The Covenant (11 page)

My special friends had cost me my job, my marriage, any semblance of a normal life. I had tried to drive them out of my head by filling my veins with smack. I knew I wasn't the only haunted ex-junkie in this crazy old world, but that didn't make me feel any better. Plenty of people in my boat had eaten bullets or walked off a pier in an effort to make the voices and the visions stop. The only thing that kept me from hanging myself in a closet was the thought of hanging there forever, waiting like a spooky house decoration for the next confused little girl who had been born with a caul on her head to come along and open the door to my hell and join me there.

I stopped shooting to listen, waiting for the rap of hammers, the endless chatter of the workers, the throb and rumble of their machines. There was nothing. I'd never felt more alone in my life. A house this old should have been choked with ghosts. It was as though something had driven them out. Driven them out and taken their place.

When in Rome,
I thought. A siesta sounded like a good idea. I shut down the lights, capped my lens, and stepped outside. The
fitz
of a beer bottle opening spun me around. Deacon sat in a dining room chair on the porch, leaning back against the wall like a gunslinger in an old Western. He held a dripping bottle of Abita beer out to me, an unopened one in his other hand.

I accepted his offering and sat on the step, my legs crossed in front of me. “I don't usually drink before five,” I lied as I took a swig.

Deacon opened his bottle and held it up to a shaft of sunlight filtering through a hole in the roof. “I usually don't drink after five, so we're even.”

I lit up and let the smoke drain out of me in a long slow sigh. It was like I'd been holding my breath for an hour. Sweat dripped from my hair into my eyes, dangled from the tip of my nose. The heat of the day had crept into the house while I worked and wrapped its woolly arms around me and clamped its thick, musty-smelling fingers over my mouth. Now a delicious bit of breeze fanned across the porch. I took another drag and felt my lungs ache from lack of abuse.

“It's a hot one,” Deacon said. I allowed that it could be considered warm for a day in May. He tasted his beer and set it on the porch beside his chair. I got the crazy idea that he didn't really drink at all. I sucked mine down in about three swallows and rolled the empty bottle against my knee.

“This kind of heat reminds me of Kuwait.” He pushed his chair away from the wall and sat with his hands on his knees, leaning forward, the big aviator sunglasses resting on his nose so that I couldn't see his eyes at all.

“So it's true what Holly said. That you were in the military before you started this preaching dodge.”

“Go Army. First Armored Division. Desert Storm. You strike me as ex-military yourself. Squid?”

“Coast Guard.”

“Must have been hell.”

“I could tell you stories,” I laughed. I spent the war aboard the
Cape Hazardous
protecting Maryland crab boats from Saddam's Atlantic fleet.

“We were one of the first across the border at the beginning of the invasion. Them Iraqi boys had had the fight bombed out of them and started giving up as soon as they saw our tanks. My unit didn't fire a shot in anger. I remember, it was about the fourteenth hour, we jumped this group of Republican Guards coming out of their fortifications and running toward us with their hands in the air. They didn't have any weapons, but it was making the captain nervous so he told me to put a shot over their heads to make them sit down. I don't know what happened. Maybe I misjudged the distance. Or maybe it was God directed my hand, because I killed one of those men, shot him with the fifty right between the eyes from maybe a half mile out. I couldn't have made that shot if I tried. His head just disappeared. I'll never forget that.”

“It's not something you forget,” I offered.

“I don't blame myself. It was an accident. We were at war and I was following orders, and on top of all that, I suspect the Good Lord guided my hand for a purpose He has yet to reveal to me. I can but trust that one day I will know His divine plan.”

I stubbed my cigarette out on the bottom of my shoe and flicked the butt into the trash pile in front of the house. People were starting to appear from the circus camp, yawning and scratching as they made their way back to their dropped tools.

Deacon turned his head to watch them go by. From that angle, I could see just the hint of a smile, his eyes crinkling up behind his sunglasses. “The VA doctor says I got PTSD.”

“I take it you don't agree?”

He laughed a little and shrugged. “I got no nightmares, no hallucinations. Jesus freed me from my demons and I'm at peace. But I can't forget that soldier.”

Why this confession? What did he hope to gain? Certainly not absolution, nor even much camaraderie. I got the impression he'd spent a lot of time in musty church basements unburdening his soul to groups of perfect strangers. Maybe that was where he'd picked up this preaching gig—I'd seen it happen before, people trading dope for Jesus, one addiction for another.

“That soldier haunts me. Sometimes when I preach, he's sitting right there in the front pew. He's got no head, but it's him. He goes everywhere I go. I can't get away.”

A couple of Deacon's workers passed, said hello and hollah, and went up the scaffolding like squirrels. I didn't respond to Deacon's confession, just sat there rolling the empty beer bottle between my palms. Pretty soon a rotted piece of roofing sailed down and landed with a crash on the garbage pile.

“We'd better get out of the line of fire,” Deacon said.

We retreated into the house. I turned on my camera lights and moved them to the next section of wall. The electrical cord had gotten itself wedged between a couple of loose floorboards. Deacon helped me pry it loose. “Anything like that ever happen to you?” he asked.

“Happens all the time with these long cords.”

“That's not what I meant.”

I tried to play it cool. Lying to myself made it easier. I was good at it. I had lots of practice. I just shrugged and snapped a picture.

“You can see the dead, can't you?”

I shot a couple of photos of the wall. Somewhere behind the house an air compressor cranked up. A man appeared in the rear doorway, pushing a wheelbarrow full of old bricks. He crossed the room and exited through the front door. “What makes you think that?”

“I think you know.”

I nodded and silently cursed Trey for an idiot. It wasn't really his fault, even though he'd dropped that bomb about me being able to see hidden things with my nekkid eyes. It had been too much to hope Deacon had forgotten about my little prodigy on the levee.

“I'd rather not talk about it.”

“I can well understand your reluctance. I rarely tell anyone about my soldier. Most people don't understand, so we hide it in our hearts, afraid and ashamed.” He took his little black Bible out of his back pocket and began shifting through the soft pages. “But there's nothing to be ashamed of. The Apostle Paul wrote in his first epistle to the Corinthians, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit is given to each accordingly, for to one is given words of wisdom, to another words of knowledge, to another great faith, to another the gift of healing, to another prophecy, and to another the
discerning of spirits
.”

“You think this is some kind of gift?”

He put his hand on my arm, gently cupping the elbow, as though about to help me across a busy street. “I have counseled others who are haunted by the dead, Jackie Lyons. Most of them, like you, believe it to be a curse rather than the gift it truly is.”

I extracted my elbow from his hand.

“But it shows that the Lord favors you above all others! And if it can bring some comfort to Jenny Loftin, and perhaps a measure of justice to her family, would that not make it a gift?”

“Justice?”

“You know as well as I do, but for very different reasons, that Sam Loftin didn't kill himself.”

I just shrugged. Maybe I did know. Or maybe I didn't have a clue. I reminded myself, this was none of my business. It certainly wasn't any of Deacon's business what I knew or didn't know.

“For the last year, I have counseled Sam and Jenny. In some ways I know them better than they know themselves. Sam loved his daughter Reece and still grieved for her, but he had living children that he loved equally, and he was devoted to Jenny. He wouldn't take himself from them.”

“Did he have life insurance?”

Deacon nodded. “And the insurance company won't pay if it's suicide.”

So that was why they needed me—to help complete the profile of a man who had no intention of killing himself, to dangle before Jenny Loftin a strand of hope, however thin, that her husband's death was anything but suicide.

But in all my years photographing the dead—for the police, for insurance companies, for lawyers—I'd seen plenty of suicides that didn't make sense. The act itself contradicts all logic and reason. So what if they bought plane tickets they would never use, or called to complain about a credit card charge, hung up the phone, and shot themselves in the head? Something snapped inside. People who had everything to live for, but just couldn't go on carrying all that hidden grief or buried pain or whatever it was that made them kick over the chair.

The only reason I didn't believe Sam Loftin had killed himself was because of what I had seen on the levee. But that made all the difference in the world. My “gift” wouldn't win Jenny Loftin that insurance money. Life insurance agents were funny that way.

I said, “I don't know what you want from me.”

“I just wish you would talk to her. When you ran out the night of Sam's wake, she said you'd be back. She said you promised to go to Sam's funeral.”

“I had another funeral to go to.”

“I'm sorry. What it someone close?” He asked like he didn't believe me.

“My mother.”

For once, he looked shocked. “I'm so sorry. I didn't know.”

“It's OK. We weren't that close.” This wasn't a lie, but I don't know why I said it. A month had passed and still I had the feeling that something had been left unfinished. It wasn't that I hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to her. I didn't know what was bothering me.

“You should let Jenny know about your mother. She'll understand. And I think if you tell her what you really saw that day on the levee, she'll understand that, too.”

People always say that if you have never seen war, you can never really understand what it's like. It's the same way with the dead. Deacon had seen war, and he said he had seen the dead, but I didn't know whether to believe him. How would he like it if I tried to tell him how to feel about the war? “Do you really want Jenny to spend the rest of her life staring out that window, waiting for her dead husband to appear? How would you like to watch your wife drown over and over and over?”

“I didn't think of it that way.”

“Most people think I'm crazy when I tell them I see these things.”

“I believe you.”

“Why? Because you see spooks, too? Because your guilty conscience fills your pews with the manifestations of your PTSD? Tell you what, preacher. Let me know next time you see him and I'll tell you if he's real.”

“I will do that.”

“When I do, maybe you can tell me why God's plan included you blowing an innocent man's head clean off. Because nobody asked that soldier if he wanted to be your final exam in Theology 101.”

“Why are you so angry all the time, Jackie Lyons?”

“Preacher, you don't know jack about me.”

“I would like to, though. I wish you would tell me.”

“There's nothing to tell. Now can I get back to my work? I got rent to pay.”

Why was I so angry? Because sometimes I felt like Deacon's dead Iraqi—an object lesson in someone else's life, with no other purpose than to get my head blown off to teach some holy fraud I didn't even know a lesson I'd never be privileged to learn.

 

15

I
WORKED ALONE UNTIL
almost dark. I knew it was time to quit when the nail guns stopped spitting. A couple of old Mexican women were waiting for me on the porch. One handed me an envelope full of money. I didn't count it in front of her. The other gave me a flashlight.

I thanked them and they left me alone on the porch. The beer Deacon had been drinking earlier still sat by the steps, nearly full. It was warm as spit but I drank it anyway, washing the dirt dobber nests out of my throat. The sun was going down quickly, the earth giving up its heat in a moist fume that smelled like rotting leaves and chainsaw smoke. I counted the money in the envelope by the light of the flashlight. Ten pictures of Andy Jackson so crisp and new they stuck together like refrigerator magnets.

I walked down through the woods, following the trail back to where I'd parked my car in front of Jenny's house. I hoped I wouldn't run into her there. When I got there, the only thing waiting for me was a tow notice from the neighborhood security guard taped to the driver's-side window. Jenny's house looked dark and empty, the house beside it brightly lit with a picturesque little old lady peeping through one curtain in an upper window. I guessed she was the one who called security.

I lit a cigarette and leaned against the hood of my car, watched some geese cross the purple velvet of the sky headed for the lake, the whoosh of their wings sounding close enough to touch, and thought about that day when I'd stood almost in this exact spot and watched a replay of the moment of a man's death. I wondered if there were some way it could be conjured up like an instant replay, so that a person could review it from eighteen different angles to determine if the man was dead before he went in the water or if someone put him there.