The Devil's Alphabet (21 page)

“So. You think argos should evangelize.”

“Ha! I wish you could. Just do some preaching and have people start growing. You remember Ernest Angley? TV healer. He’d slap people’s foreheads—whap!—and they’d flop over, quivering like fish.” She hooted in laughter. “I used to love watching him. It was like professional wrestling for Baptists.” She wiped at an eye, still chuckling. “Oh law. Is this sturdy?” She touched a bookcase turned onto its side, one of the few things in the shop low enough for her to sit on.

“Go ahead,” Deke said.

He thought they’d talk in his office, but if Rhonda wanted to talk out here, then fine. He took a seat opposite her on one of the unfinished pews. “You said you wanted to talk about the school?”

“The reverend’s on me again about her Co-op school. She wants to use part of the loan for the high school for it. She called it a ‘branch campus’ of the high school, so it wouldn’t be considered a separate expenditure.”

“Is that legal? The grant’s for one school: the loan’s for one school …”

“Oh, it may be unusual, but I looked into it and it’s legal. I found some other high schools that do it. Usually they’re for tech-ed programs or special ed, but there are also these ‘alternative schools’—for problem students, nontraditional learners. I think the betas would qualify as nontraditional.”

“The whole town qualifies,” Deke said.

“And if we think it will cause problems with the grant, we use the grant for the main school, and part of the loan for the Co-op school. Of course the town council would have to vote on it.”

“Two separate schools,” Deke said evenly. “One for charlies, one for betas.”

“I know, I know,” Rhonda said. “I told the reverend, it’s like a slap in the face to the argos. We’ve been telling everybody that the school is for everyone, that someday the argos are going to have children. But this way it looks too much like two clades grabbing all the money and telling the argos to go hang—and that’s
not
the way it’s intended. Still, you know how people are. I don’t like what that would do to the town. If I were you, I wouldn’t vote for it.”

Deke leaned back in the pew. Whenever Rhonda told him what he shouldn’t do, he started checking the locks.

“What
would
make me vote for it, Aunt Rhonda?”

She smiled. “If I were you, I’d want some of that high school money to set up a fund, a fertility assistance fund. Just for argos.”

“Really.”

“If argos don’t have children, why should they pay for a school? I don’t blame them. That’s why every argo couple who wants to ought to be able to go to the fertility clinic at the university.”

“Some of us are already doing that,” Deke said.

Rhonda didn’t pretend ignorance. “And it’s expensive, isn’t it? I don’t have all the numbers, but I figure you’re spending twenty, thirty thousand every time you try to fertilize an egg, none of it covered by insurance. Is that right?”

“You’re in the ballpark.”

“We’re a poor little town,” Rhonda said. “That’s a lot of money even for someone with their own business, and most of your people aren’t even working. Tell them they have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars, you might as well tell them to build a rocket ship while they’re at it. No, they need assistance.”

“This fund. Now that
is
illegal.”

“Well, it wouldn’t hold up to an audit, that’s for sure. It would have to be unofficial. When we build the school, we’d go through Alpha Furniture for part of the construction, on account of you’re a local, minority-owned business, then we’d—”

“We’re not minorities, Rhonda.”

“Handicapped, then.” She grinned. “Certainly a class of people oppressed by prejudice and bias—whatever the government wants to hear. Work with me, hon.”

Deke laughed. “Jesus, Rhonda …”

“That money goes to Alpha, but a significant amount is for the fertility fund. I can show you how to set this up. The important thing is that you are the administrator of the fund.
People trust you, Deke. You’re the Chief. They know you’ll divide up the money fair and square.”

“I know what embezzlement is, Rhonda. And fraud.”

“Pah! We’re talking about a higher law. I’m only suggesting this—and the only way the reverend would go along with it—because you’re an honest man. That’s the only way this would work. We trust you to do the right thing, especially for your people.” She held out a hand. “Now, pull me up.”

Deke helped her to her feet and walked her to the front door. “I’ll come back around to hear your decision,” she said.

“You can hear it now,” Deke said, and Rhonda held up a hand.

“No,” she said. “You go home and think about it. Talk to Donna.” Everett hopped out to open the car door for her. “Oh, one more thing,” Rhonda said. “Paxton tried to climb over the wall to the Home last night.”

“Come again?”

“One of my boys almost shot him. They had to pull him down, and he went wild. Clete had to knock him down a peg.”

“Jesus, Rhonda, Clete?” The boy was a moron and a thug. “What did he do to him?”

“Oh, don’t worry, Paxton’s a little roughed up, but he’s fine.”

“I told you last week,” Deke said. “You can take care of Harlan, God knows he needs it, but Paxton is off limits.”

“Paxton put himself
on
limits when he tried to break into the Home. I chewed Clete out when I heard what happened. But honestly, Paxton’s acting like a drug addict. Next time he tries something like that they’ll shoot him dead. Besides, there’s no reason for him to break in.” She opened the car door. “His daddy’s gone dry again.”

“Really.”

“Hasn’t produced a drop since we brought him home from the church.”

“Maybe he’s recharging. He was sure gushing that night.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I think it’s something else. Something between fathers and sons. You know how ugly that can get.”

His gut tightened as if she’d jabbed a two-by-four under his ribs. Goddamn her. She was talking about Willie and Donald Flint. As if he could ever forget what happened, what she held over him.

She tapped the top of the car. “You think about that fund, Deke. While you make your beautiful furniture.”

There were four of them who found Willie that day, but it was Deke who’d led the way into the house, an ancient cabin that didn’t even have an indoor toilet. He practically knocked down the door getting in. Rhonda came in behind him, followed by Barron Truckle and Jo Lynn.

It was Jo who’d come to Deke with the news of the charlie parties, the rumors of a new drug and bad things happening up in the woods. She’d convinced him they had to do something about it, and not only that, but since Willie and Donald were charlies, they had to bring Aunt Rhonda with them. Rhonda wasn’t mayor then, but Jo said she was the leader of her clade. It was the first time he’d heard that word.

Donald Flint, Willie’s youngest son, was in the front room, sitting on the couch with a half-naked charlie girl on his lap, facing him. Another charlie girl lay on a pile of blankets on the floor; she’d been jolted awake by the sudden noise. The place was a sty, beer cans everywhere.

Donald looked at them stupidly, then decided he should be offended. He pushed the girl off him and started to get up. Deke yelled something—he didn’t remember what—but it made Donald stick to his spot on the couch.

Rhonda kicked the girl on the floor, told both of them to get home. She knew their families, and they knew she knew them. The girls scrambled for shirts and jeans and hustled out. Half a minute later they’d started up one of the six cars in the gravel driveway and peeled out.

Deke told Barron to watch Donald, and then he followed Jo down the hallway. She marched straight to Willie’s bedroom as if she’d been there before. Or perhaps she was only following the smell. When that back bedroom door opened the stench rolled out in a wave: shit and rot and a strange sickly-sweet odor he didn’t recognize. It would be months before Deke would be able to name it as the smell of stale vintage.

The old man’s corpse lay sprawled sideways across a pair of double beds that had been pushed together. He was wider than any human being he’d seen to that point. Willie’s body seemed to have collapsed in on itself like a rotted pumpkin, and his skin was pocked and cratered by infection and his son Donald’s inept needlework.

Someone gasped, and Deke looked down and behind him. Rhonda had come into the room and burst into tears. He’d always thought that was just a phrase, but the tears were coming out of her like a cloudburst, a flood, making her cheeks gleam.

Then just as suddenly the tears stopped. Her face went rigid and somehow she willed herself to regain control of her body. Later, Deke thought that this was the moment she became mayor of Switchcreek.

I see now, Rhonda said. Or at least that’s what he thought she said. I see now.

Rhonda turned and strode back down the hallway. Deke hurried after her, shoulders scraping the ceiling.

In the living room, Donald was off the couch and barking into Barron’s face like a furious child. The boy was naked except for a pair of sweatpants hanging low on his hips. Two years before he’d been a skinny kid, and then the Changes had made him into a plump, round-faced charlie. Over the past few months, however, he’d transformed again, turning into a cartoonish mass of muscles: biceps too big for sleeves, shoulders swallowing his neck. A bodybuilder who’d been eating other bodybuilders.

Rhonda reached the boy in two strides and turned his head sideways with a slap.

Donald blinked, touched his cheek. Rhonda shouted something—Deke thought it was something dramatic like,
You killed him
, but perhaps it was only a string of curse words—and then she hit him again, this time with her closed fist.

Donald frowned, shook his head. Then he leaped on her.

Rhonda fell to the floor, Donald on top of her, his hands locked around her throat. Donald was fast, and strong. But still no argo.

Deke’s memories of the next few minutes were disjointed, a collection of snapshots. He remembered his arm swinging down like a wrecking ball. He remembered Donald suddenly on the other side of the room, sprawled on the floor. An armchair and a lamp between them had been knocked over.

Then suddenly Donald threw himself toward the couch, reaching under it. Was there a gun? Deke couldn’t remember if there was a gun.

The next moment Deke was across the room and Donald was tumbling through the open door like a rag doll. There was a sickening
whump
as he struck something outside—a car, as it turned out.

Deke wanted to destroy the man. It was that simple. And he got what he wanted.

Outside, Donald lay half sitting up against the crumpled front fender of Willie’s Ford pickup, his head bent at a too-steep angle, as if he were trying to look inside his own chest.

Rhonda, Barron, and Jo came out sometime later. Maybe it was only a few seconds. “I fucked up,” Deke remembered telling Jo. “I fucked up.” Jo leaned over him and circled her arms around his gray neck.

A little later Jo and Rhonda would work out where Barron would take the body, who would call the authorities, what mix of manufactured and true facts they could agree upon—the standard bookkeeping of conspiracy. Rhonda would take care of the charlie girls who’d fled from the house. It would turn out to be almost comically easy to convince them that now that Donald had run off, and who knew if the police would ever find him, the only way they could avoid being charged with Willie’s murder—accessories, at least—was to follow Rhonda’s instructions to the letter. Rhonda told him that by the end they were thanking her, tears in their eyes, for protecting them.

But before all that, they waited for Deke. He took a long time to get to his feet. When he stood, Barron looked at him like he was a monster.

But not Jo, and not Aunt Rhonda. “You saved my life,” Rhonda told him. “And this thing here?” She jerked her head
toward Donald Flint’s body. “You will not spend one second regretting the day you took this evil piece of shit out of the world. I’m only sorry you beat me to it.”

Words.

He thought about Donald every day.

He walked downtown to Donna’s Sewing Room—a too-quaint name for such a noisy workshop. He stepped through the back door and into a big room loud with the growls of industrial sewing machines, the blare of country radio, and the deep-voiced chatter of half a dozen argo women. Donna stood at the end of a row of machines, a huge bolt of cloth on her shoulder, explaining to her youngest employee how to clear a jam in her machine. The girl, Mandy Sparks, was only seventeen, and the bulky, secondhand JUKI sewing machine was older than she was. All the machines were secondhand and prone to breakdowns. Donna spent half her time playing mechanic.

She frowned to see him there—they usually didn’t bother each other during the day. He said, “You got a second?”

Donna told the girl to cut the cloth and start over—“But slow down, for goodness’ sake. Slow is steady and steady is fast”—and set the bolt of cloth down against one wall. She led him out to the smaller showroom, which was empty of customers.

“What is it?” she asked.

He slipped his arms around her waist and looked up at her. She was nearly a foot taller than him, but both of them were still growing. No one knew how long argos could live. Some days he felt in his bones that they had decades in them, maybe centuries. Years of slow growth, their bodies stretching up and
out and into each other like trees. And some days he felt the future coming at them like an axe.

“Come on, Deke, I have to get back to work.”

He wanted to make something better than him. Something as beautiful as she was.

“I’ve got some good news,” he said.

T
HEY’D COME TO
him Sunday morning as he lay sprawled out on the grass. The voices crooned to him, making pitying, motherly sounds. Hands brushed the hair from his eyes, caressed the welts on his face.

Pax pushed himself onto his back, groaned. A voice like chocolate said, “There there. We got you.”

Small hands slipped under thighs and waist—“One, two …”—and then he was off the ground and swaying. Bruised skin awoke. Nerves totaled up damages.