Helltown

by Jeremy Bates

  He closed the door, twisted off the beer cap, and was about to head outside to have his smoke in the cool night air when the telephone jangled.

  He picked up the handset. “Yeah?”

  “That was fast you quick sumbitch,” Jesse Gordon said.

  “I was standing next to the phone,” Cleavon said.

  “What you doing standing next to the phone? You some mind reader now, know I was gonna call?”

  “I was getting a beer from the fridge. On account of the fridge being in the kitchen, and on account of the phone also being in the kitchen, I was standing next to the phone.” He paused. “Listen, Jess, what’d’you say about coming over tomorrow for a coupla beers, throw some steaks on the grill?”

  “And I’m guessing you want me to bring the steaks?”

  “Now there’s an idea.”

  “As much as I’d like to sit around and listen to you bitch about your dumb ass brothers, Cleave, I got other plans.”

  “Other plans, huh?”

  “Plans with the missus.”

  “Connie? Since when you start having plans with Connie, that fat cow?”

  “Since she told me she’s making her famous roast pork tomorrow night. She stuffs it, you know? Only cooks it on special occasions. You wanna guess what this special occasion is? I’ll tell you—she’s starting a diet.”

  “She gonna cook a roast pork to kick off a diet? Shit, Jess, that’s why she’s so fat all the time, all she does is cook and eat what she cooks. No way this diet’s gonna work. She ain’t gonna last two days on no diet.”

  “I don’t care she lasts until her midnight snack. I’m still getting her roast pork tomorrow night.”

  “Maybe I’ll come by and try some of that famous roast pork?”

  “Don’t think so, Cleave. It don’t work like that. You can’t, you don’t just invite yourself over ’cause you don’t got no good food of your own. You got a coupla pigs. Go stick one on a spit and you got your own roast pork, bacon, ham, whatever, as much as you want.”

  “So why you calling me? To tell me your fat cow of a wife is cooking a roast pork dinner that I can’t have none of? I tell you, Jess, Connie can’t cook for shit, so go on and have your fuckin’ roast pork—” He cut himself off. “Shhht—you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Jesse said.

  “Someone just picked up.” Cleavon and his brothers shared a party line with Jesse and Connie Gordon, and four other households who’d refused to sell their properties to the National Park Service when it started buying up land fourteen years ago. “Who’s there?” Cleavon said. “Speak up.”

  “Cleavon?” a voice said.

  “Higgins?” Cleavon said.

  “Yeah, it’s me Weasel. Who you talking to?”

  “Me,” Jesse said.

  “Jess? Good, that’s easy—I was just about to call y’both.” He was speaking fast, excitedly. “Boys, we caught us some new does!”

  “Lick my leg!” Cleavon exclaimed, unconsciously using a saying his pa had often favored before he blew his brains out with a double-barrel shotgun. “Doe” was code for the out-of-town women they used in the black masses. “How many?”

  “Three.”

  “Three!” Jesse crowed happily. “Good work, Weasel, you sumbitch! They not too, they not like the last one, too cut up, are they?”

  “I don’t know, Jess.”

  “The hell don’t you know?” Cleavon said, frowning. “You didn’t just leave them there, for Christ’s sake, did you?”

  “You don’t understand, Cleave,” Weasel said. “They were with four bucks. I couldn’t, there were too many, for me to go back. That’s why I’m calling. I need help rounding them up.”

  Cleavon blinked. “Seven in all? The fuck they driving, Weasel—a goddamn limousine?”

  “Driving?” Weasel said, playing dumb.

  “Hell, Weasel,” Cleavon said. “It’s just us, nobody else is on the line listening in, now start talking some sense.”

  “It’s just that, Mr. Pratt told us, he said—”

  “Fuck Spencer! Now spill it. What were they driving?”

  “Cars, Cleave. Normal cars. One was, one was a Jeep, green, if I remember right. Everything happened so fast, you know? The other, blue, I think. That’s the one I ran off, that crashed. Ballsy driver. Came right at me straight as a bullet. Never seen anything like it. He kept coming, he held it together a second longer, I might’ve been the one in the woods.”

  A silence followed.

  Cleavon said finally: “You pulling our legs, Weasel?”

  “No, Cleave. Why?”

  “Why? Why? You better be messing with us, Weasel.”

  “I’m not messing, Cleave. What’s wrong?”

  Cleavon’s headache, which he’d temporarily forgotten about, was back and worse than ever. He kneaded his eye sockets and tried to keep from throwing the phone across the room like he’d done to the rabbit ears. He had to deal with two retards in Earl and Floyd all day long, every day of the year, he didn’t need it from Weasel too. But he got it, didn’t he? He sure did. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Weasel,” he said. “Those people you ran down—”

  “Does, Cleave, does and bucks—”

  “Those fuckin’ people,” he snapped, “you think, what, they’re just gonna sit there where they crashed and have a barbeque? Shit no, Weasel, they gonna get in the second car and go for help. They gonna go to town. They gonna raise hell, that’s what they gonna do! Now where the fuck are they?”

  “Damn, Cleave, I didn’t think, I thought, you know, I thought they’d… Damn, Cleave—they’re right near your place, not a hundred yards north of the bridge.”

  “Listen up, Jess, and listen good,” Cleavon said. “Me and the boys’re gonna cut through the woods, get this under control. You and dipshit here, you two drive up and meet us quick as you can. I’m gonna call Lonnie now.”

  “Get him to stop anyone coming his way?” Jesse said.

  Cleavon nodded, then realized nobody could see him. “They’ll probably stop at his place looking for help. Probably. But who knows for sure. They might drive right on past, so, yeah, get him to stop them whether they want to stop or not.”

  “Hey, Cleave,” Weasel said. “I wasn’t thinking, I’m sorry—”

  Cleavon slammed the handset down. He waited a few seconds, picked it up again, and began dialing Lonnie’s number.

  “Cleave?” It was Weasel.

  “Get off the fuckin’ phone Weasel!”

  “Sure, Cleave, okay, see you soon.”

  Cleavon depressed the switch hook, counted to five before releasing it, then dialed Lonnie’s number. After two rings Lonnie’s boy picked up. “Hello?”

  “That you, Scottie? It’s Cleavon McGrady. Your pa there?”

  “Naw, he’s gone to Randy’s for the meat draw.”

  Cleavon swore to himself, then said, “Scottie, listen up, okay? I have something important you gotta do. You listening?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Some people might be coming by, on the way to town. They might stop by your place, looking to use the phone. You can’t let them do that. You tell them you don’t have no phone. You got that?”

  “Why they wanna use my phone? Who they calling?”

  “It don’t matter. You just tell them you don’t got no phone. Can you do that?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’m gonna call your daddy now. You remember what I told you.”

  “I ain’t got no phone.”

  “Good boy. Your daddy will be home soon.”

  Cleavon hung up and dialed Randy’s Bar-B-Q. He knew the number by memory; Randy’s was one of only two bars in Boston Mills, the main watering hole so to speak, and he often called there when looking for Jesse or Lonnie or whoever else he wanted to find for whatever reason.

  “Randy’s,” a man drawled in a Southern accent. Randy had lived in Louisiana his entire life, a small claims court lawyer. Then he got in some kind of financial trouble a
nd moved out here—fleeing the law you might say—and opened up the bar. The running joke between Cleavon and the guys was that he was going to need a damn good criminal lawyer whenever the IRS or FBI or whoever tracked him down and came knocking on his door.

  “Listen, Randy, it’s Cleavon, I need to speak to Lonnie. He there?”

  “Does shit stink? Hold on a sec.”

  Cleavon waited. He could hear a cacophony of sound in the background: laughter, talking, someone speaking on a mike, reading out numbers. A long thirty seconds later: “Cleave?”

  “Lonnie,” he said harshly. “You gotta get back to your place, now.”

  “My place?” It came out “My plash?”

  “Listen to me, you drunk shit,” Cleavon said, “and listen good. Weasel got us some new does. But he fucked up, he fucked up good, ’cause there were two cars and one still works just fine. Me and the boys are gonna go round them up now. But if some took off in that second car, they’re gonna be heading to town. That means past your place. They might even knock on your door, looking for help. I’ve already spoken with your boy. He’s gonna tell them you don’t got no phone. If they’re still there when you return, you keep them there until me and Jess arrive. If you see them on the road, you don’t let them pass—”

  “How many does we got, Cleave? Are they lookers—?”

  “Pay attention, Lonnie, for Christ’s sake! This is important. You do whatever it takes to make sure they don’t get to town. Now get going. We’ve wasted enough time talking.”

  “Hold up, Cleave, hold up,” Lonnie said, sounding more alert, no longer slurring his words. “How’m I supposed to stop them if they’re on the road?”

  “You got your rifle in your truck, don’t you?”

  “’Course.”

  “So you see them coming, you block the road with your truck. When they stop, shoot their tires. Fuck, shoot the driver, you have to. Just make sure they don’t go nowhere ’till me and Jess arrive.”

  “Yeah, right, okay, don’t you worry, Cleave, you can count on me. But you didn’t tell me, Cleave, these does, they lookers or not—?”

  Cleavon hung up the phone, then returned to the den. The TV picture was still on the fritz. Earl was snoozing in his recliner, snoring and drooling a river. Cleavon clapped his hands loudly, startling Earl awake, and said, “Get up, shithead. And go find your deaf-ass brother. We got business to take care of.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “Ding dong. You’re dead.”

  House (1986)

  The road angled upward. Noah slowed the Jeep to forty miles an hour. Anything faster would be reckless in the fog, which seemed to have become denser and more opaque during the last half hour. As soon as he breasted the summit he started down the other side, which dipped sharply. The slope was so great the bottom dropped out of his stomach. He leaned back against the seat, his arms at right angles to the steering wheel, the way you hold the safety rail while zipping down the big hill of a roller coaster.

  The road finally flattened out and came to an abrupt end—at least, to a crude wooden barricade with a grime-covered, reflective “Road Closed” sign.

  “A dead end!” Noah said, braking.

  “No, it’s okay,” Steve said. “You can go around it. The road still leads out of the park.”

  Noah peered into the gloom. Visibility was nearly zero. “How do you know that?”

  “Jeff told me. He did the research for this trip, so I assume he knows what he’s talking about.”

  Noah contemplated that. “And if we get lost?”

  “We can’t if we stay on the same road. And if worse comes to worse, we’ll backtrack. We passed a few houses before the bridge. We’ll knock on a door, tell whoever answers there’s been an accident, get them to call an ambulance. But going straight ahead is by far the fastest option right now.”

  Accepting that logic, Noah circumnavigated the barricade. The road immediately deteriorated, a victim of the elements and neglect. Weeds overran the shoulders and sprouted up here and there through the blacktop. Low branches bounced off the Jeep’s windshield and slapped the roof, as if to shoo the intruders away. Noah thought briefly of the vehicle’s paintjob, then told himself this was a trivial, selfish concern, given Jeff and Jenny’s conditions.

  And exactly what were their conditions? he wondered with a hollow feeling in the pit of his gut. Was Jeff going to lose his ability to walk? Was Jenny going to live out the rest of her life in a vegetable state until her family decided to pull the plug? Or was his overactive imagination blowing things out of proportion? “They’ll be fine,” he mumbled to himself.

  “What?” Steve said. He had been examining his shattered reading glasses.

  “Nothing,” Noah said, embarrassed he’d spoken his thoughts out loud. “Have you ever had a bad accident before?” he added, to say something.

  “I broke my collarbone skiing in Aspen, if you can call that a bad accident.”

  “Aspen, huh?”

  “My parents were both into skiing. As a kid I probably saw every major ski resort west of the Rockies.”

  “You still ski?”

  “Not for years.”

  Steve tossed the useless eyeglasses onto the Jeep’s dashboard, and a silence fell between them. The trivial talk was awkward given the circumstances.

  Finally Noah said, “How long does it take to recover from a broken back?”

  Steve shrugged. “It depends on the type of fracture.”

  “How bad do you think Jeff’s fracture is?”

  “We don’t know he has a fracture. There’s no way to tell the extent of his injury without an X-ray.”

  “But if it is fractured?”

  “A single fracture, and no associated neurological injury…” He shrugged. “Most tend to heal within a few months.”

  Noah frowned. “Neurological injury? You mean, spinal cord injury?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Back at the crash, you mentioned he could be paralyzed from the waist down.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything. I was caught up in the moment. Again, it totally depends on the extent of the injury.”

  “But there’s a possibility he could be paralyzed?”

  “I’m not a spinal surgeon, Noah. I haven’t examined him. I don’t know.”

  “Be straight with me, Steve. I’m not his mother.”

  Steve hesitated. “Yeah, there’s a possibility. Even so, there’s always rehab, physio…”

  “Which could last years.”

  “Better than never walking again.”

  “Yeah,” Noah said sourly. “Better than that.”

  Noah saw the gravel driveway and white mailbox at the last moment. He slammed on the brakes. The Jeep squealed to a stop.

  “What the hell?” Steve said, alarmed.

  “A house!” Noah said, already swinging the Jeep onto the driveway.

  The house was set a hundred feet back from the road, barely visible in the spectral haze. It had projecting eaves, tall windows, and a wrap-around porch. Yellow light glowed from behind a window in a square belvedere, which protruded vertically from the eastern corner of the low-pitched roof.

  “Thank God,” Steve said. He twisted in his seat and checked Jenny’s breathing and circulation.

  “How is she?” Noah asked.

  “Her pulse is weak.”

  “That’s not good, is it?”

  “Could be due to shock, or internal hemorrhage.”

  Noah banged over a pothole.

  “Hey!” Steve cried out. “Careful!”

  “Sorry, dude,” Noah said. “I’m trying. This driveway’s in shit condition.”

  Steve sat forward again.

  Noah avoided a few more potholes and stopped next to a waterless stone birdbath. He killed the engine but left the high beams on.

  Steve hopped out. “Wait with Jenny. This shouldn’t take long.”

  Noah nodded and watched Steve hurry up the veranda steps. Several spindles in the veranda railin
g, he noted, were snapped in half or missing altogether. In fact, the entire house seemed to be falling apart. Broken slate shingles littered the scorched-grass lawn, while the paint on the weatherboards and ornate pediments above the windows was blistered and peeling.

  Steve knocked on the front door, waited, knocked again, waited longer.

  He turned and shrugged.

  Swearing, Noah joined him on the veranda. The knocker Steve had used was big and brass and couldn’t have gone unheard.

  “Someone’s gotta be home,” Steve said.

  Noah rapped the knocker three times, hard, angry.

  Silence.

  Steve cupped his hands against the small window in the door’s upper carved panel and peered inside. Then he reached for the door handle.

  “Whoa,” Noah said. “What are you doing?”

  “Seeing if it’s unlocked.”

  The handle twisted in his grip. The door swung inward.

  “This is trespassing,” Noah said.

  “It’s an emergency,” Steve said.

  Steve stepped into the atrium and flicked on an overhead light. After a moment’s hesitation, Noah joined him. A vase of dead flowers sat on a small deal table. A mirror hung on the opposite wall. Noah caught his reflection—and barely recognized the wide, frightened eyes staring back at him.

  Directly ahead of them a staircase led to the second floor, and beside that a long hallway, which ended at a closed door. To their left was a small dining room. The table appeared not to be used for eating, as it was covered with newspapers and magazines. Six Chippendale chairs were tucked beneath it, the decorative backings broken in several of them. To their right was the living room. Stuffy antique furniture and moody oil paintings in ornately carved gilded frames shared the space with discarded socks, dirty dishes, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, and boxes stocked with an assortment of junk. A wood-paneled television sat on a small table next to the fireplace. A brown wire snaked from it across the floor to an upholstered Lay-Z-Boy recliner, on which sat a controller box the size of a large book.