November Mourns

by Tom Piccirilli

  Now he could barely control the urge to haul her forward into his arms, hide his face against her neck.

  She reached out to brush her fingers through his hair but stopped short, as if his new flecks of gray might be catching.

  “Hey, Elfie.”

  And there it was, the smile that opened him wide. His breath caught and he could only stare—at the perfect teeth, the way she cocked her chin, and how she hit that pose in the moonlight. With an awful clarity he knew she would always symbolize this emotion, the one too intense to have a name.

  “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see you again,” she said.

  “Were you hoping for or against?”

  Her lips remained fixed in that modest smirk, but he saw her stiffen. There were some things he shouldn’t ask because he didn’t really want to know the answer. Waiting to see where they stood only broadened the breach within him.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I have missed you though.”

  It was nice of her to say it anyhow. He wanted to believe, as the lust began to do a slow crawl through his guts, and was again surprised at how weak prison had made him in some ways.

  She took his hand and drew him farther from the others until they reached an outcropping of rock perched above the river. He kept seeing a pale hand gesturing to him from the corner of his eye, and he had to force himself not to turn. Maybe he’d totally flipped over the edge on C-Block, or maybe coming home again had done it. You didn’t need much of a push.

  Elfie rubbed her thumb over his knuckles—the nail a dusty blue of glitter—back and forth like settling a baby, the same as she’d always done in school after he’d been brawling. He wondered who she’d dated while he was gone, what new loves, regrets, and heartaches she’d found. He looked back and scanned the gathering to see if any guy was watching intently, somebody pouting, ready to yank a squirrel killer .22 from his pocket and come charging. But there was no one.

  “Have you been all right?” he asked, and hoped it didn’t sound too dull.

  But the way her face closed up, it must’ve. She held back her questions, her lasting dismay. Her thumb kept brushing over his knuckles, like she was trying to get into his skin and down into his blood. He didn’t know what the proper response was supposed to be.

  “Yes, I’ve been fine,” she said.

  “I’m glad.”

  The wind continued to heave and abate. Elfie nodded, her hair tangling under her chin, until she slipped it back behind her ears. It kept coiling, flowing toward his throat. You could find your paranoia anywhere.

  “I’m working at my father’s bait and tackle shop. I do his accounts and the books for a couple of other stores nearby. Chuckie Eagleclaw’s art gallery, Bardley Serret’s Rock Museum, and the Craftsman and Leather.”

  Shad almost said, You were always good with numbers, but managed to stop himself in time. It was something her father had told her from the start, because he never had anything important to say. Shad had watched Elf go to her pa and admit she was pregnant, asking for his help, and had heard the man say right then and there, You should go to that banking school in Washatabe County, you always were good with numbers.

  Elfie started talking about Chuckie’s books and how you could beat the IRS, but Shad could barely hear her. Mags’s pale hand kept distracting him.

  “I kept your letters,” she said. “They were lovely. You write beautifully.”

  “I kept yours for a few months too.”

  It stopped her. “Only a few months?”

  “Well, somebody filched them.”

  She gave a sidelong glance. It was a natural enough reaction, this kind of fear, thinking there was somebody out there who’d read your mail, knew your home address. “Really?”

  “It’s what guys in the joint do. They’re bored. I read a lot of novels and used the envelopes as bookmarks. I’d reread your letters every couple of days, but eventually someone got around to stealing the books.”

  “Did you know who did it?” she asked.

  “Sure. A guy they called Tushie Kline. He was always nosing around my bunk. Tush liked to cause little difficulties where he could. Inconveniences really, general annoyances. Nothing big, just the kind of crap that would ruin your afternoon.”

  She grew more interested, leaning in now, maybe a touch excited as her eyes grew more serious, hoping to hear about a shiv in the jugular. “Did you do anything about it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Did you hurt him?”

  This was the part where he could really push the story if he wanted, throw in all kinds of nasty action. Hanging somebody in the shower stalls with the elastic from their own underwear, setting them on fire and locking the cell door. Making a gun with a twelve-penny nail, a steel tube, and a rubber band.

  But he decided his time as a conversation piece was over. “I taught him how to read.”

  She drew her chin back like he’d slapped her. “What?”

  “Tush always stole books and tore them up, flushed them down the john. He hated them because he was illiterate, like everybody in his family, and he lashed out.”

  “That sounds familiar,” she said.

  Half the county did the same thing. Kept their kids home from school because they thought it was a waste of time. Put them to work on the farm or hauling moon by the time they were eleven or twelve. The best runners were about fourteen years old—young, stupid, and juiced with immortality. Almost everybody had a relation who had died before hitting sixteen. Rolling over down an embankment, broadsiding a semi, head-on into a tree and rupturing the gas tank.

  Burning moonshine, if it was the good stuff, couldn’t be put out. The flames just kept going for hour after hour. Scorch marks and rusted, burned-out GTO husks littered the hogback paths of the hollow.

  “So I taught Tushie to read. Prison libraries have an extensive catalogue of children’s literature. The Dick and Jane, A is for Apple type of stuff; and the middle-grade books. He picked it up quick, quit trashing my stuff and we started hanging out together a little, talking about the stories. Got to be okay pals.”

  Night swarmed around them, alive and malleable. Water lapped across the flat stones and grumbled in the weeds. There were still people who brought their cats down to these rocks in croker sacks and drowned them in the shallows. Elfie shuddered against him and it reminded him of where he was. A cloud of her breath burst against his chest.

  She looked into his eyes and he stared back, thinking of how he’d first beaten the hell out of Tush Kline. The guards had urged it on for a few minutes before stopping him. He remembered the troubled looks he’d gotten from other cons in the library later on, making Tush practice his alphabet, the guy’s tongue prodding the corner of his mouth as he struggled to spell out Dog. Money. Gun.

  Elf had her lips slightly parted, perhaps welcoming a kiss or just feeling him out, see what he’d do next. Shad wasn’t certain they’d ever actually been in love, though they’d come pretty close. Maybe they’d been on their way to some kind of happiness, as much as anyone could hope for in the hollow, before she’d become pregnant. It had shocked them both but also infused them with a tenuous sense of joy. Something to look forward to, a new significance that might count for more than they’d believed.

  Shad had walked around for about a week wearing a stunned smile, and by the time he’d finally come to fully accept the situation, that he was actually going to be a daddy, she’d miscarried.

  Elfie had cried for three days straight until her electrolyte balance was shot. He had to force-feed her salty soup and clean up the constant vomit. Her mama stared out the kitchen window at the trailer but only came over to read the Bible, pray, and order things off the late-night shopping channel without her husband knowing. Painless Nostril Hair Waxer. Anti-snoring Throat Lubricant with Uninterrupted Airflow Pillow. A four-gallon tub of Dissolve’a’Grit.

  Elf spent another week mostly unresponsive and staring thro
ugh the ceiling. He’d heard about this sort of thing before but watching her lying there inert and totally silent, only her lips moving a little, scared the shit out of him. Even more so because when she wasn’t holding herself responsible for the baby, he knew she was blaming him and hating him to death.

  One morning she came back a little and started dressing herself again. She cleaned the trailer constantly, dusting the high corners. Prying up the floorboards with a spackle blade, really smearing on her mother’s Dissolve’a’Grit. You didn’t have to be Freud to figure it out.

  Eventually she became herself again, never mentioned the baby, and acted as if none of it had happened. Shad played along. They continued seeing each other until he took his fall, but they both must’ve felt some relief that it was done with.

  Now he wondered if enough time would ever pass for him to bring up the kid. If he could tell her what he needed to say. It grieved him to have this secret burden. He always felt it did an injustice to the child as well, without so much as a whisper about it.

  “Are you planning to get a job?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I suppose you’ll just run moon like the rest of them.”

  “You know me better than that.”

  “It’s what everyone does. A few years ago, they still had the option of farming, fishing, working the fields or the cane. But it’s different now.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s all make liquor or run liquor. All your old friends are working moon, except for Dave Fox. Jake, Luppy Joe, even Tub sometimes moves whiskey when he’s not doing the road shows or the stock car derby.”

  She mentioned more names. The ones he hadn’t thought about since he’d left, coming back to him one after the other. It went to show how elated he’d been to get out of the hollow, even if it was only into the slam. Maybe he’d have time enough to do what needed to be done.

  “It’s not their fault,” he said. “It’s just the way things are.”

  “Don’t you want to do more?”

  “I haven’t thought about it much lately.”

  “I assumed you would’ve thought of nothing else.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” he told her, and there was more indignation in his voice than he’d meant.

  “I see that now.”

  Naive, a touch too judgmental, but resolute in her convictions. It saddened him some, how much he’d learned behind bars, how forgiving it made him.

  “Why’d you come back?” she asked. “You were one of the few people who actually got out of this town.”

  “I wasn’t exactly out,” Shad said. “I was in prison.”

  “For being a man of admirable qualities. You stood up to that Zeke Hester when nobody else would.”

  “My intentions weren’t exactly noble. I just wanted to kill the son of a bitch.”

  “That’s noble enough around here.”

  Maybe anywhere. She could always crack through the bone of any conversation, reach right in and get to your deepest place. Even if she was wrong, she never let you pull any shit with her. He probably still needed that in his life, even though he’d been waiting two years to find someone he could be soft with once more.

  “Shad? You didn’t answer me.”

  He looked at her with the blue awareness that whatever had once held them together had already departed. He could hunt for his passion for the rest of his life and never find it again.

  “Why’d you come back?”

  “To find out what happened to Megan,” he said.

  The sound of his sister’s name had an unearthly quality to it, ephemeral as an echo. He suddenly felt thirsty and glanced around hoping to see one of Luppy Joe Anson’s jugs nearby. The need for moon was suddenly on him.

  “I was awfully sorry to hear about her.”

  Shad wanted to ask a dozen questions, but he couldn’t go about it that way. The proper place to start was with his father. All the rest would be rumor, hearsay, and gossip.

  “You’re a very stupid man, Shad Jenkins.”

  He shrugged and gave her the grin that used to make her tilt forward to nuzzle his chest. Now she just stared at him, wary and nettled. “You’re not the first to tell me that, Elf.”

  “It’s no surprise. You’re going to get yourself into very bad trouble in the hollow. You ought to leave. You have to go.”

  “I will,” he said, feeling the rage fragment until slivers prodded his neck, his wrists, “as soon as I find out what happened to Mags.”

  The ebbing bonfire suddenly burst apart with rekindled life. Swirling flames heaved and bucked. Somebody shouted and the others laughed, still spurting streams of moon.

  Shad saw arms whirling and waving, covered in red, and thought somebody was bleeding before he realized it was a guy on fire, trying to put his blazing jacket cuffs out. It was Jake Hapgood, his swept hair singed. Becka Dudlow, the reverend’s wife, eased beside him and led him away into the dark, smoke rising from his collar.

  “Shad, you’re gonna die here,” Elfie said.

  “Sure,” he told her.

  Whatever it took. As if any of them had a choice.

  Madness in the air, wanting him.

  Chapter Two

  NOVEMBER WINDS SWEPT THROUGH THE SCRUB oak ringing the property. Stands of slash pine swayed and lurched to the song. The dry creek bed, lush with moonlight, cut a swathe toward the stunted orchards to the west. Shad could feel the abhorrent vacuum of his father’s house from a quarter mile away. He stopped his car on the road, unsure that he had enough strength to go on tonight.

  The Mustang held meaning. Life and death had been packed tightly in here. It was a sky-blue ’69 Boss 429, with 375 horsepower and 450 lb-ft. Bigger and heavier than the preceding year’s model, with much-improved handling. Four headlights to slice through the mountain mist, and the interior was more rounded off, with separate cockpits for the driver and passenger.

  The seat now perfectly adjusted so that he didn’t even really have to press down hard on the pedal, it all came naturally. The thrum of the engine worked into his body, became a part of his pulse.

  There was a history to the machine. The two previous owners had died in it, pretty much behind the wheel. You couldn’t feel sorry for them.

  One was showing off for his girl. He had his hand up her skirt and was tearing donuts through her uncle’s cornfield, knocking down the scarecrows. It proved how crazy you could get with boredom when you weren’t blocking state troopers for the haulers. Standing on the pedal and cutting off the cruisers so the hunkered-down trucks of moon could slip away.

  You lived stupid and died ridiculous. A prized sow had slipped her pen and escaped through the rows, came across the tire tracks and started to eat the crushed corn.

  When the driver stopped short the point of his chin snapped down against the steering wheel. It showed where his heart was—you never hit another man’s animal. In an instant, his jawbone had shattered and he’d had a heart seizure, dead before the car came to a rest. His fingers still twitching inside the girl while she flipped.

  The other guy was Luppy’s cousin from the next county over, and Shad had met him once. About twenty-five with a prim manner, vain to the point of carrying a pocket mirror all the time. He dreamed of making a break for Hollywood and becoming a soap opera star. Didn’t give a damn about movies, just wanted to do soap operas so his mama and aunts and lady cousins could see him every day on television.

  He’d become so obsessed with his prematurely receding hairline that he couldn’t quit looking at it. In the car he always checked himself in the rearview, fluffing his curls up in the front, doing whatever he could to cover his broadening forehead.

  While tugging at his thinning forelock he missed a stop sign in the middle of town. The blaring horns caught his attention and brought him back to the road, but not in time. He panicked and stomped the brake, skidding up a curb. The ’Stang did a slow, complete 360 in the intersection out in front of Chuckie Eagleclaw’s place, bumped t
he Civil War cannon on a little plot of turf there. His door sprang open and the guy flopped out into traffic. He managed to make it to his feet before getting smeared by Chuckie’s mom, who was turning the corner in her pickup, coming to bring Chuckie his lunch. Hush puppies and sweet-potato pancakes.

  Not even a scratch on the car from where it hit the cannon. Chuckie came running outside to check on his mother, shouting, “Ma, you all right?”

  She shouted back, “The hell you worrying about me for? I ain’t the one snarled in the fan belt.”

  It gave you strength, being directly connected to death via the machine. Just driving it around in circles, going out to the highway but never getting on, passing the exit and heading back again. It made you feel invincible in an ass-backwards way. Like the black angel was sitting behind you, watching over you so long as you didn’t piss him off. That was the trick.

  Shad put the ’Stang back in gear and rolled slowly toward his father’s house.

  Something about the place suggested sorrow. Maybe the lay of the land, or because it had been built—mortar, brick, and log—by Pa while Shad’s mother lay dying of pneumonia, in a trailer at the edge of the grounds.

  The lengthening shadow of her headstone on the foothill struck the road when the moon rose halfway across the sky. Shad never walked through it.

  Mags would be buried up there now as well. It would take Pa a full five months, perhaps six, to cut the stone from the quarry and chisel and smooth the marker. He would put more love into the rock than he’d ever shown anybody in life. It was the man’s way, and Shad felt no resentment about it. You couldn’t pass judgment on your own father, no matter what he’d done. There were boundaries of blood that couldn’t be crossed.

  Almost midnight, and Pa sat on the porch in his rocker, a hound pup flopped at his feet, shivering. The dog’s name was Lament. Every dog Pa ever owned was named Lament. There was a reason for that, but Shad didn’t know it.