Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  For the first part of that hour Honeybun locked his camera out in the SUV in order to dance, his Honeybun acrobatics briefly stealing the spotlight from Tanya. Then he got an idea. Returning with the camera, he started canvassing the patrons with a question, as much for his own amusement as for usable footage. “What miracle,” he went around asking, “are you looking forward to in the new year?” Many of the answers were funny or glib, as you’d expect them to be at Guidry’s at one a.m. (a fiftysomething woman, cocking a thumb toward her husband, said, “Viagra”), and a notable portion of them required the intercession of parole boards more than God’s hand, but Honeybun found himself surprised at how affecting some of the other answers were. A man in a biker vest talked about freeing the father he idolized from the grips of Alzheimer’s; a young woman wearing a 2015 tiara talked about unlocking her sixteen-year-old brother from such a profound case of autism that he’s unable to speak, citing her brother’s condition as the reason she found Tanya and Cameron’s story so inspiring, why she’d come to see them tonight.

  Honeybun’s drifting passage down the bar ended at a man sitting alone at one end. None of the crew members recall noticing much about this man earlier in the night. Casey thinks he saw the man leaving angrily with a blonde woman at some point—they brushed into him on their way out, nearly spilling Casey’s drink. He must’ve returned without her, Casey thinks, because when he saw the man next he was slouched solo at the bar, looking as though he might be nursing the wounds from whatever had happened with the woman. Though the man is twenty-eight he looks considerably older on the footage, as though hard living, or maybe just inebriation, has fast-forwarded his physical features by ten years. His eyes are nestled in puffs of flesh, shadowed by the brim of a camouflage baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. He has a flat and slightly zigzagged nose. The white polo shirt stretched over his torso is a size or more too small, revealing a roll of white belly. A pair of athletic sunglasses hangs from his shirt collar, though the sun had been obscured then retired since noon.

  As Honeybun approaches you can see a base smile cross the man’s face. It’s obvious he’s overheard the question coming his way, and the way he shifts in his seat suggests his answer has been prepared for a while, ready for him to uncage it. He doesn’t even wait, in fact, for Honeybun to ask him anything. The man—whose name, everyone would later learn, is Tommy Landry—just pitches toward the camera, licks his lips, and says as loudly as he can:

  “I’ll tell you what a real miracle would be. If Cameron Harris ever hooked up with a chick. He’s a fucking faggot.”

  “Okay, wow, you’re a real asshole,” was all Honeybun could get out, dipping his camera down and away from the man, before Cameron appeared suddenly and as if out of nowhere, so swiftly and so forcefully it was like one of the faces on the People magazine covers had spat him out of the ceiling.

  The punch he threw knocked Landry, all two hundred and fifty-some pounds of him, right off the barstool. This first blow isn’t visible on the footage—at that moment the camera was aimed at the sticky floor—but, out of documentary instinct, Honeybun re-steadied the camera on his shoulder and skittered backward a couple yards to record what happened next.

  On his way down to the floor Landry smacked the wall, and he tried using it now to scramble up onto his feet, ripping down a poster of Miller Lite girls as he climbed upward. No one really did anything at this point—you can hear a wave of excitement and laughter rolling through the bar—since the expectation was that this fight, like most bar fights, would end right there, with a single punch and then lots of entertaining braying. As well, because of the tight crowds and the way Guidry’s is laid out, only the closest onlookers were aware of the combatants’ identities—Cameron’s in particular.

  Once on his feet, with his cap having been punched clean off his head, Landry swiveled toward Cameron. His face was contorted with a crazed and cornered look that might’ve been owing to pain, or to basic rage, or possibly to fear: No one but Cameron and Landry would understand, for a while, that this was a continuation of that same face-breaking fight they’d had ten years before on the Biloxi beach, paused—but not forgotten—for a decade.

  Jumping over his crashed barstool, Landry made a rage-sloppy, all-out lunge toward Cameron. Cameron fielded the lunge with remarkable agility, considering his blood-alcohol content, but then again Cameron had been trained by the U.S. Army and was serving combat duty in Afghanistan while Landry was serving as rush chairman of the University of Alabama’s Pi Kappa Alpha chapter. Cameron feinted left, throwing off Landry’s balance midway through his charge, and then grabbing Landry’s right arm with his own right arm he palmed the back of Landry’s head with his left hand and with a single snap of motion, graceful if only in a savage way, guided Landry’s face into the two-inch-thick oak bar.

  Landry let out a gurgling yelp as, for the second time in his life, Cameron Harris shattered his nose. The crowd made a collective leap back as Landry’s face bounced off the bar and with a beefy thud his back slammed the floor. The amperage of violence had by now electrified Guidry’s; some people fled the fight circle, mostly women, while other people, mostly men, jostled in for a view. Cameron was on top of Landry almost the second he smacked the floor, his punches terrifyingly rhythmic: one to the ear, pause; one to the jaw, pause; one to the eye.

  “Oh…my…god,” you can hear Honeybun saying, in something close to a howl. A bystander tried pulling Cameron off but Cameron wheeled his left arm up and back, striking the bystander in the cheek and sending him sprawling sideways, enfolded back into the crowd. “Get this cocksucker off me!” Landry croaked, during one of the pauses, before Cameron punched him square in the mouth. “Faggot,” Landry wheezed, during the next pause, his teeth stained red, a mustache of blood above his lips. Cameron struck him in the mouth again.

  By this time the footage’s audio amounts to shrieks and frenzied crosstalk. “Help him!” you can make out a woman pleading. Another female voice calls for Tanya, Tanya. A half-dozen men jump in front of the camera lens in quick succession, the last of them staying put with his back blocking the camera. “Get his arms,” someone shouts. “Calm the fuck down,” someone else is shouting at Cameron. “Get his fucking ARM!” To Cameron: “It’s over, dude, it’s over!” Not quite buried in the audio is Landry’s voice, feeble, broken teeth clogging his throat, still saying faggot.

  The next thing visible is four men, two on each of Cameron’s arms, yanking Cameron up and off Landry, their expressions so strained it appears they’re unsuctioning him. Landry’s hands cover his face just as Cameron’s heel strikes it, a parting kick that may or may not have been intentional. Cameron struggles for a few seconds, flailing like a captured animal, until a fifth man manages to take hold of his ankle and, with a drill sergeant’s timbre, screams at Cameron to calm down. Then Cameron goes limp, with his one free limb, one of those miraculous legs, dangling inertly from his body as the five men cart him out of the bar, the stunned crowd parting and Tanya running close behind, then Griffin, then the crew interspersed with Tanya’s friends, then fifteen or twenty people hoisting their cellphones to snap photos or record video, and then finally Honeybun, moaning something unintelligible as he records Cameron being dumped into the backseat of the production SUV and Tanya in her black cocktail dress, sobbing, crawling in after him.

  The first social media posts went up even before the crew pulled out of the parking lot. Stacking up throughout the wee hours of the morning, some with shaky noisome video and others with dark and blurry pictures, they were all variations on this one, a Facebook post from a witness:

  Keith Niolet For real. I just saw Miracle Man beat the shit out of some dude at Guidrys.

  January 1 at 1:34am • Like

  Among the many people who saw these posts that morning was Jesse Castanedo, the reporter for the Biloxi Sun Herald, who’s covered enough hurricanes in his career to instantly recognize one o
n the horizon, to spot a Category 5 shit-storm blowing straight his way.

  sixteen

  From the inside of his ’72 Maserati Ghibli Spyder, idling out front of a mobile home at the end of the steep and sinuous dirt road he’d traveled to get here, Euclide Abbascia was watching four massive dogs, of a size and demeanor he’d only ever encountered before in Luca Giordano’s seventeenth-century painting of the hellhound Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades, leaping and leaping and then leaping yet again at the car’s windows, Euclide brought close to tears by the scritch-scratch-scritch of their claws carving up his doors. Compounding his distress was uncertainty that he was even at the right place. When the Google Maps voice announced, “You have arrived at your destination,” he’d been looking at two mailboxes perched by where an old logging road (by the looks of it) met the county route. Happening upon a fork as he followed the road into the woods, he’d opted for the road more traveled, the Maserati’s low underside aching from all the washouts and ruts despite Euclide’s efforts to baby it up the climb.

  Reasoning with the dogs from inside the car did nothing to calm them, quite possibly because Euclide’s entreaties came out in Italian. He honked the horn.

  The youngish woman who emerged from the mobile home aligned with Euclide’s mental image of the woman he’d spoken to on the phone the previous day, who’d identified herself as Damarkus Lockwood’s sister Shyrece. Distracted by the dogs, he’d also failed to notice the wooden ramp on which she was now descending. So this must be the place, he decided, rolling his window down two inches.

  The woman clapped her hands and waved and hollered at the dogs, which stopped jumping but didn’t quite retreat, running circles around the car now as though formulating Plan B. She seemed in no hurry, not walking so much as flowing down the rocky driveway in her aquamarine sock feet, dressed in bright pink pants with an unzipped sweatshirt over a jewel-studded black T-shirt. As she approached the car she came into focus as a lithesome woman, no older than thirty, slim but somehow voluptuous at the same time…and a quite pretty woman too, as Euclide couldn’t help noticing. Her face, scrunched into an expression of annoyance but also what looked like amusement, was corona’d by a short, ringleted afro. Tattoos of stars ran up both sides of her neck, as though to suggest a sparkler flaring beneath her T-shirt, a firecracker of a heart.

  Once alongside the car she ran her gaze across its silver contours, ignoring the driver stranded within. Euclide rolled his window down a few more inches. “Huh,” she finally said, still neglecting to look at him. “I know you bad lost.”

  “Can I get out?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you?”

  “The dogs, I mean.”

  She made a brief, tepid show of yelling at them to get back. “They ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  Once out of the car Euclide wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and made sure not to glance at the car door. This he could do later, when he was somewhere safe to weep. “Euclide Abbascia,” he said, extending his hand.

  She didn’t take the hand, instead tilting her hips to the side and raising one arm akimbo. “Didn’t we talk on the phone yesterday?”

  “We did,” he said. “Yes we did.”

  “And I told you not to come ’round.”

  “You did, yes,” he said, lowering his rejected hand, “but the nature of my work can be so complicated and strange-sounding, you see, that I feared I did not express it very well over the phone.”

  “Naw,” she said, with a deadpan shrug. “You did fine.”

  “Ah, well.” Euclide broke out a grin. “Thank you.”

  “You welcome,” she said, drily, clearly immune to his smile.

  Euclide laughed, at the same time taking stock of the area. The mobile home—newish-looking, to Euclide’s eye—sat in a clearing of woods so tight that he wondered how anyone had gotten it up here, the hemlocks encircling it so ancient and high that the house seemed situated inside a silo. Indicating long-ago settlement was a scatter of slanted gray outbuildings behind and to the side of the house, the forest in the process of claiming some of them, a sapling poking through one rotted roof like a conquering flag. Several children’s bicycles of various sizes stood leaned against the house and a netless basketball hoop was hanging something less than regulation height on an electrical pole. Strands of Christmas lights hung blinking in the daylight. One of the dogs lifted his leg to pee on Euclide’s front tire. “I imagine you don’t get many visitors up here,” he said to her.

  “Same as anybody else, I reckon,” said Shyrece, nudging her shoulder in his direction as if to point out Exhibit A.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” he mumbled, before shifting himself out of small-talk gear. “Look, I have no wish to be a pest, but if I could speak to your brother for just a few minutes, it would—”

  “Like I told you,” she cut in, “I don’t think my brother wanna talk about the things you wanna talk about.”

  Euclide issued an affected sigh. “Would it be possible for him to tell me that himself?” He threw on a dumpy, browbeaten expression. “Just to confirm? This way, you see, my boss won’t make me write letters to him, and mail them certified, and on and on like that, wasting everyone’s time…”

  Shyrece lifted an eyebrow. “Sounded yesterday like your boss is Jesus.”

  “Ah!” A quick laugh came bubbling forth; he liked this woman. “In a sense, okay, I guess this is true.” Wagging his head with a mock-sour expression, he said, “He’s a very tough boss…”

  Shyrece assessed the situation for a while, her lips pursed and her hand still locked to her hip. Then she turned back toward the house and started casually back uphill, saying quietly, with a darting glance at the Maserati, “Jesus sure must pay you all right though.” Despite any real signal from her, and with the four dogs drooling disturbingly close to his heels, Euclide followed.

  Euclide’s lips fell apart as he entered the mobile home. The living room was all but covered with Native American artifacts and memorabilia—a war bonnet, tomahawks, a beaded breastplate, arrows, whorls of arrowheads under glass, paintings of battle scenes, much more—mounted so neatly upon the fresh white walls that Euclide felt inside a gallery, that if he looked harder he’d see tiny price cards below each item. He was dizzied by a kind of cultural disorientation he’d experienced before in the States though never so vividly. Occupying a couch amidst all this powwow ornation, with the wide eyes and bulging neck of a bullfrog, was an old man wearing puffy orthopedic shoes and a T-shirt on which was emblazoned an airbrushed portrait of the rapper Ludacris. To Euclide’s left, in the kitchen, a one-year-old girl in cornrows was banging a sippy cup on the tray of a high chair.

  The old man looked up from the television. “Who’s this?”

  “He wanna talk to D,” Shyrece said, scattering some Cheerios onto the tray, which the baby scooped up in little fistfuls to throw to the floor.

  “What for?” the old man demanded, his eyes roaming over Euclide.

  “Don’t matter,” Shyrece said. “D ain’t gonna wanna talk.” To Euclide she said, “D’s back there working. Go on sit down, I’ll get him for you.”

  The old man monitored Euclide, taking a seat cater-corner from him, and then let out a hospitable-sounding grunt. “That there’s a right comfortable chair, isn’t it?”

  Euclide agreed it was. He asked, “Is Damarkus your son?”

  “My son?” A scoff. “Naw, that’s my grandson. His mother, she was my daughter.”

  “Where is she?”

  “My daughter? Aw, she passed giving birth to Shyrece. Me and my wife, we brung them two kids up. ’Course, then she went and passed.” The way he explained all this suggested less sadness about these deaths than disappointment with the women in his life for their inability to stay alive.

  Euclide gestured toward the walls. “Are you the one who’s fond of Indians?”

/>   “Fond? Shit, man, that’s what we are. We Cherokee.”

  Euclide didn’t know what to make of this claim, stifling his gut reaction to chortle at what he thought was a joke or maybe involved a sports allegiance with which he was unfamiliar. Looking at the old man, it seemed as preposterous as Father Ace alleging he was Chinese. Then again, Americans sometimes mistook Euclide for Spanish, Portuguese, Lebanese, Greek, or more often Mexican—really any of the world’s tribes of butterscotch brunettes. The grandfather tilted Euclide’s direction to ask, with a confidential hush, “Why you wanting to talk to D?”

  “I’m just inquiring,” Euclide answered, “about a man he served with, in the Army.”

  “This boy do something wrong?”

  “No, not at all.” A pause. “Not that I’m aware of, I mean.”

  “Then why you asking about him?”

  “Something unusual happened to him, medically, and I’m trying to sort out some of the particulars of his injury.”

  “What kind of unusual?”

  “Well, he was paralyzed. And then, for no apparent reason, he wasn’t.”

  “Huh.” The grandfather moved his lips around as if literally chewing this information. “Can’t hardly believe what doctors doing these days. You look at D—hell, only half him came home. Now he get around better’n I do. Me, I was with the Fourth Infantry over there in ’Nam. Back then, now, they wouldna even tried saving D. No point in it, man. They woulda just shot him up with some morphine and tagged him for Mortuary Affairs. Tell you what, they working miracles these days. That right there, that’s the truth.”