A breeze blew from the river, and the leaves on the live oak trees shined like silver spangles. Soon, that breeze would bring thunderclouds and an afternoon storm.
I said, ‘Johnny swears that he came here with Peter Lisman. He says he talked with you and your husband inside your house. He says he shot his gun twice inside. He says he was leaving when he was wounded.’
Cecilia Phelps fixed me with her good eye. ‘Does it matter? Either way, he landed in the hospital and now jail.’
‘Are you saying that he was inside?’
‘The police have a recording of Edward reporting a man outside our house. They have an affidavit in which Edward admits shooting your husband. They have physical evidence. So that is what happened. Some stories are more compelling than others – ours being more compelling than your husband’s.’
‘Is Johnny telling the truth?’
‘Why would you want to challenge our story?’
‘Johnny’s in jail.’
‘The situation could be worse. Anyway, he’ll be out soon.’
‘They won’t even give him bail.’
‘Be patient.’
‘Everyone thinks he’s out of his head.’
‘That reputation might keep him safe.’
I said, ‘Did my brother shoot Johnny?’
She sipped from her cup, a drop of tea rolling down her chin from the stiff side of her mouth. ‘Don’t try to change the story,’ she said.
The maid came with another pot of tea and, as she refilled our cups, I asked Cecilia Phelps, ‘So what do you recommend I do?’
‘Whatever you wish to do,’ she said, ‘but stay away from my family. Stay away from here. Stay away from Little Marsh Island and my husband’s mills and Sheneel and Alex Greene’s old house. This family has always fed on its own misery. You don’t want to be consumed by this.’
A week later, the State Attorney dropped all charges against Johnny. Daniel called to tell me, and an hour later Johnny’s lawyer called too, as perplexed by the decision as he was by the judge’s unwillingness to grant bail.
I cleaned the house, put my books on the shelves, and, on the night that Johnny came home, sat on the bed as he came out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist. The bullet wound had mostly healed. The last of the bruising tinged the skin over his ribs. The scabbing had flaked away. The pock over his left hip looked like another navel, as if he had experienced a second birth. He had lost weight in jail.
Would he want me after all he’d been through?
Did I want him?
He stood in the bathroom doorway, and I thought he must be wondering the same thing. Outside, a rainstorm had cooled the hot afternoon. The bedroom windows were open and the sweet smell of humidity and of the mix of living and decaying vegetation combined with the steam from the bathroom shower. Water dripped from Johnny’s hair on to his shoulders. He stared at me as if uncertain whether pain or pleasure would follow.
Then he came to me, and we had uncomfortable sex, facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes, gripping each other’s half-familiar skin, unsure, bony, awkward, as if we were rediscovering ourselves in each other, rebirthing uncertainly, uncertainly reconnecting.
When Johnny lay on his back afterward, I watched him for a long while and wondered whether our lovemaking had been more than an illusion and whether we were now together or apart. I asked, ‘What are you thinking?’
For a while, he said nothing.
‘What are you thinking about?’ I asked again.
‘Chromium-six,’ he said.
TWENTY-NINE
Johnny
‘Chromium-six,’ Papa Crowe said when he visited me in jail.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Anything that got a number in it ain’t a real name. Real name is jimson weed or cockleburs or alligator root or dogwood.’
‘What are you talking about?’
We sat in a room with three other prisoners and their visitors, the prisoners lined on one side of a long partitioned table, the visitors on the other.
‘I’m talking about chromium-six. It what Sheneel find in Georgia where my family use to live. It what she worry about on Little Marsh Island.’
‘I still have no idea—’
‘It come from the mills. It get in the water. Too much, it give people the cancer. Pulp mill owners, they got to regulate it. The Phelpses don’t even regulate how much they piss on each other leg.’
‘Where did you find out about this?’
‘These eyes old but they can read. Phelpses is in the Georgia papers yesterday. They make a settlement with the government – pay a fine and quit dumping waste where it run into the water supply.’
‘Sheneel found chromium-six on your family’s old land in Georgia?’
‘She put water in a bottle and dirt in a box, and she send it in like a raffle ticket, and now a judge tell the Phelpses to quit poisoning the water. Don’t you see? That why the Phelpses kill her. They got so many folk and so much money in they pocket, they no room for the keys, but Sheneel cut a hole in the pocket.’
‘So they killed her, and I went after them, and now I’m here.’
‘Where you think they going to dump the chromium now?’
‘Little Marsh Island?’
He nodded. ‘They put up some big walls and dig a hole in the middle. They right on the salt marsh, and the tide wash out what don’t sink into the ground. That neighborhood on the other side of the road, they drink well water. I wouldn’t drink it after the Phelpses move in, no.’
‘Tell it to the people who live on the other side of the road.’
‘Maybe I do that. I knock on the doors and tell the people about the Phelpses, and then the Phelpses maybe pick me up like they pick you up and maybe they shoot a bullet in my head instead of my belly. Or maybe they call the police and the police put me in the cell next to yours. Then we can talk about the Phelpses all day and all night.’
‘So why did you come to see me?’
‘To tell you the news. And to tell you, you owe me a new rifle.’
‘It’s at the top of my list when I get out of here.’
‘I bet.’ He pulled a plastic baggie from a pocket and laid it on the table. ‘Also, I bring a present.’
Inside were three dark berries, dried and flat. ‘What are they?’
‘You eat one these and you go away awhile. You come back in a couple day and you think you been on vacation.’
‘Put them away. I’ve got enough trouble already.’
‘OK, if you like it here so much.’
Few sounds are more despairing than metal closing against metal, and few sounds more hopeful than metal pulling free as a door swings open after the electronic locks slip their bolts. Though the wind that blows into the cell through the open door has blown from other closed and locked corridors, it feels as full of promise as the ozone breeze that follows a summer rain. The voice that says, C’mon, let’s go – you’re out, tickles your ears like a sexual tongue.
Sex at home afterward was a comparative disappointment. The pain in my belly kept me from letting go. As I touched her skin – as she touched mine – I couldn’t forget that it all comes to pain and disintegration sooner or later. Everything else was a distraction, a denial, including sex – especially sex. But I went through the motions because she expected me to, and if I didn’t, I might as well be still locked up.
In the morning, Lillian cooked eggs, and we ate outside on the patio. She had repaired the sunroom window and cleaned the house of blood and broken glass. Percy, lying in the shade of the live oak, showed no sign of having eaten a chunk of a man’s leg. The world turned as if my collision with Peter Lisman and the Phelpses had never occurred. But the air smelled of the paper mills, and the sun glared in the haze.
‘What next?’ Lillian asked.
I drank my coffee. ‘I figure we have two choices. We get out, or we go in deeper.’
‘Why would you want to go in deeper?’
�
��It’s not a question of what I want.’
‘Then what is it?’
I shrugged. How could I explain, without sounding as crazy as everyone seemed to think I was, my need to go down through the skin that clothed my life and the lives of everyone I knew – my need to blast through the barriers that the men whose torn bodies I’d processed had blasted through?
Lillian said, ‘This doesn’t fix you. You don’t get back what you’ve lost.’
I said, ‘I just want to do something.’
‘Even if it kills you?’
I felt a dull pain in my stomach and I tried to hide it. ‘Especially if it kills me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m glad. You wouldn’t want to be where I am.’
She gave me the funniest smile. ‘But I do. I want to be where you are.’
I liked the smile. ‘I need to run an errand this morning,’ I said.
‘I’ll go with you.’
I considered that. ‘I need to do this on my own.’
‘I want to—’
But I left her and Percy in the backyard and drove north on the Interstate, then east into Fernandina. I needed another gun and hoped Papa Crowe might have one.
A log truck carrying slash pines dropped bark and wood splinters on the road in front of me, and I accelerated around it and fell in behind another log truck. A police car stood in the driveway of a white clapboard Baptist Church. A dark-skinned woman holding an umbrella against the sun pushed a stroller on the sidewalk. When I reached Papa Crowe’s house, a long black town car was parked in front – a car I’d last seen when Papa Crowe leaned through its window and pasted a muddy cross on Cecilia Phelps’s forehead. Now, all four windows were open, and Peter Lisman sat in the driver’s seat, as placid as a sleeping man.
I drove past, turned around, pulled beyond the house again, and parked at the edge of the Bosquebello Cemetery. I walked back on the road shoulder, trying to stay out of sight, but when I came to Papa Crowe’s yard, Lisman was standing outside his car waiting for me. A pair of dark sunglasses hid his eyes and made his pale face look all the more like death.
There was no avoiding him, so I crossed the yard and said, ‘How’s the leg?’
His shrug was hardly a shrug. ‘How’s the belly?’
‘Real good,’ I said, and turned to the house.
‘I wouldn’t go in there,’ he said in his pinched voice.
I stepped on to the porch, knocked, and, when Papa Crowe didn’t answer, let myself inside through the screen door.
The front room was dark. Two corked Coke bottles – one full of a yellow liquid, the other with the remains of something black and syrupy – stood on the wooden table. I glanced into the kitchen. A fly was buzzing above the sink. The refrigerator hummed.
A second, mostly closed door led from the front room. On my earlier visits, I’d guessed it went into Papa Crowe’s bedroom. I started to knock but heard a murmuring voice and I pushed the door open. Sun fell into the room through mostly closed slat blinds, and the air smelled of sour sweat. The floor was pinewood and the walls gray with age. A single steamer trunk stood in the center of the room, open and stuffed with clothing, the only furniture other than a metal-legged sleeping cot.
Cecilia Phelps lay on the cot, her yellow cotton dress peeled down to her waist. Her breasts seemed shaped of melted, glistening plastic. Her belly was a mix of blisters and jagged scars.
Papa Crowe kneeled by her side, wearing only blue jeans, his shoulders taut but mottled by age. He held his hands over her naked skin, touching or almost touching her, lightly caressing her breasts and belly, her blisters and scars, as if his healing fingers could draw the fire and pain from her body.
She lay still, her eyes closed, and he murmured words in a language that I didn’t understand, then lowered his hands until his fingers kneaded her skin. She made a sound, a moan of pleasure or pain. Her skin blushed. He lowered his head over her body as if he would pray for her, and he opened his mouth as if he would speak more strange words, but he said no prayer, said nothing. He parted his lips and kissed the burnt skin of her breasts, kissed as he had touched and caressed them, and her hands rose from the cot and lowered between her own legs.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said.
My voice drew them out of their intimate trance. She turned and her stare accused me. For a moment in the half-light, I mistook the damp on Papa Crowe’s lips for blood. He said, ‘What the hell you do in my house?’
All I could say was, ‘I need another weapon.’
Cecilia Phelps stayed on the cot, her dress at her waist, her disfigured face fierce, as Papa Crowe pushed me through the door into the front room. His voice low, he said, ‘I give you my gun already.’
‘I—’
He waved at the front door. ‘Get out.’
‘I need a weapon.’
‘You a man that lose things. I got nothing for you.’
‘Give me what you have.’
‘You don’t listen. You humming your own music and don’t hear nobody else.’
‘I’m sorry for walking in on you.’
‘Damn right. Too many men walk through my door without knocking. Then you sit in my chair and you say this house is yours, not mine, and it time for me to be gone.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not sorry enough,’ he said.
‘I need a weapon.’
‘You need something, that for sure.’ But his anger was easing. ‘You a hard-headed man.’ He walked back to the bedroom. ‘Wait in the kitchen.’
When he rejoined me, he placed a balled flannel shirt on the kitchen counter. He ran his fingers through his gray hair and said, ‘When I take you to Cumberland, I tell you about the Confederate general that owned the island till his son shoot his own boy and himself too.’
‘Right,’ I said.
He unwrapped the flannel shirt, exposing an old steel revolver with a dark wooden grip. Next to it was a little cardboard box. Unlike the dusty rifle that he’d loaned me, the revolver shined with oil and polish. ‘My granddaddy give me this gun. It one of the first double-action. He say it did the general’s son his business.’
I picked it up. ‘It isn’t much of a gun.’
‘It kill a man just the same.’
‘How did your grandfather get it?’
‘He there when the general’s son do it. He carry it away.’ Papa Crowe picked up the cardboard box and removed four handcrafted bullets. ‘This gun old. Closest ammunition you can buy is thirty caliber, but I wouldn’t do it if you like your fingers and hand.’ He offered the bullets to me. ‘You shoot these and you find more yourself.’
I sprang the cylinder and loaded the bullets. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
Papa Crowe held me with his eyes. ‘You lose that gun and you lose a part of me.’
‘I understand.’
‘It shoot no good from far away but it do the job up close,’ he said as I stuck the barrel into my waistband. ‘You go after Edward and Stephen?’ He kept his voice low. Cecilia Phelps wouldn’t hear from the bedroom.
‘Not this time,’ I said.
‘You going to tell me?’
‘No.’
He stared at me, then shrugged. ‘Get moving, then.’
I nodded toward the bedroom. ‘You hate her husband and son. You hate her family—’
He said, ‘The Phelps men give her as much grief as they give me. More maybe.’
‘You’re a good man,’ I said. ‘Strange, but good.’
When I stepped from the front porch into the sand-and-oyster-shell yard, Lisman was sitting in the town car again, the windows open, his pale skin glistening with sweat. I went to the car and leaned in at the driver’s door. ‘How many years has it been since Edward Phelps pulled you off the timber crew and brought you into his house?’
He looked at me through his dark sunglasses. ‘Enough to know when to mind my own business.’
‘But they’ve got you minding their business – and the wor
st of it too. They’ve put you in their septic tank with a brush and told you to scrub. That doesn’t bother you?’
‘Nope,’ he said.
I brought the old revolver up from my belt and pointed it at his vein-marbled forehead. ‘Well, if that business ever takes you back to my house, I’ll kill you. I’ve learned the danger of hesitating.’
He looked unworried. So I stepped from the window, and, using the tip of the revolver barrel, I scratched an almost complete circle on the car hood. Lisman watched through the windshield as I added an open-mouthed, diamond-shaped head to one end of the circle, completing a rough picture of a snake biting its tail. ‘I’ve decided I know what this means,’ I said. ‘You think you’re moving on. You think you’ve taken care of Sheneel and Alex Greene. You might think you’ve taken care of me. But you’ve only gone in circles. You’ve gone nowhere. It comes back to get you.’
I drove back through Fernandina, then south on the highway into Jacksonville. The woman at the phone desk at the Sheriff’s Office said Daniel was off duty, and when I asked when he would come in, she connected me with the Homicide Room where a man said his shift started at two p.m.
Daniel and his wife lived in a ranch house with a dock that backed into Black Creek outside the southern end of the city. Patty spent most of her time in the front garden when she wasn’t working as a pediatric nurse. When Daniel wasn’t on duty, he spent most of his time fishing from the dock.
I checked my watch. Ten-fifteen. I knew where to find him.
Patty had trained a purple-blossomed bougainvillea up a trellised arch that covered the first part of a brick walkway from the street to the front door. She’d used railroad ties to raise three small flowerbeds above the front lawn. Patty’s car was gone, but Daniel’s stood on the driveway.
I tucked Papa Crowe’s revolver into the back of my waistband and knocked on the door. Loud seventies music played inside – REO Speedwagon singing ‘Keep on Loving You.’ The air on the front porch smelled of flowers and freshly turned soil. I knocked again.
Nothing.
But as I stepped off the porch to go around to the back of the house, the door opened. Daniel, his hair wet and feet bare, wore a black bathrobe. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.
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