by Jack Cady
Sarah was complex. Her life was one of questions. As a young woman she questioned with her hands — painting, pottery, carving and sculpture. She also played several musical instruments but mastered none of them.
Shortly after her son John was two years old, Sarah began to question with her body, leaving her husband, her son and the house she had always hated. Sarah went to bed with a lot of men, looking for answers to her questions.
At age forty she turned to social functions for a semblance of control. Sarah was not much of a thinker, but she was a talented doer. She had a genius, but little discipline, and she was completely moral. Letters to intimate friends reveal that she probably never did a wrong thing in her life, though some called her actions bad. If she had not acted, she would have offended her search.
Her last words puzzled her husband and brought fearful delusions into the last years of his retirement. She said: “Of course I want to know. But, no, not that much. The price is too high.” Sarah was more of a Tracker than she cared to acknowledge. Their answers, however, were more than she could abide, so she searched elsewhere, to save her soul.
When the Mercedes stopped fishtailing on the snowy road John Tracker eased his speed and began looking for a spot to pull over. His forearms were trembling. He drove erratically, telling himself over and over that he had seen a trick. A whole crazy house of tricks.
The road was bad, the shoulders covered with snow. The danger helped cut through his near-hysteria so he could mindlessly point the automobile through hazards that slowly began to demand his attention. The road wound between hills and snowy groves; there were no side roads. Drifted fence rows were like long-running mounds of snow, shadowless in the declining light.
He saw movement in the periphery of his vision, an animal loping over a small crest. It must be in deep snow and yet it ran easily. A large gray dog it was, moving along the crest. It must be hunting. The light was fading, the dog might not be gray at all, it might be white. And a memory stirred. John shuddered, tried to pull it forward in his mind, but the memory would not come.
Sometimes people in shock did not know how unstable they were. He told himself that, and cut his low speed even lower. All right, he thought, take stock. Get a grip on it. He knew the apparition of Theophilus had to be a trick. He knew that because he knew Theophilus. The knowledge was the kind that worked in the world in which you drove cars, ordered steaks and did business. It was not, however, quite enough for the world of the Devil and Theophilus Tracker. Even as a child John had felt something pressing about the house; a gloom, a glowering presence. He’d always told himself it was because his mother hated that house. She had, after all, left his father, and she’d left her son not yet three years old to grow up alone in that house. For a time, these things explained his sense of gloom.
Later, like his mother, he had sought more rational answers. He told himself he’d grown up living with tricks. Even now, he reminded himself, there was that apparition — a trick. It had to have appeared by projection, film on smoke and steam that rose from a jet. Technically it was simple. Combined with expert lighting, it would be far more real than a movie. It would be three-dimensional. That was the kind of patient and exacting work that characterized the productions of Theophilus. The answer did not completely satisfy him, but it at least allowed him to feel some relief.
The sight of the dog was still trying to jar something loose in his memory. He waited, but the memory still would not come.
He turned to his problems. Strictly speaking they were few and not as bad as they looked. Tearing down the house would be easy, and it would not even be difficult to salvage. True, there was a question of ownership with Vera still alive, but that would be no problem; he had the state on his side.
Vera was no real problem either, once she was found in that house. He planned to bring a four-wheel drive truck across fields and avoid the grade. He could take her to a retirement home or a hospital.
The real problem was himself. It was easy to make money. Once you understood your own system and set it up to work with other systems, business required your time but nothing more. Talent and intelligence and originality were inappropriate. He had nothing against business except that it was boring, and too often conducted by boring people. Still, maybe it wasn’t business that bored him. Maybe such feelings were his way of avoiding an issue.
The real issue was that he was forty and was accomplishing nothing special. But a good many men might feel that way, even men who controlled more companies than he would ever control. All right, the real issue was that he knew so little about himself, less about the universe, and was not a creature of the present at all. He was a slicked-down version of diabolic fear who drove through the world in an expensive automobile. He was a Tracker. Face it, he was not free, not even from his family. Especially not from them. Hell and the Devil had been simple for Johan and Theophilus. They were never simple for Justice. Justice may have, as some claimed, been crazy, but he was never unkind. John felt — hoped — that if he dug hard enough he’d find his father’s early teaching was in him somewhere.
He could distinguish between myth and legend. Somewhere, deep, was tucked away history about the Inquisition; a haunt resting deep in the subconscious. Devils, druids, Dionysus, demonology and angelology. It was all there and could be studied out. Studied out? A quaint phrase, also of another time. Rural, not natural for a sophisticated man of the world like himself. Of the world…Which world?
Maybe such a question was the place to start. It might bring him to terms with his father Justice, although he doubted it would ever explain Johan or Theophilus.
Then there was the money. In his world it was valued, it was a key to freedom. You could do whatever you wanted if you had enough money — except he knew he was kidding himself. He wanted to be free, but he did not know what the word meant.
There was a lot of money in that house, though. And with Vera alive it was a touchy problem. Vera could not live forever. It was amazing that the old bat had held on this long…
Fatigue made his mind hazy. A closed filling station was further along at a crossroads. He drove slowly and made himself concentrate on the road. When he arrived he pulled onto the snow-covered lot and stopped. A few minutes rest. He leaned back to drowse, and suddenly came erect. The gray dog. He did not want to think of what it meant. Oh, coincidence, surely; but the memory he had sought now came crashing in. It was overpowering. When he was little. Eight or nine…
Bee stinging, leaf dropping, the buzz of insects over the hot, corn-crackling fields. It was the summer his grandfather lowered him down a well and also killed a dog. He sat rigid, remembering the wind moving through nights of heat and fireflies as it rose from the river and poured over the bluff. For Easter, Justice had given him eight baby ducks. Six grew into fat white pekins that rustled in the tall grass between the house and the woodlot. One died when it was little. A second swallowed a bee and was stung inside. His father helped him bury both. At the time he could not remember his mother, although he would soon be sent to live with her. His father still had hope in those days. John could remember Justice saying that maybe the three of them, he and his father and mother might all be together. His grandfather Theophilus held other opinions, but by the time Theophilus got around to talking, John would not have believed him if he said the direction of the sky was up.
Before the ducks and the well it was different. He believed everything. He believed the old well by the chicken house was a mysterious, horrible place. He believed it possible that everyone loved each other, because their cursing was usually at the world in general.
The ducks caused his grandfather to take an interest. John remembered hot August afternoons when the ducks lay panting in shade while chickens clucked and pecked in their pens. His grandfather would connect a hose, and sometimes in the hot afternoons they would squirt water at the ducks. It made John laugh. The d
ucks would rise, poke their heads high in the air and take the water in front. The ducks seemed to fear getting their backs wet, and John never decided whether they liked the spraying or not. Sometimes one of the cats, or the small hound, would amble by and catch a sousing.
It was the hound and the big gray dog and his grandfather that caused the trouble. At first it was only funny. Then something in the old man seemed to build. There was a big gray dog roaming the countryside and it was apparently fearless. It had been shot at, trapped, poison-baited. Buckshot must have laid under its pelt like freckles. Yet for over two years the dog took small game, chickens, sucked eggs and made at least as good a living as most people in the county. It also had strong herding instincts, it was known occasionally to hang around the vicinity of a tethered goat. The dog was shrewd. It worked all through the area before it tangled with Theophilus Tracker.
On a morning when his grandmother slept late, as she usually did because of helling around with the old man all night, there was cackling and flutter among the chickens. The chicken house was a hundred yards from the kitchens. The disturbance could barely be heard, and if anyone had been talking it would not have been heard at all.
Theophilus tensed. Listening. Justice, his long hair curling about his ears, a frying pan in one hand, stopped breakfast; standing, mouth half-open, caught in the middle of making more pancakes. In John’s memory it was terribly etched and clear.
Theophilus unhunched from above his plate, chomping, his blue eyes brilliant with fury. Jubilant. “Hot damn.” He chomped. “Hell ’n breakfast.” He jumped from his chair, kicked a panel in the wall which fell open to display weapons, and grabbed a heavy shotgun. He was moving fast. Justice stood there, silent.
Theophilus wheeled, ran from the kitchen, and John followed in spite of the yell from his father.
The old man seemed to gallop. John could still remember sunlight on the blue-clad, grayhaired figure; the bouncing form of the old man as he ran through tall grass, the shotgun carried like a club. The grass was green, green, green, like the very roots of color, like the color tumbled off the blades in shouts, extended into the black earth and yelled from the roots. Theophilus ran and John’s short legs could not keep up. Behind him came Justice, and John knew he was going to get caught.
“Come here.” His father scooped him on the run, stopped, turned him toward the house. John wiggled, nearly got loose but was caught firm.
Theophilus stopped now, braced, and the gun boomed twice, pounding over the tall grass toward the low buildings that housed the chickens.
The first sight of the gray dog was when he appeared around the far side of the chicken house and lit out for home. A chicken dangled like an afterthought in his mouth; spit red, a little fire of color glowing between the gray head, the green grass and the white chicken. The dog was running seriously but without desperation. His hind quarters were up. His head was high enough to brag about the chicken.
John wiggled loose and ran. His father did not catch him again until he was near the chicken house. He nearly reached Theophilus, who was still braced in the tall grass and swearing at the summer sky. The old man turned, grinned like a man who could kill death itself, and threw the shotgun down. His teeth looked like he could grin and chomp at the same time. “I just kilt ten thousand goddamn chickens.” Theophilus seemed proud. John leaned past him to view the destruction and knew that it was not ten thousand, but it was a lot of chickens. White bodies spouting red were scattered and tumbling about the henyard like torn paper. Some were already silent. Some were flopping and spasmodic. As John watched, the unhurt chickens began clucking their way through the bodies and occasionally pecked at the live remains. John was interested, but Justice made him go back to the house.
The next day the dog took another chicken. Theophilus hit him, but only enough to burn the dog’s flank. He went off in a low squat, still running seriously, still with a rose in his mouth and flaunting the white chicken.
Theophilus went to town, returned with a thirty-thirty rifle and spent the rest of the day shooting at cans, sparrows, twigs, hawks a half mile in the air, clods, and between the legs of neighbors’ cows. Because it was a rifle and not a carbine the kick was bruising. He stove up his shoulder for three days. Justice made worried grunts. Vera scoffed and claimed that his shoulder was in better shape than the rest of his parts.
The dog got two more chickens. Then the scene changed. The defiant dog took one of the ducks. John’s little hound watched the snare, made an indifferent sally to run the dog away, then lay down in the shade and seemed to be thinking about it. While John wailed for his duck, picking soft white feathers from the thick grass, Theophilus turned from contest to war.
John Tracker shook his head, trying to dislodge the memory. His car was too warm. He turned down the heater, thought back to his visit to the house, shuddered, and returned to the memory. Forty years old, and it was still vivid.
“Don’t go near the well.”
His father told him that over and over.
“Don’t go near the well.” When he went out to play his grandmother would tell him that. His grandmother knew why, he was sure. No doubt there was something in the well, a formless scary blob. It lay dreaming of the crunch of bones from little boys it occasionally got in its mouth.
“What’s in the well?”
“Water,” his father said.
“What’s in the well?”
“Nothin’ in that one, boy. Nothin’ in that one atall.” His grandfather would never tell him the location of the other well. Sometimes in dreams he believed it was hidden under a trap door beneath his bed.
“What’s in the well?”
“Fall in there and you’ll see. Look in there and it’ll grab you.”
His grandmother knew. He always walked wide of the well. It was fun, in the sunlight, to circle the chickens, walk through the grass, head out across woodlot or pasture and know that the black spot that was the mouth of the well was like a lid on a pit. Nothing down there could move above the black spot. Sunlight did not touch the blackness. Sometimes in bed and staring into darkness John imagined the mouth of the well, existing as a black spot in the night.
Sure. The Devil was in that well. He must be. According to grandfather Theophilus he was everywhere else. The well had to be the Devil’s headquarters. The sun held him under, but on extra dark nights the black went with black and he could get out.
“Hell and business,” Justice would say. He was a quiet man, but when he spoke it was often half-humorously. One evening Justice complained of having to make a trip to the city next day. It was a matter that could not be handled in the neighboring towns, and John figured it was because of the library. When his father went to the city he always returned with books.
The kitchen lights were still on against the weak dawn when John fumbled and eye-rubbed his way into the early light of the next morning. Theophilus was half dressed — pants, undershirt, no socks. His gray whiskers were untrimmed. He was stiff and had scratches on his arms; always scratches on his arms. When he was a lot older John would figure who made those scratches. The first time he bedded with a woman who used her nails, the realization about his grandfather and grandmother was more shocking than the bleeding marks on his back.
“What are you doing up?” Theophilus said as he slurped coffee. The rifle lay on the table. Bronze cartridges fanned in front of it like fingers. The flow of the electric light on the black rifle made it look soft. The polished stock was already gouged where Theophilus had banged it against something in anger over a miss.
“Goin’ to help get the sumbitchin’ dog.”
“Goin’ to get a lickin’ about that mouth.” Theophilus was growling, and he was pleased. “Go back to bed.”
“It’s cold.”
“It’s August.” Theophilus looked at him, grinned, and John once more rea
lized early that any deception was better than none.
His father came in. “What are you doing up?”
“He came down to see you off,” Theophilus said. “Sit down.”
Justice did, and started rolling the cartridges with his short, accurate fingers. He seemed abstracted as he sipped at the coffee; about ready to speak, he turned to John instead, his hands seemingly nervous. “I’ll bring you a present,” he said. “Now go back to bed.”
“But it’s — ”
“Early,” Justice told him. “I want to speak privately. Boys need a lot of sleep.” Justice’s hair was so curly his ears were hidden. His hair was brown and combed close but it popped up in places. He was, John noted, dressed in his Sunday suit.
John turned, left and went to his room, went into the big closet, slid through a sectioned corner of the wall that turned like a lazy Susan, and entered a passage that ran left and up to a hallway on second floor. That hall jogged right at a ninety degree angle and dead-ended against a wall. John jumped twice, was not tall enough, and went down the hall to drag a chair from beneath a windowseat. He stood on the chair, reached high, found the pressure point. A ladder hinged from the ceiling, and he climbed to the third floor. The ladder closed behind him as he followed another hall that led onto a stone terrace that had a fountain that did not work. It was a broad terrace, flat limestone laid and cemented, slicked by the weather. This was not the terrace with the greenhouse. This terrace was like a lonesome stone plain — a little paper, a few leaves and some soil trapped in wind corners. Turtles cast in concrete sat on the edge of the fountain. John twisted one of them and a chute opened at his feet.
He climbed into the chute, which descended on a fast slant, turning twice; a large slide through darkness that dropped him one-and-a-half floors to a small cell that automatically lighted as the chute entry sealed. In the cell was a human skeleton that lay on a bunk beside a chair and a table. John wiggled under the bunk, pushed a panel and rolled sideways until he felt a ledge, then climbed down a ladder leading from the ledge, opened another panel, stepped through garlands of dried fruit and was in the pantry next to the kitchen.
