“The sheriff’s a good man,” Hardy said, keeping the defensiveness out of his voice. No use disputing Bill, because the baldheaded money-grabber never lost an argument. Like any man, he was wrong about half the time, but he mistook surrender for weakness, whereas any fool knew that sometimes it was better to run like hell and live to fight another day. Then again, Bill owned about five percent of Pickett County and it didn’t look like the bank was foreclosing anytime soon.
“Sheriff out to be enforcing these ‘No trespassing’ signs,” Bill said, the grin staying in place to add, “I’m just joking, but I don’t have to be.”
“Nobody wants any trouble up here.”
“Yeah, I know. We did that dance. The North Carolina Historical Society didn’t find one trace of Kirk’s Raiders, and all the do-gooders at Westridge University didn’t find a damned thing, either. Just some stories that make the rounds every Halloween when folks want to scare their kids into good behavior.”
“Them names had some basis in history.”
“There’s no record that Earley Eggers joined the raiders, but I know you’re little touchy about it.”
“You would be, too, if your family’s reputation was shot to hell.”
“That was a century and a half ago.”
“People bury the past, but some things stick around long after they ought to be forgot.”
Bill opened the Humvee door and rolled out of it. Economic prosperity had spread to his waistline. Standing, the top of his balding head barely reached the door handle, but his belly was as inflated as his tires. He smacked his lips as if chewing sunflower seeds. “I know you were the only heir that fought against selling the family property, but I also noticed you didn’t offer to give up your share after we cut the check.”
Hardy swallowed hard. “Turns out people keep buying up property around here and building big homes, driving up their neighbors’ taxes until they either have to sell out or go bust. I needed the money or I’d have lost my land.”
Bill’s grin widened, throwing wrinkles across his forehead and scrunching his bulbous nose. “Growth happens whether you’re ready or not.”
“Yeah, well, shit happens, too, but you don’t see me diving in headfirst and telling everybody the water’s fine.”
“Titusville’s not a secret anymore. It kept popping up on those national lists the magazines keep, the ‘Top 20 best places to retire,’ ‘50 best outdoor adventure towns,’ and all that. After Westridge upset Duke in basketball, you could make it a reasonable question on a geography test.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say your pictures might have made a difference.”
Pride made the grin shift into a smirk, the eyes growing even darker. Budget Bill swept his arm out to indicate the view of the mountains that rippled soft and blue-gray in the distance, evidence that the Earth was a work in progress, a shifting landscape that only appeared fixed and firm from a man’s temporary perspective. “I’ve got the eye, my friend. But I had great material.”
“I’m not your friend.”
“Neighbor, then.”
“Got your camera with you? Thought you might want to get a few shots of the knob before your bulldozers do their trick and knock it down forever.”
“It’s already well documented, neighbor.”
“Or maybe you want a picture of my rosy red asshole.” Hardy twisted his head and spat into the leaves, wishing he hadn’t given up chewing tobacco so he could squirt a strand on the man’s fancy and squeaky-clean Timberland hiking boots. “I don’t got no legal cause to stop you. Them ‘Save the Knob’ hippies couldn’t get anywhere with their long-haired Yankee lawyer, so what good could I do?”
“You sound just like them, making it ‘Good versus evil.’ But I’m providing a product and contributing to the community. Funny, in all the kiddie movies these days, developers are the bad guys. Why is that, Hardy?”
Hardy nodded toward the ridge that covered the cool, black tunnel of subterranean secrets. “I don’t know what ‘evil’ is, but I know when something ain’t right.”
Bill took a couple of brisk steps forward and slapped Hardy on the shoulder. Hardy looked down on the beaming cherub in the catalog-ordered flannel shirt.
“Take it easy,” Bill said. “I wouldn’t subject a stranger to the sinister mysteries of The Jangling Hole. It wouldn’t be neighborly. That’s why I’m putting my house right there on top. Once I clear the trees so I can get the view.”
“You mean, so everybody can see how big your house is.”
Bill gave a laugh that sounded too big to have come from his belly. “If there are any Civil War ghosts, restless Cherokee spirits, hillbilly horrors, or tap-dancing babies of Satan, then they’re welcome in my living room anytime. I might even rig up an infrared camera and see if I can get any of it on film. Those would fetch a pretty penny, don’t you think?”
“Enough for you to buy another mountain.”
“Hey, don’t take it too hard. We won’t have the road cut all the way to the top until next week. Plenty of time for all the wild turkey, rabbits, and deer to scamper off into the valley. Or maybe down to your pasture. You still hunt, don’t you?”
Hardy didn’t want to acknowledge that he’d given up hunting Mulatto Mountain one misty November morning after he’d gotten the feeling that something was hunting him. “Mountain’s been here since the Book of Genesis.”
“I tell you what,” Bill said, pressing on Hardy’s shoulder to guide him toward the Hole. “You find me a verse that says a man ought to ignore a calling. And it’s not like I’m going to pave every square inch. We’re working with a land trust to place a few acres under conservation easement.”
“So you can get the tax breaks on land too steep to destroy and spread even more cost onto the shoulders of the working folk,” Hardy said, shrugging off the man’s hand and walking beside him.
Bill gave the irritating laugh again. “If I didn’t know you were a registered Republican, I’d swear you’re turning into a Commie. Come on, admit it. The truth of the matter is you don’t want me to ruin your view. Within five years you’ll be selling out and moving into one of my condominiums near the hospital.”
“Over my dead body.”
“That’s one way of doing it. I’m sure the missus isn’t quite as hard-headed as you. Not so opposed to change.”
A hawk soared overhead, a dark silhouette against the high clouds. The maples had turned early this year, the leaves dark purple and brilliant red. The buckeyes and poplars were golden, and the oaks were in the first throes of going dark green. A squirrel darted along a hickory branch, then leaped into a pine and cut a candy-stripe route down the trunk. The traffic from the distant highway was softened to a distant whisper, and the wind played its own voice through the trees. Hardy wondered how much of his anger was due to his inability to stop the spinning hands of time.
Change is fine with me, as long as it’s not change for the worse. But some things are better left alone. Like whatever’s sleeping in the Hole.
Hardy followed the developer, wondering how many times the man had poked his head in the Hole. Maybe Budget Bill Willard didn’t have enough imagination to get into trouble with it. Then again, Bill hadn’t lost kin to it like Hardy had. Hardy feared the Hole for good reason: it had stolen his son from him.
They were within twenty feet of the Hole, near where the two boys were standing when Hardy had first arrived, when Sheriff Littlefield stepped out of the woods.
“Howdy, Bill,” the sheriff said, nodding at Hardy and narrowing his eyes and giving a small shake of his head. Nothing, the look said.
“Big day for trespassers,” Bill said.
“I checked out the property. We didn’t find a trace.”
“I heard one of your boys got a little loose with his pistol. Maybe he was shooting at one of Hardy’s spooks?”
Littlefield stepped between the two men and the Jangling Hole, overtly avoiding glancing into the chilly depths. His hand rest
ed on the butt of his sidearm as if he were guarding gold bullion. “A lot of funny stuff goes on in this place,” Littlefield said.
“Yeah, like what happened in the red church in Whispering Pines? People are still snickering about that one.”
“Nobody who lived through it is doing much laughing.”
Bill looked at the sheriff, then at Hardy, and he gave his thigh an animated slap. “You fellows are serious about all this, aren’t you? I can understand it from Hardy here, being a seventh-generation, pig-porking hillbilly. But you’ve got education, Sheriff. You know there’s no such thing as boogeymen.”
“I know what I see and I know what I know,” the sheriff said, before pursing his lips into a stubborn line.
“Your chief deputy died in a car crash,” Bill said. “Those other deaths were just what the coroner said: animal attacks. And, anyway, just because you’ve gone goosey in the head doesn’t mean I have to change my plans any. I’ve got approval from the planning board and I’ve followed every line in the building code and subdivision ordinance. Hell, I practically know them by heart, since I helped draft them.”
“Maybe there’s a higher law,” Hardy said.
“Don’t thump the Bible on my head, Hardy. You haven’t been to church much since the day your boy went squirrel-shit nutty.”
The blood rage filled the backs of his eyelids. Hardy, who was two decades older, launched himself at Bill and wrestled him to the ground. The farmer’s limbs were tough and leathery, like strips of beef jerky, but they bulged with muscle around the bone. He climbed on top of Bill, who squealed in surprise and tried to roll away. Hardy’s arthritic knees sent blue lightning to his skull but he rode the developer as if the man were a wayward bronco in need of busting.
Hardy’s hands were tightening around the man’s throat when Littlefield reached down and yanked him away by his long john collar. The fabric stretched and the elastic snapped as Hardy clawed his way back toward Bill’s face, but Littlefield got one of his arms in a wrestling lock and tried to restrain him. Hardy pulled free of the sheriff and was about to ram his knotty fist into Bill’s fig of a nose when the voice wended low from the cave.
“Earley.”
The two combatants froze, and the sheriff stepped back from the fray. Bill rolled away and scampered to his feet.
“He . . . I’m filing on this one, Sheriff,” Bill said between slobbering gulps of air. “You witnessed it. Assault.”
“Didn’t you hear it?” Littlefield said.
“All I heard was the wind.”
“Something in there talked.”
“Arrest him, Sheriff.”
Hardy eased away from the Hole, wondering if his son had heard that same voice on a long-ago summer day. He looked down at his hands as if they belonged to a stranger. “I’m guilty,” he said. “Of a lot of things.”
Sheriff Littlefield picked up his hat and pulled the brim down so it threw his eyes in shadow. “Looked like you slipped to me, Bill. I don’t see any probable cause.”
“You’re both crazy,” Bill said, breaking into a jiggling jog back toward his Humvee. “See if I support your ass in the next election.”
As the oversize engine gunned to life and the vehicle circled, smashing into a two-foot wild cherry in the process, the sheriff moved to Hardy’s side. “Maybe he’s right,” Littlefield said. “Maybe we’re both crazy.”
“I wish,” Hardy said. “That would make a whole lot more sense.”
They shared a gaze into the silence of the Hole but looked away before whatever might be in there had a chance to look back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wood and lacquer exploded in a white cascade, a cannonball thundering through the ranks.
“Mother fuck,” Elmer Eldreth said, balancing on one toe like a ballet dancer after two pitchers of Old Milwaukee. He squared and faced the 6 and 10 pins, which wobbled with just as much unsteadiness as the man who’d tried to knock them into the next county. Hands out, Elmer pointed his index fingers at the pins like a gunslinger in a street showdown.
“Split like a whore’s legs on payday,” Jeff Davis said. “Too bad Mac’s gone high-tech redneck with those electronic scoreboards, or I’d cheat you a pin on the card.”
Elmer holstered his fingers as the rack swept the fallen pins away and replaced the two outside pins. Only one way to play it, knock the 10 with a reverse spin and hope it kicked off the wall and across the lane to the other gutter. But that was a shot only a lefty could pull off, and only under the blessing of a blue moon, or by selling his soul to the Gutterball God. And damned if Elmer’s soul wasn’t already maxed out, run-to-the-red bankrupt.
He trailed Jeff by seven pins in the last frame, and unless he nailed the split, he wouldn’t get that final bonus roll that might push him over the top. Tonight’s bet was for tickets to the Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Charlotte. The big NASCAR races were heading west and north, following the corporate money, and all the Southern tracks were stuck with the Tru Value Hardware Monster Truck Mash and rinky-dink shit like that.
Not that Elmer was opposed to watching mountains of steel and rubber pile up in a giant, smoking scrap heap, he just didn’t feel like driving two hours to do it. He could get the same experience right at home in the trailer park and have a fridge full of beer at his fingertips to boot.
Still, a ticket was a ticket and a win was a win.
Not that a win was likely. Jeff had drilled two strikes in a row to come storming up from behind. That little jab about Mac McAllister’s new computerized scoring system was pretty much dirty pool, except Jeff usually kicked his ass at pool, too. Elmer suspected Jeff had laid back and coasted in his draft, fell behind on purpose just to make a last-second run and blow Elmer’s head gaskets while dashing for the checkered. Elmer was running on fumes but he was going to punch the pedal to the end. He realized he was mixing racing and bowling in his head but he figured one beer-drinking activity was as good as the next.
“I’ll nail this one,” Elmer said, licking his thumb as the ball rolled up the return and clacked against Jeff’s in that macho ball-knocking ritual that no heterosexual male would ever acknowledge for what it was.
“You can’t even nail Mac’s wife,” Jeff said, loud enough for their pal to hear over the clatter of pins, the rumble of wracking machinery, and a twangy, boozy Kenny Chesney blaring from the jukebox speakers.
Mac lifted the aerosol can he’d used to sanitize a row of rental shoes, pointed the nozzle at Jeff, and shot a pine-scented mist that mingled with the popcorn-and-pungent-pork stench from the concession stand. “That’s about the best blow job you’ll ever get, Captain,” Mac said.
“Serious,” Elmer said. “Let’s make it double or nothing. If I get the split, you owe me four tickets.”
“And if you miss?” Jeff said, his squirrel-gray eyes toting up the odds in his favor.
“You get game and I throw in a freebie at Dolly’s Dollhouse.” The dollhouse was a private club featuring what the tourist trade referred to as “exotic dancers,” but Elmer and his friends called “titty wigglers.” Because of the anti-porn sentiment of the Baptist South, the girls had to wear thongs, but anybody with half an imagination (and Elmer often used his imagination both during the visit and later on in bed, squeaking one off while Vernell snored and drooled beside him) could see enough to get his money’s worth. Though Elmer’s oral hygiene was limited to Slim Jims and toothpicks, he’d seen thicker dental floss than the moist fabrics that ran between the dancers’ ass cheeks and up their clean-shaven diddies.
“Freebie, shit,” Jeff said. “Looking’s free but touching ain’t.”
“I’ll get you one in the back room.” Rumor had it a C-note would buy you a hand job in one of the private rooms that rented by the minute. Elmer never had enough bills to test the theory that a full menu was available from Chucky, the former Hell’s Angel who served as bouncer, harem king, and part-owner of the gentlemen’s club. Elmer wasn’t getting much action from his wife, but h
e figured he was paying out more for it than if he’d stayed single and bought his companionship straight up.
Vernell kept bitching and whining about the two yard apes that always had strep throat or needed new shoes or some shit. Worst part was only one of the brats was for-sure his. The youngest, Bobby, a tow-headed, sleepy-eyed kid who looked like he’d been squirted from a Scandinavian, was no way in the world pumping Eldreth blood.
Could be worse, though. Poor Jeff’s kid was a blooming faggot, sizing himself up for pantaloons and mascara before he was barely old enough to beat off. And Elmer tried not to bring it up, but sometimes when a good pal had an oozing scab, you couldn’t resist scratching it a little.
Jeff held his arm straight, thumb up, sighting down the lane like an engineer building a bridge. “Considering your odds are maybe the same as a Democrat taking the courthouse, you’re on,” Jeff said, then hollered at Mac, “Hey, what’s the mathematical probability of sparing out a six-ten?”
Mac slapped a pair of red-and-green clown shoes against the counter top. “Mathematical probability, my ass. If you roll perfect, odds is one in one. Roll bad and you got no odds.”
Elmer hefted his ball, a royal blue 16-pounder with sparkles in its smooth finish. He gave one biceps curl, flexing his wrist. The backspin would be a bitch. Elmer had no intention of ever making good on the bet if he lost, but he needed to take at least one pin out or Jeff would rib him for the next three weeks. Bitch of it was, you could settle for the one but that would pretty much knock out all chance of getting the spare. This was one of those all-or-nothing rolls.
Plus he needed that extra roll or Jeff took the game and the tickets anyway.
In the next lane, a fat man whose gray jacket failed to bag the vanilla pudding of his gut sat like the Buddha of Bowling, a cigarillo in his slack mouth. Mac had not yet given in to the anti-smoking sissies, and though Elmer didn’t smoke himself, he loved the poke in the eye to all those fucking liberals who dared tell a man how to run his business. Elmer had an insane urge to rub the Buddha Dude’s belly for luck, but the guy might sit on him and roll him out like the Pillsbury Doughboy in a laundry press.
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 35