(1993) Arc d'X

by Steve Erickson

  Sometimes, it seemed to her, he talked of them as though they were white. Sometimes he talked of them as though they were better than white. She noted this with wonder and rage.

  She took charge of his bedchamber and the rest of the house, also as they’d agreed on the rue St-Antoine, the enormous fury of Thomas’ daughters notwithstanding. She kept out of the sight of visitors to whatever extent was possible, though the visitors never stopped coming. Often they’d wait for Thomas in the parlor of the house, anxiously anticipating the appearance of the famous fiery philosopher-king while wondering with baffled alarm about the tall beggar who seemed to have wandered into the house from the woods outside and was now shuffling down the hall toward them in rags. The stories of Thomas’ eccentricities and quiet outrages only grew with his fame, and inevitably became more frenzied during his campaign for political office. There were stories that he was broke and in debt, which were true. There were stories he hated the clergy, which were true, and God, which were not. There were stories he was going to ride at the head of a great slave army and lead a new revolution. And then, in the shadow of the Nineteenth Century that advanced at twilight across the Virginia hills, there were stories he kept a beautiful black woman in his bedroom. These became the currency of doggerel, newspaper articles STEVE E R I C K S O N • 49

  and songs. With some variations, the name of the woman in these songs was always the same. Dashing Sally, Dusky Sally, Black Sally.

  When Sally heard the stories she feared Thomas would send her away. She thought to confront him one night and ask what he was going to do with her, and to remind him of their contract that he never sell her; but she didn’t have the courage and she was too afraid of what he might answer. She lay awake many nights wondering about what was going to happen to the children whom Thomas never acknowledged. Thomas, however, didn’t send her away or sell her. He answered none of the charges made about Sally, either publicly or privately, and denied no rumors; the greater the controversy grew, the more his allies pressed him to answer and deny, the more his daughters now used this turn of events to try and banish Sally from their lives forever, the more he kept his silence. However he may have been haunted by the rape of Sally and the betrayal of his conscience, he would not compound these things by denying her.

  One night, as she slept in his bed, the door opened and she turned and saw his silhouette in the light from the outer hall.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “I’m elected” was all he said. Then he went to the window of their bedroom and sat in a chair in the dark, and was still there when she finally drifted back to sleep.

  He was gone when she woke the next morning. She got up from the bed and drifted through the house, where the day had already begun; she was a little alarmed at how late she’d slept. “Have you seen Thomas?” she asked everyone, but no one had seen him at all. He didn’t return in the afternoon or the evening.

  He didn’t return the next day, or the day after, or the following day. She stood on the porch late into the evening, staring out at the road and the wooded Virginia hills. The other members of the household watched her and whispered to each other. Visitors to the house were turned away with the news that Thomas wasn’t home. The weeks passed, and then the months.

  A year passed, and then another. Sally struggled to keep the plantation together but everything began to dissolve in the mists of ruin and decay. The walls of the house smeared like colors in a hot steam, and everyone at the plantation became more inert. One night she announced, “I’m going to find him.” James loaded her a A R C D’X • 50

  small wagon of supplies including food, blankets, the black box with the rose carved on top full of her jewelry, and the carving knife she’d wrapped in one ragged red Parisian glove. Leaving her children in the care of her mother, she set out with the wagon and two horses, down the road she’d watched so many evenings waiting for his return.

  For a brief moment it occurred to her perhaps he’d returned to Paris. But Paris had been all terror and Bonaparte in the years since they’d left, and nothing was there for him anymore. She drove the wagon westward as its supplies slowly dwindled. Sometimes she slept in those inns that would give a black woman a corner to stay in; usually she slept outside. She could feel the eyes of the Indians watching her from the hills but she worried more about being raped by frontiersmen or seized by whites as an escaped slave. Finally the supplies ran out and all she had was her jewelry box and her knife. She abandoned the wagon and rode one of the horses. She tried to sell the other horse to two men in a tavern one night; when she overheard them asking each other what a lone colored woman was doing with two horses she became frightened and left, without the other horse.

  Everywhere she went she asked people if they’d seen Thomas.

  To her great alarm she was surprised by how many said he was dead. She was shocked by how many insisted there had never been such a man. Every once in a while someone claimed to have spot-ted him, perhaps even recently; someone told her he’d been seen with the Indians, a thin giant shadow walking with them along the ridge of the mountains.

  She did what she had to do. When there was no food left she worked for those who would feed her. When there was no work she begged on the road until her voice was gone. When there was nothing but her body to give for a place to sleep then she gave it.

  Twice she was captured as a slave when she couldn’t produce proof of her freedom, and twice she escaped because both times her captors expended themselves in the pleasure of her. She hated both of them enough to kill them with her knife, but as she’d grown older she had become shrewder about the politics of murdering white men, about the relentlessness with which white people would hunt her down for it. So she didn’t avenge her violations but fled them.

  STEVE E R I C K S O N • 51

  She searched a long time. She crossed the great river that lay to the west, and continued on where neither white man nor black had gone, into the land of the red. She collapsed one winter’s day from cold and exhaustion and hunger in the middle of a field of snow, and when she woke she was in an Indian tent with several women who were admiring the jewelry from her box. She stayed with the Indians through the winter. She gave them the jewelry.

  Now all she had was the knife. With it she drew for the Indians pictures in the dirt of a tall man with a head of flame; but she had trouble communicating to them his whiteness, since she was now so far west some hadn’t seen a white man. For a while in her own mind Sally pictured Thomas as she supposed the Indians did, black in the sun. Often in her imagination she made him blacker than she. She stripped him nude and placed irons around his ankles and chained his arms, and rode along behind him on her horse, the reins in one hand and a whip in the other.

  In the spring she set out again, on a new horse and blanket, wearing the clothes the Indians had given her. She crossed land as red as the Indians, land so red she could only believe the Indians who lived on it had emerged straight from the ground made of its rich red dirt. She rode as the Indian woman of an unknown tribe, and when she met other tribes and they asked her to identify her own, sometimes she said Virginia and sometimes she said Paris, and sometimes she tried to say another word that she’d been trying to say a long time, except it had caught in the ventricles of her heart like her own name in the ventricles of a strange vision she’d once had. For the remainder of her journey the word rested there and she couldn’t clear her heart or throat of it, she couldn’t bring it to her lips. Under the searing sun of the summer she rode, con-centrating on nothing but saying it, and she didn’t finally say it until she’d found him.

  She found him in an Indian village high on a mesa that overlooked the world as far as she could see it. She stumbled onto the village by chance, meeting some Indians at the foot of the mesa and allowing them to lead her up the path along the mesa’s side.

  Ihey offered her a place to sleep and took her to an adobe house that waited on the other side of a narrow stone bridge that crossed the m
ain mesa to a smaller one. The bridge was so narrow and high that, as she crossed, she didn’t dare look anywhere but A R C D’X • 52

  straight ahead. The house was empty and cool. Some water was in a bowl. Some blankets were in the corner where she could sleep.

  As she was falling to sleep, she had a dream. She dreamed she was back in the Hotel Langeac on the rue d’X, back in the bedroom where she’d slept with Thomas. She dreamed it was once again that night when he’d told her they were going home and she’d been devastated by the realization of how she’d miss him, as possessor and master and father, if she stayed behind in Paris. In this dream she once again reached behind the headrest of the bed and took the knife from the red Parisian glove and, as she had that night, raised the knife above her head and brought it down into him.

  Except this time no moths flew from the bed. This time she could hear the wet sound of the rip of the knife and she knew she’d killed him. When she dreamed this, the word that had been caught in the ventricles of her heart loosened itself and floated up to her throat; she could feel it on the back of her tongue. The knife slipped from her fingers.

  She heard it fall to the floor. Which was odd, because she was sleeping on the floor, and there was nowhere for the knife to fall.

  She heard a strange sound in the room, and it took her some time to identify it as music, playing very low. At some point, in the low clouds of her sleep, there was also the shriek of a siren, like the alarm of an air raid.

  The word was between her teeth. She wanted to bite it in two and taste its blood.

  In her sleep she raised her fingers to her mouth and tasted blood after all. Dimly she looked at her fingertips as though pieces of the word would be there.

  “America,” she said. She woke and there was blood on her pillow. There was blood on the sheets of the bed beneath her. Someone was lying in the bed with her and his head was flowing with blood; and she was startled to have found him again, and wanted to ask what had happened to him and where he’d gone, except that she knew he couldn’t answer. Then in the next moment she forgot her dream entirely, only the flotsam of it washing in and out with the tide of her consciousness; and though the tall man in the bed next to her looked familiar, she could no longer remember his name. The music suddenly stopped and she heard the click of the radio. She sat up in the hotel room to look at the two men in suits STEVE E R I C K S O N • 53

  at the foot of her bed. One was a very large black man and the other was a small white man with red hair. The black man bent over to pick up the knife from the floor and stood there for some time, holding it in a handkerchief and turning its bloody blade over and over.

  She looked again at the dead man next to her. She was now awake enough to cry out, and she rose from the bed too fast, becoming dizzy. “Take it easy, Mrs. Hemings,” the large black man said. He put the knife in the handkerchief over on a table in the corner of the room and took Sally by the arm to steady her.

  “Married name is Hurley,” said the small, wiry white man. He was reading from a note pad that he pulled from his coat pocket.

  “Hemings is her own name.”

  The black man pulled a chair from the table and sat Sally down.

  The room was stark. No pictures hung on the dirty white walls and there was no furniture besides the bed and the table and the chairs. On the table were the knife, now forming a small pool of blood, and the radio that had been playing. Besides the door that led out into the hotel hallway there were two other doors, one of them to the toilet’where there were a sink and faucet but no bath or shower. The other door was next to the bed.

  “Mallory, is that guy still out in the hall?” the black man said to the other one, who turned and opened the door and signaled to the hotel concierge in the hall. The concierge was a fat man with a handlebar mustache; he was pale and breathing heavily. He tried not to look at the bed where the body was. “Where’s this go?” the black man said to the concierge, pointing to the door by the bed.

  “That’s been shut up as long as I’ve been here,” the concierge said. Bringing himself to look at the body, he blurted, “I don’t like this in my hotel.”

  The black man went over to the door by the bed and opened it.

  The concierge made a sound of surprise: behind the door was nothing but a wall of dirt. Some of the dirt fell into the room. The black man touched the dirt wall and looked at his fingers; he gnawed on the inside of his cheek, which he tended to do when he was confused. “This has been opened recently,” he said. He looked at the dirt trickling into the room through the door. “Someone tried to get out through here,” he said. Then he walked back over to the table where Sally was sitting in a daze. She stared at her A ft C D’X • 54

  hands in her lap. The black man sat down in the other chair and looked at her. “Now then, Mrs.—” he started. “Damn,” he muttered, and turned to Mallory.

  “Hurley,” Mallory said.

  “Mrs. Hurley,” the black man said, “what’s your name?”

  Sally didn’t answer. “Sally,” Mallory said, reading from his note pad.

  “Thank you, Mallory,” the black man said with annoyance, “I know you know what her name is. I want to see if she knows what her name is.” The concierge was still whimpering at the sight of the body in the bed. “Mallory,” the black man said, “please take away our friend here and let me talk to Mrs. Hurley?” Mallory took the concierge out and closed the door, and now it was just the one man and the woman. Sally still hadn’t said anything and stared at her hands in her lap. “Hey,” the man said, snapping his fingers.

  Slowly she looked up at him. “Mrs. Hurley,” he said, “my name is Wade. I’m a policeman. I have to ask you some things and you’re going to have to try and tell me the answers to what I ask you.”

  Sally looked around the room, at the walls and the bed.

  “Can you tell me what happened here?” Wade said. She looked vacantly ahead of her and then at the dead man. “Can you tell me who he is?” Wade asked, and she looked at the bloody knife in the handkerchief on the table. “Is that yours?” She reached to touch it. “Just leave it, Mrs. Hurley. Sally. We’re going to have to check that out and if it’s not yours then you don’t want to touch—”

  “It’s mine,” she said.

  Wade gnawed on his cheek again. His brow furrowed and he looked around him to see that the door was closed. “Now you should be careful what you say,” he said to her in a low voice. “In this city you can be locked up for nothing other than the fact that someone in my position just doesn’t happen to like you, which I’ve done in the past but don’t want to do now.” Wade was trying to figure out if she was black. It was a tricky situation for him. It wasn’t beyond Mallory to be spying for either Wade’s superiors at headquarters or some low-level priest up at Church Central; everything was fucking intrigue in this city and here was Wade, a black man in a room with a very beautiful woman who might be black and might have just murdered a white man. So he couldn’t cut her much more slack than he’d be able to justify later on.

  STEVE ERICKSON • 55

  “It’s mine,” she repeated with determination. She was determined about it because it was the only thing she remembered now, or thought she remembered, though as the moments passed since she woke she became less and less certain. It seemed important to be able to lay claim to this singular memory. The legal ramifications of the knife’s being hers either hadn’t occurred to her or weren’t as important as the sanity of being able to remember this single thing.

  “I’ve got to take you in then, Mrs. Hurley,” Wade said. He got up and went to the door of the hallway, where Mallory was waiting.

  “You make the call?” he said to Mallory.

  “They’re coming in now,” Mallory said. He looked into the room at Sally and then at the bed. “Should we check out the body?”

  “Let the coroner do it,” Wade answered, “that’s his job.” He nodded at Sally. “I’m taking her in. I want to hold off a little whil
e before notifying the husband.” Sally turned slightly in her chair.

  Talking to Mallory, Wade lowered his voice. “You said there’s a child?”

  “A daughter,” Mallory answered. Sally turned back in her chair.

  “This is the way I like these babies,” said Mallory, “open and shut.”

  “That’s because you’ve got an open and shut brain,” said Wade.

  “When the others get here I want you to go over this place top to bottom. The whole hotel and the streets outside. Go around back and see if you can figure where that door used to go.”

  “You’re going to have to take my altar shift this afternoon,”

  Mallory told him, with no small satisfaction.

  “Shit,” Wade fumed. “Where?”

  “Humiliation.”

  Wade heard sirens outside from down the street and then the sound of them pulling in front of the hotel. Doors slammed. “That was actually damned punctual,” he said. Two other police came up the stairs and into the room. One looked at the body casually and the other, who was new on the detail, turned a little white. More cops were on the stairs and Mallory started giving directions. Another older cop came in and started on the body. “Either of you got a rosary?” Wade asked the first two cops who had just arrived.