Blood-Stained Kings

by Tim Willocks

  Perhaps, then, she wasn’t in her right mind, for she was gripped by a resolution, a paralysis, an inertia—in the end it didn’t matter what it was—to see the pregnancy through. She was nauseous and sick; she was drained; she was anemic and weak; she ate little and lost weight—all the normal trials of a secret pregnancy intensified by crippling bouts of terror. But her essential conviction, which she could not have explained to anyone even if she’d chosen to share it, never wavered. Come what may, she would have her child.

  Her child.

  By four months into the pregnancy she felt bloated beyond belief; yet by the bathroom scales she’d gained barely two pounds. No one noticed, or if any of the servants did they dared not say. During this period Faroe went about his life. He tried with some patience to penetrate her moods and she developed a savage temper she had not known before. Faroe sent her again to the psychiatrist, who also did not notice her gravidity. By five months she was taking her meals to her room and refusing to sleep with Faroe or even to see him. Despite her own conviction that she was going insane, she refused any further psychiatric help. Finally, after frantic scenes involving a locksmith and the dismantling of a barricade, Lenna found herself alone in her room with Faroe, the bulge in her belly no longer disguisable.

  The pressure of twenty-three weeks of silence, of secrecy, of mounting paranoia and fear, burst the walls of her resolution. She told Faroe everything and he listened in white-lipped silence. At the end of her confession Faroe left without saying a word.

  The lock was replaced on her door, only now she did not have the key, and her life of exile continued. She was supplied with the necessary supplements of iron and vitamins. Faroe came to see her each evening and took her for a walk around his gardens. He never spoke a word of whatever it was he was feeling. Her parents were excluded—by her choice as much as Faroe’s—and she saw no one else except a Guatemalan nurse, who brought her food and helped her bathe and who spoke no English. Despite these conditions Lenna’s heart lifted. She knew—or rather she thought she knew—what it meant to such a man that, in his terms, his wife might be incubating a nigger’s child. Perhaps the torment of doubt that she had passed on to Faroe somehow lessened her own. Her health and strength improved. She gained weight steadily. Her commitment to her child grew more intense. The child had asked for nothing and knew nothing of the world that awaited its birth. It knew nothing of its paternity or its race. Through these last months she speculated on the future. If the father of the child was Wes, she knew, she came to realize, that Faroe would never let her keep it. It would vanish without trace into a family she would never know and would never be able to find. She did not underestimate Faroe’s power. If it was his child? She did not know. Was it in him to forgive and forget? He said nothing and she dared not ask for fear of provoking him. He would want the child brought up as his own, that she did not doubt, but would she be allowed any part in it? Or would she be banished from their lives? She could not know.

  And she could not know either that Filmore Faroe had already made his deal with a devil called Clarence Jefferson.

  Grimes might rather not have heard what was to come next. Lenna had already begun to hold her hand against her belly and rub as though it ached. As she continued her story, her fingers hooked and dug into her, and she rocked to and fro as internal cramps, genuine and severe, bent her forward over her knees. Grimes knew she was in physical pain but he restrained an impulse to reach out. The best he could do for her was sit and listen, for he knew that this was a tale that had never been told before and that her pain was necessary to its delivery.

  When Lenna’s water broke, Faroe brought a Vietnamese doctor, whose name she never knew. The doctor gave her an injection and Lenna woke up in a one-room shack with a tin roof. Where it was, she didn’t know. Her mind spiraled through a twisting tunnel of drugs and pain and dread, and she clung to and focused on her task of delivering the child. Faroe was there, stony-faced and grim, and the Latina nurse and the Vietnamese doctor. Hours passed and Lenna focused and clung. Toward the end, rain started to drum on the shack’s tin roof. When the girl child was born and Lenna heard her cries and looked, Lenna cried too. She cried for her beauty. She cried for her puckered, squalling face. She cried for her trembling, fist-clenched energy, tiny yet boundless in its innocent rage. And she cried for her pale brown skin, though at that moment she would not have changed it for the world.

  The murmuring, smiling nurse took the baby aside and the doctor bent over Lenna and she barely felt the sting of another needle. Lenna asked to have the girl child back. She could not see her. She had not even held her in her arms. She asked again. She demanded and was ignored. Her consciousness started to fade and drain. She remembered the needle and fought it, sliding, sliding. She demanded yet again, her words a blur in her ears.

  Give me my child.

  She heard the door open on a gust of rain, and a massive form—a burly shadow in a Panama hat, a pervading essence of disciplined evil—entered the room. There was a muffled groan and the clink of chains.

  Lenna’s mind mounted a resistance that defied all science against the chemicals crushing her down. She knew. She tried to scream but her vocal cords were numbed. Gunshots thundered, relentless in the squalid space now smoking with bloody execution. She raised herself from the mattress.

  At the foot of the bed knelt Wes Clay.

  His face, once beautiful—beautiful, even now—was so damaged that she doubted he could see her eyes. Lenna’s throat still wouldn’t move. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t scream. She struggled not to black out. A dull thump. Wes Clay gasped and doubled forward, out of her sight. She saw Filmore Faroe, his face a bright mask of bigotry as something vile blurted from his mouth. He raised both arms above his head. There was a flash of steel in the lamplight and the confusion of her senses was swamped by a single desperate question: where was her child? Lenna struggled for the edge of the bed. She saw her—her baby daughter—there: nestled with innocent contentment in the crook of a thick and bulging arm, the security of a massive hand. Lenna tried to move her arms, to take and stroke and hold. But before she could reach she was frozen by the image of her own ultimate horror.

  Dripping and swaying in the air before her hung Wes Clay’s head, suspended by the hair from Filmore Faroe’s bloodstained fist.

  Still Lenna could not scream. She looked at Faroe’s face.

  Faroe blinked twice. Then he lowered his prize and turned his back and walked away without a word.

  Lenna tumbled from the mattress to the rough plank floor. Her baby. She hauled herself to her knees, head swimming, her veins and limbs drugged with liquid rubber. The slam of a door pierced the fog. She raised her head.

  The room was empty.

  The burly essence of evil—and the swaddled innocence nestled in the bulging arm, the massive hand—was of an instant gone. And with that sudden vanishment Lenna’s soul vanished too and her heart was turned to stone.

  And now she screamed: with a pain too wide and deep for human knowing.

  She crawled through blood. Past the blade of a shining machete; past bodies, one and two; past a third she dared not see. The door swam before her. Disembodied fingers, bloodstained and numb, found the handle, turned and pulled.

  A gust of rain.

  A bolt of jagged lightning.

  She crawled on, into the drenching wind of an infinite night.

  Finally she fell.

  And as she fell, and in a voice more ancient than her own, she launched across the midnight field a cry that was as vast and bottomless as the darkness itself.

  FOURTEEN

  A LIFE IN MEDICINE had acquainted Grimes with the infinite variety of human suffering, most of it random and without discernible meaning. Even so, Lenna’s tale left him feeling numb. Faroe’s crime was so extreme that for any ordinary individual it would have been an act of psychosis. But Faroe had not been insane. He had been justified and informed within his deepest fiber by an entire subcultur
e, by an entire history living still, which murdered black men for far smaller infractions than Wes Clay’s, and finally by his own line; a line that deserved to end.

  Lenna sat on the sofa. The cramps seemed to have subsided. She was no longer crying and she seemed spent. There were things Grimes could have said but they would have been platitudes sucked empty by the scale of what she had suffered. His words would not have been to help her but to ease his own desire to be useful. He kept his mouth shut, and his tears inside, and let her finish.

  Later, on the night that Lenna gave birth, Filmore Faroe found her unconscious body and took her back to Arcadia. When she came around he told her that “the baby of the nigger” had been killed. Throughout all the years that followed Faroe never gave any sign that he believed this not to be true. Lenna remained in a state of near catatonia—of total psychic collapse—for many months. Then the player of games, the burly essence—Clarence Jefferson—reappeared, secretly, before her and offered his irresistible gift.

  Grimes could imagine his caramel voice, his bright and shameless eyes, the force of his logic, as he bore down on the traumatized woman and lured her in.

  She could, Jefferson told her, win back Faroe’s heart. Yes indeed, for such a monstrous crime could leave even Faroe vulnerable to the weakness, the virus, of guilt. Jefferson knew Faroe better than Faroe knew himself; more than that, he understood the way of things human. Faroe had loved Lenna: and rare was the lover betrayed who did not, in the secret heart of his jealousy and shame, love his faithless one even more, and even as he hated her, Faroe would accept her contrite return, Jefferson promised her. If Lenna would have the revenge that would restore her to life, she had to trust him. Then, once she’d regained Faroe’s affection, whatever she wanted for his punishment, Clarence Jefferson would bring it to pass.

  There was no doubt in Grimes’s mind that Jefferson had talked Fil-more Faroe into the fateful and murderous course that he’d taken with similarly unctuous words.

  Grimes knew that most of what passed for evil in the world was in fact the product of stupidity and other human failings such as self-delusion, avarice and rage. Clarence Jefferson floated above such emotional and intellectual pitfalls. He had set himself the task of ripping aside the mask behind which, as he saw it, all of human life cowered in unforgivable ignorance of its true nature. The cosmos was amoral and cared nothing for its contents. All men—all women—were at their core violent and depraved. Everything that civilization had erected—law, religion, art—was nothing more than a flimsy dike, repeatedly breached, with only a single purpose: to hold back the violent sea of depravity within. The only redemption, the only absolute truth, lay in embracing that depravity and living it out to the utmost possible degree. This was his raison d‘être. He was the bad man’s Calvin, a philosopher-king of vileness.

  So in her mental desert Lenna had listened to and heard the fatman’s words. The idea appalled Grimes, but it was probably true: hatred had been her only way out, the only lifeline strong enough by which to haul herself out of madness. What other emotion could have given her life meaning? The bought love of therapy? The sublime balm of forgiveness? He could hear Jefferson chortling at the thought from his grave. From hatred alone had Lenna found the strength to reconstruct her sanity and her self. She had steeled herself to the self-abasement she knew she’d have to endure and, over years, she had won back Faroe’s forgiveness, and then his love, and finally even his trust.

  Then she’d told the fatman what she’d wanted; and even he had been impressed.

  Jefferson faked Faroe’s death in the car wreck, using a skid-row vagrant of similar appearance and build. He substituted the appropriate X rays and medical records, chose the appropriate coroner and guided the legal process through to a moving and tearful cremation ceremony, after which Faroe’s ashes were scattered on the garden he had cultivated himself. The real Filmore Faroe was meanwhile a drugged prisoner, unknowingly awaiting the construction of the Stone House and the recruitment of the Jessups.

  Grimes listened to what she’d done to Faroe without comment. The apt and perfect sadism of her revenge astonished him with its precision and scale, its sustained longevity. He would have given in to something far more primitive and brief, something that employed a dull knife. Lenna didn’t chronicle the years she’d kept him in there. She just related, without emotion, Filmore Faroe’s escape from the Stone House and his sending her there to be raped by Jack Seed. Then she sat hunched on the sofa and stared into space.

  It dawned on Grimes that they were in even worse trouble than he’d thought. Filmore Faroe, at this moment, had to be a very angry man; and he would realize that with Lenna free and hunting for Jefferson’s hoard, he wasn’t yet out of danger himself. The power that Lenna had wielded was now in Faroe’s hands and that power stood against them. Against George and Ella, too. Grimes looked at Lenna again and didn’t know what to do. For a moment he wished that she would vanish before his eyes. Then he felt ashamed of himself.

  He said, “It was Jefferson’s letter that told you your daughter was still alive.”

  Lenna, still staring, nodded.

  “And that I knew all the rest.”

  “You did, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Grimes, “I knew everything. Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

  “I couldn’t trust you. Not with Ella out there. I didn’t know who to believe. And Jefferson told me not to push you. He told me to wait.”

  Lenna looked into his eyes. Then the tone of her voice changed slightly and she quoted without hesitation.

  “ Tut that to him, Lenna, and only that, then have patience and wait … For Grimes, as you see him, is a clown—a true clown, a fool—and so he has the heart of a clown, and in his own time, which will be the fool’s time and not that which might best fit his purpose, he will come to you with his clown’s courage and his fool’s strength, and he will stand at your side and show you the way, the way that he does not even know himself ”

  Grimes looked into her harrowed face for as long as he could. Then he swallowed and stood up.

  Grimes walked over to the door and pulled it open and looked out. The rain had eased off to a drizzle. Gul loped past him and disappeared into the predawn dark. Grimes lit a Pall Mall and thought about Jefferson. Grimes hated him. The fatman had spun his poisoned web across a vast arc of space and time, and yet his genius lay in the fact that he himself did not eat of the people trapped within it. He let them eat each other while he stood back and laughed. He fed on the strife and pain of their feeding. Everything Grimes had learned tonight confirmed his original theory that the only way to deal with this was, simply, to stay out of the web. But Jefferson had foreseen even that and with a cordial sentence—“Give my regards to your daddy”—he had snared Grimes too. The taunt of the airline ticket had just made it more certain that Grimes, the fool, would do the wrong thing. If the letter had arrived alone Grimes would have burned it on the spot and packed his bags and headed for Montana. But he hadn’t—he’d given Jefferson’s regards to his father—and now he and George and Ella and ultimately Christ knew who else were diligendy engaged in the fatman’s work. Hatred. Jefferson had taught Grimes some lessons of his own about hatred. The airline ticket had been more than just a taunt: it was a reminder that forced him to acknowledge that he could still—even now—walk away from all this if he wanted to. He could leave them all to it. His chances of survival would be a hell of a lot better than they were at the moment.

  He flicked his cigarette out into the dew and turned from the door. Without looking at Lenna he went over to the dryer and took out his suit. It was still a little damp but he wasn’t in the mood to care. Gul trotted back inside, wet again and dourly vigilant, and followed Grimes as he took the suit into his bedroom, found a clean shirt and changed. Grimes tied his black tie in front of the mirror without catching his eyes. His shoes were still soaked and cold but there wasn’t much he could do about that; he was goddamned if he
was going to die wearing sneakers. He finished the necktie and turned around to Gul, who sat on his haunches and looked up at him with blind devotion.

  “We are fucked, man, do you know that?” said Grimes.

  Gul stood up and came over and Grimes squatted down. Gul licked his throat and Grimes put his hand in the dog’s mouth. Gul chewed his fingers without inflicting any wounds.

  “You know what Clarence Jefferson said to me before he died?” said Grimes.

  Gul let go of his fingers and looked at him, waiting.

  “He said, ‘Tell me you don’t hate me.’ ”

  Gul blinked.

  “Now he calls me a clown.”

  Grimes smiled and rubbed the dog’s dewy flanks until he felt the hatred dissolve from his heart. If he could do it without hate, maybe it would be a thing worth doing after all. And, for all that he was a belligerent old bastard, Grimes did want to see his father again. Grimes glanced over to the table where he’d emptied his pockets: wallet, keys, revolver, passport, ticket to Argentina. He walked across and put the things in his pockets. He went over to the window: the rain had stopped. He clicked his tongue at Gul and went back next door. Lenna sat where he’d left her on the sofa. She was still staring into space and looked lost.

  “Better get ready,” said Grimes.

  Lenna didn’t react.

  “Lenna?” said Grimes.

  She looked up at him.

  “Get dressed,” said Grimes. “We’re going to Baton Rouge.”

  Lenna said, “I thought we were going to Georgia.”

  “We need an airport,” he said. “I’ve got a ticket we can use.”