“Okay if I come up?”
“I reckon,” Charlie said with a sigh, eyeing his son. “No one told you to come out and cheer me up, did they?”
Larry shook his head. “Mom didn’t ask me to come out here. Honest.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. “I believe you.” But Larry, like his dad, was a lousy liar.
Larry sat down across from Charlie. Overhead the leaves of the big tree rustled in the night wind. “I was just thinking, son.”
“About what?”
“About all those things your Uncle Frank gets his family. The big TV, the nice stereo, the computer, the videogames. I bet you wouldn’t mind having some of that stuff, would you?”
Larry shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe some of them.”
Charlie frowned and took another drink, this time a big one. “I reckon I let you both down. You and your mom.”
Larry shook his head without saying anything.
But the liquor had Charlie talking. “When you get to be my age, son, you start to look back, trying to make sense of your life, I guess. You start wondering how you got where you are. Like me being sheriff. When I was a boy, if somebody had asked me what I’d be doing thirty years down the road, the last thing in the world I would have thought of would be. . . well, what I am doing now. I still remember the day the mill closed down. I had worked my way up to foreman. Tom Harlan was mayor and he came to me and offered me the sheriff’s job. He said it would just be temporary. And that was how I figured it, too. Something to bring a little money in until I could find something better. Only, somehow, it just went on, year after year. And I kinda got used to it. Everybody else did, too. Hell, you probably can’t even imagine me doing anything else. But you know what I wanted to be back when I was your age? i wanted to be a veterinarian. I even remember what made me decide. One day, when I was about eleven, I came across one of our cats out in the barn and it was about to have kittens. And she looked so scared. I got this funny feeling that she wanted me to stay out there with her. The way she kept looking up at me with her eyes and meowing. So I lay down next to her and kept petting her hack and every now and then she’d look up at me, just to make sure I was still there with her, I guess. I watched them come out, one by one. And you know, she knew exactly what to do for those kittens, scared as hell, but still doing the right thing. Anyway, that’s where I got the idea of becoming a vet. So I could help out a little bit in this world. Only...
“Only what?”
Charlie’s head felt light now and the words tumbled out.
“Well, things just didn’t work out. My daddy died and I kind of had to take care of everything. So I got the first job that came along. Out at the old Randolph mill. And I did pretty well. Well enough to send Frank to college down in Waynesborough. Course, I kept thinking the way everybody does that one day, when everything’s taken care of, one day I’ll go back and do what I want. But things just don’t work the way you’d like them to sometimes.”
Larry frowned. “Couldn’t you still? Go back to college, I mean?”
Charlie shook his head. “I’m forty-three. Too old to be starting life over again. Charlie took another drink and sighed. “I reckon some people would think I was a fool for not jumping at your Uncle Frank’s offer. Maybe it’s just my stubborn pride. Too proud to work for my kid brother.”
Larry stood up and went over to the little cabin. He clicked on the light, then turned it off. “Course, I reckon if we moved down to Orlando, like Uncle Frank wants us to, it would mean leaving the tree house behind.”
“Yep.”
Larry clicked the light on again, frowning. “You probably wouldn’t like me hanging around your showroom, either, the way I always hang around down at your office.”
“Hadn’t thought about it.”
“You’d start going off on business trips, too, the way Uncle Frank’s always doing.”
“Don’t know.”
“We sure have put a lot of work into this tree house,” Larry said. “Remember when we started building it? It was only going to be a couple of boards, just big enough for me to sit on, Remember, Dad?”
“I remember, son.
“And then you said, ‘If you’re going to do something, you should do it right.’ And we drove over to Willard and got all those things. The wood and the wire and stuff.” Larry paused. “I guess you appreciate something more when you make it yourself, right?”
Charlie looked at his son then with genuine admiration. “How’d you get so smart at fourteen?”
Putting his hand on the boy’s shoulders, Charlie managed to get to his feet. He drained his glass and shook his head. “This stuff sure has got a kick to it. You mind helping me down that ladder?”
Once Larry had negotiated Charlie down out of the tree house, they stood for a moment in the backyard. “My daddy once said every man should get drunk once with his son. But only once. He wasn’t much of a drinker, either. Kept promising that when I turned twenty, he’d take me out and we’d have a few beers together.” Charlie said. “Anyway, I reckon this is our one time.”
“But I’m not drunk,” Larry said.
“Course not. You’re only fourteen. Besides, your momma’d kill me.”
“Maybe when I turn twenty-one.”
“Maybe.”
There was a long silence as the two of them stood there with their arms around each other, Larry leaning forward every now and then as his dad swayed tipsily. “Dad, we’re pretty happy, aren’t we? Larry said suddenly. Charlie looked down. Then, giving his son a kiss in the middle of his head, he smiled and nodded. “We sure as hell are, son. We sure as hell are.”
9
Hank was watching.
“Heapmore. . . heapmore,” he whispered, his lips trembling as it stood in the wedge of moonlight that came down the side of the barn. The eyes seemed to fill the dark holes, the same eyes he had seen at the well so many years before.
He was on the cot that his momma set out for him on the back porch of their house, where he slept in the summertime when the nights were warm. He was thirty-two years old.
“Heapmore.”
It came closer, crossing down from the barn into a strip of darkness.
“Heap—”
He waited, watching, the way he had watched so long ago that day in the woods by the side of the well. The man had whispered mockingly to him, his breath warm against Hank’s ear as he whispered of the thing that was always coming, growing louder and louder the closer it came, the thing that sometimes came to Hank when he would open his eyes in his sleep and see its shadow and hear the sound of it closing in on him. Desperately, frantically, he would try to name his fear, to tell his momma what he had witnessed in the dark perception of his mind, to tell her that the man hadn’t gone, to make her see that he was only waiting out there in the other darkness. “Heap—”
Hank jumped, turned around, and saw her. She was standing with the light from the kitchen behind her and was wearing her white nightgown. “You awake?” Momma whispered. “Hank, baby. You awake?”
She sat down on the cot, the way she always did, her big arms around him to stop the trembling. He tried to tell her. But she only stroked his hair and whispered, “Baby, there ain’t no heapmores out there. Your momma done checked before she went to bed. Ain’t no heapmores nowhere.”
He went on trying; he had to tell her.
“Hush. I done told you, baby, them heapmores, they’s only in them dreams you got.” Pushing him back down on the cot, she fluffed his pillow. “You want your momma to tell you how it’s going to be?” she said. Then began the story she always told him of the day that was coming closer and closer and how you could almost hear it sometimes if you woke up in the middle of the night and listened real good. “The Lord’s judgment on the wicked,” she whispered, and spoke of the terrible wailing of the condemned sinners, the gnashing of th
e teeth, the skin being stripped from their bodies. How their eyes would be gouged out by red-hot pokers and their fingers sliced off one by one, how their maimed and disfigured bodies would be dragged down by punishing demons, pulled down into holes that would open up all over the surface of the earth, hissing with steam and overflowing with liquid fire.
Pulling him closer to her, she whispered, “But where’s we going to be that day, baby? You remember what’s going to happen to your momma and her baby?”
His eyes still on the darkness beyond the screen, Hank nodded.
“That’s right. You and me, we going to be took up when the rapture comes.” Inside the house, on the walls, there were pictures of the way it was going to look, pictures that his momma had cut out of a newspaper and taped on the walls, next to the pictures of Jesus. Hank would stare at them for hours. One showed a man waking up in his bed and looking over at the other side, the side his wife slept on. Only she was gone, and where she had been sleeping there was only a hollow in the sheets and the nightgown she had left behind when she had been taken up. Another showed a bicycle careening into a fence, the boy who had been riding it vanished, and the boys who had been with him moments before gaping in disbelief at the empty bicycle seat. There were others: A little girl taken from a swing as her daddy was swinging her. An old woman caught up in the rapture when stepping on a bus. A man yanked into righteousness driving a semi-truck.
“And where we going to be took, baby? You remember?”
“Clouds,” Hank whispered.
“That’s right, baby. You and me and all them righteous ones, we’s going to be sitting up on clouds, soft as a feather cushion. And what we going to be doing, baby?”
“Lemonade.”
“That’s right. We’s all going to be drinking lemonade from big glasses that don’t never get empty. And the ice in it, it don’t never melt. Drinking lemonade and sitting on them clouds, watching the Lord’s judgment on the wicked, watching all them sinners hollering and carrying on like you ain’t never heard. Just the way your momma done promised it would be. And it’s coming, your momma can feel it in her bones, any day, any night, it’ll sweep down on us, in a twinkling of an eye. Why, baby, it might be just about to happen. Maybe tonight, just when the sun is about ready to start coming up.”
“Clouds . . . lemonade,” Hank repeated, but his eyes were still on the darkness.
Then, getting up, his momma stroked his head some more and told him not to worry about any of them heapmores. She had checked all around, under the cot and in the crawl space and out in the barn. “Ain’t no heapmores no place,” she told him. Telling him to have sweet dreams, she went back inside the house and left Hank in the darkness of the porch.
“Heap,” he whispered. “Heap—”
10
“Who?”
“Charlie, wake up.”
Charlie burbled a name, then, sitting up suddenly, as if something had stung him on the back, he looked straight at his wife. “Damn,” he muttered, putting his hand to his forehead. It was pounding with an unfamiliar pain.
“Aura Lee just called.”
“Jesus, what time is it?”
“Almost two o clock. Hank ran off again.”
“Hank?” Charlie murmured, his eyes still closed.
“I told Aura Lee he’d be okay. But she says she still wants to talk to you.”
This time Charlie didn’t answer.
“Charlie? Did you hear me?”
He rolled over again and stared up at his wife.
“I think you had too much of that liquid gold Frank left,” Lou Anne said.
Charlie closed his eyes and nodded. “I was wondering what it was. Thought maybe I was dying.” He groaned. “I better get out there.”
“Can’t it wait until the morning, Charlie? You know he’ll turn up okay. He always does.”
“Problem is, one of these nights he’s going to turn up on Big Phil Beck’s back porch.” It was something Big Phil said every time Hank disappeared for more than a couple of days: “I catch him snooping around my little Vicky’s window, I’m getting out my shotgun and blow away what little brains that retard’s got in that ugly white head of his.” Probably just talk, but Charlie didn’t care to find out.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Charlie said. Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he cradled his head in his hands. “Shit, how do people put up with this kind of thing? It feels like somebody’s running around my brain with a power drill.” He pulled his boots on, stood up, then stepped over to the bed, leaned down, and kissed his wife good-bye.
Twenty minutes later, Charlie pulled his car halfway up Aura Lee Hargis’s clay driveway, got out, and made his way through the dark and cluttered front yard. He stopped and righted an old garbage can whose bottom was rusted clean through. Like many country people, Aura Lee never threw anything away, but left it where it fell or else stored it out of view in the crawl space underneath her house.
Suddenly the screen door on the dimly lit porch opened with an explosive bang. Aura Lee stepped out, squinting down fiercely at Charlie, a shotgun clutched tightly in her hands.
He stopped. “Aura Lee, it’s me. Charlie McAlister.”
“What done took you so long?”
Charlie stared up at the woman. Aura Lee, he wanted to say, it’s the middle of the night. I left my wife and boy at home to come help you find your crazy son. But instead he said, “I got here as fast as I could.” He stood there waiting for the woman to lower the gun, then said, “I’d feel a whole lot better if you’d put that gun down. Don’t want it going off accidentally.”
“It ain’t going off accidentally,” she declared. “My daddy taught me how to shoot before you was born.”
“I’m sure he did. But if you don’t put it down, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go on back home, Aura Lee.”
She hesitated, then lowered the weapon. Charlie mounted the porch steps and reached out to take it. Aura Lee looked at him for a moment, and then let him take it from her and set it down in one of the chairs on the porch.
“Now let’s just go inside and talk about what happened.” Aura Lee pushed open the screen door and led Charlie into the parlor. On the far wall was a tattered sofa covered with yellowed, unraveling doilies. Above it, scattered all over the rest of the walls, were the pictures Aura Lee had cut out of her newspaper, The Rapture Gazette, and glued into cheap frames bought on sale at Becky’s. Intermingled with these were garishly colored pictures of Jesus, all different sizes. A big one-hundred-dollar Bible lay open in the middle of the table, a two-inch-wide blue ribbon wedged between its pages.
“I ain’t done nothing but pray since my baby run off,” Aura Lee said. “Pray and wring my hands and read Scripture.” Apparently this wasn’t the only thing that Aura Lee read, Charlie saw, since spread on the sofa was a copy of one of her magazines. Its headline announced: UFO SIGHTED HOVERING OVER ELVIS’S GRAVE
“Getting down on my knees, too. Praying and asking the Lord to send me my baby back.”
Charlie nodded sympathetically. “Well, you just sit down right there and take it easy. We’re going to find your boy.” But Aura Lee wasn’t listening. “That’s when I first heard them noises. I was in here a-praying. Only they wasn’t near as loud.”
“What noises?”
“Right off, when I first heard them, I thought it was Hank. Hank a-scratching at the back door trying to get in. So I go back and I go out on that porch and I take a look, a-calling out, Hank, baby, that you? But I don’t see nothing. Not a thing. So I come back inside and I commence my praying again. And then I hear it some more. And that’s when I seen where it was coming from.”
“Where?”
“From underneath.”
“Underneath what, Aura Lee?”
“From that old crawl space,” she said, her voice suddenly dropping to a whisper
.
Charlie stared at her, then looked down at his feet. Most of the little houses around Lucerne had their floor raised up on concrete slabs, leaving about four feet between the floor and ground. Sometimes the crawl space was left open, though at Aura Lee’s, the area had been loosely walled in by lattice and cheap paneling.
“At first, they was awful soft. So soft I started wondering if maybe I wasn’t just hearing things.” Aura Lee nodded her head. “But they was there, all right.”
Charlie frowned. “Could just be some animal got up under the house.”
“Wasn’t no animal,” Aura Lee said, shaking her head firmly now.
“You know how raccoons are. Always on the prowl for something to eat. Or a cat,” Charlie suggested.
“Wasn’t no coon. Wasn’t no cat, neither.”
Suddenly Aura Lee stood bolt upright, a strange look coming over her eyes.
“Aura Lee, what is—”
“Hush up.”
“What’s wrong?”
This time she said nothing, just stood there, her head cocked to one side, her mouth open. Slowly her eyes rolled toward him. “You hear that?”
Charlie listened, but all he could make out was the sound of the crickets through the open windows. “No, I don’t hear—”
Aura Lee hurried over to a corner of the little parlor. She looked around on the floor, as if she had just dropped something. “There,” she whispered.
“What?”
“You hear it now?”
Charlie jerked around, suddenly conscious that something was wrong behind him. He frowned, looking at the tattered screen in the window by the big Bible. The crickets had stopped. They were not making a single sound. Charlie went over to one of the windows and looked out.
“Listen there,” Aura Lee said, “Ain’t it like I said?”
This time there was no mistaking it. Aura Lee was right. It was a kind of faint scratching, slow and deliberate, not the kind of noise you might expect a raccoon or a trapped cat would make if it was trying to get out.
Deliver Us From Evil Page 6
