A Choir of Ill Children (19 page)

“It’s all right.”

The familiar sound of branches tearing at the shingles consoles me in some odd fashion. It reminds me of the nights when my parents would make a fire and we’d sit in the glow of the television screen taking comfort in each other’s company. Rain splashes and murmurs. Dodi reclines against the pillows, drawing me forward onto the bed. I move beside her, and she groans and pulls me closer. When I try to press her legs open her small fist comes up to my chest like a rock and stops me. I wait, listening to the growling in the skies. I like the sound.

“You’re the only one who can save us,” she tells me.

“Shh.”

“Stop shushing me, dammit.”

She lies back, displaying her thick but well-trimmed pubis mound. She squirms a bit but not from desire. A harsh frowning line appears between her eyes. From her position she can look out the window and see the distant tracks of lightning at work in the bayou. Her hand slides over her belly, ranging across the silken loveliness of her pale, cool skin.

“Will you save us?”

I need affirmation too. It’s why we’re here. A whippoorwill calls and she flinches so forcefully that she cracks the back of her skull on the headboard. She rubs the spot and her hair is suddenly wild and unruly. I find that deliciously erotic and my breath grows heavier. She glances up at her own shadow on the wall, brushing her riotous curls out with her hands.

“Thomas—”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore tonight.”

“It ain’t your choice.”

But it is. I press myself toward her and mash her lips with mine. She moans out of annoyance and not passion, wanting to scold me some more. In another part of the house my brothers are angry. Jonah’s poetry is caustic and piercing but no worse than Sebastian’s laughter. Cole’s love is the love of the night-world and he alone understands the true liberty of darkness. The water on the window throbs and streams, reaching like splayed fingers.

I shut the light and Dodi halfheartedly protests once more, mewling louder and perhaps shedding tears against my chest. Maybe it’s only sweat. The storm keeps rolling in. I take what I’m after. Thunder settles on the property. Poetry be damned. Let them grouse in their dirty corners.

T
HE DEAD KID IS WALKING AROUND THE BACKYARD
again, and this time he’s brought Herbie the child murderer with him.

The rain drizzles in gentle waves, wind nudging it to part here and there. Our lawn is flooded and covered with large puddles six inches deep in places, like miniature ponds. Mallards and ducks will have a good time swimming in them tomorrow morning. The cypress and willows swing and crackle, like old men laughing. Johnny’s mouth drips skimmer dragonflies and Herbie carefully avoids them, crutching his way across the grass. They’re having a quiet conversation, laughing a lot, Johnny nodding heartily in agreement. When he does, the mosquitoes fly from his lips and a dark cloud wreathes his head. Herbie is good on the crutches, fast, and he manages to skitter away before he can get bitten.

It’s a thing to watch. Herbie has his trouser leg pinned up to the stump and wrangles ahead easily. He looks twenty years older but just as powerful. Those arms have broken the back of a bull gator and I figure he’s still strong enough to do the same now. It gets me smiling a little.

I put on my pants. I remember how embarrassed I was last time when I went downstairs naked to meet with Johnny Jonstone. I take the steps three at a time and turn the corner into the kitchen, waiting to see my brothers.

Instead, Sarah reaches up for me from where she sits on the floor beneath the phone.

“Don’t go out there, Thomas,” she tells me.

“Sarah,” I whisper. I get the vague sense that this isn’t how things are supposed to be, but I don’t follow up on it. Still, I’m curious. I touch the back of my skull and wince and she does the same. “What are you doing back here?”

“They won’t let me go,” she says, her voice heavy with anguish. “Not just Jonah. All of them.”

“But you left with Fred.”

“No, not quite.”

I cross my arms and lean against the cupboard. The stitches in her belly have gotten infected and the skin is raw and torn around the thick white bandage. There are wads of cash scattered around her. I’d guess it’s the five thousand I paid her to leave. They’ve sent her to haunt me because my conscience has failed to do so.

“Where are they?” I ask. “Where are my brothers?”

“They won’t help you anymore.”

“I figured that.”

She reaches up to the phone and pulls the receiver down with her, and I can hear a harsh buzzing, possibly a voice, emanating from it. A couple of long-jawed orb weaver spiders creep across the floorboards leaving threads of web against her legs. She says, “My father hates me. He wants to fuck me. It’s worse now than when I was a child. He wants me dead.”

“Sarah, don’t listen to . . . to whatever you’re being told.”

“You don’t understand!”

“It’s all lies. Your father loves you. He always has. Everything’s all right. You need to go home now.”

She shakes her head. The tattooed masks of Tragedy and Comedy leer and grin at me, and their mouths are full of blood. “I never should have left. Fred’s just going to get wired again, there’s no way he can break his habit. He burgles houses and sells whatever crap he can. He’s in and out of rehab every few weeks. I belong here. I love Jonah. You all need me.”

“You might be right,” I say, “but you still have to go. Your parents care about you. You’ve got a life waiting.”

Her nostrils are red and cracked once more. Maybe she’s back on cocaine or maybe that’s merely how Jonah wants her to be—broken without him. He keeps her tangled up in our minds.

The murdered boy is at the back door gesturing for me to come outside. The scent of sweet gum trails inside and the rain makes the world smell clean. There are more black fingerprint marks around his neck, as if Herbie has been practicing over the last couple of days, trying to get back into shape. Johnny raps at the screen door exactly the same way that Eve tapped on the glass in my office. He leaves behind a smudge of crushed milkweed bugs.

Sarah says, “Thomas, can’t you feel it, can’t you get a whiff of it? Stay out of the yard tonight.”

“You people are always telling me that.”

“Follow good advice,” she cries. “They told you once that the man isn’t dead. He’s come looking for you. Go run and hide.”

“I’d rather get to the bottom of this and be done with it.”

“You’ll never be done with it, don’t you know that?” The buzzing on the phone is getting louder but I still can’t hear any distinct words. “You’ll just wind up deep in the swamp again.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing.”

“Don’t you believe it. You’re—”

“—no longer safe, I know. Everybody’s said it. But I still think it’s time Herbie and I had a discourse.”

“He doesn’t want to just talk.”

“I know that. Hang up the phone.”

“No, I can’t, I’ve been trying . . .” She grips the receiver so hard that the plastic case is cracking.

“Go back home, Sarah.”

“But my father. He hates me! He wants to screw me. He has ever since I was a little girl. His eyes, you should see them, they’re always bloodshot and on fire, like roadside flares burning. Oh God, if only you could see his eyes.” She presses her mouth to the phone. “Hello? Yes, Daddy . . .”

“That’s somebody else talking, Sarah. Who is it? Jonah? Sebastian?”

“Let me stay with you,” she pleads.

“No.”

I grab the receiver out of her hand and put it to my ear. The buzzing of voices has stopped but I can still hear breathing on the line. I hang it up and walk to the back door. Johnny’s gone, and when I turn back I see that the phantom Sarah is too. Spiderweb strands flutter to the kitchen floor.

I walk out the back door into the yard.

The night is slick as crude oil. The rain continues to fall and it feels good against my heated forehead. It’s as if I have a fever, but I’m not ill. The pain in the back of my skull begins to recede. I brush my curls out of my face and I hear my mother calling after me, high-pitched but not quite wailing. Mama has enough of her own troubles. I don’t bother to look for Maggie or Drabs hiding in the brush. They’re not there. For the first time in my life I feel completely alone, and I’m not sure what to make of it. Mist swirls at my ankles as I wander across the muddy grass. Herbie’s here someplace, come back to put the squeeze on me.

T
HE MOON
’
S A WET SMEAR ACROSS THE
crashing, boiling clouds. Silver bleeds down against the windswept, shuddering trees. Cottonmouth snakes slither beneath the cabbage palm and shagbark hickory, tails slapping hard in the water.

If he hadn’t been smiling I wouldn’t have seen him.

But Herbie Jonstone has waited nearly twenty years for this and the glee makes him show off his nice white teeth. The moonlight catches in them like peanut brittle and I turn a second too late.

He’s good with the crutches, all right. Two decades on one leg will do that for you. Before I can completely wheel around and face him he’s driving one crutch hard into my solar plexus. I squeal and go down to my knees in the marsh grass.

“Been waiting for a long time to see you again, boy.”

His teeth are clean but his breath is bad. Smells like he’s been eating undercooked possum in the deep woods for a while now. No shower for a week and the rain isn’t helping much. If he’d been downwind of me I would’ve gagged on his BO five minutes ago.

When I finally get enough of my breath back to speak I say, “Been . . . in the same house all . . . my life. You could’ve come visit from Tupelo . . . anytime you wanted to, Herbie.”

His tremendous arms bulge again as he tightens his fists around the rubber grips. His palms creak harshly against them as loud as the twining ropes of the church bells. “I been meanin’ to, but I sorta got sidetracked. Life throws us curves, it does indeed. Got caught doin’ somethin’ sorta unfriendly to somebody and had to do some time in Angola.”

He’s not afraid of me running off. He knows we’re here for a reason and neither of us is about to shirk that obligation now. I find that I’m actually interested. “How long were you on the Farm?”

“Fifteen years. It wasn’t bad though, ’cept I missed the kids.”

“I bet you did.”

I dive for his leg and he brutally swats me aside with a crutch. It catches me hard across the mouth and my throat runs with blood. He reaches down, grabs me by the neck, and hoists me into the air. Christ is he quick. His huge arms are solid as wrought iron, and despite his unfriendly intentions, I’m impressed. I grasp at his fingers, trying to loosen their hold, but can’t even move them an inch. He draws me in close until we’re almost nose to nose.

He could collapse my trachea in an instant but he doesn’t. He’s a talker and wants to make it last for a time. “You got anything you want to get off your chest in the sight of God, son, ’fore you die?”

As a matter of fact, I do. “A few things.”

He chuckles warmly and I find myself almost liking him. It’s no wonder he can cull the kids so easily. “Well, let’s hear some.”

“Why didn’t you kill me that day? You didn’t bleed out and the gators didn’t roll you down under the river.”

“No, they surely did not.” He cocks his head, slack-jawed, staring deeply into me until the rain dribbles over his lips. He’s got to spit out a mouthful of water. “I barely had the strength to pull myself to the opposite shore. Oh, that was low, son, leaving your belt on the other young’n. Gotta admit though you had a flair, a real flourish, the way you handled yourself. If I could’ve put the squeeze on you then I woulda, but I was already a couple quarts low.”

He starts tightening his fingers a bit, putting the pressure on. “Why’d you wait so long to show up here?” I asked him.

“Had some other things on my mind I had to handle first.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Seems like you would, seein’ as how you appear to be a mite out of your noggin’.”

“Now that’s just insulting.”

The rain intensifies. Thunder erupts above us, swarming over the house and breaking savagely across the yard. Sheet lightning slashes down like white-hot razor wire, shearing off tree limbs and leaving fires scattered along the tree line. Herbie starts getting a touch nervous, gritting his teeth and watching the flames writhing in the storm. A chuckle works loose in my chest. I ask, “So, did Johnny bring you or did you bring him?”

“Who the hell’s Johnny?”

“The boy you strangled. Claimed he was your son, remember? I saw you talking to him out on the lawn before, laughing together. What did he say to you? He gonna keep coming back here?”

Herbie’s got to raise his voice over the wind and fierce rain. “One thing’s for certain, boy, you’re crazier than three cats in a dryer.”

“Coming from you that’s a laugh.”

“Maybe so. Say good-bye to this sorry world.”

He’s waited too long though. His crutches have sunk and slipped in the mud and slowly shifted to the left. His grip has loosened without him even knowing it. I break hard to one side and throw a fist at his face as hard as I can. It catches him on the temple, but he hardly notices.