Wink (16 page)

Chapter 31
  The Power of Hooting

Marty ran directly across the freeway. He crossed I-10 in a blind run, holding the knife in one hand as he darted through the traffic. Nobody honked or swerved or slowed, but sped by him with such absolute disregard that he might have been a piece of road debris.

There was a concrete median in the middle of the freeway with a blinding-net stretched across the top of the barrier. The net was laced into a hurricane fence, which Marty climbed as quick as a squirrel and launched into the oncoming traffic on the far side of the freeway.

He looked neither left nor right, but trusted fate to decide whether he made it across or joined the wildlife fatalities that littered the shoulder along this stretch of road.

When he made it safely to the far side, he did not pause to celebrate, or to think of Sadie and his father’s threat to kill her, but bolted across the flood ditch, across the feeder road, and slid through the barbed wire fence lining the Jackson property. He knew that to think of Sadie would slow his step, that the thought of her would somehow break this spell and would smash any chances he had of saving her.

He ignored his body as he ran. It no longer mattered if his heart gave out, or his breath stopped, or his legs crumpled from fatigue. His brain shucked away all thoughts beyond the action of the moment, and he became feral and unhinged.

The night turned into a black-and-white landscape of flat pasture and scattered trees. He focused on the far trees and the movement of his arms and legs. There were no other thoughts in his head but to reach the trees, and it was not until oak limbs and briary underbrush scraped his cheeks that he remembered his destination and allowed himself a brief thought of Sadie and the legs he had carved but never given to her.

He thought little of where he was going until he stood on the outside of Jackson-Williams Cemetery. It was almost a surprise to see his arms reach out and throw him over the iron fence that defined the cemetery.

He landed inside the cemetery and watched the tombstones speed by as he ran. He no longer felt any part of his body nor heard his breath and pounding heart. He was a spectator inside his own head.

His feet stopped and his knees buckled. His hands shot out, and the Bowie knife hacked at the earth covering Uncle Cooper. A strange hooting sound erupted from his lips as he jabbed the knife into the dirt. It was unintentional, but as the sound escaped his lips a surge of electric energy pulsed through him. His arms became steel beams lashed to a metal frame by unbreakable cables. The sound coming from his vocal cords was inhuman, and with each hoot his knife dug deeper than the stroke before. Larger and larger chunks of earth broke free until he heaved bucket-sized slugs of dirt over his head and into the graveyard.

He fell into the hole and dug until it was deep to his chest. He stabbed the Bowie knife into the ground, wrenched the blade, and launched a bolus of dirt into the night. The knife kicked in his hands, responding to Marty’s endless string of hoots.

The image of the owl carved into the Bowie knife’s handle fluttered against his fingers. The lizard slid across his palm. The blade glowed blue and cast a metallic illumination into the darkening and deepening hole. Marty hooted as he stabbed the ground. He heard nothing but the hoots spewing from his lips of their own will. His blood coursed through him in sharp jolts that spurned his muscles into spasms, clenching and throbbing as he hoisted chunks of black earth over his head.

The knife struck something solid. By now he was head-deep, right at five feet, and the jagged walls pinched off the light.

Marty hooted and stabbed the knife into the top of Uncle Cooper’s coffin. It was metal, but the Bowie knife sliced through as easy as paper. Marty hacked and pried at the top of the coffin until he hit the inside padding.

It was then that the exertion overtook him and demanded its due. Whatever had possessed him fluttered away. He heard wings flap, followed by a series of gentle hoots that faded into the distance.

Marty sucked in deep breaths, and his legs and arms shook. He thought of Sadie and for some reason smelled her, even though mud covered him and dust filled his nose. His science teacher had said smell was the deepest part of your memory, and he guessed that must be where he had tucked Sadie. She smelled like peaches.

He tucked the knife into his belt and peeled away the coffin lining above his uncle. Even though it was dark, Marty could see enough to make out Uncle Cooper’s face. He lay on his back just the way they had buried him. His skin had grown more pallid. His cheeks sucked against the bone and looked as paper-thin as Gerald had looked there at the end. His hair for some reason was messier, and Marty remembered something about people’s hair continuing to grow even after they died.

He stared at his uncle until his breath slowed and then he reached out and touched the dead man’s cheek. The skin was dry and tough as an old belt. When his fingers met his uncle’s skin, the left eye snapped open. It was a quick, mechanical roll of the eyelid, and Marty thought of the baby dolls girls play with.

The Dead-Eye rolled in his uncle’s head until it stared at Marty. He felt that familiar jolt, and the eyelid dropped over the eye, slow and steady, the way someone might close a window blind. As soon as the eye closed, the lid raised again in the unmistakable gesture of Uncle Cooper’s Dead-Eye wink.

A voice rang out from above him, and when Marty turned he saw Mr. Jessup standing alongside the hole he had just dug.

“What the hell you doing, boy?” Mr. Jessup asked. He was a stick-man shadow with an old golf-style cap on his head, holding a shovel across his chest as if he meant to hit something with it.

Marty dug one finger into Uncle Cooper’s left socket and popped out the Dead-Eye, cold as a marble, and left the socket black and empty.

Mr. Jessup stepped back as Marty sprang from the hole, and when the old man saw who it was, he lowered the shovel and said, “Marty? Son, what the hell you doing? You can’t be out here like this, desecrating a grave and all. I can send you to jail.”

“Jail don’t matter to me,” Marty said.

He didn’t wait for Mr. Jessup to respond. His legs were moving again of their own willpower, carrying him over the graveyard fence and into the stand of trees.

Chapter 32
 
An Appointment with Kerosene

You run away from the cemetery, carrying the Dead-Eye and your knife. You run faster and faster, so fast that in the darkness it feels as if your feet barely touch the ground. Wings flutter around you, and you hoot as you run. Far-away throats echo your hoot, and in your hand, you feel the Bois D’Arc handle throb. You explode from the tree line and float across the open pasture. You lean through the barbed-wire fence and slide between the strands and run blind across I-10, toward your house and Sadie on the other side.

Cars and trucks blow by as you scale the hurricane fence, and when you drop into the oncoming traffic, you see headlights. They are so bright you raise your hand. They are as high as you are tall, huge white orbs bearing down on you with irresistible force.

You freeze. You cannot help it. Something about this moment becomes the end of everything, and despite the better sense to run you stand still as the headlights close the distance in fractions of a second.

The lights bear to your left. A tornado of wind knocks you down, and you feel the summer heat of the pavement against your spine as you are slammed to the ground. A scream of wheels pierces your ears, along with the hiss of air-brakes. The smell of burnt rubber is immediate and overwhelming, and then the giant form of a blue-cabbed, shiny-chromed semi tractor-trailer is beside you, passing by with its wheels shuddering and screaming under the driver’s sharp yank.

You are on your back as the truck jackknifes. The box trailer passes over your head in a fury steel and rubber. Heat engulfs you. It is a sulfurous, terrifying heat, filled with agonizing screams, and for a heartbeat you wonder if you are in hell, and that is exactly where you are.

The concrete median shakes as the semi impacts it. The trailer skips like a child’s toy over the median, into the eastbound traffic, and now there are explosions of metal and glass all around you.

You roll over and stand, somehow still alive, and you race across the freeway and into the drainage ditch. They are tearing through the ditch now, a minivan with bags strapped to the top, a truck pulling a trailer, a small four-door car with a girl behind the wheel. They barely miss you as they slide and flip and run into one another. You bolt through the chaos, across the feeder road and into your yard.

Nobody honks. That seems odd to you, and somewhere inside you wonder if anyone died because of you.

I didn’t mean it. That’s what you think as you run, because you didn’t mean to cause anyone pain. All you wanted was to cross the freeway. All the truck driver wanted was to avoid you. All those other people wanted was to get somewhere, either east or west. Nobody meant to hurt or be hurt, and it doesn’t matter one bit, does it?

You don’t look back as you run through your driveway. The oyster shells that make up the driveway crackle beneath your feet, and the ground shudders with the pileup on the freeway. You pass by your uncle’s old Ford and jump over the body of Office Hernandez. His face is completely gone.

The air is filled with thundering screeches and you no longer doubt that you are in hell and the Boogerbears are feasting.

You dive into the shed behind the house. It is dark inside, and in the darkness you feel the sharp points and edges of the rusting tools that hang from the walls. You step deeper into the shed and your foot rolls over something warm and round. It wraps around your ankle and you feel the fangless bite of a rat snake through your jeans. The snake pinches your skin and its jaws slide back and forth as it tries to saw its teeth deeper into you. They are hungry for you. You feel it in the desperate grind of its bite, the intensity of its coil around your leg.

You grip the snake by the tail and yank it off. You sling it against the wall, and even though you hear it hit the tin you do not see it fall into the darkness.

You step over the debris on the shed floor, crawl over an old washing machine, and perch on a three-legged kitchen table. There is a window on this side, on the far wall away from the door, and beneath the window is Uncle Cooper’s old woodshop. Ancient woodshop tools hang rusting and dead over a decaying workbench. You are not here for the tools though, but for something you remembered seeing on the bench.

You find an old lamp at the corner of the bench, one of those with a wick and a glass top. You hold it to your ear and slosh it around. You hear liquid inside.

Balancing on the three-legged table, you slide the Bowie knife out of your belt. You clean it on your pants. The dirt slides away from the polished blade, and when you run your fingers across it, it feels smooth and pure.

You remove the lamp’s glass top. You unscrew the wick. You smell kerosene. It smells good, and you inhale deeply, hold the breath, and then pour a little on the tip of your Bowie knife.

As you exhale, you lean forward into the knife blade. It is easier in the darkness where you cannot see the blade, because you must keep your eye open as the point pierces your left eye.

It is terrifying. Your mother’s rage does not compare to this. Your father’s black widow tattoo is laughable, because who could be afraid of a little spider when a knife is in their eye. You act without thinking, because to think would be to fail.

The fluid of your eye drains out like a cracked egg. You feel pain deep in your head, and you finish the job quickly, the way Uncle Cooper said. He lied, you think, because he did. This hurts. It hurts like no other pain you ever imagined.

When you are finished, your cheeks are wet from blood and tears. The knife is glowing blue. The handle carvings are writhing in your hand, licking your palm. You hoot, and you hear hooting in response, loud and clear as the raging steel of the freeway.

You do not give yourself a moment of rest or pity. You know that if you hesitate, you will not finish the job, and the job is not yet finished.

You pour kerosene over the Dead-Eye. You rub it clean. You put it in your mouth and suck off the kerosene, and then spit it into your palm. You hold open the lid of your left eye, and you shove the Dead-Eye into the empty socket.

Something is released inside you. The pain of losing your eye is gone in a breath. You are filled with electricity, and when you open your Dead-Eye, you see the world for the first time. You see a Boogerbear with such detail that you could count its feathers.

Chapter 33
  Marty’s Dead Eye

The electric power of the Dead-Eye coursed through Marty. His veins tingled, his muscles tensed, and all over him the little hairs stood erect and alert. The searing pain of his lost eye was clipped away like a necrotic limb, and his Dead-Eye burned furious visions into his brain.

He fought to keep his balance atop the wobbly, three-legged table inside his uncle’s shed. The world took on a binocular quality that disoriented him. Through one eye he could see the world he had known his entire life. Through the other eye, the Dead-Eye, a window had opened to expose the world Uncle Cooper had warned him about. Marty took hold of the tabletop and forced himself to remain steady, and he stared forward, looking into a pair of round, black eyes.

A Boogerbear sat crouched in front of him on the workbench. To its back was the shed window. Its wings were splayed out in a half-flap, with the feather-tips of one wing resting near Marty’s right hand. It stared at Marty with the casual nature of something unaccustomed to worry. There was no trace of humanity. They were the same eyes he saw in the rat snakes, cold and unassuming, reptilian orbs void of the mammalian soul.

It pulled its knees closer to its chest, and Marty wondered if he had interrupted a Boogerbear at rest. It confirmed his thoughts when it put its beak between its knees and closed its eyes. It shook its wings and drew them around itself.

With the knife in his hand, Marty slid off the table and made his way out of the shed. When he reached the doorway, he heard a flutter behind him, and turning he saw the Boogerbear was no longer crouched on the table. All he saw was the empty window on the far side of the shed.

The darkness outside took on a new luster. An under-glow light rose up from the ground, as if the dirt itself had become luminous. Through his Dead-Eye, he could see the oak tree and his house with a clarity not possible even during the day, and he wondered what it must look like in the sunlight.

He looked farther out, toward the pasture, and saw a Boogerbear hunched over his mother with its wings spread. Its arms kneaded at her flesh as it stabbed its beak downward, into her torso.

Neither her body nor the grass around her moved with the Boogerbear. The only evidence of its presence, beside the fact that he could now see it, was the quiet suckling sound that rose up from where it stabbed its beaks into his mother.

It looked up at Marty. It was that same casual glance that the one in the shed had given him, but this time Marty was ready.

He winked. The night lit up like a camera flash, silent and brilliant, and the Boogerbear took to the wing with a gawking stare at Marty. It shrieked as it flew above him, so close he could feel the wind. It smelled the way he imagined a buzzard would smell, dead and decayed, and Marty slashed the knife at the air behind it. He missed, but saw a long blue streak where the knife passed.

It flew above the house, into a growing flock of Boogerbears that gathered and circled above the chaos on the freeway. Three perched on the roof of the house with their back to Marty, watching the freeway, and one dove in front of the house, beyond where Marty could see.

“I’m sorry,” Marty said to the people on the freeway, even though they could not hear him. He allowed himself a deep breath before he bolted through the back yard and sprung over the hurricane fence separating his house and Sadie’s. He was at the back door before he stopped and listened.

The house was silent as best he could tell. It was difficult to hear because the sirens were approaching, and there was the sound of a distant helicopter beating its way to the scene of destruction on I-10. A woman screamed, and Marty slid around the side of the house so he could see the carnage.

Boogerbears swooped in and out of the wreckage. They hopped along the side of the freeway and in the ditch, swarming like crows in a freshly sown cornfield. One stood atop the chest of the sobbing woman, who was half-thrown through her front windshield. The Boogerbear jabbed its beak into her with the rip-tearing motion of a scavenger until at last her arms shuddered and she fell silent and still.

The screen door opened behind him, and Marty neither glanced nor hesitated as he slid beneath Sadie’s house. He heard the crunching of gravel as his father approached, and then he saw a pair of boots take the same spot he had occupied a few seconds before. A pang of worry shot through Marty that his father might somehow feel him, but his father paid all his attention to the scene on the freeway.

The sirens rang loud as they approached, and then they were quiet amidst the hollering of men and women on the freeway and the slam of car doors. The helicopter circled above them so close it shook the treetops and a spotlight slid across the carport.

“Dammit,” Marty’s father said, when the spotlight lit him up. He stumbled back into the carport and in frustration kicked gravel beneath the house. It pelted Marty’s cheeks, and even though he managed not to shift his weight he could not fight the instinctual urge to wince.

When he winked the Dead-Eye, he saw the same camera flash he had seen before. The night lit up, and his father must have felt something, because his heel caught and he fell backward. He landed in a sort of backward crab-crawl and even though he bounced back to his feet, the gun slipped free and slid beneath the house.

His father moved with an animal quickness, something Marty had never seen before. His body was halfway under the house before his eyes fell on Marty.

There was a stunned silence as they stared at one another. Through one eye Marty still saw his father, a ghost of a man, but still a man. Through the Dead-Eye he saw something entirely different. His father was shaped like a man, with arms and legs and a head, but the eyes were black and empty. The shadow of a beak protruded from his face like a reflection from a clear windowpane. Insubstantial wings jutted from his back, and they beat against the dirt as his father shot forward and grabbed the pistol.

“Got you now,” his father said.

As he brought the gun to bear, Marty slashed the Bowie knife against his father’s wrist. It was not a powerful stroke but it drew blood and gave Marty the precious seconds he needed to scoot farther beneath the house.

The gun discharge lit up the crawlspace beneath the house, and the thump of the shot for an instant made Marty think he had been hit. His boots tore at the dirt as his arms pulled him free on the other side of the house.

Marty jumped to his feet. His father rounded the corner and chased him through the front yard a scant hundred yards from the police officers working the wreck on the freeway.

Even though Sadie’s house was the same layout as Marty’s, he had no tree to access the carport and thus the attic, like he did at his house. He sped around the carport, through Sadie’s driveway and catapulted the fence into his yard, hoping to reach his attic and find safety from his father.

He glanced behind him and saw his father jump over the fence. Black wings spread and lifted him off the ground. He was too heavy for flight, but the wings gave him the extra lift he needed to clear the hurricane fence without touching it.

Marty grabbed the mimosa tree that butted against his carport and hauled himself onto the roof. He ran across the carport and was on the edge of the house by the time his father began pounding the tin behind him.

“That’s how you do it,” his father said, and then there was the crack of wood and the screech of tin cutting against itself.

Marty turned and saw his father with one leg stuck
through a breach in the roof, sunk like a man in quicksand. He grabbed at the tin, clutching it, and then he disappeared with a crash into the carport below.

The pistol skittered across the carport and even though it meant backtracking, Marty skipped to it, careful to stay on the nails so he would not fall through and picked it up. He stabbed the knife into his belt, pulled the hammer back on the pistol, aimed it at the mimosa tree and waited for his father’s head to appear over the edge.

The helicopter flew over the house but focused its spotlight and full attention on the freeway. It hovered over the house, banked, followed the feeder road, and lowered itself to the ground. Beyond that, on the freeway, loud tools bit through steel and glass, and men and women exchanged orders and painful yells for help.

His father banged around in the carport below. There was a long zippering sound. Then his father said, “Hey you, want some buckshot?”

There was the unmistakable shuck of a pump shotgun from below, and Marty remembered the bag of guns his father had stashed beneath their house. He was already running when the first shot tore through the carport roof. Another shot blew up the tin in front of him and Marty leapt over the hole and gained the relative safety of the rooftop.

He ran across the shingles, along the familiar groove he had cut these past two years, and swung into the darkened attic. His boot landed on a snake and he kicked it aside with no more thought than he would toe a stick out of his path.

It did not surprise him that the attic appeared a little brighter, but he was surprised to see someone standing at the far window. It was difficult to see the person with both eyes, and so Marty closed his good eye.

The figure at the far window turned to face him. At first Marty wasn’t sure he believed what he saw, but when the figure held up his hand he knew undeniably who it was.

“Uncle Cooper,” Marty said. He ran across the attic, but when he tried to put his arms around his uncle, he passed through as easily as he would a shadow.

Marty backed up and stared at his uncle. He was clear through Marty’s Dead-Eye. His uncle’s left eye was no longer blind and it was a bit odd to see both of them working. His skin had become smoother, his hair thicker, and his shoulders more blocked. It was his uncle but a younger, stronger version.

“
Them Boogerbears are swarming, son.
” The words sucked the heat from the attic and left a cold, damp air hanging in its place. His voice was just over a whisper.

Down the road, the helicopter thumped as it lifted. Sirens wailed as they hauled the less wounded into Baytown and the more critical ones deeper into Houston.

His uncle touched his shoulder, but all Marty felt was a soft flutter against his skin like a moth’s wings. “
I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you, son
.
I been watching, though. I been telling your Aunt Loretta to hold on while I close things up. She loves you, son, just like I do. You know that, don’t you
?
”

Marty wasn’t sure what to say, so he said, “I love you, too, Uncle Cooper.”

That seemed to be enough and Uncle Cooper stared down at him for a few long seconds, and then he looked at Marty’s hand. “
Whose pistol is that
?
”

“I think it’s the sheriff’s pistol. It’s real heavy.”

“
Hmm. Well, ain’t that what got you in trouble the first time, dickering around with a pistol? Ain’t that what happened to Gerald
?
”

“Yes, sir,” Marty said.

“
You think it’s gonna solve your problems now? You think more of the same is gonna get you where you want to get? Do you even know where you’re going, or who you need to shoot
?
”

Marty shrugged. He looked down at his uncle’s feet, at the worn boots that had been clip-clopping in the attic. If he had known it was his uncle, he might never have left the attic in the first place.

“
Well, it ain’t gonna help.
” He squatted so that he was eye-level with Marty. “
You see me, son? You got the Dead-Eye now. You see it, don’t you? You see them Boogerbears, and you understand, don’t you
?
”

He squeezed Marty’s shoulders and Marty felt it deep in the nerves next to his bones, cold and electric. “
There ain’t nothing to be afraid of. Nothing. You don’t got to fear death, or pain, or none of it. Fear is a myth created out of ignorance. People fear death because they can’t see it, same as they fear the dark. They’re a bunch of blind fools who think believing is seeing. That pistol ain’t your weapon, son, and your daddy ain’t the one you need to shoot. Your weapon’s right here.
”

He tapped Marty’s brow above his Dead-Eye.

“
You done shown a strength my daddy never had, and neither did his brothers. My sister didn’t have that strength, and my grandaddy damned near died with that Dead-Eye in his skull. Nobody believed my granddaddy, and even though my daddy sort of believed him, he wouldn’t do the deed needed doing. It was me, son. I was the only one who believed enough to stab out my own eye. I don’t have to ask you if that takes faith, do I
?
”

“No, sir.”

“
You believed, and you took the pain. You got through it. You’re stronger than your daddy. You’re stronger than them Boogerbears. You’re stronger than this.
” He pointed at the pistol in Marty’s hand. “
You think shooting your old daddy is gonna scatter them Boogerbears, or draw more in? They’re like birds, I told you that. They flock together. What do crows do when they see you throwing seed out for ’em
?
”

Marty thought about how the Boogerbears were swarming on the freeway around the wreckage. He thought about the one he had seen on his mother’s corpse and inside his father. “If I shoot my daddy, will that bring more Boogerbears?”

“
That’s right.
”

“But if he shoots me, I’m dead.”

“
You’ll be with me and your Aunt Loretta, son. That ain’t dead. Death’s a doorway, boy. Are you scared of doors? Well, I ain’t, neither. Problem is that too many folks pick the wrong door. Your momma ain’t in a good way. She’s in a bad place, son. Your old daddy is in trouble, too, but look here. Look out this window at the Marsh house next door. Look up in the attic and tell me what you see.
”