He looked ahead; to the right of the orchard was the old barn. Beyond the barn was Feely's house. No lights were on in the windows. That was good. Other kids were scared of Old Man Feely. He was legendary in town. But Billy wasn't scared of anything that he couldn't see—and nobody ever saw Old Man Feely anymore.
The apple trees made ragged columns, like an army on a slope heading towards battle; then there were the woods, and the creek. But it would be a couple of miles to the highway. Billy wasn't sure if he'd ever gone that far.
Instead, he remembered the place his friend Mack had shown him, part of the slope from the orchard. It was a special place. He had caught Mack there, once, smoking cigarettes. Mack was thirteen, and could smoke if he wanted to (that's what he'd said at the time, anyway). And then, Mack had shown him the place, all covered over with rocks.
"What is it?" Billy had asked, peering down into the darkness.
"Part of the old mine," Mack told him, shining a flashlight down the path of the tunnel a ways. "They had to close off parts of it. I heard it goes all the way to Watch Hill. I heard that sometimes you can hear the dead people stumbling around in the mines trying to find their way out."
Billy had known about the mines because, right behind his house, there were a couple of pipes sticking up on a ridge in the lawn. His father had told him that it had been part of the underground mine, too.
Billy had asked Mack, "Ain't it kinda scary down there?"
Mack had grinned. "Lots of bad things down there, Billy, but if you're with me, I can protect you from them."
Strangely enough, for Billy, that time sitting in the hole in the ground for a couple of hours on a Saturday, watching Mack smoke cigarettes, and telling scary stories to each other, was the best time he could remember ever having in his entire life.
So, Billy decided to go find that hiding place in the dirt again. It didn't take long—the rock pile was still there. He figured that maybe he'd hide for a while and come out later to see how sad his parents were and how much they missed him. Then, maybe they'd be nicer and not yell so much. He wouldn't have to run away at all.
He rolled some of the rocks back, dropping a few apples in the process. Then, he took off his sweatshirt because moving the rocks made him hot. The hole seemed smaller than he'd remembered it—but then, he had grown a lot in the past year. He brushed spiders and gunk off the entrance and sat down in it. He squeezed himself back into the tunnel just a bit more. He could see all the way to Old Man Feely's house from his spot. Maybe it would be better to cover himself up again.
But it would be dark.
He didn't love the dark.
But what if Old Man Feely came out when he was asleep? What if that happened? Then he'd be in bigger trouble. And what if the other kids' stories about the Feely place were true? What if something haunted it?
I don't believe in all those scary things.
I don't.
No such thing as ghosts. If there were, wouldn't they have been out on Halloween last night? All he'd seen were other kids dressed up as ghouls and things, not actual ghouls.
Billy wasn't scared of things he couldn't see.
He pulled some of the rocks back in front of the opening, just enough so he could see out, but so that no one could see in.
He put his knees up until they were under his chin, closing his eyes for a second.
He didn't think he'd sleep. It was too early in the day.
Just for a minute. Try an apple. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Don't keep the worms away, or the flies. Do worms fly? Flying around like an angel across the treetops ...his thoughts spun into drifting sleep.
Billy Hoskins fell asleep at three o'clock in the afternoon, about the time that Joe Gardner and his family crossed the Paramount Bridge, and about the same time Homer "Hopfrog" Petersen parked in the handicapped space in front of Logan's Market downtown and spotted his ex-wife Becky walking her dog while Homer couldn't get out of the car even to say hi because he was overcome with fear that she hated him more than anything. It was about the same time that Colony, West Virginia, would experience a change of seasons, when winter would be coming on strong.
When Billy would awaken, it would be dark and cold.
Something would touch the back of his neck and he would be so afraid that his breathing would become rapid. He would turn around and follow the warm feeling down, down, down, scraping his knees along the way, but unable to resist.
And then, one final breath from his lips, and the feeling of having wandered into the real Demon Mother Zone, and with it, the certain knowledge that there was nothing, nothing he could do about it.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE TRUCK DRIVER
The truck which had rammed into Hopfrog Petersen's small VW back in the seventies did not go over the edge of the Paramount Bridge. Instead, the driver managed to get it to the other side. He swerved a bit, and managed to blow gusts of dirt up, before finally bringing his eight-wheeler to a stop. The driver jumped down out of the cab and ran back to the bridge where the other car had gone over.
A policeman was there (by his badge, the driver saw that the policeman's name was Dale Chambers), and the truck driver noticed another accident at the roadside, a Mercury Cougar, lying on its side, without a driver.
"You see it?" he asked breathlessly. "You see it?"
"See what?" The policeman seemed calm. "The accident?"
"No," the driver said. "That thing, that flash of light!" He would realize later that he was excited, in spite of the tragedy for whoever had been driving the VW. "It was a UFO," the driver said. "I know it was! I saw it come down, all silver like. It wasn't like anything I ever seen before, it was like somebody parted the sky, like a big lightning crack came down in between the sky and earth, and came between my truck and the VW!"
"Mister, you got beer on your breath. I advise you to get a lawyer real soon." The policeman went to call on his radio for an ambulance, but the driver wandered to the edge of the bridge and looked up to the sky.
Although he would later be charged with vehicular manslaughter (and this charge would inevitably be dropped because a good lawyer can do a lot with the loopholes in the law), he would return often to this spot, considering it sacred, the place where he saw the flashing and exploding lights from the sky.
This was so many years back, and the man didn't tell anyone his story for fear of being thought insane.
Time passed. Some wounds healed.
The business of the living took over the town and then, one day, Joe Gardner returned to the place of his birth.
CHAPTER FIVE
THERE ARE NO STRANGERS IN A TOWN LIKE COLONY
1
On the other side of the Paramount River, inside the county, a sign:
Colony, West Virginia.
"The Friendly Place on the River
Home of the World Famous Colony Rockers"
Population, 1,700.
Someone had spray-painted across the lower edge of the sign:
Welcome To Colony. Now, go home. And yer little dog, too.
You take the train down from Harper's Ferry to get there, or you can fly in to the airport in Charleston, rent a car, and drive southeast almost to the Virginia border, to Stone Valley, say, and then wind your way through the Malabar Hills, another forty minutes to Colony from the top. If you know the back roads, you get there with greater difficulty, but with an appreciation for the beauty of the area, the clear sky, the trees still resplendent with red and orange and yellow leaves, the wind, brisk but invigorating. A river winding on its outer edges made it look like a vast and fertile quarry, surrounded by monoliths. Was it beautiful? No one who lived there thought so, but it was; it was beautiful, as were all American towns that had seen their heydays at the time when the railroads ruled, when coal was king, when honor was a commodity that was valued above life, and when a certain degree of patrilineal inbreeding was considered genteel. It had the look of a tired county seat and yet Stone Valley, modern and stu
pid, held that honor. Colony was town on the inside, country on the out; a deer or possum might cross the old roads, like Lone Duck Road or Paramount Road or the one called simply the Old Road. There might be the smell of smoke in the air, from a cabin set back in the woods—the fireplace lit when the chill of early evening sets in. The taste in your mouth is like leaf mold and river ice, an acquired taste if you're not used to the country, a taste of memory wine if you've been here before, in your youth, in the days of green and summer and light that never faded.
Joe Gardner stood beside his Buick. Aaron needed to pee and had been too embarrassed to get out at the paved road, so here they were, pulled over to the side of yet another dirt road. Aaron shivered a little as he peed. Joe noticed that Hillary was sound asleep in the back. Jenny took a hike over to the river's edge to stretch her legs. She was looking a little ragged; they all were. They'd been driving five hours, and after stalling on the bridge like that (Joe now assumed the car had stalled, he told himself over and over again, it had stalled—it wasn't that he himself had stalled, that his body had stalled, that his mind had stalled, but that the car was having its usual round of mechanical problems), Joe wanted to let the Skylark cool down a little. Aaron finished peeing, and turned around without zipping his fly up. Sometimes Joe thought his son was quite possibly the smartest, most handsome little boy on the face of the earth.
And then there were those times when Aaron left his fly unzipped.
"X-Y-Z," Joe told his son.
Aaron glanced down and saw his own shirttail sticking out from his fly. He pressed it in, zipped up. "Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"Why is it that the pee keeps coming even after I think I'm done?" He had a deceptively sweet Vienna Boys' Choir sort of voice, vaguely cherubic, which he tried to disguise by lowering it an octave to sound more mannish. This was a very serious question, Joe could tell by the tone of voice.
"It's like plumbing. Must be you need a new washer."
"I don't think so. I think maybe I need a new dryer." Aaron laughed. Then, looking up at his father's face, "I can't wait 'til I get to shave."
Joe reached up and felt the day's growth around his chin. "You think it's a treat, do you?"
"No," Aaron said, "Only we saw this movie in school where it says that when you get to shave, girls start liking you."
"It's not exactly like that. You want girls to like you?" This was a new twist; Joe hadn't expected to worry about Aaron and girls for another few years.
Aaron shrugged. "I guess... I guess I want everyone to like me."
"It's more important that you like yourself, Bean," Joe used the affectionate nickname that Aaron was quickly outgrowing.
"Oh," his son said thoughtfully. "Well, in that case, I only like parts of me."
"Which parts?"
Aaron scrunched his face up a bit. "The parts that work. Like my hands and my brain and my feet when I run. The basics." Aaron was one of the most wonderful and strange kids that Joe knew; sometimes he made Joe believe in reincarnation, because the kid seemed preternaturally intelligent, as if he'd been around from another time. Joe had read books where people talked about old souls and young souls, and if there were such a thing, Joe thought he was probably a young soul, while his son was the old kind. Aaron whispered, almost under his breath, "And Mom says she wishes not all your parts worked quite so well."
It stung, that comment. Joe didn't need to ask Aaron to repeat it. He didn't even want Aaron to know that it was an important comment, something Aaron shouldn't be repeating. Nobody's perfect. It was his litany at this point, his rosary, his private prayer. Nobody's perfect. We all make mistakes. What's past is past.
Aaron might've figured it out, but recalling his own childhood, Joe knew you didn't figure it out until you were older, maybe in your late teens, when you saw something die between your parents, when you wanted to prove that your own kind of love was stronger than theirs, that it would last into eternity, not just break apart at the first pretty face. He didn't blame Jenny for having made those kinds of comments. I wish your father's parts didn't work so well. Jenny shouldn't have said it in front of Aaron, but when you got to the state that she'd been in, you probably didn't notice what you were letting slip.
All right, so I cheated. Once.
I will write that I won't cheat ever again in my entire life if it makes you happy. I will be your slave and never ever look again at another woman if it will mean that every now and then you look at me tenderly again, without getting that hurt look on your face. Okay?
He'd said all that in therapy, which they'd sped through from January to August. He remembered what his father had said, when Joe was fifteen, and had found out about his mother. "Well, women have difficulties with us. She called me an asshole, Joe, and you can't argue with that. When you come down to it, all of us, all men on this planet, are assholes."
Another thought, unbidden, the one that lurked there in his brain at all times, always, even before he had cheated: You're evil.
You're evil just like your mother was evil.
You are possibly the worst human being on the face of the earth, you are lower than low, not just because you cheated on your wife and family, but because the moment when you were cheating, your son was dying.
Joe glanced down at Aaron, scruffed his hair up. Aaron grinned, but was watching the trees, as if expecting to see a bear.
Joe wished it had never happened. It was a year ago now, at a bar in Baltimore, down at Fell's Point. A bar where you could barely see the person sitting next to you, where men and women did things in shadows.
She was there.
She was not nice, not sweet, not even very pretty, certainly not the beauty that Jenny was.
But she had one thing. That one thing.
She looked like her.
(He shivered whenever he thought of the name.)
Like Melissa.
Just in the eyes, really.
And the way she touched him.
Aaron said, "Dad, look!" He pointed across the road.
A flock of birds, dark against the fading sky, burst from nearby laurel bushes and flew up, chattering, coming together as one dark cloud, and then dispersing again.
Your son was dying. Paul Aaron's baby brother. Hillary's baby brother. Something got him in the dark while you were sleeping with someone other than your wife. Something came out of the dark, something called sudden infant death syndrome—maybe—but maybe it was just God saying that if you screw around on your wife, you don't get everything you want, if you cheat your family out of their father, you don't deserve another beautiful little baby.
Maybe it was God. Or maybe it was something more idiotic, more brain dead and arbitrary: Maybe it was fucking life.
Joe lived with these thoughts, side by side with more mundane ones, and managed to function most of the time. Sometimes he just stared into space. He had lived a life where he had let two people he had loved die, and yet, here he was, with his wife and kiddies, watching a flock of birds take off. They were on their way to Gramma's house. Over the river and through the woods, indeed. Aaron watched the birds with wonder. He looked so much like his mother, it was amazing, although Joe saw a little of himself, just a pinch or two, in the eyebrows that were like caterpillars mating, or the way his ears poked out from his hair, or in his incipient height—Aaron had shot up four inches in under six months.
Joe looked from his son to the billowing flock of birds. "They're late. We're going to have an early winter, and those guys are never going to make it to Florida," Joe said.
"Birds are neat." Aaron stuffed his hands in his pants pockets and hitched his shoulders up. "I wish I was a bird sometimes."
"And where would you fly to?"
"I dunno. Maybe China. Where would you fly to?" Aaron asked.
Joe watched the birds go up and over the sloping hill beyond the river, and then, out of sight. "Anywhere but here," he said.
He followed Aaron over to Jenny, who was stepping over
the low bushes and moving into the dusky stand of trees along the hillside. She seemed to be looking for something. Jenny had never really been out of the larger cities of the Northeast; in fact, Baltimore was the smallest city she'd ever lived in—she'd only ever been to the country when she needed to get to the beach, or as a rest stop off a major highway.
When Joe approached her, she turned at the sound of his footsteps on twigs. "I saw a deer," she said. "I know I did." She kept her voice whispery and held a hand up for Joe to stop making so much noise with his damn shoes (he could translate this just by the flick of her wrist). She motioned for Aaron to step up beside her, and when he did, she put her arm around his shoulder and leaned into him.
She pointed into the woods.
Joe moved forward as silently as he could.
He looked to where she was pointing.
A small doe stood beside a tree, chewing at its lower branches. It was thin and more shades darker than Joe had remembered deer being. Its eyes didn't seem to register the intruders. It seemed close enough to touch. Even though he'd seen deer before, it had never been with his family. This seemed different, almost sacred. Maybe it was a good sign, after all. Maybe coming here was the right thing to do, and the right timing.
Aaron turned around and said, "Look, Dad, it's Bambi."
Joe smiled. He liked his son, he liked his family, he liked his life.
His father had advised him, before the wedding, "Don't fuck this up, Joe, because once you do, you spend the rest of your life working on the engine without ever driving the fucking car."
My mother's dying, but life is still worth it.
Then a piercing wail came up from somewhere behind him, the doe took off into the woods—it was a child wailing—not just a child, you asshole, it's your child, it's Hillary—like a reflex, he spun around and ran towards the Buick. He had left the door open, damn it, she'd been asleep, but she was only three, what was he thinking? Anything can happen to a three-year-old, his heart raced faster than his feet.
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