But Herbie Jonstone has waited nearly twenty years for this and the glee makes him show off his nice white teeth. The moonlight catches in them like peanut brittle and I turn a second too late.
He’s good with the crutches, all right. Two decades on one leg will do that for you. Before I can completely wheel around and face him he’s driving one crutch hard into my solar plexus. I squeal and go down to my knees in the marsh grass.
“Been waiting for a long time to see you again, boy.”
His teeth are clean but his breath is bad. Smells like he’s been eating undercooked possum in the deep woods for a while now. No shower for a week and the rain isn’t helping much. If he’d been downwind of me I would’ve gagged on his BO five minutes ago.
When I finally get enough of my breath back to speak I say, “Been . . . in the same house all . . . my life. You could’ve come visit from Tupelo . . . anytime you wanted to, Herbie.”
His tremendous arms bulge again as he tightens his fists around the rubber grips. His palms creak harshly against them as loud as the twining ropes of the church bells. “I been meanin’ to, but I sorta got sidetracked. Life throws us curves, it does indeed. Got caught doin’ somethin’ sorta unfriendly to somebody and had to do some time in Angola.”
He’s not afraid of me running off. He knows we’re here for a reason and neither of us is about to shirk that obligation now. I find that I’m actually interested. “How long were you on the Farm?”
“Fifteen years. It wasn’t bad though, ’cept I missed the kids.”
“I bet you did.”
I dive for his leg and he brutally swats me aside with a crutch. It catches me hard across the mouth and my throat runs with blood. He reaches down, grabs me by the neck, and hoists me into the air. Christ is he quick. His huge arms are solid as wrought iron, and despite his unfriendly intentions, I’m impressed. I grasp at his fingers, trying to loosen their hold, but can’t even move them an inch. He draws me in close until we’re almost nose to nose.
He could collapse my trachea in an instant but he doesn’t. He’s a talker and wants to make it last for a time. “You got anything you want to get off your chest in the sight of God, son, ’fore you die?”
As a matter of fact, I do. “A few things.”
He chuckles warmly and I find myself almost liking him. It’s no wonder he can cull the kids so easily. “Well, let’s hear some.”
“Why didn’t you kill me that day? You didn’t bleed out and the gators didn’t roll you down under the river.”
“No, they surely did not.” He cocks his head, slack-jawed, staring deeply into me until the rain dribbles over his lips. He’s got to spit out a mouthful of water. “I barely had the strength to pull myself to the opposite shore. Oh, that was low, son, leaving your belt on the other young’n. Gotta admit though you had a flair, a real flourish, the way you handled yourself. If I could’ve put the squeeze on you then I woulda, but I was already a couple quarts low.”
He starts tightening his fingers a bit, putting the pressure on. “Why’d you wait so long to show up here?” I asked him.
“Had some other things on my mind I had to handle first.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Seems like you would, seein’ as how you appear to be a mite out of your noggin’.”
“Now that’s just insulting.”
The rain intensifies. Thunder erupts above us, swarming over the house and breaking savagely across the yard. Sheet lightning slashes down like white-hot razor wire, shearing off tree limbs and leaving fires scattered along the tree line. Herbie starts getting a touch nervous, gritting his teeth and watching the flames writhing in the storm. A chuckle works loose in my chest. I ask, “So, did Johnny bring you or did you bring him?”
“Who the hell’s Johnny?”
“The boy you strangled. Claimed he was your son, remember? I saw you talking to him out on the lawn before, laughing together. What did he say to you? He gonna keep coming back here?”
Herbie’s got to raise his voice over the wind and fierce rain. “One thing’s for certain, boy, you’re crazier than three cats in a dryer.”
“Coming from you that’s a laugh.”
“Maybe so. Say good-bye to this sorry world.”
He’s waited too long though. His crutches have sunk and slipped in the mud and slowly shifted to the left. His grip has loosened without him even knowing it. I break hard to one side and throw a fist at his face as hard as I can. It catches him on the temple, but he hardly notices.
The rain can’t cool the heat inside my head any more. “You’ve got accounts to settle, Herbie. Johnny wants his fair share of justice, and that’s why he’s brought you to me.”
Those teeth shine the darkness again. “That so?”
“Come on, put the squeeze on me.”
“You left me to die, son. I reckon that to be a mite unneighborly.”
“You’re a killer of children.”
“Some, it’s true. But that’s my mission.”
My mother’s song remains behind in the air like the scent of jasmine. Her soft voice drifts through the brush. It confounds Herbie too, who keeps glancing around. “What is that?”
“I’m your savior,” I tell him.
“What’s that?”
I get my hands on his shirt collar, but he flings me from him easily. The cloth tears in my hands and the muscles ripple on his heavy arms, that mighty, massive chest swelling as he takes another deep breath.
“You need more heroes like me in this here world, someone of distinguished valor and admirable exploits, that’s what it is.”
If he recognizes his own words now, he doesn’t show it. “That right?”
“I’m gonna make my mama proud today.”
“Only if she’s gonna be proud to see you dead.”
“Let’s find out.”
“I don’t believe you quite understand the situation we got here, boy.”
“And I believe I do.”
He comes forward with his shoulders low, bulling his way into me. His eyes have a chummy light playing in them. Brake lights on the roadside. We hit, grunting, shoulder to shoulder. He has a lot more weight behind him, and the ground is too wet and slippery for my bare feet to dig in. I slide back and nearly go over. He slams into me again, charging on the crutches, and the handles come together hard on my collarbone. It hurts and a red blaze fills my head as we cling together and grapple. I drive hard into his barrel chest and he laughs in my face. To him I’m seven years old and all he wants to do is get his fingers around my throat.
I reach out and seize him by the neck. I try to strangle him exactly as he’s choking me, but I don’t have the upper-body strength Herbie does. It’s not going to work like this. Already there’s a blazing nimbus of yellow spots in my vision. He’s having fun, really getting into it now, throttling me and yanking me side to side. I thrust my hand down and miss, try again and manage to grab hold of his pinned-up pant leg. It takes a hell of a lot of finagling but Herbie’s still in no rush to kill me outright, so I have some time. The spots grow larger, bubbling. He’s enjoying the noises I make as he jerks me back and forth—“Whagh, whoogh, yeack.”
I manage to shred the loose cloth and pull it from him. It’s wet and heavy and I twirl it around until it feels thick as rope. I loop it around his neck and haul for whatever I’m worth. It doesn’t do much besides throw him off-balance a little, which is enough for me to break loose. I fall back into palmetto and cypress and lie in the mud coughing, gasping.
Rain comes down so violently that I feel like I’m underwater. Burning ozone fills my head and my flesh is alive and crawling off my bones. Herbie looks pretty hysterical with his hair and beard electrified, sticking out on end and dancing with blue static. The charge in the air quickly grows heavier, intolerable.
I look up at the window and see the fists of my brothers pressed against the glass. A soft hand touches my shoulder and suddenly yanks me backward.
Some
one’s feet are off to one side, sticking out of the brush.
A pair of boots jutting from beneath the brush. I recognize them immediately. They’re size twelve.
They’re my father’s.
The phone is ringing. The voices gnaw at the back of my brain. Herbie crutches his way forward after me again, still grinning, sparks shooting out of his hair. The lightning arrives between us in one blinding, insane moment as the storm of ghosts blasts its all-embracing fury into my heart.
IN MY MOTHER’S DREAMS SHE’S FOLLOWING MY FATHER through the ironwood and swamp cyrilla into the deep slough of the bayou. The perfume of magnolia and sweet gum fills her head as a fog rolls across the morass, covering snapping turtles and noisy heron. She places her feet carefully, unlike my father, who’s rushing and plowing through the palmetto.
His face is so tight that it looks as if the flesh of his cheekbones will rip along its creases. His camera snaps against his chest so hard that surely the lens will crack at any moment. He’s out of breath and hissing through his teeth as if he’s in great pain. He stumbles, goes to one knee and curses, gets up but trips again immediately, falling to the other knee.
The swamp remains his enemy, even now. He’s tried to kill and drain it off but despite all his efforts he hasn’t disturbed a full inch of it. The heavy machinery fights the entire day long, dozens of men harrowing, smoothing, and bulldozing, and yet each new morning they find themselves in exactly the same place. The loons laugh. My father laughs too, wearily, his boots covered in the slime of ages.
Now he’s running—scampering, really—as the afternoon turns to purple and stars peer out of the east. My mother easily glides among the poplar trees while he gashes his arms on branches. His blood dapples bark and leaves, ripped pieces of his shirt hanging on barbs and thorns. He’s a man obsessed by all that attracts him. And all that attracts him is everything that dooms him.
He stops to light a cigarette but his hands are trembling so badly that he can’t get his lighter to work. When he finally manages a flame he brings the lighter to his mouth so quickly that he knocks the cigarette from his lips. It falls into the mud and the mist claws at his legs.
Someone else watching him might think he was lost, but he clearly has a destination in mind. He might despise the bayou but he knows it intimately, much better than it appears. He acts like a hunted animal as my mother follows. She plucks an orchid and places it in her hair. Every so often she jams her knuckles into her mouth to suppress her misery. She isn’t trying to hide but my father never bothers to look behind at where he’s been or what harm he’s caused along the way. His narrow vision is what puts him at odds with all that comprises his world, but he never thinks of leaving. He doesn’t believe he can alter his course, so never does.
My mother recognizes the place and so do I. He’s trampled miles of cabbage palm leading to the flat rock. This doesn’t surprise her, or me either. He’s always been plagued by the site and its significance and age, the profane antiquity of the rock. It sometimes keeps him awake at night, knowing that Kingdom Come is forever entwined with the ancient history of seeping ground and stone he cannot move.
I’ve begun to suspect, now, who he might be meeting here, though my mother still doesn’t know. I tell her to go. I shout for her to leave this place, but she remains hunched among the cypress, the orchid standing out in its magnificent color amidst the green.
In these dreams there’s a hint of a smile upon her sad face, the slightest touch of fear. Her fingernails trail in the fog, swirling it like river water. This is a time of revelation for all involved. My stomach tightens, the sweat runs into my mouth. He eases his camera to his eye, pointing, panting, aiming, because he doesn’t want to miss an instant of this.
“Mama, go,” I urge, and her hand rises from the mist as if to quiet me.
We watch as my wife Maggie walks toward my father, smiling for his camera and for him. My mother’s face drops in on itself, every plane and angle breaking into pieces.
In my mother’s dreams I say, “Mama, don’t look anymore,” and she tells me, “Oh, Thomas, it’s much too late for that.”
JOHNNY, THE MURDERED BOY, IS GIVING ME mouth-to-mouth, breathing bugs and bilge into my lungs.
I can barely see with a fiery afterimage glare cutting across my vision, but Johnny Jonstone’s right in my face. His gray eyes are thankful yet beseeching, and he’s thumping on my chest with his dead little fists. I taste mosquitoes under my tongue. His flesh is cold but the fever in my forehead is drilling even deeper. I’m on my back in a tremendous puddle, nearly going under, but he’s got my chin tilted back and my nostrils pinched off, his lips sealed over mine.
He smiles when he sees I’m alive and awake and mouths something I can’t understand. I roll aside, take a long drink of the dirty water and vomit until there’s nothing left to give but bile. I keep retching and my stomach feels like it’s about to squeeze out between my ribs. I try to stand several times and finally make it to my feet. The rain lashes my bare back and, being a proper penitent, I almost enjoy the punishment.
Herbie’s still on fire.
His corpse hisses and spits where the drops touch his blackened skin and blazing clothes. The flooded grass beneath him has boiled and burned away and the mud’s dried hard as cement. His crutches are stuck four inches deep in it and his body slumps and hangs there in the wind, spewing yellow gobs of bubbling fat. The flames swirl, lick, and devour, filling him, rising from his open mouth. His pretty teeth are charcoal. He’ll grin all the way to hell and then some.
Johnny’s gone. So are my father’s shoes.
I leave Herbie burning and head back to the house. My legs barely respond and I’m forced to shuffle and lumber forward, falling a lot and clambering back up. I look to my brothers’ window to see if they’re laughing at me, but the room is utterly dark. I’m spastic and the shaking gets so bad that I’m afraid my shoulders will pop out of their sockets.
The phone is ringing. I manage to swing open the back door and plod into the kitchen. I grab the receiver and the buzzing of my brothers’ angry voices spouts across the room.
I growl into the mouthpiece, “Whine all you want to, I’m still alive and I’ll be seeing you in a minute.”
I gently hang up the phone and head for the stairs, but I’m so exhausted that I crumple on the fifth step and tumble back down to the ground floor. I crash on my face. The fillings in my back teeth have melted and run. When I close my jaw my whole head chimes faintly.
At last I’ve made enough noise to awaken Dodi and she rushes to me wearing only one of my T-shirts and a pair of lace panties. “Oh God a’mighty, Thomas, what’s happened to you! You’re all burnt!”
“I—”
“You went outside tonight, didn’t you, even though I told you that only the real badness was comin’ for us!” For the first time I see her mother in her, all of Velma Coots’s hard-line attitude showing through. “But you had to just go on anyway, without a thought in your whole big brain. Damn, I’ll get some salve for your chest and neck. Most of your hair’s gone too.”
“Help me up.”
“You never do listen to all the good advice that folks try to give you. Headstrong, that’s what you are. Mulish. Mama says it too. This ain’t the way you set about to savin’ the people of this town like you’re supposed to. You’re just set in your ways and stubborn that you won’t listen to anything anybody else has to say no matter how smart it is. Why, I think that—”
“Dodi, shut up and help me over to the divan.”
“I’m callin’ Doc Jenkins.”
I try to nod but my head tips the wrong way. “Him and the sheriff both. Go on now.”
She drags me to the sofa, runs off for a minute, and comes back with some foul ointment she daubs all over me. It makes my eyes tear but she keeps smearing it on. “Why you want the sheriff?”
“Just do it.”
“Baby Jesus in the manger, I ain’t never seen burns like these before. Even you
r eyebrows are near gone. The hell happened? Was you outside in the rain? Was you hit by lightnin’?”
“Pretty damn close.”
She snorts and strands of her hair flap from the corners of her mouth. “It’s a miracle you ain’t dead.”
“Call Doc Jenkins, Dodi.”
“Oh, tha’s right.”
She runs to the kitchen while I lie there quivering and jerking, teeth ringing, and the stench of the balm jockeying to trade places with the stink of ozone and fried flesh. The walls warp out of shape and close in. I get the dry heaves but they fade fast. There’s not an ounce left in me to give.
“Storm’s knocked the phone out,” she says. “It’s just makin’ an awful racket and I can’t get a dial tone.”
“Put some clothes on,” I tell her. “Take the truck, go into town, and get them to come out here.”
“No way am I drivin’ in this weather,” she squeals. “You jest got done bein’ struck by lightnin’ and now you want me to go out there? The hell is that? Ain’t you got no concern for my well-bein’?”
“You’ll be fine.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Lightnin’ ain’t gonna hit you twice tonight. Skip right over you and nail me instead.”
She isn’t going to do it unless I somehow make her feel safe. That’s exceedingly difficult to do lying here crisped and twitching. “It’s my storm of souls, Dodi, not yours. It’s here for me. Nobody else is going to get hurt right now. Go get Doc and Sheriff Burke.”
“Mama,” she says. “I should go tell her what’s happened. Maybe Mama can do the proper thing for you.”
“Not at this second. For right now I need you to—”
“Okay, hush, I’ll go.”
She makes me as comfortable as possible on the divan and puts a sheet over me that sticks to the salve and oozing burns. She throws on a windbreaker, takes my keys, and goes without another word.
I look up the stairway at the closed door to my brothers’ bedroom.
The house breathes its extensive history. A century ago the dead were laid out in this same room and shown in their coffins for three days of mourning. My forefathers rested here through the long nights. I keep waiting for Johnny to start tapping at the screen again but he doesn’t. He’s served his purpose, whatever it might be. I hope to Christ that Herbie’s leg doesn’t come looking for me. I’ve had just about enough of those two.
A Choir of Ill Children Page 15
