The bus’s tires were stenciled across the entrance into the canyon. I cut my engine and headlights. Somehow the engine flared to life again, then coughed and died.
“What’s happening?” she said.
“Maybe the carburetor and a bad plug or two acting up.”
“There’s fires burning at the base of that cliff.”
“You want to leave?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her chest was rising and falling. She rubbed the backs of her hands as though they were chafed. “I really don’t know.”
“We can go back to town and tell Wade Benbow what we saw.”
“Tell him we saw what? A murdered girl and a man with no eyes?”
“No one knows where we are, Jo.”
“I Scotch-taped a note for Spud and Cotton and the Japanese woman inside the little window on the front door.”
“Do you have my gun in your bag?”
“Yeah. I bought some shells for it, too. It’s not going to do us any good here, though.” She paused. “Is it?”
“We both saw the hooded man and Moon Child. That means that nothing we thought we knew about the world is true. It’s like starting our lives all over. How many people get to do that?”
“I bet the dead think it’s a great opportunity,” she said. “Except they can’t tell us that because their mouths and eyes are stopped with dirt. I want to get this over with. Good God, do I want to get this over with.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I HATE VIOLENCE. I hated it then; I hate it now. I hate even more the people who flaunt it and take pleasure in speaking of it. They belong to a culture of cowards and misogynists who have chewing tobacco for brains and never make the connection between their obsession with firearms and carnality, penis envy and white supremacy. It’s not their fault; most of them were unwanted at birth. Every one of them is cruel, every one of them a spiritual failure. The louder their rhetoric, the more craven their behavior. I have entertained thoughts about them that make me ashamed, because in some ways they are more victim than perpetrators.
The Holland family wrote their history in blood. My father, James Eustache Broussard, went to war but was not like the Hollands. I never heard him utter an unkind or profane word, not once. He wore a formal coat at the table even when he ate alone. He also went over the top five times at the Somme and would leave the room when others spoke of war.
When I was small and asked him why he shunned the subject, he said, “Hell is more than half of paradise, Aaron. So we should take no joy in the destruction of the Eden that was given us.” That’s how I discovered the work of Edwin Arlington Robinson.
I mentioned Nathaniel Hawthorne and Goodman Brown earlier. Goodman wandered into the New England darkness and on the trail met a figure who walked with a cane carved in the likeness of a serpent, so realistic it seemed to ripple in the figure’s grip. But rather than flee the figure’s presence, Goodman convinced himself he was above temptation and need not fear the guile of a demonic sp
irit. As a result, his faith in man and God was robbed from him.
I wondered if I was about to take the same journey, although I seemed to have no alternative. I had to save Stoney. I also had to save my own sanity and confront the man who had no eyes. I had another motivation. (And this is where my pride got to me.) Was I being offered the chance to step through the curtain? Allowed to unravel the great mysteries? Allowed to see my best friend, Saber Bledsoe, and ask his forgiveness?
My father, who was buried alive under an artillery barrage on the Somme River, said there was no such thing as death. We enter eternity at birth, he said, and at a certain time in our journey, we go deeper into a meadow that is sprinkled with flowers and grazed by herbivores, where there are no fences and where we turn our swords into plowshares and like the earth abideth forever.
That’s what he learned inside his premature burial place, one that stank of cordite and mustard gas.
With these thoughts in mind, I parked the car in a dark spot by the side of the mountain, removed a pair of binoculars from the glove box, and, with Jo Anne at my side, walked into the box canyon.
* * *
IMMEDIATELY INSIDE ITS parameters, the temperature changed dramatically, as though we had entered another dimension, perhaps caused by a weather inversion that had sealed the canyon, creating a bubble of warm air that had molded itself against the rocks and trapped the firelight on the cliffs and subsumed the smell of woodsmoke and burnt sage and the pine needles under our feet.
I put the binoculars to my eyes. The scene was idyllic. How could evil exist in a natural environment unmarked by the Industrial Age? Then I saw the bus parked below a row of giant boulders at the far end of the canyon. It looked like a toy, a harmless artifact borrowed from the culture of The Saturday Evening Post.
“Do you see any people?” Jo Anne asked.
“There’s smoke coming from behind those boulders, but I can’t see anyone.”
I handed her the binoculars. She fitted them to her eyes and adjusted the focus. Then she wiped her eyes and looked through them again.