Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  I am no longer afraid.

  “I never had a date before,” he remarks as he guides me onward.

  “So this can be the best date you ever had.”

  “Yes. Ha-ha. I see you. Only date is best date. Perfect moment. Gotcha.”

  “You got me good.”

  “Are they real pretty, Juju, like I hope?”

  “The what?”

  “The horses, the big ones, in the park?”

  “Yes. You climb on. Feel like you’re flying.”

  “That I want next date. Then be best, ever. You say you take me, that’s a pact, right?”

  “Yes BG, that’s a pact.”

  The Great Elk, perpetual statued sentry at the gates of Greenwood Cemetery, watches us enter.

  “I know the walk,” BG confides. “Helps me home.”

  He leads me through the channels between the high tombs. We are deep among the dead when a distant canine bark calls after me. When I look back, I can only see a canyon of burial houses, receding long beyond the reach of the flashlight. In the farther darkness, Ella barks again.

  BG stops. “Home where my heart is.” The Almonester crypt looms over us.

  “BG, you said you’d take me to Scott. You promised. This isn’t where I meant.”

  “Boy?” BG calls around us. “Boy?”

  “Stop it, BG!” I say.

  BG looks puzzled. “He always off somewhere. Been gone lately too. Came back tonight. Gosh, no time now for hookie.”

  “Look at me, BG I’m talking about Scott—Scott. Why would Scott be here?”

  “We all have be put somewhere, Juju. Home where someone have you when no one need you. Boy learn me that. Maybe he went inside.”

  “Inside where?”

  BG points to the crypt face. In that instant, the spell breaks and the storm’s fury returns around me.

  “Are you saying… is Scott in there… like them? Like you?”

  “They all in there, place you left for us.”

  “Who?”

  “Everyone. I can’t stand it, all the loud. Go on, hear yourself.”

  I climb the plinth. Pressing my ear to the granite, I hear the dead, dying on the other side.

  The rape resumes. Lirienne moans as the next man penetrates her. She writhes on the shower-room floor, her druggy haze lifting. The growing ache beneath her waist becomes a searing wound. When awareness takes hold, her screams begin.

  Shut that slut up! a voice booms. So the animal having her clasps his hand over her mouth. She bites, gets part of his fleshy palm. The animal yelps. Fists bludgeon her face. I feel the blows. Lirienne’s still screaming, even after her jaw breaks.

  A sucking sound, as the rapist now tries to have her tongue out with his teeth instead. He chews her lip away and a bloodlust sweeps the pack. In a biting frenzy, they all put their teeth in her.

  Her screams end when her back breaks. The sex does not. There’s others waiting. Bitch still warm. Hurry yo ass ah’ready!

  “Juliana?” a girl’s soft voice now calls.

  I know it instantly. “Lucy?”

  “Why did’n you tell, Juliana?” She’s confused, reproachful. “I did’n tell on you. I know you supposed I would. But I did’n. I love you.”

  “I’m sorry, Lucy. I was so scared. I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

  “He cut my neck. But I still wouldn’t tell. I tried to ask him let me go but the words couldn’t get out. It tasted funny when I tried to speak.”

  “No Luz. Please. Forgive me.”

  “I ain’t mad at you. But he is. He come tonight. He’s so angry. I’m scared, Juliana. He jus—”

  “Get in this fucking box, Daddy’s girl!” Henry’s roar cuts through the stone between us. Somewhere inside, Lucy is screaming now. “Make her, Jean!” Henry growls. “Get in our fucking box, you bitch! I know you out there. Come see what you made! Come home! We gotcha place all ready!”

  Then he starts to sob, become the broken man the day he laid BG inside. “No, no, no” he hushes, over and over. “Rêve doucement, Petit Jean.”

  The interior quietens. The rain bombing on its roof gets louder. Distant elsewhere in the cemetery, Ella begins a long lupine bay. BG presses his club hands to his ears and moans, a lament as inhuman and incessant as Ella’s. The wind escalates. The three wails rise and become as one.

  I slam my hands against the tomb. I scream in at Henry, “You’re dead. You shouldn’t be here. Where is Scott! What have you done with him?”

  Henry’s goading voice. “Oh. He close. Coming soon. We gonna have a bon temps. Lemme show you how he gonna sound.” Henry screams, a wordless shriek of utter agony, a death wail. It’s like a steel saw cutting into the very granite of the crypt wall, seeking an out, wanting me in.

  With a bone-jarring crack, the slab splits down the middle, a jagged lightning scar that runs from top to bottom. A fat vein of water erupts from the seam and flows under my feet. I recoil, tumbling onto the flooding path. Scrambling on all fours, the water is to my elbows.

  “I need to warn Scott,” I pant, floundering for the flashlight as it drifts beyond my reach. “I need to draw him to me. I have to protect him. Help me, BG. You promised!”

  As I grab his leg and pull myself standing, BG doesn’t feel right. His flesh is mushy, loose. Above his perfect white collar, his face is suddenly changed, now putrefied, almost black. Mottled patches of purple and red have risen on his neck and jaw. It’s the mask of his extended drowning; 25 years submerged in Purgatory. It’s charcoal tone almost blends into the night sky. The tissue is bloated, his eyeballs brown and bulging. His lips part in a death grimace and I see every one of his teeth.

  I scream, expecting the end, as he clasps me to him. Beneath his shirt, his torso is still swelling and I realize that, in all the time he has waited for me to save him, BG has never stopped drowning.

  He whispers in my ear.

  “What?” I gasp.

  He smiles as a membrane of water extends around his unearthly form, while the substance of him dissolves within it. For one moment, I hold only BG’s saltwater shape. In the next, he falls through my arms to nothing.

  The crypt shudders again. I scramble up and feel the fracture in the stone, fingertip-wide now, expelling a torrent of water. There isn’t much time. I scramble back down onto the path.

  The flashlight is lost to me. I see the beam bobbing as it leaves on the fast-rising flood. I’ll have to work by touch. I plunge my arms into the water and feel along the ground for what I now know I need.

  As I probe, I watch the flashlight, the sole compelling point of light in the deathly black. As it floats past a far-off tomb, it lights on two figures huddled on the plinth. The water is above her knees but Ella is all right. She can swim. She’ll make it. I’m glad.

  Standing beside her, a small boy with wavy dark hair and a strong face, like his Dad. He wears a checked shirt, pulled out of his pants, beneath the bright blue Mets jacket Scott would have bought for his first gameday visit.

  “Joshua.”

  I know my son wants to reach me. But he can’t. He’s too scared. Not of the water. Of me. I want to go to him too. But I have a thing to do first.

  The flashlight flips over and they’re both gone.

  I’ll find him when I’m done; tell him I love him and make it ok again. Just one more task.

  Deep underwater, my hand brushes against something. I seize it, test it. Perfect. I can do this. Just a little more time, please! A slow sweep of the hand, counting down the clock, until I come full circle.

  In the rising submergence, as my purchase finds another, my purpose finds me.

  I grab the second thing. “Gotcha!”

  The Book Of Canaan

  The Bear Claw

  For leadership

  Hardy

  On the afternoon of Wednesday August 31st 2005, WKRG’s Jennifer Mayerle reported on the damage sustained in Biloxi, Mississippi. At the flattened shell of a gas station, as she performed to-camera (tc)
, a distressed man led two small boys directly into the live shot.

  Man: I lost my wife.

  Mayerle: How are you doing, Sir?

  Man: I’m not doing good.

  Mayerle: What happened?

  Man: The house just split in half.

  Mayerle: Your house split in half?

  Man: Right there on Heidenheim and Bayview. Back—Lord, we get up in the roof, all the way to the roof and the… and the water came in and the house just, just opened up, divided.

  Mayerle: Who was at your house with you?

  Man: My wife.

  Mayerle: Where is she now?

  Man: Can’t find her body. She gone.

  Mayerle: You can’t find your wife?

  Man: No. She told me—she told me—I tried. I… I hold her hand tight as I could and she told me, “You can’t hold me.” She said take care of the kids and the grandkids and my kids.

  Mayerle: What’s your wife’s name, in case we can put this out there.

  Man: Tonette Jackson.

  Mayerle: And—ok. And what’s your name?

  Man: Hardy Jackson.

  Mayerle: Where are you guys going?

  Man: We ain’t got nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. I’m… I’m lost. That’s all I had. That’s all I had. What’s the Lord want more me to do?

  Mayerle (tc): Katrina is proving to be a dead—

  Man: Two or three more bodies round there where I stayed there. Lay—laying right there in the mud.

  Mayerle: You guys—you take care of your boys, ok?

  Man: Ok. (walks away)

  Mayerle (tc): Katrina is proving to be a deadly storm.

  Chapter 54

  Scott? You hear me, Bud?

  There is light in his eyes. It cuts in and out of his vision. Sounds, imprecise and indistinct, tease his senses. One of them is a dog barking.

  “Blink if you hear my voice or see the light, Scott.”

  A metal clatter bangs, closer and clearer.

  “Boomer?” he slurs.

  “That’ll do. Ten CCs Mannitol. Run him upstairs for a head CT.”

  Someone shouts from afar, “Jim! Glenn wants you in ICU!”

  “On my way. Start a saline. Ask Wendy where to put him after. I’ll be back in thirty. Christ, what a night.”

  Dark silence returns.

  “Watch the turn, ok? Easy! Get him over the goddamn rail!”

  He feels himself sliding downward, head-first. It is oppressively hot. Every inch of his skin is coated slick with moisture. He tries to move his arms but his entire body is constricted. Something is eating him—slathering him in its saliva and forcing him farther down its throat with determined ravenous swallows.

  Now he is fully in, falling into the belly of the beast. A wall of its breath punches down past his own spilling form. With a lurch, he lands in the center of the thing and lifts off, freely floating in its bowels. He hears a vibrant whoop-whoop, a sound which escalates with horrible fast ferocity, the beating heart he is the fodder to feed.

  The monster speaks. “Chopper 8 en route. Cloverleaf ETA, six minutes.”

  He opens his eyes.

  Scott lay still and let himself acclimate to the darkness, until he was sure it was actual darkness occluding his sight. He lifted his head, looked down the length of his body, and focused on two large windows beyond the foot of the bed. In the blackness past them, he made out the distant aura of urban lights, could see the arrangement of the glass panes against it. Nocturnal insect chatter filled the air, louder than he’d ever remembered hearing since a child.

  When he tried to sit up, his head reacted as though a spike had been driven into the top of his spine. He put his hand there to ease it and felt the bandages, followed them right around his skull.

  Staying prone, he dug his heels into the mattress and worked his feet until they protruded over the edge of the bed. He tossed the sheet back and wriggled his torso until he was fully sideways, his legs now dangling. In a flimsy hospital apron, his entire body swam in sweat from the labor and it clung to him like saran wrap. His mouth was bone dry. He rested, licking his upper lip and sucking his cheeks to salivate.

  With one hand, he pulled against the mattress edge and inched his ass nearer the side, stretching until one toe made contact with the floor, smooth and wooden. Realizing the apron had ridden up to his chest, he put his hand on his crotch. Thank God, he thought and passed out, his other leg still dangling.

  “Hello Scott.”

  The woman in the pastel-blue blouse and summer skirt stood over him. He was seated upright in the bed, his modesty back under wraps. Brilliant daylight streamed through the windows.

  “It’s good to see you awake finally,” she smiled.

  “Thank you,” he tried to say, sounding and feeling like he had a mouthful of ashes.

  “Wait,” she warned. She fetched a tumbler of water under his chin and brought the straw floating in it to his lips. “Slowly. Baby-sips, all right?”

  When he was done, she set the water beside a tray of food on the side table.

  “Thanks,” he croaked.

  “Can you raise your hand?”

  He did, meekly. As it lifted, he felt a constriction around his chest. He pulled the neck of his apron out and peered in at the bandages wound tight around his upper torso.

  The woman transferred the tray into his lap—cut-up pieces of Vienna sausage and some bread. “Be sure and eat. You haven’t been on the IV for the last two days. The doctor was afraid you were gamey enough to likely mess it so he took it out.”

  “What time is it?”

  “A little after Four. He checked you out again this morning. Seems he was right.”

  Scott felt his head. The bandages there were gone.

  “You took quite a blow to the noggin,” she said. “Any headaches, nausea?

  “No headache,” he replied. “ Blow?”

  “Here.” She guided his hand toward the back of his skull. Scott felt the abrasion under his hair—the telltale impression left by medical staples and the raised lump around it.

  “Where am I? You said two days?”

  “You’re in the Ursuline Academy. I’m Sister Coleen.”

  “This is Dedham?”

  “No, New Orleans. You have the place all to yourself. Everyone evacuated before you got here.”

  “Evacuated? What about the hurricane? Isn’t it over?”

  “Yes. It’s over, at least that part.”

  “So it’s…” Scott extended his jaw, calculating, “Tuesday? Two days.”

  “Thursday,” she corrected.

  “September First?”

  “September Fifteenth.”

  Scott stared blankly. He was completely lost.

  “It’s been two weeks since the hurricane, Scott. You were brought here on Sunday night last.”

  “Where have I been?”

  “Somewhere between this world and the next, not to put too fine a point on it.”

  “Huh?”

  “You spent almost all that time in a coma.”

  “I did?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How did I get here?”

  She held her hand up. “No more talking. Eat. And rest. And no more jailbreak attempts, please.”

  He was too weak to protest.

  “The doctor will be back in the morning. He can fill you in on the details.”

  She walked toward the open door of the sparse clean bedroom. Apart from his bed, the table, and an armchair, Scott saw no other furnishings.

  “I’ll bring you some sweatpants and a t-shirt later. Lucky we have guards on the basketball team who’re about your height.”

  Scott motioned to where leafy branches floated in a blue sky frame outside the windows. “I haven’t seen weather that good since I got here.”

  Sister Coleen sighed. “I’m minded what my grandmother used to say. The cruelest punishment of Hell is that you get to look up and see Heaven.”

  Scott watched her inquisitively.


  “Nothing,” she explained. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  Doctor Piano regarded Scott from across where his half-moon spectacles had slid to the end of his bulbous nose. “No tinnitus?”

  Scott shook his head.

  “Phantom smells or tastes?”

  Scott was tempted to make a lame joke about the pungent aroma of cigar smoke that the Doctor seemed to carry about his person. “Nope.”

  “Or dead sensations anywhere that you notice?”

  “I’m all good, honestly.”

  Piano stuffed the stethoscope into his satchel. “Well, Coleen,” he announced, “I think he’s to have a clean bill and you can finally get yourself up to New York.”

  “Doctor,” Scott interrupted. “I still don’t know how I got here. What happened to me?”

  Piano sat on the bed. “What do you remember?”

  “I remember a house. I was trying to get away.”

  “Do you recall where you were trying to get to?”

  “There was a hospital.”

  “Lindy Boggs.”

  “Yes! I had to get inside.”

  “You did. But not under your own steam.”

  “Huh?”

  “You were involved in a car accident, a hit-and-run.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Right outside the hospital. Excellent place to have it. You were quite a mess when they got you inside.”

  “I had stitches.”

  “You suffered a head trauma as a result. They had to put you into an induced coma to stabilize you. Let’s see…” Piano thought for a moment. “Three broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a dislocated hip.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And I believe you had three cardiac arrests in the first 24 hours.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So how did I get here?”

  “Well, Lindy Boggs was evacuated a few days after the storm. You were airlifted out with the rest of the patients and from there to Baton Rouge until you were out of the woods. Then, as I understand,” Piano looked to Sister Coleen for agreement, “you were brought here to convalesce.”