Mom found a plastic pan made of a yucky aqua color, but that was okay because yucky was just what the situation required. She held it under his face, and the snakes exploded from his mouth. His eyes squeezed shut in the effort of vomiting, and drops of something besides molasses beaded his forehead. His abdomen spasmed twice, three times, four, a pause, then a fifth eruption.
“Oh, my Lord,” Mom exclaimed to Dad. “Call the nurse.”
“He said this might happen. And look, it’s stopped now.”
“But it’s blood.”
“What did you think it would be, grits and sausage gravy? They just operated on his nose.”
Ronnie looked into the pan and his guts almost lurched again. A thick gruel of blood and mucus pooled in front of his face. And what were those things floating in—
Fingers. They cut off my fingers and made me eat them.
Dad’s words came as if through cotton. “What the hell are those?”
“Get a nurse.” Mom waved her hands helplessly.
The draft of the door opening wafted over Ronnie again, but this time it provided no comfort. He lay back on the raised pillows.
A tired-looking nurse looked in the pan. “Oh, those are the fingers of surgical gloves. The doctor stuffs them with gauze and uses them as packing.”
“How did they get in his stomach?” Mom’s voice was a thin screech.
“The packing must have worked its way down the pharyngeal opening of his Eustachian tubes. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about?” Dad’s voice was loud enough to make Ronnie’s head hurt. “It’s not your kid in the bed, is it?”
The nurse gave a forced smile that Ronnie figured she wore while giving medicine to somebody who wasn’t likely to last the week. A smile that plainly said, If there were another job in Pickett County that paid this well, he could puke rubber fingers until he choked, for all I care.
But all she said was, “I’ll see if I can find the doctor.”
After she was gone, Mom said, “You didn’t have to raise your voice.”
“Shut up.”
“David, please. For Ronnie’s sake?”
Ronnie wasn’t bothered by the argument. The relief of passing nausea was so great that he would have slow-danced with the pain bully, he felt so wonderful. So what if more sweat had popped out along his neck and in his armpits and down the slope of his spine? The stomach snakes were gone.
The act of vomiting also cleared his head a little. That was a mixed blessing. Or mixed curse. Because not only were the good wide thoughts gone, they were being replaced by memories.
Before he’d been wheeled into surgery, the sheriff had talked to him about the things that happened at the red church. It was scary enough just to talk to a policeman, especially one with a crewcut and a face that looked like it was chiseled out of stone. But the sheriff wanted him to remember what had happened, when Ronnie really, really, really wanted to be in the business of forgetting.
Forgetting the wet, slooshing sound his shoe had made as he jerked his foot from the graveyard grip.
Forgetting the raw, bloody arm reaching around the tombstone.
Forgetting the laughter that had fluttered from the belfry of the red church.
The sheriff finally went away, and they had rolled Ronnie to the operating room. Then came the needle and the mask and the wide thoughts and the darkness.
“How are you feeling, honey?”
He looked at his mom. Her hair was wilted and stringy, a dull chestnut color. She looked about a hundred and twelve, older even than Mama Bet McFall, the crazy woman who lived up the road from the Day farm.
“Better,” he whispered, and the air of his voice scraped his throat as it passed.
The door opened again and Ronnie craned his neck. The doctor was whistling an uneven tune through the scrub brush of his mustache. Ronnie would bet money that it was a Michael Bolton song. Or maybe something even lamer. Ronnie was almost glad that his nose was clogged. He would have bet double-or-nothing that the man was wearing some sissy cologne. He flopped his heavy head back on the pillows.
“I heard you had a little episode,” the doctor said.
Episode? Was that the medical term for vomiting up fingers?
“I’m okay now,” Ronnie said in a wheeze, mainly because the doctor was leaning over and reaching for his nose. And even though the painkiller was still dumbing him down, he was smart enough to know that being touched there would hurt like heck. Even through the molasses that encased his brain.
The doctor backed away at the last moment. “The packing looks like it’s still in place where the break occurred. I don’t think any harm was done.”
Nope. No harm at all to you, was there, Mr. Mustache?
“We could always roll him back into the OR and pack some more gauze up there,” the doctor said to his parents, as if Ronnie weren’t even in the room.
“What do you think?” Mom turned another shade closer to invisibility.
“I believe he’s okay,” the doctor said, fingering his mustache. “In fact, I’d say you could go ahead and take him home. Call me next week and we’ll schedule a time to take the stitches out.”
Dad nodded dumbly. Mom worked at the gnawed skin of her fingers.
Ronnie was eager to go home. By the time the nurse showed up with a fake smile and a wheelchair, he was sitting up in bed, feeling dizzy but no longer nauseated. As the nurse wheeled him to the elevators, he was floating away again. The outside air tasted strange and thick.
Ronnie was surprised to see that the sun was setting. He felt as if years had passed, not hours, since he’d fallen. Pinkish gray clouds wreathed the horizon above the dark mountains.
Mom had pulled her big black Coupe De Ville by the hospital doors. Dad eased him into the backseat and they were on their way home. They had gone about two miles when Ronnie remembered Tim.
“Where’s Tim?” he managed to ask. He was sleepy again, a molasses-head.
“At Donna’s. They went back to the graveyard to find his glasses.”
So Tim had survived the encounter at the red church. The Encounter. Sounded like a title for a cheesy monster movie. Whatever. His thoughts were getting wide again.
He wanted to be asleep by the time they drove past the red church.
He was.
“Didn’t see nothing,” Lester Matheson said. His face was crooked from decades of chewing his tobacco in the same cheek. He ground his teeth sideways, showing the dark mass inside his mouth, occasionally flicking it more firmly into place with his tongue.
“Last night, either?” Sheriff Littlefield turned from the man’s smacking habit and looked out over the rolling meadows. A herd of cows dotted the ridge, all pointed in the same direction. Like their owner, they also chewed mindlessly, not caring what dribbled out of their mouths.
“No, ain’t seen nothing up at the red church in a long time. Course, kids go up there to mess around from time to time. Always have.”
Littlefield nodded. “Yeah. Ever think of posting a ‘No Trespassing’ sign?”
“That would only draw twice as many. I’d never keep nothing out there that I couldn’t afford to get stolen.”
Littlefield shifted his weight from one foot to another and a porch board groaned. The Mathesons lived in a board-and-batten house on the edge of two hundred acres of land. Even Lester’s barns seemed better built than the house. It was roofed with a cheap linoleum sheeting that had visible patches in the material. The windows were large single panes fixed with gray strips of wood. The air coming from the open front door was stale and cool, like that of a tomb.
The sun was disappearing into the angle where Buckhorn Mountain slid down to the base of Piney Top. The air was moist with the waiting dew. Pigs snorted from their wooden stalls beside the largest of Lester’s two barns. Crickets had taken up their night noises, and the aroma of cow manure made Littlefield almost nostalgic for his own childhood farm days. “Have you ever seen Boonie hanging arou
nd the graveyard?”
Lester scratched his bulbous head that gleamed even in the fading light. His hand was knotted from a life of work, thick with blue veins and constellations of age spots. “Well, I found him in the red church one time, passed out in the straw. I just let him sleep it off. As long as he didn’t smoke in there, he couldn’t really hurt nothing.”
“Have you noticed anything unusual around here?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘unusual.’ The church has always been mighty unusual. But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”
“I’m not interested in ghost stories,” Littlefield lied.
Lester emitted a gurgling laugh and leaned back in his rocker. “Fine, Sheriff. Whatever you say. And I guess Boonie just happened to get killed in one of them gang wars or something.”
“Perry Hoyle thinks it was a mountain lion.”
Lester laughed again, then shot a stream of black juice into the yard. “Or maybe it was Bigfoot. Used to be a lot of mountain lions in these parts, all right. Back in the thirties and forties, they were thick as flies. They’d come down out of the hills of a night and take a calf or a chicken, once in a while a dog. But they’re deader than four o’clock in the morning now.”
Lester was a hunter. Littlefield wasn’t, these days. “When’s the last time you saw one?” the sheriff asked.
“Nineteen sixty-three. I remember because everybody was just getting over the Kennedy mess. I took up yonder to Buckhorn”—he waved a gnarled hand at the darkening mountain—”because somebody said they’d seen a six-point buck. I set up a little stand at a crossing trail and waited. My stand was twenty feet up a tree, covered with canvas and cut branches. Moon come out, so I decided to stay some after dark, even though it was colder than a witch’s heart.
“I heard a twig snap and got my rifle shouldered as smooth as you please. We didn’t mess with scopes and such back in them days. Just pointed and shot. So I was looking down the barrel when something big stepped in the sights. Even in the bad light, I could see its gold fur. And two shiny green eyes was looking right back up the barrel at me.”
Lester drained his excess juice off the side of the porch. The old man paused for dramatic effect. People still passed down stories in these parts. The front porch was Lester’s stage, and they both knew his audience was duty-bound to stay.
The sheriff obliged. “You shot him,” he said, even though he knew that wouldn’t have made a satisfactory ending to the tale.
Lester waited another ten seconds, five seconds longer than the ritual called for. “About did. I knew what he was right off, even though his fur was about the same color as a deer’s. It was the eyes, see? Deer eyes don’t glow. They just sop up light like a scratch biscuit draws gravy.”
“What happened next?”
“He just kind of stared back at me. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Looking at me like I was an equal, or maybe not even that. Like I was a mosquito buzzing around his head. He drew his mouth open like he was going to snarl, and his whiskers flashed in the moonlight. And I couldn’t pull the trigger.”
“Scared?” Littlefield asked, hoping Lester wasn’t insulted. But Lester seemed to have forgotten the sheriff as he stared off at the mountain.
“In a way I was, but that’s not the reason I didn’t pull the trigger. There was something about him, something in the eyes, that was more than animal. You might think I’m crazy, and you probably wouldn’t be too far wrong, but that cat knew what I was thinking. It knew I wouldn’t pull the trigger. After maybe half a minute of us staring each other down, he slipped into the woods, his long tail twitching like he was laughing to hisself. Like I was a big ball of yarn he’d played with and gotten tired of.”
The sun had slipped behind the horizon now, and Littlefield couldn’t read Lester’s expression in the darkness. All he could see was the crooked shape of the farmer’s face.
“I was frozen, and not just from the chill, either,” Lester continued. “When I finally let out a breath, it made a mist in front of my face. I was sweating like I was baling hay and racing a rainstorm. I strained my ears for any little sound, even though I knew the cat was gone.”
Littlefield had been standing more or less at parade rest, a habit he had when he was on official business, even around people he knew. Now he let his shoulders droop slightly and leaned against the porch rail. As a youngster, he’d hunted at night himself. He could easily imagine Lester in the tree, muscles taut, ears picking up the slight scurry of a chipmunk or the whispering wings of a nighthawk. Like any good storyteller, Lester had put the sheriff in another place and time.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m going on so about this mountain lion,” Lester said. “You’re asking yourself what that’s got to do with Boonie Houck’s death.”
“That mountain lion would have died a natural death long ago.”
Lester said nothing. There was a clattering inside the house, then the rusty skree of the storm door opening. Lester’s wife Vivian came out on the porch. Her hair was in a bun, tied up with a scarf. She had a slight hump in her back, a counterpart to her husband’s twisted face. The interior light cast her odd shadow across the yard.
“You done yapping the sheriff’s ear off?” she asked, her voice trembling and thin. She must have been a little hard of hearing, because she talked louder than necessary.
“Ain’t hardly started yet,” Lester said, not rising from his rocker. “Now get on back in the house before I throw a shoe at you.”
“You do and I’ll put vinegar in your denture glass.”
Lester chuckled. “I love you, too, honey.”
“You going to invite the sheriff in for pie?”
“No, thank you, ma’am,” Littlefield said, bowing a little in graciousness. “I’ve got a few other people to talk to tonight.”
“Well, don’t listen too much to this old fool. He lies like a cheap rug.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.”
The door sprang closed. The darkness sprang just as abruptly. “So you haven’t seen a mountain lion since then?” the sheriff asked Lester.
“Nope.”
“And you’re sure you haven’t seen anything strange around the red church?”
“Haven’t seen nothing. Heard something, though.”
“Heard something?”
“Last night, would’ve been about three o’clock. You don’t sleep too well when you get to be my age. Always up and down for some reason. So when I heard them, I figured it was one of those in-between dreams. You know, right before you fall asleep and your real thoughts are mixing in with the nonsense?”
Littlefield nodded, then realized the old man couldn’t see his face. “Yeah. What did you hear, or think you heard?”
Littlefield glanced at his watch, about to chalk up his time spent talking to Lester as a waste. The luminous dial showed that it was nearly nine o’clock.
“Bells,” the old man said in a near-whisper.
“Bells?” Littlefield repeated, though he’d plainly heard the man.
“Real soft and faint, but a bell’s a bell. Ain’t no mistaking that sound.”
“I hate to tell you this, Lester, but we both know that the red church has the only bell around here. And even if some kids were messing around there last night, there’s no bell rope.”
“And we both know why there ain’t no bell rope. But I’m just telling you what I heard, that’s all. I don’t expect you to put much stock in an old man’s words.”
The ghost stories. Some families had passed them down until they’d acquired a mythic truth that had even more power than fact. Littlefield wasn’t ready to write Death by supernatural causes on Boonie’s incident report. Since Samuel had died, the sheriff had spent most of his life trying to convince himself that supernatural occurrences didn’t occur.
Just the facts, ma’am, Littlefield told himself, hearing the words in Jack Webb’s voice from the old Dragnet television show.
“There were no re
cent footprints around the church. No sign of disturbances inside the church, either,” Littlefield said, piling up the evidence as if to convince himself along with Lester.
“I bet there wasn’t no mountain lion pawprints, either, was there?”
This time, Littlefield initiated the ten-second silence. “Not that we’ve found yet.”
Lester gave his liquid laugh.
Littlefield’s head filled with warm anger. “If you believe so much in the stories, why did you buy the red church in the first place?”
“Because I got it for a song. But it won’t be my problem no more.”
“Why not?”
“Selling it. One of the McFall boys came by the other day. You know, the one that everybody said didn’t act like regular folks? The one that got beat near to a pulp behind the football bleachers one night?”
“Yeah. Archer McFall.” Littlefield had been a young deputy then, on foot patrol at the football game. Archer ended up in the hospital for a week. No arrests were made, even though Littlefield had seen two or three punks rubbing their hands as if their knuckles were sore. Of course, nobody pressed the case too much. Archer was a McFall, after all, and the oddest of the bunch.
“Well, he says he went off to California and made good, working in religion and such. And now he’s moving back to the area and wants to settle here.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Me, too. And when he offered me two hundred thousand dollars for the red church and a dozen acres of mostly scrub pine and graveyard, I had to bite my lip to keep from grinning like a possum. Supposed to go in tomorrow and sign the papers at the lawyer’s office.”
“Why the red church, if he’s got that kind of money?” Littlefield asked, even though he was pretty sure he already knew.
“That property started off in the McFall family. They’re the ones who donated the land for the church in the first place. Remember Wendell McFall?”
Coincidences. Littlefield didn’t like coincidences. He liked cause and effect. That was what solved cases. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Couldn’t say no to it. But I had a funny feeling that he would have offered more if I had asked. But he knew I wouldn’t. It was like that time with the mountain lion, like he was staring me down, like he knew what I was thinking.”
The Red Church Page 5
