A Place for Sinners

by Aaron Dries

  Crucifixes sometimes become daggers.

  Wind blew hard off the coast and flowed into the church through the big open doors. Father Lewis’s smock billowed, revealing the outline of his wiry frame; the goose bumps prickling thirteen-year-old Caleb Collins’s arms had nothing to do with that breeze.

  “You’re not coming with me, are you?” he asked.

  5

  Dean Collins, an imposing man with a handlebar mustache and a gout-ridden leg, noticed that his daughter was gone from the tent just before sunset. The search had taken its toll. He leveled sugarcane for a living, and his body was as though carved from stone. It now looked half its size. Withered by fear.

  He’d circled Chinaman’s Beach and was almost back to where they had begun. From his current position, crouched in the V between two boulders, he could see the blue tent behind the fence near the cliff face. State Emergency Service volunteers were to his left, two baby-faced police officers on his right—local boys whom Dean had known for years. Boys refusing to look him in the eye.

  A violent storm had thrashed the coastline two weeks prior, and as a result, the landscape looked either half-destroyed or only half-built. The kind of place God just don’t care about no more, Dean thought. He shook his head and watched tendrils of mist curl around his ankles.

  The shotgun was heavy in his hands, cocked and fully loaded. His breath blew over the double barrels, making a faint tooting sound. “Please, please, bring me back my little girl.”

  A hand landed on his shoulder. Dean tensed but didn’t jump. He faced Clover, a man his own age who just happened to look a hell of a lot older. His huge, dark-skinned hands were covered in scars of different sizes, care of snakebites and saw wounds. And yet whenever Clover opened his mouth to speak, a thin and uncertain voice wavered out, with all the strength and substance of smoke. He’d been born Gordon Dunne, but christened Clover by his mates. He was “Shamrock Aboriginal”, a heritage he was very proud of, hence the nickname.

  “Dean-o. We’ve checked long and hard. I don’t think she’s here.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Mate—”

  “I said she’s here.” The wind howled, flapping the thin remainders of what had once been Dean’s proud, thick hair. “Girl’s got grit. I guess it’s easy to see what you don’t got in yourself when you see it in others, ’specially kids.”

  “Dean-o, settle down.”

  “She’s still just a kid. That’s why she strayed; it’s what they do. Damn it, Janine and I have lost her half a dozen times in shopping centers. It happens to everyone. You can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “You’re only one guy.”

  “She’s smart, Clover. That’s why she’s alive.”

  “I know. I never said she wasn’t, it’s just—”

  “I was reading in the tent,” Dean said, flat and stern. “Caleb was still sleeping. The sun was going down. I called out to her but she never came.”

  “We’ll find her and bring her home. You should turn in. Go to the missus and your boy.”

  “I’m staying put, Clover.”

  “Listen to me. I’ve known you for twenty years. You’s family, through thick and thin. You’ve helped me out when nobody else gave half a shit, not even my folks. Everything I got, I got you to thank for. So now it’s my turn to ante up, okay? Mate, I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’ve got to let me make this easier for you. Go home. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Fuck you, ‘I shouldn’t be here’. Pftt!”

  You don’t want me here because you don’t want me to see her body on the rocks. Or facedown in the water, pigtails floating around her head.

  Clover stepped close enough for Dean to smell his odor: part sugarcane, part alcohol.

  “Mate,” Dean said, clutching the gun as though for life. “In ’65 my parents parked their XK Falcon on the shoulder of a road, just out of Evans. You know the road. They stopped to poach a rabbit that’d ducked out in front of them. The old girl took a burlap sack out of the back and stood near the car, while my dad loaded his pistol with buckshot. It’d rained the day before and the earth was sloppy. Stupid bastards, shoulda known better. The car slid in the mud and rolled, killing her first. Dad didn’t stand a chance. Fuckin’ rabbit got away.”

  “Dean—”

  “My girl’s out here, lost somewhere. Clover, I’m coming back for her. I don’t want her to think I’ve left her, not even for a second. I’ll never stop. Not now, not never.”

  6

  Trees sheltered a path overgrown with lantana vine, whose bright flowers were inked by darkness. Amity spared a quick look over her shoulder at the tent where her sister and father were sleeping and stepped forward. She didn’t take the time to think of where she was going, or what might happen to her if she got lost.

  “Gonna go exploring, it’s gonna be fun. Fun, fun, de-dum-de-dum,” she mumbled as she stepped through the hollow of scrub. The wind rattled the vines around her. Amity screwed up her face; the lantana smelled like cat pee.

  Thinking about fairies and singing about Carmen Sandiego helped her take her mind off the musky stink. And then, without warning, a cloud of orange dust exploded from beneath her feet and shot up her nose. The ground had given way. A landslide of soil and scattering ants carried her through the cloud and into open air. Rocks. Flashes of gray waves. Screaming seagulls. Amity slammed against a narrow outcropping, cried out. Her little fingers scraped against the boulders. Barnacles lent grip to her sneakers. She shivered. Petrified. Amity felt the crevice of the cave’s opening on her right and shuffled inside.

  Before she had a chance to brush the ants from her hair, kamikaze bats began to squeal, flying circles in the small space before crashing into the rocks and dropping to the ground. Twitching and broken. Survivors flapped their leathery wings and jittered out into the dark.

  Once Amity had wiped the dirt from her eyes and saw that the radio she kept tied to her wrist was now in pieces between her knees, she began to whine. Picking up the shards of plastic, one by one, paved the way for tears that carved lines through her soiled cheeks.

  Amity didn’t wonder where she was, didn’t think about how she was going to escape—there was only the fresh sting of awareness: her most cherished possession had been destroyed, and not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would ever put it back together again. As far as she was concerned, it was the end of all music. And what did she have to show for it? Just some broken plastic. A shoelace tied around a wrist that now served no purpose, other than reminding her of this, the great loss of her life.

  “Oh no, no, no.”

  The lead bitch bounded from the dark and latched its jaws onto her thigh. Teeth sank through her denim jeans and tore at the flesh beneath. Blood squirted up onto the pink frills of her torn shirt.

  Pain.

  Pain unlike anything she’d ever imagined.

  Pain so strong she saw it as a very real, very distinct color. And that color was RED. It was like looking into the sun; it blocked out everything else. The cave was gone, as were the broken pieces of radio, even the dogs. There was only RED, boiling and alive.

  Amity wondered, where was the Papa-Jesus she’d heard so much about? Her mother always said that he was everywhere and in everything, but that was so hard to understand. Wasn’t Papa-Jesus an old man with a long white beard, as he was in the pictures she saw at school? An old man like that couldn’t be everywhere at once—that was just silly, just like the name “God”. Papa-Jesus made more sense to her, even if his absence did not.

  So maybe he’s a ghost.

  But ghosts were mean and hung around old houses, so that couldn’t be right.

  What about Baby-Jesus, then? What’s the difference between Baby-Jesus and Papa-Jesus? Baby-Jesus was a real person once, wasn’t he? So he’s like a friendly ghost? Like Casper. Does Baby-Jesus help his pa get around, kind of like the elves that help Santa in the North Pole? How does he hear everyone’s prayers?

&n
bsp; Wait, Santa Claus isn’t Baby-Jesus, is he?

  It was all so confusing. But through this confusion—through the RED—came that frightening question again: if Papa-Jesus was everywhere, then where was he now?

  He’s not playing by the rules, she told herself. And I know that ’cause little girls aren’t supposed to get hurt.

  7

  Caleb sprinted through his house and into the kitchen, stopping at the table in the middle of the room. Envelopes with phone messages scribbled across their faces, shopping receipts and old bills that his parents had doodled over—all went flying through the air. Though his face was flushed bright red with panic, his eyes were dark and focused.

  They aren’t here!

  He dragged a chair to the refrigerator, stood on the seat and reached up. Magnets that had been holding newspaper clippings and report cards in place shook free and scattered across the linoleum.

  Be careful, boy. You shouldn’t be doing this. You were told to stay put.

  Caleb stretched over the top of the refrigerator, shuffling dust and forgotten trinkets—a Vegemite jar full of sewing needles, a ball of twine. He heard the jingle of keys brushing against his fingertips before he saw them.

  Gotchya.

  He limped down the hallway toward the front door. He’d left it open. Leaves waltzed across the carpet, carried on the wind.

  Don’t go any farther, whispered a little voice in his head. You’re going to get in so much trouble.

  But he didn’t listen—he hardly ever did—and ran into the still-foggy morning instead. Caleb saw the limbs of neighboring trees fading out of the gray wash, the sliver of the dark road. The Holden was still in the driveway. He hobbled over to it, slipped behind the wheel.

  “Holy shit!” he said, looking down at the dashboard, knowing the word was something he shouldn’t say. But it didn’t matter; the guys at school said far worse things. They even dropped the f-bomb sometimes—the dreaded word that got you sent to detention quick-smart.

  His fingers were shaking so hard he struggled to get the key in the ignition. I’ve seen Ma and Pa do this a thousand times—it can’t be that hard!

  “Stop fighting me,” Caleb told the car. He closed his eyes, took a breath and funneled all of his focus into his fingers. Then, as though the key had been listening, it slid into place with a satisfying click. Caleb turned it so hard he could hear the crack of his wrist bones. “I did it! I did!” The engine revved and roared. He lifted his foot off the clutch and the Holden lurched. Stalled.

  Caleb peered in the rear-vision mirror and saw his reflection hunched over the gigantic wheel. It all looked so wrong. He was a teenager doing something that teenagers should never do—it was so much worse than swearing. He was driving a car without ever having been trained. And he’d seen enough episodes of Degrassi Junior High to know what happened to kids who drove without a license.

  Can teenagers go to jail? I’m not sure, but I think so.

  The engine rolled again. Sweat dripped over his lips and onto his tongue.

  He saw himself in a white room, face lined with shadows from the window bars. Sitting on the bed. Bound ankles. There were no sports posters on those walls. And even worse: no telephone.

  The car zoomed backward at an angle, ran into the garden and bounced over the curb. The postbox cracked in half and twirled through the air.

  He had no idea where the second car came from. Where seconds before there had been just a blank slate of fog, there was now a wall of rushing metal.

  The station wagon clipped the Holden’s tail, sending it spinning into the wattle tree near the property line. The sounds were intense: screaming tires, folding metal, the tinkle of glass fragments bouncing across bitumen. Pollen stained the mist. Leaves blanketed the windshield.

  Caleb’s heart thrashed within his chest. There was no pain. Yet. He straightened himself and looked in the rear-vision mirror again, the scented pine-tree card arcing back and forth beneath it. A jet of hot blood squirted across the dashboard. His nose had been punched flat.

  8

  Dean Collins followed his daughter’s cries. Clover was close behind. Crabs scurried from their hiding spots as the two men forced themselves between the rocks. The shotgun was gripped tight in Dean’s hands.

  Emergency volunteers crept down the incline—not an easy task, considering the fog glare. Wind whooshed off the ocean and carried the stink of salt and rotting things over their heads and through the town.

  Clover watched his best friend draw closer to the cave. “Go slow, Dean-o!”

  They were descending at such a speed that it would make stopping difficult. He’d only seen Dean run like this once before, and that was on the morning of Caleb’s birth. They had been cutting cane in Queensland—a rare freelance stint, cash in hand—when the call came through that Janine had gone into labor. Clover would never forget the shock on the man’s face. I knew this would happen, that expression seemed to say. I knew this would happen but I took the job anyway. What kind of husband am I?

  “Slow down!”

  Between the swooping birds, the slimy rocks beneath their feet and Dean’s gout-ridden leg, it was no surprise that his best friend fell. Clover heard Dean’s ankle snap and watched, helpless, as the bone shot up through the skin. Dean toppled to his knees, and in an instinctive jerk that would cost him his life, drew the shotgun close to his chest.

  A fist-size burst of light sparked so bright in Clover’s eyes that it lingered when he blinked, dancing in the dark. Dean’s head was gone. A mushroom cloud of skull pieces and brain exploded through the air, carried by the wind. It painted Clover’s face.

  The corpse rolled over the outcropping, fell ten feet and landed on hard-packed sand, ass first, as though sitting upright. The spine snapped in half and stabbed up through his shoulder. Twin fans of blood and shit burst from each trouser leg. Dean’s body slumped to the side, convulsed and went still.

  Clover could feel life draining from him, and watched the wavering hand at the end of his wrist, the fingers curling inward. Defeated. “Dean,” he said. Flat. Toneless. There was blood diamoned in his whiskers. The dogs in the nearby cave started barking again, more ferocious this time.

  “Help me!” came a voice.

  The shotgun, slick with gore, was wedged between two rocks five feet away.

  The feral dogs yelped, snapping their heads toward the gunshot. Amity was still fighting the cockroaches; their pursuit of warmth was relentless.

  The lead bitch swung around to face Amity and lowered its head. She saw its long, stained teeth. The gunshot had distracted the dog from its desire to possess the girl-meat, but not for long. This wasn’t the first animal the pack had cornered and toyed with before the sport wore thin and that desperate need to eat took over.

  Amity watched the shadow plunge over the cave entrance and sat upright, still scratching cockroaches off her arms. Wind blew again, creating a vacuum within the narrow crevice that made her hair flare around about her head. She forgot about the dogs, the cockroaches, the RED pain, and the shattered radio, which she missed above all else. There was just that shadow, too big and well defined in that pale light to be anything other than a man.

  “Pa!”

  The two dogs near the entrance leaped and snapped, thrilled by the excitement. Nothing worked them into frenzy quite like defending something. The lead bitch refused to take her piercing green eyes off the meat. Her hair stood on end, hindquarters tensed in readiness to pounce. She’d made the small pink creature fear and tremble—and that was good. Fear shook the meat from the bones.

  It made them sweeter.

  Amity watched the heavy industrial torch twirl through the air and snap one of the two dogs across the nose. It howled and turned, its tail between its legs, and ran into the rocky labyrinth outside the cave. It didn’t make it very far before its long, untended claws lost their grip on the barnacles and it dropped out of sight.

  The torch shattered against the cave wall. Cockroaches swarmed
over the bulb shards and plastic casing, too dumb to recognize their disappointment when no warmth or food was discovered.

  Amity wanted to scream again, only out of happiness this time. Someone’s come to rescue me! She wanted to jump up and down, to clap her hands like she did when her first grade teacher told her class that prizes would be awarded for the best crayon drawing—but she didn’t. The doggy’s eyes were still locked on her. And even worse, she could only see the man’s lower half, which raised a question she hadn’t considered before that exact moment: were those even her pa’s trousers? Maybe, maybe not. He did wear big, heavy boots like those to work, but there was something about the way her rescuer walked that struck her as decidedly not-like-Pa.

  But doubt didn’t matter, not in the end. “Help me, please!” she screamed anyway. “I’m in here! Wait, watch out—”

  The dogs leaped at the person who might or might not be her father. She watched those boots—which might or might not have belonged to the man who had said yes to her camping requests, who had vowed to keep her safe when she woke up at night, afraid of the monsters living in her closet—rise up and strike the smaller dog in the stomach, driving it from sight.

  The bitch knew that they were not alone, but no longer cared. There was only the meat. She would rather die than let someone else come along and snatch it away.

  Clover hunched down, inserted the gun into the yard-wide crevice and took aim. “Wolf, ya fuckah!” he yelled. A chill crawled through him. Random memories crashed around in his head.

  Dean Collins running through the sugarcane field, his skin blackened by dirt.

  His two-bedroom house on Cashmore Lane. The renovations that never seemed to get finished. A series of tarpaulins forever fighting northwesterly winds.