A Choir of Ill Children (21 page)

The burns are beginning to hurt. I’ve done my best not to look down and inspect myself but as I quiver the sheet rubs harshly against the raw places. I run my fingers through my hair feeling how short and well trimmed it is. The ridges of my brows are tender.

Rooms mutter with the extent of the past. The wind stamps its foot on the roof and the rafters groan as if about to buckle beneath the weight of the black sky. We’re alone. The poetry is gone but our responsibilities to blood remain. I’ve an apology to make to Jonah. I never should’ve urged Sarah to leave, no matter what the consequences. It wasn’t my place to save anyone from the impossibility of the commonplace. They deserved the chance to fail, no more or less than anybody.

I toss the sheet off and move, in spasms, up the stairs. Whatever my brothers have brought upon me they’ve brought upon themselves, and we’ll face it together. It’s the promise I made to my parents so long ago.

Our hate is only another part of our love. Perhaps we’ll survive it and perhaps we won’t. There are no guarantees anymore, if there ever were. We’re all unprotected now. The house voices its concern, moaning, wind in the attic and the dampness bloating the timbers. Maybe someone stalks the second and third floors, carrying a reap hook or a camera.

It could be. But I’m more concerned with my missing eyebrows. The ridge of my frontal lobe feels huge and significant. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window and know I could easily substitute for any of my brothers now. I’ve been redesigned to snap into the proper place.

With each step I take the pain in my side grows greater. It’s as if Sebastian is still biting me, tearing through my flesh so that our sister can be born. Her face, body, and following that, her name. What do they call her up there in the shadows, tittering in the confines of that overwhelming brain? How am I supposed to address her?

Thunder pulses in a constant growl and the lightning shreds the night.

I reach the door.

It’s unlocked.

I open it and enter, facing the darkness, full of my own rage and useless intent. Mulish. I turn on the light.

The bedsheets and covers are on the floor, balled in a corner like the makings of a nest. The windowpane is dirty with their fingerprints, but my brothers aren’t here.

On the wall are words.

PENETRATION. ADD THIS TO YOUR TALLY OF DEFEATS BUT DO NOT SWAY FROM THE COURSE. VALUE SHORTCOMINGS. MEANING. THE MIND IS DISSATISFIED WITH THE SEXUAL URGE AND THE LIBIDO FINDS NO MERIT IN THE BASAL GANGLIA. SIGNIFICANCE. IRRATIONAL NUMBERS AND THEIR DECIMAL EXPANSIONS ARE NECESSARILY NONTERMINATING AND NONPERIODIC. THE HAM IS STILL IN THE HOUSE.

D
OC
J
ENKINS PULLS UP MY EYELIDS, SHINES HIS
penlight in, and says, “Aspirin will help with the pain, a bit. That salve is good for the burns so leave it on even if it does smell like a New Orleans whorehouse at low tide. As for that shaking, it’ll stop eventually.” He wags his head. “Or maybe it won’t. Nothing to be done about it. You survived. Most don’t, so be grateful. Drink lots of fluids. Read your Bible. Oh, and no sex for at least a couple of days. See the dentist soon and have those fillings replaced. You want to go to a hospital?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

Doc is built low to the ground, stocky with especially long hominoid arms, hairy knuckles, gray wiry thatches on his ears thick as scouring pads. He doesn’t wear bow ties but there must be some kind of an optical illusion at work because I always think he’s got one on, I can see it. He’s wearing a pleated vest and a pocket watch with a fob made of sallow curls. His paunch bounces a little as he swings around the room, and he might be considered a jolly-looking little man if only he ever smiled.

“What about Herbie?” I ask.

“That the crispy critter? No amount of fluids or sex is gonna help him much now. That motherless son has been charred down to a burnt matchstick.”

Lips crawling, Burke makes faces. He’s out of his element and under pressure here in my home. He’s still got his anger and frustration prodding him along but he’s trying to show a certain amount of reverence for my grandfather, whom he respected and feared as a boy, and my family history. I figure he’ll return to his natural belligerency pretty soon, and I want to get as much information out of him as I can before it happens.

He won’t take his hat off inside. He needs those stately inches, even with me down on the couch with no eyebrows. “I ran a check on that name you gave me. If this really is Herbie Jonstone then he’s a pretty bad prick. Got out of Angola a few weeks back and he’s already wanted for knocking over four convenience stores between here and Mississippi. Has three cases of sodomy stacked up on him, possible murder charges. A few of his former associates and their families have gone missing.”

“He dumps them in the swamp.”

The sheriff’s chin first juts one way, then the other. Burke is tonguing the empty spaces where his back teeth used to be. If he doesn’t get a couple of bridges made soon his cheeks will start to sink in. “Why was this convict in Kingdom Come? What brought him here on such a straight run?”

A few last flashes of lightning close up and fiery, illuminating the property. The deputies are in the back trying to work Herbie onto a stretcher, but he keeps crumbling like cigarette ash whenever they grab him too hard. The storm, having made its point, now withdraws and sinks into the background. Thunder continues to rumble in the distance, a smug and steady presence.

“To finish something he left unfinished a long time ago.”

“You knew him?”

“You could say so.”

Burke’s nasty tiny eyes fill with all sorts of abstractions as he runs various possibilities through his head: me and Herbie were partners, maybe I’ve got a network of hit men working for me, that’s where the money comes from, all those convenience store robberies—he wants to sucker me into a trap but has no clue how to do it and settles for just looking at me suspiciously.

“He tried to kill me in the bayou when I was a kid,” I tell him.

“What? The hell you say. Why isn’t that in our records?”

“I never told anyone. I thought a bull gator had gotten him.”

Doc scratches his earlobe and gets his finger tangled. “A piece of him anyway. Had no left leg below the knee.”

Burke’s voice wavers again in his excitement and skips up to the next octave. “So he comes here after twenty years to finish doing you in, the two of you tussle in the yard, and he winds up being struck by lightning? That the long and short of this story?”

It seems as if there should be a lot more to it, but I don’t know what else there might be. “Yeah, that just about covers it all.”

“You must’ve pissed the man off pretty good. First thing he does when he gets off the Farm is come lookin’ for you. Guess you knew how to stir up trouble and get under somebody’s skin even when you was a boy.”

“He’s a child murderer. It didn’t take much.”

“I reckon not.”

I’m fading fast and keep catching myself beginning to nod. The pain settles in further and really starts to bite. Dodi says, “You’re gettin’ pale, Thomas. I think it’d be best if you got some sleep now.” She smears more of the salve across my chest, and her hands make me hum. She’s still only wearing my T-shirt and lace panties. She wiggles to the kitchen and returns with a glass of water and five aspirin. I swallow them all but can’t get more than a sip of water down.

“For Christ’s sake girl,” Burke bellows, “go put some clothes on. It ain’t decent you walkin’ all over creation with hardly anything on your body. Didn’t your mama teach you nothin’ right?”

“Plenty,” Dodi says.

“I got a few more questions,” he says to me.

“Sure,” I tell him. “Just don’t ask anything about my vinegar.”

“Vinegar? Why you talkin’ about vinegar? Doc, his brains fried up like grits and eggs, and he was never too clever to begin with.”

But Doc enjoys staring at Dodi and now he’s irritated that Burke has sent her away to cover herself up. One hand holds his black bag and the other lengthy arm dangles as if he might bring it up to club the sheriff.

The deputies have tossed Herbie in the back of Doc’s wagon, and they have to borrow a hammer to break up the hardened earth to free the crutches. Herbie Jonstone has mostly boiled out from the inside. He’s hardly more than cinders, but I’m surprised that enough of his face is intact that I can still recognize him. His lips are gone so he’s got even more of his smile to show.

“Looks like the good Lord had something to say about that old boy,” Burke says, and I can hear the laughter beginning to bubble in his voice. I glance up into his eyes and listen to the clock tick off the seconds until the other shoe drops—one, two, three, Burke getting his leer nice and right on his face, four, and there it is coming ’round the curve, five—“And about you too.”

His smirk isn’t that much different from Herbie Jonstone’s, and it makes me think of the tally of my defeats, the value of shortcomings, and where the ham might be if it’s really in the house.

I
N MY MOTHER
’
S NIGHTMARE SHE IS ABOUT TO BE
murdered.

It starts with the stink of stale smoke and sour beer. She’s drinking tequila in Leadbetter’s while the men play darts to see who’ll get to take her out into the parking lot. The animal heads peer down at my mama and several times over the passage of the night she talks aloud to them, laughing, climbing up onto the barstool so she can kiss them on their dusty snouts.

A guy named Willy plugs the number twenty on the board and follows it with a bull’s-eye. His whole life is scrawled across his face, down to the smallest detail. You can read his thoughts as they rattle and clang together in his cluttered brain. He works at the mill and he’s eager to take his jealousy and frustrations out on the boss’s wife. He grabs my mother’s forearm and hauls her out to his truck, tosses her in, then lunges forward to kiss her. Willy hasn’t got much in the way of finesse.

He fumbles at her blouse and pops off a button that arches onto the dashboard. He groans harshly, a beast that’s been kicked almost to death, which is pretty much what he is. He tries to dry hump her leg but the gearshift blocks him and he winds up rubbing against that for a while, hardly noticing the difference. Willy is what you might call a single-track individual. Moonlight descends through the passenger window and outlines my mother in flaming mercury.

Beneath Willy’s lips she is laughing. It’s a grisly, unnatural sound that presses ice to Willy’s spine and makes him pull back. He stares at her, so beautiful there with this unsettling noise coming up out of her throat. Maybe she needs to throw up. He’s not unfeeling, this particular Willy. He pats her arm like a good friend and tries to shove her out the door so that she doesn’t fuck up his floor mats.

Still, he really wants a piece of ass but now he’s thinking about how it looks. He’s already been written up three times on the job and it would probably be considered excessively stupid in the way of financial planning if he’s caught with the boss’s wife. No wonder the guys all looked a little relieved when they didn’t win that goddamn dart game. Linnigan and Tyrell both definitely shanked on the nineteen.

What happens if she screams rape? His pecker runs for cover and takes a downturn against his thigh. He thinks about physical evidence and glances around. Shit, the button, where the hell’s the button gone? She’s still laughing quietly but at least she hasn’t gotten sick yet.

“Uh,” Willy says, “hey, listen, I think that maybe we’ve got, uhm, like a misunderstanding here, you know.” He curses the dartboard his wife got him for Christmas that’s hung up out in the garage. He puts in a couple hours of practice every night out there, getting the proper wrist action down. Damn the bitch, why couldn’t she have bought him the new socket wrenches he’d asked for? But no, fuck no.

Broadhead skinks skitter through the gutter. My mother leans forward now, bewitching, enticing, getting him roused again, sort of, her breath coming in short bursts. She’s nearly hyperventilating. The windows fog quickly and beads of precipitation run down the windshield.

The flashing neon beer signs cast a nimbus through the haze. Her hands reach out, all talon and bone, and Willy whines partly out of lust and the rest from fright. She’s still giggling, much more softly and quietly, muttering to herself, a woman in pain. Willy can’t make out the words but since she’s talking he figures he’ll join in the conversation, see where it goes.

“You’re so pretty, I mean, more than that really, I’ve always watched you, thought about you, I mean, we all have. What else are we gonna do, right? It’s only natural, that, us watching, I’m sure you ain’t gonna hold a grudge about it, am I right? But it’s not—it’s not safe for a woman like you to be out at a place like this, so late at night, flashing your gams, titties shaking, you need a touch more support there, in my opinion. My wife, her bras are these pointy-torpedo-lookin’ things, lots of wire, them Winnebagos ain’t never gonna droop. And there you are climbing onto bar stools and kissing decapitated animal heads and such, might be some talk about that around town, you know. You might wanna forgo such activities, at least this close to home.”