Eating Memories (37 page)

The butler sprang from the carriage and the young man’s strong arms gathered Morrisy in. “I’ve brought the doctor,” Holbrook said as he bore him to the carriage. “Rest your mind now, sir. I’ve brought help.”

Sanders was inside, waiting on the seat.

“He is horribly fevered,” Holbrook told Sanders in a hushed and fearful tone.

Morrisy lay in Holbrook’s lap, feeling the jerk and sway as the liveryman turned the team towards home. The doctor’s bearded face peered down at him. A meaty, cool hand cupped his cheek with a touch as welcome as the nearly-forgot touch of his mother.

“Morrisy,” the doctor said with a heavy sigh. “Dear God, Morrisy. I fear you have done yourself in.”

Morrisy fought to hang onto that caress, for it reminded him of childhood fevers, the sort which were a cause for great pampering and only of minor concern; the sort of fevers that brought toasted cheese and hot chocolate and his mother’s tender kisses. He closed his eyes, and even in the jolting of the wagon, felt a helpless sense of security.

* * *

Morrisy awoke with his arm in flames. He moaned and opened his eyes to find himself abed in his room. His staff and the doctor were working furiously about him, the doctor shouting orders at the butler and cook.

Morrisy reached out to tear the wrappings from the left arm and beat out the fire; but Holbrook jerked his good right arm down to the bed.

“Burning,” Morrisy rasped to Holbrook. “All aflame.”

The butler did not seem to understand. He peered at the doctor. “Has he dreams of Hell, then?”

“Most probably feels the mustard plaster,” the doctor answered distractedly.

“Burning,” Morrisy told them, but no one cared to extinguish the blaze. He would burn, all unnoticed it seemed, to an ember.

“His groans are piteous.” Holbrook was holding Morrisy down, seemingly oblivious that his master was about to be consumed.

“The fire,” Morrisy whispered. “See to the fire in my arm.”

Holbrook’s face contorted. “Oh, please, Dr. Sanders. Can you do nothing to ease his pain?”

“The pain is secondary now,” Sanders retorted. “It is merely a nuisance. Cook! Keep those linens hot. I want them scalding.”

Morrisy wished for the fire to be out. He wanted them all out, in fact. All out of the room. Charlotte was too shy to come with them there.

“What o’clock?” he asked.

Holbrook seemed startled but answered, “Quarter past seven, sir.”

Unbidden, Morrisy’s eyes were shutting again. He thought to ask Holbrook whether it were morn or night; but before he could part his fever-gummed lips, he had fallen asleep.

* * *

The clang of a steel instrument into a metal basin awoke him. The fire in his arm was out and the doctor was turning away from the bed, heavy shoulders hunched. “His kidneys have failed utterly. Call the priest and be quick.”

In a chair Holbrook was woeful and sobbing. “For all his kindnesses to me, I have betrayed him.”

Morrisy longed to tell Holbrook not to brood, that he was fit and very much alive, albeit dull-headed. He opened his mouth but had not the strength to fashion the words.

Sanders clapped Holbrook on the shoulder. “No fault of yours, my boy. He was strong-headed and would have died trying to bring her back whatever you’d done.”

Morrisy tried to raise his head and announce it was too early for eulogies. He meant only to blink, but fell asleep instead.

* * *

His shoulder was being shaken. Morrisy opened his eyes. Father Drayble had his purple stole astride his shoulders and was asking a question.

“Sins?” the priest repeated in a voice loud enough to raise the dead. “Have you any sins, Mr. Morrisy, you wish to confess?”

Oh sins, Morrisy thought. There were thousands of them, it seemed. He had loved his wife, whom he could embrace, more richly than the God whom he could not; but that was not a sin for the confessing, for Morrisy had no regrets of it. Heaven was an ephemeral commodity to Morrisy; and the fires of Hell a faint punishment for the inferno Charlotte had ignited in his loins. Had he wished for salvation he should have struck her head from her body and filled her mouth with garlic; but in loosing the collar of his dressing gown, he had willingly opened himself to the forces of the night, and had found, to his enchantment, they were sweet.

No. Morrisy had little fear of God or His wrath. He had already experienced all that could be known about damnation, and had discovered that its hidden name was grief.

“Leave him be,” Sanders snapped. “For he is not in his right mind, and I doubt he has strength for speech. Get on with it, then.”

Morrisy felt Drayble’s oiled finger press against his forehead, and so fell into a slumber again.

* * *

His eyes sprang open to treacly, loam-scented dark. Flat bits of metal slid down either side of his face like chill tears. Something was tied around his jaw. He meant to tear it furiously off, but his knuckles struck hard against the close ceiling, and his elbow knocked against the near wall.

Realizing where he was he panicked, tearing at the wood of the coffin with feeble hands. Soon exhausted, he quit his labors and lay listening to the silence. From out his lungs came no sound of air. His shuddering fingers could find no throbbing beat in his neck.

He was aware of the imminent crush of earth above the coffin, the weighty, terrible tonnage of it. Horrified, he tried calling for someone to bring him out; but he had no breath left and there was none about him to hear.

Holbrook. Holbrook would come. After a few moments of hopeful quiet, he became aware that something sharp and hard was digging into his back, as though he lay on stones. Inching his arm around, he drew one bauble out. Not a stone, he felt. Something heavier, something more ornate, its shape a kneeling angel.

Charlotte’s coffin screws. But how had they come there? he wondered. And what could their presence mean? He smiled in relief as he realized that it was Holbrook’s way of telling him he had found Charlotte and set her lid aside.

Above him in the world, Charlotte would be feeding on young Holbrook, stealing the roses from his cheeks. Morrisy waited patiently to hear the chuck-chuck of a spade into earth.

He waited.

Alone with his questions, he wondered if something had delayed Holbrook. Had the man forgotten? Had he become overly enchanted with the sweetness of Charlotte’s feeding and to the unaccustomed richness which had been bequeathed him?

Morrisy waited.

Memories leeched from his mind as the torpid drip of water draws minerals through a rock. Morrisy struggled, but soon forgot the manor house that he’d deeded to Holbrook. He forgot the acid-sweet taste of berries, and the warmth of the sun on his back.

Finally, and with only a whimper of regret, the memories of Charlotte faded, as well.

He waited, forgetting even what it was that he anticipated. Slow as rain seeping into earth, Morrisy became a changed man, one stripped of love, of waning hope, and last and most blessedly, of heartache, until all that was left him was his thirst.

Author’s Note:
I’ve worked for a number of years with African Americans, long enough for me to have learned to recognize the Stupid White People Tricks folks often play. I dedicate this, in fact, to our collective white ignorance.

In the ‘80s,
The Dallas Morning News
was picketed by John Wylie Price’s group of stalwart (and often annoying) protesters. The Dallas Police Department had gone into overkill. Picture it. The African-American protesters. The sun just starting to chase the blue shadows. The mist rising from the river behind us. Across the street, in the park, a line of mounted cops with nightsticks waiting silent in front of the fountain. I tell you, I’d been at my share of protests in the ’60s, but this was the most intimidating scene I’d ever witnessed.

I was standing there at the first floor plate glass windows with a black friend. We were both pretty solemn (I was thinking of the Cossacks who had run down the Russian peasants, in fact), when a white woman of my acquaintance, a well-known bigot, came up to us and said, “Why, look at them out there, waiting to cause trouble! Martin Luther King must just be rolling over in his grave.”

That said, she walked away. The friend and I exchanged glances, then we both collapsed into laughter.

Well, nobody got hurt, even though old John Wylie picketed us for several months. The employees got to know the protesters. I’d walk through the picket line every day and say “Hi.” John Wylie helped an elderly white woman of my acquaintance to cross the street every afternoon. We made if through.

And bigotry’s getting better here. We even have an African-American mayor, a great one, a guy who’s talking about making the Trinity River into a park. Whoo-doggies! Can you believe it?

Peace at last.

The cab deposited them at the end of the Jefferson Street Bridge as casually as a pigeon dropping guano on a statue. Garbell and Woods clambered out, leaving Boyer to pay. He put his company Visa through the cab’s reader and from deep inside the robotic viscera of the machinery came a satisfied sigh: the sound of a fiscal-mechanical orgasm.

As soon as Boyer’s legs were free, the door slid shut and the metal box slammed itself into reverse, speeding north towards the bubble towers of Dallas. It looked as though the cab thought all of Hell were at its heels.

When Boyer hiked his rifle and backpack to his shoulder he noted with pleasure that his new fatigues made a crisp, arrogant crackle. Twelve hundred bucks at Abercrombie and Fitch, twelve hundred bucks that he hadn’t been able to write off on his company account.

Glancing up at the sky, he had the sudden, riveting fear that it might rain. Somewhere in that backpack was a canny little rain slicker, folded to a size no bigger than a wallet, only he wasn’t sure he would be able to find it in time. While he was searching and unfolding, his hunting fatigues would get soaked beyond repair; his sparkling new rifle would grow an incipient layer of rust.

“What’s that smell?” Woods asked in his prissy tenor voice. From where he stood, well to the rear of the Purchasing Director, Boyer imagined he could see the disgusted curl of Woods’ effeminate lips.

Boyer and his company were spending a pile of money to tame that mouth. After this weekend, he expected Woods’ lips to purse in budgetary thought when catalogues were shoved up to his face.

“The river,” Garbell, the rotund Controller, answered. “The fucking river always stinks like this. It’s from the dead bodies they throw in it.” He whinnied a laugh.

Boyer glanced around the bridge worriedly. Their guide was late. Maybe he wouldn’t show up and it would rain and the three of them would have to trudge back to Dallas in a downpour. Now that should make an impression.

Then Boyer caught sight of a man making his way slowly towards them, and he froze. Well, they had black men in Dallas, of course. But Dallas had presentable blacks, men you wouldn’t be ashamed to introduce as members of your country club.

The man approaching was definitely not presentable. He was short and broad. His tee shirt, two sizes too small for his pectorals, was so begrimed that it appeared to have clawed its way out of a shallow grave. The material was cut short above the waist, giving whomever cared to look an assertive vista of the man’s washboard abs. Where had he gotten that physique? Prison?

Standing a little straighter, Boyer watched the black enter the bridge and saunter towards them. At the guardrail Woods and Garbell turned, their faces cautious.

The man halted. Boyer glanced down to the incredibly dirty Nikes. Two brown toes were peeking out from a rent in the left shoe’s side.

“You the mo’fucks want to go hunting?”

It was a question with a double-blind. Instead of answering, Boyer asked, “You our guide?”

The man spun on his worn soles and headed down the bridge toward Oak Cliff. “You come on, you comin’,” he called, leaving the three to tag after.

Just over the bridge, the guide turned left and entered a maze of sagging, burned-out warehouses. Boyer found himself, despite misgivings, admiring the set of the black’s shoulders and the belligerence of his swagger.

As though charisma were something one could catch, like athlete’s foot, the proximity of the guide made Boyer feel like a real man, too—someone on the heady verge of adventure. Two weeks earlier, while making their arrangements, Boyer had tried, with limited success, to explain the thrill to his wife.

“Sport?” Carolyn had asked dryly. “Sport’s not when you go out and kill things at a distance. Sport’s when big men hit and bump and throw each other down on Sunday afternoon TV.”

Carolyn simply failed to understand the machismo of hunting.

“What’s your name?” Boyer asked.

The guide gave Boyer a suspicious frown. “Russell,” he told him after a hesitation.

Not a real man’s name, but there it was. “Russell,” Boyer said thoughtfully. “Well, call me Dak.”

“Dak,” the guide said. “That supposed to be your name or what?”

“Right!” Boyer quick-stepped closer to the man’s side. “And that’s Alton,” he said, pointing to an obviously annoyed Woods. “And Chaz.” Boyer put his hand down quickly as Garbell shot him a dark, warning look. The two executives were obviously of the old school, the one which didn’t believe in getting too friendly with the help.

Boyer cooled his new ardor for Russell, put his head down, and walked on in silence.

“You three got the stupidest damn names of any white people I ever met.”

Woods leveled another drop-dead look at Boyer.

Quickly Boyer snapped his head forward and drank .in the scenery. The central decorating hue of Oak Cliff appeared to be a drear, post-disaster gray; yet where the asphalt had cracked, hardy grass grew. As he passed by, Boyer looked down at it incredulously. It wasn’t good-looking grass, to be sure, but it was wild and untamed, much like Russell himself.

“So, good hunting around here?” Boyer asked.

“What you pays me for.” Russell put his hand, palm out, towards Boyer.

Translating the gesture, Boyer dug the credit card from a flap in his backpack, and then watched in amazement as Russell drew a mag reader from a faded, torn pocket. With a quick, efficient zip, the guide slipped the card through.

Boyer experienced a moment of dizzy fear. How much money was the reader syphoning off the company bank account? Was it the amount earlier agreed upon, or not? Would Boyer’s boss, Minski the Sales Monster, call him into his office next month and wave large invoices in Boyer’s face?

Boyer wanted to ask Russell to see the reader, but he wasn’t at all sure how the guide would take the request. When Russell handed back the card he took it and slipped it into his pack without a murmur.

“Gonna be great hunting today. Got feeders set up,” Russell said.

The emptiness of the streets was disturbing; the pregnant gray sky added a dollop more peril to the ambiance. As he walked, Boyer found himself matching Russell’s march, step for step, cleaving to him, actually, as though they might be striding down the wedding aisle together.

“We need to keep close to each other, hear?” Russell’s irises were a startlingly soft red-brown, like the auburn of fox fur. “I paid off the gangs, but still, it’s smarter to stick close.”

Russell and Boyer turned in tandem to see the pair of executives trailing by nearly half a block. Garbell had taken a pint bottle from somewhere and he and Woods were passing it back and forth, their faces pink with merriment and liquor.

Russell stopped dead in the street, a scowl on his face. “Get ’em up here. Try to keep them sober.”

Trotting back down the street, his rifle and backpack beating a tattoo against his rump, Boyer met the executives’ grinning faces with a somber frown of his own. “He says we need to stay together.”

Woods curled his lip. Garbell gave a fat sigh of agreement as he put his pint bottle away.

Three blocks later Russell paused by a flaking stucco building. “Get them rifles ready, hear? We go inside, I flick on the light, and you got yourselves a field day.”

Boyer slid the gun from his shoulder and checked out his Target Lockon. Next to him Garbell, who had evidently done some pre-hunt target practice, was calibrating his new Remington model 4010’s KillCount down to zero. Enviously, Boyer studied Woods’ gun, a Belgian-made beauty whose price tag had to have been nearly twice that of his own.

“Ready?” Russell asked.

The three nodded. The guide ushered them into the building, into the fetid, musty darkness, a darkness that grew even more frightening as Russell shut the door.

“Shoulder to shoulder,” Russell said from the impenetrable shadows somewhere to Boyer’s left. “Don’t want you shooting your asses off.”

Boyer groped a hand to the side, and collided with something pillowy: Garbell’s stomach.

“You set?” Russell whispered.

Boyer answered in a hoarse, excited rasp, “Yeah.”

Then the lights came on.

Boyer squinted into the florescent blaze. In front of him a tray of rotting food squatted in the center of the raw concrete. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cockroaches made a brown, gleaming chevron over the tray. A few began to flee. More froze, seemingly tom between the seduction of dinner and the peril of the light. Boyer raised his rifle and began to fire, the hysterical beep-beep of his Lockon screaming in his ear.

Through the dusty atmosphere of the warehouse blatted the clean red beacons of his pulse laser, the green of Garbell’s and Woods’. Cockroaches spun, smoking, on the floor.

He shot. Ten, twenty, sixty roaches, fell. He was vaguely aware of Garbell’s rasping litany of, “Oh, boy. Oh, boy,” and Woods’ dark and sinister chuckle.

“That’s it.”

Russell’s voice broke through the sound of drumming blood in Boyer’s head. He lifted his gaze from his Leopould scope and noticed that the floor was a veritable battlefield of dead and dying bugs. The tray of food sat, nothing moving atop it.

“All right!” Garbell shouted and slapped Woods’ and then Boyer’s open, offered palm. “All right!”

They furiously checked their KillCounters. One hundred and twelve kills for Boyer, eighty two for Garbell, and Woods with a poor showing of fifty eight, despite the superiority of his gun. Boyer felt a moment of apprehension. He’d shot better than the men he had wanted to entertain. But then Russell’s huge paw slammed his palm with a large, satisfying, stinging smack.

“My man!” Russell said. “My man! You one mean cockroach killer!”

Aglow with the complement, Boyer flicked a glance to the side arid noticed that Garbell didn’t seem injured by his second-place showing. “Let’s kill more,” the Controller said, his round cheeks aflame with excitement.

Herding them outside, Russell took them to another hunting ground. Much to his delight, Boyer beat the both of them again, Garbell retaining his solid runner-up position. Woods began truculently complaining that his gun’s scope was off. He was still muttering about his gun when Russell announced lunch.

The announcement arrived jointly with the rain. The three hunters diligently took their slickers from their backpacks and slipped them on, Boyer finding his even more easily than he had hoped.

Russell, unraincoated, took shelter under the eaves of a building. “I take you up to Maxie’s,” Russell said. “We can eat lunch there.”

He darted out into the cloudburst, his head down, his arms tucked to his sides against the sudden chill. They followed. Boyer had expected a restaurant, but Russell’s destination was a flower-bordered house, three blocks down: a tiny, green-landscaped jewel among the crumbling ruins.

At Russell’s impatient knock, the door opened. Maxie was a thin, taut man who seemed to be fashioned of rope and wire. His skin, the only soft thing about him, was the texture of good glove leather.

Russell and Maxie exchanged a few whispered words—Maxie’s dark eyes shifting skeptically in Boyer’s direction—then the guide ushered them in.

Maxie’s kids were eating lunch on the threadbare rug of the living room. Three grade-school girls sat primly around a foot-high table while a boy of about two stumped bow-Ieggedly around, torn sandwich in hand, his diaper sagging.