Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Read online

  And on the other side, she stood there as beautiful as he had ever remembered her.

  She opened her mouth to speak, dark water spilling from between her lips.

  "I know you're not her," he said. "I know I'm standing outside a barn, holding my son in my arms. There's a town just down the road. And apple trees. It's cold. It's getting on night. I know you can't be her. I don't know what you are, but I know you're not her." Was he shouting? He couldn't tell—his breathing was difficult. He felt a pain in his chest as his heart beat wildly. Unbidden tears streamed down from his eyes as he tried to see her as she was, rather than the way she presented herself.

  Her face froze in its expression. Then, for a moment, he knew clearly that the voices within him were the beacon of his insanity: she was, indeed, who she looked like, and she was trying to talk to him, but the voices in his head were getting louder, more raucous, shrieking across his nerve pathways. He knew the world was not the insane place that he had been living in, that it could not be, that the creatures he had been slaughtering could not be anything more than simple human beings. His own obsessions had brought him to this.

  He felt the screwdriver in his hand and turned its blade towards himself.

  You failed once before, the clearest voice in his head said, so do it, do it right. Do it now.

  He pressed the blade against his chest and was about to give it a good shove, when he felt a searing numbness in his leg, and he fell to the ground—the sound of a gunshot—a burning around his right calf. He closed his eyes. Rock salt? When he opened them, it was night, and the boy stood over him, looking at him. He could see the barn and the darkening sky. From nearby a man shouted, "What the hell are you trying to do to that boy?"

  Shot, I've been shot, damn it, you don't shoot your own kind.

  But of course you do, you always kill your own, it's the law of man.

  And what you don't kill, the wild things get.

  He looked up and recognized the other man, the one holding the gun, and tried to cry out to him. Although he trusted no one at this point, he knew that this man with the gun thought that he was rescuing the boy from the clutches of a madman. The man would try to help the boy.

  The man with the screwdriver knew it was too late, knew that they'd tricked him, almost made him kill himself, and now they would descend upon the man with the gun, too, and all would be lost.

  The game was over.

  Now he knew the boy was one of them.

  The boy, who looked just like a boy, a perfect imitation, resembling so closely, in so many insignificant details his own son, looked at him.

  Then the boy turned his head in the direction of the man with the gun and sniffed at the air just like a wild animal detecting its prey.

  The man lay there and for one second, like another scent, came the smell of memory and all that had happened in just a few days, all that had turned him from a sane man into someone who believed that darkness had fallen across the universe.

  He remembered where he had been just a week before, how different things had been, how normal life had seemed, how balanced.

  How unspeakable it had become.

  2

  From the Journals of Joe Gardner when he was eighteen:

  I will not go back to that place as long as I live. It's bad, and everything it touches rots. I don't care if my mother's on her deathbed, I don't care if my dad's being tortured by Nazis, and I don't care if it goes to hell. I know what it can do, that place. I know where it can take you.

  And I'm not ever going back there as long as I live.

  I know what it is.

  It's a hunting ground.

  PART ONE

  YOU ALWAYS RETURN TO YOUR FIRST LOVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  PATTY GLASS AND HER VANISHING ACT

  1

  From the Colony (West Virginia) Press Leader, April, 1972:

  Patricia Frances Glass, 12, is still missing. After thirty-four days, the search has finally been called off.

  2

  The signposts of life are, more often than not, grounded in some simple act; for Patty Glass, in 1972, it was an act that she didn't even know she had participated in.

  It was spring, and the ground was mushy from the rains. There was that swampy smell that always came with the rains, too, like the sewers had begun flowing into the river, and the river had flooded the low ground. Somewhere nearby lay a dead animal, maybe a possum or a raccoon.

  The boys—there were two of them, and two girls, too—wouldn't have minded finding the dead animal and seeing if its guts had been pushed out, because as kids went, they were healthy in their interests, which included some truly repulsive things.

  They'd gone frogging before the sun was up, and Hopfrog already had a big burlap sack full of croakers. Being of insensitive nature, Hopfrog Petersen was going to use the frogs for scare tactics—his mother had an inordinate fear of slimy things, and it was his only way of getting back at her for the damage she was doing to his mind with her religious zeal. Patty was not exactly Hopfrog's girlfriend, but she was one of many seventh graders who had a crush on him. His real name was Homer, which he despised more than wedgies, but in spite of his name and nickname, he was indisputably the handsomest boy in the county, perhaps in the world, at that moment. At least as far as Patty was concerned, he was.

  Hopfrog didn't think much of his own looks, except insofar as he could manipulate people—which, he discovered when he was about five or six, could go a long way in a town like Colony, West Virginia. Florrie Everett, who ran the Five N Dime, would kiss him on the forehead and give him extra candy; the girls all did his homework when it was too difficult for him; even his father, who worked at the furniture factory as a customer service rep, seemed to go easy on him and say, in his defense, "The boy just shines, Boston, you can't get mad at a boy for just shining." (Boston was his mother, and it was her real name.)

  But Hopfrog and Patty were not the only kids on this expedition. Lo and beholden, as Hopfrog's own mother would say in her misuse of language, there, trailing Patty, were Joey Gardner and Missy Welles. Joey loomed over them, a boy doomed to play basketball with all the coordination of a drunk; he was terminally gawky, as far as Hopfrog was concerned. Didn't even like having him along. Joey was okay, on the scale of bullies versus wieners—although he leaned to the wiener side—but he seemed to have terminally bad breath and the beginnings of a problem with BO. Hopfrog Petersen and Joey Gardner were not the best of pals, on top of all this. Hopfrog considered himself a loner, even with the girls flocking after him, and wasn't sure if having someone like Joey along was good for his image. And the only reason Joey was there at all was because (as everyone from fifth grade on had known) Joey had a humongous crush on Missy (whom he called "Melissa") and wouldn't leave her alone. Missy was there because Patty had dragged her along, and they were just about inseparable and often insufferable—well, Hopfrog was quickly becoming a misanthropist in his brief span of years, and was right then wishing that he'd gone frogging all alone.

  They were crossing the old Feely property out on Lone Duck Road and had to take a detour. (Hopfrog being the natural-born leader, he, in fact, led the troop across the back of the old barn, away from the farmhouse windows, so Old Man Feely wouldn't take any shots with rock salt at their vulnerable asses.) There was a slender clutch of woods near the gray-boarded barn, all piney and dark, even in broad daylight—which it was not, being still six a.m. and hardly more than purple light all round. Hopfrog, with Patty Glass clutching his free hand (the other held the croaker sack), followed by Joey and Missy, tramped across the muddy grass that was like Old Man Feely's hair, all thin and droopy, to the woods. Old Man Feely wouldn't even see them in time to go for his shotgun; Hopfrog knew that if they could stay to the northeast of the farm, they would go unseen.

  And as he stepped into the pines, he heard a twig crack in front of him.

  He looked up into the red coal eyes of Old Man Feely, and then noticed the rest of him:
five feet four inches from the ground, fat like a pig at the fair, his overalls half buttoned—Old Man Feely must've been pissing in the woods, 'cause the denim around his crotch was soaked. His plump head was beaded with water, too. In one hand was a bucket full of dark water, in another, his shotgun.

  Hopfrog stood perfectly still, as if it would make him invisible. Joey and Missy and Patty weren't so smart; when Hopfrog looked over his shoulder, finally, everything seemed like it was in slow motion as Joey went running back across the field. Missy and Patty practically clung to each other in terror and shock; it was up to Hopfrog and Hopfrog alone to avert this disaster-in-the-making.

  He turned back to face Old Man Feely.

  He took his croaker sack—all those beautiful bullfrogs, at least a dozen—and tossed it to the old man.

  Old Man Feely dropped his bucket and his gun to catch the croaker sack. Hopfrog turned and pushed Patty and Missy forward and screamed, "Run!" Joey was already ahead of them by about twenty feet. Hopfrog, feeling like he was running through molasses air, pushed at Patty. Missy slipped in the mud, so he grabbed the back of her collar and lifted her up as he ran.

  For just a second he glanced back to Old Man Feely, and it was like looking at a pagan god:

  There was the little man, surrounded by frogs, standing there as if he were summoning all the powers of the universe.

  And then, Old Man Feely went for his shotgun.

  Rain began coming down, and sunlight was coming up, and Hopfrog was sliding across the grass just like he was on his skateboard—

  When he felt something in the seat of his pants—

  Then, he heard the shot—

  Then, and only then, did Hopfrog know he was up shit's creek without a paddle, as the burning salt found the most tender flesh of his posterior.

  He fell.

  3

  Back then, in the early 1970s, Colony was still called, by some of the old-timers, New Colony. A man who claimed he was the incarnation of the prophet Moses had a vision of an angel settling down over the crest of House Mountain in 1723. He and his band of ragged followers started a short-lived colony when the land was still part of the Virginia Colony; then, after the American Revolution, the religious group had disappeared, probably gone farther up into the Malabar Hills; then, New Colony was left to itself to grow wild again, until the next century. The area was reborn as an ill-conceived tobacco plantation that ran from the Paramount River to the north and west sides, all the way southeast to House Mountain, well over a hundred acres, actually. The deed to the plantation, circa 1836, was limited to only a hundred, so that Stephen Friar and his sons lost much of the nine hundred acres they were using free and clear. Then, in the War Between the States, the plantation was destroyed, and the land went bad, which often happens after years of tobacco farming and days of war. The Friar boys were all dead by 1865. The Feelys, the Glasses, and the Reynolds worked what there was of farmland. An unincorporated area had already sprung up, a corners of sorts, owing to a crossroads. Then, a town grew. Some of the land was useful, some useless, as Mennonites came into the valley, and then departed within thirty years, leaving behind farmhouses and furniture. There were the mines, too, across the Paramount River into the Malabars, a few of which had been reduced to high plateaus by strip-mining. The mines, too, had their days, but most of them were abandoned in Colony before Hopfrog and his friends were born, although there were plenty of old-timers still around with cases of black lung and stories of cave-ins and coal-mine canaries that never died. The last mine in town, and the last quarry, failed and closed by the mid-1950s. The furniture market out of West Virginia burst wide open because people in the other states wanted country simplicity, and Colony, the incorporated township, was officially born—a mayor and a police department and a Decency League and everything—after the Colony Furniture Company was formed in 1948 and built the Colony rockers, imitating a simple Mennonite design. These were the rockers that America's grandmothers sank into. This is how towns are born, not from land or water, but from an idea of what to sell to a million people that they don't need but must have anyway.

  After World War Two, Colony seemed to settle into its own routine. The Colony Furniture Company still employed most of the employable residents who had not developed a trade of their own. The miners who wanted to ply their trade headed over to the other side of the Malabars (or "Mallomars," as Joey Gardner called them) and worked rock and cave. The town became a getaway commuter place for people from Charleston who wanted a quieter, gentler life. They even had a train stop, just up from the Miner's Lodge, although the train waited for no man beyond the requisite ten minutes. Main Street was long and flat, and half the shops were boutiques, because of the nearby Civil War battlefield stopover, officially named Flushing Farms, after a previous Mennonite owner, called, more popularly, Fleshling Farms, because of the buried dead. A plaque by the highway read: Two hundred Confederate soldiers died at the battle of Colony, a victory for the Union Army, May 1864. Although West Virginia had separated from the South, the residents of Colony looked more kindly on Lee's Virginia than on Lincoln's Union. There were banks and restaurants, and, clearly, by 1972, when Hopfrog, Joey, Missy, and Patty were twelve, it bore no physical resemblance to the original plantation. Still, its traditions and rituals remained firmly rooted in the memory of tobacco-growing, and there existed a code of honor and the kind of chivalry which is most often spoken of by men and women who dreamed of a world that was long vanished, and possibly never existed.

  As Hopfrog's grandfather often said about Patty Glass, who claimed to be related to Thomas Jefferson by way of uncertain ancestry, "There's lots of mules in this town who spend half their lives braying about how their ancestors were fine Arabians."

  It was Patty that Hopfrog felt sorriest for, of all the girls in school, not just because she was a snob and could trace her ancestry back not only to Jefferson, but the Friar Plantation, as well, but because he knew that she was adopted from an agency in Winston-Salem. This was something they had in common.

  A bond.

  So when he fell in the mud at the Feely place, with rock salt biting his butt, he told her to go on and leave him there, to get the hell out before she got rock salt in her butt, too.

  And, later, he wished he hadn't told her to go.

  Maybe, he thought, just maybe she'd still be alive if I'd held onto her real tight.

  4

  "Patty, Jesus!" Hopfrog pushed at her, but she kept trying to help him up. Rain was coming in sheets now; Joey and Missy had already run off someplace. Damn Patty for staying behind.

  Patty was crying—she always fell apart whenever anything happened that she hadn't anticipated. She was tugging at Hopfrog's sleeve in a feeble attempt to lift him.

  "Get the hell out of here, for Christ's sake!" Hopfrog spat at her. "He's gonna shoot you, too!"

  Patty Glass leaned forward and planted a big kiss right on Hopfrog's mouth; he recoiled, but it felt good. For a second, in the illusion of her kiss, the threat of impending Old Man Feely was gone. The rain dried and the sky became a beautiful blue. But then Patty let go of him, and he slid back into the mud.

  He looked up at her face.

  Between the tears and the rain, she looked as if she were shining with water.

  He heard the frogs croaking behind him.

  "Hopfrog," Patty said, looking down at him, and then up to, presumably, stare into the squash face of Old Man Feely.

  "Just run." Hopfrog gritted his teeth.

  Patty caught her breath, and then ran off. Hopfrog watched her go behind the barn.

  Then he felt the shotgun poking his shoulders.

  "Git up, pig boy," Old Man Feely said.

  Hopfrog pushed himself up from the mud with his hands, and turned to face the man. "I was you, I wouldn't call nobody else a pig," he said.

  Old Man Feely had the gun pointing at Hopfrog's face.

  Hopfrog tried to imagine what rock salt in the nose or on the cheeks might feel li
ke, and he thought of how his face would be scarred, thus taking care of his reputation as the handsomest boy in Colony.

  But there, on Old Man Feely's shoulder, sat a big old bullfrog.

  Hopfrog looked from Feely's face to the frog, and back again.

  They could've been distant cousins, mother's side.

  It was possibly the shittiest day of his life so far, but Hopfrog just couldn't help himself, what with the rain, the rock salt in his rear end, and the frog on Old Man Feely's shoulder; he just got the giggles.

  "What you laughin' at?"

  The giggles had him so hard he couldn't even answer. He fell down in the mud and rolled to the side. "Okay!" he shouted. "Just shoot me, you want, just shoot me!"

  But Old Man Feely would have none of it. "You goddamn kids trespassin' all over my property, I see you back here, I'm gonna put somethin' stronger'n salt in my gun, you hear?" Old Man Feely had the funniest voice; he never spoke without shouting, and there was always something in his shout that was like firecrackers.

  Old Man Feely stomped off towards his farmhouse, and the last Hopfrog saw him, the bullfrog was still sitting up on his shoulder, too.

  Hopfrog watched Feely set his gun down on his porch, and then open the door of the house and go inside.

  He glanced around to try and see if he could salvage any of his croaker sack, but the frogs had generally dispersed in the morning rain.