The Fallen: A Novel Page 5

  It’s not like it would be a sin, the demon told him.

  “Hey, turn that down! I can’t hear the fucking TV!”

  If anything, she cranked it up a notch.

  R-E-S-P-E-C-T, the demon sang inside his head.

  Earl drained his beer, dropped the can into the sink, and lumbered into the hall. He shouldered her door aside and paused there, letting his shadow loom over her. She was on the bed, flipping through a magazine, and when she looked up, he saw a light go on down inside her eyes.

  She reached over to silence the music. Her shirt stretched taut across her breasts.

  “You ain’t supposed to be in here.”

  “Maybe you forget who makes the rules around here.”

  “Mama’ll be home soon.” Her voice caught, false bravado cracking. Earl thought about that light he’d seen in her eyes. Fear maybe. Or respect. The two weren’t that far apart.

  He felt a stirring in his loins. Thirty-five years of denial, thirty-five years of holding the demon in check.

  “You and me, we’re going to have a little talk,” he told her, but the words sounded funny. They sounded like the demon he heard inside his head. They sounded like his own true voice.

  Earl Kimball stepped into the room. He shut the door behind him.

  The demon capered and grinned.

  Eight months into his marriage, Boyd Samford found out for sure that his wife was cheating on him. He had suspected it for months—since she turned cold in the sack—but it had been easy to make excuses: nothing like a shotgun wedding and a screaming newborn to cool the libido. But when the baby started sleeping through the night and Marie still didn’t have any interest, Boyd knew something was up. Long as he had known Marie Richards she had loved nothing better than a little backseat boogie.

  Confirmation came when Boyd left work a couple hours early one day, sick to his stomach. He felt even sicker when he pulled up in front of the house. The car had been parked right there in his driveway for God and all the neighbors to gawk at: Sam MacLean’s Camaro.

  His stomach cramping, he drove to the McDonald’s on Cedar Grove and High and emptied his bowels in the men’s room. With every twist in his guts he could envision them, Sam and Marie tangling together. He gritted his teeth and hammered on the stall with his fist. It wasn’t supposed to work out like this, not for him. Nineteen years old, a wife and kid, a dead-end job stocking shelves down the market. Now this.

  When he got back to the house fifteen minutes later, Sam’s Camaro was gone. Marie looked up when he came through the door. “Boyd?” she said. “You okay?”

  And it was like he wasn’t even in the room, like he was watching it all happen on a flickering video feed with a ten-second delay, a NASA broadcast ten million miles from the world he had known: his hand coming up and smacking her across the face, his weight bearing her to the floor. Marie was screaming, and then the baby was screaming, too, but none of that mattered, not now.

  “I know,” he whispered. “I know, you bitch.”

  Her sweats tore away, her hot stink enveloped him. He wedged a knee between her legs, and then—

  —no, no—

  —he was inside her, with one thick hand mashing her lips, while he whispered in her ear, “Since you’re passing it around, honey, I’ll take a little for myself.” Nothing had ever felt so fine.

  Those were hard weeks in the Run.

  In Holland House, brooding like a feudal castle high above the town, Zach Holland marked his son up pretty good, the first time he had laid hands on the boy since Perry was five years old. In six short weeks, eight apartments came open in the Ridgeview Assisted Living Community as retirees began to pop off like Fourth of July fireworks—an epidemic of heart attacks, strokes, and aneurysms. More than once, Frank Bukowski, owner of the Tipple Supper Club up in Crook’s Hollow, settled brawls with a dusty Louisville Slugger that had languished unused behind the bar for years. And up on Widow’s Ridge, Lily Sleep couldn’t rest. She felt an aching in her bones.

  All over Sauls Run, that was a hard summer.

  That was the summer Harold Crawford got a dog.

  He found the dog, a bony mongrel the color of mud, on the verge of the county road that wound by his farm. Five years had passed by then. Crawford had begun to settle in, to feel safe in the Run, at home for the first time in—how long? His whole life, he supposed.

  It hadn’t always been so easy. Mountain folk were wary of outsiders, and during his first days in town, everything about Crawford—his accent, his manners, even the way he carried himself—marked him as a stranger. That was okay, though. He didn’t intend to stick around. The plan had always been to find a city in the south, some place warm and populous—Atlanta maybe, or Jacksonville—some place that wouldn’t freeze his Southern California blood, some place where he could lose himself in the crowd. That was still the plan. But sleep came easy that first night in the Run, and so he stuck around another night, and then another, and somehow time slipped away from him—a seductive procession of dreamless nights. The dark tide that had always threatened to drag him under receded. For the first time in his life, Harold Crawford was at peace.

  He took a room in a cheap motel on the outskirts of town, spent a month tramping the steeply wooded hills, working the toxins out of his system, letting the clean, sharp air scrub everything away—L.A. and LeMarius Oxford and the girl he had tried so hard to forget, everything. By the time he started running short of cash, he felt renewed. He packed up his car and drove south, heady with optimism. Then, eight hours down I-77, some asshole in a Firebird cut him off in traffic, and Crawford had found himself pursuing, swept up by a rising breaker of fury. Ten minutes later, with the speedometer needle hovering just over ninety, he forced himself to pull over. He sat on the shoulder, gripping the wheel white-knuckled while he waited for the tide to go out.

  So he would have to stay in Sauls Run—that was all. He would have to stay. Better to put his new identity to the test—better to risk everything—than surrender the peace he’d worked so hard to attain. Back in the Run, Crawford applied for work in the sheriff’s department. Dean Blaylock called him in for an interview two tense weeks later; another week after that, Crawford found himself back in uniform, back on the streets.

  He leased an apartment overlooking High Street and spent his off-hours hunkered in the living room, waiting for the knock at the door that would mean the whole elaborate tissue of lies had begun to come apart. The knock never came, and slowly, slowly, Harold Crawford began to relax. A year passed, then another and another. He opened an account at One Valley Savings on Oak Street and began putting away a little money each month. Maybe it was over. Maybe it was over at last.

  Crawford found himself rising steadily through the ranks of Dean Blaylock’s department. He turned out to be a gifted mimic, and soon he had developed a way of speaking, of carrying himself, that made him indistinguishable from men who had grown up in the mountains. When asked about his past, he alluded vaguely to the Midwest, a love affair gone sour. And while he risked no friends beyond his circle of professional acquaintances, he felt increasingly at home.

  By this time, the savings account at One Valley had grown considerably. One day after work, he called a real estate agent, and together they spent the next few weeks looking over available properties. Anxious for a little privacy after four years in an apartment, Crawford settled on a run-down clapboard farmhouse in the middle of twenty-six acres of scrub. A fixer-upper, the agent called it. Crawford called it home, and set about making the repairs enthusiastically, scrubbing the place room by room, replacing Sheetrock weak with dry rot, sanding and painting, though he did little more than sleep in the house. He spent most of his time on the road in his county car. He certainly didn’t have the time for a pet.

  But something—he couldn’t say what—made him stop when he saw that bony mutt crumpled by the roadside. It staggered up at his approach, whimpering. At first he thought a car might have gotten it. Its fly-swarmed hind leg
told another story: It had come up short in a fight. The dog whimpered again when he hunkered down beside it.

  Getting soft, Harold Crawford, he told himself, and so wholly had he obliterated his past that there wasn’t even the faintest echo of his real name in the thought.

  Crouching, he stroked the dog’s shank. It rolled its head and gazed up at him from one watery eye. “Well, shit,” he said. He found a blanket in the trunk of his car, wrapped the dog carefully, and moved it to the front seat. Then he headed back to the house.

  It was only a dog, he told himself.

  How much harm could it do?

  He had left the dog in a bed of old straw in the barn. When he got back from work, it thumped its tail in greeting. He fed it from a bag of dry Alpo, then cleaned up the leg. He held the dog gently and cooed at it as he boiled away the grit with hydrogen peroxide. The cooing seemed to help some.

  When the dog had settled down, he bandaged the raw flesh. Then he fished his knife out of his trousers. A door came ajar in his memory when the long blade flicked from the haft—the first time in years that had happened. Maybe it was the barn that did it—the vast, looming barn that reminded him of the empty warehouse where the girl had died. Or maybe it was the knife, gleaming in the falling sun from the loft. For a moment Harold Crawford paused, feeling the old tidal pull, that slick undertow of rage, and then he did what he had to do: He slammed the door shut before he got a good look at what stood in the darkness behind it. The past was past, he told himself. You are a good man. Let it lie.

  Yet his fingers shook as he worked them through the dog’s coat, pausing now and again to cut out a burr or knot. By the time he finished the job, stars buttoned down the black scrap of sky in the loft door. He sat in the dark for a while and cradled the dog’s head, breathing the damp and doggy odor of the barn and listening to the night music, the peepers and crickets and tiny tree frogs with the big voices as his thick hands moved in the mutt’s rough fur.

  That night he dreamed that he walked along a strand frosted with the sheen of a crescent moon—a horned moon, his father would have called it. The black water heaved at his shoulder, luring and restless and immemorial. He could feel it singing through his body, that old tidal pulse of blood and desire.

  But he stayed the course.

  Something awaited him at the limits of his vision, a black heap heaving gently in the swells, just where the water met the shore. Harold Crawford felt a surge of hope. He couldn’t identify the black heap, not yet, but he knew what it was the way you know things in dreams: an opportunity. A chance to make things right.

  The dog improved. The next day it hobbled out to meet him at the barn door as he clumped up in his heavy boots. The day after that, it waited for him at the edge of the porch, frisking at his heels, favoring the bad leg. Crawford had never had a pet. He wasn’t sure how to talk to it. “Hey, boy,” he said, and by default that became the dog’s name.

  Boy sat on the porch with him in the evenings when Crawford allowed himself a solitary beer. One beer at nine thirty to ease him off to sleep, then eight hours in the sack. He woke at the same time every day, shaved whether or not he had to work, kept his few possessions—his weapons, his uniform—in relentless order. Order and ritual and iron resolve: Such were the raw materials he used to dam off the past, to wall away the man who had left the City of Angels in his rearview mirror.

  At ten o’clock every night, he took Boy to the barn.

  At ten fifteen he brushed his teeth.

  At ten thirty he was in bed.

  By midnight he was walking down the broken beach of his dreams, resisting the lure of the dark water and straining to make out the black form bobbing in the distant tide.

  Boy woke him.

  In another life, he had stood in a cop’s house in L.A. and watched him drop three goldfish into a tank of piranha. Deliberately starved for days, the piranha swarmed the goldfish—a flurry of arrow-swift motion. Blood clouded the water. Crawford—

  —Grubb, your name is Grubb—

  —had stumbled back a step, stunned by the force of his own excitement.

  Now, waking headachy and exhausted with the dog barking at the moonlit sky, barking and barking until Crawford wanted to scream—now the moment came forcibly back to him: the roiling water, the bright silver darts of the piranha, most of all the hunger. That was what it was, wasn’t it? Hunger.

  Yes, and he’d known what he was going to do even as he lifted the window sash and leaned out into the humid night. “Hush now!” he shouted to the dog. “Goddamn it, I said hush!” But it was all an act, this little display of annoyance, the habitual deceit of a man always on the run—from the law, from the past, from himself. He’d known what he was going to do from the moment he’d seen the dog whimpering by the roadside, hadn’t he? That was why he’d stopped in the first place. He’d known even then how it was all going to end.

  He reached for his pants, hanging over the bedpost.

  Outside, the night was warm, the yard silvered by the ethereal radiance of a full moon, reminding him for a moment of the broken beach in his dreams. Then Boy appeared in the door to the barn, moonstruck, barking, barking, barking.

  “Hush up,” Crawford said. And louder: “Hush now!”

  The dog darted past him and spun in the yard, its muzzle lifted to the sky, baying. Howling.

  “Boy!” Crawford shouted.

  The dog darted at him, squatted playfully on its haunches. Barked. Barked and barked and barked.

  Fucking dog thought it was some kind of game.

  “Come here, now,” Crawford said.

  Boy circled him, nipped at his trouser legs, and dashed away to hunker down with his muzzle low to the earth, his tail a joyous blur. Crawford feinted at him, spun, got a handful of air, and went down. He could feel the impact all along his spine. He felt the old familiar tide tug at him. Calmer inside, ice, he smiled. His voice changed, friendly, cajoling: “Come on, Boy! Here, Boy!”

  The dog hurled itself into his lap, a yammering bundle, tongue bathing his face. Crawford gripped the squirming creature by the loose flesh at its neck. With the other hand he fumbled in his pocket.

  High in its mountain fastness, the thing coiled in agony.

  A door banged open in Harold Crawford’s mind: the girl writhing underneath him, the blade glittering in the vast moon-splashed warehouse as he knotted his hand in her hair, wrenched her head back, and felt an orgasm smash through him.

  Yes, he thought. Oh yes.

  A dam crumbled inside him, a black and buoyant tide.

  He held the dog close against his side with one hand and lifted the other to the sky.

  Abruptly, the dog went still, its glazed eye fixed on something in the moonlight. Something shiny.

  The knife.

  In its dungeon under the mountain, the thing cried out as the wave of pain at last receded. Its life force flickered, flickered, and caught. It subsided once again into dreamless sleep.

  Below, moonlight fell on the Run.

  It fell on the vacant expanse of High Street and the Stone Bridge arching over Cinder Bottom. It fell alike on the grim folk who had been miners once and upon the man who had been their master, in his high house. It fell on them all, wise men and grave men and doomed men who aspired to be better than they had been or had any hope of being.

  In a winding hollow east of town, it fell through a high window to burnish Harold Crawford’s grinning blade, tossed carelessly on the nightstand. Crawford himself walked the shattered edge of a continent in dreams, drawn onward by that shape rolling gently in the swells. It was a man; he could see that now. A drowning man, and if he could but save him everything would be forgiven.

  Moonlight fell on Widow’s Ridge, as well. When the creature drifted into painless sleep, ten thousand thousand raging cells in Lily Sleep’s bones grew still.

  They would abide.

  Their time would come.

  Lily sighed and shifted in her sleep, and fled unknowing down corr
idors of dream.

  Burying the Dead

  The Present

  Chapter 6

  Under a sky the color of polished steel, Henry watched them put his father in the ground.

  He stood in blue shadow, the wind snapping briskly at the green funeral home awning overhead and blurring the sermon into incoherent snatches of scripture. Not that he was listening—not that he was doing anything at all, in fact, beyond trying not to think. He craved nothing more than silence, a moment of refuge from the steady clamor of his thoughts.

  Henry drew a long breath and exhaled slowly, searching for patterns in the plume of smoky air. He stared restlessly at his clasped hands, at the tips of his shoes, at the fragrant ranks of flowers already drooping in the chill air—at anything but the mound of carefully draped earth, the casket gleaming on its runners, the curtained walls of the pit itself. Anything but the grave.

  The thing of it was, though, it was still there. No matter how hard you tried not to look at some things, they were still there. No matter how hard you tried not to think about them, you could not not think about them. You could push and push and push them away, but in the end it did no good. They always came crowding back. So he stood there, seeing without looking, hearing though he didn’t want to listen, and for a single disorienting moment, he wasn’t sure who was standing in his spot: the man who had come here to bury his father or the grieving twelve-year-old boy who’d come to bury his mother on a muddy summer afternoon more than half a life ago.

  Even then—especially then—there had been things he could not not think about, no matter how desperately he wanted to avoid them. So he had stood before his mother’s casket, deaf to the words of his father’s homily, his mind spilling over with his own remembered words instead. They came back to him now—

  —go ahead do it I wish—I wish you’d—

  —nearly the last words he’d spoken to her in the days before the rain closed in like a gray shroud and he lost her forever.

  Henry swallowed.

  The circle closed. Time folded back upon itself; you always came back to the place where everything began. So it would end as it had started, with another set of words to haunt him, the last words he’d spoken to his father on the August afternoon when he had left the Run, three years gone. He’d finished packing for the drive to Ransom by noon. His car was already idling in the driveway when he turned to face his father through the taut mesh of the screen door. “I worry about you on the road alone,” his father had said.