Gone South Read online

  Gone South

  Robert R. McCammon

  For my family

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  1. THE GOOD SON

  2. TICKING

  3. MARK OF CAIN

  4. THE HAND OF CLINT

  5. A WAYS TO GO

  6. MEET THE PELVIS

  7. BIG OL’ FROG

  8. MYSTERIOUS WAYS

  9. TIME THE THIEF

  10. LINE OF FIRE

  11. TRAVELING BY NIGHT

  12. JUPITER

  13. SATAN’S PARADISE

  14. THE SMALL SKULLS

  15. THE TRUTH

  16. BLACK AGAINST YELLOW

  17. CORRIDORS AND WALLS

  18. THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE

  19. HOME SWEET HELLHOLE

  20. THE KING BLED CRIMSON

  21. SILENT SHADOW

  22. THE SOUND OF SCALES

  23. CROSSBONES

  24. ELEPHANTS AND TIGERS

  25. REPTILIAN

  26. TO THE EDGE

  27. TOO DAMN HOT

  28. AVRIETTA’S ISLAND

  29. THE BRIGHT GIRL

  FOREWARD

  Why I Wrote Gone South

  THIS BOOK WAS MY followup to Boy’s Life, and was written basically from a dark place of despair.

  I’ve had difficulty writing this commentary, because it takes me back to a point in time that was not very happy. In fact, it was just before I started writing Speaks the Nightbird, and when I knew I had to do something drastic to keep my career going. So: unfortunately, no sunshine or smiley faces to be found in here. But since I’ve been asked to do this — and paid to do it, as well — I am fulfilling an obligation.

  Bear in mind that I had thought Boy’s Life was the best book I’d written up to that point, and I was pretty much dashed down upon the hard rocks when I realized Boy’s Life was not going to get much — if any — promotion. Gone South was the second book in a two-book contract following Boy’s Life. It was really tough for me to get myself together and write it, thinking that a great opportunity for success had been mishandled.

  Now, I hate to get back into all this, because some will say I ought to be glad I was ever published at all, and I certainly am. But let me assure you that the road leading to Gone South is littered with a lot of pain and disappointment, and it is impossible to say anything about why I wrote this book without dredging-up some of it.

  Let me go back to the beginning of my career. I came into the business with the book Baal, published as a paperback original by Avon Books in 1978. At that time, Stephen King had just started to take off, the supernatural was “hot,” and publishers were looking for writers to get on the bandwagon. I was stuck in a dead-end job writing headlines at a local newspaper here in Birmingham, but I’d always enjoyed reading supernatural or “horror” fiction, and writing short stories in that particular genre, so I thought I’d try to write a book. Looking back, I don’t think Baal was a very good book, but it was the best I could do at the time.

  Baal was my first effort. I had no other “trunk novels,” as many writers do. So I basically learned how to write in public, for better or for worse.

  I went through the early eighties as a horror writer, with most of my books being published as paperback originals. I was paid very well for these and I was on the track of doing a book every year. But in the late eighties I began to want more. I thought my writing was getting better, I was building a fan base, and I wanted to move away from doing strictly “horror” because I simply had other ideas I wanted to try. I also wanted my books to be published in hardback because I wanted them to remain on the shelves and get more attention than the average paperback receives.

  But I started running into resistance. I was told repeatedly that my fans expected a certain type of book from me, and that was the bottom line. I suggested that I might try writing under a pseudonym, but I was told that wouldn’t work because then my fans “couldn’t find me.”

  The point being, I was beginning to understand that I had a particular place in the publishing world — that place was “horror” and I ought to be satisfied with where I was. At the same time, I drew the wrath of hardcore horror readers who thought I wasn’t bloody enough, or that I was at best a Stephen King imitator, and I drew the scorn of other writers (and booksellers) in my hometown because I wasn’t writing Southern fiction. Please understand that I’m not bashing “horror,” because I loved doing it and I reserve the right to go in that direction again if I want to. I’m bashing the idea that once you do a particular kind of writing, you’re expected to do that over and over until you die or — I guess — give up and stagger away.

  I was in a book featuring Southern writers a few years ago. The chapter that profiles me has the heading of “Frustration.”

  Now I’m getting to Gone South.

  First, though, I want to put into your mind and imagination the myth of Sisyphus, who was decreed by the gods to push a giant rock up a steep hill, but could never quite reach the top before the rock broke loose from his grasp and rolled back to the bottom, where he had to start all over again and again and again and again and again. Forever.

  Much has been made of my retirement from publishing for ten years or so. I tried to step out of the “horror” box, first with Speaks the Nightbird and then with a World War II novel called The Village. The latter novel got not a single offer. It was only by sheer luck and happenstance that Speaks the Nightbird was published by an Alabama publisher and in time I found my way back to the bright lights of New York.

  The really weird thing about my career is that I sometimes feel everything would be okay if I went back to writing on the level of Baal, and if in some fractured insane universe I could be happy not wanting to grow or challenge myself or try to do anything that hasn’t already been done. For a writer — or anyone in the arts, really — not doing something that involves risk is a path to a slow death. Here, of course, is the classic confrontation between business and the arts: one seeks to minimize risk, the other revels in it. It’s been true throughout history and is particularly true today, in this time of corporate mergers, falling stocks, and all the entertainments that are readily available to people who would rather not take the time or effort to read, or who see a book as a chore instead of a door.

  Sisyphus. The giant rock. Again and again and again.

  Gone South is a scream. It begins in fire and desolation and follows the plight of a Vietnam veteran named Dan Lambert, whose bad luck turns downright tragic when he gets in a fight with a bank’s loan manager, a gun goes off, and he finds himself on the run with a bounty on his head. On his trail are two bounty hunters, one a seasoned veteran with three arms and the second an addled Elvis Presley imitator.

  Yes, there’s humor in the book. Sometimes you have to laugh while you’re screaming.

  See, this means something to me.

  I am not and have never been a writer just for money. I can’t be. An agent looked at me in anger one time and said, “Rick, just do the goddamned work!” But I can’t, if I don’t believe in it.

  This means something to me. I am not a sell-out. I am not a self-promoter or a celebrity wannabe. I am a writer, by God.

  Yes, by God. Because I was born to do this. I care about two things in this world: my family and my creations. I was born to do this, and though I might have had to pull back for ten years to figure out what I had to do next to keep creating, I am still here.

  Still pushing that rock, again and again and again.

  Gone South is a journey from Hell back to the Garden of Eden. Back to a fresh start.

  Back to being new again.

  I told that once to a tableful of publishing executives. Blank stares followed.

  But even if no one gets wh
at I’m trying to do, or no one cares, this means something to me.

  It means purity and hope, and struggle when you think you can’t go on another step, and laughing with bloody teeth in the fucking face of failure, and lighting a candle against the dark, and standing as firm as a human can against a howling wind, and going deep into yourself to find out what makes you tick, and what your limit of mental anguish is, and how long you can go without sleep.

  All to create a world and people who did not exist before I gave them life and purpose. All to speak in my own voice about the world we live in and the people we are, and I hope you get the fact that my voice may be quiet under the voices of my people, but in no way am I silent about the things I think are meaningful, important, and valuable.

  It does mean something to me. Almost everything.

  It means enough to me to continue pushing that rock, again and again, with hopes that this time — this time — I may reach the top.

  Or not.

  But it’s who I am, and it’s what I do. Sometimes I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but there you go. The good with the bad.

  As you struggle along with Dan Lambert into the Louisiana swamp, with bounty hunters coming up behind you and your life in shambles, with no friends to call for help and nowhere to go but the deeper darkness that lies before you … fear not.

  I have already been there.

  And I came through just fine.

  Robert McCammon

  July 2, 2008

  Just after midnight

  1

  The Good Son

  IT WAS HELL’S SEASON, and the air smelled of burning children.

  This smell was what had destroyed Dan Lambert’s taste for barbecued pork sandwiches. Before August of 1969, the year he’d turned twenty, his favorite food had been barbecue crispy at the edges and drenched with sloppy red sauce. After the eleventh day of that month, the smell of it was enough to make him sick to death.

  He was driving east through Shreveport on 70th Street, into the glare of the morning sun. It glanced off the hood of his gray pickup truck and stabbed his eyes, inflaming the slow ache in his skull. He knew this pain, and its vagaries. Sometimes it came upon him like a brute with a hammer, sometimes like a surgeon with a precise scalpel. During the worst times it hit and ran like a Mack truck and all he could do was chew on his rage and lie there until his body came back to him.

  It was a hard thing, dying was.

  In this August of 1991, a summer that had been one of the hottest in Louisiana’s long history of hellish seasons, Dan was forty-two years old. He looked ten years older, his rawboned, heavily lined face a testament to his ceaseless combat with pain. It was a fight he knew he couldn’t win. If he knew for certain he would live three more years, he wasn’t sure if he’d be happy about it. Right now it was day-to-day. Some days were all right, some weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit. But it wasn’t in his nature to give up, no matter how tough things got. His father, the quitter, had not raised a quitter. In this, at least, Dan could find strength. He drove on along the arrow-straight line of 70th Street, past strip malls and car lots and fast-food joints. He drove on into the merciless sun and the smell of murdered innocents.

  Lining the commercial carnival of 70th Street was a score of barbecue restaurants, and it was from their kitchen chimneys that this odor of burned flesh rose into the scalded sky. It was just after nine, and already the temperature sign in front of the Friendship Bank of Louisiana read eighty-six degrees. The sky was cloudless, but was more white than blue, as if all the color had been bleached from it. The sun was a burnished ball of pewter, a promise of another day of misery across the Gulf states. Yesterday the temperature had hit a hundred and two, and Dan figured that today it was going to be hot enough to fry pigeons on the wing. Afternoon showers passed through every few days, but it was just enough to steam the streets. The Red River flowed its muddy course through Shreveport to the bayou country and the air shimmered over the larger buildings that stood iron-gray against the horizon.

  Dan had to stop for a red light. The pickup’s brakes squealed a little, in need of new pads. A job replacing rotten lumber on a patio deck last week had made him enough to pay the month’s rent and utilities, and he’d had a few dollars left over for groceries. Still, some things had to slide. He’d missed two payments on the pickup, and he needed to go in and see Mr. Jarrett to work something out. Mr. Jarrett, the loan manager at the First Commercial Bank, understood that Dan had fallen on hard times, and cut him some slack.

  The pain was back behind his eyes. It lived there, like a hermit crab. Dan reached beside himself on the seat, picked up the white bottle of Excedrin, and popped it open. He shook two tablets onto his tongue and chewed them. The light turned green and he drove on, toward Death Valley.

  Dan wore a rust-colored short-sleeve shirt and blue jeans with patches on the knees. Under a faded blue baseball cap, his thinning brown hair was combed back from his forehead and spilled over his shoulders; haircuts were not high on his list of priorities. He had light brown eyes and a close-cropped beard that was almost all gray. On his left wrist was a Timex and on his feet was a sturdy pair of brown, much-scuffed workboots. On his right forearm was the bluish-green ghost of a snake tattoo, a reminder of a burly kid who’d had one too many cheap and potent zombies with his buddies on a night of leave in Saigon. That kid was long gone, and Dan was left with the tattoo. The Snake Handlers, that’s what they’d been. Not afraid to stick their hands in the jungle’s holes and pull out whatever horror might be coiled up and waiting in there. They had not known, then, that the entire world was a snake hole, and that the snakes just kept getting bigger and meaner. They had not known, in their raucous rush toward the future, that the snakes were lying in wait not only in the holes but in the mowed green grass of the American Dream. They got your legs first, wound around your ankles, and slowed you down. They slithered into your guts and made you sick and afraid, and then you were easy to kill.

  In the years since that Day-Glo memory of a night in Saigon, Dan Lambert had shrunken. At his chest-thumping, Charlie-whomping best he’d stood six-two and carried two hundred and twelve pounds of Parris Island – trained muscle. Back then, he’d felt as if he could swallow bullets and shit iron. He weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds now, and he didn’t think he was much over six feet. There was a gauntness in his face that made him think of some of the old Vietnamese people who’d huddled in their hootches with eyes as terrified as those of mongrel dogs expecting a boot. His cheekbones jutted, his chin was as sharp as a can opener under the beard. It was the fact that he rarely ate three meals a day, and of course a lot of his shrinkage was due to the sickness, too.

  Gravity and time were the giant killers, he thought as he drove along the sun-washed highway with the back of his sweat-wet shirt stuck to the seat. Gravity shrank you and time pulled you into the grave, and not even the Snake Handlers could beat such fearsome enemies as those.

  He drove through pale smoke that had drifted from the chimney of Hungry Bob’s Barbecue Shack, the cook getting all that meat good and black for the lunch crowd. A tire hit a pothole, and in the truck’s bed his box of tools jangled. They were the hammers, nails, levels, and saws of a carpenter.

  At the next intersection he turned right and drove south into an area of warehouses. It was a world of chain-link fences, loading docks, and brick walls. Between the buildings the heat lay trapped and vengeful. Up ahead a half-dozen pickup trucks and a few cars were parked in an empty lot. Dan could see some of the men standing around talking. Another man was sitting in a folding chair reading a newspaper, his CAT hat throwing a slice of shade across his face. Standing near one of the cars was a man who had a sign hanging around his neck, and on that sign was hand-lettered WILL WORK FOR FOOD.

  This was Death Valley.

  Dan pulled his truck into the lot and cut the engine. He un-peeled his damp shirt from the backrest, slipped the bottle of aspirin into his pocket, and got out. “Ther
e’s Dan the man!” Steve Lynam called from where he stood talking with Darryl Glennon and Curtis Nowell, and Dan raised a hand in greeting.

  “Mornin’, Dan,” Joe Yates said, laying his newspaper in his lap. “How’s it hangin’?”

  “It’s still there,” Dan answered. “I think.”

  “Got iced tea.” A plastic jug and a bag of Dixie cups sat on the ground next to Joe’s folding chair. “Come on over.”

  Dan joined him. He drew iced tea into a cup and eased himself down beside Joe’s shadow “Terry got a ticket,” Joe said as he offered Dan some of the newspaper. “Fella came by ’bout ten minutes ago, lookin’ for a man to set some Sheetrock. Picked Terry and off they went.”

  “That’s good.” Terry Palmeter had a wife and two kids to feed. “Fella say he might be needin’ some more help later on?”

  “Just the one Sheetrock man.” Joe squinted up toward the sun. He was a lean, hard-faced man with a nose that had been broken and flattened by a vicious fist somewhere down the line. He’d been coming here to Death Valley for over a year, about as long as Dan had been. On most days Joe was an amiable gent, but on others he sat brooding and dark-spirited and was not to be approached. Like the other men who came to Death Valley, Joe had never revealed much about himself, though Dan had learned the man had been married and divorced the same as he had. Most of the men were from towns other than Shreveport. They were wanderers, following the promise of work, and for them the roads on the map led not so much from city to city as from hot-tarred roofs to mortared walls to the raw frameworks of new houses with pinewood so fresh the timbers wept yellow tears. “God, it’s gonna be a cooker today,” Joe said, and he lowered his head and returned to his reading and waiting.

  Dan drank the iced tea and felt sweat prickling the back of his neck. He didn’t want to stare, but his eyes kept returning to the man who wore the desperate hand-lettered sign. The man had sandy-blond hair, was probably in his late twenties, and wore a checked shirt and stained overalls. His face was still boyish, though it was starting to take on the tautness of true hunger. It reminded Dan of someone he’d known a long time ago. A name came to him: Farrow. He let it go, and the memory drifted away like the acrid barbecue smoke.