“Ain’t your pocket gonna catch inside that hole?” the deputy asked.
“As long as I hold it or it’s on my person, it won’t harm me. But the minute I let go of it, and the aura of evil touches it, it’ll blaze. I got to hurry, boy.”
With that, Jebidiah wiggled inside the burrow.
In the burrow, Jebidiah used the tip of his pistol to push the Bible pages forward. They glowed brightly, but Jebidiah knew the light would be brief. It would burn longer than writing paper, but still, it would not last long.
After a goodly distance, Jebidiah discovered the burrow dropped off. He found himself inside a fairly large cavern. He could hear the sound of bats, and smell bat guano, which in fact, greased his path as he slid along on his elbows until he could stand inside the higher cavern and look about. The last flames of the Bible burned itself out with a puff of blue light and a sound like an old man breathing his last.
Jebidiah listened in the dark for a long moment. He could hear the bats squeaking, moving about. The fact that they had given up the night sky, let Jebidiah know daylight was not far off.
Jebidiah’s ears caught a sound, rocks shifting against the cave floor. Something was moving in the darkness, and he didn’t think it was the bats. It scuttled, and Jebidiah felt certain it was close to the floor, and by the sound of it, moving his way at a creeping pace. The hair on the back of Jebidiah’s neck bristled like porcupine quills. He felt his flesh bump up and crawl. The air became stiffer with the stench of burnt and rotting flesh. Jebidiah’s knees trembled. He reached cautiously inside his coat pocket, produced a match, struck it on his pants leg, held it up.
At that very moment, the thing stood up and was brightly lit in the glow of the match, the bees circling its skin-stripped skull. It snarled and darted forward. Jebidiah felt its rotten claws on his shirt front as he fired the revolver. The blaze from the bullet gave a brief, bright flare and was gone. At the same time, the match was knocked out of his hand and Jebidiah was knocked backwards, onto his back, the thing’s claws at his throat. The monster’s bees stung him. The stings felt like red-hot pokers entering his flesh. He stuck the revolver into the creature’s body and fired. Once. Twice. Three times. A fourth.
Then the hammer clicked empty. He realized he had already fired two other shots. Six dead silver soldiers were in his cylinders, and the thing still had hold of him.
He tried to draw his other gun, but before he could, the thing released him, and Jebidiah could hear it crawling away in the dark. The bats fluttered and screeched.
Confused, Jebidiah drew the pistol, managed to get to his feet. He waited, listening, his fresh revolver pointing into the darkness.
Jebidiah found another match, struck it.
The thing lay with its back draped over a rise of rock. Jebidiah eased toward it. The silver loads had torn into the hive. It oozed a dark, odiferous trail of death and decaying honey. Bees began to drop to the cavern floor. The hive in Gimet’s chest sizzled and pulsed like a large, black knot. Gimet opened his mouth, snarled, but otherwise didn’t move.
Couldn’t move.
Jebidiah, guided by the last wisps of his match, raised the pistol, stuck it against the black knot, and pulled the trigger. The knot exploded. Gimet let out with a shriek so sharp and loud it startled the bats to flight, drove them out of the cave, through the burrow, out into the remains of the night.
Gimet’s claw-like hands dug hard at the stones around him, then he was still and Jebidiah’s match went out.
Jebidiah found the remains of the Bible in his pocket, and as he removed it, tossed it on the ground, it burst into flames. Using the two pistol barrels like large tweezers, he lifted the burning pages and dropped them into Gimet’s open chest. The body caught on fire immediately, crackled and popped dryly, and was soon nothing more than a blaze. It lit the cavern up bright as day.
Jebidiah watched the corpse being consumed by the biblical fire for a moment, then headed toward the burrow, bent down, squirmed through it, came up in the grave.
He looked for the deputy and didn’t see him. He climbed out of the grave and looked around. Jebidiah smiled. If the deputy had lasted until the bats charged out, that was most likely the last straw, and he had bolted.
Jebidiah looked back at the open grave. Smoke wisped out of the hole and out of the grave and climbed up to the sky. The moon was fading and the pink on the horizon was widening.
Gimet was truly dead now. The road was safe. His job was done.
At least for one brief moment.
Jebidiah walked down the hill, found his horse tied in the brush near the road where he had left it. The deputy’s horse was gone, of course, the deputy most likely having already finished out Deadman’s Road at a high gallop, on his way to Nacogdoches, perhaps to have a long drink of whisky and turn in his badge.
The Long Dead Day
She said a dog bit her, but we didn’t find the dog anywhere. It was a bad bite, though, and we dressed it with some good stuff and wrapped it with some bandages, and then poured alcohol over that, letting it seep in, and she, being ten, screamed and cried. She hugged up with her mama, though, and in a while she was all right, or as all right as she could be.
Later that evening, while I sat on the wall and looked down at the great crowd outside the compound, my wife, Carol, called me down from the wall and the big gun. She said Ellen had developed a fever, that she could hardly keep her eyes open, and the bite hurt.
Carol took her temperature, said it was high, and that to touch her forehead was to almost burn your hand. I went in then, and did just that, touched her forehead. Her mother was right. I opened up the dressing on the wound, and was amazed to see that it had turned black, and it didn’t really look like a dog bite at all. It never had, but I wanted it to, and let myself be convinced that was just what it was, even if there had been no dog we could find in the compound. By this time, they had all been eaten. Fact was, I probably shot the last one around; a beautiful Shepard, that when it saw me wagged its tail. I think when I lifted the gun he knew, and didn’t care. He just sat there with his mouth open in what looked like a dog’s version of a smile, his tail beating. I killed him first shot, to the head. I dressed him out without thinking about him much. I couldn’t let myself do that. I loved dogs. But my family needed to eat. We
did have the rabbits we raised, some pigeons, a vegetable garden, but it was all very precarious.
Anyway, I didn’t believe about the dog bite, and now the wound looked really bad. I knew the real cause of it, or at least the general cause, and it made me sick to think of it. I doctored the wound again, gave her some antibiotics that we had, wrapped it and went out. I didn’t tell Carol what she was already thinking.
I got my shotgun and went about the compound, looking. It was a big compound, thirty-five acres with a high wall around it, but somehow, someone must have breached the wall. I went to the back garden, the one with trees and flowers where our little girl liked to play. I went there and looked around, and found him sitting on one of the benches. He was just sitting. I guess he hadn’t been the way he was for very long. Just long enough to bite my daughter. He was about her age, and I knew then, being so lonely, she had let him in. Let him in through the bolted back door. I glanced over there and saw she had bolted it back. I realized then that she had most likely been up on the walk around the wall and had seen him down there, not long of turning, looking up wistfully. He could probably still talk then, just like anyone else, maybe even knew what he was doing, or maybe not. Perhaps he thought he was still who he once was, and thought he should get away from the others, that he would be safe inside.
It was amazing none of the others had forced their way in. Then again, the longer they were what they were, the slower they became, until finally they quit moving altogether. Problem with that was, it took years.
I looked back at him, sitting there, the one my daughter had let in to be her playmate. He had come inside, and then he had done what he had done, and
now my daughter was sick with the disease, and the boy was just sitting there on the bench, looking at me in the dying sunlight, his eyes black as if he had been beat, his face gray, his lips purple.
He reminded me of my son. He wasn’t my son, but he reminded me of him. I had seen my son go down among them, some, what was it, five years before. Go down in a flash of kicking legs and thrashing arms and squirting liquids. That was when we lived in town, before we found the compound and made it better. There were others then, but they were gone now. Expeditions to find others they said. Whatever, they left, we never saw them again.
Sometimes at night I couldn’t sleep for the memory of my son, Gerald, and sometimes in my wife’s arms, I thought of him, for had it not been such a moment that had created him?
The boy rose from the bench, stumble-stepped toward me, and I shot him. I shot him in the chest, knocking him down. Then I rushed to him and shot him in the head, taking half of it away.
I knew my wife would have heard the shot, so I didn’t bother to bury him. I went back across the compound and to the upper apartments where we lived. She saw me with the gun, opened her mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out.
“A dog,” I said. “The one who bit her. I’ll get some things, dress him out and we’ll eat him later.”
“There was a dog,” my wife said.
“Yes, a dog. He wasn’t rabid. And he’s pretty healthy. We can eat him.”
I could see her go weak with relief, and I felt both satisfied and guilty at the same time. I said, “How is she?”
“Not much better. There was a dog, you say?”
“That’s what I said, dear.”
“Oh, good. Good. A dog.”
I looked at my watch. My daughter had been bitten earlier that day, and it was almost night. I said, “Why don’t you go get a knife, some things for me to do the skinning, and I’ll dress out the dog. Maybe she’ll feel better, she gets some meat in her.”
“Sure,” Carol said. “Just the thing. She needs the protein. The iron.”
“You bet,” I said.
She went away then, down the stairs, across the yard to the cooking shed. I went upstairs, still carrying the gun.
Inside my daughter’s room, I saw from the doorway that she was gray as cigarette ash. She turned her head toward me.
“Daddy,” she said.
“Yes, dear,” I said, and put the shotgun against the wall by the door and went over to her.
“I feel bad.”
“I know.”
“I feel different.”
“I know.”
“Can anything be done? Do you have some medicine?”
“I do.”
I sat down in the chair by the bed. “Do you want me to read to you?”
“No,” she said, and then she went silent. She lay there not moving, her eyes closed.
“Baby,” I said. She didn’t answer.
I got up then and went to the open door and looked out. Carol, my beautiful wife, was coming across the yard, carrying the things I’d asked for. I picked up the shotgun and made sure it was loaded with my daughter’s medicine. I thought for a moment about how to do it. I put the shotgun back against the wall. I listened as my wife came up the stairs.
When she was in the room, I said, “Give me the knife and things.”
“She okay?”
“Yes, she’s gone to sleep. Or she’s almost asleep. Take a look at her.”
She gave me the knife and things and I laid them in a chair as she went across the room and to the bed.
I picked up the shotgun, and as quietly as I could, stepped forward and pointed it to the back of my wife’s head and pulled the trigger. It was over instantly. She fell across the bed on our dead child, her blood coating the sheets and the wall.
She wouldn’t have survived the death of a second child, and she sure wouldn’t have survived what was about to happen to our daughter.
I went over and looked at Ellen. I could wait, until she opened her eyes, till she came out of the bed, trying for me, but I couldn’t stomach that. I didn’t want to see that. I took the shotgun and put it to her forehead and pulled the trigger. The room boomed with the sound of shotgun fire again, and the bed and the room turned an even brighter red.
I went outside with the shotgun and walked along the landing, walked all the way around, came to where the big gun was mounted. I sat behind it, on the swivel stool, leaned the shotgun against the protecting wall. I sat there and looked out at the hundreds of them, just standing there, looking up, waiting for something.
I began to rotate and fire the gun. Many of them went down. I fired until there was no more ammunition. Reloaded, I fired again, my eyes wet with tears. I did this for some time, until the next rounds of ammunition were played out. It was like swatting at a hive of bees. There always seemed to be more.
I sat there and tried not to think about anything. I watched them. Their shapes stretched for miles around, went off into the distance in shadowy bulks, like a horde of rats waiting to board a cargo ship.
They were eating the ones I had dropped with the big gun.
After awhile the darkness was total and there were just the shapes out there. I watched them for a long time. I looked at the shotgun propped against the retaining wall. I looked at it and picked it up and put it under my chin, and then I put it back again.
I knew, in time, I would have the courage.
White Mule, Spotted Pig
Frank’s papa, the summer of nineteen hundred and nine, told him right before he died that he had a good chance to win the annual Camp Rapture mule race. He told Frank this cause he needed money to keep getting drunk, and he wasn’t about to ride no mule himself, fat as he was. If the old man had known he was about to die, Frank figured he would have saved his breath on the race talk and asked for whisky instead, maybe a chaw. But as it was, he said it, and it planted in Frank’s head the desire to ride and win.
Frank hated that about himself. Once a thing got into his head he couldn’t derail it. He was on the track then, and had to see it to the end. Course, that could be a good trait, but problem was, and Frank knew it, the only things that normally caught up in his head like that and pushed him were bad ideas. Even if he could sense their badness, he couldn’t seem to stop their running forward and dragging him with them. He also thought his mama had been right when she told him once that their family was like shit on shoes, the stink of it followed them wherever they went.
But this idea. Winning a mule race. Well, that had some good sides to it. Mainly money.
He thought about what his papa said, and how he said it, and then how, within a few moments, the old man grabbed the bed sheets, moaned once, dribbled some drool, and was gone to where ever it was he was supposed to go, probably a stool next to the devil at fireside.
He didn’t leave Frank nothing but an old run down place with a bit of dried out corn crop, a mule, a horse with one foot in the grave and the other on a slick spot. And his very own shit to clean out of the sheets, cause when the old man let go and departed, he left Frank that present, which was the only kind he had ever given. Something dirty. Something painful. Something shitty.
Frank had to burn the mattress and set fire to the bed clothes, so there really wasn’t any real cleaning about it. Then he dug a big hole, and cut roots to do it. Next he had to wrap the old man’s naked body in a dirty canvas and put him down and cover him up. It took some work, cause the old man must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he wasn’t one inch taller than five three if he was wearing boots with dried cow shit on the heels and paper tucked inside them to jack his height. Dragging him along on his dead ass from the house had damn near caused one of Frank’s balls to swell up and pop out.
Finished with the burying, Frank leaned against a sickly sweet gum tree and rolled himself a smoke, and thought: Shit, I should have dragged the old man over here on the tarp. Or maybe hitched him up to the mule and dragged his naked ass face down through the dirt. That w
ould have been the way to go, not pulling his guts out.
But, it was done now, and as always, he had used his brain late in the game.
Frank scratched a match on a thumb nail and lit a rolled cigarette and leaned on a sick sweet gum and smoked and considered. It wasn’t that he was all that fond of his old man, but damn if he still didn’t in some way want to make him proud, or rather be proud to his memory. He thought: Funny, him not being worth a damn, and me still wanting to please him. Funnier yet, considering the old man used to beat him like a Tom-Tom. Frank had seen him knock mama down once and put his foot on the back of her neck and use his belt to beat her ass while he cussed her for having burned the cornbread. It wasn’t the only beating she got, but it was damn sure the champion.
It was shortly after that she decamped with the good horse, a bag of corn meal, some dried meat and a butcher knife. She also managed, with what Frank thought must have been incredible aim, to piss in one of his old man’s liquor jugs. This was discovered by the old man after he took a good strong bolt of the liquor. Cheap as the stuff was he drank, Frank was surprised he could tell the difference, that he had turned out to be such a fine judge of shit liquor.
Papa had ridden out after her on the mule but hadn’t found her, which wasn’t a surprise, because the only thing Papa had been good at tracking was a whisky bottle or some whore, provided she was practically tied down and didn’t cost much. He probably tracked the whores he messed with by the stench.
Back from the hunt, drunk and pissed and empty-handed, Papa had said it was bad enough Frank’s mama was "a horse and meal thief," but at least she hadn’t taken the mule, and frankly, she wasn’t that good a cook anyhow.
The mule’s name was Rupert, and he could run like his tail was on fire. Papa had actually thought about the mule as a contender for a while, and had put out a little money to have him trained by Leroy, who though short in many departments, and known for having been caught fucking a goat by a half dozen hunters, was pretty good with mules and horses. Perhaps, it could be said he had a way with goats as well. One thing was certain, none of Leroy’s stock had testified to the contrary, and only the nanny goats were known to be nervous.