The Sleepwalkers (38 page)

At the door he stops, turns back to the witch.

She’s already busied herself lighting candles and humming.

“My father was a great man,” says Caleb. “He won’t be forgotten.”

The witch pauses in her humming and looks at Caleb.

“Yes, Billy,” she says pleasantly. “I know.”

As Caleb steps out through the screech of the screen door, he hears her singing behind him:

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the morn . . . ”

And he and Christine cross the field of stars for the last time.

Awareness comes in patches, like glimpses though a dense fog. Ron feels many hands on him, the burn of the rope on his throat; he hears the crackling of leaves and sticks under bare white feet somewhere below. When his eyes flutter open he sees tree branches dissecting the night sky. Once he sees a star, a bright one. Might be the North Star, but he can’t tell. Then he falls back under, to a place even below dreams, a place of uneasy silence.

When he opens his eyes again, all he sees are green blades of grass. He sneezes and realizes some of them are tickling his nostrils. Must be what woke him. He also realizes the rope on his neck has gone slack. He raises his face slowly from the dewy grass, wincing as the muscles of his neck knot up sharply. His skin burns from the rope, and when he looks down at the grass, he sees little dots of his own blood.

At first everything is blurry. All his eyes can make out is shadow upon shadow. As a moment passes, though, the shades of darkness differentiate. He sees trees arching grandly above him, forming the roof of a great, natural cathedral. A few feet in front of him is the utterly placid surface of what looks like a pond, reflecting the blackness of the sky like a great, dark mirror. Except it reflects no stars, and the moon, which hangs just over the treetops, is nowhere to be seen on its surface.

Now he sees white shapes. They form a ring surrounding the pond. The shapes become figures, young people, wearing white nightgowns. Their eyes are closed and their faces are as still and calm as the surface of the water they encircle.

Ron hears a voice and looks up. Next to him a man stands, his arms stretched wide. Bizarre, inhuman sounds emanate from his lips and fill the little clearing with chattering, bellowing, screaming, hissing. The old Ron, the one who was a preacher once in Mississippi, the one who was run out of town by his own congregation, would know these sounds for what they are: the man, the director, is speaking in tongues.

In one of his outstretched hands he holds the end of a rope. The other end is still looped around Ron’s neck.

Ron takes a deep breath, fighting to think clearly. He sees the sleepwalkers, the director, and the sheriff at his side, all facing the pond. All have left their backs to him, apparently thinking his lights would be out for quite a while. If he has a chance at all, this is it. He glances over and sees Margie next to him. She’s on her back. Her lips move as if she’s speaking, except no sound comes out. Her eyes are rolled back in her head with only the whites showing. She’s deep in shock. Her legs look like they belong in a butcher’s shop, and the puddle of blood she’s lying in must be an inch and a half deep. Her face is very pale; her breathing is so shallow Ron can’t see her chest moving. In another fifteen minutes, she’ll be dead. Whatever he’s going to do, he’ll have to do it alone.

Just as he thinks this, the babbling ceases and in a booming voice the director proclaims, “Bring forth the sacrifices!”

“John,” says the sheriff, so quietly Ron can barely make out what he’s saying. “One of them—that lady, Lee—got away while we were dealing with the ones at the trailer. We’re going to have to get one more to make sixty-six.”

The director, still in his clown makeup, steps up to the sheriff, a much larger man, and slaps him in the face as if he were a snotty child. He smiles.

“Never fear, the spirits will pick a replacement,” he says. “Maybe . . . even . . . you!”

He steps away from the sheriff and opens his arms wide again, addressing the eerie assembly.

“Who will go?” he says.

Ron knows this is his chance. He slips the rope off over his head slowly, carefully, trying not to put any tension on the line and alert the director. There’s a moment of terror when the rope catches on his hook, but he’s able to pull it loose without too much wrangling. Finally, he’s free.

He glances once more at Margie, wishing he could help her, knowing he can’t, and looks up again. One of the gowned figures has stepped forward, a slender black kid with cornrows in her hair. The director looks at the kid and begins speaking tongues again.

Then Ron is on his feet running.

The edge of the clearing is only maybe ten feet away, and he’s shocked to see the Dream Center rising up just about twenty feet beyond that. From where he was lying, he was unable to see it. Now every perception comes to him with amazing clarity. He must dart between these two small trees, slip around that oak, then make it around the corner of the Dream Center. If he can make it that far without their noticing, he should be able to escape. His knees don’t hurt him now. He feels strong. He feels utterly free, as the ground races past him, and here come those trees. This is the victory he’s waited for his whole life. They won’t take him, no way, not Ron Bent. They’ll turn around and he’ll be gone. He’ll find Caleb and Christine, get some guns, come back and burn this old hospital into the dust. Here come those trees, and he’s shooting between them—now just pass the oak, get around the corner, and— First, his mouth snaps shut so hard he feels his teeth shatter. Then he sees his legs; they’ve miraculously shot out in front of him and hang suspended in the air for an instant. He hears something snap in his windpipe. Then he’s on the ground with a devastating thud. Trees spin around him like he’s on a carnival ride. And maybe that’s all this is, maybe that’s all life ever is, he suddenly thinks. After all, here’s a clown, looking down at him, snarling. There are some teenagers, hanging out. Of course, the teenagers’ eyes are shut and the clown is holding the end of the noose that’s choking Ron’s life away.

These thoughts, these sights, spin around him. And he realizes in a flash that he was just jerked into the air, like a dog who chases after a kid on a bike, forgetting that it’s tied to a tree, and almost breaks its neck when he reaches the end of its chain. Except instead of a chain, it was the director’s lasso that got him. And unlike those tough, ol’ dogs, Ron thinks, he might’ve actually broken his neck. He tastes blood in his mouth. His tongue sifts through shards of broken teeth. This head sings a one-note, droning song. And hands carry him to the water’s edge.

He watches out of the corner of his eye (turning his head would hurt too much) as the end of the rope around his neck is tied to a big cement weight. The sheriff loops some rope around Margie’s neck and ties her to a weight as well.

Margie is utterly still. Ron tries to find the words to pray for her soul, but can’t. All he can think of is the one-note ringing in his head. He can’t even hear the babbling of the director anymore.

And it’s kind of peaceful.

Several sleepwalkers come forward and put Margie and him into a rowboat. The black kid climbs in the boat as well, also with a weight and a rope around the neck.

The sheriff pushes off the shore and steps into the boat. There’s a little rocking motion as they get going. It’s kind of nice.

For some reason, it comes into Ron’s head that this might be the start of a good joke . . . an old preacher, a sheriff, a waitress, and a black kid all get in a boat. . . The punch line eludes him. Still, if he could smile, he would. As it is, all he can do is watch the stars sitting so still way up there in the sky. Clouds race past them, but the stars always reappear, faint but eternal. He doesn’t hear the singing from the shore as all the sleeping possessed ones join the mad rodeo clown in chorus. Instead, he thinks back on his life. Ron Bent was never much for paying attention, even when things were really serious, like now.

He remembers Camilia’s sweet potatoes with the brown sugar on top, the same color brown as her skin as they made love in the back of his Challenger on their wedding night. He remembers lighting up a smoke and breathing it deep in the cold, cold of morning before getting on a bus to God knows where. He remembers holding a stranger’s hand during prayer at church, not knowing who the man was, and loving him anyway. And he remembers Keisha. Keisha, trying to teach him how to double Dutch, begging for money for the ice-cream truck, Keisha, with the same beautiful, caramel-colored skin her mother had. Keisha, loving him no matter how many times he’d messed up and disappointed everyone else.

God, why are you taking me now?
I thought I had a bigger part to play.

He was never much good at accepting his lousy luck.

More stars go by. He realizes his clothes are wet. Did a storm come through while he was unconscious? If so, it’s cleared up now.

The boat is slowing. Just then, feeling begins to trickle back into his fingers and toes, and the cold metal of the boat bottom finally registers against his body. He wiggles his fingers.

Maybe Ron Bent isn’t completely broken yet.

Sheriff ’s leg moves next to Ron as he rows. There’s a gun on his hip.

Ron, his face pressed awkwardly against the aluminum bench of the rowboat, smiles.

A gentle rain starts falling again.

This is it. Ron tenses and strikes.

He yanks the sheriff ’s gun from its holster and shoots him in the head. Bang. In one second it’s over.

The chorus on the shore of the pond chokes to silence.

As Sheriff Johnson topples overboard, the boat pitches. Nobody makes a sound; the sheriff ’s mouth is gone, Margie is passed out— or dead, and the girl with the cornrows is peacefully sleeping, possessed. Only Ron yells, tumbling into the water as the boat capsizes.

The water is freezing. Ron pulls to the surface and takes a breath, sees the ring of sleeping faces, the makeup masked director, the big, round moon wreathed in clouds. This is it. This is where he’ll pull Margie and the sleeping girl to safety. And he’ll kick the director’s ass. And he’ll, he’ll—

But now, suddenly, he’s rushing down, away from the moonlight into the dark.

He panics at first, not realizing what’s happening. Then he understands. The weight dropped when the boat tipped over, pulling the rope taut around his neck. When it ran out of slack, he was pulled under. And now he’s being dragged down fast.

Despite the speed, the descent seems like it’ll never end. His ears pop painfully over and over. The pressure makes his head ache.

Already the cold of the water has numbed his fingers and toes.

He’s still falling headfirst into oblivion.

He glances over and sees the outline of somebody else falling next to him, but whether it’s the sleepwalker girl or Margie he can’t tell.

He flails his arms, trying with all his strength to pull himself and the weight to the surface, but his effort doesn’t even slow his descent. He tries to get his fingers under the rope, to loosen it enough to pull his head out, but the noose is so tight he thinks it might have actually cut into his neck. So he falls.

The blackness mixes into a dizzy delirium. He’s going to die. He tries to make his life flash before his eyes, but he can’t. Maybe he already did that too much anyway.

Figures, he was never good at much. Why should dying be any different?

He’s falling.

Maybe he passes out for an instant and dreams, or maybe he just thinks he does. Anyway, he’s back in the jungle.

Ron sits with Dirty Dan in an old, blown-out foxhole. They’re up
to their knees in brown rainwater, and it’s still coming down. Another
forty-eight hours and they’ll be able to swim back to Lai Khe, Dan
jokes in a whisper. Ron can’t bring himself to laugh. They’ve been in the
hole for two days, ever since Ron turned around and found that his few
remaining companions had disappeared, sleeping beneath the emerald
canopy of leaves somewhere behind him, full of lead. He wonders: have
the others found them yet, put them in a box and shipped ’em stateside?
Or are they still out there in this rain, being eaten day by day by
roaches and lizards? Would he even recognize them anymore?

For two days, Ron and Dan have sat in the hole, watching the water
creep up around them. By now they’ll both probably have to have their feet
amputated from jungle rot. But there’s no way they can leave. Somehow
they wandered into Charlie’s backyard. Hardly an hour goes by without
their hearing footsteps pass above, or hearing the coarse, evil-sounding
chattering of the North Vietnamese from amongst the nearby trees.

Yesterday a group stopped so close Ron could smell the piss as one of
them relieved himself.

Usually when they hear the enemy approach, Ron and Dan submerge
themselves as much as possible and try not come up for air if
they can help it. If the enemy sneaks up on them, they’ll just sit very
still, holding their fingers on the triggers of their rifles until they tremble
with cramping, waiting to be discovered, waiting to die.