Echoes
Echoes
ROGER ARTHUR SMITH
Copyright © 2018 by Roger Smith
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form without written permission from the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-936097-09-8
ISBN-10: 1-936097-09-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954297
Baobab Press
121 California Avenue
Reno, Nevada 89509
Cover Design by Travis Bennett
FIRST PRINTING
18 19 20 21 22 23
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Arthur F. Smith,
Who moved the family to Hawthorne and beyond.
Contents
One to make ready,
Two to show,
Three to make ready,
And four to g—o.
A hideous yell of more than mortal agony drowned the last word. A dull reverberation followed … and then all was still.
—“Vanderlyn,” American Monthly Magazine, 1837
Lisette sensed that this time she wouldn’t just be hurt. It would be worse. Much worse. She had been afraid of this new country, this new city, but her mother counseled her to have courage, their lives would be immensely better. America, the land of the rich! Los Angeles, a city of movies and bright sun whose name, her mother told her, meant angels.
Lisette had tried. Even though she could not understand how people talked here, on a Saturday she went to the playground of what was to be her new primary school. Her mother had dressed her in her nicest red dress, because it went with her long, wavy auburn hair. She was at her prettiest. That was comforting. She sat on a swing made with a strap of black rubber and twisted its chains and then let the twists unwind, swinging her round and round, while waiting for some American children to come to the playground so she could make acquaintances. From playmates she could learn. She waited and waited for a young face to flash before her eyes as she spun.
An adult came instead. She never saw that face, but she believed from the strength of the hands and the odor that it was a man. She was grabbed up backwards from the swing, just as a last twist of the chain unwound. A hand clapped over her mouth, pinching her nose at the same time. He was very strong. She smelled an awful, hospital sort of odor, and a long, confusing, blurry time passed. Then, soon after he dropped her on a bare concrete floor in a chilly room, she knew for a certainty it was a man. He used her as a woman, just as her mother had warned her about bad men. And he hurt her—in so many ways—so now her insides throbbed with pain, a dull, pulsing pain if she lay still, and a piercing pain in her gut if she struggled to move. The struggle wasn’t worth the effort. He left her with ropes on her hands and legs, tape on her mouth—only tears from her eyes moved freely. She felt sticky all over.
When he returned, even though it was again from behind, outside her peripheral vision, he came with another. Lisette could hear the distinct footfalls. In any case, when the shouting started, though she could understand none of it, the voice did not sound as if it belonged to a man. The man had been terrifyingly silent the whole time. In truth, the voice overshadowed anything she had ever recognized as human.
The tape was pulled from her face, Lisette began to scream, but a horrendous slap stunned her silent. As she tried to get a breath, she felt the knife inserted into the corner of her mouth. A jerk and ripping pain and then the gush of warm blood over her cheek brought a whimper, yet she recalled her mother’s admonition to have courage, and thought, in sad surprise rather than resentment, C’est ce que le courage m’a apporté en Amérique. The knife was used elsewhere, again and again, and although the pain made Lisette howl once more and the fear was like a detonation inside her, this one soupçon of comfort came to her before the end. Her death would make a difference.
As life left her, a realization came—perhaps from the outside, perhaps from within. She didn’t know. What she did know was that she was their fourth victim.
With that something awoke, something pure and evil, old as humankind itself. It was now aware of Lisette’s tormentors. They were marked.
One
Mildred Warden did not hear the boy enter her library. That was because of the wind, she assumed. The spring zephyr had arrived the week before, the first part of May, 1960, and gathered strength until it was a bellowing, whistling wind, a hideous racket that had a scratchy sound to it because of the sand it carried. The wind scooped clouds off the desert, and from the naval ammunition depot nearby, whirled the sand into the air and flung it at Hawthorne. It was no wonder that commercial buildings, county buildings, and houses alike—everything—looked drab and poorly painted. The town received a yearly sandblasting. This was especially true for the Mineral County Library, because it stood far out along A Street on the edge of Hawthorne, as exposed to the central Nevada wastelands as a cast- off child.
Mildred was startled away from reading the Saturday Evening Post—the March 19, 1960, issue with the painting of downtown Manhattan on the cover. So colorful and so thrilling!
All at once, there the boy was, standing right in front of her desk, practically under her nose. She glanced outside the window—the sky was a pale, sandy blue—and back to the boy. A cold thrill made her shiver. How had he come in without ringing the bell on the door? If the door opened, it tinkled automatically. It had to have been because of the wind. It was too noisy—there was no other explanation. But then, Mildred wondered, why