Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  ‘What’s it like?’ I asked.

  ‘Terrible.’

  Then the path turned to the left and opened into a sandy clearing. ‘This is where Peter Lisman says he found Sheneel,’ Johnny said. A gray tarp, stretching over two tent poles, hung near the center. Two blue duffel bags weighed down the edges. A pair of jeans, a bra, and a pair of underpants were draped on the side that the sun was shining on. Laura Greene sat on a long log in front of a little campfire. She wore dusty pink shorts and a grimy yellow T-shirt with a logo for the Atomic Cantina. She was smoking a cigarette and talking to herself.

  She looked startled when she saw us and said, ‘What do you want?’

  Johnny and I glanced at each other. He asked her, ‘Where does the water turn salty?’

  She looked confused and asked, ‘Why do you have a gun?’

  Johnny touched the revolver. ‘It’s Papa Crowe’s. He loaned it to me.’

  ‘Who are you going to shoot with it?’

  I asked, ‘Why are you here?’

  She looked at me as if I didn’t belong. ‘I need to see them do it.’

  ‘What?’

  She got up and walked into the woods. Barefoot, she stepped through the bramble and scrub. We followed as she pushed through the branches for a hundred yards or so until she reached the chain-link fence that surrounded the construction site. I stopped. On the work site, a crew was starting to frame the processing plant. The large crane swung an iron I-beam across the concrete slab, and a group of men in orange vests and white hardhats looked at a large diagram that they had spread across the hood of a pickup truck. Toward the marsh, a backhoe dug a trench. At the trailer where Johnny and I had talked with the prostitute, a man, tucking his shirt into his pants, stepped on to the makeshift wooden stairs from inside. The prostitute’s head stuck out of the door and she looked across the site where the men were working as if she was searching for someone in particular. When she faced me, over the space of rough sand and weed, she hesitated – and I felt that she saw me – before disappearing into the trailer and closing the door.

  I hurried away along the fence until I saw Johnny standing with Laura Greene. In front of them, outside a section of fence that had been removed, a square-sided pit that could have seated a building the size of a one-car garage had been cut cleanly into the marsh. Except for a swill of brackish water and white froth and foam at the bottom, it might have served as a grave for an enormous animal.

  Johnny pulled the revolver from his waistband, handed it to me, and, before I could stop him, lowered himself into the pit, stumbling in the ankle-deep muck. When he got his balance, he looked up through the glaring sunlight and smiled, as if this was the place he had longed to be. He dipped his hand in the water and brought a finger to his mouth again.

  ‘Salt?’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’

  Laura Greene said, ‘This is why Sheneel died. And Alex too. Sheneel found out what the Phelpses had done in Georgia at the Garden House. They’re digging there now too. I’ve been to see it.’

  I said, ‘The government ordered the Phelpses to clear the topsoil.’

  ‘That’s scraping and cleaning, not digging. Yesterday morning, they went in with shovels. I watched them pulling them out.’

  Johnny scrambled up the sandy side of the pit. His shoes and pants were wet and filthy, and when he wiped sweat from his forehead, he left a mark like a bruise. He cleaned his hands on the sides of his pants, and I gave him the revolver.

  Laura Greene stepped close to him, gestured at the revolver, and said, ‘You have the plantation gun. I went to Papa Crowe’s house looking for it after I saw what the Phelpses were doing in Georgia. But the gun wasn’t there. You had it. You do it.’

  ‘I’ll do what I need to do,’ Johnny said.

  She gave him the smile of a lover who shared a secret. ‘I think you will.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said, and asked her, ‘When did you look for the gun at Papa Crowe’s house?’

  She kept her eyes on Johnny. ‘I told you. After I saw the Phelpses digging at the Garden House. Yesterday morning.’

  ‘Did you wreck his home?’

  ‘I might have, a little.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When I couldn’t find the gun, I knew Papa Crowe wouldn’t face what’s real. He would never use the gun himself. He’s been sleeping for more than thirty years. I wanted to wake him up and make him angry.’

  ‘I think you succeeded,’ I said.

  She said to Johnny, ‘If you don’t want to use the gun, give it to me.’

  Johnny looked at the revolver. Its wooden grip fit neatly in his hand. Its cylinder held a single bullet. He looked back at Laura Greene. ‘I’ll do it.’

  She smiled, closed-lipped. ‘All right.’ She started back along the fence.

  I called after her, ‘Why did you draw the snake on Papa Crowe’s wall?’

  But she was gone.

  I looked at the pit, looked at Johnny. ‘What did you just agree to do?’

  He said nothing, but stuck the revolver into his waistband.

  A half-hour later, we drove across the Georgia border, exited on to a strip lined with gas stations, an auto body shop, a tire shop, and a Hardee’s, and drove into an area of old lumber roads lined with timber and pulp pines. We drove until we reached a trail where heavy machinery had recently broadened the road shoulder and cleared the trees at the edge of the forest.

  We parked and walked a quarter-mile or so, following tire and tractor tread marks down through a thick grove and up an incline. A woodpecker hammered against the upper trunk of a tree, went silent as we passed, and started hammering again.

  At the top of the incline, we found the charred remains of a house. The ashes were fresh. The first wind would blow them through the woods.

  ‘That was the Garden House,’ Johnny said.

  Fifteen yards away, the blackened corrugated-metal roof of a carport rested on the burnt remains of a car.

  Down a long slope from the second fire, there was another newly dug pit, larger and rougher than the one outside the Phelps construction site. The machinery that had dug it had piled the dirt at the edge of a narrow creek, forcing the water out of the creek bed and through the surrounding vegetation.

  We stepped into the pit. The sandy loam was dry, and broken tree roots twisted into the open air like mangled fingers. The air just three feet below the surrounding land felt cool and smelled of old earth. On a hot night, one could lie in the dark under the lace of branches and breathe a deep and familiar comfort.

  Johnny reached into the soil between two roots and pulled out a broken piece of an old green-glass Coke bottle. I kicked the loam under my feet. Fragments of shell were mixed with the dirt and sand. I pulled out a rusted can lid.

  We prodded the sides of the pit without finding anything more. But as I climbed out, Johnny picked up a white object: bone – a circular chunk, a couple of inches long, sawed clean on either end, a hole straight through where there once was marrow.

  ‘Let me see,’ I said.

  He gave it to me like a fragile thing.

  I turned it over in my hands. ‘Beef bone,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s too big for a person. This came from a butcher.’ I threw it back into the pit. ‘Let’s go.’

  He remained where he was, scuffed the dirt with the toes of his shoes.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said again.

  But he bent and pulled another thing from the dirt, something small, which he held in his palm, spat on, and wiped clean on his shirt.

  ‘What is it?’

  He put it in my hand. It was a golden ring for a man’s finger – cut, twisted, and shaped like a little coiled rope. I wiped it on my shirt too. It was old but it came away polished brilliant.

  He took it back from me and slid it on to his middle finger.

  ‘We go tonight?’ I asked.

  He gazed at the ring. ‘Yeah.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Joh
nny

  Papa Crowe stood with me on his front porch. When I knocked, he looked broken and small as he swept the glass from the floor of his front room. Now, holding the broom as if it could prop him up, he glanced into the sky, then down to my car where Lillian waited in the front seat. ‘What she do there?’

  ‘She doesn’t trust you after you broke into our house.’

  ‘I know how she feel.’

  He had swept the debris into piles and rescued various dried leaves and powders, sorting them into little mounds on the wooden table on the porch, but the syrups and oils that he’d kept lidded in jars and stoppered in soda bottles had soaked into the flooring.

  I decided to let Laura Greene tell him that she did the ransacking. I showed him the gold-rope ring. ‘Do you recognize this?’

  He looked stunned. ‘Where you get that?’

  ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘That my uncle’s.’

  ‘The one who disappeared from Garden House with his family?’

  ‘He don’t disappear. He walk off. I see them go.’

  ‘Where did they walk off to?’

  He said, ‘Where you get it?’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘It was a night the Phelpses send their men to clear the property, which they lie and say they own, though we be living there a hundred years. Bunch of security men in blue jackets, they come with baseball bats and axe handles and a can of gasoline. My uncle get my aunt and my cousins and the children together, the twelve of them, and he say they leaving, they going where no one can kick them around or burn their house – my daddy say they go across the ocean even if it only Atlanta – and they walk through the woods and out to the road, and that it for them, they gone.’

  ‘What did the Phelps men do?’

  ‘Nothing. My daddy and me and the others, we not ready to go. We leave the next week, except my cousin Mary and her boy stay till they get the cancer and die. The Phelpses only come to scare us this time. They do the business later. These men follow my uncle through the woods to the road. They shoot their guns in the air. They don’t want no blood or mud on their pretty jackets, not this time.’

  ‘They followed your uncle to the road?’

  ‘That the last we see of the Phelpses for about three days.’

  ‘I found the ring down by the creek at Garden House.’

  ‘I don’t think that likely,’ he said. ‘My aunt give my uncle that ring, and there ain’t nothing he love more except his children and her and maybe the house where they grow up.’

  The ring felt warm and heavy on my finger, clean of the sand and dirt that I’d dug it out of. ‘Did you ever dump trash by the creek?’

  ‘Why would we do that? We drink that water. Man don’t defecate in his own kitchen sink.’

  ‘The Phelpses have been back on the land in the last couple of days. They burned Garden House and the carport. They dug a big hole by the creek. We found old garbage in it, and I found the ring.’

  ‘How big a hole?’

  ‘Big. You could put this house in it, or almost.’

  ‘Deep?’

  ‘Not so deep. Three feet. In some places, four.’

  He thought about that and his forehead moistened with sweat. He asked quietly, ‘What else you find?’

  ‘Bottle glass. A can lid. A beef bone.’

  He thought. ‘Horse.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Horse bone, not cow.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Metal, glass, bone. Horse bone – bone that carry a man’s weight. Heavy things. Hard things. You bury them with your dead. Things that don’t disappear back into the earth over-quick.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Mary and her boy must’ve buried those things in their last days.’ His voice was quiet and sad. ‘The rest of us already run off – to Fernandina or Savannah or Jacksonville.’

  ‘Did the Phelps security men catch up with your uncle and the others on the road?’

  ‘Must’ve done.’

  ‘Mary didn’t report it when the Phelpses brought them back?’

  ‘Maybe she did. Maybe no one believe her. Maybe she and her boy sick and dying, and she think it all the same anyway. They soon be where the others go.’ He began sweeping the porch, though it was already clean. Sometimes if you don’t put your hands to work, they’ll start shaking. He asked, his eyes elsewhere, ‘They burn Garden House now, do they?’

  ‘It’s just ash.’

  He stopped sweeping and looked hard at me.

  I stepped off the porch.

  He dropped the broom on to the planking and came after me. ‘Give the ring to me.’

  I balled my fist.

  ‘It don’t belong to you,’ he said.

  I stared at him.

  ‘Goddamn it, give it to me.’ Then his voice softened. ‘It all I have.’

  I twisted the ring from my finger as if I was uncoiling the golden rope, and I laid it in his hand.

  At noon, Lillian and I pulled up to the security booth at the Phelps Paper Company headquarters. The white factory buildings and silos stood bright and still in the sun. The single smoke stack pumped sweet white chemical smoke into the sky. I wondered how many decades the factory would need to be gone before the stink washed into the soil and streams.

  The Hispanic woman in the security booth wore a white open-collared blouse under her blue blazer, and I wondered too how long she stood in the shower at night to get rid of the smell, and whether, when she climbed into bed with a lover after she cleaned herself, she brought the poisonous odor with her.

  I had last seen the security guard months earlier, but she seemed to recognize me. I told her that Lillian and I were there to see Edward and Stephen Phelps. In case the Phelpses wanted to turn us away, as they almost certainly would, I added, ‘Tell them we’ve come about the hole at the Garden House.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘They’ll know what it is.’

  Ten minutes later, Bob Peterson, head of security, met us outside the main building. He had rolled up the sleeves on his shirt so his muscles showed. I’d tucked Papa Crowe’s revolver under the front seat of the car so I looked like no threat at all. He led us through the maze of hallways, past Stephen Phelps’s office, to a suite where a blond ponytailed secretary sat across a large room from a long light-stained pinewood conference table that must have been meant to remind everyone of the origins of the paper and pulp processing business. The secretary smiled blandly as Peterson led us through to Edward Phelps’s office and left us there. Inside, Edward Phelps sat at a pinewood desk. Stephen Phelps, looking pale and nervous, sat across the room on a brown leather couch. If Lillian and I faced either father or son, the other would have our backs. That was week-one Navy armed-strategy training. I crossed the room to a floor-to-ceiling window, which neatly framed the end of a factory building and the smokestack behind it, and made the Phelpses turn to look at me. Lillian repositioned one of the chairs at Edward Phelps’s desk so that she faced me. The Phelpses couldn’t look at both of us either.

  Edward Phelps smiled at that.

  I said, ‘If I had a really dirty secret, the kind that could bring me down and make my sons and daughters and grandkids want to change their names, I would bury it deep in the Georgia woods.’

  Edward Phelps dropped the smile.

  Lillian said, ‘It would seem safe there. For a while. You could even draw a toxic metal circle around it. Who would dare to go near it? But you would worry. If the secret was so bad that it could make your kids and grandkids want to change their names, you might think it would take on a life of its own, no matter how deep you buried it.’

  ‘It could tear a man’s family apart,’ I said. ‘It might lead his wife to try to kill herself. Being around a lot of death, if that’s what the secret involved, can make a person want to die – even if the person isn’t responsible.’

  Edward Phelps said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I th
ink we do,’ I said.

  Stephen said, ‘Dad—’

  Edward spun on him. ‘Shut up.’

  I said, ‘This morning, we drove up to the land where Papa Crowe and his family used to live. Looks like you wanted to do some clean-up before the court-ordered work. Your people did a pretty good job, but they missed a few things. Thirty-one years is a long time, but not in good dry, sandy soil. Glass or metal or bone could probably last hundreds of years before crumbling.’

  Stephen Phelps said to his father, ‘If you won’t, I will.’

  Edward Phelps looked at Lillian. ‘Your husband came home from his last tour in bad shape. Broken. What wouldn’t you do to help him? And what wouldn’t he do for you? You know what happened on his ship. You know what his job was. But, still, here you are with him, and I’ll bet you still kiss those hands that crammed the dead soldiers into bags. And your husband knows about your friend Tom Corfield – I made sure he found out – but, still, here he is with you.’

  ‘Stop it,’ she said.

  He said, ‘Some of us are less perfect than others. But I’ll tell you something that’s true. What happened to those people in Georgia happened because of fear and love, not meanness.’

  ‘What happened?’ Lillian asked.

  Stephen Phelps stood up and said, ‘Enough.’ He held a black pistol in his hand.

  Edward Phelps put his fingers on his lips and looked resigned.

  ‘Enough and enough,’ Stephen said.

  Lillian said, ‘Too much.’

  He glared at her. ‘We gave you every chance. All you had to do was walk away.’

  ‘And what will you do now?’ I said. ‘Shoot us in your dad’s office?’

  He glared at me too, then fished in his pocket for a cell phone, dialed, and said, ‘We’re ready.’

  Lillian and I exchanged a look. If we rushed Stephen Phelps, we might surprise him into shooting wildly or doing nothing at all. But we stayed where we were, and, seconds later, Bob Peterson entered the office with a pistol that matched Stephen Phelps’s.

  Peterson looked at Edward Phelps for a cue, but the old man gazed down at his desk. Peterson turned to Stephen Phelps, who simply nodded.

  Peterson pointed his gun at me and then at Lillian. ‘Let’s go.’