The Devil's Alphabet

He didn’t know what to say except, “Yes.”

“I remember your momma carrying Jo Lynn around the church in her little dresses when she was just a year old. She loved that girl like she was her own. So pretty, and so smart. Smart as a whip.”

Pax waited for the slight, the veiled insult. Rhonda had been the church secretary while his father was pastor. She was a sharp-tongued woman with opinions about everyone and everything, including his mother’s performance as a pastor’s wife.

Rhonda shook her head. “And you two! You two were like brother and sister. Only three months between you, is that right?”

“Four,” he said. A dozen feet behind Rhonda, a young charlie man, broad as a linebacker and not showing any of the fat that clung to the older people of his clade, watched them talk. His hair was shaved to a shadow. A diamond stud winked from one ear.

Pax spotted the twins at a nearby table. The girls didn’t seem to be eating. The beta man who’d walked them into the church-a beta man in a dark suit-sat at the end of the table, the beta pastor beside him. The man seemed to be trying to talk to the twins, but they only stared at their plates.

Rhonda half turned to follow his gaze. “That’s Tommy Shields, Jo’s husband.” There was the slightest pause before the word “husband.”

“I’m sorry-what? Nobody told me she’d-”

Rhonda lowered her voice. “Oh, hon, not the way anyone but them calls a husband.”

Pax didn’t know what she meant. No betas had been getting married when he left town.

He knew Tommy, though. He’d been a junior in high school when Deke and Jo and Pax were freshmen. Complete asshole. That freshman year, Tommy had beaten up Deke, evidently for standing too close to Tommy’s car, a red-and-white ’76 Bronco that he’d restored himself. Pax didn’t remember seeing Tommy after the Changes.

“Still,” Rhonda said, almost sighing. “Tommy’s a help to those girls. They’ve got a hard row to hoe-but I don’t need to tell you that, do I?” She shook her head sadly. “It just breaks my heart. I let the sisters know that the town’s going to help any way it can. And of course, they’ve got their church to help.”

Their church. “You’re not going here anymore?” Paxton asked. Rhonda’s grandfather had been a founder, and Rhonda had held the office of church secretary for twenty years. Pastors came and went, she’d told his father more than once, but she wasn’t going anywhere. Even during the Changes, when the church had closed and her own body was bloating, she’d refused to step down. Then again, Pax’s father hadn’t stepped down either, not until a year after Pax had left town. Pax had never tried to get the whole story-that was his father’s life, nothing to do with him now.

“Oh, Paxton, it’s not like it was before,” Rhonda said, keeping her voice low. “This is Reverend Hooke’s church now. I go to First Baptist, though I can’t be as involved as I’d like.”

Paxton’s father had impressed upon him at a young age that attending First Baptist was almost as bad as converting to Roman Catholic. The First was where the rich people went-as rich as anyone got in Switchcreek-and everybody knew they didn’t take their scripture seriously.

“Aunt Rhonda’s the mayor now,” Deke said, sounding amused. He was bent under the ceiling, holding his plate and plastic cup of iced tea between big fingers. Waiting to see how Pax would react.

“Really?” Pax said, trying not to sound too shocked. “Mayor Rhonda.”

“Six years now,” Deke said.

“Well,” Pax said. “I bet you keep everyone in line.”

Rhonda chuckled, obviously pleased, and patted his arm again. Her mood kept changing, fast as switching TV channels. “You and I need to talk. Have you seen your father yet?”

He felt heat in his cheeks and shook his head. “I just got in.”

“He’s not in a good way, and he won’t take my help.” She pursed her lips. “After your visit, you give me a call.”

“Sure, sure,” he said lightly.

Her eyes, already small in her huge face, narrowed. “Don’t sure me, Paxton Martin.”

Pax blinked. She wasn’t joking. He remembered a church picnic when he was nine or ten: Aunt Rhonda had found Pax and Jo misbehaving-he couldn’t remember what they’d been doing-and she’d taken a switch to their backsides. She didn’t care whose kids they were. Then she gave them both Moon-Pies and told them to stop crying.

“I’ll call,” he said. “I promise.”

She smiled, all sweetness again. “Now you better go eat your meal before it’s cold.”

She turned away, and several people at the table nearest them resumed talking. The charlie man stepped away from the wall and followed Rhonda. He glanced back at Paxton, his expression serious.

Deke walked toward the other end of the room, where a group of argos, including the woman in the green dress, ate standing up, bent under the drop-tile ceiling. Pax tried to follow, but he’d been recognized now, and people wanted to shake his hand and talk to him. Some of them seemed exactly as he remembered them. Mr. Sparks, already an old man when Pax knew him, had been one of the few of the elderly who’d survived, and in his own skin. He still looked trim and vigorous. Others had become distorted versions of their old selves, or else so changed that there was no recognizing them. Each of them greeted him warmly, without a hint of reservation or disapproval, as if he’d decided on his own to leave Switchcreek for greater things. After all, every other unchanged person under thirty seemed to have left town. After the quarantine lifted, after the Lambert riots and the Stonecipher murders, who the hell would stick around if they didn’t have to? The skips skipped.

He squeezed past two tables of charlies, nodding back at those who said hello to him, even when he wasn’t sure of their names. The people of Aunt Rhonda’s clade were as wide as he remembered from the year and a half he’d lived among them: squat, moon-faced, engulfing their metal folding chairs. Finally he made it to the far side of the room where the argos had congregated. Most stood with their slouched backs touching the ceiling. A few perched on benches at the edges of the room, knees and elbows splayed, like adults at kindergarten desks. Each of them was a different shade of pale, from pencil lead to talcum.

Deke held out a long arm. “P.K., you remember Donna?”

Like all argos, the woman was tall and horse-faced. But while argo hair was usually stiff as straw and about the same color as their skin-troll hair, Deke had called it-hers was long and red, cinched tight close to her head and then blossoming behind, like the head of a broom.

The woman held out her hand. “Good to see you again, Paxton.” Her voice was as deep as Deke’s-deeper maybe-but the inflection was more feminine somehow.

“Oh! Donna, sure!” He put down his plate and grasped her big hand in both of his. Donna had been a year behind them at school. She was a McKinney, one of the poor folks who lived up on Two Hills Road. Poor black folk. And now, he thought, she was whiter than he was.

“You two have been married how long again?” Pax asked. As if it had just slipped his mind. He remembered a wedding invitation that had been forwarded to him from his cousins’ house in Naperville. He’d meant to respond.

“Eight years at the end of the month,” Donna said.

“You guys were kids!” Pax said. “Tall kids, but still. What were you, nineteen? That must have been some shotgun wedding.”

“Not really,” Deke said.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry,” Pax said, then realized he’d said “shit” in church and felt doubly embarrassed. There was no such thing as a pregnant argo, no such thing as an argo baby. “I didn’t mean-”

Deke held up a hand: Don’t worry about it.

Donna said. “We want to feed you supper, then of course you have to stay at the house.”

“No, really, that’s okay-”

“We’ve got plenty of room. Unless you’re staying with your father?”

“No.” He said it too quickly. “I thought I’d just stay at the Motel Six in Lambert.”

Deke said, “Have you talked to him lately?”

Pax started to say, Twelve years, give or take-but then the two argos looked over his head. Pax turned. Tommy Shields walked toward them, the twin girls trailing behind him.