The Devil's Alphabet (4 page)

“Are they investigating him?”

“Jesus, Pax, they’re not investigating anybody that I know of. Listen, I’m going to a meeting with the sheriff and the DA on Monday. If you’re still here then I’ll be sure to tell you what they say.”

Ah. There it was. Deke finally taking a poke at him.

“I can’t stay,” Pax said. “I’ve got to be back to work by Monday. In fact, I should probably drive back tonight.”

“Tonight.”

“Tomorrow morning at the latest. If you could drive me back to my car—”

“You’re not going to go see your dad?”

Pax opened his mouth, closed it. “Listen, my dad doesn’t want to see me.”

“You need to see him,” Deke said. “He’s not doing so well. The charlies—the old men anyway—things get worse as they get older.”

He had no clue what Deke was talking about. There
weren’t
any old charlie men when Pax left town; his father was one of the oldest who came through TDS-C alive, and he’d only been fifty.

Deke said, “I don’t think your dad’s leaving the house much.”

“Deke, he hasn’t called me or wrote me in twelve years.” Pax didn’t mention that he hadn’t tried either.

Deke put his big hand on Paxton’s shoulder. “Then you’re about due.”

They left Jo Lynn’s house, heading west until the road angled north and crossed the creek at the single-lane bridge. Some of the graffiti on the cement walls had been there since Pax was a kid. Deke turned onto Piney Road. They’d almost made a complete circle since leaving the church.

The house where Paxton grew up was a little three-bedroom ranch surrounded by trees. Paxton’s father’s car, a Ford Crown Victoria that was fifteen years old before Pax even left town, was parked in front in its usual spot. It looked like it hadn’t moved in years. The tires looked low, and leaves were shellacked to the body and windows by sap and dirt.

Deke pulled up behind the Crown Vic and stopped, shut off the engine.

Pax made no move to get out. His ears felt warm in the sudden lack of wind.

The picture window drapes were closed. The white siding had grayed, begun to flake. The screen door hung open, but the wooden front door was closed. The grass on the lawn stood a foot tall, the tips sprouting seed.

Deke said, “Some ladies from the church bring food by, but he throws them out before they can do anything else for him.”

“Really?” Pax couldn’t picture his father being rude to church folk, especially women.

“And Rhonda’s got some chub boys who come by every once in awhile. Mow the lawn, check in on him.”

“Chub boys?”

“Charlies. ‘Chub’ is just …” He shrugged.

“I get it,” Pax said. And thought, I bet you don’t call them that to their faces. “Anyway, it looks like they haven’t been around for a while.”

Pax climbed out of the Jeep. He stood there, holding on to the door, looking at the house.

“You want me to go in with you?” Deke said.

“No, no, you don’t have to do that.”

Pax walked across the lawn to the front porch and knocked. He was eye level with the small, diamond-shaped window set in the door. After a minute he cupped his eyes and peered through the smudged glass. He could make out a patch of familiar wall, then nothing but shadows. He tried the doorknob—locked—and knocked again, louder.

Something glinted in the grass beside the cement step. He crouched to pick it up: a syringe and needle, the tube empty. What the hell? He stood to show it to Deke. The man’s head stuck up over the Jeep’s roll bars like a giraffe’s. He squinted to see what it was, then shrugged.

Pax had no idea what that shrug meant. He set the syringe on the porch where he could find it later.

He walked around the corner of the house, stepping carefully through the high grass, wary of hidden needles. The side window for his parents’ bedroom was filled by a silent air conditioner;
the glazed bathroom window next to it was closed and dark.

Behind the house, the backyard had shrunk from the advancement of the brush line. The rusting frame of his old swing set leaned out of the shrubs. Farther back, the low, cinderblock well house—made obsolete by the sewer and water lines added in the ’80s—sat almost buried in the undergrowth like a Civil War fortification.

The door to the back porch was unlocked. Pax went through it, to the kitchen door. He knocked once and turned the knob. The door swung open with a squeak.

“Hello!” he called. “It’s me, Dad.” The air smelled sickly sweet and fungal, a jungle smell. “It’s Paxton,” he added stupidly. From somewhere in the house came the sound of a TV.

The kitchen was as he remembered it, though dirtier than his mother would ever have allowed. Dirtier even than his father had kept it when it was just him and Paxton living here during the year of the quarantine. The garbage can overflowed with paper and scraps. Dishes sat in the sink. In the center of the breakfast table was a white ceramic casserole dish, the aluminum foil peeled back. From somewhere near the front of the house came the low murmur of television voices.

Pax made his way through the dining room, dusty and preserved as an unvisited exhibit, to the living room, where he found his father.

The Reverend Harlan Martin had a firm idea of what a pastor should look like, and it began with the hair. Each morning after his shower, he’d carefully comb back the wet strands from his forehead and spray everything down with his wife’s Alberto
VO 5, clouding the bathroom. Sunday required extra coats, enough hairspray to preserve his appearance through a fire-and-brimstone sermon, a potluck dinner, a visitation or two, and an evening service. His Sunday hair was as shiny and durable as a Greek helmet.

As a child, Pax loved when the hair was down, as when his father slept late and came to the breakfast table unshowered, pushing the long bangs out of his face like a disheveled Elvis. Like now.

His father sat sprawled on the couch, head back and mouth open, eyes closed. His dark hair, longer than Pax had ever seen it, hung along the sides of his wide face to his jaw.

“Dad?” Pax said. The atmosphere in the room was hot and unbearably humid, despite the ceiling fan turning above, the air heavy with a strange odor like rotting fruit. He took a step forward. “Dad?”

His body spread across most of the three cushions. He wore a blue terrycloth bathrobe half closed over a white T-shirt, and black socks stretched over broad feet. His face was deeply cratered, the skin flaking and loose.

His father’s chest moved. A whistling wheeze escaped his mouth.

Okay, Pax thought. Alive, then.

The coffee table and chairs had been pushed to the walls, leaving a wide space with a clear view of the television’s flickering screen. The television abruptly became louder—an ad—and Pax flicked off the set.

His father suddenly lifted his head, turned to glare at Pax. His eyes were glassy, the lids crusted with sleep matter.

“Out,” his father said, his voice garbled by phlegm. He coughed, and raised a wide hand to his mouth. The arm was as
pockmarked as his face. He pointed past Paxton’s shoulder. “Out of my house!” He still had it: the Preacher Voice.

“Dad, it’s me, Paxton.” He crouched down next to his father, and winced at the smell of him. He couldn’t tell if the man was delirious or simply confused by sleep. Did charlie men grow demented early? “It’s your son.”

The huge man blinked at him. “Paxton?” he said warily. Then: “It’s you.”

Pax gripped his father’s hand. “How you doing, Dad?”

“My prodigal son,” his father said.

“The only kind you’ve got.” Pax tried to let go, but his father squeezed harder.

“Who called you? Rhonda?”

“I came for the funeral, Dad. Jo Lynn’s funeral.” Pax extricated his hand and stood. He was surprised to feel something oily on his palm, and rubbed his hand dry on the back of his pants. “You mind if I open some windows?”

“She wants me. Wants to milk me like a cow. You can’t be here.”

Pax unlocked the front door and pulled it open. Deke stood by the Jeep, elbows resting on the roll bar, smoking a cigar that looked as small as a cigarette in his big fingers. He turned at the sound of the door, and Pax held up a hand to tell him everything was okay.

Though of course everything was
not
okay.

His father’s body, huge as it was, looked like a bag to hold an even larger man. The skin hung loose at his neck and cheeks, and now beads of sweat appeared along his brow.

“You’ve got to leave,” his father said, but his tone was no longer firm.

Pax wondered how long it had been since his father last ate.
Could he even move? Pax pulled open the big front drapes and fought down a wave of dizziness. The air in the room was too close, too fetid. The sickly sweet odor had blossomed, become suffocating.

His father’s face shone with sweat, as if breaking a fever. A water blister had appeared on his cheek, as large as a walnut, the skin so tight it was almost translucent. Pax stared at it in horror.

“Oh,” his father said softly. “Oh, Lord.”

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“You took me by surprise,” he said. He looked up, smiled faintly. His eyes were wet. Two more blisters had appeared at his neck. They seemed to expand as Pax watched. “You better leave now.”

Pax turned toward the door, lost his balance, and caught himself. At the front door he braced himself against the frame, and the wood seemed hot under his right hand.

“Deke!” Pax called. Deke and the Jeep swam in and out of focus. “Call Nine-one-one!”

Keeping a hand against the wall to steady himself, he made his way back to the couch. Stains the color of pink lemonade had appeared on his father’s T-shirt.

His father looked up at him with half-closed eyes. “Paxton Abel Martin.” He said the name with a slow drawl, almost singing it, in a voice Pax hadn’t heard in a long time. He had a sudden memory of being carried up the church stairs in the dark—he must have been four or five—held close in his father’s arms.

Pax kneeled in front of him. The rich, fruity smell enveloped him. Pax gently pushed the robe farther open and began to lift the T-shirt. Blisters had erupted over the skin of
his belly: tiny pimples; white-capped pebbles; glossy, egg-sized sacs. The largest pouches wept pink-tinged serum.

“Oh Jesus, Dad.” Pax bunched the edge of the T-shirt and tried to cover one of the open sores, but the oily liquid soaked through and slicked his fingers. “Dad, we’ve got to get you—get…”

His fingers burned, but not painfully. He looked at his hand, rubbed the substance between his fingers. Slowly his gaze turned to his father, and their eyes locked.

There you are
, Pax thought. There, waiting underneath the sagging flesh, the mounds of pitted and pocked skin: the man who had carried him up the stairs. Relief flooded through him. What if they’d been lost forever? Pax and his bloated father were here, in this stinking room, and they were also Harlan Martin and his four-year-old son, climbing out of the church basement after a long Sunday-night service. He felt himself being carried, and at the same time felt the weight of the boy in his arms.

And then Pax was off his feet, an arm across his chest hauling him backward, heels dragging. Big hands carried him through the door and dumped him on the lawn.

“Don’t touch your mouth,” Deke said. “Or your eyes.”

Pax raised his hands. “Don’t worry, I’m not—” He tried to sit up, but the world slipped sideways, and he fell back again into the long grass. “Shit.”

“Just lay there,” Deke said.

Through half-lidded eyes he stared at a crack in the sky. He slowly fanned his arms and legs, making angels in the grass.

———

Sometime later he heard the crunch of tires on the gravel, the slam of car doors. Huge figures hove into his peripheral vision: two young men in tank tops, arms like cartoon bodybuilders.
Chub boys
. One of them looked at him and shook his head, frowning. Pax saw the little diamond in his ear and remembered him from the church basement. The other one, younger with blond spiky hair, snapped the wrist of his latex glove and said, “Gotta use protection, son.” He laughed.

Deke’s voice rumbled like distant thunder—Pax couldn’t turn the sound into words—and one of the charlies answered respectfully, “Sorry, Chief.”

A minute passed, maybe longer, and then a hand reached down out of the sky and hoisted Paxton upright. Deke. The big man helped him to the Jeep and set him down in the passenger seat. Pax just managed to stay upright as Deke turned the vehicle around and got them back on the highway. The air felt good on his face.

“Sorry, man,” Deke said. “I thought he was dry. Rhonda told me he was dry.”

Dry? Pax didn’t know what he meant. He wanted to ask why the chub boys had come, and what they were doing to his father, what the
fuck
was happening—but the questions failed to arrive at his lips. His thoughts refused to stay in order. He bounced along silently as Deke drove back into town, past the Gas-n-Go and the First Baptist Church, onto High Street where a row of houses overlooked the creek. When he was a kid, the only people who’d lived down here were the rich folks.

Deke parked in front of a two-story house, brick on the
bottom and wood siding on top, a traditional ranch with the roof raised ten feet.

“Can you walk?” Deke said.

Pax slowly opened the door and thought,
Can
I walk? He put a foot down on the cement driveway. He hadn’t noticed before how all the driveways up north were paved with asphalt, but down here they were all cement.

“P.K., you want me to help?”

Pax lifted a hand and stepped down. When the surface refrained from tilting beneath his feet he followed Deke up to a tall, narrow door. Inside, the living room was as airy as a church sanctuary. Light poured through the row of new, high windows that had been set above the old walls. The furniture was all polished oak, all argo-sized.

Donna came out of a back room and looked at Paxton. “What happened?”

“Is the guest room made up yet?” Deke asked. “He needs to lay down.”

At the end of a hallway was a room painted bright orange and white—University of Tennessee colors. The bed filled up most of the space. Twelve feet long and eight feet wide, practically a playing field in its own right, covered by a UT Volunteers bedspread. He couldn’t guess where they’d gotten a mattress for it.