Scott Nicholson Library Vol 2

by Scott Nicholson

  A man was standing in the room, someone Reggie didn’t know. He was nodding his big head and scratching at his gun blue stubble. His shirt was off, and his plump red shoulders hunched into a pale, hairy chest. Then Reggie craned his neck and saw the rest of the room. Peggy was in bed with a man who had a Rebel flag tattooed on one side of his back.

  How many other guys do I have to compete with?

  Then he saw her face. Her cheeks were wet with tears, her nice yellow hair spilling on the pillow, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She was smiling, but it was a frozen smile, the kind you got when you were in church and the preacher told you somebody had died for your sins. Sort of like “Isn’t that nice?” but you wouldn’t mind being somewhere else.

  Peggy never wore that expression when Reggie was making love to her. She would giggle and nip at his earlobe, her breath fresh on his neck like a morning wind. And she always caressed his back and wrapped around him like one of those eight-armed Buddha babes. But right now her arms were spread out at her sides, palms turned up and fingers slightly curled, as if surrendering to something.

  Whatever that redneck was doing to her, she wasn’t fighting it. But she also wasn’t enjoying it. Maybe she really did love Reggie, the way she said. And he hoped that she was saving her special stuff for him. Reggie couldn’t complain about other guys getting their turn. After all, she was married. But he knew she would stay true to him in her heart.

  And now her redneck lover was getting up and pulling away from her. The other man got into bed with her. He was still nodding, but Peggy didn’t even blink, just winced a little as he entered her. Her head rocked back and forth as he went to work, but her eyes never left the ceiling.

  Reggie felt a hot firmness in his pants where the fabric pressed against the sun-baked tin. Maybe he could wait until they left, then he could have Princess Peggy to himself, to tell her that he was in love with her and would she mind letting him show how much?

  But he was afraid Little Mack would come home any minute, and then word might get back to Junior. Damn the world, always getting in the way like that. Love ought not be so fucking complicated.

  He slid backward off the roof and hooked his sneakers on a fat branch. Then he looped down to the ground and peered around the corner of the shed, ready to sneak back through the woods. But somebody was coming.

  A wrinkled, leather-faced old man with an eye patch stepped out of the silver trailer next door. He staggered slightly, as if his knee bones were realigning themselves with every step. The man walked to Peggy’s door and knocked lightly, then put his bat-winged ear to the door. He was grinning like a mud turtle as he pulled the latch and went into the trailer.

  That old bastard looks eighty, if he is a day. If he can get it up, then sweet Peggy is a miracle worker. But I don’t want to stay around to see if that particular wonder comes to pass.

  Reggie shuddered at the image of the one-eyed old-timer’s stained khakis dropping down around those varicose legs and knobby knees. He was sick now, disgusted at himself for sharing his soul with something that opened up for anything that moved. He was about to jog off, blind with tears, when a hand fell on his shoulder. He turned and found himself in the arms of a new kind of lover, one that made him forget all about Peggy Mull’s lies.

  ###

  Sylvester had traveled many miles. But distance no longer mattered to him. Or to the parent.

  Distance was only time, and shu-shaaa had forever. Forever to return to the bright hot center of everything where the universe began. Forever to cross space and rejoin its kind in a white collection of energy.

  Forever to gather its seeds together, the seeds that had been scattered by that cataclysmic explosion at the dawn of chaos. Forever to retrace the explosion that had spread the stars and matter and atoms and galaxies across the black mist of nothingness.

  Sylvester dripped with the glory of the parent, stewed in cleansing juices of perfection, and wallowed in the brilliant healing rays of the sun. Its warmth washed his flesh and the sweet breath of the far trees sang in his ears as his budding fingers found memory of the door latch. His mind screamed words, but words had no place upon those flowery lips. He dimly recognized the trailer park and the white metal box that had once had meaning, that drew him forward on some buried instinct.

  He was still much too human, human enough to know the parent was beyond names. Human enough to remember Sylvester Mull and the existence of pain. Human enough to know that hunger came in many forms. And the parent’s hunger drove Sylvester to harvest.

  He grabbed the boy by the shoulder, watched the human eyes widen as Sylvester bestowed the parent’s flawless blessings. They communed, mouth to mouth, and Sylvester tasted speerhorn stooge stoner prince, all crazy images, as their juices swapped genetic mutations. Then he let the boy fall, left him to answer his own calling, and continued toward the white metal box that had once been home.

  He wished he could say words. He wished that the parent would lift its green veil so that he might speak his human heart. But wishes were fruitless. His tongue had gone to seed.

  No matter. This was his door and doors were made for going through.

  The parent was hungry.

  And he was home.

  “Shu-shaaa.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Emerland negotiated the narrow, twisting road, cursing the stupid hick loggers who hadn’t bothered to remove all the stumps. The branches that hung low on both sides of the road swatted at the candy-apple red paint on the flanks of his Mercedes. He winced at the grating of wooden fingernails.

  Calm down. This time next year, or two years from now, this will be a two-lane blacktop. Hell, maybe even by autumn. These winding dirt roads can be yanked straight and these mountains can be shaped the way they were intended.

  He drove out from under the trees into the late afternoon sunshine. Blinded by the sudden light, he didn’t see the capsized SUV in front of him until he was almost upon it. He jerked the steering wheel to the right, hoping his tires didn’t fall into the same deep rut that the Pathfinder had hit. He bounced onto a flat patch of land and steered around the wreck.

  “What in the hell is going on here?” he shouted to the empty passenger compartment of the Mercedes. His only answer was the purring German diesel engine.

  Once safely past the Tracker, he slowed and looked in the rearview mirror. A thin layer of dust covered the overturned vehicle and the front grill and bumper were spattered with green goo. A small rivulet of brackish gold oil ran down the rut. He couldn’t tell if the wreck had occurred hours or minutes ago.

  The scene didn’t make sense to Emerland, and that made him uneasy. Someone who could afford to drive a new SUV could pay for a tow truck. And what was somebody with a new car doing in this neck of the woods? Or was it Mull’s, bought with DeWalt’s money? And where was the driver?

  He saw the Mull farmhouse a hundred yards down the slope. An old pickup truck was parked by the porch, its grill and round headlights making a grinning mask. The farmhouse itself was supported by locust poles and bordered with field stones, constructed back before the days of building codes. Emerland noticed that Mull had electricity and a telephone line, but no cable television or satellite dish. No doubt the old bastard had been dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, but probably had developed a taste for technological and material comfort by now. From such seeds, Emerland grew gardens.

  He drove up to the farmhouse and got out, smelling the damp woodsy humus and barnyard rot, and the rich odor of manure and stale hay. The air was heavy with the pollen of poplar and wild cherry blossoms. It seemed that the leaves had come out in the last few hours. The fields were actually rolling hills, just like the cliché, and Emerland tried the words on his tongue as a possible name for the new resort.

  “Hello. Mister Mull!” He was peeved that Mull hadn’t come outside to greet him. At least the old bastard could have stood on the porch barefoot with a flintlock across his arm, the way Emerland ha
d imagined.

  But whoever had spilled that Pathfinder might have gotten such a cold and menacing reception, which may be why the driver lost control.

  He had acquaintances who were developers, and they always talked about how obstinate these old mountain families were. Rumors went around that some of these backwoods rednecks shot at every three-piece suit that turned a cuff on their land. That they believed anybody who showed up without a hound at their heels was either a Revenuer or an evangelist, both of which meant you’d better be on your toes. That anybody who had all their teeth couldn’t be trusted. But that was ridiculous. The movie Deliverance was not a documentary. At any rate, Emerland wasn’t scared off that easily.

  Emerland enjoyed the hunt. The faint-hearted could go elsewhere, to backfill the Everglades or build shopping malls over abandoned toxic dumps in Jersey, making easy money. But their dreams were flat. Even if they built an eighty-story office building in Atlanta, they’d never reach as high into the sky as Emerland did with his mountain monuments. No one would be able to look down on him.

  He shouted Mull’s name again, growing impatient. He’d at least expected barking dogs. In the city, he would have clamped down on the car horn until he got results. But right now, he wanted to be the slick seducer, not the head-butting goat.

  He looked around at the land that would be his. The decrepit outbuildings looked like they’d be no challenge to a stiff wind, let alone Emerland Enterprises’s bulldozers. But maybe he’d let the barn stand, renovate it into an old-timey saloon, with rusty cross saws and staged photographs of moonshiners on the walls. The bar could charge eight bucks a shot for drinks named “Mountain Squeeze” and “Blue Ridge Brandy” and “Olde Firewater.” And maybe he’d leave the outhouse standing so the tourists could have their pictures taken in front of it.

  He yelled once more, then stepped onto the porch. Yellow-green chicken shit and old black stains covered the planks. The windows were boarded over and shuttered with pine slats. An old rocking chair, held together by twine and spit, showed an imprint of two bony buttocks in its frayed seat cushion.

  Yes, this old bastard would hop at the chance to move into a high-class condominium.

  The screen door was broken, splinters and wire mesh sagging from brown hinges. The front door was open. Emerland peered into the dark interior. The place was a mess, with furniture tilted over and shattered Mason jars covering the floor like spilled silver. Mull must have pitched a hell of a drunk.

  “Mister Mull, are you home?” he shouted through the doorway. His words were swallowed by the cold warped walls.

  Damned old coot. True, I didn’t make an appointment, but that must be his truck there. I doubt if that SUV came to take him away. And from the seedy look of this place, I’m positive Mull’s not out somewhere tending his farm.

  Emerland put his hands on his hips. He might as well walk around and get a feel for the place. Maybe he’d step into the woods and peek over the ridge at the view. Look at Sugarfoot and admire his own handiwork. But first, he wanted to check out the Pathfinder.

  Emerland pressed a hand to the SUV’s hood. The engine had cooled, which meant the vehicle had been there for a while. He knelt and stuck his head inside the shattered sunroof. Papers and cards had spilled from the glove box to the driver’s-side door. He shuffled through them until he found the white registration sheet. He pulled it out into the sunlight, looked at it, and let out a grunt.

  “I’ll be damned. Herbert DeWalt. Now what the hell is he doing over here?”

  He put this piece into the puzzle. Could DeWalt have been tipped off about Emerland’s plans? Emerland didn’t trust any of his assistants. He’d bought or stolen most of them from rivals, and he knew that the practice worked both ways. A well-placed bribe, forty pieces of silver here and there, had been known to tempt even the most faithful of inner circle members.

  But DeWalt had had three years to make a move on this property and apparently hadn’t reached Mull’s price yet. If DeWalt was after the land, he must have lost his old edge, the skill and instinct that had chopped millions from the bank accounts of others. True, the rich bastard had wheedled a few acres off of Mull, but that was a drop in the bucket. Emerland believed in buying entire mountains.

  He stood up and looked at the bristled pine ridge tops. Mull might be showing DeWalt around right now, pointing out boundaries and right-of-ways. And it would be just like DeWalt, from what Emerland had heard, to pretend not to give a damn that he’d just wrecked his expensive toy. Probably wrecked on purpose just to show off, like a cartoon character lighting cigars with a hundred dollar bill. Emerland clenched his fists in rage. If DeWalt wanted to go to war, Emerland was ready to bring out the big guns.

  Because he had made up his mind that this was his land. He walked toward the woods.

  ###

  James walked beside Aunt Mayzie, prepared to catch her if she stumbled. He wondered why she couldn’t watch from the porch like any normal person would. She could have seen plenty from there, the city workers decorating the stage and some of the vendors setting up their displays. But no, she just had to stick her nose into things, get right in the middle of those white people and bump their shiny shoes with the rubber tips of her crutches, smiling and saying ‘scuse me.

  All around them, people shouted and chatted happily, excited about tomorrow’s Blossomfest. Decorations hung from the light poles, giant yellow tulips that could be turned upside down and spray-painted silver for use as the town’s Christmas bells. Traffic had been detoured from Main Street and the asphalt was covered with hay-packed replica wagons and folded plywood booths. A banner proclaimed “Welcome to Blossomfest” in red letters on white vinyl, with Mayor Speerhorn’s blown-up signature at the bottom. The banner fluttered stiffly beneath a power line, catching the spring wind.

  James felt like a period typed onto a blank page, the way the white folks clustered around them. But with Aunt Mayzie, that made two periods, or maybe a colon. And he was so busy helping Mayzie weave through the crowd that he couldn’t keep an eye out for the mushroom creature in the Red Man cap.

  Oh, but I thought you decided that was a dream, bro’. Just a drunken nighttime sideshow. A wrong turn by that gray ball of meat you keep under your flattop.

  But James hadn’t convinced himself it was only his imagination. Because he wasn’t really the imaginative sort. In grade school, when the English teacher had told the class to get out a sheet of paper and play “What if?” James had stared at the tip of his pencil until his eyes crossed. He was always more concerned with “What had been.” And at the end of class, he’d turned in a page with one sentence scrawled across the top: What if I can’t think of anything?

  But if the subject was history or science, something with a past, James filled the front and back of a page in fifteen minutes. He was too analytical and left brained to create phantasms, fictions, or things that go bump. Not to mention thinking up a fruit salad scarecrow with green eyes and an alfalfa wig. So that would be that.

  Still, he found himself looking into the white eyes, searching for green light.

  Aunt Mayzie was having a grand time, talking to people she knew or asking vendors about the merchandise. They wandered past the soap makers and the tobacconists and barbecue cooks. One old man wearing fireman’s suspenders and a dark “NYPD” ball cap was weaving a basket from brown reeds. A blotchy-faced woman at the next booth, who was almost as wide as an elevator, stapled canary yellow bunting to the edge of a table.

  “What are you going to be showing, ma’am?” Aunt Mayzie asked, leaning forward on her crutches, her shortened leg angled behind her.

  “We’re delivery florists, but we also do flower arrangements. Weddings, funerals, that kind of thing. You want our business card?” the blotchy woman said without looking up.

  James looked around. The words “floral arrangements” had flooded his mind with too many unwanted images. He looked into the tops of the trees that lined the main street, expecting some sor
t of overgrown spider to drop down.

  “I’m not in any danger of either a wedding or a funeral,” Aunt Mayzie said to the woman. “Where’s your store?”

  “Down in Shady Valley. We get a lot of business from the university. You know, academic functions and such. And boys saying thanks to the girls, if you know what I mean.”

  The blotchy woman opened a gym satchel and handed Aunt Mayzie a card.

  “Petal Pushers,” Aunt Mayzie said. “Ain’t that a cute name, James?”

  James nodded, anxious to move on. The sun was starting to flatten out above the western ridges, growing fat and orange the way it did before it dropped over the side of the earth. And then the darkness would come. And even the sodium street lamps and the heavy police patrols wouldn’t make James feel safe. He cleared his throat.

  “We’d better go on and see the rest of the sights before dark, Aunt Mayzie. Plus, we have all day tomorrow, and I’m sure this lady wants to get back to her work.”

  “All right, James. You young folks are always in such a rush. Good luck to you tomorrow, ma’am,” Aunt Mayzie said.

  The woman nodded absently, already turning her attention back to her bunting, the heady aroma of flowers rising on the evening breeze.

  They walked to the Haynes House, a nineteenth-century home that had been restored as a community center. The music stage had been built on its grassy lawn beneath a big, dying oak that had been throwing down leaves since before the Cherokee hunted the hills. A couple of husky guys in flannel shirts were setting up the sound system, black Marshall stacks that had cones as big as manhole covers. Teenage kids hung from the porch rails of the Haynes House or clustered around the stage, sipping Pepsis and dreaming rock-star fantasies.