What the Hell Did I Just Read?

WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ?

TROY LAMBERT

KRISTEN LAMB

CONTENTS

Crossroads

Jesus Saves

Jesus Had a Dog Named Lucifer

Weather or Not

Dandelion

Bone Frog

The End of Dreams

Victoria’s Secret

Meeting on the Moon Bridge

Uncle

Jimmy

King of Hearts

Write in Peace

Who The Hell Wrote That?

About Kristen Lamb

Also by Kristen Lamb

About Troy Lambert

Also by Troy Lambert

CROSSROADS

The boy was the product of a traveling bible salesman who’d fallen in love with a prostitute. Story was his mama’d run away from New Orleans still covered in bruises from her last beating, a beating so bad she’d swallowed two previously loosened molars. Hitchhiked as close as she could get to Houma before the pig farmer who’d offered her a ride panicked when she’d started talkin’ to people that wadn’t there.

Didn’t wanna get mixed up in whatever trouble the crazy woman was in, injured or not. Forced her out onto the weed-choked shoulder of a country highway before speeding off, her cheap high heels forgotten in the floorboard of his truck.

That particular July day was hotter than any she could recall. The road shimmered with heat that reflected down from a cataract white bowl of sky. Heat piled on heat piled on more heat. She didn’t dare walk in the tree line for fear of missing her chance to hitch another ride.

Plenty of cars passed, but no one stopped.

So, she’d walked. Walked until she’d heard voices again, only those voices was different from the ones she normally heard. Nice voices. Sweet and kind. Voices she thought was angels calling specifically for her.

Who’s that young girl dressed in red?

She stopped short and gaped down at her threadbare party dress that reeked of old cigarettes and sadness. Absently, she fingered one of the few glorious glass beads that still clung to the ragged bodice. The baubles snatched up sunbeams then shattered them into crimson sparks. Her dress had once been so beautiful. So had she.

Must be the children that Moses led.

More singing. She shook her head hard, but the voices remained. Either she’d gone fully crazy or was dyin’. Perhaps both, only now she didn’t care.

Wade in the water. God’s gonna trouble the water.

The music intensified, a riot of notes lifting over the treetops like birds taking flight. The song drew her into the cool shadows, into the piney woods which she figured was a better place to die anyway. Better to die on a soft bed of pine needles than on the gravel shoulder of a highway to nowhere. She walked as far as her legs would carry her; walked until she collapsed in the doorway of a roadside tent meeting.

She went looking for Jesus and instead found a husband, the handsome salesman who rushed her to the closest hospital.

***

Annalise Curbow was her name. Curbow, originally Corbeau, was derived from the Old French word corb, which meant crow. The boy always found it interesting that a group of crows was called a murder. 

They were also known for mating for life, but his mama hadn’t been that kind of bird and migrated far from their home near Shreveport two years after he was born. Left him in a Piggly Wiggly. Told the clerk she’d forgotten her purse in the car, asked if the clerk could hold him, then never returned. Left the boy, the old Pontiac and a hastily scribbled note with only two words.

Forget me.

This, however, was one thing the boy’s father could not do. His father insisted it had been the voices that had done it. The bad ones had returned and she drew her demons away, keeping the boy safe. She hadn’t left them, she’d saved them.

And for a long time, the boy believed him.

This was all the boy knew of his mama, other than his daddy would never give up trying to find her, propelled by a vision he’d received after a fast so long it nearly took his old man’s life before it gave him a word.

Forty days with only water. Madness. Yet there, at the edge of death, on the shoulder of the glory road, God gave him his answer. His beloved Annalise, wife and mother, would not be found in the world of men, only in the wilderness.

And they’d been wandering there ever since.

His daddy was good at hearing when he was called and following without question. He’d once been a top bible scholar, expert in the Old Testament and ancient languages, a distinguished man who’d walked away from a stack of teaching offers. He’d been called to minister to addicts and ex-cons, then to sell bibles, then to marry a hooker, and finally called to the wilderness to find her. Leave it all behind in search of a promise. No longer a salesman, he became part father, part missionary, and part something dangerous.

His daddy had taught him how to read using an ancient King James Bible–one with all eighty books–in a one-room trailer on the edge of a swamp. They lived a few miles from a collection of buildings too small to be properly called a town, but still they’d named it anyway. The town was populated with a strange mix of those folks searching and those folks praying never to be found.

They’d fit right in.

He’d never gone to a regular school. By the time the boy was ten, he could read and write Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. No matter how much the boy protested, his old man insisted one could only properly grasp God’s word by going back to the original texts to the original languages used by the authors.

It wasn’t all bad. His daddy also taught him more practical languages. Taught him French and Creole, since they often left the trailer and the not-quite-a-town and drifted off the map completely to dangerous places only good for hiding. Places with their own culture, residents unable to understand English, and probably unaware it was the unofficial national language of the country they lived in. Most of the time, they spoke in the dirty bayou patois like those around them.

The boy and his father would haul dry goods, sweets, and textiles out to isolated pockets of filthy people in homes accessible only by boat. They’d be half-devoured by insects by the time they tied up to docks banked by cypress and guarded by gators. Homes on stilts rose like specters out of the swamps, wood buckled with moisture, the air saturated with briny sulfurous rot that clung to their clothes and invaded their pores.

They’d dine on whatever unlucky critter made it into the pot—possum, nutria, snapping turtle, alligator gar, snake, or all the above. Supper likely consisted of  some crawling creeping thing forbidden in Leviticus.

Not quite locusts and wild honey, but close enough. Had the boy known any other life he might’ve preferred to starve, but he hadn’t. He’d scarf down whatever meager meal was offered then go outside to play with children who toted shotguns and wore machetes slung across their backs.

His daddy might have formally been an expert in The Old Testament, but the old man read Revelations so much the sturdy linen pages were clean worn through in spots. His daddy was certain End Times were coming and soon. Had seen plenty of signs when helping with missions in the big cities, witnessed first-hand humanity’s spiral into the darkest sorts of depravity. Dealt with more than a few dealers, pimps, and conmen. Though his father preferred peace, he was not entirely opposed to violence and had the scars to prove it.

He wanted the boy to be prepared for whatever came, because he knew something was coming. Insisted the boy know how to survive because civilization balanced on a matchstick. The boy eventually dismissed most of what his old man said, thought them the rambling thoughts of a brain par-broiled in the bayou heat.

Alas, when the boy turned twelve everything changed.

***

It happened shortly after his daddy dunked him in the shallows of Caddo Lake. Baptism. He’d broken the dirty water’s surface feeling much the same, save for being covered in mud and insect bites. There was no lighting of a white-winged dove, no sudden parting of the clouds, no grand transformation.

But after that, his daddy looked at him differently, began taking him even deeper into the darkness than he believed possible. Told him it was time to let go of childish things. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

His daddy finally was willing to take him beyond the boundaries set by innocence, places where spirits held more sway than Jesus. Dark disregarded realms of superstition and ghosts.

At first, the boy silently mocked these people with homes covered in bones and chalked symbols. He had no idea why his daddy would plunge this far into a place even God seemed to have forgotten. Began to wonder if God existed even though his old man heard God, talked to Him all the time, and saw Him everywhere.

But the boy did not.

All he saw was another day roasting in his boots and getting eaten alive by mosquitos big as birds. Another day in search of a sign that had not come in the twelve years since the promise was made to his father, and he was angry. They’d obeyed God and gone into the wilderness to find his mama.

Instead, they found…her.

***

The boy had just turned fifteen when it happened. He was almost as tall as his daddy and probably stronger since he always volunteered to carry the heavier pack, partly because he wanted to prove himself and partly because he’d hit the age where it became clear his father was no longer a young man. That he would not live forever. Carried the packs though his young bones ached from the pain of his summer growth spurt.

The boy was caught in that dim expanse of adolescence. Trapped in that murky borderland between the twilight of the dimming child who has yet to fully yield to the bright dawn of the rising adult.

He was not a child. Not a man. Next to his father? Always a boy.

He was old enough to take his turn with his father’s straight razor, old enough to carry the shotgun, but not yet old enough to call the shots.

That rubbed him almost as much as his new boots.

He and his daddy had set off just before sunrise from their trailer, loaded with trade goods and tiny New Testaments as they always did. They walked along a trail the boy knew well enough to traverse in predawn light and never stumble, the trail that ran parallel to a nameless body of stinking dark water toward Bosephus Fontenot’s rickety dock where they kept their boat tied up in exchange for sacks of red beans. The boy liked Bo, and Bo liked him. Made him a necklace of gator claws and teeth for protection, a necklace he knew his daddy only permitted him to wear because it had been a gift.

He hoped Bo would be at his shack, not out gator hunting. He was idly wondering what yarn Bo had ready to spin for them when his daddy stopped so short the boy nearly fell over him. Without explanation, the old man stepped off into the brush, detoured down a trail the boy would never have known existed had his father not been in the lead. It was a deviation so sudden it was like watching a man with a dousing rod jerk a different trajectory, led by something that made no sense to the naked eye.

The boy knew better than to question or complain. Knew only to follow, something his daddy taught him well. That and the commandment to honor his father and mother was the only commandment tethered to God’s favor; favor he sensed he’d need to call on one day.

They walked for hours, the climbing sun boiling the morning away. They were making their way through soggy bottomland using a pig trail so narrow they were forced to walk single-file. Pressed between impenetrable walls of bald cypress that seemed to trap more heat and mosquitoes than breathable air.

That’s when they heard the screams and ran toward them to offer aid, toward a small clearing up ahead. They stopped short when they saw her. Staggered back a few feet nearly falling over one another. Hung back in the shadows of the narrow path, not believing their eyes.

It was a young girl, half naked and clawing her way out of what appeared to be a shallow grave. And she was screaming like a pig being slaughtered.

No. Tortured.

The boy nearly dropped his heavy backpack, but his father reached out and kept it from falling. She had to be only about twelve and maybe ninety pounds. Yet, on some primal level the boy knew she was more dangerous than any three-hundred-pound wild hog.

Once free of the unmarked grave, she crawled a couple feet, heaved a great breath, then slumped face-first into the dirt. Stopped moving, stopped screaming and the boy was about to mutter a prayer of thanks when she opened her mouth.

…and then he wished with all that was in him she’d kept screaming.

***

She, instead, made a clicking sound that reminded the boy of a beetle. No, not a beetle. Beetles. Thousands of them.

He gripped his walking stick, desperately wanted to ask his father what was going on, what to do. What was that ungodly noise and how was she making it? But he couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even swallow his throat so constricted with fear.

His father raised a hand for him to remain still, not that he’d needed telling. What he needed was the signal, the twirl of a forefinger ordering him to turn around, to go back the way they came, away from that insect-like clicking. 

He sensed his old man was just about to do that, had resigned to turn around, maybe go back and see if Bo could help, when the girl called a name, drew it out like a hiss, Annaliiiisssse. Annaliiiisssse. Annaliiiisssse. Then she began to laugh softly, a laugh threaded with madness.

They both went rigid, dropping their walking sticks at the same time. It was then the boy knew with grim certainty. There would be no running away. Not today.

His daddy made a strangled noise and drew him into his arms, held him in a tight hug that was only slightly more shocking than his own tears. His father never hugged him and instead of it offering comfort, it did the exact opposite. 

All he needed was for the old man to tell him he loved him, and he’d come completely undone.

How does she know Mama’s name? the boy asked in a rough whisper, trying to ignore the sinister cackle behind them.

I don’t know, his father mumbled. 

I’m afraid, the boy said into the shoulder of his daddy’s chamois shirt, surprised he’d admitted this aloud.

Me too, son. Me too. He stroked the boy’s back and held him. You go on back to the trailer. Think you can find your way? There’s at least forty dollars in the—

I’m not goin’ anywhere. He backed away and wiped his face with his sleeve, drew up to his full height and met his daddy’s stare. Not leavin’ you.

Hands on his hips, his father said, You are if I say so.

The boy shook his head. No. Either I’m a man or I ain’t. You can’t have both.

His daddy grimaced then spat in the dirt all the while that laugh bubbled and foamed behind them, the one that sounded like sandpaper over an open sore.

After a long minute, his father nodded grudgingly. We need to take her with us. Get her help.

When they turned to study the girl, to assess the situation and decide on the best angle of approach, she went limp so suddenly it was as if someone unplugged her.

Spears of sunlight now jabbed through the leafy canopy above where they could get a better look at her. She wore a thin pink sundress and a bracelet made of beads that seemed to spell out a name, the kind he’d seen in tourist shops the handful of times he’d gone with his daddy to preach on corners near the beaches in Port Aransas. Her skin, though dusted reddish brown with fresh dirt, was all wrong, with the bluish undertones of a corpse.

The boy relaxed a little. Maybe she was dead. Sure looked dead. They stood there, not daring to move. Stood there so long the boy’s muscles ached, his heart pounding so hard his head swam. He opened his mouth to say something, but his father shook his head slowly and mouthed, It’s a trick.

No sooner had his daddy said the words than she pushed up on her palms and bit at the air. Teeth snapping so hard he was sure they’d shatter.

His daddy struck a trembling hand out in front of him. Son, I need you to move real slow like. His voice shook as he eased his pack down then licked his lips and bent close to the boy’s ear. Fetch out a blanket and some rope.

The boy had done this move countless times with gators. Toss a blanket over them so they couldn’t see. Disoriented them enough to straddle them and tie them up. But this was a girl, not a