“She’s entertaining.”
“That’s alright, I won’t be long.”
He went to the spare bedroom, because that was where she “entertained,” and because that’s where the sounds were coming from. He knocked hard on the door and called, “Dee!” in a voice that would have caught the attention of the hearing impaired.
A moment later, the door cracked, and his mother wedged herself into the small gap. She had on nightclub makeup, and too much hairspray. She wore a red silk robe open over a black bra and leather miniskirt. There was a riding crop sticking out of the top of one tall black boot.
She gave him a pinched, put-out look. “Where the hell are your manners, Felix? You can’t just come barging in here while I’m working.”
“Is that what you call it these days? Working?” He gave her his fakest, sweetest smile, then dropped it like it hurt his face. It did, actually. “I came to settle up Dad’s tab with you.” He fished the money from his cut pocket and flashed it under her nose. “That’s what he owes you, plus interest. Take it, and then leave him alone.”
She propped a hand on her hip. Behind her, the room was filled with grunting and gasping and whimpering. “How can I leave him alone when he’s the one who came around here bothering me?” she demanded with self-righteous satisfaction. “Maybe if he had a single friend in the world, he wouldn’t have to beg me for money.”
“He has–” Mercy bit back the retort. It was childish, and he’d be damned if he got sucked into talking schoolgirl circles with her. “Like I said. Here’s your money.”
But she didn’t take it. Her eyes skipped from the wad of cash up to his face and back again. Her smile was slow and catlike. “Where’d you get this?”
“None of your business.”
“Are you flush these days?” Her smile widened. “That biker club paying you well?” Her eyes glued to his face, she shoved the door wide and let it fall back on its hinges, giving him an unimpeded view of the room. “If you’re looking to spend it on something, I’m sure I know someone who could take you on.”
The room was empty save a king-sized bed and a scattering of wooden chairs against the walls. A girl lay spread-eagle on the bed, tied hand and foot to the posts with rope, naked. There was a man between her legs, hips thrusting violently as he fucked her, his body jackknifing. A second man knelt on the bed beside the girl, suckling her breasts, a hand clamped tight over her mouth. A third man watched from one of the chairs, his jeans unfastened.
Dee’s smile was evil. “Simone here is a real crowd pleaser. She can please you too, for the right price.”
Mercy had never wanted to hit a woman in his life, but in that moment, he wanted to punch his own mother full in the face.
He shoved the money toward her. “Take it,” he said through his teeth.
Dee took a step back. “No.”
“Why the hell not?”
Over on the bed, the second man had noticed the presence of a newcomer, and lifted his head from the girl’s breasts. “Dee, I thought you said it’d just be us three.”
She lifted a hand for his silence. To Mercy, she said, “Remy borrowed money from me; it’s Remy who’s gonna pay me back.”
“Why does it matter so long as you get what’s yours?” Mercy threw the bills down at her feet. “Take that. You take it, and you leave Dad alone, or I swear to God–”
“What’ll you do?” she taunted. “What would Remy’s son ever do besides go hide in the swamp and play with lizards?”
The man who’d been going at the girl finished with a grunt and then withdrew, climbing down off the bed, coming to stand beside Dee, not at all self-conscious. He reached into her robe pocket and withdrew a pack of smokes and a lighter. “Is there a problem?” he asked, giving Mercy a dark look.
It was Oliver Landau, Mercy recognized, his mother’s current boyfriend. A white trash thug who’d come into some money thanks to a workman’s comp claim. Average height, wiry, his arms a touch too long, his chest marked up with sloppily-done tribal tattoos that had no meaning, he had a low-browed face that was made for mug shots, and couldn’t hope to match wits with a cocker spaniel.
Mercy smiled down at him. “Yeah. Your girlfriend’s stupid. That’s the problem.” Over the man’s head, Mercy saw the second man move to take Oliver’s place at the girl’s sex. She arched and mewled when he entered her.
Oliver made an aggressive gesture that lifted his shoulders and puffed out his chest.
Dee patted his arm and said, “I tried to raise him better, but there’s just no hope. The boy’s got no manners. He was just leaving, though, weren’t you, Felix?”
Oliver scuffed his bare foot across the bills on the floor. “What’s this?”
“A debt settled,” Mercy said. “If you’re smart, you’ll tell her to accept it and move on. You’ve been paid back,” he said to Dee. “Do you hear me? You’ve been paid.”
She made an airy, careless gesture with one hand and turned her back to him, going to the man in the chair. “It wasn’t your debt to settle,” she called, flipping back her robe and straddling the man’s lap, hiking her leather skirt up around her hips in the process. Her hand went between her legs, under the skirt. She made a little face that indicated she’d aligned the two of them and now the man was inside her. Then she put her hands on his shoulders and began to roll her hips, while over her shoulder, the man watched the spectacle that unfolded on the bed. “Now run along,” Dee said, voice a little breathless now that she was busy. “I need to take care of my guests.”
Oliver gave him a stupid, hateful look. “Get lost, shithead.”
Mercy stared him down, until Oliver flinched and glanced away; only then did he turn his back on the hideous moment in the bedroom. As he walked for the door, he heard the girl, Simone, screaming.
There was some drama back at the clubhouse when he returned. The newest prospect had been caught with the sergeant’s old lady, and Mercy’s size had been needed to prevent a bloodbath right there in the parking lot. By the time the prospect had been voted out, stripped of his cut, and put on the bus headed back to Shreveport where he belonged, it was after five. He called to tell Remy he’d be running late for dinner, but got no answer. He could picture his father and grandmother out on the porch, watching the fish jump for the dragonflies, neither of them able to hear the phone ringing beside the fridge inside.
As he walked through the market, picking out pasta, a head of garlic, some tomatoes, the last of his anger began to fade. The scene at the clubhouse had helped chase away the immediate aftereffects of seeing his mother, and the idea of a family dinner was soothing away the rest.
The ride home always filled him with both nostalgia and regret. He knew the bend of each oak branch, the smell of each puddle, the call of each bird. It was easy to forget how savage this place was; sheltered by buildings and pavement, New Orleans seemed the height of civilization, a vital beating heart of the world of humans and twentieth-century problems. But just a few short miles sent him plunging back into the wilderness. Out here, the gator was king, everything that crawled and swam and flew a part of his court. The men who lived in the swamp were like deer, hushed, respectful, stepping carefully.
Each time he made this trip, Mercy was filled up with boyhood memories, barefoot and tan in the bateau while they hunted, or sprawled across the porch with a book, learning about nations thousands of miles away that he’d never see with his own eyes.
And then the guilt would get him, a tight knot in his gut, because he’d abandoned the people who’d raised him.
“We want this for you,” Remy always said. “Go do more than I ever did. See the world the way I never could.”
Becoming an outlaw biker wasn’t exactly the same as going to college or joining the Marines, but in Remy’s narrow world, it was a big step. One for which Mercy was grateful.
Off a badly paved road, Mercy turned the bike down the dirt drive, between the knotted branches of two squat oaks, and that was when it
hit him. The sense that something was wrong.
Remy’s truck was parked in its usual spot, but there was evidence that other cars had been there, the grass flattened down where it normally stood tall.
He killed the engine and swung off his bike. The drone of cicadas flooded his ears, that hypnotic, ceaseless chattering. He stood very still in the driveway and strained, listening. There were no other sounds besides the insects. No whirring or humming or thumping or dull murmur of voices from the house. The air vibrated around him, that electric charge of utter silence, absolute quiet.
He pulled his shopping bag from its place bungeed onto the bitch seat and headed for the back door. He paused, something dark catching his attention down in the pale, powdery dirt of the driveway. It was tobacco juice, a big glob of it, spat there on the ground between boot prints.
Gram chewed some, used to, but had stopped on doctor’s orders. And Remy had never picked up the habit. He got his tobacco fix with cigarettes.
Mercy picked up the pace, making it to the door in three long strides. The knob turned against his hand and he pushed inside. “Dad? Gram?”
The smell almost knocked him down. Blood. The copper tang of wet, steaming-hot blood. The stench of gore.
The grocery sack fell out of his hand, tomatoes bouncing across the linoleum. The door eased shut with a groan.
Everywhere, the signs of struggle. Open cabinets, dishes shattered on the floor. Open drawers, pawed-through flatware jutting up like quills. Overturned chairs. Stippling on the table: stray buckshot. Powder burns. Acrid scent of a fired weapon, just under the blood. Footprints in the blood itself, tracking toward the living room.
He found Remy face-down alongside the sofa, his blood soaking into the carpet, his long, powerful frame lifeless, his usual rich coloring almost as white as the scars that crossed his arms and knuckles.
“Daddy,” Mercy breathed, going to his knees beside his father. His fingers found Remy’s throat. No pulse. He turned him over, and saw the gunshots in his chest and abdomen that had nearly cut him in half. How he’d made it this far from the kitchen, no one could know. Sheer strength and force of will.
He was dead.
Mercy cradled his father’s head in his hands, eyes moving over the dark marks where bruises had settled into his face, evidencing the fight he’d put up.
Then he remembered. “Gram!” He laid Remy gently back to the carpet and shot to his feet, tearing through the rest of the small house, calling to Nanette over and over.
He found her in the front yard, down by the water, her tiny frame crumpled like a dried-up flower. Her streaming white hair was full of blood, her skull soft and pulpy. She’d been bludgeoned to death. Her dress was ripped. There was blood on it, and on her legs. She’d been raped. His eighty-five-year-old grandmother had been raped before she was murdered.
The Cherokee girl Louis Lécuyer from Quebec had brought to New Orleans with a dream and a promise, and the son they’d made together, both dead.
It was a long moment before Mercy realized that the awful screaming that echoed through the swamp was his own, and that his throat was bleeding with the effort. He closed his mouth, and the silence reigned supreme again.
Save for the cicadas.
The plunk of fish.
Birds flapping through the canopy.
The sun beat down, unforgiving and insistent. Its blanketing heat was making the smell worse.
Not decomp, no. Too freshly dead for that. Just blood, fear, sweat, recent death. The stink of a body stopping, like it had run up against a wall and ceased to exist.
“Go to a place in your head,” Remy had told him once, when he was eleven, the first time they’d taken a gator home to dress and cook and tan themselves. All of the gators went to the depot, where the tags earned them cash. But this one had been small, and wily, hard to catch. “We’ll keep this one,” Daddy had said. He’d squeezed Mercy’s shoulder. “Don’t think about how bloody and messy it is. Just concentrate on what you need to do.”
So now, on his knees in the tall grass beside the water, staring at his brutalized grandmother, his throat raw from screaming, Mercy concentrated on what he needed to do. He had to take care of his family. That’s what a good son would do.
He gathered Nanette up – she weighed no more than a child – and took her in the house, laid her on the sofa. Then he went to the shed where Remy kept his hunting and fishing gear. He found a shovel and a pickaxe, and toting them over his shoulder, he walked up the slight rise into the trees until he found the spot he wanted, the little clearing between the oak roots, where the ground was soft and covered in a turf of pale green grass. There was honeysuckle, tangled among the briars, and spiked yucca fronds. There was a view between the tree trunks down to the water, with its paving of duckweed and purple blooming hyacinth.
A good spot. A pretty one.
It took him hours to dig the graves, side by side, deep enough that the foxes couldn’t dig them up. It was black dark by then, the moon shivering on the water the only light. His eyes had adjusted. Like the hellhound he wore on his cut, he could see well at night.
He carried Nanette up first, and laid her gently down in the bottom, covering her one shovelful at a time, until they were six feet separated, and the flat of the shovel tamped down the fresh earth on top.
Daddy was heavier, almost as tall as he was, strong and solid, despite the leanness, his weight crushing the air from Mercy’s lungs as he toted him up the rise. He eased him down into his bed of earth, and then realized he couldn’t let go. He cradled his father in his arms, as he lay on the upturned dirt, and pressed her forehead to Remy’s cold neck.
It was not a moment of danger that caused his life to flash before his eyes, but this final chance with the man he loved so much. Every morning, every hunt, every lesson, every book passage, every smile, every “I’m proud of you, Felix.”
“I want it to be me,” Mercy whispered, “who gets in that hole. I want it to be me.”
But finally, he relinquished Remy to his grave, and shoveled the dirt over him, until he was packed just as tightly and lovingly as his mother beside him.
He’d done it. He’d concentrated on what he had to do.
And then Mercy lay down on top of his father’s grave and the sobs tore him apart, until he finally lost consciousness.
The heat woke him. The oppressive weight of the sun beating down on his leather-clad back grew too heavy, and his eyes opened. He was sweating, as he laid there, palms pressed to the dirt, and his lungs were full of the smell of the ground, of green things, of the swamp. He thought he caught a whiff of Daddy’s aftershave, but that wasn’t possible. Because Daddy was dead.
Slowly, he pushed up onto his hands and knees, and he knew. He knew. There was an emotion building and boiling inside him, filling up every corner of him, down to his fingers and his toes. His face was stiff with dry tears, but he felt this new emotion burning that stiffness away.
Rage. It was rage. For the first time in his life, he knew what rage tasted like, and it was nothing like the petty shit people pretended it was. It was driven, it was burning, it was consuming. It was amazing.
And with that rage, came the knowing. Oliver Landau had killed his father, acting on Dee’s instructions to come for the money owed her.
Well, Oliver Landau was going to die today. And Mercy was going to enjoy every second of it.
**
“She’s with her gentlemen,” Barbara said when she answered the door.
“Good.”
Mercy didn’t care if it was locked or not – he didn’t check; it felt good to kick in the door to the guest bedroom. One of those little bursts of violence that fed the rage, made it stronger and more focused.
The girl, Simone was there, and his mother, and the three men from the day before. They were having a fucking orgy or something. He didn’t know. He didn’t register any of it. He saw Oliver’s stupid tattoos and went for him. Caught him around the throat and lifted him off
his feet, his arms picking up the burden effortlessly. It was easy as breathing, to pick a man up and hold him by his windpipe.
Oliver clawed at his hands, and someone, probably Dee, slapped him in the back, the head, kicked at the backs of his knees.
Like flies landing on him, all of it.
“Don’t get comfortable,” he told the two cohorts, and then he left, dragging a naked Oliver Landau with him, his mother screaming behind him.
He’d brought Remy’s old Ford, and he tied Oliver with rope, gagged him with an old rag, and tossed him into the bed, beneath the cover of the camper shell. “You’re going to wish,” he said before he closed the tailgate, “that I’d put a bullet in you just now.”
“Please,” Oliver whispered. “God, please.”
“Please what?” Mercy asked.
The breath wheezed in and out of him. “Just…end it, already.”
“End it?” Mercy feigned ignorance. “Like…let you go?”
Oliver’s eyes closed tight, more tears sliding down his cheeks.
“Oh. You meant kill you, right?”
Slow, halting nod.
“Aw, come on now, don’t hurt my feelings, Ollie. I thought we were having fun.”
The first thing he’d done, once he’d dragged Oliver into the house, was pull one of Nanette’s old loose flannel nightgowns down over the man’s head. “So you can remember what she smelled like when she died,” he’d explained, as he was tying him in one of the kitchen chairs. He’d set everything up in the kitchen of the little tar paper house out in the swamp, his home. Where no one could see or hear them.
He’d started with a knife. “Those are the stupidest fucking tats,” he’d said. “Let’s see what you look like without them.”
At some point, as the ink had come off, Oliver had admitted everything. Dee had sent him after the money, he and the other two men she’d been entertaining. She’d wanted the money, or his head, Oliver had said. And she hadn’t been picky about which, according to him.
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