Fiends

by John Farris

  "No, they ain't in there, Arne. Otherwise I'd just burn it all down and be shut of the lot of them. We got us another ways to go. When you can't believe what you see no more, then just close your eyes and hold on tight to me. I promise if you do just what I say, you'll see the light of day again. If you don't—if you lose your nerve—well, then, reckon neither one of us has got a prayer."

  August, 1970:

  Huldufólk

  1

  "Potato salad?" Rita Sue said. "Marjory, I told you yesterday I was bringing potato salad!"

  "Must have been where I got the idea," Marjory said cheerfully. "Duane, could you give me a hand with all this stuff?"

  "Sure," Duane said, leaping nimbly from the backseat of the Fairlane convertible. In addition to a picnic hamper, there were Marjory's portable Zenith shortwave radio, a folding card table, and a two-gallon cooler on the front porch.

  "Potato salad," Rita Sue said again, fuming in the front seat. She was wearing sunglasses and a dab of sunblock cream on her vulnerable nose.

  "Doesn't make any difference," Marjory assured her. "We don't make it the same way."

  "I can eat me a bluing tub full of potato salad any day," Boyce said. Always the peacemaker.

  "Marjory, I don't think that card table will fit in the trunk," Rita Sue objected.

  "Yes it will. Have a little confidence, Rita Sue."

  "Well, I've got my clothes back there which I don't want all mussed up."

  "How many changes of clothes did you bring?"

  "Three. What's wrong with that?"

  "Nothing. If nuclear war is declared while we're gone, nobody can say you won't be dressed for it." Marjory opened the trunk lid. "Plenty of room. What's in that box, tools?"

  "Oh, that's mine," Duane said. "Killing jars and stuff. A can of carbon tet."

  "Is that for butterflies? Why do you kill them?"

  "To relax them."

  "I'll bet it does. So why do you want to—tell me after lunch." Duane grinned. "I'll show you. There's an art to preserving specimens so they look lifelike, like they could fly right up out of the schmitt box."

  "The what?" Boyce said, chortling.

  "Stuff it back where it came from, Boyce," Marjory advised him. "Rita Sue, what did you do with the camp stools?"

  "Marjory, we're going on a picnic, for pity's sake! Can't you sit on the ground like everybody—"

  "That's called roughing it, Rita Sue. I get in a really bad mood when I have to rough it. You know how long I lasted as a Brownie."

  "Where're you going now? Marjory, it's already ten o'clock!"

  "Enid has a camp stool she uses when she paints outdoors!"

  "Rita Sue," Boyce complained, "let me have something to eat. My stomach thinks my throat's been cut."

  "You can't eat yet. It's not time to eat! First we get there. Then we go swimming. That's the way I planned it. I don't know why everybody has to go and ruin things."

  "Just let me have one bread-and-butter pickle, and I promise I won't ask for another thing."

  "I'll have one too while you're at it," Duane said, settling down again into the backseat.

  Eventually Marjory reappeared with the camp stool and several other items, including a flashlight and a snakebite kit, that she happened to think of at the last second.

  "Boyce, can you drive okay with your foot the shape it's in?"

  "Yeh, it's my left foot's the hurtin' one, I don't need it to drive." He mashed the accelerator and gave a rebel yell. "We're in like Flynn, and off like a dirty shirt!"

  "Well, it's not my car," Marjory said to Duane, as they went hurtling in reverse down the drive to the street. "Hey, nice day. There's a pickle seed on your chin."

  "No, it's a green pimple. Where're we going?"

  "Ask the Tour Director."

  "Are you referring to me, Marjory?" Rita Sue said.

  "Where's the picnic?"

  "Oh, I thought we'd go up to Dante's Mill for a change, because Rising Fawn is always so crowded on weekends. And it's nicer to swim there. Boyce, you better had slow down for this intersection! If you make a rolling stop we could get hit by a Ready-Mix truck, they come barreling down Beaver Ruin like they own the whole road."

  Marjory said, "I suppose you all heard the Feds got Father Berrigan."

  "Marjory, don't get started. He did break the law, and my daddy says what can you expect from a papist anyway? Everybody knows they're born troublemakers, when they're not drinking themselves to extinction. That's all I have to say on the subject."

  "If they put him in jail," Marjory said to Duane, who looked sympathetic about the matter, "that's it. I've had it with this country. I'm leaving. I said, you'll have to get somebody else to pull you through Bio, Rita Sue!"

  "Where have I heard all this before? Well, burn voyage, as the French say."

  "Where would you go?" Duane asked, willing to take Marjory seriously.

  "Enid and I are going to Italy. To Florence. She'll study painting, and I'll—I don't know. Must be plenty of things to do there."

  "Next summer I'm going to take a motorcycle trip. The West Coast. Maybe up as far as Alaska."

  "Will you be off probation by then?"

  "Yeh."

  "That's a terrific idea, Duane. Well, I probably won't make it to Italy. Not right away. We'd have to sell the house and everything. But we're going. It's a feeling I have in my bones. My sister needs to get out of the rut she's in, and do something with her life. Rita Sue, do you have that tube of zinc oxide handy? My shoulders are getting a little red already."

  "Don't use it all up. I burn like a french fry in hell."

  "You know who I'd like to be?" Marjory said. "Sophia Loren. Mama mial That beautiful olive skin. I'll bet Sophia doesn't get sunburn. If you could be anybody else, who would you like to be, Duane?"

  "I don't know. Nobody. I guess I haven't been me long enough yet to know what it's like."

  Marjory and Duane had done a lot of talking during the past four days, but still she was surprised by the way his mind worked; she thought he was the deepest person she'd ever met. Rita Sue said, "You do have a resemblance to Sophia Loren in one department, Marj," Marjory smiling sheepishly, said, "She's talking about my—" And Duane, also smiling, said, "I caught that right away." Marjory took the tube of sunblock from Rita Sue, uncapped it, and looked at Duane again. He spread the ointment on her shoulders, and then, even though she was wearing her baseball cap, which shaded most of her face, he dabbed a little on the end of her nose. Marjory went on smiling. Somehow it was sexier than kissing.

  2

  Dante's Mill State Park, seventeen miles west of Sublimity, had been created in the early sixties with the flooding of eleven hundred acres to create a lake popular with both fishermen and swimmers. Large powerboats were banned. Slow-moving houseboats were acceptable, and could be rented for the day at the state-run marina near the spillway. Thousands of tons of rock had been dumped to ensure a clean shoreline. There were three campgrounds, each with a swimming beach and boat landing, a cafeteria in the park's headquarters, and a children's petting zoo. The centerpiece of the park was the restored old settlers' town, more than a dozen frame buildings, four of which had been built before the Civil War; a stable and smithy; a mill that still functioned; and a covered bridge.

  It was known before the land was purchased for a park that there were caves around and perhaps directly beneath Dante's Mill, as there were throughout the region. Some had been explored by cavers who thought there might be a link, a vast almost endless succession of deep chambers extending north and east to Dunbar Cave near Clarksville, Tennessee, and the famous Mammouth and Great Crystal Caves of Kentucky, a distance of more than one hundred miles. The ground due to be flooded was gone over thoroughly, and one previously undetected cave entrance the size of a rabbit hole was plugged after examination by members of the National Speleological Society revealed nothing but three muddy, middling caverns connected by umbilicus passages and containing only a few commonplace
bats and transparent crickets.

  Geologists concluded that the limestone subsurface of the land to be flooded could hold the lake; there were already dozens of really large man-made lakes across the Cumberland Plateau. Perhaps entrances to caves of incalculable had already been significance covered by the damned waters of Barren River, Percy Priest, or Guntersville. The chance that anything really worth exploring lay in the vicinity of Dante's Mill was remote, although previously undetected entrances to caves turned up all the time, betrayed by a puff of steam, a stream of bats at dusk, a newly created sinkhole, or an oddity like the Gochen Hollow Sucking Fire Pit in Alabama, so named because it inhaled the smoke from surrounding camp-fires.

  "My mother must have found a dozen new caves," Duane said. "All over the south."

  "She was a spelunker?"

  "Cavers don't like to be called spelunkers. Spelunkers wear tennis shoes and write on the walls and leave Coke cans lying around. Cavers are serious explorers. My mom was stuck in a cave for three days once. A rockfall pinned her down. She never lost it, though. That's one thing she taught me: never lose it."

  "What's 'it'?" Marjory asked him. They were driving through the cool woods toward the lake that came and went from view as the road curved through the hills of Dante's Mill State Park. They had put the top up on the unpaved road, which was a little clouded from gritty red dust raised by the tires of other vehicles.

  "I guess she meant whatever it is you need to get through whatever's giving you hell right then. She took me down once. I was about three, but

  I'll never forget. We just went straight down into this dark cave, two hundred and fifty feet on a rope. She had me under one arm."

  "Good Lord. Were you scared?"

  "I thought it was fun. They named a cave after her, in Missouri I think it was. I haven't seen her for a long time. Three years and two months. My dad divorced her when I was just a kid. He said all he wanted from a wife was dinner on the table every night when he got home. She wasn't too great about getting dinner on the table."

  "Where is she now?"

  "France. She married a, I think he teaches mountain climbing. She took that up, too. She writes me every month. In French, because she says she wants me to learn French. I'm learning it pretty good. When I was ten I hitchhiked to the airport and hid on a plane and they didn't find me until we were halfway to Washington. I just wanted to see her."

  "Does she want to see you?"

  "I don't know. She's got two other kids now. Maybe she doesn't. But she keeps on writing, so I know she thinks about me."

  "Won't your dad let you go see her? You're old enough."

  "He said if I could pay for my own ticket, okay. I had a job last year and I was saving up money. But he took it all to pay for the lawyer when I got in trouble."

  "Do you get along with him?"

  "Yeh. I just do what he says. He's not that bad. Neither is Nannie Dell. My stepmother."

  "What's she like?"

  "She wears pigtails. She organizes prayer groups. She's a good cook."

  "Here we are!" Rita Sue announced, as Boyce found a place to park the Fairlane in a graveled lot that was almost full. "Who's going swimming?"

  Rita Sue and Marjory changed in the women's bathhouse and joined the boys on the sunny strip of beach where they were having a chin-up contest on the exercise bars. Rita Sue wore a skimpy two-piece fire-engine-red suit with a long-sleeved lace shirt that came down to her knees, and a Mexican straw hat with a brim the size of a birdbath; Marjory wore a dark blue tank suit and matching short-sleeved top. She tried not to look down to see how much she was shading the sand with her hips.

  Boyce complained about being out of shape after his week on crutches and dropped out of the contest. Duane had broken a sweat but wasn't breathing hard after twenty-seven chin-ups.

  "You going in?" he asked Marjory.

  "Oh, I don't know."

  "Race you to the raft."

  "Oh, I don't want to race."

  Boyce laughed. Duane looked at him and looked at Marjory. "Why is that funny?"

  "Race her and you'll find out," Boyce said.

  Marjory was sitting on the side of the raft that wasn't overpopulated by kids when Duane finally showed up. She felt happier when he grinned at her.

  "Shouldn't have done all those chin-ups first," he said.

  "Don't you think Rita Sue's darling in that little suit?"

  Duane turned for a look at the beach. "She's okay. No butt and, you know. You look a lot better."

  "Maybe a little better than Namu the Killer Whale."

  "Marjory, why don't you just shut up and stop criticizing yourself? Hey, you want to know something? Nannie Dell was seventeen when she married my dad, right? She looked just like you do: the same build. She says it was all baby fat; kind of laughs about it now. Nannie Dell turned twenty-four last Thursday and she's had offers to model, but she won't because she's too religious."

  Marjory looked at the sky for a few moments, then at Duane's face in the water, and said, "I guess I kind of lost it there, didn't I?"

  "No harm done. Let's swim."

  3

  After diving and swimming for an hour, they changed and joined Boyce and Rita Sue in the shade of the picnic grounds for lunch. Then Boyce and Rita Sue took a siesta in the macrame hammock Boyce strung between a couple of pines. Duane got two of his lethal jars, a small butterfly net, and a pair of binoculars from the trunk of Rita Sue's car. Marjory carried her Zenith shortwave radio and they went off down a nature trail, then left the trail and found a big log to sit on.

  Duane took a two-inch joint rolled in Saran Wrap from his shirt pocket.

  "Oh, do you smoke much dope?" Marjory asked him, mildly alarmed.

  "No. Once in a while. There's a steel player down the street where I live, he used to be in Tammy Wynette's band. He has pretty good pot. Want to try a toke?"

  "I, uh. Well. I never."

  "I didn't think so. This is good stuff. If you want to try it."

  "Sure. Why not?"

  Duane lit the joint and showed her how to smoke it. "Suck in the smoke and hold it down as long as you can."

  Marjory did as she was told, and managed not to choke. When she was red in the face she exhaled. "Yeah. So what?"

  "Wait." Duane toked and passed the little joint back to her. They sat smoking for a while, not saying anything. Duane picked up his binoculars between tokes and scanned the trees overhead, the sun coming through in flashes. Marjory noticed a swarm of butterflies and nudged him.

  "There's some." It seemed to her that each of the butterflies—there must have been fifty of them—stood out from the woodsy background with exceptional clarity. They were yellow with brown stripes and scallops of dusky blue. Their wings were serrated. Marjory felt an affinity for butterflies she'd never known before. She was in awe of them. She nudged Duane a second time.

  "Tiger swallowtails," he said, and raised his binoculars again. "There's a painted lady over there. Nice specimen. Maybe I'll—no, there she goes."

  Marjory nodded solemnly, holding down what felt like a furnaceful of smoke. She exhaled, looking at her feet. The radio played softly, a melancholy Judy Collins song. Marjory felt the urge to take off her sneakers and play with the pretty butterflies.

  Duane handed her the binoculars and got up with a relaxed smile.

  "Excuse me, Marjory. I need to go."

  "To the little boys' room?"

  "No, I'm just going to take a whiz in the woods."

  Marjory laughed and laughed, rocking on the log. She thought it was one of the cleverest things she'd ever heard.

  He glanced at what was left of the joint she was holding between thumb and forefinger. "You can finish that, I've got another one."

  She nodded and took another drag on the diminishing joint as he walked away. So here she was, sitting on a log in the woods smoking pot with a car thief and amateur lepidopterist who she thought she might be in love with. Life took some funny turns, Marjory though
t.

  There was a mosquito on her wrist. Marjory just gazed at it benevolently until the mosquito was full and staggered into the air so slowly she thought it was going to crash-land. She imagined the mosquito big as a bomber and smashed on the ground, spilling quarts of her blood. She shuddered and felt less mellow. But another, last deep pull on the roach restored her blowsy good-humored equilibrium.

  Judy Collins had segued from '"Winter Sky" to one of Marjory's favorite songs, "The Last Thing on My Mind." She sang along until the music was obliterated by a blast of static. Then, even more annoying, the radio seemed to go dead, although she'd changed the batteries the night before. Marjory picked up the radio and balanced it on her knee while she searched the AM band trying to find something. She heard voices, but faintly. Dry whispery sounds, in a language she didn't think was English. A woman, or i child, sobbing. She knew instantly it wasn't a program. The sobbing gave her a chill. She dialed higher up the band and came across it again. She turned the radio off. She felt uneasy. She looked at the roach that had almost burned itself out on the log beside her, one tiny spark remaining. There was a pain behind her eyes, as if the day had become too bright to bear. She had feelings of guilt, of obligation denied, that she couldn't make sense of. She looked up with a stricken expression when she heard Duane's footsteps in forest litter.

  "What's the trouble?"

  "I don't know. My radio's acting weird."

  "Is it?" Duane took the Zenith from her and turned it on. A riot of music from a polka band caused Marjory to yelp and laugh in surprise. Duane turned the volume way down and found the Beatles. "Sounds like it's working okay."