“What’re you going to do? Are you going to beat me up, Ricky? What a tough guy you are, beating up a fifteen-year-old girl.” Grace looked at Beverly. “I’m sorry, Bev, but I’m leaving. Are you coming?”
Beverly looked over her shoulder at Ricky and Hooch. Then back to Grace in a sincerer tone, she said, “Grace, don’t you think that maybe you’re overreacting just a little? I mean, he said he was only joking.”
“Bev, if you get back in that car, then you’re making a mistake. I hope you can see that.”
Grace turned around, holding back tears. They weren’t tears of sadness; they belonged to her rage. In her mind’s eye, she continued to see that old couple diving down the embankment, trying to get out of the way. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that no one had been hurt. And it was all because Ricky Osterman had wanted to look so cool and show off. God, what a jerk.
People like him were the cancers of small towns, and it was only a matter of time before his black heart metastasized. She doubted any of what she said would have an effect, but saying it to him had felt good. For that reason alone, it had been worth it.
As she walked away, she heard Ricky and Hooch both start complaining. “Oh, come on. You don’t gotta go, too. Just stay. We’ll behave. Gahhh! There she goes.”
Grace thought they were talking to her for a moment, but then came the sound of footsteps running up behind her. “Hold on, Grace,” Beverly said, out of breath. “I’m coming with. I’m sorry.”
5
Elhouse got Gertie set up in bed, her knee elevated on a pillow, a cloth with some ice as the cherry on top. She refused to let him call the doctor, said it was a waste of money and, most importantly, a waste of time. She would be fine. It was only a scratch.
Elhouse stood beside the bed, looking down at her with a pensive darkness in his eyes. “You gonna be all right? I still have some chores I gotta finish up. It’s hardly past eight o’clock.”
“Elhouse, go on now and stop doting. You ain’t the type. I told you three times already that I’m fine.” Her gray hair was let down and covered the shoulders of her white nightgown. After forty-five years of marriage, he still thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. “Just hand me my book, and I won’t be a bother.”
Elhouse leaned downed, pressed his lips to his wife’s cool forehead, and kissed her. “I’ll be back soon to check on you.”
“It’s over there on the chair.” She pointed. “Under the quilt.”
Elhouse went over to the wicker chair in the corner of the room and grabbed Gertie’s copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It wasn’t her kind of book, but her sister had read it a few weeks back and had promptly made a long-distance call from Denver raving about it, so Gertie felt inclined to keep up.
“Any good?” Elhouse asked, handing it to her. He didn’t care, but it was something to say.
She nodded with apprehension. “I don’t understand why this Holly doesn’t just get a job. Foolish. Hard work is how you get what you want. No other way.”
Elhouse tried to light up his face, but what was on his mind overwhelmed any artifice he could muster. “I wouldn’t know,” he said, his feet turning toward the door.
She made a content sound and cracked her book. That was his cue to leave.
Elhouse went downstairs and out into the front yard. It was just about full dark. The night was calm. No breeze, only insect chatter. The faint sound of cars driving on Route 2 in the distance. The air held the faint smell of smoke. He’d noticed that a lot lately. It always seemed to be there. Perhaps it always had been.
He headed toward the barn, needing to do something to take his mind off what had happened this evening. Because right now he wanted nothing more than to grab his shotgun from the upstairs closet, hop in his truck, and drive on over to Nate Osterman’s house to give that bastard’s son a scare so good the kid would have to change his underwear.
I might even do it, too.
He knew he wouldn’t, though; he wasn’t a violent man. Some men were, but he wasn’t. Instead, he would settle for changing the oil in his tractor. It needed to be done anyway. Maybe by the time he finished, the angry knot in his gut would have unwound a bit. Maybe then he could think about calming down.
He went to his workbench and grabbed a couple wrenches, a new oil filter, and an old bucket he used for catching the dirty oil. He could do the job in fifteen minutes when he was in a hurry, but tonight he wanted to take his time, give the anger flowing through his veins a chance to die out.
The John Deere tractor was a reliable old machine that’d served him well over the last twenty years. He was a firm believer in the idea that if a person takes care of a piece of equipment, then it’ll return the favor.
With a sigh, he dropped to one knee and put down all his supplies. Then he slid a little stool over and took a seat. His back was a little sore, but not all that bad considering the night he’d had. If he’d been hurting, that might’ve been the last little push he needed to send him on over to have a word with the Osterman kid.
Elhouse pushed the bucket under the tractor’s oil pan, and with the wrench, he loosened the drain screw. He backed it out with his fingers, and the dirty oil started drooling out. With a rag, he gripped the oil filter and gave it a hard twist. It came loose. When he removed it, more dirty oil poured into the bucket.
He sat there and watched the engine give up its lifeblood for a good five minutes. When it was down to its last few drops, he screwed on the new filter by hand, careful not to strip the threads. Then he put the drain screw back in. That done, he stood and went to his workbench. He tossed the old filter in the garbage. He was about to grab the fresh engine oil when he heard the front door to the house slam shut across the field.
Elhouse walked out the barn doors. He had to squint to see at night. Gertie was walking across the backyard, heading toward the woods behind the house.
“Gertie, where in God’s name are you going?” he said, a half-shout.
She didn’t seem to have heard him. He noticed something else, too: she wasn’t limping. Her gait was slow and steady… if she had a gait at all. The nightgown hung so low, it covered her feet, sweeping over the grass. She looked like an apparition gliding through the night.
Elhouse blinked hard, twice. Then he called to her again, but once more was met with silence.
He glanced up at the bedroom window—the light was still on—then back at his wife as she moved farther away from the porch light and was slowly swallowed up by the dark. The moon made her look as though she were faintly glowing. Or maybe it wasn’t the moon at all.
He rubbed his eyes, convinced the strange aura he was seeing around her was due to his cataracts and nothing more. Dr. Barrett told him that might happen—that he might see “halos,” especially at night. This was the first time he had actually noticed it, though.
Elhouse started after her, a fast-paced walking stride. She was a good hundred feet ahead of him.
“Hold on now, wait a second,” he said.
Gertie kept moving until she reached the tree line. She stopped and stood motionless on the fringe of the woods.
Elhouse came up a moment later. He stopped ten feet away from her. A shallow stream that ran along their backyard acted as a barrier between his property and the town’s woods. The water separated him from his wife. Somehow she had managed to get on other side of it.
“What’re you doing up and about?” he asked, catching his breath. “You’re s’posed to be in bed. You walk through the damn stream?”
She didn’t answer.
Her back was still toward him, and for some reason, he was scared for her to turn around. Whatever was there—whatever he would see when she did—would not be her. He knew this in a deep place inside, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe the instinct, and so he wrote it off as something conjured up by his imagination.
Still, the idea had legs, and it was starting to take hold. A sense of unreality washed over him, and the cold j
aws of terror were reaching up from his subconscious and starting to bite down on the back of his neck. His palms were prickly. His mouth was going dry. A warning siren started to wail inside his head, but he ignored it. Suddenly the entire moment had the feel of some bizarre dream.
“What on earth are you looking at? Ain’t nothing out there, Gert,” he said, his voice taking on an unsure tone.
He stepped down into the stream. Cold water rode up over his boots, soaking the bottoms of his pant legs. He watched his wife’s back the whole time, unable to explain why he was approaching her the same timid and cautious way he might a dangerous animal.
“Hey, are you okay?” he asked. But what he really meant was: Is that really you? Say something—anything—so I know it’s you.
He looked her up and down. It was hard to tell for sure in the dark, but he didn’t notice any water on the bottom of her nightgown. He dismissed it. She’d probably just lifted it as she went across. No big mystery there.
“Come on, dear,” he said, reaching out to touch his wife’s arm, as if doing so would ground the strangeness of the situation and end it all.
But there was nothing to grip. His hand passed right through a frigid space. And when it did, the thing that looked like Gertie finally turned and faced him.
6
Elhouse stood at the end of their bed, looking down at Gertie as she slept. It was as if he had just been dropped there by some invisible hand of God. He had no idea how he had ended up in the bedroom. He couldn’t recall coming inside or walking upstairs. The last thing he remembered was changing the oil on the tractor. Everything between that and how he had gotten here was a black sheet.
He glanced down at his feet. They were soaked and caked in black mud. Then his eyes found the bedside clock. It was a quarter past ten. He had gone out to the barn around eight o’clock to work on the tractor. That meant almost two hours of the night were missing from his memory.
He wiped a hand over his mouth. Something bitter touched his lips when he tried to lick them. His tongue was like sandpaper.
What happened to me?
His whole body was crawling with restless energy. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so worn out. It was like he had a bad hangover… but different. He felt dirty inside, as if something had reached in, hollowed him out, and left something rotten and sick behind. Every bit of him hurt, felt used and tired.
There was something in the back of his mind, too, something new that hadn’t been there before. A tiny green spark floating in a sea of black. He couldn’t look directly at it and see it, but he sensed that it was there. It had the feel of an unfinished thing, a chore he had forgotten he needed to do but would eventually require doing. He recognized that the idea of it was the source of his restless feeling. A part of him understood he was bound to the green spark now—beholden to it.
Elhouse looked down at his wife. The moonlight printed the shadow of the windowpane across her face.
He undressed slowly, stripping down to only a T-shirt. His underwear was soiled. He hoped it was just water. He balled them up and stuffed them under the bed to deal with in the morning, then put on a fresh pair.
Jesus, what had happened—was happening—to him? Maybe he was in the throes of a stroke.
He sat on the edge of the mattress for a moment, looking down at his bald legs in the moonlight. Hair hadn’t grown on them for years, and his skin itched and burned tonight. For some reason, that was okay. It was as it was supposed to be.
He held out his hand, studying it in the moonlight. It didn’t feel like his own. His arms broke out in gooseflesh as the temperature in the room dropped. Or maybe it’d been cold the whole time. He could see his breaths. There was a smell: smoke and mildew. He had smelled it before, and recently, but he could not recall when. Something was in the room. He knew it as sure as he knew anything, but he was not scared of it because whatever it was, the thing was also the spark, and now so was he. The green thing in his head grew a little—and so did that feeling of purpose, that forgotten chore.
He had a strong sensation that he was sinking, being digested by an endless pit of darkness and despair.
I have to fight it. I have to… I…
Elhouse got into bed next to Gertie and lay down. She stirred and rested her hand on his chest. A battle raged on inside him, and something wicked and powerful was jockeying for control of his soul.
He reached up and put his hand on top of hers. Her skin was soft. He knew every ridge on the landscape of her body, every bump—every bone I’d like to snap—and wrinkle. That’s what marriage is all about sometimes. It’s about wandering in each other’s fields until there isn’t a single stone left unturned.
Half awake, Gertie whispered softly, “Everything all right, dear? You’re absolutely freezing.”
He hadn’t cried since his mother’s funeral, but he wanted to now. “Go back to sleep, Gert. Everything’s fine.”
But of course it wasn’t.
He kissed her hand—want to bite it—and she patted his chest, then rolled onto her back. Her wrapped knee was sticking out of the covers. The bandage was starting to come unraveled.
Images of sharp objects flashed in his mind. Ugly, horrible images of ripped flesh and twisted faces struck with the look of shrieking pain. A giant colorful thing. A mask of bone. A green spark. He breathed slowly and stared up at the ceiling.
Sleep seemed an impossible thing, but eventually something like it overtook him. He dreamed darkness was falling down on him, enshrouding him. And in the folds of the shadow, the greenest eyes he had ever seen were watching him. He watched them back, became lost in them. They were inviting. They promised so much. He swam in them and felt himself dissolve.
The green spark grew inside him until it became everything.
7
On the other side of town, Ricky was sitting alone in his father’s garage. The lights were out, save for the small fluorescent above the back workbench. The rusty sign on the front of the shop read OSTERMAN AUTO & TOWING in dingy red lettering. The small square cement-block building sat alone on an acre of gravel out on Pollock Road. Most of the acre was stacked with junked cars his father used for spare parts. The shop was his old man’s pride and joy. Not that there was much to be proud or joyful about. The entire operation consisted of one old tow truck, which always happened to be in need of its own repairs, and a few oil changes here and there during the week. Maybe someone might stop in to have a headlight fixed or a flat patched or ask about a whining alternator, but that was about it. For anything more expensive or more important, a person who knew any better found their service elsewhere. It was no secret that Nate Osterman was a drunken hack whose honest business days were behind him.
Ricky had a key to the back door of the shop that he used to let himself in when he didn’t feel like going home, which was often. He and his father didn’t get along so well, and his relationship with his mother wasn’t much of a relationship at all. There could’ve been something there had things worked out differently when he was younger, but things hadn’t. As far as Ricky was concerned, things never worked out differently. Not for him, anyway.
He was five years old when his mother had her accident. He remembered some of it—bits and pieces like shards of a broken something he’d never truly known to begin with. He remembered yelling from upstairs. A loud crack. A crash. Then his mother wasn’t upstairs anymore, and it was silent, and his father was coming slowly down the steps. His mom was at the bottom of the staircase, her head bleeding and eyes open, staring through him. She wasn’t moving. No response. Silence. Slow footsteps getting louder. Another crack, this one across his face. Ricky was sent to his room with a burning cheek, tears hot in his eyes. Soon after, from his bedroom window, he saw a car pull up and park in the driveway. He recognized the man who got out. It was a doctor. The very same one he had gone to see three weeks before to have his tonsils taken care of, where he had been promised ice cream after they did a quick procedure.
>
The doctor came to the front door, carrying a little black bag. There were muffled voices from downstairs, and eventually the doctor carried Ricky’s mother out and placed her in the backseat like a fragile porcelain doll. Ricky remembered the taillights as the car pulled away. They looked like the eyes of a giant monster, and his mother was caught in its mouth.
Barbara Osterman was gone for a little while after that, but she returned a few weeks later. She wasn’t the same, though. No doubt about that. She hardly spoke anymore. And when she did, her flat, almost childlike voice made Ricky uncomfortable and sad. Sometimes she would look at him and smile. Then her brow would wrinkle, and she would turn away from him as if she didn’t know who—or what—he was anymore. Most of the time, she never got off the couch, unless it was to make meals—usually burned—or to wash Nate’s dirty duds in the sink. She just sat there dully, smoking her Chesterfields, one after the next, filling the ashtray while she knitted lumpy, uneven sweaters for family members Ricky had never met.
That’s the entirety of the memory. But as he got older, the full picture slowly revealed itself, through both gained wisdom and firsthand experience. Ricky might not have been the smartest kid, but he understood well enough that his father had more than likely tossed her down the stairs that day. And Ricky hated him for it. If it weren’t for his old man, Ricky might’ve had a relationship with his mother. Ricky might’ve known what it felt like to actually be loved by someone.
He hopped off the stack of tires he was sitting on and spat across the room. A big glob of phlegm landed on the window of his father’s small office. He finished his beer and sent the bottle against the cement wall. It smashed and sent shards of glass flying everywhere.
He laughed. But when he realized there was no one there to see it, the grin faded.
Buncha pussies, he thought.
He was drinking the rest of the beer they’d picked up after leaving the lake earlier. He had been under the impression they were all going to party and get wasted. He thought maybe he would even get to dip his tip, if the girls loosened up enough. But what should’ve been a fun night turned out to be a bust. Everybody had left him. The broads had split once they got back downtown. And Hooch had left shortly after, leaving Ricky alone with half a case of undrunk beer and his racing thoughts.
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