Had I, I wondered, fallen into the sweet hands of a killer? Hooker hadn’t looked to me like someone who would kill, but what does the kind of man who kills look like?
“What happened to him?” I asked, somewhat naïvely.
“Best part of him run down his old man’s leg.” Hooker answered.
I could see the whole body now. From where I sat, a distance away in the near-darkness, I saw he was naked, except for a pair of running shoes that were too big for him and made him look clownish. I wondered if Al had been naked at his moment of death, if he’d stripped down to fix in the only useable vein he had left, or if Hooker had stripped him of any whiff of dignity he might have possessed.
Hooker sounded matter-of-fact. “Last night, when I left the hall. He’d OD’ed. I dragged him out here because I didn’t want Gracie having to deal with it. Just because his life’s over, doesn’t mean hers has to be.”
Even when we harden, we each turn to stone in our separate ways. I had wanted to feel sorry for Al the first time we’d met, and now I found myself trying not to feel sorry for the cold skin-and-bones body of a man I’d never warmed to in life.
“I need your help,” Hooker repeated. I slid off the cold toilet and walked over to where he knelt, stuffing Al’s head in a garbage bag and tying the rope around his throat. He took hold of Al’s torso; I grabbed the ankles, recoiling, at once, at the feel of Al’s skin.
“Keep hanging with me . . . you and me, we could go places,” he said.
“Like where? The electric chair?” Helping a friend move a body no doubt made me an accessory to murder. Hooker seemed irked when I hesitated, before taking Al’s legs in my hands. I said what did he expect me to do, I’d never lifted a body out of a refrigerator before.
Al was heavier than I’d imagined a dead body to be (I’d always wondered why it took six pallbearers to carry a coffin to its grave) and one of his shoes came off as we carried him through the doorway into the carving shed. I dropped the legs to the ground again. Hooker said “not much further to go,” and stooped to retrieve the shoe.
He pushed the mudroom door open with his foot, then unlatched the back of the hearse so we could slide Al in. What you going to do now, dumpster his dead ass? Frenchy asked?
Rainy told the twins they’d better not touch or she’d hold their hands flat on a hot stove element with an egg lifter until they learned some respect. Frenchy admonished her. Threatenin your kids wid a good burnin, that be way-killer not cool.
Al’s other shoe fell off as we set him down between the rollers. Toop swooped it up and limped off into the bushes, his ears sticking straight out on either side of his head, as if he were about to lift off above the trees.
“There’s something unnormal about that dog,” Hooker said.
Vernal had a client once who hunted down a renowned Nazi war criminal and, when he found him, put a bullet between his eyes. “There is no evil in reducing life to other, more enduring forms,” Vernal said, in his most famous address to a jury. “Homicide, in this case, was not a sin. It was, I submit, a necessary resistance against an ossified form of existence.”
He stole those lines from another book, of course, but he said no one ever went to prison for failing to be original. I got Toop back in the car, using Al’s other shoe as a lure. Hooker seemed to relax once we were on our way and had left the village behind. He even joked that we ought to stick the “On Appointment” sign in the window. I wasn’t in the mood.
I didn’t speak or take my eyes off the road after that. Hooker made small talk, about the sea lion and other creatures washing up dead on the beach, “an albatross, couple of eagles, a ton of seals,” and wondered if it had anything to do with the eerie weather conditions. The only dead thing Hooker didn’t seem concerned with was the body in the back.
We flew by the Yaka Wind Honour Site. The cloud cover had lifted and when we passed the first of the roadside shrines, the wreaths jumped out in our headlights.
The sky stayed clear for a while longer, even as we got to the top of Garbage Dump Hill, as if the moon, the stars, and the planets had all conspired with Hooker to give him light in darkness. He told me to pull over when we got to the lay-by. I killed the motor, and sat staring straight out over the ocean. Hooker was quiet for a while, then asked me if I knew how to tell the planets from stars: I said “no idea”, my mind elsewhere, on more urgent matters, like not getting arrested. “By their reflections in the water,” Hooker said. “A planet makes a straight line. A star’s reflection dances. See, up there? Take a look.”
It wasn’t the moment for an astronomy lesson. Hooker reached over and put his good hand on my arm, in a motion halfway on its journey to being a caress. “All the shit we’re made of? It comes from those dying stars. We’re made out of stars, you and me.”
When I didn’t respond he turned his head towards the side window and looked out over the water again. “Something bugging you?”
I stared at my hands and began picking at the little bits of skin coming away around my nails. Hooker let out a deep breath. Toop looked at me, the worried ‘W’ between his eyes, and then over at Hooker, as if trying to decide which of us needed him most. “Go on, out you get,” I said, looking at Hooker and nudging Toop out the door.
Hooker asked for my help again, getting the body out and hauling it as far as the “Keep Our Dump Clean” sign. He went back for the gas can. “Don’t worry, I always clean up after myself,” he said.
I left him by the side of the road, stooped over Al’s body like one of the dark birds at his feeder.
Rainy and Frenchy climbed onto the front seat beside me. Rainy curled up with her head in my lap, and Frenchy rolled down her window so she could stick her head outside.
Them stars up there? she said, pointing out over the sea where Hooker had shown me the dancing reflections. They be in the sky same night I be born? Frenchy, I knew, had been born in a mental hospital, where you couldn’t see any stars. They’d loosened her mother’s straightjacket to help her bear down.
“Same stars, same sky,” I said.
How come you figure there be so many stars up there? she continued.
Rainy made a hissing noise between her teeth. God figure he put them there so we have light out after dark.
Frenchy said she’d always wondered why God created light in the first place, before he made anything that had eyes.
“Don’t start,” I said. I could hear the helplessness in my voice.
Why you don’t drop us by the side of the ditch and we bail ourselves on home . . . Rainy said, her voice trailing pitifully off. By this time we were pulling into our driveway.
Too late to bail, girl, Frenchy said. We be in Paradise now. Ain’t nowhere left to go.
Paradise be a whole lot more like paradise, it got TV, said Rainy.
Frenchy had never cared much about TV. I don’t miss it, she said as I manoeuvred the hearse into the barn. You ever seen a baby spit up on TV?
What that stupposed to mean? Rainy asked.
You ever see a fat black girl win a beauty contest on TV?
Rainy blinked and wiped away part of her face. Nobody be fat on TV.
What I sayin. No one on TV be actual. They got a problem, they solve it by talkin, not by smackin or shootin each other in the head.
I told them I needed to be left alone, but privacy wasn’t a concept either Rainy or Frenchy understood; they had begun to view our friendship as a kind of medicine they couldn’t live without. They followed me into the house, then upstairs, sticking to me like peanut butter to the gums, refusing to be quiet, and interpreting my need for silence as evidence of a troubled mind. I sat on the bed without taking my coat off, reached into my pocket and felt around for the shoe I’d found on the beach. It brought me closer to Angel, present always in his absence, teetering on the unseen edge of every moment.
I drew a bath and sat soaking, my thoughts returning, also, to the night I’d spent with Hooker Moon, our trek up the beach this morning, an
d Al’s body, naked except for a pair of shoes. I thought of this, too: the foot that had fit the baby shoe meant for an angel — that foot would grow to one day fit a shoe the size Al had lost.
Rainy came and sat beside me while I soaked in the tepid water. Shoe fit, we find another one just like it, she said, eventually.
PART SIX
To discover the true enemy, the holy war, the good fight,
shift your eyes.
— Sam Keen, Face of the Enemy
THE WIND RAGED ALL NIGHT AND THE rain blew in torrents across the land. I woke in the morning with the same sense of vertigo I’d experienced in the airport the day of my escape, and again waking in Hooker’s cabin on Kliminawhit.
In my dream I’d been driving down a highway in an unfamiliar country. I turned at a sign saying, “Dead End Road Please D i e Slowly”, (the ‘r’ and the ‘v’ in Drive whited out), and lured by VACANCY flashing on and off in blue neon, checked in for the night at the Cause of Death Motel.
The manager, wearing a three-piece pinstriped suit with an incongruous tie — blood red with dollar signs, dice and martini glasses splashed all over it — asked if I would care to join him in a bowl of vodka soup and said he didn’t mind smoking in the room “long as you don’t burn the house down.” The hands on his watch ticked counter-clockwise. I could feel his smile on the back of my head. A six-pack of beer, Death Lite, sat on the counter next to a stack of invoices stamped “Overdue.”
“Help me,” I tried to whisper.
The manager lit a cigarette, and sucked the smoke in through teeth that were stained as yellow as his moustache. I pushed the smoke away with my hand, and tried to communicate, by using sign language, that I needed a place to hide.
“Everybody wants help, usually when it’s too late,” the manager said. He preferred doing business with the dead because with them there were no obligations, even though they could be a joyless lot. “A corpse can shed tears for hours after death, but most can’t manage a smile.”
He looked at me again, to see if I smiled, but my face stayed closed like a fist. “You just visiting?” he said.
I said I didn’t know anymore. I hated that circumstances could take away your life without even killing you.
Beneath the warm and mannered smile, his eyes seemed to ask, “What about your death is going to be memorable?” “People want most what they pretend to hate,” he said, with a dreamy lack of emphasis. He poked out his cigarette on the back of his hand, then passed me a leaflet that he said might help me make up my mind. “There’s this to think about,” he said. “During your lifetime you take 500 million breaths. Where would you most like to be when you breathe your last?” He reached for a bottle of beer opened it with his teeth, and poured it into a champagne flute. When I took it from him, his fingers were colder than the chilled stem of the glass.
“To the dead and the undead,” he said. “Our unholy alliance.”
I drank the flat, tasteless beer, and glanced over the pamphlet. I could choose the Black Room if I wanted privacy, the medicine cabinet in the bathroom being stocked with every kind of narcotic, measured out in lethal doses, or the Green Room where a chair had been placed in the centre of the floor in front of a TV screen, and a rope, with a noose at one end, dangled from a beam. In the Red Room it got messier.
I left the leaflet on the counter and walked down what seemed like an endless hall with a door at the end of it. The door was ajar. In my dream I started spinning as I entered the White Room, where Angel lay strapped to a mortuary slab. A circular saw hung from the ceiling. Each time I took a breath, the saw that sounded like the cry of a peacock was lowered, so slowly it would take a lifetime — 500 million breaths — before it would sever the spine of my beloved who had, only moments ago, been born. I don’t remember how I got there, but I found myself back outside, sitting in the hearse, On Appointment in the window. Above the sign “Cause of Death Motel”, the word SORRY had replaced the neon VACANCY. I opened one eye and saw Rainy standing over me, chewing the ends of her dead hair. Time warp fast when you having fun, she said, trying to blink. She caught one eyeball mid-cheek, and popped it back in its socket.
I lay without moving until the dizziness passed. Frenchy insisted on serving me breakfast in bed: a limp salad, a diet Pepsi, and a dill pickle. I tried to eat the pickle until Frenchy complained the crunching hurt her ears and she’d run out of vampire’s tea-bags (her name for the tampons) to block out the noise.
Over the next few days the storm showed no sign of abating. The house swayed and creaked in the wind and the rain drove at the windows, blinding them. Whenever a gust shook the house, the twins began wailing in surround sound and the HE made the rat-tat-tat sound of a machine gun followed by the pinging of bullets hitting rocks. When he couldn’t get Frenchy’s attention he buried himself in his coffin, going glock-glock-glock, until she scooped up her damaged boy and rocked him in her arms, soothing him with her inexhaustible stock of sniper rifles. Rainy tried to drown out the wind by reciting nursery rhymes:
Yo! Yo! Ebony sheep
Got me some wool?
Yo muhfo, you muhfo . . .
Muh, one of the twins bleated, as Rainy stopped to take a breath and the wind whipped the roof so hard a row of shakes was torn loose, bouncing off our windows on their way to the ground.
She just say what I think she say? Frenchy asked, letting the HE fall from her arms onto the floor. She just say her first half word!
Say Muh, best believe, Rainy said. I’d never thought I would hear Rainy sounding like such a proud mother.
Rainy told us she had something else to brag about: she was about to become a grandmother. I studied the twins closely. Their bellies under their all-enveloping robes had swollen in unison, from zero to nine months, almost overnight.
On the seventh day the wind died though the rain continued to fall all through the weekend. I booked a space on the next scheduled sailing of the Island Spirit, which had been sitting at the dock for ten days due to gale-force winds in the straits.
To make ready for the journey the HE dressed in a white, musk-smelling robe and wrapped his face in a checkered red-and-white kaffiyeh to conceal his features. He wore a key as big as the care key Gracie had worn to activate Baby-Think-It-Over, on a chain around his neck. The rat, sensing the twin’s hatred of him, stayed hidden inside the HE’s robe.
Rainy did up her hair in a bongolock with a built-in zipper that opened to reveal a foot-long python. Say Muh (the name had stuck) lay in her coffin dressed in a floor-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse embroidered with the slogan, I Have Special Permission to Enter Heaven, but her no-name sister was nowhere to be seen. Rainy figured she had manifested herself into the python for the trip. Be what the angry dead do.
“Women suicide bombers are especially desirable because, like stealth bombers, they are much less detectable. Women more easily conceal bombs under their clothes, passing themselves off as pregnant.” I listened to Radio Peace and Love as it faded in and out while I scrubbed the back of the hearse, where Al’s body had taken its last ride, then slid one of the woven willow coffins onto the rollers — the HE and the twins, in their various manifestations, would have to share. I filled the space on either side of the rollers with pillows for Rainy and Frenchy. Rainy said she felt seasick already, remembering the last voyage we took, when they’d been stuck below deck in the dead-wagon. Rainy said when Frenchy’d told her we’d be going to an island in the Pacific she’d envisioned spending eternity under a palm tree drinking piña coladas, not under a “Chrimas” tree growing moss. I left a week’s supply of food in the barn for Aged Orange, though I suspected the raccoons would eat what the peacocks didn’t steal first.
“Drive Carefully: It Is Not Only a Car That Can be Recalled by Its Maker”, read the sign at the Christian vegetable stand, reminding me I was supposed to have made an appointment at Chubb’s to have a brake job.
We boarded the Spirit after a short wait at the ferry terminal where we
had to thread our way through a crowd of protesters calling themselves the Right to Turkey Lifers, whose cause it was to raise turkey-consciousness in the weeks leading up to Christmas. One of the demonstrators tapped on my window; I opened it, partially, to be polite, and she handed me a pamphlet. The Turkey Lifers intended to inject tainted blood into any Christmas turkey that made it onto Natural Lee’s meat counter. The demonstrator said that persecuting these shy birds had become another unhealthy aggressive American tradition; she hoped to educate people and stop the “wholesale slaughter of turkeys,” and asked me to consider stuffing a vegetable marrow this year instead.
I didn’t leave the car deck right away, but sat listening to the safety announcements. The world had become more preoccupied than ever with safety, and a part of me yearned for the freedom I had had, in comparison, when I was a hostage on Tranquilandia. The only people who spoke about safety on that lawless island were the drug barons, who equated safety with something found on a gun and advocated making the world a safer place for crime.
“We regret, no pets will be allowed above the car deck except guide dogs for the visually impaired,” the announcement continued. Rainy would only agree to leave her python in the car if the HE left his rat. I told them to work it out, and took the steep flight of stairs to the purser’s office on the ship’s main deck.
Rainy and Frenchy joined me shortly afterwards as I waited in line for the key to my cabin. The HE and Say Muh had gone to steal snacks in the ship’s cafeteria, Frenchy said, and Rainy worried that they were up to no good. Frenchy said the HE wasn’t about to blow anybody up, not if there wouldn’t be enough casualties to justify wasting the explosives.
One day they gon kill us all down, said Rainy, who didn’t like the idea of her grandchild being used as a grenade before she had even popped out. On Tranquilandia, I recalled, it was considered the most efficient form of birth control — to kill guerrilleras while they were still in the womb.
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