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Hail, man un-kind [Johnny ff., 37-38]

Description: She knew she shouldn’t have come. She knew her best friend and boyfriend didn’t want her to be there with them. It was her why they stopped at that god-forsaken gas station. It was also her why they stayed. Either alive or dead. And Johnny also has a say in it.

Warnings: mental instability, slow burn, manipulative relationship, enemies to lovers, totally bizarre found family dynamic, obsession, murder, explicit sexual content, dub-con elements, schizophrenia, unreliable narrator(s), dubious morality, cannibalism, moral downfall

Chapter 37: The face of love's rage

Hunting was an elemental part of Johnny Sawyer’s being. Sometimes he would run his hand along the mounted trophies and pelts on the wall, recalling the exact moment he pulled the trigger. He only hunted animals with a rifle. They were far smarter than people; couldn’t be lured in with soft half-smiles, a drink, or the promise of a ride. But bringing them down never brought the same kind of satisfaction.

Still, he knew exactly how big game reacted to being shot, when the bullet tore through their hide faster than they could understand. They would still be on their feet, let out a confused bellow, shiver, and their eyes would go black with despair.

In the mottled mirror above the swaying dresser drawers, he saw the image of a wounded buck. Prey. Cornered and hapless.

I’m alive.

She left these hastily scratched words for him. But who was She? Until now he’d meant that damned Maria Flores when he used the word, because it was easier - but which lying bitch deserved the right to exist inside his thoughts? He was confounded, his tongue felt like a block of ice in his mouth. From the photo, where Maud'd written her message, his own sweaty back stared back at him. "I’m alive. I’m alive, I am, and I’m laughing at you, you dumb prick."

We’re all laughing, whether we’re rotting in the ground, or lying in the cold room like a bride of meat hooks and cleavers. Whether we called ourselves your wife, whether we pressed our slobbering kisses to your fucked-up mug. “No. No! Goddammit, no!” His fist slammed into the cold glass. Shards exploded across the floor, into the empty crib.

He should have kicked, ripped the drawers out of their frames, slashed the pillows open with his knife. But strength had left his muscles. For the first time in his life, even rage couldn’t push him forward. He gripped the dresser with both hands, his head sinking between his shoulder blades like a bucket going under water.

He couldn’t breathe. This isn’t happening.

She couldn’t have done this. She couldn’t have left. She couldn’t have taken his child.

She wouldn’t dare. You wouldn’t, Maud.

She damn well did. Her letter was proof that she was still alive, and that she wanted Johnny to know it. Wanted him to know she had gotten further than anybody ever had. That she had his unconditional trust, the whole family’s, just so she could turn around and betray every last one of them. The mother of his goddamn child wanted him to know it wasn’t Nancy who split her head open and simmered her soft flesh into stew.

There was proof everywhere: her stained white shoes were gone and half the closet gutted. Missing, too, was that cherished book of horrors and love, overstuffed with keepsakes, and her nail file, the one she’d used to stab through eyeballs and ears.

She’d even left the music player behind, the one Johnny and Uncle Hands gave her for Christmas. Nancy was dusting it off when Johnny stormed into the living room. Her brown knit cardigan and pin-curled hair smelled faintly of smoke. She must’ve just lit the fire, the logs crackling and popping to life. She said something, but Johnny couldn’t hear anything over the blood thundering in his ears.

He yanked on his flannel shirt as he walked, didn’t even bother buttoning it over his stomach. He leaned over the balcony and screamed Maud’s name over the yard, over the trees, across every fucking acre. He wanted his voice to sink into the dirt, to fill the air all the way past Muerto County lines.

Still, part of him refused to believe it, wouldn’t take it as truth.

You killed for me. You killed ‘cause you liked it. You’re guilty. Out there, you’re just a target. Too many sins on your head, Mommy Maud. They’ll catch you, and you’re done. Or I’ll catch you first. And then…

He tore through the house, every door upstairs, then down to the basement. Searched every roach-ridden cell and corner, and sent the shivering rats scurrying off. His boots smeared mud and mouse-shit across Nancy’s carpets and the cold concrete of the garage.

“This is my fault,” she said. “I should’ve seen it comin’. Got too sure of myself. Thought I knew what was goin’ on in her head.”

She didn’t raise hell about the mess, not even when Johnny downed his third beer and tossed the empty bottle straight into the sink, glass shattering everywhere. Footprints and broken glass. That was all that's left. No Maud’s voice, no pale lily-of-the-valley scent

Johnny’s dark eyes were fixed on his mother, or on the woman who had spent his whole life claiming to be that. This was the first time in months he allowed her to pull his head against the soft weight of her chest, to stroke his hair. He didn’t move, only let it happen, his mind already far away, tracing the outline of a sneaker print in the dust, and in his mouth he held the taste of the dirt Maud had stepped on as she left him.

When he finally spoke, his voice tasted like beer, cold and bitter, as though he had swallowed the glass itself. Perhaps he would force one down that whore’s throat too, so she could talk it over with that annoying old fag from Floresville about what it feels like. What was his name, Harry?

“She doubted me. Every damn day. Everythin’ was about her and the kid. I worked myself to hell for her. Took all her bloody nagging, and fuck, how many times I wanted to wipe that sneer off her mouth... and still she left. You don’t leave family.’

“Bring her back, son,” Nancy said. Her fingers raked through Johnny’s hair and closed, firm, around a fistful at the nape of his neck. Her worn, yellowed teeth ground against each other. “I ain’t gonna stand in your way. Not even if it’s only the child you bring home.”

“Yeah,” Johnny growled. “You ain’t Drayton.”

“I ain’t Drayton.”

The old fart was playing tricks on him. At least that’s what it felt like when Johnny swung the car off the highway and onto the dirt road leading up to Grandpa’s house. He could’ve sworn he saw the man for a split second, shuffling toward him from the shed full of rusted scythes and saws, his oversized gray pants smeared with dirt and ash. His sleeves were bloody and his thin black hair stuck up in greasy clumps. Maybe it was just the distance, but his face looked softer somehow, older, like all the bones had caved in.

“Boy!”

He’d heard that word so many times before. Johnny slammed the car door, and the old heap shook with the booze-fed rage humming through it. It was still the prettiest thing in the family, dents and years be damned. Hands had given it to him on his twenty-first birthday; big man knew what made a man tick. Nubbins had been jealous ever since, just the idea that Johnny got to drive made him spit nails. Drayton always squawked that he was driving like Hands, reckless, stupid.

But the old man’s voice now wasn’t scolding — it was rather worried, almost… caring. A sharp breath swallowed halfway. When Johnny rounded the hood, though, the figure by the shed was gone.

He waited a moment. His boot sank into the damp soil, and he clicked a cigarette against his tooth before lighting it. He still didn’t believe in ghosts, even though they’d dropped by a few times. Maria in the cold room, Danny with blood-slick teeth laughing that she never wanted Johnny anyway, and that Grease-haired party bastard talking to him like he was thirteen again.

But Drayton didn’t show himself again. Only the chains swayed on the rafters and Nubbins’s bone charms clattered. Down the dirt road, the old house looked emptier than it ever had. PRIVATE PROPERTY, the sign on the fence puffed its chest out.

Back when the old man still worked the gas station with him, he’d warn the young ones not to wander too close, saying they might end up on land owned by folks who didn’t take kindly to strangers.

Johnny knew his uncle was dead.

Sissy was sitting cross-legged on the rug, a few soft chicken feathers stuck to her black-and-white dress. She didn’t seem surprised to see him; she knew his steps by sound, the weight of them. Her round blue eyes were sleepy, distant. Hands wasn’t home — probably pulling a shift at the gas station — but Johnny hadn’t come for him anyway.

He took the burning cigarette from his mouth and looked at the hole in the wall his fist had left last Christmas.

“Where’s Nubbins?”

“Where you think?” she said. “Down at the slaughterhouse. The house is ours now - mine and Big Boy’s.” Sissy tilted her head and started rubbing her dirty toenails with her fingertips. “What’s got into you, huh?”

“Maud’s gone.”

“What?”

“I said Maud ran off, and took my damn kid with her!”

Johnny had lost his temper plenty of times before, but if it hadn’t been for those three beers, he might’ve stopped himself. His gloved fingers tangled in Sissy’s messy blonde bun, yanking her up from the floor, spit flying as he shouted in her face.

“You knew about it? You knew what she was fixin’ to do? Answer me, for fuck’s sake, or I swear I’ll gut you right here!”

He knew exactly how to grab a woman, how to scare her half to death. Sissy let out a sharp cry and clawed at his hand.

“You know what’s wrong with you?” she hissed through her teeth. “You ain’t seen the light! There ain’t no light in that head o’ yours!”

“I’ll count to three. You tell me what you know, or I’ll make you so ugly no trucker’ll ever stop for you again.”

A strangled laugh escaped her throat. She reached behind her back, and Johnny—sluggish from drinking—wasn’t quick enough to stop her before the razor bit into his arm. He grunted, flinging her across the room with a violent motion. She half-rolled into the dining room, knocking over a chair as she went.

From the living room came Grandpa’s groan, a sign he’d heard the commotion, and that meant Bubba would be lumbering in soon enough.

Johnny cursed under his breath, glancing down at his hairy forearm where blood poured in thick streams. Sissy raised the razor to her lips and gave it a delicate lick, like some spoiled cat.

“You’ve known me all my life. If I’d even guessed somethin’ like that, you think I’d let her go? You think I’d let her walk out? But are you sure, huh? You real sure she left... and it ain’t…”

Johnny set her straight, told her exactly why Nancy had nothing to do with it.

Sissy wouldn’t let him near her. She pushed herself up, gripping the wall for balance, the razor trembling in her hand. The corners of her mouth twitched downward.

“Oh, lordy.” Her eyes darted toward the staircase lined with hunting trophies. Bubba’s worried moans echoed faintly. “But it was her that killed Drayton, and you know it. Deep down, you know it, Johnny.” She backed away. Johnny moved with her, leaning his bleeding arm against the doorframe of the kitchen. “Say you know it.”

Bubba’s huge shape cast a long shadow as he came into the dining room. He shoved the mask on in a hurry; the lipstick was smeared, his eyes sat a little crooked beneath it, which made him look even more grotesque. He twisted his hands nervously and stared at Johnny’s wounded arm. “Mhhmm?”

By then Johnny understood how futile it had been to come here. Maud never wasted words, and though he would have loved an excuse to beat Nubbins half to death, he knew he’d been the last one his wife’d blab her plans to. I even let them call you that, cunt. You can run, but you can’t hide.

“So you know.” Sissy slowly lowered the blade and wiped the blood into her dress, rubbing both sides, slow and careful. “I don’t know where Maud went, but… I warned her to watch her back with your ma. ‘Cause that old bitch sure as hell finished Drayton off.”

“She wouldn’t’ve dared. He is her brother, the family—”

“Family?! You was about to gut me a minute ago, you idiot! And from the look on you, you’d’a done it if I hadn’t knocked some sense in ya! Nancy wanted to do to Maud what she did to your real ma, and if I’m wrong, I’ll swallow all my poison! Drayton sure as hell didn’t agree with her, and that’s why now everything’s… duh!” The words couldn’t carry the rest of what she meant. She flung her thin arms in the air and spun once, dramatic. “And what if she goes to the law, Johnny?”

Bubba fumbled at his mask, trying clumsily to set it right, and finally gave up and lunged instead for Johnny’s arm. Johnny tried to pull away, but his big cousin insisted on seeing the wound up close.

“She won’t. I’m sure of it. She’s like us. A born killer, and she likes it.”

“But she’s a woman,” Sissy snapped back. “And folks believe a woman… the flyers of her and those fellas are still out there. She could say she was forced. She could even say the baby… well, you know.”

Sissy couldn’t bring herself to say the word, and Johnny wasn’t in the mood to ponder why. Sure, Maud could claim she’d been raped. She could say anything — but she wouldn’t, not if she knew what that would do: call attention to what she carried with her. The hairs of dead people, Nubbins’s trinkets strung from teeth, a baby fathered by Pretty Boy Johnny.

“Get off me, dammit” he barked at Bubba, who grunted a piggish noise and slid into a corner. “Tear a damn chicken’s head off and feed the old man.”

“Grandpa’s fine! And don’t you go actin’ like poor Bubba’s the one to blame for what happened.”

Bubba shuffled in the corner, thudding his massive fist against his own forehead again and again. Johnny never could tell how much the big ox really understood of what went on around him, just that he could scare himself with his own shadow, and that without Drayton around, he’d gotten even more fretful.

But Johnny didn’t give a heck. Not about Bubba, not about Sissy, not about anyone who wasn’t his wife or his kid. That smile of hers, the way her pinky used to hook around his. All of it a rotten lie. No better than Nancy, who was only holding her tongue now because she wanted her grandbaby back.

But that baby wasn’t Nancy’s. That baby was his.

On his way out, he spotted his half-smoked Chesterfield on the floor and lit it again. He wasn’t going to hunt this big game with a rifle. Catching her would be pleasure in its purest, sweetest form.

He took out his skinning knife and sharpened it in the shed. Bone fragments crunched under his boots, reminding him how long he’d kept himself reined in. How long had it been since he’d felt that fine little crack under his fingers? Maud even went and ruined that fancy makeup girl for him. Killing her hadn’t even been about Johnny in the end. And ever since, he’d been starving—they all had, feeding on scraps.

He flicked his cigarette butt into the bone dust.

What Sissy said about Drayton… on another day, maybe he’d have asked his mother about it. Maybe he’d even have cared that the old man - who Johnny himself had often thought about icing - finally met his match in Nancy. A stroke would’ve suited him better, or some clever victim caving in his skull with a hammer.

But there wasn’t time for that now. Johnny was sure of himself, but he wasn’t stupid. Maud knew his ways. She knew exactly what she was running from, and that meant she knew what mistakes not to make. She wouldn’t go back to Floresville, not to her mother.

Still, Johnny wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Not now, not even if it cost him his life.

And wouldn’t it be somethin’, he thought, if that doe-eyed whore saw what became of Laney Raines after she up and vanished?

Drayton would’ve told him not to go. Hands, however, backed him all the way. And that was one more reason Johnny had always loved him better.

As he drove past the sign pointing toward Newt, he thought he heard a ghost again. Danny, that sorry bastard, laughing at him with pity. For a moment he almost regretted not being the one to finish him off. He also regretted ever listening to Maud’s bullshit about her ghosts. She’d infected his mind, and now he had to put up with Maria’s boyfriend mocking him from beyond.

Maud played him too. Made the poor fool believe she was some innocent lamb - someone who needed protecting, an ally -, before she buried a blade into him right down to the bone.

“Danny boy, how’s it feel, huh? To know we’re bound together forever by these doggone women?”

Hometown Groceries, Maud’s drunk mother’s store was just as depressing as it had been in summer when Johnny last came through. He parked across the road, window rolled halfway down, and watched the woman work. She wore an apron and loose jeans with scuffed leather shoes, her hair hanging in a greasy ponytail. She was restocking the vegetable crates; green beans and parsnips were out, the cabbages soggier than she was.

Johnny’s throat went dry when Laney glanced his way, and for a second he saw that same face, the one that, behind a fogged window, could’ve been Maud’s. Right then he wanted to slice her throat open, let her blood spray over the spring strawberries, stain that cornhusk-coloured hair rust-red. His heartbeat quickened, nostrils flared, and he tugged the black leather glove tighter on his wrist.

He couldn’t do it there: too early in the day, too many witnesses. An ice-cream truck eased into the intersection and an old woman shook rugs on her balcony. Maud’s little leeches were there too; her sisters, scrawny schoolkids tugging at one another as they made for the shop. Blonde, downy heads Maud had never loved.

There was no point in killing the chicks or the old hen. Maud had long since buried them, along with her red-bloused, dick-sucking friend.

He ate a cheap gas-station hot dog, washed it down with beer, and drove on without stopping all the way to Rocksprings. The road unspooled before him like a grey ribbon without end; the clouds kissed and blended into the horizon. Beneath his torn plaid shirt his arm pulsed along the thin line where Sissy’s blade had grazed him. He hadn’t even washed the wound; the fabric bled right through. To the attendant at the station he said it’d been a circular-saw accident. Funny, things like this happen to most men sooner or later, don’t they?

But Johnny wasn’t like most men, and the woman who’d dared to leave him wasn’t like most women. He kept the radio tuned, flipping through static-laced stations, but none of them spoke of a pregnant young woman missing for nearly a year who might have claimed she’d been taken by raving cannibals. That would be too soon. Even if Blondie was sitting in some police interview room right now with that pitiful, stupid look on her face — even if the goddamn FBI had her -, there’d be no trace of it on the air yet.

The lamppost outside Tammie’s place wore two faces: Danny Gaines on one side, Sonny Williams on the other. A few more missing person posters lay crumpled in the trash; Maria’s and that red-haired chick’s Sissy used to play with, all folded to pieces. Johnny reached in up to his elbow, shoving the posters deep down under the stink of compost and used rubbers.

He waited in the doorway of the damp-walled attic apartment until Tammie got home from her shift. At first she thought he was some strung-out junkie trying to break in. “Lord almighty, Johnny… it’s been forever! Why didn’t ya come by the bar? Holy Mary.” She looked him up and down, her tired eyes ringed with heavy black liner.

Johnny had no mind to walk into that bar and let a dozen tongues wag later about where he’d been. He didn’t answer, just clicked his tongue, tasting the smoke still coating his mouth.

“Well, you comin’ in, or you just fixin’ to keep my threshold warm?”

The little place was cold but smelled good, which was strange to him, after all the rot and meat stench he called home. Only the crack pipe spoiled it, that Tammie lit up the second she dropped her purse. She didn’t ask about the wound on his arm. She’d long since pegged him as the kind who got cut up from time to time.

She shrugged off her leather jacket. It was men’s size, big on her even with those curves. Underneath she wore a patterned dress that used to hug her shape but was now pulling at the seams. Still looked good, though. Johnny found himself wondering why he’d come.

A good hard fuck might’ve done it. Something rough, mean, near to wicked. She’d have given him that, sure enough. But that wasn’t what he needed.

Her blondeness was the colour of cheap bleach, faded now, dark roots showing through.

“You okay?” she asked, pulling the curtain over the little triangle window. “You look pale, hon. You oughta clean that cut, though.”

“That jacket,” Johnny said, nodding toward the black leather jacket she’d tossed aside. A gold rattlesnake curled across the back. “Where’d you get that? Some fella?”

He wasn’t jealous, not really, but he let her think he was. He stripped off his bloody shirt without even unbuttoning it.

“Somebody left it at the bar,” she said. “Never came back for it, so I took it. Lemme get some music on.”

She turned the dial; Skynyrd, Free Bird. Johnny smiled, dry and small, as he slid the sharpened blade out. Wasn’t this band that wussy’s favourite, the one he’d shoved that sunflower down the throat of? Grant Finch?

He let Tammie see him, but not make any noise; with his left hand he struck quick at her throat, silencing her vocal cords. He plunged upward toward her belly, and the spilling blood soaked the worn dress. Tammie’s eyes went exactly the way a shot mouflon’s eyes do—just like Johnny’s own in the mirror above the empty crib.

He tucked the knife back under his brown belt, then seized Tammie’s throat with both hands. The music swallowed the dying, saliva-slick squeaks that escaped her; Johnny felt every tiny crack and convulsion against his fingers. She was there, under his grip, and he was in charge. If he hadn’t been so remorselessly furious at a woman whose name Tammie didn’t even know, he might’ve told her—honestly—that it was a shame, because he’d liked her once.

Nowadays - unlucky for Tammie -, whom he liked, or which family someone belonged to didn’t mean a thing.

“And this bird you cannot change. Lord knows, I can’t change.”

He grabbed his shirt and shoved it under his belt. It would be good enough for rags. He pulled on the leather jacket instead, zipped it up to his chest, and brushed the baby-hairs off his face.

He planned to bring his son home before the baby was even born.

1975 1976 1977 1978 1979

More than a hundred candles flickered at the Granger Hill sorority. People set them beside the two-leaf gate so they wouldn’t block traffic; dirtied, broken flower petals drifted among the gravel. Seven girls’ black-and-white photographs lay among dusty, pale pink flowers and black ribbons: some cut from yearbooks, some from family albums. Agent Holden Ford, in a winter coat and cap (which Bill joked made him look like a Russian agent), stared at one photo—Thelma Wang’s—though it wasn’t true to say he really saw it. His mind circled the man responsible for this: the one who’d come on Halloween night, chained the gate, forced the lock, and methodically hunted the girls. He slit two throats with precise, swift motions, stabbed Bonnie McDonough in the gut twice and then through the neck, strangled Marla Hoskins, Hattie Riordan, and then Thelma who’d almost managed to call for help.

The Pretty Boy’s methods, the Pretty Boy’s weapon. There was no question about it.

“He’s not hiding from us,” Holden said, his gloved hand in his coat pocket. Beside him Bill struggled hopelessly to light a cigarette in the sticky, heavy January fog. “And that still doesn’t fit his profile. He no longer cares about consequences.”

“We have to say something to the press. Something smarter than what we’ve said so far. They’re going to tear us apart, Holden… we’ve been amusing the country with the idea that blond girls are done for, that our Pretty Boy goes after them. And now this.”

“He’s got a purpose. This wasn’t anything but pure anger. He scratched the itch.”

Only afterward did Holden realize how callous, how almost sacrilegious his words had sounded. He bit his lip and crouched down so he wouldn’t look down on the dead girls’ photos from the superior height of the living. He still tended to overreach, to think with the studied killer’s head when he ought to be thinking with a feeling one.

He was nonetheless convinced that this monster felt; only in the most grotesque way God could invent.

Bill finally got his cigarette lit and slid the pack into his breast pocket.

“If we catch him, he gets the chair,” he said. “This guy won’t get away. Maybe that’s for the best.”

“Let’s hope we catch him before he finds her,” Holden replied, straightening a water-dripping, frost-fragile bouquet in a half-cut mineral-water bottle. “The blonde woman he’s looking for.”

Chapter 39: Normal things

The employees of the Dalhart Greenlane Shopping Center always said Betsy Price was an odd sort.

She was docile, a little slow-witted at times, but her hands were quick. She worked as a cleaner, mostly tending the area around the three modest little fast-food joints and the space in front of the gift shops. She ate her packed lunches in the cramped supply closet she’d turned into a sort of nest: stacked crates, spare plastic bags. She never gossiped, never stuck around, never let anyone close enough to press. Betsy only ever took the morning shift, because she had a small child she raised alone. The kid started school in at the age of six – barely -, earlier than most, and that only made the cleaning crew more curious about who on earth could have gotten together with this dreamy, simpleton of a woman.

Maud had long grown used to being Betsy. Third name, third body, third skin she’d worn since her escape. She prayed to God she wouldn’t need a fourth. Hiding, in itself, would have been manageable; no one ever cared about her anyway, except for that not-quite-one year in Muerto County.

But she wasn’t alone anymore, and staying hidden with a child was a much, much harder challenge. Especially when the child’s father, her abandoned lover, was the tried-and-true killing machine America had been hysterically terrified of since ’74. It sharpened everything: the footsteps behind her, the headlines, the way strangers’ eyes lingered just a second too long.

She’d dyed her hair in a filthy gas station bathroom, mouse-brown and flat, cutting it ragged with the little paper scissors they sold by the register. It barely brushed her jaw after that. Her bangs stayed, hanging low enough to shadow her eyes, that no longer held a trace of the shy doe they once were. Not unless she forced it. Not unless someone needed a harmless woman to look at.

Pregnancy had helped at first; in her condition people were more considerate. Drivers stopped for her along the dead-stretch highways where nothing grew, and the billboards stood blank like tombstones. Once she reached southern Arkansas, she could sleep half-price in the spare upstairs room of a diner until she found a job.

She became a waitress in a pizza place, where staff came and went so often they didn’t even think twice about hiring her. She caused no trouble, because she didn’t want to. She kept her gaze low, did her job, and paid on time for the shabby little half-house she eventually rented. The kitchen and bedroom spilled together, and the once-white curtain had turned yellow with nicotine, but it was safe and quiet.

Back then, for some whim, she called herself Marie. After a few months her real name, and the life that belonged to it, began to feel like a hesitant dream someone had once told her. Her missing person flyers faded and peeled, and stopped being replaced. Maud E. Raines, disappeared in 1973, vanished for good, just like Maria Flores and all her friends. There were too many others anyway, all swallowed by the same country humming with fear.

Some nights she’d flip open the newspaper or switch on the crackling little TV across from her metal bedframe and swear she could smell the blood wafting off the headlines. That was what America was breathing in alongside with oxygen; cult murders, missing black kids in Atlanta, and so many girls.

“Crazy times”, her landlord said, “we’re dropping like flies, and then will come Judgment Day.”

That was when Maud realized how much she hadn’t missed ordinary people’s ordinary rambling. She could’ve taught the old codger a thing or two about Judgment Days. About the one with a face stitched together out of human skin, but the soul of a frightened boy. Or the kind that looked like a sweet-voiced housewife who’d bash your brains out with a rolling pin the second your guard slipped.

Or, for that matter, the one who stood tall and strong as a pillar, all muscle and black-glowing eyes, a man who had once been named Jonathan Gilbert.

Marie Gilbert gave birth to her son on June thirtieth, 1974, in McGehee, southern Arkansas. At the very last moment she stumbled into the local hospital on her own feet, and no one searched for her during or after. The on-call OB delivered the child, a middle-aged woman with buck teeth. The birth went relatively smoothly, and although Marie screamed from the bottom of her lungs, it didn’t seem like this was the worst agony her body had ever faced. Her almond-shaped, filed nails left indelible marks in the foil-covered armrest.

Dr. Ansell asked Marie questions about her background, where she’d come from, whether she had planned the pregnancy. When Dr. Ansell examined her naked body more closely, she was horrified by its condition. Marie’s wrists and shoulders were marred by faded bite marks and her thighs bore the ghosts of knife wounds. The later X-ray clearly showed that several bones had once cracked or broken and healed improperly. But since Marie refused to say anything, she had to accept that the most she could do for her was to hand the baby boy to her safe and sound.

The little one smelled of milk and talc-powder. Nothing about him suggested he had been conceived in flesh and blood, and nothing showed that he had floated, as an embryo, listening to death-screams. That everyone whose murmur reached him from the outside world had been a ruthless killer, a graverobber, a freak. No—Lele was healthy. His soft little mouth found Maud’s nipple without effort, and he looked up at her while he nursed with a clean, almost piercing gaze. He was too beautiful a baby. Maud could not find herself in him at all, except in the beat of his heart and that strange, swaddled calm radiating from him. He cried rarely, and even then not loudly.

Maud—Marie—whispered to him the thoughts and longings she could never voice to anyone else. She apologized, so many times that two lifetimes would not have been enough to count them. Not only to Johnny, for leaving him, but to the ones who had to die so Johnny could howl his rage after her. It wasn’t fair, and she knew it. Pretty Boy had taken five women in two years, at least, that was how many the authorities knew of. Every one of them had been blonde, and even the Feds had noticed that, let alone the press, with its nose even sharper than theirs. Johnny had begun turning killing into a show, making sure everyone saw he wasn’t just hunting anymore; he was taunting and hating. He carved a misshapen “M” into the skin of some victims. No photo of that ever leaked, but Maud could easily imagine the skinning blade biting into white backs, smooth bellies.

She knew well that if the father of her child ever found her, far worse awaited her. She had known it even when she made her decision. The chance that Johnny would quietly accept it—even under family pressure—was zero. After what happened to Maria, he would sooner destroy everything around him than resign himself to another defeat.

Not that it came without sacrifice and deprivation on her side. For Lele’s sake, Maud locked herself back inside the stone coffin of normalcy, a role she had mastered long ago, the only member of the Sawyer family capable of playing it, because she had grown up outside.

She tried to bury that life too, just as she had her first twenty-three years in Floresville. The Cary Grant book, the pressed sunflowers, the bracelet Nubbins made. Everything that remained of those whom the monster called Mommy Maud had devoured. She hid them deep in a drawer.

Only the clothes she kept wearing, because she had no money for new ones; she pulled the green bucket hat Nancy had given her tight over her head, wrapped herself in teenage Johnny’s denim jacket, and set out to the pizza place or to do the laundry of some rich local attorney.

At nights Maud returned to the farm. The heat-sweating walls adorned with bone trophies. The darkness of the basement and the rush of drafts shrieking through the pipes. The whisper of uncut grass and the generator’s rumble against the falling sun. The smell of diesel and the swish of a heated chainsaw in the air. Dozens of license plates nailed to the wall, a spider weaving webs through ribcages. The birds eating from Bubba’s hand, Sissy’s whistle, and Maud’s own blood-dripping fingers between Grandpa’s wrinkled lips. Lace curtains, yellowed newspapers, and flies. Thousands, millions.

The day she first smelled the slaughterhouse stench while sitting in Gus, Grant’s lousy truck, and felt the pull, the desire to live among the flies instead.

Lele’s quietness held. Of his few toys, he loved Sissy’s plush fox the best. Chirping softly, he floated it over the worn, coffee-cream patterned carpet as if it walked on tiny legs. When he rested in Maud’s lap, he often pressed the plush to her face, stroked her with it, and waited for his mother to kiss the toy’s pointy nose. When she did, the tiny furrows on Lele’s baby forehead smoothed out.

He loved when his mother whispered to him, even if the words weren’t always fairy tales. He was still far too young to know whether he was listening to the tale of Timmy Tiptoes or Maud’s aimless musing about how much she missed Johnny. She often left the television on all night, even though after a while the screen filled only with black-and-white static. Lele didn’t mind; with his blue pacifier in his mouth, he dozed under warm blankets while Maud listened to the news. It was the pure, undiluted horror through which she could forge some kind of connection with the man who had given her so much: so many kisses, so many wounds, so many flushed, burning cheeks, shuddering pleasure, and Lele. Sometimes she crawled under the duvet with her little boy, closed her eyes, and pictured herself back in the family house, in that tiny room, the warmth around her not a blanket but Johnny’s chest. Still, it wasn’t throbbing with tameless life, and carried none of his scent of cologne and hay-sweat.

She never regretted her choice. To Nancy, she had been nothing more than a machine, a thing she fed money into to get the next innocent little one she could break. If Maud had stayed, she would have ended up exactly where Drayton did, disappeared even from the family’s sight, in Bones’ incinerator or in Devil’s River. Sometimes it crossed her mind that telling Johnny she’d disappeared of her own free will hadn’t been a good idea. But then she looked at Lele, who was already speaking in short but complete sentences. When he said “mommy,” even the warmth of Daisy’s last breath couldn’t compare to it. No—she could never have condemned Johnny to believing that both of them were dead.

The fear of dying was far less tormenting than the stone coffin. Its walls were cold and gray, a suffocating, airless box. When she changed Lele and glanced up into the round mirror above the changing table, she saw a hollowed-out face, deepening crow’s-feet around her eyes. She was starving, so badly that even her dyed, chopped hair had begun to fall out. Yet no hamburger, pie, or loaf of bread could quell this hunger.

She knew this feeling, but never had it been so strong. Not since she and Johnny caught those two robbers on that Texas backroad. Sometimes she felt she’d give anything to sit again in that sweltering car, tongue sweet with strawberry candy, and hear the bones splinter in Ada’s wrist. To feel that weight again, the swing of the cleaver in her palm, the metal that so reliably turned a useless mass of meat into nutritious portions.

You were baptized in blood, lived on human flesh, and now you are something different. Even the native tribes knew that.

Her mind was willing to endure the wasting away. Her instincts weren’t.

The girl was seventeen, cute at first glance. She drew little hearts on her shoes and wore a bow-tipped headband that reminded Maud of the girl with candle-flame hair. She came from the local trailer park, where most of her kin lived as well, all of them speaking with a peculiar accent that was hard to place. Her name was Trudy, and Maud met her at the pizzeria, where they agreed the girl would babysit for a bit of pocket money. Lele had already turned two, and Maud’s employers—especially the demanding lawyer—expected more of her time.

But Trudy was not sweet. She was often late, flipping through magazines instead of playing with Lele. She never apologized, just swept past Maud with a sigh, or stomped across the coffee-cream carpet in her heart-decorated shoes as though she had better places to be. Maud knew why. The same reasons why people in Floresville had spat in her face and looked right through her, and now they had even more to whisper about. A strange, quiet woman with her silent, brilliant little boy. Trudy, choosing her words with no care at all, laid out for her every rumour circulating in that flea-bitten trailer park, in the pizza place, and in all the other corners of that Arkansas shithole.

She had been working for Maud for a month and a half when she left Lele in the bathtub. The little boy climbed out on his own, once the water had gone ice-cold and the last of the pearlescent bubbles had vanished. Trudy denied it, but Lele told the story himself in his own short yet perfectly assembled sentences, sitting before the TV with his plush fox tucked under his arm.

“That’s not true,” Trudy protested stubbornly, letting that condescending sigh slip from her lips again. She wore a light summer blouse that left her shoulders bare, and Daisy Dukes no self-respecting mother would have allowed a girl her age to wear out on the street. “He’s still so little, he makes things up. If you don’t trust me, Marie, then I can leave, but you won’t find anybody else.”

Maud—Marie—asked her to come with her to the matchbox kitchen. Before that, she turned up the TV and shut the door between the living room and the bedroom. The front door opened into the kitchen, so she twisted the blinds shut there too, slowly, methodically. Above their heads the fan droned monotonously, and the drawer rails rattled as she pulled one open.

“Is that where you keep your stash money?” Trudy asked, something she would’ve known if she had ever cooked Lele a proper dinner.

“Mm-hmm.”

Maud’s hard fingers curled around the handle of the meat cleaver, and when she turned, she expected Trudy to scream. But she wasn’t even looking at her. She was fussing with her shoelaces, bending forward with straight knees. When she looked up, her eyes widened—but she had no time for anything more before the cleaver crashed into her face. The meticulously sharpened blade split her nose and lip. The momentum of the blow sent her crashing against the sink, and Maud yanked the cleaver out of her skull; the smell of fresh blood flooded the kitchen.

Trudy tried to scream through her mangled face, but Maud smothered the sound with a sharp slap. The girl, mouth full of blood, whimpered, rolled onto her stomach, and crawled toward the door. Maud struck again, from the shoulder the way she’d been taught, and this time she left the blade buried in Trudy’s back. With her white sneakers she kicked her once, twice, then braced her palms against the doorframe and went on kicking a dozen more times, until the sole of her old, perpetually filthy shoe tore loose.

She butchered the fresh “chicken,” packing its parts into black bags and stowing them in the chest freezer down in the basement. That evening she ate pot roast with carrots and mash for dinner after putting Lele to bed. The head, though, she left it nearby the trailer park, to give the fleabags there something real to chatter about.

After that, she had no choice but to move on and change her name. Not because of the authorities, but because of Johnny. She knew that if he heard about the case, he would recognize her: her style, her fury, the devilish little details, just as she always knew exactly whose blood Johnny was spilling as he laid down the milestones of his wife-hunt.

This time she went all the way to South Carolina, to a small town called Hartsville. The local church community gave her a service house in addition to the modest monthly pay for cleaning the church and the soup kitchen. Shawna White and her charming, though strangely quiet little boy, were divisive figures. The churchgoers could not quite agree on whether they liked her or would rather avoid her entirely.

And then that man showed up. That nitpicking conspiracy nut who was always walking his wire-haired mutt, Boris, around the area. He didn’t like that a single mother had moved into the service house, and he made that clear to Maud—Shawna—more than once, right there by the runoff pipe whenever they happened to cross paths. He also didn’t like that Lele tried to befriend Boris, though rather clumsily, since he rarely had the chance to be around dogs. The mutt snatched the plush fox out of his hands and ran off with it, straight into the water. Maud got the fox back, but it was torn and filthy, beyond repair, especially considering even Sissy had found it in a dumpster.

The wifeless old bastard knocked on her door one foggy February night, claiming that the four-and-a-half-year-old Lele had abused his dog. He stood dithering on the porch, showering Maud’s fake glasses with spit. She listened silently, clutching Nancy’s white-and-green terrycloth robe tighter around herself.

“Keep your voice down, please. My boy’s sleepin’.”

“Sleepin’? That little hellspawn oughta be locked up, not tucked in! Boris came home bleedin’, bawlin’ his head off, and he was out here — don’t you lie to me. He always roams this way, and he’s got every damn right to! But you ain’t got no right to stiff me on compensation, or to keep that boy’s daddy from him. Figures now, why the kid’s such a mean little brute, growin’ up with a mother like you.”

Maud would have put on her madam-here-is-your-change smile, if she hadn’t already known this wouldn’t end here. That the man would rouse all of Hartsville, shouting that she and her son were dangerous. And from then on Lele would have to bear the sting of exclusion, even though, until now, the other children had been happy to play with him at the playground, charmed by his sweetness and beauty.

She couldn’t allow that.

She caught up with him at the runoff pipe, now wearing jeans and a windbreaker, without her glasses, her hair tied back with a bandana. She struck him on the back of the head with a stone she’d found next to the house; the bottom of it was caked with dirt, worms wriggling along its underside. The man toppled headfirst into the icy water, and Maud went after him, carefully, not wanting to slip on the gravel.

The terrified, soaking-wet man clutched at his bleeding nape and swung his fist at the shadow moving toward him. His blow left an ugly bruise blooming across Maud’s collarbone, but the pain meant nothing to her. She peeled her lips back from her teeth like a rabid animal, like Nubbins, and struck him again, this time right between the eyes. She pressed down on his back and shoved his head under the shallow water with all her strength.

“Now go to sleep, you piece of shit.”

A week later, while waiting for the moving van, Lele noticed Boris nosing through a heap of trash. His flank looked ragged and was red with dried blood. He wouldn’t let Maud touch him, but he allowed the mover to, and the wounds, it turned out, had been caused by barbed wire.

This was how Shawna became Betsy in Dalhart, Texas once more, and how Lele began school there. They brought Boris with them, because despite everything, Lele had bonded with him, and Maud thought a friendship with an animal might do him good. With a bit of help he quickly learned how to care for the dog, and renamed him Brownie.

“Because it’s Daddy’s favorite cookie,” he said. “That’s what you told me.” The forgiveness shimmering in her son’s dark, warm eyes was something utterly foreign to her. She'd never known it was possible to feel genuine awe toward a five-year-old.

He certainly hadn’t inherited that trait from Johnny.

Seven girls at once. Fuck, baby.

Maud sat at the dining table with a beer in her hand, the day’s newspaper spread open before her. Pretty Boy had struck again, and what he’d left behind was worse than anything so far. He’d broken into a sorority house—apparently without much planning. He chained the gate shut, then ruthlessly hunted down every girl who’d been home, preparing to host a Halloween party. In his wake lay only corpses, a collapsed strawberry-cream cake, and the photo in the paper of the grieving crowd gathered at the double iron gate. His composite sketch was, as always, included in the article; Maud set the beer bottle beside the scarred face, pressed her forehead to his, her lips to his.

It was hard to decide what caused the cold vice in her stomach: the fear that Johnny, in this impossible frenzy of his, might find them… or the thought that he might be caught. There was no one to protect him. Not even Johnny himself, who no doubt would have boasted with his deeds. Which meant Maud had to live her pretend-life knowing Johnny might have been fried in the electric chair, and knowing the Sawyer family would blame her. That Sissy would sob curses into her songs, and Nubbins would smash dug-up skulls thinking he was smashing hers.

After Lele’s first day of school, sleep came slowly. Since leaving Muerto County, she rarely had vivid dreams, as if with the shadows her imagination, those more colorful corners of her mind had faded too. Mostly, that worked in her favor; Betsy Price, after all, had never known Grant Finch or Daisy Anderberg or any of Maria Flores’ circle. There was no reason for them to haunt her.

But that night she was back in the basement of their first rented place, her hands resting on the lid of the chest freezer. Something pushed from inside, then flung it open, knocking her backward. She fell, staring up at the pale-limed man rising from the swirling mist. His black shirt had its sleeves cut off, fraying at the collar; his slicked-back hair smelled of pomade; dirt and dried blood clung beneath his nails.

“What will you do when I find you, Mommy Maud?” he rasped as he stepped out of the freezer, and Maud couldn’t move, as if she’d been nailed to the cold concrete. She stared at the wound gaping in Johnny’s chest: cut by a knife, rough, merciless, the blood soaking through his shirt.

“Will you finish me off? And what will you tell the kid? He knows about me. Because you can’t shut up. You babble, daydream... when it was you who left. You think you got away?”

Maud then realized that in her dream-heavy hand she was clutching a cold, human heart. She knew from its weight and texture, but she didn’t look at it, because she knew what would happen. The same that had happened the day after she met Johnny, when he gave her Grant’s head in a basket of sunflowers. She’d vomit.

And in the dream she surrendered to her fate.

The next morning she made bacon and eggs and muffins for Lele, then sat down with him to talk. To talk about things he already knew partly from the whispers, and from the too-intelligent questions he asked. “You love Daddy, but why didn’t he come with us? Who is Auntie Sissy? Why is your name different now? What should I tell Mrs. Lawson, my teacher?”

Mrs. Lawson, a very elegant, elderly black lady with delicately powdered eyelids had indeed called her in to ask why Lele J. Gilbert’s brilliant mind was paired with such unusual reticence for his age. Maud—Betsy—gave evasive answers. It was not among her options to tell Mrs. Lawson: “Because I asked him to. He knows too many secrets, the kind that could separate us forever.”

She had asked Lele for silence, so he kept quiet even when he didn’t have to. Yet he remained friendly, and every day he spent hours with Brownie in the small communal garden of the dovecote-style apartment building. He tried to teach him tricks, threw sticks for him, and waved at his mother whenever she peeked out the kitchen window. His dark-brown hair curled into ringlets at his chin, just like Johnny’s when freshly washed. In his sailor-striped sweater and canvas pants he was so adorable any company would have snatched him up to film a cereal commercial with him.

But don’t think you got away, echoed in Maud’s mind. Johnny will either die, or he’ll find you.

At the end of September, not long after Johnny’s birthday— which Maud celebrated in spirit, grateful that there was still someone to celebrate at all — a sharp, metallic sound struck her ear as she scrubbed the wheezing gas stove. The window was open, and only moments earlier she’d heard Lele giving commands to a panting Brownie. Maybe she’d gotten a little lost in the low-volume music humming from the old radio.

She dropped the scouring pad and leaned out the window, but there was no sign of her son, only Brownie wandering and barking helplessly among the bushes.

Maud—Betsy—knew exactly what she’d heard. The wire-mesh door of the trash chute area, the one the building management had put up around the dumpsters so scavengers wouldn’t turn the courtyard into a pigsty. And Lele was shouting, louder than ever before; he hadn’t screamed this sharply even as an infant, when everyone would have known the reason.

“He’s here! He’s here!”

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