Dream With Little Angels

by Michael Hiebert

  “Mr. Allen!” she yelled, her fingers gripped tightly around her weapon’s handle. “Mr. Allen, are you out here?” Then, lowering her voice almost to a whisper, she said, “Abe, go get back in the car. Right now! Get back in the car, and lock the doors.”

  Three hens pecked the ground around the bloody wheelbarrow. “Mom,” I said, trying to keep things calm. “Maybe it’s just animal blood.” I figured this wasn’t such a bad assumption, considering we were on a farm and all.

  My mother ignored me completely. “Abe,” she said again, her voice low and commanding, “listen to me. Get back in the goddamn car, right this instant. Lock the doors. Do it. Now.”

  Grudgingly, I headed back to the car, slightly annoyed, but also a bit relieved. Annoyed because it was me who found the wheelbarrow in the first place, and I didn’t see why a wheelbarrow full of blood meant I had to go wait in the car yet again. Besides, I really thought my hypothesis of animal blood was a good one. As I slinked away, I heard my mother unclip the walkie-talkie she had brought along for the day and call the station for backup. I made a wide turn toward the car so I could see everything as long as possible. Every two or three steps, I looked over my shoulder and watched while my mother scanned the entire farmyard slowly, her gaze locked on the horizon. Both her hands gripped her gun, which she had pointed toward the ground at waist height.

  “Mr. Allen!” she yelled again, this time so loud it made me jump. “Mr. Allen, if you’re out here, you must make yourself known now, before I make a mistake and accidentally shoot you!”

  I stopped between the truck and the farmhouse as, far beyond the red pickup, the shadow of a figure emerged from the old burnt-out building. From the angle I was at, I don’t think my mother could see me, but she did see whoever it was that had come out into the sunlight from the old barn’s dark insides. She recognized him immediately. From the look of surprise and fear on his face, I don’t think he had heard my mother yelling at all or had any idea we were here.

  “Jesse!” my mother called out. “Is your grandpa around here somewhere?”

  He shook his head, but said nothing.

  “Where might I be able to find him?” she asked. I stepped back, cautiously sneaking another peek at my mother. She still held her weapon tightly at her side. It wasn’t pointed at Jesse James Allen, but by her posture, she was anything but relaxed.

  Jesse had yet to say a word. He just stood there. I could make out his face more clearly now. It was filled with fear and confusion. From here, he looked pretty near exactly as he had that morning on the street. I didn’t think a comb had touched that mess of hair at any point in time in the interim.

  “Jesse!” my mother said. “I need you to tell me where your grandpa is, and I need you to do it now. Jesse, I have a gun in my hand. Do you understand that?”

  I returned to my position just far enough around the edge of the house to be out of my mother’s line of sight. Only, Jesse James Allen did see me. His head turned and looked dead straight at me. Something in his eyes threw a chill through my blood I doubted I would ever forget. I took two steps back, putting myself between the red pickup and the tool shed.

  It was then that I noticed the smell. A horrible smell, like the one that used to come out of the old mink farm that had been in operation down Old Mill Road before the townsfolk signed a petition to get them to shut it down. Only, this smell actually seemed worse, something that, until today, I wouldn’t have thought possible.

  The smell confused me, and it took a good couple seconds for me to pinpoint the source of it. Then I figured it out. It was coming from the tool shed. The shed had a pair of double doors, with a fairly thick chain threaded several times through the hasps of each door. Normally, the chain was secured with a padlock, and the padlock was there now, but it was open. I took a step closer, holding my breath as best I could, unsure whether I really wanted to know what was creating that horrible stench. Part of me, that eleven-year-old-boy part, knew I needed to find out, or I would forever regret not knowing.

  I glanced back to Jesse, seeing his attention rapidly alternate between me and my mother. The color was draining from his face.

  “Jesse, I need you to put your hands in the air and walk slowly toward me,” I heard my mother say. I knew she was too busy to pay me much attention, so I lifted off the lock and carefully slipped the chain from the hasps in the doors. The whole time, I did my best not to breathe through my nose, but breathing through my mouth only made it worse because, whether or not it was actually true, I imagined I could now taste that smell.

  When the chain was free, I set it quietly on the dusty ground and swung open the wooden doors. At that moment, I saw exactly where that smell was coming from.

  Propped up on the slated wooden floor was the decaying remains of Jesse’s grandpa. There wasn’t much left of him—his body looked nearly skeletal. Maggots covered near on all the skin he had remaining, and my stomach churned so hard I had to look away before I got sick.

  “Mom!” I called out.

  “Abe! I thought I told you to get in the goddamn car and lock the door?” she asked. “You’re getting worse than your goddamn sister!”

  “But, Mom,” I pleaded, “you really need to see this.”

  I heard her slowly start stepping around in my direction. “Jesse, put your hands up, do you hear me? Put them up now!”

  My mother came up beside where I stood, walking sideways, her back to the farmhouse, her gun now aimed directly at Jesse James Allen just the same way I’d seen it aimed at Stephen McFarren, only now I realized that night with Carry and her boyfriend had been just an act compared to the real thing. “Why aren’t you in—” She made a fast shoulder check, glancing into the shed, and I watched the second it took for her brain to throw it all together. “Jesus Christ.”

  That’s when Jesse James began running toward the back fields where the cornstalks were doing their best to keep standing. “Abe, I’m begging you. Get in the car now! I’m seriously not kidding around.” She took off on foot after Jesse, running as fast as I’d ever seen anyone go. A few hens in her way quickly scattered as her boots left the dusty driveway and hit the dead wild grass of the outlying farmland. “Jesse! Stop right now, or so help me God, I’ll shoot you!”

  But Jesse didn’t stop. My mother did, though. She stopped and carefully took aim before pulling off a shot. I could not believe how loud it was. My ears were still ringing as I watched it miss, hitting the hard ground right near Jesse’s foot. The dirt beside his shoe flew up in an explosion of dark brown powder.

  My mother started off after him again, still gaining fast, especially once Jesse hit the cornfield. The stalks slowed him down substantially and, since it was so late in the season with harvest over and all, the corn gave easily to his weight, leaving an open trail behind him. When my mother wasn’t more than thirty yards away, she stopped again, yelling, “Jesse, I’m givin’ you one last chance. Stop, or you will be shot.”

  I guess Jesse James Allen didn’t believe her, because he kept trudging as fast as he could through that corn, and this time my mother did not miss. Even though I was somewhat more prepared for the thunderclap of sound made by her gun, I still jumped as she pulled the trigger and got off her shot, putting a bullet right in the back of Jesse’s leg. Jesse James Allen went down, falling into a clump on the tilled ground, amidst a cradle of green stalks all on their way to dying or going to seed.

  While this all happened, I had stood frozen, not even noticing the smell from the shed anymore. Something about it captivated me. It was like watching a movie, only different on account of it was real life with my very own mother in the starring role.

  Strange feelings swept through me that I hadn’t felt before, but I was starting to get used to that. Maybe this was part of becoming a grown-up.

  Seeing Jesse lying there, all crumpled up in the dirt, made me wonder if my mother might have killed him, but I figured it was probably unlikely anyone could die from a bullet wound to the back of
the leg. At least not right away. At least my mother didn’t think he was dead. I heard her yelling at him over and over while she patted him down: “Where is she? Where is she?”

  When Jesse James Allen answered, his voice was strained and the words seemed to come out in a flood of pain.

  “The old farmhouse,” he said, and once again fell still.

  CHAPTER 27

  I wasn’t entirely sure what to do. In all the commotion, my mother seemed to have completely forgot about me and, from what I could tell, I was no longer in any danger from either Jesse James or his grandpa on account of one lying close to death in the cornfield and the other being eaten by maggots in the shed behind me while he rotted away in the waning heat of late afternoon.

  Officer Jackson’s cruiser pulled up. Just like that day at Robert Lee Garner’s, he shut down his siren, but left the red and blue lights flashing. “Jesse’s in the cornfield, Chris!” my mother yelled to him as she ran to the burned-out husk of the old barn. “I had to put one in the back of his knee. He’s unarmed.”

  Pausing upon seeing me, Officer Jackson asked, “What’re you doing here?”

  “Helpin’,” I said.

  He gave me a dubious look. “Bet you are,” he said, then jogged out to the field, where Jesse James Allen had begun screaming in pain amidst the broken patch of corn.

  I once again fell back on my theory that forgiveness came easier than permission and started toward the old barn, reaching it barely after my mother did on account of the cornfield being much farther from it than the new farmhouse.

  “Abe!” my mother said in a clipped whisper. “What the hell are you doing? I told you to stay in that goddamn car!”

  I was very aware of her gun and remembered quite clearly how she acted the night we caught Carry with the boy in the car, but I wasn’t scared. There were some things a kid of eleven years just had to be part of. And I’d come way too far to give up now. I’d never forgive myself if I did. Dewey wouldn’t, neither.

  I could tell she wanted to give me a speech about listening to her when she told me to do something, but there were far more important things she had to deal with first. So instead, she said, “You are going to get such a talking-to when this is all over, let me tell you what. You’re turning into your goddamn sister!”

  Suddenly I had new admiration for Carry and her change in attitude. It took a lot of guts and bravery to keep up this sort of thing. But I was already heavily invested. There was no turning back.

  Besides, from where I stood, I was the one who found Grandpa Allen and the wheelbarrow. I had played just as much a part in this as she had, possibly even more. Geez, I was even the one who convinced her Mr. Robert Lee Garner was actually innocent. In some ways, I was starting to think, without me, she might never have got this far in her investigation. Of course, that was the old eleven-year-old version of myself talking. I had started noticing lately that there were two different versions of me going on in my body—the little boy who was a lot like Dewey, and another one who was starting to be a lot more grown up.

  “Oh my God,” my mother gasped when we entered the dilapidated barn. At one time, it was a three-story structure with a hay loft, but much of it was now gone, mostly due to the fire, the rest due to time. Lengths of wooden boards that once ran along the outside had fallen away, leaving open rectangles to the outside. Those, combined with the gaping holes where doors and windows had once been, allowed the dusty light of the westerly sun to fall eerily through, casting weird patterns surrounded by even stranger shadows around them. It was like walking into the mouth of some sort of deformed clown. In some places, like the back corners, it was near on pitch-black.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case in the center area of the back wall. Tiffany Michelle Yates stood there, her arms stretched straight above her head. Her hands were tied to a metal hook hanging from a thick black chain. The chain went right to the top of the barn, looping over one of the ceiling’s crossbeams before coming back down where the rest of it wound around a rusted winch with a red handle. The winch was bolted to the wall barely three feet away from Tiffany.

  Her head lulled limply forward. Her black hair, matted with hay and dirt, hung down over her chest. I’m pretty sure my mother and me had the same thought at nearly the same time: We were too late. There was no indication of life in the way Tiffany Michelle hung there. She wore a big, oversized gray T-shirt that came nearly to her knees, and for all I knew, there was not another stitch of clothing on her.

  The sun’s orange light poured down on her through an oddly shaped hole in the barn’s roof, lighting her up in the middle of all that darkness as though she were under a spotlight. It kind of made her look like an angel, and I remembered asking Dewey if he thought Mary Ann Dailey was with the angels now after reading what it had said on her tombstone behind Clover Creek First Baptist.

  Dream with little angels.

  I hoped Reverend Starks was right and that God didn’t see color so that Tiffany Michelle Yates could be with the angels now, too.

  “Tiffany?” my mother asked softly. Apparently, she wasn’t quite as positive as me about Tiffany’s condition.

  There was no reaction, though. Tiffany Michelle just continued hanging there from that rusty hook, her entire body limp.

  My mother said Tiffany’s name twice more, and I think she was about to give up when those strands of black hair moved slightly. “She’s alive,” I said, amazed.

  “Tiffany,” my mother said again. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

  Slowly, Tiffany Michelle raised her head and I had to take a step back. It was her eyes. They terrified me. They were wide with fear and looked at us the same way a coyote looks at you when you happen upon it accidentally in the woods. She no longer appeared anything like the little girl with the big ice cream cone and that pink dress. Now she looked like some sort of wild animal.

  Silver duct tape covered her mouth. In places, dried blood stained the gray T-shirt hanging over her. It looked like the blood in the wheelbarrow, only not nearly so thick.

  My mother took a slow step forward. “Tiffany, honey, it’s okay. You’re safe now. Jesse James is in custody. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

  Tiffany’s eyes stayed wide.

  From her belt, my mother removed her flashlight and played the beam across Tiffany, hesitating only slightly on the trickle of red running down the inside of her left leg. It looked fairly dry, but not nearly as old as the blood on her shirt, and ran all the way down to her toes, which barely managed to touch the hay-covered dirty barn floor. Jesse had tightened the winch just enough to keep her heels elevated. I couldn’t imagine how uncomfortable she must have been hanging there like that.

  My mind tried remembering back to how pretty she had looked that afternoon on Main Street, with her hair freshly washed and tied back with that thick yellow ribbon. Now she resembled something out of a horror movie. No matter how hard I tried, I could not overlay the two images inside my head.

  “Tiffany, can you understand me?” my mother asked, keeping her voice quiet and soft.

  Tiffany nodded, her eyes starting to focus normally again.

  “Good. Jesse James is in handcuffs. I shot him in the leg. You’re safe. He can’t hurt you anymore.” She looked straight into Tiffany’s eyes and repeated this last part. “He can’t hurt you anymore. Do you understand?”

  Again, Tiffany nodded. Tears began to well in her eyes.

  “I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth,” my mother said. “Is that okay?”

  Tiffany confirmed it was.

  “This may sting a bit. I’ll try to go slow,” my mother said. She went slow enough. The tape left a sticky residue around Tiffany’s mouth, and her lips were near on blue in color, but having the duct tape taken off seemed to bring her some relief.

  Her chest heaved as she took several deep breaths, but otherwise she said nothing.

  “That blood on your leg?” my mother asked. “Are you injured? Or . . .” S
he trailed off. My mother’s blue eyes met with Tiffany’s brown ones. They gleamed with an intensity that relayed some sort of information between them I had no way of grasping. But right away, my mother nodded in understanding and, with one more step, came close enough to wrap her arms around Tiffany’s head and pull her gently against her chest. “It’s okay,” she said, patting the back of the girl’s head. “He can’t hurt you anymore. It’s all going to be okay.”

  After a long hug, my mother inspected the winch holding the chain in place. It didn’t take her long to figure out how to unlock it and turn the handle so the chain lowered enough that both of Tiffany’s feet were flat on the barn floor. Then she removed her knife from her belt and cut the knot free that tied Tiffany Michelle’s hands to the hook. Almost immediately, Tiffany’s legs gave way and she collapsed. My mother managed to catch her just in time before she landed in the sawdust and dirt covering the wooden floor.

  Officer Jackson came in the same way we had. “I’ve got Jesse James cuffed in the back of my car. I’ve already read him his rights,” he said. He lowered his voice as he approached us. Tiffany Michelle Yates was still wrapped in my mother’s arms. I was starting to feel awkward and in the way.

  “How is she?” Officer Jackson asked.

  My mother gave him a look similar to the one she’d shared with Tiffany. Again, I didn’t understand it, but Officer Jackson replied with, “Jesus Christ.”

  “How’s Jesse’s leg?” my mother asked him.

  “He’ll live.”

  She frowned. “I almost wish I’d aimed higher.”

  “No, you don’t,” Officer Jackson said. “You did it right. And you saved her life.”

  “Yeah, well, I should have saved two more of them,” she said.

  Two dried pools of blood were on the floorboards farther along the wall. “Hey,” I called out. One looked fairly recent—even the hay on the floor in that area was stained a brownish scarlet. The other one, even farther down, wouldn’t even have been noticeable if the sun hadn’t fallen since we arrived, stretching the odd-shaped span of now golden light far enough to show it. It was old and faded. Years of hay and dirt had all but covered it up except for those places where the floorboards happened to somehow be clean enough to see it. “What’re they from?”