After climbing the steep steps up to the street level again, he was surprised to observe the stillness of clay-baked Sunland City. As a boy, it had always seemed like an Italian water town, not precisely a Venice and something less than a Naples, thrust into the Gulf Coast like a conqueror’s flag.
But now it seemed as ancient as any dying European citadel: It looked as if the conqueror, having pillaged and raped, had left a wake of buildings and archways and space. It had been a lively seaport once. It was now a vacant conch. The hurricane that had torn through it the previous year had not touched a building, but it had cleaned the streets of any evidence of life. When he found the Flamingo, he kissed the first girl he set eyes on, a wench in the first degree with a beer in one hand with which to wipe off that same kiss. A teenage boy in a letterman’s jacket sat two stools over. The boy turned and stared at him for a good long while before saying anything. Then, suddenly, as if possessed, the boy shouted, “Holy shit, you’re King!”
“And you, my friend, are underage.”
2
The boy stood up—he was tall and gangly, with a mop of curly blond hair, a face of dimming acne, and cheek of tan. He thrust his hand out. “Billy Wright. I swim, too.”
“Oh.”
“But you’re like a legend. A fucking legend. The King. King Shadiak.”
“Am I?”
“You beat out every team to Daytona Beach. You beat out fucking Houston.”
“Did I? Well, it was a long time before you were born.”
“You ever see the display they got on you?” Billy pressed his palms flat against the air. “The glass cabinet in the front hall, near the locker room. Seven gold trophies. Seven! Pictures! Your goggles, too. Your fucking goggles, man.”
“If they do all that for you at your high school, you should really be something, shouldn’t you?”
Billy made a thumbs up sign. “Fucking A. You are something, man.”
“I’m nothing,” Roy said, downing his drink and slamming the glass on the bar for another. “No, make that: I’m fucking nothing, man.”
“What you been doin’ all this time, man?” Billy asked, apparently oblivious to anything short of his own cries of adoration.
“Selling Jesus.”
“Who’d you sell him to?”
Roy laughed. “You’re all right, boy. You are all right.”
“Thanks,” Billy said, then glanced at his watch. “I better get going. Curfew soon. Listen, you come by and see me if you got car trouble. I work at night at Jack Thompson’s. You know him? I can fix any problem with any car. I’m not the King of anything like you, but I may be the Prince of Mechanics.”
“Why would anyone care if his car got fixed around here?”
The boy laughed. “That’s a good one.”
When Roy arrived at his mother’s house a half hour later, he was three beers short of a dozen.
“The great King comes home.” His mother’s voice was flat, like the land. “You had to get drunk before you saw me. And you couldn’t shave for me, could you?” Alice Shadiak asked. His mother wore khaki slacks and a white blouse. She had lost some weight over the past few years, and seemed whiter, as if the sun had bleached her bones right through her skin. A sun visor cap protected her face. She had seen him from the kitchen window, and had come to greet him on the porch. “I suppose you need a place to stay.”
“I can stay downtown.”
“With your whores?”
“They all missed curfew, apparently.” He attempted a light note. “Must’ve heard I was on my way.”
His mother sighed as if a great weight had just been given her. “Some man of God you turned out to be. I just wish you’d have called ahead. I’d have had Louise fix up your old room. Lloyd’s in Sherry’s old room. The house is a mess. Don’t act like such a foreigner, Roy, for God’s sakes. Give me a hug, would you?” She moved forward. In all his life, he could count the times she’d hugged him. But he knew he needed to change, somehow. He had not hit on precisely how. He would have to listen to his own instincts, then disobey them to find out how he might change. He held his mother, smelled her saltwater hair. When he let go, she said, “Susie called. She wants to know when you’re going to forgive her.”
“Never,” Roy said.
“What are you going to do?” Alice asked.
Roy Shadiak said, “Mama, I had a dream. It came to me one night. A voice said—”
His mother interrupted. “Was it Jesus?”
“It was just a voice. It said, ‘Set your place at the table.’ Something’s trying to come through me. I know it. I can feel it. Like a revelation.”
“It was just a dream,” Alice said, sounding troubled. “What could it mean? Oh, Roy, you’re vexing yourself over nothing.”
“This is my table. Sunland City. I have to set my place here,” Roy said. Then he began weeping. His mother held him, but not too close.
“A man as big as you shouldn’t be crying.”
“It’s all I have left,” he said, drying his tears on the cuffs of his shirt. “You live your life and make a few mistakes, but you lose everything anyway. Everything I ever had, it all came from here. Everything I ever was.”
Alice Shadiak took a good hard look at her son and slapped him with the back of her hand. “You did it to yourself, what you are. Who you are. Don’t blame me or your father or anyone else. All this big world talk and wife-leaving and crying. Don’t think just because it’s been twenty two years that you can just walk back in here and pretend none of it ever happened.” She raised her fist, not at him but at the sky, the open sky that was colored the most glorious blue with cloud striations across its curved spine. “No God who takes my boys away from me is welcome in my house.”
“I told you, I don’t work for God anymore,” Roy said. He went past her, into the house. He found the guest bedroom cluttered, but pushed aside his mother’s sewing and the stacks of magazines on the bed. He wrapped the quilt around his shoulders and fell asleep in his suit.
3
In the morning, he took a milk crate down to the town center. He set it down and stood up on it just as he would in other towns when he had preached the gospel. Folks passed by on their way to work, and barely noticed him. He spread his arms out as if measuring Sunland City and cried out, “I am King Shadiak and I have come here to atone for the murders of my brother Frankie and his friend, Kip Renner!”
A woman turned about as she stepped; a laborer in a broad straw hat glanced up from the curb where he sat with a coffee cup; an old Ford pickup slowed as its owner rolled down the window to listen.
As Roy Shadiak spoke, others gathered around him, the older crowd mostly, the crowd that knew him, the people who had been there when he’d drowned the two boys at the public swimming pool over on Hispaniola Street, down near the Esso station, by the railroad tracks.
“No need, Roy,” one of the men called out. “We don’t need your kind of atonement. We been fine all these years without it”
“That’s right,” several people added, and others nodded without uttering a word.
“No,” Roy said, pressing the flat of his hand against the air in front of him as if it were an invisible wall. “All these years I’ve squandered my life in service to others. I owe Sunland City an atonement.”
“You want us to crucify you, King?” Someone laughed.
Others chuckled more quietly.
“That is exactly what I want,” Roy Shadiak said. “Two atonements, two murders.”
A woman in the crowd shouted, ‘Two atonements for two murders!”
“Two atonements! Two murders!” others began chanting.
“Frankie Shadiak!” Roy shouted. “Kip Renner!”
“Two atonements! Two murders!” The crowd became familiar now. Roy saw Ellen Mawbry from tenth grade, Willy Potter from the corner store, the entire Forster clan, the Rogers family, the Blankenships, the Fowlers. As he chanted and as they chanted as the day loped forward, they all gathered—lab
or stopped, activity ceased, schools let out for a spontaneous holiday, until the town center of Sunland City was a sea of the familiar and the new. All turned out for the returning hero, their King, who passed among them to offer his life for their suffering.
“Two atonements!” they cried as if their voices would reach beyond that Florida sky.
It was what Roy expected from a town that God had turned his back on twenty three years before.
And then Helen Renner, her hair gone white, stepped out of the crowd toward him. She wiped her hands on her apron, as if she’d just finished baking, and went and stood at the foot of the milk crate.
Roy crouched down and took her face in his hands.
“Don’t do it,” she said. “Roy Shadiak, don’t you do it. Neither one of them was worth it. We all let it happen. We’re all responsible. It may not even fix anything, Roy. There’s no guarantee.”
His kissed her on her forehead. “I’ve got to. It’s something inside of me that needs room to grow, and I’ve been killing it all these years. I’ve been killing every one of you, too. Two atonements,” he repeated, “for two murders.”
4
Joe Fowler was a crackerjack carpenter. He and his assistant, Jasper, were at the Shadiak house within an hour of Roy’s leave-taking of the makeshift podium. He stood on the porch in paint-spattered overalls, his khaki hat in his hands, looking through the screen door at Roy’s mother. “We got some railroad ties from out the Yard,” he said. “They got pitch on ’em, but I think they gonna be just fine for the job.” His voice quavered. “We’d like to offer our services, Alice.”
Alice Shadiak stood like stone. “You and your kind can get off my porch. I don’t mean to lose two sons in this lifetime.”
Roy came up behind her, touching her gently on the shoulder. “Mama, it’s got to be done.”
“Where is it written? Where?”
“On my soul,” he said.
“Our kind has no soul,” she said, pulling away from him. “I don’t need God’s forgiveness on my house. I don’t want sweet Jesus’ tears.”
“It’s Jesus that keeps you here.”
“He doesn’t even look on us, Roy,” his mother said. “He doesn’t even come to our churches. What does it matter? Does anyone in Sunland really believe there’s a Jesus waiting to shine his light on us?”
“That’s because of me.”
“It’s because your brother and his sick little friend were unnatural and perverted, and God cared more for them than for decency or nature or for any of us. I don’t mind burning for that, Roy. I don’t mind that sacrifice.”
“I do,” Roy said. “I saw Jesus out in the fields up north, and in the alleys of the fallen. Nobody else did. And you know why? Because Jesus was laughing at me, he was showing me that he was not going to be mine. He was going to belong to every fool who walked this earth.”
Joe Fowler nudged the screen door open and stepped inside. “He’s right, Alice. We ain’t had Jesus or God for all this time, only those…things.” He shivered a little, as if remembering a nightmare. In a softer voice, he said, “I’m getting tired of this life.”
“I would advise you to get out of the light, Joe,” Alice Shadiak said, sounding like the retired schoolteacher that she was. “I heard about your little Nadine.”
All of them were silent for a moment, and Roy thought for a second he heard the cry of some hawk as it located its prey.
“Your boy knows what he’s doing,” Joe said, spreading his hands as if he could convince her with gestures. Still, he glanced briefly up at the empty sky. “We can’t keep on like this.” Then Joe grinned, but Roy could tell he was tense. “I’m prouder of you now, King, than I was when you won all those ribbons at the championship. Why don’t we get on with this business?”
“Yes,” Roy said, feeling an ache in his heart for Susie and the kids, but not wanting to retrace his steps. He glanced out on the porch, and beyond, to Joe’s truck. “That’s a sturdy piece of wood, Joe.”
“From the old Tuskegee route, before tracks got tore up. We’re going to have to balance them good. That’s why I brought Jasper here.” He nodded toward his assistant, who stood, mutely, on the porch. “We can get this going now, you like.”
“Why wait?” Roy shrugged.
His mother retreated into the shadowy parlor. She called to him, but Roy did not respond.
Jasper suddenly pointed to the sky and made a rasping sound in his throat.
Calmly, Joe Fowler said, “Come on in, Jasp, come on, it’s okay, you’ll make it.”
As if too frightened to move, Jasper stood there, sweat shining on his face. He stared up at the sky, pointing and shaking.
“Jasper.” Joe opened the screen porch slightly, beckoning with his hand.
Roy shoved Joe out of the way and ran out to the porch. He grabbed the young man by his waist.
The cry grew louder as the great bird in the sky dropped, blackening out the sun for a moment.
5
The smell was the worst thing, because they got it on their talons sometimes, from an earlier victim, that sweet awful stink that overrode all other senses.
Roy hadn’t slept a night without remembering that smell. He couldn’t get it out of his head for the rest of the afternoon.
“Where do they take them?” Roy asked.
Joe, who was still jittery, helped himself to the vodka. “Down to the shore. There’s at least a hundred out there. And the rotting seaweed, too, and the flies, all the crawling things … it turned my stomach when I had to go down there to try and find Nadine.”
“That’s where it has to be.”
“No, King. No. I won’t go down there, no matter if it’s midnight or midday.”
“But how can you abandon her?”
Joe turned his face toward his glass. “She ain’t her. I saw her. I risked my sanity, and I saw her. It ain’t her. It’s a It, not a little girl. I told her not to go out between two and four. All of us know about the curfew. All of us know to stay inside. And you ,,,” Joe shook his head. He raised his glass as if to toast Roy. “You’re the luckiest son of a bitch alive, you can get out, and instead, you decide to come back. You fucked up once, King, you don’t need to keep on doing it.”
“How many are left?”
“First, have a drink.” Joe pushed the glass across the kitchen table.
Roy picked it up. Downed the remainder. Set the glass down. “How many?”
“Twenty-six, in one piece. The rest in as many as they leave us in. Some morning, you take a walk down there. Only, if any of them calls your name, you just run, you hear? You don’t want to know who it is, believe you me.”
Roy reached across the table and pressed his hand against Joe’s shoulder. “That’s where we need to do it.”
“I ain’t never going down there again.”
“You’d rather all this continued?”
“Than go down there? You’re damned right.”
“I’ll find someone else, then.”
Joe stood up, pushing his chair back. He said nothing. He stomped out of the kitchen and went to sit with Jasper and Alice.
Roy drank some more vodka. He glanced out the bay window. On the roof, two houses over, three of them had a woman pressed against the curved Spanish tile. Their wings had folded against their bodies, and they were digging with their talons into the soft flesh of her stomach.
He was sure that one of them saw him spying, and grinned.
6
That night, he found the teenager working at Jack Thompson’s garage on the south corner of Hattatonquee Plaza.
“Billy?” Roy asked as he stood beneath a streetlamp.
The boy dropped the wrench he was using and bounded out to the sidewalk. “Hey, it’s the King. How you doin’?” He snapped his fingers several times, as if he was nervous.
“I’m doing just fine. And yourself?”
“Hey, any day you get through the afternoon here’s a good day. So I heard you’re going
to try something.”
Roy nodded.
“Let’s go for a walk, Billy. Can you get off work?”
“Sure, let me just tell Mr. Thompson, okay?” Several minutes later, they were walking down along Hispaniola Street toward Upper Street. Roy had been doing all the talking, ending with, “And that’s where you come in. Joe’ll give me the ties, but I need someone to help.”
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “You ever see how big those suckers are?”
“Yep. But we won’t be out that late. We can do this at nine or ten in the morning. Hell, if you want, we can probably do it tonight.”
“I heard the beach is really a bad scene. My dad got taken down there. I heard this guy at school say that they’re like cracked eggs or they’re all ripped up, only not quite dead yet. If I think about it too much, I get sick.”
“It must be strange.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you grew up in it. You never knew what the world was like before. You don’t know what the rest of the world is like.”
Billy stopped walking. “I thought it happened everywhere.”
Roy shook his head. “Only here. Because of what I did.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Other places, you can walk around anytime of the day or night and those things don’t attack. Honest. When I was the King here, I used to skip classes at two and take off with my friends to Edgewater to the McDonald’s. Didn’t anyone tell you? Not even your dad?”
Billy shook his head. “Well, if God did this, why didn’t he do it just to you?”
Roy shrugged. “Who knows? It may not even have been God. Maybe there’s just those creatures. The way I figured it, it’s not just because of me killing those boys. It’s because everybody here thought it was okay, no big deal. Nobody made a fuss.”
“You loved your brother?”
“I did, but I didn’t know it then. I wanted him and his friend to go to hell back then. I was the King back then. I thought I was God, I guess.”
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