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  Weird Dude Walking was another story altogether.

  Because Alex had returned to the scene of the slaughter yesterday afternoon, and not even a stitch of clothing remained. No blood on the ground, either, and not a goat in sight (Alex had the Remington with him just in case). Goats would eat any old thing, especially natural-fiber clothing, but surely a few scraps would be scattered around, or a bone button from the coat. Strangest of all, though the ground was pocked with cloven hoof prints, there was not a single mark from the boots the man had been wearing.

  Which meant Weird Dude Walking must have risen up and floated away like Christ gone to heaven.

  Even if Alex wanted to report what he’d witnessed, he had no evidence. He never doubted his sanity, though his own family had called him “crazy” any number of times. But only a crazy person would witness a man feeding himself alive to a bunch of goats.

  Maybe not crazy, though.

  Maybe special.

  If a thing like that happened in the old days, the people called you a prophet and let you boss them around.

  “Alex?”

  Alex looked up, not realizing he’d been staring at his palms as if expecting them to start bleeding. “I thought you were at work.”

  “It’s my day off.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, babe. Just thinking about the state of the world. It’s a guy thing.”

  “I’ve got a guy thing for you.” Meredith nuzzled her breasts against his back and put her arms around his chest.

  “Not now. I’ve got some things to work out.”

  “Don’t you want to smoke some?”

  “I need to keep a clear head. Dope is the opium of the masses.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hemingway. He said dope is the opium of the masses. But that’s pretty fried, because opium is what they make heroin out of, and not many people can hook up with some ‘H.’ I guess they didn’t smoke much weed back in Hemingway’s time.”

  “I thought he said religion was the opium of the masses.”

  “Same thing. Religion is for dopes, so it all works out.” He gave a stoned snicker, though he’d not had any marijuana since the night before.

  “You want some lunch? I could cook one of your acorn squashes and some wild rice.”

  “I’m not hungry. I think I’ll go check the babies and meditate.”

  He got up from the table and went outside. He had a small greenhouse, but he didn’t grow his dope in it. The surveillance planes might see it and that would be the first place the snooper troopers would train their little spy cameras. His marijuana was in a little shed by the garden. He used a wind turbine and water wheel to generate electricity for the full-spectrum lights, because one of the ways cops got a warrant was by checking the electric company’s records for a jump in kilowatt hours. The jump was “evidence” that a citizen might be using grow lights. Since he was off-grid, he was outside the system, in more ways than one.

  He unlocked the shed, checked the sky for bogies, then went in. The main room was filled with a blue glow thrown off by the bank of grow lights. Marijuana plants, spawned from Kona Gold seeds a friend had mailed from Hawaii, stood as tall as Alex, and the room was sweet with the fully flowering buds. The three dozen plants were grown in five-gallon buckets, and the soil was ripe with the best compost Mother Nature could produce. Alex sat cross-legged before the plants in a yoga position. He was at peace in this place, this shrine to the sacred buzz.

  Too bad he had to hide it away. In a righteous world, he could grow it out there in the garden, right in front of God and everybody. Even Weird Dude Walking. If grass were legal, maybe the country’s farmers wouldn’t need crop subsidies. Get them off welfare and stifle the fed’s war on drugs at the same time. Damn, why couldn’t the Libertarians come up with any good candidates?

  He let his anger at social injustices slip away as he breathed deeply of the cannabis sativa. A spider had spun a web at the base of one of the plants. The spider was yellow with black streaks across its back, and it worked its way toward the center of the web where a struggling fly was tangled in the silken threads. Alex realized it was life in a microcosm, a symbolic play. You buzz around minding your own business, and then suddenly your ass is snared and along comes Reality to suck out your juices.

  Just like the goats had sucked the life out of the man in the black hat.

  Heavy.

  Too heavy to contemplate with a straight head, despite what he’d told Meredith. He just didn’t want to smoke with her, because then he’d either have to talk or silence her in bed. The only way to shut up a woman was to stick part of yourself in her. He needed to be alone. He pulled a joint out of his sock and fired it up, not shifting from his yoga seating as he puffed. He began a game of situation-problem-solution.

  Situation: You had a vision. Nobody else will believe you, because you don’t belong to any religion of the masses. Well, Meredith will probably believe you, but she believes in Atlantis and UFOs and even Dunkin’ Fucking Donuts.

  Problem: You either keep it to yourself and forget it, or you have to admit that miracles happen.

  Solution: Smoke more dope.

  He took a deep draw off the joint and held the smoke in his lungs. In his mind’s eye, the blue smoke seeped into his blood stream and sent its tendrils into his brain. The drug stimulated him and relaxed him at the same time, one of its contradictions that appealed to him and suited his worldview.

  Been a long time since you were in Methodist Bible School, but miracles in the Bible sort of had a point to them. Like Jesus with the loaves and fishes so everybody could eat, and Jesus turning water into wine so everybody could get wasted. Far as I can remember, nowhere in the Bible did some dude feed his own ass to the goats.

  Alex took another puff. The spider had reached the fly, which must have worn itself out, because it had stopped struggling. Or maybe the fly had sensed the jig was up and could see two dozen copies of the approaching spider through its compound eyes. Alex considered rescuing the fly, playing God, releasing it to go off and eat shit and hatch maggots. But it wasn’t right to fuck with Nature. Besides, that would have meant standing up, and his legs had a nice tingle going.

  Situation: Weird Dude Walking had to come from somewhere. Miracles don’t just crawl down off the top of the mountain in the middle of the Blue Ridge, half a world away from the Red Sea and Egypt and Jerusalem.

  Problem: That meant Weird Dude was an emissary of some sort. Sent by God or the devil or what the movie trailers called the ‘dark imagination of M. Night Shyamalan.’ An emissary sent specifically for YOU, Alexander Lane Eakins, and for you alone.

  Solution: Just because an emissary drags ass to your castle door doesn’t mean you have to open up and let him in. Pretend it never happened. Denial is A Good Thing.

  The joint was down to an orange roach, and Alex hot-boxed it until it burned his fingertips. He exhaled the smoke so that a blue cloud swept over the spider and the fly. One could get the munchies and the other could die with a shit-eating grin. Seemed to be some sort of circular cosmic justice in that.

  He sat until the sparkling edges of his buzz wore off, then he went into the house to ignore Meredith.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Katy’s back ached. She’d ended up sleeping on the couch, unable to face Gordon, much less lie in the same bed. She’d cooked oatmeal for Jett, then walked to the end of the road and waited for the bus with her. Gordon must have arrived late and headed out early. He hadn’t even made his usual pot of coffee.

  After Jett rode away on the bus, sitting at a rear window and refusing to wave, Katy went back up the gravel drive. As she passed the neighbor’s house, she hurried, afraid that Betsy Ward would come out on the porch and try to engage her in conversation. She’d always picked up on a distinct coldness emanating from the woman, as if Katy’s big-city accent were somehow alien and even infectious. Plus the Smiths appeared to have a bit of a bad reputation,
and Gordon’s distant and antisocial manner certainly didn’t help. Gordon had warned her that Solom was a little clannish, at least among the families that had owned land here for generations. He assured her attitudes were changing as more outsiders moved in, but she sensed resentment rather than acceptance was the more common response.

  No one seemed home at the Wards’s, so she continued up the long gravel road to the Smith house. As she mounted the steps, she realized with alarm that she still thought of it as the “Smith house,” even though by legal rights it was half hers. She put away the blankets from the couch, cleaned the bedroom, then found herself in the kitchen. It was only ten o’clock, too early for lunch. Besides, with no one else to cook for, she often resorted to an alfalfa-sprout-and-cheese sandwich or a can of vegetable soup. She was digging for a can opener in one of the drawers when she found a handwritten recipe on a dog-eared index card. She recognized the writing; it was done in the same elegant penmanship of the other recipes she’d found tucked in books, on the pantry shelves, or amid stacks of dishes. Rebecca’s recipe for sweet potato pie.

  It sounded like a nice treat to draw the family together over the dinner table. She checked off the items she would need. She had cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, and even whipped cream, but she had no evaporated milk. She could call Gordon at his office and ask him to stop by the grocery store, but she wasn’t in the mood to ask a favor, even if the favor was for his benefit too. She would pick it up herself at the general store. That meant she had a four-mile round trip. Might be a nice day to walk, because the weather was clear and fortyish, with the barest whisper of wind. Besides, the house had started to become oppressive. She thought she’d get used to being a housewife again, the way she had the first two years of Jett’s life. But back then, she’d been busy with an infant. With the house to herself all day, she’d become increasingly bored, despite her newly discovered culinary adventures.

  She changed into stone-washed jeans, blouse, jacket, and tennis shoes. At the last minute, she decided on a scarf in case the weather changed suddenly, and rummaged around upstairs until she found a green silk scarf that happened to match her eyes. She couldn’t remember buying it; perhaps someone had given it to her as a gift and it had been packed away and forgotten. Outside, she made a cursory check of the hen’s nests, spying several eggs she would collect for the pie when she got back, assuming she were brave enough. The goats weren’t around the barn. They must have been up in the forest, working the underbrush.

  She passed the Wards’s house again, and this time Arvel’s pick-up truck was in the driveway. The man himself was checking the fluids in his tractor, which was parked by the barn up behind the house. She waved in what she considered a neighborly fashion. Arvel flipped a grease rag at her, then motioned for her to come to him.

  He met her in the driveway. “How ya doing, Mrs. Smith?”

  “It’s Logan. Katy Logan.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right.” He gave her a one-eyed squint. “Things going good?”

  “Fine. A lovely day.”

  “Sure enough. Taking a walk, are you?”

  “Yes. I’m going to the general store.”

  Arvel rubbed his hands on the grease rag. “Shame Gordon won’t set you up with a better car. Him being a professor and all, he’s bound to have the money.”

  “We decided we’d save up for a while and wait for things to settle down a little.” She didn’t want to tell her neighbor that Gordon was turning out to be a control freak. She’d always kept her personal life to herself, which might have contributed to the failure of her first marriage. Katy recognized the irony of requiring Jett to undergo drug counseling while she and Mark had never sought marriage counseling. “How’s Mrs. Ward?”

  “She’s in the hospital.”

  From his tone, he could have been talking about a leaky radiator. “What’s wrong?” Katy asked, hoping she didn’t sound snoopy.

  “Slipped in the kitchen yesterday and busted her skull. Had a few stitches and a concussion, but the doc said she ought to be home in a few days.” He gave an uneven grin. “I always said she was a hard-headed woman.”

  “I didn’t hear any sirens.”

  “You’re a good piece up the road, and there’s a stand of pines between our houses. Most neighbors in these parts are kind of on their own.”

  “I’ll have some flowers sent to her room.”

  “She’d like that. Except no Queen Anne’s lace. Betsy’s allergic to that.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Nothing can mend her but time. And I’ll get along fine myself. I learned to cook on camping trips, and the laundry will keep until she’s back on her feet.”

  “Okay. But come knocking if you need anything.”

  “I’ll do that. Say, I’m driving the tractor up the river road. I have a job tilling up an old burley tobacco field. Want to catch a ride?”

  She smiled despite herself. “It might be faster to walk.”

  “No, really, just climb up here and straddle the P.T.O. box. If you’re going to be a mountain woman, you might as well learn the basics. Plus the goats are riled.”

  “Riled?”

  Arvel hesitated and looked out across the pastures that ran alongside the gravel road. “Uppity. They usually rut in the spring, but for some reason they’re tangling here on the front door to winter. They get mighty strange when they’re in the fever.”

  Katy started to chuckle, but something about the man’s expression stopped her. She remembered her own encounter with Gordon’s goat. “Mighty strange” seemed like a good catch-all phrase for the odd occurrences that had plagued her over the past few weeks. “Maybe a ride wouldn’t be so bad after all,” she said.

  ***

  David Tester sought to live his life according to the words of the Bible. Primitive Baptists didn’t hold with the cross, the crucifix, or even pictorial representations of the Lord. Such things were graven images, and therefore false idols. It was God’s decision alone to decide which souls were taken to Glory, and God might choose all or none. To leave that choice up to the sinner was an insult to God’s power over all things. The best course of a sinner was to live according to the Gospel here in this life and assume God had ample room in the next. As the church elder, David’s life served as an example, and even though he avoided temptation when possible, he knew he suffered the sin of pride.

  Primitives chose their elders from among the congregation. The position required no formal training. Basically, anyone who heard the call of the Lord would stand up and give it a go, and sometimes would preach for years before being officially selected to lead the church. In the meantime, other elders sought the same position, depending upon the passion in their hearts.

  David’s own brother Ray had delivered a few sermons, but Ray didn’t have the gift of oration as his older brother did. David’s biggest regret was that Ray had subsequently left the church, and David’s biggest failure was the pride he had felt at being named elder. Ray’s chances of reaching heaven were just the same as they had been before, but David sometimes wondered if weakness ran in the Tester blood.

  Because Harmon Smith was back, and the only way that could have happened was if the Lord so willed it. David had no magic spells he could invoke, no special dust he could sprinkle, no prayers for strength against enemies. The plain, bald truth of it was God had brought Harmon to Solom for a reason. He almost wished he were a Southern Baptist, so he could believe Harmon was of the Devil and therefore had arrived to work against the Lord’s purpose. The only comfort David could draw was that God’s ways were known to God and should be accepted. Even if you didn’t have such faith, God was going to do as He pleased anyway, so it was best to be prepared for the worst.

  The question now was whether or not David should try to do anything about Harmon. If the answer was “no,” then David would go about his business, keep his head down, and let his congregation deal with the situation as the Lord so chose. If the answer was
“yes,” then maybe the little valley community of Solom had been chosen as the final showdown, the battleground depicted by the apostle John in the Book of Revelations.

  Maybe the signs had already shown themselves, the seven seals broken, the red dragon risen up from the sea, and all that, and the farmers of Solom had been just plain too busy to notice. The charismatic Baptist sects had made a lot of hay over the signs, and it seemed like, growing up, David had heard almost daily that the end was nigh and the Lord’s return was just around the corner. What David could never understand was the fear in the voices of the doomsayers. The Lord’s return was a thing to be welcomed, no matter if it rode in on fire, famine, and spilled blood.

  But what if the Lord had sent Harmon Smith back as some kind of test? The Old Testament was practically one long test, what with Abraham being ordered to offer up his son on the altar and Job undergoing terrible trials. Even Jesus Christ had to stand on a plateau and turn down the Devil’s offer of a shining city laid out before Him, and if God couldn’t trust his very own Son to do the right thing, then what chance did David have?

  David paused in his work forking mulch over Lillian Rominger’s strawberry bed. After the killing frosts, David’s landscaping business slowed down, and besides some tree pruning and a side business growing poinsettias in a small greenhouse, he would be scraping by the next few months. Lillian was one of his best customers and kept him busy through November doing odd jobs. She was a Methodist widow, stocky and brusque, but for all that she was attractive and only a decade or so older than David. During the summer, whenever the heat drove him to remove his shirt, she always seemed to pop up with a glass of iced tea. In the autumn, she often worked alongside him, not afraid to get her knees dirty.