Bag of Bones (44 page)

But why?

D
evore was mad, all right, mad as a hatter, and he couldn't have caught me at a worse, weaker, more terrified moment. And I think that everything from that moment on was almost pre-ordained. From there to the terrible storm they still talk about in this part of the world, it all came down like a rockslide.

I felt fine the rest of Friday afternoon—my talk with Bonnie left a lot of questions unanswered, but it had been a tonic just the same. I made a vegetable stir-fry (atonement for my latest plunge into the Fry-O-Lator at the Village Cafe) and ate it while I watched the evening news. On the other side of the lake the sun was sliding down toward the mountains and flooding the living room with gold. When Tom Brokaw closed up shop, I decided to take a walk north along The Street—I'd go as far as I could and still be assured of getting home by dark, and as I went I'd think about the things Bill Dean and Bonnie Amudson had told me. I'd think about them the way
I sometimes walked and thought about plot-snags in whatever I was working on.

I walked down the railroad-tie steps, still feeling perfectly fine (confused, but fine), started off along The Street, then paused to look at the Green Lady. Even with the evening sun shining fully upon her, it was hard to see her for what she actually was—just a birch tree with a half-dead pine standing behind it, one branch of the latter making a pointing arm. It was as if the Green Lady were saying go north, young man, go north. Well, I wasn't exactly young, but I could go north, all right. For awhile, at least.

Yet I stood a moment longer, uneasily studying the face I could see in the bushes, not liking the way the little shake of breeze seemed to make what was nearly a mouth sneer and grin. I think perhaps I started to feel a little bad then, was too preoccupied to notice it. I set off north, wondering what, exactly, Jo might have written . . . for by then I was starting to believe she might have written something, after all. Why else had I found my old typewriter in her studio? I would go through the place, I decided. I would go through it carefully and . . .

help im drown

The voice came from the woods, the water, from myself. A wave of lightheadedness passed through my thoughts, lifting and scattering them like leaves in a breeze. I stopped. All at once I had never felt so bad, so
blighted,
in my life. My chest was tight. My stomach folded in on itself like a cold flower. My eyes filled with chilly water that was nothing like tears, and I knew what was coming.
No,
I tried to say, but the word wouldn't come out.

My mouth filled with the cold taste of lakewater instead, all those dark minerals, and suddenly the trees were shimmering before my eyes as if I were looking up at them through clear liquid, and the pressure on my chest had become dreadfully localized and taken the shapes of hands. They were holding me down.

“Won't it stop doing that?” someone asked—almost cried. There was no one on The Street but me, yet I heard that voice clearly. “Won't it ever stop doing that?”

What came next was no outer voice but alien thoughts in my own head. They beat against the walls of my skull like moths trapped inside a light-fixture . . . or inside a Japanese lantern.

help I'm drown

help I'm drown

blue-cap man say git me

blue-cap man say dassn't let me ramble

help I'm drown

lost my berries they on the path

he holdin me

he face shimmer n look bad

lemme up lemme up O sweet Jesus
lemme up

oxen free allee allee oxen free
PLEASE

OXEN FREE
you go on and stop now
ALLEE OXEN FREE

she scream my name

she scream it so
LOUD

I bent forward in an utter panic, opened my mouth, and from my gaping, straining mouth there poured a cold flood of . . .

Nothing at all.

The horror of it passed and yet it didn't pass. I still
felt terribly sick to my stomach, as if I had eaten something to which my body had taken a violent offense, some kind of ant-powder or maybe a killer mushroom, the kind Jo's fungi guides pictured inside red borders. I staggered forward half a dozen steps, gagging dryly from a throat which still believed it was wet. There was another birch where the bank dropped to the lake, arching its white belly gracefully over the water as if to see its reflection by evening's flattering light. I grabbed it like a drunk grabbing a lamppost.

The pressure in my chest began to ease, but it left an ache as real as rain. I hung against the tree, heart fluttering, and suddenly I became aware that something stank—an evil, polluted smell worse than a clogged septic pool which has simmered all summer under the blazing sun. With it was a sense of some hideous presence giving off that odor, something which should have been dead and wasn't.

Oh stop, allee allee oxen free, I'll do anything only stop,
I tried to say, and still nothing came out. Then it was gone. I could smell nothing but the lake and the woods . . . but I could see something: a boy in the lake, a little drowned dark boy lying on his back. His cheeks were puffed out. His mouth hung slackly open. His eyes were as white as the eyes of a statue.

My mouth filled with the unmerciful iron of the lake again. Help me, lemme up, help I'm drown. I leaned out, screaming inside my head, screaming down at the dead face, and I realized
I was looking up at myself,
looking up through the rose-shimmer of sunset water at a white man in blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt holding onto a trembling birch and trying to
scream, his liquid face in motion, his eyes momentarily blotted out by the passage of a small perch coursing after a tasty bug, I was both the dark boy and the white man, drowned in the water and drowning in the air, is this right, is this what's happening, tap once for yes twice for no.

I retched nothing but a single runner of spit, and, impossibly, a fish jumped at it. They'll jump at almost anything at sunset; something in the dying light must make them crazy. The fish hit the water again about seven feet from the bank, spanking out a circular silver ripple, and it was gone—the taste in my mouth, the horrible smell, the shimmering drowned face of the Negro child—a Negro, that was how he would have thought of himself—whose name had almost surely been Tidwell.

I looked to my right and saw a gray forehead of rock poking out of the mulch. I thought,
There, right there,
and as if in confirmation, that horrible putres-cent smell puffed at me again, seemingly from the ground.

I closed my eyes, still hanging onto the birch for dear life, feeling weak and sick and ill, and that was when Max Devore, that madman, spoke from behind me. “Say there, whoremaster, where's your whore?”

I turned and there he was, with Rogette Whitmore by his side. It was the only time I ever met him, but once was enough. Believe me, once was more than enough.

*   *   *

His wheelchair hardly looked like a wheelchair at all. What it looked like was a motorcycle sidecar crossed with a lunar lander. Half a dozen chrome wheels ran
along both sides. Bigger wheels—four of them, I think—ran in a row across the back. None looked to be exactly on the same level, and I realized each was tied into its own suspension-bed. Devore would have a smooth ride over ground a lot rougher than The Street. Above the back wheels was an enclosed engine compartment. Hiding Devore's legs was a fiberglass nacelle, black with red pinstriping, that would not have looked out of place on a racing car. Implanted in the center of it was a gadget that looked like my DSS satellite dish . . . some sort of computerized avoidance system, I guessed. Maybe even an autopilot. The armrests were wide and covered with controls. Holstered on the left side of this machine was a green oxygen tank four feet long. A hose went to a clear plastic accordion tube; the accordion tube led to a mask which rested in Devore's lap. It made me think of the old guy's Stenomask. Coming on the heels of what had just happened, I might have considered this Tom Clancyish vehicle a hallucination, except for the bumper-sticker on the nacelle, below the dish.
I BLEED DODGER BLUE
, it said.

This evening the woman I had seen outside The Sunset Bar at Warrington's was wearing a white blouse with long sleeves and black pants so tapered they made her legs look like sheathed swords. Her narrow face and hollow cheeks made her resemble Edvard Munch's screamer more than ever. Her white hair hung around her face in a lank cowl. Her lips were painted so brightly red she seemed to be bleeding from the mouth.

She was old and she was ugly, but she was a prize compared to Mattie's father-in-law. Scrawny, blue-lipped, the skin around his eyes and the corners of his
mouth a dark exploded purple, he looked like something an archeologist might find in the burial room of a pyramid, surrounded by his stuffed wives and pets, bedizened with his favorite jewels. A few wisps of white hair still clung to his scaly skull; more tufts sprang from enormous ears which seemed to have melted like wax sculptures left out in the sun. He was wearing white cotton pants and a billowy blue shirt. Add a little black beret and he would have looked like a French artist from the nineteenth century at the end of a very long life.

Across his lap was a cane of some black wood. Snugged over the end was a bright red bicycle grip. The fingers grasping it looked powerful, but they were going as black as the cane itself. His circulation was failing, and I couldn't imagine what his feet and his lower legs must look like.

“Whore run off and left you, has she?”

I tried to say something. A croak came out of my mouth, nothing more. I was still holding the birch. I let go of it and tried to straighten up, but my legs were still weak and I had to grab it again.

He nudged a silver toggle switch and the chair came ten feet closer, halving the distance between us. The sound it made was a silky whisper; watching it was like watching an evil magic carpet. Its many wheels rose and fell independent of one another and flashed in the declining sun, which had begun to take on a reddish cast. And as he came closer, I felt the sense of the man. His body was rotting out from under him, but the force around him was undeniable and daunting, like an electrical storm. The woman paced beside him, regarding me with silent amusement.
Her eyes were pinkish. I assumed then that they were gray and had picked up a bit of the coming sunset, but I think now she was an albino.

“I always liked a whore,” he said. He drew the word out, making it
horrrrrrr.
“Didn't I, Rogette?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “In their place.”

“Sometimes their place was on my face!” he cried with a kind of insane perkiness, as if she had contradicted him. “Where is she, young man? Whose face is she sitting on right now? I wonder. That smart lawyer you found? Oh, I know all about him, right down to the Unsatisfactory Conduct he got in the third grade. I make it my business to know things. It's the secret of my success.”

With an enormous effort, I straightened up. “What are you doing here?”

“Having a constitutional, same as you. And no law against it, is there? The Street belongs to anyone who wants to use it. You haven't been here long, young whoremaster, but surely you've been here long enough to know that. It's our version of the town common, where good pups and vile dogs may walk side-by-side.”

Once more using the hand not bunched around the red bicycle grip, he picked up the oxygen mask, sucked deeply, then dropped it back in his lap. He grinned—an unspeakable grin of complicity that revealed gums the color of iodine.

“She good? That little
horrrrrr
of yours? She must be good to have kept my son prisoner in that nasty little trailer where she lives. And then along comes you even before the worms had finished with my boy's eyes. Does her cunt
suck
?”

“Shut up.”

Rogette Whitmore threw back her head and laughed. The sound was like the scream of a rabbit caught in an owl's talons, and my flesh crawled. I had an idea she was as crazy as he was. Thank God they were old. “You struck a nerve there, Max,” she said.

“What do you want?” I took a breath . . . and caught a taste of that putrescence again. I gagged. I didn't want to, but I couldn't help it.

Devore straightened in his chair and breathed deeply, as if to mock me. In that moment he looked like Robert Duvall in
Apocalypse Now,
striding along the beach and telling the world how much he loved the smell of napalm in the morning. His grin widened. “Lovely place, just here, isn't it? A cozy spot to stop and think, wouldn't you say?” He looked around. “This is where it happened, all right. Ayuh.”

“Where the boy drowned.”

I thought Whitmore's smile looked momentarily uneasy at that. Devore didn't. He clutched for his translucent oxygen mask with an old man's overwide grip, fingers that grope rather than reach. I could see little bubbles of mucus clinging to the inside. He sucked deep again, put it down again.

“Thirty or more folks have drowned in this lake, and that's just the ones they know about,” he said. “What's one boy, more or less?”

“I don't get it. Were there
two
Tidwell boys who died here? The one that got blood-poisoning and the one—”

“Do you care about your soul, Mr. Noonan? Your immortal soul? God's butterfly caught in a cocoon of flesh that will soon stink like mine?”

I said nothing. The strangeness of what had happened before he arrived was passing. What replaced it was his incredible personal magnetism. I have never in my life felt so much raw force. There was nothing supernatural about it, either, and
raw
is exactly the right word. I might have run. Under other circumstances, I'm sure I would have. It certainly wasn't bravery that kept me where I was; my legs still felt rubbery, and I was afraid I might fall down.