not, Skye thought, but she held her tongue.
Minty, still caressing Skye’s hair as she fired up a smoke one-handed, said, “Now your brother’s a good man but Lord knows he’s cold.” Drawing on the cigarette, little furrows creasing her powdered skin and red lips. “I know what he seen and done the day his wife died would have driven most men mad but that don’t change the fact that he’s an emotional retard.”
“Gene’s been good to me, Minty. And he loves Timmy.”
“He can’t understand that you’re a woman now,” Minty said, as if Skye hadn’t spoken. “With a woman’s needs.” She puffed some more, then set the cigarette in the groove of a porcelain ashtray, the filter tip branded with lipstick, and hugged Skye to her. “You just take it nice and easy. It’ll all work itself out and you can stay here just as long as you like.”
Not since her mother died had Skye been cradled in a woman’s arms. Her mother’s sister had done her duty by the foundling child, but Aunt Ellie had not been demonstrative. A kiss on the cheek on birthdays and Christmas the extent of her displays of affection. So lying on Minty’s big bed, on a plump floral comforter, the older woman holding her and touching her hair, Skye was lulled into a sense of unearned comfort.
The room was almost oppressively feminine with its frilly cushions, rose petal wallpaper and vanity table with curly legs and hinged scalloped mirrors spread like wings, the surface a litter of tubes and lotions and lipsticks and face paint, the air in the room thick with Minty’s perfume and cigarettes.
From the moment Minty had rattled up to Gene’s house in her little Japanese car—Skye standing outside with her backpack at her feet—she’d been sure that Gene had thrown his sister out because she’d dallied with the man in the RV. Skye hadn’t argued. What else was she meant to tell Minty? That Gene had ordered her out because he was afraid she’d butcher his son like she’d butchered the men in the old Dodge? And butchered her own daddy, way back when?
“How was he, anyway?” Minty asked.
Skye stared up at Minty, who had reclaimed the cigarette and was squinting at her through the smoke.
“Who?”
“Mr. Brad Pitt, honey, the love God in the RV.”
“Nothing happened.”
Minty waved that away with her cigarette, a pellet of ash falling onto the comforter, Minty cursing and scuffing it away with her painted fingers. Skye used the opportunity to rise from the bed and take a drink from the mug of lukewarm coffee standing among the d
ebris on the make-up table. She sat down on the stool, nervous that she’d get too comfortable. Too trusting.
Minty finished the business with the ash, and lay on her stomach propped up on her elbows, her stockinged feet kicking up behind her like a sorority girl. “Honey, this ain’t my first hoedown. You and Mr. Pretty all alone in that big old RV? Somethin’ musta happened.” Sucking on the smoke, one eye closed. “Details, girl, gimme details.”
“We kissed,” Skye said.
“Kissed? That’s all?”
Well, I tore a chunk of flesh from his neck.
Skye nodded. “That’s all.”
“You get scared?”
Skye looked down, worrying at a button on her shirt. Nodding.
“Ah, baby, that’s natural too. Don’t you fret, there’ll be another time. Plenty of other times, pretty little thing like you.” Minty stood. “I’m gonna get me a teensy-weensy vodka tonic. Can I fix you one?” Skye shook her head. “Mnnnn, maybe better I don’t, your lawman brother’s likely to jail my butt for corrupting a minor.”
Minty left the room and Skye heard the clink of a bottle and the slam of the icebox. She stared at herself in the mirror, the soft light giving her a sharper view of her face than she’d ever had in the chipped looking glass back in her room in Gene’s house. Something had changed. Her eyes were clearer, the blue more intense. The little pockets of puppy fat padding her cheeks and jaw were gone, and her skin seemed stretched tighter over her bones. The scatter of zits that had traced her hairline had disappeared.
My new diet, she thought. And came close to laughing.
That was different, too, she realized. A confidence. A boldness that she’d never felt before. Then she flashed on Timmy’s face, sleeping. Smelt his milky smell as she got him into his pjs and the confidence evaporated and she saw a desperate and loveless life stretching ahead of her.