It just became one of the things she didn’t think about much lately, the things she filed away to be looked into later. Like the way David was absorbed in what he was writing, so much more so than with the first book. He didn’t even want to go into town anymore and put it off as long as possible. And the way Stephie did little except sit in front of the TV or reread books she had read dozens of times. Every day was waiting, every day was like life lived in airline terminals, bus stations, the waiting rooms of expensive specialists in terminal diseases.
But mostly the way one day segued into the next, each the deadly same, the hot sun baking everything, the white dusty road empty as a broken promise, not even a Bible salesman or a lost tourist to break the monotony. Days came and they went and she forced the inevitable frustration out of her mind, almost physically pushing them away, thinking, It’s only for the summer, one summer out of all the summers of our lives, it seemed a minimal price to pay: for she knew the book was working. She had read the letter from David’s agent, but she had known already. If the book worked the way David wanted and everybody believed in it and promoted it and it was a bestseller, she could quit worrying about the money. The money and Stephie’s school and all this morbid, sickening bullshit about ax murderers and hundred-year-old poltergeists and just get on with it, with their lives, go somewhere bright and cheerful, Florida maybe, swim in the sun and the salty sea with the diseased smell completely out of her nostrils, this monstrous, diseased homeplace no more than a bad memory, a day gone with no more to show than a number on the calendar, what I did on my summer vacation.
The snakes, the wasps, and then the sounds through the wall were all Corrie could stand, especially when she thought of Stephie. They agreed to let Stephie go stay with friends of the family for a few weeks, until school started or they moved back to Chicago for the winter.
The weather that year turned unseasonal. In late July the temperature climbed into the nineties and stayed there except occasionally when it eased over the one-hundred-degree mark. It was a fierce and strange malign heat that became a tangible presence, bad company that will not go home. The earth grew dry and fissured, miniature cataclysms appeared in the parched clay, widened and deepened, creeping like bower vines across the blistered dry earth.
Some days dawned with the mocking promise of rain but the sun hanging over the eastern field withdrew it, the dew vanishing, the bog along the lowland almost instantly sucked into nothingness until all there was was a malevolent red sun tracking across the horizon into a sky gone marvelously blue and absolutely cloudless.
Old men at their checker games allowed it had not been so dry and hot since the thirties, they could not agree on precisely what year. The secondary roads turned to a shifting layer of dust that rose listlessly in the slipstreams of passing automobiles, drifting down, talcuming the greenblack honeysuckle shrouding the shoulders of the road. Farmers began to fear for their crops, stood out at night studying the skies for a sign that was not there. Corn began to yellow in the field, the blades twisting limply on themselves in defeat. At night heat lightning flickered in the far-off dark, vague and impotent.
After unrelenting days of this, tempers grew short and there were random outbursts of violence. People did things they ordinarily would not have done, began to think the old laws did not apply. Calvin Huggins, a local pinball cowboy, would-be poolshark, the kind of gambler who raises his draw to an inside straight, was the first to make a fatal mistake. He drank a cold beer on payday when the shoe factory let off. He was sitting on a stool in the Snow White Café, the end one nearest the air conditioner, feeling the pleasant warmth from his paycheck through his pocket and cold beaded beer bottle against his palm and he thought of his wife home in the hot little rental house with the busted air conditioner, probably waiting on the money and he for no good reason other than the fact that this was payday and he was red and worn out from the heat suddenly thought, To hell with her. Her face, bitter and accusatory, drifted freefall into his mind. Fuck her, he thought. I never could do anything to suit her anyhow. He bought a roll of quarters for the pinball machine. The pinball machine had been at the back of his mind all day anyway, like a glamour woman who probably won’t but just possibly will. He went home at midnight drunk and broke, the grocery money and rent fed quarter by quarter down the remorseless gullet of the pinball machine.
At noon the next day, he was under the Pontiac Firebird that was his pride and joy, a metallic brown, just the color of the one Rockford had driven on TV, replacing the brake pads. He was on the last one, the right front, and had been moving the bumper jack corner to corner. He was ever one to tempt fate, it is a fact that a man who will draw to an inside straight will trust a bumper jack.
She watched from the porch with eyes that were just smoldering hate in her face.
Hey, you bringing that beer like I said or do I have to rattle your head around a little more?
Wordlessly, she brought the can of beer.
Set it on that block and hand me them fuckin visegrips, his final words.
The jack was tilted ever so slightly. Perhaps a finger might dislodge it, the weight of a cool evening breeze. Her eyes found there was a crowbar leant against a cottonwood and without even thinking, she took it up and positioned her feet and slammed the crowbar against the post of the jack with all her might. The jack skewed crazily, went sidewise and the drum came down on his right temple as he reached backhanded for the beer. She went in the house and stood at the sink washing dishes thinking no thoughts at all and watching nothing whatsoever out the window, and when she was sure he was dead she dialed 911 to tell them about the accident.
Long a watcher of the changes of the seasons and a believer in signs and portents, Annie Mae Hicks came out of a network of clay gullies just at dusk dragging an armful of honeysuckle vines and saw the first light bobbing across the field, angling down a distant rise toward the homeplace, a yellow light, not blinking as a firefly does but erratic as a lantern slung along by a man’s side. She didn’t think whose or what side it might be: she didn’t want to know. She just thought, so it’s finally back, but there was a kind of detachment, then a giddy relief. She knew intuitively it had nothing to do with her. Not this time. It’s them, she thought, them Yankees or whoever: I got nothing it wants anymore.
Her husband told it around town about the lights but no one paid much attention to him, he had cried wolf once too often. No one believed him exactly but still there was something about the Beale farm.
Coy Hickerson put it into words in the shade of the magnolia in the courthouse yard, trying to distract his partner into not noticing the potentially fatal move he had made on the checkerboard. Sometimes I think it’d be a good thing if that place burnt to the foundation.
You can’t burn dirt, Cagle said.
I don’t believe none of that bullshit about lights and voices, but I do believe in luck and that place is just as unlucky as it gets. Nobody never had any dealings at all with that place that didn’t come to a bad end. Them Beales had the right idea, just get the hell away from it and let somebody else sweat out the hard times.
Them Abernathy sisters lived out there till a few years ago, a man said from the circle of watchers. Nothing ever happened to them.
Hell, they died, Charles Cagle said, seeing the move and taking his double jump. Anyway, times don’t get no harder than that.
Everybody dies, that’s a given. They’s different ways of doing it.