Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

  He raised his head, tilted his hat back. He didn’t look quite so homely in the pleasant glow of the oil lamp. “What?”

  “I think two ulterior motives cancel each other out.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.” She sat up, reached over, cupped her hand behind the glass chimney of the oil lamp, and blew out the flame.

  10

  The lime grove reverberated. Three shots-Emily had placed the pistol in the whore’s hand for the third, and pressed the whore’s forefinger against the trigger so her hand would test positive for gunshot residue. Lewis had his back turned; he looked out over the grove, the low, tangled silhouettes of the trees, the sharp-smelling limes, the cold silver starlight. The grass was wet. He remembered coming there with his father when he was a boy, and being told the story of how his grandfather had given the grove away to the people of St. Luke.

  “Lew, over here!” Emily, in a sharp whisper. “Hurry up.”

  He was squeezing the bottle of rum by the neck. The cap was still screwed on, but somehow the bottle had almost emptied itself. He took a jolt, turned back. Shea’s body lay prone atop Angela, his head resting on her chest. She was still on her back. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was open-she was hyperventilating fiercely, but not otherwise struggling. Phil had stretched her right arm out and was pinning it to the blanket with both hands. Emily guided Lewis around, positioned him, kneeling, just to the left of Angela’s head. He turned his Dolphins cap back to front.

  Angela opened her eyes, looked past Lewis. Instead of closing her eyes again when Bennie raised the machete, she looked straight up at Lewis. Their eyes met; her eyes seemed to sink into their sockets. They melted, they morphed, and in the instant between the moment the machete began its swift descent and the moment it struck bone with a dull thwack (the sound having been absorbed by the soft ground beneath the blanket), he saw the ram’s eyes staring up at him from her face. He moaned and tried to pull away, but Emily was behind him, forcing his head down with one hand, shining the flashlight on the severed wrist with the other.

  “Wait for it,” she said. She’d learned to anticipate the dying exhalation by timing the arterial spurt. “Wait…wait…”

  The spurt of night black blood slowed to a dribble. “Now!” Emily pinched Angela’s nostrils shut. Lewis closed his eyes and covered Angela’s mouth with his. There was no death rattle; he felt a gentle pressure, a puff of moist coppery breath, which he sucked into his lungs as if it were a toke of rain forest chronic or freebase cocaine. When he opened his eyes, the eyes staring up at him from the dead whore’s face were those of the dead whore again. Angela. Angela Martin. From Montserrat.

  And Lewis felt…nothing. The experience was nothing. The dying breath was only a breath. Emily was crazy. They were all crazy. Going around killing people, hacking off hands. For nothing. For a breath.

  He took the flashlight from Emily and climbed to his feet. The knees of his white duck trousers were wet from the grass. He shined the flashlight around, looking for the bottle of Reserve he’d dropped. Emily stood up, swaying slightly. Her cheeks were flushed, her decollete bosom was heaving, and she was grinning crookedly, showing her chipped front tooth and looking for all the world like a woman who’s just had a screaming orgasm. Beyond her, Lewis saw the bottle winking in the grass, reflecting the flashlight beam. Lewis pushed past Emily, picked it up. Empty. He started to throw it across the field. Strong hands grabbed his arm, forced the bottle out of his hand.

  “I have a swell idea,” said Phil, his voice dripping with irony. “As long as we’re in this together, what do you say we not leave behind a bottle with your fingerprints all over it.”

  In this together, Lewis’s mind echoed dully, as Emily broke off an overhead branch and began sweeping her way backward, away from the blanket, obscuring their footprints. Together. Bennie finished wiping down the gun and the machete. Together. Phil and Bennie placed the former in the dead woman’s left hand and the latter in the dead man’s. Together. The four of them left the grove, circled back through the periphery and around to the road, climbed back into the black Land Rover. Together. They drove south along the dundo road until the stars appeared overhead again.

  Chapter Eight

  1

  Monday morning rolled around again. Holly slapped the alarm clock into submission. “Kids!”

  No answer.

  “Schoolday. Wakey wakey.”

  No answer. She furled the mosquito net, grabbed her bathrobe off the back of the chair, slipped it on, padded barefoot across the cabin, peered into the kids’ room. They were both in Marley’s bed. Holly wondered whether she should say anything to them about phasing out this same bed stuff. And at what age would it no longer be healthy for them even to continue sharing a bedroom? Her instinct told her puberty, which for Marley was still a couple years away. Her instinct’s track record told her she’d better start asking around, gathering opinions.

  “Aroint, you varlets,” said Holly. That was how her father (a public school English teacher, and as secular as his father had been religious) used to wake up Holly and her sister. Someday, she promised herself, she was going to look up aroint in the dictionary, see what the hell it meant.

  Marley seemed distracted all through breakfast. He played with his cereal, stirring swirls with a spoon held between his toes, blowing bubbles into his hot chocolate (he could manipulate a cup or glass with his feet if he had to, but preferred to drink through a straw). When it came time to leave for school, he needed to be reminded twice to take his book bag, and during the ride he was uncharacteristically quiet in the backseat. Holly asked him if anything was wrong.

  He caught her eye in the mirror, jerked his head toward Dawn, in the front seat. “Ater-lay,” he said.

  When they reached the school, Dawn hit the ground running and joined her friends, who’d chalked a hopscotch square on the sidewalk at the base of the front steps while they waited for the doors to open. Marley climbed into the front seat.

  “So what’s going on?” inquired Holly, as she helped him hang his book bag crossways, around his neck and athwart his chest.

  “I heard you talkin’ with Dawson about the Machete Man yesterday morning.”

  Shit. “Did you tell Dawn?”

  “No. But we got to get a gun. I tried Special Agent Pender’s last night, an’ I can do it, Auntie, I can shoot it.”

  “I see.” Holly bent her forehead to his; they looked into each other’s eyes and breathed each other’s breath-this was the Honi, a ritual Hawaiian gesture she’d learned at Esalen. Marley had obviously failed to brush after breakfast-she could smell cereal and hot chocolate on his breath-but now didn’t seem like the right time to mention it. (Timing and forbearance: two niceties some parents, Holly’s own mother included, never learned.)

  “I’ll ask around,” she said. “And in the meantime, I’m also going to ask around, see if anybody on the island teaches kickboxing. Just to tide you over.”

  “You’re the best, Auntie.” He kissed her on the cheek, hopped out of the bus, executed a karate kick with one bare foot, then the other. “Pow,” he said. “Take dot, Machete Mon-right in the tessicals.”

  GPM, thought Holly. Good Parenting Move. She told herself she was starting to get the hang of this thing. Of course, Marley hadn’t reached puberty yet. Tek pride was the St. Luke term: he ain’ tek pride yet. That’s when the going really got tough, everybody said. She could only hope she’d be ready when the time came.

  2

  It was snowing in Lewis’s dream. Gray snow. Thick gray snow falling silently from a darkened daytime sky. A voice called come inside before ya burn ya feet off. That’s when he realized it wasn’t snow, it was ash. The volcano had blown. He ran for the house, a wooden shack painted flesh pink, its roof already obscured. But he couldn’t make headway-the ashes were up to his shins. Skin sloughed from his feet, flesh melted from his calves…he could see white bone through the ash…he slogged toward the shack…peculiar how
there was no pain…now he was teetering, tiptoeing on the stumps of his ankles like a ballerina en pointe…he wasn’t going to make it…the ash was high, higher, choking him….

  “Mistah Lewis.”

  He opened his eyes. He was in his own bedroom, on his own island. No volcano, no eruption. “Whazzit?”

  “Dr. Vogler is waiting downstairs, sah.” Johnny shoved the bedroom door open with his hip, backed in holding a silver breakfast tray with a glass of rum-spiked tomato juice and a bottle of aspirin. Indispensable-the man was indispensable.

  “What time is it?”

  “Half past eleven.” Johnny set the tray down next to the bed.

  “Fuck me,” Lewis moaned as he sat up. Valium and white rum: a potent combination.

  “Looks like ya already took cyare a dot, Mistah Lewis,” said Johnny, stooping to pick something up from the floor.

  “Hunh?”

  “Lucky t’ing you ain’ smuddered.” Johnny handed him the brassiere that had been lying next to the bed. It was an enormous black underwire job-44, double E cup. Lewis moaned again as it all came back to him, unspooling in fast reverse. The more recent memories were the most sporadic-retinal flashes of Emily Epp squatting atop him, nude, eyes closed, pale watermelon breasts swaying. But he remembered the lime grove all too starkly. Those earlier images were seared in, sights, sounds, smells, even the touch of the Montserrat girl’s lips was-

  Montserrat. The volcano. His dream. Could he somehow…? No! Ten t’ousand times no. He’d felt nothing, he told himself firmly. The idea that you could take in another human being’s soul or spirit with their dying breath was absurd. Beyond absurd-it was insane. He’d dreamed of Montserrat because he knew that was the whore’s island.

  Lewis took a sip of the Bloody Mary Ann, belched tomato juice. “Take Dr. Vogler out to the patio, bring him some coffee, tell him I’ll be right-”

  “Mistah Lewis.”

  “-out. What?”

  Johnny nodded toward the bedroom window. The sky was nearly as dark as it had been in Lewis’s dream.

  “Little late in the season for a storm, isn’t it?” said Lewis. There was a rhyme every St. Luke kid learned as a toddler: June, too soon; July, stan’ by; Au-gus’, it’s a mus’; Septembah, remembah; but Octobah, it’s ahl ovah.

  “It’s still early in the mont’, sah. Dey ahlso say the Octobah storm, she ain’ blow so fierce, but she piss lak hell.”

  “Put Vogler in the drawing room,” said Lewis. “I’ll be right down.”

  Blue seersucker two-button sport coat, blue-and-white butterfly-patterned bow tie. “I’m afraid we’re going to be having another truncated session,” said Vogler, glancing pointedly at his watch.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Lewis. “I don’t really want to do this anymore anyway. I should have called you to cancel, but it slipped my mind, what with the funeral arrangements and all.”

  The psychiatrist blinked a few times behind the thick lenses of his reddish-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses. “I have to tell you, Lewis, I think that’s a bad idea. You-”

  Lewis cut him off. “If so, it’s not my first, and it certainly won’t be my last. End of discussion.”

  Vogler shrugged. “Your decision.” He glanced at his watch again-he was taking this better than Lewis had expected. “You still have a few minutes on the clock-anything you’d like to talk about? As long as you’re paying for it.”

  “Come to think of it, there is something I wanted to ask you. I was thinking things over last night. You know, thinking about Hokey, how easily it can all be taken from us, realizing how precious every day is. And the upshot was, I decided to quit dicking around and get started on that novel I’ve been telling myself I was going to write since…since prep school anyway.”

  “That’s encouraging,” murmured Vogler.

  “The thing is, I have this character, he-I mean she-She’s totally nuts, but I’m not sure what to call it specifically.”

  “What are her symptoms?” Vogler was still reserving opinion as to whether the query was genuine, or a more elaborate version of Doctor, I have this friend…

  “That’s the thing-she doesn’t really have any. Except she believes something totally crazy…oh, I don’t know, say she thinks she’s a vampire or she believes in ghosts or something like that-don’t worry, I’ll think of something more original. But say she really believes something that couldn’t be true, and it makes her do bad things, but other than that she acts perfectly normal.”

  “Does she have hallucinations?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Vogler decided the query was genuine. “Sounds like what you’re describing is Delusional Disorder. We don’t see it in a clinical setting very often. It’s a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia, but unlike schizophrenia, hallucinations are rarely present, psychosocial functioning is generally unimpaired, and the behavior is generally well within normal parameters, except where the specific delusion is directly concerned. And whereas with schizophrenia, the delusions tend to be what we refer to as bizarre-i.e., clearly implausible and not derived from ordinary life experiences-for a diagnosis of Delusional Disorder, they have to be nonbizarre.

  “That’s where the diagnosis gets tricky, though. All sorts of cross-cultural factors come into play, especially where the delusion is of a religious or spiritual nature.”

  “How about something like…I read somewhere there are societies where they believe the soul leaves the body with the last breath?”

  “The Ibo,” said Vogler promptly. “I did an undergraduate paper on them. It’s a perfect example of the problem I was just telling you about. The Ibo belief, for instance, that every human has two souls, the Maw and the Nkpuruk-Obi, both of which leave the body with the last exhalation-that would be considered nonbizarre if held by an Ibo in Nigeria, but bizarre if held by a Catholic in Cleveland.

  “Whereas the doctrine of literal transubstantiation, i.e., the wafer is the body of Christ; the wine is the blood, would be considered nonbizarre in a Catholic, but bizarre in an Ibo.” He checked the time again. “I hope that was some help. And please, feel free to call me if you change your mind or run into any problems. Patients leave and reenter therapy all the time-I assure you, I’d think more of you, not less, if you managed to overcome your resistance.”

  Like I could care what you think of me, thought Lewis. “Can I get another prescription for Valium when I run out? They really saved my bacon the other-”

  “I don’t prescribe for patients I’m not treating,” said Vogler, with evident satisfaction-apparently he wasn’t taking his dismissal as well as Lewis had first thought. “Oh, and I just remembered one more interesting fact about Delusional Disorder: out of the three hundred and ninety-five psychiatric disorders recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, Delusional Disorder is the only one that’s contagious.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” asked Lewis in alarm.

  “Sorry, time’s up,” said Vogler-by then he was practically oozing satisfaction. “Call my office for an appointment if you decide you need more Valium.”

  3

  If Pender had died in his sleep Sunday night, they’d have had to bury him with a grin and a hard-on. What had begun in the cramped Quonset and been interrupted by Pender’s turn at guard duty, ended in the spacious sleeping loft of the A-frame. At their age, they needed the leg and elbow room.

  Dawson was gone when he awoke a little after ten-he’d neglected to set his alarm-but he could smell her scent everywhere. Madagascar jasmine, not from a perfume bottle but from the white blossoms she’d picked down by the lane and strewn across his bed and herself as she waited for him to return from guard duty the previous night. Blossoms they’d crushed under and between their bodies as they made love. He’d laughed, called her his flower child. You can take the girl out of the sixties, but you can’t take the sixties out of the girl, she told him.

  The sky was overcast as Pender climbed the hill to the Crapaud. He assumed it was
going to be another of those hit-and-run showers. On his way out of the Crapaud he encountered Dawson on her way in. Morning after the night before. Pender knew better than to let it get awkward. “Well helloooo, gorgeous,” he boomed.

  “Sheesh, tell the world, why don’tcha,” said Dawson, Raggedy Ann blush circles blooming on her round cheeks. But she went up on tiptoe and kissed him as they brushed past each other in the doorway, and he knew he’d been right not to underplay it.

  The rain held off for Pender’s commute, but the sky continued to darken. He parked the cruiser in the police lot behind Government Yard, entered the quadrangle through a stone archway overgrown with bougainvillea, and crossed the cobblestones to police headquarters.

  Inside, there was a commotion in the lobby. People were scrambling around the lobby floor chasing little rolling limes the size of golf balls. The desk sergeant rushed by with a chair, set it down in the middle of the lobby, directly under the domed skylight. Another uniform helped a sobbing dark-skinned girl in a thin flower-patterned dress into the chair; when he caught sight of Pender he beckoned him over.

  “Two more Machete Mon deadah in de lime grove,” he whispered, as somebody else gave the girl a glass of water. “She run all de way.”

  “Where’s Chief Coffee?”

  The officer looked around in surprise. “He was here a minute ago.”

  Pender raced his cruiser full throttle up the dundo road leading into the rain forest. Layla Coffee’s makeshift crime lab van was parked next to the road. The sky was gray, verging on black; the grove looked like a tangled fairy-tale maze. “Julian?”

  “Edgar?”

  “Yeah.”