ARVIN WAS LEANING AGAINST THE ROUGH RAIL of the porch late on a clear Saturday night in March looking at the stars hanging over the hills in all their distant mystery and solemn brilliance. He and Hobart Finley and Daryl Kuhn, his two closest friends, had bought a jug earlier that evening from Slot Machine, a one-armed bootlegger who operated over on Hungry Holler, and he was still sipping on it. The wind had a bite to it, but the whiskey kept him warm enough. He heard Earskell inside the house moan and mutter something in his sleep. In the good weather, the old man slept in a drafty lean-to he had nailed on the back of his sister’s house when he moved in a few years ago, but once it turned cold out, he lay on the floor next to the wood stove on a pallet made up of scratchy, homespun blankets that smelled like kerosene and mothballs. Down the hill, parked in the pull-off behind Earskell’s Ford was Arvin’s prized possession, a blue 1954 Chevy Bel Air with a loose transmission. It had taken him four years doing whatever kind of work he could get—chopping firewood, building fence, picking apples, slopping hogs—to save enough money to buy it.
Earlier that day, Arvin had driven Lenora to the cemetery to visit her mother’s grave. Though he would never admit it, the only reason he went to the graveyard with her now was because he hoped she might recall some buried memory about her daddy or the cripple he ran with. He had become fascinated with the riddle of their disappearance. Although Emma and many others in Greenbrier County seemed convinced that the two were alive and well, Arvin found it hard to believe that two bastards as nutty as Roy and Theodore were purported to be could have vanished into thin air and never be heard from again. If it was that easy, he figured a lot more people would do it. He’d wished many times that his father had taken that route.
“Don’t you think it’s funny how we both ended up orphans and living in the same house like we do?” Lenora had said after they entered the cemetery. She set her Bible down on a nearby tombstone and loosened her bonnet a bit and pulled it back. “It’s almost like everything happened so we’d meet each other.” She was standing next to her mother’s place looking down at the square marker lying flat to the ground: HELEN HATTON LAFERTY 1926–1948. A small winged but faceless angel was carved into each top corner. Arvin had pushed spit between his teeth and glanced around at the dead remains of last year’s flowers on the other graves, the clumps of grass and rusty wire fence that surrounded the cemetery. It made him uneasy when Lenora talked like that, and she had been doing it a lot more since she’d turned sixteen. They might not have been blood relation, but it made him squeamish to think of her any other way than as his sister. Though he realized the odds weren’t good, he kept hoping she might find a boyfriend before she said something really stupid.
He weaved a little as he moved from the edge of the porch over to Earskell’s rocking chair and sat down. He started thinking about his parents, and his throat got tight and dry all of the sudden. He loved whiskey, but sometimes it brought on a deep sadness that only sleep would erase. He felt like crying, but lifted the bottle and took another drink instead. A dog barked somewhere over the next knob, and his thoughts wandered to Jack, the poor harmless mutt that his father had killed just for some more lousy blood. That had been one of the worst days of that summer, the way he remembered it, almost as bad as the night his mother died. Soon, Arvin promised himself, he was going to go back to the prayer log and see if the dog’s bones were still there. He wanted to bury them proper, do what he could to make up for some of what his crazy father had done. If he lived to be a hundred, he vowed, he would never forget Jack.
Sometimes he wondered if perhaps he was just envious that Lenora’s father might still be alive while his was dead. He had read all the faded newspaper accounts, had even gone out combing the woods where Helen’s corpse had been found, hoping to discover some piece of evidence that would prove everybody wrong: a shallow pit with two skeletons slowly rising side by side up through the earth, or a rusty wheelchair pocked with bullet holes hidden deep in an overlooked gully. But the only things he’d ever come across were two spent shotgun shells and a Spearmint gum wrapper. As Lenora ignored his questions that morning about her father and kept on blabbing about fate and star-crossed lovers and all that other romance shit she read about in books checked out from the school library, he’d realized that he should have stayed home and worked on the Bel Air. It hadn’t run right since the day he bought it.
“Damn it, Lenora, stop talking that nonsense,” Arvin had told her. “Besides, you might not even be an orphan. As far as everyone around here’s concerned, you daddy’s still alive and kicking. Hell, he might pop over the hill any day now dancing a jig.”
“I hope so,” she’d said. “I pray every day that he will.”
“Even if it meant he killed your mother?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I’ve already forgiven him. We could start all over.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not. What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“Well, if he could come back—”
“Girl, just shut up about it.” Arvin started toward the cemetery gate. “We both know that ain’t gonna happen.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice breaking into a sob.
Taking a deep breath, Arvin stopped and turned around. Sometimes it seemed as if she spent half of her life crying. He held his car keys in his hand. “Look, if you want a ride, come on.”
When he got home, he cleaned the Bel Air’s carburetor with a wire brush dipped in gasoline, then left again right after supper to pick up Hobart and Daryl. He had been down all week, thinking about Mary Jane Turner, and he felt the need to get good and sloshed. Her father hadn’t taken long to decide that life in the merchant marine was a hell of a lot easier than plowing rocks and worrying about whether it rained enough or not, and so he had packed his family up and headed for Baltimore and a new ship the previous Sunday morning. Though Arvin had kept after her from their first date, he was glad now that Mary hadn’t let him in her pants. Saying goodbye had been hard enough as it was. “Please,” he’d asked as they stood at her front door the night before she left; and she had smiled and stood on her tiptoes and one last time whispered dirty words in his ear. He and Hobart and Daryl had pooled their money together for the bottle and a twelve-pack and a couple of packs of Pall Malls and a tank of gas. Then they drove up and down the dull streets of Lewisburg until midnight listening to the radio fade in and out and blowing off about what they were going to do after high school, until their voices turned as rough as gravel from all the smoke and whiskey and grandiose plans for the future.
Leaning back in the rocker, Arvin wondered who was living in his old house now, wondered if the storekeeper still stayed by himself in that little camper and if Janey Wagner was knocked up by now. “Stink finger,” he muttered to himself. He thought again about the way the deputy named Bodecker had locked him in the back of the patrol car after he had led him to the prayer log, like the lawman was afraid of him, a ten-year-old kid with blueberry pie on his face. They had put him in an empty cell that night, not knowing what else to do with him, and the welfare lady had showed up the next afternoon with some of his clothes and his grandmother’s address. Holding the bottle up, he saw that there was maybe two inches left in the bottom. He stuck it under the chair for Earskell in the morning.
23
REVEREND SYKES COUGHED A LITTLE, and the congregation of the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified watched a trickle of bright blood run down his chin and drip onto his shirt. He kept preaching, though, gave the people a decent sermon about helping your neighbor; but then at the end he announced that he was stepping down. “Temporary,” he said. “Just till I get to feeling better.” He said that his wife had a nephew down in Tennessee who had just graduated from one of those Bible colleges. “He claims he wants to work with poor people,” Sykes went on. “I figure he must be a Democrat.” He grinned, hoping for a laugh to lighten the mood a little, but the only sound he heard was a
couple of women in the back near the door crying with his wife. He realized now that he should have made her stay home today.
Taking a careful breath, he cleared his throat. “I ain’t seen him since he was a boy, but his mother says he’s all right. Him and his wife should be here in two weeks, and like I said, he’s just gonna help out for a while. I know he ain’t from around here, but try to make him feel welcome anyway.” Sykes started to weave a bit and grabbed hold of the pulpit to steady himself. He pulled the empty Five Brothers pack from his pocket and held it up. “Just in case any of you need it, I’m gonna hand this over to him.” A hacking fit came over him then, bent him double, but this time he managed to cover his mouth with his handkerchief and hide the blood. When he got his breath back, he rose up and looked around, his face red and sweaty with the strain of it all. He was too embarrassed to tell them that he was dying. The black lung that he’d been fighting for years had finally gotten the better of him. Within the next few weeks or months, according to the doctor, he’d be meeting his Maker. Sykes couldn’t honestly say that he was actually looking forward to it, but he knew that he’d had a better life than most men. After all, hadn’t he lived forty-two years longer than those poor wretches who had died in the mine cave-in that had pointed him toward his calling? Yes, he’d been a lucky man. He wiped a tear from his eye and shoved the bloody rag in his pants pocket. “Well,” he said, “no sense keeping you folks any longer. That’s all I got.”
24
ROY LIFTED THEODORE OUT OF THE WHEELCHAIR and carried him across the dirty sand. They were at the north end of a public beach in St. Petersburg, a little south of Tampa. The cripple’s useless legs swung back and forth like a rag doll’s. He was rank with the smell of piss, and Roy had noticed that he wasn’t using his milk bottle anymore, just soaking his rotten dungarees whenever he needed to go. He had to set Theodore down several times and rest, but he finally got him to the edge of the water. Two stout women wearing wide-brimmed hats rose up and looked over at them, then hurriedly gathered up their towels and lotions and headed for the parking lot. Roy went back to the chair and got their supper, two fifths of White Port and a package of boiled ham. They had lifted it from a grocery store a couple of blocks away right after a truck driver hauling oranges let them out. “Didn’t we spend some time locked up here once?” Theodore asked.
Roy swallowed the last slice of meat and nodded. “Three days, I think.” The cops had picked them up for vagrancy just before dark. They had been preaching on a street corner. America was getting as bad as Russia, a thin, balding man yelled at them as they were escorted past his cell to their own that night. Why could the police throw a man in jail just because he didn’t have any money or an address? What if the man didn’t want any goddamn money or a fuckin’ address? Where was all this freedom they bragged about? The cops took the protestor out of the block every morning and made him carry a stack of telephone books up and down the stairs all day. According to some of the other prisoners, the man had been arrested for vagrancy twenty-two times just in the past year, and they were sick of feeding the Communist bastard. If nothing else, they were going to make him sweat for his bologna and grits.
“I can’t remember,” Theodore said. “What was the jail like?”
“Not bad,” Roy said. “I believe they gave out coffee for dessert.” The second night they were there, the cops brought in a big, hulking brute with a carved-up face called the Zit-Eater. Right before bedtime, they stuck him in the cell down at the end of the hall with the Communist. Everyone in the jail had heard about the Zit-Eater except for Roy and Theodore. He was famous up and down the Gulf Coast. “Why do they call him that?” Roy had asked the paper hanger with the handlebar mustache in the cell next to theirs.
“Because the fucker gets you down and pops your pimples if you got any,” the man said. He twisted the waxed ends of his black mustache. “Lucky for me I’ve always had a nice complexion.”
“What the hell does he do that for?”
“He likes to eat ’em,” another man said, from a cell across the way. “Some claim he’s a cannibal, got leftovers buried all over Florida, but I don’t buy it. He just likes to get attention, that’s what I think.”
“Jesus, someone oughta kill a sonofabitch like that,” Theodore said. He glanced at the acne scars on Roy’s face.
The mustache shook his head. “He’d be a hard one to kill,” he said. “You ever see one of them retards that can carry a car on his back? They had one of ’em at this alligator farm where I worked one summer down by Naples. You couldn’t have stopped that bastard with a machine gun once he got started. The Zit-Eater, he’s like that.” Then they heard some commotion down at the end of the hall. Evidently, the Communist wasn’t going to give up easy, and that cheered Roy and Theodore a little, but after a couple of minutes all they could hear was his crying.
The next morning, three broad-chested men in white coats came in with billy clubs and hauled the Zit-Eater away in a straitjacket to a nuthouse on the other side of town. The Communist quit bitching about the law after that, didn’t complain once about the fresh squeeze marks on his face or the blisters on his feet, just carried his phone books up and down the stairs like he was thankful they’d given him some meaningful work to do.
Theodore sighed, looked out over the blue gulf, the water smooth as a pane of glass that day. “That sounds nice, coffee for dessert. Maybe we could let them take us in, get a little break.”
“Shit, Theodore, I don’t want to spend the night in jail.” Roy kept one eye on the new wheelchair. He’d slipped into an old folks’ home a couple of days ago and borrowed it after the wheels on the last one gave out. He wondered how many miles he had pushed Theodore since they had left West Virginia. Though he wasn’t good with numbers, he estimated it had to be up around a million by now.
“I’m tired, Roy.”
Theodore hadn’t been acting right since he cost them the job with the carnival the summer before. A young boy, maybe five or six years old, eating a cardboard scoop of cotton candy, had wandered into the back of the tent while Roy was out front trying to drum up some customers. Theodore swore that the boy asked for help in zipping his pants up, but not even Roy could buy that one. Within minutes, Billy Bradford had loaded them up in his Cadillac and dumped them a few miles out in the country. They didn’t even get a chance to say their goodbyes to Flapjack or the Flamingo Lady; and though they had tried to get on with several other outfits since then, word of the crippled pedophile and his bug-eating buddy had spread fast among the carny owners. “Want me to go get your guitar?” Roy asked.
“Nah,” Theodore said. “I ain’t got no music in me today.”
“You sick?”
“I don’t know,” the crippled boy said. “It’s like there’s never no letup.”
“Want one of them oranges the trucker gave us?”
“Hell no. I’ve et enough of them damn things to last me till the Judgment Day. They still give me the shits.”
“I could drop you off at the hospital,” Roy said. “Come back for you in a day or two.”
“Hospitals, they worse than jails.”
“Want me to pray over you?”
Theodore laughed. “Ha. That’s a good one, Roy.”
“Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you. You don’t believe no more.”
“Don’t start in on that shit again,” Theodore said. “I’ve served the Lord in various capacities. And I got the legs to prove it.”
“You just need some rest,” Roy said. “We’ll find us a good tree to sleep under before dark.”
“It still sounds mighty nice. Them passing out coffee for dessert.”
“Jesus, you want a cup of coffee, I’ll go get you one. We still got some change left.”
“I wish we was still with the carnival,” Theodore sighed. “That was the best we ever had it.”
“Yeah, well, you should have kept your hands off that kid if that’s the way you feel.”
Theo
dore picked up a pebble and threw it in the water. “It makes you wonder, don’t it?”
“What’s that?” Roy asked.
“I don’t know,” the cripple said with a shrug. “Just makes you wonder, that’s all.”
25
IT WAS A COLD FEBRUARY MORNING in the early part of 1966, Carl and Sandy’s fifth year together. The apartment was like an icebox, but Carl was afraid if he kept knocking on the landlady’s door downstairs about turning up the thermostat, he might snap and strangle her with her own filthy hairnet. He had never killed anyone in Ohio, didn’t believe in shitting in his own nest. That was Rule #2. So Mrs. Burchwell, although she deserved it more than anything, was off-limits. Sandy woke up a little before noon and headed for the living room with a blanket draped over her narrow shoulders, dragging the ends of it through the dust and dirt on the floor. She curled up on the couch in a shivering ball and waited for Carl to bring her a cup of coffee and turn the TV on. For the next several hours she smoked cigarettes and watched her soap operas and coughed. At three o’clock, Carl yelled from the kitchen that it was time to get ready for work. Sandy tended bar six nights a week, and though she was supposed to let Juanita off at four, she was always running late.
With a groan, she sat up and stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and flung the blanket off her shoulders. She turned off the TV, then shivered her way to the bathroom. Bending over the sink, she splashed some water around in the bowl. She dried off her face, studied herself in the mirror, tried vainly to brush the yellow stains off her teeth. With a tube of red lipstick, she made up her mouth, fixed her eyes, pulled her brown hair back in a limp ponytail. She was sore and bruised. Last night, after she closed up the bar, she let a paper mill worker who had recently lost a hand in a rewinder bend her over the pool table for twenty bucks. Her brother was watching her closely these days, ever since that goddamn phone call, but twenty bucks was twenty bucks, no matter how you looked at it. She and Carl could drive halfway across a state on that much money, or pay the electric bill for the month. It still irked her, all the crooked shit that Lee was into, and then him worried about her costing him votes. The man told her he would fork over another ten if she’d let him stick the metal hook up inside her, but Sandy told him that sounded like something he should save for his wife.
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