Free The Evening Hour by A. Carter Sickels Page A

pocketknife and smashed their hands together.
    Before Terry, Cole didn’t have many friends. The stutter ostracized him as soon as he opened his mouth, and belonging to a crazy snake-handling church didn’t win him any friends either. But mostly it was his voice. If he was called on at school, he would mumble inaudibly in order to cover up the stutter, an annoying habit that he never completely kicked. While in his mind he constructed sentences and stories seamlessly, eloquently, whenever he opened his mouth to speak, the words came out mangled. Ugly.
    Spit it out, retard.
    Over time, as the stuttering faded, his teachers thought he’d outgrown it and his grandfather believed that God had cured him. But Cole credited Terry Rose, who talked so much that his words infiltrated Cole’s speech and he began to sound like a boy instead of a stuttering preacher, losing the strange speech patterns that had been derived from the convoluted style of his granddaddy’s sermons and verses of the King James.
    Cole had met Terry Rose the summer he was thirteen, on a day that Cole had sneaked away to go fishing. He had just cast his line when a voice rang out: “Is there anything to do in this shit-hole?”
    The voice belonged to a boy who was smoking a cigarette. He wore a baseball hat that said “Indy 500,” and told Cole that he used to live in Indianapolis. “You like cars?” he asked, his voice flat, nasally.
    Cole shrugged.
    â€œMy dad was a race car driver,” Terry said. “He got killed in an accident.” Now he and his mother were living with his aunt in Rockcamp.
    Terry told Cole that he had a brother in Texas and a sister in Florida, and as he talked about the places he’d been to, many of which were the same places that the postcards had come from, Cole felt a warmth blossoming inside him, a combination of wonder and familiarity, as if this boy was the missing link to his mother. Terry bragged that he knew how to take apart a carburetor and put it back together. He said he was going to be a race car driver like his dad. He claimed that he’d already had several girlfriends. Cole had no reason to disbelieve anything the curly-haired boy told him. He had never met a city-dweller before: he wondered if they all talked this much. When Cole went back the next day, Terry wasn’t there, and Cole felt disappointed, wondering if he had been real or if he was one of the restless spirits that his grandmother said walked the mountains. But a couple of days later, he was back. Terry never seemed to notice Cole’s stutter, and eventually Cole also learned to ignore it, so much that it began to disappear.
    Once he’d overheard his granddaddy complain that Cole had been a pretty good boy until Terry Rose came along. But Cole had never felt like a good boy. When he closed his eyes, he saw Charlotte dancing with the man at the Eagle. He saw Terry Rose, his toothy grin. He wished they would both disappear. He felt drunk and mixed up and far from God.
    When he woke up, his head was pounding. He showered, ate several aspirin, and poured black coffee into a thermos. He was heading out the door when the phone rang.
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    â€œI’m on my way to work.”
    â€œWell, I thought you would already know by now.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI got a call a few days ago.” His grandmother’s voice sounded thin and tight. “There’s a space for your granddad.”
    Cole’s skull felt like it was going to explode. “No, I didn’t know.”
    â€œI thought they would have told you.”
    â€œIt’s a mess down there. Nobody knows what’s going on.” He tried to think of which space was open, then remembered Otis Smith, his grown children standing over his cold body. “You sure you want to do this?”
    She took a breath. “I don’t see what else we can do. The other night, he grabbed the fire