“Look,” she’d said after she’d done it, and he had looked at his hands.
At the palms of his hands. All red, the palms, like they were blushing and warm.
“You got skin like water,” she said. “See-through hands. I can see you through your skin, boy. Boy.” She said “boy” like it was a dare, so he had kissed her behind the booth, where nobody could see them.
He had known what the other boys did, the ones in school, even over in the Isthmus, for they bragged about girls in a way that disturbed him. But he had felt lightning in his body, and her lips felt like fire and sensations had gone through him that words could not even describe, for it was his first kiss ever, and she had seen his excitement when she drew back from him. She had whispered, “I guess you like me.”
Embarrassed, he had dropped a hand in front of him and clasped it with the other, “Huh?”
“It’s nature,” she had said, the teacher of his flesh. He leaned forward and kissed her again, but she pushed him away this time and said, “Nuh-uh.” But it led him, this feeling, just like the boys had told him it would, it led him without a thought in the world to anything else.
* * *
The horse leaned down, disturbing the water, and Theron’s reflection whirled and broke in the water. She had liked him, that girl, that day. He had changed since then, he knew it.
He was a man now, even if the others called him boy.
The rockpile road ended at the Isthmus Highway, rising out of reeds and swamps and trees like an altar of the true religion. Theron wasn’t supposed to take Naomi up on it, for even though few cars traveled it until summer, when the summer people from the cities came down, and when Daddy blocked the rockpile road to keep them off his property, the highway could be dangerous, for an occasional truck roared through in nothing flat, and a girl’s mother got hit a long time ago trying to push her daughter out of the way and to safety. But Theron, a man now, and cocky, rode Naomi up the brief, steep hill, batting back the sticks and dead vines that had not yet greened since the winter, and clopped up onto the potholed blacktop. Naomi was faster on the highway, riding down the centerline, for it was completely flat, and where it dipped could be seen, and avoided, for several yards.
As he slowed her down at a bend in the road, there was a car stuck in mud on the shoulder.
2
Theron was not big on cars, not like the other boys, but this one was pretty and sporty, a two-seater.
A man stood beside it, kicking the bumper and cursing to high heaven. He was a lot younger than Daddy, but maybe only Mama’s age. He wore a tan suit, and had rolled his slacks up almost to his knees, which were black with mud.
He was soaked head to toe, caught, no doubt, in the storm.
His eyeglasses were fogged up.
Theron dismounted, and led Naomi up to the man.
“Mister, ‘scuse me, but what kind of car you got?”
The man looked at Theron as if he could not hear. Almost like his father in the shed. Then he said, “Right now it’s the kind that breaks down.”
“Pretty nice. Never seen one like that before,” Theron nodded. “You’re stuck.”
“You must be the local genius,” the man said, and then grinned. “Sorry, but you ever get so pissed off at something you can’t see straight, kid?”
“I guess.”
“So, kid, you live nearby? You got a phone or something?”
“Yeah, only we don’t let strangers use it.”
“Okay. Anybody else around here? A drugstore?”
Theron chuckled, and covered his mouth to keep from making the man feel too bad. “Sorry—sorry— don’t mean to laugh. Don’t mean to. But you’re twenty-five miles from town center.” He pointed toward the direction that the man must’ve already come.
“That piss hole? Christ, kid, that’s a town? I thought it was a mosquito breeding ground. Nothing the other way? You sure?”
Naomi whinnied, and Theron patted her nose. “She’s shy. Just shy of biting, sometimes, I think.”
He tugged at the bandanna around his neck, self-consciously.
There was something about this man he didn’t feel comfortable around.
The man said his name was Evan, and he was from Connecticut, and that he wrote magazine articles and was supposed to meet his wife up the shore, but he was doing some kind of article on lost byways of the South.
“You write,” Theron said. “That’s wild. Wild. Me, I barely read. I watch TV. Anything you write ever get on TV?”
Evan shook his head. “Yeah, I once did write for the TV news.”
“I can’t watch that. My daddy thinks news people make stuff up, but Daddy thinks anybody on TV’s a big fat liar.”
“Well, kid, I definitely I hated the work. I hate what I do now, too. What a way to make a living, huh? Get up in the morning, not liking your work? The rat race.”
“You do what you got to do.” Theron shrugged. “Survival of the fittest, I guess. Even rats got to eat.”
The wind, which had died, picked up again, rattling the dead reeds, shagging at the budding trees, dispersing the petals of those that had blossomed early.
The boy could smell honeysuckle already, up here on the Isthmus, and it wasn’t even May.
The man had a kind look to him, a wrinkled-brow honesty, and Daddy had always told him that when someone needed help, there was only one thing to do.
“Look, mister,” Theron said after watching the man pace his car, “if you don’t mind walking down there,” he pointed down the gully past the wetlands to the stand of trees that separated Chite from the mainland. “It’s about two miles. I’d let you ride her, but she wouldn’t make it easy on you. Look, my daddy’s got a phone and nobody’s supposed to use it, but I don’t know what else to do. Only I got to warn you about one thing.”
Evan said, “What’s that, kid?”
“We keep to ourselves most of the time. I go to school up in Isthmus, but we don’t really mix. My baby sister, Milla, she never even seen a mainlander.”
The man named Evan seemed to grasp this immediately.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Evan got a camera and a tape recorder out of the back of his car and strung both of them around his neck like ties. His shoes were brown and would be uncomfortable for the trip; Theron smiled when he thought of crossing the land on the other side of the rock pile road, where the mud would surely suck him to his ankles if he wasn’t careful.
As they descended from the highway, down to the road between the wetlands, Evan asked, “are there snakes down here?”
“Too cold still. There’ll be plenty by June. I once saw a man from Tangier bite the head off a cottonmouth. You ever see that? He just chomped, and spit it out like it was tobacco.”
Theron rode Naomi, but walked her slow so the man could keep up with them.
He wasn’t sure how Daddy or Mama, or even Leona for that matter, would take having a stranger over; Daddy was normally friendly with outlanders, but this was the hurting season, and it might be embarrassing for someone to walk right into the middle of that.
Theron assumed that other fathers had their own hurting seasons, although he’d been too awkward to ask any of the boys over in the high school, both because they always seemed smarter than him, and because he was already teased enough as it was for being so different.
The sun was just past noon when they reached sight of the house, and the wind had pretty much died. The sky was white with cloud streaks, and the earth was damp, the moss that hung from the trees sparkled with heaven’s spit, as Mama called rain when she was feeling poetic.
Naomi tried to pick up speed as they neared the shed, but he kept her slow out of courtesy to the stranger.
“How you doin’?” he asked Evan.
Evan wagged his head around and said, “Hey, kid, can I get a picture? You and the horse and the house and that thing—what is that? Some kind of bag?”
Theron looked in the direction where Evan indicat
ed, as the man unscrewed his camera’s lens cap. Dangling from the willow, with the wash, was the Luck Sack.
“It’s for good luck,” Theron said. “It keeps away hurricanes and floods in spring.”
“How’s it work?”
“So far, so good.”
The boy posed for a picture, sitting up proudly on his horse, keeping his chin back so the man could get a clear shot of the red bandanna that girl in Tangier had given him.
Theron wished he had a hat—his father had a hat, and now that Theron had crossed the border between boyhood and manhood, he would’ve liked something brown with a broad brim to keep the sun out of his eyes, to make him feel like a horseman.
“So,” Evan said, snapping several pictures, “you have other good luck charms?”
Theron struck pose after pose, attempting a masculine look for this one, a shy look, a rugged, tough pose. “We’re not much into good luck. It’s what we call tradition. Say, how much film you got in there?”
“Lots.”
Snap–snap–snap.
“What’s in that sack, anyway?”
“One of the cats. We got seven. Kittens on the way,” Theron said. “I love kittens, but cats I ain’t so fond of. You gonna put my pictures in a magazine or something?”
“Maybe,” Evan said, lowering the camera. He let the camera swing around his neck. He reached beneath his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
The man’s face glowed with sweat—the two miles had been hard on him, because he was a Yankee. He seemed to be taking in the house and the river, maybe even the bay if his eyesight was any good with those thick glasses. “Are you people witches or something?”
Theron straightened up and grunted, “Nahsir,” his pride a little hurt by such an assumption. “We’re Baptists.”
“Ronny, honey,” Leona said, her eyes lowering, not even looking at the stranger; she kept the screen door shut, and her massive form blocked the way. “I don’t think you should be bringing people home right now.”
“This’s Evan. He’s a Yankee,” Theron said. “He needs to use the phone.”
Leona looked at Evan’s shoes.
Theron saw the squiggle vein come out on her forehead, like when she was tense over cleaning.
“Mister, our phone’s out of order.” She said it lightly, delicately, sweetly.
Then she looked him in the eye.
Evan blinked.
“That’s okay,” he said, patting Theron on the shoulder.
Leona arched her eyebrows and stared at the small tape recorder and camera around his neck.
“You a traveling pawnshop, mister?”
“Nah’m,” Theron butted in. “He writes for magazines. He’s a famous writer, Leo, he used to write for Dan Rather.”
“Not really,” Evan said.
“I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t come in the house. The little girl’s sick, and like I said, the phone’s not working. We had a big storm this morning. Always knocks out the power lines and such.” She kept her hands pressed against the screen door as if the man would suddenly bolt for it. And then, to Theron, “Now, Ronny, why’d you bring this nice man all the way out here when you knew the line was down?”
Theron said, “‘Cause I thought it’d be up by now,” turning to look up at Evan, who kept staring at Leona. “It’s usually up in a hour or two,” and, as if this were a brilliant idea, he clapped his hands. “I know, Evan, you can stay and have some sandwich and pie, and then maybe the phone’ll be up.”
A groan from the shed out back, and Evan and Theron both glanced that way. It was Daddy with his hurting. Leona groaned, as much to cover up the other noise as anything, and she clutched her stomach. “I tell you, mister, what little Milla’s got, we all seem to be coming down with. You’d be wise to get on back up to Isthmus.”
“Some kind of flu,” Evan said.
“That’s right. That one that’s been going around.” She nodded, looking pained.
Evan grinned, as if this were a game. “Had my flu shots, ma’am. And anyway, even if I hadn’t, I’ll survive it.”
Leona lost all semblance of pretend kindness. “Just get off this property right now, and Ronny, you take him back up to the highway.” She stepped back into the gray hallway and shut the big door on both of them.
“She always this sweet?”
Theron shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her today. She’s almost a hundred, but all age done for her is make her ornery.” He went and tied Naomi around the sapling.
“I thought you had your marching orders,” Evan said, following him.
“I don’t listen to Leona. She’s just the hired help. You take orders from servants, my daddy says, and you end up a shit frog. We got them in the spring house. You ever see a shit frog? They go from the stable to the river, but they still can’t get it off them.” Theron grabbed the laundry rope with both hands and clung to it, letting his knees go slack. “You gonna take more pictures?”
“I don’t know,” Evan said, but he lifted his camera again, snapped some more of the boy, and then of the river, and the house, and the tire swing, and the Lucky Sack hanging on the willow. He looked all around, through his camera, as if trying to see something else worth photographing, when he seemed to freeze. He lowered the camera and turned to face Theron.
Theron shivered a little bit because of the man’s look, all cold and even angry, maybe.
“Where are the lines?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Kid, if you got a phone, where’s the pole? Where’re the lines? If the line’s down, you got to have a line in the first place, kid. What kind of game is this?”
Theron didn’t have an answer, not yet anyway. He said, “Dang.”
From the shed, a series of shouts, cusswords as strong as Theron had ever heard from the boys at Isthmus.
The stranger named Evan turned around at the sound, took in the whole landscape, the house, the river, the shed, the springhouse, the laundry rope, the bay, the boats, the way the grass was new and green and damp. He walked over to the Lucky Sack, and Theron shouted, “Mister! Evan! Hey!”
But the man had already opened the sack, his face turning white, and he looked at Theron, his eyes all squinching up, and Daddy began screaming at the top of his lungs from the shed, and Old Moses, the horse, started thumping at the wood.
“You sick fucks,” Evan said, weeping, “you sick fucks, you said it was a cat, you sick…” But the sobbing took him over, racking his body, the convulsions of sadness shaking him.
Theron blurted, “It’s bad luck to look in the Sack, mister.”
“Who is it, you sick fuck, what is this?”
Theron tugged at the red bandanna around his neck. “It’s private.”
“Listen, you.” Evan raised both fists and brought them down on the boy, knocking him to the ground.
Theron was angry, and knew he shouldn’t, but told him anyway because he hated keeping the secret. “It’s the first girl I ever kissed. It’s the part of her that’s sacred. It’s the part that made me a man!”
But then Mama was there, behind the man, and hit him with the back of the hoe, just on his skull, and the glasses flew off first, and then his hands wriggled like nightcrawlers, and he crumpled to the ground.
3
Milla held on tight to Mama’s skirt, her brown eyes wide, her hair a tangly weedy mess.
She looked like an unmade bed of a baby sister; when Theron got up from the ground, he went and lifted her up.
“It’s okay, it’s just fine, Milla-Billa-Filla,” he said as he bounced her around. She was only three, and she looked scared. Theron loved her so much, his sister. He had prayed for a brother when the birthing woman was in their house, but when he had seen Milla in the shed, lying there in his mother’s arms, while the birthing mother screamed as Daddy tied her to the mast, he knew that he would love that little girl until the day he died, and protect her from all harm.
Mama said, in her tired way, “Ronny, why
’d you bring him down here?”
Theron kissed his sister on the cheek and looked up to his mother. He was always frightened of his mother’s rages, for they, like the hurting season, came in the spring and lasted until midsummer. “I—I don’t know.”
“That ain’t good enough. And don’t lie to me, or you shall eat the dust of the earth all your days and travel on your belly.”
“All right. I guess because I wanted Daddy to stop hurting for a while. I want us all to stop hurting for a while, Mama,” and then he found himself crying, because he didn’t like the hurting season, and he didn’t completely understand the reason for it.
For a moment, he saw the temper begin to flare in his mother’s eyes, and then she softened. She bent down, dropping the hoe at her side, and gathered him up in her arms, him and Milla both, hugged tight to her bosom. “Oh, my little boy, you may be a man now, but you will always, always be my little boy.” She threatened to weep, too, and Theron figured they’d be the soggiest mess of humans in the county, but Mama held back. Daddy was silent in the shed, no doubt exhausted.
* * *
Theron thought it might be the right time to ask the question he’d had on his mind since he first discovered about the hurting season. “Why, Mama?”
“Ronny?”
“Why does it have to be us?”
“You mean about the season?”
“Not just the season,” he said, drying his tears, “but us here, and them,” he looked across the bay to Tangier, “over there. We don’t mix.”
His mother reached over to his forehead and traced her finger along the brand that had been put there, a simple X. He felt her nail gently trace the lines of the letter. “It’s our mark,” she said, “from the beginning of creation. Passed through the fathers to the sons.” Theron looked at Milla. “What about the daughters?”
“Uh-huh, that, too, but no birthing, no creation. Our womb must not bear fruit. You remember the scripture.”
He did: “And your seed shall not pollute your womankind, but shall be passed through the women of the land to bring your sons and daughters into lesser sin. And of your daughter, the fruit of her womb shall be sewn shut, and neither man nor beast may enter therein. Behold, you and your seed shall sin that the world may be saved.”
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 51