Fred is shaking his head like a swimmer with water in his ear, but he can’t get out the sound, the infection. I feel a great pity for him even though he’s such an asshole. He scowls at my ribs. “You think I’m not man enough to keep my woman? You think I won’t fight for her?”
“There’s no need to. You’ve got to accept the fact that she’s leaving you. The war is over. You’ve lost.”
“Like hell I have.”
Like hell, he has. Fred has now become expendable. He has no reason or purpose to remain with us and probably never really did. Stepping foot in this house was like getting caught in quicksand, and the more he struggled the deeper set he got until he couldn’t get away again. Sarah, though, will stay behind. To what end, I don’t know, but that’s for her to decide.
Fred sold off most of his belongings days ago for more drugs. The video camera and the DAT recorder are long gone, and so are all of the worthwhile effects from the house—the television, stereo, all the petty cash, my watch and other jewelry. None of it is important to me except the framed photo of my parents that he lifted tonight.
I search the room while he continues to strew items everywhere. We’re both digging and rutting around. He looks over and says, “What are you doing? Hey you, what’s your name again? Listen, that’s mine! Take your hands off that. That’s mine. Hey—”
The photo is halfway free of the frame and the glass is cracked. I turn to go and Fred pulls out one of our kitchen knives from under the mattress. He’s even more disconnected than I thought. He looks down at the face and asks, “What was that? What’d you say to me, you bitch?”
I try to listen, but there’s nothing.
He’s fast but awkward. The knife slashes down but he misses me by six inches. I don’t even need to step aside. He tries again, stabbing for my ribs, for my sister’s pouting face, and I jerk left, catching his wrist and bending it backward, farther and farther until he drops the blade. I keep going until the popping and cracking of small bones grows loud enough to drown out Jonah’s recital.
I slap a hand over his mouth. Fred is screeching beneath the palm I use to cover his slippery lips. I keep the pressure up, twisting, feeling the hairline fracture working up his ulna inch by inch.
His agonized, horrified eyes keep gazing toward the face as I hiss into his ear, “Listen, I’ve been recutting your coke with an even better crystal than you’re used to. You were stepping on yours too much. If you’re going to do something then do it right. You’re leaving tonight, Fred, and you’re going without Sarah.”
He bucks like a dying fish and I slip my hand aside so I can hear him. “No! My arm! Hey, no, you—”
“My brother loves her and she’s starting to fall for him, I think. Get over the fact that it’s a little weird.”
“A little! Ow! Oh God . . . help, listen . . .”
It will finish badly when she dries out, I suppose, and probably end with madness, but almost everything does. I tell him, “Be pleased. It provides reassurance, a new hope for all. Take heart in that.”
I let go of him. Even though his arm is broken, the relief of my turning him loose overwhelms him and Fred groans and pants on his knees. I stuff a thousand bucks in his pocket, drag him down the hall, and shove him through the front door out across the porch. He bounces down the steps onto the lawn, moaning in tune with the cadence of Jonah’s poetry and all the loons and katydids.
Maggie, huddled in the willows, maintains her vigil.
THUNDER HANGS HEAVILY IN THE FURIOUS CLOUDS TO the east as the storm approaches. The river is already in a frenzy, half a foot higher than normal. The jut of cruel chins is outlined by lightning, and the sky is the color of a three-day-old bruise. Electrical surges burn out and explode bulbs all over the house, sending shards of glass soaring. Even the dog kicker must be staying in. No size twelve tracks are found in the mud, no dirty prints have been left on fur. Dogs are accepting treats from their owners again, showing a little tail-wagging. But they continue to howl, and you know there’s a reason.
When the rains finally come, the world is given a new perspective. Not whitewashed or cleansed, but slickly covered over and gleaming. Water pulses beneath windowpanes. It crawls across trees and houses, swallowing and drinking us in. You watch it arching over steeples and cliffs and the cabbage palms, buffeting, constantly beating and vying for your attention.
Trucks going by tear up the brutal din with separate gentler sounds: splashes, splurges, crunches, and whines. Anything is better than the pitter-patter and constant thrum of wind coming for you. Broadhead skinks skitter down walls, leaping into the water. The lightning is frantic and raging, that sudden charge making your hair bristle and skin tighten. Your ears pop. Fires erupt in the woods but the downpour immediately snuffs them out. You almost want to see the wild burning because it’s something that can exist, momentarily, in conflict with the storm.
The parking lot of Leadbetter’s is abruptly littered with corpses. Three drunks in two nights are found drowned in sixteen-inch puddles to one side of the curb where the grade dips. Two-hundred-and-thirty-pound men with forty-inch beer guts are discovered drifting with their key chains in hand, slowly circling a stopped drain. You pass out during a storm like this and you’re dead.
Shanty houses in the bog town are consumed in avalanches of mud and slide into the swamp. Ramshackle hovels at the edge of Potts County simply fall to pieces and families are forced to move into their trucks and chicken coops.
Dodi, who used to enjoy dancing in the rain, running around the yard and begging me to join her on the swing, comes to loathe the gurgling, sluicing water thudding at the roof. She can’t sleep and lies awake crimped at the foot of the bed. She wants company and I move with her into a different room, watching her nervously curl and uncurl.
She doesn’t often seem to mind being traded away by her mother, but tonight seems to be an exception. Dodi scowls at the ceiling. Velma Coots knows spells to keep a tempest like this at bay, potions intended to hold the hidden evils back. The thumping and tapping at the walls is like the hammering of the damned waiting to get inside. Why they’d want to, I don’t know.
She covers her ears and lets out a muffled cry, the sheets twisting tightly around her lithe body, each flawless curve shown off. “I can’t stand much more of this, Thomas. I can feel the demons out there, roving about.”
“It’ll pass in another day or two.”
“Storms like this one don’t just leave on their own, you’ve got to do something to run it off. It’s a storm of souls, the granny ladies say. The dead want back in and they’ve brought all the sins of the people along with them. Mama would know what to do.”
“Do you want to visit her? I’ll take you in the morning.”
“I ain’t going out there.” She speaks in a way that makes it sound like the rains, and what’s in them, have come specifically for her or for me. “Can’t you feel how badly it wants us?”
“Us?
“All of us.”
We can’t call her mother because Velma Coots doesn’t have a phone. That’s uncommon even in Potts County, but not unheard of. “It’s late, Dodi, try to sleep. Maybe by morning this will have blown over.”
“You have to go, Thomas.”
“What?”
“You gotta go.”
“Where?”
“To see Mama and find out what to do.”
I pull the blankets around us. “If there’s really something that could be done, wouldn’t she be doing it already?”
“She might need some help. Mama’s strong in her ways but she can’t protect all of Kingdom Come by her lonesome. It’s been a labor for her so far, and it’s getting worse.”
I don’t sneer and I don’t question. If I chose to scoff and dispute what goes on in Potts County I’d never stop, and I’d wind up like my father. “The other conjure women can join her.”
Branches scratch at the shingles, wood clapping on wood. It’s a familiar sound, and one I like, but Dodi s
naps up as if a child killer is just outside. Sweat courses down her neck, dappling my legs. Her fear is intoxicating and erotic but also sobering. I want to take her roughly but a detached terror is filling the room. I wonder what’s going on between Sarah and my brothers, and if they can feel this too. Or whether they all sleep blithely and dream of each other. I think I hear talking.
Dodi moves forward across my chest, the wet sheet drawing unpleasantly over us now. Beads of sweat hang off her nipples. I want her desperately, and I don’t want her at all.
“Maybe it’s got to do with that little gal from the flat rock, and what happened there,” she says. “Or what hasn’t happened yet and still needs to be done.”
“What do you mean?”
I’ve always known that Velma Coots didn’t give Dodi to me in payment for fixing a goddamn roof and digging screw worms out of a couple of sick cows. There was another agenda to the transaction. There usually is. When Dodi looks at me in this fashion, I remember once more it’s true, and I realize she’s actually here to spy on me for some reason. There’s genuine panic in her flitting eyes, and the last piece of the masquerade slips from her as she trembles in my arms. I can see the purpose, but not the objective.
“What’s your mother want from me?” I ask.
“You got power, Thomas, more than any of the granny witches. More than all of them. There’s power in names and it was your family that named this town. In one way, you are the town, and we’re you.”
“Dodi, I think you’re getting a little carried away here—”
But she isn’t. I hold her on the bed for a long while until her head droops and her breathing eases. Her skin dries with strange outlines of salt streaks. She falls asleep to the muted whispers of Sarah and Jonah down the hall. I let her slide from me and cover her with a blanket.
I take the truck into town, driving carefully along the flooded roads. I’ve got to stop several times in order to shift debris so I can ride by. When I get to Velma Coots’s shack she’s standing in her doorway, glowering at the folds of swarming rain, waiting for me.
“’Bout time you got here,” she says. “Was starting to think you weren’t gonna show.”
I step inside and I’m somewhat gratified to see that even in this torrential downpour and heavy wind, the roof job I did is holding up. A brass cauldron in the fireplace spews noxious fumes and sloshing black liquid. A short curved blade lies on a table nearby.
“What the hell do you want from me?” I ask.
“Jest a little blood and vinegar, there, in the pot.”
“Vinegar?”
“Some of yer seed.”
“My seed?”
“Sperm.”
“You’ve got to be shittin’ me.”
She isn’t, and her expression is so contorted that the hinges of her jaw look like they’re in the wrong places. “Evil’s come looking for us. It’s here to stay one way or another. The bad is just gonna get worse. The demons and the spirits, they up in arms and on the loose. You know that, and you believe it, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” She purses her lips and gives me a slow once-over, as if this will be the last time she ever sees me. “’Sides, the carnival will be coming through soon. We ain’t got much time at all.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Everybody’s got sacrifices to make,” she says. “Or don’t you know that already?”
I shake my head but it’s all right. I take up the blade and cut my hand open over the boiling brew. Where my blood strikes the liquid it hisses and spits. The flames bend and sputter as if drinking. I remember my father’s failures to change these ancient ways, and how his defeats and nearsightedness eventually drove him into the one hope of Kingdom Come, his own miserable mill.
Velma Coots gives me a scarf and I bind my wound.
“Now, your seed.”
“No.”
“I need it!”
“Sorry, I have more use for my vinegar than you do.”
She starts hopping in place. “You got to. The magic won’t work proper without it!”
“Do your best.”
She takes the blade and holds it out toward my belly as if she plans to use it on me. The fire reflects in the sheen of my blood coating the knife. I glare at her, waiting to see if she’s really going to make this kind of move. She’s castrated a thousand pigs in her life. Rain crashes harder and still the roof holds against it. I can take pride in that, if nothing else, why the hell not.
She lets loose a snarl and stabs the knife into a wooden table. “Then whatever happens from here on out is on your conscience, Thomas, you hear that? It’s on your head.”
“Of course it is,” I say. “So what else is new?”
CHAPTER FOUR
SOMEONE IS CALLING MY NAME.
She needs help and is begging adorably, the way we all like.
In the night I awaken to find my brothers talking to the face. They sway in the darkness, a shambling mass of bodies—of body. Sebastian is delirious with fury, his complaints coming from three throats, hitting three different notes, harmonizing well with a little doo-wop shuffle going on. They glare at each other, stuffed with devotion and anger and regret, each third of that brain filled with memories and needs.
Sarah isn’t here and neither is Dodi, but I feel a female nearby, one that makes me possessive. They want her, and they’ll go through me to get her. I listen, hoping to hear her voice, but there’s nothing now but the cruel whispers of my brothers, the feel of lips playing against my side. It’s too dark to know which of them is kissing her. Perhaps they’re taking turns, each attending the face in his own manner.
I try to enter myself, aware of every breath, the singular beating of my sole heart. The chill of my belly and the cold pressure of their mouths. I go further inside, hoping to discover muscles that might be making her eyes blink, small indented nostrils breathing deeply, misplaced cheekbones, lovely earlobes.
There isn’t anybody. It’s a bruise or a scar. Cole is weeping and Sebastian, in his hate, bites into my side. The storm is no match for his own fever. Pain erupts, but I’m not certain it’s mine. Blood runs thickly down to the mattress. They scurry away, one of them laughing as they move, in spasms, with a whirl of limbs and clashing purpose.
I get up and turn on the light. Rain thumps and the house creaks and settles. My brothers are under a sheet, flinching, pretending to sleep, baiting me. It gets like this sometimes.
The vast and overpowering noise of a massive tree toppling fills the room. It sounds as if the whole house is about to be crushed beneath a hundred tons of history. The rafters rock and the pounding rain withdraws into vacuum, the sudden displacement bringing us to total silence for an instant before the thunderous blast.
The oak falls directly past the window. A million branches undulate like snakes crawling by, striking the ground in an earsplitting explosion of mud and splintered timber.
I tear the sheet aside and grab hold of Sebastian, lifting his stunted frame and taking the others along too. The mouths are going at once, all of them talking at the same time with a dissonance of words, the tributary voice, the subtext and cacophony of tone and meaning.
They make no sense and neither do I. I’m yelling, but I’m not sure what about. I’m leaking all over, and I’ve got my own rage. This is when it’s good, when everyone is at his best. I try to look my brother in the eye but I can’t, he’s forever turned inward facing the others, glowering at Cole who continues to sob.
“Why did you bite me?”
“I didn’t,” Sebastian says from their throats.
“I’m bleeding.”
“No, you’re not.”
The blood drips and patters on the floor, loud in the room even with the wind bashing at the house. Is he being purposefully dense or is he playing word games? . . . telling me that another—the face that may be my sister—is the one who is bitten and bleeding? Is he trying to wrangle me into an admission? In that forebrain anything is possibl
e.
“It hurt.”
“Not you it didn’t.”
I want to hit him but I’d break my hand on that threefold skull. I go to the bathroom to clean myself up, searching each shade and line of my side. I’m looking for the familiar face but see only Sebastian’s teeth marks.
Perhaps she’s with them now—adhered on a chest, growing in an armpit, or dangling off a kneecap—beloved and finally wanted, and so much the luckier for it.
DRAGGING HIS PAST BEHIND HIM LIKE A MILLSTONE, the private eye meets me in my office.
His name is Nick Stiel and two months ago his wife of eight years died of leukemia. He says it flatly without any emotion. His eyes are half-lidded as if it’s an ordeal for him to open them all the way. His hands are slender but his wrists are surprisingly thick. The watchband is too tight, and coarse black hair sprouts from around it. His palms are callused, the first two knuckles scarred and distended. He’s studied martial arts for years. One of the Japanese disciplines, I’d guess. None of the spiritual doctrine has helped him to get over her loss.
I’ve given him one file containing a full report on the situation concerning Eve and another on the dog kicker. There’s also a map of the county, names and home addresses of everybody currently involved, photos of Eve, keys to a 4x4 wagon I rented for him, and a three-thousand-dollar retainer.
“Why me?” he asks.
“You concentrate on lost child cases and you’ve got a high rate of success.”
“In Los Angeles. This is a whole different world.”
“You ain’t kidding.”
He blinks, attempting to think it through. He knows it doesn’t feel right but he’s too distracted by his wife’s death to get past the fog. His heartbreak is so apparent I can tell he’ll get along well in Kingdom Come. If he tried to beguile the people of Potts County, or lie to them or provoke or bully or trade witty banter, he wouldn’t get so much as a shrug from any of them.
A Choir of Ill Children Page 5
