A Choir of Ill Children (16 page)

Leaves press harshly against the windows and the whippoorwills call. I want to ask my father if he’s seen Maggie out there under the willows, but I’m afraid he might lie to me.

The phone is ringing downstairs and I have the overwhelming feeling that it’s Drabs. He’s being chased and can’t hold out for much longer. I’ve got to pick up but I’m unable to leave the bedroom. My father’s sitting on my legs as if he’s trying to crush them. The phone stops in midring and a deep-set moan rises from my chest. I want to kill someone but everybody’s already dead.

My father murmurs my name, his own name. He still has his camera and he takes photos without aiming and without any flashes. I understand that this all has something to do with Maggie and not with my mother or God or Kingdom Come. Like any man, like any myth, he became jealous of that which would eventually replace him. He coveted what was mine. He loved her because he loved me and yet hated what I, like every son, represented. With the possible exception of my brothers.

Not his death or destruction, but his slow substitution and eventual erasure.

His evil has a new face now. Mine.

The camera clicks sullenly. He rises and steps to my brothers. His affection is evident in the way his eyes glitter with the tragedy of his tenderness. He is the hostage who, when finally released, cannot leave his prison.

He’s no longer my size. He’s grown much larger in his absence from us. I cannot fill his clothes and shoes. We don’t take up an equal amount of displacement in this world anymore, and a vacuum has been created that must be filled. His void lives on, awaiting me in this room and under the bed, behind the drifting curtains, breathing heavily right next to me. I turn over.

Whoever she is, she’s back again, doing fine and supple things to my lap. Perhaps this is the body of my sins. Her fiery red hair flares as shafts of moonlight spear down, piercing our dark corner. My father’s shadow cuts across my chest, black and eternal, and I can’t see her face although she’s looking right at me.

Her faint noises aren’t quite ecstasy or agony, but perhaps composed of both. My brothers moan in their sleep and she immediately quiets. She stifles her plaints against my side, where the face of my sister—what could have been my sister—had once been. She kisses the spot which is now scarred with Sebastian’s teeth marks before taking me into her mouth again.

Someone—possibly me—wants to murder someone else, again possibly me. She drags her nails down my legs and then back up again, making other little motions as if she’s scratching the words of oblivion into my skin. I try to decipher them. The silhouette of my father pinches its concealed chin, also attempting to read the wildly cursive script with all those well-defined curves. I keep catching the dotted “i,” stunted “n,” and hanging “g” of “ing” endings. She writes with plenty of active verbs. She’s changed her narrative voice a bit since we first met in the back of my truck. Now there are more semicolons and less of an emphasis is drawn to words via italics. Her paragraphs are shorter but there’re just as many footnotes, and now she’s added a comprehensive index and bibliography.

Suddenly I make out a few words. My father does too and grunts.

GRAVITY.

PENETRATION.

GRAVY.

MEANING.

SIGNIFICANCE.

I want to question her but I can’t talk. My father waves his hands, vying for my attention but doesn’t make a sound. I’m working toward an orgasm and don’t know how in the hell that’s happened. If she’s touching me in some other deeper and delightful way then I can hardly feel it.

She’s nearly finished with her documentation, these hexes. My father’s shadow slumps but his sorrow isn’t for me. I almost let loose with a gust of wild laughter. Whatever she’s done here, perhaps it’ll help us to progress to the next level.

I buck wildly into her mouth—what might be her mouth—and her tongue swirls and spins, tightening and loosening again. It’s a damn nifty trick. I snort and hold tightly to her cold, stiff hair. She mutters and mumbles. I wonder if it’s Eve here in my bed with me, veiled in the dark. My cum streams down her throat, if she has a throat. If it’s Eve then I want to ask her to put on the bobby socks so we can start over and do this thing again. She talks through a mouthful of my vinegar calling somebody else,
something
else to come forth. She makes promises and demands, repeating nearly unpronounceable names.

The statements in my flesh have ignited again, and the room grows brighter. Her face remains wreathed in blackness. So does my father’s. I expect some ancient and omnipotent presence to drag itself across the mire of time, up through the deep woods and morass of the bogs as it staggers toward the house.

I give it a few minutes, but nothing arrives and eventually the glow fades. She groans with worry, rises from the bed, and opens the door. I reach for her but she turns away and gently shuts it behind her. I get the feeling that the next time she visits will be the last.

My father clicks his camera at me, then checks out the window to see if Maggie is there. I drop back against the pillows, waiting for the phone to ring again, hoping I’m only asleep and not as dead as my old man.

P
RIVATE EYE
N
ICK
S
TIEL IS TEARING UP
L
EADBETTER
’
S
. This sort of thing happens every once in a while and most of the men don’t mind much. They’ve all gone through it themselves, more or less. This is custom. Ritual. But none of them is nearly as good at it as Stiel is. They stick to one end of the bar while Stiel performs a series of intricate martial arts moves and smashes tables, plunging his fists through chairs. This is pain in motion.

Deeder is a little miffed because he wants to shoot darts and Stiel has already torn the dartboard in half. Deeder has nothing left to aim at except the wild boar’s head above, trying for the glass eyes, sometimes for the nostrils. Verbal Raynes has moved off beer and is now halfway through a bottle of Four Roses. He hasn’t shaved in a week and nobody has been ironing his shirts for him. “God damn, I never thought I’d say this, but I miss Gloria! That Harry don’t know how good he’s got it.”

The others respond with nods and pats to his back as they cram together in a small circle, doing their best to stay out of Deeder’s range. He hasn’t hit the boar head once but he keeps flinging darts all over the place. Verbal paws at his throat, counts through his change, and heads for the jukebox. He’s played “Lucille” fourteen times in a row so far and no one has complained yet. It’s that kind of night.

“She say she comin’ back?”

“No, keeps telling me she don’t ever want to see me again.”

“You a hard luck man, Verbal.”

“You speak the truth, friend.”

“You miss her kids any?”

“Miss ’em? I still got ’em.”

“You got ’em!”

“She and Harry done left all three of ’em with me. They goin’ on a second honeymoon.”

“I’m thinkin’ that’s some poor parenting on their part.”

“I’m inclined to agree.”

“No wonder she and Harry are lookin’ so sprightly these last couple weeks. I thought it was just ’cause they were heading to the Caymans, but—”

“The hell’s the Caymans? That near Gainesville?”

“Western Caribbean, a peaceful British Crown Colony known as the Cayman Islands.”

“What?”

“Consists of three islands just 480 miles south of Miami. The Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac, and Little Cayman.”

“Goddamn!”

“Me and Deeder went down there once, few years back, after the insurance settlement came through for when we caught the game warden illegally tapping our phones.”

“This over the Large Mouth Bass incident again?”

“Completely different set of circumstances, Verbal. About as clear cut a case of criminal search and seizure as you’re likely to find. Them carp was in the tub for Rosh Hashanah, a traditional Jewish holiday, and for no other reason than that despite what they might say.”

“You a Jew?”

“I was going through a phase.”

The women eye Stiel and talk in hushed tones about him. Here’s a real man who knows how to love and hate properly, but will take out his aggressions on inanimate objects, not you or your mother. His hands are bleeding and he enjoys the fact, smearing and licking his distended knuckles. It’ll take a lot to rebuild the scar tissue but he’s got to start somewhere.

He’s smiling so hard that the corners of his mouth are cracked. Cigarette smoke twines about him and he turns and chops at it, thrusting, kicking. There’s a beautiful sense of ballet to the violence. Lily’s perfume is so heavy upon him that it bows his spine. The animal heads stare down and he glares back.

“How goes it?” I ask.

His neck is scratched. I recognize the little healing cuts—they’ve been made by briars. I knew he was spending more time with Abbot Earl at the monastery but hadn’t realized that he’d become a penitent as well.

Stiel doesn’t consider this display of brutality a loss of control, and neither do I. He says, “I’m still on it. You’ll get your answers. I’m going to stay in town until it’s done.”

“Maybe that’s a bad idea.”

He registers shock and freezes for a second, splinters under his fingernails. “You want me off this case?”

“No.”

Relief loosens the hard edges of his face. He needs that last vestige of self-respect and I’ve got no reason to steal it away from him. Immediately his jaws tighten again because he knows I’m about to ask about Eve. He looks around for something else to beat up and there’s nothing left unbroken nearby. His eyes settle on me and I wonder if we’re about to get into it.

Stiel pauses and assesses me once more. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?” he asks.

“No.”

“You scared of anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you were you’d know it.”

“Maybe that’s true.”

Now it’s time for the slow once-over, coming from a guy with pink fingertips, his spirit torn apart by the death of his wife and his seduction by a schoolteacher, a detective who’s stuck in a swamp town for no reason he understands, tormented by a little girl driving him out of his head.

“What the hell are you all about?” he asks me.

I think about telling him,
Shall I discuss my boyhood? Do you want to hear about the day when I let a child murderer die in the bayou?
But it sounds too orotund. I cross my arms and wait.

Deeder’s dart comes sailing by. Stiel throws a fist at me that stops a quarter inch from my nose. It’s a killing stroke. In the days before Lily scrubbed off his scar tissue he would’ve shattered my septum and driven it up through my brain. “Lucille” comes on again. We stare at each other.

I
N MY MOTHER
’
S DREAMS SHE IS TUGGING AT THE COAT
sleeve of her father.

He ignores her as he’s constantly done over the last three weeks since she returned with the news that Mama had been murdered. Except for the brief time he spent yelling at her for disturbing the bloody words on the school wall, he’s said little.

He sits in a chair in the center of the living room, staring blindly ahead. Sometimes the radio is on, playing quiet music, but more often there’s complete silence, like now. She yanks at his cuff and he doesn’t respond. For a moment she fears that he’s dead and she searches his chest for the handle of a reap hook.

There isn’t any. The ends of his brown wiry mustache flutter lightly with his soft breath. Perhaps he is still angry with her for washing the evidence away, even if some of it was left behind. She does not mind blood and has had to kill a chicken and a pig over the last two days, but she can’t stand the sight or smell of chalk anymore.

Perhaps this is all her fault. She apologizes once more and offers to make oxtail soup, his favorite. He doesn’t answer. This is the worst he’s ever been.

The drought continues and the dead fish stench works up from the bottoms and spreads throughout the entire house. She’s grown accustomed to it by now and so have the parakeets, who peck at their water as the breeze brushes curtains aside and rattles the windows in their frames. Dust devils whirl past and the cottonwood trees dip and sway as if bending to peer down at her.

His face seems fleshless in the dying light, eyes sunken, lips parted so that his teeth appear as square and prominent as tombstones.

They have not been to her mother’s grave. He would never go, she assumes rightly, and she feels that it’s not safe enough yet for her to visit alone. The murderer and writer might not have left Kingdom Come, and could be lurking in wait for her almost anywhere. The swamp folk occasionally call to her through the kudzu and sparkleberries and try to warn her against certain places and people. They don’t tell her anything she doesn’t already know.

The sadness that has collected in her chest hasn’t yet relented. Her mother had been laid open before the world and everyone now knows. This is almost as great a burden as dying itself. She is left behind without any reasons, without the substance of why this might have happened. She frets over the colored folks who’ve been lynched and had their homes burned down.

In the attic, a rat—or something—scampers. She’s removed all the traps her mother kept stocked with molding cheese and poison. Mother had become almost obsessed with killing the creatures that did not belong here. It drove her into the attic at all hours of the night, carrying a broomstick, hunting and brushing out the corners. The rats—or whatever might be hiding—have their reasons and deserve to stay.

Father does not mind. Father doesn’t mind anything anymore.

The granny ladies give her stews and thick teas to feed to her father, saying they will make him well again. She thanks the witches and takes the kettles home and pours their contents into the weeds. Sometimes the shrews will roll in the stuff and chitter madly to one another.

If her father is not dead then he is ill, and his sickness will end. He’ll awaken and yawn, stretching and rubbing his belly, ready for another huge breakfast like in times past. They’ll walk along the back roads of Potts County and eventually find themselves outside the gates of the cemetery. He will put his hand to her back and gently press her forward while he waits behind. She’ll visit Mama’s grave and say all the things she still has yet to say, and her mother will listen. Then Mama, perhaps, will tell her what must be told, and the simpering faces leering from behind the trees will recede into the night. Then everybody can get back to doing what they have to do.