Landfall

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  He put his head back against the base of the cypress, closed his eyes, and took in a mouthful of rain. He held it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing, then he looked around, as though he might discern his location. It was pointless, really. He’d never been out this way much, and all he knew was that he was somewhere near Maggie’s house. He also knew he had to be fairly close to the river, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  He needed to pull himself together and start making his way back to Maggie’s property, or anyplace further away from the river, but pulling himself together suddenly seemed like it would require far too much effort.

  God was punishing him, and he knew it. He’d made God angry, and now he was feeling the fruits of his sins. God the angry Father was punishing the murdering son, and the wind and the rain were his fists.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” Boudreaux said quietly. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

  As he started in on his next Hail Mary, he thought to himself that if he did survive this day, Miss Evangeline was going to kill him anyway, so maybe he ought to just pray for his soul.

  Miss Evangeline stood on the front porch near the wide steps, gripping her walker with both hands as the wind blew the rain into her face. She’d torn a hole in the bottom of a black garbage bag, and pulled it over her head to cover her clothes, but the wind whipped the bag around so bad that her house dress was soaked through anyway.

  The water had come up to the second step, and she looked at the places where she knew the kalancho and impatiens to be. Poor plants was gonna drown good, and Mr. Benny yard gonna be naked.

  She looked back up, squinting against the rain, and peered up one side of the street and down the other, hoping to see his big truck crawling through the water. She just wanted the truck to come back, wanted him to wade through the yard and back to the house, so she could yank him up outa the water and choke his neck dead.

  She remembered then, back when they lived in the old white house on Bayou Petit Caillou, a day when he was six or seven years old.

  She’d had his breakfast ready by the time the sky lightened, but seen no sign at all of the boy, and he hadn’t come when she called him. She wore herself out walkin’ all ’round the hen house and the yard, and no Mr. Benny. Finally, while she was out in the middle of the yard, callin’ and cryin’, there he come up to the dock, paddling his daddy’s pirogue with oars that was bigger than him.

  She ran down the bank to the dock, wood clothespins rattlin’ in her apron pocket, and Mr. Benny just smile up at her like nothin’ bad wrong.

  “What kind of crazy you are?” she yelled at him as he tied off the boat. “Why you make Miss Evangeline heart attack itself like that?”

  “I wanted some redfish,” he said, holdin’ up a stringer of four or five fish.

  “You too little be out your daddy pirogue by yourself,” she said.

  He squinted his blue eyes up at her and told her, “I’m almost as big as you.”

  She walked over to the pirogue, her slippers slappin’ against the dock, and put her hands on her hips. “You thinkin’ it’s a good day to sass me some, then.”

  “But I am almost as big as you.”

  “You get up here ’fore I snatch you out that boat,” she said, and glared at him while he got out. Then she turned and walked back up the yard, him trailin’ her, with his stringer in his hand.

  “Miss Evangeline, you gonna cook me these redfish for breakfast?”

  “I already cook your breakfast, me. I gon’ slap you senseless with them fish.” She stomped as best she could in her slippers, and yanked the screen door open. “Come in the house an’ don’t scare Miss Evangeline no more.”

  To make sure he knew she was mad for true, she hadn’t said not one more word to Mr. Benny ’til he had got done eatin’ them fish.

  Now she heard the front door open behind her, and the screen door squeak, but she ignored them, and stared out at the water until Amelia loomed over her shoulder.

  “What you doin’, you crazy fool?” Amelia snapped. “I about walked myself through the floor lookin’ all over this house for you!”

  Miss Evangeline straightened her shoulders and stared out at the street. “I been right here,” she said.

  “You need come in the house,” Amelia said.

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere ’til Mr. Benny come back here,” Miss Evangeline snapped.

  “He come back, you be dead from pneumonia, and he shoot me in my face,” Amelia said. “Look at you. Your house dress all soak through, and your slipper drench, too.”

  “You go inside. I gon’ wait right here ’til that fool come home.”

  “He come up that driveway, see you standin’ out here in a garbage bag, he gon’ lose his mind.”

  “He done lose it already,” Miss Evangeline said.

  “You wanna do somethin’, you come back in the house and pray for him,” Amelia countered, taking her mother’s elbow.

  “I been prayin’, “Miss Evangeline said. “Prayin’ he don’t come up wrong ’gainst the juju, goin’ out that girl house like so.”

  Amelia gently but firmly turned her mother toward the house. “Juju scared to death of that man,” she said.

  “He need to leave her be,” Miss Evangeline said as they walked back into the house. “I tol’ him that for true, me.”

  “He do what he do, Mama,” Amelia said. “Nobody tell him nothin’.”

  She closed the front door behind them and led her mother down the hall toward the kitchen.

  “Fifty-seven year,” Miss Evangeline muttered. “I been raisin’ him now fifty-seven year.”

  She inched along down the hallway, the tennis balls on her walker leaving snail trails of water on the hardwood floor.

  Maggie straddled her tree limb, her arms around the trunk of the old oak, and tried not to think of dry clothes, or sunshine, or hot coffee.

  She had no idea how long they’d been up in the tree. Thirty minutes? An hour? It felt like much more than that, though she knew it couldn’t be. Her skin felt raw from the beating the rain was giving it.

  She looked over at Kyle, squinting as the rain stabbed at her eyes. He was on another limb, a little bit higher than Maggie’s, and he hugged the trunk as he leaned against it. She could see that he was shaking, and she felt the weight and substance of her failure to protect him.

  “Mom!” she heard Sky yell, and Maggie looked at her daughter. Sky was looking toward the front yard, and Maggie turned to see. At first, Maggie wasn’t sure what Sky was looking at, but then she realized that Boudreaux’s huge truck was slowly moving toward them.

  It was a good twenty yards away, but it looked like it might hit their tree. It wasn’t moving very quickly, but it was a heavy truck, and they were in an old tree. Maggie yelled to be heard above the storm. “Hold on!”

  Then she braced herself and waited for Boudreaux’s truck to hit the tree.

  Boudreaux didn’t know he’d passed out until the water took him again and he woke up drowning.

  He reached out his hands and felt the ground moving beneath him, felt mud and rocks and the roots of trees. He pulled his knees up under him, let the water drag his knees along the bumpy ground, and lifted his head up into the blessed air.

  He was being carried through some woods, and he made out a few cypress and oaks as he passed them, heaving and coughing and leaving a trail of vomit behind him. He wasn’t moving all that fast, but it was fast enough given his condition, and he considered just going with the flow until he hit the river, and letting it take him out to his beloved bay.

  But then he remembered how upset Miss Evangeline would be with him, and how upset God already was, and he wasn’t all that anxious to turn up dead before either one of them.

  He paddled at the water with his arms, arms that felt like they’d been weighted down with cha
ins, and tried to spot something to grab on to, but the water from the sky colluded with the water from the ground to blind and disorient him.

  He tried to get his knees off the ground, to stop the beating they were getting from the rocks and roots beneath the surface, but the water wasn’t all that deep and he wasn’t all that buoyant. The best he could do was to keep them from dragging, but they still smacked against anything taller than a dandelion, and he wondered if he would soon have to contend with a broken kneecap in addition to his other immediate troubles.

  Finally, he was pushed in the general direction of a large pile of debris, an assortment of brush, branches, a kid’s bicycle, a broken pallet, and what looked like a chaise lounge, all hung up between two trees. He unexpectedly felt his knees come off the ground, and realized that he’d hit some kind of dip or trough, and he managed to get one foot and then the other underneath him.

  He wasn’t exactly walking, more being propelled, but he was able to use his feet to angle himself toward the debris pile. He grabbed onto the thin trunk of the nearest tree, and pulled his upper body up onto the pallet.

  He threw up more water and the last of his chicory coffee, then rested there for a moment, his face pressed against the rough but comforting wood.

  He blinked his eyes against the rain and looked at the woods he’d found himself in. He had no idea where he was. He wasn’t even sure if he was still on Maggie’s property. There were quite a few wooded areas along this section of the river.

  It occurred to him then to wonder if this was where Maggie had been raped all those years ago, and the thought that it might be left him feeling more alone, yet suddenly surrounded by ghosts; ghosts of both the dead and of the living, as they had been twenty-two years ago.

  The edge of the pallet was pressing uncomfortably against his torn abdomen, and he turned around so that his back was against the pallet, still gripping the wood with one shaky hand. He rested his head against the pallet, feeling more drained and weary than he could remember ever feeling before.

  His eyes closed and he saw gentle morning waves flowing up onto the sand out on the island. Saw the sky lightening to a deep, bright pink and the seagulls hovering in the air in front of him. Saw Gregory standing there, pale as moonlight, with his ridiculous bag of bread, tossing out bits and pieces like he was on an early morning picnic.

  “You’ve had your moment of peace, Gregory,” he’d said to him quietly. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Gregory looked over at him, one eye twitching, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed once, hard. Boudreaux bobbed his .45 automatic at him, just once, to emphasize his desire to move it along, and Gregory stuffed the empty bread bag in his left pocket, then reached for the revolver tucked in the front of his waistband.

  “You won’t cock that thing and aim it before I’ve had time to blow the genitals right off your body. You understand that, do you not?” Boudreaux asked him.

  Gregory only nodded, then slowly drew out the old .38. “Easy, son,” Boudreaux cautioned. “Now put it in your mouth.”

  “Oh, geez,” Gregory whispered.

  “Do it now. Don’t you get that thumb anywhere near that hammer until you’ve done so.”

  He watched Gregory turn the barrel toward himself, watched his hand shake uncontrollably as he slowly drew it toward his face. Then Gregory’s legs started shaking.

  “Oh, sit down, damn it,” Boudreaux said, and Gregory practically fell to the sand.

  Boudreaux stepped over to one side of him, his gun pointed between Gregory’s legs. “Do it.”

  Gregory looked up at him helplessly. “I said I was sorry,” he managed to say.

  “I don’t care that you’re sorry,” Boudreaux answered quietly.

  “But I confessed…I told you of my own free will,” Gregory said.

  “And I appreciate that.”

  “Please, I told you I was leaving. For good.”

  “You also told me you’d considered suicide,” Boudreaux answered. “And it’s only because you’re my nephew that you’re being given the chance to do so.”

  He saw Gregory look down at the gun in his lap, could almost see him thinking.

  “I can shoot you three times before you manage to raise that gun, son. But I won’t. I’ll blow a hole between your legs and then cut you into seventeen pieces while you’re still bleeding to death, do you understand?”

  Gregory nodded weakly, then shakily raised the .38.

  “Both hands,” Boudreaux told him, and Gregory awkwardly gripped the revolver in his two trembling hands and slowly brought it toward him.

  “Please. I didn’t know. I told you, I didn’t know,” he pleaded in a near-whisper.

  “It doesn’t matter what you knew,” Boudreaux said calmly. “In your mouth”

  He watched Gregory insert the muzzle into his mouth, saw a disgusting line of saliva drip from his lower lip as he did it.

  “Point it up, moron.”

  Gregory tilted the muzzle upward toward the back of his head.

  “Cock it.”

  Gregory’s hands trembled violently as he stretched out a thumb and pulled the hammer back.

  “If you make me shoot you, you will die slowly and painfully and without any mercy whatsoever. I know you believe this,” Boudreaux said. “I know you know it to be true.”

  Gregory closed his eyes, and Boudreaux saw a tear spill from the corner of his right eye. He felt nothing because of it. There was only the cold, deep, unrelenting anger.

  “Do it now,” he repeated.

  Gregory’s finger twitched within the trigger guard. Boudreaux leaned a little closer, stretched his arm a little nearer to Gregory’s manhood, careful not to put himself in front of Gregory.

  “One…two…th—” he said, and the gunshot rang out, thumping Boudreaux’s ears. He saw a spray of red from the back of Gregory’s head before he looked away at the Gulf, heard a soft thump as Gregory’s body fell backwards into the sand.

  The gulls had risen into the air at the report, and Boudreaux had seen them in his peripheral vision as they landed once again. Then he’d flipped his safety back on, tucked the gun into the back of his waistband, and crossed himself before he’d headed back up to his car.

  Boudreaux swiped weakly at his face, trying to clear away the rain and one solitary tear. He still felt that it had been assisted suicide more than anything else, and he still believed it had been the right and just thing to do. Yet he knew that at some point soon, probably that very day, God might want to discuss it with him.

  There was nothing Maggie and the kids could do but watch, as the truck was pushed along the side of the house. Then, when it was about fifteen feet away, it began to turn counterclockwise. The bed of the truck slowly came around, and Maggie was expecting it to coast into them broadside, when the right front bumper or wheel well slammed into one of the house’s concrete footings.

  There was a loud, metallic groaning, and the bed of the truck kept sweeping slowly toward the tree, then stopped. They watched to see if the truck would break free from the pillar, but it didn’t. Maggie could see now that the pillar had caught between the wheel well and the right front tire. After a moment, the screech of grinding metal stopped, and the water coursed under and around the truck.

  Maggie stared at the truck. It sat tall on its oversized tires, and the roof of the cab was just five feet or so below the side deck of the house. If they could get up on top of the cab, they could climb up onto the deck.

  She looked at the limbs of the old oak tree. A couple of the sturdier lower limbs of the tree reached within about six feet of the truck’s bed. Theoretically, they could jump to it, but she had no way of telling if that would make the truck jerk free. They could also get down from the tree, make their way to the truck, and climb up into the bed, but they’d have to be on the ground behind it first, and that seemed far riskier. If the truck broke free, it would either coast over them or crush them against the tree.

  Maggie watched the
truck for a few minutes, trying so hard to detect the slightest movement that she began to imagine she saw it. But the truck got no closer, and she yelled at Sky.

  “Sky!” Her daughter looked over at her. “I think we can get up to the deck from the truck.”

  Sky squinted her eyes against the rain to look at the truck, then looked back at Maggie. “It’ll start moving again.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Maggie yelled back. “But we can’t stay up here indefinitely.”

  Maggie slipped one foot down to the limb below her, then swung her other leg off of her branch.

  “Mom! Let me go first,” Sky yelled.

  “No! I’ll jump over there and we’ll see what happens,” Maggie yelled back. “If it holds, you come so I can get you up on the deck to help Kyle.”

  Holding on to the branch above her, Maggie inched her way out on the limb. It was slippery, and the rain seemed to be intentionally sweeping sideways into her face, but she eventually got out as far as she could before the limb thinned out too much to dependably hold her weight.

  From where she stood, there was only about five feet of air between her and the bed of the truck. If she pushed off well enough, it was an easy jump to the back of the truck. She took a deep breath, and jumped.

  She cleared the tailgate by a good twelve inches, but the bed was as slick as ice, and she went down onto her knees with a thump. She heard metal and concrete give a short chorus of complaint, but the truck held. She stood up carefully, feet planted wide, and waited for a moment before looking over at Sky, who was already making her way over to the other limb.

  Maggie glanced up at Kyle, and felt a pressure in her chest at the wide-eyed look of fear on his face. She tried to give him a reassuring look, then turned her attention back to Sky. The girl was inching out on the slippery branch.

  “Be careful, Sky, but push off as best you can,” Maggie yelled, moving over to give Sky more room to land. The truck bounced a bit, but held.

  Sky got out as far as she could, her hands gripping the branch above her, then looked over at her mother. Maggie nodded at her, and she took a deep breath and jumped, one leg out in front like she was jumping a hurdle.