Learn the truth, they had told her, and the truth shall make you free. Her grandfather in that bed had let some of the devil out of himself and into her, let it out the end of his dick most likely, and that was what caused her to see the dead, or think she did, just as he did. And when he’d said You’re of a kind I know, you’re of my kind, that’s what he meant: that he had made her of his kind by what he had done to her. Of course she had hated him, hated him without knowing why. She knew now.
So angry, so angry, she wouldn’t have believed how angry it was possible for her to be, layers of black anger one under another like layers of black tar paper on a rotten shack’s roof (when had she been set the task of ripping such paper off a roof or was that a dream too?). She’d practice walking in the Spirit and fellowshipping and then find herself one morning screaming at her son, Shut up shut up shut up, fingers around his throat and thumbs pressing against his chin.
That was him too, inside her still even though expelled, that devil-shaped black absence. Wanting her to do a murder, sure, why not? That’s what Ray said when she told him how scared she was; and he found someone to take the boy in, just for a few days, a month maybe; he told her Bobby, you can see him whenever you want but let’s not us take any chances. We’re dealing with forces here stronger than the atomic bomb, forces strong enough to destroy the world through our agency. Forces that almost have destroyed the world, in fact, and more than once.
She too: there were people who had offered to take her in, they were so damn kind, maybe if she had accepted their help what happened next might not have happened: but her old capacity to take what she needed for herself had been thrown out of whack too and she couldn’t.
It was because she’d been alone, no friend, no man, no kids; because she had just got off a tough shift and had only her dark apartment and her dreams to go back to: that’s why on that September night, weird hot night two months ago, she’d stayed on old 6A past her turn, and driven down the row. Just to see whose parking lot was full; to see if she might glimpse Lars’s Firebird with the wide wings painted on the hood. Dog returning to its vomit. The Play Pen. Seven Seas. Embassy Lounge. The white Tempest convertible turned in there, coming from the opposite direction and crossing in front of her, flashing across her vision; in her rearview mirror she saw it inserting its brilliance into a row of dull black and gray hardtops.
Not your fault, she thought, making a wide U-turn at the next intersection and turning back: not your fault you can’t resist. In the parking lot she took off her glasses, dropped them in her purse; changed her shoes for heels. She ran her hand over the slick flank of the white car as she walked past it. Just washed.
The billed caps at the bar turned her way as she entered: She knew most of them, not by name but by species, the way you know kinds of chickens or dogs; every one of them—it just happened to be so that night, she would still recognize them without it—had a thick unkempt moustache. They each had a pickup, she bet, and a dog in the back of the pickup; an ex-wife too, and a big old belt buckle on their jeans, brass or silver, last scrap of their knight’s armor, right there protecting the soft underbelly. She knew the sound those buckles made when they dropped to the floor. She ordered a shot and a beer, and poured the one into the other.
It was easy to tell which one was the owner of the Tempest. He wore no belt at all; his pants were the kind that used none, held closed by a little dickie tab. Shiny boots beneath, and a sports team’s wind-breaker. They exchanged glances for a while, in the mirror and down along the bar, while she half listened to a guy who claimed to know her from long ago. “Nobody knows me from long ago.” She picked up her drink at length and walked down the bar just as he was taking out his wallet.
“Leavn already?” she asked him.
“Well,” he said. “Now that you ask.”
“Maybe you thought this place was no fun.”
“No band,” he said, and shrugged. His sandy hair rose in front in a smooth wave in which the comb marks were distinct.
“I like music,” she said. “Jukebox’s full.” She drank. Her Reading man had called these drinks “boilermakers”; this one was in her lips and her fingertips already, or something was. “Or. There’s music at the Del Raye. Every night.”
“Which is where?”
She thumbed south. He nodded thoughtfully, as though considering a risky business venture, regarding her through black-rimmed glasses.
The white car’s interior was leather, as she had known it would be, alive to her touch, lipstick red. The door closed with a light but solid sound she seemed to have heard already, or to remember. She thought of asking him to put the top down but didn’t. He turned the key and she felt the drive train through her behind. He pressed the accelerator a couple of times, unnecessarily maybe, maybe just to hear the engine or let her hear it: then he drove out of the lot, one freckled hand on the white steering wheel.
“You can hear me sitting way over there?” he asked.
She slid toward him along the seat and turned on the radio, pressed in the lighter. A little halo of light appeared around it. She felt warm and loved here, dangerous too. She opened the glove compartment.
“Careful,” he said.
A gun clipped to the compartment’s door, its handle toward her hand. Toward his hand actually, able to be pulled in a second. Before he could take it she had it.
“What’s it for?”
“I don’t need a reason.”
She weighed it in her hands. “Big,” she said.
He grinned at her. “That’s a nine-millimeter,” he said. “Stop about anything.”
She stroked its checkered handle, held its barrel lightly in her fingers. She saw he wanted to take it from her, wanted to badly, and yet wanted to watch her with it too. She slid away from him smiling. “What’s this?”
“Safety. Don’t touch it.”
She moved the little lever. Men loved things that were heavy and oiled and fit their hands, with parts that moved slickly and clicked easily into place. A cold happy rage was filling her, had reached her heart, her throat.
“Don’t,” he said. “It’s fuckn loaded.”
Her back was to the door, the gun pointed his way. “I like it,” she said. “I want it.”
His eyes glanced from the road to the gun, back and forth. “Dumb bitch,” he said. “Give it here.”
“Pull over,” she said. “I’m gonna kill you.”
“Shut up,” he said.
“Pull the fuck over.” She had to hold the gun in two hands to keep it steady. He talked more, hand held out, withdrawn, held out again. She said no more. She could see his teeth, clenched in rage. He pulled over. The car and her blood hummed around her.
“Get out,” she said.
“The hell you say.” He still held the white steering wheel, hands at ten and two.
“Devil’s in me,” she said. “I’m gonna kill you and steal your car.”
“Let’s talk,” he said.
“Get out!” She could smell him. “Out!”
“Please.”
A noise started in her throat, cat-screech or child’s impatient mad shriek, pressed out between her bared teeth. The glowing gun poked at him. He eased the door open and the roof light came on; she could see the shine of sweat on his face; what did he see. He was out and she was in the driver’s seat. He called out Please again as she pulled shut the door. If he hadn’t said that, if she hadn’t heard that from the dark. She hadn’t thought she would shoot, had all along thought that she would not.
Two months later, her wrist still ached a little. She had thought then that firing it had broken her wrist. The night too. It seemed not to be a sound it had made so much as a blow falling on the whole wide world at once, caused by her though. As much as her foot on the gas pedal, it had blown her forward, impelled her away. Away down this same road she now went, away as though fallen down a chute.
That was another thing they had among the endless things of that house in Bondieu, th
at board game they had made her play where you come upon a ladder suddenly and climb up, only to fall down again along a twisty chute. She thought of the dark richly colored board, punitive, and their laughter. She thought: I killed somebody. She never found a report of it in the paper or saw it on TV (her TV busted and cold in the living room’s corner like a gloomy invalid) but she hadn’t looked hard, and she sure as hell never asked. She knew now. She’d killed somebody.
But that wasn’t what she’d thought then, that night, flying west and south in his Tempest, a strange wind arising as day came. Then she had thought He’s made me kill somebody. Taken away my life and given me death and the dead for it and now he’s made me kill somebody. Not even really knowing or thinking that she was headed toward Kentucky, toward Breshy County and the bed where he lay, as she was now too this night. The gun had lain then on the seat of the Tempest beside her and as she drove she assumed or supposed she would take it with her to Hogback, to be with her when she saw him; but eventually she had awakened, as though surfacing from dark water. No. No. And a little while later she had pulled over at a scenic overlook and thrown the gun as far as she could into the yellow woods below, listening for its strike. She heard nothing; only the leaves of the trees lifting in a long wave just then, as though she had tossed a stone into a pool.
On a night long before she first ran away from Hogback, Bobby had awakened deep in the night in that bed and turned to Floyd beside her; the moon was bright, or he’d left a light on, as he often did. He lay asleep, but not asleep as she had seen him other times: his eyelids were open a crack, enough so that she could see the glitter of an eye within; his breath was stopped though his mouth was open, and his hands were held up a little, fingers curved, like a dead dog’s paws.
Grandpap, she’d said. She shook him, his heaviness, and could not rouse him; put her ear against the rough cloth of his nightshirt and listened to his heart, tolling with fearful slowness. Grandpap she said into his ear, afraid to cry out, not knowing why, or who she feared would hear. After a time she climbed down off the bed and went out into the night, near bright as day where the moonlight lay and empty black where it did not; a summer night it must have been because she went shoeless, she could remember her own long spectral feet on the road. Got to the nearest neighbor, a childless couple who had sometimes spoken kindly to her but whom she had avoided, wary cub. A light burned in their front room; no when she came closer she saw it was the TV, showing nothing but not gone off, the strange changeless cross or sign it made, its open eye. He was asleep in the lounger before it. Roused at her knock. My grandpap’s asleep and won’t wake.
They didn’t want to do anything, or could think of nothing to do, but in the end they let her lead them back down along the road to his house; they went inside and were whispering in the front room when he opened the door of the bedroom. Huge, barefoot, alive. Why’ve you brung people into my house. The blacks in his eyes like shafts leading back into the night.
When they were alone he told her—dawn coming and the moon set—that he had been gone, called out by the Spirit to follow. He told her that though she saw him in his bed he had not been present there; nor had he been dreaming. Dreams are inside, he said; he had gone outside, by way (he thought) of his open mouth and the window—he pointed to where it stood open, the rag of curtain flailing in the outpassing air. He would tell her one day, he said, where he had gone, and what he had seen and done there. Now, though, he wanted her to know but one thing: when she found him thus in the night beside her, as though asleep but stiller, she must allow no one and nothing to harm his vacated body, for he could not resist then. Let no one see him. Above all she must never allow him to be turned facedown: for then, returning, he would not be able to find a way back in. And if the sun found him still outside he never would be able to: himself and his body separated for good, till death or Judgment.
She listened, and asked nothing; as she asked nothing when he told her how the world would end, or what God had planned for him. She’d made coffee and grits and they ate in silence. For a time after that, she left the bed they shared, slept on the kitchen floor with the door shut or out in the pines where he would not go to find her; but the weather turned cold, and she came back.
Once or twice after that night she had awakened to find him in that sleep again; had vowed to watch, and see him come in at the window when dawn was near. But she was no more able to stay awake than she had once been able to sit up and see Santy Claus come down the chimney, to bring her a flannel nightgown and put into her empty shoe a ring of gold-colored metal, a Nestlé’s bar and a lipstick. And, anyway, soon she ceased to believe anything he said.
She knew now, though, what land it was that he had gone out to: she knew, for since then, more than once, she had herself seen him there: lost, unable to return to the earth of daytime, and all because of what she had done. She had seen him there, seen his bewilderment at her own presence, facing him: she and he, in that land he would not now leave, till death or Judgment.
Bondieu in Breshy County is a single street, one swaying stoplight on a wire across it; the Flamingo, a bar when the county is Wet, a café when it’s Dry; Dumont’s store, the hardware store, a five-and-dime, and a concrete-block building that had not been there when she was a kid, that housed the state welfare offices. And Our Lady of the Way Hospital, a new building attached to the old one. Out at the south end of the street, almost visible as she came in from the north, the road upward to the big house on the hill where once she had been taken in, and hidden, and baptized.
She turned in at the hospital, but for a time sat in the parking lot while her car grew cold. The mountains went up not far away; you could see them from here. Amazing how little it was, this town that she, coming down from Hogback, had used to think was so big: almost too little to survive against the spiky mountains and the rain. But here it was still, no less of it though not much more.
She ran in the door, holding her bag over her head against the rain, she’d just had her hair done the day before.
Her grandfather had been moved, she learned, to a different part of the hospital; no longer in ICU where she had first found him, someplace less urgent now obviously; she went through the halls smelling familiar smells.
He was not the same: he had moved since the last time, she wondered if suddenly or by degrees: his arms that had lain slack at his sides in his own bed had contracted, and lifted his hands a little, and curled the fingers. Feeding tube going in through his nose, and from under the sheet a tube coming out, from the catheter to the urine bottle. She had an impulse to check it, see if it needed changing.
She sat by him. She would touch him and speak to him, but not yet.
One or two of the people in the healing group—one was that girl Rose—had offered to come with her on this trip. Her grandfather in a coma in a hospital far away? She shouldn’t have to go alone. And Bobby had refused them that too, refused to let them be kind. He and she had made her sinner-self strong, so strong that she could eat up whatever good they brought to her and them too along with it, let them keep their distance from her.
“Grandpap,” she said.
A nun entered the room with a little knock and a quick smile.
“They told me upstairs you’d come.”
Bobby said nothing.
“He’s really doing well. Considering. Nothing much changed. His vital signs are good though. A strong heart.”
She sat beside Bobby in the other chair there by the bed. Like the rest of them she had stopped wearing the voluminous black garment, layers of serge and net and starched white. A plain black dress like a schoolgirl’s, and a white hat; her hair steel-gray beneath. Always said they hadn’t any, all cut off.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. Her face pink and scrubbed and finely lined.
“Sure.”
“Mr. Shaftoe. He had no insurance.”
“No.”
“Had he ever been UMW? United Mine Workers?”
; “No. He never.”
“Well that’s my question. He has been here for nearly ten weeks. And it appears that his condition is not going to change. That’s the consensus.”
Bobby regarded her, adopting the blank uncomprehending face she used for welfare workers and supervisors. Don’t guess at them; let them say; it’s safer. Sometimes they just can’t say it, whatever it is, and let you off a while more.
“We’ve been able to get Medicaid for him,” the nun said. “But the coverage is limited. You probably know.”
No answer for this either.
“What we hoped,” the nun said, “was to get your permission to move your father to a nursing-home facility.”
She turned from the nun and looked down on her grandfather’s stone face.
The nun looked too, and folded her hands in her lap attentively, as though perhaps he would speak, and something new would be learned, or it would be proved that nothing could be.
Bobby had always trusted these women, believed that though they might judge you they wouldn’t abandon you or dismiss you. But maybe that was nuns on TV. These were running a hospital; they were just as likely to put you out if you couldn’t pay as Conurbana Pediatric, only they’d do it nicer.
“Nothn I can do,” she said.
“Will you come to the office before you go?” she said, rising. “You can talk to the doctor then too.”