CHAPTER TWO

Jesus, he thought. That was close. The blinding bolt of lightning struck so near Eli Wynn that he had almost said the swear out loud. He was not sure that he had not, so it was a good thing that some Blalock horses had bolted before he left the farmhouse to go on Mrs. Blalock’s flour errand. Otherwise, she would have sent Smarty Marty to accompany him. Marty would’ve relished an opportunity to tell on Eli for taking the name of the Lord in vain.

Beard’s General lay just beyond the small forest of trees that soldiered Hollow Creek Road at the perimeter of the Blalock farm. From there it was a hop, skip, and a jump across the road and over the creek. Eli happened to be the farmhand of least renown on Mr. Blalock’s roster. So when Mrs. Blalock suddenly found herself out of flour (or short on any kitchen ingredient that the farm couldn’t make for itself), she inevitably sent Eli to retrieve the goods.

Marty, the little snitch of a Blalock who was just as often sent along on errands to make sure Eli received the correct change, indeed would have told on him. He would have tattled even though the late Jacob Wynn’s son Eli was eighteen years old, going on nineteen. He might not look it, but years were years, even if they weren’t wrinkles. Mr. Blalock liked to say that whenever Mrs. Blalock caught him casting sidelong glances at the younger and more attractive ladies in the parking lot after church. Cherub cheeks or not, Eli figured he should be allowed to swear by God if he wanted to swear. Sometimes he swore aloud in protest when he was sure no one was around, least of all Smarty Marty.

Eli had never been so near a lightning strike before. An entire minute after his vision cleared, he could still feel a sunburn-like tingling against the sensitive skin of his clean-shaven mug. The post-flash darkness was accompanied by a stiff, warm breeze that at first caressed his face, then threatened to set it ablaze. The ground undulated beneath him. He’d heard the rumble of the violence in the earth beneath his feet. The ordinary sounds of the woods around him—chirping birds, buzzing insects, and the splat of an occasional heavy raindrop on the blanket of leaf corpses that covered the ground—had been replaced for a moment by a monotonous, high-pitched whine. That sound began to fade at the same time his vision began to clear. His nostrils filled with the electric blue smell of burning ozone and then, close behind it, the aroma of scorched wood.

Jesus, he thought again. His lips split in a wide, shit-eating grin at the novelty of the thought in his head. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Then it faded.

On repetition, the twinge of shame that stabbed him over taking the Lord’s name in vain crept to the forefront of his mind. The back of his neck, which had not been in the path of the lightning flash, felt as hot as his face and prickled. Its sting crept over his skull and down his forehead, blistering the smattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose like a red morning sun draining away the shadows of the night. The fine hairs that faded down the nape of his neck from the thick bowl cut of yellow hay on top of his head stood at attention.

Eli had experienced shame and humiliation before. Many times, thanks to Smarty Marty’s steady watchful eye. If he so much as scratched his balls while growing up a farmhand with Mrs. Blalock’s son, he’d find himself sent to bed without supper. It wasn’t the act of ball-scratching itself that fueled his embarrassment so much as Mrs. Blalock knowing he’d scratched them. He could practically hear her gears grinding over it as she glared down her nose at him from what in those moments looked like a good twenty feet of height.

However, this embarrassment wasn’t precisely the same as the ones before it. The heat on the back of his neck and top of his head radiated off him in a way that seemed very much like he’d spent too long in the sun without his hat or his work shirt. Moisture erupted from the pores on top of his head in tiny bubbles that popped when he ran his hand over them. A red-tinged vapor arose from them. It was held aloft on the wind, snaking toward a scorched tree that stood smoking in the distance.

That must have been the tree that was struck. It was really close. Maybe he had gotten more of a shock from it than he’d initially thought. Weakness overcame him, settling a heaviness about his shoulders. His lanky knees buckled. He collapsed to the earth, squatting atop them, head bowed in the direction of the steam flow.

“It’s the Lord,” he muttered. “He’s damned me for taking his name in vain.”

He hadn’t uttered the Savior’s name. Not out loud. But he shouldn’t have thought it, either.

From a copse of trees that mostly hid the scorched one from his view in his submission, Eli thought he could hear the wet, ragged breaths of a hungry animal. A bear, maybe? Or a wild dog? He’d once heard Pastor Mark describe the voice of Jesus as the sound of many waters. That didn’t seem right. If it wasn’t Jesus, then it perchance could be the Devil. Maybe Jesus had sent the Devil, and the Devil had come to claim him for his blasphemy.

“I’m sorry,” Eli whispered hoarsely. “Please. Give me a chance to be sorry. Give me a chance to make it right.”

And he would. On Sunday, when Mrs. Blalock invariably dragged him to Hollow Creek Nazarene Church for the weekly preaching and singing, he’d repent. Pastor Mark allowed the folks in his flock to repent of their sins without saying them out loud. All he had to do was kneel at the altar while the preacher prayed over him. The congregation was supposed to close their eyes during that part. Sometimes Eli peeked, though, just to see who might’ve been sinning and who else was spying on the penitent.

Once, his curiosity got the better of him for six Sundays straight. On all of them, the one person who showed up at the altar for forgiveness was Peter Mayberry, the church piano player. That set Eli’s imagination to conjure all the fanciful ways the doughy man with thin chestnut hair could sin. Did he touch himself? Or was it something less salacious? Was he a glutton? It couldn’t be wife-beating because Peter Mayberry was a confirmed bachelor. Murder? Defiling the deceased?

Those last two possibilities set off an explosion of grotesque and bloody imagery inside Eli’s head. There stood meek Peter Mayberry, slicing the ears off wayfaring victims and shoving knitting needles up their nostrils to poke at their brains in a dank basement somewhere. There he stood, pouring their organs and intestines into a meat grinder, patting the result into perfectly shaped discs to fry up for his dinner or to freeze for a rainy day.

Eli’s stomach had protested the vision in the sanctuary at its loudest volume. He’d had to swallow the large lump in his throat. Both sounds had reverberated throughout the room, causing more than one head to swivel his way. That got Mrs. Blalock’s attention. She’d swatted him on the thighs with her hymnal and elbowed him in the ribs hard enough to make him gasp. On the seventh Sunday, Eli pushed Peter Mayberry’s potential iniquities from his mind and kept his peepers shuttered.

Except for that one incident, Mrs. Blalock almost always kept her head primly bowed toward her lap while Eli peeked. Even if she did open her eyes, all she likely saw was her folded hands and the shapes of her knees under her Sunday dress. If he sat in a different row from her, which he did on days when Smarty Marty had been particularly pesky, she’d never know he’d sinned at all, much less the nature of that sin.

So it would be a Sunday morning repentance six days from now for the first day of spring crime against The Almighty. If he forgot to do it on Sunday, he was sure to be absolved in three weeks when Pastor Mark and the elders passed around the Easter communion. He did forget things sometimes. From this point on, there would be no more taking of the Lord’s name in vain, even if a bolt of lightning struck him directly.

As if confirming the notion, Eli felt the burden lifted from the back of his neck. A remarkable shift in the wind dried the sweat of his panicked repentance just as he both intuited and heard a patter of fresh raindrops dotting the canopy of forest around him. How long had he knelt here?

The incoming weather cooled the prickly top of his head and dampened his work shirt. With it, strength returned to his legs and arms. He tested them by planting his hands palm down on the earth and pushing against it to regain his feet. He wiped the remaining sweat and raindrops from his face with one grimy hand and restarted his path through the woods. To Beard’s General on Hollow Creek Road. To get a bag of flour for Mrs. Blalock.

Another loud clap of thunder startled him, but this time he managed to keep his thoughts free of any potentially sinful reactions. The rain patters picked up seconds later, transitioning from a fine mist to a pelting of pregnant droplets that changed the color of the dirt from a dusty peanut shade to a rich and ominous fudge. Something rustled in the copse. Whatever beast was hidden there may have decided to have him for lunch after all.

Eli broke into a jog and then a run. Rationally, he knew better than to turn tail on a beast and flee, but his rational mind was not in control of his heart and leg muscles.

Less than a fifth of a mile down the path, he arrived at the shoulder of Hollow Creek Road. Across it, Hollow Creek babbled fast but low through its five-foot deep and more than twice as wide bed. Eli leaped from the line of trees that bordered the Blalock farm and dashed across the road. He did not bother to look for oncoming traffic, not at this time of day. Once across, he scrambled down the embankment that led to the creek bed.

He could have simply run to the bridge that connected Hollow Creek Road to Beard’s parking lot, but he’d never liked the looks of that dilapidated thing. How many cars crossed its rickety planks every day? How many more would succeed before it collapsed under their weight? No, if he were going to end up in the creek, he would do so under his power.

Eli deftly navigated the four exposed chunks of granite riprap that had, over time, become dislodged from the roadside bank and plunged into the creek bed. Sediment serving as mortar and mild erosion during high water days had forged them into a nearly perfect set of stepping stones, each about one Eli-stride apart from the next. He’d crossed them so often that he hardly bothered to look when he leaped anymore. His muscles had memorized the correct number of steps to the jumping-off point as well as the perfect amount of power and thrust to shore his footing as he crossed. The routine familiarity of the act caused the lightning and the copse of trees to dim in his memory. He welcomed the amnesia. The farther the distance between him and the stricken tree, the less it seemed like he had nearly lost his salvation.

He glanced at the sky. He had dallied too long in the woods. The clouds were all but sure to release before he could return to the farmhouse with Mrs. Blalock’s fresh bag of flour in tow. It was after the school bell on a Monday, to top it off. That meant Kathy Beard’s only son Jerry would be working the cash register. He posed a greater danger of distraction.

Eli liked Jerry. He was an older boy but slow on the uptake, just like Eli. He’d been held back a year because of it when he was in grammar school. Jerry was always friendly to Eli, unlike most young men their age. Eli himself had been taken out of school just before the eighth grade during the summer that he’d been kicked in the head by the Blalocks’s mule Jenny. They said they pulled him out of school because they needed his help for planting and harvests. They never pulled their own boy out, however. Smarty Marty was just about to end his ninth grade year. Sometimes Eli wondered if the Blalocks thought the mule kick had knocked out his smarts the way it had knocked out his lights. Truthfully, he couldn’t say he had learned very much new since then. The school wasn’t really for boys like Eli, anyway. The main thing he learned from looking at books was how looking at books confused and bored him.

Jerry was a hoot. He was a big fan of knock-knock jokes and had bent Eli’s ear with several of them over the years. He also had a secret stash of pictures of naked ladies near the cash register that his mother Kathy did not know about. If she happened to be in the back while Jerry was working the register (and while snitchy Marty Blalock’s eyeballs stayed glued to the shiny jars of candy on the opposite counter), Jerry would allow Eli a peek at some of that treasure.

Somehow, his friend had recently acquired a new calendar emphasizing a photo of the most beautiful woman Eli had ever seen. She was naked, of course, and reclined against what looked like red velvet. Her hips and legs were positioned just so, protecting her modesty in a teasing way. She lay with her knees bent, her right foot resting atop her left one, her toes curled. Her left arm was straightened into a prop. Her right one was stretched into the air and bent at the elbow so that her right hand was hidden behind a gloriously curly mane of strawberry blonde hair.

The pose was intended to highlight her completely nude breasts. Even so, it was her face that rendered Eli dumbstruck. Partially hidden behind her right arm, the half of the woman’s face that Eli could see melted his heart. It straightened his pants in a way he had not experienced when he’d pored over previous pinups. Her left eye was half-lidded and decorated with blue eye shadow, contrasting beautifully with her rosy cheeks. Her parted cherry lips revealed a perfectly straight row of gleaming white teeth.

Jerry claimed that the woman in the picture atop the calendar was a young Marilyn Monroe. He said she’d been paid fifty bucks to pose for it before she became a movie star. He said that she had admitted to it a few years ago. She’d done it because she needed the money at the time. Eli was skeptical. The woman didn’t look like the pictures he’d seen of Marilyn Monroe in the copies of the Hollow River Echo newspaper that Mr. Blalock always brought back with him from Saturday stock markets. He also couldn’t imagine the woman in the picture on that calendar, wearing that comfortable, knowing smile, needing anything at all. Ever.

The memory of the first time Jerry had shown him the calendar triggered a longing in Eli as he scaled the wall of the creek bed and jaunted across Beard’s parking lot. A part of him wanted Jerry to be there, wanted his friend to give him another peek at the loot. Especially if there was no chance of Marty catching him.

But the part of him that feared Mrs. Blalock’s reaction if he returned to the farmhouse with a bag of flour soaked through by a heavy downpour overrode it. If she discovered her flour was ruined because Eli took time from his errand to harden his prick over a picture of a naked lady, he might again endure that awful glare of her knowing he had indulged his lust, as if she had seen his hard-on herself.

Please let Mrs. Beard be behind the counter today, Eli prayed. He bounded up the three steps that led to the wooden porch and dashed through the door, nearly knocking over one of Kathy Beard’s potted ferns that sat just outside as he did.

Another clap of thunder rolled across the sky as Eli vanished into the store. A black furry snout appeared from the edge of the woods out of which he had emerged. Above it, flaming red eyes stared at the threatening heavens. A deluge was coming, if she had correctly read the boy’s mind. Creatures great and small should seek shelter.

Her stomach protested the idea, and she understood why. The accidental transition from her hell world to this one had used her up. She’d tried to feed on the boy whose flash of guilt for having sworn in vain the name of the god he worshipped had a pleasing tart flavor. But it had been too fleeting, a mere morsel barely tasted when what she needed was to feast.

If the stories she’d siphoned from the boy’s head were true, the prey in this world, like the souls of the damned in hers, could be ripe with the shame and guilt she needed to sustain her. In the short time since she’d first encountered him, Eli Wynn himself had experienced shame and remorse for at least three different acts, past and present. He felt shame for what he called “peeking” (the penitent Peter Mayberry fellow he’d recalled sounded like a promising source of nourishment). Next was his guilt over the oath. Finally, there was the shame of his lust for the creature in the photograph, the female that he thought Was Not Marilyn Monroe.

Above her, the sky let go. A soft pattering of rain began to fall. Instinct combined with the sting of the stuff when it struck her eyes and the end of her nose pressed her to flee, to hide until the storm subsided. But her hunger was too powerful. That, and the fact that her thick pelt seemed to be protecting the bulk of her skin from the wet stuff. Regardless of her discomfort, it was not time to hide.

This was the time to hunt.