She knew him, knew his nature.
He had been a man, but now was trapped in the in-between, the emptiness between times and universes and conditions, the ultimate nowhere, and he was trying to make a place for himself, to haul himself back into the here-and-now from the not-there-and-never. Because he was not quite here or anywhere, he had become more than simply a man who once had been—he was now all those almost-things that aligned with his nonbeing, that had conspired with his thoughts to transform and destroy him while he lived. The desolate ghost of lost love. Desire reduced to madness. Yearning honed to violent need. Regret fractioned into a bitter keening trouble along the nerves. She saw as through his eyes a patch of clarity, the shape of a locket picture opened in the gray surround, an Acadian woman with chestnut hair. Not a virgin—far from it—yet virginal to his touch. Vida knew he was trying to match her up with the woman. Not their looks—though they might have been reflections of one another—but their hearts.
Was she, like that woman, still open to love?
For an instant she believed she was. And he believed it—he recognized her. She experienced his shock at the recognition, his dawning happiness. But then he became confused and she felt the cold burn of his displeasure when he found she loved another. The compression of his anger squeezed her thin and juiceless, until she was a pale thread woven through his shadow heart. She began to lose consciousness, to go tumbling away from the turmoil of their thoughts, mingled like blood and water. But even as she faded, she was given to know his name and from this she understood what had happened. Understood the perverted trick that love and time and maybe some speckled froglike demon of the mist hunched high in a sentry tree overlooking the town had played on them. She tried to tell him none of this was necessary. She loved only him and no other. To prove it she said his name over and over until it had the sound of a grackle cawing in mockery at her fall.
Jack, she said, jack jack jack jack jack jack…
She woke standing and in a state of extreme arousal. Naked. Warmth and wetness between her thighs. The place in which she stood, a filthy cabin with a sagging roof, garbage everywhere, her new green dress crumpled, adding a splotch of bright color to a nest of mattress stuffing and rags…None of it bothered her. She laughed and touched herself, closed her eyes when a hot charge shot through her belly. She kept on touching herself until her knees weakened and she had to lie down. The grimy bedclothes seemed to crawl up around her and give her a cuddle.
She closed her eyes again, waiting for him to come, hurrying him with her wish. She’d force him to recognize her again. Make him acknowledge that he had not been betrayed, that she was here for him and would give herself utterly, freely, and without inhibition. He’d realize what had happened to him, to her, to them, and then this craziness could stop. When she felt him near she let her knees fall apart and held out her arms, but kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to see that gray stain—she wanted the man he had become, the Form integrated with the flesh, blue-eyed and deep, not this paring of both that had been splintered off by the shock of broken love, the product of a wrongly set spell. He settled atop her, less substantial than a man; hut in her arms he gained solidity, manifesting the lean structures and prodding heat that she associated with him. When he plunged inside, a flood of joy and power flowed with him. But as he began to thrust, he thrust the rest of himself inside. All the poison of distraction and bitterness. The raw spoilage of love. He used her violently, blaming her for not being who she was, not seeing her…seeing instead an inadequate substitute, another Midsummer Queen. Never the right one. He battered at her, nearly stopping her breath. He had forgotten their moment of mutual recognition, and it was worse than with Marsh, who—at least—had seen her. Worse even than the worst of Marsh. His contempt was suffocating her. Every movement he made, envenomed by contempt, caused her agony. She felt herself shutting down and understood that he was using up her light, her force, her soul. He was extracting it like a spider sucking juice from a fly and whatever remained would be left to sag and mutter and dodder. She screamed his name, not wanting to die by fractions, to live past death like a roach without a head, wobbling about for no good purpose. To her amazement he answered, calling her name. His voice seemed to issue from a long way off, but it was him. She was certain of it.
“Jack!” she said, locking her legs behind his back, wanting to pleasure him now he remembered…though he continued to hurt her. Then, in an eyeblink, he was gone. She drew up her knees, turned onto her side, curling around the pain he’d made. The sour stink of the bedclothes assailed her. She was cold, she didn’t know what to do. Life in its profusion, her mama had said, comes to no conclusion but confusion. Everybody said the same thing different ways…except for the Jesus shouters, and who knew what they were saying. Hope was out of fashion, but Vida was old-fashioned. She had hope in her now. If he remembered once, he would remember again. She could stand up to a lot so long as she had hope. She didn’t have much, just a sprig. But like the aluminum Christmas tree with spray-painted gold leaves her mama kept in the closet, it required no nourishment to survive.
She should pray, she told herself. When in doubt, pray it out. Another of her mama’s rhymes. She clasped her hands beneath her chin, tried to concentrate, but no direction offered itself as an avenue along which to beam her message.
Jesus, she thought. How ’bout it, Jesus? You there?
She sang his name, liking the sound of it so much, she strung it into a melody punctuated by preacherlike gasps.
“Jesus…uh Jesus…uh Jesus…”
But the Man from Galilee must have been off banging nails in another quarter.
She tried working the Pan-African side of the street, making up her own prayer tongue the way they did in the Temple of Metabalon.
“Shaka malava…shaka malava hakaan. Okamalau otey osha. Shaka malava hakaan…”
That was better, that got a little something going in the outer darkness. The god of Gibberish. Long-legged and licorice-skinned. He always made time for Vida. She heard herself uttering chuckling liquid syllables and was pleased by the versatility of her devotions. Ashamadey kinka kala, she said to herself, and gave a giggle. She’d pray down any trouble came her way. Jamiania kucha votaraka shonderay…
Vida’s scream was sheared off as Mustaine came out of the brush at the rear of Madeleine’s shanty. Rotting away on a point, a broken-down sentry post guarding a reach of black water. The mist had cleared and the moon had swung halfway up the sky, bathing the scene in radiance, making the place appear innocent and rustic. A hideaway under a silvery enchantment. The solemn cypress showing like enormous bones set on end and bleached by ghostlight. He took a step forward, shoving the mountain of his fear ahead of him. He had an urge to call out to Vida, but was afraid something else might hear. He managed finally, to say her name, but it came out a croak. He summoned breath and this time he shouted, “Vidaaaa!”
A frog kerflopped.
Mist started to seep out through gaps in the shanty wall.
Each separate tendril eeled forth, lengthening, evolving a connected tendril that itself evolved another tendril, until in a matter of seconds, the swamp was wreathed in white streamers, as if all the mist that had been sucked into the cabin had reestablished the same configuration into which it had been arranged before being needed inside. The silence held a reverberation, a subsonic funeral rhythm.
A wall of mist was forming in front of Mustaine, growing larger and thicker until it blocked both the path and his view of the shanty, swirling in delicate eddies. Hairs prickled on his neck and a sense of déjà vu heightened his fear. Nevertheless, he pushed forward. The sense of déjà vu intensified; the mist boiled up around him, and he experienced a terrifying slippage. It seemed some vital chemical was leaking out, and as its level dropped, his energy was depleted. He sank to his knees, giddy, head lolling, and fell onto all fours. His breath vomited forth in shuddery grunts. He felt weak…on the verge of mortal weakness. As if he were about
to puke up his heart. Violent shudders pumped through his gut. He was drowning in symptoms. Fever. Nausea. Double vision. Not doubled images, but different angles on the patch of ground beneath him. Something was sliding out of him…but not easily. Stretching a connection part umbilical cord, part soul string, and causing anguish both physical and mental. Some dormant scrap of flesh and self that was suddenly dying to be born, tearing a hole in his flesh, his mind, so it could pour on out. He lost track of his body. A gray shadow filmed his vision. Sweat burned his eyes. And then it was free of him. He was free of it. The connection snapped, the pain receded. His strength gradually returned. He was able to breathe again. To think.
He rolled onto his back and looked up.
Framed by leaden sky and cypress tops, the Good Gray Man was standing over him.
For a long moment Mustaine couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, transfixed by the sight. Its outline was haloed by mist, fuming at the edges, here expanding, there contracting, as if the mist were both sustaining and constricting it. Its skin, its surface…tacky-looking, like undried gray paint, but in flux. The horrid gray paper-sack shape of its featureless head. Half executioner, half monstrosity.
Its arm telescoping, it reached down with a mitten hand, and Mustaine, oddly unafraid, let it touch his shoulder.
The touch made him think of dry ice, so cold it burned. But what he saw, conveyed by the touch (of that he had no doubt), was more painful by far. Vida. Naked, her skin smeared with grime. Her slitted eyes showing crescents of white beneath the lids. Curled up among dirty rags, hands clasped. Muttering nonsense syllables just as Madeleine LeCleuse had done. Mad as rats. The vision faded and Mustaine, seeing that the Good Gray Man was walking toward the shanty, got to his feet. He went a few steps forward and for no good reason, knowing she would not answer, he called out, “Vida!”
The Good Gray Man was suddenly facing him—as if it had reversed itself and not actually turned. It pushed its arms toward Mustaine, hands open, and he was picked up and flung backwards by a hurricane-force gust.
Not of wind, though.
Lying atop a flattened patch of skunk cabbage to the side of the path, trying to regain his breath, Mustaine knew what he had felt. A blast of desolate emotion. Grief and loss and longing welded into a bleak irresistible power.
It was all through him.
Desolation such as he could have never imagined. Yet it was familiar. It suited him somehow, it fit neatly within the fences of his soul. A foul, ingrown self-absorption cooked by years of emptiness into a killing force. And now he felt it was killing him. Tamping down his other qualities, making of his skull a small black space in which to breed its compulsions. He shook his head, trying to knock it loose, but that only seemed to seat it more deeply, to ratify the fact that it had found its rightful place.
He heaved up into a sitting position, one hand braced in the mud. Standing on the bottom step of the shanty, the Good Gray Man lifted his arms in a summoning gesture and the mist that had spread throughout the swamp came at his summons, flowing back to him all in an instant, enclosing him in gauzy white. Then it began to coalesce into a much smaller figure dressed in black coat and a white shirt and faded blue trousers that might have been jeans. Still hazy, rippling. Not quite formed. Its face was pale, difficult to discern. It glanced briefly at Mustaine, as if to warn him off, then mounted the steps and vanished inside.
Dwarfed by the immensity of the swamp, isolate in the silver moonlight, the shanty appeared to have shrunk, become a toy cabin in a kid’s mock-up of an evil landscape. Mustaine, still infected by the black emotion that had blown him off the path, confounded by the Good Gray Man’s mimicry of his clothing…he couldn’t get his bearings. He struggled up, gazed about. Every cypress stump and leaf, every gleaming inch of water, testified to a hopeless knowledge. He had lost her. How it had happened, he wasn’t clear. But that it had was undeniable. He went slogging through the mud, making an unsteady beeline for the shanty. Intent upon breaking in, dragging her out. Ignoring the impossibility of this. But on reaching the rear of the shanty, hearing Vida’s voice issuing from beyond the gapped wall, chanting insane endearments and garbled prayers, he clamped his hands to his ears and wobbled away. Pressure built in his chest. He thought if he opened his mouth, it would come out a howl.
The brightness of the night made him feel exposed, visible to the silver eye of God, vulnerable to divine strategies. He imagined he could hear Vida still. Wanting to hide from her madness, he hurried toward the thickets on the far side of the shanty, sheltered under the skimpy shadow of a sapling oak. A path wound off into the thicket—the same path, he remembered, that led to the highway—and seeing it as an answer, a refuge, an opportunity, he started along it. Turn around, he thought. But his body knew the truth of things and kept on walking. He tried to throw out his heart as an anchor, to grab hold of the branches and spin himself about, to will himself back to the shanty—but his heart was too light, his fingers too weak, his mind too filled with despair. For several steps, each time his foot struck the ground, her name jolted out of him. Spoken feverishly, viciously, with feral grief. Please God…Jesus, he thought. Send down your holy fucking death ray and scourge this place. He saw a lake of black glass with burnt cypress matchsticks poking up from it. He saw a red sun lowering toward a brackish ocean in which a golden swimmer drowned. He saw Vida naked on her rags. Vida emerging from Thalia’s Pond, water diamonds spraying from her hair. Vida sitting next to him beneath the Gulf stars. He saw the years ahead already shoveled under their graveyard mounds.
Turn around, he told himself.
Soon he began to run.
15
Louisiana Breakdown
IT’S A QUIET TIME IN GRAIL, THIS DAY AFTER ST. JOHN’S Eve. All night long folks have been studying cards, tea leaves, shells, the various instruments of divination, and the word is not good. A night upon which the daddy of the new Midsummer Queen is found mutilated on the fringe of the swamp, you wouldn’t expect the signs to be real favorable, but then you might not figure they’d be as unfavorable as they are.
Some turn away, pull back before they get a look over the edge. They don’t care to see that black bottomland roiling up and belching bubbles. What’s known is never equal to what’s knowable.
Others deal with the situation.
In the upstairs apartment above Remedies, Nedra Hawes packs her clothes in a steamer trunk that looks to have a hundred drawers, and explains for the tenth time that morning why she can’t take Arlise with her to Newport.
“The energies aren’t right, dear,” she says.
Few minutes earlier, she said the same about staying in Grail.
Arlise is putting on a show of tears, but she’s a realist, she realizes Newport ain’t her flavor. She’s merely trying to negotiate the size of her parting gift.
“Well, I’m gon’ come visit you, anyway,” she says with lilting menace.
That ruby, pearl, and diamond ring Nedra never wears…it’s purely Arlise’s style.
Most people, though, they just endure. They can’t afford to notice the big picture—they got their own fish to fry. They grit their teeth, bow their heads, and let the weather roll across them. Tell ’em the boat they’re in is sinking, they’ll try to sell you an oar. The signs are everywhere, but they don’t care. So the luck of the town has flown…so what? They’ll keep on keeping on.
Two crabs fighting in the weeds down by the docks, their claws yielding a tiny clatter.
A boy in a Cub Scout uniform standing outside Cutler’s Lawn and Garden, waiting for his mom, begins to bleed heavily from the nose.
Off in the swamp, a place where hardly anybody ever goes, a heap of rags nobody will ever find rests facedown in four inches of algae-encrusted water. Straws of gray hair sticking up dry from the soaked scalp. Streams of bubbles issue from the mouths of nibblers beneath the surface.
Adieu, Madeleine…
Out on his acreage, his taste of Old Saigon, Joe Dill’s looking worse for
wear, with his eye stitched and bandaged, curb-sitting in his underpants out front of the Miami, a bottle of Scotch in hand. He tips his head to the weather and spots a seagull falling from the gray, stricken in midflight, dropping out of the big sky movie to become a bug feast.
Leaning in the doorway behind him, Tuyet, wearing a red silk bathrobe, hums a sing-songy tune and smiles as a cat trots past, on its way to investigate the thump.
Yellow rose floating on the surface of Thalia’s Pond.
Clifford Marsh used to bring Vida yellow roses, but could be that’s a coincidence…though he passes through town now and then. On the sly. Drops in for a drink and a conspiratorial chat with Miss Sedele and Joe Dill.
Town business, it’s said.
Jeannette Lamoreaux sits on a straight wooden chair outside her mama’s parlor, glumly fingering the lacy dress of a bridal doll lying on her lap. She misses her daddy, but she’s out of tears for now, worried more about her mama who’s on the sofa sobbing to the preacher. Last time Jeannette peeked in, the preacher had one arm around her shoulders, which mama said was an all-right thing to do with boys, and a hand high on her leg, which mama said was not all right. Jeannette sees her life changing in a way she cannot express. She knows the preacher’s hand on mama’s leg is not a good sign, and she wishes she had never, ever, ever been chosen the Midsummer Queen.
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