Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  “Don’t ever speak about him. Don’t even mention him. You killed him. You’re getting dead for that. But you talk about him again and you get a slow death for that.”

  Henry laughs, spittle bubbling on the corner of his mouth. “You don’t know? Man-oh-man. Fine.” He shrugs dismissively. “Kill me. We all dying no ways. Then you never know. Good story. Storm’s always better with a good story.”

  “I don’t care for any lies you want to peddle. You’ll say anything right now. Believe me, you’re not going to save your sorry ass.”

  “Fine. Kill me. Just know the real reasons why we here now. You still have cause to after, but maybe you not be his yard dog no more.”

  “Who’s?” I’m afraid I already know.

  “I didn’t kill your Daddy. Frank Hinds shot Joe, right in front of me.”

  I stagger back. “You’re lying. He told me. You shot Papa. You’re still alive.”

  “So’s Frank. You think I’d stop with Joe? How you rate my chances against two guns? Yea, as you say, I’m still here. So’s Frank. How you puzzle that piece?”

  “You escaped after. Frank thought—”

  “You so fucking blind, child? Look at me. This is blind! Frank took everything from me and then God decides that I’m the one has to lose the sight. But man, was I blind that day. Blind with grief. Rage. Turns out I been blind long before that.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Frank and Joe been planning their move for weeks. Frank mostly. Joe couldn’t piss without Frank holding his dick. They was gonna step aside and let Marcello’s crew take all my action. All they wanted was safe passage and travelling cash. But they didn’t trust no one so Frank started skimming both ends, lining the larder for the big move.”

  “Papa loved you. You were good to us. Why would he turn on you?”

  “Your mama died. Everything changed. He changed. And the serpent was ready. He took my Lirienne.”

  “You put Lirienne to those animals. I saw the old papers. Gert had them all in Dallas, what you did that day. Her body in the prison showers, Lucy and Papa dead in your kitchen.”

  “And where was me, Juliana?”

  “I just assumed—”

  “Blind! Don’t you see nothing in that head o’yours?”

  “Every night. I see you shoot Lucy, again and again.”

  “Well, that on me, no argument. But I didn’t put Lirienne to them scum. That on your Daddy.”

  “Liar!”

  “Like father, like daughter. Open your eyes and look at that poor bitch on the floor. That on you. Like I said, you got his touch for the game.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Your Daddy send Lirienne to her death. I loved her. I fucked her up but I did’n ever bandon her.”

  “My father wasn’t that kind of man.”

  “Your father weren’t the man you thought he was. He brought her up there that morning. While I was burying my boy, he was selling my girl. All parta his plan, hang her on me. What I gonna do? What I had to do, get the fuck out of New Orleans. Then he can hand it all over to Marcello and walk away with the heat always on me.”

  “Well you saw to it he didn’t go anywhere. You shot him. I heard it. I still hear it.”

  “Ha!” Henry almost leaps off the couch with glee. “Blind you is but now you’s using your ears. Think girl. How you hear me shot anyone? You bout made the best muffler I never heard.”

  “Frank?” My head swims. “Frank shot Papa? That’s not possible.”

  But now I remember what I heard from inside the trunk. Heard. The peels of a gun, like thunder, not pops. When I remember Lucy convulsing, I always dismiss the sound—or lack of—because it was only the pop of our silencer, a thing of child’s play.

  I shake my head. “Why would he?”

  “Why anyone do anything this world?”

  “Greed? That’s your game.”

  “No. Love. When your Mama die, it change him. I guess he didn’t want to leave you behind. Now his chance to play family for real.”

  “Papa?”

  “Ain’t you been hearing me? Frank shot your papa because Joe weren’t your papa. You Frank’s!”

  I raise the gun and bead on him. “No! You’re a fucking bottom-feeding liar! Frank took me away to protect me. He told me he killed you so I’d be safe.”

  Henry pulls the tails of his shirt from his pants. There’s an ugly spider scar under his left ribcage. “Yet here I am. Only thing better than Frank’s aim is his lying. He left me just live enough so’s I could get away, so’s the heat be off him. And he got what he always couldn’t have. Got his girl and everything he needed to take you from the piss-poor life he watched you have with Joe.”

  I grab Henry by the shoulder and toss him on the floor. “Story’s over. Any last words?” I press the barrel to his skull.

  “You just tell Frank he disappoint me. Sending his girl by herself to do his dirty. You got more balls than him. Supposed to be my payday, hold you for getting something back to see my boys right. You tell him he got himself one smart bitch on his payroll now. Seems apple ain’t fell far.”

  “I’m not his girl. He took care of me, helped me find a real family, a normal family. But I’m not here for him or anyone else. I’m here for me. I’m here for you. Goodbye Henry. Rot in Hell.”

  Henry rolls onto his back. He looks up my way and his laugh is almost pitying. “Oh Lord. Am I still blind?”

  “What?”

  “He gave you away? He killed your papa and he didn’t even want you? And still you come down to clean up his mess. And he did’n have to lift a hand to make it so. He get good price for your ass? Guess he only got a taste for the… what they call them… ‘Milfs’. You too fresh for him. Not your Momma though.”

  I drop my full weight across Henry’s chest, pin his arms down with my knees. “You’re dead already. Stop talking. Stop it!” My finger flexes on the trigger as I grab his hair and pull his head up tight to meet the muzzle.

  “You stop and get the fuck on! Make Daddy proud. Maybe then he love you.”

  “NO!” I push the gun into—“NO!” —Henry’s palm and squeeze the—“NO!” —trigger. “NO!” —Five shots plough—“NO!”—through his bones before—“NO!”—I realize what I’ve done. I don’t hear his screams—“NO!” —just my own. When I stop, the muzzle of the gun has actually gone through the wound in his hand to the floor beyond.

  “NO!”

  I stumble upright, the gun coming free from the hole in Henry’s hand, and I hold both my own to my head. Henry’s blood is on my fingers, now in my hair, on my face. All I can do is stand catatonic and watch as he rolls onto all-fours and crawls away, whimpering. He’s starting across the hooker’s corpse when I snap out of it.

  “You value family, huh? I’ll give you a family tie,” I growl.

  I seize his ankle and help him across the hooker and out to the kitchen. Stopping, I retrieve his flick knife and cut the ends off the kettle cord. He doesn’t even struggle as I drag him down the porch steps and over to an old jetty cutting into the river. I wade in to the side of it. At the end of the jetty, the water is neck high on me, and when I let go of his ankle, Henry rights himself, immediately immersing to his chest. One swift headbutt wins his attention.

  “Guess what, Henry. Lucy didn’t kill BG. You shot the wrong girl. I drowned him. And now I’m going to do the same to you. Like father, like son.”

  He tries to kick out at me but it costs him his footing. As he goes under, I shove the cord through the hole in his hand and fasten it to the jetty leg as far under the waterline as I can reach. Beneath me, I sense him screaming as I tighten the knot. It’s a foretaste of his fate to come so I let him have a moment before pulling him up.

  “What life would he have had, Henry? He was a freak, the spawn of freaks. It was a mercy killing. I did everyone a fucking favor.”

  “You evil,” he splutters. “You could be no way other.”

  “And so what if Frank cut me loose? He did me
a favor. Look at you all. You’re poison to anything you touch. It was an act of love, to keep me from the hate. Storm surge’s coming. When this river rises, you’re going to run out of sky. Say hello to Katrina for me. You can swap stories with BG when she takes you to him.”

  Henry clutches the edge of the jetty with his free hand and tries to raise himself. The cord holds him back. He fails. He’s going nowhere but to damnation. He sobs, “You killed my boy. You killed my son.”

  I snarl in his face, “And you killed mine!”

  I drag myself out onto the bank, lie on my back, wracked. My battered body doesn’t want to but I stagger back inside the house. I don’t want Tanya to see the hooker, and I loathe myself as I pull the body from the house and slip it into the river beyond the cars. I don’t even look at Henry a few feet away.

  Dewey’s keys are still in the trunk of the Trans-Am and I grab them and head back upstairs. Before I unlock the bedroom door, I whisper to Tanya that I’m coming in and I don’t want to be brained with some loose pipe she might have found. I needn’t worry. She’s cowering under the bed and it takes an age to coax her out. I know the look on her face all too well. It’s what faced me in my mirror the long night of BG’s death. It’s the stare of a thousand faces in the basement in Peabody. It’s the virulence of my birthplace. I’ve passed its birth rite to the next generation, but I know Tanya can live through this because, as the Trans-Am carries us away from Henry Almonester, I finally accept that I want to as well. I can get through this now because I don’t have to go through it alone.

  Chapter 53

  Storm Surge

  Sunday

  We get back to Monica before dawn. There is initial testiness with Tanya’s foolhardiness, then tears all round, and finally gratitude for our safe return—or Tanya’s anyway. There’s no hiding the blood on me, and when I emerge from the shower, Monica is suddenly wary around me. That’s fine. I’m in no mood for sharing. I need to sleep. If she’s deciding to cut on me again then so be it. We must part company shortly as it is. I hand her the initiative by leaving the keys of the Trans-Am on the table as I retire. I’ll gladly walk out of our story by foot if it comes to that.

  I collapse on the kid’s bed, and when I next open my eyes, rain patter fills the darkness around me. The lights don’t work. I feel my way to the other room and rouse Monica where she lies clutching Tanya tight.

  My watchface is shattered. “What time is it?” I ask.

  “I—Where’d the day go?” Monica groans. Tanya stirs.

  “Power’s out,” I announce. “I think the storm’s here.”

  A timely gust invades my broken bedroom window and whistles down the corridor.

  “We can wait it out here, right?” Monica supposes. Tanya wakens. “Mamma?”

  “Lemme go check the radio in the car.” I venture outside and climb in. When I power up the ignition, the first thing that greets me is the gas gauge red light, the needle right on the edge.

  The clock says 9:24pm. No shit, the day went.

  As rain drums on the car roof, I spend 30 minutes listening to the local news warnings, learning just how screwed we are.

  “Majority of trees will be uprooted. Airborne debris will be widespread—appliances, light vehicles. All wood buildings will be destroyed. Persons, pets face certain death if exposed. Human suffering incredible by modern standards.”

  And this from the normally double-speaking drones in the Federal agencies!

  “Monica!” I yell, before I’m even in the door. “Grab everything. We’re going. We fucked up.”

  At least I tied Henry good. Every cloud… and all that.

  The rain gets worse and only downtown do streetlights burn, revealing how horridly empty the city is. The announcer’s voice blaring from the car radio advises listeners what to prepare in their attics as a last resort: a flashlight, radio, water, batteries, an axe. He fields frantic calls from people riding it out in their homes. One man talks about his elderly mother, bed-bound and infirmed; she’s too weak to be moved into the attic. What should he do? The next caller suggests the man write her name and address on her bare back with a marker. When the host presses him to expand, the caller is reluctant. All he says is, “In case…”

  It seems the entire city has crawled inside my radio. God knows, none of them is visible outside my window. I want to turn it off but somehow silencing them will be as bad as abandoning them. So I carry them to the Superdome, as though our car is their ark.

  The Superdome and I were both born in the same summer: 1975. It comes into view now, like a nuclear explosion frozen on impact, a mushroom cloud’s first moment. Its very shape spells Dread. My stomach flips at the prospect of entering it.

  In the lowest level of the adjoining parking-lot tower, I spot a discarded courtesy wheelchair and push it back to the car.

  “I don’t need that,” Monica huffs.

  I plant the gun on the seat, to gasps from Tanya.

  “We need that. They’re frisking people and they have metal detectors. Plus, we can wait in line in this rain or you can do us all a favor and be our pity pass to the front. Now sit your handicap ass down.”

  As Monica climbs on, she asks, “Is it loaded?”

  “Yes. So you best mind your P’s and Q’s, Missus. And you’re paralyzed, so keep your legs still, gottit?”

  “Pity your mouth weren’t the same way,” she mumbles.

  I wheel her up onto the front concourse. There are people waiting to enter but nowhere near the ten-deep throng the radio warned of. With a mix of courteousness and cajoling, we talk our way to the front.

  A Louisiana National Guardsman in olive fatigues runs a hand-held metal detector across myself and Tanya. As he waves it around Monica, it squelches constantly. They exchange awkward smiles as we’re ushered into the lobby. A Guardswoman tosses the contents of our bags onto a fold-out table and rifles through them with surgical-gloved hands. Another gives us a plastic bag and directs us to the lower-tier block of seats in the main arena.

  The stadium is vast. The sheer height of the roof makes ants of everyone on the ground. A loose assembly of guardsmen, rifles slung, ambles in the endzone. There are a few wheelchair and stretcher-bound refugees settled on the edges of the football field but the majority of people is dotted in the seats themselves. White and black faces punctuate the banks of green-and-red colored seats, and I have no idea how many people I’m seeing; certainly nowhere near full as I feared. The mood seems one of good-natured resignation and relief. The overriding sense is the smell—dank, warm, sweaty, like old sneakers after a hard run.

  We wheel Monica to a discrete corner. The instant she rises, I gather the gun into the plastic bag and we walk down the aisle to a section occupied by families and couples. We seat ourselves behind a trio of English voices.

  “You know, somebody mighta needed that wheelchair,” Monica berates me.

  “In an empty parking lot?”

  “Just saying.”

  “Can we have this argument when we get out tomorrow?”

  “I cannot believe you brought that thing in here, Juliana!”

  “Well, if it makes you feel better, as soon as we get outside, I’ll toss it in da riva!”

  Monica laughs.

  “What?”

  “You don’t even notice?”

  “What?”

  “You got here first, you talking all proper, like Jackie O. Now listen to yourself. You talking like one of us, like you never left.”

  I look at Tanya. She nods agreement. I hold my poker face but I’m busted. Neither of them could know how, in my early years with the Putnams, Penny took with relish to the task of eradicating my sloppy southern prun-ci-ation. We’d spend countless hours with a little cassette recorder and plug-in microphone, capture my mangling of the English language and set about repairing it, pulling me across her linguistic Mason-Dixon line. With repeated stabs at phrases such as ‘The debutantes looked delightful on the day of their presentation to the goodly gent
leman of Emerson College campus’ and the like, Penny determined to transform me from Blanche DuBois to Barbara Walters. Saturday mornings were especially quality Mom-and-Daughter time, watching the videotape of 20/20 from the night before. Penny would pause the VCR and thoughtfully repeat Barbara’s somber pronouncements on the night’s issues. “Imagine that, Julianna,” she would say, “President Reagan believes that the Soviet Union has no choice but to countenance unilateral nuclear disarmament.” Happy days.

  “Yo Mama!” I tease Monica. I really hope Penny hears too.

  The bag contains MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—and some bottled water. The MREs are plastic pouches, a grey so familiar that I can’t bear to touch them so I give mine to Tanya. They have chemical heating, and as the night wears on, the tang of processed chicken joins the ripe human odor of our confinement.

  A man files up and down the next aisle, holding a piece of card aloft. On it is scrawled:

  Rise, go to New Orleans, that great city, and cry against it;

  for their wickedness is come up before me.

  Jonah 1:2

  A gang of youths on the tier above throw their empty MRE boxes at him and catcall down. A passing Guardsman warns them to can it.

  The lights are lowered and people begin to nod off. Tanya is spread across two seats in the contorted way that only the young can sleep. Ella sits under us, bored now of the initial excitement of sensing other animals. Many people have brought pets of all types with them so maybe it is an ark after all.

  “I guess you got a lot of explaining to do when you get home,” Monica remarks in the shadows beside me.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “You are going home, Juliana?”

  “I wrote it all down. BG, Henry, everything.”

  “Why on earth would you do that?”

  “I couldn’t just leave Scott with unanswered questions. I left it with Frank so that all this would be long done by the time he handed it over.”

  “How you know Frank will come through and give it him?”

  “I’d come to believe that Frank couldn’t take the risk of what might happen if I made it home and found out he hadn’t. Now I’m convinced I was right.”