The Pines (24 page)

Pam put the two of spades on the ace. She’d been playing at that table since before there’d been light enough to see the blunted deck. Her hair had dried plastered to her face, and her movements seemed both jerky and slow, like an old film run in a faulty projector. Every so often she’d mumble something about the rain being a good thing for the woods and all.

“It’s light enough to leave.”

“There sure ain’t no gun here.” Pam kept playing.

“When we get home, I can take care of your cut cheek better.”

“I told Lonny, I said to him, ‘What happened to that gun?’ an’ he asks me what do I want with a gun anyhow, but I told him, ‘I’m scared out here by myself an’ you not home alla time.’ So then he gets mad an’ says…” No ripple of emotion disturbed the perfect calm of her voice.

“We have to go, Pamela.”

“Not yet.” Black queen on red king. “I don’t wanna.”

“We’ve got to make sure Matthew’s all right.” She got up, wobbly with fatigue.

“’Thena?”

“I’m all right. My leg’s asleep.” She saw the knife on the floor, set it on the table in front of Pam. “You take that.”

Pam’s eyes looked bruised. She didn’t touch the knife.

The floor was wet, and cracks in the dented ceiling still dribbled moisture. In the tight closet, Athena found a broomstick and screwed off the mop attachment. Heading for the door, she stumbled. Rug remnants lay several layers thick in places, a quilt of damp, faded colors in the haze. Red rectangle. Blue square. Her own muddy footprints. Maddening hints of pattern. The toe of her shoe slipped under a green L-shaped piece, and she almost pitched forward again, feeling even clumsier, even more disoriented.

“I know it’s still out there.” Pam’s voice sounded listless and flat. “You better not open the door now.” She didn’t glance up from the cards, but her face twisted when she heard the squeak of the latch.

The door stuck, dented into the frame. Athena yanked. A heavy mist of rain blew in. Outside, it was still a little dark. The front of the mobile home seemed to have been repeatedly struck by a car. “Come on, or I’ll leave you.” She stared: beyond the clearing, the woods looked vacant and pure.

“Watch out for these steps. They’re sort of ripped loose. Are you coming, Pamela? I swear, I’ll leave you here by yourself. Are you listening to me?” She took a deep breath. “How long do you think this door will hold if it comes back?”

Once outside, Pam wept again at the sodden piles of bones and feathers, at the petunias flattened in the mud. Looking wildly about, she clutched the little knife with both hands.

The rain fell lightly, so gentle they barely felt it as they moved in silence through the fog-soaked trees. The sand looked churned and lumpy, and the pines possessed a frightening, crawly clarity.

Pam kept looking back, her eyes showing white all around. Suddenly, she began to run.

“Come back! Pamela!” Yelling, Athena pursued her. As she caught up, she saw her dive and make a wild grab.

Pam stood up, a bedraggled hen in her arms and mud on her dress. “Oh poor baby, Pammy’s got you now you don’t have to be afraid of those bad dogs no more there.”

“You’ve got me all turned around.” Athena shook her head, scanning the dreary stretches of pine growth. “Where’s the road?”

“This way,” Pam called. Carrying the chicken, she virtually skipped along. “The sky looks sorta like pancake batter, don’t it?”

“What?”

“All kind of yellow-gray and lumpy.”

“Oh.” The rain had gone, leaving the sky overcast and quiet. They hurried, Athena leaning heavily on the broomstick. Letting Pam pull farther ahead, she stopped and stared, her mind straining to make sense of what she was seeing. Was it some sort of carving or statue?

A broken figure sprawled on the ground. She blinked. It focused, became a prostrate human form, caked with sand. Focus sharpened.

“Oh dear God.”

The familiar face seemed to gaze back at her. Darkly stained, the clothing lay in shreds, and the contents of the pockets had leaked in a pathetic ring of meaningless objects. The thing twitched. She rubbed her eyes. It seemed to keep moving in tiny jerks, until she realized that crickets crawled all over it.

“’Thena?”

“Stay back.” The belly had been torn out, and cracked ribs protruded from the flesh. Intestines trailed in twisted loops.

“Whatchya lookin’ at?”

“Don’t come over here.” She looked away. The sands were endless, sodden nothingness, veined with rivulet marks, the pines a fatty gray. Hoping her tired eyes would blur, she took a step, then another.

“What is it? What is that over there? What?”

She heard a dull roaring, more substantial than the wind in the pines, and she hustled Pam toward the sound. They found the road and started across the bridge while the swollen creek thundered against the planks. “My fault. All my fault.” Athena peered down through missing timbers at black water. A leafy branch twisted madly, disappeared in the dark churning.

“What? Hurry up, ’Thena. What was that back there anyways? I mean, we gotta go see if Matty’s all right.”

Damp wind made a hollow whining at the walls.

The boy lay collapsed against the back door. He hadn’t moved in hours. Pammy was dead. He knew it. Face screwed tight in misery and exhaustion, he held his body in a rigid fetal position.

The blood…Pammy…

He’d heard it, heard Chabwok kill, felt it.

The taste.

She was dead. He had no strength left even to cry.

The dog ran barking at them. Pam shrieked once, a reflex of abject terror, then kept her arms held tightly around the chicken, while Dooley circled and leaped. “Now you get out of here now! Go on!”

Something wasn’t right. Athena shook her head as the dog bounded back to greet her. Then she had it. The dog shouldn’t be outside. She had locked him in the house with Matthew. Suddenly and deeply frightened, she stood in the gentle mist and stared up at the house.

The porch had bloated, thickened boards protruding, bursting upward. Pam had her key out, and she yelled to the dog. When the back door opened, the boy tumbled out. Pam dropped the hen, which squawked around them while the boy lay there, blinking.

When his wordless cry rang out, his mother looked away, feeling like an intruder. Numb, she gazed at the morning woods. She didn’t see the boy’s gratitude, didn’t see the light in his face as he turned to her.

Marl brushed a chewed piece of field mouse out of the corner.

“You’re a good son, boy. Don’ know why she’d wanna run off tha’ way. Your mother. You’s justa baby.” Al stretched out on the wooden bench, and each time it seemed certain he’d finally fallen asleep, he’d raise his head and babble some more. Then he’d grunt, reaching for the jug under the bench. “A good son. But we don’ need ’er.”

Not listening, Marl swept the floor of the gin mill. Only a dusty sort of light drifted through the open doorway. It made everything seem peaceful. Curled on the counter plank, the cat licked at its paws with a bright pink tongue. And Marl kept sweeping, pushing clumsy-looking homemade cigarette butts ahead of him across the relentless sand, densely packed between the floorboards. Shoulder blades twitching, the cat furrowed its face in the direction of Al’s clogged snores. Then it rolled away, exposing all of the sharp teeth in a pythonic yawn. And the broom continued its rhythmic swishing, quiet, soothing.

At last, the boy leaned the broom against the wall and walked softly toward his father. For a moment, he stared down at the large, mottled face. Then he moved to the other end of the bench. He took hold of a boot and pulled, tugged it off. Al muttered wetly in his sleep.

Before he tossed the boots under the bench, Marl stared at the gray flesh of his father’s feet, at the long, curving toenails, jutting like black hooks.

The siren stayed silent, and the tires left a damp whisper. Staring out the window, Athena remained mute and unseeing. At the sides of the road, pines bristled and sagged, flowing past.

“Honey, I just feel so bad that I took so long getting here. The roads. I mean, I’m just so sorry,” said Doris, her voice raw with cigarettes. “I tried to call Larry. I even tried Siggy but couldn’t get hold of anybody. Half the phone lines are still down from the storm. I’m just so sorry.” Spray flaring up behind them, they swerved to avoid a downed tree in a sheet of water. All the roads were flooded, many impassable, forcing them onto winding detours that seemed to take them always farther from the highway. “I’m just afraid of getting stuck out here,” she muttered between her teeth as she wrestled the wheel. “We’d never get a tow.”

Athena shut her eyes. No matter how she tried to unfocus her thoughts, she couldn’t blunt her awareness of the sheeted form behind them. “Oh, don’t get stuck.”

Doris shot her a look. When she’d first picked her up, Athena’s words had tumbled out, hysterical and fantastic, but since then she’d retreated into silence. “Will you look at this!” The rig splashed around a turn. “What in hell’s going on up there?”

In the half-submerged road, several vehicles had parked haphazardly, and people milled around a bogged car. A uniformed trooper stood in the middle of the road, shaking his head. He looked very young.

“I’m sorry, honey.” Swaying, the rig slowed. “I just have to see what this is.”

Athena nodded, already jumping down. Though the water rose above her ankles—part of a sudden lake that stretched to cover the floor of the woods—the sands felt solid underfoot. With a dazed expression, she looked around. Pines stuck out from the wash as though caught by an incoming tide.

“’Thena? What are you guys doing here?”

Searching for a dry place to stand, she looked up to find Steve sloshing toward her.

“We tried to call you,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d be able to get through.”

She saw the confusion on his face as she moved away from him and walked toward the knot of people at the found ered car. Wind in the wet branches made a low whistling moan.

The car windows were crystal webs. It had sunk up to the axles, and through a forest of uniformed legs, she saw the crimson film on the soaked floor. She drew closer. She stared a long time, nodding, as though this were only to be expected. There was very little blood really, but she imagined that most of it must have been washed away. The body had been so badly savaged that it barely looked human anymore. The throat had been mauled out to the neckbone, and whitish segments showed through straggling veins. There was no face left.

“I tried to talk her out of coming along, but you know how stubborn she is.”

She recognized Doris’s voice. And soon she realized that other people around her were speaking as well, had been all along, but their words sounded as distant and meaningless as the drip of rain from the trees. She couldn’t seem to make sense of anything, so she stopped trying. “Doesn’t matter,” she whispered to herself. “The wind knows.” Her shoes began to sink into the watery soil. “The pines know.”

“Shit, it’s like his stomach was bit out.”

Feeling a dim sympathy, she glanced at the young trooper beside her. Vaguely, she became aware of Barry’s voice, somewhere off to the side, on the edges of the crowd. Swirling, all the voices drifted away from her again, and there yawned a cathedral quietness, swelling with the rush of wind, punctuated only by damply muffled footsteps and splashings. Sand shifted and yielded underfoot, the earth soft as seaweed, soft as ruptured entrails, and the deep whirl pool of silence broke only upon the sharp, liquid twittering of the birds. She realized that Steve was beside her again, that he was asking her something. “It looked like Wallace,” she told him, knowing he wouldn’t understand. “Lying there in the mud. I thought it was Wallace again.” Dizzy, she leaned on a police car, wondering how she hadn’t heard the birds before. “And the crickets on him, moving, like Wallace was still moving when I found him. Only I didn’t know what to do. Not then. I would now.” Her voice trailed off, and she wondered if he’d heard her, if she’d even been speaking aloud.

She tried to walk away, conscious that the sand made no brisk noise underfoot, just this rotten, mushy sound. The pines whispered. She looked for the birds but couldn’t see them any more than she could the toads. She wanted to call out to someone. To Barry, yes, Barry. Always so forceful, he would help her. People milled all around, but her throat felt dry, and the small sounds she made and the sounds made by the other people seemed muffled to the point of muteness. Yet the wind held many voices, gently hissing ghosts among the trees. They pleaded with her, surrounded her with their desperate longings.

Barry appeared to be questioning a bald, muscular man with a red face. A trooper kept interrupting, while another muttered something.

“We was gonna come back with a tow.” Only Athena really listened, heard the words and understood. “It got so dark,” the man kept saying. “We couldn’t, the rain, it come down so hard we couldn’t see.” The young trooper she’d first noticed stood by one of the blue-and-whites, trying to radio for instructions, and before long, she’d heard enough to piece together some of the facts: car pool of construction workers; late shift; short cut. “It just, the road, it washed out from under us. We got stuck.” It was widely believed that the area was riddled with car thieves who used these back roads, so they’d left one man behind with the car while the others had hiked to a farm house. The bald man looked as though he’d been sick. “We just wanted a tow. We tried to come back. We did.”

“Are you all right?” Steve stood beside her. “Doris just told me what’s, I mean, who’s in the rig.” He stared at her. Too closely. “Athena, what can I say? Can I do anything? I’m so shocked, so sorry. Doris said something about dogs. Lord, that’s awful.”

“Hey, ’Thena!” Putting his notebook away, Barry approached. “How’d you get here?”

“Leave her alone,” Steve said.

“What’s your problem?”

Doris and the trooper wheeled up the litter, and the sound of the invisible surf boomed louder than it ever had in Athena’s ears. The night tide. Only it was morning. Mourning. The tips of the pines vibrated, describing circles that grew ever smaller. Athena shut her eyes and knew the sea swirled all around her, knew the breeze that whipped through wet branches carried a faint tang of salt spray.