Fiends (13 page)

5

Getting ready for bed, Marjory bumped into Enid coming out of the bathroom with her newly washed hair wrapped in a towel. "How was your date?"

"Duane's been lifting weights for a year, don't you think he looks terrific? He's nuts about Janis Joplin, too. And he's real smart. He's going to be a zoologist or specialize in space medicine or something like that. He stole a car once, but it was just a youthful indiscretion. He kissed me and I kissed him back."

Enid put a bare foot up on the railing and with a tissue dabbed at a blood drop over the ankle bone where she'd nicked herself shaving. She gave Marjory a slant look.

"Why, Mar-jory."

"Wasn't time not to," Marjory said, drawling like Duke Wayne.

6

He was awakened in the early morning by a shaft of sun through a large gap between logs of the hillside cabin; by pesky mosquitoes and a louder, intermittent humming. He identified without having to think about it the squeaky-wheelbarrow voice of black and white warblers, the sweeter notes of nuthatch and thrush. He was shaking uncontrollably, jarring his bones. He couldn't remember where he was. He didn't know why he was there.

At the Place it was always warm. In winter the radiators hissed and chattered. Sometimes there were as many as six male patients in his room, usually only three or four. The single bureau in the room, metal that looked like wood, had six drawers. The sheets were changed twice a week, unless somebody had an accident. There was a blanket on each bed. Tears ran down his cheeks now as he shivered and made noises in his throat. He missed his blanket. He missed the routine of the Place. Nothing much to do, really. One day his team mopped floors, on another they cleaned the bathrooms. Breakfast was always at seven-thirty, lunch at eleven-thirty, supper at five-thirty. He liked cinnamon toast for breakfast. That was Sunday. Creamed chipped beef and biscuits for dinner. That was Wednesday. Chili mac, he never cared much for chili mac, always let Rooney have the chili mac off his tray in exchange for an apple or orange. Friday the best day, though, because every Friday his mother baked two pies: apple, cherry, huckleberry, it depended on the—

"Unnnnnhhhhh!"
he groaned, and dark phlegm jetted from his lips as he lunged to his feet, momentarily ignoring the pain in his arthritic knees. His brain, already on a low ration of blood, reeled; he saw flashes of light brighter than the sun streaming into the hidden cabin. There was a lot of noise in his ears, like sand rubbing on glass. For several moments he was on the verge of fainting, but clung to the stones of a chimney as if it were the face of a cliff until the homeostatic mechanisms of his brain, for too many years subjected to routinely prescribed chemical abuse, once more stabilized the aging body. The neurochemical flood in response to crisis awakened in its own time, ahead of the brain that had little or nothing to do with adaptation and survival.

Arne heard his dog barking. He saw, quite clearly, the hills and fields of home just outside the cabin door. He saw his mother, apron fat with feed, scattering corn to the chickens. He saw his father plowing the straightest furrows west of the Cumberland River. He limped to the doorway, crying, and found himself in the cold, damp passage of a cavern two hundred feet below the earth, the way lighted by emanations from—from giant luna moths clinging to the walls; must be a trillion of them! His dog was barking. Arne turned and saw a dusty road in red sunlight and Hawkshaw lying in dust with blood spilling from his opened throat. You
come, too,
his mother said, raising a hand black as a thorn, limber as a whip, to rope him in . . .

I'll let you have my apple for some of your chili mac,
old Rooney said. He said it every Thursday night, been saying it for—

Arne turned to take the apple but it was his father, eyes drained like the dead, handing him a stone wet from the river.

For
my grave, Arne.

Hawkshaw was barking again.

He heard voices.

Morning sun painful to his eyes, that persistent whining in his ears.

"Come back here!"

A girl's voice. Arne's throat constricted. He felt glad and then distressed.
It was Enid—
and she was mad at him for running away, even though it hadn't been his fault. Nothing that had ever happened to him in his life was his fault, and now see the fix he was in! He needed a place to hide. She would look in the cabin first thing, discover him cowering there. Even if she took him back to the Place, they wouldn't let him in again. Somebody else had his bed and bureau drawer now, somebody else had taken his place on the team. Floors Monday and Thursday. Bathrooms Tuesday and Saturday.

Shrill whistling. The sound hurt his ears.

"You get back here right now, I'm done chasing you! We'll just leave you and see how you like it!"

A little dog ran into the small clearing and came to a skidding stop when he saw Arne. Black and tan beagle. Foxhunter. His tail shot up and his throat swelled and he began to bay. Arne backed up slowly, not because of the dog, but because he'd heard Enid coming—no, there were two, perhaps three of them, Enid's blond sister too, with the big body and short haircut, she'd been afraid of him for some reason.

He crept behind low-hanging sumac where he wouldn't be seen. The beagle held his ground and quivered, eyes popped, crooning hoarsely. A teen-aged girl pushed her way through a thicket, followed by a freckled boy, and they pounced on their dog.

"Smarty britches!" the girl scolded, when she had the struggling beagle under control. The boy snapped a leash to the dog's collar. "Just about missed your breakfast, chasing those old squirrels! We got to be all the way down to Texarkana by tonight, you hear that, Gumshoe?"

When they were gone Arne stirred, freeing a pants leg from a sticker bush. His clothes were in sad shape, his shoes muddy.
Cinnamon toast.
His stomach rumbled, his mouth watered. He'd been living off what fruit he could find, a few nuts. The shattering visions had vanished, but his heart palpitated. He listened, hearing the boy and the girl at a distance, the whining sounds which he now identified as truck tires on pavement, a trickling of water not far away. He heard a radio, a car horn. So there might be a town nearby. Had to be careful no one saw him.

You don't know who they are,
his father warned him.
You don't know who none of them are, so keep away.

Arne looked around—and there was his father sitting with his back to a windfall, left arm propped up, the wrist a blackened smoking stub. Ax in his father's right hand. One side of his face shimmering like flies in offal.

Arne grabbed his own face with both hands, fingers digging into his scalp until a little blood trickled down. He couldn't look, he couldn't scream. His unused throat like a dry well crammed with stones. His tongue had healed long ago, but with each passing month it was easier not to speak, easy to forget he ever could.

When he dared to lower his hands he saw a wolf spider on a piece of log where Big Enoch had been. Arne got to his feet, grasping anything he could reach to help pull himself up. Instincts prevailing, he went in search of the water he could hear trickling over rocks. When his thirst was satisfied, he simply followed the little stream downhill. It was the easiest direction to go, and going was better than sitting around, dozing off, having a fit or a spell of seeing what he never wanted to see again.

Through a gap between ridges he had a glimpse of a wide concrete highway and one big truck after another, windshields dazzling in the sunlight. Even this far from the highway there was a visible gasoline or diesel haze in the air. No wind. Already the morning was heating up. He came to a dirt road that looked well used, heard a car or truck coming, and slipped into shadow. It was a pickup truck, towing a trailer almost as big as the house he'd lived in as a boy. Looked like a house, with windows and a door. He'd seen similiar trailers on television, but still he was amazed by the size of this one, it brushed tree limbs on either side of the road. Dust from the wheels set him to sneezing and coughing as it drifted through the woods. The cloud of dust was a long time settling. When he could breathe again he walked on slowly through the woods, staying a few yards in from the road.

Around a leisurely bend he saw a large clearing and the glimmer of a lake through trees. Campground, on a little bluff above the lake. More cars, boats and trailers, mobile homes. A few tents pitched beneath tall trees. There was also a wooden building with a long roofed porch, two flagpoles in front. He heard a radio and smelled bacon sizzling on a grill. Three children were playing with what appeared to be a dinner plate, throwing it back and forth. He hadn't seen anything like it on television. The children were adept at their game. The yellow plate soared as if it weighed almost nothing, dipped, skimmed along inches from the ground.

There was another dog on the campground, big as a wolf. It was called a Rin-Tin-Tin, he knew that from one of his favorite television shows. The Rin-Tin-Tin was on a chain, chewing a bone. Arne was far enough away across the campground so the dog couldn't be aware of him.

A gray-haired woman in plaid slacks served up bacon and slices of ham from the grill and called the children to breakfast. Arne held his shrunken stomach, soured from fruit, and looked around. There were several wooden signposts with symbols and letters burned into them. Arrows pointed in different directions. Arne could read very well, a fact which he had scrupulously kept from the administrators of the Place. He had finished third grade when his formal schooling suddenly ended, but nearly fifty years later, he slowly improved on his long-neglected skill with the help of television sets installed in the patients' lounges.

His lips moved. He sounded out the simplest words. The hairs on the back of his sunburnt neck prickled. At last he knew where he was.

Dante's Mill State Park

Birdsong trickled through the woods. A child laughed, the radio played a country song. A car and trailer drove past him out of the campground. He saw a red squirrel on a chinquapin limb, tail shivering. He saw a whirligig of butterflies in a hot flash of sun. He saw an arrow on a saw-toothed sign beside the road, pointing the way he must go.

Across the road on the tent ground a boy and girl wearing identical khaki shorts and tank tops left their tent. Towels around their necks, they strolled toward the bath house.

When they were out of sight he walked across the road and into the trees, hearing the radio they'd left playing in their tent. No one else was camped nearby.

When he glanced into the tent he could see the portable radio on a little folding stool. He was dismally afraid. But he must have the radio; it was more vital to him than food. Although he would never do what she wanted him to do, he had to hear his mother's voice again.

Nobody was looking; nobody knew or cared that he was there. Arne reached a long arm into the tent and stole the radio. It was heavier than he'd thought it would be, and he almost dropped it. Also there were so many buttons and knobs he couldn't figure out how to turn down the volume; this panicked him. If they came back soon and found their radio missing, they'd be able to follow him through the woods. He couldn't walk fast enough to get away. The young man was muscular and would probably beat him. Arne stood behind a tree frantically working the dials, and although he couldn't turn it off, he succeeded in silencing the radio between stations. Then he unbuttoned his shirt and held the radio against his chest, pulled his shirt over it, and retreated to the woods across the road.

The theft, his mental anguish, his panicky getaway, took a severe toll. Out of sight of the campground, he couldn't walk another step. Clutching the radio, which was staticky but not loud, he found concealment in a rhododendron thicket. Woodpeckers hammered at a dead tree nearby. He held the radio in his lap and stared at it, longing for the sound of her voice. If she had spoken to him while he was in the bedroom at Enid's house, why wouldn't she speak to him now? The sun rose, his mind wandered. After three or four hours the batteries in the portable radio went dead. Arne's head slumped in a stupor. The muscles of his outstretched legs and arms jumped erratically. His eyes were half-open, but he had lost touch with his surroundings again. His mind was elsewhere in time.

(Arne, get up! We're going now.

(Sluggish from sleep, gasping at the pain from his bitten tongue, Arne looks up. The fire is low, the moon is down; daybreak, the angel-eyed watchers gone, and his father has risen. At that moment of preternatural consciousness Arne can smell fear and death as plainly as any animal.

(He shakes his head vehemently.

(I need you, Arne. Can't manage without your help. Pick up that bundle of vine and—

(Arne opens his jaws in a silent scream. Tracks of dried blood down either side of his chin. He shudders as his father drops on one knee beside him. Tears. Big Enoch wets the fingertips of his remaining hand in the water of his fiery eyes and attempts to erase some of the old blood, stroking, soothing the boy.

(But we got to do it! It's for her sake as much as ours, can't you understand?

(Shaking his head again, crying, too.

(Come on. While we're walking, I'll tell you why. Tell you everything she done—and what she done to me. What she'll try to do to you, if you give her the chance. There ain't a choice in the matter, Arne. Believe me. I wanted it different, but no—just ain't no hope for her now.)

August, 1906:

Big Enoch's Tale