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Chapter 28
  Being Ike Jameson

You have run these back roads longer than you can remember. You grew up on them, driving at fourteen, joyriding when it was easy to wire a car, running dope from the coast into Houston and Beaumont, back in the time before the Mexican gangs and cartels fucked it all up.

You never killed a man, but you shot at plenty, hit a few, and watched other men kill and be killed. You know all about killing. You know who to call and you know what to do. You bury the sheriff, the one your idiot son killed, and you clean up his mess.

You consider killing your son, the young one, and somewhere inside your head, you wonder about the vegetable in the house. You haven’t been in Gerald’s room since, well, since ever. You have no more business in that room than a goat in grade-school. He could be dead for all you know, and you figure that’s about what he is anyway, and what do you care? With all the stuff going on these days, he would have got blowed up if he went off soldiering like he said. Better sooner than later. Dumb shits like that don’t got no place in this world but to get themselves killed for one damned reason or another, like that sheriff, like that younger one if he don’t be more careful.

Behind the shed, after you bury the sheriff, you hold the gun to Marty’s head and you consider pulling the trigger. That’d keep him quiet, and you could haul him into the pasture and drop him off for the crows. Nobody would miss him. Easy as sucking a peach.

You can’t do it, though. He’s looking at you with your eyes, and in that moment you make a critical mistake. You show him pity.

Things happen fast after that. Your idiot son who you realize you should have shot has stirred up the local bee’s nest, because up rolls a police officer. For some damned reason, Betsy is in there and she and that goddamned Mexican deputy step out, and you raise the pistol; it’s a big pistol, an old Colt .45 by the looks of it, one of them single-actions that you got to pull back the hammer each time you fire, and you hit him right in the neck. It’s a big gun, and it takes a chunk out and throws him over the hood of his car. He fires back but he’s hit, and you got a Colt .45 by god, hot and heavy and accurate as God’s own hand.

You take cover behind that old Ford and you prop up that pistol and you draw back the hammer and you wait. You got the target sighted in and instead of raising up to shoot you, he sticks up his head and for some damned reason fires out into the back yard. He ain’t even looking your way. It’s like he done forgot you, like you don’t matter, and you drop the hammer, and God in Heaven is it beautiful.

That’s one dead Mexican. That’s what you think as his head snaps to the side, looks like he got walloped by a ten-pound bowling ball. His hat comes off along with a piece of his skull, and boy howdy, that’s one dead Mexican.

You rise from your kneeling position, a man coming out of prayer, his prayers answered. It is euphoric. It is orgasmic. You go to the body, stand over it, and you shoot and kick it in celebration. You are part of the club. You killed a police officer, and a goddamned Mexican at that. You wonder if that counts as one or two kills.

After you drag the officer around to the front of the old Ford and park his cruiser somewhere besides your driveway, you look for your wife and that idiot son of yours. You hope she killed him for you, and you guess that’s what happened because they’re both quiet. If she didn’t, you will not pause again, not now that you are part of the club.

“Betsy!” you yell. You look and look, and when you find her in the grass of the back yard, you see she is shot clean through. She didn’t have much in the way of tits before, and she has that much less now. Her shirt is torn open and her ribs are showing. Hollow point .45, that’s what you think, and the stupid bitch has two fingers dug into the opening in her chest. You squat next to her and touch her. Bitch is still warm.

Then you feel sick and burp up a mouthful of bile. You shove it back down. You squeeze the pistol’s grip. You finger the trigger and wonder what the slug would taste like, and whether it would tear out the part of your brain that is screaming right now.

That’s odd, you think, and you stop and listen to the screaming. You had not heard the sound before, but it is there, bouncing off the inside of your skull, ringing in your head if not in your ears. It is a darkness coursing through you, consuming you, crowing and cawing.

You stand and you scream at your idiot little boy, Marty, the one who killed his brother and who killed the sheriff and who killed his own momma, and who made you kill that Mexican deputy. A warmth spreads through you, and you become huge, magnificent, gigantic. You are invincible. You are enormous. You will consume the boy, but not before you punish him. You will draw him out first and then you will devour him. You may even eat his fucking little heart.

You hop the fence separating your house and the Marshes. Your feet rise off the ground and you clear the fence without a touch. You are shirtless and the breeze licks at your skin. You feel licking all over your body as if tiny, icy tongues are tasting every inch of you, and they lift you up and across the driveway. Feathers brush against the spider web tattoo on your back. The screen door opens itself, and you catch a fleeting glimpse of black hands and the tip of a dark wing.

You feel yourself shoved into the house and you hear flapping all around you. The beating of wings becomes so loud that at one point, as you are rifling through the master bedroom, you put your hands to your head and you scream at them. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

You wait and you catch your breath, and the beating quiets down. You know the woman and her daughter are here, and you try to think of their names but cannot. You remember only the name Marsh and nothing more.

They are not under the bed or in the master closet. They are not in the bathroom or the pantry or behind the couches. You do not bother taunting or calling them because you know they are here. Their car is in the driveway. That means they must be here. The girl is crippled, and they need that special lift-van to haul her around.

When you find the girl’s wheelchair in her bedroom your assumptions are confirmed. “I know you’re here,” you scream. You crouch and look beneath the girl’s bed.

Something slams into your back. It is heavy and solid, and even though it feels like it split your spine in two, you stand and yank the pistol around and fire. You see the neighbor woman stumble back into the hallway. You fire again, hit her in the stomach, and she buckles to the floor.

You look back at what she dropped on you, and you say, “A goddamned sewing machine? Are you crazy? You tried to kill me with a goddamned sewing machine? I got a Colt .45, you stupid bitch.”

She crawls into the living room, and for a moment you look around as if seeing the house for the first time. It is the same as your house only without the clutter. You barely recognized the floor plan, but that is why you knew exactly where to go and where to look. This house is neat. It smells neat. It looks neat. It feels neat. It is an insult to you, calling you a sick parody of all that is good.

You feel something peck at your eye, a twitch, and you jab a knuckle into it and shake your head. You hear flapping, and behind you in the girl’s bedroom the window shatters and a breeze sweeps in. You feel the floor shake as if feet were pounding, but it is only you and the neighbor lady who is hauling herself up by leaning on an end table.

“Where’s that little cripple of yours?” you ask.

She sweeps a table lamp at you, one with angel wings and a halo around the top.

You shoot her in the stomach and she doubles up. “You’ll bleed out,” you say. She neither answers nor moans, but her lips move in what looks and feels like a silent prayer. “I am going to find that little daughter of yours, and I am going to ruin her before, during, and after I kill her.”

You turn your attention to finding the little one, the crippled girl, the one your wife said was Marty’s girlfriend. You know she has to be here somewhere.

You can go slowly now. You have all night and it’s not like she can run away, can she?

Chapter 29
 
Hearing Uncle Cooper

After his father crossed the yard to Sadie’s fence, Marty swung into the attic, crouched on the wooden floor and listened. In one hand, he held the wooden legs. In the other, he held the Bowie knife in a steel grip. He was glad and a little proud that he had neither dropped nor broken the wooden legs. He tucked them into his pocket and stood.

He swept the knife at the darkness in front of him. He hooted. “Hoo, hoo.” He found strength in the sound, and he wondered if warriors had ever used the owl’s hoot before charging into battle. He thought maybe Native Americans had used owl sounds, but he wasn’t sure. He hooted again and stepped forward.

His foot pressed against something on the ground, and even though he could not see it, he could feel it was one of the rat snakes. It curled around his boot and wrapped a tail around his calf. Its fangless mouth struck his jeans. He swiped at the shadowy snake and the knife sliced through its flesh. He hacked a few more times and then kicked it off his boot.

When he reached the far window, the one facing Sadie’s house, he saw his father cross their driveway. He leaned into the sheriff’s pistol as if it were a cane supporting him.

Sadie and her mother were not in Sadie’s bedroom window, but the window was open. They had been there. They had heard and seen everything.

His father went through the back door and screamed inside the house, and after a while he entered Sadie’s bedroom and leaned beneath the bed. Sadie’s mother appeared in the hallway holding a white sewing machine over her head, which she slammed into his father’s spider-web back.

His father yanked the gun around and fired with the fierce swiftness of a wild animal, and Mrs. Marsh tumbled backward and was out of view.

There was another gunshot, followed by silence. The silence stretched on and on, so long his hand cramped on the knife handle. Two gunshots, he thought, two people in the house, and nobody in the window. His mother gone, his brother, his father for so many years before this, Uncle Cooper, and now Sadie, all of them gone.

At first it was a slow drip, but then the pain pressed into his chin and the back of his knees, and he knelt on the floor. The weight of his emotions crushed his gut, and he doubled over, gagged, and pressed his head against the wooden planks.

He heard himself wailing in the empty attic. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t. I can’t.”

A hand pressed gently between his shoulder blades, and it was warm and comforting. A voice whispered. “
Be strong, Martian. You got to wink them away.
”

Marty recognized Uncle Cooper’s voice. The familiar Dead-Eye electric jolt surged through him, and the room turned cold despite the summer heat as if a great deal of energy had been sucked out of the attic. He waited, curled into his protective fetal ball, but Uncle Cooper said nothing more.

“Hoo, hoo,” Marty said, after he stopped crying. He clutched the knife in his hand and stabbed it into the wooden plank floor. He found the strength to lift his head. Two luminescent eyes hung in the air, surrounded by royal blue feathers. They blinked and were gone.

“Hoo, hoo,” Marty said. He stood slowly, letting the blood flow up to his head. With the knife in front of him, he checked Sadie’s house next door.

He saw movement in the house, nothing more than a flutter of shadow behind Sadie’s room. That would be his father.

Then his eyes moved to the attic. Staring back from the blackened attic window was Sadie Marsh. She lifted a small hand and cast her spell. Her face bore no expression but was small and pale against the attic’s deep black.

“
You know what to do,
” Uncle Cooper said.

Marty’s hand clenched the knife, because he knew. He winked at Sadie, waggled the knife to show he was being strong, and then he ran across the attic and dove out the window and onto the roof. Instead of his usual path, he leaped off the roof, and with his arms thrown to the side, glided over the air-conditioner unit and landed in the grass beneath his bedroom window.

Chapter 30
  Kathy Marsh

One night you make love to your husband. You make love to him because tomorrow is your anniversary, and you know that tomorrow you’ll be too tired to make love to him. You are quiet, because your daughter is in the other room, but when you reach your peak, you want to scream and tear at the sheets. You want to shout because he is your gift from God, your savior, the man who brings all things wonderful and holy into this house.

He is older than you by almost ten years. Still, the age never seems to matter, because that gap equalizes a man’s and a woman’s respective maturity levels. Men mature slower. It takes them until they are thirty to reach a point where a woman is when she finishes the last of her teens.

You saved yourself for him, and he is the only man you’ve slept with or seen naked. You were not his first, but you are his last, and that makes all the difference. He waited all those years after you met, patiently, until you were married, and he gave you a daughter and a home and a purpose in life. You kiss his neck and his lips as he says to you, “Love you, Sweet Thang.”

You are his Sweet Thang, and that you can remember, he has never called you by your name, only Sweet Thang, practically from the day you met him at a church beach trip in Galveston.

“I love you, too,” you say, because you do, with all your soul.

The next day, you load your daughter and your husband into your car, and you drive to that special spot on the beach in Galveston. It is the spot where you met. It is your anniversary, and this is what you do each summer on your anniversary. You make love to your husband the night before, then load a basket with food, fill the car with gas, and drive two hours to the beach, and you celebrate God’s glory in the muddy waters of Mexico’s Gulf.

You find yourself on that familiar stretch of straight, flat road that cuts through Bolivar Peninsula, the one that leads onward to Galveston Bay. You see the brown waters stretching out to your left. There are drilling rigs and tankers and ocean liners in the water. People are there, too, along the shore, in their trucks and tents and four-wheelers.

Your daughter is in the backseat of your car. “Sadie-love,” you say to her. “Do you see that sailboat?”

You point seaward and Sadie looks. There it is, a great magnificent beast of a ship, something with a dozen sails that they probably call
canvas,
an old-looking warship that must have docked at Galveston for some reason or another. It seems to you that God’s eye is on you, because Sadie adores sailboats and has prayed many nights that she could sail on one.

The world stops. It is black. You hear nothing, see nothing, and in a blink you open your eyes and the beach is gone. The road is gone, and for a few terrified heartbeats you don’t know where you are.

Then you see lights above you, and a blue-faced doctor leans over you, and then he or she, you cannot tell from the mask, disappears and you are in another room. This one is quiet.

It was that quick. There seemed to be no breaths between, and now you are standing next to another bed, holding your IV stand rolling beside you, and you look down on your daughter, down on Sadie-love with tubes in her nose and mouth, and her eyes still taped shut from the surgery. She is damaged. They say things about her spine and her legs, a mumbled garble of mixed hope and sorrow, and they say nothing at all about your husband.

Finally you ask. “Where is Larry?”

The nurse purses her lips. She is pretty. She is kind. She looks like she is about to cry, and she leads you down the hall, holding one of your arms and pushing your IV stand. Everything smells like alcohol. She places you in an elevator and you ride up two floors.

This room is a cacophony of machines. They are keeping your husband alive, the nurse says, and she calls him a beating heart corpse. A doctor enters, and you hardly listen as you sign a release form.

His heart will go to a woman in Houston, the doctor says, a young woman with children, and his liver and lungs and other organs will be delivered unto others.

This is God’s plan. That is all you can think. This is God’s plan.

Please, God, you pray, let this be part of Your plan.

•

You pray. You press both your hands to the wound in your stomach and fight the throbbing for breath. You pray silently to Jesus, to Mother Mary, to Adam and Eve and Daniel and David and Solomon, and anyone else who might be listening. “
Lord, save my baby,
” you beg them. “
Please save my baby.
”

You pray to your Larry. He is there, you can feel him, you can almost see him, and you feel a new strength in you, something a little warmer than the surge you felt a few minutes before, racing through the house with Sadie in your arms like when she was a baby, so light when your muscles are charged with the force of God’s hand.

You don’t notice until he speaks, but Ike Jameson stands over you, dangling the pistol like a dead thing at the end of one arm. “What was that?” he asks.

You don’t answer, and he raises the pistol. “Where is Little Miss Prissy Pants?”

Something is beside him, one of the scraggly black angels, and as you watch, the feathers sharpen, and the beak and head come into crisp focus. It is looking at you, and it is not an angel at all. It is a
thing,
something sent from Hell itself, and it pecks at Ike’s leg. He scratches where the beak penetrates his skin, and then fires his gun once, draws back the hammer, fires again.

You should feel that, surely, because he cannot miss from this close, but you feel nothing at all.

“I’ll find her,” he says.

He puts his back to you, walks into the hallway, into the crochet room, knocks down a stand with your knitting blankets. You see him as if he is carved into fine detail, see the
thing
as it hops beside him. It flaps its wings, takes a fly-leap forward, and stabs its beak into his thigh.

You realize you are looking down on him, that somehow you are on the ceiling, and when you look to your left, you see your body, old and broken, lying in a pool of blood next to the angel lamp your sister gave you when you first got married. Your eyes are thrown open, and you put your hands to your eyes, touch them, and you feel how dry they are, sense how empty they are.

You always believed, said you believed, proclaimed your belief, and those around you spoke of their belief. Such an odd word, now,
belief.
So inappropriate. You laugh, in spite of everything, and you are filled with a joy you thought you would never know. It is a relief as you let go of your
belief,
toss it away like an old, worn, dirty sock. There is no room in your heart for that word, and you purge it from your mental dictionary, and vow never again to use it, because it is too weak for what you feel at this moment. You
know.
You
see.
You
are.

Fear is tossed away along with that word, and you search for your Sadie-love, find her huddled in the attic. She is frightened, and you wonder why she is frightened. Doesn’t she
see
?

You realize she still clings to that weakened value you have so recently disregarded. You cannot say the word, but she is merely one of those, someone on the other side. You go to her and are surprised to see a pair of black wings jutting from one of her legs. You slap at the wing, and one of the things emerges like an owl from its hole, flaps, and is gone through the window so fast you never see its eyes.

You put your arms around your daughter, and she shivers. She cringes. It is not the reaction you expected, and she turns, looks toward the darkness with widened eyes, blind to you, but not to the reality in the house below.

“
Sadie-love,
” you say. “
I’m here, baby.
”