Valley of Bones

Five

I took up with Hunter Foy again, but it wasn’t exactly the same as it was before, because the little tiny part of me that was still able to love had got totally squashed by what all had happened at the house and there was nothing in my heart but gravel and old oyster shells. I started to help him in his dope business at that time and I was amazed to learn how big it was. Hunter used to make regular trips into Gainesville and Panama City to sell to his customers there, bulk sales, bricks of compressed seedless marijuana, shiny with brown resin. He had a very superior product, Hunter, and it made me curious. I watched TV like everyone else, and I wondered how he was able to do like that, without other drug gangs coming in and how he got it all organized and who his supplier was. I wondered pretty hard because it wasn’t long before I knew that Hunter Foy did not figure all of that out for himself, him being smart enough for a Foy but not by any means the sharpest knife in the drawer.

It was February 3, 1985, a Monday, when I found out the secret. I biked over to Hunter’s trailer, and there was an old rusted Dodge pickup with Virginia plates sitting in the yard with a couple of big feist dogs in it that growled at me when I went by. I wasn’t supposed to be there that night but I had forgotten a book and I wanted it. The book was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and like every ill-educated fourteen-year-old in the world I thought it was hot stuff. I went barging into the trailer like always, saying Hey whose truck…and then I stopped because I was looking into the barrel of a big revolver. On the other side of the pistol was my first sight of Percival Orne Foy. Hunter said real quick and nervous oh that’s just my girlfriend, unc, and the older man slowly dropped the pistol off of me and said we got business, girl, you’d best be on your way, and I said sorry, I just forgot my book, and I went and got it.

When he saw the book he gave me another look. He was fair and rangy with the white-gold hair and the blue eyes that all the Foy clan have and around thirty-five at the time. He favored Hunter a little, or I guess you could say Hunter favored him, on account of him being the son of Orne’s brother, but where Hunter was soft around the jaw and mouth and a little empty in the eye department, Orne Foy was steel hard in both places, and not like any other man I’d met until then, and the first thought that raced through my mind as he held that pistol was this man could kill Ray Bob Dideroff for me, if I could get him to want to. He looked at me for what seemed like a half hour but couldn’t’ve been more than a couple of seconds, and I felt a little like I had when I first got that look from Ray Bob, like he couldsee me not the mask I showed to the world, but there wasn’t any of that evil in it, no lust at all, only an interested regard from a being higher than me, one of those winged lions from mythology, or like a man sizing up a dog he was thinking about buying. He said you reading that book and I said yes and he asked me how did I like it, and I said I thought it was great. He said I guess you think you’re one of the people who hold up the world and I didn’t say anything and he said, what you got there is a shadow of a shadow of a shadow. Would you like to see the real thing, the source of the light? And I said, yes, sir, and he got up and took my arm and took me out to his truck. I guess there might be another major drug trafficker somewhere who travels with a copy of The Viking Portable Nietzsche never more than a reach away, but if so I never met him. He handed me it, and I looked at it and said Nitscha? And he said it right, and I said, I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed. He looked at me funny like I might want to bite him and said you’ve read Nietzsche? And I admitted it was just Collier’s Book of Quotations, although it was on my lips to say oh, sure all the time, I wanted him to respect me so much, and that was the first time I had that particular and useful feeling. He told me to get out and he’d be back in a month and we might talk about it. Later I found out he bought them by the case and gave them out like Gideon does Bibles, a missionary in his way was Percival Orne Foy.

Well, started reading that night and I’ll admit that there was a lot that left me confused in it, mostly references to things I never read and philosophical terms. I had to look up Wagner and all the Greeks he mentions in the encyclopedia, which wasn’t a bad thing. But the core of it set me on fire, seemed pretty much designed to set on fire any bright heartbroken fourteen-year-old with a lust for revenge. The will to power! The tyranny of the weak! And fuck Christianity while you’re at it, all those hypocrites at Amity Street. Mediocrities! Slaves! I did the usual blasphemies, including dragging poor Hunter out and busting into Amity Street and making him fuck me on the table up front while I howled and laughed like a goblin.

When Orne Foy came back next month I was there and sat at his feet and drank in wisdom. Nietzsche had been right, Western society was hopelessly decadent, was moving inexorably toward chaos, Atlas shrugging away, fundamentalists and Jews running the country trying to turn us into a nation of repressed slaves. But it couldn’t go on. The environment would collapse, poisons would flood the air and the water, new diseases brought by filthy immigrants that we didn’t have the sense or guts to keep out would ravage us all. The economy would collapse because all the weak couldn’t stand for the strong to flourish and chained them with all their rules and regulations, so a real man couldn’t breathe…but after the collapse the faithful remnant would emerge, heavily armed, from their hidden fortresses and reclaim the world for glory and honor and savage beauty.

And a lot more in that vein. I had never really thought much about the world, except to despise it, so Orne’s teaching fell on rich virgin soil and flourished. He had a place in the wilds of Virginia where he grew dope in defiance of the slave government, and where, after the final collapse, he would establish the nucleus of the new civilization. I wanted in on all that, needless to say, a perfect fascist disciple, me, maybe all teenagers are fascists of one kind or another. And also he said he was paying off Ray Bob to let Hunter operate in the county, which I should have figured out, given Hunter’s soft brains. He was bored by all our talking and he usually lay stoned in his headphones while we philosophized and his uncle raped my mind the way Ray Bob Dideroff did my body. It was terrific, better than dope, really, the only funny thing being that he seemed not to be interested in my actual body, which I shoved under his nose as often as I could manage. In those days only actual professional whores had access to the kind of clothes they sell for little girls at every mall nowadays, but I wore my thinnest Tshirts and tightest jeans, and once I even brought along one of those cold packs you use in coolers and ran it over my nipples so they would poke out when I went into the trailer. But nothing. I had to make do by imagining it was him when I fucked Hunter.

Meanwhile, the year advanced, the weather got hot again, and I waited patiently as I could for events to transpire, and as it happened I had to wait for Memorial Day weekend. The police always threw a big barbecue, and of course we all had to go because of Ray Bob being the chief. I was happy to see that Momma was losing it ever more frequently, fits of screaming in public. Ray Bob kept getting her to take more pills, but it didn’t seem to do any good. I saw him talking to Doc Herm at the party, looking over at where Momma was downing beer after beer and popping large numbers of those green-and-black caps in an effort to resume her equilibrium.

After the picnic I sneaked off with Hunter and we went to the beach and listened to some people play music in a house there and we sold some dope, and then we fucked a couple of times on the beach and then I said I wanted to go home and take a shower. He dropped me off at the end of our street. We had this long driveway leading to the house and I could hear the crying from halfway down the drive. When I walked in the front door I could hear that it was Esmeralda and Bobbie Ann doing it. They were in the kitchen. Esmeralda looked at me and said something in Spanish that I didn’t understand and I walked off to see what was what.

Ray Bob was lying in Bobbie Ann’s room at the foot of the famous rocker, with his fly open and his skull in a couple of big pieces hanging on to the end of his neck. She had used more bullets than were strictly necessary. She herself was in the yellow Mustang in the garage, looking like she was about to drive off, had she not been dead. They say that women never shoot themselves in the head out of vanity and Momma was true to type, having placed the muzzle of the Colt Python against her breastbone and blown most of her tiny cold heart into the rear seat. The place stunk of gunpowder, blood, shit, and Jim Beam, so I did not tarry long.

I honestly had not really expected Momma to kill herself, I figured she would make a run for it, but I was not unduly dismayed either. I was sadder, to tell the truth, when I found she had also killed Jon Dideroff, who had never as far as I known done anything to hurt her. Collateral damage, I guess, he just got in the way, or maybe she just didn’t like the way he looked just like a little Ray Bob. Esmeralda and the girl had been out on a shopping trip when it happened, or she might’ve taken them out too. She also missed Ray Jr., who’d been off at the beach with his friends, and I remember thinking oh, well, you can’t have everything. I was the blond beast then and that is how we think.

The Colt Python was Ray Bob’s, of course, one of a dozen firearms he owned. He was the county NRA president and a great believer in gun safety, so there was a big gun safe in his den, with a key and a five-button combo lock. The manufacturer had provided two sets of keys, and one of them had lived in a tackle box on a high shelf in the Sears shed until I pocketed it when Ray Bob locked me in there. Conveniently, it was still in the manufacturer’s little plastic envelope, along with a printed card that had the combination on it. Ray Bob kept his pedophile pictures in the gun safe too, as I learned when I tested the key. I grabbed a few, stunned-looking little girls holding big hairy erect penises or lying on beds with their pudenda exposed and that bruised look around their eyes. I had left some of these and the key packet in an envelope on Momma’s vanity table a couple of weeks ago, as a hint, and had been happy to observe that she had grabbed them up shortly afterward. Who did she imagine had supplied them? I wonder. She never said a word to me, and I guess by then she was not thinking too clearly.

Supplying the key and the combination was actually the easy part. Much harder, really, was taking apart every single Librium cap in the house, pouring out the sleepy powder, and refilling each one with cornstarch. It took hours and hours. Momma must’ve felt sort of strange when real life came back after so many years, she couldn’t sleep as well through those long afternoons, when the rocker went squeak, squawk and Ray Bob’s gentle voice reading Wind in the Willows filtered out of her precious little girl’s room. She tried booze, but you know booze doesn’t give you that guaranteed sleep like Librium does, and besides it doesn’t suppress the violent urges. Kind of stimulates them as a matter of fact. Momma always went crazy when she drank, everybody in the Boones knew it, and that’s why she had always previously been careful to remain a pill head.

I paused only to stop by the kitchen and scream at Bobbie Ann, this is all your fault! And then I picked up the little bag I had packed against this day and as the police sirens wailed I rode off on my bike to Hunter’s place to tell him what we had to do.