Читать книгу Gemini Rising - Brian McNaughton - Страница 9

CHAPTER SIX

Having covered the Planning Board the previous night, Marcia didn’t have to be at the Banner office until noon. After seeing Ken and the kids off, she was thinking about going back to bed for an hour or so when the phone rang.

“Damn it!” She had almost tripped over Lucy, who always raced her for the phone when it rang.

“What?” asked the voice on the phone.

“I’m sorry. Hello.”

“Marcie?” It was Jack Higgins, the managing editor. “What’ve you got cooking today?”

“Well…” Marcia wasn’t good at coming up with fast answers to questions like that, and Higgins knew it. He had trapped her into more than one dismal assignment by taking advantage of this failing.

“Good… There’s this old screwball out at Blackwood’s Corners who’s been seeing things. Called me up yesterday afternoon as I was leaving the office. His name is…dum dum dum…Peachtree, believe it or not, and they know where to find him at the general store. Do it now, before he has second thoughts about spilling his guts. You can sell it to the wires if you want to, but save something for us.”

“Wait a minute,” she said hastily, before the editor could indulge his fondness for hanging up on a mystifying note. “What’s he been seeing? What’s this all about?”

“He didn’t want to say much over the phone. He’s crazy, probably. But we haven’t had a good Jersey Devil story in five years or so, and I figure it’s about time. If you really think this guy is off in outer space, if he doesn’t know what day it is, then forget it. Otherwise, keep it light.”

“Don’t hang up, Jack! What’s the Jersey Devil?”

“Jeez, kid, where’ve you been? That’s what keeps the presses rolling when nothing else is going on. We got clips up the kazoo. Look them over. According to one version, a halfwit got herself raped by the Devil back in colonial times, and the offspring has been running around loose in the pines ever since. It’s supposed to be like a giant kangaroo with bat’s wings, no kidding, plus other embellishments that slip my mind at the moment.”

Marcia groaned. “This sounds like a job for Ron Green.”

“Rongreen—” even to his face, Higgins often spoke the name as if it were one word, perhaps the name of a condition related to gangrene “—the very name that came first to my mind, but he’s out chasing hippies. Our fair township is being overrun by them, Rongreen says.”

“Oh, no. I wanted to do that story. I was going to talk to you about it.”

“Well, you got to speak up, sweetie, not just sit around looking cute. Rongreen got there first.”

“But he isn’t…right for it. Those people won’t talk to him,” she said without thinking; and then she began to regret her words.

“Well… Well, I’m inclined to agree with you. But he thought of it, so I let him do it. But wait. He won’t take his own pictures, claims that’s not how they do things on the Daily News. You know Ron. A story like this, the pictures are the whole thing, and I can’t spare him a photographer. So you hook up with him sometime this week and get headshots of the crazoids he’s talking to. Also the dumps they’re living in, or whatever. And try to talk to them yourself. If you get stuff that he doesn’t, you file it, and we’ll pull it together here. It will piss him off, but I’m at the point with him where I don’t care whether he’s pissed off or not. Take your camera today, too, and get a shot of Peachtree. If you get a picture of the Jersey Devil, I’ll personally see to it that you get a five dollar raise.”

“Goodbye, yourself,” she said into the dead phone, then scratched Lucy’s ear reassuringly when he seemed upset by her tone of voice. “Not you, lamb.”

She realized that she’d made a bad mistake in disparaging Ron Green to Jack Higgins, a smiling assassin. Now he was using her to manipulate Ron into an untenable position. When her material was combined with Ron’s—or, worse yet, used in preference to his—he would object loudly. He might even issue an ultimatum, which Higgins would gladly accept. Ron would be out of a job again, and he would be lucky to find one on a shopping throwaway.

She went upstairs, with Lucifer following, and changed her nightgown for jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers. Mr. Peachtree probably wouldn’t approve of her outfit, but she didn’t plan to waste much time on him. She was dressing with the young people in mind, knowing that she could relate to them better than any balding, beer-bellied cynic in a cheap suit. She wanted that story. It was hers. If her efforts hurt Ron by showing him up—well, that was his own fault.

She sat down on the edge of her bed for a moment, dismayed by her own hard-heartedness. This wasn’t like her. She’d never before looked on her job as a struggle for the survival of the fittest. But she was upset. She had a daughter who might be headed for the kind of breakdown she’d once had; she had a husband who was probably sneaking around with another—and no doubt younger—woman. There: she’d stated both facts bluntly, facts she hadn’t wanted to face last night.

“And on top of it all, I’ve got you,” she said, thumping Lucifer’s resonant ribcage. “Where were you last night, baby? My theory is that the dognappers caught you and you escaped, the way you looked and acted. Growling at mama. Shame on you!”

Lucifer looked suitably ashamed, but he kept wagging his stump at all the attention. Literally dozens of people, even strangers in the street, had cautioned her about the nasty reputation that Dobermans had for turning on their masters, but she’d always laughed in their faces. They didn’t know Lucy. The dog’s uncharacteristic performance last night had shaken her profoundly, reviving memories of all those warnings. He must have had a truly harrowing scare, but he was himself today. She wished he could talk.

She got her Nikon and gadget bag from the closet. She used her own equipment in preference to the ancient Speed Graphic that the paper would have provided. Higgins had grumbled about it at first, as he would grumble about any deviation from time-honored routine, but even he had been forced to give grudging praise to some of her pictures. She believed that she was a better photographer than she was a reporter. Maybe she could make a living by photography if Ken…

“No, you’re staying home, baby,” she told Lucy as he flung himself excitedly against the front door. “You’re staying indoors, as a matter of fact. I know, I know. But we can’t have you getting stolen again. Try to pretend that you’re a good boy, okay?”

She walked out to her car, steeling herself against the whimpers she heard behind the closed door. He might show his displeasure by pulling all the covers off the beds and all the towels from the bathroom racks, but he had been cured long ago of worse habits. The kids would be home by four to let him out, and he would probably stick close to them.

The man at the general store in Blackwood’s Corners seemed more interested in her t-shirt, worn without a bra, than he did in her questions.

“Some camera you got there,” he said, ostensibly studying the Nikon slung around her neck.

“Thanks. But do you know a man named Peachtree?”

“Oh, sure. Peachy, everybody calls him, and he pretends to get mad about that, but he likes the attention. Self-reliant old coot. Won’t even apply for Social Security; says he never put a penny into it. Still goes out at his age and jacks deer.”

“Does what?”

“Takes his old pickup down a fire lane where the deer feed, turns on his spotlight, the deer freeze, and blam! Peachy’s got meat on the table for the next month or so. Only don’t put that in the paper, you’ll just get him in trouble with the wardens.”

“I don’t want to make trouble for him. I’m only interested in this thing he says he saw.”

“Hoo boy.” The storekeeper laughed for what seemed a long time, then took his glasses off to dry his eyes on his sleeve. “What is it, flying saucers again?”

Marcia’s suspicions were verified, and she smiled wryly. She couldn’t answer the question. She didn’t know what Peachtree had seen. The Jersey Devil had been Higgins’s idea, and her knowledge of that subject was too sketchy for her to suggest it.

“Has he seen flying saucers?” she asked.

“To hear him tell it, you’d think there was a regular scheduled flight out there. Noises. Lights in the sky.”

“You talking about Peachy?” The speaker had entered the store unnoticed by Marcia. He was a lanky old man in loose overalls.

“This here young lady is from the paper up to Riveredge, Alvin. She wants to interview Peachy.”

When the man smiled, his face showed deep creases suggesting kindliness. “It ain’t flying saucers this time. Is that what you been telling her, George?”

“I don’t know what to tell her, Alvin. I ain’t seen Peachy in weeks.”

“Well, ma’am, you got to understand that Peachy is an odd sort of person.”

“I told her that,” the storekeeper said.

“He lives like a hermit,” Alvin continued, ignoring the interruption, “but at the same time, every so often he gets the yen to have people listen to him and make a fuss over him. So he comes out of the woods with some crazy story and tells whoever will listen. Anybody who stays out there for six months on end, even if he don’t drink his own homemade applejack, he’s going to start seeing things. When was it, fifteen-twenty years ago? He called up the papers about a flying saucer he seen; they come and took his picture and made a big fuss over him. I guess he figures he’ll repeat his former triumph with this snake thing.”

“He told you about it?” Marcia asked.

“Sure, he’s all excited about it. Scared, too, though he don’t want to let on. I drop in on Peachy every once in a while. He’s an old man, you see—” Alvin was pushing seventy himself, she guessed—”and I just look in to see he’s okay. This thing’s come snuffling around his house two, three times in the past couple weeks. Claims it killed two of his dogs, but I think he’s got them confused with a couple dogs he lost ten years ago. Says this thing sounds like a consumptive steam engine, nosing and poking around his doors and windows. He seen it once. A big, black thing, he says, like a snake with long legs. It whipped around a tree so fast that his eye couldn’t follow it, then it was gone. Sort of like a weasel, I guess, only a hundred times bigger. You can’t say we don’t make good applejack around here.”

“You figure Peachy’s monster, that’s what’s bothering your livestock?” the storekeeper asked.

Alvin’s face lost its good-humored set. His calloused fingers drummed for a moment on the countertop. Marcia sensed that the storekeeper had joked about an inappropriate subject.

“That’s a dog,” Alvin said. “That’s some goddamned no-good dog I’m going to drill right through his black bastard heart. I beg your pardon, young lady.”

Marcia had winced at the idea of shooting a dog, not at Alvin’s language. Suppose he shot a straying Lucy by mistake? But this was too far for Lucy to stray.

“Maybe the hippies are doing it,” the storekeeper suggested.

“Hippies,” Alvin snorted. “They just want to sit around in a circle and chant all night and smoke their funny cigarettes. I watched them close; closer than they ever dreamed, and they ain’t up to no harm. Dumb, maybe. But they’re just wasting their own time and hurting themselves, not other folks. The ones out to Falls Road, they got this goat there, and they treat it like Mrs. Astor’s pet horse. I figure they like animals.”

“Some dog is killing your animals?” Marcia asked.

Alvin sighed. “Not just mine. And killing them, that would be better than leaving them to bellow and bleed to death. Some son of a bitch dog, pardon me, just wants the choice parts, so he comes along and snaps them off, neat as a razor cut.”

Marcia’s stomach felt queasy, and she didn’t want to hear which parts the dog preferred.

“No human being, least of all hippies who spend all day combing a good-for-nothing billy goat, would be that mean,” Alvin said. “I come in here for another box of them .300 Savage hollow points, George. I’ll take them and be on my way.”

“I think old Alvin’s fighting a war,” the storekeeper said after the tall man had left with his purchase. “Either that or his eyesight’s gone completely. That’s the second box of bullets in two weeks.”

“Who was that?”

“Alvin Walker. Got a dairy farm two, three miles out; two hundred acres or so. He could sell it this afternoon to a developer for a million dollars, but he says Florida’s too hot for him and he’d rather milk cows than watch TV. Sees less money in a year than I do in a month. Some folks is just plain nuts. Him and Peachy, they speak the same language.”

Marcia made a mental note of the name. She had instinctively liked the old man, and she believed he would be an excellent source of information on the hippies—as, to her distress, she found herself thinking of them now.

Alvin Walker had convinced her that Peachy was, as Higgins had so aptly put it, “off in outer space,” and she was fairly sure that he would have no printable story for her. But she felt obliged to see for herself, and she wrote down the complicated directions that the storekeeper gave her.

She turned from the blacktop to a gravel road, from the gravel to a dirt road, from the dirt road to something that was less than a pair of ancient wheel-ruts through the piney woods. She drove slowly for a long time, and then the track ended in a bare dirt yard.

She sat in the car for a while, drinking in the scene. It suggested a way of life that she had never experienced, not even through books or movies. Half a dozen junk cars in varying stages of dismemberment stood around the yard, presumably cannibalized to keep one vehicle running. The house itself had a log cabin as its nucleus. From there, frame additions had been made at random, covered with tarpaper or galvanized iron. The work had been done by someone who may have heard that there was such an art as carpentry, and who had tried to reinvent that art in total isolation.

Maybe there was a story here—not a story about a monster, but a story about Peachy himself. She fitted a wide-angle lens to her camera and began to take pictures before she got out of the car.

Going closer, she saw an impressive set of antlers over the door. Reddish hides, foxes on closer inspection, were nailed to the door of an attached shed. There were some raccoon hides, too. The shed was full of burlap bags containing—she paused to check—pine cones. She had heard that some people collected these for sale to manufacturers of Christmas decorations.

The atmosphere was warm and drowsy. Except for the excited scolding of a blue jay, it was silent. That was odd. Alvin Walker had mentioned dogs. Perhaps they were all off on a romp with their master.

She knocked timidly at the door.

“Mr. Peachtree?”

The blue jay squawked more raucously. She wondered what it was like in these silent woods at night, in this jerrybuilt house without electricity. She could imagine it. She could even imagine something that came “snuffling around the doors and windows like a consumptive steam engine.”

“Mr. Peachtree!”

She knocked so forcefully that the door drifted open.

The wood near its makeshift fastening had been broken. She peered into the dark, cool, cluttered room. Overriding the sour odors of a careless hermit’s lair was a smell at once familiar and ominous. It was only much later that she connected it in her mind with the odor of a butcher shop.

It took her a while to realize just what she was looking at, because she had never seen anything even remotely like it before. Her eyes scanned the room once, twice. She was looking at Mr. Peachtree.

Something had torn him apart.