have necks. Ah, sophistication, he thought. A used car dealer’s called Lucky Lee’s, Fast Eddie’s Pool Hall, and a roadside diner that seriously sported a sign: GOOD EATS.
In between the towns, Phil knew, were even more remote communities—actually sub-communities—that existed in complete obscurity, loosely knit hamlets known as “hill towns,” where the populace remained unknown to public record. “Hill folk,” they were called, and “hill squatters.” There were more conventional names, too.
White trash. Crackers. Uncensused settlements of the catastrophically poor. People who lived off the land and had never had a real job, never been to the doctor’s, had never owned a television. Children who’d never been to school. The Third World of America the Beautiful. They lived in lean-tos, tarpaper shacks, and abandoned trailers with no running water and no electricity. A cliche to the average person, but all too real in these parts. But Phil knew that all states had their rural poor, and all states had their hillfolk, tiny flecks of humanity swept aside by the world. For cash they sold scrap metal and moonshine; for food they took to the woods. It was hard to believe that in a society of computer chips, banana chips, and anti-lock brakes, of sitcoms, Home Shopping Clubs, and pay-per- view, and of surround-sound stereos and microwave ovens—it was hard to believe that such destitution could exist at all, much less under the very nose of the same society…
He’d see them all the time as a kid, picking through garbage bags dumped in the woods, or wandering down the Route in ragpatch clothes and homemade fishing rods slung over their shoulders. Sometimes the children, filthy and smudge-faced, would beg for pocket change in front of the Qwik-Stops and general stores, until the proprietors ran them off. Yes, he’d seen them many times.
And maybe that explained Phil’s unease about returning to Crick City. The hand of fate often dealt from a bad deck. How close had Phil come himself to being one of these people?
Christ, he thought.
The Malibu’s corroded ball-joints shimmied through the next long, winding turn. To his right, up on the hill, stood the Fletcher place, a bedraggled old antebellum house that was leaning with its own weight. There were holes in the roof, but the Fletchers still lived there—they refused to move. And to Phil’s left sat a trailer on blocks at the edge of Hockley’s pond; it had been there for as long as he could remember, and during heavy rains the creeks would fill and the water would rise up past the trailer’s floor. Yet the inhabitants never moved.
I moved, Phil pondered. I moved out of here over a decade ago…and look where I am now.
Past the next bend, the sign appeared:
CRICK CITY TOWN LIMITS
There was no main drag per se; the Route blew right through Crick City like a spit through a kabob. Decrepit houses passed sporadically, as if shoved into the woods. A small trailer park here, Hull’s General Store there. Every so often the woods receded, opening up into tracks of hilly, unkempt farmland, some with great barns off in the distance so rotted you could see through them and vermiculated wooden crosses on which scarecrows had once been crucified until they, like the barns, had eroded away. Phil swerved twice to avoid waddling possums at the centerline; a third possum had not been so lucky, already crushed by a previous car to a plop of meat. A crow lifted off as the Malibu swooshed past, carrying with it a string of entrails a yard long. Phil grimaced as the pink ribbon sailed away.
Didn’t the Romans or someone read the future in animal guts? It was an absurd circumspection but one that fit with the image. What did the future hold for him? How could his future be a productive one, now that he was coming back here? My fortune told in possum guts…
Past the next plot of farmland, a rising plane of disheveled corn, he spied Krazy Sallee’s, the town strip joint. The bulb-bordered sign promised GO-GO GIRLS AND BEER TO GO! Even this early, several pickups spotted the great gravel lot. A mile past was Bouton’s Farm Supply, and another mile Crick City’s sumptuous four-star hallmark of cuisine, Chuck’s Diner. They didn’t have terrine of duck foie gras or roasted quail with porcini mushrooms, but the hash wasn’t bad. Several stragglers walked along the shoulder as Phil drove on, a couple of rednecks in overalls, and the infamous Armless Man, whom Phil remembered from early childhood. Every day the guy would walk from the Crownsville trailer park to Snoot’s Liquors, pick up a bottle of Bushmills, and walk back. Every day, like clockwork. And it was a good five-mile clip each way. The guy must be a hundred by now, Phil thought, amazed. Some things never change.
And around yet another bend…
A third pedestrian ambled down the shoulder. Hillfolk, Phil deduced the instant he got a good look. The boy, in his late teens, looked tall and lanky, and he seemed to walk at an awkward pace like someone with a trick knee. Long black hair hung in greasy strings, and from afar the kid’s face more resembled a smudge of dirt. I hope this hill kid’s on his way to the store for some soap. And his clothes offered another vestige: they clung to his body like fetid rags, patched up with oilcloths, old towels, pieces of other garments. Yeah, he’s hill folk, all right, Phil felt certain, until—
Phil shuddered.
—until he’d approached close enough to recognize the giveaway details.
Christ, his face…
One half of the kid’s face swelled forward, the other half seemed collapsed. A bent nose showed one nostril tiny as a pegboard hole while the other nostril seemed flared out to the diameter of a quarter. And the ridge of the forehead was totally bereft of eyebrows.
And the eyes—
A Creeker…
—showed maroon irises.
That’s what they called them around here. Creek people. Creekers. The utmost extremity of the hill dwellers. Though often talked about, they were seldom actually seen. (Phil had only seen them himself a handful of times in all the years he’d lived out here.) The creek people were inbred over multiple generations, to the extent that nearly all of them displayed drastic physical deformities. Malformed heads and faces. Arms and legs all different lengths. One eye larger than the other. Phil had heard some were born with no eyes at all, and no mouths. To intensify the tragedy, mental defects were just as apparent. Some Creekers couldn’t speak at all, and many of those that could were only able to mumble globs of words that made no sense. Like the hill folk, Creekers were the secret of any backwoods town—unacknowledged, as if they didn’t even exist.
««—»»
“Well, there he is. I was beginning to think you were gonna stiff me,” Chief Mullins said from behind his huge, cluttered desk. Phil was taken aback; the Crick City Police Station seemed much smaller than he remembered it, compressed and stuffy. Through the back window he could see the tiny jailhouse, and parked next to it was Mullins’ Pontiac Bonneville fitted with a siren horn and red and blue lights. Hunting trophies lined the top of the chief’s banks of beaten file cabinets, along with his framed certificate of appointment as the town’s head law enforcement officer. The certificate, once bright white, had yellowed from the countless years it had been propped there.
“You gonna sit down, or you got poop in your pants?”
“Actually, Chief, I’ve got poop in my pants, but I’ll sit down anyway.” Phil pulled up a metal folding chair, then quickly declined Mullins’ offer of coffee, remembering that it generally tasted like caffeinated turpentine.
I can’t believe I’m sitting here, he thought.
Mullins’ corpulent face and balding head shined in the sunlight. He sipped his coffee and sighed. “Bet’cha never thought in a million years you’d ever be working for me.”
“Look, Chief, you said you wanted to talk, and I’m here to listen. I haven’t taken the job yet.”
“‘Course you’ll take the job. Once a cop, always a cop. Shit, you’d rather spend the rest of your life guarding piles of fabric?”
Good point, Phil admitted.
“Besides,” Mullins added, “I need ya.”
“All right, so what’s the scoop?”
“The scoop is I ain’t got no cops, and though Crick City ain’t exactly big, I ain’t a one-man police force.”
Mullins, as Phil remembered, always had two or three officers working for him. Phil struggled to recall their names. “North and Adams, they’ve been with you for years. What happened to them?”
