You Will Never See Any God: Stories (5 page)

After that the boy had even a deeper terror of and hatred for Stark. It was not because of the calf; he had no sympathy for it, for he had seen suffering, he had witnessed agony and seen the dumb struggling eyes of animals in pain, and he had grown used to it, had felt nothing at seeing death—no, that was not it—it was that Stark could want something so misshapen, so awful around, and would want to make it live. The boy wanted to destroy the calf the first time he saw it because it was so badly disfigured, just as he had calmly destroyed ducklings with misshapen beaks and pigs that were born with their guts outside themselves. That which was misshapen and marked was evil, was not natural, and needed to be destroyed, and he felt a shudder run through him, remembering how Stark wanted to keep the animal alive. There was something terrible in that effort at prolonging the life of something already wrongly there.

Stark had finished milking and he came across the yard from the barn, carrying the pail in one hand and the lantern in the other and the lantern made the shadows of his legs appear black and huge, swaying jerkily as he walked. Stark disappeared into the house, and again the light in the backroom came on first. The boy edged along the fence row behind the house until he squatted only six feet from the window with the yellow, drawn shades. There was no sound; nothing. He wondered about the light, what
it could mean, why it was so important that a light burn there whenever it was dark. Perhaps, he thought, Stark was really not alone; a thousand thoughts swung through him, and he bent his head to listen but there was still no sound, no movement. He heard the locusts in the trees and the friendly crickets and then Stark turning the cream separator in the kitchen, and then the separator, too, was silent. The boy heard the door slam and he knew Stark was going out to feed the calves the skim milk. The boy stood up and moved back towards the plum thicket. It was completely dark now and he moved by ear, and it was then, as he came to the corner of the house, that he sensed someone, even as the other person, startled, sensed his presence, and the boy threw himself back as the hands reached towards him, clutching his shirt, tearing it.

“Who are you?” Stark said, his voice loud and near, and the hands tore for him, but the boy was very quick and he ducked, turning all at once, and he hit the fence and doubled over it, feeling quick pain cut him and forgetting it as he was up and running again. At the top of the hill he stopped and listened. It was dead silent. He stood, breathing hard, pausing in his breathing to listen, and tried to figure what had happened. Stark had been surprised, too, he knew, probably more surprised than he. When it was light he would come up the hill, following the tracks. The boy felt ashamed, for he had prided himself on his quickness and quietness and cleverness, too, and to be nearly caught was something to feel ashamed about. Perhaps Stark was clever too, he thought, and this made him feel better. It was a kind of contest now, a contest of wits and observation that it had not been before. He caught his breath and then doubled back, and turned and went down the hill away from both the Stark place and his own, making firm tracks, and when he reached the bottom where there were trees and grass, he walked carefully and lightly up to the
road, and then crossed the road, brushing out his tracks behind him. After he crossed the road he was in their own pasture again, and he walked quickly up the hill to the house.

He did not go down to the Stark place for several days after that, but finally something drove him back; it was a curiosity, a compulsion. He wanted to know about Stark, about the lighted backroom; he wanted to see again and watch again and he wanted to feel the fear and tenseness and the terror. He knew he wanted that—the terror and the disgust, and yet somehow he hated it too; he wanted to feel the hatred and shuddering disgust burn through him, and still he wanted to destroy it. It was this that drew him back; it was something like the pleasure of hunting, of fearing to kill something and still wanting very much to kill; it was like the sweet feeling of bringing death—death to something that shouldn’t or needn’t live except as a target for a rifle.

He chose his vantage point differently this time, moving between two box elder trees, protected from the yard by the battered sway-sided hump of a collapsed garage, but still able to see the yard quite clearly. He was only a few yards from the backroom where the light came on and then, that evening, the front door slammed and he saw Stark moving, lantern and pail in hand, to the barn, his legs throwing great grotesque shadows as he moved.

After he had passed out of sight, the boy moved, with the lightness of smoke, across the weed-patch yard to beside the yellow window. He tried the window but it was tight, locked from the inside. The boy hesitated. He knew he must see the room, see what was there. Again he felt the swift thrill of terror and excitement, if he should be seen or if he should get caught, come face to face with the lavender scar and the redrimmed eye. He circled the house and waited to see if Stark was anywhere in sight, but then he saw the lantern swaying down in the yards. The boy moved soundlessly across the porch and swung open the screen
door. The kitchen was dark; he knew it was the kitchen by the soured odor of the cream separator and by the heavy smell of fried potatoes. He went quickly through the room and through another one to the room with the lamp. He stopped and looked about him. It was only a bedroom, quite neat and clean, with a bed and a dresser and a chest of drawers. The lamp stood on the dresser and beside it were some slender books, a half dozen or so, with titles the boy had never seen before, and there was a picture, too, of a family. The boy looked at it; it was the only thing to look at in the room. It was an old picture, taken years before, quite yellow now. The man sitting rigidly in the straight chair with arms folded across his chest had on a stiff celluloid collar, and the woman had a frowzy, tormented look on her face. In the picture, too, were a boy and a girl, the boy younger, both plain, vacant-faced children, like any other boy and girl. And on the picture, written very faintly, but carefully, too, as if it had been written a long time before, above the man’s head were the words “Ezra Stark, Sr., died 1938,” and above the woman’s “Mathilda Stark, died 1943,” and “Carl” beside the boy, and “Harriet” beside the girl. He did not know why the picture was there, and he did not really care.

The boy surveyed the room again. He was genuinely disappointed. He had expected something of a purpose perhaps, overwhelming and evil, a mad old woman, an opium den, a room full of glowering icons, but instead there was only the single dull picture. He turned to go when he caught the swift light sound of a step on the porch. The boy felt a swift clutch of fear—the windows were no good, the bed too low. Now that he was inside, in a strange room, he felt trapped and confused—outside, with space and movement, he could think and act, but here, here he did not know where to turn. He pulled the closet curtain back and stepped inside, burrowing beneath some coats hung on the bar above his head. The curtain trembled after his movement and he tried to
still it, but there was the faint vibration as he heard Stark come slowly from the kitchen into the room. The boy held his breath; he dared not breathe, for he could hear every breath, every movement of Stark. Now that he needed to hold his breath, every second demanded a new one. The blood flooded his temples, there was a filled choking feeling in his throat, he had to breathe but Stark was still there, and he did not breathe. He saw the silhouette of Stark against the curtain, saw Stark move across the room, and then slowly turn and go away again, and still the boy did not breathe, even with the blood pounding in his temples and his hands like ice. He heard the footsteps move away, heard the creaking of the floor in the other room and then the half-musical sprongging sound of the screen door opening and closing, and yet the boy waited, breath drawn in, until the stillness settled again, dropped with that heavy silence that could be only the silence of one alone. He moved then, looking carefully past the edge of the curtain into the lamp-lit yellow room, and then he crossed the room to the dresser. He shielded his eyes against the lamp and looked out into the late half light, half darkness, and then he turned the lock on the window and opened it. The window was very dusty and had not been cleaned for a long time. There was no screen and he shoved the window up and prepared to go out when his arm touched the lamp and jarred it and he had a quick breathless moment catching it, keeping it from falling, and then suddenly, quickly, quite deliberately, he flung the lamp on the floor, smashing it, sending kerosene and the flame eating after the kerosene across the floor and beneath the bed. It was a small blue-yellow flame at first as he watched it, growing yellowly, with a faint fuzzy orange color as the flames caught at the blankets overhanging the bed. The boy slid out the window and moved in a crouched half-run across the yard. He did not look back until he reached the hilltop in the cornfield and then the whole house
was a rich cherry glow in the valley, the flames licking the roof and the sides of the house like cherry drippings on chocolate, and the boy watched, feeling the tightness in his chest from running or from fear, he did not know which.

He walked now, carefully, mocking the sounds of the late-evening doves from the trees in the pasture. He thought someday he would go hunting them. There was no one around the place when he got there; even the mother was gone. The boy slipped up to the porch, drifting in perfectly soundlessly, so that even the sleeping dog did not awaken until the boy was already in the kitchen door. The boy went into the living room and sat down in the straight chair by the lamp and opened his catechism and waited. He heard the cars go by the place, all going down towards Ezra Stark’s place, and much later even a fire truck from town, and then the cars began coming back, and the mother came in the house, and looked at him, with some excitement and some surprise, and she asked where he had been; there was a fire at that old bachelor’s, Stark’s place, and the boy said he wondered why all the cars went by, down there.

A long while later the father and the brothers came back, and the father took off his soot-covered cap and sat down.

“It was awful,” he said. “I never seen anything so awful.”

“What?” the boy said.

“Wasn’t you there too, boy?”

“I was studying my catechism.”

The father nodded. “The fire at Stark’s—it was terrible. Stark must have gone into the shack after something, I don’t know what, and we found him in what used to be the bedroom. We could smell him a hundred yards away.”

“Was he dead?” the boy asked, leaning forward suddenly.

“There was hardly anything left of him,” the father said, “or of the house either. It was awful.”

The boy felt a great warmness ride him, cover him as if honey or an anointment bathed him, as if some great evil had lifted from him, from everyone now. He would not need to go down there again; it was all finished, there was no longer anything for him to do. He closed his eyes and luxuriated in the rich, good feeling it gave him.

“It was some fire,” one of the brothers said. “You should have been there to see it.”

“It was terrible,” the father said.

“I was studying my catechism,” the boy said.

The Shooters

The brother brought the news of the killings even before dawn; he had been in to Charleston to deliver a butcher hog to the locker plant for slaughtering that day, and had run into Gavin Terrell, the young town marshal, his friend, and had heard of it—how the whole family up by Craig, not ten miles away, Jung he believed their name was (it would be on the news pretty soon), was shot to death by .22 rifle, the father of past forty, the wife, the eighty-two-year-old mother-in-law, the eleven-year-old boy, and the young hired man to boot, all shot and dumped like sacks of potatoes into the entrance of the storm cellar. Done the day before, the previous afternoon, the coroner had reported.

The brother spoke carefully, looking at the mother who was old and suffered from high blood pressure, wanting not to frighten her, but better to tell her now than wait for the hysterical news reports.

“Na, na,” the mother said, “has the world gone crazy?” She sat at the kitchen table and rubbed the top with a wet cloth, preparing it for breakfast with elaborate care, as she did every day. “Why would anybody do such a thing? Crazy, that’s what.”

The brother shrugged.

“Do they know who did it?” Leonard’s wife asked.

“No. Of course not,” Leonard said, looking to the brother for verification.

“I’ll bet it was a neighbor,” the brother, Melvin, said. “Went off his head. Probably mad about something. Some of these neighbor troubles go back for years.”

“It’s common enough nowadays, people being crazy,” the mother said. She began to tell of the farmers and wives who had needed psychiatrists in recent years, or had been sent up to Cherokee for a time, all from that area alone.

The young wife frowned above the frying pans on the kitchen stove where she stood preparing their early breakfast. “Do you suppose it’s really just a neighbor who went mad? Or somebody on the loose? Somebody who’s a killer? It seems so terrible for someone to kill five people. Just a neighbor couldn’t do that, I would think.”

The brothers looked at each other. Melvin, the farmer, cap on, wrestled with his hands. “Whoever it was, they’ll catch him today. Might have got him already, as far as anybody knows.”

“And how many were there?” the mother asked, rubbing carefully in circles on the smooth artificial table top.

“Five. Even the hired man, a kid of seventeen. Stayed there overnight because of haying. He didn’t even belong there.”

“Why would a neighbor take him too? I mean if it were a neighbor doing the shooting? Why the kid too?” Leonard asked.

There was a pause, a reflective moment, and the brother thinking of this new aspect that had not occurred to him.

“Yeh,” he muttered, not wanting to say more.

“It’s somebody crazy is all,” the old mother said, finished then with the table, arising and going to the sink, collecting potatoes in a gray enameled pan, and the knife, sitting down again and beginning to peel them for the noon meal, their dinner.

“Are you going to Sioux City today?” Melvin asked.

“Yes. Every day. You know that,” Leonard said. Every day since the discovery, in mid-visit to the Iowa farm where his old mother and brother lived, of cancer, and the necessity of going to Sioux City for radiation treatments, six minutes each day beneath the Cobalt-60 machine. He borrowed his brother’s car each day for the thirty-four-mile trip, an hour and a half gone and back.

“You going this morning or this afternoon?” Melvin asked. Leonard looked to his wife. She lifted eggs and bacon from the skillet, tested cornbread in the oven, put that out too. No sign from her for a preference.

“This afternoon,” Leonard said.

Melvin nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Gavin wanted me to come into town this morning. To help out.”

Leonard nodded, understanding him.

“You’ll be around here all morning?” Melvin asked.

“Yes,” Leonard said, knowing his brother was aware of the danger, wanting to protect the farm and the mother from being alone.

All that morning Leonard and his wife and his mother worked in the garden, not with the old mean labor that he had given when he was a boy, twenty years ago, but rather with an easy pleasantness that came from doing work that one didn’t feel compelled to do; they set out tomato plants and weeded the strawberries. There were already many strawberry blossoms, fragile and white.

At noon sharp, Melvin was back.

“Well, did you and Gavin nab the killer?” Leonard asked. Melvin shook his head, grinned. “Nope. There’s a story they got somebody up at Spencer. But nobody’s sure yet, and Gavin doesn’t believe it.”

At one o’clock they went to Sioux City. No, the mother did not want to go along. “Ooph, I’m not feeling so good today,” she said, Leonard thinking she was only begging off to have her afternoon
nap. They drove the new highway, thirty-four miles in thirty minutes, went in to see the sleepy radiologist who muttered of palliation. “Are you feeling all right now?”

“Yes,” Leonard said.

“No back pain anymore?”

“No.”

“He gets tired very easily,” the wife said.

“Yes. That’s bound to happen,” the radiologist said, and gave a stricken yawn, trapped it partially between throat and chin. “That’s caused by the radiation. But your back pain has gone away?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Good.”

They, the sleepy doctor and the robust nurse, took him through the heavy lead door and lay him on the cot, rolled him beneath a streamlined bullet-shaped machine that said “Eldorado” on it.

“Only two more treatments on your side and then we radiate your neck,” the doctor said. “That will suppress the growth, and give palliation for a good long time.”

The thought of time, any time, gave him a chill, how the bored doctor could talk easily of a “good long time” when he knew it could not be more than three years at the most for him, this doctor who could easily yawn away three years of his own life without even thinking about it.

Leonard did not say anything. He lay still, as he should, looked up at the perforated squares on the ceiling, lay silent in the air-conditioned comfort of the lead-in room. The red light came on after the radiologist and nurse exited to the safety of their control booth, the machine above him thukked and a little complacent hum of the machine began, as of a digestive process deep within it. He contemplated lying there, and of the discovery three weeks before of the malignant cancer in him, not localized, spread already with unseemly haste, and where the doctors had at first
talked confidently of energetic treatment and suppression, now their lips could manage murmurs of only “palliation,” an unforgivable word to him, absolutely a devilish word to him at thirty-three. Palliation and defeat, and nothing to be done, oh the best doctors agreed, there was nothing else to be done, for “it” had already spread beyond localized bounds, and what was there now to do but palliate and wait?

He waited the six minutes, felt nothing but the hard cot beneath him, heard nothing but the mystery of the tiny hum, looked at the perforations, little holes in the ceiling, clean as if made by tiny bullets, and the efficient gamma rays burned into his bowels, warmed his kidneys, all unfeeling. The curved machine thukked exactly on time, the red light went out, the nurse forced open the heavy door and came in smiling, wheeled him from under.

In somber quiet, as usual now on this, the eighteenth trip to and from radiation, they shot the thirty-four miles back to Charleston, needed nothing in the little town, saw Gavin Terrell camped strategically in the police car at the edge of town, waved to him. Gavin waved back, smiled.

“They haven’t got him yet,” Leonard said, the first words in all that way.

“How do you know?” his wife asked.

“Gavin wouldn’t be sitting there if they had.”

They went the two and a half miles to the farm and down the long lane from the gravel road.

“Oh, the cattle are down this way!” the wife said, delighted, and it was true, the large herd spread on both sides of the creek, near the farmstead. “We’ve got to take some pictures.”

“That will be nice,” he said, the sullenness still on him.

The brother, Melvin, and the old hired man who came whenever Melvin needed him worked on the seeder; there were soybeans to be replanted and the seeder was pulled in the middle of the yard.

“The cattle are down this way,” the wife said to them. “Is it all right if I take some pictures of them?”

“Take as many as you want,” Melvin said, getting up from under the machine and looking himself. The pasture was a mile long, and narrow, for it flanked the creek on both sides. The cattle were young and tended toward wildness, newly brought from the Nebraska range. The first thing they’d done after the 160 head had been unloaded was to go to the far end of the pasture, the mile away, and herd up there. Melvin had explained it to them when they went out to count the cattle one time. “The only experience they’ve had with barns and buildings is with things that hurt, vaccination, castration, branding, and so naturally they want to stay away from anything that looks like buildings.”

And they had until now.

“Well maybe the grass is getting short up at the other end,” Melvin said, although he knew and Leonard knew that could not be.

The wife was excited and pleased. She got the camera and went out by the fence and the beautiful Hereford calves lifted their heads and sniffed, and she took the picture, with at least a hundred heads, white-faced and white ears, pointing at her.

“I thought I’d never get a picture of them,” she said, back at the yard, pleased with everything.

Leonard sat on the porch and slipped the oiled cloth along the spine of the Marlin rifle. Sullenly he cleaned the gun, although he had cleaned it the day before after shooting the six pigeons up at the other place that Melvin farmed. He knew that he was sullen, and told himself he could not help it, could not. The bandage on his neck bothered him, the bandage covering the latest biopsy only three days old. He cranked his head and touched the wad on his neck.

“Don’t pull at that, please, Len,” his wife said.

“Aaah,” he muttered, slipped the cloth the length of the rifle, noted appreciatively the steel gleam, the hard steel bolt reflecting neither figure nor shadow, only light.

“Aah,” he muttered again, touching the lump of bandage with his fingertips. The cold lumps of frozen things in himself, those lumps of growing cancers, and the hot unhealthy burn of the radiation, neither good, he thought, both or either would kill him, frozen and burning all at once, and if he thought of it he could feel them both, he believed, truly feel them crawl in his tissues, in his marrow, that dark cold cancer in him and the glow of the radiation; condemned to death quite surely, and he did not know how or why. Nor did anyone.

Snap! the bolt went shut, beautiful, slick and sliding elegantly the Marlin .22 that he had cleaned up and made good again. The shining steel-colored bolt slipped open and shut and open again beneath his finger touch. He looked down the barrel and the beautiful grooves spiraling down to the distant small opening where the small bullet entered, and closed the bolt.

“Think I’ll get a pigeon or two,” he said by way of explanation to the women, his wife working with the flowers in the front yard, his mother sitting in the lawn rocking chair. He took the new box of bullets, fingered out six and filled the clip, snapped the clip in, liked the way the bolt slid forward, seated the slender little bullet, closed solidly. Now truly a weapon.

“Na, there he goes again,” the mother said, “shooting birds and rabbits. Murderer,” laughing a little, looking at the wife to see if she would smile.

He turned sharply on his mother, really snarled, “Mind your own business, goddamn it,” feeling a ridge of blood thunder in his forehead, his arm tremble, and a burning beneath the bandage. Murderer! Murdered would be better, he thought.

“Well, Leonard,” his wife said chidingly, and softly too, lest he
get really angry. The mother looked away as if she had not heard; she had had five sons and had borne many ferocious asides.

He went through the gate, carrying the good-feeling rifle. The dog wanted to follow; he sent him back. In deadly quiet he moved up along the heavy windbreak, any slight sounds he had to make completely hidden by the crash and bang of the hogs feeding in the near hog yard. Beyond the box elders he heard the chattering, unmistakable, of squirrels. He wondered absently if this was a female with young, knew they were almost impossible to tell apart from the males, and he had seen a dozen or so in the last week, cavorting foolishly and openly around the corncrib. Whatever it was, it would have to take its chances, for what followed would be purely by design. He slid up in the protection of a tree, peered gingerly forward, could tell finally the movement high in a far maple, the scolding squirrel, head and body pointed straight down the trunk.

He brought the rifle up, not moving fast, careful to avoid startling motion, traced the barrel at the squirrel thirty yards away, planted the rear sight on him, on his neck, lowered the blade of the front sight so that it rested at the bottom of the rear, exactly as he had tested it from a hundred practice shots, followed the squirrel perhaps six inches or so as it came down the trunk, and worked back on the tender trigger.