The Hole (10 page)

A similarly fat man, belly and chest bulging around the edges of his overalls, reached across Elliot to grab the large clay bowl of applesauce. ” ‘Scuse me,” he said, grunting the words.

“Sure,” Elliot said and leaned back to give the man room. He heard Evajean laugh quietly next to him.

“Lot of men died,” the fat man said.

Elliot, pretty sure he was the one being spoken to, said, “Last night?”

“Lot of good men.” The fat man wasn’t looking at Elliot but, rather, into his bowl of mixed oatmeal and fruit.

“I’m sorry,” Elliot said.

“Yeah,” the fat man said, “yeah, I bet you are.” And he stud up, taking his food to the far end of the the table.

“Don’t you mind him.” This from Cecilia, resting her hand gently on his arm. “William can be a genuine grumpy puss when he sets his mind to it. Almost never smiles. Sometimes I think he don’t know how.”

“You know him well?” Evajean asked.

“Of course, honey. I’m married to the big old grump.” Cecilia laughed, a sound hearty and deep.

“I’m sorry,” Elliot said to her. “For the men who were killed.”

“Honey,” she said, setting down her spoon and turning to give him her full attention, “those men died because the Lord felt it was their time. I’m just happy-we’re all happy-that they did it not by falling prey to the drink or catching something whoring in the city, but serving the greater good of fighting those things have been making life so miserable for us. What better way to lose your life, I have to say, than saving the life of another?” And she picked up the spoon again and resumed eating, like she’d just set down all there was to say on the topic.

Elliot nodded and gave Evajean a troubled and confused look. She shrugged and smiled back at him. She wasn’t worried, but he remained very much so.

Everyone seemed so nice, so proper and focused on their lives in the vanishingly small town. This breakfast table with its perfect order and cordial occupants summed up Nahom wholly for Elliot: ordered, structured, and, like the oatmeal, bland. But under it all was a slightly wretched air of fear and menace. Again he affirmed-to himself, if not yet to his traveling companion-his plan to get the hell out of here as soon as they were able. That meant fixing the truck, probably, and if they were very lucky, fixing it would involve only getting a few of these large men to flip the vehicle back over and maybe haul it back up to the road. Callie would’ve told him to keep his fingers crossed.

Further down the table, laughter broke and spread like a pathogen in their direction. Elliot had no idea what it was about, but he chucked politely and poured more applesauce into his bowl. He wanted to get up and briefly away from here, take Evajean somewhere private so they could discuss how to get on again with their journey. Nothing of significance was back at the house, so it might just be as easy as asking for help with the truck and then waving goodbye to his rescuers.

He leaned over to Evajean and whispered in her ear. “We should leave,” he said. “I want to go.”

She looked at him, shrugging her shoulders, asking him why. “Because,” he said, not liking this clandestine conversation at a table were so many might hear. “I want to get going. I don’t like it here.”

Now she did respond, whispering back, and Elliot saw they were drawing attention. Several the townsfolk had stopped eating and were watching the two, looking not concerned but slightly more than curious. Elliot hated this and found himself angry at Evajean for forcing him into the situation. Why hadn’t she stayed at the truck? If she’d only stayed at the truck until he woke up, they’d at least be hiking along the road. But then, of course, they’d have found the Nahom sign just like he did and taken the path and they’d be just where they were right now.

“Don’t be silly,” she said and Elliot almost missed it, so caught up in his thoughts. “These people are nice, they’ve been very nice to us, and it’s the least we can do, since they saved your life, to stick around and make them happy. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, but it wasn’t. He broke from their parlay, resumed eating, and nudged the dog with his foot. Breakfast had to end soon.

Soon turned out to be half an hour, a crawling period of more eating, more empty conversation and loaded smiles. He felt a great sense of pressure on his chest and in his ears, weight from whatever it was about this place that just wasn’t right, and at several points during those thirty minutes he almost stood up and walked away from the table, just to get some air.

Near the end, Evajean put her hand on his knee and squeezed, trying to comfort. But the gesture only make things worse because it was the same as Clarine had done so many times and, like in the cave, he didn’t want to drag her memory into this place. Nahom made him ill.

Finally it was done. The people carried their bowls and utensils to a large bin in a corner of the town square and dump them in, submerging the dishes in soapy water. Children began washing them while the adults, bellies full and ready to go about their day, exchanged concluding pleasantries and broke into groups to begin whatever tasks they had assigned. Now, in the hubbub, Evajean was willing to talk.

“What’s gotten into you?” she said as they walked back to the small house. Elliot carried the dog under his arm, its head in his palm, and the animal yipped pleasantly at a family of squirrels chattering in a nearby tree.

He started to answer but she cut him off. “No. I understand, what happened last night, it’s terrible. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry if I had you worried, being gone and all. But I was only trying to help, to get you help. These people
saved you
, Elliot. And you’re acting like they’re a bunch of Nazis.”

“Evajean-”

“No,” she said again. “You want to get out of here, I get that. But, Jesus, Elliot, this is the first nice place I’ve been since- since Henry got sick. I still want to find the Hole. It’s not like I want to
live
here. But why can’t we enjoy it for a day without you having whatever the hell kind of breakdown you had back there?”

Elliot was quiet, embarrassed. How could he make her understand what this place was doing to him without it sounding crazy? They walked without talking the rest of the way to the house. At the front door, though, he turned to her, hand on the knob, and said, “There’s something wrong here. I guess you don’t feel it like I do, but I’m not kidding about it, either, Evajean. There’s something very wrong in this town.”

She rolled her eyes and he almost slapped her. What the hell was wrong with this woman? Why was she treating him like a goddamn child? Elliot exhaled slowly, forcing his mind to clear. He set the dog down and opened the door. They entered without speaking to each other, and Elliot went into his room and sat on the bed. The dog hopped up to join him.

Later, when she hadn’t come to get him, he went to her. Evajean was sitting on the couch in the house’s living room, reading a fat, clothbound blue book. “It’s the Bible,” she said when he glanced at it. “All they have is this stuff.” She pointed at a little shelf against a wall, where half a dozen books were propped up by a coffee can.

“I want to know what happened,” he said, sitting down next to her. The dog padded in from the bedroom, yawned, and lay down on the rug.

“You should take him outside,” she said.

“I will.”

“You should do it now, he might have to go.”

“Tell me what happened,” he said. “Run me through it and then I’ll take the dog out to piss.”

She looked at him sharply. “You’re still being this way?”

“What way?”

“You’re still going to act like this?”

“I’m not acting like anything,” he said, and lifted the book out of her hands. “You’re really reading this?”

“What else is there?” she said.

He shrugged. “So was I out when you woke up? Or did you never pass out?”

“You mean the accident?”

He nodded.

She leaned back into the cushions and gazed up at the ceiling. “I didn’t hit my head. What I remember-and you have to understand, this was all happening so quickly-but what I remember is that boy in the road and you swerved. Then there was a big bump, which I guess was us going over the curb-”

“Or the boy.”

“-and then it was all just chaos. I really thought I was going to die, Elliot.”

“You probably almost did,” he said. He wanted her to appreciate the weight of what they’d been through, to recognize it as serious, because that would make convincing her to maintain that reference easier. They weren’t out of trouble yet.

Evajean swallowed. “And then it was like I was in this tunnel, being spun around and banged into things. You were screaming and the dog was barking, and I just pressed my hands into the dashboard because I guess I thought I might fly out. And then it stopped. The truck stopped falling and I could tell we were upside down. I didn’t know where, you know? But your eyes were closed and your mouth was open and I knew you’d been knocked out. I didn’t know if you were even alive, Elliot.”

“Sure,” he said. “I was lucky to be. You too.”

“And so I got out of the car and I could see how bad it was and I just started yelling for help, panicking, I guess. And then, this is the really weird part, I just got this
feeling
like I knew which direction help was. I knew where I needed to go to be safe and get you safe. So I took the dog because I didn’t want it to get eaten by a bear or a mountain lion or something and I started walking.”

“And you ended up here.”

“No,” she said, “no, I actually didn’t think I’d picked right after a while, because I’d walked for, I don’t know, a couple of hours and hadn’t found anything. I kept shouting for someone but nobody heard me.”

“Then how-”

“They found me. I’d pretty much given up at that point and was ready to just go to sleep and see what happened in the morning. And then I heard some people talking and laughing and then these guys just came out of the woods. Funny thing was, they were dressed up all strange in these big robes and carrying weird stuff like a table, but I knew they weren’t any danger. I told them what happened and they sent me back here with one of them. I guess he got them to go out and look for you.”

“Were they grey robes? With blue?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You saw them?”

“I think so. Right before I was attacked the second time.”

She looked at him, confused. “Second-”

“The crazies attacked me once, tried to grab me, but I managed to get away. That’s when I came across the men you just described and while I was watching them, the crazies came back and took me to where I was when the men showed up to rescue me. Did the guys in the robes tell you what they were doing?”

“No,” she said, “and I didn’t ask.”

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“Right, you already said that. But what don’t you like, Elliot? They’re nice and friendly and-”

“But don’t you feel it? Like there’s something we’re not seeing, something under how nice and friendly they are? I keep getting images in my head, Evajean, like there’s a sickness here I haven’t found yet.”

“That’s crazy.”

“What’s crazy? Those people in the street we saw? The boy we ran into? Those crazy fucks who kidnapped me, took me to that cave? The whole world’s crazy now and it’s been crazy for, goddamn, for a long time.” He turned to face her directly, grabbing her shoulders. “You know what those guys you found were doing in the woods? With their table? Some kind of ritual, is what. I saw them, setting a chest on that table and putting a rock in a hat. One of them stuck his face in that hat and then he lead them all to goddamn
buried treasure
. What do you think these people do here, with their church and their shelves of Bibles? It’s a cult, Evajean. That’s why they’re so happy. Everyone in cults is always so happy.”

“Elliot-”

“Until they kill themselves or put poison gas in the subways. Shit, the one I talked to after they rescued me, he called what they did to the crazies in the cave-and you should’ve seen what they did except you don’t really want to, trust me-he said it was ‘blood atonement.’ How friendly and helpful is that?”

“I’m sure you heard it wrong.”

“They killed people with shovels, Evajean.”

She sighed, loud and annoyed. “What did you want them to do?” she said. “Leave you there in that- was it a cave? In that cave?”

Elliot couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t getting it. Frustrated, he stood up and inspected the books on the shelf.
The Pearl of Great Price.
The Doctrine and Covenants.
“Look at this,” he said, taking one and holding it out to her.

“So they’re Mormons,” she said. “So what? There are a lot of them. They’re like Presbyterians.”

“I don’t like it,” he said again. He dropped the
Book of Mormon
onto the couch and sat down. “Aren’t they the polygamists?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “They don’t do that anymore.”

The dog nuzzled up against his thigh and whined. “You need to take him out,” Evajean told him. “No matter what these people are into, I don’t think they’ll appreciate our dog pooping on their floor.”

Elliot gathered up the dog and carried it out to the garden in the front of the house. He let it roam while he looked over the town, trying to pin down what exactly had him so on edge. The violence, yes, but wasn’t that expected? You can’t fight off a cave full of crazies without drawing some blood. The blood atonement comment, however, was out of place even there-and clearly ominous. It could be a religious thing, maybe, now that he knew that’s what this community was about. Mormons were friendly people, though. He’d had them stop by his door, young kids overdressed for the heat, with funny tags indicating he should call them “Elder.” He’d chatted with them briefly, politely, and they hadn’t come across as any odder than the Jehovah’s Witnesses passing out Watchtowers or Girl Scouts selling cookies.

He could see some of them, walking through Nahom, carrying baskets or armfuls of firewood. The town was like an Amish place he’d visited with his parents when he was a teenager, though not quite as out of step with the world’s technology and fashion sense. It was more like just a
very
small town, the kind you might expect in the mountains of Virginia.