Johnny yelled, ‘Papa Crowe?’
No answer.
I stepped into the kitchen. Broken plates and more broken glass covered the counter and floor. A toaster lay on its side in the sink. The refrigerator stood open, emptied of its contents – carrots, a carton of milk, a stick of butter, and a chunk of ham strewn among the wreckage.
Johnny went into the bedroom and I followed. A metal cot had been twisted and broken, the thin mattress tossed against a wall. A large trunk lay upended, clothes and a worn Bible scattered around it on the floor. On the wall, someone had painted a large blood-red snake biting its own tail, the picture still glistening and wet.
‘Christ,’ I said.
Johnny touched the snake.
‘Don’t,’ I said.
He moved close and breathed in the snake’s smell. ‘It’s not blood.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know what blood smells like.’
‘What is it, then?’
He gestured at the front room. ‘Maybe something from one of the bottles. It’s sweet.’
‘Let’s leave,’ I said.
He kicked through the clothes. He picked up the Bible. It was old, the pages yellow under the black leather cover. Three bookmarks – made from the small striped feathers of a blue jay – stuck from the top. Johnny opened to one of them. He read, ‘I will lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence shall my help come?’ He looked at me.
‘Where does it say help comes from?’
‘It used to say, from the Lord, but that’s scratched out, and Papa Crowe wrote his own answer.’
‘Which is?’
Johnny raised his eyes to mine. ‘No help nowhere.’
THIRTY-FOUR
Johnny
That night, I grilled salmon steaks on the patio. Lillian drank white wine until she was drunk, and I downed two more beers than I should have, even without meds. As the sun dropped and the city darkened, a crescent moon rose and, with it, off its lower blade, Venus or Mars or one of the planets that shines brighter than the stars in the night sky. Lillian moved her chair close, and if I held her hand in mine and focused my eyes on the moon so that the rest of the sky disappeared, I could forget everything that had happened since I shipped out to the Arabian Sea.
I said, ‘I don’t need to believe in fictions if they believe in me.’
‘What does that mean?’ Lillian asked.
‘It means I need another beer.’
We stayed on the patio until nearly midnight, blotting out thoughts of Sheneel Greene, her brother and mother, Papa Crowe, the Phelpses, Peter Lisman – everyone but us.
Then, in the dark, by the fence at the back of the yard, Percy began whining.
‘Did he catch something?’ Lillian said.
I got up and found him curled against the fence, panting hard, his stomach distended. ‘Hey,’ I said, but when I reached for him, he tried to bite me. I made calming sounds and moved toward him, and now he let me. I carried him to the patio and inside to the kitchen, then set him on the cool tile floor.
Lillian got towels from the hall closet. As she wrapped them around him, I walked back outside with a flashlight.
A few feet from where he had been lying, I found the rotten, half-eaten remains of a blackbird. I got a shovel from the shed, dug a hole deep into the sandy soil, and scooped the bird into it. Once before, I had buried a sparrow that had bounced off the glass of the sunroom door, and Percy had dug it up again. I’d buried it a second time, eighteen inches or more below the surface, but he’d dug at it like an old scab until we’d put a potted Satsuma orange tree on top of it, and even then Percy had paused by the tree as if he could smell the old stink of death.
Now, I went to the patio, pried out a concrete paver, carried it to where I’d buried the blackbird, and dropped it on the ground.
When I went back into the kitchen, Lillian was lying on the tile, cradling Percy. Percy had fallen into a heavy-breathing sleep, but Lillian’s eyes were wide and watchful. I said, ‘I’ll get you a blanket if you want to stay here.’
She pulled herself from the dog. ‘I want to stay with you.’
Later, as we slept, I fell hard into a dark, dreamless space, deeper than exhaustion. When I had muttered about fictions believing in me, I should have said that I had always needed Lillian to believe me, or at least needed to believe that she believed me. Tonight I believed that. She held me, cradled me, sick dog that I also was, and I fell into the tunnel of sleep. I fell, knowing that Lillian was holding me. If I crashed, we would crash together.
Hours later, when a dim light fell on my face and pulled me toward consciousness, I smiled under the sheet without opening my eyes. This was the first time in weeks that the morning sun had shined me awake. I felt the warmth of Lillian beside me and wished for this kind of peace always.
But when I pulled back the cover and opened my eyes, no sunlight met them. Instead, a man stood at the foot of our bed, aiming a flashlight at me. I listened. Lillian still slept. The silence of the house except for the man’s thin breathing terrified me. Behind the flashlight beam, he was a shadow.
I said, ‘Who is that?’
‘It me,’ Papa Crowe said.
His voice should have relieved me but didn’t. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Don’t feel so good for another man to walk into your house without you asking, do it?’
‘What are you doing?’ I asked again, and reached to turn on the bedside lamp.
‘Don’t move,’ he said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous—’
A gun blasted at the foot of the bed, and wallboard dust rained into my face and my eyes like flecks of night. I yelled into the roar.
Lillian woke and got to the lamp on her side. The room lighted up. Papa Crowe stood in front of us in jeans and a red T-shirt. He held his revolver in one hand – I’d left it on the dresser when Lillian and I had gone to bed – and a yellow flashlight in the other.
Lillian said, ‘What the hell?’
Papa Crowe fixed his eyes on hers. ‘I see the two of you leave my land this afternoon. You wreck my house—’
‘You saw what?’ I asked.
‘I come across the marsh behind my house in my johnboat, and you step off the porch, go through the yard, get in your car, and drive away. When I tie my boat and go in, I see what you do. I swear to God I don’t understand.’
‘We didn’t do that,’ Lillian said, her voice hushed.
‘Like hell you didn’t.’ He pointed the gun at her.
When he had loaned me the gun, he’d given me four bullets. He’d shot one, and Lillian had shot another on Daniel’s dock. Unless he’d brought more ammunition, that left him one each for Lillian and me. ‘Why would we do that to you?’ I asked.
‘That what I don’t understand.’
‘We went to your house because we wanted to talk to you.’
‘And you walk in and tear it apart.’
‘The door was open. I saw the damage through a window. We thought you might be inside and hurt.’
He didn’t believe it. ‘So you come in to help me?’
‘That’s right.’
‘No,’ he said. He pointed the barrel of the revolver at the wall and pulled the trigger again. Lillian screamed, and dust rained down on us. He tossed the revolver on to the bed sheet between my legs. ‘The last one is for you to put a hole in your own head.’
He moved toward the door, but I said, ‘Why did you lie about the kitchen fire?’
He turned and stared at me with hard eyes.
‘Your wife, Avis, died,’ I said. ‘You pulled Cecilia and Stephen Phelps out of the fire.’
‘Yeah.’ His voice was small.
‘What was Cecilia Phelps to you? Who did you try to save first? Her or your wife?’
That stung him. ‘You way off, boy.’
‘Is this why you won’t get rid of Edward and Stephen yourself? Would she keep coming to see you if you put down her husband and boy?’
Lillian sat up against the headboard and pulled her knees against her chest. She eyed him as if she was trying to see inside. ‘Who is Peter Lisman?’
Papa Crowe looked at her and screwed his lips. He seemed to be trying to square our questions with his belief that we’d torn apart his house. ‘You know who he is. He work for the—’
‘Yeah, he works for them,’ she said. ‘But who is he?’
‘I don’t know,’ Papa Crowe said.
She said, ‘We can find out in public records. They’ll say where he came from. They’ll explain why he killed his father.’
‘He was juvenile. The records is sealed.’
‘We would rather hear from you,’ she said.
He ran a hand along his face. ‘His daddy, Aaron, he one of Edward Phelps’s cousins.’
‘And?’
He hesitated again. ‘And he a bad man. He make Edward and Stephen look like gentlefolk. He beat Peter till Peter kill him.’
‘Who’s his mother?’ Lillian said.
‘Peter’s? She live in an apartment in Fernandina,’ he said.
I said, ‘That’s not his mother.’
Again, his hand rubbed his face. For a long while, he said nothing. When he spoke, he spoke quietly. ‘Miss Cecilia only fourteen when Aaron Lisman take her. I know her then myself. She live with her family on Ash Street. She a beautiful girl, and Aaron, he a strong man and one of the Phelps clan, and what she going to do? When she have the baby, her daddy give it to Aaron and tell him this his bastard, he bring it up and feed it. Aaron could’ve killed Cecilia’s daddy right then – he done it for less – but he take the baby home with him and start beating it before it cut its first teeth.’
I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
‘What’s it matter?’ he said. ‘That woman, she been beat enough. She mine to worry about.’
Lillian said, ‘Cecilia knows who Peter is?’
‘Sure. You look at that white face.’
‘And Edward knows?’ she asked.
‘The Phelpses and Greenes have the sickness of some kind. It in the blood – and the soul too, I think. It show in about one out of a hundred – make a body white like Sheneel and Peter. Sometimes it make them stupid. Sometime it make them mean.’
‘Peter knows that Cecilia is his mother?’ Lillian said.
‘Sure.’
I said, ‘Why are you protecting her?’
‘Why you wreck my house?’
‘We didn’t,’ I said.
‘Who, then?’
I said, ‘What would someone be searching for in your house?’
‘That no search. That pissing in my well. That telling me to be gone.’
Lillian asked, ‘What do you mean, No help nowhere?’
‘You break in and you been reading my book too?’
I said, ‘What do you mean by it – No help nowhere?’
‘I mean what it say. No help come to you. You make it happen or it don’t happen. You wait on the Lord to do your work, the Lord knock you down and call you the lazy-for-nothing that you is. You wait on your neighbor, the bus never come. You ain’t helpless. What you asking others for?’
I said, ‘What’s really between you and Cecilia Phelps?’
His voice was small again. ‘We both lose somebody.’
Lillian said, ‘You lost your wife. She lost her baby.’
‘The baby? Yeah, she lose the baby. So I lay my hands on her. I hold her.’
‘And she holds you?’ Lillian said.
He shook his head. ‘No. I never let that woman touch me.’
I thought about the comfort that Lillian had given me as we’d fallen asleep a few hours earlier. ‘You help her, then,’ I said. ‘You bring it to her.’
He shook his head. ‘I ain’t helping her. She past help. I help myself mostly. Cecilia start the fire that kill my wife. Now every time I lay hands on her, I take my fingers up and down her throat. I use to think someday I break her neck, but I never do it. It better to hold her life in my hands like that. It better to watch her suffer and to have her coming to me for something and for me to choose if I want to pity her and give it to her. Her family take so much from me for so many years, I never give this up.’
THIRTY-FIVE
Stephen Phelps
Four seagulls turned with the wind above the construction lot – a hundred yards inland, the way they do when a storm is coming. But no storm was coming. Sunny morning – me sitting on the stoop of the trailer with a shotgun, Felicity inside cooking something that smelled like burnt electric wires. I spotted each gull in the sight. But no one eats seagull, not even a dog.
Baby, it’s ready. Felicity. Inside.
When a woman cooks a meal that smells like burnt electric wires, best to stay outside.
Baby, it’s—
Blackbird. On the roof of the backhoe. Dropping down to the sandy dirt. Looking for what? No food here.
But I was on my feet, charging like a goddamned soldier after the goddamned bird. Squeezing off one shot. Two. Three – and a spray of black feathers.
It wanted to fly. But with one wing gone? It spun into the air and crashed on the ground. I got to it, picked it up. It weighed almost nothing. Pecked my palm. I broke its neck.
Its little breastbone and ribcage – like a box. What little gifts, what diamond rings and ancient coins wouldn’t fit in such a box? A knife slice, and three Paxil tablets from Kathryn’s medicine cabinet melted into the blood and organs. Bitter meat but meat nonetheless.
Poor blackbird. Shot and then poisoned. Never fly again – unless launched in the night over the fence behind Johnny Bellefleur’s yard.
What dog could refuse?
Not theirs.
A whine and a yip. Poor dog.
One down, two to go.
After the words and whispers, the shovel scraping the dirt, and more whispers – silence. Light off in the kitchen. Light off in the bedroom.
Over the fence I tumbled. Following the blackbird.
I sat in the yard, waited. I wanted them asleep – so deep that they would hear no sound as I approached their bed, so far away that their dreams would change the first touch of the screwdriver on their necks into a cold pendant necklace, a sexual fingernail.
Waited.
Midnight.
One o’clock.
Two o’clock.
Time to give her a cold pendant, him a fingernail.
I stood, stretched. Jogged in place. Breathed deep in, out, in. Started across the lawn – almost whistling I was so happy.
Stopped.
Like a hand held my shoulder. Like Dad slapped me.
No hand. No slap. But a pair of eyes by the fence gate. A man – skinny, dark – watching me. Nightmare eyes. Arresting eyes.
My imagination? My creeping cowardice?
I started across again.
The man said, ‘Get you home, boy.’
I knew the voice. Hated it. But in the night, screwdriver in my hand?
‘Get you gone,’ the man said.
I ran at him. Thinking about the soft spot under the breastbone.
Bastard stood where he was. The night was his own. The yard, his own. Me, his own.
I stopped. Eye to eye with Papa Crowe. I said, ‘I could kill you.’
He said, ‘But won’t.’ He unlatched the gate. ‘Go on! Get!’ Like I was a dog.
‘What are you going to do to them?’
‘I take care of it. This no place for you.’
‘I need to do this.’
‘It ain’t yours. It been mine since before you born.’ He stepped toward me. I could stab him or I could run. ‘Get on home,’ he said.
I went through the gate. I stood in the front yard. Waited.
Heard one gunshot. Two.
I grinned, laughe
d, whistled.
Was I sorry Papa Crowe did the job I’d come to do? A little. No shame in that.
THIRTY-SIX
Lillian
Papa Crowe drifted out of our house around four-thirty. Johnny’s eyes were wide, his face pale. We sat in bed, silent, the lamps on for a half-hour. Then I got up and checked Percy. He was sleeping where I’d left him, but the towels had fallen from his body, and a puddle of vomit was drying on the tile by the oven. I sat by him on the floor and petted him as he slept.
Johnny came from the bedroom, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. He looked at me, looked at the puddle of vomit, then went to the refrigerator, poured a glass of orange juice, and sat at the kitchen table. He watched me pet Percy and asked, ‘Is he still breathing?’
Johnny finished the juice, closed his eyes, and crossed his arms over his chest as if he would sleep sitting in the chair. The sun rose, graying the sky outside the kitchen window. Maybe traffic was filling on the roads throughout the city and in our yard birds were singing, but in the kitchen the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator and, now and then, a clicking of the plumbing in the walls.
When Johnny abruptly opened his eyes, as if frightened by the quiet, I asked, ‘What?’
‘Get dressed,’ he said.
As the sun came higher into the sky, we drove back to Little Marsh Island. Egrets flew across the road from swamp to swamp, their stark white feathers flashing against trees and grasses, or stood sentinel-still in the shallows, watching for fingerling fish.
The chain was down on the sandy service road to the construction site, and, as we approached, three dump trucks pulled on to it, the empty metal dumping-beds thundering against the undercarriages. A red sedan stood on the shoulder of the road as the trucks entered.
A half-mile past the entrance, we pulled to the side and hiked back. Johnny carried the revolver in his waistband, his T-shirt hanging over it. When we were a couple of hundred yards from the service road, Johnny walked through the long grass on the shoulder and on to an overgrown path that angled through the trees. We ducked under a tangle of branches and vines and continued over sandy soil covered with pine needles and rotting leaves. When Johnny saw a small pool of brown water, he left the path, dipped a finger in it, and brought it to his mouth.
Second Skin Page 25
