Moments later, he was back with a paycheck. “All right, then,” he announced. “I’m finished.”
Ephraim took off in a flash, winding back through the cages and out to the flea market area. Jonathan scuttled to keep up, darting through wandering packs of tourists and visitors. After a row of antique displays, they came to the record collector’s stand—and, as fortune would have it, the longhair was working. He spotted them coming and cracked a grin. “Well.” His gaze came to rest on Jonathan. “What’s up, Abe?”
“Jonathan.”
“Sorry. Whoa, you’re dressed to the nines, my man.”
Jonathan looked down—“What?”—in confusion.
The longhair laughed. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.”
Jonathan still didn’t understand.
The longhair shifted his gaze to Ephraim, who stood in flannel and mud-stained pants, with no hat on his head and three days’ worth of stubble. Excepting his haircut, he bore little outward resemblance to an Orderly, even one in Rumspringa. The longhair looked back to Jonathan, frowning. “Well, this won’t do,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t sell you anything dressed like that. Your people might see.” He got up and, turning, opened a door to the parking lot. “Here.”
Ephraim picked up the case marked “2 for 5” and walked out. Jonathan followed him.
Once on the dock, Ephraim got down on his knees and started to sift through the tapes. From the doorway above, the longhair remarked: “A couple of recent additions in there.”
Ephraim looked up with a glimmer of hope. He motioned one hand in a half-circle, questioning.
Puzzled, the longhair watched him, trying to make sense of it.
Jonathan ventured a guess. “He’s talking about last week, I think.”
The longhair’s expression brightened suddenly. “Ah! You dug that Possum. Is that it?”
Ephraim appeared confused, if hopeful.
Grinning, the longhair went on to explain: “That’s what they call George Jones, his moniker.”
Ephraim nodded emphatically yes.
“No,” said the longhair. “Sorry ’bout that. But I’ll keep my eyes open. Try me next week.”
Satisfied, at least insofar as the longhair identified, Ephraim nodded his head. Between them, a torch had been passed, an exclusive understanding sallied forth.
He returned to the bargain box, much relieved. He sifted and picked with a gratified air. One of the tape covers featured a group of (women?) in war paint stalking a scrap yard. Another showed figures with plastic geranium pots on their heads, entitled: Devo. Continuing, someone who looked like the Minister Bontrager lost on a drunk: Aqualung. Finally, a creature named Ponharev leaned on a wall with his barn door flap hanging open.
“Forget that, kid,” said the longhair. “You want something wicked? Try this.” He brandished a tape.
Turning it over, Ephraim regarded the cover design. Very little was clear: a wash of darkness streaked with burgundy red and what looked to be creases of light. On closer examination, a host of misshapen figures began to emerge. In the center, strapped to a chair: the head of a goat on the shoulders and chest of a man. Beside it, a body, inverted, possibly hung by a hook from the roof of a cave. To its left, a five-pointed figure entangled in hieroglyphics. And down below, a lake of crimson bobbing with limbs and appendages, reading: “REIGN IN BLOOD.”
Ephraim looked up to the longhair, as though to ask, This is good?
“That,” said the longhair, grinning with relish “is wicked shit.”
Outside, the crowd was steadily thinning. The clouds hung heavy now. Rain was imminent. Jonathan’s pacer, tied to the hitching post, shifted restlessly, stamping the gravel.
Time was short. They would need to return via 341 at a steady clip.
Ephraim climbed into the buggy ahead of Jonathan, fixed on manning the pacer. Always the more assertive driver, he gripped the reins and parried about. Within moments, the railroad tracks had passed under them. Turning west, they rolled through a stoplight, moving by quilt and basketry outlets—then under a bridge and onto an overpass, into the thick of a traffic jam …
At once, it was clear they had made a mistake. And terribly, irreversibly so—there was no way to angle the buggy around with a full lane of steadily oncoming traffic. Their own lane, devoid of an adequate shoulder, was backed up for three hundred yards from the Sprawl Mart—a ten-acre superstore complex—ahead: one week away from its grand opening, and still, after fourteen months in construction, mobbed with resident protesters, area farmers and small local business owners.
Ephraim and Jonathan hadn’t foreseen this delay. For them, as with most of the Plain Folk who normally veered from this road on principle, the Sprawl Mart was just another English atrocity. In appearance, it wasn’t much worse than the rest. They certainly hadn’t expected the roads to be tied up this badly in both directions.
An oncoming tour bus gradually slowed to a crawl on approaching Jonathan’s buggy. Ephraim looked up to see wall-eyed Redcoats staring down on them, angling cameras. One of them slammed his head to the tinted window in mute incapacitation. The others didn’t really appear to know what they needed or wanted to say, they just stared. The driver’s voice came over the intercom: “Don’t worry, folks, these people are guaranteed nonviolent. Just try to remember: the camera steals their souls.” (Laughter.) “So, if you must, try and shoot on the sly …”
Flashbulbs exploded. Ephraim winced.
Behind the bus, a line of drivers began to honk and rev their engines. The bus driver paid them no mind. Ephraim looked up, blinking away the static. He singled out one of the cameras and pointed. The Redcoat blinked, apparently startled. Ephraim threw him a middle finger. Jonathan gasped. The bus driver took off.
Slowly, their lane began to move. But it didn’t proceed more than twenty yards—they had just drifted into view of the road crew—when everything slowed to a halt once more. A traffic director had flipped his sign from SLOW to STOP. The delay would continue. Three more lanes of traffic would now be allowed to pass, one at a time, before the next chance to get through came around, and even then, there was no guarantee …
Ephraim, losing patience quickly, hopped out of the buggy and scouted ahead. He passed a line of motionless vehicles. Most of their drivers regarded him warily. Scowling, he batted the hood of a station wagon at random, then turned around.
He climbed back into the buggy. His body felt overheated. He clawed at his forearms … Something was wrong: out of nowhere, it seemed, he was terribly thirsty. His throat was burning.
Ahead, in the distance, a tractor-trailer was angling out of the superstore lot. It swung around to the west at a drag. Ephraim spotted it slowly approaching.
He whirled on Jonathan, agitated, motioning: Where’s the stereo? Jonathan glanced over one of his shoulders, into the trunk. Ephraim followed his gesture and, presently, pulled up the battery-powered player. Then he inserted the Wicked Shet tape.
At first, once the leader had rolled and the opening notes had begun, booming out of the speakers, Ephraim was forced to assume there was something wrong with the tape. This equipment had never emitted such grating, cacophonic belches. It sounded like a chain saw, whining and rising in sharp, sporadic bursts, then leveling … Adding to matters, the longhair had sold them faulty goods. Or so it seemed—till the bashing commenced: like a trash can lid being whacked with a crowbar—ONE, overtop of the chain saw, then—ONE, TWO—more menacing now, more deliberate—ONE—as a serpent coiled to strike—ONE, TWO—the strike giving way to a gallop: the pound of a broken fan belt slapping the underside of an engine hood: approaching, over the fields, preparing to sack and pillage and raze and defile—ONE, TWO—with the chain saws winding, the crowbar, the fan belt, pushing to a head, then: “AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHH”—a scream, like ten thousand demons plummeting hell-bound, end over end …
Ephraim’s equilibrium reeled. He fell forward, bracing his weight on the dash.
A series of
turbulent images flared in relief on the screen of his inner eye. He watched them tumble and weave and recede into blackening madness.
Then came the vocals:
Slow Death
Immense Decay
Showers that cleanse you of your life
Forced in
Like cattle you run
Stripped of your life’s worth
Human mice for the Angel of Death
Back to the galloping, chain saws, crowbars, visions of torture beyond comprehension:
Angel of Death
Monarch to the kingdom of the dead …
Beside him, Jonathan reached for the stereo, desperately trying to silence the roar.
But Ephraim, in white-knuckled rapture, blocked his attempt with a sweep of one leg and then went on, much to the shock of surrounding motorists (if equally geared to the protesters’ cheering) to tighten the reins, angle the buggy out into the oncoming lane and charge.
Jonathan nearly flew off his box.
A bystander shouted. “Get out of the way!”
Gripping the reins even tighter, Ephraim lashed the pacer’s haunches, lunging. Above the wind and the pounding of hooves and the carriage wheels grating on asphalt beneath him, the Wicked Shet blasted.
Surgery with no anesthesia
Feel the knife pierce you intensely
Inferior, no use to mankind
Strapped down screaming out to die …
Angel of Death
Monarch to the kingdom of the dead
Infamous butcher
Angel of Death …
Jonathan cried out. The protesters screamed as the oncoming trailer blared its horn. The rest of the traffic joined in with it, over which Ephraim, holding steady, howled.
Benedictus
What felt to be three or four centuries back—in a time so gone it was hard to imagine it having existed in this day and age—the essence of compound filth had preceded The Crow’s arrival well in advance: ahead of the corn liquor rasping his palate, ahead of the musk of his perspiration, before his appearance—dragging one leg that had never recovered from gout in childhood—scowling sternly, his brow in a furrow of ruts, underscored by his graveyard eyes.
And so, now, after all this time …
Some things never changed.
They just ripened.
From two hundred yards in the distance, his arrival by carriage was heralded in on a plague wind. Twenty years later and no less rancid. In fact, the stench had only intensified.
He pulled to a stop alongside of the waterwheel. Slowly, the carriage door opened outward. A dung-crusted boot touched down on the platform and pivoted. Another boot dropped to the gravel. Rocking forward, the old man stood to position, slightly cocked to the left—in profile now, and, as might have been expected, of wider girth, having bloated with age. His beard was almost entirely white. His pitted nose had swollen and flattened. The passage of years had exacted a toll, to be sure. But his aura was undiminished. The rancor was deeply imbedded and festering—instantly, jarringly identifiable …
And still, he was dragging that gimpy leg.
The only significant, nonbiological change in his appearance was the hat on his head—a creaseless, wide-brimmed, black felt hat—which, at last, confirmed the nigh to implausible: he, Benedictus, was now a minister.
Certainly, stranger things had happened. But few, if any, less appropriate.
The idea of Old Man Bontrager reading the Book of Isaiah—or delivering the Es Schwer Deel—in the presence of an organized body of worship was so preposterous, so perverse, so obscene, it begged the question: what could have happened to District Seven? What in the world had become of the church?
Clearly disgusted, though, given his sour expression, equally unsurprised, the old man stared at the upended plow in the yard, and the hinny, gnawing its bit. Removing his hat, he spat in the dirt, then wiped his mouth with one dirty sleeve. Frowning, he pondered the image intently. Then he made for the summer kitchen.
He got to the door, unlocked it, went in. A pile of crockery fell from the windowsill—rattling, crashing. A moment of silence. He reappeared with a bottle of corn whiskey.
Nothing had changed.
Minister Bontrager. Lord deliver.
What came next?
Officer Rudolf Beaumont, of course …
Ludicrous though it may have sounded: Rudy “The Great White Chickenshit” Beaumont—fishtailing into the drive in what would’ve appeared to be his very own township cruiser—his yapping in bursts from the driver’s seat window discernible even at seventy yards. His nasal bleating, as unmistakable—down the lane it proceeded, approaching …
He slammed to a halt. He got out of the cruiser and yelled toward the house: “Get out here, Bennet! This motherfucking kid!”
He was heavier. Balding.
He looked like a swine in tights.
That much, too, hadn’t changed.
In early adulthood, Rudolf had been pronounced unfit for military service (the navy) due to acute asthma. In order to spare him disgrace in the family (three generations of low-ranking sailors) he’d been assigned to “domestic” service, stateside, overseeing “highway patrols.” The closest he’d come to “the shit” was an unpaved stretch of road outside of Philth Town. There, he had “monitored” thirty-man labor teams made up of conscientious objectors—most of them Orderly draftees working the pavement in lieu of active duty. In other words, he had stood guard over pacifists—mostly young Amish and Mennonite men—some of whom recognized him from Blue Ball, and none of whom knew how to take him seriously.
Back home, his father had been renowned as the laughingstock of the Amish Basin: by day, a scarcely respected mining executive and would-be community man, by night, a chauvinistic bigot who, after steadily hosing his mind with drink for the better part of a lifetime, had gone off the deep end, much to the shame and lasting disrepute of his family, by first becoming an honorary member of the Pennsyltucky Nazi party—Rudolf was named after Hitler’s deputy—second, shooting all five of his dogs for “chronic insubordination,” and third, coming out of the closet on a gin-blown, ass-naked yodeling public rampage—one that had led to a padded cell, leaving Rudolf behind as an angry young short man.
And Rudolf was most undoubtedly short. That much was clear in his one-to-one dealings, as had been the case with the Orderly COs—most of whom, once again, had known him for years, and who certainly bore him no personal favor. At first, his insistence on being addressed as “sir” had been greeted as vaguely hilarious. However, soon—after three or four tantrums—the whole thing had started to lose its charm. Soon, as the only non-Orderly present, he’d been shut out: the use of English had been dropped. He had wound up in conversational exile. His every command had gone unacknowledged. The only time anyone had paid him the first bit of mind was to crack a short-man joke. That much, he’d gotten without a translation. And it had driven him green with anger. When he’d threatened to call in the National Guard and have them all cited for insurrection, the Orderly COs had heard enough. All twenty-five of them had dropped their shovels and walked to the nearest service station. After lodging a formal complaint with the army by phone, they had gone on an all-night drunk.
The next they had heard, he’d been back in The Basin, working as a meter maid.
Eighteen years ago.
Now he defended the public trust.
“Get out here, Bennet!” he yelled at the house.
Benedictus stepped from the kitchen.
At the sight of him, Rudolf jerked a thumb toward his cruiser: “Stunk up my whole backseat!”
A motionless figure was sitting in the vehicle.
Beaumont opened the door and grabbed him. Headlong into the dirt he was tossed.
Stepping forward, The Crow looked down on him.
Already marked with cuts and bruises, the boy looked up in evident terror. The boy: the poor, unsightly wretch—as blighted to God-awkward, all out of sorts.
I
t hurt just to look at him.
He looked like his mother.
This was entirely too much to process …
Rudolf continued to blather hysterically: “—going upstate next time, so help me—”
In all likelihood, the boy had already outwitted The Chicken-shit once, if not many times. No doubt, there would have been multiple incidents—and more than spontaneous cow-tipping sprees. The kid would have proven a considerable nuisance. And gotten away with it, largely.
Till now.
Benedictus loomed over him, seething. The boy cowered. A moment went by. Then, as if signaled, he got up and slunk through the yard toward the house with his head hung low. Rudolf clouted his face in passing.
Class act(s). Benedictus and Beaumont. The Church and The State. The Crow and The Chickenshit.
Fighting again, they were—back and forth:
“This one’ll cost you!” Rudolf yelled.
Bontrager yelled back. “What do you want?”
Rudolf went into the summer kitchen. Gone for a moment, he reappeared with a jug of corn whiskey.
“And double the weekly,” he said on his way to the cruiser. “Move it.”
Benedictus climbed the stairs to the porch, went in, was gone, came back. Then—by stroke of outrageous fortune—he handed Beaumont an offerings box. Beaumont opened it, pulled out a wad of bills, and—incredibly—even counted them.
Score.
Long Live The Celluloid.
Perfect.
And just ahead of the rain, no less. From over the hill in a wall of gray—sweeping the fields with a pattering rumble.
Rudolf’s cruiser moved off down the lane. Benedictus was left on the porch, enraged, confused and in evident thirst.
Scowling, he turned and went into the house.
Fannie
While most of The Order explained away Ephraim’s behavior by branding him not only damaged, but insolent, reckless, antisocial and, somehow, inherently cursed by nature, Fannie knew more than to blame superstitions and old Amish lore for her cousin’s condition. No, he hadn’t been doomed to clumsiness owing to the fact that he was born on a Wednesday. He wasn’t a mess on account of the household chores not having been completed that morning. The storm outside at the time of his birth had not foretold of an early passing. The fact that his gums had broken early, and all such nonsense, wasn’t to blame. Fannie knew better, as Fannie remembered in vivid detail too much of their childhood, too many early impressions of Ephraim—before he’d been taken away by her uncle, the Minister—back when her mother, Grizelda, as Ephraim’s surrogate, had tended them both—back when, side by side, they had crawled through the autumn wheat on their hands and knees.
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