Those Across the River (27 page)

Lester yelled and dropped his father.

Both brothers yelling now.

The boy tucked the ear in his mouth like a piece of candy. I sighted down the barrel now, arguing with myself about whether to shoot the boy; that was when Buster grabbed Charley’s axe from his belt and ran at it.

It didn’t even duck.

Buster swung hard and hit true.

He buried the axe in the boy’s head as if in a soft tree stump; I knew the sound it was making even though I couldn’t hear it, knew that Buster was
feeling
that sound in the bones of his arm. He let the handle go. The boy staggered backwards until he hit a tree, then slid to the ground as his legs buckled under him. Every man stood still, holding his breath.

A gout of blood poured down the boy’s head.

Then stopped.

The axe fell out of the boy’s head and onto the trail. And then the wound was gone. The men who were close enough to see it gasped. The boy wiped the blood out of his eyes with the hem of his dress and stood up, picking up the axe.

Buster backed up a step. I walked onto the trail and stood next to Buster, my gun pointed at the boy. Not ten yards away. Despite my shaking hands, I was sure I would hit him.

The boy dropped the axe.

Grinned his sharp-toothed grin.

Then started to shake.

The doctor might have thought it was a seizure from the head wound, but that had not just been a wound any more than this was just a seizure.

Buster and I backed away.

The boy changed.

Quickly, tearing the red dress.

The moon came back, shone on its dust-colored fur.

It stepped out of what was left of the dress.

I remember smelling urine and thinking Buster’s bladder had loosed. Turned out it was mine.

I sensed Buster turn and run beside me, so I turned and ran also, still holding the pistol with two shots left in it.

I believe all of us ran.

All except the doctor, with Saul’s head in his lap.

I never saw them again.

Or Lester.

 

 

 

BUSTER AND I ran together until we could not run. Twice I hit trees, once so hard I almost lost consciousness. When we could no longer run we trotted, and then we walked. Buster wore the expression of a tragedy mask and, at times, made a sound between panting and sobbing. I put my arm around the big man’s shoulders but Buster didn’t seem to care; just clutched his hands under his chin like a child saying grace and made that sound.

I don’t know how long that went on. I know we were making for the river, and I have no idea if we were heading in the right direction. I was sure we wouldn’t get there. I was right.

When strong hands took my arm and spun me, I didn’t resist. I had no fight left. “This one?” said a small-eyed Negro with an unevenly trimmed woolly head. A white man said, “Yeah. This’n shot me. With this.” He had already plucked my pistol out of its holster. He had permanently matted long hair and a huge mustache. They were both naked, as was a white woman with a curly brown mane, who moved past us and made for Buster. Thankfully I didn’t see any more. The men hoisted me on their shoulders like a rolled-up rug and started running with me.

Behind me I could hear Buster screaming hoarsely, “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Not about the men running with me; about whatever the woman was doing to him.

I knew I was going to die.

And something odd happened; I relaxed.

And it all got funny.

The white one, the one with the cowboy mustache, was running in front with my legs, limping, favoring his right side. I remembered now shooting one of the monsters in the haunch the night my wife was bitten. The right haunch. I started laughing.

Then I realized that I recognized his mustache.

He was one of the hobos who came through town looking for work. I sat next to him while he ate ice cream at Harvey’s on that hot summer day. The colored with the bad haircut had been with him. It was also possible that Curly Woman was the pipe-smoking “Polish” woman. Jesus, they had our number. They hadn’t been angels looking for honest men; they had been devils making maps.

I laughed harder.

The colored with the bad haircut, who was holding my upper body, laughed, too, and said, “Sound like young marse got a joke to say.”

I thought about Dora, alone in the house, and I stopped laughing. I clawed and tried to dig my fingers into the black man’s eyes. He didn’t yell, just made a sound like
ack
, twisted out of it and dropped me. Because the other one had my feet, my head hit the ground. Now my feet were dropped. I opened my eyes just in time to see the black one straddle my chest fluidly and sit down on me like an anchor. I remember the moonlight on his blousy but threadbare shirt, how old and dirty it was, and his stink. It was the not-unpleasant smell of a Negro’s skin and hair corrupted with something feral and something coppery like old blood. I had smelled it while he ran with me, but now it washed down over me.

“You need a bath,” I said.

He blinked his small eyes in surprise.

“Lawd, you got a mouth on you,” he said admiringly, then hit me with incredibly hard open hands until I blacked out.

I think it was twice.

I
WOKE UP in a cage, naked, outside.

It was morning. It was cold. My head hurt like it was sitting in a socket of cold, broken glass. A curious chicken just outside the iron bars cocked its head so it could see me with its preferred eye.

“Good morning,” I said to it.

I sat up, noticing first how white my legs looked and then that they had rust stains from the bottom of the cage. I had a very civilized and unnecessary urge to cover my private parts, but there was not so much as a handkerchief in the frigid cage. There was not enough room to stand, or to fully extend my legs.

I looked at the chicken again.

“Would you please tell management that I would like to be moved to a better room?”

It walked off disinterestedly.

“I’ll have your job,” I said.

I knew where I was, though I scarcely believed it.

I knew where I had to be.

Despite the murderous pain in my head, I looked around and took stock of my situation. A grey, ancient smokehouse sagged just to my left. Near it stood a sort of round wooden disk. The fact that everything was blurry informed me that my glasses were gone.

To my right, a low stone wall defined the limit of what appeared to be an overgrown garden. Past that were rows of dilapidated shacks, swarmed over by kudzu and impaled by young trees.

This was all somehow familiar to me.

When I turned around and looked behind me, I knew why.

I saw it.

La Boudeuse.

The plantation of Lucien Savoyard, my great-grandfather.

Of course.

I turned around and looked at that wooden disk again, noticing this time the leather straps and buckles. Yes. This was the wheel on which Savoyard’s slaves had been flogged and tortured and spun until they were witless. I noticed that it was not overgrown.

“He awake,” a voice I recognized said. The Negro from last night. Not the strong, bald one. Bad haircut. He came over with a chipped bowl and stood over my cage with it.

“Open your mouth.”

I was thirsty enough to oblige and I drank as best I could the cold water he poured through the bars. I was shivering.

“I think the man cold,” he yelled back at the house. He seemed genuinely amused by this.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I said.

He looked at me.

He said the next thing very slowly.

“Cause we know who you are. We smell who you are. But don’t worry none. We’s the forgivin type.”

He stooped for the chicken that had been eyeing me and snatched it up by the neck, taking it inside with him, unconcerned with its beating wings. It took a moment for that to sink in. How fast he was.

It rained.

I had been testing the lock to the cage, bracing myself as best I could and pushing with both feet, hoping something might give. Something did, but it wasn’t in the door. I hurt my back.

“Goddamnit!” I said. That’s when I felt the first drops. “Goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit.”

Soon it was pouring.

I hugged my knees, watching the rain splashing in the muddy yard, trying to focus on that instead of the cold that was creeping through my body and the dull, tight pain above my right hip.

I saw a white foot tread in a puddle, and I looked up the leg and at its owner. The woman with the curly hair. Curly and matted. Naked, like me, standing in the rain. There was dried blood near her ear.

She had killed Buster.

“You’re handsome,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

She just stood there.

A beautiful woman with a wide, abundant thatch of hair on her pubis.

Slightly deflated breasts with huge nipples and brown areolas.

Someone’s mother.

The house was behind her, with its cupola and its balconies and mad growths of ivy. One of the upstairs French windows was open.

Then I saw her.

Eudora.

Her pale figure perfectly framed in the darkness of the interior.

Holding a bedsheet wrapped around her.

She looked out at me for a moment. I couldn’t make out her expression. Then a black hand was on her shoulder and she turned under her own power, and she went out of sight.

“She’s Hector’s,” the woman said.

“I see.”

“Good,” she said, and opened my cage.

She crawled in with me, entwined her limbs with mine, with her animal stink and her wild, tangled hair.

At first I tried not to let her, but it was like she was carved from warm oak. Her grip was unbreakable, even working against the thumb. She kissed me with her full lips and her rotten, hot breath, and I kept my mouth closed against her until she used her hand to force my mouth open. I bit her lip so hard my canines touched through it, and she jerked away from me, ripping the soft tissue open so a little part of her lip hung; the wound bled onto her chin in the rain. She laughed softly, like we were kids hiding in a tree house with a dirty secret. Drops of her blood fell on my chest and mixed with rainwater. She licked at where I bit her, taking her blood back into herself, and soon the bite was gone.

“You tryin to make me bite you back, huh? You want me to turn you? I might, pretty man, ’cept he said not to. But I will do this.”

She broke my ring finger.

I think she would have broken my little finger, but I didn’t have one on that hand.

I was so numb and cold and crazy it didn’t really hurt.

It didn’t matter.

She started putting mud all over us. It was smooth and sticky, more like clay. She warmed it on her crotch, then used it to get me hard.

She stuck me in her dirty like that and rode me until I came.

Then she slept on me and I was glad to be warm.

It just didn’t matter.

 

 

 

IT GOT TO be near dark and Mustache brought me dinner and a horse blanket. I had the impression somebody had a powwow and decided I might die of cold, and, for whatever reason, I wasn’t wanted dead. Not quickly, anyway. Dinner was roasted chicken, no doubt my friend from the morning. The funny thing was, I was so exhausted and deranged that I felt emotional about it. Like the chicken had suffered despite its innocence. I cried and ate it crying. It was poorly cooked and red near the bone. It occurred to me that perhaps they weren’t used to cooking things here.

When it was full dark, Curly Woman came and got me.

“He wants to see you.”

I wrapped up in the blanket and went with her into the big, wrecked plantation house, noticing now the flaking paint and bullet holes and how there was no glass in most of the French doors. We came in through the dining room. Candles burned and spilled wax on a once-magnificent table where a carved peacock’s jeweled eyes had been knifed out, probably by Union soldiers. I noticed that the candleholders were rusted Civil War–era bayonets jammed into the wood. She removed a candle and used it to light my way past the stairs now; I noticed a depression where the steps had been stove in by a cannonball at the end of its momentum, then crudely replaced. A groove in the fine wood floor betrayed its trajectory, how it had skipped like a giant skee-ball. The Yankees who occupied La Boudeuse after the slave uprising had shelled it for sport when they left. This was like a temple to madness.

In the hallway, we walked past rotted tapestries and, because I looked at them, she graciously stopped and held the candle so I could see the motif. Eighteenth-century laborers hardly laboring at all. How different must have been the scene out the window that gave onto the fields; slaves toiling bent-backed in the sun, tearing their fingers on the rough plants while, inside, in dyed silk, French shepherds lolled on rocks under shade trees. The master at his desk, the mistress at her loom and the house nigger pulling on the fan cord.

 

 

 

HE WAS IN the library. The big, bald colored from the town square. The one who sniffed at me and stared at Dora. The one they had gone to lynch. She squatted near him now, at his feet, not looking up at me at first. Then she did and her eyes filled with tears and she looked down again, wiping her eyes with the end of her dress. Her own dress was on her now, but unwashed. His concubine. I saw my pistol on the small table that also held his ashtray. He was smoking a cigar, wearing a silk robe. The robe was opened on his broad, muscular chest, and I noticed that he was branded. A fleur-de-lis inside the lower loop of an
S
.

Savoyard.