Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  “Deal. But mind that now, you hear. Keep it safe always. Keep it private. It’s just for you. If anyone else ever sees it then they will scare it away and you’ll be all alone.”

  “I promise. I won’t… ever!”

  “Good. Because that’s the power of special things. They connect people. When they choose you, you get to pick one other person to be in the power of the special thing, only one mind. And when you pick them, you and they are joined by the special thing, forever. If you never lose the special thing, then you never lose them.”

  “So I get to pick a person to be part of the special thing?”

  “Yes. But you have to choose carefully. No changing your mind. Maybe you should wait and think on it for a while.”

  “No, I know. Can I say now?”

  “Sure. Who’s the lucky one?”

  “Papa. Papa in Heaven.” A queer relief, beyond my young knowing, came over me. All the pent-up anguish that I’d learned to keep from Frank ebbed away. In that moment, I accepted that it was a truly special thing I held now.

  “Fine,” Frank clipped. “That’s a thing done. Put it away now. We have road waiting. Finish your crepes.”

  The magic show was over.

  So this is the only headstone, Scott, that Juliana Bourget will ever have: the journal you are reading now.

  Born July 9, 1975–Died August 26, 1981.

  I wonder if she ever made it onto the milk cartons in New Orleans for any time. ‘Missing! Have you seen this girl? Wanted for infanticide!’ Probably best I didn’t after all.

  There is a grave in Oxford. I’ve never seen it but the Granville County Registrar was very helpful when I rang this week. He consulted the records, remarked how relieved he was to have it all digitized now, and read back the particulars to me.

  Julianna Wolford, born April 20, 1976. Died May 15, 1976. Pulmonary hypoplasia. The world welcomed her and then took 25 days to drown her. Still, I pray she felt as loved in her too-short life as I was in mine.

  Frank told me about this real nice family in Boston, a lawyer friend of his who was helping Frank get his new business ready for when we got there.

  “Really nice house,” Frank said. “A real gentleman and lady. You know the one thing they don’t have?”

  “No.”

  “Some smart pretty little girl to run around and play in that big fancy house while I’m away with business. Do you think you’d like to stay there a while, until we get on our feet? Get you all set up in school. Your Papa would want me to make sure you were taken care of.”

  So I swapped the motels and the Buick for a new Iona street, this one in the Boston suburbs. It was a beautiful house. I got my own room and I never wanted for anything, except to be gone. Every night, I clenched the special thing, and in the end, all it took from me was time. I outran the past by staying put, in my gilded cage on Powder House Road.

  Julianna Bourget officially ceased to be in December 1981. My Christmas present was the wonderful news from Penny that she and Jonathan had finalized their adoption of me. I just shrugged. What the fuck did adoption mean to a six-year old anyway?

  “Just be sure and tell the other girls that you are Putnam—of Dover,” Penny clarified. “Not from. And certainly so much easier on the tongue than that awful southern name.”

  And Frank? Frank became a ghost, literally and figuratively. He’d stop by from time to time and see me, compliment me on how I was doing in school and apologize for not being able to come more often. He said that because of what he had done on Iona Street, bad friends of Henry were looking for us.

  “But not Henry, right? He ain’t comin back?” I pleaded.

  “Right. Henry isn’t going to be a problem any more. Just his friends.”

  “Cause you…”

  “I took care of him.”

  “You made him… dead?”

  “I swear, on my life.”

  “You swear on mine too, for Papa?”

  “Yes Julianna. I swear on your life. Henry is dead.”

  Frank said it wouldn’t be safe until he got it all straightened out. And that just like I was safe, because I had my new birthday and name and the special thing to protect me, he needed to keep himself safe.

  “You can’t tell anyone about Frank Hinds,” he said. “The bad men will hear. Just call me Tom, like the cat on TV. Can you do that?”

  I nodded. “Can I still give you birthday presents? Just like we promised?”

  “Sure.”

  So Frank Hinds ceased to be, just as had I, just as had Henry Huval. In an age before computers, Henry simply switched, no fuss. Frank’s challenge, in weaving the threads of our new lives, required more care with the needlework; birth certificates from brief lives, a paper trail to cement the fiction, and the desperate complicity of a little girl, secured by any means fair or foul, any sleight of hand or heart.

  I’ll give him credit. He did a remarkable job. You know his name, Scott. He shuns the limelight. I don’t think that’s to protect his deception or his past. He has more than enough of what Bogart called ‘Fuck You! Money’ to feel fully secure. No, I think he just dislikes people, period.

  On that same call, I asked the Registrar to check Frank’s new name. It didn’t come up in Oxford. I guess he found it elsewhere, maybe even as far back as St Pat’s Cemetery in New Orleans. If you ever have a mind to make one last quest, look there for a baby boy, born shortly before WW2, one who lived as briefly as the Wolford girl. The name on the headstone will read ‘Thomas Sanders’. Yes, that one!

  One more thing. He never once touched me, not in any way your imagination might be fearing as you read this. I swear he didn’t. But now you know he did so much worse.

  That’s it. I won’t say goodbye. You deserve so much more than that, more than is in my power to give you.

  I love you, Scott Shelby Jameson. I never stopped loving you and I swear I never will. You will have many questions and I leave it to you to deal with Frank as you must. He is a very !!dangerous!! man, Scott. Remember that.

  As for me, give me what I deserve. Your hate? Perhaps. Your disgust? I guess. Your disappointment? Most definitely. Hate me. Curse me. Deny me. Divorce me. But I beg of you only one thing. Remember me. You are my story, my best memory, and the one good thing I tried to do. For as long as you draw breath, that will never die and nor will I.

  Always Your Girl

  Jules.

  August 2005

  Chapter 49

  The Coriolis Effect

  An act of kindness undid everything.

  Maybe it was the boy in Beijing’s Beihai Park who clasped the Holly Blue butterfly between his hands and briefly considered the sound it might make if he ground his palms together. Instead, he opened them and launched it skyward. The beat of its wings roused the air a thousandfold times. When, many weeks later, a billion such beats gathered to a single purpose, the butterfly had long been a dry dead thing, on the August day that a newly-born hurricane opened her eye.

  Maybe it was Monica Washington in Memorial Baptist Hospital in New Orleans.

  On the Fourth of July, she and daughter Tanya sat in the Urology Department. Her dialysis done, they waited for a fresh prescription for Monica’s meds.

  The elderly man beside Monica struggled with the childproof cap of his own meds, and she was pulled from her woolgathering when he wrenched the cap off and the contents spilled onto the floor beneath him. Monica instinctively dropped from her seat to gather the capsules. As the man bent forward with the same intent—and a none-too-quiet ‘Fuck It!’—his cheap sunglasses slipped from his face and clanked on the tiles.

  “I got em,” Monica said, retrieving the glasses as she continued plucking pills with one hand. And when she offered them up, Monica came face-to-face with Henry Almonester. Though she stifled the scream of recognition, her body itched to scurry back across the tiled floor. But when Henry did not look her in the eye, a tinge of wonder froze her. When he spoke, however, that voice dispelled all doubt, turnin
g Monica’s legs to jelly and all notion of scurrying to fantasy.

  “Thank you,” he croaked. “Mighty kind of you, Miss…”

  He held his hand out, expecting—not taking—the glasses. Monica was then certain he was blind. Still, it was Henry. Still, she was terrified beyond experience.

  “Smith… Denise Smith,” she lied, barely mustering the nerve to put the glasses into his grasp. He put them on and that only made it worse. In Monica’s imagination, not seeing his eyes meant not knowing his interest.

  “What?” she said.

  “I said, you got my pills, Miss Smith?”

  “Yessah,” she gasped meekly.

  “Well, get em to me.” He jiggled the bottle.

  Monica took one capsule and tried to push it into the open top. Her hand shook so much she couldn’t even get close. She clenched her mouth and fought back the tears.

  “Open your hand, pleaths,” she begged him. ‘I’ll hand em to ya.”

  Henry sighed, his lips pursed in faint disdain, and he opened his hand. Monica had to grab her own wrist to keep it steady as she dropped the pills to him. Henry took one and slipped it between his lips. His tongue snaked out, and as he dry-swallowed, he issued a rasping sound that made the bones in Monica’s butt twist in revulsion. He rebottled the rest.

  “Thank you, child. That a lil lisp I hear from your sweet lips?”

  “Yeth,” Monica replied, cringing as she heard herself.

  “Would you mind fetching me a cone o’water. This pill won’t go down, sorta like my last woman.”

  With great effort, Monica got to her feet. She made an urgent Get Up! motion at Tanya who shot back an exasperated Whaddup? glower. Monica didn’t know that sweat was rolling down her own face and her eyes were crazy popping.

  “Monica Washington?” a nurse called, appearing at the side of the reception desk. Monica froze. Tanya mouthed a quizzical That’s us! at her gone-mad mother.

  “Monica Washington,” the nurse repeated.

  Monica looked at Henry. She swore he looked directly up at her, seemed perfectly content about getting his water or not now.

  “Mon-ica Wash-ing-ton?” the nurse chanted.

  “Mom?”

  Monica pressed her hand to Tanya’s mouth, grabbed her bag, and yanked the teen off the seat and down the corridor. She only released Tanya when they rounded the first corner. Without a word, she hustled the confused girl through the front doors and out onto Napoleon Avenue where Monica’s tears and wails finally broke free. Her heart was about to blow like a firecracker but she kept them moving and she never dared look back.

  “Monica Washington!” the nurse screamed a final appeal.

  Henry Almonester raised his hand. “Nurse.”

  “Yes?” The woman approached.

  “You’re looking for my stepdaughter, Monica. She just withdrew to the bathroom. She was taken by a dizzy spell but she asked me to wait on for her call.”

  The nurse eyed him doubtfully.

  “Don’t you be making that face at me,” Henry growled. “You go judging people in your own time, when’s not on your employer’s dime, you catch me?”

  The nurse pffed. “There then,” she said and handed Henry the printed script. He snapped it away and stood, brushing her aside as he started down the corridor. He didn’t even break stride as he whipped open his cane and weaved it along the floor ahead of him. If anything, he was positively swaggering.

  Monica didn’t sleep that night. The next morning, she telephoned Juliana to tell her she had seen the Devil.

  The phantom calls started later that week. From a blocked number, the line was always dead when Monica picked up. They came at all hours but they were not frequent. A whole day might pass in peace. Those were the worst. If her tormentor wasn’t occupied placing calls, he could be anywhere. In Monica’s imagination, he was everywhere.

  The deliveries began soon after, all paid for by an anonymous benefactor: Papa Johns pizzas, Winn Dixie groceries, and more. They might have been poisoned. They couldn’t reasonably be. Still, Monica put them in the trash and asked God’s forgiveness for the waste.

  She didn’t tell, she didn’t run; because a secret is a rotting anchor, hidden in deep water. You drop it and convince yourself that it’s safe, tethered beyond sight. In that peculiar comfort, you forget that it binds you. And when a storm rolls in, it will not raise.

  So, in her simple house on Iberville Street, Monica put sturdy new locks on the front door and spooked at every strange sound beyond it. The tension confused Ella, her three-year old German Shepherd bitch, and Tanya decided, since the freak-out at Memorial, that her mother was finally hitting ‘The Change’. Tanya moaned about it to her MySpace friends since there was little else to do. Monica had everyone practically under house arrest.

  The break-in occurred on the last Saturday in July. Monica returned from her weekend job—assistant at a toy stall in the French Quarter flea mart. She unleashed Ella, planted herself in an armchair, about to ring Grace Thibeaux and ask her to send Tanya home. Ella trotted to the rear kitchen. Monica had slipped one shoe off when the sharp barks began. Ella wasn’t a twitchy dog and it stopped Monica mid-dial.

  She hobbled back to the kitchen to find Ella stood upright against the counter, balanced on her hind legs, sniffing at the sink. That was off-limits. Ella knew better. But Monica didn’t need to come closer to understand why Ella had forgotten herself. She could see from the hallway. That the kitchen back door was busted open was alarming enough, but what Monica observed floating in the full sink was the clincher. She recognized it, had sold it only that morning. Now naked, the Cabbage Patch baby doll turned slowly on the water and all the time its glassy eyes never left Monica’s.

  Monica rang Thibeaux’s and ordered Tanya to pass Saturday night there, with instruction that, other than church, Tanya was to stay put until Monica returned from work the next day. When she got done with that call, Monica packed bags for them both and phoned Gertie in Dallas. She tried to keep it together. She could tell all to her aunt when they arrived. But she couldn’t hold it in now. The events tumbled out and the two women cried, soothed each other, and in the silences cursed themselves for the things not done.

  Sunday afternoon, the flea market was as busy as ever. The time passed in a blur for Monica. As Ella slept under the teddy bear table, Monica willed the crawling clock past Three, despairing of Six, and paid scant attention to the distraction of faces, questions, and purchases around her.

  Out of nowhere, a man with greasy black hair and pockmarked skin handed her a cellphone. Worlds away, Monica took it without question. She saw the picture of Tanya on the screen but it still didn’t register. Tanya was in the clothes she wore over to the Thibeaux’s the day before. The picture showed Tanya, Leticia Thibeaux, and some other girls playing pickup soccer in City Park. It was timestamped five minutes earlier.

  “Wha—” Monica protested.

  The man with joyless brown eyes and two-day stubble—the same man who had bought the doll from Monica the day before—put his finger to his mouth. “I think you oughta take your break, doncha?” he whispered.

  Flustered, Monica excused herself with her boss and the man led her out to an ageing red Lincoln Continental sedan on the street. He opened the back door and directed her in. A clawing sensation dug its fingers into the prickling of Monica’s scalp when she saw Henry seated there but the closing door cut off any retreat. The driver took his place at the wheel and pulled away from the market. As they entered the warehouse district fronting the river, Henry broke the ensuing silence.

  “You can keep the phone. Dewey tells me she’s a good-looking kid.”

  “Don’t hurt her,” Monica pleaded. “She’d no parta nothing.”

  Henry coughed. “I dunno what part of what you’re talking about. You think you know me?”

  Monica nodded.

  “I can’t see you, child. Speak up now. Who you think I am?”

  “Mister Henry. Henry Almonester.” />
  “Damn right,” Henry crowed. “Ain’t no more to say then. We of a mind.”

  “What do you want? Why you terrorizing us?”

  “I like you, Monica. You like your auntie. She had stones. Only woman ever stood up to me.”

  “I didn’t do nothing, I swear.”

  Henry hmm’ed. He opened his belt and undid his pants button. When he unzipped his fly and gathered his penis out onto his lap, Monica gagged in revulsion and turned her head away.

  “I hear you not doing so well with liquids, Monica. Maybe we should try us some solids.”

  “No. Please. Don’t,” she sobbed, as the levee wall rolled past her window. “Please don’t make me do that.”

  “What? You won’t do it for your girl? Dewey, we go back to the market, let this nice lady alone. Maybe her girl do it for her, better daughter than you a mother. Call Denny. Have him fetch her.”

  “Wait.” Monica reached blindly until she could feel Henry. A thousand live maggots wriggled under her skin as she gripped his flaccidness. She never looked away from the window.

  “No. No,” Henry chided. “Not like that. I got the cure for that lisp of yours. Come over, black bitch. Do it right.”

  Monica closed her eyes and leaned into Henry’s lap. When she didn’t take her fist from around him, Henry pinched her arm hard. “Don’t be fooling me none,” he hissed, pulling her hand away. “You always the mouthy one. Don’t change now.”

  Monica closed her lips around his penis and willed it to happen quickly. The tears fell from her onto him. Henry pushed her head firmly down and in a voice possessed chanted over and over, “Sale pute noire.” His penis never stirred throughout. It remained an inert corpse of flesh.

  Henry grabbed Monica’s hair and yanked her off. He cackled smugly. “Dewey, my cock still don’t like nigger. Ain’t that the bitch?”

  Dewey snorted.

  Monica shrank against the door as floods of tears overwhelmed her.

  “At least I still get the wummin wet,” Henry whoo-hoo’ed. “Bon. We let this nice lady back to her work now.”

  Dewey turned onto Decatur and headed back to the Quarter.