He had intended to continue on Bridge, eventually turning north when it connected with Maple, out toward the depot, but the lights of the ShadowShow marquee flared to life just as he passed the theater, startling him. He pulled over into one of the parallel parking slots at the curb, looked back over his shoulder. The marquee lights were on, all right, and from this end he could see the MIDNIGHT SHOW letters on the white background; but what the hell did they mean? The Square was empty of traffic and would be for the rest of the night.
Shaking his head in irritation, Presley slid across the seat and got out on the passenger side. Cold rain stung his face. He walked quickly over to the theater and up to the ticket booth, only to find it empty.
But a door was open, and from inside the theater came sounds of a movie. A war movie, Presley thought, judging from the gunfire. Or maybe a western.
Hell, he thought. Might as well check it out and see what’s up.
He walked into the empty lobby, frowned, and pushed open the door into the auditorium.
A woman’s Technicolor face on the screen, staring wide-eyed into the camera and screaming.
Good Christ, Presley thought. It looks a lot like Eula.
A gunshot, and the woman’s left eye broke. Blood and brain tissue sprayed from the back of her head.
Presley’s jaws clamped hard on his gum. What in the name of God? Movies didn’t show that.
He frowned. There was old Ort, sure as shit, sitting at his little old switchboard. And he looked up, and a shot took him out, sent him jerking back against the wall. The body slid down, leaving a slimy red trail of blood.
And next was Quarles (that goddamned Marine Quarles, never thinkin’ of his men), on the phone, but a shot right into that face put a hole beneath the gray military haircut, knocked old Sam Quarles over on his ass.
And then the movie camera lingered on the rifle rack behind Quarles’s desk. Six rifles there, three with scopes. God knew how much ammo in the drawers. Enough.
The screen showed a tour through the jail, each stinking prisoner dealt with in turn, some of them crying, pleading, but to no avail. A single shot for each of them.
Top floor, end cell. A wickedly grinning black man held out his red ruined arms through the bars of the cell. One shot and he reeled back to lie in his own blood.
Closet off the stairway, ladder in the closet. Ladder led up to a trapdoor in the roof. You went up there to change the floodlights when they burnt out.
But a man standing on the roof of the jail had a good view all around, parts of eight streets as clear as anything, and no tall buildings until you got away off to the Square.
But even the Square wasn’t impossibly far away. Not for a high-powered rifle with a good scope.
Harmon Presley slid down into a seat, his eyes rapt on the screen. He forgot entirely about the mill, about the rain, about the damn cheapskate county and the lack of two-way radios.
His finger twitched.
6
Though no one particularly noticed it at the time, the attendance statistics for Gaither Elementary for the second week of September were abnormal.
Gaither Elementary, which included grades one through eight, was the largest school in the county. Six hundred and four students were registered there as of September 3, the day school began. There were four other grade schools actually inside the city limits: Southside (which was black), with four hundred and eleven students, Porter Memorial, to the southeast, with three hundred and seven, Church Street School, with three hundred and twenty-two, and Bailey School, with four hundred and fifteen. In addition to these were the county schools in the outlying districts, some of them, like New Haven Springs, so close that city families sent their children there.
But even allowing for its size, Gaither Elementary posted the largest absentee record of all the schools in the county between September 9 and September 13. Part of it might have been weather: the week began with a cool rain, the legacy of a tropical depression, and continued with unsettled afternoons promising or delivering violent thunderstorms. Gaither lay in Tornado Alley, and some parents were extra cautious, remembering the devastating storm of 1938 that killed eleven students and one teacher in the old Palmer Street School.
Still, there was something more. Johnny Williams, in the sixth grade, had missed the first day of school. He also missed the entire second week. Cindy Fellows stopped coming to school on Wednesday of that week. Clipper Nix dropped out of sight on Friday. There were others, but these all had this in common: they had complained to their teachers of terrifying dreams, dreams of a black and white dog nearly a month dead. Indeed, of the burial party that had interred Tuxedo, only Lamar Woodruff and Billy Touhy had a perfect attendance record that week. They did not speak to anyone about bad dreams.
Johnny’s father had reached the end of his patience with his son sometime back. Johnny, miserable from lack of sleep, submitted to a belting each morning; but each day he was clearly unable to attend school, and his mother let him stay home. Only on the night of Wednesday, the eleventh, did he manage, finally, to fall into deep sleep without dreams of Tuxedo’s returning.
Wednesday night was also the night that Lamar and Billy slipped away from home well after dark. They met, as they had arranged, in the brush field below the trestle. Billy, burdened with a mattock, found Lamar hunkering on his ankles near the track. The ground squished under his feet, sodden with the rains. Lamar shone his flashlight in Billy’s face as he slogged toward the tracks. Billy squinted against the glare. “Don’t blind me, man.”
The beam dropped. “I got a shovel,” Lamar whispered.
“Let’s go.” Lamar got up and took the lead, shovel in one hand, flashlight in the other. Billy followed, unable to use his own light because both hands were occupied, the left with his mattock, the right with a can. They stuck to the gravel roadbed all the way to the trestle. There they turned aside. The embankment, reinforced with creosote-impregnated ties, was easy enough to negotiate, but the creek bed was a morass.
“Damn,” Lamar said. “Mama’s gonna burn my ass when she sees these clothes.”
“We’ll rinse ’em out in the creek, down at the culvert.”
“Shit. Never get this mud out, man.”
“Hold on a minute.”
“What is it?”
“Lost my shoe, man.” Billy floundered in the dark, retrieved his loafer — a shapeless lump of red clay in the glow of the flashlight — and jammed his foot back into it. “It was around here, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. There’s the rock.”
Billy, grunting, hefted the flat rock and placed it aside. He turned on his own flashlight and laid it on top of the rock, directing its beam toward the grave they had dug for Tuxedo. “This is dumb,” he said.
“You didn’t think it was so dumb last Sunday night.”
“I know.”
Lamar chunked the shovel’s blade in and out of the earth a few times without actually starting to dig. “What did you see, man?”
“Williams’s damn dog. I told you that.”
“But how?”
Billy sighed. “I woke up real early. It was about three o’clock, I guess. I looked out the window, and there Tux was. Just standin’ there in the streetlight, lookin’ up at the house. All tore up and nasty.”
“Wish I had a cigarette.”
“I was so scared I nearly peed in my shorts. And then he turns and runs off down the street, guts hangin’ and all.”
“Wish I had a smoke,” Lamar repeated. “With me it’s just the sound of a dog scratchin’ at the front door. But there’s nothin’ there when I open it.”
“I wouldn’t have the guts to open it, man.”
“Your idea to come do this tonight, man.”
Billy hefted the mattock. “That’s different. If he’s down there, he’s dead, and he can’t hurt us. If he ain’t — you’re gonna have to walk me home, man.”
“Let’s see about it.”
The clay had settled back i
nto the excavation they had made, but it turned easier than it had that first time. It took them perhaps a quarter of an hour to uncover the soggy top of the Snowdrift box.
“Puke,” Lamar said, wrinkling his nose at the stench.
“Shine the light, man.”
Lamar turned his flashlight on the box. Billy, using the mattock, peeled away the cardboard. The fur was streaked red with clay, but the body was Tuxedo. Billy prodded it. It gave and did not rebound under the pressure of the mattock.
“Let’s end it,” Lamar said from behind the flashlight.
“Gotta get him out, first. Too wet in the hole.”
Neither wanted to touch Tuxedo. In the end, Lamar was able to pry the body out with his shovel, and Billy hooked the blade of the mattock under it and hauled it up to the edge of the hole. Together they worried the corpse onto the flat rock. “Now,” Billy said. “Hold my flashlight, too.”
Billy picked up the can he had brought and spilled gasoline over the body. The can held a little more than half a gallon. The body seemed to soak it up, thirstily, until toward the end, when more was running off than staying on. Billy reserved a few ounces. “Break off a tall weed,” he told Lamar.
Lamar went to the edge of the brush field and came back with a three-foot-long stalk. Billy took out a pocket handkerchief and knotted it around the head of the stalk. He poured the last of the gasoline onto this.
“Get back, man,” Lamar warned. He gathered the tools and pulled them away.
Billy took several steps back, pulled out his father’s cigarette lighter, and fired the handkerchief. For a moment he stood there in the startling glare, holding a ball of flame before his face. Then he pitched it like a spear.
The bundle on the rock caught with a whump and a billow. “Shit, man,” Lamar said, taking another step back. The two of them stood revealed, faces frightened and naked, in that sudden yellow light.
“Look at him,” Billy said.
In the heart of the flame, Tuxedo stirred. A foreleg straightened out. The back arched.
“Just burnin’, man.”
The paw moved in short, jerking arcs, as if the dog were asleep and dreaming of chasing a rabbit.
“I don’t know.”
Billy and Lamar retreated again, into the brush field. The fire shriveled the hair off the body, popped and sang as it fed on fat and fluids. They watched it for a long time, undisturbed by anything save the night sounds — the pump of frogs, the chirr of insects, once, from up the ridge, the sound of the night freight rumbling past toward Atlanta. Moths came and danced in the light, the fat moths of summer’s end.
At last the fire died down. The two boys came closer and inspected the rock. Only charred remains and some bones remained. Billy scraped them back into the hole and together they turned the rock over to hide them.
They struggled toward the culvert in shoes made leaden by mud. At the culvert they stripped to their shorts and rinsed their jeans legs. They scraped mud from their shoes, finally decided to go barefoot for the rest of the way home. “Still want me to walk you home, man?” Lamar asked as they headed toward the houses.
“Naw. I feel better now.”
Lamar was silent for a long moment, as if listening to himself. “I do, too.”
“We don’t say nothin’ about this, right?”
“Hope to die.”
The moon, past full but still bright, broke through clouds, silvering the trees. “I hope this ends it,” Lamar said.
“You and me both,” said Billy grimly. “You and me both.”
It was toward dawn, though still very dark, when the boys got home again. They fell exhausted into bed and did not dream.
That was Wednesday night, or rather Thursday morning. On the following Friday night, Johnny Williams’s father would shake him roughly awake. “What is it?” the boy moaned, still half asleep.
“Get up. I want you to come in here.” His father’s hand jerked him unceremoniously out of bed. “Get on your feet, or I’ll whup you again.”
Johnny was up and shivering. “Daddy, what’s the matter?”
“You and that damn dog,” his father said. “You and that damn mutt of a dog. Sayin’ he come back at night, gettin’ your mama so worried. When somethin’ is dead, it’s dead for good, boy.”
Johnny shook. His father sounded strange, excited and gleeful. “Daddy, I — ”
“Come with me, Johnny.”
“Let me put on my pants.”
“You don’t need pants. Come on.” His dad’s huge hand clamped on the back of the boy’s neck. Johnny was dragged forward, out of his room, up to the door of his parents’ bedroom.
“Daddy?”
His father paused with one hand on the doorknob, the other on Johnny’s neck. “When somethin’ is dead, it’s dead. I’m gonna show you somethin’, boy.”
He opened the door.
7
Quarles was ready for Harmon Presley on Thursday afternoon only because Presley’s neighbor heard the first shot, and then twenty minutes later saw Presley go running out of his house and into the car, and went to investigate. As soon as he saw Eula, the man called the Sheriff’s Department. Quarles took the call himself.
So Quarles was ready when Presley pulled his car up onto the curb in front of the county jail, got out, and walked up the six concrete steps to the entrance and to the niche where Officer Ort manned the switchboard. The sheriff met his deputy on the top step. “Harm,” he said quietly. “I reckon I’d better take your sidearm.”
Presley grinned up at him. The revolver dangled in his right hand. “Do you?”
Quarles, standing one step above him, extended his hand. “Give it to me, Harm. Butt end first, and slow.”
Presley brought the gun up almost to firing position. The shot came too soon, before he even squeezed the trigger. He found himself looking at the sky, with a strange taste in his mouth. Presley tried to raise his head, got it high enough to see the man with the rifle leaning out the window.
I’ve been shot, he thought. Lying flat on his back at the foot of the steps, he could not find his body, could feel nothing but a kind of dreamy cold.
“Harm?” Quarles’s face, leaning over him, blotting out the sky. “Why’d you do it, Harm?”
Presley laughed. The sound bubbled in his throat. “See you later, Sam,” he murmured before he died.
8
When he could no longer hold out, Ballew Jefferson telephoned the bank. His own secretary, Brenda Wayly, answered on the second ring.
“Listen,” he told her. “This is Mr. Jefferson. I’m still feeling ill, and I need you to do me a favor. Are you listening?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take this down. Ready? I want you to withdraw some money from my savings account. I need a thousand dollars. Got that? All right. I want it in fifties and smaller denominations. You know where I live.”
“Yes, sir. We had the Christmas party there.”
“That’s right. Now, listen, Brenda. I want you to take off the rest of the day. You have to go shopping for me. Go to the grocery store and buy me some canned goods, soups, meats, vegetables, whatever is easy to fix. Get me about two or three weeks’ worth. And tissue paper. I need several boxes of tissue paper.”
“Sir? Are you all right? Your voice sounds funny.”
“Of course it sounds funny. I’m sick, Brenda. I’m cold all the time. My teeth are chattering. And I need some groceries. Now be sure to buy the tissue, five or six boxes.”
“Mr. Jefferson? Are you all by yourself there?”
“I’m ill, Miss Wayly, but I’m not dying. I’m doing all right. I just need some time to myself. Time to rest. Now. When you get the groceries, bring them out to my house. I want you to leave the groceries beside the side door, just in front of the garage. You’ll see it. Put the rest of the cash in an envelope and drop it down inside one of the bags. It will be all right there until I can take the groceries in. Do you have all that?”
“Mr. Jefferso
n, I think you should call a doctor. You’ve been sick a long time.”
“I know what’s best for me, Miss Wayly.”
“But — ”
“Take a hundred dollars of the cash for yourself. Now. Be out here with the groceries no later than three o’clock. Do you understand that? And don’t knock; just leave the groceries and go. Thank you.”
“I still think — ”
“I think you like your job with the Trust Bank, Miss Wayly. Am I wrong in that?”
A sigh on the line. “No, sir. I’ll be there before three o’clock.”
“Thank you.”
Jefferson hung up the phone. Despite the two flannel shirts he wore, he shivered. He went to the stove, where the gas burners were clear and blue, and warmed himself. The thermometer he had tacked to the cabinet said it was over a hundred degrees. Well, that was a lie. He knew when he was cold, and right now he was freezing.
Over the past few days Jefferson had retreated to the kitchen. He slept there, in a sort of nest of quilts, blankets and pillows he had stolen from the bedroom in a series of jumpy, furtive, quick sorties. The pile was under the table. Another pile, heaped against the counter on the other side of the refrigerator, consisted of empty cans. His supply was running low: he had lived for the last two days on a diet of Campbell’s Vegetarian Vegetable Soup, the last canned goods in the house.
Beside the table, covered incongruously with a silver serving tray, was a dented galvanized iron bucket: his sanitary arrangement. He had knocked out the screen from the window over the kitchen sink, and the bucket could be half filled with water, swirled, and dumped into the backyard, whenever he remembered to do it.
Days ago, before he saw that midnight movie, Jefferson had thought he had hit bottom and bounced back. Well, that was wrong. He had been merely miserable before. Now he was absolutely wretched. He felt filthy, and he stank: but how could he wash himself when he was freezing cold all the time? His face bristled with beard. He was dropping too much weight, drastically fast — already he had pulled his belt to the last hole over his shrinking belly, and soon he would have to punch a new hole. He wondered, briefly and bitterly, how many people in town had seen that abominable film.
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