The Clearing (12 page)

She nodded. “If I had a clock wound tight as he is right now, I couldn’t stand to stay in the room with it.”

He put a palm on his neck, drew it away, and looked at his hand. “May, would you look and see if I’ve got a scratch?” He sat at the table.

She came close and pulled down his collar. He felt one cool pass of her fingers, and the motion surprised him, raising the hair on his arms. “Nothing back here but a little pink,” she said.

“All right, then.” He stood up. “Byron grabbed my neck,” he explained.

She looked at him without expression. “Still brothers,” she said, turning to the stove.

At sundown Byron got off at the station in Tiger Island, bare-headed, wearing a suit coat. He sat in the waiting room and stared at the night agent, who after a while looked up and spat. “You think I’m pretty, bub?”

Byron didn’t smile. “You’re a sight, all right.”

The man wagged his bald head and went back to writing train orders.

Byron turned to look out the open door, and before long saw two men in striped suits and round felt hats hustling up River Street. Out on the platform, a little boy in knickers, about six years old, was playing on stacked boxes of muskrat traps. Byron called out to him.

“What?”

He held up a coin. “If I give you a nickel, will you sit on my knee and talk to me?”

The boy nodded and came in, pulling on Byron’s lapel and climbing onto his thigh. He smelled of mud and his nose was running. “Where’d the nickel go?”

“You have to say the abc’s,” he told the child, keeping an eye on the door.

“Don’t know ’em.”

“Can you count?”

“I can count to a nickel,” he said, putting a sooty finger in his ear as two olive-skinned faces appeared in the doorway and stared at Byron and the boy like hawks. Both stepped inside, and one checked the men’s room, then they looked at each other, shrugged, and slouched back out.

Byron thumbed up a dime and the boy counted to thirteen for him.

“You can get down now,” he said.

When he was alone, he looked at his cooling, empty lap. The heft of the child had anchored him, but now he could stand and do what he would do. He walked up to the agent’s counter and snapped down a five-dollar gold piece.

The man picked it up and turned it in his inky fingers. “I ain’t seen one of these in a long while.”

“You know who I am. But if someone asks if you’ve seen me, you haven’t.” The agent’s face did not change, and he nodded.

“If I find out otherwise, when they pull you out of the river there’ll be five dollars worth of telegraph wire wrapped around your neck.”

“Message received, damn it.” The agent turned away as a telegram rattled the sounder.

Byron walked from the station into a neighborhood of large, somnolent cypress houses, five or six of them boasting columns or gingerbread galleries—the homes of mill owners, he guessed. He saw a soaring brick steeple three blocks away and walked to it, pulling open an arched front door and stepping into a fragrant Catholic dark. He chose a pew in the middle of the empty church and studied saints soldered in the lightless stained glass, and standing flat and dark as negatives.

The last time he’d been in such a church was south of the Meuse when he’d been observing a buildup of French troops for the U.S. government. Desperate for shelter, he’d packed in out of the February wind with over a thousand soldiers. Several priests came in to hear confessions, and lines of penitents flowed around the blocks of pews where others were smoking and talking, boisterous and tipsy with fatigue. He was seated in the middle of a loud group, couched in his Presbyterian reticence, when a sixteen-inch shell landed outside, turning eight hundred years of stained glass into a lavender-tinged hailstorm. The great concussion knocked the film of water off his eyeballs, and when he stood, blinking, the first thing he saw was the glassless tracery of the rose window over the choir loft, a naked suggestion that German artillery was erasing all of history. Then another shell hit, and the air filled with pinwheeling gilded pipes and spruce flutes and tin oboes. Soldiers were screaming, afraid that this was some new type of delayed-fuse ordnance—not a blown-apart pipe organ raining down on the surging raft of men. One of the church’s great doors sailed open, and Byron joined a press of bodies in the aisle, helmet rattling against helmet as he and others formed a living cobbled street. It was then that the roof’s back was broken by a smaller shell into an unholy avalanche of masonry and roof tiles, killing lines of penitents, burying priests in the confessionals like beetles in sorrowful wood.

That freezing night and many times since, Byron wondered if the unconfessed men had passed unhindered to Paradise.

About nine o’clock a nun gently touched his elbow and he jumped up.

“I’m locking the doors,” she said, looking at him curiously. “Did you want something?”

His head moving like a bird’s, Byron glanced around at all the intact windows. “Do they hear confessions here?”

“Yes,” the nun said. “Do you want me to summon Father?”

With a start he saw the ranks of organ pipes intact above the loft. “Not yet,” he whispered.

Sometime after twelve o’clock he walked back to the station, crossed the tracks, and passed south of the railroad bridge, following the star-glossed river and its muddy breath. A weatherboard nightclub rested its chin on the levee, its rear half propped on spindly pilings over a shallow bend of the Chieftan River. Backed by a thumping jazz band, a vocalist was singing “Do What You Did Last Night.” Byron listened for a minute, finding the song unlike his records, even frightening— a music that had cast off sentiment like a white dinner jacket and strutted, half-naked and sweating. Crossing the stinking apron of oyster shells, he came out of the dark and into the dark, where six couples clung and drifted over the dim floor. Through a door frame in the back wall he could see two felt-covered card tables ringed by men wearing white shirts and arm garters. He bought a beer and drank it halfway down, remembering that Randolph at one time liked cold beer almost too much; thinking of the ordinary, patient face of the brother who’d come to this netherworld to save him, he was overcome by a melancholy anger. Gulping down the rest of his beer, he slammed the mug to the bar and pulled from his pants the rod he’d extracted from the log.

With wild swings he shattered the glass fronts of two old slot machines by the door and beat down the mechanisms before moving quickly to a Buckley quarter bandit, pounding the pot-metal top and smashing the jackpot window, the quarters flying like ice chips. A woman screamed and the two men he’d seen at the railroad station came rushing from the back room. One of them said, “Hey, you crazy?” and moved toward him.

Byron slammed him on the shoulder with the rod, and the man’s false teeth flew across the room as he went down. “Never say that to a crazy man,” he said, coming up with a pistol in his left hand in time to make the other one freeze and withdraw his empty hand from under his coat. “Give,” Byron said, and the man handed over a large revolver. He took a nickel-plated automatic from the man with the broken shoulder and walked on toward the back room where players at the green tables had begun to stand and mill. He brushed past the band members and the dancers as they moved toward the door and stepped around him in broad arcs as though he were hot enough to set them on fire. In the shallow back room he tossed the guns through an open window into the river and then upended card tables, spilling waterfalls of poker chips and yelling at the men to get out or get shot. With the rod he began to break out windows, swinging it through sash work with great, crashing arcs.

One man stayed in the room, his hands up. He wore a straw fedora and a cream-colored suit over a dark shirt. After Byron finished the last window, he looked in his direction and smiled. “Mr. Buzetti,” he said, “would you please step over here a minute.” He motioned to the door and the two of them went back out into the bar.

“You fuckin’ nuts or somethin’?” Buzetti asked.

Byron holstered his pistol and held up the shaft. “I found something at the mill in Nimbus that might be yours.”

Buzetti finally lowered his hands. “I got nothing to do with your piss-hole of a mill.”

He raised the steel bar up to the man’s face. “A thing like this can cause a lot of damage.” He walked behind the counter and beat starbursts into the back-bar mirror, exploded the rod through the leaded glass in the side cabinets, and raked the liquor bottles onto the duck boards. Buzetti made a break for the door, but Byron pulled his pistol and stopped him. “Now that you understand how dangerous this rod is, I want you to tell me we’re not going to run across any more of them out at Nimbus. Galleri stays closed Sundays, and we don’t have to worry about some Sicilian gentleman spiking our trees, is that right?”

Buzetti took off his hat and looked around the shattered room. “I can swat you like a fly. I was in the big war.” He tapped his chest with his knuckles. “Like a fly.”

Byron walked up to him and grabbed the left lapel of his bright suit, dragged him into the back room, and raised the Colt against his forehead. “A fly can’t shoot back, you pimp asshole.”

“You a dead man,” Buzetti hissed.

“You’re not going to leave us alone?”

“Fuck no.”

Byron raised his elbow on his gun arm. He had smelled coppery blood on his face before. “You know, a month ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about doing this, but then I bought some Caruso records in the mail and found that Italian is good for more than selling whores.” He was thinking, though, not of Caruso’s voice, but of his brother’s worried expression rising above a celluloid collar. Suddenly, Byron began singing loudly into the gangster’s startled face,

La donna e mobile
qual piuma al vento
muta d’accento
e di pensiero.

“You crazy!” Buzetti cried, his confidence melting. He glanced over his shoulder toward the river.

Byron stopped singing and his eyes turned to little rocks. He held the .45 out the window and fired a skull-cracking shot into the air.

“You no can scare me,” Buzetti said, his voice reedy. “What you smiling like that for?” And then he heard it, the faint sound of a gong striking and a tingle of engine-room bells. “Hey,” he said, his shoes shuffling as he twisted to the window. In the river, a low grate of running lights was backing away from the bank and the water erupted in a silver line as a three-inch hawser sprang taut out of the current. Beneath the floor the nightclub’s timbers began to groan and crack like giant knuckles. “Hey,” Buzetti screamed. “Hey, hey! Okay, okay, let’s talk.”

“Scuzi,”
Byron told him, as he climbed through the window and jumped for the river. The mill’s rafting steamer was backing on a wide-open throttle, jets of steam spuming out of its escape pipes as the paddle wheel dug water, the boat’s heaviest rope straining in and out of the nightclub’s supports. The first piling broke like a cannon shot, and the rest of them leaped out bringing along the main sill, the building breaking in two right in the middle of the dance floor, half of it tumbling into the river with a great clattering of slot machines, liquor bottles, card tables, and the screams of a drunken whore as the restroom wall fell away and revealed her seated on a commode, high and pale in the night air.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ella heard water splashing in the kitchen before daybreak and went in to find Byron naked and washing himself out of a small tub on the counter. She walked up and pressed against his damp back, running her narrow fingers over his nipples. As she expected, he jumped when she first touched him.

“I’ve been with you for two years, Kansas Queen, and I still can’t tell when you’re creeping up.”

She smiled against his shoulders. “Why are you washing now?”

“I’ve been for a swim.”

She backed away a step. “I thought you went into town.”

“I did. Then I came back and swam in the millpond.”

“Ugh. You better put on some turpentine, then.”

He turned and embraced her, putting his huge hands on her backside.

“Has your brother told your father we’re married?”

He tried to look at her then, and she raised her face to his. “I don’t think so. It’ll make the old man want to see me and you both. He’s like that. He’d pick out a cottage for us somewhere in a crowded neighborhood and get me a job counting trees or selling wood to people, and that I couldn’t take.”

She felt tremors in his arms, something left over from the shell shock, though it appeared he didn’t realize they ran all through him like messages, every day. “Where did you go tonight?”

“To see Buzetti.”

She closed her eyes. “Oh, no.”

“I was steady as a post when I handled him. When I’m going up against a real bastard, I just feel the rightness of it. Tonight, well, it was like France was supposed to be.” He reached out and she handed him a towel. “No one got hurt very badly.”

“Amazing,” was all she said. He drank a glass of bourbon and they went to bed. She asked him again to talk to her, knowing he was exhausted and would sleep until noon.

“I might tell Rando what happened tonight,” he said. “You know, he makes me feel stronger. I just might tell him.” And with that he was asleep, his back to her, a dim surface botched with white scars.