The Folks Read online

  It fit the holiday, though. A black, twisted Halloween forest with fangs of gray rock.

  Near the half-way mark, the charred surroundings gave way to green. Once in Pinecrest, you couldn’t tell anything was different. You couldn’t tell it was Halloween, either. The holiday was not celebrated in The Village, was not even acknowledged. No carved pumpkins or black and orange crepe paper, not in a Village of fundamentalist Christians. The only thing out of the ordinary around the Village that Halloween were all the red, white, and blue VOTE BUSH/CHENEY and BUSH/CHENEY 2000 signs.

  I drove by the college, which crept up a hillside, blocks of buildings at a time. The administration building and science building were all you could see of the school from the bottom. The rest of it disappeared into the trees. There was no doubt that it was there, however. Just behind the large granite sign at the foot of the hill, with CHRISTIAN COLLEGE OF THE HAND OF GOD carved into it, stood the college’s pride and joy: a twelve-foot-tall wood carving of Jesus Christ on the cross. It had been carved in 1894 by Lawrence Bollinger and given to the brand new school as a gift. The years had not been kind to Jesus. That giant crucifix had long been the subject of pranks and acts of vandalism. During my first week as a student there, someone had dressed the dying savior in a fishing cap, sunglasses, and a white T-shirt with bold writing on the front: My dad’s in heaven, and all I got was this lousy crucifixion. The perpetrator was caught and promptly expelled.

  Bollinger. If you go into the Mount Crag Public Library and swing a dead cat—something they don’t happen to encourage there—you’ll hit a book with that name in it.

  The family goes back to Columbus. They were thought to be among the first “hillbillies,” which they had remained for a very long time. Until one of them stumbled onto some oil.

  They were rich overnight. Just like the Clampetts. No one was sure how much of the mountainous land the Bollinger’s owned, but it was a lot. Maybe all of it. Anything that happened in that area—including the long-ago building of a secluded Christian college—happened only with the permission of the Bollingers. The family had donated a lot of money to the college over the years, although no Bollinger had ever enrolled. They were everywhere, and yet, with the exception of Amanda, were never seen. Evidence of their existence, their wealth and influence, could be found at nearly every turn, but no one knew what they looked like. Their names appeared in books on local history, on memorial plaques, on a small theater for the performing arts in town, but the family itself remained invisible, locked up in their great, sprawling, mountainside home.

  Two

  “Hi, Grandma,” I said as I entered the living room.

  She made a sound behind closed lips. That was all she’d been doing since I left school—making vaguely responsive noises, an occasional monosyllabic answer to a question. But we didn’t talk anymore. She no longer sat down and asked how my day was, or asked me to taste things while she was cooking. I had let her down.

  But I did not let that keep me from talking. I refused to play her little game and talked to her as if nothing had changed. Drove her nuts, I think.

  “How’s it going?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for a response. “Did you meet with the Floral Committee this morning? Red said he saw you over at the church when he was towing a car earlier.”

  She nodded, rocking in her chair. In her large lap, she held an open Bible and some church literature, and held a magnifying glass in her right hand over the Bible. I once asked her why she didn’t get a Bible with larger print, and she said, “Then the letters would be too big through my magnifying glass.”

  Scratchy church music played on her ancient record player, which she still called a phonograph. Piano and strings and some kind of flute. There was always music coming from somewhere in the Village, and it was always depressing and bloody and full of death.

  Fortunately, I could not hear it from my apartment over the garage. It was my refuge. I had everything I needed there. A bed, all my books, a small refrigerator, which I kept locked, to keep beer cold and hidden from Grandma, and a television and VCR.

  There was no cable in the Village because there was no demand for it. I had rigged an antenna up on the roof from my window, but it made little difference; reception had never been very good there. But when stations did come in, they were interesting and varied. Sometimes, there would be a period of a few days when I could pick up as many as a dozen channels. A few of them would play only old black-and-white shows, even with old black-and-white commercials, while others would broadcast in foreign languages.

  Once, I found Sumo wrestling on one station and a gloomy, poorly shot cockfight on another. One station seemed to play nothing but old news footage about the assassination of President Kennedy.

  “Don’t worry about me for dinner, Grandma,” I called from the kitchen as I poked around in the refrigerator. “I’m going down the hill to help with the Halloween celebration.” I scooped some left-over bean-and-corn casserole onto a paper plate. “With a kill—er, um, somebody, y’know, killing people out there, they need enough people to keep the kids supervised and occu—”

  I turned around and she was standing right there in front of me and it scared me so much, I yelped like a dog and dropped the casserole on the paper plate to the floor.

  She hardly seemed to notice.

  “You went to the funeral?” she asked, looking disapprovingly at the black jeans I wore with my coat and tie.

  I took a deep breath and gave myself a moment to get my bearings again. “Yes. It was just a graveside service, but there were a lot of people there.”

  Grandma was pear-shaped and slightly stooped. Very grandmotherly. Until she started talking religion. She shook her head slowly and said, “It’s the work of the devil, Andrew.”

  I had been waiting for that. I smiled and said, “I’m not helping the devil tonight, Grandma, I’m helping the kids.”

  She squinted through her glasses a moment, then clicked her tongue. “Not that, I’m not talking about that.” Her dentures clacked together. “I’m talking about the killings. They’re the work of the devil. Or maybe they’re the work of God. Trying to test us, somehow. Trying to tell us something. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.” She reached out, closed a knobby, arthritic hand on my upper arm. “That’s why we gotta be diligent, Andrew, honey. And that’s why you never shoulda dropped out of school. You were meant to go to that school and learn God’s word. There wasn’t a single killing the whole time you were enrolled at Hand of God. No one went missing. No one just dropped off the face of God’s earth like they never was. Everything was nice, and the only funeral was from natural causes.”

  I tried not to laugh. “Well, the stock market didn’t crash, either, but that doesn’t make me Alan Greenspan. Grandma, don’t you think that’s a little—”

  “Wait till people start to see,” she went on. “Wait till all your friends down the hill figure it out. They’ll start to suspect you.”

  I let the laugh come that time and her hand dropped from my arm. “Grandma, my friends don’t think that way!”

  “Oh, yes, they do,” she said as she turned and left the kitchen. “They just do it for the wrong side.”

  Either Grandma was suddenly losing her mind very quickly, or she was having one of her biblical brainstorms. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the two.

  When Grandma first took me into her care, I thought she seemed so sad because of what had happened to Mom, her daughter. As I got older, I saw my error. It wasn’t what had happened to Mom that mattered, but how what had happened to Mom might look to everyone else. Grandma was embarrassed, humiliated among her people.

  Somehow, Janine Sayers—my grandma—had failed in her effort to raise a good Christian girl in accordance with scripture and the tenets of her church. Instead, she had raised a troubled, angry girl who flew into rages, then became as loving as a kitten. A girl who quickly developed a drinking problem and moved to the city, w
here it grew worse, and where she was impregnated without the benefit of wedlock by some guy she met in a bar whose name she did not know.

  I can remember times when my mom would hold me in her arms and cover me with kisses. Times when she’d spin in circles laughing with me, our hands locked, until neither of us could stand up anymore. But she would change so quickly, become quiet and brooding, or enraged, or incoherent. And then she would drink. And drink, and drink.

  I never resented her for any of her behavior, for the way she treated me sometimes. Grandma refuses to believe me, but I didn’t even hold against my mom the fact that she had started the fire that burned my face, head, and neck so badly. Watching her twist and suffer at the whim of her illness—it had always been clear to me that she was sick—how could I feel anything for her but agonizing pity?

  She had been drinking the night of the fire and had passed out on the sofa in the living room while I slept in my bed. She’d been smoking a cigarette at the time. The place was in flames when she coughed herself awake and ran from the apartment, down the steps and past the pool, screaming. Into the pool, dizzy. Later, she said she’d forgotten me, but I knew better. She’d just been drunk. One of the neighbors had pulled me out just before the fire trucks arrived.

  Grandma showed up then and took over. I remember very little from that initial period after the fire—except for the pain, I remember that very well—and know only what Grandma has told me. I never saw my mother again. After her first visit to my bedside in the hospital, she went home and closed her teeth on the barrel of a gun. Killed herself.

  I would go through those years of intensely painful operations and skin grafts once again if it would bring her back. Illness and all. It would be worth it just for those fleeting times when she was happy, and all was right with the world.

  Living in the house in which Mom had grown up, I wondered how much of that torturing illness had been my mother’s alone, and how much of it had been passed to her directly from her own mother, or how much was simply the result of being raised by her.

  I had not given a moment of thought to a costume, so I quickly poked around in my closet and drawers for a few minutes before leaving to go down the mountain, looking for things that might be combined into a costume. My heart wasn’t in it, so I didn’t look long. Somehow, it did not feel right to dress up in a Halloween costume the evening of Carla’s funeral.

  It was still raining. The road that snaked down the mountain was dangerous in the rain. I had a great deal of respect for that road. It went down the mountain like a snake, curving sharply this way, that way. The downward-bound side of the road dropped sharply into jagged gray boulders around which a creek bubbled cheerfully. I had hiked along that creek. There were a lot of broken pieces of cars scattered around down there, and a lot of people had been hurt, crippled, and killed among them. I had no intention of being one of them. Besides, there was little chance I would be speeding down the hill, never mind up, in my blue 1972 Volkswagen Beetle. That car hadn’t sped anywhere in a long time.

  The rain made the blackness of the burned forest gleam in my headlights. It looked unnatural, menacing, and I could never shake the feeling, as I drove through the charred landscape, that it was watching me.

  Although it was raining hard, the Halloween celebration would take place as planned. Up and down the main street of Mount Crag—which was called, coincidentally, Main Street—children would gather to play organized games on the covered sidewalks and receive prizes from the shops that lined the street. Merchants had agreed to stay open past closing time to participate. Just as they had for a few years now. Every precaution had been taken.

  Carla Firth wasn’t the first young woman to show up dead. And she wasn’t the first to die that way—slashed and badly bitten, partially gutted. She was only the first in a while.

  Three

  “You didn’t wear a costume?” Carrie asked. She looked broken-hearted.

  I shrugged. “I just wasn’t in the mood, you know? The funeral and all.”

  She nodded sympathetically as she poured my coffee at the counter. “Well, it’s not like I went all out.”

  Carrie was dressed as a gypsy, with necklaces and bracelets that dangled and clattered.

  “You look great!” I said, and meant it. She always looked great. Except in her eyes, where she always looked a little wounded.

  “It’s a wonder I got as much of this thrown together as I did this morning,” she said, cleaning behind the counter. “Keith fell down the steps in front of our house and slammed his head on the concrete walk. I took him down to the walk-in clinic and he had to have some stitches. Stayed home from school today.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Yeah, he’s fine. He’s decided to make use of the stitches in his forehead and dress as the Frankenstein monster. Mom’s going to bring them over in time for the parade. Wanna go trick-or-treating with us?”

  “Sure.” By trick-or-treating, she meant going from shop to shop up and down

  Main Street. Sometimes they got candy, and sometimes they got gift certificates or even toys. The merchants had come to compete with one another in giving out the best candy, the most unusual gifts. And the kids got a whole lot of advertising flyers with their Tootsie Rolls and Butterfingers, which were handed off, of course, to Mom and Dad.

  “Well, you’ll have to wear something. The boys would be disappointed if you didn’t.”

  “Do I look like somebody who needs to come up with a scary costume for Halloween?” I asked with a smile.

  Carrie jerked as if I had reached across the counter and poked her in the stomach. “How could you say such a thing, Andy?” She sounded shocked, even hurt.

  “Just a joke, Carrie.”

  “But that’s a terrible thing to say about yourself. That kind of thinking damages your self-esteem, and you—”

  I laughed and said, “Have you been watching Oprah, or something?”

  She slapped my arm with a hand towel.

  “I’ve got plenty of self-esteem, Carrie,” I assured her quietly. “But I’ve also got a sense of humor. Sometimes I need to laugh about it as much as some people need to stare at it.”

  Carrie folded her arms and sighed. “Sometimes you sound two or three times your own age.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’m not really sure. I’m tired. You want the special tonight, Andy? Pork chops with rice—oh, wait, you hate pork, don’t you? Okay, what would you like?”

  Carrie used to do nearly everything but cook in the diner. She had inherited the Pantry Shelf from her father; she had played and worked there since she could remember. She had been running it since her father had a heart attack, she and Gustav, the cook, a monolith of a man who spoke with an impenetrable Eastern European accent, and who had worked for her father since the diner first opened for business.

  In the past year, she had hired a couple of waitresses, both single mothers like herself. She no longer waited tables, but she was all over the diner, never holding still, pouring coffee or operating the register, busing tables or cleaning up messes, and always chatting with customers, making them feel welcome. And yet, she always had time to take my order.

  She went to the window and shouted my order to Gustav, whose reply sounded like someone breaking granite. Miraculously, Carrie understood what he said and responded. Sometimes when she did that, I wondered if she simply gave a random response to make everyone think she understood him, when in fact, she was as stumped by Gustav’s accent as the rest of us.

  Carrie returned to the counter and rested her arms on it, leaned forward. “I’d planned to go to the funeral, but I was too busy with Keith. Were there a lot of people?”

  I nodded. “Especially for a graveside service in the rain. I didn’t stay very long.”

  “Her poor parents. I ache for those people.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure they’re real upset because Carla won’t be finishing college.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Andy,
have a little compassion. They’re suffering right now.”

  I shrugged, said no more about it. I’d known Carla’s parents from church when I attended Hand of God. Her father was a deacon who would tell you all about the many illnesses and hardships with which God had been testing him his whole life until your head split open like a macheted melon. And the whole time he talked, his wife would be nodding her head silently, up and down, nodding and nodding. When it came to their daughter, all they cared about was that she get excellent grades in college and go to church every Sunday. Nothing else mattered to them. Normally, I was a very compassionate person—at least, I’d always thought so—but I had spent just enough time with Mr. and Mrs. Firth for compassion to come very slowly.

  “I bet it eats at them,” Carrie said quietly, staring at my coffee. “Even in their sleep.”

  “What eats at them?”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Wondering…y’know…who.”

  I shook my head. “Who killed their daughter, you mean?”

  Carrie blinked a couple times and her upper lip started to curl, but did not. “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

  I folded my arms on the counter and leaned close to her, whispered, “Then why didn’t you say it?”

  “I guess I’m just not very comfortable talking about…Well, about death.”

  “Nobody in this town is,” I said, still whispering. “Every time this happens, everybody talks about it like somebody moved out of town. Left the country. Not like somebody was killed. Again. Ripped apart in the woods by some…animal, some monster that will just do it again later because nothing’s done.”

  Carrie frowned. “Did you hear something about it being an animal?”

  “No, I meant the person doing the—never mind.”