Helltown (8 page)

“What do we do if Jeff comes to again?” Mandy asked. She’d finally removed her hands from her ears.

“Just talk to him. Tell him an ambulance is coming. But don’t move him.”

“That’s all?” she said.

“That’s all,” he said. “We’ll be back soon.”

CHAPTER 4

“Goddamn foreign TV. I told ya we should’ve got a Zenith.”

Gremlins
(1984)

Cleavon sat in his recliner with one eye squeezed shut, the other open, because this seemed to help keep the headache thumping against the inside of his skull at bay. The Sony color television glowed softly in the dark room, though it didn’t produce any sound because the volume knob was busted. On the fourteen-inch screen, a customized ’86 Toyota Xtra Cab sporting a lifted suspension and oversized tires idled at the track’s starting line some five hundred miles away in Mississippi. Then the flag dropped. The truck leapt forward. A dozen cameras flashed.

The truck shot toward the bog, windshield wipers waving back and forth. When it hit the water it sprayed curtains of mud down both flanks, turning the bright red and blue paint job—BAD TO THE BONE airbrushed across the hood—a shitty brown. A few seconds later it got caught up and stopped, shimmying back and forth, dipping and rising, smoke billowing from the raised wheel wells. It made Cleavon think of an antelope or zebra losing their battle to cross a muddy river on one of those nature shows.

“It’s them big fat tires,” Earl said from his own recliner a few feet away. “They just slow you down, am I right?” He reached for a fresh beer from the six-pack in the cooler resting between the two of them. The recliner squealed in protest at the sudden shift in his six-foot-seven, four-hundred-pound body. It was no wonder the fucking thing hadn’t collapsed under his weight yet. It wasn’t made for someone so big. Clothes weren’t either. Earl always had trouble finding clothes that fit him, not that he bought clothes much, a pair of jeans, a few wife beaters every few years, if that. The white, stained tank top he had on now stopped halfway over his gut, above his bellybutton. The jeans stopped a few inches shy of his ankles. He looked like a fucking retard, Cleavon always told him, but Earl didn’t care. Cleavon didn’t either. He just liked telling him he looked like a fucking retard.

“The skinnier the better, ain’t that right Cleave?” Earl went on. “That’s what you always say. Leave them fat meats to the pretty boys who can pay someone to change the bearings and seals every year. That’s what you always say, Cleave.” He burped, a loud, maggoty one smelling of food left in the sun for a few days. “And he don’t got no sense using a stick shift. Not for a big old slophole like that. Am I right, Cleave? Am I right?”

Cleavon grunted but said nothing to his brother. On the screen a young fella began wading into the waist-deep muck to attach a tow strap to the truck’s front hook. Suddenly the picture hiccupped, then went haywire, flickering all over the place.

“For fuck’s sake!” Cleavon said.

“It’s all right, Cleave,” Earl said. “You just gotta leave it for a bit, is what you gotta do.”

Cleavon eased himself to his feet and crossed the room, delicately, like he was walking on egg shells, one hand pressed to his forehead. He smacked the top of the TV, the headache making him hit it harder than he’d intended.

“Hey!” Earl said. “That ain’t helping—”

“Shut it,” Cleavon growled. He began fiddling with the rabbit-ear antennae. “Get the light, Earl, I can’t see shit in the dark.”

Earl set his beer on the floor, which his gorilla arms reached sitting like he was. Then he heaved his monstrous bulk out of the recliner, which sprang back and forth with what might have been joy. He lumbered across the room, burping once again, and hit the light switch. The sixty-watt bulb dangling from the socket where their parents’ chandelier used to hang blinked on.

Cleavon fiddled with the antennae for a full minute, but all he managed to do was wake his fucking headache. Grimacing, he tore the rabbit ears loose and tossed them across the room.

“Hey, Cleave, why’d you do that?” Earl said, going to pick them up. “That’s not helping, throwing them like that. How’s that helping? You gonna break them. And you break them, and that’s it, they just won’t work.”

“Shut the fuck up, Earl,” Cleavon snapped. “I’m in no mind for your bullshitting right now. I been in the garage all day, I’m beat to shit, and also, I got a headache like a motherfucker. So shut the fuck up with your bullshitting.” He went to the cooler, rubbing his forehead. There were no beers left. Four empties sat in a line next to Earl’s recliner. “You drank all the beer, Earl?”

“I did not, Cleave,” Earl said. “We shared them. They were sitting there, we were sharing them.”

“I had two, you had four. That don’t sound like sharing to me. That sounds like you having twice as much as me, you fat shit.”

“I wasn’t counting.” Earl shrugged his big shoulders. “Besides, I got them, didn’t I? I went to the shed, I told you, I said, the TV got a signal, some monster truck racing, you wanna watch it, have some beers. Then I filled up the cooler with ice and a six pack. You didn’t do nothing but come in here and sit down—”

“Aw, shut up, Earl,” Cleavon said. He left the den and went down the hallway to the kitchen. The headache felt like a drill behind his eyes. While he’d been sitting in the recliner, it had almost faded to nothing. But all that fussing around with the TV had pissed it off, and it was drilling like a sonofabitch now.

He stepped into the kitchen and stopped at the sight of the Corn Flakes scattered on the floor, the soured milk puddled on the countertop. “Floyd!” he shouted, then cringed as the headache drilled deeper. “Floyd!”

There was no answer. Cleavon expect one either. Floyd was deaf as a fencepost and had been that way for a good ten years now. You wouldn’t believe what happened to the stupid fuck. Cleavon didn’t at first. He could still see Floyd as clearly as if it were yesterday, come stumbling back to the farm, clothes torn, blood pouring down his face, looking like he’d gone insane. But he and Earl had never changed their story, not once, so Cleavon believed it happened the way they’d said it happened.

Floyd and Earl had been hunting rabbits. What they’d do, they’d catch one of the rabbits in a trap, tie a stick of dynamite around it, light the wick, and let it go. Nine times out of ten it’d head straight underground. When the dynamite blew, Thumper might turn a couple of his pals inside out, but the rest would leave the warren and hop around in loopy circles. You could stroll right over and pluck them up by their ears, just as easy as picking daisies. Floyd and Earl caught as many as two dozen a day this way. They sold them to Pete Scoble in town, who in turn butchered them and sold them as meat in Akron. It didn’t make anybody rich, but it paid the bills and put food on the table.

On the day Floyd lost his hearing he’d been sitting in the pickup while Earl strapped a stick of dynamite to the rabbit they’d caught in the trap. When he let it go, however, it didn’t go underground; it made like the devil to the pickup, TNT strapped to its back, fuse burning. Earl had his rifle and tried to shoot it, but he didn’t have the best of aim, and a moving rabbit was a tough target. The critter took cover under the truck. Earl yelled at Floyd to haul ass, but Floyd had never been quick upstairs, not even back then.

According to Earl, the truck did a big cartwheel, flipping ass over tits before landing on its wheels again. Floyd received a dozen deep gashes to his face and complained of ringing in his ears for a good week. None of the cuts healed properly because he kept picking away the scars, and his ears didn’t heal either, because he kept digging his fingers into them all the way to the knuckles.

Nevertheless, Cleavon thought now, being ugly and deaf didn’t give him the right to be a pissing slob. Who couldn’t make a bowl of cereal without spilling shit all over the place? Cleavon scowled. He would get the lazy oaf to clean up the mess later; he didn’t want to deal with any more idiocy right then. He just wanted a beer and a cigarette and some peace and quiet.

Stepping on the cereal, crunching it beneath his boots, he opened a counter drawer and rifled through Scotch tape and screwdrivers and a bunch of other junk until he found a bottle of Aspirin. He popped the cap and upended the container to his mouth. He chewed the five or six pills that flopped onto his tongue, thinking they’d get to work faster ground up. Then he opened the old Kelvinator refrigerator and snagged a cold Bud. As an afterthought he bent back down and scanned the near empty shelves. There were another six beers, a bag of carrots, a carton of milk, a couple loafs of bread, a bowl of eggs, a jar with two pickles floating in it, and not much else.

He closed the door, twisted off the beer cap, and was about to head outside to have his smoke in the cool night air when the telephone jangled.

He picked up the handset. “Yeah?”

“That was fast you quick sumbitch,” Jesse Gordon said.

“I was standing next to the phone,” Cleavon said.

“What you doing standing next to the phone? You some mind reader now, know I was gonna call?”

“I was getting a beer from the fridge. On account of the fridge being in the kitchen, and on account of the phone also being in the kitchen, I was standing next to the phone.” He paused. “Listen, Jess, what’d’you say about coming over tomorrow for a coupla beers, throw some steaks on the grill?”

“And I’m guessing you want me to bring the steaks?”

“Now there’s an idea.”

“As much as I’d like to sit around and listen to you bitch about your dumb ass brothers, Cleave, I got other plans.”

“Other plans, huh?”

“Plans with the missus.”

“Connie? Since when you start having plans with Connie, that fat cow?”

“Since she told me she’s making her famous roast pork tomorrow night. She stuffs it, you know? Only cooks it on special occasions. You wanna guess what this special occasion is? I’ll tell you—she’s starting a diet.”

“She gonna cook a roast pork to kick off a diet? Shit, Jess, that’s why she’s so fat all the time, all she does is cook and eat what she cooks. No way this diet’s gonna work. She ain’t gonna last two days on no diet.”

“I don’t care she lasts until her midnight snack. I’m still getting her roast pork tomorrow night.”

“Maybe I’ll come by and try some of that famous roast pork?”

“Don’t think so, Cleave. It don’t work like that. You can’t, you don’t just invite yourself over ’cause you don’t got no good food of your own. You got a coupla pigs. Go stick one on a spit and you got your own roast pork, bacon, ham, whatever, as much as you want.”

“So why you calling me? To tell me your fat cow of a wife is cooking a roast pork dinner that I can’t have none of? I tell you, Jess, Connie can’t cook for shit, so go on and have your fuckin’ roast pork—” He cut himself off. “Shhht—you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Jesse said.

“Someone just picked up.” Cleavon and his brothers shared a party line with Jesse and Connie Gordon, and four other households who’d refused to sell their properties to the National Park Service when it started buying up land fourteen years ago. “Who’s there?” Cleavon said. “Speak up.”

“Cleavon?” a voice said.

“Higgins?” Cleavon said.

“Yeah, it’s me Weasel. Who you talking to?”

“Me,” Jesse said.

“Jess? Good, that’s easy—I was just about to call y’both.” He was speaking fast, excitedly. “Boys, we caught us some new does!”

“Lick my leg!” Cleavon exclaimed, unconsciously using a saying his pa had often favored before he blew his brains out with a double-barrel shotgun. “Doe” was code for the out-of-town women they used in the black masses. “How many?”

“Three.”

“Three!” Jesse crowed happily. “Good work, Weasel, you sumbitch! They not too, they not like the last one, too cut up, are they?”

“I don’t know, Jess.”

“The hell don’t you know?” Cleavon said, frowning. “You didn’t just leave them there, for Christ’s sake, did you?”

“You don’t understand, Cleave,” Weasel said. “They were with four bucks. I couldn’t, there were too many, for me to go back. That’s why I’m calling. I need help rounding them up.”

Cleavon blinked. “Seven in all? The fuck they driving, Weasel—a goddamn limousine?”

“Driving?” Weasel said, playing dumb.

“Hell, Weasel,” Cleavon said. “It’s just us, nobody else is on the line listening in, now start talking some sense.”

“It’s just that, Mr. Pratt told us, he said—”

“Fuck Spencer! Now spill it. What were they driving?”

“Cars, Cleave. Normal cars. One was, one was a Jeep, green, if I remember right. Everything happened so fast, you know? The other, blue, I think. That’s the one I ran off, that crashed. Ballsy driver. Came right at me straight as a bullet. Never seen anything like it. He kept coming, he held it together a second longer, I might’ve been the one in the woods.”

A silence followed.

Cleavon said finally: “You pulling our legs, Weasel?”

“No, Cleave. Why?”

“Why?
Why?
You better be messing with us, Weasel.”

“I’m not messing, Cleave. What’s wrong?”

Cleavon’s headache, which he’d temporarily forgotten about, was back and worse than ever. He kneaded his eye sockets and tried to keep from throwing the phone across the room like he’d done to the rabbit ears. He had to deal with two retards in Earl and Floyd all day long, every day of the year, he didn’t need it from Weasel too. But he got it, didn’t he? He sure did. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Weasel,” he said. “Those people you ran down—”

“Does, Cleave, does and bucks—”

“Those fuckin’
people
,” he snapped, “you think, what, they’re just gonna sit there where they crashed and have a barbeque? Shit no, Weasel, they gonna get in the second car and go for help. They gonna go to town. They gonna raise hell, that’s what they gonna do! Now where the fuck are they?”

“Damn, Cleave, I didn’t think, I thought, you know, I thought they’d… Damn, Cleave—they’re right near your place, not a hundred yards north of the bridge.”