I open my mouth and heave white liquid and unidentified brown lumps onto the slick hillside and almost fall face forward into my own mess. Then another jet of water smashes into me and I realize that I’m soaked, pelleted by a hard jet of lukewarm water the strength of which tips me over. As I try to roll to my feet I see the riot police - pink warriors encased in black armor - wade into the crowd, batons flailing. Gunshots erupt nearby and are answered with a volley of rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. My eyes, nose, and throat burn with the expanding fumes, and I cry helplessly as I hug the ground and wait for the crash of the baton. Around me, hundreds of once-proud demonstrators scatter and flee, their faces streaked with blood and mucous, grime, and the remains of their pride.
“We were like lions,” I whisper.
Somehow the riot police avoid me, and when I’m helped up it’s my old friend, the cabbie - someone I seem to have known for ages even though I just met him tonight.
“Hey, American, are you all right?”
“No.”
“I better help you back to your world, my friend. You don’t belong here.”
“But I do,” I say, even though I know he’s right.
My body is a mass of sharp pains and screaming bruises. He helps me down the hill and through a side street, past some dilapidated housing flats and then to an alley filled with corrugated tin huts. Eventually he says, “Here we are,” and helps me into a primer-coated Dodge Dart. He winds through poorly-lit streets and avoids throngs, police and army roadblocks, and anything that takes the luster off this flawed jewel of a city. At the Regent, he says goodbye without taking my money. How will he replace his cab, I ask. He shrugs. “It wasn’t my first, and it will not be my last.”
I wipe my eyes and shake his hand. I can’t help feeling that we knew each other, somewhere, some other time.
The hotel shower removes most of the stench - sweat, rubber, tear gas, blood.
I wipe the steam off the mirror. I look at my reflection. And my arteries seem to freeze as I see, all too clearly, scars I’ve never had: thigh, side, shoulder, and neck. Healed scars, as if the wounds were inflicted many years ago. Violently I grasp the sides of the bathroom mirror staring into my own eyes, and I’m not sure who watches whom.
The world, the ground below me, shifts to the side and I lose my balance, crashing into the tile wall. Naked, wounded, I cry the last of my tears while strange tastes stain the inside of my mouth.
When I pack my things, two days later, I seal the long crate carefully. I know I’m going to make a difference when I return. I have plans. The misguided SLA became extinct in a fiery Los Angeles charnel house in 1974. The Black Panthers have degenerated into a weak social service organization, its members jailed or defanged. Eagerly I pat the crate one last time before my cousins come to pick it up and take it to the airport. I can’t help but feel that it’s time for a new plan of action.
I will wash my assegai, Shaka’s fabled invention, on a new continent. I will be great once again, if briefly.
Usutu.
* * *
UNTIL HELL CALLS OUR NAMES
Published in MORE MONSTERS FROM MEMPHIS;
Honorable Mention in THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY & HORROR (12th edition); Winner of the 1999 Darrell Award of the Memphis Science Fiction Association.
It is well nigh upon 1899 as I write these words and I will have gone to my death by morning, never to rise again unless my life should prove worthy of the god I renounced years ago in a windswept prairie town. Nay, even a righteous man who has seen what I have seen would likely turn his back on god and have another drink.
That is what I have done, and worse.
Much worse.
And for my sins I will pay with suffering beyond the pain of my affliction, the relief of which I have long since hastened with a daily fifth of whiskey and a dozen decent cigars. It is dusk as I write, and I shall rejoice to see the morning light once more. The whiskey has dulled enough pain to allow my time-ravaged organs a few more hours’ function, but I have seen their faces at the window and their shades out back, near the well, and I know they will deny me the dignity of a quiet death, preferring instead to repay my kindness toward a stranger with vile, degrading death at their wretched hands.
Even as I write, cocked Colt’s revolver at hand, the walkers approach - I hear their shuffling steps on the loose boards, and I know not why they wait. Perhaps ‘tis all part of the torture, once meant for someone else.
I have endeavored to set down this account of the story told to me by John W. Forrester, late of the Confederate Navy. When I met him, a decade after the war, he was a drunkard whose only redeeming quality was the medal pinned to his chest by President Davis himself. My handwriting has gone spidery and my thoughts wander, but my memory has not failed me in my seventy-six years, and I am doubtful it will fail me now.
I remember all too well, and the rest of it.
Not much time left, so I must write.
I am one Samuel G. Wheeler, at your service for a while. I gambled my way from New York to San Francisco and back again twice before I turned twenty, and that before the railway and its plush, velvet-lined comfort. I rode the paddlewheelers up and down the Old Man and each of his family members, and I barely once was forced to pay my passage out of pocket, so strongly did the cards run in my favor. A drink in one hand and a fine cheroot in the other, the tilt of smooth planks below me and a lovely woman at my side or - dear me, I confess it! - below me; aye, that was my life anytime at the cut of a fancy painted deck.
Except one night, in a dusty Kansas saloon where the locals knew enough not to face me across a felt, and where drinking with company meant you and your bottle. Where “the Indian” barged his way in and not a one of them, sheriff included, could see to tossing him street-side. On account of the shiny metal disk he wore around his neck. Not the long greasy hair, nor the dusty old buckskins, nor the toeless boots that once wore a shine, told his story. But the sixguns on his hips and the crude tomahawk in his belt combined with the gleam in his eye to hint to a man that he’d better mind his own business. I spotted his special belt buckle immediately, but I doubted anyone else had. Then again, who knew which loyalties conflicted with the official way of things in a south Kansas town.
The tavern was crowded and Fate slipped me a joker, for the Indian heaved his considerable bulk onto the stool beside me.
The ‘tender nodded, staring at the guns and the hatchet and the medal of honor, and then he begrudgingly served beer and whiskey, avoiding the glare. I heard muttering from the corners, where local toughs scowled at this affront to their sense of propriety, such as it was. But the sheriff turned back to his whiskey and poker hand, and the voices faded.
I turned and faced the Indian, nodded once and then drank, motioning for two more. He stared through me until the new drinks were poured, and then he drank both quickly, his and the one I bought. When he spoke, it was in that whisper that has since haunted me on lonely nights.
“You are too kind.”
It was a painful whisper, drawn protestingly over dried-out vocal cords as if by supreme effort.
I nodded in deference to the decoration. “A war hero’s welcome to share my spirits any time.”
He slapped the decoration harshly. “This hunk of metal has brought me only pain and sorrow, yet I cannot remove it from my clothing. I am John Forrester, and I am cursed with it, because of what I have done.”
It was not an Indian name, and only then did I gaze past the sun-darkened skin to see not an Indian at all, but a white man two decades my junior who had disappeared inside the parched skin of another.
Smug with silver in my pockets and yet another drink in my hand, I confided my name and urged him continue, while nodding at the ‘tender to make sure he’d not be tossed from the premises. At least, thought I, not as long as the sheriff preferred his card game to a brawl. The man who was not an Indian wore the stench of death on him, his own and that of anyone else who got in his way, b
ut he seemed affable enough to one willing to buy him drink.
And he had a story to tell, that was plain to see.
“Leave the bottle, Jack,” I said.
With a sideways glance at some of his rougher customers, Jack slid the bottle toward my hand. When it came to a stop, I quickly poured the Indian another.
Forrester nodded again and his eyes shone beneath the hood of his brow. Gratitude or anger, I could not tell.
And then he began to tell his story, a story so far and away ridiculous that I should have laughed and returned to my room for some needed sleep. He told a story no sane man would believe, but somehow - the way he spoke, as if hell were even then setting a place for him at the table - he hooked me with his cracking whisper and with his eloquence, his educated tone and civilized syntax. I will let him tell the story, for he lived it. Then I will tell you the rest of it, the part which leads me here, to this remote mountain outpost. And the scrapings outside my window.
*
Forrester began:
I had been employed by the Confederate Navy to bring my ship-building skills to various secret projects important to our beloved Confederacy. My father and grandfather both had all their lives built sailing vessels of graceful curved planks and shaped beams, and later steamships, and most of those vessels now plied the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico in an effort to breach the Yankee blockade, which was choking the life out of the country slowly but as surely as night follows day. Understand me
- I was given a rank and a title higher than most because of my status in the shipbuilding trade. Without my surname, I would have poled a barge or piloted a riverboat. But with the name … ah, with the name I was destined for greatness. Educated in the tradition of the sea from the day I’d first walked on two feet, it did not take my father long to place a swaying deck under me, and by the age of sixteen I had enough experience to rate a first mate’s pay, had I wished to ship off to distant lands and seek my fortune. And I did so desire! Instead my father kept me within the family business and insisted I assist the draftsmen he employed.
To a lad who wished to taste the world, these were conflicting orders, as you may well imagine. After hours, when the last of our engineers and tradesmen finally made their way off the shipyard, that was when I could indulge my youthful curiosities and steal away to spend my father’s money in the dives of New Orleans, where a silver dollar bought many a woman’s favors and, more often than not, a bout of some disease. I sampled the wares, I admit, for I had a young man’s stamina, and a purse altogether fattened by my father’s hand. Before a year had passed, I knew each New Orleans brothel well, and I had suffered my share of “gentlemen’s afflictions,” as it were.
*
At this point in his narrative Forrester halted and gripped his glass more tightly. A long draught nearly drained his poison and he poured more amber liquid - lest the glass empty too soon, I reckoned. I knew not where his tale was headed, but the grumbles behind our backs had become whispers.
I poured for myself.
Drank.
Nodded for him to continue, if so inclined.
He did, god help me.
*
My father learned of my adventures and, though he disapproved, chose to turn a blind eye. He’d had his share of romance as a youth on the Continent, where his father had dispatched him to learn shipbuilding. So he ignored my bleary eyes and fatigue, allowing me to learn a man’s way on my own.
What he knew not was that after exhausting my interest in the brothels of New Orleans, I had come to enjoy the city’s less obvious charms. I had witnessed - quite by chance - a ceremonial blood sacrifice performed by a group of slaves, and this act fascinated me to an extent which I could not then or even now describe. I made inquiries which led to several curious shops located at the outskirts of the city’s oldest section. There I spread my father’s money until I learned the name of an old woman who agreed to teach me the rites of her strange religion. She was not pleased to do so, but needed finances to care for an ill daughter, and so was born our arrangement. Once she began, I forced her to give me everything - I wanted nothing left out, no exceptions. I was the only white man ever to witness some of the most obscure slave rituals, often held in clearings well away from any habitation.
Aye, I was resented. Hated, even. But at my age, what had that to do with fulfillment of my desires?
Indeed, my desires were to lead me astray yet again, for it was not long before -
*
Before his pause could register upon me, he had slammed his empty glass on the counter.
“Damn this heat! Damn this thirst - it just won’t go away … no matter how much I drink. It’s part of my cursed existence.”
His glare met mine and I gestured at Jack for an unending supply. I was flush from recent winnings, and the tale was entertaining enough. Forrester poured, drank, poured again, and continued. His square hands shook only slightly, and I realized that he was drunk - but how dangerous? He spoke with the dulcet tones of a Southern gentleman, but resembled nothing if not the most savage of prairie Indians. His weapons were all well within his reach, though his fingers were now curled around a refilled glass.
The suggestion that he drink water from the well outside died on my lips. His thirst was not one so easily quenched.
I let him speak, watchful for the signs of impending violence. How comforting the weight of the Colt’s, tucked out of sight under my shoulder.
*
Soon I heard whispers about the old woman’s daughter, and I conspired to make her acquaintance during one of the many street festivals. Giselle Devereaux was perhaps the most beautiful freewoman in New Orleans. She had been ill with some kind of tropical disease, malaria it was said, but her mother had sold enough charms and amulets to those like myself, and her care had snatched Giselle from the jaws of death. Or Madame Devereaux had made a pact with the Devil himself, some said, for her daughter had been too far gone for so rapid a recovery.
After I met Giselle, I cared not. I desired only to possess her, body and soul. I am not proud of myself, for I conspired to seduce her even as she dwelled in the home of her mother.
I was nothing if not stubborn - persistence is the Forrester trait. I pursued and cajoled, coaxed as one would a shy kitten, and pleaded. And then I merely took.
Our initial union was against her will, but I persisted and soon we became inseparable. Giselle lost herself in love, though in truth I was merely lustful and infatuated with her physical charms, which were ample - and worldly. In her arms, between her supple thighs, I found the strengths and appetites of a tigress, easily matching my own. Indeed, when we made love it was more like a visit to some dungeon - there was only violence and raw passion.
I confess, I used Giselle carelessly and tossed her aside for some waterfront strumpet who batted long eyelashes and pouted at me, for that was my shallow nature. And when Giselle attempted to sway me with her body, I forced myself on her in the way of dogs and madmen and shamed her into crawling away without dignity or a hint of lust left.
Unbeknownst to me, Giselle was with child when I abandoned her. I would not hear of her entreaties, or her mother’s, and neither woman chose to inform me of the life forming in her womb. Perhaps I would not have cared.
About then, my father’s firm was engaged by our naval secretary to continue work begun on the Carolina shore. President Davis himself, desperately needing a weapon against the Yankee blockade, was the client. The Yankees were implementing a plan - named Anaconda - to build a fresh-water navy and capture the major ports on the Mississippi, thereby splitting the Confederacy in two.
*
He paused to pour and drink again, and his hands appeared to hold their burden steady. Perhaps he was beyond mere intoxication, for his demeanor seemed to grow increasingly sober.
Forrester ignored the glances of men who entered the saloon. I wondered yet again at his Indian disguise, and the reaction it provoked. Why not reveal his true identity? Sout
hern gentlemen with loose purse strings here purchased as many friends as any carpetbagger or Yankee financier. It was a mystery I hoped we would confront.
I was to regret this proclivity of mine for curiosity.
“Go on,” I urged, with no clear understanding of my role in this exotic narrative. Would that I had faced a raft of strong poker hands instead!
*
The Navy (Forrester went on) sought a secret weapon which could free our waters of Yankee warships. A two-man undersea craft named the Pioneer had tested well. Engineers had drawn plans for a seven-man vessel, and only my father’s company could successfully bid on its construction, having already begun incorporating metal plating into our warship design. President Davis was in sudden need of a river fleet, and conversion of old steamers progressed slowly. Clearly, a seaworthy undersea attack craft could indeed cripple a slow-moving river fleet. Alas, the first engagement of Yankee gunboats and Confederate river batteries had proven their worth at our expense. We knew the Anaconda stretched south, and we knew that within three months our river supremacy would be tested. The President decreed that the port of Memphis become our stand against the Yankee fleet, which by now numbered dozens of converted steamers - gunboats and steam-propelled naval rams designed by the evil Ellet clan, those social-climbing upstarts and snake-oil salesmen!
We made Memphis a symbol. If we could halt their advance there, the moral victory would far and away offset our losses.
Understand, sir, I was merely a shipbuilder’s son. I had no battle experience. No commission. But I was an experienced sailor, hardy - some would say foolhardy - and more than capable of discerning the romantic aspects of such a mission. As my father eagerly accepted the contract to build a nineteen-foot, seven-man Pioneer craft, so did I blindly volunteer to command this craft on its maiden voyage of destruction. Thus I spent the following six weeks overseeing the building of the peculiar craft, which would deliver a torpedo mine to blow up the hull of an enemy ship. Our Pioneer craft was ready by May and we conducted secret trials in the Memphis Harbor. As the Yankee fleet sailed south, we seven learned the tricky handling of our difficult vessel. Our first engagement was not far off, and yet complications piled upon me.
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