Deliver Us From Evil

by Allen Lee Harris

  “I d-don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve never played baseball before.”

  “Where you from?” he almost blurted. Instead he ran up to where Jamey was standing and patted him on the shoulder. “Come on, it’s easy.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the two boys were in the McAlister’s backyard. Larry was wearing his baseball cap, the one Charlie had gotten for him the last time they had gone up to Atlanta to see a Braves’ game. “This is how Dale Murphy does it,” he began, turning to Jamey. “Don’t choke it, see, put your hands right there, where I’m holding mine. Got it?” Giving him the bat, Larry watched Jamey take the same posture. “Get your butt out more, Jamey. That’s good. You just keep your eye on the ball. I’ll tell you when to swing.”

  Larry went through his elaborate warm-up motions— tipping the brim of his cap, rubbing his nose, frowning, shaking his head as if he didn’t like the catcher’s sign, and at last made his pitch. “Swing!”

  Jamey did, but too late.

  Larry shook his head. “One more time. It takes anybody a while to get the hang of it, Jamey. Besides, even Dale Murphy has his off days.”

  After a few more pointers, Larry returned to the mound. And again the pitch came sailing in. Just as Larry went to yell “Swing!” there was a loud crack and the ball went flying off Jamey’s bat, hurtling through the leaves of the pecan trees. Throwing down his cap, Larry watched it. “Holy shit!”

  Larry ran toward the fence to catch the ball, but it was already over on the other side. He turned and sped toward the gate, then stopped dead. There, standing right in front of him, his big red face twisted into the worst scowl that Larry had ever seen in his life, was Clemson McGee.

  “What’s that retard doing here?” Clemson exclaimed. Larry glanced over at Jamey. “Hush up, Clemson, he’ll hear you.”

  “So? Retards ain’t got no feelings.”

  “He’s not a retard,” Larry said defensively, his voice dropping to a whisper. “He just stutters at first.”

  “What’s a matter with you?” Clemson demanded. “Don’t you know a retard when you see one? Why, just look at him. I bet he even drools just like them retards do. I bet he got that retard drool all over your yard.”

  “Just shut up, okay?”

  “You make me,” Clemson said. Then, looking right at Jamey, he started in, yelling loud enough for Jamey to hear him. “Retard . . . retard . . . re—”

  Before Clemson could get the second syllable out, Larry had punched him in the mouth, knocking him onto the yard. Larry, nearly as startled by his action as Clemson, immediately kneeled down. “You okay?”

  “Get away from me!” Clemson screamed. “I ain’t never coming over here again. Alvin neither, you hear? We ain’t never coming around no more.”

  “Wait a second, Clemson.”

  But Clemson was already back up on his feet. “I’m going to tell everybody, you hear? How you done started hanging around with that retard.” With that, Clemson stormed out of the yard.

  Larry turned around and looked helplessly at Jamey, not sure what to say. That was when Larry noticed that his mother was standing at the kitchen door. From the look on her face, it was obvious to Larry that she had witnessed the incident with Clemson. She smiled and walked outside toward Jamey. “You going to stay and have supper with us, aren’t you, Jamey? I’ve already set your place.”

  Jamey’s eyes were fixed to the ground. “I th-think maybe I’d better go home.”

  But Larry was already standing next to Jamey, his hand on his back. “Come on, stay and eat. Maybe we can spend the night in the tree house.”

  And soon after supper they were dragging two sleeping bags out of the storage room into the backyard.

  Jamey looked up at the enormous old oak tree. “It’s so high,” he said, “you can hardly even see the tree house.” “Yeah. We built it that way on purpose, me and Dad. That’s why we made the ladder like we did.”

  Looking around, Jamey frowned. “What ladder?”

  Larry smiled proudly. “Watch.” Larry raised both his hands into the air. “You’d better stand back a little.” Closing his eyes, Larry began to whisper a litany of words that could be used only to coax hidden powers from their secret sources.

  And as Jamey watched, his head back, his mouth open, the lowermost leaves of the oak tree rustled, as if stirred by a wind that seemed to stir nothing else, and slowly the foot of the ladder loomed down from the dark vastness of leaves, moving toward them inch by inch. “I’m calling you, ladder. Come down to us, ladder,” Larry whispered in solemn invocation. Then, as the ladder’s foot came to rest on the ground between them, Larry opened his eyes again and looked at Jamey for his reaction.

  “How did you do that?” Jamey gasped in amazement. “It’s a secret,” Larry said, laughing. “Promise you won’t tell anybody? Only me and Dad know.” Larry then displayed the elaborate mechanism of trolleys, pulleys, and fishing line that he and his dad had devised to achieve the invisible- ladder effect. “It took us about a week just to get everything right,” Larry said as he clambered up the silvery aluminum ladder, both of the sleeping bags with him. jamey followed.

  Once the two boys were securely in the tree house, Larry reached over the side of the railings and, pulling out another wire, he slowly drew the ladder back up to them. “See . . . somebody going by wouldn’t even know we were up here. It would just look like a regular tree.”

  Ten minutes later, they were both lying in their sleeping bags. Larry glanced over at Jamey, whose eyes seemed fixed on the dark horizon. “Do you like the stars?” Jamey asked.

  “Sure,” Larry said after a moment. “I guess.” Realizing that this wasn’t much of an answer, he went on. “You interested in astronomy?”

  Jamey nodded.

  Larry waited a moment, thinking Jamey would start talking again. But he didn’t. He just lay there, looking up at the sky.

  “You know the names of the stars and stuff?” Larry asked, more to be polite than anything else.

  “A little,” Jamey said, and began to point at the various stars overhead, naming them and saying something about their size or how far away they were from earth. “Betelgeuse, it’s in Orion. It’s a red giant. And down there, that’s Sirius. It’s the brightest star. I mean, the brightest one to us, here on earth. Betelgeuse would be a lot brighter if we were the same distance from it. If Betelgeuse was where the sun is, we’d be inside it right now,” Jamey whispered, something like a smile flickering on his face. “And those up there, they’re the Pleiades. Some of them are still being formed.”

  Larry blinked. “The what?”

  Jamey told him, speaking without condescension or even surprise that Larry did not know all these things. He talked about the stars with a kind of affection, the way another boy might talk about his hunting dogs or the way Larry spoke about baseball. Then a thought occurred to Larry. It was something he had seen on TV once. “What about black holes? Aren’t they supposed to be sucking everything in or something like that?”

  “Yes,” Jamey answered. “Once something falls in, it’s gone. Forever. Even light. And one day, billions of years from now, there will be nothing left but light, the light the stars left behind them, because by then all the stars will have stopped burning.”

  “What about us?”

  “We will have been dead billions of years. Everything will be dead. Except for the lost light that will still be traveling from all the stars that have died.”

  Larry frowned.

  “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be the very last beam of light in the whole universe, traveling all alone up there through the cold and dark. Because one day, that’s all that’ll be left. Just that one little beam traveling through dead and empty space. And then it, too, will be gone forever. Then everything will be dark.”

  “And the
n?”

  Jamey looked at Larry. “Then the universe will be dead.”

  Larry swallowed hard. You mean, there won’t be anything else? Nothing at all?”

  “No. Not unless there’s always been something else. Something that’s hidden from us.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Jamey said softly. “But haven’t you ever felt it? Something out there all around us, only we can’t see it. Just like we can’t see the stars in the day. But they’re still there anyway. Maybe there’s something else like that. . . another world.”

  Larry nodded. Wasn’t that what Hattie had been talking about? The shadow you catch from the corner of your eye at twilight? Larry had a crazy idea—he would tell Jamey the secrets Hattie had told him, secrets he had never imparted to another human being, not even his mother and father. It was strange because, after all, he hadn’t even known Jamey for a whole day yet. But there was something about him, some peculiar quality that made Larry certain he would understand it all.

  He looked over at Jamey. He was still staring up at the stars.

  No, Larry thought, wait a little while. Settling back down on the floor of the tree house, Larry remembered the first time he had laid eyes on Jamey—only two days before— the night he and Clemson and Alvin had seen him standing in the window at Abigail’s, staring out into the darkness at what appeared to be nothing.

  Jamey hadn’t been staring at nothing. He had been looking at the stars that night. And the candle he was holding, it was probably because Abigail kept the house so dark. Maybe it was all he had to read by. Maybe it was even the only light in his room.

  “Tell me some more about the stars,” Larry whispered, leaning his head back down. The last thing he remembered before going to sleep was Jamey’s soothing voice, without any trace of a stutter or even hesitation, making it all seem at once so simple and yet so mysterious. He spoke of how long ago people thought the stars made a music as they moved, the music of the spheres. Larry closed his eyes and tried to hear it, but couldn’t, and Jamey told him the music was always there, only we didn’t recognize it because we were expecting it to sound like something else, like ordinary music. “What does it sound like, then?” Larry asked, his eyes still closed. And Jamey told him to wait until there was no other sound, not a dog barking or a leaf rustling or even the low murmur of his own breathing, and then if he listened hard, he could catch it, though only for a second or two.

  “The stars’ music is what’s left when nothing else is there. Only we call it silence,” Jamey told him. Jamey had told him, too, about how all the stars we see now are the fragments of different pieces of time, and that the light that came into our eyes at any moment represented nearly the whole span of the universe’s history, some of the beams being merely four or five years old, but others going back thousands and even millions and billions of years, and how this vast array somehow managed to crowd itself onto less than an inch of retina at the back of our eye. “Maybe that’s how God sees everything,” Jamey said, “with all of time laid out at once before Him. Maybe He lets us see the stars so that we would have an image of eternity, and to make us understand that it was not merely going on and on forever, but everything being held together all at once, the past and the present and the future.” And as Larry listened to Jamey’s words, it seemed to Larry that his body was gently floating out among the leaves, rising up through the topmost branches into the night sky, drifting higher and higher, like the helium balloon Larry had bought years ago at the Blount County fair that had slipped out of his hand. He had watched it as it rose up and up, finally disappearing as a tiny speck in the blue haze of twilight.

  2

  When Larry woke up, he wasn’t sure where he was. He looked around and saw the empty sleeping bag next to his own. He sat up and just as he was about to call out, he saw Jamey. He was standing in the far corner of the tree house, with his back to Larry, looking out through the leaves into the dark woods behind the McAlister house.

  “Jamey?” Larry asked, both groggy and puzzled. “You okay?”

  Jamey nodded but still did not turn around. Larry waited a moment, then stepped over to the other boy. “You’re shaking,” Larry said. “You’re shaking all over. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  Larry put his hand on Jamey’s frail shoulder and felt the shivering. It couldn’t be that he was cold, the weather was too warm for that. And then, too, Jamey’s T-shirt was wet through and through, like he had been running. “Tell me what’s wrong?”

  “It will g-go away,” Jamev said, stammering for the first time that evening. Larry frowned. Suddenly it occurred to him what had happened. “You had a nightmare, didn’t you?” Jamey hesitated a second, then nodded, but still keeping his back to Larry.

  “Guess it was a pretty bad one, huh?”

  Again Jamey nodded. “I’ll be okay. It goes away after a while...’’

  “You feel like talking about it?”

  Jamey said nothing. He didn’t even move. At first Larry thought maybe he hadn’t heard him, so he repeated the question, adding, “Sometimes it helps if you talk about it with somebody. I’ve had some pretty bad ones, too.” Larry waited for him to respond, “Jamey?”

  “I can’t talk about it. I promised someone I would never tell anybody else about my nightmare. This man who used to come and see me where I was...b-before. He’d come and bring me books to read. And we’d talk about the stars. But once he asked me about my d-dreams. And I told him. And that’s when he made me promise never to tell anybody else about them.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But what difference could it make?”

  Again Jamey shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, it’s only a nightmare. What could there be—” Suddenly Jamey turned around and looked at Larry straight in the eyes. Larry flinched back slightly, his mouth open. Somehow, for an instant, it didn’t even seem like Jamey. And then Larry realized why. It was Jamey’s eyes. Before, even when they talked, Jamey had looked directly at him only for a second or two at most, then always quickly looked away. With other people he avoided their glance altogether. Now Larry knew why. It wasn’t shyness. It had nothing to do with shyness. If Jamey always looked away, it was because he had no other way of controlling the impression his eyes gave—the feeling that he was looking right through you, right down into the deepest reaches of your soul.

  Larry nodded. “It’s okay. I understand, I guess,” he said uneasily, then stepped back a few feet. Jamey looked at him for a moment more, then lowered his eyes.

  Overhead the limbs of the huge old tree shook briefly in a gust of wind. Larry glanced up and shivered. “Let’s go back to sleep now. All right?”

  The two boys lay back down in the sleeping bags. Looking up through the branches of the tree, Larry racked his brain to think what Jamey’s nightmare could be, a nightmare so terrible someone had asked him never to talk about it.

  Put it out of your mind, Larry told himself. But no sooner had he shut his eyes than he opened them again. He sat up quickly and looked down into the darkness of the yard.

  At first he could see no one. But as he glanced over toward the fence, he made out a shadow where there shouldn’t have been one. He shivered and then heard the voice again. Only this time he understood what it was saying. “J-j-j-Jamey,” it called out in a mock stutter. Larry jumped to his feet. “Goddamnit,” Larry said with an angry hiss.

  “What’s wrong?” Jamey asked, sitting up.

  The face was still in a shadow, but Larry figured there was only one person it could be. “It’s that asshole, Clemson, I bet.”

  “J-j-j-Jamey.” The voice called out again. Larry gritted his teeth. And yet, as he listened to the voice, there was something wrong about it. Whoever was saying the word was obviously disguising his voice, but, somehow Larry couldn’t imagin
e Clemson’s voice sounding like this. At best, Clemson’s voice, with its nasal twang and drawl, could be irritating. But this voice wasn’t anything like that. Larry could feel it in the pit of his stomach. This voice was scary.

  “Wh-who are y-y-you, Jamey?” The voice called out. “Wh-wh-where d-d-d-did you c-c-come fr-from?”

  “Goddamn you,” Larry said, hissing. Still, it had to be Clemson. Larry turned and started to go toward the ladder. But Jamey took hold of his arm.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going down there and I’ll beat the hell out of that jackass.”

  Jamey shook his head. “No.”

  Larry stared at Jamey, who was listening, listening hard.

  Y-y-your d-d-d-daddy’s b-b-been w-w-w-waiting for you, Jameyboy.”

  “I’m going down.”

  “It’s not who you think it is,” Jamey said.

  Larry frowned. “Who is it, then?”

  But Jamey’s eyes were no longer on Larry. They were looking away, out into the darkness. “I’ve heard it before, the same voice.”

  “Where?”

  Jamey shook his head.

  “Where, Jamey?”

  “In my nightmares.”

  Larry stared at the other boy. He wanted to say he had to be mistaken, that it was just Clemson being an asshole. But as he looked into Jamey’s eyes, he realized it was better to say nothing. He had never seen anyone more terrified in all his life.

  Larry turned around and walked to the railing of the tree house. But the voice had stopped calling out. Larry peered down again at the spot where he had seen the figure. Nothing was there now.

  “He’s gone,” Larry said. He turned back to Jamey. “It was just Clemson. I should go over to his house right now and beat his ass.”

  But Jamey said nothing. And, coming closer to the other boy, Larry saw he was trembling. “It’s okay. I told you, it was just Clemson, acting like a turd. It’s okay now. He’s gone.”