At the End of the Road (7 page)

“Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. Do you accept Jesus Christ into your heart as the Son of God, and as your own personal savior?”

“I do.”

Lots of times Preacher Seevers would pinch the person’s nose shut for them, then kind of cradle the back of their head, and dunk them in the water good and deep. It looked like a lot of fun to Kyle, and he wanted very much to be baptized. He never was though. His Mama and Daddy were divorced before he was old enough to say that Jesus Christ was his personal savior and really believe it in his heart.

went home for a Sunday supper that served as lunch and dinner. For some reason, food never did taste right on Sundays. It never tasted as good as it did the other days of the week. Even when they had leftovers the next day—the exact same food seemed to have more flavor. On Sundays, it tasted flat. Maybe it was because Mama wouldn’t let them change clothes until after they ate. That Sunday in July, the day after Kyle made the woman wreck her car, Mama had made a pork roast, some greens, creamed corn with fried okra, corn bread, and banana pudding for dessert.

They were all sitting at the redwood picnic table (it was actually plywood painted to look like redwood) eating their supper. Mama put a vinyl tablecloth over it on Sundays. There was a knock at the front door, and Daddy looked at Mama. Mama got up to go see who it was. All the children turned to watch—they could see the front door from the kitchen eating area.

They all saw that it was a colored lady in a policeman’s uniform. Mama talked to her for a minute but didn’t let her inside. Kyle knew exactly what the woman wanted. She was coming for him, and in a minute his mama would open the door wide and turn and point back at Kyle and say, “That’s him right there. He’s the one you want. He killed that woman.”

But Mama didn’t let the woman in. Kyle saw her looking past Mama, looking at all of them sitting there eating. The woman’s eyes caught Kyle’s eyes, and he looked away immediately. But it wasn’t fast enough. In that split second when their eyes met, it felt to Kyle like they communicated with each other. It felt like he could hear her voice in his head, and her voice said, “You did it. I know you’re the one who did it. I can see right through you.” And Kyle felt like she could hear his voice in her head, and his voice said to her, “Yes, ma’am, it was me. I did it. I killed that woman. It was me. And I know you have to take me away, and I understand. I don’t hold it against you.”

The police lady handed Mama a picture. Kyle couldn’t see the picture, but he didn’t need to. Mama studied it for a minute, then handed it back and shook her head. Then the woman asked Mama another question. Mama turned back to all of them and said, “Boyd, do you ever remember anybody getting in a wreck up on the road?”

Daddy didn’t look up from his dinner, just shook his head.

Mama closed the door and sat back down. Daddy raised his eyebrows at her. “They’re looking for a girl went missing. Lived right up yonder off of Lee Road. Right pretty girl too.”

Daddy got up from the table and went to the front window. He parted the curtain a little bit and watched the police lady leave.

woman.

Her mind hadn’t cracked, but rather it had expanded into a fibrous network that had to be traversed slowly—lest she fell from the safety of her brain’s webbing into one of the empty spaces. She knew that if she fell, fell in her mind, all would be lost. She would be lost. So when she did dare to think coherent thoughts, she was careful to keep her balance while on the relative safety of the interconnected strands of sanity, and not peer into the empty places where the webbing dropped away.

The empty places of her reticulated mind were dark. They held memories. Memories of what the monster had done to her. If she looked, she would remember. And she would slip inside, never to return.

Today, she was allowing herself a certain level of conscious thought. And by “today” she meant
period of wakefulness
. In the course of twenty-four hours, she would experience multiple episodes of wakefulness that she considered days—although she had been here only two actual days. So today, during this segment, she was allowing her mind a level of clarity that she typically deemed too dangerous to allow herself to experience.

The problem with clarity and coherent thought was that they made it impossible to ignore the pain in her body. She had been operating at about 50 percent coherency, and that level allowed her to peer from her eyes like someone squinting through a peephole in a door—the door protecting the person from whatever might be on the other side. But today, this period of wakefulness, the reticulated woman allowed herself to operate at about 80 percent coherency. This would allow her to not only inspect her surroundings, but to draw
implications
. The problem, the drawback of conducting herself at this level, was that the pain in her body could no longer be blocked out. It wasn’t that the pain was not endurable, but that because of the nature of it, because of the series of memories it might unleash, the pain might push her off the webbing and back into one of the dark chasms.

Her woman parts. A steady, deep throb. And the crusty, itchy sensation of dried blood. And her throat. The constant burning. The intense fire that churned there. If these things were felt, then her mind could not help but to reflect back on the cause of these injuries. And the cause was there for her to examine if she so chose, but the memory of it was stored outside of the safe network of rational thought, in the empty spaces between. Where the monster lived.

It was dark up here. She only sensed “up.” She had no empirical knowledge to base that on, but, nonetheless, she felt that she was “up here.” And now, with this level of clarity she was allowing herself, she had an insight. When the monster came, it came from below. Sound. The sound of it approaching told her this. She had made an inference, and that was a higher brain function. And with that, her brain grew less fragmented. A small segment of the web fused together, and her brain grew a tiny bit more complete, more whole.

A chain was cuffed to her left ankle. The chain was anchored to a smooth metal pole. She thought of the pole as home. And a few feet out from the pole, two metal bowls were bolted to the wood floor. Immovable. She lapped food and water from them. There was nothing else in her world, only darkness, so the one object in the center of that would quite naturally become her base, her home.

Today, she ventured out from the pole. Explored. Tentatively at first, careful to feel and sense with her still damaged fingertips for danger. But nothing was there. She extended herself from the pole as far as the chain would allow. She completed a 360-degree circuit, but nothing was there, so she retreated back to her pole. Then she crawled forward again. She lay on her belly (mindful of the sharp uptake in the internal throbbing when she exerted herself this way). From this supine position, she reached out, but still felt only nothingness. She stretched her body outward, every joint and sinew extending to its limits, the shackle biting thoughtlessly into her ankle, and her straining fingers felt something. She felt a surface of some kind. A wall? She decided to call it a wall. It was cool and slick. Her outstretched fingers could just glance it. She had no fingernails, and her fingertips were exceptionally painful from whatever had happened to them, exquisitely sensitive. If she surged forward, she could gain perhaps an eighth of an inch to her reach. When she did this, the wall made a sound. A tiny crinkle sound. Like plastic. If she had her fingernails, she would be able to feel and sense so much more.

After careful exploration, she discovered three such places where she could touch the wall. In the last of these places, there was something different about the wall. She could feel a flaw. A vertical edge.
A seam
. Yes, a seam. All of the stretching had loosened her body somewhat, and where she had at first been able to only feel the wall in scratching glances of her fingertips, she could now maintain light contact with the very tips of her nailless, sensitive fingers. So she rested her finger at the seam. It made a light scratching sound when she flicked it. And there was a sensation that the seam lifted a bit when she did this. She felt certain that when (or if) her fingernails grew back or the pain receded, she could begin to pry the seam apart.

Below, she heard a noise. A creaking door. Then the sharp hollow sound of a boot striking a wooden step. It sounded like a match striking sandpaper. Again. And again. And again.

Like a spider, the woman scuttled to a far corner of her reticulated mind and waited there out of sight. She would emerge again later.

watched the boy and girl playing in the cornfield. Kenny’s eyes were squinted against the bright day, and although he wasn’t aware of it, the slitted eyes and his mostly bald head gave him a distinctively reptilian appearance. A nice breeze blew across the porch and it felt good on his head where pinpoint dots of sweat glistened. The breeze licked the sweat away, cooling him, and lifting the few long, wispy clumps of white hair that held on there like recalcitrant weeds. The wind gusted and the lengthy patches of old-man hair were lifted up, writhing around his head, Medusa-like.

Kenny’s tongue darted out to moisten his dry lips, and his heavy, doughy hand made a clumsy pass across his head to flatten down the scattered strands of hair. He licked his lips once more and watched the children.

He was in that place again. Maybe that was what was giving him the reptilian appearance. He was in that place that was primordial, where his thoughts were no-thoughts, where his thoughts were lizardly, encompassing everything and nothing simultaneously. Like an atavistic predator he kept his eyes open, but saw nothing consciously. Waiting until something entered his environment and pierced the eye-brain barrier of cognizance, and went straight to the primitive constructions deep within his mind.

The children had registered there. He licked his lips.

Kenny was a deacon at the Lithia Springs First Baptist Church of God. At least he had been before the stroke. It was always something. First he’d come down with the diabetes, had to take them shots, then the stroke had paralyzed the right side of his body. He still could be a deacon of course, using his wheelchair to navigate the wide aisles between the rows of pews, keeping a careful (but nonjudgmental) eye on the flock, being sure they were forthcoming with the tithes in the silver-plated collection plate, not shortchanging The Lord.

Managing the heavy tray used to distribute the grape juice (Kool-Aid in reality) that represented the wine that symbolized the blood of Christ would be too great of a challenge, but he could still easily hand out the wafers (Ritz crackers broken into quarters) that represented Christ’s flesh. (Privately, Kenny always thought the idea of symbolically consuming the flesh and blood of Christ was like that movie
Night of the Living Dead
, but he would never in a million years give voice to such a thought.) Since his stroke, he was no longer expected to carry out such duties. His generation was of a time that those with disabilities were to be waited on and not expected to have responsibilities. It was the Christian thing to do.

While he was still in Parkway Medical Center, the congregation had taken up a donation and purchased Kenny an electric wheelchair. Kenny had not known that such a thing existed. The battery on it looked like it weighed seventy-five pounds and had to be recharged nightly, but it ran like a champ.

A group of the church men (including Preacher Seevers himself) showed up the day before he got out of the hospital with a truckload of lumber and constructed a gently sloping wooden ramp from the front porch to the driveway.

And the church ladies delighted in bringing him casseroles of tuna, hamburger, and pork. Enough time had passed now that most of the ladies had stopped dropping off their kitchen creations. Except Opal Phillips. Opal still kept Kenny on her regular rotation of visiting the infirm and crippled. She seemed to have an internal calculator of exactly how many full meals Kenny would be able to meter from each single-dish conglomeration, and would, without deviation, show up the following day with a new casserole.

But there was something about Opal Phillips that set Kenny’s teeth on edge. Made his mouth go dry. Mostly, it was the longing looks. At first those longing looks had been spiritual in nature, and Kenny had been content to oblige them. It quickly grew evident that Opal had more on her mind than spiritual communion. The supposedly chaste kisses to his forehead lingered a little too long. It caused Kenny a great deal of anxiety. Invariably, after Opal left, Kenny’s mouth had gone so dry that he had to clean hard white balls of spittle from the corners of his mouth.

Other than Opal, the church folks had mostly forgotten about Kenny now. It didn’t take long. It was as if that by buying the chair, building the ramp, and delivering some meals they now felt free to compartmentalize Kenny away from their everyday world. He was taken care of, so now they could go on about their real lives. Kenny wasn’t even expected to attend church anymore. And he liked that just fine.

All Kenny had ever really wanted was to be left alone. He’d been that way his whole life, but had never had the courage to give in to his natural personality. He just wanted to be left alone and allowed to retreat into his lizard mind. He didn’t blame the awakening of his primordial self on the stroke; it had always been there, even before his mama had passed. But he’d kept it shut away, only allowing himself to dabble in it on occasion.