Phantom Nights (27 page)

"I mighty do 'preciate it. Well, good night, sir."

Leland put down the receiver of the telephone, teeth clenched on the immobile toothpick. Cellophane candy wrappers littered the desk in front of him. His throat was raw, and he trembled. Chills. The dizzy pace of the last two campaign days in a mountainous area of Tennessee had him feeling nauseated much of the time. Aspirin was all he could take for the headache that had stayed with him since Mally Shaw knocked him cold with the fireplace poker; late in the day he'd been chewing an aspirin every twenty minutes along with a piece of hard candy. His gums and tongue burned, but nothing like the burn in his stomach. He wasn't keeping meals down. Somebody had left a half-eaten hamburger, heavy on the pickles and ketchup, in a wastebasket nearby. The smell fueled his nausea. There were flies.

Why couldn't it be over yet? Had Jim Giles managed to take care of the kid who had seen them with Mally Shaw? No matter how hard he tried to push Mally's death aside in his mind so he could concentrate on winning an election, something loomed up to distract him, distort his perception of the success he had worked so hard to achieve. A burning boy in a burning house. Where was it going to end, when Mally was finally in the ground? He needed, deserved, to be at peace.

A fly brushed his perspiring forehead. There was a low tone of thunder over downtown Knoxville. His hotel was three blocks away. Right now, at a quarter past midnight according to his watch, he didn't have the strength to walk there. And it was raining.

He put his face in his hands for a few moments, then crossed his arms on the desk and laid his head down.

A few minutes later, as he was passing from a heavy doze into fevered sleep, the telephone rang. He reached for it without opening his eyes, fumbled the receiver to his ear.

"What? What is it you want now? Don't tell me anymore, I don't want to know! Just do your job."

No one answered him. The only sound he heard was the faraway sound of a church bell.
The
church bell, the one that had begun to toll as he fled the graveyard at Little Grove in Jim Giles's pickup truck with the crumpled left fender.
Squirrels
, Giles said, with a hint of amusement at Leland's terrified expression.
Squirrels nesting in belfries can do that, get a bell to going thataway.

But it wasn't a squirrel outside on the street in the rain shaking the doorknob of the locked-up campaign headquarters trying to get in. Leland didn't know what, or who, he was looking at. Someone half-obscured by a large, glistening, black umbrella.

Leland hung up the phone and rubbed his swarmy eyes. When he rose from the swivel chair nausea resumed in his stomach like a cold, uplifting wave. He gripped the edge of the desk with both hands while the rattling of the doorknob continued. Whoever it was didn't bother to knock. As if no one was expected to be inside at this hour. Rain spritzed the glass in the door. Beside the door on his left there was a storefront window with a pleated shade drawn down.

A cruising fly nuzzled his ear; Leland batted it away. His nose was stuffy and he had to breathe through his mouth. Those heavy indrawn breaths fanned a spark of panic. He picked up a paper spike and walked slowly around the desk. The puffy side of his head throbbed. The injury Mally had done him didn't show beneath his wavy hair. He had smiled the livelong day and his voice was all but gone. He craved to rest, because tomorrow would be another endurance test, another spin of the political whirligig sending him on his way to the United States Senate. Eye drops to get the red out, then keep the chin up and go on smiling like a man possessed by the mad glamour of his quest—but Goddamn it,
she
was determined not to let him get his rest!

Leland advanced through the long shadowy room with its haphazard arrangement of desks and other telephones, all of which seemed to be ringing now; the figure at the door kept working the knob, meantime concealing herself behind the umbrella. The spike protruded from between the middle and the index fingers of his fist. Ten feet from the door.
Let us have an end to it now
. Raw anger balancing on the hindbrain seesaw opposite paralytic dread. Five feet. Rattle, rattle. He reached with his other hand and clicked back the lock, grasped the knob, and snatched the door open.

The umbrella came at him, filling the doorspace as she stumbled across the threshold. The point of it like a foil in a duel. Leland struck back with the paper spike and ripped fabric, wrenched the umbrella from her hand. She backed fearfully into the wall behind the door.

She was a middle-aged Appalachian woman, frayed as an old broom but with some service left in her.

"Preserve me, Jesus!"

"Who are you?" Leland asked fuzzily. It was not the face or form he had prepared himself to see.

"The man there at the hotel said I was to come clean up this yere place when I done got off working in the laundry? He give to me three dollar. Said as how the door would be unlocked and nobody here. Are you fixing to stab me with that thing? The
Lord
is my shepherd! My name is Leona Tuggle, mister. And I'm a-needin' the three dollar right bad."

"Oh, no, I—I wasn't—" Leland dropped the paper spike on the floor. "It was—I thought you were somebody—" He cleared his throat. "It's all right. I'm sorry."

She looked from his congested face to the posters on the walls.

"I
know
you."

"Yes. It's me, all right." Found out, he hunched his shoulders, curiously abashed by her up-country foreignness.

"Well. Right pleased I am to make your acquaintance. 'Pears you tore my umberella; you see where it's tore right here?"

Ignorant, to be sure
, he thought. But with that fervent shine of a preternatural keenness, of native wit, in her lime green eyes.

"It doesn't look too bad. Tell you what, Leona, let me give you a dollar for it."

"A dollar?" She rubbed her forehead in a calculating manner. "And I'll be a-keeping the other three dollar once my work is done here?"

"That was the deal, wasn't it?" Leland checked his pockets and came up with enough change, maybe a dime over, which he passed into Leona's hesitantly outstretched hand.

As soon as he did so, fingers making contact with her palm, she trembled and her thin lips parted in dismay. Teeth gone, others askew. She pressed back against the wall again. Her eyes seemed paler still, almost transparent, as if they had lost their seeing of this world. Her expression gave him skin crawls.

"What's wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?"

The coins fell from Leona's limp hand, rolled on the floor.

"No. No! Don't be a-touchin' me again!"

"Are you crazy? I wasn't trying to buy your skinny ass."

Leona's head fell back. Something, a slow shock, crawled through her body.

"She
waits
. She waits at the Crossing for you to come. I don't have the get of it. But there be pity in her for what you have done. The destruction ye will visit upon yourself!"

"Heyyy snap out of it, woman."

"I
see
the reckoning."

He wanted to grab, to shake her, but he was afraid of the way she was winding herself against the wall, head flipping one side to the other. He squinted hard at her, as if there was blood in his eyes.

"I haven't done anything. It wasn't me, do you understand—you old hoodoo bitch!"

Leland broke suddenly. With a low whine in his throat he dug out his wallet, snatched bills from it. Leona, released by the powerful current that had snugged her against the wall, slumped to the floor, eyes open and unblinking.

"From the throne of Jesus ye will tumble into the everlasting fiery pit."

"Here take it take more money it's all I've got on me
take
it and go back to the hills you came from! Never open your mouth about this. Never speak my name to anyone. It just happened! Nobody's fault. You hear me? She didn't have to run. You can't hold me responsible. I will not take the blame!"

He stepped over her and ran out into the street and looked around wildly. Saw the rooftop neon of his hotel mistily uphill. Inside Leland Howard for U.S. Senate headquarters, Leona Tuggle was on hands and knees picking up the money he had flung at her. Not acting in haste. A dollar for her silence; if she betrayed him, another dollar to see her dead. She would know. Her posture, except for nakedness, was exactly the one he had forced Mally to assume in his farmhouse the third and final time he mounted her. Damn it, nigra women were the white man's prerogative, always had been. Mally knew that. They all knew it.

In his hotel room at last he recalled a superstition handed down to him by a half-crazed great aunt also thought to be in touch with spirits. Thus he could not lie down until he had used a jackknife to slice up a pair of silk undershorts. With these pieces of fabric he plugged up the drains and spigots in the bathroom sink and tub so that nothing of an unearthly nature could visit him through these popular means of entry into the living's false sanctuary.

All lights ablaze in the room, Leland fell asleep at last on his side with knees drawn up, grasping his limp penis in one hand like a baby holds a rattle.

"H
e's here," Francie Swift said a moment after opening the front door to Bobby Gambier. A moment after that she added, defensive on Alex's behalf, "Is he in trouble? He wouldn't tell me a blessed thing." She was fresh from her bath, slight frame in a cotton kimono, tortoiseshell hairbrush in one tanned hand.

"I don't know yet, Francie. Your mom or daddy at home?"

"No. They're horse-dealing in Kentucky. Hank's upstairs in his room and I don't know where Cotton's got to tonight, probably parked somewhere with Miss Watermelon Festival. Please come in. I think Alex fell asleep. He's using the hammock on the side porch."

He followed her through the living room of the Colonial house with its French furniture and gold-framed antique horse paintings to the all-weather porch. Painted concrete floor, stone hearth, a pool table, and a poker table with six captain's chairs around it. Alex was sprawled asleep in a hammock in one corner, bandaged right hand dangling near the floor.

"You fix him up?" Bobby asked Francie.

"Wasn't the worst burn I've seen. His eyebrows were singed pretty good, though. His clothes, phoo. I dumped everything, including his moccasins, in the trash. Doesn't he wear undershorts in the summertime? Those shorts and the shirt he's got on now belong to Fuller, but he won't miss 'em. He's lifeguarding at the underprivileged camp at Reelfoot 'til school starts up again. Do you know what happened to Alex?"

"House fire where he didn't have any business being at."

Francie's eyes got bigger. "Oh no."

"Wasn't Alex that burned it down, according to a reliable eyewitness."

Hearing voices caused Alex to twitch in his sleep. He didn't open his eyes.

"Sheriff, could I fetch you something cold to drink?"

"No uh thank you much, Francie. Sorry for keeping you up this late."

"That's okay." She cast a long look at the boy in the hammock. "Are you taking him home now?"

"Well I uh—"

"He's fine here! Really. We don't mind. I mean, it's just for tonight."

"Then if you're sure he's no bother. We've had a lot of upset at our house past couple of days. You know Alex."

"Been knowing him since kiddie Sunday School," Francie said quietly. "Whatever toy I had, he wanted to play with it. Didn't dream he'd turn out to be such a big old boy. From the size of his hands and feet he's got two-three more inches to grow don't you think?"

"Wouldn't doubt it."

"Want me to go somewhere else so you can talk to him?" Francie said, looking Bobby in the eye but crossing her arms to resist the request. "How do you do that, mind my asking?"

"Would you bring me that scorepad and pencil there on the poker table?"

Bobby pulled a wicker-basket chair to the hammock and turned on a brass standing lamp, illuminating Alex. He'd had a shower and didn't stink of smoke. Francie gave Bobby the writing tools and stayed behind the chair, slowly skimming down her blonde hair that wafted, glistening, like spider's silk in a woodland sunrise.

Bobby gave his brother a shake. "Hey, pardner. Need to have some words with you."

Alex tensed and peeped at him.

"Did you get a look at who was chucking those firebombs tonight?"

He could see reflected in the louvered glass of the outside door Francie's hand with the brush suspended a couple of inches from her head, the tortoiseshell oval like a floating third eye of inquiry.

Alex made a slight negative gesture with his bandaged hand.

"Take you by surprise then?"

Nod.

"Ramses Valjean told me you were in Mally Shaw's kitchen looking for something when the house went up. What was it, and how did you come to know about it?"

Alex closed his eyes as if determined to go back to sleep. Bobby rocked the hammock. Alex gathered himself with a scowl and sat up, licking sore lips. Francie had provided him with Vaseline. He put his feet on the floor one at a time and looked for her. Then he sighed and took the pad with his left hand. He scrawled awkwardly with the pencil in his bandaged hand, showed Bobby the page.