Black Hammock

by Michael Wiley

  ‘The outfit will make a difference?’ Carol asked.

  I said, ‘It’s a matter of respect.’

  ‘But you’re going to kill them,’ she said.

  ‘Not right away,’ I said. ‘And anyway I always show respect for the dead.’

  I had never seen Carol cry, and she didn’t as I left, but she stood at the motel room door, skinny and black-haired and almost pretty, and said, ‘Stay safe.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said, though in Rough Justice – which I had read and reread in Atlanta, trying to touch anything from home – Lane Charles said he thought safety was overrated. He thought people should throw themselves back into a fight even years after someone hurts them. He wrote, Justice delayed isn’t justice denied. It might be a bastard cousin to a left hook while both men are still standing in the ring, but sometimes you need to heal after you take a blow. If a punch knocks you out or cracks your jaw, you’ve got to stop seeing double and get the dental work. Then you can climb back into the ring and break your opponent’s neck.

  ‘See you soon,’ I said, and kissed Carol, and then the wind that comes before afternoon thunderstorms in this part of the South blew across the parking lot, raising a plume of hot dust, and the first thick drops of rain darkened the concrete.

  Paul and I drove out through the rain toward the ocean, weaving through backstreets past subdivisions of little bare houses and then factories and then nothing at all until we reached Sawpit Road, which ran alongside Clapboard Creek and took us through a stretch of timberland with scrub pine trees growing in rows as neat as field corn.

  When the creek hooked east toward the ocean and the timberland stopped as suddenly as if some god had used a knife on it, we drove out of the rain on to dry pavement, though clouds were chasing us from the west and the sunshine seemed like a mean lie.

  We came to the old bridge to Black Hammock Island, and Paul slowed the car and looked at me. ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  I just kept my eyes on the road, which had changed hardly at all in my years away.

  As we crossed the bridge, Paul said, ‘You’re breathing hard.’

  ‘Nope,’ I said, ‘just breathing.’

  ‘They won’t know you,’ he said. ‘They can’t. You were only eight—’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but—’

  ‘You’re dead to them,’ he said. ‘You look nothing like—’

  ‘If they recognize me, I don’t know that I’ll be able to go through with it,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a good man,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘A good man,’ he said. ‘An honorable man. This is an honorable thing for you to do. For you. And for your sister and brother.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘So take it easy,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad to be back is all,’ I said.

  ‘Remember, when the curtain goes up, they deserve everything you give them,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be here with you if they didn’t.’

  We drove for a mile past marshes, mudflats, weather-beaten trees, and dry ditches. Then we came to the driveway. A padlocked gate stretched across it, and a hill – a dune of sand that had blown across the island thousands of years ago and then had sunk and hardened into a soil almost as thick as clay – rose between the gate and the house.

  ‘You sure about this?’ Paul asked.

  ‘I’ve been coming this way for a long time,’ I said.

  ‘What are you going to tell your sister and brother?’ he asked.

  Lexi had been about a year old when I last saw her, Cristofer a newborn. She would be nineteen now, he eighteen. We’d grown up without each other. What could I tell them that would make sense? I said to Paul, ‘I’ll tell them that once upon a time an eight-year-old boy jumped from the top of a pine tree. He made no sound as he fell past the first thin branches. He made no sound as he fell past the thickening and past old nests and fire scars. He made no sound as he cut the difference between himself and the dirt – ten feet to five, four to two. When an inch remained between him and the ground – a half-inch, a quarter – the people sitting under the tree suspected nothing. Although the boy had fallen a hundred feet or more, no one knew what was coming. Then, in the time between what was and what would be, the world ended in a catastrophe of blood and bones.’ I opened the door and asked, ‘You think Lexi and Cristofer will like the story?’

  ‘You’re hopeless,’ Paul said.

  ‘Ha,’ I said, and as I got out of the car, the wind that comes before thunderstorms rushed up the road and rain broke from the sky. So I climbed over the gate and walked over the hill and into the yard. Lexi was sitting on the front porch as if she’d been waiting for me for eighteen years.

  TWO

  Lexi

  The man came over the hill in the afternoon. Vaulted over the gate. Came over the hill and into the yard. Black clouds stacked in the west. The sky held its breath. Breathed out. The wind whipped over the hill sweeping dust and sand off the dry ground. Rain pocked the ground. The sand and dirt turned into fish scales and then into a brown wash.

  Because metaphors are one-way tickets. From here.

  Lightning jagged the sky. The yard smelled like salt. Like a first world. If I closed my eyes I could believe it. The man came over the hill and up the driveway. Kicking wet sand and dust.

  These things are hard to get a grip on.

  But I know this much. Nothing on this island stops for rain.

  The man wore blue suit pants and a blue jacket. A white handkerchief poked from his pocket. A cotton-white star. He’d polished his black shoes fine and hard. A beautiful man. I could see that much even through the waves of rain and the tar smoke and the spattering sand and dust.

  Cristofer bounced on his trampoline in the side yard. Bounced and grunted. Skinny golden-haired angel. Bouncing. Reaching into the sky. All day long. Skipping meals. Rain or wind or sun. Mom painted in her studio shed. Walter washed tar off his hands and arms in the kitchen. As if. Tilson fixed the chicken fence. He’d fixed it a thousand times if one. Lane Charles stood at the side of his cane field. He knew better than to step across the property line. Walter had said he’d shoot him. He sometimes stepped across the line anyway.

  I sat on the front porch. Reading ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ out of the Bible that I’d cut the middle out of. So I could stick in a paperback book. Because that’s what I did when Walter hid my dad’s books in the attic and said, Thou shalt not. And Mom rolled her eyes but let Walter have his way. As if. But I could cut the middle out of a Bible. And I could climb a ladder to the attic and find Walter’s hidey-hole.

  I read ‘Tell-Tale’ from Great American Stories. And I stroked my leg under my dress. Higher and higher. Circling higher. Because there was happiness between the rainclouds and the sun and who deserved it if I didn’t?

  My orgasm and a man coming over the hill. The most exciting events of the day. Of any day. Around here.

  So much was unclear until he came. We’d been ghosts. Ghosts in a fog in the night though it was a July afternoon. I know that much. Until the rain came the sun had shined so hot it could burn a hole in a bleached sheet if you left it out too long to dry. It had been a day to run off to the pine woods and sit in the shade. Or to find a porch swing and read a book. A place to escape the stinging hot July and the weed-and-holly smell and the tar smoke and the biting yellow flies.

  The man in the blue suit came over the hill. He raised his face to the rain as if he was looking for directions. But if the rain was guiding him it was a cruel rain telling him to walk to our house. He was fine-looking though I couldn’t see his eyes. And eyes as they say are the windows.

  I took my hand out of my dress. Picked up the Bible. Walter gave it to me because I’d tired him with begging begging begging for my dad’s books. Pastels of a shepherd and lambs. Jesus and Mary. The burning bush. Jacob wrestling. It had a red binding and a strap with a heart-shaped lock that held the cover closed even if you chucked it at a wall.
Which I’d tried. I kept the key on a leather string around my neck.

  I opened the cover and breathed the old-yellow-paper smell of Great American Edgar Allan. Closed it and locked the strap. Look at me. I was a girl on a front-porch swing with a Bible on her lap. Church mouse.

  The man came to the porch. When he smiled each white tooth was a star in the sky. He took the handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the rain from his forehead. He said, ‘Is this where Kay Jakobson lives?’

  I gave him my best smile also. It was small change. ‘My mom,’ I said. ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘An admirer,’ he said.

  ‘She’s old for you,’ I said. ‘And married. And self-obsessed and not a very nice person.’

  ‘I saw her paintings,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not the first.’

  ‘In Atlanta,’ he said.

  ‘And you came all the way down here to meet her?’

  ‘I want to buy one,’ he said. ‘If she’ll work that way.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ I said. ‘How did you get into the yard?’

  He said, ‘I climbed over the gate.’

  ‘Bad idea to climb over a gate,’ I said.

  ‘I tried to call,’ he said.

  ‘No you didn’t. I would’ve answered.’

  ‘I tried—’

  ‘You’re a liar.’ I said it nicely.

  He smiled those teeth at me. ‘I would have called if I’d known you would answer,’ he said.

  ‘I’m here all the time,’ I said.

  THREE

  Oren

  When we started planning this trip, I told Paul, ‘My mother’s family has been on that land since the end of the Civil War. They’re beholden to it.’

  ‘Beholden?’ he said. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m telling you, I need to blow them off that place,’ I said, ‘or they won’t go.’

  ‘Big bad wolf? You could just sneak up and kill them,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not that easy.’ I said. ‘They would still be there. Something of them would.’

  ‘Now you’re talking about ghosts?’ He was impatient with stupidity.

  ‘Something bigger and realer,’ I said. ‘Something in me. If I don’t go to war against them and blast them out of that house, they’ll never be gone. Not for me.’

  ‘There will be damage,’ he said. ‘Your sister and brother. Are you willing to live with it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Depends on what they’re like.’

  ‘You’d better figure that out fast.’

  ‘I need to see what they’re made of,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll know.’

  ‘Just don’t start believing in ghosts,’ he said.

  Face-to-face, I said to Lexi, ‘I guess this doesn’t look like the kind of place I would expect Kay Jakobson to live.’

  ‘I guess not,’ Lexi said. She was nineteen but looked younger. Stunted. Did she look like me? Not even at a squint. She looked more like the pictures Kay painted of herself. What did they look like? ARTFORUM said, Kay Jakobson’s self-portraits, despite their pure, unforgiving lines, show the same desire that makes people scratch the scabs off their skin and reveal intimate secrets to strangers. Lexi had the palest skin, but with her dress hiked halfway up one thigh and those blue eyes, she seemed to have something craving that needed to get out.

  The house hadn’t changed since I’d been gone. It was two stories with just one door because my mother’s great-great-great-grandpa thought a backdoor was an extravagance or wanted no one sneaking up behind him or both. When the roof leaked, they painted it with tar from the kiln. They nailed a new layer of shingles over the tar and smeared them with another coat to be sure. In the heat, the tar dripped from the eaves, and brown tears ran down the walls.

  ‘Nice windows,’ I said to Lexi.

  Lexi put a hand on her bare thigh. ‘Mom cleans them with Windex,’ she said. ‘When tar drips on them, she uses a razor blade.’

  I wondered what Walter and my mother had done to her. I said, ‘A lot of tar.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. How much did she belong to this house? How much did she belong to my mother and her husband? Where would she stand when the fighting started?

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Walter makes it. My mom’s husband. Pine tar is the best. Sand pine and slash pine and longleaf and loblolly. That makes the tar that everyone on the island wants when they want tar. Once a man drove from Charlotte to buy some. It’s that good. Termites don’t like it.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘I could talk for hours about tar,’ she said.

  I couldn’t tell if she was playing with me. ‘It sounds like it,’ I said.

  ‘Everyone in my family can,’ she said. ‘Except my little brother. He doesn’t talk. At all. Did you know you can mix tar into your shampoo if you’ve got dandruff?’

  ‘I don’t have dandruff,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘You can also disinfect a cut.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I could teach you a thing or two,’ she said.

  I smiled.

  She said, ‘You should come up on the porch. Get out of the rain.’

  Instead, the screen door opened and Walter came out. He wore blue jeans and held a .22 rifle. Eighteen years had aged him thirty. He’d last seen me when I was a kid and he thought Tilson had killed me, but wouldn’t he know me?

  ‘Bad idea to climb over a gate,’ Lexi said. ‘And when someone lives on an island with only one old bridge, it’s a bad idea even to cross that bridge.’

  Walter asked, ‘Who are you?’

  If I went up the porch steps and took his gun, I could shoot him and then hunt down my mother. I said, ‘An admirer.’

  Walter screwed his face. ‘An admirer of what?’

  ‘I want to buy one of Kay Jakobson’s paintings,’ I said. ‘I’m a collector – starting out.’

  Walter said, ‘You’ve got money, I suppose?’

  ‘Some,’ I said. ‘Enough, I hope. For an artist of her kind.’

  ‘What kind is that?’ he said.

  I stared down his stare. He showed no recognition, no worry. ‘She’s not for everyone,’ I said.

  ‘But she’s for you?’

  ‘I like self-portraits,’ I said.

  Then he eyed me as if he might know me. ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘you’ve come into our yard uninvited. I don’t like you. You can go back out the way you came in. You want a painting, buy it from the gallery.’

  Lexi said, ‘Walter is a Puritan of sorts. If you can believe that a man who likes nothing more than to screw my mom can be a Puritan. If you can believe that every morning a Puritan would sneak four eggs from our chickens and eat them plain. No salt. No pepper. And leave half a scrambled egg hanging in his beard. But Walter knows what he knows and he holds to it like God has told him it’s so.’

  Walter said, ‘You’ve got a filthy mouth, girl.’

  She looked down at her Bible.

  I asked her, ‘Will you introduce me to your mother?’

  She pointed at the shed across the yard. ‘That’s her studio.’

  ‘I’m obliged,’ I said.

  Walter said, ‘The boy in the suit is “obliged”?’ He pointed his .22 at the sky and fired it. The sound stung the air.

  If I tried to take the gun, he would shoot me. I said, ‘What’s your problem?’

  He said, ‘I don’t like strangers coming through the gate unasked.’

  I said, ‘There was no bell, no way to let you know I was here.’

  Walter laughed. ‘You want a doorbell? Where the hell do you think you are?’

  ‘How do visitors let you know they’ve come?’ I asked.

  ‘They don’t,’ he said. ‘That’s why we have the gate. That’s why there’s a lock on the gate. That’s why there’s a hill between the gate and the house. That’s why we live on an island south of nowhere. W
e don’t want visitors.’

  I laughed at that.

  But Walter chambered another bullet, metal sliding against metal. ‘You’ll be leaving,’ he said.

  I thought, If he kills me now … but I said, ‘I’ve come to see your wife.’

  ‘What makes you think she wants to see you?’ he asked.

  Lexi put the Bible on the floor under the swing and jumped off the porch. ‘I’ll take you,’ she said.

  Walter fired into the sky again, but Lexi and I crossed the yard, kicking mud and wet weeds. The stench of tar hung in the air. Tilson stood by the chicken fence and watched us, fear in his eyes, as if I was a ghost of myself. Next door, Lane Charles turned from his field and watched, grinning idiotically.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Lexi asked me.

  It was too soon. I said, ‘Call me whatever you want.’

  Lexi stopped and looked at me. Did she know me? She said, ‘I’ll call you Edgar Allan.’

  FOUR

  Lexi

  Walter had built Mom’s studio in the shade of a live oak. Spanish moss hung from the branches and lay on the ground and on the shed roof. Mom kept the door and windows shut in the July heat. An oven to bake her paint on the canvas.

  I knocked.

  ‘What?’ she said. Which sounded like Go away. Mom had never learned manners.

  I knocked again.

  The door opened. Fleshy was the word for Mom. Paint flecked her skin and her hair. She smoked a cigarette. Sweat smelled from her body. But when she saw the stranger she pursed her lips. Asked, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘An admirer,’ he said. ‘A great admirer.’

  She looked at him. Uneasy. I thought she would slide back into the shed and bolt the door as she sometimes did. But she said, ‘You’re welcome here.’ She stepped into the yard as if she’d been waiting for him forever. The man in the blue suit looked at me like it was all a big joke. He was dangerous. A nameless man. A man of lies. But I didn’t care. Didn’t care. Didn’t care. I wanted something. Needed something.