The Tangled Bridge

by Rhodi Hawk

  “Where the shuttle at?” Shalmut asked. “I’m ready to go.”

  She looked into the rain. “They had a lot of stops to make, trying to bring everyone in.”

  “St. Jo’s cup gonna runneth over,” Shalmut said with a rheumy laugh.

  “Shalmut, do you remember the little boy at the levee? The blind boy and his mother?”

  “Bo Racer, yeah,” Shalmut said.

  “Bo Racer?”

  “Yeah, kid go by name of Bo Racer. His mama name is Esther.”

  Madeleine thought over the strange name for a moment. “Do you know where he is?”

  Shalmut shook his head, or maybe he rocked, it was more a gesture of overexerting his thought energy than answering the question.

  Madeleine tried, “Are they always at the levee like that?”

  “No, no, they got a home. Just get run out sometimes.”

  “Where’s their home?”

  “I don’t know, baby.”

  “They live in an apartment?”

  “Naw, an ole trailer.”

  “A trailer,” Madeleine said, thinking. “In the country or one of the parks?”

  “That damn park, the park, the Rose Bush or Rose Something.”

  “Rosewood Arms?”

  Shal looked relieved. “That’s it. Rosewood Arms.”

  Then he squinted like he was striving to think of something. “Wait a damn minute. They here.”

  “Here?” Madeleine said, looking across the darkness between steel girders.

  “Yeah. On over there.”

  He pointed in the direction where Del and the boys were. Madeleine strained to see. On the other side of the small assemblage, sitting next to a pile of construction rubble, sat a little boy and his mother. They looked an African-Hispanic mix. The boy’s smile was gaping wide, sunglasses on his face. The mother looked tired.

  Several feet away, Del was now shouting and cussing for no apparent reason but to draw attention. The boys gathered around her and one of the other outreach volunteers ambled toward them, too. The baby’s wailing rose.

  “Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky…”

  Madeleine looked back at Shalmut. He was singing to the baby in her arms with that roughshod voice of his. Even drunk out of his mind it sounded like heaven. The baby quieted.

  “… Stormy weather, since my gal and I, ain’t been together…”

  She’d heard his voice so many times before. He and her father used to sing together, busking for dollars from the tourists. Daddy rarely needed the money—he just lived on the street because his turbulent mind caused him to blink in and out of mainstream society. She felt her throat go hot.

  Ethan made it under the bridge and hitched his way toward her. She smiled at him. The baby was watching with wide eyes as Shalmut sang.

  Ethan reached Madeleine’s side and looked full into her face, frowning.

  She turned her lip away from him but he gently took her chin and turned it back. “What happened to your lip, Maddy?”

  She shrugged. “When I surprised Oyster in the dark. They thought we were coming to attack them.”

  Shalmut stopped singing. Ethan’s clean-lined face was pulled taut with anger, and he was soaked to the bone.

  “Them huffers,” Shalmut said, and Madeleine followed his gaze to the pack of boys who had finally pulled the kerchiefs away from their faces. “Mean as snakes, them kids.”

  Even in the dimness beneath the bridge, she could see multicolored smears under the boys’ noses where they must have been huffing spray paint.

  The strange bird call echoed under the bridge.

  Madeleine listened. Same as she’d heard in the predawn woods just before she found Shalmut and Alice. The sound, it came from the blind boy, Bo Racer. He’d stood and was looking around. The nervous tick-tock sound bounced up toward the cathedral height of the bridge’s underside and back down again. His mother Esther stood, too.

  Next to Madeleine, Ethan’s gaze zeroed in on Oyster. He took a step toward him.

  “Hang on, Ethan,” Madeleine said.

  But Ethan was heading straight for the huffers, as Shalmut had called them. Madeleine hoisted the baby higher on her hip and followed. Ahead, Del was flapping the water out of her tank top, exposing a fair share of skin in the process. The police officer watched her. A violent crack of thunder, and Del screamed with exaggerated fear. The baby started crying again. Lightning was flashing all around now, like camera strobes, and the rain cracked open to a deafening rush. Madeleine slowed, listening as the downpour intensified, growing thicker and louder and forming a solid white sheet from the top of the bridge. It stole the breath from the air. One by one, the huffers opened their mouths as if to allow in more oxygen, the same way alligators and dogs drop their jaws to cool down.

  “Wait a minute, Ethan,” Madeleine said, her hand on his arm.

  He wheeled on her. “I told you to be careful in that corridor! You act as though you don’t even care what happens to you.”

  Rain was now shearing the perimeter so hard it drowned out the sound of cars charging across the bridge overhead. The water looked like an opaque curtain that daylight could no longer penetrate. If she walked through that curtain she’d disappear. And if someone were standing three feet outside of the shelter, she wouldn’t be able to see that, either.

  Beneath the white noise came the blind boy’s clicking, that tick-tocking bird call. Like at the levee just before dawn.

  Her heart rate jumped. The air beneath the bridge seemed to thicken. Something was wrong.

  She could hear the blind kid, Bo, calling. “Mama, it’s here again.”

  Oyster was staring at Ethan. “Hey, bent-dick, you got a problem?”

  The other boys caught sight of Ethan’s face and repositioned the kerchiefs over their noses.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong. Ethan and the boys were squaring off, but something deeper was going on. Something briar. Madeleine looked up. Severin was crawling upside-down along the footing of the bridge, her naked form streaked and smudged. Lightning and thunder shuddered all around.

  Get away, Severin. We have a bargain.

  Severin grinned down from above. “The blind boy comes, you break its neck, truly, easily.”

  Ethan’s arms were tensed at his side as he glared at Oyster. “You need to check your attitude, son, and think twice about hitting unarmed women.”

  “Y’all need to think twice about busting in on other people’s territory,” Mako shouted.

  “Hey,” the policeman said as he took a step toward the huffers.

  Bo’s mother reached for her son.

  Bo turned to her. “Mom, I said it’s here again.”

  “Gimme my baby!” Del shouted at Madeleine.

  Madeleine raised the child to her, and Del stepped forward. A sense of anger electrified the underbelly of the bridge. Everywhere, in everyone, but it wasn’t just the huffers’ anger, or Ethan’s, or Del’s, it was …

  Severin raised her head, leering down at Madeleine, and lifted a finger to her lips in a shush. Black thorns were unfolding from the piling, forming a nest beneath the devil-child.

  Maybe I’ll use him next, Alice had said.

  Madeleine turned to look for Shalmut Halsey but he was no longer there. She spotted him standing behind the police officer. Shalmut, who only moments ago couldn’t even get to his feet.

  “No!” Madeleine shouted.

  Shalmut’s hand went to the policeman’s belt and pulled his gun from the holster.

  “Shal! NO!”

  Del’s arms were still raised toward her baby when the first bullet flew. It took her just inside the left shoulder. Madeleine jerked the baby away and Del’s eyes froze to shock. The infant bawled, raising its arms to its mother. Del took two steps sideways and looked at her arm. Blood coursed from just below her collarbone. The tank top stained black-crimson. She had been standing just behind Bo, who turned and ran toward Madeleine.

  “Break its neck!” Severin cried.


  And Severin imparted a vision so awful, so awful. Fractions of a second before Bo reached her: Severin’s vision of how Madeleine might swing her arm out, catch the thin neck, and …

  Madeleine had to close her eyes against it, hugging the baby to her chest.

  Bo kept running past her, blind boy running blind, into the wall of rain.

  Click click click click, tick-tock click.

  Shalmut fired again. Madeleine hadn’t heard the report but she somehow heard the bullet zip past her ear. Someone was falling. She was falling. She sank to the ground before she even realized Ethan had knocked her over a moment before the bullet would have struck her in the head. She had a hand in the mud and the other clutching the baby’s head.

  Del reached for the baby again, though she herself could barely stand.

  Esther was wailing and scrambling after her son.

  “Get down!” Ethan yelled.

  The policeman stood in shock. Shalmut shot him point-blank through the forehead.

  The baby shrieked, all of the folks under the bridge shrieking, their voices blanketed in thunder and rain.

  The policeman slumped to his knees.

  Del fell sideways and did not use her hands to break her fall. Lying in the dirt, she pedaled out her right leg twice—same way Vessie had been bicycling Zenon’s leg in his hospital bed.

  Shal, drop it!

  Shalmut’s eyes were wide. He swung the policeman’s gun and people scattered in its path. Another report rang out, the sound seeming so inconsequential. Nothing compared to the thunder. It took Mako in the back as he was running for the rain.

  Severin had brought the thorns. They curled black from the sparrows’ nests, from the girders, even from the graffiti, stretching forth to envelop the madness that was occurring. Madeleine saw another river devil standing just beyond Shalmut. She’d seen him before. Whereas Severin looked like a little girl, the other river devil looked like a full-grown man. Muscular arms. She saw him in silhouette only. He stepped forward as lightning flashed, and she caught sight of his face. Eyes impossibly pale like powder blue robin’s eggs. His skin filthy like Severin’s with that odd shadowplay of sunlight on aged copper.

  Severin laughed. Musical, delicate, childlike. She glowed faintly in the darkness of the underpass. Her tiny hand stretched toward Shalmut and shed light on him, too. He and the river devils both shone in that sepia glow, washing to white with each strobe of lightning.

  Madeleine tried to clamp onto Shalmut. Nothing. Slippery as Alice had been. No way to make him stop this. Madeleine was as helpless as the rest of them.

  Another shot. One of the outreach volunteers went limp where he lay crouched on the ground.

  People disappeared into the rain. Madeleine was on her feet again, trying desperately to get a fix on Shalmut, stumbling forward, but her pigeonry had no effect.

  Shalmut turned back and looked her dead in the eye with the gun swinging in her direction. She saw now, saw through the illumination of Severin’s briar light, that he was smiling.

  Madeleine stopped. Shalmut wasn’t smiling with his mouth, and not his cheeks. His smile was nothing more than a lift to the eyes.

  Madeleine recognized that expression.

  Other than the fallen, most everyone else had already disappeared into the rain or was cowering in the mud. Except Ethan.

  Ethan lunged. He knocked Shalmut in the left side of the jaw, and Shalmut’s head snapped sideways. The gun discharged again. The bullet landed in a wooden palette. Shalmut’s head wobbled as he fell to the ground. Madeleine watched, and realized that she was still trying to clamp her pigeonry into him. Still trying to grab control. Clamping onto a spirit that was already loosening from its host.

  Shalmut was sprawled in the dirt, a cloud of dust creeping from him like fog on a riverbank. He lay still.

  thirteen

  HAHNVILLE, 1927

  WHEN PATRICE AND GILBERT returned to Terrefleurs, they did not find that Trigger had collected Marie-Rose and brought her back home. They did not find Trigger at all. Not right away. The plantation workers were settled into their Sundays, shelling peas on their porches and recuperating from a long week in the fields.

  Patrice and Gil found Rosie first. After checking all the outbuildings, they’d returned to the main house and looked through the basement. There, curled atop a burlap sack of red beans, lay little Rosie.

  Gil said, “But I’d checked the basement. She wasn’t in here.”

  Rosie was wide awake, but in the briar and not responding to their prods. More disturbing were the sounds she was making. Guttural clucks. Odd little lashes of her tongue. And a queer sort of smile at her eyes. Patrice did not like that smile.

  The thorns were curling their way into the cellar, beckoning Patrice into the other world. The scent of cool, rotted earth and rolling mist. She made herself calm. Refused to acknowledge the grinning river devil who watched from above in the beams crisscrossing the ceiling.

  “We’ve got to find Trigger,” Patrice said.

  Gil had walked to the other side of the basement and was staring at the space beyond the coal furnace. “Well, I found him and a little somethin extra.”

  The look on Gilbert’s face had Patrice on her feet and crossing to his side in half a heartbeat, leaving Marie-Rose alone on her bean sack. Trigger was there alright. He was standing opposite Gilbert with that same strange smile Marie-Rose was wearing.

  On the floor lay a man Patrice did not know. Near death. A step stool was crushing his windpipe.

  Patrice looked from him to Trigger and then back again. The stranger’s mouth was open to a gray, blood-streaked tongue, and he was missing his front teeth. She thought to help him but at the same time, knew that he must be a bad man. That he had something to do with all this. A rumpled raw cotton sack lay near his knee.

  In the man’s hand was a knife, and it was streaked with blood.

  She dared a glance at Trigger again. A black smudge across his cheek. A bloody gash down his forearm.

  Trigger made a low, strangled grunt.

  “Trigger?” Patrice tried, and then thinking he might answer to his given name instead: “Guy?”

  But Trig was in the briar, just like Rosie. His look was so foreboding that Patrice had to remind herself that he was still her baby brother, gentle as a kitten. She reached for his hand but he stepped away, shying back without having looked directly at her. He stepped up, back onto that stool that rested over the fallen man’s neck.

  “Don’t—” Patrice started to say.

  An unearthly hollow sound emitted from somewhere in the stranger’s throat.

  A noise from behind made Patrice whirl. Marie-Rose was standing only three feet away and making a strange gasping cluck, her gaze leveled on Trigger, and he was looking at her, too. The expressions on their faces made Patrice back toward Gil and wrap her arms around herself.

  “Their necks,” Gil said, and Patrice saw that both Marie-Rose and Trigger had blood at their back collars.

  “What’s happened here?” Patrice said.

  Gil pointed to the man on the floor. “Who is he?”

  But the question strongest on Patrice’s mind was not who he was, but how he’d come about lying there on the fruit cellar floor. Had one of the younger ones attacked him?

  Gil said, “I’m goin in.”

  “No. Let me.”

  Patrice knew she was the eldest and strongest of the four. And something was off about the way the younger siblings were mired in the bramble.

  She said, “Keep an eye on them. Don’t let them wander.”

  “I will.”

  “And keep an eye on … him.” She gestured to the man on the floor.

  Gil nodded. “Careful, Treesey.”

  * * *

  IT TOOK NO TIME at all for the thorns to come. No sooner had Patrice receded her mind that the fruit cellar seemed to worm to life. Potatoes in the bin sprouted eyes that gave to roots that became black, lengthening thorns. So did the
tiny roots along the wall.

  Patrice could see Trigger facing her just as he was in the material world. He was standing atop something that was not a step stool, but a sort of iron jaw, a trap, and beneath its teeth some kind of horrible bramble devil was writhing. A black, tarry thing that looked like a man whose arms and legs were far too long and thin. Trigger looked down at it and wobbled atop the trap, making the creature squeak.

  “Trig—” she started to say, but he put his fingers to his lips in a hushing sound.

  He smiled beyond Patrice’s shoulder, and she turned to see Marie-Rose. She was grinning at some kind of colorful, winged flying fish. A briar sylph. It looked lighter than paper and it shimmered in a colorful display in stark contrast to the black briar. Weightless on a breeze. The sylph was making those sounds, the swallowed “g” sounds, and Marie-Rose was answering back.

  And then Patrice realized that the sylph had led Rosie to one particular tree that stood out from all the others. A tall black pine that seemed to reach higher than heaven. At its base were carvings. Patrice recognized them at once.

  Papa.

  Carving used to calm him. A way for him to bring his physical body back together with its ghost. Trigger had recently started whittling, too.

  Before he’d died, Papa had carved dozens of toys for the children. Patrice alone had fourteen dolls made of tupelo gum—one for each birthday. There would be no more.

  So lovely was the sylph. And so absorbing the briar. Patrice had to work hard to form a thought: She had come here for a reason.

  All four of the children’s river devils were there, laughing, whispering, pointing. Patrice’s devil was touching the iron jaw. It somehow made Patrice want to touch it, too. Even though part of her knew that in the other world, a real man lay trapped by it.

  The colorful, hovering sylph receded toward the black woods and Marie-Rose stepped out as though to follow it further.

  “No,” Patrice said aloud, and her two younger siblings shushed her.

  Why? she wondered.

  But she didn’t need words to communicate with them, especially not here. So Patrice compressed her thoughts into a single feeling. She let her body assume a sensation that reflected their mother—a feeling like tension and dread and always-fleeting hope or love.