by Taylor Brown
He raised up on one arm and slapped her hand away.
“I done told you I don’t like that,” he said. “It ain’t womanly, playing with yourself.”
She bit her tongue, wishing her mouth wasn’t the only place with teeth. She slid her hands up the backs of his arms and gripped the three-headed muscles there, opening herself yet wider beneath him, thrusting him home with her heels, hurrying him toward the shuddering, wheezing, spittling brink—his breath exploded from his mouth, a long roar. Yes, she said, yes. Eustace pulled out, as if still afraid of making children after all these years. Sons. His seed shot hot across her belly, his prick jerking like a hammer. Afterward he crashed onto his back, unwilling to touch the stuff come curdled and sticky from his own balls.
“Fuck,” he said. His great chest heaved. His organ shrinking now, curling like a pig’s tail beneath his belly. Granny rose and dipped a rag in the washbasin and began scraping him from her body. She parted herself slightly to clean between her legs.
“You don’t got to be in such a hurry about it,” he said.
She came back to the bed.
“Since when were you one to cuddle?”
“That ain’t what I mean.”
She knew it wasn’t. She knew he would rather his seed dried across her flesh, glistening like the trails of slugs and snails she found on the porch of a morning. A web of dominion, possession.
“Let me ask you something.” She lit a tobacco cigarette.
His nose turned up at the smoke.
“What?”
“That boy of mine, you think he’s all right?”
“‘All right’? The hell does that mean?”
“Means you’ve seen some of the same things he has. I want to know what it done to you. Whether you think he’s all right.”
Eustace started to rise.
“Woman, I don’t got the time.”
She grasped his wrist.
“Eustace. I don’t ask you much.”
He lay back, inhaling through his nose. His eyes reached through the ceiling.
“Please,” she said.
“What it done,” he said. “Time I was nineteen, I’d killed a hundred men, seen them tangled in bobwire screaming for they mamas while my Lewis gun tore them to pieces. They say a million boys went down in three days at the Somme. I don’t doubt it. Tribes of monkeys in matching helmets with the worst toys their monkey-brains could think up, blowing one another to pieces. Thinking in they heads they was something special in the world, made in the image of God. A sick god, must be, or blind or cock-hard for the spilt guts of boys screaming his name. I seen them out beyond the wire in they gas masks and coal-scuttle helmets, scurrying here or there, and pretty soon they was just ants to me. I seen them as God might, from high up, hordes of them nameless, cut down at the end of my gun, pink-popped like under a magnifying glass. Pretty soon it wasn’t nothing. I’d of killed them all if I could. They wasn’t no god but my Lewis gun.”
He rose from the bed and Granny grasped his arm.
“You didn’t answer my question. About Rory.”
Eustace’s teeth ground sideways in his mouth.
“I just did.”
He pulled on his shirt and overalls and boots and walked out, the house trembling as he went. She heard his boots clomp down the porch steps, his truck coughing to life in the yard. He gunned the engine once, twice, warming it up, and then she heard the churn of the tires in the dirt. She lay back, her cigarette half gone, and leaned to flick the ash through a knothole in the floorboard. She had another long night ahead of her, alone, and when she rose she would have to take down the shotgun. Who knew what evil might come to call. She could have asked Eustace to stay, but she’d asked a favor of him once tonight and didn’t like what she got. She was not afraid, really. She was tired, heartsore, and she could not quit thinking of that blue bottle burst twinkling in the yard. She closed her eyes and inhaled, letting the smoke curl into the deepest branches of her lungs. Exhaling, she imagined the little black nests of doubt and fear being blown right out.
CHAPTER 23
Rory woke with a start. He was lying naked on a frozen plain, white under a white sky, and he’d never been this cold but once. Black stars hung above him, tattooed into the white vault of the heavens. No, not stars, for they were moving now, soaring, circling into a slow-turning cyclone of something: carrion birds. Ravens, black-winged, silent as what they sought.
He tried to sit up but couldn’t. Couldn’t will his body to move. Just his head obeyed, and he saw, on either side of him, men in uniform. Dead men, slack-jawed in some ultimate awe, staring blindly at this last unkindness. They were laid out on both sides of him, as far as he could see, a highway of the gutshot and disemboweled, the stabbed and bludgeoned and brained. He blinked and they were not men now but stone Buddhas in soldier’s uniform, a thousand faces of serenity shattered and split and crumbled, as by chisel and sledge.
Sato was one of them, and Connor Gaston, and the Chinese infantryman he killed.
Rory cocked his head back and saw her coming. Christine. It was her and it wasn’t. Because her hair was alive, writhing, a great mane of satin-black serpents that floated all around her face, like the halo of something evil. They had forked tongues, pink, and eyes like volcanic glass, and she wore nothing at all but them. He tried to rise again but couldn’t. He was dead, frozen, like all the god-men laid out shoulder-to-shoulder. His brothers.
She stood over him, looking down, her sex flushed red like a wound, and he felt himself unfurling, hardening despite the cold. She lowered herself onto him, slowly, and buried her face into his neck. She began to move on him, skin to skin, and the serpents did, too. She slid high enough to unsheathe him, or nearly, then down. Again, again. The serpents all around him now, stroking him like the arms of lovers, an orgy he couldn’t track. It felt so good, all of it, that he didn’t care when the first one sank its fangs into his arm, the second his shoulder, the third his neck. Then all of them, loosing themselves into him. Their venom. He didn’t care until the pain came and his blood was two hundred degrees, boiling, and he was only afraid she’d stop.
* * *
Rory woke with a jolt, something wet in his lap. His jar of shine lay overturned between his thighs, his trousers darkened like he’d pissed himself. He righted the jar and rubbed his eyes, but he still had whiskey on his hands. He got out of the car and leaned on the hood, trying to blink the fire from his eyes. Cars were parked all around his, humped under the moon, and he could hear the guitar thrumming from the filling station, see the shadows bounding against the blinded windows. The green dinosaurs on the pumps seemed to quiver, as if they knew what was coming. Rory gave his eyes one last swipe with the back of his arm and started inside, whiskey running in ant-crawls down his legs.
The preaching was over, the music begun. The believers were testifying in this tongue or that, man’s or God’s. Combinations thereof leapt from their throats. Some of them were pogo-ing in place, hands raised as if to snatch some spirit from the air, while others twirled and twirled, arms out, tornados of flesh that bounced among chairs and walls and shoulders. A few of the women had simply crumpled on the ground amid their skirts, bawling faceup into the light.
Rory stood in the back this time. He knew he smelled of whiskey but it wasn’t that. He felt no part of them, a stranger, soot-blacked and lifeless as one of the stones that edged the slaughter-fire that morning. His eyes cut through the crowd, looking for Christine. He found her at the front, keening like something not quite human. Her eyes were mashed closed, her brow furrowed, her cheeks flushed with blood. Her mouth agape, like she was being tortured. Like the thing she most wanted in the world was slowly being given to her or taken inch-by-inch away. Rory watched, and he was jealous. A green-black burn, like venom beneath his skin. He wanted to be the thing alive inside her, searching her furthest places, not hurting her but almost. He wanted to be the deepest thing. The only.
He stepped back. He was alien to
this place, a dark spirit in a house of light. He was the black thing that foo dogs guarded against, the slinking wickedness caught in Granny’s bottles.
Pastor Adderholt, slick-haired in his shirt and tie, skipped sideways across the floor, his heels clicking the boards in a frantic, bowlegged jig.
“Ho Jesus!” he said. “Praise him!”
Rory walked out.
It was a cold night, and dark, and he thought he just wanted to go home but found himself sitting against the side of the building instead, sipping from what remained in the jar. He spread his back wide and flat against the wall, and he could feel the place throbbing like an engine against him. He swelled his lungs with air, and it echoed in the hollows of him, that power, in those empty places that never did fill up.
He left when the music died, before anyone could see him. He pulled out of the lot and into the road, gunning the motor. He glanced once in the rearview mirror, and he thought he saw a girl-like figure standing in the road behind him, watching him go.
Probably just a trick of the light.
* * *
The Sheriff’s white coupe sat idling at the top of the road, plumes of exhaust smoke throbbing from the tailpipes. The spilled whiskey fumes still burned in Rory’s nostrils, heady as nitro, and he gigged the motor as he passed, a machine growl, like one dog threatening another. Rory took a detour through town, passing down a street of long-fallen glory, the once-smooth pavement ribbed and potholed, the old Victorians clutched in thick jungles of weeds and mosses and creeper vines. Their windows were dark, their fish-scale shingles rotten and stained and missing in swaths, as if scraped by the hand of a careless fishmonger.
He stopped before the blackened ruin of the one at the end, the old bawdyhouse where Granny had lived in Prohibition times, his mother hidden in one of the upper rooms. He pictured her in the corner tower, in the tall window beneath the witch-hat turret, her shadow swelling spiritlike against the pulled blinds. That tower was nothing now but a black-charred spear, snared in a maze of low-hanging limbs, the house itself an obscene negative of what it once was. A white house scorched black. A miracle it even stood. It burned in the early thirties, not long after the valley was flooded and the sin-houses popped up at the end of the road. The story was, a drunk passed out with a cigar burning in his teeth, a whore working in his lap. The cigar fell on the bedspread, catching fire, and the girl didn’t notice until she smelled the smoke. She said his thing never flagged an inch.
When Rory got his draft notice, he thought of climbing up into that tower. He did not know if he would come home again, and he thought he might find some part of his mother still up there. He might hear the echo of her voice. He did not even make it onto the porch. His foot stove right through the first step, the handrail collapsing beneath his hand.
The whole place seemed pasted together by memory, as fragile as that, the thinnest conspiracy of soot and ash that would collapse one day under the alighted feet of a sparrow or crow, implode on a band of trouble-seeking boys. All the past seemed like that, constructed of the most tenuous of blueprints, waiting for the wrong wind to blow. A history you could bring crashing down with a single kick to the right beam or post, a structure risen up in ash and smoke. He had the sudden urge to find that linchpin, that column or stanchion or joist, for if he collapsed the place it might swallow up the ghosts that haunted him, the shadows that roamed in his skull. All forgotten in a tangle of timber-bones.
Instead he pulled the car into gear and slipped away, easy on the throttle, as if even the throat of the engine could splinter the foundation stones.
The town square was empty, the grass browning at the courthouse steps, the darkened windowpanes of shop after shop rattling as he passed. He crossed the dam, the lights of lakefront houses scampering in and out of the trees. In the rearview mirror a panorama of the town in miniature, diminishing, the yellow-starred constellation of clapboards and shacks and mills powered by a hundred thousand acre-feet of river pent against the Gumtree Dam.
He was a mile out from town when the headlights appeared on his tail, growing fast, and he knew they were the same ones from the week before. The car rode right up on him, blasting high-beams into his mirrors like an insult.
Rory downshifted and stomped the gas.
The motor bawled, shoving him into his seat, the speedometer spinning wildly clockwise. The roadside trees shuddered, liquefying with speed, blurred to torrents of a parted sea. The machine was vibrating on every side of him, galled to fury, and he was not slow now, not crippled. The world was unspooling before him, delivered at the beckon of his foot. The trees fell away, the night rushing in over the fields, and he knew that old tobacco road was coming up.
He rounded a wide bend and began braking, downshifting, blipping the throttle with his heel to keep the rear wheels from locking up. He swung the wheel hard onto the red road and laid into the gas, shooting a rooster-tail of dust. His eyes flicked to the mirrors. The twin lights of his pursuer burst through the rolling cloud of his wake, undaunted. The road straightened, the tires kicking sideways over softer patches in the clay, Rory fighting the wheel to keep the car out of the ditches. The T-junction with the logging road was a half mile ahead, mere seconds. He sang between a pair of curing barns, tin walls flashing, and then he was out of the fields and into the hardwoods, trees thrust in phalanxes on every side. He spun the car onto the gravel of the logging road, balancing the machine on the very edge of itself, sliding, and came out of the junction hard on the throttle to find a roadblock waiting for him. Two cars parked nose-to-nose between the trees, flanked by government men with hats and ties and guns.
He flicked the wheel one way, then hard the other, stomping the hand brake to cut loose the rear end. The tail swung violently against the weight of the engine, the car reversing itself in a spray of thrown dust and gravel, and he hit the gas going back the way he’d come, peppering the roadblock with pebbles and grit. He broke from the swirl of dust and saw his pursuer turned broadside in the road, penning him like a bull in a stockade. It was Cooley Muldoon in his big green Hudson, smiling.
Rory started to let off the gas, beaten, then didn’t. He drove the throttle to the floor. The smile drained from Cooley’s face. He realized his mistake. He’d turned his driver’s door to the front. He looked down at his gearshift, his arm working frantically, but there was nowhere to go. There were trees to both sides, crowding the road. The Hudson jerked, the brake lights flared—he’d stalled.
Rory was almost upon him, straight-legging the accelerator, when he mashed the brakes with both feet. The coupe hove hard onto its nose and plowed down the road, shuddering and rattling, squabbling for traction in the gravel. Slowing, slowing. The Hudson reared large in the headlights. The Ford bumped the driver’s door with a jolt. A hard sock in the shoulder, like it had only been a joke.
It hadn’t.
Cooley spilled out of the shotgun door and bolted upright, pointing over the roof, his face skewed monstrously under the moon.
“You’re dead, Docherty! You hear me? Bring it on the track and I’ll kill you legal. They’ll be sucking you out that shit-can with a vacuum hose.”
Rory leaned out the window, one hand palming the wheel.
“Wait till I tell everybody old Cooley Muldoon’s a federal bootlicker.”
Cooley started around the car, his hand on his knife.
“You won’t be telling shit, Docherty.”
The tax agents arrived first, crowding the windows on every side, all barrels and shouts. Rory placed his hands behind his head, winking at Cooley.
“See I won’t.”
The agents reached in and yanked him from the car. There were four of them. They pushed him up against the door and kicked his legs out wide and one of them went right for the pistol housed in his wooden leg. That surprised him. The agent dropped the magazine and worked the slide, jacking the chambered round into his palm. Rory watched him over his shoulder. The man was not large, but he had the close, balled should
ers of a footballer and a handlebar mustache. His hair was regulation cut, slicked from a part that gleamed like a scar on his head, like someone once tried to cleave him and failed.
Rory sniffed.
“Kingman.”
The man looked up. His tie was wide and flat, his tweed trousers worn high-waisted and trim, their bottoms tucked into a pair of polished jump boots.
“You know my name. That’s good.”
“I knew they were sending some new revenue man down. I didn’t figure him for the spitting image of the Archduke of Prussia.”
“Ah, you know your European history.”
“I know it didn’t end so good for Franz.”
“Yes, his assassination set off the powder keg of Europe, a war the likes of which the world had never seen.”
“Well, somebody went to school.”
“Yale.”
“They teach you to use turncoats to run interceptor?”
Kingman flicked the extra shell into the trees.
“Perks to working for Uncle Sam, you might be surprised.”
“Oh, I’m familiar. Got me this fancy leg, for instance.” He knocked his wooden leg against the fender.
“Let up on him. We know he can’t run off.”
The agent retracted his forearm from the back of Rory’s neck. Rory stood and shook himself off.
“You must of pissed somebody off, they sent you down here.”
Kingman smiled.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“No?”
“I have my uses. You see, there’s been some mythmaking going on in the papers of late. Saying there’s some kind of a camaraderie between you boys and us. Some kind of code. But we both know that’s a lot of bull, don’t we? We know one of your kind would kill one of mine just as quick as he’d take a piss, and has. So they decided it was time to quit pretending. That’s why they brought me in. I’m not the pretending type.”
“Some speech,” said Rory. “You practice that with your prick in hand?”
Kingman smiled, planting his knuckles high on his waist. Rory saw he had a commando knife sheathed on the right side of his shoulder rig. A stiletto blade, double-edged, designed to kill. Members of the Office of Strategic Services had carried them—the OSS—Ivy League operatives who parachuted alone into France, organizing resistance groups and blowing bridges, assassinating enemy officers and collaborators.