Shad had a copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz in his back pocket, which, he realized too late, also miffed the Aryans, but not enough for them to take a poke at him. He had just received the second of Elfie Danforth’s letters, and it held his place about halfway through the book.
He could already feel himself being forgotten by her, and was saddened by the fact that he didn’t really mind. Her cursive script had a stop-and-go jitter to it, as if she had to walk away every few sentences and come back later after thinking up something else to tell him. She mainly wrote about people and events that didn’t matter to him and never would. She asked him nothing. He thought about the determination it took to go through four pages to your lover and not ask a single question.
A new resolve had begun to fill him in the slam—as his detachment from the hollow continued to change him into some new version of himself.
Tushie Kline stood three or four guys behind him in line, eyeing A Canticle for Leibowitz and planning to rob Shad’s cell in a couple of days. Shad knew there were plans being formed that held him at their center, but he couldn’t pinpoint the who or why yet. He kept hoping the jonah thing would help him out a bit more than it appeared to be doing.
That afternoon, he felt the angry heat on the back of his neck and eyed Tush first, knowing there was going to be a problem there soon. But not right at that second. He scanned beyond the cons slopping mashed potatoes, beef patties, and string beans onto the metal plates and saw the insanely abnormal arms of Little Pepe swinging toward him. If he had a shiv, Shad couldn’t see it within those enormous fists.
Not much time to do anything except bark a cuss, reach over the counter, grab up the tray of burgers, and hurl it into Pepito’s face.
It was enough to get everyone yelling and laughing and for the bulls to run over. Shad’s luck held as he faded into the crowd and the bulls had no one to grab except Pepito, who was spouting off biblical passages in Spanish.
They didn’t throw Little Pepe into solitary because he hadn’t really been fighting, but two days later the leader of the tribe had him killed for disobeying orders.
So now Shad was coming out of Griff’s Suds’n’Pump holding a handful of change and a bottle of engine cleaner when the dead breath whispered and got his hackles up.
He took two more steps across the parking lot as Zeke Hester’s belligerent presence descended upon him.
Shad paused, listening to the sudden rush of air swirling behind him. He had compromised his hands, which was a dumb but understandable mistake. You tried to be on guard as much as possible, but you just couldn’t do it all the time. Immediately he dropped what he was carrying and spun to his right as Zeke’s fist plowed forward like a steam engine about to derail.
Zeke Hester stood six-four, weighed in at about 280, his body solidified from working on road crews since dropping out of school when he was fifteen. He was river bottom swamp scum who never bothered with pulling the legs off spiders or torturing small animals—he went straight to the weakest kids in grade school and started drawing blood. He moved up quickly to intimidating teachers, beating the drunks sleeping at the edge of the trailer park, and troubling girls at the roller rink in Waynescross.
Jake had been right when he’d said that prison had agreed with Shad. A crazy thing, but there it was. On the inside he’d lost his youthful clumsiness and earned a lissome agility. Working out in the gym every afternoon, honing himself, losing a beer gut and packing on an extra twenty pounds of crafted muscle. Two years with nothing to do but exercise your mind and body and try to keep from losing control. Sometimes it worked in your favor. It felt good to have real speed even when the highway patrol wasn’t chasing you back and forth across the river.
Zeke did an ungainly dance, trying to keep himself from falling as he overshot and wheeled in a half circle. Shad planted his foot on Zeke’s ass, kicked out, and sent him sprawling onto the pavement.
Here we go.
When Zeke looked up his face was filled with murderous frenzy. His cracked front tooth had worn away to a black nub. His gums were already rotted too, and he’d be down to eating nothing but succotash and applesauce by the time he was thirty. The busted cheekbone lay unnaturally flat and angled a little too far back toward his ear.
What Shad told M’am was true. He could kill this man with a very small amount of guilt. The realization disturbed him a bit, but not all that much, considering.
“I want to talk to you,” Shad said.
Zeke hadn’t shaved much or had a decent haircut since he was sixteen. His feral, savage appearance played well with the role he was going for. You had to cultivate your persona, your disguise.
If he was ever shorn down you’d see a pink face full of cutie-pie chubsie-ubsieness, all the weakness inside him scrawled into his soft, muddy face. When they were kids, the girls used to like him because he looked sort of like a lost puppy, until they got a look at his eyes.
Zeke scrambled on the ground for something to throw, but all he could find was the engine cleaner. He clambered to his feet and hurled the bottle at Shad like it was a brick. It flew over Shad’s left shoulder and splattered against the gas pumps.
“Been waitin’ two years to pay you back!”
“That so?”
“It is!”
Shad knew guys who liked to play the moment out, grinning before a brawl, warming up to it. All that mattered to them was ego and image. They went through the day acting like there was a camera covering their every move. Like there was a group of teenage girls sitting on a couch somewhere watching them, cheering them on, getting sweaty. It was much harder to fight when you were alone.
“You should’ve waited and put this off for as long as you could, Zeke.”
“And why’s that, convict?”
“Because I won’t let you off so easy this time.” Shad gave him the killing gaze so there’d be no doubt in Zeke Hester’s mind at all.
“You think I’m scared of a jailbird like you?”
“You should be after last time. You’re going to answer my questions or I’m going to hurt you again.”
“You ain’t got the brass,” Zeke hissed, with a hint of fear in his dull voice. He was an idiot, but he had sense enough to know that everything Shad said was genuine. He tried to smile, putting some snarl into it.
They squared off and Zeke let out a nervous chortle, shrugging his shoulders, loosening up as if this might be a twelve-rounder. He slid out of his jacket and threw it wildly over Shad’s head. He had on a sleeveless black T-shirt and hit a pose so his biceps bulged. He kept tightening and opening his fists, making his blood rush so the veins would stand out on his arms, hoping to look cut and strong. He scanned left and right to see if any girls might be around, but there was nobody except seventy-year-old Griff staring out the window, his lips covered in beer foam.
It was going to be tough getting through to Zeke Hester if he thought he was on a movie set, about to be the next action hero star. Already you could see he was hoping to come up with some snappy, sarcastic patter. Something they could use for the trailer and highlight on the poster.
Shad said, “Did you do anything to my sister?”
“What’s that?” Zeke was still flexing, scared and unwilling to face the real context of the situation.
“Answer me.”
“You—”
“I don’t have all day. I won’t ask you nicely again.”
Zeke bolted up straight and his crude features, already cloyed with ignorance, grew even more moronic. “Megan? Your sister? You think . . . so you think I had something to do with what happened to her?”
“I’m asking you.”
“I reckon you can just turn yourself around right now and go find yourself a knothole for you to stick your rod in ’cause I ain’t—”
Shad flowed forward and covered the ground between them in one step. He brought his hand up from low and backhanded Zeke with a solid shot, but Zeke’s unkempt head didn’t even turn aside. He wasn’t al
l flab. Beneath the matting of beard that chin was pointed stone.
“Goddamn you, Jenkins!”
“None of your usual posturing for the next five minutes, Zeke. What happened to her?”
“How the hell should I know!”
“You made a grab for her once.”
“Now you listen to me ’bout that! You done sullied my good name—”
Again Zeke checked left and right, really hoping somebody would come along and listen to his script. He’d worked hard on it for the last two years. The word sullied wasn’t an easy one to pull off, but Shad had to admit it sounded pretty natural. Zeke had been practicing.
“Did you try again?” Shad asked.
“What’s that?”
“Don’t make me repeat myself.”
The longer they went without tussling, the more time Zeke had to fan his anger and keep himself worked up. The fear was draining out of him too. “That ain’t it at all, you son of a bitch!”
“Then why were you bothering my father?”
“Me? You blame me? That bastard’s been putting the devil in folks’ ears for weeks, telling ’em I had a hand in Megan’s murder.”
Shad tensed and stood straighter. “You think she was murdered?”
Zeke screwed his face into about as much of a pout as he could pull off. His fingers fluttered about like he was in front of a chalkboard trying to map out Sherman’s March. “You’re a damn fool. She was only seventeen. No young girl like that dies for no good reason, up in them foul woods.”
“That’s right.”
“Don’t you glare at me like that no more neither. You want to scrap, we’ll have it out right now. But don’t you give me that eye no more. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with what happened to yours. No matter what you and your miscreant daddy’s got to say about it. And you better not be spoutin’ gossip like that ’round town no more!”
Zeke Hester didn’t have the temperament for any real slyness. Shad felt a small surge of shame even though he’d been attacked. He had known better. Zeke didn’t have anything to do with Mags’s death. He would’ve left marks.
“Get out of here,” Shad told him.
“You don’t tell me to move on, boy.”
“It’s time for you to be quiet now.”
“You go on and stay the hell away from me, if you have any consideration for what’s good for you. Or I’ll beat you down and leave your ass out on the highway like week-old roadkill.”
Shad sighed. Pa was right. Zeke didn’t have a good memory. Already he was starting to flex again, weighing his odds, getting ready to push a little harder. You could see how he tongued his rotted tooth and the raw nerve gave him a painful kick that lifted him up onto his toes.
Whatever Zeke was going to say would be immensely unwise. It would be mean and it would be about Mags. Shad took a step backwards, as if urging the insult toward him.
Here it comes.
Zeke Hester smiled through that wild thatch of hair, and muttered, “The way she threw it around, driving guys crazy, I’m surprised it didn’t happen no sooner. Now, you dwell on that some.”
“Sure,” Shad said, and he went for Zeke’s bad arm, grabbing it at the elbow and wrist and giving it a vicious twist.
The snap was clean and loud as a gunshot. Zeke instantly went into shock and didn’t even scream. He sat down heavily, twitched a few times, and started to cry.
Chapter Seven
HIS FATHER’S PICKUP WASN’T IN THE YARD when Shad finally decided to visit Megan’s grave.
A trace of storm grew heavier in the air as the wind rose and gusted through the pastures. Crimson-tinted clouds swarmed across the sky, darkening it to the hue of trailer-trash bruises.
The rain let go for a while, stopped briefly, and began again, fitful and hesitant and cold. Stands of pine jerked and swayed, bowing as if determined to groan in your ear and confirm every apprehension. As he drove up the wet dirt road the Mustang hit every rut.
He parked at the base of the foothill and got out. The hound pup crawled free from beneath the house and trotted up the road to greet Shad. Lament’s collar was old and oversized, but he’d grow into it. The tags were scratched and they jangled together as he began to lope.
“Come on,” he said.
The dog followed as Shad worked his way up the knoll toward the graves of his mother and sister.
The sun had begun to hemorrhage in the west as the late afternoon cooled even faster. The nearest church, four miles away along the bottoms, crooned a despondent tune he’d heard before but could only remember while it played. The breeze in the boles of the oak trees hummed and occasionally drowned it out.
Standing in the weeds, he noticed again how stricken the land had become. The groves had thinned until they were little more than brushwood and briar patches.
His cool and calm seemed to come and go lately, and he knew he had to work on that before it got him killed. You played games as a kid that became the discipline of your adult life. He’d never realized it years ago—lying there in the darkness at the back of his closet, covered in sweat with his cheek pressed to the smooth hardwood floor, as the silence heaved around him, and he kept going further inside himself, hoping to talk to his mama, demanding it to be—that he was developing a skill that would come in handy in prison.
He tried to center himself before the tombstone of his mother, drifting for a second while he sought out the dark, quiet place behind his eyes. Your strength had a name that wasn’t your own, and there were times you were going to need it. It would also need you.
With one foot set on his mother’s grave, the other toed into his sister’s, he kept his eyes open waiting for Mags’s hand to flit into his vision once more and give him another sign. He shoveled the blackness aside like dirt covering her. The sound of his own heartbeat faded.
His depths parted. He went further, intent on her whisper. He didn’t know what might happen if he ever hit bottom. It didn’t matter. You went where you were called.
He kneeled, held out a fist to the ground, thinking how killers liked to stick close to their prey, even after it was dead. Would the malevolence in the hills climb down this far?
He aimed himself. The world shifted to red as Shad hooked on to somebody, or perhaps something, moving in and out of view, brooding about him again. He held his hand out farther and slowly wriggled his fingers, the way you do to get fish to rise to the surface. His chest grew warmer. Mags was helping. Maybe Mama too. He started panting, eventually hyperventilating, as the indistinct and somehow imperfect shape, the glowing broken threads of an anguished aura still wheeling from it, turned its unfinished face toward him. And beneath it, another face, slowly becoming recognizable.
There.
Easy.
He was almost there.
Another moment, Mags. This is for you.
He was almost . . . yes . . .
. . . when he felt a weak influence fuss beside him, like a kid tugging at his elbow. Intruding on his purpose. Tushie Kline used to do it all the time, jabbering on about books, his homeboys, and anything else that flitted into his head. Tush couldn’t turn off his talk.
It was over. Shad’s breathing returned to normal. The irritating force continued to pluck at his concentration until he looked over.
Preacher Dudlow stood beside him, staring down at the ground, with his hands clasped over his mammoth belly, sucking at the edges of his mustache.
Well now, Shad thought.
Most preachers Shad had run into were still brimstone types, thin as cottonwood and harsh as sun-scorched bone. They visited the hollow in their vans and set up tents out in the fields. They raved and slammed the meaty part of their palms into sinners’ foreheads and commanded them to heal. They took crutches and canes and busted them over their knees. You watched the cripples struggling to stand upright on their diseased, gnarled legs. Folks threw silver. Gospel singers caterwauled like beasts. Deaf men leaned over mumbling, “I cahn heh thuh voice’a Jehsus.”
Maybe they could. They were as punchy as if they’d knocked back a jug of moon.
But Dudlow had always been a happy, robust man, perfectly round but still sort of muscular, with his face tanned by his outdoor sermons in the pastures and his baptisms at the river.
This afternoon he was bundled tightly in a sheepskin coat and wearing a bright red hunter’s cap with the flaps down over his ears. A mauve knitted scarf had been wrapped twice around his throat and still trailed over both shoulders, down to his ankles. Mrs. Swoozie, Dudlow’s mother, lived next door to him, around the side of the church. The only thing she’d ever found to ease the pain of her arthritis, so she said, was to keep busy crocheting and cooking around the clock.
Shad didn’t know if Dudlow was genuinely unaware of his wife Becka’s lifestyle or not. The preacher might have simply repressed his knowledge beneath the weight of his religious beliefs. It was hard to admit to that kind of failure, especially to yourself. But Becka was usually crocked out on meth and a lot of the buyers came right to her back door. Perhaps Dudlow’s whole act was only a performance and he was actually helping to cook the meth in the church basement.
No matter which was true, you didn’t want the preacher knowing your secrets.
“Comfort and condolences, Shad Jenkins,” Dudlow said.
“Thank you, Reverend.”
“I’ve been meaning to stop by.”
“And now you have.”
He pointed down to the road, where he’d parked his microbus behind the ’Stang. “Yes, I saw your car, thought I’d come up. You look well.”
“So do you.”
Dudlow patted his stomach as if consoling a loved one. “Mama’s got me on a strict diet of legumes. Problem is she bakes so much for the Youth Ministry, the Fellowship Hall, and the Ladies Coalition that she doesn’t miss a few pies. And I can’t help but indulge. I’m weak that way.”
November Mourns Page 7