Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  “I’m gonna go in there,” he said.

  Alison swiveled around in the seat.

  “He tole us to stay put.”

  “It’s taking for-goddamn-ever.”

  Alison gasped because of the naughty word.

  “Well, he says it, so I can say it.” Ed Junior crinkled up his face and looked nastier than she’d ever seen him. “I am sick of this, you know? He does this to me all the time.’’

  “Daddy’s just getting happy.”

  “Town drunk,” Ed Junior muttered under his breath, “town drunk, town drunk.”

  “You be quiet about my daddy! “ Alison shrieked. When she had calmed down, she said, “Hot. Hot hot hot.”

  “If you shut your mouth it gets cooler.”

  “I bet it’s over a hunnerd degrease.”

  “I bet,” Ed Junior said. “You wanta play scissors rock paper?”

  “You cheat.”

  “If I don’t cheat?”

  Alison wished she could go back and tell him not to play, that it wasn’t important for him to play that dumb game with her, that he didn’t need to climb out of his seat belt, over the front and middle seats, to the back just to play that damned game, but the six year old with the blonde hair didn’t know to warn him. Ed Junior, sweating, held out his hand. Rock.

  Alison’s hand was flat. “Paper covers rock,” she said.

  “See? Didn’t cheat, did I?”

  “You let me win,” she pouted.

  Ed Junior opened his fist, and inside was a stick of Juicy Fruit gum in its silver wrapper. She took it from him and unwrapped it like she was peeling a banana. Ed Junior, with his flattop and freckles, grinned in spite of the heat and the hassle and put his arm around her. “You done it all yourself, kiddo, now give your big brother a smackerooni and tell him he’s the bravest, smartest, best guy in the whole world.”

  She pushed him away, giggling, “Gross, Ed, gross, not a kiss, oh, okay, you’re the bravest.” She cringed and giggled at the same time as he pretended to smooch at the top of her head. “Bravest—stop it—smartest guy—”

  “You forgot best.” He made farting noises with his mouth against her ear.

  She squealed, “Bravest smartest best guy in the whole wide world.”

  He let her go, and sighed. “Okay. You’re free. No kisses.”

  “Whew.”

  “Man oh man, I’m broiling up. If he don’t come outta there in two—” Ed Junior stopped mid-sentence as Alison pointed. Their father walked out of the cantina’s doors into the flat afternoon sunlight, wiping his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. His shirt was unbuttoned and his belly hung over the front of his belt. His pants hung low, and his zipper was only halfway up the flagpole. He stumbled a little, leaning on the hoods of the cars as he made his way over to the Ford station wagon. He rapped on the window and waved to his son and daughter.

  Only Alison waved back.

  Ed Junior whispered, “Shithead.”

  Alison sucked in her breath as if it would make the nasty word go away. Ed stared out the back window. When their father got in, no one said a word. It took a while for their father to start the car up, and by then the wagon reeked of warm beer.

  Alison began singing, “Buckle up for safety, buckle up.”

  Ed Junior moved closer to the back window. He tried to roll it down, but it was stuck. It always stuck in the heat.

  “Didn’t mean to take so long,” her daddy said as he backed the car in a zigzag out of the parking place.

  “Yeah, right,” Ed Junior said under his breath.

  “Got talking some business in there, ran into Mike Sawyer from Twenty-nine Palms, and he was talking about maybe expanding his vending machine route out this way, and I was thinking, what if I carried his stuff at the station? I mean, we’re talking M&M’s and Life Savers, just like before, but Fritos, too, and maybe even some sandwiches like a mini-Automat, you know, so people on trips, they’re always stopping, and they can get some good food. I mean with this highway just expanding, and everybody’s got to go through here if they want to get up to Victorville, or down from the mountain to Palm Springs, it just makes sense, I mean, the whole town is expanding, it’s gonna grow, and I don’t wanna miss the boat, I don’t wanna just dry up when this town is ripe for development, and vending.” And while her father jabbered away, Alison began humming and Ed Junior tried to roll down the back window, and they hit a bump or pothole on the road (only it turned out to be a dog), and the car started spinning. The back end whirled; where Ed Junior sat seemed to be going in front of the car; and then Alison was trying to scream but her Juicy Fruit gum had gotten caught in the back of her throat. Glass broke, but she never heard Ed Junior make a sound although she saw him flying through the back window. The absolute craziest thing was, though, that her father kept right on talking (or at least it was how she remembered it), talking about the town of Palmetto expanding and growing, the population explosion and the best of times for America and vending machines and gas prices.

  Then she coughed the gum up from her throat.

  She tried to see out the window to where Ed Junior had flown but all she saw was the high yellow wall of the old house they called the Garden of Eden. Later, she heard the term “brain damage” for the first time. Much later, she heard the term “tardo,” when other kids spoke of her brother, Ed Junior.

  In those days, she learned how to build walls. Walls kept good things in and bad things out.

  6

  That was then, this is now, Alison repeated to herself, and began to see the wall in her mind again. Ed Junior seemed wrapped up in the cartoons he watched, and Harv continued to work on the Hugheses’ lemon of a Chevy. Her father gulped back another beer (number five) out at the gas pumps.

  When work was done, she got in her rickety T-Bird—patched together by her brother and able to run on a prayer and gas fumes—and drove away, ostensibly to get a Coke at Paco’s Tacos; instead, she found herself attracted to Nitro and the trailers. It was after nine, the sun was mostly down over the far hills. A scattering of people were there, some in cars; a few of the residents still stood and gawked around the Sun Dial Trailer Park. The other parks seemed empty and dark, as if people were hiding.

  Back on the highway, Alison drove down to the south in the tidal darkness as it spread across the land. Get out, Al, while you can, get the hell out before somebody sets fire to you while you’re napping through your life. She covered her eyes with her left hand for a moment, and when she uncovered them, something darted out in front of her car. “Jesus!” She swerved out of the way and honked her horn. It had been some animal, a coyote, maybe a wolf. She pulled the car to the shoulder and parked. “God, don’t scare me like that,” she said aloud to her reflection in the rearview mirror.

  Something leapt up from the ditch beside the road, pressing its face against the shotgun window.

  A face, human, beast, like a man’s face melted with a blowtorch mail it’s stretched and ridged. Reminded her of: pit bull. Reminded her of: a guy named Kevin Sloan whom she’d only caught a glimpse of once or twice around town. Something about him and a pit bull. Melted skin. Eyes large and outlined in red. Like a comic book drawing. Shit, it looks like Sloan is a pit bull. Or a pit bull is Sloan. Her mind, in those few seconds, worked fast, but terror and shock create their own domains outside intelligence. The heart beats faster, the adrenaline pours, the ordinary way of seeing, of reversing images and then setting them right again as the image burns into the brain, all cut off the learned systems of logic and reason and rational thought.

  Before Alison could react properly, the wall was there.

  7

  Sloan pressed his face to the window of the car.

  Beautiful skin, smell meat.

  The nights always began the same, with her call. What coursed through his blood had a language of its own, and the translation was: hunger come hunt flesh taste infect spread harvest nest. It awoke him with a stinging pain, and then the scent of his of swea
t drove him mad. The stench, too, of the place where he stayed, the cave with its bat guano and lizard flesh, not the delicate perfume of human skin and pumping blood flowing beneath it like an underground stream searching for a well, for a fault, for a tunnel to burst out. Sloan’s eyesight was keen in the dark, and he crawled on all fours through the corridor, sniffing the clean air of the outside world and the promise of humanity.

  His own human feeling submerged, and even the dog feeling that had overtaken his bowed form was only there in his sense His instinct was crushed in a blood obedience to her voice. SHE’S IN MY FUCKING HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD, YOU CUNT YOU ARE FUCKING DEAD, YOU GET OUT OF MY HEAD, I KILLED YOU, the old voice roared. The call in his blood had sent him out on this night. He ran as if in a dream, as if she sat astride his back and reined him to the left and right, her bare heels like the sharpest spurs as they dug into his shanks, prepare the way for my children to come. He’d been heading for the trailers when he’d seen the car pulled to the side of the road. He felt her heat; heat was strong near the road, and the odor of blood and living tissue. He ran for it, and found her there. “Beautiful,” he said, holding his claws up to the window. The girl seemed to freeze. She did not seem scared as much as she seemed blank, not there. Smell tissue blood, pumping furiously, the living animal flesh stretched taut across unpolluted meat. Sloan’s hunger was not one of feeding but of passing. He needed to give her what he had. Needed to past the demon into her, as he would others. Prepare the way. Make ready.

  GET OUT OF MY HEAD! Something shrieked as it ricochet through his brain. And then another car pulled up behind this one and Sloan ducked down, out of the headlights.

  8

  Alison awoke abruptly, a flashlight shining in her eyes.

  “You been drinking, young lady?” the man said.

  She covered her eyes, blinded, and then the man leaning over into her half-opened window said, “Alison. Hey. Didn’t know it was you.”

  When her vision adjusted, she recognized the man. Chip Grubb, deputy sheriff on patrol in Palmetto. Grubb’s face hung like a wheel of half-melted cheese over her. “You look like your mom, you know that?”

  Alison tried to fight the image in her brain of this body on top of her mother’s. I wonder what my mother sees in you, Alison thought. “I just pulled over to think,” she lied, trying to send out whatever vibes she could to make him go away and leave her alone. Then she prayed he wouldn’t ask to see her license, since she was just a month shy of sixteen and wasn’t really supposed to be driving, anyway.

  “My, yes,” Chip Grubb whispered, “just like your mama, pretty hair, and those eyes.” He redirected the white beam of light to her eyes, and she turned to face forward.

  “I have my father’s eyes,” Alison said.

  9

  After Alison Hunt had driven off back home, Deputy Sheriff Chip Grubb was about to get into his black-and-white Torino when he thought he saw something, just a blur of movement, cannonballing toward him, and he remembered the Nevilles, who had said a wolf had gotten into their backyard, not a coyote, a wolf, they insisted— and then the fragments of The Juicer they’d shoveled off the highway not far from this spot after some animal had torn into him—and fear didn’t have much time to provoke a fight-or-flight response in the officer.

  His hand automatically went for his gun, but the creature attacking him caught his hand before it touched metal.

  10

  Passing from Sloan’s mouth, his spit, into the deep gouge of the wound, like snake’s poison, through the epidermal layer down almost to the bone, cell invading cell, and slowly the walls would collapse and the new cells would take over, but none of this the dog-thing knew, only the demon consciousness knew as its feverish warmth spread from the hand to the wrist to the forearm to the elbow, on its path to the heart.

  What Sloan knew: taste of blood, passing pain out through teeth, warm, brief flash of strength with human blood.

  11

  Peter Chandler/Confessions

  The day after Wendy’s burial, I found the strength to go to her grave. Someone had come forward and bought her a little plot in the town bone yard on the other side of Nitro. I had been feeling a little sick, and I attributed this to many things, including the shock of Wendy’s death.

  It was the first week of July, and the town was decked out like a peacock in a hen house, with brightly painted flags and slogans and red, white, and blue crepe paper—Palmetto was going all out for the Fourth and the Grubstake Days celebration. The local paper still ran a story about the family that had been attacked, apparently by coyote, which was so unusual that coyote experts from as far away as Los Angeles were called upon for their opinions. But the family, the Nevilles, were apparently unharmed by the animal, although Mr. Neville was bitten and had experienced some problems related to asthma or his heart or something. Others had seen the coyote, or wolf, or mountain lion, depending on whom you talked to about it. A vigilante group was formed, and went on search of the area, but didn’t find it. Couldn’t even find tracks. Sloan also was among the hunted, but the authorities believed he had run deeper into the hills, perhaps beyond Victorville.

  Sloan had not gone far.

  One night when I was taking the garbage cans out to the street, I felt someone’s presence. It was late, and he startled me. He stood in the road, just out of the streetlight. My first reaction was to heft a rock at him, but I was shocked by his presence. I was sure would’ve left town.

  “Yeah?” I asked, trying my best to sound tough.

  Sloan, half in shadow, looked haggard. The skin around his face seemed bloated as if he’d been drinking for two weeks straight. “Got-to-help,” he said.

  “You better get out of here, asshole,” I snarled. “I told the cops it was you.”

  “Gonna-die-soon,” he muttered to himself. “Callin’, callin’, callin’. Ya’allees come’n she callin’. In me, in you. Call out, she call, you come. Town-nest.”

  And then he moved from the shadows into the darkness, and was indistinguishable from it. I wasn’t sure if he’d been there at all, or if I had hallucinated from the up-and-down fever I’d been having. Palmetto had gone crazy, or else I was seeing things crazy, and that was worse. I stood there a while longer, shivering, not from the cold or from seeing Sloan, but from a feeling in my body of bones and blood and tissue aching, and I wondered if I was going insane or if I was dying and just didn’t know it. It was the beginning of feeling the turning, and I guess my body tried to resist it.

  And then I read the item about Wendy’s funeral in the paper. It didn’t mention her mother or father. All it had was her name and her birthdate.

  My father was on the road for a week, on business, which I knew meant he was down in the flatlands chasing women and losing whatever money he had, but that was fine by me: a time of peace and quiet. I borrowed my mother’s car. I had my learner’s permit, and although it was against the rules to drive without a licensed driver sitting next to me, my mother understood my need to go alone.

  Wendy had been buried in a small cemetery to the south of Pepe Alvarado’s home, and just a few miles from the Coyote Cantina. It was the old Boniface bone yard, as it was known around town. I went in the late afternoon, when it was getting cooler, and picked up some flowers at Connie’s Florist. The grave was easy to find among the others: it was free from debris and plastic flowers.

  As I stood, thinking about her, about Wendy, and that last day with her, I got the eerie feeling that I was being watched. I looked around, but saw no one.

  And then, as if emerging from one of the graves in the far corner near the great stone wall surrounding the cemetery, a dark figure arose and began walking slowly, purposefully, toward me.

  12

  “You’re the one who broke into my garden,” the woman said. She wore a fairly smart, dark purple silk jacket and black pants. She had a multicolored scarf wrapped up in loops around her neck like a snake, and it finally curled around her head. “I knew you’d ev
en eventually show up here. I’m her mother. Call me Stella.” Her manner was brusque and matter-of-fact.

  “1 never broke into anyone’s yard,” Peter said.

  “Then who are you? You’re the only one who’s come here. You one of her lovers?”

  “I was just a friend.”

  Stella smiled, and the smile was like a wild animal curling its lips back from its teeth. “My daughter had no friends!”

  “Look, I’m sorry she died. I was there that day.”

  Again, that hostile grin. She shook her head, and for a split second he caught the resemblance, saw a little bit of Wendy in the nose, in those cheekbones beneath the eyes, and then gone. “She’s not dead.” Stella pointed to the grave with her walking stick. “Oh, they may have buried her flesh there, and perhaps some useless bones, but I imagine she’s already transformed by now. My brother told me how it would happen, you see, and my brother would know. Have you ever seen a caterpillar turn into a moth? It doesn’t just change, you know, it has to close in on itself, and spin silk around itself. But moths are harmless, aren’t they? Do you know about a certain kind of wasp that stings the grub and buries its eggs inside its body? And while the helpless grub lives on in a coma, the hatchlings begin devouring it from beneath its skin, until the finally emerge. These are all part of my daughter’s transformation. It is a kind of evolution, even if the life that evolves must feed on the life that was. I am scaring you, aren’t I?”