Black Hammock

by Michael Wiley

  Lexi said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  I said, ‘This is how it was with him then. Fearless.’

  She said, ‘I wouldn’t want it.’

  ‘Pretty terrible,’ I said. ‘But in its way, I’ve never known anything better.’

  She said, ‘Definitely wouldn’t want it.’

  I said, ‘So Amon asked, “Are you ready?”

  ‘I was ready for anything he wanted me to do. But a voice that came from a place inside me that I hadn’t known existed said, “No.”

  ‘“Come,” Amon said, and inched close to the edge.

  ‘“No,” I said.

  ‘“It’s nothing,” Amon said. “Like flying.”

  ‘“I don’t know how to fly,” I said.

  ‘The people who had gotten out of their cars moved closer, almost to the rail, but Amon gave them a look that made them stop and back away.

  ‘“There’s not much time,” Amon said. “We’ll miss it.”

  ‘“Miss what?” I asked.

  ‘He said, “Our one chance.”

  ‘But I pulled my hand from his and sat down on the ledge, my legs crossed under me. He easily could have picked me up, thrown me off the bridge, and jumped after me, but he sat next to me, his legs dangling over the edge. He put an arm around my shoulders.

  ‘Sirens approached from both ends of the bridge, and megaphones told drivers to move their cars out of the way. A helicopter swooped in and hovered a hundred yards away, the pilot, visible through the windshield, wearing a white helmet and sunglasses that made him look like a hard-headed insect. By the time a San Francisco Marine Unit boat and a Coast Guard cutter arrived, the police had put all the onlookers back into their cars and made them drive away and had barricaded the bridge entrances. A plain-clothes officer climbed over the bridge railing and sat a few feet away from us on the ledge – with his legs, like mine, crossed under him.

  ‘“Why are you out here, sir?” the officer asked.

  ‘“Taking the scenery,” Amon said.

  ‘“Better places to do that,” the officer said. “What do you mean to do now?”

  ‘Amon said nothing.

  ‘The officer looked at me. “Are you all right?”

  ‘I looked at Amon, and he nodded.

  ‘“Yes,” I said to the officer.

  ‘For an hour or more, the officer talked with Amon, asking where we were from, who we had left behind, why Amon had chosen to come to San Francisco. When Amon stopped answering the questions, the officer talked about the weather, a visit that he had made to Florida with his family when he was a boy of about my age, and then about hope, love, and his belief in humanity – matters that belonged on the earthward side of the glaring water. Then, in the same calm, matter-of-fact voice that he’d been using since he joined us on the ledge, he told me to stand up and climb over the railing on to the road.

  ‘Amon, who had seemed not to be listening, gripped my shoulder, though I hadn’t tried to follow the officer’s instruction.

  ‘The officer said to Amon, “If you look behind you, sir, you will see a policeman with a rifle aimed at you. You can make a decision about your own life. But you will not take your child with you. Do you understand?”

  ‘I looked and saw that what the officer had said was true.

  ‘Amon didn’t look, but after a few seconds he eased his grip on me. Then he stood and climbed back over the railing on to the road, where two policemen rushed to him and handcuffed him.

  ‘The plain-clothes officer grinned as if he had won a game. “Climb over, son,” he said.

  ‘I stood and peered over the side of the bridge. With Amon’s steadying arm gone, I tottered as I watched the slow eddies behind the Marine Unit and Coast Guard boats. The water seemed to pull at me and I leaned toward it. I heard Amon’s voice telling me, It’s nothing.

  ‘But a policeman’s hands reached over the railing and sucked me back. In a moment, I was on the other side, and a second policeman was wrapping a blanket around me – not the blanket that I had carried in the pickup from Black Hammock Island but a clean one – and I was shivering, though I felt a fever rising from my chest to my head.

  ‘Afterward, Amon denied that he ever meant to jump or to harm me. The court hospitalized him for evaluation and sent me home on an airplane. Kay looked at me as if she was unsure whether I had caused or was the victim of Amon’s flight, and, though we had never had as close of a relationship as most mothers and their children, I felt a new coldness. In San Francisco, the doctors dug up Amon’s records and said that he had suffered from a breakdown triggered by the visit from the social worker, which had made him fear losing me as he had lost his daughter Lang. It was a sympathetic story once the newspapers, magazines, and television news retold it. The doctors reassured Amon that rest, therapy, and, most of all, an encouraging letter from the state Department of Children and Families would restore him to mental health. Photographers from Newsweek, Time, and the San Francisco Chronicle snapped pictures of him as he walked out of the hospital, wild-eyed and bearded, his long hair uncombed. Amon had broken no laws, except maybe negligent driving and criminal trespassing for crossing the guardrail and the law of common sense for running off across the country the way he did with me. The police made a collection, bought another plane ticket, and sent him home.’

  ‘Christ,’ Lexi said.

  Out in the yard, the music had stopped, but the generator hummed and Jimmy’s motorcycle droned far and near as he rode out over the hill and back toward the house.

  I said, ‘For about a week after Amon returned, we were famous, though Amon chased away the reporters who made the trek to Black Hammock Island. But one of the soldiers who’d known him at the Bien Hoa military base – a man named Eric Cantrell – saw a Time Magazine article and got to thinking. He’d been among the guys who’d taken Amon to the Hall of Mirrors brothel on the weekend when he met Phan Thi Phuong, but Cantrell had left the service after one tour and, until reading the article, had heard only rumors about the death of Amon’s Vietnamese daughter. Now he lived in New Orleans and owned a bar that he had decorated to look like a miniature Hall of Mirrors, though the two Cambodian hookers he’d convinced to run their business from his bar stools in the early nineteen-eighties had been arrested and then had disappeared. Decades had passed since he’d left Vietnam, but he still met with other Bien Hoa vets every six or eight months. He rode a Kawasaki Eliminator, and the others owned a variety of bikes ranging from the barely street-legal to a grandpa-and-grandma thing with a homemade sidecar. One man was a real estate lawyer, another a high-functioning addict who shot up in gas station bathrooms as they traveled, a third a high school history teacher, another a roofer.

  ‘When Cantrell called to tell them he was riding to Black Hammock Island to see Amon, only two of them could join him – Rob Terrenbaum, the realtor, and Stevie Abbott, the addict, who said he was bringing his sister, Denisa, even though she’d caused problems on earlier rides. Terrenbaum rode from L.A. to Taos, where Abbott met him with Denisa sitting behind him on his bike.

  ‘“Is she necessary?” Terrenbaum asked.

  ‘“Can’t trust her alone,” Abbott said, though in truth on her last trip with them it was his own need for drug money that resulted in her getting beaten up.

  ‘When they arrived in New Orleans, Eric Cantrell left the keys to his bar with one of his bartenders, and the next day, five hundred miles to the east, the motorcycles roared across the bridge to Black Hammock Island.

  ‘As Amon’s friends expected, Amon was a mess. On returning from San Francisco, he’d stuffed the packet of phone numbers and psychotherapy resources into the kiln. He’d stopped bathing and mostly stopped eating. He was living in the yard, unwilling – it seemed, unable – to step on to the front porch. He was cared for only by Tilson, who had brought a plastic sheet from his own house for him to sleep under when it rained. I went outside to him when I could, but Kay mostly kept me upstairs.’

  ‘Did this reall
y happen?’ Lexi asked.

  ‘Every bit,’ I said.

  Lexi said, ‘Mom never told me any of it.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t. During Amon’s absence, Walter had begun coming to the house again. He was no longer a skinny boy but a man nearly as large as Amon, and Amon seemed to lack the strength or the will to chase him away. Early one morning, a week after Amon returned, I was watching from a window as he slept under Tilson’s plastic sheet. Walter walked into the yard, eyed the sleeping heap, stooped by it, and spoke so quietly that I couldn’t hear. Amon showed no sign of hearing either, and Walter spat on the sheet, then crossed the yard, climbed the porch steps, and came into the house without knocking. He went upstairs, walked into Kay’s bedroom, and closed the door.

  ‘I ran out to the yard and shook Amon, telling him where Walter was. But he said nothing, did nothing.

  ‘When Amon’s Vietnam friends roared into the yard and found him flea-bitten and stinking, they sat by the kiln with him and got him drunk – blackout drunk, vomiting drunk, drunk into oblivion. Then, after listening to his drunken, disjointed mumbling, they beat the hell out of Walter.’

  ‘Good,’ Lexi said.

  I said, ‘The next morning, when Amon sobered up enough to stand, Stevie Abbott’s sister went to him and kissed him with her hard, thin lips. He shoved her away. She came back and kissed him again and kept coming back until he stopped shoving her. She took off her shirt and stood, skinny and hard-breasted in the shivering morning light. So he unzipped her jeans and lowered them to the dirt. As Kay watched from her bedroom window and I watched from mine, he turned her around and pushed her to her hands and knees.

  ‘Apparently, he felt better afterward,’ I said. ‘He drew water from the well and bathed. When Eric Cantrell went inside to the kitchen and brought back the turpentine, he scrubbed the deepest stains from his skin. He poured the remaining turpentine into his bowl of well-water and slicked back his hair. Only then did he realize that these men, who had disappeared from his life more than twenty years earlier, had come to save him.

  ‘Amon’s friends spent nearly a month at the house. Mostly they stayed drunk. When the liquor ran out, Cantrell or Terrenbaum would ride over the hill on a motorcycle and return an hour or two later with new supplies. Abbott found a dealer a couple of islands up the coast. His sister sometimes wandered into the woods for a day or two or walked out on the road and crossed the bridge, but when she came back she would go to Amon and they would find a hidden spot or sometimes stay right out in the open, and afterward Amon would eye Kay like a housecat with a bird in its mouth that it was unwilling to give up. The men invited Tilson to join the party, but though he would pick up their spent bottles and trash from the yard, and even bring them new bottles when they called for them, he stayed sober, as if he knew that they needed someone to watch over them. Lane Charles, though, came from next door and drank as hard and laughed as loud as the rest. Walter appeared twice at the edge of the pine woods, watching and waiting, until Stevie Abbott got on his motorcycle and chased him into the trees.

  ‘Terrenbaum left first, and a week later Cantrell rode out, followed by Abbott with his sister behind him hugging him with her skinny thighs. Denisa had spent the previous night with Amon, but when she climbed on to the motorcycle, she gave him the finger as if to say he should expect no tears.

  ‘When Amon’s friends left, the battle between him and Walter flared. Walter tried to go back to the behavior he’d adopted when Amon was gone. He walked out of the pine woods, crossed the yard, calling to the chickens as if they were his own, mounted the front porch, and entered the house without knocking. But now Amon stood inside with a club of pinewood that he’d picked from the kindling. He split Walter’s head with it, and Walter jumped on him and threw him to the floor. As blood came from the wound, turning Walter’s face into a red mask and dropping from his eyes like tears, the two men wrestled, gripping each other by the throat, pounding each other’s head on the floorboards, silent except for moans, as if their fight was about something more than sex or territory – about more than themselves.

  ‘Kay watched from the kitchen doorway – holding me behind her – and though blood smeared across Amon’s and Walter’s faces and arms and stained their clothing, though they knocked over chairs and lamps and broke the table, she never tried to stop them. When they exhausted themselves, they lay in each other’s arms, breathing each other’s breath, drenched in each other’s sweat and blood, until one of them drew enough energy to throw an elbow into the other’s cheekbone or to raise the other’s head and slam his skull against the floor. It seemed that they wouldn’t stop until one of them was dead.

  ‘But then Walter pulled himself from Amon’s hands, got up with great difficulty, and, instead of dropping on to Amon again and crushing him, turned away. Without a glance at Kay, he walked to the door and went out. Amon lay on his back, breathing hard through his torn and bloody lips. A broken tooth – Walter’s – clung to his forehead. His eyes focused on the ceiling as if he was looking for stars. He clenched and unclenched his fists, though his fingers were broken.

  ‘Then Kay went to Amon, dropping to her knees. She said his name and said it again, and though his eyes remained on the ceiling, he raised a hand and searched the air until he found her and gripped her.

  ‘“I’m sorry,” he said.

  ‘Tears filled Kay’s eyes.

  ‘“So sorry,” Amon said.

  ‘She kissed his wrecked lips, and he tried to pull her to him.

  ‘But first she said to me, “Go.” The kiss had smeared Amon’s blood on her face. “Go,” she said again as Amon tried to bring her body to his own. “To your room,” she said, and she let herself be drawn down to Amon.

  ‘The next two years were calm,’ I said. ‘Amon moved back into the house and shared a bed with Kay. She set up an easel and a mirror in the front room and painted the self-portraits that made her famous. He shaved his beard and cut his hair short. In the mornings, he tended to the chickens or, with Tilson’s help, cut kiln wood in the back acres. In the afternoons, he collected the drippings from the tar box and sold pails of tar and jars of turpentine to customers who drove over the hill and into the yard. Many days, Lane Charles came with a bottle of vodka. In the early evenings, Amon would sit in his chair reading one of his books, or he would set up a target and shoot at it with one of his guns, or he would walk with me through the pine forest, telling me stories about the life he had lived. Shortly after sunset, he and Kay would tuck me into bed and then disappear behind their bedroom door.’

  Jimmy cut the engine on his motorcycle. Everyone in the yard was quiet. Only the generator hummed, dull and constant, boring into the night.

  I told Lexi, ‘When you were born, Amon loved you with the same intensity that he loved me, but he also seemed to fear you. Maybe you reminded him of Lang. Maybe he’d learned the danger of loving a child too much. And when Cristofer was born, Amon started spending more time in the yard again, but each night he came inside and locked the door behind him, and before disappearing into his bedroom with Kay, he stood for a long time in your doorway and Cristofer’s and mine. As much as the family ever had been – as much as we ever could be – we were happy.

  ‘Once when returning from the woods, though, I thought I saw Walter slipping away from the house. And sometimes when Amon was cutting wood with Tilson, Kay set down her paintbrushes, put you and Cristofer into my care, and left the house for a morning. I would follow her until she walked out over the hill and turned up-island on the road toward Walter’s house.

  ‘The night that Walter came back for good had been no different from the months and months of nights before it. Amon had knocked back a bottle of Smirnoff with Lane Charles in the afternoon and had invited Tilson to join the family for dinner. We were eating big meals in those days, but dinner was done now, and the table was covered with greasy plates, platters with bones and the tendon remains of a chicken, the head of a red fish that Tilson ha
d contributed, and bowls with the last, uneaten greens from a kitchen garden that Kay had started.

  ‘Amon, Tilson, and I remained at the table. Kay had taken you and Cristofer upstairs to put you in your cribs. Amon and I watched as Tilson gathered the bones from the chicken legs and thighs, used his teeth to scrape off the remaining cartilage, and sucked away the specks of blood.

  ‘Amon said to him, “I’m not much given to the fine points of table manners, but do you want to explain what the hell you’re doing?”

  ‘Tilson wiped the grease and saliva from the bones on a pant leg. “Seem to me you get luck now,” he said, and he cupped the dry bones in his hands, shook them, and cast them like dice on to the tabletop. Then he gathered them and cast them again. Though he hadn’t drunk Lane Charles’s vodka, he stared at the bones with glazed eyes.

  ‘Amon asked, “They say I’m going to be lucky?”

  ‘Tilson swept the bones into a pile. He said, “Good luck, bad, or something else, sure.”

  ‘Kay came down the stairs. But instead of joining us at the table, she stood holding the bottom of the banister. Amon patted his lap, inviting her to sit, but she stayed where she was.

  ‘The look in her eyes scared me, and though I had no reason to, I looked from her to the door. Outside, the sun had lowered through the pine woods, but the frogs and locusts that usually sang after dark were silent. Still, the house felt safe and tight.

  ‘Then Walter walked in. He was wearing his work overalls, a pressed white cotton shirt, and on his feet a pair of polished black dress shoes. “Good evening,” he said, calm and easy, as if he expected a warm welcome and a hot plate of food.