The Devil's Alphabet

Pax gripped his father’s hand. “How you doing, Dad?”

“My prodigal son,” his father said.

“The only kind you’ve got.” Pax tried to let go, but his father squeezed harder.

“Who called you? Rhonda?”

“I came for the funeral, Dad. Jo Lynn’s funeral.” Pax extricated his hand and stood. He was surprised to feel something oily on his palm, and rubbed his hand dry on the back of his pants. “You mind if I open some windows?”

“She wants me. Wants to milk me like a cow. You can’t be here.”

Pax unlocked the front door and pulled it open. Deke stood by the Jeep, elbows resting on the roll bar, smoking a cigar that looked as small as a cigarette in his big fingers. He turned at the sound of the door, and Pax held up a hand to tell him everything was okay.

Though of course everything was not okay.

His father’s body, huge as it was, looked like a bag to hold an even larger man. The skin hung loose at his neck and cheeks, and now beads of sweat appeared along his brow.

“You’ve got to leave,” his father said, but his tone was no longer firm.

Pax wondered how long it had been since his father last ate. Could he even move? Pax pulled open the big front drapes and fought down a wave of dizziness. The air in the room was too close, too fetid. The sickly sweet odor had blossomed, become suffocating.

His father’s face shone with sweat, as if breaking a fever. A water blister had appeared on his cheek, as large as a walnut, the skin so tight it was almost translucent. Pax stared at it in horror.

“Oh,” his father said softly. “Oh, Lord.”

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“You took me by surprise,” he said. He looked up, smiled faintly. His eyes were wet. Two more blisters had appeared at his neck. They seemed to expand as Pax watched. “You better leave now.”

Pax turned toward the door, lost his balance, and caught himself. At the front door he braced himself against the frame, and the wood seemed hot under his right hand.

“Deke!” Pax called. Deke and the Jeep swam in and out of focus. “Call Nine-one-one!”

Keeping a hand against the wall to steady himself, he made his way back to the couch. Stains the color of pink lemonade had appeared on his father’s T-shirt.

His father looked up at him with half-closed eyes. “Paxton Abel Martin.” He said the name with a slow drawl, almost singing it, in a voice Pax hadn’t heard in a long time. He had a sudden memory of being carried up the church stairs in the dark-he must have been four or five-held close in his father’s arms.

Pax kneeled in front of him. The rich, fruity smell enveloped him. Pax gently pushed the robe farther open and began to lift the T-shirt. Blisters had erupted over the skin of his belly: tiny pimples; white-capped pebbles; glossy, egg-sized sacs. The largest pouches wept pink-tinged serum.

“Oh Jesus, Dad.” Pax bunched the edge of the T-shirt and tried to cover one of the open sores, but the oily liquid soaked through and slicked his fingers. “Dad, we’ve got to get you-get…”

His fingers burned, but not painfully. He looked at his hand, rubbed the substance between his fingers. Slowly his gaze turned to his father, and their eyes locked.

There you are, Pax thought. There, waiting underneath the sagging flesh, the mounds of pitted and pocked skin: the man who had carried him up the stairs. Relief flooded through him. What if they’d been lost forever? Pax and his bloated father were here, in this stinking room, and they were also Harlan Martin and his four-year-old son, climbing out of the church basement after a long Sunday-night service. He felt himself being carried, and at the same time felt the weight of the boy in his arms.

And then Pax was off his feet, an arm across his chest hauling him backward, heels dragging. Big hands carried him through the door and dumped him on the lawn.

“Don’t touch your mouth,” Deke said. “Or your eyes.”

Pax raised his hands. “Don’t worry, I’m not-” He tried to sit up, but the world slipped sideways, and he fell back again into the long grass. “Shit.”

“Just lay there,” Deke said.

Through half-lidded eyes he stared at a crack in the sky. He slowly fanned his arms and legs, making angels in the grass.

***

Sometime later he heard the crunch of tires on the gravel, the slam of car doors. Huge figures hove into his peripheral vision: two young men in tank tops, arms like cartoon bodybuilders. Chub boys. One of them looked at him and shook his head, frowning. Pax saw the little diamond in his ear and remembered him from the church basement. The other one, younger with blond spiky hair, snapped the wrist of his latex glove and said, “Gotta use protection, son.” He laughed.

Deke’s voice rumbled like distant thunder-Pax couldn’t turn the sound into words-and one of the charlies answered respectfully, “Sorry, Chief.”

A minute passed, maybe longer, and then a hand reached down out of the sky and hoisted Paxton upright. Deke. The big man helped him to the Jeep and set him down in the passenger seat. Pax just managed to stay upright as Deke turned the vehicle around and got them back on the highway. The air felt good on his face.

“Sorry, man,” Deke said. “I thought he was dry. Rhonda told me he was dry.”

Dry? Pax didn’t know what he meant. He wanted to ask why the chub boys had come, and what they were doing to his father, what the fuck was happening-but the questions failed to arrive at his lips. His thoughts refused to stay in order. He bounced along silently as Deke drove back into town, past the Gas- n-Go and the First Baptist Church, onto High Street where a row of houses overlooked the creek. When he was a kid, the only people who’d lived down here were the rich folks.

Deke parked in front of a two-story house, brick on the bottom and wood siding on top, a traditional ranch with the roof raised ten feet.

“Can you walk?” Deke said.

Pax slowly opened the door and thought, Can I walk? He put a foot down on the cement driveway. He hadn’t noticed before how all the driveways up north were paved with asphalt, but down here they were all cement.

“P.K., you want me to help?”

Pax lifted a hand and stepped down. When the surface refrained from tilting beneath his feet he followed Deke up to a tall, narrow door. Inside, the living room was as airy as a church sanctuary. Light poured through the row of new, high windows that had been set above the old walls. The furniture was all polished oak, all argo-sized.

Donna came out of a back room and looked at Paxton. “What happened?”

“Is the guest room made up yet?” Deke asked. “He needs to lay down.”

At the end of a hallway was a room painted bright orange and white-University of Tennessee colors. The bed filled up most of the space. Twelve feet long and eight feet wide, practically a playing field in its own right, covered by a UT Volunteers bedspread. He couldn’t guess where they’d gotten a mattress for it.

“Go Vols,” Pax said. It was the first thing he’d been able to say aloud since leaving his father’s. “My dad…,” he said.

“Your dad’s going to be fine. Just lay down, P.K. If you need to throw up, there’s a bathroom next door.”

Deke left the door ajar when he stepped out. Pax lay on his back and breathed deep. The ceiling fan hung high, high above him, the blades turning slowly.

The blades slowed, came to a stop. Then the room began to turn.

He gripped the bed and closed his eyes.

The day the Changes started, they were riding Pax’s fire-engine red Yamaha four-wheeler, ripping up and down the gullies behind Deke’s place. It was the second week of July, a few weeks after Paxton’s fourteenth birthday, 90 or 95 degrees. They didn’t hear the siren until Pax shut off the engine to give Deke a turn. It didn’t sound like a cop car or a fire truck. Had to be an ambulance, though ambulances didn’t come up to Switchcreek much. Deke, scrawnier and a head shorter than Paxton, hopped on the back of the ATV and put his arms around P.K.’s waist.