A Choir of Ill Children (23 page)

They have been put in charge of this as I was put in charge of them. Why did they give it up now? Is it a sign of trust? Or will I be unlocking the box of my own undoing?

For hours I walk among the remnants, chronicles, and accounts of my family, hunting. I think about how the mind might actually be dissatisfied with the sexual urge, and how irrational numbers are necessarily nonterminating and nonperiodic.

We are archaic. We are tuned to the deceased, and still my brothers’ blues thrum through my basal ganglia with rhythm and skill.

Just before dawn, as the light streams in through the single attic window, I find the lock that the key fits.

Penetration.

It’s an old black trunk covered with stamps and stickers from foreign cities that looks as if it’s been around the world twice before returning to Kingdom Come. The key slides in and turns easily, perfectly, the hard snap of metal on metal extremely loud in the silence of this crypt.

I ease the hasp down and open the trunk.

My mother lies within, wrapped in clear plastic, shrunken and contorted as any of my brothers. She smiles in her rictus and remains exactly as my father has left her: dead but still dreaming.

And beneath her corpse, the wrapped body of a six-year-old kid. It’s Johnny Jonstone.

C
LAY THE CONJURE BOY AND HIS BUDDY
D
ARR
have their bikes parked outside of Doover’s Five & Dime at around closing time when I pull up. There are dead cormorants, grebes, ring-neck ducks, and heron scattered all around the area, some with their heads or wings missing. Whatever the brew is that they’re cooking up takes a hell of a lot of bird parts. Mallards wallow across the Spanish moss and morass behind the store and snapping turtles hang off the skiff lines and traps draped in the mire.

Darr is the only one in sight. He’s been raking up piles of feathers and bones with a threshing scoop, but now stops to withdraw his knife from a cormorant at his feet. He stomps on over, grinning like we’re old buddies, cleaning his switchblade with a bandanna. There are stained croker sacks up on the porch that flutter, flop, and roll a bit. This is getting a little out of hand.

His head is freshly shaven around the three strips of hair. Those jailhouse tattoos on his arms look larger and more intricate now, and I realize they’re a work in progress. He, or perhaps Clay, has been adding to them with a needle and ink. The edges are a bright black and scabbing over, but I still can’t make out what any of them are supposed to be.

He finishes wiping down the blade and replaces it in his right boot. The butterfly Band-Aid on his forehead has finally fallen off. “Back again?” he asks.

“I’m renting a skiff.”

“Yeah, well now, that’s good. Hey, you got yourself a nice haircut there.”

“Thanks.”

Clay steps out onto the porch and takes a seat on an old bench. He watches me carefully, expressionless but alert as always.

Darr says, “You know what I simply cannot stand?”

“Fencing,” I answer.

“No, not fencing really, not in and of itself, as it goes,” he tells me. “You see, seems like you’ve already forgotten.”

“No, I haven’t. You hate watching fencers who have no notion of the hardcore reality behind the art form. You’ve got to have convictions to live with the blade. Belief. But those players, they might as well be shooting hoops or sliding into third base. They never embrace the tenets and ideology behind that discipline.”

“That’s exactly correct, word for word!”

“It’s a little trick I have.”

That makes him laugh. He throws his head back and lets the guffaws loose and claps me on the back. “A damn good one, tossing people’s words back at ’em.”

Clay looks down at all the dead birds and a wrinkle crosses his features that might be embarrassment on anybody else. He still doesn’t want any part of the ways of the granny witches but he’s as caught up in the wheel as the rest of us. I step over to him and cock a thumb at Darr. “He’s talking about fencing again.”

“He can’t help himself sometimes.”

“You the one doing the tattoo work on him?”

“He does most of it with sewing needles. Lottie Mae touches it up some if need be.”

I offer him a cigarette and he passes. Clay’s got a look in his eyes like he’s going to have to kill me one of these days although he’s not quite sure why. Once again I get the feeling that he’s been through something very much like this before. I want to ask him about it.

“You’ve come again,” he says, “to bother my sister.”

“No, I’m here to rent a skiff.”

“Why?”

“I need to find something in the bayou.”

“What’s that?”

“Maybe I’ll explain it to you sometime.”

We’re still waiting for circumstances to play out in a specific fashion, the pattern growing larger until we can’t see the threads of it anymore. The wingless grebes have something to do with the eyeless newts and the kicked dogs, my grandmother on the roof, my father in the mill, the flat rock, Eve’s all-day sucker.

I turn and head into the store but Lottie Mae is standing on the other side of the screen door just staring. I try to ignore her but it’s impossible. It’s obvious she’s been busy lately.

She nudges the screen open with her hip and approaches with no trepidation at all. There’s a scent of alcohol about her but it’s not booze, it’s rubbing alcohol. She’s had her navel pierced and there’s a very sharp tattoo on her belly. If Darr did this one too he’s got a hell of a lot of talent. The design is something almost cabalistic but not exactly. Maybe it’s a sign of protection or one of contrition.

At least she hasn’t been downing any more vodka gimlets. She’s dressed seductively and the air of confidence surrounding her makes her sultry in the extreme. She’s had new training for her mission. The feathered points of her short dark hair are curled and wet with sweat, wisps clinging to her forehead. There’s drama in her stance, the hint of misconduct and danger. Jesus, there’s several swamp whores who can’t cast sexuality with such a perfect aim. A gentle laugh flits from her throat and I know I’m the prey, and I like it.

“Lottie Mae?”

“Hello, Thomas, how are you?” She tilts toward me and gets a better look. “Oh my, what happened to you? Your eyebrows. And your neck, it’s all burnt.”

By now she and the whole town knows about Herbie the child killer, the storm of souls, and my missing brothers. “I’m okay. I just came to rent a skiff from Doover.”

“He ain’t here today. I’m working the store.”

“So long as I get a boat.”

There’s another, much uglier smell on her breath: it’s oxtail soup. She’s back to making incantations, perhaps now with her brother’s help. Her resolve has returned along with a new sense of purpose.

She’s completely split from the granny witches now. She’s taken Clay’s advice to stay away from the crazy old women and she finds herself much more capable without them. “You gonna stobpole into the bayou all on your lonesome? You ever done that before?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll be lost inside of ten minutes and nobody’ll ever see you again. There’s a thousand square miles of slough out there. How you gonna challenge that? A gator can take off the back end of a skiff with one bite or a swipe of the tail. Why you headin’ into the swamp anyway?”

“Exercise. My doctor says I need to get out more.”

“All Doc Jenkins knows is how to hand out aspirin and scratch his ole ugly ears. Skiff rental is five dollars for the afternoon. Some of them monastery folks come around on occasion, they want to go see the wonders of God out in the bayou, commune with nature. Usually Doover takes the charters out himself, if need be, but I can go with you instead.”

She means it to be a temptation and it is. I can’t understand why we’re still at this. It’s got nothing to do with the chants and hexes of the granny witches dancing around on my lawn in the rain. I’m not sure it’s anything personal either. There’s probably no reason anymore, we’ve simply become tangled up together and can’t figure out a way to get free.

Her brother and Darr have been listening to our conversation.

“Heya,” Darr says, “let’s all go. I got nothing better to do for the rest of the day. We’ll have a few beers, get to know one another a little more.”

I’m still thinking of my brothers and Drabs and what else might be out there waiting for me in the bog. Snapping turtles cling and drop from the skiff lines, vanishing beneath the green ooze and mist writhing upon the water.

Clay stares at me.

“Sure,” I tell them. “Sounds like fun.”

S
UNLIGHT SKIMS OFF THE CYPRESS AND TUPELO
trees, casting a fiery gleam against the woven layers of deep shadow. Crescent rows of dark shanties line the distant slopes of brush and morass, vine-draped and overgrown with hanging moss and orchids. A couple of doors clatter in the hot breeze of bog town. Faces appear pressed to the ramshackle pineboard slats, the glint off eyes and wet lips shining through the cracks in the rotting planks.

People have been dying out here by the hundreds since the beginning of the world, swallowed by the bayou without a ripple. Or they’re found hanging among the sparkleberries after a week of being lost in the maze of green marsh, tormented by snakes, gators, and half-pound spiders. Potts County loses a half dozen almost every year, mostly adolescents who come out to conquer the bottoms.

Stobpoling takes a real finesse that I don’t have. After lurching wildly for twenty minutes and almost tipping the boat several times, I let out a sigh and Clay rises. He takes the pole from me without a word and the skiff evens out immediately. He leads us through the stagnant waterways.

“Any particular direction?” he asks.

My grandmother’s body had been impaled on the school roof facing west. For no other reason than that I say, “West.”

“All right then.”

Darr’s got three six-packs in a chest of ice and already he’s on his seventh or eighth beer. He hands me a can and I sit back and slowly drink it, enjoying the taste. This really is relaxing and almost feels like a camp-out with some friends. The company is good. A bull gator’s powerful musk pervades the area, and it’s not until we’ve been on the water for twenty minutes that I consider the possibility they’ve brought me out here to kill me.

An emerald wash of light ignites the side of Lottie Mae’s ashen face, with a soft powdering of caramel-colored freckles standing out as if etched until she fairly glows in these shadows. She presses close across the seat as I shift away, her breath on my neck causing spasms in my groin. I have to stifle a groan. Clouds roll and snarl the sky as the sun chops down against tupelo and willow branches.

We pass more bog shanties that lean so far over they might fall into the bayou at any second. Pigs run wild in yards and there are tricycles upended in the shores of muck. Tupelo trees sway and waver along the slopes and leaves shake out over us. Boat motors growl nearby.

“We been orphaned since we were pretty young but the swamp takes care of its own,” she says.

“What happened to your parents?”

“Mama got a fish bone wedged in her throat and died at the dinner table when I was eleven. Papa took a job hauling highly flammable materials but he never could quit smoking. Blew himself up one night outside of Memphis and it took them two days to put out the flames.”

I look toward Clay and he nods.

Darr finishes off a can of beer and tosses it over the side, where it plops and floats on the slime. “My daddy, he got caught burglarizing the house of the second cousin to the governor of Georgia. He would’ve made it too except he found some dirty magazines and took to reading them right there in the bedroom, all a’goggle. Guess it got his imagination rolling. The dumbass pervert didn’t even hear the sirens when the sheriff pulled up. I did a deuce with Pa down in Jacksonville. Embarrassing, that’s what it was. I mostly pretended I didn’t know him.”

I take the key to my mother’s tomb out and toss it at the can. It rings loudly and both quickly sink.

“What was that?” Lottie Mae asks, and I hear a genuine curiosity and concern beneath the coquettish purr.

“Nothing important.”

“Is anything important to you?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

It’s easy to say but hard to get across the meaning and intention. The word alone sounds foolish, but we’ll go on from there. “Blood.”

“Like in killing or like in kin?” She kicks her shoes off and I can see the catclaw briar scars and sycamore scratches that don’t mar them in the least. The bright white orchids grow thicker the deeper we head into the swamp. Herons and loons follow us along the way, weeping.

Reflections flash in the distance, and the faint sounds of the calliope can be heard straining across the slough.

“Oh, listen,” Lottie Mae says, “it’s the carnival tonight. I forgot all about it.”

It gets to me. “What?”

“Swamp folk put it together every year or two in the bottoms. Nothing fancy, just a get-together, more or less. Big party, really. Some booths and stuffed toys. Sell hot dogs and frogs’ legs. Got a couple of old rides they set up for the kids to go round in.”