Given (16 page)

It had been Frenchy who had closed the window when I went downstairs: she said the sound of water rushing over the stones in the creek hurt her ears. On TV you could turn the volume down, but here there was nothing she could do but use a couple of tampons to block out the roar. (She confessed to having opened my tampons without asking, and borrowing a few.)

When we had first arrived on the farm, she said, she had enjoyed hearing the creek, but after a while the sound changed — the noise of the water rushing around the stones kept her awake at night. Instead of hearing the lullaby of the water over stones, right away in tune with it Frenchy's mind would begin to replay the judge addressing the jury, or handing down her death sentence. Frenchy wanted my help to move the rocks in the stream. If we could just alter their pattern, the way the stones were arranged on the bottom of the creek bed, she felt she could get them to change their tune. Frenchy had always believed that by transforming the world around her she would find peace. (In prison it had been a train that kept her awake. She got so obsessed she took legal action against the railroad company, claiming they were deliberately harassing her. When the train passed the prison at 2:16 every afternoon, it whistled and woke her up.)

My friends kept odd hours, preferring to sleep during the day. Sometimes, late at night, Rainy would creep downstairs and bring back a sugar fix from the kitchen. Other times she would begin endlessly sweeping.

Twice I had been awakened in the night to the
fshhhh fshhhhh fshhhhh
sound of her sweeping moonlight from the walls. Rainy had earned her name because at one time shopping and crying had been her hobbies. Now it was crying and sweeping.
Take the “s” out of sweep and weep's all you got left,
Frenchy said.
You be cryin and weepin both at the same time, yo.

I weep all I want,
Rainy replied.
Weepin bring me closer to God.

Aged Orange had been banished from my room the day my friends had moved in. Frenchy claimed her boy was allergic to cats — if he were exposed to their fur his body would break out in hives and he'd look like he'd been sunbathing naked when a bomb went off in a strawberry patch. Aged Orange was demoted to being an outside cat and spent much of his time clinging like a monkey to the screen doors of the patio, ever hopeful that I would relent and let him in.

I soon discovered the real cause of Aged Orange's banishment — the white rat with red eyes who lived in the lining of the HE's long black waistcoat and lived on whatever fell from his mouth as he tried to eat.

“Why does it have to be a
rat?
” I asked Frenchy, exasperated.

You catch one and don't gatt his ass — you got a friend fo life,
Frenchy replied, kissing the rodent on his greasy lips.

Despite his youthful appearance, the HE was a sickly boy. Pus oozed from the sides of his head where the bugs had chewed off his ears when his mother had left him to die on the riverbank. He slept standing up, one blind eye open, and from the way he sometimes behaved, slapping his head against his open palm, first one side, then the other, I wondered if the bugs has infested his brain. (On Tranquilandia a runaway slave was punished by having his ears stuffed with carnivorous insects and sealed shut with wax.)

He wanted the windows covered, day and night, and closed the curtains whenever he could. He lit incense and placed the Qur'an on the bedside table that he had moved to the wall of my room facing east, the wall he would face daily for the five prayers.

A smelly, bloody discharge issued from both his nostrils and he sniffed constantly, making a
glock-glock-glock
sound in his throat, and blowing his nose, over and over again, into his red-and-white checkered
kaffiyeh
. He sounded like a cat trying to cough up a massive hairball.

The day Frenchy took the time to scrub more than just the surface of blood off her boy's face I could see God had tested him more severely than he had tested the rest of us. I saw the place where her bullet had struck between his eyes, severing his optical nerve and lodging itself above his nose. She couldn't be convinced that she had left her son blind. He saw, she insisted, what the rest of us couldn't see. Her boy saw with the eyes of the heart.

The HE was responsible for the fly infestation in my room. Not only were the flies drawn to the blood he left behind every time he moved, but when the HE's hair got too unruly Frenchy tried to slick it down with a daub of butter that she also used to polish his boots. The butter attracted the flies, and they stuck to the HE's body as if he were a living twist of flypaper; only once when a fly landed on him did I see something come loose inside him, as if the boy's brain had finally got word that the body it lived in had been badly hurt, and he tried to smash off what was left of his face, and broke my water jug in the process.

The HE, anyone could see, was still angry at having been shot by his mother and left to die. Frenchy said she'd seen her boy manifest himself in a thousand different violent ways.
It be what the angry dead do,
she said. Rainy was of the opinion that Frenchy's boy ought to do a few therapy sessions around his murder issues.

Boys who had been made by hate, I learned, didn't want to be unmade. In the ten years or more the HE had been dead, he had been fighting more than just his own battles.

After Frenchy shot her boy and left him by the river, he'd been reborn. He hadn't been a natural reborn killer, he had had to work hard to make the name he had earned for himself. I asked Frenchy if being shot in the bank robbery hadn't changed his mind about shooting other people.
You stop eating ham sandwiches just cause Mama Cass choke herself on one?
Frenchy said.

The HE spent his teenage years toughening himself up, driving splinters under his fingernails then lighting them on fire, killing time by lying in a burlap sack full of biting ants, in the hot sun
.
He had joined the army and been sent, along with 10,000 other children, into the line of fire and across minefields. The children were deployed so that their bodies would explode all the mines (the donkeys were “too stubborn” to do it), and clear the way for the soldiers who came after.

Each child wore a plastic key around his neck, the key that would open the gates to Paradise once he had died a martyr's death. At one time the keys had been made of iron, but iron had become too expensive and too many of them were needed.

Before stepping onto a minefield Frenchy's boy would wrap himself in his desert-sand-coloured blanket (the one on which his dog slept at night) so that his body parts wouldn't fly in all directions after a mine had been detonated. When the dust finally settled, after the
ker-boom
of a detonation, he never saw anything more of the other children who'd been at his side. Maybe a scrap of burned flesh or a shard of bone lying around. That was all.

Day after day the HE detonated mines, wrapped in his blanket; he got up each new morning and set out across the minefields, willing and eager to die over and over again. He blew up so often and so spectacularly that he was given the name
shahid as-said,
the happy martyr, one of God's Chosen, the HE, the Holy Explosion. By the time his mine-jumping days came to an end he was left with as many pieces of shrapnel in his body as he had bones.

When the human wave of children had swarmed the land and won the day, The HE began his training as a soldier. He was made to dig his own grave and was buried alive, next to a corpse, for days. He learned how to handle grenades and machine guns. While many of the other children didn't survive the first few days — they suffocated in the earth, or threw the grenades too late and blew themselves up — it was the dog test that was hardest for Frenchy's boy. He loved dogs and would sooner poke out his own eyes than have to watch one be mistreated in any way.

His handlers hauled him out of bed one morning and drove his dog — the one he'd shared his blanket with — across the parade ground, and shot him. They shot to wound, then ordered the HE to slit his throat. When he refused he was given a rucksack full of river stones that he had to run with on his back, until he collapsed. He lay in the sun, dying all over again, a different kind of death, and the hurt dog limped over and lay down beside him and licked his face. Frenchy said her boy dug a grave for his dog, put its body in the rucksack, and made a cairn out of the river stones. He buried his heart, that day, too, under those stones, knowing a broken heart is an open heart and he couldn't risk ending up like his dog, bleeding and licking his master's hand for the rest of his afterlife on earth.

The next day he woke up ready to kill dogs.

Rainy's twins spent their first days at the farm in a red mist, hovering around their mother's head, wailing whenever the rat poked his head out of the HE's shirt, reaching a pitch they only could have inherited from their mother, one that caused the windows in my room, and the bathroom mirror, to crack. Rainy added to the problem by ignoring their terror, complaining because we didn't have TV — the only reality she knew that could save her from her life — reminiscing about the bad old days back on the Row where we all watched “westruns” every Friday night, and the first time she saw a vision of the “Version” Mary in her bowl of microwave popcorn.

Then, early Sunday morning, the twins, who had been fed on anger, who had sucked it in with their mother's milk for the short six weeks of their lives, manifested themselves before my eyes, as Twin Terrorists. I was lying in bed listening to
Radio Peace and Love
when their transformation took place. They appeared out of their fine red mist, covered from head to toe in voluminous white robes. They wore white veils, too, that concealed their heads, so that only their burnt-almond eyes were visible to the world.

As far as terrorists went, the twins were fairly low maintenance. They prayed for two hours a day, standing, stooping, and kneeling in devotion, and spent most of their free time — the way some girls obsess about their first menstrual period — talking about strapping on their first explosive belt loaded with nails and screws to make the damage from the blast more deadly.

Rainy was distraught when she saw what her twins had become.
You take a huge rip off of yo bong and be smoke and coughin and homies be dyin from how much smoke and coughin there be,
that
be a suicide bonger,
she said. She didn't approve of children being used as human killing machines. In her religion the power over human life — including the right to take it away — belonged exclusively to God.

Frenchy tried to explain to Rainy how “sacricide” bombers didn't think of themselves as killers of innocent people, but as being on call for a holy cause.
Muhfo walk in, shout jihad! put the truth back in killin, his body be da bomb.
All you needed, she said, were nails, an explosive, a battery, a switch, a short bit of cable, a couple of chemicals, and a sturdy belt with large pockets.
That and be pumped to sacricide yo self.

Rainy thought about this.
What he get hisself? Seventy-two-year-old version chillax wid in Paradise?

Now when the HE began going
glock-glock-glock
I realized what it meant: he was getting ready to detonate, to relieve the pressure building up inside his head. The only way Frenchy could distract him from blowing us all to kingdom come was by naming off sniper rifles —
Remington, Beretta, Mauser, Savage, Parker-Hale, Sig-Sauer, Dragunov, Steyr —
like some kind of deranged child's lullaby.

I got out of bed and rummaged through the coffin where I'd hidden Hooker's bottle of vodka, opened it and took a swig. Rainy said
pass that bottle, road sister
but Frenchy stopped her.
You been dead too long, girl. Don't start wid that now.

Rainy had always said she could drink any man under the table if she wasn't already under the table with him to begin with. But she never got drunk — she was too angry for that. The booze would always vanish into some black pit in her soul.