The red church (6 page)

As he closed the door and looked across the grave-yard where Storie searched the weeds for clues, the chill evaporated. Something fluttered in the belfry.

Bird or raccoon, he told himself without looking up. Not the thing that had laughed as Samuel died. He hurried down the slope to see if Storie had found any of Boonie's missing parts.
FOUR

Bummer.

That was Ronnie's first thought when the gray blindfold of unconsciousness dissolved into light. And that was the last thought he'd had when the anesthesiologist had pressed the mask to his face. Or maybe not. He'd been so stone-black-buzzed from the injection that he couldn't be sure if he'd had any prior thoughts at all.

His face, at least what he could feel of it, was like a molasses balloon. Pain tingled and teased him through a curtain of gauze. It was a sneaky, funny pain, a bully that skulked around the edge of the playground, waiting for you to chase a stray kickball. Once you were alone, it would jump on you and beat you and kick you and rip you—

More of the druggy haze fell away. Ronnie opened his eyes and the light sliced at his pupils. His eyes were overflowing, but he couldn't feel the tears on his cheeks. His stomach turned crooked flips. Mom and Dad were blurry images beside the bed. A man with a mustache whose eyes looked like licorice drops leaned over him.

"I think we've got somebody waking up." The man's mustache twitched like a caterpillar on a hot griddle. He wore a white coat.

Doctor.
Ronnie's thoughts spun, then collected.
Pain plus doctor equals hospital.
He opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue was too thick to find his teeth.

"Easy now, little partner," the doctor said. "Take it slow." Slow was the only way Ronnie
could
take it. His arms and legs felt like lead pipes. He turned his head to look at his parents. Despite the numbness, he felt a warmth growing in his chest. Mom and Dad were
together.

Well, they weren't holding hands, but at least they weren't yelling at each other. And all it took to make that happen was for Ronnie to . . . What
had
he done?

He slogged through the tunnels of his memory. He remembered the ride to the hospital, Dad hold-ing him in the backseat, Dad's shirt against his face. The shirt should have smelled of sawdust and sweat and maybe a little gasoline, but Ronnie had smelled nothing but blood.

Then, farther back, before that, the little foot bridge, falling, the rocks . . .
Ouch.

Ronnie was old enough to know that the memory of pain could never quite match up to the real thing. Which was a good thing; otherwise, everybody would be running around as crazy as old Mama Bet McFall, or Grandma Gregg down at the Haywood Assisted Care Center back before she slipped into the grave. But even Ronnie's memory of the pain was strong enough to wipe out some of the numbing effects of the drugs.

Dad stepped forward, his lower lip curled, his face made sickly green by the fluorescent strip lights. Dad never looked quite right indoors, sort of like the tiger Ronnie had seen in a pen down at the Asheboro zoo. Both of them nervous and impatient, pacing, too large for walls or bars.

"Hey, Ronnie," Dad said, unsuccessfully trying to funnel his deep voice into a whisper. "How are you feeling?"

"Muuuuhr." Even Ronnie couldn't translate the sound his vocal cords made. Mom leaned over him, a tight smile wrinkling her face. The skin under her eyes was dark blue. She reached out and brushed hair away from his fore-head with a clammy hand. "It's okay, baby." The doctor checked Ronnie's pulse. "Coming around fine. You'll be able to take him home in an hour or so. Buzz one of the nurses if you need any-thing."

The doctor left the room, and the draft from the closing door swept over Ronnie like a tide of water. Being a molasses-head wasn't all bad. His thoughts weren't dropping as fast as usual, but he was thinking
wider
than he ever had before. If not for the pain bully waiting behind the numbness, Ronnie wouldn't mind hanging out in this half-speed dreamscape for a while.

This was almost peaceful. If he closed his eyes, the white walls fell away and the sky got big and he could float on a cloud and no one could bother him, not even dingle-dork—

Tim.
What had happened to Tim?

The molasses of his face rippled as his eyes opened wide. Mom and Dad and . . . where was Tim?

Be-cause suddenly it was all coming back, the molasses creek turning a bend and flowing into sunlight and, now hot and golden
,
churning over a precipice in a sugary waterfall. The run home, the hand on his foot, the bleeding thing—
they got livers for eyes
—the toppled monument, the red church, the graveyard. Had the bleeding thing trapped Tim?

Dad must have sensed his agitation, because a hand on his shoulder prevented him from sitting up.

"Now, you heard the doctor, son. Just rest up."

Mom chewed on the skin at the end of her thumb. "You got busted up pretty good when you fell. Broke your nose. The doctor said you were lucky you didn't crack your skull."

Good old Mom. Found the bright side to every-thing. So he had a broken nose. He thought of some of the players on his football cards, how their noses had great big humps across the bridge or were twisted off to one side. Just what a guy like him needed. Now Melanie would never talk to him. The molasses mask slipped a little more, and the pain bully chuckled from the shadows, knowing an opportunity was drawing near. Ronnie became aware of a lower portion of his body, where the knot of snakes nested in his stomach. He was going to throw up.

Total bummer.
He groaned and his tongue worked.

"What is it, honey?" Mom said, her face now paler and her eyes wider.

"Poooook," he said. His right arm flailed like a water hose under pressure.

"Puke?" She looked at Dad. "Oh, Lord, David, he's going to throw up." Dad looked helpless. The situation called for quick action and compassion. As a caregiver, Dad made a good pallbearer.

Mom spun and began searching under a counter beside the bed. A mirror ran along the length of the counter, and Ronnie was startled by his own reflection. His nose was purple and swollen, little clots of bloody gauze hanging out of his nostrils. His eyes were like green-brown marbles pressed into ten pounds of dough.

The image accelerated his nausea. He turned his body with effort, and now Dad helped, putting a hand in his armpit to lean him over the steel railing of the bed. The scene in the mirror was doubly dis-orienting from being reversed. The greasy snakes crawled up Ronnie's throat.

Mom found a plastic pan made of a yucky aqua color, but that was okay because yucky was just what the situation required. She held it under his face, and the snakes exploded from his mouth. His eyes squeezed shut in the effort of vomiting, and drops of something besides molasses beaded his forehead. His abdomen spasmed twice, three times, four, a pause, then a fifth eruption.

"Oh, my Lord," Mom exclaimed to Dad. "Call the nurse."

"He said this might happen. And look, it's stopped now."

"But it's blood."

"What did you think it would be, grits and sausage gravy? They just operated on his nose." Ronnie looked into the pan and his guts almost lurched again. A thick gruel of blood and mucus pooled in front of his face. And what were those things floating in—

Fingers. They cut off my fingers and made me eat them.

Dad's words came as if through cotton. "What the hell are
those?"

"Get a nurse." Mom waved her hands helplessly.

The draft of the door opening wafted over Ronnie again, but this time it provided no comfort. He lay back on the raised pillows.

A tired-looking nurse looked in the pan. "Oh, those are the fingers of surgical gloves. The doctor stuffs them with gauze and uses them as packing."

"How did they get in his stomach?" Mom's voice was a thin screech.

"The packing must have worked its way down the pharyngeal opening of his Eustachian tubes. I'm sure it's nothing to worry about."

"Nothing to worry about?" Dad's voice was loud enough to make Ronnie's head hurt. "It's not your kid in the bed, is it?"

The nurse gave a forced smile that Ronnie figured she wore while giving medicine to somebody who wasn't likely to last the week. A smile that plainly said,
If there were another job in Pickett County that
paid this well, he could puke rubber fingers until he choked, for all I care.
But all she said was, "I'll see if I can find the doc-tor."

After she was gone, Mom said, "You didn't have to raise your voice."

"Shut up."

"David, please. For Ronnie's sake?"

Ronnie wasn't bothered by the argument. The re-lief of passing nausea was so great that he would have slow-danced with the pain bully, he felt so wonderful. So what if more sweat had popped out along his neck and in his armpits and down the slope of his spine? The stomach snakes were gone. The act of vomiting also cleared his head a little. That was a mixed blessing. Or mixed curse. Because not only were the good wide thoughts gone, they were being replaced by memories. Before he'd been wheeled into surgery, the sheriff had talked to him about the things that happened at the red church. It was scary enough just to talk to a policeman, especially one with a crewcut and a face that looked like it was chiseled out of stone. But the sheriff wanted him to remember what had hap-pened, when Ronnie really, really, really wanted to be in the business of forgetting. Forgetting the wet, slooshing sound his shoe had made as he jerked his foot from the graveyard grip. Forgetting the raw, bloody arm reaching around the tombstone.

Forgetting the laughter that had fluttered from the belfry of the red church. The sheriff finally went away, and they had rolled Ronnie to the operating room. Then came the nee-dle and the mask and the wide thoughts and the darkness.

"How are you feeling, honey?"

He looked at his mom. Her hair was wilted and stringy, a dull chestnut color. She looked about a hundred and twelve, older even than Mama Bet McFall, the crazy woman who lived up the road from the Day farm.

"Better," he whispered, and the air of his voice scraped his throat as it passed. The door opened again and Ronnie craned his neck. The doctor was whistling an uneven tune through the scrub brush of his mustache. Ronnie would bet money that it was a Michael Bolton song. Or maybe something even lamer. Ronnie was almost glad that his nose was clogged. He would have bet double-or-nothing that the man was wearing some sissy cologne. He flopped his heavy head back on the pillows.

"I heard you had a little episode," the doctor said.

Episode? Was that the medical term for vomiting up fingers?

"I'm okay now," Ronnie said in a wheeze, mainly because the doctor was leaning over and reaching for his nose. And even though the painkiller was still dumbing him down, he was smart enough to know that being touched there would hurt like heck. Even through the molasses that encased his brain. The doctor backed away at the last moment. "The packing looks like it's still in place where the break occurred. I don't think any harm was done."

Nope. No harm at all to you, was there, Mr. Mustache?

"We could always roll him back into the OR and pack some more gauze up there," the doctor said to his parents, as if Ronnie weren't even in the room.

"What do you think?" Mom turned another shade closer to invisibility.

"I believe he's okay," the doctor said, fingering his mustache. "In fact, I'd say you could go ahead and take him home. Call me next week and we'll schedule a time to take the stitches out." Dad nodded dumbly. Mom worked at the gnawed skin of her fingers.

Ronnie was eager to go home. By the time the nurse showed up with a fake smile and a wheelchair, he was sitting up in bed, feeling dizzy but no longer nauseated. As the nurse wheeled him to the eleva-tors, he was floating away again. The outside air tasted strange and thick.

Ronnie was surprised to see that the sun was set-ting. He felt as if years had passed, not hours, since he'd fallen. Pinkish gray clouds wreathed the horizon above the dark mountains. Mom had pulled her big black Coupe De Ville by the hospital doors. Dad eased him into the backseat and they were on their way home. They had gone about two miles when Ronnie remembered Tim.

"Where's Tim?" he managed to ask. He was sleepy again, a molasses-head.

"At Donna's. They went back to the graveyard to find his glasses."

So Tim had survived the encounter at the red church.
The Encounter.
Sounded like a title for a cheesy monster movie.
Whatever.
His thoughts were getting wide again.

He wanted to be asleep by the time they drove past the red church.

He was.

"Didn't see nothing," Lester Matheson said. His face was crooked from decades of chewing his to-bacco in the same cheek. He ground his teeth side-ways, showing the dark mass inside his mouth, occasionally flicking it more firmly into place with his tongue.

"Last night, either?" Sheriff Littlefield turned from the man's smacking habit and looked out over the rolling meadows. A herd of cows dotted the ridge, all pointed in the same direction. Like their owner, they also chewed mindlessly, not caring what drib-bled out of their mouths.