The Gordon Place

by Isaac Thorne

  There was also the fact that the black man’s wife was already down there in the crawl space. Lee Gordon wasn’t exactly superstitious, but there was a part of him that remembered tales his father used to tell him about the black people and the voodoo they practiced. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea to put the man’s murdered body in such close quarters with his bitch of a dead wife. What if black folks around here were into voodoo and devil worship and bullshit like that? What if bringing them together somehow triggered something? What if it left some kind of mark or curse on his house? No, he thought. It wasn’t ideal, but it would save Lee some strength, some clean-up effort, and possibly some lousy juju if he merely left Darek Afton in the square. His body would be discovered, unfortunately. Lee struggled with the calculations, but couldn’t think of an obvious way the man’s death might be traced back to him. There was no one out in Lost Hollow’s town square at this time of the evening. He doubted that there ever were on nights like that one. Most folks were home digesting dinner or dozing in front of the idiot box by now, and no stores were open here past five o’clock on a weeknight.

  On the street before him, the last bubbles of life strained through the open wound on Darek Afton’s neck. They surfaced like translucent red boils along the edges of the cut, burst, and were then no more. Lee Gordon sighed, wiped his hands on his pants, and heaved the still-warm corpse by its armpits. He dragged Darek Afton out of the street, where he would most likely have been used as some groggy driver’s speed bump the next morning. After some effort, Lee propped him against the obelisk, allowing the man’s head to roll forward on his neck as if he were sleeping and the blood that spread across his shirt was nothing more than red wine he’d vomited all over himself in the night. It was a fitting end for the black man who had caused him so much trouble, he thought: bled to death in the shadow of the Daughters of the Confederacy monument in the middle of lily-white Lost Hollow’s town square. Finally, he had been put in his place.

  ***

  You bastard! Graham’s diminished voice shouted from somewhere in the stream. Lee ignored it. He forced what he hoped was a sympathetic look on his son’s face and nodded in the beam from the Maglite. “I’m thorry about your dad, too,” he said to Afia. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I have. I won’t lie to you, Graham. This hasn’t been an easy trip for me. When Patsy told me that she wanted us to talk to you for this Halloween story we’re doing, I had a bit of a panic attack. There was bad blood between your father and my father and—please don’t be offended—I always wondered whether your father had something to do with my father’s murder. I mean, it was more than bad blood, really. They hated each other.”

  She paused, perhaps waiting for him to reply. Lee said nothing.

  “I mean, your father stood outside our house, drunk and shouting threats at us, more than once. The police wouldn’t help us. When I was little, it felt like this horrible vicious cycle that was just going to go on forever. There were nights of peace and quiet, nights when my dad and I could talk about normal things like my day at school or what we wanted for dinner. Then there were those other nights, the nights when I was terrorized by the possibility that your father in his drunken rage was going to break down our door and murder us both.” She shivered visibly, then chuckled. “Did you know that I told Patsy and Staff that we—you and I—probably would have been friends way back in elementary school if it hadn’t been for our family circumstances. We were both outcasts in a way. You with your bruises and shyness, me being the only black girl in the class, and both of us missing our mothers.”

  Lee Gordon remained quiet. In his heart, he seethed. Seriously? This black woman was seriously suggesting that Lee Gordon’s son would ever befriend a nigger girl?

  Yes, came Graham’s voice from somewhere within him. I would have. Maybe if things had been different I would have even asked her out when we got to high school. How do you like that? Does that bother you?

  Lee scoffed. The boy was getting too big for his britches.

  After a time, the bitch standing over him seemed to give up on her attempt to drag him into this particular set of navel-gazing exercises. She bent and placed against the open cellar door the three beer bottles that she’d held by their necks in her right hand. Next, she carefully stepped back from it, testing her system. When the door stuck, she applauded her own efforts and smiled down at him.

  “Voila!” she said. “Let there be light!”

  “Thankth,” Lee intoned. It was the most he felt that he could muster under the circumstances.

  “All right, then,” Afia replied. “I suppose if you don’t need me I’ll take another walk around outside. If you don’t mind, of course. Staff and I discovered some pawprints out there earlier that look like they lead to a little blocked off area, maybe something that used to be a crawl space access. It looks like the dog or whatever made those prints was trying to dig out the blocks. Do you have any idea what might be under there?”

  “Ain’t nothing under there as far as I know.” He hoped he wasn’t showing on Graham’s face the alarm he felt at her inquiry. “Place has been blocked off for years. The only thing under there should be insulation and plumbing.”

  “Staff thought maybe it was chasing a rabbit or some other kind of critter that ran in there to escape.”

  He nodded. “Yes. Thath’s probably right. I’d prefer if you didn’t go pulling and prodding at that old set of blocks, though. I don’t know what condition things are in over there. You could get hurt.”

  “Oh, sure. I won’t disturb anything. I promise. It’s just that Staff and I are here to try to get some Halloween stories and Patsy was telling us about the local legend of the black bitch, which is supposed to be some kind of dog with a human face. She says it’s an omen of some kind.”

  Lee shrugged his son’s shoulders for show. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Except that he did know. He had seen the creature prowling around the perimeter of his house for years, once or twice while he was still alive, he thought. He had heard her lonesome screams in the night, sounding like what older folks might think was a banshee. Before his own son had shoved him to the bottom of the cellar, he thought she might have just been a product of his semi-guilty conscience, some kind of memory of his encounter with an enraged Grace Afton as she nosed her way into his life, trying to cause trouble. But then he’d seen her again—sensed her, really—countless times throughout the years he had paced the floors above in his Ethereal form. Now and then she’d come by, sniffing, sensing, seeking. Occasionally she would scratch at the front door, clawing at it as if trying to pry it open. That scratching would continue down the front porch and across the front of the house, around the corner, toward the old crawl space access. And she would scream, sometimes right there on his front porch. She would scream loud enough to wake the dead, and always it ended with a low, mournful canine howl. Ghost or not, it was that scream that had chilled him most. Often he told himself that it was probably just some form of wildlife that was somehow able to mimic a human voice. Maybe a hawk. He couldn’t really have seen a human face on it in those few glimpses he’d gotten over the years. Could he?

  I saw her, too, Graham’s voice chimed in from somewhere among the waves in their shared stream of consciousness. There was a taunting quality to it, a courage he’d never heard from his brat in life. I saw her just last night, Dad. Up there in the cellar doorway. Just before you happened to me. She was inside the house, Dad. She was finally in the house. You must have opened the door for her in all your bullshit bravado. I’ll bet she’s finally coming for you.

  SHUT UP, BOY! Lee screamed inside his head. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!

  He shook his head to clear it and then realized that Afia Afton was still standing over him. She looked concerned, but also mildly amused.

  “Can I ask you one more question, Graham?”

  He cleared his throat. “Thure.”

  “Why do you want to
restore this old place? Your dad beat the hell out of you here, from what I understand. Didn’t he also die here? What possible good for you can come out of bringing this place back from blight?”

  He shrugged on the surface. Inside, Lee felt burned by her accusation that he was somehow not a good father. Was he strict? Sometimes mean? Sure. But he was raising his son the same way his daddy had raised him, and he’d turned out all right. “Good question, I guess,” he replied. “I don’t know.”

  “Ok, then. Well, I’m going to go back outside. Just call or text if you need me. We’ll be hearing back from Staff and Patsy pretty soon. I’ll call and check in with them if we don’t.”

  “Ok.”

  She started to turn away again, unblocking the white light from the hallway that spread through the cellar door frame.

  As she walked away, Lee felt a wicked grin spread across his son’s lips. “Oh!” he shouted up at her. “Oh, and Athia?”

  “Yes?” She paused in her steps but did not turn back to look at him.

  “Your mother is a black bitch,” he shouted.

  He switched off the Maglite and flopped onto the cellar floor, leaning his back against the cinder block wall for support.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Afia Afton sat in silence on the decrepit front porch steps of the old Gordon place, her forehead cradled in the palm of her right hand, her elbows propped on her knees. She cursed herself for allowing Joanie to talk her into this assignment. A slightly more ashamed part of her also cursed Staff and Patsy Blankenship for their catalysis of the memories of the bad history Lost Hollow held for her. There was an old adage she’d heard growing up, heard frequently after she was placed in the state foster system: you can’t go home again. What no one ever bothered to tell her is it’s best if you never try.

  There was another old adage that Afia had often heard. She supposed she had been naïve to dismiss the one about the apple not falling far from the tree. Graham Gordon had grown up in a backwoods racist home with a backward racist father. The man had never even moved outside the city limits. He had never experienced life outside a small Southern town full of white people who tried to absolve themselves of their racism by clinging to the myth that the American Civil War was all about state sovereignty, not slavery. These were people who flew Confederate flags beneath the Stars and Stripes in their front yards and assuaged any twinges of guilt they might feel over it by claiming they did it all in the name of preserving history and heritage. The problem with that excuse, of course, is that knocking down racist symbols does not actually erase history. Preserving history is for museums, history books, and documentaries. Flagpoles and town squares dedicated to the heroes of lost causes do not preserve history so much as they lionize oppressors. Everything about Lost Hollow that had influenced Graham in his childhood still held sway over his world view and, apparently, that included his dead father’s irrational fear of and hatred for black people.

  She should just walk away, Afia thought. There was no story here. At least, there was no story that she wanted any part of broadcasting. Graham Gordon’s father had endlessly harassed her family when she was little. His son, now trapped in the cellar of his father’s old house, had tried to pull down her pants on the playground when they were eight years old. He’d been stupid enough to believe his father’s racist myths, and at least racist enough himself at that age to think he had the right to put his hands on her in order to validate that myth. Afia had practically forgotten the incident from all those years ago. Now that Graham turned it all up fresh in the soil of her memories, she seethed over it. What right did he think he had to put his hands on her? And what right did he have to call her mother a bitch? She was the woman who had loved Afia enough to risk a confrontation with a white male principal in a redneck school district. She was the woman who had dared to stand up to Afia’s assailant and demand an apology. She was a brave woman. A strong woman. But a bitch? If she was a bitch, it was only in the most empowering feminist connotation of the word.

  He had no right, the distant voice of Afia’s mother Grace Afton said inside her head. It was a voice she barely remembered, not a voice she heard often. Until this moment, Grace Afton had been a giant question mark in Afia’s history. She was unfinished business. Afia had spent most of her life angry with her mother for having disappeared. Now, thinking back on the incident at the school playground, she felt the sting of guilt over that anger.

  The fury, the outrage, that had overcome Grace Afton’s face when Afia told her what had happened had been frightening at the time. On some level, Afia supposed the child version of her had been afraid that her mother was angry with her. As an adult, she could see that Grace wasn’t angry with her daughter. She was angry for her daughter. Now her daughter was angry too. And sad. She’d never told her mother how much that love and support meant to her that day. Now she might never get the chance.

  The hooting of a nearby screech owl broke her out of her reverie. She hoped it was an owl anyway. There was something oddly human in that trilly sound. It wasn’t repetitive like a hoot owl or the caw of a crow. It ranged in pitch and varied in frequency and, at least twice, she thought she heard it say her name: A-fee-aaa. A-fee-aaa.

  A cool autumn breeze caressed her just then, making her shiver, raising gooseflesh. Afia looked up from her hands and shaded her eyes against the morning sun. She glanced at the cars parked along the side of the road near the front yard, scanning beyond them, searching for the source of the call. There was nothing there that she could see. Only a few tall brown cattails swaying hypnotically in the breeze. She started a little when a loud thump sound came from somewhere inside the house. Graham getting restless, she assumed. And that was fine. Let him be restless. His cavalry would get here by and by. Until then, he was no more of her concern. She and Staff should just be on their way once he and Patsy returned with the ladder. It was not her responsibility to save the man.

  No. You won’t save him, the voice of her mother said in her head. You can’t save him. What’s done in the dark is brought to the light, sweetheart. What man sows he reaps, and the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons. Where had she heard that line before? It sounded biblical. Afia had never had much use for the patriarchal strictures of the Christian church. She was certain she’d never heard her mother quoting scripture. Even so, the words made sense. The only person who could truly save Graham Gordon was Graham Gordon. Yes, he might need someone to bring him a ladder to get out of that cellar, but getting out of that cellar didn’t absolve him of anything.

  There was the screech again. A-fee-aaa. A-fee-aaa. She wondered then if the local kids had been hearing an owl out here at night instead of the screams they’d been reporting. The vaguely human sound of the screech owl certainly gave her the creeps. That didn’t explain what Jeremy Beard had said he’d seen out the rear window of the place, but she could understand how the owl’s vocalizations, wherever they were coming from, could easily be mistaken for the mournful wail of a human woman.

  She heard something skitter by on the pavement at the road. It sounded the way a dog’s claws or a deer’s hooves sound when they panic and bolt for elsewhere, when they just can’t seem to get their legs under them as they attempt to flee. In the shadow between the back end of Graham Gordon’s Tacoma and the front end of Patsy Blankenship’s Sonata, something moved. It might have been a leaf being dragged along the pavement by the autumn breeze, although at that moment Afia hadn’t noticed any pickup of wind. She supposed it could have also been a squirrel or some other rodent scampering away with some spoils that had recently fallen from the already near-barren branches on the trees that surrounded the Gordon place. Whatever it had been, it was gone in an instant and probably not important.

  Afia’s thoughts drifted back to the Halloween puff piece that she and Staff had been assigned to obtain for Channel 6 News. They had the Beard interview. They could still get Patsy on camera to describe other scary legends of Lost Hollow. But she would be damne
d if she would now allow Graham Gordon to sully her airwaves.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Staff and Patsy Blankenship had just finished securing the extension ladder they’d hauled from Patsy’s garage to the luggage rails atop the Channel 6 News pickup’s topper when the familiar sound of an iPhone’s default Note text message alert caused them both to prick up their ears. Staff automatically grabbed at his hip, where the holster on which he hung his iPhone was clipped, even though it should have been evident to him that the sound was not coming from there because he’d felt no accompanying vibration. He glanced at the screen as he lifted the device, then clipped it back into place.

  “Not me. Must be yours.”

  Patsy stretched her arms through the open passenger side window of the S-10 and lifted her purse from the seat. She rummaged around inside it for a minute, reminding Staff of his grandmother searching for a pack of chewing gum when he was a kid, and mumbled something about why bag manufacturers always use black as an interior lining. She located the phone and stared at the screen, her enormous eyes looked confused behind her Coke-bottle lenses.

  “Well, I guess this means Afia gave Graham his phone back, but he must have hit his head harder than we thought,” she said. “Either that or Afia’s using it to text us random nonsense.”

  She held the iPhone up so that Staff could see the message on the screen. Just beneath all of her attempts to text Graham earlier that morning appeared a single balloon with the reply, “Knock knock. Who’s there? Cotton. Cotton Who? Cotton a trap.” Just as Staff was about to ask Patsy what she thought he meant by that, another balloon appeared. “Why shouldn’t you tell secrets in a cornfield? Because it has too many ears.”

  “He’s texting you kids’ jokes?”

  Patsy examined the new text and shrugged. “I guess so, although I can’t imagine why.” Another text arrived just then. Patsy read it aloud. “Why are the zombies unhappy with their roadmap? It only leads to dead ends.”