[dawson]
Dawson drank deeply from the bottle of whiskey, his throat muscles bulging and jacking. His eyes were screwed shut. His fingers were cold. His whole body was cold. He could feel hate and fear and despair crawling all over him. Shaking. Shivering in the heat. The whole world dipping and sashaying, the shadows curved, alive, like the shape of a woman on the dancefloor.
And so he drank.
Maybe it was the blood on his shoes. His heavy, steel-toed boots. Sensitive osmosis. A drawing up through the rubber soles. Soggy, sucking touch. Eating his toes, foot-bones, ankles, and moving up his shins. Charity's sweet, caramelized blood: he could almost taste it on his lips. The shallow, aging hills and ditches of her body. He had taken her many times. Her familiar, maternal sex. Old eyes that rarely lit up with satisfaction. But always soft and tolerable. Reliable and uncomplaining, like a plowhorse with wrinkly lips. Dead now. He had killed her. His boot to her face. And now her blood was on his feet.
Dawson set down the bottle. He stared into the dark.
Or maybe the preacher. So white and fragile once his vestments were off. An almost feminine body. There was no God in his eyes when he was dying. There was no salvation in the way he screamed. The emptiness of his open mouth spoke of a cold and soulless space, with stars that were merely burning balls of gas and celestial bodies that glowed for eternity, regardless of a prayer.
The whiskey was making things worse.
He set the bottle down. It was almost empty anyway.
Dawson didn't want to be conscious. He didn't want these sick, gaudy images. He didn't want to feel the grease of blood between his toes or the devil in the shadows. He didn't want to ever leave his room again.
Murderer.
He had helped kill a preacher, for God's sake!
The shivering wouldn't stop.
His crawling, segmented spine.
And the drawl of the alcohol.
There was a knock at the door. Dawson stood. The room tipped. He staggered into a wall. His mouth was dry and thick and his boneless legs buckled under him like bedsprings. Outside his window, the stars were spit-shined and polished. They blurred and ran. He fumbled with the doorknob, slippery. He opened the door and looked out onto the porch and the warm, exhausted night air slipped in between his legs like a housecat.
“Hello?”
A thick silence.
There was no one there.
The night looked at him, sullen and groggy. He closed the door. Stood there for a moment. Thinking, reeling. And then drew the lock, the chain, and went around to every room in the house, closing the windows. He picked up his bottle, went to his bed, and wormed in between his sheets, stinking, his mind itching with a hayfever. Dawson sat there for a long time – awake, despite the whiskey. Watching the door. Curled in his sheets. Vowing never to come out again.
The preacher and the whore sang him lullabies in the dark.
The heat knocked.
[mathis]
Mathis walked down the street, wiping his face with a paisley bandanna, his footsteps summoning clouds of dust, rising around him like red demons called up from an underworld. It was completely silent. Broad daylight. Not even the rusty sigh of a screen door or the sound of kids playing in the street. The hibernating buildings, squatted on foundations that expanded and contracted in the heat, a steady, mouthless breathing. Mathis felt spooked. And he found little comfort, for some reason, in the gun at his waist. There were nuances riding on the heat. The suggestions of rot and dumb fear. Something empty and mindless and untargetable breeding in the germy shadows.
Mathis took his box of Marlboros from his pocket and fumbled his last cigarette out. He felt a little better putting it between his lips and lighting up. A little calmer. The sky was just so wide, sucking in around a ribbing of thin clouds. Clear and undisturbed, trapping the town, like a jar trapping an insect.
An eerie, alien feeling in his feet.
He lit up.
Shaky fingers.
He could see Phoebe Winston's house from where he stood. A solemn, plain porchfront. The roof sagging a little, like the back of an old nag. But otherwise, there was a stripped and perfect tidiness about the home.
The crypt behind her picket fence.
He looked to his left, up at the Stillwell's place. He saw a face in the window for a moment, drawn and skinny. A chased, narrow face. The Stillwell's oldest daughter. But she was gone in an instant. A curtain fell in front of the window. Sheriff Mathis took a drag on his cigarette and kept walking.
It was fear that he felt.
He walked all the way up to Phoebe Winston's fence. He stood there for a moment, eying the house, speculating a little, before unlatching the gate and walking up to her porch. A subservient, pious silence on the way. He made his way up the steps. A windchime hanging from the lip of the rain gutter spun and curtsied and sang to him in a captured voice. He knocked on the door.
Childish nonsense from the chime, alive as a child.
Mathis waited.
Footsteps behind the door.
The wind picked up. Laughing chime. Silver chime. Bruised and tongueless chime. Crazy, spinning, spinning. Fluttered and frantic. The tip-tap of a moth at the glass. Breathless singing, ringing, spinning. Almost as if it realized what was approaching the door, behind the bent and rusted screen, and longed for escape.
Mathis shook his head and took off his hat.
Phoebe opened the door.
She looked at him through the screen, thin, protective. Her mouth sickle-shaped, downturned. Heavy shadows perched under her eyes, like folded, resting bats. But otherwise, an unwrinkled face – a disturbed symmetry. Something was wrong about her. He couldn't tell what. Something under the face, a kind of twisted, watch-cog mechanism under the flesh and the prayers.
She said, “Good afternoon, Sheriff.”
“Good afternoon, ma'am.”
“Anything I can do for you?”
He nodded and licked his lips. “Yeah. Is there a chance that I could sit down or something? Ask you a few questions? We could set out here or inside, whichever suits you best.”
She opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. She gestured towards two wicker chairs and sat with him. The heat rested on them like a hen brooding over warm, speckled eggs. Phoebe's lips were humble and waxy. There was a flower pot on the porch railing. Little dying daises with heads like toes all raisiny and wrinkled by bathwater.
Mathis leaned back. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and raised his eyebrows at Mrs. Winston. “You mind?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
He crushed the cigarette on his heel.
“Okay,” he said again, adjusting his collar. “I've got a few questions for you. You heard about Will Franklin and Charity Beck?”
“Yes. A shame.”
“Yeah, real shame. More than a shame, I'd say. It's terrible. Two people beaten to death right here. Right here in town. We've got a population of a hundred and forty three, Mrs. Winston. That's a helluva small town by anyone's standards. Things just don't happen in these kinds of towns like that. We're easy going, simple people. We farm our land and make our conversation and go to church on sunday. Here and there we might have some kid that's gone of the deep end steal an apple or something. That's about it.”
He looked up at her and sighed, leaning forward. “Listen. I'm getting old. These godawful cigarettes are getting to my lungs. That's what Doctor Ross is saying, anyway. 'Sheriff' has always just been a fancy title. Kind of a hobby, you know? I don't like trouble. Nobody does. I don't like knowing that twenty-four people had it inside of them to beat the hell out of two peaceful citizens, one of them a preacher. So I'm going to put it to you this way. You're gonna come with me, down to the jail, and you're gonna sit in there for instigating a murder on two counts until someone from Lubbock can come take you to court. They're gonna get you some help and they're gonna give you a fair trial. I don't like trouble. I'm expecting you to come with me easy and everything'll be just fine. Charlotte can come, too, if you want. That might be better. Are you going to do that for me, Mrs. Winston?”
She smiled, her teeth craggy and black as old indian arrowheads.
A shiver jazzed down his spine and he bit the inside of his lip.
Flies twitched and probed his hands, gossiping, throbbing.
“Sheriff, I'd be glad to come with you. Charlotte can't, though. She's dead. She's on the bed in the room next to kitchen. I fed her cyanide. It would be nice if you could get her out of the house; she's starting to stink and the flies are all over her. But she's got the nicest smile on her face. I could look at all day, because it reminds me of better times. You had a daughter of your own, Sheriff. You know the feeling, I'm sure. Under a tree, please. A great, big one that reaches up to heaven. Dig her grave there. Lord knows she needs as much help as she can get. Lord knows, alright.”
She started laughing. Body shuddering under her dress. She put her hand on Mathis's knee. Cold and cruel, her skin splotchy, crinkled and patterned around her handbones like a paper fan. The curdled lips. The chime. Harsh gyrations. Mathis stood up rapidly, the chair legs grinding on the porch. He unholstered his gun and pointed it at Phoebe. This made her laugh harder. Choking, gargled laughter. Stray hair floating around her face like mustard gas.
“Get up,” Mathis said.
She got up.
“Turn around.”
She turned around, crossing her hands behind her. He pulled handcuffs from his belt and snapped them around her wrists. He had to tighten the cuffs as far as they would go, so that she couldn't slip out.
“Walk,” he said.
Phoebe turned around and walked. Her face was solemn again. Eyes bruised and purple, like neglected vegetables after the frost.
As they walked out of her yard, she said, “You can feel the poison, right? You can feel it in the air, can't you Sheriff? The poison?”
The heat preached.
