by Jamie Mason
He’d stowed the rake and shovel out of the way and put out the lanterns, and with the moon drifting out of its optimal angle, Jason found himself much more alone in the dark than he’d been all evening. Even the most familiar terrain can sprout treacherous shifts in the gloom. So, considering that Jason had mostly avoided looking at his backyard in the last year, much less keeping acquainted with the rise and fall of it, it was no surprise that a small swell took out his feet two-thirds of the way to the carport. His speed dropped him hard onto his tailbone and his teeth clicked together through the meat of his tongue. Jason howled behind clamped lips, and tears leaked from the corners of his eyes as he lurched back to his feet. He grabbed at the edge of the tarp, and his overtaxed left hand delivered the final insult to his composure in a cramp that burned deeply, curling his fingers into his palm. He unfolded them gingerly with his right hand, only to have the misery spike through to his knuckles.
Jason sobbed into the crook of his elbow. His tongue ached all the way down his throat, and a sickening clarity bloomed in the wake of the pain. If he could taste the iron in his own blood, if he could feel the hot muscles in his palm unfurling, if he had to plant his feet to keep his quaking legs from dumping him over onto the ground again, then it was all real. The tarp didn’t cover a pile of abstractions and the smell wasn’t an authentic touch to a particularly vivid nightmare. Since meeting Harris, Jason had become some sort of an anti-Midas; everything he touched turned to shit. He needed to scream. It was rising up like lava through his lungs and pressing against his voice box, and unless he was to surrender any hope at all of making it through this ordeal a free man, he couldn’t very well do it in his backyard in the dead of night.
Then there was the other problem. Bile and despair boiled in adrenaline had left his guts cramping in sodden, heavy waves all night, but in the pause, his intestines looked to make their complaint a bit more urgent. Jason gritted his teeth against a bout of churning. His face burned in solitary humiliation. The spasm passed, but with a lingering ache that promised a showdown that he was pretty sure he’d lose. He wasn’t going to make it all the way to the car, never mind past the clenching it would take to get the trunk loaded. Jason yanked off the gloves and hurled them onto the tarp and stomped off into the house for a ridiculously reality-affirming trip to the toilet, then to bury his face in a pillow and bay like Mrs. Truesdell’s dog in a bear trap.
• • •
“Ford Watts!”
Ford gasped and inhaled an eye-watering throatful of bootleg chip dip. He coughed and spluttered. “Good God, Margaret! You scared me half to death.”
Tessa nosed along the floor under the counter to recover the crumbs launched by his startle.
“Better I do it for you than the doctor catching you eating gobs of”—Maggie’s eyes took inventory under arched brows—“sour cream and onion salt? Honestly, Ford.”
“I was hungry!”
“Then eat the hummus with the carrot sticks. Or an apple. Or the whole-grain—where did you get these?” She rattled the foil of a potato chip bag. Her shoulders sagged. “They’ve upped your pills twice in the last year. . . .”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry.” He put a hand to her shoulder and drew her long braid over the other. “I don’t cheat much, I swear.”
She leaned her cheek against his hand and pouted prettily, the years falling away with the practiced flirt. “No, you just wait until I leave the house.”
“How was the ladies’ moonlight stroll anyway?”
Maggie shrugged out of his hold with a smirk and rolled her eyes. “Nice deflection.” She swept chip crumbs into her hand and brushed them into the sink. “You should have come along. It’s a beautiful night. But Tessa nearly panicked a girl sleeping in the park, though.”
“In the park? It wasn’t that Siffert girl hanging around again, was it?”
“No, no. This girl was in her car. I didn’t recognize her.” Maggie cleared the countertops and tidied automatically. Ford watched her hair, swinging like a metronome, keeping time with her industry. The spell of order, as worked by his wife, soothed a soft-focus peace over Ford. It always had, and better than any heart medicine ever could. Maggie didn’t seem to realize she was puttering, or indeed that she was being watched. “She was a tiny little thing. I thought she was a kid until she woke up.”
This snapped Ford out of his reverie. “What was she driving?”
“A little, blue econobox. I don’t know. It had a smiley face doohickey on the antenna. Why?”
“Did she say anything? Was she all right?”
Maggie shrugged. “I just told her it didn’t seem safe. She looked okay. She was friendly. Said she was just killing time.”
“Really? And this was just a little while ago?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I talked to a little, tiny girl who drove a blue car earlier today. Smiley on the aerial and all. It was way earlier this afternoon. I would’ve expected her to be long gone by now.” He slid the tip of his tongue over the edge of his teeth. “You staying up or going to bed?”
“I’m meeting Cyndi early to help her set up at the garden show, so I’m to bed.”
Ford nibbled his thumbnail. “I’m gonna take a real quick drive.”
“Ford, it’s so late.”
“I know, but I have tomorrow off. I’ll sleep in. I just want to do a drive-by.”
“The neighbors will think we can’t stand to be in the same house together. I come in, you go out.”
He pulled her to him. “The neighbors are all asleep. Your reputation is safe, Miss Margaret.” He leaned down to kiss her.
She granted him a tight-lipped peck. “Don’t kiss me. You smell like onions.” She pushed him toward the door. “Get it over quickly and come home.”
• • •
Leah woke up dead. The silence was wet in her ears, and her eyes scratched barbed swirls in their sockets. The left side of her head was surely missing and felt red and black, and the pain dripped all the way down into her jaw, while the right side sang an echo of the damage. Her chest wanted more than the stingy nips of air she’d been sucking in, and that was her first clue that she may not have passed on after all.
She rolled from her side onto her back and was assaulted by a spike of intensity through the pulpy spot on her head. A roll of nausea welled up her throat and a strobe of panic pounded in her chest as a crinkly blanket settled over her face, blocking her nose and mouth. Then the smell hit her and with it, another dense fog of confusion. The family cat had slunk off to the garage to die one summer. The clinging stench had ruined just about everything in there made of cloth or plastic. Rot and worms and jellied hell could only mean death, but if she could think it, could she actually be it?
She pushed the smothering cloth away and held it off her face and tried to see. She was blind. The blackness vibrated with purple and acid-yellow branches of lightning that faded as she tried to catch them in focus. She put a fearful hand to her eyes, suddenly terrified they wouldn’t be there, that she’d find only squishy pits in their absence. But the lids were smooth and rounded over, just as they should be. And closed. She slid them open and still wasn’t sure she hadn’t gone blind.
Vertigo yanked at her bearings and Leah threw out a hand to stop the spinning. A random survival tip came back to her from an article she’d once read on spelunking—if you fell and became disoriented, you could spit to figure out which way was up. So she tried it and was rewarded with a sprinkling of saliva over her cheeks. Then she knew she wasn’t dead because she could feel stupid. She was pretty certain she wasn’t in a cave, if not of much else.
She held the blanket off her face with one hand and, with the other, explored her confines as she took inventory of hurting, of not being dead, and what the hell was that smell? A remote call of No, don’t! came from some exiled store of know-better, but a second too late to make any sense of it.
Leah’s hand closed around an irregular cylinder wrapped in soggy stuff th
at shifted and squelched between her fingers. She remembered being twelve years old and hauling her cousin out of the swimming pool by her cool, wet forearm, only to have the little snot clamp down and yank her off the edge. She’d almost drowned that day, and suddenly she was back there, thrashing, flailing, clutching for her cousin’s arm (It’s not Allison, Leah, stop!).
Leah kicked the tarp free and a blast of clean night air shocked her back to the untethered present. She sucked in gulps of it, wild-eyed. The starlight pricked her aching eyes like flecks of foil confetti, and the chill drove a peg deep into her temple. She shut her eyes and rolled away from the pain, onto her right side and up against—a snapshot flashed into her mind, of standing at the edge of a hole in the ground, a body slumped in the mud, mostly covered in a filthy cloth and slimy plastic.
Her hand still held the stick, it’s a stick, a bat, the neck of Reid’s guitar, ohGodLeahwhatisit? . . . She kept her eyes closed tightly, wishing the dead dream back. The psychedelic lightning played again against the pitch depths, and she squeezed her fluttering eyelids tight against the urge to open them, denying the frenzied need to know what she held in her hand. The night breeze wafted between her face and the shape in front of her, eclipsing the current, bouncing back a fetid vapor. Leah opened her eyes, and then her mouth to scream.
16
Wills and ways, Boydie. Wills and ways. You got one, you got t’other. Like bull’s-eyes and buttercups.” Boyd’s mother had always said it with such an inspired gleam in her eye that he’d never thought too long on how the axiom didn’t actually make any sense. That it came by way of his crusty and perpetually ironic grandfather should have been a clue. PapPap had never seemed overly impressed by his middle daughter and her pair of matching rug rats, especially the stubborn, ornery one. But just as the word cute had meant “cross-eyed” and “bowlegged” in its origins, Shelley, Bart, and Boyd Montgomery had taken one thing and declared it another. And by continued misuse, it had become this other thing. In this case, a bit of nonsense had bloomed into their own personal mission statement, a rallying call for getting through life’s rough patches. And Boyd certainly owned enough of the bull’s-eye will to win him a way through most everything he had pushed up against in his time.
He had kept track of Old Green Valley Road, a silvery river of moonlit asphalt winding alongside him just a whistle-distance away. He’d eyed it for landmarks through the gaps in the trees, he was sure of it, but he came out of the woods into confusion and only just barely ahead of a galloping defeat. He rechecked the lay of the lawn and recognized the back of Phil’s house, but the big backyard, which had never been home to fewer than four cars, was empty. Boyd scanned the house and tried to pin down the deserted mood echoing back at him. The grass was trimmed, the shutters gleamed of fresh paint in the moonlight, the—Boyd’s eyes slipped back to the windows. Behind the reflection that glanced off each pane lay a square of darkness that yawned deep into the house. Boyd saw straight through to the gray silhouette of the front-porch posts. Neither shade nor curtain protected the home inside. It was empty.
Boyd confirmed this in a frantic scurry from window to window, dashing from one to the next, while his mind chased its tail. He’d known for sure after the first bare room gaped back at him, but his grand plan still whined for its life. All he wanted, needed, deserved, was a car, and maybe a little cash, and definitely a few hours’ head start. Phil had cars to spare and likely a little pill money besides. Boyd had been counting on it. He prayed for a break, batting away the unrighteous pangs that nudged him to really consider what he was asking for, and why he might not be exactly worthy of it.
No new options presented at the front of the house either, but the FOR SALE sign sunk into a grassy patch near the street erased the need for any further window-peeping. At a single stroke, Boyd had no idea what he was going to do. Knowing the woods as well as he did wasn’t going to get him far enough out of town in the hurry that he needed, and he’d already wasted too many precious hours on this great idea to start all over from scratch.
A whole herd of curse words reared up in his throat and trampled on his courage. Little fireflies of terror flitted behind his eyes, and he was huffing like a train gathering speed, the breath loud in his own ears and floating in his head as if he were taking on helium instead of oxygen.
I want to go home. The sudden, dizzying lament that welled up in him seemed only remotely connected to a sound he’d just heard in the near distance, a small sound that his distraction wouldn’t allow him to replay for naming.
He hadn’t thought far beyond the need for a set of wheels and the convenient fact that Phil owed him big-time for keeping his hush promise. Boyd hadn’t been looking forward to the exchange, but drug pushers didn’t always get to choose their hassles, and that was just Phil’s own darned fault. But now, marooned in a sea of failure, Boyd’s attention had been yanked yonder past the trees dividing the properties, over toward the house that had once been his own. There might yet be a car there for the taking, or at least something there that would spark an idea. I want to go home. The word home usually never rang in his head without meaning his family’s roost in Branson Heights. For good or for ill, it was where he’d formed his ways and grown his spine. Only just now, that wasn’t the place he wanted.
Boyd hadn’t felt the loss of the house on Old Green Valley Road as much more than a tactical regret. Katielynn had been so house-proud, always painting and curtaining and fussing, but Boyd’s thoughts had always been on other things when he’d cut the grass or banged at the plumbing. A roof from the rain and a place to go after he’d been somewhere else was mostly all he’d ever required of the word home.
But now, the image of Mamaw’s quilt tucked up nice and cozy over their brand-new sofa flared up in his memory, and Katielynn’s sugared corn bread—he could smell it. A rain squall of remembering soaked him: him rolling on the rug with his pups, making love, digging graves. He savored the recollection of his courage and even of his sweet regret at what she’d brought down on him, brought down on them all. He itched to be there, to stand in those same places and draw the strength of his old life (and their deaths) back up through the ground that held the record—the whole truth, not the law truth—of these things. It sparked first and then fizzed like a lit fuse, twisting through the dark toward his house, drawing him along. Just a peek. Just to see the spot one more time.
He slipped back into the ranks of the trees and rode the shadows sideways into the tangly back hem of his old backyard.
Boyd had only once before approached the house from this direction, through the back boundary of woolly bracken and tall, ancient trees. It had been on the night he’d trekked home from burning (and burning, and burning, oh my Lord, how that thing had cooked) the dirtball faggot’s car full of Katielynn’s stuff.
He’d run out of the house, sprung from a nightmare in a deep, afternoon sleep. His vigor was plain old panic, but he wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t going to die of the hangover he’d woken with. His heart quivered every time he tried to take a deep breath, and his swollen tongue tasted of mold. His liver, or something down that way in his guts, throbbed hideously out of rhythm with his brain, which leaped up against the walls of his skull with each heartbeat. He would probably still have blown a mite picklish on a Breathalyzer, but his rebounding sense of self-preservation spurred him into action nonetheless.
So, he had forced down three aspirins and a bottle of Gatorade, taken in small sips after throwing up the water he’d chugged in a Legionnaire’s desert thirst.
Boyd had come to his more or less sober senses absolutely furious with Katielynn. He’d thundered through the house, punching pictures, shoving her T-shirts and panties and her stupid Snoopy toothbrush down the throat of her flowery overnight bag, and pummeling the rest of her things into a couple of pillowcases. Then he packed kerosene into the car. A great deal of kerosene. Every drop he had stocked away, in fact. The stores always had more to sell and it wouldn’t be cold
for months, so hell—yes, hell—with it.
On the way home from the bonfire, he’d been winded and sick at the stomach from all the alcohol and no food, and the thought of his empty house had both pulled and repelled him in waves like a deranged magnet.
Now, better than three years later, he fought and fell again through that same tidal drag, simultaneously wanting and not wanting to be home. The lay of the land worked for Boyd in the same way a long-remembered fragrance sparks memory in other people. Hunger and thirst and the sooty after-buzz of adrenaline were the same again, and each step forward felt like a tick backward in time. The light drag of his feet ruffled up the layers of seasons that had settled on the forest floor since he’d last been there. It turned them over fresh, and he imagined bringing up the very leaves and twigs from that day, all of it back up under his boots—My God, they’re the same boots—so that as he drew nigh on the thinning edge of the tree line, he would have been hard-pressed to say for certain how long it had been since he’d shot Katielynn.