At the End of the Road (12 page)

It was warm like bathwater. A thick green stew of living organisms enveloped him, held him gently. Kyle had thought the water would be cold, revolting, and lifeless, but it felt good, warm and comforting. He would have stayed down in it, but of course he needed to breathe. Kyle’s feet sank into the soft bottom, but found enough resistance to propel him upward. He broke through the surface, green slimy pond scum covering him like a birth caul. He stood up. It wasn’t deep at all. The water came to his chest, but the clay bottom continued to give way and he sank farther standing there. Kyle made his way to the bank, the wet clay sucking at his shoes.

Kyle took off his shirt, and Grace let him use her Wonder Woman cape to wipe the slime and algae from his arms, face, and hair—ruining it. He smelled the same way a newborn puppy smells—sharp and pungent, offensive at first, but also familiar and comforting.

Kyle felt different somehow. He had gone through two trials in two days. Fire and water. He was growing, changing, and he knew it. What would be next? What would be his next trial?

“Open it, Kyle. Open it and see if it was worth it.”

He unraveled the brown thread. There was so much of it that it gathered in a big puffy pile on his lap. He worked his way down to find the silver dollar piece hidden inside. Kyle stared at the dollar, knowing Grace must have snuck it out of Daddy’s room, and he got to thinking about all the mean little things that he had done to Grace over the years—terrorizing her out in the cornfield, calling her a baby-cry, not letting her come with him when he went exploring. Just thinking she wasn’t good enough to be his friend. But she had saved Kyle from being trampled and gored to death by Buddy the bull, she had played it perfect and kept quiet about the fire (which had cost her the Wonder Woman doll she so loved), she had saved him from the paralyzed man (Kyle was too overcome with emotion right then to remember that she was the one who had gotten him mixed up with the paralyzed man in the first place), and she had planned and executed the single best game of treasure hunt of his life.

He smiled and hugged Grace. Grace pulled away and looked at Kyle like he had lost his mind. He had never in his lifetime spontaneously hugged Grace. He only did it when Mama made him.

He didn’t know what was wrong with him, but Kyle started crying. Tears were a shameful thing to him, and he turned away so that Grace wouldn’t see. But she had seen. And that got her to crying too. And they just sat there a minute, crying on the bank of the green pond, neither one of them really knowing why.

Only yesterday he had made up his mind to be better to Grace, to treat her like a friend. And already he had let her down.

“Kyyyyyyyyle!” The note of alarm in her voice was escalating.

They were in the corn, and he had lost her. The one thing that could completely unnerve her. When Grace reached that level of panic, Kyle typically only had a few minutes to intervene and save her before she broke down in a sobbing spell that could last all afternoon. He hadn’t been paying attention.

She could be anywhere among the rows. Kyle had been daydreaming. Thinking about the fire. Thinking about not getting caught. It just somehow didn’t seem right to get away with something like that. Like there ought to be a punishment. It was just too big of a thing to have done. Too wrong and bad. Nobody ought to ever be able to get away with doing something that bad. If people were allowed to get away with horrible, dangerous, destructive acts like that, then this world wouldn’t be nothing but pure chaos. And he had got to figuring that just because his folks didn’t catch him in it, that didn’t necessarily mean that he had gotten away with it. Kyle had started to feel like there was something just outside of his field of vision. Something bad. Something that he couldn’t quite see but knew was there, hiding itself in the shadows. Biding its time. Maybe God didn’t like it when people got away with bad things. And He put the fix in.

Kyle was scared. It was like being chased by a ghost. Or Soap Sally—the crazy woman Mama had told them about who lived off in the woods by herself in a lean-to covered in pine straw. Soap Sally kept a fire burning and she cooked polk salad in a metal pot all day long. That’s all she ate. Polk salad (Paw-Paw Edwards used to call it poke sallet) is poisonous, but lots of people eat it. It has to be boiled three times to get all the poison out, but even then, you’re still getting some of the poison. All those years of eating polk salad had damaged Soap Sally’s brain. She was crazy. Soap Sally had needles on the ends of her fingers. Because her poisoned brain didn’t know any better, she jammed sewing needles up under her fingernails, and she would scoop the polk salad right out of the boiling pot using her needle-fingers.

To make money, if Soap Sally ever came across any kids wandering out in the woods, she would get them and stab them with her needle-fingers and boil them in the polk salad and make soap from the fat she rendered off their tender little bodies. And she would sell the soap for money in town to the beauty shops where the women got their hair done and their faces made up. Soap Sally made a lot of money from selling that soap because it made the women’s faces smooth and pretty like baby’s skin. She told the people at the beauty parlors that she made it from special roots and berries she found out in the woods. Mama said most folks knew it was made out of little kids, but they bought it anyway because of how good it made their faces look.

Kyle realized that he and Grace had burned down Soap Sally’s woods. They drove her from her home. Maybe she was living in the corn now. But he was pretty sure Soap Sally was made-up. Just like he was pretty sure that Santa Claus was not for real. Nonetheless, when Christmas came around, Kyle found himself writing letters and composing wish lists and believing with all his heart. And late at night when he couldn’t sleep and he could hear branches rubbing and clicking together outside his bedroom window, he thought about how that could be Soap Sally out there, that he could hear her needle-fingers clicking together while she was sneaking around, looking for some kid she could turn into soap and sell in town.

Right now, though, Kyle wasn’t worried about Soap Sally. It was the shadows that lingered on the edges of Kyle’s world that bothered him. Those shadows were stretching out to him, but when he would turn to look, they’d curl themselves back in like they had never been there. Something bad was coming his way.

“Kyyyyyyyyyyyyle!”

There was something disturbing in Grace’s voice that froze his blood, the same way his blood froze when he saw that the fire had gotten away from them. He guessed a part of him always knew that the panic in Grace’s voice when she got lost in the corn was at least a little bit playacting. That she was in on the game as much as he was. But there was some new quality to the way she was calling out to him now. The only thing he could compare it to was when they found the fox that had its leg caught up in one of Daddy-Bob’s traps and the way it had cried to be set free.

Grace was trapped. Or hurt. Or both.

He took off, tearing through the corn; his hearing tuned like radar to hone in on Grace. Kyle knew it was time for him to pay for the sin he’d committed by setting that fire. Something bad wasn’t just coming his way.

Something bad was here.

Road.

Kenny Ahearn sat on his front porch and watched the public works crew in their yellow vests as they got to work tearing up the ground. The fine strands of white hair that clung to his otherwise bald head whipped around in the breeze. The men were about a half mile up the street. It didn’t make sense to him. He didn’t care what they said, there was nothing wrong with the well water. There had been a county meeting last year—Lithia Springs had once been an incorporated city, but that had been dissolved many years ago, and now Lithia Springs was just an unincorporated swatch of Douglas County named for the trace levels of lithium that spiked the water drawn from its natural springs—to vote on whether or not to bring public waterlines to this road. Kenny strongly opposed the idea of losing his free well water and having to pay for the new lines—for many reasons—but he had not attended the meeting to vocalize his opinion, because he did not know if he would be in the minority or the majority, and either way, he did not wish to draw attention to himself. In any case, it came out that the local groundwater was contaminated with chemical runoff from the Watkins Lumber and Pulp Processing Plant in the northern corner of the county. The plant had been fined and shut down until proper waste disposal methods were put in place. The chemical levels were low and said to be harmless in the short term. But it was estimated that it would take fifty years for the groundwater to cleanse itself. It was a public health issue. County water was coming.

Kenny had used his electric wheelchair (God bless the good people of the Lithia Springs First Baptist Church of God!) and gone down to the end of Eden Road that morning and talked to the foreman. Kenny was finding that his wheelchair was opening all kinds of doors for him. Normally, people did not stop what they were doing to make time for Kenny Ahearn. But being in a wheelchair, they seemed to make him priority. Kenny suspected that the sight of a wheelchair made them nervous, and they just wanted to deal with him right away so that he could be dismissed.

The crew foreman had made a big show of hunkering down next to Kenny and telling him how the project would progress. They planned to lay the main line first, starting at the top at Lee Road and working their way down to the bottom where Eden Road met Mount Vernon Road and Sweetwater Reservoir. They would then come back and run pipe from the main line to each house one at a time. There were only twelve houses on the road, and the foreman figured that they would be hooking up Kenny’s house in four, five days at the most.

The foreman even said that the county was going to pave the road when they were through. That suited Kenny just fine. The washboard surface and mudholes of the dirt road made using his electric wheelchair on it a real chore.

Kenny sat on his porch now, staring across the road into the cornfield, thinking about all of this. The foreman had confirmed Kenny’s fear that the waterline must be run underground (of course) to the back of the house where it could hook in with the existing pipes that ran up from the well pump. This could not be allowed to happen. The side lot contained his rose garden. His mama had planted it when his daddy was still alive—over twenty years ago. And with Mama gone that rose garden was his legacy, his memory of both of his parents. And over the years, he had used the beloved ground to bury the remains of the few strays that Mama had allowed him to keep and care for. Pets that he’d loved far more than he had ever loved any of the supposedly “real people” in his life. So the rose garden in the side yard was a memorial as well. Kenny would not sit idly by and see Mama’s roses turned under, his memories exposed.

Even if he were physically capable, Kenny could not transfer the roses to the backyard. The ground was dark and rich in the side yard. It was easy to dig there. The backyard was littered with flat slabs of granite. The farmer who had built this house back in the 1930s had saved the large granite slabs when he cleared the surrounding land for farming. He had constructed a kind of rock patio back there. Nothing could grow there. The ground was impenetrable.

Kenny’s house was essentially isolated on the road. To the left was a field of pole beans, to the right a plot of okra that gave way to watermelons and pumpkins at the fringes—all owned by Daddy-Bob. Directly across the road from him was a thick field of corn. To the left of the corn was a cow pasture. To the right, the house that had those children who just about burned down the whole damn world the other day.

Kenny slitted his eyes and set his gaze straight ahead, just above the corn. All of his senses were wide open, seeing what he could draw to himself. To solve his dilemma. Kenny believed he had that power. Kenny believed he had many powers, but the key to it all was his ability to draw what he needed so that it came straight to him, so that the universe would deliver whatever it was that he needed right to his front door.

After a while, Kenny sensed a presence in the corn. A movement. From deep in the sticky green he heard a voice and set about drawing it to him.

pletely lost in the field. The harder he tried to pinpoint the direction of Grace’s voice, the more turned around he got. He would run in the direction he thought her voice was coming from, and when he got there and listened, she sounded farther away. He made himself stop. And listen. And wait for it. She hadn’t called his name in what felt like a long time. Still, he forced himself to stand still, to set all his senses wide open, to see or smell or feel or hear anything that might lead him to Grace. A high-pitched scream broke the silence like shattering glass, but it was cut short. The scream was clipped like something bad had happened to the person doing the screaming.

It was enough for him to finally get a true sense of the direction. He took off to his left, running for all he was worth. He felt the rough corn fronds cut his cheeks. Kyle didn’t care. And he didn’t care about omens or retribution. He just knew that Grace needed to be saved.

Like entering a different world, Kyle broke through the corn into the bright sunlight of Eden Road. Directly in front of him, the paralyzed man was sitting on his front porch. And he had Grace.

His good arm was wrapped around Grace’s head, so that the crook of his elbow covered Grace’s mouth and face. Grace’s Wonder Woman doll was gripped talon-like in his fat fingers. Grace in a million years would never voluntarily go up on the paralyzed man’s porch. No kid would. So he knew right away that she’d been lured up there with that doll.

His good leg was hooked around Grace’s thighs. His dead half just sat to the side, not moving. Grace was squirming like an impaled night crawler, but he had hooked her good. She wasn’t going to get away from him on her own. She looked Kyle in the eyes and of course he saw the terror there, not the pretend terror from their games, but the true terror of having got herself into something more real than either of them had ever imagined.