A Choir of Ill Children

by Tom Piccirilli

“Learn anything at all about the girl?”

  “No,” he says, trying hard to drop an octave and failing. “Let’s stick to the subject at hand.”

  “How about the dog kicker?”

  “You never mind about him.”

  “He’s tearing the town apart, that dog kicker. People don’t feel safe putting their own pets in the yard.”

  “Hey—”

  “Can’t leave them outside, you never know when the little dears are gonna get trampled upon.”

  “Shut up. I don’t want to hear that crap.”

  “The kids, I think that’s the worst part. It just isn’t right that they should suffer so.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “What it’s doing to the poor children of Kingdom Come, seeing their beloved pets . . .”

  It doesn’t take much to put Burke on the defensive. He hops out of his chair like a boy rushing to watch cartoons and heads off to free Dodi. His bootheels tick against the tile floor making the same sounds as a scuttling rat.

  Binky’s photo stares back at me from the wall, full of sorrow and anguish, with no promise of better days ahead.

  I SEE THAT FRED’S ARM REALLY HAS HEALED UP NICELY as he reaches out to shake my hand. He’s gained a good deal of weight and all the manic tension has washed out of him, leaving him slow and sedate. He’s apologetic about having stolen from me, but not overly so. He doesn’t hold any hostility toward me and doesn’t offer to pay me back. He probably doesn’t remember much about that last night in the house anyway. Now he’s got a sense of pride about him that he didn’t have before. The rehab guys have done a fine job of whipping him back into shape.

  He looks around for Dodi. He might be clean but he’s still got the hots for her, that’s natural enough. She’s in another room, on the third floor, waiting patiently for Sarah to leave before showing herself again, as per my instructions.

  It doesn’t take long for Fred to get around to making his big movie pitch to me. Not the porn freaks flick he had all worked out but his new documentary on addiction. He foresees it as an eighteen-part opus he wants to market to PBS. He unfolds a piece of paper covered with figures—costs, estimates, and percentages—most of which I find rather reasonable. I tell him I’ll carefully consider his proposal.

  Sarah’s on the phone with her father, whispering, the cord wrapped so tightly around her hands that it’s a garrote. The sweet scent of honeysuckle sweeps through the house. A couple of long-jawed orb weaver spiders creep across the floorboards leaving fine threads of web behind. She says, “Yes, Daddy, I understand. Thank you, Daddy, I love you.”

  Staring at the photo of my parents that he’d tried to steal, Fred rubs his arm. He mouths words and I can read his lips. He’s reciting the line I gave him before breaking his ulna, about how it would provide spiritual reassurance, a new hope for all. How he should take heart in that.

  Maybe he does. But he remains an addict, and he starts looking around, wondering if I still have the better crystal I was cutting his coke with. His lips are still too wet and his tongue peers through them like a slug.

  Sarah’s bags are packed and she stands in the hall crying softly, looking back up the stairwell at the closed door of the bedroom. She’s got her blouse tied at midriff, but the stitches on her belly are protected by a thick white bandage. It crinkles and snaps as she gives the house a last once-over. I think she’ll miss it—us, Jonah, these preoccupations—for a while at least. Potts County can get in the blood. This distraction has been a rather intriguing one. It’s presented her with lots of material to tell the shrink that her parents will have to hire. And the five grand in cash I’ve given her will help soothe some of her fleeting despair.

  The tattooed masks of Tragedy and Comedy leer and grin at me as Sarah turns. She says, “Tell him—”

  “What?”

  “That it’s best this way.” Her voice breaks down the center. “It’s time that I left. We . . . this . . . couldn’t go on indefinitely. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for all of it. Please tell him that.”

  “I don’t have to. He’s listening.”

  “Oh my God,” she whimpers.

  Fred is quietly opening and closing drawers, searching for the stash. Sarah brushes the tears off her chin and takes my hand. For the first time I feel a bit sad that she’s going. The chemistry is changing once more, and we need to find a new equilibrium. She steps up on tiptoe as if to kiss my cheek but she doesn’t. She glances into my eyes and smiles grimly.

  “Take care of yourself, Thomas.”

  “And you, Sarah.”

  “Please watch over Jonah—all your brothers—as well.”

  “Of course.”

  “They don’t need that girl, really. They need you.”

  She wheels aside and walks out. Fred babbles something about staying in touch, promising to send me some of his screeners, then grabs Sarah’s luggage and follows her out the front door.

  The screaming starts.

  THAT IMMENSE BRAIN IS TWO-THIRDS WRATH NOW, unbalanced as neurotransmitters slither and slosh and Cole’s love diminishes in the misfiring synapses of heartbreak and rage. Sebastian is bitter and Jonah insane. Their hands are twitching, tongues unfurling, thoughts so distorted and loud that there’s a buzz at the base of my neck and the hair stands on end. I want to see their eyes but every time I come close those gnarled arms and legs whirl and block me. I think about those powerful hands that gripped me in my nightmare, protecting me from the depths of the swamp and what waited to strangle me there. The lungs wheeze and hiss, growls bleeding through. Cole tries to speak reassurances but they won’t let him talk. There’s no real poetry but the mouths mumble angry stanzas of indignation. They shamble and pirouette forward, the stunted distorted bodies quite beautiful and natural in their own way—the fluid angles and flesh of contorted bone, tendon and muscle are aesthetically elegant. The three shriveled forms merge to support the massive head, the unseen eyes, whirling and almost prancing. Sparks leap and pop across the carpeting. I speak Jonah’s name and he withdraws to the corner, dragging the rest of the scuffling bodies with him, where they are all consumed by shadows. Fingers point at the door and I leave.

  I’M PARKED OUTSIDE OF DOOVER’S FIVE & DIME AT around closing time when Lottie Mae’s brother, Clay, and his buddy Darr pull in on their bikes. Cormorants, loons, and grebes wallow and squawk in the green morass channels behind the store, waddling beneath the rotting docks where the swamp folk tie their poled skiffs when they come in to buy provisions.

  Darr still has the butterfly Band-Aid on his forehead. The adhesive has worn off one edge and it flaps freely as he approaches. He hasn’t bathed and the cut is crusted with dirt. He’s a man who likes the world to take care of itself.

  I wonder what the play is going to be. Clay stands and watches, arms hanging loosely at his sides, expressionless but alert. He glances at the door searching for his sister, unsure if she’s still inside, or if, possibly, I’ve done something with her already.

  Like Einstein, Darr doesn’t waste time and valuable mental energy choosing different clothes each day. He’s still got on the tight red sleeveless T-shirt, the jeans, boots, the belt buckle. One difference. He’s tossed the tiny knife, probably in a fit of anger thinking the blade was a traitor after being cut by it, a defector to the enemy camp. It’s the kind of thinking that leads men to call their guitars by women’s names and eventually divorce them. He’s got a new love, an eight-inch switchblade stuffed inside his left boot.

  I get out of the truck and wait for him to step up. His belly keeps him pretty far off from me, but he’s got the reach to make the distance. He cocks his head and the Band-Aid flops the other way as he stares over at the loons plodding along through the grass.

  “You know what I simply cannot stand?” he asks me.

  “I’ll play along since this has the structure of a rhetorical question. What is it that you cannot stand?”

  “Fencing.”

  I clear my throat. “Fencin
g?”

  “Watching fencers who have no notion of the hardcore reality behind the art form. They think it’s a sport, the damn fools. Or worse, some kind of performance they’re putting on for their mamas, like ballet or synchronized swimming. It was never meant to be a sport. You’ve got to have convictions to live with the blade. Belief. True belief, that’s it, that’s what I’m talking about. But those players, they might as well be shooting hoops or sliding into third base. They never embrace the . . . the tenets, the ideology behind that discipline.”

  “I can’t say that I have an opinion one way or the other.”

  “Trust what I’m tellin’ you. No matter how much training they go in for they always got that swashbuckling bullshit fantasy going on in their heads. No way around that for most of ’em. They feel gallant sashaying around with their Musketeer sword, lunging after each other on the mats, shouting in French like it means somethin’ special when they can’t even pronounce the words. With those silly helmets on over their faces, you shouldn’t be caught dead in one’a them, and the machines buzzing when they tap each other on the chests.”

  “Even the women?”

  “Especially the women! Oh hell, don’t get me goin’ on that!”

  He spits into the mud as the last couple of patrons leave the store and get back into their skiffs, stobpoling into the bayou. Lottie Mae turns the sign in the window to CLOSED and notices the scene out front. Vines drape against the glass and frame her face for a moment. She raises her chin and sets her lips into a thin white bloodless line before she withdraws.

  Darr sways a little, maybe a sign of inner ear damage. “Wouldn’t you think they’d get tired of that foolhardy act? All that idiotic fake valor they’re supposed to be clutching hold of when they go prancing around like any old so-and-so? How you supposed to prove you’re made of real blood and bone when you go stabbing at each other covered with all that metal getup gear on, huh? Don’t you think you’d get a lot further along if they didn’t have cork tips on the swords?”

  “They’d probably try a lot harder not to get struck.”

  He bursts into a robust laughter, which sounds genuine and a bit crazed. “That’s it! You got it! My point, that’s exactly my point right there!” His muscles ripple and the washed-out jailhouse tattoos look worse than melanoma.

  I blink at him a couple of times and lean against the side of the truck. Not only does Darr expect the world to handle itself but he’s also got high hopes for the logic of his assertions to eventually come to validity all on their own. Maybe he’s talking in metaphor. I wonder if this is some vague attempt at intimidation.

  “I do believe you and me understand each other well.”

  “I’ll get back to you on that,” I tell him and walk over to Clay.

  Maybe he’s a conjure boy and he’s already working spells and making invocations for purpose unknown, even to himself. His shoulders are drooped with weariness and his eyes are half-hooded. It appears that he has been through this—or something very much like this—many times before. I feel the same way.

  “Why do you keep showing up around my sister?” he asks.

  “The first couple of times she showed up around me, but I admit I came seeking her out tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  A small line appears between his eyebrows and it takes me a second to realize that this is his version of a frown. Then the line disappears. “Don’t you have anything better to say than that?”

  I think about it. “No, not really.”

  “You should probably stay away from her. I think that would be best.” No implied caveat, no brandishing of weapon or muscle. His voice is slightly cold, traced with melancholy. I can tell that he once almost made it out of Potts County, only to be drawn back in.

  “Did you come back to town for your sister?” I ask. “To protect her? To take her out of here?”

  “No.”

  “Why then?”

  “Maybe I’ll explain it to you sometime.”

  It’s good to hear him telling the truth, flatly, without riddles. We’ll get to the meat of the matter perhaps, if things turn out in a proper fashion, whatever the hell that is. We must wait for certain circumstances to play out, a chain of events that began with Lottie Mae’s vomit, or maybe my grandmother on the school roof, or long before that even. Each incident following the other in a pattern that can’t be determined yet. At least not by me.

  I ask, “Does your friend really dislike fencing that much or was the whole thing some kind of roundabout threat?”

  “No, he hates it.”

  “So why’d he tell me?”

  “He likes you.”

  “Oh.”

  Darr takes out his switchblade, opens it, and hurls it into the weeds at a passing cormorant. The bird shrieks in pain, rolls and flops and tries to crawl away as Darr goes after it.

  There’s very little blood. He stomps through the muck smiling, catches the duck and stabs it through the brain. He carries the corpse over and hands it to Clay, who handles the murdered bird with a certain reverence. Lottie Mae comes out with a croker sack, refusing to meet my eyes. I watch with mild fascination. Clay puts the dead cormorant in the sack, ties it shut, and places it behind the seat of his bike. He and Lottie Mae get on his motorcycle, Darr gets on the other Harley, and they all ride away without another word.

  I stand around for a while longer, thinking about Drabs and looking into the glowing green of the bog. The grebes and mallards float past, dipping for fish. A cold wind starts blowing and it feels good against my throat. Bull gators roar out in the morass and a few cormorant feathers drift by.

  The loons weep, just as my mother wept, echoing through the lowland. I light a cigarette. Rising swamp gas ignites and flames spring and dance across the stagnant water, flailing and sinuous, writhing and red like dying men unwilling to let go of a hated life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE CRONE AND TWO OF THE OTHER GRANNY witches somehow get into the house one late afternoon and start running around performing rituals all over the place. They rush from room to room spattering foul-smelling oils across the doorways, chanting and carrying out cleansing ceremonies.

  Strangely enough they pass by the bedroom where Dodi lies with my brothers trying to draw Jonah back from the abyss of his depression. They don’t aim their prayers there and don’t waste their potions.

  Velma Coots hasn’t sanctioned this attack. It’s not her way. She, out of all of them, knows better. This faction of conjure women has broken off from the rest of the whole, rising out of the swamp after much planning on their part. When I come near they shriek words I don’t understand and make warding gestures in front of my face. They believe there is a dark truth hidden here that must be excised immediately, and they’ve finally decided to take matters into their own hands. I can appreciate that kind of bravado. They wear their shawls, lace wrapped three times around their hair, bracelets of thistle and flower petals, carrying charms and bells that they ring every so often between all the yelling.

  The Crone tires quickly and reaches out for the velvet draperies, sits on the divan, breathing heavily. She’s too ancient to have a name any longer. When she coughs you can hear the ages rattling inside her shrunken frame. No human names can cling to her anymore—they slip from her dusty shriveled flesh like a young girl’s whimsies. She holds star charts that show an alignment—a misalignment—of the planets and moons. Bloody streaks have dried across the parchment as if she’s tried to compel the celestial bodies back on course through the force of her own soaking blood. I suppose it’s as good a try as any.

  I decide to make tea and offer them finger foods and pound cake. The Crone’s voice is so brittle that it sounds as if it has been broken and repaired with a hammer and nails many times before. “You’re culpable,” she says.

  “So you old ladies keep telling me. The more I hear it the less I believe it though, to tell you the truth.”

  “Dues
a’plenty but it ain’t your fault, not entirely.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sometimes it’s just the way things are. Wrong, but natural.”

  “Well, thanks for that much. Pound cake?”

  “Okay.”

  Her rags are paper-thin, held together only by filth, but she’s swathed in them as if wrapped in gossamer. There’s something very beautiful about all her stacked-up years, vicious and startling as well. She deserves reverence and respect and I do my best to keep from throwing them out on the lawn.

  “What’s this shit you’re tossing all over the place?”

  “Oxtail soup, boiled for three days.”

  “Christ!”

  “We thought it might help.”

  She says it sadly because she realizes it won’t. We’re beyond such measures and probably always have been. Her hands tremble as she takes the proffered teacup and a slice of cake.

  “I appreciate the effort. A little lemon?”

  “Yah, please.”

  I add a slice of lemon to her tea and watch her eat with trembling hands. She gums the food until it’s a thin gruel that swirls around her mouth for a time before she swallows.

  My great-grandfather must’ve danced with her long ago. Thinking of it makes me a little rueful, about how it had been and how it should be. He danced with all the girls and plucked jasmine bouquets for each one of them when he did his courting, down Main Street and over the meadows, through the orchards and while walking to church. He had a good line, I guess. I look at her twisted brown fingers and imagine them pale and young again, drawn into his hands as they do-si-doed in the spring across the town square. That corrupted withered voice once tittered shyly as she whispered to him. The generations continue to close in.

  “I’m old,” the Crone says as if this should be news. “I don’t have much consternation left in me. What I do got I reserve for the proper time, the right people and things.”

  “Me?”

  She cackles and pieces of her clothing flake off. Her hair has come loose from her skull and nearly transparent strands waft to the floor. She’s thin and tattered as a streamer caught in the wind. There’s a madness circling in her eyes but it’s a kind of insanity you can embrace. A madness of history and survival, much different than that of Drabs or Maggie or my brothers or even me. Her voice fades in and out, weakening then gaining strength. She smells like bad meat.