by Bob McGough
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, Mr….?” He started.
“Most folks just call me Marsh.”
“Well then Mr. Marsh, I want to welcome you to my service. Glad you decided to attend tonight, and I hope you took something from it,” he smiled. It looked genuine enough.
I was struggling to get a read on him. Eyeing him up, he wasn’t quite what I expected. For one, I had seen he was pretty stout, but up close I could see he was built like a brick shithouse. He was basically a walking talking muscle, and I had a suspicion that his camper was basically just floor to ceiling weights.
His shirt was tight across his chest, tight enough it was a wonder he hadn’t split it in all his charades. So tight you could see the faint dark splotch of tattoos on his upper arms. The tail end of one actually poked out from the rolled up sleeve on his left arm. It might have been the bottom of an anchor, but it’s not like I had all day to stare and puzzle shit out.
It was the eyes though that really drew me in. It was almost like looking into a mirror, so similar were they. I’ve always heard folks say ‘I know it like the back of my hand.’ I always thought this was a stupid phrase, because really, how much time do you spend studying your hand? I was certain I couldn’t pick mine out of a lineup.
My eyes though, I’d stared in a mirror enough to know them. And eyes like mine didn’t come along just any day. No one else in my family had them, not like this. You ever stand in a hall of mirrors, and stare off into one of those infinite regressions? I felt like if we locked eyes too hard, that same thing would happen.
“Well, if I’m being honest, I didn’t come for the sermon,” I said in order to distract myself from falling into those eyes.
“You come because these chairs make such good napping spots?” He asked with a wink.
I laughed politely at his joke. It wasn’t right someone who preached so hard being so fucking likeable. “Well, that was a perk. But no, I came hunting Inez Richmond. I heard she was here.”
Was there a flicker in those icy eyes?
“Sister Inez? She was here a few days ago, but I’m not really in the business of just spreading other folks’ business around frivolously,” he said softly. “Why are you looking for her?”
“Well her son was wondering where she got off to, asked me to look around a bit. Me and her, we run in similar circles.”
His brow furrowed. “I thought her son was in prison.”
I shook my head. “That’s her oldest. She’s got another few kids.”
The furrows deepened. “Are they Richmonds too?”
That was an odd question I thought. I couldn’t think why I shouldn’t answer it, but I was getting less sure about where we stood. “No, they’re from another daddy.”
“I see,” he nodded, a sad sort of look coming on his face. Was he worried about the kids? He seemed the type that would probably damn the mother to hell for having kids out of wedlock during service, but then would probably coach a little league team for them later that day. “Well I can tell you that she was here, and she experienced a cleansing miracle. She asked to be baptized, which I did right after the service. She left soon after. And sadly, she has not been back since.”
He seemed genuinely upset by that fact. “And you say she has abandoned her children? Is there something I can do to help? I can’t but feel responsible in some way.”
Jubal County had gotten by just fine without folks coming from all over to try and save us, and we would do the same soon as they left. “Their grandfather is looking after them, it’s fine. But you say she left right after? So what, like one, one thirty?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “It was probably closer to two if I had to put a number on it. But I don’t wear a watch.” He raised his arms, showing his wrists were bare.
“Well, then the hunt continues I guess.” I shrugged. “She’ll probably turn up in a day or two, all strung out again. The word of the Lord can’t compete with the high of the Meth I reckon,” I chuckled.
At then Hatty’s face grew hard. He reached out and shook my hand once more. “I do hope you come back Mr. Marsh. Do, and I will prove to you that nothing is more powerful than the word of the Lord.”
He stalked off then, and I was left wondering why that felt like a threat.
Lies! All Lies!
Jerm looked to be about done talking, and I suspected that me walking up just then would probably do him no favors. So instead I just walked out of the tent, staying just inside the narrow band of light provided by the hanging lights. I pulled a cigarette from what was left of my pack and lit it. I wasn’t alone in that at least, as there were a few others standing around smoking, waiting for their friends to get done talking.
There’s a sort of camaraderie amongst smokers, especially these days when it gets so much hate. Those folks might have normally not given me the time of day, but one leathery old man actually gave me a slight nod, the warmest welcome I’d been given more or less. So I stood there and chewed things over in my mind.
There was no evidence to back it up, but my gut, it told me that Hatty was behind that spell. Or whatever it had been. If that was the case, then he was a lot more than he seemed. He wouldn’t be the only preacher with a little power that I had ever encountered, but he would be the most devout. Someone who both preached, and could call down fire and brimstone? That wasn’t a good combination. Not for anyone.
And if Inez was caught up in it…
The Richmond family was an old one around here. And while I’d never known one to get really caught up in the kind of doings I find myself in, there were some old, odd stories about them. Thomas Richmond burning down a church was almost par for the course when it came to that lot.
Jerm came walking up at last, asking to bum a cigarette. Very begrudgingly I handed him my next to last smoke. I supposed I would have Forrest run me by a gas station on the way home so I could buy another pack. I hated to spend the money, but at least it was one of my necessities.
We left the light, stepping into the night dark. The wet grass clung to my legs, and a few lonely drops fell on my head, the tail end of the storm still dripping from the sky above. Very faintly in the distance I heard a low rumble of thunder, but it was clear that the worst of the storm was over.
“Jerm?” Something was nagging at me.
“Yeah man?” He replied.
“You said Inez’s car was here late that night, didn’t you? Like after dark?”
He nodded vigorously. “Yeah, it was. I saw it from the road when we drove past that night. When we went riding. Dempsey and me.”
“You saw the car, after dark, from the road, as y'all were driving past,” I said blandly. The road was a good quarter mile away, and by the time you reached where the cars were parked, the light of the tent was good and faded. There was no fucking way. “That’s your story?”
We had made it to the car by now. The dust of a day spent on dirt roads had only been partially washed off by the heavy rain. It had clung tenaciously to the sides, and now red-brown rivulets lined the sides, pooling in the edges and ridges.
Jerm turned to face me, his face nervous, but his tone defensive. “Yeah man, I mean what other story you think there is?”
I swung the driver side open and slid behind the wheel. Jerm mirrored me, and as I shut the door and turned the key, I looked over at him. “Jerm, you met my dad right?”
He shivered. “Black Tom? Yeah, one time. It was rough.”
I looked him dead in the eyes. “He seem like the kind of guy to raise a fool?”
The other man looked down at his lap, then looked up and gazed around, his eyes drifting over the few cars still parked around. Most were getting ready to leave as well from the looks of things. “Look man, I’m just…”
“Jerm. Just tell me how you know. I don’t need reasons or excuses. Trust me, I won’t think any less of you.” That was mostly because I doubted I could think any less of him. He was an alright guy to share a pi
pe with on occasion, but he had all the spine of a dishrag.
He sighed heavily. “We uh, we came up here to see if anyone had left their car behind. Figured it would be safe, you know.”
“No cameras in a pasture,” I nodded. “Guessing that was Dempsey’s idea?”
“Don’t matter really,” Jerm said softly, and he was right. It didn’t. “But yeah, her car was still sitting there, and it was the only one. I figured, well, maybe she’d have a little rock or two inside. And seeing as she wouldn’t need ‘em anymore, getting clean and all, she couldn’t even be mad I took ‘em. It was unlocked, but weren’t nothing worth taking.”
“Robbing a friend, that’s pretty low,” I said. I mean I’d done it, we’d all done it, but Jerm had sorta gotten on my nerves at this point so I wanted to dig into him a little.
“Oh fuck off Marsh,” he swore. He glanced my way, and I could see tears were welling up in his eyes. “I just want what she got damn it. I been coming back every fucking service, and not once has that bastard laid hands on me.”
He began to sob, wracking ugly snarls of tears that blended with snot and ran down his face. “I’m so fucking tired,” he managed to gasp out. “I can’t stop. I want to.”
“But I can’t.”
Sometimes I Sits And Thinks
It was a silent ride. I didn’t have anything to say, and it seemed Jerm wasn’t really in a speaking mood. He cried gently into his arms for a while, then sat quietly staring out the window. I left the radio off, letting the silence wash over us.
Jerm didn’t say a word until I pulled into the driveway of his mother’s house, where he lived in a little outbuilding around back. He pulled the crumpled ones from his pocket, offering them to me. “Here you go,” he muttered.
I glanced at the money, then sighed. “Eh, you’re on the way. Keep it.”
He looked at me, his eyes questioning, but I refused to look back. He shrugged and tucked the money away once more. “Thanks Marsh,” he said, climbing out and then disappearing into the darkness behind the small, neat home.
I sat there for a moment, watching him walk away and debating on stepping out and asking for that money after all. It was half a pack of smokes after all, and I was soon to be tapped right out. Instead I put the car in reverse and carefully pulled out into the street.
A mile up was a small gas station, not some chain but a mom and pop number known as the Kountry Korner. It was closed, had been at least for an hour, but there was a pale white security light that lit the paved area which surrounded the pumps. It was there that I pulled over and parked.
I knew how Jerm felt. Anyone who lived like us, you got that way at some point or another. Usually sooner rather than later. It was a sort of world weariness that sapped the very life from your bones. Then you either got used to it, or it dragged you under.
I’d gotten used to it.
Jerm, it was dragging under.
I lit my last cigarette and thought it all over. Jerm had been treading downward for years, I mean we all were really. But he’d not been so bad when I last saw him, and that had been less than a month ago. I think hope was killing him.
He’d seen Inez, one of us, get clean and he wanted that. He didn’t want to be tired any more. But she was gone, and no miracles were forthcoming for him, no matter how bad he wanted it. Someone out there had given him a sliver of hope, a chance at a new life, but had snatched it right away. And I was pretty sure it would kill him.
There was nothing I could do to fix that. I was no miracle worker. If I was, I wouldn’t be living in a storage unit in Elk Grove, that’s for fucking sure. I had no hope to give, to spare, to conjure. And I always made damn sure that any such tripe didn’t linger around me too long. Shit wasn’t healthy.
I tried to imagine what Inez must have felt. What it would be like to not ride herd on the demons in your soul with the demons on your back. To pull that ache, that itch, right out, sweat it from your pores and be done with it once and for all. I couldn’t even fathom it. I’d been down so long that I’d forgotten what up felt like.
All these thoughts, it made one thing clear: Inez was dead. I wasn’t sure where she was, or who had done it, but I’d decided there was no way you get shuck of all this and you don’t go back to your kids. And if I had to lay money on it, my guess was that Hatty had something to do with it. Why he’d want to kill some old strung out woman I couldn’t even begin to fathom.
But he’d lied to me, when he had no call to. Which as a preacher doesn’t look too good. So it meant he did have a reason to lie to me, and no reason I could come up with put him in a good light.
I could call the cops I supposed, but I knew they would no more believe me than I would them. They had about as much faith in Inez as they would in anyone else they’d arrested a dozen times over the years, and would proceed to just write it off as her being on a bender somewhere. And if something wasn’t done pretty quick, then the Reverend would be riding off into the sunset. I suspected tracking down itinerant preachers wasn’t real high on anyone’s list, so good luck then.
Finding who killed Inez wouldn’t help Jerm either. He was gone in a way past helping, short of a miracle that would never come. But it would square things up at least a little. Because whoever killed Inez, they had basically signed Jerm’s death warrant the same time.
And they might be fuckups, one and all, but goddamn it they were my people. No one else was looking out for us, with good reason I supposed, but some things you just can’t let stand. Even as I thought it, I started cursing myself right the fuck out.
I kept cussing, and mentally beating myself up as I slipped the car into drive and turned back towards the Revival. I’d have to find some gas first though, because the Pontiac was about running on fumes.
Some gas, a pack of smokes, and a bite to eat. There went my fucking money.
Goddamn a good Samaritan.
Memory
I parked the Pontiac a ways down the road, cut up in a drive to a house so old and so far gone that it was little more than a pile of wooden slats. It was far enough up that it would be out of sight from anyone that wasn’t looking real hard, and it was not like this road got a lot of traffic anyway.
I’d spent all my money on gas, pork rinds, a pack of smokes, and a Natty Daddy. I sat there in the car enjoying my bounty, making the most of it. Who knew, I might not be coming back. I might run into what did for Inez. And then wouldn’t I feel the fool leaving behind a bit of meth and half a bag of pork rinds? Can’t take it with you.
There wasn’t any sort of plan in my head beyond ‘wander up around the revival and scope things out.’ It was about as terrible as most of my plans, but who was I to buck tradition this late in the game. I’d put more thought into what flavor of pork rinds to buy than that.
But with the tangy taste of bbq pork skin filling my mouth, I mused that sometimes it didn’t take a lot of thought to nail it.
I was beginning to hum right along, my brain sparking in its usual terrible way. The Natty Daddy did next to nothing to even me out, but then it would take a lot more beer than one 25 oz to do that. That wasn’t the intent though, not really. I just wanted a little liquid punch to the head.
Getting out of the car I left everything behind. I had nothing worth carrying. An empty wallet? If I died I wanted to make it as difficult for the cops as possible to ID me. One last fuck you. My cell phone? Dead as shit, and out of minutes. Keys? Who cared if I got locked out, or the car got stolen. Wasn’t mine.
It was just me. Once more into the breech and all that bullshit.
I stood there, staring at the ruins of the house. I swear there are more abandoned, ruined buildings in Jubal County than not. No one ever took the time to clean them away, or at least burn them down. It felt like as a collective we just couldn’t let shit go.
A wad of phlegm launched from my mouth as I spat on the closest slat. I missed, not that it mattered. If I was much of one for omens, I might have taken that poorly. Instead I j
ust set off through the brush that surrounded me, making my way in a roundabout fashion to the pasture the revival was set up in. My guess was that it was about a mile away, maybe a touch more, but when you haven’t owned a car in years, walking turns out to be no big thing.
At least that’s what I thought til I got my first mosquito bite.
The best magic the world could have ever created was some sorta spell to keep the little buggers off you. But if it existed, I sure as hell didn’t know it. At least by keeping a steady pace I limited how much they could get to me, but even still I got a few of the little bastards on me, and in the dark I never realized it till it was too late.
But at least it wasn’t deer flies. That would have been even more of a bitch. Those pricks could snag you at a run if they had a mind to, and I’d certainly seen enough of them over the course of the day. They were bad this year, worse than I’d seen in a long time.
The woods were still wet with the passing storm, and water dripped from limbs above me. Every so often the breeze would blow hard enough to shake the trees a bit, sending a cascade of drops to shower on my head. It didn’t much matter, seeing as my pants were pretty quickly soaked from brushing against wet brush. Why shouldn’t my shirt match?
The moon was providing a decent amount of light, enough for me to be able to see fairly well. Enough that I didn’t trip over every little log and hole in the forest. I could have called up a little light, but I was trying to be as discreet as possible, and the drugs coursing through me, they were damn near screaming, begging to fuel a bit of witchery. My impulse control has never been the best, so it was a struggle to not give in.
A sound began to reach my ears, and after pausing to hear better, I realized it was running water. There was a stream nearby it sounded like, off to my right. I veered off towards it, thinking it would be easier to walk along a creek bed than through thick brush.
It was a surprisingly large stream, several feet deep from the looks of it, and maybe twenty feet wide. It had cut pretty deep into the earth, and from where I stood, it flowed past perhaps six feet below me. I didn’t feel like climbing down there, so instead I just walked along the top of the bank. It wasn’t much improvement, but at least it spiced up the scenery a bit.
