Matthew found hands and knees and crawled excitedly toward Tizzy's grave.

"I busted in the school buildin last night. I took her right outa Mr. Wainwright's desk." A lewd eyebrow arched. "Took a buncha dirty magazines too."

"What kinda dirty magazines?"

"Ole boy and a ole gal goin at it...two ole gals goin at it, too."

Tizzy was wide-eyed. "Two ladies?"

"Well...maybe," he grinned. "Look more like two ole gals a-lickin on each other to me."

His County lenses were in her face, the boy enjoying himself.

"Matthew could you git me some cigarettes?"

"Anybody been a-lickin on you lately, baby?"

But this annoyed her. "I ain't yer baby and I ain't listenin to yer trash!"

Matthew went bug-loony and serious, his voice a whisper.

"I hope you never fergit the thangs you've said to me today!"

He sprang and paced some more, angry and spewing venom. Tizzy winced as she sat up, dutifully brushing off her dress and hair. There wasn't poo to be gained by furthering this conversation. Matthew was gone too mad to give her cigarettes now, mad like a mad cur dog. He just hadn't gone to s...o...b..ring yet. Straightaway, Tizzy crossed her legs and dropped both hands into her lap. She sighed. She was bored.

"I'uz thinkin bout takin you with me," he'd begun to blather. "But you kin jist turn tail and scratch it fer as I'm concerned. You kin bet yer bottom's dollar on that. They's bigger gals and friendlier gals on down the line. Gals with great big t.i.ts!" A fever took him. "I been to the county seat. And I been to Bowling Green, Kentucky. You didn't know that, did ye Miss Sweet Patootie. I took the Trailways down to Bowling Green when my sister died--me and Mama. And one or two thangs did happen while I was there."

Tizzy was matter-of-fact: "Yer crazy Matthew...yer crazy as a betsybug..."

"What's the differnce? What's the differnce if'n I am?"

"...utterly depraved."

"Least I ain't no gooshy G.o.ddam girl! And ain't no baby neither. Ye got that? I ain't n.o.body's baby neither! I ain't n.i.g.g.e.r trash! I ain't chickens.h.i.t! And I surely ain't no f.u.c.kin pig farmer!"

Her attention was his now. He spat again, this time in her direction, and turned his back on the cross-legged baby. "Ye got that?"

They both grew sullen as--kuhcaaaw!--an inky blur swooped out of the pine, a crow cawing at some ghostly visage before it rose on the wind, gone now, across the clowdermilk moon. It would be dark soon. Preacher Polk would expect her from choir practice by suppertime.

After a wee, mournful spell, Tizzy rubbed the back of her sore head then gloomed up at Matthew. "I didn't mean to hurt yer feelins you know--"

But, whoa Moses--the lad twitched just then. Something was up.

Yes, Matthew Birdnell was adrift in his own mind. Stealthy, with untold reverie, he took interest in some shadow of a sound, some movement in the surrounding wood. He c.o.c.ked his head, sniffing at the wind. Finally Matthew ducked low and crept to the brink of the narrow road which led to Pott Ridge Cemetery. He detected little, nothing really, his superior radar scoping down the deep ruts which bent from view. His back straightened, he held the pointed revolver closer to his side then tilted to face the deepening forest behind him. Catwalking light and cautious to the edge of the trees, Matthew shielded himself with the trunk of a large yellow locust. He was straining to see something in the pitch of thick undergrowth, out there, unspeakable secrets and nightly chitters quickened in the mountain dark. These woods ran north, beyond Choat's Peak, climbing up the deadly ravines of Old Riddle Top, these woods knotted and spread and ran higher toward that G.o.dawful summit until you couldn't run anymore. His jaw crawling, Matthew unc.o.c.ked the gun then pulled his eyes from the forest, looking back at Tizzy who was beyond curious: her senses had come alive with this elaborate display. She was on her knees now, ready to jump and flee at any moment.

Matthew relaxed, returning to her with a sheepish grin.

"Awww...yeah..." he considered. "You jist fail to grasp the situation. That's to be expected I reckon..."

He tisked, taking pause before her kneeling form. Her chinaman eyes were just slits, but she was kind of cute in that cornflower dress. Slowly, Matthew held out the pistol, its slender barrel rusting in Tizzy's moonshone face. She took hold of it, cradling the barrel with both hands and an unnatural fascination; teeth wet, open. Her eyes glued on his.

He dug a frail newsclipping from his shirt pocket, thrust it at her.

"Got ye any idea who that is right there?"

Tizzy studied the wrinkled photo, intently, but finally shook her head. "No...I..don't reckon I do..."

Something lit in him then, like she'd never seen, something soft and scary and kind of nice danced across his horizon as Matthew squatted down. A dirty fingernail stroked Tizzy's cheek.

"Well...mama..." he spake, searching the dead, then back into Tizzy's eyes. "It ain't no secret. That'uz Mr. Johnny Dillinger."

She brightened a st.i.tch. "I've heard o'him--"

Matthew was nodding. "Ye heard o' Alvin Karpas?....Clyde Barrow?...How 'bout Big Chester Wilkes? Heard o'him?"

"They's gangsters, ain't they?" The girl got blunt.

He applied pressure.

"Chester Wilkes stuck up a bank in Elk City, Oklahoma...three years ago. He took her five minutes a-fore closin time....his last day on this earth. As fer as J. Edgar Hoover knows. Cause they ain't seen Chester Wilkes since." He whispered with husky glee. "Twelvethousandollars....like that! To spend on anythang he wants." Nervous tremors shifted in him. "Well, he shot that janitor in the back o'the head and it's a cryin shame. Yes it is. But Long John Dillinger hadda shoot one er two ole boys who got lost along the way."

Matthew s.n.a.t.c.hed the clipping from her; it went back in his pocket.

"Wanna know somethin else mama?"

"What?" No, she wanted to say no. But she was afraid to.

"Gimme six months--remember I said this--gimme six months, and Matthew Birdnell's a-gonna be on the F.B.I.'s Ten Most Wanted. I kin a.s.sure ye."

"Goodness..."

He wagged his head, sure of fate.

"That be the way it is." The wind came screeching with some screeching thing in it. His jaw dropped. An old mean taste swelled up in Matthew as his gla.s.ses combed across pearly timbertips, across mean ridge after mean ridge. "Devil done shat on these mountains."

Tizzy was glazed, rapt with hush and amazement. At last she took the dirty hand from her cheek and lay the pistol in his palm.

"Don't talk ugly, Matthew," she was soft.

Matthew looked her over for a moment.

"Yer daddy's crazier than I am."

"I know it."

"Tizzy...I'd burn down Cayuger Ridge if I could."

"I would too..."

"Now, I don't figger there's a chance in this life...that I could git away with that."

"Matthew...you wanted me to go...?"

"Aw it occurred to me t'other day."

It occurred to him. Well, how about that. Who would have ever conjured such notions? Matthew Birdnell? Tizzy had never met anybody who saw her in faraway places with patent leather shoes. Cayuga Ridge, these dire mountains, they all grew distant in her mind. "My daddy'd come undone..."

Matthew gave a hopeless shrug.

"I love you," she said. And he laughed.

"Tizzy, er you a Christian?"

"Huh?"

"Do you believe in Jesus?"

"Sometimes I do."

"Well, sometimes I wanna take all yer clothes off and sleep with ye all night."

Her body was a swoon, unsteady as she warmed to the fire in his eye.

"Why?" she heard her say. His smile was loose.

"I thank it's a blood condition, don't you?"

She felt the good light fading on their faces.

Later he showed her the hole he'd been digging for a crippled man who couldn't get out of bed that morning; they held hands, and Tizzy made it home in time to set the table. Fortunately, Preacher Polk was late from sick rounds, so he didn't climb the step till after dark. By lantern and moth, they sat in clenched silence. They ate turnips and cold soup.

They never spake during meals or any other time much for that matter. Sometimes an entire week would pa.s.s and the Preacher might communicate his desires with four or five well-placed grunts, half-words that sounded like the thick tongue of a varmint; a nanny goat or some other cloven-footed critter. A Lych clansman couldn't possibly utter sounds much worse. The Preacher was long in his pilot coat, like a burnt stringbean, and when he removed the round hat indoors it revealed a white-stubbled dome. The chin bore a jutting tuft of fur like Tizzy had seen in pictures of sea captains in her school primer. Grim and staring at the salt mortar, his leathery mouth worked the hard turnip like a cud. His eyes and long nails were tobacco-yellow. Tizzy doubted there were many words betwixt him and her mother, a girl barely three years older than she, who died in childbirth. A girl known as Latisha.

Tizzy didn't know how old the Preacher was exactly, but to her he seemed like an old stringy taproot who walked upright and rocked the heavens with each thundering prophecy. Most Cayuga Ridge folks seemed to like him well enough, or liked what he dealt them every Sunday, anyway. Most around here felt they needed a good thumping from time to time. She couldn't figure it out.

After supper Tizzy cleaned the dishes then went to bed as usual. She didn't have a room of her own, exactly; she slept in a storage closet behind locked door. The closet was narrow with a high window. It held layers of folding chairs leant against the wall, stacked hymnals in peach crates, church decorations and the like. In a spare corner beneath the window was Tizzy's cot and clothing crib.

On her lone chair lay a cracked china doll's head, just the head, raked in moonlight. Every night, from under her quilt, Tizzy would whisper to all that was left of her first toy, her first childhood memory. The crack split the china forehead, ran betwixt the blue b.u.t.ton eyes, ending like a lightningbolt across the nose. The crack even bit off one tiny nostril. But her cupid lips were still perfect, dolly's eyes undimmed. Ann was fine, indeedy do. The rosebud cheeks might be dirty with age, the hair might be a few blond curls left to the imagination, her rag body may have been torn asunder long ago, by other hands; but she was the only real friend Tizzy ever had.

Tizzy began to sing a song to Ann, for Ann is what Tizzy called her. Hugging her pillow, Tizzy sang, "there was a little ship and it sailed on the sea," softly she cooed in the flood of moonlight, to the broken doll's face and the crickets outside her open window. Tizzy did well to ignore any rustlings outside her door.

In the parlor Preacher Polk sat on the couch, engulfed in darkness. He was naked. Crickets were screaming through the keyhole, taunting him as he shivered and gulped from a fruit jar. The drink poured down his whiskery chin, glistened on his pale chest. A few cold rivulets settled in his privates like fingers of Satan.

With divine method, he replaced the lid and screwed it tight. Rising from the couch, the Preacher shuffled his bony feet across the room then into the kitchen. There he found the loose board beneath the b.u.t.ter crock and stowed his rookus juice in the floor. Then he crept back, hobbling through the house, into the hall.

The boards were rough and creaking, he felt with those yellow nails along the wall, until he hovered outside Tizzy's door. But her door wasn't locked after all. The iron deadbolt was slid back. The Preacher pressed his wet lips against the woodwork, the gap of the doorframe. A thin line of moon divided his features, his breath came ragged.

Inside, Tizzy drifted off to sleep, eyes heavy as the Preacher uttered his lowliest moan then carefully lowered onto his hands and knees. In foul desperation, he began to crawl along the floor, muttering, scurrying like a rat.

Suddenly Tizzy was wide awake. Green Tizzy eyes frozen and staring at the door. Outside, the crickets stopped.

Hooves went clopping by, as a hunchman rode his gla.s.s-clanking mule past the dark parsonage. A crow spake down to him from the weatherc.o.c.k.

It was hours before Tizzy slept again, dreaming of a mother she'd never seen one picture of, a mother who looked like Ann and asked her kind questions in a kind voice beside a beautiful honey-lit river. Just a brief motherly glimpse before Tizzy woke once more, shortly after midnight. Something m.u.f.fled and strange caused her to stir. A plea from elsewhere in the house, then a torn whimper that seemed to live deep in the walls. Tizzy was full of grog, yawning as she threw back the covers and her feet touched bare floor.

She appeared in her father's room. She heard him there. He was still naked, still damp.

The Preacher lay knotted on the bedspread, drunken, his skin crinkly, unearthly white; his eyes wrenching shut as he gagged and sobbed. Horrible, horrible trees of life, he cried. Wailing nonsense. Talking feverish gibber from a gaping maw. The Preacher curled up tighter and tighter, ignorant of his night child. Ill met in some unholy struggle, he fought to smother himself; his brute tears. But the most pitiful pains kept racking his sh.e.l.l. Those yellow jaundice fingernails locked in weird prayer, trembling with palsy. With grief.

He was starkers with grief.

Ooooooh, the treee, cried He.

Tizzy beheld as long as she could. Stricken, she was, mute with a craven fear beyond her dreams. Here lay her father. Her sire. His serpents spake wantonly, until, at last, she did flee the Preacher's doorway.

S T E P 3.

He was next. That's what he was. Next.

The spider was a fiddleback. The spider took steps. The spider paused mid-step when that raggedy-a.s.s rooster cut loose. The rooster wound up at first blush over Choat's Peak, every G.o.ddam day. Rooster would probably eat spider, given the chance. The fiddleback counted time with its upheld leg. Down below, where the floorboards warped, nine brats and Matthew's Mommy and Pap kept snoring, four to the bed. Baby Jes was gurgling in the bottom drawer. Matthew could hear him.

Matthew quit staring up at the fiddleback spider on the ceiling and decided to do something about it. First, he sucked his split thumbnail, for it was black with blood. After Tizzy went home last night, he'd bunged the thumb badly with his spade; anxious to pack his grip and get out of that graveyard. Grinning Deke the undertaker would have to find some other idjit to dig his holes at six-bits a box. No, he'd worried the subject long enough. This morning Matthew sat up on the rope bed, careful not to disturb his golem brother, Pug Lyle, who lay alongside the other two Birdnell boys. Pug Lyle was a rank moron. His folks shared the second bedrack with his sisters. Over there, the baby in the drawer had the same inbred, lumpish face as most of his clan. A few down in Cayuga Ridge confused them for Lychs. But Matthew had whipped more than one snothead for making that mistake. Matthew was lucky. He looked normal. Not too scary at all. Nothing like some ugly throwback Lych b.a.s.t.a.r.d hiding in your woodshed. They were weird things and rarely seen. No, Matthew didn't brook such wild mistakes in judgment. He was the second-oldest sprout of the Skawmarrow Birdnells. The sprout with moxie.

And he was next.

His older brother, Weldon, would have been twenty years strong, in just two more days; there were no worms in Weldon's helmet. But big brother went silly last summer under the noonday sun, breaking his back for little Pap and that ox. Blew his brains with a shotgun. Well, Pap might miss his Studebaker pickup for a while, but he'd be plumb untolerable without that ox. So Pap was getting the best end of the deal, all and all. Matthew thought about shooting the ox too, out of spite, but there was pity in his heart for the other runts. Eight stomachs gnawing with hunger come wintertime. They would need that sorry ox the most, poor children; Pap sure wasn't going to sacrifice a costly pork trotter for their upkeep. They'd be obliged to brother Matt then, the runts. "Yer welcome," he said aloud. Otherwise, he disowned every G.o.ddam one of them.

This morning he would do plenty about it. The spider stayed put. Matthew crept from the room carrying his shoes, hitching his britches. He went to the privy and wiped his a.s.s with a page from The Queen's Saxonican Juris Dictionary. Then he stole a chunk of baloney and some pone, pocketed thirteen cents from the tin behind the clabber urn, and on this morning, he pushed the truck, letting it roll down the holler until he could pop the clutch just past the smokehouse, well out of earshot.

Waiting for the bell, Tizzy hovered near her pilgrim oak, looking for signs of her mama racc.o.o.n. Across the schoolyard, Shonda Gay jabbered with Shonda's new girlfriend, that raven-haired beauty who just moved here from Ewe Springs. She was too pretty for words, with such lovely alabaster skin. And Tizzy didn't like her one bit. Her name was Courtlynn. Of course, she'd only been pointed out to Tizzy from a distance, Tizzy had not really met the new girl yet, but that hardly made a difference. Right now those two witches were giggling and pointing in Tizzy's general direction; when one wool-headed Tom Braxton intruded upon them, flashing his teeth. They began to fawn over Tom while Tizzy screwed up her face.

Tizzy squinted straight up through the gnarling oak limbs to the sky. Crushing her school hornbooks to her flat bosom, no c.o.o.ns offered comfort to her black, scurrilous goblins. Tizzy's blood was plagued by goblins this morning. Preacher Polk had risen and left for The First Reconstructed Church Of Cayuga Ridge after breakfast, just like always. As though she were deaf-mute. Shooed aside like a gnat or a contagion, unseen and unseeing. But Tizzy knew better. She thought of last night. Of that boy. Of that graveyard. Of a naked, crybaby preacherman. Her blood was changing, had already changed.

Tizzy heard the rattletrap before she saw it.

His brakes squeaked and there he was. Matthew Birdnell idled in his pickup next to the stone fence, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with p.i.s.s and vinegar.

Tizzy hoped none of them were watching, least of all her daddy, as she stepped over to his runningboard. "Matthew..." she began, but her mouth went dry.

"Lookee hyere," Matthew said and came up with a folded section of roadmap. He hung with it out the pickup window. A map corner was circled with charcoal. "They's a Savings and Loan over in Shanville that I got my eye on. You'll be a-readin bout it in the post office."

"What er you gonna do?"