Helltown (30 page)

“Randy’s,” Cleavon said.

“You called him at Randy’s?”

“First thing I done when I hung up with Jess and Dumbass.” Cleavon eyed Spencer apprehensively. “What? What’s the problem?”

“There’s no problem,” Spencer said. “You did well.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Spence,” Cleavon said. “You don’t think the sheriff… Motherfuckingshitter! The sheriff, he’s gonna find out I called Randy’s, ain’t he? He’s gonna know I was the last person to speak to Lonnie. He’s gonna think I had something to do with what went down at Lonnie’s. He’s gonna put it all together.”

“Put what together, Cleave?” Spencer said amiably, carefully. “You just tell Sheriff Humperdinck, if he asks, that you called Randy’s to see if Lonnie was going to be around for a while because you wanted to join him for a drink. Lonnie, however, told you he was calling it a night and heading home.”

Cleavon screwed up his lips as he thought about this. Then he nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense, don it? I was just calling to see if Lonnie wanted to stick around for a beer. But what if Randy was standing next to Lonnie? What if he heard something different?”

“Like what?” Spencer asked. “What did Lonnie say to you?”

“Shit, I don’t remember his exact words.”

“And neither will Randy, even if, by some rare chance, he wanted to snoop in on a call between Lonnie and yourself when he has a bar to run. No offence, Cleave, but you’re not the President of the United States.” Spencer held his brother’s eyes until Cleavon nodded his agreement. “You have nothing to worry about, Cleave,” he added. “None of us do. Some out-of-towners crashed their car. On their way to find help they came across Lonnie’s place. Something happened, it doesn’t matter what, and his son died. Lonnie shot two of them, but not before he got shot himself. The five others fled into the woods. The sheriff will conduct a search, of course. But the national park is twenty thousand acres of dense woodland. It will be like looking for needles in a haystack. When no one turns up, the conclusion will be they got lost and died. And that’s it. All we have to do is sit tight and wait this out.”

“You’re forgetting ’bout the girl who got away, Mr. Pratt,” Jesse Gordon said, blowing a purple bubble and swallowing it again. “She saw Cleavon and Earl and Floyd. If she gets to town tonight, tells the sheriff about them…”

“Jess’s right,” Cleavon said. “And we’re wasting talk standing round here shooting the shit. Jess, me and you, we’ll take the El Camino. The bitch hasn’t seen it. She’ll think she’s flagging down help. By the time she finds out it’s us, it’ll be too late.”

They were correct, Spencer knew. The young woman getting to town would be a disaster—but this was a disaster Spencer wanted. “You’re overreacting, Cleave,” Spencer told him in a calm, rational, slightly patronizing tone. “It’s highly unlikely she could make it to town on foot. That would be a good ten mile hike—”

“She could—”

“She won’t. Not in the middle of the night. Moreover, she’ll know you’ll be out there looking for her. As soon as she hears a vehicle approach, she’ll duck into the woods. You’ll drive straight past, never the wiser.” He shook his head. “No, she’ll bunker down somewhere until morning, when she feels safer. She won’t think you’ll still be looking for her then. That’s when you’ll get her.”

“I don’t know,” Cleavon said. “She gets to town—”

“She won’t.”

“But if she does—”

“She won’t,” Spencer said with enough decisiveness to signal the discussion was over. “Besides, we have other matters to attend to. We have to get rid of the other out-of-towners in case Sheriff Humperdinck comes by questioning you boys about Lonnie. Speaking of which, where are the other two? There should be—”

“I gave ’em to Toad and Trapper,” Earl said in his giddy, booming voice. He shifted his bulk from one foot to the other, almost as if he had to urinate. “Cleave said I could, I asked, and he said I could, ’cause they’d just shed, and they were real hungry, and it would save us giving ’em rabbits.”

“You fed them to your
snakes
?” Spencer said skeptically.

“Yeah, Spence,” Earl said, obviously tickled blue by the idea. “They’re two happy snakes right now, I’ll tell you that, you should see them—”

“Show me.”

Earl led Spencer through the ramshackle house, down one cracked-plaster hallway, then another, until they stood before a solid oak door.

Earl had purchased the snakes from a pet store in Akron some ten years ago. They were green anacondas, the largest species of snake in the world, though they had only been a few inches long then. They grew fast. After two years they were nine feet in length and devouring a couple rabbits each a fortnight. When they became too big for the timber and wire-mesh melamine cage Cleavon had built for them, Earl demanded they be relocated to the room he and Spencer stood before now. Cleavon put down linoleum tiles to make cleaning the floor easier—they defecated like horses—and he installed a thermostat and humidifier to keep the temperature at eighty-five degrees with ninety degrees humidity. It was a lot of work, and Cleavon wasn’t happy about doing it, but when Earl got something in his mind, there was no talking him out of it. There was no ignoring him either, not unless you were prepared to deal with four hundred pounds of single-minded, unreasoning fury.

And then, of course, there was the time one of the snakes tried to make a meal of Cleavon. He especially wasn’t happy about
that
. This wasn’t long after the snakes moved from the cage outside into the house. Earl would often plunk down in the rocking chair he set up in one corner of the room and sit there watching the snakes even when they weren’t doing much of anything, which was their usual state of affairs. On the occasion in question he had been drunk and didn’t close the door properly when he left to go to bed. Cleavon woke in the middle of the night shouting. One of the snakes—Toad, Spencer believed—had curled itself around Cleavon’s left arm and ankle, swallowing his arm nearly to the elbow. Even Earl, with all his strength, couldn’t unwrap the thing. Cleavon wanted him to cut it in half, but Earl wouldn’t hear of it. In fact, Spencer wouldn’t have been surprised if, had it come to it, Earl chose the snake’s life over his brother’s.

Fortunately the situation didn’t devolve to this. Instead Cleavon had Earl ring Spencer and explain what happened. The telephone call had been chaotic, with Earl blabbering incoherently and Cleavon cursing in the background. Spencer didn’t know the first thing about snakes, but he had once read about a boy who had been bitten by a pit bull. The quick-thinking owner of the dog got it to release the boy’s arm by dumping half a liter of alcohol down its throat. So that’s what he told Earl to do. Amazingly it worked. The snake regurgitated Cleavon’s limb and released its death grip from his arm and leg.

Now Earl took the key dangling on a string from around his neck and unlocked the door. He stepped fearlessly into the room, hit the light switch to the left, and said proudly, “See, Spence, I told you, they ate them, they ate them good, didn’t they?”

Spencer wrinkled his nose at the sudden stench of feces and urine, and beneath this, the pungent, musky odor the snakes emitted from their anal glands to keep the poisonous organism found in the marshes and swamps of South America at bay.

The two anacondas lay curled in opposite corners. They were both over twenty feet long—nearly twice their length when Toad attacked Cleavon. Their glossy olive bodies dwarfed their heads, which were marked with prominent red stripes. Black oval-shaped markings spotted their backs, tapering down to black spots with yellow centers along their flanks.

Spencer’s eyes went immediately to their grotesquely extended middle sections. He stared, fascinated. Despite the massive sizes of the animals, he’d had no idea they could consume fully grown humans. But why not? he thought. Surely if anacondas could swallow caiman and deer in the wild, they could work their mouths around human shoulders.

Spencer wished he had arrived earlier so he could have witnessed the spectacle of the two men’s deaths, so he could have looked into their eyes and seen the understanding of their impending doom. Now that would have been something.

“Did I do good, Spence?” Earl asked.

“Wonderfully,” he said softly.

“Can I feed ’em more bucks and does in the future? We’ll save on rabbits if I do, and all those does and bucks, they just go to waste where we bury ’em out back, so this way we make use of them, and we save on rabbits. I’m right, Spence, am I right?”

Spencer told Earl he could do whatever he wished in the future—an easy proclamation to make considering Earl would not live to see the morning—and they returned to the front porch where they found Cleavon in a heated discussion with Jesse and Weasel. Cleavon was still lobbying to go find the missing woman, while Jesse and Weasel seemed okay with leaving the matter until first light.

“So what we gonna do till morning then?” Cleavon challenged. “Get pissed and hit the sack like this was any old Friday night? You think any of you gonna sleep knowing that bitch is on the loose out there?”

“Why don’t we hold a black mass, gentlemen?” Spencer suggested. “My mistake,” he added, casting the bound women a glance. “Why don’t we hold
two
?”

All eyes turned toward him.

“Huh?” Cleavon said.

“A black mass,” Spencer repeated. “Earl’s snakes have taken care of the two bucks nicely. That leaves these two does. It’s either bury them out back right now, which would be a shameful waste, or have some fun first. Given we have the time…”

The women moaned and flopped around on the porch like fish out of water. Their struggles only earned the attention of the men present, whose eyes began to burn with primitive hunger and lust.

“I don’t wanna waste them,” Earl said, squatting next to the small woman and patting her on the head. “I wanna have some fun? Please? Can we, huh? Can we have some fun?”

“Given all the trouble we’ve gone through to get them…” Jesse said, nodding. “Yeah, I think it would be a mighty shame not to get our due.”

“I’m in,” Weasel said with alacrity.

“Cleavon?” Spencer said.

“You four go have your fuckin’ orgy,” Cleavon griped. “I’ll search for the girl myself, like I do every goddamn thing else myself round here.”

Spencer clenched his jaw. “Weren’t you listening to me? She’s—”

“Hiding. Right.”

“Tell you what, Cleave,” Spencer said, playing his final card, “this being our last mass in a while—we’re going to have to lay low for several months after this—I was contemplating holding it in Mother of Sorrows church.”

“Inside the
church
?”

“That’s right. Do a proper mass for once. Also, if that young woman somehow makes it from the forest—and that’s a big if—Stanford Road will take her straight past the church. She’ll see our cars parked out front and come to
us
for help.”

“She’ll come right to
us
!” Earl parroted. “Then we’ll have her, we’ll have her good!”

“Smart thinking, Mr. Pratt!” Weasel exclaimed.

“Hell of an idea, Mr. Pratt,” Jesse said, nodding sagely. “Hell of an idea.”

Cleavon, however, was ever the pessimist. “Or she might walk right on past the church.”

“Would you?” Spencer said. “If you were terrified and alone and you’d just been through what she’d been through, would you pass up the nearest help you came across? Anyway, Cleave, to alleviate your concern, we’ll rotate a sentry outside the church while the masses are proceeding, to keep an eye on the road.”

Cleavon scratched his stubble. “Well, now we’re getting somewhere, boys.” He nodded. “I s’pose that might be okay. But the church, it’s a bit public to hold a mass, ain’t it?”

Spencer shook his head. “There’s nothing for miles save that little motel.” He made a show of glancing at his wristwatch. “And who’s going to be peering out their window with night-vision goggles in the middle of the night? Now, are we all agreed?”

To Spencer’s immense relief, they were.

They drove to Mother of Sorrows church in three separate cars. Cleavon, Weasel, and Jesse in the El Camino; Earl, Floyd, and the two women in Earl’s old nuts-and-bolts jalopy; Spencer in his Volvo. They parked at the top of the hill on which the church was built and dashed through the rain to the abandoned building.

The sanctuary was pitch black and dusty. The air smelled stale, with the faintest traces of myrrh and spikenard. Spencer turned on his flashlight and led the way down the center aisle to the small nave. The others followed, carrying the supplies they would need for the black mass: the cast iron chamber pot, the brass Chinese gong, the cased ceremonial sword, black and white candles, and a rusty bucket filled with chicken blood. Weasel usually brought his Casio keyboard to the black masses they held at the scattering of abandoned houses they frequented, but Spencer assured him the church had a full-sized organ that was in working order.

Earl dumped the two struggling women on the stone floor, next to the altar, and said, “Can we do the small one first, Spence? Lookit her go! She’s like a rabbit that knows what’s coming for it. So can we, Spence, can we do her first?”