by Brian Hodge
“Not to mention the rest.” Justin scooped up a doublecupped fistful of water, held hands over crotch and squeezed his palms together. A spurt of water ejaculated.
Justin caught Leonard staring into the water, shoulders drooping in a rounded slump that hadn’t been there moments before. And when he spoke, he didn’t look Justin’s way.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting a little unconditional devotion … is there? There isn’t. Terri takes me for what I am, no questions asked. She doesn’t elbow me in the ribs if I snore. She doesn’t tell me to go to the gym more often. She doesn’t try to get me to spend a half hour in a tanning bed.” He splashed water around himself, gazing down upon the submerged rest of his body. “I look pretty good, don’t I? For forty-four I look pretty good?”
Against better judgment, Justin looked him over, appraising. Well, he did need some work. A little too much flab where muscle should have resided. A tan was a matter of personal choice, supposedly out of vogue in these days of melanoma awareness, but millions of other Floridians would violently disagree. Did Leonard even see the sun through anything other than a windshield? He had a brown forehead and brown hands and that was all. What could be said of this sight?
Justin saluted. “Thine alabaster titties gleam.”
Leonard frowned, not sure he liked this, not sure he liked this at all. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Justin flashed his most cryptic smile. “Len … you’re a temple.”
Better, but not by much. It would have to do, and Leonard muddled back to the deep end. Splashed beneath the arc of water from a spouting aquatic nymph, Andrew Jackson Mullavey’s only true bid for grandiosity here at what was a generally understated pool.
Justin floated, still, an oasis of self. He had come to the conclusion that their host was one genuinely eccentric human being. But there was eccentric, and there was eccentric. Lovable oddball versus man with truly suspect delusions. Yesterday had served to weld that perception into place quite effectively.
Breakfast had been at eight, and then Mullavey had taken them to a field for skeet shooting. They’d made the trip on horseback, no less. Mullavey in riding breeches and atop his hand-tooled saddle, shotgun slung across his lap, getting a good laugh at the neophyte riders from Tampa. Along with them went another of Mullavey’s house staff, another Caribbean fellow, who pulled the trap to send clay pigeons winging skyward. Mullavey was no slouch with the shotgun, could draw his bead and pick the whirling targets out of the sky with impressive regularity. A dusty cloud on impact, etched against blue sky, and a shower of gray fragments. Justin managed okay, maybe 50 percent accuracy. Leonard mostly wasted shells.
At the end of the shoot, Mullavey held the last of the plump gray targets in one hand, hefting it, the smoking break-breech shotgun dangling from the other. A faraway look in his eyes, as even his jowls seemed to tighten.
“They used to hunt men down here,” he said softly, with great contemplation. “Legally. Not all that long ago, in the overall span of time. It must have been … quite a thrill.” The man was actually reverent, transported. Then slowly, moment by moment, Mullavey came back to earth. “Sometimes, gentlemen … the business world just does not seem enough.”
He dropped the clay pigeon to the ground, soft thump in the wild grass, then stared at it. Reversed the shotgun in his hands. And drove it butt-first down upon the target, shattering it like a powdery gray skull.
They had gone back for lunch soon after that, and were free to do as they pleased until dinner. Justin and Leonard racked a few games of pool in what he assumed was considered the game room — animal heads on the wall, what else could it be? — until Terri made an appearance, and Justin suddenly felt like a useless appendage.
He had decided to go for a walk, prompt some of that Louisiana cuisine to digest before the evening onslaught. He’d gone out the back of the house, circuited the pool. Smokehouse. Gardens and gazebo. The Mullaveys would no doubt have tea served to them out here, or coffee, genteel breakfasts in this shrine to family success.
He followed the lawn back to a scalloped brick wall that ran the perimeter of the cleared portion of Mullavey’s property. Beyond which was also Mullavey-owned, on down to the river. The wall stood seven feet high, draped with ivy, and proved no great obstacle. Justin hoisted himself to the top and dropped to the other side.
He had followed the wall as it undulated along the tree line like a great brick snake. Found, some hundred yards hence, that he could have let himself out through a gateway in the brick. Thick hardwood doors on iron hinges, locked from this side and stout as a stockade wall; he wouldn’t be using it to regain admission to the grounds.
Justin had left the wall behind him, picked up a worn path and walked deeper into the woodland, a forest of oak and bald cypress, vines and Spanish moss. The air was thick and still, no breeze to stir up relief from the humidity. Like a minor rain forest, with that rich scent rolling in off the river, where brown pelicans went diving for fish. This seemed a holy place, in its primeval way. Mullavey may have owned it on paper, but to Justin’s eyes and heart, the man’s grasp seemed more tenuous here. A time-sharing plan, at best.
He must have been a half-mile from the manor house when he came upon the little settlement. Quick initial glimpses through the barricade of tree trunks: motion, people at work, dark skin and thick growth of another kind, and Justin slowed his approach.
The heat seemed to grow denser, his shirt heavier as it clung to chest and back and shoulders. An undeniable skew in mood came with every careful step closer he took: no logical reason to feel this way, but he knew, intuitively, that he wasn’t supposed to have strayed this far. Justin kept within several feet of the tree line’s rim before it abruptly cut off, and he pressed close to the trunk of some fat old cypress, its knees poking up through the earth like probing fingers., the bark hard and runneled beneath his hands.
Before him lay a tableau of pure agricultural peasantry. Beyond the trees grew a jungle of a different nature. Acres and acres of tall green-brown stalks, twelve feet high if they were a foot, growing as densely close as a lawn. A small portion of the field had been cleared to stubble, with two dozen or more black workers hacking away with machetes. Bent low to the earth, chopping the stalks just above ground level. Others bundled the cut stalks and loaded them onto carts.
Cane. Sugarcane. Harvest time.
This had been like watching something out of a documentary on third world poverty. These people in their simple clothes, broad-brimmed hats, usually straw, to fight the glaring sun. The harvest falling solely to manpower, no machines in sight.
The workers apparently lived on-site. In the distance, near the river side of the cane fields, stood a cluster of small hovels. Thirteen or fourteen. Crude cabins, if sturdy looking, tacked together out of wood.
Justin had watched awhile, then eventually meandered back to the manor house. Eaten with curiosity, but he kept his mouth shut during dinner.
He’d not gone back for a second look, but now, floating in a half-doze while Leonard seemed to be resolutely applying himself to pectoral-firming pool laps, Justin wondered. Maybe it wasn’t even Mullavey’s property — though the man had boasted of owning miles of riverfront land. Maybe Justin had crossed an invisible border at some point along the way. But then, why the easy access to the field from Mullavey’s backyard, that gate and pathway through the trees?
He was fighting disillusion. Justin wanted to believe that there might still be in the business world those who were every bit as benevolent as they appeared, like the Andrew Jackson Mullavey he had first seen in August. The man who had bristled at a stupid idea to plug his coffee bags with something that would play unemployment for laughs. The man whose company had kicked out twenty-six million in charitable contributions last year.
People like that, Justin so wanted to believe they were for real. But couldn’t, not anymore. Corporate charity? He saw it mainly as a PR gambit, or salve for CEOs’ conscience
s, those who had any left at all.
Did the local public know that its philanthropist at large could be running a migrant worker operation on his own land? Which certainly wasn’t illegal, but neither did it mesh well with the persona Mullavey had no doubt worked so hard to convey.
Maybe they did. Maybe they all knew. And didn’t care. Without buying power, without a media demographic, without a collective voice of any volume, migrant workers were invisible people. Statistics.
But then again, weren’t they all?
Justin climbed out of the pool ninety minutes later, toweled himself off all the way upstairs to his room.
He stood at the open window, let the breeze have its way with him. Shut his eyes and felt the flippant caress of the curtains — tender was this early afternoon. Would that he could have shared it with April.
He could not get home soon enough.
Justin turned from the window, decided to pack what he could before grabbing a quick shower. Retrieving those bits of his portable life scattered throughout the room. Comb here, paperback there, address and phone booklet elsewhere. He sat a moment on the edge of the bed — made sometime during his absence — and gathered the odds and ends from the nightstand.
A moment’s pause to again look at the vase on the nightstand. He had admired it all weekend: porcelain, gilded around the rims of mouth and delicate handles, soft white with green and rose tracery from some unknown artist’s delicate brush. Anything like this, of probable high value — sentimental if not monetary — he couldn’t resist the urge to pick up. A carryover from childhood, perhaps, his mother watching him with Don’t touch on her lips, at the ready. He’d always been a defiant little snot.
He picked it up…
And nearly dropped it when he tilted it around to peer inside. The vase was not empty.
Justin rattled it back into place, hurriedly, then sat there stiff and straight in his wet trunks, as if caught trying to steal something. Blatant innocence that would never wash, thinking, I didn’t see that, that’s not what it looked like, it’s just a twig.
He reached for the vase again, carefully, brought it over to the bed. Upended it so the object inside slipped out onto the bedspread, and when it landed, it was closer to his thigh than he wanted. Fix that easy enough. He scooted.
It lay on the bed with tiny talons curling upward — a bird claw, shiny black. A couple of small feathers had been lashed to it with white and red thread, after a few beads had first been strung onto the thread. Charming. Just fucking charming. He sat looking at it as if, any second, it would go for his eyes.
He finally he picked it up, and wasn’t this just the creepiest little thing? Whatever happened to a mint on the pillow? And to think for two nights he’d slept with this thing a couple of feet from his head.
Well, no. No. He had not slept. He’d tossed and turned and been rudely yanked around every time sleep kissed his eyes. And now, upon this bed, he felt quite small, very much the innocent fool wandering around under the wrong roof. Just what the hell went on beneath it? This wasn’t the sort of talisman that got made on a whim, and wound up beside your pillow by accident.
Justin rose from the bed, left the claw beside the vase on the nightstand. Out the door and slowly down the hall, empty here on the second floor. The sounds of life within this massive house — a kitchen blower, thin voices, strains of opera on some stereo — were distant, too far for close comfort. The polished wood was cool beneath his bare feet, smooth, no splinters here, and no footfall could be too soft. The wrong noise could draw all the wrong attention. What would he do if someone emerged from one of these rooms? Where are you going? he would be asked, and would have no answer. Because he would have no breath with which to speak.
Those two weeks last year were still too close for comfort, and yet, in that time he’d forgotten the true taste of fear.
He stopped outside Leonard’s room. It would be empty, of course. Outside at the pool, minutes ago, Justin had left behind both Leonard and his weekend marital surrogate. She’d peeled her top away and he was being coy about his trunks.
Justin opened the door. Entered. Left it open, he wouldn’t be long.
The room was similar to his own, no replica, but still put together to a near-identical layout. He laid eyes on the nightstand, the vase there. And had to know. Not wanting to look inside, realizing that he could never leave until he did. Were these grisly trinkets left with all unsuspecting guests like party favors … or was he special, anointed?
He stepped closer. And looked.
Empty.
The same as all the rest of the vases in the rooms he then checked.
He showered furiously, working himself into a rich lather, as if to scrub clean every part of him touched by this house. Never mind that he would have to walk the gauntlet of its taint all over again, just to be free of it. He whipped the towel over his body with enough force to chafe.
Justin finished packing with his hair still wet, cinched everything into the weekender with time to spare.
When Justin got downstairs, outside, on the bricked-over clearing where they had first set foot on Mullavey’s property, he found that the limo was already idling. Napoleon Trintignant waiting for them, wiping the fenders with a soft treated cloth, keep that metal gleaming. Justin supposed this was what he wanted, a little time alone with Mullavey’s driver. Everything about the place aside, this guy he liked.
“Yo, mon,” Napoleon said. At ease today. Gray slacks and white shirt only, no jacket, no cap. “Here’s a man in a hurry to get home, I see.”
Justin nodded, opened a back door and tossed his luggage onto the seat. Paused, hand on door, and stood looking at that backseat bar. Oh baby. It did look inviting. All those bottles, and not a cheap label among them.
He slammed the door.
“So where’s your other one, where’s Mr. Greenwald?”
Justin backhanded a wave toward the second floor. “Probably with Terri. Scraping one last layer of skin off his cock. He’ll be along. I just felt like getting outside.”
“Enjoy your weekend here, did you?”
Napoleon asked it neutrally enough, Justin decided. And was this paranoia he felt, everyone in Mullavey’s employ a suspected spy? Close, but not quite.
“It was different.” Justin stretched, full height, scruffed out his damp hair and turned slowly, a panoramic view of house and land. “Beautiful country around here, it really is. Great food. But on the whole … I’d rather spend the weekend at home.”
“Where is it you come from again?”
“Tampa.”
Napoleon nodded, seemed to think this over. Folding his cloth and stowing it in the limo’s trunk. Buffing the trunk lid with a shirtsleeve where he’d palmed it shut.
“Someday I would like to go to Florida. I’ve never been there. Is it nice there? Do you enjoy it?”
“It’s got its good points. I like it a lot.”
Napoleon nodded, smiling, encouraging. Like he wanted more. A travelogue, maybe. “Is your city near Miami?”
The question was startling. Napoleon may have been able to cruise the roads in and around New Orleans with ease, but his knowledge of geography beyond seemed oddly limited.
“Not really, no.”
A frown of disappointment. “Too bad, mon. Miami, I know there from TV. I’ve seen that show, Miami Vice, I like that very much. Do you know those men on that show?”
Justin smiled. The naïveté was endearing, in a peculiar way. “Never met them. And where did you come from? You, and the rest of the house staff?”
“We are from Haiti, all of us.”
Justin smiled wider. “Then why do you sound like you’re Jamaican?”
“You notice that, you can tell, hey?” Napoleon laughed with delight, obviously pleased with the success of his ruse. “I drive Mr. Andrew here, I drive him there. I see a lot of people in my job, but they’re not always seeing me, you know? I’m just the driver. So I try to sound a little different. Everybod
y likes Jamaicans, they sound so happy. So I make people happy to hear me. If they know I’m Haitian, maybe it makes them sad, they think, ‘Oh, poor man, you come from the poorest country in this part of the world.’ So I fool them, I don’t want to be leaving no sad people behind me.”
“Why’d you tell me the truth, then?”
Napoleon straightened a bit, scrubbed a loose fist against his chin, looked at him sideways. Reluctance. “You? Today you look sad already. What more can I hurt?”
Justin laughed, needing it. He bet his blood pressure had dropped ten or twenty points since coming out here. Napoleon suggested that if they were going to continue to talk, they at least get out of the direct sun, so they wandered off the brick onto the lawn, where the grass made a comfortable pair of seats.
Justin asked him about Haiti, how long it had been since he was there. Nine, ten years, since boyhood. He didn’t remember it well; mainly the poverty, the dirt. His mother had died there, his father had come here for work, and it seemed that most all his life had been spent at the Mullaveys’. A good life, at that. Justin asked him about the people at the cane field, if they were Haitian as well.
“You know of them too?” Napoleon asked, clearly surprised, and Justin told how he had come across the field on a walk. “Yes, they too are Haitian. Mr. Andrew likes to hire Haitians. We make hard workers.”
All along, Justin had been wondering how to steer the conversation around to talismans in the guest rooms. Bird claws and feathers and beads … how could you drop that in and make it sound natural? He decided it couldn’t be done. You hold your nose and jump right in and keep your eyes open for reactions.
“Let me ask your opinion about something,” Justin said, and reached into his shirt pocket. Two-fingered the bird claw out and held it in his open palm. Time had proven a great curative: He could touch the thing now without revulsion, without apprehension. His curiosity had gotten the better of them. “Why was this hidden next to my bed?”
