“Maybe the Devil got him,” Dan continued. “Hey, Al, ain’t there no more applejack? Dry Squad giving you trouble?”
“Nobody gives me trouble. Shit. Why don’t you get the hell outta here wi’ them stinkin’ shoes? Look at ’is! It’s all over ’is shoes! Go on. Get out!”
“Where’s your boy to night?” Dan kept his voice pleasant to the point of servility.
“What’re you talking about?” demanded Wes. “He’s right here.”
Dan blinked back the haziness. “Where da hell’d you come from?”
Slow shadows shifted in the corner, and Marl’s face glowed softly.
“Startin’ many fires lately?” muttered Wes.
There came the muffled thump of a whiskey jar set down carefully. A couple of regulars glanced at Al, then at Wes. The boy could be heard breathing. “Don’t you go botherin’ that boy,” Dan said in a low growl. “Don’t let his father hear ya.” A match flared as someone lit a cigarette, and the shadows jumped.
Old Dan nodded and gave the boy an encouraging if bleary smile, while reflecting on how funny it was that most of the regulars had such protective attitudes toward the kid, almost as though he were their own kin. Maybe it was the way people just naturally got around half-wits, feeling sorry for them and all. But that didn’t ring true. For instance, the Stewart loony took a lot of abuse, especially around here when he came cadging drinks. So maybe it was just that…He lost the thought when a farmer, already undoing his belt buckle, got up and swayed toward the door, leaving a good half inch of whiskey still in his glass. Dan looked around, then his gnarled hand shot out with the speed of a cobra. He bolted it, just a taste of burning sweetness.
Silence dripped through the room like something molten. The lean brown and white cat skulked through, belly low to the floor, tail twitching like a snake with a broken spine.
“You know what’s out there, boy?” Dan had already sidled up to the boy and begun his usual teasing. “There’s storks out there, four feet tall, that’s what.” Foul gasses bubbled in his damp breath. “They see a man, they fly right at him, spear him through the eyes, eat his brains out.” He made a stabbing motion at Marl’s yes, and the boy jumped back, as much from the smell as from alarm.
“D-dey ain’t real.”
“Sure is real. How you think I got this?” The old man fingered the pocket of hardened scar tissue where his left eye should have been. “That ain’t all, neither.” He leaned forward. “If’n the storks don’t get you, the Devil will.”
“Leave ’im alone,” another man muttered. “He’s liable ta throw one.”
“You know how big the Devil is? He’s big as a house, boy! An’ he got wings like a bat!”
Marl tried to pull away, but Dan had him by the arm, gnarled fingers digging hard into the tender flesh about the elbow.
“All you’ll hear’ll be flappin’ like sheets on a line. Soon’s you hear that, you know you gonna die.” As he spoke, Dan leaned in and out of the sphere of light, eclipsed face, gesticulating hands, appearing and disappearing in fragments. “He’ll come right down behind you, he will. An’ first thing he’ll do is just swallow your head, just put your whole head in his mouth and bite it off. Then while he’s chewin’ he…”
With a startled cry, the boy leaped back, almost pulling the old man off his perch.
“Don’t bring that in here!” A general tumult erupted. “Put it outside!”
While the newcomer stood in the doorway, blinking and trying to identify the problem, his dog frisked to the end of its chain and sniffed at the room.
“You get that fuckin’ mutt outta here! You hear me? Or I’ll get down ’at meat cleaver and chop it up!” Al bellowed. “What did you say?”
Still shuffling his feet in confusion, the man faintly grumbled something like “Oh yeah?”
Al went berserk. “Good, an’ I’ll chop you up too, motherfucker!” Some of the regulars tried to calm him as he reached for the cleaver.
“What’s the matter wi’ him?” The man backed up, pulling the now growling dog. “Jest a hound dog.” He kicked the animal and dragged it outside.
“Who da hell’s he think he is?” Al started slamming things around. “Comin’ in my place with a dog? Ain’t no dogs allowed in here. I own the fuckin’ place, don’t I?”
“Sure thing, Al.”
“You’re right, Al. You’re right.”
Something crashed on the stairs.
Everyone looked while Lonny picked himself up and seemed to get his joints going in the right direction again. Eyes still rimmed with sleep, he headed straight for the whiskey barrel.
“’At’s it. Drink up my profits, shithead.” Al saw him freeze. “Good for nuthin’ rummy.”
Lonny blinked at him. “I jus’ want one, Al.”
“No.”
“But, Al,” he began, the trace of a whine already in his voice, “gotta have one. Al?”
“No.”
Lonny stood with his mouth open. He started to shake, and Al watched, smiling with satisfaction. The door opened and the guy who’d taken the dog out came in again, looking wary. Al shoved an open jug at Lonny.
“You tie up tha’ dog?” demanded Al.
The man looked up warily. “He’s outside.”
Spit ran down Lonny’s chin while he drank. It hit him fast. The almost painful warmth spread from the pit of his stomach and poured into his chest, flushed up his neck and face, melting his eyes.
Watching, Dan shook his head sadly, dirty gray hair flopping over the back of his collar. Lonny looked even worse than usual, yet for a moment, the old man recalled him as a boy, full of hell and haunting the pines.
“Well, then sit down and buy yaself a drink.” Al smiled expansively. “I ain’t seen ya in here before, buddy.” He pointed at Lonny. “Look at ’im. He don’t think I knew ’bout that jug he had upstairs. I knew. Yeah, I knew. Asshole.”
“Usually, I go out Bear Swamp Hill way.” He was a thin, gray sort of man, and as he moved into the light, Dan guessed him to be part Indian. So many around here were.
“It’s my boy, y’see,” Al explained, chuckling. “He’s scared a dogs. Like to have a fit when he saw ya bringin’ that one in here.”
Dan glanced at Marl—the stocky youth sat by himself, watching everything as usual. No, not so stocky, he decided, looking closer, not anymore leastways, and taller too, really starting to shoot up. “Hey, there ain’t been no ghosts to night,” Dan announced, peering around at the shadows and making sure the stranger noticed.
“How’s at?”
“This here gin mill’s haunted,” replied Dan. “I thought everybody knew that. You should see it sometimes when the spooks is out—things flyin’ around by themselves. You wanna hear about it?” He toyed with the cracked fruit jar he’d been drinking from, letting the guy see it was empty.
Jagged laughter exploded from the corner.
“Way I heard it, Lonny went after his brother’s wife one night, but she grabbed a shotgun and just ’bout blew ole Lonny’s head off.”
“How’s about it, Lonny? Can the black bitch take you in a fair fight?”
“Them ghosts—Hessian mercenaries they was.” Sooty lanterns flickered, and Dan’s eyes glinted as the words spun out. “Shot ’em against a wall in the old town. Back during the Revolution.”
“You pullin’ my leg, ole man?”
“Come to think on it, there ain’t been no ghosts in here fer a while. I remember once…” But the newcomer’s eyes had strayed to Lonny.