He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside.
Why, you’re crazy as hell, he told her.
I got to stop and pee, the old woman in the nightmare snickered. You wouldn’t sneak a peek at a old lady peein, would you?
I’ve got all the craziness I need, Tyler said. Carry yours on somewheres else, and you can load your own damn cowfeed.
They had come to a cleared area where stacks of crossties were drying. Beside a tiestack a black Buick Roadmaster sat cocked outward bound, gleaming in the frail sun, luxurious, profoundly out of place.
Tee hee hee, Grandmother said. Grandmother’s back had begun to shake with uncontainable mirth and she was making sniggering, chortling sounds, and she was trying to stop but she couldn’t. When she turned her face was congested withlaughter. She grasped her sides and burst out laughing, pounding her thighs with her palms. Then instantly the look of revelation on his face seemed to sober her for a hand snaked out and an iron grip clamped his throat and a broganned foot kicked the rifle away. It clattered somewhere behind him. They locked and swayed for a moment in a broken ballet, then she tripped him and fell across him in parodic lechery. Brass knucks slammed his temple hard and the world darkened and tilted on its axis. When it righted itself the face was very close to his own. The tortoiseshell shades hung by one earpiece and the pokebonnet was comically askew.
I got you now, you little son of a bitch, Sutter said.
Tyler tried to twist his face away but Sutter hit him hard in the mouth and Tyler didn’t know anything for a while.
He awoke to a dull throb in his temple and to music. Singing and some rhythmic accompaniment. A jouncing over rutted roads and the roar of an automobile engine.
…and I wound up her little ball of yarn, the voice sang.
A radio then. The Grand Ole Opry perhaps.
It was just two weeks from this I went out to take a piss,
And I found myself a burden of great pain,
For it had been to my mishaps I had caught a dose of claps,
And I’ll never wind that little ball again.
Not The Grand Ole Opry then. The voice went on singing. The song seemed to have an infinite number of verses in an ascending order of obscenity and the voice seemed to know all of them. Not the Grand Ole Opry. Then it all came back to him. He remembered Sutter, and it was Sutter himself singingat the top of his voice with brush slapping the rockerpanels rhythmically. This son of a bitch is driving in the woods, he thought in wonder. His face lay against the cold glass of the window, and he didn’t know how close Sutter was watching him, but he chanced opening one eye and all there was was the dark boles of trees streaking by on both sides of a logroad snaking into deeper timber.
His jaw hurt and an incisor lay on its side in a position it had never been before. It hurt when he worried it with his tongue but he couldn’t stop worrying it. He wondered if Sutter had brought the rifle. If he had more than likely it was in the back seat. Maybe there was a chance he could whirl suddenly and grab the gun and twist the door handle and just jump. There was an even better chance that when he whirled for the gun Sutter would coldcock him with a fist as hard and big as the end of a locust fencepost, and if there was any way around it he didn’t want hit again. Then he remembered the gun didn’t work anyway, and he debated just jumping. He thought when the timber thinned sufficiently he’d make a leap for it and try to land on his feet and just keep on hauling. With an eye toward this, his right hand crept on his right thigh toward where he knew the doorhandle was. An inch, no more. Again. Creepmouse, creepmouse.
Don’t even think about it, Sutter said. Move it agin and I’ll leave you a bloody stub to jack off with.
He knotted his hand into a fist and it just lay on his thigh.
Sutter went back to singing. The wreck on the highway. Whiskey and blood run together, but I didn’t hear nobody pray, sweet Jesus, I didn’t hear nobody pray. He had a tuneless monotone of a voice and the whipping of the brush did not match this song as well. Where are we going?
Sutter stopped singing. Far enough so’s there ain’t no busybodies around. He resumed singing.
Tyler turned. To his surprise Sutter still wore the gray dress. He had removed the tortoiseshell specs but the bonnet was still there, rakishly askew and tied demurely under his horselike chin.
You ought to get that radio fixed.
We’ll see how smart your mouth is here directly.
At length the road seemed to just vanish, to fade into heavier and heavier timber, but Sutter seemed not to notice. He was driving over wristsize saplings that caused the car to lurch sickeningly and the engine to labor harder, and he drove it until he reached a veritable wall of timber with no give to it. When he cut the switch something gave under the hood with a soft whoosh and a rising curtain of steam enveloped the car. Sutter’s hands were at untying the bonnet.
Where’d you come by that getup?
Sutter studied him. Folks in this world are always just walkin off somewheres else and providin me with what I need. Do you honestly want to know?
Tyler thought about it. No, he said.
I thought not. Now I looked you over pretty good back there at the tieyard. While you was dozed off. You ain’t got no pictures. Now what I want to know is where they are and how we get to em.
Tyler was prodding his tooth with his tongue when it gave with a soft cracking he actually heard inside his skull and his mouth was filling with warm blood. He started to open the door then thought better of it and leant forward and spat a mouthful of blood into the floorboard between his feet. Damn, boy, ain’t you had no raisin? This car probably belongs to a doctor or a lawyer or somethin.
Tyler sat staring at the tooth. A dull anger seized him. He had been run halfway across three counties by some madman he had done nothing to, barely knew, had only heard rumored. Folks who had befriended him were in peril. Perhaps dead. And now the son of a bitch had knocked out a perfectly good tooth, one that would have served him all his days, one that lay worse than useless in a stringy gout of blood. And. And. And a thought that he had been trying to keep stuffed down into the darkness, that kept skittering out playfully and showing glimpses of itself. His sister was dead.
You remember that day in town when me and you had that talk? Sutter asked.
Yes, he said. It seemed a long time ago but it was not. He tried to remember everything about the day. The way the light fell, what his sister had been wearing when he came in that night, what de Vries had said about the roof.
You see how all I warned you’s come to pass? You see how I tried to tell you right. You see what meanness you’ve brought on everbody, and all that’s happened might never have been. It was your choice, and ever bit of it is on your head. There’s people been killed over your stubbornness, and probably more to come. I told you to imagine the worst thing that could happen and it would be.
Tyler didn’t say anything. He was staring past the glass. Where the brush ended a sedgefield tumbled steeply downhill in a stony tapestry toward a hollow so deep and distant it looked blue. Above the horizon a hawk dipped and rose on the updrafts of wind with soundless grace, and he wondered how it would feel to be there, to be watching all this throughthe arrogant yellow eyes of a hawk.
It’s just business to me. Just money. But more money than a man makes in ten years, just handed to me all at once in a paper sack. And the only holdup is you.
I’m not going to give them to you. The only man that’ll get them from me is Bellwether.
You’ll give em to me. Oh, yes. When I’m through with you, you’ll be beggin me to take em. You’ll say, Please, Mr. Sutter, take these nasty things and be done with em. You’ll pray to whatever god it is you hold dear for me to reach out and take em out of your hot little hand. Now get your ass out.