Bethany's Sin

SEVEN

THE LAW IN BETHANY'S SIN

At noon Oren Wysinger turned his white-and-blue Oldsmobile patrol car off Fredonia Street and into the McDonald's parking lot.

Watching from under the brim of his hat, he saw a few people stop eating to stare at him; only when they were certain the blue light wasn't flashing round and round the rooftop glass bubble did they return to their lunches. That feeling of power made Oren Wysinger happy, as if he'd just been reminded that he was an important man.

Maybe even the most important man in the village. He circled the restaurant slowly, looking at the cars parked in their yellow-outlined slots. Mostly locals. There was a red sports car he didn't recognize; somebody out for a drive, maybe some young guy from Spangler or Barnesboro trying to pick up girls. He parked his own car and watched that red job for a few minutes. After a while a teenage boy and girl, both wearing blue jeans, she in a halter top and he in a short-sleeved white shirt, came out of the restaurant and got into the car. The boy noticed Wysinger and nodded, and Wysinger tipped a finger to the brim of his hat. The sports car pulled out of the parking lot slowly, but Wysinger had the distinct feeling that boy would get out on Highway 219 and drive like a devil with a pitchfork up his ass.

Oren Wysinger was forty-six years old. He had the face of a man toughened by the weather: squint lines around eyes so deeply brown they were almost black, creases and cracks and gullies in the flesh that looked like dried-up riverbeds. Gray sideburns, close-cropped, came down from underneath the hat, and below it the hair looked like so much salt and pepper sprinkled across pale skin. His hooked nose was made even more hooked by a large bump of bone on the bridge, where he'd been caught by a beer bottle during a fight three years ago at the Cock's Crow. He looked wary and cautious and dangerous, distrustful of strangers and fiercely protective of Bethany's Sin. Because that was his job as sheriff. On both seamed hands the fingernails were bitten to the quick.

Wysinger stretched, his six-foot-three bulk completely filling the driver's side of the front seat, and his ornate belt buckle scraping up against the steering wheel. He was hungry as all hell; he'd had scrambled eggs and ham at five-thirty this morning in his small brick house on Deer Cross Lane, and during his morning rounds he'd chewed on fig Newtons and Cracker Jacks and drunk a couple of pints of milk. The wrappers and containers lay on the rear floorboard. He got out of the car, walked across the lot into the restaurant. He knew the counter girls because he was a man of strict habits. They were cute little high-schoolers, two from Barnesboro and the other, the prettiest one, whose name was Kim, from Elmora.

Kim had his lunch waiting for him: three ham burgers, French fries, and a large Coke. She smiled and asked him how he was doing, and he lied and told her he'd run down a speeder over on Cowlington just an hour before. He took his food, nodded or spoke to a few of the people at the tables, and then went back outside to his car. He switched on his radio and listened to the troopers while he ate. One of them was asking about a registration on a pickup truck. Codes were talked back and forth. Static, different voices, during one transmission the unmistakable scream of a siren. He found himself idly fingering the roll of fat at his midsection; it was no more than a bicycle tire, but it bothered him nonetheless. He could press all the way down through the fat to where the muscle was still firm; at one time the muscles and sinews had stood out like piano wires all along his body, and when he moved he could swear they vibrated. But now he wasn't getting enough exercise; he used to be able to walk his rounds, but in the past few years the village had been expanding outward and he found it more practical to take the patrol car. He thought of the troopers out on the highway, hard-muscled men in their streamlined metal-and-glass machines. They would be wearing green or gray-tinted sunglasses to ward off the reflection of sun from asphalt, and those Smoky Bear hats that gave them impressive profiles. He'd wanted to be a trooper, and many years ago enrolled in the program, but things hadn't worked out. It was his attitude, he's been told; his reflexes were too slow as well. That was a fine thing for a pencil pusher to tell a man who'd been All-State halfback at Slattery High in Conemaugh, his hometown, about seven miles northeast of Johnstown. Slow reflexes. Shit. And that bullshit about attitude, too. What did attitude ever count for, anyway? They had it in for his ass because he was from a small town and hadn't lived in Johnstown like the rest of them; they didn't like him because his picture and a story about the ex-football star joining the state trooper program had been in the Conemaugh Crier. They'd laughed at him for that. The sons of bitches. Whole goddamn program wasn't worth shit anyway. And he had nothing in Conemaugh, all of his friends having died or moved away, all the landmarks of his boyhood fallen to progress and concrete.

He wolfed down his last hamburger and, after finishing the Coke, crumpled the cup in one large hand. So what? Those bastards could have the open road, and they could run their asses ragged on it for all he cared. In another few minutes he heard the troopers talking about a red Jaguar convertible out on 219, clocked at sixty-eight.

That would be the sports car he'd just seen; he nodded and smiled to himself. At least his instincts were still sharp. He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine growled. As he pulled out of the McDonald's lot, he was thinking of the fine light down on Kim's bare arms. What was her last name? Granger. Pretty girl. Probably had a lot of boyfriends, too. All of them football players.

As he drove, his eyes flicked from side to side; he drove along the Circle, nodding as a couple of people waved from the sidewalk, and he turned toward his office. Tree branch shadows, cool and dark, moved over his car, engulfing him. He could still hear the troopers on the radio. They sounded very near, but he knew they were actually many miles distant, absorbed in their own lives. How simple it would be to break into one of those transmissions, to scream into that radio, to startle them from their daily rounds, to shout out wildly, This is Oren Wysinger in Bethany's Sin: we need some cars up here and some help because...

No. No, couldn't do that.

There was no microphone on his radio.

As he listened, the voices seemed to be fading away until there was only an occasional muffled sentence or two. Voices from another world, fading in and out through thick clouds of static. On Cowlington Street a huge shadow loomed over the patrol car, and Wysinger felt a brief chill in its presence. He pressed his foot down a fraction on the accelerator. When he turned right at the next intersection, he glanced quickly into the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of the three-storied stone house before it was covered over again by the maze of leafy branches. He didn't like to pass by there, though that was part of his job, too. It reminded him of the Fletcher house on the outskirts of Conemaugh; that house had been smaller, but it still stayed in his memory after ten long years, like someone lurking in the dark basement of his soul.

He'd been driving a patrol car in Conemaugh then, working with two other local men as part-time deputies. And it had been a cold morning in February when he'd gone to that house on the hill, summoned there by Mrs. Kahane, a teacher at Slattery, who'd told him something was wrong. Tim and Ray, Cyrus Fletcher's boys, had been absent for three days, and no one answered the telephone or the door. He tried the front door and found it locked; all the windows were closed and curtained, and he couldn't see in. But the back door swung open at his touch. And when he stepped in, he smelled something high and sweetish, not unlike the odor dead dogs gave off when he pulled their car-flattened, brain-crushed carcasses off the highway. It was cold in the house, though, and it wasn't a rotten-meat smell or a blood smell, but the scarlet smell of Death. He found everything in order in the kitchen. Tepid coffee in two white cups on the kitchen table. Plates set in their proper places; four of them: for the boys, Fletcher's wife, Dora, and Cyrus himself. Bacon and green-veined eggs on the plates. Hecalled out for Cyrus and Dora, but no one answered, and after a long time he climbed the oak-banistered staircase to the second floor, where the bedrooms were. Somewhere a clock ticked in that house; he remembered that very distinctly, even now long afterward. Somebody must be here,he'd thought; somebody had to wind that clock.

He found the boys in their beds, with quilts and a blanket still over them. They had no faces anymore; their features had been hacked away. One of them - Tim? - had his mouth open, and Wysinger could see the glittering teeth were streaked with thick, dried blood.

Their throats had been slashed, too.

In the other, larger bedroom, it was worse. Dora, in the robe she wore every morning as she made breakfast for the family in the predawn hours, lay on the floor on a mat of blood. Her head had been almost severed from the body, and one leg had been cut off and lay in a corner now, like a discarded walking stick. It was then that he became sick, and he struggled to get to the bathroom without puking his guts out on the rug.

But in the bathroom lay Cyrus. Parts of him were scattered on the floor, and Cyrus Fletcher had been a large, strong man who cut firewood and hauled it into town for his customers. Now it seemed that there was very little left of him except strings of flesh and muscle, jagged white shards of bone. The remnants of a staring, screaming face, and even that had been crushed by the blow of a heavy object. Long afterward, when Wysinger had stopped shaking and throwing up, he noticed the marks in the bathroom walls.

Slashes. Like the blows of an ax. Those same slashes in the room where Dora lay. And as he ran to his car to call for help he realized the ticking of the clock, not wound for three days, had suddenly stopped.

From that moment on, unknown to him then, the true horror had begun. Like the spinning of huge, time spanning webs. But he knew it now, and he disliked passing that stone house on Cowlington because it was filled with dead things, too, dead relics and things he didn't understand. Things from a strange, ancient past. His car was covered by shadows, and he felt cold, though the sun was burning brightly beyond the overhang of trees, and birds sang, and the wind breathed through the leaves like ancient whispers that no mane could understand.

Nearing the small red brick building that was the sheriff's office, Wysinger instinctively put his foot to the brake. Parked in front of his office was a battered old Ford pickup, a crazy quilt of rust-eaten paint. The tailgate was down, and a young man was sitting in the truck's bed, his legs dangling. Wysinger narrowed his eyes slightly as he pulled into the parking space with the sign that said RESERVED FOR SHERIFF. He didn't know the man - at least he didn't think he'd ever seen him before - and he was suddenly both curious and suspicious. But he took his time getting out of the car, pretending to check the radio and the contents of the glove compartment before he swung his legs out and stood up; he closed the door and locked it, then glanced over toward the young man with a careful eye.

"Good afternoon," the man said. A flat accent unfamiliar to Wysinger. Beneath aviator-style eyeglasses his eyes were light brown and friendly-looking, as if he expected Wysinger to stride across the few feet of pavement that separated them and give him a hardy, good-to-meet-you handshake.

Wysinger nodded; he looked at the license plate. Nebraska.

Filed it away in his mind. The man looked to be about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, certainly no older than that. He had curly brown hair and a brown mustache; his hair was unruly but clean, and the mustache looked newly trimmed. But the Nebraska tag and the young man's denims and blue workshirt immediately told Wysinger what he was: a drifter. Somebody looking for handouts; one of the legions of people who roamed the country, often living out of their cars or trucks, looking for odd jobs, anything to get them by. People who had left home early, lured by the call of the open road, searching for something only they seemed able to understand.

"I'm the sheriff," Wysinger said unnecessarily, but he wanted this young man to know exactly who he was dealing with, right here and now.

"Yes sir," the man said, with a cheerful air that immediately irritated him. "That's just who I want to see." He got down out of the truck and neared Wysinger; in the bed Wysinger could see an assortment of tools, odds and ends of wood and brick, a folded tarpaulin.

"What can I do for you?" Wysinger asked.

"I'm Neely Ames," the man said, offering a hand. Wysinger took it slowly, and they shook.

"Do I know you or something?" Wysinger eyed him.

"No," the man said. "Unless you were in Greenwood yesterday, 'cause that's where I was. No, really I'm just sort of passing through, on my way up north."

"Uh-huh," Wysinger said.

"I do odd jobs," the man said, nodding toward his truck. "Hall off stumps, cut grass along the roadside, take garbage to the dump -

whatever needs doing. I was passing through and I noticed you had a pretty little town here, and I was wondering if any of the folks needed some work done. But before I asked around I figured I'd check with the sheriff so there wouldn't be any misunderstandings, you know?"

"Right," Wysinger said.

Neely could read the distrust in the sheriff's eyes. That was nothing new to him; he'd seen it before, plenty of times, in towns like Hollyfork and Whiting and Beaumont and a hundred others. It was a little drama he'd gotten used to playing out, and it required him to stand with a serious yet imploring expression on his face. Not too imploring, though, because then they thought you were making fun of them. He had to look honest, too, not the kind of person who would break into the bank in the middle of the night and run away with the town's life savings. Neely disliked posturing for people like this, but a man had to eat and rest from the road sometimes, and that meant having folding money in your wallet. And often that was hard to come by. But in four years of traveling he'd never stolen; once, in Banner, Texas, he'd found one of those small plastic wallets that come open in the middle and there had been a little over a hundred dollars in it but no identification. He'd kept the money but never thought of it as stealing. Just getting lucky. But he'd been unlucky, too, like the time he'd been thrown into a putrid smelling jail cell in Hamilton, Louisiana, on suspicion of robbing a Majik Market of seventy-five dollars. The teenage girl who'd been working the counter said she thought he was the one but she couldn't be sure.

After a day he was released for lack of evidence and told by a square-jawed policeman to hit the road and doan you eveh come back this way, you heah? He was grateful to get out, and though he hadn't been anywhere near that Majik Market, he had a sudden mean impulse to swing by it and rob the place of every damned penny in the register. But he hadn't, because the road, stretching out ahead until it vanished from sight, beckoned him on like the line of his destiny.

But in those four years he'd learned two things: all towns are basically alike; and all officers of the law are basically alike. Two lessons of the road that had been drilled by repetition into his head.

"So you want work, do you?" Wysinger asked him. The sheriff's expression had never changed.

"I thought I might find some here, yes," Neely replied. He sensed he was about to get the old we-don't-like drifters-around-here speech; he'd heard that before, too.

Wysinger motioned toward the pickup. "Where are you on your way to? You got a home up north?"

"No. I'm just traveling. Seeing the country."

"What for?" Neely shrugged. "Seems like a good way to pass sometime. And it's something I've always wanted to do."

"Seems more like a waste of time to me." He narrowed his eyes like a wolf. "What'd you do, run out on a wife and three or four kids?"

"No," Neely said easily. "I'm not married. No kids, either."

"In trouble with the law somewhere? What'd you say your name was again?"

"Ames. Like the brothers." He could tell this was a lost cause.

He made a move toward his truck. "Well, Sheriff, I've got some miles to travel yet, to borrow loosely from the poem."

"Poem? What poem?"

"Frost," Neely said, opening the door on the driver's side and starting to climb in. He could move on north to Spangler, Barnesboro, Emeigh, Stiiflertown, dozens of tiny dots on the red ribbon of 219. There'd be work ahead. The hell with this guy.

"Talk about the law scare you a little bit?" Wysinger said, coming around to the side of the pickup. "Make you run?"

Neely put the key in the ignition and started the engine.

"I thought you wanted some work," Wysinger said. "Where you goin'? Why don't you get out and we'll talk about it, and maybe I'll make a few telephone calls and End out what you've been up to?"

"Sorry," Neely said. "I've changed my mind."

"Well, maybe you'd just better - " Wysinger stopped in mid-sentence.

Neely looked at him. The sheriff was gazing off to the right, his mouth half-open, his eyes glazed. Neely glanced into the rearview mirror. There was a black Cadillac parked across the street, and he could see the outline of a figure sitting behind the wheel. Motionless.

Watching. Wysinger, without speaking to Neely again, walked across the street to that car, went around to the driver's side, bent to the window. Neely could see his mouth moving. The figure nodded its head. Then Wysinger seemed to be listening. Neely shook his head, put the pickup in reverse, and started to back out.

"Hey! Hold on a minute!" It was Wysinger, calling out from beside that car. The sheriff's head bent back down; he was listening again. In another minute the black Cadillac pulled smoothly away from the curb and vanished down the street, and the sheriff unhurriedly walked back across the street to where Neely waited.

Wysinger ran a hand across his mouth, and his eyes were dark and uneasy.

"What's going on?" Neely asked him.

Wysinger chewed at a thumbnail; "Seems you've got yourself a friend in this village, Ames. Somebody wants you to go to work.'

"Who?"

"The mayor," Wysinger said. "If you want to work, 'll be put on the village payroll. It won't be much, though, I can tell you that from experience. And you'll be working long hours, too."

"Just what is it I'm supposed to be doing?'

Anything and everything. Hauling trash, cutting down weeds, keeping grass mowed, picking up litter on two-nineteen, such like as that. The pay's a hundred a week. 'll be on call from me whenever there's something needs doing." He glanced up in the direction the Cadillac had gone. "What do you think?"

Neely shrugged. The money sounded pretty good, and he was in no hurry to get anywhere. Bethany's Sin was a pretty little village, inviting and clean. No sense in not trying to make a couple of hundred dollars before he headed up into the New England states.

"Why not?" he said. "Sounds okay to me."

Wysinger nodded. His eyes were like black mirrors, and Neely thought he could see himself reflected in those orbs. "There's a boardinghouse on the corner of Kittridge and Grant, one street behind the Circle. Lady by the name of Bartlett runs it. It's clean and not too expensive. Why don't you drive on over there and tell her I sent you. Tell her you're working for the village now, and she'll give you a nice room." His eyes were strange and motionless. Dead, Neely thought suddenly; his eyes look dead.

It was then, looking into the sheriff's black and fathomless eyes, that Neely almost said no, don't think I'll take it. Think I'll drive on north and try my luck there. But he didn't because he needed the money. He said, "Okay. Sure. I'll go on over there right now."

Wysinger held his gaze for a moment, and then the sheriff said,

"Go on. And then come on back here as quick as you can. There's a dead tree needs cutting down ' a couple of streets from here; I've been scared its going to fall across the road some morning." He stepped away from the truck and glanced both ways. "It's clear," he said. "You can back up now."

Neely raised a hand and pulled the truck out into the street, then drove back toward the center of the village. Then it had been the mayor in the black Cadillac, he told himself. He hadn't been able to see the man's face. He grunted. Never had a mayor give him a job before. He felt uneasy, though, around that sheriff. He'd have to watch that guy, because he sensed a cruel streak in Wysinger, and when you give a cruel man a badge you only sanction his cruelty.

But what else had he sensed in the man, just moments before?

Something dark and intangible, something like...fear? Yes, it probably was true that Wysinger was afraid of the mayor. Obviously the mayor of Bethany's Sin holds a lot of clout. Good to have him on my side, Ames told himself.

Wysinger watched the truck disappear from sight around a corner. His teeth tore at the nail of his left index finger. Within him his heart beat like the noise of a fist whacking an empty container.

He didn't like very many people, and he didn't care much for that Neely Ames, either, because he didn't like those who had no responsibilities, who took life pretty much as it came. He didn't like people who didn't live in cages. So the feeling inside him now was more akin to pity than to anything else.

"May God save your soul," Wysinger said, and then he turned away and vanished into his office.