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Just North of Nowhere
Just North of Nowhere
Just North of Nowhere
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Just North of Nowhere

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“Some really small towns are Siren and Flasher. Crampback, Bumhip and Wetwhistle are others. Those places are to the west. Eastward, you’ve got Hog Wallow, Smokey's Hole, Blue Ball, Ong's Hat. A half-mile outside Bluffton there's Engine Warm. Now, Engine Warm's just a notion, no people at all. Compared to Engine Warm, Bluffton's not in the same game for small but it's not much.”

So begins "Just North of Nowhere," Lawrence Santoro’s lyrical exploration of the fantastical, magical, bright and dark town of Bluffton (Pop. 671) in the “Driftless Zone” of the upper Midwest. Bluffton teems with the strange, the wondrous, and the downright dangerous: a house that prowls and preys on the curious, a blind man who sees a century ago, a time shifting librarian who seeks to rebuild the world, just because she can! The 26 chapters of Just North of Nowhere, form what Ray Bradbury might have called an “accidental novel” and includes Santoro's Bram Stoker Nominated horror phantasmagoria, God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him.

“There is only one pleasure greater than hearing Lawrence Santoro read his tales of Bluffton aloud, and that is having them collected here in this volume, where you have the opportunity to read, re-read and savor every little description. The added revelation of this book, for those who have read or heard parts of the narrative separately, is how seamlessly and inevitably it all comes together. Santoro has assembled a remarkable cast of characters, but none so vivid, so funny, so dangerous and variable as Bluffton and surroundings itself. Bluffton is one of those tiny jewels...that reflects the world with excruciating clarity in every facet but casts its light in unfamiliar and unsettling ways. It is at once diabolical and redemptive, as all great works of dark tale-telling should be. And now, with gratitude to Larry, this jewel is ours. May we use it wisely.”
Richard Chwedyk, Nebula Award-winning author of "Bronte's Egg"

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 3, 2011
ISBN9781452404899
Just North of Nowhere
Author

Lawrence Santoro

As literary manager and dramaturge of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, Larry Santoro led the script development arm of one of the nation's leading producing theaters.As story supervisor and associate producer of the syndicated television series, "Hyde & Seeke," Larry wrote, directed and supervised production during the comedy/mystery show’s first season.In 2001, the Horror Writers Association nominated his novella “God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him” for a Bram Stoker Award in long fiction.His production of Gene Wolfe's "The Tree Is My Hat" was presented at WORLD HORROR CON 2002. Introduced by Gahan Wilson, the audio drama featured a performance by best selling author Neil Gaiman. Larry’s script was nominated for a Stoker Award in 2003. A compact disc of the production is available.His first novel, JUST NORTH OF NOWHERE, was published in 2007.A collection of his short fiction, DRINK FOR THE THIRST TO COME, will be published by Silverthought Press in June, 2011.A expanded version of JUST NORTH OF NOWHERE, will be published in several e-formats at about the same time.

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    Just North of Nowhere - Lawrence Santoro

    JUST NORTH OF NOWHERE

    by

    Lawrence Santoro

    Smashwords Edition

    © 2007 Lawrence Santoro. All rights reserved.

    This book was first published by Annihilation Press in March, 2007

    ***~~~***

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    This book is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in it are fictional and any resemblance to real people or incidents is unalloyed coincidence.

    ISBN:  0-9779049-1-1

    ISBN13:  978-0-9779049-1-4

    Cover art by Alan M. Clark

    www.alanmclark.com

    Author photo by Tycelia Santoro

    Author’s website: http://www.santororeads.com/Home.html

    Author’s blog: http://blufftoninthedriftless.blogspot.com/

    The following chapters of this book were previously published in somewhat different forms:

    God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him appeared in CTHULHU AND THE COEDS: KIDS AND SQUIDS, 2000. It was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in Long Fiction by the Horror Writers Association

    The Hoor’s Revenge appeared in BLOOD AND DONUTS, 2001.

    What Do You Know of the Land of Death?’ Clown Said One Night to the Haunted Boy appeared in FREAKS, GEEKS AND SIDESHOW FLOOZIES, 2002.

    All were published by Twilight Tales Books.

    Table of Contents

    A REQUEST

    A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS EDITION

    Foreword: Some Words About THE DRIFTLESS

    1  CRISTOBEL RISING

    2  THE STREGA CRISTOBEL AND OLD RATTLER KEN

    3  DROOPY GUY

    4  BEST NOT GO WHERE STRANGE THINGS WANDER

    5  ENGINE WARM

    6  OCEAN BOY AND THE LOCAL ‘SHROOMS

    7  FRESH TRACKS IN LONG-GONE SNOW

    8  BETWEEN SEASONS

    9  LIGHTNING HARVEST

    10  INTERNIST

    11  THE NINTH GODDAMNED KID

    12  GOD SCREAMED AND SCREAMED, THEN I ATE HIM

    13  CHILDREN, INVISIBLE, WATCHING FROM THE GREAT DARKNESS

    14  FATTY BORGOS AND THE ETERNAL WISDOM OF BURMA-SHAVE

    15  THE HOOR’S REVENGE

    16  DANNY’S MUD

    17  THE EEPHUS PITCH AND HANGING HIGH FLY OF THE CONSOLIDATED CATBIRDS

    18  WHAT DO YOU KNOW OF THE LAND OF DEATH? CLOWN SAID ONE NIGHT TO THE HAUNTED BOY

    19  THE HEART OF MR. CLAY

    20  EINAR AND THAT PIECE OF CRAP HENRY J

    21  THE WORST DAMN MONSTER EVER

    22  LONG THOUGHTS

    23  BEDLAM AND SWATHE’S CHAOS MENAGERIE & GRAND GUIGNOL

    EXTRAVAGANZA

    24  ABSENT THE SCENT OF PIE

    25  WE ARE BECOME OUR RESTING PLACE

    26  AN END

    Afterword: YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT CAME FROM?

    A REQUEST

    However you got it and for however long a time you keep it, this book is yours for now.

    Now do me one favor: when possible read it aloud. I know, Teach yelled when she saw you nibbling on the words in your first grade reader. Teachers hate seeing that. Subvocalizer! she probably muttered, branding you the mental equivalent of a mouth-breather.

    Forget it. Vocalize. First, it’ll slow you down. Brain-only readers play through too fast. They miss a lot. The PIFMA Foundation estimates that silent readers, on average, elide over from 12 to 18 percent of any given text. Such readers frequently miss the why of a thing or, minimally, fail to grasp the wonder of a word having congress with a mate. In gifted hands, the effect is called poetry. With my work? Well, you might have more fun being Bunch than learning about him secondhand.

    Take this from this at least: you get a different story from words you see versus those you speak and hear. Beastie things creep from words chewed upon and which tickle your ears as opposed to ones you intellectate from the page...

    What?

    I wrote, intellectate. Not a word, but you got it when you heard it. Said aloud and the meaning went ‘click.’ Right? Saying a story can be the difference between seeing a picture of stuffed sheep’s bladder or tucking into your first steamy haggis.

    Second, for me writing is a physical act. Watch me at a café, on the ‘L,’ at home. I talk as I type, I wave my arms, shout, squint, growl, laugh, shiver.

    And third, I’m an old theater head, so there’s nothing I like more than getting naked in front of friends and other strangers and leaping about, participles dangling. For years I’ve been part of a gather of Chicago-based writers called Twilight Tales. In addition to running workshops, hosting conventions, publishing – online and on paper – Twilight Tales holds a weekly public forum at which, from time to time, one might be invited to read, given fifty public minutes to test fly a new story or to try to sell something just out.

    Bluffton became a means toward turning those 50-minute tricks a couple times a year or to get me up at the monthly open mike.

    So there! Bluffton: born in breath and need. Every word’s been spoken aloud hundreds of times. Do not let them dissolve gently into that moist gray stillness behind your eyes. Let your tongue dance with your lips and teeth, bring forth spit and breath and the words to bang against your ears. Now go, read and taste Bluffton. Is it just gray gut and ground suet or is it the …great chieftain o’ the puddin-race?

    Let me know. I’m easy to find. I’m right over there typing and mumbling.

    Lawrence Santoro

    December 2006

    A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS EDITION

    First, thank you for buying the e-book version of JUST NORTH OF NOWHERE.

    With some significant exceptions, what you have on your screen is very like the ink-on-paper edition published in 2007 by Annihilation Press. This edition, however, corrects errors that made it onto the page in the rush to get JUST NORTH OF NOWHERE out of the shop and onto the shelves in time for the World Horror Convention in Toronto. My fault. I apologize.

    This version adds material left out of edition one. First: I’ve actually finished the chapter entitled Danny’s Mud. Yes, parts of it were left out. How did that happen? I sent the wrong version of the chapter to the publisher. Then I missed the omissions when I was reading the galleys. My proofreader did ask, Larry, is that chapter complete?

    Yes, yes, I said and went on to something else.

    It wasn’t, Marty.

    Now it is.

    Also: three chapters cut from the original book are back. Two of them, The Heart of Mr. Clay and We Are Become Our Resting Place link Danny’s Mud with Engine Warm. Together they form a complete story arc.

    I cut them for two reasons. One, they would have added enough pages to make JUST NORTH… a more expensive book. Two, We Are Become Our Resting Place felt bit precious. I’ve toned that down. I’m still not entirely convinced it belongs here but I like the arc. So, let me know.

    The chapter called Fatty Borgos and the Eternal Wisdom of Burma-Shave was also cut for space. It doesn’t advance the overall arc of the book but I always liked it as just a chilly tale of a creepy guy. And maybe it is a ghost story. I hope you like it too.

    Prepping this edition gave me an excuse to return to Bluffton. I’ve missed it. I’ve been to lots of other places since I put this book to bed, but I’ve always had a fondness for the town and people. Part of that fondness may have been recollections of the friends and times I gathered at the Twilight Tales readings at the Red Lion Pub. Alas, both Twilight Tales and the Red Lion are no more. I miss them both. They belong to an exciting and richly productive period of my life. Still, my fondness for the town and people of Bluffton remains a thing apart from nostalgia. Very simply, when I put the book down, I miss the place. I’ve heard similar comments from friends. Readers have told me that Bluffton has stayed with them, that it pops into memory, that they miss it.

    I’m pleased. I’ve always thought that I may go back again, look into more dark corners of the place. When I do, I hope you’ll come with me.

    Lawrence Santoro

    May, 2011

    SOME WORDS ABOUT THE DRIFTLESS

    Some really small towns are Siren and Flasher. Crampback, Bumhip and Wetwhistle are others. Those places are to the west. Eastward, you've got Hog Wallow, Smokey’s Hole, Blue Ball, Ong’s Hat.

    A half-mile outside Bluffton there's Engine Warm. Now Engine Warm’s just a notion: no people – except maybe one, and that depends on what you mean by ‘people’ anyway. Compared to Engine Warm, Bluffton’s not in the same game for small but it’s not much.

    You could say Bluffton gets started at about Engine Warm. You wouldn’t be too wrong, but that’s just land out there: bluffs and first growth forest going back to before the Swedes and Norwegians got connived into coming to America. It’s deep woods, hardwood and Douglas fir, deadfalls moldering into morel patches and chokecherry grown full to wild and woody trees, it’s goldenrod and creepers and critters of all sorts and the steady gargle of the Rolling River and the stench of mud flats along the banks.

    So, okay: Bluffton really starts where the bridge crosses the Rolling at Papoose Creek but even that’s a stretch. Just past there, the sign says BLUFFTON – Pop. 671. That’s an exaggeration, but it’s right every now and then. So, while Bluffton’s been going for a pretty good piece, what people would recognize as the town doesn’t get going until the sign.

    You don’t go to Bluffton unless you need to. Put another way: you don't get there, unless you're looking and, looking, half the time you can’t find it. Times are you don’t even know you’re looking. More about that later. You’ll see.

    It’s a pretty sweet place. Small towns set below rocky bluffs by small quick rivers nested among serious and stately trees generally are pretty sweet.

    The country around is called the Driftless. Now, Driftless sounds like something a town layabout might be: pokey, pointless, useless, feckless, but no, those are other qualities. What the Driftless is, is a place where the glaciers didn’t go, last ice age.

    Picture this: here comes most of the ice there is north of the equator; it’s grinding down out of the North Pole covering what’ll be Canada, flattening what’ll be the US of A’s Midwest in twenty thousand years or so. See?

    So, twenty-one thousand years later, you’re driving a lonely stretch of Interstate, middle of the night, and a barn fire on the horizon, half a county away, looks like your own personal Armageddon looming out there, ready to snatch you to the Hereafter.

    See? What the glaciers made was miles of lonely nowhere.

    Those glaciers didn’t happen in Bluffton. Something split them. Look it up. Scientists call it the Driftless Zone. Some quality of geology, God, physics, old magic or whatever made a whole half-world of miles-thick ice decide to go around instead of overtop the area that was going to become Bluffton someday. Ask folks that know.

    Today, the Driftless is cliffs, hills, and what looks like miniature mountain peaks. It’s ancient soils and plants seen only in books, or remembered by college people and other such individuals. Dark trees rise heavy and green from jagged hills. Animals, gone forever elsewhere, teem here. There are caves, sinkholes, limestone jut-ridges, and mineral lodes. Rivers in the Driftless cut deep defiles; leave bluffs. Thus: Bluffton.

    Go look it up.

    Sunrise comes grudging down in the bluffs. On the rolling lands above, dawn scoots across the land like/that! Good for early risers – the Amish and others do some pretty good dairy farming up there.

    Where somebody’s grown a town along a river’s deep cut, it takes a little more of the day for morning to slip down and light it up. When it comes, though, everything's like it should be: warm in summer and properly lazy and shiftless.

    Shiftless – that’s the word for town layabouts, not Driftless!

    So sunrise might take a little getting there but night’s pretty quick. One minute it's day, then it’s not. Above, the Dreibelbieses and Aufderheidens are still plowing. Same time, down the bluffs, town people are lit up for night.

    Winters now, Winter mornings, the sky’s the color of outer space; a deep breath draws stardust to the blood and frost shards go for the heart.

    Getting back to getting there: Bluffton’s a small target. Drivers from Chicago miss it. Same for those from Minneapolis. People sometimes get there going somewhere else. An almost-empty gas tank gets you there; a bum strut, or thinking you’re lost and pulling off the highway for your way, that puts you there too. Sometimes a whim takes the wheel, a lonely moment, a small crisis, middle of the driving night, and there you go: you’re suddenly off the County road – it’s County H to Bluffton – and heading downhill past the stockyards toward Commonwealth.

    When you arrive, you’re looking, you think, hey, this is okay, and wonder why more people haven’t come.

    They did. They do. They arrived, like you, they stayed a bit then left. See? Nothing keeps most people. And winters are a bear!

    Chapter 1

    CRISTOBEL RISING

    Looking back, the death of her old red cat started her. Understand: this was a dozen years before Cristobel actually did anything, before she was Cristobel for that matter. She was already well-versed in the Craft when that tired old cat, Creature by name and by then only skinned bone and white fur tufting from a ratty red coat, scooted out the door. He never came back. Died, presumably, out somewhere by itself. Cats did that.

    Cris already knew she was filled by magic. For one thing, her hair: Mahogany brown from birth, it suddenly sprouted a white streak above her right eye. The streak spread over her crown and flowed down her back. The Lightning Kiss, Nonna called it.

    That was one thing.

    Her Nonna knew Cris had the Craft; said as much when Chris was a child, before the hair and long before Creature fled. That was the other thing: Nonna Chiaravino, tall, thin, angles everywhere, had the gift and gifts are bound to show up somewhere else.

    Cris trusted this assessment. She was small. She trusted tall people.

    Years went. Not too many. Cris was no longer so small and Nonna… Nonna had begun to be smaller. Shorter, narrower, and she curved, now, was not so angular.

    Then. . .

    Well, the way it went was this: one day, after cutting the pasta with the guitar she’d brought from the old country, Nonna lay down on the mohair sofa. A nap before supper. By now she was small—if she hadn’t actually passed Cris, rising, she was very nearly her size. Dwindling black-clad Nonna put a damp hanky across her face—the evening was hot—and when Cris came to nudge her for dinner the old lady gasped awake—too suddenly, maybe. From behind the veil, the old lady sucked a screech, half sat up and without removing the hanky breathed a revelation into Cris's six-year face: One day, she said, her voice full of phlegm, there will be a wind in your life, child. And that wind, ah, will move you! You resist, but it takes you! Fly with it! Fly, child when the wind comes. You have the Craft in you. The wind gives you the way.

    Then the old lady died. She ended squeezing Cris's hands, each squeeze held longer, gripped looser and, finally, not gripped at all.

    Cris wasn’t allowed to go to the viewing or the funeral. She did see the box Nonna was to be buried in, though. No bigger than a boot box.

    She must have been wrong.

    Years went by.

    Cris grew. She read the ways of the strega – which is what people called her Nonna in whispers.

    Cris learned that, yes, she probably was filled with magic – the Craft.

    She worked on the profession of her faith.

    Faith?

    Yes! To become strega was to embrace belief no less vigorous than any other orthodoxy! Strega lived in the deepest places of the world, moved in realities as chilly as commerce and as fulsome as science. Strega held strengths that could sooth the future and enflame joy as easily as it could dissuade history or teach fright.

    Cris followed the Way and had done remarkable things. She had achieved!

    And she really loved that damn red cat! Everyone else had problems with Creature. She loved him—loved him!

    When Creature became sick, she compounded cures. The animal grew sicker.

    Then he got better and Cristobel—she called herself Cristobel by then—Cristobel held her head high, an eyebrow arched. For days she looked down her long nose at everything.

    Then Creature began to crap an awful leaky brown stuff. He passed water from everywhere. He crept at the edge of rooms, embarrassed for himself.

    Reluctantly, and too late, she took him to the vet. It had always been too late, the vet said. The cat’s end was an inevitability; walking dead, his kidneys had failed, failed completely.

    The cat, finally. . .

    Well, Chris was to have kept him in the house, at home, under the protection of medicine and regimens.

    Creature slipped out. Disappeared. Cats do that. That was it.

    She debated. Then she acted; worked a rising spell, a resurrection.

    Worse than she feared, worse than Creature’s return with the stench of deep death on stiffly motile flesh, worse than his presence shadowed by preternatural wisdom or glimmering dark urges born from a cat's view of the Great Forever, worse than all she had considered, Creature never returned at all. The resurrection had failed. She’d failed completely.

    She gave it time. For a month, she fully expected the animal to appear at the door in the night. Half dreaded, always expected. No question.

    One day she didn't expect. That morning, she realized the powers had been accidents, the Craft, just recipes and coincidence. Woman's work for gosh sakes! She got on with life. She resisted the Strega part of her—she was young—she got a job and got on with it.

    She married.

    Twelve years later she knew a lot more. She hadn't practiced the faith, not since Creature and her failure, but she’d read. A hobby. An affectation. A chuckle, she thought. She spoke the makings and pronounced the words and smiled as she made dinner for her husband!

    She dreamed. Dreaming was wonderful. Things walked in her dreams. In her dreams she saw preparations, watched herself grind ingredients to bits, work the bits to powders. She made pastes and poultices in her dreams, burned herbs and breathed their vapors.

    Her dreams became more vivid: grinding, powdering, coating beeswax with dust and lighting fragrant oils. Nights, she watched and the stars breathed vaporous sendings to her. Dreams.

    Looking back, the husband wasn't important. Looking back, he was important only insofar as he had anaesthetized her to the world. Through him, she stopped needing to feel. She stopped tasting food, air, stopped hearing spring and the sweep of snow on the panes. She’d stopped smelling the lightning. Well, that was it: she’d simply stopped. It hadn't hurt, that was the point, she hadn’t needed the warnings that pain brought, nor the direction the senses gave. She had him. He warned. He pointed. Her husband was the News at Eleven whenever she needed it.

    When he said they had to talk, she laughed. You’re leaving? she laughed.

    His right eye squinted.

    That’s what women say when we’re on the move, Sweet! She feigned a serious face, 'We have to talk.' She said it again, feigning deep emotion: a woman opening a monologic discussion with a to-be-left lover. She laughed again: So silly that he would say such a woman’s thing. Him! And him such a man. Too much a man to use we have to talk faintness.

    He didn't laugh. He was on the move. They talked – he talked. At the end of the words, he left. It was a windy day.

    She cried. Of course. The tears felt okay and she cried for a long time. She cut her hair. With her hair boy-short, the white streak that he'd had her dye-away stood out. In a few days its roots showed just above her right eye, white against mahogany richness. When she’d had a pre-Raphaelite cascade, her hair tumbled below her shoulder blades, her Lightning Kiss, as Nonna called it, had poured over her back. She liked it.

    He’d said he did, too. It was the very first thing he’d ever said to her. His opening move: he loved her hair, that streak!

    He’d hated it. Eventually, he said it was, well maybe a little too dramatic, could she, like, maybe, do something?

    Of course! She did.

    That was then.

    Now, scalp-short but growing, damn if that white tuft didn't remind her – damn – of the tufted coat of that old red cat in its final days, how that white fluff was all that remained of its fur by the time Creature lay – in her imagination – cold, dead, and un-resurrected by her Craft.

    She had failed with the cat, and that made her mad. Chris went to the boxes in the basement. This was a month – maybe a bit more than a month – after the husband’s ‘talk’! Excepting her dreams, she’d not practiced the Craft for a dozen years. The articles from that time had sat those years, among other useless bits – brought instinctively – from her old life: bundles of herbs tied with brown string, her pestles, mortars, and crystals still feathered with greasy dust, phials of oils and tinctures, her stilettos, rods, and wands, tubes and leaf-wrapped pouches, ointments and powders, charts, tables, registers of ingredients, the directions this way and that, the ways, means to make, enhance, augment the philters, her old notes, stained, soaked, crossed out, spattered-upon, over written.

    Her damn life was there. Here I am. THIS phase of me, she thought.

    Opened, the boxes exhaled reeking nebulae of dust. Cris had a large, opulent nose—men learned, grudgingly and after a time, to like that nose. Her wide nostrils bespoke passion, hinted at an urge toward the dark, toward the bed. Without being crude, it suggested, that opulent nose did, that wonders might lie ahead.

    Now, in the basement of her recently happy home, those arched nostrils took in the swimming bits of ground bone and pestled powders of a dozen years past. Odor, memory, anger, pain forced a gag from Cris—on top of which she sneezed. Then she threw up. Into the boxes, over the powders, crystals, jars, and tinctures, over the rotted fruits, herbs, and spices, the crumbling weeds and molds, the lean daggers and sheathed blades, she heaved breakfast and last night's cheap wine.

    When she finished retching, she breathed again. The scents had opened, cleared her. She was Cristobel.

    Later, she packed a few things and drove away. Her car was a twelve-year-old Saab sedan that hadn’t been any damn good since he’d bought it for her. No matter. It was what she had, so she thought no more of it. She drove. The car hummed. Miles slid by.

    The day? It had been windy. She drove with the wind, though she didn’t think of it at the time.

    Sometimes, she pulled off the road, nights, and slept. A woman, alone, on the highway, nights! Didn’t bother her.

    Some nights, she took a room just for a wash and a place to sit quietly surrounded by cinderblock and paint. Other nights she drove, the speed terrifying her into a chattering half-awake dream-state. American Zen, she said to no one.

    She’d been on her walkabout for. . .

    Well, she didn't know for how long! She had been out there for a bit. She had no real idea where she was. She'd seen things along the way, some things, indeed! But now the land was nothing, nowhere, flat, wide and filled with crops, crops of some sort: growth rolled to the lines of the surrounding horizon all day for days. As night settled, the roadway blackened, gradually narrowed to glowing white lines rushing her headlights.

    One evening, distant lightning licked between looming darknesses. For a few jagged seconds the sky showed mountains, brightly shadowed ancient hills and arroyos of cloud. The voice of the thunder thumped her chest long after the jagged light had finished.

    The landscape changed. In a dozen miles, the only light in the land was hers, her Saab's one flickering headlamp and the dashboard glow on her face in the rearview. The road was narrow and the way wound upward. In the lightning's distance, island hills arose from what had been the drab golden forever of the plains. The car climbed, trees closed in.

    She had no idea when she had left the interstate, she had not done it on purpose, a twitch of hand and eye and the old car must have eased onto an exit, and that exit had exited to a road, and that road had given way to others, then to this. She flowed – mercury in lightning, she thought in an image from the Craft – along a channel made for this passage. This hilly land in the northern plains, this place of forest and bluffs led her. . .

    Odd, she thought, this place ought not be here. This sudden place belongs somewhere, elsewhere.

    Nope. Here it was. Rising forested hills narrowed the road and the roadway led her. It wasn’t the land of cloud-mountains seen minutes, hours, before in the lightning. No, this was earth and solid.

    Her hands knew the way. She didn't. Turning now, a narrow corridor between trees, under linking branches, the road became: "County Road H, the sign said. She heard it. The voice was hers, of course. She didn’t believe in magic. Not any more. To stamp it proof, she said County Road H aloud. There!" she said.

    She could see no more than a hundred yards ahead, fewer behind. The curves and rises, dips and banks through the darkly massed trees embraced, held her close and to the narrow road. Even so, her speed never dipped below too fast. Too fast for conditions, her husband would have said.

    Such a husband, the News at Eleven had been.

    A high cedar fence chattered, passing. A gate with a sign, a sign that couldn't be read at speed; a drive-in theater, maybe. Closed perhaps. Then it was gone.

    A river flowed beyond the trees on her right; she knew it had been there for miles, paralleling her way. She hadn't seen it in the dark, no star or moonlight flicked on water, there were no clear places in the trees and bluffs that had replaced the horizon-spanning fields, but even in the too-fast-for-conditions Saab she smelled river mud in the air stream. Huh! There were deer by the roadside, bright eyes on long, sharp faces, impossibly slender legs, angular attention curled in their shining muscles; in her lights for a moment, and they were gone.

    She was closing on something.

    County H lifted for a moment; for a moment she felt the roadway rise under her ass. The moment carried her with such authority. She felt the car bank, so lovely, felt the Saab take the curve at speed so perfect, felt the earth sink, just so, as she swooped, straightened out and closed upon a small iron suspension bridge. The tires hummed as she rolled across.

    Then they stopped. No humming. The car made a jerk of a stop. Something had gathered ahead, an invisible soft something, brought the car to a quick rolling halt. No harm, no injury. But, by the powers, she stopped and the car died.

    Stopping woke her. Silence. Immobility. She figured she’d awakened. She’d been in a roadway fugue-state, driving like that. Suddenly aware, she sat dead in the middle of a black iron bridge in the middle of nowhere in the heart of the night. Then the rain poured.

    God damn car, she said, then, Yipes, she said. The rain on the roof was hard. In its noise she felt its fall from a great height. The road ahead was clear. The way back?

    She looked.

    A door had closed behind her. Not a door visible, but a door had shut, nevertheless and she was on this bridge. It assessed her, the bridge. No back up. Severe Tire Damage back there, she said. "News at Eleven!"

    Ahead, the roadway steamed in rain and glare.

    The face that appeared in her headlight above the grasses at the end of the bridge should have given her concern. It did not. It was a man’s face. It needed a shave. It squinted at her light. It was not friendly. It was trying to figure.

    Huh, she said.

    The face rose to become a hairy man, a naked man. No, she’d only thought he was, but, now, she saw he was only mostly naked; streaming and muddy as though risen from the river over which this bridge, no doubt, passed.

    She saw clearly now: he wore cut-off jeans. No shirt. No shoes.

    Whatcha stopping for? he yelled from the edge of her headlight.

    I am not stopping, she called back.

    He walked down the beam toward her. His toes seemed to grip the wet asphalt. Musta, he called, 'cause you got here and now you ain't leaving.

    The car stopped. I didn’t!

    He stood by her door. The rain shoved his hair across his face.

    You are wet, she yelled through the closed window.

    He shook his head. It's raining, he said. Pop your hood.

    She blinked, then released the catch.

    The man disappeared into the Saab's mouth. The car clanked and bumped as he. . .as he did what it was men did with engines!

    Give her a try, his voice rose above the rain.

    The engine coughed, started, stopped.

    Don't be shy, cripes, give her some! he yelled.

    The engine turned, caught, coughed, then raced to full life.

    He slammed the hood shut. His hands were black with oil. He didn't wipe them. He didn't mind. She knew he didn't. She cracked the window. May I? she began but didn't know what she was offering.

    Nup. I’m where I’m at.

    He was weighing something. She read that. He wasn’t thinking of what he could get for his service. He wasn’t looking at her as a women. No. His eyes were not overtly intelligent, yet they weighed her. He was deciding about some part of her she didn’t know that she possessed.

    Get off the road and get yourself up to Einar's, there. In the morning!

    Einar's?

    Place up the other end of town, there. He pointed at a sign on the roadway, ahead. In a few more seconds, the sign would have been a green and white blur, passing. She couldn't read it from where she sat.

    Einar's. It used to be the Amoco, now it ain't. It's Formerly. Einar's lousy but he'll have the part you need. Don't let him charge an arm for her. For the first time, he looked at her like a man would. Well, he’ll figure he can! What you need is a butterfly spring. Not a whole carb!

    His eyes held more.

    May I offer you... she looked at his greasy hands, the soaked cut-offs. She still had no idea what she was offering.

    Nope. I got what I need for now. He jerked his head over his shoulder to show her the bridge, the night. I'm here. You getcherself to Bluffton, there, and see Einar in the morning. He’s probably still up, but he’s a little goofy, nights.

    Then he was gone and the bridge released her.

    She rolled into town. Into Bluffton, Pop. 671. Green sign, white letters, potted with buckshot-rust.

    Thanks, she said to the night.

    Chapter 2

    THE STREGA CRISTOBEL AND OLD RATTLER KEN

    Maybe the Old Rattler Ken, needed just that little bit of a nudge to start seeing again. Maybe Cristobel could do magic. What the hell, who knows?

    Old Ken had been blind since just after the century's turn. That’s the OLD century, damn near a hundred years, that long. He was that old.

    Blind, maybe, but Ken kept pictures of his life. The pictures were in his head and they moved like a flicker show at the Kiddorf’s Magic Light. Ken had never seen a flicker show, but he'd heard about them. Anyway, the Kiddorf was gone since 1950-something, but the pictures of Old Ken’s life moved like he figured the Magic Lights had done.

    Now, the movie picture he sees in his head every morning of his life is about an hourglass—one of those old things, counts time. His daddy had one. The hourglass in Old Ken’s head-picture hangs in blackness. It shines and doesn't much move. Here's how it works: Every morning the sun rises over the bluff. Day crawls down the town from stock pens to the bend of the river. By and by it gets to Old Ken's flop on upper Slaughterhouse Way. When it reaches his window, sunlight slips into his hotbox room through a rip in the shade – just a squiggle of bright day, about the length of a bloodworm. That warm beam wipes itself on the old guy's sleeping face.

    He doesn't see it, no he doesn't, but he feels how hot. When the heat gets him, he remembers what sunlight was; remembers rosy warmth on his cheeks from almost a century back when he was a boy. When that happens, Old Ken's body jerks, remembers a boy's urge to be out, up among the trees, or walking the furrows on the Amish farms. He remembers hunting snake. God! Hunting snake!

    Memory jolts his body. The pain that follows drags him awake, plops him into the smelly bed he's flopped on these last decades, into tar-stinking morning beneath the asphalt roof of the dump he lives in on Slaughterhouse and at that moment. . .

    KERRRR-THUD

    . . .one thick yellow grain of hourglass sand falls from the nearly empty top to the almost full bottom.

    That is the movie picture of Old Ken's life.

    Bedded in his own stink, Old Ken takes the fingers of both hands, pries open his caked-shut lids, turns his face to the heat, already starting to wiggle off to other parts, and confirms: Ya, still blind!

    Then he hauls himself up, gets moving.

    When he'd been a young shit, the Rattler's morning picture was something else. Need a sunbeam to wake him? A boy? A boy brings his own sun to each damn day. Mornings were a thumping blaze of hot spit, flapping shirts and snake-taking gear, ready to fly and flail; something else, again! In Ken’s mind's eye, aged eleven and running, life was diamondback and timber snake, their skins nailed, pretty much living, to daddy's parlor walls. In his head, he saw bluff snake, hognose rattlers, snakes seven, eight feet and longer! Sixteen rattles flicking at the end of some, a dry-bone, hailstorm to chatter the dead awake. All them critters, every one, shaking like life, alive and writhing as they'd been one twitch before he’d stripped the meat out of them and tossed it to the hogs.

    That was a moving picture to keep in your head!

    Cold-blood, be damned! In Young Ken the Rattle-Killer's dreams, the hot living skins shook daddy's parlor walls, ceiling to floor. Snake he'd shot, speared, gaffed, fish-hooked, trapped, pinned, stoned, back-snapped, whip-cracked, or just plain stared down to the death shivered the whole damn house. Cold-blood? Ha! In Ken's young dreams, each vengeful head clacked a white wet jaw at him as he moved between the pissed-wriggling walls of daddy's house. Cold blood, hell!

    Now that was dreams!

    And another darned thing! Each dead critter was a hot new dollar. And that was no dream! No. He loved metal dollars! But dollars were just, what'd you call 'em? Receipts! Markers for the real wages. Life's true measure was snakes themselves, a growing house of dry and lively skins.

    Soon, the skins in the pictures in his head had filled daddy's place, every wall of it. Then they filled the outside walls, every inch. From porch to turret to bellied roof and chimney, the building writhed in spitting angers. Soon, in his dreams, enough rattling, chattering, flickering snake skins there were to cover every wall of every building on the home place, the hayracks and barn, the tack rooms and stables where daddy's precious horses stood waiting, being born, standing, chewing, crapping, snorting, whatever the hell! Oh for crineoutloud, every wall in Bluffton could have been nailed over by the snakes Ken killed in his head and heart!

    That was a picture to keep and he kept it. In Young Ken's dreams, he had stood sweated and breathless on the edge of Morning Bluff by the Amish fields beyond the Picture Man's castle. The town below danced in sun's heat as daylight touched the colored critters nailed everywhere to every wall. The town quaked in their throes and hissing hatreds, scales flashed spud-russet red, sky blue and eyeball yellow, flicking rings of black and diamond orange winkered, set the whole valley unfolding in color mad summer breeze.

    His doing! The wriggling and thumping snake skinned town, below in the rainbow sunrise. He’d done iteHH. Yes sir!

    He couldn’t remember that picture becoming this cold hourglass and its daily fall of a single grain of sand but, bit by bit, through the blind century, it had. Every day, now, that grain dropped – KERRRR-THUD – a cold, still clock.

    For a while, Ken figured if he could cry, tears might could wash away even blindness. Then there'd be the town again, alive and twitching.

    He couldn't cry, of course. Hell? What was there to cry over? Besides. The town was still there, out in the dark. Even after nearly a hundred years it was there.

    A boy, Ken crossed the town in a few pumps of his legs; a couple of heartbeats and it was gone.

    Took an hour, now, for the Old Rattler to totter from his flop on Slaughterhouse down to Commonwealth. The right turn took a couple, three minutes, then fifteen-twenty for the fifty-two uphill steps to the Restrant, another ten up the steps and to the door, two or three to the booth, the same where Old Ken sat at about the same time for the past how many years? By God, since the day Olaf Tim opened the place!

    Now, that was a story. Olaf Tim had called the joint The White House Restrant, Great American Pies Our Specialty!

    Ken called it the White House, since, or just the Restrant, like Olaf had before he lost his brains. Ken knew the place when four fluted columns supported the porch roof. The columns went in the little fire of ’45 and the name had stopped being the White House Restrant before that, ever since the Tim family, Republicans all, put some distance put between their business and THAT man in Washington.

    Through his tenth summer, Young Ken had watched the little bandy-rooster Swede, Olaf Tim, build his Restrant. Now and then, Tim got a town layabout to hold one end of something, while he nailed the other end in place, but, pretty much, he did the whole thing himself.

    Ken had watched the scrawny Scandahoovian crawl all-fours over the building, fitting, cutting, rabbeting, trimming, joining, putting board skin over the skeleton he'd framed out, battening the wide boards, then laying soft layer upon soft layer of wet white paint on dry white paint, taking every crack and seam out of the grainy wood with thick thick white.

    When Olaf took delivery of a fancy sign reading White House Dinner, Great American Pies Our Specialty! the Swede stood in the street and stared at the building, then at the sign, then at the building. Back and forth, for ten minutes. A GOOD ten minutes.

    Ken watched.

    The ten minutes up, Olaf got to work. In a couple days there were four fluted columns in place of the plain pillars that had held up the porch roof.

    Olaf covered the columns with more layers of white paint—changed his sign from Dinner to Restrant—did it himself, thus the personalized spelling—then nailed the white and gold thing to the porch roof and that was that. He was done.

    Through that short summer, Mrs. Tim had sat in a rocking chair by a tree in the street. She attended her knitting, watched her husband labor, and got fatter day by day. She nodded to Ken every morning as he passed on his way to snake the bluffs, but never said anything.

    Ken passed, nights, on his way home, a string of rattlers clacking down his back, and there'd be Olaf Tim, still working. Mrs. Tim, fatter, would nod to Ken as he passed.

    The day the White House opened its door, Ken was there, ready for breakfast.

    After a summer of wondering, breakfast was less than might be expected. The eggs were slippery, hard and shiny, the bacon, limp and chewy. The spuds were just north of raw. All the grub smelled like wood shavings and turpentine and the coffee, soapy and hot, tasted like what paint might. He figured things would improve when the place was broke in a little.

    Disappointed or not, Ken paid with a hard bounty dollar. He took his change and left a nickel; said he'd probably be back. Mrs. Tim was nowhere he could see. Her chair was gone from the street.

    Later that morning, while Ken was in the woods that verged on the Amishman Amos Dreibelbies's place up on the west bluff, two things—among many—happened in town: Mrs. Tim gave birth to the boy that had been making her fatter and fatter. She had screamed through a night-long delivery over at Doc's parlor. Once the boy came out, she told Doc that if the young one lived, he ought be called Timothy.

    Timothy Tim? Doc said. By then she was asleep.

    The other thing that happened was Olaf Tim blew his head off. After serving that first meal, Olaf dragged his wife's rocker into the new kitchen, took off both boots, sat them by the stove, stuck his double-barrel into his beard and pulled both triggers with his two big toes. Took doing, but folks were like that then: determined.

    Mrs. Tim was fine. She got one of the layabouts to clean up, repaint the kitchen and fix the mess on the ceiling. She hired a fat girl to take the money and tend baby Timothy Tim while she cooked. The Restrant reopened the day after the funeral. That day she started rising at 2:30 in the A.M. to make the great American pies promised on the sign her husband had ordered from Mankato.

    A man promises, py Gott someone’s got to keep it, she told Young Ken her first day on the job. She shoved a slice of apple in front of him and waited.

    Ken agreed: Nora Tim made pretty good pie.

    But it’s great? she asked.

    Not wanting her to go barefoot to Olaf’s two-barrel and leave little Timothy a whole orphan, Ken took another bite, considered, then nodded. Ya. Great, he said.

    Since Bluffton was in America, that covered that: at least one great American pie!

    Pretty soon, the scent of baking smothered the whole river bend

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