Summer of the Dead (9 page)

Hell. She'd barely spoken to anybody.

“Okay,” he said. “Later.”

“Yeah. Later.”

And then she backed up and drove away, lifting her eyes to the rearview mirror only once, and then only for an instant, because she knew he'd be watching to see if she did just that: looked back at him. Even a glance might encourage him. Give him hope. She'd met his brother, knew a little bit about his family—you couldn't live your whole danged life around here and
not
know somebody's family—and so she knew that Jason came from a rough bunch of people. Emotionally, he was fed on scraps, and then told he ought to be full.

Things had been a little easier between her and Jason, more relaxed, before the stunt he pulled last fall. Out of the blue, he showed up at her house one afternoon. No notice. No warning. She was in the kitchen, stirring a can of Campbell's tomato soup and a cup of water in a pan on the one gas burner that still worked, and she heard the knock.

“Hey,” he'd said.

He stood on the wooden porch, grinning a nervous grin. Holding, rather than wearing, his Yankees baseball cap. Thumbs on the visor, flapping the cap up and down, as if he were fanning his knees.

Lindy had stared at him. Her hand was gripping the doorknob so hard that her wrist hurt.

“What is it?” she said, thinking that maybe something had gone wrong at the station, but also wondering why the hell he hadn't just called or texted her.
Jesus
. She was really, really pissed, but she didn't want to show too much emotion. That would mean she cared.

“Got my brother's car today,” Jason had said. “Thought you might wanna go for a ride or something.”

Anger moved through her in a long shuddering ripple, so intense that she worried it might show on the outside. “No,” she said. “I don't.” She had refashioned her grip on the doorknob. “Kinda busy now, okay?”

What she'd wanted to say was:
Don't you ever,
ever
do this again. Don't you ever come by like this. Never.
But she didn't. Anything other than a preoccupied dismissal was a bad idea; a passionate reaction was just what he was after.

“Okay,” he'd said. Still pinching the visor with his fingers, he flapped the cap up and down a few more times. The goofy grin continued. Then it slipped off his face, as if he'd suddenly become aware of it. He had one more thing to say: “Listen. I got a question.”

He was stalling. Buying time, so she wouldn't shut the door. He was trying to think of something to ask her, to keep the moment going.

“Make it fast, Jason,” she said. “I gotta go. Like I said.”

He nodded. Moved his jaw around a few times, in a circle. He had a wad of gum in his mouth, she saw, or maybe it was smokeless tobacco. Probably the latter. Almost every guy in her senior class had the telltale circle imprinted on the right rear pocket of his Wranglers. The exact circumference of the Skoal tin that he stored there.

“Okay,” Jason said. “It's about your name. Been meaning to ask. It's short for Linda, right? Or Lindsay? Something like that.”

“No. Short for Lindbergh.”

“Like Charles Lindbergh? The pilot guy?”

“Like Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The writer.”

Jason shrugged. “Never heard of her.”

“Big surprise.” That was mean, which was something Lindy didn't like to be. “You're close, though,” she added. Her tone was milder, more amiable, to make up for the sarcasm. “She was his wife. My mother's favorite writer.” Lindy jiggled the doorknob. “See you at work, okay?”

She could still remember watching him as he trudged back to his brother's car, shirttail hanging way past his butt. He whacked the cap against his right thigh in rhythm with his steps. He'd probably had to pay his brother to borrow the car. Probably cost him at least a week's salary. Eddie Brinkerman was a big jerk. Everybody knew that.

Lindy sat on the couch now and thought about Jason's face, the way it had looked that day at her front door: big round chin, skin energetically colonized by red pimples, small eyes, black wispy loops and dabs of hair where sideburns ought to be, and a strained look overall, a kind of yearning, which all the false bravado in the world couldn't cover up.

She heard the sound. She stood up from the couch.

It came from the basement. Right? That's what it seemed like, anyway.

Usually she checked on her father first thing, immediately after her arrival home, in case something had happened to him while she was gone overnight. But not today. Today, she'd been distracted by her encounter back at the station with Jason Brinkerman—and, granted, she'd been a little bit lazy, dumping her butt on the damned couch before looking in on her father, wandering in a mental thicket of the past.
My bad,
Lindy scolded herself.
Better make sure
.

She opened the basement door.

Darkness stared back at her. The mustiness came up in a rush, the same stale smell of earth and dirt and dead insects that kindled in every ancient cellar, but this one was spiced with something else, too. Something extra. Something
other:
a clammy cold, a closed-in, folded-over, cutoff cold, a nowhere kind of cold, a cold that no amount of summer heat could ever dispel. She hated opening this door. She didn't mind it when he came upstairs, but she hated opening this door.

“Daddy?”

There was a rattling sound, a sound like dry branches being dragged rapidly across hard-packed dirt. Like a series of tense whispers or hopeless sighs. Plaintive and shadowy, half-real, half-imagined. Her father sometimes liked to cramble around the space with a dirty blanket flung over his shoulders; when he bumped the basement walls, the fabric rubbed against the rugged surface, making a scratchy sound, a sound that clawed at Lindy's conscience even when she wasn't hearing it for real.

“Daddy?” she repeated.

“Shut the goddamned door.” His voice was hoarse and ugly, a blunt bitter jab. It was filled with haste and anger.

“I'm home now. Just wanted to see if—”

“I said shut that goddamned door or I'll come up there and rip your goddamned face off.”
He almost screamed it. The thrust and rush of his voice made her flinch, even though this was nothing new, even though his was an impersonal rage. He'd been like this before. Many times. The cursing had accompanied his decline; in the time before, she'd rarely heard him utter a profanity. Never, in front of her mother. But now his language was foul, clotted with obscenities, as if he'd reached into a muddy hole and pulled out the dark wet roots of the nice regular words, discovered their dirty hidden origin. As if he'd tunneled to the secret end of language, blindly fingering its rotten, burnt-out, dead-smelling, joyless core, and now insisted on bringing the rancid bounty to her attention as often as he could, shaking the dangling, dirt-caked clumps in her face:
Here. Get a load of
this,
girlie
.

She closed the basement door.

She looked around the kitchen. The summer Sunday morning was still here, still intact, no matter what was going on in the basement. Sunshine skittered in through the red-and-white-checked curtains that trimmed the window over the sink. Her mother had made these curtains by hand many years ago, and they were threadbare by now, thinned by time and by repeated washings, so insubstantial that they blocked little of the light. But Lindy would never replace them. Never.

He's okay,
she told herself.
He made it through the night. It's all fine
. She turned. Her books were stacked on the table, right where she'd left them, next to the pile of mail. The sight of them steadied her.

Her eyes fell to the floor just inside the back door. She didn't go in and out of the house that way, because the backyard was a mess; it was too slanted, too cluttered with rocks, too shaded by a gnarled congress of old bent trees. Grass never had a chance to take hold. In the summer, it turned into a dust-choked desert, except on rainy days, and then it became a swamp. So when she saw the filthy outline of a footprint on the floor—she knew the print of his boot, knew the size and the shape, knew the distance between the ridges—the realization knocked her back, filling her with surprise and dread:

Her father had gone out last night. He was at it again.

 

Chapter Ten

Sunrise was still a ways away, but Charlie Frank didn't mind. He wasn't afraid of darkness. He liked it. His habit was to walk along the road every morning before the sun came up, hands in his trouser pockets, humming a hymn—the selections varied, but he was decidedly partial to “In the Garden”—and relishing the fact that he didn't need any lights to guide him. He knew his way in the world—this world, at least—without the constant interruption of light. Light was a crutch. A sure sign of weakness. There were too many damned lights in the world, anyway, too many spotlights illuminating too many things that weren't worth seeing: stupid billboards out on the interstate or signs telling you route names and numbers. If you didn't already know where you were and where you were going, then you had no business being out in these parts in the first place. And you didn't want to get him started on vehicle headlights, the bright kind, the kind that splashed up in your eyes like acid. When cars and trucks came along this road, Charlie had to wince and throw up an arm to keep from being blinded.
Damned lights,
he'd mutter.
Lord have mercy
.

His mother liked him to keep all the lights on in the house, all night long. And he complied, because it was important to her. But if he'd had his way, he would have unscrewed every durned lightbulb in the whole durned place; come sundown, he'd settle into his chair in the precious dark and put his head back and breathe easy. Maybe, if he lived alone, he'd go off the grid entirely. Just get himself a generator for heat and cooking.

But his mother wanted light, lots of light, and so for now, that was that. He'd never go against her. No telling how long she had left; one doctor said one thing, another doctor said another. And a third one said a third thing. All Charlie knew for sure was that Martha Frank was growing weaker by the day, and eating was getting harder and harder for her, and you didn't have to be a doctor with a fancy degree to know what happened when somebody couldn't eat anymore.

He found his solace in walking. Walking in the dark. For Charlie Frank, walking and thinking went together, just as one step follows another. This was when and where he did his best thinking: along Godown Road in Raythune County, in the time before the sun came up over the top of the mountain—at which point everything changed, and not for the better. All that light! It was as if somebody had suddenly started banging the bottom of a saucepan with an old metal spoon, banging and yelling, demanding that attention be paid. The sun's arrival was showy and brassy, disturbing the peace of the great dark world. Charlie much preferred the world as it was right now: drizzled with darkness, edges dissolved, no shape more important than any other shape.

He had lived here for his entire life. Never thought of living anywhere else. But after his mother died, he would be free. That was what some people—including his brother, Wally—had already pointed out to him when they visited, speaking in low tones, shaking their heads gravely, keeping an eye on his mother across the room, his twisted-up, long-suffering mother. They meant well. They truly did. They just wanted what was best for him. No matter how often he cleaned her, changed her diapers, there was still a smell that rode around with her. The smell had become part of her now. He smelled it when he picked her up; the top of her mostly bald head rubbed against the bottom of his chin, and he could smell everything. It would not—it could not—be long now. Could it?

He knew what they said about him: Forty-seven years old. Lived with his mother. Always had. Surely still a virgin (not true, but it was none of their goddamned business). He ought to be thinking about himself for a change. Once his mother died, it would be time. Time to kick up his heels. Move on. Well, to hell with them: He
was
thinking about himself. Anywhere else he went, there would be lights. Towering racks of them. Lights blazing from every porch and pole and rooftop. He was happy here. Happy to walk along a blacktopped road edged by a thin strip of dirt and then woods, dense and high, woods that absorbed the darkness the way a thick wool coat draws in old smells and holds them.

Charlie's humming had gradually changed into a faint singing, a melodic murmur, and the shift into words was a natural progression, like a leaf turning over in the warm breeze to show its tender veined underside:
And He walks with me and He talks with me, and he tells me I am His own, and the—

Charlie stopped. He'd heard a noise in the woods off to his right. A steady rustling. It was too loud and it went on too long to have been produced by a squirrel's hectic scamper. It was too robust. Charlie knew night noises as well as he knew his own name. And that was no squirrel.

“Hey,” he said.

The rustling stopped.

“Hey,” Charlie repeated. “Who the hell—?”

He heard a flapping sound, like the long tail of a coat. Then the big shape rose up out of the woods. It came roaring at him, pile-driving Charlie down into the dirt, flat on his back. He was stunned but still conscious. Charlie's eyes had long ago adjusted to the darkness and so through a haze of pain and confusion he saw the knife, raised up high.

“NoNo—Oh, NoNoNo,” Charlie cried out, his breath coming in frantic bits and whispers, which was all he could manage. He felt a blow to his shoulder. It dazed him and he stopped fighting, just for a second, and so did his attacker.
What the—?
Charlie roused himself one more time, punching and gouging, and then the attacker started up again, too. “No!” Charlie yelled. “Don't—Why—” He raised his hands and he fought, scratching and reaching and clawing, but the knife thrusts came in a flurry now, too strong and too fast, and there were too many of them. After a final series of twitches and a shuddering groan, Charlie Frank was quiet, a part now of the longest darkness of all.