Xeno Sapiens (53 page)

“How old were you,” 'Scilla asked. Her
thoughts of rootlessness and dissociation were still very much on
her mind and to hear Ricky speak about vintage Americana spanning
seven decades gave her a sense of time and place that was
comfortable and easy to slip into.

“I was eleven, Willie thirteen. Kids grew up
into work faster then. I would put in ten hours a day after school.
But we were luckier. We didn't grow up into the
ways
of the
world so fast.

“I don't know how long I was out, slipping
back and forth between daylight and darkness. It seemed like a
dream most of the time while I lay there hearing the crackle of
burning pine straw, seeing the red and orange of the flames moving
closer, winking through the smoke. And I saw Willie Morgan,
stripped down to the waist, sweat pouring off of him, his eyes
flashing with the bright white light of a madman. Big as a grown
man even when he was thirteen and had a full beard when he was
eleven.

“He had a big old double sided ax and a
pruning saw. I had seen that ax many times, hanging in the barn
behind his house. It was old and pitted with a splintered handle,
but Willie kept that edge sharp. Willie almost always done whatever
cutting had to be done. His dad was a mean drunk and most likely
would have ended up burying that ax in his leg when he swung it. He
never got completely out of the bottle after his wife died, and
that was where he was on the day of the fire. He likely never knew
a thing about it until after it was all over.

“For three solid hours Willie chopped and
sawed. I remember hearing the crash and thud of trees falling while
I laid there; remembered seeing him shining with sweat, and though
I was too far away to have heard it, I imagined hearing his breath
coming harder and harder while he raced to make a firebreak. To
this day I remember how I was almost hypnotized by how he worked;
how I didn't much care about the fire coming ever closer. That
didn't seem very important compared to what Willie was doing. He
must have felled fifty trees in those three hours, working like a
maniac without a single break, creating a small firebreak, but it
was enough to stop it from taking these two houses.

“And it must have been right after one of
those times I slipped away, but I opened my eyes and he was
kneeling down next to me, reaching down to pick me up and tote me
into the house. And even then, I could see in his eyes how much of
a toll had been taken on him. There was a wild light in them, like
a fever, and it never went away in all the years I knew him after
that. It was a wonder it didn't kill him, but the fact is he
plugged along for another seventy years.”

“Sounds like you miss him,” 'Scilla
said.

Ricky tilted his hat up.

“Can't help but miss someone you've known
for seventy years, been neighbors with, got up to the dickens with
back before the time there was even electricity in these parts.

“He was a hoot, no doubt. There wasn't
nothing Willie was afraid of. Strange things happen all the
time-things that nobody can explain-but Willie couldn't leave 'em
alone like regular folks. He would go looking for trouble, most
often with my dumb ass right there beside him.”

“What kind of strange things?” 'Scilla had
had her fill of strange things over the past year.

“Here it comes,” Margie said. “The big
lie.”

“Absolutely not,” Ricky said. “Margie knows
I speak the truth. That's why she's stayed with me all these years.
But as part of the town, you need to know this, 'cause you're gonna
hear of it anyway.

“As a lad of fourteen, Willie and me were
out burning the roads in his dad's old truck. Frank Morgan was the
only one with an automobile around these parts and Willie, whenever
his dad was laid up drunk -which was most of the time- would take
that car and go joyriding.

“Me and Willie both had made a raid on Tom
Danle's likker still and were both pretty well lushed up, neither
of us caring if the sky stayed up or fell down. We had already been
given hell by a bunch of field hands who had their horses and wagon
run off the road by this crazy Willie bearin' down on 'em, jammin'
the gears and sprayin' dirt and gravel all over hell and half of
Tennessee, the motor snortin' and hollerin' like a stuck pig. Bales
of cotton and bushels of corn come tumblin' down like manna from
heaven when them carts went rolling into the ditch. Them field
hands didn't leave us much doubt as to where me and Willie would
spend the afterlife. And the way Willie was drivin', I didn't think
it would be much longer before I found out for certain.

“This was in October, not much later than
this, and it was gettin' on toward dark. I had slipped off during
the day and I had no jacket. It had begun to get chilly, like it
does, and I begged Willie to get us home. The booze had been my
blanket for a while, but it was wearing off. And aside from that, I
had something else weighing heavy on my heart.”

“And what was that?” 'Scilla had finished
her pie and Margie had magically whisked her plate away. She felt
cool and uneasy now, with night falling on the Saunders household.
The daylight had matured to spun gold, slipping in through the
living room and laying its brassy sheen on the TV screen where it
rattled on and on, unheeded. 'Scilla's palm was wet with
condensation from the glass she held. She set the glass down on a
folded paper towel.

“It was October 29th,” Ricky said. “The eve
of Let To Day.”

“Some kind of local holiday?”

Ricky scratched one raspy cheek and stared
at the ceiling with his pale, albino-like eyes.

“I don't think I would call it
that
.
More like a local superstition. Folks here in Brighton, even the
newbies from East North Carolina and upstate New York don't
question it. They just let it be, like everybody else.” 'Scilla
thought this had the sound of a gentle warning.

“We were headed toward Ira Parnell's
pasture,” Ricky went on. “Nothing there now but weeds and thorn
bushes. But the fence is still there. I used to sit on that fence
during the trailing end of the summer and watch the sun go down
over the pond. It would shine off the water and back into my eyes
and it looked like there were two suns; one in the sky and one
sinking into the water. I could almost see myself, a little
towheaded kid with a wisp of straw in his mouth, decked out in
crappy dungarees, a pretty stiff breeze kickin' up a cowlick in his
hair, the sun shinin' the color of apple cider.” He smiled
whimsically, bringing up the elfin charm that was a part of
him.

“I asked Willie where we were goin'.

‘“You'll see,’ he says. Folks thought it
best to steer clear of Willie after the fire. Everyone thought
Willie would come to a bad end and they all figured I would go down
the tubes with him. And that night he was plain crazy, as crazy as
the day he had built the firebreak. Driven
by
something or
to
something, I still don't know.

‘“We're here,’ he says.

“I knew right off it was Parnell's pasture.
I saw the fence stretchin' off to my right, looking like black,
iron bars with splinters of wood sticking out at the ends like
hair. The wind blew a little, sort of sad like it does when
darkness is heavy on the land with no electric lighting. Above the
wind I could hear the fence creak from time to time. But for mine
and Willie's breathing, that was the only sound.

“Willie didn't say anything, just took me by
the arm and pointed me toward the side of the mountain that popped
up on the far side of the pasture. It was then that I seen the
shimmery white mist rising up out of the ground, drifting up from
the face of the mountain and rolling on down the hill. It didn't
come up in one big cloud, or drift down like a lacy fall of dew. It
came up out of the ground, like the earth had cracked open and was
breathing in the cold. It shone in the moonlight, a watery silvery
blue. It spun around like a wind chime in the breeze, slow as a
country afternoon, and started to steal across the field, moving
steady, spreading apart like fingers.”

He stopped for a few seconds and pried the
top off of a Coca Cola. He grimaced slightly as he did so, glancing
at Margie sitting across the room in her rocker, arms crossed,
nodding gravely at times as if corroborating the tale. Ricky took a
long swallow of the Coke and set it on the floor.

“The fog spread out into shapes, like
columns about six feet high and two feet through the middle. It
came on apace, moving toward us like an advancing patrol, five or
six of those curtains of fog. And I started praying. I felt out of
place, unwanted and...” he cocked his head, the exact phrasing he
wanted eluding him.

“I knew I was seeing something I shouldn't
see, something maybe I shouldn't have even known about. There was
something
. Something watching and waiting. And I felt like
if we didn't leave it might get tired of waiting.

“I grabbed Willie by the arm, just
gibbering. He shook me off.

‘“It's never been this close before. I have
to see.’

“That's when I knew he had seen it before,
who knew how many times? And I wondered if it wasn't this as much
as the fire that had made him crazy.

‘“They're gonna be here in a minute,’ I told
him. And when he looked at me, he was smiling like a moron, hair
all out in kinky curls, his beard twisted and tangled on top of
that boy's face.

“‘I know,’ he says.

Ricky looked sagely at 'Scilla, but with an
impish gleam of humor in his eyes. But it was a front. 'Scilla
could tell he was deadly serious.

“Then the fog was at the car, swirling
around like blowing spirits, cold and wet, shining all silvery
blue. I thought there was
somebody
in the fog, somebody or
something that I couldn't see, watching me, wondering if it could
extend its unearthly arm and drag me into it and take me away back
to that hole in the earth it came from.

“And then the fog seemed to trifle away a
little and I saw something in the mist. A shape seemed to take
form, flesh turned to vapor; a ghostly face in the fog.”

'Scilla frowned. Ricky took no notice at
all.

“And then it swept down over us, seeming
almost to fall on us like some swooping bird, wet and cold and
sticky.” Ricky took a whistling breath. “My Sainted Aunt, it felt
as close to death as I want to be until my time comes.”

He sat back and drained the rest of his
Coke. He set the empty on the floor. A lawn mower engine, the last
of the season, wound down distantly beneath the twilit sky. Moths
skirted against the screen.

“And then,” 'Scilla prompted.

“Willie fired up the car and blasted outta
there so fast he almost cracked us up by driving dead bang into a
bigassed old pine tree. There was something in Willie like a streak
of rock that can be chipped away but not broken. I could see in his
eyes as he drove that something had gotten hold of his poor,
scrambled brains, and had dug in and made a home there.

“After a short time, he stood on the brakes,
damn near tossing me straight over the hood.

‘“I'm going back,’ he says.

“‘Fine,’ I say. ‘You do that. But you go
alone. My daddy's gonna bust my ass black and blue as it is. If you
had any sense, you'd go home, too.’ I started to hoof it, afraid to
be out in the dark after what I'd seen, but knowing it was
preferable to going back.

‘“Where are you goin'’, Willie hollers, like
he can't believe I ain't going back with him. Well, I felt for him
some, you know. But nothing could have got me back there. I was
just about cryin', begging him not to go back.

‘“I have to go,’ he says. ‘I have to see.’
And just lookin' at him you knew that nothing would stop him. And
off he roared, leaving me there scared and cold, but glad all the
same. Glad to be away from the fog, and glad to know I could make
it home before midnight, when Let To Day started. Glad to take the
beating I knew I would get.”

“Did Willie go back?”

Ricky was silent for a few seconds.

“I don't know,” he finally said. “I didn't
see him again for a couple of days. I had tried to forget about it,
though my dad forcibly reminded me of what had happened by whoopin'
my ass pretty soundly. When I did see Willie again, he said nothing
about it. And for seventy years I never asked him about it, and he
never told me about it.”

“Why didn't you see him the next day?”

“It was October 30th, Let to Day. Nobody
knows how old it is, or how it came to be. On Let to Day, none dare
to venture out of their homes, especially not to work. Most of the
town's folk head out of town for a one day vacation. Take in Luray
Caverns or Tweetsie Railroad. We're all back the next day in time
to give the young 'uns their trick or treat candy. Only those that
wish to fall to the Stranger's Discomfort will lift a finger to
till the land they've worked all summer.”

'Scilla didn't like the sound of that and
said so. “Sounds very ominous. What's the Stranger's Discomfort?
Diarrhea?”

Lisa giggled and Ricky smiled.

“Nothing of the sort,” Ricky soothed. “Just
a phrase I picked up from my dad and his dad before him. Just a bit
of local color we can call our own. But it's tradition and
tradition is mostly a good thing. No need in upsettin' it just on
the off chance it's something besides a scary bedtime tale.”

He looked wisely at 'Scilla. “Don't worry
yourself over some local mumbo jumbo. It's our one excuse to get
out of this one horse town and play hooky from work.”

“I'm not really in the mood for anything so
dark.”

“Not much of a dark side to Brighton. Just a
rinky dink burg with no claim to fame but a funny holiday and some
nice scenery. Folks from all over the country live here, most of
'em like you, only looking for a place to start over.”