Chapter Six

Clyde hummed tunelessly as he walked the length of the locker room. He glanced at Eugene’s locker, a slight smile curving his lips as he remembered the younger man opening it just before the dead, disemboweled rat fell at his feet.

Again, he saw Eugene screeching and leaping up on the bench, the sound reverberating through the room and bringing the remainder of the six-man crew running. It had earned Clyde a few days of peace from the daily malice that usually surrounded him. Now, Eugene bore the brunt of their ridicule, with everyone mimicking him as they hopped from foot to foot and screamed in a high falsetto. Clyde knew they probably suspected him as the perpetrator, but he didn’t care. No one dared to call him out.

As the day wore on, his anger began to resurface. It rumbled through him, a growing rash of discontent labeled “Mae.” She’d been creeping through the apartment since the incident with Jimmie, too meek to say anything beyond yes or no. And lately, he noticed, she had been putting on airs, talking about getting a job. He drew a long breath, then exhaled as he walked to the pay phone on the corner. He hated Chicago more than he had ever hated anyplace, even Rayville.

At least, back there, he knew where he stood and where the hatred was. It wasn’t hidden behind grins and smiles or whispered just loud enough to be heard. He knew how everyone in town had felt. They made sure that he did. Whatever they had to say, fear of him forced them to give him a wide berth.

Back in Delhi, Mae had made him believe she loved him no matter what. When they met in the woods, he thought she accepted him as he was. She wanted to be with him. She was sincere.

On their wedding night, the two had lain side by side, shoulders touching, thighs touching, and their fingers tracing each other’s hands. Mae had rolled over and climbed atop him, stroking his head, his face, and back again—just like she had watched his mother do—until he felt his manhood rise, stiff and pulsating, waiting for her touch.

She’d slowly spread her legs, lifting herself until she could ease onto him. He felt her allow him to inch into the heated wetness between her thighs. Her body stiffened, going rigid at the resistance of her virginity, before she yielded, crying out and then sliding all the way down upon him. He had reeled and bucked with pleasure as she rode him, her small hands still cradling his face.

“My Mae,” he had whispered, their bodies slick with sweat, him holding her against his chest.

“Always,” she’d whispered back.

They should have stayed in Delhi, he pouted. Maybe they couldn’t return to Rayville, but everything was fine in Delhi, close enough to still work at the garage with his father. But no, Mae had dreams and fed them to him every night, painting a new life for them both.

There had been no women, not one, since he started courting her. Like Adam being tempted in the garden, she had been his forbidden fruit. With her came the knowledge of his own sin. She had managed to eradicate the darkness, her light making killing wrong. He never spoke of it; she never knew what he had done, but the desire ebbed and dissipated. He’d left the darkness behind with Mama.

Then they came here, and the darkness crept back insidiously, first in his dreams, then here in this shit city. The darkness had begun invading his thoughts regularly, pointing out how Mae was changing. He could feel it, and he knew it was that skinny old bitch who was taking her away, pulling them apart.

Who can blame her? the darkness jeered at him. She was all citified, trying to sound all proper when she spoke. She’d even begun correcting him when he talked—or worse, talked for him, rushing to fill in the words his tangled tongue couldn’t express.

She never said it, but it was clear to him that she didn’t want somebody like him anymore. There was no way he believed she wasn’t sniffing after Jimmie, with his conked hair and yellow, pretty-boy features. He should have smashed his face in while he had the chance. Smeared it until Mae wouldn’t be able to look at him again.

The darkness showed him the disdain in her eyes as she looked at him when he came home, how she cringed as he tried to get his thick, heavy tongue to shape some loving words that would bring her back to him. Shaking his head angrily, he squeezed himself into the phone booth and closed the door.

He stared at the telephone receiver in his hand for several long minutes, the darkness torturing his mind and pushing between him and Mae. Finally, groaning miserably, he put it to his ear and dialed the number to the general store from memory, listening to the operator’s voice that demanded his coins. Dropping his nickels, dimes, and quarters into the coin slots, he waited for the connection to ring through.

“Hey, hello, this Hattie’s General Store. This here be Hattie.”

Deep within his soul, his mother’s voice climbed, whispering in his head and curling through the darkness. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand as he began to whimper softly, an almost suffocating longing to lay his head against her breasts, the smell of her milk surfacing and surrounding him. He sucked in his breath, the darkness rolled behind his closed eyes, and sighed, strengthening him.

“How do, Miss Hattie? This Clyde Henry.” His words were short and breathless with despair. “Can you gets word to my mama? Tells her I be calling back day after tomorrow.” Remembering his manners, he added, “If you please?”

He imagined Hattie’s mouth screwed up in disgust, knowing that his polite words did nothing to endear him to her. She didn’t like him, hadn’t since he had punched her eldest boy in the mouth, caving in his nose and knocking out three of his teeth when he’d caught him staring at Mae last year.

Growling low in his throat when Hattie hesitated too long, he allowed his displeasure to telegraph itself across the miles of wire, willing the darkness to travel the distance and remind her of what he could do. He connected with her own bitter darkness.

“I sees what I can do,” she mumbled into the phone, unable to hide the sudden quaking in her voice.

“Yes, ma’m, you do that, please.” He let the fear continue to build in the gap of her silence. “I calls back then.”

He was confident as the line went dead that she would obey him. He pushed the door to the phone booth open, glaring at the man standing impatiently in front of it.

“You ain’t the only man what wants to use the phone.” The man pushed forward, his body sticking with Clyde’s as he reached for the phone.

Clyde stepped aside, grasping the man’s shirt collar, and shoved him inside the booth, watching his arms flung forward, his feet scrambling to keep him standing. His head thumped against the metal phone.

“I a . . . ain’t the one t . . . t . . . today,” Clyde stammered and turned toward the street. He imagined that, in Delhi, one of Miss Hattie’s eight children had hightailed it out to his mother’s shack to give her the message and smiled in satisfaction.

Over the last week, he had felt a connection with his mother for the first time since they had fallen out with each other, and he savored it. Maybe she had been right about all of it . . . Mae and his moving. As he walked back to the garage, Clyde whistled tunelessly. He’d never been good at it, but it soothed and reminded him of when his mama had hummed or sung for him.

He began unbuttoning his overalls as he walked toward his locker, images of Fannie flowing seamlessly through his memories, the helpless loneliness that had plagued him since arriving in Chicago abating. His thoughts of Mae continued to boil in a stew of confusion, the darkness stirring it restlessly. Pushing up the locker’s handle with one hand, the other worked the button-down snaps of his coverall. He felt almost happy.

It sat on the top shelf, highlighted by the shaft of fluorescent light from overhead. The toy organ grinder’s monkey filled the entire space, its large ears protruding from the neckless head resting squarely on its shoulders. Its round, sightless eyes protruded, yellow circling the black orbs. Short black fur covered the long arms and ended in paws that held metal cymbals, partially hiding the bright yellow vest that covered its chest. The short, bowed legs were covered in garish red-and-yellow striped pants that stopped just short of its lower paws.

He stopped, unaware of how long he stood staring into the locker, his breath hitching and then ceasing, arrested by the sight in front of him. His eyes bulged, focused straight ahead, and his brain rushed to assimilate information about the object before him, first stubbornly refusing it and then finally translating it into reality. The image seared itself onto the screen of his mind to slam him backward in time and place, back to Rayville, back to the last classroom he’d ever sat in, back to Robert, back to monkey boy.

Clyde’s gaze drifted back to the wide mouth stretched across the monkey’s face. The lips skinned back to reveal two rows of square white teeth and red gums. Beneath the arms raised to clang his instrument, he saw his name, “Clyde,” crudely written with black marker on the yellow vest.

Gradually, the sound of the cymbals banging together penetrated his consciousness. He shook his head, trying to recall if the sound had been there all along. Laughter rained around him—rising over the tops of the lockers, soft at first—then quickly escalating into hoots.

The swell of darkness billowed over him, separating him from his movements as bitterness overtook him. He yanked the toy from the shelf, ripping the arms and legs free before slamming it to the floor and stomping on it. He felt the satisfying crunch as the metal cymbals bent and the monkey’s body collapsed under his heel.

Clyde fell back heavily, landing on the wooden bench between the rows of lockers, feeling the rawness in his throat from his guttural screams as awareness of his surroundings returned. His chest expanded and contracted rapidly as he sucked in air, forcing him to lean forward—hands on knees, palms up—and stare at the grease beneath his nails.

He wiped his hands on his thighs, forcing deep breaths in and out. The darkness continued to swim before his eyes, hanging over the lockers like a cloud. The men’s laughter echoed and burned his ears. Hatred and violence built unchecked until they erupted from his throat.

“LEAVE ME BE!” he roared, his hands balling into fists as he staggered to his feet. Air whistled in and out through his flared nostrils, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, and his muscles taut with the power the darkness fed through his blood.

Clyde’s knee bent awkwardly as he climbed to the top of the bench, bringing his other leg up and leaning forward to grab the edge of the lockers, his fingertips stretching to pull them forward. They crashed to the floor, their metallic ring filling the room as they hit the floor.

Four of his coworkers stood on the other side, frozen into a tableau of astonished horror, naked to his anger. Their laughter disappeared, lost in the echo of the metal crashing around them.

Clyde jumped back to the floor with a nimbleness that belied his stunted legs. Straddling the remains of the monkey lying between his feet again, he watched their eyes moving uneasily, shifting from him to the shattered toy. Its crumpled cymbals were silent, its batteries lying on the floor next to it. Clyde’s head swiveled from side to side, his body bowed tight, and his chin lowered to his chest.

“What the fuck?” one of the men closest to him shouted, having found his voice. He pushed past the others, knocking them off balance in his haste to make his way to the emergency exit behind them. His hand hit the steel bar as Clyde charged at them. The other three men piled into his back. The alarm blared into the room.

Clyde stretched his arms until his hands touched the door frame on either side, watching them run, leaving him alone with his anger for the space of a dozen heartbeats. He let the darkness rise, swirling around his feet until it obscured the room and the monkey’s remains behind him. From within the dark mist, he heard running feet and raised voices. They propelled him onward through the open exit, the darkness leading and guiding him, reaching out to the chaos in the other men’s souls. Darkness always found darkness. He loped forward, manic glee stretching his mouth in a wide grin.

Clyde stood in the mouth of an alley, his body trembling and his knuckles skinned raw and throbbing with pain. Blood and gore splattered the coveralls he still wore. In the distance, a church bell rang five times, disorienting him further. He remembered that he got off work at 4:30. It was a full thirty minutes later.

His eyes blinked rapidly and fluttered, and he felt light-headed, bewildered, and unaware of having come there. His thinking was blurred around the edges, replaced by an ever-increasing need that gnawed at him.

He raised his bloody knuckles, bits of flesh stuck in the skin, and scrutinized them. Flashes blinked in and out of his conscious memory: laughter, a monkey, his coworkers running and looking back over their shoulders as he closed the distance between them. Had he caught them?

He waited for his memory to catch up. When he heard them again, there was no laughter, only the sound of bones crunching and muffled screams for mercy and pleas that sent shivers of pleasure through his body. He smiled, licking his knuckles and tasting the blood. He felt power flowing back into him. He shivered in near ecstasy. Oh yes, he had caught them. The memories drifted together, puzzle pieces of pain, a dark thread strung between him and the still bodies he’d left in another alley somewhere behind him. The thread assured him they were alive.

Awareness bled into his reality, and he knew what he was waiting for. He was in her alley and had come for her. The darkness needed Eva. It had broken loose, rolling and declaring its dominance.

Already, he could feel her throat between his hands as he cleansed the world of her filth, purging it from her. No longer would the stench of her sin sully the air. Panic rose as her foul odor blended into his olfactory memory, mixing her scent with Mae’s.

Outrage flash fired, ignited. He heard his mother’s accusations. “She done robbed you of your power. She done castrated you, just like Delilah did Samson. Done took your power. Stole your anointing, the special power God done give you at birth. Just like I warned you.”

His conflicted emotions spun and spiraled as the sentient blackness ruled. He felt Mae’s voice attempt to rise to the surface, colliding with his mother’s voice.

A choked cry of anguish strangled in his throat as the darkness channeled his need for Eva, fusing it with the warped misery his life had become. The darkness had searched for culpability and found Mae.

She blinds you, it warned. Took you from home and brought you here to this hellish place. He heard her smooth lies woven around him, chaining him. First, do Eva—then her, it demanded.

Clyde began to tremble, clenching and unclenching his hands, then fisting them at his side. Sweat broke out on his forehead, dripping down his nose as he fought to master the churning turbulence. He tried to think of his good Mae, her touch on his skin, and how she made him feel safe and loved.

For a flickering moment, it worked, and he remembered his Mae, the way her deep dimples appeared on her cheeks when she smiled at him, how she lulled the darkness until it lay coiled and dormant, buried beneath his love for her.

Then he saw her face last night. Mouth drawn, eyes darting nervously around the room when he came in, withdrawing when he touched her. The taint of sin is on her, the darkness whispered. Just like it is on Eva.

Grasping his head with both hands, he squeezed. First, he had to deal with the one the darkness had chosen for him. The one he had been watching. He had to stop being a fool. The Creator abhorred a fool. He focused on the woman.

This one was Eva, just like the trifling woman that led Adam to his fall from grace, like Mae had led him to his fall. He’d heard men call to her, voices thick with the familiarity of where their hands and tongues and mouths had been and how they longed to be between her thighs again. Clyde had watched the sway of her hips, felt her in his man parts, and let the darkness persuade him.

The Creator’s righteousness, absent for so long, was again his constant companion. The restraint of the last year dwindled as his mama’s words enfolded him: “You was created special for this.” He was the one who could stop them all. The needs of the darkness roared to full life.

Clyde stood still, pressed into the shadows, intently listening until he heard it—the rhythmic click of her heels against the concrete. He sighed. She had come. She wore a powder-blue sweater tossed over her shoulders against the unseasonable coolness of the summer evening. Reaching up, she smoothed the finger waves styled into her hair. A full-throated laugh rushed into the night as she waved over her shoulder at someone out of his line of vision.

He pushed back against the alley wall and remained still, the darkness concealing him as she passed by just within his reach. The shadows that had swallowed him hid him as he tensed to lunge.

Reaching out, the urgency heating his blood, Clyde grabbed her, slapping his hand over her mouth while he held her against his broad chest. Feebly struggling as she craned her head backward to look up at him, her eyes widened in terror.

“I gots you now, Jezebel.” He breathed into her face, a bubble of freedom bursting in his chest as he pressed on her throat with one hand and watched her gasp for air. She choked, her eyes rolled upward, and her body went limp against him.

His mind was clear now, and he could think. He recalled parking his truck in the rear of the alley. Moving quickly, he pulled her semiconscious body to it, his arm wrapped around her waist like an affectionate lover. Opening the passenger door, he pushed her onto the seat, sat, and waited again. Sliding the key into the ignition, he looked from left to right, then drove out slowly onto the deserted street. Eva’s body slid from the seat to the floor. Her eyes fluttered open, and she moaned, her hands reaching up to grasp the edge of the seat.

Clyde leaned sideways, his hand releasing from the steering wheel as he lifted his fist and slammed it into her face, the nose bone crunching and blood spurting outward, splashing warm across his lips. He shuddered in ecstasy, his tongue sliding over his lips, relishing the taste as he sucked off the red droplets.

The road was barren as he slowed the truck and drove over the grass into the park’s wooded area, the truck concealed by the trees. Clyde pulled a blanket and a shovel from the backseat before opening the passenger door. He wrapped the blanket around her, hoisting her over his shoulder. He kicked the door shut and balanced the shovel he carried in his other hand before dropping the body to the ground. Walking quickly, he scanned the area repeatedly, reassuring himself that he was not seen. He walked deeper into the trees, finding the clearing he had marked on his previous visits.

Clyde heaved Eva, listening to the thud as her body hit the ground, swallowing his disappointment. She was already dead. She’d stopped breathing during the ride, denying him the pleasure of hearing her confession of her sins.

Whirling on the corpse, he kicked it, hearing the squelching sound as his steel-toed boot connected with her head. He stepped back as a deep red stain spread across the blanket.

Looking around him, he was temporarily transported, and an encroaching sense of safety swam through his blood. The closeness of the trees and the way they surrounded the clearing felt familiar, like home. The twilight of late summer blinked in and out through the leaves as he inhaled a deep lungful of air and let the tension begin to uncoil.

The fabric of his new world continued shredding at the seams, leaving him powerless to stop. Nothing had been right since they had arrived in Chicago. The laughter of the past and present pounded in his brain, making him desperate to hear Fannie’s voice again.

Throwing his head back, he let his mouth fall open and howled, “Fuck!” then recoiled from the word. His language had deteriorated, tainted by the sin around him.

Turning, Clyde kicked out at the tree trunk looming near him before sliding to the ground. Pulling his knees up to his chest, he buried his face against his thighs and let the darkness envelop him. It pushed against every part of him until he felt it sliding out of each orifice and back into the night air. He found himself sobbing brokenly. The darkness demanded satisfaction.

Taking the shovel in his gloved hands, he began to dig, turning over heaps of earth and creating the hole she would lie in. More than she deserved, he thought. Better to be left in the streets where she whored, for the dogs to devour. But he could leave nothing to chance—no loose ends, no chances of being caught.

Bit by bit, with each shovelful of dirt, he felt the fear eroding. He shook himself, dropped the shovel, pounded his chest, and howled again at the sky, the laughter ringing in his ears.

“Stop being a pussy,” he shouted into the night air, now relishing the way the foul, forbidden words sounded coming off his tongue. “I ain’t no p . . . p . . . pussy.”

He let the words rattle around his brain, the bad words pushing at the laughter, the ridicule, and the humiliation.

He walked around the body twice before shoving it with his toe and rolling it into the open grave, listening to the gratifying thunk as it hit the bottom. Whistling, he dropped clods of dirt from his shovel onto her ruined face as she stared wide eyed and unseeing at him.

He would bury her deep, let her disappear like every whore before her. Now, the darkness turned its attention to Mae and her transgressions.