he’s tellin’ me what time he’ll be back.”
“Is that so?” the sheriff asked. “What friend might that be, Dick?”
“Oh… fella lives in Union Town. You wouldn’t know him.”
“I know a lot of people in Union Town. What’s your friend’s name?”
“Joe,” Mr. Hargison said, at the exact second Mr. Moultry said, “Sam.”
“Joe Sam,” Mr. Moultry explained, still sweatily grinning. “Joe Sam
Jones.”
“I don’t think you’re gonna be helping any Joe Sam Jones clean out his
garage the day after Christmas, Dick. I think you’ll be in a nice secure
hospital room, don’t you?”
“Hey, Dick, I’m headin’ off!” Mr. Hargison announced. “Don’t you worry,
you’re gonna be just fine.” And with that last word the toe of his left shoe
nudged the silver Christmas tree star that lay balanced on the hole’s ragged
edge. Dad watched the little star fall as if in graceful slow motion, like a
magnified snowflake drifting down.
It hit one of the bomb’s iron-gray tail fins, and exploded in a shower of
painted glass.
In the seconds of silence that followed, all four of the men heard it.
The bomb made a hissing sound, like a serpent that had been awakened in
its nest. The hissing faded, and from the bomb’s guts there came a slow,
ominous ticking: not like the ticking of an alarm clock, but rather the
ticking of a hot engine building up to a boil.
“Oh… shit,” Sheriff Marchette whispered.
“Jesus save me!” Mr. Moultry gasped. His face, which had been flushed
crimson a few moments before, now became as white as a wax dummy.
“The thing’s switched on,” Dad said, his voice choked.
Mr. Hargison’s speech was by far the most eloquent. He spoke with his
legs, which propelled him across the warped floor, out onto the crooked porch
and to his car at the curb as if he’d been boomed from a cannon. The car sped
away like the Road Runner: one second there, the next not.
“Oh God, oh God!” Tears had sprung to Mr. Moultry’s eyes. “Don’t let me
die!”
“Tom? I believe it’s time.” Sheriff Marchette was speaking softly, as if
the weight of words passing through the air might be enough to cause
concussion. “To vamoose, don’t you?”
“You can’t leave me! You can’t! You’re the sheriff!”
“I can’t do anythin’ more for you, Dick. I swear I wish I could, but I
can’t. Seems to me you need magic or a miracle right about now, and I think
the well’s run dry.”
“Don’t leave me! Get me out of this, Jack! I’ll pay you whatever you
want!”
“I’m sorry. Climb on up, Tom.”
Dad didn’t have to be told a second time. He scaled that ladder like
Lucifer up a tree. At the top, he said, “I’ll steady the ladder for you, Jack!
Come on!”
The bomb ticked. And ticked. And ticked.
“I can’t help you, Dick,” Sheriff Marchette said, and he climbed the
ladder.
“No! Listen! I’ll do anythin’! Get me out, okay? I won’t mind if it
hurts! Okay?”
Dad and Sheriff Marchette were on their way to the door.
“Please!” Mr. Moultry shouted. His voice cracked, and a sob came out. He
fought against his trap, but the pain made him cry harder. “You can’t leave me
to die! It’s not human!”
He was still shouting and sobbing as Dad and the sheriff left the house.
Both their faces were drawn and tight. “Great job this turned out to be,”
Sheriff Marchette said. “Jesus.” They reached the sheriff’s car. “You need a
ride somewhere, Tom?”
“Yeah.” He frowned. “No.” And he leaned against the car. “I don’t know.”
“Now, don’t look like that! There’s not a thing can be done for him, and
you know it!”
“Maybe somebody ought to wait around, in case the bomb squad shows up.”
“Fine.” The sheriff glanced up and down the deserted street. “Are you
volunteerin’?”
“No.”
“Me, neither! And they’re not gonna show up anytime soon, Tom. I think
that bomb’s gonna explode and we’ll lose this whole block, and I don’t know
about you, but I’m gettin’ out while I’ve still got my skin.” He walked around
to the driver’s door.
“Jack, wait a minute,” Dad said.
“Ain’t got a minute. Come on, if you’re comin’.”
Dad got into the car with him, and Sheriff Marchette started the engine.
“Where to?”
“Listen to me, Jack. You said it yourself: Dick needs magic or a miracle,
right? So who’s the one person around here who might be able to give it to
him?”
“Reverend Blessett’s left town.”
“No, not him! Her.”
Sheriff Marchette paused with his hand on the gearshift.
“Anybody who can turn a bag of shotgun shells into a bag of garden snakes
might be able to take care of a bomb, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t! I don’t think the Lady had a thing to do with that. I think
Biggun Blaylock was so blasted out of his mind on his own rotgut whiskey that
he thought he was fillin’ that ammo bag full of cartridges when all the time
he was shovelin’ the snakes in!”
“Oh, come on! You saw those snakes the same as I did! There were hundreds
of ’em! How long would it have taken Biggun to find ’em all?”
“I don’t believe in that voodoo stuff,” Sheriff Marchette said. “Not one
bit.”
Dad said the first thing that came to mind, and saying it left a shocked
taste in his mouth: “We can’t be afraid to ask her for help, Jack. She’s all
we’ve got.”
“Damn,” the sheriff muttered. “Damn and double-damn.” He looked at the
Moultry house, light rising from its broken roof. “She might be gone by now.”
“She might be. She might not be. Can’t we at least drive over there and
find out?”
Many houses in Bruton were dark, their owners having obeyed the siren and
fled the impending blast. Her rainbow-hued dwelling, however, was all lit up.
Tiny sparkling lights blinked in the windows.
“I’ll wait right here,” Sheriff Marchette said. Dad nodded and got out.
He took a deep breath of Christmas Eve air and made his legs move. They
carried him to the front door. He took the door’s knocker, a little silver
hand, and did something he never dreamed he would’ve done in a million years:
he announced to the Lady that he had come to call.
He waited, hoping she would answer.
He waited, watching the doorknob.
He waited.
Fifteen minutes after my father took the silver hand, there was a noise
on the street where Dick Moultry lived. It was a rumble and a clatter, a
clanking and a clinking, and it caused the dogs to bark in its wake. The
rust-splotched, suspension-sagging pickup truck stopped at the curb in front
of the Moultry house, and a long, skinny black man got out of the driver’s
door. On that door was stenciled, not very neatly: LIGHTFOOT’S FIX-IT.
He moved so slowly it seemed that movement might be a painful process. He
wore freshly washed overalls and a gray cap that allowed his gray hair to boil
out from beneath it. In supreme slow motion, he walked to the truck’s bed and
strapped on his tool belt, which held several different kinds of hammers,
screwdrivers, and arcane-looking wrenches. In a slow extension of time he
picked up his toolbox, an old metal fascination filled with drawers that held
every kind of nut and bolt under the workman’s sun. Then, as if moving under
the burden of the ages, Mr. Marcus Lightfoot walked to Dick Moultry’s crooked
entrance. He knocked at the door, even though it stood wide open: One… two…
Eternities passed. Civilizations thrived and crumbled. Stars were born in
brawny violence and died doddering in the cold vault of the cosmos.
…three.
“Thank God!” Mr. Moultry shouted, his voice worn to a frazzle. “I knew
you wouldn’t let me die, Jack! Oh, God have mer—” He stopped shouting in
mid-praise, because he was looking up through the hole in the living room’s
floor, and instead of help from heaven he saw the black face of what he
considered a devil of the earth.
“Lawdy, lawdy,” Mr. Lightfoot said. His eyes had found the bomb, his ear
the ticking of its detonation mechanism. “You sure in a big
pile’a mess.”
“Have you come to watch me get blown up, you black savage?” Mr. Moultry
snarled.
“Nossuh. Come ta keep you from gettin’
blowed.”
“You? Help me? Hah!” He pulled in a breath and roared through his ravaged
throat: “Jack! Somebody help me! Anybody white!”
“Mr. Moultry, suh?” Mr. Lightfoot waited for the other man’s lungs
to give out. “That there bumb might not care for
such a’ noise.”
Mr. Moultry, his face the color of ketchup and the sweat standing up in
beads, began fighting his condition. He thrashed and clawed at the pile of
debris; he grasped at his own shirt in a fit of rage and ripped the rest of it
away; he gripped at the very air but found no handholds there. And then the
pain crashed over him like one wrestler bodyslamming another and Mr. Moultry
was left gasping and breathless but still with two broken legs and a bomb
ticking next to his head.
“I believe,” Mr. Lightfoot said, and he yawned at the lateness of the
hour, “I’d best come on down.”
It might have been New Year’s Eve before Mr. Lightfoot reached the bottom
of the stepladder, the tools in his belt jingling together. He grasped his
toolbox and started toward Mr. Moultry, but the poster of the bug-eyed
minstrel on the wall caught his attention. He stared at it as the seconds and
the bomb ticked.
“Heh-heh,” Mr. Lightfoot said, and shook his head. “Heh heh.”
“What’re you laughin’ at, you crazy jigaboo?”
“Thass a white man,” he said. “All painted up and
lookin’ the fool.”
At last Mr. Lightfoot pulled himself away from the picture of Al Jolson
and went to the bomb. He cleared away some nail-studded timbers and roof
shingles and sat down on the red dirt, a process that was like watching a
snail cross a football field. He drew the toolbox close to his side, like a
trusted companion. Then he took a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from the
breast pocket of his shirt, blew on the lenses, and wiped them on his sleeve,
all at excruciating slowness.
“What have I done to deserve this?” Mr. Moultry croaked.
Mr. Lightfoot got his spectacles on. “Now,” he said. “I can.” He
leaned closer to the bomb, and as he frowned the small lines deepened between
his eyes. “See what’s what.”
He took a hammer with a miniature head from his belt. He licked his thumb
and—slowly, slowly—marked the hammer’s head with his spit. Then he tapped the
bomb’s side so lightly it hardly made a noise.
“Don’t hit it! Oh Jeeeeesus! You’ll blow us both to hell!”
“Ain’t,” Mr. Lightfoot replied as he made small tappings up and down the
bomb’s side, “plannin’ on it.” He pressed his ear against the bomb’s iron
skin. “Uh-huh,” he said. “I hears you talkin’.” As Mr. Moultry
agonized in terrified silence, Mr. Lightfoot’s fingers were at work, moving
across the bomb as one might stroke a small dog. “Uh-huh.” His fingers stopped
on a thin seam. “Thass the way ta your heart, ain’t
it?” He located four screws just below the tail fins, and he lifted the proper
screwdriver from its place on his belt like a glacier melting.
“You came here to kill me, didn’t you?” Mr. Moultry groaned. He received
a punch of insight. “She sent you, didn’t she? She sent you to kill me!”
“Got,” Mr. Lightfoot said as he made the first turn of the first screw,
“half that right.”
Eons later, the final screw fell into Mr. Lightfoot’s palm. Mr. Lightfoot
had started humming “Frosty, the Snowman,” in his somnolent way. Sometime
between the removal of the second and third screws, the sound of the
detonation mechanism had changed from a tick to a rasp. Mr. Moultry, lying in
a stew of sweat, his eyes glassy and his head thrashing back and forth with
dementia, had lost five pounds.
Mr. Lightfoot took from his toolbox a small blue jar. He opened it and
with the tip of his index finger withdrew some greasy gunk the color of eel’s
skin. He spat into it, and smeared the gunk onto the seam that circled the
bomb. Then he took hold of the tail fins and tried to give them a
counterclockwise turn. They resisted. He tried it in the clockwise direction,
but that, too, was fruitless.
“Listen here!” Mr. Lightfoot’s voice was stern, his brow furrowed with
disapproval. “Don’t you gimme no sass!” With the miniature
hammer he clunked the screw holes, and Mr. Moultry lost another few ounces as
his pants suddenly got wet. Then Mr. Lightfoot gripped the tail fins with both
hands and pulled.
Slowly, with a thin high skrreeeeek of resistance, the bomb’s tail
section began to slide out. It was hard work, and Mr. Lightfoot had to pause
to stretch his cramping fingers. Then he went back to it, with the
determination of a sloth gripping a tree branch. At last the tail section came
free, and exposed were electronic circuits, a jungle of different-colored
wires, and shiny black plastic cylinders that resembled the backs of roaches.
“Hoooowheeee!” Mr. Lightfoot breathed, enchanted. “Ain’t it pretty?”
“Killin’ me…” Mr. Moultry moaned. “Killin’ me dead…”
The rasping was louder. Mr. Lightfoot used a metal probe to touch a small
red box from which the noise emanated. Then he used his finger, and he
whistled as he drew the finger back. “Oh-oh,” he said. “Gettin’ kinda
warm.”
Mr. Moultry began to blubber, his nose running and the tears trickling
from his swollen eyes.
Mr. Lightfoot’s fingers were at work again, tracing the wires to their
points of origin. The smell of heat rose into the air, which shimmered over
the red box. Mr. Lightfoot scratched his chin. “Y’know,” he said, “I believe
we gots us a problem here.”
Mr. Moultry trembled on the edge of coma.
“See, I”—Mr. Lightfoot tapped his chin, his eyes narrowed with
concentration—“fix things. I don’t break ’em.” He drew in a
long breath and slowly released it. “Gone have ta do a little
