Flight of the Stone Angel (8 page)

This was almost too much for Charles. His parents had never allowed him to run indoors, lest he damage some old and valuable piece of china glass – Augusta had ridden a horse through the house.

He followed her up the grand staircase, and as they passed by the open doors along the hallway, she gave him a running commentary.

here were precious clocks in every room, all stopped at the same time, the hour of her father’s death.

Augusta said, somewhat disgusted, “The house is made of cypress. Termites cannot penetrate it. The walls will not fall down. These floors are made of heart pine, and there’s hardly a patch of wood rot. However, I am making some headway with the roof. It’s got some prominent holes that’ll let you see daylight. The poor bats, though. They don’t take too well to direct sun. Some of them are migrating to the lower floors.”

He peered into the last room before the next staircase. The carpet was spotted with dung. Bats had indeed taken up residence here. Against one wall was an elaborately carved canopy bed. He had only seen one like it at a New York auction house. Mosquito netting partially covered the bed in a wreckage of gauzy spiderwebs and woven rotted threads of cotton. A dead bat lay on the mattress, its molding body fusing with the material.

They continued up the stairs and into the attic, where he found more antiques serving as homes to spiders. At his feet lay a broken Federal bull’s-eye mirror.

“Wait here a minute,” said Augusta. “I’ll make sure they’ve all cleared out. There’s only been a handful of bat rabies cases in the past thirty years, but you never know.” She disappeared through a doorway, and the scent of something foul came wafting through the brief opening.

He turned to the only source of light and air. This was not the round window facing the town. This one afforded a view of the land at the back of the house. A pair of field glasses lay on the broad sill.

Looking down, in the hour of dusk, he could still make out what once had been a carefully planned maze and stepped terraces of lush vegetation. This was the good bone structure of a ruined garden. He could imagine it in bygone days when the shrubs had been carefully trimmed and the flowers confined to their beds. A flagstone path wound through the grounds, disappearing in places where it was overgrown with plants reverting to the wild, blooming in random bouquets of blue and red. More exotic flames of orange were –

Oh, but now two bright-colored blossoms took flight, and all the flowers called out to one another. Birds – the garden was alive with birds. In a chain reaction of motion, all the colors were rising from the foliage in a brilliant wave, fluttering on the air and singing songs.

He picked up the binoculars and trained them on the small pecan trees and shrubs. Here and there, he picked out the conical tops of bird feeders spread throughout the avian sanctuary.

This was no side effect of Augusta’s neglect; it was an act of creation.

She was back again, standing beside him, and the flowers continued to fly and sing.

“My compliments, Augusta. It’s the most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen.”

“Let me show you the view from the other side while we still got some light. Hold your nose when you pass through that door.”

He did as she suggested, but the stench of dung and urine was overwhelming, and his eyes stung. He could feel the crunch of bugs beneath the soles of his shoes, as she led him around the stalagmites of droppings with the beam of her flashlight.

Not all the bats had flown at sunset. A pair of tiny eyes gleamed with reflected light. He turned away quickly, not wanting to alarm the creature into sudden flight. When they had cleared the midsection of the attic and passed under an archway, a breeze of fresh air alleviated the smell. Light penetrated the roof through a gaping hole between the wooden ribs of the ceiling. Foliage had attached itself to sod trapped by the wind in the cross wood of exposed beams. Ironically, he recognized the encroaching plant as resurrection fern.

And now he noticed that another bat had been left behind. The animal was revolving in circles on the floor, trailing a torn wing in the dust.

“I wonder if that cat’s been up here.” Augusta looked down at the poor beast and shook her head. “Now that one – see the red metal on his leg? He was banded fifteen years ago. The government man wanted to mark a lot more of them that way, but he had clumsy hands and crippled as many bats as he did right, so I run him off the place. That bat is the old man of the colony.”

And now it was at the end of its life. The injury to its wing fit well with a cat’s claw. If the bat could not fly, it could not feed. “What’s the name of the bat?”

“Charles, if you ever hear me giving pet names to flying rodents, you can tell them it’s time to put the old woman away.”

“Sorry, I meant the species. Brown bat? Serotine?”

“The government man who checks the bands, he calls them
big
brown bats or sometimes
Genus Eptesicus.
I call them owl food.” The old woman was standing at another round window overlooking the town. A telescope stood on a tripod, its long barrel pointed down to the earth. A notebook lay open on the sill and bore a crude map recording the sites of nests.

This was what the bird in flight must see. The whole countryside was laid out before him. Augusta pointed to a Victorian house on the other side of the cemetery. A wide dirt-colored ribbon led away from the building, and he recognized it as the mystery road along Finger Bayou, the one with the blank sign.

“That’s Cass Shelley’s place.” She moved the telescope closer to the glass and focussed it. “Here, take a look.”

He put one eye to the lens. The Shelley house bore a recent coat of paint. The shrubs had been cut back, and all the flowers kept to the perimeters of rock gardens surrounding the trees in the front yard. There were no signs of neglect, and that was odd for a property in Augusta’s stewardship.

Beyond the boundary of wide Upland Bayou were the homes and shops of Dayborn. Augusta was pointing to the line of trees beyond the town square.

“Now you see that windbreak of trees? That’s the end of Dayborn’s proper limits and the beginning of Owltown. That’s where the New Church roadies live in their cracker box houses and mobile homes.”

He followed her pointing finger to a crescent of neon lights bounded on its far side by another bayou.

“Owltown never sleeps,” said Augusta. “Twenty-four hours a day, you can buy liquor and drugs. Gambling goes on till daybreak. That’s the Lauries’ work. Almost everyone in that place is related to the Lauries by blood or marriage. Don’t you go there after dark, unless you take a gun.”

“Why is it called Owltown?”

“Oh, it’s had that name forever. Up till thirty years ago, we used to have quite a population of rare owls on that plot of land. That was before the damn Lauries took over the habitat and cleared the horseshoe bend on the lower bayou to make a fairground. Damn waste.”

“I gather you dislike these people.”

“It wouldn’t bother me if the whole place burned to the ground. I don’t trust myself to go to Owltown with matches in my pocket.” She moved the telescope back to the side of the window. “Well, now you’ve seen it all.”

“Thank you for the tour.”

“My pleasure, Charles. Anything else I can do for you?”

“You can tell me how Cass Shelley died.”

She was genuinely surprised. “I thought Henry or Betty would’ve told you that by now.”

“I never thought to ask them. So, how did Mallory’s mother die?”

“I believe the attack was outside the house. That’s where Henry found Kathy’s dog. Poor beast was half dead. Cass’s bloody handprints were all over a good portion of one side of the house where she must have been driven back to the wall. The grass was covered with her blood, and they found two of her teeth there. And there were rocks scattered around – lots of rocks. They had bits of her skin and blood on them.”

“Are you saying this woman was stoned to death?”

Jimmy Simms bore the Laurie family resemblance in a girlish delicacy of bone structure. And though he had turned thirty this year, his unshaven face was still spotty with the straggly silken hairs of an adolescent beard.

Jimmy’s father would no longer speak to his small half-finished son, and neither would the man allow him in the house anymore. But over the long years of estrangement, Jimmy’s mother had continued to slip him her husband’s castoff clothes. He could roll up the legs of his father’s long pants, but the shoes were so big, even with newspaper stuffed in the toes, he always limped with a blister on one foot or the other.

He shambled up the path to the Shelley house. The old black Labrador retriever knew his footsteps, despite the alternating limp. The animal raised his regal head in the usual greeting, a look of tolerance but no great interest.

Jimmy reached into the pocket of his oversized windbreaker and pulled out a bulky package. Unfolding the paper wrapping, he displayed the half-eaten fish fillet for the dog’s approval. He had recently retrieved it from the trash bin behind Jane’s Cafe, and now he set it down on the dirt in front of the black Lab. Years ago, he had brought offerings of red meat, but the dog had since lost his chewing teeth, and now Jimmy’s gifts were made of softer foods.

“Babe Laurie is dead,” he said to the dog for the fifth day in a row, as if by repetition he could make himself understood. He sat down in the dirt and stroked the animal’s neck.

The dog only sniffed at the fish, and then rested his massive graying head on his paws.

The sun had set, and the light was going fast. It had been Jimmy’s long habit never to be caught out after dark, but tonight he decided to remain until the moon had risen. There was no telling how much time was left for the ancient dog.

The animal slept for a while. From the low growls and the frantic movement of a hind leg, Jimmy surmised that the old black Lab did not like his dreams. Now the dog snapped awake, raised his head and turned his face upward until the waxing moon was reflected in his eyes. Jimmy jumped in his skin, believing the eyes had begun to glow.

The dog stood up with great effort. He yelped, then crooned, his voice slowly swelling to a full-throated howling.

The old lab still had magnificent moments. One day soon, the animal would die, and Jimmy would miss his company and their common bond of despair, which the dog expressed so eloquently in his song to the moon.

The dog believed his own name was a long high note and two whistling ripples of music from a child’s mouth. No one had called him by this sound since the child went away. She had done the unthinkable. She had left him behind, broken and bleeding. And she continued to do this to him night after night, in every dream, eroding his sanity a little more each time he closed his eyes.

He parted his lips and bared his remaining teeth to the little man beside him, growling low, until the man scrambled to his feet and limped away.

Now the dog began to wail in earnest, sharing his dementia with Alma Furgueson down in Owltown. The dog howled and Alma cried. Her neighbors pretended not to hear. The strange duet went on for hours.

Alma pulled the covers up over her head, but still she could see the rocks flying and hear the sickening sound of their impact on human flesh and bone and teeth. She could hear the sound of Cass’s body breaking.

Alma’s nearest neighbor was long accustomed to this racket. But now he removed the sound-baffling pillow from his head. He woke his wife, and they both listened, for this was something they had never heard before. Alma had begun to harmonize with the dog.

Lying on her bed in the Dayborn jail, Mallory was also listening. She turned her face to the bars that kept her apart from the dog.

One fist rose high in the air and crashed down on her pillow with enough force to burst the case and send the feathers flying all around her cell, like small freed birds. Throwing off the covers, she stood up and walked barefoot to the window, the better to hear her dog’s mad serenade.

After a time, the old black Lab fell into an exhausted silence. Mallory returned to her bed and to sleep, lying under a blanket dusted with feathers and resembling a sheltering wing.

The eary morning sky was an outrageous shade of deep blue. The air was crisp and breezy, filled with ever present birdsong, as Charles passed through the long stand of trees which served as windbreak and borderland between Dayborn and Owltown. He made his way along the well-worn path to join up with a paved road curving into Owltown’s small commercial district.

This main street was lined with simple structures, one and two levels of weathered gray board. Though obviously decades old, they had the temporary character of hastily constructed carnival booths. The telephone poles and streetlamps had a greater sense of permanence. A neon sign in every third storefront window advertised liquor by the shot or the quart.

A car sped by, whipping up trash and dust in its wake. Bottles lay against the curbs; some were shattered, and one was still grasped in the hand of a slumbering drunk. Half of him lay on the walkway, and the rest of him sprawled in the street. Aromas of stale whiskey and vomit hung cloudlike over the man’s body. He snored contentedly as Charles passed him by.

A woman was coming toward him, hobbling as if one leg might be a good three inches shorter than the other. And now Charles could see that it was, for she held a broken shoe in her hand and limped along on one bare foot and one stiletto heel. Her brassy hair had the texture of slept-in cotton candy, and the dress of dark blue sequins threw off a million brilliant sparks of sunlight. She had wept her mascara into a raccoon’s mask.

He was about to ask her if he could help, putting out one hand to hail her when a car pulled to the curb beside him, and a familiar voice commanded, “Don’t touch anything in Owltown, Mr. Butler. You don’t know where it’s been.”

The weeping woman turned abruptly to face the car marked with the official star and legend of the sheriff’s office. Her face was in a panic as she hurried down the street, moving faster now that she had lost her one good shoe in a race to be gone.

The car’s curbside door opened in invitation, and Charles got into the front seat with Tom Jessop. The interior smelled of aftershave and cigarettes. The dashboard was a clutter of loose papers, envelopes and handwritten notes on napkins and matchbook covers. “Good morning,” said Charles.

The sheriff touched the brim of his brown Stetson in a return salutation. “Where you headed, Mr. Butler?”

“I’m hoping to get out to the fairgrounds before the tent goes up.” And he also hoped the sheriff had no time-consuming business with him. Charles had waited all his adult life for this event.

“Yeah, that tent raising is a rare sight.” The sheriff put the car in gear and they glided away from the curb. “You get a great view of the lower bayou from the horseshoe bend. The Lauries cleared that bend by fire – killed every root system on the near shore.”

“Not very sound ecology. Wouldn’t that tend to speed up the erosion of the land?”

“Yeah.” The sheriff smiled. “One day, all of Owltown will be under water. It may take the better part of a century, but I’m a patient man.” And his patience was evident in the slow crawl of the car.

“I take it you don’t care much for Owltown.”

‘Let me give you the tour, and we’ll see how well
you
like this place.“ They stopped at a cross street. The sheriff pointed to a line of gray shacks along an unpaved road. ”You go that way, and you can see something real nasty at the peep shows.“ He turned to the rear-window view of the road already traveled. ”Go back that way, and you can buy drink, drugs and a woman at the same establishment – one-stop shopping.“ The car began to crawl again. ”When I was a kid, we didn’t have all those good things – there was nothing out here but Ed Laurie’s bar and a pack of owls.“

They proceeded down the main street, and Charles observed more signs of liquor for sale. “I wouldn’t have thought a place this size could support so many bars.”

“Those’re all New Church hospitality houses,” said the sheriff. “There’s not one liquor license in the pack. No money changes hands, no tax revenues. But you need a church voucher to get a drink”

The sheriff slowed the car to a roll and pointed out a two-story house on the left side of the street. “That’s a real landmark there – Ed Laurie’s old bar. Thirty years ago, the only Lauries in this parish all lived on the second floor.”

It was like the other buildings, naked wood and spare in form, but older than the rest. The sunporch roof sagged in an evil smile, and bright-glowing beer logos blinked on and off in the window. And now Charles noticed the relative quiet. He could hear the noise of distant car engines, but no birds. He had become accustomed to their music everywhere he went. Apparently, birds did not sing in Owltown.

The sheriff stopped the car in front of the bar. “That’s where Babe got his start when he was five years old. He was called Baby Laurie then. His daddy would sit him on top of the jukebox so the boy could preach scripture, and worse. If you wanted live theater, you went to Ed’s bar to see who Baby Laurie was gonna hex that night.”

“Hex? Are we talking about voodoo?”

“Nothing that sophisticated, Mr. Butler. But the little bastard was real good at predictions. If he said your wife would have a stillborn child, she might accidentally connect with a baseball bat in the gut before she come to term. ‘Course you could ask Baby Laurie to pray you and yours away from the wrath of the Lord. And if you made a contribution to the ministry, then lo and behold, your baby would be born alive.”

“A protection racket? So the father was – ”

“Or one of Babe’s big brothers did the work. The other boys were full-grown by then. Their father was the most hated man in St. Jude Parish. If Ed hadn’t died of a drunk’s liver, eventually we would’ve found him floating face down in the bayou. And don’t you know, Babe was just the image of his father.”

“So you’re saying there’s more than a few people who wanted to see Babe dead?”

But the sheriff said nothing at all as he set the car in motion once more. Either the man was evading the question, or he simply didn’t care who killed Babe Laurie.

“Sheriff, you said Babe’s brothers were full-grown when he was five. But that was thirty years ago. Surely Malcolm couldn’t be much over thirty.”

“Malcolm is fifty-one. Just a few years younger than I am.” Charles stared at the lines and jowls of the sheriff’s face, and the graying hair that Malcolm didn’t have. This was not possible. He couldn’t have been so far from the mark in –

“Malcolm is a strange one,” said the sheriff. “He encourages rumors that he’s even older. Makes people think he’s onto a secret, and maybe he is.” But Jessop’s tone lacked conviction and bordered on sarcasm. “Years back, Babe and Malcolm looked almost like twins. But when Babe died at thirty-six, he looked ten years older. Could be Malcolm used his brother like that magic portrait of Dorian Gray’s. Babe becomes debauched, and Malcolm stays young forever.”

Charles was still stunned by the age factor, but the sheriff misunderstood the surprise in his eyes.

“Don’t get excited, Mr. Butler. I’m sure I got that literary reference off the back of one of my bubble gum cards.”

“I remember bubble gum,” said Charles, not missing a beat, not rising to the bait. “It was wonderful. Do they still make it?”

“Why you poor ignorant man.” Jessop pointed to the glove compartment. “In there. Help yourself.”

Charles opened the small door in the dashboard, and a pile of card-size packets spilled out with the rich timeless smell of gum and an Officer Friendly logo printed on the wrappers.

“I give them out to the kids.” Sheriff Jessop pulled a few packets from the pile that Charles was stuffing back into the glove compartment.

“So Babe was debauched?” The landscape crawled by the car window, and Charles looked at his watch. Still lots of time. “Not leading the exemplary life of an evangelist?”

“Babe was no saint – that’s a fact. These past few years, he was stoned on drugs or drink every time I saw him. That sorry, diseased son of a bitch.”

“Diseased?”

“You bet. Every last soul in Dayborn remembers his party at the Dayborn Bar and Grill. It was his nineteenth birthday, but the Lauries were really celebrating Babe’s first case of the clap. That VD party was a legend. It went on for three days.” He put his hand into the pile of clutter on the dashboard and extricated a folded sheaf of papers bearing today’s date and the seal of a medical examiner. He handed it to Charles. “Cut to the second page, top of the sheet.”

Charles scanned the lines. According to the autopsy report, Babe Laurie had died in an advanced stage of venereal disease. Various drugs and alcohol were listed in the contents of the stomach. Charles turned to the sheriff, who was nodding, saying, “Yeah, he was diseased all right.”

Approaching the fairgrounds, they traveled by a cluster of trailers. Men in sleeveless Tshirts were standing in groups, drinking beer for their breakfast. Now a shoving match ensued and one man hit the ground in a hurry. He was kicked in the ribs by another man, and the content of a beer can was poured over the fallen man’s prone body. But the sheriff seemed not to care about this infraction of the law against assaulting one’s fellow citizen.

Charles unwrapped the packet in his hand and released the spicy aroma of bubble gum. He discarded the baseball trading card and held the bright piece of gum to his nose, seriously assessing the bouquet. It even
smelled
pink. When he popped it into his mouth, the taste evoked a flood of memories. That summer on the road with Cousin Max, bubble gum had been a staple of his diet.

Before they pulled into the parking lot, he had outdone himself by blowing a larger bubble than the sheriff could manage with twice the chewy pink waddage. Then Charles did a bit of showboating by blowing a bubble within a bubble. The grand finale was a resounding pop, and the sheriff took his hands off the wheel to applaud.

The car rolled to a stop in a dirt parking lot, and the two men sat companionably for a few minutes of highly competitive chewing and bubble blowing.

“You know, Sheriff,”
Pop.
“I haven’t seen a single child in Owltown.”

Pop.
“The families with kids live in Dayborn. Most of this roadie trash around here is drunks, junkies, hookers and the odd pervert – the staff and clientele of the Owltown business district.”

Pop
. “How many Lauries are there?”

“With cousins, second cousins, and relations by marriage? I guess a few hundred people. When the family business got too big for Mal and his brothers to manage it, they brought in relatives from Texas and the Carolinas. Now the whole pack of them work for the New Church.”

Pop. Pop.

“How does a church support so many people?”

“When the tent show’s touring up north in the Bible Belt, they pull in at least thirty grand on a bad night. The Lauries who stay behind in Owltown make even more money running the mail order business.”

Charles aborted a bubble. “Mail order religion?”

Pop.
“Oh, yeah. For a five-dollar donation you can have an envelope full of dirt from the Holy Land. I’m afraid I crunched up a lot of that holy dirt when I pulled into this parking lot.”

Pop.
“God forgives you,” said Charles. “How much for a piece of the true cross?”

“Twenty dollars. However, those sawdust shavings are laminated in a strip of plastic. You can use them to mark your favorite scripture in the autographed Bible.”

Pop
. “Autographed by…?”

“The authors, all twelve of ‘em.”

Charles’s last bubble died in a smile. The sheriff had produced the lesser pops but the better punch line. Then Charles was appalled to learn that the sheriff was not joking. There were twelve apostles on the New Church governing board, and the text of the Bible had been substantially rewritten.

As he opened the passenger door of the car, the sheriff leaned toward him and said, “I’m gonna send my deputy back here to pick you up when you’re done. I’m not being pushy, Mr. Butler, I’m just real concerned for your health. So you won’t mind that?”

“Not at all. I appreciate the concern.” And he meant that, for they had just been bonded by gum, hadn’t they?

“Have a nice visit,” said Jessop, “but don’t stray off the fairgrounds. That’s just a friendly caution.”

Charles stepped out of the car and walked over the open field beyond the parking lot, past the blights of vans and trucks, trailers and food stands. When he stood at the center of the denuded horseshoe bend, he had a spectacular view of cypress trees and their mirror reflections lining the far shore of the bayou. A snowy egret took flight in the distance, escaping the noise which was growing in volume as the grounds filled with workers shouting and barking commands.

His eyes followed the flight of the bird. Its wings spread on the air and long legs flowed back from white feathers. The sun dappled the bayou in a bright band of sparkling lights. A fish broke through still water near a string of trap lines extending out from the bank. Scales shining like silver, it rose out of the bayou as though to fly free. At the end of the tether of hook and line, it fell back into a foam of splashing water.

Charles turned his attention to the metal shafts erected in the middle of the field. Each tall pole waved a bright red banner, and long ropes trailed down to the ground. The tallest would be the center pole of the great canvas tent, which now lay in a huge flat circle spread out at his feet. Its circumference would make a fair-size dog track.