“How?” I watched him catch both his knees in his hands as he unraveled, vomit spewing across the ground in front of him, a string of bile reaching his shoes as he dry heaved his stomach empty in the dirt. A mist of rain fell around us. Slow, then harder.
I turned and walked toward the door, its deep black shadow dark and uninviting in the side of the corrugated metal. Gray dirt masked the undulating curves in the exterior. It reminded me of a filthy set of teeth in the face of a raging mouth, some ungodly beast, which threatened to swallow us whole if we turned our back on it. Panic rose in my mind with the spread of a curtain, but it did not force me away. It induced awe and a painful curiosity.
From behind me I heard Simms choke on his words. “He electrocuted them. They’re in the water, just laying there in some kind of wade pool.”
I drew near to the doorway of teeth, a memory from earlier trying to return. What was it? What had Henning said of the farm…something about the cattle watering trough he remembered from his childhood. Why had they built it was what Henning had wanted to know.
Oh, it’d been the congregation area all right, Simms. You had that bitch picked dead to rights, didn’t you? But you can’t blame yourself. It’s a goddamned circus. Blame the guy who brought out the clowns and the popcorn. Because he did exactly what he said, he cleansed them of their sins. Isn’t that right? Why let God do it when you can do it for Him, right Marcus? Better yet…in front of the whole damn world.
Something called out to me then. Goose flesh crawled down my arms. And there it was again…a whispery sound, like stropped leather. It called out from inside. From behind those ragged metal teeth. Standing there they became a lot scarier in the creeping rain.
When I touched the door frame, metal slick beneath my hand, it became a mixture of cold filth and uncertainty. To the touch it caused shivers like raked chalk on a schoolroom blackboard. And even though I didn’t want to go in there, I had to. I was hearing the voice again—but they were all dead, according to Simms. Like a moan or the wind, or something in between, the sound emerged again. And the doorway beckoned come and see. See what Marcus made.
Taking a deep breath, I stepped through the entrance of the building before giving myself a chance to change my mind. Overhead glass transoms emitted a strange hooded light into the chapel like eyes slowly looking back inside the soul.
The smell of cooked flesh stung my nose and made my eyes water. I drifted toward the pulpit in the middle of the room. Below it, bodies of men, women and their children lay spilled like chord wood against one another, a small number of them stretched over the side of the shallow pool, hands frozen in death, clutching for the safety that never came. Others were buried or tangled in an embrace, face down in the blackened waters.
A dying sound curdled in my throat. It blew out a single breath of hope and died on my lips. Whatever remained behind in that terrible emptiness belonged to the comfort of misery. A piece of hell resided in my chest.
One little girl’s eyes appeared as jelly congealed in their sockets. Silvery beads of water dripped across her lifeless features. Tangles of hair clung to the empty scream of her jaw. The foundation of a death mask rounded out her face in a frozen block of terror and pain.
Drawing closer, a pungent smell invaded my nose, mixing into an ugly cocktail of shit and smoldered flesh. I tried desperately to breathe through my mouth. The muffled sound from outside came to me again, only much closer now. What in the hell is that?
I scanned the pile of bodies again, wondering if there could be a survivor, if there was a chance someone might have lived through the shock. I had my doubts thinking of the dead girl’s eyes again, grizzled and fried in the shadows of her face. Without touching anything, I stooped down in front of two of the victims. The semidarkness of the chamber made every effort to catch the faint rise of a chest futile. Nothing moved.
Two more agents came in the door and I turned to watch them space out across the far wall.
“Somebody here?” I waited for a response from the pile of bodies to move me into action. The echo of my own voice answered me. What in the hell would I do if someone did need my help? I wasn’t sure the water was completely absent of power even though I knew the transformer blew apart in front of me like the forth of July. I found a hymnal book sitting along a bank of chairs, grabbed it up and flung it backhanded into one corner of the water waiting for any potential crackles of electricity that might threaten to pull me in.
“Mere…” A pained voice from somewhere said.
My head bolted around, eyes wandering over the rear of the room, stretching far into the murky shadows where the black seemed to begin. I stood and staggered toward the darkness. Tied up on his side and bleeding from a cut above his right temple was the deputy that had been taken hostage.
I screamed out at the agents, a second bath of adrenaline washing over me. “Somebody’s alive in here.”
A gag was pulled across his mouth and cinched tight to the face. Broken capillaries shined around the edges of the bundled knots separating his lips. Blood pooled into his uniform, seeping it dark red at the shoulder. My fingers worked on the back of the gag, pulling the cinch loose and tossing it aside. He was crying when the knot came away.
“You’re okay, now. It’s over,” I said, not really believing it myself. Nothings ever over til’ it’s over. And I got my hands under his shoulders to bring him up. One of the agents worked on the rope around his chest, arms and hands.
“My stomach.” He began to cry. Blood streamed out his mouth as he bent forward.
“Need some help over here!” I yelled as we emerged from the building. The charred smell of cooked flesh was replaced by fresh air, and my eyes squinted at the thinning sunlight that ripped through the storm clouds off to the west.
A paramedic with the name tag Felipe clamored to our side. We laid the deputy on the ground and the agents disappeared back inside the building. I stayed to help remove the strands of rope binding the deputy’s torso. His shirt was soaked across the chest and I could smell bile on my hands. Heavy tinges of blood pressed through the fabric above his belt.
As Felipe busied himself checking vitals, the deputy began coughing. More blood pooled out of his mouth and speckled his face and lips. Bright red dots shinned over the paramedic’s hands as they moved. A second tremor of disaster bridged the space between my heart and brain.
“Let’s get his shirt off.” Felipe stood and motioned his arm, screaming for another paramedic.
I reached for the top buttons of the deputy’s shirt and ripped with both hands. A string of buttons flew around me like hammered silver. Blood matted the t-shirt centering on the entry point of what appeared to be a gun shot wound through the lower abdomen. The paramedic shredded the undershirt, folding it over to the ground. His fingers pushed around the seeping hole, causing considerable amounts of blood to flow out of the wound.
“Roll him over.” Felipe ripped open a compress from his bag. “Did you see an exit wound when you untied his arms?”
“I don’t remember.”
We checked the deputy’s back and found it clear. A second paramedic rushed in beside us to help stabilize the bleeding. As he knelt down, the deputy’s mouth erupted in a balloon of latex red. Without warning a fit of convulsions seized hold of his body. When it stopped, his jaw laid still melting blood in the wet dirt around him. He looked like a wax figure caught in a horrible fire.
“I don’t have a pulse.” The second paramedic raced to open the zipper of a lap bag.
“Get it charged.” Felipe pushed a needle and several cc’s of a drug filtered into the deputy’s body. Then he began CPR.
The second paramedic thumbed on a switch and stretched out a set of defibrillator paddles.
“Clear!”
Felipe leaned back.
The paddles pumped out electricity. Buckling with the charge, the deputy rose up with the shock hitting his chest and fell limp again.
Felipe reached down to the deputy�
�s bloody neck, fingers slipping across his throat. “Hit him again.”
“It’s charging.”
A beep emitted from the equipment and he shouted clear again.
Another jolt quivered the deputy, expanding his chest slightly and then leaving him flat against the dirt.
I slumped back on the ground deflated by their body language. And it was another minute before I heard them again.
“Go ahead and call it.”
Felipe wiped his hands across his pants and brought up his watch. “Time of death, 4:23.”
Exhaustion trickled through the shoulders with those words and settled into my legs like weighted bags of sand. A terrible numbness spread inside me, as though I had taken a portion of the defibrillator shock.
And this is how it ends. In a crowded haze of agents and guardsmen. With everyone dead. The little girl with the gelatin eyes piled in between the bodies of church members, teeth exposed in a watery mask. A Sheriff’s deputy dead at my feet. And the realization that my stepbrother, who I didn’t understand anymore today than I had growing up, had fulfilled whatever bizarre calling God had brought him here for and left Chimayo blood red in the wake of a crazed pilgrimage.
I sat on the ground a long while, growing more confounded by it all. I stared at the dead deputy beside me. Something made me reach out and grab his hand tight in mine. I searched the faces in a throng of movement. Shock and disbelief settled over most of the ones close by, those FBI agents and national guardsmen who arrived on the scene first. It was as if I had stepped into the middle of a family at a funeral. Every serviceman on the scene shared the same pained feature. They all looked enough alike to have been brothers and sisters or someone’s cousin, the disguise of anguish worn by everyone at death’s ball.
The reason I’d gone there was to find my sister, and in the wreckage of half burned bodies, somewhere near the bottom, they found her for me. Dental records confirmed what I suspected when I viewed the remains of the woman in the body bag.
Darla’s pale skin, transfixed by a ghostly shade of purple, nearly matched the darkened color that encircled her eyes. As expected, I failed to keep it together. Mostly, I cried. And I never said a word. At the time I didn’t know how.
The desert had taken its toll. Her lips crackled dry from too many days spent baking in the afternoon heat. Over the years her hair had lightened, I could see, slicked down and still slightly damp from the water they found her in. Thin rows of crow’s feet had emerged with age, but she was still beautiful enough to remind me of our mother. Even when the zipper closed back around her head.
Through the ensuing days, I waited for answers to the madness that existed in the world. But none would follow. At some point, I knew, the agents would piece together the events in a manual, a far reaching effort to keep it from happening again; writers would challenge themselves by filling in the holes with biting dialogue, and the movie of the week would fall so far short of the experience it might as well have been another event altogether. Whichever actor took on my stepbrother’s role, would inevitably study the film from CNN and try to capture the nature of the beast with slight of hand acting. Yet he would never breathe the monster into his character, because no one could. There’s a difference between playing crazy and repeating it.
The cover of Time Magazine captured the turmoil on its front jacket the next week. It showed an older man sitting on the wet ground next to a dead sheriff’s deputy, his hand held out in an embrace of sorrow; a young man’s lifeless fingers hanging on to the living for the last time. I wasn’t even aware the picture had been taken. Blood covered my chest and thighs where I’d assisted in rolling the deputy over to check for an exit wound. My face caked in dirt stains and sweat, and sweet Jesus, my eyes…those vacant, disturbed-looking eyes that were locked onto the scene in a trance. The tears had come easy by then.
There was a period of a month for the memory of the dead to give me some sense of peace at night, particularly the girl with the melted eyes. I couldn’t shake the memory of her. One reoccurring dream found her bathing in a tub, washing her face as I approached, calling to her softly, “Can I help you?” and something inside me knowing all along I couldn’t. I saw the black water edging up against her skin as she washed off layers of gray ash from her shoulders. She would reach for me gently, never in an effort to scare, but one needing help, and I’d sit down beside her and watch her bathe until she disappeared under the ashy swirls.
Other times, cold sweats carried the memories of the dead floating in pools of brackish water. They sailed through the undercurrents of dreams, always early in the night, and always under the helm of my stepbrother, whose fate ended with a gunshot to the head two days after his capture.
Ferguson Capshaw, an ex-marine gunnery sergeant, between jobs, the article reported, took responsibility for the shooting of Yehoshua. Authorities later determined his motive had been simply revenge; he was the divorced father of two of the children who were found that day at Jericho Falls, along with his former wife. Using a 9mm semi-automatic with armor piercing rounds, he’d waited just outside the courthouse lobby prior to the arraignment, having entered a back door when the janitorial department left that morning. When Yehoshua had stepped through the front entrance surrounded by officers, Capshaw emerged from behind a men’s bathroom door, where he had perched motionless on a commode seat for five hours. In the matter of a split second, he squeezed off two rounds, one missing entirely to the left and clipping an officer in the arm before slamming into the marble wall behind his intended target. The other entered Yehoshua’s cheekbone from the left side and took off the top cap of his head, killing him instantly.
18
Out on the horizon, the night sky turned the color of cobalt and ash. Clouds drifted in under a blanket of crystal stars. A small crackle of flames settled low in the dying fire, as I gripped the bones feeding into my ankles. My head was beginning to throb and the seeds of need called to be watered. Accepting I needed a drink didn’t make it any easier; it made me pitiful, because I knew it wouldn’t stop at one or two or even three. Early on in my adulthood, drinking became something akin to growing spurts. Except, instead of eating, I drank everything in sight. Nothing quenched it and my appetite grew.
“You know what I think? I’m tired of sitting in the sand,” I groaned. “Sorry, everybody.”
“Whatever we need to do,” Nicole said.
I twisted over, knees tight with age. “Honestly, my throat’s raw from picking apart my shit-hole life.” I looked around. “I can’t be the only one thirsty.”
Charlie raised her hand. “I could use some water.”
“Well, I’ve got to get something. I’ll lose my voice keeping this up. Besides, the fire’s almost dead.” I didn’t give anyone a choice in the matter. I rose up from the fire and left them sitting in the glow of dying embers. I walked to Rabbits Hole alone. Uninvited.
Inside the house I took a bottle from the shelf and poured a stiff glass of Jack and knocked it back with a head-turning flinch. The corner on the label of the bottle had peeled up. I ripped it away, leaving the glue-back white of paper trailing across its face. Then I slammed another shot, until the shake in my hands began to subside and the familiar black surge of nothing surfaced in my head, the one that kept the voices at bay.
After a while I heard the door to the porch slam closed for the first of several times. Voices of my family settled into the rafters outside. I drummed my fingers on the counter, staring at the empty glass. Then poured another smaller shot and waited in the confines of the kitchen for the courage to go out.
“Are you okay?” Charlie slipped up behind me.
I held up the glass. “I will be in a second.”
“We can take a break. You don’t have to do this, you know?”
“There’s not much left. The hardest part, and then it’s over,” I said. “Just needed a little liquid strength. Some guys have to have steroids. Me, a splash of Jack and I can be the strongest fucker on the p
lanet.”
“Why did you never share any of that?”
I scratched under my arm, still holding the rocks glass. “What you just spent time hearing…I’ve been trying to forget for a lifetime. I’m just lousy at doing it. I’d fix you something, but…” I pointed at her stomach.
She walked over and hugged my neck. “I don’t need anything. But you do.”
“You think I need a hug?”
“I think you need more than that.” She laughed in my ear and held me for a long while. “Please tell me it won’t be much worse.”
I pulled back. “Depends on whether you want to know how I destroyed a man and then tried to kill him. Ever think you’d hear that out of me?”
I followed her back onto the porch and collapsed into one of the empty chairs. Charlie handed out bottles of water to Amy and Nicole, hands snapping them up like candy.
Nicole said, “Planning your escape?”
The Weight of Glass Page 22
