Blood Memory (23 page)

“When was this?” I’m sure I never saw anything like that. In my experience, Grandpapa’s word was always law.

“Dr. Kirkland and a cousin of mine was breaking some horses one spring. One of those broncs was stubborn, and Dr. Kirkland lost his head. He tied that horse to a fence and started beating it with a hoe. That animal was screaming something terrible. Dr. Kirkland was using the handle end at first, but the more he beat that horse, the madder he got. I think he was about to flip that hoe around and start chopping that poor creature to pieces when Luke grabbed his arm.”

“No,” I whisper, unable to imagine such a scene.

She nods once with an exaggerated motion. “Dr. Kirkland’s a big man, you know that. And strong as an ox back then. But Luke knew things he never showed nobody. He caught ahold of Dr. Kirkland’s arm some way that he couldn’t move it. Dr. Kirkland was yelling he was gonna kill Luke when he got loose. He tried to beat Luke with his other hand, but Luke did something to that arm he was holding, and Dr. Kirkland turned white and dropped down to his knees.”

“My God. What happened?”

“Luke kept squeezing until Dr. Kirkland let go of that hoe. Then Luke patted that horse, turned, and walked off into the woods.”

“Did my grandfather do anything to get back at Luke?”

Louise shakes her head. “I reckon he did. He shot that horse five minutes later.”

“Jesus.”

“It don’t pay to cross Dr. Kirkland. He don’t play.”

A strange current of emotion wells up from my soul. “Louise, what would you say if I told you Grandpapa killed Luke that night? Not a prowler?”

She stares at me for several moments, then begins shaking her head like a superstitious native confronted by a ghost. “Don’t tell me nothing like that. I don’t even want to
think
that.”

“If it scares you that much,” I say softly, “you must think it could be true.”

She finally stops shaking her head. “What are you saying, Cat?”

“Nothing. Crazy thoughts.” I want to tell her what I know, but something stops me. Is it my lack of proof of Grandpapa’s motive or just common decency? Louise has precious memories of my father. What good could it do for me to smudge them with accusations of child molestation? “May I see your bedroom, Louise?”

A knowing expression comes into her face. “You want to see if Luke built the bed.”

“Yes.”

“Come look.”

She leads me to a door set in the back wall and opens it. In the small bedroom beyond stands a bed that looks as if it belongs in a Manhattan loft. Four brushed-steel posts support an oval-shaped canopy frame, and within the headboard and footboard are ornate patterns rendered in different metals, some of them reminiscent of the mandala on Dr. Malik’s office wall. It’s one of the most detailed pieces my father ever did.

“My God,” I whisper. “Do you know what that bed is worth?”

Louise laughs. “I got an idea. I guess this bed is what I’ve got instead of retirement.”

“Please don’t let anybody steal it. And if you ever want to sell it, give me a call.”

“I may take you up on that one day.”

She leads me back into the front room, and we stand in a suddenly awkward silence. The economic gulf between us could scarcely be greater than it is.

“How old are you, Louise?”

“Forty-six.”

Older than I thought, but still only fifteen years older than I am.
“What do you do for a living, if you don’t mind me asking?”

She looks at the floor. “I got a man here takes care of me. I just keep up this house for…well, you know why.”

This wasn’t what I was hoping to hear. “Is the man Jesse Billups?”

Louise sighs, and for a moment I dread her answer. “Not Jesse,” she says. “Henry. The man who drove you onto the island. He ain’t pretty like Luke, but he’s got a good heart.”

“Are you married?”

“I ain’t interested in getting married. I dreamed of it for a long time, but…the man I wanted to marry got killed. That was the end of that dream for me.”

I reach out and take hold of her hand. I never met this woman before today, yet I feel more intimately bound to her than to people I’ve known my whole life. When I think about what Grandpapa told me about my father’s death, it makes no sense. How could the man this woman loved so profoundly commit unspeakable acts with a child? With his
own
child. And yet…the professional in me knows that such things happen.

“Sounds like the rain’s slacked up,” Louise says.

“You’re right. I should go now, while I can. Do you have a car?”

She shakes her head. “No, and Henry’s gone to Lafayette to see his kids. They stay with his ex-wife.”

“What about Jesse?”

She opens a kitchen drawer and takes out a cell phone. After dialing, she listens, then says, “Jesse, this is Louise. I still got Miss Ferry with me at my place. She needs to get back to Natchez. You carry your narrow ass back here and take her to her car. Call me back and tell me you’re on your way.”

She hangs up and looks at me helplessly.

“Does anybody else have a car we can borrow?” I ask.

“Lots of people here own cars, but they keep them on the mainland, by the ferry dock.”

“What do they use for transportation here?”

“There’s five pickups on the island, and Jesse got the keys to all of them. Use to be, lots of people had keys. But Dr. Kirkland started complaining about the gas they were using, so Jesse keeps all the keys now.”

“What do you do in an emergency?”

“Make do. But Jesse’ll call back in a minute. He’s probably just checking that everything’s tied down tight for the storm. The fishing boat on the south end, maybe.”

“No, he left the island. He said he had to get some supplies on the mainland.”

Louise looks bewildered. “That’s funny. Jesse don’t leave the island too often. And never at the same time Henry’s gone.”

“Somebody called his cell phone, and he said he had to leave right then.”

“He say who it was?”

“No.”

“That don’t sound right.” She shrugs, then goes to the front window and looks out. The sky is darker, if anything. “If Jesse doesn’t call back, you can stay the night with me. I know it’s not what you’re used to, but I can sleep on the sofa. You can sleep in the bed your daddy made.”

I stand motionless in the close air of the shack, listening to the rain drumming over the drone of the air conditioner. My skin is crawling. “There’s no guarantee the bridge will be there tomorrow, is there?”

“Depends on the rain. But if it’s flooded out, somebody can take you back to your car by boat.”

“I appreciate it, but I think I’d rather get back to my car now, if you think I can make it.”

She turns from the window and looks at me. “Oh, you can make it, if you don’t mind getting wet. You can use my bike. Ain’t much lightning out there. And if you cut through the woods, the rain won’t be as bad, ’cause the trees make a tunnel over the road. Cut down through the hunting camp, then—when you hit the road to the boat ramp—turn back up along the shore till you come to the bridge.”

“I can do that.”

“Sure you can. It ain’t even dark yet, really. Just cloudy. And I got a light on the front of my bike. I’ve ridden around this island in the middle of the night when I needed to. It’s safe. Just watch you don’t slide off the gravel into a ditch or something. Lots of snakes this year on the back side.”

I shiver, recalling the hallucinatory snakes I saw in my apartment as the d.t.’s began. “How fast can the water rise? Could the bridge be covered up already?”

“I doubt it. If the river wasn’t already so high, you wouldn’t have nothing to worry about. But you’ll be at the bridge in ten minutes. If you do have a problem, call my cell phone. Stay where you are, and I’ll come get you.”

“How will you come?”

“On my two feet.” She takes my cell phone from me and programs her number into its memory. “If I need to, I can get there in no time. And if Jesse calls back, I’ll send him after you. He can drive you across and bring my bike back both.”

I move to the door, then turn back and hug Louise.

She squeezes me tightly. “You going through some tough times, girl. You come back and see me sometime.”

I promise that I will, though I suspect I won’t ever be here again. Then I walk onto the porch and carry her bicycle down to the path.

“Hey!” Louise calls through the rain. “Wait!”

I stand in the rain while she disappears inside for a minute. The air out here has a greenish tinge, like the look the sky gets before a tornado. The wind is blowing hard from the south, and the raindrops sting my face. I hope she’s getting me a raincoat, but when she returns, she’s carrying what looks like a Ziploc sandwich bag.

“For your cell phone!” she says over the wind.

Taking the Baggie, I slip my phone and car keys inside it, crush the bag to get the air out, then zip it shut and stuff it into the front pocket of my jeans. I start to pedal away, but Louise grabs my arm, her eyes desperate.

“I know you didn’t tell me everything,” she says. “I know you got something bad on your back. All I know is this: ain’t no man all good or all bad. And if you find out something bad about Luke, I don’t want to know. Okay?”

I wipe the rain from my eyes and nod.

“Time will heal you,” Louise says. “Won’t nothing else do any good at all.”

I feel an eerie certainty that if I don’t start for the bridge now, I won’t make it to my car. Pushing down hard on the right pedal, I struggle toward the road that cuts through the woods toward the hunting camp.

The wind slaps the rain against my right cheek and ear, but soon I’m passing the shacks by the lake. The porches that were full of people an hour ago hold only dogs now. I’m alone again.

When I turn south on the camp road, the wind hits me full in the face, pushing against my body like a sail, trying to drive me back toward the lake. I lean low over the handlebars to cut my resistance and bear down hard on the pedals. The shoulder is so muddy in places that I almost take a spill, but the farther down the island I ride, the sandier the soil gets, and soon I’m making good time despite the weather.

Beneath the black storm clouds, the world has gone gray. Everything ahead looks as flat as a black-and-white photograph. The gray cabins of the hunting camp are almost invisible in the shadows beneath the trees. Even the grass has lost its color. Only a slight brightness low in the sky to the west lets me know the sun is there at all.

There should be a left turn soon. If not, I’ll come to the southern tip of the island, a rolling, mosquito-infested hell of scrub-covered dunes and muddy slews that I always avoided when possible.

Out of the grayness ahead, the old channel of the river appears, and relief washes through me. A mile up the road that runs along this channel is the bridge that leads to my car. I’m about to turn onto it when two bright beams of light swing across me from behind. I look back over my shoulder.

Headlights.

They look high enough to belong to a truck like the one Henry was driving. Louise told me she would send Jesse after me if he called her back.

I stop the bike at the turn and wait.

To my right, a blue-white beam much larger than those cast by the headlights illuminates the far shore, then sweeps south again. For a moment this puzzles me. Then I realize it’s the spotlight on a push boat. A quarter mile south of where I stand, the old channel runs back into the main channel of the Mississippi River. A push-boat captain driving a string of barges upstream is checking his course.

The driver of the pickup has spotted me. Forty yards away, he flicks his lights to high beam. The rain is blowing almost horizontally through their glare. I raise my hand to wave, then freeze.

The truck hasn’t slowed at all.

As the hair on my neck stands up, something Sean told me before we were lovers sounds in my head:
That hair standing up on the back of your neck is two hundred million years of evolution telling you to get the hell out of wherever you are
—

The truck engine roars with acceleration in the same moment that I dive into the ditch on the left side of the road. I regain my feet as the truck crushes Louise’s bicycle beneath its bumper and bounces after me across the ditch. My only hope is the trees, but I can’t outsprint a truck, not even for thirty yards.

An unholy grinding of gears gives me hope. The bike must have been caught in the truck’s linkage. As the driver tries to manhandle his vehicle off the twisted wreckage beneath it, I reach the first giant willow and dart behind it.

Looking back, I see headlights bouncing up and down. Then suddenly the truck’s motor dies. The headlights remain on though, and the interior light flicks on behind them. There’s a figure inside the cab—a man—but his face is obscured by distance and rain. He leans into the space between the door and the body of the truck. I’m squinting my eyes to try to see his face when a flash blooms in the dark and splinters pierce my left cheek. Only then does the super-sonic crack of the rifle bullet reach me.

I run.

Panic drives me through the trees without direction. A single thought burns through the flood of endorphins in my brain: get away from the man in the truck. A second gunshot quickly follows the first, and one look over my shoulder tells me that the shooter has followed me into the woods. Now and then he flicks on a flashlight to find his way through the trees. From his careful progress, I know one thing: he’s driving me southward, down an ever-narrowing strip of land. It’s only a matter of time before he corners me on the tip of the island, a bare patch of sand with a mile of rushing water at my back.

I need to find a way to slip around him, but on this ground that’s almost impossible. The island here is like tropical jungle. The willow and cottonwood brakes give good cover, but there’s too much underbrush on the ground to move quietly, even in the rain. There’s only one other chance.

The boat ramp is on the west side of the island, facing the main channel of the river. If the shooter were farther behind me, I might have time to launch the fishing boat before he reached me. But he’s not. I’ve got to slow him down. But how? I have no weapons. As I fight my way through the underbrush, an image comes into my mind—
bull nettle.
Bull nettle is a twisting green vine about four feet high that bristles with thousands of hypodermic needles. Those needles inject a painful toxin into any animal that rubs against it. Horses will lie down in bull nettle to avoid brushing against more of it. In humans it causes painful itching and hives, and the effect is immediate. The southern tip of DeSalle Island is covered with bull nettle.

I veer south again. Tree branches whip my face, and peppervine claws at the legs of my jeans. Here the ground rises and falls in three-foot undulations, and I pray not to step on a cottonmouth as I splash through the dark slews. I’ve seen fifty moccasins together roiling the water in the drying pools.

The rain falls relentlessly, and the sound of my pursuer crashing through the brush grows nearer. Sweat pours from my skin, and my heart thumps against my breastbone. Free diving keeps me in good physical shape, but terror steals my breath, and alcohol withdrawal probably isn’t helping matters.

As I slow to get my bearings, the rifle cracks again, driving willow splinters into my left arm. I duck down and scramble between two cottonwood trunks, then crab-crawl through the dark until my arms begin to itch like fire.
Bull nettle!
There’s a thicket of the stuff all around me. I could never have imagined being glad to feel this pain, but at this moment I’m ecstatic.

Thirty yards into the thicket, I bear right, toward the boat ramp. Before I cover twenty yards, the sound of cursing floats through the trees. With a tight smile on my face, I rise and sprint for the west side of the island. A light beam cuts the air close by, but then a scream of male rage echoes through the trees. I can’t make out his words, or even if there were any.

My heart lifts with hope as I hit a level patch of sand, cause for joy until I spy a string stretched across my path at thigh level. It’s an old trotline strung with rusty fishhooks, and though I twist my body torturously in an effort to avoid it, nothing can stop my headlong flight. I swallow a scream as the hooks tear into my flesh. The line rips free from whatever held it as I fall, but the treble hooks are well and truly buried in my right thigh.

The rifle booms again, its echo rolling over sandy berms like cannon fire. My hunter heard my scream and got a new fix on my position. I pray he doesn’t know about the boat ramp, but what are the odds of that? I’m almost certain that it’s Jesse Billups behind me. Who else knew where I was?

At the top of a dune, I catch myself and stop. The main channel of the Mississippi has opened before me, its far shore a mile away, cloaked in rain and darkness.
Get down!
shouts a voice in my head.
You’re silhouetted against the clouds!

Sliding down the dune, I race south along the bank, skirting cypress knees and driftwood snags. There’s the boat ramp, forty yards along the shore. Its concrete slab runs right down into the water at a steep angle. A glitter-coated bass boat sits on a trailer on the sand about five feet above the river. The problem is, it’s totally exposed. To launch that boat quickly, I’ll have to unsecure it from the trailer, lift the hitch end of the trailer, and heave both trailer and boat down the ramp into the water. If I can manage that, the boat should float free while the trailer sinks into the depths. I’ll have to swim freestyle with the fast current to catch the boat and board it, but I can do that. I’d rather swim the damned river with one arm than fight this island on foot anymore.

The boat ramp looks deserted from here, but that means nothing. If I walk into that open space unprotected, a ten-year-old could pick me off with a rifle. I crouch near the river’s edge, my senses primed for the slightest stimulus.

Something’s not right. I don’t hear my pursuer anymore. The wind is louder on the exposed bank, but I should hear
something.
The rain raking the water sounds like rain hitting a tin roof, only the pitch is higher—almost a hiss. The southerly wind blasting upcurrent is building whitecaps three feet high. Rough going for a bass boat.

I need a weapon. A tree branch? Not much good against a rifle. A rock? Same problem. What do I have with me…?

Cell phone.
If I can get close enough to my attacker to identify him before he shoots me, I can give his name to the police—and tell him I’m doing it. Killing me at that point would be the act of an idiot.
Or a lunatic,
counters the voice in my head.

Taking the Ziploc out of my pocket, I see silver metal but no electric light. Did the sealed bag somehow short it out? I squeeze the phone through the plastic, and the light of the screen clicks on. My joy is short-lived. The screen reads,
NO SERVICE
.

Shit!
I need to move to higher ground. There’s no true high ground on the island, but there are better spots than this.

A blue beam of light sweeps over me, nearly stopping my heart. It’s the push boat again, driving its barges upriver. Any hope there? I could signal the crew by standing in the spotlight and waving my arms, but that would be suicide. I could try swimming out to the boat, but I would probably be sucked under its barges and into its massive propellers.

I’m thinking of sprinting north along the shore, away from the boat ramp, when a flashlight beam shines out of the woods behind me and moves steadily along the bank. In seconds it will pick out my hunched body on the sand.

Without even thinking I shove the Baggie into my front pocket, crawl to the river’s edge, and slip into the current like a rat leaving a sinking ship. The water is cool but not cold, thank God, and it soothes the hives caused by the bull nettle. The waves are another matter. When I swam this river at sixteen, its surface was like glass. Now it batters me like breaking surf, and the rain lashes my face as I try to keep my head above the waves.

The flashlight sweeps over the spot I just left and lingers, but I’m no longer there. The current has me now. I’m moving along the shore at the speed of a jogging man, and a force like the hand of a giant is pulling me out into the river.

I feel no bottom below me because there are no shallows here. This part of the island forms the outside of a river bend, and so takes the full brunt of the current before deflecting it west. The cutting power of all that water is enormous. Wherever it hits a bank like this, the Mississippi gouges out a channel over a hundred feet deep. Compounding this effect, the river also narrows here, creating a sort of sluiceway that would knock down skyscrapers if they were placed in its path.

I’ve got to get my shoes off. My jeans, too. In this river, they’re more lethal than Jesse’s rifle. I’m reaching down to pull off my left shoe when the flashlight pins me to the crest of a wave. I don’t feel or see the impact of the bullet, but the whipcrack by my ear knocks my heart into my throat. Whoever is firing that rifle knows what the hell he’s doing.
I’m a good shot,
Jesse bragged, when telling me about my father.

I yank off the shoe and dive, exhaling to bleed off buoyancy, extending my limbs like sails to catch the current and drift more swiftly past the island.

When I surface again, the flashlight is gone.

Unsnapping my jeans, I try to peel myself out of them, but they’re tight even when dry. I curse my vanity, sinking like a stone as I fight to get the soaked denim off my legs. My left leg comes loose, but the other won’t. Kicking back to the surface, I see why. The fishhooks from the trotline have fastened the jeans to my thigh. Two prongs of the treble hook are buried deeply in my flesh. I’d like to rip the jeans to get them free, but even if I could manage to tear the wet denim, I can’t afford to do it—not with what I have in mind.

I pull gently on the central stem of the hooks, and a trickle of blood runs toward my groin. Getting fishhooks out of flesh is a tricky business. I’ve seen my grandfather remove dozens. Sometimes he snips off the loop and pushes the barb out through unwounded skin; other times he widens the hole with a scalpel and frees the barb the way it came in. Both methods take tools I don’t have.

It’s really a question of pain.

My fingers can’t grip the free hook firmly enough to rip out the other two, but my Tag Heuer watch has a steel band. Slipping the barb of the free hook into a crevice in the band, I turn my forearm so that I can jerk upward with maximum force. If I can stand the pain, this should rip the buried barbs out of my skin.

Taking a deep breath, I curl into a fetal position, then explode out of it, yanking my right arm up and my right leg down. The flesh of my thigh rises like a pup tent, and a scream bursts from my throat. Consciousness flickers, and my stomach starts to come up. My brain screams for me to stop, but in that moment I yank still harder, and something tears free.

Afraid it was only my watchband, I right myself in the water and look at my thigh. Where the hooks were embedded is now only a ragged hole streaming blood. It looks like a small, vicious animal took a hunk out of me. After retching in the water, I carefully remove the freed jeans leg, making sure I don’t hook myself again. I’m tempted to let the jeans sink into the river, but that would be a fool’s gesture. This pair of Banana Republics is going to save me.

Treading water with only my legs, I tie knots in both legs of the jeans. Then I put the jeans behind my head, take hold of each side of the waist, and whip them back over my head in a wide arc, trapping enough air in the makeshift life vest to keep me afloat for ten minutes. Then I lay my chin in the inverted crotch of the jeans, with the knotted legs sticking up like the arms of those inflatable figures you see at car dealerships. I learned how to do this on the swim team, and it works surprisingly well. Now I can devote some energy to trying to figure out where the hell I am in relation to the man who wants to kill me.

I’m fifty yards from the island now. All I can see is a narrow strip of beach, but then that, too, disappears.
Fifty yards
.
Only fifteen hundred left to swim. Maybe seventeen hundred
…

The safest thing to do would be to drift south along this bank for a mile or so, then climb ashore. The problem with that plan is that I’d be getting out of the river at a place called Iowa Point. This isn’t a town or even a crossroads, but only a dot on the map. The nearest telephone lies across five miles of uninhabited swamp. Uninhabited by humans, anyway. There are plenty of alligators and snakes to keep you company. Very little chance of a cellular transmission tower. But if I
cross
the river, I’ll come ashore less than a mile from Louisiana Highway 1, not far from the Morganza Spillway. There I can flag down a car—which shouldn’t be difficult in my underwear—or easily walk to a place where I’ll have cellular service.

Am I crazy to try it? Most people would say yes. But I swam this river fifteen years ago, and if I did it then, I can do it now. The fact that it almost killed me—under ideal conditions—is something best not dwelled upon. The trick, as I’ve told several people, is not to fight the current, or even to try to swim across the river. The trick is to float with the current and gradually vector out toward the
thalweg,
or deepest part of the channel. Once you reach that, the river will do its best to deposit you on the opposite shore of the next bend.

Under optimum conditions, that would happen about a half hour from now. But tonight there are complications. Darkness. Rain. Waves trying to beat me to death. A string of barges that I can’t see and that could crush me like a tractor-trailer squashing a mosquito. Any normal person dropped into this situation would drown within ten minutes. But I’m not normal. And at least the madman with the rifle has been removed from the equation.

My makeshift life preserver is steadily losing air. I’ll have to reinflate the jeans soon. Because of the pounding waves, I keep my right hand gripped over the jeans pocket that holds my bagged cell phone. Every time a wave carries me to its crest, I glance around to make sure I’m in no immediate danger. All kinds of debris gets swept into the river when it’s high. The biggest threat is logs. Some float high and dry, but others ride half-submerged, like alligators, tearing the props off pleasure boats and staving in the sides of barges. From the bridge at Natchez, I’ve watched hundred-foot trees bobbing like twigs in the muddy flood below.

Ten minutes of steady kicking move me into the main body of the river, and in that time I probably drift half a mile downstream. Now it’s barges that concern me. Though the last string has passed, others will come, and there’s simply no way to see them with these waves. The front barge in a string carries only two lights: green on the starboard side, red on the port. The push boat itself might be a thousand feet behind those lights, its pilot ignorant of anything happening below the bow of his waterborne freight train. If I’m crushed by barges, no one will ever know, not even the man who killed me.