Denver looked at me with a sly grin. “You scared to go in?”
“No, I’m not scared. How about you?”
“Me? I ain’t scared a’ nothin.”
With that, we breaststroked through the towering weeds like men on safari and jumped up on the porch—having to, since the steps had fallen off. Using the few remaining boards like stepping-stones, we picked our way to the front door, which hung open, reminding me of a hungry mouth.
Denver went in first, and I heard rodents skitter for cover as I followed him into a small parlor that had been ransacked then used as a dump. A divan was piled high with trash, broken chairs, and an old record player. A table and a dresser stood against the wall at odd, unlivable angles. Clothes littered the floor. A thick layer of dust lay over it all.
I took a step, kicking paper, and looked down to find an old pile of mail. On the top, a letter from the City of Fort Worth addressed to Denver Moore in Red River Parish, Louisiana. The date: March 25, 1995. I started to hand it to him, but he waved me off.
“You open it. You know I can’t read.”
I slipped a thumb under the yellowed envelope flap and the glue gave way like dust. Shaking out a single sheet inside, I unfolded what turned out to be a warrant for driving without a license. Squinting in the dim light, I read aloud: “Dear Mr. Moore, we have a warrant for your arrest for the amount of $153.00.”
We broke out laughing, the sound falling strangely in the dark, ramshackle house. I tucked the letter in my pocket, a keepsake. Reaching down, I scooped up another letter, this one addressed to Hershalee from Publishers Clearing House, informing her that she may have won $10 million. Looked like she’d died on the eve of her lucky break.
Hershalee’s bedroom was eerie, like walking through a life suddenly abandoned. Family photos still sat on the bureau. Her clothes still hung in the closet, and the bed was made.
Denver looked at the bed and smiled. “I remember one time Hershalee was watchin some other folks’ kids, and she wanted to make em mind. So we come in here’n closed the door, and she told me to jump up and down on the bed and holler like she was beatin the tar outta me. She wanted to make them other children do what she say.”
The memory turned him melancholy, but the moment passed quickly.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you Hershalee’s bathtub.”
Denver had told me about the tub when he’d bought it for Hershalee, using the money I’d insisted he keep from his Colorado adventure. Hershalee bathed in it but had never had it hooked up to running water, and she kept it on her screened-in back porch. Denver and I picked our way out there, straining to see in the house’s dark center. Boards groaned and creaked under our feet and the hair on my neck twitched a little. When we reached the porch, a little more light streamed in through the johnsongrass that crawled up the surrounding screens. And sure enough, there sat Hershalee’s bathtub, crawling with spiders.
Only the tub-half of the porch was screened in and open to the air. On the other end, some kind of extra room, dark and boarded up, jutted out toward the bayou.
“Hershalee was mighty proud she had this new tub,” Denver said. “Come on. I want to show you the potbellied stove where she heated up water to take a bath.”
He started toward the kitchen, but froze and looked back at me: “Did you hear that?”
I stopped and listened in the weird silence. Then I heard footsteps, like heavy boots. Worse, I heard heavy breathing. Someone was stalking toward us from
inside
the boarded-up room fifteen feet away. But it didn’t sound to me like some
one
—it sounded like some
thing.
The hair on my neck stirred again and I looked at Denver.
Thump, thump
came the steps, then the creaking of a door handle. Denver’s eyes widened until they seemed the size of pie plates. “Let’s get outta here!” he whispered.
We bolted off the porch, back through the inky house, hurdling piles of trash and upended furniture. I barely beat Denver to the front door. We burst out, one-two. I leaped over the rotting porch planks and flew off the front porch, Denver airborne behind me. We hit the ground running, but a few feet from the house, pulled up and stopped.
I stared at Denver and he stared back, both of us panting with relief. Then we broke into nervous laughter.
“Do you think that was a possum or a coon?” I said lightly, as though neither of us had really been all
that
scared.
“Mr. Ron, ain’t no such thing as a two-hundred-pound possum or coon that wears boots and walks like a man.”
I picked up a big stick and looked back at the front porch, ready to do battle with whatever emerged. Then, instead of calling it a day, Denver and I did just what they do in the horror movies: We edged around the side of the house toward the bayou. I was fully prepared to see some kind of boot-wearing swamp monster lumbering back to his gooey lair. Less than a minute had passed when suddenly every hair on my body stood at attention. Denver and I locked eyes, transmitting shared terror.
“Let’s get outta here!”
This time we both said it and raced back to the Suburban in a dead sprint. We jumped in, slammed the doors, and punched the lock buttons. I turned the ignition key and . . . nothing.
My brand-new car wouldn’t start. Over and over, I cranked the key forward. Denver’s head swiveled between the key and the house, the key, the house. His eyes grew wider. He punched the imaginary gas pedal on the passenger side, willing the thing to start.
The engine coughed and sputtered as though out of gas. But the tank was nearly full.
“Do you believe this?” I said, my voice up an octave.
“Sure do,” he said and swallowed.
A full minute passed as I tried the ignition again and again. The hair on the back of my neck was now so rigid the follicles hurt. The engine coughed and spit and finally caught. But when I pushed on the gas . . . nothing.
Terrified, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the swamp monster we
hadn’t
seen out back roared out from under the truck, crashed through the windshield, and ripped our throats out. I had never before felt such fear. It was visceral, palpable. With the engine barely turning, I jerked hard on the gearshift and we rolled forward, my $40,000 SUV limping like an antique buggy. About a quarter-mile down, the road dead-ended. I bumped off into a muddy pasture to turn around, but the engine stalled. As I cranked the ignition again and again, Denver kept glancing up the road, looking for the Something.
Finally, the Suburban sputtered to life again and I pulled back onto the road, the engine popping and sputtering like an old tractor with a tank of bad gas. We crept along like that until we passed Hershalee’s house. A hundred yards later, the engine roared to life then settled into a kittenish purr, gauges perfect, as if nothing had happened.
At that, Denver erupted into a belly laugh so all-consuming that if he’d been on an airplane, the oxygen mask would’ve dropped to help him breathe. He gasped and howled, tears squirting, until he finally blurted, “Now, Mr. Ron, you got a story to tell—a good one! You sure do!”
Then, as if an eraser had wiped the smile off his face, he turned dead serious and stared into my eyes. “Nothin keeps you honest like a witness,” he said.
When
we heard them steps thumpin toward us from inside that boarded-up room that wadn’t fit for no human, I thought my eyeballs was gon’ pop outta my head. We hightailed it outta there like nobody’s business. But when I was runnin, I started feelin a little silly, thinkin maybe what we heard coulda been a vagrant or somebody just holed up in Hershalee’s house. But when we slid around the side a’ the house and my skin started crawlin, I was purty sure it was somethin, not some
body
. And when Mr. Ron’s brand-new car started actin like a spooked horse, I knowed it for sure.
After we got past Hershalee’s house, I told Mr. Ron that it wadn’t the first time I seen strange things on the plantation. Like that time my auntie, Big Mama’s sister, made it rain.
Lookin back on it, I think Auntie was what you might call a spiritual healer, like a “medicine man,” ’cept she was a elderly woman. She lived out there near the bayou ’bout half a mile from Big Mama’s, and I used to go over there and see her sometimes. I was scared of her. She always wore a long, dark skirt and a rag around her head, and when she laughed, sounded like a flock a’ birds scared and flyin away. But Big Mama made me go to show my respect and also to help Auntie gather up the fixins for her medicines.
She used to take me with her down by the swamp where she’d be gatherin up some leaves and roots. We’d go in the evenin, just when the sunset was givin over to a cool twilight, and take us a little basket. I’d carry it for her, pickin our way through the cypress trees, while the bullfrogs and crickets were tunin up. I always kept one eye out for gators.
“Now Li’l Buddy, this here’s for takin the pain out a wound,” she’d say, pullin up a root and shakin off the earth. “And this here’s for pneumonia.”
She musta knowed twenty different kinds of roots and what have you, and what she knowed musta been a secret ’cause she made me promise I wouldn’t tell nobody what she was pullin and where she was pullin it.
Auntie lived by herself. She had a room in her house with a big table in it covered with jars in all kinda sizes.
“See them jars?” she told me one time.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“In each one of em, I got somethin for anything that happens to you.”
Folks used to go see Auntie when they was sick. But if folks wadn’t sick, they stayed away. I wadn’t surprised. She had some kinda spiritual thing goin on in that house. Ever time I went in there, she made me sit on a little stool in the same spot, even facin in the same direction, like she didn’t want me to mess up whatever voodoo she had goin on in there.
One day when I was sittin on that stool, she sprinkled some powder on the wood floor. Then she walked over to me and stared into my eyes and said real low, “Do you believe I can make it rain?”
I looked out the window and didn’t see nothin but blue sky. “I don’t know,” I said, half-scared but kinda curious.
“Sit there,” she said.
Then Auntie picked up her broom and started sweepin that powder around on the floor, hummin a li’l tune like no song I ever heard. She hummed and swept, hummed and swept, brushin at the floor with small strokes. She swept that powder all around the front room, then swept some onto the front porch, hummin all the way.
Then she called to me. “Li’l Buddy, walk out on the porch.”
I did, and this is the truth: A cloud had formed right over the house. Just one cloud—not a whole skyful. And right when I looked up at it, that cloud flashed with lightnin and thunder cracked. I could feel it rumblin up underneath the house. Then it come a rain right there on the porch.
Auntie turned her face up into the sprinklin drops, smilin a little, like she knowed a secret. “I told you,” she said.
’Cept for Mr. Ron, I never told nobody ’bout that, ’cause most people gon’ say that’s just superstition. They’d rather pretend things like that don’t happen.
I guided
the miraculously healed Suburban back over the red dirt road that eventually spit us out onto Highway 1. We drove a mile or so looking for another dirt road, just a slit in the weeds really, so narrow we missed it a couple of times and had to double back. It was the road to Aunt Pearlie May’s house. In the 1960s, she’d moved into a shotgun house out closer to the plantation and had lived there ever since.
As I eased the truck along the pitted trail, bumper-high johnsongrass parted to reveal a slice of America that most Americans never see. Six shot-gun shacks squatted in a clearing in the woods, lined up like prisoners held hostage from another era. No yards divided the lots. Instead, junk huddled in heaps around every house—old tires, beer cans, car seats, rusted mattress springs. In the middle of the road, lay the bloated carcass of a dead mongrel dog.
In front of one house, a young black man and woman watched us from a molting sofa someone had dragged out into the dirt. The woman pulled on a cigarette as chickens pecked around her feet. Smoke boiled into the air from one yard, where two kids tended a pile of burning trash. Nearby, a girl pinned wet laundry to a rope that ran between the house and a dead tree. She looked about twelve and was pregnant.
I slowed down as if driving past a bad accident. The residents stared at me like I was an alien.
“Stop right here,” Denver said. There, sitting on a tree stump beside the road was an elderly woman sucking on a can of beer at three in the afternoon. Dressed in men’s trousers and a stained T-shirt shot through with holes, she lit up when she saw Denver. He got out of the truck and hugged her then handed her a $5 bill. With a wheezy giggle, she poked her hand through one of the holes in her shirt and tucked the money in her bra.
“Y’all come on in the house,” she rasped. “I got some greens on the stove and they’s fresh.”
Denver politely declined and hitched himself back into the Suburban.
“She ain’t no kin,” he said. “Just a friend a’ Pearlie May’s.”
We crept down to the last house, past a man working on a tractor. He had disassembled the machine into several dozen pieces near his front door, which wasn’t really a door at all but a red-plaid blanket tacked up to keep the flies out.
Pearlie May’s house sat at the end of the row. A dozen or so plastic lawn chairs littered the dirt out front, punctuated with huge pyramids of empty Natural Light beer cans stacked like fire logs. Next to the porch lay a mountain of brown Garrett snuff jars, hundreds of them. From the end of a long chain, a spotted mongrel dog yapped at a flock of unperturbed chickens, who knew just how long the chain was.
“Li’l Buddy!” Aunt Pearlie May said when we walked up to her porch. “Lord, if you ain’t got your daddy’s nose!” Denver gave her a hug—not a big one—then she leaned on the rotten porch railing and aimed a four-letter word at the barking hound. “Shut up, dog, ’fore I come out there and shut you up!”