by Brett Riley
He put a hand on Stransky’s arm. This ain’t the way, he said.
She raised her eyebrows. No? You’ve tortured my people for years. You threatened to torture me.
I was wrong.
She pulled her arm away. Maybe so. But we ain’t got time to be nice. Get behind me on this or walk away till it’s done. But don’t try to stop me. You’re outnumbered.
Troy looked around. The Troublers scowled and gripped their weapons. Bushrod sneered.
We should be tryin to build somethin better than what we’ve had, Troy said.
We will, Stransky said. After all these motherfuckers are dead.
Her eyes were sharpened steel. The guard drooled blood.
I hope you made your peace with God, son. You’ll be meetin Him soon.
Get him up, Stransky said.
Bushrod grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair and yanked him to his knees. Stransky slapped him across the face once, twice, three times. Nothing. She sent Bushrod for some water. He came back with a canteen and handed it to her. She dumped it over the guard’s head. His eyes fluttered open but did not focus. She poured more water on him. When he seemed more or less conscious, she knelt again.
I’m gonna ask you nice one more time, she said, her voice gentle. After that, it’s gonna get bad. Now. How are they deployin y’all? How many guards on the explosives? Tell us, and maybe you’ll live to lick Rook’s ass another day.
The guard spat in her face.
Bushrod drew his pistol, but Stransky waved him back. She wiped the spittle away and grinned. You shouldn’t have done that. Ain’t nothin these folks like better than beatin one of you self-righteous fucks half to death just to see how long you’ll last. Mister Bushrod, y’all take him out back.
Bushrod yanked the guard to his feet and shoved him up the hill. The other Troublers followed. Stransky stayed behind with Troy. When the others passed out of hearing, he said, This part tastes bad in my mouth.
You can stay on the porch with the old man. No need to watch.
He shook his head. If we’re together, we’re together. I aim to see it through.
Suit yourself.
She started up the hill. Troy followed, hoping the guard would talk quickly, knowing he would not.
Ten minutes after Bushrod tied the guard to a straight-backed chair and started beating him, the man’s brown mane had turned as red as the Nile when Aaron raised his hand over it. The guard’s lips were bloated leeches, his left eye swollen shut. An egg-sized hematoma sprouted in the middle of his forehead. His chin rested on his chest. Flecks of blood spattered his clothes when he exhaled. Only the ropes held him in place.
A Troubler brought a satchel. Bushrod took out a mallet, a chisel, and a thick rope tied into a noose. He held it all up to the Crusader’s good eye.
Troy leaned against the far wall, flexing his right knee. In the by and by, I’ll pay for this. Another mark on my soul, deep and jagged like the scrawlings on a prison wall tallyin up the endless days. But he did not turn away. You had to remember. You had to carry your shame with you like stones in your pocket. If you lived long enough, maybe you could earn putting it down, one rock at a time.
Bushrod circled the guard three times, tossing the mallet into the air, catching it by the handle, tossing it again. He never missed, the sound of wood on flesh metronomic and flat. The guard’s lips moved. He was praying, but for what? Deliverance? The strength to die well? He kept silent but for his labored breathing.
Stransky knelt in front of him and pushed the hair from his face, as a lover might do. It left swaths of gore, lined like brushstrokes. When she spoke, her voice was tender. Just answer the questions, and all this will stop.
The guard said nothing. Stransky shrugged and stepped away.
Bushrod tossed the mallet into the air, caught it by the handle as it was still arcing upward, and then brought it down with all his force on the guard’s left shoulder. The man’s banshee scream overrode the sharp crack of smashed flesh and breaking bone. The guard’s head jerked upward, the cords in his neck standing out. Half a dozen startled birds flew out of a nearby tree. Stransky watched them go, her face serene. The guard grunted and moaned through clenched teeth. Nearby, two trees stood on the hill like sentries, an improbable tire swing hanging from the cedar, perhaps a gift from some Troubler father for his Troubler children. Diagonal slats of light shone through the branches, which the breeze sent swaying, the sun’s rays kaleidoscoping, hypnotic. The guard’s breath sounded heavy and wet, as if Bushrod had driven his clavicle straight into a lung. The arm hung lower than any arm should. The divot in the shoulder looked deep enough to hold water.
Let’s try that again, honey, said Stransky. She might have been asking him inside for coffee. Remember you got a whole shitload of bones. Where are your people deployed? How many on the ordnance?
The guard watched her, his nostrils flaring like a blown horse’s.
Bushrod raised the mallet with both hands and brought it down on the other shoulder. The guard fell over, chair and all, and screamed, guttural and animalistic. A deranged prophet of doom risen from time’s most fetid pools. He clenched his teeth hard enough to shatter them, white flecks on the scarlet staining his shirt. Blood gushed from his mouth. Bushrod took up the chisel. He sat on the guard’s upper arm, grinding the crushed bones together, and set the chisel against the man’s hip. Then he brought the mallet down again and again and again, metal thudding on metal like someone staking a tent. The guard shrieked, his voice hoarsening. He tried to buck Bushrod off, but the Troubler held his seat and kept pounding, as merciless and implacable as ocean waves on rock, until the tip drove through clothes and flesh alike, blood spurting and pooling beneath them as if Bushrod had been drilling for it. By the time the hipbone shattered, the guard had already passed out.
Bushrod stood as Stransky retrieved a dipperful of water from the rain barrel. She doused the guard, who awoke sputtering and screaming as if he had never ceased. Stransky squatted and peered into his cheese-colored face. Talk, she said.
Bushrod knelt and fit the chisel against the guard’s knee.
No, he said, and then he burst into tears.
Stransky turned to Bushrod and nodded. The big man got up and stepped back with the others, watching, listening. Stransky stroked the guard’s bloody cheek. All right, she said. Tell me.
The guard looked as if he wanted to die. He likely did.
Pickets of twenty-five and a cache of explosives every half mile along the lakefront, he croaked. And every quarter mile on Lakeshore Drive. Same number every half mile along the river levees. Fifty guards and more explosives on the east side of the 17th Street Canal. Fifty on the Industrial Canal—twenty-five on the northeast side, where it meets the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, twenty-five on the southeast between Florida Avenue and Claiborne. Fifty on the east side of the London Avenue Canal. Posts on street corners every three blocks. Six to a dozen troops at every one.
Do they ever stand down?
Never, the guard said, spitting blood. His teeth looked like jagged icicles. There are rumors, though.
What kind? She daubed at his lips with her shirt hem.
When the wall’s done, he said. Some say Mister Royster will call us all there to witness its completion and celebrate the Lord’s victory over you heathens.
Stransky looked at Troy. See? That fucker’s done got cocky.
It’s just a rumor, Troy said.
But it sounds like him, don’t it? Dancin on our graves. She turned back to the guard. Well, honey, we’re gonna have somethin to say about that.
The guard found the strength to look defiant. Just kill me, you seditious harpy. Send me to the bosom of my Lord. I need to make my apologies.
Okay, Stransky said.
She stood and drew her sidearm and shot him in his ruined face. He jerked once and lay still. Blood ooz
ed from half a dozen wounds.
Bushrod was wiping off his instruments in the grass. The other Troublers turned away and chatted as if at a picnic.
Troy felt sick. Everybody we ever lost, the ones who went out on patrol or walked home alone and just disappeared. How many of em ended up like this man? A brutality worse than hell itself.
Stransky was looking at him, waiting. He supposed he had to get on with it. He had come this far. God help him.
He cleared his throat. Them canals—those are the same places that breached durin the ancients’ time. In the storm they called Katrina.
Stransky holstered her weapon. Yeah. Looks like Rook knows his New Orleans history.
We didn’t learn nothin here we couldn’t have figured out by ourselves.
She shrugged. Had to be sure. Ain’t all of us got that McClure kid workin for us.
Troy frowned. She’s got nothin to do with this.
Stransky cackled. Sure, she does. You’re lookin at us like we’re monsters, but sendin a little kid into the lion’s den all these years—you’re cold, Gabe. Colder than me, and smart like a goddam rattlesnake. You been runnin the wrong outfit all along. She turned to Bushrod. Dump this dead-ass motherfucker in the bayou.
What about the inspection? Bushrod asked.
Send somebody else. I got too much to do here.
She brushed past Troy and walked through the cabin’s back door. Bushrod untied the Crusader. A thick coat of blood covered the Troubler’s hands, his clothes, his face. A savage from a time when the ancients were but babes. He picked up the body as if it were a child’s and slung it over his shoulder, flinging blood about the yard, and then he traipsed around the cabin and down the hill.
I could follow him to the water’s edge. Gun him down, knife him in the liver and then cut his throat, bash his skull in. Be the lord of order one last time. And all it would cost me is the town I love and everybody in it. Troy swallowed his rage yet again like the bitter pill it was and turned back toward the house, hoping that his sick stomach could hold down some gumbo. It would be a long day.
26
When Jack Hobbes joined the lord of order’s office, Troy gave him a house on North Rampart. In ancient times, it had been a small inn, big enough for perhaps a dozen people if they shared rooms. It faced an old and crumbling vacant lot. Hobbes had always expected Troy to fill that lot someday, but he never had, perhaps because Hobbes liked the open space when the everyday burdens he bore like hundred-pound sacks of grain—all the violence, all the death—threatened to crush him. He had always dreaded Troy’s resignation, retirement, or death, not only because of their friendship but also because it would likely force Hobbes to move into the lord’s traditional quarters. Too much room for a man’s thoughts, his guilt, to echo and distort into something even worse.
Now, Troy’s home had been razed, the ashes picked through and scattered, and Royster had turned Hobbes’s sanctuary into a prison. LaShanda Long was lord of order, but she had received neither the traditional Temple office nor a new lord’s residence nor much actual power. What could you count on in times like these? Everything seemed made of smoke and rain.
Hobbes sat in the den, the lamp turned low, an island of light in a dark sea. Outside, nothing moved in his yard or the lot. The guards’ conversations, muted and unintelligible, blended with cricket song and the deep and bellicose croaks of frogs. If Hobbes were to set foot outside, those guards would gun him down. And sometimes that seemed like a sweeter fate than boiling to death indoors, gelded and meek.
All the crews had done their jobs as well as ever. Firewood in the kitchen tinderbox. Fresh water in the barrel out back. Chamber pots emptied. Food in the cupboards. Later he would take a cool bath and then sweat himself half to death all over again. Then he would probably take another bath because what else was there to do?
Santonio Ford’s people would be planting and growing and watering and tending and hunting and fishing. Hobbes had always loved to fish in his downtime, taking the occasional dip in the river to cool off. But now he could not even smell the water. He could not open the windows, for then the guards’ prattle would drift in, would tempt him to dig under the floorboards and drag out his pistols and splatter brains and viscera all over the street. Such an end would be wasteful and selfish.
No matter what else happened, he had marked his guards’ faces. He would send them to their rewards before he met his own.
He took up the carafe of tepid water from the side table and poured a glass, drained half of it, and set it back in the pale ring it had formed on the varnished wood. Wonder what Ernie and Gordy’s up to. And if Gabe’s alive.
Outside, an unseen guard tittered. The stars winked and glittered, as if the very universe mocked Hobbes’s hopes and dreams.
27
Tetweiller lay on his sofa, windows thrown open to whatever breeze might come. Outside, the guards conversed about the wall’s completion and how the Troublers were squeezing the city’s population out of their homes. I ought to knock their noggins together. They don’t do nothin but talk, and you can only take so much jabber about that goddam wall or how bad somebody’s constipated.
He drank from a demijohn of whiskey, one shot at a time, the liquor amber and fiery in the morning sunlight. Like Hobbes, he had stored plenty of contraband under his floorboards, all of which he would have to haul like a pack mule when the fight finally started. He had also hidden enough whiskey for ten men. He did not intend to spend his confinement brooding or scratching out his memoirs with a goose quill. No, he would stay good and drunk, because once the shooting started, he might not have the chance again this side of heaven. He might catch a bullet five feet from his own door.
He set his shot glass down without draining it and closed his eyes. Lord, watch over Gabriel and Jack. Please deliver Gordy from whatever’s eatin him. And if you got any patience left for an ornery old bastard like me, help me stand tall one more time. I wanna die on my feet. After he said his amens, he picked up the glass and drank. The whiskey settled in his gut, as hot and comfortable as ever.
Someone rapped on the door, hard and steady. He cursed, got up, and answered it, the whiskey sloshing inside him.
LaShanda Long stood on his porch, a half-dozen armed Crusaders backing her. She smiled. Hey, Ernie. Get your boots on.
Long rode beside Tetweiller, the guards flanking them. The old man had not spoken since mounting up. His worn pistols hung in their cracked holsters like wilted flowers in the buttonhole of a tattered and emaciated groom. Anger and the smell of whiskey radiated off him, but Long sensed no fear. He rode with his head high. He heard about how I wounded Gabriel. Maybe he even hates me. But he wasn’t there. He didn’t see everybody watchin us. If every shot missed, then me and Santonio would be dead or stuck in our houses or out in the bayous with the Troublers.
They reached Jack Hobbes’s house and dismounted and handed their reins to the guards. The old man refused to look at her, but he followed her to the porch. She knocked, the same rapid hammering she had unleashed on Tetweiller’s door.
When Hobbes answered it, he looked them over, his face noncommittal. Huh. Nice to see you, Ernie. LaShanda.
He turned and walked back into the house. They followed, Long shutting the door behind them. They sat in the stifling den. Hobbes brought them water. For a while, no one said anything.
Then Tetweiller turned on Long. You ain’t told em about us. That’s clear. But you shot Gabe and took his office. What the hell you playin at?
Long sighed. I didn’t want any of this, Ernie.
Hobbes drank some water and put his glass on the side table. Reckon he’s scared. Me too. We’re leaves in the wind. For all we know, Gabe’s dead.
And if he is, it’s on you, Tetweiller said.
Long looked Hobbes in the eye. We all did what we had to do. Gabriel included. As for the office, Santonio turned it down, a
nd when they gave it to me, they didn’t bother to ask if I wanted it.
So you shot Gabe with love, Tetweiller scoffed. I reckon you ain’t even thought about bowin down to Rook and Royster and lettin the city die.
Of course I have, she said. I’m torn up inside and scared to death. But I didn’t give y’all up. Neither did Santonio. I recruited up until I couldn’t go nowhere without guards. Don’t that say somethin?
They sipped water and sweated and shuffled in their chairs. The heat settled onto their skins, greasy as ointment rubbed on a wound.
Private talk with traitors, Hobbes said. Must have been tough to manage.
Long smiled. They can’t call me lord of order without givin me somethin.
Maybe, said Tetweiller. But I ain’t sure we should trust you any further than I could throw the river bridge.
Dang it all, Ernie. You’re as stubborn as a mule.
Reckon we’ll need a little more than your word, said Hobbes.
She sighed. Fine. Let me tell you what Santonio and me have done and what we’re about to do.
Hobbes watched her for a moment. Then he nodded. Tetweiller said nothing.
She told them everything.
Long and Tetweiller left that afternoon. The guards followed, asking no questions. The sinking sun was a blood orange on the horizon, the warm breeze refreshing after the sweat-lodge atmosphere of the house. It had smelled dank and sour, like sweaty underarms and damp crotches. Hobbes had looked twenty pounds lighter.
Tetweiller had softened. He and Hobbes still had reservations and probably would until she and Ford started gunning down Crusaders in the streets. But the three of them had found some common ground.
Long addressed the guards. Take Mr. Tetweiller home. Until he’s inside, don’t let him outta your sight, not even to make water.
The guards saluted. Tetweiller rode away without a word. Judging by the sun, it had to be around four o’clock, an hour before Long’s meeting with Ford near Loyola. Needing to think, she let her horse amble for half an hour. Then she turned it toward the park.
