It Came Out of the Sky”, Creedence Clearwater Revival 12 page

But Ev had known a few fellows who had lived and hunted all their lives in Maine and who still had to be pulled by a search party or who finally made it out on their own only by dumb luck. Delbert McCready, whom Ev had known since childhood, had been none of these. Del had gone into Big Injun Woods with his twelve-gauge on Tuesday, November 10th, 1947. When forty-eight hours had passed and he still hadn't shown up, Mrs McCready called Alf Tremain, who in those days had been the constable. A search party of twenty went into the woods where the Nista Road petered out at the Diamond Gravel Pit, and by the end of the week it had swelled to two hundred.

They were just about to give Del—whose daughter was, of course, Hazel McCready—up for lost when he stumbled out of the woods along the course of Preston Stream, pale and dazed and twenty pounds lighter than he had been when he went in.

Ev visited him in the hospital. “How'd it happen, Del? Night was clear. Stars were out. You can read the stars, can't you?”

“Ayuh.” Del looked deeply ashamed. “Always could, anyway.”

“And the moss. “Twas you who told me about how to read north by the moss on the trees when we was kids.”

“Ayuh,” Del repeated. Just that. Ev gave him time, then pressed.

“Well, what happened?”

For a long time Del still said nothing. Then, in a voice which was almost inaudible, he said: “I got turned around.”

Ev let the silence spin out, as difficult as that was.

“Everything was all right for a while,” Del resumed at last. “I hunted most of the morning but didn't see no fresh sign. I sat down and ate m'dinner and had a bottle of my ma's beer. Made me sleepy and I napped. I had some funny dreams... can't remember “em, but I know they was funny. And, look! This happened while I was sleepin”.”

Del McCready raised his upper lip and showed Ev a hole there.

“Lost a tooth?”

“Ayuh... it was layin in the crotch of m'pants when I woke up. Fell out when I was sleepin”, I guess, but I ain't hardly ever had any trouble with my teeth, at least not since that one wisdom tooth got impacted and damn near killed me. By then it coming on dark

“Dark!”

“I know how it sounds, don't you worry,” Del said crossly—but it was the crossness of someone who is deeply ashamed. “I just slept all the afternoon away, and when I got up, Ev—”

His eyes rolled up to meet Ev's for one miserable second and then shifted away, as if he could not bear to look his old friend in the eye for longer than that one second.

“It was like somethin” stole m'brains. The tooth fairy, mayhap.”

Del laughed, but there hadn't been much humor in the sound. “I wandered around for a while, thinking I was following the polestar, and when I still hadn't come out on the Hammer Cut Road by nine o'clock or so, I kinda rubbed my eyes and saw it wasn't Polaris at all, but one of the planets—Mars or Sat'n, I guess. I laid down to sleep, and until I came out along Preston Stream a week later, I don't remember nothing but little bits and pieces.”

“Well...” Ev halted. lt sounded entirely unlike Del, whose head was as level as a carpenter's plane. “Well, was you panicked, Del?”

Del's eyes rolled up to meet Ev's, and they were still ashamed, but there was also a leaven of real humor in them now. “A man can't stay in a panic for a whole week, I don't b'lieve,” he said dryly. “It's awful tirin”.”

“So you just...”

“I just,” Del agreed, “but just what, I don't know. I know that when I woke up from that nap my feet and my ass was both asleep and all numb, and I know that in one of those dreams it seemed like I heard somethin” hummin'—the way you can hear power lines hum on a still day, you know—and that's all. I forgot all m'woodcraft and wandered around in the woods like somebody who'd never even seen the woods before. When I hit Preston Stream I knew enough to follow it out, and I woke up in here, and I guess I'm a laughingstock in town, but I'm grateful to be alive. It's God's mercy that I am.”

“You ain't a laughingstock, Del,” Ev said, and of course that was a lie, because that was exactly what Del was. He worked at overcoming it for nearly five years, and when he saw for sure that the barbershop wits were never going to let him live it down, he moved up to East Eddington and opened a combination garage and small engine-repair shop. Ev still got up to see him once in a while, but Del didn't come down to Haven much anymore. Ev guessed he knew why.

Sitting in his rented room, Ev closed the compass up as tight as it would go and drew the tiniest circle yet, the smallest the compass would make. There was only one house inside this marble-sized circle, and he thought: That house is the closest one there is to the center of Haven. Funny I never thought about it before.

It was the old Garrick place, sitting there on Derry Road with Big Injun Woods widening out behind it.

Should have drawn this last circle in red, if no other.,

Frank's niece, Bobbi Anderson, lived on the Garrick place now—not that she farmed, of course; she wrote books. Ev hadn't passed many words with Bobbi, but she had a good reputation in town. She paid her bills on time, folks said, and didn't gossip. Also, she wrote good old western stories that you could really sink your teeth into, not all full of make-believe monsters and a bunch of dirty words, like the books that fellow who lived up Bangor way wrote. Goddam good westerns, people said.

Especially for a girl.

People in Haven felt good about Bobbi Anderson, but of course she'd just been in town for thirteen years and people would have to wait and see. Garrick, most agreed, had been as crazy as a shithouse rat. He always brought in a good garden, but that didn't change his mental state. He was always trying to tell someone about his dreams. They were usually about the Second Coming. After a while it got so that even Arlene Cullum, who sold Amway with the zeal of a Christian martyr, would make herself scarce when she saw Frank Garrick's truck (plastered with bumper stickers which said things like IF THE RAPTURE'S TODAY SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL) driving down the village's Main Street.

In the late sixties, the old man had gotten a bee in his bonnet about flying saucers. Something about Elijah seeing a wheel within a wheel, and being taken up to heaven by angels driving chariots of fire powered by electromagnetism. He had been crazy, and he had died of a heart attack in 1975.

But before he died, Ev thought with rising coldness, he lost all his teeth. I noticed it, and I remember Justin Hurd just down the road commenting on it and... and now Justin's the closest, except for Bobbi herself, that is, and Justin also wasn't what you'd call a model of sanity and reason. Few times I saw him before I left, he even reminded me of old Frank.

It was odd, he thought at first, that he had never put together the run of peculiar things that had happened within those two inner circles before, that no one had. Further reflection made him decide it really wasn't so strange, after all. A life -particularly a long one—was composed of millions of events; they made a crowded tapestry with many patterns woven into it. Such a pattern as this—the deaths, the murders, the lost hunters, crazy Frank Garrick, maybe even that queer fire at the Paulsons'—only showed up if you were looking for it. Once seen, you wondered how you could have missed it. But if you weren't...

And now a new thought dawned on him: Bobbi Anderson was perhaps not all right. He remembered that since the beginning of July, perhaps even before, there had been sounds of heavy machinery coming from Big Injun Woods. Ev had heard the sounds and dismissed them—Maine was heavily forested, and the sounds were all too familiar. New England Paper doing a spot of logging on its land, most likely.

Except, now that he thought about it—now that he had seen the pattern

Ev realized that the sounds weren't deep enough in the woods to be on NEP's land -those sounds were coming from the Garrick place. And he also realized that the earlier sounds—the cycling, waspy whine of a chainsaw, the crackle-crunch of failing trees, the coughing roar of a gas-powered chipper—had given way to sounds he didn't associate with woods work at all. The later sounds had been... what? Earth-moving machinery, perhaps.

Once you saw the pattern, things fell into place like the last dozen pieces going effortlessly into a big jigsaw puzzle.

Ev sat looking down at the map and the circles. A dark, numbing horror seemed to be filling his veins, freezing him from the inside out.

Once you saw the pattern, you couldn't help seeing it.

Ev slammed the atlas shut and went to bed.

Where he was unable to sleep.

What are they doing down there tonight? Building things? Making people disappear? What?

Every time he drifted near sleep, an image came: of everyone in Haven Village standing in Main Street with drugged, dreamy expressions on their faces, all of them looking southwest, toward those sounds, like Muslims facing Mecca to pray.

Heavy machinery... earth-moving machinery.

As the pieces went into the puzzle, you began to see what it was, even if there was no picture on the box to help you. Lying in this narrow bed not far from where Hilly lay in his coma, Ev Hillman thought he saw the picture pretty well. Not all of it, mind you, but a lot. He saw it and knew perfectly well no one would believe him. Not without proof. And he dared not go back, dared not put himself in their reach. They would not let him go a second time.

Something. Something out in Big Injun Woods. Something in the ground, something on the land Frank Garrick had willed to his niece, who wrote those western books. Something that knocked compasses and human minds galley-west if you got too close. For all Ev knew, there might be such strange deposits all over the earth. If it did nothing else, it might explain why people in some places seemed so goddam pissed off all the time. Something bad. Haunted. Maybe even accursed.

Ev stirred restlessly, rolled over, looked at the ceiling.

Something had been in the earth. Bobbi Anderson had found it and she was digging it up, her and that fellow who was staying out at the farm with her. That fellow's name was... was...

Ev groped, but couldn't come up with it. He remembered the way Beach Jernigan's mouth had thinned down when the subject of Bobbi's friend came up one day in the Haven Lunch. The regulars on coffee break had just observed the man coming out of the market with a bag of groceries. He had a place over in Troy, Beach said; a shacky little place with a woodstove and plastic over the windows.

Someone said he'd heard the fella was educated.

Beach said an education never kept anyone from being no-account.

No one in the Lunch had argued the point, Ev remembered.

Nancy Voss had been equally disapproving. She said Bobbi's friend had shot his wife but had been let off because he was a college professor. “If you got a sheepskin written in Latin words in this country, you can get away with anything,” she had said.

They had watched the fellow get into Bobbi's truck and drive back toward the old Garrick place.

“I heard he done majored in drinkin',” old Dave Rutledge said from the end stool that was his special place. “Everyone goes out there says he's most allus drunk as a coon on stump-likker.”

There had been a burst of mean, gossipy country laughter at that. They hadn't liked Bobbi's friend; none had. Why? Because he had shot his wife? Because he drank? Because he was living with a woman he wasn't married to? Ev knew better. There had been men in the Lunch that day who had not just beaten their wives but beaten them into entirely new shapes. Out here it was part of the code: you were obligated to put one upside the old woman's head if she “got sma'at.” Out here were men who lived on beer from eleven in the morning until six at night and cheap greenfront whiskey from six to midnight and would drink Old Woodsman flydope strained through a snotrag if they couldn't afford whiskey. Men who had the sex lives of rabbits, jumping from hole to hole. And what had his name been?

Ev drifted toward sleep. Saw them standing on the sidewalks, on the lawn of the public library, over by the little park, staring dreamily toward those sounds. Snapped awake again.

What did you find out, Ruth? Why did they murder you?

He tossed onto his left side.

David's alive... but to bring him back I have to start in Haven.

He tossed onto his right side.

They'll kill me if I go back. There was once a time when I was almost as well-liked there as Ruth herself... least, I always liked to think so. Now they hate me. I saw it in their eyes the night they started looking for David. I took

Hilly out because he was sick and needed a doctor, yes... but it was damned good to have a reason to go. Maybe they only let me go because David distracted them. Maybe they just wanted to be rid of me. Either way, I was lucky to get out. I'd never get out again. So how can I go back? I can't.

Ev tossed and turned, caught on the horns of two imperatives—he would have to go back to Haven if he wanted to rescue David before David died, but if he went back to Haven he would be killed and buried quickly in someone's back field.

Sometime shortly before midnight, he fell into a troubled doze which quickly deepened into the dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion.

He slept later than he had in years, awakening on Tuesday morning at a quarter past ten. He felt refreshed and whole for the first time in a long while. The sleep had done him a power of good, too: during it he had thought of how he could maybe get back into Haven and out again. Maybe. For David's sake, and Hilly's, that was a risk he would take.

He thought he could get in and out of Haven on the day of Ruth McCausland's funeral.

Butch “Monster” Dugan was the biggest man Ev had ever seen. Ev believed that Justin Hurd's father Henry might have been within a shout—Henry had stood six-six, weighed three hundred and eighty pounds, and had shoulders so broad he had to go through most doors sideways—but Ev thought this fellow was a tad bigger. Twenty or thirty pounds lighter, maybe, but that was all.

When Ev shook his hand, he saw that word on him had been getting around. lt was in Dugan's face.

“Sit down, Mr Hillman,” Dugan said, and seated himself in a swivel chair that looked as if it might have been rammed out of a huge oak. “What can I do for you?”

He expects me to start raving, Ev thought calmly, just the way we always expected Frank Garrick to start when he caught up to one of us on the street. And I guess I ain't going to disappoint him. But if you step careful, Ev, you may still get your way. You know now where you want to go, anyway.

“Well, maybe you could do something, at that,” Ev said. At least he hadn't been drinking; trying to talk to that reporter after those beers had been a bad mistake. “Paper says you'll be going to Ruth McCausland's funeral tomorrow.”

Dugan nodded. “I'm going. Ruth was a personal friend.”

“And there are others from Derry barracks that'll be going? Paper said her husband was a trooper, and she was in the line of policework herself—oh bein a town constable's no great shakes, I know, but you get what I mean. There will be others, won't there?”

Dugan was frowning now, and he had a lot of face to frown with.

“Mr Hillman, if you have a point to make, I'm not getting it.” And I'm a busy man this morning, in case you didn't know it, his face added. I've got two cops missing, it's starting to look more and more like they ran into some guys jacking deer and the jackers panicked and shot them; I'm in the hot-seat on that one, and on top of it all my old friend Ruth McCausland has died, and I don't have either the time or the patience for bullshit.

“I know you're not. But you will. Did she have other friends who'll be going?”

“Yes. Half a dozen or more. I'm going by myself, starting a little early, so I can talk to some people about a related case.”

Ev nodded. “I know about the related case,” he said, “and I guess you know about me. Or think you do.”

“Mr Hillman—”

“I have talked foolishly, and to the wrong people, and at the wrong times,” Ev said in that same calm voice. “Under other circumstances I would known better, but I've been upset. One of my grandsons is missing. The other is in a sort of coma.”

“Yes. I know.”

“I've been so confused I haven't really known if I was comin” or goin”. So I blabbed to some of the nurses, and then I went up to Bangor and talked to a reporter. Bright. I kind of got the idea you'd heard most of the things I had to say to him.”

“I understand you believe there was some sort of... of conspiracy in the matter of David Brown's disappearance—”

Ev had to struggle to keep from laughing. The word was both bizarre and apt. He never would have thought of it himself. Oh, there was a conspiracy going on, all right. One hell of a conspiracy.

“Yessir. I believe there was a conspiracy, and I think you've got three cases that are a lot more related than you understand—the disappearance of my grandson, the disappearance of those two troopers, and the death of Ruth McCausland—my friend as well as yours.”

Dugan looked a bit startled... and for the first time that dismissive look went out of his eyes. For the first time Ev felt that Dugan was really seeing him. Everett Hillman, instead of just some crazy old rip who had blown in to fart away part of his morning.

“Perhaps you'd better give me the gist of what you believe,” Dugan said, and took out a pad of paper.

“No. You can just put that pad away.”

Dugan looked at him silently for a moment. He didn't put the pad away, but he put down the pencil.

“Bright thought I was crazy, and I didn't tell him half of what I thought,”

Ev said, “so I ain't going to tell you any. But here's the thing—I think David's still alive. I don't think he's in Haven anymore, but I think if I went back there I might be able to get an idea on where he is. Now, I have reasons—pretty good ones, I think—to believe that I'm not wanted in Haven. I have reasons to think that if I went back there under most circumstances, I'd most likely disappear like David Brown. Or have an accident like Ruth.”

Butch Dugan's face changed. “I think,” he said, “I got to ask you to explain that, Mr Hillman.”

“I ain't going to. I can't. I know what I know, and believe what I believe, but I ain't got a speck of proof. I know how crazy I must sound, but if you look into my face, you'll know one thing, at least: I believe what I'm saying.”

Dugan sighed. “Mr Hillman, if you were in this business, you'd know how sincere most liars look.” Ev started to say something and Dugan shook his head. “Forget that. Cheap shot. I've only had about six hours” sleep since Sunday night. I'm getting too old for these marathons. Fact is, I do believe you're sincere. But you're only making ominous sounds, talking around the edges of things. Sometimes people do that when they're scared, but mostly they do it when edges are all they have. Either way, I haven't got time to woo you. I answered your questions; maybe you'd better state your business.”

“Glad to. I came here for two reasons, Trooper Dugan. First one was to make sure there was going to be a lot of cops in Haven tomorrow. Things are less likely to happen when there are a lot of cops around, don't you agree?”

Dugan said nothing, only looked at Ev expressionlessly.

“Second was to tell you I'll be in Haven tomorrow too. I won't be at Ruth's funeral, though. I'm going to have a Very pistol with me, and if, during that funeral, you or any of your men should see a big old star-shell go off in the sky, you'll know I have run afoul of some of that craziness no one will believe. Do you follow me?”

“You said going back to Haven might be... uh, unhealthy for you.” Dugan's face was still blank, but that didn't matter; Ev knew he had gone back to his original idea: Ev was crazy, after all.

“Under most circumstances, I said. Under these circumstances, I think I can get away with it. Ruth was loved in Haven, which is a fact I don't think I have to tell you. Most of the town will turn out to see her into the ground. I don't know if they still loved her when she died, but that don't matter—they'll turn out anyway.”

“How do you figure that?” Dugan asked. “Or is that another one of those things you don't want to talk about?”

“No, I don't mind. lt would look wrong if they didn't turn out.”

“To who?”

“To you. To the other policemen who were friends to her and her husband. To the pols from the Penobscot County Democratic Committee. Why, “twouldn't surprise me if Congressman Brennan sent someone up from Augusta—she worked awful hard for him when he run for office in Washington. She wasn't just local, y'see, and that's part of what they got to deal with.

They're like people who don't want to throw a party but who are stuck doing it just the same. I'm hoping they'll be so busy making things look right—with putting on a good show—that they'll not even know I've been in Haven until I'm gone.”

Butch Dugan crossed his arms over his chest. Ev had been close to the truth—at first Dugan had indulged himself in the fancy that David Bright, who was usually an extremely accurate interpreter of human behavior, had been wrong this time; Hillman was as sane as he was. Now he was mildly disturbed, not because Hillman had turned out to be crazy after all, but because he had turned out to be really crazy. And yet... there was something oddly persuasive in the old man's calm, reasonable voice and his steady gaze.

“You speak as if everyone in Haven was in on something,” Dugan said, land I think that's impossible. I want you to know that.”

“Yes, any normal person would say that. That's how they've been able to get away with it this long. Fifty years ago, people felt like the atomic, bomb was impossible, and they would have laughed at the idea of TV, let alone a video recorder. Not much changes, Trooper Dugan. Most people see as far as the horizon, and that's all. If someone says there's something over it, people don't listen.”

Ev stood up and extended his hand over Dugan's desk, as if he had every right in the world to expect Dugan to shake it. Which surprised Butch into doing just that.

“Well, I knew when I looked at you that you thought I was nuts,” Ev said with a rueful little smile, “and I guess I have said enough to double the idea. But I've found out what I needed to know, and said what I needed to say. Do an old man a favor, and peek at the sky once in a while. If you see a purple star-shell...”

“The woods are dry this summer,” Dugan said, and even as the words came out of his mouth they seemed helpless and oddly unimportant; almost frivolous. And he realized he was being drawn helplessly toward belief again.

Dugan cleared his throat and pushed on.

“If you've really got a flare-gun, using it could start a hell of a forest fire. If you don't have a permit to use such a thing—and I know goddam well you don't—it could get you thrown into jail.”

Ev's grin widened a little, but there was still no humor in it. “If you see the star-shell,” he said, “I got a feeling that being thrown into the pokey up to Bangor is gonna be the least of my worries. Good day to you, Trooper Dugan.”

Ev stepped out and closed the door neatly behind him. Dugan stood for a moment, as perplexed and uneasy as he had ever been in his life. Let him go, he thought, and then got moving.

Something had been troubling Butch Dugan. The disappearance of the two troopers, both of whom he had known and liked, had temporarily driven it out of his mind. Hillman's visit had brought it back, and that was what sent him after the old man.

It was the memory of his last conversation with Ruth. He had been worried about her even before then; her handling of the David Brown search hadn't been like the Ruth McCausland he knew at all. For the only time he could remember, she had been unprofessional.

Then, the night before she died, he had called her about the investigation, to get information and to give it; to kibbitz, in short. He knew neither of them had anything, but sometimes you could spin something out of plain speculation, like straw into gold. In the course of that conversation, the subject of the boy's grandfather had come up. By then Butch had spoken to David Bright of the News -had had a beer with him, in fact—and he passed on to Ruth Ev's idea that the whole town had gone crazy in some strange way.

Ruth hadn't laughed at the story, or clucked over the failure of Ev Hillman's mind, as he had expected she would do. He wasn't sure just what she had said, because just about then the connection had begun to get bad—not that there was anything very unusual in that; most of the lines going into small towns like Haven were still on poles, and the connections regularly went to hell—all it took was a high wind to make you feel like you and the other person were holding tomato soup cans connected by a length of waxed string.

Better tell him to stay away, Ruth had said—he was sure of that much. And then, just before he lost her altogether, it seemed to him that she had said something about—of all things—nylon stockings. He must have heard her wrong, but there was no mistaking the tone—sadness and great weariness, as if her failure to find David Brown had taken all the heart out of her. A moment later the connection had broken down completely. He hadn't bothered to call her back because he had given her all the information he had... precious little, really.

The next day she was dead.

Better tell him to stay away. That much he was sure of.

Now, I have reasons... to believe that I'm not wanted in Haven.

Tell him to stay away.

I might disappear like David Brown.

Stay away.

Or have an accident like Ruth McCausland.

Away.

He caught up to the old man in the parking lot.

Hillman had an old purple Valiant with badly rusted rocker panels. He looked up, driver's-side door open, as Dugan loomed over him.

“I'm coming with you tomorrow.”

Ev's eyes widened. “You don't even know where I'm going!”

“No. But if I'm with you I won't have to worry that you're going to set half the woods in eastern Maine on fire trying to send me a message like Double-O-Seven.”

Ev looked at him consideringly, and then shook his head. “I'd feel better having someone with me,” he said, “especially a guy as big as Gorilla Monsoon who packs a gun. But they ain't stupid in Haven, Officer Dugan. They never were, and I got a feeling that they're a lot less stupid just lately. They expect to see you at her funeral. If they don't, they're going to be suspicious.”

“Christ! I'd like to know how the hell you can stand there babbling all that crazy shit and sound so fucking sane!”

“Maybe because you know too,” Ev said. “How funny it is. How funny all of these things started in Haven.” Then with a prescience that was startling, he added: “Or maybe you knew Ruth well enough yourself to sense she'd gotten off-kilter.”

The two men stood looking at each other in the graveled parking lot of the Derry barracks, the sun beating down on them, their shadows, clear and black, slanting out neatly at two o'clock.

“I'll let on tonight that I'm sick,” Dugan said. “That I've got stomach flu. It's been going around the barracks. What do you think?”

Ev nodded with sudden relief—that relief was so great it was startling. The idea of sneaking back into Haven had frightened him more than he had been willing to let on, especially to himself. He had half-convinced this big cop that something might be going on there; he could see it in his face. Half-convinced wasn't much, maybe, but it was still a giant step forward from where he had been. And of course, he hadn't done it alone; Ruth McCausland had helped.

“All right,” he said, “but listen to me, Trooper Dugan, and listen good, because our lives could depend on it tomorrow. Don't you call up any of the men who'll be going to the funeral tomorrow and tell them the reason you're not going to be there is just a gag you're running. Call up a few people tonight and tell them you really are just as sick as a dog, that you hope you are going to be able to make it, but you doubt it.”

Dugan frowned. “Why would you want me to say—'But suddenly he knew, and his mouth dropped open. The old man stared back at him calmly enough.

“Christ Jesus, are you telling me that you think the people in Haven are mind-readers? That if my men knew I really wasn't sick, the people in town could pick the news right out of their heads?”

“I ain't telling you a thing, Trooper Dugan,” Ev said. “You are telling me.”

Mr Hillman, I really think that you must be imagining—”

I never expected you'd want to come with me when I came to see you. I wasn't angling for it, either. The most I hoped for was that you'd keep an eye out and see my flare if I got in trouble, and that would at least keep the heat on that nest of snakes down there a while longer. But if you offer a man more, he wants more. Trust me a little further. Please. For Ruth's sake... if that's what it takes to convince you to come with me, I'm willing to use it. Something else: no matter what, you're going to feel some peculiar things tomorrow.”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 524