Orpheus Lost (5 page)

“Mumbo-jumbo with numbers,” his father snarled. “Only judge who could make sense of your bullshit was that Yankee. What
you
need, girly, is a lesson instead of a prize, and I’m going to give it to you.”

“You’re drunk, Mr. Slaughter,” Leela said politely, stepping aside. “You know Miss Morrow was born and bred in Charleston, and if you lay a hand on me, you know my Daddy and the elders will come and pray for you on your own front porch. They’ll pray the Holy Spirit down and you’ll get Jesused. But I do agree about the prize. I think Cobb should have won.”

She never seemed to hold anything against Mr. Slaughter or against anyone at all, for that matter. Leela was strange that way, like all the Pentecostals. Preachers’ leeches, Cobb’s father called them. Never met someone they couldn’t love. They applied themselves to it in the name of the Lord like wetbacks crossing rivers in the night, like Mexicans swimming the Rio Dreamtime because all were precious
etcetera
in God’s sight, black, white, or brindle, sober or drunk. Suffocaters, according
to Cobb’s father, who had trouble breathing when Christian love was on the prowl. They’ll pray you to death, he claimed. They’re preachers’ leeches. You gotta rub salt on them before they’ll drop off.

“If one of them sets foot on my porch,” Cobb’s father regularly announced, “I’ll shoot him dead.”

“You know you don’t mean that, Mr. Slaughter,” Leela said.

Cobb felt winded whenever she spoke to his father. This was her primary offense, an act of blasphemy and insurrection on a monumental scale: she never took Calhoun Slaughter seriously. Such disregard endowed her with awesome power in the eyes of Cobb, but it also enraged him. Whatever sort of drunken buffoon his father could be, Cobb never could afford to take him lightly.

Something else: no other living person had the right to take him lightly. Cobb knew what he knew about his father. He did not forgive those who did not hold his father in high esteem.

Cobb was slight in build. There was something in his eyes, something that reminded people of his mother, some reflex of flinching in his muscles that invited taunts. Once, in the fourth grade, Leela intervened between Cobb and a clutch of older boys. Her ferocity was greeted with astonished glee and her underpants were pulled off for punishment and brandished like a flag.

“Just wait, Cobb,” Leela promised. “We’ll get them.”

“Leave me alone,” he said, shamed.

But she never left Cobb alone. She was, in fact, immensely curious about both Cobb and his dad. That was the problem. She asked if his father had nightmares about Vietnam. She wanted to know what the military discharge was about.
Dishonorable
, were the whispers that snaked around Promised Land. She asked Cobb point-blank: Was that true?

No, Cobb said. It was
not
true.

Cobb said his father was a hero, and if she didn’t believe him—

She believed him, she said. She knew his father was afraid of nothing. She knew demons chased Calhoun Slaughter. She had heard him shouting at them, she had seen him fighting back.

She told Calhoun Slaughter himself that his demons could be cast out if he trusted in the Lord. She asked him what his demons looked like. She asked him if the pulpy hole in his cheek gave him pain. How had it happened? What did he take for it? She was dangerously curious. She was a threat, although she never did ask about Mrs. Slaughter’s death.

Once, long ago, Cobb had seen Leela’s face at their window, after dark, spying. He was mortified. It was his twelfth birthday and festive days were always dangerous because his father drank in high celebration until the moment—the werewolf moment—that always came. Cobb was expert at divining when that turning point was on the way and at coming up with reasons for leaving the house unobtrusively before the metamorphosis began. On his twelfth birthday, he sensed the moment settling in like a change in the weather and he moved toward the front door and was stunned to see Leela’s face at the window. I was bringing you a present, she told him later, but she threw his timing off. He had never forgiven her, in spite of—because of—the stricken look in her eyes and the way she flinched at each lash.

That particular time, Cobb’s hands splayed against the wall, his thumb had been broken. He wore a splint and a bandage for weeks, though both were somewhat inexpertly applied by Cobb himself. His thumb never set quite straight and he acquired a cleft nail. Pigfoot was one of his nicknames at school, Split Corncob another.

Mark of the Beast
, ran the schoolyard murmur. Cobb’s got a cloven paw. His father shot prisoners in the back of the head, the rumor ran. His father beat up on his mother till she killed herself. On nights when the moon is full, you can hear her weeping and you can hear Cobb’s father howl like a wolf. One day Calhoun Slaughter will kill his son.

Or possibly, a parallel whisper warned, Cobb will kill the Old Man.

Don’t make Cobb angry, children whispered.

Don’t go near the Slaughter house after dark.

Neither Leela-May nor Cobb ever spoke of the night of his broken thumb. He knew that his disfigured hand, not Leela, bred the stories. After all, they both lived in crackbrained families; they both lived without benefit of mothers; they both navigated, daily, around highly unpredictable dads. They both could see the billboard thoughts and they could hear those thoughts turning, click click, inside the skulls of every person, child and adult, in Promised Land. There’s a kid on a treasure hunt for trouble, people murmured. People read the signs. Old man’s a lunatic, they whispered. Allowances have to be made.

So they had that much in common, Cobb Slaughter and Leela-May Moore. In another sense, they had nothing in common at all because on the derangement scale their fathers were at opposite ends.

The next day, after the night of her face at the window, Cobb Slaughter found in his desk a perfect single gardenia and a sand dollar taped to white card. On the card, block capitals in ballpoint ink announced:

THIS IS A LUCKY SAND DOLLAR. IT’S A FREAK. I FOUND IT AT FOLLY BEACH. IT’S GOT SEVEN PETALS ON THE STARFLOWER AND SEVEN SLITS INSTEAD OF FIVE. SEVEN IS GOD’S PERFECT
NUMBER. IF YOU PUT IT UNDER YOUR PILLOW, IT WILL PROTECT YOU SEVEN DAYS OF THE WEEK.

The card was unsigned.

He knew it meant:
I’m a freak, you’re a freak. So what?

He knew it also meant:
Your protection needs are so great, only magic and God can help.

He was ridiculously comforted. He was ashamed. He was furious. He loved her and hated her.

He still had the sand dollar. He kept it with him at all times, wrapped in a silk handkerchief and protected inside a vintage tin that had once held loose-leaf tobacco. The tin had been in his desk drawer in the brief stint in Paris and with him in Afghanistan and then in Baghdad and now in Boston. He kept it in the inner pocket of his vest when he felt the need of totemic power.

He studied Leela closely through the one-way glass. He had not seen her for fifteen years but he could have picked her out of a line-up in an instant. He noted that her mane of coppery hair was shorter, though still unruly. She tossed it in the same provocative way, daring all comers. Every boy in Promised Land had wanted her. Many were lured; more than a few were chosen. He felt abiding hostility toward every last one of them. When she made out with boys in cars, or on the veranda of the abandoned Hamilton house, he had hidden and watched.

Even when Leela was still religious, she was wild.

Now, all these years and miles from Promised Land, she was examining the interview room, plotting escape routes perhaps, or calculating the ratio of walls to floor, who knew? Slaughter could see her squinting, lining up points with her thumb, assessing dimensions. There was not much to see: four walls, no
windows, a table, two chairs, a microphone, tape recorder, bare floor, everything a pale institutional green. Once the door was closed, the room appeared seamless. There was neither handle nor lock on her side. Inevitably, of course, she looked at—she looked through—the black plate of glass. All the detainees did that, as though staring would make it a window.

Slaughter savored this moment. The interview room, which was the phrase his team used in logs and documentation, gave him pleasure. He liked being outside and looking in. Whoever was in the interview room deserved to be there. They had given good cause. They needed to be shown—no, more than that, they needed to experience bodily the fact that carelessness in matters of national safety had consequences, and the consequences were costly. It angered Slaughter that certain kinds of people were so casual, so unaware. His duty was to make them aware and he took it seriously.

He liked the fact that whoever was in the room knew he was being watched, understood that she was being studied like a germ on a microscope slide, but as to
who
was watching or
why…
there the room’s occupant was either uncertain or had no clue. Very quickly, however, that occupant—any occupant—dredged up likely and unlikely reasons by battalions. So the space and the waiting were like the forecourt of Judgment Day or like a Rorschach Test. Sins recalled or simply fantasized or buried deep in the mud of shame swarmed like bees. Sometimes detainees batted at them or covered their faces with their hands. Cobb himself called the room Bonbec, a private joke picked up on his NATO stint in Paris, and the nickname caught on though no one else knew what it meant.

Leela was looking at him so directly, so intensely, with such a well-remembered air of challenge, that he felt alarm. He had the uneasy sensation that she saw him and that she saw through
him. Instinctively, he moved back from the glass. Leela crossed her arms and tipped her chair away from the table. She smiled slightly and nodded, as though she guessed the rules of this game. He was certain she would have written something sassy on the wall in lipstick if she’d had any with her.

She pulled the microphone toward her. “Is this how we begin?” she asked.

He did not answer.

“Am I supposed to get the ball rolling?”

Silence.

“What kind of confession are you after?” she demanded, and then she laughed. “Sexual? Social? Mathematical? You want a list of my speeding tickets? A list of equations I’ve never been able to solve?” She gave him the finger, but in a manner more flirtatious than obscene. She smiled and puckered her lips. She blew him a kiss. She pushed the microphone away from her again. She walked around the room and felt the walls, which were padded and gave slightly to the touch. After this, she sat again and folded her arms and closed her eyes. She was in—or appeared to be in—such a perfect state of repose that she gave the impression of sleep. He imagined her solving quadratic equations in her head.

We’ll see who lasts longer, he thought. We’ll see who blinks first.

This had always puzzled him: the way she could move from being wired to being still. The transition was always sudden. His theory was that she simply could not switch herself off until her batteries burned out. In the third grade, the fourth grade, other children would chant:
Leela-May’s got ants in her pants
. And then, quite suddenly, she would be somewhere else, staring out the window in a brown study until a teacher, baffled, would loom beside her and slap a ruler against her desk and say
sharply
What planet are you on, Leela-May?
and Leela-May would startle and say something predictably strange, such as
I’m sorry, Miss Bostick, but I was thinking about the eleven-times multiplication table and I was wondering what eleven means and why it behaves the way it does.

Slaughter looked at his watch. She had been brought in at 10 p.m. An hour had passed.

He looked at her lips. The lips, he had learned, were a giveaway; the lips and the corners of the eyes. For those who feigned indifference to cover their fear, it was the tiny muscles and involuntary twitches that betrayed. As the minutes ticked by, the twitching would increase and he would count the convulsions of the nerves. Tapping feet were a further sign. Some of his men—all of whom had had experience in Baghdad and in Afghanistan and in other undisclosed locations—kept scores and a record book: number of minutes before fidgeting set in; number of hours before compulsive jiggling of the legs.

At midnight, she remained as still as a lake becalmed.

He had done considerable preliminary research. He had always kept tabs on her in a general sense and for purely personal reasons. When he thought about it, he owed her a lot, though the debt was, he supposed, perverse. The desire to overtake and surpass her remained strong. His own curiosity quotient—the furtive subterranean kind—was what drove his career. There was always someone from Promised Land who had seen someone who had seen Leela-May, or who had talked to her sister or her father, or who had chatted to someone who’d had a letter, and she was always that wild girl who turned out, to the fond bewilderment of all, to be practically a genius, it seemed: first Harvard, then MIT, no one could understand what she did. There was never any
shortage of enlisted men from Promised Land—marines, navy, air force, grunts (black and white, but more often black)—and he would bump into them and have a drink and pick up news of back home. And now that Cobb himself, like so many, had graduated to a private security force—the financial perks being considerable, especially from those corporations rebuilding key industries in war-torn zones and from those which felt equally nervous and insufficiently safe from sabotage at home—now that he was corporate and private, getting news was simpler than getting good Southern grits. So, though he had not seen her since high school, Cobb had kept track.

They had both moved out of state: Cobb to Virginia Military Institute on ROTC money; Leela on a math scholarship to Boston. Cobb always had her current address. He had her number. From time to time, late at night, he would call. Usually he got her answering machine. Her voice smelled of browning gardenias and school cupboards and chalk and locker rooms. If she herself answered, he did not speak but he did not hang up. He waited. Cat got your tongue? she would say. Or she might ask, lightly: Are you a deep breather? When you call back, leave a message on my answering machine and I’ll pass it on to Ma Bell.