A Choir of Ill Children (20 page)

The rain can’t cool the heat inside my head any more. “You’ve got accounts to settle, Herbie. Johnny wants his fair share of justice, and that’s why he’s brought you to me.”

Those teeth shine the darkness again. “That so?”

“Come on, put the squeeze on me.”

“You left me to die, son. I reckon that to be a mite unneighborly.”

“You’re a killer of children.”

“Some, it’s true. But that’s my mission.”

My mother’s song remains behind in the air like the scent of jasmine. Her soft voice drifts through the brush. It confounds Herbie too, who keeps glancing around. “What is that?”

“I’m your savior,” I tell him.

“What’s that?”

I get my hands on his shirt collar, but he flings me from him easily. The cloth tears in my hands and the muscles ripple on his heavy arms, that mighty, massive chest swelling as he takes another deep breath.

“You need more heroes like me in this here world, someone of distinguished valor and admirable exploits, that’s what it is.”

If he recognizes his own words now, he doesn’t show it. “That right?”

“I’m gonna make my mama proud today.”

“Only if she’s gonna be proud to see you dead.”

“Let’s find out.”

“I don’t believe you quite understand the situation we got here, boy.”

“And I believe I do.”

He comes forward with his shoulders low, bulling his way into me. His eyes have a chummy light playing in them. Brake lights on the roadside. We hit, grunting, shoulder to shoulder. He has a lot more weight behind him, and the ground is too wet and slippery for my bare feet to dig in. I slide back and nearly go over. He slams into me again, charging on the crutches, and the handles come together hard on my collarbone. It hurts and a red blaze fills my head as we cling together and grapple. I drive hard into his barrel chest and he laughs in my face. To him I’m seven years old and all he wants to do is get his fingers around my throat.

I reach out and seize him by the neck. I try to strangle him exactly as he’s choking me, but I don’t have the upper-body strength Herbie does. It’s not going to work like this. Already there’s a blazing nimbus of yellow spots in my vision. He’s having fun, really getting into it now, throttling me and yanking me side to side. I thrust my hand down and miss, try again and manage to grab hold of his pinned-up pant leg. It takes a hell of a lot of finagling but Herbie’s still in no rush to kill me outright, so I have some time. The spots grow larger, bubbling. He’s enjoying the noises I make as he jerks me back and forth—“Whagh, whoogh, yeack.”

I manage to shred the loose cloth and pull it from him. It’s wet and heavy and I twirl it around until it feels thick as rope. I loop it around his neck and haul for whatever I’m worth. It doesn’t do much besides throw him off-balance a little, which is enough for me to break loose. I fall back into palmetto and cypress and lie in the mud coughing, gasping.

Rain comes down so violently that I feel like I’m underwater. Burning ozone fills my head and my flesh is alive and crawling off my bones. Herbie looks pretty hysterical with his hair and beard electrified, sticking out on end and dancing with blue static. The charge in the air quickly grows heavier, intolerable.

I look up at the window and see the fists of my brothers pressed against the glass. A soft hand touches my shoulder and suddenly yanks me backward.

Someone’s feet are off to one side, sticking out of the brush.

A pair of boots jutting from beneath the brush. I recognize them immediately. They’re size twelve.

They’re my father’s.

The phone is ringing. The voices gnaw at the back of my brain. Herbie crutches his way forward after me again, still grinning, sparks shooting out of his hair. The lightning arrives between us in one blinding, insane moment as the storm of ghosts blasts its all-embracing fury into my heart.

I
N MY MOTHER
’
S DREAMS SHE
’
S FOLLOWING MY FATHER
through the ironwood and swamp cyrilla into the deep slough of the bayou. The perfume of magnolia and sweet gum fills her head as a fog rolls across the morass, covering snapping turtles and noisy heron. She places her feet carefully, unlike my father, who’s rushing and plowing through the palmetto.

His face is so tight that it looks as if the flesh of his cheekbones will rip along its creases. His camera snaps against his chest so hard that surely the lens will crack at any moment. He’s out of breath and hissing through his teeth as if he’s in great pain. He stumbles, goes to one knee and curses, gets up but trips again immediately, falling to the other knee.

The swamp remains his enemy, even now. He’s tried to kill and drain it off but despite all his efforts he hasn’t disturbed a full inch of it. The heavy machinery fights the entire day long, dozens of men harrowing, smoothing, and bulldozing, and yet each new morning they find themselves in exactly the same place. The loons laugh. My father laughs too, wearily, his boots covered in the slime of ages.

Now he’s running—scampering, really—as the afternoon turns to purple and stars peer out of the east. My mother easily glides among the poplar trees while he gashes his arms on branches. His blood dapples bark and leaves, ripped pieces of his shirt hanging on barbs and thorns. He’s a man obsessed by all that attracts him. And all that attracts him is everything that dooms him.

He stops to light a cigarette but his hands are trembling so badly that he can’t get his lighter to work. When he finally manages a flame he brings the lighter to his mouth so quickly that he knocks the cigarette from his lips. It falls into the mud and the mist claws at his legs.

Someone else watching him might think he was lost, but he clearly has a destination in mind. He might despise the bayou but he knows it intimately, much better than it appears. He acts like a hunted animal as my mother follows. She plucks an orchid and places it in her hair. Every so often she jams her knuckles into her mouth to suppress her misery. She isn’t trying to hide but my father never bothers to look behind at where he’s been or what harm he’s caused along the way. His narrow vision is what puts him at odds with all that comprises his world, but he never thinks of leaving. He doesn’t believe he can alter his course, so never does.

My mother recognizes the place and so do I. He’s trampled miles of cabbage palm leading to the flat rock. This doesn’t surprise her, or me either. He’s always been plagued by the site and its significance and age, the profane antiquity of the rock. It sometimes keeps him awake at night, knowing that Kingdom Come is forever entwined with the ancient history of seeping ground and stone he cannot move.

I’ve begun to suspect, now, who he might be meeting here, though my mother still doesn’t know. I tell her to go. I shout for her to leave this place, but she remains hunched among the cypress, the orchid standing out in its magnificent color amidst the green.

In these dreams there’s a hint of a smile upon her sad face, the slightest touch of fear. Her fingernails trail in the fog, swirling it like river water. This is a time of revelation for all involved. My stomach tightens, the sweat runs into my mouth. He eases his camera to his eye, pointing, panting, aiming, because he doesn’t want to miss an instant of this.

“Mama, go,” I urge, and her hand rises from the mist as if to quiet me.

We watch as my wife Maggie walks toward my father, smiling for his camera and for him. My mother’s face drops in on itself, every plane and angle breaking into pieces.

In my mother’s dreams I say, “Mama, don’t look anymore,” and she tells me, “Oh, Thomas, it’s much too late for that.”

J
OHNNY, THE MURDERED BOY, IS GIVING ME
mouth-to-mouth, breathing bugs and bilge into my lungs.

I can barely see with a fiery afterimage glare cutting across my vision, but Johnny Jonstone’s right in my face. His gray eyes are thankful yet beseeching, and he’s thumping on my chest with his dead little fists. I taste mosquitoes under my tongue. His flesh is cold but the fever in my forehead is drilling even deeper. I’m on my back in a tremendous puddle, nearly going under, but he’s got my chin tilted back and my nostrils pinched off, his lips sealed over mine.

He smiles when he sees I’m alive and awake and mouths something I can’t understand. I roll aside, take a long drink of the dirty water and vomit until there’s nothing left to give but bile. I keep retching and my stomach feels like it’s about to squeeze out between my ribs. I try to stand several times and finally make it to my feet. The rain lashes my bare back and, being a proper penitent, I almost enjoy the punishment.

Herbie’s still on fire.

His corpse hisses and spits where the drops touch his blackened skin and blazing clothes. The flooded grass beneath him has boiled and burned away and the mud’s dried hard as cement. His crutches are stuck four inches deep in it and his body slumps and hangs there in the wind, spewing yellow gobs of bubbling fat. The flames swirl, lick, and devour, filling him, rising from his open mouth. His pretty teeth are charcoal. He’ll grin all the way to hell and then some.

Johnny’s gone. So are my father’s shoes.

I leave Herbie burning and head back to the house. My legs barely respond and I’m forced to shuffle and lumber forward, falling a lot and clambering back up. I look to my brothers’ window to see if they’re laughing at me, but the room is utterly dark. I’m spastic and the shaking gets so bad that I’m afraid my shoulders will pop out of their sockets.

The phone is ringing. I manage to swing open the back door and plod into the kitchen. I grab the receiver and the buzzing of my brothers’ angry voices spouts across the room.

I growl into the mouthpiece, “Whine all you want to, I’m still alive and I’ll be seeing you in a minute.”

I gently hang up the phone and head for the stairs, but I’m so exhausted that I crumple on the fifth step and tumble back down to the ground floor. I crash on my face. The fillings in my back teeth have melted and run. When I close my jaw my whole head chimes faintly.

At last I’ve made enough noise to awaken Dodi and she rushes to me wearing only one of my T-shirts and a pair of lace panties. “Oh God a’mighty, Thomas, what’s happened to you! You’re all burnt!”

“I—”

“You went outside tonight, didn’t you, even though I told you that only the real badness was comin’ for us!” For the first time I see her mother in her, all of Velma Coots’s hard-line attitude showing through. “But you had to just go on anyway, without a thought in your whole big brain. Damn, I’ll get some salve for your chest and neck. Most of your hair’s gone too.”

“Help me up.”

“You never do listen to all the good advice that folks try to give you. Headstrong, that’s what you are. Mulish. Mama says it too. This ain’t the way you set about to savin’ the people of this town like you’re supposed to. You’re just set in your ways and stubborn that you won’t listen to anything anybody else has to say no matter how smart it is. Why, I think that—”

“Dodi, shut up and help me over to the divan.”

“I’m callin’ Doc Jenkins.”

I try to nod but my head tips the wrong way. “Him and the sheriff both. Go on now.”

She drags me to the sofa, runs off for a minute, and comes back with some foul ointment she daubs all over me. It makes my eyes tear but she keeps smearing it on. “Why you want the sheriff?”

“Just do it.”

“Baby Jesus in the manger, I ain’t never seen burns like these before. Even your eyebrows are near gone. The hell happened? Was you outside in the rain? Was you hit by lightnin’?”

“Pretty damn close.”

She snorts and strands of her hair flap from the corners of her mouth. “It’s a miracle you ain’t dead.”

“Call Doc Jenkins, Dodi.”

“Oh, tha’s right.”

She runs to the kitchen while I lie there quivering and jerking, teeth ringing, and the stench of the balm jockeying to trade places with the stink of ozone and fried flesh. The walls warp out of shape and close in. I get the dry heaves but they fade fast. There’s not an ounce left in me to give.

“Storm’s knocked the phone out,” she says. “It’s just makin’ an awful racket and I can’t get a dial tone.”

“Put some clothes on,” I tell her. “Take the truck, go into town, and get them to come out here.”

“No way am I drivin’ in this weather,” she squeals. “You jest got done bein’ struck by lightnin’ and now you want me to go out there? The hell is that? Ain’t you got no concern for my well-bein’?”

“You’ll be fine.”

“That’s easy for you to say. Lightnin’ ain’t gonna hit you twice tonight. Skip right over you and nail me instead.”

She isn’t going to do it unless I somehow make her feel safe. That’s exceedingly difficult to do lying here crisped and twitching. “It’s my storm of souls, Dodi, not yours. It’s here for me. Nobody else is going to get hurt right now. Go get Doc and Sheriff Burke.”

“Mama,” she says. “I should go tell her what’s happened. Maybe Mama can do the proper thing for you.”

“Not at this second. For right now I need you to—”

“Okay, hush, I’ll go.”

She makes me as comfortable as possible on the divan and puts a sheet over me that sticks to the salve and oozing burns. She throws on a windbreaker, takes my keys, and goes without another word.

I look up the stairway at the closed door to my brothers’ bedroom.

The house breathes its extensive history. A century ago the dead were laid out in this same room and shown in their coffins for three days of mourning. My forefathers rested here through the long nights. I keep waiting for Johnny to start tapping at the screen again but he doesn’t. He’s served his purpose, whatever it might be. I hope to Christ that Herbie’s leg doesn’t come looking for me. I’ve had just about enough of those two.

Dodi’s stuck in the mud. The tires of the truck scream but she doesn’t engage the four-wheel drive. Gravel, silt, and muck spatter the front windows as the rain continues to thrash against the glass. Shifting from reverse directly into third gear, back and forth, she finally manages to grind and rock the truck loose. Hopefully the transmission won’t fall out before she hits town.