“Where? Which hills?”
“To Gospel Trail. The gorge.”
With a surge of panicky strength, she snapped her arm away and broke free. “Hell no, I’d never go out that way.”
The vehemence surprised him. “Why?”
“You know the talk.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yeah you do.”
Shad was getting the feeling that he’d somehow missed an important facet to the county and was only now getting around to it. “Not really. Tell me what they say.”
Glide appeared embarrassed by her outburst, humbled enough to actually dip her chin and blush. The rosy flush of her cheeks was authentic enough to tug at his guts.
She put on a moderately enticing girlish act, as if trying to throw him off the scent of her anxiety. There was a taunt in her eyes as well, the kind that made crazed lonely men run for shotguns to battle one another, and he knew better than to put his hand on her now.
“M’am gives tell that there’s wraiths out that way. The suicides can’t sleep. Hiding in the deadwood and brambles just waiting to catch folk. The land’s got a taint to it, she warns everybody. I’m not saying I believe that, but if you ever heard my M’am going on about spirits, you’d give ’em considerable thought.”
“You’re right,” he admitted.
M’am Luvell, Glide’s great-grandmother, was a hex woman the superstitious kin of the hollow respected and feared. They brought their sick children to her, their cows that didn’t give enough milk. The pumpkin heads and the kids with flippers. They came for love potions and charms to ward off the evil eye. They carried their chickens and their terror, and she would feed on it. All of it. Shad sort of liked the lady.
“Her mama was thrown into the chasm when M’am was a missy. Diptheria, I think. Or cholera. She watched it happen. She says the wraiths came out of the rocks and spent the afternoon with her, playing with her at first, then chasing and chewing on her legs.”
After Shad’s mother died, Pa went to M’am Luvell for a tonic to take his nightmares away—moon wasn’t strong enough anymore. She’d taught him how to play chess.
“I’d like to see her,” Shad said.
“Go right on,” Glide told him, aiming her tits to show him the way. “It’s not my place to stop anyone. Nor to urge ’em on, neither.”
Venn squirmed beneath the hay for a moment, whimpered, and lay still again.
BULLFROGS ROARED IN THE POND AND THE WIRE grass appeared alive, agitated as it knifed into the breeze. Shad moved to the nearest shanty and stood at the ramshackle pineboard door. He reached out to knock and the walls groaned in protest, tilting horribly. The years of humidity, rain, and moss bleeding into the wood had rotted it to tissue paper. He tapped with his index finger and hoped the splintering door wouldn’t fall off its hinges.
M’am’s voice, low and almost dangerous, but filled with a quaint mischief, called out through the thick spaces between the slats. “Come on inside now, Shad Jenkins. Don’t you worry none ’bout my home. It’ll last long enough to serve me my remaining years, rest your mind on that.”
He was still giving too much of himself away. He walked in and instantly felt as if he’d stepped into a pagan place of worship. A hallowed arena where the blood never finished soaking into the earth. Some areas had an innate sense of sanctuary about them. Another person’s belief could wrap around your throat as tightly as your own.
M’am Luvell sat huddled on a small seat suited for a child, smoking a pipe. She nodded at him, eyes closed. Her dwarf’s body was hidden beneath afghans and oversized sweaters, except for the stubby fingers with yellow cracked nails, wrapped around her pipe. Some of the folk in Moon Run Hollow carved their own from corncobs or hickory, but hers was store-bought and expensive. It gave the hex woman another element of contradiction.
Even so, he was a little surprised to realize she was smoking marijuana. The sweet stink of it filled the shack and made him clear his throat.
He waited. Five minutes passed. It was a test of his patience, he knew. You learned more about people when they jumped than when they didn’t.
The room was empty except for a small table in the corner, a plate and some utensils on it, and a kitchen area filled with wooden boxes and glass bowls filled with powders, roots, and herbs. Opposite that, a tiny bed with a cotton-stuffed mattress. At its foot rested the homemade wicker-backed wheelchair they would use to push her around downtown. Shad drifted over, inspected it, and recognized the work. His father had built everything in the house.
M’am Luvell had crossed to the point where age no longer mattered. There was a timeless quality to her, like a stone outcropping barely forming the shape of an old woman. The fierce decades had passed her in these mountains and done what damage they could, but she’d survived the forces thrown against her.
Shad tried to imagine how she might stretch her hand out and call him over to her. So that he’d crouch at her side while she patted his head with a diminutive hand, whispering words of understanding to him. You were always looking for somebody to trust.
“Commiseration,” she said, opening her eyes. “Comfort and condolences.”
“Thank you.”
“First time you been by since you were a child.”
He nodded, remembering back to when he was about five and Pa had brought him here. “You helped my father when he needed it.”
“That wasn’t so much.” She noticed her pipe was out and laid it aside on the table. “I just gave him a game to take his mind off his troubles.”
“It still does,” Shad said. “Considering the burden of his worries, that counts for a great deal.”
“For some neighbors, maybe,” she told him. “But not all.”
“Sure.”
That was the end of it, these preliminaries. He felt it come to a close as if a cell door had slammed shut. M’am Luvell had pondered him long enough and was now ready. “So, what do you ask of me?”
“I’m not certain,” he said.
“Well, you think on it some.”
She cocked her head, watching him impassively. He glanced around and wondered what the hollow folk did with their chickens when they brought them to her. Did they just toss them on the floor so that you had squawking hens flapping all over? What other payments did they make? Since there was no place else to sit, did they kneel? He couldn’t recall if his father had stood straight before M’am. Shad remembered lying on the floor, staring at spiders in the corner.
“They say my sister just fell asleep out there in the woods on Gospel Trail.”
“But you don’t believe it none?”
“I want to have an answer.”
She broke into a quiet titter that sounded like bones clicking together. “I always did like the Jenkins men. You got an easy honesty about you. Sometimes leaves you stupid and exposed, but it’s still a peculiar quality around these parts.”
Shad was getting a little tired of people calling him stupid all the time, even if it might be true, but he said nothing.
“You afraid of me, boy?”
“No.”
“Why’s that? Hex women scare most hollow folk.”
Telling her the candid fact that geriatric dwarves didn’t hold much sway in the world most of the time just didn’t much appeal to him, so Shad went at it a different way.
“I knew a guy in prison just like you. An older man who did a lot of smirking and chuckling. He knew people from the inside out and used it to his advantage. He talked up a streak and could slap you back into your place without half-trying. You looked at him and no matter who you were, you still saw somebody twelve feet high, with plenty of power in his face. It made a lot of cons cringe and hold their heads down.”
“Who be that fella?” she asked.
“The warden.”
M’am Luvell burst into a brittle laughter and shuddered in her seat. Drool slid down her billy-goat chin and clung to the curling white hairs. “You got wit. Your pa ain’t got any of
that wag.”
Shad didn’t exactly find it so witty, telling the truth. “He’s got some.”
“And what happened to this warden? I can see by the way you’re leaning that there’s more you got to say on him.”
He looked down and saw she was right, he actually was leaning. No matter how hard you worked at it, you always had a tell. A way for them to see inside you.
“A bank robber named Jeffie O’Rourke used to work for him in the office. As a secretary, an assistant sort of, but really they were lovers. Jeffie used to write him long, affectionate letters. They both liked to paint. The warden did seascapes, masted ships on the ocean. Jeffie did watercolors of children. Puppies. Flowers. The warden would tell him about the garden in his backyard, the hot tub, and the satellite dish. How he’d introduce Jeffie to the family when Jeffie got out.”
“How you know all this?” M’am asked.
“I was his cellmate.”
She let out a disapproving grunt. “Oh, you must’ve seen a lot.”
“No, nothing like what you mean. But the warden fell for a new inmate, a straight guy called Mule. Mule was doing time for statutory rape, but he used to brag about how he would beat women, how much he hated them. The warden wasn’t only gay but a misogynist too, and Mule appealed to him. He liked hearing the stories. He thought he could sway Mule’s preference, bring him around. One night he came by the cell to break it easy to Jeffie and tell him it was all over. He probably did love the kid, in his own way. Didn’t want to hurt him, said he’d help with his parole and hoped they could still be close friends.”
“Uh-yuh.”
Thinking back, Shad’s voice dipped. “Jeffie O’Rourke had an easel with a self-portrait of himself looking serious. Fist under his chin, thoughtful, with his eyes very dark and deep. Maybe it was supposed to be sexy. He was painting it for the warden’s birthday, which was coming up in a couple of days. He took the news about Mule poorly. Snapped his paintbrush and jammed it through the warden’s eye and into his brain. Took half a second. Killed him on the spot.”
Her disproportionately large head bowed to the right and the furry white chin bobbed, as if she’d heard the story many times before and was being tolerant by listening one more time. “What happened then?”
“They carried Jeffie away to solitary and he vanished.”
Shad let it hang in the air like that, unsure of which way M’am Luvell might take it. Sounded like he was saying the guards killed Jeffie and buried him in secret. But the reality was, Jeffie truly had disappeared. He’d broken three prisons before and probably could’ve gotten out of this one anytime he wanted. He’d only stayed locked up because he was in love.
“And what lesson do you get from that?” M’am asked.
“I’m still working on it,” Shad said.
A weighty silence passed between them, but neither looked away. It was a comfortable moment upset only when she beckoned him closer.
“And what if you find out it was Zeke Hester that done harm to that sweet child? Or some other mad dog fool on the loose?”
“I’ll kill him.”
“Without no regret?”
“Not too much.”
He’d already decided that if events repeated themselves, he’d lie this time and do whatever he had to do to stay out of the joint. He considered any further dealings with Zeke to be an extension of what had already gone on before. He’d paid his price and wouldn’t give up anything more.
“Without feeling?” she asked, prodding him a touch.
“There’s always feeling.”
“Not everybody can say that.”
“Not everyone would want to.”
She trembled at that, holding in the rancid laughter, but that sharp, clacking noise still rustled and rattled from her chest. Her hands came up in small balled fists and made him think of an excited child wanting candy. “But what if nobody killed your baby sister up on that bad road, Shad Jenkins? What if sweet Megan did go to sleep in the Lord’s arms like they say? What if you never got nobody to blame?”
“When I’m satisfied I’ll let it go.”
“And if it’s not to be?”
“Do you always ask this many questions of the people who come to ask you questions?”
She pursed her gray lips. “Yuh.”
Okay, she was finally getting under his skin a little. “Do you accept it, M’am? That a seventeen-year-old girl’s heart just stops out in the low hills? In a spot she’s got no reason to be?”
The question took her back with a hint of sour amusement. “Asking my opinion, are you?”
“I suppose so.”
“Heh. Been a while since anyone asked me my consideration on a subject. They want answers and blessings and ways to fend off spells. And fatter calves.”
So maybe it threw her, having somebody in front of her who didn’t bootlick. “Tell me about that place.”
M’am fidgeted in her chair like she might want to hop off. Shad didn’t know whether to help or not. He heard her ancient knees pop and winced at the sound, but she soon settled.
“I used to go up there with my ma and pa on Sunday afternoons after church. Dressed in pink with pretty bows in my blond hair. Hard to picture now, but so it was. Mama’d sing ‘Gather at the River’ while Daddy praised the Lord the whole ride up the mountain. In an ox wagon.” She smiled, and he saw that, brown and crooked as some of her teeth were, she still had all of them. “But those hills were cross. Peevish. The land’s got a taste for us.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Quiet now, you asked and I’m saying. So listen.”
M’am Luvell pulled a wooden match from beneath her afghan and snapped her jagged thumbnail against it. She relit her pipe and allowed the seconds to roll by while she drew in a long, wheezing lungful of weed.
“We fed the gorge our ill and our hated, and now the ground’s sick and full of scorn. It’s hungry, but fickle. Storms come out of nowhere. Winds that’ll take a man off his feet and hurl him into the chasm. There’s outrage up that way, in those woods. It took my ma when I was but a girl a’four.”
“Wraiths?” Shad asked. “That played with you first before they chased and bit your legs?” He said it without judgment or presumption.
“It’s the reason why I never grew none. The young’un spoke out of turn. But she did no more than declare the truth. As do I.”
Shad stared at her.
“You understand what I’m telling you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
“But don’t that threaten you none, boy? What you might find if you go digging in bitter soil?”
He shrugged. “There’s evil everywhere.”
The bullfrogs kept roaring, finding a nice contrapuntal harmony. Shad studied the old woman, trying to figure out if he was missing something here or if maybe she was. It didn’t much matter one way or the other. She tilted her head again, this time in the opposite direction, waiting for him to ask something else, but he didn’t see a point anymore. He walked out.
Chapter Six
YOU LEARNED TO PAY HEED TO THE DEAD breath on your neck.
Shad had gotten away without much trouble in the slam, but he’d still tapped into the sensibility of always having danger at hand. Knowing it was always out there, an inch to your left. You always had to be careful, never think you were one of the blessed, like you couldn’t be touched. You could only be so stupid before you deserved to get taken out. Some cons thought their silver-tongued charm might be a defense, as if the charisma that made women giggle and bat their eyelashes on the outside could actually make the gen pop like them behind bars.
Usually the violence wasn’t aimed at Shad, but it sometimes got close enough that another man’s blood wound up on the front of his shirt. His first week inside it happened twice on the cafeteria line when the guy standing directly in front of him had been attacked.
One got a sharpened toothbrush in his right ass cheek. Four days later the other took a se
ven-inch length of shower pipe upside the head. Both of them had walked to the infirmary under their own power, but it did a quick job of fine-tuning Shad’s slam instincts.
A few of the guys on C-Block started calling him a jonah. That only helped to steer everyone clear. They laughed it off but it was constantly in the back of their minds, as they watched Shad standing there with another con’s blood on his clothes, knowing he had nothing to do with it. Being in the wrong place at the worst time.
Like all institutions, the joint had plenty of its own irrational and arbitrary beliefs. You had to study on how to live within them.
If you did damage, or had harm done to you, that was one thing. But if you were drawing the bad luck toward you, and it missed and nabbed the guy on your left, then you got a different kind of mark. Some of these men had been in Vietnam, a few of the old-timers in Korea, and they still had this war mentality that the new meat would cause the most damage because he didn’t know where to step.
The Haitians and Mexicans were especially superstitious and gave a wide berth to Shad most of the time. Except for this one inmate called Little Pepe—Pepito—a five-foot-nothing monstrosity as wide as he was tall, with immense tattooed arms so huge they didn’t look real.
Pepito got it into his head that Shad was giving him the evil eye, putting some kind of curse on him and his tribe. It had to do with Shad’s books and always being in the library. Pepito figured there was a great amount of mystical knowledge and conjurings that could be found if you knew how to use the Dewey Decimal System properly. He thought Shad was a witch.
Little Pepe considered himself an honorable man. He was in for strangling his sister’s husband with a Venetian blinds cord because the guy raised his voice at the dinner table, played poker, occasionally spanked his seven kids, and had taken too big a bite out of a coke deal they were in on together. Pepito’s nephews and nieces were everything to him, and it still grated his soul a bit that he’d killed their father in front of them on Easter. Pepito was a stand-up guy if you caught him on the right day.
His indignation remained righteous. He had a family to protect inside the slam as well as out. Even though the leader of his tribe had turned down Little Pepe’s request to shank the witch, he planned to do it anyway. On the cafeteria line, where the spells seemed to be landing on others.
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