The Natural Order of Things (27 page)

It burns him to think of it, but inside one of those rooms, in the flickering blue glow of the television, unholy and unpardonable things are going on. Should he pound on the door, demand that his son come outside and return home with him? After careful consideration, Devin chuckles sardonically at the misnomer. A home is supposed to offer
sanctuary from the cares of the day, or so he has been led to believe, but this has turned out to be a terrible lie, one that has been perpetuated through the ages. Call it the propaganda of family life.

The truth is that there will never be a place on Earth where mere mortals can feel completely safe. Maybe his son has already come to this realization, even as he sleeps in the arms of a woman who has vanquished his childhood faith, a woman who in the end will prove utterly incapable of protecting him from the horrible forces that rule the world.

They are lost, well, maybe not quite
lost
, how can they be, there are only so many roads out here, impossibly long ribbons of crushed stone that roll across immense tracts of untilled farmland, bisecting one another at ninety degree angles every two or three square miles, a thousand nameless lines plotted with monstrous logic on a grid in the middle of this vast November desolation. The leaves have already peaked, many of the trees are practically bare now, and few things compete for their attention—the rusted hulks of plows and tractors, the skeleton of an old windmill, a collapsed grain silo, a decaying barn with a hex sign near the peak of its gambrel roof, a length of barbed wire that stretches from fence post to fence post, marking either the beginning or the end of a wilderness—it’s difficult to tell which.

They drive on. As they crest the rocky summit of a hogback ridge, they smell old campfires and see a thin spire of silver smoke rising from the floor of a lonesome river valley. They hear swales of twisted yellow grass swish back and forth, whispering wetly in the mist and fog, and from time to time they glimpse painted ponies loping and cantering in the dead meadows. Except for the insatiable buzzards squatting among the big bales of hay and poking at the scattered bones of rodents, most of these farms look uninhabited. The birds watch the passing car, raise their hooked beaks, and, with long, plaintive cries of hunger, implore the travelers to provide them with the ripened innards of road kill.

Claude straightens up, suddenly serious, business-like, and takes a contemplative sip of his cold coffee. “Think of the erosion,” he murmurs. “I bet the coffins will eventually slide down that steep slope. Like bobsleds. Just give it a little more time.”

Elsie turns her bleary eyes to him and scowls. “What are you
talking
about?”

He points.

Dozens of shattered headstones, their inscriptions faded by a century of wind and rain and snow, erupt from a distant hillside like the skewed teeth of an exhumed skull, the last signs of a town long since deserted, its weary settlers happily returned to the anonymity of dust. Shuddering with a kind of grim pleasure, Claude imagines coffins, hundreds of them, rank and fetid and bursting with the bones of a black-clad parson and his irredeemable flock, hurtling down the muddy escarpment into oblivion.

“The soil must get pretty thin,” he says. “The earth begins to crumble away. Imagine this place after a heavy downpour. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a pile of remains down there in the gulch. Maybe we should check it out. You’ve always wanted a memento mori, right? You could probably use one as a paperweight, or maybe as a bookend.”

The car swerves a little, and Elsie grips the sides of her seat. “Please pay attention to the road!”

She closes her eyes again and sighs. Except when money becomes the topic of conversation, she rarely listens to anything he has to say. She has grown accustomed to “a certain lifestyle,” a fact she had to impress upon him after they spent a long sleepless night at the Hinnom Motel where they endured the ecstatic yelps of a couple in the
adjacent room. “True Olympians those two,” Claude joked. “Gold medal winners.” Elsie was furious. She’d been expecting a romantic resort, an enchanted cabin in the woods, or at the very least, a quaint bed and breakfast that smelled of fresh cut flowers, warm cinnamon rolls, and espresso, not some fleabag motel with mysterious stains on the pillowcases and mildew on the shower curtain.

Claude tries to reassure her that there is nothing to worry about, that he can find enough money to treat her well and still make the minimum payments to his creditors, everything is under control, but then he recalls, with the mounting panic that more and more has come to define his life, that he is two months behind on his car loan. Of course, this fact hasn’t deterred him from embarking on yet another pointless excursion with his lover. How much money has he spent? No, he won’t think about that just yet. He’s having too much fun.

The sedan screeches around a sudden bend. Glancing back at the toppled headstones, Claude says, “Maybe I’d be better off buried up there.” Self-pity comes so naturally to him. Over the years he has mastered its gratifying tone of despair; it gives him so much pleasure that he sometimes feels like a hedonist, shamelessly wallowing in the sharp sting of a self-inflicted wound. “I’d be the first new tenant in a hundred years, probably more. Gotta be cheap for a plot. Save on the funeral costs.”

Elsie smirks. “Claude, darling, you couldn’t get credit for a pine box.”

Her voice takes on an omniscient quality. It never goes away, that voice, not entirely. During the long afternoons when Claude dozes in his cubicle at work and at night when he falls asleep in Elsie’s arms after an hour of forbidden delights, the voice comes to him, shrill and acrimonious, berating him for the most inconsequential of his failings, and now he hears it again, a coiling phantasm that rattles and hisses in the claustrophobic confines of the car. Lately, he has built up an immunity to its venom and finds that it actually soothes him, lulls him into passivity, makes him think of bright blue skies, crystal clear waters, a gentle crescent of tropical beach with miles of white sugary sand.

They speed toward a red brick schoolhouse set upon by seething stalks of corn. Claude reaches for his cup of coffee and from the corner of his eye catches the schoolhouse door open and close, open and close. On the rooftop, a flock of grackles marches back and forth with a slow, dignified gait, but at the sound of an approaching car the birds suddenly take wing, converging high over the frozen fields, so high they look like an infestation of locusts come too late to destroy the fall harvest. Claude, clinging to some distant memory, watches them disappear over the horizon and recalls how lovely the world can sometimes be.

What finally snaps him out of his debilitating stupor isn’t Elsie’s abrupt scream or the searing pain of her fingernails digging deep into his forearm, but the loud thud and wet slap of matted fur against the grille, the gruesome crunch of bones beneath the spinning tires, the horrific howls of pain that echo across the immeasurable emptiness of peat bogs and paddocks and the disquieting calm of the treeless hills rising above the plain. In the rearview mirror, he sees a great shaggy carcass tumbling end over end, a
dazzling shock of scarlet against the gray stretch of pocked and rutted road. Only then does he think to hit the brakes and turn on the hazards.

Elsie claws him with her long nails. “What are you
doing
?”

He yanks his arm away. “That hurts!”

“Just keep driving.”

“I can’t. I’m sure I have some kind of, you know, legal obligation.”

“For chrissake, Claude, please don’t get the law involved.”

“No need to worry. It was an accident. When the time comes, I’ll explain it all to the police.”

She turns around and points to the thing in the road. “How do you intend to explain
that
?”

He scratches at the stubble on his chin. He hasn’t shaved since they left the city, and he can see the first flecks of gray growing among the coarse black hairs. He glances at his watch and then at the receding sun reflected faintly in the milky gray puddles. It seems like they’ve been driving these roads for years. The days have started to blend together, dreary and formless as the heavy clouds that seem to sink closer and closer to the earth. He tries to envision this place in the dazzling summer sunshine—the patched farmland rippling with green, equatorial heat; the lush and heady meadows blazing with goldenrod, yellow buttercups, blue sage, indigo lilacs—but he simply can’t do it. He suffers from a chronic lack of imagination; that’s what Elsie told him last night after they made love. “You have a fat cock, sure, but a
small
mind,” she said, yanking the filthy Hinnom Motel sheets around her beautiful body.

Now she folds her hands on her lap, breathes in and out, comports herself with the stillness and austerity of a necromancer practicing the ancient art of divination, another of her fleeting interests, and one destined to bore her like all the others before it—the books written by medieval Christian mystics and New Age crackpots, the bells and crystals and chimes, the wands and tinctures and incantations. Occasionally, Claude unearths some of these books buried beneath the fashion magazines on her nightstand. Though he can’t say why, he commits several passages to memory: “Thou shalt speak out of the earth, and thy speech shall be heard out of the ground, and thy voice shall be from the earth like that of the python and out of the ground thy speech shall mutter.” What the hell does it mean? He asked Elsie to explain it to him, but she rolled her eyes and quipped, “Oh,
you
wouldn’t understand.”

Looking at the mass of bloody flesh and fur on the road, Claude finds that the mysterious text offers a small clue to the dilemma he now faces.

“A ghost,” he breathes.

“What? What’s that?”

“Elsie, do you believe in ghosts? Perturbed spirits?”

She shakes her head and speaks slowly to him as she might to a child or an idiot. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Claude, I really am, but I think you’re fucking losing it.”

“But those books you’re always reading—”

“Don’t lose your shit. Not now. I’m warning you.”

“Fine, fine.” He grips the steering wheel tightly with both hands. “Just stay right here. I’m going to take a look, see what I’ve done.”

“You didn’t
do
anything!” She tries to regain her composure, but her voice is still manic, almost desperate. Saliva gathers at the corners of her mouth. “It was already
dead
when you hit it. Dead in the middle of the road. Flies buzzing all around.”

Claude has never seen her so flustered, and he rather enjoys it.

“Dead? Are you sure? I thought I saw it run right in front of the car. It came out of nowhere, Elsie. Like a phantom. An apparition.”

“Don’t make me repeat myself. You were daydreaming. As usual. Now drive away like I asked before I become ill.”

Because he can’t quite accept the reality of the situation, he kisses her hand and takes in the scent of her lotion, sweet but subtle, a magic elixir capable of purging his soul of his foul crimes, his weakness of character.

“Maybe you’re right …”

He puts the car in drive, takes his foot off the brake, and gently presses the accelerator. The sedan eases forward, it hums and purrs as a well-maintained vehicle should, a vehicle that is free of damage from a head-on collision. But before reaching the next bend in the road, Claude dares to look back one last time at the thing at the edge of the ditch, carrion for the great birds of prey that hover always in the sky, huge creatures of prehistoric visage that swoop low over the fields and perch on the telephone lines to peck madly at the vermin burrowing deep in their black wings, and though he can’t be certain, he thinks he sees the thing struggling to lift its shattered head, writhing with unimaginable suffering, doomed to take its last agonizing breath beside a pasture reeking of cow shit.

An hour later, the ordered patchwork of fallow fields and the deranged matrix of country roads suddenly give way to a series of concentric circles that suck Claude and Elsie ever closer to the town of Gehenna. The streets reek of burning rubber and raw sewage. A canal brimming with toxic sludge encloses a row of brick warehouses like a moat protecting the ruins of a forbidden fortress, an armada of beer cans and whiskey bottles bobbing up and down on its distended surface. On the lopsided porch of an enormous Victorian house, four or five children stare blankly into the foul mist, maybe thinking of ways to escape the fate of their parents, and throw stones at a snarling black dog chained to the oak tree in the front yard.

Claude and Elsie drive through the town square. They haven’t eaten since early that morning and search the dark storefronts for a bakery, a coffee shop, a farmer’s market, but they find only boarded-up windows and a sinister madhouse tavern where men in denim coveralls and steel-toed boots stand in the doorway, smoking cigarettes and double-checking the losing numbers on their lottery tickets. On Main Street, they spot a diner with a red neon sign blinking in the parking lot. At this late hour there are few options, and they decide to risk it.

After locking the car doors and activating the alarm, they go inside. Claude immediately lowers his head to avoid the scornful looks of the customers who chew mechanically and with little satisfaction on their steaming buttermilk biscuits sopping with gravy. They regard him with unmistakable loathing, as if to say, “There is something not right about you. You are destructive and depraved. Now leave us be.”

Claude and Elsie both order “The Fish” (that’s how it’s printed on the menu, “The Fish,” as though it’s some culinary wonder that draws people from miles around), but when the waitress sets the plates in front of them, Elsie uses the tongs of her fork to pick at the bones and scales with the precision of a pathologist.

“Look at this thing,” she says. “I bet the cook scooped it out of that canal with a net he keeps by the back door. Fried it up in a greasy skillet, too.” She tosses her silverware down with a loud clatter and snaps her fingers at the waitress. “Excuse me, miss! Oh, miss. A moment of your time, please. Are you
sure
this is fish?”