In the Valley of the Devil

by Hank Early

  I moved my flashlight slowly, tracing a wall of plants clustered so tightly they could have easily been mistaken for a single, impenetrable barrier.

  These stalks hadn’t been planted in neat rows like most of the cornfields I’d visited. These were tossed haphazard and thick across the land, so that it was difficult to see a way forward.

  “Come on,” Mary said. “Stay close.”

  I heard her voice but didn’t see her. I moved my flashlight slowly as I turned around, trying to locate the source of her seemingly disembodied voice.

  “You just passed me,” she said.

  I moved the light back, blinking into the dimness, and saw the edge of her and then all of her. How many times had I passed the light over where she stood and not seen her?

  And then she was gone again.

  I followed, coming to my senses gradually as my eyes became accustomed to the blinding presence of the stalks. Picking up my pace, I reached for her and slid my hand from her shoulder down her arm and grasped her hand.

  She squeezed and let go. “It’ll slow us down.”

  “Okay,” I said, but the words in my mind were Ronnie’s: “Stick together.”

  “We need to slow down,” I said.

  She stopped. “What’s going on with you?”

  I decided to come clean. “Bad dreams. A feeling something is about to go wrong. Something Ronnie said that didn’t sit right with me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That we should—”

  There was a clattering of stalks just behind Mary. It sounded like some wild beast was barreling through the corn.

  She turned, gun raised. Something pushed against the stalks near Mary, bending them forward, like a piece of buckled wood, before straightening again, leaving the stalks wagging, their tassels dripping corn silk into Mary’s hair.

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  There was no answer. But it was clear that whatever it was that had caused the damage to the stalks was still there. The night had fallen into an uneasy silence. A waiting.

  “Ronnie?” I said. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Then something happened that would stay with me for a very long time. Someone laughed. It came from behind the wall of stalks, an eerie tinkling of laughter that penetrated the wall of stalks like a sharp blade.

  Mary stepped back.

  “Show yourself, or I’ll shoot.”

  I meant it. I had my 9mm out, had it aimed steady at the place in the thick stalks, had it leveled at the place I guessed a man’s heart might be.

  The stalks whispered. The sounds moved away.

  The night let out the breath it had been holding.

  “Shit,” Mary said.

  “Let’s go back to the road. I think we’ve been set up.”

  “Either that or somebody’s trying to play a trick.”

  “Hell of a trick,” I said.

  “I know this question is going to sound crazy, but was that…”

  “A person?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think so. Just a person trying to scare us, I think.”

  “Why?”

  “Hell if I know. Come on.” When I reached for her hand this time, she grasped mine tightly and held on. After a few false starts, we found a path that led us back to the road.

  Once there, Mary walked to the truck and leaned against it, her gun still in hand. “Something’s bothering me too,” she said.

  I walked over and leaned against beside her. I had to piss, but that could wait until Mary had had her say.

  “My first thought when I heard that thing was of Jeb Walsh.”

  “Jeb Walsh? You think he’s running through the cornfield, spooking folks?”

  “No…” She shook her head. “I can’t quite explain it. It was the way he looked at me that day. It was … I don’t know … more than a threatening look. I could actually see the … I guess I’d call it calculation.”

  “You mean he was thinking of how to hurt you?”

  Mary nodded.

  I put my hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “Whatever that was—inside that corn—it had nothing to do with Jeb Walsh. Walsh might wish he could hurt you, but he can’t.”

  She nodded.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I guess we both got a little spooked.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to take a piss, and then I’m taking you to the house. Fuck Ronnie Thrash and his pot field.” I started toward the corn and had my pants unzipped, meaning to take care of business fast when I heard her groan.

  “I gotta go too.”

  “Grab a stalk,” I said.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  I closed my eyes as the piss started to flow. Daddy used to say a good piss was better than good sex, and though that made me question whether he’d ever even had good sex before, I did enjoy a good piss.

  “You okay?” I said, craning my head to see where Mary was. “Mary?”

  “Over here,” she said.

  “You didn’t go back in the cornfield?”

  “Just a little. I’m not peeing out in the open where a car could come by and—”

  She stopped abruptly.

  “Mary?”

  No answer.

  A drop of panic hit me. Just a tiny drop. I felt it somewhere in my neck as it spread, warming my face, tingling my scalp.

  “Mary?” I said, raising my voice as loud as I could without screaming.

  I cut my piss off midstream, wincing at the pain. Zipping my pants as I turned, I realized I’d put my 9mm on the truck, and now I had to go back for it.

  In my hurry to grab the gun, I knocked it across the roof to the other side of the truck. It hit the ground with a thunk.

  “Say something, Mary. Say something for me, please!”

  But the only sound was the wind, a high and lonesome keening through the stalks.

  Mary was gone.

  11

  I barreled into the stalks like a drunk, falling and getting back up and then falling again. Sharp husks cut my arms and hands. I dropped my flashlight. Picked it up and remembered I’d never retrieved my gun. I crashed back out and grabbed it. It was only then when I remembered my phone. I tried to call Mary only to find that I had no signal.

  I plunged into the corn again, trying to find a path, but there was something dizzying about the strange silence that greeted me. I broke it, calling Mary’s name.

  My voice fell flat, a dead bird crashing into another wall of stalks. I aimed my flashlight ahead of me, but its glow seemed to be swallowed alive by the layers of dark so thick there was no end to them.

  I reached out to steady myself on the cornstalks, and my hands touched corn silk like spiderwebs, woven by the relentless September wind.

  The moon was a thick thumbnail in the pearl black sky.

  As I moved deeper into the cornfield, I tried to keep the moon on my right, so that I knew I was heading in the direction I hoped I’d find Mary. Or Ronnie. Just thinking the name filled me with anger. Why had he not met us?

  This was his fault. His motherfuck—

  Relax. Just take it easy. She’s okay. You’re panicking.

  But why hadn’t he shown up to meet us? I couldn’t think of one adequate explanation.

  After a time, the wind picked up, bending cornstalks until they were nearly parallel to the ground. Voices rode the tail of the wind, soft, hurried. They were off to my right, and I immediately changed directions, even though there was a part of me that worried about getting too far away from “ground zero” so to speak. But I had to see what it was, who it was.

  When I heard the voices again, they sounded like they were coming from my left. I stopped to listen, but then either the wind shifted or I’d been confused, because now the sounds were directly in front of me. I plunged forward, breaking stalks as I barreled blindly into the dark, desperate to find a way forward, a path.

  A shadow passed overhead, and when I looked up, I saw it ri
sing through the sky, a dark kite. Bats, hundreds of them, eclipsing the cold moon shard and then vanishing into the empty spaces between the stars.

  I slowed down again, tried to think.

  I attempted a second call to Mary. This time I had service, but it went straight to her voicemail. Which meant her phone was dead or didn’t have service. We were way out, and I was a little surprised I’d even been able to get through. I tried one more time to be sure, but when I got the same result, I put my phone away and focused on getting my bearings.

  Gradually, I realized my eyes had adjusted and I could see better. The problem was the stalks again. It was almost as if someone had flown an airplane over this patch of land and dropped the seeds, scattering them to the wind, letting them land randomly, in a maze-like pattern instead of in the neat rows one usually imagined when thinking of a cornfield.

  Sometime later, still moving doggedly deeper into the cornfield, I saw a series of lights dancing in the small cracks between the stalks. I parted them with my hands, and glimpsed three men standing in a clearing with flashlights.

  One of the flashlights jumped. There was a shout, and then the light bobbed toward me.

  “Don’t move!” a voice said, and the flashlight was bright in my eyes.

  I covered my face with the arm holding the flashlight. “Where is she?”

  “Hold it, boys. I know this man.”

  The voice belonged to Ronnie Thrash. The light moved out of my eyes. I blinked several times, trying to get my bearings.

  “I’m sorry about this,” Ronnie said.

  My eyes locked on Ronnie. He was standing about ten yards away, holding a shotgun pointed at the ground. I looked at the other two men. One held the large flashlight, and the other a rifle trained on my head.

  “You set this up?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “What was it like then?” Despite the rifle that was a muscle twitch from putting a bullet in my head, I stepped forward, too angry to care.

  “Can we talk about this somewhere else?” he said, holding his hands up.

  I moved closer.

  “Stay back,” the man with the rifle said.

  “Don’t shoot him.” Ronnie had dropped his own shotgun.

  “I don’t take orders from you,” the man with the rifle said. He fired and I hit the ground, belly first. I reached for my gun.

  “That was a warning,” he said. “Put your gun down, or the next one will be in your mouth.”

  I let go of my 9mm and held my hands up.

  “This is Earl Marcus,” Ronnie said. “The one whose daddy was RJ?”

  Both men were silent.

  “Hell, you sure was excited when I told you about him the other day.”

  “What’s he doing here?” the man holding the light said.

  Before Ronnie could answer, I rose to my knees. “I’m looking for my girlfriend.”

  “She a black girl?” the man with the rifle said.

  “Yes.”

  “Johnny’s done taken her to Mr. Jefferson’s.”

  I looked at Ronnie. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “I can explain.” Ronnie held a hand out to his friend with the rifle. “If you’ll just lower that, Justin.”

  Justin lowered the gun.

  “Goddamn, you want to shoot somebody, don’t you?” Ronnie said. He walked over, holding out his hand as if to make an apology. I waited until he was very close before throwing the punch. It hit him square in the jaw, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say it lifted him off the ground. Either way, he crumpled like a piece of loose leaf paper. The man holding the flashlight whistled appreciatively. For a second, I didn’t think Ronnie was going to get back up, but then he lifted an unsteady hand.

  “I reckon I deserved that, but Jesus, Earl, did you have to make it so damned hard?”

  I reached down and grabbed him under his arm, dragging him back to his feet. “You’re going to take me to her right now.”

  “Sure, sure…” He tried to put an arm around me, but I shrugged him off. “She’s fine, Earl. I promise you that. I made him promise me he wouldn’t hurt her. He just wanted to scare her.”

  I almost hit him again and would have if I didn’t need him to take me to Mary.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Okay, okay. Boys,” he said, turning to the other two men, “pray for me.”

  * * *

  “He told me if I didn’t get both of you here, he was going to hurt Virginia.”

  “Who?”

  “Virginia, my niece.”

  “Who was going to hurt her?”

  “Lane. He would do it too. Hell, he probably already has. He’s a real piece of shit. The only reason Wanda ever got hooked up with him was because of his money. And the access to drugs. But, I told him I’d only do it if he promised not to hurt her.”

  “Do you even hear yourself?” I said. “You’re not making a lick of damned sense.”

  “I know it looks bad, but it’s going to be okay. We’ll just head up to the house and…”

  “What does he want with Mary?”

  “I’m not sure, but he promised he wasn’t going to hurt her. He said he just wanted to teach her a lesson.”

  I was beyond bewildered. First, why in the hell would Ronnie believe that Lane Jefferson wasn’t going to hurt Mary? And second, how did this asshole even know Mary or anything about her?

  I was about to ask him one of these when Ronnie pointed at a fork in the corn ahead. “Stay left,” he said. “Here’s the deal. Lane ain’t got no pot fields. At least none that I know about. He has me and some other boys watch the corn at night to make sure nobody comes snooping around. He said he wanted us to get Mary and take her to him. He was going to embarrass her and then let her go. He knew she was a cop. He was going to try to make it a story or something about her snooping around, looking for pot. Hell, I don’t know. It sounded like it was a stupid-ass plan to me, so I figured my best choice was to go along.”

  “You’re so dumb it makes my head hurt,” I said. “None of that even makes sense.”

  He stopped. “Look, I know you think I’m a degenerate, pothead, whatever. And maybe that’s true. I won’t argue with it. But I care about those damn kids. And Lane threatened Virginia. I did what I had to do.”

  “You care about them so much, you tried to rob their mother.”

  “Shit, Earl, she owed me that money.”

  “You’re a piece of shit, and you had better hope Mary’s okay. If she’s not, I may kill you.”

  That made him go quiet. It made me quiet too. The scary part wasn’t that I’d said it. The scary part was that I meant it.

  We worked our way through the thick corn in silence. It was a torturously slow journey. On more than one occasion, Ronnie led us down a path only to realize it was a dead end. Two other times, he stopped, admitting he was confused. Eventually, we found a relatively wide path and followed it for a while.

  “How much farther?” I asked.

  “Once we get out of the cornfield, it’s like a mile or so.”

  “Shit. Walk faster.”

  “Let me get a smoke. Hold on.” He stopped and pulled out a cigarette.

  I slapped the cigarette out of his hand. “Forget the damned smoke. Walk.”

  “I ain’t never seen you like this, Earl,” Ronnie said. “Jesus. You must really love that girl.”

  “Just get me there.”

  “Sure, but I don’t see why a cigarette is gonna hurt.”

  I glared at him, and he got moving again.

  “You should come by the house for a barbeque some time, so we could hang out when things ain’t so tense. I got a new grill and some really nice pot.”

  “That’s not gonna happen, Ronnie. You lied to me. You put Mary in danger. Can’t you see that?”

  “Can’t you see that I didn’t have no choice?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Even if it was true that he had no choice, I was too angry at the momen
t to care.

  “’Cause it ain’t like we don’t go way back, you know? Hell, me and you’ve shared secrets I’ll bet you ain’t told nobody before.”

  I let that go and was pleased to see trees up ahead instead of more corn.

  The ground sloped gradually upward as we walked, and I realized we’d walked so far that we were getting close to the base of Summer Mountain.

  From somewhere on my left, I heard the distant shriek of a train whistle.

  “What’s he trying to protect anyway?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Jefferson. You said he’d hired you to watch the cornfield. What’s to protect? Is he expecting somebody to steal the corn?”

  “Hell if I know. He just pays by the head.”

  “By the head?”

  “Two hundred for whites, four hundred for blacks.”

  I stopped. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  “He pays more for blacks? Why?”

  “Earl, you ain’t ever been hard up for work, have you?”

  “Sure I have.”

  “Maybe you think you have, but when you’re really hard up for work, you don’t ask but one question: How much? That’s all I know: two hundred for whites, four hundred for blacks.”

  “How many have you caught? Before Mary.”

  He shook his head. “We ain’t been at it very long. This is just the third night we’ve been out. We almost caught a kid last night, but the little fucker was fast.”

  I still didn’t quite follow the logic of paying more for blacks, but I decided to let it go. Hell, one way or another, Sheriff Patterson would be hearing about this. Lane Jefferson might not be growing pot, but he was doing something out here that wasn’t legal. I was sure of it.

  We kept moving, reaching the tracks just in time to see the tail end of the freight train blasting by, breaking the night into slabs of hot air and dense sound.

  Once it was gone, we stepped across the tracks, and Ronnie pointed at a little trail I would have certainly missed without him. It was overgrown and took us into the heart of the deep woods.