In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  The boy only shrugged. “I’m okay.”

  “Still mad cause I made you go to bed?”

  He shrugged again.

  “Well, don’t be,” she said. “Wasn’t much to it after you left.”

  The bus soon rolled into the parking lot and the door hissed open, and he was off.

  She called after him: “I love you!”

  He disappeared up the steps and the doors closed.

  In the office, she tore a scrap of paper and scribbled on it No Work Thru Tuesday and went out and clipped it above the night-deposit box for Stillwell, should he come back. He’d left so suddenly the night before, she thought he might be gone for good. So be it if it’s so, she thought. Next she made another sign, this one larger, on a sheet of white typing paper. She wrote in big block letters with a magic marker: Restaurant & Motel Closed Fri.–Tues. See You Soon! She hung it in the cafe window, just as the first of the weekday regulars pulled into the lot in a pickup, six sun-browned men in denim shirts and straw hats, two in the cab and four perched in the bed. She went out to the truck and made her apologies, explained that she had business she had to take care of. The driver nodded, thanked her, and drove back in the direction of town, where Annabelle knew they could all buy biscuits and tater logs at the Texaco.

  It was noon when she got back from town herself. She pulled off the highway into her drive and saw the pickup and cabover parked in front of the house. She braked and sat in the idling station wagon. In the backseat was a paper sack from Thrifty Dan’s containing birthday candles, balloons, paper hats, and plates. The sack was set on a paper box that held a birthday cake.

  The sight of the camper and truck filled her with an inexplicable dread.

  She eased her foot off the brake and the station wagon gave a squeal and popped slowly over the gravel. She parked behind the pickup. When she got out, she saw the blood trail straight away, and the sight of it tripped something in her chest, and she felt as if a heavy weight had plunged into her stomach.

  The blood led onto the porch and across the straw welcome mat, into the house.

  The front door was ajar.

  Annabelle walked onto the porch and saw Stillwell through the screen, slumped on the floor by the bathroom door.

  She didn’t think, just moved, screen door banging behind her.

  She dropped to her knees at his side. His face was the color of chalk. He watched her like a hurt and cornered thing. His hat lay on the floor beside him in a pool of blood. The blood had seeped between the cracks in the floor. She saw a torn flap in his jeans and another in his shirt, the fabric soaked through. When she reached to pull his shirt from the wound, his hand shot out and gripped her wrist. He stared into her eyes and swallowed, big Adam’s apple working like a piston, and suddenly the fear she had felt at the bottom of the drive took a more definite shape, as his fingers tightened around her wrist.

  “I should phone for an ambulance,” she said.

  He pulled her roughly down. “Don’t,” he said.

  And suddenly the world went dim. Her vision darkened. Her tongue thickened. She felt as if she were suddenly not herself but someone else’s vague idea of Annabelle Gaskin. A notion. A fragment. A figment. She closed her eyes and felt her balance tip. She thought she heard music, a jukebox, the sharp laughter of women. The scent of the night rushing in through an open window. A flare of pain in her leg, as if the skin had been sliced—

  What happened? What did you do?

  —and now Stillwell was speaking, two words—no hospital—in a voice that was thick and wet, or was he? Had his lips even moved?

  Annabelle loosened the cowboy’s fingers from her wrist and tucked his arm against his chest. She closed her eyes again, this time to dispel a wave of dizziness.

  Stillwell’s breathing slowed. Steadied.

  Annabelle got her arms under his shoulders and took a deep breath and heaved him to his feet. She half-dragged Stillwell to the edge of her bed. She stripped his shirt, careful not to rip the fabric from the skin where the blood had dried. She gasped when he was bare-chested. His flesh was a road map of black veins, as if some dark ichor were pumping through him. They stood out thick as barbed wire beneath his flesh, coiling around patches of dead skin.

  Stillwell raised his chin from his chest. “Shade,” he said.

  A slant of sunlight lay across the bed, touching the bare skin of his abdomen.

  A tiny red patch was spreading there.

  His veins seemed to warm like stove-top coils.

  Annabelle quickly pulled the shade.

  She switched on a bedside lamp and turned her attention to the gash in his side. It had clotted and dried, maybe twice over. She went to the bathroom and filled a ceramic washbasin pitcher with hot water. This she poured into the basin, which stood in a corner of the bedroom in an antique stand. She dipped a towel in the water and pressed the damp cloth to the wound.

  Stillwell closed his eyes.

  She helped him to lie back on the bed and pulled his boots from his feet and dropped them on the floor. One tipped over and spilled blood onto the boards. She peeled off his socks—the left one came loose like hide, thick and sticky and wet—and began cutting at the leg of his jeans with scissors. She turned back the fabric and the wound here had dried and reopened and she could see bone through the meat of his leg.

  All will be made clean all will be made new.

  Annabelle leapt back from the bed as the words rang in her skull like a bell.

  Again, his hand clamped her wrist and the world dimmed, and the only light now was just visible around the edges of the window shade and beneath the crack in the door.

  A shape moved in the corner by the dresser, a shape like a woman, its mouth open wide, its teeth too many and sharp, and the air was filled with the cloying scent of a rich, old perfume, sickly sweet and strong to hide a deeper, fouler stench, and now the shape stepped out of the corner, and Annabelle opened her mouth to cry out STOP DON’T but she was helpless and she was going to die because she could not speak or breathe.

  She gave out a short, harsh cry, as if dragged awake from a nightmare.

  The room grew light again.

  The cowboy lay unconscious.

  Otherwise, Annabelle was alone.

  She clutched her chest and stepped away from the bed, slick with sweat and trembling. She looked down at the blood on the sheets, on herself, the floor. She stared at the corner of the room where the woman-thing—

  what woman-thing, there was no woman-thing, there is no woman-thing

  —had unfolded itself from the shadows.

  She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths.

  All will be made clean.

  What does it mean?

  To make it clean. To make it new.

  She saw, in her mind’s eye, Stillwell tugging at a box spring in the shallow end of the swimming pool, and suddenly she understood. He wanted her to do this for him. To make it clean. She could not have said how she knew this, or why it made such sense, but it did, and as she went about the tasks that lay ahead, she was not aware that her mind had shifted tracks, that her thoughts had become the thoughts of another, vaguer Annabelle Gaskin.

  She fetched gauze pads and iodine. She probed the wound in Stillwell’s leg with the tip of her finger and saw, beneath the epidermal layer, a second layer of white skin.

  White as the woman-thing.

  She glanced at the corner by the dresser, where the washbasin stood, in it the white ceramic pitcher she had filled, her own bloody handprint on the handle.

  Annabelle cleaned and disinfected both gashes. She poured alcohol over a needle from her darning kit and threaded it with navy-colored thread and put the first stitch into his leg. She had to work to get the needle through. Her hand did not shake. She pushed, pulled, pushed, pulled. She saw an older wound near his groin and palpated it and saw into the slit where layers of pink tissue should have been, but there was only an ashen sheaf of meat, like the pages of a book half
-burned. She thought nothing of this, nothing she would remember. She worked on, stitching both wounds, and if anyone had asked her why she was doing this—tending to a man who had broken into her home and bled upon her boards—she would have had no answer save one: Because he told me to.

  She emptied the washbasin into the bathroom sink and turned the shower on his boots, rinsing them clean. She washed his hat in the sink and hung it and his boots from the clothesline out back to drip dry. She soaked up the blood in the hall with towels. She carried these down to the motel laundry and ran them. She got on hands and knees and scrubbed the blood trail from the porch and the floor in the house with hot soapy water and a stiff-bristled brush. Where gouts of red had spilled on the gravel outside the cab of the pickup, she scattered the rocks with her Keds. Inside the truck, blood had grown tacky in the crevice between the seat and seat-back. She got more towels from the house and used these to soak it up. The rest of the cab she wiped down with a rag and a bottle of liquid spray.

  She found the keys to the truck still in the ignition. She cleaned these, too, then drove the vehicle back down the hill to the RV lot behind the motel, where she left it. She walked around the truck, inspecting it, and saw where the front bumper and grill were bent, almost as if something had struck it. She saw blood streaking the rusted steel. Annabelle shouldered the water hose from in back of the cafe and brought it over and sprayed the front of the truck. Hot and sweaty and blood-flecked, she pulled the pickup’s keys from the ignition and walked to the rear of the camper, where blood streaked the edges of the door.

  The smaller key from the rabbit’s foot opened the door.

  Inside, the cabover was dark.

  Annabelle went in.

  The wind blew the door shut behind her.

  The cabover smelled like death, high and sweet and terrible.

  Her eyes watered with the stink of it.

  Like the den of an animal, she thought.

  She wiped her face, let her vision adjust.

  She saw the blood, pools and pools of it along the linoleum. Stillwell’s knife lay in one of these. She reached down and picked it up and—

  make it clean

  —held it. The blood slicked her hand, cold and sticky between her fingers.

  Strips of shirt hung like ragged bits of flesh across the narrow room.

  Annabelle took one step forward, then another, careful of the blood. She ducked the strips. Ahead was the cowboy’s sleeping berth, the mattress set crookedly atop a long cabinet with a single door.

  Something gave a soft thump behind the door.

  Annabelle froze.

  “Is someone there?” she said.

  The door creaked open, a long, loud sound in the stillness of the camper.

  She eased forward, took a knee before the open cabinet door and leaned inside and felt around in the dim space, fingers brushing cobwebs and things of metal and wood and plastic—a toolbox, a hammer, a water jug, the cold steel of a propane tank—and finally something soft.

  Something with fur.

  Oh God, Annabelle thought, as her fingers closed around a foot, soft pads and claws.

  You, a voice hissed in her ear.

  She jerked her hand from the cabinet and scuttled backward over the floor until her shoulder banged into a cabinet, and there, above her, she saw the woman-thing with red eyes, peering down from the edge of the berth, and now she could smell her, too, a very old stink like a carcass in a roadside ditch. She regarded Annabelle with a cocked head. Eyes that narrowed. Annabelle sat immobile beneath that gaze, which seemed at once to scrutinize her and look straight through her, to some other plane.

  The berth shifted with her weight as the woman-thing came crawling headfirst down the ladder, lizard-like. She came within inches of Annabelle’s face, leathered flesh around her nostrils working as she scented the air.

  Annabelle clenched her eyes shut.

  Her grip on the knife had tightened so that the carved handle bit into her palm.

  She felt the woman-thing’s nose slip along her cheek, felt her lips upon her neck, her tongue—like sandpaper—scratch the flesh where her arteries throbbed.

  Then she felt nothing, and when she opened her eyes, she saw that the woman-thing was backing away on hands and knees, turning, pushing halfway through the open cabinet door. A dress clung to her thighs, thin and worn and rotted. When the woman-thing drew away from the cabinet, turning, there were two small corpses, white and stiff, hanging from her mouth, and these she dropped in Annabelle’s lap with a grin.

  You and the boy, she said, lips not moving through her smile, her voice like a coiling ball of snakes.

  Terrified, Annabelle looked down.

  Two white rabbits lay in her lap, shriveled, reeking. Maggots in their eyes.

  Make it clean.

  Annabelle shut her eyes against the scream, which merged with the woman-thing’s hoarse, dry laughter.

  Seat of her jeans smeared with blood, she came out of the cabover cradling the hem of her blouse where she had tucked the rabbits to carry, along with the knife. She took everything back to the house. She moved slowly, mechanically, like a thing winding down. She washed the knife in the kitchen sink and wrapped the rabbits in a plastic garbage bag. These she walked down to the motel dumpster. She took towels from the office and an armful of cleaning supplies from the maintenance closet and went back inside the cabover and cleaned it. She sprayed and scrubbed and held her breath and gagged and did not see the woman-thing again. When she came out for the last time that day, her arms were full of soiled towels that she carried down to the motel laundry.

  On her way back to the farmhouse, she stopped at the station wagon and stared through the rear passenger window at the grocery bag and cake box on the seat. She stared at these for a long time, as if trying to remember their purpose. Whatever it had been, it made her weary now just to look at these things. She opened the door and took them out and carried them inside. She set the paper bag on the kitchen counter and slid the cake box into the refrigerator. She washed her hands in the sink, wet a paper towel, and wiped the bloody handprints from the cake box. She unpacked the paper bag and threw it away.

  Finally, she took Stillwell’s knife from the sink and went to the bedroom.

  She stood over the bed, staring down at the cowboy’s sleeping form.

  She put the knife to his throat.

  What have you done, what will you do, they were tossed in a cabinet—

  Her hand trembled.

  The blade touched skin.

  A voice that was not her own burst into Annabelle’s head: NO!

  A woman’s—

  the woman-thing’s

  —voice.

  Annabelle took the blade away.

  Oh God, she thought, when she saw the knife in her hand.

  She shoved the blade back into the scabbard on Stillwell’s belt.

  Annabelle took a shower under water near-scalding hot, careful to wash away every fleck of blood that had found its way beneath her fingernails.

  It finds you, she thought, but she did not know what this meant or why she thought it.

  The steam billowed up and enveloped her, filled the room.

  She stood for a while beneath the water, head down, watching the blood swirl and run away down the drain, and she thought: This is what is happening to me. I am draining away. She stepped back from the spray and drew the shape of a rabbit in the frosted glass of the shower door. She stared at this until the water ran cool. Finally, she shut off the flow and got out to towel off. She had to wipe the mirror to see herself, trembling and looking drowned, and she thought, with a slow, coiling dread, that the woman staring back at her might not be herself.

  She was afraid.

  She fell asleep in the rocking chair in the corner of the room nearest the window, draped in her grandmother’s afghan. When she woke, the shadows outside were longer. Stillwell lay covered by a quilt, sleeping. She glanced at the clock on the wall and saw the time was
half past three in the afternoon. She had slept almost four hours. She heard the hallway creak and looked over. Sandy stood in the bedroom doorway, lunchbox and knapsack in hand, eyes large and round as he stared at Stillwell in the bed.

  “Momma?” the boy said.

  The skies outside were a mottled purple and gold as Sandy sat in the empty shed. Inside the cages, where the rabbits should have been, were half-eaten carrots turning black. He thought of how he and his mother had searched beneath the house and in the scrub fields all last Sunday. Today, his mother had taken Sandy into the kitchen. She had given him milk and tea cakes. Sitting with him at the table, a cold cup of coffee in hand, she had explained that Mr. Stillwell had fallen from the ladder onto his knife. Sandy had thought of the day his mother had broken the news to him in the hospital that his father had died, the news punctuated by the sound of a canned soda dropping from a drink machine somewhere nearby.

  “Is Travis dead?” he asked.

  “What? No. No, honey, he’s just hurt.”

  Sandy looked down at his plate and thought about the ladder, the roof, the Ka-Bar knife in its scabbard. He looked up and said, “But how could he fall on it when he keeps it put away?”

  An odd, fretful expression had passed over his mother’s face, as if she knew the answer but could not quite remember. Or could not tell. “I guess,” she said, fingers tightening around her mug, “he had it out. When he fell.”

  The boy said, “But—”

  “Eat your tea cakes,” she said, “then go play.”

  Now, sitting quietly in the shed, Sandy spoke aloud, even though there were no rabbits to hear. He said, “Travis is in Momma’s bed.” In Momma’s bed and hurt, he thought. Momma took me to the hospital when I stepped on a nail once out by the water tank, so why ain’t Travis at the hospital? “And why would Momma lie to me?” he said.

  The empty shed had no answer for this.

  But another voice—a woman’s voice—did: That’s what mothers do.

  Sandy gasped, felt his body erupt in gooseflesh. He leapt to his feet and ran out of the shed and into a wash of amber light, the sun hovering low over the distant hills. He backed up against the weathered farmhouse wall, staring at the crooked shed his father had built.