by James Sallis
People thereabouts still called them locusts. My friend Billy and I collected their husks off trees and the house and lined them up in neat rows on the walls of our bedrooms. Later I'd learn their real name: cicadas. I'd learn that they emerge in thirteen- or seventeen-year cycles, coming out in May, all dead by June. The male dies not long after coupling, whereupon the female takes to a tree, cuts as many as fifty slits in one of the branches, and deposits 400 to 600 eggs. Once her egg supply is gone, she dies too. Six to eight weeks later the nymphs hatch and fall to the ground, burrowing in a foot or so and living off sap sucked from tree roots until it's their turn to emerge, climb, shed skins, unfurl wings.
Most of this I learned forty-odd years later.
Not a title – my name, Bishop Holden told me at our first meeting. He and I were of an age. When, after my childhood experience of them, the cicadas came again, I was in a jungle half a world away and Bishop was in line at the local draft where, told to turn his head and cough, he instead grabbed the doctor's head in both hands and planted a hard, wet kiss on his lips. He was carried away, discoursing incoherently of conspiracies and government-funded coups, and remanded by courts to the local psychiatric hospital. He'd been in and out of one or another of them most of his life. At the last, during convulsions caused by a bad drug reaction, he'd bitten off the finger of an orderly trying to help him and developed something of a taste for flesh. He'd bagged another finger, half an ear, and a big toe before (as he said) putting himself on a strict diet.
He had skin like a scrubbed red potato, pouchlike, leathery cheeks. In khakis, cardigan, and canvas shoes, he reminded me of Mr. Rogers.
"Ready for them?" he asked. Our chairs stood at a right angle, a small shellacked table pushed close in to the apex. I turned my head to him. His turned to the window.
Ready for what exactly, I asked.
"The cicadas. It's time. I've called them."
Called them up from the depths of the earth itself, he said; and while I was never to learn much about Bishop Holden, over the next hour and in later sessions (until one bright morning he bit through the chain of a charm bracelet on the wrist of a teenage girl passing his breakfast sandwich through a carryout window) I learned quite a lot about cicadas.
Now, so many years later and a bit further south, it was time for them again.
Two abandoned shells, spurs hooked into mesh, hung on the screen of the window above the sink when I got up the next morning. It sounded as though a fleet of miniature farm machinery, tiny tractors and combines and threshers, had invaded the yard.
Thanks to Bishop, I knew that three distinct species always surface at the same time, and that each has not only its own specific sound but a favored time of day as well. Someone once said that the three sounded in turn like the word pharaoh, a sizzling skillet, and a rotary lawn sprinkler. The morning cicadas, the sizzlers, were hard at their work.
"What the hell is that racket?" J. T. asked from the doorway. I told her.
She came up close behind me and stood watching as they swarmed.
"Jesus. This happen often?"
"Every seventeen years, like clockwork. No one understands why. Or how, for that matter."
I filled her in on cicadas as I pulled eggs and cheese from the icebox and poured coffee for a reasonable facsimile of Val that wandered in-what a writer might be tempted to call a working draft. I dropped a tablespoon of bacon grease from the canister on the stove into a skillet, laid out bread in the toaster oven I really needed to remember to clean. Dump the crumbs, at least.
"Did I hear cars?" Val asked as I poured her second cup. The rewrite was coming along nicely.
"Doc Bly and his boy."
"Not a delivery, I assume." Doc ran the mortuary. He was also coroner.
Putting breakfast on the table, I told them about the young man who'd died out by the lake.
"He'd been living in the woods?"
"According to Nathan. More than one of them."
"Have any idea what's with the numbers?"
"Not really."
"They were permanent?"
"Looked to be."
"Not just inked in, like kids used to do back in school?"
"Not that crude. Not professional, either, but carefully done.
In prison there were guys who'd do tattoos for cigarette money. They used the end of a guitar string and indelible ink, took their time. Some of them got damned good at it. That's what this reminded me of, that level of skill."
"Nathan have any idea what these people are doing up there?"
"None."
"But now you're going to have to find out."
"Guess I am."
"I'll come along," J. T. said.
Half an hour later we were scraping cicadas off the Chariot's windshield as Val pulled out on her way to work. J. T. went in to get the thermos of coffee we'd forgotten and came back out saying the beeper had gone off while she was inside.
"On the table," she said.
Of course it was.
And of course it was the bugs. Raising hell everywhere, June told me, getting in houses that left their windows open, in water troughs and switch boxes and attics, reminded her of that movie Gremlins. She'd already logged over a dozen calls. Though what anyone thought we could do about any of it was beyond her. Was I on my way in?
Sure, I said.
New plan was (I told J. T.) we'd go in for an hour, two at the most, and sand down the rough spots.
It took Lonnie, J. T., and me well into the afternoon to get everyone calmed down and the town more or less back on track. House calls included the local retirement home, where one of the cicadas had somehow got down a resident's mouth and choked her to death; a little girl terrified that the bugs were going to eat her newborn kittens; and a Mr. Murphy living alone in an old house I'd thought long abandoned. Neighbors having heard screams, J. T. and I arrived to find that Mr. Murphy had intimate knowledge of insects: when we lifted him from his wheelchair, maggots writhed in ulcers the size of saucers on his buttocks, some of them dropping to the floor, and more could be seen at work in the cushions and open framework of the chair. "Don't much mind the littluns," he said, looking from J. T.'s face to mine. "Them big ones is a different story altogether."
So the new new plan was to get a late lunch, then head up into the hills. And since chances were good we might not be out of there by nightfall, I'd look up Nathan first. No way I was going to be in those hills after dark without someone who knew them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
We parked by the derelict cotton gin and came up the line of humps and hollows that form the mountain's side, an easier but much longer ascent. By the time we reached the cabin, it was going on four o'clock. The owner didn't take too much to yard work. Every couple of years he'd clear a space around the cabin. The rest of the time pine trees, shrubs, and bushes, along with a variety of grasses and wildflowers, had their way. We were well along into the rest of the time.
Nathan stepped out from behind an oak, twelve-gauge in the crook of an elbow. His dog came out from beneath the cabin growling, then, at Nathan's almost silent whistle, went back under.
"Defending the realm?" I asked.
"Been out."
"Hunting?"
"After a fashion."
Meeting J. T.'s eye, he said, "Miss." I introduced them. "Found the camp," he went on, "maybe three miles in, 'bout forty degrees off north-northeast. Ain't much to it, mostly the hind end of a cabin they done put some lean-tos up against."
"How many are there?"
"If you mean lean-tos, there's three. If you're asking after people, which I expect you are, then my guess'd be close on to a dozen. Youngsters was all I saw. You headin' up that way?"
I nodded. "Talk you into coming along?"
"Figured to."
Instinctively tilting the shotgun barrel maybe ten degrees to clear a low branch, Nathan stepped back into the trees.
It took us almost two hours to get there. By the time we did, th
e sun had put in its papers and was marking time. The lean-tos were saplings lashed together with heavy twine, a spool of which I later saw inside what was left of the original cabin. The cabin hadn't been much to start with. Now it came down to half a room, five-sixths of a chimney, and a smatter of roof. A smatter of people sat on a bench out front-more saplings, these set into notches in two sections of log.
One of the homesteaders, a woman like all of them in her early to late twenties, sat beside a pile of sassafras root, cleaning with a damp cloth what was to be a new addition to the pile. Another was picking through field greens. They watched us silently as we approached. A man emerging from one of the lean-tos paused, then straightened and stepped towards us. Another, that I'd not seen and damn well should have, swung down off the low branch of a maple at the edge of the clearing. Scraps of plank from the cabin were nailed to the trunk at intervals to make a ladder.
Boards had also been nailed up over the cabin's gaping front, three of them, bridging the void. Crude block letters in white paint: "All the Whys Are Here."
"Tell me you're not the trouble you look to be," the man from the lean-to said, holding out his hand, which I shook. Older than the rest, pushing thirty from the far side, dark eyes, beetle brow, bad skin.
"Deputy sheriff," I said, "but not trouble. Not the kind you're thinking, at any rate."
"Always good to hear. Isaiah Stillman." Nodding towards Nathan, who stood apart at clearing's edge, he said, "Your friend's welcome, too."
"My friend's not much for company."
"Um-hmm. He the one lives down the mountain?"
"The same."
"So what can we do for you, Deputy? If we're-" He stopped, eyes meeting mine. "Our understanding is that this is free land."
"Close as it gets these days, anyhow."
I described the young man who'd died by the lake last night, told Stillman how it happened.
"I'm truly sorry to hear that."
"You knew him, then?"
"Of course. Kevin. We wondered where he'd got off to this time. Never could stay in place too long. He'd go off, be gone a day or two, a week. But he'd always come back."
The woman cleaning sassafras had put rag and roots down and walked up behind Stillman, touching him on the shoulder. When he turned, her mouth moved, but no sound came. Taking her hand and placing it against his throat, he said: "It's Kevin, Martha. Kevin's dead." Her mouth opened and went round in a silent no. After a moment she returned to the bench and her work. The other woman there put a hand briefly to her cheek.
"We'll be having our dinner soon," Stillman said. "Will you join us?"
We did, settling into a meal of lukewarm sassafras tea, greens, rice cooked with black-eyed peas- "Our take on hopping John," Stillman said.
"Interesting."
"Flavored with roots instead of salt pork or bacon, since we're vegetarians."
– and something that must have been hoecake, which, like hopping John, I'd read and heard about but never seen.
"Delicious."
J. T. cocked eyebrows at me at that. Nathan, having got over his standoffishness, was busy sopping up juice from the greens with crumbly bits of hoecake.
"We plan to grind our own cornmeal eventually," Stillman said.
Of course they did.
"I should notify your friend's family," I said. Helped myself to another spoonful of the hopping John. Stuff kind of grew on you.
"We are his family, Mr. Turner."
"No direct relatives?"
"His father threw him out of the house when he was fourteen. The old man was an engineer,' Kevin always said. ' He knew how things were supposed to work.' For a year or two he stayed around town. His mother would meet him, give him money.
When she died, Kevin left for good."
"What about the rest of you?"
"Have family, you mean."
"Yes."
"Some of us do, some don't. For us, family is-"
Leaning over the makeshift table, the young woman I assumed to be deaf and dumb moved her hands in dismissive, sweep-it-away gestures.
"Moira's right," Stillman said.
"You always think she is," one of the others said.
He ignored that. "This isn't the time to be talking about such. Besides, night's closing in. I imagine you'll be wanting to get back."
"We should, yes." "You and your friends are always welcome here.. .. Can you see to Kevin's burial, or should we?"
"We can do that."
"We'd expect to pay for it, of course."
"The county-"
"It's our responsibility. We do have money."
We both looked about the camp, then realized what we were doing, looked at one another, and smiled.
"Really," he said. "It's not a problem-despite appearances. So we'll be expecting an invoice. Meanwhile, you have our gratitude."
Moira raised a hand in farewell. Nathan, J. T., and I stepped out to the accompaniment of a half moon and the calls of whippoorwills, down hills and across them, right and left legs lengthening alternately like those of cartoon figures to meet the challenge, or so it seemed, returning to a world gone strange in our absence.
CHAPTER TWENTY
"I know almost nothing about you."
Her eyes went from my eyes to my mouth and back, ever steady.
"Why should you?"
Outside, rain slammed down, turning lawns and walkways to patches of mud. A mockingbird crouched in the window, soaked feathers drawn tightly about.
"I come here every week for-what? a year now?-and we talk. Most of my relationships haven't lasted near that long."
I let that go by.
"I know almost nothing about you. And you know so much about me."
"Only what you've agreed to have me know, or what you've told me yourself."
"Here's something you don't know. When I was a child, ten or so. .." For a moment she drifted away. "I had this friend, Gerry.
And I had this T-shirt I'd sent away for, off some cereal box or out of a comic book. Nothing special, now that I think about it, just this thin, cheap shirt, blue, with 'Wonder Girl' stenciled on it in yellow letters. But I loved that T-shirt. I'd waited by the mailbox every day till it came. My mother had to take it out of my room at night while I was sleeping, just to wash it… It was summer, and all day there'd been a rain, like this one. Then late afternoon it slowed, still coming down, but more a shower now. Gerry starts running down the drive and sliding into this huge mud puddle at its end. This is back in Georgia, we didn't have paving, just a dirt drive cut in from the street. At first I didn't want to, but I tried it, then… just gave myself to the simple joy of it. Gerry and I went on sliding and diving for most of the rest of the afternoon. My shirt was ruined, of course. Mother tried everything to get it clean. The last I saw of it, it was in with the rags."
She looked back from the window.
"Poor thing."
"The bird?"
She nodded. Muffled conversation came from the hall, indecipherable, rhythmic. It sounded much like the rain outside.
"You must have to turn in some sort of reports," she said.
"I do."
"In which case, it has to be coming up on time for one."
After a moment I said, "They're not going to give your license back, Miss Blake."
She looked at the watch, which from old habit she still wore pinned to her shirt pocket. "I know. I do know that… And I've asked you to call me Cheryl." She smiled. "Recently I've taken up reading again. Do you know the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick?"
"A little."
"Late in life, while visiting in Canada, he underwent some kind of crisis, something like Poes last days, maybe. He came to in a fleabag hotel and had himself committed to a detox center.
Another patient there told a story that promptly became Dick's favorite slogan. This junkie goes to see his old friend Leon, and once he gets to his friend's house he asks the people there if he can see Leon. 'I'm very sorry to have t
o tell you this,' one of them says, 'but Leon is dead.' 'No problem,' the junkie responds, Til just come back on Thursday.'"
She stood.
"See you on Thursday."
Long after she was gone-my next client had canceled-I sat quietly. Eventually the rain lightened and, with a vigorous shake of feathers, the mockingbird launched itself from the window.
As an RN on a cancer ward, Cheryl Blake, who now worked as a cosmetics salesperson, had drawn up morphine and injected it through the IV ports of at least three patients. At trial, asked if the patients had told her they wished to die, her response was: "They didn't need to. I knew." She served six years. Two days before Christmas last year, the state had paroled her. I saw her first on New Year's Eve.
Memory opens on small hinges. A prized T-shirt long ago lost. The pale green chenille bedspread, its knots worn to nubbins, I'd had as a child and sat night after night in my cell remembering. I'd gone in, in fact, on New Year's Eve.
In prison, trees are always far away. From the yard you could look across to a line of them like a mirage on the horizon, so distant and unreal that they might as well have been on another planet. They were bare then, of course, just gray smudges of trunk and limb against the lighter gray of sky. When springtime came, their green was a wound.
In a corner of the yard that spring, Danny Lillo planted seeds from an apple his daughter brought him. Each day he'd dip the ladle into the tank that provided our drinking water on the yard, fill his mouth, and take it over to that corner. Week after week we watched. Saw that first long oval of a leaf ease from the ground, watched as the third set of leaves developed pointy tips. Then we went out one afternoon and someone had pulled it up. Maybe four inches long, it lay there on its side, trailing roots. Danny stood looking down a long time. All of us who had given up so much already, the one who put it in the ground, those who simply watched and waited, the one who pulled it up-all of us had lost something we couldn't even define, all of us felt something that, like so much else in that gray place, had no name.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE