Copyright © 2017 by Andy Davidson
Excerpt(s) from The Night of the Hunter: Vintage Movie Classics by Davis Grubb, copyright © 1953 by Davis Grubb, copyright renewed 1981 by Louis Grubb as Executor of the Estate of Davis Grubb. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2110-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2111-1
Printed in the United States of America.
For Crystal
Dear God, don’t let me sleep. Dear God, there is something awful out there in my garden, and I’ve got to keep it from my lambs. Dear God, don’t let me sleep.
—The Night of the Hunter
Prologue
Texas, 1980
He sat for a while in the close, quiet dark of the bedroom, black straw Bullhide in his lap. The woman lay on the bed in a slant of blue nightlight. She was naked, small-boned, pallid and pretty. Her eyes were wide and red with burst capillaries and fixed on the ceiling where a brown water stain had long since faded, the flesh beneath her jaw purpled over. Outside, a scrim of light lay over the world and the wind scraped blades of yucca along the trailer’s metal shell. Directly, he stood from the chair and picked up the stuffed bear he had set aside, its one eye black and shining. Somewhere, in the deep silence of the Elcona, a clock was ticking. He put the bear back in the chair and pulled his hat low on his head and went out of the woman’s trailer, which was set back in a sweet-smelling juniper grove.
From Fredericksburg, he drove the pickup and cabover three hundred miles without stopping. The sun rose over rolling hills and tight, gnarled groves of live oaks wrapped in mist. He took a thin strip of blacktop toward Rocksprings, then on south until he came to a great green body of water, beyond which lay Mexico. From here he hooked back north, sinking the pickup and camper into the land like a barb. He drove with no destination in mind: Del Rio, Comstock, Langtry—the true desert west of the Pecos where the highway emptied out onto a vast scrub plain. Dry washes snaking beneath bridges where the bones of animals lay bleaching in the sun. He drove just under the limit and rode the narrow shoulder when bigger rigs passed. Ernest Tubb warbled on the radio.
At twilight, he pulled off for gas in a wasted town where the wind never ceased banging metal against metal. He stood away from the pumps and smoked a cigarette while a boy in overalls filled the pickup’s tank. The sun bled out in colors of orange and pink, and he wiped away the tears the wind brought. The boy was a half-breed, rangy with muscle. He walked with a limp and glowered and spoke no words of peace or friendship.
“Propano?” he asked the boy. “Para mi caravana.”
The boy shook his head and spat away from the wind. “Próxima ciudad. Maybe.”
He gave the boy three dollars, ground his cigarette beneath the flat of his boot, and drove on into the mounting dark.
It was night when he stopped again at a roadside bar west of a town called Cielo Rojo. Calhoun’s was spelled out in red neon above the porch, the cantina’s only extravagance, the rest of the place all cinder blocks and tin, white paint peeling from the blocks and showing faded blue beneath. It was a sad, sturdy place at the edge of a low dry forest of mesquite. Across the highway a set of railroad tracks ran from one end of the night to the other. He parked the pickup and cabover in a pool of orange arc-sodium light. A train was passing, and he stood in the lot and watched it, enjoying the steady, percussive rhythm of its going. Like a knife punching holes in the lonely night. He went inside the bar for a beer and found, plugged into the back wall near the toilets, a Wurlitzer Stereo with a handwritten note taped below the selector switches: Works. New in 1963—Mgmt. The chrome was flecking and the cabinet was cracked.
He looked around.
The only other patron sat alone in a corner, an old abuela with a face like a canyon. She wore a thin silk blouse with a bow at the throat. Her hand shook when she reached for the glass of whiskey in front of her. The bartender was a white man, big and silver-haired and bored behind his register, working a crossword with a chewed pencil.
The place was cool and dim and pleasant.
He bought a can of Pearl with the last two dollars he had, then dropped a quarter in the Wurlitzer. He punched a number and settled down at a table and tipped his chair back against the wall and put his boots up. He set his hat over his eyes and drifted in the peaceful dark of not being on the road.
The man in the box began to sing.
The music rose and fell.
Out of the darkness came her scent of lemon and vanilla, the curve of a white calf beneath the hem of a pale blue cotton dress, her shape an hourglass, like time itself slipping away. She, before the picture window that looked out on the mimosa dropping its pink petals on the grass. Her slow smile spreading beneath a pair of eyes blue as cobalt glass. Water sheeting on the window and casting its shadow like a spell of memory on the wall behind. Her little red suitcase turntable scratching out a song beneath the window and he, a boy, with his bare feet on hers as she held his hands and the record turned and they danced.
Their private, sad melody unspooling in his heart forever.
The song played out at three minutes.
In the silence that followed, a voice spoke inside his head.
A woman’s voice, soft and clear and sweet, and the word she spoke was his name.
Travis.
He heard the clatter of a quarter dropping and opened his eyes and tilted his hat back on his head and saw a woman who was not the woman he had been dreaming of. No woman ever was, but all women were measured against the dream, the memory, and so far, all had come up wanting. This woman stood alone at the Wurlitzer in a white summer dress with red flower print. Her skin was light as bone, her hair as red as a fortunate sky. She punched her selection and turned and looked at him and her eyes were large and round and green and she was not, he saw, so much a woman as a girl—seventeen, maybe eighteen. But the way she stood, alone before the box and somehow apart from the world, made her seem so much older.
“I like this song,” she said, and her voice was the voice that had spoken inside his head.
The man in the box began to sing again, the same sad warble.
Travis dropped his boots and set his chair on all fours.
She held the hem of her dress between her fingers and began to sway. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back to bare a long white throat. The old song working through her, Travis thought, like a slow, hot wire. He saw, where neck joined shoulder, an old white scar, blade-thin. She wor
e a gold locket, an oval-shaped clasp, the kind to hold pictures inside. It glinted in the scant bar light. The flowers of her dress were deep crimson, and they spilled down from her waist like—
red on the old man’s shirt like red on the seat like
—blood.
Her lips, the lightest shade of pink, moved around the words of the song, but no song came out of her.
Her skin so pale.
His heart beating faster now.
She moved toward him, swaying. Her red leather cowgirls scuffed concrete.
He slid his right hand to the buckle of his brown leather belt, ran his thumb over the eagle there, its outstretched wings, its talons curved and sharp.
Travis.
She opened her arms like a flower unfolding and slipped sideways onto his knee. She was in his lap and the tips of her fingers had found his cheeks before he knew it was happening, and when they touched his skin he started because her fingers were cold.
His own hand moved to the knife he wore on his hip, a Ka-Bar in a leather scabbard, its handle cut crudely from ironwood into the shape of an eagle’s head, cut to match his buckle.
She smiled, pushed his black Bullhide far back on the crown of his head. Traced her fingers down from his hairline and along his crooked nose, lingered over his lips. Her touch like a snake’s tongue finding its way.
His grip around the knife eased.
She took his hand in her palm and pressed her fingers against the pulse of his wrist and spun them lightly, as if unlocking a combination.
A jolt shot through him like he’d touched his hand to an electric fence. He twitched and his beer tipped and spilled and ran over the table and pattered on the floor. Red spots fired behind his eyes like he’d stared full-on into the sun. The world went white. A curtain dropped, a gauzy membrane through which the world looked faint, like after-rain rising from a hot road or his own breath fogging his windshield, but then he was back, as sudden as he had left. Only he felt slow and stupid now, and he knew, somehow, that he was no longer himself.
She put her lips to his ear and whispered, “I know your name, boy.”
Her breath was terrible, like something gone off, spoiled deep inside.
A thing was happening to him, a momentous—
monstrous
—thing.
Still holding his hand, still smiling, she pulled him up and out of his chair and now he was leaving the table, stumbling along behind her, helpless not to follow as she drew him across the floor and out of the bar and into the dark, and the old woman never looked up from her whiskey and the bartender never looked up from his puzzle.
The man in the box sang on.
Outside, they drifted hand in hand like teenagers in a movie. Beyond the gravel parking lot the lonely highway and the darkened plains stretched endless. For him, the world was now a picture knocked crooked. He could barely judge the ground beneath his boots and the stars in the sky shimmered and blurred and became long straight lines of light, as if time itself were stretching to the breaking. She laughed and squeezed his hand. His slow gaze went to his Ford parked in a pool of orange light near the scrub at the edge of the lot. The truck bed saddled with the Roadrunner. His miserable little—
home
—camper.
She laced her arm through his. “Will you show me?”
Each of her words curled like an edge of burning paper and flew away into the night, became a star in the sky.
“Show me what the others never see.”
“Others,” he said. The word sounded as if it had been spoken from a deep and empty well.
Her grip on his arm tightened, and he felt the unexpected strength of her.
Not a girl, he thought. Something else.
“Show me, killer,” she said, close in his ear again, and now he recognized her smell, a red metal reek he had known as a boy when his father had leaned over his bed to kiss him goodnight after a shift at the stockyards.
She sat on the metal stoop of the cabover and spread her legs and drew her fingers lightly along her thighs, tugging the hem of her dress up with them. He saw the fine blue web-work of veins in the soft, pale flesh.
Felt the throb inside them.
“I want to see,” she said. “Where you sleep. Where you eat.”
She smoothed the fabric of her dress back down—he wondered how her hands didn’t come away bloody, touching all those flowers—and rose. She made a slow, lazy circle around him, and he turned with her but could not keep up. He staggered. Laughed at himself. She moved faster, made another circle. Another. He, trying to keep her in his field of vision, she at the edge, skipping away. Gravel popping beneath her boots like bones, tiny bones. His legs growing weaker. Head swimming. Another circle. Another. Until finally she was nothing more than a flicker, like an old-fashioned machine he had seen at a fair as a child, a light shining through the shape of a horse galloping. He staggered again and went down on one knee and fell over on his ass. The world went away, and when it came back her face filled his vision where she leaned over him, hands on her knees, breathing fast and shallow in the manner of a child who has just played a great fun game. The stars behind her still turning.
Now she looked over her shoulder at his camper. “Take out your key and open the door,” she said between breaths, brushing her hair back from her face.
He put his hand in his pocket where he lay on his back and felt the rabbit’s foot keychain and two keys. A black tuft of fuzz and metal, the keychain made him remember he was part of a world that was real. She put her hand out. He took it and suddenly was standing, as if some great gust of wind had swept him to his feet. He took a step sideways, felt his balance tipping. “Shit,” he said. Then he felt her fingers twine with his, and now he could stand without fear of falling, their two hands become one, the snake’s head whole.
To better find our way, she said.
But she hadn’t spoken, had she?
He took out his keys and together they crossed the small distance to the camper, and the key sought the lock and went smoothly in.
The door opened outward.
He stepped back, and now his hand was empty of hers.
Travis looked around.
He stood alone on the stoop.
She was nowhere.
The air, for the briefest moment, took on a chill, and for the space of a single breath he saw the cold in front of his face.
He caught the doorjamb to steady himself.
He heard laughter, like glass chimes on a summer day.
Off to the right he saw a shape.
She stood a dozen feet away at the edge of the lamplight, her hands clasped primly behind her, as if she had always been there, her mouth turned up in a cold little smile, her white dress covered in—
blood
—flowers.
Out in the dark, a coyote yelped, a young, strangled sound.
Another answered.
“Who are you?” he said to her.
She came in close, crossing the distance between them in a single step. He knew this had happened and it made no sense, but it was like a lost snatch of song on a record that had skipped a groove: it did not matter, the song went on. She reached behind him. Traced her index finger over the stamp of the letters on the back of his belt. She whispered each letter—T-R-A-V-I-S—but her lips did not move save to widen into a grin. Then she turned her sharp chin up to the night sky, to the moon, a sliver of shaved silver, and he thought, for a second, she was going to howl. But she only said, “My name is Rue.”
“Rue,” he said thickly. “Where’d you get all them teeth, Rue? You got about a thousand, a thousand—”
She kissed him, her lips meeting his, and the sensation was at once like setting his tongue to a battery, or an ice cube, or a moist clutch of fetid earth.
She backed lightly up the metal stoop and into the narrow camper, smiling all the while, and his last glimpse of her from where he stood, beneath starlight and sky, as she turned and disappeared i
nto the camper dark, was a flash of white calf, curved and sharp as a scythe buried in her red stump of a boot.
He looked up at the stars.
“Travis,” she called down, softly, unseen in the gaping black maw of the camper. “Come in here with me. Please.”
This time, he thought. This time. Maybe it will all be. Different. She is not the one, but I know it. I know it and that makes this. Different.
He went up the steps and closed the door.
Again, he was alone.
Orange lamplight came bleeding through the tiny windows. Shadows spilled out of the pine-laminate cabinets and corners. The air was stale. He heard the clink of an empty glass in the sink as the camper groaned and settled. He stood very still. He listened. The room was silent, as silent as a forest of bamboo, he thought, tall and thick and blotting out the sun, heavy artillery sending distant tremors through the earth, the sounds of battle fading, the only sounds the call of a bird and his own thudding heart. The instinct to run had brought him to such a place once, and the same instinct was spreading through him now like spilled ink, a black and permanent stain.
In a splash of red neon across the aluminum dinette, two pale hands emerged from the shadows and steepled themselves atop the table, and now he saw the rest of her sitting in the corner, in shadow. He suddenly remembered a trip to the Fort Worth Zoo when he was a boy, the white tiger exhibit, how the big cat had watched him and his father from where it lay in the daylight gloom beneath a frond, its huge snow-mitten paws draped one over the other. I can eat you whenever I want, that gaze said. Whenever.
When Rue spoke from the dark, her voice was somehow changed.
It was deeper, crueler.
Hungry.
“I know you, Travis. I’ve been watching you. You and all the pretty girls, and all the pretty girls watching you. You show them what they want to see, and they want you. They take you into their beds. But not their hearts.”
He felt light-headed, as if fingers were fluttering through his skull, searching out his secrets.
“It isn’t you they really want,” she said. “It’s him. The stranger who steals your face.”
In Valley of the Sun Page 1