WOODS

And then he woke up in the woods. He knew it was the woods because there were leaves and mud and shit piling up under as he went scraping through the brush. He went through water, and thorns. He saw kudzu and stinkweed. They were in the bayou. Beyond the fairgrounds, out towards Metarie, twenty minutes drive from where the Lady’s boy Lerion had jacked them up. They'd dragged Kretz from the car, but now he'd been slung over a shoulder. Bound up like a calf, with his head pinging off the mysterious valet's back as they trudged on through the brush, Bobbi heard people talking from all around. Three guys, he'd thought when they'd first arrived, but now he thought he heard female voices up ahead, laughing maybe.

And he saw T.

She was behind him a ways and it was almost full dark, but he recognized the 1980’s jean jacket with bandana patches. Definitely T. She wasn’t moving either, carried over somone else's shoulder. The question of why the old Lady Pam would kill the girl, and then drag them both into the swamps, ate at him until they threw them next to each other in the unlined bed of a white Dodge. Bobbi’s dad had a Dodge just like it. The boy recognized the corrugation.

She wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t all there either. Like Lerion had touched her up some, she looked dirty about the face. She was staring at him, whispering something but the talking seemed louder, more people maybe, and Bobbi couldn’t hear the words. Looked like she was saying “can” or “car”, but he couldn’t get it.

Just say it…They can’t hear us…

He tried to say it, but nothing much happened. He felt his tongue moving like a dead eel in his mouth, but his breath couldn’t bend to the words. His eyes must have went wide, T’s did too, but not for long enough. They lay there, the two of them, for a while then, with the murmurs around them ebbing and fluxing in the gloaming, and the white unlined Dodge-bed going grey underneath their heads.

***

When it started up, it was all the way dark. He felt like maybe he’d been dreaming. Whatever they’d pressed him with, it was pretty solid. The hell-strung feeling he’d carried into forced imprisonment was gone, as was the gut-ache, the head ache, the freezing and burning and the awful taste in the back of Bobbi’s mouth. Everything - come to think of it - was gone. Coming to that final, inarguable realization, would be the last wholly conscious thing Bobbi Kretzle did for a long while.

The drums started suddenly, and loudly. Boom. Boom. Boom. Slow. Like a county gang cleaning up a median in 100 degrees. Sweat. Boom. Boom.

And it was hot as well. It seemed hotter, even, since sundown out here in the swamp. His daddy, another daddy, not the one with the truck, used to say “only wanted men go to the swamps, because you caint be there unless you jess caint be nowhere else.”

He was right. That wetland out beyond the fairgrounds lay there his entire childhood and adolescence, just sprawling and begging conquest, but Bobbi’d never been but to the very edge of it, and there only a very few times. Once was when he was thirteen, on a dare. He hadn’t lasted long. The smell. Something about the smell out there was too old, too permanent. It reminded Bob of a musty basement, with triple canopy cyprus marking the ceiling instead of mold-blackened joists. He was sure it was that smell, flooding Bobbi's olfactory system almost from the minute he woke up. Whatever they pressed in him, though, had killed that off too, mostly.

Now there was torch light, and as they came to a small fire Bobbi could see faces. Big guys. Three white dudes, all wearing jeans, one wearing a shirt. Nobody he knew. He could tell they was amped up though, they were breathing loudly and they were all talking over one another even though they were trying to keep it quiet. They plopped him down hands tied behind him, leaning up against a fallen tree. He heard one say:

“Uh uh. Uh uh. Not him ol boy no. No Sir.”

And then, the same voice, all twitchy and stressed and trying to be quiet:

“Yep. You got it ol son. Yes. Yes you do…”

And one of the dudes, probably - Bob thought - the one who’d shouldered him here, walked over to T. She was against the same tree, but asleep. Bobbi saw her eyes winking a bit maybe when the dude grabbed her by the her belt and her hair, from behind. He winced - or tried to wince - as the dude pushed her down onto planks of wood on the ground. Bobbi thought that looked harder than necessary. Another dude said:

“Wait Wait.”

And the guy who’d body slammed T said:


“What’s that sir? Whasat sir? Huh?

And the tweaker, still crouching over by Bob, spoke again:

“This guy’s like the last one’s, but he gotta see this one here”

He was pointing a shakey finger, Bobbi could see in the dancing torch-glow, at the girl, now on her back on those planks. She was definitely awake now, Bobbi could see.

“ohhhhh”

Both the other guys said that at once, and the one guy not handling T came over and crouched down level with Bobbi and said:

“Oh no son that’s too bad. Not a good evening for either one of y‘s”

“no-siree”

They were fast then, checking time on cell phones, smoking faster, getting to it. They took T’s arms and cut them loose from the bunji’s she’d been trussed with. Bobby watched them flop down on to the planks. They were two by sixes like the ones he’s used to build hundreds of sheds with. They cost three bucks a piece at Morris place in town. Bobbi watched, leaning and drooling-helpless, as they cut her shirt off, and her bra, and lined her hands up on those planks. Dipping - he saw - into separate sacks on the ground, for nine-inch steel railway nails. He watched them loose her feet, cut away pants and panties, and spread her on the planks. They tapped the nails first, like you do, before they got the stroke and started swinging away. T’s eyes were madness and then rolled-gone, as if they’d done all they could do, and escaped while they could. When they were done they left them there for a few minutes on the ground. Bobbi was something like amazed, and didn’t notice when they’d lifted him into a wooden chair. The drums were louder, but not faster, when they came to take them.

They left the light of the torches, carried again. There were two guys holding the big X, and another two humping him along. The stink, Bobbi knew, was worse out here. He could feel it more than anything else, invading, occupying him. Waiting for it’s piece. The drums were so very loud, but still so slow.

Boom.

They placed the chair in the same white truck bed, just outside a ring of bodies. He saw there were more than he’d ever dreamed. 50. 100 folks,


Naked. Black and white.



Fucking and screaming and moaning in a gigantic, red circle. Bobbi saw mud and tears. He saw people fucking and eating of one-another. He saws a guy pissing on a woman from behind. There was torchlight, and another greenish glow…and everything was happening around a giant pile of brambly sticks and planks. A pyre.



An evil pile, rotting wood and live earth, infested and moving. Writhing. Worms and things with teeth. Slime and evil. Bobbi could feel the pile, could feel it’s smell invading. He pissed himself. He felt himself being sick, and there were rats and dogs licking at his shoes, eating his sick dripping down the legs of the chair. He was sorry then, about all of it. Sorry to his mom and T’s mom for ever taking up the pills and the needle, and sorry to God and Jesus for every miserable turn his awful life had ever taken.

Now it was a party. A roast. Nobody trying to be quiet anymore. All that turning an tossing seemed like it should be, had to be, louder. Louder than anything in woods, or the world. He saw a fat white dude choking a waif-thin black-girl with his bare hands. He saw a woman eat nose and face off a squirming dog. He saw two men stabbing a white woman over and over hundreds of times. There was a gigantic hound fucking a lady with her head and arms on the pile, and bobbi saw the far side of the pile, where they’d cut something open, and were shouting and dancing while they flung the offal around and rubbed it over each other. There was blood and smoke from torches. Bobbi saw a child smash a crucifix through an old lady’s eye and grind it around by the cross-part. And he saw them put that big X up over the top of the pile. The drums were slower and louder.

BOOM.

The moaning got louder. And the crowd around the wood drew back, a dark, wet thing hovering in expectancy. Bobbi saw arms waving around the base of the wood, and then fire blooming from underneath. There was a “whoosh” sound and a suck of air at his legs as the thing caught.

BOOM.

From his seat in the truck, Bobbi was almost level with T’s eyes, and now, he could see by the light of the new fire, she was staring at him from the terrible cross. He felt himself falling in there, her black eyes interrogating him. Then, he noticed the moans had quieted to almost nothing, and the he saw the crowd back up from the flames as a new sound filled the area, beyond and deeper than the pops and hissing from the flames. Bobbi heard scratching like the scratching of a million nails and then saw it: A black flood loosed from the flames and fleeing in, over the un-burnt wood toward the X. Bugs.

BOOM.

When he was seven years old, Bobbi remembered his mother taking him out back and showing him a preying mantis and a Walking-Stick bug that her father had found in the swamps.

If they’re big enough to see from ten feet away, them Tulane boys’ll give you money for ‘em. Stu from across-a-river got gave almost a hunnert bucks for a june beetle the size of a silver dollar. These outta fetch a healthy price.

Bob didn’t remember anybody getting paid, but he remembered those bugs. The mantis was the size of a full grown cat, and bright green almost to a florescent yellow. The Stick looked more like a branch, and he remembered grampy needed to pry it away from a real stick to get it in the storage crate he’d selected for transport.
The drums…


The bugs flooding from the burning pile were bigger than those bugs, and Bobbi saw no flashes of yellow. Only black and slithering and pumping skeletal legs, like a wave of slime with teeth, snapping and pincing to escape the flames newly sprung behind. Within minutes they’d converged on the X from the bottom, and as the flames closed in behind, the bugs overtook T from below. Bob watched, mystified, as his girl’s feet, her legs, torso, arms and face were overrun with the filthy, snapping vermin-wave, and then - almost immediately after - consumed in an evil black and red inferno.

He watched her, and her eyes never broke their death-grip on his, even with her hair and mouth crawling with bugs and burning. Even at the end, with her torn body burnt away into the pile, her head hung from one arm and still seemed to glance Bob’s way, accusing. The light was brightest then, and Bob felt it must be burning his skin.

Still, he felt nothing at all.