A Garden of Vipers

by Jack Kerley

  Nautilus saw Clair Peltier realize Carson’s rescue would trigger an immediate radio call advising of his safety.

  “Shit,” she whispered.

  “All sorts of things can happen,” Nautilus said. “Good things.”

  Clair walked to the deck doors. The next line of storms gathered at the horizon, purple clouds dragging tendrils of lightning. Wind blew in hot bursts, the waves gray and ridged with foam.

  Clair’s eyes went wide. “Someone’s at the door, Harry.”

  She ran to the front door and yanked it open. Nothing but rain in rippling sheets.

  “I know I heard it. Knocking.”

  Nautilus said, “It’s the rain on the roof.”

  Then Nautilus heard it. Faint, at the edge of hearing. Coming from outside. He followed the sound into the rain, down the steps, under the stilted house. Nothing. Then the wind gusted and Nautilus saw the red kayak, curved, scarred, rocking in its rack with the wind.

  “Harry,” Clair yelled from the stoop.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “The wind.” He stared at the kayak.

  A minute later he was standing in the rain, trying to push the boat as far into his old Volvo wagon as he could manage, binding it to the passenger seat with a rope. It protruded six feet from the rear gate, but was secure.

  “Harry!” Clair called from the door. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He climbed into the car and drove into the whistling gray.

  I had closed my eyes against the vision of the balloon and tumbled beneath the surface of the green water, deliriously happy. Down here, below the surface, was where I knew Clair. A world where everything would make sense had our minds the language to comprehend its logic and order.

  choonk…choonk…choonk

  A rhythmic sound caught my attention. I kicked and spun in the depths, trying to localize the sound. No…not a sound. A sensation. Something tapping on my knuckles. I opened my eyes carefully, half-expecting them to flood with seawater. But they opened into air, dry and cool.

  The tapping on my knuckles again.

  My head seemed to rotate on an axis, and a round pink face floated into view. The eyes were blue and interested. There was a smile that seemed slightly off-kilter. It was the face of a child. My vision sharpened, saw a beard line; not a child, a grown man.

  “Who are you?” I asked. My words seemed to come from somewhere beside me. From the edge of a pillow, its case white and crisp.

  “Freddy. What’s your name?”

  “Carson.” It was the only thing I could say with certainty.

  “Want to meet my friend, Carson?”

  “Give me a minute, Freddy. I’m just waking up.”

  “Miss Holtkamp said a minute is sixty seconds. One…two…three…”

  I took several deep breaths, noting my chest wouldn’t expand completely. With each breath my awareness seemed to rise, as if air drove out the dark. What is happening? Where am I? Think. Analyze. Survey.

  “Fifteen…sixteen…”

  A room. Blue walls and ceiling. Fifteen by fifteen or so. Wide door leading out to a hall. Green tile floor. A window to the side. Are those bars? Daylight. A smell of disinfectant…

  “Thirty one…thirty-two…”

  Chest restrained somehow. Belt? Rope? Hands, feet, no motion. Sense of pain at the wrists, compression at the ankles. Mouth dry. Oh God, there’s an IV shunt in my hand! Fight the fear…study, measure, analyze… Music in the air, low volume. Electric piano, sax. Heavy bass line. Then a blare of horns. Funk music, Bootsy Collins maybe.

  “Fifty-nine and sixty! Want to meet my friend, Carson?”

  Friend? I shot a puzzled eye toward the door; no one there.

  “Uh, sure, Freddy.”

  The guy pulled his arm from around his back. There was a cloth puppet on his hand, worn almost bare, a nondescript and cartoonish dog with floppy brown ears, plastic eyes with floating, black-button pupils, and a lolling felt tongue. Freddy made wet sounds, opening and closing his hand on my arm, like the puppet was gnawing or licking.

  “Puppy likes you.”

  “That’s great. Can you help me, Freddy? My arms are tied or something. Can you untie them?”

  The puppet stopped licking and disappeared behind Freddy’s back. He frowned. “That’s not green. It’s red.”

  “What?”

  “When your arms are like that it’s because you’ve done something red. They don’t come loose until you’re green again.”

  Red equals bad; green, good?

  “Is it, uh, red to have a drink of water, Freddy? I’m very thirsty.”

  He shook his head and giggled, like I’d just told a great joke.

  “There’s no color in drinking, Carson; it’s just drinking.” He padded away, leaving me alone with the music, just at the edge of hearing. Freddy returned seconds later with a plastic cup held in the puppet’s mouth.

  “Puppy brought you Kool-Aid. Purpleberry.”

  I found I could wriggle a little bit higher, and the head of the bed was elevated several inches as well. I opened my mouth.

  “It’s raining purpleberry,” Freddy said, dribbling sugared water into my mouth.

  “Thanks, Freddy.”

  “You’re welcome, Carson.”

  “Freddy? Could you tell me where I am?”

  He told me. It was the second time I’d heard that answer today.

  CHAPTER 40

  I drifted off again. My dreams were dark and inchoate, whether the result of my situation or drugs, or both, I could not tell. I dreamed of two balloons bobbing in an indigo sky, one light, one dark. They floated above and around me. I knew I was an object of interest.

  “What do you suppose will come of this?”

  “We can only give him so much.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Wait and watch.”

  Later—no idea how long—I heard metallic clattering and opened my eyes to a black woman pushing a cart into the room. She was five-nine or -ten, slender and strong, her forearms dancing with muscle as she jockeyed the cart across the threshold. Her hair was pulled back. Her skin was dark and luminous, her face high-boned and classical, Egyptian. I read her age as early sixties. She wore a lime-green nurse’s uniform of jacket and skirt. White hose hissed over her legs. Towels were stacked on the cart beside a box of something called Steri-Wipes.

  The cart bumped my bedside and she snapped a towel open; no, not a towel, an adult diaper. She whisked the sheet from my body, naked save for a white bunching at my waist. I smelled urine.

  “You been sleeping past your bladder calls. I need to make a change so you don’t get the rash. Lift yo’ butt in the air.”

  The whole incident was so incongruous I couldn’t speak, but could lift a few inches. She removed a wet diaper, cleaned me off with a wipe, taped on a fresh diaper. All in under thirty seconds.

  “Where am I, ma’am?”

  “You’re in heaven.” She said it like she’d say You’re in a shoe store.

  “What?”

  She flapped the sheet back over me. “It’s the only name we’re allowed to call it, and the only answer you’re gonna get.”

  “Where the hell am I?” This time my voice was angry.

  “I got others to do for,” she said, checking her watch. “There’s a schedule.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Folks call me Miss Gracie. That’s always been enough for the others.”

  “What others? Where am I?” I called at her retreating form. But all I heard back was the clatter of the cart.

  Lucas sat crossed-legged against the wall, the Mobile Register in his lap. It seemed Detective Ryder had met an ugly fate.

  He read from the paper.

  …confirm that Ryder was an avid kayaking enthusiast who enjoyed rough waters. Records in the Mobile Bay Pilot’s Office indicate three freighters entered the bay during the period Mr. Ryder might have been in the water, the Argentine Star, the
Lady Hannah, and the Bali Pearl. The kayak, recovered on Ft. Morgan point, was bent and scarred.

  Convincing, Lucas thought. But Crandell was an expert in convincing others of false events. Lucas closed his eyes and his head flooded with memory. Comets turning to flashlights. A strobing white light high above. Voices through a predawn fog.

  “I saw something at the base of the microwave tower. It should be to your left. Can you see the tower light blinking above the trees?”

  “Be careful. He’s…resourceful.”

  Resourceful? Hardly. But one learns from mistakes….

  Lucas shook the past from his head. Even if Ryder had died in a natural accident, things would start moving fast now. And if Ryder were alive somewhere, albeit temporarily? They’d move like a whirlwind.

  What was the advice his mentor had provided? His beloved teacher?

  “When a shitstorm starts blowing, cover your ass and figure a way to get your enemy to walk into it.”

  I heard a car pull close outside, tires crunching over gravel. Two minutes later Crandell entered the room, shutting the door behind him. He wore khaki Dockers and a polo shirt. A heavy gold watch wrapped a thick wrist. His arms were pelted with golden hair. He was broad-chested, tanned, powerful-looking.

  “Hello, darlin’,” he sang in a raspy baritone.

  I stared at him.

  He said, “Now, I didn’t mean that as an endearment, Ryder. It’s a line from a song that goes—”

  “Spare me, Crandell. You have any idea of the prison time you’re racking up?”

  He clapped his hands and laughed like I’d shared my favorite joke. “What’s the sentence for abuse of a corpse?”

  “What?”

  He leaned close. “You’re missing and presumed dead, Ryder. You were blown by a storm into the path of a freighter. By the way, your little pointy boat confirms the story; it’s in real bad shape, sorry ’bout that.”

  His breath was disgusting, like something in him was rotting. I turned my face away. He picked up a pencil on the table, began pricking my cheek with the point.

  “Question time, if you get the point. What do you know about Lucas?”

  “Lucas?”

  I felt the pencil point break my skin.

  “Ouch, Jesus.”

  prick

  “I’m moving up to your eye next.”

  prick, prick

  “He’s one of the Kincannon brothers,” I said. “The prodigal son, or something. He’s a psycho.”

  Crandell pecked the sharp lead randomly on my face as he talked: forehead, chin, nose, cheek.

  “Where is he?”

  prick, prick

  “How the hell would I know?”

  prick

  “What did Taneesha Franklin give to DeeDee Danbury?”

  “What?”

  Crandell swung the pencil in a roundhouse arc, like he was driving a knife into my right eye. I gasped. He stopped an inch short. I stared at the pencil point above my pupil. Crandell’s hands were absolutely steady. My heart hammered in my chest. Crandell set the pencil back on the table. He reached into his pocket.

  “I’m showing you two photographs. Tell me what they represent.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Shhh. Two pictures. Ready?”

  He pulled a photo from his pocket. “Number one.”

  A long shot, Dani and Taneesha Franklin in the front window of a Waffle House, coffee on the table, pages spread between them.

  “If I recall, they’re discussing reporting techniques.”

  Crandell retrieved a second photo from his pocket, held it before my eyes. It had been taken in late afternoon, the shadows lengthened. Taneesha Franklin stood on Dani’s porch, handing her a small parcel.

  “What is Miss Franklin handing Miss Danbury?” Crandell asked.

  “A copy of All the President’s Men.”

  Crandell tucked the photos back in his jacket, then jangled the change in his pocket.

  “I want to know what Danbury got from Franklin. And where it is.”

  “It’s a fucking book. A gift. Have your boss ask Ms. Danbury. Buckie-boy’s your boss, right? He hired you to put loony brother back in his pen?”

  Crandell grabbed the handles at the foot of the bed and whisked me from the room.

  “Come on, Ryder. I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

  I was propelled down a tight hall off the main room.

  “Who might that be?” I asked.

  He grinned and licked his finger.

  “Mr. Ampère,” he said, touching his wet finger to my bare toe, “Buzzzzt.”

  Harry Nautilus stood in the covered loading dock of the Alabama Forensics Bureau and watched two interns pull the kayak from the Volvo.

  “Easy,” Wayne Hembree said. “Kid gloves.”

  “Kid gloves?” an intern laughed. “This thing is beaten like a…” He saw Hembree’s eyes. Said, “Where do you want it, sir?”

  Hembree gave instructions, then turned to Nautilus, his voice somber. “Harry, we’re all devastated. Carson was like a—”

  Nautilus put his hand on Hembree’s shoulder, squeezed.

  “Not right now, OK?”

  The interns set the kayak on a table that reminded Nautilus of an outsized autopsy table, a bank of lights overhead. Someone flicked a switch and the kayak was bathed in white light. The boat was bent like clock hands indicating four o’clock. Hembree reached out and stroked the craft with a fingertip.

  “I’ve never dealt with a kayak before.”

  “You got one now, Bree. Learn.”

  Hembree looked across the room at one of the techs, a young guy with an intense look, as though doing math in his head and being timed on the results.

  “MacCready, you know polystyrene, right? Polymers?”

  “I love plastics. Plastics are my life.”

  “Drop what you’re doing and give me a hand,” Hembree said. The guy walked around the boat until he found the manufacturer’s name. Aimed the scowl at Nautilus.

  “They still in business? The manufacturer?”

  “I guess so. The boat’s pretty new.”

  Nautilus tumbled through time, recalling when Carson had purchased the boat. He’d had a party, like a housewarming, except for a kayak. Carson set the boat in the living room on sawhorses, hung leis and Mardi Gras beads over its pointy tips. Everyone at the affair, thirty or so friends and neighbors, had to put a hand on the boat and offer a blessing of some kind.

  There was a fair amount of drinking and most benedictions were funny. Nautilus recalled being dragged to the center of the room by Danbury, his hand pressed against the boat. He’d never been good at speeches—hated them—and mumbled some things about winds and tides and friendship.

  No one laughed like they had at the other little speeches, everyone getting quiet. Several people wiped away tears. A tipsy Carson had hugged him. It was embarrassing and Nautilus had slipped outside to walk on the beach. When he returned the kayak was in the street, upside down on the shoulders of a dozen people, Carson riding it like a horse as folks waved tiki torches in the dark.

  What if those nights were over?

  “…tensile strength and resistance and we might be able to…”

  “What?” Nautilus said, jolted into the here and now.

  “Talking to myself,” MacCready said. “I’ll give the manufacturer a call. They’ll probably have specs on tensile strength, resistance strength. Or can put me on to someone who knows.”

  Hembree looked at Nautilus, said, “I’ll call you when we have something.”

  Nautilus was almost out the door when Hembree called after him. Nautilus turned.

  “Get some sleep, Harry,” the moon-faced technician said, his eyes quiet wells of concern. “You look ter—pretty tired.”

  Nautilus pulled the Volvo from the loading dock. He drove six blocks before realizing it was raining and turned on his wipers. His stomach grumbled from not eating in over a dozen hours. A
small seafood restaurant appeared in the rain and he pulled into the lot.

  “It’ll be a few minutes, babe,” a hefty, fiftyish gum-chewing waitress said, scribbling his order on her pad. She tossed the ticket to the cook behind the counter.

  Harry Nautilus put his elbows on the table and dry-washed his face with his hands. The restaurant was quiet and his thoughts loud.

  “You got a paper around?” he called to the waitress. “Something to read, anything?”

  She reached beneath the cash register, came up with a handful of newsprint, brought him the Register. He snapped it open. A page-one headline read, MOBILE DE-TECTIVE MISSING, BELIEVED DROWNED.

  Nautilus pushed the paper away like it was on fire, threw a twenty on the table, ran out the door.

  My forehead turned cold and I opened my eyes. My guts felt like they’d been removed, beaten with jellyfish tentacles, stuck back inside. Miss Gracie was wiping my head with a cool, damp cloth. It felt wonderful.

  “You feelin’ all right?” she asked, looking into my eyes.

  “No.”

  She wrung water from the towel, refreshed it from a bowl of ice water on the bedside table.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  Miss Gracie patted the towel against my forehead, then folded it and left it laying.

  “Used to be they’d send people here to test us. Fakes. If we told them things we wasn’t supposed to, it could be real bad. If you were fake he wouldn’t have done that to you. I can’t do much, but I can at least give you a clean head.”

  “Where am I? And please, don’t tell me—”

  “You’re in a story. An’ I think it may be ending. Least the way it is now, the way it’s become.”

  “Story?”

  “I’ll come back later. Maybe you should know a few parts of the story. Sleep now.”

  I closed my eyes beneath the cool towel and drifted off. The next time I awakened, my pain had subsided and my vision was clear. I was still in bed, but someone had pushed me into a different room. Smaller. There was a steel door, closed, a slat at eye-height, also closed. The walls were covered in a thick, coarse-woven fabric, like old-time mats in high school gyms. A light was recessed into the ceiling, crisscrossed with bars.