Littlefield

by Scott Nicholson

  Then again, he had little worth returning to: a bastard of a dad, few friends, and strange changes below his waist that didn’t seem to know in which direction to point. Vernon Ray was as lost as the Churr-rain man, whether he was a wino or a Civil War ghost.

  “I’m with Dex,” Vernon Ray said.

  “This don’t mean we’re going steady, sweetheart,” Dex taunted.

  “Okay,” Bobby said. “Majority rules.”

  Bobby stood aside and let Dex lead them back onto the tracks and toward town. Vernon Ray wasn’t sure whether Bobby was secretly disappointed or not, and he was too afraid to ask.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The morning was crisp and its breath held the threat of frost. Hardy was braced by the chill and always found the sunrise a glorious miracle that only the Lord could concoct. The only thing cockeyed about it, at least from his flesh-and-blood perspective in the opening of the barn, was that the sun made its virgin appearance each day over Mulatto Mountain, painting the peak in red and gold like it was getting licked with hellfire.

  Since it was Sunday morning, the developers’ bulldozers were silent. Even the roosters seemed sleepy, crowing like they didn’t give a darn whether they impressed the hens or not. The cattle were scattered across the sloping pasture, working the sweet fall grass. Wood smoke from the chimney whisked across his face, momentarily masking the aroma of manure and the rotting tomatoes in the garden.

  Donnie was playing in a stall, the one where Hardy kept clean straw. Whether inside the house or in the barn, he had to keep his son penned up. And he wasn’t sure whether the headshrinking doctors at health department were right when they said Donnie would be better off in a state hospital. Couldn’t be much worse than pacing around in a stall like a blind horse.

  Hardy peered over the stall door at his son. Donnie wore overalls, a father-and-son match, though Donnie’s were two sizes larger. Pearl had secured a straw hat on his head so Donnie could pretend he was a normal boy going to help his dad with chores. But Hardy couldn’t trust him with pitchforks, milk buckets, or horseshoes. Maybe he was doing wrong, as overprotective as he accused Pearl of being, but he didn’t want to allow any more pain in his heart by allowing his son to get hurt.

  “All right, Donnie,” Hardy said. “I got to go into the loft and throw down a few bales.”

  Donnie looked up and grinned, lips wet with drool. He tossed some straw into the air and it spun in the sunlight that leaked between the siding planks. A piece of chaff stuck to his chin. He looked happier than any of the kids Hardy had seen hanging around down at the bowling alley or the shopping mall. Then again, Donnie was probably the world’s oldest kid.

  Hardy gave a wave and Donnie raised both arms as if mimicking the gesture.

  I’ll take it. Hell, better than a trained monkey, and this one gets the Eggers name and birthright.

  “Someday, son, all this will be yours,” Hardy said.

  “Gwek,” Donnie said.

  “That’s right. With the price of beef going up, you might have yourself a future.”

  Donnie’s lips fluttered as if imitating the sound of a tractor engine.

  “You just stay here and hold down the fort and I’ll be right back,” Hardy said.

  In the loft, he shoved bales to the south end so he could throw them down a feeding chute. Though the cows didn’t mind short grass, the two horses were particular, and the three goats were big fans of fiber, though they were so picky they only ate the seed heads.

  Hardy had purchased the goats over in Solom to rid the pastures of briars, and they were so troublesome he’d wanted to get rid of them, but Donnie’s face had lit up when he’d first seen them. He’d clapped his hands and went “Gwa, gwa.” Most likely he’d only been suffering indigestion, not showing joy, but then Donnie wasn’t the only one grasping at straws these days.

  Hardy tumbled a few bales down and got busy rearranging a few stacks to make room for the fall’s tobacco crop. Since the Great American Cigarette Settlement, most small growers had sold out their quotas, the latest version of farm welfare. But Hardy continued to maintain the half-acre patch his own father had once reaped.

  He wasn’t sure it was due to habit, tradition, or a finger in the eye to all those liberal do-gooders who made smoking seem like the crime of the century. Whatever the reason, the income barely covered the property taxes for the dirt it grew on.

  Another reason to sell out to Budget Bill and head for greener pastures. I couldn’t make that much if I grew tobacco here for the next 200 years, but at least I’d help put a few nails in a few coffins before then.

  Hardy gathered the oak tobacco stakes, which were warped and gray with age. The tobacco stalks would be speared on the stakes and allowed to dry golden-brown in the sun, and then the crop would be hung from the barn rafters until it was the color of chewing tobacco spit. Long after the first frost, Hardy and Pearl would sit on buckets and crates and twist the leaves into bundles, talking over old times, swapping Bible verses, and doing everything they could to pretend they were happy and their son was normal.

  The tied bundles would be hauled to the warehouse auction in Winston-Salem, Hardy making the trip alone in the two-ton flatbed Ford. The Ford was so slow that the payment check would probably beat him back to the farm, where a stack of bills would be waiting for them both.

  A winter of split firewood, potatoes, and cabbage, and then they might be lucky enough to do it all again, with Donnie cooped up in his upstairs room with crayons and pillows as the blue happiness in Pearl’s eyes continued its glacial melt to gray.

  Hardy tumbled some stakes through the loft door, enjoying the knocking as he played an oversize game of tiddlywinks. He was about to toss down the next armful when he saw Donnie halfway across the pasture, climbing the slope.

  Headed for Mulatto Mountain and the Hole.

  “Donnie!” Hardy almost tripped as he tried to run before he’d tossed the stakes out of the way, and one of them rebounded off the wall and glanced him across the side of the head. Dizzy, he wobbled to the stairs.

  Donnie never tried to climb out of the stall before.

  Donnie barely expressed the coordination to walk to the bathroom, much less go hand-over-hand and place his feet in the right notches to escape. But now he moved like an athlete, still a little hunched and swinging his arms low, but motoring just the same. Hardy reached the ground floor and broke into a jog, his worn lungs wheezing, wishing he’d quit the smokes himself before they’d painted a permanent skin of tar inside him.

  Hardy wasn’t sure what would be worse, Donnie reaching the woods and maybe getting lost, or Pearl stepping out on the porch or looking through the kitchen window and seeing her 27-year-old baby boy escaping from the zoo.

  And the one question Hardy didn’t want to ask: Why was his catatonic son heading straight for the Hole, like a migrating bird picking up the magnetic currents of the Earth?

  And another question Hardy didn’t want to ask: What would happen when Donnie got there?

  Hardy pushed himself as hard as he could, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool weather. He reached to brush it from his eyes and came away with blood on his fingers. Hardy was gaining on him, but Donnie was just a few hundred feet from the fence.

  “Donnie!” Hardy yelled, wasting a precious gulp of air.

  Donnie’s head juddered up and down as if he acknowledged his name, but he didn’t slow a bit. A few of the cows lifted from their grazing and looked at them. Hardy dared a glance back at the house and it was still and peaceful, a thread of smoke rising from the chimney and stitching itself into the shredded clouds. Hardy wondered if he’d have been better off with the tractor instead of boot power, but it was too late for second-guessing.

  As if there were any other kind of guessing.

  Donnie was almost to the fence when the primrose shrubs and blackberry vines along the fence line shook as if rushed by a sudden wind. Hardy saw shapes among the undergrowth but chalked them up to lighthea
dedness.

  Surely those ain’t people in them briars?

  Then Donnie reached the fence and went up and over with the ease of a chimpanzee, barely causing the split locust posts to shiver. Even amid the fear, Hardy felt a surge of pride. His son was finally a man. Or at least a boy again.

  Then Donnie disappeared into the maple saplings, silver birch, and jack pine, and the shapes along the fence solidified.

  Men. Six or seven of them.

  Except they weren’t quite men. More like man-sized balls of fuzz, indistinct, though they stood and appeared to monitor Hardy’s approach. Then they grew a little more solid, and Hardy noted those familiar gray uniforms and the kepis on several of the heads. Just like Earley in the portrait.

  The things from the Hole.

  It wasn’t bad enough that they’d beckoned his son through some kind of invisible signal, they had to come down and meet him. Like a welcome party.

  A couple of the men were armed, bearing long muskets rubbed shiny with cloth. Hardy wondered what happened to you when you were hit with ghost bullets. Did they only kill ghosts, or could they work on the living, too?

  The way Hardy’s heart was beating against his scrawny rib cage—

  ratta-tat, ratta-tat

  —he didn’t think he’d have to worry about which way he died.

  The big sky squeezed.

  He fell to his knees as his chest muscles clamped down hard, and though his ears clanged with that goddamned metal drumbeat and he couldn’t suck in a breath, he forced himself to crawl toward the fence.

  The dead soldiers watched him with dead faces, their strange pale skin pocked with filth and their beards knotty and mottled.

  Hardy put one hand in a fresh cap of cow manure and shoved forward, making it a few more feet before he collapsed. Then he dragged himself forward by wriggling like a cold serpent fresh out of hibernation, crushed clover sweet in his nostrils. He found he could breathe again, and the grip behind his ribs gave way to the punch of a dozen glowing spikes.

  This was the part where he expected to hear trumpets and open his eyes to see a heavenly host of pillow-breasted angels, but all he heard was that confounded ratta-tat ratta-tat. He rolled onto his back and saw the world upside down, and the bearded soldier in the broad slouch hat floated through the fence.

  Funny, the things you see when you’re dying. I always thought it would be liquid sunshine and sweet Jesus Christ driving a golf cart.

  The officer moved toward Hardy, legs not moving, scuffed boots dangling inches above the ground. The man grew more solid as he approached, as if Hardy’s life force was being sucked from his heart and charging up the batteries of the long-dead spirit. He stood over Hardy and knelt down as if tending a fallen comrade.

  The officer’s eyes were deep and cold, and that same bottomless chill was mirrored inside Hardy’s throat. The man reached for Hardy’s face, and Hardy felt it was safe to go ahead and surrender if the war was already lost.

  Just before he closed his eyes, two sounds battled for storage space in the sodden silo of his brain.

  Pearl, yelling his name.

  And ratta-tat, ratta-tat, fading, fading, along with the soldiers, the October trees, the bearded officer’s face, the soft-clouded heaven that was now below, the dream of being a man.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “We should have brought Dex,” Vernon Ray said.

  “Nah, I’m tired of his pissing and moaning,” Bobby said. “Besides, he doesn’t believe in any of this.”

  “I’m not sure I believe it, either.”

  “Keep watching.”

  Bobby was lethargic, groggy from an extra hour of sleep. The laziness of Sunday morning had infected the woods as well. A church bell gave its soft toll in the valley below. If not for Vernon Ray’s obsession with whatever had happened inside the Hole–and his own memory of the whispered words from the cave–he’d be lying in bed touching himself or flipping through some Spawn comics while Mom burnt the bacon. Instead, he was on a ghost-hunting patrol.

  They had staked out a position on the ridge, in a stand of laurels where they couldn’t be seen, cushioned by galax and fern. Bobby wasn’t sure whether concealment did any good if you were trying to hide from ghosts. If they could float right through tons of granite, then they could probably see through trees. Vernon Ray peered through a pair of binoculars he’d swiped from his dad’s collection, and Bobby had a digital zoom camera he’d checked out from school.

  He was supposed to use the camera for a nature project, creating a slide show of fall flowers, but he figured if he nailed a ghost for “Show and Tell,” he could probably impress even Karen Greene. He’d been sniffing around Karen all semester, but she was currently hot for Josh Brannon, son of Titusville’s biggest car dealer. Bobby figured, as the son of a drunken plumber, he was barely on her Top 10 list, so any publicity was good publicity.

  Vernon Ray was sprawled on a North Face sleeping bag, a Boy Scout special, while Bobby had a ratty blanket. If Dex were along, he’d have brought an entire camping outfit, with tent, Coleman stove, and probably a global-positioning compass. Bobby wasn’t really resentful of his wealthier friends, because he’d never really known his family was poor until he’d gotten into the middle grades and the division between trash and treasure grew more stark.

  The trailer-park kids got free lunch at school, and Bobby was so embarrassed at getting his ticket punched that he’d stopped eating at school. Sure, the other boys hung with him because he was a pretty decent halfback and could drain three-pointers on the hoops court, but when his dad picked him up after practice in the rusty truck with scrap pipes hanging all over it, Bobby slunk away as fast as he could.

  But a digital photo of the creeps from the Jangling Hole would even things up. Bobby would be featured on the front page of The Titusville Times, maybe with a headline of “Legend Buster” and a mug shot that would moisten Karen’s panties, assuming she’d passed puberty, and she sure had the look of it judging from what she was sporting upstairs.

  “V-Ray, do you think a camera can see a ghost?”

  “Well, sometimes digitals capture orb phenomena, balls of milky ether that represent paranormal activity. Skeptics say it’s just lens flare or the flash illuminating specks of dust.”

  “You’re really into this.”

  “I don’t have any friends, remember? If it wasn’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t exist.”

  “Just like our imaginary friends in the Hole.”

  “Oh, they exist, all right. One of them tried to grab me yesterday and drag me in.”

  “Bull.”

  Vernon Ray laid down his binoculars and rolled up his right sleeve. “My wrist is still bruised. See?”

  Bobby didn’t think bruises were such a rare commodity. His dad roughed him up a bit, usually when drunk, and Bobby figured that stuff went on in every household, not just the poor ones. Dad had made an art of playful abuse, making sure the evidence wasn’t visible enough to be noticed by nosy neighbors or do-gooders in the public education system. But Vernon Ray’s marks were pretty ripe and impressive, the purple blotches spread out as if made by big, strong fingertips.

  “That don’t make any sense,” Bobby said. “If ghosts aren’t solid, how can they grab you?”

  “Manifestation.”

  “Do what?”

  “Manifesting into physical form. Sometimes they’re invisible, sometimes you can see them a little bit. So why couldn’t they make themselves real if they wanted? It’s not exactly like they have to follow the rules of physics. They’re obeying a different set of laws, learning as they go.”

  “Right. And you want to go back in there?”

  “I just feel some sort of connection. The Hole’s has been around forever, but nobody has ever offered any real proof of the supernatural. Mostly it’s just been urban legends dressed up in overalls and corncob pipes, with the Civil War flavor thrown in to play better to the audience. So why should the Hole become active all of a sudden?
”

  “The bulldozers ripping the mountain to pieces?”

  “Maybe. Ghosts are sensitive to disturbances of their resting place.”

  “Think it has anything to do with the Stoneman’s Raid re-enactment?”

  “Who knows? Maybe the ghosts have been walled inside the mountain listening to those bugle calls and shouts of muster and it triggered some sort of memory. If they get energy from the things around them, they get stronger the more they get pestered. Maybe they get a charge just from us sitting out here thinking about them.”

  “Man, this sounds pretty damned loopy, you know?”

  “Hey, all you got to do is tell this to a grown-up, and I’m sure you’ll get a rational explanation, a warning not to trespass, and a weekly session with the school shrink. Only kids can be trusted with this kind of knowledge.”

  Bobby took a sip from his Gatorade bottle and peered through the tree trunks at the grassy entrance to the Hole. “I reckon. But if we don’t see anything, this never happened, right?”

  Vernon Ray looked through the binoculars for a moment, then lowered them and turned to Bobby, red rings impressed around his eyes. The brown irises and thick lashes again reminded Bobby of Bambi, and he hoped his friend wouldn’t say anything stupid and sensitive. Why couldn’t he just be a guy, for Christ’s sake?

  “Thanks for coming along,” Vernon Ray said, though it looked like he wanted to say more.

  “Well, I’m a sucker for anything weird,” Bobby said, hoping Vernon Ray wouldn’t translate it into an invitation of some kind. “I mean, beats hell out of sitting around watching the race or doing homework.”

  “Think you’ll get in trouble?”

  “I was born in trouble.”

  Vernon Ray was about to respond when Bobby heard a pattering like rain on leaves. He squinted at the sky, and though some gray clouds had gathered, there was more than enough blue to patch a pair of jeans. The wind had picked up a little and the sun-speckled canopy was whispering in a parched autumn voice, limbs creaking slightly. “Shh,” Bobby said.