Southern Gods

by John Hornor Jacobs

  He dialed in 1570, the frequency Phelps indicated was Mr. Couch’s station. At first that frequency was just static, the occasional word rising through the noise like a fish rising to the surface of a murky pond, pale and indistinct. Closer to Brinkley, the signal gained clarity, coalescing into something understandable.

  KBRI played swing and big band platters, Lawrence Welk, Jimmy Dorsey, Johnny Mercer, and Vaughn Monroe—Ingram thought of this music as the drone of the USO.

  The more Ingram listened, the more he thought of the music at Helios Studios. Rhythm and blues, Phelps had called it. A driving beat married to raw emotion that Ingram found the big band music lacked. And then Ingram remembered Hastur and the “Long Black Veil.” The chanting and sound of slaves marching, the sound of knives and pain and hatred.

  Despite the heat of afternoon, Ingram shivered. He switched off the radio and drove in silence.

  The coupe devoured the miles. Before dark, Ingram rolled into Brinkley, a hundred miles west of Memphis. Driving down the main drag, Ingram scanned the buildings looking for the KBRI call signs. He spotted them near a nexus of power lines and transformers running into a short narrow building with a large plate glass window. The door read:

  Behind the building was a steel tower stabbing into blue sky.

  Ingram pulled the coupe into a diagonal parking space, put on his hat, and went inside.

  At a small front desk, the secretary sat smacking gum, twirling a pony-tail, and reading a biology book. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She looked up brightly as Ingram entered the door.

  “Hi! Can I help you?”

  Ingram had assumed the KBRI radio station premises would not be too dissimilar to the Helios Studio space—cluttered, smoky, full of interesting photographs and musical paraphernalia. Quite the opposite; the KBRI office was near bare, a small desk with phone (and teenager), a couch and side tables littered with newspapers, then a long unbroken space of fifteen to twenty feet of empty hardwood floors that met a back wall with a large plate glass. An older man sat at controls in front of a microphone. Ridged waffle-like material covered the walls of both the front office and sound-booth.

  The KBRI broadcast played softly throughout the front office, emanating from fabric-lined speakers mounted on the wall.

  Ingram walked closer to the girl at the front desk and said, “Hi. My name’s Lewis Ingram. I’d like to speak with Mr. Couch, if I may.”

  The girl turned in the chair, hooked a thumb back at the sound booth, and said, “Daddy? He’s just about to do a round of advertisements. Once he finishes them, he should have time to talk with you. You can have a seat over there.”

  She stood, faced the sound booth, and waved her arms over her head like she was flagging down a passing airplane. Mr. Couch looked up, irritated, and then shook his head. He spotted Ingram standing in front of the desk. The girl pointed to Ingram’s chest, then made talking motions with her hands. Couch nodded, returning to his work. Ingram took a seat.

  When Couch finished with the announcements and advertisements—the Cotton, Grain, and Stock Report, messages from the London Woolen Company, Immanuel Baptist Church, the Clifford and Weldon Piano Service company—he walked briskly to the front office, adjusting his glasses. He approached Ingram, hand out, ready to shake. A thin, even scrawny, man, Couch was buttoned down and buttoned up, wearing a bow tie and suspenders.

  “Martin Couch, sir. I’m the owner and operator of KBRI. What can I help you with?”

  Ingram stood and took Couch’s hand. “I’m trying to find someone, Mr. Couch.”

  Couch withdrew his hand from Ingram’s grasp. “Are you a policeman?”

  “No sir, I’ve been hired to find Early Freeman. Early’s boss, Mr. Phelps, mentioned you saw him last.”

  “Oh. Yes, I spoke with Mr. Phelps on the phone. And just the other day, Sheriff Grazer came by and asked me some questions. I told them everything I know.”

  “Do you think I could ask you just a few questions? We think Early moved on to other towns with stations, and I’m trying to find out where those might be.”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “OK, then. When was the last time you saw him?”

  “I think it was July eighteenth, a Thursday. He dropped off a couple of forty-fives for Derwood, our night DJ, and then took Lisa and me over to the dime store for a malted and a sandwich.” He nodded toward his daughter.

  “So you’re pretty familiar with Early, huh?”

  “You could say so. He comes by and drops off records for Derwood to play. You know, Negro folk music… very primitive. We only play that at night when we drop the wattage and limit the broadcast area.”

  “I see,” Ingram paused. “Do you know if Early had any contact with Derwood? You think I could talk to him?”

  “I don’t see any problem with that, Mr. Ingram. But he hasn’t got a phone. Lisa, can you write down Derwood’s address for Mr. Ingram?” Lisa flipped through a Rolodex and jotted some information on a 3x5 card, bringing it over and handing it to Ingram.

  “Thanks. Did Early say where he was heading next?”

  “No. I’m sorry. We just talked about children. Early was quite worried about being a father. He confided in me that his father was not the most pleasant of men and he feared making that same mistake. Of course I reassured him; someone who worries about those things doesn’t become it.”

  Couch took off his glasses and polished the lens with a white handkerchief. “In my own way, I guess I was his friend. I never accepted any money from him, nor his offers of ‘entertainment.’ He’s been coming round here for the last year at least, once a month. And recently, he’s been questioning me about being a good father.” Couch looked at Lisa, who rolled her eyes at this last statement. “Which I tried to answer to the best of my ability, though my being a ‘good father’ is constantly up for review.” Couch grinned at his little joke, and the girl rolled her eyes again and sighed heavily.

  “Well, I appreciate it, Mr. Couch, and I know Early appreciates it too.” Ingram put his hat back on and said, “Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Ingram. I’m glad to have been of help.”

  Ingram turned to the door and stopped.

  “Oh, there’s one more thing. Did Early mention anything about a pirate radio station broadcasting out of these part? Or anything about a fella named John Hastur?”

  Couch blanched, and he blinked several times rapidly. “No,” he said, hesitantly. “He didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  Ingram furrowed his brow. He glanced over at the girl, who had retrieved a fingernail file and was busily grooming her nails.

  Ingram turned back to face Couch. He took a quick step toward the man, forcing him to look up, using his sheer size as a tool of coercion.

  “I guess I should phrase that another way,” Ingram said. “Do you know anything about a pirate radio station located around here? You ever heard of John Hastur?”

  Couch looked down at his hands holding the glasses and handkerchief as if he’d just discovered something brand new. He placed the glasses on his face and said, “No, Mr. Ingram, I have no knowledge of any of this. I’m sorry, really. But I have to get back to the booth and finish up the afternoon broadcast. Sorry I couldn’t be any more help. Good day.”

  The girl glanced at Ingram on his way out, and around her gum said, “Thanks for stopping by. Be sure to tune in to KBRI on Sundays for the Sunny Sunday Sermon’s with Maddox Bradley.” She gestured back toward the booth. “He makes me say that.”

  Ingram grinned. “Stick in there.”

  ***

  The 3x5 card Lisa gave Ingram read, “D. Miller, 200 Cherrylog Road, Brinkley. P.S. I think you’re cute.”

  Chuckling, Ingram got back into the coupe and headed toward the filling station he’d seen earlier as he entered Brinkley’s main street. The station attendant pointed him in the right direction.

  Brinkley, Ingram realized, was just Main Street and one other b
lock of modern houses: four walls, a roof, a driveway, porch, backyard, maybe even a second story. Once he drove beyond that block, he passed overgrown lots next to small, low-slung houses and shacks with no discernible line between driveway and lawn. Derelict cars lolled on cinder blocks and scarred tree trunks; stacks of tires teetered by front doors. Beyond stood hovels held together with galvanized tin and bailing wire.

  It was dark now, and Ingram drove into unknown country, the electric lights illuminating Main Street diminishing in his rear view mirror. As he drove past the tar-paper shacks, he saw candles and lanterns lighting bare rooms with shadowy figures.

  Ingram followed the station attendant’s directions and eventually his headlights found the hand-painted sign for Cherrylog Road. Flat fields surrounded his car. Corn blocked his view to the left and right. Rustling with the breeze, the stalks stood taller than even Ingram underneath a sky salted with starlight. His tires crunched on the gravel, and the road wound among the fields, passing corn, then cotton, then a stand of trees, then more fields until Ingram crossed a small concrete bridge.

  Ingram saw a farmhouse, dormered and gabled, with a porch and a gallery, passably maintained except for the soft decay of scaling paint. Bean fields ran up and kissed the yard. Ingram parked his car, angling the headlights onto the porch and front windows.

  He shut down the coupe, leaving the headlights on, and opened the door. It was quiet, except for the rustle of the wind and the tick-tick-tick of the coupe’s engine as it cooled. Each footstep crackled dry grass, each footfall on porch-step creaked abnormally loud. Ingram hunched his shoulder blades with the noise.

  Knocking on the front door, he bellowed, “Hello?” He walked around the house’s lower level, shielding his eyes, and peered through the windows. The interior of the house was dark, shadows and looming patches of blackness appearing as furniture. The stars didn’t give enough light to see, and the coupe’s headlights didn’t reach. Ingram moved back to the front of the house, squinting his eyes in the glare, and considered heading back to town to get dinner.

  The headlights died.

  Suddenly, he was blind. From behind the coupe, Ingram heard footsteps and low-pitched sounds like garbled speech.

  Oun tulu dundu nub sheb tulu onnu ia denu fin de nulu sheb lar stir rub neb.

  Ingram paused, listening. His body tightened, arms out as if fending something away.

  He jumped off the porch, landing in the grass in front of the coupe. Still blind, he crouched as low as possible, and balled his hands into fists. He thought of his gun.

  Still the bizarre words came. Ingram edged out to the side of the coupe so that he might be able to get into his car, retrieve his .38 under the front seat. Anything. He felt his back prickling in the same sense he’d had years ago in the Pacific, the sense of impending danger. For a moment he felt a strange dislocation and he closed his eyes, thinking that when he opened them he’d smell the smoke and gunpowder, hear the screams of his men and the report of their rifles. Even now he felt the thick jungle undergrowth of years before, lost in the darkness of Guadalcanal.

  Oun tulu dundu nub sheb tulu onnu ia denu fin de nulu sheb lar stir rub neb.

  The sound of the voices pulled him away from his reverie. Ingram opened his eyes, and could see again, dimly. Shapes formed out of the blackness: the coupe, a bush, the line of overgrown lawn.

  A tall, black figure watched him from across the rural road, the silhouette of a man, lean and angular. The darkness concentrated down to two specks, the creature’s eyes. They watched him, unblinking.

  Ingram remained locked in the thing’s gaze as the guttural sounds continued, coming in harsh, pounding rhythms. Layered above and beyond the voices came a sound like the tearing of the dark; beyond sound, it rocked Ingram’s frame, shook his bones.

  Something bad’s gonna happen. Something bad…

  His mind felt disjointed; his thoughts careened around and dashed away unchecked. He gritted his teeth. His shoulders rose, and he raised his fists, every muscle taut.

  The sound grew—Hastur! he thought, remembering the recording from Phelp’s studio—widening and expanding. He felt like he could taste an oily blackness invading his mouth.

  Desperate, he dug his keys from his pocket and leapt forward toward the coupe’s door. He fumbled at the handle. The keys flipped away, slipping from his fingers. His hands were numb, unresponsive. The hideous sound filled all his senses. Eyes full of night, the reek of the dark in his nose and on his hair, the oily taste of blindness on his tongue, Ingram’s senses filled with noise and blackness and pain.

  “Come on, then, bastard. Come on,” he bellowed into the approaching dark, swinging his fists.

  The shadow overwhelmed him.

  Ingram screamed with rage, ripping at his own face. The black noise grew, rising. He felt the red sensation possess him, the fury of battle-madness gripping him like long ago, and he hated. The dark thing standing across the road, himself, the world—he felt unbounded hatred for everything. He staggered forward, trying to get to the black figure still watching him, eyes like congealed darkness, to kill it, rip it to shreds, pound it to a pulp. If anything came between Ingram and the loathsome figure across the road, it would die too.

  Ingram fought desperately to remain standing and sane, but his ears rang from the screams. The strange, high-pitched sound ripped at his mind again, and his sanity skittered away like butter on a hot pan. He keeled over into the grass and ripped at his eyes, his ears; anything to stop the sound, stop the darkness. Blackness pushed in from all sides, invading his body, and he knew no more.

  Chapter 5

  Ingram awoke to stars.

  He’d dreamed of Captain Haptic, his old captain. They’d been on leave, in Hawaii, drinking and singing old country folk songs, off key. A real memory. But in the dream, Cap Hap had been dressed as a Roman centurion, like in the movies, with a breast plate and plumed helmet. He drank like Ingram remembered him, though.

  From where he lay on the lawn, the black curtain of sky above him was strewn with millions of twinkling points of light. He looked down at himself. Dried blood streaked his fingers and palms. His face felt raw.

  Ingram lay there on his back, half-under his coupe, face throbbing. He watched the heavens turn above him as he breathed in the grass, chest rising and falling.

  The sound of cicadas ebbed and peaked, accompanied by the hoot of an owl and the faint far-off bark of some lonely, chained dog.

  Ingram brought his hand up to his cheek, and his fingers came away sticky. He rolled over on hands and knees and patted at the grass in the darkness until he found his keys. He rose painfully, and levered himself into the coupe. He turned the key, and the engine growled into life. Ingram discovered that the light switch for the headlights had been depressed to the off position.

  Ingram pulled out a smoke and lit it with trembling hands.

  Why did he stop? Let me live?

  Ingram felt his anger building—a strange echo of the feeling he’d had with the rough sound of the silhouette—his resolve to see this job through calcifying to some rock-hard permanence. With every throb of ripped face, his anger grew.

  I’m gonna find that bastard if it’s the last thing I ever do, so help me God.

  It was Ingram’s version of prayer, and he didn’t know even if he meant Early Freeman or Derwood Miller or the silhouette by the side of the road.

  The coupe trundled through the night, crunching its way back Cherrylog Road.

  On Main Street, Dougan’s pharmacy was closed, but KBRI was still lit. Ingram drove the coupe slowly past the building. Couch was in the booth window, head bent, ministering to his flock, an electric priest sending out his blessings at 1570 kilohertz with one thousand watts of power. But Ingram wanted no more conversing with Couch, no more dissembling; thinking about it now, he realized it was only the girl’s presence that had kept him from forcing the truth out of Couch. With cracked bones and blood. Maybe too much blood.

  He pulled t
he coupe around the back of the KBRI building, parking in the shadows of the tower. Ingram exited the coupe and tested the building’s rear doors; both were locked. He went back to the car, lit a cigarette, and sat fiddling with the radio, tuning in KBRI.

  Ingram watched for Derwood, smoking and taking sips from the pint of whiskey he kept under his seat. From his bag he took a white undershirt, poured some whiskey on it, and dabbed at the scratches on his face.

  Jesus. Did a number on myself. What the hell happened back there?

  Couch’s voice sounded sonorous and lulling even through the speakers of the coupe. Ingram leaned back in his seat and dozed.

  When Derwood took the air at 10 PM, Ingram sat upright and cursed, looking around the lot, wishing he had watched the front door.

  “Welcome, ya’ll, to KBRI’s evening programming. I’m Derwood Millah, and tonight we got a real treat for you, the new single from Little Rock’s own Jim Cannon. Later we’ll spin some of the Memphis favorites but right now I don’t want you to forget that everybody needs some plumbing work sometimes. Pipes get clogged, food gets down the drain and not to mention hair and other stuff… ooh. But there’s a solution to all of these problems. That’s right, if you need help with your plumbing, be sure to call W.T. Grant and Son Plumbers, right here in Brinkley, and they’ll come by and—”

  Derwood’s voice wasn’t as smooth as Couch’s but what he lacked in polish, he made up for with enthusiasm. When Derwood began playing music, Ingram sat upright.

  Rhythm and blues, he called it.

  It came through the speakers like a dream, a deep pulsing dream. He started with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who sang a throaty spiritual. He followed it with Robert Johnson, who cried of hell hounds and debt. When Derwood announced a Helios artist, Hubert Washington, Ingram started the coupe, maneuvered it out of the parking lot, and drove back to Cherrylog Road.