Phantom Nights (15 page)

Whatever Cecily's problem was, it was all
her
problem, and Alex took small comfort knowing from past incidents he had more or less innocently precipitated that it should all settle out given enough time.

He looked back at the house with a quick flare of anger. This thing
wouldn't
settle out. If he ever had the chance, one chance to get even with Leland Howard for what he'd done to Mally tonight—

But it was Bobby who would deal with him. Bobby was the Law, and the Law was more powerful than a man with his face on billboards.

Thinking of his older brother with the gold badge pinned to his uniform shirt pocket, Alex felt proud and confident of the doctrine of just desserts.

He yawned. Couldn't know if Mally would return tonight, but he doubted it. Even when she eventually did come home, probably it wouldn't bother her knowing he had stayed there. For cry-eye, Mally had enough to be upset about already.

J
ames Giles arrived at Leland Howard's farm to find Leland in a rocking chair in the yard looking as if he had survived a bad accident and got drunk afterward. There was crusty blood in his hair above his right ear. The front of his white shirt had blood all over it. He was barefoot, having discarded his shoes. Which were bloody as well, as if he had danced the night away in an abattoir. The fifth of Old Crow he'd been working on was three-quarters empty. His face was dirty, with tear tracks through the dirt.

Giles looked him over carefully and looked at the dogs in the kennel, either asleep or just lolling, as if they'd been run hard. Before Leland spoke Giles already had a chilling idea of what had happened here.

"James, James, it wasn't my fault! I don't know what to do, James."

Giles walked closer to the man who employed him and could send him back to Brushy Mountain Prison on a whim and took the bottle of Kentucky whiskey away from him.

"What happened?"

"Mally hit me with a poker when my back was turned and ran off."

"After that."

"Well, she—I didn't know which way she'd gone."

"Turn the dogs loose then?"

"It's not my fault! I didn't know they would—"

"You damn fool," Giles said in his customary low-pitched voice, no special emotion in this assessment. "Ever one of those Catahoula bitches is in heat. They can be mean cusses then. The nigger woman have blood on her?"

"I think she did, James. I
think
she was into her period. Not flying the flag, but there was a bloody dish towel in the kitchen she might've used on herself. I let the dogs have a whiff on it."

"You damn fool," Giles said again. He took a kitchen match from his shirt pocket and chewed on the wood. It helped his thinking. "You'd have done the woman better to pour gasoline over her and light her up."

"I didn't know, I didn't think!" Leland cried, rocking furiously. "I didn't know so much blood could come out of a human body. She's dead, James."

"Most likely." Giles looked around and didn't see a corpse. He looked at the Dodge nearby, wondering why Mally had been afoot. But there were two flat tires. "Show me where they caught up to her."

"I can't go back there! I can't look at her again. You don't know what those Catahoulas did once they got ahold—"

"Yes, I do." Giles tilted the whiskey bottle and emptied it, slung the bottle high over the roof of the house. He put a hand on Leland's shoulder and bore down, squeezing until Leland gasped in pain. "You ready to quit that damn rocking now? Listen to me?"

"Jesus, I've got a whopper of a headache. I think I need to go to the doctor; I'm still seeing double."

"No doctor." Giles looked down at the gold lozenge of the Bulova watch on Leland Howard's left wrist. "Three, maybe three and a half hours to sunup. And you don't want her body found anywheres near your place."

"What can I do? No matter what, I'm a ruined man!"

"Start with, get up out of that granny rocker." When Leland didn't obey, Giles lifted him out of the seat by his shoulder. Leland began to weep again. Giles slapped him on the undamaged side of his face, fingers stinging like bony whips.

"You're still a man. An important man. Don't go throw it all away count of some trifling nigger woman."

"But they'll say I killed her!"

"Not if we do this thing right. Shut up your blubbering. Go in the house and clean yourself up while I get a couple tarps. You didn't kill nobody. Can't call it murder necessarily; reckon it's a style of murder. Dogs got after her; well, that's just how they'll say it was. Pack of wild dogs. Nobody's fault less'n hers for being in the wrong place tonight. You never got seen with her; that puts you in the clear." He gave Leland a shove toward the house. "Hurry it up. I need to get two spares on that old Dodge and butcher a hog. Twenty minutes, you better had be sober enough to drive."

"Why are you doing this, James? Why are you helping me?"

"Two months since my parole, you never lorded it over me. Reckon when you make it to the high station you're bound for, a pardon won't be out of the question."

"That's right. Whatever you want, James. Whatever's in my power—"

"I never did have no big wants. Like to get my name clear, that's all. Now get going, Mr. Howard." Leland had taken a couple of steps when Giles remembered. "By the way. Didn't find such as you told me to look for in the woman's house. But that there be a problem for another day."

I
n his dreams Alex was exploring Mally's house and finding rooms he hadn't known were there. One was exactly like the reading room at the Evening Shade Public Library where he spent a lot of time: shelves of reference books and a couple of maple tables with green-shaded lamps on them. The placid old soul of a librarian behind her desk, distance in her eyes, listening to her books like a sailor listens to the sea. He wished he could settle down with a good novel by Ernest Haycox or a
Saturday Evening Post
serial by Luke Short, but he caught a glimpse of Mally in the stacks and followed her instead.

Then he was inside the boarded-up depot at Cole's Crossing, where no trains had stopped since before the war. He could recall having been there only once, when he was about three years old. The trains that had stopped were sooty locals with antiquated rolling stock, mixed baggage and coach. Only a handful of passengers, nearly all of them colored, getting on or off.

In his dream he was looking up at the familiar octagonal clock with Roman numerals above the closed ticket window. The clock seemed not to be working. Bobby stood on a tall ladder taking it apart, finding the works clotted with old pink bubblegum. He didn't have time to talk to Alex, who felt guilty. Although he knew it wasn't his bubblegum. He wasn't allowed to chew gum in the house, another of Cece's rules.

Cecily and Bernice were playing hearts in a corner of the depot. Cece was naked, as she often was in his dreams. They were using a coffin for a card table. Alex's mother lay in the coffin. He was furious with Cece and Bernice. Such disrespect. Why didn't they close the lid? He could smell the stuff they'd put on his mother's burns. And coal smoke that poured from a black locomotive standing on the tracks outside the depot.

Mally Shaw was on the platform. When she saw him, she shook her head as if she was annoyed about something he'd done. Everybody had rules where he was concerned. Maybe it was because he had slept uninvited in her house. He started to run down the long platform toward her, but his feet like Wyatt Sexton's were on wrong. Wherever he willed himself to go, he stumbled in another direction. Mally boarded the grim-looking train while he flopped around with misery in his soul. Alan Ladd came along leading an Indian pony by the reins and told Alex it was ten cents to ride for ten minutes. Alex found himself on the pony's back, but he was three years old now and scared. Just trying to hang on while the pony broke into a trot. But there was no saddle, and he was slipping slowly off the back of the pony, going upside down beneath its belly before finally falling . . .

Alex woke up on the floor beside the bamboo sofa. He sat up and although it was still dark and his eyes were tearing he saw Mally in the hall down by her bedroom looking around at him.

"It's over, sugar," she said. "Go back to sleep." She went into her bedroom and he heard the door close.

He tried to lie down again on the cushions with his knees bent the way he had made himself almost comfortable earlier, but now he had a crick in his neck and he needed to pee.

When he passed Mally's bedroom the door was standing open, although he was sure she'd closed it. Moonlight filled the little room with its rumpled bed, reminding him of what he'd seen going on there during the rainstorm. Some clothing strewn about, her intimate things.

Every corner of the room was alight, and Mally was not there.

Nor was she in the bathroom, or the kitchen, or standing outside on the back porch where he ultimately chose to relieve himself, arcing into the weeds around the cistern while listening pensively to peepers and the early staccatos and trillings of birds in the back woods.

When he was inside again, he spoke her name a couple of times but knew the house was empty except for himself, although he had clearly seen Mally for a couple of seconds, heard her voice. Then heard the closing of the bedroom door. The hidden rooms of Mally's house had existed only in his fretful dreams.

Now he was alone, but he had not been alone.

Go back to sleep
, she had said, fondness in her tone.

Alex rubbed the prickling skin of his forearms.

Not much chance of that.

Secret Pleasure

The 4:10 from Nashville

Showdown at Pee-Wee's Good Eats

T
he closest parishioners to Little Grove Holiness Church were Elder Ike Thurmond, his wife Zerah and their eight children. They lived on a farm less than half a mile away from the church and graveyard at Cole's Crossing. Ike and two of his brothers, who had made their break away from furnish and shares in '37 with the aid of loans from FDR's Farm Security Administration, now leased some good bottomland along the Yella Dog. The brothers made out fine on the eighty-odd acres of corn in good times and squeezed by on the proceeds from a sawmill and a machine shop they also owned when the rains didn't fall in dry years like this one.

Ike had just begun to stir in his bed, as always—Sundays not excepted—anticipating his Dominecker roosters by about five minutes, when he heard something he hadn't heard for going on twenty years: the deep sound of the old iron church bell at Little Grove Holiness. It had been so long since that bell had rung he'd all but forgotten its particular tonal quality.

He was a good six foot six in spite of the shrinkages of age and numerous infirm joints, and at seventy still had a grip on all his precious faculties. So he wasn't imagining this nor hearing another church bell carrying from a greater distance in the stillness before dawn. Next closest church was New Life Baptist in the Adair community, four and a half miles down the Southern's main line. White folks' church. But a cracked bell on a rusted vertex didn't just ring out suddenly, any more than he could jump out of bed as spry as if he were nineteen again. It took plenty of Sloan's Liniment, applied by Zerah, and four packets of Goody's Headache Powder just to get him down the stairs for that first cup of coffee.

But he was hearing a bell all right; if not
the
bell, then one that tolled like it.

His wife reached out for him suddenly with cold, wrinkled fingers; at fifty her own impairments were hypertension from salty food, a common complaint of the women in her community, and fading eyesight due to cataracts.

"What's that I hear, Ike?"

"Church bell."

"Like it was just down the road."

"Must be."

"But?"

"I know."

"It ain't rung in how long?"

"We hearin' it spite of, that's all I know, 'cause I ain't deef and you ain't crazy."

Zerah uttered a low, adulatory moan with a religious fervor that had the sparse hair on his crown wanting to stand up. "Sweet name of Jeee-zuss! You don't reckon?" She gripped him fiercely.

"The Lord's done us a wonder?"