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“Stop it, homo,” Luke said.

“Make me,” Gus said. Gus stabbed at Luke while Marty stepped backward, away from the two older boys.

Luke held his hands in front of his face, shielding himself from Gus’s continued and frenzied attacks. He swung and kept Luke on his heels. Luke moved ever backward alongside the mountain of trash, wincing as the knife slashed inches in front of his hands.

“Look at this knife! It’s a honker!” Gus raised the knife above his head.

Marty caught a glimpse of black wings above the boy. They were gone as soon as he saw them, but the afterglow seared into his eyes as Gus yelled, “I am Conan the Barbarian!” He brought the knife down on Luke with the force of an axe-swing, and he laughed as he sliced off a piece of Luke’s left hand. Two fingers dropped into the dirt, and for a moment both boys stared at the severed appendages in disbelief.

Luke sucked in a deep breath, and gripping his left wrist he let out a bellowing yell that scared up the seagulls all around the trash dump. The birds burst into the air and shrieked along with Luke.

Gus threw the knife at Marty, but Marty stepped to the side and the knife clattered into the stacks of trash behind him. Gus turned and ran toward the tree line near the road, back toward his house and the trail Gus and his followers used to gain access into the dump.

Marty scooped up the Barbie doll’s legs, and as Luke continued to scream behind him, he found the Bowie knife and wiped it clean on his pants. Carrying the knife in the hand opposite the doll, Marty sprinted out of the dump the way he had come.

He could hear Luke screaming even as he passed Mr. Jessup and the Jackson-Williams Cemetery, nearly a quarter mile away.

Chapter 24
  More Big Bad Bear

Sheriff Dansley nodded at Kreisha, the nurse who worked the front desk at Cypress Knee Memorial Hospital. She waved him into the hallway, hardly looking up from whatever game she was playing on her cell phone. Kreisha was one of two nurses on staff, and the other nurse, Wyn as they called her, short for Wynona, was walking down the hallway just outside Betsy Jameson’s room. She carried a pillow and a rolled-up bed sheet.

“She doing alright?” Dansley asked Wyn. He motioned with his hand at Betsy’s room.

“She’s awake, finally.” Wyn stepped closer to Dansley, close enough that he could smell her breath, which smelled like chewing gum, and she said quietly, “She’s got some detox to undergo if she wants to get sober. She’s starting to go into withdrawal. We had to sedate her when she started screaming last night.”

“She screamed?”

“Like something out of a horror movie. If she wasn’t our only patient last night, she would have woke up the whole hospital. As it was, she scared poor Annabelle half to death.”

“Did you restrain her?”

Wyn puffed out her lower lip and looked up at him with her doe-eyes. “Why ever would we do that to a poor ol’ patient, Sheriff? We’re the good guys here.”

“I suppose so,” Dansley said. He patted her on the head for no other reason than she seemed to deserve it with that face of hers, and then he stepped by her and walked into Betsy’s room.

Betsy lay on her side, facing the window away from the door. He could see her spine through the opening in her hospital gown.

“Betsy, girl, how you doing?” he asked.

She didn’t answer or move or seem to notice. He walked around the side of the bed where she could see him. Her eyes were open and unfocused. He took off his hat because it seemed like the right thing to do.

“Betsy, I’m real sorry about your boy, Gerald. I really am. If there’s anything me and Jackie can do, you know we will. You want us to take up a food offering and bring it to your house?”

Betsy lay still and unblinking as a corpse, and if she hadn’t had a little color to her, Dansley might have thought she was just that. He could have brought up the allegations of negligence and abuse. He could have taken her into custody and put her on suicide watch, but he kept the Big Bad Bear at bay and stuck with a gentler, more effective tactic, the Teddy Bear approach. She was already broken, and he saw no sense in breaking her further.

“Alright, then. I’ll get Jackie and maybe Pippy and them to take up a pool, and we’ll bring you supper for a couple of days. That sound good, girl?”

Betsy didn’t move, and he thought of the word
Waste
. “Betsy, girl, I need you to tell me what happened. You got real trouble with Gerald. We knew he was in bad shape, but nobody knew he was that bad. Coroner said he could have been passed for several days, covered in sores and whatnot. And that little one of yours, Marty, he’s still missing. You know where Marty might have got off to?”

“Hell,” she said. Her lips hardly moved and her body didn’t move at all. “Marty is in hell.”

He looked up, saw Wyn with her ear to the door, and motioned her to enter, quietly, and stand where she could hear.

“What does that mean, Betsy, that Marty’s in hell?”

“Means he’s gone. Or I hope he is.” She rolled her head and looked up at him. She started crying, a deep sick sound that was painful to watch and hear.

Dansley waited until it passed, and then said, “Did you hurt him, Betsy? Did you hit him when you were shooting up the house? Were you gunning for that young ’un of yours?”

“I tried,” she said. “I tried. I just want him to go away.” She leaned out and reached for Dansley. He thought she was reaching for his gun, and he reacted by grabbing her wrist, but she clasped his hand in hers and pulled herself up. “Make him go away. If I see him again, I’ll kill him, Officer Bill. I’ll make him good and dead and all. You get that boy away from me or next time you come out, bring a body bag with you.”

He’d heard enough, and he shucked Betsy’s hand away and left her sobbing in her bed behind him. To Wyn in the hallway he said, “That crack cocaine will mess you up.”

“She’s a meth addict,” Wyn said.

“Same thing in my book. Like saying liquor’s worse than beer. Don’t make no sense that people ruin themselves like that.”

When he reached his cruiser, he dropped into the seat and thumbed open his cell phone. He was about to call Jackie when the radio cracked and Pippy interrupted the silence. “Stabbing reported at Cypress Knee Landfill. EMS en route.”

He picked up the radio and said, “Pippy, identify.”

“Two young males, Caucasian, minors. You know one of them.”

She couldn’t say their names over the radio, but that last part told him what he needed to know. He had just found Marty Jameson.

It turned out one boy lost a couple of fingers and was on his way to Baytown to see if they could sew them back on. With the doctors nowadays, the boy would probably be playing piano by Christmas. Everyone else clammed up about it, other than to say it was Marty Jameson’s knife that had done the cutting.

After he had a good idea of what happened, he drove to the Jameson house, spoke with the Marsh family next door, and then camped out near the underpass on I-10. The crippled girl, Sadie Marsh, had said she saw Marty come and go earlier.

Jackie had packed him a bologna sandwich for lunch today, with sweet pickles, pepper jack cheese, and an orange. He ate that around two o’clock, and then later, about dinner time and as the sun began to set, he peeled and ate the orange. As he sucked on an orange slice, he saw Marty walk through the pasture behind the house, slide through the back yard fence, drink from a hose behind the shed, and then jog into the house.

He finished his orange, smoked a cigarette, and when the boy did not come back out, he walked the distance from his car to the house. It was dark by then, summertime hot, and his boots stuck to the blacktop.

When he reached the driveway, he heard what sounded like an owl hooting inside the house. It wasn’t an owl, though. He could tell it was the boy, hooting for some reason or another, and then the boy burst through the back door and flew through the carport. He disappeared around the corner, and then reappeared on the rooftop. He glided across the broken shingles as spry and sure-footed as any squirrel Dansley had ever seen. Then he grabbed a shutter on this side of the house and swung into the attic.

“I’ll be damned,” Dansley said. “That’s how they got up in the attic.”

He watched the window for a while and was about to call out to Marty when a grown man appeared in the window. It must have been some kind of dark in that attic, because the man seemed to be threadbare, like an old worn-out undershirt, all thin and cobwebby. It was hard to see the face in the darkness but Dansley could tell the man looked down at him. The man shook his head and turned back into the attic.

“And there’s our prowler,” he said. It was dark now and he unslung his flashlight and walked to the foot of the window. He was beside the room where Gerald had been, next to what looked like a dysfunctional air-conditioning unit. He checked his feet for snakes and was half glad it was dark and he couldn’t see what might be down there.

In any case, he couldn’t get up to the window, not without a ladder, and his old bones were too brittle to swing off the rooftop like the boy had done.

He was about to shine the flashlight into the attic when he heard something land near him. It plopped into the grass as if a pile of snakes had dropped from the roof, and he thought of swampy waters and cypress trees, and how water moccasins would drop from the limbs if you drove your boat beneath them. He froze and listened, checked his feet, and heard only silence. He swept the flashlight across the yard and saw nothing that might have caused the sound.

A cool finger stroked his neck. He swept his hand across the back of his neck and nearly flipped off his hat and turned around, this time a full-circle. He stomped his feet and checked the ground and then the eaves along the house. He was getting the spooks, and so he snorted and spat and rubbed his nose as a sort of head-clearing exercise.

“Sheriff. I’m armed.” He put his hand on his pistol and unclipped his holster.

Another coolness wrapped around his foot this time, from inside his boot, and that made him jump more than he would have liked. “No, sir,” he said, speaking to himself and to the jitters that were taking over.

He stomped, certain now that his foot was not alone in the boot. He didn’t know how it got in there, but the coolness wrapped between his toes, slid across the instep, and made its way up the back of his calf. It was as if he were lowering his foot into a tub of writhing, frigid snakes. With each second, they wrapped another length of icy coil around his leg and squeezed.

He heard flapping in the darkness beside him and caught a glimpse of a black bird about the size of a child. There were wings and arms beneath those wings, but when he looked directly at it, it disappeared.

He saw another one from the corner of his eye, this one near his leg. He drew his pistol, but when he hit it with the light, it was gone. He heard more of them thump to the ground. They hiss-whispered as they swarmed, and from his periphery he saw there must be five or six of them.

The coolness spread up his right thigh and into his chest, his shoulder, and down his right arm. The right half of his face seemed to melt away as a numbness took over, and he stomped his boot to stop the crawling there. “Out,” he said, and then he realized he couldn’t say anything else. He was suddenly out-of-breath and light-headed. His gun had fallen into the grass even though he didn’t remember dropping it, and his right arm hung limp and numb and heavy on his shoulder.

The crawling in his boot intensified its grip, down to the bone, and his leg buckled. When he commanded his right arm to stop the fall, the arm betrayed him, and he crashed into the grass.

Numbness spread to his face, and that’s when he realized what was happening. It was as if his entire right-half had been cleaved off. His right eye grew fuzzy, but through that dying eye he saw the clear image of the creatures that were surrounding him, with the torso of a child and the wings and head and legs of a scraggly crow.

One of the things hissed at him, and he heard it clearly now, the sound enhanced through his dying right ear as the stroke pinched off life to that half of his body. Its bird-beak stabbed into his chest, where Officer Dansley felt a sharp, warm pain begin to spread.

Chapter 25
 
The Ghost in the Attic

There was a smidge of red on his new handle, and as he ran away from the trash dump, Marty thought how this was the second time the knife had drawn blood. He ran past Jackson-Williams Cemetery, saw Mr. Jessup still raking, and then dove through a fence marking the Jackson property line. He passed the cows and crossed another fence and the feeder road, ducked beneath the I-10 underpass, and then he was on his side of the road with the cars on the freeway buzzing their way westward behind him.

He slowed to a trot as he neared his house and stopped when he reached the water hose behind the shed. The hose was cracked and old. Marty turned it on and bled out the rubber shavings and drank heavily from it. He thought he must sound like a horse at the trough.

He sprayed his head and shirt, and then he turned the hose on the knife and scrubbed it for several minutes. He scrubbed and scrubbed, but the knife still looked dirty. The smidge of blood on the handle would not come out, not without sanding.

He washed the Barbie doll legs, too, the ones he had gone to the dump to find. He worked the grit out of the joints, and then put them into his jeans pocket.

When he felt rested enough, he jumped the fence and jogged to the Bois D’Arc tree where he had found the wood for his knife handle. He collected a new whittle stick, measured it against the Barbie doll legs, and by the time he got back to his house, the clouds had moved inland and the sky was dark with evening. He was hungry, and after he drank from the hose again, he stomped his way through the yard with his knife leading the way.

Marty ate the rest of the mini corndogs from the freezer, and when he finished, he walked around the house and called out for his mother. He knew she wasn’t there, but it was quiet, and he wanted to hear something other than his own boots clumping the floorboards. He thought about turning on Gerald’s breathing machine, since it felt as if the house was unhappy without its chuffing heartbeat but decided that would be awkward, and he didn’t want to think on Gerald anyway.

He ruled out going back to Sadie’s house tonight. If he got really scared, he would go there, but he would try to stay the night here where he belonged. Besides, he had his knife, and there was nobody here to shoot or hit him.

He sat at the table he and Uncle Cooper had made, and waited. When the night thickened enough, he heard the boots marking their path in the attic. He stood, looked up at the ceiling and said, “Hoo, hoo!”

He felt like an owl for some reason, a night creature, something very much like the church gargoyle, but with feathers and wise eyes and a razor beak. He felt as if he had talons and the taste of blood on his tongue and the slice of air on a pair of invisible wings.

Without stopping to think, and still hooting, Marty skipped out of the house, scampered up the mimosa tree and ran across the rooftop. It was dark and the attic was pitch black; but he grabbed the shutter and swung inside feet-first and stood there, ready for what might come, ready for the boot-stomper, the pacer, the maker of steps in his place of solitude and sanctuary. Now was a time of action, and action does not think, but acts.

He sliced the attic air with his knife. It was black air, and thick with dust. A rat scurried beneath the eaves and Marty said, “Hoo!” He wondered if that was a terrifying sound to the rats, and he guessed it probably was. It was the last sound many of them heard before a pair of claws broke their back and a razor-beak tore out their neck.

The toddler chair was over by the west side window. At first, Marty thought he had left that window open, but as he approached, he saw the pane had been broken out. There wasn’t much glass on the floor.

He turned to the darkness of the attic and said, “I’m not afraid of you, ghost-man. I’ll gut you. I’ll cut your throat and chop off your head. This is
my
attic. Hoo, hoo.”

Marty sat in the toddler chair, and to prove his bravado, he put his back to the open attic. He faced the window, and through the oak tree leaves saw lights next door. Sadie was not at her window, but she would be soon. She had nothing better to do.

Even though there wasn’t much light, his eyes adjusted enough that Marty could work on his new project. He raised the broken window and placed the Barbie doll legs on the windowsill where he could see them in the moonlight. They were long, lean legs, a buxom torso, and nothing more.

He used the Bowie knife to strip the new piece of Bois D’Arc wood in his lap. He sliced away the knots, and when he was ready to add details, he switched to his uncle’s Old Timer knife and the small whittling blade.

Sadie had come to her window by then. She watched him without waving, and after a while she closed the blinds and her bedroom light went off.

More lights switched off next door, and as he whittled, it seemed to Marty that he could see better in the dark. Take all the lights, and his owl-eyes would still be able to see.

He hooted and stomped his feet against the floorboards as he cut. The floorboards answered behind him. He stomped again, and the attic answered, closer this time, with the clear boot-steps he and his mother had heard. He didn’t stop whittling, but kept slicing away pieces of the Bois D’Arc and checking it against the Barbie doll legs on the windowsill.

He ignored the boot-steps behind him. He shrugged off the hand that touched his shoulder. He hooted at the voice in his ear, the one that whispered, “
The Boogerbears are gonna get you
.” He heard a snake drop from the rafters and plunk to the floor, a distinct and unmistakable sound, and still he did not turn to look.

Marty cut and whittled and hooted as the attic breathed behind him, and the ghost-man paced back-and-forth with occasional touches on his shoulder or neck. Once he rustled his hair, but Marty was a warrior fighting a battle against his inner resolve. He sliced away all the wood that wasn’t a pair of legs, and by the time dawn came through the east window across the attic, Marty had finished his night’s work.

He stood then and turned to face the rising sun. The attic was empty, full of nothing more than shards of light that cut through the sheets of hanging attic dust.

“Hoo, hoo,” he said to the attic. “I win, ghost-man. I been shot at and beat and I still ain’t dead. I been choked and I still ain’t dead. I sleep with snakes and spiders at my feet and I still ain’t dead. I ain’t scared of Boogerbears or you or anything else. I put my back to you and I still ain’t dead. You can’t kill me. Nobody can.” He swished the Bowie knife in front of him for emphasis.

When he reached the east side window and was about to swing out, he saw Sheriff Dansley’s cruiser parked down the road a ways, near the underpass, facing his house. He squinted at the car and could see it was empty. He looked around the yard, saw no one, but when he leaned out the window and looked down, he saw Sheriff Dansley’s body lying below, beside the air-conditioner in the high grass. He lay corkscrewed as if he had tried to stand as he died.

Marty didn’t know what to do. For a few minutes it seemed his brain shut off and grew completely void. He waited, and watched Sheriff Dansley on the ground below, but the sheriff didn’t move. He didn’t twitch, and his chest didn’t rise up-and-down.

“Mr. Sheriff?” he asked. The man lay absolutely still, and so Marty hopped out of the window and ran across the rooftop, across the carport and down into the yard.

When he touched the sheriff’s cheek, it was cool as dirt.

Marty heard crackling in the driveway and when he looked up, he saw his father’s truck pulling off the feeder road. His father blew smoke out the open window and honked the horn when he saw Marty.

Marty wanted to run, but when his father saw what Marty was hunched over, he stopped the truck near the fence. Hanging out the window with the cigarette in his mouth, he looked down at Sheriff Dansley, back up at Marty and back down at Dansley. “Hell’s bells,” his father said. “You shot the sheriff, didn’t you? But you did not shoot the deputy.” He laughed and said, “Stay put. Don’t touch him.”

Marty waited beside the dead man while his father parked the truck in the carport. For some reason, he thought of the horse-apple tree where he had found the wood for his knife, and he wished he was there now, even in the wind when the horse-apples fall on your head and put out your eye. He wished he was anywhere but here.

His father rounded the side of the house, stood there a moment, and toed Sheriff Dansley’s thigh. Then he kicked him. “Goddamn, boy, he’s dead, ain’t he. What the hell you do?”

“Nothing, Daddy.”

“This ain’t nothing. This is a dead sheriff is what this is.” He looked at Marty and noticed the Bowie knife in his hand. He nodded at the knife. “That how you do him, boy? You stab his ass? I’m gonna have to start calling you
Killer
, ain’t I. You about near killed your brother, and you damned sure killed the sheriff here.” His father kicked Sheriff Dansley and spat in the grass near him.

He looked at the house and back to Marty. “Your momma see what you done?”

“I didn’t do nothing, Daddy.”

His father cuffed Marty on the head, and Marty fell over Sheriff Dansley and into the grass. “Don’t you sass me. You done made a mess. You’re going to jail, boy. You can’t kill no sheriff and get by with it, not in a town this small. Now you answer me. Did your momma see what you done?”

Marty stood and clutched the knife. His head rang from where his father hit him and he heard bees in his ear. “She didn’t see nothing, Daddy. She’s gone.”

“Where’d she go?”

Marty shook his head and leaned away from his father, ready for another hit that did not come.

“I leave her here alone and look what happens. Shows you can’t trust a dang woman, boy. You remember that. Women is some crazy bitches, all of ’em, good for nothin’ but rubbing down on, and you ain’t old enough for that yet. When’s she coming back?”

“I don’t know.” There was another slap on the head, harder this time, but he was ready for it. He managed to turn away so it only glanced the top of his head, but now his eyes were blurring up, and he was afraid his father was going to see him cry and beat him harder.

“Well, you don’t know much, do you. You ain’t done nothing and you don’t know nothing and your momma ain’t here and you don’t know where she is or when she’s coming back. What the hell
do
you know?”

“I don’t know,” Marty said. He recoiled when his father’s hand went up, but the hand never fell.

Instead his father said, “Goddammit, boy. Um . . .”

Marty thought he was about to say something else, but then he leaned down and unbuckled Sheriff Dansley’s holster. He slipped the holster off and fished around for the pistol in the grass. He held it up, played with the hammer, and then pushed it into the fitted holster. “Fine-looking gun, ain’t it. Tell you what, boy. You done got your hands dirty but I think we might make some good of it. His car was parked down yonder a ways. He ain’t in the driveway, so if we don’t go messin’ with the car there ain’t nothing to tie him right to us. You didn’t call him, did you?”

“No, sir.”

“Did your momma?”

“I don’t know.”

“You say that again, boy, and I swear to God I’ll shoot you in the throat.” His father drew the pistol, thumbed back the hammer and pointed it at Marty. “Did your momma call the cops?”

Marty’s hands went up, not to his face but to his chest. The gun barrel looked heavy in his father’s hand, and he wondered if it was a hair-trigger like their .38, the one his father called
Mad Annie.
“No, sir.”

“There you go.” His father lowered the gun, thumbed the hammer down, and holstered it. “Just needed a little intellectual lubricant, didn’t you. Now why’s the sheriff out here? And before you say you don’t know, you’d better roll your tongue for the last time. I’m cutting it out if you don’t man up and get to knowing what all you got to know.”

Marty thought about why the sheriff might have come. He held up the knife. “This, Daddy. Gus and Luke. At the dump. Gus cut off Luke’s fingers.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Friends. They were playing with the knife and Gus cut Luke. That’s why the sheriff was out here, is what I imagine.”

“Huh. What you imagine.” His father looked out at the freeway, where the sheriff’s car was parked down the road. “I figure that’ll be alright. Now I ain’t doing your dirty work, boy. You got to man up, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now go out to the shed and get the wheelbarrow. This here’s a big bastard, and we can’t lift him by ourselves. Get that old tarp, too, the one your uncle had covering his riding lawn mower. We’ll wrap his ass in that.”

By the time Marty brought the wheelbarrow and tarp, his father had stripped off Sheriff Dansley’s uniform, hat, boots, watch and ring, and folded it all neatly in the grass beside him, and in doing so had straightened Dansley’s arms and legs. He was wearing nothing but an undershirt, briefs, a pair of black socks, and he looked like a stiffened and disheveled old man who had died trying.

They rolled the sheriff into the tarp and loaded him into the wheelbarrow. “Open the gate up there,” his father said, and Marty opened the back gate leading into the pasture.

His father wheeled Sheriff Dansley to the spot where they had been throwing dead rat snakes for the past year. It was a place Marty avoided, and until now he hadn’t seen it up this close. He saw far more snakes than he thought there would be. They were piled in varying states of decay, stacked in the wild poses only dead snakes can twist into. “Now get that spade shovel, boy, and get to digging.”

His father smoked several cigarettes while Marty dug. He kept walking from the snake pile to the shed and back again, checking the driveway and casting glances all around. He looked through the yard toward Sadie’s house. “She didn’t see you, did she?”

“No, sir,” Marty said. He said it quick, and thought maybe he had answered too fast, because his father squinted at him, and then walked that way.

His father touched the Marsh’s back fence and stood there a minute while Marty dug. Then he came back to Marty and said, “Yeah, I don’t think they could have seen, not from that side of the house. And the shed blocks us here. Dig your ass faster, though, boy. We ain’t got all day.”

When the hole was about as deep and wide as Marty was tall, his father balled up the sheriff and rolled him in. “Now cover it up, boy. Use grass and junk to make it look like you never dug here. Find some cow patties, too, put them on top and around it. Then move all these snakes onto it and throw some weeds on that. If they bring out dogs, they’ll think they hit the snakes, not a body. You see how that works?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now get to it.”

By now it was after lunch, and his father stripped off his shirt and slung it over the back fence. He moved with his spider-webbed back through the pasture and along the fence. He stopped and picked up a busted AA battery, sniffed it, and threw it into the pasture.

Marty covered the sheriff as his father instructed, and then he hosed out the wheelbarrow, wiped down the shovel, and combed through the grass where the sheriff had died. “You got to be thorough,” his father said. “I ain’t going to jail for your ass. They come and find something we missed I’m nailing you to the wall, guaran-teed. You get me?”