“Since before time, eh?”
“Thereabouts.”
Smoke moved in slow circles around the lamp’s glow.
The sound of liquid, pouring.
“Medoc. 1947.”
“Must be a special occasion, Win.”
A long pause. The man named Winston heaved a sigh that seemed to hang in the air with the smoke. He said, “It’s coming, you know.”
“Winston?”
“They’re coming, Virg. I can smell them. They’re coming.”
“No more of that stuff, please. It’s bad enough, the nightmares you gave me last time.”
“I gave you? Who was it who found out about it? Look out there. The streets. How many towns are like this, do you think?”
“Like what?”
“Of no real consequence anymore. Why, Colony could just be gone tomorrow, and who would come around to check its pulse? Stone Valley would continue the same as always, and nobody else really cares or even comes through here. The furniture company just laid off fifty more employees. It’ll be gone soon. We could go like that”—fingers snapped—”And it would be a day or two before anyone came around to investigate. If a snow comes, could be longer. Maybe two weeks.”
They sat in silence for a while, with the shadow of smoke curling around the lamp. The silence was broken with the clinking of glasses as more Medoc was poured.
“I saw the writer, Virgil.”
“You’re talking in too many circles for me. What writer?”
“For a doctor you’re not too bright, Virgil. The one who used to live out on River Road. Oh, the one with the voices. You remember.”
“Anna Gardner’s boy? He’s back? You’re sure?” “Haven’t lost all my marbles just yet. He stopped across the street for a paper hours ago. A woman and children in the car, too. Looks taller but he’s still got that paunch. He’s how I know. It’s coming back again, soon. Got to make sure none of them come round my place, not like they did that last time. And don’t you ridicule me, you hypocrite—you sit there drinking my wine and smoking my Cubans, and scared out of your mind because you know it’s true.”
From the dark on the other side of the table, the other man sighed. “I figured as much.”
“‘Bout time you admitted it. But there’s only one problem, Virg. We’re just too old to do anything about it. I don’t have the same kind of strength I had back then. And I know you don’t have the belief you once did. I know I don’t.”
Five minutes of silence.
“When you’re right, you’re right. So, what do we do?”
The other man said, “What, you think I’ve got a solution to every problem? I’ll do what every other fool in this town does in a crisis and sit on my fat ass until doomsday.”
“I suppose we could talk to John and see if he’s got it under control.”
“Tried that. He hasn’t been answering his door. Got me worried on that count, too. He’s too much of a believer, you ask me. When he goes . . . well.”
“Oh, dear,” the other man in the dark room said. “Me a doctor and you an ex-preacher, Winston, and between us we can’t make it go away.”
“Nobody can. Look at that town. Look at the streets. I can feel it out there. It’s caught, but it wasn’t meant to be kept down forever.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE LAST NIGHT OF BYRON CHEEVER
1.
Watch Hill was a lonely place on weeknights. On the weekend, teenagers often went to the cool stones and flat markers, and, with a crowbar, pried back the doors to mausoleums—to make out, or camp out, or just to lie back and watch the stars.
But because Byron Cheever was out on a Thursday night, the graveyard was barren of life.
Out to the north he could see the orchards leading to Old Man Feely’s place, and the river beyond it. To the east, he could see the town, with its flickering yellow lights. All the rest was wilderness. The beacons of Stone Valley shone from the ridge the other side of the Malabars. He had been born in Stone Valley, but his first memories had been of Colony, of the Paramount River, of the Old Town, with its stone houses and Federal-style buildings, the Civil War cannons over in front of the Post Office, the taste of ham and eggs at Wanda Mirkle’s Pig-in-a-Poke coffee shop, the smell of the river in spring when the fish were running and the girls were for the taking along its banks.
He became overly sentimental as he sat there on the flat raised marker of some lost soul from decades back. He was going to have to die, that’s all there was to it. He had learned something about himself, something about his inner nature, and it terrified him. He didn’t want to be anything other than what he presented of himself: a guy who liked pussy. It was the only Byron Cheever he had ever known. This other one, this man inside his skin who had been turned on by that other man, had to die. The only way By knew how was to kill both men, the one on the inside, and the one on the outside.
He thought he could hear the hum of the universe as he sat there. The airwaves of God, maybe, that kept the whole lunatic world somehow on track. And only he, he was tuned into it. His parents wouldn’t hear it— they were so far removed from the workings of the cosmos, they were only into money and appearance. Byron, the inside man, was something of a poetic soul; he knew what suffering was, what true pain was. He knew how when he had pushed sissy boys down on the playgrounds of childhood, he knew that he was the one who had suffered the most—how those kids had made him push them down. How it was out of his control, how those kids had been laughing at him, on the inside, how they had forced him to push them and beat them and kick them until they were bloody and bruised. It was always them. And when he had beat off over his little brother, Hugh, when Hugh was nine and he was thirteen, even though Hugh wept and asked to be let go, he knew that it was Hugh making him do it, and he was right, wasn’t he? Hugh was now a teenager and already a queer—it was Hugh who had made Byron Cheever do it to him. And how he had suffered for what Hugh had made him do! How different his life might be if Hugh had not made him hold him down and spit all over him and beat off against his thigh! He might not have this inner self now, telling him how much he liked to hurt boys and how it made him all excited.
God, if only all those other boys had never existed. It was like they were demons put on earth to torment him and other guys like him, normal guys, guys who liked pussy, who were smart and got ahead and were going to one day show all of them, all the rest of those people who had ever hurt or tormented him (he could name them: Hugh, Mark, Bart, Gus, Clay, Jimmy, Joe Bob) ... he was going to show them just how much they had damaged him.
Byron had considered suicide several times before, but never intended to carry it out. He was too valuable to the scheme of things, he had reasoned. He was going to go on and make something of himself and destroy those who had made him suffer.
But with those photos, those bitches . . . Byron Cheever knew it was over for him. He was already dead. His frat brothers—particularly Beau, oh, man, how am I gonna look Beau in the eyes again? He’s my best friend, he’ll never understand, he’s so handsome and butch, he’ll think I’m such a fag, he’ll never want to be my friend again. Kicked out for cheating, and now, this. Aw, what the hell’s the matter with the world! Why does it always happen to me? Who the hell fucked up?
Already dead.
Already dead.
It was like a song going through his head.
Might as well die
Say bye-bye to By
‘Cause I’m already dead.
What was the point? Why live? What reason did he have for getting up the next morning, for facing the cruelest of possible worlds?
Who cared about Byron Cheever and his suffering?
2.
He searched the trunk of his daddy’s Cadillac. He found some old Penthouse magazines, and a large flashlight, a toolbox (he didn’t want to kill himself with a screwdriver, although it might be possible), and beneath the spare tire, a thick extension cord. Good length. That would be good for death. A g
ood strong cord around his neck—he’d beat off before, strangling himself with one of his mother’s silk scarves wrapped around his neck. He liked the sensation. It was a smooth feeling with the scarf. It would not be so smooth with the extension cord, but life was a bitch without tits, so what did it matter if there was more pain at the end? It was all pain, all suffering, all torture. What’s another fuck? as one whore said to the other.
When he slammed the trunk closed, he thought he heard something move nearby.
He looked towards the Connor crypt; turned the flashlight on it. The small building was intact, door closed. Sometimes kids were around. Maybe they were giggling at him. Maybe they’d been there all along, and they were going to go home and tell their mommies and daddies what they saw and heard, how Byron Sumner Cheever was a pervert, not just a homo, but the kind that got off only when he could hit somebody and make them cry.
They’d tell their folks that he was not normal.
Oh, God, hurry up and kill yourself.
He spun the flashlight’s beam around the graveyard, all of its two low, sloping hills. Nothing but the wrought-iron gates, nothing but the luminescent stones, nothing but the flat November grass, and the silvery dew, like an early frost. Nothing but the dead and soon-to-be-dead.
He didn’t ask, “Who’s there?” because he was afraid someone would respond.
He imagined his family, here in a week, looking down at the coffin as they lowered it. Thought of the minister saying his Good Bookisms, thought of his mother, weeping tears of loss, his father, tears of remorse. They would hug and shiver. They would miss their son. They loved their son. (They hated Hugh because Hugh was showing signs of major queerdom, he couldn’t play sports and he couldn’t do boy things very well, he was walking funny—Jesus, they’d only have Hugh, it was like having half a son. Good, let them suffer for once.)
He turned the flashlight off. He tested the cord for strength by pulling on it, snapping it. He swatted the air with it, then slapped the cord down on one of the markers. He walked around among the raised stones and swatted them. When he came upon one of the stone angels, he whapped it hard, over and over again until some chips flaked off from the angel’s face.
He would like it to have been that fucking Marti Wiley for making him fuck her and then for telling her bitch friends that he had raped her. Jesus, she had practically raped him, she had wanted it so bad. The world was so unjust. He would like that stone angel’s face to be her as he whapped it and slapped it and sliced it open with the extension cord. It almost made him want to live.
But, still, he climbed up the side of Watch Hill, to the top.
He wrapped one end of the cord around the lantern that thrust out of the Feely mausoleum. It was welded to the stone and was made of iron. This was the oldest building on Watch Hill, built by the Feelys when cholera had taken several of their children. It had faces of cherubic children carved into its stone walls.
Engraved above the lantern were the words, “Cast Our Light Unto the Darkest Places.”
Byron Cheever, like all of the youth of Colony, had seen those words since his earliest days. He had broken into the mausoleum with friends and spray painted the inner walls. He had gotten laid for the first time up against the doorway on a hot night during the summer he turned fourteen.
There had been two other suicides here in the past sixteen years that he was aware of. It was an historical place. A twelve-year-old girl had drunk poison and left a note about beatings and worse, back in the eighties. Just a couple of years back, Angus Zane, one of the village idiots who had been in school with By, had slit his wrists, although no one knew why.
It was a lonesome and wonderful spot.
He secured the extension cord on the lantern and held onto it. He lifted himself off the ground, did a pull-up.
It would hold.
It would do the trick.
He let go of the cord and went over to the mausoleum. There were plenty of loose bricks around the doorway, after the countless crowbars that had been used to pry the door open. He picked up one of the large bricks and set it down beneath the cord. Then he went and propped the flashlight up so it would shine directly, he hoped, on his swinging body. It would be dramatic that way, if they found him at night. If they found him in the daylight, it wouldn’t matter. He began to hope they would find him at night.
He inhaled the chilly air, deep and strong.
Coughed.
I look out at you, Colony, Paramount River, farm and town and hills, and I say, Fuck this.
Byron Cheever balanced himself on the brick. He wrapped the cord around his neck.
3.
It was a hard balancing act, because the brick was on its end, and By was not petite. He was a husky, strong young man, who had never had to balance himself before. He was hoping that he could finish his malediction to the world before the brick went, but it was not to be.
The brick toppled.
He swung.
He did not die.
He hung there, strangling, barely able to breathe.
He remembered reading or hearing something about how, if your neck didn’t break you would just hang there and strangle. And death would take its sweet ass time.
In the grip of a new panic, a panic that the suffering in his life had begun all over again, he saw something, a dark shape standing just outside the flashlight beam.
Someone was watching him, and he thought he heard the sound of a child giggling.
And then another sound, a booming, rending of bones and earth and wood and stone, as if every grave in Watch Hill were erupting with the rising dead of Judgment Day while the majority of Colony slept.
He realized this was a private vision, meant only for him.
At the crossroads of life and death, as he swung there, the shape, a child, stepped into the light and told him what he must do.
What needed to be done this night.
And then, the child became something other than flesh.
4.
Enough people in town were asleep, but Sheriff Dale Chambers never seemed to get the chance. Since escaping unnoticed from Lannie’s car an hour before, and having to hoof it all the way to the office, he was exhausted and wired at the same time. He was mentally kicking himself for being so weak as to fall in love with Lannie Barnes, to let his weenie lead him astray like that. He sat in his office, and read the report about the missing Hoskins boy; his deputy was out patrolling the streets, checking out leads, seeing if the boy was sleeping over at a friend’s house. They’d find the Hoskins kid. He wasn’t worried.
Truth was, Dale was a fairly incompetent sheriff, and he’d be the first to acknowledge it if anyone had ever had the balls to confront him with the truth. He despised most of the town, thought they were idiots and functional clowns. They were like a bad dream, or a sewer stink made flesh. He had always wanted out of the place, but there were chains holding him back, the invisible chains of marriage and obligation. And fear, too, that worst of all chains, the fear that there was no other world out there beyond Colony, no world that would support him or look up to him or kowtow to him.
He was sheriff, after all.
Folks looked up to him.
(Except that one person, that all-seeing person who wrote the notes.
Naughty, naughty man.)
It was almost two a.m. He knew he would be up all night, wondering what to do with Lannie and Nelda, each of them, the rock and the hard place. Lannie, the slut he loved, and Nelda, the icebox he married. It was always the same choice, he knew, all of womankind was either one or the other.
He started typing up a couple of reports for the morning, mainly his comments on the performance of his office.
And then, about the Hoskins boy, he wrote:
Possible runaway. Possible kidnapping. Possible murder.
He looked at those possibilities. Rubbed his eyes.
“Goddamn it,” he said, slamming his fist on his desk.
From the outer office, Cathy Z
ane, who worked the night shift dispatch, came in with a cup of coffee. “Who you gettin’ pissed off at now, Gump?”
“You ever call me that again,” he said, “Your ass is gonna be grass.”
“My ass already got mowed this week,” she said, smiling. She set the coffee down. “White, like you like it. So, what’s all the cussing for?”
“Oh,”—Dale waved his hand in a vague gesture— “That Hoskins kid.”
“Billy? I’m sure he’s fine. Boys always run off at that age and they always come home. Heck, he may just’ve snuck out to meet some girl.” She sat on the edge of his desk and thumbed the dozen pieces of paper in his to-be-filed box. Idly, she said, “Two accidents out on Twenty-eight. Big rig and a trailer. Looks messy. Stone Valley’s got it, though. The other one was some fool drove his car into the river. Don’t know who it is yet.”
“Ten dollars on Pearl Watson.”
“I don’t waste my money on a sure thing. We got Jud on it. Quiet night, ‘cept for those two.”
Dale couldn’t keep another cuss in. The thought of Lannie taking Jud’s thing in her mouth, well, it got his blood boiling but good. “Goddamn it,” he said.
“Cross yourself when you do that.”
“I ain’t Catholic.”
“Well, do it anyway. What is worth using the Lord’s name in vain?”
“Well, I was thinking about Billy Hoskins. I mean, Cathy, if he’s run off, we can find him or he’ll come home. Right?”
“Right.”
“But if he’s dead—”
“Billy Hoskins? He ain’t dead. He ain’t. Don’t say that. He just run off.”
“But if he’s dead, the state boys’ll be down on us so fast we won’t know what hit us. I hate the state boys. They’re always going through my papers, always trying to piss me off.”
Cathy clucked her tongue. “My, but you are a worrywart. Listen, that kid might be lying in his own bed right now for all we know. You know how kids are these days. Lying, cheating, stealing, running, hiding, sneaking. No morals, no cares. He’ll be back before dawn in his own bed, and if his folks’re right in the head, they’ll give him a whupping he won’t forget.” She slid off his desk and walked out.
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