The Deadsong (2 page)

“Oh, it’s nothing. I have a rowdy client coming in tomorrow morning. Not looking forward to it, that’s all.”

“Anyone I know?”

“That big lady we use to see at Avery’s buying all the doughnuts in the case by the register. She wants to start her own sweet shop on the town square.”

“As if we don’t already have enough garbage-peddling yahoos on the square. It’s not like it use to be. Hell, the place is practically deserted now.”

“That’s Hemming for you.” Linda wondering if he could see right through her lies, the way their father had. It wasn’t entirely a lie. She would be meeting with big Barbara Crenshaw come sun up, but there was something else, something in his eyes that frightened her, and always had.

Paulie looked around and pushed a small envelope across the table. Linda took it and began to open it.

“Not here,” he said. “It’s for Gina.”

She nodded and put the thing in her purse without saying anything.

“You tell her Uncle Paulie says hello.” He winked at her and tried to smile, but his mouth twisted wryly into an odd shape. This was a man who looked like he’d forgotten how to smile.

The blood began to pump madly in her ears. She returned the smile best she could, then checked out at the visitor’s station and headed back to the farm on Highway 7.  As she drove, she thought about Dick.

After Linda and Dick were married, they had rented a four-room apartment above the local billiard’s hall on Main Street. It had been a hellish six months listening to fighting words and wooden cues breaking balls game after game. Sleep was an elusive experience not permissible until well after two in the morning when the last patron stumbled out onto the sidewalk. A man from Texas had bought the place and had planned to convert it into a hip diner for younger patrons but had abandoned development of the idea shortly after the newlyweds moved out.

Linda’s father had grown ill and asked them to move in with him. They did. Dick was hired on at the aluminum plant on Industrial Park Drive and worked four days a week from three in the morning until three in the afternoon. His pregnant wife worked part-time as a teller at Hemming Savings & Loan while he slept.

On Christmas Eve, Linda’s father had died in his sleep of a brain aneurysm. The usual activities brimming with Christmas cheer rotted away to the bittersweet process of burying a loved one and initiating a legal uproar that would decide which of his five children would inherit his home and fourteen acres on Highway 7. At the reading of the will, his estate was bequeathed to his only daughter, Linda Gail Starkweather, and her husband, Richard Lewis Starkweather. The house was theirs.

On Labor Day, their daughter, Regina, was born––eight pounds and eleven ounces of pink flesh wrapped in a soft blanket. A nurse had told Linda she’d give anything to have a child so beautiful. Linda looked into her daughter’s eyes mirroring her own––a vibrant electric blue––and thought of the price she herself would pay. The fresh joys of motherhood became rancidly infected with the horrific reality that one day, someone or
something
would come to collect. One day without notice and without warning, it would come.

She was damn certain of it.

5

Gina groaned and kicked off the sheets. The morning sun was irritatingly bright. The house was empty. Dylan would be on his way to school by now, and her mother would be at her desk listening to a behemoth explain why another pastry shop in town was a good idea. But all that was far from her mind. Jared––the star quarterback who gave her a telltale wink of interest––took center stage in her mind's eye, which made her stretch with a smile. The warmth felt good, and it was one of those days she could afford to lie around another hour or so before sneaking into class.

But she wasn't alone. She could feel eyes moving over her exposed body. She lay perfectly still and listened for shuffling or the shallow breathing of some pervert that might be standing over her. A shot of adrenaline-drenched paranoia gushed through her and popped open her eyes.

It was a snake. She froze and immediately scanned over the glossy scales and the diamonds on its back.
Dylan, I'm going to kill you
, she thought. Surely that pecker-headed twerp had put that damned rubber thing on her bed, but it wasn't of the run-of-the-mill, made-in-China variety. It came from the desert, forged by the mighty hands of God himself––or perhaps by someone else or
something
else entirely.

But it was a snake. Its black tongue flicked out at her.

“Hey there, baby girl. You smell terrific.”

Gina almost thanked the snake before she realized what had happened. It had spoken to her.

She had to be mistaken. Surely it was a dream. She had a flash of what little she remembered from the Bible––a serpent comes into the Garden of Eden and tells Eve to eat an apple from the tree of life.
Just eat the damn thing
it might have said like a drunken brute sliding an apologetic meal under his wife’s blackened eyes.
Sorry, honey, but you had it coming.

“Hello,” Gina said. It was all she could say. The snake lay flat with its head tilted up at her. It seemed to smile, but it couldn’t have. Snakes can’t smile. This one was smiling.

“Sorry if I woke you. I hadn’t planned to visit until much later this week––after that pigskin-totin pretty boy has had you bent over this bed, railin and wailin in your snatch patch.”

Her jaw unhinged and hung with the words in the air. The snake slithered closer. Her brain told her body to jerk itself away, but she couldn’t move. She was paralyzed.

“I can taste your thoughts, sinfully tasty they are. It wouldn't be your first rough romp in this house, would it? You know what I'm talking about. Don't act like you've forgotten. Why say anything when your uncle is locked up far from here? Is it because of your mother? What it would do to her? Hasn't she been through enough already, you ask? And your brother would tease you, call you names, and tell everybody. Everybody, Gina. Your teachers, neighbors, friends, classmates––even the clerks at the public library would secretly point and snicker like children. Is that what you want?

“You're safe now, baby girl. He's afraid of you. Did you know that? Why do you think he's paid your bills, bought your first car, hell––nested for your college tuition? He's afraid you'll tell what he did to you. But you won't. You can't. He'll deny it, dontcha know? Then you'll be the liar.

“This brings me to lover boy. He has a secret. A dirty little secret indeed. He hides it well. So cunning, so clever. Even I admire his style. It's mighty fine, baby girl. Migh-tee fine.”

Like fine wine in the summertime.

“It seems Jared enjoys playing a certain game, you might say. I'm not talking about Candyland or Scrabble, no ma'am, nothing as innocent as that, I assure you. But enough of that. We’d better get this over with.”

Gina’s heart thudded in her chest as the snake coiled up in a rigid pose, rattling, opening its pink, wet mouth to reveal––

"Rise and shine, slacker!" Dylan was standing in the doorway with muddy patches of earth on his blue jeans. His voice startled her out of her paralysis and in a fleeting blink, the slimy reptilian shaft smiling beside her was gone. Dylan stared at her blue-trimmed bikini with butterflies on them until she jerked up the sheet tightly below her face. "Eff'n pervo! You ever hear of knocking?"

"Spare me the bitchy attitude, will ya? I had a blowout up the road a piece. Tried changing it, but the jack sank in the mud. I need a ride."

"Forget it. I am not going to school today." The sun hid itself, taking with it the golden rods of sunlight that had felt so good. She flipped over to face the window, shaking.

"I already called for a tow.
Pleeease?
" His voice grew into a nasally whine that made him sound like a begging child.

A begging child, he was indeed.

6

“What’s it gonna be then, huh?” Martha Kemper paced up and down the linoleum with her eyes stuck out at her son. He reclined back in his chair looping a gold necklace around his index finger. He pointed it at his mother and twirled the chain like a hula-hoop.

“Dammit, boy! Put that thing down and listen to what I’m a tellin you!” Her syllables tripped over one another, and then she tripped herself on the hem of her robe. Jared swallowed the laughter before it could escape. The gaudy getup she wore reminded him of wallpaper you might find in a sleazy motel out west, one where filthy all-night truckers paid by the hour to catch a few winks and push into a hooker’s meat curtains for a while.

“I dunno, Ma, I’m not cut out for the service. We’ve talked about this already. I just don’t see myself doing it, that’s all. Coach McGraw says scouts will be looking at me this season, and I gotta be sharp, ya know? I could get a scholarship. A full ride, maybe. Why can’t you be happy about that?”

Martha craned her head down. She looked as though the waxy skin would melt off her face at any moment. “Jared Galen Kemper, you disgrace your father’s name.”

“Whoa, whoa, Ma––”

“Your daddy served in the gulf, your granddaddy in Vietnam, your great-granddaddy in dubya dubya two––he got a Purple Heart. And the Congressional Medal of Honor after he was long gone. Mortar shell blew his bottom half clean off, but he never had a raw word to say about it. He sacrificed his life out of loyalty and patriotic love for this great nation, boy. He did it so his children and grandchildren would live proud and live free. So, show some
RESPECT
!”

Jared stole a quick glance at the clock beside the fridge. He should have left for school twenty minutes ago.

His mother got closer. Her stringy locks hung in her eyes, her breath rancid and sour. For the first time he noticed the tiny craters in his mother’s un-spackled face. Saliva webbed and snapped at the corners of her mouth. “Someday you’ll have children of your own, and they won’t have no respect for a coward or traitor. If you think throwing a ball around in padded tights will get you anywhere in this world, then by all means, Son, take that road, but––,” She held up a thin finger and shook it at him, “remember this: if you take the coward’s path, there ain’t gonna be a thing in this world that’ll wash that yella off your belly. I only pray the good Lord will show you mercy.”

I hope he shows more mercy on you, Momma
.

7

It started to sprits along Highway 7, but the sun was out in full bloom––a dose of liquid sunshine, his Momma would have said––with only with a single bruise-colored blotch of cotton candy clouds hugging the sky. The drive to
Turd-en High
, as he and his friends loved to call it, took under fifteen minutes without the usual school traffic.

After parking next to the chain-link fence separating the student parking lot from the football field, Jared went inside and spent the next forty minutes in Pearson’s office. By the time he squeezed into Miss Webb’s literature class, he was sopped with sweat and had quietly buried a soul-singeing terror behind the mascot on his blue and gold t-shirt.

Miss Webb shook a stub of white chalk at her class, obsessing about T.S. Eliot and his contributions to literary criticism. Standing just shy of five feet tall, she was a taut divorcee who spent most of her extracurricular hours logged into internet poker sites that promised little return if any, but that was just fine. She’d sit in her recliner cradling her laptop computer and watch her two Siamese kittens spat curiously at the dangling power cord.

She approached Jared after noticing he was still standing by the front door of the classroom.

“I’m glad you could join us, Mr. Kemper,” she said.

He held up a card between his index finger and the finger he used to greet his mother’s gentlemen callers. Miss Webb snatched it from him and perched her spectacles on her beak to read Mr. Pearson’s scrawl. Her contempt for the slacker jock receded, reshaping her face into one that was rather pleasing to look at, despite the river of wrinkles flowing from the corners of her eyes––no doubt carved there by an eighteen-month feud in and out of divorce court.

“Oh, I see.” She grinned and handed the card back to him. “Go on, then.” Her tone was encouraging like that of a giddy mother hearing of her son’s daring plan to stop the love of his life from boarding a plane to some distant city and wedding the douchebag who stole her away––the way most Hollywood garbage seemed to end.

He stepped out in the empty hallway and closed the door behind him.

She secretly lusted after this young man the way most of her female students (and Danny Rickles) did, but Gloria Webb would never see him alive again.

8

They lived only three miles from Durden High. It stood just off Highway 7 near the Hemming city limits across from Ava’s Flowers & Things. Hemming had been an agricultural whore in the 1920’s, peddling corn, cotton, and tobacco to the more well-to-do folks north and east of Tennessee for half the price of the competition. Ruins of the bygone era freckled the community, a stolid reminder of profitable heydays that had given way to more substantial commercial industry such as the aluminum manufacturing plant where Dick Starkweather had been crushed by a metal press two winters ago.

It had been a dream and nothing more. Still the stench of the nasty thing lingered.
It was a dream, right?
Gina threw on the AC in her Volkswagen, blasting the cool, faded smell of vinyl and leather through the vents. She sucked it in through her nostrils like a white powder junkie snorting her paycheck.

"Keep you feet on the mat, will ya?" Gina barked.

Dylan looked down at the chocolate muck caked on his sneakers. "They're
on
the mat," he sneered.

What was she going to tell Mr. Kessler? The dog ate her homework? Hell, it was a believable scenario, at least to her. Fender would happily feast on a term paper seeping with bullshit just as much as the dime novel he had for dinner the night before. Even actual bull shit seemed appetizing to a senile farm dog.