by Isaac Thorne
“Yeah. A hundred times. I guess I’m still bent about it. I honestly thought video journalism would be a better gig. What does a guy with a good eye have to do to earn a little respect, anyway? If I didn’t know Joanie better, I’d think she had something against gay guys. She’s sending us into what I know is going to be a redneck pocket hell of backward racist conservatives.”
Afia took her eyes off the road for the first time and looked at him wide-eyed. “You’re gay?”
“Yes,” Staff replied with a deliberate lisp. “Can’t you tell? And you’re an African American woman. This is not news to anyone who has been half awake since we were both hired.”
Afia examined her own hands, still responsibly wrapped around ten and two on the steering wheel. “I’m black?” she said in mock astonishment. “Oh my. Maybe we’d better forget the DEET and go buy ourselves some camouflage and a gun rack instead.”
“Afia—”
“No, seriously, don’t judge the place like that before you’ve seen it. Yeah, a bunch of racists lived here when I was a kid, but it wasn’t the loud-mouthed redneck Trump resurgent racist types. At least, I never saw them around town back then. I never met racists in that balls-out throwing shit at you while you’re just trying to go to school way. It was more subtle than that here, more patronizing, I guess. They wouldn’t call you names, but they’d assume you couldn’t speak as eloquently as the white folks, so you’d get the part with the fewest lines in the school plays. Most of the other kids assumed we were poor, too, even though my dad worked at the same carbon plant in Hollow River that theirs did. I guess they figured a single black father household wouldn’t hold onto money the way a lily-white nuclear family would. I don’t know. I never asked.”
He looked away from her, focusing on the toes of his own sneaker-clad feet. They were crossed at the ankles and propped on the dashboard in front of him. “I’m sorry, Afia. I was just trying to be funny. You mean to tell me that in the whole time you lived in this white-bread small town in the deep South that no one ever once threatened you or called you the n-word? Not once?”
“Tennessee is not the ‘deep’ South,” Afia reprimanded. She thought for a second. “Well, there was this one guy.” Her upper lip twisted into an angry sneer. “His last name was Gordon, I think. I don’t remember his first name. He had a kid my age that used to come to school beat up all the time. We had a lot of problems with him for a while, but I guess I was too young to remember too much about all that. I know he hated my dad’s guts, and I know my dad had to call the sheriff about him trespassing at our place more than once. It wasn’t long after my mother disappeared that all the trouble started, I think. Dad never told me what it was all about, though. Just said some crazy alcoholic white man thought dad had wronged him somehow.”
She shuddered.
“I do remember one night when he woke us up, standing on our front porch with a beer in one hand and a shotgun in the other. Let me tell you, you’ve never heard anything scary until you’re awakened from a dead sleep in a quiet country house by the sound of someone trying to bash in the front door. I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared in my life, not before then and not since. He kept pounding on the front door with the butt of that shotgun, screaming for my dad to come out and face him. My dad called the sheriff on him then, too.
“I was afraid he was either going to break down the door or start shooting up the place before they got there, but he never did. He took off running when the deputy arrived with his strobes flashing. Nobody ran after him, though. I don’t know why. He just ran off into the woods behind our house and disappeared. My dad went down to the station the next day to press charges, thinking they’d go arrest Gordon at his house. The sheriff told him that more than likely it wouldn’t amount to anything in a court of law. His word against my father’s and the judge was as likely to believe Gordon over my father as the other way around. My dad figured it was because we were black. Some part of the white folks believed we probably deserved whatever it was this dude was holding against us.”
Staff grimaced. “Must have been awful.”
“It was. I always wondered whether that man had something to do with my dad’s murder. They found him, my dad, at the base of that bullshit obelisk the Daughters of the Confederacy placed in the middle of the town square back in the early Sixties. The town administrator showed up to open the office for the day, and there was my dad, propped up against it like a wino passed out in an alley. Only the red stuff running down his shirt wasn’t wine. It was blood. Whoever attacked him had sliced him from ear to ear. Some kind of hunting knife, probably. That’s what the sheriff’s department said, anyway.”
There was a hitch in her voice. Staff opened his mouth to tell her that she didn’t need to relive this horrible chapter of her life for his sake, but she started up again before the words formed on his lips.
“Not that they were much of a sheriff’s department. There were never any suspects, at least not that they publicly named. No apparent motive other than hate. My dad’s wallet was still in his pockets. His car was parked in one of the slots in front of the administrator’s office, keys in the ignition, and had apparently been wiped clean of fingerprints. The only blood in it was his own.
“The sheriff said he thought the murder had been committed somewhere else, and that the killer had driven my dad’s car with him in it to the town administrator’s office and placed his body against the obelisk as some kind of racist insult or something.”
“They never even questioned this Gordon dude?”
Afia shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
“So what happened to him?”
She shrugged. “Dead, probably. He was kind of old even back then. Quite a bit older than my dad, for sure, even though he had a kid my age. He was a heavy drinker, too, from what I heard. I can’t imagine he’s still kicking around.”
“You’ve never looked him up?”
She did not reply. After a beat, Staff let it be.
“So, Joanie knows you’re gay?” Afia asked when another few minutes of uncomfortable silence had passed.
Staff laughed. “Everyone at the station probably knows it. I actually prefer it that way because of the times we’re living in right now. I thought things were getting better under Obama, but now...well, now you have to be much more careful about where you work because the company could see your homosexuality as a public relations liability depending on the demographic they want to serve.”
Afia nodded.
“That’s what it comes down to, anyway,” Staff continued. “You won’t see Nike backing down from a Colin Kaepernick campaign because racist conservatives aren’t their demographic. It’s the same thing with places like Chick-Fil-A. You won’t see them cozying up with outspoken liberal celebrity spokespeople because their base demographic is conservative Christian with a capital K. Corporate America is starting to choose tribes just like the American people have chosen tribes. There’s no middle ground anymore.”
He sighed. “That’s why I told Joanie up front during my interview that I was gay. I don’t think she could legally ask me about it, but that hasn’t stopped other companies from finding reasons to fire someone like me over it. Religious freedom is just the latest excuse to discriminate. Trump had just been sworn in when I was interviewing for this job, so I told Joanie straight up that if my being gay was going to be a problem for them, I didn’t want to even bother with the rest of the interview.”
Afia cocked an eyebrow and cut her eyes at him. “What did she say?”
“Well, obviously, I was hired. I think she went to some of the higher-ups before they agreed to hire me, though. It was like I was a felon or something. She kind of lost her poker face when I brought it up, you know? I don’t think sexual orientation had ever come up in any of her interviews before.”
“It’s a pretty effective ice-breaker. That’s for sure. Here we are, by the way. We just passed Lost Hollow’s city limits. We’ll be in the town square in just a few.�
��
“So,” Staff said after another short pause. “When did you tell Joanie you were a black woman?”
Before Afia could reply, Staff felt his body lurch forward against the seatbelt, His head thrust forward toward the S-10’s windshield. His feet were still propped on the dashboard, and it now felt like his toes might punch through the glass. He threw his hands in front of himself, bracing against his own knees because his legs were in the way of the glove compartment. Afia, on the other hand, held onto the steering wheel at arm’s length, forcing her back into the bucket seat and locking her elbows in place. She was practically standing on the brake pedal.
The S-10 came to rest one hundred-eighty degrees into the oncoming lane, straddling the double yellow line in the center of the Hollow County stretch of SR-501. Behind it lay two new semicircular skid marks along the ancient gray pavement. Had she been a teenage white boy in Lost Hollow on a Saturday night in the late Eighties, she would have no doubt been congratulated on the least impressive donut of the evening.
Staff, whose shoulders were already feeling stiff following his brace for impact, glared at her with wide eyes, his mouth hanging open. “What. The. Fuck?” he managed.
“I’m sorry,” Afia said, her voice shaky and too loud. “Oh, God, I hope I didn’t hit it. I hope I didn’t hit it.”
She fought with her seatbelt, popped open the driver’s side door, and leaped out of the S-10. Staff watched her circle the vehicle, first examining the front tires, then the rear. She was frowning. Staff rolled down the window.
“Afia? What the fuck?”
“I...I’m not sure.” She circled the S-10 once more and then climbed into the driver’s seat. “Something ran out in front of us. Looked like a dog. Black. I was afraid I was going to hit it. I guess I didn’t.”
“We probably would’ve felt it if you had.”
“Yeah, probably. It darted out from that road back there, just as we passed the city limits sign. It was just this little black coat of fur on four stumpy legs. I guess it was a dog. I’m not sure. Something was weird about its head, though. It didn’t look like any other dog I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe it was a badger or a groundhog or something.”
“Maybe. Are there black groundhogs that run on dog legs?”
Staff shrugged. “Well, at least we didn’t hit whatever it was. We need to get the truck back into the right lane, though, don’t you think? I’d hate for Channel 6 to have to shell out the big bucks for a new truck and new equipment because we were T-boned by a semi or something.”
“Yeah.” She shifted the S-10 into Reverse and straightened it into the correct lane. To their right lay a stretch of country lane that a faded green street sign identified as HOLLOW CREEK RD. A few notches below that sign was another, more faded yellow sign that merely read DEAD END. Staff jerked a thumb at them.
“Does every place in this county have the word ‘hollow’ in the name?”
“Probably. It has a creepy quaint ring to it that the locals like. Makes them feel Colonial or some shit, though I can’t imagine the town dates back much further than the early nineteenth century. We can ask when we get to the town square. The administrator is supposed to meet us at the B&B and give us some ideas about the best places to visit. Her name is Patsy. Sounded like a real Southern Belle on the phone. Stretched out her o sounds and skipped the l in some words.”
“Creepy looking little dead-end road, that’s for sure.”
Afia glanced at the sign. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here. If I remember, that’s where that Gordon dude lived when I was a kid. Our house was through the woods behind his place. Our driveway connected to another road a mile or so down.”
“That close?”
“Yeah. I think I’ve had all the memories of those days that I can stand for one day.”
“You don’t want to see your old place, since we’re driving by?”
Afia looked at him, resentment behind her tired eyes. “No.”
She shifted the S-10 into Drive and hit the gas, allowing Lost Hollow’s city limits and the dead-end Hollow Creek Road to diminish in her rearview mirror. From his side of the truck, Staff watched it as well. For a second, just as they rounded a curve to the right, he thought he might have seen the creature they’d nearly struck, dog or not, poke its head out of the weeds and scrub along the side of SR-501 that lay opposite the Hollow Creek Road dead end. Then it was gone. It had either withdrawn into the scrub or was obscured by distance and the black capital letters at the bottom of the mirror that read OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.
I hope not, he thought, as the pickup rounded another curve and obscured the scene entirely from his view. It’s just as well with me if objects keep their distance while we’re fifty miles away from home.
A few minutes later, Afia relaxed her grip on the steering wheel a little, stretching her fingers against the warming rays of the autumn sun as it began to set behind a cluster of buildings that loomed large in the windshield as they approached.
“Finally,” she said. “We’re here.”
CHAPTER THREE
His face hurt. Graham’s bottom lip throbbed, and his chin felt wet, coated by a layer of blood that had run from his injured mouth. He grimaced, then opened and shut his jaw to make sure everything still worked. It did, but it was all sore. Even flaring his nostrils produced a sensation in his cheeks, not unlike the soreness one experiences in major body muscles after an impact in a car accident or an intense gym workout to which one is unaccustomed. The same discomfort assaulted his shoulders when he attempted to push himself up to his knees against the cold earthen floor of the cellar.
On his knees, Graham gingerly placed a hand on the back of his head where he’d felt the blunt object come down on him, then pulled it away with a wince and a sharp hiss. That hurt like hell, worse than the soreness from the fall.
His eyes had fluttered open in a blanket of complete darkness. The cellar had no windows, no door other than the one he had entered, and now probably only half its staircase. The uppermost segment of the stairs might still be intact, hanging precariously by whatever nails had been used to secure the stringers to the joists and the bottom of the door frame eight feet above his head. But the lower half he knew he had destroyed on the way down. He felt it and, moreover, saw it before his Maglite had died. Now that it was gone, whatever light there might be from the first-floor hallway glimmering through the planks of the cellar door and into this dungeon was not enough to enable him to see anything around him.
He was trapped, but at least he was able to move. There was that. The next question was how to find his way out of the cellar. Stupidly, he’d tossed his iPhone into the passenger seat of his Tacoma before he’d walked inside. He’d lately made a habit of leaving the damned thing where he wouldn’t have convenient access to it if something more critical needed his attention. The danger, of course, being that he’d stop paying attention to the critical task to check his Twitter feed or Instagram account, on which he could boast all of ten followers. Usually, he would have locked the phone in his glove compartment or placed it in a lower pocket of a pair of cargo pants, where he couldn’t feel its presence as much. This time, he’d tossed it through the window of his pickup, onto the seat, in his frustration with Patsy. He’d assumed he would only be inside the old place for a few minutes and was unlikely to encounter anyone on this lonely stretch of dead-end who might nab the phone, or even his pickup, for themselves.
“Thit!” he exclaimed to the darkness. His swollen and bruised lip had given him the thick and labored vocalizations of a dental patient suffering from paresthesia as the numbing agent begins to wear off. “Thit! I can’t believe I did that.”
From somewhere else, his father’s voice boomed: YEAH! PRETTY FUCKING THUPIDT YOU SISSY SACK OF SHIT. The sound rang inside his skull like a fire engine, making his eyes vibrate in their sockets. The old house dust and debris in his sinuses rattled like the ball bearing in an empty can of spray paint.
Pain like railroad spikes ripped through the flesh of his scalp and sent him face-forward to the floor, elbows out. He clenched the palms of his hands tightly against his temples. Saliva flooded his mouth from somewhere in the back of his throat, where a lump had formed that was threatening to spill the partially digested cheeseburger and onion rings he’d had for lunch. He crouched in the darkness on the cellar floor until the sensations finally began to subside.
“Concuthion,” he said. “Maybe I have a concuthion.”
MAYBE, the voice boomed in his head again. OR MAYBE YOU’RE JUST A STUPID SACK OF SHIT!
Graham winced again, slapping his palms against his temples, and rolled over on his side. He wanted to scream, but the pain in his head was too much. Only a squeaky moan escaped his lips. Sometime later, the pain receded once more, and he was able to return to his knees. A concussion. Yes. That would explain the ringing in his ears. And the nausea. And the pressure against his skull. It was a concussion. He just needed to remain awake until he could escape the cellar or until rescue arrived. He couldn’t call for help because his radio lay shattered somewhere on the floor of the cellar along with his Maglite, and he didn’t have his phone. Patsy had probably already left for the day, assuming Graham would reach out to the sheriff’s department if he needed any assistance out here. Law enforcement and investigating potential trespassers on his own personal property was his job, after all, not hers.
A concussion didn’t explain his father’s voice in his head, which was excruciatingly louder now than it had been before his tumble into the cellar. He’d always been able to hear his dad berating him. Probably a result of some psychological side effect of the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of the angry—now dead—man when he was a child. That’s what his counsellor suggested anyway. He’d never been physically hurt by it before, though. Emotionally? Psychologically? Sure. Who wouldn’t be injured in those ways by the chronic berating voice of a long-dead parent stuck in one’s head, a voice that pointed in perpetuity at every misstep and error in judgment as a lack of intellect? Psychologists would call it a product of anxiety. He’d been told that before. Obsessive compulsive disorder, for example, had been known to create critical voices in one’s own head that way. Graham didn’t know for sure whether he was afflicted by OCD. His counsellor hadn’t diagnosed him with that so far. He knew only that the voice was real, and that now it felt more real than it ever had before.
