The Devil's Alphabet (11 page)

“I’ve only got a little while ’til I’m mad as a hatter again,” his father said. Then, “Why aren’t you in your bedroom?”

Pax ignored the question, and his father turned and shuffled through the guest room door.

Pax rubbed a hand across his face. He felt shaky, unbalanced. He picked up the picture Tommy had given him and put it on the bookshelf next to the bed. This guest room had doubled as his mother’s library. She’d been a voracious reader: mysteries, romances, true crime, anything she could get her hands on. During the Changes, when she was burning up from fever, she’d made him read to her.

Pax got to his feet. The vintage still fizzed in his bloodstream. The room quivered with a strangeness that coyly refused to reveal itself, as if each book and article of furniture had been replaced by a subtly imperfect copy.

He found his father in the kitchen, trying to open a can of Campbell’s soup, the manual can opener almost lost in his huge hands.

“Here …,” Pax said, and reached to take the can from him.

“I got it,” his father said. Pax sat at the table. Eventually his father did manage to peel the lid away. He dumped the soup into a pot on the stove and stood there stirring with his back to the room.

“I suppose Rhonda took you to see her place yesterday,” his father said.

Pax was surprised he remembered her visit. “It was nice. Homey. Very clean.”

His father grunted. “You don’t think I can take care of myself.”

“I never said that,” Pax said, unable to keep the annoyance from his voice. He didn’t know if it was fatigue or the vintage, but his emotions kept teeter-tottering between anger and grief.

His father said, “I do things the way I want, when I want. I’m not going to go to her little …
pet shop
. All this—” He made a gesture that could have meant anything. “All this bother, I’m not usually like this. I manage just fine. God always provides a way.”

“If this is providing, then you must have really pissed him off.”

His father half turned. “Watch it, boy.”

“Not just you, the whole town,” Pax went on. “The Changes? Now that was Old Testament–quality smiting.”

“Not everything’s a punishment, Paxton. There are trials in life. Tests that teach us something.”

“Oh, got it,” Pax said. “The Job thing. God makes you into a monster, takes away your church, kills your wife—”

His father swung toward him. “Shut your mouth!”

Pax remained stock-still. He and his father locked eyes, but only for a moment. Pax looked away first, shook his head.

His father turned back to the stove.

Pax quickly pressed tears from his eyes. What the hell was the matter with him? He breathed deep, trying to master his emotions.

After a couple minutes his father brought the pot to the table. He set it on a hot pad and picked up a spoon. Pax raised an eyebrow.

His father looked up. “I can do this because it’s my house.”

“Yeah. If Mom could see you she’d kill you.”

“Trust me, she’s watching.”

Pax couldn’t watch, though—Harlan was practically inhaling the soup. He looked away, but still had to listen to him. After a few minutes, Paxton said, “You remember your first sermon after they reopened the church?” Even though the town was in quarantine, the churches and schools had been shut down for several months for fear of spreading TDS to the remaining townspeople who were unaffected. When his father was finally allowed to hold a service, the pews were almost empty and the cemetery almost full. “You preached on the plagues of Egypt.”

“Exodus twelve thirty,” his father said. “‘For there was not a house where there was not one dead.’”

“Jo said you had it wrong,” Pax said. “It wasn’t the plague story we were in, it was the Tower of Babel.”

His father wiped at his mouth, made a questioning sound.

“I don’t remember exactly how she put it,” Pax said. “Something about humans growing too proud again. If a multitude of languages didn’t teach us anything, then maybe a multitude of bodies would.”

His father grunted, then scraped the last of the soup from the pot. Pax rose and carried it to the sink.

“So what’s it going to be, then?” his father said. “Are you going to fight me on this?”

“I can’t take care of you,” Pax said tiredly. “I have my job, my—”

“I’m not asking you to take care of me!”

“You can’t do it yourself, Dad. And at Rhonda’s place you’d have your own room, home-cooked meals. They have big-screen TVs even. It’s chub paradise.”

“Don’t be funny with me. You’re doing this out of spite, Paxton. You’re still angry.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not angry about anything. I’m trying to help you.”

His father made a derisive sound. “I raised you. I know when you’re lying.”

“I’m going back to bed,” Pax said.

He stalked back to the guest bedroom. In the morning he’d talk to Rhonda, and by noon he’d be gone. He pulled back the bedclothes, unlidding the dank odor of mildew, and started unbuttoning his shirt.

His father’s shape filled the doorway and Pax dropped his hands.

“She’s selling the stuff,” his father said. “To the young chubs, and anybody else they can sell it to. They get high off it.”

“No she’s not.” Then: “How would you know anyway?”

“People talk. They come visit, say things. What else could she be doing with it?”

“Research,” Pax said. “Scientists are using it to search for a cure for … what happened to you. What’s happening to you.”

His father snorted. “What scientists? Where?”

“It’s a full research program, Dad. The government’s involved.” Actually, she hadn’t mentioned the government, but
they’d have to get involved if the academics found a cure. No pharmaceutical company would bother to manufacture a drug good for only a few hundred hillbillies in east Tennessee.

“She told you that?” his father asked.

“You can ask her yourself in the morning—she’s coming by to get the papers. Try to be decent.”

Pax lay on the bed, trying to ignore the noise from the living room. His father had turned the TV on again. Finally Pax sat up, pulled out the stack of papers from beneath the bed, and found a pen on one of the shelves.

He turned to the first yellow sticky, and signed. He sat there on the bed until he’d signed and initialed every blank. Then he rolled onto his side, pulled the pillow over his ears, and tried to sleep.

His father had discovered them a year and a half after the Changes, on an April day drowning in cold rain. Jo and Deke had already dropped out of school, and Pax had skipped that morning to join them at Jo’s house for an impromptu meeting of the Switchcreek Orphan Society. He knocked at her door and Jo called out, What’s the password? She’d insisted that their society adopt a password, and a Morse code knock to go with it: three short, three long, three short.

Deke and Jo were already lying in a nest of blankets in the living room, and he’d felt a stab of jealousy. Then they stripped off his clothes and pulled him into their warmth. Although the three of them had stopped having intercourse weeks before, they still fooled around in other ways. Much of the time, however, they did nothing but lie together in a warm bundle. They talked about stopping even this, but the damage had already
been done, and they’d been unable or unwilling to break this cocooning habit.

That morning Jo lay between them, Deke with his arm under both their shoulders, Pax with his head and hand against her round, smooth belly. She’d told them that she could feel the child—they didn’t yet know that there were two—rolling and moving. Pax had pressed gently down with his palm, afraid to hurt her or the baby, but so far had felt nothing but yielding flesh and a steady warmth.

Jo was terrified and excited—keyed up in a way she’d never felt before, she said. Paxton was merely terrified. It wasn’t just that she was pregnant; it was that she was the first person with TDS—argo, beta, or charlie—to carry a child. No one could tell them what the child inside Jo would look like, or even whether Jo’s new body could survive a pregnancy. Only Deke seemed calm.

The rain must have masked the sound of Harlan’s car. Pax found out later the school had called home to report his absence, but he never learned how his father knew to come directly to Jo’s house. He walked straight in—no coded knocks, no “S-O-S”—and froze in the doorway. For a moment his expression was quizzical. Only a moment. Harlan Martin was not the behemoth he would become, but the eighteen months since the Changes had doubled him: his weight, his strength, his anger. His father had developed a hair-trigger temper. And why not: His wife was dead, his church was falling apart, and his only son had insisted on defying him, disappointing him, disgracing him.

Pax scrambled to his feet. Harlan strode across the room and grabbed Paxton by both arms, spun and slammed him into the wall, shaking a framed photograph loose from its hook, and
pinned him there. Jo screamed and perhaps Deke spoke, but Pax couldn’t remember anything that was said. He only remembered his father’s face, pressed close to his own, twisted by shock, fury, loathing—too many emotions to name.

“My God, Paxton,” his father said, his voice filled with disgust. “What in heaven’s name have you done?”

Paxton had fallen asleep to the sound of the television blaring in the next room, and when he jerked awake sunlight was pouring through the window and the TV still babbled from the living room. It felt like less than a minute had passed, but it must have been hours.

Behind the noise of the TV he heard the telephone ringing.

A few seconds more and the ringing stopped. He didn’t think his father owned an answering machine. He closed his eyes, lay there for a time, and then opened his eyes again. He couldn’t hear his father snoring.

He sat up, found his watch where he’d put it on the floor. Eight-thirty. He pulled on his pants and shirt, walked barefoot out to the living room. The couch was empty. He went to the kitchen, then opened the door to his father’s bedroom, then checked the bathroom.

“Shit,” Pax said aloud. His father was gone.

He went out into the backyard and circled around the house, calling his father’s name. The wet grass washed his feet. Both Pax’s Tempo and his father’s Crown Victoria were still parked in the driveway. The Crown Vic’s driver’s-side door was ajar.

He walked toward the car, a sick feeling in his stomach. He came around the back bumper to see through the open door—
and there was no one inside. He started to shut the door, and then saw a set of keys hanging from the ignition.

Pax leaned in, turned the key. The engine didn’t even click. Stone dead. The dome light was off too.

He put the keys in his pocket and slammed the door. He was walking into the house when his cell phone began to vibrate.

It was Deke’s number. Pax flipped open the phone. “Tell me you know where my father is,” Pax said.

“He’s at the church,” Deke answered in that sub-basement voice. “You better hurry.”

“The church? What’s he doing at the church?”

“By the looks of it, getting ready to baptize somebody.”

Pax went into the bathroom, peed. At the sink he splashed his face with tepid water, ran his wet hands through his hair. In the mirror he looked like a wild man. His father’s son, all right.

It almost took him longer to get the Tempo started than to get to the church. It was just two and a half miles away down a twisty and hilly stretch of Piney Road. But his father must have walked there. How could a man who weighed six or seven hundred pounds walk it? Two days ago he could barely get off the couch.

Deke’s open-topped Jeep was in the parking lot, as well as a dark blue Buick. Pax parked, tiredly climbed the steps, and paused with his hand on the door. From inside someone called out, and even without being able to make out the words he recognized his father’s voice—his preaching voice.

The Reverend Harlan Martin was bringing the Word.

Pax pulled open the creaking door and went inside. The vestibule was dim and empty, but the double doors to the sanctuary were propped open. Inside, light shimmered from the
yellow-paned windows on the eastern wall, making the tops of the pews gleam.

A broad aisle led down the center of the church to the raised pulpit. Set into the wall behind the pulpit was a recessed archway that contained the baptistry, a cement pool sunk below the floor.

His father stood in the pool, water up to his waist, praying or preaching or both at the same time.

His cheeks shone with tears. One hand gripped the panel of glass that acted as a kind of splash guard for the pool, and the other was raised above his head, fingers spread. He wore a white dress shirt, too tight to be buttoned over his stained T-shirt. His hair had been combed back from his head.

“Forgive us, Lord!” he called, his voice echoing. His eyes were tightly closed, his face anguished. Blisters stretched across his forehead and cheeks, larger than Pax had ever seen them. What he’d taken to be tears could have been oil from ruptured sacs.

His father clenched his raised hand into a fist, opened it again. “Let your mercy come down on us. Forgive us now, our weak flesh, our corruptible hearts …”

Deke and a beta woman in a skirt and loose shirt stood off to the side of the sanctuary, next to the organ, talking in low voices. They saw Pax and waved him forward.

As Pax drew closer to the pulpit he could smell the spicy-sour tang of vintage. His father was still praying—
We ask you, Lord, hear us, Lord
—eyes shut, hand up like a drowning man. For as long as Pax could remember his father prayed for “we” and “us.” Pleading on behalf of the entire church, or the world.

Deke said, “Paxton, have you met the Reverend Hooke?”

Pax recognized the woman’s clothing, if not her face. She’d
worn a shirt and vest like that when she’d led the singing at the funeral. They shook hands, and Pax said, “I’m sorry about this, Reverend. How long has he been in there?”

“I got here a half hour ago,” Hooke said. “Who knows how long he was here before that—long enough to overflow the baptistry. I turned off the water as soon as I realized what was going on. I don’t even know how he got in.”