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“Yes, sir,” Marty said.

It was late afternoon when his father made one more lap from the air-conditioner to the snake grave and back again. “I think we done got it. I can sell them clothes down in Houston. That’s high-dollar, boy. Same with that gun and belt. Speaking of which, let’s go out to the shed, back where we put that wheelbarrow. I got to show you something.”

Marty went behind the shed and waited. He had laid his Bowie knife and the carved wooden legs next to the water hose, and he picked them up and was looking at them when his father returned.

His father held the sheriff’s pistol in one hand and a handful of rags in the other. “This here’s how you make a redneck silencer, boy. It only works with revolvers like this one. You try this with an auto and you’ll mess up your hand and jam the slide. Now watch.”

His father wrapped the rags around the end of the gun, aimed at the ground and fired a shot. There was a muffled report that sounded more like a hammer hitting wood than a gunshot. “You can still hear it, but not very far, and most folks will ignore it. You fire like that in a house and you can’t hear it from outside. You see how that works?”

Marty nodded.

“We can’t have no witnesses, boy. It’s alright if they
think
you done it, them bastards can think all they want. But if they can
prove
you done it, you’re in the shit. You got to keep your mouth shut. Can you keep that little pie hole of yours closed long enough to let this all settle?”

His father aimed the rag-wrapped pistol at Marty and drew back the hammer. “Can you keep shut till the day you die? How long you think that day is, boy, between then and now?”

“I don’t know, Daddy.” Marty had the knife in his hand and his father glanced at it, sort of smiled, and went on.

“You take this to the grave one way or the other, boy, you get me? I can silence you now and put you right in there next to the sheriff. Ain’t nobody gonna miss your sorry ass. Say you’ll keep quiet, boy.”

“I’ll keep quiet, Daddy.”

“Say it again.”

“I’ll keep quiet, Daddy.”

“Now keep quiet.” For a moment, Marty wasn’t sure if he was going to pull the trigger. Then he laughed and handed the gun to Marty. “You’re a big boy, ain’t you. You’re gonna be just like your old man. Now do it. Fire off a couple and see how it works. Don’t shoot nobody in the head, leastaways nobody don’t deserve it.”

Marty did as he was instructed. His father reloaded the revolver and stuffed it into the back of his pants.

When they rounded the shed and were walking through the back yard, Marty saw a sheriff’s patrol car pull off the feeder road and into the driveway.

There was the squeeze of a hand on Marty’s shoulder as his father yanked him backward, toward the shed and the pasture. “We got to scoot out of here, boy.”

The headlights splashed over them, along with a brief red-blue glare as the officer flashed the emergency lights. The squawk of a siren warned them not to run.

“Guess we got to do this the hard way,” his father said.

They stopped, turned, and faced the car. Marty noticed his father held his hand by his side, casually, with the pistol concealed by the angle of his stance. From the front, with the darkness and shadows as additional cover, he would appear unarmed. His father thumbed back the hammer, and with the other hand waggled a finger at Marty to keep quiet.

The car stopped near them, and Officer Hernandez stepped out of the driver’s side. “Stay right there,” he said. He turned, opened the back door, and helped Marty’s mother out. A blank expression filled her face, as if she had just woken up.

“Betsy?” his father asked. “What the hell are you—?”

She wasn’t looking at his father. She stared at Marty with empty eyes. A firm line formed her mouth. Her hands were bound behind her back.

Officer Hernandez took her by the arm and led her to the front of the car. “You be good for me, Betsy?”

“Yes, Officer.” She did not look away from Marty, and her lips barely moved.

Officer Hernandez fished out his key and released her handcuffs. “Good. I need to ask you all a few questions.” He pointed toward the feeder road to where the sheriff’s car was parked, and when he shifted his eyes away, Marty’s father raised the pistol and shot the officer in the neck.

A spray of blood splattered his mother’s face and she winced as the officer fell on the hood of the car. One hand clutched his neck and a sudden burst of blood, while the other drew his pistol, waved it toward Marty’s father, and fired two blind shots in that direction. Officer Hernandez fired two more as he rolled over the hood of his car and fell to the other side. Marty’s father crouched and ran toward the old Ford pickup, and for a few seconds, the gunfire ceased as the men fought for better footing.

Marty’s mother wiped the blood on her face with the back of her hand, and her lips parted to show a row of clenched teeth. Her head bent down, her shoulders hunched, and her legs shot her forward with the force of a wild beast on the kill.

Marty ran toward the pasture, but when he hit the hurricane fence and was about to launch over, a pair of hands gripped his shoulders and yanked him backward. He landed flat on his back, winded and dazed, and his mother looked down at him with smeared blood on her cheeks.

She screamed. She fell on him and delivered a series of blows to his head and face and chest, and then her fingers wrapped around his forearm and wrenched the Bowie knife free. She struck his head with the handle he had carved, and it was a hard hit, the sort he expected from that type of wood. The thoughts in his head dulled, and his body grew slack. She adjusted her grip on it, such that the enormous blade angled downward, raised it above her head, and with both hands was about to drive it into Marty when a gunshot opened a hole in her chest, and a fistful of flesh and bone spewed out.

She lurched forward, gasped, and fell beside Marty. She dropped the knife, and her hands tore at her shirt and bra until she was bare-chested. Her nails clawed at the wound, and when two fingers found the hole in her sternum, she stuck them inside and dug around, and threw her head back in a silent, breathless scream, and convulsed in the grass as if she were being electrocuted by her own nerve endings.

More gunshots followed, along with the sounds of glancing steel and smacked flesh that answered each shot.

His head rang, but Marty rolled to his knees and put his hand against his mother’s chest as she thrashed in the grass. “Momma,” he said. Her blood was hot and thick and black as warm syrup.

There was a pause in the gunshots, and then one more, followed by silence.

His mother shivered and sucked wet breaths. “Momma,” he said again.

When he looked up, Marty saw his father standing over Officer Hernandez’s body and what was left of the man’s head. The body lay still next to the police car, and his father kicked it and shot the officer’s head again. He didn’t seem to notice what had happened to Marty and his mother.

“Momma,” Marty said, knowing it would be the last time he said it, and then he ran to the house and monkey-swung up the mimosa tree and onto the carport. His footsteps were muffled by the continuing rants of his father, who cursed police officers and Mexicans and the Hernandez lineage. His father reloaded the revolver as he spit on the body.

When Marty reached the roof peak leading into the attic, he slid into a prone position and watched from his hiding spot as his father quieted, raised his head, and assessed the scene.

“Betsy?” his father said. “Where did you get off to? What did you do with Marty?”

His mother had stopped moving. Marty could see her from his vantage point on the roof, but for his father in the yard, the high grass and darkness hid her as completely as a fawn in the forest.

His father called out a few more times, and then he went to Officer Hernandez’s cruiser and opened the trunk. He removed a shotgun and assault rifle, along with two black duffle bags, all of which he shoved beneath the house. Then he took hold of the dead officer’s heels and dragged the body to the front of the Ford pickup truck, out of view from the driveway, knelt, and dug around his pockets until he came up with a set of car keys. He crouched there in the headlights with his hands draped across his knees, and he jangled the keys and said, “Hey boy, hey Marty, come here! Betsy! Where are you?”

Nobody answered, and his father rose, dropped into the police car and drove it down the feeder road to where Sheriff Dansley’s cruiser was parked, and then he walked back to the house.

He circled the yard, walked beneath the carport and banged around, and then reappeared and checked on Officer Hernandez. “Piece of shit,” he said. He kicked the man’s body and walked deeper into the yard toward the back fence and the pasture. He swept his eyes at his feet, watching for snakes, and it wasn’t until he nearly stepped on her that he saw Marty’s mother lying face-up and twisted in the grass. He squatted, touched her body, and as he hunched over her a pair of black wings unfolded from the spider-web on his back. They were shadow-like, as if a gossamer crow had descended on him, and with a blink they were absorbed into the darkness and disappeared.

Chapter 26
 
What Uncle Cooper Said

You’re in the attic now, in the afterlife if that’s what people call it, or that other dimension or Purgatory or Heaven or whatnot. You turned away from the light and found yourself stuck in your own attic, and that’s just fine. That’s right where you meant to be.

Some people would call you a wraith. Some would call you a demon or an angel, or a spirit or a ghost or the Boogeyman, and that last one is your favorite. It sounds a lot like Boogerbears, don’t it?

You rest on the term Boogeyman. You pick the term dead. You are a dead Boogeyman.

These ain’t the most spectacular terms or as Martian might say, “That ain’t the most coolest name.”

That’s what he said when you explained the Boogerbears. He sat on that woodshop bench a-swinging those knobby knees of his, staring back at you with those big eyes, and he said, “Boogerbear ain’t the most coolest name, Uncle Cooper. Why don’t you call them demons or devils? Ain’t that what they are?”

Back when you had a voice, a year ago if you counted the moons right, you said, “I call ’em whatever I feel like calling ’em, son. Never felt right calling them nothing more than a Boogerbear, because that suits ’em. Call them what you like. But what you got to remember is they act like crows. They don’t just look like birds, they act like birds.”

“They fly?”

“Ever’ where. And they don’t do nothing but bad things.”

“What kind of bad things do they do?”

“All sorts. They get up to all kinds of nonsense. Mostly they make you feel bad, like they peck away your happiness. Back before your Aunt Loretta died, I kept them Boogerbears away pretty easy. We were happy, and all it took was a couple of winks and off they’d skitter. You can spook ’em with a good bluff, even if there ain’t a thing you can do to harm them.”

“I did that with a dog once. At the dump. He was real ugly.”

“And you had to be sure about it, didn’t you? There weren’t no faking the dog. He’d of known if you were bluffing him. Same with them Boogerbears. They know if you bluff. They’ll start a-pecking you if you try and fake ’em. But I can see ’em with this Dead-Eye, and I let ’em know I can see ’em with a big old wink. Like this!”

You winked and saw the electric jolt run through him. You try winking now in the attic, but there are no eyelids and no eyes and nothing happens. You are a shadow, a specter, an apparition, a spook, and there’s a couple more words for a dead Boogeyman. How about that.

You pace in the attic, clip-clopping your boots on the planks, going over what you said to Marty and hoping he remembers, especially this next part.

You squeezed your Dead-Eye into your palm and dried it with a clean shop towel. “You see the empty eye socket? There ain’t no eye in there, is there? I had to get the Dead-Eye inside somehow. How do you think I did that, Martian?”

The boy didn’t answer, but you could see the wheels turning as if his swinging legs were winding cogs in his noggin. “Cut it out?”

“Right. I had to cut out the old eye. Dug it out with my granddad’s jackknife, sterilized in lamp kerosene. I cut it out, nerve endings and all, left nothing but this hole. Your great-granddad shoved this Dead-Eye into the socket and told me to blink. That’s when I saw my first Boogerbears, and they were all around my granddad, just before they took him, and there weren’t nothing I could do about it. They get us all in the end, son.”

You pace the attic now, the dead Boogeyman helpless, and look out the window as the dying echoes of gunshots haunt the back yard.

Chapter 27
  Sadie’s Escape

Sadie sat at her window waiting on dusk and Marty. This afternoon though, Marty did not follow his habit of moving to the west side window. She grew bored as night fell, and after a snack, she returned to the window and sucked at an apple she had squirrel-nibbled down to the core.

“Baby,” her mother said as she approached from behind. “What did I say about that window?”

“No more window. But it’s my room. I’ll look out if I want, Momma.”

Her mother held her breath and then inhaled deep, held that, and exhaled slowly. She was a force of nature, and that huff bent the treetops and shoved clouds across the sky. This time the storm passed, and she knelt and kissed Sadie’s cheek.

“Okay, honey, okay. But let me look with you from now on. Will you promise you won’t go to this window if I’m not here?”

As she finished her sentence, they both started at a gunshot and a flash in the yard next door. It was unmistakable, and it was not from inside the house like the other night. This was from behind the house, away from view, but Sadie saw flashes of orange erupt from the back yard as a flurry of gunshots followed, and then silence. It happened fast, all of it in one breath, and she and her mother sat frozen at the window waiting for the next round to come, if it did.

Sadie’s eyes moved up, toward the attic, and she saw the man in the window staring out at her. “Look, Momma.”

“Oh, Sadie-love,” she said. “We need to—”

Gunshots erupted from the back of the house, and after a few seconds Marty flew up the mimosa tree and across the rooftop. He fell onto the roof and lay down, peeking into the back yard at something Sadie and her mother could not see. It was quiet all around her, including her room, and she realized her mother had stopped talking.

A wet hand touched her head, and when she turned, Sadie glimpsed one of the black creatures with its wings and arms wrapped around her mother’s head. It covered her mouth and nose, and her mother’s hands wiped at her cheeks as she fought for breath. It obscured her face except for a hazy image of wide eyes and open mouth, as if she were below dirty, rippling water. She clawed lightly at first, and then with growing urgency as her breath refused to come. She slapped at the back of her neck, and then shook her head side-to-side with such disregard that she slammed into Sadie’s dresser, stumbled, and collapsed with a painful thump onto the floor.

“Momma!” Sadie said. She slid out of her wheelchair and dragged herself to where her mother had fallen. She swatted at the wings and arms suffocating her mother. The creature had no more substance than fog, but it charged the air with a deep temperature drop as if she were shoving her hands into a freezer.

Sadie waved her hands through the wings as if she were shooing away a crowd of flies. The effect was not much, but it seemed to irritate the creature enough that it let go with its arms and pawed at Sadie. It made a screeching sound and turned its head upward. The wings came free, and it flapped once, rose above her mother, and dissolved like a winter breath.

Her mother’s head bled from where she had struck the dresser. The blood mixed with the purple veins rising in her cheeks and neck. Her mouth opened, and a sucking sound came out and then a rasp, and finally a long, hoarse inhalation of air. She put her hands to her throat and leaned forward into Sadie, with her head beneath Sadie’s chin, her face almost in her lap. The air came hard for her, and Sadie put her hands on her mother’s shoulders and held her until her breathing grew quiet and steady.

She embraced Sadie, put all her weight on her, and Sadie stiffened her back and bore it, holding her mother the way she would a scared child. After a while, her mother took a deep breath, put Sadie at arm’s length, and looked in her eyes. Neither of them said anything.

Her mother nodded, seeming to accept something, and helped herself up by first using Sadie’s desk and then the wheelchair handles.

“Let’s get you back in your chair, baby. Then we’ll call the police and head over to, oh, I don’t know where. Anywhere but this house. We can’t stay here next to this monstrosity. I can feel my toes boiling in Hell.”

As her mother helped Sadie into the chair, a scream broke the silence. She had not realized how quiet it had become, nor how long they had embraced. It must have been quite a while, because the silence took on a background quality, forgotten until Ike Jameson’s high-pitched wail rose up from the back of Marty’s house, so clear and loud that it pierced the room as if he were standing just outside.

“When I find you, boy, I’m gonna kill you like there ain’t never been a killing before! I’m gonna start with your little girlfriend next door, see how you like it! You hear me, Marty Michael? You hear me, boy?”

“Oh, God,” her mother said. She had been positioning Sadie’s legs in the wheelchair; she paused a moment and then put one hand beneath Sadie’s legs and another around her neck.

Sadie instinctively wrapped her arms around her mother, but she had not expected to be lifted from the chair and hauled weightlessly into the hallway. Her mother always used the push-board to scoot her from chair-to-bed, and relied on Sadie’s help seating herself in the wheelchair or sliding into the bathtub or onto the toilet. Her mother did not have this strength, or so Sadie thought before she was being carried into the dining area and then into the kitchen.

“We need to get out of here,” her mother said. She tried to sound calm, but an undercurrent of doubt swam beneath what she was saying. “Get the keys,” she said, and pointed Sadie to the wall where they were hung.

“I’m coming for you!” Ike screamed. He sounded closer.

“Oh, Lord in Heaven save us,” her mother said. “Sadie-love, we have to hide.”

Her mother turned back into the house and was heading toward the master bedroom when Sadie said, “The attic, Momma.”

Her mother didn’t comprehend the word. She ran through the kitchen and the master bedroom before Sadie pinched her mother’s cheek. She stopped, and Sadie said it again. “The attic, Momma. It’s the only safe place. Go in through your sewing room.”

It clicked with her mother, and they ran through the
house faster than Sadie thought her mother had the strength to do. She was fast and strong, and it was as if Sadie were flying through the house rather than being carried.

Her mother’s front room, the one with the attic access in the closet, had long been the sewing, crocheting, and quilting room. It looked like a boutique picture window, serene and calm, and it stood in stark contrast to the scene unfolding around her.

Sadie’s mother tucked her under one arm and somehow managed to climb the shelves inside the sewing room closet. She pressed open the attic access and with one arm shoved Sadie inside. Her mother’s face burned red and the veins popped out on her forehead and neck and her breath sucked deep and heavy into her chest. Every bit of her heaved and billowed with the exertion, but she hardly appeared spent. To Sadie it seemed she was just getting started, and she could almost hear her mother’s heartbeat raging in her chest.

“Shh, baby, be quiet,” her mother said. The clouds burst in her mother’s eyes, and she sobbed something Sadie didn’t quite understand. It sounded like, “I’m sorry,” and then she slid the attic access back into place and left Sadie alone in the attic.

It was far larger than she had imagined, filled with air that must have been pent-up long before she was born, and empty but for blown insulation along each side of a plank wooden strip running down the middle. There was nothing magical here, only dust and splinters and the sort of dark that moved about as you watched. For a while, there was complete silence below, and in it, Sadie wept as quietly as she could.