“Oh? Why not?”
Big place, where he’s going.
“Long trip?”
He’s already there, Chief.
• • •
“Just gone,” said Eli.
“Is that right, old boy?” Taft asked.
“His place?” said Eli. “Door’s not even locked. His stuff’s all there, clothes, food in the fridge, his stash. His truck’s parked out in the boonies—not far from you, matter of fact. Unlocked, pretty good payload of painkillers hidden in the cab. No Wes. Nobody’s seen him for, what, a week?”
“Well,” said Taft, “from what you said, he won’t be missed. Can I pour you one?”
“Just a short one,” said Eli. “No, he won’t,” he went on. “Sheriff’s tickled. Best he can think, Wes and some of his friends had a disagreement, and it didn’t end well for Wes. But you wouldn’t expect that to mean Wes would be gone for good. He and his friends don’t usually take things that far.”
“So you think he’ll be back someday?”
“It’s possible,” said Eli. “Sheriff’s cautiously optimistic. But it’s almost too good to be true, isn’t it? Fellows like Wes? They’re always there, aren’t they? You never really get rid of them.”
“Mmm.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” Eli went on, “how we were talking about Wes just the other day?”
“Mmm.”
“We were saying how if Wes were to go away, just go away, that wouldn’t be a bad thing,” said Eli.
“Were we, old sport?”
5
BEASTS ON THE BUS
UP IN THE FRONT, WHERE HE SAT WITH THE OTHER LITTLE ones, Toby turned in his seat and looked at the big girl. Suddenly she and her sister and their cousin had shut up and left poor Lucas alone. Toby looked again. The new driver was there. He was with the girls. He was doing something. What was the new driver doing? What?
The bus had pulled into a turnout and stopped. The driver, whom Toby had never seen before, had gone back toward the rear and was talking in a low voice to some of the older kids. Toby looked at the big girl, Mandy. He was afraid of Mandy. They all were.
Toby was seven and a half. He didn’t miss much, and here was something new. What? The school bus, normally a loud, clamoring barnyard of voices and misbehavior, had gone quite silent, quite still. The other younger kids at the front turned in their seats and looked. Toby was afraid to look. He couldn’t look. He looked. Sitting in Mandy’s seat, wearing Mandy’s leather jacket and Mandy’s backpack, and having even some sense about its expression of Mandy’s hardened gaze, was, unmistakably, a dusky, wrinkled, warted, and hideous amphibian—and not an ordinary amphibian, but about a two-hundred-pounder—Mandy, herself, being a heavy girl. What?
For the first month of school, Toby and the other grade schoolers had watched the Grant twins, Mandy and Candy, and their cousin, TJ Bush, tag-team poor Lucas Polk. They had watched as Mandy, Candy, and TJ worked Lucas the way a small family of timber wolves might work a motherless moose calf surrounded on a frozen pond. Morning and afternoon, as Lucas boarded the bus and made his way to the rear, Mandy tripped him. As he stumbled farther back, Candy hip-checked him into the kids in the seats to his right, causing them to shove him back into the aisle. When Lucas at last made it to his seat, TJ, immediately behind him, reached forward and snatched his hat, or, if Lucas wasn’t wearing a hat (guess why he seldom did), TJ grabbed his hair, yanking, and slapped his head back and forth from behind—playful slaps, arguably, but hard.
“Careful,” Mandy called to TJ. “Don’t get him mad. Don’t get Lucas mad. He might tell his dad on you.”
“I ain’t scared of his dad,” said TJ.
“You should be,” said Candy. “Hey, Lucas, shouldn’t he be scared of your dad?”
“But his dad ain’t around,” said TJ.
“That’s right,” said Candy. “Lucas’s dad ain’t around. Where is he, Lucas?”
“He’s in the joint,” said TJ.
“The what? What’s that you say, cousin?”
“The slam. Lucas’s dad’s in the slam. He’s in the big house. Ain’t he, Lucas?”
“Warden! Warden!” cried Candy.
“Is that right, Lucas?” said Mandy. “Hey, Lucas? Hey? I’m talking to you. Where is your dad, anyway?”
“Fuck you,” said Lucas.
“Ooh! Lucas said fuck! Lucas said fuck!”
“Warden! Lucas said fuck!”
“Where is he, Lucas? Where is your dad at?”
“Warden! Warden!”
Fifteen, twenty minutes: the ride between home and school took that long, no more. You can stand anything for fifteen, twenty minutes. Can’t you? Lucas looked out the window or he looked at the floor. The ride to school was better than the ride home. No, it wasn’t. Fifteen, twenty minutes: Lucas’s daily, rolling hell. And if it didn’t stack up very high beside other, older, more celebrated, more adult hells, still, it was no fun for Lucas.
• • •
“Poor kid,” said Taft. “How is it you know him?”
“His mom’s my cousin Sally,” said Eli. “She’s had a tough time, every way. Now it’s her boy. They won’t leave him be.”
“Bullies,” said Taft. “I saw it at school. They’re like sharks. They can smell a quarter-teaspoon of blood in the Gulf of Mexico. They go right after it. They tear away at it until there’s nothing left.”
“Somebody ought to stop them,” said Eli.
“But how, exactly? That’s the thing, old boy. There’s nothing to stop. It’s a word, a tone of voice, a look, a little shove in the hall, a moment. You can forbid it, but that’s not stopping it. The kids doing it, the bullies, have to stop it. They have to change.”
“Well, then somebody ought to change them, then,” said Eli.
“Somebody ought to, old sport,” said Taft.
• • •
Poor Lucas. Taft was right. The school couldn’t protect him from Mandy and Candy and TJ. The teachers couldn’t. The bus driver couldn’t. You would think he might. You would think a rural school bus in transit ought to be like a vessel on the high seas: a universe apart, self-contained, charged with a precious cargo, and therefore necessarily subject to a captain whose authority is absolute. Not at all. Old Bob Buchanan, the regular driver, was a vague, mild soul who had learned that the kids of today would eat him alive unless he remained invisible. They would eat him alive; or if they didn’t, their parents would. Bob knew what went on among his riders. He knew Mandy and Candy and TJ. He knew them too well. He wished he could help Lucas Polk. He knew he could not.
Time was, he might have. Time was, if a kid was out of line, Bob would have pulled over and kicked him the hell off the bus; let him walk home. No more. Kids didn’t get out of line today. Schools did, principals and teachers did, bus drivers did. Not kids. Today if you kicked an out-of-line kid off your bus, you’d soon have an angry mom on your doorstep. If she didn’t hear what she wanted to hear, she’d be back tomorrow with her lawyer. Bob was looking at five years to retirement, with luck, four. Therefore he drove the bus: he opened the door, he closed the door. Bob knew what went on behind him. But he reckoned the hell that began at his back was Lucas’s hell, it wasn’t Bob’s.
Where was he, Bob, anyway? Young Toby had watched as Langdon Taft (for the strange driver that day was he) cut the engine of the bus, set the brake, left the driver’s seat, and walked down the aisle to where Lucas sat studying the floor between his feet. Taft stopped.
Lucas looked up. He saw a tall, thin-built man, older, not from school. Nobody he knew.
“You get this every day?” Taft asked him.
“Get what?” asked Lucas.
“This,” said Taft. “Does this happen every day? With them?” He glanced at Candy and Mandy in their seat a couple of rows toward the rear. They were quiet.
“Pretty much,” said Lucas.
“Why do you take it?”
Lucas shrugged.
“Why don’t you do
something?”
“I did,” said Lucas. “Once I punched TJ. That made it worse.”
Taft nodded. “I suppose it did,” he said. “Let me try?”
“No,” said Lucas. “That would make it worse worse. A teacher? A grownup? They’ll just wait till you’re not here. Then it will be worse.”
“Not this time. This time’s different.”
“How?”
“Watch,” said Taft.
He turned to Mandy and Candy. The bus was silent. TJ, in the seat behind Lucas, watched. Taft stood over the twins.
“Get off,” he said.
“What?” said Mandy.
“Get off. Your ride’s over.”
“What do you mean, get off?”
Taft was silent.
“Who are you?” Candy asked him.
“Friend of Lucas’s,” said Taft.
“Lucas?” said Mandy. “What’s he been telling you? We don’t mean nothing. We’re just fucking with him. Lucas knows that. Right, Lucas?”
“Get off,” said Taft again.
“You mean, here?” Mandy asked. “You mean, now?” Her voice broke a little. “How are we supposed to get home?”
Dangerfield sat on the long seat in the very back of the bus. He wore the rusty scholar’s gown of an old-fashioned schoolmaster, with a scholar’s tasseled mortarboard cocked on his head and a long wooden rod in his hand for a pointer. He pointed the rod at Mandy. Tell her to hop, he whispered.
“Hop,” said Taft.
Not that way, sighed Dangerfield. The Talents, the Talents. Bring the Talents.
As Dangerfield had instructed him to do with Wesley Fillmore, Taft made an odd, fastidious little gesture in Mandy and Candy’s direction, as though he dusted a bit of lint off his sleeve toward them. Watching, little Toby saw that both the Grants, even as they sat in their places, had been changed. He hadn’t seen them change, but he saw that they had changed. They had been transformed. They had been turned from loud, strapping, jeering high school girls into large and loathsome batrachians.
“Go,” said Taft.
Mandy and Candy slid out of their seat and fell to the floor with a double plop, then, too stout to hop easily, they commenced to belly-flop their way to the front. Together they tumbled down the steps and out of the bus onto the gravel of the turnout, and began feebly hopping away down the road, Mandy ahead, Candy following.
In the bus, Taft wasn’t finished. He turned to TJ Bush. “Are you going with them?” he asked.
“No, sir,” said TJ.
“Do you want to go with them?”
“No, sir.”
“You don’t have much to say, do you?”
“No, sir.”
He did a minute ago, muttered Dangerfield.
“You did,” said Taft. “When you were going after my friend Lucas. You had a lot to say then. ‘Where’s your father, Lucas?’ you asked. ‘He’s in the joint,’ you said. ‘He’s in the big house,’ you said. Did you think that was funny?”
“No, sir,” said TJ.
“Why say it, then?”
“I don’t know.”
Dangerfield pointed his rod at TJ. Watch him lay it off on the girls, whispered Dangerfield.
“I know,” said Taft to TJ. “Those girls.”
“Yes, sir,” said TJ. “That’s it, sir. It was them. They always want to shit on Lucas, not me. We won’t do it any more, though.”
Dangerfield stood, leaned forward, and cracked TJ over the head with his pointer. “Ow,” cried TJ, ducking.
“That’s true,” said Taft, “you won’t do it any more.” He glanced at Dangerfield and nodded once, then turned and went back forward. He stopped at Lucas’s seat again. “What do you think?” he asked the boy.
Lucas regarded him. “I don’t know,” he said.
“They’re gone,” said Taft.
“TJ isn’t gone.”
“TJ’s finished. They all are.”
“Maybe.”
Taft smiled. “You’re a skeptic,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“You’ll see,” said Taft. Lucas didn’t reply.
Taft returned to the driver’s seat. He started the engine, let off the brake, and got back on the road. As the bus passed Mandy and Candy, flopping and lurching along the roadside, somebody in the rear began to clap. Soon the entire bus was cheering.
Little Toby was seated near the driver. “Hey,” he said.
Taft drove the bus.
“Hey,” said Toby again.
“You aren’t supposed to talk to the driver,” said Taft. “It’s distracting.”
“You aren’t the driver, though. Bob is.”
“True,” said Taft.
“Where is Bob?”
“Day off.”
“Were they toads or frogs?” asked Toby. “Mandy and Candy.”
“Toads.”
“They looked more like frogs.”
“Toads.”
“Will they always be toads from now on? Mandy and Candy? Are they toads for good?”
“I doubt it,” said Taft. “The toads wouldn’t have them.”
“So they’ll be back to how they were before?”
“No,” said Taft.
• • •
Taft was right. Mandy and Candy were in school the next day, and they were in human form (or what, with them, passed for human form); but they were much subdued, and subdued they remained. When not in class, they practically lived in the office of the school psychiatrist. In the halls of the school, if they met Lucas, they shrank to the wall and sidled fearfully past. On the bus they were mute and harmless. TJ was the same. Then it was learned that the girls’ father had taken a job upstate. He moved the family, and Mandy and Candy were to be seen in the valley no more. TJ was sent to a military school, where he was reported to be doing very well.
It was young Toby, in later years, to whom the incident on the bus when the Grant twins were silenced returned; Toby who experienced it again and again in his memory, puzzled over it, and tried to account for it. What had happened that day? What had he seen? Was Mandy and Candy’s transformation some kind of conjuror’s trick, an irresistible illusion? Who was the illusionist? Taft? Hard to believe. Someone else, then? Who? Nobody else was there. Nobody? Who was it in the back seat, then, whom Taft had nodded to at the end? That seat had been empty. Was somebody there?
At seven and a half, Toby didn’t miss much. He knew what he had seen. It was no magic trick. The girls, the toads, were real. But he got no further. How could he? He had no hold. Taft gave him none. That afternoon on the bus, as Taft drove along to complete the route, minus Mandy and Candy, Toby hadn’t left off questioning him. He got nowhere.
“What happened?” Toby asked him.
Careful, whispered Dangerfield. He stood by the doors of the bus, to Taft’s right.
“What do you mean?” Taft asked Toby.
“Mandy and Candy. What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes, it did, too. You did it. How did you do it?”
“Do what?” asked Taft.
“You know what. Turn them into frogs.”
“Toads.”
“Turn them into toads. How did you do that?”
“I told you before,” said Taft, “don’t distract the driver.”
Good, chuckled Dangerfield, that’s good, Chief—and he struck the dashboard of the bus a happy smack with his wooden pointer.
6
SORRY FOR CATS
PASTOR CHET CARTER, OF THE VALLEY GOSPEL CHAPEL, told his flock that, without the Lord, the condition of a man or a woman in this, our life, is utter solitude. We are born alone, we die alone—absent the Lord. He is present at our comings hither, and he is present at our goings hence: He and only He. Thus the doctrine of Pastor Chet.
Calpurnia Lincoln said Pastor Chet was full of it. “Born alone?” she said. “Nonsense.”
“You think?” Eli asked her. He had come by the Hospice for a visit with Calpurni
a. She sat in the easy chair by the window of her little room. Eli perched on the windowsill.
“Bald-headed nonsense,” said Calpurnia. “I know. I was born at home. We all were, at the old place on Bible Hill. I helped my mother when my brothers and sisters were born; at least I was there. Were any of us born alone? Nonsense. Mother was there, after all.”
“That isn’t what Pastor Chet’s talking about, though, is it?” asked Eli. “I don’t think your mother counts.”
“She might have thought she did, in the circumstances,” said Calpurnia. “Being she was the one having the baby. But, come on. Alone? It was like a party. There were a couple of aunts, cousins, the midwife, mother’s canary bird—you know: first came the doctor, then came the nurse, then came the lady with the alligator purse. Quite a crowd. Born alone? I should say not.”
“All that help. Where was your father?”
“Out in the barn buying drinks for the cows, probably. That’s where he was whenever he could be.”
“I liked your father,” said Eli.
“My father died in 1940,” said Calpurnia. “You weren’t even born. But as for dying, dying alone, same thing. Nonsense. Look at this place. You can’t turn around without somebody coming along to bring you your meds, your lunch; coming to change your linen, wash your windows, clip your toenails, do your hair; somebody wants to play some Hearts, watch the ballgame, visit. Dying? Well, sure, I guess. That’s what this place is, isn’t it? That’s why we’re here. Dying alone? No. Far from it. Mind you, I’m not criticizing. It’s alright here. I like it fine. But alone? Phooey.”
“You’re right about that,” said Eli. “You’ve got everything in here. Even animals. I saw a dog downstairs.”
“That’s Ringo. Belongs to one of the girls. Cindy? I think he’s Cindy’s. She brings him in to see people, get us all cheered up. Works, too. It’s a new thing they do.”
“A dog in a clinic? A dog in a hospital? Is that sanitary? I don’t know if I approve of that.”
“I don’t know if anybody cares whether you approve of it or not,” said Calpurnia. “We’re glad to have him, Ringo. I’m glad. That’s one thing I miss about this place, is my dogs. Do you remember any of my dogs?”
“I remember your cat. I remember Snowflake.”
The Devil in the Valley Page 5
