The Outcasts (24 page)

L
ucinda was alone with the man in the bed, which was massive and ornate, like the rest of the furniture in the room. A fine sheen of sweat covered his naked pale body. He was blindfolded with a silk handkerchief, his hands tied to the elaborate headboard with soft leather straps. He told her to stand closer and described how he wanted her to touch him. He began his customary rhythmic grunting as she stroked him, muttering for her to slow down or speed up or grasp him more firmly.

She turned her head towards the door, looking for Tartine to return. As much as she hated the woman, her presence made the time spent with the fish less frightening, less repugnant. What she had experienced in the past few hours was something she could never have imagined in even her most depraved moments. She thought of his flesh under her hands and envisioned gouging the skin with her nails the way her own flesh had been peeled away by the leather straps.

It could not be much longer before Bill would slip into the house and take his pick of the rare, jeweled objects that lay scattered about, the money carelessly piled on the man’s desk, and then she could put on her clothes and leave.

The man shifted impatiently under her touch and she worked her hands more forcefully and he exhaled with pleasure.

She pulled her thoughts away from the room and thought of Bill and his erratic treatment of her the past few days. She had known for some time that he was a killer but had willed herself to believe that it had always been in self-defense. Just as she had willed her mind to separate his charm from his character, his facile warmth from his cold efficiency, his ready passions from his utter incapability to feel love or even liking for another.

But he had cared for
her,
had promised her that he always would—until her disobedience regarding May, and his discovery that there was no gold in Middle Bayou. His coldness and threats had worsened ever since. Even her recent illness had made him impatient and distant. Her constant need for reassurances was weakening her and pushing him farther away.

She again looked impatiently towards the door and saw a form in the doorway that was not Tartine. It was a man lingering in the half-light of the hallway. At first she thought it was one of the servants loitering, spying on them, but the man stepped into the room and she saw it was Bill.

He quickly put a finger to his lips and she continued stroking the man on the bed, but she was suddenly acutely aware of her own dirty, matted hair, the film of old sweat on her face and body, the scratches on her arms with their ugly crisscrossing patterns. Bill watched her at work, his eyes as steady and emotionless as a serpent’s, and then the features of his face changed. A look of distaste, even disgust, shadowed his mouth, and in that moment she knew he was going to leave her.

She had become motionless, staring at Bill, and the fish shifted on the bed and said, “Don’t stop. I didn’t tell you to stop.”

Bill pulled a long slender object from his pocket, and as he approached the bed, the object caught the light and resolved itself into a folding shaver’s blade, which he opened gracefully in one fluid movement. He slipped it into Lucinda’s hand and closed her palm over the handle with both of his hands, and when she looked at it there was already blood drying on the blade.

Pushing Lucinda onto the bed, Bill leaned over her and whispered, “Do it. Prove to me you’ll do anything for me.”

The fish, startled by the sudden pressure on the bed, began to protest. Bill quickly removed the blindfold, and, seeing the intruder, the man began to scream.

Lucinda, crouching on the bed, looked at the blade, unable to move. Bill knelt behind her, reached around, and grasped her hand in his own with a crushing grip to guide her movements. He directed the blade at the fish’s throat and made a rapid, sweeping pass. The fish stopped screaming in that instant, his eyes wide in terror, and began thrashing violently, a thin wash of blood starting to seep through the shallow wound.

She could feel Bill’s breath in her ear and he said to her, “Look at him.”

But she closed her eyes, her hand still gripped tightly in Bill’s own, the bed bucking with the fish’s struggles, and he made another pass with the blade and she felt it catch and progress haltingly, as though it were cutting through something denser than flesh. She felt the warm wash of blood over her hands, but still she kept her eyes closed, heard Bill’s voice saying, “Look at him…
look at him
.”

The fish still hadn’t begun screaming again, but he thrashed weakly, his legs kicking for a surprisingly short time.

Her head fell back onto Bill’s chest, his work now done; their hands rested quietly together on his thighs, the movement of his chest deep and even and satisfied, as after their lovemaking.

When she finally opened her eyes, it was to stare up at the large canopy overhead, the parallel lines of the struts, intersected by cross supports, looking near perfect in their execution, and she soundlessly recited,
If a transversal line cuts across parallel lines at right angles it is called a perpendicular transversal…

Her breathing calmed and she rested awhile in a vacant, cool place.

I
t had begun to rain in earnest, but the boy was where Nate had left him. They came to Canal Street, where the boy hailed a carriage with a whistle and Nate followed him into its dark swaying interior. Nate had never been in such a covered carriage before and he felt it undignified, the conveyance somehow feminine, and it sharpened rather than diminished his sense of exposure. But he was soon glad to be out of the rain, the trip being too far a distance to cover quickly on foot. The carriage moved down St. Charles Avenue, and once the boy pointed to a group of armed men just exiting a saloon.

“Duverje’s men, looking for you,” he said.

The carriage turned back towards the river on First Street but pulled over after a short distance when the boy leaned out the window and told the driver to stop. He instructed Nate to pay the fare and they stepped onto a street lined with gaslights and large houses tucked behind lush growths of still-green magnolia and live oak.

There were few walkers and even fewer carriages, and the boy moved without hesitation across the street to a two-story columned house. They stood beneath a dense stand of crape myrtles and the boy looked at Nate expectantly.

Nate scanned the second-floor balcony for any open doors but everything seemed closed tight, the windows shuttered and dark. The front of the house was elevated from the ground by a few shallow stairs and, though it was exposed to the street, Nate realized that there were no lights coming from the front windows either, leaving the narrow porch deeply shadowed. A steep brick wall encircled the back of the house, but enough trees grew alongside it to aid anyone wishing to scale the barrier.

He looked up and down the deserted street and whispered to the boy, “What’s your name?”

“Alger.”

“I need you to try and scale that wall, circle round to the back, and see if any doors are unlocked.” He grabbed Alger’s collar and brought the boy’s face up close to his own. “And Alger, you stay in the shadows. You see any movement, you take off, hear?”

The boy nodded and disappeared into the blackness along the side of the house, his bare feet making no sound on the soaked earth. He easily gained a toehold on a magnolia tree and climbed effortlessly up the lowest branches, then dropped to the far side of the wall.

Nate hunkered down, uncertain how and when McGill would approach the house. He had a good view of the street from both directions within the stand of trees, which were dense enough to keep him from being observed from anyone inside the house as well. The wall surrounding the back garden made it difficult for a man to get in unless the back gate had been left open or unlocked, but still, there was no guarantee that while he kept a vigil at the front of the house, McGill wouldn’t gain entry from the back.

The rain pelted first one side of the street and then the other, as though poured from a sweeping, celestial watering can, and the earth and the rotting leaves blanketing it had a keen, wasting odor, like coffee grounds boiled in fish oil, so unlike the astringent, metallic scent of the desert of West Texas or the peppery fragrance of the Big Thicket to the east. It was the smell of long unattended decay, of people living too near one another; the effluvia of extravagant wastefulness.

The minutes passed and the boy still did not reappear. The house remained silent and Nate shifted in restless anxiety with a feeling of worsening dread taking hold in his chest. He stood, determined to follow the boy over the wall, when a hazy figure on the porch caught his eye. The boy had emerged from the opposite side of the house. He paused once, as though listening for sounds, the cameo of his pale face contrasting sharply with the surrounding shadows. He crept to the door and pressed one ear to it before grabbing the knob and twisting it. The door opened easily, and, turning once to signal Nate to come on, he slipped inside.

“Shitfire,” Nate said. He yanked the Dance from his belt and ran, sliding in the mud, for the porch stairs. Quickly scanning the streets, he gained the porch in a few steps, and then stood to one side of the door frame. He took a breath and stepped into the entranceway, his shooting arm extended, the gun cocked. It was dark in the hallway but a lamp was lit to the far side, next to a curving staircase. Alger stood motionless within the halo of light, his back to Nate, looking at something on the floor.

Nate remained still for a moment, listening for any sounds that were not their own, and then toe-heeled his way towards the lamplight. He grabbed Alger around his chest, pushed the boy behind him, and saw what was on the ground. It was a woman seated against the wall, her arms at her sides, her legs sprawled and unbent, the toes of her red-and-white-stockinged feet turned out like a dancer’s. Her head was bowed, as though in prayer, and a solid sheet of drying blood had flowed down her bosom and around her body like a cape carelessly thrown.

Keeping an eye to the stairs, Nate uncocked the hammer on the Dance, knelt down, and pulled at the woman’s hair, tipping her head back and exposing the slit in her throat, which opened like a gaping mouth. There was no mole under the eye identifying her as Lucinda, and he guessed it was Hattie’s missing girl.

He dropped her head, stood, and grabbed Alger by the back of his neck. He shook the boy and whispered, “You get out of here. Wait for me in those trees. If I’m not out in fifteen minutes, go get help.”

“From where—” the boy started, but Nate gave him a push and Alger ran, skating once on the wet marble, and slipped out the door.

Nate moved to the bottom of the stairs, straining his ears for anything to indicate someone else alive in the house. Hugging the wall, he moved up the steps onto the second floor and saw lamplight from an open door at the end of the hall. There were no sounds, no winking eclipses onto the carpet thrown by someone moving in front of the lamp. He walked carefully to the door, inhaled, and moved gun-first into the room.

It was a bedroom containing a massive canopied bed, its heavy satin covers spilling onto the floor; lying motionless on its sheets was a bulging form, fish-belly white. He approached cautiously, his shooting arm testing the room, and saw that it was a man, spread-eagled and naked, his throat cut raggedly from ear to ear. On the far side of the bed was a standing mirror, and a wan oval shape reflected in the glass composed itself into a face with staring eyes.

He wheeled around and saw in the corner opposite the bed a woman painted in blood, her dark hair wild around her head, her knees drawn up defensively to her chest. He held the gun on her for a moment, but her eyes remained fixed and unblinking and he knelt down, placing his cheek close to her mouth and nose, feeling for breath.

He felt nothing and pulled his face back to check for the identifying mark that would prove she was Deerling’s daughter. He looked in her eyes and with a jolt realized that they were now focused with calm lucidity on his own. A rasping sound from behind caused him to turn, and before he felt the blow to the side of his head, he reflexively discharged his revolver, then lay in a throbbing, half-aware state.

He was rolled onto his back, the Dance taken from his grasp, and when his vision cleared, he was looking at the man from the Lynchburg ferry crossing, now beardless and without spectacles. McGill smiled in a genial way, and Nate remembered the liking he had felt for the man, the sense of immediate kinship with a well-spoken and sympathetic traveler.

McGill hunkered down next to him, holding the gun casually, loosely, and said, “Hello, Officer.”

Nate started to sit up and McGill shook his head. He said, “That shot may or may not be answered. New Orleans has such a shocking disregard for the sounds of violence. Nonetheless, I shall be brief. I admire your tenacity. It took courage to follow me into a darkened house. But it was very foolish.

“You now have two choices. I can shoot you, and if I do so, you will die slowly and painfully. Or I can cut your throat, which will be quicker, but I can’t speak to the pain.” He smiled brightly and made a sweeping motion across his throat. “Neither could my most recent encounter. Severs the speech organ, you see.”

Nate raised his head and looked at Lucinda, whose eyes had returned to their glassy unresponsiveness. The blow had fractured his thoughts, but it was McGill’s effortless affability, driving the flow of events swiftly and cheerfully before him, like trained sheep to a corral, that made his stomach clench and heave. Nate said, “There will be others coming.”

“No. I think you are quite alone.” McGill waggled the gun like a finger. “I will give you a few more minutes to decide. Otherwise, I’ll have to choose for you.” He raised the pistol, pointed it at Nate, midbelly. “I’m sure your partner would have decided on the latter, given the opportunity. How long did it take him to die? I’ll bet it took more than a few hours.” He stood then and dragged a small dressing chair a safe distance from Nate. He sat and crossed his legs comfortably, brushing lint from his pants with his fingertips.

“Have you ever pondered your own death, Nate?” he asked. “Not death in the abstract, but the final, inevitable moment when you are confronted with the rushing formlessness of what’s coming next. How is it, do you think, that we have the will to live from day to day through the horrors of life when at the same time we are eaten away by the suspicion, or even the certainty, that after death there is only the eternal black hole?”

He rested his elbows on his knees, holding the gun between his two palms. “I think this deluded belief in an afterlife comes from God. Oh, I believe in God. Or, rather, a kind of god: a malevolent spirit, a trickster that rests in the mind like a disease and whispers to us that we do not stop but continue on in some kind of fever dream in the beyond.”

He gestured towards Lucinda. “Ask Lucy what she has seen after returning from some blasted wasteland of nonbeing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing!” He laughed and settled back into the chair. His expression grew contemplative. “In every infected mind, on every dying face, resides the stubborn hope that somehow one’s
aliveness
will not end. The constancy of this belief is astonishing, and really quite maddening. But I am the extinguisher of that hope.”

He stood up and pulled the chair to one side. “Do you know what I did during the war? I was an engineer, a builder. And yet, all my accomplishments—the roads, the bridges, the aqueducts—were seemingly pointless compared to the lauded feats of our butchers in the field. I killed not one person in a battle, but now I am the hunted man.” He cocked the trigger and aimed, shutting one eye in an exaggerated stance.

“It’s what I would call the greatest of social ironies.” His finger pulled the trigger, but the hammer remained fixed; there was no resulting blast, and Nate realized before McGill did that the thing that Dr. Tom had warned him about repeatedly had happened. The cap from the previous shot had split and fouled in the cylinder.

With that thought came the desperate reflex to move, but a face, haloed in dark hair, appeared behind McGill’s shoulder, and an outstretched arm pointed towards McGill’s head, the hand curled with graceful fingers around something small and metallic. A dull popping noise was followed by an explosive scattering of the top of McGill’s forehead, and he went rigid, falling to the side opposite the concussion. He convulsed for a short time and Lucinda stood and watched, the Remington remaining in her hand, until Nate could stand and yank it from her grasp.

Her lips were moving as though still in conversation with the dead man when Nate pulled back his fist to strike her, fear still coursing through his body. The remembrances of Tom’s final hours, of the German woman with the murdered children, made him not want to kill her so much as obliterate her, reduce her vacant features and slackened body to an unrecognizable heap.

Instead, he slowly unclenched his fist and took her hand, seeing for the first time that the blood matting her nightdress did not appear to be her own and most likely came from the man on the bed. He led her down the stairs and out the door, where the boy was waiting for them, still keeping vigil in the stand of sodden crape myrtles.