Forever never ends

CHAPTER FIVE

Junior Mull looked out from under the bushes, watching the silver strand of his fishing line where it entered the dark water of Stony Creek. Damned trout were taking a day off, he decided. Scarcely a nibble all morning.

His jeans were wet from where he'd been sitting in the black mud of the creek bank. Still, it beat the hell out of having his ass parked in a hard chair at Pickett High. He could be there right now, staring at the ceiling tiles and picking his nose as Old Bitch Moody droned on about integers.

The raw fish smell of the creek and the thick swampy odor of decaying weeds filled his nostrils. The water was a little murky from yesterday's rain, but the fish were supposed to bite better after a rain. That theory had gone all to hell today. Didn't those scaly bastards read Field and Stream?

He dried his fingers on his army jacket before reaching into his chest pocket. May as well fire up another joint. At least I can keep up my sense of humor.

Junior gripped the rod with his left hand as he flicked the lighter and drew in a lungful of harsh dope. He exhaled and fanned with his hand to disperse the smoke. Not much traffic on the road this time of day, but no need to advertise his location. That pea-headed truancy officer had been after him since the fifth grade. Plus, now that he was on probation for shoplifting, it was a good idea to keep a low profile when breaking the law.

He took another drag and looked around his hidey-hole. A stand of laurels hid him from passing cars and an old tired cedar drooped protectively overhead. Empty liquor bottles and rusted cans were scattered around the perimeter of the clearing, and black chunks of wood huddled together inside a ring of creek stones. The charred smell of the dead campfire mingled with the mist that drifted off the creek as the sun rose higher.

His old man had shown him this place. Sylvester was no slouch at playing hooky, either, and that was one of the few qualities Junior had inherited. That, and what his dad called a "kinship with nature." Junior giggled and took another hit.

Kinship, hell. Kinship was fucked up, that's what it was. Like Gramps, stewing away on that big old farm, sitting on a goddamned fortune. But did he ever give Junior a red penny of it? Hell, no.

Junior used to hang out up on the farm, especially in the summer when his dad was away on his hunting trips and Mom was staining the sheets with that redneck Jimmy Morris. Junior liked the smell of the hay in the barn and the rich dust from the tobacco that had hung drying in the rafters. He even liked the smell of chicken shit.

There was lots to do on the farm, playing "fort" in the corncrib with his brother Little Mack or fishing out of season in the branch. Or going up in the briars and eating gooseberries until your belly was about to bust. Even hoeing the garden beat the hell out of hanging around the pool halls in Windshake.

But then Gramps had caught Junior getting into the white lightning. All he'd taken was half a cupful, and he'd been real careful to mark the level in the jar so he could fill it back with water. But the leathery old bastard had taken one swig, sniffed at the jar like a dog smelling between a girl's legs, then went crazy enough to threaten him with a shotgun.

Well, fuck him and his liquor.

Junior sucked down another lungful of marijuana. Junior could go over to Don Oscar's and buy his own moonshine. And Gramps could sit in his chair and rock until his bones came loose before he'd ever set foot on that scraggly-assed side of the mountain again. Crazy old bastard.

Junior chuckled to himself.

The dope was starting to work, making his eyelids twitch and the water glitter under the sunlight in a billion little speckled diamonds and the breeze was a whisk broom in the treetops and seven birds were singing different songs but the notes kind of fit together if you listened. And his stomach was clenched and the back of his neck tingled and he stared at the fishing line where it went into the water and at the round ripple that went out from there, and then another little ring inside that one, and then another, perfect circles that would keep spreading forever but never touch the one ahead of it.

And the water was even laughing with him, lapping up against the creek bank and tickling the muddy ribs of the earth. Stony Creek was RIGHT.

He snorted a little as smoke snot rolled down his lip. He took a final draw, scorching his fingers as he pinched the roach, but even the pain was funny, kind of dead and faraway, as if it were somebody else's and he was only borrowing it for a second.

He went back to watching the ripples where his line went into the water. Might have to try some corn. They're not hitting nightcrawlers today. But I sure do like sticking those slimy, squirting bastards on the hook, though. And I'm as fucked up as a football bat and high as a Georgia pine.

Suddenly the line grew taut, but slackened almost immediately. Junior's hand clenched around the rod.

Come on, you bastard. Hit it one more time.

Then he was standing and the pole was quivering and the water erupted in white-silver splashes. Four-pounder, it felt like. It had taken the hook and was trying to wind the line around an old black tree stump that jutted from the creek like an overturned molar.

Junior tugged and then cranked the reel, pulling in the slack he had gained. He cleared the fish from the stump, but it could dip around a rock just as easily, cutting the line on a sharp edge. Then the fish surfaced again, twitching like a convict in an electric chair, but the fight was over, the bastard was Junior's now, and all that was left was a little show of sport.

Junior reeled it in and flipped it onto the bank. It was the ugliest fish he had ever seen. If it even was a fish.

The thing was shaped like a bowling pin, with a blunt face and heavy tail. It had fins that were like fingers, three in a row down each side. Its single gill was a continuous gray slit across its forehead and gooey mucus dribbled out as the gill flapped in search of water. Its eyes were like wine grapes, green and round and bulging and without pupils. And its mouth The fucker's got TEETH. Not little bumps of cartilage like hogsuckers and knottyheads have. This thing's got a mouthful of bone briars, and no way in hell am I gonna stick my hand in there and work the hook loose.

The fish-thing stopped wriggling as dirt and twigs collected in the gill. Junior put his boot on its belly so it wouldn't flop away while he figured out what to do with it.

Now, I may be fucked up. And after two joints of Tijuana Taxi, that's more than a maybe. But there's no way I'm as fucked up as this here fish-thing.

So, Junior, you can take this thing home and show the old man and see if he's ever seen anything like it, since he's caught and killed just about everything that bleeds in these Appalachian Mountains, except maybe humans. But that would mean having to explain why you were fishing instead of attending the tenth grade, which would lead to an ass-busting or at least a good bitching-out.

Or you can boot this deformed hunk of fishfuck the hell back into the creek and pretend you never saw it.

Junior pulled out his pocketknife and started to cut the line. The fish-thing writhed under his foot, spinning free and snapping at his leg.

"Goddamn it," Junior yelled, hopping back. The thing's eyes were glowing, green and bright as the neon on the pool hall’s pinball machines. Junior whipped the pole, carrying the thing into the air and then back onto the earth. He whipped again and sent the thing's head cracking against a rock with the sound a dropped watermelon makes.

He lashed again and again, sweating and panicky, until the thing was a green-red hunk of shredded meat. Then he put his boot on the raw corpse and jerked the pole with all his strength, and the line finally broke.

"Son of a bitch,” he gasped, catching his breath. He kicked the thing into the water and watched as it turned once, slowly, then spiraled toward the creek bottom like a soggy log. He looked down at the twin rips in his denim cuffs.

He looked back at the thing and wished he hadn't. The tenderized fillet of dead meat had flipped its mutilated finger-fins and twitched its broken clubby tail and headed upstream.

Junior's buzz left him, jumping from his skin like a ghost from a guillotine victim.

Chester stepped off the porch and Boomer reluctantly followed. Even the hound dog sensed something was wrong. Boomer lowered his head and growled at the underbrush that was thick along the fence line. Boomer never riled himself enough to waste a good growl on shadows.

Something about the trees ain't right, Chester thought. I know I been in the white lightning just a mite early today, but that only makes a body see double or else see things that ain't there. And this IS there, whatever it is.

Chester looked at the forest that bordered his weedy cornfield. The trees swelled with buds and new leaves. The dandelions were popping their yellow heads out of the pasture. Usually at this time of year, Chester could practically feel the trees stretching up to the sky, fighting for sunshine and begging for leaves.

But these trees above the house looked kind of sick. Not quite withered, but droopy, like they were sad about something.

Trees ought to be happy in spring. Their sap-blood was frozen up all winter, when all they could do was shiver in the north wind while their bones snapped off. But now the thaw had come and you'd think the wooden-hearted things would be jumping for joy.

And that green glow was back, only it was real faint, so that only a buzzard-eyed mountain man like himself would ever notice. The few airplanes that flew over wouldn't have seen anything out of the ordinary.

He heard a cracking sound, then a rumble of falling timber. Trees only fell like that when struck by lightning or else coated by an ice storm. They didn't snap like that in March, when the roots were busy soaking up the melted snows from the soil.

"Well, I don't expect it's that acid rain that DeWalt's always going on about," Chester said to Boomer after climbing back up on the porch and settling into his rocker. "I mean, even if the trees is-now what's that twenty-dollar Yankee word that DeWalt used?"

Boomer looked up expectantly.

"Oh, yeah. ‘Distressed.’ So even if the trees is ‘distressed,’ as they say, they ought not be falling over for no earthly reason.”

Another tree dropped near the ridge line, a few hundred yards up the slope, the brittle sound echoing off the damp mountains. Chester saw the top of a white pine swaying where it had been hit by the falling tree. Something funny was going on. And he had half a mind to go out and investigate. But later was as good a time as now, maybe even better. That was the kind of philosophy that Chester credited with helping a body live to a ripe old age.

"I might have to give DeWalt a call," Chester said, twisting the lid off his moonshine jar. "See if he's got any book-learning on dropping-down-dead trees."

Boomer slowly wagged his tail. Chester looked out at the strange woods. He had a feeling that the trees were waiting, holding their breath in that moment of stillness that always comes before a storm.

"Yep. DeWalt will know what to do."

Boomer curled up at his master's feet to wait.

Nice little piece of tail there.

Forgive me, Lord, for I have committed the sin of lust. I have committed adultery in my mind. But, Sweet Jesus Christ, did you SEE that stuff bounce around inside that cotton dress? No church secretary should dress like that and expect a God-fearing man not to weaken a little. And her without a bra. Mercy, mercy.

Armfield Blevins pulled a handkerchief from the front pocket of his JC Penney jacket. He wiped at his forehead, the high glaring brow that his daughter said looked like Edgar Allan Poe's. Whoever the hell that was.

Probably one of them damned washed-up rock stars they couldn't seem to drive off the stage. Them ancient rock stars that would keep on rocking even if they had to do it from a rocking chair, and keep on rolling until their wheelchairs needed an overhaul. Getting up and spreading the devil's message just like Armfield spread the Word of God, only they delivered to packed stadiums and their message was blasted from a million stereo speakers. Armfield was lucky to draw two hundred for Sunday services, less during football season.

But the devil worked through everybody. The devil didn't need two-hundred-watt amplifiers. He whispered right in your ear. Look what he had done to Armfield. Steered his eyeballs right onto Nettie Hartbarger's body. He could feel the devil’s tool pressing like a hot and vile snake against the inseam of his slacks.

And, forgive me, Lord, but it feels good. And Nettie is just a door away, at her desk in the vestry, doing the books, doing Your work, back there all alone and warm-blooded and curvy.

But Armfield knew it was the devil working on him, softening him up, to coin a phrase. Just as the devil had laid out the shining cities before Jesus, sweeping his cloven hoof out like a real estate salesman, offering them to the Son of God free and clear and with a righteous right of way if Jesus would only forsake His Father. But Jesus had resisted, and so would Armfield.

But, damn it, we all fall short of the perfection and glory of God. And what would Jesus have done if the old devil had offered him a piece of Nettie's tail instead of some old Jew cities built of mud and stone?

Armfield gazed up at the mahogany crucifix hanging on the wall behind the pulpit. Jesus looked down in return, wooden and Indian colored and sad, peering from under His crown of briars.

Armfield had scored the crucifix at a foreclosure sale, from a Catholic church in a nearby rural county. The Catholics had suffered declining membership and the diocese decided to close the doors. Armfield saw the purchase as one more victory, one more proof of the rightness of the Baptist way. Some of his parishioners had grumbled when he’d placed the icon on the wall, but Armfield had persuaded his flock that the display was conservative, hearkening back to the old days of Christianity.

There was only one Old Time Religion, and that was the Baptist faith. Jesus didn’t belong to some bunch who worshipped Mary and ate wafers. The Son of God belonged to those who were willing to have their heads washed clean of sin. Armfield looked up at the darkly stained wooden face.

"Forgive me, Jesus," the preacher whispered. Then, hearing a door creak open at the rear of the church, he added loudly, "And thank thee, Oh Lord, for thy continued blessing, that it may shine on this, Your church. Amen."

"Amen," added Bill Lemly, his deep voice filling the narrow church hall. Armfield turned and saw Lemly's wide-shouldered frame filling the doorway against the backdrop of the dark, wet world outside. Lemly walked up the aisle, his shoes leaving prints on the red carpet, that tongue of sanctity that carried the sinners forward, nearer to God and close enough to smell the five-dollar-a-pint aftershave that Preacher Blevins wore on Sundays.

"Good evening, Preacher," Lemly said. "Looks like the Lord's brought us some more rain."

"Yes, Brother Lemly. We may need to build ourselves an ark before this one's over with."

"Now, God promised He'd never do that to us again. The next time He destroys the world, it will be with something different. Something good."

What would it be next time? Nuclear rain, man-made brimstone and fire from heaven? Cancer-causing chemicals in our sugar substitutes? Or another eight years of a Democrat-controlled Congress? The Lord worked in mysterious ways.

"So right, Brother,” Armfield said. “But the prophecies are coming together, just as the Bible promised."

"The Lord will be coming soon to take us home, and what a glorious day that will be."

That was one part of this deal that made Armfield uncomfortable. He wanted to go to heaven, wanted to waltz through the Pearly Gates and huddle at the feet of Jesus, plucking a harp and adding his thin voice to the choirs that would sing His praises, forever and ever without end. Armfield just didn't want to do it anytime soon.

One of his secret fears was that one day he'd be plugging along, minding his own business, maybe out checking the trim job on the graveyard hedges or working up the lead paragraph of a kick-ass sermon, and he'd feel a tap on his shoulder. He'd turn around and there would be the Lord Himself, tall and blond and blue-eyed and glowing.

Armfield didn't want to die. At least, not for a long time to come.

"Yes, Brother Lemly, a glorious day that will be," he said, licking his thin lips.

Armfield parted his Bible and tucked his purple nylon bookmark smack in the middle of the Gospel According to Saint Luke. Good a place as any to quote from come Sunday.

One of these days, he was going to get around to reading the Good Book, and from cover to cover, too, not with all this skipping around. He'd started it once when he was sixteen, sat down and zipped through Creation and Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, the greatest story on earth unfolding before his eyes. Then he'd hit the “begats,” and it had been like slamming face first into the wall of a Jewish synagogue: "Such-and-such begat thus-and-so, who in turn… "

Armfield wasn't the world's most educated man. He was a poor reader and the only original thoughts that popped into his head were when he was trying different poses on the fantasized flesh of Nettie Hartbarger. But he’d been the loudest in his class at Henneway. He had been the most outspoken critic of the liberals and the baby-killers and the Catholics and other lower forms of life.

He had prayed for strength and guidance so the Lord might sit on his shoulder and shine His Holy Reading Lamp so that Armfield could do the Lord's will. And finally he'd come to accept that the Lord's will was for Armfield to never finish the Bible. Armfield's dad couldn't even read, but he'd certainly gone to heaven, the way he'd tossed the family's cookie jar money into the collection plate every week. Money that Armfield could have used for orthodontia so his damned front teeth didn't stick out like a knot-sucking beaver's. Money that his mother could have spent on a mammogram, which might have detected the breast cancer that took her to the Lord while Armfield was at Henneway. Money that might have kept his malnourished sister from running away and becoming a hooker in Charlotte.

A flash of lightning blinked outside, once, then three times in succession, flickering across the colored plate glass windows as if they were movie frames. But the Jesus in the plate glass didn't change position, just knelt among those lambs like He was giving them the Sermon on the Mount translated into bleats and baas. Then the thunder rumbled, shaking the hand-hewed arches of the church.

"The Lord's pitching a fit tonight, Preacher," Lemly said, his laughter rumbling as deep as the thunder. “Must be somebody’s doing some serious sinning.”

Armfield nodded from the pulpit. Even though he was on the dais, with a solid oak rail between Lemly and himself, Lemly somehow towered over him, dark eyed and broad faced and muscular and tanned. Lemly had been a football star at State, then had moved back home after graduation and opened a building supply business. Now he owned four stores among the surrounding counties and had another in the works.

This man could sell dogwood timbers to Jesus.

But Brother Lemly was also a church deacon and generous benefactor and county commissioner and Leading Citizen. If Armfield wanted to get a grip on public opinion, to find out how a certain action or statement might play in Windshake, he asked Lemly. Hell, Lemly was public opinion, when you got right down to it.

The front door opened again, and the top of an umbrella poked its way into the church. It spun, sending a silver shower of water drops across the foyer, then lifted, and Armfield's lightbulb-shaped head lit up with a smile.

"Hey, darlin’," he said, forgetting his "preacher voice" for a moment.

"Hi, Dad. Hi, Mr. Lemly," Sarah said. She shook back her hair, her long red hair that was just like her mother's, only not scorched from too many hours under a dryer cone down at Rita Faye's Beauty Salon. Sarah smiled, white and perfect teeth showing between her lips. Armfield made damned sure his kid had gotten her braces, if for no other reason than that she'd never have to look in the mirror and be pissed off at her miserly old man.

"Hello, Sarah," Lemly said. He turned back to Armfield. "Say, Preacher-"

Armfield had insisted that the congregation call him "Preacher" instead of "Reverend." It was much more folksy. Put the parishioners at ease. Got him invited to dinner come Friday. Loosened the purse strings come Sunday.

Kept their guard down. No association in their minds with the Reverend Bakker or the Reverend Swaggart. Or even Falwell, who hadn't been convicted but seemed to leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth just the same. He turned his attention back to Lemly.

"I was wondering if Nettie was here,” Lemly said. “Said for me to pick her up at six o'clock sharp, and it's nigh on."

"She's in the vestry, Brother. Probably didn't hear us because of the rain."

"Mind if I go on back?"

"Help yourself, Brother. Just don't take Nettie away before she's got the Lord's bank account balanced."

Lemly's laughter thundered again, and he left the room, his wet shoe soles squeaking across the oak floor of the dais.

Damn. Armfield had been hoping Lemly might have some new angle to work, a tent revival or gospel singing to fill up the old coffers of Windshake Baptist. And maybe a few dollars could trickle their way into Armfield's pockets. But Lemly was here after Nettie.

Hmm. Might not be too seemly. Both of them single and dedicated to the church. Still, fairly young and prone to the call of lust, weak against the devil's whispers. And local tongues might wag.

He'd have to keep an eye on them. That wouldn't be much of a problem, especially in Nettie's case.

"Now, what are you doing here, young lady?" he said to his daughter.

"Mom sent me over to tell you supper's ready," she said.

Her face practically shone with innocence and youth, like the Virgin Mary's did in those Renaissance paintings. She had her mother's fair skin, with some delicate freckles on her smooth cheeks. Of course, he didn't really know what her mother's skin looked like these days, because she wore more makeup than a white-trash trailer queen.

Armfield looked down at the open Bible, then cupped it in his hands as if it were an infant. He held it lovingly to his chest. The weight of the book comforted him. Its gilt-edged pages gave him strength. And it made a damned fine prop when he went into one of his "whopped upside the head by the staff of Jesus" routines, when he twitched and gibbered across the dais on those Sundays when the congregation needed a little extra stimulation.

The routines were the reason why Windshake Baptist Church had recruited him. While a lot of the Southern Baptist churches were letting divorced ministers and liberals and even a few converted Episcopalians do their preaching, Windshake was going to hold the line. At last year's Baptist Convention, some formerly conservative pastors were arguing for what they called "continued accessibility in the face of modernity." Whatever that translated to in common English, it sounded like selling out to the devil to Armfield.

So a touch of fire and brimstone was welcomed in Windshake. Most of the congregation felt that if it was good enough for their grandparents, then, by God, it was good enough for them.

Except some rivals had popped up along the outskirts of Armfield's territory. First Baptist over at Piney Ford was starting to pack them in. There was a Methodist church around the back side of Sugarfoot and a little Lutheran church in a converted vegetable stand out in the Stony Creek community. He'd even heard a Unitarian group was meeting in the basement of a used bookstore.

But Armfield wasn't worried. A little competition just made you work harder. It was also a sign that Windshake was prospering, as some big-money tourists had settled in the area over the last few years. Windshake Baptist's take had picked up about eight percent a year over Armfield's reign at the pulpit. Well, make that three percent, after Armfield skimmed off his "tribute."

"So, are you coming, Daddy?" Sarah said, her voice echoing off the polished wood and plate glass and into his hairy ears.

"Depends on what's for dinner. If it's another one of those vegetarian omelets, then I'll be heading down to the steakhouse." Armfield snickered.

"Oh, Daddy," she said.

"Just picking, honey."

Sarah's accent was fading, her open vowels getting flattened like a flower in an old diary. She was a sophomore down at Westridge University, and she had been picking up all kinds of figures of speech and mannerisms from those Yankee intellectuals. Armfield wondered what else she might be picking up.

"May the Lord watch over her," he offered in silent prayer, and set his Bible gently on the pulpit, where it would be ready to provide inspiration on Sunday. He wondered if he should tell Nettie and Brother Bill that he was leaving. Naw, Nettie would lock up. Besides, he didn't want to walk in on the lovebirds.

Armfield was afraid he would suffer the sin of envy. He'd suffered enough sins for one day. It was going to take a good half hour heart-to-heart chat with the Lord to wash those wrongs away. But the Lord would forgive. He always had.

Armfield walked down the aisle, under the high wooden ribs of the church. The only noise was the creaking of his knee joints and the muted roar of the rain pounding on the roof. He joined his daughter in the foyer, where she held the umbrella poised and open outside the door, ready for the thirty-yard trot to the parsonage.

Armfield was so focused on his looming penance that he didn't resent the falling rain. As he looked at it slicing across the streetlight in fat needles, he thought he saw a faint green shimmering. He shook his head and hunched under the umbrella.

At least it’s not frogs.

“Race you,” Sarah said, and she was gone, along with the umbrella.

Armfield laughed, and then the sky split with a streak of thunder and lightning, the bolt touching ground near the church.

“Spare me, Jesus,” he whispered, then dashed against the rain to the house.

Don Oscar was tangled in a forsythia hedge, its sharp green buds scratching into his skin. He felt ready to bloom, ready to explode into velvety yellow orgasms. He felt alive, more than he had ever felt while human. He was chlorophyll and carotene, watery tissue and carbon, a metastasis of animal and vegetable. He burned in joyous rapture as his energy was drained by the parent.

He was food of the gods.

The parent’s slender white tongue-roots were stretching under the skin of Bear Claw, siphoning and converting the Appalachian fauna all across the stony slopes. Now it had sent out its disciples, fish and fowl and man and beast all marked by the touch of the cosmic reaper. And Don Oscar was one of the children, providing nourishment to the beloved space-seed so that its mission could continue.

He was dimly aware that his wife Genevieve was nearby, nosing in the dirt like an old sow snouting up succulent truffles. The wild lilies were sending green shoots into the sky along the banks of the creek, and Genevieve was among them, rolling in the rich swampy mud. Her torn calico dress was damp and black, sticking to her ample thighs as she wallowed without shame.

Don Oscar had never loved her as much, had never appreciated the glorious depths of her organic wealth as much as he had while converting her. Now they were bound in a far holier matrimony than they had ever achieved in their human relationship.

Now they served the parent, and it in turn served them, blessing them with the radiance of the sun, granting them the boon of moisture drawn through their epidermis, allowing them the pleasure of transpiration. Parting the clouds of their ignorance so that they might be aware, sloughing off their sinful skins so that they were made pure.

Don Oscar had lost his sense of time, but he thought maybe it was all science, only now there was a new science, with new natural laws. He regretted the wasted mortal effort of survival, the long struggle of the flesh. He was filled with self-loathing for the resources he had needlessly piddled away, for his avarice and selfishness. But then, his path had been worthwhile if it had ultimately led to this perfect day.

Was it only yesterday that he had been converted? Or did days matter anymore? Now there was only eternity, a blissful servitude that stretched forever ahead as the hot golden rays of the sun reached across the fingers of the galaxy.

He sprawled among the forsythia, leaning against the slender branches, leaking opal fluid from his wounds and scratches, absorbing carbon dioxide as he died and was reborn a million times over.

As he soaked and absorbed, as he swelled with verdant joy, he was overcome by a rapturous desire to share. He would pay a call on the neighbors.