by Billy Coffey
“The spring will do all I want,” Dorothy says, “all that matters. I will make it right to the boy afterward.”
“And how?” Arthur asks. “You would tell the boy of his death only after he is restored to a life no better than that from which he was taken?”
“I would see him live a long life before I take him.”
“Why?” Arthur asks, and in such a strong voice that Dorothy hears Abel calling from behind, wanting to know if everything is okay. “It must be paradise. Yes? Abel is bound for glory, yet you would rather him keep to this poor world and let him suffer as we all must suffer. It is rest we seek, whether any of us know it or not. Have you ever considered that when you are called? That those you take to one path or the other only seek a rest from their worry and their fear? Their pain?”
“It is not a poor world,” Dorothy says.
Arthur pushes his chair on, turning those wheels with his hands. Turning them and turning them. “Such a thing can only be said by one who merely visits here rather than dwells.”
Dorothy wonders how many times Arthur pushes his own half-broken body in a single day, and how wearying it must be. How that single, repeated act must steal a bit of his pride each time. “I have not seen what lies beyond the path, Arthur Free, though I know it is paradise truly. It is rest and more. But does that paradise make this world somehow less? Does the eternal life you and Abel will find cheapen the mortal life you live now? If this world and all in it mean nothing, then why do they look back as I take them? Why do they all look back? I would just once have someone only look forward as I take them. That would soothe me, knowing but one soul has lived such that it knew the beauty of this world rather than dwelled on its brokenness alone. That is all. It is not such a terrible thing, seeking rest from what has always ailed you. Or have you forgotten what drew you to the Reverend Johnny that night?”
Arthur keeps his eyes forward, on through the paths and avenues of the landfill. “It is,” he answers, “when what you seek to end your own pain only brings more upon the innocent.”
*
It is Abel who asks, “Where we goin’, Arthur?” though that same question has wormed its way into Dorothy’s mind ever since they crossed by the small office building and on into the deep chasms of the dump. They’ve passed several trucks, both large and small. They stand as shadows in the darkening sky.
“Where we must, Mister Shifflett,” Arthur says. “Where we must.”
He rolls on. Dorothy pauses and lets Abel pass her. She stops Dumb Willie and says, “Dumb Willie, you seen anything?”
He shakes his head. The motion pops a small bubble of spit that had been lodged at the corner of his mouth.
“It’s munsters. Here,” he whispers.
“But you haven’t seen anything?”
He shakes his head again. Dorothy turns, watching Arthur and Abel go. “Dumb Willie, it might come to you alone to get Abel where he needs to be. Do you understand? If I can’t, it has to be you. No matter what, you get Abel into that spring.”
“Kay Do. Tee,” he says.
“Good. Now come on, let’s see what Arthur’s up to.”
They only have a few steps to catch up. Arthur’s arms are strong but it has been a long way from the gate, and Abel is shining such that the brightness has seemed to sap the little strength he had. They are coming to what appears to Dorothy as a monument to human waste: a labyrinth of ancient refrigerators and freezers, washing machines and dryers, old televisions, all of them arranged in a mound of mazes.
Dorothy puts herself in Arthur’s path, making him stop. “You gave your word you would take us,” she says. “Now here we stand little farther from where we’ve come, and I am left believing your preacher is not the only one who knows how to play tricks.”
She spots a glimmer of Arthur’s smirk in the dusk. “The way is hidden. I protect it well.”
“You promised you’d take me,” Abel says.
“And I’ve kept that promise.” Arthur raises a finger toward the monolith of metal ahead. “The spring is inside.”
“That spring’s in there?” Abel says. “You keep a miracle in a dump?”
Arthur turns both his head and his wheels. What Dorothy sees in the old man’s eyes is a sadness that shakes her, and a despair of things lost and never to be had again that she knows well.
“Was not always a dump, Abel Shifflett. This land was once an Eden, but now that Eden is gone. The spring is all that remains. What better place to hide a miracle than among all that people discard and call useful to them no more?” And when Abel says nothing, “You think I work at a landfill for the pleasure of it?”
Abel peers past Arthur and into the stacks and rows of appliances, where a narrow tunnel has been made. He grips Dumb Willie’s arm. Bright smudges are left on the big man’s sleeve. Dorothy bears witness to the flood of hope upon the boy’s face, and a recognition that it is this place of dirt and stink where they have been meant to come first, not Fairhope, and the hidden spring within it the thing he must meet.
He walks forward with Dumb Willie’s hand in his. Dorothy comes alongside, leaving Arthur alone.
The three of them stop near the entrance when the old man calls, “No, Abel. You cannot do this thing.”
Dorothy raises her voice. “Your task here is done, Arthur Free.”
“Soon,” he answers, “but not yet.”
Dorothy feels a pull upon her, a summoning that speaks of betrayal. Power enters as a dark current through the crown of her head and down, flooding Dorothy’s arms and chest and legs, tingling her feet. She sees the faint distance shimmer and yield to dual roads leading into the distance, one wide and leading downward to blackness, the other narrow, following ever on.
“What have you done?” she asks.
Arthur tries to sit tall in his chair. He draws a pistol from the small of his back. “What I must. This place was laid not for the likes of you, Abel. You are a good boy, but your time is gone.”
From either side of the mound walk the three men Dorothy knows from the trailer when she and the boys first arrived. They carry weapons in their hands, shotguns and pistols from their trucks. Dumb Willie lifts Abel into his arms. His face is white with panic as the men encircle them.
“End this,” Arthur says. He looks to Abel rather than Dorothy.
Abel’s eyes are lanterns, his face shivering.
“I will ask no more,” the old man says.
“You call down your own judgment, Arthur Free,” says Dorothy.
“And you may take me, but I will not go alone.” He points the gun toward Dumb Willie and shouts to the men, “It’s this one with the price on his head.”
Abel screams, “No!” too late. Dumb Willie has already made his last act, no different from all the ones that came before it since that first day upon the school playground. He turns Abel’s hand loose and places his body in front, wanting only to save a friend already dead.
Gunfire rings, searing the stillness of the landfill and of Dorothy’s own mind. Arthur fires wide, but one of the men does not. A shotgun’s blast drives a hole into Dumb Willie’s stomach and chest, sending him backward to the ground.
“No!” Dorothy yells, with a force that trembles the very dirt beneath them. Rats scurry from their hiding places among the refuse.
Arthur drops the pistol in his hand as the noise moves over and through him. The men’s eyes grow wide, beholding their end. Dorothy steps forward, putting herself in the center of their circle as Dumb Willie stumbles toward the dark path made between a stove and a doorless refrigerator, Abel in his arms. A streak of blood is left in the place where they disappear.
Dorothy turns. The thin form about her slips away.
And here in this quiet corner of Raleigh, Death is loosed.
*
Twelve years Harold Franklin has lived in these parts, and he has never known a day without want. He knows what poverty can do to a man. How it strips dignity and worth. His daddy dug coal in the West Vi
rginia mountains. For thirty years, Tobias Franklin spent more of his life below the ground than above it.
It was the only way he knew to provide for Harold and Harold’s momma, and for that Tobias grew to hate the very earth that kept his family alive. He loathed the stench of the mountain’s bowels and how its gray dust clung to him, to his soiled clothing and his white hard hat and the ridges of his cracked skin, even to the soft lining of his lungs, turning them black with sickness.
Harold was seven when his daddy died. It was a Saturday in January and there had been blowing snow, and Tobias said he could see the angel of death standing over him as he wheezed his last.
It was a meager life that awaited Harold and his momma after, leaving her feeble before her time and him to vow a better life for his own family. He ran to Raleigh, where he found Darlene. She cuts hair in a little strip mall near the city’s center while he buries trash all day, having forsaken the mines that killed his daddy. He takes their boy Harold Jr. to school each morning rather than letting him on the bus. Those bus kids are ornery cusses, picking on Harold Jr. for how worn his clothes are and how his feet are growing out of his shoes. Kids these days, they’re awful—raised wrong and spoilt all the way through.
And so when he’d been standing near the office with Lonnie and Lester and heard Arthur say that big stupid man was the one killed them kids up in Virginia, all Harold thought of was that reward money. Even split three ways (Arthur said he didn’t want none of it, which Harold thought foolish but which meant more for him and Darlene and Harold Jr.), that was more than the landfill paid in half a year.
He never entertained the thought that retard would get shot. Even when Lester said he’d do it, Harold thought otherwise. But he did, that shot rang out over the dump like Death’s raging bell, and now . . . and now . . .
It’s as if that girl is an iron pot left lidded over a flame. Harold stands, feet frozen to the hard dirt where his body will soon lie, horror-stricken as the girl’s insides look to bubble and shake and boil over with neither clatter nor spit but a roar of “NO” and “NO.” Her stretching in height and breadth, dark hair turning to a black like dark clouds marshaling to storm. To Harold Franklin, they have all been caught inside an explosion in reverse: not that girl blowing outward but somehow gathering in, consuming the very night before releasing it as woven shadows that slither from her feet, searching.
The wad of tobacco set in Harold’s jaw slips free. He cannot feel it rolling across his tongue, does not sense it moving back toward his throat. His eyes do not see the retard Lester shot scampering toward a hole between the appliance pile, too full are they of the terrible truth that the pretty young girl’s skin is but a blind for the terrible thing hid beneath.
The tobacco catches in Harold’s gullet and hardens, making his throat gasp and his eyes bulge, robbing him of breath. Those black fingers of night crawl for him. He cannot run. The shotgun in his hands falls. The ground races up. The trees fade to a thin gray fog. His lungs die first as Harold clutches his throat.
The rest of him dies following.
Light blooms in warm peace. Harold rises up to find himself alone. Lonnie and Lester are nowhere; Arthur has wheeled off. Even the girl has fled from the approach of a shine truer than the sun. Before him lies the world split open in a long pathway that rises gently into the beyond. And at the mouth of the path, Harold sees his daddy waiting. Tobias Franklin wears his Sunday finest rather than the soiled mining clothes that were his second skin, a suit of deep blue with a starched shirt the color of mountain snow beneath. Smiling, grinning at his boy.
“Come on, now,” he says. “Been waitin’ on you, son.”
Harold gazes down at his own fallen body. His mouth is hung open, lips a powder blue. The neck and chest of his work shirt, washed fresh and ironed not a day ago by Darlene, are stained with brown expectorate.
“We got to go on now, Harold. You come on with me. Joy waits.”
He takes his daddy’s hand, as strong and solid in new life as it had been in the old. Together they walk the path. Harold’s gaze moves from the light before them to the night they leave behind, casting a final look at where he fell. His daddy watches. In his eyes Harold beholds a sadness not of his father, one that expresses a feeling Harold cannot put to words. He never should have come to this place. Darlene and Harold Jr. already had all the reward that was needed. They all had each other. Harold wants to say it, tell his daddy, but such wisdom is too late now. It would only fall as ash from his lips.
*
Lonnie Patterson hardly has time to see the girl rage before the aneurysm that has gathered in his brain for months bursts, ending the world with flashes of red and orange. It is warmth that wakes him again, morning in his eyes and the rough feel of a tongue on his cheek, a wet nose pressing against him.
The yellow Labrador was called property of the United States military, but to Lonnie and all the men in his unit, Scout was his alone. The two of them were inseparable during those first few months he was in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan. He defended her with his weapon; she defended them all with her nose. Wasn’t a dog in all of Helmand Province so adept at sniffing out IEDs as Scout. Wasn’t a thing missed that dog’s attention except for the Taliban sniper round that felled her. Scout has since been as much a source of misery as one of longing. In the long years following Lonnie’s return home, he has lost a wife and both children in the divorce. As painful as that was, the loss of Scout hurt more. He had never had a friend more true, nor has Lonnie ever found a surer source of love.
“What you doing here, girl?”
The dog barks, tail thumping against Lonnie’s knee. Scout licks his cheek again and now Lonnie’s nose, Lonnie wincing as he struggles to draw in breath he finds he does not need. He rises from the ground and sees himself lying there still. Scout bounds off toward a path that rises shining in a soft angle toward the sky. That path wasn’t there before, Lonnie thinks, wasn’t no place. Path like that don’t even belong in the world.
“I think I died,” he says. “When I do that?”
Scout calls with a bark. She turns in a circle, jumping, chasing her tail.
Lonnie steps forward and leaves himself behind. He turns and sees Harold isn’t here anymore. Lester, too, is gone. What has this cost them all, the promise of quick money made easy, the killing of a slow boy?
“Can’t leave’m,” he says, turning back toward the night. “Har’ld? Les? Where y’all at?”
He turns at Scout’s whimper, a mournful tone too real and felt for even a noble beast to manage. The dog comes forward and sits on her haunches, pink tongue hanging. She nudges Lonnie again, then opens her jaws to set her teeth into Lonnie’s arm that way she used to do when he was about to step in a bad place. Tugging him. Trying to save.
Lonnie faces the path once more. He leans his head in as though to gauge its distance, see if he can spot his friends farther along.
“Where’s that go, girl?” he asks.
Scout turns him loose. She bounds to where the path begins and turns, tail wagging so hard it looks to hurt.
Lonnie grins and follows. Thinking as he does about those old days when it was just him and his dog and the cold Afghan night. Back when everything was scary but fine. Yessir, everything was fine.
Sure is good, having that dog again.
*
Last thing Lester Harmon needs is to still be at work when there’s more work to be done next day, but it ain’t no thing killing a retard. ’Specially when there’s money to be had in it. ’Specially upon remembering the words that retard said when they passed on their way to Arthur’s office.
You stink. You a weed.
Don’t nobody call Lester Harmon that. Don’t nobody who wants to live. And now what Lester thinks is after he puts one in that child killer, he’ll maybe have himself a turn with that young woman.
He fires, sending the retard on to the hereafter with a load of buckshot in his belly. The girl shouts out, setting Arth
ur’s hands to his wheels and buckling Lester’s knees, and as he swings both barrels around he knows he should have pulled on that girl first, corked all her blubbering. Should—
The scatter-gun wavers in Lester’s hands as that girl turns into something not human, a thing with red eyes ablaze and a horn that sprouts from the crown of her battered old hat. Her face twists into that of a lion, a bear, a demon’s spawn, her legs thickening, hoofs breaking through the toes of her dusty shoes. And in that girl’s hands, a heavy chain slicked with blood.
Lester turns to flee and trips over an old car battery lying on the ground. His head lands hard on the rock beside, splitting both with a wet cracking sound. Blood fills Lester’s vision. His arms and feet no longer work. He is fading, fading, the night calling him as the demon trundles forward. Beside him a hole opens in the world, black and swirling. From it grope shadows of bone hands and thin, hoary legs of beasts born in the dark places beyond nightmare, spider eyes that glow yellow and gargantuan.
In Lester Harmon’s last moments, he sees that demon hold a look of something near mourning. His dying body rages at the hollow life it leaves behind, all that emptiness both trailing him and waiting on, shadows reaching for his ankles and legs, his waist, the blackness pulling, taking him, taking him.
*
Dorothy has time enough to glimpse Arthur racing away, his arms pumping at the tires on his chair. Dumb Willie and Abel are gone. The only evidence of their escape is the blood left where the maze of metal and rust begins, and there is where Dorothy races. Her hair and shirt are left sticky and stained red. Her hat falls at the entrance.
Abel. All that matters is Abel.
No water waits on the other side. There is nothing but black and the smooth sides of doors and polished steel. The uneven ground threatens to send Dorothy sprawling. She uses her hands as eyes, groping the way forward.
