Devil's Oven

by Laura Benedict

  Devil’s Oven

  Other Books by Laura Benedict

  Novels

  ISABELLA MOON

  CALLING MR. LONELY HEARTS

  Anthologies

  edited with Pinckney Benedict

  SURREAL SOUTH 2007

  SURREAL SOUTH 2009

  SURREAL SOUTH 2011

  Devil’s Oven

  Laura Benedict

  Devil’s Oven copyright 2012 Laura Benedict

  Published by Gallowstree Press

  Cover Art by John Hornor Jacobs

  ISBN: 978-0-9850678-0-9

  E-reader Version

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Characters, places, companies, and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Dedicated to the memory of Howard and Marie Baugh

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ivy Luttrell had pricked her thumb many times while sewing, but this time, watching a drop of her own blood melt into the seam she had just finished—the seam joining the head and neck of the beautiful man whose dismembered body she had found up on Devil’s Oven—she heard her mother’s voice in her head, a voice that rose from deep in her memory.

  “You have to expect miracles, baby, if you want them to happen.”

  Ivy rested a hand on the man’s motionless chest. It didn’t feel cold, or dead. Just still. She closed her eyes, squeezing out the harsh overhead light spreading over the trailer’s dining room table. She took a deep breath, and waited.

  • • •

  Ivy laid out the body parts on the table as though they were pieces of a puzzle. Her half sister, Thora, was down the hill, in the tidy house they finally built for themselves after living in the rusting hillside trailer for most of their lives. Ivy was a seamstress by trade, but she knew Thora wouldn’t understand what she was doing, why she would be stitching together a body she’d found in pieces up on the mountain. Thora wouldn’t understand that the body—the man—was a gift from the mountain. It was so much more than the bits of decorated pottery or dull arrowheads Ivy had collected over years of walking the mountain’s face. Devil’s Oven had taken her mother and father. Now it was giving something back to her.

  She had been mushroom-hunting alone, as always. As she bent to inspect a clump of scarlet-headed false morels, she noticed a thick, rounded fingertip—a man’s—poking up from the earth. But she wasn’t afraid or disgusted. Even after she recovered the rest of the body parts from their small, absurdly shallow graves, she felt more wonder than fear. It had taken her days to find all the pieces. She brought them down to the trailer one piece at a time, secretly.

  Never before had she touched a man’s body so intimately, bathing each part in the trailer’s tub with the same care she would lavish on an infant, drying it with thick towels she had sneaked out of the house. She had avoided toweling the most private parts, averting her eyes. Few of the clients who came to her to have their clothes altered or made were men, and Thora liked to tease her about the ones who were.

  “You act like they’re going to bite you,” Thora said. “I’m right in the next room. What do you think they’re going to do?”

  Time and again, Ivy told herself that she wasn’t really afraid of men. She had been friendly with a few boys in high school almost twenty years earlier, quiet boys like Tripp Morgan. The quiet ones never made fun of her badly repaired cleft lip, or the way she absently chewed her uncut blond hair when she was daydreaming, or her decades-out-of-date clothes that had belonged to Thora. They didn’t mock her to her face, at least. But there had been no dates, no parties, no special boy. Worse, she had begun to wonder if Thora was right when she said it was her own choice to be so shy, that she wasn’t bad-looking but was just too afraid to let a man near her. Was it possible that it was her own fault she blushed a fierce red each time she had to measure a man’s inseam, even as he held the end of the tape against his own inner thigh?

  Looking over the body, Ivy knew she had to start with something difficult, something bold, like attaching one of the severed legs to the torso. Her slender hands trembled as she threaded a curved needle with nylon that matched his olive-cast skin, and coated the nylon with a pinch of beeswax. If she was going to get all of the sewing done that night, she had to force herself to be brave about touching the body in those uncomfortable places.

  She was glad no one could see her as she clumsily shifted the right leg so that the ragged edges of the thigh and groin would meet. The curtains were pulled shut, but it wasn’t like anyone came near the trailer now, day or night. Not even Thora. The shabby building remained tucked against the side of the mountain only because Thora—stubborn Thora—had refused to have it demolished. Outside the curtains, a clear triangle of light illuminated the entrance to the old barn and nothing else. Their closest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away.

  There were people who said they wouldn’t live on Devil’s Oven for love or money, but she could never be one of them. It didn’t matter that there were books written about the disappearances and murders that had occurred there since it was settled over two hundred years earlier, and that in the last century, the mountain had seemed to reach out and pluck twenty different airplanes from the sky.

  Devil’s Oven was Ivy’s strength and nourishment. Her home and heart. What was there for her to be afraid of?

  It had given her the man lying before her. He could hardly be considered a threat; he couldn’t even object if her handling of him was careless. He was dead.

  Maybe.

  As she sewed a sturdy baseball stitch—it would show a little, but only to someone who was looking for it—she was careful not to pierce the grey-white cauls that had grown over the wounds while he was buried on the mountain. The cauls were taut, as though the flesh and muscle beneath them were under intense pressure. She had run her finger over the one covering the opening to his left hand, tracing the fine, knobby veins woven into the thing like lace, imagining that she might feel a pulse or some movement. She felt only a tepid warmth, but that warmth had been like a faint promise of something to come.

  It took her the better part of an hour to do the first leg, and the second took almost as long because it was harder to shift the body. The cauls had settled against one another, staying out of the way of her stitches. She was happy to find that the stitching held when she twisted and gently tugged at it. She rested for a while, flexing her fingers, which tended to stiffen when she did hand sewing. Realizing she had been working in total silence, she turned on the radio. The twenty-four-hour public station was all she could get on FM this late at night. It was playing a quiet symphony, something she didn’t recognize. She wondered what kind of music the man had listened to.

  He was a handsome man. She had positioned his head on the table so that it faced her chair. His lips were full, the color of cherrywood, the sort of lips she had always imagined would be described as sensual. The morning she lifted his head from its dirt grave, she had accidentally touched those lips, but she had avoided touching them a second time. They had been soft, but firm, like the rest of his skin. This had been a man who cared about how he looked. His hair wasn’t too short. It was deep brown and wavy, long enough to have significant curls but not look feminine. He was clean-shaven, too. It seemed to Ivy that almost none of the men she saw in town were clean-shaven anymore. And those eyes. She couldn’t help but imagine that his perfect, heavily lashed eyelids might open, and she would find him looking up at her, puzzled yet grateful. What color were his eyes? Would he be able to see her? Would she be afraid then?

&nbs
p; Finally done with the rest of him, she began to stitch his head to his battered neck. She thought about how different she was from him, how pale and thin and insubstantial she felt beside him. She pictured them walking down Alta’s Main Street together and gave a little laugh, a delighted sound that made the room around her seem brighter. They would be quite the sight! She, only five feet, five inches; he, like an exotic giant beside her.

  People might stare, but it wouldn’t matter a bit to Ivy. She and the man would be happy. Life would be a dream.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bud Tucker drove as slowly as he dared to the offices of the trucking company he owned. He wasn’t sure what he would find waiting for him. Maybe the offices burned down, his employees injured or harassed, or the trucks vandalized. His imagination didn’t usually run to the dramatic, but his thoughts had been disturbing of late, full of ugliness and fear. Death. Then again, he had never owed money to the kind of people who caused bad things to happen when you didn’t pay them back. He had only ever owed money to his old man, or the local bank, which was happy to take just an asset or two, or make another loan at a higher interest rate. This was new territory, and it was making him sweat in places he wasn’t used to sweating.

  When they had called first thing that morning, he was getting out of the shower, his six-four bulk dripping like a rain-washed monument. He stood on the warm marble floor of the bathroom, beneath which ran some two hundred feet of water-heated pipes, and watched the little red light on the muted phone blink one, two, six times, then stop. They hadn’t called the house before, but somehow he knew—he knew—it was them. Later, when he went downstairs, he learned that Danelle, the woman who came to keep house for them during the day, had picked up the call, but the caller had hung up without speaking.

  “It wasn’t a local number,” she said, turning from the refrigerator where she was putting away groceries. “Some people are just plain rude, Mr. Bud.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” Lila, his wife, his love, sat at the breakfast table paging through a book of patio designs. She had lifted her lightly freckled cheek to him for a kiss without looking away from the book. She was dressed for her morning walk, wild auburn hair tamed into a bulky ponytail that brushed the collar of her aquamarine anorak, her feet clad in white leather walking shoes.

  Bud shook an envelope of oatmeal into a bowl of water, then picked it up and put it in the microwave.

  Danelle took the bowl and shooed him away. “You sit down and read the paper,” she said. “I’ll get your breakfast.”

  “What do you think about slate around the hot tub?” Lila said. Their house had been one remodeling project after another within two years of its initial construction. She wrinkled her nose like a child, thinking hard. “Or maybe it would be too slippery.”

  She wasn’t really asking for his opinion. It was a game Lila played, pretending to include him in her decisions. He usually played along, but this morning he wasn’t in the mood to do much more than eat his breakfast and get out of the house. If he was home, and he was in danger, he was putting Lila in danger, too.

  “What’s the problem with the concrete that’s already there?” But even as he spoke, he was thinking that turning the concrete into slate would cost him at least two or three thousand. He wouldn’t have to pay the contractor for more than a month or two. By then he would have things figured out. Sooner, he hoped.

  “Concrete is just so boring,” she said.

  Lila hated to be bored. Her need for novelty was one of the reasons they were in trouble.

  Lila was his heart. His baby, his one true passion. He had a tough time denying her anything.

  • • •

  Let me do it, please, please. You trust me, don’t you?

  Lila stuck out her lip like a little girl being denied a special treat, and he laughed. They were living in a tired rental house and had been married for a month. She didn’t even wait for him to answer, but made him kneel down on the floor in front of the sink because he was so much taller than she.

  She spread the shaving foam thick, smoothing over the top and sides of his head. He liked having her close, liked that something so simple could make her happy. It didn’t matter that the floor was damn hard on his knees.

  Now, hold still, she said. I can do it better than you can because you can’t see behind your big ol’ head.

  He was tall enough that he could watch her in the mirror as she scraped neat rows with the hand razor into the lime-scented lather. Her clear green eyes were serious, and her breath was light on his skin as she bent close, steadying herself against him. At the end of every row, she shook the lather off into the sink and tossed her head to keep her loose red curls back behind her shoulders.

  With her slender legs so near, and her denim cutoffs tickling his back, he couldn’t resist reaching behind and running his hand up her delicious sculpted calf. But he paid for it when she jumped, squealing, and the razor sliced his skin.

  Damn it, Bud! she said. That was your own fault.

  You shouldn’t ought to put that so close to a man’s face, he said, sliding his hand up into her shorts.

  Look, you’re bleeding, she said. Her voice was scolding, but she spread the remaining cream over the cut. In the mirror he could see a trail of pink foam above his right ear. It stung, but he would never tell her so.

  You’re much better at other things, he said, tugging her shorts down over her hips to expose her white lace thong. Things I can’t do for myself.

  • • •

  In fact, Bud had a hard time denying anyone anything that sounded vaguely reasonable: Claude and the sales guys at the office, the rig drivers, Danelle the housekeeper. Everyone at The Twilight Club, the strip joint he had bought to diversify things a few years back when he was flush. Dwight, who managed the club for him, and the revolving cast of dancers and waitresses who worked there. They were all under his skin.

  He knew too damn much about the women at the club: their childcare problems, eating disorders, abortions, drug habits. He felt for their lack of privilege and worried that they didn’t care enough about themselves. If they wept in front of him, as they so often did, he had to turn away so they wouldn’t see the emotion on his face. It was his greatest weakness, this emotion, and he knew it.

  How many times had his old man mocked him, calling him a goddamn nelly boy? When he was a kid, it didn’t matter if he was standing at the end of the diving board, ready to show his dad the dives he had learned at summer camp, or suited up in his school uniform—navy blazer, gray wool slacks, shirt, and club tie—he had always felt naked and small around his father. Now his father, who had built a coal business from nothing, was eighty years old, and Bud, at forty-five, stood half a foot taller. He even shaved away his beard and the remains of his wiry blond hair every day so that there was nothing soft about him but his blue eyes and slight middle-aged paunch. But despite being bedridden, nearly deaf, and tended to by a nurse who changed his diapers, his father was still a bully who, with a single word, could make Bud feel like a loser.

  If his father would go ahead and die, like the doctors had been predicting for the past three years, all Bud’s problems would be solved. Olney Tucker was a bastard, but he had never threatened to write his only child out of his will. Up to now, Bud had managed to hold out, keeping a reasonable cash flow going to cover the needs of the people who surrounded him, suffocated him. But he had really screwed up this time, and was going to have to get the old man to bail him out. And although he knew it was a stupid and juvenile thought, he wondered if it wasn’t what he deserved for all those times he had wished his father dead.

  • • •

  At the trucking office, Bud exchanged nods with Claude Dixon, who was at his desk talking earnestly into his telephone headset. He had hired Claude as a clerk, not knowing he would eventually turn into the best logistics guy Bud had ever had. Claude was thirty-nine, and still looked like a kid. The drivers and clients all liked him, loved his jokes. But his c
hoice of a wife was a hell of a puzzle.

  Sheryl Dixon had graduated from Monroe Consolidated the year after Lila, had gotten a job at the Git ’n’ Go Mini-Mart and never left. Unlike Claude, who was skinny, tip-nosed, and always energetic, Sheryl was ponderous. She spent most of her time on a high stool behind the counter, maneuvering her bulk through the store’s narrow aisles only when she absolutely had to. She was only quick with her gossip. If it happened in Monroe County, Sheryl knew about it first. But when she and Claude stood side by side, they were a sight gag.

  • • •

  Bud closed the door to his private office and dialed Dwight’s cell phone. Dwight answered immediately.

  “What’s up, boss?” It didn’t matter what time it was, or if he had spent a whole day and night working at the club, Dwight always sounded alert, ready for whatever came at him.

  Sometimes Bud worried that Dwight was a little too alert, too ready to fix things.

  “Hate to wake you, man.” Bud absently slid the framed snapshot of Lila on the deck of their beach condo out of his direct view. Was there something he didn’t want her to hear? To see? Maybe he didn’t like the reminder that he couldn’t tell her everything. “I’ll be out of town for a day or so.”

  “Sure,” Dwight said. He hesitated. “Truck business?”

  They both knew better.

  “I need to take care of some things,” Bud said. “It’ll all be fixed up when I get back.”

  “Did something happen?” Dwight was agitated, as Bud had known he would be. “We can take care of it.”

  “Just look after the club,” Bud said. He liked Dwight, appreciated him. But he had let Dwight’s enthusiasm get him in too deep. “When you do the payroll, be sure to slip an extra fifty into Skye’s envelope. Her mother’s in the hospital.”