The Levee: A Novel of Baton Rouge

by Malcolm Shuman

  I eased the door shut and flashed the light on the window over the bunk bed.

  “Come on,” I whispered, dragging Blaize after me.

  I pulled him across the room, knocking the train off the tracks as we went, feeling the tiny cars and figures cracking under our feet. I stood on the bed, flashed the light through the window. There was a tree outside, and, thank God, a limb.

  “We’ve got to climb out,” I whispered.

  “I …” He whispered, his breath crackling.

  The intruder was halfway up the steps now, coming slowly, deliberately, as if he knew there was no escape.

  I reached down, tugged on the sash, and the window edged upward with a groan.

  “Go on,” I hissed. “Get on the limb. When you get to the trunk shinny down.”

  “Colin …”

  “Now!” I ordered, shoving him forward. He bent over, and grabbed the limb with both hands. Seconds later he was straddling it, pulling himself along with his arms.

  The steps were just outside the door now. The handle was turning.

  I stuck the flashlight in my belt and ducked through the window. I found the limb, and, legs across it, followed Blaize. He was at the crotch of the tree now, but once there, wasn’t moving.

  “Come on,” I said. “You have to climb down.”

  “I can’t find any limbs.”

  “Then drop. It isn’t that far.”

  “Colin …”

  I nudged him but he wouldn’t budge.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “The hell you can’t,” I said, and pushed hard. He lost his grip and I heard him give a little cry as he fell, landing with a thump on the ground below.

  I hugged the trunk, then let myself slide downward, skinning my arms on the rough bark as I fell.

  I hit the earth and jackknifed backward, onto my side. I rolled over and sat up.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he wheezed, and then broke off into a fit of coughing.

  “Come on. We have to get back to the car.” I helped him up and we started across the big yard, the high grass brushing our ankles. The cemetery was half a mile away, across open pasture. If we didn’t stop we had a chance of making it.

  We reached the edge of the front yard and found our way blocked by another fence. I pushed down on the bottom wire to hold it for Blaize but when I turned he was twenty steps behind, wheezing.

  “Quick,” I said. “Get under.”

  “I don’t … think … they’re coming after us,” he choked out.

  I waited while he held the wires apart for me and then ducked through.

  “Doesn’t matter. They will be.”

  “Maybe we can … walk.”

  “No.” The cemetery, impossibly far away, was a smudge of black against the lighter sky. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

  I trotted beside him as he half ran, half walked, his breaths becoming more ragged with each second.

  We came to the live oak in the center of the field and stopped.

  “I can’t go any more without resting,” Blaize said.

  I looked around. Maybe whoever it had been had lost us, given up. Maybe, nestled in the shadow of the big tree, we were invisible.

  The outbuildings were to our right, blocking our view of the River Road, and to our right, between the tumbled sugarhouse and ourselves was what appeared to be a storage shed. But there were no lights, no sounds of movement from any of them.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “It’s only another quarter mile.”

  Blaize lowered his head, though whether it was a nod I couldn’t tell.

  “Come on.” I grabbed his arm and we lurched out into the pasture, away from the comforting cover of the tree.

  We’d only gone twenty feet when I heard the ground pounding somewhere to my left. Pounding like someone with a mallet …

  With a sick feeling I realized they were hoof beats. And they were coming closer.

  I glanced over my shoulder, caught a blur of movement near the storage shed. Then it seemed to grow in size until something detached itself, became another form entirely.

  A horseman.

  “Run!” I yelled. “Now!”

  I’d only gone a few steps when I heard Blaize give a little cry and when I turned I saw him on the ground, crouching where he’d fallen, and the horseman was almost at his side, reaching down.

  I felt something against my ankle, stopped, picked up a fragment of brick and without aiming threw it as hard as I could.

  A grunt of pain came from the horseman and he toppled from the saddle. I rushed back, helped Blaize to his feet, and pulled him forward again.

  “Colin …” His voice was a bare whisper.

  “You can make it,” I promised.

  Then night turned to day as brightness exploded around us and I felt the world spinning.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It is time. I put the car into gear and edge back out onto the River Road, careful to avoid a red sports car coming from the other direction, a middle-aged man with sunglasses at the wheel.

  Gloria Santana had a red MG, given her by her father when she graduated from college. We’d all noticed and commented on it. I wonder what happened to the MG. Did it sit in her driveway until the tires rotted or did her father finally send someone to haul it away, selling it to someone who never knew who its owner had been?

  The car that passes is a Corvette, the man behind the wheel, with his open collar and blowing hair, probably a lawyer or investment executive. I have never owned a sports car, though when I was in high school, I thought it would be the key to make me popular with the opposite sex. But somehow after the death of Gloria Santana, the desire to own a sports car vanished, and for the rest of my life I have driven nondescript vehicles, starting with a used Mercury in college and graduating, successively, to station wagons and vans and now, most recently, a Toyota Roadrunner. None of them has been red.

  The Corvette was coming from the direction of Windsong and I wonder if they’ve rebuilt the old place. Or maybe the man in the Corvette was just out for a ride.

  I ease the accelerator up to twenty-five. The levee is emerald green, with a fringe of blue wildflowers at its base, and I know that around the next curve I will see it, and I wonder what I will feel.

  But I have only gone a few tenths of a mile before I realize something is wrong.

  In the first place, the shotgun cabins that used to line the River Road, stretching from Bergeron’s store to the boundaries of the plantation, are gone, and the pasture holds no cattle or horses. The barbed wire fence is gone, too, and in its place is a low brick wall, with artificially patched sections designed to give the impression of age. In the distance, a quarter of a mile from the road, I see houses, shimmering like palaces in the sunlight, steep-roofed structures of brick with wide windows. I hunt for the hulking ruin of the plantation house but there is nothing, just a single line of oaks shading a paved boulevard that leads inward toward a larger building. I stop before brick gate posts with a guardhouse in the middle of the boulevard. The guardhouse has been built to resemble a pigeonnaire, with its steep roof and square configuration, but it is glass on all four sides, and a man in uniform sits inside, manning an electric gate. A faux-antique sign on one of the posts says WINDSONG COMMUNITY AND GOLF COURSE. The guard looks up, waiting to see if I am one of the privileged, like the man in the Corvette, but I keep going. In the distance, over the low wall, are the gently rolling hills of a green, and I see the flags for the holes, and a lake in the center.

  Maybe, I tell myself, I have mistaken the place, and the real plantation is still ahead, but just before the curve, where the brick wall ends, I see it, a path leading back to a cluster of cedars. The cemetery.

  I pull in and stop, shocked by what should not have been a surprise.

  It is all gone, leveled for a golf community. The house that we escaped from that night, the field where we ran, the outbuildings, even the sugar mill ruin. A
ll that is left is the cemetery, but I do not want to go there.

  I try to envision that night, but it is difficult, because I see Blaize and myself running across the green, dodging a golf cart with two duffers. Where was it that it happened, near the hole over there? Or was it by the sand trap? I am disoriented, adrift. I have come all this way, fearing what I would see, and now I realize there is nothing. I feel at once relieved and cheated, because now all I have is the memory and how can I be sure it happened at all?

  But it did.

  When I awoke I was lying on a hard surface, staring up at wooden rafters. My head throbbed and when I tried to move it the room lurched and the contents of my stomach wanted to spill out through my mouth. I tried to move my arms but they refused to obey. For some reason there was a ringing in my ears.

  I knew I was dreaming, because this was the way it always happened in nightmares: The slow-motion run as if you were submerged in water, nothing working, legs barely moving, no part of my body responding to commands from my brain, while something unspeakable gained on me.

  Except that this time it had caught me and I was at its mercy.

  With a matter-of-factness born of shock it came to me that maybe I was dying. Maybe I had been paralyzed, my spine broken, and soon even the nerve impulses that allowed me to breathe would shut down.

  I tried my arms again and this time I felt movement in my fingers. They scratched a rough surface I finally recognized was wool. I was lying on a blanket.

  Then I heard Blaize’s breathing. It was coming in desperate gasps, from somewhere above and to the right. This time when I willed my head to turn it did and I saw him just above me and to the side, huddled on a bunk.

  But where? We weren’t in the upstairs room of the plantation house. The walls here were bare, just gray boards, and all I could make out was a chair.

  I was shaken out of my thoughts by the voices.

  “I told you not to put those things out,” a voice said. “I begged you.”

  It was slightly muffled, coming from somewhere outside the room.

  “I told you somebody would get hurt.”

  “And I told people to stay off the place,” another voice answered. This one I recognized: it was Sikes.

  “That doesn’t mean you can booby-trap the fields. For Christ’s sake, they’re just kids.”

  “You were just a kid, too.”

  “That was a long time ago. It’s over.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s over. Things like that ain’t never over. Kids come around, people get blamed.”

  “Everybody’s forgotten. You can’t keep fighting what happened then. My father’s dead.”

  “Your father? You still call Gaston Drood your father? Haven’t you learned by now I’m your father? I’m the one stood up to him, I’m the one threatened him, I’m the one protected you after he …”

  “I know.”

  “You know what the bastard had the nerve to say to me? He said, ‘It’s not like he was really my son.’ That was his excuse.”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “Yeah, he’s dead, but nobody needs all that raked up. They come around asking questions, running all over the place … I kept this place for you. I stayed here while you was up north. Because I knew some time you’d be back. I knew my son was coming back one day.”

  I listened thunderstruck. I’d completely misunderstood what Michelle had told us, and she probably hadn’t understood either.

  After what Drood done to my son somebody ought to kill him …

  Only it wasn’t Darwin Drood who’d molested Sikes’ son. Darwin Drood was Sikes’ son, and it was Darwin’s supposed father, the man who owned Windsong, who’d molested Darwin.

  Sikes had fathered Darwin by the old man’s wife and she’d either killed herself or been murdered by her angry husband soon after giving birth.

  “All these years,” Sikes was saying. “All these years. I deserve something.”

  “But not to set traps for people.”

  “They wouldn’t of stepped on it if they’d of stayed away.”

  “But don’t you see what this means? The law’ll come out here. We’ll both be charged. We have to let them go.”

  “That’s just why we can’t let ’em go, son. The first boy was different. You just give him money, sent him on his way. When he gets tired of running he’ll call his folks and they’ll come get him, wherever he is. Wasn’t nothing done to him. You just saw him hiding on the levee and helped him out. No crime in that. But this is different.”

  Silence, punctuated by Blaize’s wheezing. He wasn’t saying anything and I didn’t know if he was conscious or not.

  “You don’t understand,” Sikes said again, speaking slowly, as if to a retarded child. “This place, Windsong, is mine. I’ve worked it all my life. I deserve it. Ain’t never had nothing to call my own. I have a right to protect it, to keep people away, to …”

  “It isn’t yours,” Darwin Drood said quietly. “It’s mine, remember?”

  “Legally, yeah. But you’re my son, my flesh and blood. If you’ve got a right, I got a right. You can’t deny me that.”

  “I’m not denying you anything. I’ve told you that you can stay here as long as you want. But not this way.”

  I willed myself to roll onto my side. The numbness caused by the explosion was wearing off and the ringing in my ears had receded to a dull buzz.

  “Son, what other way is there? They got it in for me in town. Old Bergeron and the rest of ’em would do anything to see me in jail. This is all they need.”

  “But these are just boys.”

  “I know, and it sorrows me to have to do it. But I’m trying to protect you and Windsong.”

  “Don’t tell me that!” The younger man was shouting now. “You’re just trying to protect yourself!”

  “No use arguing,” Sikes said. “I’ll take care of it. You go on back to the house.”

  “The house isn’t fit to live in. I haven’t been in it since it happened fifteen years ago. Until tonight. This is my house. That’s why I brought them here, to protect them.”

  “Then go ride your horse, I don’t care. It’s best you not see.”

  I was on my hands and knees now. There was a window just above the bunk where Blaize tossed, unconscious. I had to get out, reach the car, drive for help.

  “I won’t let you,” I heard Darwin shout. It was followed by a thud and a grunt and I realized one man had struck the other. I climbed onto the bed, lifted the sash, and, climbing out the window, dropped onto the ground.

  It took a moment for me to get my bearings. Then I realized I was outside one of the buildings to the side of the main house. This must be where Darwin Drood had taken up residence while he mulled over repairing the big house. I tried to get my bearings. Which way was the cemetery?

  “Hey, you!”

  With a sick feeling I recognized Sikes’ voice. His head was peering through the window. I started for the cemetery, then realized I wouldn’t make it. My only hope was the River Road and then up the side of the levee, to the batture.

  Unless there were other booby traps.

  I took off at full speed.

  “Come back here, damn you!”

  I heard him behind me now, his feet pounding after me. I’d never been fast, but I felt a surge of energy born of adrenaline.

  I reached the fence and jammed my foot onto the middle wire, propelling myself half over.

  “I said come back here …” His hand grabbed my leg and I kicked out, eliciting a curse. I dropped onto the other side, in the berry bushes, feeling the stickers grab my skin and clothes. I fought myself free, ignoring the pain, and beat my way across the gravel, to the levee. I leapt the ditch and pulled myself through the fence, leaving bits of shirt and skin on the barbed wire. I raced up the slope, vaguely aware that Sikes was trying to disentangle himself from the briars.

  If I could reach the borrow pit, find the way across to the batture …

  I turned at
the top and looked back. He was at the second fence now, cursing the briars. I fled down the levee, toward the trees at the bottom. I was upriver from our camping spot and I didn’t know if there was a place to cross here. I fumbled for the flashlight, shined it in the foliage, but the shadows seemed to mock me. I cut the light and thrust myself into the bushes, feeling thorns grab my skin and clothing. The smell of stagnant water was all around and I fought my way toward it. The pit wasn’t deep, not more than three feet. I could wade it and if I made it across he wouldn’t be able to follow.

  I heard him running down the levee now, toward me, and a light stabbed out, painting a white circle on the trees twenty feet to my left.

  Jesus, he had a flashlight, too.

  I froze while the beam moved slowly away from me, then went out.

  If I just stayed quiet, like a rabbit huddling in the undergrowth, maybe he wouldn’t see me, would give up and leave …

  His steps thudded on the packed earth of the levee’s toe and I realized with horror that he was coming toward me.

  Don’t move. For God’s sake, I can’t let myself move …

  I thought of the saints I’d prayed to in childhood, tried to recall which was the one who helped people in this kind of danger, decided there wasn’t any, and gritted my teeth.

  All at once the light flared on, blinding me.

  “There you are!” he cried and I saw an arm reaching for me. I pulled away but the briars held me like chains and his hand grasped the front of my shirt. I smelled his reeking breath and squirmed to free myself but his grip was like a steel trap.

  “I told you kids to stay away,” he said, still huffing from the chase. “I told you, didn’t I? I said ‘Stay off Windsong.’ But you wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t none of you listen and now look.”

  He pulled me toward him and I felt the briars giving up their hold.

  “I told you and you came anyway and now I gotta do what I gotta do.”

  “No,” I begged but he was dragging me by the arm now, and there was nothing I could do but follow.

  “Don’t give me no pleasure. I want you to know that. Don’t give me no pleasure at all. But I gotta protect what’s mine.”