In the Valley of the Devil

by Hank Early

  I just stared at him.

  “Look, Earl, I’m sorry for that stuff the other day. I wasn’t gonna hurt anybody. Hell, Wanda knew that. And I just wore the mask because of them kids. You might not believe it, but I love them two.”

  “Why don’t we just talk out here?” I said.

  “Fine.” He held out his hand, turning it over and opening it up. Something dark and plant-like was in his palm.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s good ole marijuana, Earl. We can roll it and smoke it later, if you want. But I brought it to prove what I’m about to tell you.”

  I waited, actually a little curious now, and not just because it had been a long time since I’d smoked any weed. I wanted to know where this was going.

  “Lane Jefferson pissed you off the other day, didn’t he?” Ronnie said.

  “I’m not sure pissed off is the right term, but I don’t respect the man. Anyone who would treat a woman and her kids like he did is a piece of shit.”

  “My thoughts exactly. Now, what if I told you that this here pot is from his cornfield, and that if you know where to look, you can find about two acres hidden in there. It’s one of the reasons he hired me and some of the other boys, so we could guard it at night.”

  “Sounds like a reason to call the sheriff,” I said.

  Ronnie laughed. “You still think this damned sheriff is anything but corrupt? Hell no. Several folks have reported exactly what I just told you, but he hasn’t done shit.”

  “So you want me to do it? I’m not a cop.”

  “But you sleep with one.”

  I started to argue but stopped. “What’s your angle here? Why drive all the way up this mountain to get me to bust the man you work for?”

  Ronnie lit a cigarette and stuck it between his lips, taking a long draw before exhaling and shrugging at the same time. “My angle is simple. I can’t stand the motherfucker. He’s a dick. It’s bad enough that I had to put up with that sawed-off piece of dried-up shit as my boss, but then he starts fucking my sister. I hate him. I just want to see him get what’s coming to him. So I’m asking as a favor—just go check it out.”

  Honestly, if Lane Jefferson hadn’t come across as such an asshole the other day, I might have been tempted to let it go. What did I care about somebody growing pot in their cornfield? No business of mine. But if you’re going to be an asshole who makes comments about my girlfriend, well, that’s different.

  Besides, I wanted to see for myself how Sheriff Patterson would react if I brought him actual photos of the plants, with Mary as a witness.

  “If Mary comes, it’ll have to be tomorrow night,” I said.

  “That’s perfect. I’m working then. I can meet you out there and take you right to it.”

  “Where will we meet?”

  “On the other side of the cornfield. You’ll have to take Highway 18. When you see the old water tower on the left, pull over and park by the corn. I’ll be waiting there.”

  “Water tower on Highway 18. I got it.”

  Ronnie took another drag on his cigarette. The orange flare from his cigarette revealed furrows of worry etched across his face.

  “One more thing,” he said in a voice that didn’t sound like Ronnie at all. “Stick together. It’s easy to get lost in that cornfield.”

  It wasn’t until later that night, when I was lying in bed, counting the seconds between lightning strikes and the subsequent deep booms of thunder, that his words really hit home, and I realized there was something off about his last statement. “Stick together. It’s easy to get lost in that cornfield.”

  But before I could reach any conclusions, my eyelids grew heavy, and I fell asleep.

  9

  The next time I dreamed about the river, it started on the train trestle, overlooking the Blackclaw. A train was coming. I felt the trestle vibrate with its power. I turned and saw the bright light of its locomotive cutting through high stalks of pale corn. I would have to run to make it to the other side before the train came. I started to do just that, when I realized that another train was coming from that direction. I was going to be sandwiched between the two freights.

  Unless I jumped.

  I looked down at the black water. In my dream it was pure glass, flecked with icelike rivulets where the water broke across the rocks. I tried to gauge the distance but felt vertigo and panic overtake me at once.

  There weren’t two trains. Only one. From my left. There was something else coming from my right. Like the train, it pounded the tracks and rattled my ears. The thunder and beat of furious footsteps.

  Squinting into the shifting darkness, I saw a faceless figure advancing toward me. The figure appeared to wear a cowl over his head, and it made progress toward me in great strides.

  I had to jump. I had to try.

  For Mary. Because she was down there. It was the one thing I felt sure of.

  I turned to do just that, when I realized I’d already made the leap. It wasn’t so much that I was falling, but instead that the water, that black glass surface, was rising.

  When I hit the sleek black river, I went through like a pin slipped into a felt pad. It was only when I reached the bottom, only when I was completely out of air, that I saw her tangled in river weeds, like chains. She struggled against the bonds, the fear large and unfettered in her eyes.

  My lungs burned as I swam toward Mary. Her mouth moved soundlessly as she screamed at me.

  And then a shadow fell over us both, a dark-winged bird plunging through the depths. I looked up and saw nothing but a darkness that was so total it felt like the last lingering moment before the deepest sleep.

  * * *

  The remnants of the dream dissipated as the day wore on. It was worrisome, sure, especially given my history with dreams, but I refused to let it ruin the time with Mary. When I’d told her about the cornfield, she’d seemed excited to go. Though diminutive in stature and reserved in demeanor, Mary relished an adventure as much as I did.

  Goose and I sat in the yard that afternoon and waited for Mary to arrive. The previous night’s rain had gone the way of my dream and been replaced by a clear, slightly cool afternoon. It would have been the perfect time for a beer, but I didn’t dare risk comprising any of my faculties. While I’d mostly forgotten the dream by that point, I’d found myself returning to Ronnie’s puzzling words again.

  Why would he need to warn Mary and me to stick together if he was going to meet us before going into the cornfield?

  It was a question for which I didn’t have an answer, but my instinct told me something was up. Could Ronnie be setting me up? It didn’t seem likely. If he was doing that, why go out of his way to tell us to stick together?

  No, there had to be something else going on, something else I was missing.

  Mary arrived a half hour later, all smiles and hugs and flirtatious kisses, and just like that, I felt myself letting go of all the doubts about Ronnie’s strange admonition.

  As she kissed me, I moved toward the house, nearly dragging her along with me.

  “I thought we had to meet Ronnie,” she said.

  “There’s plenty of time. He said to come at night. It’s not even dark yet.”

  She kissed my mouth. I kissed her back and pulled away. “Hell, we’ve got time for two sessions.”

  She play-slapped my arm. It was an old joke between us. Once, when our relationship had still been new, I’d asked her if she was ready for another “session.”

  “What?”

  “You know, another … session in bed?”

  “Session?”

  I shrugged.

  “That is totally not a romantic term,” she’d said, but I could tell she was teasing. And she’d never stopped teasing me about it, either.

  She giggled and said, “Two sessions, huh? You are feeling full of yourself today. I’m always up for two, and you’re always up for two…” Her eyes nearly danced with mischief. “Until the first ‘session’ is over, and then you sudd
enly want to sleep.”

  “Not this time,” I said.

  “Every time.”

  She was right of course. At fifty-one, sometimes my desire was greater than my abilities, and I often promised more than I could deliver.

  We tumbled into the bed in Granny’s old bedroom and found the closest thing to heaven that there can be on earth.

  * * *

  As Mary had predicted, session number two was beyond my abilities, but that didn’t seem to bother her too much. She snuggled next to me, our bodies still intertwined, and purred softly in my ear.

  “I’m happy.”

  I felt something in me shift. Of all the things women had ever said to me, I didn’t believe I’d ever heard anything so perfect, so damned heartfelt.

  “Me too,” I said.

  And the moment lingered, a blissful glow that made me think that maybe there was something closer to heaven on this earth than making love.

  * * *

  But despite the perfection of the moment, I still felt a growing anxiety on the inside. It was a familiar one, hard earned from years of disappointments and betrayals, and perhaps most prominently, my own knack for self-sabotage. It was the flat, dull feeling that crept around the edges of happiness, the one that whispered, Something is about to go wrong. How can you be so happy? There was almost a guilt in it, a sense that I didn’t deserve anything resembling lasting joy.

  You’d better wake up. Something is coming, the voice cajoled.

  I tried to ignore the doubts, the pervading sense that something was about to go wrong, but it seemed the closer Mary and I got, the deeper our relationship grew, the more I sensed doom—like the black waters rising in my dream—on the periphery of it all.

  By the time we were ready to leave for the cornfield, I was practically in despair, and Mary noticed.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just thinking how bad things would be without you.”

  “Why are you thinking that? That was a moment we just had. Don’t borrow trouble.”

  “You’re right. It was.” But she couldn’t mistake the pitiful note in my voice. I couldn’t mistake it either, and I hated myself, not only for letting it show but for feeling it in the first place.

  “Well, what’s the problem?”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Just the venom making me crazy.”

  Another old joke. I’d long believed the snakebite I’d suffered at seventeen had changed me profoundly. It wasn’t just the dreams; sometimes I saw things that couldn’t be there. Mary—like any sane person—didn’t believe in those kinds of things, so it had turned into a kind of joke between us. Except only one of us was really joking.

  “That venom is why I love you,” she said. “Makes you dangerous.”

  I laughed and leaned over to kiss her cheek.

  * * *

  We left at dusk in my truck. We both had flashlights and our firearms. Mary was excited, especially when I told her about what a jackass Lane Jefferson was.

  “Sounds like he could be friends with Jeb Walsh.”

  “Problem is,” I said, making the turn at the bottom of the mountain, “half the people in this damn county could be friends with Jeb Walsh, which is exactly why he’s here.”

  “I like those odds,” Mary said.

  “What odds?”

  “Well, you said half of the people would be friends with him, so that means half wouldn’t be. In an even fight, I always like the odds of the people with decency and morals. We’re gonna win.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I know I am. We’re smarter. We care more. We’re stronger because of it.”

  See? That was why I loved her so goddamn much.

  We turned onto Highway 18 just before we hit downtown Riley, and headed north toward Summer Mountain. Corn Valley was essentially the narrow strip of land between Summer and the Fingers where I came up and live now. The joke was that Summer Mountain was named that because it got the best weather, and it got the best weather because that was where all the rich assholes lived.

  Okay, so the joke didn’t say assholes. I included that word, mostly because it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to use the word rich without—at least mentally—adding asshole. Was I bitter because of my lack of money? Maybe, but I believed it was more indignation than anything else. But then again, like most people, I was really good at lying to myself.

  It didn’t take long for the scenery to change dramatically as I drove through the valley. Not only was the land flat here, but there was also a real sense of being swallowed up by the mountains on either side, like we were traveling across the base of a murky, flat-bottomed bowl, and the starry sky above was more than a sky. It was a hint of a better world, if only we could squirm over the lip of the mountains and out into free space.

  The fields on either side were dotted with the remnants of a past that had largely been forgotten: plantation homes and grape arbors grown over with every creeping vine until the dark night made them into the husks of previously sentient structures. It was hard to look at them and not imagine their stories like untold secrets tangled up among the spliced-together bits of man and nature. All of them seemed to suggest the same theme: nature wins.

  The corn came suddenly, like great waves, and it was as if the bowl contained even a deeper chamber, and we’d entered it, enclosed now not only by the mountains but by the corn stalks with their silky husks and tassels that seemed to whisper in the late September wind.

  Mary reached over and touched my arm lightly. I smiled at her, and she smiled back, but there was something under the smiles, something existential, something that made my heart ache the way a heart can ache sometimes when you’re with the right person at the right moment and you realize just how fragile it all is, how time, despite the deceptive way in which it lulls us all, wins every race in the end.

  “I’ve never seen corn so tall,” Mary said. “You could hide a dozen pot fields in here.”

  “All we need to do is find one, and we can take him down.”

  We crossed some railroad tracks, and I looked down them both ways as we went over, amazed how they sliced through the cornfields clean, what it must be like for the engineers to see this ocean of corn between these mountains, and for a second I wished I could be one of them, bound by nothing but the way forward.

  Because sometimes—no all the time—being bound to the land or to a person was a painful thing. When you thought about it, love—the true kind anyway—always ended in sadness.

  “Earl?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I thought you were fading out for a minute. You’re so damned quiet tonight.”

  “Sorry, just feeling my age.” Before she could reply, I saw something rising out of the corn on my left. A water tower was situated about thirty yards from the shoulder of the road.

  “Here we are,” I said, and pulled over off the right side of the road, leaving just enough space on Mary’s side, between the truck and the corn, to allow her to get out.

  “I don’t see Ronnie,” I said.

  “Do we really need him to look through a cornfield?” Mary asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  She gave me a look. “Really? I think me and you will be okay, Earl.”

  I swallowed and realized I had been feeling more than my age. I was feeling something else, something terrifying, something that had come alive inside me and had lodged itself against my chest.

  “We should wait for Ronnie,” I said.

  Mary—obviously on a different wavelength from me at the moment—leaned in for a kiss, and said, “Boring.”

  “We just need to wait, okay? He’ll be here soon—”

  Something flashed to my left. It was the briefest of lights, as if someone had flicked a lighter or maybe unlocked a smartphone. It seemed to have come from the water tower.

  “Did you see that?” I said.

  “See what?”

  “A light.” I jabbed my thumb at
the water tower. “It came from up there.”

  She nodded at the road. Headlights were coming toward us. “You sure it wasn’t the headlights?”

  I considered the approaching car, glancing from it to the water tower. “No. It came from the water tower itself.”

  The car blew past us, its driver and possible passengers hidden by the night.

  “Want to check it out?” Mary said.

  I looked at the water tower again. It was one of the old ones, wooden legs, corrugated tin tank. In the dark of night, it looked like some ancient god, holding watch over the fields, awaiting some sacrifice to be poured into the depths of its belly.

  I didn’t want to check it out.

  I’d never felt like this before. Normally, very little made me afraid. I relished conflict with the bad guys and actually wondered if my lack of fear might be a personality defect. But looking at that tower beside this dark cornfield frightened me like I’d never been frightened before.

  It was the dream. I didn’t want to admit it, but that was what was behind my fear, my hesitation, and I hated myself for it. I didn’t want to be the kind of man who believed his own visions. My father was that kind of man, and I believed it was this trait, this inability to see through his own delusions that had ultimately led to his downfall.

  I couldn’t let myself end up like him.

  I needed to just face it, and it would go away, I’d return to normal, be fearless again.

  “Okay,” I said. “Stay put.”

  “No way,” Mary said. “I’m coming too.”

  We both exited the truck. I was halfway across the road when Mary hissed at me. “Over here,” she said.

  I turned and saw her pointing into the cornfield, just past the truck. A light bobbed through the stalks like a firefly, flickering mysteriously.

  “Wait,” I said, but Mary was already gone, gun raised, through the wall of stalks.

  10

  I entered the cornfield and was immediately disoriented. I’d heard military veterans talk about something called the fog of war, during which they become confused and unable to determine the best course of action. I felt that now. In fact, I stopped almost as soon as I entered, trying to figure out where I was and what had happened to the road and the water tower. They were gone. It was all gone, replaced by the looming stalks and the claws of their tassels, which seemed to scrape the bottom of the starry sky.