“I’m sorry I couldn’t lift you into bed,” Avery said from the window.
“How long?”
“Less than an hour.”
Miranda wrapped the afghan around her and limped into the kitchen, one hand on the wall at every step. She went to the fridge and took a carton of Coleman’s Neapolitan out of the freezer, a spoon still lodged in the strawberry where she had last dug in. She set the ice cream on the table and fell into a chair and went to work on the chocolate.
“Spoon?” Avery asked from the kitchen door.
She pointed at a drawer.
He got one and sat down and set Cook’s pistol on the table and plunged into the vanilla. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, that’s good.”
They ate quickly, and Miranda felt the ice cream working, smoothing the hard, rough edges that remained in her throat, the bannik’s claws a lifetime ago. She ate until her head hurt. She closed her eyes and pushed at the space between them, and when she looked up she saw Avery holding his head between his hands, too, his spoon dripping vanilla down his arm, and their eyes met and they laughed, and they sat together, laughing, ice cream dripping over their chins, in pain with brain freeze, but alive.
After a moment, Miranda got up and went to the sink and dropped her spoon into it. She wiped her face with a dishrag.
“I should have left by now,” Avery said. He stuck his spoon in the ice cream. “I shouldn’t have stayed. My wife, my daughter.”
“You could have taken Hiram’s boat,” Miranda said. She leaned against the counter, drawing the afghan close.
“I don’t know why I didn’t,” Avery said.
Miranda stared at him.
“But I need to go now.”
“I can take you,” she said. “Let me put on a shirt.”
She went out of the kitchen and into her bedroom and threw the afghan and her rag of a shirt on the bed. She pulled open a bureau drawer, drew out a faded gray T-shirt, and tugged it on, easing it over the wound in her side. The maxi pads bulged beneath the cotton. She saw her reflection in the bureau’s mirror: cheeks scratched, throat bruised, eyes sunken.
Avery was dozing at the table when she returned to the kitchen, his head still in his arms. She took his spoon from the carton—a silly, domestic act, out of place, to clean up after yourself when you had shot men with arrows and leaped from a bridge and bled and been stitched up—and went to toss it in the sink. Thinking of the children she had left in the woods with a sharp pang of guilt. She looked up through the window, across the bottoms, to where the treetops were silver with late-morning mist. I should go and find them. Keep out of sight until Riddle and Cotton get hit back, and it’s over.
She saw it then, a heavy gray column of smoke rising from the trees to the south.
She remembered the boy’s dream.
Everything aflame.
In an instant, she understood that she had been wrong.
The fire was not hers.
Avery lifted his head at the sound of the spoon dropping in the metal sink.
She rushed past him into the hallway and snagged Hiram’s Bear where it lay on the floor, along with the single arrow beside it, her body stiff and tired and hungry and sick and crying out, No, no more, but she ignored it and ran out onto the porch and down the ladder to the floating dock, where she tossed her weapons into the johnboat that had borne her and the witch and the baby and the boatman deep into the bottoms. Metal smeared red from the deer flank she had brought out Sunday eve. Avery stood at the back-porch railing, calling down to her, but she paid him no heed. She yanked the starter cord until the Evinrude caught, and then she was gone, bent full throttle for the oxbow downriver, beyond it the narrow entrance to Iskra’s bayou, another world—her world, now burning.
V
Revelations
THE NATURE OF FRIENDSHIP
Riddle sat on the Plymouth’s hood, smoking a Marlboro, Robert Alvin behind the wheel with his head cocked back, mouth open wide enough to shove a fist through. The hot summer wind scoured the flat croplands that lay beyond the empty parking lot where once had stood a truck stop café: a tattered awning offering SALISBURY STEAK and SOUP now speckled with mildew, plywood where windows had been. Heavy gray clouds rolled in from the southwest. Far across the bean fields, a swarm of race cars on some dirt track made a sound like a hive of bees. The inside of the Plymouth was warm and dark, and Robert Alvin began to snore.
Riddle took a walk across the parking lot, kicking the crumbling asphalt, bending to pluck the odd dandelion and watch its seeds swirl away. The wind pulled smoke and ash from his cigarette, his tie whipping over his shoulder. Riddle’s eye watered behind silver-mirrored shades. He felt a headache creeping. It had started dead center in the back of his neck, an auger turning, twisting up his nerves like the strings of a marionette.
He thought, inevitably, of Miranda Crabtree. Pressed back against the wall of the grocery, wet with sweat and blood, and cringing. He put his fingers to the center of his forehead, where the auger had settled its bit. By now the bitch was dead and the midget was a bedroll on the back of some biker’s hog. And soon Mr. Skull Face would show on a thundering machine to inform the constable it was done. Saddlebags of money would be stowed in the Plymouth’s trunk, payment for John Avery, and the little man with the sharp teeth would take out a bag and present it like a prize to Charlie Riddle. Inside it, a single gray-green human eye. Miranda, Riddle thought, she always had her mother’s eyes. But this was not the end, no, for waiting back at Sabbath House, still, was Avery’s wench: black, lean, and sassy, how she’d crumble when the news came that her husband had been sold into bondage. “Like your ancestors,” Riddle might say, and then he would laugh and put a cigarette out in her ear and let Robert Alvin hold her by the arms so she could watch as he hammered her baby’s brains into pulp with the butt of his Schofield.
By God, it was all so good.
So why is my fucking head splitting?
The auger bored deeper and the nerves wound tighter. He drew on his cigarette. The tip burned red.
The plywood over the old restaurant’s door was loose, so he pried one corner away and wandered for a while inside the blessed gloom of the gutted building, torn pages of a phone book and old paper menus scattered about like dirty feathers in a barren nest.
* * *
When they came, they came from the west, a gang of motorcycles rolling up the blacktop that lay like a long hot tongue over the flatlands. He heard them from inside the building, and when he stepped out the door, he saw that Robert Alvin had heard them, too. The deputy stood half out of the driver’s door, one boot in the car, one on the pavement. They rolled into the parking lot two by two, six of them. Twice they wound round the Plymouth, slowing on the second run and revving their engines, and Riddle saw what was going to happen the instant before it did, and it made no sense to him. The sensation was like a loss of balance, when the world pitches against your stride.
A woman with thick arms in a white T-shirt torn at the midriff rode double on the third hog. She drew a scattergun from a sheath near the chrome piping on the bike’s flank. In the roar of the motorcycles, Riddle didn’t hear the blast, but he saw the flame, blue smoke, and the window of the open Plymouth door exploded, blowing Robert Alvin back into the car.
The circle of steel ponies opened up and trained toward Riddle, where he stood his ground beneath the old restaurant’s tattered awning, his antique pistol already out of its holster, hammer thumbed back.
The bikes spread wide and charged.
Riddle fired three times, and two in the center fell, bikes slewing left and right, riders on either side veering off to keep from spilling. Still, four came on, gunning.
Riddle shoved through the plywood sheet that hung askew across the door. Inside, he made for the far corner, where a section of the roof had fallen in behind a metal and glass countertop, the ceiling hanging like an unhinged jaw. He took cover behind the counter and slipped three bullets from his holster into the Schofie
ld.
A crescendo of engines rose outside, and a single bike exploded through the plywood sheet.
Riddle stood up from behind the counter and fired.
The rider was jerked sideways from his mount, which shot away into the pine-paneled wall and lodged there.
Riddle heard the rise and fall of engines. He caught a glimpse of three bikes through the demolished doorway, drifting back to idle out of sight. Directly, the big engines cut out, the only sounds the faint buzz of the racetrack far across the fields and the sputter of the man dying on the floor not ten feet away. The man lay in an ever-widening circle of blood.
He went cautiously around the counter, his boots crunching broken glass, to hunker beside the dying man. His hair was long and bright yellow, and he wore a red paisley bandanna at his throat. His teeth were clenched, and Riddle saw that he had an overbite, a fine dusting of grizzle on his jaw.
“Didn’t have to be like this,” Riddle said.
The man’s eyes slid fearfully at the constable.
Riddle put his hand over the man’s mouth and nose, almost gently, felt the sputter of his breath, the dampness of his face. “We should of been friends,” Riddle said. He pinched the nose and clamped the mouth shut, and when the man began to struggle, Riddle dropped to his knees and put his whole weight into the task, and he felt the man beneath him wanting not to die, the muscles tensing, the body pushing against him with everything it had, and it was almost a kind of miracle healing, like bringing a man back from the dead instead of sending him there, the way the biker’s broken body fought against the end. Finally, the fight went out, and the man lay still beneath the constable’s hand.
Riddle wiped his palm on his khakis and stood up, his right knee popping, a sound like the period of a sentence. Through the broken plywood, he could see the Plymouth, the driver’s door still open, Robert Alvin’s right heel on the dash, his khakis hiked above his boot.
“I wanted us to be,” Riddle said quietly. His hand shook as he fumbled another bullet from his belt into his gun. Then, hurling his voice through the open door: “I WANTED US TO BE FRIENDS, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!”
Something dropped through the roof in the rear corner of the building, a bottle, long flame trailing from a piece of rag stuffed down its neck, and then the bottle struck the tiles and exploded, and the flames rolled out and gathered back and the building was on fire.
Riddle backed away to the smashed entrance where he knew the last three waited in ambush. He cocked the Schofield pistol. “You can all go straight to fucking hell,” he said, and he plunged through, shooting.
WALL
The bark emerged from a narrow waterway a mile upriver from Crabtree Landing. Littlefish took his long arms from the water and let the current turn him. He had never ventured as far as the river. Here, the air smelled different—less of peat and murk and more of fish and gasoline and the faint tang of wood smoke. He felt unsettled, exposed, so he put his arms back in the water and paddled upriver with wide, webbed hands, until he came to a narrow, jagged inlet. He could see, through tall dead trees pocked with bird holes, a big white house bestrewn with moss and bright green mold, as if it had somehow risen out of the bog itself. It was the house he had seen in his dreams, and the sight of it here, in this lonely, muted place, was terrifying. Littlefish paddled on, remembering what Sister had taught him when hunting, how to go wide round your prey, out of its line of sight. Being careful. Being quiet. Unable to shake the feeling that the house, with its lidded windows and open white maw, was somehow watching him, he rowed on.
Once, he happened to look down and saw a snake corkscrewing behind his fingers as they lingered in the water. He pulled them out quickly, and the snake vanished.
The boy had chanced on a snake once before, down at Baba’s dock, where it warmed itself in a shaft of sunlight. Lazy, crooked, wicked. He thought to scare it by tromping the boards, but the cottonmouth had cracked at him like a black whip. In the end, the boy had pinned it to the dock with his gigging stick and cut its head off with a pocketknife. He remembered, now, how the jaws had worked on in death, dripping poison. Later, he’d brought Baba down to show her. “This,” she said, picking up the head, a runnel of blood and tissue and the candy-pink mouth yet open, “is the only way to deal with a snake.”
He thought of the Father Hen, who had come a-roaring out of the woods and struck at Baba like a bold black moccasin.
He heard a rustling off to his right, from the bank. Caught motion in his periphery, the sound of branches cracking, shifting, breaking. His bark slowed in the opposing current. Suddenly a sheaf of branches drew apart on their own, like a curtain opening, and through this new, ragged hole in the tree line he saw a high, crumbling wall of stone, angling deep into the woods.
Curious—
Had the trees just moved on their own?
—he banked his bark among a deadfall of branches and stepped out onto a narrow beach smooth and sandy. He gathered his sack and went up the bank.
He touched the wall, ran his fingers over the rough, tumbled surface.
Feels like me, he thought.
The wall stretched into the trees as far as he could see.
He heard the sound again, that cracking-rustling, and turned and saw that the opening in the brush through which he’d stepped had closed, the trees settling back like Baba sometimes settled with a groan in her big rocking chair.
He thought of Baba’s skin, blistered, blackened. Her head a cloven ruin.
His friend, she was out here, somewhere. He pictured the Father Hen, all in black, standing before the low stone building in his dream. Now, as if a waking vision, Littlefish saw the girl beside him, her hand in his, tears streaking her mute, stony face.
The boy looked down the length of the wall, some hunter’s instinct at work inside him.
The only way to deal with a snake.
Littlefish followed the wall inland.
MIRANDA AT THE CABIN
Miranda ran out of the trees, breathless, and saw, atop the hill, the old woman’s home destroyed. She charged up the slope, slipping twice in the red clay, but she did not fall, pulling herself up by vine and root to the top where, panting, she bent over a prone mass draped with kudzu on the porch steps. She pulled away the vine and saw a round knob of blackened bone and gristle, and there, on a last patch of skin, unburned, were three silver whiskers. She pressed the heel of her bow hand against her forehead. She pushed hard against her skull, as if to hold back a flood tide of grief and rage that threatened to break her, drown her. She covered the old woman’s face and looked to the burned-out cabin, to the yard beyond, chickens clucking stupidly in the boy’s garden. She stood upright, her side oozing warmly into the pads, and called his name, her voice carrying up the hill.
In back of the house, she found the boy’s gigging stick on the ground, the prongs red. She saw where the boy had lain. She ran her hand around his shape in the dirt. There were two other sets of tracks: the girl’s small bare prints and a pair of man’s dress shoes. She saw the boy’s tracks, too, short and wide and webbed and leading away from where he had fallen, and she followed these. She followed them until they tracked back on themselves, and she realized he had crossed his own path, had come back from the woods to his shed; a quick glance through the door told the story of a scattered departure. Here, she lingered, surveying the damage the old preacher had done: torn comics, overturned shelves. The boy’s bow and arrows broken. Destruction so vicious, so personal. Heart in her throat, she went into the woods, and there, on the carpet of needles, over roots and knobs of pine white with old sap, she saw the blood. One or two drops every few steps. They led her to the boy’s tree, his ladder, where she saw the book, the handprint, the blood on the boards.
A hard, hot lump rose in her throat. She swallowed it.
She reached for the book.
Miranda remembered the story Hiram had told her, a memory she did not possess. Her mother had given her the book, reading aloud each night the sim
ple sentences at the bottoms of its pages, and Miranda had memorized it by the time she was three. Cora Crabtree’s joke to show Hiram how his infant daughter had learned to read. “Read the book for Daddy,” and Miranda on her blanket on the floor, holding the book open on her lap, would point and recite the words, and Hiram’s eyes would well with wonder. Cora laughing, Hiram saying, “What? What’s funny?”
She opened the book.
This is my church, the page said, the words printed beneath a white-steepled country church painted in watercolors, beside it a bright green tree. This is where I go to worship God.
The boy had drawn flames billowing from the porch and windows, from beneath the eaves, and atop the steeple he had scribbled a bright red cross.
This is our minister. He is very nice.
The picture, once of a smiling man in a black shirt and priest’s collar. Over the priest’s head of well-combed chestnut hair, in black crayon the boy had drawn a dark hat. Over the chin he had scratched a graphite beard. Over the throat: a red slash that ripped the page.
She dropped the book on the ground and tested her weight on the first rung of the ladder, and when it held, she began to climb. All the way up, to the lookout she had helped him build, and at the top, she saw it right away, drawn in red at the center of the wooden platform: an arrow, pointing north. Across the bayou, over the vast bottomlands, to the red tower thrusting up from the trees, at its pinnacle the horrid cross, upon it the bird skeleton crucified.
She flashed on the torn page, the preacher’s gouged throat.
No. He cannot do that.
His blood on the wood below was still tacky.
She scanned the waterways, but his bark was nowhere in sight.
Leg and side slowing her up, she descended the ladder and made for the bank where she had left his bark among the cypress trees the night before. She found footprints, more blood, saw scuff marks in the dirt and bent blades of grass where he had run the raft out.
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