Black Hammock

by Michael Wiley

Walter yelled at Lane Charles again, ‘Hey.’

  In a few seconds, the man would disappear into his field.

  Walter chambered a bullet and sighted the rifle again.

  ‘Don’t —’ I said.

  He did, and his shot missed the tractor again.

  Lane Charles hunched low in his seat.

  ‘Goddamned fool,’ Walter said, and chambered another bullet.

  I tried to knock the gun from his hands.

  But he shot.

  Lane Charles’s head snapped back. Blood lit up the air above him.

  ‘What did you do?’ I yelled.

  The tractor veered back into the yard and careened out toward the hill, spitting dirt from its tires, then turned back toward the pickup trucks and motorcycles. Lane Charles lay on the steering wheel, his body hard against the throttle. The sun glinted off his glasses.

  ‘What have you done?’ Kay shouted at Walter.

  He stood, shocked, with the rifle in his hands, as if someone had tricked him into holding it. ‘Not my fault,’ he said.

  I knocked the gun from his hands.

  Outside, the tractor arced short of the pickup trucks and headed for the house. It seemed it would hit the porch and come through the door. Walter looked terrified. Paul, Carol, Jimmy, and Robert watched. The sun flashed off the tractor and Lane Charles’s bloody shirt.

  I watched the tractor come. It would hit the house. My head was buzzing.

  Then Paul stepped behind the yellow truck and came back with a shotgun. He aimed at Lane Charles.

  ‘No,’ Lexi said.

  I wanted to shout out the window at Paul. But I said to Lexi, ‘He’s already dead.’

  Paul squeezed the trigger.

  Lane Charles’s body jerked.

  I felt sick.

  But the tractor seemed to figure out where it was going. It passed by the side of the house and bumped and rattled across the yard toward the pine woods. I listened for a crash when it hit the trees, but only quiet followed and an uncertainty worse than sound.

  Walter picked up his .22 and said, ‘I’m ending this now.’ He headed for the door.

  Lexi stepped in front of him, blocked him.

  Walter looked like he would hit her. ‘They’ve got their hands on our necks,’ he said. ‘I won’t stand it. I’m—’

  Out in the yard, Paul yelled, ‘Go,’ with such strange force that Walter went to the window instead, to see what he was doing. Paul’s German shepherds streaked across the yard toward the house, Stretcher leading. They turned and ran along the porch, turned again, sprinted to the side and around the back, and came again to the front. They circled the house, the sun sparkling in their gray fur, turning it silver, clouds of dirt and dust rising from their feet. They circled the house a second time and a third, and then Walter raised his rifle to his shoulder and tracked Stretcher’s movement as the dog came around to the front. I ran to him to take the gun. I was ready to shoot him. He wanted to end this and I was ready to end it for him.

  But he pulled the trigger.

  A spot of blood shined on Stretcher’s haunches. The dog spun and for a moment stood still. Then it tried to bite the bullet wound like a gaffed shark turning on itself.

  ‘Ha,’ Walter shouted out the window.

  I ripped the rifle from his hands. ‘Enough,’ I said.

  But Stretcher wasn’t done. The big dog turned toward the house, smelled the air, and sprang on to the porch. His feet hardly touched the planking before he leaped through the window. He came at Walter, knocking him to the floor, making noises made only by predatory animals – muscle noises, noises from deep in the throat, deep in the chest, skin slapping against skin.

  Then Flip and Cereb came through the window, ripping and yapping. Stretcher closed his jaws on Walter’s leg, and Walter screamed. Cereb cornered Kay, growling low from the belly, and Flip, his ruff high, stood by Cristofer, watchful.

  Walter screamed again as Stretcher tore at his leg. I set Walter’s gun down against the wall. Lexi went for it, but Cereb turned from Cristofer and backed her away with his teeth. She shouted at me, ‘Shoot it.’

  I caught my breath, dizzy. But I put a finger to my lips. ‘Shh,’ I said, and I went to the green chair and sat down. Close your eyes, Paul had said. Let it happen.

  I closed my eyes – then opened them again.

  Walter screamed again when Stretcher’s teeth found his leg bone.

  Lexi ran across the room, grabbed the rifle, and swung the butt down on the head of the dog.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said, too late – for a third time, too late.

  The butt came away sticky and gray, and Stretcher fell, his teeth caught in Walter’s leg.

  Flip went after Lexi, and she prodded him back with the gun. Flip lunged, and she jabbed him. He sprawled, got to his feet, and lunged again. She knocked him down again. When he got back to his feet, I whistled once, high, and Flip’s muscles relaxed. Cereb trotted over from Kay and licked Flip on the ears, as if neither one ever had known meanness.

  Then, out in the yard, Paul whistled too – long and low – an answer to my high whistle. Cereb turned and leaped out through the window, jumped from the porch, and raced across the yard toward the pickup trucks. Flip sniffed at Stretcher’s body, looked at me. I pointed at the window and he leaped out.

  Kay went to Walter. One of his pant legs was ripped. His shin, up to his knee and down to his work boot, was covered in blood, his pale flesh ripped and ragged. His face was gray, and for the first time I knew what he would look like when he was dead.

  ‘Get towels and water,’ Kay said.

  Lexi went to the kitchen and brought back a bowl, towels, and turpentine. Kay had Walter lie on the floor with his hurt leg on one of the dinner chairs. She bathed the torn skin, touching it with the softest part of a towel, tipping water from the bowl to rinse it. Walter moaned until Kay screwed the cap off the turpentine and shook the bottle over his leg, and then he screamed again, louder than when Stretcher was biting him. His face looked feverish. His jeans were damp with sweat. A foul smell rose from him as she bandaged his leg with a clean towel.

  ‘Hush,’ Kay said. ‘Hush.’

  But as the first and worst of the pain lifted, he looked around the room savagely. When his eyes landed on me, sitting on the green chair, he said, ‘Why didn’t you shoot it?’

  I looked down at him. I said, ‘It wasn’t bothering me.’

  ‘It was trying to kill me,’ Walter said.

  ‘You shot it,’ I said. ‘It didn’t shoot you.’

  Walter grimaced, as though a sudden pain had shocked him. ‘Why didn’t any of the dogs go after you?’ he asked.

  ‘I showed no fear,’ I said.

  ‘And why not?’ he said. ‘Unless you knew they wouldn’t attack you.’

  I said, ‘They looked more like the kind of dogs that would attack you.’

  Walter tried to push himself on to his elbows, scowling as his leg dragged on the floor. ‘You’re with those people out there,’ he said.

  ‘I thought we’d been through that already,’ I said.

  He said, ‘Let’s go through it again.’

  I’d underestimated him. Stretcher had worked hard on his leg, but his ligaments still held him together and he was still capable of anger. So I got up from the chair and went to him. I nudged one of his elbows with my shoe. I blamed him for Lane Charles’s death. And Stretcher’s. And my dad’s. And for all but killing me. ‘Some men see straight,’ I said to him. ‘Some men have such great eyes they seem to see around corners. But others – they’re so preoccupied with themselves it’s like they live in a house of mirrors. I think you’re that third kind of man.’

  ‘I see clear enough,’ Walter said.

  I sighed. ‘Where’s your duct tape? Do you have rope or twine?’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  Because I want to finish tearing you apart, I thought. I said, ‘Because you don’t seem like you’ll be very steady on your feet right now. Someone’s g
ot to get the house together.’

  Walter shook his head. ‘You just go on making yourself comfortable,’ he said. ‘We’ll tell you when this is over.’

  But I crouched so that I could look into Stretcher’s dead eyes. Then I pushed the mattress to cover the window, went into the kitchen, and dug through the drawers and cabinets. I brought back tape, two screwdrivers, a ball of brown twine, three Bic lighters, an aerosol can of roach spray, another of white spray paint, two candles, and a rusty flashlight that glowed dimly when I tried the switch and shined it at Lexi. I pushed the dinner table against the front door and stacked the dinner chairs on top of it.

  Because the tighter you pack an explosive, the harder it explodes.

  I went up to Kay’s bedroom and then inched her bureau down the stairs, resting each time it thumped on a step and, when I got it to the first floor, shoving it against the dinner table. I got Walter’s hammer and went back upstairs. I smashed the bathroom mirror. I came down with the pieces of glass in a bundled towel. I opened it and poured the glass out at Kay’s feet. ‘Do with it what you will,’ I said to her.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Make weapons,’ I said.

  I sat down on the green chair with one of the kitchen knives, sliced the towel into strips, and tied the strips together end-to-end.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Walter asked.

  ‘In general, tearing your house apart,’ I said, but added, ‘We don’t know what we will need.’ I stretched a length of the ripped towel between my hands as if it was a rope.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Lexi

  The heat rose inside the house as the afternoon passed. Walter unbuttoned the top of his jeans. He was lying on the floor bare-chested next to the dead German shepherd. Mom sat in the kitchen doorway with her legs spread and the front of her dress unbuttoned to her belly. Ignoring the broken mirror. Cristofer stood in a corner like a scared animal. His hair slick with sweat. I sat by the shelves where the room was darkest. The hem of my dress rolled up. If the people outside didn’t kill me I would sweat to death. Oren kept preparing the house. Carrying in scissors and a cutting board and an old razor and a box cutter and a broom handle. Anything bladed. Anything blunt.

  Walter pushed himself to sitting. Stared at him like he wanted to kill him. Tried to get to his feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Mom asked him.

  The leg that the dog bit wouldn’t hold him. He looked around the room for help. I watched and wouldn’t mind if he fell. But Oren brought him the broom handle. Walter used it like a staff. He went to the mattress that covered the window and shouldered it aside. The sun shined sharp into the room. The people in the yard were resting. An airplane hummed high and lonesome overhead. Beyond the hill a locust whined.

  Walter limped to the dead dog. Grabbed its hind legs. Almost fell. And said to Oren, ‘Help me.’ Oren stared at him until Walter asked again. Then Oren picked up the dog’s front legs and he and Walter carried it to the window. Walter said, ‘On three.’ On three they threw the carcass out over the porch into the yard.

  As the sun set the people cooked another meal over the open fire. The smell of meat drifted into the house. And the sweet smoke of roasting corn. The people talked and laughed. The woman’s laughter rising high and fearless over the voices of the others. The darkening sky looked like it would weigh the whole world into silence.

  Walter stood by the window. Leaned on the broom handle.

  ‘You’re an easy target,’ Oren said.

  But Walter yelled out into the yard, ‘What do you want?’

  The talk and the laughter carried on.

  Walter yelled, ‘I’m coming out and I’m going to shoot each one of you.’

  The people kept talking.

  Walter yelled, ‘I need air.’

  They ignored him.

  ‘You understand?’ Walter asked.

  Paul the driver stepped out from behind the yellow pickup with a black semi-automatic. He pelted the outside wall with bullets. Walter dropped to the floor like someone had kicked the broom handle. Or punched him in the liver.

  He was panting. Broken or almost. He said to Oren, ‘Cover the window.’ Oren did and the room was dark. Walter crawled to one of the mattresses and was quiet. After a while Mom spread out beside him. Cradling his sweaty back against her breasts. Then Cristofer sat down. Rocking and grunting.

  Oren came to me and took my hand. He led me upstairs. Through the hall. To the attic hatchway. Without a word. He boosted me through and pulled himself up after me. He put the board back over the hatch. Whether to keep everyone else from coming up or me from going down I didn’t know. The last light of the day glowed in the attic vents. Sweat broke from my forehead. My arms. My legs. ‘What are we doing?’ I asked.

  He said, ‘Once upon a time there was a boy named Oren.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I said.

  ‘His mother was a seventeen-year-old girl named Kay,’ he said, ‘and his father was a thirty-seven-year-old man named Amon which in Hebrew means Teacher. I looked it up. It’s also Egyptian for The Hidden One.’

  ‘As in disappearing from this house?’ I asked.

  ‘Now you see him and now you don’t,’ Oren said.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Oren

  As the sunlight at the roof vents dimmed and darkened, the generator in the back of Carol’s truck ripped, sputtered, ripped, and hummed. The floodlights went on and the vents glowed again. Cereb and Flip barked, Jimmy laughed, and, right on schedule, music started to play – loud music with a deep beat that entered the old roof beams and made the house tremble.

  ‘When I was born,’ I said to Lexi, ‘Amon moved into the house with Kay and her father. Kay at this time had been going to school only occasionally and then only so that she could steal oil crayons and paint from her art teacher. Because she lived in such a remote house or because of her strange personality, she had few friends other than Walter, who lived up-island. Walter was a skinny kid given to running away from home but never far, never crossing the bridge from Black Hammock. He slept in the woods in the summer and, on cold winter nights, wrapped himself around the Jakobson’s tar kiln for warmth. When Kay went to school, they rode the bus together from the base of the bridge, and in the afternoons Walter lounged on the porch with her, watching her draw or paint. Her pregnancy had brought him still closer. As her belly swelled, he’d spent more time at the house and treated her and the unborn baby as if the baby was his own, as if he would stand between her and any threat to her.’

  Jimmy’s motorcycle roared, and the speakers in the back of Carol’s truck blasted Bachman–Turner Overdrive’s ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.’

  ‘After moving in, Amon put an end to Walter’s visits,’ I said. ‘He discouraged Kay from seeing this child who reminded him that he had gotten another child pregnant – and maybe also reminded him of the young man he had been in Saigon, little more than a boy himself – a boy-man who had also believed that he would sacrifice himself to protect his lover and their daughter, but instead had thrown his daughter on to a live grenade.

  ‘Lying in bed with Kay, with their baby asleep in a crib near the open window and the smells of lovemaking and the baby’s new life mingling in the night air, Amon should have been happy. When he’d come back from Vietnam, he’d seemed destined for loneliness and misery, and when Phuong failed to respond to his letters, he had learned to expect no more than that. Kay’s appearance in his life, her pursuit of him, and the child she had given him had been a great miracle, a miracle no less extraordinary, to his thinking, than the laying of hands on a cripple. He should have been happy.

  ‘But as Kay lay naked in bed beside him, her hand on his thigh, her fingers digging into his flesh, he sensed in her a hunger that scared him. When he had first known her, she had wanted to see him naked, asking him to take off his towel and underwear as he’d stood before her. She’d asked him to expose himself to her. She hadn’t asked him to do such things again, but she hadn
’t needed to. He’d taken off his clothes for her and she’d taken hers off for him. But he’d sensed in her eyes and her touch a desire to go deeper, down to the blood and bones, to get into the parts of him where he held his most brutal memories of himself and those he had loved before her, the parts where damage rolled into damage like underwater currents. Seeing his old wounds would not be enough for her. She would want to rip away the scars and see what moved beneath.

  ‘He had read enough books and experienced enough of life to know that he might be projecting his own fears and guilt on to her. If his own sense of himself coursed through his veins as thick and bitter as the pine tar that dripped from the kiln into the box under it, that might not be her fault. But more than once in the middle of the night he had awakened to her touch and had felt as if she were prodding him with a needle or the blade of a box cutter.

  ‘The anger and misery that had lifted when he first had carried Kay into his bedroom, in the house that he’d built with his own hands, now settled back on to him with a weight that seemed all the heavier because he knew it was unwarranted. Not her fault, he repeated to himself, but he blamed her anyway. She had made him happy, and if he had lost that happiness, he reasoned, who else could be the cause?

  ‘But me, he loved,’ I said. ‘When I wasn’t in my crib, I was in his arms. He carried me through the house, through the yard, and out into the woods. He introduced me to the smell of the pine trees and the heat of the tar kiln. Instead of a mother’s breast, I felt the rough skin and cloth of a man who had rubbed hard against the world.

  ‘Except when he had me in his hands, he turned mean. Kay had re-taught him his strength, and he used that strength to assert himself into the house, starting the kiln fire in the morning before Kay’s father was awake, greeting the tar customers who drove over the hill and into the yard, inviting Tilson into the house to drink with him in the late afternoon, and collapsing at the end of each day into the chair that Kay’s father always had claimed as his own. Amon took over the responsibilities of the house so fast that by the time Kay’s father stopped appreciating the extra help and started to resent it, Amon had completely displaced him. Four months later, Kay’s father died from a stroke or a heart attack or something else – no one checked, but it was quick – and Amon suspected that the man had just stopped breathing when he realized he’d become useless.