Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  I couldn’t hear her words or Papa Crowe’s response, but saw that he spoke gently before touching her glassy forehead with his fingers. She drew back as if his touch stung her, then seemed to will her face back to his fingers. After saying a few words, he lifted the lid from the mustard pot, dipped a thumb deep into a muddy substance, and drew a thick cross on to the woman’s forehead.

  She said something more, he nothing. The window went up and the town car rolled slowly out of the yard. Papa Crowe turned away, frowning.

  When he came into the house, I said, ‘Who was that?’

  He looked distracted as he returned the pot to the shelf. ‘That Mrs Cecilia Phelps. Edward wife. Proud woman, too bad for her.’

  ‘And she comes to you?’

  ‘Lot of people come to me, and I don’t dose them all with jimson.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘You like that? Long time ago, she get burn in a house fire. Gas stove blow up. She get her boy Stephen out, but when she go back for Stephen’s little brother, the house fall down on her.’

  ‘It’s terrible.’

  ‘Better it be Edward that got burnt.’ He went back to the kitchen for his tea.

  ‘I still don’t get it. Why does she come to you?’

  ‘I got the only medicine that take away the pain.’

  ‘The muddy cross?’

  ‘It cow dung. Put it on a burn and it take down the pain and swelling. Thirty year after the fire, she still think it do her good, so it all the same.’

  Percy came into the kitchen and lay by the table.

  I said, ‘You know what, I will take some tea.’

  ‘I figure you would sooner or later.’ He got the pitcher from the refrigerator and poured me a glass. ‘You want jimson for that?’

  I gave him a look.

  ‘Was a joke,’ he said, and handed me the tea.

  ‘I’ve been told I need to lighten up.’

  ‘It OK to be heavy, but a man got to laugh. He don’t laugh, he split down the middle.’

  ‘What did Cecilia Phelps tell you that made you frown?’

  ‘You see that? You got the vulture eye too much.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  He considered me. ‘For some people, time don’t pass,’ he said. ‘Something bad happen, and time stop. It like that for Cecilia Phelps. Time stop thirty year ago, the day of the fire. She living that afternoon still. She running out of the kitchen with Stephen in her hands and her hair burning. She running back for the baby, and the ceiling coming down on her. It a terrible thing when time don’t pass.’

  ‘So what did she say?’

  ‘She say she never forgive me.’

  My own words to Lillian stabbed at me. ‘Why would she say that?’

  ‘She blame me for the death of the baby.’

  ‘Did you have anything to do with it?’

  ‘’Course not. I tell you – the gas stove blow up. But a woman like that, she think I got the power to make fires like I heal them.’

  ‘It seems like there’s a lot of blame around here.’

  He looked at me. ‘Yeah, it do. So, I got a question for you. What you do now?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m done. Six weeks in a hospital. No more for me.’

  ‘Then why you drive here to talk with me?’ He shook his head. ‘I know what you going to do now. You go talk with Edward Phelps. You ask him what he do when Sheneel threaten to tell what the paper mill putting in the water.’

  ‘Not me. I’m going home.’

  ‘Maybe you also ask him why his wife’s driver is a big pale man, look like the man you say hit you with a baseball bat.’

  ‘That’s what he looks like?’

  ‘He do five minutes ago.’

  ‘A lot of men are big and white.’

  ‘True enough.’

  I called Percy to me with a pat on my leg. ‘Thanks for the tea,’ I said.

  ‘I know another thing you going to do.’

  ‘Yeah, what’s that?’

  ‘You go fishing with me tomorrow.’

  That made me smile. ‘Why would I do that? I don’t like fishing.’

  ‘I show you the islands. We catch dinner for you and your wife.’

  ‘Last time I went on a trip with you, it turned out bad.’

  ‘We get the bad one out of the way. Tomorrow be the good one. I show you things you never see before.’

  ‘That’s what worries me.’

  ‘The redfish is running. You like oysters? We dig some.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  He shrugged. ‘You change your mind, be here at five a.m. We be pulling out crab pots when the sun come up.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Lillian

  Daniel stopped by when his shift ended. ‘Is he home?’ he asked, and, as if Daniel had conjured him, Johnny stepped into the living room from the kitchen.

  ‘Ready for duty,’ Johnny said.

  Daniel looked exhausted, listing to the left, his thin hair pasted against his forehead. When he saw Johnny, he seemed to want to back out of the house. He said to me, ‘I want to explain—’

  Johnny said, ‘The drugs in Sheneel Greene’s body included Rohypnol. No one takes roofies for fun. And people don’t kill themselves with it. It’s used to rape or rob or maybe kill someone.’

  Daniel’s voice was heavy and weary and slow. ‘See, you’re wrong again. Kids take it at parties, and we see it a lot in intentional overdoses. Look it up on your damned computer before you open your mouth.’ He turned back to me. ‘I want to explain what happened with the—’

  ‘The Phelps mills are poisoning the water and the land,’ Johnny said. ‘Sheneel was going to expose them.’

  Daniel shook his head. ‘Shut the hell up, Johnny. All right?’

  I said to Johnny, ‘It would be a good idea.’

  But Johnny had already done the damage. Daniel asked him, ‘Do you really know who the Phelpses are?’

  ‘I know they’ve bought some cops,’ Johnny said.

  Daniel said, ‘I’ve warned you about that.’

  ‘What will you do? Lock me in a mental ward? I’ve done that. Put me in jail? Take me out back and fight me?’

  Daniel looked at me. ‘Your husband needs serious help.’

  I said, ‘You told me the investigation was still going.’

  ‘It was. But it turned out that it was going nowhere. Look, this is my job. I can’t tell you everything. But we’re confident about Sheneel Greene. No one knows for sure what happened with her brother. The Gullah sometimes take care of their own problems. Alex cut Sheneel’s arm, and that might have been too much for them. If he didn’t kill himself with drugs, he did it by breaking the rules and bringing this on himself.’

  ‘Why would he cut off Sheneel’s arm?’ I asked.

  ‘Why would anyone?’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  He said, ‘It’s the only answer I’ve got.’

  Johnny said, ‘It’s time for you to leave.’

  Daniel stared at him.

  ‘Out of the house,’ Johnny said.

  ‘I came to explain to Lillian—’

  ‘To tell lies? We’ve had enough already. Time to go.’

  Now Daniel was angry. ‘You’ve got to back off, Johnny.’

  ‘I want to,’ he said. ‘I’m doing my best to. But every time I take a step back, you take two steps toward me. Or someone else does.’

  ‘I’m telling the truth,’ Daniel said.

  ‘That’s another lie.’ Johnny got in close to Daniel, and Daniel stayed where he was. Percy growled.

  ‘Johnny!’ I said. ‘Daniel!’

  ‘You never learn, do you?’ Daniel said to Johnny.

  Johnny laughed at him again. ‘For the last six weeks, doctors and nurses have been bouncing me off the walls – telling me when to eat, when to sleep, when to piss, when to watch TV, when to talk, when to shut up – and if I’ve done it wrong, they’ve drugged me into doing it right. I’ve learned a
few things along the way.’

  Daniel moved closer to Johnny. ‘Then act like it.’

  Percy barked.

  Daniel spun toward the dog. ‘Don’t you start too!’

  Johnny punched Daniel in the jaw.

  Daniel fell back but stayed on his feet. He lifted his fingers to his face, checking for blood. ‘You’ve gone too far,’ he said, and went for Johnny.

  I screamed.

  Daniel stopped. Johnny stopped.

  I told Daniel, ‘Just leave, OK? Get out. I’ll take care of it. Johnny will stay out of the way.’

  Daniel opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘Go,’ I said.

  He went.

  The house was silent.

  Percy wagged his tail uncertainly.

  Johnny looked at me and burst into laughter.

  ‘Not funny,’ I said. ‘Not funny at all.’

  ‘I know.’ But he kept laughing. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for so long.’ His eyes teared he was laughing so hard.

  ‘He’s my brother,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  His laughter died a slow death, and he stared at me with wet eyes and I stared at him. He already knew everything I could tell him: the point-by-point arguments for why he needed to calm himself, why he needed to back off, why hitting Daniel would come to a bad end. What was there to do? I could pack a suitcase and leave him to himself. But his erratic violence drew me to him in spite of myself. And, after all, he was right about Daniel. Daniel was walking the line between honesty and lies, or maybe he’d already fallen hard into corruption.

  Johnny stared at me, eyes wet, and said, ‘What?’

  What was there to say? What was there to do? I shrugged and said, ‘You want to eat in or out?’

  La Nopalera ran a chain of restaurants in North Florida and South Georgia. They fried good chips and served two-for-one margaritas on weeknights. Before Johnny’s last deployment, we ate there once or twice a week, and the waiters still recognized us and brought me my first margarita and Johnny a beer before they gave us menus.

  We ate, and, as I finished my second drink, I said, ‘When I was thirteen and Daniel was twenty, I would sneak into his bedroom. He had dropped out of college and was living at home. This was before he decided to become a cop.

  ‘I would open his dresser drawers and pull out a T-shirt or a pair of shorts. Ever since I can remember, he’s been big – bigger than my parents, so much bigger than me – and if I held a T-shirt under my chin, it fell to below my knees. I would open the desk drawers. I don’t know what I was looking for – notes from Daniel to a girl or from a girl to him, secrets of any kind.

  ‘One afternoon, I found magazines. Playboy. Penthouse. I took them to my room, and for the next two weeks they were mine to look at when I got home from school and sometimes at night with a flashlight. When I wasn’t looking at them, I hid them under my mattress.’

  Johnny chewed a bite of chicken taco and said, ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  I said, ‘One day after school I locked the door and lifted the mattress, but the magazines were gone. I panicked. What if my mom had found them? Or my dad? But that night at dinner neither of them acted differently, and then neither of them came to have a private talk when I went to bed. For nearly a month, I was sure that they had found them. But then I snuck back into Daniel’s room and checked his drawer, and there were the magazines. He had found them and taken them back.

  ‘I knew I should leave them, but instead I took them to my room again and hid them as I’d hidden them before. Three days later, they were gone, and a week after that I took them again. We went back and forth that way for months. And all that time, we never said a word to each other about the magazines. We never even glanced at each other over the breakfast table to acknowledge the strange dance we were doing.’

  ‘Did he ever try anything with you? Ever put his hands on you?’

  ‘No. Never. That’s part of what I’m saying. It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘And yet it was.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘When I was fourteen, he joined the police academy and moved into an apartment with a friend.’

  ‘He took the magazines with him?’

  ‘No. The morning after he left, I checked his drawer and they were gone, and so – I don’t know why – I checked under my mattress, even though he’d had the magazines for the past couple of weeks. He’d put the magazines under my mattress as a farewell present.’

  Johnny ate his taco and drank from his beer. ‘Kind of creepy.’

  ‘And yet not.’

  ‘He was twenty when this started? And you were thirteen?’

  ‘Maybe it was wrong. Maybe it was weird. But he never touched me or suggested that he wanted to touch me. Maybe it was just part of the messiness of being human.’

  ‘But you were only a kid.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m not excusing it. I’m trying to explain it.’

  ‘I can explain it.’

  ‘Daniel and I have still never talked about the magazines. I know that when he looks at me, the magazines are part of what he sees, and they’re definitely part of what I see when I look at him. But I also see the rest of him. The man who became a cop. The brother who took care of me. The guy who set you up in an office when you came home. The one who has saved you from yourself a couple of times. I see a complicated man but also a good man.’

  ‘So you’re excusing his cover-up of Sheneel and Alex Greene’s killings?’

  ‘Is it a cover-up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m not excusing anything. I’m trying to understand it. I’m trying to avoid condemning him too quickly.’

  Our waiter, a tall thin Mexican who never stopped smiling, brought a third margarita. ‘On the house,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t need another drink,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘I think you do.’

  When the waiter left, Johnny said, ‘You liked the magazines?’

  ‘I was thirteen. It was sex. Of course I liked them.’

  When we went home, we kept our hands to ourselves. Percy climbed under our bed, where he sometimes hid during thunderstorms, though the night sky was clear and a full moon was rising. I lay in the bed covers, grading student essays through the margarita haze. Johnny lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. He rolled on to his side. ‘So you liked looking at pictures of nude women?’

  ‘At thirteen? Yeah.’ I put down my pen and looked at him. ‘Are you getting off on that?’

  ‘You’re not thirteen anymore. I’m not your brother. Of course I’m getting off.’ He rolled on to his back. When I turned out the light, he was still staring at the ceiling.

  I woke later in the dark and felt his body cupped around mine, holding me.

  A couple of hours passed and I woke again. Now he was sitting on the side of the bed, tying his shoes. The clock said three forty-eight.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Getting dressed.’

  ‘Don’t be a jerk. Where are you going?’

  ‘Fishing.’

  I felt a flash of fear. ‘What do you mean, “fishing”?’

  ‘Hook on the line. Bait on the hook. Fishing.’

  ‘Don’t do anything—’

  ‘What am I going to do to myself with a hook and bait?’

  ‘You’re really going fishing?’

  ‘That’s what I told you.’

  ‘But you don’t fish.’

  ‘I do now.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Stephen Phelps

  Blue moonlight on our white bed sheets. Blue moonlight on her white nightgown and her tennis tan. Kathryn, wife of mine – no more mine than the photograph that I kept on my desk, a stool that I shifted to rest my feet on when I was tired. And if I waited for the moments between her breathing in and breathing out, she looked … not quite dead, but not quite living either. I put my hand on her bare shoulder, and, in the air condition
ing, under the ceiling fan, her skin was cold.

  Kathryn sleeping, me sleepless. Most nights. Not my fault.

  Time to think.

  Bob Peterson’s report: Johnny Bellefleur left Lillian Turner alone – most nights. Sad for such a woman to be alone. Easily remedied. What color of moonlight fell on her skin? What quiet fell between her breathing in and breathing out? What unlocked doors, what windows left open to catch the breeze?

  My hand on Kathryn’s tan thigh in the blue moonlight.

  If I had my way, I would break every pane of glass from every window in their house. I would rip every door from its hinges.

  Why shouldn’t I have my way?

  I put my hand under Kathryn’s nightgown.

  ‘No,’ she said. Asleep. Mostly.

  I would wander their halls. I would come to their bedroom. She would be sleeping. Mostly waiting for me.

  I shoved my fingers inside Kathryn’s underwear.

  ‘Sleeping,’ she said.

  ‘Present tense or past?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  I pulled her underwear from her legs.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  NINETEEN

  Johnny

  We motored from the Fernandina harbor dock into the Intracoastal Waterway, north toward the end of Amelia Island and the Atlantic Inlet, and then back toward the dark marshes where narrow rivulets and creeks emptied into the larger water. With the moon hanging in the western sky, Papa Crowe sat at the back of the aluminum skiff, a hand on the throttle of a thirty-horsepower Evinrude. We pounded over the sloppy waves, the brackish spray snapping against my cheeks and arms and filming my lips with salt. Fishing rods rattled against the hull. A night bird shadowed through the moonlight.

  An hour earlier, when I arrived at Papa Crowe’s house, he was sitting in his car, the windows open, the engine running, the radio on to AM Talk. I got in on the passenger side, and he said, ‘You late.’