The Listener

by Robert McCammon

  There was no reply. Curtis could not feel her on the other end of the mental radio; the tubes were not glowing.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he told Ludenmere. “I can’t get to her right now.”

  “Oh Jesus…you say…you don’t know how to drive?”

  “No, sir, I don’t.” Curtis paused to wipe the rain out of his eyes. “I’ll get up to the road and find help. Find a house…somebody to help us. There’s got to be somebody livin’ in one of those cabins up there.”

  “Right. Yeah…I don’t think…I’d better move from here…damn…don’t think I can move. Near passin’ out, Curtis…”

  Curtis had no idea if Ludenmere was going to die or not; he had no way of knowing how bad the injury was, but he figured the least—and maybe the most—he could do was go for help.

  “I’ll find somebody,” he said. “You hang on, I’ll be back directly.”

  When Ludenmere didn’t reply, Curtis knew it was time to get going. He stood up in the driving rain and began half-running and half-staggering in his soggy Redcap’s uniform and his waterlogged shoes the three-hundred-yard distance to Sawmill Road.

  ****

  Donnie had fallen to his knees. He was facing Nilla, Little Jack and Hartley, and even as the blood spouted from the cut artery and his wounded face began to bleach to gray the black cinders of his eyes still said he would kill them if he could. He let out a bellow that might have had words in it, or might have been a warning to the spirit realm that Donnie Baines was on his way and he could lick any phantom in the house.

  He drew a tremendous breath, as if that would give him a few more seconds of life, and maybe it did. Then he shuddered like a dog that had been hit by a dump truck and he fell forward on his face with his eyes still open but staring no longer at anything of value to a corpse. He landed in the mess of his own gore, and caused it to ripple across the floor like a small tidal wave.

  “Out,” Hartley said. “Got to get out.” His own face had grayed. The blood was filling up his shirt at the belly. “Jack…can you pick up the lamp?” The boy was in shock, staring numbly at the dead man. “Jack!” Hartley tried to shout, but it was more of a painful wheeze. The boy jumped; tears sprang to his eyes and a thread of saliva drooled down from his lower lip.

  “I can get it,” Nilla said. She got her hands under the lantern’s wire handle and let it slide down to her wrists, then lifted it off the floor that way. Though the outer glass was cracked, the flame was still strong.

  “Got to get out,” Hartley repeated. “They come back and find this, they’ll kill us.” He pushed away from the wall he’d been leaning against and Nilla saw both the terrible pain and the awesome willpower in his single-eyed face. “Come on, Jack,” he urged. “Steady up now, hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy answered, but his eyes were still swollen with shock and his voice sounded hollow.

  “Lead us out of here,” Hartley told Nilla.

  Rain was hammering madly down on the tin roof. Nilla’s light showed that Donnie had opened the back door to let the air circulate. Out on the porch they found the screened door was latched, but Hartley solved that problem by kicking the whole thing off its hinges. Then he gave a gasp and doubled over, and Nilla saw that not only was he bleeding badly from his wounds but he was also bleeding from the mouth, which she did not have to be a nurse or a doctor to figure was a very bad sign.

  In the driving rain, the two steps down to the muddy earth were too many for Hartley. He took a fall that put him on his injured side and slammed from him a harsh grunt of pain. As Nilla was leaning down to try to help him, she heard something in her mind that sounded like a distant garble of words. Maybe there was a question in it, but if it was Curtis speaking he wasn’t making any sense. She had neither the time nor the concentration to answer; right now the only thing she could think about was getting her brother and herself as far away from the kidnappers as possible, and she was aware that Mr. Hartley could be dying in front of her eyes.

  She was unable to do anything to help him to his feet. “I can get up,” he said, priming himself to try. With a supreme effort he struggled to his knees and stayed there for a moment, as lightning streaked overhead and the thunder spoke and the rain came down upon all. Then he did stand up, slowly, fighting not only his injuries but the weight of the storm. He hunched over and pressed his elbows into his belly as if to hold his insides from sliding out.

  Headlights came through the rain up at the front of the cabin. The car stopped. Nilla heard two doors open and shut.

  “Let’s go!” Hartley said, and motioned with a lift of his chin toward the woods to the left.

  “Jack!” She hit him on the shoulder with an elbow, because he was standing there open-mouthed and seemingly as dumb as a rock. “Go!” she said, and hit him again to get him moving. His first couple of steps were made like he was sludging through glue, but then he started running into the woods without care that everything was dark ahead of him, and he was gone like a jackrabbit. Nilla held the lantern up for Hartley to see his way. They hadn’t gotten but about twenty feet when he fell again, even harder than before.

  A flashlight shone from the cabin’s back porch, searching for the runaways.

  “Get!” Hartley said. “I’m finished, Nilla.” Now a pair of lights were working from the porch, and when one found them the other did too.

  “I can’t—”

  “Take care of your brother,” he told her. “That’s what you have to—” His gaze shifted, his eyes squinting in the glare of the two combined lights. “They’re comin’. Get while you can.”

  She had no choice. She ran, following Little Jack into the unknown.

  ****

  “Looky here,” said Ginger as she walked to Hartley and put the light in his pallid face. “What I found…a one-eyed dead man.”

  Behind her, Pearly shone his bull’s-eye lantern into the woods. In the last minute the rain had eased from a hard downpour to a steady fall, and through it he could see the light of their lantern, moving away.

  “They won’t get far,” Ginger said, but she had not moved her attention from Hartley. “All this mud and the thicket out there…not far at all. Likely break their legs and we’ll hear ’em cryin’.” She knelt down a safe distance from Hartley, and it was then he saw the gun in her other hand. “You made a mess. How’d you do it?”

  “Ask Donnie,” said Hartley, with a grim smile that showed his bloody teeth.

  “Now here’s a brave man, Pearly. You say he was in the war? Oh yeah, that scar and all. Well, looks to me like he’s gonna be dead here real quick. We brought you the knife you killed Donnie with. Give it here, Pearly.” She put the flashlight aside, moved the pistol to her left hand and took the gory knife from Pearly’s hand in her right. “Looks like he stuck you a few times, too. You used this, or did you make yourself a blade somehow?”

  “Ginger,” Pearly said. “We’ve got two hundred and fifteen thousand fuckin’ dollars split two ways!” He had barely been able to suppress his delight at seeing the third split dead on the floor back there, at the same time realizing the chauffeur and the kids had gotten out, but now his bloodlust was up and it was all a matter of taking care of business. “Let’s finish him off and cut out! We don’t need the brats!”

  “Yes,” she answered, still staring fixedly at Hartley, “we do. Think on this, Pearly: if Bonnie and Clyde had had two kids with ’em in that car, would the lawmen have shot them to pieces? Hell, no. We’re gettin’ those brats and takin’ ’em with us. They’re gonna be our insurance policy against bein’ shot up on the road.”

  “I get that,” he said. “But we’re dumpin’ ’em somewhere, right? Soon as we’re in the clear?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Ginger slowly wiped the knife’s blade on Hartley’s trouser leg. “We’ll dump ’em…somewhere. By the by,” she said to Hartley, “I think I might’ve killed your master. Now…I’m not gonna waste a bullet on you, ’cause I can tell you’re sinkin’. We’re gonna go fe
tch those kiddies back, and if you’re not dead by the time we do…you’ll wish you were.” With that, she drove the knife with ferocious strength into the calf of Hartley’s left leg, and she twisted the blade.

  ****

  Nilla had caught up to Little Jack in the dripping woods. They both heard the ragged wail from behind them that made them stop in their tracks and stare at each other, their eyes wide and glistening in the lantern’s yellow light.

  Nilla broke the silence that followed. “We’ve got to keep moving. We’ll find a road or another cabin, or somebody.”

  “Yeah,” her brother said. Then: “What do you think they’ll do to Mr. Hartley?”

  “I think they’ve already done it. We can’t help him, Jack. He would want us to keep going.”

  “Yeah.” It was delivered gruffly, in a voice that might have belonged to their father at that age, yet in it was also a note of terrible pain that was all the father’s son.

  There was no time or energy to waste, and they both knew that. Nilla didn’t know if those two would come after them or not, but she couldn’t risk slowing down to find out.

  They went on into the thicket, their feet sinking through weeds and mud as the rain continued to steadily fall, and beyond the lantern’s flame was nothing but a world of dark upon dark.

  Twenty-Two.

  It was raining in fits and starts when Curtis found the first cabin. He had turned west on the darkened stretch of Sawmill Road and was running in the direction of town. He banged on the cabin’s door…once…again, and a third time, but there were no lights and no one answered. He gave a shout of “Help me, please!” and hit the door twice again. There was still no reply from what must’ve been an abandoned place, and Curtis ran on.

  The next cabin was about eighty yards away and on the left side of the road, and he’d almost gone past it before he’d realized it was there. Beside the cabin, nearly hidden in the brush, was the battered frame of a car sitting on cinderblocks. Curtis crossed the road, ran through the weeds and up a pair of cinderblock steps to the door. He hammered on the weathered wood and shouted, “Help me! Somebody, quick!”

  Nothing.

  “Please!” he tried once more. “Help me!” He balled up his fist and hammered again…and suddenly he saw a faint light moving beyond a front window. Did a face peer out from the dirty glass? He couldn’t tell. He was about to shout and beat at the door a third time when he heard a bolt being thrown back.

  The door came open and the double barrels of a shotgun were put in his face.

  “Get on outta here, you!” hollered the old man holding the gun. He was a bony Negro, bald-headed and with a white beard, wearing a gray nightshirt. Curtis saw behind the man’s right shoulder an equally-aged and frail Negro woman, white-haired and with a face like a roadmap on dried parchment, lifting an oil lamp to give off a meager light.

  “Please, sir!” Curtis said. “There’s a man—”

  “Get on outta here, I said! I don’t want no damn trouble!” The shotgun was trembling and the old man’s eyes were wild. He looked fearfully from side to side and then thrust the double barrels against Curtis’s chest. “I’ll shoot you down, you don’t move off!”

  Curtis thought that if he spoke one more word the fear-crazed old man might blow a hole through him, and what good would that do for Ludenmere, Nilla and Little Jack? He had no choice but to say, “I’m movin’, sir, I’m movin’.” He backed off the steps and away from the door, the door slammed shut and the bolt was thrown, and Curtis turned and ran back to Sawmill Road. He began to run along the center of the road in the direction of Kenner again, and in a couple of minutes the breath was rasping in his lungs. He saw another cabin but its roof had collapsed. He kept going, as the thunder boomed distantly to the southeast and the lightning was a brief flash of illumination over New Orleans. The rain had become a drizzle. Mist was rising from the wet woods on either side of the road. Still Curtis ran on, and then he saw his shadow thrown before him on the cracked pavement.

  He turned around. Headlights were coming. Coming fast.

  He stood in the road’s center and waved his arms up and down.

  Whoever it was, they weren’t touching their brakes.

  “Hey! Hey!” Curtis shouted, and jumped up and down in the glare of the lights for emphasis. The car wasn’t slowing; it was going to run him right over.

  When Curtis realized he was about to be struck, he leaped aside and the car—no, it was a beat-up pickup truck wet with rain and somebody riding in the truckbed—swept past him doing what Curtis figured was maybe fifty miles an hour. The vehicle went on another hundred feet and then its driver must’ve stood on the brakes because the single working tail light flared, the pickup started skidding and it looked for an instant like it was going to swerve and crash over on its side.

  After that the truck just sat there, its rough engine idling.

  Curtis was about to get himself in gear again and run to the truck when the vehicle suddenly was put into reverse with a grinding of gears. It came at speed toward him, but its driver couldn’t keep a straight line and the vehicle ran off the road on the right side before the steering was corrected.

  Then the pickup truck was there beside him, at a crooked angle.

  The driver had rolled down his window. A flashlight was clicked on and shone into Curtis’s eyes.

  “What’re you doin’ out here, boy?” the driver asked.

  Curtis couldn’t make out the face. The voice sounded like it belonged to a young man, but it was hard and a little slurred. He was aware that the person in the truckbed had gotten down and with a staggering gait had come around to stand on his right, uncomfortably close.

  “There’s a man needs help,” Curtis said. “He’s been—”

  “I think that’s him,” someone else said—another young, hard voice. It belonged to the pickup’s passenger. “Prob’ly is.”

  “There’s a man’s been shot,” Curtis went on. “I need to get him—”

  “You shoot somebody, nigger?” asked the young man on Curtis’s right. His voice was also slurred, and Curtis realized these three young whites had likely been out drinking their fill to overflowing of rot-gut moonshine.

  “No, not me. He’s—”

  “No, sir,” said the one standing up. “You say sir to me, boy.”

  “You think that’s him, Monty?”

  “Prob’ly is. Charlene said he was skinny.”

  “Please,” Curtis said. “Listen. There’s a man’s been shot and he needs help.”

  Monty, the passenger, went on as if Curtis had not spoken. “She said she never saw him before yest’a’day. Buck prowlin’ around up here lookin’ for a white girl to rape.”

  “Yep.” The driver took a swig from a clay jug that had either been in his lap or in Monty’s possession, and Curtis could smell the strong liquor of a backwoods still. “Out here up to no fuckin’ good,” the driver said.

  “Man’s been shot!” Curtis said, near exasperation. “Can’t you hear what I’m sayin’?”

  “We don’t care if a damn nigger’s been shot,” said the one standing up. “Do we, Whipper?”

  “No,” said the driver. “We don’t.” He opened his door and slid out with the jug in hand, and Curtis thought that anybody called ‘Whipper’ was someone he wanted to be very far away from.

  But it was way too late for that.

  “If you won’t help me,” Curtis said, “I’m movin’ on.”

  “Movin’ on, he says,” said Monty.

  The passenger got out of the truck. The light was still in Curtis’s eyes, and all he could make out about Whipper was that he was short and stocky and had meanness in his voice. The flashlight beam by itself was used like a weapon to blind him. Curtis looked to left and right on the road, but there was nobody else coming.

  He felt the violence building. These three were eager for it, and the moonshine had only primed them further. It was only a matter of seconds now before one of them made the first
move.

  Curtis turned away from the truck and ran.

  “Get him, Fido!” Whipper shouted, and Monty let out a happy whoop.

  The third one—Fido—must’ve been faster than the others, because he was on Curtis like a mad dog before Curtis had made ten yards toward the woods. An arm locked around Curtis’s neck, and Fido’s considerable weight threw him so hard to the ground the muddy earth might’ve been concrete. The breath burst from Curtis’s lungs, and as he rolled to get away Fido fell on him with a knee to his throat.

  Something crunched. Curtis felt a pain rip from his throat up the back of his skull and for a terrible instant he feared his head would explode. Fido pinned him to the ground, that knee pressing down with paralyzing force.

  “He ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Fido said. He slapped Curtis’s hands away, and then he laughed like he’d done this kind of thing many times before and enjoyed it way too much. After the laugh, he drove a fist into his victim’s face that burst the nose into a bloody mass and knocked Curtis senseless.

  Curtis came to with the realization that he was being dragged across the pavement. He tried to get his feet under him but one of the toughs gave him a punch in the center of the chest and again knocked the breath out of him. Someone else smacked him with an open hand across the right temple, and that person said, “Ow, shit! This nigger’s got a head like iron!”

  “We’ll fix that for him. Get ’im up in there!”

  “He don’t weigh nothin’.”

  “Ain’t been eatin’ his pig’s feet and shitbread. Watch the bag, Monty.”

  Curtis was thrown over the side into the truck’s bed. His right hand hit something that felt like rough burlap. There was a movement in it and then he heard not one rattlings but many.

  He lay in the truckbed on his side with the bag next to him. The rattlings subsided. One of the young men—Monty?—climbed into the truckbed and shoved Curtis’s legs over with a booted foot to give himself more room. The pickup’s engine gave a rattle not unlike the sound from the bag, it boomed a blast of exhaust, and then Curtis felt the truck start moving, gaining speed fast.