Black Hammock

by Michael Wiley

  When the pile was gone Oren turned off the fan and slid it to the far end of the dresser. We brought the other sheet to the window. He shaped the pile like the first one. Slid the fan against it.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. And he flipped the fan on high. As feathers and cotton dust shot from the room into the night he grabbed the roach spray from the floor. He pulled Mom’s lighter from his pocket. Held the spray can and lighter outside of the window. Lit the aerosol stream. It bloomed orange and red. The blaze spread into the threads and feather-down. Which rose and blew across the yard. Touching other specks. The fire rippled through the air. Waves of fire. Flares raining into the yard.

  Oren said, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘You’ll kill your friends,’ I said.

  But the men by the trucks shouted, ‘Oooh.’ And Oren’s girlfriend whooped like she was riding a bull.

  Oren took my hand and we ran downstairs.

  Mom and Cristofer already had climbed through the kitchen window. Oren helped Walter after them. I climbed out next. Oren came after.

  The front of the house was bright with floodlights and flecks of fire that rose on the wind and settled to the ground. I couldn’t see Paul or the other men. But Oren’s girlfriend danced in the fire fall. Spots of flame landed on her shoulders and in her hair. She looked up at the sky. She opened her mouth. She let a flame land on her tongue.

  Oren ran toward the back acres. And the rest of us followed. Walter limped behind. Before we reached the pine woods Oren looped toward Lane Charles’s house. He headed for the back door. Walter caught up. Grinning. Breathless. Hope in his eyes. He said, ‘Why not go for the bridge?’

  ‘Lane Charles had a truck,’ Oren said. ‘And unless they cut his line he had a phone too.’

  We crossed into Lane Charles’s yard. Rested by a cluster of wax myrtle trees. Ran to the door.

  It was locked. Oren kicked it and it swung open.

  We stepped into a small dark room that smelled of burlap. The house was quiet. Other than Walter’s breathing. Oren led us into the kitchen. And through a hallway to the front of the house. Walter asked, ‘What are we—’

  ‘Shh,’ Oren said.

  We came to the living room. Which was dark behind curtained windows.

  ‘Sit down,’ Oren said. We felt our way through the room until we found chairs and a sofa. But before we could sit there was a flash. The lights in the house went on.

  Paul the driver and the other men stood in the room. Paul held a long-barreled pistol. Oren held a pistol that matched Paul’s. The other two held rifles. The front door opened. Oren’s girlfriend walked in. She walked past Paul and the other men. She went to Oren. Jumped into his arms. Kissed him. Stuck her tongue in his mouth. Like a snake.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Oren

  I said, ‘Once upon a time …’

  After a certain point, a story tells itself.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Lexi

  ‘Once upon a time …’ Oren said.

  Midnight was long gone. After walking us into our yard Oren’s friends had cleaned up our house. Like it was their house now. They had carried the mattresses up to the bedrooms. They had scrubbed the hearth and the floor by the window where rotting flesh had leached into the pores of the stone and the grain of the wood planking. They had set the dinner table upright. They had arranged the chairs around it. They had swept the dirt and filth out through the door to the porch. The house no longer felt or smelled like it was ours. Mom and Walter and Cristofer and I were intruders.

  Oren’s girlfriend had gone upstairs and was moving furniture in Mom’s room. Out in the yard one of the bikers was dragging Lane Charles’s body toward the chicken pen. The other re-dug the pit where Tilson had buried the chickens. Then he used the heel of his boot to mark a spot to dig a pit for Lane Charles. Paul was cleaning the front porch.

  Walter sat at the head of the dinner table. Broken and humiliated. His face greasy and red with sweat and fever. Mom sat at the other end. Her dress hanging low on her shoulders. As if it had become too big for her. Her eyes fiery. Cristofer sat across from me. Smiling.

  Oren sat on the green chair and looked worried for the first time since he came.

  Then he stood. And walked in circles around the table. Like a zoo cat. ‘Once upon a time,’ he said, ‘a boy died and was reborn. This was no ordinary boy. When he was born the first time he crawled out of a tar box as if it was a womb and his afterbirth was the hot pine drippings. He crawled out and rolled around in the dust and sand, and his father who also was a man of dust and sand loved him though others reserved their judgment. How does one love a child who has crawled out of fire? What does one do with such a child?’

  ‘I loved you,’ Mom said. Blankly.

  ‘The child’s mother decided she knew what to do,’ Oren said. ‘She would kill the child.’

  ‘Amon took you for himself,’ Mom said. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘Who could blame her,’ Oren said, ‘with a hot and sticky dust-coated child like that? A child like that belonged in the ground. Dust with dust. Or buried in a forest where his flesh could feed the pines that grew from the sandy soil.’

  ‘I had no choice,’ Mom said.

  Walter said, ‘Nothing that you think happened really did. Not in my eyes. Not in the eyes of the law.’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Oren

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘the boy died, but extraordinary child that he was, he had a second birth. This second birth couldn’t have been more different from his first. Instead of crawling out of a tar box, he crawled into a room with white carpet, white bed linens layered twelve inches deep, and white overstuffed chairs that could swallow a child in comfort. Air conditioning poured from ceiling vents. Happy music piped into the room from a stereo controlled elsewhere.

  ‘You might think that a dusty, tar-coated child would look out of place in a room like that, but this child cleaned up well – so well that you would never know that the room was unnatural to him. It made him itch, though, and it made him sweat, which, in the air conditioning, gave him a chill. If you think that this child was ungrateful for having a second chance at life, you’re right. Once a child of tar, always a child of tar.’

  Walter said, ‘You were never my child. Not Kay’s rightfully either.’

  I said, ‘Now and then, a workman who had helped the child escape from his murderous mother would come to visit. He told the child about his little sister and brother. He told him about his mother’s growing fame as a painter who pretended that she was a perfect eggshell but whose bloodied yoke showed through the cracks – which made her more famous. He told him about his mother’s new husband, a self-righteous man of vicious habits, a man who believed he was doing God’s work, but he had no children of his own for a sacrifice so he went seeking another man’s.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ Walter said. ‘I’ve always only meant to protect your mother.’

  I said, ‘The workman who gave the child a second life made him promise never to return. Too dangerous, he said. Nothing good would come of it, he said.

  ‘For a long time – many years – the child kept his promise. He went to school. He played with other children. He slept at night in his fat white linens in his fat white bed in the fat white house.

  ‘Only after he became an adult did he question the workman’s reasons for him staying away. What was wrong with danger? he wondered. He’d come through more danger by the time he was ten years old than most people saw in a lifetime. He accepted danger as one of the conditions of being alive, whether for a first or a second time. And why should the idea that nothing good would come of his returning stop him? The house where his mother lived had long been a bad place. Why should it change for him?’

  THIRTY-SIX

  Lexi

  Oren’s girlfriend came downstairs. Went outside into the yard. Came back from the trucks with a cooler. Which she carried into the kitchen. She turned on the water in the sink. Pots clanked each othe
r as she put them on the stove. Then meat was frying in a pan.

  I pushed my chair back from the table and got up.

  ‘Sit down,’ Oren said.

  I went to the kitchen door and looked in. Bacon was cooking in a skillet. Oren’s girlfriend was unloading ground beef and turkey breasts from the cooler on to the counter. She’d put plastic-wrapped loaves of bread by the sink. And a browning bunch of bananas. A bag of apples. A bunch of carrots.

  ‘Sit down,’ Oren said again.

  I went to the door to the porch and looked out. The generator hummed in the back of the yellow pickup. The floodlights made the night glow golden. But beyond the hill the sky was black. A sliver moon hung overhead. A bent needle. One of the men was digging in the yard. The other was raking cinders and ash from Oren’s blizzard of fire. Paul sat on the porch swing. Rocking and rocking and rocking.

  I went back to the dinner table and sat.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Oren

  I glared at Lexi. ‘When the boy became an adult,’ I said, ‘the workman visited once more. He retold the stories that he’d told on previous visits, as if he wanted to be certain that the young man knew who he once had been and where he’d come from.’

  I repeated the details that Tilson had given me and that, up in the attic, I had told to Lexi. How Kay and Walter had killed my dad. How they had hidden the bloody wood chisel in the tar box afterward, and then years and years of tar sediment had solidified around it. How Tilson, after hiding me in his shack, had gone back to the house and showed Kay and Walter his bloody hands – the blood from a thigh wound that he gave himself – to convince them that I was dead. How, after that day, Kay and Walter had never mentioned me, as if Tilson had buried that part of their memory along with my body. How Kay and Walter had let Lexi and Cristofer live, though Walter treated them as if they were stains on his life, and the best that could be said of Kay was that she neglected them and left them alone.

  ‘And when the workman was done telling the stories,’ I said, ‘he made the young man repeat his promise never to return.’

  In the kitchen, Carol was taking plates from the cabinet, and the house smelled of dinner.

  I said, ‘But the young man was angry. The stories that the workman had told him churned with other stories he knew about himself, and they made a kind of heat inside him. He was angry, and he was impatient, and, if truth be told, even after all of his years away, he was homesick. So, harboring resentments and desires as deep as his tar-marrowed bones, he decided to return home and go into the family business.’

  I looked from Lexi to Cristofer, from Walter to Mom. ‘And so,’ I said, ‘here I am.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Lexi

  Oren held his hands out wide like we were supposed to clap.

  Then his girlfriend came to the kitchen doorway with a tray of sliced turkey and green beans and corn. She said, ‘Dinnertime.’

  At three in the morning she brought platter after platter and bowl after bowl to the table. The room smelled of turkey and carrots and butter. She had filled one bowl with lettuce and apple slices. Another with stuffing that she’d made from bread and ground beef and bacon. Oren’s friends stayed out in the yard. And a clanging and a metallic chopping started. As if the men were taking apart their trucks. Oren’s girlfriend ignored the sound. She put juice glasses on the table. She filled them with red wine.

  Oren clinked his glass to hers. Raised it to us. ‘To family,’ he said.

  None of us lifted a glass.

  Oren said, ‘Eat up.’

  Mom and Walter stared at the food. I thought it would taste like tar and ash. But I forked three slices of turkey on to my plate. And spooned stuffing and carrots on top.

  Everyone watched as I put the food in my mouth. It wasn’t tar and it wasn’t ash. I ate the turkey and drank my wine. Then Walter stabbed a slice of turkey with his fork. He frowned. Stabbed another slice. He filled the rest of his plate with potatoes and stuffing. Mom pulled the salad to her. Before eating she picked up her glass and stared at the wine. And drank it.

  My belly cramped after three days of mostly scraps and canned food. But I kept eating. I put a piece of turkey on Cristofer’s plate. He keened low. He stopped when I tried mashed potatoes. I filled his plate with mashed potatoes.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Oren

  ‘And so here I am,’ I said again, ‘and, as you fill your stomachs, as you gorge yourselves and make yourselves drunk on my wine, you might ask yourselves, What are the implications of this young man’s return? What possibly can it mean for us in the short term and long run?

  ‘If I were a prodigal son, you would have cooked a feast for me. You would have dug the gold rings out of your jewelry boxes and put them on my fingers. You would have filled my pockets with coins. But I’m the unwanted son, the son you thought you had killed. So, along with my good friends, I’ve prepared a feast for you. But what possibly can that mean? In the short term? In the long run?’

  I went to the table, picked up a slice of turkey and took a bite. Then I stared at Walter and asked, ‘What does it mean?’

  FORTY

  Lexi

  Walter put his fork on his plate. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘It means nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing happened here. Nothing. Amon left with you eighteen years ago and now you’re back. That’s what it looks like.’ He tried to smile. ‘You’re back and we’re glad to have you. Welcome back, son.’

  ‘Amon’s bones aren’t in the yard?’ Oren asked.

  Walter said, ‘Even if a body was there it would’ve rotted after eighteen years.’

  ‘You know that? Or you hope it?’ Oren said. ‘What would Daniel Turner think?’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what he thinks,’ Walter said. ‘Unless a court tells him he can dig here he won’t. And a court won’t tell him he can. Not after all this time. Not unless you’ve got more than these lies to tell.’

  Oren said, ‘How about you, Mom? Do you mind if I call you that? I mean, that door is long shut. Vines have grown over it and the hinges have locked up with rust. The umbilical cord stopped pumping many years ago. But Mom – what can my arrival mean?’

  ‘I’ve loved you,’ she said. ‘I did what I needed to survive.’

  ‘It’s a little late for that don’t you think?’ he said.

  ‘Too late for love?’ she said. ‘No.’

  ‘How about you?’ he said to me. ‘What can it mean?’

  ‘It means trouble,’ I said.

  He grinned.

  ‘You can stay if you want,’ Walter said. ‘You can tell your stories to anyone who will listen. If anyone will. But we’ve been here for a long time. You’re wrong if you think we’re going to cower. You’re wrong if you think we’re going to run away. And if you think we’re going to say we’re sorry for what we’ve done you’re wrong again. We’re better off without your father.’

  ‘I don’t want you to run away,’ Oren said. ‘And I don’t care if you’re sorry.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Walter said. ‘Because you aren’t getting either.’

  Mom asked, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want you to disappear,’ Oren said.

  Walter shook his head. ‘That isn’t happening.’

  In the back of the house metal scraped against wood. The men were climbing on to the roof again.

  The noise unsettled Walter. ‘What are they doing now?’ he said.

  ‘Same as they’ve been doing all night,’ Oren said. ‘Cleaning up.’

  Oren’s girlfriend went to the fireplace. Looked up through the flue.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Walter said.

  She pulled the grate out and leaned it against the wall. Then she sat down on the hearth with her legs crossed under her. She stared into the empty space. As if she knew what was coming.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Walter asked again. He shoved his chair back and pushed himself to his feet.

  Something fell into the chi
mney from the roof. Scraping the bricks. Bouncing off the damper. And landed hard on the blackened floor of the fireplace. It looked like it once was a work boot. But little had lasted of the leather and laces. Then another boot scratched and bounced and landed.

  ‘Goddamn it, no,’ Walter said. He hobbled over to the hearth.

  The rotten end of what could have been a leg bone tumbled through the chimney and cracked on the floor. Two more bones fell. Clanked on the damper. Bounced out of the fireplace on to the hearth. Then a clump of fabric. A rotten ball of denim and dirt. It smacked on the floor. Walter watched. His eyes blazed. And a piece of red-and-black checkered flannel fell from the chimney into the room. The same as the shirt that my dad wore in the photo of him that Mom kept on the bookshelf. Darkened with age and water. And more bones fell. And something else rolled on to the hearth. Muscle or root or meat.

  Walter trembled.

  But Mom’s face hardened. She stood and helped Walter back to the table. She guided him into his chair. Maybe the fluttering and plummeting reminded her of why she had killed my dad. Maybe the toughness that had driven her out of her father’s house and up-island to visit my dad when she was only fifteen years old pumped through her veins again. Maybe she felt the force that had driven her to paint thousands of portraits of herself.

  She went to Oren. He was so much taller. But she seemed to stand over him. He was an animal that needed to be pushed down before it would submit to her. ‘Leave,’ she said. ‘Take her.’ She pointed at his girlfriend. ‘Get your other friends and go. This is no place for you.’

  Without moving his feet Oren seemed to step back. He started to speak. But no words came.

  ‘Just go,’ Mom said.

  Then a tapping came at the door to the porch. And the sound seemed to wake Oren.

  ‘Listen,’ he said.