Inside a Silver Box (8 page)

Finally he let her go and said, “Please, Lorraine, I just wanna help.”

Slowly, hesitantly Lorraine lowered her hands. Her eyelids and the flesh from the middle of her forehead down to the bridge of her nose were red and very swollen, effectively shutting her eyes.

“What is it?” she cried. “I can’t see.”

“It looks like bug bites.”

“Bugs? Why would the Silver Box go out of his way to make a place so completely and then leave bugs to hurt somebody like this?”

Ronnie wondered too but he didn’t echo his companion. Instead he took her hands in his. “It’s just bug bites,” he said. “They’re swollen but they’ll go down. We should get some cold water on’em and I bet the swellin’ll go down soon.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

“How long could that take?”

“When I get a mosquito bite, it usually lasts a day, two at most.”

“Two days,” she wailed.

“It’s okay, Lorraine. I’m right here wit’ you, girl. I promise you that.”

He took her down to the stream and, using cupped hands, poured water over her eyes.

“That feels really good,” she said.

“Don’t it sting?”

“No, the water makes it feel relaxed. I think you’re right about it helping.”

“You think maybe we should wait here until you could see again?” Ronnie asked as he went about plucking the deep red ground berries.

“No,” she said. “Silver Box didn’t give us a deadline but he made it sound like we had to act fast. We have to keep moving.”

“But he said that time stopped until we get back.”

“Maybe he meant it stopped until when we got here,” she argued. “We can’t take the chance.”

“Okay. You just put your arm in mine and I’ll tell ya if there’s a rock or tree branch in the way.”

Lorraine smiled and reached out for her killer’s crooked arm. They got to their feet and continued on the unlikely path of their lives.

*   *   *

A
S THE DAY
progressed they made good time, feeling energized by the sun and air, the ground berries and also somehow by their closeness.

Ronnie noticed that a new kind of tree was appearing here and there. This new vegetation had dark bark on thick trunks with huge outcropping branches that bore light green leaves the size and shape of one-man kayaks. The wary side of Ronnie’s streetwise mind wondered what this new kind of tree might mean for them.

“There’s a little light getting in between my eyelids,” Lorraine said before he could mention the trees to her.

“That’s good,” he said. “That means you’re gettin’ better.”

They walked arm in arm, as close as lovers or siblings or small children using the buddy system on a school outing.

“Even though I was mad at you, I still wanted to jump your bones again last night,” she said after a while.

“I never had a woman do that to me before.”

“Did you like it?”

“It was wild. You know like if you was a man.”

“I thought you said you did that in prison.”

“Yeah, but I was always the one on top. You know I never let a woman do too much with sex. I guess I never even wondered about what she felt.”

“What do you think now?”

“That I never knew nuthin’ before we met.”

“Maybe you’ll regret it by the time this is over.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because of my great-uncle Phil Goldstone, my mother’s mother’s brother.”

“What about him?”

“He was in the war that Ma Lin fought in.”

“Vietnam?”

“There’s a rock in front’a your left foot.”

They stopped and Lorraine nudged her left foot out until her shod toe tapped the four-inch-high obstruction. Stepping over the rock, they went on.

“Uncle Phil hated everything about the war,” Ronnie continued. “He said that he hated the enemy and he hated the white government for sendin’ him there. But he made his best friends and had the greatest times of his life there. He hated it, but he loved it more’n anything too.”

“And that’s how you feel about me?” She hugged his arm closer.

“That’s how I feel about everything. My whole life’s been a war, and you the last fight in that war. I won the fight but then I lost it too. And now … now I’m free and I don’t regret a thing. I cain’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it brought me here.”

Three steps of silence and suddenly Lorraine pulled away and started scratching furiously at her sides and all around the waist. She made panting sounds and was in such distress that she fell to the ground scratching, scratching. Ronnie got down with her, putting his hands up her dress to help.

“Don’t do that!”

“I have to, Lorraine. I got to see what’s wrong.”

Lorraine stopped struggling and lay stiff on the ground. Ronnie lifted the blue fabric.… Bug bites covered her abdomen and sides going down under the line of her panties, coming out at her thighs, and traveling down another five or six inches.

“The bugs must be in your clothes,” he said. “I’ll carry you back to that pond we saw and we could wash’em there.”

Lorraine yowled loudly and Ronnie hoped that insects were the largest creatures in that wood.

*   *   *

H
E WALKED HER
out into the middle of the deep pond. It was about thirty-five feet across, fed by the stream that they had lain next to the night before and three or four other rivulets.

When the girl was shoulder high in the natural pool, he had her take off her clothes. These he took to the shore and rinsed over and over, finally beating them with rocks.

“Ronnie, are you there?” Lorraine called from her semidarkness.

“Right here beatin’ on these clothes. You know if there was any bugs left, they all dead and crushed. How you doin’?”

“The water soothes the itch. It’s cold but I like it.”

“It’s really pretty here. When your swelling goes down, you’re gonna love it.”

“You know what’s so crazy, Ronnie?”

“What’s that, Lore?”

“That we just accept all this as real. I mean, it’s impossible, right?”

“It always felt like that for me,” the once brooding and ravenous brute said.

“Like what?”

“Like nuthin’s real but I couldn’t stop it anyway. Locked doors, hunger, me hatin’ myself for the things I never did and the things I never did right.”

Lorraine turned her blind gaze toward her companion. There was a question in her mind that went unspoken.

“You surprised that a niggah like me think about things too?”

“I guess I am,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think that name about you but what you just said, that question and that feeling has been in my heart for as far back as I could remember.”

“It’s like when somebody you know die, right?” Ronnie added. “You feel like they should be alive, like they must be somewhere. All you got to do is figure out the right way to turn or somethin’ special you could say.”

“But if you did, it would turn out like Claude Festerling,” Lorraine added. “And me too if you hadn’t come back.”

Lorraine pushed herself toward the sound of Ronnie Bottoms’s voice and came out of the water only a few feet away. He wrung her clothes with all his strength and then reached out.

“You’ll be cool in these.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bottoms.”

FOURTEEN

T
HAT NIGHT THEY
slept on the flat top of a boulder far away from any water, reasoning that whatever had bitten Lorraine was an insect living in or near the stream. Ronnie stayed awake for a long time after she was asleep to make sure no biting bugs crawled up or flew down.

He finally fell asleep and did not see the approach of the huge form of a woolly beast that was at least forty feet in height and twice that in length. The nearly silent four-legged creature moved through the woods like shadow. From its shaggy, egg-shaped head, a long and needle-thin bone slowly stretched out until it reached the sleeping young man, pricking him on every joint and at the back of his neck.

The slight discomfort from the venom of the mammal’s sting caused Ronnie to twist and turn until he came to rest on his back with legs straight and arms down at his sides.

Its work done, the needle withdrew and the shadow beast backed away, merging with the moonlit shadows of the nighttime forest.

“Ronnie, I’m cold,” Lorraine complained in her sleep.

He imagined turning on his side and holding the young coed. In his dream he did this but not within the reality of the Silver Box.

*   *   *

L
ORRAINE WOKE UP
with the sun in her eyes. The itching was gone, and not only could she see again but the world looked clearer than it ever had. She jumped to her feet with unaccustomed ease and looked down on her companion.

Lowering herself again to her knees, and seeing that his eyes were open, she said, “Wake up, sleepyhead.”

“I’m awake,” he said, “just not up.”

“Then come on. I can see and all the bites are gone.”

“That’s great,” Ronnie said. “You know I’d get up wit’ ya but my arms and legs are stiff as sticks. I cain’t even turn my head.”

“Why not?”

“Just another trick SB be pullin’, I suppose.”

“You can’t move at all?”

“Been gettin’ stiffer and stiffer every minute. It’s hard for me even to open my mouf. It hurts where that cop broke the bone and I don’t even think I’ll be able to talk after while.”

“Don’t be scared,” Lorraine said. “I’m here.”

“I know you are” were the last words he spoke for some time.

*   *   *

L
ORRAINE SAT BESIDE
the paralyzed young man for the next few hours—talking.

“I’m sorry for getting so mad,” she said at one point. “I mean, not sorry but I’m just saying that I understand what it is that drove you. And even though you didn’t want to save me, you did anyway. Only you could have done it. But I don’t know why … I mean, you know, I’m really mad. You did a terrible thing to me and I hate you for it partly but … I never got anything but A’s in school, you know. I was always the best student in every class and I thought that meant that … that…”

Ronnie listened and appreciated that she sat there next to him, keeping him safe from whatever might attack a paralyzed man in the deep woods. Any kind of animal or bird could start eating him out there and he wouldn’t have been able even to try and shoo it away.

Ronnie had no sensation except for a thrumming that started in his chest and traveled through his arms and legs, down along his fingers and toes. The vibrations passed through his bones and reminded him, as so many things did, of his mother’s wordless songs when he was little.

“… I could see in the way the police treated you, and in the things my father had to say, why black people have it so hard,” Lorraine was saying. He noticed that she was talking faster and faster. “I mean, you were still wrong to do that to me and if it wasn’t for how it happened, I’d—I might really have hit you in the head with a rock.”

Her voice carried sharp anger. She could have hit him now. Worse … she could just leave him to be eaten by birds and foxes. There were foxes in the eastern forests; he’d learned that in third grade.

Third grade was a good year, Ronnie thought. Miss Peters was a very kindly woman who would make him stay behind in her classroom at recess and over the lunch break to keep him occupied and off the playground, where he was likely to get into fights. She talked to him about foxes and forests and why the smartest people in the world knew that they didn’t know anything for sure.

“Ronnie?” Lorraine said.

He tried to turn his eyes to show that he’d heard, but he couldn’t even do that.

“My legs are all jittery,” the girl said. “I’m going to take a run up the path a little ways. It’ll only be a few minutes. I’ll be right back.”

*   *   *

I
N THE PERIPHERY
of sight, he saw Lorraine jump off the fifteen-foot-high boulder. He worried that she might have broken her neck on landing until he heard her call, “I’ll be back soon.”

He wondered if she had abandoned him; if she had decided to go on because the world was about to be destroyed and her parents might die. He would have left her. At least the old him would have.

A moment of darkness filled the world, and Ronnie realized he was still blinking. Whatever had paralyzed his movements left his heart beating and allowed his lids to work on his eyes.

The thrumming in his bones somehow kept him from being frightened. It was his mother, and the feeling of life so pure and so strong that the thing Ronnie wanted most to do was laugh. And even that, the feeling of a laugh that wouldn’t come out, made the young brawler glad.

He’d never killed anybody before Lorraine, and somehow God—even if God was a machine and not an old white man in a white beard—had turned the clock back a little bit and given him a chance to undo what had been done. The forest was beautiful and the white girl had taken off all her clothes in front of him and nobody got hurt.

It was at that moment Ronnie accepted his death. Maybe, he thought, he had died in the police interrogation room or in that Rikers cell when his back was turned and somebody came up on him with a toothbrush turned into a knife. Maybe he had died and come to this imaginary place to have his last thoughts like prayers asking for forgiveness for what he’d done wrong. He had tried in this dream to save the white girl. He had said he was sorry even though people always told him sorry was not enough.

But sorry was all Ronnie had. He tried in his mind to make things right. He dreamed the girl back to life and imagined the great Silver Box that had God inside. He said he would do what’s right and if that wasn’t enough, if that didn’t make things okay, he’d have to go along with it because there was nothing else to do.

When Ronnie blinked, he imagined the world coming to an end, but instead a large, emerald green bird flew up and landed on his chest. The long-taloned bird had bloodred eyes. It turned its head from side to side, examining Ronnie.

Maybe this, the ex-con thought, was his personal executioner studying him for the deathblow.