“Hasn’t produced a drop since we brought him home from the church.”
“Maybe he’s recharging. He was sure gushing that night.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I think it’s something else. Something between fathers and sons. You know how ugly that can get.”
His gut tightened as if she’d jabbed a two-by-four under his ribs. Goddamn her. She was talking about Willie and Donald Flint. As if he could ever forget what happened, what she held over him.
She tapped the top of the car. “You think about that fund, Deke. While you make your beautiful furniture.”
There were four of them who found Willie that day, but it was Deke who’d led the way into the house, an ancient cabin that didn’t even have an indoor toilet. He practically knocked down the door getting in. Rhonda came in behind him, followed by Barron Truckle and Jo Lynn.
It was Jo who’d come to Deke with the news of the charlie parties, the rumors of a new drug and bad things happening up in the woods. She’d convinced him they had to do something about it, and not only that, but since Willie and Donald were charlies, they had to bring Aunt Rhonda with them. Rhonda wasn’t mayor then, but Jo said she was the leader of her clade. It was the first time he’d heard that word.
Donald Flint, Willie’s youngest son, was in the front room, sitting on the couch with a half-naked charlie girl on his lap, facing him. Another charlie girl lay on a pile of blankets on the floor; she’d been jolted awake by the sudden noise. The place was a sty, beer cans everywhere.
Donald looked at them stupidly, then decided he should be offended. He pushed the girl off him and started to get up. Deke yelled something-he didn’t remember what-but it made Donald stick to his spot on the couch.
Rhonda kicked the girl on the floor, told both of them to get home. She knew their families, and they knew she knew them. The girls scrambled for shirts and jeans and hustled out. Half a minute later they’d started up one of the six cars in the gravel driveway and peeled out.
Deke told Barron to watch Donald, and then he followed Jo down the hallway. She marched straight to Willie’s bedroom as if she’d been there before. Or perhaps she was only following the smell. When that back bedroom door opened the stench rolled out in a wave: shit and rot and a strange sickly-sweet odor he didn’t recognize. It would be months before Deke would be able to name it as the smell of stale vintage.
The old man’s corpse lay sprawled sideways across a pair of double beds that had been pushed together. He was wider than any human being he’d seen to that point. Willie’s body seemed to have collapsed in on itself like a rotted pumpkin, and his skin was pocked and cratered by infection and his son Donald’s inept needlework.
Someone gasped, and Deke looked down and behind him. Rhonda had come into the room and burst into tears. He’d always thought that was just a phrase, but the tears were coming out of her like a cloudburst, a flood, making her cheeks gleam.
Then just as suddenly the tears stopped. Her face went rigid and somehow she willed herself to regain control of her body. Later, Deke thought that this was the moment she became mayor of Switchcreek.
I see now, Rhonda said. Or at least that’s what he thought she said. I see now.
Rhonda turned and strode back down the hallway. Deke hurried after her, shoulders scraping the ceiling.
In the living room, Donald was off the couch and barking into Barron’s face like a furious child. The boy was naked except for a pair of sweatpants hanging low on his hips. Two years before he’d been a skinny kid, and then the Changes had made him into a plump, round-faced charlie. Over the past few months, however, he’d transformed again, turning into a cartoonish mass of muscles: biceps too big for sleeves, shoulders swallowing his neck. A bodybuilder who’d been eating other bodybuilders.
Rhonda reached the boy in two strides and turned his head sideways with a slap.
Donald blinked, touched his cheek. Rhonda shouted something-Deke thought it was something dramatic like,
Donald frowned, shook his head. Then he leaped on her.
Rhonda fell to the floor, Donald on top of her, his hands locked around her throat. Donald was fast, and strong. But still no argo.
Deke’s memories of the next few minutes were disjointed, a collection of snapshots. He remembered his arm swinging down like a wrecking ball. He remembered Donald suddenly on the other side of the room, sprawled on the floor. An armchair and a lamp between them had been knocked over.
Then suddenly Donald threw himself toward the couch, reaching under it. Was there a gun? Deke couldn’t remember if there was a gun.
The next moment Deke was across the room and Donald was tumbling through the open door like a rag doll. There was a sickening
Deke wanted to destroy the man. It was that simple. And he got what he wanted.
Outside, Donald lay half sitting up against the crumpled front fender of Willie’s Ford pickup, his head bent at a too-steep angle, as if he were trying to look inside his own chest.
Rhonda, Barron, and Jo came out sometime later. Maybe it was only a few seconds. “I fucked up,” Deke remembered telling Jo. “I fucked up.” Jo leaned over him and circled her arms around his gray neck.
A little later Jo and Rhonda would work out where Barron would take the body, who would call the authorities, what mix of manufactured and true facts they could agree upon-the standard bookkeeping of conspiracy. Rhonda would take care of the charlie girls who’d fled from the house. It would turn out to be almost comically easy to convince them that now that Donald had run off, and who knew if the police would ever find him, the only way they could avoid being charged with Willie’s murder-accessories, at least-was to follow Rhonda’s instructions to the letter. Rhonda told him that by the end they were thanking her, tears in their eyes, for protecting them.
But before all that, they waited for Deke. He took a long time to get to his feet. When he stood, Barron looked at him like he was a monster.
But not Jo, and not Aunt Rhonda. “You saved my life,” Rhonda told him. “And this thing here?” She jerked her head toward Donald Flint’s body. “You will not spend one second regretting the day you took this evil piece of shit out of the world. I’m only sorry you beat me to it.”
Words.
He thought about Donald every day.
He walked downtown to Donna’s Sewing Room-a too-quaint name for such a noisy workshop. He stepped through the back door and into a big room loud with the growls of industrial sewing machines, the blare of country radio, and the deep-voiced chatter of half a dozen argo women. Donna stood at the end of a row of machines, a huge bolt of cloth on her shoulder, explaining to her youngest employee how to clear a jam in her machine. The girl, Mandy Sparks, was only seventeen, and the bulky, secondhand JUKI sewing machine was older than she was. All the machines were secondhand and prone to breakdowns. Donna spent half her time playing mechanic.
She frowned to see him there-they usually didn’t bother each other during the day. He said, “You got a second?”
Donna told the girl to cut the cloth and start over-“But slow down, for goodness’ sake. Slow is steady and steady is fast”-and set the bolt of cloth down against one wall. She led him out to the smaller showroom, which was empty of customers.
“What is it?” she asked.
He slipped his arms around her waist and looked up at her. She was nearly a foot taller than him, but both of them were still growing. No one knew how long argos could live. Some days he felt in his bones that they had decades in them, maybe centuries. Years of slow growth, their bodies stretching up and out and into each other like trees. And some days he felt the future coming at them like an axe.
“Come on, Deke, I have to get back to work.”
He wanted to make something better than him. Something as beautiful as she was.
“I’ve got some good news,” he said.
Chapter 12
THEY’D COME TO him Sunday morning as he lay sprawled out on the grass. The voices crooned to him, making
