Here, Sandy.
He turned and faced the cowboy’s cabover and pickup at the bottom of the hill.
Yes.
The orange cat sat on the truck’s hood, staring at the sleeper window.
Sandy.
The boy twitched.
The wind came rolling across the valley, the chimes singing from the porch. The old windmill turned and the clothesline in back of the house flapped like wings.
The sun was sinking.
Come to me, Sandy.
For a second, it was as if a bank of clouds had swept over the hills to block the day’s last light and his eyes had fogged over like glass under breath. But neither of these things had really happened—Had they?—and when he shook his head, the sensation went away.
Far away down the hill, he saw the cat scoot backward, its ears flattened.
Here. Now.
The cat hissed and streaked away beneath the boardwalk.
The boy made sweaty fists at his sides and swallowed. He remembered his mother’s bravery, the morning they had first seen the camper in the lot—
it could be any mean son of a bitch in that thing
—and went down the hill.
He went on trembling legs.
The sun like a lidded eye behind the horizon.
He stood at the grille of the truck and looked up at the sleeper window. He saw his reflection there, despite the dirt, a boy distorted in corduroy pants and a long-sleeved green shirt, a mop of blond hair. He looked down at the bumper. There was a dent on the driver’s side. He ran his finger over it. He walked round to the back of the camper and stood at the foot of the metal stoop. He listened for the clap of the farmhouse door, his mother’s voice, but there was only the steady press of the wind against his back. He took one step onto the stoop and pulled the latch.
It was locked.
He stepped down. Thought for a moment. Fetched a heavy cinder block from a stack near the motel’s maintenance closet and dragged it over beneath the kitchenette window. He stood on top of this—just like the baptistery, he thought, for short people and kids—and wiped away the road grime from the window. He peered into the cabover. He saw a faucet, a range, a stack of dishes in the sink. Wooden cabinets and peeling linoleum and a jar of peanut butter beside an open sleeve of saltine crackers on the dinette table.
Something popped above his head.
Startled, Sandy looked up.
The fluorescent lamp that towered above the cabover had popped on, and now all the rest in the RV lot were doing the same, one by one.
He peered back through the kitchenette window, and from the corner of his left eye, up toward the sleeping perch, he saw something move. A flash of white. An arm. A leg. Drawing back into the shadows like a trapdoor spider on a filmstrip he’d seen at school.
Sandy stood on tiptoes and squinted.
Unable to see anything, he got down from the cinder block and went around to the front of the pickup and stared over the cab at the front-facing window of the berth, its crack sealed with duct tape.
Sandy looked back up to the house, which was painted in golden light.
The sun was a faint quarter circle now.
The scrub fields and slopes behind the motel were purple as they cast the day’s last light back at the sky.
Sandy climbed onto the pickup’s hood. He clambered over the metal and cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face to the cracked sleeper window.
He saw the cowboy’s bed, a bare and empty mattress.
He let his eyes adjust to the dim light through the tinted glass.
Pushed his face even closer.
Something struck the window from the inside.
Sandy jerked backward and fell flat on the hood of the pickup.
The metal caved beneath him.
The sun disappeared, and the only light was that which streaked the clouds above, behind these columns a deeper, ominous dark.
Sandy lay looking up at the face of a woman, framed by the sleeper window, her skin as white as the fur of his rabbits. She reclined on her side, propped on her elbow, smiling. She had pink lips. One hand pressed to the glass, fingers splayed. Her lips moved, and though he couldn’t hear it, he recognized the single word she spoke. His name. Spoken with the same luscious sound as the first bite into a red, raw apple, a delicious wet sound, and Sandy could see in the dim light the V of her throat and collarbone and the slope of her breasts beneath her white dress. He lay prone and fixed on the hood of the pickup, staring up as the woman took her hand away from the glass and let slip one thin strap of dress and the fabric pulled away from the curve of her left breast like autumn’s last leaf dropping, and he heard, again, his name upon her lips, and this time her smile widened and her face transformed and what he saw next broke his paralysis, and as the monster-woman-thing began to laugh inside the camper—
I see you, Sandy. Do you see me?
—he rolled and dropped down and ran as hard as he could.
He ran for the house and never looked back. Afraid, if he did, he would see the awful, terrible thing he had seen staring out at him, grinning at him, laughing at him. Calling his name. That round face gone gray, bright green eyes turned black as marbles in a set of Chinese Checkers, and finally the mouth that had spoken his name as if tasting it, a mouth filled with white things wriggling among crooked teeth, sharp as roofing tacks and far too many to count.
He ran to his mother’s bedroom and found her asleep in the rocking chair again, Travis in the bed. Sandy stood in the doorway, gasping, wet with sweat, but he did not wake her. Instead, he leaned against the doorframe and closed his eyes and forced himself to calm down, to breathe, and when he opened his eyes, he stared at the cowboy, his mother’s quilt pulled halfway up his bare chest. He noticed the strange patches of skin there, dry and scaly. Much like the flesh of the thing he had seen in the camper.
In Travis’s camper.
He thought of the wrappings, which Travis never wore at night.
He’s allergic.
Sandy reached out and lifted the quilt. Travis lay in underwear, the sheets beneath him fresh and clean. Across his stomach and legs there were wider patches like those on his chest. The wounds on his hip and side were bound in tape and gauze. Sandy thought about trying to lift one of the pads, but decided against it when Travis murmured, words the boy couldn’t understand. Sandy saw the black veins beneath his flesh and a ring of bite marks on the cowboy’s inner thigh. Surrounding a gash, the flesh there flaking. Bite marks made by very sharp—
roofing tacks
—teeth.
Something here was terribly wrong, and Sandy had never wished more that his father was not dead. He dropped the quilt and backed away, bumping up against his mother’s maple bureau, on top of which the cowboy’s belt and scabbard lay in a heap. Sandy saw the eagle-headed handle and took the knife out of its scabbard and slipped behind the bedroom door, slinking down to the floorboards and curling his knees up to his chest and hiding in the narrow triangle of shadow where the open door met the inside wall.
He would wait and watch and listen, and if something happened, he would be here.
For her.
Outside, the stars were beginning to shine.
At half past nine that night Annabelle woke in the rocking chair and saw her son’s right leg sticking out from behind the bedroom door. She had been dreaming about Sandy, something terrible she instantly forgot upon waking, and her heart rose to her throat when she saw him on the floor. She pushed the door aside and saw he was only sleeping, chin slumped on his chest. Tears welled in her eyes at the sight of his brightly colored knee socks, which had slipped down below the hem of his pants and bunched above his sneakers. She checked the alarm clock on the bedside table. She barely remembered the boy coming home from school, let alone what she had said to him or where he had gone or how he had ended up here. She gathered him up into her arms and lifted him—he murmured something and wrapped his arms around her neck—and she wa
s about to carry him out to his room when she saw on the floor, beneath where the boy had been curled asleep, Stillwell’s Ka-Bar knife.
Annabelle tucked the boy into bed and went back to her own bedroom. She picked up the knife and sat in the rocking chair. Through the window she could see the Texas moon shining bone-white on the yellow-grass yard. Sheets on the clothesline whispered like ghosts, his hat and boots hanging among them. She turned the knife in her hand and ran her finger along the ridge of the eagle’s head.
The moon had climbed in the sky when Stillwell woke.
He sat up in bed, moving stiffly. His stomach growled, loud and vulgar.
He saw Annabelle watching him. Saw his knife in her hands.
“How long I been out?” he said.
“Since this morning,” she said.
“I’m taking your bed,” he said and moved to get out.
“Be still.”
He winced, leaned back against the headboard.
She remained in her chair, rocking gently.
He lay looking at her, or out the window, or at his belt and scabbard and keys on the bureau by the door.
“Your hat,” she told him, “is on the clothesline, drying.” She had washed it, she said, like his boots. In the shower. “I washed it with my hands and a bar of soap.”
He turned his heavy brown eyes upon her.
Annabelle looked down at the knife in her hands and said, “I have some things I want to say to you, Mr. Stillwell. And I want you to hear me.”
He watched her, unblinking. Waiting.
She took a deep breath. She had decided not to speak about the fog shrouding her memory, a fog she knew was somehow his doing. She had read about hypnotism, mesmerism, tricks of the mind, but this was darker, a kind of violation. It left an absence, like a stain she could not wash clean. No words for it, she thought. No sense in even trying. Everything else, she told him. She told him that it was no concern of hers where he went or what he did, but he had brought violence into her house and she could not abide it. She told him of the six months she had spent working the night-shift at the ER in Fort Stockton. All those cowboys brought in with knife wounds in the wee hours. A knife wound was a knife wound, she said, plain and simple.
“But I have never seen the like of what’s happened to you,” she said. She told him her daddy was bit on the hand by a brown recluse, and what happened to him, she said, well, it looked a little like what was happening all over him. Not exactly, but a little. “Other day when I saw you with them bandages,” she said, “I thought you might be a leper.”
“I ain’t.”
“No. You are not. But you got something rotten in you, all the same.”
Annabelle rocked in her chair for a while, the knife almost forgotten in her hands. “Maybe it ain’t so Christian,” she said, “but this is where we are, Mr. Stillwell, and all the pity in the world I may have for a man down on his luck, or all the work I may need done round this old place, none of that matters now. Because now, you see, I have to think of my son.”
“A boy’s mother ought not think of anything else,” Stillwell said.
“Easy to say if you ain’t a mother.” Annabelle went to her bureau and opened a drawer and took out a man’s pair of jeans and a gray T-shirt. She lay these, folded, on the end of the bed.
“I’m throwing a birthday for Sandy day after tomorrow,” she said. “I need you gone before then.”
The cowboy looked down at the bedcovers.
She left him alone, taking his knife with her.
Dressed in Tom Gaskin’s clothes, Travis walked out into the hallway, where his still-damp boots had been set, heels against the baseboard. His hat hung on top of them. He picked everything up and went into the living room. The TV was static. Annabelle lay on the couch, curled beneath a homemade quilt. She glanced at him, but she looked away and did not speak, just stared into the static. He thought to ask for his knife, but he decided not to and walked out into the night and saw his Roadrunner parked down the hill behind the motel. He felt weak and hungry, each step setting off a throb in his hip and side.
Inside the cabover, there was no blood, save the old dark stains upon the mattress.
Washed clean, made new.
He sat in the dinette and thought about the choice before him.
It is no choice at all, Rue moaned from the shadows of his sleeping berth. We are stretched to the breaking, Travis. I don’t want to be this slow, shambling thing forever. I can’t live like this. After the gift I’ve given you, this is how you repay me?
Travis ignored her. His stomach pained him worse than the stitched wounds in his hip and side.
You are weak, Rue hissed. You make us weak.
The temperature in the cabover began to drop, and soon every breath he drew was expelled in a cloud.
I see now, Travis, Rue said. Her voice dry and cracked and full of poison. I see now why Mommy left you.
The moon was low in the sky, the hour late, when Travis stepped out of his camper. He wore a dead man’s clothes save his own belt and boots. The wind blew his long dark hair about his head. He put his hat on and moved slowly, painfully. He trudged up the hill and stood at the base of the front porch steps.
Wind chimes stirred in the breeze.
I will never leave you, Travis. I will never drive you away.
To the east, the morning warmed like a fire rekindled.
Who else has loved you so?
He sat down on the porch steps and slipped off his boots, one, then the other, and set them as a pair on the uppermost step. He got up and went to the screen door and opened it slowly, careful of its dry hinges. The doorknob turned in his hand, and he moved silently in his socked feet over the planks of the floor, into the darkened living room.
He saw Annabelle, asleep on the couch, TV still broadcasting its empty noise.
Down the hall, the boy’s bedroom door was open, the boy asleep in his bed.
Annabelle stirred, rolled over on her side, her back to Travis.
He saw the handle of his knife protruding from beneath a couch cushion, within easy reach, should she need it. He bent and slid it free.
He went down the hall to the boy’s bedroom, moving quietly. He stood in the doorway and looked in on a narrow bed tucked in a far corner, the boy on his side, facing the wall, bed sheets kicked loose and twisted at his feet. His small bare legs stacked one atop the other like fresh, raw wood. A bookshelf and desk stood on the other side of the room, a heap of schoolbooks on the desk. The white bead-board walls were hung with framed pictures of the boy and his father. Tom Gaskin in jeans and an olive Army coat, a duffle over his shoulder. Tom and Sandy in the motel pool, back when it was full and blue and bright and the boy was tiny. And here, set upon Sandy’s nightstand, was a photograph of Annabelle, ten years younger and pregnant on a stepladder, hanging pictures in the cafe. There was something in the way the light caught her hair in the picture, something in the shape of her calf beneath her green dress—it gave him pause. He did not know why, could not say why. He thought of all the barren surfaces in his own father’s house, the lack of pictures in frames.
Everything Travis had ever lost, the boy had found.
But I found you, came Rue’s plea.
And I found them, Travis answered.
He went down the hall to the front door. He watched Annabelle sleeping. He slid the Ka-Bar into his scabbard and took the pack of cigarettes from the table near the door, along with the lighter, and went out of the house and sat down in the porch swing in his socked feet to smoke.
Sandy woke.
From a dream in which he had stood alone in the field behind the motel, looking all around for his rabbits. He had seen them in the scrub, darting. He knew they were there. But a wolf had come down out of the hills. He had seen it coming, lean and hungry, its ribs showing through its pelt, and he had stood helpless with fear as it came, and the closer it got the bigger it seemed, until finally it was larger than any man, with legs that were all a
ngles, too long for its shaggy body, and it walked unnaturally as if it were a bat or a dragon, though it had no wings, and he saw his rabbits in the last moments before the monster reached him, and they were far away and safe near the shed, but he was not.
He lay in bed for a while and listened to the stillness of the house. A floorboard creaked on the porch, and he heard the sound of the swing going to and fro, the chain upon the hooks screak-screaking.
Wearing only a white T-shirt and underwear, he padded along the hall toward the living room, where he found his mother asleep on the couch, the TV churning static. Through the curtains, he could see a man’s shape in the swing, a cowboy hat. He backed away and went out the back door of the house. From the corner nearest the shed, he saw that the cabover down the hill was dark. He slipped around the back of the house, brown grass crinkling beneath his bare feet, and came up behind where Travis sat in the swing.
The cowboy cocked his head in Sandy’s direction. “Best not sneak up on people.”
Sandy climbed the porch and swung a leg over the rail and sat on it. He looked at Travis’s un-booted feet, the cigarette in his hand. The knife that lay flat across his jeans. “What you doing out here this time of night?” he asked, scooting back against the post.
“Might ask you the same.”
“Momma said you hurt yourself. She said she told you to leave.”
“She did.”
“Them cigarettes stink.”
“They belong to your momma.”
“No they ain’t.”
“You ask her.”
There was no wind. They sat in silence, and it seemed as if all around them the night was listening.
“You know there’s something out there in your camper?” Sandy said. “I saw it.”
Travis drew on his cigarette and looked out at the Roadrunner.
“It got my rabbits,” Sandy said.
It was a moment before Travis said, “Thought they just run off.”
You know better, Sandy thought.
Abruptly, the cowboy put his cigarette between his lips and set his knife on the swing. He stood and unbuckled his belt, pulled it free of his jeans, and slid his scabbard off the belt. He sheathed the knife and made to give it to Sandy. Sandy threw one bare, skinny leg over the rail and hopped down and crossed the few feet between them and took the knife.
In Valley of the Sun Page 20