Bean sees the sign and falls silent for a second. "A hundred and twenty-three people? I"ve see that many people in one bathroom at LAX."
They pa.s.s a sandy driveway. There"s a half-collapsed green and white motor home squatting in a field of sand with tufts of scraggly gra.s.s protruding everywhere. A skinny old man wearing overalls, with close-set, beady eyes, watches them pa.s.s. The air is still and hot as it rushes through their windows, but its sound falls to a whisper as Caleb slows the car down. There"s a gas station called Pete"s Gas and Store, covered in peeling white paint. The parking lot is gravel and the pumps are antique. The place is silent. They pa.s.s a few boarded-up stores, maybe three on either side of the road. On one side they see a hardware store that seems to be open for business and on the other side they see a diner with a few patrons sitting by the window, eating. That"s the whole downtown strip. They pa.s.s a few more driveways, marked by listing mailboxes, that curve and disappear from sight amidst dense vegetation, then nothing but woods.
"d.a.m.n," Bean says. "That"s it, that"s the town?"
"Yeah," says Caleb, "this is where I grew up."
They pa.s.s another driveway or two, but they"re coming less frequently now. Caleb squints out the windshield, concerned. It"ll be dark soon. The red sun skates on the edge of the horizon. Caleb glimpses it fleetingly through breaks in the trees. Soon, he won"t see it at all. And he knows he won"t be able to find his way after the light is gone.
"s.h.i.t," he mumbles.
"What?" says Bean, concerned. "You know where we"re going, right?"
"Well, I remember the old address was Walnut Road, but I haven"t seen it. Maybe we pa.s.sed it."
"Dude, you used to live here, right? Come on, we can"t be lost."
"I moved away when I was, like, seven," Caleb says, defensively.
"Great," Bean says. "We"re lost in the Land of Rednecks. I mean, that"s fine for you, you"re cousins with everybody here, but what about me?"
"Walnut Road," Caleb says, spotting the sign. He swings the car around the corner. The wheels squeal and Bean almost falls out of his seat, across the arm rest, and over onto Caleb"s lap.
"Jesus, Knight Rider," says Bean, "give KITT a rest."
The road is gravel. The grind of the tires eats up the silence all around them. One driveway, another driveway-Caleb leans forward. The sun is going fast now, and here, under a thick canopy of trees, night is already closing its fist on sight. The car rolls a little farther, and Caleb sees what he"s looking for.
"Bean, what does it say on that mailbox?"
Bean squints. "Mason."
The mailbox was once white, but mold and dirt have stained it a streaked greenish brown. The reflective letters stuck to the side, however, are still legible.
The roar of gravel on tires gives way to a gentle hushing sound as they turn into the sandy driveway.
"We"re here," Caleb says.
Bean thinks he hears a slight tremble in his friend"s voice. He almost makes a joke about it, but what he sees out the front windshield causes words to evaporate in his throat.
It"s like nothing Bean has ever seen.
Ma.s.sively girthed live oak trees line the sides of the drive like huge, ancient sentries. Their arms reach out over the rutted dirt path, interlocking, forming a thick canopy above. It"s like pa.s.sing through a tunnel, except this tunnel is alive. Tendrils of wispy Spanish moss hang from the gnarled branches above, floating above their pa.s.sing car like a host of drifting ghosts. The air is very still all around. Bean wants to say something, but when he breathes in, it doesn"t feel like there"s enough air to fuel his words, so he closes his mouth again. One thing"s for sure: this place is weird. There"s something creepy about the trees. Like they"re watching. And Bean is not a superst.i.tious guy. h.e.l.l, he never worries about anything. When any normal person would be in a panic, Bean is chill. Gonna fail history, no problem. Find out your girlfriend blew the captain of the wrestling team, well, it was time for a change anyway. But this, this is weird. As he looks down the drive, it feels like he"s looking into a hole. Like staring down a well. And now the house comes into view at the bottom of the well, small and distant but growing larger, coming nearer. Like they"re falling toward it. Bean feels a sense of vertigo. A finger of nausea worms its way into his stomach and won"t leave. The house comes closer and closer, growing impossibly large. The driveway splits into a circle, which rings another gigantic live oak. They orbit its trunk and slow down in front of a set of crumbling front steps. Caleb stops the car with a jerk and turns off the key. They both sit listening to the ticking of the cooling engine and looking up at the house. Already, Bean has never hated a place so much in his life.
It"s an old, plantation-style mansion with huge, towering columns. The paint is coming off in sheets. Shingles, fallen from the roof, now litter the mossy brick walkway. One section of the eaves trough hangs almost to the ground. The windows are all black and lifeless. A few errant shafts of light still break through the foliage-apparently the sun isn"t quite gone yet-and their glow reveals air thick with still, choking dust particles. A thought creeps into Bean"s head, and the more he tries to block it out, the more insistently it blares in his mind: The place is dead.
He hears a click. Caleb is out of the car.
"Hey, buddy," Bean says, trying to sound jovial, but knowing his desperation is coming through. "This isn"t the place, is it?"
Standing next to the car, Caleb stares at the front door blankly, as if lost in thought. For an instant, an irrational fear shoots into Bean"s head that his best friend has suddenly become a zombie.
"Yeah," Caleb says finally. "This is where I grew up."
And Bean suddenly wonders: if Caleb grew up in a place this strange, this different from what Bean imagined it would be, does he really know his friend at all?
Caleb begins striding forward, toward the door. Bean is out of the car and lurches forward to stop him.
"Hey, man, it doesn"t look like your dad lives here anymore. I mean, didn"t you say he"s a lawyer or something? This joint is a rat condo. Let"s dip, find a hotel, and call him in the morning."
Though Bean places himself squarely in Caleb"s path, his friend brushes past him and up onto the wood of the porch, which whines in protest at each footfall.
Bean is getting desperate. He doesn"t know why, but he is. "h.e.l.lo? Earth to Caleb. There"s no one home!"
But Caleb is already inside.
Bean swears under his breath and follows.
Inside, the light isn"t to be trusted. It"s corrupted by shadows, especially now, at dusk, when reality is almost liquid, and especially here, in this place, which seems alive with a strange energy that makes everything . . .
"Empty," says Bean from the doorway, making Caleb jump. "See, I told you. Now let"s get the h.e.l.l outta here and find a Days Inn or something."
But the place isn"t empty. It"s full. Full of furniture, covered with a thick coating of dust, full of rotting books and musty rugs, oil paintings so dusty they are only shadows of themselves, and the old grandfather clock, long since silenced mid-tock.
"It"s not empty," Caleb says absently.
Bean shivers. That"s exactly what he"s afraid of.
"It"s all here. Just like when I was a kid . . . This is my dad"s stuff." Caleb presses further inside, past foyer and into the hallway.
"Dude," Bean protests-but his friend has already gone ahead.
The kitchen. Pots and pans hang from a rack over a central island, woven to one another with thick cobwebs. Over Caleb"s shoulder, Bean sees the biggest spider he"s ever seen, sitting very still in the center of his web. Not sitting, Bean thinks, waiting. Caleb crosses over to the fridge and opens up the door. The reek is horrendous.
"Oh, Jesus," says Bean. "Just shut it and let"s get the h.e.l.l out of here."
"It"s still full of food . . . " says Caleb. He crosses into the dining room. Not much to see there. A wooden table, a china cabinet. The scurrying of mice.
Caleb crosses out of the room, down the hall, up the stairs. Bean follows as he pokes his head into the master bedroom. The bed is unmade, clothes litter the floor. One window is broken out and the wall is stained yellow with water damage. Another room, this one a guest bedroom. The bed is made, and next to it on the nightstand are the husks of what must once have been fresh flowers. There"s something crunching on the floor here-leaves maybe. There might be a hole in the ceiling above, but it"s too dark to see for sure. It"s getting really dark now, especially in the hallway. The whole place smells like something. Sweet, rotting something. Not a dead animal, or rotten eggs, but something.
Bean can barely keep up as Caleb swings into another room. This one is a study, with a heavy wooden desk, filing cabinets along one side, and a big, empty leather chair. The window across the room is a pale, glowing rectangle. They"re almost out of light.
"Look, man, I think we"ve established that no one lives here, so let"s just grab a phone book in the morning and look him up." Bean is barely holding it together. "Come on."
"Look at this," says Caleb. He"s holding a file in this hand, rifling through papers.
Bean wishes he had a rifle right now-he"d march Caleb out of this crazy, abandoned place this minute, at gunpoint, since it seems he won"t go willingly, and never look back. He"d hop the first flight to LAX, grab a soy latte from Coffee Bean, and catch a flick at the ArcLight. And forget about this place, if he ever could.
"This is one of my dad"s case files. There"s no way he"d move and just leave this here."
"What kind of case is it?" asks Bean. Maybe if he humors his friend, he can speed up the process.
"Just a routine DUI defense it looks like," Caleb says, shrugging. "But he wouldn"t move and leave it here."
Caleb crosses to the filing cabinets and opens one.
"See, these are all case files. There"s no way he"d leave them here and move away. There"s no way he"d leave any of this."
"Well," says Bean, getting irritated now, "looks like he did."
"I know, it"s just so . . . "
Bean says: "h.e.l.lo, your dad isn"t home right now, but if you"d like to leave him a message, please wait for the beep and let"s get the h.e.l.l out of here!"
Spanish moss, reaching for them, trees watching, an abandoned house now waiting in darkness. This is some bad, trippy s.h.i.t. Bean has been trying to have fun all day, cracking jokes, talking about adventures and beaches and women-but the truth is, from the moment he read that letter, something hasn"t been right with him. And it isn"t just the fact that his best friend wasn"t honest with him about the reason for their trip when he first invited him-in fact, he blatantly lied about it, saying they"d just chill out at the beach-it"s that something is deeply, profoundly wrong about all this. The letter, the house, this town. Where the h.e.l.l are they, anyway? Somewhere in the Podunk panhandle of Florida. This is no place for a kid who lived most of his life in Beverly Hills until he moved to Malibu at the age of ten. This is no vacation. A cruise is a vacation. Cancun is a vacation. This is some G.o.dd.a.m.ned Hardy Boys s.h.i.t.
Now that they"re back in the car, rolling away from the house, Bean feels a little better, but not much. The trees still make a weird tunnel, but the sense of vertigo is gone, replaced by hunger and that deep, nagging unease.
"I need a frigging joint," says Bean.
This is one way in which the two friends were very different. Caleb is straight as an arrow, while Bean is a fan of intoxication. It isn"t like he"s a fiend or anything. Such things just facilitate having a good time, and Bean"s a big fan of good times. Plus, there"s nothing to steady your nerves like a bowl, and d.a.m.n are his nerves unsteady now.
"I told you, I could have worn some tightie-whities on the plane and stuffed some weed in there and they"d have never caught me," Bean says. "They didn"t even check me over that well."
"You need all the brain cells you can get," says Caleb.
"So what"s the deal?" Bean says, still trying to shake off the jitters. "What now?"
"Now," says Caleb, "we"re going to go visit a neighbor and find out if they know anything about Dad."
"Dude! It"s dark out. The people around here might be cannibals, for all we know! We can"t just go to someone"s door in the middle of the night."
"It"s not the middle of the night."
"Even worse," Bean says. "It"s dinner time. Do you know what rednecks do to people who interrupt their dinner? One word: buckshot."
"Don"t worry about it," Caleb says. "I grew up around here. I know these people."
"Yeah, but you haven"t been back in ten years! A lot can change."
But Caleb is already turning down the neighbor"s driveway. The headlights reveal forest all around and another rutted, sandy driveway just like the one at Caleb"s father"s place. There"s a "whoo, whoo" sound, deep and throaty, and a big, brown hound dog runs into the light of their headlights, dragging a thick chain from its neck. It barks fiercely enough, but it doesn"t look too healthy.
That thing"s bonier than the last model Caleb dated, thinks Bean, and he almost laughs out loud.
Ahead, the headlights blaze upon the side of a mobile home. It appears to be better kept up than the one they saw earlier, but not by much. An old Dodge Diplomat sits near the doorway, with four flat tires and several potted plants adorning its hood. The dog is still barking.
"s.h.i.t," says Caleb as the screen door opens. A fat man with a rifle, no shirt, and a big red mustache steps out, glaring at them, and starts walking toward the car.
"You might be a redneck if . . . " says Bean.
"Just shut up," says Caleb. "I"ll do the talking."
The man with the gun steps up to the window. The gun isn"t pointing at them, but it"s not exactly pointed away from them either.
"Yer trespa.s.sin"."
"I"m sorry, sir," says Caleb. "I just had a question for you, and I thought you might be able to-"
"Askit."
"Alright," he says, with a glance at Bean. "Do you know what happened to your neighbor?"
"Jim? Hurt his back at the lumberyard."
"No," says Caleb. "The other neighbor. In the big house over there?"
"Oh," the man grunts and nods. "The law-yer. Yeah. He"s gone, alright."
"Do you know where he moved to?"
"Didn"t move. Didn"t take any of his stuff, anyway. Was going to go over there and see if there was anything useful in the place, but I didn"t want to be stealin". If ya ain"t got yer honesty, ya got nothin"."
"So you don"t know where he is?"
"Nope."
Bean leans over, impatient, and whispers to Caleb, "This redneck doesn"t know anything-he"s too stoned. Let"s get out of here."
"Shut up," says Caleb, shoving Bean back to his side of the car.
"Excuse me, sir?" says Bean. "Do you know where we might be able to score some crippie?"
"Beg yer pardon?"
"Shut up, Bean."
"You know," says Bean, "mar-i-juana?"
"I don"t use no dope, and I don"t want no druggies on my property. Now you boys had better get on outta here."
"Sir, I"m sorry for my friend," says Caleb. "I just wanted to know-"
"You boys git. I"m within my rights to shoot ye, you know that? And with all that"s been goin" on around here, ya"d be smart not to poke yer nose around."
"Please, the lawyer next door was my father. Do you have any idea where he might be?"
This seems to soften the man. He sucks his teeth for a second, nodding to himself. "Ya ain"t from around here, are ya?"
"Well, I grew up here, but no. I haven"t been back in a long time."