Down at the gravel bar by the flicker of a bonfire hulked two soldiers, unarmed, no helmets, no caps, but in khaki uniforms, and two floozies, everyone drinking beer from the bottle. The women had plump, bare white arms with tattoos on them. Both were smoking cigarettes.
“They’re right where I wanted us to wash,” James whispered in her ear.
Just outside the halo of light waited headlamps and the grill to an olive drab Willys-Overland. The soldier telling the story was very stout. He staggered toward the griping girls.
“All right. All right.” He raised his beer bottle above his head of black hair. “Let me finish the story.” The women quieted down. “While crossing the bridge, the man either saw or heard something.”
One of the women took her cigarette from her gleaming lips, puckered, then sputtered the loudest raspberry fart Hettienne had ever heard. Roars of laughter from all but the heavyset soldier.
Finally they all calmed down. The heavyset soldier started again. “When he reached the other side, he turned around and he goes back to investigate. He either stopped his car or the auto stalled on the bridge; no one is sure.”
“But ’cept for him who is driving it, jerk-off,” one of the women protested in a ringing Ozarks accent. “Who the story is about. He’s real sure what his crappy car did.”
“The next morning,” the heavyset soldier hushed her. Once she shut up, he leaned over as if bowing, and this made him seem even rounder. In the orange of the bonfire, his buzz-cut hair shone bluish, as if someone had stippled it onto his scalp with a mechanical pencil. “The next morning, he was found lying on his stomach. His head, severed from his body, was just a few feet away. Beside the head: a bloody hatchet!”
“And a note from General Dwight David Eisenhower that says, ‘Greetings! Private McGowan, you are a dickless moron.’” This was the other soldier.
“But that’s why it’s called Hatchet Man’s Bridge,” whined the heavyset McGowan, pointing at the one-lane bridge over Sac River.
James turned, lowered his chin to his chest, and was laughing into his forearm. Hettienne hunkered down behind the berm as well and bit her lip. “Oh, Jesus,” James whispered, holding his chest. They overheard more ridiculing and arguing, and then all four trespassers had at a song from before the war, “Hooray for Hollywood!” They sang abysmally, often in just vowels.
“They have a lot more beer,” James whispered. “They aren’t leaving.” James looked at her with his forehead smooth. He pulled at his bottom lip. “Say, we look pretty awful. What if we both stood up and walked down to the water like spooky ghosties?” When she did not react, he patted the shotgun. “And this is with us.”
Hettienne lifted the sticky weskit and examined her stomach, touched her arms where her skin transformed from its usual pale to a star-bright white. “I do look like . . .”
“Like Hell,” he whispered, his eyebrows bobbing. “A banshee.” His face was plenty white and gray, too. And in the overalls, smeared white, he was a sight.
“Just stand up straight and tall beside me in the light,” he whispered. “Trust me. They have never seen anything like the way you look right now.”
She blinked at him. Then at last she nodded. “Okay, then. But we got to make this like a drama, Uncle James,” she whispered.
He nodded at her, his eyes widening. Time to turn this weirdness to advantage.
She ran her hands hard down the front of the weskit. Then she worked globs of Roy Boy into her hair, bumping James with her elbows. He watched her in the corona coming off the fire. Reeds and weeds threw diagonal shadows across his sweating face.
“Jesus, Hettienne. Don’t get it in your eyes,” James whispered.
She looked at him and whispered, “Get yourself ready.” She faced him and extended her palms. After a moment’s hesitation, he stroked his thick, rough fingers along her open hands, then smoothed the excess salve onto his cheeks, nose, and knuckles. He stifled a choke, the stuff was so potent. When he finished, he looked at her as if waiting for a signal.
They both rose up, James following her lead. They mounted and then came floating down the berm, a white Sídhe of a girl with long opal limbs, blonde hair shot through with streaks of white and silver, and the streaked hillbilly djinn, James, shambling behind her in overalls, the Remington shotgun ready in his arms. In the first splashes of water, full in the headlights, they halted, tall, straight, and still as two pillars.
Hettienne dramatically raised a sparkling arm, then extended her index finger and pointed to the bridge, the gesture amplified by the bell sleeve of the medieval-looking weskit. Intruders!” The voice that had droned poetry at dinner now filled the valley. “Evil awaits!” Her arm seemed to stretch even longer to the icicle tip of her finger. “Begone!”
Screams from the women. The tall soldier leapt for the driver’s seat of the Willys, and the stout girls tumbled toward the jeep. The round soldier stood with his beer drooping, pouring out, fizzing into the Sac. The thin soldier mashed the horn of the Willys. “Get in, dumbass!” one of the floozies screamed from the backseat.
James did not move a muscle. And Hettienne held that same pose, pointing away toward the bridge. Headlights bobbled down the tunnel of trees that loomed over Sac River. The Willys careened, the floozies screamed, and the men shouted, Oh, Lord! Oh, my God! What the Hell? Scrabbling, bumping like a toy up the embankment, then squalling tires on Buffalo Road, the Willys lunged toward Springfield.
At last there was silence. Stars returned above them, the big ones that could burn down through the milky vapors roiling above the water. Hettienne’s eyes seemed blank again, her face long and emotionless. That low and awful voice had come out of her once more.
“Who is it I am with?” James asked.
She whirled to him. “Your niece,” she said, her voice small, pleading. “Your niece, Hettienne.” And then she did something they only allowed each other in greeting and parting, and threw her arms around his neck and buried her face against his chest.
Turning to the house, they could see lights blazing in the upstairs windows. “Oh, Hell,” he said. “No need to wash in the river. You can wash in a tub. Come on, kiddo.”
“Come on, kiddo, what?” she asked, bouncing on her toes. “What do we tell them?”
“Leave that to me.”
- 8 -
On the back stoop, Simon, her father, and her mother waited. Simon held up a kerosene lamp. Hettienne and James, glowing in moonlight now without the cover of the foggy Sac, halted before them. Hettienne hooked her arm in James’s elbow.
“Been hearing trespassers,” James said. “Several nights running.”
Simon, John, and Charlotte stared at Hettienne, streaked in the sparkling white.
“Planned a little surprise. Give them a little scare. It’s Roy Boy. Horse liniment.” He pointed at his front and nodded at her.
“We heard screams,” said Simon, not amused. “And a car horn.”
“We succeeded. Spectacularly.”
Simon and John exchanged a look.
Charlotte descended the stairs to James. “You were supposed to watch her. To keep her out of trouble!”
“She woke,” James said. “We saw lights at the river. We planned a scare for them.”
“Young lady?” asked Simon.
Hettienne glanced at James but then she realized she could not hesitate. “It’s just a costume.” She held out her white-streaked arms, made more shocking by the drooping bell sleeves of the weskit, silvered, heavy, and slick. “Ghosties. We’re ghosties. See? To scare