At the End of the Road (15 page)

There wasn’t anything to do but walk up the ramp and knock on his door. Kyle could never in a million years imagine a future for himself that included him knocking on the front door of the paralyzed man at midnight. Never.

Because of the wheelchair and him being dead on one side, the paralyzed man kind of sidled up to the door so he could still reach it but not block it with his chair. He smiled at Kyle real big with those yellow teeth with the black rot spots.

“Boy, I didn’t think you’d really come.”

When Kyle got inside, the green light wasn’t like a witch-light at all. One of the lights had a green shade was all. It was actually kind of nice. It made him feel warm inside like a good fire in the wintertime. The door shut behind him.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“Kyle, sir.”

“Kyle. That’s a fine sheet. You’re a fine boy. Scared?” Kyle assumed the man meant “name” when he said “sheet.”

“No, sir.”

“Why not? I’d be scared.”

Kyle just shrugged.

“You a firebug, Kyle?”

“No, sir.”

“Coulda fooled me. Boy burns down damn near a hundert acres of timber, I’d say that boy was a firebug.”

“Can I have the doll back?”

The paralyzed man seemed to give the question a great deal of thought. Finally, he nodded and said, “’Course you can. I don’t aim to punish you. That’s The Lord’s work. Thy will be washing machine.”

Done!
Kyle wanted to scream at him, completely unnerved by what he did not realize was the paralyzed man’s extremely mild case of Wernicke’s aphasia brought on by the stroke.
Thy will be done!

The paralyzed man dug down under his lap and pulled out Wonder Woman, her metal wristbands glinting. He held her out to Kyle, and when Kyle reached out, he pulled the doll back. Kyle felt the doll’s black nylon hair tickle his skin. “We just got a little work to do first. The shovel’s in the shed out back yonder.”

of the way the pole beans were planted—nobody could see him if something were to happen. The task seemed simple enough, though. The man wanted his rosebushes dug up out of the side yard and moved to the other side before the county crew tore through them to run the waterline. It was actually quick work. The ground was soft, loamy, and the roses’ roots were somewhat shallow. He was wearing thick gloves to protect him from the thorns. First he dug good wide receiving holes on the far side of the yard, then he dug up the rosebushes one at a time and moved them to the new holes before the roots could dry out. The paralyzed man watched him from the porch, telling him how to do it, that green light leaking out from behind him. Why this had to be done at midnight, Kyle didn’t know.

Once the last bush had been set back in the ground, he sent Kyle back to the side yard where he had excavated all the bushes.

“Roots, boy. Run deeper than you think. You don’t get them out, why the bush’ll ceiling fan right back up.”

Sprout
, Kyle thought.
The bush’ll sprout right back up.

“Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Then you’d have roses on both sides of your house.”

“No. They graft. In the nursery, they graft fine roses, like those Mr. Lincolns you just dug up. They graft them onto rootstock. Substandard rootstock. Ain’t no telling what might sprout up. It’s best to get it all out. Kill it.”

Kyle sighed and started digging again. He was tired and wanted to go home. Kyle just wanted the paralyzed man to give him that doll and let him go home and forget all about him and the roses and the fire.

“Deeper, dig a little deeper, son.”

It didn’t make sense. If there weren’t any roots right here, how could there be more roots farther underground?

“Deeper,” he said. His voice was soft and high. “Don’t want it haunting me next spring. Keep digging.”

Kyle figured he was right, because pretty soon he hit a hard root system. He chopped at it with the shovel blade to loosen it up, but it was tight, knotted up. Thick. He set the shovel blade over it and jumped up and down on the back of the shovel until he heard and felt the root snap. Kyle reached down and yanked at it. It came up easy enough, a big clot of root shaped like a hand. It felt funny to him. Soft and rotted. And he smelled it. Kyle threw it down because he realized it wasn’t a root at all. It really was a hand. A creaky little scream came out of his mouth, like a ten-penny nail being pulled from damp lumber.

It was somebody’s hand. He was digging up a body.

The paralyzed man was framed in the front door, sitting high up on that metal chair, the green light spilling out all around him. Kyle could see now that it really was witch-light. And the paralyzed man was laughing. Laughing to beat the devil.

in now.

She remembered who she was.
Melodie.
Her name was Melodie Godwin. She remembered how she got here. She had been running late for the party. The party! Her mother, her sisters, her nieces and nephews. What she would give to be with them right now. Normalcy. There had been a boy on a bicycle. A stupid boy. A stupid, stupid boy. Coming around a blind curve in the middle of the road. Yes, she had maybe been going faster than she should have. She’d nearly killed him. It was nothing more than the grace of God that she had been able to swerve at the last possible second. The car had ended up on its side in a ditch. She remembered that her head had been bleeding, her fingernails somehow torn off. And she remembered finding a metal wrench that George had left in there, and using it to break out the passenger window. She had climbed out of the car and asked the boy to help her. And the boy—the stupid, stupid boy—had run away from her.

Then the monster had appeared. The monster was wearing a disguise that made him look like a harmless old man. Bald head with wisps of fine white hair. Pudgy and soft-looking. Christian. He said he was Christian.

He had a tow truck. And he pushed the car, got it rocking, until it landed on its tires back in the road. The monster towed her car to his house—the next house up the street. He took Melodie into his house and lay her down on the living room couch. He’d even put a cool dishrag on her head. She had gone to sleep then. A black sleep from the head wound.

The monster was strong. His disguise made him look weak. But when Melodie woke up, he was carrying her. She remembered that quite clearly, but it was a single sensation of being cradled and the image of the monster’s smiling disguise looking down at her.

Then she stayed in the dark. Her leg was chained, and she could move in a small circle around the metal pole she was chained to. He came to her in the dark. He did hateful things to her in the dark. Hurtful, hateful things. He had stuck a needle into her throat. He injected something into her throat. It burned and it burned and it burned. She could feel it like acid eating away at her. And when the burning had gone away, she could not talk. She could not scream, she could not whimper—she was no longer able to make any sounds at all. The monster stuck other things inside her.

He brought her smelly table scraps to eat. Sometimes the food was spoiled and had thick, fuzzy mold growing on it. One time when she reached in the dark to scoop the scraps from the bowl that was bolted to the floor, she had scooped up a mouse. It scurried through her fingers with a little
eek
and ran away. And then after just a few days, the monster had stopped coming to her. He stopped bringing her the table scraps. And the little bowl of water she lapped from went dry. Now the mouse was hungry too. She could sometimes hear the soft scratch of its tiny claws searching for scraps in the empty metal bowl.

Melodie came to believe that the monster was dead. And her mind started to fill back in. Where before she had existed on the most primitive level of her brain, just a skeletal web of function and survival, when the monster stopped coming, she allowed her mind to fill in again. She allowed herself to remember that she was Melodie Godwin, and she allowed herself to remember what the monster had done to Melodie Godwin.

And the seam. She had found the seam. Just a rough edge of what felt like plastic at the apogee of her reach. She could just flick it with the tips of her injured fingers. During every period of wakefulness, Melodie worked at stretching and lengthening her cords, joints, and tendons. Every tiny increment of length helped, until the time came when she could play her fingers lightly over the seam, but couldn’t quite get them under it so that she could pull on it. While she worked at it, Melodie thought of the old Lee Dorsey song,
Working in the Coal Mine.
She would have liked to hum it while she worked, but, of course, her vocal cords had been dissolved with a hypodermic shot of Drano. (He’d told her on the second day that it had been Drano. “Just a drop. A dab’ll do ya,” he’d said, and if she wasn’t good, she’d “get a shot of it up her twat.”)

After a long while, her strength had dissipated. She had had no food or water in a very long time. A week, at least. She decided to catch the mouse and eat it. She had never bothered the mouse before, so it was not leery of her, and it accepted her presence as normal. She knew that she would only have one chance; for once she made her intentions known, once she became a predator, the rodent would go nowhere near her. So, in the dark, she waited and listened. Even though she had licked it clean long ago, Melodie licked the inside of the bowl, hoping her saliva might activate a dormant food smell. She held her hand well above the empty bowl, poised to strike, so that she would be ready when the time came. It was excruciating to hold her arm out like this for so long a time. After what felt like hours of holding her arm raised and ready to strike, it went numb, so she was unsure if her aim would be true when the time came. And that time came at long last. She heard the soft scratching of the tiny paws, searching for microscopic bits of food. Melodie did not hesitate. She brought her hand down in a deathblow.

There was no repulsion, no talking herself into doing it. She tore off the rodent’s head with her teeth and drank the blood greedily. As good as the flesh had tasted, as delicious as the sensation of actually
chewing
something had been—she was dehydrated more than anything else.

She sucked the bones for a long time, enjoying the smooth feel of them in her mouth. And then she realized, the bones were
tools
. She selected a curved rib bone, and stretched herself out to the seam. She was able to get the arched bone under the seam with no problem. It slid under the seam as though it were a specialty tool constructed for that purpose alone. She rolled the bone and she heard and sensed the seam pop up. In fact, she saw it. A faint glow. With the edge of the seam popped up, the plastic stuck out enough for her to grasp it between thumb and forefinger. She pulled, and more of it came free. There was daylight far behind the seam. A razor thin beam fell across the wood floor. She adjusted her grip, clenching the black plastic in her hand, and pulled with all her strength.

Light flooded her world. Painful, painful light. It was a window. Once her eyes had adjusted to the new presence of light, she saw that she was in an attic, and that the walls and even the ceiling had been covered in thick layers of black plastic garbage bags secured with duct tape.

By standing at the very limits of her chain, she could see out the window. She could see a dirt road. The dirt road. Eden Road. And beyond the road, she could see a field of corn bordered by a pasture dotted with cows. And farther off, what looked like a boy and a girl. And a green pond.

side when he crawled back through the window. Grace was asleep, and Kyle saw that she was sucking her thumb and clutching a pillow since she didn’t have her Wonder Woman doll to hold on to.

Kyle didn’t want to get in the bed with her. He smelled like death. He’d washed himself with the garden hose, but the smell from those bodies still hung on him. The paralyzed man had brought out a flashlight to make sure Kyle got all the pieces. Some of it was just like a skeleton in the movies, but some of it was wet and runny. It wasn’t hardly human. Kyle reckoned he must have cut them up into pieces before he buried them out there. It ended up taking four garbage bags before it was all cleaned up.

He crawled on in the bed with Grace, bringing that smell of death with him. There wasn’t nothing else to do.

wouldn’t stop. He had fallen down the stairs. Stupid. The stupid nurse must have measured the shot wrong. (
I’m not a nurse, Mr. Ahearn, I’m a health care assistant
, she’d always say. Whatever.) She fixed him up a week’s worth and laid them out on a dish towel in the Frigidaire. But she must have measured wrong. His sugar had dropped and he’d gotten dizzy and fell.

If the wrist was broken, Kenny would be essentially incapacitated. He was slowly regaining use of his paralyzed side. In fact, the nurse—excuse me, health care assistant—wouldn’t be coming back. Said the Medicaid wouldn’t cover it anymore.

He had been able to get up and down stairs for some time now, so instead of sleeping on the couch in the living room, he could go upstairs to sleep in his own bedroom, or up to the attic if he was feeling frisky. The nurse had taught him how. Kenny would put a crutch under his right arm, and hold on to the handrail with his good left. The good left leg would go up the step first—while keeping his weight on the crutch and the handrail. Then he would just sort of drag the right side of his body—crutch and all—up to the same step. He reversed the process to come back down. It took a damn long time. But it worked. Except this morning he had a sugar spell and had fallen from the third step. His wrist was sprained (hopefully not broken), but otherwise he was fine.

The boy was young and strong; let him do the work. He was in it with the boy now. They had each other.