Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  Between fitful fearful breathes, I chanted., “Ten—Nine—Eight…”

  Lucy hurriedly tore fresh strips from the roll. Henry snatched them up as quick as she produced them and he sealed the hilt of the barrel to the neck of the bottle.

  “More!” he yelled. Sweat was rising on his face. Lines of rosy red spittle trickled from the corners of his mouth.

  “… Seven—Six—Five…”

  He wound tape upon tape. The point of insertion disappeared under a smothering of grey plastic lengths.

  “… Four—Three—Two…”

  Henry gripped the gun handle and held the assembly aloft, marveling at the silencer we had just made for him. Then he shot Lucy in the stomach with no more sound than a handclap. She pitched forward against the table, whipped back, and slid from her chair onto the floor.

  “Oops,” Henry said.

  Before I could scream, he seized me in his arm and dug his fingers into my windpipe. I kicked and flailed at thin air as he lifted me and carried me out to the hall. As I tried to warn Papa, only a rasping gagging sound came from the chokehold he had on me. When we burst through the living room door, Bob Bettencourt froze mid-chug. Henry put two bullets into the TV screen. It shattered in a white powdery shower of glass as smoke wisped from the rear casing.

  “Ain’t ya no respect, you fucks?” Henry hollered. “There’s a death here.”

  “Jesus, Julia—“ my father gasped, leaping to his feet, about to lunge for me.

  Henry leveled the silencer at his head. “Don’t be no hero, Joe. Ain’t ya time.”

  Bob Bettencourt was on his feet now. “Where’s my Lucy?” he cried.

  Henry whipped the gun his way. Bob raised his arms to shield his face. He still had the bottle in his fist, and in a spray of glass and beer and blood, Henry put a bullet in his head and Lucy’s father crumpled to the floor.

  “Oh, she coming. Just wait a bit, Bob,” Henry spat. He turned to my father. I could see tears in Papa’s eyes. “Don’t hurt my baby, Henry,” he pleaded. “It weren’t my idea.”

  Henry released me and shoved me to Papa. “I got no beef with you, Joe,” he hissed. “But you oughta stay a while. I got me something to do.” His whole body twitched with raw vexation. He motioned with the silencer. “Move, both the ya!”

  Papa scooped me up and led the way into the hall. “Closet. Open it,” Henry ordered. Papa pulled open the door to the large windowless coatroom. Inside, he set me down on the lid of an antique pirate’s chest and flicked the light on.

  “You packing, Joe? Show me.” Henry barked. My father turned and opened his jacket. “Legs too. Lift em.” Papa hitched up his pants legs.

  “Bust that bulb,” Henry ordered. My father looked around hastily for some implement. “Just fuckin hit it,” Henry cursed. Papa dispatched a right hook to the bulb. The glass shattered.

  “Don’t go nowhere now,” Henry said. He shut the door, and in the dark, we heard the key turn and the sound of it then skittering across the marble floor of the hall. I felt Papa’s hands fumble for me, clasping my face and inspecting my body.

  “Are you ok, Muffalana? My God. Oh God. Did he hurt you?”

  I shook my head. “He killed Lucy,” I sobbed.

  Papa hugged me tight. “Why? What in God’s name for?”

  “He thinks she killed BG. He shot her. She’s dead, Papa.”

  On the other side of the closet wall, we heard a loud crash from the kitchen, as Henry threw one of the chairs clear across the room. We froze. Then the screaming started. For a moment it was strong, full-bloodied, while Lucy still had strength to react to the knife and the cutting. When Henry punctured her windpipe, it ceased. That was worse. There was only a rasping sound then. My father pressed his palms to my ears. I could only hear my bloodbeat now, the accusatory rhythm of my guilt.

  The kitchen went silent. We listened in the dark for any sound, any forewarning of what would happen next. When a shadow appeared behind the thin strip of light under the door, Papa didn’t think twice. He threw up the lid of the chest.

  “Juliana,” he whispered, “you gotta go inside, honey. Trust Daddy.” He hoisted me up and stood me in the box. “Shush, shush,” he warned. “Don’t make no sound. Don’t you come out, no matter what.”

  I tried to cling to him but he bundled me down. “Hold your hands inside, Baby. Make a prayer. I gotta close this.”

  I felt the lid shut above me. Sound was my only sense now; the closet key carefully inserted into the lock, turning briefly, stopping; a subdued voice calling through the door—“Joe?”; my father, in response, shuffling to the door, whispering back—“Frank?”

  “Gonna open this. Don’t shoot me now.”

  I inched the lid up and peered out. The closet door cracked open and Frank Hinds stepped through it. My father sighed. “He’s gone all to Hell, Frank. He knows. Jesus, how’d he know?”

  I watched them speak in a blurred exchange of run-into whispers; no longer their measured back-and-forth, now abrupt anxious mouth-to-ear flashes.

  The chest lid snatched open and sharp light stung my vision. When he saw me there, Frank’s face blanched. All I could register was the gun now in my father’s hand, something I had never ever seen before.

  “Jesus Joe, I told you to send her home,” Frank hissed.

  “Daddy’s gonna make it ok,” Papa whispered to me. “Just stay a bit longer, ok?”

  I wanted to grab him and pull him in with me but he shut the lid firmly. I heard the closet door close as quietly as it had opened. Thereafter, if I measured time by my breathing, it took an eternity; by hearing, it happened in an instant. The events in the kitchen—footsteps, voices, scuffles—sounded imprecise and indistinct. Like someone else’s nightmare, I grasped for meaning and prayed for it to end. One event was certain. Henry’s gun went off. The report, like thunder, ripped through the house and boomed within my confines.

  “No!” I cried, flinging the chest open and scrambling out. I groped for the handle and pushed the door open. The bright hall blinded me instantly. The gun blasted again. In the hall, the reverb was deafening.

  “Papa!” I screeched.

  As I ran to the kitchen, a dark shape rushed out at me. Strong arms lifted me, and as they span me round, I glimpsed the shock of red around the kitchen table before Frank Hinds carried me, kicking and screaming, to the front door and out to his car.

  “Shut up, Juliana,” he barked, bundling me into the front seat. I screeched Papa’s name, over and over, as Frank started the car and sped from Iona Street. I tried to open the door. It was locked and he pulled me back. As he clenched my shoulder to the seat, Frank roared through the suburban streets, ascended to the expressway, and quickly directed us toward the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway: the lake crossing.

  To go north. To leave New Orleans.

  As we queued for the toll booth, he leaned over. “Look, Juliana. I gotta get outta here. Trust me, you do too. If you want out, right here, right now, that’s fine.” He swung my door open. “There it is. I won’t stop you. But your Papa asked me to take care of you, if anything ever happened him. So when we get up to the barrier, you gotta choice. Holler to high Heaven and none of us is going anywhere. Or let it be. We’re not safe in the city anymore. Up to you, Hun.”

  “Where’s Papa?”

  For the first and last time, Frank Hinds hugged me and cried. “He went to your Mama,” he sobbed. We were holding up the queue and the cars behind us honked. Frank pulled back, fixed my hair, and put his sunglasses on.

  “So, you coming or not, like your Papa would want?” he asked. I nodded. I was in shock.

  He shut my door and we passed through the toll, a man and his daughter, both in black, dressed for a funeral.

  We headed north. For the longest time, Frank hardly spoke, with the blessed effect that he never scolded me whenever I cried.

  In Jackson, he tipped a JC Penny’s sales clerk $50 to select a new wardrobe for me. He peeled the note from a large billfold. He did
that a lot on the trip. The fold never seemed to get smaller. He told me it was his magic bundle. “Don’t forget… you know, understuff,” he instructed the clerk.

  He bought me coloring books, comics, candy by the boxload. When I told him I missed my Tuesday Taylor doll, I got Ski Tuesday; the fold-out lodge, the ski suit, everything!

  Now looking to all the world like vacationers, we drove to a junk yard outside of Jackson. Frank spoke with the manager and the bundle worked its magic again. The man produced an old white Buick station wagon with wooden side panels and an interior which reeked of motor oil. Frank transferred several sealed boxes to the back of the wagon, as well as the plates he’d removed from his own car.

  “Didn’t you like your car,” I asked, as we watched the giant walls of the crushing machine reduce his shiny new sedan to a wrinkled block of metal.

  “It wasn’t my style,” he replied.

  Over the next few days, we motelled in Birmingham, Charlotte, Baltimore ,and Trenton. At each stop, Frank would unload all the boxes into our room and stack them on the highest shelf in the clothes closet. That first evening, he took a parcel from one and showed it to me. It looked like a brick that was wrapped tight with black plastic and just as heavy to hold. Frank cut a small slit in the top and peeled it back, revealing a compacted substance that looked like Mama’s Avon talcum powder.

  “I’m showing this to you for a reason, Juliana,” he said. “I know it looks like candy but it isn’t. I don’t want you getting any notions about tasting any while I’m out.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a chemical.” He took a dollar bill and held it up. “You see this? Well, this powder is the stuff they use to make money out of. It’s dangerous when it’s raw. You touch it, you’ll get sick, very sick. You understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “Is it magic too, like your bundle?”

  “You could say as much. Now, get to bed. I want Olivia and John all colored-in when I get back.”

  Every night, Frank slipped out, taking armloads of the packs with him. When he’d return, the packs were gone and the grocery bags he carried in their place went promptly into a locked suitcase on the same top shelf. I would make to be sleeping so he never caught me watching while he performed this ritual. There was no goodnight kiss or ‘Sleep tight, Muffalana’ before he turned in. I decided that was ok. I liked that he said my proper name instead and how he said it. I wrote it over and over in the margins of the coloring books, fascinated by how I felt like I was seeing it for the first time with him.

  He even brought a Walkman back from one of his excursions. It looked pretty new and already had a tape in it, stopped mid-song. The label said Don Williams. It was country music, the type Mama loved. The very novelty of a voice right inside my head was pure magic and I played it constantly as we progressed north, as the green fields and wooden barns gradually transformed into a hue of grays and browns, of concrete, steel, and brick.

  Frank’s magic packs were all gone by the time we left New Jersey. But there was another disappearing act, one he had already pulled long before we rolled into Massachusetts. It involved his other ritual on the road—offloading Henry’s drugs by night, robbing the dead by day.

  Don’t worry, it wasn’t actual bodysnatching. Each day on the road, whatever sleepy burgs we happened to pass through, Frank would seek out the town cemetery and walk a while among the headstones. He’d paced up and down, a notebook in hand. I’d see him stop from time-to-time, jot something down, and continue searching. We must have visited a dozen or more on the way.

  “Are you looking for someplace to bury Papa?” I asked.

  He considered my question for a long time, just like the way I’d eavesdropped him on the porch.

  “You could say that, Juliana,” he finally answered. “I just need to make sure it’s the proper place. You’d want that, right?”

  “Then we can all be together. Mama too.”

  “Yes. That’s important to you?”

  “Mmm-hmm. Papa said it be on Earth as it is in Heaven. Me, Papa, and Mama.”

  “I’ll make sure it’s a humdinger then.”

  The last time he did it was in Oxford, North Carolina. While I played on the grass, Don crooned about having a black cloud that followed only him around. After we departed, Frank never did say if he’d found the perfect spot there. Instead, that evening, he gave me a stack of new books, new elegant journals with calfskin covers. I recognized the Almonester-Pontalba emblem on their fronts; it had been a ubiquitous design element throughout Iona Street.

  “These are for when you start school,” he explained. “I wrote your name on the inside so that everyone knows they’re yours.”

  I opened the top volume. At the head of the first page, I read the word he had written in brash capitals.

  JULIANNA

  “That ain’t right,” I said. I wrote my well-practiced version underneath—JULIANA

  “No, Julianna. You had it wrong all this time. N-N-A. Not one N—two.”

  “But Mama—”

  “Your Mama just gave you the short way, to make it easy for you. Where we’re going, people are much more”—he sighed—“much more fussy about doing things the proper way. Try again. Copy what I did.”

  I went again, his way, because I didn’t want to anger him. I could sense the annoyance in his tone.

  “Very good,” he said. “Now, you think while I’m gone you could do a whole page like that, fill it up?”

  “I dunno. I like my way better.”

  “Well, if you can, I have a special treat for you in the morning. The most special treat in the whole world.” Frank stood and gathered his parcels for the night. “But, I guess,” he reconsidered as he headed for the door, “if you can’t, that’s ok. I saw a pretty little girl over in Room B9. Maybe I’ll give it to her instead. Shame though, it’s the greatest thing in the whole world. Once I give it away, I won’t be able to get it back. So think on if you want it or you want her to have it.”

  At breakfast next morning, he studied the three pages I had completed at his behest. I didn’t know who the girl in B9 was. I just hated her and I wanted the special thing for myself. Frank set the journal down and placed two items on the diner table.

  “Very good. Are you ready for the most special thing in the world?”

  I nodded, rapt. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the two things before me—a small folded piece of paper and a mysterious something concealed in a wrap of white tissue.

  “When is your birthday, Julianna?”

  “July the Nine. But it been done already.”

  He showed me both sides of the paper. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. All blank.” I giggled.

  “Right. Now open the other item yourself.”

  I eagerly unfurled the tissue. When I saw the ordinary silver dollar inside, I was confused.

  “Don’t pout,” Frank said. “Hold your hand out.”

  He placed the coin in the center of my palm. Taking my other hand in his, he pressed my palms flat together. “Hold them tight, Julianna. This won’t work otherwise.”

  I pressed hard against myself.

  “Now, here’s the magic.” He pinched the folded paper between his fingers and held it up in honest sight. “You have to make a deal to get the special thing. But it’s a good deal. Do you think you’re a big enough girl to make this deal?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If the special thing likes you, then it will come to you. It will be a birthday present, but better than any birthday present you ever got, because it gives you a new birthday too, one for you and the special thing only.”

  “On the same day I got now?”

  “No. A new day, for you and it only.”

  “Oh! Can I pick Mama’s? I know when.”

  “Sorry. The special thing gets to decide. And if you want it—really want it—then it will tell me, right here on this piece of paper.”

  “But it’s all white.”
<
br />   “Yes. Only if you wish really hard and want really bad, then the special thing will write it, like magic. But you have to wish hard now. Do you want it, Julianna? If not, just say so and I’ll give it to that other girl.”

  I nodded furiously.

  “Ok. Wish.”

  I poured all of my powers into the act, pressing my hands so hard I could barely feel the coin between them. As I bent my will to it, Frank’s hand flicked and the paper vanished. The gasp was still on my lips when his fingers danced again and the paper returned! He opened it and read quietly to himself.

  “You did good.” He smiled. I couldn’t remember him ever smiling like that before.

  “I did?”

  “Open your hands, Julianna.”

  I parted my hands. The silver dollar was gone. In its place rested the most dazzling thing I had ever seen. And it was heavy, shiny.

  “Is it—”

  “Gold? Mmm-hmm. Pure gold.”

  The coat pin I now held was wrought in the same shape as the emblem on the journals.

  “Why is it shaped like Mister—like the books?”

  “Because the special thing knows everything about you. And it knows what’s making you sad. So it made itself like that so you could remember. Every time you feel sad, you can hold it and it will take the pain away.”

  I started to tear up. “I don’t want to be sad on my new birthday.”

  “You won’t be. And you still have your old birthday. But Julianna, you have to keep that one a secret, just between you and me. If anyone asks, you can only ever tell them your new birthday. If you let slip your old one, then the special thing will know and it will go away forever and you won’t have anything left to take the sadness away.”

  Frank wiggled the paper. “Here. Want to read what the special thing decided was your new birthday?”

  “Ok.”

  He opened the note. I tried to speak the unfamiliar date on it.

  “Say after me,” he instructed. “It’ll get easier, like your proper name. April-Twentieth.”

  I did as he asked. “And you’ll still give me a present on my old birthday?” I added. “And I’ll give you one on yours?”