He had come up here to get his mind off Harriet, but he only had thirty-five cents after the potato chips, and the comic books were twenty cents each. Half-heartedly, he leafed through a story in Dark Mansions called “Demon at the Door” (“AARRRGGGHH—!!!—I—I—HAVE UNLEASHED A—A—LOATHESOME EVIL … TO HAUNT THIS LAND UNTIL SUNRISE!!!!!) but his eye kept straying to the Charles Atlas bodybuilding advertisement on the page opposite. “Take a good honest look at yourself. Do you have the dynamic tension that women admire? Or are you a skinny, scrawny, ninety-seven-pound half-alive weakling?”
Hely was not sure how much he weighed, but ninety-seven pounds sounded like a lot. Glumly, he studied the “Before” cartoon—a scarecrow, basically—and wondered if he should send for the information or if it was a rip-off, like the X-Ray Spex he’d ordered from an ad in Weird Mystery. The X-Ray Spex were advertised as enabling one to see through flesh and walls and women’s clothing. They had cost a dollar ninety-eight plus thirty-five cents for postage, and they had taken forever to arrive, and when they finally came they were nothing more than a pair of plastic frames with two sets of cardboard inserts: one with a cartoon drawing of a hand through which you could see the bones, the other with a cartoon of a sexy secretary in a see-through dress with a black bikini underneath.
A shadow fell over Hely. He glanced up to see two figures with their backs half to him, who had drifted from the pool tables to the comic-book rack to converse privately. Hely recognized one of them: Catfish de Bienville, who was a slumlord, something of a local celebrity; he wore his rust-red hair in a giant Afro, and drove a custom Gran Torino with tinted windows. Hely often saw him at the pool hall, also standing around talking to people outside the car wash on summer evenings. Though his features were like a black man’s, he was not actually dark in color; his eyes were blue, and his skin was freckled, and as white as Hely’s. But he was mostly recognizable around town for his clothes: silk shirts, bell-bottom pants, belt buckles the size of salad plates. People said he bought them from Lansky Brothers, in Memphis, where Elvis was said to shop. Now—as hot as it was—he wore a red corduroy smoking jacket, white flares, and red patent-leather platform loafers.
It was not Catfish who had spoken, however, but the other: underfed, tough, with bitten fingernails. He was little more than a teenager, not too tall or too clean, with sharp cheekbones and lank hippie hair parted in the middle, but there was a scruffy, mean-edged coolness about him like a rock star; and he held himself erect, like he was somebody important, though he obviously wasn’t.
“Where’d he get playing money?” Catfish was whispering to him.
“Disability, I reckon,” said the hippie-haired kid, glancing up. His eyes were a startling silvery blue, and there was something staring and rather fixed about them.
They seemed to be talking about poor Carl Odum, who was racking balls across the room and offering to take on any comers for any sum they wished to lose. Carl—widowed, with what seemed like about nine or ten squalid little children—was only about thirty but looked twice as old: face and neck ruined with sunburn, his pale eyes pink around the rims. He’d lost a few fingers in an accident down at the egg-packing plant, not long after his wife’s death. Now he was drunk, and bragging how he could whip anybody in the room, fingers or not. “Here’s my bridge,” he said, holding up his mutilated hand. “This here’s all I need.” Dirt etched the lines of his palm and the nails of the only two fingers remaining: the pointer and the thumb.
Odum was addressing these remarks to a guy beside him at the table: a gigantic, bearded guy, a bear of a guy, who wore a brown coverall with a ragged hole cut in the breast where the name tag should have been. He wasn’t paying any attention to Odum; his eyes were fixed upon the table. Long dark hair, streaked with gray, straggled down past his shoulders. He was very large, and awkward somehow about the shoulders, as if his arms did not fit comfortably into the sockets; they hung stiffly, with slightly crooked elbows and the palms falling slack, the way a bear’s arms might hang if a bear decided to rear up on its hind legs. Hely couldn’t stop staring at him. The bushy black beard and the brown jumpsuit made him look like some kind of crazy South American dictator.
“Anything pertaining to pool or the playing of pool,” Odum was saying. “It’s what I guess you’d have to call second nature.”
“Well, some of us has gifts that way,” said the big guy in the brown jumpsuit, in a deep but not unpleasant voice. As he said this he glanced up, and Hely saw with a jolt that one of his eyes was all creepy: a milky wall-eye rolled out to the side of his head.
Much closer—only a few feet from where Hely stood—the tough-looking kid tossed his hair out of his face and said tensely to Catfish: “Twenty bucks a pop. Ever time he loses.” Deftly, with the other hand, he shook a cigarette from the pack in a tricky flick like he was throwing dice—and Hely noted, with interest, that despite the practiced cool of the gesture his hands trembled like an old person’s. Then he leaned forward and whispered something in Catfish’s ear.
Catfish laughed aloud. “Lose, my yellow ass,” he said. In an easy, graceful movement, he spun and sauntered off to the pinball machines in the back.
The tough kid lit his cigarette and gazed out across the room. His eyes—burning pale and silvery out of his sunburnt face—gave Hely a little shiver as they passed over him without seeing him: wild-looking eyes, with a lot of light in them, that reminded Hely of old pictures he’d seen of Confederate soldier boys.
Across the room, over by the pool table, the bearded man in the brown jumpsuit had only the one good eye—but it shone with something of the same silvery light. Hely—studying them over the top of his comic book—noted a squeak of family resemblance between the two of them. Though they were very different at first glance (the bearded man was older, and much heavier than the kid), still they had the same long dark hair and sunburnt complexion, the same fixity of eye and stiffness of neck, a similar tight-mouthed way of talking, as if to conceal bad teeth.
“How much you plan on taking him for?” said Catfish, presently, sliding back to his pal’s side.
The kid cackled; and at the crack in his laugh, Hely nearly dropped the comic book. He’d had plenty of time to get used to that high-pitched, derisive laughter; it had rung at his back from the creek bridge for a long, long time as he stumbled through the undergrowth, the echoes of the gunshots singing off the bluffs.
It was him. Without the cowboy hat—that was why Hely hadn’t recognized him. As the blood rushed to his face, he stared down furiously at his comic book, at the gasping girl who clutched Johnny Peril’s shoulder (“Johnny! That figure of wax! It moved!”)
“Odum aint a bad player, Danny,” Catfish was saying quietly. “Fingers or no fingers.”
“Well, he might could beat Farish when he’s sober. But not when he’s drunk.”
Twin light bulbs popped on in Hely’s head. Danny? Farish? Being shot at by rednecks was exciting enough, but being shot at by the Ratliffs was something else. He could not wait to get home and tell Harriet about all this. Could this bearded Sasquatch actually be the fabled Farish Ratliff? There was only one Farish that Hely had ever heard of—in Alexandria or anywhere else.