“You don’t have a lost child here,” he says. “You’ve got a found one.”
“A considerably harder job for you, I’d guess.”
“It is,” he confesses. “Missing children cases almost always involve a parent, family member, neighbor, or pedophile with a prison record. It’s a matter of investigating the home situation and canvassing the neighborhood for suspects.”
“The same might hold true here.”
“It might,” Stiel says. “If she was brought here for a reason.”
“It’s a working theory.”
Thunder performs a contrapuntal to our voices, booming during pauses, in a slow but rhythmic collision like waves striking the shore. He’s unnerved by the noise, and after three days of it, so am I. He’s so emotionally battered that he’ll be able to deal with the townsfolk’s customs and the bad attitude of the granny witches. There’s distrust among their kind, but anyone with eyes like his has a better chance of being welcomed.
“She still doesn’t remember anything?” he asks.
“That’s what she says.”
He nods. “You sound as if you don’t believe her.”
“I suppose it’s possible.”
“But unlikely.”
“Yes.”
Nick Stiel moves slowly, shifting in his seat, facing the window as rivulets of intense rain streak sideways across the glass. “You know these people. Are there any suspects?”
“I’m not even sure a crime’s been committed.”
He looks at the list of names. “What the hell is the Holy Order of Flying Walendas?”
“A monastery nearby.”
“Sounds more like a cult.”
“I suppose it is.”
“How might they be involved?”
“Seekers are drawn to the abbey.”
“Seekers?”
“As I said. People looking for something in their lives. God, faith, a retreat from the cities maybe. Some stay on but most don’t. This girl was found out at a place we call the flat rock. It’s an ancient slab and might have some pagan or pseudoreligious significance.”
Something very much like a smile nearly lifts the edges of his lips. “You really believe that?”
“My father did.”
Despite his current mental state, he’s subtle, superior, and already on the case. Stiel still has his instincts. He can ask me anything but knows that I might be the culprit myself, playing games with lives, looking to be captured. He’s judging reactions and trying hard to get a bead on me.
“What do you think happened?” he asks.
I could tell him that the girl was brought out to the flat rock in order to be sacrificed to an old god or quite possibly a new one. Or that she’s a demon in disguise. Or a nymphet who’s left a trail of smashed middle-aged men exactly like him in her wake. She’s only playing eight. Eve could be thirteen or eighteen or eternal.
“That’s what I’m paying you to find out, Stiel.”
I can see him sticking around in Kingdom Come whether he solves this matter or not. He’ll have to spend a lot of time interviewing the girl and talking with Lily, his misery alive within him but his lust making itself known. Each day in Lily’s small empty house, sitting in front of her bare walls and facing that stern glance, watching the vague proportions of her body. Always seeing more of her, the many sides of Lily, that slope of her big tits, the turn of her ankle, the way she snatches her glasses off her face and grips the plastic arm between her teeth, tongue darting.
In six weeks they’ll probably be married or dead, and if Eve’s true nature is not discovered, he might find himself becoming her father.
HUDDLING IN THE DIM RECESSES OF LEADBETTER’S, not caring about the lightning strikes in the hills or the fact that the floods are now high enough to cover their license plates, they continue to meet and share pain. This is custom. This is ritual.
Verbal Raynes, having his third pitcher of beer, throws his mug against the wall with the wild boar’s head on it and shouts, “God damn it, I wish Gloria would go back to her husband!”
The others respond with deep sympathy and soothing, comforting words. “Fuck that bitch!”
Verbal scratches at his three-day beard and considers. His contemplation takes him farther inside the almost empty pitcher of beer, and the bartender gives him a new mug and charges him for the busted one. The boys attend.
“She say she miss Harry?”
“No, keeps telling me she don’t ever want to see him again.”
“Well, now, that ain’t a good sign, I’m thinking.”
“Not what I was hoping for, truth be known,” Verbal says.
“Yup.”
They, like most men, are men of myth and mediocrity. They carry with them the fables of their commonplace grandfathers and the blood of warriors and drunks. Over the years, they’ve had to scrape their broken fathers off the back porch and put cold compresses on their mothers’ busted noses. They’ve awoken in unmopped kitchen corners beneath the scowls of wives who’ve been failed early by life. This is their heritage and legacy.
“Her kids move in with you too?”
“All three of them.”
“Three! Goddamn!”
“Jesus, take me now, Lord.”
“Verbal, you is a doomed man. No wonder that Harry ain’t looking so glum anymore these days.”
“The lucky bastard.”
“She at least still good in bed?”
“No more,” Verbal tells them. “Like lying a’top a fresh-caught bass.”
“Deeder done that once. On accident, a’course. Don’t look at me like that. Me and him, we was—”
“It’s only been three weeks, you’d think she coulda kept warm a little longer than that!”
“It’s a sad affair, I’d say.”
“The hell was you and Deeder doing with them poor bass again?”
“I done told you it was an accident.”
“But the game warden said—”
“Who’s word you gonna take? His or mine? Wasn’t rightly doing nothing to them, mind you, it’s jest that when Deeder—”
“Let’s have another drink.”
“And fill ’em to the top this time.”
Mugs high, the dim light catching in the speckled foam. “To Deeder and his Large Mouth Bass, may God forgive his profane soul.”
The women circle and dance alone or in pairs to the lonely strains of guitars and banjos on the jukebox. Even if they listen to the men, which they never do, they wouldn’t hear them. A man’s dread is not their dread. There are dilemmas that cannot be equated or solved. His pitiful cares and frets have no real standing in comparison, they think. Look at the stretch marks and wrinkling upper lip and loosening chin, the ass that hasn’t quite dropped.
Smoke is so heavy in the room that you could get stuck in it like barbed wire.
Women coil in close, being eyed, laughing too loudly but without any humor, attracting the wrong kind of attention which is how it ought to be. Everybody will get laid tonight or wind up dying out in the parking lot, caught in the torrents and foul eddies that have come to claim us all. It’s the way it’s always been, but now it’s even worse.
The animal heads stare down and we look back wondering which of us is the most neglected.
My mother is still here in some fashion, weaving across the wet, stained floor. I don’t know whether she’s alive or dead, but her presence remains behind. She knows their speech and fears, and she smells no different than any of them. I can feel her nearby, breezing past, just out of eyeshot. The cloying stink of sweet perfume, sweat, and recklessness. She was sitting on the stool that I’m sitting on right now when she met my father, or so I’ve heard.
“You wanna dance, Verbal?” the woman asks. She’s creeping toward forty but keeps her voice toddler-pitched, swinging her hips out far enough to clip hedges, and knowing this is a ceremony that cannot ever vary.
Verbal Raynes, master of his own fate, at least as courageous as h
is cousins and uncles, drags his fingernails across the bar top, digging out thin curling gouts of shellac. He tells her, “Why the goddamn not? Let’s go, honey!”
Across the haze sits Betty Lynn, her baby fat almost gone since I last saw her. Her stomach is flat, and at nineteen the harsh eons of experience are alive in her eyes. She tilts her head at me, her teacher in these lessons, as if giving thanks. I nod back.
The wild boar continues its judgment from above. My mother, unseen but only inches away, titters. The smoke circles around us until I can almost believe we no longer exist.
We do, and we know this, but there’s no need to ever admit it.
CHANTING, THEY HURL HEXES.
The river is flooding out the bottoms and a host of granny witches, led by Velma Coots, have staked out the house. They’re parked there in the woods at the edge of our property, performing rituals and pointing their fingers and curses. It’s starting to piss me off just a tad.
I head into the storm and face them. Besides Velma Coots there’re six other women—three of them homely, one a beautiful teenager, an elderly hag, and an ancient crone. They wear shawls and rags for this ceremony, lace wrapped three times around their hair. In a matter of seconds I’m as drenched as they are. They’re all grounded deeper than any tree around us. They’ve come from out of the swamp for this bizarre meeting—this invocation.
“We need your seed,” Velma Coots says.
“Will you cut that shit out, lady!”
“We have to have your vinegar.” Water rushes into her mouth as she speaks. I turn and spot Dodi in the bedroom window, rain spouting in a thick stream from the weathervane and arching directly before her. She’s excited by the role she’s playing in this confrontation. Behind her there’s a sudden blur of activity. Stirring shadows as my brothers lurch forward. They understand that they too have a part in this service. Our seed is the same.
I really want a cigarette. “No.”
“Your pride is going to cost us all our lives!”
“You say that standing out here in the middle of it?”
“I’m doing what I have to do.”
“We all are.”
“Not you. You’ve got a duty to perform, Thomas.”
A laugh starts deep in my chest but it doesn’t get too far. “There’s power in names, Dodi said. My name is a part of me and so is my pride. You can’t have one without the other.”
The tempest moans and tears at us, with the sumac and cottonwoods and willows bowing and waving wildly all around. I won’t wind up like my father, and I won’t be mocked.
“This storm’s a reckoning that’s come looking for you, Thomas. They out there, the dead.”
“I don’t much mind.”
“Dodi’ll get some of your brothers’ seed, if not yours.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
The other conjure women begin a different chant, something with a singsong lilt and an Assyrian melody. It’s a piece of antiquity, this song, and it sounds right on the brunt of the thunder. I tap my foot in the mud, going with it. They spin and thrust their hands in my face. None of them has said a word directly to me.
I ask the teenager, “What’s your name?”
She draws back as if I’ve slapped her. Her nostrils flare as ozone burns and the lightning skips by. Drowned grebes and ducks float by our feet, and the mud laps like whitecapped breakers on an ocean. The Crone looks from me to the girl and goes, “Ssssshhh, chile!” A name has power, and to allow another to know it is a dangerous venture.
The wet lace runs across the girl’s forehead while glimmers of sheet lightning ignite to our left, to our right.
“Lottie Mae.”
“You work at the mill.”
“Yes.”
“You ought to be there right now.”
She’s offended by this small talk and because I’ve questioned her competence as one of my own employees. Even in the gray soaked day I can see a flush of crimson enter her cheeks. “I got someone to cover my shift. And you shouldn’t be caring about such things right at this here moment. You’ve got a greater responsibility, I hear tell. You’ve an obligation to Kingdom Come.”
“No more than you or anyone else.” I gaze at her and she holds my stare. I think I’m falling in love. I take a step forward and she nearly retreats into the brush. “How far would you go?”
“What?”
“For what has to be done.”
She catches on quick and freezes in her tracks. “I—”
“What would you do, Lottie Mae? To get my vinegar.”
“Listen here, this ain’t a—”
I reach for the ends of the lace and unwrap her face. She’s beautiful with a dark tangle of short black hair and defiant eyes. I draw my hand across her throat and watch the red deepen there as she quickly slips away. “Go home, ladies.”
Velma Coots stomps toward me about to get into it again. The Crone hovers at her shoulder. “Thomas, you can’t hide from this burden. It’s a commitment that’s come for you.”
“That’s enough, Velma Coots.” The sound of her name brushes her back some. “I’m tired of this. Go home. The storm will end tomorrow.”
“The swamp demons don’t give up that easy, son. This commotion won’t ever stop until you—”
“It’s already stopping. Can’t you feel it?”
The rain abates and Velma Coots seems a little stunned, her fingers and pink nub waving slightly as if testing the air. It’s got her curious but she’s still wary.
The other conjure women withdraw from around me now, the Crone drawing signs and wards in the wind. I do have pride, and ego, and I’m not certain if they’ve just fed it or sucked it clean like the marrow from a cracked chicken leg.
Lottie Mae cocks her chin and looks up at the window. A plethora of hands and arms are moving, in spasms, and wave down to her.
CHAPTER FIVE
I ONCE MET A DEAD BOY IN THE SWAMP.
I was seven or eight years old and had somehow gotten away from the yard. I heard my mother calling after me, high-pitched but not quite wailing. It was as if she were singing a slow ballad. As I listened I thought I was following the sound of her voice back to the house.
Instead I’d become turned around and continued heading deeper into the broad channels of slough, steering toward the swamp. I wandered for hours over muddy embankments, past cabbage palms and shagbark hickory, hearing her the entire time—or only thinking I heard her—unafraid as I walked on.
Eventually I began climbing through tangles of mangrove and chickasaw plum at the bank of the river. Tendrils of fog eased over the stagnant morass and pulsed beyond the cypress and fallen ironwood. I wasn’t tired. The world had opened up for me in a way it never had before.
I studied the lesson being taught. The voice of my mother had stopped but still I pursued it. That song remained behind in the air like the scent of jasmine. It carried into trees and sparkleberries. I climbed through the shallows and stood hip deep in the bayou, knowing my place. One of my places, at least.
The boy had been half-buried in mire.
A shovel lay nearby but someone hadn’t finished covering him over. His left arm hung at an angle outside the grave—fist clenched—and his right foot lay bent in such a way I knew the bones had been shattered. The sneaker remained neatly laced up, double-knotted with a looping bow, just like my own.
Most of his face could still be seen. His eyes were open. They were gray and drying.
He was about my age, maybe a year or two younger. I knelt and confronted the body, wanting to touch it but unwilling to put my hand on his skin. Part of his neck was dirty but the rest was pale and clean as if it had been scrubbed. I could clearly see the dark bruises under his Adam’s apple the size and shape of fingerprints.
“Hey, young’n.”
For an instant I thought the boy was talking to me. I peered closer. I ran my fingers through his short, blond hair. His mouth was filled with skimmer dragonflies and mosquitoes.
/> “Young’n, you there, kid!”
I spun and stared farther into the slough until I saw a thread of white smoke rising. A man sat in the morass puffing on a cigarette. He waved amiably and asked, “You wearing a belt, son? Yeah, you are, I can see it from here. I need a belt and a nice strong piece of stick.”
He had no shirt on and his body seemed carved of brass. The muscles rippled on his heavy arms and massive chest as he slowly raised the cigarette and puffed deeply. A broken-backed bull gator thrashed in the bog, squirming and rolling, dying. In its jaws was a human leg.
It was the man’s. He had used his shirt to try to stanch the flow of blood pouring from the stump, but it hadn’t made an effective bandage. He’d knotted the sleeves together but they were wet and loosening. He calmly continued smoking, apparently in no particular hurry to move, even though he was bleeding out.
“I need your belt and a stick so I can make a tourniquet. You do know what a tourniquet is, don’t you, boy?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s good, I had a gut feelin’ you was a smart kid. My name is Herbie Ordell Jonstone, come here from Tupelo, Mississippi. Don’t be scairt none, you could do me a righteous turn, you could.”
“Uh-huh.”
I stared down at the boy and kept stroking his hair.
“That there is my son, Johnny Jonstone. This bull gator here got to him first. A tragedy it is, a man losing his firstborn and his leg like this all on the same afternoon. But you can help to make it right.”
“I can?”
“Good Lawd above, yes. We need more heroes like you in this here world, boy, trust me on that. Someone of distinguished valor and admirable exploits, that’s what you got a chance to be. Willing to help a man down on his luck and in pressing adversity. I bet this here story receives some national coverage on the TV, and folks from all around our great nation will hail your name.”
“You really think so?”
“For certain. And tell me now, just what is your name?”
“Thomas.”
“You gonna make your mama proud today, Thomas. You’re my savior is what you are.”
A Choir of Ill Children Page 6