Twilight (13 page)

Still he sat. He seemed to have nowhere else to be, no one in all the world to talk to. The image of the ambulance lights wending upward over the horizon of dark hills would not fade, it seemed to have seared itself onto his retinas. A lifetime ago she strolled up the roadbed toward the school bus, books clutched defensively against her breasts, her face already closed against the anticipated catcalls and whistles. A lifetime ago she led him to the first-grade door and released his hand and consigned him to life. Little sister Death, commended to Fenton Breece.

The house sat in the haunted glade. Fairytale cottage, gingerbread house, but where is the playful troll? The warlock seems not about. Somewhere about his rounds perhaps. A pale ribbon of nighcolorless smoke rose plumb from the flue and dissipated in the windless air.

Tyler pillowed his face against the polished walnut and squeezed the trigger. A windowlight went and he heard glass fall somewhere inside. He waited. A rifle barrel might appear at a shotout window. A warping face appear like a face from a nightmare. He profoundly hoped it would. He just lay there with the sun warm on his back shooting out window glasses. Playing X and O with the six-pane windows. When at length he was bored with this he reloaded the rifle and with it yoked across his shoulders he went off down the slope toward the house.

No soul about. The room still held a vestigial heat thoughthe fire had burned down and the heater when he laid a palm to it was only warm. He looked about. The room was neat and austere. Yesterday’s dishes washed and put away on the drainboard. Cot carefully made.

He opened the door and looked into the stove. A bed of coals waxed and waned in their delicate cauls of ash. Suddenly he wrenched the heater over. It toppled on its side in a hail of falling stovepipes and drifting soot. He scattered the coals with a foot. The linoleum darkened, then bubbled beneath them. He piled on the neat chintz window curtains, torn pages from old farm magazines, whatever seemed combustible. He knelt and blew his fire. A flame flickered, caught, a thin cutting edge of fire.

He went out.

Most of the morning Sutter was hid out by the Tyler place waiting for something to happen. The law to return, the boy to turn up. He’d had time to alter the scene in the field to some degree by calling the law himself and he wasn’t overly worried about the local law but Tyler might have it in his head to make it to the state or to Bellwether and he had to have the pictures before that happened. But this morning nothing happened at all. The place seemed vacant, abandoned, a dreamlike place where no one lived anymore.

He went down and searched some more. He didn’t find anything. Memorabilia, relics, the castoff souvenirs of life. They seemed to have possessed precious little worth keeping. He went out and hunkered in the yard watching the road and thinking while he smoked a cigarette. If I was arabbit, he thought, and a fox jumped out of the bushes on me, which way would I run? Would I stick to the road where there was other rabbits, or would I head for the deep pineys? In his heart he knew. A rabbit would cut for the deep pineys every time. And if the rabbit had any idea of making it to Ackerman’s Field, the shortest way was across the Harrikin. If the rabbit was fool enough to chance it. He stood up. There seemed little point in rushing in blind. He’d ask around a bit.

By midday he was in Patton’s store. He was eating cheese and crackers and drinking a dope when a man said with a patently spurious air of concern, Shore sorry to hear about your house, Granville. Did you manage to save anything?

Do what? he asked in a spray of cheese and crackers.

Did you manage to get any of your stuff out of the fire?

I’m a son of a bitch, he said. He slammed the bottle down on the dopebox and went out.

It was true what the man had said. He crouched before the quaking ashes. The day had turned chill and he held his hands outstretched for the warmth. He just sat staring mutely at all that was left of his home as if his mind would not quite accept it.

Rabbit my ass, he said at length.

He thought of a rabbit he’d run down and caught as a boy, hemming it in the tall grass. Its soft fur shrouding the delicate bone, its eyes almost confused with fear, its fierce little heart hammering against his cupped hands.

The deputy carefully laid the warrant back on the highsheriff’s desk. He shifted his weight in the folding chair. He cleared his throat.

I’m supposed to serve that?

The sheriff finished paring his nails and put away the penknife. Well, it’s a state warrant. I figured you still planned on drawin your pay the fifteenth. Christmas comin on and all.

Hell, he’ll go right through the roof. You know he shot it out with Radio Atkinson that time. Run him plumb off.

Then he’ll just have to go, Odel said. If you hang up your badge and retire, then somebody else’ll just have to go. He’s goin through the roof all the same.

Yeah, but I won’t have to see it.

Suit yourself.

You want to ride out there with me?

About as much as I want acute appendicitis.

The deputy drove out the Riverside Road. He drove slowly, taking in all the scenery. The day was very bright and he felt it just might be the last of his life. All this he might never see again. Sweet scrub blackjack. Beer cans and Coke bottles and windblown candywrappers pressed like dubious gifts onto the honeysuckle. Shotgun shanties with folk sitting about their leaning porches taking their ease. They seemed in no immediate peril. No warrants for Granville Sutter riding like malignant melanoma in their breast pockets. Before he reached Sutter’s gingerbread house he braked the car and checked the load in his revolver and placed it on the seat between his legs.

Piss on it, he said aloud. Let’s go get the big mean son of a bitch.

But the gingerbread house was gone. In its place mounded gray ashes. He couldn’t believe his luck. It was oneof those miracles when the gods pity and spare you that only happens once in a life. He kept looking about the still empty woods and back at the ashes. He approached them. There was yet a faint and fugitive warmth.

He sat in silence. The day had perceptibly brightened. All the sound there was was the car idling and the faroff calling of a mourning dove.

Gone like a bigassed bird, he breathed. He looked across the folded dreamlike horizons to the far blue timber of the Harrikin.

If you drove out the Riverside Road through the flatlands and crossed the high trestle bridge over Little Buffalo, then went on past the alluvial riverbottoms to where the earth begins to rise in a series of folds that become hills and hollows and sheer limestone bluffs, and if you kept roughly parallel to the river at some indeterminate point, you would be in the Harrikin. The road would fade to a ghostroad, the timber would thicken, the earth begin to climb in ascending hills. You would begin to come upon abandoned farms whose acreage bore only the faint spectral traces of tillage. Fallen houses with their broken ridgepoles and blind windows and windscattered shakes that are home now only to the foxes and dirtdaubers and the weathers. Tiny gray crackerbox shacks with dark, doorless apertures and tin roofs skewered with rusted stovepipes. Landscaped by the winds with the fallen leaves of decades. A series of them like a housing development brought to fruition by the profoundly impoverished. The roads meander and cross each other. They deadend and vanish. There are occasionally the ruins of houses where no road ever existed, once occupied by folk who had no need for anything wider than a footpath.

Once this land was privately owned. Now it is owned by companies or conglomerates of companies in Atlanta, Chicago, New York. By people who have never seen it, are perhaps unaware even of its existence.

It was bought up in blocks by other companies in the first days of the previous century for next to nothing. It was rich in phosphate, in iron ore. There were boom times for a while. A town sprang up virtually overnight. Originally it was the county seat of Overton County, though the Harrikin itself extends over into two other adjoining counties. A railroad bisects it, but the
track is unused, as are the roads, and honeysuckle and kudzu cover its rails with impunity. There was a company store, a jail, a post office. Graveyards, one black, one white. Flush times. The heads of these companies grew very rich. The miners subsisted. They made enough for their families to survive. Those with other inclinations made enough to support the whiskeymerchants and whores and cardsharks who had materialized the first payday by some intuition of money approaching magic and these selfsame cardsharks and whores when the mines were shut down vanished like rats scuttling down capsizing decks.

The earth was sunk with vertical shafts, with horizontal tunnels. Great pits were eaten to the surface with pick and shovel and machinery, and some of this machinery is there yet, rusting back into the earth.

When the mines closed and the railroad shut down the town died and the money quit the people left like the Maya abandoning their cities to build other cities and all thatremained were the few families who’d refused to sell their land and itinerant squatters staking dubious claim to what no one else wanted and misanthropic misfits who felt some perverse kinship with this deserted, tortured land. Some of these folk did not, in a sense, exist. They paid no taxes, were listed on no courthouse rolls. They owned no Social Security numbers, having neither applied for nor received anything from the federal government, in fact only vaguely aware of its existence, its distant machinations only rumored to them. Census taking in the Harrikin was haphazard at best. There were folks born here with no birth certificate to show they were alive, folks buried with no papers to show they were dead.

The Harrikin grew wild. Trees sprouted up through
the works of man. Kudzu and wild grapevines climbed the machinery until ultimately these machines seemed some curious hybrid of earth and steel. Roads faded and the woods took them until there was nothing to show that wheels or hooves or feet had ever passed here. Brush and honeysuckle obscured the sunken shafts, and horses or whatever trod here might abruptly have what they’d taken for solid earth suddenly vanish beneath their feet. Livestock wander into the Harrikin and are seen no more. Hunters have vanished as well, folks who thought they knew the woods lose their sense of direction in these woods, even compasses go fey and unreliable.