Big Woods Page 16

  I gulp and nod in agreement.

  “Tell you what,” he says, shifting his belt around his chunky waist. “Here’s my card. I want you to know that you can come to me, anytime. Anytime at all.” He hands me his card and when I take it, he claps his other hand on top of mine. “You take care of yourself,” he says, and releases my hand and heads back to his cruiser.

  I let out a long sigh and wait until he drives off before I pull back onto the road and head home.

  I beat Mom home, but just barely, and when she hustles through the front door, leaden with bags of books and paperwork, I take them from her and set them down. We are standing in the foyer and the last of the daylight catches dust motes flying all around us.

  “I love you,” I say, and my voice echoes around our big, empty house. I grab her and hold on to her like she’s the last thing in this world I have.

  61

  Sylvia

  As you know, I wasn’t able to have children of my own, but Hank—short for Henry, named after John’s father—came to me as a gift.

  He was the result of a teen pregnancy and his mother—one of my patients in the Labor and Delivery Ward (I had started subbing on the floor again on the occasional weekend)—didn’t want to give him up, but the poor girl had her whole life ahead of her. Her parents had arranged for an adoption, but it fell through when he was born. The adopting couple had wanted a little girl.

  The mother—a frightened, skinny girl named Angela—had long, thick mahogany-brown hair and liquid brown eyes with long lashes like a gazelle’s. She confided in me late one night that she got pregnant on Valentine’s Day, the very first time she had allowed her boyfriend to go all the way with her, her face marked with fear and shame as she told me.

  Hank was a starkly beautiful baby: porcelain-white skin with already a shock of thick, black hair and high, round cheeks like apples that made his little eyes scrunch up even more than a newborn’s already do.

  During his first few days, Hank was fussy with colic, but after just a few minutes in my arms, he turned from a red-faced, hot ball of tears to a dreamy and calm newborn.

  “Well, don’t you just have the magic touch,” the grandmother said to me one night with pleading eyes. But she didn’t need to plead; I was bonded to that baby from the first time I held him, and after the adoption fell apart, I went home after my shift and thought it over and told the family the very next morning that I’d like to adopt him. John had been dead for three years.

  Hank was a happy baby, just the dearest thing, and I’d tiptoe into his nursery during naptime just to stare at him. I couldn’t believe he was mine. He may have not been my son by blood, but like I told him from the time he could understand, “I may have not carried you in my belly for nine months, but I rocked and held you in my arms for even longer than that.”

  I took an extended maternity leave and stayed home with him for the first three months, nestling him into me, breathing in his newborn scent, his skin smelling sweetly like peach cobbler.

  He had a happy childhood, with lots of playmates in our neighborhood, and when he was old enough, I took him fishing and we’d spend weekends camping or playing in nearby parks. But when Hank turned seven, I saw a change in him. At first, I thought it was just because he was an only child with no father—and I blamed myself for spoiling him—but even that couldn’t explain his behavior.

  He became a bully, and one time I saw him taunting a neighbor’s dog who cowered in the corner while Hank poked a long stick at him. I scolded him and snatched him back inside the house. I hate cruelty of any kind, especially to animals and children, but even my scolding seemed to have no effect on him. He just stared back at me with blank eyes and a smirk.

  When he was eight, he scared a neighbor girl. They were playing together in the boggy creek that ran between our homes. At some point, Hank had turned on her and made her play this game where he held her under water for longer than was safe. Her parents marched over to the house later with the teary mud-streaked girl in tow to talk to me about it. I was so embarrassed.

  I didn’t know what to do. I went to church and met with my minister and prayed over it, but in the end, none of his suggestions worked. Even Hattie didn’t know what to do for me. I’d take him out to her place with me and she’d just study Hank and shake her head slowly.

  His adolescence was a nightmare, with constant trips to the principal’s office. When he hit puberty, he pulled back from me almost overnight and fell in with some of the rougher kids at his school. And at home he would stay locked in his room doing God knows what, only coming out for dinner. He was rabid with sex, it seemed, and I’d find hordes of dirty magazines in his room. If I pitched them out, he’d just bring more home, and so I gave up intruding after a while.

  I remember taking him to a neighborhood birthday party once when he was thirteen, and I watched him as he watched the younger girls at the party, staring at them with his mouth open, hungry. It wasn’t natural the way he looked at them and chased them around, and I wanted to run over to them and cover them up, put pants over their little skirts, but it wasn’t their fault he was the way he was. Watching him that afternoon, he sickened me.

  Then, in high school, Hank became best friends with a tall and gangly boy named Tim. Tim was fanatically religious and invited Hank to all the events at his church. It was a weird church—the Church of Christ, where they speak in tongues—but Hank loved it and soon he started reading the New Testament, especially the Book of Revelations, and started to talk to me about the end times, his latest obsession.

  At least he was talking to me, I thought, but soon he got into yet another fight at school. He assaulted a younger boy. The police were called. The boy’s nose was broken; blood was splattered all over his white t-shirt and he spent the rest of the afternoon in the hospital. Apparently Hank had gone into a demented rage where he had bashed this kid’s head in at the locker banks. I was just about to yank him out and ship him off to boarding school (another mother had given me the tip) when I came home from work one day with armloads of grocery sacks and found a note waiting for me on the kitchen countertop.

  In the letter, Hank told me that he had run away to Dallas to join a missionary and that he never wanted to hear from me again. I was devastated and heartbroken, but he went on in the letter about how he had disowned me, how God was his true father, and how women are the true reason for original sin.

  I tried to find him, of course, and I was eventually able to track down the name and telephone number of the church he had joined. But when he got on the line he informed me that I was dead to him, that he had changed his name, to never call him again. I tried to plead with him one last time to come home, but he cut the line before I could finish.

  I was distraught, but if I’m honest, by that time, I was also relieved.

  It made me heartsick, though, and each November around his birthday I’d feel an emptiness that I couldn’t shake. But even that, too, began to fade with time. I would try to picture him in Dallas, or in Houston, or even farther away, doing God’s work, and try to imagine that he had finally found some kind of peace.

  The year before I met Delia, I was holding up a gnarled, burnt-orange pumpkin at a farmers’ market on the outskirts of Starrville, eyeing it for a centerpiece, when I heard Hank’s voice. I froze and turned to look and saw him, just a few stalls over. He had grown taller (he was twenty-four by then), but he pretty much looked the same, just older, and he was dressed in a stark white button-down with black pants and a black hat. He was encircled by a group of young girls and women, all wearing funny-looking clothes—long prairie skirts, blouses that were buttoned all the way up to the neck, and granny boots—and I could hear him instructing them on what to buy, carrying forth in a loud voice about all the different types of produce and how that was evidence of God’s great bounty. I wanted to walk over to him, to reach out and hug him. My son. My child. But I swallowe
d a hard lump in my throat and turned away. I pulled my straw hat down over my eyes and kept my promise to vanish from his life.

  But I did go and sit in the station wagon and wait for him to leave. I followed him as he drove down a few twisting roads before parking in front of the Starrville Church of Christ. I watched as he slipped inside the church. A stream of people had gathered outside on the sidewalk and I climbed out and asked one of the children, “Who is that?” And the young boy said, “Oh, that’s Papa! I mean, the Reverend Owen Goforth.”

  So he had changed his name. I waited in the car until he left and then trailed him home. He lived on a hilly piece of land in a shabby farmhouse. His car was loaded down with lots of children, and an older girl who I assumed to be his young bride—all of them dressed in those funny clothes—and I shivered when they crossed the cattle guard. I did not want to imagine what went on behind those gates, so I left that day and never returned and tried to force him from my mind.

  62

  Leah

  Tuesday, December 12th, 1989

  Lucy missing 10 weeks, 4 days

  When I woke up this morning and went downstairs, I found this note from Mom:

  Tonight’s the school’s annual fundraiser so I won’t be home until 7. Dinner’s in the crockpot.

  Love you!

  So today after school, I don’t drive straight home. I cruise the backroads behind the school that loop behind the strip mall. The sunlight catches Lucy’s clear tray of cassettes, sitting in the passenger seat, and I put in her favorite, When In Rome’s “The Promise.” I haven’t let myself listen to it since she’s been gone, but now I feel like I have to. The familiar drumming starts and I’m singing along until I get to the lyrics about being there for someone who’s in doubt and danger. My throat seizes up and my whole body rolls with sobs, but suddenly I’m filled with an urgency I can’t explain. I start driving to every single place Lucy and I have ever been together. It’s like I’m looking for her, pleading to be led with some sign. I drive past her elementary school, emptied for the day, and then down a few blocks to our favorite park. Kids are swinging and riding on the seesaw and I scan their faces, looking for Lucy. I see a girl who could be Lucy’s age, same hair, same height, but I know it’s not her. She cartwheels across a field, her face streaked with mud, and then cartwheels back across.

  I keep driving. I reach the roller rink, a white brick warehouse painted with swirls of red with a giant sculpture of a roller skate plastered to the side of the building. The parking lot is empty—it’s a school night—so I keep driving past and before I know it, I’m almost to the interstate, and to the city limits. I turn down the feeder road and there to my right, at the back of a wide gravel parking lot, is Billy’s Sound World. It’s the record shop Dad used to take us to when Mom needed to catch up on work on Saturday mornings.

  Billy, the owner, is cute in a dangerous, creepy older guy kind of way. He’s probably in his twenties and he’s not from here, he’s from the coast. He’s always tanned with blond streaks running through his wild hair and he wears a shark-tooth necklace and drives a black van. Dad likes to come here because, unlike the chain store at the mall, Billy stocks the obscure stuff—The Grateful Dead’s bootleg albums, alternative music—and Dad used to ask him about different Beatles trivia. My face would go red and I would be kind of embarrassed for Dad. I could never tell if Billy was patronizing him or if he was as sincere as he acted, but Dad would stand in the corner in his professor pose and regale Billy with stories from his college days in Austin, telling him about shows that he and Mom went to at The Armadillo World Headquarters. Janis Joplin, Willie Nelson, etc. Dad would leave with a stack of records under his arm and Lucy and I would each pick out a new cassette single.

  I remember the last time we came in here, it was in the summer, in August, and we had just finished swimming at the community pool. We were both wearing sundresses—mine was yellow, Lucy’s was red—with our swimsuits underneath, still damp from the water. Our skin was sizzling from the sun and smelled like coconut sunblock, our hair wild and crunchy with chlorine. I remember that Dad was asking Billy about the White Album by the Beatles, about whether or not he had it on vinyl, and Lucy and I were talking about whether or not we should each buy a single or put our money together and buy Prince’s “Purple Rain.” Lucy really wanted that tape and she was dancing around me singing “When Doves Cry.” I could see Billy watching me, and it felt good to be noticed, but then I noticed him looking at Lucy, too, the way that guys do, and heard him say to Dad, “You’ve got your hands full with those two.”

  I pull into the parking lot, and gray gravel dust coats my new car. The parking lot is deserted except for Billy’s van. I adjust my jean jacket and apply a fresh coat of lip gloss before heading in.

  I push the dirty glass door open and step inside, and a jangle of metal bells hanging together from a rope clank together. Billy is at the back of the store, sliding records back into their sleeves. The place smells musty and in the weak light, I have to squint to get rid of the sun spots.

  “Hey!” Billy says and shakes his head back in a nod. “Help you find something?”

  “No, just browsing,” I say, trying to sound as casual as possible.

  Billy turns his back to me and continues filing records. I can’t tell if he remembers me, so I stand there in the singles aisle and study the paper spines. After a few moments, with his back still turned, he says, “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I manage to say, but there are no tears. I cried them all out in the car and now I just feel strangely relaxed, zoned out. “Got any new singles?”

  “You bet,” he says and looks me in the eye, happy that I’ve changed the subject. “Here, follow me,” he says, and I trail him to the front of the store where he pulls out a huge cardboard box and places it on the glass countertop. “I just got these in today,” he says, ripping open the box with an X-Acto knife. “Help yourself,” he says, pulling a fresh cigarette out of his pocket and lighting it.

  I run my fingers over the paper covers, aware that my nails aren’t painted, and try to appear like I know exactly what I’m looking for. I settle on Erasure’s “A Little Respect”—something light and poppy that doesn’t remind me of Lucy—and follow Billy to the cash register to check out.

  And that’s when I see it, taped to the side of the cash register, a fluorescent teal poster with the edges curling up.

  DEEP ELLUM RECORD CONVENTION

  AT THE RECORD WAREHOUSE

  SATUDAY & SUNDAY DECEMBER 16th & 17th

  It’s in three days, and my mind is going back to the weekend I spent in Dallas with Nicolette’s family last year, shortly before we starting drifting apart. We had meandered through Deep Ellum and went into the Record Warehouse and I remember walking past a storefront a few doors down, painted in a dark purple that said PSYCHIC: HAVE YOUR FORTUNE READ, SEE INTO YOUR FUTURE, COMMUNICATE WITH THE DEPARTED, and it hits me all at once: this is a sign from Lucy, the reason I’ve driven out here. I need to see a real psychic, not Carla Ray, I need a true psychic to tell me whether or not Lucy is still alive, and if so, how I can find her.

  “You going?” I ask Billy, pointing to the flyer.

  “Oh yeah,” he says, taking a slow drag off his cigarette. “I go to that every year, it’s great.”

  “Mind if I come?” I ask. I bite my lower lip and look up at him, twisting my hair around my finger, trying to look like other girls do when they’re flirting.

  He looks at me up and down. “How old are you?”

  “Old enough,” I say, giggling, my cheeks burning red. He cocks an eyebrow at me. “I drove out here didn’t I?” I ask, looking straight at him, a dare.

  He shrugs and says, “Cool. I could use help loading and unloading the record crates, keeping an eye on my booth. I’m leaving at ten a.m. Saturday morning. Meet me in the parking lot if you really wanna come.”<
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  I nod, trying to look nonchalant, and hand over the money for the single. When he hands me my change, our hands brush. I shove the cassette in the back pocket of my jeans and walk out, aware that his eyes are on me.

  63

  Sylvia

  When Delia first mentioned that there was a preacher involved, I was suspicious that it might be Hank, but I shoved that thought away, not wanting to believe it.

  The first week after the men threatened me, I lived in fear that he would come for me. I already slept the light sleep of a night-shift worker, but during that first week, it was even more amplified. Every noise would send me shooting up out of thin sleep. But he never came, so after a week I finally built up enough courage to leave the house.

  One early morning, I drove over to Starrville and prowled the neighborhood streets. I lowered my windows and tried to divine which house had been Delia’s, to see if there was any sign of her, but it was futile, and I finally faced the truth that I’d been dodging since Delia was taken from the hospital: the minute they got her back, they had killed her.

  I buried all of this until the first children went missing a few years later, and then were found murdered. I didn’t want to believe it at first; I wanted to believe, like everyone else, that it was devil worshippers in Big Woods, so I went out there, but I knew with dread that it had all been a ruse. Delia had mentioned an oil man, and it all pieced together in my mind: the oil man with a lease in Big Woods would have the perfect spot to stage something. And this town, with all its fanaticism, would easily believe it had been the work of the devil. I kept investigating it, becoming obsessed with it, following the children’s stories, hoping for something to point away from Hank and his men. But it never did.