They’d been best friends, but she hadn’t done a thing for Janie after the flood. Hadn’t tried to contact Reed and hadn’t made trouble for the Nole Company. Just like all the others. A coward. Hadn’t done a thing to make them pay for the murder of her best friend.
And Lord, Janie’s little girl… would’ve grown up to look just like Janie had when they’d gone to school together. Inez began to cry.
And felt… whispers… across her cheek. She looked up and the woman was smiling, her hair glowing.
“Janie…” Inez whispered. Inez felt an aching in her legs, an aching in her belly… from lack of child, lack of husband… suddenly she was thinking of things she hadn’t imagined in years: naked men, sweaty buttocks, and that secret thing they had… that she’d never understood, even taking care of her father in his deathbed, doing everything for him. She wondered if she’d even understand after she were married.
Inez was sweating profusely, stomach feeling queasy. She looked up, and the woman was right there, burning, burning…
Inez looked away, down into the cool, dark, now swift-running stream. And saw herself and her best friend Janie, the way it should have been, floating there with their eyes wide open, lips blue, hair trailing out and catching the debris like seaweed.
Charlie Simpson raised his gun at the great shadow stumbling its way toward him through the darkened store, shadow-arms sweeping items off counters, breaking bottles, the shadowy figure weeping. He began to squeeze the trigger.
“Dammit, Charlie! Don’t shoot!”
Charlie relaxed, and a very drunk Jake Parkey stumbled into view.
“What the hell you breakin’ in here for, Jake? I’m closed!” Charlie didn’t think he’d ever been so angry before.
Jake looked down shyly. “Need a gun, Charlie… need some protection.” Then he looked up, his eyes wide like an excitable little boy’s. “There’s a beast out there, Charlie; ain’t no bear! No bear was ever like that! Why, I can hear it out there at night, a-stalkin’ and waitin’ for me… for us! It’s waitin’, Charlie! I gotta get a gun ready for it. We all do!”
Charlie shook his head slowly. “Don’t know if I can sell you one, Jake… not the way you’ve been with Doris lately.”
Jake grinned crazily. “No harm… no harm, Charlie. Won’t happen again! Don’t care no more… she’s crazy, that Doris! Don’t even want her around! Drive me crazy if I keep livin’ with her. She’s out somewhere now… I don’t care if she never come back. No problem, Charlie, no problem. I’m through with that woman.”
Charlie stood silently, considering. Selling a man like that a gun… all hell to pay. Everything had just gone crazy; he wondered if he could see it to its end. Maybe they could just get all the craziness out of their systems… maybe the Big Andy would blow up like some volcano… get all that pent-up hate and long delayed revenge out of its system, and it would calm down some too.
He pulled the key ring out of his pocket and moved to the locked cabinet where he kept the guns and ammunition.
Mr. Emmanuel pulled away from the Parkey woman, rising up in a crouch over her sweaty, mud-slimed hips. Her eyes were closed, and she was still moaning, whimpering softly to herself. Like some animal. He was repulsed. By her and by himself.
His clothes were dirty. He’d throw them away. Burn them. He stood and pulled his pants up, zipped them and turned to walk… run back up to the town. What had come over him? Never… she looked and sounded like a pig. Moaning… moaning…
He raised his eyes and looked out over the grassy expanse of the old townsite. Deep blue green. Water green. Here and there mist rose from the shadows in the grass.
And brought the water with it. Climbing and climbing until he knew it would soon engulf him. People were screaming out there, whimpering. Dead animals drifted by, stench in their wake. People were drowning. Through the mist he could see the outstretched arms, the thrashing legs, the pale faces etched with desperation.
He squinted; he moved closer. But it was mist again: white, swirling mist. Fog filling in the shallow depressions of the earth, once sliding mud, that now covered the old townsite. A fine, impossibly wet, fog.
Chapter 24
For some reason Charlie decided to do a little repair work on the slab before going home for the evening. He didn’t know why—he worked a bit patching and strengthening the slab about once every five years, certainly no more frequently than that. It had to be done occasionally; the slab was quite old and a poor foundation for all the buildings on it even in the best of condition. Once enough bricks and stones started deteriorating, it was a downright hazard. Charlie’s family had had a lot to do with this slab being here, so he felt a special responsibility for it. Ben Taylor usually offered to lend a hand, but Charlie had always refused. Tonight he would have liked the company, but he figured he’d been afraid enough the past week. It was time to muster a little backbone and see to this job himself.
He brought out the cement and plaster and two different sized trowels from the storage shed in back. There were a couple of large brushes inside the store itself, and the embankment by his store, at the end of the slab, had about all the replacement stones and bricks he might need. He’d seen a few holes here and there down around the base of the slab. There were always stones missing—he never could understand that. He could understand wear and tear, the stones eroding away. But entire stones? What happened to them?
Charlie started with the cracks radiating out from the front door of his store, a firm believer in the idea that he should be taking care of his own eyesores first. He laid down a thick layer of cement here, knowing that in a few months’ time the slab would settle some more, the crack would widen, and the portion of the slab facing his store would look the same as before. But at least for those few months it would look mended. That was something.
He stood away from the slab and examined it critically. There was a series of hairline fractures running along the bottom, near the roadbed. For some reason they worried him, perhaps because there were so many of them. Cracks always formed in that area, but never before had there been so many, it seemed. He poked at one of them with the edge of the long trowel, and a layer of plaster fell away, revealing the decaying brick beneath.
Charlie remembered then that this brickwork was a relatively recent patch in the slab, one of the last his father himself had done before his death. And yet it looked older than those sections underlaid with field stones. The brick was cheap material, porous, and falling apart with the moisture. Charlie hadn’t realized that so much dampness could be trapped in there; seeing it, he was surprised the whole slab hadn’t crumbled by now.
He applied the cement thickly here, carrying bits of granite gravel from the embankment to use as a strengthener, and made a new, stronger top layer. After smoothing it out, he examined it for imperfections. It was a good job… couldn’t have been better. Now if only that crumbling brick underneath held together.
He patched some holes in front of Ben Taylor’s store, using roughly square stones from the embankment, using a hammer and chisel to knock off an occasional rough edge to make a better fit. Strange how only one stone would be missing here and there, as if someone had made windows in the slab. It looked as if the stones had been pushed out, or had fallen out, but he was never able to find even the broken pieces of the fallen stone on the outside. Maybe kids had picked them up and played with them. Or maybe some adult in the town made a habit of moving them without telling anyone, playing the mischief-maker. It was a mystery, kind of like losing socks in a washer—they just seemed to dissolve into the atmosphere. He chuckled as he thought about it, lifting one of the heavy replacement stones to slide it into place. For a moment he looked into the darkness of the hole, and discovered he couldn’t see past a couple of inches. But it was hollow back there in this section; he could feel an ice-cold draft seeping up from between the rocks. When the stone slipped in there was a thud and an echo, and Charlie thought he could hear a scurrying of tiny feet inside, like rats in a barrel.