A Choir of Ill Children (22 page)

She likes his voice apparently and closes her eyes to listen to him spout. It goes on for a while longer, some stammering here and there but not too much, with Willy unsure of exactly how this damn scene is going to play out. If any of the guys are watching maybe he can send a signal, write something on the fogged up windshield—HEY, I GOT A SITUATION HERE, COME FUCKING HELP ME OUT—but he’d have to write it backward and he’s not too sure how many of them guys can read anyway.

Her blouse is open another button and her skirt is hiked to almost midthigh. That mouth is glowing gray in the dim light, laced with neon crimson every few seconds as the signs flash, lips growing more and more wet as the tip of her tongue prods along the edges.

Willy decides to just go through with it. His wife isn’t doing much for him after having three kids in two and a half years, and she lets the oldest one sleep in bed between them, like a chocolate- and shit-smudged buffer. As if that’s not bad enough, Willy isn’t allowed to watch TV anymore.

When his wife isn’t planted in front of the tube watching soaps or talk shows the kid is glued to the carpet about six inches from the screen, still using the remote to change channels about every ten seconds. It makes Willy nuts and drives him out of the house and into the garage, where he throws darts until he can feel the capillaries in the recesses of his heart about to rupture. His brother Jackson had been only three years older than him and was already dead from a myocardial infarction. Jackson had gotten a treadmill for Christmas, went out and bought himself a warm-up suit, new tennis shoes, sweatbands, water bottle, headphones so he could listen to the soundtrack to
Chariots of Fire,
took about eleven steps on the thing, and fell over dead. Ever since Willy had seen his brother with painted pink cheeks in his casket he’d just been counting down the days until it was his turn.

My mother presses her palm flat against Willy’s chest and pushes slightly, a go-on-geddouta-here gesture, as if they’re longtime friends. It takes him a minute to see that she’s got tears on her cheeks even though she’s not really sobbing. It gets him thinking about the cops again and the dime bag of weed he’s got stashed under the backseat. He wonders why he didn’t think this whole thing through a little better, why he didn’t back the fuck off when he saw her nuzzling the wild boar’s dead head. He should be able to put one and one together by now but he never does.

He tries again, unsure of how to proceed. He wants to just get it done and go get a beer, wait for the deputies to come drag him out by his ankles. “Ah, see, it’s like this if you wanna know the truth, my job gets me down some, nothin’ against your husband a’course, and my house, well it’s a wreck and there’s all this noise, screaming all the time and there’s candy bar wrappers on the floor, and the babies, Jesus, she doesn’t know how to feed them, half the food’s in their hair for Christ’s sake. So that’s why I need to, you know, to look at somebody like you, it’s why the guys stare, the fact that you’re so beautiful. That and, well, you gettin’ up on the stool and all. It’s why I want the sex. With you. In case you were speculatin’.”

She doesn’t bother to pull her blouse together as she turns in her seat to open the passenger door. Willy almost reaches out to stop her but he’s stuck on the gearshift again and is starting to prefer it. Moonlight blazes in around her so brightly that Willy has to avert his eyes. She closes the truck door and walks across Leadbetter’s parking lot to the brush while Willy grunts with relief and decides he’ll tell his buddies he finished the deed with the boss’s wife. He won’t have to say much seeing as how they won’t believe him anyway, all of them having failed in this before as well.

My mother looks down and sees a pair of boots.

I know them too. They’re my father’s.

And the hands around her neck, caressing at first and then tightening, they’re his too.

T
HE
C
RONE HAS SOMEHOW GOTTEN INTO THE HOUSE
again. I wake up in my—my brothers’—bedroom and she’s standing there staring at the wall of words.

It’s still dark out. She moves her toothless mouth when she reads, plucking at her lengthy chin hairs, cocking her head and repeating phrases. The words have been carefully carved in using an old-fashioned key, which was left sticking out of the plaster at the bottom of the last letter. She grunts and runs her bony finger along the grooves and curves.

“Does it mean anything to you?” I ask.

She takes a breath that sounds as if it might never stop rattling around in her chest. Her brittle voice rustles, crackles and ticks. “Hell no . . . you’d have to be out of your head for this fool talk to make sense.” She gums more of the words and swallows them down. “What’s this here? This basal ganglee?”

I sit up and the raw skin pulling makes me champ at my tongue. It takes a few seconds for the pain to subside enough for my vision to clear. Sheets are covered in ointment and soot but not much blood. I lean back against the headboard and light a cigarette. “Nerves deep in the brain.”

“Well, they’d be the right boys to talk about such things I suppose. Where are they?”

I struggle not to hiss. “I don’t know.”

“How’d they get there?”

“No idea.”

“You miss ’em?”

It’s an average question, a common one, and perhaps it’s the normality of it that takes me back. I hadn’t thought of it in terms like this. Missing them implies love, or at least affection, and we are somehow beyond that, being blood. She knows this but is testing me. We’ve still got a long way to go before we get to the heart of the matter, if we ever do.

“Where’s that Coots girl?”

“Upstairs. She’s upset that my brothers are gone.”

“Here, let me bum a butt.”

I offer her a cigarette and give her a light. She inhales deeply and the eras that have worn down her shrunken frame seem to flash by. She is dainty, she is young, she’s refined and smokes like a noblewoman. She’s dancing with my great-grandfather and laughing at his feeble attempts at romance. I can imagine her doing a two-step shuffle around the room with bits and tatters coming off her as she sways until there’s nothing left of her except a small pile of rags.

Those charms and bells sewn into her filthy clothing ring in time with my melted fillings, chiming through the house and my head.

She sits on the end of their bed, somewhat uneasy. The nest of sheets and blankets on the floor in the corner seems as if it should have huge eggs laid within it. “Looks like you had yourself a hurtful night,” she says, gesturing to my wounds. “The storm do that to you?”

I have to think about it before I answer. “Mostly it was a killer named Herbie, who felt compelled to come back here to the bayou. Considering he survived a bull gator attack many years back, he probably felt invincible in the bottoms. He was finished off by lightning.”

“Really?” the Crone asks, blowing smoke in a thin billow. “Hmph, you got more good luck floating about you than anybody I ever knowed. More ghosts and puzzles too.”

That’s twice she’s told me that and it’s starting to get to me a little. I look from her to the words and back again. “Why?” I ask, genuinely curious. “Why do you think that is?”

“Some questions ain’t worth askin’.”

“And some are.”

Her face is stark but not hollow. There’s an energy in those wrinkles that means something I’ll never understand. She carries a thousand epitaphs that won’t ever fully convey her life’s signature.

“You even got yourself a nice haircut out of it,” she says.

I run my hand through my shortened curls again, and it’s true; I sort of like it.

“Guess that’s one secret that don’t have you no more. This bad fella from the past.”

“No, not any longer. But another has been eating at me. Who killed my grandmother on the roof of the school?”

She waves the question off. “Nobody knows that and nobody ever will, I’m thinkin’. You won’t find all the answers no matter how hard you try.”

“Probably not,” I agree. “So what are you here for?”

“I done told you once, I got to reserve my consternation for the right time and the proper folks.”

“This the time?”

“No.”

She finishes the cigarette, wets her fingertips with her tongue, and puts out the burning ember. She carefully conceals the filter somewhere in her tatters, possibly to use in a spell somewhere down the line. Settling herself on the mattress she lets out a relieved sigh and begins to drop off. The silence of the house is compelling and relaxing. It can be an overwhelming influence of serenity and solace. I wonder if I should put her to bed in one of the other rooms.

Wavering a bit as the dust settles around her, she takes in the quiet. “At least your brother isn’t crying his blues anymore.”

“Not here anyway.”

“Not anywhere. He’s got himself a new way to grieve.”

“What is it?”

She shrugs and her rags slip across her shoulders. “You got any more of that pound cake?”

“No,” I say, “but I could make another if you like. It won’t take long.”

“Nah, don’t go to no bother. I just had a hankering for it.”

We’re about done for the night and I can feel her gathering her resolve to leave. Sometimes it can be difficult, with the night and the darkness and quiet pressing down and the smell of sweet gum settling in. “Last time you were here you were talking about the past.”

“Yep.”

“About how it can die and be reborn.”

“I got’s to get going.”

She gets up and shuffles out of the room, but pauses at the doorway. I give it a three count as she stands there, waiting, and then ask, “Did you dance with my great-grandfather?”

“That man owned two left feet and thirteen arms. Had me a hell of a time fighting him off. Few men take no for an answer, and he sure wasn’t one of ’em. Had to use tooth and claw to pertect my virginity.” She glances back, reading the shadows lying across me, and says, “Drink some oxtail soup, it’s good for you.”

“Fuck no.”

A childlike titter breaks free from the cobwebs far inside her body as she leaves and shuts the door. I hear her hobbling steps all the way down the stairs and out across the front yard into the greater darkness. The willows brush against the shingles as if pleading with me to call her back.

I do miss my brothers, and they are singing a new brand of blues. I can feel the song occasionally prodding the back of my head and every so often my side erupts with agony. Retribution is waiting for us all. I’ve checked the house for them and now Dodi is in another bedroom surviving her guilt because she feels she’d somehow failed in her duties to them. I listened to her weeping earlier, surprised that she’d taken their leaving so deeply to heart.

I take the key off the nightstand and hold it clasped in my fist. It must fit somewhere even if nothing else does.

Maybe they followed Johnny Jonstone back into the swamp.

There’s only one way to find out.

Tomorrow I’ll head into the bayou.

T
HE HAM IS STILL IN THE HOUSE
.

I’ve got the key and I try it in every lock I can think of even when I know it’s not going to fit. Every bedroom, closet, storage area, and bathroom door. I spend an hour in my parents’ bedroom going through belongings I’ve never touched before. My mother’s jewelry chests, cabinets, dresser drawers, desk compartments, anything at all with a lock no matter how undistinguished. I enter rooms I haven’t stepped foot in since I was a child. I’m surprised at how clean everything is. Dodi has really kept the place up.

She sleeps curled around pillows. She’s wept herself into exhaustion. I stand over her, wanting to make love and not wanting to make love, yet hoping she’ll awaken. The Crone has gotten me into the mood to talk, but except for an occasional grimace Dodi appears to sleep deeply and peacefully enough. I lie beside her for a while enjoying the company.

She’ll be leaving soon, I know, now that my brothers are gone. I take her hand and press my lips to her palm, brushing her knuckles across my cheek. I hope to Christ she doesn’t start hacking off her fingers too.

I leave her and close the door quietly behind me, heading up to the attic.

There’s a century of packed, hidden and lost effects up here. Dozens of knotted lives and deaths drifting through time. There’s nowhere to start looking because each inch and article is only another chapter of somebody’s continuing existence. Their memoirs and confessions and endless guilt. There are fifty broken arms packed beneath the rafters. Twenty abortions, sixteen rapes, a couple kidnappings, four murders, a thousand clandestine affairs and shrouds of indemnity. Innumerable veiled threats and countless failures.

Niches, cubbyholes, and crawl spaces abound, stuffed with boxes, furniture, trunks, furnishings, toys, possessions, and personal effects beyond my understanding. I pick up a thin polished piece of wood with two metal clasps and a pointed end set against a spring. I could stare at it for the rest of my life and never learn its intent. But it’s not junk, nothing here is. All of it has a meaning and reason even if it’s never known again.

This is family.

There are locks upon locks.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. We must’ve been a secretive people once, carefully preserving, protecting and placing our items away in the time before the secrets owned us. So much to be hidden and safeguarded and secured. The shadows were made for just such things, and these things were made for the shadows. I shouldn’t be here because I haven’t brought anything to leave behind. This is a sacred place of ancestry and kindred history, and I can feel the importance of what has been harbored in the house.

The storm of ghosts hasn’t done much to shake loose any of the dead. They’re still snug and cozy and quiet. I want to start calling out names—“Grandfather? Uncle Jonathan? Aunt Fidencia? Rollie! Nicole! Jort?”—but there are too many for me to remember.

The key fits many of the locks but won’t turn once inside them. For a moment I wonder if the mechanisms have been rusted shut or jammed with lost years. But if that were true my brothers wouldn’t have left the key for me. I can see their shambling trifold form moving carefully among the contents of the attic, crooked and gnarled and toiling, just to spray a drop of oil into a lock so that one day I might find whatever needs to be found.