by Max Wilde
Tincup threw clothes into a bag, his hands shaking. He lifted a picture of the nativity scene from the wall of the motel room and unlocked the safe hidden behind it, removing a skinny pile of dollars. No great fortune but sufficient for him to lose himself in the land down south, with its porous border and lax morals.
If Skye Martindale—or whatever she was—had laid waste to the man-mountain Drum, then Tincup wasn’t about to dally and be next item on her menu.
“Where you go?” Marisol said, standing in the doorway, dressed in a pink nightgown.
He didn’t answer, just zipped the bag and shouldered her aside, heading for the Eldorado parked beside the empty pool.
“Hey, motherfucker,” she chased him down and seized his elbow.
Tincup threw the punch as he spun, a nice looping left—way they’d taught him when he’d boxed in juvenile hall all those years ago, before he’d crawled under a revivalists tent flap and found God. A left that took the big whore on the chin and sat her on her ass in the dirt.
He popped the trunk and stowed the bag and was opening the car door when a Chevrolet turned in from the road, stopping beneath the sign, blocking his path. He saw a blonde woman driving and a young man in a cap and sunglasses seated beside her.
“We’re closed,” Tincup said, waiting for the Chevy to reverse.
It didn’t. The man unfolded himself from the car, moving slowly, as if he’d recently been in an accident.
“Reverend, no time for an old friend?”
He took off the cap and dropped it back into the car, reaching behind his head and freeing his ponytail, shaking his hair until it hung to his shoulders. Then he slipped off the sunglasses and fixed those unforgettable eyes on the preacher.
Tincup, hand on the doorframe of the Eldorado, thought that the horror he had witnessed over at Drum’s house had left him unhinged, because—surely to God—the man who took form before him was locked away forever in a fortress for the criminally insane.
“Junior?” Tincup said.
“In the flesh.”
Junior Cotton advanced, lurching rather than walking, a smile parting the hair on his face. Tincup shrank back against the car, his arms raised in supplication.
“I had no part in what happened, Junior. It was all the work of Martindale.”
“I never said you did, Reverend.” Junior turned to the blonde girl. “Do it, Della. Do it now.”
The girl said, “Cool,” and stepped in toward Tincup, and he saw her arm lift and something burned as it caught the sun, then he felt a blade enter his flesh just below his throat and travel down, till it bumped against the buckle of his belt.
Tincup’s white shirt turned red and fell open as his viscera, no longer contained by skin and flesh, spilled out. Desperately trying to repack himself, he turned and would have called for Marisol had his mouth not been filled with something warm and salty.
He stumbled away from the Cadillac, his vision strangely keen, seeing every crack in the broken paving round the drained swimming pool. Then his legs failed him and he plummeted down into empty deep end, landing among garbage, broken bottles, an old deck chair and two car tires.
He dragged himself to his knees, his hot insides bulging against his fingers, grunting out a prayer as the first missile struck him. He looked up and saw Marisol and the other whores ringing the swimming pool, black shapes against the burning sky, pelting him with loose slabs of paving.
Tincup was crawling toward the steps of the pool, a sausage of intestines dragging like a tail, when a chunk of concrete felled him and he died looking at the grinning skull of a dog.
49
As Timmy watched his daddy’s cruiser drive away he felt something in his belly, like when he was at Aunt Sally’s, and the sidewalk and the bright sunshine were gone and the Creepshow flashed him a scary-faced man smiling as he came out of darkness with a little silver knife.
Timmy had to bite back a scream and he almost ran after the car, shouting for his daddy to stop, but he woulda looked like a big wussy in front of his buddies who were kicking the soccer ball around on the field, calling to him to come and play.
So Timmy watched the car turn a corner and disappear and the whistle blew sharp and loud as Miss Marples called them together and split them into teams.
When his father had come to get him after school, Timmy had asked to let him stay for soccer practice. His daddy, face more serious even than it normally was, had thought a while and nodded and said he’d be back in an hour.
The whistle blew to start the practice game and the ball came to Timmy and his mind wasn’t there—he was still seeing the man’s dead eyes—and it slipped by, his friend Billy shouting at him, calling him a clown. Timmy scrambled after the ball and took it off another boy, bigger and slow as an old horse, and he let his legs and feet take over, and nobody could stop him as he darted and wove through four, five, six players and banged the ball into the net past the fat goalkeeper.
Face flushed with pleasure and palms stinging from highfives, Timmy backpedaled, moving out to the right of the field near the trees, just knowing that the goalie—feeling like a stooge—would give the ball an almighty thump.
And he did. Right over Timmy’s head and into the cottonwoods.
Timmy went after it, leaving the kids in their bright jerseys and Miss Marples’s screechy whistle behind.
He saw a shape in the trees and he slowed. Somebody picked up the ball and was walking into the shadows. Timmy stopped, then just enough sun poked through the leaves and he saw light hair and blue jeans. Skye. She was back.
He called her name and ran after her and she moved deeper into the trees with the ball, teasing him.
“Skye!” he shouted, running to where he saw her last.
When he came through the trees the grass ended and he was on sand and rock. He saw a car parked by the dirt road leading out into nothing. Timmy heard footsteps on gravel and he turned and saw Skye coming up behind him.
But it wasn’t Skye. It was some other girl.
Timmy had it in his head to run, but she threw the ball at him. “Here little guy, catch.”
He caught it and she was up to him real quick and she was holding something in her hand like a handkerchief and he thought she was going to blow her nose, but it was his nose that she put the cloth over, pressing hard, and Timmy dropped the ball and tried to fight her but she was too strong, and something sharp went up into his nostrils that made his eyes water, and as the whole world started to go soft and dark the Creepshow kicked in real strong, and Timmy saw dead people around the girl.
Too many dead people to count.
Gene, up in the bedroom of his house, some dark intuition still skulking at the edges of his consciousness, was eager to see the town in the rearview of his Jeep. He shed his uniform and lay the gun belt and star on the bed. He’d surrender them when he and Timmy passed the sheriff’s office on the way to the interstate.
Dressed in Levis, a T-shirt and a clean pair of Nikes, he grabbed clothes from the closet and threw them into a backpack. As he lifted the framed picture of a pregnant Marybeth from the bedside table he felt such emptiness that he was tempted to sink down onto the bed and cry tears enough for a country song.
But he trod hard on those feelings, tamping them down, sliding the photograph between layers of clothes to protect the glass. He zipped the pack, the buzz of the meshing teeth reminding him of how he’d zipped his dead wife into a body bag that day out in the desert.
Gene found himself back at the closet, lifting out the one garment of Marybeth’s that he’d kept: her nightgown, a birthday gift that he’d bought up in the city. He brought the silk to his face, felt the softness on his skin and could still detect traces of his dead wife’s fragrance on it. It took all his strength to return the nightgown to its hanger and leave the bedroom, dumping his backpack in the passageway.
He went into Timmy’s room and started shoving kid-sized clothes into a Spiderman pack. The soccer practice was a mercy,
giving Gene the time to do most of the preparation without distressing the boy, but he knew he’d have to face a barrage of unanswerable questions about where they were going and why, when he brought him home to let him choose a few toys and precious things to take with them.
Gene had no exact destination in mind. They would go far north, that much he knew. He had the notion to drive them into a vast, empty snowscape, as if the cold and the whiteness would bleach their memories of all darkness and pain.
Marybeth had made sure that they had each taken out life insurance when they married and when she died Gene had been shocked at the size of the payout. He’d never touched it. Felt it was blood money, resolved to keep it for Timmy’s education, so he’d left it in the care of a school friend who was an investment banker up in the city and the money had swelled, despite the turbulence in the world markets Gene saw reported on TV but didn’t try to understand.
He wasn’t rich but he wouldn’t have to worry about getting a job for a while. He’d leave the keys of the house with the town’s remaining realtor, a man reduced to working nights as a bartender to supplement his dwindling income. The realtor would store the household contents and go through the pretence of finding a buyer, but Gene knew that most likely the house would stand empty, at the mercy of the wind and the dust, like so many in the borderlands.
But he wouldn’t be here to see it.
His phone rang. “Martindale.”
“Uh, Gene, this is Dolly Marples.”
“Yes, Dolly.”
“Timmy was here at his soccer practice and he went after the ball into the trees by the side of the field and, Gene, he just never came back.”
The intuition that had been dogging him coalesced into hard terror.
“You see anyone, Dolly?” Gene said, rushing back to his bedroom, strapping on the gun belt.
“Not me, Gene, but one of the boys is pretty certain he saw Skye in the cottonwoods.”
Running down the stairs of the house Gene killed the call, speed-dialed the operator and asked for the bus company. When he was connected he identified himself and enquired if there had been any unusual behavior on the city-bound bus that morning.
“Well, sir, the driver reported that a passenger demanded he make an unscheduled stop and allow her to disembark.”
“You got a name for the passenger?”
“I surely do, and I can only imagine she is kin of yours.”
“Skye Martindale?”
“Yessir, that would be correct.”
“How far from the city was this?”
“Just shy of halfway.”
Gene was already firing up the cruiser by the time the call ended, speeding toward town, reaching for the microphone and speaking to Darlene the dispatcher.
“My boy Timmy’s been abducted at the school playing field. Suspect to be considered dangerous. All units to use necessary force.”
“10-4. Identity of the suspect?”
“Skye Martindale.”
“10-9, unit two.” Asking him to repeat himself.
“You heard me.”
A buzz of static. “Uh, that wouldn’t be your sister, Gene?” Darlene, in her consternation, losing her command of the Ten Code.
“Goddamit, yes, Darlene. That would be my sister. Now get this out to all units.”
Gene skidded to a halt by the soccer field and freed the Remington from the clips beneath the dash, pumped it and ran toward the teacher and the group of boys who stood in a huddle, staring at him.
50
The brat lay unconscious in the trunk of the Chevrolet and Junior Cotton feigned sleep, the cap pulled low over his eyes, his head resting against the side window of the car as Della drove into the twilight, the sky the color of a fading bruise.
Not Junior Cotton’s favorite time of the day. A time when old memories flickered and looped through his mind.
The gloaming, his mama had called it, this hour between sunset and dark. The witching hour that had so enchanted her in the summer months. A time when, if they were holed up in a motel, she’d wander out onto the porch, or stop the car if they were driving and stand alone a while, watching the world shrug on a coat of darkness.
Junior saw her clearly, that last evening, standing beside a field, her back to him as he waited in the car. She hugged herself and moved her upper body in the merest suggestion of a dance and he could just about hear her humming over the sound of the corn whispering in a slowly stirring breeze and the orchestra of night creatures tuning up.
Then she’d turned to him and waved and he knew she was smiling even though her face was in darkness. Mama came back to the car and the dome light clicked on and caught her perfect teeth as she slid in behind the wheel, smoothing her skirt under her. She reached across and hugged him, kissing his cheek.
She giggled and put a hand to her lips. “Oh, that beard of yours is getting to resemble a cheese grater, Junior. Where oh where did my little boy go?”
He laughed too, just shy of fourteen, his voice breaking and his body in the grip of a growth spurt—his shirts cuffs left short of his bony wrists and his ankles exposed beneath his ironed blue jeans.
She shut the door and the light died and she lit a cigarette, filling the car with the familiar scent of her Virginia Slims, the ones that had littered the ashtrays of his childhood, the butts stained red with her lipstick.
Mama started the car and pulled off the berm onto the blacktop, some back road linking two rural towns of no consequence, the yellow headlights leading them into the empty night.
She started singing the old Sinatra song, “In The Blue of Evening,” her voice pure and true, made just a little husky by her pack-a-day habit. The voice of a chanteuse.
Junior was lulled into a near sleep and it was only in the very last second, right before the impact, that he heard the howling engine of the pick-up truck running without lights that speed down a gravel farm road and ploughed straight into his mama’s door in an explosion of glass and tearing metal, their car flipping and tumbling, Mama unrestrained by a seatbelt—they’re designed by men, Junior, who have no notion of the female anatomy—flying out through the windshield, her feet left shoeless by the violence of the collision.
Junior, conscious but dazed, was suspended upside down, held by his seat belt. The only sound the plop of liquid dripping onto something metallic.
“Mama?” he said and when he received no answer he unclipped the belt and fell onto the roof of the car and crawled out through the shattered windshield.
The pick-up truck, crumpled and ripped, stood smoking off to one side, and in the beam of their car’s one surviving headlight he saw that the driver—the sole occupant—was slumped across the wheel. Junior had seen enough dead people to know this drunken redneck’s time had come.
Then Junior glimpsed something else at the very edge of the beam that was attracting a floorshow of moths and bugs: a heap of flesh and broken bones that he knew to be his mama, and when he approached and sank to his knees in her blood he saw that in the flight from the car a spur of metal had sliced her open from neck to sternum with the accuracy of a pathologist, the organs of her upper abdominal cavity (esophagus, trachea, lungs and heart) dumped out onto the asphalt.
The sight of these glistening innards, so intoxicating when they were removed from a butchered stranger, left him gagging, making little high-pitched whoops of grief.
Junior composed himself. He and his mama had made a pact, and that pact needed to be honored. He returned to their upturned car and found a flashlight in the glove box. After a short search he located the sealed Tupperware container that had kept their chicken sandwiches fresh, and emptied out the last crusts.
He went back to Mama and placed the container beside her. Then he opened the Swiss Army knife that he’d carried with him these last three years, taken off some hick kid in a flyblown town. Selecting the longest blade he severed the arteries and veins that connected the heart to his mother’s body and lifted the quivering organ and pla
ced it gently inside the plastic container, sealing the lid.
He carried the Tupperware back to the car and set it carefully on the blacktop while he rooted inside once more and found his duffel bag lying beside the dome light. He tipped out soiled underwear and socks and placed the transparent container holding his mama’s heart inside and zipped up the bag.
Junior walked away across a field. Walked until morning, when he found himself in a small town. He went into a washroom at a gas station, cleaned himself up and checked to see that his billfold was still in his pocket. It was and it still bulged with banknotes, his mama always making him the target of her largesse, the endless flow of cash coming from he knew not where.
Junior rented a room in a small hotel—the desk clerk waiving the check-in formalities when Junior flashed a pile of dollars—and took the duffel bag up to the room and fell asleep cradling it.
A flighty red neon sign danced him awake and he closed the curtains and clicked on the TV—some inane game show with a canned applause track that would mask what he was about to do.
He unzipped the bag, took a deep breath and lifted out the Tupperware container. Looked at his mother’s heart. Cried. Stilled his tears. Took the plastic box into the bathroom, removed the heart and placed it carefully inside the bathtub. He stripped naked and joined the heart in the empty tub, keeping with him only the Swiss knife.
Unbidden the voices rose in him, the language he knew as well as his native tongue, and he felt the strength and purpose that came with them as he sliced open the heart, carving through the walls, exposing the hollow chambers of the atria and the ventricles, dividing the pump into quarters.
There was some blood. Enough for him to paint an inverted pentagram on the porcelain between his legs and his balls tightened and his young cock grew out of its fuzz and it took no time at all to shoot a sticky stream of seed onto the bloody symbol.