A Time of Torment (35 page)

‘Is there any chance Perry saw more than he’s saying?’ Henkel asked Lutter.

‘He’s a good boy,’ said Lutter.

‘That wasn’t the question, Charlie.’

‘He only told me what he told you.’

Which could have been true, but it wasn’t answering the question either. Perry was his mother’s boy. She might well have shared things with her husband that Perry told her, but likewise she might not. Either way, Charlie Lutter knew less about his boy than his wife did, and that was God’s truth.

Henkel had put his hat on, and told Lutter to make sure Perry knew the importance of staying quiet about those bodies, and Lutter said that he would, and thanked him, and Henkel had looked away so Lutter could dry the tears of gratitude and relief that were welling up in his eyes.

But Perry Lutter knew none of this. He only understood that he mustn’t talk, not ever, about those bodies in the woods. His father had told him not to, and Perry always obeyed his father. He loved his mother, and dreaded her moments of anger less than the potential withdrawal of affection that might accompany them, but his fear of his father was not as complicated by love, and consequently Perry followed his instructions to the letter.

Now here was Perry, a strange, distracted smile on his face, wearing his favorite green windbreaker to ward off the gathering cold, tramping through his beloved woods, keeping count of squirrels, and the flight of birds disturbed by his presence. The thing in the Cut was far away, the Bad Speakers reduced to a sullen background murmur, and Perry was counting, counting, counting because when he looked at the ground he sometimes saw mounds of dirt, and they brought to mind the bodies in the hole, and by a process of association both illogical yet profound, it seemed to Perry that each mound might house its own bodies, all crying out for him to start digging so that their resting place might be discovered and their moms and dads could come and take them home.

Eight, nine.

Thirty-one, thirty-two.

‘Perry! Hey, Perry! Hold up there.’

To Perry’s right, where the woods ended and the road began, stood a figure with red hair, and sharp nails and teeth. Perry knew his name. It was Lucius, and he came from the Cut. Perry had seen him around town, at the diner, driving by in his big truck.

Digging a hole in the woods in which to bury two dead boys.

Seventeen, eighteen.

Thirty-three. Jesus’ age. Amen.

Lucius started walking toward Perry. Another man appeared behind him, and Perry recognized him too: Benedict.

Christ, Lucius, this one already smells bad. I think he shat himself.

He’s gonna start smelling worse if we don’t get him in the ground.

Perry wanted to run, but he couldn’t.

Thirty-four. Thirty-

‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Lucius. ‘We just want to talk to you.’

‘I gots to go home,’ said Perry.

Lucius drew nearer. He was almost within touching distance of Perry. Behind him, Benedict had not moved.

‘We’ll give you a ride. It’s going to rain.’

Perry glanced at the sky. There were clouds, but they were white and wispy. He had not smelled rain. He would not have come out if he had.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Perry. ‘No rain.’

Benedict started walking. He did so slowly, reluctantly, coming down to join Lucius, coming to damn himself. Perry started to cry.

‘Perry,’ said Lucius, ‘just get in the fucking truck.’

When it was done, and the sun had set, Lucius took Benedict’s chin in his right hand, still smeared with blood and dirt, and said, ‘We tell no one about this, you understand?’

And Benedict understood.

S
herah was asleep. She had tried to make love to Oberon, not knowing what else to do to draw him out of himself. He had been gentle in his refusal, and she had not been offended, for she understood him better than he realized, although she was younger than him by nearly three decades. She stroked his head before she went to bed, as he sat by the window staring out upon the Cut, and noticed a patch of dried blood behind his left ear. She wet a handkerchief with her spit, and cleaned it away.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘A stain, no more.’

She tried to slip the handkerchief into her sleeve, but he caught her hand and opened her bunched fist. The redness was visible against the white of the material. It might almost have been mistaken for a smear of lipstick, had both of them not known better. Oberon looked up at his wife from where he sat, and she stared back at him without blinking.

‘I’m sure it was necessary,’ she said, for want of something else to say. She did not know if it was true or not, and it didn’t matter anyway.

‘It was not,’ he replied. ‘I did it because I wanted to. I did it because I hoped that it would give me some peace.’

‘And it didn’t?’

‘No.’

‘He killed your sons.’

‘He did what he thought was right. And he paid for it.’

One of my boys was sick, he wanted to tell her, although she would not have needed his testimony to confirm the depravity of Gideon’s nature. It had been familiar to all of them. Gideon was a mad animal, just like Lucius – maybe even worse than him, because Lucius had some semblance of reason, but Gideon had none. His brother, Balder, who died alongside him, had enjoyed hurting women: that was his weakness. Oberon also sometimes hurt them, but it gave him little pleasure, and the end for them, when it came, was always quick.

If his sons had been so damaged, then what did it say about himself? Could he really only blame the mother for Gideon’s profound physical, psychological, and moral decay? The blood of the Cut was tainted: how could it not be, after all this time, and generations of intermarriage? Even the occasional introduction of new stock could only dilute the contamination, not eradicate it entirely. The flaw was in Sherah too, he thought, for how else could she wipe another man’s blood from her husband’s skin without a blink of her eyes?

Oberon shivered, despite the glowing embers of the fire, and the heat that remained in the room.

‘It’s airish,’ he said. ‘Don’t you feel it?’

‘What?’

‘That chill. It’s coming from the north, but the trees are still, and there is no sign of wind. What carries it here?’

‘I feel nothing, and it’s been mild these last days.’

She put the back of her hand to his forehead, but it was no warmer than it should have been. She did not like seeing her husband this way. It wasn’t usual for him to be so odd-turned. He was their rock, but perhaps Cassander was right, and that rock was now weakening and fracturing.

It was then that she had moved her hand from his head to his chest, and down over his belly to the bulge of his crotch.

‘Come to bed,’ she said, ‘and I’ll warm you up.’

He had lifted her hand from him, held it to his lips, and kissed it once.

‘You go,’ he said. ‘I need to sit up awhile.’

That had been two hours earlier. The lights of the nearest houses were extinguished, all but one: a lamp still burned on Cassander’s porch. In time there came the sound of a truck approaching, and from the darkness of his post by the window Oberon saw Lucius emerge and walk toward his father’s house. The door opened, and Cassander appeared. He said something to his son, and both looked over in Oberon’s direction. Then Lucius entered, the door closed upon them, and the porch light went out.

Oberon remained in his chair, his fingernails scratching at his thighs like a man who feels the dirt conspiring against him as he tries to halt his final, fatal fall.

Oberon was not the only one sitting awake by a window. At the edge of the Cut, where the back road from Turley sliced a ragged, uneven route through the trees, Odell Watson gazed into the darkness. Odell had been woken by the return of Lucius, although when the truck turned into the Cut two figures had been seated in its cab, not one. He thought the other might have been the one named Benedict.

Odell had overheard his mother and grandmother talking. Oberon, the one who led the Cut, had come to the diner, and spoken with the sheriff. Her mother had watched them unnoticed from her place at the serving hatch, and caught a little of what was said; not all, but enough to know that the sheriff and the Cut were not far from each other’s throats.

‘Sheriff don’t have the strength to face down the Cut,’ his grandmother had said.

‘I think the sheriff is a good man,’ his mother replied. She would not tell him what she knew of the Cut, but she still wished him to prevail against it. He would just have to do so without her help.

‘They’re the worst kind.’

‘Oh, you don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘I do, and you better listen to it, girl. Good won’t avail against the Cut, or not good alone. They’re like a pack of wolves. And the sheriff, he’s no better than a rabbit. They’ll tear him apart.’

‘Then what will avail, huh?’

And Odell’s grandmother had taken a moment before replying.

‘Hunters,’ she said.

Now Odell sat by his window and thought of men like wolves, but the only images that came to mind were ones from old movies, or the werewolves from
Twilight
that didn’t look right when they talked. He thought also of Lucius. His grandmother was wrong about him: Lucius wasn’t a wolf but a fox, like old Brer Fox in the tales, except Brer Fox wasn’t smart and always lost, while Lucius and his kind didn’t ever seem to lose. He even looked like a fox, all red and sharp.

Odell was growing sleepy. He turned from the window, and a bird shrieked from somewhere in the dark. He paused and the sound came again, except now it was more like the noise foxes made when they were mating: it had a human quality to it, like a child weeping. Odell listened until it faded away, then climbed between his sheets. Only on the verge of sleep did it strike him that the cries from the woods were deeper than those of any fox he had heard, and might almost have been calling the word ‘Momma’ over and over again.

T
he day dawned bright and clear: blue skies, the barest fragments of cloud, and a sense of the world transforming itself once again, the beauty of fall still lingering but the trees barer than before, and arrowheads of geese drifting high above, less like birds than the impression of them, as of a child’s hurried marks on a blue page.

Miss Queenie opened the doors of Shelby’s Diner, Teona Watson setting the first pots of coffee to brew before returning to the kitchen to start on the bacon. Brewing the coffee was usually one of the waitresses’ tasks, but they’d both arrived late that morning, drawing glares from Miss Queenie that could freeze piss on an icicle, as Debbie, the older of the two, put it, and were still putting on their faces in the restroom. Miss Queenie thought that Teona appeared tired, and had asked her if everything was okay at home. Teona told Miss Queenie that she’d been kept awake by an animal crying in the woods. She had wondered if it might be the copulation of foxes, but it was too early for mating season – the peak would come in January.

By eight a.m. nearly every table in Shelby’s was full, and men and women stood talking by the stools at the counter, because the community always drifted to Shelby’s when there was news to discuss or be disseminated. Perry Lutter had not returned home the night before, and a search by his parents at first light had not discovered him in his usual haunts. A call had been made to the sheriff’s department, and the patrol cars were out searching for him. In the meantime, Sheriff Henkel had asked those with time on their hands to check their lands, just in case Perry had met with some accident and was lying incapacitated, and anyone with business on the roads was keeping one eye peeled for him.

‘He’ll turn up,’ said Miss Queenie, with the assurance of a woman who had lived in this community for over seventy years, and knew the rhythms of its inhabitants – Perry Lutter’s more than most. But she had heard the whispers: that it was Perry who had found the bodies of those two boys, and might have seen the ones who put them in the ground. The talk was of Mexicans out of Ohio, and those people didn’t fuck around, although this last observation was couched in more delicate terms for Miss Queenie’s ears.

And so distracted were Miss Queenie and her staff that they paid less attention than usual to the two strangers who were sitting at the back of the restaurant, for unfamiliar faces in such environs usually attracted some small interest. The taller of the two, a black man in a dark sports jacket, was reading the
New York Times
, which was only available at one gas station in the county, a fact of which the man in question was now acutely aware, given that he and his colleague might have been eating an hour earlier had they not had to learn this the hard way. The other – smaller, and significantly less dapper, than his companion – had a magazine open on the table, and was turning the pages with conspicuous regularity while taking in little that he was reading, and everything he was hearing and seeing around him.

A patrol car pulled into the parking lot, and a deputy got out. He wandered into Shelby’s, ordered a coffee, and quickly found himself surrounded by a small group of people, Miss Queenie among them, with others hovering at the periphery, or keeping an ear cocked from their chairs, but there was no news, and no sign of Perry Lutter. Folks were being asked to convene at the sheriff’s department at eleven a.m., where they’d be organized into teams and given areas to cover. Ordinarily, forty-eight hours would have to elapse before someone could formally be declared missing, but this was Perry Lutter, and no such declaration was necessary.

And the two men sat in their corner, drinking their coffee and listening to all that was said.

There were other strangers circling the Cut too: a pair of Japanese tourists had to be sent on their way by Jason Hayward after they drove as far as the barrier that blocked the road onto his property, then started smiling and babbling at him when he pointed out that they must have ignored damn near half a dozen
PRIVATE PROPERTY
signs on their way in. He’d had to help them perform close to a ten-point turn to get them facing in the right direction again, and then one of them had tried to thank Jason by pressing some kind of Hello fucking Kitty candy on him. Later, Brion Moline told Hayward that he’d encountered the same two men on one of the southern roads into the Cut, hunched over Stan Tekiela’s
Birds of West Virginia
field guide, but by then the Cut had bigger worries than errant Japanese tourists.