The Dying Ground (25 page)

“Wanna go first, Maceo? Heard y’all Louisiana boys like it that way.”

His goons laughed behind him. He shoved Cissy backward and her head hit the wall with frightening force. A sickening sound escaped her lips before she slumped to the ground like a rag doll, unconscious. All I could wish was that she stayed that way.

Smokey pulled a knife from his pocket and cut away the last of her clothes. She didn’t move, not once, while he yanked her body from side to side. Once she was completely naked I lost any composure that I had left.

“Come on, Smokey, man, please. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Leave her alone.”

“No chance of that, brother man.” He kicked Cissy’s leg and then grabbed hold of her ankles. “Get up.” He dragged her toward him on the gravel. A streak of blood from the gash in her head left a gruesome trail. I thought immediately of John Claire. His ghost was in that alley. I felt the presence, just as I knew that Holly and I both had set these events in motion.

“Smokey!” I yelled once, loud, before a hand was clamped over my mouth and I was kicked in the shoulder that had been popped grotesquely out of its socket.

“Got damn, Smokey! You motherfucker! Let her go!” I cried without shame, begging and pleading for my aunt.

“Hold her up.” Smokey motioned to one of his boys. He stepped forward and pulled Cissy up by her armpits. I saw him strain under her weight. She was unconscious and offered little resistance to his manipulation. Smokey slapped her hard across the face. She didn’t respond.

“She ain’t breathing. She ain’t breathing!” I hoped my words would get to him, but they had little effect.
“She ain’t
breathing!”
I shouted one more time and finally got a response.

A bark, sharp. Pointed. Followed by a single low growl. At the end of the alley the homeless man stood at the street entrance, Lana Turner at his side. They stayed long enough for their presence to be noted before jetting off toward the hills. I couldn’t expect anything more. It was all we needed.

Smokey’s boys dropped Cissy to the ground. She lay just as she fell, arms crooked with one leg bent awkwardly outward.

Smokey stood and backed away from Cissy’s discarded body. “Fuck. Let’s get out of here.” He kicked Cissy once, hard, to show his disappointment, then moved toward me like a bulldozer, and used one kick to the chin to send me backward to the ground. I landed on my bound hands. That time the pain was yellow, the yellow of vomit and piss as I rolled onto my side.

Smokey pulled out his gun but stopped when he saw people running along the end of the alley. “Fire! Somebody call 911! Fire!” The yells came from the running neighbors who bypassed the bowels of the alley and ran toward the fire on College Avenue. I could smell the smoke. The Cougar had gone up in flames.

I crawled to Cissy. Shards of glass ground into my knee but I kept moving. I wobbled upright and used my feet to move her clothes closer to her body. I could see the wound in the back of her head, open and weeping blood. “Cissy.”

She didn’t move. I used my feet to drag her shirt over as much of her body as possible. All I could think was that it had all started because of love—my blind, relentless love for Felicia and a misplaced desire to protect her. My single-mindedness had made everyone else in my life vulnerable. I’d left everyone, including myself, wide open, and now Cissy had paid.

A boom sounded behind me. A car explosion, I was sure. Smokey’s boys ran off into the night as the activity increased on the street. Smokey followed behind them. I knew he would
leave me alive. He wanted Holly, not me. He didn’t even want Cissy, though he would have taken supreme pleasure in her abuse. He wanted Holly, and he wanted me to be able to tell him what had happened.

On his way past me he lashed out and caught the bridge of my nose with his pistol. “Another time,” he said. Then raised the gun again. The second meeting of metal and flesh finished it off. I spiraled down into blackness.

“Maceo.” It was a hollow sound, with a hint of mocking laughter at the base. “Maceo, you fucked up.”

I looked down to find myself standing knee deep in water. The cool, clear water of a water fountain. The fountain in the center of Cal’s campus.

“Maceo.”

I hated the sound of my father’s voice. It reminded me of failure. “Maceo, Maceo, Maceo. Where’s my love, boy?”

I stepped from the fountain and walked away. I kept my back to him, refusing to give him power by looking into his eyes.

“Turn around, Maceo.” Then, quieter: “Don’t make me say it! Don’t make me say it!” Another round of spiteful laughter and then the word that locked me in place.

“Greg! Greg, you hear me talking to you?”

My father’s use of my real name was his favorite sport, a way to keep control and clarify the mark he’d left behind. “That’s right, I said it: Greg. Gregory Samuels, Junior. You think because that old man changed it, it changes you. You think it’s not the truth. Gregory Samuels, Junior. That’s you.”

He stepped in front of me and I ducked my head. I felt his palms on my chest pushing, pushing me backward until I fell underwater. I reached a hand out for his help, hoping he would pull me up. He laughed instead and spit a stream of putrid water into my eyes. He grabbed ahold of me with his arms and legs, using all his limbs to grip me like a vise. We dropped toward the bottom at breakneck speed.

I strained for air. He watched my struggle with pleasure.

Then we hit bottom. Solid earth.

“ ‘Beneath the cypress lies the heart of my life.’ What kind of shit is that?” My father read the words carved into the tombstone of my mother’s grave. The words were written on the first page of Gra’mère’s prayer book.

I looked around to find that we were in the cemetery at Red Fields. My head rested at the base of my mother’s tomb. Blood clouded my vision as it poured from a gash in my forehead.

“Did you hurt yourself? You weak motherfucker. Get up! I was going much faster than you when I crashed. Ninety miles an hour—after begging that old man to let me see you.” He spit at the ground, then wiped quickly and frantically when he realized the spit had landed on the Sophia of my mother’s name.

“Look what you made me do. That old man raised a sissy. I told him you needed to see me. And not like this. He wouldn’t let me near you.

“When I crashed they pulled me from the car with a crushed skull, but I held on for two days. You know why? I wanted to hang around long enough to see that old man’s heart stop.

“I should have taken Eleanor when I had the chance, but you came sooner than we thought so I blame you too. Just as much as I blame him. Now you owe me, so get up and help.”

He dragged me to my feet. I watched as he pierced the earth with a jagged shovel. “I can take her with me now. Help me. Pick up something, use your hands. You owe me, Greg.”

He knocked me to my knees and shoved my face in the open dirt.

“You owe me.”

I could tell by the way my father’s arms shook that he meant to kill me.

I
was moving.

“He’s coming to. He’s coming to.” I didn’t recognize the voice, but it was male and authoritative.

Not the voice of my father.

“Maceo? Oh, my God!” That voice I knew. Alixe. I knew it was her but I didn’t know how she’d gotten there. I tried to move my mouth to tell her about Cissy but I couldn’t. My head throbbed with nauseating intensity, and for the first time ever I could feel my nose on my face.

“What happened?” I heard her ask.

I listened to the rush and movement around me and couldn’t contribute a thing. I heard a gurgling sound from my own body and then a sticky liquid traveled out of my mouth and onto my neck.

“Move, people, move!” The voices became faint again, softer and far away. I dropped into another blackness.

“Maceo.”

The voice was frightened. I could hear it. I could even smell it. I knew that if I reached out it was possible that I could even touch it. It was that strong, that heavy and palpable.

“Maceo.”

I groaned in response and opened one eye. Alixe was there out of focus, in a hospital room.

“Can you hear me?”

“Where’s Cissy?” I tried to sit up but felt dizziness.

“Cissy’s here. Don’t get up. You have a concussion and a dislocated shoulder.”

It all came back, rushing back: Smokey and the alley. The homeless man and Cissy. Everything that had been done to her. “I need to get up. Help me up.”

“You need to stay put.” She eased me back on the pillow. “You need rest.”

I sat up anyway. It took all the strength and effort I had, but I couldn’t stay in the hospital bed. “How’d I get here?”

“Ambulance. Some people found you in an alley.”

“How long have I been here?”

“About half an hour. You also have bruised ribs.” I swung my legs off the side of the bed and ripped away the hospital gown with my good arm. I stood naked in the middle of the room, but it was the least sexual experience of my life. “Where are my clothes?”

I stood up and took a moment to get my balance. I caught sight of myself in the mirror while I searched for my clothes. My nose was packed with bloody gauze and my face was bruised with broken blood vessels from ear to ear. My torso was wrapped tightly and my arm was in a sling.

“I’m going to call a doctor.”

“I don’t care what you do. I’m getting my clothes.” I grabbed my jeans and the bloodied shirt from the closet.

Alixe watched but refused to help as I struggled into my pants. I dropped into the chair, wracked with frustration. “Help me.”

“I can’t do that, Maceo. The doctors want you to stay.”

“Alixe. The guys who did this. If I stay here they’ll come back. Do you understand?”

She blinked twice, hard, and backed toward the door. “What?”

“I cannot stay here.” I pronounced each word with precision to try and make her understand. “Help me, please.”

She inched forward, tentatively.

“Alixe, please.”

She sighed and helped me get my jeans up to my waist and my shoes on my feet.

Alixe guided me to the third floor, where Cissy was in Intensive Care. She hadn’t regained consciousness in the ambulance or in the hospital, and she was being watched closely. The family had been notified and the staff expected my grandparents to arrive at any moment.

Just as I reached the glass window of Cissy’s room I saw Holly burst through the doors on the other side. He stormed down the hall, frantic, already expecting the worst. He nearly lost his footing when he saw me. He ran the last yards, then looked through the window at an unconscious Cissy, a freeway of wires and tubes, her head wrapped entirely in bandages. He slammed his fist into the wall repeatedly until two orderlies approached from either end of the hallway.

“What the fuck?” His voice broke and he let his forehead fall to the glass. “What the fuck.”

Alixe watched us both, silently, at my side. I felt her fingers graze my elbow in comfort. She was still in uniform. I knew she
was expected somewhere else in the hospital but she hadn’t said a word about it.

“Lamb had just gotten me out and my pager was blowing up. I called the numbers back and they kept saying, “Where ya girl?” He looked at me with more pain in his face than I’d ever seen. “Who did this, Maceo? Smokey?”

As I nodded, Daddy Al, followed by Gra’mère, Rachel, Phine, and Nelia, stormed in through the double doors. A security guard ran behind them, waving a sign-in sheet that was ignored by everyone. Daddy Al’s faced was riddled with anger. He’d set his sights on Holly and myself. I took a step backward but he was on us both before we could say a word.

His open hand met the side of my face, sore from the encounter with Smokey. His palm stung worse than the gun butt had. I went sprawling onto the ground, landing once again on my shoulder. Gra’mère screamed and Rachel rushed forward to calm Daddy Al, but he shook her off. He yanked me up from the floor and used the other hand to pin Holly to the wall by his neck.