Twilight Eyes (28 page)

Preventive measures must be taken. On those nights that I did not sleep in her trailer, I would post myself, without her knowledge, just outside her door. I could suffer from insomnia there as well as anywhere. Furthermore I would probe more relentlessly with my sixth sense, in search of additional details about the as yet vaguely defined threat the future held in store for her. If I could predict the precise moment of her crisis and could pinpoint the source of the danger, I could protect her. I must not fail her as I had failed Jelly Jordan.

Perhaps Rya was instinctively aware that she required protection, and perhaps she was also aware that I intended to be there when she needed help, for as the evening wore on, she began to share some secrets about herself, and I sensed that she was telling me things she had told no one else in the Sombra Brothers Carnival. She was drinking more than usual. Although she was not drunk by any definition, I suspected that she was trying to establish an alibi of inebriation, which would be convenient when, in the morning, she found herself full of self-reproach and regret for having told me so much about her past.

“My parents weren’t carnies,” she said in such a way that it was clear she wanted to be encouraged in her revelations.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“West Virginia. My people were hill people in West Virginia. We lived in a ramshackle dump in a hollow up in the hills, probably half a mile from the nearest
other
ramshackle dump. Do you know what hill people are like?”

“Not really.”

“Poor,” she said scathingly.

“That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Poor, uneducated, unwilling to be educated,
ignorant
. Secretive, withdrawn, suspicious. Set in their ways, stubborn, close-minded. And some of them . . . a lot of them, maybe—are too inbred. Cousin marries cousin pretty frequently up in those hills. And worse than that. Worse than that.”

Gradually, with steadily less coaxing, she told me about her mother, Maralee Sween. Maralee was the fourth of seven children born to first cousins whose marriage had not been blessed by either minister or state but existed only by virtue of common law. All of the Sween children were good-looking kids, but one of the seven was retarded, and five of the other six were more dull-witted than not. Maralee was not the bright one, though she
was
the best-looking of the seven, a radiant blonde with luminous green eyes and a lush figure that had every hill boy sniffing after her from the time she was thirteen. Long before her ample charms had matured, Maralee had considerable sexual—one could certainly not say romantic—experience. At an age when many girls are having their first date and are still unsure of the exact meaning of “going all the way,” Maralee had stopped counting the number of hill boys who had spread her legs on various grassy beds, in leaf-carpeted glens, in the haylofts of decaying old barns, on a moldering mattress discarded at the edge of the makeshift dump that the hill people had started in Harmon’s Hollow, and in the musty backseats of different automobiles in one of the many collections of junked cars of which hillbillies seemed so fond. Sometimes she’d been a willing participant in the sex, and sometimes she had not, and most of the time she had not cared one way or the other. In the hills, her fall from innocence at such a tender age was not unusual. The only surprise was that she managed to avoid pregnancy until well past her fourteenth birthday.

In that region of the Appalachians, among those hillbillies, the rule of law and the morality of polite society were disdained, generally ignored; however, unlike carnies, the denizens of those remote hollows did not create their own rules and codes to replace those they rejected. There is in American literature a tradition of tales about the “noble savage,” and our culture at least pretends to believe that a life lived close to nature and far from the evils of civilization is somehow healthier and wiser than the lives that most of us lead. In fact, the opposite is often true. As men retreat from civilization they quickly shed the inessential trappings of modern society—luxury cars, fancy houses, designer clothes, nights at the theater, concert tickets—and perhaps an argument
can
be made for the virtues of a simpler life, but if they go far enough away and stay long enough, they also shed too many inhibitions. Inhibitions implanted by religion and society are not generally foolish or pointless or narrow-minded, as it has recently become fashionable to claim; instead, many of those inhibitions are highly desirable survival traits that in the long run contribute to a better-educated, better-fed, more prosperous populace. The wilderness is
wild
and encourages wildness; it is the breeding ground of savagery.

At fourteen Maralee was pregnant, illiterate, uneducated, and virtually uneducable, without prospects, with too little imagination to be terrified for herself, too slow-thinking to fully appreciate the fact that the rest of her life was destined to be a long, cruel slope into a terrible abyss. With bovine calm she was sure that someone would come along to take care of her and the baby. The baby was Rya, and before Rya was even born, someone did offer to make an honest woman of Maralee Sween, perhaps proving that God watches over pregnant hillbilly girls about as well as He looks out for drunks. The chivalrous gentleman in pursuit of Maralee’s hand was Abner Kady, thirty-eight, twenty-four years her senior, six-five, two hundred and forty pounds, with a neck almost as thick as his head, the most feared man in a county where dangerous rustics were not exactly in short supply.

Abner Kady made a sort of living by brewing moonshine, raising coon dogs, and engaging in petty theft and occasional grand larceny. Once or twice a year he would get together with some buddies and hijack a truck off the state highway, preferably one loaded with cigarettes or whiskey or some other cargo that could be disposed of at top dollar. They traded the booty to a fence they knew in Clarksburg, and either they would have become halfway rich or wound up in prison if they had worked harder at it, but their ambition was no greater than their scruples. Kady was not only a moonshiner, brawler, bully, and thief, but he was a casual rapist as well, taking a woman by force when he was in the mood for spicing his sex with a bit of danger, but he never had to take a ride on the prison train because nobody had the guts to testify against him.

To Maralee Sween, Abner Kady looked like a real catch. He had a four-room house—hardly more than a shack but with indoor plumbing—and no one in his family would ever want for whiskey, food, or clothes. If Abner could not steal what he needed one way, he would steal it another, and in the hills that was the mark of a good provider.

He was good to Maralee, too, or at least as good as he was to anyone. He did not love her. He was not capable of love. Still, though he browbeat her, he never actually laid a hand on her, mostly because he was proud of her beauty and endlessly excited by her body, and he could not have been proud of—or aroused by—damaged merchandise.

“Besides,” Rya said in a voice that now fell to a haunted whisper, “he didn’t want to damage his little fun machine. That’s what he called her—his ‘little fun machine.’”

By “fun machine,” I sensed that Abner Kady had not meant that he had good sex with Maralee. It was something else, something dark. Whatever it was, Rya was unable to speak of it without encouragement, even though I knew that she desperately wanted to unburden herself. Therefore I poured another drink for her, held her hand, and with gentle words I eased her through that minefield of memory.

Tears shimmered in her eyes again, and this time they were not for Jelly but for herself. She was harder on herself than she was on anyone else, and she did not allow herself ordinary human weaknesses like self-pity, so she blinked the tears back regardless of the emotional stress and turmoil that might have been washed away with them if she had only allowed them to flow. Haltingly, in a voice that broke every few words, she said, “He meant that . . . she was . . . his baby machine . . . and that . . . babies . . . could be fun. Especially . . . especially . . .
girl
babies.”

I knew then that she was not merely taking me on a Hansel and Gretel journey into the spooky witch-woods but into a far more frightening place, into a monstrous memory of a childhood under siege, and I was not sure that I wanted to go with her. I loved her. I knew that Jelly’s death had not only sorrowed but frightened her, had reminded her of her own mortality, and had birthed in her a need for intimate human contact, a contact she could not fully achieve until she had broken down the barrier that she had erected between herself and the rest of the world. She needed me to listen, to draw her out, to understand. I wanted to be there for her. But I was afraid that her secrets were . . . well, alive and hungry, and that they would reveal themselves only in return for a piece of my own soul.

I said, “Ah . . . Jesus . . . no.”

“Girl babies,” she repeated, looking neither at me nor at anything else in the room, peering back along the spiral of time with obvious dread and loathing. “Not that he ignored my half brothers. He had uses for them, too. But he preferred girls. My mother gave him four kids by the time I was eleven, two girls and two boys. As far back as I can remember . . . I guess since I was at least three . . . he was...”

“Touching you,” I said thickly.

“
Using
me,” she said.

In a dead voice she recounted those years of fear, violence, and the foulest abuse. Her story left me cold and black inside.

“It was all I knew from the time I was a baby . . . being with him . . . doing what he wanted . . . touching him . . . and being in bed with both of them . . . my mother and him . . . when
they
were doing it. I should’ve thought it was normal, you know? I shouldn’t have known any better. I should have thought that every family was like this . . . but I
didn’t
. I knew it was wrong . . . sick . . . and I
hated
it. I
hated
it!”

I held her.

I rocked her in my arms.

She would still not cry for herself.

“I hated Abner. Oh . . . Jesus . . . you can’t know how much I hated him, with every breath I drew, every moment, without relief. You can’t know what it’s like to hate that intensely.”

I thought of my own feelings toward the goblins, and I wondered if even
that
could match the hatred spawned and nurtured in the hellhole of that four-room shack in the Appalachians. I suspected she was right: I could not know a hatred as pure as that of which she spoke, for she had been a weak child unable to strike back, and her hatred had had more years than mine to grow and intensify.

“But then . . . after I got out of there . . . after enough time had gone by . . . I came to hate my mother more than him. She was my
mother
. Why wasn’t I s-sacred to her? How could she . . . let me . . . b-b-be
used
like that?”

I had no answer.

This one could not be blamed on God. Most of the time we do not need either Him or the goblins; we can hurt and destroy one another without divine or demonic assistance, thank you very much.

“She was so pretty, you know, and not in a brassy way, very sweet-looking, and I used to think that she must be an angel because that’s what angels were supposed to look like, and she had this . . . radiance. . . . But eventually I came to see how
evil
she was. Oh, part of it was ignorance and low intelligence. She was
stupid
, Slim. Hillbilly stupid, the product of a marriage between two first cousins who were probably also the product of cousins, and the miracle is that
I
didn’t wind up either retarded or a three-armed freak in Joel Tuck’s sideshow. But I didn’t. And I didn’t wind up bearing more children for Abner to . . . molest. For one thing, because of . . . because of things he did to me . . . I can never have children. And besides, when I was eleven, I finally got out of there.”

“Eleven? How?”

“I killed him.”

“Good,” I said softly.

“While he was sleeping.”

“Good.”

“I put a butcher knife in his throat.”

For almost ten minutes I held her, and neither of us spoke or reached for a drink or did anything but just
be
there.

At last I said, “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I feel so helpless.”

“You can’t change the past,” she said.

No, I thought, but I can sometimes change the future, foresee the dangers and avoid them, and I hope to God that I can be there when you need me, the way no one else has ever been for you.

She said, “I’ve never . . .”

“Told anyone else?”

“Never.”

“It’s safe with me.”

“I know. But . . . why did I choose to tell you?”

“I was here at the right time,” I said.

“No. It’s more than that.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Now she leaned back from me and raised her eyes and looked into mine. “There’s something different about you, something special.”

“Not me,” I said uncomfortably.

“Your eyes are so beautiful and unusual. They make me feel . . . safe. There’s such . . . calmness in you. . . . No, not exactly calmness . . . because you aren’t at peace, either. But strength. Such strength in you. And you’re so understanding. But it isn’t just strength and understanding and compassion. It’s . . . something special . . . something I can’t define.”

“You’re embarrassing me,” I said.

“How old are you, Slim MacKenzie?”

“I told you . . . seventeen.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Older.”

“Seventeen.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“Well, all right. Seventeen and a half.”

“We can’t approach the truth by half years,” she said. “That’ll take all night. So I’ll just tell you how old you are. I know. Judging from your strength, your calm, your eyes . . . I’d say you’re a hundred . . . with a hundred years of experience.”