by Poppy Brite
The afternoon light was very clear, sifting through the canopy of leaves and the cracks in the wood, filling the treehouse with green and gold. Eddy leaned back against the wall, beginning to relax. “Where do you get fresh Jamaican around here?”
“Got a frien’ who flies to Jamaica two times a month or so. He lan’ at a little strip up in de hills near Negril on de western coast, pick it up an’ fly back to his place in de swamp, then somebody else pick it up an’ bring it to New Orleans. No problem.”
“He has an airstrip in the swamp?”
“Ya mon. Jus’ a little shack an’ a place to lan’ his plane.”
Eddy’s heart was pounding. “Do you think he might be making a trip soon?”
“I t’ink he could be convinced,” said Dougal gravely. “I don’ b’lieve he would fly to North Carolina. He don’ like to fly over U.S. airspace. But if we get Zachary down to de swamp, I t’ink my frien’ would take him.”
“I’ll drive to Missing Mile. I’ll shoot coffee into my veins and drive all night if I have to. I’m not letting them get him.”
“You wan’ drive my car? You wan’ me to go with you?”
“I guess so. We can’t bring Zach back through New Orleans. We’ll have to go around it and straight down into the swamp. Do you think your friend—”
“My frien’ will be there,” Dougal soothed. “Don’ worry. We call him once we get on the road.”
He was smiling at her, his teeth crooked but very white in his dark face, his eyes the color of warm chocolate. She couldn’t help smiling back.
“See,” said Dougal. “I tol’ you we plan better with our heads cleared out. De smart ganja works ever’ time.”
Agent Cover maneuvered his white Chevy van through the carbon monoxide snarl of downtown New Orleans. A fruitless visit to the French Quarter had left him staring at a lot of dead ends. Edwina Sung’s toothbrush was missing from her bathroom, and it turned out she had withdrawn seven thousand dollars from her bank account yesterday afternoon, several hours after the raid. Possibly she was shacked up somewhere, consoling herself over the loss of her favorite wanted criminal. But Cover suspected his exotic little bird had flown the coop.
A short electronic purr came from the region of his armpit. His cellular phone. He wrested it out of his sweaty jacket and thumbed the talk button. “Cover.”
“Afternoon, Agent. This is Payne from the DMV.”
“Yeah?” Cover perked up a little. A call from the Department of Motor Vehicles could mean good news.
Sure enough, Payne went on, “We got a trace on that name you gave us. Zachary Bosco—”
“Bosch.”
“Well, it took us a while to trace ’cause somebody had changed it in the computer. But we got a registration for him. Plate reads LLBTR-5. It’s a 1965 Chevy pickup, color red, down in Terrebonne Parish—”
“Terrebonne? You mean down by Houma?”
“Yep, Houma it is.”
“Shit.”
“You gotta go down there, Agent? Better be careful. Some a’ them Cajuns don’t like cops much. Kinda got their own laws an’ idears about things an’ all. Hot as hell an’ swampy as an open grave too. Listen, you need anything else today?”
“No. Thanks, Payne.”
Cover terminated the call, tugged the knot of his tie loose, and sat in stalled traffic with the air-conditioning vents aimed straight at his face. He knew Bosch must have gotten into the DMV computer and messed with the plates. Bosco. Cute. He probably could have deleted his registration altogether, but that might have set off alarms in the computer, and it was more his style to create as much confusion with as few keystrokes as possible.
A red 1965 Chevy pickup … it was all wrong. Stefan “Phoetus” Duplessis knew approximately as much about automobiles as he did about girls, but he swore up and down that he remembered Bosch driving a black Mustang.
Duplessis had been of little help so far. He had found articles in the Times-Picayune implying Bosch could be found in, variously, Cancun, Mexico; Bangor, Maine; and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The newspaper, of course, insisted no hacker could ever violate the sanctity of their system and every word they printed was one hundred percent genuine. And it turned out they did have a staff writer named Joseph Boudreaux, the byline on the goddess-in-a-bowl-of-gumbo story. Cover had an agent tracking down the reporter to find out if he’d actually written the story. But there was little doubt that Bosch could have cracked the paper’s pathetic security.
Privately, Cover thought the hacker had grabbed his cache of ready money and left the country, in which case they were most likely fucked. Duplessis said Bosch was part Cajun; it was just possible that he had relatives in Houma and was lying low in some fish camp. But Cover thought he was too smart to have stayed in Louisiana. And from other things Duplessis had said about the Bosch family, Cover doubted the kid would want to stay with any of his relatives.
He called in an all-points bulletin on the pickup, though he hoped the damn thing was rusting in a junkyard somewhere and wouldn’t be found. He knew it couldn’t have anything to do with Bosch.
But by the time he made it back to the office, the pickup had already been sighted in Houma, which was only an hour’s drive from New Orleans. Cover could think of no excuse that would keep him from checking it out.
“Any word on that hacker?” Frank Norton called as Cover strode past his door.
“Maybe.”
“You know, Ab, if you get outsmarted by a nineteen-year-old, you’re really gonna have egg on your face.”
“Fuck you, Spider.”
The old agent let out an annoyingly hearty belly laugh that followed Cover all the way down the hall.
The highway between New Orleans and Houma was precariously close to flooding, as it was much of the year. Cover’s tires had thrown off a thin steady spray of water for the last forty miles or so. There were cranes in the breakdown lane, big white birds standing on one leg watching his van slush by, or catching frogs in the reeds and cattails that grew right up onto the blacktop. Huge gnarled trees hung low over the road, draped in Spanish moss. God, he hated the look of Spanish moss.
The local cop in Houma said the truck was parked in somebody’s front yard and looked like it hadn’t moved in a while. Cover navigated the joyless streets of downtown Houma, got lost several times, finally pulled up in front of the house. The yard was dotted here and there with scraggly chickens. He disliked chickens; his grandmother had kept a henhouse, and even as a little boy the chalky smell of their shit, their scaly feet, and the weird, wobbly red flesh of their combs had filled him with revulsion.
The pickup was a sorry sight, sitting on three flat tires and a cement block, with an ancient paint job that might have once been red beneath the chicken shit. But there was the license plate, clear as anything: LLBTR-5. The cop was leaning against his cruiser taking a steady torrent of abuse from a big black-haired, red-faced man with a flair for dramatic gestures. Relief spread across the cop’s ratty little face as Cover pulled up.
“Mister Big Damn G-man!” hollered the Cajun. Cover cringed. He hated being called a G-man. “Mister G-man, maybe you can tell me for why this stupid cop wants to plague me all damn day, hein? I’m just stirrin’ up a pot a’ gumbo, me, an’ he come knockin’ an’ ask so many questions I done scorched my roux!”
“Uh, Agent Cover, this is Mr. Robicheaux,” the cop broke in. “He says the truck hasn’t been driven for about five years—”
“Damn right it ain’t! My wife she made me put on that damn, what-you-call-him, vanity plate. Was a damn voodoo curse, says me. S’posed to stand for ‘Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler,’ an’ it ain’t rolled since. Now the chickens roost in there.”
Agent Cover opened the truck’s passenger door. There were three frizzly chickens on the front seat, several more nesting in straw on the floorboards. They cocked their reptilian eyes at him and gobbled frantically.
As if to cap off the sheer perfection of his day, a single egg rolled off t
he seat and landed square on the tip of his left tassel loafer. Cover stared down at the golden yolk and milky albumen oozing over the carefully polished leather.
Somebody hates me, he thought. He wished he never had to set foot in the sweltering mud of Louisiana again. He wished he never had to interrogate another snotty punk who knew a thousand times more about computers than he ever would or wanted to. He wished he had the coveted White House detail.
But none of that mattered. What was the first thing they had drummed into him at Glynco?
Absalom Cover was a Secret Service agent. And Secret Service agents were granite agents.
Trevor sat in the diner punishing a bottomless cup of coffee, sketching and writing in an old spiral notebook he’d found in the back of Zach’s car. His hands shook a little, and the glossy black Formica of the tabletop was scattered with constellations of white sugar. Only by pressing the heel of his right hand against the table and holding the notebook flat was he able to steady his pen.
Eyes, hands, screaming mouths clawed their way across the page and were lost in the drowning pattern. He could never remember drawing this fast, not since early childhood, when he was desperate to get as many things as possible down on paper because he knew that was the only way he would ever get good at it.
His hand began to cramp, and he banged it against the table in frustration. He hated it when his hand cramped; it was like having his mind go blank. Trevor made himself extend and flex the fingers, stretch the muscles of the palm. He flipped through the pages, saw that Zach had noted things here and there in a nearly illegible handwriting full of flourishes and jagged psycho spikes. A trio of phone numbers for Caspar, Alyssa, and “Mutagenic BBS.” A bunch of incomprehensible scribblings that looked mostly like this:
DEC=> A
YOU=> info ter
DEC=> all sorts of shit, then A
or “MILNET: WSMR-TAC, NWC-TAC” or “Crap file–> CRYPT Unix
Trevor studied these random jottings like hieroglyphics, wondering whether he would know Zach better if he could understand them. But all in all, he concluded, Zach was not driven to record his existence on paper as Trevor was. Only six years younger, Zach belonged to a generation that preferred to leave its mark in other ways: on memory chips, on floppy disks and digitized video, every dream reducible to ones and zeroes, every thought sent racing through fiber-optic filaments a thousandth the thickness of a hair.
He picked up his coffee cup and drained it, heard the china jitter as he set it back down. The saucer was full of cold coffee that had sloshed over the edge of the cup. Trevor signaled the waitress for a refill, turned to a fresh page in the notebook, and began making a list in the small, clear handwriting he had cultivated for lettering comics.
FACTS
It makes things appear. (Hammer, electricity)
It makes us hallucinate. (Bathroom, bed)
THEORIES
It really tore up my story, then put the pieces back together and instantaneously moved them 1000 miles to SB’s mailbox.
It made us hallucinate the pieces.
I am completely insane and the mail is a hell of a lot faster than we think.
It can do whatever it wants, and is playing a game with me.
It can only do a few things, and is trying to communicate with me any way it can.
He stared at the list, wondering whether he was wrong to ascribe conscious, willful qualities to an “it” he was afraid to name. What if the house or what was left there had no consciousness, no ability to premeditate its actions? What if the events happening to them were like forces of nature, like a recording he and Zach had somehow gotten trapped in? Trevor thought that might be even worse.
The bell above the door jangled as Zach burst in and crossed the diner in three great bounds, oblivious to the stares he received. He slid in next to Trevor, smelling of sweat and beer and crackling energy. His eyes were bright, his hair wild. “DAMN!” he said. “I fucking LOVE this!”
“What? Being a rock star?”
“YEAH!”
Trevor started to close the notebook so as not to kill Zach’s buzz, but Zach saw the list. “Can I read that?”
Trevor pushed it over to him. Zach read it quickly, nodding at each item. “What did you hallucinate in bed?” he asked.
“That I had torn your heart out as we slept.” So much for not killing his buzz.
“Oh.” Zach turned those shining jade-colored eyes on Trevor, regarded him for a long moment. “When? This morning?”
“Yeah.”
“But then you woke me up wanting to fuck.”
Trevor shrugged. “Yeah.”
Zach thought about it, shook his head, started to say something else but stopped. Trevor didn’t press him. Zach picked up the coffee cup and inhaled deeply of its aroma, then actually took the tiniest possible sip. Trevor saw a shiver run up Zach’s spine, watched his throat work and his dark-fringed lashes flutter as the homeopathic dose of caffeine took effect. He leafed through the notebook and found Trevor’s drawings. “Won’t the lines on these pages show up when you reproduce them?”
“I’m not going to reproduce them. These are mine. I don’t feel like working on anything else right now.”
“But, Trev, they’re all yours.”
“I wonder,” said Trevor, staring at his hands. “I really do wonder.”
“Well, look, I have to get back. I just wanted to tell you we’ll be practicing a couple more hours. You can drive home if you want to—I’ll catch a ride with Terry.” Zach pressed his key ring into Trevor’s hand. Not just the keys to his car, Trevor realized, but to most everything this boy possessed in the world.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem. But be careful out there, okay?” Before sliding back out of the booth, Zach leaned over and planted a warm, none-too-hasty kiss on Trevor’s mouth.
“You’re so cool,” he said. “See you soon.”
Trevor watched him leave, then stared at the key ring as if its worn metal could tell him tales of Zach, then glanced around the diner wondering who had seen them kiss.
In fact, no one had seen it but a neatly dressed, pallid old man sitting in a sunny booth by the door nursing his own cup of coffee. The waitresses called him Mr. Henry. He was a lifelong resident of Missing Mile, and until a few years ago he had lived chastely with his younger sister who taught Bible school. They attended Baptist church services every Wednesday and Sunday. Neither had ever married. Since his sister’s massive stroke, which had mercifully killed her on the floor of her own tidy kitchen instead of leaving her to linger in some sterile ward, Mr. Henry had only been waiting to die too and be buried in his own small rectangle of earth beside her.
But that kiss reminded him of a summer’s day he had hardly let himself think of in seventy years. A vacation on the Outer Banks … a local boy he had met on the beach, his own age, twelve or thirteen. All day they swam in the vast expanse of ocean, dozed on the soft hot dunes, exchanged their deepest dreams and darkest secrets. Far from the ordinary fare of schools and families, they became what they wanted to be; they were unimaginably exotic to each other.
They were only lying in the sand embracing when his father found them. But his father had been a deacon of the Baptist church, a self-styled Old Testament patriarch who, finding himself trapped in the immoral whirlwind of the early twentieth century, had become a domestic tyrant. His father had beat him so badly he could not walk for five days, could not stand upright for a week. And his father had told him he never deserved to stand upright again, for he was no man.
Mr. Henry had been believing that for seventy years. But seeing the two beautiful boys’ lips meet and the tips of their tongues press quickly together reminded him how sweet it had been to kiss the briny mouth of that golden-skinned creature in the dunes, though he knew if his father had caught the
m kissing he would have killed them both. Now they could do it in public if they wanted to, with the nonchalance of any young couple in love. He wished he had been born in such a time, or had been brave enough to help make that time come.
Trevor saw the old man staring. He flushed to the roots of his hair and returned to his notebook, scowling fiercely. But as he began to draw again, he could still feel those faded eyes on him. He was sick of this place anyway, with its odor of grease and boiled coffee grounds, with its rotating fans that emitted a loud, steady ratcheting sound but did not cool the air.
He got up, left a generous tip on the table to make sure his cup would be kept full again next time, and gave the old man what he imagined was a polite but sardonic nod as he left the diner. To his surprise, the old man smiled and nodded back.
Trevor thought of driving out Burnt Church Road to the graveyard before he went home, but decided against it. The grave of his family had felt too peaceful, too final when he visited it on Sunday morning. It contained no answers for him, only crumbling bones. The answers were in the house, in its dampness and rot, its twenty-year-old bloodstains and shattered mirrors.
And also perhaps in its strange sylvan sensuality, its lushness of green vines twining through broken windows; in the home it was becoming to him and Zach, more than it had ever been his alone; in the succession of shady days and sweaty nights that seemed as if it would go on forever, though they both knew it could not; even in the galaxies of dust that swirled through late afternoon sunlight like golden notes descending on a saxophone, there in Birdland.
Trevor parked the car at the side of the house, went inside, and got a Coke from the refrigerator. He stood in the kitchen drinking it, looking at Zach’s stuff on the table. Zach seemed to have chosen this as his room and insinuated himself here. His Post-its were stuck to the edge of the table like some bizarre yellow fringe. On the refrigerator he had plastered a bumper sticker that read FUCK ’EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A JOKE. His laptop computer, surely an expensive machine, sat in plain view as if he trusted the house to protect it from thievery or harm. He thought of Zach breaking into the electric company last night, just skating right in as pretty as he pleased, as if anybody could call up and read the whole town’s power bills anytime they wanted to. What a silly kid, Trevor thought. What an amazing genius.
