Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (8 page)

Fate Porch sat at the kitchen
table, sipping home-brewed whiskey and smoking his pipe. The home brew burned
his throat going down, but it took away the dry bite of his smoking tobacco,
and it gave him a pleasant buzz that took some of the edge off his anxiety. He
was worried about Odell, but he wasn’t ready to believe his mother’s grim
prophecy of the boy’s death. The old lady’s prognostications usually turned out
to be right, but she wasn’t infallible. She had the
sight
, but she was
old and her mind wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. Anybody could throw the
bones, but it took someone with true second sight to read them properly, and if
Maw’s mind was dulled by her years, then her interpretation could be wrong.
Fate was banking on her being wrong; he just wasn’t ready to accept that one of
his sons could be dead, cut down in his prime. But if Odell
was
dead—if
some son of a bitch had killed him—then there would be hell to pay and nothing
else for it. And Fate would personally see the killer delivered into the hands
of the Old Scratch.

He got up to stretch his bones and
get the kinks out of his back, then he went out on the front porch in hopes of
seeing the boys drive up, but they didn’t. Not yet. He stuck his hands in the
deep pockets of his overalls and rocked on his heels. In a rare moment of
self-reflection, he admitted to himself that his age and his poor health were
catching up with him and that his oldest boy Luther would have to take over
soon as head of the family. Sooner than Luther knew. Because Fate had cancer.
He could feel it eating away his insides, and Maw had confirmed it with her
sight. Fate didn’t hold with doctors, so medical treatment was not an option.
As his name implied, he was a fatalist; if he was meant to die of cancer, then
so be it. No doctor’s scalpel was going to change his fate.

He was confident that Luther was
ready to take the reins of familial leadership and that their relatives in
Vidalia and Statesboro would give the boy the same respect they had given him.
Luther had inherited Fate’s iron will and coldly calculating mind, and he
surely would need those attributes to keep Cowboy and their more slovenly
cousins in line. Luther had been toughened by their hardscrabble existence and
had come to understand that life could crush a man of weak will in the blink of
an eye. Fate had given his eldest son plenty of bare-knuckled instruction,
beating him mercilessly when it was called for, but never to the point of breaking
his spirit. That was the main thing. You could beat a man down to his knees,
but you had to leave him a shred of dignity if you expected him to get up again
on his own two feet. Luther knew what it meant to take a beating, but there was
no quit in the boy. The only way to keep him down was to kill him. And if you
killed a Porch, you were as good as dead, because the family motto was
blood
for blood
. Fate’s own father had shotgunned two revenuers who had shot and
killed Fate’s uncle during a raid on his moonshine still. “It all boils down to
two things, son,” Fate’s father had told him on  his sixteenth birthday. “Blood
and honor.
Family
blood and
family
honor. Ain’t no bloodshed too
much if it’s shed in defense of that honor. Cain’t nobody else do it for you
either. Not the cops, not the government, not Jesus Christ Hisself. It’s all up
to you and yours.” Fate had learned his lessons well, and so had Luther in his
turn. And if Maw was right about Odell being dead, then Fate was going to let
Luther call his own shots in settling the matter. It was his time.

Headlights coming up the driveway
pulled Fate from his ruminations. Now he would learn the fate of his middle
son, Odell. And Lord help anyone who might have harmed the boy. He stepped off
the porch and went out to meet the boys as they were climbing out of Luther’s
car.

“It’s bad, Diddy,” Cowboy told him
as he slammed the passenger door and spat on the ground. “Real bad.”

“Not so loud,” Fate said in a loud
whisper. “You’ll wake your gramaw.”

Luther eased his door shut. “The
Partain boy says his friend killed Odell. Shot him and buried him out past the
wolf’s den.”

“Oh Lord,” Fate moaned. His throat
clenched and the cancer made itself known in a stab of sharp pain. A wave of
dizziness washed over him and little spots of light appeared in front of his
eyes.

“You all right, Diddy?” Luther
asked.

“Yeah. Just a dizzy spell. You
believe the boy?”

“We got him hung up in the old
Jenkins barn. Gave him a little taste of my knife and he broke. No way he’s
lying, the little pussy.”          

Cowboy said, “You want us to go get
the sumbitch, right? The peckerwood that killed Odell?”

“Joe Rob Campbell,” Luther said.
“Lives in that brick house on the corner of West Main and Fifth Avenue.”

“What do you think, Luther?” Fate
tried to see his oldest son’s eyes in the darkness.

“Well, the first thing to do is get
Odell’s body,” said Luther. “Take the little peckerwood with us and make him
dig it up.”

Fate nodded. “Then what?”

“Cut Partain’s throat and bury him
right there. Even if he didn’t pull the trigger on Odell, he was there. Can’t
leave him alive no how ’cause he could go to the cops.”

“And the Campbell boy?”

“Seeing as how he lives in the
middle of town, we’ll have to be real careful. We go drag his ass out of bed,
take him out in the woods and kill him. Unless you wanna kill him yourself.”

Fate rubbed his stubbled chin,
contemplating Luther’s plan. “No, I won’t kill him. I’ll let you have that
pleasure.”

“What about me?” Cowboy chimed in.
“He was my brother too. I want a shot at the little bastard.”

“Luther’s calling the shots,” Fate
said.

“Damn, Diddy, why—”

“Hush up, boy,” Fate warned Cowboy.
“Don’t make me go upside your head.”

Luther wasted no time in taking up
the mantle of leadership. “We’ll take my car. Get a couple of shovels out of
the barn, Cowboy. I’ll get a blanket for Odell. You coming with us, Diddy?”

“Bet your ass I am.” Fate swallowed
the pain in the back of his throat and ignored the foul taste emanating from
the cancer that was slowly eating his life away.

The front porch light came on, and
his mother appeared behind the screen door. “Fate?” she called. “It come to me
how to get the one you want.”

“What, Maw?”

“Come to me in a dream,” she said.
Unlike her rail-thin body, her voice was deep and strong. “You must take off
the ring finger of the one you have and send it to the one you want. He’ll come
to you if you do that.”

“God...dang it,” Cowboy said,
modifying his curse so his father wouldn’t smack him for taking the Lord’s name
in vain. “Gramaw’s spooky, ain’t she? How you reckon she does it?”

“You hear me, son?” the old lady
called.

“I hear.”

“She already knows about Odell,
don’t she?” Luther whispered.

Fate nodded. “She knows. She knew
before any of us.”

“What’s she talking about, take off
the ring finger?”

“The Partain boy. He wearing a
ring?”

“Hell, I don’t know” Luther
shrugged. “He might be.”

“He’s got a school ring,” Cowboy
said. “I seen it. It’s one of them Blue Devil rings. Like the football team? I
had dibs on it.”

“That’s what she’s talking about,” Fate
said. “Send the finger with the ring still on it to the son of a bitch who
killed Odell. We’ll send a note with it, saying if you wanna see your friend
alive, do what we say.”

“Oh, yeah, I get it,” Cowboy said.

“But what if he goes to the cops?”
Luther asked.

“Your gramaw says it’ll bring him
to us,” said Fate. “He won’t go to the police.”

“We ain’t gonna stick the finger in
the mail, are we?” Cowboy said.

“Hell no,” Luther said. “We’ll
deliver it our own selves. Get the bolt cutters. We’ll take off the sumbitch’s
finger with a clean cut.”

 Fate was nearly overcome with
fatherly pride. He reckoned he had raised his boys right. After he was dead and
gone, Luther and Cowboy would see to it that the family honor was upheld, come
hell or high water.

And he had an inkling that there
would be plenty of hell coming their way.

Cornelius Weehunt stood on the rim
of the sinkhole and gazed down into the thick darkness. He didn’t like standing
this close to the hellish pit, and it scared the bejesus out of him, but
somebody
had to keep watch until it was filled in and paved over. Nobody else was doing
it, so Corny had taken the task upon himself. Sure, it was a thankless job,
standing here in the middle of the night with Main Street deserted and creepy. 
Nobody would come up to him later, shake his hand, pat him on the back or give
him a medal for it, but he didn’t care about that. All he cared about was
making sure nothing evil came out of there to plague his town. And if something
did rise up from hell’s depths,
he
would be the one to raise the alarm.
He remembered a story from his childhood about a little boy who stuck his
finger in a dyke to hold back a deadly flood, and he likened himself to that
heroic little boy. That story was one of very few he could remember since his
accident ten years ago. He had fallen off a ladder while painting a house and
landed on his head. The doctor said he was lucky to survive the fall, what with
his head injury and all. It had hurt his brain, the doctor said. Hurt it bad.
Killed off a little part of it. He would never be like he was before the
accident. His memory was full of holes. He sometimes lost whole days, and try
as he might, he couldn’t remember where he’d been or what he’d done on those
lost days. And that wasn’t all. Sometimes he would fly into a rage for no good
reason and smash up things, yell and curse. Once he’d even attacked his best
and only true friend, Otis Dellums. Otis had been eating Vienna sausages out of
a can and Corny had jumped up and kicked poor Otis in the mouth, busting his
lip and knocking out a tooth. He still felt real bad about that, but good old
Otis didn’t hold a grudge. Otis was retarded. But he had a good heart, and when
he smiled at you, it made you feel warm all the way down to your feet. People
said Corny was retarded too, but he knew that wasn’t true. It was just that
part of his brain was dead. And evidently it wasn’t one of the real important
parts. If it was, he wouldn’t be standing here now at the edge of the sinkhole
in the middle of the night, watching over things for the whole town of
Vinewood, would he? Heck no. Corny Weehunt was smart enough to know what it
meant to be a good citizen. And seeing as how nobody else was out here but him,
he figured he was some ways better than all those people snug in their beds on
this sultry night. He was like those old railroad signalmen his father had told
him about, solitary men manning their lonesome outposts in the dark of night,
dedicated to their work and giving up warm beds to make sure the trains ran
safely over the tracks. Corny was sure his father would’ve been proud of him
for keeping this night watch.

“Ain’t no flies on Cornelius
Weehunt,” he said aloud. “Just these damn skeeters.” He slapped his ear where a
mosquito was buzzing. He didn’t think he got him, but the slap made his ear
ring so loud that he couldn’t hear the skeeter anymore.

But he could hear Whisperer. He
could hear Whisperer just fine, though he sometimes wished he couldn’t. It
wasn’t that Corny didn’t like the company of the whispery voice that often
spoke to him; it was more that he didn’t always like or even understand the
things Whisperer whispered to him in that rasping, hissing voice that reminded
him of insect wings buzzing inside his head. If asked, Corny couldn’t have said
if the voice was male or female, but of course nobody ever asked because Corny
never told anyone about Whisperer. He figured that people would say he was
crazy if they found out about the voice inside his skull and that Doctor
Jackson might even want to put him back in that mental hospital if he knew
about Whisperer. And Whisperer wouldn’t like that at all. The last thing Corny
wanted was to make Whisperer mad. Bad things happened when Whisperer got mad.
Really bad things. Like the time the voice had told him to shoplift that
bone-handle hunting knife from the Economy Hardware Store. Corny knew stealing
was wrong, though he
did
like that knife a lot and wouldn’t have minded
owning it and wearing it on his belt. That was the time he had refused to obey
Whisperer and had talked back, saying, “Stealing’s wrong. It’s against the law
and I ain’t gone do it.” Old Man Jones had given him a queer look and come out
from behind the counter to stand right behind Corny. “Who you talking to, Corny?”
Jones asked. Corny said, “Nobody. Just myself.” And Jones said, “You ain’t
thinking of stealing something, are you?” “No, sir,” Corny said. And Old Man
Jones said, “Better go on now if you ain’t fixing to buy something.” Then the
bad thing happened. In a slithery voice Whisperer told—
commanded
—Corny
to pick up that bone-handle knife, slip it out of its leather sheath and point
it right at Old Man Jones’ big potbelly, which was exactly what Corny did. That
incident had landed Corny in jail, but Chief Chaney let him out after Corny
promised that he would stay out of the hardware store. Luke Chaney was a good
man who understood Corny’s special problems. The chief knew Corny was not a bad
man. But even Chief Chaney wouldn’t have understood about Whisperer. And Chaney
wasn’t Chief anymore. Besides, Corny knew in his gut that Whisperer didn’t want
him to ever tell anybody about Whisperer. And if he ever did spill the beans,
Whisperer would make him suffer for it.

Now, as he stood at the edge of the
killing hole, swaying a little in a rising wind, Corny cocked his head and
tried to hear what Whisperer was saying. The hissing words were garbled but he
could make out the urgent tone in the voice. Whisperer was telling him
something of great importance, but he couldn’t quite make out the words.
“Damnation,” Corny whispered back. “Tell me plain.”

But the whispering stopped
suddenly, the way insects sometimes stop their chittering when something hungry
threatens them.
Something hungry
, Whisperer hissed. And the darkness
down in the hole thickened like cold gravy and he backed away, his heart
thumping hard in his thin chest and making his ribs tingle. The street lights
of Main Street flickered and dimmed, painting the storefronts and the street
with a sickly light, reminding him of old, old photographs, black & white
but yellowed to brown with age. It was then that Corny knew the darkness itself
was hungry.  He had no idea what the dark could be hungry
for
, but he
sensed that whatever it was, it couldn’t be good, and that it—the dark—was
very, very dangerous.

He turned away and loped down the
street, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the hole of
congealing darkness.