The Tangled Bridge (10 page)

“We thought you's the doomsday committee,” Oyster said in that strange deep voice as he fell into step with Madeleine and Ethan. “Wouldn't a hit you if I saw you's a lady.”

Ethan's eyes narrowed on the boy and then rose to Madeleine, but she quickly looked away before he could see her injured side. Lightning flashed all around, followed almost immediately by an explosion of thunder. Madeleine clutched the baby and quickened her pace.

Mako joined Oyster, his knife now tucked away somewhere out of sight. “They say they's a voodoo spell in the water. Make people go hara-kiri.”

“Madeleine.” Ethan was looking hard at her face.

She tried to keep her head turned but he grabbed her elbow and looked to see her swelling lip.

A huge raindrop landed on the pavement, then another on her arm. The entire pack of boys broke into a run. Madeleine wanted to run, too.

Another flash of lightning, this time further off in the distance, and the thunder was slower to follow. Ethan's injury prevented him from being able to run for the bridge with the others, and she didn't want to leave him behind. She forced herself to slow down. Rain was splashing freely now, hissing the pavement, collecting into serpents of water that writhed and rushed for the drains. The bridge shelter loomed only a minute away.

“Go on ahead,” Ethan called above the rush. “Keep the baby dry.”

She bent her head over the baby and ran for the bridge. It felt good, as though the wind and water were washing through her, rinsing her free. Ethan had seen the injury but he'd let it go for the moment at least. She'd hear about it from him soon enough.

The baby finally broke into an all-out bawl. Thunder ripped so hard it threatened to burst Madeleine's eardrums.

A police car was parked just outside the bridge. She hoped to see Vinny, her friend on the task force, but she didn't recognize the officer seated inside the car talking into a radio handset. Same with the one standing with the others under the bridge.

Madeleine jogged out of the rain and under the bridge with the rest of them. The concrete structure stretched high above, spackled with mud sparrow nests, graffiti painted in scribble patterns along the massive footings. Traffic sounds swelled and droned amid the pulse of thunder. In addition to the five boys plus Del, about twelve homeless people were already waiting. She knew most by sight if not by name—she saw a woman who used to be a dry cleaner before Katrina, but since had been struggling with addiction. Another younger couple had come to New Orleans after Hurricane Rita to work day labor in the reconstruction. Also addicts. She recognized another young man, couldn't think of his name, whose brows met in the middle in a single thick line. He used to wait tables but went homeless, then got back on his feet only to go homeless again. He had no chemical addictions as far as Madeleine could tell. Just a painfully shy loner.

Madeleine scanned the faces of the three other outreach volunteers. She knew them all. They'd held a brief meeting to strategize before setting off this afternoon.

No sign of the shuttle to St. Jo's. In the sinking light, everyone looked the same shade of gray. Ethan was still making his way toward the bridge on his crooked leg.

“Whatchoo got there, Miss Madeleine?”

She looked and saw Shalmut Halsey sitting near a concrete piling.

“Hey, there.” Madeleine smiled, relieved to see a kind face, and hoisted the still-weeping baby so he could see.

Shalmut began to rise to his feet but made it only halfway before sitting down again.

She took a second look at his face. “You alright, Shal?”

He shook his head. “Fine, fine, just a little too much medicine.”

Madeleine detected a sick odor of booze on him. “I thought you were gonna go to the shelter after they questioned you this morning.”

“I thought you's gonna go home'n sleep,” he slurred.

Considering what happened last night, it was no surprise Shalmut would try to drown out the head noise. He did that even when things were fine.

Maybe I'll use him next,
Alice had said while she still gripped a broken bottle with freshly spilled blood on it. Madeleine's shoulders tightened.

“Where the shuttle at?” Shalmut asked. “I'm ready to go.”

She looked into the rain. “They had a lot of stops to make, trying to bring everyone in.”

“St. Jo's cup gonna runneth over,” Shalmut said with a rheumy laugh.

“Shalmut, do you remember the little boy at the levee? The blind boy and his mother?”

“Bo Racer, yeah,” Shalmut said.

“Bo Racer?”

“Yeah, kid go by name of Bo Racer. His mama name is Esther.”

Madeleine thought over the strange name for a moment. “Do you know where he is?”

Shalmut shook his head, or maybe he rocked, it was more a gesture of overexerting his thought energy than answering the question.

Madeleine tried, “Are they always at the levee like that?”

“No, no, they got a home. Just get run out sometimes.”

“Where's their home?”

“I don't know, baby.”

“They live in an apartment?”

“Naw, an ole trailer.”

“A trailer,” Madeleine said, thinking. “In the country or one of the parks?”

“That damn park, the park, the Rose Bush or Rose Something.”

“Rosewood Arms?”

Shal looked relieved. “That's it. Rosewood Arms.”

Then he squinted like he was striving to think of something. “Wait a damn minute. They here.”

“Here?” Madeleine said, looking across the darkness between steel girders.

“Yeah. On over there.”

He pointed in the direction where Del and the boys were. Madeleine strained to see. On the other side of the small assemblage, sitting next to a pile of construction rubble, sat a little boy and his mother. They looked an African-Hispanic mix. The boy's smile was gaping wide, sunglasses on his face. The mother looked tired.

Several feet away, Del was now shouting and cussing for no apparent reason but to draw attention. The boys gathered around her and one of the other outreach volunteers ambled toward them, too. The baby's wailing rose.

“Don't know why, there's no sun up in the sky…”

Madeleine looked back at Shalmut. He was singing to the baby in her arms with that roughshod voice of his. Even drunk out of his mind it sounded like heaven. The baby quieted.

“… Stormy weather, since my gal and I, ain't been together…”

She'd heard his voice so many times before. He and her father used to sing together, busking for dollars from the tourists. Daddy rarely needed the money—he just lived on the street because his turbulent mind caused him to blink in and out of mainstream society. She felt her throat go hot.

Ethan made it under the bridge and hitched his way toward her. She smiled at him. The baby was watching with wide eyes as Shalmut sang.

Ethan reached Madeleine's side and looked full into her face, frowning.

She turned her lip away from him but he gently took her chin and turned it back. “What happened to your lip, Maddy?”

She shrugged. “When I surprised Oyster in the dark. They thought we were coming to attack them.”

Shalmut stopped singing. Ethan's clean-lined face was pulled taut with anger, and he was soaked to the bone.

“Them huffers,” Shalmut said, and Madeleine followed his gaze to the pack of boys who had finally pulled the kerchiefs away from their faces. “Mean as snakes, them kids.”

Even in the dimness beneath the bridge, she could see multicolored smears under the boys' noses where they must have been huffing spray paint.

The strange bird call echoed under the bridge.

Madeleine listened. Same as she'd heard in the predawn woods just before she found Shalmut and Alice. The sound, it came from the blind boy, Bo Racer. He'd stood and was looking around. The nervous tick-tock sound bounced up toward the cathedral height of the bridge's underside and back down again. His mother Esther stood, too.

Next to Madeleine, Ethan's gaze zeroed in on Oyster. He took a step toward him.

“Hang on, Ethan,” Madeleine said.

But Ethan was heading straight for the huffers, as Shalmut had called them. Madeleine hoisted the baby higher on her hip and followed. Ahead, Del was flapping the water out of her tank top, exposing a fair share of skin in the process. The police officer watched her. A violent crack of thunder, and Del screamed with exaggerated fear. The baby started crying again. Lightning was flashing all around now, like camera strobes, and the rain cracked open to a deafening rush. Madeleine slowed, listening as the downpour intensified, growing thicker and louder and forming a solid white sheet from the top of the bridge. It stole the breath from the air. One by one, the huffers opened their mouths as if to allow in more oxygen, the same way alligators and dogs drop their jaws to cool down.

“Wait a minute, Ethan,” Madeleine said, her hand on his arm.

He wheeled on her. “I told you to be careful in that corridor! You act as though you don't even care what happens to you.”

Rain was now shearing the perimeter so hard it drowned out the sound of cars charging across the bridge overhead. The water looked like an opaque curtain that daylight could no longer penetrate. If she walked through that curtain she'd disappear. And if someone were standing three feet outside of the shelter, she wouldn't be able to see that, either.

Beneath the white noise came the blind boy's clicking, that tick-tocking bird call. Like at the levee just before dawn.

Her heart rate jumped. The air beneath the bridge seemed to thicken. Something was wrong.

She could hear the blind kid, Bo, calling. “Mama, it's here again.”

Oyster was staring at Ethan. “Hey, bent-dick, you got a problem?”

The other boys caught sight of Ethan's face and repositioned the kerchiefs over their noses.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Ethan and the boys were squaring off, but something deeper was going on. Something briar. Madeleine looked up. Severin was crawling upside-down along the footing of the bridge, her naked form streaked and smudged. Lightning and thunder shuddered all around.

Get away, Severin. We have a bargain.

Severin grinned down from above. “The blind boy comes, you break its neck, truly, easily.”

Ethan's arms were tensed at his side as he glared at Oyster. “You need to check your attitude, son, and think twice about hitting unarmed women.”

“Y'all need to think twice about busting in on other people's territory,” Mako shouted.

“Hey,” the policeman said as he took a step toward the huffers.

Bo's mother reached for her son.

Bo turned to her. “Mom, I said it's here again.”

“Gimme my baby!” Del shouted at Madeleine.

Madeleine raised the child to her, and Del stepped forward. A sense of anger electrified the underbelly of the bridge. Everywhere, in everyone, but it wasn't just the huffers' anger, or Ethan's, or Del's, it was …

Severin raised her head, leering down at Madeleine, and lifted a finger to her lips in a shush. Black thorns were unfolding from the piling, forming a nest beneath the devil-child.

Maybe I'll use him next,
Alice had said.

Madeleine turned to look for Shalmut Halsey but he was no longer there. She spotted him standing behind the police officer. Shalmut, who only moments ago couldn't even get to his feet.

“No!” Madeleine shouted.

Shalmut's hand went to the policeman's belt and pulled his gun from the holster.

“Shal! NO!”

Del's arms were still raised toward her baby when the first bullet flew. It took her just inside the left shoulder. Madeleine jerked the baby away and Del's eyes froze to shock. The infant bawled, raising its arms to its mother. Del took two steps sideways and looked at her arm. Blood coursed from just below her collarbone. The tank top stained black-crimson. She had been standing just behind Bo, who turned and ran toward Madeleine.

“Break its neck!” Severin cried.

And Severin imparted a vision so awful, so awful. Fractions of a second before Bo reached her: Severin's vision of how Madeleine might swing her arm out, catch the thin neck, and …

Madeleine had to close her eyes against it, hugging the baby to her chest.

Bo kept running past her, blind boy running blind, into the wall of rain.

Click click click click, tick-tock click.

Shalmut fired again. Madeleine hadn't heard the report but she somehow heard the bullet zip past her ear. Someone was falling.
She
was falling. She sank to the ground before she even realized Ethan had knocked her over a moment before the bullet would have struck her in the head. She had a hand in the mud and the other clutching the baby's head.

Del reached for the baby again, though she herself could barely stand.

Esther was wailing and scrambling after her son.

“Get down!” Ethan yelled.

The policeman stood in shock. Shalmut shot him point-blank through the forehead.

The baby shrieked, all of the folks under the bridge shrieking, their voices blanketed in thunder and rain.

The policeman slumped to his knees.

Del fell sideways and did not use her hands to break her fall. Lying in the dirt, she pedaled out her right leg twice—same way Vessie had been bicycling Zenon's leg in his hospital bed.

Shal, drop it!

Shalmut's eyes were wide. He swung the policeman's gun and people scattered in its path. Another report rang out, the sound seeming so inconsequential. Nothing compared to the thunder. It took Mako in the back as he was running for the rain.

Severin had brought the thorns. They curled black from the sparrows' nests, from the girders, even from the graffiti, stretching forth to envelop the madness that was occurring. Madeleine saw another river devil standing just beyond Shalmut. She'd seen him before. Whereas Severin looked like a little girl, the other river devil looked like a full-grown man. Muscular arms. She saw him in silhouette only. He stepped forward as lightning flashed, and she caught sight of his face. Eyes impossibly pale like powder blue robin's eggs. His skin filthy like Severin's with that odd shadowplay of sunlight on aged copper.