Dead Fish Jumping On The Road E-Book

W.L. Liberman

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Joe Simpson is a cynical reporter haunted by childhood memories.

It's the 1960s, and Joe has fled the big city only to end up in the small resort town of Applewood. Writing for the Gazette, Joe's life is uneventful until strange events begin to unfold.

A young girl drowns off a motorboat, and a local farmer plants a hoe in his wife's back. The assistant manageress of the bank vanishes without a trace.

Why is the whole town going crazy?

Things heat up even more when the town's first hippie opens up a record shop and invites his menacing friends to take up residence. Meanwhile, big money is moving in to develop the town's shoreline into a glitzy resort.

Applewood is about to erupt, and it is Joe's job to get to the bottom of it.

Leseprobe

Dead Fish Jumping On The Road

W.L. Liberman

Copyright (C) 2018 W.L. Liberman

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2019 by Next Chapter

Published 2019 by Next Chapter

Cover art by Cover Mint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

Chapter One

June 9th, 1966—my very first dead body—as an adult. Norma Jennings drowned off Roach's Point in Rattlesnake Bay. Aged 22, she stood five feet three inches tall, weighed 118 pounds and wore her long blond hair in a ponytail. Norma had fallen out of a speedboat, a Shark 235 with twin Johnson 75's. The boyfriend drove. They'd been fooling around.

Norma rode the bow backward while dangling her feet in the water, letting her heels kick up from the hard surface not suspecting that tragedy would strike. I pictured her smile and the brightness of her eyes, heard her brazen laugh. She wore a white bikini that barely covered her ample figure—a cheerleader's body. The boyfriend, Blake Rothwell, spun the boat's wheel at full speed, pushing it to 22 miles per hour, slewing through the waves at blunt angles. What a blast, he might have thought, high on the motion and velocity and thrill of doing something dangerous, something far out on the edge. Just the look of her made him push it to the limit. He wanted to be bad without knowing or caring or even understanding what bad was. Bad was in that summer.

Norma teetered this way and that, moving with the motion, still laughing, grabbing at the edges and missing, breaking a brilliantly lacquered nail, too drunk to be afraid. She held a Mickey of scotch in her left hand and tilted it to her lips as Blake continued to throw the boat around in its own wake. I could picture the heave of her white bosom, the pout of her full lips and see how she wiped her mouth after each pull on the bottle. I heard her titter as the liquor ran down her chin and dribbled into her cleavage. Her shrieks of laughter brayed out harshly over the wind and currents.

I could imagine Norma on that boat but in my real life I reported the facts. Five foot ten inches. Black hair. Blue eyes. One hundred sixty-pounds soaking wet. Twenty-six years old. Pugnacious attitude. Scarred childhood. That's me, Joe Simpson, reporter. How mundane it sounded. Just the facts, please, just the facts, bud. How many times I'd uttered that dreary phrase and how the facts as I often knew them, bored me to tears. But then, some stories came along and changed all that. I tried to escape from just such a story that had no ending…and then I landed in Applewood. Only partially on my feet.

Boyfriends named Blake always screwed up. The whine of the powerful outboard screamed in his ear. The boat slammed into a massive roller thundering forward like an avalanche. The Shark's hull dipped dangerously to the starboard side, slipping down to the varnished gunwale. Water the colour of slate licked the polished chrome fittings as, suddenly, Blake stared at an escalating mountain of boat over his left shoulder. He fought the rising motion for balance, struggling to keep the boat from flipping over and threw in a prayer for good measure. After a suspended eon, the Shark's hull leveled out with a thump slapping the water like a surfboard riding a high curl and that's when he grabbed the throttle and cut it dead. Blake felt victorious. He'd conquered the Bay and filling his lungs let out a piercing rebel yell. What kicks, he thought. But then Norma had gone. She'd gone for good. He hadn't even heard the splash or seen the upturned kick of her pretty white legs. Afterwards, we found broken shards of the mickey stuck into the surface of the polished hull dripping traces of her blood. AB positive.

The water lay 94 feet deep where Norma disappeared, too deep for the divers to have any chance of finding her but they went out anyway knowing all along it was useless. Roach's Point is a rocky knoll thrusting outward into the Bay. A flat shelf of granite extended out seventeen feet where the water stood waist high but dropped off crazily. Not a few had stepped off it into oblivion, hence its name, Dead Man's Plank. Blake's boat tore up the water no more than 35 yards offshore. But the night had been balmy and rough, the wind at 14 knots with swells of two and a half to three feet rolled in and pounded the beach. The water temperature leveled off at seventy degrees Fahrenheit—skin puckering cold. Currents moved in a vicious counter-clockwise vortex sucking up everything in their path, then spewed their miserable victims on to the pebbled shoal.

And that's what happened to poor Norma. She'd been sucked down to the bottom. Her tangled, semi-nude body rested peacefully at the water's edge as if the Bay had vomited it up whole. The Bay embraced her, swathed as she was in lacy strips of weed and marsh grass. Black clay and snails and leeches filled her cheeks, minnows kissed her eyes and lips and in her tightly-closed fist we found half a translucent clam shell. I still have that shell. I keep it as a sad and angry memento, the single remnant of a lush young woman who died foolishly. It was kicks too, she'd thought. And that seemed to characterize the atmosphere all that summer.

In the bleak dampness of an early June dawn, grey-coated shapes hovered around her, moving and talking mechanically, wishing they were somewhere else. They longed for a joke, a ray of light and for an easing of their burden. I'd gotten a call at 4:32 am. It was Hal Bigelow, one of the local cops.

“Norma's washed up,” he said softly, and gave me the location. Then he hung up taking care not to bang the receiver in my ear.

Under threatening skies, the four men seemed anonymous, squinting into the weak light, their hats and faces slick from the moist Bay air. As I approached, Doc Seaton bent low over the body, no mean feat for Doc since describing him as rotund was being generous and he looked to be at least eighty years old. I saw him remove and wipe his gold wire spectacles with a handkerchief he'd managed to tug out of his back pocket. Having finished scrubbing the shiny lenses, he stuffed the soggy rag back into his coat. The others stood stock still hanging their heads, hats in hand, like members of a funeral procession waiting for the corpse to descend into a freshly dug grave.

I picked out Hal Bigelow's enormous bulk right away since he stood six feet eight. Beside Hal, primping like a prissy, pampered mouse, perched Alistair Macafee, the mortician's sleek assistant. Steff Randolph, the mortician, stood looking like an upright cadaver himself. Steff had brought the hearse. He and Alistair waited on Doc Seaton's say-so, then they'd slide a gurney out and artfully arrange Norma's broken body on it. After which, she'd be transported to the Applewood town morgue where Doc would perform his standard autopsy, producing the standard results. Blake Rothwell reported Norma missing six hours after she'd sunk into the still, frigid waters of Rattlesnake Bay.

Standing with the group, we'd become five faceless citizens witnessing a little bit of horror together. I thought I caught Alistair smile ever so slightly as Doc gingerly probed one of Norma's shoal-scraped breasts and I wanted to flatten his smug, oily weasel face. But Doc wasted no time.

“Okay boys,” he said. “You can load Norma up now.” Doc stood up groaning and stepped back from the body. “Oh, hello Joe. Didn't hear you come up.”

“Doc.”

Doc puckered his lips, then clasped his hands on his round belly, clucking like a desiccated turkey.

“Such a shame, a pretty young woman like that.” He reached into his trench coat and fished out a packet of Sweet Cap's and offered them around. Hal and I each took one. Steff and Alistair busied themselves with the details of collecting their newest client. Steff brought out some threadbare field blankets and neatly covered Norma up, working delicately as if she were merely sleeping and he didn't want to wake her accidentally. Hal extended his lighter and we all drew from it.

“I delivered her, you know. I delivered a lot of them. And sometimes, I get them back. Kicks,” Doc snorted, blowing smoke. “Makes me sick.”

Doc and I felt the same way about it. But then every town boasted a fast crowd and Applewood crowed as loud if not louder than most.

“Cause of death, Doc?” I asked sheepishly.

“Accidental drowning,” he drawled.

“You can get the blood alcohol reading from the police report,” Hal said to me from behind a paw as he dragged on his smoke. I nodded, pressing my hand in close so that the stub almost burned my nose. The smoke brought quick tears to my eyes. It was the smell of her, like soft, rotted flesh decayed into a jellied tub of corruption. To my everlasting gratitude, Steff and Alastair lifted the stretcher and picked their way carefully over the wet stones to the hearse. I spotted a flash of muddied, yellow hair, just before the door clamped shut. Steff gave us a flagging wave, showing his exuberant side, then he and Alastair climbed into the impassive black machine. They drove slowly off down the sandy, pitted track toward the main highway back to town. Hal flipped the collar of his coat down onto his shoulders, unbuttoned the front and looked skyward.

“Looks like it's gonna be a decent day, after all,” he said.

Chapter Two

“Sassafrass!” spat Theodore Graff, as I bulled my way into the meagre offices of the Applewood Gazette, paid circulation 12, 331, balancing a cup of coffee and an apple danish in one hand and a brownie bag containing all my writing stuff—pencils, pads, erasers, and leaky pens in the other. At short arm's length, Teddy, who wasn't tall but almost excessively squat, blew out his apple cheeks, pursed his thick lips and scrutinized the front page of the afternoon edition as he leaned over the composing table in the middle of the room. By the severity of his scowl, I could tell instantly he disliked the results.

The cigar he'd been sucking on for the past week jutted from his rubbery lips as he closed one eye and stared hard at the page, then did the same with the other.

" Crooked," he muttered disgustedly. Then roared at the top of his lungs, “Stumpy!”

“Hi Teddy,” I said.

He swiveled his thick head about to unleash a blast in my direction. Just then, however, Stumpy Butler, the ancient, wizened pressman, his Popeye-like forearms hanging helplessly at his sides, black ink smeared up to the elbows, leaned in from the composing room.

“You called, Teddy?” he asked in a querulous, innocent voice, as if he might have heard someone call him from a long distance off but wasn't sure and decided to check, just in case. Stumpy owned about three teeth and appeared frequently bamboozled if not drunk. The typesetter broke down the week before and while repairs were effected, Stumpy knocked in type the old way, by hand. Except. With Stumpy, that word lay there, except.

“Crooked again, Stumpy,” Teddy growled at him, doing his best to snarl and curl his lip upward.

“How do you mean?” Stumpy asked in his quavery way.

“The type is crooked, goddammit. It's very simple, Stumpy. It isn't straight. How can I get out an edition when the type is all over the place, man? We'll drive our readers to blindness. We've got standards of excellence to maintain. Get it?”

“Yes sir.”

“Do it, again. And I want absolute precision.”

While following this riveting exchange, I managed to sling my coat over a chair, dump the bag onto my desk, take a bite out of the Danish and get in two or three slurps of coffee, steeling myself for the wrath of Teddy; whole rage fomented out of him because it could. The image of Norma fractured my mind and I thought simple, mundane tasks might wipe it away. Warily, Stumpy ducked back into the composing room to give the type another go. I could hear him whacking the letters into place.

Teddy leveled his bushy brows at me while I continued to consume breakfast. “Where the hell have you been? We're on a deadline here.”

“Asleep,” I answered truthfully. “But from 4:15 to 5:30 a.m., I was in the company of Norma Jennings.” Teddy's creased his brows more tightly knitting a dense bush across his forehead.

“Description,” he commanded.

I wiped the apple glaze off my chin with a paper napkin and swallowed before answering. “Bloated and ugly. A putrified mass of flesh. Brought half the Bay in with her. Steff, Alistair, Hal and Doc Seaton were there too. It was pretty grim. That bastard, Alistair, smiled like a voyeur when Doc touched her,” I said. I held my fist up and shook it. I didn't mind a fight. I'd been in plenty as a kid.

Teddy merely grunted. “And the Rothwell kid?”

“Nothing yet. He'll probably be charged with careless and dangerous operation of a motorboat or some damn thing. He waited six hours before reporting Norma missing.”

“So soooon?” Teddy remarked sarcastically.

“That means he'll beat the drunk rap for sure. He showed up at the station with Freddy Oliveira in tow. Released on his own cognizance. Told to stick around, the usual crap. She used to be a beautiful girl, Teddy, I mean really beautiful. The whole thing stinks. It just stinks,” I said, shaking my head in disgust.

Teddy hooked his thumbs into his suspenders and ran them up and down. For once, his white shirt looked clean. “You remember now—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Stick to the facts. Just stick to the facts.”

“You got it, Joe. That's what we're here for. You write up what you've got and then we'll see what a mess Tommy can make of it. Then I want you to run out to the Beatty place. His sow dropped 12 piglets last night.”

I grimaced. “Now there's a story.”

“It is around here,” Teddy replied in a threatening tone, daring me not to like it.

I lit a Sweet Cap perching on the corner of my desk. Teddy had turned back to examine the layout on the composing table. He glanced over his shoulder.

“You still here?”

“Yup…I was just thinking—”

“I don't pay you to think, Joe. I pay you to report. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?”

I shrugged, trying to swallow my anger with the apple Danish that now sat in my gullet like a hard lump. “You're the boss.”

“And don't you forget it.”

“Wouldn't dream of it,” I murmured.

“What was that?”

“ I hear you, Teddy.”

“Good. Now scram.”

Before I could vamoose, I needed to pluck my courage up and ask Teddy for more dough. I owned a black 1960 Chevrolet Biscayne convertible. It had looked sweet and gleaming on the dusty used lot. When I bought it a few months ago, the original whitewalls were still on the car. Within a week, however, two of the tires had blown, the transmission had acted up and the brakes squealed louder than I imagined those baby piglets ever could. Barney Diggle from Diggle's Gas Bar sold it to me. Barney had a reputation as a bit of a crook but I needed a set of wheels cheap to get around, especially when stories popped up in the backwoods. The repairs set me back a few hundred and my rent was due.

“Teddy….I need a raise….badly…”

His back stiffened so tight I though his suspenders would snap. He swiveled back to me. “I told you not to buy that damn car, didn't I? But no, you didn't listen to me, did you? Smartass kid who thinks he knows better, aren't you?”

“Hey, I'm twenty-six.” Teddy had a point. I probably bought the car because Teddy harangued me about Barney Diggle. “Besides, I don't know about that….”

“I do…” And he thrust the stub of putrid cigar in my direction. I steeled myself.

“What's your point, Teddy? If I sell my car will you give me a raise?”

Teddy choked on his bile. I could see it in the sudden red flush that repainted his face from its normal pink to a severe purplish hue. “Don't be a damned fool, Joe. Of course I'm not giving you a raise. Do you know how—”

“—Lucky I am to have this job? That there are at least sixty, eager young newshounds waiting in the wings. Waiting for my demise, waiting for me to falter, waiting for my miserable ballpoint to blow up in my face. Isn't that what you were going to say, Teddy?” I asked him.

I had what the others didn't. A mother in prison, serving life for murdering my father. Norma's body was the first I had seen in the flesh. But I couldn't forget seeing the outline of my father's corpse under a sheet hastily thrown over him just after my twelfth birthday. Nice present. I saw the blood dripping into the cracks of the floorboards, the pale, flushed expression as my mother, wild-eyed, frantic, her expression pleading, the cops dragging her out of our apartment, a third floor walk-up on a 19 by 120-foot lot on Borden Street in Toronto. A guy in soiled coveralls wheeled the covered gurney carrying my father's body down the long hall of our building. And like Norma, my father's arm flopped out from under the starched sheet. The fingers splayed, the back of his hand grimy with black hair. I remember one of the detectives in a rumpled suit, fedora crushed on his skull, saying, “Jeezus Harry, get the kid the hell outta here.” A large, blue policeman carried me down into the street. I kicked and cried, beat my hands against his massive chest. It felt like striking a stonewall.

Like me, my dad reported the news. He worked the crime desk for the Toronto Mercury and wrote lucid stories that were simple and powerful in their brutality— that is, when he was sober. He blamed it all on the War, of course. Said he came back from Germany damaged. My mother sulked. They only kept each other company when they hit the bottle. Then all of the suppressed rage spilled out of him and she loomed there, right there in front of him. And he had to punish someone.

She used a steak knife from the kitchen drawer. The serrated blade broke off in his chest. In this regard, being 'special' sucked.

Knotting the clump of greying sagebrush that marked the beginning of his forehead, Teddy shook his foul, shredded cigar stub in my face.

“I'd watch it if I were you, Joe. You're getting too damn big for your britches. If you weren't such a good reporter, I'd have kicked your butt out of here a long time ago.”

“That and the fact you haven't given me a raise in two years,” I said.

“Two years?” he grunted. “What is your salary now, Joe?”

“Eighty-seven fifty; gross,” I replied, shoving my hands into the pockets of my scuffed chinos, looking at him in a brash sort of way. As brash as I could muster, blowing smoke to the ceiling.

“Eighty-seven fifty,” he repeated. “You know when I started out that would have been a king's ransom. You could have fed a family of ten on that wage and had plenty left over.”

“This isn't 1925,” I replied.

Teddy smiled dangerously. “No,” he said. “No, it isn't…” he said.

“I'm not talking about anything outrageous, Teddy. A hundred a week would do me fine.”

“A hundred a week, eh?” he said quietly, prelude to a welling torrent of outrage. “Just a lousy twenty percent increase, that's all you're asking for?”

“Um, fifteen percent actually.”

“Sure,” Teddy smiled sweetly. “Just fifteen percent. Uh-huh. Sounds reasonable to me. I mean, after all, there are steel plants and coal mines closing all across this country…” Listening to this twaddle, I sighed. “…family farms are packing it in and moving to the cities to go on the breadline, the soup kitchens are working overtime, little kids are begging in the street and you want me to give you a fifteen percent raise while all of this abject poverty, this undiluted misery is swilling its black hopelessness all around us?”

I looked out the picture window into the street. It was deserted, no line-ups, no ragged kids pressing their noses in. “That's right,” I replied.

“And where do you think that money's going to come from? You expect a new advertiser just to waltz in here and plunk down a wad of cash for a stack of advertisements? Or maybe we should trim some of the fat around here?”

I shrugged. I really didn't know, or care if the truth be known.

“Perhaps, you'd like me to cut Stumpy's pay? Stumpy,” he roared and Stumpy Butler's bewildered visage, pale and dripping with sweat, popped out of the composing room.

“Yes, Teddy?” His jaw went slack dragging his mouth open.

“Stumpy…how would you like to take a cut in pay?”

“Wwwhaaaattt?” Stumpy swallowed. “What for?” I'd seen lame animals look less pathetic.

“Why…to accommodate Joe here, who feels he's the most deserving of a raise.”

Stumpy looked even more miserable, if that was possible and scratched his meager scalp. “Well, I, uh…”

Teddy cut him off. “Nadine,” he snapped and Nadine Morgan, the chain-smoking office manager who'd heard every word, raised her beehive above eye level to peer over her cubicle.

She breathed smoke. “Yeah?”

“Maybe you'd like to make a fiscal sacrifice for Joe here? What do you say?”

Nadine snorted. “If anybody should make a gesture here, it's you, Teddy.”

Teddy raised his finger and pointed it heavenward. “Of course, of course. Take the food out of the mouths of my children.”

“Your kids are grown up and left home ages ago,” Nadine snorted, shaking her head.

“But still…it's the principal that's at stake here,” he insisted.

“Unbelievable,” Nadine muttered. “All this over a few measly bucks,” she said and shook her lacquered head some more. Not a wisp stirred.

The toes of my shoes had become increasingly more interesting. Just when I thought he would explode, I looked up. “So do I get the raise or not?”

“You think you're pretty smart,” he hissed back.

I knew Teddy would try it on. He always did and in the past I'd usually cave but not this time. This time I was determined to see it through.

“No, I just need a raise, Teddy. And it has been over two years.”

Teddy suspended his performance on a dime.

“All right, Joe,” he said very quietly. “We'll play it your way,” he added in a tone that told me this wasn't the end of it.

But I didn't care about the consequences. “That's a hundred a week, effective today,” I said happily. “Right?”

Teddy nodded. “Now, I've wasted enough damn time,” he said grumpily. “I've got a paper to put together here.”

Stumpy stood aghast.

“Well, I'll be,” he said scratching his sparse head. And then he had an idea, I could see it growing in his eyes, moving slowly downward from his forehead to his chin, until finally his entire face lit up.

“Say, Teddy..?”

“Not now, Stumpy,” Teddy hollered. “I've got work to do.” Stumpy swallowed hard, crestfallen, then slunk back into the composing room, muttering to himself at his missed opportunity. With Stumpy it was often difficult to know just what he was thinking. Maybe he'd lay Teddy across the metal type and threaten to whack him on to the front page if he didn't get a raise too?

“Say Joe, didn't I give you an assignment?” Teddy asked.

I nodded, basking in my newfound prosperity. “Yup.”

“Well, hop to it.” Now that the crisis was over, he'd become reasonable…normal.

“I'm leaving, I'm leaving. Er, I expect Doc's autopsy report on Norma might be ready by now.”

“That's pretty quick work,” Teddy growled.

“Well you know Doc Seaton. He's a fast worker. Listen can I….?”

Teddy waved his hand in disgust, as if he had a sudden bad taste in his mouth and resumed sucking on the cold stogie to take it away.

“No. Piggies first. Autopsy after. Go on, get going,” he said.

“You've made me very happy.”

“Sure.”

“I'll name my first born after you.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

I went to open my mouth again.

“Get outta here,” Teddy yelled. I grabbed my jacket, patted Nadine's wrinkled cheek. She raised her head far enough to give me a wan smile, picked up my brownie bag and left slamming the door.

Chapter Three

I drove out of town trying to shake off those childhood memories but that was like saying time stood still and the sun never rose each morning. My old man used to say that he could feel a big story coming on, that he'd get this tingling feeling in the back of his neck. Jack Simpson. Had a nose for the news, his buddies used to boast. The only times I saw him smile, even whistle under his breath sometimes was when he slapped a copy of The Mercury on the kitchen table and pointed to his byline on the front page. “Best feeling in the world,” he'd crow and my mother and I would smile shyly with him, wondering how long the euphoria would last. Never long enough. Maybe the only good thing I got from him was the same intuition. My neck had been tingling ever since Norma's body washed up on shore. In truth, it was a curse but like my old man, I couldn't leave go of the big one when it came along. I realized, that in my own way, I was competing with him even though he lay in a box below ground, shamefully dead.

On a busy day it took no more than seven minutes to escape Applewood and the countryside opened up like a spring flower. I followed Highway 26 north for six miles, then turned on to Nottawasaga Road 8, heading west, intending to make my way out to the Beatty place and report on the blessed coming of the divine piglets.

The road opened before me empty and infinite, except for a car coming up quickly in my rear view mirror. I glanced at it, then looked ahead. The sun soared. A mild breeze blew. I had begun to relax, slipping into that state of semi-reverie on a pleasant, summer day. The black car raised dust as it fish-tailed around the curves. Guy's going awfully fast, I thought. I gripped the wheel a little harder as the car loomed larger in my sphere of vision. My Chevy was a big, solid car and could move when I wanted it to but the road narrowed and wound around this far out in the country. A solid line split the pitted tarmac. No passing allowed.

The dark car drew nearer, edging up. I knew by its low-riding chassis that it was a Corvette and heard the throaty growl of its engine. The driver pulled up close, just back of my rear bumper. What the hell was he playing at? Guy should be reported but I couldn't make out any details to report. Couldn't make out the driver as the windshield had been blacked over. In fact, the entire car was black from top to bottom. Some kind of joker, I figured, thinking I drove like a knock-kneed tourist or an old-age pensioner. He inched closer, dropped back, then moved up again, boosting the gas. I began to think the guy was nuts. Some psycho road hog having a thrill.

I eased up on the accelerator hoping the Vette would pass but it dropped back. Then, I pumped the brake lightly to warn him off but he hung back for a second then charged up again playing kissy-kissy with my rear bumper. I squared up behind the wheel then trod on the accelerator watching the guy fade in the rear view…but not for long. He swooped up then pulled out beside and slightly behind me as we accelerated around a hair-pin. I felt the Chevy's tires spin on the gravel shoulder. The foghorn blast from a logging truck made me jump out of my skin. The Corvette dropped back quickly tucking itself neatly behind me. I caught a flash of the flushed face and angry, flexed jaw of the driver. He jabbed a rigid thumb up in the air. His obscene words swallowed by another blast of the air horn. Just as the rig blew by, the dark car moved up again inching its way forward. The harder I pushed, the faster he went, matching me effortlessly. We balanced neck and neck charging down the twisted road at 80, 90, then 100 miles an hour, faster than I'd ever gone before. Faster than I thought possible. I felt like the guy was laughing at me. Playing some stupid but dangerous game. What the hell was I doing? My hands locked on the steering wheel. My arms had gone rigid, fused into iron bars.

I heard it before I felt the impact.

A bang erupted behind my head. The car rumbled and shuddered and rocked on its springs. I wrestled the wheel with all my strength lifting my foot off the accelerator…the rear left had exploded. The back end of the Chevy jerked sluicing on loose gravel and sand rabbiting dangerously. The front end swung left. The scream of rubber filled the air or maybe it was me doing the screaming…I wrenched the wheel to the right and felt the car careen toward the shoulder.

The Chevy left the road shooting up a hill where it jounced and bounced in the ruts and gullies of the boggy grassland.

I gripped the wheel with all the strength I could muster as the car dove to a stop in the gully of a lumpy slope where I cracked my head on the dashboard. A creak, then a groan teased out of the metal carcass as The Chevy began to roll backward toward the road. Dizzily, I stomped on the brake forcing some steel into my leg. The car's jerking progress stopped just short of the gravel shoulder before exposing its rear end to the highway. When I finally managed to look up, the Corvette, pristine in its throaty power, vanished around the next bend. I jammed the transmission into park, kicked in the parking brake and switched off the engine letting my head loll back on the seat. I lay like that for a long time panting and moaning although probably only two minutes had lapsed. In the rear view, I could see a nasty lump forming on my forehead where the skin had broken and was rapidly turning green and blue. The Corvette had no license plates. A cipher.

I examined the damage. The right front fender looked banged up pretty good and a long, sickening scrape scythed across the doors where I'd plowed through a stand of prickly scrub and saplings. Now that my head pounded to beat the band to match the damage, it was all just about perfect.

I kept a spare in the trunk. After much huffing and wheezing, I changed the tire. I looked at it in disgust. The blown whitewall seemed beyond repair, shredded into oblivion. And then I wondered what had happened. I shook my head. I really didn't know. I did know that a nice goose egg formed on my head, my hands were covered in grease, my elbow smarted where I'd skinned it on the tire jack and I'd sweated through my short-sleeve, button-down, cotton shirt. And now, I had to see a man about pigs.

I swung the car onto the road feeling a bit numb. The front right tire clanged against the crumpled wheel well.

Turning up a gravel road, I spotted the dented mailbox marking the Beatty place and bumped along their dirt drive, hearing the squeal of extremely animated pigs and worse, smelling the stench of filthy, mud-slopped bodies. They heard my car. No sooner had I cut the engine than Jan Beatty, blonde and apple-cheeked, wiping her large, reddened hands on a calico apron and Evan, stout as a fireplug in his bleached coveralls and a fierce expression shielded by a ratty-looking straw hat pulled low on his dark bearded face, waddled down the steps of their porch.

“'Bout time you got here,” fumed Evan. “We've been waiting on you. Expected you to show up over an hour ago.” Then spat a stream of tobacco in a black arc at my feet splattering my socks.

“Now Evan,” scolded Jan as I wondered what Ozark nightmare they'd crawled out of, “there was no call to do that. Mr. Simpson'll think we're uncivilized. How about some cold lemonade, Mr. Simpson? I make it myself. It is such a warm day.” Her voice resonated with that ever-present nasality that city slickers come to expect in country folk. I wasn't disappointed. You could hitch a hay wagon to it. Jan stood on the porch steps and turned to await my reply before disappearing inside the farmhouse.

“That'd be swell,” I said, resisting the urge to wipe my socks in front of Evan. His eyes formed dark orbs rimmed with white. He had the look of a wild stallion about to rear up and stomp something or someone into a pulpy mess. His thick beard had been trimmed into a round bush by a pair of garden shears but his upper lip remained clean. Surprisingly delicate nostrils pulsated like vibrating flanges as he snorted in anger. He spat again and leaned in close. I smelled his acrid, tobacco-filled breath. He gave me a dead-eyed stare. Spooky. I was still trying to shake off the effects of the near-death experience I'd just had in the car. Evan began to murmur in a muttering, accusatorial tone pointing a stubby finger in my direction. He sniffed the air then shrugged violently as if physically assaulted by some odious shape.

“I smell it, boy and I smell it on you,” he said.

“Smell what?” Had my deodorant let me down?

“Slime. Evil slime. It burns the air around me. I choke. I gag. I want to clear my throat and spit it up. It's here around you and I say, get it gone from me.”

“Well, when you find it, whatever it is, let me know.”

He gathered himself up to blather on when the porch door flew open with a frightening bang. Evan nearly left his boots standing in place. So did I. The resounding knock of wood on wood made me realize that for a working farm, the Beatty place had become uncharacteristically quiet suddenly. Eerily quiet. The grunting undercurrents of the piggies surged through the hazy air. Jan marched down the stairs carrying a broad tray…a wooden tablet embroidered around the edges with a cyrillic-like script…laden with a frosted pitcher and tall glasses. I heard the rattling of spoons as she clumped along. She lay the tray across the flat end of an upturned log. In her best hostess manner, she poured out three glasses handing one to Evan and me where we stood virtually toe-to-toe in mute enmity. She looked at us curiously.

Jan asked, “What's the matter with you two?” Hands on ample hips, scolding us as if we were rapscallions up to no good.

“Oh, it's nothin',” Evan muttered darkly and slurped his lemonade in the manner of a horse watering at a trough. I seemed incapable of moving, morbidly fascinated by what was becoming another episodic moment hashed into the day.

“How do you like it? Is it cold enough for you?” It took me a long moment to realize it was me Jan addressed. I took a sip and she watched me raptly, eagerly awaiting my pronouncement. Jeee—zus and the hepcats! Never in my existence had I tasted anything so sour. My palette had gone dry as the arroyo. I couldn't even swallow let alone talk. I would have dearly loved to spit the noxious beverage into Evan's warthog face. I nodded with false enthusiasm stretching shriveled lips as wide as possible. “Mmm…aahhh…eerrggg…”

Evan stared mightily with his accursed eyes. Even Jan felt his intensity.

“Evan. What's got into you? You're acting most peculiar. Don't mind him, Mr. Simpson. He's in one of his moods. They come and go, just like the seasons. And sometimes just as slow too,” Jan said, dimpling her plump face with a smile.

Perhaps it was the lemonade, perhaps not but while verbally paralyzed, my mind raced on toward some distant intellectual nebula. Maybe I had simply been concussed. And suddenly, silence blanketed the world. The silence permeated the air, drenched it. I felt my ankles and feet melt into the earth, then slowly take root. My hosts stood, shoulders touching then began to merge, while sheer white light emanated from their direction. But it became a benign hue not dazzling and not stinging to the eye. As seconds ticked off, the Beattys formed the light, that is, it came through from behind them and gradually achieved an elevated state of phosphorescence obliterating all else nearby. The radiance then sprang forward as if seeking a new host and moved behind my eyes, probing my ears, my senses, my mind. I couldn't hear anything but a low crackling, wireless hum. Fragments of the landscape zoomed into my foreground, then out again. Zoom. I strained to hear. Dead leaves crunchless underfoot. Zoom. Calves lowing silently in the meadow. Zoom. A crop duster soaring lazily in the mute distance. Zoom. My voice bellowing a dumb scream to the cotton-wadded atmosphere. But the world had been framed and screened and the big knob controlling the volume had been switched to off. Who was watching? And could they hear my thoughts?

Then, I heard it.

Solid, basso-profundo lines…musical notes. Music the like of which I'd never felt before—shattering and powerful. Chords struck for an eternity touching and surrounding my person like an everlasting truth. It was then, in a single, peerless second that the utterly simple significance of nature came to me as if the notes contained a secret hieroglyph meant only for me. It was a pattern. I was to unmake it. An oratorio of voices descended like a fluttering cloud and mingled freely with the music. Its form so powerful that a massive city could rise up on its own underpinnings without fear or concern for physical danger. Each popping molecule pressed in around me but instinct indicated there was no cause for alarm. Clouds lightened then darkened spasmodically like the clench of a heart, moving quickly across the pulsating sky in staccato fashion. The sun winked at each rapid fire uncovering, flickering with the intense pulse of a disco strobe fuelled by juiced up circuitry. As sound and sight melded with my throbbing blood, my worldview tilted dangerously. Somehow, I'd landed on the ground just as the cosmic pandemonia frothed to their collective apex; the voices withered, the sky dissipated and my senses boomeranged back to normal perspective as I stared uncomprehendingly at Evan's manure-splattered boots.

Jan exclaimed, “Oh my goodness! Evan, help Mr. Simpson up. He's had a fainting spell. Let's get him into the shade. Probably a touch of heat stroke, I'm sure.”

Evan glowered some more but complied with his wife's request as I felt myself yanked upright and dragged to a cooler locale under cover of the barn's slanted roof where the world continued to congeal into proper view.

“Wow. Some lemonade,” I rasped, feeling my burning face.

“I expect you got too much sun,” Jan said reassuringly. “Your face is quite bright, you know. And that lump.”

“I'm feeling better, thank you.”

“Well, if you're sufficiently recovered, let's go see the piggie-wiggies, shall we?” Jan cried, desperately hoping the sight of them might restore her moment of glory. She beckoned me to follow her broad back and shoulders—shoulders sloped from fetching slop pails, rolling hay bales, mucking out stalls—around the side of the weather-beaten barn. Evan, stolid as an A-bomb, strode darkly after.

The grunting and snorting sounded menacing as we approached the large pen, all bedecked with ribbons of pink and blue.

“There they are,” declared Jan proudly. I peered in. An obese sow lay on her side as her offspring recreated a rugby scrum pushing and shoving, digging in their little hooves for better traction to get at her swollen teats. A collection of squeals rose up as the victors fought successfully to their prize.

I asked, “What do you call them?”

“Maisie.”

“Maisie? They're all called Maisie?”

“Easier to remember,” Evan said with quiet menace. “We've got a lot of animals here. Can't always remember their names, you know.”

“No, of course not,” I agreed, edging away from Evan and his strangeness. “I guess you're both tinkled pink.”

“Actually,” Evan interjected, “there were thirteen but I strangled one at birth. Thirteen is bad luck, an evil omen.”

“Oh Evan. Don't be so strange. He's so superstitious, Mr. Simpson. There's nothing to it, really. Why, he's always looking out for black cats and ladders and things. Sometimes, he just gets carried away, don't you Evan?” she cried.

“No,” he replied dully.

I desperately wanted to get the hell out of there. “Say, why don't I take a picture for the article, then I'll just beat it.”

“Don't you even want to know their birth weights or how long poor Maisie mommy was in labour?” Jan asked, disappointment etched keenly on her face.

“Sure, sure, okay,” I replied as she promptly began to list each one in turn. “Why don't you just tell me the average birth weight, Mrs. Beatty? I'm not sure how much space we're going to have, you know, including the picture and everything.”

I managed to coax a nice smile out of Maisie mommy and her brood, even composed an orderly tableaux with a proud Jan and a glowering Evan and then tore the hell out of the Beatty place as Jan waved enthusiastically and Evan stared out from under the brim of that ratty hat. I could see the rims of his eyes and their wildness chilled me as I rammed the gear lever into reverse, trod the accelerator shooting shards of gravel and stones into the air as I peeled out of there. Once back on the main road, I relaxed my foot and eased off the gas pedal still shivering. Now the sun shone heatless. Checking the rear view mirror, all the colour had drained from my face except for the pulsating lump. If for a scant millisecond, I'd thought I understood nature, it had been a sad mistake. I saw Norma Jennings' rotted face staring back at me as I tore away and nearly lost control. Control of everything.

Chapter Four

On the way back to town, whizzing past rotted fence posts, grazing heifers, sun-dried fields of peaches'n cream corn, waffling oaks and heat dissipating off the tarmac, my brain suffered gridlock. I was entranced without being able to assimilate anything that had happened yet alone wonder about the meaning or possible origins of such ungodly events. Maybe I was just a dupe, a sap and that was it. The Big Guy simply laughed at me.

And what about fate?

You walk down the street and a flowerpot hits the sidewalk in front of you. Or you stroll in the woods and suddenly you hear a tremendous crashing sound, something smacks you in the head, your knees buckle, your vision goes dark. After a moment, your senses return. Instantly you're up to your armpits in the branches of a fallen maple tree. You are standing where the main part of the trunk forks and it is only by some random aura you aren't smashed to kindling. My mother had not committed a random act. I damned my father to hell. I hated him for what he'd done, for the marks he'd left on me but I loved him too. I just didn't want to be him.

Some hundred yards ahead, I spied a wiry figure perched atop a fence post. I slowed the car to get a better look. There came that now familiar feeling. I reached into my jacket pocket and rubbed Norma's clamshell. For good luck. I saw a middle-aged man—gaunt as a scarecrow, ably balanced, hugging his bony knees to his skinny chest, swaying minutely. He looked deeply tanned and wore torn fatigues, an over-sized white T-shirt with a pocket over the left breast and black high tops with no socks. His ankles seemed sharp as chiseled flints.

The strange man appeared to be whispering to himself while staring ahead, his gaze frozen on some fixed point. The surrounding area remained unpeopled, just rumpled fields merging into dense forest. His hair was iron-grey and cut close, shaved around the sides and back like most of the farmers in the area. The typical bowl cut.

I pulled on to the grassy shoulder and stopped. At the squeal of the brakes, the man's head began to swivel like a machine gun turret on a Sherman tank; smoothly checking for signs of the enemy. His eyes reminded me of wet cement, vacant and opaque. For a second, I thought he might flap his arms and try to fly. But he didn't. We both sat there and I watched him continue to swivel his head while wondering what to do.

He frightened me a little and I tried to remember if there were any asylums nearby. I couldn't just sit there forever and I didn't want to leave the poor guy, I mean what was his story? I began to write the copy up in my head. Seemed more newsworthy than a bunch of piglets, that's what instinct signaled to me. I leaned out from behind the wheel and unhitched the door carefully. I left it open in case a quick getaway was required. Steady and slow—I approached. I didn't want to rile him but made sure he saw me too. I was surprised to discover that, the birdman, as tall as he was, kept his perch so easily. He looked healthy enough with that ruddy complexion and although lean didn't seem undernourished in any way. What he was, however, meant being somewhere else in his mind. Part of me wanted to join him.

As I drew near, I heard him talking to himself in a parrot-like manner, to the point of mimicking the scratchy pitch of the bird's voice.

“Did you see him? He was so tall…above the tabernacle. His hands were on fire…Did you see him? He was so tall…above the tabernacle. His hands were on fire…”, he said repeatedly in that nasal tone. No squawking or screeching though.

I approached. “Sir?” The head swiveled. The voice nattered. “Sir?” No reaction. Oh well, what the hell. “Polly?” That got his attention. He stopped and then wet his lips. I was stumped. Now what?

“Polly…want a …banana?”

As it happened, I didn't have any crackers but I did have a banana in the glove compartment of my car. Meant to eat it but just forgot it was stuffed in there. If he'd been out here for any length of time, I reasoned astutely, he was bound to be hungry. Something in his face told me he was receptive to the idea, a kind of quizzical look. I reached out my hand.

“Come on, Polly. Come on down now and I'll give you a banana.”

The birdman cocked his head to the right, then the left and unfolded one leg like a stork until it touched the ground, whereupon taking his weight fully, released the other and stood in a half-crouch, with his hands cupped forward in front and elbows tight to his sides. His long neck stood outstretched and as I took a step toward him, he pulled it in sharply lifting his thin lips, exposing yellow teeth.

I held up my hands. “Okay. Okay, Polly.” I backed away slowly.

“Why don't you come with me and get the banana? Come on. Come on, Polly.” I coaxed him bit by bit to the car…he duck-walked along the shoulder of the road. The sharp smell of freshly laid tar wafted up. I opened the passenger door and he stepped in, standing then crouching on the seat where he resumed his perch, head and shoulders above the line of the windshield. Over on the driver's side, I opened the glove compartment, removed the banana, peeled it and held it out to him. He examined it for a few moments and then reassured it was what I said it was, took it in his hands holding them like talons and began to peck at the mushy fruit eagerly, head bobbing rhythmically. I put the car in gear and drove carefully back to Highway 26.

And so we drove into town, this creature on my right pecked at a banana ready to take wing if he were able, as I contemplated how this might look to the so-called sane world. Then I decided, to hell with the sane world. What had it done for me lately?

I skirted the town perimeter and came up through the alleyway behind the police station. Now I had a problem. Should I lead him inside or leave him in the car and bring somebody out? Might he fly the convertible? By now, he'd finished the banana and resumed the swivel routine. Instinct told me he'd stay put for at least a little while.

“Polly. I want you to stay here in your perch until I get back. Do you understand, Polly? Polly, do you understand?” I don't know if he heard me but I stepped over the door of the car praying that Hal Bigelow hadn't finished his shift yet. I was in luck. He sat behind the main counter filling out forms. In his meaty fist, the pencil looked like a toothpick.

“Hal, we've got to parley. Outside.”

He barely looked up. “Simpson. Back again. Why don't we give you a desk or maybe you'd like an office?”

“Hal look. I don't have time to explain but you've got to come outside with me right now. I've got something to show you. It's in my car.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously showing concentrated mental activity then flitted to the mound of paperwork in front of him. “Hal, when I say now, I mean now.”

He sighed, fingered his chin, then slapped the pencil down on the clipboard. “Okay, okay.” he groused, rising, taking the elevator to his full height. “What's up? You got some fancy hubcaps or something?”

“Come outside and try not to fall flat on your kisser, wise guy.”

I literally pulled him out the door. It was like dragging an elephant stuck in the mud. We went out back. I feared the birdman had taken off or been driven away. To my relief, there he sat, maintaining his perch in the front seat, swiveling his head, scanning the unseen horizon for the figure in his terrifying vision.

“Have a look-see,” I said.

Constable Bigelow stopped dead and gaped. “What the hell? What's he doing?”

“You know this guy?” I asked.

“I sure do. It's Ellis Boston.”

“The guy who planted a hoe in his wife's back?”

“Yeah. Say. How did you know about that? The public announcement hasn't gone out yet. It's all been on the QT.”

“Never mind.”

“What the hell is he doing?”

“Being a bird,” I replied.

Hal said, “Come again?”

“He thinks he's a bird, Bigelow. A bird. What'd you think I said?”

“Don't ask,” he muttered and stepped gingerly toward Ellis Boston who affixed him with a piercing stare. Hal stopped several feet in front of the car. “Ellis? Ellis? What the hell are you doing? Ellis, can you hear me?” The only response he elicited was a muted squawk.

“He won't answer you. But he was mumbling something when I found him. Something like,”Did you see him…above the tabernacle. He was so tall. His hands were on fire." Or words to that effect," I said.