Then I recalled the jagged fang driven like a blade into the chunk of
wood at Mr. Sculley’s. Beautiful or not, Old Moses had just torn a dog in
half.
He was still hungry. This happened so fast, my mind hardly had time to
see it: a pair of jaws opened, fangs glistened, and an old boot was in there
impaled on one of them along with a flopping silver fish. The jaws sucked the
remaining half of the dog’s carcass in with a snarling rush of water and then
closed delicately, as one might savor a lemonhead candy at the Lyric theater.
I caught a quick glimpse of a narrow, pale green cat’s-eye the size of a
baseball, shielded with a gelatinous film. Then Gavin fell back off the table
into the water, and the lamp he was holding hissed out.
I didn’t think about being brave. I didn’t think about being scared.
I cain’t swim.
That’s what I thought about.
I jumped off the table to where Gavin had gone in. The water was heavy
with mud, and up to my shoulders, which meant Gavin was nostrils-deep. He was
flailing and kicking, and when I grabbed him around the waist he must’ve
thought it was Old Moses because he almost jerked my arms off. I shouted,
“Gavin! Stop kickin’!” and I got his face up out of the water. “Humma hobba
humma,” he was babbling, like a rain-soaked engine trying to fire its plugs.
I heard a noise behind me, in that dark and soggy room. The noise of
something rising from the water.
I turned around. Gavin yelped and grabbed hold with both arms around my
neck, all but throttling me.
I saw the shape of Old Moses—huge, horrible, and breathtaking—coming up
from the water like a living swamp log. Its head was flat and triangular, like
a snake’s, but I think it was not just a snake because it seemed to have two
small arms with spindly claws just below what would have been the neck. I
heard what must have been its tail thwacking against a wall so hard the house
shook. Its head bumped the ceiling. Gavin’s grip was making my face balloon
with blood.
I knew without seeing that Old Moses was looking at us, with eyes that
could spot a catfish through murky water at midnight. I felt its appraisal of
us, like a cold knife blade pressed against my forehead. I hoped we didn’t
look much like dogs.
Old Moses smelled like the river at noon: swampy, steaming, and pungent
with life. To say I respected that awesome beast would be quite an
understatement. But right at that moment I wished I was anywhere else on
earth, even in school. But I didn’t have much time for thinking, because Old
Moses’s snaky head began to descend toward us like the front end of a steam
shovel and I heard the hiss of its jaws opening. I backed up, hollering at
Gavin to let go, but he would not. If I’d been him, I wouldn’t have let go,
either. The head came at us, but just then I backed out of the front room into
a narrow corridor—which I certainly didn’t know was there—and Old Moses’s jaws
slammed against the door frame on either side of us. This seemed to make him
mad. He drew back and drove forward again, with the same result, except this
time the door frame splintered. Gavin was crying, making a whoop whoop whoop
sound, and a frothy wave from Old Moses’s agitations splashed into my face and
over my head. Something jabbed my right shoulder, scaring a ripple up my
spine. I reached for it, and found a broom floating in the debris.
Old Moses made a noise like a locomotive about to blow its gaskets. I saw
the awful shape of its head coming at the corridor’s entrance, and I thought
of Gordon Scott’s Tarzan, spear in hand, fighting against a giant python. I
picked up the broomstick, and when Old Moses hit the doorway again I jammed
that broom right down its gaping, dog-swallowing throat.
You know what happens when you touch your finger to the back of your
throat, don’t you? Well, the same thing happens, evidently, to monsters. Old
Moses made a gagging noise as loud as thunder in a barrel. The head drew back
and the broom went with it, cornstraw bristles jammed in the gullet. Then, and
this is the only way I can describe it, Old Moses puked. I mean it. I heard
the rush of liquid and gruesome things flooding from its mouth. Fish, some
still flopping and some long dead, went flying all around us along with
stinking crayfish, turtle shells, mussels, slimy stones, mud, and bones. The
smell was… well, you can imagine it. It was a hundred times worse than when
the kid in school throws up his morning oatmeal on the desk in front of you. I
dunked my head underwater to get away from it, and of course Gavin had to go,
too, whether he liked it or not. Underneath there, I thought that Old Moses
ought to be more particular about what he scooped off the Tecumseh’s bottom.
Currents thrashed around us. I came up again, and Gavin took a gasping
breath and yelled his head off. At that point I started yelling, too. “Help!”
I shouted. “Somebody help us!”
A light speared through the front door, over the choppy water, and hit me
in the face.
“Cory!” came the sound of judgment. “I told you not to move, didn’t I?”
“Gavin? Gavin?”
“Lord God!” my mother said. “What’s that smell?”
The water was settling down. I realized Old Moses was no longer between
the two mothers and their sons. Dead fish floated in a slimy brown sludge on
the surface, but Mom’s attention was on me. “I’m gonna tan your hide, Cory
Mackenson!” she shouted as she waded in with Nila Castile behind her.
Then they walked right into the floating monster disgorgement, and from
the sound she made I don’t believe my mother was thinking about whipping me
anymore.
Lucky me.
7
A Summons from the Lady
NONE OF MY FRIENDS BELIEVED ME, OF COURSE.
Davy Ray Callan just laughed and shook his head, and he said he couldn’t
have made up a better story if he’d tried. Ben Sears looked at me like I had
seen one too many monster movies at the Lyric. Johnny Wilson thought about it
awhile, in that slow, deliberating way of his, and then he gave his opinion:
“Nope. Didn’t happen.”
“It did!” I told them as we sat on the porch of my house in the shade
under a clear blue sky. “It really did, I swear it!”
“Oh yeah?” Davy Ray, the feisty one of our group and the one who was most
likely to make up astounding tales, cocked his brown-haired head and stared at
me through pale blue eyes that always held a hint of wild laughter. “Then how
come Old Moses didn’t just eat you up? How come a monster ran from a kid with
a broom?”
“Because,” I answered, flustered and angry, “I didn’t have my
monster-killin’ ray gun with me, that’s why! I don’t know! But it happened,
and you can ask—”
“Cory,” my mother said quietly from the doorway, “I think you’d better
stop talkin’ about this now.”
So I did. And I understood what she meant. There was no use trying to
make anybody believe it. My mom herself couldn’t quite grasp it, though Gavin
Castile had sputtered the whole story to his mother. Mr. Thornberry,
incidentally, was all right. He was alive and getting stronger day by day, and
I understand he wanted to get well so he could take Gavin to see more Looney
Tunes.
My friends would have believed it, though, if they could’ve smelled my
clothes before Mom threw them in the garbage. She threw her own tainted
clothes away, too. Dad listened to the tale, and he nodded and sat there with
his hands folded before him, bandages on his palms and fingers covering huge
blisters that had been raised by the shoveling.
“Well,” Dad said, “all I can say is, there’re stranger things on this
earth than we can ever figure out if we had a hundred lifetimes. I thank God
the both of you are all right, and that nobody drowned in the flood. Now:
what’s for dinner?”
Two weeks passed. We left April and moved through the sunny days of May.
The Tecumseh River, having reminded us who was boss, returned to its banks. A
quarter of the houses in Bruton weren’t worth living in anymore, including
Nila Castile’s, so the sound of sawing and hammering in Bruton was almost
around the clock. There was one benefit of the rain and the flood, though;
under the sunshine, the earth exploded in flowers and Zephyr blazed with
color. Lawns were deep emerald, honeysuckle grew like mad passion, and kudzu
blanketed the hills. Summer was almost upon us.
I turned my attention to studying for final exams. Math was never my
strongest subject, and I was going to have to make a high grade so I wouldn’t
have to go to—and the mere thought of this made me choke—summer school.
In my quiet hours, I did wonder how I’d managed to beat Old Moses away
with a bristle-brush broom. I had been lucky in jamming it down the monster’s
throat, that was for sure. But I figured it might have been something else,
too. Old Moses, for all his size and fury, was like Granddaddy Jaybird; he
could holler a good game, but at the first sting he took off running. Or
swimming, as the case might be. Old Moses was a coward. Maybe Old Moses had
gotten used to eating things that didn’t fight back, like catfish and turtles
and scared dogs paddling for their lives. With that broomstick in his throat,
Old Moses might have figured there was easier prey where he came from, down at
the bottom of the river in that cool, muddy banquet hall where nothing bites
back.
At least, that’s my theory. I don’t ever want to have to test it again,
though.
I had a dream about the man in the long coat and the green-feathered hat.
I dreamed I was wading toward him, and when I grasped his arm he turned his
face toward me and it was a man with not human skin but diamond-shaped scales
the color of autumn leaves. He had fangs like daggers and blood dripping down
his chin, and I realized I had interrupted him in the process of eating a
small brown dog, the upper half of which he held struggling in his left hand.
It was not a pleasant dream.
But maybe there was some truth in it. Somewhere.
I was a walker in these days, bereft of two wheels to call my own. I
enjoyed walking to and from school, but all my friends had bikes and I
definitely had lost a step or two of status. One afternoon I was pitching a
stick to Rebel and rolling around in the green grass with him when I heard a
clankety sound. I looked up, Rebel looked up, and there was a pickup truck
approaching our house.
I knew the truck. It was splotchy with rust and its suspension sagged,
and the noise it made caused dogs to bay in its wake. Rebel started barking,
and I had a time getting him quiet. The truck had a metal frame thing bolted
in the bed from which hung, clattering like asylum inmates, a bewildering
array of tools, most of which looked as antique and worthless as the truck. On
the driver’s door was stenciled, not very neatly, LIGHTFOOT’S FIX-IT.
The truck stopped in front of the house. Morn came out on the porch,
alerted by the clamor, but Dad wouldn’t be home from work for another hour or
so. The truck’s door opened, and a long, skinny black man wearing dusty gray
overalls got out, so slowly it seemed that movement might be painful for him.
He wore a gray cap, and his dark skin was smoky with dust. He came slowly
toward the porch, and I have to say that even if a bull had suddenly come
charging up behind him, Mr. Marcus Lightfoot probably wouldn’t have hurried
his pace.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Lightfoot,” Mom said, her apron on. She had been
working in the kitchen, and she wiped her hands on a paper towel. “How are
you?”
Mr. Lightfoot smiled. His small, square teeth were very white, and gray
hair boiled up from under his cap. This is how he spoke, in a voice like a
slow leak from a clogged pipe: “Good afternoon to you, too,
Miz Mackenson. Hey there, Cory.”
This was a good-paced conversational clip for Mr. Light-foot, who had
been a handyman in Zephyr and Bruton for more than thirty years, picking up
the task from his father. Mr. Lightfoot was renowned for his skill with
appliances, and though he was slow as a toothache, he always got the job done
no matter how baffling the problem. “Mighty fine.” He stopped, looking up at
the blue sky. The seconds ticked past. Rebel barked, and I put my hand over
his muzzle.
“Day,” Mr. Lightfoot decided.
“Yes, it is.” Mom waited for him to speak again, but Mr. Lightfoot just
stood there, this time looking at our house. He reached into one of his many
pockets, brought out a handful of penny nails, and clicked them around, as if
he were waiting, too. “Uh…” Mom cleared her throat. “Can I help you with
anythin’?”
“Jus’ passin’,” he replied, slow as warm molasses. “Wonderin’ if
you”—and here he paused to study the nails in his hand for a few
seconds—“might need somethin’ fixed?”
“Well, no, not really. I can’t think of—” She stopped, and her expression
told me she had thought of something. “The toaster. It went out on me day
before yesterday. I was gonna call you, but—”
“Yes’m, I know.” Mr. Lightfoot nodded sagely. “Time sure
does fly.”
He went back to the truck to get his toolbox, an old metal fascination
filled with drawers and every kind of nut and bolt, it seemed, under the
workman’s sun. He strapped on his tool belt, from which hung several different
kinds of hammers, screwdrivers, and arcane-looking wrenches. Mom held the door
open for Mr. Lightfoot, and when he walked into the house she looked at me and
shrugged, her statement being: I don’t know why he’s here, either. I left
Rebel the gnawed stick and went into the house, too, and in the cool of the
kitchen I drank a glass of iced tea and watched Mr. Lightfoot stare down the
toaster.
“Mr. Lightfoot, would you care for somethin’ to drink?” Mom asked.
“Nome.”
“I’ve got some oatmeal cookies.”
“Nome, thank you kindly.” He took a clean white square of cloth
from another pocket and unfolded it. He draped the cloth over the seat of one
of the chairs to the kitchen table. Then he unplugged the toaster, set it on
