He’d just been worried about the possibility of competition.
“You stay out, Daddy.”
“I got to take a crap.”
“Ghosts don’t crap.”
“I never said I was a ghost, did I?”
This was all too familiar.
“Daddy, you used to do this before. You used to sit in here, whenever I was in the bath or shower. Saying you were shitting.”
“Well I was.”
“Daddy, I could hear what you were doing while you were watching me shower, and it wasn’t shitting.”
He gave her nothing but silence.
Maddy felt scared and angry.
She wanted to kill the old blue bastard for raising up this kind of memory, but how the hell do you kill an imaginary figment of a ghost?
So she kept on talking, buying a little more time.
“You want to shit, go shit in the field. It’ll make the grass grow green.”
Maddy waited.
She let the water run cold.
She heard the click in the lines as the pump worked dangerously dry. She listened for the sound of a closing door.
Hell.
Ghosts don’t need doors, do they?
Then why bother knocking?
She turned the shower off. She stood there shivering. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten since the pork chops, two nights ago.
What was in the fridge?
All that she could remember was the stick of salami. She supposed she could fry it up. The thought of cold meat just turned her belly.
Her stomach growled like a rabid hound
Damn it.
She wasn’t afraid of a figment of her imagination.
She wrapped herself in the clammy shroud of the ivy shower curtain.
Then she stepped out of the shower. She pulled her dirty digging clothes back on. She had wanted to change into something clean but Bluedaddy had spoiled all that.
Now fully covered, she stood by the closed bathroom door.
She listened.
Nothing.
Finally she opened the door.
She set one bare foot out.
When the old hound Zigger licked her outstretched foot, she damn near jumped out of her skin.
* 2 *
Clavis Petrie dreamed of pine coffin boards and things coming back.
The cemetery crosses waved their arms at him like happy ghosts.
The tombstones sprouted birthday candles.
And there was Daddy looking like a crazy scarecrow in momma’s wedding gown, dancing a weird hootchy-kootch on top of the gravestones.
And then Clavis awoke from his dream and sat up as sudden as a sprung steel rat trap.
He rose from the pew. He toppled the hymnals he’d stacked like a child’s blanket fort. The hymnals hit the floor making a racket loud enough to wake ten dead men. Clavis knew it was Sunday without any calendar, pocket watch, radio or television. Clavis just knew it, the same way that a farmer feels rain coming on.
He adjusted the ring collar he’d made from the shirt stiffener that came with his black five and dime dress shirt. He straightened his popsicle-stick and butcher-twine crucifix. He shoved his lank, wheat-blond hair across his forehead. He stretched, blinked and cleared his throat, then spat a wad of blackish phlegm upon the floorboards. He looked about guiltily, as if someone might have seen him spitting in a church.
“The goddamned air in this goddamn church is like living in a goddamn tomb,” he said.
No one answered. He hadn’t expected anyone to. There was nothing in this empty church but empty pews, lined up like waiting caskets.
“Welcome, brothers. Welcome, sisters. Welcome to my congregation.”
“Morning, Clavis,” a familiar voice said.
“Daddy?”
There he was. Clavis’s father. It looked just like him, standing there and leaning on a broom. Only he was blue. He was blue and kind of ragged, like he was made out of hand-me-down lightning bolts. No, not ragged. He was tattery, like one of them low wet whispers you hear in church just before the service starts.
His Daddy started sweeping.
“It’s time to clean up the old mess, Clavis,” Daddy said. “It’s time to clean all the old mess.”
Clavis glanced at the wad of spit, soaking by his feet.
“I didn’t mean to...”
Only Daddy hadn’t noticed the spit, or if he did he didn’t seem to care.
“Time to be up and about your work, Clavis. There are things for you to do.”
Clavis peered at the boarded up windows.
“The sun’s not even up yet, Daddy.”
“Just because the sun ain’t up, don’t mean God’s sleeping. Even when your god’s asleep, his dreams go busily about his work. That’s what you and me are, Clavis. We are God’s dreams. And he got something special dreamed up for you to do for me, son.”
He added the last word like he’d just remembered it.
Then he passed the broom through Clavis’s hand. The hand tingled like he’d been sleeping on it. There was something in the tingle that made Clavis listen to his Daddy harder than he’d ever listened before.
Then his Daddy told him what he needed to do.
A few minutes later, Clavis went downstairs to the workroom his Daddy built.
He found a green plastic bucket.
He dropped a hammer and a handful of four-inch spikes into the bucket and a bottle of wood glue. Then he dug out the two stoutest two-by-fours he could find in the woodpile. He shouldered them up with the bucket hung under one cocked elbow.
Back upstairs in the church, Clavis never noticed the flickering old bone-armed woman, sweeping out the corners of the church with a gray willow broom. He never noticed the Daddy mask that the old woman wore.
It was a good thing he didn’t notice.
The mask wouldn’t have fooled him for long.
He would have recognized what lay behind it.
You see, Clavis was a lot harder to fool than Maddy or Helliard. The truth was, Clavis was a whole lot crazier than either of them. Being crazier brought him closer to the truth of how things are, when we don’t want to see them that way. Clavis was way too crazy to be fooled by spook tricks like this, except when he wanted to be fooled.
He walked from the empty church, whistling a tune his Daddy dearly loved.
That Old Rugged Cross.
It was Easter weekend, and Daddy wanted Clavis to celebrate it right.
* 3 *
Marvin Pusser owned five post office uniforms.
Five caps.
Five dress shirts and five jackets.
Five pairs of good silk boxers, five pairs of dress socks, five noosed neckties. Five pairs of lovingly shined shoes.
Five belts.
Every week he handed two uniforms to the dry cleaner. A third waited on a padded hanger in his closet. The fourth he wore. The fifth hung in the van, just in case.
Marvin was Crossfall’s only mailman. He’d been so for the last six years. It was the easiest job he’d found, except the winter was too cold and the goddamned council wouldn’t spring for a new heater in his Dodge cube van. They said it was the post office’s problem. Wasn’t that a bitch? They had enough cash for a new fire truck after the Heber boy burned the old fire hall last year, but nary a cent for the comfort of the postal service.
To hell with all of that foolishness. Marvin had some work to do. He sat in the cab of his cube van, tracing a glue stick along the edge of a magazine page. Just enough so that when old man Clements tried to flip open his latest Playboy, he’d find out there was more than one way to stick pages together.
He sniggered, but he wasn’t doing this for fun.
No sir.
Magazines like this just shouldn’t be in the public mail. It was sacrilege. He kept his eyes respectfully squinted as he glued. It wasn’t right to stare too hard at dirty pictures, especially not while he was in uniform.
Besides, pictures weren’t r
eal.
Pictures couldn’t feel your eyes.
No sir.
If you weren’t peeking at the real thing, it just plain wasn’t right.
He sucked in a little drool at the thought of the peeking he planned to do today and blamed the drool on the concentration he was applying to gluing down the stroke book. This was going to be good. He smacked his lips and glued another page. It might have been easier to throw the magazine in the trash, but you couldn’t teach a man a lesson unless you waved it under his nose. People learned from something, not from nothing. Something you could feel or see, like skin.
Besides, tampering with the mail was sacrilegious.
Some might call gluing the pages of a skin magazine tampering but magazines weren’t real mail. Oh sure, they were close enough so you had to deliver them but not like letters, love notes and postcards.
Marvin scratched his teapot belly contentedly. It felt good to sit. Even just to fart around like this. His feet hurt like usual. His jeezus jumping piles were driving a burning stake up his arsehole.
To hell with that guff.
Work wouldn’t do itself.
“Rain, snow, sleet or hail; the public got to get its goddamn mail.”
Although Sunday wasn’t a mail day, Marvin was in full uniform. Being the mailman of a town with a population of nearly two thousand souls was a position of some responsibility and authority and Marvin took this as seriously as a church sermon.
Besides, he liked delivering on Sundays. On weekdays, most folks were at work. On Sundays, folks started to relax. Oh sure, some of them would dress themselves up and get to church, but most folks just liked to lie about in their pajamas.
Some folks even liked to get naked which was why he liked Sundays. He liked catching people off their guard. Yes sir, Sundays were a prime peeping opportunity. He cranked the key and fired the van up, which was when he spotted Clavis standing in front of the old town church that had been closed down for the last half year.
“Well Christ in a pink-painted sidecar,” Marvin wondered aloud. “Just what the hell are you up to now, Clavis?”
He watched Clavis drag an armload of two-by-fours out of the church and tack them up in the shape of a rough cross. All the time Clavis kept talking to the air and waving his arms like someone might be paying attention.
Marvin shook his head in disgust.
“That Clavis is crazier than a cat yowling soprano in a Tallahassee fiddle factory.”
Marvin knew that he ought to do something.
He was a mailman, after all.
Then he shook his head. To hell with all of that noise and guff. Defacing churches and self-mutilation weren’t postal jurisdiction. He might as well delegate this particular bit of responsibility.
He slid his cell phone from his pocket.
He dialed the law, giving Wendy Joe Joel her second phone call of the morning and an excuse to telephone Chief Wilfred Potter. Mind you, Marvin didn’t know a thing about anything Wendy Joe Joel was up to.
He wouldn’t have cared if he did.
His next stop was Lily Milton’s trailer.
Yes sir and yes ladies, Marvin had himself a plan for some peeping that felt so damn good it was downright sacrilegious.
CHAPTER 5
Voodoo 101
* 1 *
“Mommy Loa, Mommy Loa, hear my cry...”
Two hours before Marvin telephoned about Clavis’s crucifixion, he missed a prime peeping opportunity as volunteer night clerk Wendy Joe Joel danced in the center of the Crossfall police station.
At that moment in time, Wendy Joe Joel was stark naked, save for a pair of latex gloves she wore for fear of catching salmonella from the raw chicken. Germs were bad things, and there was no telling where they’d sprout up.
Her dark skin glistened with sweat and exertion. Cigarette smoke haloed her head. It should have been cigar smoke but it’d be hard enough getting rid of the reek of the raw chicken she’d scattered on the floor, without adding cigar smoke to the stew. The cigarette was one of Chief Wilfred’s smokes, though. She’d stolen the cigarette from the pack on his desk, just last week. She hoped it’d make it a little more magical, it being the property of the man himself.
“Grant me my wish, Mommy Loa.”
The chicken was another compromise. The chicken should have been live, but the last thing Wendy Joe Joel needed in her life was to have to clean up a mess of freshly sacrificed yardbird.
“Mommy Loa, Mommy Loa, hear my prayer.”
Wendy Joe whirled and danced like a tornado seed, beating an overturned wastebasket drum. A half-dozen red candles melted themselves into the desk top. A couple of insomniac flies buzzed lazily about the chicken chunks.
It shouldn’t have been such a pretty sight. Not that Wendy Joe considered herself all that pretty of a woman for looking at. The fact was at forty-three years of age with two grown kids, Wendy Joe looked better in a barrel. Her ass broadened out truck-bumper wide and her stretch marks had grown stretch marks, but by God she could dance. When Wendy Joe shook her thunder, there wasn’t a bull cock in the house that wouldn’t stand up and beg for more.
Except the one man Wendy Joe wanted.
“Mommy Loa, make that damned Chief Wilfred notice me. Make his weather vane stand up and point for me like I was a high north wind.”
Wendy Joe had been trying to get Chief Wilfred to notice her ever since she took the job. But the man was dense as dried mud when it came to noticing her. Wendy Joe had tried damn near everything.
Conjuring was her last resort.
“Mommy Loa, make him leave his frigid bitch of a wife.”
You had to talk plainly to the gods if you wanted them to listen.
“You know she don’t love him,” Wendy Joe went on. “Not the way I could. Not the way I do.”
It wasn’t quite singing, but she felt every word so damn hard it had to be conjure.
Wendy Joe’s momma had taught her conjure. Wendy Joe had used the magic, now and then, but not too often. Her momma taught her that power wasn’t to be taken too lightly.
You don’t take no cannons to a shooting gallery and you don’t conjure unless you’re ready to deal with whatever steps through the door.
This was an exception, Wendy Joe told herself.
“Mommy Loa, make him notice me or by fuck I will let loose all of the hoodoo gri-gri conjure magic I know to kick his wide white ass sideways to hell and back.”
Then the phone rang, reminding her there was a town out there, just dying to know what she was up to in the dead of night, by her fat, black, lonesome self.
“Mommy Loa, Mommy Loa, amen,” she hastily whispered.
Still naked, she sprinted across the office and grabbed the telephone.
“Chief’s office,” she said, reaching across the desk to pinch out the candles.
“This here’s county,” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“That you Davey Cawdor?”
Davey was Windsor’s night man. She’d met him at a Christmas party last year. She remembered the way his cute butt had moved in those dress pants he was wearing. The boy could dance too, but he was way too young to interest Wendy Joe.
“That’s me, Wendy Joe,” Davey answered.
“How’s your momma doing? Is her arthritis any better?”
“Momma’s fine. The salve you made for her worked real good. We’re awfully grateful to you.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“Are you still riding that little motor scooter of yours?”
Wendy Joe drove a moped back and forth to work. She’d never been comfortable in a car, but the moped got her around just fine.
“It’s a moped. Not a scooter.”
“Same difference. You still look cute as hell on that little bitty bike.”
“Yeah, yeah – and my asshole is a star,” Wendy Joe grumbled. “So what did you call me for anyway?”
“We got us some trouble. I thought I’d pass a little in your
direction. We’ve got a fire going on at the Night Owl. We dragged a couple of shot-up bodies out of the fire. Old man Delrosa and his boy, as dead as roasted toast. I’m thinking maybe it’s a crime scene.”
This was news. This far back in the Nova Scotian woods, shootings were about as rare as double-decker outhouses.
“Is there any word on the perp?”
She loved how official that word made her sound. Chief Wilfred and the boys always laughed at her when she used words like "perp." They said she watched way too many cop shows on the office television. She looked at the chicken and the candles and laughed to herself.
What the blue-diddle did they know about what she did with her nights?
“We’ve got an all-points on a rust red Mercury seen fleeing the crime scene,” Davey went on. “Be on the lookout and be advised, this suspect is armed and definitely dangerous.”
“Roger and out,” Wendy Joe said, even though she was just hanging up a phone.
She yanked her uniform back on. She shook some cinnamon from the spices she kept behind the stapler in her desk drawer to purify and to help kill the stink. She grabbed a broom and set to work cleaning the rest of her mess back up.
The crime wave would have to wait. Odds were that rust red Mercury wasn’t anywhere near Crossfall and it wouldn’t do no good for Chief Wilfred to see what she’d been up to all night long.
Two hours later, while Wendy Joe was scraping the last of the candle wax off the desk top, the telephone rang again.
Two calls in one morning. It was some kind of record, maybe even some kind of omen. She hoped it was a good one. But later that day, when she got the third call, she knew it was as far from good as bad could get.
She had the feeling things were just getting started.
The fact was she was right.
* 2 *
Helliard Jollienne read the sign.
The sign said Lucky Burger, even though it hadn’t been painted in a while. The paint had begun to peel. What hadn’t been peeled, you could see straight through. Underneath the Lucky it looked like the place used to be called Happy Burger.
Happy or lucky, it looked like a good place to stop for a bite to eat. Small and out of the way so that nobody would notice him. Even if they did, all they’d care about was the color of his cash.
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