Skin and Bones

Chapter 1-1

Chapter One

October 22, 1981 * 2:52 p.m.

He came out of the corn, a dark blur. And she hit him hard. There was a crunching sound like a corncob snapping as her old Dodge Dart struck him. Bracing against what she feared would be an ugly plunge into the ditch, Gloria Downing cursed through tight lips, steering into the skid. The old girl screeched to a stop and died right in the middle of this backwoods country highway, a letter highway—A or B, or DD or some other cup size. She cautioned a look over her shoulder at a mass of black fur squirming on hot asphalt.

Gloria swung her door open. A breeze was rattling the corn stalks and above that whispery sound was a high whine like air escaping a balloon. The dog’s back legs kicked like he was trying to scratch at a flea up around his neck. His front legs were bent at crude angles. But it was the sound he was making that caused her stomach to knot up, the taste of warm bile rising up her throat. She ran twenty yards and dropped to her knees, and when he tried to get up and couldn’t, his wide blue eyes filled with panic.

“It’s okay,” she said, gently holding him down. “Be still, you’ll be okay, you’re a good doggie.”

She reached for the tag on his collar, but she stopped short. If he had a name then he belonged to someone, maybe a little girl who was at this very minute standing on the porch of a nearby farm house calling for him.

She leaned down close to his face, trying not to look at the b****y gash torn across his chest. She focused on those blue eyes. “You’re a good doggie. You’re a good boy.”

He groaned as he tried again to get to his feet but only managed to end up knocking Gloria onto her a*s, his head in her lap. She wondered if dogs could cry. She hadn’t had a one in years, hadn’t wanted one since the night her father killed Rhoda.

Suddenly, he lurched, his tongue shooting out of his mouth. He was taken by a spasm and then fell still. She reached down and closed those big blue eyes and for the next few minutes she sat in the middle of the road with his head in her lap, crying. Eventually a vehicle crested the hill up the road bit, floating on the heat shimmering over the highway. She got to her feet as it came to a stop on the gravel shoulder. An old farmer with a John Deere cap propped high on his head climbed slowly down out of it. He scratched his deeply tanned neck, shook his head and put his hands on his hips. “Poor fool dog.” He drew in a deep breath, letting it out slow. “Man’s best friend, but like a lot of folks, some just ain’t real smart.”

His gaze shifted from the dog to Gloria. “Walter,” he said.

“Gloria.” She swallowed hard. “And I’m really sorry.”

His eyes brightened a little as he shook his head. “No, I’m Earnest. The dog is Walter, and he’s been at this k******e thing since he was a pup. Like I said, dogs are like folks. Ain’t all of them real bright. The difference is that dogs usually are all good. Folks ain’t, you know,” he scratched his neck again. “He was a dumb dog but a good one. And you know, most folks would’ve just left old Walt along the road there and gone on to wherever they was going.”

He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and handed it to her. She hadn’t really noticed the blood on her hands until now.

“I’ll be sure to tell Walter’s people that you stopped and saw after him.” He smiled and somehow that seemed to smooth out some of the deep lines in his face. “Now then, I might need a little help lifting him in the back of my truck. Old age gets a guy down in the back.”

Gloria helped lift Walter into the truck’s bed.

“Well I reckon I don’t need to worry about him getting after my chickens no more.” He climbed in behind the wheel. “If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else. Don’t you let it spoil your day anyways.”

He waved as he drove away.

Gloria went back to her Dart and was surprised to find that it hadn’t sustained any serious damage. There was a noticeable dent on the front bumper but that didn’t concern her. What bothered her was the streak of blood running across it. There was no time to worry about that now. She’d lost fifteen minutes and she didn’t want to get to her father’s place after dark.

A thought came to her, that maybe this was an omen; that maybe she should call the whole thing off and turn back. It was that memory of Rhoda that got her moving again. She’d named the dog after her favorite television character, and like Rhoda Morgenstern, her Rhoda was a firebrand with a knack for getting herself into trouble. While Gloria was at school, Rhoda was confined to a pen out back of the shack they lived in deep in the woods a couple miles east of the little farm town of Toulouse. And like Walter, her Rhoda had a real liking for chicken too.

She’d climbed off the bus that day in the fall of 1970 and did what she always did, fed the chickens while Rhoda ran around barking like a lunatic. Gloria came inside and started dinner while Rhoda slept under the dining room table. She was laboring over her math homework when she heard him pull up the drive. She hoped he wasn’t drunk, and wondered why Rhoda didn’t stir at the sound of him.

“That goddamn dog!” Joe Downing called.

Gloria ran outside to find feathers all over the yard, lots of snow white chicken feathers mixed in with orange and brown fallen leaves. She could smell the biscuits. They were burning.

“I told you, goddammit. I told you if she did it again that would be the end of her.” He snatched Rhoda up by her neck.

“No!” Gloria shrieked.

He was drunk alright, though you couldn’t have told it by the way he moved. He began swinging the dog back and forth. And to her horror he swung the dog at her, catching her across her shoulder, knocking her against the wall. Her head hit hard. Inside something fell and broke. She would later discover it was the picture of Momma in her best Sunday church dress.

“Don’t hurt her,” Gloria begged.

“Talking back?” Now she’d done it—the fire in his eyes wasn’t for the dog anymore, it was for her. He swung the little dog at her and then took two quick steps toward her, but she was off the porch now, running.

“You just go on!”

Gloria dodged the tree limbs, jumped over the rotting logs, keeping to the path she’d made down to Trunk Creek. She knew every bend. She was running faster than she’d ever run in her life. She had to get far enough away that she wouldn’t hear Rhoda crying no more, far enough away that she wouldn’t hear . . . But, of course she did. She heard the gunshot ring through the hollows, chasing crows out of the trees and up toward the darkening skies. And in that moment she felt the same sort of anguish she always felt when she thought about how her momma had looked in the last days before the cancer got her.

She trudged home after a time, because it was cold and because it felt like rain was coming. She prayed Joe Downing was passed out drunk. But he wasn’t. Turns out killing Rhoda wasn’t the worst thing Joe Downing did that night.

Gloria reached under the seat of her aging Dodge and pulled out a bottle of vodka. She started to unscrew the cap but stopped short. No, she told herself, she would need her wits about her.

She slipped it back under her seat where it clinked against the g*n.

Micah Stevens flicked sweat from his bangs and willed his Huffy past the big houses on Mechanics Street. They were the oldest in Toulouse, and half of them were said to be haunted; people saw ghosts and all that sort of creepy stuff. That didn’t stop Micah and his buddies from hitting those houses every Halloween because, haunted or not, the people who own the big houses on Mechanics Street give out all the best stuff. A fluffy white cat watched him from the porch of a gray stone two-story with a steep slate roof. The cat was sprawled next to a glowering jack-o-lantern. Glowering was a fifth grade spelling word, one he’d recently missed actually. He’d been looking for weeks to find something he would consider glowering and the jack-o-lantern fit the bill. With a feeling of accomplishment, he made a mental note to hit that house first. It’s good to get to the ones with Halloween decorations before dark. Even the rich folks on Mechanics Street start rationing their candy at some point.

Micah started up the hill at the top of which stood the Toulouse Public Library. He’d climbed this hill a lot. The library was one of his favorite summertime hangouts on rainy days when he and the guys couldn’t play ball. Instead of coasting down the hill like usual, Micah pedaled hard. He was really flying when he reached the bottom. Then with a frightening suddenness he stopped. It was as if he’d hit an invisible wall. He was thrown forward but didn’t clear the handlebars. He was jerked back like a dog on a chain. He was no stranger to bike wrecks, but this was the worst. He and his bike were tumbling, skidding, sliding across the asphalt. He was bound to it, the shoestring on his sneaker wrapped around the pedal. Road burn, the thought of tearing his good school jeans, those things shot through his mind, which was mostly concerned with the white-hot fire in his groin. As he finally slowed to a painful stop, that fire spread into his belly, forcing the baloney and cheese he’d had for lunch up up up. It settled in his throat like a hot meaty milkshake. And as if all of this wasn’t bad enough, a rust bucket Camaro was heading right for him. It didn’t slow down a lick. Micah scrambled to the curb, dragging the bike onto the lawn of a big blue house with a scarecrow sitting on porch swing.

The Camaro’s driver finally hit the brakes. “You stupid s**t, you’re gonna get yourself killed!” He roared away, a cloud of black smoke in his wake.

Taking in air in big gulps, Micah dipped his hand down the front of his jeans. They were both still there. And when he pulled his hand out there wasn’t any blood.

“Oh man, oh man,” he whispered. Taking the knife his grandfather from Wisconsin had given him for his birthday, he sawed through his shoestring. He walked around the yard, the dull ache in his middle slowly subsiding.

“I’ve got to get going,” he told himself.

The water tower at the edge of town glimmered like a big silver spaceship. Its shadow sprawled across the overgrown field where he and the guys played baseball on long summer days. Standing for leverage, and so that he wouldn’t jar any sensitive parts, Micah pushed his bike through the witch grass toward the woods. When he got there he walked the Huffy in a little ways. Some of the guys were afraid of the woods. There were a lot of stories, rumors of witches and creatures and all of that. But none of that kid stuff scared him. What scared Micah Stevens was the old man.

“I’ll be back before dark,” he said to his bike as he left it behind and started out on foot. And he’d better be sure of it too, because the thought of being in the woods after dark was way worse than getting racked in a bike wreck.

Lou Aberdeen wanted to spit in the beer he was pouring. He might have spit in the shot of whiskey and been able to get away with that, but it was such rot gut s**t that it was bad enough already. He put a beer and a shot down in front of The Wooden Nickel’s best customer and the biggest asshole in eight states.

“Put it on my tab.”

Lou nodded and Joe Downing smiled his bullshit smile as he fired up a smoke. He looked over Lou’s shoulder at the television over the bar with eyes that seemed to be working independently. Downing was skinny as a cat turd, wiry. The veins in his forearms stood out like cords. His long fingers ended in thick yellow nails that he often employed to pick at his few remaining teeth. He usually wore a grease stained foam cap that he got free from a truck stop or from Ernie’s Tire Emporium over in McFall. Lou wondered what kind of dumbass would give Joe Downing something to wear as an advertising gimmick. The cap sat atop a mop of ratty gray hair and that really pissed Lou off. That nasty mop was thick as shag carpet. Lou himself had been balding since he was a junior in high school.