In the Valley of the Devil

by Hank Early

  But then the girl spoke, and something about her voice seemed more solid than a dream, and I knew then that I was awake. There was still a sense that I’d moved across a threshold, that I’d found a place where the regular rules of the road—and the world—might not apply.

  “You a cop?” she said.

  “No, were you expecting a cop?” I asked, stopping a few feet from where she sat, trying to steady myself against a sudden rush of vertigo. “Mind if I sit?”

  She looked at me closely. “Free country. But don’t get too close.” She held up her hand, and I saw darkly lacquered long nails. “I scratch.”

  I nodded and sat down, leaving a good three feet between us. “This okay?”

  She looked at the gap between us. “I guess.”

  She was about fifteen or sixteen, wearing torn blue jeans and a tank top. Her hair was short and curly. The most distinctive thing about her though were her earrings. She had a hoop hanging from each ear that looked big enough to shove a small bowling ball through. Her expression was guarded.

  “You’re not a cop?”

  “No.” I held up my hands. “I swear.”

  “You must be a drug dealer or something then.”

  I shook my head. “Why do I have to be either a cop or a drug dealer?”

  “Because I’ve lived in this trailer park my entire life, and the only white men I’ve ever seen here are cops or drug dealers. One man was both.”

  I nodded. “Well, I’m neither. So take a good look. I’m here because I’m looking for somebody.”

  “Okay. If he ain’t black, he ain’t here. So…”

  “It’s she. And she’s black.”

  “Well, I still think you might be confused. There’s only eleven women in the trailer park, and I’m pretty sure none of them are interested in being found by you.”

  “The person I’m looking for is named Mary Hawkins. She disappeared on the other side of the tracks a couple of days ago. Have the police not been out to talk to anyone over here?”

  “I saw some the other day, but they didn’t talk to me. I’m just a kid. Most of them deputies don’t even look at me, or they look at me the wrong way. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I think so. Well, I’d like to ask you some questions, if it’s okay?”

  She shrugged. “I guess, but make it quick. I’ve only got an hour and a half before the next train comes.”

  “It’s good that you know when it’s coming because this doesn’t seem like a safe place to sit.”

  She grinned, but there was no joy in it, only a rueful kind of exasperation. “You think there’s any safe places in the world to sit? Maybe for men like you, but not for me. So, I stopped worrying about safe. I only think about the places that matter to me—safe or not safe, it ain’t even about that.”

  I nodded. “I can appreciate that. What is it about this place, this bridge, that you like?”

  “You blind or dumb?” she said.

  “I … uh…”

  “’Cause you’d have to be to ask a question like that. Look around you. There ain’t no other place in the world better than this right here. Especially when the moon is out like tonight. God, I can feel the moon pulling my insides up against my skin. I figure it’s how it must feel to be a werewolf. Sometimes I wish I was one of those. Think about that. When that moon is up, you get to slip out of this world and go into another one, go wild, and when the moon goes down and you come back to yourself, you can’t remember none of it, but you feel … I don’t know … you feel relieved, like the demons are gone.”

  It was a strange analogy from a strange girl, but I had to admit it made perfect sense to me. When she put it like that, I wished I could be a werewolf too. But wishes were easy things. Reality was always more difficult.

  “Best part is when the next train comes along, I can feel the tracks beginning to vibrate.” She shrugged. “I like thinking about the train, where it is, what it’s passing by.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sounds nice.”

  “Most people think it’s stupid.”

  I shook my head. “It’s definitely not stupid. Everybody else who lives out here and doesn’t come out here to sit is stupid.”

  She smirked. “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “That thing. Patronize me.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not. I promise.”

  She looked me over closely. “What’s a white man looking for a black woman for?”

  “She’s my girlfriend.”

  “Now I know you’re full of shit.”

  I smiled and held out my hand. “That is probably true. Earl Marcus. And Mary really is my girlfriend.”

  She took my hand and said, “I’m not really supposed to talk to strangers, but as you may have noticed, I don’t put a lot of stock in supposed-tos. My name’s Deja.” She pumped my hand once and let go. “Just make sure you keep your distance, Earl.”

  I tipped my hat to her. “I promise.”

  “Well,” she said, “ask me something.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Have you really not heard about the missing police officer?”

  “I heard about it.”

  “Well, that’s Mary.”

  “I figured that.”

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “I heard Old Nathaniel got her.”

  “Old Nathaniel? You know the story?”

  “Everybody in the trailer park knows the story. My brother even saw him back in the summer.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Gone.”

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

  “I mean he’s been missing since July.”

  “Wait a minute. Start over. Where did your brother see Nathaniel?”

  “In the cornfield. He used to sit with me on the tracks sometimes at night. One night we were sitting out here, and over there in the cornfield”—she pointed across the river where I could just make out the darks stalks bending in the breeze at the edge of the cornfield—“we saw lights.”

  “Lights?”

  “Yeah. Brighter than flashlights. Two or three of them. Wayne—that’s my brother—wanted to go look, and he tried to get me to come with him. I told him to forget it. Was he crazy? Mama had raised both of us to stay on this side of the bridge, but Wayne didn’t care’. He said he was fourteen and not scared of some old story. He wanted to see.

  “So he went on over on his own. I sat right here and watched him disappear into the corn. He was gone maybe ten minutes or so, just long enough for me to get worried about him. I started across to look for him, when he came tearing out of the woods, running like his pants were on fire. He got to the bridge and shouted at me to go home, so I ran too. It wasn’t until we were both back home that he told me he’d seen Old Nathaniel.”

  “Can you tell me exactly what he saw, how he described Old Nathaniel to you?”

  “Well,” Deja said, “he didn’t really describe him to me. But he didn’t have to. Everybody around here knows what Old Nathaniel looks like. He’s tall and wears like a sack with eyeholes over his face. And below that it’s like a gray Confederate soldier’s uniform.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Did he ever say what the lights were about?”

  She shook her head. “No. He said he couldn’t find them and he was walking along in the corn, getting confused, when he heard a sound behind him. He turned to look, and there was nothing there. That was when he realized that it might be him, ’cause you know, he’s the Hide-Behind Man, right? A few minutes later, he heard it again, but this time he ran, and when he started running, he heard someone chasing him. He looked back and saw it was Old Nathaniel. He thought he was going to die then because that’s what the story tells you. Once you see him, it’s too late, but Wayne has always been fast, and I guess he was too fast for Old Nathaniel.”

  I shook my head. “Do you really believe he saw Old Nathaniel? I mean seriously? It’s not something that sounds realistic.”

 
“I know. But … I’ve never seen him so afraid. He didn’t want to leave the trailer for days. Then Mama sent him to the gas station to get some milk and…” She shook her head.

  “He never came back?”

  “Never.”

  “Do you have to go through the cornfield to get to the gas station?”

  She shrugged. “It’s shorter to go that way, but I don’t think it matters. I heard they’ll catch you on the road and take you to Old Nathaniel.”

  “Who’ll catch you on the road?”

  “Some white men.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “There’s stories all over the trailer park.”

  “Did you call the sheriff? When your brother didn’t come home?”

  “Of course. Mama called and called. He came out several times, and they looked all over. But in the end, he said Wayne was at that age where he would be “feeling his oats,” whatever that means, and we had to consider that he just took off. We told him that wasn’t like Wayne, and we told him about Old Nathaniel, but the sheriff didn’t want to hear that.”

  I just shook my head. I had no words for the anger I felt upon hearing Deja’s story and realizing that this was the second person to go missing in the last several months.

  The second black person.

  And they both had ties to Old Nathaniel.

  And what were the lights about? Brighter than flashlights? Deja was looking at me closely.

  “Sorry. Just thinking.”

  “About how my brother went missing and your girlfriend went missing around the same area?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Were you also thinking that maybe Old Nathaniel had something to do with her disappearance too?”

  “I don’t really believe in Old Nathaniel, but yeah, I think someone out there is using Old Nathaniel as a way to do some very bad things.”

  “I didn’t really believe it either. But then Wayne told me what he saw, and I know Wayne. He wasn’t lying.”

  I watched her carefully in the light of the moon. The river below us hummed, a steady rush of time sliding by. Somewhere below it all there was the insistent tick of a clock inside my own skin that was marking time against the moment when I’d either find Mary or admit to myself that I wasn’t going to.

  “Look,” she said, pointing across the train trestle, toward the dark edge of the cornfield. Her voice was a whisper. A gasp.

  I looked but didn’t see anything. “What am I looking at?”

  “Right by the edge of the field. It’s him.”

  I scanned the edge of the cornfield slowly, looking for a disturbance in the solid wall. I was almost to the place where the stalks ended and were replaced by trees, when something caught my eye. It was just an irregularity, a misshapen stalk. Or it was a scarecrow, leaning with hook-limbed dexterity on its stake. Or it was a man, wearing a bag over his head, standing out against the corn because he was unmoved by the wind while all the stalks bent and swayed and whispered a song in the tongues of reapers.

  And then the figure—be it man or scarecrow or misshapen stalk—dissolved, melting back into the endless and haphazard rows.

  “Did you see?” she asked, her voice like a slow breeze.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I did.”

  * * *

  When I made it back to my truck, it was nearly eight o’clock. For the first time since Mary had been missing, I found myself worried about someone else. Maybe it was the time spent with Deja, or the story about her brother, but whatever the reason, I found my thoughts returning to Wanda’s kids, Virginia and Briscoe, and what Ronnie had said about Lane Jefferson threatening Virginia.

  I climbed into the truck and glanced up at the water tower. No signs of life, just a dark relic of the past, one more object for the wind and the weather to wear down and turn to ruin.

  I put the truck in gear and drove well over the speed limit up to Ronnie’s place.

  I found Ronnie smoking a joint and watching porn on his laptop. His place, which had once housed a still and the men who used it to make moonshine, was no larger than a shotgun shack. It had two rooms. One of them was the den, where Ronnie was seated on the couch, the computer in his lap, and the other served as a kitchen, with a small table and a large cooler. He had a generator in the middle of the floor, but it was off at the moment. There was an outhouse about twenty yards from the shack, though from what I could tell, Ronnie preferred to do his business in the great outdoors.

  “You got to see this, Earl. This girl is truly gifted,” he said, without looking up from the computer.

  “Cut that shit off. I’m here because we need to talk.”

  “I can talk and watch.”

  I walked over and slammed the lid of the laptop. “You fucking owe me,” I said.

  It wasn’t planned. In fact, it was the opposite of my plan, which had been to come over and try to appeal to the part of Ronnie that had always wanted to be my friend.

  Shit. Now, I’d have to improvise.

  “I owe you? That’s interesting. Seems to me, when the chips were down not too long ago, you needed Old Ronnie to help you take care of some shit and keep his damned mouth closed about it, which I’d like to point out, Old Ronnie has done.”

  “Like that’s been hard. Considering your priors, you’d go to prison for the rest of your life if you spilled the beans, so don’t act like you’re doing something noble.”

  He held out his hands. “Fine, it’s not noble, but you know what was?”

  I waited, hoping he would say something that would piss me off enough to hit him.

  “Getting you and Mary to the cornfield to save my niece.”

  “That was just stupid. There were so many ways around that.”

  “Yeah, like going to the police? How would that have worked? Or going to you? Do you think that you would be able to save my niece?”

  “I think I could.”

  “Of course you could. How could I forget the all mighty savior, Christ our Lord, Earl Marcus?”

  “Fuck off. If you’re really concerned about those kids, you’ll go with me right now to find them.”

  “Find them? Why?”

  “You said Lane threatened Virginia. I just talked to a girl—a girl whose brother disappeared back in the summer. I think Lane Jefferson had something to do with it. The point is, he’s not above hurting kids.”

  “Well, shit, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. He’s a piece of garbage, makes regular criminals look like decent human beings.”

  “We can’t let him hurt one of those kids.”

  “How are you going to stop it?”

  I sat down beside him on the couch. I put my face in my hands. All I wanted was Mary. But it seemed like there was always one more thing to keep me from her.

  “Let’s ride out to wherever your sister is staying and check on the family. On the way, you can tell me who can help me find some dirt on Lane Jefferson. You do know where’s she’s staying, right?”

  “I got some ideas.”

  * * *

  On the way, he told me again about the man with the Old Nathaniel tattoo, the one who’d worked security at the warehouse on Summer Mountain.

  “Name’s Timmy Lambert. His daddy was in the KKK and raised Timmy to hate everybody that wasn’t white. Timmy was good at that. The thing was, Timmy wound up hating most whites too. Timmy was just a hateful kind of guy.”

  “You say was.”

  “Well, Timmy’s back in prison. This time he ain’t coming out. He sicced his pit bull on his girlfriend and her little boy. Waited until they were in the bedroom and let the dog in the room with them. That pit hated that little boy. Mama died trying to keep the dog off him.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That’s right. Jesus is the only one that can forgive Timmy Lambert.”

  “And he has the tattoo?”

  “Sure does. And he worked for Lane. To be honest, he was probably a lot closer to him than I was. Doesn’t mean h
e knows anything, but it would be worth a drive up.”

  “Hays?”

  “Yep. Hey, ain’t that where your brother and my grandfather are?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You know that.”

  He grinned. “I suppose we’ll have to pay them a visit if we go.”

  “Yeah,” I said, though I already felt myself dreading it.

  22

  My heart broke when I saw where Wanda was staying with the kids. The house was little more than a shell, burned out and overgrown with kudzu vines. When we pulled up, Virginia was standing on a bucket, trying to pull the vines away from the windows. The boy, Briscoe, was sitting in a bare patch of dirt, sucking his thumb and pushing his dump truck around. All of this despite it being after nine o’clock at night. By any decent standard, both those kids should have been getting ready for bed and school the next day.

  Briscoe grinned when he saw Ronnie and me get out of the truck. Virginia glanced at us and kept working.

  “Where’s your mama?” Rufus said.

  “Gone,” Virginia said.

  “Gone where?”

  Virginia shrugged and pulled some more kudzu off the low-hanging roof.

  “Why didn’t she take the car?” Ronnie asked.

  “It’s out of gas.”

  “How long has she been gone?” I winced, fearing the answer.

  “Since sometime last night.”

  “Jesus Christ, what is wrong with that woman?” Ronnie said. He balled up his fist and punched the front door of the house. I grabbed his arm.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “These kids don’t need to see you freaking out.” Oddly enough, seeing Ronnie freak out had calmed me down some. I would listen to my own advice. Getting angry about their idiot mother might feel good, but it didn’t do a lot to help them.

  “We’ve got to call the sheriff and get these kids some help,” I said.

  “No,” Ronnie said. “I promised Wanda I wouldn’t do that. I’ll take them to my place.”

  “Hell no,” I said. I honestly thought they’d be better off alone than with Ronnie. “We call the sheriff. He’ll get them some help.”