Scarecrow Gods (17 page)

For days the boys reminisced about the bounce and jiggle of Bunny’s immense boobs as she’d run naked into the water. Doug had told them the rest. Greg had come home late, way past his curfew. Doug had hid on the stairs for two hours listening to his parents argue over suitable punishments and decrying the state of teenagers in the nineties. When they’d heard Greg’s key in the lock, they’d both stood ready to confront their
out-of-control
son, but the look of utter misery on his thin face, quenched their parental rage. He cried as he explained the strange and mysterious chigger infestation that had attacked Bunny and him as they
sat
in the car at the drive-in movie and how Bunny had vowed never to see him again.

His father had smiled and his mother had cocked her head, dubious yet concerned about the tears. Outraged at his parent’s disbelief, Greg ripped off his shirt revealing a back that resembled a chicken pox infected ten-year-old. A hundred pinpricks of red dotted his skin sending his father to the telephone and his mother running to the vanity.

While Doug’s dad consulted with their pediatrician and shouted commands at his mother from the other room, Greg sat slumped in a kitchen chair, stripped of everything including his underwear. It was quickly determined that he lacked any of the symptoms of the pox, so with an apology to their doctor for waking him up, Doug’s dad hung up and went into the bathroom for the traditional cure for chiggers. When he returned, Doug’s mom grabbed the plastic bottle of pink fingernail polish and dolloped it over each dot of redness. If the little beasts couldn’t breath they couldn’t live and the nail polish would smother the non-existent chiggers. The old Southern cure was the only way, short of invasive surgery, to remove the thousand biting bodies. Within half an hour, the red dots coating Greg’s body had turned to a pleasant shade of pink, and in between his sobs, he begged them not to tell anybody.

Yeah, it had been an evil thing to do, but the episode had been a justified retaliation. It shouldn’t have resulted in this bad of a beating, however.

Greg had gone too far.

“We gotta get him back,” said Danny. “Right Berg?”

Bergen was only half-paying attention, his eyes knitted in concentration as he tried to bring down the crow. After six acorns and the acrobatics of an unusually dexterous crow, they were at a stalemate and Bergen was getting pissed.

“Yeah.” Clyde put the cards away. This was serious business. He’d also been losing.

“Let’s kill him,” said Tony. “Lemme call one of my uncles up in Jersey and I’ll arrange a hit.”

Four sets of eyes, seven wide open and one pounded shut, stared at the Yankee transplant turned Mafia Hitman once removed.

“Kidding. Just kidding, guys. Jeeesh. Like every Italian family from New Jersey is part of the Mafia. You guys watch too much television.”

Bergen, tossing a handful of acorns away in disgust, spoke up for the first time since Doug had arrived. “I got an idea.”

People paid attention to Bergen when he had ideas. He may appear to be the spokesperson for the International Order of Dorkdom, but there was no one smarter in the entire school, and that included a good percentage of the teachers, so the boys listened closely.

Bergen took a deep breath and stared hard at each of his friends.

“It’s simple. We do exactly as Tony said.”

“What?” shouted four voices.

“You heard me,” said Bergen, a sly gleam in his eyes. “We shoot him.”

The boys jumped as the crow fell from its perch, squawking and cawing. Somehow it managed to catch itself three feet from the ground and swooped, barely missing Bergen’s head. The boy never flinched. As the crow flew off and into the afternoon, Bergen leaned back, placed his hands behind his head and smiled.

“We
can’t
shoot him. Shit, Bergen. Are you off your rocker? What the hell are you thinking?” Clyde jerked his head around to make sure there weren’t any police hiding behind the trees, listening in.

“
Thur
we can,” said Doug. The bleeding had stopped, but his lips had swollen to the point words had trouble getting by.

“Sure we can,” repeated Bergen, his smile like something from a Manson groupie. “And we can get away with it too, if we use paintball guns. Ones with red paint balls.”

The boys stared, Slowly their suspicion disappeared into smiles as each imagined the look on Greg’s face when his chest suddenly sprouted a dozen red
holes
.

* * *

Paradise Valley, Arizona

He smiled and stared into her eyes. She found it hard to meet them, their blueness as deep as an ocean. He was boy-next-door handsome, his face both trusting and engaging. She allowed herself to trace the laugh lines from his flush lips, along the hard line of his jaw and noticed, not for the first time, how humor had been forever caught just beside his eyes, as if the orbs were spiders and had embalmed a giggle.

And within those lines, those sad happy lines that promised anything and everything, she was trapped like a moth struggling.

“Not a moth, but a butterfly,” he said. “You’ve transcended youth and metamorphosed. No longer the caterpillar—lanky, unsure, unmanicured, you have changed. Your spirit has become wings, perfect beauty untouched.”

She sighed, struggled, and felt the lines grasp tighter.

“You flit from flower to flower, searching and tasting, carrying your past along until your feet are too burdened.”

She could see herself catching the air. Descending. Ascending. Gliding. In search of…

“—me. And like your bee cousin, you find me. Unerringly you return to the hive where you are the same, different, yet a much needed part of the whole. My lovely butterfly, you are needed. Desperately, you are needed.”

He smiled wider. Cheshire.

“Open yourself.”

His lips moved. Embracing, coalescing, they mingled in transference. His breath was flower scent, his lips slick pollen. She was hungry, his ripeness her evolutionary destiny. As her heart beat and swelled she barely felt anything as her clothes, one at a time, were removed and cast to the winds.

“Butterfly. My butterfly,” he whispered, the heat from his words warming her. “So perfect. So impermanent. I want you.”

“Take me,” she sighed.

“Yet I touch you. I touch you and the perfect pigment of your wings evaporates. Fingerprints that ruin. The more I touch, the more I feel, the more I love,” his breath was fast now. “The more I hurt. If I love, you can never fly again.”

“Never fly,” she whispered.

“Never.”

The knife came from nowhere and descended, its edgeless blade stiletto sharp, falling to a circular tube at the base to collect the blood. He slipped it to her and felt her body undulate as she imagined it in
his hand.

She didn’t discover the blood until later. A butterfly, deflowered, her blood taken to promote growth. Never did she wonder why. Never did she care. She was a butterfly and still flew upon the winds.

CHAPTER 6

Wednesday—June 13th

Chattanooga, Tennessee

As always, Maxom was in search of the boys. He’d flown past each of their homes, but other than a spilled bag of French fries and the tantalizing smells of open trashcans, there was nothing there for him. He’d paused to perch atop the high, rusted lifeguard chair of the dock admiring the Monet dapples of pastels upon the surface of the lake as the fresh water seaweed applied its leafy bristles from beneath.

He would have remained entranced had not a family arrived for a day of sunshine and water sports. His head cocked as he watched the avalanche of wind-milling arms and white flesh flow down the hill and onto the long wooden dock. The vibrations not only making the tall chair quiver, but running deep into the pilings, rippling mud in minute holocaust storms. Invisible to the humans, it wasn’t only Maxom who detected these metronomic pulses of radiating waves along the edge of the dock. A thick muscled bass shot away with a flick of its broad tail. Crappie rose, their hyperactive curiosity sending them to the surface in kamikaze darts and dodges.

Maxom allowed the bird’s Darwinistic reflexes take hold, sending him soaring, barely escaping the clutches of ten, short stubby fingers. The words
Mommylookyatthebirdy
fell away into the silence of the afternoon as he allowed his borrowed wings to catch the thermals, lifting him into the sky. He headed towards the center of the lake, allowing the bird to control, sitting back like an observer, enjoying the flight.

Three-hundred yards out, he passed the navigation buoy used by the TNT Plant to guide the barges in. The red and white cone marked his turn around. Maxom wheeled right and glided slowly across the white swipe of sandy shore, then up and up until the woodline was first beneath, then behind him.

An hour of intense garbage spotting and sparrow dodging finally ended as he came to rest on his favorite branch, high in the oaks that surrounded the boys’ fort. Yet again, they were nowhere to be found. He began to patrol outward in gradually widening circles. Ten minutes later, he spotted six figures moving panther-like through the forest.

* * *

The drip drip of the new rain fell softly from the leafy canopy to the sentinel ferns guarding the forest floor, fronds like spears slicing the air to discourage passage. Sparrows shot into the sky in bursts of communal fear, the beat of two dozen wings stilling the forest’s constant insect moan. The denizens of the loamy earth shrunk away from the bitter scent of impending violence, disappearing one by one into the below ground. The forest stilled and waited, hoping that once again it would be spared the collateralism of the damage inherent in war.

Six warriors, their nervous breaths slipping through clenched teeth, padded through the grotto. Sweat ran trails through facial camouflage. Hands, slippery from exertion, held rifles at port arms, blue metal barrels pointing the way. As they reached the boundary between nature and man, they stopped and crouched, listening attentively to the last orders before they’d engage the deserving enemy. The leader pointed and three warriors exited the forest edge, sprinted across the road and took up positions on the other side. When every one was in position, they sank and merged with the land. A half an hour later, their target came into view.

The vehicle traveled slowly, the sole occupants, a man and woman. The man behind the wheel barely watched the road. His angry eyes darted back and forth. His hands gestured wildly.

Three of the forest shadows laid their shoulders to a great stump and watched as it tumbled down the steep clay bank and onto the road. The woman screamed, her hands jumping to the dash to save herself from becoming one with the glass of the windshield. The man, his forearms quivering with effort, steered left then right, the rear tires biting deep into the asphalt. Blue smoke drifted from the rear of the vehicle as it skidded to a stop, the front fender bare inches from the object blocking their way.

Unaware of the danger, the man leapt from the vehicle. He paced back and forth several times trying to bleed away the adrenaline that was surely hardening within his legs. Finally, he spun and stared into the forest, bright brown eyes attempting to delve danger from within the earthy mosaic of dappled shadow. He was still looking as the shots took him down.

Six face-painted, camouflaged warriors rose from the earth. Rifles to their shoulders, they fired, subdued
pops
followed by blossoms of red upon the man’s chest and the white surface of the vehicle. Six, twelve, eighteen rounds pummeled the man, each volley sending him back, his body undulating with the impacts. With arms thrown out, he fell to his knees and screamed, begging God for a second chance—one in which he would be better, do better, if only.

If only…

The warriors descended and continued firing, their volleys staining the man’s chest until the white of his shirt had become a sea of red. Standing over him, they heard a last whine before they targeted his crotch.

A volley.

A scream.

As one they turned and left, jogging in formation back into the forest and through the grotto, returning whence they came.

* * *

Paradise Valley, Arizona

Evil’s Agent.

Evangelist.

Unless Billy Bones had been speaking of Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Fallwell or Billy Graham, he could only have been referring to John the New Baptist. In fact, the more Simon thought about it, the more he was certain that John was
Evil’s Agent
.

Even Brother Dominic had had his doubts about the cult leader. Not falling for the populist theory that the man was harmless and only concerned with fulfilling empty lives, the Brother had investigated John extensively. Those investigations were probably the reasons behind his death.

Damn it all. Was the man, this agent of evil, going to get away with it? Father Roy had already detailed Simon’s inadequacies and, based on past conversations, the old man’s idea of solving problems was to let God sort it out, including the false prophesizing of John the New Baptist.