He leans closer to where the crow reentered the hedge, thinking if it shed a feather he will take it for a souvenir, and when he does, a scrawny white arm shoots out through the green and seizes him unerringly by the neck. Tyler has time to give a single terrified squawk, and then he is dragged through the hedge. One of his sneakers is pulled off by the short, stiff branches. From the far side there is a single guttural, greedy cry ¡ª it might have been "Boy!" ¡ª and then a thud, the sound of a pet rock coming down on a small boy's head, perhaps. Then there's nothing but the distant drone of a lawn mower and the closer drone of a bee.
The bee is bumbling around the flowers on the far side of the hedge, the Maxton side. There is nothing else to be seen over there but green grass, and closer to the building, the tables where the elderly inhabitants will, at noon, sit down to the Strawberry Fest Picnic.
Tyler Marshall is gone.
T. J. Renniker coasts to a stop at the corner of Chase and Queen. His Slurpee is dripping dark blue juice over his wrist, but he barely notices. Halfway down Queen Street he sees Ty's bike, leaning neatly over on its kickstand, but no Ty.
Moving slowly ¡ª he has a bad feeling about this, somehow ¡ª T. J. rides over to the bike. At some point he becomes aware that what was a Slurpee has now dissolved into a soggy cup of melting goop. He tosses it into the gutter.
It's Ty's ride, all right. No mistaking that red twenty-inch Schwinn with the ape-hanger handlebars and the green Milwaukee Bucks decal on the side. The bike, and ¡ª
Lying on its side by the hedge that creates a border between the world of the old folks and the world of regular people, the real people, T. J. sees a single Reebok sneaker. Scattered around it are a number of shiny green leaves. One feather protrudes from the sneaker.
The boy stares at this sneaker with wide eyes. T. J. may not be as smart as Tyler, but he's a few watts brighter than Ebbie Wexler, and it's easy enough for him to imagine Tyler being dragged through the hedge, leaving his bike behind . . . and one sneaker . . . one lonely, overturned sneaker . . .
"Ty?" he calls. "Are you jokin' around? Because if you are, you better stop. I'll tell Ebbie to give you the biggest Indian burn you ever had. "
No answer. Ty isn't joking around. T. J. somehow knows it.
Thoughts of Amy St. Pierre and Johnny Irkenham suddenly explode in T. J. 's mind. He hears (or imagines he hears) stealthy footsteps behind the hedge: the Fisherman, having secured dinner, has come back for dessert!
T. J. tries to scream and cannot. His throat has shrunk down to a pinhole. Instead of screaming, he hunches himself over the handlebars of his bike and begins pedaling. He swerves off the sidewalk and into the street, wanting to get away from the dark bulk of that hedge just as fast as he can. When he leaves the curb, the front tire of his Huffy bike squashes through the remains of his Slurpee. As he pedals toward Chase Street, bent over his handlebars like a Grand Prix racer, he leaves a dark and shiny track on the pavement. It looks like blood. Somewhere nearby, a crow caws. It sounds like laughter.
16 Robin Hood Lane: we've been here before, as the chorus girl said to the archbishop. Peek through the kitchen window and we see Judy Marshall, asleep in the rocking chair in the corner. There's a book in her lap, the John Grisham novel we last saw on her bedside table. Sitting beside her on the floor is half a cup of cold coffee. Judy managed to read ten pages before dozing off. We shouldn't blame Mr. Grisham's narrative skills; Judy had a hard night last night, and it's not the first. It's been over two months since she last got more than two hours of sleep in one stretch. Fred knows something is wrong with his wife, but has no idea how deep it runs. If he did, he would be a lot more than frightened. Soon, God help him, he is going to have a better picture of her mental state.
Now she begins to moan thickly, and to turn her head from side to side. Those nonsense words begin to issue from her again. Most of them are too sleep-fuzzy to understand, but we catch abbalah and gorg.
Her eyes suddenly
flash open. They are a brilliant, royal blue in the morning light, which fills the kitchen with summer's dusty gold.
"Ty!" she gasps, and her feet give a convulsive waking jerk. She looks at the clock over the stove. It is twelve minutes past nine, and everything seems twisted, as it so often does when we sleep deeply but not well or long. She has sucked some miserable, not-quite-a-nightmare dream after her like mucusy strings of afterbirth: men with fedora hats pulled down so as to shadow their faces, walking on long R. Crumb legs that ended in big round-toed R. Crumb shoes, sinister keep on truckin' sharpies who moved too fast against a city background ¡ª Milwaukee? Chicago? ¡ª and in front of a baleful orange sky. The dream's sound track was the Benny Goodman band playing "King Porter Stomp," the one her father had always played when he was getting a little shot, and the feeling of the dream had been a terrible darkwood mix of terror and grief: awful things had happened, but the worst was waiting.
There's none of the relief people usually feel upon waking from bad dreams ¡ª the relief she herself had felt when she had been younger and . . . and . . .
"And sane," she says in a croaky, just-woke-up voice. " 'King Porter Stomp. ' Think of that. " To her it had always sounded like the music you heard in the old cartoons, the ones where mice in white gloves ran in and out of ratholes with dizzying, feverish speed. Once, when her father was dancing her around to that one, she had felt something hard poking against her. Something in his pants. After that, when he put on his dance music, she tried to be somewhere else.
"Quit it," she says in the same croaky voice. It's a crow's voice, and it occurs to her that there was a crow in her dream. Sure, you bet. The Crow Gorg.
"Gorg means death," she says, and licks her dry upper lip without realizing it. Her tongue comes out even farther, and on the return swipe the tip licks across her nostrils, warm and wet and somehow comforting. "Over there, gorg means death. Over there in the ¡ª "
Faraway is the word she doesn't say. Before she can, she sees something on the kitchen table that wasn't there before. It's a wicker box. A sound is coming from it, some low sleepy sound.
Distress worms into her lower belly, making her bowels feel loose and watery. She knows what a box like that is called: a creel. It's a fisherman's creel.
There is a fisherman in French Landing these days. A bad fisherman.
"Ty?" she calls, but of course there is no answer. The house is empty except for her. Dale is at work, and Ty will be out playing ¡ª you bet. It's half-past July, the heart of summer vacation, and Ty will be rolling around the town, doing all the Ray Bradbury¨CAugust Derleth things boys do when they've got the whole endless summer day to do them in. But he won't be alone; Dale has talked with him about buddying up until the Fisherman is caught, at least until then, and so has she. Judy has no great liking for the Wexler kid (the Metzger or Renniker kids, either), but there's safety in numbers. Ty probably isn't having any great cultural awakenings this summer, but at least ¡ª
"At least he's safe," she says in her croaky Crow Gorg voice. Yet the box that has appeared on the kitchen table during her nap seems to deny that, to negate the whole concept of safety. Where did it come from? And what is the white thing on top of it?
"A note," she says, and gets up. She crosses the short length of floor between the rocker and the table like someone still in a dream. The note is a piece of paper, folded over. Written across the half she can see is Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. In college, just before meeting Dale, she had a boyfriend who used to call her that. She asked him to stop ¡ª it was annoying, sappy ¡ª and when he kept forgetting (on purpose, she suspected), she dropped him like a rock. Now here it is again, that stupid nickname, mocking her.
Judy turns on the sink tap without taking her eyes from the note, fills her cupped hand with cold water, and drinks. A few drops fall on Sweet Judy Blue Eyes and the name smears at once. Written in fountain-pen ink? How antique! Who writes with a fountain pen these days?
She reaches for the note, then draws back. The sound from inside the box is louder now. It's a humming sound. It ¡ª
"It's flies," she says. Her throat has been refreshed by the water and her voice isn't so croaky, but to herself, Judy still sounds like the Crow Gorg. "You know the sound of flies. "
Get the note.
Don't want to.
Yes, but you NEED to! Now get it! What happened to your GUTS, you little chickenshit?
Good question. Fucking good question. Judy's tongue comes out, slathers her upper lip and philtrum. Then she takes the note and unfolds it.
Sorry there is only one "kiddie-knee" (kindney). The other I fryed and ate. It was very good!
The Fisherman
The nerves in Judy Marshall's fingers, palms, wrists, and forearms suddenly shut down. The color drops so completely from her face that the blue veins in her cheeks become visible. It's surely a miracle that she doesn't pass out. The note drops from her fingers and goes seesawing to the floor. Shrieking her son's name over and over again, she throws back the lid of the fisherman's creel.
Inside are shiny red coils of intestine, crawling with flies. There are the wrinkled sacs of lungs and the fist-sized pump that was a child's heart. There is the thick purple pad of a liver . . . and one kidney. This mess of guts is crawling with flies and all the world is gorg, is gorg, is gorg.
In the sunny stillness of her kitchen Judy Marshall now begins to howl, and it is the sound of madness finally broken free of its flimsy cage, madness unbound.
Butch Yerxa intended to go in after a single smoke ¡ª there's always a lot to do on Strawberry Fest! days (although kindhearted Butch doesn't hate the little artificial holiday the way Pete Wexler does). Then Petra English, an orderly from Asphodel, wandered over and they started talking motorcycles, and before you know it twenty minutes have passed.
He tells Petra he has to go, she tells him to keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down, and Butch slips back in through the door to an unpleasant surprise. There is Charles Burnside, starkers, standing beside the desk with his hand on the rock Butch uses as a paperweight. (His son made it in camp last year ¡ª painted the words on it, anyway ¡ª and Butch thinks it's cute as hell. ) Butch has nothing against the residents ¡ª certainly he would give Pete Wexler a pasting if he knew about the thing with the cigarettes, never mind just reporting him ¡ª but he doesn't like them touching his things. Especially this guy, who is fairly nasty when he has his few wits about him. Which he does now. Butch can see it in his eyes. The real Charles Burnside has come up for air, perhaps in honor of Strawberry Fest!
And speaking of strawberries, Burny has apparently been into them already. There are traces of red on his lips and tucked into the deep folds at the corners of his mouth.
Butch barely looks at this, though. There are other stains on Burny. Brown ones.
"Want to take your hand off that, Charles?" he asks.
"Off what?" Burny asks, then adds: "Asswipe. "
Butch doesn't want to say Off my pet rock, that sounds stupid. "Off my paperweight. "
Burny looks down at the rock, which he has just replaced (there was a little blood and hair on it when he emerged from the toilet stall, but cleanup is what bathroom sinks are for). He drops his hand from it and just stands there. "Clean me up, bozo. I shit myself. "
"So I see. But first tell me if you've gone and spread your crap around the kitchen. And I know you've been down there, so don't lie. "
"Warshed my hands first," Burny says, and shows them. They are gnarled, but pink and clean for all that. Even the nails are clean. He certainly has washed them. He then adds: "Jackoff. "
"Come on down to the bathroom with me," Butch says. "The jack-off asswipe will get you cleaned up. "
Burny snorts, but comes willingly enough.
"You ready for the dance this afternoon?" Butch asks him, just to be saying something. "Got your dancing shoes all polished, big boy?"
Burny, who can surpris
e you sometimes when he's actually home, smiles, showing a few yellow teeth. Like his lips, they are stained with red. "Yowza, I'm ready to rock," he says.
Although Ebbie's face doesn't show it, he listens with growing unease to T. J. 's story about Tyler Marshall's abandoned bike and sneaker. Ronnie's face, on the other hand, shows plenty of unease.
"So what're we gonna do, Ebbie?" T. J. asks when he's done. He's finally getting his breath back from his rapid pedal up the hill.
"What do you mean, what're we gonna do?" Ebbie says. "Same things we were gonna do anyway, go downstreet, see what we can find for returnable bottles. Go down the park and trade Magics. "
"But . . . but what if ¡ª "
"Shut your yap," Ebbie says. He knows what two words T. J. is about to say, and he doesn't want to hear them. His dad says it's bad luck to toss a hat on the bed, and Ebbie never does it. If that's bad luck, mentioning some freako killer's name has got to be twice as bad.
But then that idiot Ronnie Metzger goes and says it anyway . . . sort of. "But Ebbie, what if it's the Misherfun? What if Ty got grabbed by the ¡ª "
"Shut the fuck up!" Ebbie says, and draws back his fist as if to hit the damn mushmouth.
At that moment the raghead clerk pops out of the 7-Eleven like a turbaned jack out of his box. "I want none of that talk here!" he cries. "You go now, do your filthy-talk another place! Or I call police!"
Ebbie starts to pedal slowly away, in a direction that will take him farther from Queer Street (under his breath he mutters dune coon, another charming term he has learned from his father), and the other two boys follow him. When they have put a block between them and the 7-Eleven, Ebbie stops and faces the other two, both his gut and his jaw jutting.
"He rode off on his own half an hour ago," he says.
"Huh?" says T. J.
"Who did what?" says Ronnie.
"Ty Marshall. If anyone asks, he rode off on his own half an hour ago. When we were . . . ummm . . . " Ebbie casts his mind back, something that's hard for him because he has had so little practice. In ordinary circumstances, the present is all Ebbie Wexler needs.
"When we were looking in the window of the Allsorts?" T. J. asks timidly, hoping he isn't buying himself one of Ebbie's ferocious Indian burns.
Ebbie looks at him blankly for a moment, then smiles. T. J. relaxes. Ronnie Metzger only goes on looking bewildered. With a baseball bat in his hands or a pair of hockey skates on his feet, Ronnie is prince of all he surveys. The rest of the time he's pretty much at sea.
"That's right," Ebbie says, "yeah. We was lookin' in the window of Schmitt's, then that truck came along, the one playin' the punk-ass music, and then Ty said he hadda split. "
"Where'd he have to go?" T. J. asks.
Ebbie isn't bright, but he is possessed of what might be termed "low cunning. " He knows instinctively that the best story is a short story ¡ª the less there is, the smaller the chance that someone will trip you up with an inconsistency. "He didn't tell us that. He just said he hadda go. "
"He didn't go anywhere," Ronnie says. "He just got behind because he's a . . . " He pauses, arranging the word, and this time it comes out right. "Slowpoke. "
"You never mind that," Ebbie says. "What if the . . . what if that guy got him, you dummocks? You want people sayin' it was because he couldn't keep up? That he got killed or somethin' because we left him behind? You want people sayin' it was our fault?"
"Gee," Ronnie says. "You don't really think the Misherfun ¡ª Fisherman ¡ª got Ty, do you?"
"I don't know and I don't care," Ebbie says, "but I don't mind it that he's gone. He was startin' to piss me off. "
"Oh. " Ronnie contrives to look both vacant and satisfied. What a dummocks he is, Ebbie marvels. What a total and complete dummocks. And if you didn't believe it, just think of how Ronnie, who's as strong as a horse, allows Ebbie to give him Indian burn after Indian burn. A day will probably come when Ronnie realizes he doesn't have to put up with that anymore, and on that day he may well pound Ebbie into the ground like a human tent peg, but Ebbie doesn't worry about such things; he's even worse at casting his mind forward than he is at casting it back.
"Ronnie," Ebbie says.
"What?"
"Where were we when Tyler took off ?"
"Um . . . Schmitt's Allsorts?"
"Right. And where'd he go?"