Heaven's Crooked Finger

by Hank Early

  HEAVEN’S CROOKED FINGER

  AN EARL MARCUS MYSTERY

  Hank Early

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Hank Early

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-391-5

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-392-2

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-394-6

  Cover design by Melanie Sun

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: November 2017

  For Joy, with all my love

  And to the memory of my two North Georgia grandmothers, Opal Rogers and Gertrude Mantooth

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Acknowledgments

  1

  My first realization that heaven—at least my father’s version of it—didn’t hold anything for me came thirty-three years ago when I was seventeen, on the day I picked up my first venomous snake with my bare hands in front of Daddy’s church. It was a moment I’d imagined and dreaded since I could see over the church pew and watch my father stalking from the pulpit to the front row, wearing the church’s old brown carpet thin, shouting so fervently, with such conviction, that I became certain I had to feel that conviction too, and if I only could, the world would fall into place, and my father would love me once and for all.

  When I was a child and I watched him holding those serpents, I was sold. The words no longer mattered. It was a visceral thing, a tingle deep inside me, an itch, a fiery rash swelling across the hidden skin of my heart. It would drive me insane unless I scratched it. The year prior, I’d watched my older brother, Lester, shaking as he lifted the cottonmouth high over his head. Eventually he relaxed, even grinned, as the snake remained passive, its wickedness calmed by my brother’s apparent faith. He was saved, a child of God, but maybe more important in the patriarchal world of North Georgia, he was a man of God. He changed. The distance that had existed between him and my father diminished, and I was left alone, isolated with an odd mix of longing and dread.

  My father lived his entire life in preparation for his death, a North Georgia mountain preacher who believed in the almighty power of God and the strictest interpretations of good and evil. If he ever found a gray area in all his days, I wasn’t privy to it; there was the Holy Scripture and there was everything else. There was this world and there was the next, and everything in this world was simply a test for the one that followed. If you passed the tests, you made it to heaven and everlasting peace. If you failed even one of the tests and didn’t get right with God, if you didn’t fall on your hands and knees and ask for his forgiveness, you were damned to a hell worse than the one Dante described. In Daddy’s hell, there was nothing but constant torture and excruciating pain. I remember falling once as a small boy, cracking my chin open on the rusted edge of a shovel left carelessly on the ground by my brother. Daddy picked me up and held me high like he always did as if somehow trying to remind God that he worried for me, that he prayed for me daily, and that he’d yet to see any of the fruits of those ministrations.

  “Feel that?” he said, his voice a low and rough rumble that always sounded like the purr of a muscle car just before you really made the engine work. He only let his voice fly in front of his congregation, and then that low rumble stretched out sonorously over us and settled in the spaces between our thoughts and the ceiling of the little country church on the side of Ghost Creek Mountain, a comfort and a threat, all tangled together.

  I nodded furiously at him. I felt it.

  “That’s hell, boy. Except hell is a thousand times worse, and there won’t be nobody to pick you up and dust you off and tell you it’ll get better. It won’t get better. Not in hell. There’s no end to it.”

  Later, I would learn the steel blade of the shovel had connected with bone, leaving the tiniest of cracks, enough to disrupt a growth plate and cause one side of my lower jaw to grow longer than the other, giving me an eternally crooked smile.

  When my turn to touch the snake came a few years later, I was a jaded teenager, probably already an alcoholic, my desperation for my father’s love by then soured and replaced by a sharp and defiant hate. But maybe, I reckoned, power lay at the heart of that action after all, because didn’t facing danger equal faith? And faith was the key I’d always lacked, the key that would unlock all doors, the one thing that would make me a part of my father’s world. In many ways, the opportunity to hold that snake in front of the church began to feel like my very last chance at salvation.

  On the morning I was supposed to take up the serpent, I vomited in the dank bathroom at the far end of the Church of the Holy Flame, wiped my mouth clean, glanced into a mirror smeared with dead insects, and promised myself I’d believe as hard as I had to and then some. I’d trust God completely, so he would seal the lips of the serpent, and instead of its venom, I’d be filled with the Holy Spirit, the secret wind I’d never known before. According to Daddy and all the men I knew, this had to happen soon or it would be a bad sign.

  I was sweating when the door to the inner sanctuary swung open, and I saw the throng already swaying to the sporadic thunking of Aunt Mary Lee’s arthritic fingers on the tuneless piano. Daddy held two snakes, a large rattler he’d been using for years and a smaller cottonmouth found years ago in some brush down near Ghost Creek. Stepping into the sanctuary, I believed I felt it. The wind. Daddy said it was a breath,
and when it took a hold of you, you might feel your feet lifted off the ground, your lungs expanding with the fresh air of heaven. I waited, closing my eyes, willing it to come in.

  I had always wanted to believe in something. I still do.

  I scanned the throng of congregants, looking for a kind face. I only saw two: my mother and Lester. Despite Lester’s newfound closeness with Daddy, he always had time for me. We were only a year apart and were close in a way I truly miss now. I knew he’d been counting on this moment for a long time, hoping all would go well, that I would join him and Daddy as a man of God at last.

  My eyes also fell on Lester’s girlfriend, Maggie Shaw. Maggie was the only girl who really mattered in our little community. She was in my grade in school, but because of her long blonde hair, quick smile, and womanly figure, she drew the attention of boys—and men—much older than she was. Even then, she was considered a threat to the godliness of male congregants young and old alike, though she had not yet been vilified like she would be in the coming weeks. I spotted her in the congregation, sitting with her mother and father, both founding members of the church my father led. I knew they were deeply disappointed in her flirtatious ways and worked diligently to keep her away from the opposite sex, because nothing was more sacred for a young girl in the Holy Flame community than purity. They had no idea about Lester and Maggie’s clandestine meetings in the church cemetery after dark. As far as I knew, nobody did other than me.

  It was just one more way in which I was deeply envious of my brother. Not only had he made the transition within the church, he was also spending time alone with Maggie. I didn’t even try to imagine what they might be doing during that time. That would have driven me crazy. I know now I didn’t love Maggie, but I wanted her with a power that can sometimes eclipse love. Often I dreamed of escaping this place with her. We’d go to Chattanooga and live in sin, an idea I found at once both reprehensible and deeply compelling. In the weeks before holding the snake, I’d crept away when Lester did, but instead of following him to the churchyard, I went to Ghost Creek and lay thinking of her until my urges overcame me and I felt better—at least temporarily.

  Yet as much as I wanted Maggie, I realize now I wanted something else even more. That itch, the one that ran across the skin of my heart, would not stop tormenting me. I had to scratch it. I had to make it stop. I craved Maggie, but I craved my daddy’s love more.

  Aunt Mary Lee slowed the tempo, and Daddy began to speak. At first, he only moaned, and I knew this was the spirit working its way through him like fingers kneading dough. Soon the moans took shape, and I heard words.

  “Come and take us, God. Come and take us now. If your will, God, be for this serpent to strike, may he strike my son dead, just as Abraham presented his own to you, God, just as he raised the weapon and you stayed his hand, I commend this boy unto your will, Lord, unto your perfect mercy, but even more so to your absolute justice.”

  Then he closed his eyes, and the other words came out. These were the words that made my head spin, made me feel useless and afraid, because Daddy was gone, and what remained was some other alien thing, ancient and trembling beneath the ages. We had prayed the prayer of salvation so many times, but Daddy said you just had to keep at it until it stuck, until your doubt went away and you felt the spirit of the Lord take up residence in your heart. When that happened, he said, your sin would fly out of your mouth so fast, you’d nearly choke on it. Once in the middle of a tornado, he made Lester and me go outside and kneel, naked to the elements, and repeat words after him. Sometimes he did it that way, feeding the words to us, but other times he wanted to hear them come from us. Our own faith. That was what he always said—“It can’t be mine, boys. It has to be your own.”

  Another time, when Mama had come home drunk, he’d slapped her and then pulled us into their room, where he made us kneel beside him and pray and pray. It was for our salvation and his forgiveness. Mother lay on the kitchen floor, blissfully unaware of it all. At the time, she’d been six months pregnant with my little sister, Aida, who would only live for a few hours.

  Daddy went on for some time. I closed my eyes and let the sounds float over me, hoping to catch even one of them and tuck it inside, hold it, feel it, and be filled. When the tongues ceased, he beckoned me. Mary Lee’s pounding began again in earnest, and I wondered if she’d fall prone like she’d done before, legs wriggling insect-like as she landed on her back.

  As I approached, Daddy took the cottonmouth and kissed it on its head. Its tongue flickered against my father’s chin, and for a moment, I believed I understood it all at last. The snake was a magnificent creature. To be so close to it, to feel its tongue against your flesh, must be a feeling of supernatural grace and power. I wanted that.

  When he held out the snake for me, I did not hesitate. I took it in my hands, feeling its otherness in the slick of skin, the cold languor in which it lay nearly dead in my palm. I turned it around so it would face me. I so wanted to be like my father, to please him, to find him where he was, wrapped in something so transcendent, I would never want to leave.

  The eyes of the snake were flat—so flat, I believed Daddy had given me a dead creature, and I almost dropped it. Later, I would realize the eyes reminded me of my own when I looked in the mirror, that in many ways, I was already dead inside when I touched that first snake.

  The serpent twisted in my hands, and I gripped it more tightly. The slack eyes found mine, and when they did, they held me in such contempt that I knew everything was wrong, not just in me, but in all of us. The breath I was waiting for would not come, not like this, not now. Again I scanned the congregation, desperate for a friendly face. I found none. My mother had covered her eyes, and Lester looked at my feet, wincing.

  The cottonmouth opened its jaws and showed me the gleaming, wet cotton inside its throat, and I began a journey past the fangs and into its belly. Years seemed to pass as I made my way through the cavern of its open mouth and into its hollow length.

  I believe a part of me is still trapped there.

  And maybe that’s why I’d never been able to quit drinking. It seemed like the one place to escape the thoughts of hell, the sense that I’d never tap into the salvation Daddy wanted for me. So many times I had said the prayer, and each time it never seemed good enough. I’d do something stupid or selfish or mean. I’d lash out in anger toward him—I’d been born with my father’s temper, just not his faith—and this would cause him to quote scripture about discipline and how it was his fault I’d not come to the Lord yet. Then he would begin to cry, nearly sobbing, as he made me hold the lowest limb of the oak tree in the side yard while he pulled my blue jeans around my ankles and tore the flesh off my ass with a switch as thick as cord rope.

  When the snake struck, I barely felt anything. I’d heard a venomous snakebite is one of the most painful injuries a person can suffer. I believed that, but for me it was only a prick before a veil fell over me and the room turned to shadow. All the people were gone. Not even my father remained. I dropped the serpent and fell to the floor. I lay there for a long time, watching shadows. Most of the shadows were children, and after a while, the realization dawned on me that the children were lost, trapped in a limbo so profound, to this day, I cannot bear thinking about it. When we were kids, Lester and I took to sneaking out of the long Sunday services in that hot and dusty church. We would slip down to Ghost Creek, so named because there was supposed to be a ghost of a girl who’d killed herself roaming its banks, still looking for whatever she’d not been able to find in her short life. I was fascinated by that nameless girl, that ghost I never saw but felt more surely than any spirit my father wanted me to feel. No one seemed to know the details of her longing, so I imagined what they could be, sitting on the bank, passing the bottle we’d stolen from the local moonshiner, Herschel Knott. I figured she wasn’t really looking for anything physical. Why would a ghost, I reasoned, need anything of this world? No, I decided it had to be escape she was looking for.
Stuck between heaven and hell, that was her prison. She didn’t care for either, and now she drifted along a creek because it was beautiful, because it was a promise she felt had been broken. That was what I’d come to feel too: betrayed, left in limbo between my father’s angry God and the hope of another, better one. In some ways, everything that came after the snakebite was a shadow world, and I moved through it like a ghost, searching for a light to shine, for some tiny morsel or scrap that would help me believe the journey was worthwhile.

  When I woke five days later, I discovered Daddy had refused to take me to a hospital and had instead left it to God to decide my fate. And as he’d done so many times before, God had decided to torture me.

  He let me live.

  2

  The letter came on a Saturday morning in an oversized white envelope. I did not open it right away.

  I’d spent the morning following a city councilman who was clearly using city funds to entertain a high-class escort. I’d taken several photos of him walking in the park with the woman. I’d planned to go through them over a quick lunch at my apartment before taking the best ones down to the mayor’s office in hopes of getting paid. I had plenty of work, but there never seemed to be enough money. Probably would have more if not for my infatuation with beer and bourbon, but then again, I’d tried quitting once. It had gone poorly, causing me to quickly come to the decision that nearly anything would be preferable to going without alcohol.

  Some people can reform, and some people just get by the best they can with their flaws. I’m the second kind.

  I put the letter on my kitchen table—pushing aside a stack of tax returns I’d been going through for another case—and stared at it.

  The writing on the front was unfamiliar. The return address was not.

  12 Old Fields Road

  Riley, GA 30710

  I held it up to the light and shook it. Then I put it back on the table and looked at it some more. I decided whatever was inside would go better with whiskey, so I poured myself a double and tossed back half of it before ripping the envelope open.