In wet weather, the Congaree swells and floods the swamp, dumping nutrients on the plain. The result was the enormous trees that lined the river, their boles monstrous and swollen, their foliage so wide that at times it created a canopy over the flow, darkening and shading the waters beneath. Hurricane Hugo might have claimed some of the largest trees as casualties when it tore through the swamp, but this was still a place to make a man catch his breath at the size and scale of the great forest through which he was passing.
The Congaree marks the borders of Richland and Calhoun Counties, its meanderings determining the limits of local political power, police jurisdictions, ordinances, and a hundred other tiny factors that influence the day-to-day lives of those who live within its reach. I had traveled some twelve miles along it when I came to a huge fallen cypress that jutted about halfway into the river. This, the old boatman had told me, marked the end of the state land and the beginning of the private tract, a section of swamp just under two miles long. Somewhere in there, probably close to the river, was Tereus’s home. I only hoped that it wouldn’t be too hard to find.
I tied up the boat at the cypress, then jumped for the bank. The chorus of crickets nearby grew suddenly silent, then picked up again as I began to move away. I stayed with the bank, looking for signs of a trail, but could find nothing. Tereus had kept his presence here as low-key as possible. Even if trails had once existed before he was jailed, they were long overgrown by now and he had made no effort to clear them again. I stood at the bank and tried to find landmarks that would allow me to get my bearings when I made my way back to the river, then headed into the swamp.
I sniffed the air, hoping to detect wood smoke or cooking, but I could smell only damp and vegetation. I passed through a forest of sweet gums and water oaks, and water tupelos thick with dark purple fruit. Lower on the ground there was pawpaw and alder and great American holly bushes, the earth so thick with shrubs that all I could see was green and brown, the ground wet and slippery with decaying leaves and vegetation. At one point I almost walked into the web of a spiny orb weaver, the spider hanging like a small dark star in the center of its own galaxy of influence. It wasn’t dangerous, but there were other spiders here that were and I had endured enough of spiders in recent months to last me a lifetime. I picked up a branch about eighteen inches long and used it to strike out in front of me when I passed through stands of higher shrubs and trees.
I had been walking for about twenty minutes when I saw the house. It was an old cottage, based around a simple hall-and-parlor plan, two rooms wide and one room deep, but it had been expanded by the addition of an enclosed front porch and a long, narrow extension at the rear. There were signs of recent repairs to its heavy timber framing, and the central chimney had recently been repointed, but from the front the house still looked virtually the same as it had when it was first constructed, probably during the last century when the slaves who built the levees chose to stay on in the Congaree. There were no signs of life: the washing line that hung between two trees was bare and no sounds came from within. At the back of the house was a small shed, which probably housed the generator.
I climbed the rough-hewn stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. There was no reply. I walked to the window and put my face close to the glass. Inside, I could see a table and four chairs, an old couch and easy chair, and a small kitchen area. An open doorway led into the main bedroom, and a second doorway had been created at the back of the house leading into the rear extension. That door was closed. I knocked one last time, then walked around to the back of the house. From somewhere in the swamp, I heard the sound of gunshots, their noise muffled by the damp air. Hunters, I guessed.
The windows to the extension had been blacked out. I thought for a moment that there were dark drapes obscuring them, but when I drew closer I saw the lines that the brush had drawn through the paint. There was a door at the end. For the final time, I knocked and called before trying the knob. The door opened and I stepped into the room.
The first thing that I noticed was the smell. It was strong and faintly medicinal, although I detected something herbal and grassy to it rather than the sterile scent of pharmaceutical products. It seemed to fill the long room, which was furnished with a cot, a TV, and a set of cheap bookshelves uncluttered by any books. Instead, there were piles of out-of-date soap opera magazines and wrinkled, much-read copies of People and Celebrity.
Every bare space on the walls had been covered by photographs culled from the magazines. There were models and actresses and, in one corner, what looked like a shrine to Oprah. Most of the women in the photos were black: I recognized Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, the R&B group TLC, Jada Pinkett Smith, even Tina Turner. Over by the TV were three or four photographs from the society pages of local newspapers. Each showed the same person: Marianne Larousse. There was a thin coating of wood dust on the photos, but the blacking on the windows had prevented any fading. In one, Marianne was smiling in the middle of a group of pretty young women at her graduation. Another had been taken at a charity auction, a third at a party held by the Larousses to raise funds for the Republican Party. In every photo, Marianne Larousse’s beauty made her stand out like a beacon.
I stepped closer to the cot. The medicinal smell was stronger here and the sheets were stained with brown patches like spilt coffee. There were also lighter blotches, some of them veined with blood. I gently touched the bedsheet. The stains felt moist beneath my fingers. I moved away and found the small bathroom, and the source of the smell. A basin was filled with a thick brown substance that had the consistency of wallpaper paste and dripped viscously from my fingers as I held them up before me. The bathroom itself had a free-standing bath, with a handrail attached to the wall and a second support rail screwed into the floor beside it. There was a clean toilet and the floor had been expertly, if cheaply, tiled.
There was no mirror.
I stepped back into the bedroom and checked the single closet. What looked like white and brown sheets lay piled on the floor and shelves, but once again I could find no mirror.
From outside, I heard the shots come again, closer now. I made a cursory search of the rest of the house, registering the man’s clothing in the closet in the main bedroom and the woman’s clothing, cheap and dated, that had been packed into an old sea chest; the tinned foods in the kitchen area; the scrubbed pots and pans. In a corner behind the couch I found a camp bed, but it was covered in dust and had clearly not been used in many years. Everything else was clean, spotlessly so. There was no telephone, and when I tried the light switch the lights came on low, bathing the room in a faint orange glow. I switched them off again, opened the front door, and stepped out onto the porch.
There were three men moving through the trees. Two of them I recognized as the men from the bar the night before, both the skinhead and the older man still wearing the same clothes. They had probably slept in them. The third was the overweight man who had been at the airport with his hunting partner on the day that I had first arrived in Charleston. He wore a brown shirt with his rifle slung over his right shoulder. He spotted me first, raised his right hand, and then all three paused at the tree line. None of us spoke for a moment. It seemed it was up to me to break the silence.
‘I think you boys may be hunting out of season,’ I said.
The oldest of the three, the man who had restrained the skinhead in the bar, smiled almost sadly.
‘What we’re hunting is always in season,’ he replied. ‘Anybody in there?’
I shook my head.
‘Figured you’d say that, even if there was,’ he said. ‘You ought to be more careful who you hire your boats from, Mr. Parker. That, or you ought to pay them a little extra to keep their mouths shut.’
He held his rifle at port arms, but I saw his finger move from outside to inside the trigger guard.
‘Come on down here,’ he said. ‘We got some business with you.’
I was already moving into the cottage when the
first shot hit the door frame. I raced straight through, pulling my gun from its holster, and cleared the side of the generator hut as the second shot blew a chunk of bark from an oak tree to my right.
And then I was in the forest, the canopy rising above me until it was about a hundred feet above my head. I brushed through alders and holly, my head down. I slipped once on the slick leaves and landed hard on my side. I paused for a moment, but could hear no sounds of pursuit from behind me. I saw something brown about one hundred yards behind me, moving slowly through the trees: the fat man. He stood out only because he was stealing across the green of a holly bush. The others would be close by, listening for me. They would try to encircle me, then close in. I took a deep breath, drew a bead on the brown shirt, then squeezed the trigger slowly.
A red jet erupted from the fat man’s chest. His body twisted and he slumped back heavily into the bushes behind him, the branches bending and cracking beneath his weight. Twin booms came from my left and right, followed by more shots, and suddenly the air was filled with splinters and falling leaves.
I ran.
I ran to the high ground, where the red maples and ironwoods grew, trying to avoid the open areas of the understory and sticking instead to places thick with bush and vines. I closed my jacket despite the warmth in order to hide my white T-shirt and stopped from time to time, trying to detect signs of my pursuers, but wherever they were, they were staying quiet and low. I smelled urine – a deer maybe, or even a bobcat – and found traces of an animal trail. I didn’t know where I was going: if I could find one of the boardwalk trails it would lead me back to the ranger station, but it would also leave me dangerously exposed to the men behind me. That was assuming that I could even find the boardwalk this far in. The wind had been blowing northeast across the Congaree when I was making my way to the cottage, and now blew lightly at my back. I stayed with the animal trail, hoping to trace my way back to the river. If I got lost in the Congaree, I would become easy prey for these men.
I tried to disguise the signs of my passage, but the ground was soft and I seemed to leave sunken footprints and flattened shrubbery as I went. After about fifteen minutes, I came to an old fallen cypress, its trunk blasted in two by lightning and a huge crater beneath its overhanging roots. Shrubs had already begun to grow around it and in the depths of the crater, rising to meet the roots and creating a kind of barred hollow. I leaned against it to catch my breath, then unzipped my jacket, tossed it on the trunk, then stripped off my T-shirt. I leaned into the hollow, scaring the beetles, and draped my T-shirt midway down, snagging it among the twisted roots. Then I put my jacket back on and retreated into the undergrowth. I lay flat on the ground, and waited.
It was the skinhead who appeared first. I caught a glimpse of the egglike pallor of his skull behind a loblolly pine as he peered out, then ducked back in again. He had spotted the shirt. I wondered how dumb he was.
Dumb, but not dumb enough. He let out a low whistle and I saw a stand of alder twitch slightly, although I could see no sign of the man who had caused the movement. I wiped the sweat from my brow against the sleeve of my jacket to stop the worst of it from dropping into my eyes. Again, the movement came from behind the pine. I aimed and blinked the last of my sweat as the skinhead burst from cover, then stopped dead, seemingly distracted by something nearby.
Instantly, he was pulled off his feet and yanked backward into the undergrowth. It happened so quickly that I was unsure of what I had seen. I thought for a moment that he might have slipped, and was half expecting to see him rise again, but he didn’t reappear. From near the alders came a whistle, but there was no response. The skinhead’s companion whistled again. All was quiet. By then I was already retreating, crawling backward on my belly, desperate to get away from here, from the last of the hunters and from whatever was now pursuing us both through the sun-dappled green of the Congaree.
I had belly-crawled about fifty feet before I felt confident enough to rise. From somewhere ahead of me came the sound of water. From behind me I heard gunshots, but they were not aimed in my direction. I didn’t stop, even when the stump of a broken branch ripped through my sleeve and drew a ragged line of blood across my upper arm. My head was up and I was breathing hard, a stitch building in my side, when I saw the flash of white to my right. Part of me tried to reassure myself that it was a bird of some kind: an egret, perhaps, or an immature heron. But there had been something about the way that it moved, a halting, loping progress, that was partly an attempt at concealment and partly a physical disability. When I tried to find it again among the undergrowth I could not, but I knew it was there. I could feel it watching me.
I moved on.
I could see the water gleaming through the trees, could hear it flowing. Lying about thirty feet to my left was a boat: it wasn’t my boat, but at least two of the men who had brought it here were already dead and the third was somewhere behind me, running for his life. I stepped into a clearing dominated by cypress knees, the strange, vaguely conical shapes bursting from the soil like some miniature landscape from another world. I threaded my way through them and was almost at the boat when the dark-haired man emerged from the trees to my left. He no longer had his rifle, but he did have a knife, and he was already springing for me when I raised my gun and fired. I was off balance and the shot struck him in the side, breaking his stride but not stopping him. Before I could get off a second shot he was on top of me, his left arm forcing my gun hand away from him while I tried to arrest the progress of the knife. I aimed my knee at his injured side, but he anticipated the movement and used it against me, spinning me around and striking out at my left foot. I toppled and fell down as his boot connected with my hand, knocking the gun painfully from my fingers. I kicked out at him again as he descended on me, this time connecting with his wounded side. Spittle shot from his mouth and his eyes opened wide in surprise and pain, but by then his knee was on my chest and I was once again trying to keep that knife away from me. Still, I could see that he was dazed, and the wound in his side was bleeding freely. I suddenly eased some of the pressure on his arms and, as he fell forward, my head came up hard and connected with his nose. He cried out and I forced him off me, then rose up, knocked his feet out from under him, and slammed him back to the ground with all of the force that I could muster.
There was a wet crunching sound when he hit the earth and something exploded from his chest, as if one of his ribs had broken free and blasted through the skin. I stepped back and watched the blood running off the cypress knee as the man pinned upon it struggled to rise. He reached out and touched the wood, his fingers coming back red. He held them up to me, as if to show me what I had done, and then his head fell back and he died.
I wiped my sleeve against my face. It came back damp with sweat and filth. I turned to get my gun and saw the shrouded figure watching me from the trees.
It was a woman. I could see the shape of her breasts beneath the material, although her face remained covered. I called her name.
‘Melia,’ I said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
I advanced toward her just as the shadow fell over me. I looked behind me. Tereus had a hook in his left hand. I just had time to register the crude sap in his right as it flew at me through the air, and then all was dark.
25
It was the smell that brought me back, the smell of the medicinal herbs that had been used to make the unguent for the woman’s skin. I was lying in the kitchen area of the cottage, my hands and legs bound tightly with rope. I raised my head and the back of my skull nudged the wall. The pain was bad. My shoulders and back ached, and my jacket was gone. I guessed that I had lost it as Tereus dragged me back to the cabin. I had vague memories of passing beneath tall trees, the sunlight spearing me through the canopy. My cell phone and gun were both missing. I lay on the floor for what seemed like hours.
In time, there was movement from the doorway and Tereus appeared, surrounded by fading sunlight. He had a spade in his hands, which he rest
ed against the doorjamb before entering the cabin and squatting down before me. I could see no trace of the woman, but I sensed her nearby and guessed that she was back in her own darkened room, surrounded by images of a physical beauty she would never again be able to claim as her own.
‘Welcome back, brother,’ said Tereus. He removed his dark glasses. Up close, the membrane that coated his eyes was clearer. It reminded me of tapetum, the reflective surface that some nocturnal animals develop to magnify low light and improve their night vision. He filled a water bottle from the faucet, then brought it to me and tilted it to my mouth. I drank until the water ran down my chin. I coughed, and winced at the pain it caused in my head.
‘I’m not your brother.’
‘You weren’t my brother, you’d be dead by now.’
‘You killed them all, didn’t you?’
He leaned in close to me. ‘These people got to learn. This is a world of balances. They took a life, destroyed another. They got to learn about the White Road, got to see what’s waiting for them there, got to pass over and become part of it.’
I looked away from him toward the window, and saw that the light was failing. Soon, it would be dark.
‘You rescued her,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I couldn’t save her sister, but I could save her.’
I saw regret, and more: I saw love.
‘She was burned bad, but stayed under the surface, and the underground streams carried her out. I found her stretched over a rock, then I took her home and me and my momma, we took care of her. And when my momma died, she took care of herself for a year until I got released from jail. Now I’m back.’
‘Why didn’t you just go to the police, tell them what happened?’
‘That ain’t the way these things is done. Anyhow, her sister’s body was gone. It was a dark night, and she was suffering. She can’t even talk – she had to write their names for me – and even if she could tell who they was, who would believe it of young, rich white men like that? I ain’t even sure what she thinks no more. The pain drove her crazy.’
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