24 Hours

“While Hickey was telling his story, I called CellStar and tried to find out if Ferris is even in town. I told them it was a medical emergency. Their security department said he should be at home.”

“But you’re still getting the machine?”

“Yes, but I’m going to keep ringing it. Somebody’s bound to wake up eventually. I want to talk to Abby right now. I need to hear her voice. Can you hold the phones together?”

Karen raised the gun to Hickey’s face. “Sit on the floor by the wall.”

“Why?

“Sit!”

He backed to the wall and slid down it, keeping both hands pressed to his lacerated thigh. Karen laid the. 38 on the comforter, then inverted one of the phones and held them together.

“Punkin?” Will said, sounding like a transistor radio. “This is Daddy. Are you all right?”

Karen heard Abby sobbing. It made her want to pick up the gun and blow a hole in Hickey’s heart.

“I’m coming to get you, baby,” Will said, his voice cracking with emotion. “But what I need now is for you to stay hidden. It’s just like the Indian Princess camp-out. Just another game. It may take a little while, but Daddy’s going to be there. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.” The voice sounded tiny and alone.

“I want to ask you a question. Has there ever been a time when you really needed me and I didn’t come?”

“No.”

“That’s right. And there never will be. I swear that on the Bible.”

“You’re not supposed to swear on the Bible.”

“If it’s real important, you can. I’m coming to get you, baby. If you get scared, you just remember that. Daddy’s coming.”

“Okay.”

“I need to talk to Mom again. I love you, baby.”

“Please hurry, Daddy.”

Karen separated the phones. “Will?”

“It would be good if we could get Abby to shut off that phone for a while,” he said, “to conserve the batteries. But I don’t think she could handle it. Just keep her calm and quiet. I’m doing everything I can.”

“Hurry, Will.”

Huey Cotton paused in the rutted road leading to the cabin and looked up at the sky. His heart was full of sadness, and his eyes felt fuzzy from staring into the dark trees. Huey experienced much of the world as colors. A doctor had questioned him about it once. Like the woods. The woods had a green smell. Even at night, when you couldn’t see the green, you could smell and taste it. The clean green of the oak leaves overhead. The thick jungly green of the vines tugging at his pant legs.

Joey was two colors. Sometimes he was white like an angel, a guardian who floated at Huey’s shoulder or walked in his shadow, ready to reveal himself when needed. But there was red in Joey, too, a hard little seed filled with dark ink, and sometimes it burst and bled out into the white, covering it completely. When Joey turned red, bad things happened, or had already happened, or were coming down the road. When Joey turned red, Huey had to do things he didn’t like to do. But by doing them, he helped the red fade away, like blood on a shirt in a wash bucket.

Sometimes he couldn’t see color at all. There was a shade between brown and black (“no-color,” he called it) that hovered at the edges of everything, like a fog waiting to blot out the world. He saw it when he stood in line to order a hamburger and heard people whispering behind him because he couldn’t make up his mind about what he wanted. The order-taker seemed to float in a tiny, faraway circle at the center of his vision, and all he could keep in his head was what the people behind him were saying, not whether he wanted pickles or onions. He knew they said mean things because they couldn’t see inside him, past how big he was, but whenever he tried to explain that, he scared people. And the more afraid they got, the more the no-color seeped in from the edges.

School was the worst. He had tried with all his might to forget the things children had said to him at the school in Missouri. But he couldn’t. They lived inside his head, like termites in the support beams of a house. Even when he got so big that teenage boys wouldn’t stand toe-to-toe with him, they teased him. Teased him and ran before he could make them pay for it. Girls teased him, too. Retard, retard, retard. In his dreams they still ran from him, and he never caught them. In real life, though, he caught one once. A teenage boy. That was one reason he’d had to come to Mississippi to live. His mother never told his aunt about it. She was afraid her sister wouldn’t take him. But Huey had told Joey. And Joey had understood.

Huey lowered his head and breathed deep. He could smell people sometimes, the way he smelled animals. Some smelled bad, others nothing special. Abby smelled like a towel fresh out of the clothes dryer. Cleaner than anything he’d ever smelled. And she sparkled. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t find her in the dark, because she was silver and gold, and should be reflecting the moonlight.