by Tim Willocks
All she’d ever done was wrong except for that. All else she regretted; all else seemed beyond any possibility of redemption. She was a contagion to all who touched her: Wes Clay, Filmore Faroe, Bobby Frechette, Cicero Grimes, Ella MacDaniels, her own parents. They all staggered out of her malignant orbit bearing infected wounds or worse. She thought of the desperation with which she had accepted Grimes’s embrace. His strong fingers on her body, his tobacco-stained breath upon her lips, had brought her into the world and she had wanted him. For those moments she had loved him, as she hadn’t loved for twenty years, but Grimes deserved better. For Lenna only Clarence Jefferson had been fit company, and her for him: a pact of erotic humiliation and self-punishment. The crucified saints and bleeding martyrs of her childhood had taught her that secret: the only cure for guilt was punishment. And what better punishment than that she allow her body to be fucked and soiled by the murderer of her child?
Except that hadn’t worked, either. She had only poisoned herself more. She should have killed Clarence Jefferson on the hundred occasions when she had the chance. And Faroe too. Killed them both and thrown herself upon the law. There might at least have been some self-respect in that. The truth was that everything she’d done had been a sustained shriek of self-pity. She had kept Faroe alive, she had kept Jefferson in her bed, just so she could scream at them: “Look what you have done to me.” She thought: look what you have done to yourself.
It was too late to change very much but, maybe, she could change a little. A fragment from the Bible stole into her mind: “If not the Lord of Hosts had left unto us a very small remnant …” Yesterday she’d commanded all the power that millions could buy. All she had now was this body, this brain, this soul, sitting here at this table. A very small remnant. But maybe her powerlessness in the world gave her back her power over herself. She could still do one thing rather than another.
She would cut herself off from Cicero Grimes. He was a good man. She would protect him from her contagion; she owed him at least that much. She would leave him a note and disappear. What mattered most was that Ella MacDaniels be safe and stay safe; and that demanded that Faroe die. If he ever found out Ella was alive there was no knowing what he would do. Lenna had to return to Arcadia and kill him. With luck, she would die in the attempt; for beyond the moment of Faroe’s death she could see no profit in existence. Yet she couldn’t stop her heart from asking: but don’t you want to know Ella? Don’t you want to help her? Don’t you want to love her?
Lenna took her heart and squeezed its selfish yearnings to death. To wish her love on anyone was second only in horror to wishing them her hate. Ella had lived her life in freedom. If it became known—if Ella came to know—that she was Lenna’s child, then her freedom would be destroyed forever. Even if Faroe were dead, Ella would be dragged down into a swamp of publicity and filth. Ella must never know where she came from.
With that decision, Lenna felt better. She’d been struggling in quicksand. Now she knew what to do. For the first time since she’d grown Ella in her womb she had a purpose worth having. Not vengeance or hatred or masochism, but the protection of a freedom infinitely more precious than her own. She picked up her coffee cup and drained it. As she set it down she looked across the room.
In a warp of time so brief it was eternity the ache inside her pelvis radiated outward through all that she felt herself to be, and the yearnings she thought she’d squeezed to death came back to life, and not screaming or shouting, but singing: with the voices of angels and a music so sweet it melted every nerve and every cell of the very small remnant she yet possessed.
The woman sitting by the window was beautiful and strong. In the bones of her face and the fullness of her mouth was the imprint of Wes Clay. Her limbs were long and her fingers graceful. Her eyes were long-lashed and gentle and her skin a lustrous brown. Her hair was a cascade of shining braids. In her nose was a diamond stud.
Lenna felt and saw all this in an instant, and in that instant she remembered with perfect clarity why she had lost her heart so gladly to Wes Clay; her man; her star-crossed lover. But more than that Lenna understood, fully and at last, why a bewildered girl those twenty years ago had endured, with such senseless and stubborn resolution, the terror of her lonely pregnancy.
For here was her daughter: Ella, grown well and tall and proud, and so inexpressibly fine.
Ella smiled at the old man eating with her; and Lenna lost her hold and fell.
Ella’s smile was of such loveliness that Lenna heard the world crack open beneath her and felt herself falling, wheeling, into whatever lay below and she prayed: let it happen. Let me vanish now with this picture painted on my soul and I will keep it alive and beauteous, even in the darkest fiery pit, and others will come and gaze on it and be comforted in their burning. I want no more. I want no more. Everything has been paid for. All debts are settled, all my trials and more I offer, free and full, for this one moment. Let me go now.
Then Ella looked at her directly across the room.
Lenna turned away.
She didn’t want to. She wanted to sit here and stare forever; but instead she turned away. Because beneath her feet was the floor of a diner and not the abyss she’d prayed for; because her stare was the stare of contagion and death; and because she was ashamed. She was ashamed that she, and not some other, better, woman, was the mother of this lovely girl. She could not look her daughter in the eye and have to tell her, even in the wordlessness of a silent gaze: I am your birthright. Lenna felt tears running down her neck. Confusion seized her, panic. Leave. Leave. Just leave, now. Then: please, just one more look; just one moreßlanee. The choir of yearnings dragged her eyes across the room.
She saw Ella looking down at her plate.
Ella lifting a fork to her mouth.
One more picture, one more glimpse.
Ella putting the fork down, untouched.
Then: Ella looking direcüy at her, again.
Lenna turned away.
She blanked her mind. She stood up. She threw some money on the table. She saw the napkin by her plate, picked it up, wiped her face. The door. The sidewalk. The road away. Go. She turned and stared at the exit. The room was a tunnel, a blur. Walk. She moved down the aisle, her eyes on the door. An awareness as strong as the heat of an open furnace flared and roared just ahead to her left: Ella, her table. Lenna kept walking, reeled through the blast, she was through it, she was past, she was gone, the door still there ahead. Then a voice.
“Excuse me, Miss?”
Against her will Lenna’s legs stopped moving. She felt her shoulders shaking. Her body was lost in a flood of sensations, intensely physical. Gut, head, muscles. She couldn’t breathe. I will not cry. I will not cry. The voice again: a simple and incomprehensible compassion.
“I just wondered if you were okay.”
Lenna’s mind swam. Say something and go. No, just go. The door: there. Just a couple of words. Let me speak to her just once. She gave in. She turned and looked at the huge and gentle eyes a few inches away.
“Thank you,” choked Lenna. “I’m fine.”
She felt a spasm bubble up through her throat and clamped down on it. She felt herself shaking with the effort. Ella took her arm.
Ella touched her.
Ella said, “Please, come and sit with us for a while.”
“No. I mustn’t. I have to.” Lenna ran out of breath and didn’t dare take another. “I have to …”
The old man wiped his mouth and threw down his napkin and stood up.
He said to Ella, “Take her outside. I’ll get the check.”
Lenna looked at him for safety. He had gray eyes, worried but strong. He nodded to her and smiled a kindly smile. With the smile he turned, for an instant, into Cicero Grimes and she realized this was his father, George. The nod and the smile poured strength into her. She turned and walked to the door, feeling Ella’s steps behind her. By the time she reached the sidewalk she was breathing again. She turned and looked
at the notch in Ella’s throat. She didn’t dare look at her face.
“Forgive me,” said Lenna, “but would you hold me for a moment?”
Ella hesitated. “Sure.”
Ella’s arms opened and Lenna stepped between them and the arms folded around her. Lenna closed her eyes as the skin of Ella’s neck touched her cheek. She felt their bodies press together, felt gentle hands upon her back. It was the softest place she’d ever been, the loveliest, the deepest. She put her arms around Ella. She thought nothing, she didn’t ask to know what it was she felt, she just accepted this gift as it was given, out of the freedom and innocence of a stranger. She lost track of time and within whatever time it was she recovered herself, so that when she sensed George Grimes walk up and heard him cough she was able to let go and stand back feeling okay. She was even able to look Ella in the eye.
“You’re very kind,” said Lenna. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”
“You didn’t,” replied Ella. “I’m fine. It was nothing. God, you should see me on my bad days.”
Lenna swallowed another urge to sob and wrested her wits back into place. She made herself think: only Cicero Grimes knew that Ella was her daughter. That was how it had to stay. She mustn’t let emotion sway the clear decision she had made to protect Ella from her origins.
George Grimes said, “You’re Lenna Parillaud.”
She looked at him and nodded. “That’s right. And you’re George Grimes.”
Lenna held out her hand and George shook it. In George’s eyes was a veiled suspicion. She was glad. She didn’t want Ella hanging out with a fool.
“This is my friend Ella MacDaniels,” said George.
Lenna’s voice was close to a whisper. “Ella.”
George looked up and down the street. “Let’s go around to the Jeep.”
As they crossed the parking lot George fell in between Ella and Lenna. His brow furrowed.
“You traveling alone?” he asked her.
“No,” Lenna replied. “I came with your son, Gene.”
“Where is Gene?”
Lenna glanced across him at Ella, who was listening. She didn’t want to expose Ella to any more than was necessary. The less she knew the better. George read the glance.
“Ella gets to know everything I do,” said George. “That’s the deal between us.”
Lenna looked at him. “Gene’s gone to find Jefferson’s papers.”
George grunted. “Anyone else know why you’re here?”
Lenna saw no reason to mention Daggett. “No. At least I don’t think so.”
They reached a red-and-black Jeep Cherokee and stopped. George rubbed a thumb along the side of his chin and stared into the western sky.
“Be dark within the hour.”
He looked back at Lenna.
“You don’t mind, Miss Parillaud, Ella and me need a word in private.”
Lenna nodded and walked to the other side of the Jeep, out of earshot. George’s evident concern for Ella was comforting. She clung to her resolution to go it alone from here, to keep herself away from anyone she didn’t want to hurt. Now it seemed a better idea than ever.
“Miss Parillaud?” called George.
She turned and walked back to them.
George coughed and said, “Miss Parillaud …”
“Lenna, please,” she said.
“Lenna, then. Now, I know this might not sound friendly but you’ve got to understand we’re in a situation here that might get dangerous. I appreciate you’re with Gene, but he’s not here. We don’t know you, or what your end is, and to be frank, well, we’d be foolish to completely trust you.”
George paused to look at Ella. She nodded.
“We’re pretty well armed,” continued George, “and we’re ready to protect ourselves, whichever way we have to and against anyone as takes up against us. We don’t mean to frighten you or cause unpleasantness, you understand, but we can’t leave you to, well, run around and maybe cause us a problem. The upshot is, you’re coming with us.”
Ella added, “George doesn’t mean we’d shoot you or anything like that, Lenna …”
“Of course not,” said George.
“… it’s just we think it would be better if we all stuck together until we find Gene. We’ll look after you.”
“Right,” said George. “That’s what I meant. Anyone comes against you, they come against us.”
Lenna looked at them both standing there, grimly heroic and at the same time terribly frail, and she realized that she loved them. It was as simple and as painful as that. She’d lived so long inside herself—inside her prison of hatred and loss—that she didn’t know how to deal with it. She felt the flood welling up again and this time the tears were filled with something more haunting than all her pain: she was happy. She was happy just to stand and breathe, here in the lot with these two people she’d never even met before.
Ella said, “All you have to do is ride with us.”
And Lenna Parillaud blinked and smiled and said, to Ella, “I would love to.”
TWENTY-ONE
THE GOOD DOCTOR’S appearance was haggard and changed. Within the shimmering light and shadow of his pale blue eyes and the hollows of his face were the stigmata—clear and yet invisible—of the time they two had spent together. Yet in spite ofthat Grimes was the man that he had been, and the man that he was and always would be: a clown in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, yearning for that which he had lost but could not name, searching not even for an answer but merely for a question that was worthy of the asking: the latest, but not the last, of an ancient line.
All this Jefferson saw in the shadows of the pale blue eyes and he felt his heart move with an unaccustomed pity, an inexplicable love. What was this love, this stirring that had haunted him in his fastness? Of what strange stuff was it wrought? And by what strange hand?
In the green-wood burning of his exile, in the Ohoopee River bottomlands, Jefferson had considered this matter long but without profit. If desire was an amoral savagery that he’d embraced without apology or regret, then love was a degradation and a crime, a plunge into gutters randomly chosen, a futile unmaking, an imbecile’s gargling laughter at the joke he did not understand. If there had been an erotic element to his love it would have been simpler: he would have fucked Grimes in the ass and the mouth while he’d had the chance; and there, most likely, it would have ended. Instead he had tortured him to the twitching brink of collapse and beyond; he had charred his nervous system to wires of blackened ash; and yet in search of what? He had not known. Integrity’s only resting place was that of silence and of pain, and Grimes had known them both. In such a place it had been that Jefferson had loved. And like a shuttered window opened of a sudden onto blazing day, love had opened onto death.
His mind had become an abattoir of unsolved riddles, the architecture of his intellect a roofless and gutted ruin, its skeleton walls tilting in the smoke. Confined to his chair by blistered flesh and ankylosing joints, he had wandered nevertheless, here, across the bottomlands, in search of the silent core. In search of his discipline.
Nothing must be wanted.
Violence must be without justification.
Suffering must be futile.
These were his tools. They could not be questioned. They could not be blunted and disabled by pedestrian reason, for their power, their occult meanings, were seated in unreason. Justification was a scourge—the vapid convalescent home of the civilized, the cowardly and the weak. He would not be justified. “Why?” was the bleating battie cry of the pitifully stupid. He would not ask “Why?” Did they really think they could explain it? They who had only possessed language for four miserable millennia and had groped at the apron strings of thought for less than three? Their trillion words of exegesis and insight, of analysis and explication, had penetrated the miles-deep mystery not an inch. Frightened scum, masturbating over the faded, cum-stained photos of a truth they dared not fuck in the ripe and rotten flesh. �
�Why?” He choked on the word. The rich horror of human existence was wasted on them. They were the flies who ate shit as happily as they ate chocolate cake.
His discipline had been of a more exacting order. His discipline had been to do away with everything in which others located their humanity: trust, friendship, progress, loyalty, devotion; and, most especially, all traces of anything that approached the treacherous bliss of tenderness. He stumbled back over fragments of remembered atrocity: of men executed for crimes they did not commit, of the healthy crippled in spine and bone, of screaming penitents devoured by beasts, of a shack’s wooden planking sprayed wide with gore. Of men and women separated from the ones they loved. Of mothers from their daughters. Of fathers from their sons.
As he had separated himself.
His bleak and futile compulsion—and knowingly thus—had condemned him to a desert—an austerity—of inarticulate longings; yet he had ground those longings into dirt. He had banished from his life all that was comforting, all that might bring pleasure. He had even denied himself the inverted solace of despair. He had destituted his humanity: without reason, without justification, without “Why?” He had wanted nothing: neither love nor knowledge, neither power nor beauty. These things he had accumulated, and exploited and spent, but he had not wanted them. He had attempted to free himself, short of death, from all the clanking chains of his wretched human being: a blind voyage into whatever lay beyond, without expectation or need of anything he might find.
And he had failed.
In a squalling bundle of swaddled rags, he had failed.
In a man who would not hate him, he had failed.
And in the Ohoopee River bottomlands he had come to know the extremity of his failure, the falsity of his solitude, the rank and disgraceful inevitability of his humanness.
