Dark Harvest, page 7
In the heat of the moment, Jim couldn’t understand that feeling. But even in the heat of the moment he understood that there was no going back—once the thing was done, there was no undoing it. So he watched the October Boy twitch and die, and doing that made him go a little nuts. You understand. All those conflicting emotions slamming around inside Jim, and all at once. They had to go somewhere.
So Jim turned them loose. He raised his face to the moon and screamed. That’s what the whole town wanted him to do, anyway. This year’s winner was screaming in the streets, and everyone turned out to celebrate. First it was the other guys on the Run, because the dead thing in the middle of West Orchard attracted them like a raw steak draws flies. They came by the dozen, and they ripped the Boy apart and chowed down on those treats buried inside him, and they slapped Shepard on the back and raised him onto their shoulders.
And to the victor went the spoils. Someone shoved a handful of Bit-O-Honeys into Jim’s hands. The candy bars were tied up in a knot of Red Vines that gleamed like blood vessels, but Jim didn’t care. He peeled those Vines and gobbled them down as the guys carried him over to Main Street, not even realizing that the mass of honey-flavored candy clutched in his hand had pulsed like a human heart just a few minutes before.
The parade made its way up Oak Street, hung a right onto Main. You know the route…and you can see them there, even now. You see them in your mind’s eye. There they are…the town fathers wait for Jim over in the square, the mayor and the minister stand stiff and proud on the steps of the old brick church. People crowd the streets, driving up in family sedans, hurrying in on foot from nearby neighborhoods.
Jim’s dad pulls up in his old beater of a pickup truck while the mayor’s glad-handing his son. Jim’s mom smears tears all over her son’s cheek when she hugs him, and he can’t even figure out why she’s crying. He can barely keep track of everything that’s going on. The bell in the church tower is clanging away. Jim’s little brother stands at his side in a bathrobe, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The street’s alive with headlights, car doors slamming, and footsteps. Rock ’n’ roll’s blasting from dashboard radios. Everyone’s whooping and hollering. Caught up in the celebration, Mr. Haines opens up the movie theater lobby. He’s giving out free popcorn and Cokes and candy, but the real show is out in the street. No one really wants to be stuck inside when there’s a party like this going on.
But the party doesn’t last long. Not for Jim, anyway. Soon the crowd begins to thin. That hard-ass cop, Jerry Ricks, hustles Jim and his father into the church. The mayor’s inside now; so is the chief of police. The men circle the altar and tie themselves up in a little knot with the minister…and they trade a few words with Jim’s dad…and all of a sudden they’re leaving through the back door with Jim knotted tight in the middle of the pack, as if Houdini himself did the job and did it right.
Jim shoulders into Ricks’s prowl car with the whole bunch of them. They drive across the Line. And you know how Jim feels. He can’t believe it’s all happening quite this fast. He’s really going to get away. He’s really going to get out of this nothing little town, just like that. No final speeches. No testimonial dinner. Not so much as a kiss my ass, really. Hell, Jim didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye to his mom or his little brother. The town doc didn’t even stitch up the gash in his side, or the one on his wrist. He’s still bleeding, now that you mention it.
It all seems crazy. And, of course, it is. Everything around here is crazy. Jim knows that from way back. There’s part of him that trusts that craziness, and it’s the part that tells him this particular brand of insanity is his ticket out of town.
But there’s another part—a smarter part—that tells Jim he shouldn’t trust anything.
Never. Ever. Not around here.
You know which part of Jim is right. And when he finds himself down on his knees in that cornfield with the business end of Jerry Ricks’s .38 pressed against his temple, Jim knows, too.
He’s figured it out, same way they all do.
He’s figured it out, just a little too late.
So there’s poor Jim. He’s finally got a clue. His knees dig divots in the dirt of that field where it always happens. The cold metal circle of a gun barrel presses hard against his gullible head. The men from the Harvester’s Guild form a half-circle in front of him, while a couple of the big ones standing close to Jim’s dad feed the old man that well-practiced line about the biggest sacrifice a man can make. And when Jim’s dad finally breaks down and tries to stop the whole thing it’s way too late, because those guys are built for something besides talking and they wrestle Dan Shepard to the ground and remind him that it’d be pretty easy to dig more than one grave out here tonight—with a little work, they can empty another hole…a smaller hole.
“Hey…you’ve got another son, don’t you, Dan? Richie’s ten, right? You want him to see eleven, don’t you, ol’ buddy?”
There’s not much left after that. The preacher drones on, drawing a diagram that Jim doesn’t even need anymore, getting in a few amens before Ricks pulls the trigger and those two big guys turn Jim’s father loose to cry and babble in the dirt while they get busy with the task of digging a hole.
But, hell, I’m wasting my breath telling you about this stuff. I’m preaching to the choir. After all, you know how it feels to go face down in that hole. You’ve known all along. Because you’re a winner, just like Jim. You’ve been for a ride in that prowl car. You’ve sat shoulder to shoulder with those men. You’ve had the cold barrel of Jerry Ricks’s pistol jammed against the side of your head, and you’ve felt that .38 slug slam through your brainpan and ricochet around in your skull.
You’ve been buried in that black dirt. And you came through the ground the next summer, first a green shoot and then a tendril. You climbed that pole and filled those old clothes, and when Halloween rolled around you were shorn like a winter wind. Someone put a butcher knife in your hand, and you made your way to town the best way you could, and you headed for that old brick church because that’s where they said you had to go.
But you didn’t make it…we never make it. You were brought down by a kid who was just like you. And they ripped you apart in the streets while that kid screamed at the moon, and they shoveled what was left of you into a bag while that kid took a ride in Jerry Ricks’s prowl car, and you rotted in a dumpster while flies circled above and the cold November sun shone down.
That’s the way it is for every winner in this town.
For you. For me. For all of us.
For keeps. For always.
Yeah. It’s always quiet when that first November morning dawns. Quiet through the winter, quiet through the spring. And then it starts up all over again. Summer rolls around, and the farmer who owns that black patch of earth starts watching the ground really closely, waiting for the tendril of a pumpkin plant to break through the rich soil. And when it does, he tends that sprout like a newborn babe until it takes root solidly and reaches for the sun.
He plants a heavy crosspiece in the ground. When the first vine starts to climb, he nails a set of old clothes to that crosspiece and sends the vine burrowing through them. And as the summer winds along, a thing with roots in a dead boy’s corpse grows into those clothes. A vine creeps out the neck and starts to grow a head, which the farmer places on the crown of the pole. And then Halloween night rolls around, and a pale man in a new black car drives out to that field where he shed tears just a year ago, only now he has no more tears to shed. Instead, he has a job to do. So he frees the thing that used to be his son from that pole, and he carves him a face, and he sets him walking on the black road that leads to town.
It happens every year.
It happened tonight.
And now the thing that used to be Jim Shepard is driving down West Orchard in a stolen car, heading for the place he used to call home. And his father is sitting in a darkened church with a shotgun, self-loathing churning in his gut as he waits for his shuffling misfit of a son to step through the creaking door and show its carved-up excuse for a face.
And all the rest of them are out there in the darkness. The other fathers, the other sons. On the wrong side of the tracks, there’s a drunk named McCormick who’s wishing he’d had the guts to stop his kid from walking out the door, because he knows how smart his boy is, and he knows that he’s just the kind of kid who could come out on top on a night like this one.
There’s a kid named Mitch Crenshaw on the other side of the Line in a ditch, crying like a baby because his pitchforked leg and foot are really screwed up and all he can do about it is lie in the mud and bleed and whimper. And over in the poor side of town there’s a kid named Weston lying on some stranger’s lawn, biting back the pain of a shattered kneecap he’s damn well sure won’t be tended until morning. And down that street and around the next corner there’s a kid named Riley who’s been busted in the face with a brakeman’s club, only Riley’s not as smart as Weston. He’s banging on his parents’ door, begging to be let in, but his old man tells him he’d better get back on the streets or else he’ll wind up with a couple of ounces of buckshot in his gutless belly.
And that’s how the lesson is learned around here. Kids in the neighborhoods, bashing Jack o’ Lanterns. Kids on the church steps, waiting with pitchforks and bowie knives. Kids in the streets, chasing shadows. And down at the market, there’s a cop named Jerry Ricks and a couple of other guys loading five dead teenagers into the coroner’s wagon, and a group of kids blow by the parking lot on bicycles, and they whisper, “I hear Sawtooth Jack slaughtered those guys in five seconds flat. He even killed old man Jarrett, and that dirty bastard had a shotgun that was loaded for bear…”
So the story spins on. The boys on those bicycles carry it through the night, and it rides over the tracks and down Main Street, chattering away like playing cards stuck in the spokes of their bicycles.
Yeah. That’s the way it works around here.
A story has to stick with those who tell it.
It belongs to them.
Just like the October Boy, it’s got nowhere else to go.
And there he is, just up ahead, getting out of Crenshaw’s rod, so let’s let him lead the story on.
The thing that used to be Jim Shepard scrapes across the yard on severed-root feet, kicking his way through tangles of weeds as he makes his way to one of those dark little houses. But this particular house is different than its neighbors. No Jack o’ Lanterns—busted or otherwise—wait on the porch. And no people wait inside.
Peeling paint scabs the front door. It isn’t even locked. After all, there’s nothing inside this house that anyone would want to steal. So you could say that the place is empty, but it’s a special kind of empty.
It’s as empty as the October Boy’s hollow head.
Some would say that there’s nothing in that space at all, and others would say that it’s only filled with flickering light and murderous intent, but memories fill up that orange gourd as the October Boy reaches for the doorknob. There’s a nasty creak as the door swings open. That’s a new sound for Jim, and different. So is the sound of his whiskbroom feet on the hardwood floor—just a scratching whisper through the dust, not the strong staccato of the polished motorcycle boots he wore a year ago on the night he won the Run.
Those boots are buried in a grave with what’s left of Jim’s corpse, but his memories are right here with him. They’re locked up in that hollow head of his, and they’re locked up in this empty house, too. He wanders through the rooms quietly, step by step, and the light from his triangular eyes strips them of shadows and paints them in bright autumnal light.
In the living room, there’s that heavy oak coffee table his father built by hand because he couldn’t afford the ones you’d buy at a department store in the city. Same goes for that big slab of a table in the dining room, and Jim knows that if he crawled underneath it and trained a triangle of light on the wood in just the right place, he’d see his father’s initials etched deeply in sanded oak, carved there by the same hand that carved the face Jim wears tonight.
Jim’s misshapen fingers scrape across the rough-hewn table. It’s not a good table. It sits kind of cockeyed, and dinner peas escaping a child’s fork have been known to roll off the side like ships sailing off the edge of a flat earth. That’s why nobody bothered to steal the thing when the house was abandoned, and Jim’s glad of that. Because this is the table where he sat with his mother and father and little brother as the days faded to evenings for years and years and years. And this is the table where he thought many things, and a few of them made the trip from brain to mouth and found the ears of those other people who shared the table, but many of them didn’t. For one reason or another, many of his thoughts never left him at all.
That’s the way it was for Jim.
That’s the way it was for his mother and father, too.
Jim never understood that before, but he understands it now, just as he understands that there’s no changing the past once it ticks on by. He takes his seat at the table, and the truth of his last thought is contained in that simple act as it would be in no other.
The darkness pulls close around him. He writes his last name in tabletop dust with a fingertip, and he thinks of his family in another house. It’s a new house, with a new table from one of those department stores in the city. His father sits at the head; his mother at the foot. His brother sits between them—a little older now, a little bigger. And Jim wonders what thoughts go through Richie’s head as he stares at the empty chair that sits across from his place at the table, and he wonders if those thoughts ever find their way out of his little brother’s mouth.
Jim thinks about that, but he doesn’t think about it long.
There isn’t much to think about, really.
He already understands that the past can’t be changed.
Now he’s beginning to understand how easily it can be repeated.
That is a hard truth—born of memory, cemented by experience. As the October Boy stares down at his name written in the dust, he feels its weight. And his gaze travels to the corded vine of a hand that wrote that name, casting a hard triangle of light on his gnarled excuse for a palm. He can feel the past there in his open hand. It’s so strange, really. Because his little brother is there, within that light, and so are his parents. He feels them, too, in the glow that burns within his carved skull…and in the dust that coats his fingertip…but he can’t feel himself there, not the way he was, because another thing sits in Jim Shepard’s chair tonight.
If the Boy were to look in any mirrors he’d find that thing trapped within the glass. He can’t escape it no matter how hard he stares, no matter what he remembers. Tonight he is a thing carved up in a cornfield, not a thing that would be welcome sitting at anyone’s dinner table, not a thing that belongs in anyone’s house.
He feels that as surely as he felt the knife his father drove into his face so many hours ago. But he also knows that he lived in this house. Before it became an empty shell, this place was his home. So surely he must have left some mark, some touchstone that can strengthen his resolve now. Perhaps that thing is hidden, like the initials his father carved on the bottom of the table. Perhaps it’s something he’ll have to look for, something that can’t be found in the light, something that remains in the shadows.
And so the October Boy goes looking for a sign.
He walks to Jim Shepard’s bedroom. His features are cast on the closed door like a shadow-show turned inside out—triangle eyes, arrowhead nose, sawtooth smile—and the yellow glow spills into the room as he opens the door.
Things have changed. Jim’s simple desk and dresser are gone. His Spartan single bed has vanished along with its cowboys and Indians spread. Instead, an old double mattress sprawls in the middle of the floor with a couple of moth-eaten blankets tumbled across it like a hobo’s nest.
The bedroom’s lone window is painted black. Half-melted candles crowd the sill. Dried rivulets of colored wax stretch in frozen streams from the wall to the hardwood floor. Teenagers have carved their initials on that floor, and cigarette burns scar the dusty oak, and the butts of those cigs swim in the grimy shallows of beer bottles set adrift on the wooden sea.
It’s awful, really. Horrible to come looking for yourself in a place once so familiar, and find it turned into something like this. And it isn’t the destruction that bothers you, and it isn’t the neglect. None of that can scrape a razor across your insides once you’ve endured the things Jim Shepard has endured. But there are other things here, things far worse than the stink of empty bottles and cigarettes dragged down to the filter.
Those things can’t be missed, or ignored.
They’re as plain as the handwriting up there on Jim’s bedroom wall.
Graffiti fills that space, scrawled in paint and pen and permanent marker. Just words, only words, but to the October Boy they are so much more, for the yellow glow that spills from his head reveals the moments that put those words on the wall and the hand behind each one of them.
The front door doesn’t move an inch out there in the living room, but the Boy hears it swinging open as the lock is picked on a cold night last November. The laughter of drunken jocks echoes down the empty hallway, and a pack of shadows drifts through the bedroom door. The president of the Letterman’s Club pops a beer and raises it, toasting the baddest cat who’s blown the block. The jocks roar their approval, cracking bottles together as a spray-paint can swiped from Murphy’s Hardware hisses two huge black words across the center of the wall: SHEPARD RULES.
Beneath that sound, there’s the squeal of a heavy permanent marker on a summer’s night: JIM’S KING OF ’62! snakes across the wall in black letters, written by a loner who spent a solid week’s worth of corn-shucking money on a Levi’s jacket just like the one Shepard wore the night he won the Run. And there’s another kid standing next to him—he’s barebacked on an August night, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans. And he can’t believe he’s writing JUMP THE LINE!!!!! on this wall while his girlfriend lies naked on the mattress behind him, drifting in a half-dream as she thinks of the things she just did in the room where Jim Shepard used to sleep.
