Chapter Twenty-Six

Raven ended the night with an idea of how the Sleeping Boy killer went about his killings, in spite of what Stella thought, and the old folks still searching through videos. Other than that, they had nothing. She felt no closer to finding Noe. She had started seeing things on the drive back to town, the bright yellow line of the paved two-way road lifting up and wrapping around her and Stevenson cocooned in the Mustang’s dark cabin. As much as she hated it, she had to get a couple of hours sleep.

But when she arrived back home, her bedroom felt too warm for sleep in spite of the time of year. She noticed that she had accidentally left the heat turned up to roasting temperatures all day. She opened the window, pushed back the thin curtains to reveal the rim of a silver moon in the Louisiana sky. She changed into her pajamas and lay down on her bed. Maybe she was wrong in thinking that sleep would find her. There was no way the whirlpool of her thoughts would let her rest. But when her head hit the pillow, REM clawed her down the instant she closed her eyes. Her world of lost boys was instantly replaced with dreams of Floyd.

* * *

One of the reasons Floyd Burns stayed married to Raven’s stepmother for so long was that Jean Rinehart had this thing for order that pleased Floyd and rubbed off on Raven. All of their possessions were tucked neatly away in boxes or drawers, the faucets remained a shiny silver, the baseboards wiped clean of any dust or grime. Broken things, no matter how sentimental, were immediately discarded without tear or regret.

And since being married to Jean, Floyd almost became the father Raven had always wanted. He still had those bad spells, though, but Raven had the ability to talk him down sometimes without him even knowing it. She had gotten so good at it that she actually allowed herself to believe that he had released the good angel lurking deep in his soul. To her, he had finally become what she believed to be normal. For a while there, Raven lived a fairy tale.

But during the latter half of his marriage to Jean, Floyd took to driving around, commenting on the passing scenery while Raven sat beside him. He would pick her up after school or daycare in Jean’s two-toned purple and cream Chevy truck and thread his way through the streets as if he were on a mission known not even to him.

If Raven swallowed the lump of fear resting in her throat to ask him where they were going or what they were doing or what they were about to do, he wouldn’t answer. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t. She’d bet her favorite canned Campbell’s tomato soup that even Floyd didn’t know what he was up to when he got in a killing mood.

On the day that she knew he had changed back for the worse, he picked her up in what he called his Sunday best – a short-sleeved plaid shirt perfectly pressed by Jean and buttoned all the way to his chin. Atop his wiry blond-haired head was a white fedora with a blue peacock feather resting in the black hatband. His black pants were creased, his belt a liquid black circle of leather around his compact waist, the gig line straight as a purpose.

The truck too was so clean that the high purple and creamy white sparkled in the afternoon heat of Byrd’s Landing. He stared straight ahead when he came to pick Raven up from daycare, didn’t look at her as she climbed into the truck with an unladylike grunt. She shrugged out of the backpack that almost matched her own weight and wedged it between them on the bench seat in such a way that she wouldn’t have to touch him. But she could still smell him and he smelled of Stetson cologne and Jack Daniels whiskey and several slices of Wrigley’s mint gum, which told her that after all these years living with Jean, he finally had a mood going.

She watched him for a while, not saying anything at all. Then he turned to her, his face serious as a grave. He then used the several pieces of gum to blow a bubble, the belly of which touched the tip of his nose. To this day, Floyd Burns was the only person she knew who could blow such a bubble from Wrigley’s chewing gum. His pink tongue snaked into the translucent bubble and it popped with a loud crack. Raven jumped, turned away from him and stared soldier-like out of the gleaming front window.

“Why, my little bird,” Floyd said. “I am so glad that you can join me in this here journey through the pagan streets of a town so in love with death that they leave their animals in the street until their fur turns to gum and their bones melt in the heat.”

Raven looked at him sideways without turning her head. She barely understood what he had said, but she didn’t really need to. She didn’t know the exact meaning of the words, but she knew that they told of something bad coming, something she would have to push into her nightmares.

“On the way over here, I passed two dogs lying in the street. One was in the middle lane near the center divider and the other was on the side of the road with its belly laid open.”

She continued to stare out the front window.

“And do you know that I’ve passed those selfsame dogs for four mornings and four afternoons in a row. I never pointed them out to you because I didn’t want to upset you. But they’ve been there for four days with the good folks of Byrd’s Landing just driving around them like it was as normal as apple pie and cheese slices.”

Raven knew this. She had seen them, too, knowing that they were probably running buddies who had died crossing the street together. She had asked Jean about them on that first day, and Jean told her not to worry about it. She told her to close her eyes the next time they passed. Later, she heard Jean on the phone asking someone to please at least remove the carcasses from the road so that her little girl, or any child for that matter, didn’t have to pass dead dogs every darn day.

He was too busy staring out the front window at the stoplight for any more comment. A young ponytailed woman pushing an enormous baby carriage was crossing the street in front of them. She had a tired, put-out look on her face while a little boy, about four or so, swung from her arm as she tried to hurry him across the street and maneuver the baby carriage at the same time. He was having a fit trying to twist away from his mother while snot flew from his screwed-up pug nose.

“What do you think, Raven?” Floyd asked. “How many points? Might be doing both her and her old man a favor. Look at those balls of snot.”

He revved the engine impatiently as the woman reached the shiny chrome bumper. She gave them a dirty look.

“Oh, she’s a feisty one,” he said.

“Daddy, please.”

“There’s three of ’em. With the little one there’s three. Quick. How many points before they get away?”

She looked him over carefully. His fancy clothes meant that today would probably be a day that they didn’t just drive around. She remembered what they did in daycare, red, white and blue windmills made from construction paper and glued to long silver straws. It was Fourth of July weekend, and Floyd Burns had a peacock feather in his hatband. She looked down at her hands, smaller but the same shape as Floyd’s. He gripped the wheel and revved the engine in glee as if he were a child about to eat the last box of red hots.

Raven knew in both blood and bone that she had to answer. He revved the engine again, this time lifting his foot from the break so that the chrome bumper moved forward slightly to bump the carriage. The woman froze in fear. The boy swinging from her arm froze with her in such a way that it seemed the very snot running from his nose stopped in midair. For a moment they looked as if they were pictures in a painting. The woman’s eyes locked with Floyd in a dance that seemed to go on forever, though it lasted no longer than a microsecond.

“How many points, Raven?” he asked, his voice as soft as the peacock feather in his hatband.

Raven sucked in her breath. She calculated the number in her head before answering him in a soft, fast voice. “Seven,” she said. “Seven. Three for the baby.”

He laughed then and smiled big. He waved a friendly palm at the woman, rolled down the window and leaned out. “My mistake, darlin’. Wouldn’t hurt you for the world. My foot just slipped, that’s all. I was someplace else.”

She brought her fist down on the hood of the Chevy and said, “Be careful. You scared the holy shit out of me.”

“Sorry,” he said again, still grinning. The woman gave him a disgusted look before flinging her ponytail over her shoulder. The miraculous thing was that Raven could see that the woman didn’t quite believe him, but later, perhaps when she reached the other side of the street, she would convince herself that it was indeed an accident.

“Do you think,” Floyd said, his gaze still following the woman as she cleared the front bumper. “Do you think that if I hit her and her rodent droppings that the good people of Byrd’s Landing would leave them lying in the road for four entire days, four long cool, sweet mornings and four steaming, hot afternoons?”

Her shoulders relaxed and her young lungs welcomed the expulsion of the breath that she didn’t know she held. She said nothing.

“No, I don’t think they would,” he said. “Not in normal circumstances, mind you. Something’ll have to happen ’fore they start doing that with humans. A bomb maybe. Or a nuclear explosion. Lots of cracked buildings and burnt-up bodies. Even then, if there wasn’t too many bodies, and if they was still thinking straight, maybe they’d stack ’em like cordwood on the street corners, maybe roll them up onto the sidewalk, throw some sheets or tarps over ’em. It’ll probably take a little bit before they’d just let folks rot in the street.” He said this all pensively as if it were a real problem that he thought about a lot but just couldn’t figure out.

He turned onto Main while looking over his shoulder at a couple of teenagers carrying Burger King bags, and a drink carrier that leaked soda as they trudged along the sidewalk.

“But if they still had the fear, mind you.” He slowed down a little, watched them for a while, then sped up. “If they still had the fear, they wouldn’t bother with even that. They’d just let ’em lay. They’d let ’em lay like dead dogs in the street while they took care of their own selves.”

He turned to look at her then. To Raven’s horror, his face morphed into the head of a rattlesnake. Both the little girl Raven and the grown woman Raven screamed as it struck.