The Backwoods

by Edward Lee

  “I know, Sergeant.” Patricia faced the facts. “My sister’s probably dead. Her body’s probably lying in the woods somewhere.”

  Shannon didn’t say anything after that.

  When he went back on his rounds, Patricia headed back toward town. She drove aimlessly, cranking the air-conditioning up. What am I thinking? she asked herself. That I’m just going to see Judy walking down the road? She’s going to wave to me, with a big smile? She knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  She drove through more of the town proper, and then the outskirts. I’ve never seen anything like this, she thought; Agan’s Point looked abandoned, evacuated. Not even one person out walking their dog . . . When she pulled into the Qwik-Mart, she found the little parking lot empty, noticed no one in the store, then spotted the SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED sign.

  Hours passed without her notice. Patricia tried to keep her mind off what was becoming the greatest likelihood. Eventually, she forced herself to admit why she was driving so pointlessly.

  I don’t want to go back to the house.

  The comfortable old house she’d been raised in now seemed utterly haunted, not just by her dour parents but by murdered people she didn’t know, and by Judy, by Ernie, by every dim, sad memory, and as she pulled up the long cul-de-sac out front, those memories massed and urged her away. She drove to the southern end of the Point. . . .

  Where the town looked evacuated; the tract of land that comprised Squatterville looked evacuating. It’s a mass exodus now, she saw. She wondered how many Squatters actually had been involved in drugs. Just those few? Or had the Squatters become a secret drug culture of their own?

  We’ll never know. They’re all leaving now.

  In small salvos they trudged up the hill and away, beaten suitcases and sacks of possessions in tow; Patricia thought of refugees leaving a bombed city. Where they go next is anybody’s guess, and it’s not like anyone cares anyway. . . .

  The sun was sinking. Patricia drove the loop around the crab-picking house and then winced at the burned pier. The boathouse had been reduced to cinders, while the boats that had been burned had been moored ashore, the hulls like blackened husks. She could still smell the char in the air, thick as the cicada trills.

  Out in the bay she saw the pale wood plank sticking up: the Squatter graffiti, their good-luck sign. The plank appeared to overlook the ruined docks, a symbol now of the clan’s bad fortune, not good fortune.

  The inevitable approached quickly, like a beast running down a fawn. The sun had now been replaced by a fat yellow moon that stalked her back to the dark house.

  She parked the Cadillac out front, then sat for several minutes staring, the engine ticking beneath the hood. I don’t want to go in. There’s nobody there anymore.

  She trudged up the steps, frowning at the odd door knocker that was a half-formed face. The fantasy beckoned her: that she would walk in, smell homemade biscuits baking, and Judy would look up from the oven and explain where she’d been the last two days, and it would all be so innocent, and they’d laugh and hug and everything would be okay again.

  Patricia’s hands were shaking when she entered and crossed the foyer. Darkness saturated the house. She walked around downstairs, wide-eyed, snapping on lights, but the illumination she sought only made the house feel bigger . . . and emptier. Her feet took her listlessly to the kitchen and no, the air didn’t smell of biscuits; it smelled sterile, lifeless. Instinct urged her to call out for Judy, but she didn’t bother.

  Her sister wasn’t here, and probably never would be again.

  She checked the answering machine. Had anyone called? Had the police left a message to relate that Judy had been found, had been rushed to the hospital for an appendectomy or something, and was recovering now and waiting for her?

  “You have . . . zero . . . messages,” the machine’s generic voice told her.

  She turned and went to the refrigerator for some juice, but her hand froze in midair. A strawberry magnet held a note to the door—Things to get: flour, milk, eggs, coffee—a shopping list in Judy’s unruly scrawl. Patricia stared at the list and began to cry.

  She wore her clothes to bed, too unsettled to undress. The bedroom window stared at her. It was locked now, its curtains drawn, but just knowing what Ernie had been doing on the other side of it several nights ago gave her a grim fright. A dead man’s sperm is on my windowsill, she thought absurdly. Just a few feet away . . . The notion knotted her stomach. She could go sleep in another room, but that idea distressed her as well. Which room would she take? Ernie’s? Her sister’s? Or what about her parents’ old room upstairs? No, they were all chock-full of ghosts now.

  She stared up at the ceiling, at the room’s grainy darkness. Were faces forming in the grains? The window, the window, part of her mind kept whispering to her.

  There’s nothing there, so forget about it and go to sleep! she shouted back at herself, but she couldn’t take solace even in her own sense of reason. Eventually she threw back the sheets, sighed to herself, and pulled back the curtain.

  See. No one there. No peeping Toms, no monsters. Beyond the glass the yard looked normal, sedate. Night flowers in the expansive garden opened their petals to the night. The moon had risen higher now and turned white, flooding the backyard with a tranquil glow. There was nothing out of the ordinary for her to see.

  Back under the covers, she curled into a ball. Did she hear the hall clock ticking? The house frame creaked a few times, causing her to flinch. Please, Judy. Please come home. Please be okay, she prayed, drifting off.

  The maw of a nightmare opened wide. She was in the same room, in the same grainy darkness and on the same bed, only naked now, splayed. Moonlight flooded the room and, in turn, her bare flesh. It painted her in a translucent lambency: bright, sharp-white skin, the rim of her navel a shadow dark as black ink. Her legs were spread to the window, her furred sex shamefully bared.

  She couldn’t close her legs for the life of her.

  She couldn’t cover herself.

  How can there be moonlight in the room? she thought. The curtains are closed. I know they are. I just closed them. But of course she thought that, for it didn’t occur to her yet that this was a dream. . . .

  She thought on through a tingling fear, concluding her question: Someone must have opened the curtains.

  Then:

  The window . . .

  She was determined not to look, but just as she’d given the order to herself, some force—the ghost of her father’s hand, perhaps—pushed her head up and made her look.

  She looked straight ahead between the mounds of her breasts, down her stomach, through her spread legs. The tiny tuft of pubic hair drew a bead like a gunsight to the window.

  The curtains weren’t merely open; they were gone. The moonlight shimmered in an unwelcome guest now. She felt humiliated, ashamed. If someone was outside, they could look in and see her totally bared, the most private part of her body displayed as if on purpose. What would they think of her, lying on the bed like that, utterly naked?

  But . . .

  Thank God. There’s no one there.

  The hall clock began to tick louder than normal, and more rapidly. She kept looking down her body at the window, saw her breasts rising and falling faster now, her flat abdomen trembling, and then, beyond the ticking, she heard something else.

  Crunching.

  Footsteps, she knew.

  Patricia’s paralysis intensified; she felt made of cement, a prone statue. When the shadow edged into the window frame, her scream froze in her chest.

  It was Ernie.

  Cadaverous now, he leered in with a rotten grin, his eyes like raw oysters, his skin fish-belly white. He was masturbating, his dead hand shucking a rotten penis with vigor. Worse than the act—and the dead, wet gleam in his eyes—was the gap that shone through the grin: the two front teeth missing. At one point he pushed a black tongue through the gap and wriggled it.

  Soon another figure joined him: David Ea
ld and his dead young daughter, both blackened corpses, the Hilds now naked, gut-sucked stick figures. Chief Sutter, as bloated in death as he was in life, his dead face the color and consistency of cheesecake, with two thumbholes for eyes. And finally Judy herself, naked and sagging, the skin of her face stretched across her skull like a stocking mask, the steam of rot wafting off her flesh.

  Yes, they’d all congregated now—this cadaverous clique—to paint Patricia’s nakedness with their spoiled grins. Ernie painted the windowsill with something else, his bony hips quivering and cheeks bloated—putrid semen spurting. In his enthusiasm, Patricia noted that he’d actually wrung the skin off his penis at the climactic moment. She also saw that maggots frenzied in the sperm as it shot out.

  Thank God the window’s locked, Patricia thought.

  Then Ernie’s and Sutter’s cheesy-dead fingers began to open the window. First they’d reveled just to see her, but now they were coming to touch. . . .

  When the stench poured into the room, Patricia wakened and screamed loud as a truck horn.

  Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God . . .

  Was she going insane? Her hand shot to her chest; her heartbeat felt like something exploding in her. But at least her clothes were on—at least now she knew it had been a dream.

  The grainy dark hung before her, a veil. The hall clock ticked but was back to its normal, quiet pace. When the house frame creaked again, she actually found it comforting—because she knew it was real.

  The window seemed to beckon her, though. Of course its curtains remained closed, just as she’d left them. But . . .

  Her paranoia raced back to snare her. Damn it, she thought. Damn it, damn it! She needed to know, just to be sure. . . .

  She swung her feet out and rose, giving herself a moment to fully come awake. When the time came to move, she faltered. Come on, Patricia. What are you thinking?

  What was she thinking? That she’d pull the curtains back to find a cluster of dead faces leering in?

  Ridiculous.

  But still, she had to prove it to herself; otherwise she’d get no sleep at all.

  There! See? She was almost ecstatic when she looked behind the curtains to find nothing there. The backyard faced her exactly as it had earlier. No movement, the night flowers standing open, moonlight shimmering.

  Then her heart slammed once.

  Wait a minute. . . .

  There was one thing outside that hadn’t been there when she’d looked before. At first she hadn’t seen it.

  Ernie’s pickup truck.

  The first foot of its front end protruded into her view. That’s impossible! She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Ernie’s dead. I saw his dead body. And his truck wasn’t there before!

  She was certain, absolutely certain it hadn’t been there before.

  And next the thought exploded:

  Oh, my God, maybe it’s Judy! She must’ve borrowed his truck earlier and gone off somewhere! And she came back but didn’t wake me up when she came in!

  Now it was joy that propelled her out of the bedroom. “Judy! Are you back?” She raced down the hall, out to the foyer, and up the stairs. She swung into her sister’s bedroom and snapped on the light.

  “Judy?”

  The bed lay empty, neatly made.

  Then she’s downstairs somewhere! Patricia felt convinced. She has to be! That’s the only thing that could explain Ernie’s truck being in the backyard. She’s downstairs right now in the kitchen, getting something to eat!

  Patricia collapsed when she burst in and flicked on the light. Her knees thudded to the floor. She shrieked.

  Judy was in the kitchen, all right. But she wasn’t getting anything to eat. A cane chair lay tipped over on the floor, along with two sandals. Judy was hanging by the neck from a kitchen rafter.

  The rope creaked, a sound not unlike the house frame. Judy’s face ballooned, bright scarlet tinged with blue, tongue sticking out. She wore the flowered sundress Patricia remembered her wearing at the clan cookout. To make it worse, the process had snapped the neck entirely, and now beneath the noose, the neck stretched a foot. Lividity had turned her sister’s bare feet something close to black, and the lower legs too, veins bulging fat as earthworms.

  Oh, Judy . . . Oh, my God, my poor sister . . .

  She’d never been that stable to begin with, and she’d never liked change. That was why she’d stayed with Dwayne so long, even in the midst of all that abuse, and that was why she’d never left this house. She was happy only when things were the same.

  But suicide? Patricia dragged herself up, the horror replaced by the reality of the despair. Squatters betraying her, selling drugs while they took a paycheck from her? Police on the property every other night for murders and burnings? Yeah, things have definitely changed around here.

  It was inexplicable, but it happened every day: people killing themselves. It was the only cure to a horrid symptom they had to live with for God knew how long, and with nobody else even knowing there was a problem.

  I have to call the police right now, Patricia realized. Knowing that her sister’s body hung dead behind her couldn’t have been more distressing, but Patricia simply didn’t have the strength to take her down herself. She turned for the phone—

  —and almost collapsed again.

  Sergeant Trey stood in the doorway to the laundry room, as if he’d just come in through the back. He seemed as startled as she.

  “Damn, Ms. White. Ya scared the bejesus outa me.”

  Patricia looked at him, confused.

  “I just come in from outside. About an hour ago I was looking out the station window and thought I saw Ernie’s truck drive by, with Judy drivin’ it,” he explained. “So I run out and jump in the cruiser, but the damn gas tank was on E, so I had to fill up at the station pump. By the time I was done with all that, Judy’d already got back to the house and—”

  He looked up the the body.

  “You . . . saw her driving?” Patricia’s question faltered.

  “Yeah, and I’m really sorry. If my damn tank hadn’t been empty, I probably coulda gotten up here in time to stop her.”

  “But . . .” The information bewildered Patricia. “But what were you doing walking in just now? You didn’t seem surprised to see that she’d committed suicide.”

  “I already knew. I found her about five minutes ago.” He explained more details. “So I went back out to the cruiser to call the state cops on my radio. Then I walked back in and found you standing here.”

  “Oh.” Patricia continued to look at him. Something wasn’t right. “But . . . your radio’s right there on your belt.”

  Trey’s eyes darted down to his gun belt, the Motorola heavy in its leather holder. “Well, yeah, sure, but that’s just my, uh, my field radio.” Trey’s eyes shifted. He bit his lip a moment, but by then his cool delivery was falling apart. “S-see, this radio ain’t got the, uh, the state police frequency on it. Just the station frequency and the county.”

  “Why the county and not the state?”

  Trey blinked. “That’s . . . just the way the . . . bands work.”

  Patricia didn’t consciously decide to say what she said next. She simply said it. “I don’t believe you. You’re acting like you’re lying. You’re acting like a prosecuting attorney who knows his case is bullshit.”

  Trey blinked again, blank faced. Then he sat down in the chair by the kitchen table, but by the time he did so, his gun was drawn and pointing right at her. “Holy ever-livin’ shit, Patricia. Why couldn’t ya just leave it?”

  Patricia’s heart hammered so loud she could hear it. “You killed my sister, didn’t you?”

  “Fuck,” Trey muttered. The expletive was directed toward himself, not Patricia. “Yeah. Wanna know what I did? I snatched her after the Squatter cookout, kept her tied up for a day at one a’ old shacks way out at the Point. Fucked the daylights out of her a couple of times, then hung the bitch in the woods.” He shrugged non-commitally. “
Then I throwed her in the back a’ Ernie’s truck and brought her here and just threw the same rope over the kitchen rafter. Easy. And who ain’t gonna believe it? Alcoholic and a head case to begin with, been depressed since Dwayne got offed. Looks like a typical widow who just couldn’t stand to live no more without her man. Happens every day.”

  “She wasn’t the only person you murdered, was she?”

  Trey snorted. “These hayseeds out here? Squatters? No-accounts like Ernie? They don’t mean shit. But you’re different. You can’t just disappear. You can’t wind up dead with a pocketful a’ dope. No one would believe it. You ain’t no redneck; you’re a big-city lawyer. Someone would come snoopin’ around.” He shook his head in the chair, suddenly exhausted. “You fucked everything up.”

  Trey’s attentions seemed diverted inwardly; he wasn’t really looking at her. Patricia had backed up against the wall, the entranceway to the foyer only a foot away. But when she edged aside an inch . . .

  Trey cocked his pistol. “Don’t think I won’t do it. Shit, I been killin’ folks for a month.”

  “You and who else? Sutter? He must have been helping you.”

  “Naw, the fat ol’ boy just wouldn’t turn crooked, even as bad as he needed the money. It was me ’n’ Dwayne at first. The idea was to make a few Squatters disappear—to scare off the rest of ’em. But it wasn’t enough, so we had to start gettin’ rougher. We did the job on the Hilds and flaked ’em with the crystal, started makin’ it look like two dope gangs in a turf war. Then we burned up the Ealds with enough shit in their shack to look like a meth lab.”

  “So the state police would think the Squatters were one of the gangs?” Patricia asked.

  “Sure. And it was workin’. It was Ricky ’n’ Junior Caudill we paid for the rough stuff. They come on after Dwayne got killed.”

  Patricia somehow kept her fear in check. “And let me guess. Gordon Felps is the ringleader.”

  Trey looked up, duly impressed. “Yeah, the money man. Don’t you get it? Agan’s Point is a shit town full a’ shit people goin’ nowhere, and I’m one of‘em. But Gordon Felps was gonna turn this place all around, turn the Point into somethin’ special, with some big payoffs for whoever helped him. Shit, all your sister had to do was sell the land to Felps and everything woulda been fine. But no, the dumb bitch couldn’t turn her back on the fuckin’ Squatters—like they were her fuckin’ little sideline family, her orphans. Like one a’ these crackpot old ladies ya read about, takin’ in all the stray cats.” He pointed up to Judy’s hanging body. “Well, this is what she gets for her loyalty to the fuckin’ Squatters. We couldn’t let her stand in our way. When little folks stand in the way of big things, they get run over. I’m tired of small-time. I’m tired of bein’ town clown on a no-dick two-man department in a shit-for-nothing town. But once Agan’s Point booms, gets all full-up with rich folks buyin’ Felps’s fancy waterfront condos? I’ll finally be a big-time police chief. It’s still gonna happen. Don’t think it won’t. We just have to adjust the game plan a little.”