Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  I asked, ‘Do you ever sleep?’

  ‘Not tonight. You?’

  ‘Here and there.’

  Now, as he cut back the throttle and the skiff glided into the mouth of a creek, the difference between sleep and waking seemed unimportant. With my eyes open or shut, the night was gentle and the warm breeze blew with the pleasant dizziness of a happy dream.

  Papa Crowe killed the engine and dropped a little anchor overboard. He baited the fishhooks with live shrimp, handed me a rod, and cast his own bait toward a mudflat that was gleaming in the blue moonlight. He lay on the thwart so his head rested against the gunwale, and closed his eyes. I cast my shrimp toward his and watched the water.

  Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. ‘Do you catch much?’ I asked.

  ‘This time of night, no.’ His eyes stayed closed.

  I started reeling in my bait. ‘Why bother?’

  ‘Can you think of a better place on God’s earth than right here before the sun come up?’

  ‘I don’t like fishing,’ I said, ‘and I really don’t like pretend fishing.’

  ‘Then why’d you come?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  As the moon closed on the western horizon and sunlight filtered into the sky from the east, the water surface turned slate-gray, then began to glow orange, and, as if Papa Crowe had known the timing of the world, the tip of his fishing rod bent down. He gave me a tired smile, snapped the rod to set the hook, and reeled in. When he pulled the redfish on to the aluminum floor of the boat, he struck it once on the head with a wooden club darkened with age and blood.

  ‘That it then,’ he said.

  He put the fish in a cooler, stowed the rods, and pulled the ripcord on the engine. For the next hour, as the sun rose orange and enormous, we collected crabs from pots that Papa Crowe had set in the estuaries. When he dropped the crabs into the cooler, he opened a gallon Ziploc bag, pulled out a sealed plastic container, and opened that too. The smell of putrefying meat, as bad as anything I’d smelled in the ship hold on the Arabian Sea, filled the air.

  Papa Crowe grinned at me. ‘Rotten chicken get the sweetest crabs.’

  I breathed in the death and corruption and tried to keep my mind on the gentle morning off the Florida coast instead of the nauseous underbelly of a hospital ship.

  After Papa Crowe lowered the last crab pot into the water, he turned the bow of the skiff toward the Intracoastal and opened the throttle. As we topped the swells and a salt breeze stung my face, I felt a happiness unlike any I’d felt since before my last tour of duty. The sun was rising, warming the early morning, and the light danced on the water in strange patterns. Gulls crossed the sky high above, seemingly oblivious to all but the breeze.

  For a half-hour or more, we skimmed across the Intracoastal, and then Papa Crowe hooked the boat through a gap that led to the open Atlantic.

  I yelled over the sound of the engine and the skiff-pounding water, ‘Where now?’

  He squinted into the sun and pointed toward a barrier island.

  I turned again to face the salt spray and the early morning sunlight. If we rounded the island, the sea would open for thousands of miles. I felt again the excitement that I’d felt on my first deployment, when I’d stood on the deck of a destroyer so powerful that it felt more like a monstrous machine than a boat and I’d watched the sun rise over the rolling surf.

  Now, the fins of two dolphins surfaced in the water to our left, and another to our right, and though I’d watched – from the same ship where I’d seen the sunrise – as pods of dolphins had corralled and butchered shoals of fish, these three looked as far from battles and butchery as they would if they were escorting us from dry land into a world without conflict or bloodshed. When I came back from the Arabian Sea, I thought I would be happy if I never stepped on to a boat again. But this morning, as we motored from shore, the expanse of the ocean brought me as close as I expected to come again to peace.

  Instead of continuing toward the open ocean, though, Papa Crowe angled the boat toward a densely wooded island shoreline. A mile or so up the beach, a structure that might have been a dock protruded into the water, but no other signs of human life appeared. The old man cut back the gas and we idled alongside a mudflat.

  ‘This a Gullah island,’ he said. ‘Lot of Greene and Crowe family live here still.’

  ‘I don’t see anyone.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’ He angled the boat close to the shore. ‘Used to be, after the Civil War, a Confederate general own the island. Then the general’s son shoot his own boy and kill himself too, and the general say the island got too many ghosts for him and he sell it to the Carnegie family – Carnegie steel, you know. The Carnegie, they immigrant from Scotland and no one like immigrant, even immigrant with money, and the other people with money, they say the Carnegie can’t join their club, so the Carnegie buy the island and start their own club. Everybody want something someone else got. They take it or they make it. But I tell you, the whole time, the Greene and Crowe live here and work the fields when there’re fields to work and fish when there’re fish to fish. The general’s son and grandson die, and then the general die too, and the Carnegie, they gone long time, most of them, except some grandchildren and bastards. But the Greene and Crowe still here.’

  Without warning, he hit the throttle and cut the skiff hard toward the beach. The boat shot on to a sandbar, and he killed the engine. ‘We here.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Come with me.’ He tossed the anchor over the side, climbed into knee-deep water, and trudged toward dry land. I followed and soon we stood together on the beach, the breeze bending the grass and hushing through the tall trees beyond the dunes.

  I said, ‘What are we—’

  ‘Shhh.’ He pointed at the edge of the woods. From between two longleaf pines, a tall brown animal stepped on to the sand, followed by a smaller animal. Horses – a mare and her foal. The sun glinted off their brown coats, as if they were wet from running.

  ‘What are they doing here?’

  ‘They wild.’

  The mare trotted on to the dune and the foal followed her. Then another five horses, all of them brown or gray, most with a streak of white running from their foreheads to their muzzles, emerged from the woods. Two bolted over the dune and on to the beach.

  ‘C’mon,’ Papa Crowe said, and he crossed the sand to a bleached driftwood log. We sat facing the ocean as the rest of the horses came across the dune on to the beach. Soon, four more joined them. The mare and another stood with their foals, and the others ran on the beach or nuzzled and rubbed against each other.

  ‘How many of them are on the island?’ I asked.

  ‘A hundred? Two hundred?’

  We sat, and again something like peace descended on me.

  Papa Crowe said, ‘Why you think I bring you?’

  Beyond the horses, the gentle morning surf rolled white, dropped softly on to the beach, receded, and rolled again. ‘To free me from myself?’

  ‘This place do that for you?’

  ‘Maybe it could.’

  ‘I think you mistaken. Everybody want something.’

  As he spoke, a hand reached from behind me and cold metal pressed against the skin of my neck. I jerked and tried to pull away, but the metal was a blade and the blade cut into me. I froze. I tried to speak but couldn’t.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Papa Crowe said, ‘else you cut you own fool throat.’

  I couldn’t turn to see who held the blade. ‘What the hell—’

  ‘Shhh,’ said Papa Crowe. ‘Now you know this ain’t your place. This my place. If you want to get free from yourself, you find your own place. You understand?’

  Blade against my throat, I said, ‘You’re insane.’

  ‘Do you understand?’ he asked again.

  I wanted to run. I wanted to fight. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yeah. ’Course you do.’

  The blade moved from my neck, and I spun. A woman stood behind m
e, holding a knife loosely in her fingers. Her skin had the kind of deep tan that comes from a life lived outside. Her stringy brown hair fell to her shoulders. She looked forty or so. She wore jeans and a pink cotton blouse that she’d knotted in front so that her belly showed. She was barefoot.

  ‘Johnny Bellefleur,’ Papa Crowe said, ‘meet Laura Greene.’

  ‘Glad to know you,’ the woman said. Her face was hard-featured.

  ‘You’re Sheneel and Alex’s mother?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Alex said you were in New Mexico.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Laura come home when she hear about Sheneel in trouble,’ Papa Crowe said. ‘Then Sheneel get killed and Alex get killed. So Laura stay here and she still alive so far.’

  She had intensely focused gray eyes, desperate eyes. I said, ‘Do you always introduce yourself by threatening to cut someone’s throat?’

  ‘Lately, it seems like a good idea to let people know what to expect if they come too close to me.’

  ‘I was just sitting here.’

  ‘And I didn’t cut your throat either, did I?’

  Papa Crowe said to her, ‘Johnny a good man mostly. Don’t take to jimson weed and don’t know his own place, but he a good man.’

  She said, ‘Let’s go somewhere else, get out of the open.’

  ‘What’s wrong with here?’ I said.

  But she was already climbing over the dune, heading toward the trees, her knife in her hand.

  We went after her, walking into the woods between the longleaf pines. We came to a rough path of pine needles and sand, pocked with hoof prints from the horses. Pine trees and cabbage palms shaded us and palmettos brushed our sides. As we moved inland, the path widened and we entered a grove of magnolias and live oaks with muscadine vines clinging to the trunks and Spanish moss hanging from the branches. A brown horse stood in the shade of an enormous oak as if it were sleeping. Except for the sound of our footsteps, the woods were quiet.

  ‘Does anyone live here?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure,’ said Papa Crowe, but he said no more.

  The path opened on to a large plot of weed- and grass-covered land out of which rose a big white house, pillared from the long front porch to the broad eaves, the first-floor windows and grand front door covered with plywood, the second-floor windows dark. A small white outbuilding was attached to the main house by a vine-covered breezeway.

  ‘One of the Carnegie girls live here till she die,’ said Papa Crowe.

  Laura Greene cut across the yard toward the outbuilding. She went around the side and opened an old door with a broken lock. The building housed an empty marble-tiled swimming pool. Gray, unpainted stucco walls rose to a gray, unpainted ceiling. On the narrow strip of floor next to the pool, Laura Greene had set up a camp with a pile of green-and-white striped cushions that looked salvaged from old chaise longues, a wicker basket stuffed with personal possessions, and two folding wooden chairs.

  ‘When I was a boy, I sometimes sneak in here,’ Papa Crowe said. ‘Back then, they cover the walls with pretty pictures, but they fill the pool with water from the well, and they so much sulfur in it, the air eat the paint off. Terrible smell, but I swim like a rich boy.’

  ‘Sit down if you want,’ Laura Greene said.

  Instead, Papa Crowe went to the pool, lowered himself on to the marble ladder built into the side, and climbed down.

  I remained standing. ‘Do you know why someone would kill Sheneel and Alex? Or why someone would cut Sheneel’s arm?’

  She glanced at Papa Crowe, who shook his head, and she turned back to me. ‘I know who cut it off. I did. I cut it and buried it.’

  I felt ice in my chest. ‘Why would you do that?’

  She looked at me with those desperate eyes. ‘I hadn’t seen her for three years,’ she said. ‘I talked with Alex on the phone, but I hadn’t even talked with her. When Alex called and told me the trouble she was in, I got on a bus. But it was too late.’

  ‘Why did you—’

  ‘I’d just moved into this place when she died. Alex called and told me she was dead and so I went out to see her—’

  ‘This was before the police?’

  ‘Of course. I brought my knife—’

  ‘Alex knew where Sheneel’s body was before the police did?’

  ‘How else would he have told me where to find her?’

  ‘How did he know?’

  She glanced down at Papa Crowe, who was pacing in the bottom of the empty pool. ‘Will you tell him to shut the hell up and listen?’

  Papa Crowe said, ‘Shut up and listen.’ He lay down on the marble tiles and looked at the gray ceiling as if it were the sky.

  ‘I went out to Little Marsh Island,’ Laura Greene said, ‘and I saw my baby. I saw what they did to her. Animals hadn’t gotten to her but insects had. There wasn’t much I could do. I couldn’t bury her. She was too big – I only had my knife. But she was holding one of her hands in front of her face, as if she was trying to keep the insects from her eyes and mouth, and I saw the snake that Papa Crowe had tattooed on her wrist, and I thought, I can do this much. So I used my knife and I put that part of my daughter into the ground.’

  ‘That’s kind of messed up.’

  ‘What would you know?’

  For eighteen months I had assembled the bodies that had come to a ship’s hold in vinyl bags, and had tagged the assemblages with individual soldiers’ names that I found on the dog tags in the boots if the boots hadn’t been blown away or burned. I’d done my job as if the broken bodies still had separate identities. ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘So I gathered what I could. She had ten dollars and her cell phone in her pockets. I bought cigarettes with the ten dollars and smoked them, and that’s how I mourned her passing. Is that messed up too?’

  ‘You got her cell phone?’

  ‘Yeah, I got that too.’

  ‘Someone called my office with that phone. That was you?’

  She shrugged. ‘Alex told me you’d come around asking about Sheneel. I wanted to know who you were.’

  ‘So you came back here and smoked cigarettes and played phone games?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And you didn’t report her death to the police?’

  ‘Why should I? She was gone. Nothing they could do about that.’

  ‘But they could get the person who did it.’

  ‘Oh, they already know who did it,’ she said. ‘Or if they don’t and I told them, they would do nothing about it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Stephen Phelps.’

  Again, I felt the ice that I’d felt when she’d told me she cut off Sheneel’s arm. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ll tell you who he is. When he was ten years old, his father – my Uncle Edward – sat him down and told him he had six or seven years to do anything he wanted. The Phelps money could buy him out of just about any trouble he found for himself until he came of age. Edward told Stephen to fool around with as many girls as he could, run as wild as he liked, take what he wanted, because time was short and, until he turned seventeen or eighteen, sixteen at the earliest, he would be innocent in the eyes of the law.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Because when Stephen was fifteen, he told me so himself. I was twenty and already had Alex. I was living in Jacksonville, near the river. Stephen came to my house one afternoon when he should have been in school. Alex was playing in the backyard, and Stephen sat at the kitchen table and I offered him food and soda, but he just sat there with a dumb look on his face like he was thinking about something faraway.

  ‘I stood at the counter, making him a sandwich anyway, talking about this and that, when I felt him behind me – his hands on my waist, his body pressed against me. I laughed, you know? We were cousins, though we hadn’t seen each other much since his father pushed my dad out of the paper company, and less after my dad died. So I laughed when he came up behind me,
until he reached under my dress and put his hand on me. I hit him, or tried to. I should’ve used the kitchen knife. He pulled down my underwear and raped me. My fifteen-year-old cousin.’ Her anger still burned in her eyes. ‘When he finished and let go, I fixed my dress. Alex was standing in the door, watching. He wasn’t even three. He didn’t understand what he’d seen, but he knew this was no good.

  ‘I told Alex to say goodbye to his cousin. I told him that Stephen wouldn’t be coming around anymore. But Stephen took the sandwich from the counter and sat at the table and ate it, and while he ate he told me about the lesson his father had taught him when he was just ten. He told me I could do what I liked. I could call his dad. I could call the police. It didn’t matter to him. He finished his sandwich and left the house, saying he’d come again soon.

  ‘I missed my next period, and sure enough I was pregnant. I called Uncle Edward and told him what his boy had done, but Edward laughed and said to send him the bill. That was enough to make me want to keep the baby, and I did.’

  I said, ‘Pregnant with Sheneel?’

  She nodded. ‘Papa Crowe helped me raise her. We gave her a Gullah name too. Ngafa. Bad spirit. Because if anyone ever tried anything with her, I wanted her to bite into him like a devil.

  ‘For sixteen years, I didn’t tell her who her father was. Then, about three and a half years ago, he started coming around again. Now he took interest in Sheneel. At first, I wouldn’t let him in, but he offered to help, and I needed money and he gave me some. If he wanted to pay me to get to know Sheneel, I saw no harm in it, and Sheneel, at that age, appreciated the attention. Then I saw him put a hand on Sheneel and I understood what this really was. That’s when I told Sheneel who her father was.’

  ‘He a sonofabitch,’ Papa Crowe said from the bottom of the pool.

  Laura Greene said, ‘Sheneel was furious. At me. At Stephen. I’d tried to protect her, but she thought I’d betrayed her. She moved out of the house that night. Alex was renting his place on Gum Street and he let her stay with him.

  ‘Stephen kept coming to my house. I don’t know what he wanted. I don’t think he knew either. He talked to me. I couldn’t stand hearing his voice. I told him to leave. But he talked and kept talking, like he owned my house and owned me.