Nowhere USA: The Complete Series: A Psychological Thriller series (Nowhere, USA)

by Ninie Hammon

  The pistols he’d stole from Peetree’s Hardware were double-action revolvers, Smith & Wesson Model 10s. You could cock one before you fired it, but you didn’t have to. Just pulling the trigger rotated the cylinder to bring up a fresh cartridge, and drove the hammer all the way back, then dropped it to fire the gun. Single-action pistols was more accurate than double-action ‘cause you didn’t have to yank so hard on the trigger to make them fire.

  Neb hadn’t never fired neither one of these pistols, had to figure a way to go out somewhere by himself so Mama wouldn’t hear the shots. He flipped open the chambers of the first one, then the other, spun the chambers around, making sure every slot had a round. When he’d gotten out the box of the shells to load them, he’d tried to fit extra shells into the slots for them on the gun belt. He didn’t understand that part — the single bullet slits in the gun belt. He tried to force the shells one at a time into the slits, finally got one in but with his big fingers it was almost impossible to work it back out again. In a gunfight, it’d be a whole lot easier to re-load from a handful of bullets in his pocket, rather than trying to pull the bullets out of the belt slits.

  But he’d stopped trying to fit the bullets into the slits, didn’t grab a handful of shells to put in his pocket neither ‘cause he wasn’t gonna to be in no gunfight. Wouldn’t need but one bullet. That’s all it would take to put down the El Dorado Kid. If it wasn’t for the Jabberwock, Neb woulda gone up Lexington and got hisself a Stetson hat and some gen-u-ine Tony Lama boots. Now, he had to make do with a John Deere cap pulled low over his eyes and his work boots.

  He got slowly to his feet, patted the guns on each hip, set his jaw and stepped away from the porch where Essie sat singing her song.

  “Ghamma, gamma, soooooo, so-wissy,” the words somewhere between a chant and a melody.

  Lily has come out of the saloon to the wooden sidewalk as Tack shows the little boy his guns.

  “You go on home now, son,” Tack tells the boy, before spinning each of the pistols around his finger and fitting it back into its holster. “Get inside and stay there.”

  The boy turns and runs away down the sidewalk as fast as he can, his boots clunking lightly on the wooden sidewalk.

  Tack looks at Lily, holds the gaze of her violet eyes, nods, then steps down off the wooden sidewalk and walks slowly down the street, moving with the grace of a big cat, each step kicking up a puff of dust from the street.

  His arms hang limp at his sides. He flexes his fingers, then relaxes his hands.

  “Hey, Kid,” he calls out. “I hear you’re looking for me.” He takes two more long strides. “Well, here I am. Come and get me. Unless you’ve turned chicken and run.”

  No one replies and Tack takes two more steps.

  “Oh, I ain’t run, sheriff,” says a voice.

  And Tack freezes. The voice has come from behind him. As if he has eyes in the back of his head, Tack can see the sniveling coward standing on the sidewalk — with Lily held in front of him as a shield.

  “Tack, don’t—” Lily cries, but her words are cut off.

  “What’s the matter, sheriff? Afraid I’m too fast for ya?”

  Tack knows what he must do. He must spin, draw and fire — in one motion faster than lightening and his aim must be perfect because Lily is …

  He begins to turn, his movements smooth, fast and flawless. He grabs the Colt out of the holster on his right hip with his left hand, and the one on his left hip with—

  Bang!

  The sound of the gunshot so startled Neb that he dropped the gun out of his left hand and released his hold on the half-drawn gun in his right. That gun flew out of the holster and banged into the bottom of the railing around the front porch and dropped with a thud into the tall grass.

  Whew! The trigger on that pistol was so light he pulled it just grabbing it out of the holster! Double-action was supposed to be way stiffer than that. Must be because this was such a fine weapon that—

  He heard an odd sound. Like the whine of a dog.

  Lifting his eyes then to the top step of the porch, he was surprised that Essie wasn’t sitting there no more. Where—?

  Then he realized she was still there, she just wasn’t sitting. She was lying on her back on the porch with her feet still resting on the next step down.

  Why did …?

  Then Neb was standing over her and he had no memory at all of moving. He had been standing with the guns lying in the grass at his feet and then he was standing on the porch looking down at Essie.

  She lay there looking up at him. But she didn’t have that blank, stupid look on her face, like wasn’t nothing at all going on in her head.

  Now she was looking at him … confused. Surprised.

  She lifted her hand like she was going to reach out to him, but then let her hand drop to her chest. The limp hand plopped down on top of the smear of red on the front of her tee shirt, a swatch of crimson that was spreading out from the center.

  It took Neb several seconds to figure out what was going on, to understand why Essie was lying on her back on the porch.

  When he figured it out, his legs went out from under him, and he folded up at the knee. His un-hinged legs dumped him on the porch beside the bleeding body of his sister.

  Bleeding from the gunshot wound the bullet from a Smith & Wesson Model 10 had put in her chest.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Viola didn’t say nothing to Zach about him driving too fast so he kept the pedal to the metal all the way out Route 17 South to Gallagher Station Road, past the Killarney cutoff and into Turkey Neck Hollow to Farmer’s Branch Road that jigged and jawed along the side of Gizzard Ridge. He’d had to slow down then, it not even being paved and all. They passed by the Martins’ house at the bottom of the hill and Eunice was out working in her garden. She threw up her hand to wave hidy and Zach waved back. Viola hardly noticed her at all. Her mind was in other places, making connections. Wondering as she watched the cabin come into view as they passed beyond the last tree.

  It was a simple, ugly log home — added to over the years as the need arose, as worn out and used up as Viola sometimes felt. Zach pulled right up in front of the house and stopped, didn’t gun the engine in a vroom, vroom, though Viola could tell he wanted to, just knew better. He sat looking at her, but didn’t say nothing. Also a good idea on his part.

  It seemed like she hadn’t been here in a hundred years, when in truth she’d only kicked Sebastian Nower out of her house on Sunday morning and today was Tuesday. The mere passage of time didn’t explain how she felt. And neither did the “wonky” Jabberwock time. Oh, she’d noticed it, alright. Of course she had. Anybody with a pulse had figured out by now that time locked inside Nowhere County by the mirage on the border wasn’t the same’s it had been before. Neither was the weather — the temperature, no clouds. And the sky with its un-sparkling stars. She hadn’t mentioned it to nobody because what was the point. It was what it was. It was all messed up and the Jabberwock had done it and wasn’t nothing to be said about it one way or the other. She refused to allow herself to speculate on what other things the Jabberwock had the power to do if it could control the sky and the weather. Like maybe making houses old overnight. Or making people vanish.

  Yeah, that part was happening, too, just like that Charlie woman had said at the town meeting. Only a fool would argue with a thing like that when the proof was right there before your eyes. The Furmans’ house. The Blakes’. Others. All of them suddenly falling-down shacks.

  Viola seen it but wouldn’t grant the knowing of it to take up space in her mind. That, too, was what it was and wasn’t no sense ‘lowing a thing you couldn’t change or fix park itself in your head and maybe mess up your thinking clear about other things.

  Viola was finally getting what she wanted in life and there was no power on earth — not the Jabberwock or anything else — that could deny her what she had coming to her.

  And maybe … just maybe, there was a whole lot more out t
here for her to want than she’d known existed and wouldn’t that be a hoot. Wouldn’t that be a wonder for a fact!

  Still, she sat and looked at the house and didn’t get out of the car. Smelled the stink of the outhouse out back and the smell so offended her she wanted to hold her nose to make it go away. She’d get used to it in a little bit and wouldn’t be able to smell it at all. But now …

  There was them little candles in the shiny white bathroom in her new house and even if there was a stink — which there wasn’t — them candles filled the room with smells that made you smile just to breathe them.

  Seeing her own house every day of her life had made it invisible. You seen a thing day in and day out for going on seven decades and after a while you didn’t really see it at all anymore. She was seeing it now, though. Seeing what was there and seeing all that wasn’t visible but was as much a part of that house as the shingles on the roof.

  Because of what was on her mind, her thoughts went to her babies, the ones buried underneath crosses in the little family cemetery under the cherry tree on the hillside above the house. You couldn’t see the cemetery from here, but it was part of what Viola seen when she looked at the house whether her eyes could actually pick it out or not.

  She’d lost three children. That wasn’t counting the twins the devil took. Elizabeth May had died of pneumonia and Josiah had just … died. She went in to nurse him one morning and Joe was lying there cold as a doll in his crib. Ezekiel was almost three when he come down with that influenza thing, throwin’ up and diarrhea. Didn’t take but two days to kill him. She had put all them little ones in the ground, knew after she birthed Malachi that he was the last, that she wasn’t going to be having no more babies. Wasn’t no telling what them others woulda grown up to be if they’d had a chance, but it was only Malachi that’d turned out to be worth anything. And he wasn’t just the pick of the litter, he was a mother’s fantasy of a son — even if he wouldn’t do what he was told. He was everything any mother could want, and right now her mind had walled off consideration of what was gonna happen if she found out he’d crossed her. Right now her mind was considering who he was.

  And what else he might be.

  She got out of the car then.

  “You wait here. Won’t take me long.”

  She had sent the boys out to collect a few things for her that she needed in her new home. Wasn’t but a few things, though. Mostly personal things like clothes, shoes, her hairbrush and the like. Beyond that there wasn’t a thing in the whole house that mattered a hill of beans to Viola. Wasn’t a thing good and fine and fair to look at like every piece of furniture and picture and gilded mirror and doodad sitting on the tables in her new house.

  She never even thought about it as the Nower House no more. It was the Tackett House, would be the Tackett House until her dying breath, and she sure as Jackson didn’t intend to clutter it up with worthless things from this place where decades of living had soaked into the walls like sweat into an unwashed work shirt.

  What she was looking for was on the top shelf of the chifforobe in her bedroom, way back in the back. She couldn’t reach it, but didn’t call Zach in to help ‘cause this was private business and he wasn’t no part of it. She dragged a chair out of the kitchen into the bedroom and put it in front of the big, ugly piece of furniture, climbed up on it, shoved worn quilts and threadbare towels off onto the floor and felt around, located the box there in the back and hauled it down. She carried it into the kitchen and turned it upside down and dumped out the contents on the table.

  Wasn’t much there. Viola never had been one to hold onto things and she hadn’t lived the kind of life where there was much in it you wanted to save. There was a handful of crayon drawings that one or the other of them had done when they was little — she didn’t know who had done which but wasn’t a one of them that you could figure out what they’d been drawing. Sure wasn’t no saved-up report cards. She almost laughed. Like she was proud of how well her kids done in school!

  There was Malachi’s diploma, though. He’d graduated — disobeying her like he done his whole life, stayed in school when she needed his help with her dope business. And there was some things that’d come in the mail when he was in the military, certificates and citations and the like. After awhile they stopped coming, though, and she figured he hadn’t stopped getting such, had just changed his home address so they didn’t get sent “home” to his mother.

  Near the bottom of the heap were photographs. They had a camera — wasn’t a good one. Most of the pictures from it was too dark or blurry, and Viola wouldn’t spend money she didn’t have on film. She didn’t care about such things anyway, but there’d been that time that Obie’d got a burr up his butt to take pictures and he’d gone around taking snapshots of everything he could find until he shot up the whole roll of film. It was probably six or seven months later before he talked her into paying to have the film developed and she remembered how thrilled he’d been when she come home with the envelope of the photographs from the drugstore.

  The whole family’d gathered around, wanted to see — at least they did until they saw what he’d took pictures of. A blurry picture of Neb chopping wood, a picture of Viola’s back while she washed dishes — things like that. Three or four pictures of the piglets in the barn that was so dark they was just outlines. The only memorable shot was when Obie’d yanked open the privy door and took a picture of Zach doing his business. Everybody got a kick out of that one.

  Even it was too dark, though. Something with the camera.

  But it wasn’t the only memorable shot, because there was another one that had caught Viola’s eye at the time, and had hung on a nail in her head all these years. She dug around through the pile, looking for it, sure she hadn’t imagined it, hoping it hadn’t got lost or accidentally thrown away.

  Then she found it.

  She held it way out in front of her — away from her face ‘cause she had trouble focusing on things close up.

  She felt a chill down her spine, like there was an ice cube on the back of her neck and it was melting, icy water that dripped off one bone to the next and to the next, all the way down.

  It was a picture of Malachi asleep, not yet a teenager, still a little boy. Between childhood and being a grown man, Malachi’s face had changed much more than his brothers’ had. Maybe it was just the looks on their faces — like they wasn’t a whole lot smarter as grownups than they’d been as kids. But it was really more than that, Malachi’s face had become lean, gaunt. His brothers’ pudgy faces had not matured like his had.

  But in the picture, Malachi’s face still bore the soft lines of childhood. He was lying on his right side, had scooted the pillow off onto the floor like he always done so his cheek was resting on the mattress. Wasn’t no bottom sheet — sometimes they was sheets enough to put on all the beds and sometimes not.

  Maybe he was sick or taking a nap or something because it wasn’t night. Afternoon, though, because there was long shadows everywhere. And the camera’d made the picture too dark just like it’d done all the others, so you couldn’t make out much of nothing near the edges.

  Musta been right before the sun dropped down below the top of Gizzard Ridge because it sent a last ray of sunlight, a sunbeam like an arrow through the trees and through the window to light up a small portion of Malachi’s bedroom. His bed, and his face against the mattress.

  Just his face — nothing else, the rest of the room lay in shadows. Far as Viola could remember, only this picture and the one of Zach taking a dump were crisply focused without no blur whatsoever.

  His eyes was closed, eyelashes so long you could see ‘em on his cheeks, hair all tousled across his forehead. The lines and planes of his face were clear, seemed to pop out in relief against the shadows around him.

  A photograph of a sleeping twelve-year-old boy.

  Change Malachi’s black hair to reddish brown, and this could have been a picture of Rusty Sheridan — who was twelve years old.


  The two faces was as alike as brothers.

  Or as father and son.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Charlie and Fish leaned against the wall in the basement of the Methodist church. Charlie had coaxed Fish off the piano stool and sat him down on the floor, there was no other furniture, and then she’d sat down beside him.

  Merrie was having a grand time playing with — destroying the hundreds of tattered, water-stained hymnals that’d been stacked against the wall. Charlie would buy new ones if there was ever again a congregation here who needed them. The little girl had made paper airplanes and balls out of the pages, had stacked the books up as building blocks for her castle, had torn pages into tiny pieces and made it snow on her castle, and had begged to be allowed to use a pair of Fish’s socks — they were clean, hung on the line to dry after he’d washed them — to make sock puppets. Currently, the puppets were castle guards, sticking out over the top wall of the structure and dropping the rocks Merrie’d retrieved from the gravel parking lot onto the heads of an invading army of “dragons” fashioned from balls of paper held together with strips of the tape she’d found in the back of a desk drawer in one of the church offices. Charlie had taken the child on a quick search-and-retrieve mission into the abandoned church office area of the building — avoiding the sanctuary where there was broken glass. Merrie had searched the offices and had returned with all manner of useless flotsam and jetsam to occupy her time.

  An incredibly creative child, Charlie thought, watching her play. That little girl could grow up to be — well, anything she wanted … if she got a chance to grow up at all.

  Even though Fish was sober, actually appeared to be totally sober, for the first time in who knew how long, he still was far from lucid. Maybe it was alcohol poisoning, all those brain cells that died from being soaked in alcohol for years. Perhaps it was the lingering effects of the DTs — he’d briefly described what he’d suffered after he poured all his booze down the drain. It was horrifying even though she was sure he had sugarcoated reality.