The Vines

by Christopher Rice

  For the past few minutes since he escorted the last guests to their parked cars, Nova’s father has been proudly telling stories about Spring House like he, Willie Thomas, owned the place, all the while pouring leftover champagne for the catering staff and valets, who are cleaning the kitchen in a controlled frenzy. But Nova’s glass of bubbly sits sparkling and untouched on the counter beside her. It feels strangely like a bribe from the birthday girl herself, and after three years at LSU listening to professors lecture on the real and bloody history of sugarcane plantations like Spring House, Nova isn’t all that inclined to celebrate some spoiled white lady who lives off her dead parents and still treats Nova as if she were a dumb child.

  Then a woman is screaming somewhere out in the dark, and Nova’s resentments are forgotten. Her father stands frozen, an upended champagne bottle in hand.

  When the overflows, the chef reaches up and rights the bottle, but he too is staring out the large picture window toward the shadowy gardens and the source of those terrible, piercing screams.

  The bottle smashes to the floor as Willie runs out the back door.

  Nova runs after him.

  She’s one hundred percent sure Caitlin’s found her husband with that girl in the shed, and now all hell’s about to break loose. And what if Troy’s got some kind of gun or who knows what? And the way her daddy is with Caitlin (Miss Caitlin to him, every time), always acting like her happy house Negro, he’s bound to do something stupid to defend her and—

  “Daddy, stop. Daddy!”

  Her foot catches on something. Her hands break her fall on the flagstone path. When she looks back, she sees that some kind of eruption in the planter behind her has tossed several bricks onto her path.

  By the time he throws open the door to the gardening shed, Nova is struggling to her feet, scanning her surroundings, trying to get her balance.

  What happens next has the quality of a dream’s last few minutes, that moment just before the dreamer starts to awake—crystal clear but somehow paper-thin and unreal.

  The woman who explodes from the shed is so covered in dirt and blood Nova doesn’t recognize her. What she does recognize, though, is that she’s got an axe raised over one shoulder, and when she swings it, Nova lets out a sound that is more animal than human. The earth seems to fly by under her feet, but it’s not enough—the head of the axe is aimed straight at her father, and her breath freezes in her lungs as she leaps.

  He ducks. The blade nicks his shoulder anyway, and he goes down. Nova leaps before the woman has time to raise the axe again. There’s no fight in the woman’s body when Nova slams her against the wall of the shed. Nova realizes the woman has dropped the axe only when both of the lunatic’s dirt-smeared hands are fending off Nova’s blows.

  “You crazy bitch!” Nova hears herself scream. “You crazy white bitch!”

  Her father is shouting her name with a strength and confidence that tells her he’s not badly injured. But her anger is a wild and uncontrollable thing; it flows copiously through valves that have been opened in her only recently by education and history and a new sense of self that one of her professors defined as personhood.

  Some stupid white girl’s not going to chop my daddy down like he’s a damn tree. I don’t think so! No ma’am.

  At first Nova thinks it’s her father who has pulled her off the crazed woman—who has sunk to a crouch and is sobbing hysterically, hands raised to defend herself. But the voice in Nova’s ear is soft, and almost a whisper. It’s Caitlin.

  “Oh gosh,” Caitlin says, sounding more dazed than panicked. “Now what on earth is happening here?”

  Gosh? Nova thinks. Caitlin’s as crazy as this bitch covered in blood.

  The woman collapsed in front of the shed has lost her mind, it seems. Her legs splayed, she’s pumping her hands in front of her face like she’s trying to disperse a cloud of invisible insects.

  Caitlin steps over the crazy woman and into the darkness beyond. Despite her lingering anger, Nova is astonished by the woman’s bravery, by the way she pushes the door open just enough to allow herself to step inside what is surely a scene of bloody horror.

  “Miss Caitlin,” Willie calls out to her, and Caitlin turns, one finger raised to quiet him. The nod she gives them is both calm and authoritative, as if she is relieving them of their solemn duty so she can face whatever bloody nightmare must be inside the shed alone.

  And that’s when Nova sees it. It is small and it is glowing, and it appears to be hovering just above the shed’s dirt floor. Her first guess is that it’s one of those glow-in-the-dark sticks that come with the emergency kits she buys her father for hurricane season, the kind you crack in both hands to illuminate. But there are too many different bright colors pulsating in it—and she can’t think of why one of those would be in the shed in the first place.

  Nova is riveted by the sight of the . . . flower? Is it some kind of flower? Maybe some decoration stolen from inside the—

  Caitlin is looking back at her.

  It’s easy to miss in the shadows, but the woman is most certainly staring back over one shoulder at Nova, and there is nothing startled or solicitous about her expression. She needs no confirmation from Nova that she too has witnessed the strange, shimmering apparition. Instead, she reaches back and shuts the door behind her, leaving Nova with the conviction that Caitlin knows exactly what the damn thing is and doesn’t want anyone else to see it.

  7

  We are not that family, Nova thinks, once the police have separated her from her father.

  He is outside now with the uniformed officers who arrived within minutes of the first 911 call, while the two plainclothes detectives who appear to be leading the investigation into Troy’s disappearance have brought Nova to the house’s grand front parlor.

  God only knows where Caitlin is. Probably upstairs, laid out on one of the canopied beds, the cops tending to her like nursemaids, even though it’s very possible she’s the one who started this entire mess. But Nova can’t go there just yet; she’s still not sure what the hell that thing was inside of the shed, right where Troy Mangier should have been lying in a bloody tumble of limbs. And so she’s still not sure what, if anything, Caitlin is hiding from them all.

  The hardwood floor under their feet is dappled with glitter and confetti. Caitlin’s presents, brought by those who insisted on ignoring the invitation’s polite promise Your presence is our gift, sit in a shiny pile atop a side table sandwiched between two of the house’s soaring front windows and their lush, puddling drapes. And even though she is trying to look submissive and polite—respectful, as her mother would have said, usually after bopping Nova across the behind with a rolled-up magazine because she said something smart—a defensive monologue is building in Nova’s throat like steam inside of a calliope.

  We were not the family the cops came to. We were not the family with some son or brother or uncle who’d given himself over to the law of the street and came banging on our doors and waving guns at all hours of the night. My daddy is alive. He works too damn hard and my mother died of cancer, and goddammit, I have never touched a gun in my life, and I shouldn’t be here being questioned by these two smug cops as if I’ve got something to do with the insanity of some crazy blood-covered white lady.

  This is the first time Nova has been invited to sit on any of the antique furniture, and only because the two cops suggested she take a seat, probably so they could tower over her like they’re doing now. The bald one studies her closely, while the one with the hairpiece leads the charge, each question tinged with something that sounds more like amusement than suspicion. They smell of too much Old Spice, which suggests they knew which house they were visiting, knew the type of fancy folks they’d be talking to.

  Except for her, of course. She is the daughter of the help. If she comes off as sounding too educated, she’ll be the uppity bitch with something to hide.
If she plays it cool and quiet, they’ll dismiss her as ignorant and weak. (And if she says anything about strangely glowing flowers, they’ll laugh her off as some wannabe voodoo queen.)

  Gripping one hand in the other does nothing to quiet her nerves, or her anger, so she tells herself this is how cops talk to everyone—dismissive, holier-than-thou. Maybe the TV shows have it right, or maybe the cops have started to watch too many TV shows. But that’s got to be it. They’re not talking to her like this because she’s black, and they’re not treating her this way just to punish her for being a young black woman who speaks with greater eloquence than they do. They’re not. They’re not. They’re not, she tries to assure herself.

  “I said she worked for the catering company,” Nova answers for the third time.

  “Still,” Hairpiece asks. “You’d never seen her before. Company’s been working parties here for a few years now, we heard, but this girl’s new?”

  “Have you asked her?” Nova counters.

  “We’re letting her calm down first.”

  “Good luck. She doesn’t seem very calm to me.”

  “But tonight’s the first night you met?”

  “We didn’t meet, officially. She was supervising . . . sort of. But I saw her at the start of the party and not much after. Until I saw them running toward the shed.”

  “How’d you know it was them?”

  “Troy’s necktie. It was shiny, gold. He could have landed planes with it. Fool should have known to take it off if he was going to . . .”

  “Going to what?”

  “Well, I don’t think they we’re going out there to get a shovel.”

  “But Miss Percival—you’ve never seen her before tonight?”

  “No, I’ve never seen her before, but I don’t work every party . . .” Because Daddy knows if he makes me work every one without pay, I might haul off and give Caitlin the whack she deserves. She is not like her daddy’s neighbors; she is not the type of black person who believes that seven hours of work—three hours of smiling at white folks, and then two hours of manual labor on either side of that—should be compensated with a trunk full of leftover liquor. For one, she’s never had a real taste for the hard stuff. Second, she’s a bigger fan of fair wages and progress than she is of cases of Diet Coke and a pat on the head.

  “So she’s still not talking?” Nova asks.

  “Let’s not focus on her.”

  “She almost killed my father. You think we should be focused on something else?”

  “Story we heard is you did a fine job of coming to your daddy’s defense.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Like maybe you were ready . . .”

  “Ready? For what?”

  “Whole thing went down pretty fast is what I’m saying. Girl starts screaming, your father starts running like he recognizes the sound.”

  “Screaming is hard to recognize?” Nova asks.

  “Like he recognized who was doing the screaming.”

  “What’d y’all find inside that shed?” she asks.

  “What do you think we should have found?”

  A flower, she thinks. A glowing flower that didn’t make any damn sense, something so crazy and surreal you wouldn’t be bothering me with this crap about Daddy if you’d seen it, and if you haven’t seen it, that means Caitlin’s hiding it.

  Focus, she tells herself. Focus on where they’re trying to lead you and keep it from going there.

  How many parties did that dumb skank work? Why were you so prepared to keep her from whacking his head off? How involved was your big black daddy with the pretty young white girl who for some reason tried to butcher him?

  “Look, I saw Troy Mangier headed out to the shed with that girl—”

  “But you didn’t see Troy come out?”

  “Because he didn’t come out.”

  “You didn’t see him—”

  “I didn’t see him come out because he didn’t come out. There’s no back door, so unless he managed to dig his way out in about five minutes’ time, then I don’t know where you think he’s going to be.”

  For the first time, her words have unsettled the two white men standing over her, and she’s willing to bet it’s the phrase dig his way out that caused Baldy to shoot his partner a nervous, fleeting glance.

  “You still live with your daddy?” Baldy asks quietly. There’s a hurried tone to the question, as if he’s eager to get them back on script. And she hates the familiar way he’s referred to her father. Sure, she calls him Daddy in everyday conversation still. Most children of the South, white or black, do the same with their own fathers. But Willie is not this man’s father. (He’s not Caitlin’s damn daddy either, but watching them together most days, you would think so.)

  “Not full time, no,” she answers.

  “Where do you live?” Hairpiece asks.

  “I’m at LSU. I told you.”

  “Still, where do you live?”

  “A dorm. Where do you—” She stops herself before she makes a joke about separate dorms for whites and coloreds. But the startled expression on the detective’s face makes the point for her. The ensuing moment is so awkward the two detectives can’t look her in the eye. It’s doubtful Hairpiece actually thought the dorms were segregated. But Nova figures these country detectives are so unaccustomed to dealing with black college students, they simply assumed all the terms would be different. Or they assumed that black people don’t use the word dorm.

  For several years now, Nova Thomas has longed to join her father, Caitlin, and so many of the other people around her in their cozy dreams about the past. If only, like so many of the white people she goes to school with, she could look at the history of places like Spring House and see only singing, dancing African slaves freed from the burden of owning property and patiently awaiting the divine justice of President Abraham Lincoln. But college is deepening her long-held suspicion that she grew up being told less than one-quarter of the real story about Spring House, the real story of Louisiana itself, and she can’t help but wonder if all of this—this interrogation, not to mention washing dishes in Spring House’s kitchen on a regular basis—would be easier if she hadn’t sat down with Dr. Taylor during office hours a few months ago and helped her figure out the exact spot on the property where the sons of Felix Delachaise used to line up to rape the new female slaves.

  One thing is for sure. She’s not telling these cops about that damn flower. She will, however, check out that shed as soon as they’re gone so she can find out why the idea of Troy digging his way out made Baldy look at Hairpiece like he’d farted. But if she’s going to risk angering the cops in one way, she might as well allow herself another. All right, voodoo queen’s out, she thinks. Time for uppity Negro.

  “My father doesn’t have sex with white ladies,” Nova says quietly. “Ever. Don’t get me wrong. There’s been a lot of women since my mother died, and I wasn’t a fan of most of them. But none of them were white, and none of them carried an axe, and none of them were low-account trash that would go out to the shed with another woman’s husband at that woman’s birthday party. So how about y’all quit this scenario where my father’s bending over backward into crazy because some white lady might have paid him some attention? Then maybe you’ll find out where Troy Mangier really is.”

  Her heart races. She can already feel the handcuffs closing around her wrists. But the sensation is fantasy and nothing more because, just then, Baldy turns and walks out of the room and Hairpiece thanks her for her time, and suddenly Nova is all by herself in the front parlor of Spring House for the first time, her hands still trembling even as she clasps them between her knees.

  8

  Blake Henderson is just a few paces from the automatic doors to the emergency room when he sees the father of the first man to die in his arms.

  Vernon Fuller drives th
e same 1988 Chevy Suburban he did when Blake was a boy, with its boxy nose and fat navy-blue side stripe. The first weak light of an overcast dawn dapples the windshield with the reflections of oak branches, turning Vernon into a vague, baseball-capped silhouette behind the wheel. As usual, the SUV is parked in one of the metered spaces on Prytania Street just across from the entrance to Touro Infirmary.

  It’s been a long night—five gunshots, one overdose, and two violent psych cases. The kind of night that would cause a normal person to grimace when they heard the list of admissions rattled off in sequence, but which leaves adrenaline-addicted nurses like Blake amped and incapable of sleep, even after fourteen hours on the floor.

  So even though he’s fairly sure how this will go, Blake starts across Prytania Street, devoid of traffic at this early hour, and toward the Suburban. For a few seconds, the only sounds he hears are his tennis shoes slapping the pavement and his scrubs scraping against his legs. Then the Suburban’s engine starts up, and its headlights wink on, and it swerves to avoid Blake at the last second before speeding off in the direction of the Garden District.

  If history is any indicator, Blake will spend the next few nights waiting for a late-night hang-up. Or an e-mail from an unfamiliar address. Any indication that Vernon Fuller wants something more than a predawn glimpse. Then Blake will forget about Vernon Fuller altogether until the next slightly menacing and unexplained visit. Vernon’s son, on the other hand, will live on forever in Blake’s memories and nightmares.

  Especially the feel of his bound wrists as Blake tried desperately to free him before the black water rose to swallow them both.