All the Devil's Creatures
Page 16
“That knowledge has been carried down, each generation. You look around this city, you see our work. There is meaning in each mold. Stories that stretch back to when our people were kings.” He turned his eyes from Geoff, seeming to look at some place far away. Geoff thought of Eileen’s Irish Channel cottage, of all that was lost.
T-Jacques said, “My father trained me, as his did him.” He looked at Geoff again. “That’s what they’re out to destroy, Mr. Waltz. Everything that swings. Dalia believed this. She found out how they planned to do it. And she found out how to stop it. And it starts with whatever was on that drive she left for you.”
Geoff nodded. “I think I know that now, T-Jacques.”
“They killed her for it. Dr. Kim knew, or thought she did. Or knew part of it. They killed her to.” He laughed with no humor. “Kim had her own agenda.”
“Did Dalia mention anything about an Operation Moth Wing?”
He only shook his head, his thoughts seeming once again to drift. “Dalia found it all, by that lake. Robert Duchamp, man—he’s part of it. But not just him. They finally figured out away to wipe the whole world clean. New Orleans was just the start. A test run. But this new thing, it’s got science. Clean, you know? There’s creatures by that lake that got no right to exist. That’s the future that they’re making. And it’s got no place for my people.” When he turned to Geoff again, he had tears in his eyes. “But I can’t help you anymore, man. I have to do the best I can around here. And maybe … find my own sort of justice.”
•
Jimmy Lee drove back toward the French Quarter, back toward his truck, the makeshift bandage he had fashioned from a rag to staunch the bleeding from his groin soaked through, staining the rented Chevy’s vinyl seat.
Need a hospital, need to get sewn up. Something happened to the traffic as he approached Rampart Street. Stop and go and then a standstill. He leaned on the horn and stuck his head out the window and he saw the holdup: some kind of parade. He heard the low bass line of a tuba and saw the people dancing. They marched and blocked the street and he thought he might just lean back and rest his eyes and the world began to gray out.
The blast of a trumpet a few feet from his open window brought him to, and when he looked out he saw the parade was near its end. His vision blurred. But then following the marchers just ahead he saw a rare white profile and the floppy hair and he slapped himself to make sure it wasn’t a hallucination. Ol’ Blondie himself.
He honked the horn again but there was no movement. Drivers had left their vehicles to move with the music. He abandoned the car and stumbled out and followed the parade. Blood flowed down his leg beneath his filthy jeans and into his tennis shoe and it squished as he walked. He saw Blondie enter a bar where the parade seemed to end. He limped his way there—ten minutes that seemed like a day, a lifetime. Walking into the crowded bar, he spotted Blondie talking to a black man drinking a beer. He shoved his way through the crowd and pulled out the Glock and just before he fired, Blondie’s companion turned and his mouth formed an ‘O’ and he hollered in rage.
•
Marisol swam through a haze like a viscous hydrocarbon stew. Swam without moving. The heat on her face pulled her upward as the pungent smoke soothed her down to darkness and rest.
Her own coughing brought her to, hog-tied and gagged in the diffracted orange light. She darted her eyes around to get her bearings and just that simple movement sent a pain through her skull that threatened to put her back under. Still in the pod, Eileen’s life cluttered around her. She pushed all questions of how she came to this spot (you cut me, bitch) from her mind as she faced the smoldering blankets threatening to ignite the plywood walls. Already, the varnish on the hardwood furniture stacked against the walls curled and charred and gave off toxic blue smoke. The sunlight through the translucent roof of the container barely made it through the haze to the floor where she lay. She struggled to breath as the slow-burning fire consumed the container’s already meager oxygen—a humble blessing, she knew; enough air in this space and it would all burst into flames. She gauged no more than a few minutes until the smoke reached the floor and suffocated her.
Her hands and feet were bound at her back with what felt like duct tape. A rag that tasted of sweat and blood filled her mouth. Above, the ceiling looked to be made of some sort of hard polymer, riddled with holes from her attacker’s gun. On the floor beneath her cheek, something sticky, probably his blood, formed a dribbled trail to the latched door. She remembered the solid cut with her buck knife, (you’ll suffer for that one, chica. No mercy death for you) followed by blackness.
She tried to wriggle her fingers and found one almost free—the left middle. The heat grew and the smoke grew and she fought not to panic, not to struggle and use up air to no avail. She worked the free finger deliberately over the creases in the tape. The point where her feet were bound to her hands formed the weakest spot, pulled by gravity. She massaged there, rubbing the tape loose with the aid of the weight of her boots. She choked as the acrid smoke pushed closer and her nasal passages filled with phlegm and she fought for breath through the filthy rag. She closed her eyes in silent exultation as the tape ripped and her legs fell free and her body stretched to its full length across the floor. Her arms still tied behind her, she relaxed her muscles and her joints and her mind and took herself to as near her meditative place as she dared to travel lest she pass out. She arched her back and let her buttocks and legs work their way on their own accord through the loop formed by her arms like a svelte cat emerging through a narrow opening in a kitchen window.
Arms before her now, she removed the gag and took a sick painful breath and retched in a spasm and regained control and used the leg of a dining table to help break her hands free. She unbound her feet and stayed close to the ground as she looked for her buck knife, hoping that her attacker had been foolish enough to leave it behind. She spied the glint of its blade beneath an armoire, almost behind a wall of flames. She grabbed it and the fire singed her arm and the heat of the handle blistered her hand.
She gazed up to the ceiling, hardly visible now through the accumulating smoke. She covered her mouth again with the ill-smelling rag and pulled herself onto the armoire and stood and grasped the ceiling for balance and pressed her lips to one of the bullet holes to breathe in the merciful air.
The flames growing beneath her created a vacuum that buckled the hard plastic ceiling. With the strength that her single clear breath afforded her, she forced the blade of her knife through one of the bullet holes and pushed with both arms as if she had ahold of a lever to move the world. She opened a long gash in the ceiling and she turned and did the same again creating an x-shaped opening. She poked her way through like a straw through a plastic lid and dropped ten feet to the ground as the fire in the pod erupted and she rolled and panted on the deserted alluvial plain.
•
Geoff lay under the bar with T-Jacques amid the confusion and the smell of cordite and the sounds of screaming and wailing (he shot my boy—MY BOY) and hundreds of jumbled feet scrambling to find an exit from the cramped space. Something wet dribbled into his eye. He wiped it away, and his fingers came back red.
The shooter left as he had come, shoving his way through. Geoff caught a glimpse of his bruised and swollen face, his matted hair, his devilish eyes and recognized him as the man trailing them all day but appearing now miles closer to death.
Geoff tried to stand but could not quite make it. T-Jacques rose and then leaned down and met his gaze.
“You’ll live—it’s just a graze. Now I got to tend to my people. You go, Mr. Waltz—leave this town. There’s nothing more for you here.” Then the trombone player walked over to where a crowd had gathered and where men consoled and held a woman struggling to reach a thing on the floor. And though he couldn’t see it, Geoff knew that thing to be the teenage boy who had stepped between them and the afflicted gunman in the millisecond after he saw the semi-automatic’s muzzle flash.
•
Marisol lay on the barren ground and massaged her knee. Though she had rolled and scrambled to the edge of Eileen’s ruined lot she could feel the dry and angry heat from the burning container. She had landed poorly and her knee felt sprained or worse. Her hand was red and blistered from grabbing the scalding knife and she had nothing with which to sooth her skin except her own saliva.
She reached for her pocket and her phone with a sinking remembrance, soon confirmed, that she had left it in the rented Chevrolet. She looked around and saw the car was gone. The sun began to redden and sink toward the busted and ill-repaired levee that she could just make out far to the west. She shuddered at the thought of lying in this dead and wasted neighborhood after nightfall.
A coughing fit from the poisonous smoke still in her lungs struck her as she stood and threatened to send her back to the dust. But she stayed upright and tested her knee and found she could hobble along. She limped south toward the river and the historic core of the city.
She had to stop every few yards to cough and rest her twisted knee. And even as the joint began to loosen as she walked, her head throbbed and ached from the blow to the temple or the smoke inhalation or both. Her hand burned and she developed an overwhelming thirst.
For an hour or more she stumbled delirious over the moonscape. At dusk she came to a large but empty intersection with no working stoplight. She sat exhausted and feared she was feverish. The sky grew purple and then black and the stars shone through the clear air as if she sat in some flat and ancient desert. The glow of civilization to her south and now to her west was like a mirage shifting and unobtainable.
She walked on surrounded now by dark houses gutted and askew. The stench of mold and rot threatened to bring on another fit of convulsive coughing. Her brain could tell her she was disoriented but was not capable of steering her straight. She came to a freeway overpass where she could hear occasional traffic above and thought of finding a way to climb up and flag down a passing vehicle. She passed beneath and studied the ramp and thought she could hear voices singing in the vibrating concrete beams. A desire to lie down beneath the ramp amid those voices came to her as a strong magnetic tug.
Praying for a moment of clarity, she stomped her bad leg on the cracked sidewalk and felt the sharp pain travel from knee to spine and into her brain. Then when she looked down a wide residential boulevard she saw the warm glow of yellow light through the windows of a single house. She limped toward it and found it raised high above street level, a well-used jeep parked in the space beneath. In her pain and fatigue, she had to crawl up the steps to the front porch. She pulled herself up by the knob of the French door and rapped on a pane of glass.
The hard-looking short-haired woman who answered said, “Hey darlin. Where you come from?”
•
Geoff came to as the sirens approached, and he watched the paramedics lift the wounded boy into the ambulance—conscious now with frightened eyes, shot high on the shoulder. Then he felt himself rising and at some point realized he was in the ambulance as well.
The next time he awoke, he was in a hospital room with a police detective standing over him. He felt alert, but his head pounded as if a wrecking ball swung inside his skull. He reached up and felt a gauzy bandage above his left temple.
The policeman took his statement. He told the cop about the lunatic who followed him and fired the shots. He told him about the black pickup with Texas plates and that its driver might be connected to a murder in Texas and one in this city.
The detective closed his pad without writing a word. He had an old New Orleans accent, like Brooklyn dipped in honey. “That’s not what we heard from the other witnesses, Mr. Waltz.”
“What … what are they saying?”
“The way this is shaping up, looks like typical gang activity. The other victim’s a known member out of the Magnolia projects—he’s going to pull through just fine by the way. They all been fighting over territory as they come back to town.”
“But the man I was with, he can tell you—”
The detective flipped to a page in his pad. “Terence Jacques Rubell? AKA T-Jacques? He’s the one that fingered the shooter as a teenager with a bandana over his face—”
Geoff sat up, ignoring the pain in his head. “T-Jacques said that? That’s—”
“And Mr. Rubell told me about you …” He read from his pad. “Geoff Waltz of Dallas, Texas. He says this is the second time you’ve shown up at one of his gigs to pester him. That you have some kind of obsession.” The detective stood as if to leave. “He says you’re loony, Mr. Waltz.”
“No, I—”
“So let me tell you something. The people of this city have enough to worry about without weirdos showing up with their own set of problems. I suggest you go back to Texas and leave Mr. Rubell alone.”
Geoff lay speechless as the detective left. The overcrowded hospital discharged him a few hours later with a prescription for pain pills and instructions to visit his own doctor when he got home. The bullet had only grazed his skull.
He walked back to the hotel in an angry and mournful fugue. As he neared the hotel entrance, he saw the despised black pickup in the garage. He jumped back and scanned his surroundings—no sign of its hideous owner. He tried to call Marisol—no answer. He felt nauseous and exhausted, like he had walked a hundred miles instead of a few blocks. He went upstairs to his room and lay down on the bed and slept and dreamed of his dead wife Janie and of Eileen—like old pals, they cooked together in the cramped kitchen of Eileen’s college apartment, a little nest of a place over a garage shaded by pecan trees and crawling with honeysuckle vines. As if Janie had been around during that time of his life. As if Eileen had ever taken the time away from indie rock and engineering school pranks to cook a holiday feast. Eileen stirred a pot and Janie held their baby. The two women laughed and the baby cooed and its heart beat loud and clear in Geoff’s head. Janie saw him first and her laugh turned to a sad smile. “It’s fallen to you, babe. I’m sorry.” Geoff tried to speak but he couldn’t form the words, as if his mouth was stuffed with cotton. Eileen held out a wooden spoon for him to taste the sauce and it smelled warm and hearty and of cumin and fennel and he walked over and then smelled something else beneath—an odor of swamp gas and cypress, of unholy life with rot at its core. And Joey Kincaid stood weeping in the corner as Eileen spoke of beings that should never be and the coming holocaust but it was as if she spoke from miles away or from another world and in the pot Geoff saw floating the faces of those beings and he stumbled back and the heart beat stopped and he turned and Janie was gone and around him now the walls pulsed with mold and decay and Eileen was gone and then he was swimming with those godless beings and they explained to him that it was their time and he knew that they were wrong and he opened his mouth to make the arguments to prove them wrong but he remained mute.
He woke with a start in his dark hotel room and he could hear a trombone player on the street below and he thought of T-Jacques and then he thought of Marisol. He checked his phone—no calls. He called Marisol—no answer. He punched a nine and a one and then paused and pressed “cancel.” He walked downstairs and flagged a cab at the curb and directed the driver to Eileen’s lot and the storage unit but the driver refused to travel to the devastated zone after dark.
He leaned against an ancient plastered wall in a sinister neon glow and rubbed his face. Then he started moving and he walked around a corner and looked for another taxi and prepared to offer the driver whatever it would take but then his phone vibrated in his pocket, sending him a jolt of shock and hope.
•
Marisol woke up on a plush purple sofa to the smell of candles and the sound of soulful R&B wafting from another room. She sat up and a lead weight shifted deep in her skull and sent rippl
es of dull pain to her forehead. A chemical ice pack shifted off her knee and onto the polished cypress floor. A bandage covered her hand and beneath the bandage she could feel an ointment. She had no memory of the sofa or the ice pack or the ointment or the bandage.
A woman walked in from a doorway leading deeper into the house—the short-haired woman Marisol did remember but as if from a dream.
“You’re awake.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You’re pretty banged up. I would have called 911 but you would have just ended up in a waiting room over night—it’s been hopeless without Charity, and now the assholes say they won’t even reopen it. Bullshit, am I right?”
“Um, sure.”
“I’m sorry. What can I get you? Tea? Something harder? You look like you could use it.”
“Just water, please.”
The woman left and Marisol studied the room—well-appointed, walls painted crimson with spiraled texturing and hung with framed Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest posters. The woman brought her water and a can of beer for herself and sat in a yellow club chair, and then she said: “You got a story?”
“It’s a long one. Short version: I got beat up and then I got lost.”
Another woman entered, tall and heavy with plain graying hair down to her shoulders. She took a matching yellow chair and the short-haired one introduced her as her wife.
Marisol said, “It’s a miracle I found you two.”
“We’re the only house back up for a four block radius. Just got our power on last week.”
The heavy one said, “I sense you are searching, on a quest of some kind. Is that correct?”
“Yeah, sure.” She drank her water in a gulp and felt the lightheadedness returning and, with effort, checked her sarcasm. “It’s my job to always be looking for the truth.”
“The land here has been tortured. This has always been a spiritual place; now the spirits have been stirred up. Whatever truth that can be found here will be well concealed or diffracted.”