Fiends (3 page)

5

He saw through tears but heard nothing of the running horse because of the pressure of blood in his ears. From his knees Arne watched as the horse and shay came nearer. The woman with the reins wore a short-sleeved white dress, like a wedding dress, that glowed in the shade of the hood, a white Sunday hat with a heavy, glossy veil, and white gloves past the elbows.

Sick and trembling, Arne got slowly to his feet, conscious of the weight of the bundles of strangler fig on his back. The horse, a gray mare not too well cared for, slowed to a walk and the shay, one wheel squeaking, drew alongside him.

There was something bulky knotted in a red and white checkered tablecloth on the small seat beside the woman. The horse snorted and pawed at the dirt road, made nervous by the smell from the cove, the presence of buzzards. There were raw whip slashes on the mare's lathered flanks.

The woman slowly, cautiously lifted her veil and peered out as if from a secluded parlor, her colorless mouth pursed in astonishment.

"Mother!"

"Arne, what are you doing here?" Birka said, and smiled fondly.

He turned toward the cove, trying to frame an explanation, but his knees were buckling. He turned back to her and lifted his arms, still winded, wanting at the moment only to be held and comforted.

"Yes," she said, socketing the butt of the whip into the holder. "You come, too."

Arne took a step toward the shay. His mother frowned, drawing back on the seat.

"But get rid of those awful things."

He didn't know what she meant. Birka gestured toward the bundles of strangler fig still oozing their clean sap, then quickly withdrew her hand. But not before Arne saw that something had popped through the kid glove where her little finger should have been.

It looked like a long black thorn.

The bundle on the seat next to his mother bulged, and Arne heard a terrified squeal. He thought it must be an animal, a baby pig, but then the bundle spoke.

"Help!
Help
meeee!"

A girl's voice. His thoughts flashed to the cornshuck doll in Hawkshaw's mouth. Horrified, he looked into his mother's eyes, just before she dropped the veil. The next thing he knew she had lifted him from the road by one arm, nearly wrenching it out of the shoulder cuff. She was a tall woman, but he had never known her to have this kind of strength. One of the bundles of strangler fig slipped from his shoulder and fell into the road.

"Never mind," his mother said grimly, and she hit the tablecloth with her other hand, hard enough to provoke more squeals. "She's mine. You just come along and do what I say."

Even through the glove leather he felt the shocking coldness of her fingers. Her breath was like a blue norther on his cheek and there was no familiar odor about her, of sachet, of clean and well-brushed hair.

He swung wildly with his free hand, knocking away the wide-brimmed hat and veil.

His mother's head was perfectly bald.

Before she could pull Arne into her lap, Hawkshaw came snarling up from the road between them, going straight for her throat. The mare reared and his mother let go of Arne to fight off Hawkshaw. The carriage teetered on one wheel and Arne fell hard, the breath knocked out of him. Then Hawkshaw dropped beside him, thrashing, his wide-open throat spraying blood, and the shay, settling down on both wheels, lurched ahead, the big right wheel spinning in the dust past Arne's head, just inches away. He saw his mother, whip in hand, standing precariously, lashing the mare down the road to Dante's Mill.

"Noooo!"

She turned her head momentarily, that frightening head with no hair, eyes big and furious, features like clever painting on an Easter goose egg in the window of Bauman's Mercantile.

"I'm going to Theron!" she called. "Tell Enoch to stay away this time, or it'll be the end for him!"

Arne was stumbling after the shay, not thinking about what he was doing, certain that what he thought he'd seen was not real but some kind of elaborate, awful joke
(his mother had hair!).
But he couldn't make her out any more because she had settled back in the seat next to the child bound up in the checkered tablecloth (had she been acting bad, was that why she—but his mother would never punish anyone that way, so it had to be a joke too, part of the joke on him like his father pretending to cut off his hand) and there was a lengthening rooster tail of dust between Arne and the shay. He was really busting his gut to catch up so the joke could finally be over, and laughing: he screamed with laughter until he fell headlong and the cut ends of the remaining bundle of strangler fig jabbed at the back of his head. He breathed dust until his tongue was caked with it. His chest heaved as he still tried to laugh. Then he sat up, looking expectantly down the road; but the shay was gone, and so was the dust, the sun was lower. She hadn't come back to explain the complicated joke, to take off her hat and veil and shake down her abundant hair, to unknot the tablecloth.
(Wait until you see who's inside, Arne / I know I know it's Mary Louise Petrie.)
And that's who it was!
(HA HA Arne Horsfall didn't we fool you!)

When he looked back the other way, toward Sublimity, he saw Hawkshaw down and motionless in the road, as if he were taking a nap.

(Ha ha, get up, Hawk—)

But he couldn't laugh any more. The laughter was all used up and he felt extremely tired; the only sounds he made were pathetic moans of grief in his parched throat.

6

When next he was aware of anything, the shadows of trees across the road had lengthened and the leaves were flooding with the breeze that accompanied the setting of the sun. Arne struggled up feebly but Hawkshaw continued to lie there, and a buzzard had come down to the road a few feet from the dog's head. That revived Arne. Yelling, he picked lip rocks to throw at the scavenger, which took flight. Arne continued to walk up the road until he could see clearly that Hawkshaw was dead, his throat had been cut. The handax lay in the road nearby. Had somebody used—but the ax blade had no blood on it.

"Who killed my dog?" Arne muttered, stupefied.

The last he remembered of Hawkshaw, alive, was down by the creek where he'd been cutting strangler fig. Hawkshaw had appeared with a doll in his mouth. No sign of the doll now. Where had they been since the creek, what was he doing here on this road with the day almost gone?

When Arne tried to squeeze something out, like a thorn embedded under his skin, all he got for his efforts was a searing headache, the worst headache of his life. It was accompanied by a bright light, bright as the flare from a photographer's flashpan. But steadier, a small sun in his brain. It illuminated peripheral images of his mother—hoeing in their garden at home, taking a pie from the black iron stove in the kitchen. His mouth watered. Was that today? No, he didn't think so . . . yet he could taste her apple pie, the crust shot through with dark amber juice and sugar and lots of cinnamon, as plainly as if he'd just cut a big slice for himself. Arne shuddered and shuddered. While he was savoring the goodness of apple pie the sun in his head wasn't so painfully hot, but he couldn't make out his mother any more—oh, there she was, they were in the barn by lantern-light, he and Birka with crowbars prying up the lid of the packing crate they'd found on the bank of the Cumberland River after the big June rains.
Scree, scree,
as the nails pulled out one by one . . . and Arne suddenly shouting:

"Don't open it! Don't open it!"

But it was not then that he was shouting; two months ago he'd been the most curious to see what was in the coffin-size crate constructed of rowan wood—
it has magical properties,
his mother had said.

"That'll be the end of us, pa."

He was talking to himself, sure enough, while the flies swarmed briskly around Hawkshaw's slit throat, the tacky blood that had spilled into the road. Arne lifted his head abruptly, as if he'd heard something—

A shay?—

—and for an instant Arne thought he saw a gray mare and a buggy far up the road, his mother holding the reins with one hand and waving to him—but the sun blazed again in his brain, staggering him. He clutched his head with both hands and fell back, began awkwardly to run, his right foot clumsy and dragging, as if it were not a part of him any more. He left the ax and the bird dog and the other bundle of strangler fig behind.

As he ran he thought:
I'm running straight to hell.

A chill overcame him and he faltered, then saw a lone Judas tree in a stand of red cedar and made for it.

The ravine he entered seemed familiar. He knew without having to think that the ravine would run uphill a fair distance. Then, over the ridge-line, he would come to a wide creek, and later on to a nice fishing hole. From there it wasn't much farther to the campsite where he'd left his father . . .

Looking up through tangles of sumac and dogwood branches, he saw the pale yellow moon rising as the light of the sun began to fade. It was a three-quarters moon. He could make it back, he was sure, before dark, before the frost, before the beautiful white moonflyers who came with the frost and watched them, hovering well out into the dark and away from the fire that Arne and his father did not dare let go out.

7

In Arne's absence his father had been active, collecting new wood for the fire, a roaring beacon Arne had no trouble homing in on.

As soon as he reached their sanctuary Arne slumped down and shrugged off the bundle of strangler fig, saying nothing. When he looked at his father Arne's mind permitted him to see his father whole, just as his mind would not permit him to remember the encounter with his mother.

His father looked at Arne's eyes, and looked away.

"Where's the ax?"

"I lost it."

"Where's Hawkshaw?"

"Well, he's—”

Arne tried to cram both fists into his mouth then, but too late; he had sensed that once he started to scream he wouldn't be able to stop, for as long as he went on living.

His father realized it, too; he hitched around with a grunting effort and hit Arne hard across the face in mid-scream. Arne chomped down on his tongue, his eyes going wide and blank.

His father hit him again but not as hard this time and Arne, who had been rigid as a fence post and white to the tips of his ears, folded up against him.

"Don't go off like that. I need you. Get hold of yourself, Arne."

A little later Arne crawled away from his father and sat up, arms wrapped around his knees. He rocked a while and stared at the fire. He was shaking. There was blood in his throat and on his lips from having bitten his tongue so savagely.

"I love you," his father whispered.

Arne nodded.

"Are you afraid to die, Arne?"

"Yes," the boy said.

Certainly he was afraid of death—but at the same time he wished for a mouthful of mushroom, the destroying angel, and a quick end to his torment. But that was crazy. Now he was going crazy too, he thought, and he was more afraid of that than dying.

Gradually his shaking stopped. His gaze was steady and sad.

"Tell me what happened," his father said.

Arne secretly bit his tongue again and again, betraying no emotion, no hint of pain, bit hard and deep so he would not be obliged to speak his thoughts, to share what he had seen and knew to be true.

August, 1970:

The Sunday Dinner Guest

1

Marjory Waller drove down to Nashville to pick up her sister Enid, who was, as usual, late in meeting her. Marjory passed by the main gate of Cumberland State Hospital, didn't see Enid waiting there or on the grounds where she often conducted her art classes on sultry summer days, and swung around into the visitors' parking lot. She drove the wrong way down a lane and, with a finely developed intuition for knowing what she could get away with, grabbed a slot in the deep shade of a pin oak, ignoring .mother driver, who honked at her.

"I was fixing to park there myself, little lady!" he yelled as Marjory got out. Because of the angle of her approach she hadn't parked well, but at least she had got there first and possession, when it came to parking places, was everything in Marjory's book of rules.

"I'm sorry, sir, can't you see my car's burning up?"

Some white vapor was coming from beneath the hood, which didn't ( lose all the way any more because of a crumpled left fender, the '62 baby-blue-with-rust Plymouth had been overheating for a month. Ought not to be driving it, Marjory thought, until she coerced Buddy or Lyle at the Esso to pull the radiator and do a little soldering for free, but Enid's Corvair was in the shop again and they were making do.

Marjory untied and yanked up the hood without blistering her hands and stood looking at the Plymouth's innards as if she were a consulting surgeon on a rare and tricky heart case. The other driver didn't go away; was he being a sore loser? He opened the door of his car and stood up, looking at her.

"Use a little help?"

She didn't like his know-it-all grin. He looked to be a lot older than Marjory, thirty at least, and pure-d country. Worked in town, maybe a sessions picker to judge from the length of his hair and his appaloosa vest (but musicians drove better cars than the unwashed 88 he'd stepped out of). He was the type to have a wife and kids stashed in the sticks, while he lucked everything that didn't fly or have webbed feet.

Marjory tugged the red bill of her St. Louis Cardinals cap a little lower, so he couldn't see her eyes, and said, "Know anything about the modulator fimbus?"

"Reckon I could locate your fimbus if I look for it long enough."

"No, thanks," Marjory said. He went on grinning and staring at her. She held up her driver's license. "I'm sixteen and a half," Marjory said. "Does that tell you anything?"

"Well," he said, "I could've swore you was older, hefty as you are."

Marjory shook her head wearily and gave him the peace sign, went over and slumped down under the pin oak, elbows on her knees, chin on her fists. After a few seconds he drove away and found another parking place.

Marjory took off her baseball cap, wiped her steaming brow with a frayed handkerchief, and stared at the logo on the front of the cap: a bird with a big yellow beak and a crimson tail, perched on a bat. The Cards were not having a good year. Even Harry Caray, the St. Louis broadcaster, had sounded a little exasperated when the team blew a three-run lead in the bottom of the ninth in San Francisco. But that was nothing compared to Marjory's reaction as the ball sailed over the wall above the center-fielder's glove.
Everybody
knew you pitched McCovey inside, jammed him, then showed him the low-breaking curve. She hadn't been able to get to sleep for two hours after listening to the game. Prickly heat was only part of her problem, although she'd suffered from it since she was a baby. Some fudge ripple ice cream would have calmed her down, but when she went downstairs in her babydolls at two in the morning there was no fudge ripple in the freezer, only some rainbow sherbet that had ice whiskers on it and looked unpalatable. Enid and her boyfriend must have sat on the front porch until after midnight eating all of the ice cream and most of the sour-cream cake, satisfying one appetite and working up another before sneaking upstairs to Enid's room (but Marjory was alert to that, even though she was hanging on every pitch of the ballgame and the old oscillating fan on the window seat of her room was making its usual racket). She wondered what time Ted had gone home. She didn't mind Ted as much as she pretended, but was scared Enid was going to slip—if she was on the pill then she must be keeping them in her purse, the one place Marjory wouldn't snoop—and wind up having to marry him. Ted Lufford was not what Marjory had in mind for Enid. Not with her looks, talent, and brains.

There was no breeze where she sat on the parking-lot island. They hadn't had much rain for a couple of months, only a few brief thunder-showers that didn't provide long-lasting relief from the torrid days and humid nights of middle Tennessee. Marjory went through the pockets of her shorts looking for a box of fruit-flavored Chiclets she hadn't finished, and popped two into her mouth. She looked at the high gates of the mental institution and the dozen buildings on the landscaped grounds. Two big sprinklers near the gate were at work on parched lawns. There were flowerbeds, magnolia and mimosa trees among the larger oaks, wide walkways—from her perspective it might have been a college campus. Inside, Marjory thought, it was like a morgue where they let the corpses walk around. Enid had given her an abbreviated tour. Once was going to last Marjory forever. She had such a horror of the asylum her knees locked before she had gone very far; listening to the inmates, cries and babble echoing, her underarms boiled with sweat and a tight, terrible grin stayed on her face so that she thought she must look like one of
them—
any second the people who ran the place were going to make a bad mistake and lock Marjory up.
Night of the Living Dead,
which she had been persuaded to see at the drive-in a couple of months ago, hadn't bothered her nearly as much as fifteen minutes inside Cumberland State.

How Enid had the stomach for it, she just couldn't imagine.

Since Marjory, two years ago, had taken over trying to manage certain important aspects of her sister's life, she had not (might as well admit it) met with much success. Enid had breezed through the finals of Vandy's Maid of Cotton contest when she was a junior; then she balked at entering the preliminaries of the Miss Tennessee Pageant, although Marjory argued with her until she was just about blue in the face. "Balked" wasn't quite the right word: Enid didn't argue back. She seldom felt the need to defend herself or a cherished viewpoint. She would not enter another beauty contest, period. Not because she had doubts about her looks (Enid was serenely aware that God had been generous with her). She simply had no desire, as she put it, "to compete in frivolous areas."

Frivolous? Okay, forget about the full-length mink coat, the scholarship, the wardrobe, the pretty good diamond jewelry—it was the opportunity for travel that mattered so much, to Marjory if not to Enid, and the high-type men, unmarried men, she'd be introduced to. Entertainers, advertising executives, Wall Streeters, even men who didn't have to work because they had so much money but were still serious about their lives, financed expeditions or invented things or got appointed ambassador to Greece. The kind of man Enid deserved, someone Marjory could take pride in as a brother-in-law, knowing in her heart, although she was only sixteen, that she didn't stand a cut dog's chance of ever landing anybody decent herself. Uh-uh, rule that out: not with her superstructure and big thighs.

So Enid wouldn't enter the Miss Tennessee Pageant, which of course led straight to Atlantic City and even more prestige, as Miss America (it was no secret that the judges up there doted on Southern women). Marjory was just able to bear this frustration, but she hadn't given up yet on another crucial promotion. Their house in Sublimity was free and clear, except for some piddling taxes they were only a year behind on. But the house was worth twenty thousand dollars, according to a local real estate agent Marjory consulted. Nashville was booming; Sublimity was practically a suburb now, and they were putting up tract houses not two miles down the road. Marjory had calculated that they could live for
two years
in Paris, France, on twenty thousand dollars, where Enid, by virtue of her proven talent, would be admitted to whichever of several art schools she chose to attend and study with the finest portrait painters in Europe. Rich people were lining up over there to be immortalized in oils. The president of Vanderbilt University was having his portrait done now, by an artist from New York whose fee was three thousand dollars. Three thousand dollars! If Enid only painted one portrait a month, that came out to be—

Enid wouldn't hear of selling the house. She thought it would be foolish to move to Paris and live off their capital when she already had an offer to go to work for $125 a week, plus benefits, in the art department of Curtis Sewell and Wainwright, Nashville's heavyweight ad agency. With that much security, then she could afford to paint portraits in her spare time, a potentially profitable hobby that appealed to her.

"Marjory," Enid had explained patiently, the last few times Marjory had hurled
Paris
in her face, "it sounds perfectly lovely and of course I've always dreamed of someday visiting the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe, what girl hasn't? I know you mean well, hon, but don't you see? It's all 'pie in the sky.'" Sighing deeply, which Enid did so well it could bring tears to a creditor's eyes, she went on. "Mama and daddy would revolve in their graves, Marjory, if I let go of the house, unless of course it was a life-or-death situation—"

"Well, it
is
your life we're talking about, and I wish you'd try to understand that. You can be a big shot or a little shot, Enid. It's the
big
shots who study art in Paris."

"Now, how many times did we hear daddy say that the worst thing you can do is trade your birthright for 'pie in the sky'? Speaking of big shots, Half-uncle Averill mortgaged his home and cashed all of his saving bonds just to get hold of that fried-chicken franchise, and do you know what?"

"Yeh, I know. It's terrible fried chicken, and the sheriffs at his door." Enid looked well satisfied; all would-be entrepreneurs were on trial, and she had just forced a confession from her guilty sister.

"That will never happen to
us.
Because we have a paid-up roof over our heads, which is our most valuable material asset. Our Rock of Gibraltar. See, I'm thinking about you, Marjory, and not just myself. I want to guarantee you the opportunity to finish college, like I did, so that you'll always have a vocation. I'm responsible for you, hon, and I take my responsibilities very seriously."

Well, at least according to law Enid was her guardian, and responsible for Marjory: Enid had just turned eighteen when their mother and father died, crushed and burned beyond recognition at the most notorious unguarded railroad crossing in Caskey County. A terrible accident which

Knid, who was on the church bus not far behind the Wallers' station wagon, unfortunately had witnessed.

Enid had been so devastated by the death of her parents that, withdrawn and vulnerable, she was reluctant to take any sort of risk in her own life. It was an understandable void which Marjory, who also grieved but perhaps had a hardier outlook, instinctively tried to fill with her well-meant schemes. Enid was such a good person, and so talented, that Marjory was loath to see her settle for a well-worn rut, when fame and prosperity could he hers for the asking. This was particularly galling because Marjory (assessing her own prospects), knew that she would never earn a red cent, or receive more than local accolades, for her one great talent, which was whacking the hell out of a grapefruit-sized ball with a skinny bat.

Marjory drew a couple of heavy breaths and glanced at the gates of Cumberland State—no Enid yet—and chewed her gum and examined a wart at the base of her right thumb, trying to decide how big it was going to get and if she should try castor oil or just have it burned off like the others. Marjory had a lovely complexion that other girls her age envied, but as if to make up for a pimpleless puberty Mother Nature had decreed that she must be a wart-grower.

Then, with nothing much doing, Marjory turned her attention to composing a letter in her mind to her reigning idol and the love of her life, although she had prudently refrained from hinting at her passion for him in the three letters she had actually mailed to date.

Dear Tim:

Although I'm sure I'll remain a "true-blue" Redbirds fan until the day I die, I still haven't forgiven them for trading you and Curt Flood to Philadelphia this season. I don't think Simmon's arm is that much better than yours! It wasn't just luck that the Cards won three pennants in five years with
Tim McCarver
behind the plate. That's some loyalty!

Anyway, I hope your broken hand is healing okay and you'll be ready for the stretch drive. By the way, it seems to me that before you went on the DL you were getting the best results with the thirty-two-ounce bat you were swinging when you hit that three-run homer in Cincinnati, a game I was lucky enough to catch on TV. That's just a suggestion from one of your biggest supporters who
adore
s-
would di
e
w
ishes you the best in your new "baseball home." I know that in spite of their
mis
e
rabl
e slow start the Phils will be near the top of the NL East by the end of