Free Into the Web by Thomas H. Cook Page A

like a geyser in his throat.
    “Ain’t no cure once you got it,” Crenshaw added.
    No cure, and nothing to do but wait until the moment comes for you to drown in your own blood.
    And, I thought, case closed.
    I was almost halfway down the mountain when I saw another house sweep into view, one Lila had taken me to many years before and which I associated with her so powerfully, she seemed almost to appear in my car as I neared the building once again, a red-haired girl sitting at my side as she had that day. “Pull in there, Roy,” she’d said, pointing to a rutted driveway, “I want you to meet my second mother.”
    Her name was Juanita Her-Many-Horses, and I’d thought her ancient, though she’d certainly been no more than forty-five at that time, her skin still smooth and brown, with deep-set eyes that shone darkly, like her hair, her features as Indian as her last name.
    “You’re a good-looking boy,” she’d said when I came to a halt before her. “You and Lila going steady now?”
    “Yes, ma’am, we are.”
    More than twenty years had passed since that day, and I suppose I could easily have continued on past the old house. I’d done it only the day before, when Lonnie and I had made our way up to Lila’s home. But now the past was a rope stretched out to me, tugging me back toward those long-forgotten days.
    “Don’t want no Bibles,” she called as I got out of my car. “Got all the Bibles I need already.”
    “I’m not selling Bibles,” I called back.
    “Don’t want no medicines neither.”
    “I’m not selling anything,” I assured her, then made my way toward where she sat beneath the shade of a large elm, cooling herself with a paper fan that bore a figure of Jesus in flowing robes.
    She dug in her lap for a pair of glasses. “You come from down around, I bet.”
    Down around.
The name she’d always given to the valley that lay below her.
    “You don’t remember me, Juanita? I’m Roy Slater.”
    Her eyes flashed in recognition. “You the one from down around. Went with Lila way back when.”
    “Yes.”
    She smiled widely, revealing gaps in her teeth. “You come plenty of times that summer.”
    A bright hot summer, the cool streams our only relief, Lila in her cutoff jeans and a white blouse knotted at the waist. I’d come so often, Lila such a fire in my mind, that Archie had teased me about it.
Speeding the way you do, that girl will be the death of you, Roy.
By then he’d been hardly less smitten than I was, his passionate attention so firmly settled upon Gloria Kellogg, he’d seemed unable to think of anything else.
    Juanita Her-Many-Horses nodded thoughtfully. “You the one that went off to school. And never come back for Lila.”
    “She told me not to,” I said softly.
    Juanita glanced over to where a pigsty rested in a dense cloud of stink a hundred yards away. Near its center, an enormous sow lay in the steamy mud, swarms of greenflies rising each time it shifted or twitched its flanks, then descending again, to feed on the muck that surrounded it.
    “Call him Amos and Andy,” Juanita said with a laugh when she noticed me looking at the pig. “ ’Cause he done already big enough for two. Call him Amos for short.”
    I nodded toward a stack of cinder blocks opposite her. “Mind if I sit with you a few minutes?”
    “Don’t mind, no,” Juanita said. “You seen Lila since you been back?”
    “Yes, I have.”
    “Seen her go down the road this morning.” “She went to Kingdom City. She should be back soon.”
    “How come she went down there?”
    “To identify a body,” I answered. “Clayton Spivey. He died over on Jessup Creek. They found him in the woods yesterday.”
    Juanita considered this for a moment. “Guess they’ll be burying him right soon. Can’t go to the funeral though. Ain’t got the energy for it. You come to help Lila some way?”
    “No, I was just on my way back down the mountain. I came up to check a few things out. For the