Prologue. Chapter One

Prologue

Missing Mile, North Carolina, in the summer of 1972 was scarcely more than a wide spot in the road. The main street was shaded by a few great spreading pecans and oaks, flanked by a few even larger, more sprawling Southern homes too far off any beaten path to have fallen to the scourge of the Civil War. The ravages and triumphs of the past decade seemed to have touched the town not at all, not at first glance. You might think that here was a place adrift in a gentler time, a place where Peace reigned naturally, and did not have to be blazoned on banners or worn around the neck.

You might think that, if you were just driving through. Stay long enough, and you would begin to see signs. Literal ones like the posters in the window of the record store that would later become the Whirling Disc, but was now still known as the Spin'n'Spur. Despite the name and the plywood cowboy boot above the door, those who wanted songs about God, guns, and glory went to Ronnie's Record Barn down the highway in Corinth. The Spin'n'Spur had been taken over, and the posters in the window swarmed with psychedelic patterns and colors, shouted crazy, angry words.

And the graffiti: STOP WAR with a lurid red fist thrusting halfway up the side of a building, HE IS RISEN with a sketchy, sulkily sensual face beneath that might have been Jesus Christ or Jim Morrison. Literal signs.

Or figurative ones, like the shattered boy who now sat with the old men outside the Farmers Hardware Store on clear days. In another life his name had been Johnny Wiegers, and he had been an open-faced, sweet-natured kid; most of the old-timers remembered buying him a candy bar or a soda at some point over the years, or later, cadging him a couple of beers. Now his mother wheeled him down Firehouse Street every day and propped him up so he could hear their talk and watch the endless rounds of checkers they played with a battered board and a set of purple and orange Nehi caps. So far none of them had had the heart to ask her not to do it anymore.

Johnny Wiegers sat quietly. He had to. He had stepped on a Vietcong land mine, and breathed fire, which took out his tongue and his vocal cords. His face was gone to unrecognizable meat, save for one eye glittering mindlessly in all that ruin, like the eye of a bird or a reptile. Both arms and his right leg were gone; the left leg ended just above the knee, and Miz Wiegers would insist on rolling his trouser cuff up over it to air out the fresh scar. The old-timers hunched over their checkers game, talking less than usual, glancing every now and then at the raw, pitiful stump or the gently heaving torso, never at the mangled face. All of them hoped Johnny Wiegers would die soon.

Literal signs of the times, and figurative ones. The decade of love was gone, its gods dead or disillusioned, its fury beginning to mutate into a kind of self-absorbed unease. The only constant was the war.

If Trevor McGee knew any of this, it was only in the fuzziest of ways, sensing it through osmosis rather than any conscious effort. He had just turned five. He had seen Vietnam broadcasts on the news, though his family did not now have a TV. He knew that his parents believed the war was wrong, but they spoke of it as something that could not be changed, like a rainy day when you wanted to play outside or an elbow already skinned.

Momma told stories of peace marches she'd gone to before the boys were born. She listened to records that reminded her of those days, made her happy. When Daddy listened to his records now, they seemed to make him sad. Trevor liked all the music, especially the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, who Daddy always called Bird. And the song Janis Joplin sang with his daddy's name in it. “Me and Bobby McGee. ”

Trev wished he could remember all the words, and sing the song himself. Then he could pretend it was just him and his daddy driving along this road, without Momma or Didi, just the two of them. Then he could ride up front with Daddy, not stuck in the back with Didi like a baby.

He made himself stop thinking that. Where would Momma and Didi be, if not here? Back in Texas, or the place they had left two days ago, New Orleans? If he wasn't careful he would make himself cry. He didn't want his mother or his little brother to be in New Orleans. That city had given him a bad feeling. The streets and the buildings were dark and old, the kind of place where ghosts could live. Daddy said there were real witches there, and maybe zombies.

And Daddy had gotten drunk. Momma had sent him out alone to do it, said it might be good for him. But Daddy had come back with blood on his T-shirt and a sick smell about him. And while Trev huddled in the hotel bed with his arms around his brother and his face buried in Didi's soft hair, Daddy had put his head in Momma's lap and cried.

Not just a few tears either, the way he'd done when their old dog Flakey died back in Austin. Big gulping, trembling sobs that turned his face bright red and made snot run out of his nose onto Momma's leg. That was the way Didi cried when he was hurt or scared really bad. But Didi was only three. Daddy was thirty-five.

No, Trev didn't want to go back to New Orleans, and he didn't want Momma or Didi to be there either. He wanted them all with him, going wherever they were going right now. When they passed the sign that said MISSING MILE TOWN LIMITS, Trevor read it out loud. He'd learned to read last year and was teaching Didi now.

“Great, ” said Daddy. “Fucking great. We did better than miss the highway by a mile-we found the goddamn mile. ” Trevor wanted to laugh, but Daddy didn't sound as if he were joking. Momma didn't say anything at all, though Trev knew she had lived around here when she was a little girl his age. He wondered if she was glad to be back. He thought North Carolina was pretty, all the giant trees and green hills and long, curvy roads like black ribbons unwinding beneath the wheels of their Rambler.

Momma had told him about a place she remembered, though, something called the Devil's Tramping Ground. Trevor hoped they wouldn't see it. It was a round track in a field where no grass or flowers grew, where animals wouldn't go. If you put trash or sticks in the circle at night, they would be gone hi the morning, as if a cloven hoof had kicked them out of its way and they had landed all the way down in hell. Momma said it was supposed to be the place where the Devil walked round and round all night, plotting his evil for the next day.

(“That's right, teach them the fucking Christian dichotomy, poison their brains, ” Daddy had said, and Momma had flipped him The Bird. For a long time Trevor had thought The Bird was something like the peace sign-it meant you liked Charlie Parker, maybe-and he had gone around happily flipping people off until Momma explained it to him. )

But Trevor couldn't blame even the Devil for wanting to live around here. He thought it was the prettiest place he had ever seen.

Now they were driving through the town. The buildings looked old, but not scary like the ones in New Orleans. Most of these were built of wood, which gave them a soft-edged, friendly look. He saw an old-fashioned gas pump and a fence made out of wagon wheels. On the other side of the street, Momma spied a group of teenagers in beads and ripped denim. One of them, a boy, flipped back long luxuriant hair. The kids paused on the sidewalk for a moment before entering the record store, and Momma pointed them out to Daddy. “There must be some kind of a scene here. This might be a good place to stop. ”

Daddy scowled. “This is Buttfuckville. I hate these little Southern towns-you move in, and three days later everybody knows where you came from and how you make a living and who you're sleeping with. ” He caressed the steering wheel; then his fingers tightened convulsively around it. “I think we can make it through to New York. ”

“Bobby, no! ” Momma reached over, put a hand on his shoulder. Her silver rings caught the sunlight. “You know the car can't do it. Let's not get stranded on the highway somewhere. I don't want to hitch with the kids. ”

“No? You'd rather be stranded here? ” Now Daddy looked away from the road to glare at Momma through the black sunglasses that hid his pale blue eyes, so like Trevor's eyes. Didi had eyes like Momma's, huge and nearly black. “What would we do here, Rosena? Huh? What would I do? ”

“The same thing you do anywhere. You'd draw. ” Momma wasn't looking at Daddy; her hand still rested on his shoulder, but her head was turned toward the window, looking out at Missing Mile. “We'd find a place to rent and I'd get a job somewhere. And you'd stay at home with the kids, and there'd be nowhere to get drunk, and you'd start doing comics again. ”

At one time Trev would have chimed in his support for Momma, perhaps even tried to enlist Didi's help. He wanted to stay here. Just looking at the place made him feel relaxed inside, not cramped up and hurting the way New Orleans and sometimes Texas had made him feel. He could tell it made Momma happy too, at least as happy as she ever felt anymore.

But he knew better than to interrupt his parents while they were “discussing. ” Instead he stared out the window and hoped as hard as he could that they would stop. If only Momma needed cigarettes, or Didi had to go pee, or something. His brother was toying with the frayed cuff of his shorts, dreaming, not even seeing the town. Trev poked his arm. “Didi, ” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “you need to pee again? ”

“Uh-uh, ” said Didi solemnly, too loudly. “I peed last time. ”

Daddy slammed his hands against the wheel. “Goddammit, Trevor, don't encourage his weak bladder! You know what it means if I have to stop the car every hour? It means I have to start it again too. And you know what starting the car does? It uses extra gas. And that gas costs money. So you take your pick, Trev-do you want to stop and take a piss, or do you want to eat tonight? ”

“Eat tonight, ” Trevor said. He felt tears trying to start in his eyes. But he knew that if he cried, Daddy would keep picking on him. He hadn't always been like that, but he was now. If Trev stood up to Daddy and answered back- even if the answer was giving in-Daddy might be ashamed and leave him alone.

“Okay, then, leave Didi alone. ” Daddy made the car go faster. Trevor could tell Daddy hated the little town as much as he and Momma liked it. Didi, as usual, was lost in space.

Daddy wouldn't stop on purpose now, not for any reason. Trevor knew the car was going to break down soon; at least, Momma said so. If that was true, he wished it would go ahead and break down here. He thought a place like this might be good for Daddy if he would only give it a chance.

“GodDAMM” Daddy was wrestling with the shift stick, slamming it with the heel of his hand. Something in the guts of the car banged and shuddered horribly; then greasy black smoke came streaming around the edges of the hood. The car coasted to a stop on the grassy shoulder of the road.

Trevor felt like crying again. What if Daddy knew he had been wishing for the car to break down right that very second? What would Daddy do? Trevor looked down at his lap, noticed how tightly his fists were clenched against the knees of his jeans. Cautiously he opened one hand, then the other. His fingernails had made stinging red halfmoons in the soft flesh of his palms.

Daddy kicked the Rambler's door open and flung himself out. They had already passed through downtown, and now the road was flanked by farmland, green and wet-smelling. Trevor saw a few patches of writhing vine dotted with tiny purple flowers that smelled like grape soda. They had been seeing this plant for miles. Momma called it kudzu, and said it only flowered once every seven years. Daddy snorted and said it was a goddamn crop-killing pest that wouldn't even die if you burned it with gasoline.

Daddy walked away from the car toward a cluster of trees not far from the road. He stopped and stood with his back to the Rambler, his hands clenched at his sides. Even from a distance Trevor could tell Daddy was shaking. Momma said Daddy was a bundle of nerves, wouldn't even fix him coffee anymore because it just made him nervous. But sometimes Daddy was worse than nervous. When he got like this, Trevor could feel a blind red rage pulsing from him, hotter than the car's engine, a rage that did not know words like wife and sons.

It was because Daddy couldn't draw anymore. But why was that? How could a thing you'd had all your life, the thing you loved to do most, suddenly just be gone?

Momma's door swung open. When Trevor glanced up, her long blue-jeaned legs were already out of the car, and she was looking at him over the back of the seat. “Please watch Didi for a few minutes, ” she said. “Do some reading with him if you're up to it. ” The door slammed and she was striding across the green verge toward the taut trembling figure of Daddy.

Trevor watched them come together, watched Momma's arms go around Daddy from behind. He knew her gentle, cool hands would be stroking Daddy's chest, she would be whispering meaningless soothing words in her soft Southern voice, the way she did for Trevor or Didi when they woke from nightmares. His mind framed a still shot of his parents standing together under the trees, a picture he would remember for a long time: his father, Robert Fredric McGee, a smallish, sharp-featured man with black wraparound sunglasses and a wispy shock of ginger hair that stood straight up on top, the lines of his body tight as a violin string; his mother, Rosena Parks McGee, a slender woman dressed as becomingly as the fashions of the day would allow in faded, embroidered jeans and a loose green Indian shirt with tiny mirrors at the collar and sleeves, her long wavy hair twisted into a braid that hung halfway down her back, a thick cable shot through with wheat and corn silk and autumn gold.

Trevor's hair was the same color as his father's. Didi's was still the palest silk-spun blond, the color of the lightest hairs on Momma's head, but Momma said Trey's hair had been that color too and Didi's would likely darken to ginger by the time he was Trevor's age.

Trevor wondered if Momma was out there soothing Daddy, convincing him that it didn't matter if the car was broken, that this would be a good place to stay. He hoped so. Then he picked up the closest reading material at hand, a Robert Crumb comic, and slid across the seat to his brother. Didi didn't understand all the things that happened in these stories-neither did Trevor, for that matter — but both boys loved the drawings and thought the girls with giant butts were funny.

Back in Texas, Daddy used to joke that Momma had a classic Crumb butt, and Momma would smack him with a sofa pillow. There had been a big, comfortable green sofa in that house. Sometimes Trevor and Didi would join in the pillow fights too. If Momma and Daddy were really stoned, they'd wind up giggling so hard that they'd lose their breath, and Trevor and Didi could win.

Daddy didn't make jokes about Momma's butt anymore. Daddy didn't even read his Robert Crumb comics anymore; he'd given them all to Trevor. And Trev couldn't remember the last tune they had all had a pillow fight.

He rolled the window down to let in the green-smelling air. Though it was still faintly rank with the odor of the frying engine, it was fresher than the inside of the car, which smelled of smoke and sour milk and Didi's last accident. Then he started reading the comic aloud, pointing to each word as he spoke it, making Didi follow along after him. His brother kept trying to see what Momma and Daddy were doing. Trevor saw out of the corner of his eye that Daddy had pulled away from Momma and was taking long strides down the highway, away from the car, away from the town. Momma was hurrying after him, not quite running. Trevor pulled Didi against him and forced himself not to look, to concentrate on the words and pictures and the stories they formed.

After a few panels it was easy: the comic was all about Mr. Natural, his favorite Crumb character. The sight of the clever old hippie-sage comforted him, made him forget Daddy's anger and Momma's pain, made him forget he was reading the words for Didi. The story took him away.

Besides, he knew they would come back. They always did. Your parents couldn't just walk away and leave you in the back seat, not when it would be dark soon, not when you were in a strange place and there was nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep and you were only five years old.

Could they?

Momma and Daddy were far down the road now, small gesturing shapes in the distance. But Trevor could see that they had stopped walking, that they were just standing there. Arguing, yes. Yelling, probably. Maybe crying. But not going away.

Trevor looked down at the page and fell back into the story.

It turned out they couldn't go anywhere. Daddy called a mechanic, an immensely tall, skinny young man who was still almost a teenager, with a face as long and pale and kindly as that of the Man in the Moon. Stitched in bright orange thread on the pocket of his greasy overalls was the improbable name Kinsey.

Kinsey said the Rambler had thrown a rod that had probably been ready to go since New Orleans, and unless they were prepared to drop several hundred bucks into that tired old engine, they might as well push the car off the road and be glad they'd broken down close to a town. After all, Kinsey pointed out, they might be staying awhile.

Daddy helped him roll the car forward a few feet so that it was completely off the blacktop. The body sagged on its tires, two-toned paint a faded turquoise above the dusty strip of chrome that ran along the side, dirty white below. Trevor thought the Rambler already looked dead. Daddy's face was very pale, almost bluish, sheened with oily-looking sweat. When he took off his sunglasses, Trevor saw smudgy purple shadows in the hollows of his eyes.

“How much do we owe you? ” Daddy said. It was obvious from his voice that he dreaded the answer.

Kinsey looked at Momma, at Trevor and Didi in the crooks of her arms, at their clothes and other belongings heaped in the back seat, the duffel bags bulging up from under the roped-down lid of the trunk, the three mattresses strapped to the roof. His quick blue eyes, as bright as Trevor's and Daddy's were pale, seemed to take in the situation at a glance. “For coming out? Nothing. My time isn't that valuable, believe me. ”

He lowered his head a little to peer into Daddy's face. Trevor thought suddenly of an inquisitive giraffe. “But don't I know you? You wouldn't be... no... not Robert McGee? The cartoonist who blew the brainpan off the American underground' in the words of Saint Crumb himself? . . . No, no, of course not. Not in Missing Mile. Silly of me, sorry. ”

He was already turning away, and Daddy wasn't going to say anything. Trevor couldn't stand it. He wanted to run to the tall young man, to yell up into that kind, curious face, Yes, it is him, it is Robert McGee and he's everything you said and he's MY DADDY TOO! In that moment Trevor felt he would burst with pride for his father.

But Momma's arm tightened around him, holding him back. One long lacquered nail tapped a warning on his forearm. “Sh, ” he heard her say softly.

And Daddy, Robert McGee, Bobby McGee, creator of the crazed, sick, beautiful comic Birdland, whose work had appeared beside Crumb's and Shelton's, in Zap! and the L. A. Free Press and the East Village Other and everywhere in between, all across the country. . . who had received and refused offers from the same Hollywood he had once drawn as a giant blood-swollen tick still clinging to the rotten corpse of a dog labeled Art. . . who had once had a steady hand and a pure, scathing vision...

Daddy only shook his head and looked away.

Just past downtown Missing Mile, a road splits off to the left from Firehouse Street and meanders away into scrubby countryside. The fields out here are nearly barren, the soil gone infertile-most believe from overfarming and lack of crop rotation. Only the oldest residents of town still say these fields are cursed, and were once sowed with salt. The good land is on the other side of town, the side toward Corinth, out where the abandoned railyard and the deep woods are. Firehouse Street runs into State Highway 42. The road that splits off to the left soon becomes gravel, then dirt. This is the poorest part of Missing Mile, the place called Violin Road.

Out here the best places to live are decrepit farmhouses, big rambling places with high ceilings and large cool rooms, most of which were abandoned or sold years ago as the crops went bad. A step below these are the aluminum trailers and tarpaper shacks, their dirt yards choked with broken toys, rusting hulks of autos, and other trash, their peripheries negligently guarded by slat-sided, soporific hounds.

Out here only the wild things are healthy, the old trees whose roots find sustenance far below the ill-used layer of topsoil, the occasional rosebush gone to green thicket and thorns, the unstoppable kudzu. It is as if they have decided to take back the land for their own.

Trevor loved it. It was where he discovered that he could draw even if Daddy couldn't.

Momma talked to a real estate agent in town and figured out that they could afford to rent one of the dilapidated farmhouses for a month. By that time, she said, she would find a job in Missing Mile and Daddy would be drawing. Sure enough, a few days after they moved their things into the house, a dress shop hired Momma as a salesgirl. The job was no fun-she couldn't wear jeans to work, which left her with a choice of one Indian-print skirt and blouse or one patchwork dress-but she ate lunch at the diner in town and sometimes stopped for coffee after her shift. Soon she met some of the kids they'd seen going into the record store, and others like them.

If she could drive to Raleigh or Chapel Hill, they told Momma, she could make good money modeling for university art classes. Momma talked to Kinsey at the garage, who let her set up a payment plan. A week later the Rambler had a brand-new engine, and Momma quit the dress shop and started driving to Raleigh several times a week.

Daddy had his things set up in a tiny fourth bedroom at the back of the house, his untidy jumble of inks and brushes and his drawing table, the one piece of furniture they had brought from Austin. He went in there and shut the door every morning after Momma left, and he stayed in there most of the day. Trevor had no idea whether he was drawing or not.

But Trevor was. He had found an old sketchbook of Daddy's when Momma unpacked the car. Most of the pages had been torn out, but there were still a few blank sheets left. Trevor usually took Didi outside to play in the daytime-Momma had assured him that the Devil's Tramping Ground was more than forty miles away, so he didn't have to worry about accidentally coming upon the pacing, muttering demon.

When Didi was napping-something he seemed to do more and more often these days-Trevor wandered through the house, looking at the bare floorboards and the water-stained walls, wondering if anyone had ever loved this house. One afternoon he found himself in the dim, shabby kitchen, perched on one of the rickety chairs that had come with the house, a felt-tip pen in his hand, the sketchbook on the table before him. He had no idea what he was going to draw. He had hardly ever thought about drawing before; that was what Daddy did. Trevor could remember scribbling with crayons on cheap newsprint when he was Didi's age, making great round heads with stick arms and legs coming straight out of them, as small children do. This circle with five dots in it is Momma, this one is Daddy, that one's me. But he hadn't drawn for at least a year-not since Daddy stopped.

Daddy had told him once that the trick was not to think about it, not in your sketchbook anyway. You just had to find the path between your hand and your heart and your brain and see what came out. Trevor uncapped the pen and put its tip against the unblemished (though slightly yellowed) page of the sketchbook. The ink began to bleed into the paper, making a small spreading dot, a tiny black sun in a pale void. Then, slowly, Trevor's hand began to move.

He soon discovered he was drawing Skeletal Sammy, a character from Daddy's comic book, Birdland. Sammy was all straight lines and sharp points: easy to draw. The half-leering, half-desperate face, the long black coat that hung on Sammy's shoulders like a pair of broken wings, the spidery hands and the long thin legs and the exaggerated bulge of Sammy's kneecaps beneath his black stovepipe pants-all began to take shape.

Trevor sat back and looked at the drawing. It was nowhere near as good as Daddy's Sammy, of course; the lines weren't straight, the black inking was more like scribbling. But it was no circle with five dots, either. It was immediately recognizable as Skeletal Sammy.

Daddy recognized it as soon as he walked into the kitchen.

He leaned over Trevor's shoulder for several moments looking at the drawing. One hand rested lightly on Trev's back; the other tapped the table nervously, fingers as long and thin as Sammy's, faint lavender veins visible beneath the pale skin, silver wedding ring too loose on the third finger. For a moment Trevor feared Daddy might snatch the drawing, the whole sketchbook; he felt as if he had been caught doing something wrong.

But Daddy only kissed the top of Trevor's head. “You draw a mean junkie, kiddo, ” he whispered into Trevor's ginger hair. And he was gone from the kitchen silently, like a ghost, without getting the beer or glass of water or whatever he had come for, leaving his elder son half elated and half dreadfully, mysteriously ashamed.

The carefully drawn fingers of Sammy's left hand were blurring. A drop of moisture on the page, making the ink bleed and furl. Trevor touched the wetness, then put his finger to his lips. Salty. A tear.

Daddy's, or his own?

The worst thing happened the following week. It turned out Daddy had been drawing in his cramped little studio. Had finally finished a story, only a page long, and sent it off to one of his papers. Trevor couldn't remember if it was the Barb or the Freep or maybe one of the others-he got them mixed up sometimes.

The paper rejected the story. Daddy read the letter aloud in a hollow, mocking voice. It had been a difficult decision, the editor said, considering his reputation and the selling power of his name. However, he simply didn't feel the story approached the quality of Daddy's previous work, and he thought publishing it would be bad both for the paper and for Daddy's career.

It was the kindest way the editor could find to say This comic is a piece of shit.

The next day, Daddy walked into town and called the publisher of Birdland. The stories for the fourth issue were already nearly a year overdue. Daddy told the publisher there would be no more stories, not now, not ever. Then he hung up the pay phone and walked a mile across town to the liquor store. By the time he got home, he had already cracked the seal on a gallon jug of bourbon.

Momma had begun staying later and later in the city after her modeling jobs-having drinks with some of the other models one night, going to someone's apartment to get stoned the next. Daddy didn't like that, had even refused to smoke the joint she brought him as a present from her friends. She said they wanted to meet him and the kids, but Daddy told her not to invite them out.

Trevor had gone into Raleigh with Momma one day. He brought his sketchbook and sat in a corner of the big airy studio that smelled of paint thinner and charcoal dust. Momma stood gracefully naked on a wooden podium at the front of the room, joking with the students when she took her breaks. Some of them laughed at him, bent over his sketchbook so quiet and serious. Their laughter faltered when they saw the likenesses he had produced of them during the class period: the stringy-haired girl whose granny glasses pinched her beaky nose like some torture device made of wire; the droopy-eyed boy whose patchy beard grew straight down into the collar of his black turtleneck because he had no chin.

But on this day Trevor had stayed home. Daddy sat in the living room all evening, sprawled in a threadbare recliner that had come with the house, his feet tapping out a meaningless tattoo on the warped floorboards. He had the turntable hooked up and kept playing record after record, anything that his hand fell upon, Sarah Vaughan, Country Joe and the Fish, frenetic band music from the twenties that sounded like something skeletons might jitterbug to-it all ran together in one long musical cry of pain. Most of all Trevor remembered Daddy searching obsessively for a set of Charlie Parker records: Bird with Miles, Bird on Fifty-second Street, Bird at Birdland. He found them, slammed one onto the turntable. The saxophone spiraled through the old house, found the cracks in the walls and spun out into the night, an exalted sound, terribly sad but somehow free. Free as a bird in Birdland.

Daddy hefted the bottle and chugged bourbon straight from it. A moment later he let out a long, wet, rippling belch. Trevor got up from the corner where he'd been sitting, keeping an eye out for Momma's headlights, and started to leave the room. He didn't want to see Daddy get sick. He'd seen it before and it had nearly made him sick too, not even so much the sight of the thin, stringy whiskey-vomit as that of his father's helplessness and shame.

His foot struck a loose piece of wood and sent it skittering across the floor. Daddy had been doing repairs around the house a few days earlier, nailing down a board that had begun to curl away from the wall. Long silver nails and a hammer were still scattered around the hall doorway. Trevor began to gather up the nails, thinking Didi might step on one, then stopped. Didi was smart enough not to go around the house barefoot, with all the splinters in the floorboards. Maybe Daddy would need the nails. Maybe he would still finish the repairs.

At the sound of the nails chinking together, Daddy looked up from his bottle. His eyes focused on Trevor, pinned him to the spot where he stood. “Trev. What're you doin'? ”

“Going to bed. ”

“Thass good. I'll fixyer juice. ” Momma usually gave the boys fruit juice to take to bed with them, when there was any in the house. Daddy got up and stumbled past Trevor into the kitchen, slapping one hand against the door frame to support himself. Trevor heard the refrigerator opening, bottles rattling. Daddy came back in and handed him a glass of grapefruit juice. A few drops sloshed over the side, trickled over Trevor's fingers. He put his hand to his mouth and licked them away. Grapefruit was his favorite, because of the interestingly sour, almost salty taste. But there was an extra bitterness to this juice, as if it had begun to spoil in the bottle.

He must have made a face, because Daddy kept staring at him. “Something wrong? ”

Trevor shook his head.

“You gonna drink that or not? ”

He raised the glass to his lips and drank half of it, took a deep breath, and finished it off. The bitter taste shivered over his tongue, lingered in the back of his throat.

“There you go. ” Daddy reached out, pulled Trevor into his embrace. Daddy smelled of stinging liquor and old sweat and dirty clothes. Trevor hugged back anyway. As the side of his head pressed against Daddy's, a panicky terror flooded through him, though he didn't know why. He clutched at Daddy's shoulders, tried to wrap his arms around Daddy's neck.

But after a moment, Daddy pried him off and gently pushed him away.

Trevor went down the hall, glancing into Didi's dark bedroom. Sometimes Didi got scared at night, but now he was fast asleep despite the punishing volume Of the music, his face burrowed into his pillow, the faint light from the hallway casting a halo on his pale hair. Back in Austin the brothers had shared a room; this was the first time they had slept apart. Trevor missed waking up to the soft sound of Didi's breathing, to the scent of talcum powder and candy when Didi crawled in bed with him. For a moment he thought he might sleep with Didi tonight, might wrap his arms around his brother and not have to fall asleep alone.

But he didn't want to wake Didi. Daddy was being too scary. Instead Trevor walked down the hall to his own bedroom, trailing his hand along the wall. The old boards were damp, faintly sticky. He wiped his fingers on the front of his T-shirt.

His own room was nearly as bare as Didi's. They had been able to bring none of their furniture from Austin, and hardly any of their toys. Trevor's mattress lay flat on the floor, a rumpled blanket thrown over it. He had pinned up some of his drawings on the walls, though he hadn't put up Skeletal Sammy and he hadn't tried to draw any of Daddy's other characters. More drawings lay scattered on the floor, along with the comics he had scrounged from Daddy. He picked up a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers book, thinking he might read it in bed. The antics of those friendly fools might make him forget Daddy sprawled in the chair, pouring straight whiskey on top of his pain.

But he was too tired; his eyes were already closing. Trevor turned off his bedside lamp and crawled under the blanket. The familiar contours of his mattress cradled him like a welcoming hand. From the living room he heard Charlie Parker run down a shimmering scale. Birdland, he thought again. That was the place where you could work magic, the place where no one else could touch you. It might be an actual spot in the world; it might be a place deep down inside you. Daddy could only reach his Birdland by drinking now. Trevor had begun to believe his own Birdland might be the pen moving over the paper, the weight of the sketchbook in his hands, the creation of worlds out of ink and sweat and love.

He slept, and the music wove uneasily in and out of his dreams. He heard Janis Joplin singing “Me and Bobby McGee, ” and remembered suddenly that she had died last year. From drugs, Momma had told him, taking care to explain that the drugs Janis had been using were much worse than the pot she and Daddy sometimes smoked. An image came to him of Daddy walking hand in hand with a girl shorter and more rounded than Momma, a girl who wore bright feathers in her hair. She turned to Daddy and Trevor saw that her face was a swollen purple mass of flesh, the holes of her eyes black and depthless behind the big round glasses, her ruined features split in the semblance of a smile as she leaned in to give his father a deep soul kiss.

And Daddy kissed back. . .

Sunlight woke him, streaming through the dirty panes of his window, trickling into the corners of his eyes. His head ached slightly, felt somehow too heavy on his neck. Trevor rolled over, stretched, and looked around the room, silently greeting his drawings. There was one of the house, one of Momma holding Didi, a whole series of ones that he was pretty sure were going to turn into a comic. He knew he could never draw the slick, tawdry world of Birdland the way Daddy had, but he could make his own world. He needed to practice writing smaller so he could do the letters.

His head slightly logy but full of ideas, Trevor rolled off the mattress, pushed open the door of his room, and walked down the hall toward the kitchen.

He saw the blood on the walls before he saw Momma.

It would come out in the autopsy report-which Trevor did not read until years later-that Daddy had attacked her near the front door, that they must have argued, that there had been a struggle and he had driven her back toward the hall before he killed her. That was where he would have picked up the hammer.

Momma was crumpled in the doorway that led from the living room into the hall. Her back rested against the frame. Her head lolled on the fragile stem of her neck. Her eyes were open, and as Trevor edged around her body, they seemed to fix on him. For a heart-stopping second he thought she was alive. Then he saw that the eyes were cloudy, and filmed with blood.

Her arms were a mass of blood and bruise, silver rings sparkling amid the ruin of her hands. (Seven fingers broken, the autopsy report would say, along with most of the small bones in her palms, as she raised her hands to ward off the blows of the hammer. ) There was a deep gouge in her left temple, another in the center of her forehead. Her hair was loose, fanned around her shoulders, stiff with blood. A clear fluid had seeped from her head wounds and dried on her face, making silvery tracks through the mask of red.

And on the wall above her, a confusion of bloody handprints trailing down, down. . .

Trevor spun and ran back down the hall, toward his brother's room. He did not know that his bladder had let go, did not feel the hot urine spilling down his legs. He did not hear the sound he was making, a long, high moan.

The door of Didi's room was closed. Trevor had not closed it when he looked in on Didi last night. High up on the door was a tiny smudge of blood, barely noticeable. It told Trevor everything he needed to know. He went in anyway.

The room was thick with the smell of blood and shit. The two odors together were cloying, almost sweet. Trevor went to the bed. Didi lay in the same position Trevor had left him in last night, his head burrowed into the pillow, one small hand curled into a fist near his mouth. The back of Didi's head was like a swamp, a dark mush of splintered bone and thick clotted gore. Sometime during the night-because of the heat, or in the spasms of death- Didi had kicked off his covers. Trevor saw the dark brown stain between his legs. That was where the smell came from.

Trevor lifted the blanket and pulled it over Didi, covering the stain, the ruined head, the unbearable curled hand. The blanket settled over the small still form. Where it covered the head, a blotch of red appeared.

He had to find Daddy. His mind clung to some tiny, glittering hope that maybe Daddy hadn't done this at all, that maybe some crazy person had broken into their house and killed Momma and Didi and left him alive for some reason, that Daddy might still be alive too.

He stumbled out of Didi's room, felt his way along the hall, sprawled headlong into the bathroom.

That was where Momma's friends found him hours later, when they drove out to see why Momma hadn't shown up to model that day; she was so reliable that they became worried immediately. The front door was unlocked. They saw Momma's body first, and had nearly worked themselves into hysterics when someone heard the high toneless keening.

They found Trevor squeezed into a tiny space between the toilet and the old porcelain sink, curled as compact as a fetus, his eyes fixed on the body of his father. Bobby McGee hung from the shower curtain rod. It was the old-fashioned kind bolted into the wall, and had held his weight all night and all day. He was naked. His penis hung limp and dry as a dead leaf; there had been no last orgasm in death for him. His body was thin nearly to the point of emaciation, luminously pale, his hands and feet gravid with blood, his face so swollen as to be featureless except for the eyes bulging halfway out of their sockets. The rough strand of hemp cut a deep slash in his neck. His hands and his torso were still stained with the blood of his family.

As someone lifted him and carried him out, still curled into the smallest possible ball, Trevor had his first coherent thought in hours, and the last he would have for many days.

He needn't have worried about accidentally coming upon the Devil's Tramping Ground, he realized.

The Devil's Tramping Ground had come to him.

From the Corinth Weekly Eye, June 16, 1972

By Denny Marsten, Staff Writer

MISSING MILE—Grisly tragedy has struck just down the road. Hardly anyone knew that the famous “underground” cartoonist Robert McGee was living in North Carolina until he bludgeoned two members of his family to death, then committed suicide in a rented house on the outskirts of Missing Mile.

McGee, formerly of Austin, Texas, was 35. His work has appeared in student and counter-culture newspapers across the country, and he created the controversial adult comic book Birdland. Also deceased are his wife, Rosena McGee, 29, and a son, Fredric McGee, 3. Surviving is another son, name and age unknown.

A state trooper commented at the scene, “We believe drugs were involved. . . With these kinds of people, they usually are. ” Another trooper remarked that this was the first multiple murder in Missing Mile since 1958, when a man shot his wife and his three brothers to death.

Kinsey Hummingbird of Missing Mile repaired the McGees' car a few weeks before the murders. “I didn't see anything wrong with any of them, ” Hummingbird said. “And if I had, it would be nobody's business. Only the McGees will ever know what went on in that house. ”

He added, “Robert McGee was a great artist. I hope somebody takes good care of the little boy. ”

No one would speculate on why McGee chose to let his eldest son live. The child has been taken into custody of the state and will be placed in an orphanage or foster home if no relatives are located.

Twenty Years Later

Chapter One

As he walked to work each afternoon, Kinsey Hummingbird was apt to reflect upon a variety of things. These things might be philosophical (quantum physics, the function of Art in the universe) or prosaic (what sort of person would take the time to scrawl “Robin Fuks” in a freshly cemented sidewalk; had they really thought the legend was important enough to be preserved through the ages in concrete? ) but never boring. Kinsey seldom found himself bored.

The walk from his house to downtown Missing Mile was an easy one. Kinsey hoofed it twice a day nearly every day of his life, only driving in when he had something too heavy to carry-a pot of homemade fifteen-bean soup, for instance, or a stray amplifier. The walk took him past a patchwork quilt of fields that changed with every season: plowed under dark and rich in winter; dusted with the palest green in spring; resplendent with tobacco, pumpkin vines, or other leafy crops through the hot Carolina summer and straight on till harvest. It took him past a fairytale landscape of kudzu, an entire hillside and stand of trees taken over by the exuberant weed, transformed into ghostly green spires, towers, hollows. It took him over a disused set of train tracks where wildflowers grew between the uneven ties, where he always managed to stub his toe or twist his ankle at least once a month. It took him down the wrong end of Firehouse Street and straight into town.

Missing Mile was not a large town, but it was big enough to have a run-down section. Kinsey walked through this section every day, appreciating the silence of it, the slight eeriness of the boarded-up storefronts and soap-blinded windows. Some of the empty stores still bore going-out-of-business signs. The best one, which never failed to amuse Kinsey, trumpeted BEAT XMAS RUSH! in red letters a foot high. The stores not boarded up or soaped were full of dust and cobwebs, with the occasional wire clothes rack or smooth mannequin torso standing a lonely vigil over nothing.

One rainy Saturday afternoon in June, Kinsey came walking into town as usual. He wore a straw hat with a tattered feather in its band and a long billowing raincoat draped around his skinny shoulders. Kinsey's general aspect was that of an amiable scarecrow; his slight stoop did nothing to hide the fact that he was well over six feet tall. He was of indeterminate age (some of the kids claimed Kinsey wasn't much older than them; some swore he was forty or more, practically ancient). His hair was long, stringy, and rather sparse. His clothes were timeworn, colorfully mismatched, and much mended, but they hung on his narrow frame neatly, almost elegantly. There was a great deal of the country in his beaky nose, his long jaw and clever mouth, his close-set bright blue eyes.

The warm rain hit the sidewalk and steamed back up, forming little eddies of mist around Kinsey's ankles. A puddle of oil and water made a swirling rainbow in the street. A couple more blocks down Firehouse Street, the good end of town began: some shabbily genteel antebellum homes with sagging pillars and wraparound verandas, several of which were fixed up as boardinghouses; a 7-Eleven; the old Farmers Hardware Store whose parking lot doubled as the Greyhound bus depot, and a few other businesses that were actually open. But down here the rent was cheaper. And the kids didn't mind coming to the bad end of town after dark.

Kinsey crossed the street and ducked into a shadowy doorway. The door was a special piece of work he had commissioned from a carver over in Corinth: a heavy, satin-textured slab of pine, varnished to the color of warm caramel and carved with irregular, twisted, black-stained letters that seemed to bleed from the depths of the wood. THE SACRED YEW.

Kinsey's real home. The one he had made for the children, because they had nowhere else to go.

Well. . . mostly for the children. But for himself too, because Kinsey had never had anywhere to go either. A Bible-belting mother who saw her son as the embodiment of her own black sin; her maiden name was McFate, and all the McFates were psychotic delusionaries of one stripe or another. A pale shadow of a father who was drunk or gone most of the time, then suddenly dead, as if he had never existed at all; most of the Hummingbirds were poetic souls tethered to alcoholic bodies, though Kinsey himself had always been able to take a drink or two without requiring three or four.

In 1970 he inherited the mechanic's job from the garage where his father had worked off and on. Kinsey was better at repairing engines than Ethan Hummingbird had ever been, though deep inside he suspected this was not what he wanted to do.

Growing older, his friends leaving for college and careers, and somehow the new friends he made were always younger: the forlorn, bewildered teenagers who had never asked to be born and now wished they were dead, the misfits, the rejects. They sought Kinsey out at the garage, they sat and talked to his skinny legs sticking out from under some broken-down Ford or Chevy. That was the way it always was, and for a while Kinsey thought it always would be.

Then in 1975 his mother died in the terrible fire that shut down the Central Carolina Cotton Mill for good. Two years later Kinsey received a large settlement, quit the garage, and opened the first-ever nightclub in Missing Mile. He tried to mourn his mother, but when he thought about how much better his life had gotten since her death, it was difficult.

Kinsey fumbled in his pocket for the key. A large, ornate pocketwatch fell out and dangled at the end of a long gold chain, the other end of which was safety-pinned to Kinsey's vest. He flipped the watch open and glanced at its pearly face. Nearly an hour ahead of schedule: he liked to be at the Yew by four to take deliveries, clean up the last of the previous night's mess, and let the bands in for an early sound check if they wanted. But it was barely three. The overcast day must have deceived him. Kinsey shrugged and let himself in anyway. There was always work to do.

The windowless club was dark and still. To his right as he entered was the small stage he had built. His carpentry was unglamorous but sturdy. To his left was the art wall, a mural of painted, crayoned, and Magic Markered graffiti that stretched all the way back to the partition separating the bar area from the rest of the club. The tangle of obscure band names and their arcane symbols, song lyrics, and catchphrases was indistinct in the gloom. Kinsey could only make out one large piece of graffiti, spray-painted in gold, wavering halfway between wall and ceiling: WE ARE NOT AFRAID.

Those words might be the anthem of every kid who passed through that door, Kinsey thought. The hell of it was that they were afraid, every one of them, terribly so. Afraid they would never make it to adulthood and freedom, or that they would make it only at the price of their fragile souls; afraid that the world would prove too dull, too cold, that they would always be as alone as they felt right now. But not one of them would admit it. We are not afraid, they would chant along with the band, their faces bathed in golden light, we are not afraid, believing it at least until the music was over.

He crossed the dance floor. The sticky remnants of last night's spilled beer and soda sucked softly at the soles of his shoes with each step. Idly brooding, he passed the restrooms on his right and entered the room at the back that served as the bar.

He was brought up short by the stifled screech of the girl bent over the cash drawer.

The back door stood open, as if she had been ready to leave in a hurry. The girl stood frozen at the register, catlike face a mask of shock and fear, wide eyes fixed on Kinsey, a sheaf of twenties clutched in her hand. Her open handbag sat on the bar beside her. A perfect, damning tableau.

“Rima? ” he said stupidly. “What. . . ? ”

His voice seemed to unfreeze her. She spun and broke for the door. Kinsey threw himself over the bar, shot out one long arm, and caught her by the wrist. The twenties fluttered to the floor. The girl began to sob.

Kinsey usually had a couple of local kids working at the Yew, mostly doing odd jobs like stocking the bar or collecting money at the door when a band played. Rima had worked her way up to tending bar. She was fast, funny, cute, and (Kinsey had thought) utterly trustworthy, so much so that he had let her have a key. When he had another bartender, he didn't have to stay until closing time every night; on slow nights someone else could lock up. It was almost like having a mini-vacation. But keys had a way of getting lost, or changing hands, and Kinsey didn't entrust them to many of his workers. He had believed he was a pretty good judge of character. The Sacred Yew had never been ripped off.

Until now.

Kinsey reached for the phone. Rima threw herself across him, grabbing for it with her free hand. They struggled briefly for the receiver; then Kinsey wrested it free and easily held it out of her reach. The phone cord caught her purse and swept it onto the floor. The contents spilled, skittered, shattered. Kinsey tucked the receiver into the hollow of his shoulder and began to dial.

“Kinsey, no, please! ” Rima grabbed futilely for the phone again, then sagged back against the bar. “Don't call the cops... ”

His finger paused over the last number. “Why shouldn't I? ”

She saw her opening and went for it. “Because I didn't take any money. Yes, I was going to, but I didn't have time. . . and I'm in trouble, and I'm leaving town. Just let me go and you'll never see me again. ” Her face was wet with tears. In the half-light of the bar Kinsey could not see her eyes. Her wrist was so thin that his hand could have encircled it two or three times; the bones felt as fragile as dry twigs. He eased his grip a little.

“What kind of trouble? ”

“I went to the Planned Parenthood clinic over in Corinth. . . ”

Kinsey just looked at her.

“You want me to spell it out? ” Her sharp little face went mean. “I'm pregnant, Kinsey. I need an abortion. I need five hundred dollars! ”

Kinsey blinked. Whatever he had expected, that wasn't it. Rima had arrived in Missing Mile just a few months ago. Among local guys who had asked her out and been turned down, the word was that she carried a torch for the guitarist of a speed metal band back in her native California. So far as Kinsey knew, she hadn't been back to California recently. “Who. . . ? ” he managed.

“You don't know him, okay? ” She swiped a hand across her eyes. “An asshole who wouldn't wear a rubber because that's like taking a shower with a raincoat on. There's plenty of 'em around. They shoot their wad and that's the last thing they have to worry about! ” Now her mean face had collapsed; she was crying so hard she could barely choke out the words. “Kinsey, I slept with the wrong guy and he's not going to help me out, he won't even talk to me. And I don't want any goddamn baby, let alone his. ”

“At least tell me who. I could talk to him. There are things. . . ”

She shook her head violently. “NO! I just want to go to Raleigh and get rid of it. I won't come back to Missing Mile. I'll go to my sister's place in West Virginia, or maybe back to L. A. . . . Please, Kinsey. Just let me go. You won't see me around here again. ”

He studied her. Rima was twenty-one, he knew, but her body seemed years younger: barely five feet tall, breastless and hipless, all flat planes and sharp angles. Her straight, shiny brown hair was held back with plastic barrettes like a little girl's. He tried to imagine that childish body swollen with pregnancy, could not. The very idea was painful.

“I can't give you any money, ” he said.

“No, I wouldn't—”

“But you can take your last pay envelope. It's there on the bulletin board. ” Kinsey let go of her wrist and turned away.

“Oh, God, Kinsey, thank you. Thank you. ” She knelt and began scraping together the contents of her purse. When she had searched out everything in the dimness of the bar, she went to the bulletin board and took down her envelope. Kinsey was hardly surprised to see her glance into it as if making sure enough money was there. She turned and stared at him for a long moment, as if deciding whether to say anything else.

“Good luck, ” he told her.

Rima looked surprised, and a little guilty. Then, as if the milk of human kindness were too heady a potion for her parched soul, she spun on her heel and left without another word.

There goes my mini-vacation, Kinsey thought.

Thirty minutes later, with the lights turned up and the swampy area behind the bar half-mopped, he found the little white packet.

It was nestled in a crack in the wooden floor directly below the spot where Rima's purse had spilled. With the lights off, as they had been when Kinsey caught her, it was unlikely that she would have spotted it. Kinsey bent, picked it up, and looked at it for a long time. It didn't look like much: a tiny twist of plastic, the corner of a Baggie perhaps, with an even tinier pinch of white powder inside. No, it didn't look like much at all. But Kinsey knew it for what it was: a towering monument to his gullibility.

She could still be pregnant, he reasoned as he walked to the restroom. She really could need money for an abortion. Somebody could be giving her coke. Maybe she was even selling the shit to get the money she needed.

Yeah, right. The things she had said about the father of her embryo-if embryo there was-hardly suggested that he would be giving her free drugs. And Kinsey knew that the market for cocaine in Missing Mile was very poor indeed. You could hardly turn around without bumping into a pothead or a boozehound, and they treated psychedelics like candy, but coke was another thing. Most of the younger kids seemed to think it was boring: it didn't tell them stories or give them visions, didn't drown their pain, didn't do anything for them that a pot of strong coffee couldn't do for a fraction of the price. They would probably snort coke if it was handed to them, but they wouldn't spend their allowances on it. And most of the older townie crowd couldn't afford it even if they wanted it.

Rima, though, seemed to have had a constant low-grade cold for the last couple of months. She was always going to the restroom to blow her nose, but she always came back still sniffling. How clear was hindsight.

You could still call the cops, Kinsey told himself as his cupped palm hovered over the toilet bowl, ready to tip the little packet in. Show them this stuff. She couldn't be far out of town yet.

His hand tilted. There was a tiny splash, barely audible; the packet floated serenely on the still surface of the water.

She had every intention of ripping you off. Bust her.

His fingers found the flush lever, pushed it. There was a deafening liquid roar-Kinsey thought the plumbing in this building was of approximately the same vintage as the Confederate boardinghouses up the street-and the packet was gone.

Pregnant or not, she's in some kind of trouble. That's one thing she wasn't lying about. Why make it worse for her?

Later, mopping the floor near the stage, he glanced up at the art wall. The words WE ARE NOT AFRAID gleamed softly at him, and he knew that wherever Rima was now, whatever she was doing, those words did not hold true for her.

He could not resent letting her take her last pay, though. There was always a chance she would use the money to help herself, to get away from whatever (or whoever) had made her stash cocaine in her pocketbook and steal from people who wished her well. There was always a chance.

Yeah. And there was always a chance that John Lennon would rise from the dead and the Beatles would play a reunion show at the Sacred Yew. That seemed about as likely.

Kinsey shook his head dolefully and kept mopping.