Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

“Not everybody can say that.”

“Not everyone would want to.”

She trembled at that, holding in the rancid laughter, but that sharp, clacking noise still rustled and rattled from her chest. Her hands came up in small balled fists and made him think of an excited child wanting candy. “But what if nobody killed your baby sister up on that bad road, Shad Jenkins? What if sweet Megan did go to sleep in the Lord’s arms like they say? What if you never got nobody to blame?”

“When I’m satisfied I’ll let it go.”

“And if it’s not to be?”

“Do you always ask this many questions of the people who come to ask you questions?”

She pursed her gray lips. “Yuh.”

Okay, she was finally getting under his skin a little. “Do you accept it, M’am? That a seventeen-year-old girl’s heart just stops out in the low hills? In a spot she’s got no reason to be?”

The question took her back with a hint of sour amusement. “Asking my opinion, are you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Heh. Been a while since anyone asked me my consideration on a subject. They want answers and blessings and ways to fend off spells. And fatter calves.”

So maybe it threw her, having somebody in front of her who didn’t bootlick. “Tell me about that place.”

M’am fidgeted in her chair like she might want to hop off. Shad didn’t know whether to help or not. He heard her ancient knees pop and winced at the sound, but she soon settled.

“I used to go up there with my ma and pa on Sunday afternoons after church. Dressed in pink with pretty bows in my blond hair. Hard to picture now, but so it was. Mama’d sing ‘Gather at the River’ while Daddy praised the Lord the whole ride up the mountain. In an ox wagon.” She smiled, and he saw that, brown and crooked as some of her teeth were, she still had all of them. “But those hills were cross. Peevish. The land’s got a taste for us.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Quiet now, you asked and I’m saying. So listen.”

M’am Luvell pulled a wooden match from beneath her afghan and snapped her jagged thumbnail against it. She relit her pipe and allowed the seconds to roll by while she drew in a long, wheezing lungful of weed.

“We fed the gorge our ill and our hated, and now the ground’s sick and full of scorn. It’s hungry, but fickle. Storms come out of nowhere. Winds that’ll take a man off his feet and hurl him into the chasm. There’s outrage up that way, in those woods. It took my ma when I was but a girl a’four.”

“Wraiths?” Shad asked. “That played with you first before they chased and bit your legs?” He said it without judgment or presumption.

“It’s the reason why I never grew none. The young’un spoke out of turn. But she did no more than declare the truth. As do I.”

Shad stared at her.

“You understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

“But don’t that threaten you none, boy? What you might find if you go digging in bitter soil?”

He shrugged. “There’s evil everywhere.”

The bullfrogs kept roaring, finding a nice contrapuntal harmony. Shad studied the old woman, trying to figure out if he was missing something here or if maybe she was. It didn’t much matter one way or the other. She tilted her head again, this time in the opposite direction, waiting for him to ask something else, but he didn’t see a point anymore. He walked out.

YOU LEARNED TO PAY HEED TO THE DEAD breath on your neck.

Shad had gotten away without much trouble in the slam, but he’d still tapped into the sensibility of always having danger at hand. Knowing it was always out there, an inch to your left. You always had to be careful, never think you were one of the blessed, like you couldn’t be touched. You could only be so stupid before you deserved to get taken out. Some cons thought their silver-tongued charm might be a defense, as if the charisma that made women giggle and bat their eyelashes on the outside could actually make the gen pop like them behind bars.

Usually the violence wasn’t aimed at Shad, but it sometimes got close enough that another man’s blood wound up on the front of his shirt. His first week inside it happened twice on the cafeteria line when the guy standing directly in front of him had been attacked.

One got a sharpened toothbrush in his right ass cheek. Four days later the other took a seven-inch length of shower pipe upside the head. Both of them had walked to the infirmary under their own power, but it did a quick job of fine-tuning Shad’s slam instincts.

A few of the guys on C-Block started calling him a jonah. That only helped to steer everyone clear. They laughed it off but it was constantly in the back of their minds, as they watched Shad standing there with another con’s blood on his clothes, knowing he had nothing to do with it. Being in the wrong place at the worst time.

Like all institutions, the joint had plenty of its own irrational and arbitrary beliefs. You had to study on how to live within them.

If you did damage, or had harm done to you, that was one thing. But if you were drawing the bad luck toward you, and it missed and nabbed the guy on your left, then you got a different kind of mark. Some of these men had been in Vietnam, a few of the old-timers in Korea, and they still had this war mentality that the new meat would cause the most damage because he didn’t know where to step.

The Haitians and Mexicans were especially superstitious and gave a wide berth to Shad most of the time. Except for this one inmate called Little Pepe-Pepito-a five-foot-nothing monstrosity as wide as he was tall, with immense tattooed arms so huge they didn’t look real.

Pepito got it into his head that Shad was giving him the evil eye, putting some kind of curse on him and his tribe. It had to do with Shad’s books and always being in the library. Pepito figured there was a great amount of mystical knowledge and conjurings that could be found if you knew how to use the Dewey Decimal System properly. He thought Shad was a witch.

Little Pepe considered himself an honorable man. He was in for strangling his sister’s husband with a Venetian blinds cord because the guy raised his voice at the dinner table, played poker, occasionally spanked his seven kids, and had taken too big a bite out of a coke deal they were in on together. Pepito’s nephews and nieces were everything to him, and it still grated his soul a bit that he’d killed their father in front of them on Easter. Pepito was a stand-up guy if you caught him on the right day.

His indignation remained righteous. He had a family to protect inside the slam as well as out. Even though the leader of his tribe had turned down Little Pepe’s request to shank the witch, he planned to do it anyway. On the cafeteria line, where the spells seemed to be landing on others.

Shad had a copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz in his back pocket, which, he realized too late, also miffed the Aryans, but not enough for them to take a poke at him. He had just received the second of Elfie Danforth’s letters, and it held his place about halfway through the book.

He could already feel himself being forgotten by her, and was saddened by the fact that he didn’t really mind. Her cursive script had a stop-and-go jitter to it, as if she had to walk away every few sentences and come back later after thinking up something else to tell him. She mainly wrote about people and events that didn’t matter to him and never would. She asked him nothing. He thought about the determination it took to go through four pages to your lover and not ask a single question.

A new resolve had begun to fill him in the slam-as his detachment from the hollow continued to change him into some new version of himself.