by Lynn Cesar
“Yes, sweetheart, yes,” said this Susan of sky to her, answering her thoughts. “Sweet Karen, I am elsewhere, I am everywhere now. You don’t have me, but I have you, I have everything, as long as this earth spins. I am in and of its glory, because I have known love, which is always— whoever it is for— a Love of the World and Love of the World does not die. Be free of grief for me, my darling Karen. But listen to me— listen for your very life, listen for your everlasting soul. Though the green god took me, the witch saved me because the god’s power over our lives was not yet fully grown. But if the green god takes your soul, he will grow too mighty for the witch. And you, if he takes you, will dwell in the bowels of his world forever. You will dwell with Xibalba, in Xibalba forever. Don’t try to grasp it, just believe it, for you are living it now with each beat of your heart, and he is coming for you, coming for you in all his Power, with the fall of this night, and the rising of this full moon.”
“How will I fight? What will I fight with?”
“Whatever comes to hand. All this is hidden from the witch, as it is hidden from me. The witch is locked in battle. The whole valley south of here is the green god’s, and all things rooted in earth have power to hunt and devour you now. Fight here and fight with your very soul. Don’t leave these acres! If you don’t conquer here, you die, and you become flesh of the green god’s flesh, and flesh of his high priest, your father… .”
“Susan! Stay with me! Please!”
But Susan was already gone and in her place stood the lean little black man, his face struggling out of a trance-state, so that when she took her arms from around him, he almost fell, and she had to seize his shoulders and steady him. Their eyes were locked, but both of them were looking inward, not outward, were seeing strange landscapes new-opened within them, scarcely seeing each other at all.
“Where’ve I been?” Terror was in the cabby’s voice. Then he answered himself, his voice lower, awed. “I was… I was in the sky. I swear I was in the fuckin’ sky! I was somewhere up in the sky and all the trees under me an all the grass was shaking and dancing.” Then at last, finally seeing Karen, he said, “You came into the tavern— ” glanced at the sky “— hours ago! Where are we?”
“You drove me! Maybe you were… drunk?”
“I don’t drink! I just play cards there!” But he said it dazedly, as if he too felt forced to at least entertain that hypothesis.
“Look. You drove me here. We’re about twenty miles out of Gravenstein. Would a hundred bucks do it?”
“I guess so… .”
“Hey. I’m kind of confused too. I mean, I just woke up! Maybe there’s something… in the air?”
“There is. Smell it? Oily smoke. Gas-fires. Somewhere down-valley… .”
“Here— ” she remembered Susan’s words of war to the south “— take this. Don’t go into town. Get straight back to Bushmill, that’s my advice.”
He stood as if harkening to something in the remote distance. Then he pocketed the money without answering at first. “Something going on down there. Don’t you hear it?”
“No.”
“It’s like… underground. Like voices. Underground… . “He shook himself, then looked at her suspiciously, as if all of his disorientation came from her. He got into the cab and spun it around. Spat gravel pulling out, raising a rooster-tail of dust behind him. She heard him hit the highway and accelerate to a howl. Karen listened till he’d vanished from hearing, then realized she was clinging to the noise until it was utterly gone, because now she had to hear the silence of the acres she stood in.
Hello old house, old trees… Why, I’ve cut a bunch of you down! But then, this is a strange place however you slice it! I mean, someone’s blown his own head off hereabouts and that would be you, Jack Fox! And down in the basement, someone else’s throat got blown out two nights ago— by a crazy old dyke, who would be me, in fact! And, just before that, you killed a young woman in a truck— just smashed the life right out of her. But you know what, you black-browed son of a bitch? Her spirit is still alive, she roams the sky and knows the sun and stars and loves me still. But you, you’re still alive too, aren’t you? You want my life now don’t you? And you’re coming to take it tonight.
Lord, what a strange awful place for a girl to grow up in! In this very ground I stand on there are things that live forever and can be killed without dying and can bruise my flesh from the grave and can take me down to live forever in terror under the earth. And I must believe these things because I’ve just kissed Susan and heard her speak inside my heart and mind, and Susan’s body is dead.
Look at that sun, just beginning to redden, maybe an hour before it’s down. Time’s running out, because time is always running out, and the darkness is always coming down, and then coming down again. And she said I must stay right here. I’ve run from here my whole life and spent my whole life here just the same, right where hope was first stabbed to death. All my life, I’ve never left this nightmare. So tonight I might as well bet the farm, and stand right here, and try to kill it.
* * * *
Late afternoon shadows in the living room. Cold ashes in the fireplace, darkness in the doorframe down to the cellar, late sun in the backyard beyond the kitchen windows, heaps of lopped fruit trees, just peeking up into view above the window sills.
So. Slip on the nice canvas coat again… and tuck thirty or forty double-oughts in its roomy pockets. Hang the pump twelve-gauge by its strap from your shoulder and… why not this nice U.S. Army 1911 model Colt .45 semi-automatic? And look, it’s got ten loaded clips for spares! Rack one in the pipe… pop the magazine, voilà!
Wow! The brandy cannon by the fireplace, full as ever! Seems I can’t empty it no matter how hard I guzzle.
Well, why not have a jolt, Bitch?
Dear Jesus. You sneaking son of a bitch! You murderous boar! Just like you, a scuttling bug, to lurk and mutter in my brain! Stand out here and face me, you brutal piece of shit! Step out here and face me and take a swig yourself, I dare you. Do it and I’ll match you drink for drink and then blow your crotch out with double-ought! I’m not leaving here.
She cried aloud and was terrified to realize that whether she thought or spoke, it rang equally loud in this house, in this silence where long-ago crimes still echoed. Whether she thought or spoke, here and now it was heard.
“I’m not leaving here,” she said more steadily, looking around her, seeing the holes her double-ought had made in the walls just days ago. “You want to lurk and put thoughts in my brain, but if you’re ready, if you’re really here, if you really dare, then show yourself. Silence. I thought so. So let’s up the ante. Let’s mess with you, you evil piece of shit. Let’s go down to your precious shed and finish what Susan started. See how you like that?”
She snatched matches from the mantel, stormed out and fired up the truck. The plum trees sped past, burnished with barbarous color in the ruddy light, their silent thousands standing watch.
She got out at the compost heap— hugely there, hiding homicide in its black belly. To torch the shed, to call any kind of attention to this spot was risky. But did she care? Wasn’t she herself, her heart and her hope, buried here? She was dying and she craved the healing medicine of flame. I will turn you to smoke, I will send your black soul into the sky.
But at the door she hesitated, and stepped around the building.
At the fence at the foot of the property, she laid her hand on the top strand of barbed wire, and remembered Susan’s voice: Don’t leave these acres. On the woods and the stream beyond the fence, the shadows lay long. The sun had just touched the hilltops. What was it she felt, out beyond the orchard? What was it she felt out there in the shadows? Was there a breeze? The far leaves seemed to stir, and yet she felt no breeze. She sensed a hum of power, under her feet, behind her, and in the high black mass of the compost heap. Or was it just the crimes she sensed? Rape and homicide were buried everywhere on these acres.
She walked back to that old cr
eaky-bangy screen door. As she pulled it open, she thought this would be the last time it sounded. And then thought, Why not— just for fun? The twelve-gauge blew off hinge number one: whack. Hinge number two: whack. She kicked the door off the splintered frame. And came two steps inside Dad’s shed, his old sanctum.
All those books and papers, snowdrifted on the desk and the shelves and the floor, and the stench of gasoline waited like a promise. All you did to me and I’ve never struck back! Susan had the nerve, and you killed her for it. She picked up the gas can and a remnant sloshed inside it. She capped it tight, as if this were a bit of Susan herself she’d found. Not much gas, but would this be all that was needed to set the house blazing? She put the can in the truck.
She came back inside and stared at Dad’s desk. All that printed paper, all those words! She could start sifting through them, for traces of the man she’d once loved more than anyone on earth. Her hot tears spilled, and then hot anger came, and the stench of gasoline waited like a promise. All you did to me, Daddy, and I never struck back! Well, try this on. The struck match hit the floor.
Wood prepared by Susan in the last hour of her life whumphed alight and Karen had to jump aside from the scorching tide of heat that swept like surf against her.
Thank you, sweet Susan, thank you! It feels so good, such a relief! Dusty heaps of pages like dirty snow, heaps of dark words written in darkness by a dark man toiling year after year, a man who came out of this hole to hurt his child. Only orange flame was left of all that now. Only raging and roaring! No more dark!
She stumbled outside. The sweat poured like healing tears off her face and she thanked God that, at last, she had done something. Broken the ice that had frozen her will. The red light stained the black skin of the compost heap till it looked like some nightmare maggot awash in blood. The sun sank as the shed began to do the same. When the sun had set, the crimson bones of the roof were crumbling down into the inferno that was its foundation.
This is good, but it’s only getting ready. After all, it’s the house that has to burn, if I am to root that cruel bastard out. Well, the dark is coming. Wouldn’t some more light would be nice?
XXV
Excitement and confusion in the quiet little ranching town of Dry Creek. Gravenstein’s exodus came down through Conejo Pass and onto the arid eastern slopes of the Gravenstein Hills late in the day and a limping, thorn-scarred, flame-scorched caravan it was, windows and windshields starred with fractures, truck beds splashed with blood both green and red… and grim-faced were the survivors! The survivors were youths and young women who were somber-faced past their years from the combat they had seen. The survivors were elders whose gaunt visages stared inward. There were stunned children whose eyes had aged a decade in an afternoon. Every smoke-smudged and bloody soul in that convoy had the same strange way of scanning the rocky, sparsely grassy terrain around the town. They seemed scarcely to notice the gathering citizens, but seemed utterly fixated on the dry grass and mesquite and scrub brush growing on the open ground, and on the few sparse plantings along the main drag.
The motorcade usurped half of Dry Creek’s central avenue. The motley assemblage of pick-ups and stake-beds and SUVs parked in a strangely defensive-looking circular formation in the big parking lot of the Metro Mart Complex, which also featured a Dairy Freeze, a few burger places, and some hardware and farm equipment stores.
The sheriff of this county, Jim Ruddy, commanded nine vehicles and a staff of less than thirty men. He found no one in particular in charge of the town’s strange visitors, though a group of a dozen battle-weary men, conferring in the caravan’s midst, gave him their attention when he and four deputies approached them. At Ruddy’s questions, they shared a look and seemed to delegate a strong-looking man, scarred about the face and arms, to speak for them.
It was Kyle. “Sheriff, our leader, and a… special squadron of our forces, are not here at the moment, are in fact reconnoitering not far off. Apparently there’s an old cinnabar mine near here?”
“The Quicksilver, that’s right, but the mine’s closed down.”
“Well, she needed to get underground to check something out. I know she’ll want to talk to you first thing when she rejoins us.”
“Check something out underground? And she has a special squadron of your forces?”
Sheriff Ruddy seemed to be a basically calm, pleasant man who was, at the moment, severely taxed by circumstances. His eyes flitted wildly around, taking in the several hundred refugees filling the largest parking lot in his small town. “Explain to me,” he said, “what has happened to you all!”
The men he addressed searched one another’s eyes. Sal Fratelli came forward. “It’s kind of an epidemic. It’s like, all the plant life, the trees and the bushes and the grass— ”
Shrieking tires and howling engines came clamoring into the heart of town. Several pick-ups braked just a hair short of collision with the sheriff’s cruisers.
“Sheriff! Come quick! Call the National Guard, call the capital— we need help! Get every man you got out to our place!”
On hearing this, the Gravenstein refugees shared a grim but unsurprised look. Kyle told Ruddy, “Let us gas up our trucks and we’ll come help you. Because believe me, Sheriff, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”
Heralded by sirens, a posse of desperate ranchers, sheriffs’ deputies, and Gravenstein refugees arrived a short time later at a cattle ranch just outside of town. And every woman and man of them stood speechless in that upland pasture, the astonished cops side by side with the scorched and tattered and unsurprised veterans of the war in Gravenstein— all stood awed and silent, watching. The pasture’s golden grasses had grown so incredibly long, that their mere luxuriance was astonishing, apart from what their golden blades were doing to the herds of Black Angus cattle.
The grass seemed to have broken in waves on the hapless herds, pouring down upon, through these glossy monoliths of beef. The tawny blades pierced their black bodies, re-emerged, and dove back into the earth. Like little black skiffs on a roiling sea, acres of cattle bobbed in the golden waves, suspended above the earth, canted at this angle or that. Their rib cages fanned out like red combs, they sank into the soil like planted shoots or lovingly planted red tubers. No sound of distress did these brutes make. There was only the sound of breeze-blown grass, the wide whispery noise of the earth at work as the great bovine skulls— with eloquent sad eyeballs— sank like jewels in the gold foam.
As the acres of grass digested the acres of cattle, three-score silent men and women gazed on, meditative parishioners in a Church of the New Earth. And just then, a troupe of mule deer came across the field, leaping dainty-footed through the deep grass, easy dabs of their hooves here and there lofting them effortlessly along in that lovely leaping way deer have.
Kyle alone spoke, “You see? The god devours only the works of Man. No other animal has broken its treaty with him. If these cattle had been buffalo two hundred years ago, they’d be untouched.”
A scream went up and a shotgun blast turned their eyes behind them. One of the deputies had fired into the air, blasting a spray of leaves from an airborne, vaguely human shape, which responded by sweeping down, snatching the man’s gun, and clubbing him off his feet with the stock. A flock of airborne shapes now hovered near and, as the deputies fumbled for weapons, Helen Carver roared in a voice of command that froze every one of them: “Hold your fire, you fools! They’re with us!”
Sheriff Ruddy, of Dry Creek, met Quetzal, of Guatemala, who descended to him on a small whirlwind. Ruddy, and the rest of Dry Creek’s constabulary, were told a number of unbelievable things, and they found in themselves— rather quickly— the ability to believe these impossibilities.
Returning to town, they found every planted thing in it erupting, growing, carnivorously active. The witch, deep in the mercury mine, had clearly felt the under-earth tsunami of Xibalba’s unstoppable advance.
“He’s consumed most of Gravenste
in,” she told them. “We’re what’s left. His dragons are legion and they are almost at hand. We must have harder earth under us— I believe there is a range of mountains to the east and its rocky ridge will help us. Even hard, dry earth, as you have here, will be no help against the ones who will come above ground to hunt us down.”
“His dragons?” quavered Sheriff Ruddy. He was speedily enlightened.
The Gravenstein convoy helped to rally and organize the citizens, some two thousand souls. In the heart of town, odd plant-growth or not, there was vigorous public resistance to the idea of abandoning home and property. And then the pavement in front of the Dairy Freeze erupted and a dragon the size of a bull, with wide crooked horns, surged up and half-engulfed two teenage girls where they stood, and dragged them, their legs still kicking, underground. Then the Gravenstein refugees mounted up with a will and all of Dry Creek followed suit. Foothill National Park was six hours away. It had water, was sited on rocky foothills, and its campsites were all but bare of vegetation.
* * * *
Kyle filled the tank of his hog, filled one spare gas can for its tank, and another can with oil-and-gas mix for the chainsaw strapped to his back. “You’re going to have to run like a demon, man,” Sal said to him, a worry and a closeness there, born of a day of desperate battle, and of guarding each other’s backs.