The church doors kick open then, and you raise your gun. The smoke has cleared enough for you to tell it’s Ann walking back in, only what you see her carrying freezes your blood flow instantly.
“Oh, hey, partner, is that you coming to the rescue?” Andy croons.
“Shush,” you hiss back, but Andy’s a million miles away at the moment. Because you had assumed that when Ann returned, that she would have this boy they’ve been harping about in tow, and that’s what you’d steeled yourself for. Only here’s what you see instead: Hazel’s canvas bag slung over Ann’s shoulder.
Atop her cradled arms, Byron’s dollhouse.
“I got him!” she yells. “Now come on out. I’ll cover you.”
From behind the door, Andy sighs simian relief.
Ann sets the dollhouse on a pew before pointing her shotgun your way. “Listen up, Johnny Law. We ain’t got no beef with you. We just want out.”
“Where’s Casey?” you snap back.
“In the car,” says Andy, his head poking around the door, only the voice behind the mask has lost its adolescent strain.
The voice is now Byron’s. Clear as day.
“She’s here?” you ask.
Byron steps out, shoulder trickling blood. “In the back seat. Scout’s honor.”
And damn if he doesn’t offer the three-fingered salute with a white-gloved hand.
Ann—or Hazel, you should say now—shuffles past you, your weapons leveled at each other’s heads. When she gets to Byron she swings his good arm across her shoulder, the action causing her bag of jars to slip down into the crook of her arm.
In that moment they freeze for you, and you stare at this pair of adult-sized dollies arm-in-arm in a chapel.
If Grant Wood had done American Gothic on psilocybin mushrooms under gunpoint from Timothy Leary, this would be The Dolls.
“We’re gonna walk out now,” says Ann. “You stay aboveboard, and the girl walks. Deal?”
Whether or not they’re lying, you can’t get up to verify it, so you nod and lower your gun.
The Dolls reply in kind, backing away. At the dollhouse, Byron reaches down and opens the blue door, and from it he draws out a jar. Its contents are impossible to distinguish from your position, but when he tries to cradle it against himself, his wounded arm betrays him, and it slips right through his hooked elbow.
“Charlie!” he screams as the jar thuds on the floor.
It doesn’t break, amazingly enough, and only as it starts to roll do you finally see what’s inside. You recognize it from the pictures you were shown after Lacy’s miscarriage. Only yours hadn’t been as developed. Byron’s is older, maybe five or six months.
This was his son behind the blue door, the one that Andy’s now carefully scooping back up. The Sheppards’ son. Charlie. Their fetus. A shriveled marionette bobbing in formaldehyde.
It hits you then that Charlie’s been sitting in that dollhouse, which has been sitting in their car. Just how they’ve said Casey is.
All the grief you’ve ever accrued floods out of you then, and you raise your gun and shoot Hazel in the arm.
Oddly enough, she merely glances at the wound—watches mutely as her shattered elbow hinges her bag away, spilling out her jars. Several break. A couple roll close to your leg, and what they hold empties you of all lingering burdens.
A brain or a heart in each. Smallish, about the size of a child’s.
All those wholesome hearts and minds worth preserving.
For some reason you can’t put a finger on, you sigh before you blow Hazel’s brains out.
She crumples at Byron’s feet. Before he can react, you fire three more shots that rupture his jar with a horrendous crack, taking two of his fingers with it.
He slips gradually to his knees, and through a sea-lion yowl, starts to peel off his mask by its red yarn-hair. His face is in partial shadow, the light shaft from a stained-glass window raking the edges.
If Rembrandt had painted his Self Portrait at an Early Age through a...
Ah, fuck it.
You watch this all, dumbfounded. Watch as he scoops up the rubbery cadaver from the floor with his good hand, clutching it a while to his chest before laying it carefully atop Hazel’s body. Watch as he draws several epinephrine ampules from his duster’s pocket that he then squeezes into his neck.
You eject your spent shells and snap in fresh loads just as Byron hauls the shotgun out from under Hazel. He’s shambling towards you now, propelled by a death-moan, and it’s only now at this moment that your eyes finally meet. Suddenly, you’re absorbing everything about a face again—the squirrelly, baggy eyes, the thin lips, the double chin.
The terminal sadness this all adds up to, clear as crystal.
Raising your weapon, you smile and whisper Lacy’s name for the last time as flesh and blood.
You both open fire.
BOW CREEK
RAYMOND LITTLE
“That was boss.”
Jimmy glanced sideways at his friend in the passenger seat of the Ford pickup, unsure of the sincerity of his comment. “Really?”
“Yeah, it scared the shit out of me,” Henry said, his attention fixed on the end credits as they rolled down the big screen.
Jimmy laughed. “You gotta be kidding.”
“Who’s laughing? What’s not scary about a big fucking pink blob that crawls around eating people?”
“Anybody that got ate by that thing deserved it. My Grandma could have outrun it.”
Henry dragged on his cigarette and flipped it through the open window. “All I’m saying is, if you saw that thing coming at you, you’d pee in your pants.”
Jimmy unclipped the speaker from his window and hooked it back on its pole. “Well at least it was in color,” he said, commenting on the recent run of black and whites at the drive-in. He turned on the ignition and began to edge forward in his traffic line across the field towards the exit.
“Hey, is that Todd?”
Jimmy pushed his thick black-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose and squinted at the pale blue DeSoto Firedome two cars down with its unmistakable white body stripe and roof. “Must be,” he said.
“He’s got a chick with him.” Henry became animated. “Pull out, get alongside him. I wanna see who he’s with.” He leaned through his window and flagged the car on his side to a halt, “coming through, emergency,” he said to the driver, and Jimmy slipped the pickup into the gap. “Man, he’s with Caroline Prendergast!”
“No way,” Jimmy whispered as they pulled alongside the DeSoto. Todd had been chasing Caroline for a date for as long as he could remember, and he couldn’t believe his buddy had kept the news of his success to himself. “Hey, Todd.”
“Hey,” Todd leaned forward and smiled. “Some movie,” he said as the two vehicles crawled side by side.
“Hi, Caroline,” Henry said. “What did you think of it?”
“It was okay,” she said as she chewed on a stick of gum. “The guy was cute.”
“You two going over to the diner?”
Todd exchanged a glance with his date. “Nah. I have to get Caroline home by eleven.”
“See you tomorrow then, buddy,” Henry called as the cars parted. He turned to Jimmy. “Home by eleven my ass.”
Jimmy frowned. “What’re you talking about?”
“He ain’t taking her home. He’s heading up to the view, the dirty little bastard.”
The two of them laughed before lapsing into a silence for the remainder of the journey, each of them wishing they were the one getting dirty with Caroline Prendergast up on the view.
~ ~ ~
“We really can’t stay up there for long. My pa gets crazy when I’m late.”
“Ten minutes, that’s all.” Todd let his right arm drop from the back of the passenger seat onto Caroline’s shoulders, his left hand on the wheel as he cruised along the country road. His headlamps lit an oval of tarmac as it disappeared beneath the bonnet, the corn fields on either sid
e no more than a dark blur. “And it’s on the way to your house...more or less.”
Caroline smiled. “Yeah, of course it is, big-shot.” She gave his ribs a gentle nudge with her elbow. “And no funny stuff. This is our first date, remember?”
“I swear, no funny stuff.” He glanced at Caroline, who raised her eyebrows in an expression of disbelief. “Well,” he said, “maybe just a kiss.”
“We’ll see.”
Todd returned his attention to the road. He couldn’t believe he was actually taking the girl he’d been infatuated with for so long up to the view. And he meant what he’d said—to feel those sweet lips he’d fantasized about so many times upon his would be more than enough on a first date. From his peripheral vision he noticed Caroline lean forward in her seat. “Slow down,” she said.
“Why? What’s wrong?” He followed her gaze into the darkness beyond his headlamps.
“I don’t know. I just...I have a feeling.”
Todd eased his foot off the gas. “We’re still heading for the view, yeah?” He heard the neediness in his voice and hated himself for it.
“Slow down,” Caroline repeated as she peered at the windscreen and Todd felt something then, like a static current that caused the hairs on his body to stand on end, and a moment later he saw the figure in the road and stamped on the brakes. The DeSoto’s tires screeched as he swerved right, his hands fighting with the steering wheel to keep the car on the road as corn stalks lashed along the length of its body. He pulled left and the nose of the vehicle spun towards the middle of the road before coming to a stop so that the headlamps lit the way they had come.
Todd exhaled. “What the fuck was that?” Before Caroline could reply, he had his answer. The figure he’d almost run into stepped forward into the beam of light. “It’s a kid.” Todd saw that it was a boy, no more than ten years old. He looked at Caroline to ask if she was okay and saw that she was weeping. “Hey,” he squeezed her shoulder. “It’s alright, we missed him.”
“It’s Billy,” she said, and Todd noticed that she was smiling as she cuffed at her tears. “It’s my brother.”
Todd looked back at the boy and felt goose bumps break out down the length of his arms. Caroline was right—it was her brother—and Todd would have been relieved he hadn’t run the boy down if it wasn’t for the fact that Billy Prendergast had been dead for three years.
~ ~ ~
“All done, Miss Russell.” Jimmy removed his steamed-up glasses and wiped them on his shirt which was wet through. “I’ve put the mower away and locked it up.”
“Thank you, Jimmy.” She patted the cushion beside her on the wicker couch, “Come up here and have a glass of lemonade before you go. You must’ve worked up quite a thirst in this heat.”
“Sure have,” Jimmy said as he climbed up onto the porch. He took a long swig from the iced glass.
“And here’s your payment.”
Jimmy looked into Miss Russell’s unseeing eyes before reluctantly taking the offered buck. He had tried to decline the payment on the first occasion he’d cut her lawn the year before, but she’d insisted. “A buck’s the going rate,” she’d said, “and my money’s as good as anybody else’s.” He wouldn’t have minded doing the chore for free. Miss Russell was as nice a person as he’d ever met, though some of the folk around town had her down as a bit strange.
“How are your studies going, Jimmy?”
“Fine. I’m on course for the grades I need.”
“That’s good. An education is worth its weight in gold.” She turned her face to him, her eyeballs pure white except for a tiny black dot in the center of each one. “It means you can go places, and I don’t just mean metaphorically. You’d do well to get away from this town while you’re young.”
Jimmy looked at his house opposite, and at all the others in the street with their neat lawns and flower beds and identical white wooden cladding. “This old town ain’t so bad, Miss Russell.”
“But you’re only looking at it with your eyes.” She reached across and felt for the back of his hand. “There are things about Bow Creek that are rotten, Jimmy. Spread your wings when you get the chance.”
“Sure thing.” He finished off the lemonade. “Oh well, I guess I better go take a shower. Thanks for the drink, Miss Russell.” As he stood he saw someone approach the front gate from the edge of his vision.
“Hey, Jimmy!”
Miss Russell cocked her head. “Is that you, Henry Alcock?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“Do you have all your clothes on right now?”
Henry blushed at her reference to his infamous drunken streak at the town’s annual summer fair for which he’d gotten himself a night in Sheriff Kotter’s cell. “Yes Ma’am. I’m fully dressed.”
Jimmy stifled a laugh at his friend’s embarrassment. “You’d better get yourself along,” Miss Russell said to him. “And don’t let that silly boy get you involved in his high jinks.”
“Okay. See you soon,” he said as he descended from the porch.
“You shouldn’t spend so much time with that crazy old lady,” Henry said once he was sure they were out of Miss Russell’s earshot.
“She’s okay.”
“Okay, my ass. Anybody who’s okay doesn’t blind themselves with a skewer.”
“That’s bullshit. A stupid rumor.”
“Yeah? Well you’re the only one who thinks so, Pops.” Henry pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it. “Anyway, I ain’t here to talk about her. I’ve got a piece of news that you’re not going to believe.”
“Don’t tell me. You’ve changed your underwear.”
“Funny.” Henry looked around as if he was about to reveal a national secret. “Todd and Caroline have run away together.”
Henry stopped outside his front gate. “What’re you talking about? Last night was their first date.”
“Maybe so, but they’ve taken off in Todd’s DeSoto. Probably going to get married and screw their asses off in Vegas.”
“That’s nuts.”
“Yeah? Well tell that to Caroline’s pa. I just saw him over at Todd’s giving his parents a hard time.”
Jimmy considered it. Running away with Caroline Prendergast was an appealing thought. Hell, given the chance he’d do the same, crazy as it was. But it didn’t add up, not after one evening at the drive-in. “They haven’t run away. Maybe they just fell asleep in the car somewhere.”
“It’s noon, buddy. They’d have snuck back into their houses long ago if they’d fallen asleep.”
A sudden sense of foreboding overcame Jimmy then, and he glanced across the wide road at Miss Russell on her porch. “Then something’s up. Todd’s in some kind of trouble.”
~ ~ ~
Sheriff Kotter leaned back in his chair, his fingers laced across his considerable midriff as he studied the two teenagers on the other side of the desk. “This kind of thing happens all the time, Jimmy.” He puffed on the cigar that hung from one corner of his mouth. “Couples running away together, without any regard for their parents’ feelings.” He removed the cigar and pointed it at them. “I blame rock and roll. Kids are rushing to have intimate relations and grow up before their time.”
“But Todd and Caroline aren’t like that. They’re barely an item.” He exchanged a glance with Henry. “I’m afraid for their safety, sir.”
“Well don’t be. They’ll turn up.”
Jimmy felt a sudden anger forcing itself up from his gut and fought to keep his voice level. “But what if they don’t? It wouldn’t hurt to have some kind of search party out. They were heading up to the view. The woods around there stretch for miles.”
The sheriff squinted through blue wisps of smoke. “Are you trying to tell me how to do my job, son?”
Henry smirked and glanced at the hunting magazines on Sheriff Kotter’s desk. “Come on, Jimmy,” he said as he rose from his seat, “the sheriff’s a busy man.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy followed his friend to the door.
“Maybe we should go look for them ourselves.”
“Hey.” The two boys stopped in the doorway and looked back at the lawman, whose face had turned an angry shade of red. “Take my advice. Don’t go poking your noses around where they ain’t wanted.” He sucked on his cigar. “You’ve always been a good kid, Jimmy. I’d hate to see you get yourself into any trouble.”
“I don’t get it,” Jimmy said as they made their way up to the view in his pick-up. “Two teenagers go missing and Kotter doesn’t seem to care.”
“He’s a lazy bastard.” Henry wound his window down. “The only thing he cares about is beer and cigars and dicking around with Pat Fenton’s wife.”
Jimmy smiled. “Where the hell do you get these bullshit stories from?”
“It’s common knowledge, Pops, common knowledge.”
They found nothing at the view, and Jimmy wondered just what kind of clue he expected they might discover there. “What now?” he asked as they looked down on the slow moving river.
“I don’t know.” Henry glanced at the trees that surrounded the small clearing. “You could have a hundred men searching these woods, and they wouldn’t even scratch it.’
“Maybe Sheriff Kotter’s right,” Jimmy said as they got back inside the truck. “Maybe Todd will just turn up after all.”
~ ~ ~
Jimmy turned onto his side and looked at the fat moon through his open window as he listened to the radio turned down low. The Everly Brothers were harmonizing, telling him to dream. They were pretty cool, but Buddy Holly was boss. Jimmy remembered the first time he’d seen him on the Ed Sullivan show, wearing the same thick rimmed glasses that Jimmy had always been so self-conscious of. After that night, though, Jimmy wouldn’t change them for the world. His eyelids began to droop, and the voices on the radio merged with others as he slipped into a half-dream. “There are things about Bow Creek that are rotten, Jimmy,” Miss Russell said, before changing somehow into Sheriff Kotter, “I’d hate to see you get yourself into any trouble.” He heard himself moan, and a voice called to him, one that he’d known all his life. “Jimmy, wake up.” He opened his eyes and was about to turn the radio off when the voice called again.
American Nightmare Page 4
