Dead Echo

  Chapter 27: Old Shake

  Even as a kid he’d never liked the night. It was dumb, stupid; he knew that. If not, why the hell would he live alone in the woods, for christsake? Regardless, it was true and it was real, and right this minute, staring out through the blinds into the darkness, it was night. He looked down at the gun in his hand, shook his head, wiped his forehead with the towel he held in the other. Looked over his shoulder into the kitchen, trying to read the wall clock. Looked back at the window.

  Nothing out there, dammit, nothing!

  He gripped the .22 a little tighter. Tried to think back to what had stirred him from sleep.

  Where were the dogs?

  He remembered feeding them right before bed. Why, there were the bowls, empty, beside his TV chair. And it seemed he could remember watching them eat, but he wasn’t quite sure. It could have been yesterday, the day before. Regardless, where the hell were they? He always kept them in at night. Old Shake hadn’t complained about the restriction for years; he was almost eight and didn’t have time for much else beside sleeping, eating, and getting rubbed. And Sally never left his side anyway. So where the hell were they?

  He let the blinds snap closed and backed slowly into the kitchen doorway. The clock read 3:47. Jesus, hours till first light. What the hell was he going to do in the meantime? Creep around in here like a fucking burglar with a gun in his hand, just waiting to the blow the balls off anything that moved?

  Weird, man, creepy. The kind of shit that got you thrown into Jackson. The State Home, as his granny used to call it. The State Home, yeah. Over the years he’d known a few who went that direction, and he never remembered seeing any of them again. He shook his head. At least today was Saturday, no, Sunday he reminded himself, looking back at the clock. Yeah, Sunday, right. The only day the mail didn’t run and thank God for small favors.

  And it wasn’t like he didn’t know what it was. He knew damn good and well. That fucking fisherman, the one from the ghost stories he’d heard when he was a kid. Probably almost a hundred times or so, and it had been a scary one, sure, but it had never felt real. That had been a good thing, a thing that gave it a nice little safe place in his mind. But now…

  Things hadn’t been…what, safe? Maybe ever since you took that walk down to the pond. And then seen that fucking mud man or whatever the hell it was. He remembered the fear and running, and that was about it. Like his mind only worked in fits and starts lately.

  But there must be more, the dirty little voice whispered. Why else would you sit in the kitchen in the middle of the night with a handgun in your lap? He looked down at the kitchen table, hardly remembering that even, and saw the gun. He wanted to let it go but didn’t. Couldn’t.

  Doom approaches.

  He sat back fast, wincing. There it was in two simple words. That, in a nutshell, was the cause of his sleeplessness, the nightmares, the fear. That was it and that was all it was and it would be everything, somehow he could see that part, and sooner than later. But where it was coming from he had no i---

  ---but he did and he damn well knew it.

  Leszno’s Farm. That goddamn place was where it came from, probably where it always came from, but something new was in the air now, for sure. Hell, the news, that poor family. God knew what else was going on over there, but you could bet it was no good. Everything about that neighborhood had soured lately, and there seemed to be no one who really let on about it other than himself. Or maybe that crazy old fucking man he’d seen by the mailtruck a couple of weeks before, but shit…what was all that anyway?

  Oh man, yeah, getting ready for the State House indeed. Life and its little jokes. But he didn’t laugh. He swallowed back on a hard lump in his throat and heard the tremor in his hand tap the pistol barrel against the tabletop. He coughed the lump through and tried to whistle, hoping that somehow both dogs were already in the house; maybe back there lying deeper in the house, somehow unaware of his need. The sound came out cracked, ludicrous, and Jester hunched forward, self-consciously pulling the gun in closer to his body. His eyes remained on the windows but nothing was out there. He already knew that; he’d sat out there on the porch every night for the past week, staring out into the goddamn woods for no reason.

  Oh, no, motherfucker…you got reason…

  He stood up suddenly and the chair kicked out from underneath him and hit the kitchen cabinet three feet away. He spun around from the sound and immediately closed his eyes and brought his free hand to his chest. Jesus Christ! I was just that far from shootin a fucking hole through the kitchen! That far! What the hell’s got you, boy? You stepping over the edge, damn straight, straight over the goddamn edge, and here it is, the funny part, the part you just won’t believe…all over the fucking boogyman.

  No. There was something out there!

  Oh, a course, sure! And if that’s the case and the whateveritis is indeed after you, well then, the question has to be: what the fuck are you still doing here? Because, you see, that’s the part that just doesn’t shake. He dropped his head and almost laughed then. This was like something a kid needed his momma for, not a grown—

  --no. It ain’t like that and you know it.

  He sat down again, hard, on the chair and shook his head. He leaned forward and placed the gun on the table, sat back and looked at it a good long time. Think! Think! You don’t believe this, whatever it is you’ve been tryin to think. You’re a grown man let’s face it, and now, for some unknown reason, you’re suddenly scared of the dark. You can try to twist and turn it around so it looks different than it is, but what it boils down to is you is scared of the dark. Believe that shit. Four o’clock in the fuckin morning and you’re staring off into space with a fucking gun in your hand, waiting to shoot anything that moves.

  There it is. Put that in your goddamn pipe and smoke it.

  He bit his lip and wondered if a little shot of whiskey wouldn’t help. Stood up and tried not to look at the gun hanging at his wrist. Whistled again, this time a bit louder. A bit better, but still no dogs. He walked over to the sink by the window, forced himself to look through the dirty pane of glass. But he did look goddammit, at the same damn things that’d always been there, of course, but he did look. The tin sheeting extending off the eave of the house to the 4 bys sunk in the concrete where they used to keep the tractor years back. Same damn extension cord from the past ten years, too, looping out to the work-light which hung from the nail. The pile of old tires and the scrap metal from T-Boy’s. What was left of a sandbox and the old dead tree where the swing used to be. He dragged his eye right to the liquor cabinet. Reached over and opened it, took out the bottle of Evan Williams. He pulled out the glass he kept beside it for one express purpose and dropped two fingers in, eyed it, and poured in one more. He readied himself and threw it back.

  It was as he placed the empty glass back on the countertop that he saw it out by the dead tree. His fingers viced together and shot the glass into the sink, spinning it around loudly, but not breaking it. He ducked down toward the window ledge, trying to see back past where the edge of the tin sheeting obscured the yard past the tree. He did have a light on a pole back there, but from the house, anywhere in the house, he’d have no better view than here. The rest of the yard was mostly wild owing to untended hedges and lazy Saturday afternoons in the heat of summer, but--

  There it was again, gotdammit!

  He ducked even lower, trying to get a better view and only succeeding in crunching his nose against the ledge. His eyes welled and blurred and he lurched back from the sink, toward the kitchen table, the gun clutched at his chest. He shook the tears from his eyes and brought the weapon to bear.

  There came the sound of something large, a garbage can most likely, getting thrown against a tree, hard. And on the tail end of that he thought he heard a dog. “Shake,” he whispered and moved away from the table. Another crash of metal from the same direction. “Sonofabitch,” he muttered, pushing past the few sacks of undelivered mail through to t
he dining room. He only paused long enough at the door to glance down at the gun again and then the knob was in his fist and he was pulling it back hard, not shaking now.

  He jumped down the small step-up, ignoring the rail and jerking his head and the gun in all directions. “Da hell’s goin on out here!” he yelled into the darkness. “I got a gun!”

  Nothing.

  He moved slowly, on point, to the edge of the drip line, pulling up behind one of the 4bys, the gun twitching at every shape in the darkness. The only thing that kept his finger still was the fear that the dogs were still out there somewhere and he’d hit one by mistake. He wished he’d thought to bring a fucking flashlight. “Motherfucker, I’ll kill ya!” he yelled again, his voice no longer as loud nor as confident as he’d pretended in Full Assault Mode. Now he could see how dark and lonely and fucking menacing it really was out here.

  He cut his eyes left and saw the garbage can. Somebody had sure enough chunked it all right. There was shit all over the place over there by the tires but that’s not what really had him. No, not by half, because the last time he’d looked in it had been rimmed-out with old rainwater and rust. He’d pushed against it as a test and it hadn’t budged an inch.

  And here it’d been chunked halfway across the backyard.

  He pointed his gun back toward the corner of the house where the can had been sitting. He wanted to shout but couldn’t find the voice, the courage now. He’d been in a couple of fights in middle and high school and it had never been anything like this. This felt more like walking along the edge of your own grave. The gooseflesh rippled along the small of his back and the gun went off in his hand.

  The explosion almost brought him to his knees.

  That and the pain.

  Suddenly a bright, crystallized point of flame lit in his right foot and immediately mushroomed into such an intricate scheme of blinding hurt that he had no idea where he was or what had happened. His ears were ringing and he got the sense of the moon hanging low in the sky right before his leg buckled and dumped him on the dew-stained ground. He rolled over on his back, wondering at the hard piece of metal in his hand, only then coming to some sort of semi-conscious acknowledgement of what had happened. The gun had gone off in his hand. And from the feel of it he’d shot himself in the fucking foot! He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed himself up on his elbows into a sitting position. He was suddenly no longer afraid, the pain killed all that. For just a moment he wondered if this was how men felt in battle, and then he saw his foot.

  The bullet had drilled a neat little hole in the side of his boot and even as he watched, blood welled up and out. A dazed part of his mind tried to tell him that at least it wasn’t spurting. He tried to wiggle his toes and winced. All right, all right. Bad idea. Get up and get back inside. And again, for another weird moment he could not even remember what had got him out here in the first place.

  An agonized howl reminded him.

  This time there was no doubt. Old Shake (where the hell was Sally?) and there was no other time on earth Jester had heard him like that. He knew the dog like people knew their kids. “Motherfucker,” he whispered, trying to get an idea where the sound was coming from. His ears still rang from his fuck-up but the wail was almost continuous now, not showing any sign of slacking. He finally reached his knee, trying to see through the swimming waves of pain, trying to situate his foot so it didn’t have to bear weight. It made the sound funny in his head, like an echo, an endless loop. His stomach pitched and he lost his dinner all out in front of him. The pistol barrel was stuck in the ground, propping him up. He thought he would puke again but didn’t. Barely.

  And suddenly the form was there again. Whatever (his mind was quick to remind him now) had drawn him from the kitchen. Right out there past the shadow-mark of light, something was moving again. Toward him. This time it seemed to be oozing out of the treeline and shrubs. Jester heard branches snapping and the heavy sound of something pushing through the bank of hedges over there and cried out from the pain in his foot again. There was a lot of blood in the grass, flowing out of him like a tide. He straightened his back and pulled the gun out of the ground.

  Something was coming toward him. It seemed to be splashes of color combining into an elusive shape and it was only as the thing got near that Jester made it out to be two things. One behind the other. Or one holding up the other. The hairs along Jester’s arm raised to hackles. The second the color coalesced he knew and just this knowing helped his head clear a little. Without a thought he stood up and pointed the pistol at whatever was coming toward him through the woods.

  He didn’t think about his foot, of the intruder creeping closer, or anything in the world really. Because he recognized what the thing was carrying. He’d know that rangy fur anywhere, and somehow, knowing this gave him the strength he needed to raise the gun. “Goddammit, mister,” he growled. “I’m sending ya to hell for that.”

  And he pulled the trigger.

  The six-inch barrel had been completely buried in the earth when he fell, due to the fact of several hard rains the previous week; it had gone in like a lover. The mud-packed barrel disintegrated in his hand amid a brilliant flash of white and he went over again, not knowing if he was for the world or against it, with it or somewhere on the outer edges, scrabbling and babbling as he went down.

  The last thing he felt was something land hard on his chest.