Here in Pine Deep, she had him by the nuts. And she fucking well knew it.
Lefty slowly closed his hand, feeling the coins against his skin. Strangely warm, oddly moist. He shoved his hand into his pocket but didn’t immediately let go of the quarters.
Katelyn still stared at him.
They both knew that he would break eye contact first. It was the way it was supposed to work. The universe turned on such immutable realities.
Lefty wanted to tough it out, but…
He lowered his eyes and turned away.
Katelyn didn’t laugh, didn’t even give a victorious snort. It wasn’t compassion or manners. He simply wasn’t worth the effort, and they both knew it. In two minutes she would have forgotten the encounter entirely.
He knew he’d wear that moment when they put him in his coffin.
And that was the way these things worked, too.
He got onto his bike, holding it steady with one hand as he began to coast down Corn Hill. When he was far enough away he put his sneakers down and let the tread skid him to a slow stop. Then he took the coins out of his pocket, unfolded his hand, and looked at two silver disks. Two quarters. A 1998—and didn’t there always seem to be a 1998 coin in every handful of change?—and a 2013. Still new looking though it was a few years old now.
The coins were still warm. Warmer now for having been in his pocket.
He raised them to his face and peered at them.
Sniffed them.
And licked them.
He had no idea at all he was going to do that.
He immediately pulled his head back, disgusted, wincing, wanting to spit.
Except…
Except all of those were fake emotions, fake reactions, and he knew it. He played out the drama, though. He even went so far as to raise his left hand to throw the coins away.
And yet after he sat there on his bike for another two or three minutes he could still feel the coins in his fist, and his fist was in his pocket.
The taste of the warm, damp silver was on his tongue.
He had an erection that he didn’t know what to do with.
Not out here, right here on Corn Hill, right here in front of the world.
Lefty felt sick. On some level, he felt sick.
He knew he should feel sick.
He wasn’t like that. He wasn’t no fucking pervert.
Lefty threw the coins away.
Except that isn’t what he did.
In his mind that’s what he did, but the coins jingled in his pocket as he headed out of town to make his next delivery. With each pump of his legs he pretended that he couldn’t hear them.
-5-
Lefty’s last delivery was all the way out of town, way out on Route A32. The Conner farm. The sun was fully behind the mountains now and although the trees on the top looked like they were burning, the flat farmlands were painted with purple shadows.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Lefty said aloud as he rode along.
The Conner’s weren’t home but there was a note on the door to leave the parcel on the porch swing-chair. He saw that they’d left him a tip.
An apple and a little Post-it that said, “Thanks!”
The note had a smiley face.
He picked up the apple and stared at it.
“Jesus Christ,” he said and threw the apple as far as he could. It sailed all the way across the yard and hit the garden fence.
Dad would have approved. A fastball with a nice break down and to the left. A batter would break his heart swinging at that.
“Fuck,” he said, annoyed even that he’d thrown a good ball. Somehow it felt like an extra kick in the nuts.
He stomped down the steps and along the red brick walkway, then stopped when he realized he was stomping. He couldn’t see himself, but the image of a disappointed fat kid stomping was disgusting. It disappointed him in his own eyes.
Lefty straightened, squared his shoulders, and walked with great dignity to where his bike leaned against the garden gate. A pair of Japanese maples grew on either side of the entrance, their pruned branches forming a leafy arch over the walkway. Lefty made himself stop and look at the trees for a moment because he was still pissed off.
His eyes burned as if he was going to cry, but Lefty cursed aloud at the thought of tears.
“You’re so fucking stupid,” he told himself.
And he sniffed as he reached for his bike. He glanced up at the sky and then along the road. There was no way he was going to get home before full dark.
His heart beat the wrong way in his chest as the truth of that hit home. It was like being punched in the sternum.
It’s dark in there.
It’s dark.
“Yes,” said a voice behind him, “it’s dark.”
-6-
Lefty jumped and whirled. He lost his grip on the bike and it fell over with a clatter.
A woman stood behind him.
Tall.
Pretty.
Short red-gold hair snapping in the freshening breeze. Floral print house-dress flapping around her thighs.
Mrs. Conner.
She smiled at him with ruby red lips.
“I…” he began but didn’t know where to go with that.
“You didn’t eat your apple,” she said. “And it was so ripe.”
He looked down at the apple. It had hit the fence hard and burst apart, the impact tearing the red skin to reveal the vulnerable white flesh.
But the apple was all wrong. The meat of the apple wasn’t white, it was gray and pale maggots writhed in it. Lefty recoiled from it, taking an involuntary step backward.
He bumped into the post and spun around.
It wasn’t the fence post.
It was Mrs. Conner.
He yelped and spun around to where she should have been, to where she just was. But she wasn’t there. She was here.
Right here.
So close.
Too close.
Much too close.
The top buttons of her housecoat were open. He could see the curves of her breasts, the pale yellow lace of her bra. The blue veins beneath her skin.
“It looks delicious,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”
He didn’t know if she was talking about the apple or about…
No.
He did know.
Of course he knew.
It’s just that it wasn’t right. Not in any moral sense. It wasn’t right because it didn’t make sense. This didn’t happen. Not even in his wet dreams. This never happened. Probably not even to the hunky guys on the football team in high school. Not to thirteen year olds. Not to fat kids.
Not really.
Not ever.
Mrs. Conner moved a step closer and he simply could not take his eyes off of her cleavage. The half melon shapes of her breasts defined by shadows that curved down and out of sight behind the cups of her bra and the buttons that were still buttoned.
He stared at those breasts, looking at them, watching the rise and fall of her chest.
Except…
Except.
The breasts did not rise and fall.
Because the chest did not rise and fall.
Not until Mrs. Conner took a breath in order to speak.
“Ripe,” she said. “Ripe for the picking.”
Lefty slowly raised his eyes from those shadow-carved breasts, past that ruby-lipped mouth, all the way to the eyes of the woman who stood so close.
To eyes with pupils as large as a cat’s.
Eyes that, he knew at once and for certain, could see in the dark.
In any darkness.
He felt himself growing hard. Harder than before with Katelyn. Harder than ever in any of his dreams. Hard enough to hurt. To ache like a tumor, like a punch. There was no pleasure in it, no anticipation of release. It hurt, and he knew, on every level of his young mind, that hurt—that pain—was the point of this. Of all of this. Of everything in his life and in this odd day. Hurt was the des
tination at the end of this day. He knew that now even if he’d never even suspected it before.
It’s dark in there.
And it was dark out here, too. And darkness called to him from the shadow beneath her breasts.
“So ripe,” she said.
And he said, “Please…”
He was not asking for anything she had, not for anything she was. Not for those lips, or for those breasts. Or for any fulfillment of a fantasy that was too absurd even for his fevered midnight dreams.
“So, so ripe,” said Mrs. Conner as she reached out and caressed his cheek with the backs of her pale fingers.
He shivered.
Her fingers were as white and as cold as marble.
“And juicy,” she said as she bent to kiss him.
With those red, red lips.
Lefty wanted to shove her away. Wanted—needed—to run as fast as his stubby legs would go. Wanted to get onto his bike and ride faster than the wind, ride faster than the sunset. Ride fast enough to leave the darkness behind.
That’s what he wanted.
But all he could do was stand there.
Her lips, when she kissed his cheek, were colder even than her fingers. Her breath, colder still.
“Please,” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said.
Those were not parts of the same conversation, and they both knew it.
She kissed his cheeks, his slack lips. When he closed his eyes she kissed his eyelids and delicately licked the tears that slid from beneath his lashes. Then she kissed his jaw.
And his throat.
Her tongue traced a line along his flesh and whenever his heart beat, she gasped.
“Please,” he said again and his breath was so faint, the word so thin that he knew that it was his last breath. Or, maybe he could take one more. A deep one, so he could scream.
He felt her lips part. Felt the hard sharpness of something touch his skin.
Two points, like needles.
“No,” said a voice.
Mrs. Conner was still so close when she turned her face that for a moment she and Lefty were cheek-to-cheek. Like lovers. Like people squeezing into a booth to take a photo. The coldness of her flesh was numbing.
But more numbing still was the figure that stood behind them. Not in the road, but on the red brick garden path, as if somehow he’d snuck over the fence so he could surprise everyone from behind.
A figure in tatters of greasy gray and the faded colors of countless garments.
A figure that smelled of earth and sewers and open landfills.
A figure whose lined and seamed face beamed a great smile.
Mr. Pockets.
-7-
Mrs. Conner said, “Go away.”
Her voice was cold, sharp, without the sensual softness of a moment ago.
Mr. Pockets just stood there.
“This meat is mine,” snarled Mrs. Conner. And with that she jerked Lefty nearly off his feet, pulling him in front of her. Not as a shield but to put him on display. Her property.
Her…
What?
She’d called him meat.
Tears burned channels down Lefty’s face.
The old hobo kept smiling.
“Get away,” said Mrs. Conner.
He stood his ground.
Mrs. Conner pointed at him with one of her slender, icy fingers. “Go on now,” she said in a voice much more like her own, without sex in it but still with passion. “Go on, git.”
The wind gusted and Mr. Pockets closed his eyes and leaned into the wind like he enjoyed the cold and all of the smells the breeze carried with it. Lefty thought the wind smelled like dead grass and something else. A rotten egg smell. Lefty wasn’t sure if the wind already had that rotten egg smell, or if it came from the hobo.
Mrs. Conner tensed and took a single threatening step toward Mr. Pockets.
“Get your disgusting ass out of my yard, you filthy tramp,” she growled. “Or I’ll make you sorry.”
“You’ll make me sorry?” said the hobo, phrasing it as if it was a matter of great complexity to him. His speech was still southern mixed with some foreign accent Lefty couldn’t recognize. “What in the wide world could that mean?”
Mrs. Conner laughed. Such a strange laugh to come from so pretty a throat. It was how Lefty imagined a wolf might laugh. Sharp, harsh and ugly. “You don’t know what kind of shit you stepped in, you old son of a bitch.”
“Old?” echoed Mr. Pockets, and his smile faded. He sighed. “Old. Ah.”
Lefty tried to pull away but the single hand that held him was like a shackle of pure ice. Cold, unbreakable. The fingers seemed to burn his skin the way metal will in the deep of winter.
“Let me go,” he said, wanting to growl it, to howl it, but it came out as a whimper.
“Let him go,” said Mr. Pockets.
“He’s mine.”
“No,” said the hobo, “he’s mine.”
Mrs. Conner laughed her terrible bark of a laugh again. She shook Lefty like a doll. “You really don’t get it, do you shit for brains?”
“What don’t I get?” asked the old man.
“You don’t know what’s going on here, do you? Even now, you don’t get it? You’re either too stupid or you’ve pickled what little brains you ever had with whatever the fuck you drink, but you just don’t get it. I’m telling you to leave. I’m giving you that chance. I don’t want to dirty my mouth on you, so I’m letting you walk away. You should get down on your knees and kiss the ground where I’m standing. You should pray to God and thank Him for little mercies, ‘cause I—”
“No,” said Mr. Pockets, interrupting.
“What?”
“No, my dear,” he said and there was less of the southern and more of the foreign accent in his tone, “it’s you—and anyone like you—who doesn’t understand. You’re too young, I expect. Too young.”
She tried to laugh at that, but there was something in Mr. Pocket’s voice that stalled the laugh. Lefty heard it, too, but he didn’t know what was going on.
Or, rather he did know and could not imagine how any thought he had, any insight he possessed, or any action he took could change this from being the end of him. The hardness in his pants had faded and now he had to tighten up to keep from pissing down his legs.
The woman flung Lefty down and he hit the gatepost, spun badly and fell far too hard. Pain exploded in his elbow and knee as he struck the red bricks, and as he toppled over he hit the back of his head. Red fireworks burst in his eyes.
Through the falling embers of sudden pain, he saw Mrs. Conner bend forward and sneer at Mr. Pockets. Her face contorted into a mask of pure hatred. The sensual mouth became a leer of disgust, the eyes blazed with threat.
“You’re a fucking idiot for pushing this,” she said, the words hissing out between gritted teeth.
Between very, very sharp teeth.
Teeth that were impossible.
Teeth that were so damned impossible.
“I will drink the life from you,” said Mrs. Conner, and then she flung herself at Mr. Pockets, tearing at him with nails and with those dreadful teeth.
Lefty screamed.
In stark terror.
In fear for himself and for his soul.
But his fear became words as he screamed. A warning.
“Mr. Pockets!”
However Mr. Pockets did not need his warning. As the woman pounced on him, he stepped forward and caught her around the throat with one gray and dirty hand.
And with that hand he held her.
She thrashed and spat and kicked at him. Her fingernails tore at his face, his clothes. Her feet struck him in the groin and stomach and chest.
He stood there and held her.
And held her.
Every blow that landed knocked dust from him. Lefty could feel the vibrating thuds as if they were striking him, the echoes bounced off the front wall of the Conner farmhouse.
And Mr. Pockets held
her.
Inches above the ground.
Then, with infinite slowness, he pulled her toward him. Toward his smiling mouth.
He said to her, “Oh, you are so young. You and those like you. Even the ones you think are old. What are they anyway? Fifty years old? The oldest living in these mountains, the one who came from far away and settled here, the one who made you, he isn’t even three centuries old. Such a child. A puppy. A maggot that will never become a fly.” As he spoke, spit flecked her face.
Mrs. Conner squirmed and fought; no longer trying to fight. She tried to get away.
Mr. Pockets pulled her close and licked the side of her face, then made a face of mild disappointment.
“You taste like nothing,” he said. “You don’t even taste of the corruption you think defines you. You haven’t been what you are long enough to lose the bland flavor of life. And you haven’t acquired the savory taste of immortality. Not even the pungent piquancy of evil.”
“You don’t…know…what you’re…doing…”
Mrs. Conner had to fight to gasp in little bits of air so she could talk. She didn’t need to breathe, Lefty understood that now, but you had to breathe in order to speak, and the hand that held her was clamped so tight. He could hear the bones in her neck beginning to grind.
Mr. Pockets shook her. Once, almost gently. “You and yours hunt these hills. You are the boogeymen in the dark, and I suspect that you feed as much off of their fear of you as from the blood that runs through their veins. How feeble is that? How pathetic.” He pulled her close, forcing her to look into his eyes. “You think you understand what it is to be old? You call yourselves immortal because some of you—a scant few—can count their lives in centuries. You think that’s what immortality is?”
Mr. Pockets laughed now, and it was entirely different from the lupine laughter of Mrs. Conner. His was a laughter like distant thunder. A deep rumble that promised awful things.
Lefty curled into a ball and wrapped his arms around his head.
“If you could count millennia as the fleeting moments of your life, even then you would not be immortal. Then, all you would be is old. And there are things far older than that. Older than trees. Older than mountains.”