The result was a face normal on one side of his nose, with no face on the other - just a sloping plain of gray scar tissue rebuilt in the rough shape of a head. There was nothing where his eye used to be, not so much as an indentation. I imagined the left side of his skull was some form of inner prosthetic. His skin resembled lizard hide. The right side of his mouth was normal, the left truncating in the scar, unable to close, making a permanent downcast hole.

“Jesus,” Cherry whispered. I took her hand, squeezed it.

“Guards say you want to talk,” Hawkes said in a strange, lisping rasp. “Got a half you want to talk to?”

47

“Home? What the fuck is a home, lady?”

Hawkes answered Cherry’s opening question, asking where home was in his childhood. “Didn’t have no home. Got run from place to place. Uncles, aunts, mamaw. I learned to stay outside, keep outta the way. Run in, EAT! Go back out, winter, summer, didn’t matter. One day a preacher an’ a sexy lady come around, said they was starting up a bible camp and they was gonna school ME for FREE.” He turned in his chair and waved to an invisible woman. “BYE-BYE, MAMAW, YOU OLD WHORE.”

Hawkes shivered and jittered. I wondered if the shotgun blast had left a bunch of wires hanging loose in his brain, sparking at random to cause the jumping and twitching.

“Did you like the idea of going off with Reverend Tanner and Miss Powers, Jimmie?” Cherry asked.

“Didn’t give a sh-shit. I figured they’d send me somewhere elst soon enough, like always.”

“So you went to the Solid Word school.”

“Words and turds, turds and words,” Hawkes said, disgust on his half-face. “Dog turds, dogs everywhere. Barkin’ and growlin’ all the time. Everything stunk of dog turd. Never cleaned it up, just waited for the rain to wash it away.”

“Tell us about the school.”

“Started off nice. GOOD EAT! Lived in little house things. NO RAIN NO PAIN.”

“Did you have school lessons?” Cherry asked.

“We learned this …” Hawkes jumped up and started throwing air punches. He spun to kick something only he could see. The man’s kicks and punches were tight, hard, and controlled. He knew what he was doing.

“Sit, Jimmie,” the guard cautioned. Hawkes sneered, but sat.

“You ended up fighting?” I asked.

“PIN A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK!” he bellowed into our faces, his breath treacherous. “BUST THEIR ASSES AND GET SOME EAT IN THE BELLY!”

“You fought and you ate?”

He backhanded away spit dripping from the keyhole mouth. “Food without maggots. Real EAT! EAT AND EAT MORE. DOPE AND WHISKEY AND GETTIN’ ALL FRISKY! WIN AND FILL THE MOUTH-HOLE!”

“What happened when you lost?”

Hawkes stopped moving as if a spring mechanism had spent its energy. His mouth drooped and his one eye turned inward. He became absolutely still.

“Coach’d come in and have his party,” he said, turning away.

“The coach?”

Hawkes leaned back his head and screamed, “HERE COMES THE SNACK TRUCK!”

I turned to Cherry. The blood had drained from her face. “Is that what Coach said, Jimmie?” I asked.

Hawkes jumped up, planted his feet wide, made the motion of grabbing a head while being fellated. He knifed his hips forward and back. Grunted, “Here … comes … the … snack … truck … uhn, uhnnn, uh-HUUUGRG!”

“Did anyone ever try and get away, Jimmie?” I asked, holding up my hand at the guard, Don’t interfere.

“Yesssssss,” he hissed.

“Did they make it?”

Hawkes’s single eye burned into mine. He made a throttling motion with his hands. “HE did this to a dog. Then HE hung Mister DOG from a TREE.”

My mind’s eye presented a limp canine swinging from a limb, the symbol of the failed escape. “It was to tell you what happened to the boy, right?”

Hawkes gestured me close with his forefinger. “Read the dog, mister,” he whispered. “The dog knows the future.”

“Who killed the dog, Jimmie?” Cherry asked. “The coach? The preacher?”

“The Colonel,” he said.

“Colonel, Jimmie?”

Hawkes cupped his hand over his crotch. “PUT ON YOUR CUPS AND COVER YOUR PUPS,” he barked, as if giving an order. “STICK A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK, BOYS! MAKE THE COLONEL SMILE!”

I said, “The Colonel was part of the camp?”

“YES-FUCKING-SIR, MISTER COLONEL! Colonel was always there.” Hawkes did the money-whisk with both hands. “BIG FUCKING SUGAR! NO MAGGOT FOR THE COLONEL!”

“Maggots?”

“PREACHER-MAN WAS FOOD MAN. MAGGOTS AND SLOP AND PUKE ’TIL YOU DROP. WIN AND GET THE GOOD EAT!”

I glanced at Cherry, shook my head, turned back to Hawkes.

“What did the Colonel look like, Jimmie?”

Hawkes craned his head toward the door, as if readying an escape. He didn’t want to talk about the Colonel.

“Time for me to GO!”

“Just a couple more questions,” I said, whipping out the photo in my jacket pocket, Bobby Lee Crayline.

“This guy,” I said to Hawkes. “Ever see him? Was he ever with you in school? He would have been about your age.”

Hawkes scowled at the photo. Turned away. “GUARD,” he yelled into the air. “I WANT THE YARD!”

“Jimmie,” I pleaded, “just a couple more minutes.”

“I WANT OUT!”

The guard shrugged at us and opened the door.

“Jimmie,” Cherry called to Jimmie Hawkes’s retreating back. “One question, Jimmie. Please? Just for me?”

Hawkes jittered and twitched. He paused in the doorframe.

48

We stood in the sun of the parking lot, five sheets of paper spread across the dark hood of Cherry’s cruiser. Heat rose from the metal as Cherry shifted the sheets like puzzle pieces. She’d asked Hawkes to draw us a map to the “camp”.

“Think this is worth anything?” Cherry squinted at lines and images Hawkes had scribbled.

“You’re expecting accuracy in a map drawn by a man with two-thirds of a brain? Aiming us at a place almost two decades gone?”

Cherry leaned over the hood, shuffled the pages yet again. “I might be able to dope out landmarks he was talking about. Here …” she pointed to a lollipop shape Hawkes had scrawled beside a line representing a road. “He called it the cow tree.”

I did dubious. “And?”

“There’s a pasture by the county line with a huge beech, the tree near the road. There’s a spring-fed creek by the tree and the farmer keeps salt blocks there as well.”

“Shade, water, salt. Cows?”

“Usually a couple dozen at least, all ringing the tree. And here’s what Hawkes called Beer Stop. If this is the tree I’m thinking about, there’s a little grocery a mile down the road that sells beer and wine. It’s been there since I was a kid.”

Cherry pulled a sheet from the bottom of the arrangement, set it on top. Joined the lines Hawkes called roads. She tapped on the center page. “This so-called map, Ryder? It might actually make sense if I can figure out Hawkes’s other landmarks.”

“This wavy line,” I said, pointing to a wavering doodle. “He said that was a creek, didn’t he?”

“Yep. And this triangle over here was - what did he call it? - the big boat rock? It could be a big pointy boulder that looks like a battleship pushing out of the mountain. There’s one like that a mile or so from the grocery.”

I tapped a dark smear of ink. “He called this big muddy field.”

“It fits the landscape,” she said. “I’m thinking we tape these pages together and go a-hunting.”

It took two hours of driving, circling, doubling back. We ended up at a chained gate blocking a dirt lane overgrown with weeds. The chain was crusted with rust, the lock a red block of oxidation.

Cherry said, “This is where Hawkes’s map leads, as far as I can figure.”

“No one’s been through this gate in a long time,” I said. “We’re on foot from here.”