Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2

by Gary A Braunbeck

  So I let the trees swallow me. Still no birds and not one cicada tuning up its music box. The taste of sharp, lemony dust in the dimness. I get my bearings and set out on a diagonal, figuring if the church is big enough to pierce the forest ceiling I’ll find it long before I reach its doors.

  And I do, for it drags at my blood. I catch glimpses of the steeple, white against the off-white sky. Again I can almost hear that great absence of sound compressed into a kind of humidity, a kind of hymn. My eardrums throb against it.

  More of the steeple’s height fills the near distance, and though I sense a large gap in the trees ahead, I still can’t see the structure itself. I walk and at last my mind lets itself remember us kids lining up at the back of Sister Heaven’s church under the earth, taking turns pressing our faces up to a plate-sized hole cut in the pine wall. And seeing—nothing. A clouded vision, an un-light. Like the sky that domes above me now. Sister Heaven asking, hungry, behind us, Do you see pictures in His eye? Has it cleared? I could almost laugh at how my mind has fought against such an empty memory, if I felt it was empty at all.

  I step into a cavity of the forest. Just an immense clearing. No walls, no roof. There is no new church at all. The steeple is nothing but a prop towering forty feet in the air, lashed atop a thick wooden post driven into the earth. The cross blends into the sky above the trees. White paint is spattered onto the ground ringing the post.

  But the church has a floor. Pine planking, perhaps a dozen yards across, extends outward as far as I can see into the trees, perhaps unto the very mountains. The craftsmanship is fine and well-cut, needing only a lacquer finish. Lines of dark peek between each board, and pine needles litter the whole of it, though not nearly as many as there should be. There are no splintered stumps of trees, no stacks of lumber, no construction equipment. Not so much as a saw or hammer.

  The pressing silence continues as I step onto the floor, which is thick and steady under my feet. A small group of objects waits for me ahead, like trophies at the end of some arduous journey I never took. A box of chalk, a handful of crayons. A small plastic jar.

  I search the surrounding trees, but they are still and indistinct, from the forest floor to the blind white sky they taper into around the decoy cross. Cara Lynn might have said, “God’s holding His breath, Pearson,” in that indulgent way she had when we were ten, eleven. It’s like she never saw I was still too full of God.

  “What do you all want from me?” I shout into the stillness, but my voice is indistinct, as though even it doesn’t know where to go. Nothing answers but a deepening of long lonesomeness. My bones gain weight, and I let them pull me to my knees. I take up a piece of chalk and quickly drag a circle, the stick sounding like a summons in all this quiet as it knocks against the gaps. I am revolted by a desire to see Mama and Cara Lynn, no matter what they are. Or what is wearing them.

  And I wonder where the hole is. There has got to be one—God’s Eye was the faith and the pageless book that was pressed against us children.

  The circle I’ve drawn is much too small. I rub it out with a palm and draw another, turning myself around to complete it. This, too, feels empty, even with me inside it. I reach for a crayon and my hand brushes the plastic jar. There’s the ghost of print on the label, but I don’t need to know what the faded words once revealed. I don’t need to unscrew the lid. Instead I grasp a black crayon and break it in a vicious scribble, smear its wax within the circle. I turn this circle into a bottomless hole. There’s your God. I rise to my feet and kick the crayons and the chalk across the floor. I look down at the jar.

  “I will not!” This time my voice carries. I lift my boot and stomp down on the jar. It shatters and white greasepaint fans out across the pine boards. At last I hear something external and look up again—two trees are shaking, and at least twenty feet up I see two white sacks of skin hanging from a spiny branch, human-shaped, swaying as if they’ve just been vacated.

  “I will not!” My throat burns. It could be fifty years since I screamed, but I do it again. “I will not!”

  The sky rumbles. In the whole expanse of it, there hasn’t been a sound in months. But it shakes, darkens, and begins to sink toward the earth. Or the earth moves up toward it. It’s like an optical illusion for a long, long moment, until the sky catches against the treetops. A ripple shudders across it, a groaning sag from the direction of the mountains, then the white cross punctures the milky gray skin, the trees shred the sky into falling pale globs of rain.

  There’s a torrent of slapping percussion, chattering tree limbs. Great tatters of jelly pelt the ground. I run into the relative shelter of the woods and hunker with my arms over my head, pieces of the sky striking me, but there’s little pain. Whatever it is liquefies as soon as it touches me.

  A minute and all is a profound quiet again, and cold, a curious blend of bright and dark. I step back into the clearing, onto the pine floorboards, everything wet and sticky, most of all myself. From the trees comes a hymn of joy, like a speaker hasn’t been plugged in right until just now, though there is nothing to make this song I have been hearing all summer.

  The pale sky is gone. The filtered sun is gone. Yet they are still there, somehow, faintly superimposed over the truth. In their place is not an atmosphere at all but a shifting blackness full of vast shifting black things. Its largeness has no scale for me to measure, and I see none of Sister Heaven’s lines in it. Stars glare—colder, less involved things than our sun—and I watch dark tongues lash out to snatch them from their courses. Clouds of gases expand, and though I can’t look at them in any real way, I know they would be yellow were it not for their darkness.

  I lie down on my back, staring up at what was once the sky but I now understand was merely a great diseased cataract. Just as Sister Heaven told us all those years ago. I suppose that would make our very Earth the vast Eyeball, clouded over with a dumb film, rolling in its socket. Almost at the thought someone stretches out beside me and takes my hand. I know it’s her. She must be so old now, and I don’t want to look. I don’t want to see her face, or Mama’s face, or Cara Lynn’s as it would have been if she hadn’t died.

  “Did you crawl down to hide in the church when I burned the school?”

  She doesn’t speak but I know she nods, just the once.

  “I had to burn it,” I tell her, my face still turned away, resolute. “Cara Lynn was too taken with you. But why’d you defile my girls like that? Couldn’t you let well enough alone, without turning them old and like you? After all those things you made us do back then.”

  “Hush, little one,” Sister Heaven says. Her voice is the same sweet sound. There’s not a bit of fire-scorched rasp in it. “Those weren’t your kin, not anymore. But your Cara Lynn has never left us all the way. She used to visit me after the fire, bless her heart. Yes, my milk brings changes. It was a gift for your sacrifice. I had no choice but to give it, I was compelled by my nature, and I’m sorry it rewrote your loved ones in the Author’s image. He said it would make you precious unto God. Even your Mama, looks like, being consecrated next to one of our own. But now they’re Resurrected. They have no need for their skin. You’ll change, too, if you die.”

  “Where’s your old Klan?” I ask her, picturing those pointed shadows hiding in her church. For something is surely making this hymn in the air.

  “All of that’s gone, little one, like I said. I broke free of it at last. Now you broke free. All of God’s children broke free. The Author wouldn’t ever listen, in life or death. He wouldn’t ever look far enough, not through skin nor the membrane that’s hung over us. He just thought you all weren’t quite human enough to matter, and so chose you children to be the lookers, here where the optic nerve is fastened strongest. He wanted God sick and blind, and thus appeased. To hold back this reunion. I used you, too, for my own ends, and that is my shame. Oh, but he would be surprised the cataract has fallen by the hand of one of his colored, and that it’s you who will reap the rewards while he rots. Cancer o
f the gut—he never could stomach the Other.”

  The voice chuckles, a sound that comes deep in the throat. Her hand squeezes mine. “But no more of that. Now is God’s time. His true Eye is a grand thing, is it not? And yet so small. This is what we Sisters of Heaven set out for: it is time for God to remember He is not alone. There are many of Him. I don’t know if He’ll like it. Or survive it. But His brethren have called Him.”

  “We got rid of the word colored since your days,” I say, but she’s gone quiet. We stare up at the roiling black soup a while. The cosmos, I guess some would call it. “Where are Mama and Cara Lynn?” I ask her, but I already know her answer, somehow: up there, out there, in here. So I change my question. “What does God look like?”

  “You have all the time to watch and see, Pearson,” she says. An enormous rending sounds from everywhere, and the sky—all that space—I don’t know the word to use now—slides by as liquid. God turns His vast head. There, an impossible blank slate of existence lurks before us. Somewhere beyond it, an endless burning light that will reveal these black shapes for what they are, and we all begin to move toward it, carried along like motes in this Eye. A multitude of arms reach out. For Cara Lynn, I begin to count them.

  DUCK HUNT

  Joe R. Lansdale

  There were three hunters and three dogs.

  The hunters had shiny shotguns, warm clothes, and plenty of ammo. The dogs were each covered in big, blue spots and were sleek and glossy and ready to run. No duck was safe.

  The hunters were Clyde Barrow, James Clover, and little Freddie Clover, who was only fifteen and very excited to be asked along. However, Freddie did not really want to see a duck, let alone shoot one. He had never killed anything but a sparrow with his BB gun and that had made him sick. But he was nine then. Now he was ready to be a man. His father told him so. With this hunt he felt he had become part of a secret organization. One that smelled of tobacco smoke and whiskey breath; sounded of swear words, talk about how good certain women were, the range and velocity of rifles and shotguns, the edges of hunting knives, the best caps and earflaps for winter hunting.

  In Mud Creek the hunt made the man.

  Since Freddie was nine he had watched with more than casual interest, how when a boy turned fifteen in Mud Creek, he would be invited to The Hunting Club for a talk with the men.

  Next step was a hunt, and when the boy returned he was a boy no longer. He talked deep, walked sure, had whiskers bristling on his chin, and could take up with the assurance of not being laughed at, cussing, smoking, and watching women’s butts as a matter of course.

  Freddie wanted to be a man too. He had pimples, no pubic hair to speak of (he always showered quickly at school to escape derisive remarks about the size of his equipment and the thickness of his foliage), scrawny legs, and little, gray, watery eyes that looked like ugly planets spinning in white space.

  And truth was, Freddie preferred a book to a gun.

  But came the day when Freddie turned fifteen and his father came home from the Club, smoke and whiskey smell clinging to him like a hungry tick, his face slightly dark with beard and tired-looking from all-night poker. He came into Freddie’s room, marched over to the bed where Freddie was reading Thor, clutched the comic from his son’s hands, sent it fluttering across the room with a rainbow of comic panels.

  “Nose out of a book,” his father said. “Time to join the Club.” Freddie went to the Club, heard the men talk ducks, guns, the way the smoke and blood smelled on cool morning breezes. They told him the kill was the measure of a man. They showed him heads on the wall. They told him to go home with his father and come back tomorrow bright and early, ready for his first hunt.

  His father took Freddie downtown and bought him a flannel shirt (black and red), a thick jacket (fleece lined), a cap (with earflaps), and boots (waterproof). He took Freddie home and took a shotgun down from the rack, gave him a box of ammo, walked him out back to the firing range, and made him practice while he told his son about hunts and the war and about how men and ducks died much the same.

  Next morning before the sun was up, Freddie and his father had breakfast. Freddie’s mother did not eat with them. Freddie did not ask why. They met Clyde over at the Club and rode in his jeep down dirt roads, clay roads and trails, through brush and briars until they came to a mass of reeds and cattails that grew thick and tall as Japanese bamboo.

  They got out and walked. As they walked, pushing aside the reeds and cattails, the ground beneath their feet turned marshy. The dogs ran ahead.

  When the sun was two hours up, they came to a bit of a clearing in the reeds, and beyond them Freddie could see the break-your-heart blue of a shiny lake. Above the lake, coasting down, he saw a duck. He watched it sail out of sight.

  “Well, boy?” Freddie’s father said.

  “It’s beautiful,” Freddie said.

  “Beautiful, hell, are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  On they walked, the dogs way ahead now, and finally they stood within ten feet of the lake. Freddie was about to squat down into hiding as he had heard of others doing, when a flock of ducks burst up from a mass of reeds in the lake and Freddie, fighting off the sinking feeling in his stomach, tracked them with the barrel of the shotgun, knowing what he must do to be a man. His father’s hand clamped over the barrel and pushed it down. “Not yet,” he said.

  “Huh?” said Freddie.

  “It’s not the ducks that do it,” Clyde said.

  Freddie watched as Clyde and his father turned their heads to the right, to where the dogs were pointing noses, forward, paws upraised—to a thatch of underbrush. Clyde and his father made quick commands to the dogs to stay, then they led Freddie into the brush, through a twisting maze of briars and out into a clearing where all the members of The Hunting Club were waiting.

  In the center of the clearing was a gigantic duck decoy. It looked ancient and there were symbols carved all over it. Freddie could not tell if it were made of clay, iron, or wood. The back of it was scooped out, gravy bowl-like, and there was a pole in the center of the indention; tied to the pole was a skinny man. His head had been caked over with red mud and there were duck feathers sticking in it, making it look like some kind of funny cap. There was a ridiculous, wooden duck bill held to his head by thick elastic straps. Stuck to his butt was a duster of duck feathers. There was a sign around his neck that read DUCK.

  The man’s eyes were wide with fright and he was trying to say or scream something, but the bill had been fastened in such a way he couldn’t make any more than a mumble.

  Freddie felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. “Do it,” he said. “He ain’t nobody to anybody we know. Be a man.”

  “Do it! Do it! Do it!” came the cry from The Hunting Club.

  Freddie felt the cold air turn into a hard ball in his throat. His scrawny legs shook. He looked at his father and The Hunting Club. They all looked tough, hard, and masculine.

  “Want to be a titty baby all your life?” his father said.

  That put steel in Freddie’s bones. He cleared his eyes with the back of his sleeve and steadied the barrel on the derelict’s duck’s head.

  “Do it!” came the cry. “Do it! Do it! Do it!”

  At that instant he pulled the trigger. A cheer went up from The Hunting Club, and out of the clear, cold sky, a dark blue norther blew in and with it came a flock of ducks. The ducks lit on the great idol and on the derelict. Some of them dipped their bills in the derelict’s wetness.

  When the decoy and the derelict were covered in ducks, all of The Hunting Club lifted their guns and began to fire. The air became full of smoke, pellets, blood, and floating feathers.

  When the gunfire died down and the ducks died out, The Hunting Club went forward and bent over the decoy, did what they had to do. Their smiles were red when they lifted their heads. They wiped their mouths gruffly on the backs of their sleeves and gathered ducks into hunting bags until they bulged. There were still many c
arcasses lying about.

  Fred’s father gave him a cigarette. Clyde lit it.

  “Good shooting, son,” Fred’s father said and clapped him manfully on the back.

  “Yeah,” said Fred, scratching his crotch, “got that sonofabitch right between the eyes, pretty as a picture.”

  They all laughed.

  The sky went lighter, and the blue norther that was rustling the reeds and whipping feathers about blew up and out and away in an instant. As the men walked away from there, talking deep, walking sure, whiskers bristling on all their chins, they promised that tonight they would get Fred a woman.

  THE WATER SHED

  Suzanne Madron

  The building stood off-kilter and out-of-place in the middle of a disheveled field of wild hay on a remote part of the property, but to say it was lost in the one hundred and eight acre former farmstead was not true. Somehow the warped planks, disguised as they were by masks of lichen and a wall of long-dead wild raspberry brambles, were obvious even from a distance, like a shipwreck sticking out of the sand of an abandoned beach.

  As children, my cousins and I had been forbidden to explore the structure. There were many dilapidated buildings on the property, but only two areas were completely off-limits. The first was the part of the barn that had been struck by lightning around half a century ago, the boards still black and reeking of fire and smoke on humid days. The water shed was the second restricted place, with its gaping window and collapsing walls.

  At one point, it had been used for irrigation, but that was long before our time. Water from an underground aquifer filled a cistern that was more a dangerous, jagged square cut into the ground and built up in corroded metal than the well it was intended to be. From the outside of the building we were unable to see into the reservoir. All we could see from our nervous glances through the broken-out and sagging window frame was the attempt to cover the open well with bowed, rotten boards weighed down with masonry.