Black Sunshine: A Novel, page 14
That movie had a more profound effect on Lloyd’s life than anything he’d ever experienced. It turned on the lights in his soul and for the first time he could see everything clearly. He had done some bad things in his life that had not caused him a moment’s guilt—and never would. But what had happened under Black Mountain the day #7 blew—it had torn Lloyd apart. Now, he knew how to fix that. He understood that he had to pay for what he’d done; he had to earn redemption.
So he’d set out in a single-minded crusade to do just that.
For an entire decade, Lloyd was a model husband and father, and took care of the Sparrow family, too. He went to church and was so pious folks noticed. Wasn’t long before he became a deacon. Then an elder! At the First Pentecostal Church of Aintree Hollow, Lloyd Jacobs was a respected man.
Like that Spaniard in the jungle, Lloyd had hauled his whole life around on his back—his wife, his kids, his church, his job. If any man had ever deserved absolution, Lloyd Jacobs was that man. But what had it got him? He was the best husband and father he knew how to be; now his wife was gone and his kids had turned into weak bloodsuckers. He’d spent 10 years doin’ for Granny and those kids and then Will Gribbins shows up out of nowhere yesterday and they treated him like he was gold! Will. The man who walked out on all of them, who never honored a word of the secret vow they’d both made.
Well, Lloyd was done trying to make things right! He’d meant what he’d said to Will yesterday morning. He would not live the next 20 years the way he’d lived the last.
Lloyd passed silently through the woods, didn’t even disturb the squirrels. He quickly found the spot he was looking for, about two hundred and fifty yards above and to the right of the meadow near the creek and the rock outcrop where he’d gone sangin’ with Will and Ricky Dan. Lloyd had only gone along with them one time, but he never forgot any of the places they went that day. The experience was a good childhood memory and he had precious few of those.
He was in position in a windfall behind a stand of cedar trees 2 hours before he spotted movement on the hillside across the meadow. Two hours without a cigarette. The smell of smoke carried in the woods. Two hours of quiet. A long time to think. And at one point during that silent wait he experienced a moment of clarity. Of sanity. It was like a lone ray of sun suddenly broke through a raging thunderstorm, beamed down to illuminate something below so bright everything else was cast in harsh relief. In that moment, the outrageousness of the act he had plotted was laid bare, naked and steaming before him.
Lloyd was about to commit murder.
Time ground to a halt for a breathless instant as the realization sunk in. Then the moment passed. The dark storm clouds gathered and darkness rolled in over his soul.
With a curious detachment, Lloyd watched through the telescopic sight on his rifle. Saw Will and Jamey top the hill and followed their progress down it and through the trees to the edge of the meadow.
When it came time to put the crosshairs on Will’s chest, Lloyd didn’t flinch. With an icy calm, he squeezed the trigger, didn’t pull it. It was a good shot.
WILL GLANCED DOWN as he was about to step into the clearing, noticed that his shoelace had come untied and leaned over to tie it. That’s when he heard the crack of a rifle and an almost simultaneous thunk as a bullet slammed into the tree trunk a few feet away—so close he could feel the air rearrange itself as the slug passed over his head.
“What the…!” This was bow season! Deer hunters couldn’t use rifles until November. Why…?
Another bullet plowed a furrow in the dirt inches from Will’s shoe and instinct took over. Still bent over his shoelace, he turned and tackled Jamey, knocked him to the ground, then shoved him toward a downed tree a few feet away. Another bullet clipped a chunk out of the bark of that tree as he dived behind it.
Will lay there panting for a moment, then yelled, “Hey! Are you blind? Hold your fire! You dang near killed us.” He paused. “You hear me?”
The woods were silent.
Will looked at Jamey. The boy’s eyes were bugged out, green gumdrops on snowballs. Will reached over and patted his shoulder. “It’s okay. Good thing that guy’s a lousy shot.”
“Why’s he shootin’ at us?”
“He thought we were deer.”
“Couldn’t he see your shirt?”
Will’s shirt was a bright blue corduroy; Jamey’s was fire-truck red. He might not have been a hunter, but Will had gone along with Ricky Dan often enough to know that the flash of anything blue—merely a flash of it—and no hunter in his right mind would fire. Blue was a “Sears color,” a color not found in the woods. Will had been standing at the edge of the clearing. This guy didn’t just catch a glimpse of blue through brush or tree limbs. He should have been able to see the whole shirt!
Even poachers—no, especially poachers—weren’t that stupid. Shooting somebody would be a really bad way to get caught hunting out of season.
Okay then, why’d he shoot? Better question—why’d he shoot three times?
Answer—because he missed the first two.
Will felt a chill, like icicles forming in all his veins.
“I guess the sun was in his eyes,” Will said, but he didn’t believe that. One look at Jamey and it was plain he didn’t believe it either.
Careful to remain behind the downed tree, Will peered through the brush toward the other side of the meadow. Nothing. Not that he’d expected to see anybody. A hunter with a scope could drop a deer from five hundred yards away.
“I wanna go home,” Jamey said softly. The boy was completely transparent. What he thought came out his mouth; what he felt showed on his face. “I don’t like it out here no more. The end.”
“I’m with you, Buddy. I don’t like it, either.” He patted the boy on the shoulder. “Rain check?”
Jamey nodded but said nothing.
Will pointed to the hill they’d topped a few minutes earlier. “Stay down low behind the bushes until we’re on the other side of that rise.”
The two of them turned and made their way slowly back up the hillside, crouched down like walking bent-over in the mine. As they crested the hill, they heard the mournful cry of a coal train whistle, and Will stopped, staggered by a memory still so powerful it could make him physically sick.
LLOYD MISSED!
How could he possibly have missed?
Will had been right in his crosshairs; the bullet should have plowed through his chest and ripped open his heart. But at the last second, Will ducked, leaned over for some reason and the bullet had whizzed by him so close he likely felt the breeze it kicked up.
Lloyd got off two more shots, but the target was two hundred fifty yards away, hidden in the bushes instead of right out there in plain sight.
A wave of such nuclear rage swept over Lloyd that he wanted to break the stock of the rifle over a tree trunk.
He missed!
Now what?
Should Lloyd go after him? Will was, after all, unarmed. Lloyd could follow him back toward the trailer and try to find another spot to pick him off. Gratefully, sanity grabbed him by the collar before he could run off through the woods like he was tracking a wounded doe.
He couldn’t go after Will. Jamey was with him.
It had been a calculated risk to shoot at Will with Jamey so close in the first place. It had been even riskier to keep shooting after the first shot missed the mark. You could believe a deer hunter mistook you for a buck once. But three times?
If he went after Will, the deer hunter ruse would be exposed for what it was. No hunter would accidentally shoot two people, and that’s what he’d have to do. He’d have to get rid of the witness.
His mind pulled up short at that. Not Jamey.
He swallowed hard. No choice, he had to pack it in.
Reluctantly, Lloyd got to his feet, slung the strap of the .30-06 over his shoulder and headed back the way he’d come, to the spot on the other side of the mountain where he’d parked his truck.
He’d had the perfect opportunity to get rid of Will Gribbins. And he’d blown it. That kind of opportunity came one to a customer. Now, Lloyd had no scapegoat. When the world tumbled down, it would land squarely on his head.
He heard the lonely wail of a coal train whistle then, and a memory spirited him away to another place and another decade. He’d been stronger than Will that day, bolder, with a reckless bravery that made him invincible. At least that’s what he’d thought at the time. But two decades of living had beaten all the sentimentality out of him. As a kid, he’d believed that invincibility was the product of courage. Now, he understood it was the product of despair, of not caring one way or the other whether you lived or died.
CHAPTER 17
A coal train whistle blasts out its warning and they both look back over their shoulders. The train’s still at least a mile away, maybe more, but it’s definitely time to get off the trestle.
A boy just on the threshold of adolescence, Will is tall for his age and lean. Lloyd is shorter, stockier, most likely stronger, too, though they have never matched up against each other all out. They’ve come close a time or two, but always backed away from it, as if doing so would cross some line, take them to a place they could never come back from.
Will tosses a final rock, watches it sail through the air and splash into Ugly Betty Creek 50 feet below.
“You see that ’un—kaplunk…splish!” Will says in the universal sound-effects language of young boys. He and Lloyd have sat for the last half hour on the cross ties on the side of the trestle with their feet dangling off the edge, chucking rocks—and spitting, too, of course—into the creek below. “Wish I had me one more big rock. But we gotta go.”
Will stands up, but Lloyd just sits there, swinging his feet back and forth.
“C’mon,” Will says. As if to emphasize his point, the train whistle sounds again, noticeably closer this time. “Race ya to the far side!”
Bootleg Trestle is almost four hundred feet long. It stretches across a rocky ravine where Ugly Betty Creek meanders among the boulders. The boys are not in the middle of the trestle; the far side—away from the oncoming train—is at least three hundred feet from them.
“What if we don’t,” Lloyd says.
“Don’t what?”
“Get off the trestle.”
“You nuts! There’s a train comin’.”
Lloyd looks up at Will, squints into the sun, and reaches up to shade his eyes. “That’s the point. What if we stay on the trestle while the train crosses?”
Will is so dumbfounded he’s rendered momentarily speechless.
“You really think we could sit here and not get knocked off the edge? This thing ain’t that wide.”
“I ain’t talkin’ ’bout sittin’ on the edge.”
“Then where?”
“Over there.” Lloyd points to the tracks. “We could lay down ’tween the tracks and let the train pass over us.”
“Yeah, right,” Will says, relieved that Lloyd has been joking, isn’t really suggesting they stay on the trestle. He takes a couple of steps back toward the short side, careful to step on the cross ties and not into the 6-inch open space between them. “You reckon maybe they’s crawdads in Ugly Betty? We ain’t never…” He realizes Lloyd isn’t beside him, turns and sees Lloyd sitting where he’d left him, swinging his feet, staring off down the ravine.
“Lloyd…?”
“I’m doin’ it. I’m stickin’.”
Will feels an ache in his belly he has no name for.
“Lloyd, you’ll get killed!”
“You think anybody’d care if I did?” The rage and pain in the words travels across the space between them like a shock wave under the sea; when it rises up and hits Will in the chest the force literally knocks him backward a step.
Of course, Will has seen the bruises shaped like squeezing fingers on Lloyd’s upper arms. He knows why Lloyd never wants to take his shirt off in the locker room during PE at school. He’s been a party to the excuses Lloyd makes for the black eyes and swollen lips—Will tripped me. Me ’n Will was climbin’ a tree and I fell out. Will’s knee got me when me ’n him was wrestlin’. It is a wordless arrangement; neither has ever spoken of it. Will knows what is happening to Lloyd at home, but he sees the fierce pride in Lloyd’s eyes and doesn’t ask about it. They both simply accept what they can do nothing about and go on with life.
But this is different! Risking your life is—
“It ain’t dangerous as you think,” Lloyd says, his voice maddeningly calm. Only his eyes are wild. “Look a-here.” He gets up, walks to the track and steps over the rail. “Ain’t nothing here but railroad ties.”
“So?”
“So do you see any scratch marks on them ties, like maybe them trains drag some’m, or a piece of ’em hangs all the way down to the ground?”
The 8-inch square beams coated with creosote, spaced 6 inches apart, have no marks of any kind on them. Will says nothing.
“if ’n some’m hung down, there’d be marks. You seen coal cars same as me. There’s least a foot clearance underneath ’em, maybe more.”
Will stares at him in stunned disbelief. Lloyd is serious. He really means to do it.
“All’s you gotta do is lay still and it’ll pass right over ya.”
“Lloyd, yore crazy.” The train whistle sings out again. Probably isn’t more than a couple of minutes away. “Now com’on. We gotta get outta here.”
Lloyd turns to face him. Will has never seen such a challenge in anyone’s eyes. “You chicken?”
“I ain’t stupid!”
Lloyd drops to his knees, shoves a couple of pieces of coal off the cross ties between the rails and Will hears them plunk into the creek below. Then Lloyd lies down on his back with his head facing the oncoming train.
Will’s heart bangs away so hard he’s certain you can see his shirt bounce with every beat. His knees feel weak; his mouth has a strange taste in it—like pennies.
Lloyd calls out, “Scaredy-cat! Scaredy-cat!” and starts to yell—a wild, primitive cry—almost a howl.
Will turns to bolt off the trestle just as the train rounds the corner of the mountain and comes into view, a roaring black monstrosity bearing down on him.
At that moment, two things happen at once, but time elongates, so he seems able to consider each individually, ponder them carefully.
Will stumbles, trips over his feet and goes down hard on one knee. Rocks and pieces of coal rip open his pant leg and tear into his skin, both palms are scraped raw. He staggers to his feet, wobbly and off-balance, and realizes he has run out of time. He can’t make it to the short end of the trestle ahead of the oncoming train and he can’t outrun the train in a race to the far end.
But the second thing is so odd that even in that desperate moment it registers as a totally unexpected phenomenon. All of a sudden, he is no longer in control of his own movements. His brain is screaming, “Run! Run!” but his body does the opposite. He throws himself down between the tracks instead, and rolls over onto his back between the rails. His feet almost touch Lloyd’s feet; he can see the train coming.
He feels the shock wave of vibration as the train hits the near side of the trestle and he lifts his head for a second to look. The gigantic black engine roars at him like a charging bull. He hears the cry of the whistle as the engineer spots the two bodies on the track and the piercing shriek of metal against metal as he locks up the brakes in a futile attempt to stop the train. Will slams his head back down into the rocks, feels them cut into the back of his scalp, has a heartbeat’s view of blue sky and white clouds and then the world is eaten up in a wild roar.
Shrieking, rumbling, rattling and convulsing, the train roars over him inches from his face.
The train’s journey across his body lasts for hours, for a lifetime.
Sound and vibration are one; they envelop him, consume him, relentlessly bludgeon his senses, blast him with hot air, pelt him with rocks and inexorably pull at him, tug him upward, suck his body toward an instant, mangled, mutilated death. He tries to close his eyes, but he is incapable of any movement, however small, except to dig his fingers into the splintered wood of the cross ties in a frantic, desperate effort to hold on! His vision is filled with the blurry underbelly of the convulsing, beast above him. He tries to shrink away from it, from the hurling death inches from his nose, but it is all around him, under him, beside him, over him. It squeezes tighter and tighter, smashes him, crushes him, roars…
It is gone!
The trestle still vibrates but Will feels cool air and sees blue sky and clouds. He hears his own voice—a moaning, inarticulate mewl. Lloyd is screaming, the wild cry of exaltation now mingled with relief in a voice that is at once human and feral. That yell, not the roar of the train, is the sound Will would remember for the rest of his life.
Tears stream down Will’s cheeks. He looks around fearfully, like the train might come back for him. He sits up; his whole body is trembling violently. That’s when he realizes he has wet himself.
Lloyd has leapt up, eyes wild as a madman, a deep, bloody scratch on his cheek that he got who knows how. He jumps up and down, whoops, pulses energy—a maniacal smile on his face.
Will staggers to his feet, stares at Lloyd for a moment, then leans over and throws up, splashes his lunch on the cross ties and rails.
“Who-hoo!” Lloyd squeals, oblivious to everything except the adrenaline high that pulses through every nerve in his body. “Wasn’t that—?”
Will turns from his vomit and lunges at Lloyd, catches him in the chest and bowls him over. The two of them tumble to the trestle floor dangerously close to the edge. Then Will starts to pummel Lloyd, crying at the same time. Lloyd covers his face with his arms and Will’s blows land ineffectually, but Will continues to swing and swing until his muscles are lead and he no longer has the strength to move his arms.
Then he gets up, his eyes wet, his nose running, and staggers away down the long side of the trestle. Lloyd calls to him, but he doesn’t answer. When he gets to the end, he sees two men far down the track racing toward him. It must have taken more than a mile to stop the train. Then he steps off into the dirt and stumbles away, gains speed with each stride until he is running wildly, madly, recklessly through the woods. Trailing a strange keening cry like a kite on a string behind him, he frantically tries to outdistance the terror. But he has brought it along with him in his heart, where it will take up residence, put down roots, and grow entangling tendrils into his soul for the rest of his life.
