The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 5

DEKE STOOD OUTSIDE the bathroom door, not listening. After several minutes, he said, “Honey?”

Donna didn’t answer.

“Want me to hold the cup?” He made the same joke every time.

He had to be in Masonville in forty minutes, and he didn’t want to be the last one into the courthouse. The last one to walk past all those cops.

Finally the sound of the toilet flushing and water running in the sink. Another minute passed.

“Donna …”

She opened the door. “Standing there don’t speed things up,” she said, and handed him an orange plastic cup with a white lid. It was uncomfortably warm.

“Uh, don’t we have a bag or something?”

She shook her head, pretending exasperation, and led him into the kitchen. She found a plastic bag, tucked the cup into it, and cinched the bag tight. “There you go. Nobody’ll suspect you’re smuggling pee.”

“On the street they call it Troll Gold.”

That got her to laugh. “Too bad you can’t sell it,” she said. Then, “They’re probably not going to ask about the money, but if they do—”

“They’re not going to ask about the money. That’s all done through administration. We’re only a few weeks late. The bank’s supposed to call me soon.”

They’d already run through the second mortgage on the house. He’d applied for a loan through Alpha Furniture, his business, but the bank hadn’t gotten back to them yet on whether it had been approved.

“Okay, then. You’ve got your envelope?”

He patted his front breast pocket. “Right here next to my heart.”

“If you leave those somewhere—”

“Have I ever lost them?”

“You do, don’t bother to come back,” she said.

“I’ll guard them with my life.” She followed him to the front door. The hall clock showed that it was a little past 8:20—he’d have to haul ass. “Hey, I may stop by and see Paxton afterward if I get done early at the shop.”

“Okay…”

He heard the skepticism in her voice and turned. “What?”

“Are you sure you two were best friends?” Donna said. “You and Jo, that makes sense. But Paxton … I just don’t see it.”

“He’s different than he was,” Deke said.

“He’s skittish is what he is. All the time you’re talking to him he’s got one foot out the door.”

“That’s not like him. Back then …” He shrugged. Before the Changes, Paxton had been sure of himself. Cocky. He had the money, the toys, the big house—what Deke used to think was a big house, anyway. And Deke had been happy just to be his friend. “I don’t know. He’s a little lost, maybe. It can’t be easy to come back here.”

“Maybe he’s in the closet.”

“What? No.”

“Why not? Have you asked him?”

“No.” Then: “I don’t know. I don’t know if Paxton would know himself.” He shook his head. “Listen, I better get going or I’m going to miss the meeting.”

“Hey,” she said. She turned him around, then bent her head and kissed him hard on the lips. Her expression had gone serious. “Are you going to be okay hearing all those details?”

“I doubt they’re going to tell us anything new,” he said.

“Still,” she said. “Call me at work when it’s over.” Four days after Jo Lynn’s death and they were still being careful with each other.

Once he left Switchcreek he had to watch his speed. He’d been stopped dozens of times over the years. Sometimes the cops said they were checking if his car was street-legal (he had the handicap permits for the modifications, the special plates, the note from his insurance—every damn thing), and sometimes they said he was speeding. Sometimes they didn’t give him any reason at all. The first time he complained about getting profiled—this was when they’d just started dating—Donna had laughed and laughed.

He got onto 411 and joined the line of cars heading into Masonville. The area had outgrown the two-lane highway years ago, but nobody had come up with the money to expand the road. He listened to the intermittent squawks of the police scanner and tried not to think of the time. He ignored the other drivers. It helped that they were all below eye level.

When he finally reached the center of town he parked in a metered lot behind a row of police cars. He loped toward the entrance to the Mason County courthouse. A woman and a boy about five years old walked toward him, the kid jabbering away, and when the woman looked up and saw Deke she put an arm around the boy, who gaped up at him. Deke didn’t mind kids. Their stares were honest.

Going into the courthouse he had to crouch to make it through the revolving door, baby-stepping to keep his knees from banging the glass. The lobby was mostly empty. He walked through the unattended metal detector—no beeps—and approached the woman sitting behind the counter. Behind her a cop came out of a rear office, glanced up from a paper in his hand, and stopped cold. His right hand moved to the top of his holster.

Deke raised his hands. “Hey,” he said, keeping his voice friendly. “I’m just here for an appointment with the DA.”

The cop stared at him like he was a goddamn T. rex. He didn’t move his hand from his gun.

“It’s okay, Kyle,” the woman said to the cop. Then to Deke she said, “I’ll take you back.”

Jesus Christ, Deke thought.

She buzzed him into a back hallway, then led him down to a conference room. Aunt Rhonda and the Reverend Hooke were already sitting at the table. The DA and the sheriff hadn’t arrived yet.

“Morning,” he said to the women. He felt underdressed. He wore a work shirt and jeans that had been stitched together at Donna’s shop—it took three pairs of XXL jeans to make a pair that would fit an argo. Rhonda was dressed in a pale green business suit, with shoes and eye shadow to match. (Thanks to Standard American Obesity, chubs didn’t have to make their own clothes.) The reverend wore a white peasant blouse hanging over a long dark skirt, and a colorful vest like the kind she wore on Sundays, this one appliquéd with rose petals. Her smooth head was uncovered—no scarf for her.

None of the chairs would hold him, so he squatted with his back against the wall.

“You haven’t missed anything yet,” Rhonda said. She sounded annoyed.

He wondered if making them wait was some kind of political statement. Rhonda had forced the meeting, but maybe the DA wanted to show he couldn’t be pushed around.

Three years ago, right around the tenth anniversary of the Changes, a beta girl named Sherilyn Manus was beaten up and raped outside a bar in Sevierville. Despite Sherilyn giving descriptions and first names of the men who’d assaulted her, the police didn’t arrest anyone for weeks. Rhonda started calling newspapers and TV stations, telling every reporter she could find about the prejudice the people of Switchcreek faced. The district attorney, Roy Downer, spent almost as much time holding press conferences. The police eventually arrested two men, and only then did Rhonda take her foot off Downer’s throat.

The DA came in a few minutes later with the sheriff right behind. Downer carried a stack of files under one arm and a laptop under the other. He set them on the table, and then both men went around the table shaking hands, making somber noises. The DA paid most of his attention to Rhonda. He looked like a bobble-head doll, a little man with an enormous, wobbly noggin. Then again, a lot of the normals had started to look like that to Deke.

Downer sat across from Rhonda and the reverend and turned on the laptop. “We’re going to release a statement to the press very soon,” he said. “Tomorrow morning, hopefully. Normally we’d never share details about an open case like this—you don’t want to hinder the investigation, or expose the office to criticism until we’ve checked all the facts. You have to get your ducks in a row…”

“We appreciate the immense risk you’re taking, Roy,” Rhonda said dryly.

“Well, I think we all agree that in cases like these, the county has to reach out to the local community. Though you all understand this has to remain confidential until we make a more public announcement.”

“Yes, of course,” the reverend said. Blanks were hard to read, but Deke had spent enough time around the clade to know the pastor was on edge. The woman sat straight in her chair, barely moving, like a squirrel catching the scent of a hound dog. “What have you found out?”

“Not a thing,” the sheriff said. He was a white-haired, broad-faced man with a complexion like a permanent sunburn. Deke had worked with him a couple times before when Deke had stepped in to keep the peace between Switchcreek folks and the county police. He was quiet and competent.

“Uh, what the sheriff means,” Downer put in, “is that we’ve found nothing that changes what we already thought. The coroner’s report said that she died of strangulation, not a broken neck, which is typical in suicides. People don’t usually manage to break their necks.”

“Jesus,” Deke said under his breath. Rhonda shook her head, but the reverend seemed to be holding herself in check.

“As for the house,” Downer said, “there were no signs of a struggle, or forced entry. The materials she used were all on hand—the rope was already hanging from the tree for the tire swing, the patio chair was nearby. The two girls didn’t hear anything. They didn’t even know their mom was outside until that morning, when they called Nine-one-one. That was at 6:10 a.m.”

“How long was she up there, then?” Rhonda asked.

Downer looked to the sheriff, and the cop said, “She died at least several hours before the call. The blood had time to pool in her feet before we found her. Besides that …” He shrugged. “It ain’t like on TV. That’s about all we know.”

“And nobody saw her just hanging out there in the open?” Rhonda said.

“The tree isn’t visible from the road,” Deke said. He didn’t add that even if someone from Switchcreek had managed to see something, he doubted they’d have called the police—any one of the clades would have called Deke or Rhonda or the reverend, one of their own.

“Which of the girls made the call?” the Reverend asked.

Downer stared blankly at her. “I don’t see how that matters, but … well, let me see.” He opened a manila folder, started flipping through papers.

“Rainy,” the sheriff said. “Though she doesn’t say so on the tape. Later she told us that she was the one who called. Sandra agreed.”

“What did she say on the tape?” the reverend asked.

Downer opened a folder and started flipping through the pages. “I have the transcript somewhere …”

“You can just summarize, Roy,” Rhonda said.

“The girl gave her address,” the sheriff said. “Then she said that her mother had killed herself. Very calm, very composed.”

“Our girls can sound calm to outsiders, even when they’re upset,” the reverend said.

Rhonda said, “She said that? ‘Killed herself’?”

The cop shrugged. “Near as I recall. We also talked to Dr. Fraelich, the doctor who was treating her. She confirmed that Jo Lynn had been prescribed antidepressants since her operation two years ago.”

“Oh! Here we go,” the district attorney said. “Yes, ‘killed herself.’ Exact words.” He pushed the sheet across the table.

“What kind of operation did she have?” Rhonda asked the sheriff.

Deke looked at the mayor. She wore a concerned expression that was very convincing.

“Uh, female problems,” Roy said. “A hysterectomy.”

“I see,” Rhonda said.

Deke glanced at the reverend, then back to Rhonda. Both these women knew that Jo had had an abortion a month before the hysterectomy, and Dr. Fraelich had helped with both procedures. Rhonda was fishing to find out what Fraelich had told the police.

The sheriff said, “Hormonal adjustment is how the doctor put it. She said it was perfectly normal in women to experience periods of depression after the operation.”

Deke said, “She’d stopped taking those pills months ago.”

“You know this for a fact?” the sheriff said.

“Maybe that was the problem: She’d stopped taking them,” Downer said. “Anyway, we’ll have the drug report this week and we’ll know if there was anything in her system.”

The sheriff said, “We know she was distraught. Her daughters said she’d been upset that night. Crying and whatnot.”

“Upset about what?” the reverend asked.

“They didn’t know.”

Downer said, “I got the impression it was just general weeping. Something she did a lot, evidently. If these kinds of hormonal problems affect menopausal women, who knows what affect it would have on a, a woman in Ms. Whitehall’s condition?”

The reverend leaned back in her chair. “What condition would that be?”

“I think he means the beta condition,” Rhonda said.

“No!” Downer said. “I didn’t mean to imply anything of the sort. It’s just, I mean, even normal women—”

Rhonda raised her black-penciled eyebrows. “Yes, Roy?”

The DA stopped himself before he began sputtering. He’d learned at least one thing since the Sherilyn Manus case, then.

“I think we’re done here,” he said. “If we learn anything new, of course we’ll call you.” He started closing down the laptop. The sheriff stood, hands at his sides.

The reverend said, “The ruling, then, is that this was a suicide?”

“That’s what the coroner’s report says,” Downer said. “I can’t see any reason to overrule it.”

“What about the note?” Deke asked.

“Pardon?” Downer said.

“If it was a suicide, you’d think there’d be a note.”

“Not always,” the sheriff said. “Sometimes it’s impulsive.”

“Did you check her laptop?” Deke asked.

Downer looked up. “The laptop … yes.” He looked at the sheriff.

“We don’t have a computer listed on the report,” the cop said. “And I didn’t see one.”

“It was a Mac,” Deke said. “A little white one with a fish bumper sticker on it. She used it all the time.”

“It’s probably in the house, then. Of course we’ll look at it.”

As they left the conference room Rhonda took his arm and let the reverend walk out ahead of them.

“What’s that look about?” she asked. “You’ve got your Chief face on.”

“I don’t know,” Deke said. “The laptop. Plus Dr. Fraelich didn’t tell them—”

“Shush. Your voice carries like a foghorn. Tell you what: Why don’t we stop back at my office. I’d like to talk to you about some things.”

“I’ve got some errands to run,” he said. “Up in Knoxville.”

“Oh, of course,” she said, as if she knew exactly where he was going. Maybe she did. It was near impossible to keep a secret from Rhonda. And if she knew a secret, she never let you forget it. “I’ll just nab you when you get back, then.”

They passed the cop Deke had seen on the way in. The man watched them as they crossed the lobby. Deke ignored him.

When they were outside Deke said, “Nab me about what?”

“Paxton’s going to sign the papers for his daddy.”

She looked at him, waiting. She wanted to know if Deke was going to fight her on this.

“P.K. has to make up his own mind,” he said.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. “Once I showed him the Home—”

“Either way,” Deke said firmly. “Either way, it’s his own decision. If he backs out, he backs out.”

“Well of course, honey.” She patted his arm. Her lipstick smile was unwavering. “You enjoy yourself in Knoxville, now.”

University Hospital was a maze of hallways like one of those haunted houses thrown together by the Jaycees every Halloween. Except he was the monster. When people caught sight of him they jerked in surprise and looked away. Deke resisted the urge to yell, Boo!

He followed the signs to the elevators. Not that he was going to take one. The carriage might be able to take his weight, but he’d have to squat on the floor to fit. He found the stairwell door next to the elevators and ducked inside.

The fertility clinic was on the eighth floor. The two women at the front desk greeted him by name. How was traffic? How’s Donna doing? Deke and Donna had been coming here twice a month for two years, and the staff was still trying hard to be as pleasant as could be.

“Sorry I’m late,” Deke said. “I had to ask three different women to get a sample.”

The youngest woman blinked at him, not sure if he was joking, then decided that he must be. “Oh, you,” she said. She whisked the bag off to the back of the lab. The other woman took a key ring from the wall and said, “I think the room is free.”

“Sure hope so,” Deke said. “Hate to walk in on somebody.”

She led him down the hall and unlocked a room. At the door she handed him a cup and lid that was a lot like the one Donna had filled, as well as a plastic, insulated sack to put it in. “Okay then!” she said, and closed the door behind her.

Well, he thought. Here we are again. Ready for romance?

The room contained a stand-alone wardrobe on wheels, a brown plaid couch, a coffee table, and a reading lamp. A door led to a small room with a toilet and shower. The drapes were closed, but bright sunlight peeled the edges.

He turned on the lamp, opened the wardrobe. Three of the shelves were piled high with magazines. He knew from past explorations that most of them were Playboys, some of them nearly a decade old. The kind of porn women would buy. A few Hustlers hid in the mix, probably left behind by clients who couldn’t get inspired by the vanilla stuff.

On previous visits he’d tried looking through the magazines. All the girls looked like marshmallow-and-toothpick manikins: bulbous heads on spindly necks, massive doughy breasts, claw-hands tipped with red fingernails. And those mouths, Jesus Christ. Lips like red rubber suction cups, and tiny pink tongues lapping over sharp white teeth. The girl-on-girl pictorials were almost too much to bear.

On the floor of the wardrobe were a stack of hand towels and an industrial-sized bottle of sanitary gel, the same stuff they rubbed on Donna’s belly during sonograms. He took the bottle and one of the towels back to the couch, set it on the coffee table. Then he reached into his breast pocket and took out a folded envelope.

Like everything else in the argo world, what didn’t exist you had to make yourself. Donna had been happy to do her part. She’d even gone to buy the digital camera and the printer that made little Polaroid-sized pictures. He removed the pictures from the envelope and laid them out like he was dealing solitaire.

He laughed to himself. Solitaire. That was the game, all right.

———

When he delivered his cup the nurses thanked him as if he’d brought them donuts. “Don’t use it all at once,” he said.

“Pardon?” the young woman asked.

“Never mind.” He waved good-bye and left his boys in their care. The UT doctors would count and evaluate them—were their heads properly bulbous, their tails sufficiently whiplike? did they swim like salmon, or laze about like carp at a dock?—and then ship them off to Boston and Barcelona. Once a month Donna came in for a date with a long needle, and the extracted eggs would be mailed off too. Sperm and eggs would rendezvous at a swank petri dish in a foreign city, where the close quarters and forced intimacy would hopefully lead to wanton permeability and penetration. So far the orgies had been a bust. Either his boys lost their nerve or Donna’s girls rebuffed their advances, or something went wrong down the line. The few times when fertilization had taken hold, the subdivision had ground to a halt a few hours later. No one could tell them why.

He clumped downstairs, crouched to make it under the exit door, and walked out into sunlight. He should be thankful that anybody at all was taking an interest in their problem. Two different research teams were working on argo fertility. The geneticists had figured out ten years ago that while none of the clades could cross-fertilize with unchanged people, the clades could breed with their own kind. So chubs made more chubs and blanks pumped out two or three bald girls at a time—but argos remained as barren as winter trees.

It was becoming clearer and clearer that nobody had the slightest clue about how to fix the problem. TDS had rewritten their genes, and nobody knew how to read the new language. Deke and Donna were considered “mature onset”—the Changes had caught them after they’d gone through puberty—so maybe the problem wasn’t that they’d been changed, but that they hadn’t changed enough. The younger argos had grown taller, stronger, more “purely” argo. Maybe their odds of reproducing would be better. But so far only two other argo couples had volunteered for the fertility study. The costs were tremendous, and the young couples either couldn’t afford it or weren’t desperate enough yet. The old ones, the people over forty who’d spent most of their lives as normals, had no desire to make more freaks.

He paid the parking lot attendant, a black kid about twenty years old who didn’t look too happy either. Deke thought about saying, So, this troll walks into a bar and the bartender says, Hey buddy, why the long face? And then the kid could tell him a nigger joke, and they’d share a big oppressed-minority laugh.

Sure, it would go just like that.

The argos weren’t a minority—you had to be human to be part of that pie. Down deep the normals understood that they were a separate species altogether, a race of predators, and any one of them could slaughter a human with a swipe of an arm. The humans knew it, and no argo could afford to forget it either.

He drove fast, anxious to get home. He was happy to have the wind beat him around the head.

Not long ago he couldn’t understand why Donna wanted to go through all this fertility nonsense. They didn’t need children to be fulfilled, did they? Couldn’t he and Donna be happy on their own? Lots of normals went their whole lives without making babies. So why the hell were they pining for a person who didn’t exist? Might never exist.

But he came to share the ache. Maybe it was the species thing. Something in his cells that demanded to go on, to not let the humans win.

Jo Lynn had given him a picture once, something she’d found on the web and printed out for him. She’d given it to him and said, This is your future. And even though the picture was a fake, one of those Photoshop jobs people liked to put on the web, he’d folded it up and kept it with him, tucked away like—

“Shit!”

The photographs of Donna.

He slapped his shirt pocket, dug into his pants pockets as best he could while keeping the Jeep on the road, but of course the pictures weren’t there. They were laid out on the donation room coffee table. He swung into the left lane and braked hard. He dropped the Jeep into the wide, shallow ditch dividing the interstate, turned around, and accelerated hard to rejoin the traffic heading back into town. Maybe the nurses hadn’t gone into the room yet. Maybe they’d gone to lunch.

Twenty seconds later he saw the lights flashing in his rearview mirror and he swore again.