Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  He waved his hand at a motorcycle that was leaning up against the corner lamppost. “For a ride.”

  “Take me with you,” she said, then added, “You know you want to.”

  There wasn't really room for the two of them on the seat, so she mostly sat in his lap, with her skirt rucked up above her knees. She could feel the thrum of the engine coming up through his body and into hers. His thighs were hard, and the summer wind was wet and hot, and by the time they had rounded the corner of Villere and headed toward Congo Square, she knew she was going to love this one boy and no other, forever.

  He drove them out to Black Bridge, where the railroad tracks cross the bayou, and they got off the motorbike. He climbed up onto the steel bridge, leaving her to follow. They sat down on the walkway like the colored boys who fished from there did, feet dangling over the side, looking out toward the lake. Thunderclouds were building in the west, and the sky had turned strange, to the color of old blood. It was so hot the air crackled.

  A bream popped the surface of the bayou below, and he leaned forward to look, bracing his palms on either side of his thighs, and she saw how his hands were covered all over with cuts—fresh ones and the scars from old ones.

  “Your hands,” she said, seizing one of them in both her own. “What have you done to your hands?”

  He looked at her, startled by her vehemence, and then he laughed. “What a la-di-da miss you are. Haven't you ever watched anyone shuck oysters? I got me a job on an oyster lugger this summer.”

  He tried to pull his hand free, but she didn't want to let it go. She turned his hand over, to look at his palm, and saw the blue eight-pointed star on the inside of his wrist, and she nearly gasped aloud at the wrenching sense of loss she felt. Somebody else already owned him.

  She released her grip on him. She smoothed her skirt down over her lap. “Why did you come to the wake?” she said.

  “To see him dead.” He said it matter-of-factly, and with no apology or explanation, and she admired him for it.

  “They say he died screaming,” she said, and she smiled so that he wouldn't mistake her feelings about the matter either.

  He stared at her for a moment, not shocked so much as assessing. “He was your daddy,” he finally said.

  “So? Why should I care what happened to him? Do you care about her?”

  “Yes,” he said, and it angered her now that he wasn't hiding it, that he was brave enough not to hide it.

  Heat lightning flared across the sky. She heard a rumbling and thought it was distant thunder at first, and then she realized the train was coming. A moment later, she saw it: the headlight, and the cowcatcher, and the smokestack belching steam. The tracks behind them began to vibrate and hum.

  “How brave are you really, Daman Rourke?” she said. She saw his mouth form the word what, but she couldn't hear him, for just then the locomotive's whistle blared. Another sheet of lightning pulsed, making the world go stark white for an instant. “Have you ever tried to outrun a train?”

  He didn't laugh at her or declare her crazy as anyone else would have done. He looked at the train that was rocking toward them, and then at the far end of the bridge, considering. “We'd never make it,” he said.

  “I dare you!” she cried, scrambling to her feet. She climbed onto the tracks and took off running.

  The rails sang and shook, and the gravel between the ties rolled and scattered beneath her feet. She caught the flash of his shirtsleeve out of the corner of her eye and she laughed, and then thought that she must save her breath—the train was bearing down on them, roaring, steam hissing, pistons hammering, rods thrusting and thumping like a dragon's heartbeat.

  She snagged the heel of her half-boot on the edge of a sleeper and fell, sprawling hard onto her hands and knees. The whistle screamed; the whole world trembled.

  His momentum had carried Daman Rourke past where she had fallen, but he came back for her, and she could see how close the train was by the look on his face.

  He grabbed her arm and hurled her onto her feet, throwing her forward and then over the side of the bridge, and her scream of laughter was swallowed by the shriek of the locomotive. She felt the air of the train passing in a gust of wind and a concussion against her ears. Lightning flashed, bleeding the sky empty.

  They landed on the levee, hitting the ground hard, and rolled down the grassy slope, ending up pressed together, wrapped up arm in arm like lovers. She could feel through the rough cotton of his sweat-soaked shirt, the hard and taut muscles that encased his rib cage, and the beating of his heart.

  He pushed off her and fell onto his back, his chest rising and falling with his harsh breathing. “Aw, man, that was stupid,” he said after a while. “Stupid.”

  She was looking at his face, though, and she could see the wild and unholy joy in his eyes.

  The next evening she was waiting for him on the levee where the oyster luggers landed. She watched him unload the day's harvest, wash off at the pump, and then share a bucketofbeer with the rest of the crew. She knew he had seen her, but he was making her wait. She didn't care; she would have done the same to him. It was a game. The best game ever imagined, because the risk was so high.

  She thought he was going to come to her at last when he stood up from the upturned barrel he'd been sitting on, but instead he looked beyond her and his face changed. She watched, then, while two young men and a red-haired girl came up to him, talked with him, laughed with him. It was obvious the red-haired girl was sweethearts with one of the other boys, but that didn't matter—Remy hated her, vehemently, passionately. She hated all three of them, for the intimacy they shared with DamanRourke, which was as palpable as the summer heat, and she knew that if she looked she would find that their wrists, too, had forever been marked by a blue eight-pointed star. They were his and he was theirs, and so they wouldfor-ever own parts of him that she would never evenbe allowed to touch.

  Only after they had left did he finally come sauntering over to her. He stopped, hooked a thumb in the pocket of his jeans, and thrust out one hip in a cocky and blatantly masculine pose that would have made her laugh if it hadn't worked.

  “Hey, Remy,” he said. “How you doin', girl?” She stared at him a long time, long enough for him probably to start thinking she was crazy, so she said, “Do you ever wish sometimes that you could just run away? Just hop on a train and ride it to wherever it goes.”

  “Well, riding a train would sure beat all the dickens out of trying to outrun it,” he said, and smiled.

  She had seen the smile coming. Even so, when it broke across his face she was unprepared for the intensity of what she would feel. She wanted to scream and beat her fists against his chest. She wanted to kiss his mouth and capture that smile forever, make it hers alone.

  She was staring at his mouth and so she saw his lips move and knew that he was speaking, otherwise she might not have heard him with the way her heart was pounding in her ears.

  “Where you going to run to anyway, Remy Lelourie? You got to learn how to find the sweet places closer to home.”

  “There aren't any.”

  “Sure there are.” He smiled again and held out his hand to her. “Come on and I'll show you one. I dare you.”

  She put her hand in his and let him lead her wherever he wanted to take her. She could feel the strength of his fingers wrapped around hers, and the scars and the calluses.

  East of New Orleans was still a swamp, with water that was dark and quiet, and thick with cypress trees. They rode out as far as they could on his motorcycle and then went the rest of the way by pirogue.

  The sun was misty and soft in the swamp, bathing the world in a green-gold light. She could tell he knew well where he was going with the way he maneuvered them around the sand bogs and through the flooded canebrakes. The bow sent insects rising up from the reeds and lily pads, and dragonflies dipping and hovering over the water. She saw the armored backs of gars and the b
lack heads of water moccasins poking out of glassy pools beneath the thick overhang of trees.

  When they came upon the willow island, she knew that this was the place. Three ancient weeping willow trees grew together on a spit of sand. Their long, hanging branches, woven and entwined, had made a dry, green cave in the middle of the swamp.

  The shadows of the slender leaves moved in etched and shifting patterns over a ground that was soft with mulch and moss. She stood in the middle of the willow cave and turned around in a slow circle. She thought that if the color green had a smell this would be it, pungent and of the earth. She knew without asking that he had been coming to this place for years—to dream and nurse wounds and just to think. To be alone—yes, that most of all.

  She had to make him put it into words, though. “Have you ever brought anyone else out here?”

  “No,” he said, and he reached out and brushed the backs of his fingers across her cheek in a touch that seemed to be both a promise and a regret.

  They came back to the willow cave often throughout that summer. Sometimes he would play his saxophone for her, and she would look at the pulse beating in his throat and think that she wanted to put her mouth right there, on the place where his heart beat, and leave it forever.

  Once they found a cottonmouth sleeping in one of the lower branches, its brown-and-yellow-blotched body almost blending in with the tree bark, so that they didn't see it at first. Day was going to search for a stick so that he could pick up the snake and throw it in the water, when she stopped him by grabbing his arm. He had his shirtsleeve rolled up to his elbow, and the world seemed to diminish suddenly to nothing but the slick, hot feel of his skin.

  “No, don't chase it off,” she said. “I can bring it back for Mamma Rae.” She had brought along a small wicker basket packed with pork-chop sandwiches, and she dumped those out now and held the basket up to him. “We can put it in this.”

  He stared at her, and she felt a flutter of excitement low in her belly. Then his gaze went from her to the snake, and she saw him go still inside.

  “Mamma Rae says snake's no good for hoodoo if you don't catch it with your bare hands,” she said, her voice low and taunting. “Come on, Daman Rourke. I dare you.”

  He smiled. “You just make sure you have that basket handy.”

  “Mamma Rae says you got to spell it by staring it down without flinching.”

  His laugh was a little hoarse, and he wiped his hands on his thighs. “Sweet mercy.”

  He hunkered down so he was eye level with the snake and he stared. He stared so hard his eyelids slitted half-closed and the veins on his neck stood out against the skin. The snake stared back, its eyes like chips of beer-bottle glass.

  The snake's thick, muscular body slithered and uncoiled. Its head darted out, its white mouth opening wide on a hiss that was like water splashing on a red-hot stove. Its tongue flickered back and forth over two venom-filled fangs.

  “You're flinching,” she said.

  “Shit,” Day said under his breath. He spread his hands open and rolled up onto the balls of his feet.

  Remy had never seen a body move so fast in her life. His hand lashed out, grabbing that cottonmouth by the back of its head and swinging around with it, coming right at her with it so that she let out a little yelp, and the snake's white mouth was open wide and its tongue was dancing and its thick, blotchy body was whipping from side to side. Day yelled something about the basket, but she was already thrusting it at him.

  He threw that snake inside the basket so hard it made a whapping sound. Remy slammed down the lid and latched it.

  They knelt on the floor of the willow cave, facing each other, with the basket jumping around as the snake thrashed and hissed and bit at the gingham-lined wicker. Day was breathing hard as he stared at her, and his eyes were so wide open they were rimmed with white, but there was that unholy look of joy on his face, and a hunger. Already, she knew, he was hungering for more.

  She knew how she would make him hers now, how she would make him hers forever. They were alike, she and Daman Rourke, in all their deepest, darkest places.

  A couple of days later when she unpacked the basket it wasn't pork-chop sandwiches she laid out on the ground. She arranged the matching pair of gold-plated French revolvers, one in front of her, one in front of Daman Rourke, and next to each a single cartridge. The light was a murky yellow inside the willow cave. It had rained hard just an hour before and was drizzling still. Drops clicked on the green canopy overhead. The air smelled of wet cypress and moss.

  “A St. Claire killed my great-granddaddy with one of these guns in a duel,” she said.

  He picked one up, running his fingers over the muzzle that shone blue with a thin layer of oil. “They wouldn't have fought a duel with guns like these. They're revolvers.”

  Strangely, his doubting frightened as much as angered her. “A lot you know, 'cause they did. My great-granddaddy lost Sans Souci in a faro game with a St. Claire and they fought a duel over it—but none of that matters now, anyway. I read about this game in a book. It's like roulette. You put only one bullet in the revolving part—”

  “The cylinder,” he said. “And you put a cartridge in the loading gate. What comes out the other end is the bullet.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him. “Well, pardon me all over. Then you spin the cylinder around a couple times and put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. And it's either bang you're dead, or bang you're not.”

  They sat facing each other, knees spread and almost touching. He looked down at the gun in his hand, and she saw his throat move as he swallowed. “You are pure crazy, Remy girl.”

  “We'll do it together.” She picked up the other revolver. Her hand trembled, but she made it go still. “I dare you, Day. I double-dare you.”

  They loaded the guns and spun the cylinders, then spun them again, and then again, as if as long as the cylinders kept spinning, then so would their world keep on spinning and they couldn't die. Outside the willow cave it had begun to rain hard again. It sounded like a scattering of pebbles hitting the water. Or buckshot.

  The hammer made a loud snap under her thumb as she cocked it. She raised the gun to her head, but he stopped her by gripping her wrist and pulling it back down again.

  “No, not that way. Put the barrel in your mouth. Otherwise you could end up alive but with only half a head.”

  She wanted to ask him how he knew that but he had already put the gun's muzzle into his own mouth, and his eyes were somewhere else—in that dark and dangerous and seductive place.

  She closed her own mouth around the muzzle. It was cool and greasy and tasted bitter. The rain had stopped again, as suddenly as it had started. It was now so quiet she heard a frog drop off a cypress and into the water.

  She watched him, watched his finger, saw it tense and squeeze, and her mind was screaming No! as the hammer fell with a soft click.

  Her eyes had flinched shut and she was already crying when her own finger jerked on the trigger. The snick of the hammer falling on the empty chamber sounded loud as a thunderclap to her ears.

  She felt his hands take the gun from her and she opened her eyes to his face. She thought, He is going to kiss me, and then he was kissing her.

  Rainwater dripped off the willows and the cypress trees and into the still water of the swamp. The ground was soft with mulch and moss beneath her back. He undid the long row of tiny pearl buttons on her shirtwaist, one by one, and his fingers trembled so that she had to help him. He spread open her blouse and slipped his hand beneath her chemise, lifting her breast free, and he lowered his head and kissed her there and then licked her nipple with his tongue, and then he kissed her mouth, and they breathed into one another.

  He moved his hand up underneath her skirt, up her leg, past her stocking and garter, to the bare skin of her thigh, and higher to the slit in her drawers. She arched against him and would have screamed if she hadn't stopped it with her fist.

  This is too much
, she thought. Too much. This could kill you if you weren't careful.

  Chapter Sixteen

  FROM THE NEW ORLEANSMORNING TRIBUNE, THURSDAY, July 14, 1927:

  WHY ISN'T CINDERELLA IN JAIL?

  By Wylie T. Jones

  The rich and famous are certainly different from you and me.

  It has been over thirty-six hours since the body of Mr. Charles St. Claire, Esq., was found brutally slain in an old slave shack on his plantation home of Sans Souci, yet the police are strangely reluctant to arrest the most obvious suspect for the crime—Mr. St. Claire's wife, Remy Lelourie.

  The Hollywood film star was found drenched in blood and sitting next to the body of her husband, with the murder weapon, a cane knife, lying on the floor by her hand, her bloody thumbprint plain on its blade. Police estimate that she was alone with the body a full two hours after the murder occurred, yet she raised no alarm and has no explanation for the elapsed time, other than “confusion” and “shock.”

  Furthermore, the colored woman who keeps house for the St. Claires has reported hearing a loud argument take place between the couple earlier that night, and not, apparently, for the first time. Mr. St. Claire's law partner has said that Mr. St. Claire had recently contemplated seeking dissolution of his marriage in the form of an annulment.

  You have read on the pages of this newspaper of Mr. St. Claire's libertine excesses in the speakeasies and among the city's colored demimonde. The Hollywood movie sets and mansions where Remy Lelourie recently made her home are notorious for irresponsible and immoral behavior. Indeed, in the past year alone the actress has been blamed for one young man's suicide and named as a correspondent in two divorce cases.

  One may perhaps see how within the godless lives of these two people a recipe for tragedy and despair and, yes, even death, might have been brewing. Yet with all this evidence the police remain strangely—and shamelessly—inactive and silent.

  The Cinderella Girl's beauty and fame are legendary, and yet that should not make her immune to arrest, especially when the crime is murder, and a bloody, heinous murder at that.