The Hundredth Man (16 page)

I grew up attuned to discord, my child’s antennae sifting the air for the subtle vibrations that presaged violent change, much as seismologists use lasers and mirrors to measure hair’s-breadth motion between mountains. We all want warning before the earthquake strikes.

I learned to want it more than most.

Truth be told, my first memory is of a kind of earthquake. I had no warning and no one outside of our house felt it. Though it was twenty-fours years ago, I remember the event with a clarity unmarred by time, perhaps even sharpened by its passage.

It’s night. I rise from bed and walk in dreamlike detachment through a narrow gray corridor that seems to span miles. Ahead is a black square set into the wall that reaches to the sky. It is the hall of our house outside of Birmingham, and it is gray with moonlight through glass and the dark square is the doorway to my brother Jeremy’s room. Screaming pours from the dark square.

I am six and my brother Jeremy is twelve.

I stand at the threshold and listen quietly, knowing somehow I must not enter. I need to visit the bathroom and, continuing down the hall, pass my mother’s room. She is a seamstress specializing in wedding dresses. My mother sits at her sewing machine as white fabric flows through it like liquid. Her hands are motionless above the cloth and her eyes are focused on sewing. The high whine of the sewing machine mutes the grunts and shrieks from down the hall. A floorboard creaks beneath me and she turns. Her eyes are wide and wet and she speaks, not knowing that I will remember her words, keep them forever.

“I know it’s wrong,” she hisses through clenched teeth. “But he works so hard. He’s a professional man, an engineer. Who would think that someone like me could marry an ” A scream slices down the hall like a scythe. My mother’s brow furrows and for a moment her hands fly out of control like startled sparrows.

“And what could I ever do anyway?”

Mother contains her hands and turns back to her sewing but becomes still and her head droops. White fabric covers her lap like a deflated ghost. She whispers, Go back to bed, it will be quiet soon …

At an age when most children are learning to handle a bicycle, I became a student of the transformations that preceded these events, every two or so months at first, then with accelerating frequency. It seemed I could feel the air in the house charge with negative particles that gathered in force and intensity until discharging in a night of black lightning. I learned to take shelter at the first hint of the gathering storm, to hide in my treehouse in the woods, or in the backseat of the car at night. After the storm’s passage I would seep back inside, antennae quivering for vibrations of the next explosion, ready to run.

And then, in the lazy span of a summer’s afternoon, it was over. . the woods behind our house are thick with slash pines and lob lollies the ground covered with a soft mattress of brown needles studded with fallen cones, and I spend my days sheltered by the soft-spoken trees. I built a tree-fort in an ancient live oak and though the fort is a rickety jumble of chip board and two-by-fours and other rescues from construction site burn piles, the heavy branches of the oak hold it securely. I feel safest in the woods, in my tight and shadowed fortress a dozen feet above the ground. Lately my father has been making me more scared than ever. He is starting to see me and he’s never done that before.

His eyes are so angry. He says I’m stupid.

I am nine.

Once from behind the boards I saw my brother …

Jeremy is fifteen.

Once, from behind the boards of my fort I saw my brother come running into the woods with a squealing shoat under his arm, a baby pig from the Henderson’s farm down the road.

I laid flat on my belly and watched my brother wire the pig to a tree and do loud things to it with a big knife. I was sure he looked up and saw my eyes between the broken wood and leaves. But he must have been looking at something else and started up with the pig again. It took a long time, and then he buried the red things deep in the pine-needled ground. He wiped the knife on leaves and stuck it in his pocket …

Then, one day not long after, I saw flashing lights at our house. I was alone in my tree fort and ran to find the county police right in front of our house.

Up close the flashing lights hurt my eyes and I looked instead at the policeman’s hands. The knuckles were like rocks and he held his hat over his privates. His eyes were hidden under mirrors. Jeremy watched from the porch glider, one foot on the floor, softly swinging the glider to and fro.

“We don’t know how it …”

“Close down the county roads until we find …”

“Coroner there now, he’s …”

“You don’t want to go there … your husband … it’s not a fitting sight for …”

“We’ll find this madman, ma’am. I’m so sorry for your …”

After a while, the policemen pulled away. I lifted my eyes from the ground and saw only dust above the road. Mother was a gray statue in the front yard. I saw how she must have been talking to Jesus, her words were so quiet.

And I saw Jeremy wink at me and make the sound oink.

CHAPTER 15

T
here’s a short story by Sartre called “La Chambre,” and in it a man named Pierre is tormented by malevolent statues that buzz around his head, driving him deeper into insanity. His sole control over them comes through his zuithre, strips of cardboard glued together in a spider shape. On one strip is the word Black, the words Power Over Ambush on another, a third holds a drawing of Voltaire. I was sitting in the dark with the heads of Jeremy and my parents buzzing around me like shadowy statues, wishing I had a zuithre, when a car crunched into my drive. I heard a long bleat of horn and saw a taxi in my driveway, the white dust of crushed shells drifting past its headlamps. It bleated again and I yanked open the door thinking, God grant me a zuithre for the idiot taxi drivers of the world as well.

“I didn’t call for a cab,” I yelled. “You got the wrong damned address.”

A heavyset guy with a black pompadour leaned from the driver’s window. My security light was in his eyes and he porched his hand above his brow like a salute.

“You owe me sixty-three bucks,” he called up. “Fare from Mobile.”

“Listen, buddy, I don’t owe you “

The back passenger-side door opened and Ava stumbled out. She took two halting steps toward the house before her knees crumpled and she dropped to the ground.

“Carson, help me, please,” she cried as she tried to push from the sand, her voice a slur of tears and alcohol.

The driver and I wrangled her up the steps and onto the couch. I peeled four twenties into his palm and he looked happy to escape. Ava tried to push herself up, brushing sand from her face and mumbling semi coherently “I got drunk, Carshon, I fuck tup and got drunk and I wasn’t goin’ to again but I got drunk and “

“Shhhh. You don’t need to explain.”

“I need assistance”

She stunk of booze and sweat and fear. I stripped her to her underwear and guided her to the floor of the shower and adjusted a spray of tepid water. Her head was on her knees and she shivered and sobbed while I sponged water over her.

Several minutes later I helped her to stand, covering her with a robe as she fumbled from bra and panties. She was more coherent and her words made halting and desultory pictures of her last few hours. She worked Saturday, with Sunday and yesterday off. She’d gotten drunk Saturday night after work and couldn’t stop drinking. This morning she’d arisen sick and ashamed. She’d called in ill and gotten Clair, who’d tongue-whipped Ava for her absence, an increasingly common event.

Ava looked at me through eyes more red than white. “I thought I’d sober up today an’ go in tomorrow and get through it somehow and I’d stop this … ugliness. Yesterday would be the last.” She hugged herself and shivered.

“But as soon as you hung up you started drinking.”

Her hands made the hard gripping motion I’d overseen from Will Lindy’s office. “I can’t stop. What’s wrong with me what’s wrong with me what’s …”

“You have to go to a detox center, get the poison out of you.”

She grabbed my sleeve with the iron fingers of someone at the edge of hysteria. “No! I can’t. People’d find out. I can’t do that. No.

NO!”

“All right, it’s fine, calm down. We can do it here.”

“You didn’t tell anyone about Friday night… I kep’ waiting for people to look at me, to know. You said you didn’t and you didn’t….”

“Of course not. It wasn’t anyone’s business.”

She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I don’t know anyone else here … I feel so alone. Then I saw you at my house, I saw you … You didn’t tell anyone and then you came over and watered. I wanted to, I couldn’t go out, I couldn’t let the neighbors see “

“Sleep time,” I said, taking her hand and leading her toward the bedroom. “We’ll talk tomorrow, get you well.”

“She hates me,” Ava blurted. “She just hates me. I don’t blame her, I fuck up so much, ever since I got there “

“Who hates you?”

“Dr. Peltier. Even when I’m at my best she hates me, I I “

I grabbed a wastebasket and Ava got sick. I waited it out and guided her to the bed.

“All I ever wanted to do was my work and I’d study more at night and review and try to learn more and more and the more she’d hate me the more I drank and some days I JUST WANT TO DIE. I JUST WANT TO DIE I JUST WANT …”

I got her calmed and covered and put a wastebasket beside the bed. She stared at the ceiling and squeezed an invisible ball in her fists. Tears poured silently down her cheeks. I closed the door and tiptoed away.

Ava tossed and moaned most of the night, her rhythms ripped apart by three days of drinking. At daybreak she found deeper escape and her face looked at peace when I inched open the door. I hoped she’d pull some strength from the peace before waking to the hard choices in her path.

Mr. Cutter sat motionless in a steel folding chair in the dark of his closet. The rise and fall of his chest was his sole motion. He hadn’t been tempted to cheat just because no one was looking. Inside him everything pumped and squirted and oozed. You couldn’t help that.

He’d sat in the chair for hours, spine erect, knees together, hands atop his thighs. He’d been a good boy.

Until an hour ago. He’d been unable to hold his water and though he’d fought it no quiver of hand, not a single bounce of leg he’d had to let go. Just a few drops at first, but instead of giving relief, it only heightened the agony and he’d finally relaxed his insides and let the liquid flow out.

Once there would have been hell to pay, he’d thought, the release spreading hot and acrid down his legs, pooling in the cupped seat. But not anymore. Everything was changing. His pictures were coming true: he was making them come true.

He thought about going to the secret room where he kept his dream and worked on it. But today was a business day and he had outside work to do and the outside face to wear.

After several minutes Mr. Cutter stood haltingly and kneaded his frozen thighs and cramped buttocks. He walked stiffly to the bathroom to shower. On his way he selected his tie for the day. Socks. Shoes. He inspected his pants, picking at lint, being a good boy, tidy. He almost passed through the kitchen without stopping today was a busy day, had to crank it in gear but his favorite drawer called to him. Everyone had a secret helper. He removed a long knife, a bread knife Mama’s bread knife. She made good bread but he’d have to behave to get it. Since he’d peed himself he wouldn’t have been allowed any bread. Bitch! A sharpening steel came out next, and Mr. Cutter whisked the blade over the steel. The sound was music. He’d once been to an ice hockey game and his heart screamed its joy at hearing skates make the same sound cutting over ice, in their wake the flakes of perfect cold, whisk whisk whisk.

Pulling into the morgue lot caused the bottles to rattle in my trunk. Every bit of liquor in my house was back there. I’d even pitched in the Listerine; to a sick drunk alcohol is alcohol.

Ava had reached the threshold of Truth: admitting the problem existed. It was my job to pick up a squirming, biting Truth in both arms, dump it squat in the middle of Clair’s lap, and hope Ava still had a job afterward. I pulled into a protected hearse bay by the side entrance. It was early and the door was locked. I hit the buzzer. Willet Lindy, carrying a toolbox, let me in.

“Don’t tell me you do the plumbing, too, Will.”

He rattled the box. “If it’s busted, I fix it, if it’s needed, I requisition it, if it’s impossible, I lie about it.”

“I need to see Clair. She in?”

Lindy winced. “Yes. But it’s annual budget time and we’re one pro sector short today. Keep your distance so you don’t lose an arm.”

Walking the hall to her office I kept pasting a bright smile on my face and it kept slipping off like a Halloween mustache.

“Morning, Clair,” I said, eyeballing through her half-closed door. She wore a dark jacket and simple white blouse. Beneath the desk she’d have on a skirt and heels. Glair’s lanyard-strung reading glasses perched on her nose as a fountain pen hovered above an official-looking form.

“I’m busy, Ryder. No time for chit-chat.”

“It’s important, Clair.”

She reluctantly gestured me inside. “Mind if I close the door?” I asked.

Clair narrowed a puzzled eye and nodded. I sat in a worn leather wingback chair opposite her ancient oaken desk. As a high-ranking public employee, ME, Clair could have demanded the full decorator treatment including thousands of public dollars’ worth of furniture, drapes, shelves. Instead, her only concessions to office were the removal of the overhead fluorescents in favor of warmer light from floor and desk lamps, and an ergonomic chair that probably cost ten bucks more than the ones supporting the chunky gals at the license bureau.

In my line of work reading upside down is helpful. I saw the header on the official-looking form beneath Clair’s pen: REPRIMAND.

I pointed to the form. “Is the reprimand to Dr. Davanelle?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your …” Clair paused and wearily closed her eyes. “Why do I think a bad morning is about to get worse?”