November Mourns

Chapter Eleven

HE DROVE INTO THE MOUNTAINS ON THE BAD road, past the patch of ground where his sister’s body had lain in the darkness.

Heading north to Jonah Ridge and the old train trestle, Shad kept trying to see it the way it had once been. A hundred years ago, in a different life, he might’ve brought Elfie Danforth up here to go a’courtin’, a picnic basket on his arm, with her parents following at a respectful distance behind them.

But other scenes kept pushing in. Imagining how it must’ve been with the wagons carrying entire families up this way, dying from cholera or yellow fever. The elderly and the children flung onto the back of a cart as they weakly argued for life. Peace officers, doctors, and town fathers dragging their friends and neighbors up the trail. If only they’d trusted themselves enough to even attempt a quarantine, instead of carrying out their duties cold-heartedly. Driving up to the gorge to pitch their own kin off the cliffs.

You knew you were going to a place designed to make you disappear. Even now, if he missed his chance and wound up a casualty in the bramble forest, he hoped Dave would have sense enough not to list it as a “death by misadventure.”

Despite the ’Stang’s mass and power around him, his chest grew tight and his breath hitched. Already this journey was getting to him and he hadn’t even hit the outskirts of town. How the hell was he going to handle it on his own?

He decided to park and take the trail up by foot. He thought maybe he’d spot something-or something might spot him-that could prove to be useful. If he didn’t ever come back down, he hoped Tub Gattling would discover the car, get the window fixed and help Pa find another buyer. At least Shad’s ghost wouldn’t be stuck in the backseat for eternity. You had to take what good fortune you could get.

If he’d planned this pilgrimage through to the end, and if rationality held any small part of it, he would’ve packed a rucksack. Brought water and provisions, a flashlight, a compass. Shad looked back down the road at the ’Stang and wondered if he should use logic at all. He took a step toward the car and stopped, the chill wind patting him down like the hands of children.

He realized then he could only follow his gut, his mama’s call, and Megan’s beckoning hand to show him the way. There was a feeling of abstinence to it, where he had to go in wearing only what was on his back. The purity of the act would have to carry him through.

Shad worked his way up the rise toward high ground dense with oak hammocks and heavy underbrush, the willows bowing in the crosswinds coming over the precipice in the distance. On the other side he saw the squat arch of Scutt’s Peak as the sun broke bronzed and crimson around it.

At a bend in the track he looked beyond the dark canopy of scrub and felt his attention being pulled toward the Pharisee. Did it prove that was the direction he should go? Or only that his enemy was much stronger than him and moving Shad blindly to his reckoning?

He should’ve brought the dog. He felt more alone and uncomfortable here than in lockup after Jeffie O’Rourke got tossed in solitary for killing the warden.

The woods closed in and solidified around him with the wild ash and birch drooping, the briar that could shred a man as badly as razor wire. The land was littered with shards of glass and flattened beer cans. You could see where the lover’s lane portion of the road came to an end. Even the horny kids knew not to go beyond a certain point. They cluttered their area and their tire tracks shredded the scrub. As if a line had been toed in the dirt and nobody went past where the fields ended and the thickets began.

The terrain sloped into stands of knotted white and slash pine to the west, and the area diverged into more dirt paths leading into the black groves. Stands of spruce almost appeared blue in the rippling light. He’d traveled over a mile on foot when he finally came to the mold-covered split-rail fence at the top of Gospel Trail.

Sometimes you could feel your life entering through a new door as another closed behind. It was as clear and distinct to him now as it had been when the prison bus had brought him past the gate that first day.

If there was murder waiting for him, it hadn’t shown itself yet.

Tushie Kline had never fully understood the need for chapters in a book. It had been one element of reading that Shad had never been able to teach him. Tushie’s mind was set up to run from the beginning of a thing straight through to its end. He’d ask Shad at each break, “Where’d the story go?” Always having trouble remembering that you had to turn the next page to find it again.

“Where’s my story going now?” Shad said.

He came to the divide and the Pharisee Bridge, the timber trestle that spanned a hundred yards across the gorge to Jonah Ridge.

Bulldozers would’ve driven up Gospel Trail to push over the trees and clear ground for new track. Men tied by ropes would’ve dangled over the cliffs to hand-bore holes and set charges, pegged down so they wouldn’t blow away in the crosswinds. The pilings on which the trestle rested had been driven deep into the cliff rock on both sides. The rugged walls of the gorge bordered the Chatalaha River for over a mile here, where the waters broke into a series of long, violent rapids directly beneath. Shad looked at the wild forests on the other side of the ravine and felt like he was about to leave something behind forever.

Gnarled firs twined along the path where the railroad ties and tracks had been uprooted. The torn and abandoned rails left behind a wake now heavy with gopher nests. The ties themselves had long since been ripped free and probably recycled farther south. Camps of men would’ve been strung through the hills, putting it all down, then tearing it back up again two decades later. Maybe the same workers, or their sons.

Shad put his foot on the first rail and got an odd jounce of exhilaration from it.

There were gaps in the tarred planks of the trestle, some only a couple of inches wide. The platform had rotted away by a half foot or more in some spots. You could stand here and imagine the highballing freight coming through at two in the morning, shaking up the mountains. The drunk miners would’ve come out here to play chicken, stand their ground as long as they could before diving aside. There was about twelve inches of safety space between the rail and the edge of the trestle itself.

There was hardly any embankment at all on either slope, just a sheer drop down to the river and the pilings and support beams driven into the rocky sides of the cliffs.

If you made a misstep now, you wouldn’t stop falling for more than half a mile. The hot-air drafts blowing up through the gorge would bounce you end over end and slow you down just enough that you wouldn’t croak from shock. You’d be awake and aware the whole ride down, thinking, holy fuck.

It must’ve been a big deal for kids years ago to walk from one side to the other on the rails. They must’ve known the schedule perfectly and timed the trains coming, then sat on the side posts as the cars crossed. Train speed couldn’t have been more than twenty miles an hour, with the mining cars stacked up behind. But the bridge, even in its prime, would’ve shaken and rattled like the apocalypse. The Pharisee would’ve felt like it was about to come down at any second.

You had to be aware of the symbols that put you through your paces, so that later on, you didn’t sound like an idiot. Crossing a rickety bridge and heading into the backwoods. Taking nothing along, not even a light.

When the men passed this story on, they’d snicker into their beer and shake their heads. Any damn fool knows not to travel up on the ridge without at least a rifle, a canteen, and a bag of trail mix. If you twisted your knee and got stuck outside all night, you could be as good as dead.

Shad kept moving over the trestle, keeping to the rail where he could progress foot over foot like walking a balance beam. He didn’t trust those planks at all, staring through the holes and seeing the roiling waters far below.

When he finally made it to the other side he stopped there, a little surprised that he hadn’t been ambushed. It seemed like the place for it.

He scanned the forests heavy with pockets of snarled catclaw brambles and briars. The musty scent rose from the matted leaves everywhere. It got you contemplating on who had died in there and who might still be in hiding. Who might be stuck and waiting for your help.

He walked over to the nearest sticker bush and ran his finger over a thorn. With the right equipment, could they tell one scratch from another? If some forensic specialist had examined Megan instead of Doc Bollar, could they have accurately pinpointed where it had happened? Which barb had cut her cheek?

He hiked for over an hour into the backwoods of Jonah Ridge. A creek wound away in front of him, straggling through the forest on a downslope and careening over rocks worn to a sleek polish. Shad kneeled, washed his face, and wet down his hair in the icy stream. About twenty yards ahead he saw the water break wide over something too white to be a rock. He walked to it, reached into the current, and came up with a dimpled plastic container of moon.

The only people he knew who liked to keep their shine cold were Red and Lottie Sublett. Shad had to be close to their place.

He took a tap of the whiskey and spit it out. It wasn’t Luppy Joe’s or any of the usual makers. Someone was using an old car radiator as a still, and the lingering fluid tainted the liquor. Red must be making his own.

Shad kept moving along the trail, watching for his sister. Over the next incline, as he parted the drifting branches still wet with dew, he spotted a shack that leaned so far to the left you could reach out the window on that side and touch the ground. Beyond it, a few twisted apple trees and a pumpkin patch took up about a half acre of partially cleared field.

There was a small garden behind the shanty with a couple rows of lettuce and thin, high-growing corn that was mostly dying. To one side sat a rabbit hutch with a skinning knife jabbed into the top of the wooden box.

Lottie Sublett sat on a carpet of pine needles, in the process of diapering four infants. These were the premature quadruplets that had shown up while Shad was in the can. The babies kicked out with stunted legs and held up their deformed fists, fingers missing from nearly every hand. The infants tried to suck their thumbs but only two of them had any.

Five other children clambered and cowered around her, most of them barefoot and dressed only in ragged overalls. The oldest was a boy no more than thirteen.

The November breeze had grown colder but none of Red Sublett’s brood looked to be uncomfortable. What did it do to your nervous system, that kind of life? When your parents were brother and sister? Did nature bury your nerve endings so deep in your flesh that you couldn’t feel somebody else’s sins?

Lottie glanced up and gaped toothlessly at him. She flinched so harshly that the ill child she’d been diapering flipped over like a griddle cake.

The years had forced their raw corruption on her, the trials of such extreme motherhood written in her face. What did you call it when a woman had so many children in so few years? Her body wracked by such burden, day in and out, month after month. She had stretch marks on her neck, along her jawline, and on just about every bald inch of her he could see. What man makes his own sister live this way?

Lottie got to her feet, peered at him, finally tilted her head in recognition. “You,” she said. “I know you a bit, don’t I? From a few years back.”

“That’s right. My name is Shad Jenkins.”

The infant who’d been flopped like a flapjack sprang over again on his belly. It started creeping and mewling like an animal that had never been given a name. It looked at Shad and started toward him, like it wanted to take a bite out of him.

“Your pa’s the carpenter,” Lottie said.

“Yes.”

“Jenkins. Ah yuh, so you are. What you doing this way? You come to visit on Red? He ain’t here right now, and I don’t know when he’ll be back. Had a red deer out behind the house and Red took a shot but missed the heart. He’s out there someplace tracking it so we can have somethin’ ’sides hare stew. Or are you meanin’ to join them church folk over yonder, eh?”

“I thought I might stop in and talk with them some,” Shad admitted.

“You shouldn’t.”

“No?”

“They got strange ways.” She said it with a hint of concern, as if it mattered but not a hell of a lot.

It took Shad back a step. How odd could these people be that a woman with nine inbred kids would call them strange?

“I don’t know much about them,” Shad said.

“They’re snake handlers. They thrill on the venom. Moon ain’t strong enough, I suppose. Got a small settlement a few miles off. We don’t cotton with them much, but we trade supplies if’n we need to. They ain’t bad folks but they got a worshipful way with the snakes. It ain’t right, cavorting like that. It ain’t a blessed church.”

“Did you ever see my sister out on this side of the gorge?”

“Who she?”

“Her name was Megan. She was seventeen, long blond hair.”

“Was?”

“She’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Comfort and condolences to you.”

“Thank you.”

“I never run into her.”

“She might’ve come up with a boy. Possibly a man.”

“Only girls that age I seen up this way are them Gabriel girls. Daughters of the man who runs the church. Lucas Gabriel.”

The eldest of her children hobbled over and murmured in her ear, staring at Shad in alarm. She hugged the kid and hummed in his ear for a second, telling him, “No no no. No, Osgood, no.”

But the boy had his mind set on something and kept arguing, his gaze shifting back and forth along the tree line.

Shad said, “I’m alone.”

“You ain’t lyin’ now, are you, mister?” Osgood asked.

“No,” Shad told him.

So he’d been right. Red had a little still somewhere, the guts of a radiator and copper piping making contaminated liquor. The kid’s mind had probably been filled with stories of how the Feds would come around and steal their civil liberties.

You couldn’t expect the best social graces from a teenager who probably didn’t run into more than ten people a year. Osgood couldn’t meet Shad’s eyes. His face puckered and went skittering with emotion.

Lottie finally grabbed the boy by the shoulders and shoved him toward the shack, and said, “Go on and start supper.”

“He stayin’?”

“Git in there.”

“I wanna know if he’s stayin’ ’round here!”

“Your daddy be back soon and you know he’ll be hungry.”

“I seen he got a gun tucked in his belt!”

“No, he don’t. Yer eyes is bad.”

“I see clear ’nough!”

“Hush all this foolishness and git in there and cook supper!”

As the kid trudged off Lottie grinned in embarrassment, showing nothing but gums. “He don’t know no better. It ain’t his fault. Me and Red really ought to make more of an effort to bring the children into town when we get our supplies. But Red’s a’scairt that the city ways might confuse and beguile the family.”

Shad had never heard the hollow called a city before. Under different circumstances he might’ve laughed at that, but the way she said it made him nod in agreement. Her concerns were serious ones.

He wondered how that lesson on the birds and the bees would go in this house.

“Can you give me directions to that village?” Shad asked.

“Ain’t rightly a village, I reckon. Just a whole mess of families gathered together within pissin’ distance. Their houses is real close together, so they’s like one big family. If you visit on them, make sure you’re careful on where you step. Those boots go beyond your heel?”

“A little.”

“Walk light. They might be doin’ a rattler roundup. They beat the fields and collect the vipers.” She pointed south, her arm firm and straight and without an ounce of flab. He could almost see the history of her life scrawled in her bones. “Like I says, you be cautious when you get farther on in the forest. You ain’t proper dressed for this area. There’s lots of thorny woods that way. You get lost in the dark and those thistles will surely trim your hair back for you.”

“How far?”

“About five miles or so, but the countryside gets pretty rugged. Don’t you have a knapsack or a heavier coat? It gets cold these nights. You didn’t bring no water along?”

“I’ll be all right.”

The children began to mewl, almost in tune with one another, all of them prowling across the yard.

“You already look like you a bit chilled,” Lottie said. “You want a tap of the jug?”

“No thanks.” He was thirsty but could feel the tension building as she started to stare at him. The tip of her tongue wet those thin lips that buckled in around empty gums.

“Red won’t be back for a while.”

“You can just tell him I said Hi. Maybe I’ll stop back in on my way home again.”

“I mean, we got us some time.” Her left hand came down over the center of her heavy breasts. Her right came up to fluff at her hair. It gave him a kick in the guts to realize she was trying to be demure. “I hardly get a chance to talk to nobody no more. You can come on inside. We got cards.”

“I can’t right now, Lottie.”

“If’n you wanna, you can come on back anytime. Come visit with us. Come see me.”

“Sure,” Shad said, taking a step back.

It saved his life. A clutch of rosebay and dogwood exploded about a foot from his head.

“Goddamn!” he screamed.

Osgood stomped off the decrepit porch step holding a double-barrel shotgun. He aimed it at Shad again. He reached for the second trigger and Shad leaped backwards into the brush.

The shit you could get yourself into.

The kid was too eager and reared at the last moment. The shot sheared loose the bark from a nearby oak.

“No!” Lottie cried. “I told you no, child! No no!”

“He’s gonna make trouble, Mama!” Osgood shouted. “I seen how he was lookin’ at you!”

No wonder the kid was so trigger-happy. Shad saw now that Osgood’s index and middle fingers on both hands were fused.

“No, boy, no!”

“He’s one of them Federal men Daddy’s always talkin’ about! They got slick ways. He’s tryin’ to beguile you, Mama!”

“He’s not, he’s not! He’s your daddy’s friend!”

“Undercover lawman! Or a government stool pigeon!”

The other children, the ones that could drag themselves around in circles anyway, moaned and let out agitated grunts. A couple of them were excitedly crabwalking side to side. They flailed and scrambled about in every direction, contorting and wriggling all over the place. It was like an anthill on fire. Leaves and moss flew in the air as they burrowed, caterwauling and braying. Holy Christ. Making more awful sounds, the babies slid and tumbled over one another, dipping into the earth at their mother’s feet.

“Yellow G-Man! Don’t you never visit around here no more and make eyes at my mama again!”

“Come back, Shad Jenkins,” called Lottie Sublett. “It’s okay now, he ain’t got no more shells. Come on back!”

Shad slid deep into the woods and ran south.

Chapter Twelve

SHE STOOPED AT A STREAM SETTING SHEETS of onionskin paper adrift.

They were so thin they absorbed the water and rode the surface tension of the creek, near invisible unless you knew what you were seeing. There was handwriting on the pages, Shad couldn’t make out from here.

He hung back in the trees, watching. The cool burn in his muscles was making him feel as if he’d accomplished something. Sweat swam into his eyes and for an instant the girl shimmered.

How many gorgeous young girls could you see in two days without starting to feel like a dirty old man at twenty-two?

Or did they only become beautiful because you were so lonely? Lust could do serious damage to your vision. Guys in the slam knew all about that.

She let loose with a chuckle as if someone had just spoken, and the laughter reached her eyes, slanted and crinkled them at the corners. So that she squinted like an eager lover about to crawl forward across the floor. Shad checked around to see if she was alone, and he didn’t spot anyone else.

“My,” he whispered.

This is how it happened in the folk tales and old country songs. The ones they sang around bonfires when they got their banjos out, ready to entertain the little ones. Like a fairy-tale book Tushie Kline once read aloud in a halting rhythm, enjoying it all the more because it had no chapters.

Maybe Shad’s story was the same.

A fella wandering along through a strange grove spots a beautiful changeling girl sunning herself in the shallows. They meet, and though she’s reluctant to give him attention at first, his charm eventually wins out. She’s more lovely than anyone he’s ever dreamed of before, so you just knew this couldn’t turn out good in the end.

She vanishes into a hole in a stone wall too small for a human to pass through. He can’t follow so he slips her notes through the hole, professing his adoration. Her father, the king of goblins, discovers one of the letters. On his right wrist is perched the Killdove and in his left fist is a plague of flies. He locks his daughter in a tower of sapphire and promises obliteration for the fella if she should ever see him again.

The princess weeps so hard that a river of tears flows out the tower window, across the land, and through the hole in the stone wall. The force of her sorrow shifts the rocks far enough apart that the fella can ease past. He follows the flood of tears back to the castle, climbs the thousand steps of the tower while fending off the bloodthirsty Killdove.

He kicks open the door to her chamber and she rushes into his arms. If they’re ever going to be together, she must either renounce her supernatural ways and die like a woman or he must give up his way of life and fade away to some other realm.

Before they can make a choice, the king of goblins prepares to release a plague of flies upon mankind. The fella grapples with the king and leaves his back unprotected as the Killdove strikes him between the shoulders and pecks out his heart.

You didn’t get the full moral lesson of a fable unless somebody gave up everything for love and died for his troubles.

When Tushie Kline finished the fairy-tale book, he fingered the knife scar under his chin, and said, “Shit, why can’t nobody bust my ass outta jail like that? It was breathtaking, man!”

Shad watched the girl slip another piece of paper into the creek, humming as it drifted along the stream. It really did sound like she was talking to somebody else. He looked around again, saw nothing, and took a step forward.

She gave a half turn and grinned over her shoulder as if she knew he was there but didn’t want to look at him. She pressed another page into the water and her finger urged it along downstream. The paper was so thin and delicate that it split apart before it had gone twenty feet, torn by the soft current. Shreds hung on stones and dead willow switches jutting from the mud.

He said, “Hello.”

Startled, she wheeled and nearly fell into the brook. She took two halting steps, stumbled over the slick rock, and went in up to her knees. It was cold water and she showed her teeth, hissing through them.

Okay, he thought, so here it comes.

She gave him a withering glare, and shouted, “The goddamn hell are you looking at!”

He sighed. He was starting to realize that he didn’t possess as much natural charm as he’d always thought he did. He sure wasn’t bringing out the best in the people on either side of the Pharisee Bridge.

Nobody in prison ever hated him at first sight the way people at home did.

“Can’t you be civil?” he asked.

She had an aloof but still-compassionate face, with soft lines at the corners of her mouth like afterimages from smiling too much. She was young, late teens or early twenties maybe, and it gave her an extra touch of humanity.

Her bare shoulders were freckled and dappled with gooseflesh. The air grew heavy with the smell of rain. Disheveled blond bangs framed her heart-shaped face, and she swung her hair off her forehead with the back of her hand, pursing lavish, bee-stung lips.

Shad’s breathing grew rapid. Had he been this horny for years and only just now noticed?

“Well, what do you want then?” she said. “And why you creepin’ up behind me like that for?”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m just-ah-”

How did you explain yourself, about why you were here? Or why you were glancing left and right looking for your dead sister’s hand to give you some sign?

“You’re just what?”

“Looking for the church,” he told her.

“Why?”

“I want to learn more about it.”

It softened her face, and she said, “Not many strangers are interested in our ways. Who are you?”

“Shad Jenkins.” As if his name held its own meaning and had nothing to do with him at all. “Were you waiting on someone?”

“I was hoping to see him today.”

“Who?”

“Not you. I surely wasn’t expecting you. I don’t think, anyhow.”

Shad couldn’t argue with that so he just stood there. She did the same. The seconds ticked off like the passing of ice ages. You could waste half your life standing around wishing that somebody else would make the first move.

The princess of goblins held firm to her stoic pride, unafraid but expecting him to do something terrible. It got to him after a minute and he backed away and started to walk south again.

“I’m Jerilyn Gabriel.”

“Lucas Gabriel’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

He stepped to her and saw that her eyes were green with flecks of gold in them catching the light. She crumpled the remaining pages into a ball and threw them into the water, picked up a stick, and poked them down until they sank into the mud.

Letters to an unrequited love? Diary entries containing the secrets of her tribe? Some words counted for more if you released them into the world, even if they went unread.

“Can you show me the way to your, ah, settlement?” he asked. He didn’t know if the community even had a name. What did you call it? A community? A colony?

“You from town?”

“Yes.”

“I hardly ever go there into the hollow.”

“Why?”

“They’d call me a witch.”

“Would they? Why do you think that?”

“We handle snakes. That scares a lot of townsfolk.”

Shad couldn’t see it. There were enough granny women still sticking to the old ways that nobody in the hollow would give her any trouble. As he was discovering, the folks he’d known all his life were a superstitious lot that ran on fears they couldn’t even name. No one would bother her except the men at Dober’s Roadhouse catcalling from the alleyways.

“Don’t it worry you none? That I might call a rain of rattlers down on you?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’ll just do so. Teach you a lesson for sneaking up on people.”

She eased closer to him, studying his face. As if he might be someone she knew but didn’t fully recognize. She shifted to one side and checked his profile, reached out like she might ruffle his hair. He was hoping, but she didn’t. She was a girl of many half-completed movements.

“What are you examining me for?” he asked.

“Nothing, just considerin’.”

“Okay. Considering what?”

“You ain’t him, are you?” she said, and her voice was suffused with both hope and regret.

“Who?”

“Him.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then you’re not.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“You want to come for supper?”

Ten minutes ago she’d looked at him like he’d escaped from a chain gang, and now he was being invited home to dinner. “Maybe your family wouldn’t take kindly to having another place set beside them. I just want to talk to some of your congregation for a few minutes.”

“Come eat and talk with them all,” she said. “They look forward to sharing with strangers.”

“Really? Why?” Shad asked, genuinely interested. “I thought you people stuck together because you didn’t want outsiders coming around and inconveniencing you.”

“Nah, the hollow folk are always welcome. But hardly any come round.”

“Hardly any?”

“Some come to sit with my daddy.”

He kept thinking of her father being the Goblin King with two handfuls of destruction.

She led him downstream, over embankments that sloped to marshy areas that reminded him of the river bottoms, even though they were three or four thousand feet above the Chatalaha by now.

The wind blew harsher, carrying with it leaves and moans through the boles. Jerilyn shivered and leaned over to take Shad’s hand. She tugged him closer, insistent but also obliging. Self-assured and sexy but somehow also critical, as if testing the structure of his fingers, reading his scars, appraising the bones. She used her thumb to gently rub across his knuckles, the same way Elfie used to do, like, Baby, baby, all will be fine, go sleep now.

They walked in silence, listening to the complaints of the deepening forest. The sun spun down through the branches laced overhead, skewering the ground with golden spearlike shafts. The woods closed in here, briars knotting into a grove of thorn and thistle anchored by oak and drifting boughs of slash pine. The cedar below was matted and wet with dew and heavy November sap.

Shad scanned the bark and didn’t see any buckshot or bullet holes nearby, but the trunks were scarred with thin chop marks. They probably used machetes to cut through the catclaw thickets.

When they broke into a clearing, Shad heard wild giggling.

“There,” Jerilyn said, pointing. “That’s where we live.”

They had their children out gathering the snakes.

SHE STARTED FORWARD IN A RUSH, AND THE TAWDRY color of the trees reared around her. Shad got his bearings and found himself stumbling into a bedlam of activity, as the brush rustled and parted with laughing kids and rattlers.

Two diamondbacks slithered over his boots. He leaped back with a startled grunt and almost dropped over on his ass.

What would have happened then? Would they have sprung for his face, latched on to his cheeks?

“Goddamn,” he whispered. Revulsion nearly overpowered him. Two girls no more than ten years old bumped into his leg, looked up at him, and smiled. He had to fight the urge to run.

So this was how they had fun up here past Jonah Ridge. Roundups.

He watched the parents carrying their croker sacks, drinking beer, and encouraging their children. They cheered and gave advice, pointing out the snakes in the deep grasses. No one wore gloves. Several Plexiglas containers hung open, with their lids unlatched. Someone sang a hymn Shad didn’t recognize. Adults stood in small groups here and there holding crooked metal rods, pouring gasoline in small amounts and setting fires to drive the snakes from their holes.

Pubescent boys leaped over the flames and dove into the undergrowth.

Nobody showed the slightest bit of apprehension. Kids carried snakes back in their arms, thrown over their shoulders. Holding two or three in each hand. They were playing with the things.

Once their sacks were full the folks emptied them into the containers.

He knew the original intent of roundups was to rid certain areas of rattler overpopulation. Gather and destroy as many snakes as possible. In some states, dealers harvested the skins.

An old-timer with a sunburned pate and a Mount Sinai voice ambled by, and said, “Hey there, how you today?”

Shad couldn’t even bring himself to nod in acknowledgment. The guy used a metal rod to trap a diamondback against the earth, hook it up, and draw it closer. The snake opened wide and bared its dripping fangs as the old man stuffed it into his sack. The muscles in Shad’s jaw ached from clenching his teeth.

He recognized most of the different species from books he’d read in the can. Seeing them all in one place surprised him. He didn’t think so many different species could live together in such a small area: garter, cottonmouth, ringneck, hognose, diamondback, indigo, and yellow rat snake.

Jesus, they couldn’t all be indigenous to this patch of woods, could they? Were these church folks bringing them in and breeding them? Penning them up and letting them loose again for their children to chase.

Could you train rattlers? Would they go only so far, then turn around and come on back home again?

Clouds drifted over the sun. The threat of rain grew stronger. The wind rose, carrying the flames higher until smoke and the smell of burning scrub wafted into Shad’s face. Trees swooned and the heady clack of thick oak limbs battering together resounded through the clearing. The oncoming storm seemed to make the folks even more excited. Their Plexiglas bins were filling.

Jerilyn reappeared. One last shaft of sun angled down toward her feet as she approached, then snuffed out as she reached him. Her bangs swept back and forth in the breeze, and he watched her bare shoulders and tried hard not to be entranced by the glimmer of raindrops on her skin. He couldn’t help it. The way the scene had been set, it appeared to have been directed especially for him. She very nearly managed to draw his attention away from the snakes boiling over in her path.

So maybe some of the hollow folks would’ve called her a witch.

“You ever see a roundup before?” she asked.

“Christ, no.”

“You said you wanted to learn about our church.”

“Yes,” he told her. “I did say that.”

Listening to the hisses coming from off to the left, the right, mothers calling their kids to them because they had to get out of the rain. They’d finish catching the rattlers tomorrow, if it was nice out.

There was a different kind of friction working in the air now. A new energy coming toward him, a presence quickly homing in on him. He spun and lifted his hands in case he had to fight. Jerilyn’s face closed up. Her lips pressed together and the fine, soft chin scrunched into wrinkles of annoyance.

“Mr. Shad Jenkins,” she said, “I’d like to introduce you to my sister, Rebi.”

He watched the grasses part, and the storm was on him.

You couldn’t look at her without a list of all the biblical seductresses flashing through your mind. She was perhaps a year or two younger than Jerilyn. Long dark hair framed by the gathered darkness, rain coming down on her and bearing through the bramble patches. An expression of insolence or petulance on that face. She was compact and had graceful curves that crowded her outfit until the seams wanted to split.

She gripped a ringneck in each hand, casually holding them out before her. She struck a provocative pose, hip out, the snakes adding some indefinable wanton abandon. It was bestial in its own way. When she came at him again, it was with a slow, big-cat walk, predatory with a hint of violence.

Doom didn’t always sneak up on you, sometimes it sashayed.

“Hello,” he said.

There was meat and jiggle to her. A light blue skirt sheathed her fine hip, and she wore a loose black top cinched at the waist by a thick belt. He should’ve spotted her from twenty yards off but he hadn’t until she was on top of him. Her breasts moved vigorously beneath her blouse. A dab of crimson touched the cheeks in her round face, the lips equally red. Her hair coiled and clung against the sides of her neck. A flicker in her black eyes made him think of Callie Anson for an instant.

He hadn’t seen a woman-any woman-during the two years he was in the slam, and now they were coming out of the weeds to find him.

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jenkins.”

It took him a second to find his voice. “You too, Rebi.”

Jerilyn’s eyes narrowed and he saw the anger move through her like an iron smoothing out creases. It had nothing to do with him. His presence served as a catalyst for some dispute that had started a long time ago.

“You’re a little wide-eyed, Mr. Jenkins. Never handle snakes before?”

“No.”

“You a’scairt?”

Everybody always asking him that, like they were waiting for him to fall apart. You say yes, and they have something to hang over you. If you say no, they shove the fucking thing right in your face. Better to sound like an urban hippie who’d never set foot in a field before.

He said, “I know enough to respect them.”

“Don’t you be worried none. If’n you get bit, we got plenty of that there antivenom serum.”

Just the thing to set his mind at ease. There was something sly about her that he both liked and hated.

“He won’t be bit, so long as you turn those ringnecks aside, Rebi,” Jerilyn told her. “You angered them some.”

“Oh, these is just babies. They wouldn’t likely break the skin.”

“Come on,” Jerilyn said. “It’s time for supper.”

Rebi looked at Shad, let her tongue out to moisten her top lip. “You eatin’ with us?”

“Yes, he is,” Jerilyn answered for him.

“That’s fine then. Daddy’s gonna enjoy meetin’ him.”

Rebi held the snakes up before him, opened her mouth wide, and brought the reptiles closer and closer and closer until all their tongues were flicking wildly together.

It made him sick to his stomach, and hard.

Chapter Thirteen

THEY LED HIM BACK UP OVER THE EMBANKMENTS and down to a trail that ran through a tract of catclaw briar. The rain came down and brought a cold that somehow became despair. It reminded Shad of the evenings when he was a kid and he and Pa would walk out to his mother’s grave and blunder their way through prayers. Six or seven years old, sometimes Mags would come along and say the proper words for them.

Rebi eventually let the two snakes she’d been carrying go free, and the girls began to walk faster. Rain cascaded off the slash pine, and oak branches snapped in the winds. The temperature dropped quickly until they could see their breath. Rebi began to laugh quietly.

He heard the other snake handlers up ahead on the trail, the children still giggling and chattering excitedly, parents giving sharp commands to watch for stickers. Jerilyn pressed a hand to Shad’s elbow, helping to guide him over the rough path.

When they broke from beneath the heavy brush, the trail sloped to a hamlet he hadn’t been expecting.

The community proved to be much larger than Shad had imagined. He’d been thinking it might be like the shantytown quarter in Poverhoe City, but it was much more formalized than that. Lottie Sublett had been right. Houses and cabins sat close together, porches bunched up to form plank walkways.

There was some money here in the settlement. But the men had done the work themselves and they hadn’t had the skills or craftsmanship to do an impeccable job. His father would’ve been appalled. Foundations had shifted and the walls inclined at bad angles. Rain would cause doors and window frames to stick or jam shut. They had sunk their own wells and septic tanks and the area had unnatural grades to it.

Now folks returned to their homes carrying their containers of snakes, the kids asking questions about church services, men talking about their hunger.

In the center of the small colony stood a two-story farmhouse with a wide veranda. It was much larger and better constructed than the surrounding buildings, erected on rocky, thorn-choked land that could never be properly farmed. It showed that these people either believed in miracles or had an insane amount of faith in themselves.

Unlike the other homes, which looked to have been built within the last couple of years, the farmhouse had been around for decades.

“That’s our place,” Jerilyn said. “It doubles as a communal center for the congregation.”

“A church?”

“We don’t really have a proper chapel,” Rebi told him, and when she spoke she turned and moved against him. He had a hard time listening even with her talking in his ear. “Just a big room in back of the house with seats.”

“Is your father the preacher?”

“I reckon you could say that, though anybody can give witness if they like. The rest of the congregation, well, they’re more than just neighbors. A lot of them are cousins, family now through marriage. More every year.”

“Was your whole village out there this afternoon?”

Jerilyn let out a smile at that, and said, “Mama and a couple of the other women stayed out of the roundup so they could prepare supper.”

One question led to another. He was starting to grow annoyed by the inquiring tone of his own voice, but pressed on. “Is this considered a holiday for you? A holy day?”

“Every month or so we do the snake hunt. No particular day, really, just whenever Daddy and the rest of them get in the mood for the celebration.”

“And what do you do with them all? The snakes.”

Rebi slid up into his face again. The girl had no idea what personal space might mean. Ferociously sexy as she was, it still got on your nerves. “Daddy does some preaching and everybody bears witness and they handle the rattlers during services. Afterward, we set ’em free, then round ’em up again.” She drew her hair aside and cocked her head so he could see. There were puncture scars along the edge of her throat.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Why the hell are they on your neck?”

“’Cause I like to dance with snakes in my hair and draped over my shoulders, that’s why.”

Glowering, Jerilyn pulled her sister roughly away. “It’s not like we let the snakes bite us on purpose. We’re not fools, and we don’t believe that God will protect us from the poison because our souls are pure. It’s just another way to pay tribute to the Lord. We’ve all built up a resistance over the years, so it’s not as dire as you might think. Like I said before, townsfolk would think that witchy.”

Rebi’s blouse had been soaked through and when she moved beside him she gave it an extra nudge so he could feel the weight of her chest pressing in close and pay attention. He did. Her hair flowed across the left side of his face and Jerilyn’s flailed against the right.

Still, you had to pretend that you weren’t aware when your life took on the pattern of a tale you’d heard before. How many guys in prison had talked about fucking two sisters back to back, back to forward, right to left, and the catfights that came afterward? The crews on C-Block would be drunk on pruno listening to how the cops would come in and bust up a brawl between two razor-wielding ladies. A rookie getting slashed in the face and screaming while he bled all over the place. The nightsticks and cuffs coming out, paramedics in the hallway, and the guy stoned and just lying there on the bed watching it all. The C-Block crews would laugh their asses off, and they never got tired of sister stories.

Rebi gripped his arm and pulled Shad up the veranda stairs. “We’re late getting back. It sounds like they’re about to start.”

“It’ll be all right,” Jerilyn said. “They’ll be glad to see we’ve brought a new friend.”

They marched to the front door and Shad stopped in his tracks and stared into the foyer ahead. Prison was closing in on him again. Both Gabriel girls tugged at him harder, but he didn’t budge.

Megan’s hand beckoned him from the hall and he finally stepped forward.

It wasn’t dark inside the home at all. He even had to shield his eyes, moving from the gloom of the storm to an abruptly illuminated room. He was suddenly surrounded by clamor: voices, a clatter of silverware, and the rattling of windows as the rain throbbed against the glass.

Rebi brought him a towel, and said, “Come sit.”

“The whole settlement sits down and takes meals together?”

“On certain days. The babies and real young’uns are put down for naps after a roundup.”

“You sure no one will be upset?”

“You got no sense about you at all.”

“There’s plenty who’d say you were right.”

“You’re thinking it’s a big fuss, Shad Jenkins,” Jerilyn said. “It’s not. You got no call to be distressed. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“Sorry, it’s been a long time since I’ve sat down and had dinner with any family.”

“Even your own?”

“I don’t have much of one anymore.”

With a casual grace, she led him down the corridor into the depths of the house. They moved side by side as if they were a long-enduring couple who’d been together so many years that they balanced each other out. It somehow felt more natural now that it ever had with Elfie. It was such a disturbing thought that it put a hitch in his stride.

Jerilyn reacted with subtle adjustments, slowing to match his pace. He dried himself but couldn’t shake the chill. Falling behind him, Rebi slid herself against his back and urged him along.

Okay, he thought, so where does the game go from here?

When do I get to wrangle the rattlers and prove myself a servant of the lord?

Folks were already seated for dinner and the first plates were being served when Shad stepped into the room. He sat between the sisters and his introduction into the fold hardly made a ripple. He counted twenty-five people and none of the children were in sight. A few of them reached over and shook his hand, clapped him on the back. A couple knew his name already and said they’d met his father years ago.

A woman flitted over, hugged him, and made a comment he didn’t catch. He heard various names spoken at him, but few he could remember. Taskers. Johansens. Burnburries. It was the first time he’d had a meal with another person since the prison cafeteria.

Up on the wall they’d nailed Hellfire Christ, and he didn’t want your sympathy. He didn’t even want your love. He just scowled at you from his agony and wrath and let you know he was up there for the sole purpose of making you come face-to-face with your own crimes and weaknesses. Hellfire Christ was damn near smiling. He wanted to see you go down.

Shad was a tad surprised. He’d thought only the Catholics went in for crucifixes. If these folks were going to have one, then he expected snakes to be wreathed around the gaunt figure. Snapping at the Messiah’s feet, twined at the bottom of the cross.

But there weren’t any other idols or paintings of serpents anywhere in view. Did snake handlers believe that Saint Patrick was a good man for casting the vipers out of Ireland or did they consider his actions disgraceful?

The shit you had to think about.

Shad ate beside the snake handlers, giving short precise answers whenever he was asked a question. The old-timer with the sunburned crown looked over and said it again. “Hey there, how you today?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Good taters!”

“Yes.”

It felt exactly like it did in the can. Your first view of the new world’s hierarchy happened in the cafeteria. You learned how the place was organized, who ran the show. Where you were allowed to sit, how the power structure worked. You started with the guy at the head of the table. All the others would fall into line eventually.

There he was. Leader of the nameless church, master of vipers, King of the Goblins, Jerilyn and Rebi’s father, Lucas Gabriel.

A bull of a man dressed all in white except for the carefully knotted narrow black bow tie that had been fashionable before Atlanta burned. The tie told Shad something about Gabriel but he didn’t know what. He was bald, his skull knobby and creased, with a fringe of kinky brown hair above each ear. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to reveal powerful forearms covered with purplish snakebite scars. He showed them off the way cons advertised their jailhouse tats. It proved you didn’t care about the surface of your flesh. Only what was in your blood really mattered.

There was an element about Lucas Gabriel that reminded Shad of Pa. Maybe the tightly compressed potential of force waiting for the chance to escape.

The patriarch. Shad knew the man had a hell of a story, and he wished he’d asked Dave Fox or somebody else what it was.

Gabriel watched Shad with washed-out eyes the color of gravel. There was no suspicion in them. Only an impish sparkle of authority that let you know he was in charge and never to cross him. It was the same gleam the warden’s gaze had held until Jeffie O’Rourke rammed a paintbrush through his eye.

“He came here on his own, Daddy,” Jerilyn said. “This is Mr. Shad Jenkins.”

“There’s always room at our table for one more,” Gabriel told her. “If someone wants to share our bread with us.” His voice had a laugh to it, but the laugh didn’t come out.

No direct acknowledgment or real welcome from the man, which put another spin on the situation.

“He ain’t never handled snakes before,” Rebi put in. Almost mocking but having fun with it, pushing a little. Shad figured these people did a lot of that, honing their social skills against one another like sharpening knives.

“Folks from the hollow, or most towns anywhere, don’t truck much with snakes except to kill ’em.” Gabriel’s smile showed off his small, even, white teeth. “Must’ve been quite a sight for him to come upon, seeing as how we were rounding up so many for services.”

“Yes, it was.”

Shad figured the hard sell was about to start, and they were going to talk about the burgeoning ranks of God’s saved people now. He began to draw his thoughts together and gather his words, but then Gabriel asked somebody to pass him the potatoes. The whole group fell to talking among themselves again even louder than before. Most of them were garrulous, chuckling noisily, leaning toward him to welcome him into their long-winded jokes and conversations. No one addressed him specifically.

He checked around to see who might be keeping to themselves.

Those were the ones you had to watch for. The hitters. The muscle.

They weren’t hard to spot. Two toughs, brothers by the look of it, with feral eyes and fixed dull faces covered with patchy beards. Shirts buttoned up to the collars, thick hair parted at the side and combed over into ridiculous juvenile waves and curls. Perhaps they were Gabriel blood, but Shad didn’t see any of the same poise in them. They sat obediently like dogs.

It took a while but eventually he heard their names. Hart and Howell Wegg.

They ate silently and with good manners, wiping their mouths a lot. They kept their elbows off the table, cut the ribs off the bone, and sliced their meat into small pieces. Whenever someone spoke to them they smiled dutifully but hardly said a word. They appeared so docile that Shad could feel himself gearing up for impending grief. He hoped he was being paranoid but really didn’t think it would be that easy.

The meal seemed to be a carefully rehearsed performance put on for his benefit, and he paid no serious attention to it. He tuned out most of it and found that even Jerilyn wasn’t saying anything of importance though she kept whispering to him. He could feel how keyed up they all were, holding back but edgy and raring. Was it due to his entrance or because this was one of their holy days? He sat and waited and knew it wouldn’t be too much longer.

It took another twenty minutes. As the ladies began to clear the table, he started to stand and Rebi shoved him back down. She told him, “It’s not anything sexist, it’s just our turn to clean up. You sit and relax, talk to Daddy for a bit.”

Gabriel held his chin up in Shad’s direction. That proved to be the only gesture he needed to make for everyone to quiet down. Some folks had already left, others didn’t seem certain of where they should go or what they should be doing.

“Not many men from town would share a plate of food from our table.”

“Why’s that?” Shad asked.

“There was talk a hundred years ago that my forefathers were cannibals.”

So now things were going to be silly.

Shad got the feeling that Gabriel was testing him, but he’d expected as much. Cannibals though? He guessed everybody had to play out their dark secret, no matter how goofy it sounded.

Rebi brought him a slice of cranberry pie for dessert. He couldn’t put it past these folks to have tossed in a fingernail or a couple strands of hair to get a reaction.

“Anybody remember that talk besides you?” Shad asked.

“Some, I suspect.”

“I never heard it.” He spooned in a mouthful of pie and swallowed without tasting. Sometimes you pushed back, and sometimes you just played along and considered the angles. Shad stared at the man.

Hart and Howell Wegg ate their dessert too, without any hint that they understood what was going on. Rebi and Jerilyn returned and took up their seats beside him again, but didn’t eat.

“You want to know about us, don’t you?” Lucas Gabriel said. His voice had a sigh to it, but the sigh didn’t come out either.

“Yes.”

“Why’s that? Not because you’re lookin’ for the Lord.”

The man was right, but you couldn’t give anything away this early in the game. “It’s presumptuous for you to say that, Mr. Gabriel.”

“I reckon that’s true. I got no defense for such boldness.”

“We all have our reasons.”

“So then, name some of yours, Mr. Jenkins. Why have you come to us?”

“I’m not certain,” Shad said. If you straddled the line, no one could trouble you for being on one side or the other.

“Good, I can appreciate a man in agitation who’s not afraid to admit it.”

Shad didn’t think he’d admitted to any such thing, but the man’s assuming nature was something to keep notice of. “My sister recently died.”

Murmurs went around the table, the usual kind words and sympathies. The Wegg brothers kept staring, vacuous but amenable. Rebi licked her lips, a gesture of sex and girlish fidgeting.

Gabriel began to paw at his chin, the scars on his arms twisting in the light like snakes themselves. “So then, perhaps you do seek to ease your burden.”

“Everyone seeks that, don’t they?”

“I do believe you’re right.”

“She was part of the Youth Ministry in Preacher Dudlow’s church down in the hollow.”

“A fine man. I’ve met the reverend in town on occasion, and at some of the Christian tent gatherings when traveling ministers come to visit.”

“I was wondering if you’d ever seen her up this way. She was seventeen, long blond hair?” He couldn’t believe that this was the only way he could describe his sister, and he wasn’t even sure if she’d still had long hair. “Her name was Megan.”

“No,” Gabriel said. “We have few visitors, and I recall each of them well.” He glanced around the table and others shook their heads and agreed they’d never met her. “Was there something we could have done for her?”

“I don’t know. I was away for a time. I’m sad to say I didn’t know her well anymore.”

Lucas Gabriel grunted loudly. “Loss of a family member is one of our most painful trials. It’s made so much worse if there are regrets or unresolved circumstances.”

Time to divert the course of the conversation, allow the man to have his say. Shad could see that Gabriel was beginning to get a touch antsy, waiting to cut loose. “Does your sect have a name?”

The man caught on to the word-sect, sounding so much like cult-and the glimmer in his eyes seemed to flare. “No, we believe that the denomination of churches and religions has more to do with man’s hubris than his following the Lord. Shall I tell you about us? Our history?”

“Sure.”

“Are you familiar with Mark 16:18?”

“No,” Shad said, though he realized it had to be the verse about snakes. Something about laying hands on. If you couldn’t quote the passage word for word, then you couldn’t say you actually knew it. That’s how it had been back in Becka Dudlow’s Bible class.

“It’s the central passage that forms the core of our faith. ‘They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’ From that verse came the original belief of the snake handlers.”

“Everybody’s got to have their own blessing,” Shad said. “Makes them feel like God’s giving them extra attention.”

“Well, I’d say you’re probably right about that, much of the time. We want to earn our consideration. My great-grandpa Saul was one of the founders of the Holiness Church in eastern Tennessee. Used to bring the serpents with him to the camps and down into the mines.”

“How’d that go over with the other men?”

“Not well, at first.”

“I’d guess not.”

The others at the table had heard the tale before, but expectation and curiosity still grew in the air, the mood fluctuating, as if they had never heard the end of the story.

“At the close of the nineteenth century, the industrialization and factories of Moloch were spreading down through the South. The rich owners began to turn their backs on God and praise only silver. They replaced our farming and our way of life. They paid poor wages for unskilled labor, offered only high-priced rental properties and unsanitary conditions. The bitterness of men took hold and they became violent.”

“Tell what happened, Daddy,” Rebi said. Jerilyn let out a soft snort that only Shad could hear.

“The snakes saved us,” Gabriel said. “God gave us the signs of his power. We followed his will. We bore witness and struggled with the serpents, and sometimes managed to heal the dying with the venom.”

Shad had talked to a couple of drug dealers in the slam who’d come out of the river bottoms and whose fathers had mined those same mountains. On the outside they drove Mercedes and Porsches, had houses in Miami, and yet they still fucked around with snake handling. It wasn’t poverty that pushed them. It was the primitive urge to try yourself against the hand of fate.

The glass of the windows vibrated with a gentle staccato.

“Thing was, all of them were actually afraid of snakes,” Lucas Gabriel said. He shifted in his seat until he was aimed entirely at Shad. “Saul most of all. Rattlers terrified him. His baby brother had died in the crib after being bitten. They knew firsthand the kind of agony one would go through. All of them had seen congregation members die. They went to church and were visited by the spirit of the Lord, and yet they never knew if they were going to get back out the door alive. If not, at least they died in service.”

That was about as old-school as you could get. “Where’s the cannibalism come in?”

“One summer the green timbers of a mine gave way and there was a cave-in. They got most of the men out safely, but it took rescuers seven days to dig Saul free. He was trapped alone there in a far chamber, except for the snakes. When he was rescued, the lower half of Saul’s left leg was gone. People figured that he got so hungry he actually ate it.”

There was an even more subtle analysis going on now. Shad allowed himself to be set up, and said, “He was driven to that extreme in only a week?”

“No, a’course not, but that’s the way legends get started. Saul’s leg had been crushed and gangrene had set in. He surely would’ve died from his wounds, but he claimed the snakes fed off his rotting leg and saved him.”

“Maybe it’s true.”

“Maybe it is, at that.” Shad knew he was expected to grin but not laugh at the miraculous twist, so he did. Gabriel joined in for a moment. “After that, Saul came out here with his wife and sons, my grandfather among them, and together they built this house. This hamlet grew up around the faith.”

Looking down to take another bite of pie, Shad saw that it had been cleared along with all the other plates. Only a few folks remained around the table, and some were talking and appeared to have been deep in conversation much of the time. He’d been focused too sharply on Gabriel.

It was dark outside and a weariness began to settle on him. He’d been up since dawn with almost no sleep and had covered at least fifteen miles of rugged terrain on foot. Jerilyn’s shoulder pressed him from one side and Rebi sort of nuzzled him on the other. They both smelled faintly of jasmine, which he hadn’t noticed before.

Gabriel pursed his lips and appeared to be considering his words. “Will you stay the night? You appear to be exhausted, and I doubt you’ll find your way back to Jonah Ridge in the dark. Pardon my saying so but you don’t seem to be an expert mountain traveler.”

“I’m not.”

“One misstep on the Pharisee and you’ll meet the Lord earlier than I presume you’re expecting.”

“Aren’t you holding your services tonight?”

“No, that’ll be tomorrow afternoon. The roundup and the storm have agitated the snakes. I want to give them a chance to calm down some.”

All right, now it wasn’t a fairy tale anymore, but the beginning of a dirty joke. Traveling salesman staying overnight with the farmer’s two luscious young daughters. There were so many punch lines he couldn’t decide on any one of them.

“So, you’ll stay?” Gabriel asked.

“Yes, if you’ll have me.” Where else would he go?

“Of course we will. Jerilyn will make up one of the guest rooms for you. Although the house seconds as a communal center of sorts there’s still plenty of free space. We’ll talk more in the morning about your sister if you like.”

This huge home just for Gabriel’s family and the snakes. Shad could hear them thumping and knocking about in their containers somewhere deeper in the house. “Thank you.”

The sisters looked at him and he looked back, wondering how far into perdition he’d already fallen and how much further he had left to go.

Chapter Fourteen

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT SHAD AWOKE naked on his feet, standing at the side of the bed. Jerilyn sat next to him, her open hand on his slick back. The room was filled with a muted pink light from where she’d thrown her slip over the small nightstand lamp. He was breathless and his chest hair was heavy with sweat.

He was aware of the nearness of her beautiful body, and the pattern of drying salt on her belly and between her breasts. A fine mist of perspiration still coated her flesh. That heady scent of jasmine wafted through the room. Shad’s breath came in bites. There was a remote sense of satisfaction within him-no, it was satiation. He struggled to remember their lovemaking and couldn’t. Your own mind was sometimes the worst gyp of all.

She grinned and her teeth were bright in the shadows. “You’re not him, but it’s okay, we still had fun together.” Jerilyn leaned back upon the pillows, spread herself over the sheets. “You’re a nice-looking boy. I like your body. And those streaks of white hair.”

He’d missed so much of what had happened that he felt dispossessed and displaced before her. He should be flattering her or cooing other soft words, but the proper time had already passed by.

“Who are you waiting for?” he asked.

“It’s not for you to know.”

Shad tried to search out the truth in Jerilyn’s eyes, but saw only a glistening of love that wasn’t for him. “You really write him letters and send them off on the creek?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you upset that he doesn’t get to read them?”

“He does read them. He quotes from them when he comes to me.”

“But you said you thought I was him. Don’t you know who he is?”

She kissed him.

A storm now shrieked outside, blustery winds tearing at the clapboards and tossing shingles. The rafters groaned and creaked furiously. When he’d moved Tushie Kline up to reading poems, Shad had to explain about metaphor and symbolism. How what happened in a man was paralleled in the heavens. As above, so below.

Tushie Kline marveled at that, and asked, “Like the depletion of the ozone could be a symbol for man’s spiritual bankruptcy? Ain’t that some fucked-up shit right there?”

“Mags,” Shad whispered, and scanned the corners of the room searching for her. “I’m losing you.”

“Who’s that?” Jerilyn asked. “A girl? Mags?”

“My sister.”

“Losing her? Now? But didn’t you say she was dead?”

“Yes.”

“How’d she die?”

“I don’t know.”

Staring at him in the darkness, Jerilyn stirred and crept across the bed, reaching for him. She took his hand and tried to pull him to her, but he wouldn’t go.

“Why are you here, Shad Jenkins?”

“Tell me everything your father didn’t.”

She curled and twined among the blankets, and her breasts swayed and her eyes lit and he wanted to fall on her. He drew back a step.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Like what?”

“About what goes on here.”

“He told you the truth… well, except for about the snakes drawing out the poison in Great-great Grandpa Saul’s leg. That’s not so. After a few days trapped down in the mine he ate the snakes. His leg was crushed and taken off by the cave-in so he ate his leg too. If you can call eating bits of yourself being a cannibal, then he was one.”

“Goddamn.”

She turned over in the pink light, and the glow worked itself against her skin and Shad started to sweat again. “But Daddy was right, the snakes did help save Saul. From starvation and thirst anyways.”

He couldn’t stand it anymore. He moved to her and she drew him down on the bed, wrapping her arms around his back as he kissed her. In a minute it became much rougher, and her laughter grew harsh and dizzying.

“My, you’re a feisty one, Mr. Jenkins,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d have the energy for another go, considering the day you’ve had.”

Something broke deep within the center of his chest and a small moan escaped him. He champed it short for fear he wouldn’t stop until he was wailing. He bent her to his will and buried his face in her throat and her unstoppable pulse snapped savagely against his tongue.

Grappling sticker bushes pivoted wildly outside the window, scratching at the glass like manic children wanting in. The heavy rain sheeted and lapped across the pane. It formed peering liquid faces that glowered and sneered from all angles, looking in at him, scrutinizing, hating.

WHEN HE AWOKE NEXT HE WAS ON HIS FEET AGAIN, with dawn inching through the wet branches framed in the morning light. Rebi was naked and creeping closer on all fours.

She rose up like a rattler, arms at her sides, and touched his belly once with her lips.

She looked up from under a fan of dark hair hanging in her eyes, and she kissed him harder, raked him with her teeth. Her expression remained the same as the first moment he’d met her. Insolent, petulant. He didn’t mind it as much now since there was a cunning in there hidden among wayward promises.

The rain had eased back to a drizzle. She reached up and gripped his wrists, casually holding them the way she’d held the ringnecks in her hands. She bit deeper, trying to draw blood but hadn’t managed to yet.

The room was now filled with a sullen blue light from where she’d thrown her skirt over the lamp. She glanced up at him, released his skin, and said, “So, you’re a night walker, are you?”

“Yes.” You couldn’t really play coy when you were wandering around in somebody else’s house with your goodies hanging loose.

“I smell my sister on you. You have at her?”

“We were together. Where is she?”

“Not here. I knew she’d be along quick. That’s fine. You ain’t him but you can have me too, if you want.”

The living fire of his rage carried him across the room and back again to her until she was staggering in his embrace. He tightened his hold on her until she let out a heated grunt of pain. “Who? Who the hell are you girls waiting for?”

“You’re gonna hurt me.”

“You might be right.”

“Do it. You can if you want. Hurt me, it’s all right.”

“Tell me his name.”

“He ain’t got a name that matters, not one worth saying. We’re here together and I want you right now.”

His temper could only save him for so much longer. In another minute he wouldn’t be able to talk. “I want to know about him. Why he’s so special. Why you won’t say his name.”

“What’s it any of your concern? Why do you care so much?”

“It might have something to do with my sister,” he told her, feeling farther away from Mags than ever.

“How can that be?” Rebi asked. “You surely are out of your head.”

“Do you write to him too?”

“Nah, I ain’t much good with pen and letters like Jerilyn. ’Sides, all I need do is talk into the southern wind, and he hears me.”

Shad let out a bark of derisive laughter. “And you think I’m cracked, eh?”

“More than most, I’d venture. But that’s all right. I’ll take some of your pain away for a time.” She slid against his bare flesh, smoothing her breasts into him, using her nails on his skin.

“What the hell do you want with me?”

She reared as if he’d just backhanded her across the nose. “I’d think that was pretty damn clear.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

“Are you afflicted? I got my own pains too.”

He checked the corners of the room, searching for his departed mother or his lost sister. It was distressing to learn that you couldn’t make your way through the world without somebody dead to show you the way.

The seeping, dour blue light only made Rebi appear more alive to him, full of grim and intense charms. He looked down and saw fine traces in the dust on the floor on the far side of the bed. He hadn’t stepped there.

Grabbing the footboard, he pulled the bed aside.

Jerilyn’s body lay on the floor, as if she were only sleeping, with a slight smile on her lips.

Shad whimpered, “God no.”

He kneeled and brought his hand to her throat, where he’d buried his face only hours before. He was so cold that for a moment she felt much warmer than him. Her icy blue flesh turned a terrible red where he touched her.

“Did you do that?” Rebi whispered with an animal excitement. No sadness or fear, just her breath quickly becoming a rapid panting. “You kill her?”

“No.”

“You must’ve.”

“I’m telling you no,” he said, wondering and despairing.

“You sure about that, Shad Jenkins?” Her mouth pressed against his ear, and she licked him.

“For Christ’s sake, Rebi, shut up.”

“Don’t boss me. I don’t take guff from killers.”

He dragged the bed aside even farther, seeing that the dust had other trails in it, spelling out words.

Run

Now

“Is that from him?” Shad asked. “The one you were expecting?”

“I don’t know. He don’t write me ever. Sounds like it’s for you though. Maybe you wrote it yourself.”

He checked his fingers to see if they were dirty. He couldn’t tell in the dim light. Not even after he’d tore her skirt from the lamp and held his hands out in front.

Rebi moved on the bed, waggled the backs of her fingers against his naked ass. He nearly jumped into the wall. She tried to get her mouth on him again. He gripped her by the shoulders and pushed her away, but she only hauled him to her again.

“I want you,” she said.

“Oh Jesus Christ.”

He had to get control, had to focus. Get C-Block solid again. Tighten up his guts before he got sick all over the floor. He forced himself to calm down. You had to deal with one thing at a time.

Like you couldn’t have two gorgeous girls coming after you any other damn day. No, had to be now like this, with a corpse under the bed and your dried spit dappling the body.

But the rage had its own will. It rose and ran inside him, moved him along until he’d grabbed Rebi and flung her across the bed. She let out a sharp laugh, part burlesque and part accommodating, as she twisted and tried to yank him down into her.

You learned to pay heed to the dead breath on your neck.

Shad clutched his pants and started to get dressed. He heard doors opening around the house and abruptly he knew that his life was in danger. The hills were being cute, playing him like this.

He grabbed his boots. He wanted to make sure he had something on his feet in case he had to run. He unlocked the window and opened it, thinking, Yeah, this really is a punch line. Traveling salesman nails the farmer’s daughters and then has to hop out the window with his pants half on. Except the wooden track of the frame had warped over the years and the window wouldn’t go all the way up.

“Someone’s comin’,” Rebi said. “You better jump.”

Lucas Gabriel burst through the doorway wearing only white long johns and heavy cotton socks, looking like he hadn’t slept a minute during the night. He rushed inside and barely glanced at Jerilyn’s corpse. His hand rested on the butt of an old army.45 that smelled like the ass end of Da Nang.

“I wasn’t sure if you were him or not,” Gabriel said. “Him with another face on.”

“What’s that mean?” Shad said. “What’s all this about faces?”

“But you’re not him, are you?”

“I told you who I am, Mr. Gabriel.”

“You’re just another moon-running townie bastard poisoning our people!”

Shad didn’t know why that annoyed him so much, but it did. He started to growl a curse but thought better of it. The man’s daughter had been murdered, even if he didn’t seem to care much at the moment.

A peculiar situation that just kept getting worse, begetting more and more strange things.

Gabriel hunched as if to charge forward with his knobby hairless skull. He was letting the compressed force within him free, and it wasn’t going to stop rushing out until more blood spilled. Shad saw that Gabriel’s throat, without the collar and tie to cover it, was also covered with snakebite scars.

Those washed-out eyes of grit and rubble gazed at him in confusion and pain.

“I haven’t done anything, Mr. Gabriel.”

“Yes you have. You don’t even know what it is you’ve done.”

“Call the sheriff’s office. Get Increase Wintel or Dave Fox up here. We need this looked into.”

“I don’t know them, and we don’t want any more hollow outsiders. I’ll handle this myself.”

That had the nuance of a threat but no will behind it. Shad thought he could cover the distance between them before Gabriel could pull his gun, but the man didn’t seem to want to draw.

You could be cornered in a room with an open door and a half-opened window. Shad couldn’t defuse the situation. Couldn’t truly even make the attempt. Not with both Gabriel daughters in the room, one on the bed, one under it.

Gabriel’s eyes narrowed and he worked his lips, staring at Rebi naked between the messy sheets. She reached over for her blouse and put it on. She moved to stand beside Shad and sort of slumped against his shoulder. Her skin still burned. Was she baiting Shad or her old man, and for what purpose?

“She isn’t for you,” Gabriel said.

“That so?” Shad asked. “Who then? Tell me his name.”

There it was, coming around to the same question, sounding like an owl. Unable to do anything except go who who who fucking who.

“He’ll show you no mercy.” Gabriel’s voice took on a plaintive note.

“Who won’t?”

“He’ll drag you down into the gorge with the other doomed.”

“Fairly vicious talk for a man of God.”

“Would you expect any more from a snake handler?”

“Yes.”

Whatever was going on in this house had started a long time ago. Shad knew he was the catalyst that had forced someone else’s hand, and Jerilyn had paid the price. He wanted to ask the man why he wasn’t crying. Why the bastard wasn’t showing any regret or true anger. What he was really afraid of. And who who who fucking who.

But Shad didn’t want to shock Gabriel from his paralysis. He turned to Rebi, hoping she’d say something calming and reassuring, take the edge off, but she only let out a slow grin that was pure backwoods jezebel. Any other time it would’ve made him hum, but now he could only groan.

The man took another step, angling sideways to show off the handle of the pistol. He flexed his fingers, inched his hand closer to the butt of the gun.

“Don’t do that,” Shad said. “I can’t smell a trace of oil. You haven’t cleaned that.45 in years. It’ll take off your hand. Or your damn head.”

“Why are you here?”

“I told you.”

“You said nothing of consequence! What are you doing in my house? You’re no friend. You don’t hear the word.”

Like it was all in playfulness, Gabriel actually put his hand on the gun and began to tug it loose.

As if you were just supposed to stand there and wait for it to clear leather.

“Don’t!”

If they were mouthy, you let them run with their talk. It gave you a wedge while they went along posturing. But when they were quiet and slow you knew they were already disconnected.

Shad slapped out with his left hand and smacked the.45 to the ground, swung around with his right, and drove a fist into Gabriel’s face. The man fell back into the door and the wood tore loose from the top hinge. His mouth spurted and a streak of blood curved down the wall.

Rebi coiled beside Shad, her arms writhing over him, and said, “Kill him. Kill my daddy.”

Their Jesus had hellfire in his eyes. You couldn’t forget it.

A scream resounded in the corridor. It had to be Mrs. Gabriel. He didn’t remember her features and couldn’t see her now in the shadowed recesses of the house. There are some people who are in your story but not of it.

“I was right,” Gabriel said. “You didn’t come here with an open heart lookin’ for the Lord.”

“You’re a real contrary bastard, you know that? Why don’t you tend to your own house?”

“He’ll find you eventually.”

“Will he?” Shad would ask one final time and then let it go. “Who’s the serpent stalking your garden, Gabriel?”

He saw a blur of black motion in the trees, coming toward the house from the shack next door. He knew it would be the Wegg brothers with more guns. Shad pushed past Gabriel but Rebi reached around from in back and hugged him. “No need for fussin’. You got no reason to fear ordinary fool men.”

He shoved her off and started for the door again, but Hart and Howell Wegg were already inside, keyed up by the scream. Hart held a rifle. Howell carried one of the Plexiglas containers filled with snakes.

These people and their snakes, like bringing over a crumb cake.

There was no animosity in their faces. Nothing like when Little Pepe had lumbered closer, intent on doing the job.

The Plexiglas canister opened and the rattlers came pouring out in heaps, twining and slithering among each other, spreading across the floor.

They uncoiled and several flowed directly for Shad as if they’d always hated him.

Hart lifted the rifle, took a step forward, and swung it around.

Gabriel shouted, “No!”

So, Shad thought, here it is again.

They had called him a jonah in the slam because violence circled him without ever quite touching down on his shoulder. Instead, it would miss him and hit somebody else close by.

The rifle blast struck Rebi in the left side of the chest. A broken cry that almost sounded like Shad’s name erupted from her mouth. Blood and viscera washed across his neck in a wave of warm brutality. Wet hair whisked across his face as she flopped sideways into his arms, slid from him, and draped dead over the bed.

Every man wanted to be a hero for a woman, even when it was too late. It gave him a reason to stand tall. The rage made him roar. Snakes hissed and lunged. Two bit into Shad’s boots and hung on. Hart and Howell Wegg, still without expression, continued to stare. The woman in the house screamed again.

Shad caught Lucas Gabriel’s eye and the moment lengthened further than it ever should have. He fought back a twinge, gave a huff that wasn’t quite a sigh as Gabriel, with great remorse, grimaced and started to lift his gun. The rattlers rose and closed in, slithering over Jerilyn’s body and blotting the smile from her lips.

The rifle swung. Shad crossed his arms over his face and went barreling out the mostly shut window, where Mags’s hand was waving to him.

Chapter Fifteen

IN THE FEDERAL PEN THE OLD MOB GUYS SUPPOSEDLY had 812 channels of cable and sat around watching porno movies and The Godfather trilogy all day long.

But on C-Block, the warden only let them have two hours of TV time in the afternoon. Nothing that might incite violence, suicide, depression, or sexual excitement-no action pictures, no Jerry Springer, no MTV, no Ah-nuld, not even Oprah. The Aryans used to lose their shit when the O was on, they’d start flinging their chairs, chase the homeboys down in the shower stalls. No O.

But every once in a while the TV guide would get their programming wrong and you could catch the last half hour of some trash hit. The ones about the regular guy pushed to his limits and having to get revenge on the criminals: the sadistic sheriff, the terrorists, his evil twin brother, his cheating wife who faked her own death and framed him for the murder. He’d cut loose and tape a hand grenade in some fucker’s mouth and toss off a quip while brains flew. He’d be bashed to hell by the end but still limping along saying funny shit, and if he heard a gun cock or a rocket launcher hum, he’d always be able to dive out of the way at the last second.

It looked easy in the flicks. The guy goes through a barroom window and the wood and glass just explode away in a shower of tiny bits like sugar candy. He does a cool diving roll, snaps onto his feet, and does a zig and a zag, breezing through the woods. Maybe one or two wild gunshots behind him, little puffs of smoke on the breeze. You couldn’t laugh too loudly or else the bulls would know somebody screwed up and there was something good on the tube.

Jeffie O’Rourke once looked at him while they watched five minutes of some seventies Southern sadism film, an innocent guy trying to escape from the chain gang. Jeffie said, “This is the only kind of movie where the hero dies or goes to prison for life but still manages to win something.”

“Win what?” Shad asked.

Like that, like a Greek chorus expounding on morality, like the Stage Manager in Our Town coming out to narrate the closing scene and put some polish on the whole thing. Maybe Jeffie had answered him, Shad couldn’t remember.

His nose poured blood and it felt like every muscle in his body had been stabbed with an awl. His forearms were covered with deep lacerations, and the briars tore at him as he came through the scrub. His face had been whipped by thistle branches and thorns still stuck out from his forehead and cheeks.

He ran.

It only took a minute before he was so turned around that he didn’t know what direction he was going. Gray clouds hung heavily in the sky and he couldn’t spot the sun. All he could see was the same smeared vermilion haze up there behind the ashen billowing stratus.

He tried not to put a sound track to it but couldn’t help himself. He heard the silly banjos and redneck mouth harps. The washboard slaps and scratches as he rolled down the embankments head over ass. The catclaws dug in deeper every second.

If he was heading back toward the ridge, all he had to do was make it across the trestle and back to his car. If he was heading farther south, he’d have to climb down the whole damn mountain before he got to the river. Maybe he could find one of the old logging or hogback trails that led to town. Otherwise, he’d either hit the cliffs or the bramble forest, both impassable.

Rebi’s blood dried slowly on him, and she glazed his tongue.

THE WOODS CONTINUED TO SOLIDIFY WITH OAK, ASH, stands of spruce and slash pine. Carpets of cedar, leaves, needles, and moss tore wide in his wake as he struggled to keep his feet. It was slippery as hell and he kept going down, tripping over concealed roots and logs. He sprawled on his face a couple of times and crawled past jagged tree trunks and broad-headed skinks.

He didn’t know how close the Wegg brothers were, but he knew they’d be coming.

Thickets swarmed around him, branches lurching in the breeze and swatting at his hair. Shad could hear the churning of water nearby and made for it.

Looking down, he saw that he’d picked up a dirt-filled beer bottle someplace and for some reason still held on to it. It felt important to keep it with him. You didn’t question your right hand at a time like this.

He slid down a muddy embankment and came to a creek that had become violently swollen with the rain. He had no idea if this was the same place where he’d first met Jerilyn and watched her pressing the onionskin pages into the stream, but he stared at the fast-moving brook and instantly hated it.

Okay, so now maybe he had a reason for the bottle. The ripped, worn label peeled off with almost no prodding. He used his filthy index finger to scrawl on the back of it

Who R U, Fucker?

He pressed the label into the bottle and threw it in the creek. Let the bastard read that, if he could. Wherever he was.

Shad crossed the brook and had just drifted behind some Catawba and dogwood when he heard the harsh clatter of tree limbs scraping back and forth against each other. Someone pushing through.

He went to his knees and hit the mat of spongy cedar, turned, and peered through the bushes.

So here came Hart and Howell Wegg-capable, efficient, and moving with deadly competence through the woods. Hart still had the rifle and Howell had stopped off to pick up his shotgun. They checked the ground for markings like they were tracking wild boar. Shad saw just how clear a trail he’d left behind him. Mauled chunks of ground, busted sticks, and bent saplings leading right to him.

Where did that leave Lucas Gabriel? The man might think Shad had killed Jerilyn, but he’d seen Rebi die at the hands of his own thugs. Would the entire settlement keep quiet about this? Would any of them go for the sheriff?

He kept thinking that a last-minute rescue from Dave Fox was about the best he could hope for.

The Weggs murmured to one another as they hunted, appearing casual and even aloof. Frigid-blooded sons of bitches. How could they have lived so close to the Gabriel girls and not fallen in love?

They had Shad cut off on this side of the creek channel, so he couldn’t circle back and return to the snake town even if he wanted to. Find that old-timer who kept asking him how his day was, pop the geezer in the chin and ransack his closet until he found a revolver.

No, Shad was on his own.

They saw the bottle floating away in the brook and didn’t know what to make of it. Shad was a touch surprised when he heard their clipped, formal conversation. They were discussing soil degradation, water erosion, organic content, and nutrient cycling in the area. All this just looking at the ground. Pointing here and there, seeing footprints, coming on slow and relentless.

Last night, he’d thought they’d been polite but a little ignorant, but they were much sharper than that. Worse, they were proving they were patient and in no hurry to make a mistake. Shad wasn’t going to last long out here with them following, and he couldn’t outrun them. He had to make a play and do it fast.

Those movies he’d watched with Jeffie O’Rourke always had the Southern boy checking all the angles, knowing where the perfect spot for an ambush would be. He’d tie a handful of leaves to his back with a vine and become invisible, maybe walk backwards in his own tracks to fake out the cops. All these little tricks to show how much smarter he was than them.

Shad had never felt so stupid in his life. He thought about what his father had told him. How if he had to take a life to save his own, he should.

For a guy who’d survived two years in the can, and being out here with a couple of huckleberries ready to shoot him for something he didn’t do, you would’ve thought it would be easy, killing somebody.

He used to see the faces of murderers on C-Block, the way their eyes would roll back in their heads with delight when they plunged the shiv in. One inch, two, then even farther, and still shoving deeper until it nicked bone and got stuck in the muscles and they couldn’t pull it out again.

They made it seem so effortless and fun, like it meant nothing more than a quick, fierce lay. But he wasn’t built like that. The very idea of it, even now, made him snort with fear.

When you couldn’t run away, you had to run forward.

The only chance he had was to wait here for the Weggs to step up the embankment, and when they got to the top, he’d launch himself. He didn’t know how to take down two men with weapons, but there wasn’t any choice anymore. He had to make the suicide play.

They were talking about the beer bottle now, wondering where it had come from, what it meant, if this was further proof of a widening sphere of pollution. They moved up the hill toward where Shad waited beneath the brush.

His vision flared red and black. He felt the hills thinking about him again, agitated and somehow even fidgeting, wheeling toward him. But it was different now. The anxiety of the land had a loving quality to it, he sensed, like a parent pacing around the kitchen at midnight, waiting for a teenager to come home. The undercurrent of the world reached for him, apologetic in a steely inflexible way, as if sorry for the trials it forced others to endure and remorseful for its needs.

The Weggs reached the top of the slope and Shad stood up from behind the bushes and pounced. You didn’t get much dumber than this.

He clamped one hand around Howell Wegg’s throat. Swung wide with his other arm and knocked the shotgun aside, pointing it down toward Hart’s crotch.

The plan-such as it was-depended on whether Hart Wegg flinched at having a shotgun aimed at his nuts. If he did, Shad had another second to work on things. If not, Hart would just fire his rifle into Shad’s head and that would be the end of it.

Adept and effective, but only a man like any other, Hart Wegg tightened up, did a little hop, and twisted aside to save his dick. Shad let go of the shotgun but not Howell’s throat, reached out and put his free hand on Hart’s chest and shoved. Off-balance like that, Hart Wegg teetered on the rim of the embankment for an instant before he went over backwards and rolled down through the cedar and brush until he was out of sight.

Strangling a man was goddamn tough, but using your thumbs to press in on the Adam’s apple made it a lot easier. None of that trying to choke a guy where the muscles and tendons were rigid and well developed. Shad got in close, leaned his hip forward tying up Howell so he couldn’t move or drop. Howell brought the shotgun around once more, trying to slam the barrel of it hard against Shad’s arms and break his grip, but Shad wouldn’t let go.

Jesus, he thought, this is it, I’m actually going to kill a man now.

“Win what?” Shad asked, because his thoughts were all over the fucking place.

Howell’s terrified eyes spurted tears that ran into his patchy beard. Hart would be along any second. Shad didn’t have much time, he had to get the shotgun. He let loose with a shout and exerted himself even more, wondering what price would be on him now for doing this thing with his own hands.

He felt the cartilage beginning to slip beneath the pressure. Howell felt it too and his eyes lit with an anguished, living panic as he realized he was seconds away from having his windpipe crushed. He tried to slip the shotgun barrel closer to Shad’s face, on a poor angle, hoping to get a shot off. Shad pushed harder and Howell Wegg’s throat collapsed.

Hart must’ve had a pretty good view of it all because he let out a shriek from below. He couldn’t fire the rifle because Shad had Howell’s slumping body propped up in front of him. A final wheezing rustle passed into the November air and Shad took the shotgun from Howell’s dying hand, turned, and ran.

HART WEGG WOULDN’T COME UP THE SAME EMBANKMENT. He’d circle tight, probably around the Catawba and slip through the woods on Shad’s left, keep no more than twenty or thirty yards off. Maybe. It didn’t matter. You couldn’t fake your way through something like this. Shad didn’t have the know-how to set an ambush or build a roost and dig in to wait. He was back to running his ass off.

Shit, extra shells. He should’ve checked Howell’s pockets. Why is it you’re so smart ten seconds too late for it to do you any good?

Somber, writhing clouds covered the sky, and the sun cowered behind the hills. Crimson light spurted distantly and leaked off in an arcing swirl like a cut carotid.

Rain started to come down again and he kept his stride as best as he could over the rough landscape. The pain slowed him some but he was working past it. He wasn’t graceful but holding the shotgun somehow helped. Carrying it gave him a subtle reassurance, the heft and weight of it connecting him to the world.

Shad continued stumbling through the woods, branches clawing at his forehead and adding to his gashes. He wouldn’t go easy, and that resistance might help keep him from going at all.

Just as Dave Fox had predicted, Shad had done little besides cause himself a lot of pain.

Soon the hitch in his side got worse and the rage deserted him, leaving only a void in the center of his chest. He bounced into jagged, rotting maple tree trunks, snarled bramble vines, red chokeberry, and wild indigo. He didn’t know how many miles he’d covered or where he might be, or whether he’d done anything besides go in one absurd loop back to where he’d started.

Whenever he came to a bank of rock that he couldn’t see over, he had to pause and check, for fear of going right over Jonah Ridge. At least then he’d die closer to home.

And as he came around through another grove of catclaw and sticker bushes the land broke wide in a series of hillocks, with the thick and menacing stands of virgin pine leading into a bleak forest of darkness that spread for miles. He slowed, stopped, and slid to his knees.

As he threw his head back gasping for air he saw Hart Wegg standing high above on a craggy bluff about a quarter mile off, sighting on him.

Shad had played it all wrong. He could see it very clearly now.

Right after killing Howell, Shad should’ve just sat down and tried to hide behind a bush. He would’ve been much better off. Now he had a shotgun that was worthless beyond twenty-five feet and Hart Wegg, the slick hunter, had a rifle good up to a thousand yards.

He wouldn’t need that much. The childishly chaotic curls of his thick hair flipped back and forth in the wind. He appeared only slightly less docile than before.

Shad knew it was already too late.

He ran for the pine, hurled himself over the rim of the slope, and saw how it eased away beneath him for dozens of feet before disappearing into shadows.

The bullet took him low in the back. He glided through the saturated air as thin wisps of mist rose from the dense, black floor of the woods and burst against his face. He watched the spray of his own blood precede him on the breeze, as he sailed for a vague and burdened eternity that ended much too soon yet not at all.

Chapter Sixteen

YOU DIDN’T MEET DEATH ALONE AND ALL AT once. You met your death a little at a time over the course of years, through the loss of your family and friends, the dead pets. The death of all the Laments.

You’ve been here many times before, you just didn’t know it then because you hadn’t gone quite far enough.

Not like this.

You hold your breath for two minutes and you’re swimming and having fun. You hold it for four and you’re drowning and about to be a corpse. You can’t hold it for six. If you’ve been turning blue that long, then take a good look around, see the saints and the martyrs and all the other turquoise-colored spooks milling about, the short-diapered fat guys with tiny wings playing the harp behind you.

Shad staggered on. He’d lost the shotgun and felt a touch lonely without it. He was in shock and knew it in a remote, uncaring way. If Mags were coming she’d be here soon-first one hand, then the other, then finally she’d be whole again and standing there with her arms out to him.

He tried to hold on to himself but kept wafting off, passing out on his feet and waking up a moment later. Sometimes he found that he was crawling or propped against a tree with his blood slathered against the bark. This wasn’t good.

“Oh Mama,” he said, because that’s the sort of thing you say when you’re dying and you know it. You always want your mama before the end, even if you’ve never met her.

From his waist down he was completely drenched in blood. The rain didn’t wash any of it off the way it would’ve if this had been a sixteenth-century morality play. If he was getting close to God and cleansing his worldly sins from his soul. He’d be on his deathbed but redeemed, and ultimately filled with insight.

Since Shad was still tremendously stupid, he hoped he had a while left to go yet.

The bullet had entered above his left buttock and gone right through. The exit wound was the size of a child’s fist, punched out the right side of his belly, slightly over his hip. He tried to remember what organs were there. He thought that most of the major shit was on the left. He couldn’t remember.

It was almost a straight line through because Shad had been diving at the moment of impact. If he’d been an instant slower, he would’ve been standing upright when the bullet hit. The angle of the shot would have taken out his entire groin. Cut his femoral artery, and ended the game a whole lot quicker.

Bad enough to die, but really, did you have to go without your nuts?

He’d read a first-aid manual in the slam, toward the end of his sentence, because he’d read everything else in the prison library by then. He saw the pages of the book in his mind now, much nearer than his own pain.

He was in shock. Made you think you were wide-eyed and surprised, in your pajamas with the back door open, looking outside in the gloom and a cat springs out. “Oh!”

Like how his father must’ve felt when he found out his third wife, Tandy Mae Lusk, had skipped town with her own first cousin. Oh!

The definition had something to do with blood circulation being seriously disturbed. Symptoms included restlessness and apprehension, followed by apathy. Check. His breathing was rapid and labored. His eyes were probably glassy and dull, with dilated pupils. A person in shock is usually very pale, but may have an olive or reddish color to the skin. He glanced down at the back of his hand and saw only shadow.

Treatment included maintaining an open airway. Preventing loss of body heat. Control all bleeding by direct pressure.

Oh, the bleeding. Oh Mama.

Shad shivered uncontrollably with the cold. He had to stop the bleeding. Okay. Glancing left and right, he checked to see if Megan were drawing near. Or the elusive contradictory presence of the hills. Or Hart Wegg. Nothing yet.

He started talking to himself, hoping it would focus him, but his voice was a reedy, manic whisper. He sounded even more crazy so shut the hell up. On C-Block, guys with anxious wired voices like his didn’t last long.

Besides, the more of your voice you gave away, the more power you consigned to your foe.

He reached up and tore off his shirtsleeves, knotted them together, and looped the rags around his belly. He put a finger in the new hole in his ass and couldn’t stick it in past the first knuckle. It didn’t hurt. His muscle and tendon and fat and whatever else was in there had shifted and sort of plugged the gap. There was hardly any blood coming from the spot, and he didn’t know what it meant. You took what luck you got and tried to be thankful. Sometimes you could only shake your head.

His stomach was still seeping badly. The patch job barely covered the exit wound but maybe it would be good enough. When he drew the knot tight he heard his own scream from a distant place. He was surprised at how high a pitch he hit, almost girlish until he let out a coughing cry. It proved to be more manly, the way the tough guys died in old Westerns.

What next?

Elevating the lower extremities. Transport to a medical center as soon as possible.

Get out of the fucking woods. A good hunter didn’t let his injured prey wander around long before making sure of the kill. Hart Wegg would be coming.

Shad took two steps and leaned against a pine. He pressed himself on, got a few feet farther along, drifted to another tree.

This was going to take a while.

His feet went numb and his skin crawled. The pain got closer and finally descended. He lurched and limped through the forest. Another burst of panic filled him, and he gritted his teeth against it.

The storm rose and the wind grew stronger, driving rain hard as rock salt against him. Branches heaved and struck out, the howling becoming louder. As above, so below. He could imagine Tushie Kline sitting there reading from A Century of the World’s Best Poetry, the book in his lap, pulling apart symbols like tearing legs off spiders.

Shad was talking again, low but quite intelligently, as if he was back in the prison library with Tush and explaining the grandeur of literature. Shad listened to himself and thought he should shut up but realized he couldn’t stop. “A morality play is essentially an allegory in dramatic form. It shares the key features of allegorical prose and verse narratives. It’s intended to be understood on more than one level at a time.”

Shad wasn’t completely sure if he agreed with what he was saying, but decided not to argue. “Its main purpose is pedantic as well as dogmatic, and the characters are personified abstractions with aptronyms.”

He didn’t remember the word, and said, “What’s that?”

“A label name,” he answered. “The nondramatic precursors to the morality play are to be found in medieval sermon literature.”

“That’s right.”

“Homilies, fables, parables, and other works of moral edification.”

“Sure,” he said.

The agony took him over until he cried out once more, then it receded and his mind cleared.

He turned and saw his body on the ground with his face screwed up in pain, sucking air heavily as he slept. Trickles of rain ran in and out of his open mouth.

Above him stood his mother and Hellfire Christ.

“Oh Mama,” he said, and wondered if this was it.

The Jesus before him wasn’t the Christ in Mrs. Rhyerson’s paint-by-numbers portrait. Nor Old Lady Hester’s picture either. You had trouble visualizing this Christ shaking hands with Conway Twitty or sitting on a cloud with Elvis.

Hellfire Christ’s fists were much larger and the wrists thicker than the gaunt icons you saw hanging on dining room walls. He was a stonemason who walked three miles from his village to the cosmopolitan city of Sepherus, where the Romans were constructing along the Sea of Galilee. He worked to the point of exhaustion because the Romans took one-fourth of his pay in taxes. If it was a bad week, they came to Nazareth and forced the two hundred peasant villagers to cough up their tribute in produce and farm animals. He’s learned a great deal about Plato and Aristotle from the Greek artisans laboring on the floor mosaics.

His features were plain, grim, and heavily wrinkled from the desert sun. The corners of his eyes were crusted with grime and dust. About five-eight and slightly balding. With no easy access to a daily bath he had a repugnant odor that nobody in the Middle East would ever notice. Even Shad’s mother was making a face, sniffing the air.

Jesus, whose voice might or might not have been the voice of Shad’s father, whispered something too low to hear.

You come all this way to meet God and the guy mumbles.

“Shad?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“You… are you hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Will you come see me now? Are we going to be together again?” Her face brightened.

“No, Mama. Not just yet. You have to help me.”

“I do?”

“Yes, you have to show me the way out.”

He saw himself now, coughing on the ground. Speckled black phlegm coated his lips. He’d read somewhere that it indicated liver damage. You might survive for a while, but it pretty much meant you were through. Maybe the liver wasn’t on the left side the way he’d thought. Terror seized him again and he looked at Jesus.

No chance at mercy there. Hellfire Christ had a lot on his mind, his burning eyes glancing side to side as he paced around the woods like a prowling animal. He didn’t want sympathy and wouldn’t give any either.

He was as bad as Barabbas, wanting to kill tyrants, cut the throats of soldiers. He stared down at Shad’s body and glowered. Hellfire Christ wasn’t smiling and looked like he’d forgotten how to.

“Shad?”

“Mama, you have to help me!”

He didn’t know which was worse-the fear of dying or the humiliation he felt hearing the squeak in his voice. He gritted his teeth and the frustration yanked at his belly and became something much more awful. He just didn’t want to die up here without getting the answers he was after. He didn’t want to die.

“You should’ve brought Lament,” she said. “The hound might’ve helped.”

Even the ghosts had to get in potshots when they could, say that they told you so.

“Son?”

“I’m here, Mama.”

“Son?”

“I’m still next to you.”

Tears dripped down her cheeks. He’d never seen his mother cry before. She held her hand out to him but he couldn’t touch her.

“I said you should listen to me, son.”

“I know. You were right.”

Her gaze skittered past, then fell on him once more. “The harlot. He lay with the harlot. I still had skin, the earth wasn’t cold, and he sanded his stone and cleaved to another.”

“Enough about Pa. Tell me how to get back to the road.”

“There’s bad will on the road.”

“Just guide me back to it.”

“You can’t return that way. You’ve come too far. You can’t go back. You’ve got to go on. To the harlot.”

Hellfire Christ, his eyes brimming with vengeance, whispered to Shad’s mother again.

She said, “I don’t want to tell him that.”

Oh, Jesus.

Hellfire Christ actually put his hand on Mama, gave her a little shove forward. She said, “No. Please, no.”

“What?” Shad asked.

“Behind you,” she told him. “There.”

Shad had been wrong. Hellfire Christ still knew how to smile. His teeth were tiny and sharp and his leer kept getting wider until you knew for sure he was insane. He must’ve given it to them that way when he was on the cross, spitting down on them, smiling in his scorn. In his last moments, Christ took a piss and really let them know what he thought.

Shad turned.

He didn’t see anything for a second because he was scanning too far ahead. He took a step and hit something at his feet.

Hart Wegg’s corpse had been laid out before him like an offering.

Without a scratch on him, and with his lips tugged into a scant grin.

Hart was twined around the rifle the same way a sleeping child might hold on to a beloved toy. Like the snakes that should have been wreathed around the figure of Hellfire Christ on the Gabriels’ cross.

“But he was your man,” Shad said to the mountains. “And Jerilyn was your woman, she loved you. They died smiling.” And then hissing, so much louder than any of the rattlers. “But not my sister! She wasn’t yours!”

He spun back and his mother was gone. Hellfire Christ stood a yard away, and then a foot, and then an inch until they were nose to nose, and this Messiah stared into Shad’s eyes. His rage was no different than what Shad felt himself. It had nothing to do with fighting for freedom or redemption or heaven’s love. You were simply crazy with hate.

They both reached for each other’s throat, and when he touched God, Shad woke in agony and retched black blood across his own chest.

SOMETIMES HE STOOD OUTSIDE THE MISERY AND watched his body lurch and crawl through the woods.

It had stopped raining. The rags around his belly were gummy with red mud and stuck with foliage and moss, which helped to seal the wound.

His sister’s hand appeared only once, on an incline as he began to flounder downhill. She waved him upward through the brush and he turned and followed and kept stumbling on.

Where’d the story go? he thought, having trouble remembering how to find his next page. He might have already reached the end of it but was just too foolish to realize it. Like those people who sit in the movie theater watching the end credits roll and say to one another, Is that it? Is it over? No, can’t be. Looking around at the rest of the audience, checking the faces of strangers as they proceeded by. It is? That’s all? The movie’s over? Huh? Well… that sucked ass!

His tenacity proved more powerful than his dread. The fear that had overwhelmed him earlier had slowly been replaced by the understanding that death had already dipped down for him but had chosen not take him. He wasn’t finished yet with what he had to do.

Why had Hart Wegg been killed? Or Jerilyn? Or Megan? What purpose did it serve to keep Shad alive in the face of so much murder?

The woods thinned and shifted into a sparse cherry orchard. A note of memory chimed at the back of his mind and he began to move faster. Everywhere he touched the diseased bark of the spindly trees his hands came away covered with runny purple sap. The fruit was dying.

A surge of strength filled him and he pushed on until he broke into a clearing. He heard the truck horns nearby, wailing on Route 18.

Shad went to his knees for a minute, panting heavily, tried to get back to his feet, and couldn’t make it. He rolled over onto his back and let out a gurgling cry. He had nothing left and hoped he’d come far enough for them to find him.

It took a while but eventually the pumpkin-headed kid appeared, staring down into Shad’s face. The boy made a flat wheezing sound like calling an animal. It brought out another child, this one with arms like flippers and no bones in his legs, who hopped and crept closer, mewling. The distant corners of the yard stirred. A spineless kid with slashes for nostrils came squirming through the high grass.

Megan had led him back to Tandy Mae Lusk’s farm, to the ill children, to her own mother.