The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (7 page)

So Pepper’s sins stayed unforgiven. Once upon a time he had come out of church feeling cleaner and safer and better prepared for “The Hour.” Now he just felt grubby and guilty—a fugitive still, and never able to go home.

The plaster figure of Saint Constance did not so much as turn her head to watch him go—could not be bothered to lick her cracked lips or keep safe hold of Aunty’s crumpled prayer. For someone who had taken such an interest in Pepper when he was born, she seemed to have lost all curiosity now.

At least the priest would keep Pepper’s secrets. That was the rule for priests: They are not allowed to repeat anything they hear during confession. And Pepper, being a stickler for rules, firmly believed that other people abided by them.

Believed it quite wrongly on this occasion.

Father André waited until he was sure the serial killer had left his church before gathering up his courage and his robes, putting on his bicycling clips, and cycling after the plainclothes policeman who had come by the church earlier. Couldn’t describe the culprit (he gabbled breathlessly) not having seen his face…but obliged to say…killer roaming the neighborhood…armed with a pistol…stained in the blood of at least five victims (not counting the lemurs)…some of them family members…probably disposed of one body in the lions’ den at the Marseille zoo.

The plainclothes policeman looked at him long and hard, nodding, running his eyes up and down the priestly robes, making notes but little comment. Smiling, even. He did promise to give the matter his urgent attention. Into his notebook he tucked the ten-franc note and the crumpled prayer he had picked up from the floor of the church. Evidence.

At noon—by which time Pepper was six miles away and still walking—he was overtaken by a calèche carrying chicken feed and asked for a ride.

“What happened to your hands?” asked the driver.

Pepper looked down at the puncture holes in his palms, his jacket, the thighs of his trousers, and wondered himself. Perhaps the wooden eagle had done it while he slept. Or perhaps birds of ill omen were invisible and could peck a boy to the bone without his ever even seeing them do it.

Where to hide? He had thought simply to stay out of sight of the sky and its flocks of hawkish angels. But now it seemed the police might be after him too.

“You wanna watch yourself out here,” said the calèche driver. “The mosquitoes like an open wound.” His gesture took in the countryside through which they were riding: marshland sudsy white with salt deposits, and the sky a great blue bowl upturned over it all. Pepper’s mother (who hated having toads in her garden but was scared to pick them up) had trapped the creatures this way, on the lawn, slamming slipware cooking bowls over them and leaving them there for the gardener to deal with; china molehills that gave the occasional bump and shudder as the toads underneath panicked and jumped and concussed themselves,
les pauvres
.

“There’s worse than mosquitoes, though,” said the driver glumly. “They all come here to lose theirselves. The vermin.”

“What, like rabbits, you mean?”

“The hyoo-man vermin,” said the driver lugubriously. “Runaways. Convicts. Gypsies. Deserters. Riffraff.” He must have felt he was not getting his point across, because he had a think, then added, “Ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” Pepper wanted to ask whether “ghosts” included the Blessed Dead. He did not especially mind ghosts, but the Blessed Dead plucked on his nerves like harp strings.

“Freaks of nature.” The driver was warming to his subject. “Goblins. All sorts. Jyoo-veniles gone to bad. There’s one out there now, so the nyooz-papers say. On the run.” And peering around him exaggeratedly, he brought his eyes back to rest on Pepper and to look him up and down.

“Oh, me? I’m not—Me, I’ve got work,” said Pepper hastily. “Quite near here. In fact, if you just let me off here…Job on a farm. Harvesting the wheat. All that.”

Again the driver looked around him at a landscape
where rice and salt were the only crops. “Best get them hands looked at, then,” he said, reining in his horse.

Pepper stood in the roadway, waiting for the cart to roll out of sight. In whichever direction he looked, he could see no sign of a building, let alone a farm. Mentally he added the latest lie to his list of sins. He felt like a mountaineer adding rocks one by one to his backpack. When the cart was gone, he would go on walking: Sooner or later he must surely come to a farm. Or else, according to the signposts, he would reach Saint-Bonnard-de-la-Mer and find something, someone.

Pepper eyed the sky nervously. He felt vulnerable out there in the open, as conspicuous on the vast landscape of white salt flats and bleached grass as a beetle on a white damask tablecloth. He told himself that Pepper Roux was dead, might as well be dead, was as good as dead. Happily, there was not a rook in sight….

But there were angels.

Just as anxiety and hunger took hold, Pepper was confronted by a hundred angels paddling in a lake. There was no mistaking them, lifting their flame-colored robes high to reveal spindle-thin legs. They were so
beautiful, so otherworldly—sunsets made flesh, wading through their own peach-pink reflections. The cuts in his hands were infected, and he was alone and lost and afraid. What was the point in running? He did not even
want
to run from this cloud of evanescent color. He wanted to be swallowed up by it.

Unstrung by weariness, he resolved to surrender, then and there. The angel host was the color of gentleness, not wrath. So he walked toward them, while the flies blipped him in the face and the mosquitoes gorged on his palms.

What had seemed close proved to be half a mile away, but he finally picked his way to the lakeshore, over scabs of salt and knots of razor grass: “Here I am!” he called. “Look! It’s me!” And he put his arms straight up in the air.

Hundreds of blush-colored shapes rose into the sky en masse.

“Here I am, look!” he called again, but they flew on: They were in flying formation, and Pepper could see that if they tried to turn back in midair, they might collide and tumble out of the sky. Once again, he had come too late and missed his moment.

W
hen Pepper tried to retrace his steps to the road, he could not find it. So, lost, famished, and starting to panic, he was very glad indeed to come across the thoroughbred-horse breeder.

“I like horses,” he said, when the thoroughbred horse breeder came out to ask what Pepper was doing on his land. “What are their names?”

“Names? They’re horses. What do they want with names?” said the horse breeder.

The horses in question were brown and black but with peculiarly light manes and almost white tips on their noses. Perhaps it was a distinguishing feature of a thoroughbred horse: a pale, shaggy mane and a cream
nose. The air hummed with flies.

“If you whistle, do they come to you?” asked Pepper.

“No teeth,” said the man, and opened his mouth to prove it. Pepper whistled. The creatures swiveled their ears at the sound, but they did not trot over.

“Do you ride them?” asked Pepper.

“Nah,” said the man. “Hernia in the unmentionables.”

“Can I ride one?”

“You just try it, lag,” said the man, with a snort.

There were three horses on the estate at home, but Pepper’s mother had forbidden him to ride them, for fear he might fall off and break his neck. Besides, just at the moment, he could not quite see how to negotiate a path through the barbed wire.

“You good with horses, then?” asked the man flatly.

“I like them,” said Pepper, hoping it sounded like the same thing. “Do you need a hand?”

For a while it seemed as if the thoroughbred breeder must have lost his ears at the same time as his teeth, because he looked Pepper up and down, turned away, and headed back indoors. “I know who you are, you
know,” he called, without bothering to turn back. “Read about you in the paper.”

Three mosquitoes died as Pepper clenched his fists in panic.

“If you stay, you work, right? But I don’t pay wages to scummy lags like you, right?” said the thoroughbred horse breeder.

“I wish I was a horse,” said Pepper, standing once more at the paddock fence a week later.

A dozen brown beasts looked back at him, blinking away flies.
Can’t recommend it,
said the tall one with fluffy feet.

Pepper really had found himself outdoor work, and he was delighted with it. Well, he could have done without the five-o’clock start and dragging around bales of hay that weighed as much as he did. But the customers here were so easily satisfied: They threw up their heads and whinnied as soon as they saw him.

There were horses in all four paddocks to north, south, east, and west of the thoroughbred breeder’s farmhouse. Well, it was not a farmhouse exactly, but a shed built from old billboards. And they were not
exactly paddocks but small patches of bald ground surrounded by rolls of barbed wire. Still, the man in the shed said that he traded in “high-class bloodstock—for the cavalry and dressage and the like.” So Pepper reckoned he had stumbled into the glamorous world of jodhpurs and rosettes.

He had no idea what Monsieur Jacques had read in the newspaper—his death notice? One of Pepper Papier’s articles? Or something about the sinking of
L’Ombrage?
The mystery was: How had he recognized Pepper just by looking at him—without even hearing his name? In actual fact, Monsieur Jacques never asked or used Pepper’s name, but got by calling him “scum,” “halfwit,” “bane,” “cockroach,” and “lag.” To a boy from a respectable home, it sounded nasty, but Pepper had gotten used to strange expressions aboard ship and tried not to mind. The horse dealer rarely spoke, but when he did, he stood still to do it, and the words fell out of him—
splat!
—so flat that Pepper could have picked them up with shovel and bucket. Monsieur Jacques was very like a horse in that respect.

Sometimes, wild horses would come roistering through the spiny, wind-crazed scrub and stand in
the distance, looking at the horses corralled behind the barbed wire. They were curd white and shaggy, so their outlines blurred against the skyline, shapeless as spray. Pepper, who did not believe in ghosts, thought the cart driver must have seen these and made an understandable mistake. He whistled to them, but they never came.

“They want to meet you,” Pepper told the tall horse, “but they’re too shy to come closer.”

I’ll master my disappointment
, said the horse, and lashed itself with its tail.

Pepper felt a special bond with a tall, dun cob with fluffy feet. At some time it had stumbled and fallen onto its front knees, and cankers had formed over the scarring so that the beast appeared to wear the badge of a good Catholic: devout kneecaps.

“When did
you
last go to confession?” asked Pepper.

I rarely get the opportunity to sin these days.

“Not even unclean thoughts?” asked Pepper, who had often fobbed off Father Ignatius with “unclean thoughts” when he had nothing else to confess to.

Hay,
observed the cob.
I think about hay, generally. Eternity sometimes. Do you taste soap, or is it just me?

The wild horses, curiosity satisfied, suddenly broke
into a gallop and disappeared over the horizon; they never did anything unless it was sudden. The thoroughbred bloodstock in the four paddocks all turned to face the way they had gone, and dipped their heads.

Just once, Pepper had asked the stockbreeder if he should “let the horses out for a run.” The stockbreeder had said he would shoot Pepper’s head off if he did, and had shown him the shotgun to prove it, so Pepper did not ask again.

There is nowhere high in the sea-fringed Camargue region of Provence: nothing much for a boy to climb. So Pepper kept a watch on the horizon and the mare’s-tail clouds that streamed out on the hot, incessant wind. And he comforted himself that, by now, Aunty Mireille would be saying lots of Masses for the repose of his soul. (What did God do with those, he wondered: all those masses of Masses people recited in church? Were they like fresh straw for Him to walk on, or did they just make Heaven smell nice?)

“Do horses go to Heaven?” he asked the tall horse with fluffy feet.

Naturally,
said the horse.
Who do you think pulls the fiery chariots?

The countryside around them spread out in shade
less folds: bleached patches of land stitched together with tall reeds. The air buzzed with flies and blood-sucking mosquitoes. Pepper was glad that his seagoing jacket was also bleaching in the strong light and getting stained—he must have become much harder to spot from up above.

He did not mind at all not getting paid: He had never been paid—not even pocket money—and you can’t miss what you’ve never had. Anyway, he loved the work. Chiefly he loved being alive.

The horse breeder’s shelter was constructed like the beginnings of a house of cards—as if Jacques had intended to build up and up, a Tower of Babel made out of words:

COGNAC MONNET—
Sunshine in a Glass!

L’OIE d’OR—Queen of Creamy Foie Gras

For Cooking, Nothing Is Better Than
VEGETALINE!

Pepper slept sandwiched between a floor that advertised:

SAVOYARD SAVON FOR SOFTER SKIN

and a ceiling that exhorted him to

BE A MAN: JOIN THE FOREIGN LEGION.

It made for the strangest dreams. Depending on whether he faced left or right, he woke looking at a green demon, brandishing a bottle of something noxious and red, or an overexcited elephant wearing a bedspread and shouting, “
I
Smoke Nothing But
Nile
Cigarette Papers!” (Odd—but not so cruel, Pepper supposed, as giving the elephant the tobacco to go inside them.) His bedroom was open at either end: to drafts at night and insects during the day. It did not rain once—despite the broken billboard nearby advertising Revel Umbrellas.

Jacques’s den, at the heart of the structure, was more complicated to reach, surrounded by complex zigzagging corridors of plywood. At night he disappeared into it and became nothing more than a noise of snoring or the rasp of knife blades. Jacques was forever sharpening his knives.

Every third day, Jacques had a lady visitor. Unlike
Pepper, she was allowed to penetrate to the center of the house of cards. Jeanne arrived on an ancient motorbike, its panniers stuffed with bread and Dutch cheese and cheap wine, wearing a coat reinforced with strips of tire rubber, which made her resemble an armadillo. “What’s
he
doing here?” she demanded as she ducked inside the shack and was confronted with Pepper.

“Lag on the run,” said Jacques. “He does the horses. Leave him be.”

After a bite to eat and a quarrel, Jacques would drag out a motorbike of his own from among the billboards, and the two of them would both mount up and roar away over the bumpy ground, tires skidding and skittering on slicks of marsh mud and ribs of white salt, a bucket of brown slop hanging from Jeanne’s elbow. Pepper wondered if they were going to confession or to hear their banns of marriage read out in church. He was still a romantic by nature.

But then one day the bikes came wobbling back at walking pace, leading behind them, on a long rope, a horse. New bloodstock, damply brown. Pepper had to pull coils of barbed wire aside so that it could be added to the horses in the north paddock.

About a week later, Jeanne and Jacques quarreled more than usual, and some of the walls of the house of cards swayed, and the advertisement for the Foreign Legion belly flopped onto Pepper’s bed. Jeanne threw a few things—knives by the sound of it; Jacques hit her and knocked her down, then crawled out into the daylight. Seeing Pepper rebuilding his annex, Jacques turned his annoyance on him.

“Don’t see why you can’t help me instead, useless lag!” he said, hitting Pepper with a coil of rope. And he dragged out the motorbike and told Pepper to ride behind him. Loath to cling to the man’s hunched back, Pepper clung to the passenger seat instead, shut his eyes, and clenched his teeth to keep them from being shaken out of his head.

When he opened his eyes again, they were in a narrow gorge with a stream at one end. A clutter of poles had been roped together into a sort of paddock. And inside the paddock…two wild white horses. Alarmed by the noise of the bike, they were pressing themselves against the far fence.

“Bottle trap,” said Jacques succinctly. “Push their
way in to get to the water. Can’t get out again. Get the ropes on them, then, moron.” Pepper hesitated. He had no idea how to rope a wild horse. “What you waiting for? Thought you liked the fleabags.”

Pepper pushed the chest-high pole barring the narrow entrance to the pen. It swung easily away from him, then back into place; it could not be pushed open from the inside. The horses showed him the whites of their eyes. Their hooves pranced. Their heads turned a little to one side for a clearer view of him. Pepper talked to them, but without much conviction: These were wild horses, not domestic ones; maybe they spoke Basque or Romany or some Camargue dialect he did not know. “Hello, horses. Nice horses.”

They threw their hooves in his face.

Pepper did not move; he only looked up. The sky over his head was an empty, blaring blue with not a bird in sight. “It’s not my time,” he told the horses, and they took him at his word, for almost at once they stood quiet. Jacques must have found a few teeth he had forgotten about, because he uttered a whistle of envious astonishment: The lag really did have a way with horses.

The bottle trap might look like access to water, but cruelly it stopped short of the stream. Trapped in the pen, the horses could not drink, even by stretching their necks between the poles. These two might have already stood there for forty-eight hours, taunted by the tinkling music of water, unable to slake their thirst. Pepper crawled under the end pole and cupped up water in his hands, reaching it over the fence.

“What you doing, idiot? Just get ropes on them, will you?” Jacques revved the bike.

The horses’ heads collided as they competed for the water, and they knocked Pepper’s hands and spilled it; he felt the wiry sharpness of their whiskers and saw the yellow shine of their teeth. He fetched more, and would have gone to and fro fifty times just to feel the soft blowing of their nostrils on his wrist, see the swiveling of their dappled ears, see up close the great blue-brown globes of their eyes with their sumptuous lashes. There was the same restless, surging energy under that white-and-cream hide as in sea waves moving under their skin of foam. It was as if two waves had broken against the shore, outrun it, and congealed into horseflesh. Their tails splashed over his head, and that
touch of horsehair felt as sweet as a shower of warm rain. It was a feeling as powerful as happiness, and fear and wonder, and it rooted him to the spot. He was alive. He was feral boy. What does a feral boy want with a name?

While Pepper had the horses’ attention, it was simple for Jacques to slide a loop of rope over each one’s head, then turn and run. They kicked up a bit then, of course—landed a kick or two on Pepper’s back as he cowered down—but Jacques was well pleased with himself, tying off the ropes to the timber fencing. He let the mares exhaust themselves, then jabbed a knife into the soft pads of their hooves, “to make them walk more ladylike,” as he explained to Pepper.

At such low speed, the bike weaved and wobbled along, but the limping horses could at least keep up. Uninjured, they could have taken off at a gallop, dragging the motorbike behind them. Now, they simply slumped along, flanks brushing.

“A week from now they won’t feel a thing,” said Jacques. “Promise.” And Pepper had no choice but to believe him.

Back at the stud farm, Jacques told Pepper to “dirty them down,” and produced a can of tarlike slime and a currycomb. “It kills the lice,” he said. “These beasts are martyrs to the lice.”

So Pepper curried the two mares and turned them from white to the color of muddy boots. As he did so, he saw them change from white, wild horses into thoroughbred bloodstock just like all the rest: shaggy, squat, and thick-legged, drab and defeated. Flies mustered around the wounds in their feet. The rest of the horses were unsettled, pawing the ground, sawing their heads up and down, up and down. The mess on Pepper’s hands smelled vile, but the taste it put in his mouth was like carbolic soap. To Pepper, everything had come to taste like soap lately. He brought the mares more water, and sure enough, as they drank, the stain washed off their noses and left them with the distinctive white muzzles all the others had.