by James Sallis
Val hadn't gone home after all. She lay on the couch with one bent leg balanced across the other forming a perfect figure 4. Miss Emily was asleep on the armrest by her head. I tucked a quilt around Val, then went out to the kitchen and poured myself a solid dose of bourbon.
I'd made pasta earlier, and the kitchen still smelled of garlic. The back door was open. A moth with a body the size of my thumb kept worrying at the screen door. Frogs and night birds called from the lake.
J. T. had all but fallen asleep at the dinner table. Used to being busy, she said. Not being wears me out, plus there's the shift thing. She insisted on cleaning up, then the minute it was done went off to bed. That the bed was hers was something I'd insisted on, despite voluble protests, when she came to stay with me. I'd taken the couch. And now the couch had been retaken, by Val. And Emily. The house was filling up fast.
"Is Eldon okay?"
Wrapped in the quilt, Val stood in the doorway. Miss Emily bustled around her to go check on the kids.
"A little the worse for wear—but aren't we all." I told her what had happened. "Thought you were going home."
She sat across from me, reached for my glass and helped herself to a healthy swallow.
"So did I. But the more I thought . . ."
I nodded. There are few things like home invasion to rearrange the furniture in your head. "Give it time."
She yawned. "That's it, enough of the good life. I'm going back to bed."
"To couch, you mean."
"There's room for both of us."
"There's barely room for you."
"So where will you sleep?"
"Hey, eleven years in prison, remember? I can sleep anywhere. I'll grab a blanket or two, take the floor in here."
"You sure?"
"Go to couch, Val."
"Don't stay up too long."
"I won't, but I'm still a little wired. I'll just sit here a while with Miss Emily and family."
"Night."
I poured another drink and sat wondering why Miss Emily had chosen to live among people, and what she thought about them. Hell, I wondered what I thought about them.
Satisfied the kids were all right, Miss Emily had climbed to the window above the sink, one of her favorite spots. Glancing up at her, I saw her head suddenly duck low, ears forward.
Then I saw the shadow crossing the yard.
I was out the door before I'd thought about it, taking care not to let the screen door bang. A bright moon hung above the trees. My eyes fell to their base, seeking movement, changes in texture, further shadows. Birds and frogs had stopped calling.
Never thought they'd show up this soon.
I eased across the porch and onto the top step, looking, listening. Stood like that for what seemed endless minutes before the floorboards creaked behind me. I turned and he was there, one sinewy arm held up to engage my own.
"Nathan!"
His grip on my wrist loosened.
"Someone been up in them woods," he said, "going on the better part of a month now."
"You know who?"
He shook his head. "But early on this evening, one of them came in a little too close to the cabin, then made the mistake of running. Dog took out after him, naturally, came back looking pleased with hisself. So I tracked him down this way. Blood made it some easy."
We found him minutes later by the lake, lying facedown. Early twenties, wearing cheap jeans and a short denim jacket over a black T-shirt, plastic western boots. Blood drained rather than pumped from his thigh when I turned him over.
Nathan shook his head.
Dogs hereabouts aren't pets, they're functional, workers, brought up to help provide food and protect territory. Nathan's had gone at the young man straight on, taking out an apple-sized chunk of upper thigh and, to all appearances, a divot from the femoral artery.
"Damn young fool," Nathan said. "Reckon we ought to call someone."
"No reason to hurry." I took my fingers away from the young man's carotid. When I did, something on his forearm caught light. I pushed back his sleeve. "What's that look like to you?"
Nathan bent over me.
"Numbers."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I REMEMBERED THEM from childhood. I was six years old. They were everywhere. Covering the trees, climbing the outside walls of the house and barbecue pit, swarming up telephone and electric poles, making their way along the chicken wire around dog runs. There they erupted from the back of their shells and unfurled wings. Hadn't been there at all the night before. Then suddenly thousands of them: black bodies the size of shrimp and maybe an inch long, transparent wings, red eyes. The males commenced to beat out tunes on their undersides, thrumming on hollow, drumlike bellies. As the sun warmed, they played louder and harder. Dogs, the wild cat that lived under the garage, chickens, mockingbirds, and bluejays ate their fill. People did too, some places, Dad told me.
People thereabouts still called them locusts. My friend Billy and I collected their husks off trees and the house and lined them up in neat rows on the walls of our bedrooms. Later I'd learn their real name: cicadas. I'd learn that they emerge in thirteen- or seventeen-year cycles, coming out in May, all dead by June. The male dies not long after coupling, whereupon the female takes to a tree, cuts as many as fifty slits in one of the branches, and deposits 400 to 600 eggs. Once her egg supply is gone, she dies too. Six to eight weeks later the nymphs hatch and fall to the ground, burrowing in a foot or so and living off sap sucked from tree roots until it's their turn to emerge, climb, shed skins, unfurl wings.
Most of this I learned forty-odd years later.
Not a title—my name, Bishop Holden told me at our first meeting. He and I were of an age. When, after my childhood experience of them, the cicadas came again, I was in a jungle half a world away and Bishop was in line at the local draft where, told to turn his head and cough, he instead grabbed the doctor's head in both hands and planted a hard, wet kiss on his lips. He was carried away, discoursing incoherently of conspiracies and government-funded coups, and remanded by courts to the local psychiatric hospital. He'd been in and out of one or another of them most of his life. At the last, during convulsions caused by a bad drug reaction, he'd bitten off the finger of an orderly trying to help him and developed something of a taste for flesh. He'd bagged another finger, half an ear, and a big toe before (as he said) putting himself on a strict diet.
He had skin like a scrubbed red potato, pouchlike, leathery cheeks. In khakis, cardigan, and canvas shoes, he reminded me of Mr. Rogers.
"Ready for them?" he asked. Our chairs stood at a right angle, a small shellacked table pushed close in to the apex. I turned my head to him. His turned to the window.
Ready for what exactly, I asked.
"The cicadas. It's time. I've called them."
Called them up from the depths of the earth itself, he said; and while I was never to learn much about Bishop Holden, over the next hour and in later sessions (until one bright morning he bit through the chain of a charm bracelet on the wrist of a teenage girl passing his breakfast sandwich through a carryout window) I learned quite a lot about cicadas.
Now, so many years later and a bit further south, it was time for them again.
Two abandoned shells, spurs hooked into mesh, hung on the screen of the window above the sink when I got up the next morning. It sounded as though a fleet of miniature farm machinery, tiny tractors and combines and threshers, had invaded the yard.
Thanks to Bishop, I knew that three distinct species always surface at the same time, and that each has not only its own specific sound but a favored time of day as well. Someone once said that the three sounded in turn like the word pharaoh, a sizzling skillet, and a rotary lawn sprinkler. The morning cicadas, the sizzlers, were hard at their work.
"What the hell is that racket?" J. T. asked from the doorway. I told her.
She came up close behind me and stood watching as they swarmed.
"Jesus. This happen often?"
I filled her in on cicadas as I pulled eggs and cheese from the icebox and poured coffee for a reasonable facsimile of Val that wandered in—what a writer might be tempted to call a working draft. I dropped a tablespoon of bacon grease from the canister on the stove into a skillet, laid out bread in the toaster oven I really needed to remember to clean. Dump the crumbs, at least.
"Did I hear cars?" Val asked as I poured her second cup. The rewrite was coming along nicely.
"Doc Bly and his boy."
"Not a delivery, I assume." Doc ran the mortuary. He was also coroner.
Putting breakfast on the table, I told them about the young man who'd died out by the lake.
"He'd been living in the woods?"
"According to Nathan. More than one of them."
"Have any idea what's with the numbers?"
"Not really."
"They were permanent?"
"Looked to be."
"Not just inked in, like kids used to do back in school?"
"Not that crude. Not professional, either, but carefully done.
In prison there were guys who'd do tattoos for cigarette money. They used the end of a guitar string and indelible ink, took their time. Some of them got damned good at it. That's what this reminded me of, that level of skill."
"Nathan have any idea what these people are doing up there?"
"None."
"But now you're going to have to find out."
"Guess I am."
"I'll come along," J. T. said.
Half an hour later we were scraping cicadas off the Chariot's windshield as Val pulled out on her way to work. J. T. went in to get the thermos of coffee we'd forgotten and came back out saying the beeper had gone off while she was inside.
"On the table," she said.
Of course it was.
And of course it was the bugs. Raising hell everywhere, June told me, getting in houses that left their windows open, in water troughs and switch boxes and attics, reminded her of that movie Gremlins. She'd already logged over a dozen calls. Though what anyone thought we could do about any of it was beyond her. Was I on my way in?
Sure, I said.
New plan was (I told J. T.) we'd go in for an hour, two at the most, and sand down the rough spots.
It took Lonnie, J. T., and me well into the afternoon to get everyone calmed down and the town more or less back on track. House calls included the local retirement home, where one of the cicadas had somehow got down a resident's mouth and choked her to death; a little girl terrified that the bugs were going to eat her newborn kittens; and a Mr. Murphy living alone in an old house I'd thought long abandoned. Neighbors having heard screams, J. T. and I arrived to find that Mr. Murphy had intimate knowledge of insects: when we lifted him from his wheelchair, maggots writhed in ulcers the size of saucers on his buttocks, some of them dropping to the floor, and more could be seen at work in the cushions and open framework of the chair. "Don't much mind the littluns," he said, looking from J. T.'s face to mine. "Them big ones is a different story altogether."
So the new new plan was to get a late lunch, then head up into the hills. And since chances were good we might not be out of there by nightfall, I'd look up Nathan first. No way I was going to be in those hills after dark without someone who knew them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE PARKED BY THE DERELICT cotton gin and came up the line of humps and hollows that form the mountain's side, an easier but much longer ascent. By the time we reached the cabin, it was going on four o'clock. The owner didn't take too much to yard work. Every couple of years he'd clear a space around the cabin. The rest of the time pine trees, shrubs, and bushes, along with a variety of grasses and wildflowers, had their way. We were well along into the rest of the time.
Nathan stepped out from behind an oak, twelve-gauge in the crook of an elbow. His dog came out from beneath the cabin growling, then, at Nathan's almost silent whistle, went back under.
"Defending the realm?" I asked.
"Been out."
"Hunting?"
"After a fashion."
Meeting J. T.'s eye, he said, "Miss." I introduced them. "Found the camp," he went on, "maybe three miles in, 'bout forty degrees off north-northeast. Ain't much to it, mostly the hind end of a cabin they done put some lean-tos up against."
"How many are there?"
"If you mean lean-tos, there's three. If you're asking after people, which I expect you are, then my guess'd be close on to a dozen. Youngsters was all I saw. You headin' up that way?"
I nodded. "Talk you into coming along?"
"Figured to."
Instinctively tilting the shotgun barrel maybe ten degrees to clear a low branch, Nathan stepped back into the trees.
It took us almost two hours to get there. By the time we did, the sun had put in its papers and was marking time. The lean-tos were saplings lashed together with heavy twine, a spool of which I later saw inside what was left of the original cabin. The cabin hadn't been much to start with. Now it came down to half a room, five-sixths of a chimney, and a smatter of roof. A smatter of people sat on a bench out front—more saplings, these set into notches in two sections of log.
One of the homesteaders, a woman like all of them in her early to late twenties, sat beside a pile of sassafras root, cleaning with a damp cloth what was to be a new addition to the pile. Another was picking through field greens. They watched us silently as we approached. A man emerging from one of the lean-tos paused, then straightened and stepped towards us. Another, that I'd not seen and damn well should have, swung down off the low branch of a maple at the edge of the clearing. Scraps of plank from the cabin were nailed to the trunk at intervals to make a ladder.
Boards had also been nailed up over the cabin's gaping front, three of them, bridging the void. Crude block letters in white paint: "All the Whys Are Here."
"Tell me you're not the trouble you look to be," the man from the lean-to said, holding out his hand, which I shook. Older than the rest, pushing thirty from the far side, dark eyes, beetle brow, bad skin.
"Deputy sheriff," I said, "but not trouble. Not the kind you're thinking, at any rate."
"Always good to hear. Isaiah Stillman." Nodding towards Nathan, who stood apart at clearing's edge, he said, "Your friend's welcome, too."
"My friend's not much for company."
"Um-hmm. He the one lives down the mountain?"
"The same."
"So what can we do for you, Deputy? If we're—" He stopped, eyes meeting mine. "Our understanding is that this is free land."
"Close as it gets these days, anyhow."
I described the young man who'd died by the lake last night, told Stillman how it happened.
"I'm truly sorry to hear that."
"You knew him, then?"
"Of course. Kevin. We wondered where he'd got off to this time. Never could stay in place too long. He'd go off, be gone a day or two, a week. But he'd always come back."
The woman cleaning sassafras had put rag and roots down and walked up behind Stillman, touching him on the shoulder. When he turned, her mouth moved, but no sound came. Taking her hand and placing it against his throat, he said: "It's Kevin, Martha. Kevin's dead." Her mouth opened and went round in a silent no. After a moment she returned to the bench and her work. The other woman there put a hand briefly to her cheek.
"We'll be having our dinner soon," Stillman said. "Will you join us?"
We did, settling into a meal of lukewarm sassafras tea, greens, rice cooked with black-eyed peas— "Our take on hopping John," Stillman said.
"Interesting."
"Flavored with roots instead of salt pork or bacon, since we're vegetarians."
—and something that must have been hoecake, which, like hopping John, I'd read and heard about but never seen.
"Delicious."
J. T. cocked eyebrows at me at that. Nathan, having got ov
er his standoffishness, was busy sopping up juice from the greens with crumbly bits of hoecake.
"We plan to grind our own cornmeal eventually," Stillman said.
Of course they did.
"I should notify your friend's family," I said. Helped myself to another spoonful of the hopping John. Stuff kind of grew on you.
"We are his family, Mr. Turner."
"No direct relatives?"
"His father threw him out of the house when he was fourteen. The old man was an engineer,' Kevin always said. ' He knew how things were supposed to work.' For a year or two he stayed around town. His mother would meet him, give him money.
When she died, Kevin left for good."
"What about the rest of you?"
"Have family, you mean."
"Yes."
"Some of us do, some don't. For us, family is—"
Leaning over the makeshift table, the young woman I assumed to be deaf and dumb moved her hands in dismissive, sweep-it-away gestures.
"Moira's right," Stillman said.
"You always think she is," one of the others said.
He ignored that. "This isn't the time to be talking about such. Besides, night's closing in. I imagine you'll be wanting to get back."
"We should, yes." "You and your friends are always welcome here. . . . Can you see to Kevin's burial, or should we?"
"We can do that."
"We'd expect to pay for it, of course."
"The county—"
"It's our responsibility. We do have money."
We both looked about the camp, then realized what we were doing, looked at one another, and smiled.
"Really," he said. "It's not a problem—despite appearances. So we'll be expecting an invoice. Meanwhile, you have our gratitude."
Moira raised a hand in farewell. Nathan, J. T., and I stepped out to the accompaniment of a half moon and the calls of whippoorwills, down hills and across them, right and left legs lengthening alternately like those of cartoon figures to meet the challenge, or so it seemed, returning to a world gone strange in our absence.
