Nimrod Thornton.

Wicked Temper.

A S K I N G.

I been seeing it done for years.

First thing, each purple morn, the Willerswitch Witch comes to that same steep k.n.o.b atop Hulep Choat's Peak. She ain't much hair left; what hairs there is is white. Her skin be grey. There might be other hags. That girlytot expects so, I expect. But this hag is--now don't you worry it--but she's the Willerswitch Witch to that tot in the tree.

My ragtag baby never leaves her tree to ask for no Christian name, mind you; she ain't one to ask. No, she keeps secret. Her eyes be my eyes.

Below, the old grey thing lifts her skirts and she spin eleven, twelve, thirteen times, eyes closed and whispering. The Witch ask where do time tell, where is the well went, where be the wind sent, how went tizzypoke? The Witch blows a French harp, jigging and clogging her pointy toes into the air, conducting them demon symphonies with her willerswitch, demon symphonies for the hollers below to echo. From the tree on Hulep Choat's Peak, one can see hollers piled upon hollers, snapdragon hillsides tumbling onto valleys, twining into murky slews. Sometimes, a tw.a.n.ging guitar string might be heard up from them hills, answering back at that French harp. Always, the Witch takes to circling the greenspired tree, first clockwise, then counter to the clock. The willerswitch will lead, the little tot will listen.

"A thousand'n ten hunert'n one babies I done pulled from they mams. Put my mark on most ever chile I birthed. Ever family has its daemon babe, ye know, a boogified daemon. Ask me, I made em so. Ask me. I hate a impudent chile. I knows em right off. I gives em they mark. Everbody got one. I kin pick a collicky babe, a trickster, a fool, er I kin pick me a pearl from ther swine. So I kisses em with my pucker, er I kisses em with the switch. Onliest ones I ever put back into they mams is them what this world ain't ripe fer yet. That's why I be ashamed I's so fergitful. That's why I got ter ask. Do you recollect them babysteps, babysteps? When you was a chile you spake as a chile oughter do. Who chile is you? Who chile, who chile, who chile is you?"

It was a very long time, many morns, and many a dizzy circle around that chestnut tree, before my tree tot got wise: the Willerswitch Witch was asking of her.

J O H A B E T H 'S H O L L E R.

"You been rightly baptized?" she asked.

"No, I'm a salesman," he lied.

A war whoop came from behind him. O'Toole turned to see. A burrheaded kid dove into the ballcrawl. O'Toole slurped the last of his Brunswick Bar-B-Q Pizza, glanced back and took the napkin from her outstretched hand. The video arcade made fireworks in her ink empty eyes. She slid sideways inside the candy-striped dress; clicking out three stacks of quarters from the coin-belt, O'Toole's waitress crossed his palm with cold coin. She was owling up at him. Almost cutesy, but not quite.

"What sorter?"

"Whazzat?"

"What sorter salesman are you?"

"Fertilizer. Fertilizer sales," he shouted above the pingpingping of a lazer attack from a Stealth Invaders nearby. She didn't seem to care if he was lying or not, she seemed dull and dazed by the lights. O'Toole had been pumping her for quarters half the morning and could tell she was a bad judge of character. He wasn't apt to start telling her the truth now. Snapping a suspender, he slid past her, brushing close as his breath dropped into her ear. "When d'ya blow this p.e.c.k.e.rstand?"

"Bout a hour. One p.m., sir."

Bells rang and the scoreboard went flippy as O'Toole chugged a load of silver into the Viper pinball. He felt ticklish without his package. But O'Toole's package wasn't welcome in here. It was the Sat.u.r.day lunch crowd, mommys and daddys--and baby kamikazes by the s.h.i.tload, bolting hither and yon, through the beer-laden tables of Bubba Dog's Pizza Jamboree. Everybody took a good retro-disco pounding from Madonna, Queen Of The d.a.m.ned, hating, loving, loathing you; preaching papa don't preach or else. This did not bother O'Toole as he shot his ball-bearing up the chute. He kind of liked the rustle of kids, of commanding mothers who tried not to blow smoke in their toddler's faces or drink as much as their rough-joking men. No, it relaxed him strangely, iced his nerve and let him cool out from too much road. Besides, the Weevil liked women with kids, liked them in a sick way in fact. O'Toole might even stumble on the wily c.o.o.na.s.s someplace like this. Baptized or no. It made sense. "Ever meet a sharpie name Tom Wivaldi?" O'Toole was the one asking questions, after all, wasn't he? Him and Geraldo?

"Uh-uh. I doubt so much as I have." She spoke casually, unaware of the consequences.

"He's gotta gold eye-tooth and chronic halitosis. Bad breath." No, O'Toole didn't take personal questions. He was the snoop, baby, and don't you forget it. Just like the Doggy Dogg. He was top hound on the trail, the heavy-hitter with a badge of steel. "Ring any bells?" His hard gaze never left his ring-a-dinging pinball, but he saw her head shake idly in the Viper's reflecting gla.s.s before she orbited away. He wasn't sure if her no meant no or if she even heard the question. For the next hour, she would venture forth to dispense change to the suckers, always circling back to hover at his elbow.

She was looking better to him. A pasty, purse-lipped wisp of a girl, crowding twenty-one with a puzzle for a personality. Not really pretty, but pretty didn't matter much to O'Toole. She didn't seem flirty or clinging or raging with hormones as he racked up points, in fact, she acted like booster shots might be in order. She seemed, instead, to crave his interrogation. He sensed a vacancy she needed to fill, like this m.u.f.f was a wanting vessel who kept emptying herself over and over as she clicked out quarters from her moneychanger. Ka-chingaching! O'Toole kept piling up more free plays. Here she came again. He would ask one last thing above this jolly ruckus. Madonna's a.s.s got kicked off the loudspeakers by Tom f.u.c.king Jones, who only wanted your extra time and your kiss. Letting his plunger fly, another team of yard apes whooped as they splashed plastic in the ball-crawl and O'Toole smiled. He didn't feel so lonely anymore.

She told him to wait by the dumpsters, so he pulled the beaten Impala convertible around back of Bubba Dog's and picked her up. When she slid into the seat, he smelled a damp odor, a whiff of stale baby powder and stale grease. They stopped by a Pump'N'Pantry where she got strawberry milk; then he found a burger shack drive-thru where she got fries with gravy to go, all the while explaining how she couldn't tolerate anymore meatb.a.l.l.s or pizza pies. They wheeled around the courthouse, then along a broad downtown boulevard, her munching home fries and him thinking how picayune this drag was when you'd been strutting Peachtree Street less than twenty-four hours before. Some little girls might call this civilization, but O'Toole's idea of metropolis was 24 HR. Pay-Per-View and the Houston Oilers. Or, better yet, Dirty Howie Stern and a Nathan's dog sweating hot mustard and sauerkraut. Christ, anymore, he just about hated Beulah Land. He would be glad when this job was kaput. The backroads just left him lonelier.

"Do you think Moses was really a Jew, you know, a real wool-headed Jew?" she was asking him, sucking gravy off her fingers.

"Wouldn't doubt it. Who cares."

"I know he was Big Daddy to the Israelites, but I cain't see the good Lord givin up no commandment to no Jew. You got perty eyelashes. Anyhow, I reckon he'uz a lot like Santy Claus, you know, just an old chap with a woolly beard and them wool-heads wanted him to be a Jew."

"Maybe so. That'uz a long time ago."

"Your daddy ever grow a beard? Mine wouldn't. Said folks didn't trust a man who weren't clean-shaved."

"Don't know. Never had one."

"No daddy a'tall?"

"Nope"

"Take a left at ther DX Station," she drawled. "My daddy was sorter a salesman too."

They went to her apartment in a converted motel built around a pool. Once inside, she shed her candy-striped dress easily and let him kiss her with something less than fever on both their parts. She wouldn't go down on him, but that didn't surprise O'Toole, a lot of these kudzu girls wouldn't. She was small breasted, her skin pale with a tendency to crinkle under his touch like an old woman's. She asked him to go slow, be careful, as they got down to business. He said he would. He was working up to something all right when she whispered that mumbo-jumbo about being careful of the baby. He kept slugging, but had the forbearance, betwixt breaths, to ask her what she meant and she kept right on wriggling, eyes shut, moaning how she was three months pregnant. O'Toole slowed his thrust and shriveled inside her.

This didn't seem to faze her much either. Maybe she figured he was through and that was that. Most likely, a lot of these local jarheads finished up the same way. Most likely, the last parlor snake, the one who left his bambino in her belly, he probably made a quick exit too. O'Toole wasn't asking.

From his edge of the bed, you could see straight through the kitchenette, out the window which framed the faraway hills. O'Toole lit a Lucky and stared at the dusky mountain peaks which rose behind those hills, fixed against crystal blue sky. He was thinking about the Weevil again, and Mr. Segretta, and how Segretta would be chewing carpet tacks back in Big Easy, waiting to hear from him. Segretta wanted the Weevil for better or worse. Especially worse. There were questions, cruel questions to be answered. He almost pitied the poor Weevil. His nostrils flared, blowing Lucky smoke. She didn't snuggle, just lay inert beside him, unvexed by her own nakedness. O'Toole used the paisley sheet.

"Better hit the road," he muttered.

O'Toole heard her scratch her s.n.a.t.c.h, but didn't care to witness it.

"Where to? Where you peddlin yer fertilizers next?"

"Oh..." he searched his mind for someplace to tell her, someplace ahead. The Weevil was the ace of sales and he kept switching routes, the harder to tail him when he did you dirt. "Oh....Fredericksburg, Claxton maybe..."

"My daddy, he was a salesman and that's why I'm here to tell about it."

"No s.h.i.t." He was tiring of her flat voice, she was beginning to give him the creeps in fact. O'Toole ran mental flashcards of his prey and kept his eyes on the picture window in the kitchen, those dim faraway hills.

"Sure he was. And he used to peddle up them mountains yer a-lookin at. He'd pa.s.s through plantin season, then again in the harvest. Never oncet winter come. Lord, they's tinkers and drummers been prowlin them hills fer years, makin a pretty penny at it too. My daddy sold pots and pans and sundries, sold em to mercantiles and directly to backcountry folk themselves."

"Hmmm, wonder if he knows the Weevil---I mean, Mr. Wivaldi."

"Ain't likely. But that's how he met my mama. Up round Cayuga Ridge. Met her and married her and brung her back here to the city. Two year later and I was borned and Mama died and not long after, my Daddy took another swing up north, through them hills, and ain't been heared from since. I was riz by his elderly sis over on Front Street."

"That's a h.e.l.luva story."

"You oughter try peddlin some o'yer wares back in there. They's lots o'folk needin lots o'nonsense. So I hear. Daddy always said, I mean, Aunt Elspeth always said Daddy said. Just go Highway 6 about twenty mile out."

"Well, I don't know about that...but the day's burnin up and I've been in this d.a.m.n jerkwater too long. Christ, I just stopped for breakfast."

"Fine. Will you be a-prayin with me now?"

"What--?" O'Toole looked down into those ink pupils.

"Won't you be a prayin with me? Fer forgiveness of the flesh?"

She left the bed and knelt naked before a small altar of candles in the corner which he hadn't noticed before they f.u.c.ked. O'Toole dressed quickly as she lit each wick and began to rock slowly, praying into her folded hands, pausing only to entreat him once more to join her. Then she held both hands in the flame. He said no thanks and left her there.

Once on the road, ragtop down, he breathed a sigh of relief. He felt even better once he had removed his package from the glove box. He had only stopped for a bite, then went looking for some pinball to relax him after driving all night. But now most of the day was spent and all he had won was a case of blue b.a.l.l.s and some bad ju-ju courtesy of one freaky tank town broad. He'd always liked getting his nut off with the local tail when he was in the field, but now it was starting to wear on him. Let's get on with it, O'Toole told himself, let's get on up the pike and find that Weevil, let's nail him and tweak a few names and numbers out of his hide, then let's drag him back to Segretta and Segretta's boys could have their way with him. h.e.l.l, that little Weevil would probably wind up lending eternal support to some steel and mortar bank tower in greater Houston. Dixie skylines were being reconstructed daily with the DNA of men who had failed Mr. Segretta. O'Toole had a job to do, he was a certified pro and it was time to start acting like one. He had always been alone, acted alone, hadn't he? He could stand the cold, forever if need be. He felt nothing, he told himself, needed no one. Mr. Segretta was all the daddy he required.

Bewley Mills Flour rose to greet him, again and again, sagging fenceposts and barbed wire dangled offers for fine stogies and nerve tonics. About ten miles outside of town, O'Toole tried the radio. The G.o.ddam gospel hour came blasting out; he flipped the dial. O'Toole was just fine-tuning a loud, lewd Link Wray boogie when his Impala swept past the big hand, a large painted billboard of a hand with a b.l.o.o.d.y spike driven through the open palm:

JESUS KNOWS.

LIFE CAN BE.

HARD AS NAILS!.

GET SAVED OR BURN.

FLY-RITE MINISTRIES 537-8596.

The heavens were mutating, a fiery red ball sinking into those hills when he saw the sign for Highway 6 and had his second thoughts. There was no telling what route the Weevil might have taken this trip. O'Toole had no real leads as yet and besides, what the Weevil was selling, well, there was a market for it just about anyplace you might chance upon. Maybe that daffy b.i.t.c.h was onto something. It would be just like old Tom Wivaldi to work a circuit where he wouldn't leave his slimy trail for any city boys, why, he'd probably fare real well with the white trash. Weevil had a sweet patter, what with those shiny suits and the gold in his mouth.

When the arrow appeared, a creamy-faced G.o.ddess smiled down upon it. She was blond on one inch ply and freckleless. O'Toole turned his Impala onto the narrow blacktop of Highway 6. Soon enough, Stillman's Freckle Creme faded away and there were no more Roi-Tan signs, only slanted barns and the occasional mule or goat. Another hour pa.s.sed as the sun ebbed behind a peak, the Impala lost its shimmer and those foothills drew near, the land turned gold into slate grey. Still, enough light lingered in the sky to spot the gas pumps ahead; there was no neon to help him. He left the road where the station sat betwixt three poplars, where leaves fluttered in the cool of evening, at the very juncture where the blue gra.s.sy flats lapped against the encroaching mountains. O'Toole braked at the pumps and bopped his horn.

He glanced up at the black boy who stood there, amazed, smiling, leaning over him, though O'Toole's fist had barely left the horn and O'Toole saw no one when he pulled in.

"Howz trix?" O'Toole said, never blinking.

A brisk wind was nigh, tugging at the boy's spanking clean workshirt. O'Toole smelled Brilliantine. There wasn't a sweat stain on the kid. He was calm, fresh and so black he was blue. A dull fluorescence escaped the garage and small office beyond the pumps.

"Savvy?"

Slender, tapering black fingers spirited a card from a workshirt pocket. O'Toole took the card and read:

I AM A DEAF-MUTE.

How may I help you?

The limpid smile endured. For a teenager, he was one long drink of java. O'Toole made nice and threw his eyes.

"Uh, how bout fillin us up with no-lead...unleaded gas, see?"

The boy seemed to understand readily, he nodded, cranking the unleaded pump. He must have read O'Toole's lips. In a jiffy, this deaf kid was riding nozzle on the Impala.

O'Toole flashed on the girl with no t.i.ts which led to another angle.

"Say pal, got any idear how I gets to...uh...Cayuga...Cayuga Ridge?"

The boy didn't answer so O'Toole turned, faced him, and repeated the question. A sleek black hand waved O'Toole on, up the road. What the h.e.l.l. O'Toole wasn't feeling so lax; after all, there were few travelers and fewer phoneboxes and no live prospects of an Econolodge before nightfall. O'Toole could use a little more group partic.i.p.ation. The boy topped off the tank then sprang to heel at the convertible's door. O'Toole squinted up at him and told dummy to keep the change. The boy took his cash, smooth faced and beaming, he motioned again--loosely--up the road, into the rising hills.

"Say I'll find that Cayuga Ridge, kid? Right up here, hereabouts?"

The boy grinned, waved to the hills again. Uneasy, O'Toole was still holding the card. He offered it back to the dummy who reached out and turned it over for him. There were more words on the backside:

May G.o.d suffer and keep you.

This did not make O'Toole feel better. This made O'Toole not so nice. With one last glance at the kid, he tossed the card and tore away from the pumps. The Impala found its gears as O'Toole took the darkening highway, speeding faster, faster, shortly the asphalt would begin to rise, winding sharply. Behind him, a shining blue-black face watched him go, grinning good cheer as O'Toole climbed Auld Clootie's Staircase; for that's what they called that snarling road up around Ewe Springs and Cayuga Ridge. O'Toole was getting somewhere all right, and behind him, those smiling white teeth parted and an oily forked tongue flicked out then back in.

Up Johabeth's Holler, on a night like Satan's velvet, Bartolomew tumbled down a steep bank of needles to join the Elder under a low pine bough. They both saw the headlights struggling up the holler, had seen beams twisting hither and yon in the darkness for nearly an hour now, an hour for both to track the car's progress from the ridges above. The Elder worked his loamy mouth for a spell, mulling his thoughts before he spake: "This'n hyere. This'n could be the one. Gettin strong feelins about this'n."

Below, lost in the holler's pit, O'Toole was fit to be tied. It must be late, he knew, nearing midnight and he hadn't seen any local color since he pa.s.sed those first two shacks upon entering the hills. About that time any trace of sunset or moonlight or the aurora borealis ceased to help him. It was blackness and little else from there on so he was forced to depend purely on his twin beams for guidance. He kept cool for a while. The blacktop kept climbing, leading him through tight, reeling pa.s.sages, deeper into the fold, as the woods grew thicker and taller until even the stars were blotted, and then, like he had dozed or pa.s.sed through a bad drunk, the blacktop just petered out.

The romance was over. O'Toole was left to navigate rough mountain ruts and nothing but. New revelations in the headlamps got scary. He gave serious thought to turning around, retracing his wheels and beating h.e.l.l out of that goofy kid at the station; but that wouldn't get him a warm motel or microwave hoagie, and just maybe, he was pa.s.sing briefly through some timber company tract or wildlife preserve and soon the asphalt might resume. Worst of all was the wild silence or rather, the p.r.i.c.kly awareness of his heart pump, the rumbling engine, the chitter of those G.o.ddam birds and bugs in the pines above, discordant echoes he couldn't drown because he couldn't get the motherloving radio to work. He abused the dial and got a low buzz for comfort. That fool O'Toole, he was the livewire now, he decided tootsweet, these G.o.ddam bug voices aggravated the beastie thing as it were; that scared, shivering little demon hiding down in his guts. It would do him no good to talk to that demon, though. They hadn't spoken in years.

A splash of moon. Twilight sky above. He went starry-eyed. Now moon and sky were gone. He wondered where they went, but knew. The mountains ate them. Skrrreeeeekacheeee! What in h.e.l.l's kitchen was that thing flapping up there? Skrrreeeeekacheeecheeecheeeeeee!

Thanks to divine intervention--somebody's, somewhere--O'Toole lost track. But he found a different track. He would never know the how, exactly. But he should have known. At the bitter end, it was hardly a surprise to him at all. So many inlets ran into the artery of this road with his cerebral clutter raging at such gale force, O'Toole was in no mood to look sharp or pay heed to the crumbling locust. The great locust tree had uprooted, falling months before in a spring rain squall, then quickly, termites and mossy consumption took their toll on JoHAbeTHs HoLLer >> and the deeply chiseled trunk which once pointed out either the true path or the tricky road to Johabeth. Yes, O'Toole's tires grazed the rotting bark and swung off when they might have kept straight and narrow. He wasn't the first.

The breeze died.

"p.i.s.s down my neck n'call it rain, you Weevil b.a.s.t.a.r.d..."

The transmission groaned, O'Toole groaned, spurring his Impala up into the dank holler where woodbine clutched the windshield and rocks hammered the cha.s.sis. There was no turnaround in sight. He labored upward for a long, long time until he came to a hump, of a sort, a gra.s.sy spot where the ruts veered out of the holler's crux, onto a protruding hillock. Here the ruts stopped, cold, where a thrashing oak spread in gusty defiance, gusting in his upthrust headlights. He had found the wind again. He could not go further.

O'Toole sat, V-6 purring, unsure of his next move--then realized the blitzed radio was still hissing at him. He switched it off, set the brake. Dust and steam clouded the open car. "t.i.ts. Ain't it just t.i.ts?" O'Toole got out, looking for polar bears or another s.n.a.t.c.h of road, and promptly ripped his suit coat on the side mirror. This frosted him even more. He had just bought this suit from Segretta's tailor, three hundred G.o.ddam shekels to an Orthodox tailor and O'Toole was in no mood, no s.h.i.tting mood at all. Fortunately for O'Toole, this was the last time Segretta or the Weevil would ever cross his mind. Oak leaves crashed overhead, alive in the caustic light. O'Toole took the hill. Winded and cautious, O'Toole stood at the apex of his halogen highbeams and saw no road nor hope of one, only a restless black nothing beyond the light. Steady now. Didn't he hear clucking, a faint cluck-cluck-clucking out there? Chickens meant chicken farmers. He stood atop the hillock, c.o.c.ked his nose to the wind, the great tree shed acorns and sighed. On a whim, O'Toole called out.

"Heeeeey Nellybelle! Where's the cement pond?!"

O'Toole felt a rude explosion behind his left temple then tasted the earth.