The Hundredth Man (36 page)

I roared and threw myself at Lindy, grabbing his neck with one hand, the other angling the gun up and away. It discharged through the roof and the kick spun it from his grip. I bent him backward across the tilting table. He tore at my eyes and hands, ripping his fingers on the scalpel, blood pouring between us. His belly was to me and I pushed the edge of the scalpel just below his navel as he screamed and snapped his teeth at me. I felt the resistance of his skin against the point of the scalpel. An inch of bright blade slipped inside his belly.

I had the power to slice him all the way down to his first breath.

“Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama …” he recited like a litany. I looked at Ava. She shook her head, No, no, no.

Lindy howled, “Mamamamamaraa …”

I felt my arms slacken.

“Dee-yup, pen it tesheeup …” On the TV screen Ava returned Nelson’s insides.

The floor listed and I grabbed the table to steady myself. Lindy spun away and dived into the bilge hatch. I looked into it and saw only wired-together ranks of batteries. A sharp crack came from the keel and the boat shifted again, harder. The gasoline can by the generator tumbled and upended, dumping fuel across the floor and through the hatch to the engine room and bilge. The batteries shifted and clacked together. We were adrift in a boat soaked with gas and a hold full of jerry-wired batteries in the rain, our captain a madman.

One short, one spark …

The boat listed several more degrees. Joists screamed, bulwarks strained. Harry and I dug at Ava’s ropes, fighting to stand on the slanting floor. Failing metal squealed beneath us and the deck shivered and dropped another six inches. I fell. Harry grabbed the edge of the bolted-down table and continued tearing at Ava’s bindings. Gasoline fumes burned tears from our eyes. Harry struggled at the ropes as I pulled myself up.

“Te-repped uten benetha …”

Harry roared with effort, his arms shaking with strain. I smelled the acrid stink of wires cooking off insulation.

Only her neck bound now.

A crack of wood and the boat teetered severely. The last holdings of the shelves emptied across the floor. On the tape Ava traced her hand over the bare body, nodded, and backed quickly from the picture. “Amam, amam,” Lindy said as the tape rolled to its beginning. His lips faded to black. The tape snapped off.

“Got it,” Harry yelled, Ava in his arms, rising.

I heard the thunder of heavy wood breaking. The boat shivered for an instant, then knelt forward and buried its prow in the soft earth. We tumbled across the floor as cans and tools and debris clattered over us. Smoke suffused the gasoline-laden air.

But we were by the door.

We scrambled out into sweet, beautiful mud, and pulled ourselves through the grasses. The snap of a spark behind us became a tremendous sucking whump and the night blazed orange and gold. We stumbled to a hummock and knelt behind it, the heat pressing our wet faces. The interior of the old shrimper’s cabin burned like a torch, but the rain-soaked wood outside was slower to ignite. Light blazed through the doors, the ports, the pilot house. For a few minutes the old boat resembled a magic lantern dropped from the stars to the earth, and we crouched golden beneath its light.

Then it simply fell to pieces and consumed itself.

EPILOGUE

“… last thing I heard was Carson yelling about floating. So I took a deep breath and relaxed. Ever try and relax when you think you’re gonna drown?”

“I’ll pass,” Ava said. A gull keened overhead and she studied its wheeling flight. Harry plucked another boiled peanut from the bowl on my deck table. He was eating them Harry style: bite off the tip of the shell, dribble a few drops of hot sauce into the opening, pop the whole affair in his mouth. He chewed and reflected.

“But I found I could just kinda bob along. When I went under I’d flap my arms like wings, float up to the surface, grab a breath, and then the water’d cover me again.”

Harry flapped his arms to demonstrate. For a moment I heard the sound of rain and saw him spinning away in the brown river. I caught my tumble into the past and fought back to the present. There needed to be time to reflect on the past, I figured, but not today. Today would be dedicated to This Moment Only, unencumbered by chains or ghosts or lines converging in the muddy dark.

“How far’d you go?” Ava asked.

Harry narrowed an eye, calculated. “Guess about a quarter mile. Then my feet hit bottom and damned if I wasn’t crawling up a sandbar on the other side.”

We were sitting on my deck. This was our first chance to talk in any detail among just the three of us. We’d spent the day following the event in the hospital, surrounded by doctors and inquisitive cops. Yesterday was more cops and the media. We answered the reporters’ haphazard questions vaguely, downplaying our roles.

Ava leaned toward Harry. “You thought Carson was” she paused; the word was hard for her to say, and wasn’t that easy for me to hear “gone?”

Harry looked at me and winked. “Boy can’t do a whole helluva lot, but he can swim. I knew if anyone was gonna pop up on the far shore, it’d been Carson. I just kept moving upriver, knowing that’s what he’d do. Then I heard a crashing sound up ahead.”

I said, “Me going through that rotten door.”

For a split second I was tumbling through the boat, sliding in mud and blood and coming to rest with a 12-gauge at my eyes. I shook the scene from my head.

Harry said, “Thought I’d go see who was disturbing my pleasant little nature hike. Then I see that damn boat up in the air … “

Two full days behind us and the event was settling into a blur. My hands weren’t too bad, or wouldn’t be when the fingernails returned. The knife slit in the meat of my hip felt like someone had sewn bees in there. They gave me a crutch at the hospital but I’d left it in the car, more trouble than it was worth. I pushed myself up from the table.

Ava’s hand reached for mine. “You OK?”

“I’m gonna go lean on the rail. My ass is stiffening up.”

Her hand squeezed mine and I looked into her eyes. They looked good, clear and sharp and green as the sunshiny sea. She winked one at me and my heart skipped a beat. I patted her hand and gimped toward the deck rail. My idiot cell phone chirped from the table. I should have never let it out of the cooler bag.

“Grab that, would you, Harry?”

He said, “Probably another damn reporter. Or Squill trying to make nice again.”

Though I didn’t circulate the cassette, Squill picked up heavy tarnish. He’d been booted from investigations and assigned the title “media liason’; the press probably deserved him. He was again reinventing history and had called earlier confessing he had been completely duped by Burlew, so sorry. It was pathetic, but that was Squill.

“Ryder’s place,” Harry said. “Hello?” He stared at the cell, then looked at me and shrugged.

“Nothing. Wrong number, I guess.”

Harry flipped the phone on the table and lumbered into the house to refill the peanut bowl. I leaned my back against the rail. Ava joined me, putting her elbows on the wood, staring quietly out into the Gulf. The sky was cloudless blue and a tight chain of pelicans moved low across the waves.

I said, “The first time you stood there, the wind blew your clothes tight against you and I had lascivious thoughts.”

She slid a breeze-blown strand of hair from her eyes. “It seems so long ago.”

“That I had lascivious thoughts? Odd, I thought I recalled several from this very morning.”

“I had every intention of showing up sober. But fear got the best of me. Fear of myself.”

“You were full of ghosts, some you invented, most were real.”

She nodded, took a sip of ginger ale. “I’ve talked with Dr. Peltier. It’s going to be different. Very different.”

Clair was making peace with her own demons, no longer brandishing them at others. I’d spoken with her last evening, and knew today she was meeting with an attorney specializing in divorce. I was anxious to see how she looked when she looked free of Zane. Might her eyes turn even bluer?

I said, “You’re going to the meeting tonight?”

“And tomorrow, and the day after that. Whatever Bear says to do, I’m doing. I like going; when I leave I feel lighter, like dancing on air.” She she set down her glass and stood on tiptoe to put her lips lightly over mine. I heard Harry slide the door open, return to the deck.

“What’s this stuff I’m seeing?” he said.

I paused, ran several combinations of words through my head.

“Kissing and blissing?” I ventured.

“Damn,” he said, eyes wide in feigned shock. “The boy finally got one right.”

I started to launch some grief his way but the phone twittered again. Harry set the peanuts on the table and lifted the phone. “Ryder’s. Uh-huh. He’s right here. Yes, ma’am, hang on just a second.” Harry looked at me.

“It’s a Dr. Prowse, Evangeline Prowse.”

I nodded. Harry brought me the cell. I turned to face the waves and brought the phone to my ear.

“Carson? Carson, this is Evangeline Prowse.” Her voice dropped low. “I’m sorry, Carson. I’m afraid I have some bad news? Terrible news.”

“My God, what?”

The voice trembled. “It’s Jeremy, Carson. He’s dead … a suicide. He hanged himself.”

I heard the words but couldn’t make sense of them. “Jeremy? No, there’s no way he’d “

“Last night. Or early this morning. He left a note? It’s addressed to you.”

“I can’t believe this, it can’t be true. My brother would never “

“Do you want me to read the note, Carson? I don’t have to, it’s personal. I can send it.”

I took a deep breath, let it drift from my chest.

“Yes, go ahead. Please read.”

The sound of paper unfolding. Then Evangeline’s hushed voice.

““Dear Carson, I apologize. I did not know it was your womb-man he was after. My translation of the materials was wrong in that area. I was sure he wanted the other one, the one in charge, Peltier. I don’t know if that would have mattered in my sending you astray, but I think it would have. I hope so. Love for now and always, Jeremy.” That’s the whole text,” Evangeline said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

I stood in my box in the air above an island, looked down the strand, and considered Evangeline’s call. With the sudden clarity of revelation the sun seemed to light the world from every direction at once, nothing had shadows. The water stretched forward like a vast carpet of green, the white of the sand, blinding. I looked at Ava and Harry, saw the concern in their eyes, shot them a thumbs up, It’s all right, everything’s all right. Much as I tried to contain it, a smile spread across my face. I lifted the phone back to my ear.

“You almost got it perfect, Jeremy; the intonation, the rhythm. But Dr. Prowse never goes by the name Evangeline.”

Silence from my caller.

I said, “She calls herself Vangie. It’s always Vangie.”

I listened for any evidence of a kindred being at the far end of the connection. With waves in the distance and breeze through my hair, I pressed my palm against one ear, the phone against the other, and listened hard into the silence. Then, for a slender moment, the breeze fell and the waves poised soundlessly between rush and retreat. I closed my eyes and discerned the lightest hint of breathing, as near as the blood in my veins, as far as the burned-away years: I heard the swift and shallow breaths of a frightened child all alone in the dark. My voice said, “I love you, brother.” Then I hung up on the past. At least until tomorrow.

Jack Kerley spent twenty years in a successful advertising career before writing The Hundredth Man, his first novel. An avid angler and outdoorsman, he lives in Newport, Kentucky.