Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (40 page)

Finally, the old man said, "My niece will not be aware of this. No set of eyes in this town will see you. Else, you're in trouble, boy."

"I think we'd both be," I replied, and the man only made a wet coughing sound in his throat. In the distance, thunder signaled an approaching storm. The sky was a deep, bruised purple, occasionally split by slivers of lightning.

“I’m not digging up this whole thing,” I said. “If this is meant to teach me a lesson or something, just let me know when I’ve learned it.”

But I did it. I hesitated, and yet I still shoveled, and it brought me closer to something. Maybe not the answers I was seeking out - I guess I’m a seeker - but toward something meaningful. If I could derive no truth from this exercise, I could at least manufacture it out of thin air.

At first I worked slowly, mechanically, self-consciously, listening to the harsh clink of the shovel in the earth, but then I sped up, and soon the physical aspect of shifting aside the dirt faded into the background. The work took center stage, and after a while, I didn't care about the nature of it. I fell into a sort of trance, shoveling as though exorcising some kind of demon, ridding my soul of its dirtiness. It seemed to bring out everything raw and dangerous which had plagued me emotionally. I reveled in each thrown clump of dirt. I began to think that the work itself was the meaning of this whole production, and I continued.

Once, old women drove up in pristine sedans. They pulled in and looked questionably in our direction as they walked toward their destination, but K just smiled and waved and the women departed from us without a word. I half-expected the authorities to show but none did. With Janita's uncle standing there, arms folded across his chest, I experienced a strange comfort.

Once I had slipped into a monotonous rhythm, my mind drifted, as if the thoughtlessness of the physical work afforded it the chance to contemplate more important ideas. Every thought I encountered was something I had been putting off, but it was also something that I needed to deal with, so the stinging sensation that pricked me every so often was welcomed without protest. I began to thrive on the grief, thinking not for the consequences. I felt sobs creep up from within, and I began to work with the image of Vanessa at the forefront of my mind. Crying and shoveling. Crying and shoveling. Crying and shoveling.

And as I worked, the day shifted from morning to afternoon. For a time, I thought I had become delirious.

Then I hit something hard. The tip of the shovel clanged against the surface of the coffin. In that moment, the reverberations seemed to shake more than my hands. That broke the trance, and the cloud over my brain lifted. But by then, I didn't care what came afterward. I realized he had brought me here for the work and the work alone. The ending was just the ending; the work was what mattered.

"Whup," the old man said from somewhere above me. "Them ain't roots you done got into. Open it up."

I hesitated. At least I
thought
this had been about the work. "Go on," he said, and I heard the rustling of his pants as he moved around to get a look at the coffin. "I can promise he won't jump out at you."

"That only happens in my dreams," I said, kneeling on the soupy dirt covering the casket lid. Exhaustion kept trying to convince me to lie down for a bit. My muscles ached severely, but I felt as though I had cleansed myself somehow. A baptism by dirt.

"Hurry up," Uncle K said, somewhat impatiently.

I wiped away clods of mud, revealing the newness of the casket, fully intending on opening it...at some point.

A close, murmuring thunder warned me against it, but on impulse I grabbed the shovel from behind me and began to cull the mud and dirt away from the sides of the casket, listening to the near-sickening scrape of the blade against the elm top. It was then I felt God's judgment closest to me, as though Kweku himself were an arbiter of the Big Man Himself, and I was ashamed.

A great wave of nausea filled me, and I was vaguely aware of the extremity of my tunnel vision, blackness pushing in around the edges, but I pressed on, commanding my limbs to keep moving, shoveling away the dirt and mud and rocks and bits of grass.

I pressed one hand down the side, looking for the handle, and the first raindrops pelted my back and thudded on the wood and dirt surrounding me. Uncle K remained remarkably, uncharacteristically quiet. Even the shuffle of his feet and quiet swish of his pants had receded into silence, but I dared not address him. This was almost done, and not a minute too soon: I felt like I might burst open, like a plastic bag filled with blood punctured by a needle. The edge of consciousness lay only inches away, muddled in the strained darkness of my vision, and I felt myself being dragged away from it.

Finally, there was enough debris scraped away to attempt to open it. I fingered the side latch. I ignored how bad I felt, how very near the point of collapse I had come, because I only had this one motion to complete. Reach down, pull open the casket, wait for enlightenment.

There was no flash of lightning as I opened it, but there was a flash of some kind, and something electric shot down my spine. White hot pain exploded in the back of my head, and with reality fading all around me, I peered into the final resting place of one Emmitt Laveau, seeing him for the first time in the flesh. So to speak.

My senses - or rather my imagination - sharpened by exertion, superimposed the images of Vanessa's face and my mother's face in the space next to Emmitt's already rotting corpse. A trinity of the dead. I screamed out the old voodoo man's name before slipping down, down, down into the darkness, which reached across my field of vision and closed the curtains on the fading afternoon light.

"I think you are ready," said K from behind me. I felt another sharp pain, and then my lights went out completely.

Twelfth Chapter

The night my father killed my mother's lover, Terrence Birrell - when he hung him by the neck and laughed while the man gasped for air and clawed at his throat to relieve the agony - I watched from a nearby row of holly bushes.

My daddy had told me to stay in the car, that he had some business to do, but of course I hadn’t. I’d slipped out and walked along the edge of the path leading back to where he had gone. I knelt down and watched in rapt horror. I saw the maniacal, unhinged look on the old man's face when he tied the rope around the victim's neck. Two men stood there with him, laughing angrily, spitefully, helping to finish up the disgusting business. Of all the things I could not remember, his accomplices’ identities were the most troubling. Finally recognizing Jarvis Garvey and Jarrell Clements locked everything into place.

Seeing my father draw a man into the air and then wrap the slack around a stake plunged into the ground was almost eclipsed by my inability to look away. The three men cracked open beers and watched, waiting for the man's dangling feet to stop twitching.

It was there, under the fragrant and prickly holly trees, that I last prayed to God. Kneeling there in the dirt, staring wide-eyed at this atrocity, straining against inevitable tears, I asked the Almighty to deliver this poor man. He received no such assistance, just more agony.

My father and the other men taunted and harassed him, spitting beer onto his clothes and hurling obscenities at him. They happily waited for him to die.

After that, I sort of lost track of the minutes. The nightmare show played out for some time, but I lay amidst the bushes and the brambles and closed my eyes, staying well after the headlights of Clements's and Garvey's cars had gone, when only the dead man and I remained.

At some point, I fell into a hard, uncomfortable sleep, in which I dreamed about nothing and still seemed aware of my surroundings. My terrified thoughts were drowned out by something else, something that reached out from the darkness and squeezed its cold fingers around my spine. It was a sound, the faintest of croaks, no louder than a grown man's whisper.

It was the sound of a rope straining against a tree limb.

Swinging. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Desultorily with the wind, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

When I reawakened, I ran, running because it was all I knew to do, relishing the way the tall grass whipped against my clothes, because it replaced the hellish creak of the rope.

At one point, I tripped and fell against a tree, and when my forehead struck the roots, I saw in that flash of a moment my face transposed over the face of one of those men, my own mock smile glinting in the car's headlights. That image has stayed with me all these years. I walked, bleeding, all the way home and sneaked back into my room after my father passed out. I avoided him, and he didn't mention anything about my disappearance. Two days later, he was in jail, where he would die an embittered, pathetic shell of a man.

That is one of the reasons, I suspect, I've kept my head down all these years, why I've left the past to be the past. It wasn't until I joined the police force at twenty-five, after watching two planes rip into buildings I myself had never visited, killing people I would never have known, that the distant, underwater feeling broke, and I began the process of swimming back toward the surface.

Being a police officer never completely changed it, because I continued down the same path, and getting the DUI seemed right in a lot of ways when placed against the background of my life, but even that feeling snapped the moment I saw Janita Laveau standing in my driveway, already having forgiven me on a level to which I could probably never forgive myself.

*  *  *

My eyes opened to the dull sensation of raindrops pelting my forehead. I stared up out of the grave of Emmitt Laveau, above the dirt, into the slate gray sky, where the clouds swirled like an omen of the worst kind. I half expected a rogue's gallery of the undead to be staring down at me, ready to drive me the short distance over into insanity.

But the sky was all there was, and I was happy to see it, happy that my dreams were just dreams. I leaned forward, sitting up, and immediately shot a hand to the back of my head. I wondered how long I had been out. I didn't bother to call out for Uncle K. Instead, I patted the wetness on the back of my skull and brought my fingers around to see. Blood. The old man had whacked me a good one with the shovel and left me here.

It was then I noticed, too, that I was covered in dirt. My legs and chest had been covered up, and I had difficulty sitting up and brushing it off. Had the old man planned on burying me? If so, what had stopped him?

I worked my way out of the grave and heaved myself onto the grass. I rolled onto my back and stared at the abundance of raindrops. Once my legs stopped shaking, I got to my feet and walked unsteadily toward the car, which was nowhere to be found. The old man had swiped it while I was taking a shovel nap.

Damnit. Wasn't even my car.

I walked three miles down a cracking, dilapidated back road, soaked head to toe in rain and mud and getting more soaked by the minute, my head throbbing. I was busy trying to invent increasingly filthy words to curse the old man with, should I see him. At least it distracted me from my head.

I trespassed on an old patch of land that ran right by my house. It, too, was owned by the Brickmeyers. Dried branches and old bushes crackled under my feet like brittle, forgotten remains as I walked.

I was exhausted. Really tired, despite sleeping in the grave. I was the kind of tired that made me question living. I tried not to think of Vanessa, tried to keep my mind on putting one foot in front of the other, but she kept popping up in my thoughts. Not the Vanessa of my dreams, the Vanessa in tight jeans with a beer in one hand, cigarette dangling from her lips, but the strung-out, junkie body double of Vanessa, unimaginably skinny with frightened eyes. In this image, she pleaded with me to help her, almost understanding that I could not.

I couldn't muster any emotion beyond misplaced regret. I was pissed at myself, but in a disconnected way, as if something had been unplugged. I wanted to hate myself, to muster up tears, but nothing came. I was just tired and bewildered. The walking wounded.

*  *  *

I went down a tree-lined hill, through an open gate, toward a small pond in the distance. The rain had slackened, but the abundance of gray sky told me the storm wasn’t finished.

When I was nearly level with the pond, I stopped. Standing in the middle of the pathway, I was entirely vulnerable, but still I moved forward.

The pond had no bank. The grass ended abruptly where the water began. An occasional tree protruded from it, but otherwise it was just muddy brown water.

Something jutted out above the surface about ten yards out. It was white and metallic and drew me in as if by hypnosis. By the time I realized, I was knee-deep in water and continuing forward.

It was a truck. A white
diesel
truck.

I slogged ahead, smelling mud rise out of disturbed water. The truck had been driven so that it was submerged well above the license plate, but I already knew what I was approaching. The driver's side window was down, and I heard a fly buzz as I looked into the cab, instinctively covering my nose and mouth with a forearm.

First thing I noticed was that he hadn’t been dead for long. Couldn’t have been. H.W. Bullen sat slumped on the passenger side of the truck, head lolling back with the eyes staring forward. He was a bloody mess. The passenger side window existed only in jagged shards that protruded from within the door like broken teeth. I saw two gunshot wounds - one in the neck and the other in the chest - before I backed away in disgust.

A whole cloud of flies erupted from the back, prompting me to look. In the bed of the truck lay the two pulpwooders. They had been given the same treatment as H.W.

*  *  *

I tried to get in touch with the authorities, but my phone had died. Completely dead. It was the graveyard nap. Even surviving all the shit I had put it through, the phone was not impervious to the steady flow of rain. When I pressed the red button, the screen flickered miserably and then blinked off. Still, I tried to turn it on every few minutes, nervously flipping open and then closing the hinged screen so I wouldn't scream.