Heaven's Crooked Finger

by Hank Early

  “It’s personal.”

  “Sure, sure. Hey, me and you have got a lot in common, Earl.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, hear me out. My granddaddy is Billy Thrash. Once my daddy died, he tried to step in and pull me into that shitshow of a church. Hey, is it true you told your daddy to go to—”

  “Just get on out of here and leave Rufus alone.”

  “Ten-four, buddy. But let me ask you something first—do you think your daddy came back because of you? It’s what I heard. Folks say he had unfinished business. Souls that needed saving. I reckon you’d be first on that list.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I heard he wasn’t going to go to the grave unless each and every one of you was saved.”

  I said nothing.

  “I never imagined you’d be so quiet.”

  “Time for you to go.”

  “Sure. If you need anything, I’m just across the creek.”

  “Stay there.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I’d like a firmer commitment than that.”

  “Hey, Earl, I can’t see the future. The world is unpredictable. I’m just a culmination of all the bad shit that ever happened to me.” He spat out into the churchyard. “Same as you.”

  “Me and you ain’t nothing alike.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Hey, here’s a question—where the hell you been all these years?” he said.

  “I been away, spending all my time rounding up assholes like you.”

  He laughed. “Another good comeback.” He looked me over and smiled as if he were in on some private joke at my expense. “You’re pretty good at them. I’ll give you that. But most of the time, they’re just for cowards looking to hide weakness.”

  With that, he clicked off the light on his phone and started back toward the creek. Just before stepping across, he turned around again. “Say hi to your daddy for me. Tell him I don’t care if he’s dead or not—I’m going to put a bullet in him if I ever see him again either way.”

  14

  Back inside the dark church, we sat down on the front pew, too amped up after the encounter to consider sleep.

  “I heard the rumors about a week or so after they found his body. There’s a kid that helps me out around here some. Lester sent him. Good kid, but he goes to the Holy Flame, and you know what that does to a person. Anyway, he said there were folks claiming to see your daddy up in the mountains. Others said he rose again, right out of the grave, and ascended to some special place. Apparently somebody’s been talking to him, relaying his message back to the church.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I was. Hell, you ain’t really surprised, are you? I mean, as far back as I can remember, he’d been saying he was going to beat the grave. This is just some of the idiots making it come true.”

  “What does Lester think of it all?”

  He shrugged. “You’ll have to talk to him, but by all accounts, Lester is one of the more reasonable voices over there these days. Now keep in mind, reasonable is a relative term with those fools.”

  “What about a man named Bryant McCauley?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “You ever meet him?”

  “Of course. He’s an old-timer and as crazy as any of them.”

  “Did he believe my father had ‘ascended’?”

  “You like eggs? I’ve got a gas burner, and I figured, if me and you ain’t gonna sleep no more tonight, might as well fix some eggs.”

  “That’s fine. Can you tell me about McCauley?”

  He stood up and moved over to where Daddy used to stand holding the serpents. He knelt and fiddled with an old camp stove, getting it lit and cracking some eggs over a hot plate.

  “McCauley was a fool, but he was always a good-hearted one. He never meant no harm, I don’t think. As to whether he believed in the ascension or not, I’m going to say yes, just because he wasn’t the kind of man to disbelieve anything. But I can’t say for sure. I ain’t heard from him since before your daddy died.”

  “He’s missing,” I said.

  Rufus pushed the eggs around, keeping them from the edges of the hot plate. The first signs of the sun were grazing the stained glass, offering a kind of rainbow of illumination. Rufus had taken off his shades, and I was surprised to see what looked like chemical burns around his eyes, reminding me that he’d not yet offered any information regarding his blindness. Not much felt taboo with Rufus, but somehow that topic did.

  “Missing, huh? Not surprising, I guess. He always had a screw loose. Why the interest in Bryant?”

  I told him about the photo I’d received.

  He listened, turning the eggs over on the hot plate as I talked. I told him about meeting Mary and finding out she’d been looking for him for the last two weeks.

  “She the new gal?” Rufus said.

  “Yes, Mary Hawkins.”

  “How’s she look?”

  “What?”

  “Come on, throw an old horny blind man a bone. Describe her for me.”

  “She’s about six two, maybe two hundred fifty. A face like a sick armadillo.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “Okay, okay. She’s . . . on the short side, I guess. Skin like dark honey. Some freckles right around her nose, but you have to be up close to really notice them. I like her hair. It’s sort of frizzy, hangs down just to her shoulders. Red highlights when the sun hits it right. Her eyes are dark brown and big.”

  “And the body?”

  “It’s very nice,” I said.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Compact but lean.”

  “Her rack?”

  “Come on.”

  “You come on. You ain’t for equal rights?”

  “What?”

  “Equal rights for the blind. You get to look at it but I don’t? That don’t sound much like equality to me. Tell me once, I’ll never ask again; it’ll go into the mental-image bank, and it’ll be mine forever.” He tapped the side of his head.

  I tried not to laugh. “Fine. Her breasts are nice.”

  “Natural?”

  “I’m assuming so. I haven’t actually studied them.”

  “You’d know if they were fake.”

  “Probably.”

  “So give me the bra size?”

  I shrugged. “C-cup?”

  He grinned and leaned his head back on the pew. I guessed he was putting it all together inside his “mental-image bank.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ve got her now.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, electing not to tell him how deeply weird that had been. Instead, I tried to go back to the subject: “If you were looking for McCauley, where would you start?”

  He stroked the rough stubble on his chin. “I guess there’s several places I’d start, but I’m going to assume they already checked his house and didn’t find nothing. After that, I’d go to his fishing shack.”

  “Fishing shack?”

  “Yeah, he and your daddy liked to go fishing over on Small Mountain. You know Silver Lake?”

  “I think I remember it. Right off the county road?”

  “That’s it. But to get to the shack, you have to get to the other side of the lake. The best way to do that is to go down the back side of Pointer on the little logging road. It’ll take you right to it. And it’s just a little shack, from what I hear. I ain’t never seen it, of course.” He grinned at me, and I couldn’t help but grin back.

  I was home. And I was going to stay for a little bit, at least until I resolved some things. Like what happened to Bryant McCauley, for one. I also wanted—no, needed—to find a way to put these rumors of my father’s ascension to rest once and for all. Maybe it wouldn’t have bothered me half as much if it hadn’t been for the dream and the well.

  And the bucket that, even in my waking hours, see
med to be slowly coming to the surface.

  “You up for a little ride?” I said.

  “Sure. Let’s eat first. And then maybe we need to go by the pawn shop.”

  “What for?”

  “Get you a firearm. You done made an enemy in Ronnie Thrash.” He laughed. “As if you needed another one.”

  * * *

  We swung by the “pawn shop,” which was nothing more than a double-wide trailer on blocks with a large posterboard attached to one of the windows that read, “Als’ Fire-Arm’s and Pown.” It looked like it had been written by a fourth grader who was well on his way to failing the year. For the second time.

  “I don’t know about this place,” I said.

  “Well, I heard it was a pawn shop,” Rufus said. “Was I misled?”

  I winced. “I think you might have been.” Still, I did need a gun, and at the moment, I wasn’t going to be too choosy about where I got it from. At least, I reasoned, whatever gun I bought here wouldn’t wind up in some criminal’s hands.

  Al was asleep on his couch but woke right up when he heard us banging on the door. He looked us over when I asked to see the handguns and apparently decided we were reliable enough. He led us to the kitchen and pulled out a large tool chest from beneath the sink. He lifted the handguns out one at a time until the kitchen counter was covered in them. I inspected a Glock .45 caliber, but it didn’t feel weighted right. After checking out a few more .45 calibers, which was what I preferred, I settled on the newest-looking piece, which was also small enough to keep hidden, a Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm. I bought some ammo and a shoulder holster. It cost me nearly three hundred dollars, most of the cash I’d brought.

  “You didn’t buy it here,” Al said. He sounded almost bored.

  “Of course not,” Rufus said. “Besides, I never saw you.”

  “Good one,” Al said, but he didn’t laugh. Instead he just headed for the couch to lie back down.

  * * *

  The fishing shack sat a couple dozen feet from the shore. It was just large enough to squeeze a set of bunk beds inside as well as a cooler and some other equipment, all of which appeared to be completely abandoned.

  “Anything?” Rufus asked.

  “Not sure yet.” I stepped inside and opened the cooler. It was filled with old water and a dead fish. I shut it quickly.

  “Jesus,” Rufus said. “There’s dead fish in here.”

  “Just one.” I sat down on the bottom bunk and looked around. There was some scribbling on the wall above the cooler. It was tough to read because the wood planks were a faded chestnut and whoever had done the writing did it in pencil. I leaned in close, squinting.

  It was a list, and some of the items had been crossed through. Those were nearly impossible to read, but a few near the bottom were still legible.

  —the girl

  —find map (Miss Laney)

  —Earl again

  My name was underlined at least three times.

  So he’d written my name down on this list. Why? To remind himself to reach out to me? And why again? Had he previously tried and failed? And what did the girl mean, not to mention find map and the parenthetical Miss Laney?

  “Hey, you ever hear anything about a map?”

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” Rufus said.

  I tried to think how to best frame the question. “Anything about a map and my father? Or do you know who Miss Laney is?”

  “Miss Laney? That’s an easy one. She started coming after you, uh, left, but she never missed a Sunday. Sat right up front, hung on your daddy’s every word. She was the first one to start taping the sermons. That was after I left, though.”

  He screwed his face up in an expression I took for deep contemplation. “As for the map . . . let me think on it. Sounds like something I heard once.”

  I leaned in again, trying to read some of the bullets that had been scratched through. It was no use. A letter here or there, but not nearly enough to make anything out.

  “There was that thing in the newspaper,” he said.

  “Newspaper?”

  “Yeah, your daddy was a celebrity for a while.”

  “What for?”

  “What for? He used the power of the Lord to face down some pot dealers. It was big news at the time. Hell, it was one of the things that helped him become more than just a man.”

  “What did it say about a map?”

  “I can’t actually remember. But I reckon you could find the article if you really wanted to. Didn’t you say you were a detective?”

  I ignored the jab, my mind already turning to the old library in Riley.

  15

  Rufus said he’d pass on the library but invited me back to crash at his place that evening. “That is, as long as you don’t mind the bad memories.”

  I told him I didn’t and that I’d definitely be back, as long as he didn’t mind me bringing along a dog.

  “How does a man visiting from North Carolina already have a dog?”

  I told him what happened the night before.

  “And you already named this dog?”

  “Goose,” I said.

  “You sure this ain’t a bird?”

  I told him I was pretty sure and thanked him for opening up his home to me.

  “It’s as much yours as it is mine. Your daddy built it with his bare hands, from what I hear.”

  “My father could do just about anything if he believed it was God’s will.”

  “There are no limits to how completely a man can fool himself.”

  What I didn’t tell him was that I wanted to be there as much for him as for me. He could make all the jokes he wanted about how scary a blind man with a sawed-off was, but I didn’t think he was safe.

  As a precautionary measure, I even drove down by the creek until I could get a glimpse of Herschel’s old place through the trees. The two pickups were parked in front of the house, and it didn’t appear any of the men had even stirred yet. Probably still sleeping it off, I assumed. Probably wouldn’t be up until evening, and I planned to be back by then. Of course, the likelihood of me being able to stand guard through the night was very slight. Maybe twenty years ago I could have tolerated three all-nighters in a row, but I was already feeling the gravity of sleep pulling me down.

  In Riley, I stopped at a coffee shop and took the opportunity to call a few clients in Charlotte to let them know I hadn’t forgotten them. They weren’t happy, but they were willing to give me time. I’d worked for these clients before, and I’d built up enough goodwill with both of them to take a few days. But just a few. Both clients had other options, something I’d have to consider soon.

  I bought an espresso to go and drank it on the way to the library. It was a short walk from the coffee place. Riley had done well over the last thirty years, retaining its small-town charm but infusing it seamlessly with modern amenities. It was the kind of place you might come antique shopping and run into some college kids who were here to hike the nearby trails. It was pleasant, and I felt myself relaxing a little as I headed up the steps to the old library.

  That feeling didn’t last very long. A familiar voice called out from behind me.

  Repent, the same voice had said to me thirty-three years earlier.

  I turned around slowly.

  “Earl Marcus? I thought you’d never come back to this place again.”

  I recognized the man even though I had not seen him since I was seventeen. We’d called him Choirboy then, just not to his face. To his face, we tried to say as little as possible. In fact, we tried not to look at his face at all.

  His real name was Chester Dunkling, and I’d always remember him for two things: being a head taller than everyone else our age and taking all the fire and brimstone bullshit my father preached as seriously as anyone I’d ever known.

  He shook my hand, and I tried to read him. Time does a lot to someone, but it can’t hide a person’s true character. I saw in those eyes the same thing I’d seen so many yea
rs ago.

  Repent.

  You can’t make somebody repent.

  Sure you can. Watch me.

  He had proceeded to pick me up and turn me over, holding me out over the gorge they used to call Backslide Gap. I screamed and yelled, but it was no use. Choirboy wasn’t going to put me down until I repented.

  Repent. Repent. Do it.

  He wouldn’t stop saying it. As determined as I was to not give in, I was more frightened his arms would give out before his stubborn desire to see me repent and that I would die before I ever made it to thirteen.

  So I repented. I told him I was sorry. I told God I was sorry. What I didn’t tell him—and was damned glad he hadn’t noticed—was I had absolutely no idea what I was repenting for.

  But it had worked. He put me down and gave me a hard stare.

  God forgives you.

  I wondered if God had forgiven him yet.

  “You come back to make amends?”

  I shook my head. “No. Just to tie up some loose ends. I’m not staying long.”

  “You should make amends, Earl.”

  “I don’t have anything to make amends for.” It had been my line thirty years ago, and it was still my line. For everybody except Lester. Lester was different. One day, I hoped he’d forgive me for what I had done.

  “I hate to hear that,” Choirboy said. He still looked the part. Tall, clean cut—wearing a pair of tan slacks hiked up nearly to his navel and a plain blue button-down oxford cloth shirt. His hair was parted neatly to one side and colored black to look like it had so many years ago.

  I felt a distinct and powerful urge to get away from him, to put some distance between myself and this distasteful embodiment of a past I’d tried so hard to forget.

  “I just want you to know, Earl,” he said, his voice a low drawl, “God will take you back if you repent, but he has limits. His judgment is pure.”

  “That’s good to hear, Chester.”

  He smiled. “Oh, folks just call me Choirboy now.” He tilted his head to one side, in what seemed like an oddly robotic attempt at a human gesture. “It kind of stuck. I like it. Lets people know right up front what I’m about.”

  “And what’s that, Chester?”