Solom

by Scott Nicholson

  Alex put down the binoculars. All was right with the world, at least his portion of it.

  Then he saw the shed.

  The doors were open, one of them hanging askew on a single hinge. The grow bulbs threw their blue-tinted light against the greater might of the orange sun. Something had forcibly broken in, or maybe out. Except there was nothing in the shed but ...

  Thirty-seven beautiful creatures. His babies. His family.

  Alex hurtled down the deck steps three at a time, the binoculars swinging from the strap and banging against his chest. One of his paranoid fantasies was that someone would learn about his hobby and try to rip him off, a fellow stoner who didn’t groove on the righteousness of karma. That’s why he was careful in choosing his customers. And the government was to blame for criminalizing a harmless flower and linking it to violence and theft, when it was put on Earth to be shared in peace.

  He ran the fifty feet to the shed and looked in, barely able to breathe. Most of the pot plants had been ripped up by the roots, though a few bare and broken stalks poked toward the ceiling like skeletal green fingers. Stray leaves lay scattered along the floor, and one light fixture had been torn from the wall. The black plastic sheeting beneath the buckets was ripped and gouged. And on the cinder blocks that served as a step was a mucusy gray-white smear that could only be one thing.

  Goat shit.

  The fuckers had trespassed onto his land, broken into his shed, chomped down on the fruit of his labors. He didn’t know how they’d circumvented the fence, but the ground was scarred by cloven-hoofed footprints. Alex, his heart pushing broken glass through his chest, followed the tracks behind the shed to the fence. There, the wire had been trampled as if pressed down by a great weight, dragging down several locust posts. The wire was pocked with tufts of goat hair, and the musky stench of a rutting billy tainted the air.

  On the Smith side of the fence, leaves had been scuffed and scooted around. Clearly evident against the dark humus was the imprint of a horseshoe. As if some rider had urged his horse to stomp down the fence and allow the goats access. Maybe the horse had even kicked in the shed door for them. Alex was sure that, if he checked beside the padlock, he’d find the arc of a horseshoe imbedded in the wood.

  Alex wondered if Weird Dude Walking was no longer walking. Maybe he’d mounted up in order to make better time. On whatever road he was headed down.

  Didn’t matter.

  The Dude had fucked with private property. And so had those creepy-eyed, stink-making, beard-pissing goats.

  The Bible said to forgive trespasses, but Alex didn’t hold to the Bible. In Alex’s belief system, trespasses meant one of two things: either you build a bigger fence or you go after those who didn’t respect boundaries.

  Alex went back to the house, to the walk-in closet that held his arsenal. There was hell to pay and Alex planned on delivering the invoice.

  ***

  He only takes one.

  That had been the way of Solom for as far back as the legends reached. All a body had to do was kept his head down, stay inside, and wait for somebody else to get claimed. That philosophy had served Arvel well for sixty-eight years and counting. As a boy, when he’d first seen the Circuit Rider on the little goat path that led to his Rush Branch fishing hole, he had managed to escape for some reason.

  He’d tried to tell his dad, a no-nonsense, up-with-the-sun Free Will Baptist, about the encounter, but Dad cut him off at the first mention. The Circuit Rider wasn’t real, and that was that, and no amount of blabbing and blubbering would change that. Except Dad’s wrinkled-raisin face had grown as pale as a potato root, leaving Arvel to figure that Dad must have had his own little run-in with the dead preacher.

  Arvel had kept himself scarce for the next two days, feigning a belly ache so he wouldn’t have to go to school or do chores. That wasn’t much of a stretch, because he was so nervous he puked every time a spoonful of food hit his gut. From the bedroom he shared with his brother Zeke, he could see the Smith barn, and under the moonlight shadows sometimes moved in the hayloft. He’d clamp his eyes tight, but one of them would end up creeping open like the lid of a vampire’s coffin. He didn’t sleep much those two days.

  Then, his brother didn’t come home from school. The county schools had buses, but the Wards and other kids in their area had to walk a mile down to the river to catch one. The bus stop was a favorite spot for shenanigans, with a dozen kids of different ages killing time with jokes, pocket-knife stretch, and the occasional round of post office or show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine. Zeke had taken up cigarettes, another favorite pastime at the bus stop, but none of the other kids dared smoke. Of course, that made Zeke the idol of the dirt-road neighborhood, but he also knew he would get his rear end worn to a pile of rags if the folks caught him. The kids say he showed them the pack of cigarettes that morning, unfiltered Viceroys in a shiny pack he must have swiped from the general store.

  As big a show-off as he was, Zeke thought he’d best slip off into the woods to do his puffing. Arvel guessed his brother was just as afraid of coughing and hacking in front of the others as he was of being spied by an adult. Whatever the reason, Zeke went into a laurel scrub and lit up. The kids watched for the trail of smoke to be sure that Zeke wasn’t joshing them, then turned their attention back to their games. It was only when the bus rolled up and one of the kids hollered Zeke’s name that they realized he’d been gone way too long to just smoke a cigarette.

  Arvel’s best friend, J.C. Littlejohn, had gone into the laurel to find Zeke. The bus driver honked and the other kids shouted names, according to J.C., but Zeke didn’t come out of hiding. J.C. found him sprawled on the ground, belly down, the moist butt of the Viceroy inches from his lips, the ember on the lit end burning a hole in a dead leaf. Zeke’s Kedd sneaker had lodged in a protruding root and he’d tripped. Freak accident, the county coroner said. His forehead hit a tree trunk and snapped his neck back, killing him instantly.

  And Arvel’s first thought upon hearing the news: I’m glad the Circuit Rider took him instead of me.

  He was having a similar thought now. Betsy had come home from the hospital and was going to be just fine. That was the trouble. Arvel had been hoping that Betsy would be the one the Circuit Rider took this time. Not that he wished ill of Betsy, but after all these years, he was still so sweat-shaky scared of the Circuit Rider he’d rather die a thousand different ways rather than end up done in by the Circuit Rider. Because them that the Circuit Rider claimed had a way of showing back up.

  Arvel had seen his brother a decade after his death, when Arvel was newly married and had taken over running the farm after Daddy’s final stroke. Arvel made a habit of keeping watch on the Smith barn, and his adolescence was haunted not by his brother’s fluke accident, but by the shifting wedges of darkness that seemed to cavort just beyond the sunlit windows. On a cold March morning, when Arvel was on his way to slop the two hogs, Zeke was standing by the collard patch, barely visible, wreathed in the fog as if he were woven into it. His head lolled to one side like an onion hanging by a piece of twine.

  “Soon as he finds his horse, you can come join me,” Zeke said, the words seeping out of the mist as if growing up from the dirt. “Gets lonely over here waiting.”

  Arvel dropped the slop bucket, splashing sour milk, table scraps, eggshells, and apple peels on his jeans. He ran back into the house, where Dad saw the smelly clothing and whooped him for spilling the slop. Dad sent him back out to retrieve the bucket, and Arvel had no choice, you didn’t cross Dad on pain of death or worse. Zeke was gone when he reached the spot by the collards. Arvel didn’t look too hard for his dead brother. Instead, he found an excuse to hang around the house or work in the barn for the next several days, only venturing to the garden in broad daylight.

  And even through the fear of that encounter, another thought had pierced through like sunshine through a church’s plate-glass window: I’m glad it was him and not me.

  Which is the
same way he felt when he’d come in the kitchen and seen Betsy sprawled on her back by the stove. The gouge in her side was the mystery. The Circuit Rider wasn’t known to mutilate his victims. Sure, they didn’t die pretty, but almost always whole. Some said that Rebecca Smith had been taken by the Circuit Rider, but Arvel figured that was just a plain old car wreck on a twisty mountain road. Harmon Smith hadn’t been seen in the days leading up to her accident, and it hadn’t really fit the pattern of the preacher’s rounds.

  But he was back now, that was for sure. The first night that Betsy was confined in a Titusville hospital room, Arvel had lain awake until 3 a.m., listening for the sound of hoof beats outside, his heart jumping every time Digger let out a bark. Once he’d gone to the window to check on the Smith barn, but the windows were dark and the moon was buried behind the clouds. Last night, he’d curled up on a couch in the hospital waiting room, a magazine in his lap as if expecting a diagnosis, and had napped just enough to have a nightmare of the Circuit Rider chasing him down the goat path from the fishing hole.

  He poured a cup of tea for Betsy and checked the lock on the back door. He didn’t know if locks would keep the dead preacher out. For all he knew, the door had been locked when Betsy had her little accident. She had no memory of falling or hitting her head, only a headache she compared to the one she’d had the morning after Arvel got her drunk on moonshine and became engaged to her the old-fashioned way.

  Betsy was local, half Rominger and half Tester, and she knew about the Circuit Rider, like everyone else who grew up in these parts. She didn’t talk about it, and didn’t seem to connect her accident with the preacher’s return. So there was still a chance that Betsy was the intended victim. The preacher could certainly do worse: Betsy was a decent cook and didn’t run her mouth too much, she was beholden to men and honored the local traditions. She could can a mean batch of relish or sauerkraut, wasn’t above butchering a chicken, and put up with Arvel’s fumblings about once a month when he needed satisfaction.

  Arvel didn’t know exactly what the preacher did with them after he got them, but he didn’t want to find out. All he knew was if he survived this time, he probably wouldn’t live long enough for another turn of the Circuit Rider’s wheel. And that was plenty fine with Arvel.

  This was Sunday, the very day Harmon Smith had been killed all those years ago. If ever there was a day for the preacher to carry a grudge, this would be it. And no doubt Zeke would be out tonight, maybe hanging around the garden carrying a hoe or flitting through the apple orchard like a shredded kite.

  He added a spoonful of sugar to the tea and carried it up the stairs, glad that he wouldn’t be alone tonight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jett tucked a stone-washed denim jacket, a pair of black stockings, and a sweat suit into her backpack. She looked around the room. She’d never really settled into this place. Maybe it was Gordon’s dreariness hanging over the entire house, or the faceless generations of Smiths who had lived in this room before her. A Brandon Lee poster and a diaphanous black scarf over the lampshade didn’t make a place any more inviting to a Gothling.

  Mom had said to hurry, so Jett flipped through the CD stack. She passed over the Bella Morte, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, the music that had once seemed to match her mood. Now it all seemed so childish. Nihilism was great when it was part of a stage character, like make-up and black-leather props and facial piercings. But when you had stared nothingness in the face, and it stared right back and grinned, then the romanticism was lost.

  Jett nudged the CDs aside and plucked up some of her mother’s favorites. Robyn Hitchcock’s “Queen Elvis,” Tommy Keene’s “Song From The Film,” The Replacements “All Shook Down,” XTC’s “The Big Express.” Seemed like music to escape by, stuff that let you be yourself with no questions asked. Songs that made you feel stoned without drugs.

  She crammed a couple of changes of day clothes in the bag. She didn’t know if she’d ever see this room again, or the rest of her stuff. It depended on how well Gordon handled Mom’s leaving. He might go postal and come after them with both guns blazing, or he might just as easily sit by the fire with a glass of wine, intellectualizing the reality of abandonment. That was the problem with Gordon. He didn’t seem human, so you couldn’t expect a human reaction.

  After packing, Jett slid open her desk drawer and reached to the underside of desk where she’d taped her bag of pot. She was a veteran of room searches, and though Mom had sworn to trust her, Gordon had no doubt rummaged a few times. She pulled the baggie free and checked its contents. Enough to get her through the week. And then what?

  Reality.

  A reality far from a creepy stranger in a black hat, a gooned-out living scarecrow, a goat that sniffed your skin like you were an apple pie, a ghost that haunted your mom.

  Fuck it. Those would all be memories one day, and the more time that passed, the less she’d be able to see them. In a year, she probably would be able to tell herself it was all just a stoned nightmare. She tossed the pot back in the drawer. Let Gordon find it. Maybe he’d cram some into his pipe and see what all the fuss was about. Might loosen him up a little.

  Textbooks lay scattered across the desk. No need to worry about that geography test next week. The sun was touching the mountains, and the first long shadows reached between the curtains. She wanted to be out of Solom before dark, and would bet her leather bracelet that Mom felt the same way.

  Jett snatched Captain Boo off the bed, flung the backpack over her shoulder, and ran down to meet Mom at the car.

  ***

  “There’s just one thing about this,” Sarah said.

  “Whatever,” Sue said, still clutching the climber’s pick-ax. “I’m already nuts to believe any of this, so just lay it all out.”

  “The Circuit Rider only takes one. He had his shot at me, and I didn’t cut the mustard with him for whatever reason. Not that I’m complaining, but I don’t know if I want to double my odds. And it may be that he’s ready to take on outsiders like you. After all, a soul’s a soul, no matter where it come from.”

  “I’ll take my chances. I worked too hard to get established here. I’m not going to run off without a fight.”

  “That’s a lot of gumption for a little thing like you. But that pick-ax might not do any good against a dead guy.”

  Sue swung the pick-ax handle against her other palm and it caught it with a smack. “It feels right, somehow. Like you’re supposed to use something that’s part of who you are.”

  “In that case,” Sarah said. She rummaged under the counter and brought out the twenty-gauge shotgun. She broke down the barrel and checked the shell. The gun hadn’t been fired in five years but the powder had been kept dry. She reached up on the shelves behind her where she displayed ammunition for sale. Pulling down a box of bird-shot shells, she opened it and slipped three of them in her pants pocket.

  “If I need more than three shots, the last one is for me,” she said, pointing her thumb to her chin to show she’d blow her own head off before she let the Circuit Rider gallop her soul off to hell. Except part of her wondered if, by committing such an act, she would be volunteering to play the part of victim.

  They stood looking at each other for a moment, sheepish expressions on their faces. “What now?” Sue asked.

  “You got your Jeep?”

  “It’s by the shop.”

  “Let’s take a ride, then.”

  “Where?”

  “If you want to catch a mouse, you have to think like a mouse. If you want to catch a contrary preacher that’s two hundred years dead and won’t accept it, then you have to think like one of those, too. And if I was the Circuit Rider, I’d head for high ground.”

  “High ground? You mean Lost Ridge?”

  “Can’t think of any better place for a soul to get lost, can you?”

  “Closer to heaven.”

  “Turn over the sign on the door and I’ll close out the register. If there’s a chance I’m dyi
ng tonight, I don’t want some Yankee lawyer claiming the petty cash as part of my estate.”

  “You’re a woman after my own heart,” Sue said.

  “Except I ain’t got one.”

  ***

  Ray was changing the plugs on his Massey Ferguson when he saw a goat moving across his meadow, hobbling as if it had blown a knee joint or gotten a thorn up in between its cloven hoofs. The animal moved between the giant rolls of hay that were still green and moist. Ray recalled the headless goats he’d found in the field. He’d buried the goats behind his blackberry patch, using his tractor to gouge a hole in the ground. The heads had never turned up.

  Ray figured The Circuit Rider would be afoot tonight. After Harmon Smith’s appearance at the general store last night, Ray thought the preacher was toying with them, letting them know he could take one of them at any time. Ray wasn’t particularly afraid of dying. He’d given up on religion, and the Primitives didn’t really believe you could do anything about the fate of your soul, anyway.

  His younger brother David hadn’t reached out to try to bring Ray back into the church. David had always been the smooth talker of the family, the one who’d learned to read before grade school. Ray had studied shop and auto mechanics before dropping out in the eleventh grade, while David had gotten a degree at the community college. Never mind that David was practically nothing but a glorified lawn mower man these days, while Ray worked for himself running a backhoe. David was the one the church members had selected to be elder.

  The church had a hand in Harmon Smith’s death. It wasn’t something the Rush Branch Primitive Baptists were either proud of or ashamed of, it just was. Like that lame goat that made its way between the rolls of hay, making a drunken beeline for the fence. Ray put down his ratchet and wiped his hands on a rag.

  As he watched, the goat eased against the wire, its left foreleg twisted as if the bone had snapped. Goats were known for breaking out of any kind of pen, and this one must have pulled a Houdini act once already. But there was no way it would make it over four feet of hog wire topped with two strands of barbed wire.