"The people I tell it to will believe me, because they'll know." "I heard what you told that man. Your stories ain't authentic, they're lies." Sarah began fussing with the cigarette packs and cans of smokeless tobacco behind the counter.
"The biggest lies are the easiest to swallow," Odus said. "But they burn like hell when you puke them back up."
He went out into the sunshine and the last chorus of "Fox on the Run."
Jett stood by the pay phone in the school lobby, fumbling in her pocket-sized purse. Many of her classmates, especially the girls, had their own cell phones, but Gordon thought they were a "distraction to learning." As if she couldn't get Brittany to text-message her the answer to a quiz question. Phones were tools and were here to stay, so why couldn't Gordon get with the future already?
Because he was lame, that's why. She pulled out the phone card her dad had given her as a present when she and Mom left Charlotte. "Five hundred minutes, call any time," he'd said. Actually, he probably didn't mean any time, since he'd started dating the blond librarian. Mandy, Mindy, Bambi, something like that. Lots of checking out going on there, probably.
Noise leaked from me lunch room, typical middle-school jokes, flirting, me rattle of silverware on hard vinyl trays. She pressed her ear to the phone and punched in her card digits, waded through the operator's asking if she wanted to donate minutes to the troops, then entered the numbers for Dad's work.
"Draper Woodworking and Design," the female voice said.
"Could I get Mark Draper, please?"
"May I ask who is calling?"
"Jett. Jett Draper."
"Oh." Uttered with a tone of sympathy.
After thirty seconds, Dad came on the line, bluff and hearty and probably stoned. "What's up, pumpkin? Aren't you in school?"
"Yeah. It's lunchtime. I have five minutes before the bell rings."
"How's it going? Did you get my letter?"
"Yeah. Thanks for the money. It really saved my sanity."
"I'll send some more soon."
"No, I'm fine. Really."
"Are you liking Solom any better now that you've had some time to get settled?"
"It's all right. A little slow, but you get used to it."
"Made any friends?"
She thought of her drug connection, the goats, the man in the black suit, the kids on the bus, creepy old Betsy Ward. "Yeah. I'm fitting right in."
Her dad's tone turned serious. "And your mom? Is she okay?"
"Actually, that's what I called about."
'Talk to me, sweetheart."
"I'm afraid she's starting to lose it."
"Lose it?"
"Yeah. She's, like, not Mom. Like some alien came down and took over her brain. She's changed so much in the last few weeks. Sometimes I can't believe it's the same person who told me that life sends messages in invisible balloons."
"She's going through an adjustment period. She'll be fine once-"
"Don't give me that counselor babble horseshit, Dad."
"Jett."
"Sorry. It just blurted out."
"I can tell you're upset. Calm down and tell me what she's up to."
"She stares off into space. I'll walk into a room and it's like she's forgotten what she was doing, or like she'd been in the middle of a daydream and I woke her up. She's totally changed her wardrobe and-this might be weirdest of all-she's started cooking. And I don't mean beanie weenies and frozen waffles. I'm talking honest-to-God recipes."
"Well, if you'll forgive the counselor babble, I'd guess she's trying hard to make things work with her new husband."
"You sound sad about it, Dad."
"We had our chance and blew it. Things just didn't work out. But-"
"I know, I know, it's not my fault and it had nothing to do with me."
"I know it's tough on you, honey. Getting along with Gordon okay?"
She didn't know whether to lie or not. Dad shouldn't have asked, or maybe it was his way of showing he cared about her. It was an uncomfortable subject. Gordon had wanted her to take the Smith name, but she'd balked. Mom had sided with her, of course, but not too vocally. "He's been a hard case but Mom says he just wants what's best for me. But I don't think him and Mom are getting along too well."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
She could tell he wasn't. She didn't understand much about boy-girl stuff, except she was smart enough to know that you wanted to forever own the one you loved, even if it was bad for both of you. "He's not mean or anything, just cold. Not to get too personal, but he never kisses her."
"They'll work it out. I'm more worried about you. I hate to ask, but how are things going with the drugs?"
"Fine." She realized she'd snapped at him, and that was the worst possible thing to do, because it would make him suspicious. "They haven't even invented drugs up here yet. It's like the 1800s. Plowing with mules, no electricity, a church down every dirt road. Nothing but clean air and sunshine."
"Good for you, pumpkin. I don't mean to pry, but I'm your dad. It's still my job, even if we're two hundred miles apart."
The bell rang, its brittle, metallic echo bouncing off the concrete block walls. The traffic in the hall picked up, a few of the guys giving her the eye, no doubt because of her black lipstick. "Got to go to math," she said.
"Love you. Keep in touch, and tell your mom I said hello."
For a moment, Jett almost told about the man in the black hat, but Dad would think she was either cracking up or in serious need of some counselor babble horseshit. Ditto with the menacing goats. Just thinking of them made her a little light-headed, as if such things were never real unless you spoke of them. Better to just ignore them, pen them up behind the walls of Stoner City. "I love you, too, Dad. 'Bye."
She wiped her eyes, careful not to smudge the liner, and waded into the hallway crowd.
Carnivorous goats.
Sounded the fuck like a cheesy zombie movie to Alex Eakins. He could dig zombies, even cheer for them in a way, because when you got down to it, those gut-munching things from beyond the grave were about the most libertarian creatures around. Talk about your free-market economies. But goats were another matter.
Alex was smart enough to be aware of his eccentric nature. His parents were afraid he was turning into a survivalist who would one day construct an armed bunker and have a standoff with federal agents. But the true survivalist didn't want to be noticed by the government, much less stage a confrontation. And a true survivalist didn't go around ranting about man-eating goats, because that was a surefire way to get noticed.
So Alex would have to figure out how to handle this on his own. The first order of business was a trip to the general store to get a few reels of barbed wire. He could add another couple of runs around the perimeter of his property as a first line of defense. His gun rack held a.30–30, a sixteen-gauge Remington shotgun, and a.22 so his girlfriends could participate in target practice. He had his bow and arrows, a slingshot, and a couple of sticks of dynamite he'd bought under the table at the last Great Tennessee Border Gun Show. Plus there was the contraband arsenal in his secret room. So goats, even a herd of them, were not something to lose sleep over.
Weird Dude Walking was another story altogether.
Because Alex had returned to the scene of the slaughter yesterday afternoon, and not even a stitch of clothing remained. No blood on the ground, either, and not a goat in sight (Alex had the Remington with him just in case). Goats would eat any old thing, especially natural-fiber clothing, but surely a few scraps would be scattered around, or a bone button from the coat. Strangest of all, though the ground was pocked with cloven hoofprints, there was not a single mark from the boots the man had been wearing.
Which meant Weird Dude Walking must have risen up and floated away like Christ gone to heaven.
Even if Alex wanted to report what he'd witnessed, he had no evidence. He never doubted his sanity, though his own family had called him "crazy" any number of times. But only a crazy perso
n would witness a man feeding himself alive to a bunch of goats.
Maybe not crazy, though.
Maybe special.
If a thing like that happened in the old days, the people called you a prophet and let you boss them around.
"Alex?"
Alex looked up, not realizing he'd been staring at his palms as if expecting them to start bleeding. "I thought you were at work."
"It's my day off."
"Oh yeah."
"Something wrong?"
"No, babe. Just thinking about the state of the world. It's a guy thing."
"I've got a guy thing for you." Meredith nuzzled her breasts against his back and put her arms around his chest.
"Not now. I've got some things to work out."
"Don't you want to smoke some?"
"I need to keep a clear head. Dope is the opium of the masses."
"Huh?"
"Hemingway. He said dope is the opium of the masses. But that's pretty fried, because opium is what they make heroin out of, and not many people can hook up with some H. I guess they didn't smoke much weed back in Hemingway's time."
"I thought he said religion was the opium of the masses. Or was that Karl Marx?"
"Same thing. Religion is for dopes, so it all works out." He gave a stoned snicker, though he'd not had any marijuana since the night before.
"You want some lunch? I could cook one of your acorn squashes and some wild rice."
"I'm not hungry. I think I'll go check the babies and meditate."
He got up from the table and went outside. He had a small greenhouse, but he didn't grow his dope in it. The surveillance planes might see it and that would be the first place the snooper troopers would train their little spy cameras. His marijuana was in a little shed by the garden. He used a wind turbine and water wheel to generate electricity for the full-spectrum lights, because one of the ways cops got a warrant was by checking the electric company's records for a jump in kilowatt hours. The jump was "evidence" that a citizen might be using grow lights. Since he was off-grid, he was outside the system, in more ways than one.
He unlocked the shed, checked the sky for bogies, then went in. The main room was filled with a blue glow thrown off by the bank of grow lights. Marijuana plants, spawned from Kona Gold seeds a friend had mailed from Hawaii, stood as tall as Alex, and the room was sweet with the fully flowering buds. The three dozen plants were grown in five-gallon buckets, and the soil was ripe with the best compost Mother Nature could produce. Alex sat cross-legged before the plants in a yoga position. He was at peace in this place, this shrine to the sacred buzz.
Too bad he had to hide it away. In a righteous world, he could grow it out there in the garden, right in front of God and everybody. Even Weird Dude Walking. If grass were legal, maybe the country's farmers wouldn't need crop subsidies. Get them off welfare and stifle the feds' war on drugs at the same time. Damn, why couldn't the Libertarians come up with any good candidates?
He let his anger at social injustices slip away as he breathed deeply of the Cannabis sativa. A spider had spun a web at the base of one of the plants. The spider was yellow with black streaks across its back, and it worked its way toward the center of the web where a struggling fly was tangled in the silken threads. Alex realized it was life in a microcosm, a symbolic play. You buzz around minding your own business, and then suddenly your ass is snared and along comes Reality to suck out your juices.
Just like the goats had sucked the life out of the man in the black hat.
Heavy.
Too heavy to contemplate with a straight head, despite what he'd told Meredith. He just didn't want to smoke with her, because then he'd have to either talk or silence her in bed. The only way to shut up a woman was to stick part of yourself in her. He needed to be alone. He pulled a joint out of his sock and fired it up, not shifting from his yoga seating as he puffed. He began a game of situation-problem-solution.
Situation: You had a vision. Nobody else will believe you, because you don't belong to any religion of the masses. Well, Meredith will probably believe you, but she believes in Atlantis and UFOs and even Dun/tin 'Fucking Donuts.
Problem: You either keep it to yourself and forget it, or you have to admit that miracles happen.
Solution: Smoke more dope.
He took a deep draw off the joint and held the smoke in his lungs. In his mind's eye, the blue smoke seeped into his bloodstream and sent its tendrils into his brain. The drug stimulated him and relaxed him at the same time, one of its contradictions that appealed to him and suited his worldview.
Been a long time since you were in Methodist Bible school, but miracles in the Bible sort of had a point to them. Like Jesus with the loaves and fishes so everybody could eat, and Jesus turning water into wine so everybody could get wasted. Far as I can remember, nowhere in the Bible did some dude feed his own ass to the goats.
Alex took another puff. The spider had reached the fly, which must have worn itself out, because it had stopped struggling. Or maybe the fly had sensed the jig was up and could see two dozen copies of the approaching spider through its compound eyes. Alex considered rescuing the fly, playing God, releasing it to go off and eat shit and hatch maggots. But it wasn't right to fuck with Nature. Besides, that would have meant standing up, and his legs had a nice tingle going.
Situation: Weird Dude Walking had to come from somewhere. Miracles don't just crawl down off the top of the mountain in the middle of the Blue Ridge, half a world away from the Red Sea and Egypt and Jerusalem.
Problem: That means Weird Dude was an emissary of some sort. Sent by God or the devil or what the movie trailers call the "dark imagination of M. Night Shyamalan." An emissary sent specifically for you, Alexander Lane Eakins, and for you alone.
Solution: Just because an emissary drags ass to your castle door doesn't mean you have to open up and let him in. Pretend it never happened. Denial is a Good Thing.
The joint was down to an orange roach, and Alex hot-boxed it until it burned his fingertips. He exhaled the smoke so that a blue cloud swept over the spider and the fly. One could get the munchies and the other could die with a shit-eating grin. Seemed to be some sort of circular cosmic justice in that.
He sat until the sparkling edges of his buzz wore off; then he went into the house to ignore Meredith.
Chapter Twenty
Katy's back ached. She'd ended up sleeping on the couch, unable to face Gordon, much less lie in the same bed. She'd cooked oatmeal for Jett, men walked to the end of the road and waited for the bus with her. Gordon must have arrived late and headed out early. He hadn't even made his usual pot of coffee.
After Jett rode away on the bus, sitting at a rear window and refusing to wave, Katy went back up the gravel drive. As she passed the neighbor's house, she hurried, afraid that Betsy Ward would come out on the porch and try to engage her in conversation. She'd always picked up on a distinct coldness emanating from the woman, as if Katy's big-city accent were somehow alien and even infectious. Plus the Smiths appeared to have a bit of a bad reputation, and Gordon's distant and antisocial manner certainly didn't help. Gordon had warned her that Solom was a little clannish, at least among the families that had owned land here for generations. He assured her attitudes were changing as more outsiders moved in, but she sensed resentment rather than acceptance was the more common response.
No one seemed home at the Wards', so she continued up the long gravel road to the Smith house. As she mounted the steps, she realized with alarm that she still thought of it as the "Smith house," even though by legal rights it was half hers. She put away the blankets from the couch, cleaned the bedroom, then found herself in the kitchen. It was only ten o'clock, too early for lunch. Besides, with no one else to cook for, she often resorted to an alfalfa-sprout-and-cheese sandwich or a can of vegetable soup. She was digging for a can opener in one of the drawers when she found a handwritten recipe on a dog-eared index card. She recognized the writing; it was done in the same elegant penmans
hip of the other recipes shed found tucked in books, on the pantry shelves, or amid stacks of dishes. Rebecca's recipe for sweet potato pie.
It sounded like a nice treat to draw the family together over the dinner table. She checked off the items she would need. She had cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, and even whipped cream, but she had no evaporated milk. She could call Gordon at his office and ask him to stop by the grocery store, but she wasn't in the mood to ask a favor, even if the favor was for his benefit too. She would pick it up herself at the general store. That meant she had a four-mile round trip. Might be a nice day to walk, because the weather was clear and fortyish, with the barest whisper of wind. Besides, the house had started to become oppressive. She thought she'd get used to being a housewife again, the way she had been the first two years of Jett's life. But back then, she'd been busy with an infant. With the house to herself all day, she'd become increasingly bored, despite her newly discovered culinary adventures.
She changed into stone-washed jeans, blouse, jacket, and tennis shoes. At the last minute, she decided on a scarf in case the weather changed suddenly, and rummaged around upstairs until she found a green silk scarf that happened to match her eyes. She couldn't remember buying it; perhaps someone had given it to her as a gift and it had been packed away and forgotten. Outside, she made a cursory check of the hens' nests, spying several eggs she would collect for the pie when she got back, assuming she was brave enough. The goats weren't around the barn. They must have been up in the forest, working the underbrush.
She passed the Wards' house again, and this time Arvel's pickup truck was in the driveway. The man himself was checking the fluids in his tractor, which was parked by the barn up behind the house. She waved in what she considered a neighborly fashion. Arvel flipped a grease rag at her, then motioned for her to come to him.
He met her in the driveway. "How ya doing, Mrs. Smith?"
"It's Logan. Katy Logan."
"Oh yeah, that's right." He gave her a one-eyed squint. "Things going good?"
"Fine. A lovely day."
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