Roy was out gassing ant-hills when the sun went down. He slipped a Maglite out of the pocket of his jeans and took a knee, watching the gasoline soak in. Hundreds of ants percolated up from the tunnels, scrambling over each other in the pale blue-white glow of the flashlight beam.
They had found a grasshopper somewhere and dragged it back to the nest, and they had been in the process of cutting it into pieces and pulling it down into the dirt when he’d interrupted them. He liked to imagine the jackboot tromping of their tiny feet, the sound of a klaxon going off as the gasoline washed down into the corridors of the nest, little panicked ant-people running to strengthen levees, hauling children to safety, swept away by the stinking flood into dark confines.
Roy enjoyed watching videos on the Internet of riots and fights, natural disasters, and sometimes people falling off of bicycles and skateboards. Fights were fun as long as they were street-fights. Ultimate Fighting was too structured—he didn’t watch fights for the gore or brutality; the unpredictability was what drew him, the chaos and incongruity, the panic and frenzy that was almost slapstick in a way. Aimless beating, kicking, the rending of shirts and slipping and falling and flopping around, reducing each other to meaningless ragdolls.
If he were a decade or two younger, he probably would have enjoyed playing video games like the Grand Theft Auto series.
As it was, behind the wheel he often fantasized about driving off the highway and tearing through backyards and flea markets, plowing through birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. Not so much for the violence of it, but for the strange sight of a car tear-assing through a place you didn’t expect to see it. You just don’t see things like that, and that’s what he enjoyed: things “you just don’t see.”
When he was a kid, he’d gotten his hands on a smoke bomb and set it off in the gym showers after sophomore phys-ed, when he knew it would be full of unsuspecting people. Waiting until the smoke had almost filled the room and was beginning to curl over the tops of the shower curtains, Roy had shouted, “Fire! Fire!” and had run outside.
His father had whooped his ass for it, but seeing thirty butt-naked high-schoolers storming through the gymnasium had been the highlight of his high school experience.
He tipped another pint of gasoline onto the ants for good measure and got back on the lawn mower, starting it up and climbing the sprawling hill toward the adobe hacienda. A garage stood open out back where the driveway snaked up out of the darkness and curled around the house like a cat’s tail. Roy drove the lawn mower inside, filling the space with a deafening racket.
When he cut the engine off, the silence was even louder. He sat in the dark stillness beside a huge Winnebago, packing a box of cigarettes.
Outside, the evening was tempered by the faint murmur of Blackfield’s fading nightlife, an airy, whispering roar washing over the trees. In close pursuit was the constant drone of cicadas and tree frogs.
Southern cities don’t necessarily have nightlife. You go up north or out to Atlanta, maybe, or Birmingham—Roy had been to Atlanta twice and didn’t care to ever go back, that traffic was horseshit—and yeah, the cities don’t sleep. Life runs around the clock. Out here in the sticks, though, a city of six thousand, seven thousand like Blackfield, there’s a few creepers after dark. Meth heads, winos, that sort of thing, sometimes hookers. But for the most part the main boulevard is a clear shot from one end of town to the other after dark, cold hollow streets like a John Carpenter movie.
He lit up, wandered back up the driveway and around the house sucking smoke out of the Camel as he went. Standing at the top of the drive, he was treated to a horizon swimming with the red cityglow of Blackfield, and under the jagged rim of the treetops glimmered the windows of the blue Victorian on the other side of the trailer park, a tiny hive of glowing elevens in the darkness.
A gray cat with honey eyes trotted out of the shadows.
As he blew the smoke into the night, multicolored lights flickered in the Victorian’s cupola. Someone was watching TV up there. “Looks like somebody’s moved into the old Martine place.”
An old woman stood by a barbecue grill crackling with flames. She was tall, taller than beanpole Roy even, and lean, broad-shouldered, with feathered gray hair. That and her hawkish nose made her resemble some sort of dour gray Big Bird.
Or a bird of prey.
The ice in her glass tinkled as she took a sip of a Long Island iced tea. Cutty always started dinner with one to whet her appetite. “Know anything about them?” she asked, as the gray cat slinked over to her and darted up onto the patio table.
“Black fella from up north.” Roy ashed his Camel and spat a fleck of tobacco. The wind rolling across the top of the hill pushed at his copper hair. He’d once let her make him a Long Island, but it was so strong he could barely finish it. No idea how she could manage it, with her scarecrow figure. She wore enormous shirts and patterned sweaters and dressed in loose layers, so she always seemed to be wearing wizard-robes, even in the heat of summer. Roy was rail-thin and the jeans he wore draped from his bones, but even so he still sweat right through his shirts when he worked.
“Him and some fat chick brought the car down couple weeks ago and the real estate agent showed him around the place. Looked like his sister. Or his wife. Or, hell, his grandmother. I can’t damn tell how old any of ’em are anymore.”
“Have you spoken to him?” Cutty threw another handful of junk mail on the fire and gave the cat’s back a slow, luxurious stroke. The smoke stank, and the ink turned the flames green.
“No.”
“Have you got anything for supper?” she asked the flames.
“No, ma’am.”
Cutty closed the grill lid and started off toward the back of the house. “Why don’t you stay and eat with us, then? Theresa is making pork chops.”
“I just might,” said Roy. “Thank you.”
As soon as the door opened he was bombarded by the aroma of pork rub and steak fries, corn, green beans, baked apples. Theresa LaQuices bustled around the spacious kitchen, buttering rolls and stirring pots.
Theresa was a solid and ruggedly pretty iceberg of a woman, a few years younger than Cutty. Her raven-black hair was dusted with gray. Spanish or maybe Italian or something, because of her exotic surname and olive skin, but Roy never could quite pin down her accent and it never really struck him as appropriate to ask. She was given to dressing like a woman twenty years her junior, and today she had on a winsome blue sundress roped about with white tie-dye splotches.
He couldn’t deny she wore it well. Against the well-appointed kitchen, she looked like she belonged on the cover of a culinary magazine. Reminded him of that Barefoot Contessa chick, only a lot older and a lot heavier.
“Well hello there, mister!” Theresa beamed. “Are you gonna be joinin’ us for dinner?”
Roy realized Cutty had disappeared. She had an odd habit of doing that. “Yes, ma’am. And it smells damn good. I wasn’t even hungry before I came in here, but now I could eat a bowl of lard with a hair in it.”
Theresa made a face and gave a musical laugh. “I didn’t prepare any lard, handsome, but you’re welcome to a pork chop or two.”
“I’ll be glad to take you up on that.”
Roy passed through a large dining room, past a long oak table carved with a huge compass-rose, and into a high-ceilinged living room with delicate wicker furniture. On a squat wooden pedestal was a flatscreen television that would not have been out of place on the bridge of a Star Trek spaceship.
Behind the TV were enormous plate-glass windows looking out on the front garden inside the adobe privacy wall, a quaint, almost miniaturized bit of landscaping with several Japanese maples and a little pond populated by tiny knife-blade minnows.
The downstairs bathroom was one of many doors in a long hallway bisecting the drafty old house. The slender corridor, like the rest of the house, was painted a rich candy-apple red, and as the light of the lamps at either end trickled along the wall Roy felt as if he were walking up an artery into the chambers of a massive heart.
He washed his hands in a bathroom as large as his own living room. It was appointed with an ivory-white claw-foot tub, eggshell counters, a white marble floor, and a gilded portrait mirror over a sink resembling a smoked-glass punch bowl.
The vanity lights over the oval mirror were harsh, glaring. Roy was surprised a house occupied by three elderly women would have a bathroom mirror that threw your face into such stark moon-surface relief. Every pit, pock, blemish, and crease stood out on his skin and all of a sudden he looked ten, twenty years older. And he had a lot of them for being in his forties.
His lower lids sagged as if he hadn’t slept—which he hadn’t, really, he didn’t sleep well—and his red hair was fine, dry, cottony, piled on his head in a Lyle Lovett coif. The lights made his face look sallow, made him look melty and thin, like a wax statue under hot lamps.
Junk food, probably. Slow-motion malnutrition. He ate a lot of crap because he didn’t cook.
He could cook, no doubt—he could cook his ass off, learned from his mother Sally—but he never really made the effort. Not because he was lazy, but because he could never find anything in the cabinets that enticed him enough to cook it (he was a chef, but not a shopper) and he never had anybody to eat with. So he really appreciated the chance for a proper home-cooked meal that left him out of the equation and gave him company to eat it with.
Back in the hallway, Roy passed an open door through which he could see a headless woman in a crisp new wedding dress.
“Hi there,” said a woman’s voice.
“Hello, Miss Weaver.”
An elderly flower child came flowing around the bridal mannequin to him, decked out in layers of wool and linen in muted earth colors. “How many times I gotta tell you?” she said, wagging a knurled finger. “Call me Karen. You staying for dinner tonight?”
Locks of silver-blonde hair tumbled down from underneath a green knit cap and a long curl of yellow tailors’ measuring tape was yoked over the back of her neck, draping over her bosom. Karen Weaver had the open, honest face of a grandmother, and eyes as blue as a Montana sky. A silver pendant on her chest twinkled in the light, some obscure religious symbol he didn’t recognize. Could have been a pentagram, except there were too many parts, too many lines.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She playfully slapped him on the shoulder. Wisps of Nag Champa incense drifted through the open doorway behind her, accompanied by the sinuous, jangling strains of the Eagles. “Don’t ma’am me, young man.”
“Yes, ma’am,” grinned Roy. He flinched away before she could slap him again.
Dinner was excellent. The four of them ate at the compass-rose dining table under the soft crystal glare of a chandelier, Cutty hunched over her plate like a buzzard on roadkill, Theresa with a napkin pressed demurely across her lap. Weaver ate with the slurping-gulping gusto of a castaway fresh off the island.
In the background, the turntable in the living room was playing one of those old records the girls liked so much—Glenn Miller, Cab Calloway, one of those guys, he wasn’t sure which. Roy was a golden-oldie man himself, dirty southern rock. Skynyrd fan through and through.
“Cuts like birthday cake,” said Weaver, flashing Theresa an earnest smile. “I’ve been cooking for ages, and somehow I still don’t hold a candle to you.”
“You get a lot of practice, cookin’ for a long line of husbands.”
Cutty said in a wry tone, “I wonder why you outlived them.”
Theresa feigned hurt at her and went back to feeding herself dainty bites of pork chop with the darting, practiced movements of someone steeped in southern etiquette.
Roy interjected, “Nice dress you’re working on, Karen. Where’s this one going?”
The old hippie’s smile only broadened. “Oh, it’s going to a very lovely couple in New Hampshire. They’re planning on a November wedding. No expense was spared.”
“Too bad it won’t be a Halloween wedding. That’d be interesting.”
Cutty shook her head. “Ugh. I can’t think of anything cheesier than a bunch of youngsters decked out like extras from the Rocky Horror Picture Show or something, exchanging their vows in front of Elvis and a congregation of monsters.”
“A congregation of monsters!” said Weaver, bright-eyed and smiling. “What a wonderful thought.”
“Only you.” Cutty eyed the voluptuous Theresa. “And what are you doing tomorrow?”
The dark-eyed Mediterranean woman straightened in her seat. “I’ll have you know I’m volunteering at a soup kitchen tomorrow evening. The one in Blackfield. I’ll be there all evening.”
“You? Volunteering? At a soup kitchen?” Cutty huffed in disbelief and pushed her food around her plate. “The only thing I’ve ever seen you volunteer is your phone number.”
As sullen and stormy as Roy could get, he enjoyed watching the sisters banter. They weren’t biological sisters, or at least he didn’t think they were. Never talked about where they came from, other than to swap stories and anecdotes about long-dead husbands. They never mentioned children.
“So, it looks like we’ve got new neighbors. Down the hill, in Annabelle’s house.”
The other two looked up from their dinner. Weaver was the first to speak. “Oh yeah? Well, are they nice? I think that house deserves someone nice.”
“I ain’t talked to ’em,” offered Theresa. “I saw ’em when I was comin’ home from the grocery store earlier today. I was behind them on the road comin’ out of Blackfield. Looked like a man and a little boy. Colored folks. They was drivin’ one of them Japanese cars.”
Sometimes Weaver could be a little eerie, like a gold-miner who’d spent too much time out in the mountains by herself, but when she smiled, the old woman could light up a room. “Oh, that’s nice—this gray old neighborhood could use a splash of color, I think.”
At that, Cutty dipped her face into one hand and rubbed her forehead in exasperation.
“Say,” Weaver added, “why don’t we invite them up for dinner one night this week?”
“Like a welcome wagon,” said Theresa.
“Yeah!”
“We’ll have a barbecue out back and invite the whole neighborhood, and dance around the maypole and sing songs and tell stories,” Cutty growled flippantly. “It’ll be a regular bacchanalia.”
Picking up her goblet, Weaver swirled a splash of wine. “That’s the spirit! We’ll even have a bonfire!”
Cutty gave her a shrewd glare.
“You know how I feel about bonfires.”
“Oh, right.”
“Still,” said Theresa. “It would give us a chance to get to know them. After all, they’re going to be livin’ in Annabelle’s house. Like that bunch in Nebraska, they’re gonna be askin’ questions sooner or later. We might as well lay the groundwork. Establish a little rapport.”
“Redirect their curiosity. Yes.” Cutty forked a piece of pork chop into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Yes, good idea. Curiosity killed the cat, after all.”
After dinner, Cutty stood at the island in the kitchen and cut an extra pork chop into pieces, then put it in a food processor and chopped it into a dry, grainy paste. Then she used the processor to chop up a cup of green beans, and then a cup of corn.
She assembled all this processed food on a plate with two steak fries and took it upstairs, along with a glass of tea. She put them both on the nightstand in her bedroom and pulled a rope set into the ceiling, hauling down a hinged staircase behind a hidden panel. She carried the plate and glass up into darkness.
A pullchain dangled against her face. Cutty pulled it and a soft yellow bulb came on, revealing an attic.
Years of accretion surrounded her, most of it dusted. Victorian-style lounges and parlor tables with baroque mahogany scrollwork and silk cushions. Steamer trunks full of foxed books, scrolls of paper, yellowed newspapers, movie posters plastered with the faces of long-dead actors. Bookcases with broken glass windows set into them. A clown marionette hung from the rafters, face forever frozen in a loopy laugh. A coin-operated weight scale from 1936. Shelves and shelves of bric-a-brac—toys, coins, bayonets, flintlock pistols.
Cutty walked a meandering path through the labyrinth to a door at the far end.
This she unlocked with a skeleton key.
Inside, a bed faced an old tube television in a dark room. The only window was a tall gothic rectangle looking out on the back garden, and it simmered with Tyrian purple light.
Playing on the TV was the History Channel, which she never failed to find ironic, considering who was watching it. The TV’s glow traced the contours of the room with a thin film of blue, and the shape under the thick quilt was only a suggestion in the soft light. The attic’s bare bulb filtered through the open door and illuminated the foot of the bed, bisecting the bedroom with dirty gold. The gray cat with the honey eyes lay curled up by the footboard.
The bedridden shape stirred in the shadows. “Evening, cookie.” Its genderless voice was a dry croak. Folded up in it was the hint of a sarcastic Brooklyn accent.
“Evening, Mother,” said Cutty.
“It is evening, right?”
The old woman slept more often than not these days, and often woke in the wee hours of the night. The bedroom was timeless; there was no clock here, digital or analog, which was how she liked it. Mother hated counting down the hours alone in her rare moments of wakefulness, and the constant ticking was maddening, a torturous metronome out of a Poe story.
“Yes,” Cutty said. “It is evening.”
She put the plate on a vanity and took a bendy straw out of the pocket of her sweater, slipping it into the tea. Sitting on the bed, she helped her mother sit up and drink some of it. The sound of her slurping was like the slow tearing of paper.
“When is it?”
Cutty traded the tea for the plate. “It’s October.”
She gathered up a spoonful of ground pork chop and fed it to the shape under the quilt. The spoon rattled against her mother’s twisted grimace as the meat slid inside. Mother mashed it against the roof of her mouth with her tongue and swallowed.
“What? Already?” wheezed the shape. “Shut the front door.”
“Time flies.”
“Time flies like an arrow, but bees like a fruitcake.”
These garbled aphorisms had long ago ceased to concern Cutty. Considering the crone’s state, it was a wonder she could even communicate. She eased some of the chopped green beans into her mother’s hard mouth as if she were feeding her through a kabuki mask.
Mother sighed. “Will you hand me the television remote controller thing, cookie?”
“Where is it?”
“I dropped it. It’s on the floor.”
The shape’s shriveled eyes followed Cutty as she put the plate aside and stooped to gather the remote. She put the batteries back in it, put the cover back on, and sought her mother’s hand.
“Here you are,” she said, putting it in the stiff claw.
Fingers curled around the remote with a subtle crackle. The TV changed channels at a stately pace as Cutty continued to feed her antediluvian mother puréed pork. The gray cat on the quilt looked up, yawned, stretched, went back to sleep.
“I think we’re getting close,” said Mother, when dinner was almost over. “Finally, finally, finally. After all these long years.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Maybe once it’s done you won’t be keeping me in the attic with the rest of the antiques.”
Cutty gave her a wry look.
“What?” asked the shape.
“You know you’re only up here to keep you safe. Safe from those nasty murdering men and their stolen heartstones.”
“Bah. You don’t care about me.”
“How can you say that?”
“You hardly ever come up here to visit with me anymore.” Her mother coughed softly into one dry fist. “You’re always downstairs with your friends and that weird Irishman who cuts the grass.”
“I’ve told you before, he’s not Irish.”
“He’s ginger as hell, he does all the lawn work, he drinks, he’s Irish until proven otherwise.”
“No habeas corpus for you, huh?”
Her mother chuckled, though her face didn’t move. “I’m corpse enough for both of us.”
Cutty spooned the last of the green beans into her mother’s mouth and set the plate aside. Reaching into one of the deep pockets of her wizard-robe cashmere sweater, she brought out an apple. It was the size of a softball and its skin was the liquid, recondite red of a ruby. Rare striations of peach and gold curved down its sides.
Her mother sighed with relief and contentment at the sight of it, like a castaway seeing civilization.
“Almost time for another harvest,” said Cutty, handing her the apple. “I think this weekend I’ll see to that. Roy and Theresa can help me carry them to the house.”
Mother clutched it in her bony hands and lifted it to her lips. Her mouth opened, the corners creasing and flaking, the joints of her jawbone cracking, and she pierced the fruit’s skin with her teeth. A soft groan of delighted pain escaped her throat as she bit into the fruit.
Instead of juice, vibrant arterial blood dribbled from its rind and ran down her arms, dotting the quilt.
As the rich carmine ran down her throat, Mother’s skin loosened, her fingers fulling and flushing. The corded veins snaking down her neck and across her shoulder plumped, throbbing, and fresh life trickled throughout her body.
“An apple a day,” she gurgled.