Dark River Road

by Virginia Brown

  Old enmity died hard. He looked back coolly, daring Chris to say anything. If he thought it made any difference to Chantry whether they fought on the church steps or not, he’d be wrong. It didn’t. Not anymore.

  “Heard that dog Mr. Ledbetter bought made high points in Nursery class,” Chris said after a minute went by, and Chantry sucked in a sharp breath that cut like glass.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Chris watched him for another second or two, then turned around and went into the church. Chantry stood still, feeling like he’d been gutted. Mikey tugged at his hand.

  “Shadow was your shark, wasn’t he, Chantry?”

  He looked down, saw troubled blue eyes staring back up at him. How did this kid know so much? He was barely six, but he saw things no one else did.

  “Yeah, I guess he was.”

  “Everybody needs a shark.”

  “Maybe you’re my shark now,” he said after a minute, and Mikey smiled.

  It was hard sitting in church with Reverend Hale up on the pulpit shouting about eternal damnation and hellfire awaiting those who did not repent. Somehow, Chantry didn’t think the good reverend had repented and shouldn’t be telling others what they should do. Mrs. Tilly sat in the first row of the choir behind the reverend, looking out at the congregation with an expression like a cat that had just ate the prize canary and was cleaning her teeth with the feathers.

  He looked away, and saw Cinda staring at him from the row just opposite. He didn’t turn his head but stared back, and after a minute, her cheeks got red and she looked down at her lap. It made him feel a twinge of something. Regret, maybe. He hadn’t really thought about her in a while. He didn’t think about much of anything if he could help it.

  The sermon seemed to last an eternity, so that by the time the last hymn was sung and the deacons opened the doors, all Chantry wanted to do was get outside and smoke before Mama got there. She probably knew he smoked. She’d have to. But she never said anything about it, and it wouldn’t have done much good anyway. He wouldn’t argue with her, but he wouldn’t quit either.

  Mama and Mikey came out of the church just as he dropped his cigarette butt to the pavement out front and stepped on it. She looked down at the sidewalk, then back up at him.

  “We have an appointment with Reverend Hale, Chantry.”

  “No.”

  Her mouth got tight. “This is not open for discussion.”

  “Right. It’s not.” He didn’t know why he talked to her like that these days, but there was something inside him that just wouldn’t let him be pushed where he didn’t want to go.

  “Chantry, the reverend is waiting for you in his study.”

  “Let him wait.”

  Mama’s eyes got all cool like they did when she was mad at Rainey about something, and he looked back at her without flinching. He had no intention of sitting through another one of Reverend Hell’s long sermons about the value of chastity when he was banging the choir director every chance he got. There had been a lot of nights he’d seen lights in the Albertson’s old house.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Lassiter,” said someone behind Mama, and Chantry looked past her to see old Mr. Quinton coming down the church sidewalk. He was a big man, with graying hair that’d gotten thin on the top but still waved back from his forehead. His eyes moved to Chantry. “Mr. Callahan, it’s good to see you back in church.”

  “Chantry has an appointment with the reverend,” Mama said.

  “Excellent. I’m sure Reverend Hale can counsel him on the perils of sin. Young men need guidance to keep from falling by the wayside.”

  Chantry got so mad he felt like telling old man Quinton to get screwed. The only thing that kept him from it was knowing that it’d hurt Mama, and while he might be mad at her, too, he didn’t want that.

  “I’ll see that he gets there on time,” Quinton said to Mama, “if you’d like to go on home. I have something to discuss with the reverend myself.”

  Trapped. He could refuse, could just walk away and he doubted anyone would try to stop him by force, but there’d be a scene. Mama would look like she couldn’t control her own son, so couldn’t expect to control an entire classroom. He saw all that as clearly as he saw that old man Quinton knew it, too. He’d been outmaneuvered.

  Nothing was said while Quinton walked with him to the back of the church and Reverend Hale’s study, but when they reached the carpeted hallway outside the door, he looked down at Chantry and said, “It would be in your best interests to listen to the reverend, boy. You don’t want to make more trouble than you can handle.”

  Chantry didn’t answer, just looked at him. Quinton looked back, sizing him up it seemed, as if trying to figure out his next move. Then Reverend Hale opened the door to his study, and told Chantry to go on inside and be seated while he spoke with Mr. Quinton.

  In a few minutes, the reverend came back in and shut the study door, then moved to stand behind his desk. The look he gave Chantry was grave. His tone was soft, almost sad.

  “Cane Creek is a small town, my son. People here know their neighbors. For several months, I’ve been grieved to hear things about your activities that concern me. Your poor mother is very distressed, and even Mr. Quinton has expressed his concerns. We fear you’re going down the wrong path. We want to save you from the sins that tempt you, from the fiery lake of eternal punishment.”

  Chantry had sprawled in a chair in front of the desk, elbow propped on the chair arm with a fist under his chin. He’d nearly fallen asleep in church despite the reverend’s shouting, and all he wanted to do now was go home and go back to bed.

  “Fine,” he said. “I see the light. Glory hallelujah, I’m saved. So I’ll just be going on home now. Thanks for the talk.”

  “Do not mock God, my son,” the reverend said in a disapproving tone.

  “I’m not mocking God. I’m mocking you.”

  Reverend Hale blinked. He sat down in his chair. After a moment, he said, “‘A soft answer turneth away wrath.’”

  “‘Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath,’” he shot back. “I can quote scripture just like the devil. Look, we’re done. We don’t have anything to discuss.”

  Hale’s eyes narrowed, and the tip of his sharp nose quivered like a weasel’s. “You don’t have a choice. Mr. Quinton wants you to listen, and your mother wants you to listen, and you will listen, Chantry Callahan, whether you like it or not.”

  Chantry sat up and leaned forward. “First, you listen. You always wanted to hear about my dreams. Well, I had a new one a couple of months ago. I want to share it with you.”

  A faint smile pulled at one corner of the reverend’s mouth and he nodded. “Go on. I’ll listen.”

  “I dreamed that I woke up one night when I heard voices. Like singing. I walked out my door and down the road. There was a house there, supposed to be deserted. But it wasn’t. I heard shouting so I looked in the window.”

  Reverend Hale no longer had the smile on his face. Chantry kept talking.

  “I saw two people wrestling on a bed. A man and a woman. They were bare ass naked. The man was on top and Mrs. Tilly was on bottom. He kept talking to God the whole time he screwed her, making that old bed squeal so loud it sounded like a freight train.”

  Reverend Hale shot to his feet. He looked a little wild, eyes darting around the room as if searching for escape. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Chantry smiled.

  “Then this man in the dream shouted to God that he was coming and it got real quiet. But when I woke up the next day, there wasn’t anyone at that house. That was my dream.”

  After the longest silence Chantry had ever thought possible when the reverend was in the room, Hale nodded and said in a voice croaking like a bullfrog, “A dream. That’s all it was.”

  “Right. Just a dream. You’re the only one I ever told about it. Reckon I should tell my mama? Or maybe Mr. Quinton? You know, just to ease my conscience.”

  “No.” Hale drew in a shudderi
ng breath. “No, I don’t think you should say anything to anyone about that dream, Chantry. Ever.”

  Chantry stood up. “And I don’t think I should have to come in here and listen to you anymore, Reverend. Ever.”

  The reverend looked at him and nodded. They understood each other very well.

  CHAPTER 14

  A raw wind blew scraps of paper and dead leaves across the railroad tracks. Chantry stuck his hands deeper into his pants pockets and hunched his shoulders against it. It’d gotten colder while he wasted time before going back to the house. If he showed up too quick, Mama would be suspicious that he’d left the reverend too early.

  The sound of a car approaching brought his head up, and he saw Tansy’s Camaro coming down the blacktop. He stopped at the side of the road. She was by herself. The car braked. He recognized guitar licks by Stevie Ray Vaughan blaring from the radio before she turned it down.

  “Hey, Chantry,” she said out the window, and he nodded.

  “Hey, Tansy. What’s up?”

  She smiled. “Get in and I’ll tell you.”

  That surprised him. Usually, she just waved and kept going, like he was somebody she once knew but didn’t anymore. That was probably true. He didn’t know himself anymore either.

  When he got in the car she turned up the radio and took off down the road again, wind coming through her open window and blowing her hair all around her face. She snagged some of it with her fingers and slid her eyes toward him.

  “You’re late coming home from church,” she said over the music. “Been with the reverend again?”

  He didn’t ask how she knew where he’d been. Probably everybody in Cane Creek knew it by now. “Yeah.”

  After a minute she passed up Liberty Road and kept going. “You sure have got everybody in town talking about you these days.”

  “Anything to please the mindless masses,” he muttered, uncomfortable with the way she was driving all over the road. “Keep it on one side or the other, will ya?”

  “I take my half out of the middle. What, don’t you like living dangerously?”

  “I do that enough as it is.”

  “So I hear.” She gave the Camaro more gas and it nearly flew over the asphalt like a bird skimming the ground. Empty fields whipped past in a blur. Bare-limbed trees stitched the dead landscape to a gray sky. He looked at her. She had her hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead.

  “People just like to talk,” he said, and she laughed.

  “Hey, I’m not complaining. The more stuff you do, the less people want to butt into my business.”

  “Glad to be of service.”

  She turned her head and looked at him, and when he jerked his head toward the road and told her to pay attention to where they were going, she laughed.

  “This from the guy who tried to outrun three cop cars and ended up in the kudzu?”

  “There were only two cars. And the road ran out. Dammit, Tansy, watch where you’re going.”

  She left the road for a narrow shoulder that ran alongside a deep gully, barely getting the car back onto asphalt in time. Gravel spat from beneath the rear tires, the car rocked, then shot forward again. She drove like she had a devil in her, and he just sat back and braced his feet against the floorboard.

  When she whipped onto a field road he grabbed the dash as the car bucked over the ruts. It wouldn’t surprise him at all to see this car up on cinder blocks in Dempsey’s front yard before long. Finally she came to a stop, dust rising up around the car in a fine haze. He just looked at her for a minute.

  “Feel better?”

  She grinned. “Oh yeah. Come on.”

  He looked around. Stubble and dirt furrows spread all the way to a line of trees. “Where?”

  She already had her door opened and had stepped out. Cold air washed into the car and he figured he might as well get out, too. It’d be a long walk back home if he pissed her off.

  A narrow rut led toward the trees, and he followed her. She seemed to know where she was going. He looked at the sky. Clouds hung so low and gray he couldn’t see the tree tops. It’d probably pour rain before they got back to the car.

  Just as his patience began to wear really thin, Tansy stopped beside a huge metal pipe laid into the side of the gully beyond the trees. It fed into the shallow creek that cut between fields. A couple of years before, the state had built a steam plant near the river to create more power, but that was a few miles away. Here, a line of steel towers ran parallel to Cane Creek. Some kind of concrete basin formed a pool next to the metal pipe.

  “Put your hand in the water,” Tansy told him, and he must have looked skeptical because she laughed and knelt down, slicing her hand through the water to splash him. He jumped back, but not quick enough to keep from getting doused. The water wasn’t cold.

  “Hey, it’s warm.”

  “I know. Strange, isn’t it? I think it must have something to do with the power plant. They get the water from that creek over there then pipe it all the way to the plant, but I don’t know what this pool is for.”

  “Probably radioactive waste.”

  “Always the optimist.” She stood up and unbuttoned her thick sweater. “I prefer to think of it as my own private hot tub.”

  “Right.” He watched as she stripped off her sweater, then pulled her shirt over her head. He looked at the pool. “Are you really going to get in that?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  He glanced at the metal structures across the creek. They made a faint humming noise. “Maybe because you might end up a crispy critter.”

  “I haven’t yet. Thought you were supposed to be so brave now. You know, dangerous and reckless, all the stuff people say about you.”

  “Did anyone ever mention stupid?”

  “Just me.”

  “Thanks.” He stood awkwardly while Tansy stripped down to her panties and bra. The air was cold enough for a bumper crop of goose pimples. She quickly stepped into the water and sat down, leaning her head back against the sloped side. He could see her beneath the water, the way nothing was left to the imagination even with her bra and panties still on. Maybe he needed to see Reverend Hale again after all, because his mind was going in a direction it should never go about Tansy.

  “Well?” Tansy kicked a foot through the water at him. “Are you coming in or not?”

  “Not.”

  “Chicken.”

  “It’s cold out here. Besides . . .” He stopped because he didn’t want to finish that thought.

  She eyed him. “Besides what? Besides, you’re a candy ass and all the rumors are wrong? Besides, you either don’t think you’ll be able to keep your hands off me, or besides, you aren’t the least bit interested? Pick one.”

  “I pick the first two.” He crouched down beside the pool, but not close enough that she could drag him in. “I’m a little too interested.”

  That seemed to please her. She leaned back against the sloped side again and smiled. “That’s better.”

  He tried not to look at her. Scooping up some loose concrete gravel from the ground, he tossed a pebble into the pool. “So, where’s Leon?”

  “I dunno. Somewhere, I guess. Don’t see him much anymore.”

  “Thought you two were pretty much a thing.”

  “Were.” She splashed around a little. “He got serious. I got bored. Besides, I’m not going to be here forever and Leon plans to come back after college and go into business with his daddy. That’s not for me. Can you see me as a farmer’s wife?”

  “A farmer’s daughter, maybe.” He ducked when she splashed him again. “So where you going?”

  “Anywhere I want. Everywhere I can.” She sat up. Water made her bra opaque. She shoved her hands through her thick hair, swept it to one side. ‘You should try this. It’s really nice sitting here in the warm water when the wind is so cold.”

  “Right. I can feel my ‘nads draw up into my belly just thinking about it.”

  She really laughed at that, the
n gave him one of those looks from beneath her lashes. “So what happened to you, Chantry?”

  “Just what I wanted to ask you.” He wasn’t comfortable with the direction this was going. He tossed another pebble into the pool. “You started avoiding me.”

  “Yeah, well. It wasn’t you. It was me.”

  “Seems like I’ve heard that one before. It’s what girls say when they’re ready to move on to another guy. But hell, Tansy, we weren’t ever like that. We were friends. Friends don’t just move on.”

  “Sometimes they get pushed on.”

  “You think I did that to you?”

  “I didn’t say you meant to. It was just . . . time, I guess.”

  “Time. Time for what?” He stood up. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. He didn’t like the way she made him feel, made him think of things he didn’t want to think about. Made him feel when he didn’t want to feel. Old hurts. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Sure it matters. It mattered then and it matters now, but there ain’t nothing we can do about it, Chantry. What’s done is done. All we can do now is start over.”

  She stood up, and he made the mistake of looking at her and wished he hadn’t. God, she was beautiful. Centerfold beautiful. She looked wild and exotic and tempting standing there like something he’d dreamed.

  He stood still as she walked out of the pool and over to him, and when she put her arms around his neck and lifted to her toes to kiss him, he closed his eyes and kissed her back. She was wet and cold and hot all at the same time, sleek and soft under his hands. He wanted her so bad it hurt clear to his knees. It was crazy.

  If it hadn’t started raining, he didn’t know what might have happened. Maybe he’d have forgotten all about the fact this was Tansy and done what his body wanted him to do. So he was glad when the clouds opened up and rain slashed down in torrents that drove them back to the car before it got bogged down in the mud.

  They didn’t say much on the way back home. Tansy stopped in front of his house and cut the engine like she wasn’t ready to say bye yet. She looked over at the driveway.