Norman Partridge - Dark Harvest

But the party doesn’t last long. Not for Jim, anyway. Soon the crowd begins to thin. That hard-ass cop, Jerry Ricks, hustles Jim and his father into the church. The mayor’s inside now; so is the chief of police. The men circle the altar and tie themselves up in a little knot with the minister… and they trade a few words with Jim’s dad… and all of a sudden they’re leaving through the back door with Jim knotted tight in the middle of the pack, as if Houdini himself did the job and did it right.

Jim shoulders into Ricks’s prowl car with the whole bunch of them. They drive across the Line. And you know how Jim feels. He can’t believe it’s all happening quite this fast. He’s really going to get away. He’s really going to get out of this nothing little town, just like that. No final speeches. No testimonial dinner. Not so much as a kiss my ass, really. Hell, Jim didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye to his mom or his little brother. The town doc didn’t even stitch up the gash in his side, or the one on his wrist. He’s still bleeding, now that you mention it.

It all seems crazy. And, of course, it is. Everything around here is crazy. Jim knows that from way back. There’s part of him that trusts that craziness, and it’s the part that tells him this particular brand of insanity is his ticket out of town.

But there’s another part — a smarter part — that tells Jim he shouldn’t trust anything.

Never. Ever. Not around here.

You know which part of Jim is right. And when he finds himself down on his knees in that cornfield with the business end of Jerry Ricks’s.38 pressed against his temple, Jim knows, too.

He’s figured it out, same way they all do.

He’s figured it out, just a little too late.

So there’s poor Jim. He’s finally got a clue. His knees dig divots in the dirt of that field where it always happens. The cold metal circle of a gun barrel presses hard against his gullible head. The men from the Harvester’s Guild form a half-circle in front of him, while a couple of the big ones standing close to Jim’s dad feed the old man that well-practiced line about the biggest sacrifice a man can make . And when Jim’s dad finally breaks down and tries to stop the whole thing it’s way too late, because those guys are built for something besides talking and they wrestle Dan Shepard to the ground and remind him that it’d be pretty easy to dig more than one grave out here tonight — with a little work, they can empty another hole… a smaller hole.

“Hey… you’ve got another son, don’t you, Dan? Richie’s ten, right? You want him to see eleven, don’t you, ol’ buddy?”

There’s not much left after that. The preacher drones on, drawing a diagram that Jim doesn’t even need anymore, getting in a few amens before Ricks pulls the trigger and those two big guys turn Jim’s father loose to cry and babble in the dirt while they get busy with the task of digging a hole.

But, hell, I’m wasting my breath telling you about this stuff. I’m preaching to the choir. After all, you know how it feels to go face down in that hole. You’ve known all along. Because you’re a winner, just like Jim. You’ve been for a ride in that prowl car. You’ve sat shoulder to shoulder with those men. You’ve had the cold barrel of Jerry Ricks’s pistol jammed against the side of your head, and you’ve felt that.38 slug slam through your brainpan and ricochet around in your skull.

You’ve been buried in that black dirt. And you came through the ground the next summer, first a green shoot and then a tendril. You climbed that pole and filled those old clothes, and when Halloween rolled around you were shorn like a winter wind. Someone put a butcher knife in your hand, and you made your way to town the best way you could, and you headed for that old brick church because that’s where they said you had to go.

But you didn’t make it… we never make it. You were brought down by a kid who was just like you. And they ripped you apart in the streets while that kid screamed at the moon, and they shoveled what was left of you into a bag while that kid took a ride in Jerry Ricks’s prowl car, and you rotted in a dumpster while flies circled above and the cold November sun shone down.

That’s the way it is for every winner in this town.

For you. For me. For all of us.

For keeps. For always.

Yeah. It’s always quiet when that first November morning dawns. Quiet through the winter, quiet through the spring. And then it starts up all over again. Summer rolls around, and the farmer who owns that black patch of earth starts watching the ground really closely, waiting for the tendril of a pumpkin plant to break through the rich soil. And when it does, he tends that sprout like a newborn babe until it takes root solidly and reaches for the sun.

He plants a heavy crosspiece in the ground. When the first vine starts to climb, he nails a set of old clothes to that crosspiece and sends the vine burrowing through them. And as the summer winds along, a thing with roots in a dead boy’s corpse grows into those clothes. A vine creeps out the neck and starts to grow a head, which the farmer places on the crown of the pole. And then Halloween night rolls around, and a pale man in a new black car drives out to that field where he shed tears just a year ago, only now he has no more tears to shed. Instead, he has a job to do. So he frees the thing that used to be his son from that pole, and he carves him a face, and he sets him walking on the black road that leads to town.

It happens every year.

It happened tonight.

And now the thing that used to be Jim Shepard is driving down West Orchard in a stolen car, heading for the place he used to call home. And his father is sitting in a darkened church with a shotgun, self-loathing churning in his gut as he waits for his shuffling misfit of a son to step through the creaking door and show its carved-up excuse for a face.

And all the rest of them are out there in the darkness. The other fathers, the other sons. On the wrong side of the tracks, there’s a drunk named McCormick who’s wishing he’d had the guts to stop his kid from walking out the door, because he knows how smart his boy is, and he knows that he’s just the kind of kid who could come out on top on a night like this one.

There’s a kid named Mitch Crenshaw on the other side of the Line in a ditch, crying like a baby because his pitchforked leg and foot are really screwed up and all he can do about it is lie in the mud and bleed and whimper. And over in the poor side of town there’s a kid named Weston lying on some stranger’s lawn, biting back the pain of a shattered kneecap he’s damn well sure won’t be tended until morning. And down that street and around the next corner there’s a kid named Riley who’s been busted in the face with a brakeman’s club, only Riley’s not as smart as Weston. He’s banging on his parents’ door, begging to be let in, but his old man tells him he’d better get back on the streets or else he’ll wind up with a couple of ounces of buckshot in his gutless belly.

And that’s how the lesson is learned around here. Kids in the neighborhoods, bashing Jack o’ Lanterns. Kids on the church steps, waiting with pitchforks and bowie knives. Kids in the streets, chasing shadows. And down at the market, there’s a cop named Jerry Ricks and a couple of other guys loading five dead teenagers into the coroner’s wagon, and a group of kids blow by the parking lot on bicycles, and they whisper, “I hear Sawtooth Jack slaughtered those guys in five seconds flat. He even killed old man Jarrett, and that dirty bastard had a shotgun that was loaded for bear….”

So the story spins on. The boys on those bicycles carry it through the night, and it rides over the tracks and down Main Street, chattering away like playing cards stuck in the spokes of their bicycles.