With (11 page)

And goddamn it all to hell if he wasn’t stopped by the fucking state police once again! And wouldn’t you know it was ole Hedge again.

“I wasn’t doing sixty-five,” Sog protested.

“Naw, Sarge, you was only doing forty. But you was driving erratic. Better let me sniff your breath.” Hedge got his face up close and drew a big breath and said, “Wowee, have you been drinking varnish?”

“I aint been drinking,” Sog said.

“What are you out this time o’ night for?” Hedge wanted to know. “Or early morning, I ort to say.”

Sog thought fast. “Some friends of mine were giving me a goodbye party.”

“’Scuse me, Sarge,” Hedge said, “but you aint got no friends.” Sog wouldn’t challenge the accuracy of that shitty observation, so Hedge went on, “And if you was at a party, you would of been drinking, wouldn’t you of?”

“Hedge, I wouldn’t take a drop because I knew you’d catch me,” Sog said. “Now if you’ll just let me go on, I’ll drive more careful.”

“You better do that, Boss,” Hedge said. “Oops, you aint my boss or nobody’s any more, are you?”

“Then you ort to be glad of that,” Sog said and drove off fast. Tomorrow—or, more exactly,
today
—when he came back to Harrison, coming and going he’d have to take back-roads to stay out of Hedge Larrabee’s territory.

It’s forty twisting miles from Harrison to Stay More. As soon as he got home, he popped a fistful of aspirin, which helped just a little, took half a glass of bourbon, which helped more, and then dragged what possessions he had left out into the yard. Just as he figured, almost nobody showed up for his yard sale. Stay More was practically a ghost town anyhow, and only a few people from hereabouts took a notion to come. George Dinsmore came and offered to buy his chickens, and he had to explain he’d already sold ’em. Latha Bourne, who used to be postmistress of Stay More before it lost the
PO
to Parthenon, offered to buy his davenport, and he had to explain he’d already sold it.

Mid-afternoon he stuck the unsold stuff back into the house and shut it up and locked it, which he never had done before. He taped a sheet of paper on the door:
GONE TO CALIFORNIA
. He took one quick drive around what little was left of the town, including the old empty schoolhouse across the creek, taking a kind of farewell look. If it hadn’t been for his headache he might have allowed himself to get nostalgic over the scenes of his boyhood but he wanted to just tell them all to go to hell.

Back in Harrison for the last time, he skipped the last supper at Western Sizzlin’ because his stomach still wasn’t settled.

He took up his spy post near the Kerr place and waited and followed when Karen Kerr drove the girl away and across town to somebody else’s house, and left her there, probably for that birthday party. The girl was carrying the gift-wrapped bubble bath. He parked down the street for a stake-out on that house, and hadn’t been waiting very long before two of the cars took a whole bunch of the girls, six or seven of them, back across town to a roller skating rink.

There is kind of a little balcony at one end of the roller rink, where the skaters stop and step out to take a breath of air or to goof off or whatever. Sog drove his truck around behind the roller rink so that he could watch that little balcony.

It began to get dark. Usually two or more of the girls would appear on that balcony together. Sog got out and stood so he could reach up to the balcony, which wasn’t very far above the ground. His eyes was level with the rink floor and he could see inside the rink, where a whole bunch of skaters was a-gliding all over the place, and there in the midst of them was his truelove, doing all kinds of fancy turns and spins and even leaps. She took his breath away. And he loved her more than ever.

He waited patiently, and just like they say, everything comes to him who waits. By and by, she come out onto the balcony by herself, breathing hard after all those stunts. She was too winded to put up any struggle. He grabbed her and gagged her and took her away.

Chapter nine

S
he didn’t mean for him to see her. She intended to take possession of the yards and fields and to let her
in-habit
know that this was her new home, and live in peaceful co-existence with the mean bastard without being
his
dog. She kept herself hidden in the grass, spying on him while he brought in a crate filled with chickens from the old home and turned them loose in the yard near the dilapidated henhouse, then broadcast chicken feed around the yard. The chickens discovered her while scratching around for their feed, but they knew her and did not even bother to cackle in recognition, and of course she wasn’t making a sound. Later she watched with great interest as he appeared, coming up the trail from the forest with some enormous thing on his back. It took her a while to recognize it, possibly because it was upside down and didn’t seem to belong on a man’s back out in the woods, but she caught a distant whiff of its scent and realized it was the big soft feel-good piece of furniture that had been in the old house, that she herself had once tried to sleep upon because it was so comfortable. He had kicked her off of it, and had said, “Bitch, don’t never let me catch you on there again.” Well, she reflected, whatever doubts she might have had that he intended to forsake the old place entirely and move into this mountaintop homestead were now laid to rest. He loved that piece of furniture more than he loved anything else in this world. That piece of furniture was his wife, and now the new home was complete.

When she had heard the first distant thunderclaps she had cringed and burrowed her belly into the earth, lowering her ear flaps down over her ears. But then the thunder came nearer and louder and the hard blankets of water fell from the sky and she started losing her mind, and decided to make a mad dash for safety and shelter in the building that had been a workshop. She didn’t care if he saw her or not. Inside the workshop she was protected from the waterfall but not from the terrible noise, and she took a leap and landed inside of one of those tall round wooden things, where she cowered and trembled. The walls of the wood around her offered only a little protection against the crash of the thunder, and once again she was convinced that the world was coming to an end. Eventually the hideous noise stopped, and she had to make three or four jumps before she could extricate herself from that deep drum. She sniffed the air and detected that he was approaching just in time for her to hide herself in a dark corner of the shop.

It was while she was hiding that she became unmistakably aware of an
in-habit
that was so present and clinging that for an instant she thought another person had been there recently. But like all
in-habits,
it had no scent. And yet this
in-habit
was so powerful she knew it had been around for a long, long time, and she had to choke herself to keep from calling “Hreapha!” to it, which would have given away her hiding place to him, who was now peering into the wooden drum as if searching for her, and then was calling “Bitchie babe?” in such a gentle voice she was tempted to answer him. She could almost
see
the
in-habit
shying away from him. No, she couldn’t
see,
but she could perceive, and this
in-habit
was a tousle-haired boy in overalls. She wanted to lick his hand, which he held out to her, but she didn’t want the man to see her. She waited until the man was gone, and then she attempted to lick the
in-habit’s
hand, but the hand, darn it, simply was not there.

One night she and Yowrfrowr had taken a stroll together to the Stay More cemetery, an interesting place to play, and Hreapha had detected her very first ghost, if that is what it was. Yowrfrowr had nudged her and cautioned her not to call her name to it, because ghosts hate barking. So they had both pretended the ghost wasn’t there, and it had gone away.

What’s the difference, she had asked Yowrfrowr, between a ghost and an
in-habit
?

A whole world of difference, my dear, he had said. The primary difference is that ghosts are the spirits of creatures who no longer live.
In-habits
are the spirits of creatures who are still alive.

Do you mean that when an
in-habit
dies it becomes a ghost?

Yowrfrowr had chuckled and grinned. Not exactly, he had said. Many ghosts have never been
in-habits
. And many
in-habits
never become ghosts. An
in-habit
is part of someone who loves a particular place so very much that regardless of where they go they always leave their
in-habit
behind. If I should ever have to leave Stay More, perish the thought of that unlikelihood, my
in-habit
will fiercely take possession of this whole damn town.

She had only been able to look at him with wonder, trying to understand just what an
in-habit
was.

Yowrfrowr had gone on grinning. Now if you’ll hold still, he had said, my
in-habit
would like to climb up on the back of your
in-habit
.

You’re as silly as you look, she’d said, and had run away from him.

Now she perceived that the man had gone, perhaps back to the truck for another piece of furniture, and she came out of hiding. Her hunger pangs were getting the better of her, and she was nearly tempted to turn one of those chickens into a ghost. But she knew all the chickens personally, although they had never exchanged names or made any attempt to communicate beyond Hreapha occasionally beseeching them to stop defecating all over her favorite lying-places.

She went up to the house and discovered to her delight that he had left out a bowl of her favorite kind of commercial chow on the porch. So he knew she was there! He was going to feed her! This would be ideal, to share the premises with him without any servitude to him, or any ill-treatment from him, and yet retain the right to be regularly provided for. She decided that when he came back again she would say “Hreapha!” at least once, just in gratitude. She licked the bowl clean.

But he did not come back. She waited a long time and then took a hike the harsh mile down the mountain to the place where he customarily left his pickup, but it was not there. She supposed he had gone back to Stay More for yet another load. Returning up the mountain trail, stepping gingerly along the ledge where not even goats could step and telling herself not to look down, she couldn’t help looking down at the sound of some familiar cackling, and she noticed, far down below, a whole flock of her feathered friends from the old place. Looking closer, she saw the smashed crate that had been their container in the treetop. Brainy as she was, it didn’t take her long to surmise that he must have accidentally dropped a crate of the chickens while negotiating the treacherous trail.

It took her a while, more than a while, to find a way to get down there. But she did, and announced to the chickens that she intended to shepherd them to their new home. Of course they couldn’t understand her language, but she went on communicating, reassuringly, telling them that her great-grandfather on her mother’s side, whose name was Yiprarrk, had been a sheep dog, and knew how to herd the animals and get them to move in the desired direction. She thus had inherited at least a semblance of the ability to herd creatures. She went up behind a big fat hen and snapped “Hreapha!” and sure enough the hen moved in the desired direction, although casting Hreapha a malevolent and supercilious look. There was a rooster who responded to Hreapha’s commands by attempting to rise up and stab her with his spurs, screaming all the while in a way that damaged her ears, and she practically had to get into a cockfight in order to convince him to accompany his harem.

It was slow work. All the rest of the afternoon was consumed in trying to get the birds moving in the same direction, up through the dark woods to the place where the remains of the trail could be picked up and they could march more smoothly toward their new home. A few stubborn hens ran the wrong way and she had to chase them down and pretend to bite them in order to get them turned around. She had shouted “Hreapha!” so many times that she was perishing of thirst. Surely Grandpa Yiprarrk had not had to work so very hard.

But she was permitted the elation of job satisfaction when finally, as evening came on, she managed to get all fifteen of the hens (and even that rooster) to the yard of the henhouse, where the sight of their former companions cheered them up so much they would have apologized to Hreapha if they could have. Although the henhouse looked as if a strong wind might blow it down, it was still usable, and inside it the former owner had attached wicker baskets lined with straw to the walls, which served as nests for the laying hens. Hreapha could see into one of the lower ones and was pleased to notice that it already contained an egg, which, after all, was what hens were supposed to do.

Hreapha did not understand any of the varied clucks, chirps, squawks, cackles, chuckles or chirrs with which the chickens communicated, but she managed to deduce that the newly arrived hens were inquiring of the already-settled hens about the possibility of drinking-water, a possibility that Hreapha herself needed to settle at once. One of the established hens peeped or piped an answer, and led her sisters a short distance up the hillside to a tiny building, just a shed of two sloping roofs and nothing else, which covered a spring emerging from the earth. The overflow of the spring collected in a small pool large enough for Hreapha and the chickens to jointly slake their thirst.

She was glad to know of the existence of that tiny springhouse. Going inside, she discovered how cool it was in there. The low temperature helped to freshen her body after its exertions, and she was so comfortable she lay down beside the spring and went to sleep. Not one of the chickens had made any attempt to thank her for helping them find their way home, but she would discover, in the days and months ahead, that they were all extremely polite and friendly to her, and they made an effort to refrain from defecating on her favorite napping spots.