Dead Man's Song

ancient history. I’m officially calling a truce.”

“Thank God,” Sarah said, and the relief was plain on her face, “because right now I need you to help me with what Terry’s going through. If you want to…if you can.”

“Sarah…” Val said, squeezing her hand again. “We’re all in this together.”

Sarah took another deep breath and let it out as a sigh, her eyes shifting from Val to the fire and then to her hands, which were wriggling and knotting in her lap. “It’s…well…I think Terry is losing his mind,” she said.

(4)

“More…like what?” Crow asked slowly.

It took Terry a full minute to make his mouth form the words. “Crow…my dead sister, Mandy’s been following me lately.” When Crow’s mouth dropped open, Terry added, “And she’s been trying to get me to kill myself.”

“Holy leaping ratshit!”

“How well you put it,” Terry said with a weak smile, but his voice cracked. He looked at the coffee in his cup, sighed, and emptied the cup over the rail, stood up without a word, and went inside. When he came out he had a bottle of Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale. He unscrewed the cap, tossed it out into the shadows, and took a long pull.

Crow forced himself to say, “Why, Terry? Why would Mandy want you dead?”

Terry pulled a chair close to the chaise longue and sat down, leaning his big forearms on his thighs, his blue eyes crackling with tension and fear, the beer bottle swaying like a plumb bob from his laced fingers. “Mandy is afraid that the beast is going to take over and that I’m going to become…”

“Become what?” Crow whispered. Icy hands were clamped around his spine.

Tears filled Terry’s eyes and for the first time Crow truly had a measure of the hell that his friend was in. “Crow…she thinks that if the beast takes over I’ll become just like Ubel Griswold.”

Each of those words hit Crow over the heart like punches, and each one was a harder blow than anything Ruger had thrown at him. Ubel Griswold sends his regards. “Oh my God!” he croaked, when he found his voice. He steeled himself to ask, “Terry…I’ve asked you a dozen times since we were kids and you always blow me off…but how much do you remember of what happened to you and Mandy that day?”

Which is when Terry’s cell phone rang. The sound made Crow jump and spill his coffee all over Party Cat, who hissed and leapt up and ran out into the yard. As Crow jumped up to slap at the lukewarm stains spreading on his jeans, he heard one-half of the conversation. “Hello. Gus…yes, what’s—? What? When? Jesus H. Christ, Gus…how did he get into the bloody hospital?” A pause. “Was anyone hurt? Well, thank God for that. No, I’m at home. I’ll…be there in just a few minutes.”

Terry snapped his phone shut and stood with his eyes closed and one hand clapped over his head, fingers knotted in his hair as if he wanted to rip a handful of it out. He took an awkward step backward and staggered, but Crow darted forward and caught him before he fell. He helped Terry to the rail and took the phone out of his hand.

“Terry, what’s wrong?”

Terry Wolfe leaned on the rail, sucking in great lungfuls of air. “Is this never going to stop?” he asked the night. The crow in the tree cawed again, a little louder this time; then in a fractured voice he said, “Kenneth Boyd just broke into Pinelands Hospital and stole Karl Ruger’s body.”

Crow felt as if someone has just punched all of the air out of his lungs. He opened his mouth, but there was nothing in his vocabulary to respond to that, so he stared at Terry as around them both the moon opened its mocking white eye and the dark silence roared.

Interlude

The Carby Place was one of those farms that would have been a delight for a wandering Tom Joad: ramshackle and down at the heels, but honest, and it grew crops that fed the family with just enough left over to bring in a few thousand a month. Every month it was a stretch to meet the bills, pay something on the mortgage, put clothes on the kids. There were only thirty such farms left in Pine Deep, and with inflation and the blight, soon there would be none. Gaither Carby knew that and still he managed to crawl out of bed every morning, pull on his work clothes, choke down a breakfast, and then lumber out to the fields to try and fight another battle in a lost war. He could sell out, and after the mortgage was settled there would be enough equity left to maybe buy a trailer home in Bensalem, and then maybe finish out life working some shit job until he was old enough to apply for social security. Either way he looked the road went nowhere.

Gaither Carby was the great-grandson of the Carby who had bought the land and built the farm. He was fifty-eight and looked seventy, with arthritis starting in his hands and steel pins in his left knee. He had the blocky build and thick, callused fingers, and the bleak fatalism of the heavily mortgaged man who was seeing everything his family had ever owned being gobbled up by the Pine Deep Farmer’s Bank. He knew it was an old story, repeated a thousand times a week across the country, and he knew that there was nothing unique or exceptional about him or his to elicit any kind of help. No Farm Aid, no Willie Nelson and Neil Young. He was going to lose the place within two or three years, and that would simply be that.

When the workday was finished, Carby came in from the fields, showered, ate dinner, and then went back outside for a smoke. Lily didn’t let him smoke in the house, and Jilly, his sixteen-year-old, always complained it made her ill. His boy, Tyler, never bitched about it, or about anything for that matter, but Carby seldom felt like fighting the same fight every day, so he took his pipe and went outside to walk the fence and think.

Tonight he wasn’t thinking at all about his money troubles, or what it was going to cost him to replace the head gasket on his battered Ford pickup. Tonight he couldn’t have cared less about the mortgage payment due on Wednesday or the fact that the sprinkler system on the western ten acres was older than he was and needed an overhaul. He didn’t care about the heating bill, the cost of day labor, or the fact that he’d recently discovered that his sixteen-year-old daughter was taking the Pill. Tonight he was thinking about what was going on in town. Yesterday he’d had lunch with Gus and some of the boys from town, and even though everyone was all laughs and buddy-buddy, he could see in their eyes that they were scared. Even Gus was scared. Killers running around, people dying. Carby was scared, too. So scared that he had unlocked the gun cabinet and made Tyler clean, oil, and load each rifle and shotgun, and then, with the whole family trailing along, he’d taken one long gun to each bedroom in the house, wrapped it in a pillowcase, and put in between mattress and box spring.

“Any of those rat bastards break in here, I want everyone to grab the closest gun. We ain’t going to end up like Henry Guthrie, God rest him.” Carby had taught Tyler and Jilly how to shoot before they were out of single digits and by the time they were in their teens both of them could drop a pheasant at fifty yards. Lily? Well, she could fire a shotgun and anyone could hit something with a shotgun, especially an intruder in the close confines of a small farmhouse. Even so, Carby was scared for his family. He walked the fenceline with his pipe between his teeth and his own shotgun in the crook of his arm; the gun was broken open at the breech but loaded with buckshot. His dog, a big shepherd named Spooker, was back at the house with the girls and Tyler.

Life’s a bitch and then you die, he thought as he walked. He’d always loved that expression. As close to Zen as he had ever seen, with the exception of No Pain, No Gain, which he had tattooed on his left shoulder back in his wrestling days. Not pro wrestling or any of that TV comedy, but Greco-Roman during his four years at Pinelands College. Carby had studied animal husbandry and agriculture, and for the most part he hadn’t learned much beyond get your cows to screw and plant as many crops as you can.

“Yeah, life’s a bitch and then you die,” he said aloud, and that made him think of death. Not just the headline deaths out at the Guthrie place, but death closer to home. His buddy Bailey Frane had buried his mother yesterday