The Devil Walks at Midnight by Joe Edd Morris

Author:Joe Edd Morris [Morris, Joe Edd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

22

Barreling out of the night the Olds came, slipstream of dust boiling behind it, silver clouds exploding upward in the luminous moonglow. East and west, north and south, Clyde and Waddell had been, directions that weren’t even directions, driving through the sprawling bottom, passing unlit houses and canted shacks. Down every graveled road and offshoot, offshoots of offshoots they went, over narrowing logging roads and imprints of roads choked by weeds and scrub brush. They followed a pasture tractor trail that petered out, a gravel road that faded to a spit of sand with lizard tails of wild grass running its middle that ended in a creek bed, then another ghost road, mere rumor of a road, that stopped shy of the muddy bracken edge of a bass pond. If it hadn’t been for Clyde’s sure foot and the rear traction of the new radials he’d bought, they would’ve slid for sure into a sludge of oblivion.

They saw the county as never before, glimpsed strange and mystifying sights they’d never before imagined, much less seen. A man stealing a cow (“Has to be stealing at one damn o’clock in the morning,” Waddell said), beating him down the road with a poker iron, a blue healer with round blue fluorescent eyes barking upfront to keep the animal in check. Two church deacons sitting on a condemned bridge railing drinking moonshine from a demijohn jug, a whiff of something sweet they were smoking lacing the night air as it sucked quickly through the windows and was gone. A gang of kids not yet pubescent cavorting naked in the cold October night, swinging from grapevines into honeysuckle hedges, saluting them with beer cans held high as they passed.

They came up on a couple copulating on the hood of a Chevy pickup idling white puffs of exhaust into the chilled air, the scene framed in the sweep of headlights as fleeting as a deer as they sped by but long enough to see the man’s buttocks white as honey melons and the woman’s yellow pumps pedaling through his red galluses, a shocked entanglement of limbs and clothing.

“Ain’t that somethin’,” Waddell mused.

Clyde chuckled. “It’s nighttime in Twenty Mile “

“May be nighttime in Twenty Mile,” Waddell said, “but, shitamighty, I been out nights before in Twenty Mile. You have, too. Hell fahr. I been to three faith-healings, two mule-pullings, and one porcupine-fuckin’ and I ain’t never seen nothin’ like all this. Anybody else see it, they’d think the whole damn bottom was sure ’nough a bunch of crazy perverts.”

“Sister Delphine might be out of business. Nobody’d have to fake it.”

The look of irony that passed between them quickly evaporated.

They kept riding, Clyde driving like a getaway man, Waddell hanging out the window like a human flag, megaphoning Roy Gene’s name through the timber and cane brakes, across the empty and barren fields they hurtled past. Like a blazing spotlight high in the sky, a full moon cast a phosphorescent glow across the land, through the trees, the road a silver ribbon unspooling before the cones of light.

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