The Southern Cross

by Skip Horack

  “Sorry about that,” said Luther.

  “Yeah, I bet you real sorry,” said Shonda. “But we about there now anyways.”

  The sky was big and blue and Luther breathed it in, ashamed to tell her that this was his first time ever out of the city as a free man. The tires hummed beneath them, and the Pearl River bridge descended, gave way to asphalt. Another several miles and Shonda turned off the highway.

  Her mother lived down a gravel road, in a trailer set back in the pines. Luther saw that the windows had been boarded up, the raw yellow plywood spray-painted with the citations of Bible passages he didn’t know: Genesis 9:11, Psalm 23:4. The Dodge stopped just ten yards from the trailer, and Luther stepped out and stretched. Shonda climbed the steps and waved him over. The door was unlocked and he followed her inside.

  Luther’s eyes were still adjusting to dim trailer when he registered the figure sitting in the corner with a shotgun. The man flicked his cigarette onto the dull blue carpet. “Woo-ee,” he said.

  Shonda screamed. “What you doing here?”

  The man was staring at Luther. He had a bottle of Wild Irish Rose pinned between his knees. “Who’s this motherfucker?” he slurred.

  Shonda took a small step away from Luther. “Where’s my mama, Freddie?”

  “I put her on a bus,” said the man. “Don’t you worry about her.”

  “You did what?”

  “I figured she’d come for her mama” Red-eyed Freddie smiled at Luther. “I know my wife.”

  “Wife?” said Luther.

  Freddie leveled the shotgun at Luther’s crotch, then took a pull from the bottle and licked his wet lips. “Looks like maybe you know her pretty well too.”

  “Wife?” said Luther again.

  “I ain’t scared of no big man,” said Freddie. He tossed Shonda a roll of duct tape, ordered her to wrap Luther’s ankles and wrists real good and tight.

  They left him laid out on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Freddie dragged Shonda outside, and she called them both a couple of punk cowards as the door slammed shut. After a while Luther heard Freddie’s hidden car start up behind the trailer. He looked at the empty wallet resting next to his head, and a dark piece of his heart hoped that Freddie would take that lying woman down the road and shoot her.

  On the kitchen table a digital clock marked the time in fluorescent green, but then went dark at midnight when the power failed. It was black inside the trailer now, and Luther counted out minutes to keep the time. Near as he could figure, it was another long hour before he was finally able to work his hands free. He pulled himself across the room, felt around through drawers and cabinets until he found a flashlight under the sink. He snapped it on and unraveled the tape binding his ankles, saw that his wrists were rubbed raw and bleeding. Standing, he went to the sink and tried the water. Dry. The trailer pulled from a well—the pump needed electric.

  In the dead fridge Luther discovered a gallon of apple juice. He hooked his finger through a loop on the neck of the glass jug, balanced it in the crook of his arm as he drank. Just then the narrow trailer began to rock in the wind, and juice ran down his chin onto the front of his work shirt. Luther tried the phone but there was no dial tone. He opened the door and made his way down the steps.

  Shonda’s Diplomat sat crooked in the dusty hardpan, two of its tires slashed across the sidewalls. The trunk was open, and he could see that the garbage bags holding his clothes were missing. “Goddamn,” he said. A light salty mist began to fall, and the wind in the pines made a sound like faraway applause. Luther walked back inside. He was hunting for spare batteries when he found Shonda’s mother taped up in the bedroom closet.

  They’d come for him in the first week of summer 1999. He was eating breakfast with his grandmother when he heard “Police! Search warrant!” a moment before the door was ripped off its hinges. A stun grenade bounced into the room and exploded in a flash-bang of blindness and confusion. Luther dropped to the floor as men in black washed over him. His grandmother was under the table and moaning. Tears dripped from Luther’s cheeks as he tried to tell the cops where her pills were.

  The old woman’s wig was off, and her bald head shone like some blue-black melon. Luther took a step back, wincing at the sour smell of piss. “Damn,” he said. “How long you been in here?”

  She looked up at him, blinking. Luther knelt down beside her and brushed his fingers across the duct tape covering her mouth. “Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “I’m friends with Shonda.”

  Luther balanced the flashlight on his shoulder and shrugged, pinning it in place against his neck. He began to peel the thick tape from the woman’s ankles and wrists. It came easily at first, the tape, but then he reached the final layers and in tender places her tissue-paper skin threatened to tear. “I’m so sorry, ma’am,” he said. “So sorry.”

  Once her hands were free, he stepped aside and let the woman pull the tape from her face at whatever pace she could handle. She worked quicker than he would have and as the last of it came off Luther saw that her mouth was open wide, like Freddie had silenced her in the act of screaming.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  The woman spit a thread of green phlegm into the hem of her filthy nightgown. “What you think?”

  Luther held out his hand but she pushed it away and rose with no help from him. It was not until he passed her the flashlight, put her in control, that he was able to convince her that he meant her no harm. He told her about Freddie running off with Shonda and all she did was shake her head. “Serves them both right,” she said in a high, quick voice. “Them two deserve each other.”

  “I guess.”

  “You got a name?”

  “Luther.”

  She gave a sharp nod. “I’m Betty,” she said. The woman retreated into the bathroom with the flashlight, and Luther listened in the dark as she tried the shower and cursed. When she came back out she was naked.

  Luther turned his head. “Whoa now, Miss Betty,” he said.

  Betty ignored him and pushed past with a towel slung over her bony shoulder. Luther heard the front door open and hurried after her. The rain was falling steady now. He stood on the concrete steps, searching. She had left the flashlight lying beside the door, and Luther took it into his hands, playing the beam through the pines until he found her.

  She stood naked in a clearing—her head thrust back, her arms stretched out. Rain ran in sheets down her small wrinkled body. Luther could see that she was smiling, maybe even laughing. “You all right?” he hollered. Betty shook her head quickly from side to side but said nothing. “Come on” said Luther. “You gonna get hurt out there.”

  After he’d arrived at Angola, Luther began spending whatever free time he was allowed in the prison library. He found solace among those books, a place where he could escape the attention a giant receives in the yard. With nothing else to do he studied the law, learned how to challenge his murder sentence with motions and writs that he wrote out by hand and filed with the court of appeals. For a time the library meant hope—but that hope began to fade as, one by one, his pleadings were denied. After four years he was all out of legal theories.

  It was at the onset of this dark period that Luther was called into the warden’s office. His attorney from the trial was sitting there, the same fat man who had tried to hug him when the jury verdict was read. The warden shook Luther’s hand and told him that he’d be free to go within the week. Congratulations, another big black man has confessed to your crime.

  A Times-Picayune reporter had tracked him down after he was back in the city living with his grandmother. She asked Luther how it felt to be free, and he stared at her until she blushed and admitted that it was a stupid question. But her next one was no better: “Mr. Jackson, what was it like to be an innocent man in prison?” Luther ended the interview. He wasn’t innocent, he felt like telling her. He just hadn’t killed that man.

  Betty sat down across from him in the living room and shined the flash
light into his eyes. She had dried herself off and put on a clean pink housecoat, big fuzzy slippers. This was an interrogation. “What you doing running around with a married woman?” she asked him.

  All his practice lying—an entire lifetime, it seemed—and still Luther didn’t know how to answer without putting the poor woman’s daughter in a bad light. Finally he stopped trying. He told the story straight but simple. “I didn’t ask for none of this,” he added.

  Betty appeared to soften. “You hungry?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am”

  “Stay there, then,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.”

  Betty went into the kitchen and returned carrying a cardboard box. Inside were a can of Sterno and a book of matches, a small pot, two bowls, and two spoons. For food, she had five small cans of Campbell’s, all different flavors—that and a jug of water she had stashed somewhere.

  Luther hadn’t eaten since Quinn gave him half of his ham-and-cheese poboy the night before. He eyed the soup and Betty caught him staring. She told him to take his pick.

  “You sure?”

  “We’ll share,” she said. “Now choose.”

  He settled on vegetable beef and Betty passed him the can to open. She wiggled her fragile fingers. “Those flip tops,” she said, “are murder on my old hands.”

  Luther pried open the lid and poured soup into the pot. Betty cut it with splashes of fresh water, then stirred the mixture with a few dainty stabs of her spoon. Luther lit one of the Sternos, and Betty killed the flashlight. They talked while Luther balanced the pot over the flame. He told her that, last he’d heard, the hurricane was still a category 5, would be making landfall sometime after sunrise.

  Betty nodded. “Then we should get some sleep before morning,” she said. “Big day tomorrow.”

  There was a flatness to her voice that Luther recognized from the projects, prison. The Sterno’s flickering séance light illuminated her polished face and he was frightened by her expression, thought he saw something of that dead-eyed fatalism that’d been following him around his whole damn life.

  Luther didn’t sleep. He couldn’t ever, not really. Instead he lay all night on the couch listening to the angry wind and Betty’s peaceful snores echoing from the back bedroom. She had lent him an old silver wind-up watch that had belonged to her dead husband. It told Luther that it would be daylight soon, and sure enough, it wasn’t long before the sun penetrated the thin gaps between the plywood boards covering the windows. Gray light filled the trailer and Luther sat up and put on his boots. Water was flowing beneath him; he could hear it. He walked across the living room and opened the door. “Fuck” he said.

  The Pearl had overflowed its banks and flooded the woods surrounding the trailer. Pines blew like wheat in the wind; the clearing was a white-capped sea. The water lapped at the front steps, and Luther realized that it was still rising. He watched as a gust of wind sent a wave surging through the pine forest. Water slapped against the top step of the trailer and soaked his feet. He saw that Shonda’s Dodge had been swept off in the night.

  Luther heard Betty cough behind him. “Well,” she said. “What you looking at?”

  “Water,” he said. “A whole lot of water.”

  Betty sidled up next to him to take a look. “Hmph,” she said.

  “We need to get on the roof.”

  “I’m not getting on any roof, Luther.”

  “We wait much longer we liable to get trapped in here.”

  “Maybe.”

  Luther shook his head and looked out the door. The water was skimming into the trailer now. There was a splashing off to his left and he saw a pair of jet-black feral hogs swimming hard, fighting their way to the high ground of the highway.

  Betty pointed. “Pigs,” she said. “Close the door.”

  “We close this door there won’t be no opening it again.” Luther took her by the wrist. “We gotta go,” he said.

  “I done told you I’m staying.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The wind picked up even more and started snapping pines. A heavy branch crashed nearby and Luther flinched. Betty tried to close the door herself but he stopped her. “No,” he said. “You gonna make a tomb out of this trailer.”

  Betty pinched him on his arm but retreated to the sofa. The water was past their ankles, and she kicked off her wet slippers. “All my things are getting ruined,” she said.

  Luther admitted that they were. “Still” he said. “Ain’t nothing in here can’t be replaced except me and you.”

  Betty took up the family Bible resting on her warped coffee table. “That’s not true at all,” she said. “Not one damn bit.”

  It was at that moment that Luther decided he would leave her, figured he’d be lucky just to make it through the storm on his own. “Stay here, then” he told her. “I’m gonna go check things out.”

  Betty pulled her bare feet up onto the sofa and refused to look at him. “Suit yourself,” she said. “But you leave that watch right here with me.”

  Luther inched his way out of the trailer and down the sunken steps. The water ran past his waist and rain stung his face. He turned and put the worst of the weather at his back as he shuffled along with the current. In the distance he could see Shonda’s lost car. The Dodge was wedged between two pines and holding steady against the current. A popping sound and he turned. The roof of the trailer was starting to buckle from the wind; an entire corner was peeled back like the lid from one of Betty’s soup cans. Luther stood frozen as the hurricane punished him. He was halfway between the trailer and Shonda’s car. The car. It had to be the car. And so he went for it. His boots were like bricks on his feet as he dogpaddled his way through the pines.

  He was exhausted when he reached the trapped Dodge. The hood was slippery and he cut his hands trying to pull himself out of the water. He leaned back against the windshield and watched the rain blow sideways through the trees. A rabbit swam by and he thought of Betty, dead or dying. He could have brought her with him, forced her along. Luther wondered what that meant for his soul—not trying to save someone who didn’t want saving. He saw his blood mixing with the floodwater and was reminded of that mythic fight that had made his name. Truth be told, he always took more than a little pride in being called the Redfish, coming out of that bloody water alive. Hell, he admitted, he was the Redfish. And that might just be what had kept him alive all these years.

  Fall

  Rabbit Man

  Milam raised meat rabbits, and what wasn’t dead was dying. All save a few were bleeding from their nares. Hemorrhage. Hell. The old man sighed, then watched two more of his Hotots die as he waited for the federal inspector to drive over from Baton Rouge.

  Something familiar. It clicked. The rabbit blood reminded him of that distant Sunday his carton-a-week wife collapsed at the altar of Holy Ghost, a crimson flower blooming on the handkerchief she’d pressed against her face. Milam shook his head to clear the image as he opened the door of the hutch that sheltered Gretta, heavy with kits. The big white doe still seemed healthy, and Milam gathered her into his arms.

  It was early October but still hot as summer. A train rumbled by, rattling the tin shed and setting a distant crow to caw. The tracks ran just behind the chainlink fence that bordered the yard, and, with his free hand, Milam out of habit waved to the engineer before taking Gretta inside his home, away from the dying rabbits.

  In the living room the grandfather clock announced nine A.M. Milam whispered, “Love you, Dottie,” then placed Gretta on the kitchen floor. The clock had been a gift to his wife, a surprise for their fiftieth. When it chimed he told her he loved her. Even on the one-strike half-hours. Even in an empty house.

  Gretta watched him pour cool tap water into an aluminum pie pan, then followed like a puppy as he walked to the bathroom. Milam knelt, set the pan down, and stroked her soft back while she drank. He made a nest of towels where she could bed down, and his pregnant girl was still drinking when he slipped quietly
back into the hallway. He clicked the bathroom door shut behind him.

  The inspector would be arriving soon. Milam went outside and settled onto his front step with a cinnamon roll. He lived maybe a mile off 190, in an ethnic ghetto of sorts. A Gaza Strip of Cajuns wedged between the Union Pacific line and the settlements of the Opelousas black majority. Two teenagers, shirtless in the heat, sauntered past his square prefab, all headphones and attitude as they laughed and traded rhymes about the crazy Rabbit Man. Milam glared after them.

  The lady from the USDA introduced herself as Dr. Susan Wall. She handed Milam a business card, and he tucked it into the front pocket of his shirt. They walked out back together, and he watched as she gave his rabbitry a quick once-over. She hadn’t been five minutes in the shed when she turned to him and asked if he would go ahead and kill the remaining ten Hotots for her.

  Milam flinched. “The hell I will”

  “It’s plague, sir.” The veterinarian removed a pair of latex gloves from her thin hands. “Calicivirus disease. No cure. Wiped out all the rabbits at the stock show up in Shreveport last weekend.”

  Milam grunted, and Dr. Wall gave him a sympathetic look. Suddenly there was tenderness in her blue eyes. She was very young, and it seemed impossible to him that she was a doctor of any sort. Maybe it was her hair, he thought, white blond and cut boy short.

  “Did you have any rabbits at that show, Mr. Fourcade?”

  “No.” Milam drew a half-moon in the dirt with the toe of his filthy house slipper. “But I stopped by Friday afternoon” he admitted. “I wanted to see the rabbits. They had all kinds up there, you know?”

  “Sure.” Dr. Wall removed a trembling buck from his hutch. “And did you handle some of the stock?”

  “I did”

  “Then you went home and handled some of your own rabbits?”

  Milam wiped his hands across his stiff khakis and nodded.