by Ninie Hammon
The fear leapt across the room like a lightning bolt and slammed into Malachi’s chest. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen a look of fear like that on a little boy’s face.
The murdering Hutus stand aside, bloody instruments of death in their hands, wild-eyed, crazed by drugs and blood lust, waiting for the Americans to leave before they fall on the hut full of Tutsi villagers and massacre them all.
Then a woman bursts out the door of the house and runs toward the American soldiers, she carries a baby and is dragging a boy of about eight by the arm.
“Take my children,” she cries at the soldiers. “Save them.”
The Hutu with a scar on his face takes two great strides and slashes into her back with a machete and she drops the baby. Another one with a sharpened stick impales the infant with it. But the little boy makes it to the soldiers, to Malachi, grabs hold of him in a death grip and tries to hide behind him.
Malachi glances down into the boy’s face. The terror in his eyes bores all the way through layers of military training and professional detachment into the core of the human being who is Malachi Tackett.
Malachi had shot the Hutu with a machete advancing on the boy. Had swung his rifle around ready to mow down every one of the other monsters. But his best friend had knocked him unconscious, saved him from the consequences of an act that would likely have set off an international incident.
When Malachi’d come to and asked about the boy, his friend had told him the murdering Hutus had cut off his head, gave it to Malachi’s sergeant as a present for Malachi.
Malachi stepped obediently back to the railing and watched the father drag his son out of the courtroom. Waited for his mother to finish giving directions to his brothers.
“You ain’t got no truck. How’d you get here?” his mother asked him, then answered her own question before he had a chance. “Rode with that McClintock woman, did you?” She smiled. “I seen she had the good judgment to make herself scarce. You can ride with me, but we ain’t going out Gizzard Ridge. I got new digs.”
“New digs? You were born in that house.”
“Ain’t gonna die in it, though!”
When she told him what she’d done, the only words he could force out between his lips were, “Where’s Sebastian?”
“He’s out there somewhere.” Her voice was dismissive. “Hope he’s ‘roughing it’ in some place don’t have no indoor plumbing.”
As they walked out of the room together, she went on and on about the Nower house she had stolen, how pretty it was inside, how Essie had her own room that had a lacy bedspread and a feather mattress.
“Why, they’s even little candles sitting in little bitty vases on the back of the toilet.”
“They’re called votive candles, Mama.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
“They smell real good when you light them — cinnamon and vanilla and the like — but ain’t no stink for them to cover up ‘cause when you hit flush it all goes away.”
She laughed at that. Saw that he didn’t.
“Ain’t no sense in getting yore nose all outta joint ‘bout things you ain’t got no control over.” She stopped. He continued on a couple of steps then turned back to her. “And you ain’t got no control over none of this — we clear on that, ain’t we?” She cocked her head to the side and plastered a phony look of sympathy on her face. “‘Cause it sure would be a pure-D shame if they was a little half-breed girl suddenly become an orphan, ‘thout no mama to look after her. Kids like her don’t usually fare too well among decent folk.”
He managed to keep his hands from balling into fists, but couldn’t keep the contempt off his face.
“Bigotry doesn’t become you, Mama. Makes the hard lines around your mouth deeper … and you could just about eat pudding out of them now.”
She didn’t even get angry, just shook her head. “You keep fooling around, son, and you gonna make me mad. You really don’t want to make me mad.”
“You’re right. I don’t want to make you mad. A woman who could do what you did here today in cold blood … God only knows what you’d be capable of if you got riled up.”
He saw her jaw tighten, her eyes narrow, and he backed off, took a breath, kept his voice level.
“Look … I can’t do this.” He made a vague gesture that took in everything and nothing. “I need some space, some air. I need to walk—”
“It’s that PTSD thing, ain’t it?”
Malachi was stunned. He had no idea his mother knew anything about post-traumatic stress disorder. She saw his surprise.
“You ain’t been around enough as a grown man, leaving like you done. You think you know me, but you don’t. You ain’t got no idea what all I know.”
Malachi drew on reserves of strength he didn’t know he had to force the next words out his mouth.
“Do you … still know how to make pole beans with ham hock, and cornbread? It’s been years since …”
She actually smiled. It even looked genuine.
“Why shore I do! Sebastian Nower had his own little garden right beside the back porch. I could even whip up a mess of fried okra or turnip greens.”
When they got out to the front of the building the crowd had cleared away. There was nothing left on the steps to indicate that a teenager had been murdered there only a short time ago.
Malachi couldn’t make himself smile, couldn’t if he’d had a gun to his head. But he did nod, turned to walk away.
“Where you goin’?” She was suspicious.
“Obviously nowhere I can’t walk to.” That seemed to mollify her. “I’m not staying in the Nower House, Mama. Neb can take me back to the Middle of Nowhere after supper. We’re taking turns looking after E.J. — Sam, Charlie, Judd Perkins, Raylynn and—”
“You hadn’t ought to be wearing yourself out—”
He held up his hand and stopped her cold.
“Not your circus. Not your monkey.”
Then he turned and ambled off down Mail Street in the opposite direction from the Nower House.
“I’ll keep it hot for you,” she called after him. “Ain’t no hurry. Whenever you’re ready.”
He didn’t trust himself to turn back around, just kept walking.
Malachi had no vehicle. He could call Charlie or Sam to come give him a ride, but he had no intention of dragging the two of them into what he was planning to do. There were other people he could ask, of course, but once his mother found out what Malachi’d done — and he wouldn’t be able to hide the deed forever — she’d come down with both feet on everybody involved. He couldn’t ask anybody to chance running afoul of his mother’s temper.
Then he thought about the boy. How had Toby Witherspoon gotten here? If they hadn’t moved, and nobody in Nowhere County moved, the Witherspoons lived on Iron Rock Road, the second or third house down from the Wiley Road turnoff. The kid surely hadn’t hitched a ride, not carrying a sack that contained his murdered mother’s purse. And that was quite a hike for an eight-year-old. Then Malachi and his mother’d stepped out onto the porch of the courthouse and he’d spotted a bicycle leaned against the big flower pot out front.
It wasn’t exactly the means of transportation Malachi would have picked — a Humvee would have been more to his liking — but he was in no position to be choosy. Gratefully, it was a big 10-speed. He had learned in the Marine Corps that the best battle plan in the world only lasted until the first shot was fired. Everything after that was improvisation. He was improvising and the bicycle was a peg up from walking. But he’d have crawled out to the Witherspoon place if he’d had to, to save that kid. And from the look on the boy’s father’s face, Malachi couldn’t get there soon enough.
Chapter Thirty-One
Toby scrunched himself up tight against the passenger door as his father drove out of the Ridge down Wiley Road headed home. He wanted to get as far away from his father as he could because he was afraid. And because his father stank. He had wet
himself.
But he must have still been a little drunk because he didn’t seem to notice. The man was in a grand mood.
“Planning on jumping out of the car, are you? I wouldn’t recommend it. You’d get the mother of all skinned knees on the asphalt.” His tone turned cold. “And I’d pick you up off the road and throw you in the backseat, or maybe the trunk, and take you home anyway.”
Toby said nothing. What was there to say?
“Why’d you do it?”
Toby didn’t answer. His father let go of the wheel with his right hand for a moment, drew back to hit him and Toby put up his hands to protect his face.
“You said Mama went shopping with her sister on Jabberwock Day, but she didn’t. I saw her that day.”
“Oh no, son, you’re mistaken.” He ground out the next words through clenched teeth. “Remember what Judge Tackett said. You got to quit making up them lies about me.” He paused. “I been ordered by the judge to beat it out of you if you ever say anything like that about me again. You got that?”
Toby nodded, saw the look on his father’s face and said, “Yes … sir.”
“Where’d you get your mama’s purse?”
“Custard brought it to me. She dug it up … somewhere.”
“Soon’s I get home, I’m gonna kill that dog.
“No, please don’t. She didn’t mean—”
He did hit Toby then. A backhanded blow aimed at his face but Toby was able to scrunch away so it caught him in the shoulder.
“Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do. Your mama tried that, and it didn’t work out too well for her.”
“You killed her, didn’t you?”
Toby couldn’t believe he’d said it, but for some deep and compelling reason he had to hear his father tell him to his face what he’d done. He hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that, though, and was so horrified his father must have seen the shocked look on his face because he threw his head back and laughed, a full, hearty belly laugh.
“Yeah, I killed her. But I wasn’t lying when I told Viola Tackett it was an accident. It was. I didn’t intend to kill her. She accused me of screwing around on her, said she knew it was Hayley and she was gonna tell the pig’s father … so I hit her. Lost my temper and kept hitting her until …”
He paused.
“There, you happy now? I admitted it. I killed your mother. Accidental.” He paused, reached up to touch his swollen lip and a look of raw fury washed over his face. “Wasn’t no accident the second time. I meant to kill her. Planned it and—” He stopped, looked at Toby and the rage was gone from his face. It had been replaced by a look that was cold and calculating, a look with murderous intent behind it, churning around ideas, planning.
That look told Toby that his father intended to kill him. Maybe not today or tomorrow. But he would eventually. He had to. He couldn’t allow the boy to grow up into a man who knew his father had killed his mother. Toby figured it’d likely be sooner rather than later, while his father was still in the good graces of the judge lady. Toby didn’t figure she would be the least upset to find out that Howie’s little boy had got lost in the woods and his father couldn’t find him.
When his father pulled up into the driveway, Toby leapt out of the car and ran into the house, where Custard was standing in front of the door yapping furiously. He snatched her up into his arms and kept running. Out the back door and into the woods. He didn’t even realize he was sobbing until he almost ran into a tree because his vision was so blurred by tears. But he didn’t stop, even when Custard began to wiggle and squirm because he was holding her so tight. He just kept running. And crying.
Nothing happened.
Stuart and Jolene stood in the middle of the cold living room of Reece Tibbits’ falling-down shack, waiting for something awful.
Nothing.
When they had encountered the beasties at Jolene’s father’s house, the response had been immediate. She didn’t even have to turn it all on before company showed up and the freakshow started. A bleeding ceiling, screaming white faces.
Stuart figured his voice would be shaky, but he spoke anyway.
“Don’t guess now is the time to ask if it’s plugged in, huh?
Jolene let go of his hand and walked to the equipment on the equipment cart beside the front door. She fiddled with gauges, switched switches. She even thumped one of the dials with her finger, but it wasn’t stuck.
“I might as well be in one of my not-real haunted houses,” she said with her back still to him. “But I set all the dials back to zero, all the default settings, so I couldn’t even fake a presence here.”
“If there’s nothing here, why is it so cold?” Stuart asked.
She turned back toward him. “That, I couldn’t tell—”
She stopped in mid-sentence and she wasn’t looking at Stuart. She was looking at the front window behind him, the broke-out picture window on the front of the house.
The hair on the back of Stuart’s neck stood on end, and he should have been so frightened he’d turn immediately around, maybe leap away. But he was so scared he couldn’t move at all for a few seconds. And some part of him didn’t want to know what was behind him.
“… like you described … what you saw on the road …”
Jolene was having trouble forming words.
Then reaction caught up with him and he spun around, arms up to ward off a blow. What he saw knocked the air out of him as surely as any tackle ever had.
The hole where the window had been was gone. In its place was a … blank space. There was no other way to describe it. It was like there had been the remains of a window there before and you could see through it to Jolene’s van parked out front and then someone erased the part inside the window frame.
But it wasn’t completely blank and Stuart instantly saw what Jolene was talking about. In the center of the blankness was a hole, small, the size of a golf ball.
The hole didn’t stay small. No sirree, it sure didn’t. It expanded. Like the aperture on a camera, making the hole wider and wider. Just like what had happened on the highway yesterday as dust from an explosion settled out of the sky. Only in reverse. Instead of a shrinking reality, this was an expanding reality.
Now it was the size of a baseball.
Now a basketball.
Irrational thoughts fired through his sparking synapses.
It wouldn’t ever be the size of a football because footballs weren’t round, a fact Merrie had pointed out to him the first time she tried to bounce one on the floor.
Ball analogies finally became useless because the hole was the size of a washing machine, then a Volkswagen, and growing steadily bigger.
Stuart saw Jolene look from him to the front door and back. Maybe if she made a break for the door … but she didn’t. She was suddenly beside him, grabbing his hand. They backed away from the opening hole together until they felt the wall against their backs and they couldn’t back up anymore. By then both of them could see that the hole was not opening up to reveal what was on the other side of the window, the van parked outside. The hole was opening up to reveal a man.
Reece Tibbits.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Toby finally collapsed, fell to his knees in front of a huge oleander bush that covered the whole base of a big oak tree. He parted the dangling branches and crawled into the dark, buggy interior until he was completely out of sight. Then he gave in to his tears for a time, he didn’t know how long.
How did you think about your father wanting to kill you? Where was a place for that in your head? Surely, he was wrong, just misjudged his father’s intent. Surely, he could just take Custard and go back home and his father would be sitting in his chair getting quietly drunk, and he’d tell Toby to make himself a sandwich and then Toby would go take a bath and go to bed and everything would be all right.
How very, very desperately Toby wanted to believe that. He didn’t believe it, but he wanted to almost bad enough to go home. There wa
s a part of him that hurt so bad he didn’t really want to escape from his father.
Oh, sure, he had believed his father had killed his mother, had been convinced of it before he ever found her purse. He thought he’d heard his father confess to the judge lady. But maybe he’d misunderstood. It was hard to hear through that crack. He could have been wrong. Until his father confessed to him, the tiny flame of hope that Toby wouldn’t even admit he clung to still flickered. That his mother really was alive somewhere, that she just couldn’t get back home, like all the other people who’d been locked out by the Jabberwock. But one day the Jabberwock would be gone and his mother would come back and throw her arms around him and he would hug her tight and smell her—
No. That was never going to happen.
His mother was dead, buried in the compost heap.
His father had killed her, just like he would kill Toby if he caught him. No, that was crazy. He wouldn’t do a thing like that, kill his own son. Fathers didn’t kill their own children.
They didn’t, did they?
Toby couldn’t know a thing like that for sure. So wasn’t it better, really, just to give up, let whatever was going to happen happen? Did he really want to live in the world knowing for absolute certain that he’d never see his mother again? Knowing for absolute curtain that his father had killed her? Wouldn’t it be better—?
And some big thing in Toby exploded in his chest.
No!
He would not just roll over and let his father kill him. If he did, his father’d get away with it and with killing Toby’s mother … and with the other murder, the one his father said he’d “planned.”
I meant to kill her!
His father had reached up and touched his swollen lip when he said that. He had killed whoever it was who’d beaten him up, had done it on purpose.
Hayley.
Toby’s mother had found out about Hayley and was going to tell “the pig’s” father. Hayley Norman — the fat girl who had been Toby’s Vacation Bible School teacher. Her father was the minister of the church … and Toby’s father had killed her.
