The Pines (7 page)

A shack appeared on the right, then a hundred yards farther, two more, obviously abandoned. The roof of the Monroe place became visible over the pines. “Damn shame ’bout the way that nigger bitch pushed ole Lonny outta his own house,” Wes muttered as they passed. “Damn shame.”

Al nodded in solemn agreement.

“Somebody oughtta take that gimp out inna woods an shoot ’er,” continued Wes. “Her an at retard kid a hers.” The truck thundered across a pine-log bridge, the water of Hobbs Creek still and muddy around the pilings. “What’s ’at over there?” He pointed into the brush and stamped on the brake.

“What’s the matter with you?” Al yelled, holding his forehead. “What the fuck you stopping for? You made me bang my fuckin’ head!”

“That’s my old man’s truck,” Wes said, already climbing out. “What’s it doing just sittin’ there?”

“He’s prob’ly off jackin’ or something. Where you going, asshole?”

“Not here he ain’t jacking.” Wes ran back, trampling through the thicket. “Looks like he just rolled off the road,” he mumbled to himself as he approached the truck; it rested against a small cluster of pines.

Al clambered down. “Get back over here! I need a goddamn drink an yer—” He saw the sudden tension in Wes’s shoulders. “What the fuck?” Al approached, muttering. He glanced first at Wes, then gazed into the truck and let loose a low whistle. “What in hell…?”

Wes stared, the cords of his neck bulging. Then he yanked the door open, and out billowed the flies. The truck was empty, cabin torn apart, cushion stuffing ripped out in great fistfuls, all of it spattered with brown. Dripping ropes of a thick, dark substance hung from beneath the door, and dried gobs lay on the ground in places where wetness had been absorbed into the earth, leaving only scum at the top, crusted bits gleaming in the sunlight.

Bloated flies buzzed drowsily in the heat. Some swarmed on a damp patch, covering it with their shining bodies.

“Can’t we get the damned windows fixed?”

“Cigarettes bothering you?”

Coughing, Athena kept her eyes on the road. “Your perfume.”

Doris laughed. “I overdo it again? Sorry, kid. Just a habit I got into back when I…”

“Don’t say it.”

“…used to work in the morgue. Like I always say, you can take the girl out of the icebox, but you can’t take the—”

“I’d settle for taking the icebox out of the conversation, thank you.”

Doris laughed again, then her face went hard. “Was that bitch at the desk giving you a bad time? What’s her problem now?”

“Said we should have taken them to the infirmary in Chatsworth.”

“Injuries that serious?”

The younger woman shrugged, steered the rig up to the bay door. They found Sig the Stink out in front of the hall, grinning shyly. Siggy Applegate was fat and bald, slow moving and unwashed, but the rest of the crew were under strict instructions to be nice to him. He was a Quaker—there were a lot of them in the area—and through him Doris hoped to gain some mea sure of community support. They needed it.

Blinking small moist eyes at them, Sig blocked the driveway, and his little arm shot up as though holding back the rig. There was something spastic about the gesture; the arm seemed to have moved of its own accord. “Uh, Athena, uh, don’t put the rig away. We had another call, Doris. It just come in. Uh, kid playing with firecrackers out by Ong’s Hat.”

“Jackpot,” said Doris. “I hope you appreciate this training, Larry. Sometimes we go days without a call. Take us out, honey. We’ll see you to night, Jack. Siggy, get in the rig!”

Peeling tar paper covered the few cedar wood shacks. In the center of the clearing, a dog sniffed around a huge mound of discarded clothing and tin cans, and everywhere rotted abandoned cars and pieces of cars.

Munro’s Furnace.

With a clattering roar, the truck aimed for the main cluster of buildings. Al yelled as the truck slammed to a halt, spraying sand, just in front of his gin mill.

“You start knockin’ on doors!” Wes swung down. “Find out if anybody’s seen Pa! I’m gonna round up guys wi’ shotguns. An dogs!”

“Count on me, buddy.” Al jumped down. “We’ll find ’im.” Any gathering of the residents of Munro’s Furnace would be sure to occasion the selling of whiskey, and as he started toward a neighboring shack, a grin seeped through his mask of concern.

Behind him, Wes cursed. Al whirled around.

A brown and white cat rubbing against his leg, Marl stood on the crumbling cement steps of the gin mill. Unkempt blond hair framed his face, pale and dappled with acne, and his short body looked well padded with baby fat. Half in the shadowed doorway, he blinked at the daylight, his cotton shirt and the lower part of his slack face glistening with wet blood.

A few yards away, Wes faced him, his mouth working silently.

“No, Wes!” Racing toward them, Al yelled, “Leave ’im alone! He jus’ gits nosebleeds allatime!”

The cat vanished, and the boy stared after it. By the time his vacant eyes widened, it was too late to run.

Wes slammed into him, shook the boy viciously, Marl’s head snapping back and forth. “My pa! You fuckin’ loony! Where’s my pa? Whad you do to ’im?” He kept screaming while the boy’s head knocked against the wall.

Al jumped in as Wes turned, shouting and swinging, and the pine wall made a buckling sound as the two men hit the side of the building.

Released, Marl sank to the ground, his expression puzzled as blood slowly branched, trickling from his white nostrils.

Under a graying sky, a small group of women hurried out of one of the nearby houses, and from somewhere men came running with eager shouts of “There’s a fight down Spencer’s!”

“But he’s got blood all over ’im!” Wes slumped against the wall, choking with rage and surrender as the blood dripped from his mouth and down his chin.

“I told ya, ya asshole—he gits nosebleeds!” Face white and rigid, Al stood astride Wes, shaking his big fists. “He don’t know nuthin’ ’bout yer friggin’ father.”

The gathering crowd made disappointed sounds—it was over.

Panting heavily, Al took a step back and looked for his son. “Where da fuck…?”

Random bullet holes pocked the wood of the doorway like tiny black tunnels. From within the darkened gin mill came a whimpering sob.

Storm clouds massed.

The highway to the shore cut straight and clean through the forest, and Athena drove mechanically through the flat sameness of the countryside.

Doris pointed out a yellow call box. “That’s got to be where the call came from.”

When Athena pumped the brakes, the ambulance took the turn sharply. As always, her breath caught at the instantaneous transition from highway to wilderness, and her palms began sweating slightly as she tried to imagine what this road must be like at night.

Navigating the choppy sand, she recalled the first stories she’d ever heard about “pineys,” so long ago, old tales told mostly as shuddery jokes. Everyone snickered about the pineys, about their being weird and dangerous—seven feet tall, some of them, supposedly; whole families with six fingers on each hand; cannibals, degenerates and worse. She shook her head and half-grinned to herself, remembering the first self-professed pineys she’d actually met: a well-dressed couple, both of whom spoke with a slight country twang. That had been almost a disappointment, and later, upon meeting so many others just like them, she’d dismissed the fables as just that.

She hadn’t known then about the shantytowns.

The road became a rut through desolate runty trees, and they passed a shack that looked as though it might collapse at any moment, flowered curtain trailing out a lopsided window. A few minutes later, similarly primitive structures appeared at a crossroads. Ong’s Hat, population twenty-three. Sagging beneath a blueberry-dark sky, these dwellings leaned at awkward and unlikely angles, as if built by children out of cards, as if any strong wind might knock them down.

Athena tightened her grip on the slickness of the wheel. All these sand-road hamlets looked the same. Yet something hung in the air. A feeling. A sense that those who lived like this had no hope…couldn’t help but be brutal. Bestial. Never would she get used to it.

A small knot of people in the road refused to budge, so Athena switched off the siren, and straining at the wheel, swerved the ambulance toward the runty trees. It lumbered off the road between saplings; then it rattled to a stop, and she backed it up.

Pines pressed the crumbling little town, and through them, the wind carried a faint scent of rain. The sky brooded, barely suppressing thunder.

Mumbling and sweating, Siggy peered through the hatch window. Doris tried to look over his few long wisps of sweaty hair, got a whiff of breath like dead mice and drew back hastily.

“It’s all right, Sig.” She inhaled thinly. “We can handle these folks.”

Trembling, he tried to grin. His teeth were yellow and ground to nubs, as though his diet consisted entirely of birdseed. “They, uh, a couple of them have got guns.” His voice seemed to come from somewhere around his knees.

“You can wait in the rig.” She pushed him aside and shoved the hatch open. Vaulting down, she moved toward the crowd, Larry and Athena close behind her. Athena lugged the first-aid kit.

The cluster of pineys fell silent, still refusing to make way, and several glared openly at Athena’s limp. Doris shouldered her way in.

Larry stared. These people had to be the worst he’d ever seen—some of the men held shotguns, muzzles low to the ground, and two sharp-ribbed dogs skirted the group. He followed Athena’s slender form as it wended fearlessly through the small crowd.

A woman in a filthy black dress got in front of him, and mumbling an apology, he tried to ease past her, unable to keep from staring at her plastic brooch: a Christmas tree, sparkles mostly gone. Her hollowed face pressed toward him, glaring with rheumy eyes, and he found himself holding his breath.

An adolescent boy lay stretched out in the bloody sand, the crowd poking and prodding.

“Don’t touch him!” shouted Doris. “Siggy! Where’s that stretcher?”

Larry glanced back to where Siggy cowered in the rig. “I’ll get it, Doris,” he said and plunged back into the crowd.

Thunder rumbled, and the wind blew harder. The crowd made a murmuring noise, and as Doris and Athena knelt on either side of the injured boy, one of the dogs began to howl.

The boy’s right hand had been shattered into burned fragments.

“Very shocky.” Athena checked his pulse. “Lost a lot of blood.”

“More than he should have.”

The crowd grew louder with angry mutterings.

A shotgun leveled. “Whatchyou doin’ to that boy?”

“Throw the kid in the rig,” Doris whispered. “Be ready to run.” She stood up, smiling. “Are you the father?”

“Whatchyou doin’?” he slurred. “Whatsat frizzy-haired bitch doin’ to him?”

Her smile never wavered. “Are you the boy’s father?” she repeated, making eye contact.

“I might be. Maybe. I could be.” Alcohol fumes belched from the toothless face. “No.”

Doris spotted a car about thirty yards away, another shotgun sticking out of it. She squared her shoulders.

Larry ran back with the collapsed stretcher under his arm, then stood gaping at the guns.

Athena beckoned him over. While they lifted the boy, she kept one eye on the crowd.
The mark of the barrens.
She’d have recognized the meanness in these faces anywhere.
No.
She noted the threadbare, old-fashioned clothing, that several of the children went barefoot.
Not pointy-eared monsters.
The unconscious boy didn’t weigh much.
Not like the stories.
They hefted the stretcher, and the crowd parted, grudgingly.
Human refuse.
As they marched toward the rig, Doris’s voice followed them.

“Isn’t anyone here related to him?”

Siggy clucked in fussy circles around the stretcher. “They could kill us all and bury us out here and nobody’d ever know.”

“Get to work, Sig,” Athena told him. The glowering sky made her nervous. “Anyway, what makes you think they’d bury us? They look more like they’d eat us.”

Larry barked a laugh.

She glanced back—their squad captain still spoke to the man with the shotgun, pacifying, politicking.
There’s nothing like
watching a pro in action.
She’d be getting a donation out of him in a minute.

Larry wrapped bandages around the boy’s hand, and Siggy had begun fiddling with an IV unit.

“Sig, I heard Doris tell you about that twice already. You set up that I V, and the hospital won’t even want to admit him.” She turned away in disgust. “We’re going to have trouble enough if she can’t find a relative.”

With a movement both clumsy and graceful, she jumped down from the back of the rig and stood in the road. Sand blowing in her face, she craned her neck to watch gray violence gather in the sky. “Doris, we’ve got to move,” she called. Shielding her eyes from flying grit, she climbed back into the driver’s seat. From one of the sagging structures, an infant wailed, but none of the people in the road responded, and the ocean sound of wind in the pines pooled and eddied around the clearing.

The motor idled.

Doris clambered into the back of the rig, slamming the doors. “Take us out, honey.” Siggy sighed loudly as they lurched away, bouncing over a rut with a jarring thud.

“Nobody admits to being the boy’s family,” Doris told them. “Or to making the call. Christ. Guess they’re all afraid of getting stuck with a hospital bill. How you making out, Sig? I looked all over the place but couldn’t find the fingers.” She laughed. “Maybe one of the dogs ate them.” Siggy held sterile compresses over the mangled stumps where the boy’s index and middle fingers had been, and she passed him more bandages. “It’s still coming out. Here, Larry,” she said, “push down hard on the wrist, try to slow the flow.”

Siggy wrapped another triangular bandage around the hand, and they all swayed as the rig swerved onto the highway. Struggling to keep his balance, Larry pressed his palm on the boy’s wrist.

“Harder.”

He could feel the pulse as liquid tried to squirt through.