Looking at the gun made Donnell lightheaded. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked. Jocundra backed away from the register, and he backed with her.
‘Ain’t but one thing to do man,’ said Richmond. He moved behind the cop, jammed the gun in his ear, and fumbled inside the leather jacket; he ripped off the cop’s badge and stuffed it into his jeans. Then he stepped out into the aisle, keeping the gun trained head-high. ‘If we don’t want the occifer here to start oinkin’ on his radio, I’m gonna have to violate his civil rights.’
‘You could break the radio,’ said the cop, talking fast. ‘You could rip out the phone. Hey, listen, nobody drives this road at night…’
Richmond flipped up his sunglasses. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That ain’t how it’s gonna be, Porky.’
The cop paled, the dusting of freckles on his cheeks stood out sharply.
‘Them’s just contact lenses,’ said Sealey with what seemed to Donnell foolhardy belligerence. ‘These people’s in some damn cult.’
‘That’s us,’ said Richmond, edging along the aisle toward the register. ‘The Angels of Doom, the Disciples of Death. We’ll do anything to please the Master.’
‘Watch it!’ said Donnell, seeing a craftiness in Sealey’s face, a coming together of violent purpose and opportunity.
As Richmond crossed in front of the register, the partition beneath it exploded with a roar. Blood sprayed from his hip, and he spun toward the door, falling; but as he fell, he swung the gun in a tight arc and shot Sealey in the chest. The bullet drove Sealey back onto the grill, and he wedged between the bubbling metal and the fan, his head forced downward if he were sitting on a fence and leaning forward to spit. A silvered automatic was clutched in his hand.
The explosiveness of the gunshot sent Donnell reeling against Jocundra, and she screamed. The cop jumped, up, unsnapping his holster, peering to see where Richmond had failed. A second shot took him in the face, and he flew backward along the aisle, ending up curled beneath a booth. His hand scrabbled the floor, but that was all reflex. And then, with the awful, ponderous grace of a python uncoiling from a branch, Sealey slumped off the grill; the grease clinging to his trousers hissed and spattered on the tiles. Everything was quiet. The jukebox clicked, the air conditioner hummed. The cop’s hamburgers started to burn on the grill, pale flames leaping merrily.
Jocundra dropped to her knees and began peeling shreds of cloth from Richmond’s wound. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘His whole hip’s shot away.’
Donnell knelt beside her. Richmond’s head was propped against the rear of a booth; his eyelids fluttered when Donnell touched his arm and his eyebrows arched in clownish curves with the effort of speech. ‘Oh…’ he said; it didn’t have the sound of a groan but of a word he was straining to speak. ‘… ooh,’ he finished. His eyes snapped open. The bacteria had flooded the membrane surfaces, and only thready sections of the whites were visible, like cracks spreading across glowing green Easter eggs. ‘Oh…’he said again.
‘What?’ Donnell put his ear to Richmond’s mouth. ‘Jack!’
‘He’s dead,’ said Jocundra listlessly.
Richmond’s mouth stayed pursed in an O shape, but he was not through dying. The same slow reverberation shuddered Donnell as had when Magnusson had died, stronger though, and whether as a result of the reverberation or because of stress, Donnell’s visual field fluctuated. White tracers of Richmond’s magnetic field stitched back and forth between the edges of his wound, and flashes erupted from every part of his body. Donnell got to his feet. Jocundra remained kneeling, shivering, blood smeared on her arms. The night was shutting down around them, erecting solid black barriers against the windows, sealing them in with the three dead men.
A car whizzed past on the highway.
The light switches were behind the register, and Donnell’s cane pocked the silence as he moved to them. He had a glimpse of Sealey open-mouthed on the floor, his chest red and ragged, and he quickly hit the switches. Moonlight slid through the windows and shellacked the formica tables, defining tucks and pleats in the vinyl. The cash drawer was open. He crumpled the bills into his pocket, turned, and was brought up short by the sight of Richmond’s corpse.
Richmond was still propped against the booth, his legs asprawl. He should have been a shadow in the entranceway, half his face illuminated by the moonlight, but he was not. A scum of violent color coated his body, a solarized oil slick of day-glo reds and yellows and blues, roiling, blending, separating, so bright he looked to be floating above the floor: the blazing afterimage of a man. Even the spills of his blood were pools of these colors, glowing islands lying apart from him. Black cracks appeared veining the figure, widening, as if a mold were breaking away from a homunculus within, and prisms were flitting through the blackness like jeweled bees. The reverberation was stronger than ever; each pulsed skewed Donnell’s vision. Something was emerging, being freed. Something inimical. The colors thickened, hardening into a bright sludge sloughing off the corpse. Donnell’s skin crawled, and the tickling sensation reawakened in his head.
He took Jocundra by the arm; her skin was cold, and she flinched at his touch. ‘Come on,’ he said, pulling her toward the door. He stepped over the writhe of color that was Richmond and felt dizzy, a chill point of gravity condensing in his stomach, as if he were stepping over a great gulf. He steadied himself on the door and pushed it open. The air was warm, damp, smelling of gasoline.
‘We can’t go,’ said Jocundra, a lilt of fear in her voice.
‘The hell we can’t!’ He propelled her across the parking lot. ‘I’ll be damned if I’m going to wait for the police. You get the ledger, the clothes. Clean everything out of the cabin. I’ll check the office and see if Sealey wrote anything down.’
He was startled by his callousness, his practicality, because he did not recognize them to be his own. The words were someone else’s, a fragmentary self giving voice to its needs, and he did not have that other’s confidence or strength of purpose. Any icy fluid shifted along his spine, and he refused to look back at the restaurant for fear he might see a shadow standing in the door.
Chapter 10
May 20, 1987
According to the map it was eight-five miles, about two hours’ drive, to the town of Salt Harvest, and there they could catch the four-lane to New Orleans; but to Jocundra the miles and the minutes were a timeless, distanceless pour of imaginary cherry tops blinking in the rear view mirror, the wind making spirit noises through the side vent, and memories of the policeman’s face: an absurdly neat concavity where his eyes and nose had been, as if a housing had been lifted off to check the working parts. Cypresses glowed grayish-white in the headlights, trees of bone burst from dark flesh. Rabbits ghosted beneath her wheels and vanished without a crunch. And near the turn-off a little girl wearing a lace party dress stepped out onto the blacktop, changing at the last second into a speed limit sign, and Jocundra swerved off the road. The van came to rest amid a thicket of bamboo, and rather than risk another accident, they piled brush around it and slept. But sleep was a thing seamlessly welded to waking, the continuance of a terrible dream, and in the morning, bleary, she saw shards of herself reflected in the fragments of the mirrored ball that Richmond had broken.
They started toward New Orleans, but the engine grated and the temperature indicator hovered near the red. A mile outside Salt Harvest they pulled into Placide’s Mobile Service; junked cars resting on a cracked cement apron, old-fashioned globe-top pumps,, a rickety, unpainted shack with corroded vending machines and lawn chairs out front. Placide, a frizzy-haired, chubby man chewing an unlit cigar, gazed up at the sky to receive instructions before allowing he would have a look at the van after he finished a rush job. Miserable, they waited. The radio news made no mention of the killings, and the only newspaper they could find was a gossip rag whose headlines trumpeted Teen’s Pimples Found to be Strange Code.
‘Somebody must have seen them by now!’ Donnell kicked at a chair in frustration. ‘
We’ve got to get out of here.’
‘The police aren’t very efficient,’ she said. ‘And Sealey didn’t even check us in. They may not know there was anyone else.’
‘What about Marie?’
‘I don’t know.’ She stared off across the road at a white wooden house by the bayou. A tireless truck in the front yard; shade trees; children scampering in and out of the sunbeams which penetrated the branches. The scene had an archaic air, as if the backing of a gentle past were showing through the threadbare tapestry of the present.
‘Don’t you care?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you worried about being caught?’
‘Yes,’ she said tonelessly, remembering the yellow dimness and blood-smeared floors of the restaurant. ‘I…’
‘What?’
‘You just don’t seem bothered by what happened.’
‘Bothered? Guilty, you mean?’ He thought it over. ‘The cop bothers me, but when Sealey pulled the trigger’ - he laughed - ‘oh, he was a happy man. He’d been waiting for this chance a long time. You should have seen his face. All that frustrated desire and obsession blowing up into heaven.’ He limped a little way across the apron.
‘It was Sealey’s crime. Richmond’s maybe. But it’s got no moral claim on me.’
Around five o’clock a sorrowful Placide delivered his report: a slow leak in the oil pan. Ten or fifteen more miles and the engine would seize up. ‘I give you fifty dollars, me,’ he said. Jocundra gave him a doubtful look, and he crossed himself.
They accepted his offer of a ride into town, and he let them off at the Crawfish Cafe where, he said, they could learn the bus schedules. A sign above the door depicted a green lobsterlike creature wearing a bib, and inside the lighting was hellishly bright, the booths packed with senior citizens - tonight, Sunday, being the occasion of the cafe’s Golden Ager All-U-Can-Eat Frog Legs and Gumbo Creole Special $2.99. The smell of grease was filmy in Jocundra’s nostrils. The waitress told them that a bus left around midnight for Silver Meadow (‘Now you be careful! The shrimp fleet’s in, and that’s one wild town at night.’) and there they could catch a Greyhound for New Orleans where she had a sister, Minette by name, who favored Jocundra some though she wasn’t near as tall, and oh how she worried about the poor woman living with her madman husband and his brothers on Beaubien Street like a saint among wolves… Try the shrimp salad. You can’t go wrong with shrimp this time of year.
The senior citizens, every liver spot and blotch evident under the bright lights, lifted silvery spoons full of dripping red gumbo to their lips, and the sight brought back the memory of Magnusson’s death. Jocundra’s stomach did a queasy roll. An old man blinked at her and slipped a piece of frog into his mouth, leaving the fork inserted. The tinkle of silverware was a sharp, dangerous sound at the edge of a silence hollowed around her, and she ate without speaking.
‘Do you want to go back?’ Donnell asked. ‘I can’t, but if you think it’s better for you there, I won’t stop you.’
‘I don’t see how I can,’ she said, thinking that she would have to go back to before Shadows, before the project began.
He toyed with a french fry, drawing circles in the grease on his plate. ‘I need a more isolated place than New Orleans,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lose it in public like Richmond.’
‘You’re nothing like Richmond.’ Jocundra was too exhausted to be wholeheartedly reassuring.
‘Sure I am. According to Edman, and it seems to me he’s at least partially right, Richmond’s life was the enactment of a myth he created for himself.’ The waitress refilled Jocundra’s coffee, and he waited until she finished. ‘He had to kill someone to satisfy the myth, and by God he did. And there’s something I have to do as well.’
She looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Magnusson told me I had something special to do, and ever since I’ve felt a compulsion to do it. I have no idea what it is, but the compulsion is growing stronger and I’m convinced it’s not a good deed.’
White gleams of the overheads slashed diagonally across the lenses of his sunglasses. For the first time she was somewhat afraid of him.
‘A quiet place,’ he said. ‘One without too many innocent bystanders.’
More senior citizens crammed into the cafe. They huddled at the front waiting for a seat, and the waitress became hostile as Donnell and Jocundra lingered over their empty plates. Jocundra wedged Magnusson’s ledger into her purse; they tipped the waitress generously, leaving the overnight bag in her keeping, and walked out into the town.
The main street of Salt Harvest was lined with two-story buildings of dark painted brick, vintage 1930, their walls covered by weathered illustrations of defunct brands of sewing machines and pouch tobacco, now home to Cadieux Drugs, Beutel Hardware, and the Creole Theater, whose ticket taker - isolate in her hotly lit booth - looked like one of those frowsy, bewigged dummies passing for gypsy women that you find inside fortune-telling machines, the yellowed paint of their skin peeling away, their hands making mechanical passes over a dusty crystal ball. The neons spelled out mysterious red and blue and green words - HRIMP, SUNOC, OOD - and these seemed the source of all the heat and humidity. Cars were parked diagonally along the street, most dinged and patched; with bondo, windshields polka-dotted by NRA and SW Louisiana Ragin’ Cajun decals. Half of the streetlights hummed and fizzled, the other half were shattered. Dusk was thickening to night, and heat lightning flashed in the southern sky.
Groups of people were moving purposefully toward the edge of town, and so as not to appear conspicuous, they fell in at the rear of three gabbling old ladies who were cooling themselves with fans bearing pictures of Christ Arisen. Behind them came a clutch of laughing teenage girls. Before they had gone a hundred yards, Donnell’s legs began to cramp, but he preferred to continue rather than go contrary to the crowd now following them. Their pace slowed, and a family bustled past: mom, kids, dad, dressed in their Sunday finery and having the prim, contented look of the well-insured. Some drunken farmers passed them, too, and one - a middle-aged man whose T-shirt read When Farm-boys Do it They Fertilize ‘Er - said ‘Howdy’ to Jocundra and offered her a swig from his paper sack. He whispered in his buddy’s ear. Sodden laughter. The crowd swept around them, chattering, in a holiday mood, and Jocundra and Donnell walked in their midst, tense, heads down, hoping to go unnoticed but noticeable by their secretive manner: Jews among Nazis.
The night deepened, gurgling and croaking from the bayou grew louder as they cleared the city limits, and they heard a distorted amplified voice saying, ‘CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHIL…’ The speaker squealed. A brown circus tent was pitched in a pasture beside the bayou, ringed by parked cars and strung with colored bulbs; a banner above the entrance proclaimed What Jesus Promised, Papa Salvatino Delivers. The speaker crackled, and the voice blatted out again: a cheery, sleazy voice, the voice of a carnival barker informing of forbidden delights.
‘CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHILDREN! COME TO PAPA SALVATINO! COME BEFORE THE NIGHT CREEPERS AND THE GHOST WORMS SNIFF YOU OUT, COME BEFORE THE DEVIL GETS BEHIND YOU WITH HIS SHINBONE CLUB AND SMACKS YOU LOW. YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT! YOU KNOW YOU GONNA COME, CHILDREN! YOU GOTTA COME! ‘CAUSE MY VOICE GONNA SNEAK LIKE SMOKE THROUGH THE CRACK IN YOUR WINDOW, CURL UP YOUR STAIR AND IN YOUR EAR, AND HOOK YOU, CROOK YOU, BEND YOU ON YOUR KNEE TO JEEESUS! YES CHILDREN, YES
A furious, thumping music compounded of sax, organs and drums built up under the voice, which continued to cajole and jolly the crowd; they streamed into the entrance, and the tent glowed richly brown against the blackness of field and sky. As Donnell and Jocundra hesitated, a police car pulled up next to the field and flashed, its spotlight over the rows of parked cars; they joined the stragglers walking towards the tent.
At the entrance a mousy girl asked them for three dollars each admission, and when Jocundra balked, she smacked her gum and said, ‘We used to do with just love offerin’s, but Papa fills folk so brimful of Jesus’ love that sometimes they forgets all about givin
’.’
Inside, radiating outward from a plywood stage, were rows of folding chairs occupied by shadowy figures, most standing, hooting and clapping to the music. The mingled odors of sweat and liquor and perfume, the press of bodies, the slugging music, everything served to disorient Donnell. He squeezed Jocundra’s hand, fending off a visual shift.
‘And lo!’ a voice shouted in his ear. ‘The blind and the halt shall be first anointed.’ A gray-haired man, tall and lean, his hair cut short above the ears and left thick on top, giving him a stretched look, beamed at Donnell. ‘We’ll get you a seat down front, brother,’ he said, steering him toward the stage. Jocundra objected, and he said, ‘No trouble at all, sister. No trouble at all.’ His smile seemed the product of a wise and benign overview.
As he led them along, people staggered out of their chairs and into the aisle. Deranged squawks, angry shouts, and scuffles, a few cries of religious fervor. A Saturday-night-in-the-sticks-and-ain’t-nothin’-else-to-do level of drunkenness. Hardly sanctified. Donnell was grateful when the usher shooed two teenagers off the first row and sat him down beside a fat lady. ‘Ain’t it hot?’ she cried, nudging him with a dimpled arm the size of a ham. “Bout hot enough to melt candles!’ The edges of the crimson hibiscus patterning her dress were bleeding from her sweat, and each crease and fold of her exuded its own special sourness. ‘Oh, Jesus yes!’ she screeched as the saxophonist shrilled a high note. She quivered all over, and her eyelids slid down, false lashes stitching them to her cheeks.
The music ebbed, the organist stamped out a plodding beat on the bass pedals, and the saxaphonist played a gospel fanfare. The lights cut to a single spot, and a paunchy, balding man, well over six feet tall, slouched onto stage. His walk was an invitation to buy drugs, to slip him twenty and meet the little lady upstairs; his face was yellow-tinged, puffy, framed by a hippie-length fringe of brown hair. He wore a powder-blue suit, a microphone dangled from his hand, and his eyes threw back glitters of the spotlight.
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