Drawn Into Darkness

by Nancy Springer

  “Out at a bridge site in a hard hat,” Forrie said, “but I can get to Newark Airport in a couple of hours.”

  “Have you spoken to Jeb and Derry?” Meaning Deb and Jerry: Mom’s mom, Deborah, and Mom’s dad, Gerald. Speaking of the Clymer grandparents so unceremoniously helped Quinn keep them safely distanced, emotionally if not geographically. Jeb and Derry’s fieldstone farmhouse south of Philadelphia was not nearly far enough away. Even before the divorce, going to visit there had felt like walking into a thicker dimension in which his childhood, which he wanted to leave behind, hung somehow preserved as if caught in Jell-O.

  Forrie said, “Hell, no. You think I’m going to tangle with those two old chain saws?”

  “Well, one of us has to call them and tell them we’re going to see about Mom.”

  “They won’t care. They’ll be glad they’re off the hook.”

  Silence, because this was too true.

  “All right,” Quinn said finally, “I’ll flip you for it when we get to the airport.”

  “Call me when you know which airline.” Anyone else would have been concerned about tickets and airfare, but Forrie was content to leave everything up to Quinn.

  “Right. Get moving.”

  Hanging up, Quinn knew he ought to get moving himself, arranging to take personal days, delegating his workload, finagling project extensions, persuading colleagues to cover for him, providing for the care and feeding of his job as if it were family. After which the biological family, his grandparents and his two uncles, would be happy to stay at home all smug and virtuous.

  Quinn took a moment to lean back in his expensively comfortable desk chair, checking on his own emotional weather. It startled and gratified him that he and Forrie seemed to be on the same page for once. But it also gave him kind of a chill he didn’t like. Forrie wouldn’t be going anywhere unless he felt afraid, as Quinn felt afraid, that something serious had happened to Mom.

  • • •

  Down on my hands and knees on the rough wooden floor, at gunpoint, trying to gather goopy remnants of dead snake with a scrap of cardboard, I considered that Zeno or any other Stoic had nothing on me when it came to accepting the vicissitudes of life.

  “Hurry up,” Stoat said.

  Why? It wasn’t like we were going anywhere. “I need a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser,” I said, thinking of the hypercivilized ads on TV and trying to joke.

  “Just shut up and do it.” Stoat sounded extra cranky. I realized he had to be in a great deal of pain, although he would never say it or show it. But surely he felt like killing something. While keeping his shotgun close at hand, he had his knife out also and was flicking it into the table over and over again, as if practicing to improve his short-range accuracy. Cold little lizard feet of fear scampered up my spine, and I hurried to collect the ophidian carnage and carry it outdoors, where, I had decided, I would just keep going. Starving in a wilderness would be way better than being terrorized by Stoat.

  But it was as if he had read my mind. “Stop right there,” he ordered as I reached the back door. “Stay where you are and pitch the stuff outside and come back here.”

  “But I need to go to the privy!” The moment I said this, it became suddenly and urgently true.

  “Privy,” he mocked. “What the hell is a privy?”

  I tried again. “I need to pee.”

  “Too bad. Either hold it or else squat where I can see you.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  He raised the shotgun and thumbed back one of the hammers with a click.

  “Okay, okay!” I threw my cardboard and its contents into the bushes, decided I was going to have to delay urination a little longer, and came back inside to look at the snake blood on the floor. No way could I get it up without a scrub brush and water.

  “Would you like something to eat?” I asked Stoat as a diversion.

  “Hell, no. I still feel like I’m gonna puke. You eat if you want to.”

  This was going to be a very long day. Unless it was shortened by death, either his or mine.

  And if he was going to die from the snakebite, I would have thought he’d be doing it by now. Damn.

  Although not really hungry, I decided to eat for the sake of something to do, or, more important, something for Stoat to watch me do. I needed to keep him occupied in ways that did not involve shooting me. Looking around our too-cozy hut, I found the multiple-purpose pocket tool. Had Justin intentionally left it for me? Was there any way I could use it to escape from Stoat? Both questions drowned, answerless, in my swampy mind as I looked over the selection of possible food. I saw no cans missing. If Justin hadn’t taken the can opener and something to eat, what the heck kind of plan could he have? My whole body weakened with worry for him.

  I made myself open a can of peaches and sit down at the table across from Stoat and his gun.

  “I hope you don’t really think I threw that rattlesnake at you on purpose,” I told Stoat after a while. “I’m not crazy. It’s just that you surprised me, that’s all, and I thought it was the other snake.”

  It was difficult to interpret any expression on his grotesquely swollen face and in his one functional eye. But as far as I could tell, he was staring at me as if I were the freak.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I said, which, strictly speaking, was true. I had meant only to escape from him. And looking at him gave me an extreme case of mixed feelings. Vengefully glad I had wreaked such damage. Appalled, shuddering, to know I had grabbed a rattlesnake with my bare hand. Sorry for him, sorry about his pain, and I couldn’t believe my own empathy for this creep. Even more unbelievably, I felt grudging admiration for him; the bastard was so tough he wouldn’t give in to the poison in his system. He refused to pass out or even lie down.

  My face must have shown far too much. “Don’t you dare pity me!” Stoat growled. I sensed he would have liked to shout, but his breathing was too shallow, his face pearled with sweat, and a pulse pounded in his temple. “I thank you for this goddamn pain because it means I can’t sleep and you ain’t got a chance in hell to get away until I feel better, at which point you’re going to be the one to die, Miss Lee Anna. I advise you to keep that in mind.”

  He scared me. I very nearly peed my pants.

  Wait a minute. He hadn’t scared me that much. I just needed to go.

  “Stoat,” I said equably, “lookie here.” I stood up, came around the table so he could see me, and toed my unlovely sneakers off. Standing on my bare, blistered feet, I said, “Please let me go to the privy like this. You’re a fair man and you’ve got good sense. You don’t want me stinking up this shack and you know I’m not going to run away in this swamp without any shoes.”

  I’m sure the “fair man” and “good sense” flatteries were key. Stoat hesitated, staring at my toes as if he found them repulsive, but finally he growled, “Fine. Just take them smelly shoes away from me.”

  “Okay!”

  “Say, ‘Yes, sir.’”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Say, ‘Thank you, sir.’”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Go.”

  I picked up my much-abused shoes and placed them against the wall farthest from Stoat, where he could see them. Then I started toward the door, but I felt something whiz past my backside and turned to look. Stoat had thrown his big, vicious knife at my shoes. If he had double vision, like he said, it didn’t seem to be slowing him down much. His knife had gone right through one sneaker and pinned it to the floor.

  “Bring my buck knife back,” Stoat ordered, but I headed out the door, pretending not to have heard.

  “I said bring it back!”

  The tone of his command stabbed me in the gut, and I knew he would kill me if I didn’t obey. I scuttled back inside, yanked the knife out of my sneaker, and returned it to him, all the time trying to muster the will and strength to kill him with it instead. But I couldn’t. Because I badly had to go pee. How humbling is that?

 
; Finally out the back door, picking my way carefully toward the privy, I nevertheless cut my foot on something sharp hidden by old live oak leaves. It bled a little, and hurt. But not as much as my heart. How could I possibly survive Stoat? And what had become of Justin?

  FIFTEEN

  Seated beside his brother on the flight to Tallahassee, Forrest looked at Quinn and asked, “The iPad, is it really for work or just to keep me from talking at you?”

  “Both,” Quinn replied at once, without looking up from the tablet, but divulging just a hint of a smile.

  “So what exactly is it that you don’t want me to talk at you about?”

  Quinn actually turned his head to answer. “Forrie,” he chided, very dignified in his three-piece suit, “where’s your grammar? You mean, ‘What is it about which I do not wish you to talk?’”

  “‘That is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put,’” retorted Forrest promptly, quoting Winston Churchill. Both brothers enjoyed their verbal sparring, although it had been a lot more serious in their teen years, all about sibling rivalry—well, mostly on his part, Forrest admitted to himself. As always younger, shorter, chunkier, and grungier than his very successful brother, Forrest sat next to the Suit, wearing khakis and shirtsleeves, uncomfortable in the airplane’s narrow seat and also within himself. “Are you going to answer my question?”

  “What do you think?” Quinn parried.

  “I think, as usual, you do not want to talk about the dysfunctional family.”

  “You mean Jeb and Derry?”

  “Them too.” Their perennially married grandparents were at least as dysfunctional as their divorced parents. “What did they say?” Quinn had been the one to phone them.

  Quinn looked away, checking out the cloudscape. Of course he had the window seat. All Forrie could see from his seat was a rather murky horizon.

  Finally Quinn gave an oblique reply. “I think they’re still mad at Mom.”

  Her own parents. Bummer. “What do they think is going on with her?”

  “They have no clue and neither do I.”

  “And they don’t care.”

  “They didn’t say,” Quinn hedged. “They’re happy to leave it up to you and I.”

  “Grammar, Quinn.” Forrie pounced on this unexpected opportunity. “Objective case.”

  Obedient to their longtime rules of verbal engagement, Quinn corrected himself. “Okay, they’re happy to leave whatever’s going on with our mother up to you and me.”

  “And what the heck do you think is going on with Mom?”

  “It is a capital error, my dear Watson,” lectured Quinn, waggling his eyebrows, “to theorize with insufficient data.”

  “Suit, come on.” Tired of the game, knowing damn well Quinn used it to keep his family at a comfortable emotional distance, Forrest gave Quinn a long, level look that would not let go. “What do you think, really?”

  “Hell, I don’t know!” Quinn broke eye contact, studied his manicured cuticles, and said to his hands, “Maybe an irate neighbor shot Schweitzer because of his constant barking, and Mom lost it somehow, and—I just don’t know. What’s the worst that could have happened?”

  “She could have murdered whoever shot Schweitzer.”

  “If she hasn’t killed Dad by now, she’s not likely to murder anybody.”

  This was a joke; therefore, Forrest answered it soberly. “True,” he admitted. But something about his face or tone made Quinn laugh, and Forrest had always loved to laugh; he joined in.

  “The real capital error,” he told Quinn, chuckling, “is to try to figure out Mom.”

  “And yet we do.”

  “Yeah, well, how about those Yankees?”

  An excellent diversion. A subject fascinating to both of them. One of their few mutual interests. Quinn put away his iPad and willingly discussed the Yankees during the rest of the flight to Tallahassee.

  Deplaning took as long as ever, but lugging his carry-on duffel bag through the Tallahassee terminal, Forrest, to his surprise, saw the light of outdoors ahead. This was not as large a terminal as he had expected. A moment later they checked in at the one and only rental car desk, then stepped outside. Forrest looked back at a single brick building flanked by tall pine trees.

  “This airport is tiny!”

  “For a state capital, yes. There’s our rental.” Quinn stopped rolling his carry-on leather suitcase, tucked away its handle, and lifted it into the car’s trunk. “Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Would you like to drive?”

  “Sure, but don’t call me Dorothy.”

  “I’ll navigate.” Belted into the passenger seat, Quinn deployed his iPad and pulled up a map app. “I’m hoping we can get to Mom’s place before dark.”

  During the two-hour drive on I-10 that followed, Forrest found himself and his brother in heartfelt agreement on a couple of sentiments not involving the Yankees. One, a Chevy Aveo had to be the Worst Rental Car Ever. “It was all I could get on short notice,” Quinn said, genuinely apologetic. Two, the Florida Panhandle was the most alien place either of them had ever seen outside of a sci-fi movie. Miles and miles of nothing except tall forest standing in dark water. A road-killed bristly bloating black pig on the shoulder. At a rest stop, a hillbilly with a long beard that looked entirely too much like Spanish moss—only he couldn’t rightly be called a hillbilly, because there were no hills in this flatland. Call him a swamp denizen, selling watermelons and boiled peanuts.

  Adding to the surreal feel were Stetson-shaped billboards advertising a Western-wear outlet, and others, normal in their rectangular shape but not so normal in content: “Learn to Fly at Wiregrass Aviation,” “Camp at Sinkhole Springs,” “Enjoy Family Fun at Possum Park.” Forrest slowed down to look at that last one.

  “Dancing possums?” he reported doubtfully. “Tempting tasty possum soup?”

  “Not in my lifetime.”

  Another billboard that caught their attention advertised Bucky Bob’s Bait and Live Oyster Bar.

  “I like oysters,” Quinn mused aloud, “but not when they’ve been rubbing elbows with night crawlers.”

  “Since when do oysters have elbows?”

  “Shut up and drive.”

  Late in the afternoon they exited I-10, and once they got past the small cluster of motels, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants by the interstate, they left behind civilization as they knew it. The rudimentary road on which they drove was a pencil-straight line punctuated by a few trailer parks and several small frame houses painted in rainbow colors. When they reached an ornate but faded sign, THE CHURCHES OF MAYPOP WELCOME YOU, Quinn told Forrest, “Keep going to the third traffic light, which happens also to be the last traffic light.”

  “Why does that not surprise me?” Forrest had slowed down not so much in obedience to the posted speed limit as to gawk at what might as well have been a Midwestern not-quite–ghost town with false fronts. PAWN SHOP, WE BUY GOLD. CHECK CASHING. Then he did a slight double take and read aloud, “‘Best Pharmacy and Hunting and Fishing Supplies. Gun Sale.’”

  “Eek.” Quinn gave an exaggerated shudder. “I’d be scared to go in there for Advil.”

  “Look what’s right next door. ‘Snell Furniture and Undertaking, Family Owned for Three Generations.’”

  “We’re in Oz, Forrie. Look over there at Cutzit Hairstyles.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” But Forrie could see all too clearly the beauty salon’s window display of conditioners, curling irons, and chain saws.

  “If there’s a doctor, I suppose they’re also the vet.”

  “Why isn’t there anybody on the sidewalks?” Forrest complained. “Is this a movie set for a bad Western?” The buildings, venerable but undistinguished, bothered Forrest; the way they stood scattered, oddly spaced, made no sense to his urban eyes. “Why is there a horse in a pasture right behind the People’s Bank of Maypop?”

  “Never mind the horse. Have a look at the church.”

  Forrest looked. �
�Holy crap.”

  “Yes, and a lot of it, I would say.” Even with its rather squatty steeple, a concession to hurricane country, the church loomed by far as the most imposing structure in Maypop.

  “Third light ahoy,” said Quinn.

  “First cypress swamp to the right and straight on toward Mom’s place.”

  The swamp quip turned out to be prophetic, but Forrie saw that he should have added cotton fields, a dairy farm, several ponds, numerous pinto horses, and a scattering of very modest houses.

  After a few miles, Quinn started watching the numbers on the mailboxes. “We’re getting close.”

  Quinn sounded tense, and Forrie noticed because he felt tense. More than tense. Worried. Scared. What the heck was going on with Mom?

  Trying to lighten the mood, he remarked, “Do you think she was serious when she said it was pink?”

  “I’d say.” Quinn pointed.

  “Whoa!” Forrest pulled the rental car off the road, stopped it, and stared. Nestled amid clouds of fluffy pink mimosa blossoms glowing in the sunset light, Mom’s shack looked like it belonged in a fuchsia fairy tale.

  Quinn concurred with Forrie’s unspoken sentiment. “That is so Mom it is eerie.”

  “I expect her to come flying out on her broom at any moment.”

  “Don’t we wish.” Quinn unbelted his seat belt. “Turn this pitiful car off and let’s go see what’s what.”

  A smell diametrically opposed to that of mimosa blossoms assaulted their nostrils the moment they got out of the car. Wordlessly they exchanged a shocked look. Forrie stared straight ahead and let Quinn lead the way to the back door. Pinching their nostrils against the stench, they let themselves inside.

  It seemed much darker there. Who could think anything so aggressively pink could be so dark? Forrest groped for a light switch, but when he found one and flicked it, he wished he hadn’t. It would have been better not to see what the maggots were doing to Schweitzer.

  Quinn made a retching noise, U-turned, and rushed out back to lean against Mom’s car for support. Forrest retreated there too, staying a safe distance away from his brother. Quinn had not actually vomited—yet—and Forrest didn’t want him to in case his own stomach responded accordingly. Grabbing Quinn’s elbow, Forrest said, “Come on. Fresh air,” and tugged his brother toward the portion of the yard farthest from the house. There, under the lovely low branches of a mimosa tree, both stood and breathed deeply.