At first he thought he was looking into a clown’s mask… the bright red lips and large white spots painted on cheeks and forehead. But then he knew there was no paint here, and the white spots were from something eaten away rather than from something painted on.
Chapter 28
Felix Emmanuel didn’t hear the shiny gray-steel van pull into the lot outside the mine office that morning; he’d spent the entire evening there, sleeping little because of the storm. But he did hear the van doors slam, and the men talking.
He peered over the bottom sill of the front window, just enough to see the Nole Company insignia on the van door and the block lettering below it: GEOLOGY. Suddenly Doris Parkey moaned under him.
He crouched and grabbed the woman by the neck. “Hush! You want me fired?”
Doris giggled and pulled his hand down over her belly. “Dammit, woman!” Mr. Emmanuel slapped her hard, clamping his hand over her mouth as she whimpered. “I’ve had it! Another word and I’ll…” He was at a loss. What would he do?
Then he realized she was looking at him in a very strange way. Her eyes wide, almost pop-eyed. Her lips trembling, losing spittle into his hand.
And then she was struggling, clawing to get away from him. Her filthy thighs and feet squirmed around him, he was punched in the face, and suddenly she was free, breaking through the back door of the office and climbing the embankment into the trees. Naked, her flabby buttocks quivering grotesquely.
To Mr. Emmanuel’s dismay, he found himself aroused. He gritted his teeth and began jerking his clothes on. He could hear the men walking toward the front door.
Ben Taylor held out the coffee cup with both hands; his fingers were still trembling. “Here, Reed. Best drink up.”
Reed received the cup into waiting palms. He avoided looking at Ben, staring past the edge of the cup as he raised it carefully to his lips and drank. He sniffed, then gasped a mouthful of air. He could hardly breathe.
“Yeah,” Ben mumbled. “Hell of a thing.”
Reed had driven back to his uncle’s place in the middle of the night with the pieces of Jake Parkey’s body. He didn’t even know if he’d gotten it all. It had been dark and he’d had to feel around the area, picking up dead wood and mud clumps and anything else that seemed to feel right to the touch, his stomach wrenching anytime he felt something that seemed particularly soft or moist. He’d paused now and then to catch his breath; try to calm himself down. It took him hours. Like some bizarre fraternity rite, bananas and syrup.
The ground had been torn apart for yards around. It must have been quite a struggle.
Now Jake was out on the back porch in two garbage bags. They were waiting for the sheriff and the coroner from Four Corners.
“I don’t want you going up there no more.” Reed looked up, and realized Ben’s hand was on his shoulder, one finger touching Reed’s neck, as if giving him direction. “It ain’t safe up there, son.”
Reed just stared at him. His eyes were burning. His uncle’s face went slightly out of focus every few seconds. “I don’t want to show disrespect, but I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said. “Dammit, Reed! Just look at yourself! Sneezin’ an’ wheezin’. Eyes so wet and hot lookin’. You look worse than any sick hound dog I ever had! You’re killin’ yourself with this; that ole house’ll wait ‘til stuff dies down around here.”
“No,” Reed said slowly, with no feeling.
“You look damned feverish, son, like your eyes were burning your skin. It scares me.”
“I don’t think it’s going to wait. It isn’t going to wait for anything, Ben. It wants me there and I think I’d better do what it wants. What you can’t face… it controls you.”
“It? You don’t mean that bear?”
“Maybe.” He looked up at his uncle earnestly, and his uncle sighed. Reed had never seen the man look so sad.
“You know, you look just like you did when you were a boy and were confused about something, thought you’d done something wrong, and trying so hard to make things right.”
“I don’t really know what it is.”
Ben stared at him awhile, as if musing, then, “Your daddy ain’t up there, Reed.”
Reed looked up in surprise; a chuckle almost escaped. “Why, Ben. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Don’t you now?” He looked out the front window. “Wonder what’s keeping the sheriff so long… you been acting like you do, if I read your face right.
“Matter of fact, I’m beginning to think I believe in ‘em, too.”
There was a knock at the door and the sheriff pushed his way in, an old man who must be the coroner tagging along behind. The sour feeling in Reed’s stomach was fading, but he wished he could talk to Ben and find out what he knew.
The geologists from the main office crowded around the sinkhole, charts in hand. Mr. Emmanuel tried to talk to them about the cave-in, but they were ignoring him, in fact wouldn’t even let him near Willy’s sinkhole.
“Damn… this is impossible.” Crouskey, the head geologist, sighed and scratched at the chart with the edge of his pencil.
A younger man strode up to the group. “I can’t find any possible source for that water, unless there’s an old storage tank buried somewhere here that they’ve ruptured.”
“I see no traces of metal here, Walt, just a clean break into the rock, as if we had an underground spring, despite what the charts say. That’s no buried tank.”
The men stared at the water in silence.
“Mr. Crouskey, I was thinking maybe some of my men could dig around the hole,” Felix Emmanuel babbled eagerly. “Maybe we could cut into the channel that’s bringing the water, expose it a little.”
Crouskey didn’t bother facing Emmanuel to reply. “You won’t be helping us at all on this one, Emmanuel. Or any other, once the main office gets my report. Just look at yourself. You hardly make a good local representative for this company.”
Mr. Emmanuel touched his face. He was sweating… sweating like a pig. And he was dirty, unkempt… filthy. He stared into the sinkhole. The water was moving, ever so slightly, barely visible. And unusually milky around the edges, like cloud, or… what was it?… fleece. He thought to call their attention to it, but did not.
Charlie went into the store early, but left the “Closed” sign out. At noon the sign was still out. By two that afternoon it was still out, and Charlie had drunk almost a quart of whiskey.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten drunk. Forty-two, forty-three… something like that. A prize horse had died… William Tell was his name, and you couldn’t find a finer thoroughbred a hundred miles from the Creeks. Mattie didn’t speak to him for a week—she never could abide a drunk. He supposed that Puritan streak in her was actually one of the reasons he’d married her—he figured she’d keep him out of most kinds of trouble. And she had.
But he’d never been in so much trouble as now, and the only bit of Mattie he had left was a few pictures, the lace doilies on all the furniture at home, and that blend of sweet gum and lilac smells that never seemed to leave the house, though it had no reason to be there. He really had no reason to believe anything out of the ordinary was happening in the Creeks; he’d been spooked that day in the woods, and later when they were hunting the bear, but he’d never seen anything that couldn’t be explained eventually.