Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  Sonny came to breakfast with no more wounds (even though, unfathomably, the midnight shouting and thumping had grown steadily more violent), but his left eye had still not healed. Instead, it had turned into a swollen and gooey depression; his eyebrow had dipped down toward this vileness and interthreaded with the mucus that had replaced his once sky-blue eye. Twice Trapper had told Sonny to go to a doctor, but, in response, Sonny had shouted abuse. Now they did not talk about the eye at all.

  Indeed, Trapper marveled that during daylight hours Sonny engaged in as much foolish horseplay as he had when both incandescent blue eyes had glowed in his farm-boy face. Joe Luc also behaved as he had from the start—with an Oriental formality underscoring the fact that he knew just what he wanted and needed no one but himself to obtain it. He told no more tales about the simple mountain folk and their fear-bred beast-avengers, but Trapper hardly missed such unsettling talk.

  Surprisingly, Sonny and Joe Luc did not appear to suffer from the lack of sleep occasioned by their midnight arguments—but they didn’t go out to work in the fields, either. They lounged about all day, drinking Coca-Colas, watching quiz programs, and playing checkers, at which Joe Luc excelled. The two got along famously during the day. Only at night did they savagely dispute.

  But at two A.M. on July 31, Trapper awoke with a start. He had heard nothing—absolutely nothing—from the hunters’ den across the moonlit buffer zone of the living room, not even a whisper. The house pulsed with the silence, and in the garden outside Trapper’s window the earth hummed with the latent energy of a thousand buried seeds. Why weren’t they at it? Didn’t they know what time it was? For the rest of that night, Trapper heaved from side to side in his bed, twisting his undershirt hem between his thin fingers, searching for sleep.

  In the morning, Trapper slouched into the kitchen. Only Joe Luc sat at the table, smugly buttering a piece of toast.

  “Where’s Sonny?”

  “Still in bed, I must suppose.”

  They ate their fried eggs in silence.

  After breakfast, Joe Luc retired to the living room and turned on the Today show on the big color set. Trapper could hear Frank Blair reporting the news as he exited via the porch off the kitchen, let the screen door bang shut, and limped down the steps toward the barn and the chicken houses. Passing through the barn’s hay-strewn carriage area, he already knew that when he reached the chicken houses, he would happen upon the baleful aftermath of a disaster.

  He did. In the chicken pens lay the tortured corpses of all his biddies, roosters, and fledglings. No signs of forced entry—no broken gates, or holes clawed beneath the chicken wire, or knocked-askew posts. Instead he found severed, eyeless heads, ineptly plucked torsos, feathers plastered against the coop’s weathered boards, stuck there by a thin mortar of blood. Broken eggs everywhere: spilled yolk or bits of shell adhering in the niches free of feathers. The stink of bird flesh.

  “I didn’t hear none of it,” Trapper said aloud.

  Whoever or whatever had killed the chickens had not been hungry enough to eat them, or desperate enough for cash to tote off a few of the corpses. What did this wanton slaughter mean?

  In the barn, a horse whinnied and stamped, and Trapper had the incongruous thought that a long time had passed since the United States Army had retired its cavalry horses. He limped back to the house.

  In his absence, Sonny had arisen. He and Joe Luc sat in front of the television set on either side of a big leather hassock, playing checkers. He said, “Morning, Trapper,” without looking up and hopped two of Joe Luc’s black checkers with a red piece that Joe Luc had already had to crown. One of Sonny’s fingernails had broken off all the way to the quick; the crimson plush of this wound throbbed with a hypnotizing animal vibrancy, focusing Trapper’s attention. At last Sonny looked up.

  “Something wrong, old man?”

  “Like what?” Trapper barked. He retreated to his bedroom, closed the door, and stood there surrounded by old furniture and disheveled bed linens. After a while, he picked up a framed photo of Sonny’s mother and used his handkerchief to wipe the dust off the glass over her puzzled face.

  In August, the gratuitous slaughter of livestock in the Bay Hamlet area became a source of speculation among Trapper Catlaw’s neighbors. In addition to his poultry, Trapper had lost an Angus bull and six heifers that he kept in the land to the north of his cotton fields. None of the meat had been eaten.

  Spurgeon Lester reported that something—who knew what?—had disemboweled both his prize bluetick hounds, dogs valued at more than five hundred dollars apiece. He had found them in the kennel behind his house, their guts looped through the chainlink fence and scattered right up to the porch beneath his and Mrs. Lester’s bedroom. Neither he nor the missus had heard a thing, not the first bugle note of their hounds’ instinctive baying. As in every other such episode hereabouts, no tracks led up to or away from the site of the slaughter.

  Spurgeon said, “What I want to know is, are people safe from this whatever we’ve got here, and how long will it go on?”

  Trapper, a farmer and a mechanic, had no answer for Spurgeon Lester.

  In the Bay Hamlet general store, you could hear gossip, rumors, unsubstantiated reports, lies, half-truths, and maybe even the truth itself. Lucas March, from this side of Cherry Creek, was out a team of matched Percherons. Seabright Johns knew an upland farmer who had lost an entire herd of white-faced cattle in the space of two nights. A woman, somebody’s hysterical wife, said that the sheriff in Harriston had come upon the mutilated bodies of three black boys in a roadside ditch. That story almost answered Spurgeon’s question about the status of people with this killer-thing, for if three black boys could go under, how long before this unnamable menace brought down a bona fide white landowner?

  The crowd in Ferril’s General passed Nehi carbonated drinks around in front of a low-slung water-filled cooler, talking nonstop.

  Trapper went home to the clapboard house where Sonny and Joe Luc played their interminable games of checkers. Squinting at the board with his good eye, Sonny leveled gibes at Joe Luc, and Joe Luc smiled back with his mysterious and tolerant smile—just as if the two liked each other.

  “Crown me, you pestiferous gook!” Sonny shouted as Trapper came into the living room from the kitchen. “Another king, goddamn it!”

  Joe Luc moved a checker. “Give me the crown also, please.”

  “Hello, Trapper. Sit down. What’s the word at Ferril’s? They going to catch this thing?” Before Trapper could reply, Sonny said, “You check the mail? I’m wondering if those adoption papers aren’t finally going to get here.”

  “Warn’t no mail. Warn’t no ’doption papers.” Trapper did not sit down. “How can you all play checkers all day, every day, when the whole country hereabouts is under bloodthirsty nightly attack?”

  “Yeah,” Sonny said. “It’s a honest-to-God curse, all right.” He moved another red checker.

  “I am always too old for such papers, anyway.” Joe Luc smiled at Trapper. His dogteeth, bright with saliva, shone like tiny scimitars. He moved a black checker, tapped it for a crown, and soon thereafter won the game.

  That night Trapper removed only his shoes. In his oil-grimed khaki trousers and work shirt, he climbed into bed and pulled the sheet up to his chin. A spear of light came into his room from the TV set. Sonny and Joe Luc, in chairs out of his line of sight, were watching an old movie.

  Then one of them walked across the planking to turn off the set. From the sound of his footfalls, Trapper guessed Sonny. A silhouette leaned into the glow of the stuttering picture and blanked it out at the end of The Star-Spangled Banner: “… and the home of the—”

  Click!

  Darkness prevailed everywhere. Sonny and Joe Luc creaked across the floor to the hunters’ den. Trapper scarcely breathed. His heart ticked like a watch in the breast pocket of his shirt. Crickets sang anthems in the midnight grasses.

  Trapper got out of bed, limped to the door, and stoo
d there vigilantly for a long time, his heartbeat for company. When his eyes adjusted to the living room’s saturated grayness, he saw that Sonny’s door gaped wide.

  Sonny almost never let his door stand open. As a boy, he had been keen about shutting out the world—his brothers, sisters, parents, everyone—whenever he went to bed. Sometimes he had closed it right after supper. But now the door to the hunters’ den stood not merely ajar but nakedly open. Why? Maybe Sonny wanted his nightly set-to with Joe Luc to wake up Trapper.

  Then a lithe muscular form, a sleekness among bulkier shadows, slipped from the open door and glided through the patterns on the floor toward the front porch: an animal shape, a spooky mixture of cunning and brute strength. After it had passed, the hardwood gleamed anew, as if freshly varnished.

  Trapper crossed to Sonny’s room in his stocking feet. His pulse rattled in his bones like small-arms fire. Unable to check Sonny’s bed, he opened the screen door to the porch and felt the cold of its poured concrete osmose through his threadbare socks. The crickets had set up a racket like a hundred thousand telegraph boards operating in unison, and the swing where he and Sonny’s mother had passed most of their evenings before the arrival of television rocked slowly, its tether-chains creaking. Nothing else hinted even bleakly at life.

  Trapper stumped across the porch and down the front steps. He hitched along the narrow walk between his dead wife’s chrysanthemums and snapdragons to the gravel road. In the middle of it, he looked east toward the Primitive Baptist Church, but the thin moonlight allowed him a view only of the hedges flanking the road and a whitish sheen above a far stand of cottonwoods. The acrid smell of pesticides made him wonder if the buzzing of the crickets wasn’t actually the drone of a crop duster, coming in crazily low over invisible telephone wires.

  But he sensed nothing else at all—no hungry were-critters—and returned to the house, where he sat down in the porch swing. For over an hour he rocked. He could not have said if he were hoping to fall asleep or waiting for Sonny. Finally, he got up from the swing, limped out to the road, and looked eastward again.

  Fires flickered to the northeast, as did a cancerous halo above the sharecropper’s yard beyond which the Baptist church stood. The sky shone red-black. The air reeked of kerosene and something awfully like the outlawed DDT. In this nauseating nightglow, in this mysterious stench, Trapper awaited a sign.

  A pickup truck jounced down the road toward him out of the lurid blaze of the Primitive Baptist Church. Its headlights bored into him like thumbscrews positioned just above his eyes. Abreast of him, the pickup halted in a spray of gravel.

  Seabright Johns leaned out and said, “Spurgeon Lester’s wife’s been killed—torn in a hundred pieces just outside the parsonage. She’d been helping late with tomorrow’s covered-dish and had started home. Spurgeon found her down the road a ways after phoning to check up on her. At first, of course, he didn’t even know it was her.”

  Two other men occupied the truck cab, neither of them Spurgeon.

  Trapper spoke up before Seabright could start spieling again: “What’re them fires down there?”

  “We’re torching all them old empty sharecroppers’ shacks,” Seabright said. “The killer’s more n likely holed up in one of them. We’re gonna burn him out.”

  “What happened to the church?”

  “That was an accident. Some fellas up there spilled kerosene and somebody’s cigarette got loose.” He sounded jubilant. “But they’s plenty of fuel oil left and they’re going toward Cherry Creek with it, them other fellas. Nick and Jimmy and I are going over by the Hamlet and up into the foothills. You want to come?”

  “No. You can’t burn up the whole countryside.”

  “Just the sharecropper shacks—so we can flush the bastard out—roast the son of a bitch!”

  “It won’t work,” Trapper said.

  The men in the truck cab laughed, and the pickup grumbled away, spitting rocks. Its taillights glowed like embers. When it was gone, the telegraphy of insects reasserted itself in the silhouetted foliage.

  Trapper returned to the porch swing and spent the rest of the night rocking. Just before dawn, limping back to his bed, he noticed that either Sonny or Joe Luc had closed the door to the hunters’ den.

  On the second-to-last day in August, Trapper no longer had to imagine that the countryside lay in ruins. It did.

  In a week’s time, he had attended three funerals, the first one that of Spurgeon Lester’s wife. The eulogies at each of these interments sounded the same predictable notes, for the preachers all extolled the virtues of the dead in voices either furred with anger or oily with self-righteousness.

  Several families around Bay Hamlet had lost barns and outbuildings in the fire-setting spree in which Seabright Johns and his chums had taken part. From as far away as Bladed Oak came reports of other cases of arson—involving houses, country stores, and even an elementary school built during World War II.

  Sonny and Joe Luc watched the newscasts every evening before the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, but paid little heed to the reports—even though the Bay Hamlet story had begun to attract network coverage. They played checkers, asked to be crowned, and badgered Trapper to bring them Coca-Colas and cookies.

  On the second-to-last day in August, Sonny got up, ate breakfast, and left in his hot silver automobile for Memphis. “I got to see what’s stalling those adoption papers, Trapper. Don’t expect me back till evening.” He drove off beneath the white battlefield sun, a contrail of dust hanging in the air behind him.

  In front of the repair shop, Joe Luc approached Trapper, who rarely encountered him outside in the heat. “Mr. Trapper,” he said, “let me show you what I’ve done for the people of Bay Hamlet—and also for you, sir.”

  Joe Luc led Trapper toward the house and behind it into the vegetable garden, through rows of okra, pole beans, and carrots. They stopped only a few feet away from the old man’s bedroom window.

  Trapper looked at the earth beneath his window, where Joe Luc was pointing. A rectangular pit seven feet deep, and nearly as long, occupied the space between the house and the last row of dry corn. In its center, three sharpened stakes formed the upthrusting points of a cruel triangle. Trapper stared into the pit, dumbfounded.

  “What’s this?”

  “To catch the beast-avenger that murders your friends.”

  “When’d you have time to dig a hole this big, knothead?”

  “At night, Mr. Trapper. When I can’t sleep, I come out here and work.”

  “I never heard it. Why’d you stick it under my window?”

  Joe Luc chuckled. “Sir, we both know why the pit for the beast-thing must be exactly here.” He continued to look amused until a sudden notion took him and he turned aside to camouflage the pit, which he did in less than fifteen minutes with cornstalks and a few sprinklings of rich country soil.

  “Don’t forget, Mr. Trapper, and accidentally step here.”

  Joe Luc went inside to watch the morning quiz programs. Trapper, numb, stared at the hidden pit as the white blister of sun rose to its zenith.

  Sonny did not get back that evening, as he had said he would. Neither Trapper nor Joe Luc waited up for him.

  The pit outside prevented Trapper from sleeping. Shadows shifted on the walls, rippled down the Venetian blinds, crawled over the tufted white bedspread. His leg hurt. He wanted to hear Sonny’s car pull up through the gravel under the floodlights atop the repair shop. Somehow he drowsed, the warm night spicy in his nostrils.

  When he awoke, the night smelled sharper, gassier. Its stink evoked animal musk rather than chrysanthemums. Someone was standing at the foot of his bed. Trapper cried out and threw the bedspread aside. He had one bare foot on the floor when a thin hand settled on his shoulder.

  “Please to not be startled, Mr. Trapper.”

  Dressed in a white, open-collared shirt, tan slacks, and well-polished shoes, Joe Luc looked like a college boy home for the last of his summer holidays in 1
948, or ’52, or possibly even ’58—before the unsettling events of the last decade and a half had bent the world askew.

  “What do you want, Joe Luc? What the hell is it?”

  “Hush, Mr. Trapper. The beast-thing has impaled itself on my stakes. For twenty minutes it has been rending its own bowels. Soon it will die.”

  “How do you know that? What makes you—“

  Joe Luc shushed him, and the two men listened. Trapper could hear nothing but crickets and a queer droning inside his own head. How could this gooky greenhorn have heard anything at all?

  Trapper seized Joe Luc’s wrist and started to rise.

  “Wait a moment, sir.” Joe Luc slid over to the window by the vegetable garden but did not open the blinds. “All right. Now get dressed, and we’ll go see the unraveled destiny of the beast-thing.”

  Trapper dressed. Did he really want to see the “unraveled destiny” of the creature that had slaughtered his chickens, felled his cattle, and so mutilated Spurgeon Lester’s wife that all three morticians in Bladed Oak had called for her funeral to proceed “closed coffin.” Once Trapper had tied his shoes, Joe Luc pulled him to the kitchen, although the more direct route lay out the front.

  “I need a knife, Mr. Trapper—a big knife.”

  “Why can’t you use your teeth for whatever you’ve got in mind?”

  Joe Luc ignored this question and rummaged up one of Mrs. Catlaw’s old butcher knives. Then he led Trapper through the dark rear porch and outside to the shop. There he picked up a grease-blackened rope that lay in the musty debris like some sort of filth-loving snake. After that, he found a flashlight.

  Trapper waited in the flood of illumination outside. Sonny’s big silver car sat in the driveway not fifteen feet away. Toads hopped about in the yellow-green glare, and a horse whinnied fretfully in the barn.

  “All right, Mr. Trapper. Ready.”

  They stalked around the house to the garden. They peered into the pit that Joe Luc had dug. The cornstalks had all fallen into its maw, and something grotesque had in fact impaled itself on two of the stakes. The third stake curled around the creature’s side like a pale exterior rib. Joe Luc shone his light on the beast, which Trapper immediately recognized as a black and royal-orange tiger. The tiger’s great mouth contained moist cordage from its own intestines. And its left eye—Trapper shuddered—had none of the terrible fierceness of its right one, for a lump of pus resided in the left socket, delicately furred over.