Furtively now, he raised his hands in front of him.
This was probably not a good idea … he told himself so. But it was important, he thought. A piece of the puzzle. This was the step Laura or his mother would never take; this was Michael’s responsibility.
He made a circle of his fingers.
He looked through that circle at the town of Polger Valley, calm under a quarter inch of snow.
Felt the power in him… looked again, looked harder.
The town changed…
It was recognizably the same town. An old steel-mill town on the Monongahela. Maybe even, in a way, better off. The mill was bigger, a huge compound of coal-black buildings strung out along the riverside. There were complex piers busy with odd wooden barges; the river was crowded with traffic. But the town was also dirtier, the sky was black; the houses hugging this hillside were tin-and-tar-paper shanties. There was snow on the ground but the snow was gray with ash; the trees were spindly and barren. The traffic down at the foot of this hill was mostly horses and carts; the one truck that ambled past was boxy and antiquated-looking. Michael caught a faint whiff of some sulfurous chemical odor.
He squinted across town to the police station and the courthouse, plain gray stone buildings a quarter mile away down Riverside. He saw the flag flying over the courthouse and recognized that it was not an American flag, not a familiar flag at alclass="underline" something dark with a triangular symbol.
Bad place, Michael thought. You could feel it in the air. Poverty and bad magic.
This is his home, Michael thought: this is where Walker lives. Not this town, maybe, but this world.
He shivered and blinked away the vision. His hands dropped to his side.
Maybe they would have to follow Walker into that place. Maybe that was their only choice. It might come to that. But not yet, Michael thought. He felt soiled, dirty; even that brief contact had been chastening. He moved down the hillside toward Polger Valley—how clean it suddenly seemed—thinking, Not yet, we’re not ready for that yet… we’re not strong enough yet for that.
He was halfway home down Riverside, past the Kresge’s and the Home Hardware, when Willis pulled up next to him.
“Hey,” Willis said.
Michael stood still on the cracked sidewalk and regarded his grandfather warily through the rolled-down window of the Fairlane…
“Get in,” Willis said.
Michael said, “I wanted to walk.”
But Willis just reached over and jerked open the door on the passenger side. Michael shrugged and climbed in.
The car was dirty with fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts, but it smelled only faintly of liquor: Willis was sober today.
Willis drove slowly down Main. He looked at Michael periodically and made a couple of attempts at conversation. He asked how Michael did in school. Okay, Michael said. Was it messing him up to be out for so long? No, he figured he could make it up. (As if any of this mattered.) Willis said, “Your old man left?”
Michael hesitated, then nodded.
“Shitty thing to do,” Willis said.
“I guess he had his reasons.”
“Everybody has some goddamn reason.”
Turning up Montpelier, Willis said, “Look, I know what it is you’re running from.”
Michael raised his head, startled.
“You can only make it worse,” Willis went on, “doing what you’re doing.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do, though. I think you know exactly what I mean.” Willis was talking now from way down in his chest, almost to himself. He downshifted the Fairlane and slowed, approaching the house.
Willis said, “Timmy used to go off like that. Off up into the hills or God knows where. And I knew what he was doing, just like I know what you’re doing. I could smell it on him.” Willis pulled into the driveway and on up into the tiny, dark garage. He pulled the hand brake and let the motor die. “I smell it on you.”
Michael reached for the door but Willis caught his wrist. Willis had a hard grip. He was old but he had hard, stringy muscles.
“This is for your own good,” he said. “You listen to me. It brings him. You savvy? You go out there and make a little door into Hell and he climbs out.”
Michael said, “What do you know about it?”
“More than you think. You don’t give me much credit, do you?”
Michael felt Willis’s huge anger rising up. He shifted toward the door, but Willis held tight to his wrist.
“My Christ,” Willis went on, “didn’t your mother teach you anything? Or maybe she did—maybe she taught you too fucking much.”
Michael remembered what Laura had told him, how Willis used to beat them. He realized now that it was true, Willis could do that, he was capable of it. Willis radiated anger like a bright red light.
“Admit it,” Willis said, “you were up in those hills opening doors.”
Michael shook his head. The lie was automatic.
“Don’t shit me,” Willis stormed. “I’m a good Christian man. I can smell out the Devil in the dark.”
It made Michael think of the sulfurous stink of Walker’s world.
“I don’t do that,” he said.
Willis’s grip tightened. “I won’t have you drawing down that creature on us again. Too many years—I lived with that too goddamn long.” He bent down so that his face was close to Michael’s face. The dim winter light in the garage made him seem monstrous. “I want you to admit to me what you’ve been doing. And then I want you to promise you won’t do it again.”
“I didn’t—”
“Crap,” Willis said, and raised his right hand to strike.
It was the gesture that angered Michael. Made him mad, because he guessed his mother had seen that hand upraised, and Laura, and they had been children, too young to do or say anything back. “All right!” he said, and when Willis hesitated Michael went on: “I can do it! Does that make you happy? I could walk out of here sideways and you’d never see me go! Is that what you want?”
Willis pulled Michael close and with the other hand took hold of his hair. The grip was painful; Michael’s eyes watered.
“Don’t even think it,” Willis said.
His voice was a rumble, gritty machinery in his chest.
“Promise me,” Willis said. “Promise you won’t do it again.” Silence.
Willis tugged back on Michael’s hair. “Promise!”
Michael said, “Fuck you!”
And Willis was too shocked to react.
Michael said between his teeth, “I could do it here! You ever think about that? I could do it now.” And it was true. He felt the power in him still, high-pitched and singing. He said without thinking about it, “I could drop you down through the floor so fast you wouldn’t be able to blink—do you want that?”
Willis was speechless.
Michael said, “Let go of me.”
Miraculously, he felt Willis’s grip loosen.
He wrenched open the door before Willis could reconsider. He stumbled down onto the oily concrete.
“You’re lost,” Willis said from the darkness inside the car. “Oh boy… you are damned.” But there was not much force left in it.
Michael hurried into the house.
2
“I don’t like telling it,” Mama said. “I can’t tell it all. I don’t know it all. But I guess I can tell what I know.”
The kitchen clock ticked away. Karen and Laura sat sipping coffee. Karen understood that silence was best, that her mother was staring past these walls and back into a buried history. Hard for all of us, she thought.