Cicada (11 page)

Wes ‘Nugget’ Crocker was a sad story as well, although for quite a different reason. Nugget, so cruelly named for his unusually enormous head, was the most intelligent person in the county, if not the tri-county. Unfortunately, his intellect was kept in check by his ignorance. His once upon a time, but long-lost naturally profound curiosity, had been squelched thoroughly in his youth by his stepfather, Earl, and it was his mother who was the one to bestow upon him his nickname.

She hadn’t done so in an endearing manner or even tone of voice, either. In the Crocker household, Nugget had been burned with cigarettes for reading anything other than the Bible. And the admonishment, “Don’t think, smartass,” was all but a mantra under that roof and throughout his adolescence. In fact, it was at his parents’ insistence that he dropped out of school to take on a janitorial job at the pulp mill to support them. Now, at thirty-three years in age, Wes ‘Nugget’ Crocker occasionally had flashes of brilliance as his mind struggled to not go quietly. When it did, he quickly remembered his life-long lessons and scolded himself on his parents’ behalf.

“Don’t think, smartass,” he’d whisper to himself and go on about his business.

The three men had all been dressed the same on the night of Raymond Stout’s murder—Jimbo, TR, and Nugget—decked out in white linens that TR’s wife had been proud to fit each one of them in. She’d told her husband several times how she had starched and ironed their conical hoods not once or even twice, but three times to ensure that they would stand upright. She wanted them to know, as she worked at the task so long. Not that her efforts mattered. TR hadn’t bothered to listen to his wife from the first time she’d sought his approval as newlyweds, and he certainly wasn’t about to change his way now.

Against the backdrop of a blood moon, Jimbo and TR had strung Raymond up while Nugget puked behind their trucks. Raymond had ascended, fighting for his life, flipping about helpless, desperate that they meet his eyes.
If they would just see me
, he told himself,
they will spare me
. He was wrong. In his flailing, near the end, he kicked Jimbo in the eye.

This brought about a frenzy renewed. Raymond hoped that perhaps they would cut him down to beat him more.
Maybe then be satisfied and leave me be
. That was the pitiful hope he died with.

After Raymond had been drowned for a full minute suspended up above the earth, Jimbo cut the binds on his bloodied wrist so that the gathered party could enjoy watching Raymond claw at his own swollen throat. No matter, however, the man was lost.

Jeffery pitched a half-full warm beer at Raymond’s head, but missed.

“He’s a twitchy fucker,” he pleaded defensively to their scoffing.

Jimbo grunted in disgust and tore off his hood to further reveal his displeasure. He was sweating profusely and used the hood to dry his brow and the nape of his neck. “That’s yer last one, you girlie arm throwin’ assthole,” he lisped, as TR pulled another beer from the cooler. “Same goes fer you, Nugget,” he hollered over his shoulder. “No more. You can’t hold it down, ain’t no thense you get no more.”

Raymond had begun to slip away, his body doing little more than subtle convulsing. His eyes were bugged out and locked on Jimbo. He tried to speak but only guttural sounds and mucous escaped as he swallowed his tongue. As his life left him, he turned his sight to the heavens and heaved one final great jerk before going still. Nugget made the mistake of looking on the man again at that moment and the shame of it all churned his stomach even worse. He began to cry as he vomited anew. If the sound of Nugget’s retching wasn’t enough, the slight wind blew the smell of it—a slush of beer and stomach acid—to waft over them.

“Jesus, Nugget! If you ain’t one philandering mother fucker,” Jimbo bemoaned ignorantly.

TR laughed with the dopey guffaw he was known for and took a swig of Pabst. He didn’t know what ‘philandering’ meant anymore than Jimbo, but it sounded funny enough to him.

“All right, fun’s over. Let’s clear out, boys,” Deputy Tippen said as he discarded the empty beer in his hand, turning to walk back to the patrol car he’d used to ferry Raymond Stout there.

“Hol’ up a minute,” Jimbo commanded. He rushed to one of the trucks to fetch a camera from the glove box. “C’mon, thithead, make yerthelf useful,” he demanded of Nugget as he kicked him in the rear almost hard enough to knock him over from where he was still on his hands and knees.

Tippen scowled, “Don’t be stupid.”

“This is history. You want part of this or not?”

They formed a semicircle to pose as Nugget captured the moment on film, the dangling corpse of Raymond Stout at their center. They’d removed their hoods, and in the instantaneous blaze of the flash bulb the white of their smiles beamed as much as their ghostly smocks. With one hand grasping the pant leg of the corpse suspended above them, Jimbo Henry David Dillard’s unusually proud stance completed the surreal tableau that suggested they considered this to be something of a hugely successful Sunday afternoon fishing expedition.

Winslow Chatham arrived back in his hometown of Melby after nearly a year abroad early one warm Tuesday morning that summer.

He remained indoors for the next two days, as the throng of those who longed to see him grew more and more restless. His return was the talk of the town. Winslow had never been a favorite son of Melby in his youth. In fact, just a year earlier there had been more than a few who were glad to see the young man go.

“Good riddance. Let him be somebody else’s problem for a change,” Deputy Tippen had muttered over his BLT sandwich at the counter of Cooperman’s Drugstore as he’d watched Winslow board the Greyhound bus on the afternoon of his departure.

By the time Winslow had returned, just shy of a year later, that, and all other ill sentiments regarding Winslow Chatham had been forgiven if not forgotten.

On the Thursday following his return, Winslow’s reunion with the townsfolk as Melby’s prodigal son took place as scheduled. But even as those in attendance grieved at his silence, Winslow Chatham remained unmoved, ignorant of them all, from his former sweetheart, Janice Withers, to his old football coach and mentor, Coach Baker. Not even the weeping cries of his mother would bring Winslow to acknowledge them.

Finally, resolved that they’d done all that they could to welcome him home, the congregation said their farewells and left him there in his closed casket, turning him over to the gravedigger, Dennis Hart.

“You certainly was a spitfire, Winslow,” Dennis observed as he ladled out the first of many shovelfuls of earth over Winslow Chatham’s cherry wood box.

“You rest in peace now, soldier. Ya done yer duty, and as I hear tell it, ya done it right proper. You rest in peace there, Corporal Chatham,” Dennis Hart concluded when he’d finished patting down the last bit of dirt an hour later.

It’d only been a few weeks since Raymond Stout had been buried, making it one of the busiest times Dennis could recall. Between the digging and the heat, the gravedigger was sure he’d lost more than a few pounds.

He’d gathered up his tools and was in the process of heading back to his little shack when the day became peculiar. He didn’t notice the man at first, but once he did it only took him half of a moment to realize who it was. There was no mistaking him. Even the reclusive Dennis Hart knew Wes Crocker. He’d overheard the men in the pool hall teasing him about his unusually large head. And this wasn’t the first time he’d seen Nugget in the cemetery—several Crocker family members were laid to rest there—but why Nugget was holding vigil over the grave of Raymond Stout was indeed a curiosity.

“First John Sayre and now this,” Dennis whispered to himself.

Nugget bent down to be closer to Raymond Stout, but he couldn’t bring himself to get on his knees.

Nugget spoke as reverently as he knew how in a hoarse whisper, “As crazy as it all is, we really don’t know one another. All the same we collided in a way that ruined us both, huh? Now you’ve gone to a place, a reward, I don’t reckon I’ll ever see.”

He paused there, feeling stupid to be off to such a sad start. A rhinoceros beetle butted its spectacular horns against the fresh granite of Raymond’s tombstone. It was out in the heat and light delirious with the pesticide that would be the end of it in another hour. Noticing its futile struggle, Wes gave in and dropped to his knees, scooping the dying thing into his quivering palms and moving it off to the grass.

“I’m sorry, mister. I’m sorry because I’m a coward, I guess. A better man would a helped ya. It don’t fix a damned thing…but I just wanted you to know.”

Nugget hadn’t seen Dennis, and the cemetery caretaker decided to keep things that way. He eased his tools to the ground and slipped behind a nearby tree. From there he spied on Nugget for the several minutes the man remained. He couldn’t make out what Nugget was saying, and he was just considering easing up behind him, but before he could make up his mind to do so, Nugget rose and stole off suddenly, crouching in a little half jog with a few furtive looks back over his shoulder as he went.

“One murdered colored man and two white men come sneakin’ around to see his final rest. Dennis, ol’ salt, something tells me Sheriff Gladwell needs to hear about all this foolishness,” the gravedigger said as he collected his things and trudged off to do just that.

…

“So…whatcha think they gonna do?” Casey asked, his face a specter made of long shadows and brightly lit washed-out flesh by the flashlight he kept pressed up beneath his chin.

“I dunno. Nothin’, I ‘spect.”

The night air was still. A few minutes before they’d been loud and laughing, but now things had grown as quiet as they should be. The boys’ conversation turned to the dead man Buckshot had found, and the plight of the small community of blacks who’d come to the county in search of refuge from the Klan. It was a Gordian knot apparently beyond the strength of most of the adults in Melby to cleave, so the boys had little hope of unraveling any way through it on their own.

“Why’s anybody care wherever them folks wanna live? Weren’t nobody out there before ‘cept during hog season. Even then, jus’ a few hunters. An’ my daddy says it too swampy to hunt no how.”

The flashlight flickered under Casey’s distorted countenance as he spoke. Buckshot grunted in agreement and threw another pinecone into the dwindling campfire as it snapped and smoldered in its fight against dying out. Casey pretended he was as indifferent to his own pondering as was Buckshot. To prove it, he began shining the beam of his flashlight into the heavens, taking turns to target the brighter stars. He wondered if maybe those distant points of light weren’t other people on far away worlds shining their flashlights back at him.

“Ya ever wonder if…” he started, but let the thought trail off. In the soft glow of their flickering campfire Casey couldn’t help but notice the tears that trailed through the sweat dappling Buckshot’s face.

There was no need for a fire. In fact, the day’s waning heat made it impractical to keep the campfire burning for any longer than it’d taken for them to blacken and crackle their dinner of hotdogs and marshmallows. The boys kept it going all the same, huddled near its flicking radiance like little otherworld imps up from below, arms and faces glistening with sweat as their eyes danced with the flames. Nearby behind them, the Sayre family barn played backdrop to their shadows, two hunched over creatures that for a while before had exploded with long limbs gesticulating wildly, a pair of puppet silhouettes exaggerating the play at hand. For the time being, however, since the conversation had fallen to darker matters, those mad shadow companions had collapsed back into two small, dark, undulating blobs.

Unbeknownst to Casey and Buckshot, they were being watched. Actually, it was their shadows that were under the most scrutiny. Where the weeds grew thick again away from the clearing that surrounded most of the barn, Rusty, the Sayre family tabby had paused in his nocturnal prowl to consider the strange movement painting the weather beaten planks of the barn. When those shapes finally settled, the old cat suddenly became aware of the little screech owl that perched nearby. The boys had watched the fire, the cat had watched the boys’ shadows, and the owl had watched the cat.

“What’s that?” Casey startled at the movement of Rusty as the cat rose with an almost indignant look, first to them and then to the young owl.

“Wha—!” Buckshot nearly came to his feet as he whipped about to know what Casey had spied. “Oh, you sissy…jus’ Rusty,” Buckshot scowled.

He plopped back down and lost his gaze into the fire once more. The young owl—the same one that had recently made its home in the Sayre family barn—was finished with the moment as well, and took to the wing unnoticed by all save Rusty who slunk off in search of the same field mice.

“Whatcha wanna do ta-night?” Casey asked tentatively, as if he was loath to disturb his friend’s troubled thoughts.

…

“What do you want to do tonight?” Cicada asked. Beneath the linen sheet she ran her toes up and down John’s bare calf.

The window of their room blazed briefly with the headlights of a gravel-crunching auto as it pulled away and departed the parking lot of The Blue Motel.

“Huh?” John said dumbly, although he’d certainly heard her.

“Want to go over to the diner and get a bite?”

He didn’t answer.

Above the dresser that lined the wall beside the dead gray screen of the television, was a cheap faux-oil painting of a rocky beach. Its scene seemed to hold John’s attention, although his mind was elsewhere. Marvelous waves heaved and broke on a crest of craggy rocks that remarkably showed no signs of erosion. The sky above was as angry as the water, dark and brooding, threatening with storm. Alone amidst it all, a great white and black gull pitched itself into the wind, frozen in space and time much like John had seen real birds kept in place as they’d embraced inclement weather headlong.

“Too bad we aren’t there, huh?” Cicada remarked on the painting. If John wouldn’t come to her, she would join him where he was.