Time of the Locust (15 page)

Squeezed into the tub now, Brenda looked over at the scale in the corner along the wall behind the toilet. She hadn't been in to see her doctor again since he referred her to a nutritionist. The slip of paper was still at the bottom of her purse. In the long nights with Sephiri, she snacked on bags of potato chips and watched infomercials, awash in a sea of wealth-enrichment seminars, self-improvement retreats, and dietary programs. She consumed the ads like opiates, addicted to the solitude and fantasy of instant prosperity and losing ten dress sizes in thirty days. And she tried to imagine Sephiri's smiling face.

The phone rang in her bedroom, and Brenda wondered if it was someone at the center or her job but made no effort to answer it. The machine picked up the call, and she heard one of the physician assistants from her doctor's office leaving a message. “Please give us a call,” she said. Brenda soaped up, climbed out of the tub, and toweled herself off. She grabbed the little mop she kept in the corner, scooted the scale out into the middle of the bathroom, and stepped onto it. The scale read 273 pounds, fifteen more than the last time she checked. “You need to take care of yourself,” the old woman cashier said to her when she was loading the conveyer belt at the grocery store the other day. “If Mama goes down, everybody goes down.”

Brenda kicked the scale back behind the toilet and looked at herself in the mirror above the sink. She hardly recognized the woman looking back at her. “When I'm gone to glory, you keep on keepin' on,” she could hear her mother say. “Try,” Brenda said to her reflection, her eyes welling up with tears. There were nights when she looked up at the stars and wondered if one of them was her mother twinkling.

Beautiful Day

T
hat spring morning was unusually balmy and bright, the sky a swirl of blue watercolor. Horus parked across the street from a handsome brick house with a white fence and pink and red begonias in the yard. Seated in the car, he could see that there was a swing bench on the porch, and hanging fern plants suspended from a beam cascaded down in long tendrils. There was a tan Lincoln Town Car in the driveway. A blue water hose was neatly rolled on a spindle next to a flowering azalea bush. In the air was the sweet smell of new grass and firewood.

On the side of the white mailbox, which stood proudly on the strip of grass near the curb of the lovely tree-lined street, were the words “The Teak Family” in press-on letters. Horus saw it the day before when he arrived in Scarsdale, New York, when he had driven by the house and back to the motel. He drove by three times. At the motel, he slept a sleep of bottomless soundless tumbling. He thought he dreamed about the press-on letters in the endless fall, except that in his dream, they read “The Thompson Family.” He thought he dreamed that he pulled the gun from his bedroom closet shelf and put it in the glove compartment of the car before leaving the house. He was not sure if he'd actually done that and did not want to spoil the meditative calm by leaning over and checking. It was still early, and he listened to the birds tweet in the trees and the squirrels start their day on the bark. The Sunday paper, wet with dew, was lying on the green carpet of the lawn. He wondered how long he could wait there before someone noticed a black man sitting in a car on a pretty street in Scarsdale and called the police.

He learned that Sam Teak had retired from the Brooklyn precinct. He wrote the address on a white slip of paper and carried it in his security uniform pocket, in his pajama shirt pocket, in his sweating palm. As he contemplated unlocked windows and ovens, as he sat up staring at the wilting flowers on the dining-room table at three o'clock in the morning, he thought about what it would be like to drive up and look at the house. To see one of the pillars of a community, a retired police officer, who was expecting to always be needed and kept his name listed in the phone directory so that someone who needed him could find him someday. People would vouch for him, protect him, turn the past into what his police reports said they were. He sent his kids to college and tithed at Christmas mass. He paid his mortgage and taxes.

Maybe
it
never happened.

Horus stared at the house across the street. The shots had been real. The blood had been real. The picture, too, of a man twenty years older, with wolf eyes that stared back at Horus from the microfiche he dug up, had been real. Horus learned that not sleeping could augment perspective. It could allow one to see things that couldn't be seen before, enable one to think of things never thought of before. Like what he told Brenda about coming up to New York to put closure on things. “I need to do it,” he said. That wasn't a lie, not entirely. It was a piece of some larger truth, snapped between two slides of shaded glass and placed under a different kind of light.

He hardly remembered the drive from Washington, D.C. He hardly remembered who he had been, the made-up figure he sculpted to get through the years on his security job. Then the nervous breakdown he had two years before he'd met Brenda—that's what the therapist he went to a few times called it. “Take some time off,” the therapist said. The job could wait. There were things to be discussed, uncovered, and faced. “We'll get you some help,” the professionals said. There were appointments made that he did not show up for. There were remedies he did not believe would work; they were not designed to address the unnamed maladies he faced. What did work, for a while, anyway, were the doors and locks at the library, the satisfaction of putting
it
away, which before all of this had been everything after that day on the basketball court. Then came Brenda, a balm and gauze, a comfort among other comforts. Her healing properties were undeniable, although she was ineffectual against the deepest wounds. But she tried; that was the point, the comfort. She tried without asking certain questions. But Horus would not think of her soothing powers now. He would not try to find the man he was trying to be in the thought of her now.

From across the street, there was the sound of the front door cracking open. A man with silver hair and rotund build came out onto the porch. He was dressed in casual pants and a light flannel shirt. He strolled down the whitewashed front walk of his yard, then stepped onto the grass to pick up the newspaper. After shaking off the droplets of water a bit, he tossed it onto the porch. He turned back and walked the rest of the front path and out onto the sidewalk. He stopped to check the mailbox and, finding nothing, closed it and looked at the man in the car looking back at him.

Horus watched him walk across the street to the car. The sound of the birds and the squirrels on the bark fell away, and he could hear only his heart beating, his breath, the flatline tone that rang in his ear. The time drip was unhurried, lavish, one step for each year, twenty steps across the twenty years, and the man was there at the car.

“Can I help you?” said the silver-haired man.

And Horus thought that he had something big to say, something deep and wide and old, but in the unexpected feeling of the expected, he could only manage his name. “My name is Horus Thompson.”

The quiet remained in the man's eyes, pool water, undisturbed.

“My father was Jack Thompson,” said Horus.

There were ripples in the pools then, which started in the center of Sam Teak's pupils and expanded outward. His eyes grew sad and celestial, primeval with inevitability. And in the dimension in which the two men were, after one earth orbit around the sun, he said at last, “God told me this would one day come. My wife did too. She's dead now.” The eyes rippled again, and he looked as if he wanted to say something else but folded it up and put it away. “Would you like to go get some coffee?” he asked instead.

Coffee. In the time drip, it seemed to Horus like such a simple easy understanding thing to do, because coffee is a thing that can easily be offered and easily accepted. The word “Yes” fell out of his mouth. And after Sam Teak got into the car and they were driving along the lovely tree-lined street, Horus tried to think only of the cup of coffee and what that kind of gesture could mean or not mean, not the look of his father on the ground, not his mother at the window, not the gun in the glove compartment. And as he stopped at each stop sign, looked both ways, and pressed the accelerator, he listened to the man talk of the nice, quiet café that opened early on Sunday mornings, how it was at the edge of the neighborhood that he had lived in for the last forty years, where he raised his children. They could go there and talk things over.

But what could there be to say? Horus tried to keep his mind blank as he listened to Sam Teak give directions to the place: three more streets and turn left; the next right at the light; go down a little ways past the fountain and the cemetery. It was quiet then, and Horus could hear the sounds of the turn signal clicking, the car pistons firing, the transmission shifting gears. His heartbeat synchronized with the uniformity of the asphalt breaks in the road.
Da-dum da-dum
. And that was when the smell of his mother's spilled coffee, Maria Thompson's coffee (cream with a sprinkle of real vanilla bean floating on the top), filled the car. The smell from the cup she dropped on the rug in the wake of what Nola Mae Pierce said.

Maybe he didn't do it.

Horus had the thought that perhaps this man in the car had only Nola Mae Pierce's curse crowning his name and that he did not have, nor had he ever had, anything to do with the death of his father or the atrocities she claimed. Memory could fool the mind, couldn't it? Maybe the old woman was mistaken (grief and rage could cloud the mind) and fixated on this man, as he himself had come to do, for the lack of a clear target on which to lay the blame. He might have heard the whole thing wrong as a boy. The repressed memory that crashed through the apertures of his mind, that took on skin and eyes of its own and breathed in the car with them now, might have somehow, through the brine of time, been changed into something else. But how could such a thing be forgotten? How could a thing that stains the soul ever be rinsed away? A constellation of happenings had gathered to bring him to this point, to this place.

Horus drove past the triple-tiered fountain, which sat in a median filled with bright red tulips. Nearing the cemetery, he could see rows of headstones in the bed of green. Behind them was a stand of white birches haunting the meadow. The silence in the car seemed to harden as they drove by.

After a time, the silver-haired man said, “It didn't happen like you might think.”

All the air seemed to drain from the car at that moment and was replaced by a substance that filled and flowed through the lungs like water through fish gills. What Horus felt as he breathed the substance during those first few seconds could not be later remembered, for his heart took hold of the wheel, saying,
For the promise. Do it for the promise.
There was justice against the debt owed to his father and his ruined family to be collected, it said. But his mind, in the habit of rationalizing a battle it knew was one to be lost, said Horus owed it to himself and to his father's memory to soldier on, in spite of what Sam Teak had just confessed.
Leave it be and carry on
, his mind said; that was the promise. Not to exact retribution and make this day the day of reckoning but to go on in spite of everything. Which of the two was right Horus did not know. That was when the middle of things took hold, and he could no longer remember the beginning. He could not stop the progression to the end.

Passing the cemetery, there was no room in the silence of the car for anything more. There was only the full tank of gas and his foot on the accelerator; the bottomless soundless tumbling and the dreamed gun in the glove compartment. Nearing the café parking lot, Horus saw the adjacent ramp that led to the highway. At its entrance was the red, white, and blue interstate sign, the colors of the flag, the gauntlet. And he heard the tornadoes and sandstorms that roared from his mother's mouth when she kneeled over the little burgundy lakes that filled his father's chest. Horus remembered his mother's firm leg as he tried to stop her from going with the people from the Utica Asylum when she dragged him across the floor, deaf to his pleas. His heart asked his mind how he could drink with the man who spilled his mother's coffee and was the reason for the emptiness of life and the fullness of death. And instead of turning into the café parking lot, Horus turned onto the ramp going north.

“What the devil are you doing?” asked Sam Teak.

Lessons

H
orus heard a scraping sound cutting through his mind. From the slot on the cell door, there was the familiar fumble with the metal. He could hear the needlelike scratches traveling across the eons from Black Plains to the Catacombs, and it was then he realized that he was back in his cell. Had he been here all the time? He remembered all that he remembered: the dew on the front doorknob and the locusts, the mailbox, the hypnotic highway. He tensed and clamped his eyes shut, fighting the urge to scream. He did not want to do it, because if he heard himself scream, he would know that he was back where he did not want to be. Horus thought he might die from the thought alone, with scraps of his sanity strewn about the sticky floor, with Amenta rising again before him. He opened his eyes to bright lights raining down. The light stabbed into him like swords. Then he heard the Bean Hole Man laugh through the slot on the cell door. The familiar cackle of Jimmy Eckert, half-human, half-jackal.

Horus wanted to believe that he had been someplace else, that the Catacombs were real. But if that were true, how had he gotten back to his cell so quickly? So easily? An empty metal tray was pushed through the door slot. Horus imagined the Bean Hole Man's smirking orifice hovering in the blackness of the narrow opening. His crusty mouth. The grayish teeth fanned into a smile in the symmetry of the metal. And out of that, the ghoulish whispers, the chants meant to harpoon his spirit, the litanies of madness. For years, the guard spewed desolation into his ear, dispensing his wicked wizardry. Jimmy Eckert's whispers were like crushed glass blown into the air, dropped into every meal, every tin of water.

I know a boy

With nowhere to go

And for his deeds

I own his soul . . .

What dragged Horus back from the Catacombs was the scraping sound and the chant. Enraging moments of realization such as this, when the savage facts of existence jeered in his face, made Horus long for the patch, the hidden country in the back of his head toward the center of his scalp. The Bean Hole Man's voice seemed to be one and the same with the wish and will of Black Plains. It filled Horus with chaos and abhorrence when he heard it, so that his fingers slunk to the private spot on his scalp instinctively. He moved his thumb and index finger deftly to that small, barren lot at the back of his head where anything at all could be plucked clean. Where he could weed and remove his feelings of rage and abomination a single hair shaft at a time. There he could pickaxe the unyielding terrain of helplessness. He could grub-hoe and root out the feelings that had no words and the words that had no sound and the thoughts that had no resolution. He could seize them from their places of refuge and watch their roots scream and die in the glare of his revulsion.

The ritual with the Bean Hole Man began, one of many.

“You're going to die here, rodent,” said Jimmy Eckert.

Horus thought of the boundless depths of the Catacomb, and a quiet entered his mind. “There are other places,” he said.

“You'll live like you'll die,” snarled the guard, “wretched and alone.”

Horus was silent.

“Tell me you're hungry.”

Horus was silent.

The guard tapped playfully on the cell door with his baton. “Tell me you're hungry, and I'll go.”

“I'm not hungry,” said Horus.

“Do you know why you're here, zero-two-seven-six-three?”

“Yes.”

“Kidnap and murder is what got you here.”

Horus felt his legs going numb, his throat going dry. He would say the same thing today that he'd said yesterday, that he would say tomorrow. “I didn't mean to kill him. Not at first.”

Jimmy Eckert laughed from the other side of the cell door. “But you did.”

Horus stared at the drain near his feet. As he drove in the car on the interstate, the beautiful day faded and the sky darkened. A cloud front approached, a moving city coming toward the car. And Horus felt he was putting something on as if it were a suit, with a hat and a mask, covering that which fueled what he was being led to do.

Horus listened to Sam Teak say over and over that there was a list; that the Brotherhood, of which he had been a part, enforced the list; that it had all been a matter of pressure (him having been a new initiate at that time); that the names on the list were chosen by the others (who were all dead now); that Jack Thompson had been designated for him (not a choice of his own). And even before he joined the Brotherhood, even during the other times before when he might have been present, he had only watched, not participated. But after all the others became members, he had to join too. Expectations were made clear to him. There was his family. His career. His pension. He didn't want to get involved but he didn't have a choice. “It was a different time back then,” he'd said.

A river ran free inside of Horus as he listened, as he drove the car. There was only his question. There was only Sam Teak's answer, the marble and the shooter. The roads rolled by. The Catskills slipped into thickening mist and clouds of ire. The sky opened up and cried, and Horus snatched the gun from the glove compartment and put it on his lap (it had been real after all). He felt his blood go hot, the gun resting on his thigh like a lapdog—loyal and waiting.

Now Horus stared at the prison-cell toilet, stained and atrocious in the bright light. “I pulled the trigger, but that's not how it was.”

“Oh? Tell me, rodent, how was it?” Jimmy Eckert's raspy voice was laced with mockery. “Warden Stotsky talked about you. Son of a black separatist. Jack Thompson was his name, right? Your father. One of those militant revolutionaries. Anti-American. Then there's you, cop killer. Murder one. You stalked him, then kidnapped him. Took him upstate and shot him, didn't you? You don't snatch and snuff a police officer on a whim. You don't do a white-knuckle ride through Upstate New York with a gun on the spur of the moment, do you?”

Horus was silent.

“But it don't matter, rodent. Nothing matters now.”

Horus thought of the fork in the road, barely visible in the driving rain, and how he drove the car into the woods, a stand of black pines. He looked away from the cell-door slot and put his hands around his aching head, now talking only to himself. “The weather closed in.”

Jimmy Eckert snorted. “Well, you know we have our own weather down here, rodent. Special weather made just for you. Ask the Mummy. He'll tell you. A two-hour glass ceiling above your head, rodent. You might not be able to see it, but it's there. Forever. Made to take the assault of a sledgehammer for two hours. Did you know that? Bang on it, if you can reach it. There's a tiny little hole for you to breathe. That's it. You won't find nothing but lights and cameras behind it. We're always watching, rodent. Always. Permanent emergency. Containment. Control. There will be other days, zero-two-seven-six-three, a trillion days like this one.”

Satiated for now, Jimmy Eckert stepped back from the slot. He stared into the dusky corridor of the Secured Housing wing, as he had done a thousand times. “Black Plains is made to kill you, that's for sure. But first, it'll teach you how to die.”