by Ninie Hammon
Then he noticed something else strange about it.
“That Jesus tree’s not all twisted up and ugly like the others,” he told P.D. “It’s … pretty.”
The tree was about twelve feet tall, with a straight trunk and limbs that stretched out from it in every direction as perfectly formed as an artificial Christmas tree. The limbs on the other bristlecone pine trees were all bent the same way, all pointed downhill like road signs showing the direction the wind blew.
That was it!
“This tree’s not all twisted up because the rocks protect it from the wind and snow,” he said, and P.D. listened attentively to every word. “Maybe they’d look like this if somebody built a wall around them.”
Ty sat down, dangled his feet into the crevice and looked at the tree. He reached over then, picked up a pebble and engaged in the universal activity of little kids. One after another, he chucked pebbles into the hole and watched them disappear into the shadows. It wasn’t as much fun as tossing rocks off the cliff face in front of St. Elmo’s Fire. But whenever Grandpa Slappy was around, he wouldn’t let Ty go anywhere near the cliff, said he’d fall off and break his neck.
While Ty sat there tossing rocks, the crevice gradually filled with light as the sun marched up the sky. Pretty soon, Ty could see dust motes in the shaft of sunlight that lit up the tree like a spotlight.
Sunlight! It must be near noon. Ty didn’t realize he’d sat there so long—an hour and a half, maybe, and hadn’t looked for thunder eggs at all. How had he spent that much time throwing pebbles into The Cleft?
The Cleft. Yeah, that was a good name.
That’s what he’d call it. “We gotta go, P.D.,” he said and looked anxiously at the blue sky he knew could turn grey and stormy in a heartbeat. As he hopped down the stairs and headed back to the chalet and the trail to the cabin, Ty felt a stab of loneliness. He had nobody to tell about finding The Cleft. It must have been wonderful to grow up like his mother had, with a twin brother to do and share everything with. No wonder she missed Uncle Garrett so much.
He turned and looked over his shoulder and determined to come back tomorrow to search for thunder eggs.
Beneath the overhang, where a rock the size of a house had been balanced all these many years, waiting for just the right moment to fall.
CHAPTER 14
AGATHA WIZNIUSKA EAGERLY RIPPED OPEN THE PACKAGE forwarded from Old Boston Road in Whitehall to the house on Cedar Boulevard in Mt. Lebanon—which was coming up in the world, for sure! But she was disappointed by the contents. Wasn’t a thing inside but a framed picture of a curly-haired little kid holding up a fish, and not a very big fish, neither. She stuffed the picture back into the box but didn’t tape it up or anything. Let that goon put it back together when he came by to get the mail. Aggie had too much to do as it was, trying to run Bernie’s whole operation until he decided to come waltzing back in here and ask her, “How yinz doin’, heh?”—making fun of her Pittsburgh accent.
And when he did, she was going let that little chrome dome have it! Vanishing like he done. Here in the office on Friday moaning about all the postings on Rebecca Nightshade’s fan page and nowhere on the planet the following Monday. And today was—she looked at the calendar—July 16, so he’d been gone three full weeks! Oh, she knew it had something to do with the fake disappearance of the author and her security guard, knew Bernie’d spring the stunt sooner or later and the three of them would show up with reporters all around and video-cams rolling.
But in the meantime, Aggie had to hold down the fort.
She glanced over at the framed picture on the wall of Bernie with his arm around Garrett Griffith of Withered Soul.
“Would it have killed yinz to throw a girl a warning, heh?” she asked the image.
The office door opened and in walked the suit-and-tie goon. He was all nicey nice, of course, but any fool could see his shoulders straining at his shirt and the bulge of a holster under his coat. Agatha Wizniuska didn’t fall off a turnip truck yesterday.
“No bills or nothing like that,” Aggie told him. “Just this.” She held out the picture. “I don’t s’pose yinz know when they’re coming back. I need to talk to Bernie about—”
As soon as he got a good look at the picture, the man snatched it out of her hand, turned on his heel and practically ran out of the office. Him so polite and all—didn’t even close the door behind him.
* * * *
Theo didn’t even realize what he’d said until the words were already out there in the air and he couldn’t call them back.
It was Cornelius’s fault. Had to be. That danged tumor messed with his life more every day. It made him so dizzy sometimes he had to hold onto the furniture to keep from falling down. Gabriella’d noticed a couple of times and he’d explained it away, said it was the thin mountain air everybody harped about all the time. But the headaches that stabbed into his skull without warning hurt so bad they actually blinded him, couldn’t see his hand in front of his face for hours at a time! He had one yesterday morning. Ty had come into his room but he didn’t think the boy had noticed. If he had, Theo sure couldn’t claim that was caused by the altitude.
And Cornelius was stealing his hearing, too, what little he had left. He’d lost every speck of it in his left ear ’fore he left Pittsburgh and now it came and went in his right ear, blinked on and off like a Joe’s Beer Joint sign. And that was something he couldn’t lay off on the thin air, neither. Sometimes, he’d lie awake at night wondering if losing his hearing meant that soon’s he closed his eyes it’d be all over and he’d wake up in Heaven. And he’d wonder if he ought to leave. There might still be time to serve that eviction notice. He figured “good as new” was a stretch, but being able to continue breathing in and out on a regular basis for a few more years wasn’t too shabby.
Couldn’t do that, though. Seemed like that boy needed him more every day. He’d just have to put up with Cornelius being ornery and hope his number wasn’t ready to be punched just yet.
There was one symptom, though, that had just come on recent, a new way Cornelius was messing with him. That rascal had given him a loose mouth, had somehow broke down walls that’d been securely in place for years, caused him to say things he couldn’t believe’d ever fall off his own tongue.
This was one of those times.
He was sitting on a tree stump a few feet from the bank of Piddley Creek—facing the creek, of course, with his back to the cabin and The Huge. That’s what he’d named the empty space out there in front of the cabin that was too big and deep to get his mind around. He wasn’t any more used to it now than he’d been that first day when he climbed out of the jeep about to wet himself from scared. But he’d figured out how to cope. He didn’t look at it, pretended the cabin was a thumbtack that stuck a National Geographic poster of a mountain to the sky.
Over the course of the weeks they’d spent up here, Theo had witnessed a couple of significant transformations. For starters, he’d watched his shiny bald head begin to fuzz over with a crinkly mat of nappy curls. But more important, he’d watched a glorious change take place in the hollow-eyed little boy who’d cowered in the backseat of the car the night they ran for they lives. Theo had about decided that he’d been wrong, that there wasn’t something tormenting the child—something that didn’t have a thing to do with that nutcase triple dipped in psycho who was after them. Until Ty woke up screaming in the middle of the night last night, that is, so loud even Theo could hear him. His bedroom was up on the second floor and by the time Theo hobbled up the steps to see to him Gabriella was already in there comforting him. She’d come out shaking her head.
“I guess he’s dreaming about Yesheb coming after him,” she said. “But maybe not. He started having nightmares after … you know, my face. And they really got bad after his father … died. He won’t tell me about the dreams.” She paused. “Maybe he’d tell you, though. Would you see if you can find out what’s wrong?”
He said he’d try
to get something out of the boy when they went on what had become their daily trip to the stream together. It took Theo something like a hundred years to make the journey. All them folks talking about thin air was like having a flock of birds twittering around your head—nice birds, robins and sparrows and the like—but maddening. Trouble was, them birds was right. Sometimes he had to stop two or three times to catch his breath before he made it to the creek.
Once he finally got there, though, he could sit on a log and watch Ty and P.D., talk to the boy, tease him, teach him one-liners and sort of warm himself on the little boy’s smile.
He wondered if Smokey’d ever smiled like that. If he had, Theo’d missed it. But he wasn’t missing this.
Only Ty wasn’t smiling today.
Lord, they’s something ugly eating at this boy. I don’t know what it is but you sure enough do. And you know he need to get it out of the dark where it’s in there festering. I’m here to listen if you’d be willing to give him a little shove.
Theo sat quiet and watched Ty try to catch a trout. The boy’s face was all pinched up in concentration and those round glasses made him look all eyes—like he was a baby squirrel. But them trout was wily critters. Other than the one he’d caught with Pedro’s help, Ty hadn’t been able to snag a single one. Theo suspected there wasn’t many fish of any kind in this piddly little creek. ’Course there could be walruses and whales in it for all he knew—the only moving water he was up close and personal with swirled around and around in a white bowl when he pushed a little silver handle.
Or water out a fire hydrant on the streets of Pittsburgh on hot summer days.
He’d intended to make some kind of remark to that effect when he opened his mouth and the wrong words fell out. What he’d meant to say was, “When I’s a kid, I played in the water on Towne Street.” What he did say was, “When I’s a kid, I prayed the water wouldn’t drown Skeet.”
What’d you let me say a thing like that for, Lord?
Surely, God wasn’t prodding him to go there. Had to be the work of that rascal Cornelius. Only the why or who wasn’t near as important right this minute as the what. What was Theo going to say now?
Ty turned and looked up at him. “Who’s Skeet?”
“He was my cousin. And my best friend.” It was like Theo’d been injected with truth serum. He’d ought to come up with a convenient lie to end the conversation right here.
“Did he drown?”
“Yes, he did for a fact. He drowned.”
Ty put his fly fishing pole down on the creek bank and walked over to stand beside him. He’d picked up on something in Theo’s voice. That was another thing Cornelius was messing with. Theo couldn’t keep up his Teflon front now good as he used to, couldn’t be glib. Or maybe it wasn’t Cornelius at all, maybe the purity in a little boy’s eyes was burning away what didn’t really matter anymore.
“Were you there when he drowned, Grandpa Slappy?” He pushed his glasses up on his nose and put his hand on Theo’s boney shoulder. “Did you see?”
Theo couldn’t find a convenient lie laying around anywhere.
“He got throwed off a bridge into the river and he couldn’t swim. His head went down into that dark water and never come back up.”
Some part of Theo had gone down into the water with Skeet. He was coming up now for the first time since the day more than sixty years ago when the white boys caught him and Skeet on that country road where wasn’t no help in sight.
The family is in Mississippi for Granny May Belle Washington’s funeral. Mama says she died of the wall-eyed epizootic. Started twitching and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she was dead.
It’s hot here like Theo has never felt heat. He and Skeet sneak away from Granny’s house where all the grown-ups sit and sweat, fan themselves and tell lies about how much they loved Granny. Mama always said the woman was a witch—and she used a b instead of a w—who beat her and her sisters with a belt even when they hadn’t done nothing wrong at all.
The two boys strip off their white shirts buttoned up too tight at the neck. They leave them folded neat in the backseat of Uncle Rupert’s coupe along with their shoes and then head toward the river down a road covered in red dust. It’ll be cooler in the shade of the big bridge. They can sit there with their feet in the water, squishing red mud up between their toes.
A car drives by, stirs up the dust and it sticks to the sweat on their scrawny, bare chests in a sticky film. The car stops down the road in front of them, just sits there.
“What them fools doin’?” Theo asks Skeet.
Skeet’s lower lip is fat, sticks out like he’s pouting even when he’s not. He’s two years older than Theo, but small, still looks twelve. He lives two doors down from Theo on Towne Street in Pittsburgh and can make a saxophone sing.
Skeet slows down, then stops. Theo keeps walking until Skeet reaches out and grabs his arm.
“Them’s white boys in that car,” Skeet says. “We hadn’t ought to walk by it. Let’s take to the woods.”
The two boys turn off the road and start toward the trees about fifty yards away. All at once, the four doors of the parked car open and teenage boys pile out hollering, “Let’s git us some niggers.”
Theo paused in the telling, knew it wasn’t a story he’d ought to share with his grandson. Not sixty years later. Not now, with things different, changed. Oh, lots of white people still hated. Scratch deep enough and you’d find that almost all of them thought they was better than you. But they covered it up these days, had to, so most times you didn’t have to see it, glazing over they faces like slime on a rotten tomato.
Mixed like he was, Ty didn’t need to hear this.
So why was Theo telling it?
“Grandpa Slappy, what happened to you and Skeet?”
“We run, but I was faster. I made it to the trees. Skeet didn’t.”
“And then?”
“I hid in the woods and watched. Them boys took Skeet to the bridge and dangled him over the river upside down. He was yelling, begging them to let him be and they was hooting and laughing. And then … he was falling.”
It seemed to take forever for Skeet to hit the water. He was flailing his arms and legs the whole way down, like maybe he could spin fast enough to curdle the air and it’d hold him up.
“He landed in that dark water and he was gone. He never come back up. And them boys up on the bridge, they stopped laughing then. Got real quiet, stood there looking, waiting for him to bob up to the top of the water and swim over to the shore. Or walk over. The river was deep under that bridge, but downstream there was places you could wade across it. When he didn’t come up, they started hollering at each other, yelling ‘What’d you let him go for?’ and ‘I thought you had him!’ Then they took off running for the car like the devil himself was after them.”
Theo remembered the looks on their faces as they ran.
“I was standing in the edge of the woods when they come streaking by but they didn’t see me, was so hell-bent on getting in that car and getting out of there. But there was one, a fat kid couldn’t run fast as the others. He was huffing and puffing and sweating. He saw me and he stopped dead in the dirt in front of me, just looking. There was tears in his eyes and streaming down his fat cheeks. And I knew he didn’t mean nothing, hadn’t intended no harm and now he’d gone and killed somebody and he was gonna have to live with that the rest of his life.”
“What did you do, Grandpa Slappy? Did you call the police?”
Wasn’t no sense in trying to explain to a boy like Ty that the police wouldn’t have done anything if he’d told. Which he didn’t.
“This is the honest truth. I never told a single living soul what I saw that day until right now, this minute.”
Ty didn’t ask him why not, but he told him anyway. “I was too scared, thought it was my fault it happened ’cause I’s the one talked Skeet into sneaking off. All these years, Skeet’s people thought he walked out on that bridge all by him
self, fell off it and drowned. And I never told ’em no different.”
He didn’t say the rest of it out loud. Couldn’t. So he whispered. Told Ty about the nightmares, the images that haunted him, how it had all took root inside and grew into tangled, poisonous vines that had wrapped themselves tight around his soul and held him prisoner for all these many years. Wouldn’t let him ride in a boat or go swimming or climb trees.
“What about the boys who did it? What … happened to them?” Ty’s voice was small, sounded scared plum to death.
“I don’t have no idea, son. No idea at all.”
* * * *
When Yesheb returned to Chicago from New Hampshire, he went into seclusion. He saw no one, ate almost nothing, was tormented in body and soul night and day. His being walked jagged paths of unimaginable pain and impenetrable darkness; he knew an agony unparalleled in human existence.
His caretakers see only that he lies in the dark on the floor of a filthy room, unwashed, unshaven, catatonic. He knows they fear for his sanity, but they do not realize that far more than his sanity is at stake here. The futures of kingdoms/worlds/universes rest on his shoulders.
When he finally returns to his body, and his body returns to the world, he is not the same man who left. His focus is different. He has clarity, now, determination and confidence.
His hair is different, too. It has turned pure white.
For the next week, he pours over the book of prophesy, the words that had awakened in him an understanding of what his destiny demanded. He studies The Bride of the Beast page by page, line by line—and confirms what was brought to his mind during his torment. He understands now that his plans have been thwarted for a reason—they were doomed to failure from the beginning because his approach was all wrong. When he finds her, and he is certain now that he will find her in time, he must not frighten her. Though he desires her fear above all other things in life, he must hide his desire. There will be time later for fear. Now, he must overwhelm her with his charm, woo her with his gentleness, be everything she ever wanted in a man. The prophesy foretells that she will fall under his spell and eagerly give up her soul to be with him. But he cannot demand it of her, cannot force her to wed him. The decision must be hers and everything he has done since the first moment he saw her has been counterproductive to that end. He has been a fool and he has paid dearly for his foolishness. He has a lot of ground to make up in a short period of time. But he is supremely confident. He has yet to meet a woman who did not fall for him. Zara would be no different.
