The Hundredth Man

by J. A. Kerley

  The stump shuddered again, and rotated upward, taking forever before it broke the surface. Rain and beautiful air, me sucking it past the mud and sand, choking, vomiting, but air. I screamed at the clutching roots, wrenched. The stump rolled me slowly toward the sky as my hands scrabbled to discover where I was bound.

  The shoulder rig, my mind screamed … tangled.

  I fought the binding with torn fingers. Then heard the sound of splashing carrying through the rain. I saw Harry in the river, a dozen feet from shore, sixty from me and moving away, white plumes rising as he slapped the water. Seeing me overtaken by the stump, he’d dived in, found attempting to swim is more destructive than not swimming at all.

  “Go back!” I screamed. “Harry, stop!”

  I watched in horror as the current sucked him out into the main channel, spinning, splashing, choking. The stump rolled me down toward the water again.

  “Hold your breath and float,” I shrieked. “Your body wants to float.”

  His head disappeared, but broke the surface seconds later, ten yards farther downstream. He was slowly rotating, as if in a whirlpool, moving away. He went under again.

  After that only flat and relentless water.

  I cursed and wailed and tore at the harness straps, the water rising up my legs. It was just straps now, the Beretta scraped away by the bottom. My torn hands couldn’t work the release, fingers like smoke at the ends of my arms. Water raged across my chest.

  The knife was still at my waist. I fumbled it loose, pressed it between my palms, and sliced furiously at the straps.

  At my neck, water …

  A snap of nylon and water filling my mouth again …

  Free. Floating in the river, gasping, the stump tumbling to the depths, roots slashing the surface. I felt the thunder of its crushing skid against the bottom.

  When I spun toward the far bank the knife fell from my bleeding fingers. I struck out wildly for it, catching the grip across my palm. I couldn’t grasp it, could never hold it as I swam. I was gasping and shaking too hard to clamp it in my teeth. Kicking hard, treading water, swirling downriver, I angled the point between the flesh and the meat high on my thigh, jammed my palm against the pommel, and thrust. The knife slid into me and stuck hard.

  I howled like a man possessed by whirlwinds and swam past anything I ever knew as pain, reaching the far side of the river bleeding, rigid with cramp, blind with mud and rage. I cried until my eyes cleared and crawled in the mud and watched the river roll by, now just a rumbling sheet of dark water. The pictures in my head were cold enough to ice the river, crust the black marshes with frost. The world was black and white and the only light came from drifting filaments at the farthest reach of the sky, faint capillaries of waning lightning.

  I slipped in the mud that squirted between my toes, fell to my knees. I threw back my head and screamed. Then, rising against the rain, clad in only a muddy twist of cloth, my knife in the scabbard of my flesh, I stood and started upriver. I was no longer a Ryder or a Ridgecliff or any name patched over a human being, I was a blazing creation of hate and vengeance and white-hot fury, and in my mind one burning picture: wiring Willet Lindy to a tree and making the evil bastard SQUEAL and SQUEAL until tube worms and black honey poured from his belly like a river.

  “Did you think you could sneak up on me, Mama?” “Will? Will, what’s going on? Let me go, Will.” “Could you see me from where you were, Mama? Did they have windows there?”

  “Will, I’m not your mama. Look at me, Will. It’s Dr.

  Davanelle.”

  His mouth at her ear, he could have bitten it off. “Did they tape the windows there, Mama? Did they have the black tape where you were?” He couldn’t help himself, he licked her ear and almost swooned with delight.

  “I can’t feel my hands or feet, Will. Please let me up.”

  “I’ve still been good, Mama. I’ve been clean. Sometimes I make the pee-pee, but I’ve tried. I made something else, Mama, I made a magic secret. Remember our magic secrets, Mama? The ones I couldn’t say?”

  “Will …”

  “I made magic pictures to show you how I am inside now, Mama. Watch, Mama. You me and the pictures. We’ll watch the pictures and then I’ll get the bad girl out of you, Mama. I promise I will.”

  One more little flick of his tongue at her ear.

  “I love you, Mama. Yes, I will.”

  There was nothing to explain where I was. No map or GPS, no moon or stars. All I had was the sound of the river at my right arm and the suck of the mud at my feet. Insects covered me like a cloud and I stopped to coat myself with muck, but the rain washed it away. Pain sang from my hip and I eased the knife from my flesh in teeth-clenching increments, a warm flow of blood behind it. I flexed my fingers and realized my grip was returning. I looked down at my bare, muddy feet and was grateful that years of barefoot beach running had callused the bottoms at least I could walk. A building poked from a small copse and I crept to it, my steps muffled by the rain and the water racing through the brush. A fish camp, deserted, little more than the tree house of my youth, a tarpaper roof amplifying the fall of the drops into a drum like sound. It occurred to me that I’d heard the camp well before I’d seen its hazy outline, my ears picking up the sound of the rain on the roof from thirty yards’ distance. I moved past the camp, then paused and listened. Rain on water and leaf and grasses, a solid hiss of monotone rain. I no longer heard the rain against the tarpaper. But I had heard the difference.

  I walked on. One hundred trudging paces. Stopped.

  Nothing. The same flat hiss. Another hundred paces. Listened. And again moved on.

  Stopped.

  I heard it. A brown cricket chirping in a field of black ones, or a cornet hidden behind a blare of trumpets. Something in the sound had changed. In front of me, behind, I couldn’t discern. I stood like a blind man smelling smoke in a tinderbox forest, moving up a few feet, back, sensing the change, the direction, sifting for discrepancies. It seemed to be off my right arm, slightly ahead. I turned that way and walked.

  Mama had known what the magic pictures meant. It was deep in her disguised eyes, the ones she’d painted green instead of the gray ones she used to wear every day.

  Let me listen to her now. Lying.

  “I’m not your mama, Will. I’m Dr. Davanelle. Ava Davanelle. We work together at the medical examiner’s office. Remember? Stop and try to remember, Will. It’s all there if you try and remember.”

  He’s never heard Mama use a scared voice before. She was trying to keep it flat, ironed down, but that scared sound was making tiny wrinkles.

  “I remember, Mama. It’s in the pictures. They’re history pictures, the secrets. Did you see me grow up to be a big boy? Did you see my muscles grow?” He pointed to the gray screen of the paused television.

  “Yes, Will, but that’s not you “

  “I saw you come back and I knew you were mad at me still but I’m going to clean the bad girl out of you forever, Mama and “

  “Will, you’ll get in trouble, in terrible trouble. You can stop this now.”

  ” then we can do it all over again, Mama, right this time, like the just-people that everyone gets to be, I want to be just-people, Mama, and you want to be just-Mama.”

  “Oh, Will, please …”

  “I’m strong now and I can get the bad girl out of you.”

  He walked to the canvas bag he’d brought with them. He removed a few bright tools from the morgue, things they’d never miss, so it wasn’t stealing. He arranged them on a clean white towel in a shining silver tray and proudly showed them to her.

  He reached down and eased a strand of hair from her eyes.

  “Don’t cry, Mama, pain makes us pure.”

  Another sound entered the one I was focusing on. I ran ahead a few paces and saw shoreline, lapping water. That was the new sound: I was following a channel angling from the river, an anchorage perhaps.

  I stepped back and focused on the sounds in the rain
again, heard a rhythmic tapping, and followed it to wooden pilings at the channel’s edge, tubular ghosts slapped with waves, invisible until I was a dozen feet away. Rain drummed a few remaining planks of decking on the old dock. My feet crunched rock and shell and I knew I was walking an abandoned launch ramp.

  I moved from the distraction of the rain on the decking, held my breath, closed my eyes, and again became a listening machine. Another sound somewhere to the right, thin and hollow. I wished for a bolt of lighting, a moment of moon-glow, anything to pierce the black. The sound disappeared once, but I backed up until I heard it again. I angled to the left and kept walking.

  Until I saw the light.

  I wiped the rain from my eyes and it remained: a strip of horizontal moonbeam hovering in the air. In the trees? No, my mind cried: in the faint outline of an old shrimp boat against the gray-black sky, its outriggers like raised spears and the hiss of rain on its wooden body a soft wail from deep within a mine.

  CHAPTER 36

  “Willy? Willy?”

  “Don’t talk to me. I have things to do. You can’t talk to me.” “Don’t you want to talk to the bad girl again, Willy?” “MMMMmmmmmmm. MMMmmmmm.” Lindy put his fingers in his ears and hummed louder.

  He’d tried this a long time ago but Mama ran his fingers through the stove flame and told him that’s what happened to fingers that got caught in ears.

  “You were so good to her, Willy. What if Mama lied and the bad girl was really the good girl?” “That’s a lie! MMMMmmmmmm.” “Did the bad girl ever make you do things you didn’t want to do, Willy? Or did the bad girl make you feel good?”

  He shouldn’t have reminded her about the bad girl in her. She was trying to use it against him.

  “It wasn’t good, Mama. It was sickness coming from me. MMmmmmm.”

  “You were going to cut the bad girl from Mama, Willy? Are you sure?”

  “Mmmmmmmm. Mmmmmmm.”

  “Maybe you wanted to cut Mama out of the bad girl.”

  “You’re crazy! That’s why you’re bad, you lie.”

  “Take these stupid ropes off me, Willy. Come curl up with the bad girl. Your bad girl, Willy.”

  “Stop talking those words.”

  “You don’t have to cut Mama out of me, Willy. I can just send her away. I can send her off the edge of the world.”

  “She won’t go. She’s STUCK here!”

  “Not anymore. You scared her with your secret magic movie, your wizard movie. She’s not even in this room, Will. Won’t you come and let me up? Let’s escape from here before Mama comes back.”

  Willard Lindy, Mr. Cutter, picked up a scalpel and whisked his thumb over the blade.

  “It won’t work, Mama. You used to say that too.”

  “No, Will, don’t, Will …”

  Her belly was so soft and warm.

  The ladder to the deck of the boat was anchored in the mud beside a large four-wheel ATV. The boat’s keel was a yard above the mud, the craft raised on thick planks for repairs that never arrived. It looked unstable and I was afraid of the boat shifting when I stepped on the ladder.

  I heard a soft sound through the hull: Ava’s voice.

  The boat held firm as I climbed to the deck. The light came from a slender strip of window where one course of tape had not quite overlapped another. I heard a second voice now. Crouching, I slipped my eye to the window.

  Willet Lindy standing over Ava. She was in a bra and panties, strapped to an autopsy table. Lindy wearing nothing but muddy suit pants and boots. I watched him define a trail down her abdomen with his finger, a scalpel poised to follow.

  I dived against the door and the corroded hinges dissolved away. It was like diving into paper and I stumbled, arms flailing, across the slender cabin. I slipped in blood and mud dripping from my legs and fell hard, bouncing, pain screaming from my hip, my knife skittering away. The boat shivered on its pylons, yawing as if on water. A crunching sound from below and the craft listed. Food cans, water bottles, plates, tools, crashed from shelves onto the floor. The television slid forward and stopped, held by a cable. The remote pitched onto the floor as I sprawled, nearly naked, on the floor.

  The tape started to rewind itself.

  “Eee-yawp, tis-tris sipppen …” On the screen, the mouth of Willet Lindy appeared from black and began vacuuming its words. The real Lindy was above me, the dark eyes of a double-barreled shotgun staring at my face.

  “Stay down!” he screamed. “Just stay right there, Detective Ryder.”

  He kicked me hard in the side with a steel-toe boot and I doubled over. “I cleaned and cleaned and now you’re getting filth everywhere.” He pushed the shotgun against my head.

  “Owp, eenyah, yeppuh …” the television Lindy said as he swallowed more words.

  “Get across the room. Not standing. Crawl!”

  I crawled.

  “I’ve been watching you, Detective Ryder,” Lindy said. “You’ve been sniffing around after Mama.” On the TV Burlew’s massive arms relaxed into Deschamps’s biceps, deflated further into Nelson’s arms.

  “Creen-yee-up, ten rip ri dish …”

  “Sit. There. Don’t. Move.”

  I obeyed. If he pulled the triggers my head would turn to gruel.

  “Why are you here?” he demanded.

  “To take Dr. Davanelle home.”

  “Mama is staying here.”

  The TV showed Ava replacing organs in Deschamps’s body like packing a parcel for shipping. One swift motion of the scalpel and the slit in the body was healed.

  “Tten-yupo, pinreep, too do …”

  “I can’t tie you up. Hold up your hands.”

  He was going to blow my hands off.

  “Your hands or your head, Detective Ryder.”

  I had never heard of anyone who escaped death saying the world became like this, hyper real almost luminous, like another sense coming on, feeling everything. Even the tiniest shift in the boat, as if someone else had crept into my final moment. Could it be?

  Again, the shift, the smallest creak. A whisper of wood.

  Someone outside?

  Lindy’s eye squinted down the black barrel. He hadn’t heard. “Hold up your hands now!” he howled. I moved my hands slowly upward and to the side so the pellets might miss my face. Lindy’s finger whitened on the trigger. I closed my eyes.

  A yellow bird flew through the door. It bellowed. Lindy spun and blew it to pieces. The bird disintegrated into a soft snow of white foam and scraps of plastic, a former life vest.

  I rolled across the floor and kicked Lindy’s legs from beneath him.

  Thunder at the door. Harry charging. Me rising, grabbing at the table beside Ava. The boat shivered under the motion and one of the shoring planks cracked. The boat shifted again and the tray of surgical instruments spilled across the floor. Lindy squirmed past Harry and cracked him on the jaw with the stock of the shotgun.

  Harry dropped.

  I grabbed a scalpel from the floor. Lindy spun toward Harry, the gun swinging up.

  I roared and threw myself at Lindy, grabbing his neck with one hand, the other angling the gun up and away. It discharged through the roof and the kick spun it from his grip. I bent him backward across the tilting table. He tore at my eyes and hands, ripping his fingers on the scalpel, blood pouring between us. His belly was to me and I pushed the edge of the scalpel just below his navel as he screamed and snapped his teeth at me. I felt the resistance of his skin against the point of the scalpel. An inch of bright blade slipped inside his belly.

  I had the power to slice him all the way down to his first breath.

  “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama …” he recited like a litany. I looked at Ava. She shook her head, No, no, no.

  Lindy howled, “Mamamamamaraa …”

  I felt my arms slacken.

  “Dee-yup, pen it tesheeup …” On the TV screen Ava returned Nelson’s insides.

  The floor listed and I grabbed the table to steady myself. Lindy spun aw
ay and dived into the bilge hatch. I looked into it and saw only wired-together ranks of batteries. A sharp crack came from the keel and the boat shifted again, harder. The gasoline can by the generator tumbled and upended, dumping fuel across the floor and through the hatch to the engine room and bilge. The batteries shifted and clacked together. We were adrift in a boat soaked with gas and a hold full of jerry-wired batteries in the rain, our captain a madman.

  One short, one spark …

  The boat listed several more degrees. Joists screamed, bulwarks strained. Harry and I dug at Ava’s ropes, fighting to stand on the slanting floor. Failing metal squealed beneath us and the deck shivered and dropped another six inches. I fell. Harry grabbed the edge of the bolted-down table and continued tearing at Ava’s bindings. Gasoline fumes burned tears from our eyes. Harry struggled at the ropes as I pulled myself up.

  “Te-repped uten benetha …”

  Harry roared with effort, his arms shaking with strain. I smelled the acrid stink of wires cooking off insulation.

  Only her neck bound now.

  A crack of wood and the boat teetered severely. The last holdings of the shelves emptied across the floor. On the tape Ava traced her hand over the bare body, nodded, and backed quickly from the picture. “Amam, amam,” Lindy said as the tape rolled to its beginning. His lips faded to black. The tape snapped off.

  “Got it,” Harry yelled, Ava in his arms, rising.

  I heard the thunder of heavy wood breaking. The boat shivered for an instant, then knelt forward and buried its prow in the soft earth. We tumbled across the floor as cans and tools and debris clattered over us. Smoke suffused the gasoline-laden air.

  But we were by the door.

  We scrambled out into sweet, beautiful mud, and pulled ourselves through the grasses. The snap of a spark behind us became a tremendous sucking whump and the night blazed orange and gold. We stumbled to a hummock and knelt behind it, the heat pressing our wet faces. The interior of the old shrimper’s cabin burned like a torch, but the rain-soaked wood outside was slower to ignite. Light blazed through the doors, the ports, the pilot house. For a few minutes the old boat resembled a magic lantern dropped from the stars to the earth, and we crouched golden beneath its light.