I

The rutted track was playing hell with Jerry Schneider's shocks. He could feel every cleft and furrow ramming hard into the base of his spine and shooting up to the top of his skull, so that by the time the farmhouse came into view he already had the beginnings of a raging headache. Migraines were his affliction, and he hoped this wasn't about to be the start of one of them. He had work to do, and those damn things left him near puking on his bed, just wishing to die.

Jerry didn't much care for the detour to the Benson farm at the best of times. They were religious nutcases, the whole bunch of 'em: a family of seven, living pretty much apart from the rest of the world, keeping mostly to themselves except when they headed into town to buy supplies, or when Jerry made his twice-weekly call to pick up a load of free-range eggs and a selection of their homemade cheeses. Jerry thought the cheeses stank to high heaven, and he only ate his eggs scrambled and with enough salt to empty the Dead Sea, but the new wealthy who flocked to the state during both summer and winter swore by the taste of the Bensons' cheese and eggs and were prepared to pay top dollar for them at Vern Smolley's place. Vern was a smart one, Jerry would give him that: he'd spotted the gap in the market straight off and transformed the rear of his general store into a kind of gourmet's paradise. Jerry sometimes had trouble even finding a space in which to park, Vern's lot being filled to the brim with Lexuses, salesroom-polished Mercedes convertibles, and, in winter, the kind of snazzy 4WDs that only rich people drove, with a smattering of designer mud on them for that authentic country look.

The Bensons would have no truck with folks like that. Their old Ford was held together with string and faith, and their clothes were thrift store when they weren't hand made by Ma Benson or one of the girls. In fact, Jerry sometimes wondered how they squared selling their food to the kind of people they regarded as being on a one-way express ride to hell. He wasn't about to ask Bruce Benson himself, though. Jerry tried to avoid having much conversation at all with Bruce, since the old man used any kind of opening as an opportunity to peddle his own particular brand of God-hugging. For some reason, Bruce seemed to believe that Jerry Schneider could still be saved. Jerry didn't share Bruce's faith. He liked drinking, smoking, and screwing around, and last he heard, those pursuits didn't much enter into the Bensons' scheme for salvation. So twice each week Jerry would drive his truck up that migraine minefield of a track, pick up the eggs and cheese with the minimum of fuss or talk, then head back down the track at a slightly slower pace, since Vern would take breakages of more than 10 percent out of Jerry's fee.

Jerry Schneider never felt as if he had quite settled back into life in Colorado, not since he'd come back from the East Coast to look after his mother. That was the curse of being an only child: there was no one to share the burden, nobody to take some of the strain. The old woman was becoming forgetful, and she had taken some bad falls, so Jerry did what he had to do and returned to his childhood home. Now it seemed like every week some new misfortune befell her: twisted ankles, bruised ribs, torn muscles. Those kinds of injuries would take some of the steam out of Jerry, and he was near thirty years younger than his mama. Inflict them on a woman of seventy-five, with osteoporosis in her legs and arthritis in her elbows, and it was a miracle that she was still standing.

Truth to tell, things had slackened back east since 9/11, and Jerry was working short hours before he made the decision to move home. If he hadn't moved, then pretty soon he would have been working a second job in a bar to make ends meet, and he was just too beat to consider putting in seventy hour weeks simply to live. Anyway, he had no real attachments in the city. There was a girl, but they were coasting. He didn't figure she'd be too cut up when he told her he was leaving, and he was right. In fact, she looked kind of relieved.

But returning here had reminded him of a lot of the reasons why he'd left to begin with. Ascension was a small town, dependent for its prosperity on outsiders, and it resented that dependence even while it concealed its true feelings with smiles and handshakes. And it wasn't like Boulder, which Jerry liked because it was a little enclave of liberalism. Most of the time, folks in Boulder seemed just one step away from raising their own flag and declaring independence. People in Ascension, by contrast, were proud to live in a state with enough radioactive material under the ground to make it glow in the night. Jerry figured that, like the Great Wall of China, parts of Colorado could be seen from outer space, the Rockies gently luminescing in the darkness. He suspected that folks in Ascension would be proud to think that their state acted as a kind of radioactive beacon for God or aliens or L. Ron Hubbard. It was worse farther south in places like Colorado Springs, down by the USAF academy, but Ascension still remained a bastion of blind patriotism.

Jerry wondered too if people grew stranger as they got closer to Utah, like the Mormons were putting something into the water or the air. That might explain the Bensons and the other religious types like them who seemed to have gravitated toward the area. Maybe they just got lost on the way to Salt Lake City, or ran out of gas, or it could be they thought they were already in Utah, and that the state was just joshing with them by making them pay taxes to Colorado.

Jerry couldn't figure the Bensons out, but he wished they'd devote a little of that time spent praying to fixing up the road to their farm. The track seemed tougher to negotiate this week, a consequence of the cold weather that had already begun to settle on the state. Pretty soon the first snows would come, and then Bruce Benson would have to plow the route to his house himself if he were planning to continue making money out of cheese and eggs. Vern's other suppliers all made their own deliveries, but not Bruce Benson. He seemed to equate his hatred of sin with a hatred of the town of Ascension, and preferred to keep his contact with the population at large to the absolute minimum. His wife was the same way: Jerry Schneider couldn't recall ever meeting a more hatchet-faced bitch, and he'd been around some. Still, Bruce must have plucked up the courage to fill her purse at least four times (although Jerry would lay even money he'd kept the lights off and the windows blacked out while he did it) because they had four kids: three girls and a boy. Then again, the kids were all good-looking, maybe with a little of Bruce to them but not so much that it would bother anyone, so maybe Bruce had seeded up someone better-looking than his wife. The old hag probably sent him off with her blessing, grateful not to have to do something she might enjoy.

The boy, Zeke, was the youngest. He had three sisters, the eldest of whom, Ronnie, was beautiful enough to make Jerry listen to Benson's ravings for a time if she happened to be out in the yard doing chores. Sometimes the sun would catch her just right and Jerry would see the shape of her through her long skirt, her legs slightly apart like a pitched tent inviting him inside, and the rays gilding the muscles on her calves and thighs. Jerry suspected that Bruce knew what he was doing, but chose to ignore it in the hope that Jerry might see the light. Jerry was hoping to see something else entirely, and wondered if Ronnie might be prepared to show it if he got her alone and away from her daddy's influence for a time. She occasionally smiled at him in a way that suggested she was suffering the frustrations that a good-looking young woman like her would surely feel, cut off as she was from any outlet for her appetites. The children were educated at home by their parents, and Jerry figured that the sexual component of that education could pretty much be summed up as "Don't do it, and especially not with Jerry Schneider." Educated at home, their ailments kind of treated at home—Jerry just hoped that nothing serious ever happened to any of the family, because the Bensons didn't hold with doctors or medical intervention—and their lives revolving only around one another and a miserable, distant God; it would be some time before the networks got around to basing a comedy on the Benson family.

One of Bruce Benson's brothers also lived with them. His name was Royston, and Jerry figured him for mildly retarded. He didn't say much, and his head was always nodding like one of those little dogs that some people kept on the dashboard of their car, but he seemed fairly harmless. There was talk around town that he'd once tried to feel up Vern's mother in the store a couple of years back, although Jerry had never worked up the courage to ask Vern—or his mother—if this was true. Maybe that was another reason why Bruce Benson never came down to the store. Nothing sours relations between folk like the dimwit brother of one party coming over all Italian on the upright Baptist mother of the second party.

Jerry passed through the main gates to the Benson farm, instinctively turning down the volume on the truck radio, since Bruce didn't appreciate music much, and certainly not the stuff that was pouring out of Jerry's speakers just now: Gloria Scott's sultry vocals, backed up by the late, great Barry White's production skills. Jerry liked the old Walrus's touch. He might not have been quite as out there as Isaac, and he could legitimately be blamed for setting the tone for the limp, insipid stuff that passed for modern R & B, but there was something about those massed strings that made Jerry want to find some willing young thing and mess up the sheets with baby oil and cheap champagne. He wondered if Ronnie Benson had ever heard of Barry White. As far as Jerry knew, the Bensons didn't even listen to the crazy preachers at the end of the dial, the ones who testified to the love of God yet seemed to hate just about everyone, or at least the kind of people that Jerry knew and liked. Introducing the Benson kids to Barry White would probably kill the old man stone dead, and drive the daughters into some kind of frenzy.

Discreetly, Jerry turned the volume back up a notch.

The Bensons always moved their chickens into a big barn as soon as winter came. In fact, Bruce had told Jerry last week that they'd be inside next time he came, but as he approached the chicken runs on the right, Jerry could see small bundles of white scattered upon the ground. They lay still. The wind ruffled their feathers some, so that they seemed to be trembling on the ground, but it was only a false impression of life.

The sight made Jerry stop short. Leaving the engine idling, he stepped from the truck and walked to the wire. Close by lay the body of one of the Bensons' chickens. Jerry leaned in to touch it, pressing gently into its flesh with the tips of his fingers. Black fluid instantly oozed from its beak and its eyes, and Jerry withdrew his fingers hurriedly, rubbing them on the seam of his pants in an effort to cleanse them of any potential contagion.

Copyright © 2005 by John Connolly