by Dale Bailey
“I’m with Tuck,” he said, walking toward the Mercedes. He heard Finney and Sue follow.
As he opened the passenger door, Sue said, “Wait, I’ve got towels.”
Tuesday, 7:50 to 8:42 AM
Two days after his seventh birthday Nick Laymon contracted a vicious fever, a heat that devoured his strength and will, that dried his eyes and swelled his lips, which made every move a bright flare of pain. His father camped at his bedside during the four days that the fever raged, sponging Nick’s small body every two or three hours, spooning broth and ice cubes into him.
Midway through the third day, the fever peaked, turning the world monstrous. Nick lost all sense of proportion: his father sometimes shrank to the size of a doll; other times his room seemed as vast as the Gulf of Mexico. He woke late that night to see red eels, their bodies pulsing with electricity as they rode the lazy currents of darkness over his father’s drawn face. Some time later, he rolled over to find his mother’s cool palm pressed to his brow. She smiled and told him they’d be together soon.
As the fever crested, his hands began to inflate like parade balloons, becoming the size of catchers’ mitts, of hearse-black Cadillacs. He shrieked at their monstrous size, barely able to lift them. His fever-wracked mind created a litany of torturous tasks, forcing him to thread needles, to pick up dropped pins, to bait minuscule hooks with minuscule worms. He fumbled clumsily, incapable of completing the simplest chores. His mind buckled in the pitch of fever.
Nick recalled very little the next morning, pieces of the fever-induced dreams coming back to him only in snatches over the years, like bits of fluff carried by currents over endless tracts of water. He remembered clearly, though, the oafishly gigantic hands and the sense of despair that spiked through him when he found himself capable of nothing. The dream haunted him through the course of his life, returning—like a junkie’s flashback—in moments of anxiety, when it seemed as if the world itself were flying apart. He’d look down in those moments half-expecting to discover his hands grotesquely swollen.
As the Mercedes wound farther into the mountains, Nick stared at his hands, feeling the heat of the long-ago fever, reliving the panic the balloon hands had given him. He had somehow stumbled into a world as hallucinatory and unreliable as the fever-dreams.
The Mercedes downshifted and bore into a steep grade. It had been Finney’s idea to flee into the Smokies; they needed time to think, he said. They were in the heart of the mountains, maybe forty miles from the quarry.
Sue reached over and took one of Nick’s unswollen hands in hers, squeezing it softly; her fingers stroked his palm. It still amazed Nick how a single touch from Sue could calm his world. He looked over at her; she gave him a quick smile, her eyes flashing. He returned her squeeze.
Finney leaned between their seats. “Stop at the next place you see, somewhere we can get some coffee. We need—”
“Coffee! You want coffee?” The quarry waters had revived Tucker, jarring him from the catatonia that had gripped him in the minutes after Pomeroy’s death. He sat hunched in the corner behind Nick, shivering, his teeth rattling like small bones loose in his mouth. He had wrapped himself in one of Sue’s bright beach towels, the word Cancun draped across his shoulders.
“We’re all fucked,” Tucker continued, “you realize that, don’t you? We just fucking killed a man and now we’re running.” He turned on Finney. “Where? Where we running to, Mr. Big Daddy Dick?”
Finney sat back and looked out his window. Tucker’s words hung in the air. Nick leaned his head back, closing his eyes. His mind filled with the half-submerged Cadillac. How long before someone found it? A thought emerged, popping to the surface of his mind like flotsam from a sinking liner. He turned in his seat, afraid to ask, asking anyway.
“Finney,” he said slowly, “did you wipe down the glove compartment?”
Finney looked at him, his eyes as gray and dull as slate. He shook his head, a slow twist to the right, then back.
“What?” Tucker shouted, his voice cracking. “You left your goddamned prints in the car? You fucking moron, this is all your fault—”
Nick whirled on Tucker, coming over the seat and grabbing a double fistful of Tucker’s damp Hilfiger sweatshirt. Nick yanked him forward, pulling him taut against the shoulder harness.
“This quit being my fault a long time ago! We’re all in this, everyfuckingone of us!” Rage throbbed at the center of his forehead, spearing deep into his brain. All he wanted was to feel his fists sinking into Tucker Reed’s doughlike flesh. He’d be easy, soft; money did that to you.
Tucker’s eyes grew wide and round; his mouth dropped open with a cluck.
Then Finney was between them, talking him down, easing his fingers loose. “Calm down, Nick. Think. We’ve slogged through the shit, it’s over now. Has to be. We turn on each other and we really are fucked. We think this through and we can beat it.” He paused, letting the balm of his words sink in. Nick released the sweatshirt, and Tucker, breathing hard, slumped back in his seat. He grunted and looked away.
“We can ride this out.”
Nick turned around and glowered out the window. “That’s what you said yesterday,” he said. “I haven’t liked the ride so far.” A crudely painted sign flashed by; Nick caught only a glimpse, something about a two-headed snake. Another right behind it said, MONKEYS CAPTURED IN VIETNAM. Fifty yards later another one announced, BOILED PEANUTS AND POSSUM.
“There,” Finney said. “Stop there, Sue.”
Sue slowed and pulled into a deserted gravel lot. At the far end a clapboard structure leaned precariously—as if frozen in its decision to collapse—over a perilous abyss. A hand-lettered sign proclaimed it THE SMOKIN MOUNTAIN—FOOD, BEER. A sun-bleached OPEN sign hung in a fly-specked window.
“Jesus,” Tucker groaned. “Granny Mae Clampett’s place.”
Sue coasted to the far side of the building and cut the ignition. A crude cage constructed of scrap lumber and rusting chain-link fence hunkered beside the store; it looked as rickety as the Smokin Mountain.
“Let’s get some coffee, lay low for a little while.” Finney stepped out of the car; Tucker, groaning, followed him, the towel trailing him like a multi-colored shroud. They walked to the store, neither one looking back, and disappeared inside, the whole building shaking when the door slammed behind them.
Sue leaned over and kissed Nick softly on the mouth; Nick felt the hint of her tongue and the soft weight of her hand pressing lightly into his lap; then she backed away, pulling her coat tightly around her. They exchanged a silent look and climbed out of the Mercedes. The sun, a flat, red wafer, floated just above the tree line. Nick shivered, knowing it would bring no warmth today.
Coming around the car, he stopped before a sign nailed to the cage: BEAR CUB. Something in the cage barked, a coughing rasp of sound. He took Sue’s hand and led her to the front.
The cage was hardly bigger than a walk-in closet; it smelled like something rotting. In the far corner huddled a small bear, its matted fur the dusky color of charcoal. A heavy chain led from the cub’s neck to a thick tree trunk, smooth and barkless with wear, rising from the back of the cage. Three leafless branches reached pathetically for the sky.
The bear chuffed loudly and, with a ponderous clanking of chain, heaved itself up; it shuffled toward Nick and Sue, its nose poking tentatively at the air. The fur had been worn from both flanks, the skin like pimpled leather. The cub thrust its snout against the fence and snorted loudly, a thick wad of bear snot landing in the gravel. The bear had no eyes; the sockets were bottomless holes, the skin around them smooth and hairless.
“Oh,” Sue said, a quick exhalation. “Let’s go in,” she said, pulling him away from the cage.
He looked, but saw no trace of the promised monkeys. Stepping inside the store, Nick glanced back. The bear’s snout still poked through the gap, hopelessly prodding the air.
The bell above the door tinkled as they came in, an absurdly cheerful sound i
n the gloom of the Smokin Mountain. The store seemed even smaller inside, the air dry and acrid. Dozens of wooden shelves lined the walls, crowded with a dusty mélange of moon pies and pouches of chewing tobacco, deviled ham and soda crackers, tampons and Tabasco. Cases of beer stood knee-high atop a splintering pallet. An antique soft drink case hummed by the register, beneath a 1972 calendar and a crude collage of black and white snapshots, mostly animals—dogs and pigs and raccoons. A small electric heater burped and hitched nearby.
Finney and Tucker sat at a card table in the back, each huddled over a large Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee.
“Mo’nin.”
Sitting on the other side of the doorway was what Nick thought at first was a manatee, all gray flesh and huge. Blinking, his eyes still adjusting to the gloom, he gleaned a person in the mountain of flesh, a woman grandiosely obese. She sat in a recliner, dressed in a flowing red muumuu, her flesh overflowing the chair in waves, her arms jiggling. Flesh hung like sacks from her face, her neck. A goiter the color of blood, the size of a grapefruit, peeked from between two folds beneath her chin. Pink rollers the size of orange juice cans had been cast about—apparently at random—in her iron gray hair.
“How you this mo’nin?” the woman said, her words coming in heavy gasps, as if speaking exhausted her.
Nick nodded and Sue murmured, “Fine.”
“We don’t get many folk this time of mo’nin, more in the ev’nin. Hep yerself to what you need—Law knows I’m too big to get it. My Henry’ll be in shortly.” She paused, craning her neck to see an ancient Coca-Cola clock nailed to the wall above her. It was 8:05. “In fact,” she said, struggling to resettle in the recliner, “he’s usually in by eight, choring and whatnot. He’ll be in any minute to hep.
“I reckon y’all with them two what’s in the back there. They’s coffee past the last shef.” She paused to catch her breath. “Pay when y’all done.” She nodded curtly and resumed reading the tabloid spread across her enormous legs.
“Thanks, okay,” Nick said, moving toward Finney and Tucker. Sue took his hand as they sat down in cane-back chairs, their backs to the door. If possible, it was even gloomier in the back.
“Coffee?” Finney said. When they both shook their heads, he said, “Just as well—tastes like shit.”
They sat in silence, the woman’s labored breathing and Tucker’s slurping the only sounds. Full light, Nick thought. Park rangers, highway patrol, even the FBI prowled the streets now, coming closer and closer to a dead man in a half-sunken Cadillac. Everything is time. In his head Nick could hear the click-clack of the analog’s second hand sweeping through the minutes.
“What now?” Finney said. “What’ll we do from here?”
“Go back, try to get the body?” Nick said, the idea filling him with dread.
“Too risky, someone would see us.”
“What about tonight?” Sue said.
“Someone’ll find it way before then,” Nick said.
“Maybe not—no one uses the quarry, especially not in December. And I don’t think too many people know about the back road—you could tell no one’s been on it in weeks, probably months.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Finney said.
Nick looked up, meeting Finney’s eyes. “It’s time to bring the Senator in, Finney.”
“No. We’re way past that now.”
“I’m telling you, he can help—”
“You idiots,” Tucker hissed. “We shouldn’t’ve come here. It places us in the area.” He slammed his fist down on the table, knocking over his cup and spilling the dregs of his coffee.
They all looked at Tucker; he was right. They were less than forty miles from the quarry and here sat Tuck soaking wet, wearing the brightest beach towel Nick had ever seen. Nick glanced at the matron. The tabloid hid her face, but he felt her eyes poring over every move they made.
“Let’s leave,” Sue said, her hand tightening in Nick’s.
“Not so fast,” Finney said. “Too suspicious. You two first. Then us. Tuck, you keep walking—I’ll pay for the coffees. Once we’re all out—”
The bell jangled its cheery welcome, and they all four looked down, suddenly interested in the stain patterns in the table cloth.
“Great,” Tucker muttered. “Someone else to ID us.”
“Well, now,” the woman said, “more visitors in the same mo’nin. A officer of the law at that.”
They all started at the word, Sue’s fingers digging small moons into the heel of Nick’s palm. Finney glanced up, blood and hope draining from his face. For Nick, time stalled, slipping into a slower, thicker plane.
Nick turned in his chair, already terrified, the split cane complaining under his weight, a tired whisper like the rustle of insect husks. His eyes climbed slowly, finding the man standing just inside the store, his mind flashing back—
—the cockroach, that hand—
—already certain who it was, a nightmare come horribly to life.
The patrolman looked back just as Nick’s eyes focused. A pair of mirrored sunglasses, a Smokey Bear trooper’s hat pulled low on his brow. He shifted with his tongue a sliver of wood from one corner of his mouth to the other. Evans, his mind screamed, had been screaming since he’d heard the bell. Evans. The trooper grinned at them, saluted with one finger.
Only then did Nick see the gun cradled in Evans’s thick hand, the heavy .45 hidden from the woman, but already sliding up his side. Nick tried to scream, tried to move, to throw himself in front of Sue—but nothing worked. His body locked in a vice of fear.
Then Evans turned away—his bulk blocking the woman—and all Nick could think was not me, not us, not yet. Nick saw the gun level, heard Evans grunt a surly, “Sorry, ma’am.” The gunshot was enormous in the small room, shaking the building, rebounding again and again off the thin walls. A quart bottle fell to the floor and shattered.
A tendril of smoke curled from the .45’s barrel. Evans looked back at them, bringing the gun to his lips, grinning—his face seemingly all teeth—and blew the smoke away. He holstered the gun and turned toward the door, moving away from the woman. When Nick saw her—his mind still booming with the echo of the gun—he thought at first nothing had happened. She lay sprawled in the chair as before, the tabloid clutched in one dropped arm, her muumuu flung above her knees, exposing even more pink, dimpled flesh. Then he saw the rose blossoming between her eyes, two small runnels of black blood tracking around the stump of her nose and into her mouth. Her head lolled to one side—the goiter bulging as if it might burst—and Nick saw that much of the back of her head had disappeared. A good chunk of the recliner had vanished as well. Directly behind her, an ocher-colored blossom patterned the wall. As he watched, it slid slowly to the floor, a bas-relief of pulp and gore and curler fragments.
Evans flipped the window sign to CLOSED and shut the door, locking it.
Time jolted back into itself. Tucker whimpered and someone said, “Aw, Jesus, no.”
Evans moved toward them, grinning.
“Well, now, what we got here?” Evans grabbed a nearby chair, reversed it, and sat down with a groan. He grinned wolfishly. Nick could see their warped reflections in his sunglasses, desperate figures trapped in a convex world. Sue shifted her chair closer to Nick, her eyes cold, glaring at Evans.
“Kids,” he said, shifting the toothpick thoughtfully, “Lemme tell you something. You get into this crime business, you got to learn some basics.” He paused, still grinning, and removed his glasses. The smile never touched his eyes. He looked like a pig, Nick thought; pointed ears, upturned nose, beady eyes. A chill crept across his shoulders as Evans carefully folded the glasses and placed them on the table. He laid the toothpick beside them.
“First, you don’t stop for coffee forty miles from the crime scene.” He paused again. “And if you do, you kill the person you bought it from.”
Sue shuddered. Tucker went deadly pale; Finney looked ill, his lips ashen, his eyes moist. None of them moved.
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Evans grunted, and looked back toward the front of the store. “My, what a mess,” he said, chuckling, a dry, dirty sound, his piggy gaze taking them all in. “But you know—killing before breakfast really concentrates the mind, makes you sharper, like the edge of a knife. You boys know what I mean, don’t you?” Evans focused on Tucker. He leaned back in his chair and plucked a bag of Fritos off the nearest shelf. He ripped it open with his teeth and shoved a handful in his mouth; he offered the bag around the table, but no one accepted. Nick felt his stomach lurch.
He said, crunching around a mouthful of corn chips, “I been watchin you fell as for a couple days now. I knew you’d make a mistake somewheres along the way—and I knew it’d be sooner other than later. But bless my soul, I never dreamt you’d do something this stupid. Killing a private eye.” He brayed laughter, spraying flecks of chips across the table; he shook his head, the grin spreading thinly across his lips again. “My oh my.”
Sue leaned in closer to Nick. Finney looked as if he’d eaten something terribly wrong.
“No matter—you just saved me a little time and effort is all. I should be thankin you—cept you’ve made the past coupla days pretty hard on me.”
His eyes found Tucker again. Tucker acted as if it were hard to breathe; a bead of sweat ran down the side of his face. He shivered, holding the beach towel around him like an old woman’s shawl.
“You know what it is when you got someone over you, breathin down your neck, tellin you the whole thing’s your fault? You know how that is?”
“Fuck off,” Tucker said, his voice cracking.
Evans’s jaw tightened. A muscle in his right cheek ticked, and his hand fisted around the bag of chips. “You watch your language, rich boy. Specially round the filly.”
Tucker started to say something and Evans held up a single sausage-thick finger. The nail was bitten to the quick, Nick noticed, and there was a slight crook at the second knuckle.
Tucker shut his mouth.
“Better.” Evans upended the bag into his mouth, drinking the last fragments. Smacking loudly, he said, “Now what we’ve got is a situation—” He grinned sheepishly, the look odd on his features. “Pert near forgot. Any of you gents packin any hardware, I’ll take it now.” When none of them moved, he said, his voice as cold as the quarry waters, “It’ll be a whole lot easier now than later.”
