Flesh Wounds, page 26
“The French named it Fat Tuesday after the tradition of parading a fat ox through town. Everyone would follow in their party costumes. Surely you can guess what the ox was for, Bill.”
“Sacrifice,” he whispered. Something pricked his chest. He looked down and discovered the beads had become a strand of barbed wire.
Kim smiled, but did not answer.
“Are you their sacrifice?” Bill asked.
“No,” she laughed.
“Me then?”
Somewhere she’d lost her clothing. Two holes, one centered between her breasts, the other just below her left collar bone, gleamed darkly. Her skin was pale and almost translucent. Beneath its thin veneer lay a roadmap of collapsed veins and arteries.
They’d come upon a stainless steel table. Kim climbed up and lay down.
“Is it me?” he asked again, his voice weak with desperation—and hope. As he watched, the gentle rising and falling of Kim’s chest ceased. He reached out to touch her face, but a voice stopped him.
“You stupid bastard!”
He whirled to find Charlotte at his back. Charlotte who owned Imago Decorations, the shop where Kim had worked; Charlotte who’d taken Kim with her to that convention in Memphis; Charlotte who’d told him...
“She was coming home to tell you she was pregnant! She insisted on surprising you, wouldn’t call from the airport like I asked.” Charlotte slapped at him, missed, and fell to the floor weeping. “She missed her period for the second time in a row and I convinced her to take one of those E.P.T. things.” She looked up, her eyes swollen and red. “The test was positive. She was coming home to tell you!”
Bill tried to say something. Nothing came out.
Another voice intruded: “Big time advertising executive, eh?” Mike Ford leaned across the table and looked down at Kim’s pale corpse. “Left us behind. Showed us up. But you’re still a dumb son of a bitch. Shot your own wife, didn’t you?” He stuffed a finger deep into one of the dark holes in Kim’s chest. “Forty-four magnum? Three fifty seven? What’d you blow her away with Billy?”
Bill swung at him, just as he’d done at the reunion. Ford dodged the wild swing and popped him in the eye. Bill went down, his hand catching on a drain tube attached to the gutters in the table. The tube tore free and vile fluids—fluids that had once carried life through Kim’s body—gushed out across his legs.
“Let’s see,” Ford mumbled. “What have we here?”
Bill looked up to find Ford dressed in white, his hands in rubber gloves, a mask across his nose and mouth, a scalpel at work on Kim’s pale abdomen.
“Stop,” Bill begged.
“Autopsy, Billy. We’ve got to determine what killed the old girl.” As Ford opened her up, a fresh wash of fluids spilled from the torn tubing, flooding about Bill’s hands and knees.
Ford laid the scalpel aside and used his hands to pry the corpse open. The sound of ribs popping and organs tearing free of the peritoneum echoed throughout the dreamscape. Ford reached in up to his elbows, dug around, and extracted a long string of Mardi Gras beads. “Not uncommon in patients of this age,” he muttered. “Certainly not the cause of her death.” He hung the gory strand about his neck where they proceeded to bleed down the front of his surgical gown. He dug around some more.
“Ah-ha! I have it!” He pulled a tiny corpse from her.
“No!” Bill screamed, turning away, curling into a fetal ball.
“Oh yes,” Charlotte insisted. “The test was positive.” She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “Look at it! Look at your child, you murdering bastard!”
He swatted at her from his protective ball on the cold floor. She shook him so hard his head rattled against the floor. She let out a long scream, like the wailing of a...
Train.
There was a train coming. Thundering and wailing, its mass shook the T.A. where it sat not ten feet from the tracks, rattling Bill’s head against the car’s cold window.
He sat up and wiped the sweat from his face. He was shivering. He stank. His body ached as if someone had clubbed him.
Glass towers to the east were ringed in a halo of dawn. New Orleans stretched beneath a sky dead grey, bruised with clouds that promised rain for Mardi Gras.
As the train roared past, Bill started the car and went to find a hotel.
The drizzling rain did little to dampen the Mardi Gras spirit. In fact, there seemed to be more people on Bourbon Street tonight. The barest sliver of a moon hung among the dark clouds, illuminating the faint beginnings of a fog. Beneath the street lamps, the wet streets took on an appearance of the macabre, as if they were bathed in the tears of a million grieving mothers. Lightning lit the sky just north of the interstate, followed immediately by the rumble of thunder, like drums in the distance.
Bill worked his way through the crowd, searching for Martin. He was tired. The hotel he’d found was comfortable enough, but his sleep had been filled with nightmare autopsies, prenatal fetuses, and accusations. He’d spent most of the afternoon in the hotel bar, drinking two dollar cokes and listening to a salesman’s pitch on wind turbine generators, the power source of the future.
He asked himself why he was doing this. Why the Trans Am? Why the drive to New Orleans? What did he hope to find here? What missing element from his youth could he possibly hope to recapture?
You know what all this means, don’t you?
“No, Kim. I don’t.”
A drunk patted him on the back. “S’okay, buddy. It’ll—” He belched loudly. “—be starting an-eee minute now.”
What? Bill almost asked. But he knew. The sacrifice.
On the final night of the celebration, blood is spilled to welcome in an eight week period of penitence. But why? For man’s sins? A pagan equivalent of the crucifixion?
Bill was shoved aside as Martin Culpepper pushed past.
“Martin!” He caught his old friend by the arm and spun him around. Martin tried to pull free, but Bill hung on. “Martin, it’s Bill. Bill Morgan. Don’t you recognize me?”
Martin’s eyes were unfocused—or rather, they were focused somewhere else. On something Bill couldn’t see. Something Martin seemed to see by looking right through the milling crowd. There were circles dark as bruises beneath his eyes. His lips were swollen and cracked. His hair was matted, plastered to his head in knotted clumps. The shirt he wore, once white, now a dingy grey, had foul, ocher stains beneath each arm. The knees of his jeans were ragged and one of his sneakers was untied. He was bone thin. His hands shook like an alcoholic in need of a drink.
“Did you see her?” Martin asked.
Ice raced through Bill’s spinal cord. His knees quivered. He had seen her. Last night. The smell of decomposing flesh suddenly assaulted his nostrils and for a second he thought he saw her cadaverous face looking at him over Martin’s shoulder.
Martin was driving! a part of him screamed. It was his fault. His hand fell from Martin’s arm and Martin slipped away into the crowd.
If there had to be a sacrifice, it should be—
Coward! He clawed at his face, drawing blood. If you’d gone to the police, told them what happened that night on the interstate... If you’d had the courage to face whoever it was in the house that night instead of blasting away...
He ran after Martin. He saw him turn the corner of Bienville Avenue. Bill followed. He was almost too late, just catching a glimpse of Martin entering a dark alley up the street. He yelled for him to wait, but there was no response.
The alley ran between a book store and a fast food dive, both closed. Twenty yards in, it turned to the right behind the book store. On the left was a high wooden fence closing off the alley behind the restaurant. Dead ahead lay the brick backside of another establishment. There was only one direction Martin could have gone.
Bill stopped, listening. The only sound was his ragged breathing. “Martin?”
Nothing.
The alley stank like a compost pile. He imagined a pile of rotting food just the other side of the fence: half-eaten burgers squirming with maggots, petrified fries, old lettuce and onions decomposing into a noxious sludge. He could almost hear the flies swarming about it.
He advanced halfway down the alley, repeated his call. No answer. His foot knocked over a bottle. Something darker than the asphalt bubbled out and ran thickly towards the turn in the alley. He followed it. Lightning flashed and the rain became a torrential downpour. He blinked fiercely to keep it out of his eyes. Turning the corner, he found the book store’s dumpster. Martin lay face down in an overflow of sopping cardboard boxes.
Roxanne Ladner stood over him.
She was wearing a one-piece swimsuit and white sneakers—the clothes she’d worn that night at Wolf River. Her hair was gathered in a ponytail that reached halfway down her back, tied with a barrette made of bright balloons. The barrette seemed somehow painfully adolescent, reminding Bill that this was only an thirteen year old girl.
Barely ten feet separated them. At that distance, no detail was hidden. He could see puberty budding like a rose: the fine down of hair on her thighs; the small, firm mounds where her breasts were forming; the curve of her hips; the full, red lips. He thought of the years he and Martin had robbed from her. Tears joined the rain running down his face.
She was dry. The rain didn’t touched her.
Their eyes locked. Hers were bitter blue, narrowed with accusation, laced with pain... and something else. It took him a moment to recognize it. Satisfaction.
Then she was gone, fading into the gathering fog as if she’d never been there at all. As if guilt and his shivering had somehow concocted her from the wind and rain, standing her there over his old friend just to scare the hell out of him.
He knelt beside Martin and gently rolled him over.
Martin’s neck was slit from ear to ear. The wound gapped red and clean in the pouring rain, bone winking from its pink depths. Martin’s eyes were open and wild. His mouth was frozen in a scream.
The windshield wipers seemed to ask the same question over and over. What now? What now? What now?
The wet expanse of I-10 slid effortlessly beneath the tires. New Orleans was just a smear of light on the horizon behind him. She hadn’t tried to keep him from leaving. She had other souls to torment before morning.
He thought of Martin lying cold and wet in the alley. What should he have done? Call the police? Tell them a ghost slit Martin’s throat?
“You could have told them you did it.”
He turned his head to find Roxanne Ladner in the passenger seat. She smiled at him toothlessly. Her face was a mass of lacerated flesh and gleaming bone. One eye was gone. Her ponytail was wrapped about her neck, stuck in place with blood. Her chest was sunken, broken ribs protruding through flesh and swimsuit alike. Her legs—
The right tires went off the shoulder and Bill fought the car back on the interstate. He kept his eyes forward, focusing on the approach of a distant mile marker.
She ran her hand across the sun-weathered dash. “Nice car, man.” Her hand left a red trail across the cracked plastic. “Needs a stereo though.”
“Go away,” he whispered.
For a time, she did.
Bay Saint Louis slid past in the night. He stopped at a rest area five miles further on, got out of the car and paced for ten minutes in the rain. When he came back to the car, she was waiting for him.
They pulled back out on the interstate. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Justice,” whispered the rain beneath the tires.
A green exit sign flashed by: WAVELAND, PASS CHRISTIAN. Time had distorted, accelerating with the Trans Am till it seemed only seconds passed before the next exit whipped by. When he looked at her next, she was young and beautiful. Her hair shone like fire in the exit’s lights.
She stretched her leg over the center console, sliding it alongside his until she found the accelerator pedal with her foot. His hand came down quite naturally on her knee, finding it soft and sensuous. She placed her foot atop his and pushed. He didn’t resist as the T.A. picked up speed.
Roxanne leaned close, one hand finding his where it lay on her knee, the other brushing the wet hair back from his ear. Her breath was warm on his neck. “Am I pretty?” Her voice was a whisper, tremulous with insecurity, the voice of a girl struggling to become a woman. The car had begun to shake. The speedometer needle fluttered around a hundred.
“It’s not so bad being dead,” she told him. She reached out and took hold of the wheel. “You’ll see.” She directed the car over on the shoulder and held it there.
At the farthest reaches of the T.A.’s high beams Bill could make out the bridge. She was steering the car on a direct course for where the railing sloped down to join the pavement. He imagined the car hitting it, ramping up and out through the darkness, arcing over Wolf River and finally coming down to impact against the far bank. At more than a hundred miles an hour there’d be little left.
She kissed his cheek. Her breath reeked of death and decay.
Bill took his hand off the wheel and lay back against the seat. He was suddenly so very tired. Let Roxanne drive, he thought. After all, she knows the way. He fought the urge to laugh hysterically.
She held the car’s course, unwavering. The engine was screaming like... like the night he and Martin had pushed it up to 140.
As the bridge loomed nearer, she took his hand and put it on her little girl’s breast. He could feel the sharp outline of fragile ribs beneath her soft flesh.
Suddenly, there was an ear-splitting explosion and the hood jumped as if struck an incredible blow from inside. Oil blew out across the windshield. Flame shot briefly from the hood scoop. The headlights flickered and died. The drone of the big engine was replaced by the soft whisper of the tires.
Roxanne Ladner was gone, the only reminder she’d been there a cloying hint of decay in the car and a chill where she’d touched him.
Deceleration pulled Bill forward. His eyes sought the bridge railing in the gloom. Would he still have enough speed when he hit it?
A hand fell lightly on his shoulder. He looked down and found delicate, familiar fingers, one adorned with the ring he’d bought her. In the rearview mirror he found her face.
“Stop the car, Bill.”
Her eyes in the mirror were bright, loving. In them he found no accusations, no reproach, no condemnations, only love and understanding. Forgiveness too.
His hands found the steering wheel. His foot found the brake pedal. The wheels locked up and the car slid.
“Easy,” Kim coached from the back seat.
He got the car under control, slid to a halt just short of the bridge. He rested his head against the wheel and shook for several minutes. When he lifted his head and looked, the back seat was as empty as the passenger side of the car. All his ghosts had left him. The Trans Am clicked and hissed, spilling its fluids out on the road, lifeless.
It was over.
A few minutes later headlights glared off the back window and someone pulled in behind him. Bill watched in the side mirror as a cautious highway patrolman got out and approached the car. He rolled down his window when the cop shone a flashlight inside.
“Car trouble?”
“I think the engine blew.”
The cop frowned. “Just how fast were you going?”
“Don’t know,” Bill lied. “I think I might have fallen asleep at the wheel.”
“Dangerous thing to do. You could have gone off the road.”
“Yes sir, I know.”
The cop clicked off the flashlight. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride to the next exit. There’s a 24-hour service station there.”
Bill got out, leaving the keys in the car, not bothering to roll the window back up. The patrol car was warm and dry. He fought the urge to close his eyes as they went over the bridge, but the bridge was empty.
“Where are you heading?” asked the cop.
Bill had to think about that one. Finally he said, “Home.”
The cop looked over at him. “Which is...?”
“Gulfport.” He was surprised at how right it sounded. They rode in silence until the cop looked at his watch. “Damn, look at the time. It’s after midnight already.”
“Wednesday,” Bill muttered.
“Huh?”
“Ash Wednesday,” Bill told him. “The first day of Lent.”
The Night was Kind to Loretta
The swamp hissed and bubbled beneath a slate black sky, belching foul gas and primal curses. Ethereal vapors hovered just above the ground, curling serpent-like about the haunting cypress stumps, swirling in endless thermal cycles over nefarious pools that gleamed in the starlight like demon-black eyes. Somewhere a gator growled and slapped the water. An owl asked the night who was doing all the screaming.
“I’m gonna come back,” the madman told her, his eyes alight like tiny bright coals. “Once a year, lover. Just like a fuckin’ anniversary, I’ll be back. I’ll tug on this here rope—” He shook the end not tied around her ankle, shook it in her face as if he were about to whip her across the mouth with it. “—and haul your ripe little ass up outta the mud. And then, Sweetpiece, you and I’ll do the horizontal like nobody’s bid’ness.”
She was through begging. And she’d done all the screaming she could stomach while he raped her. Somewhere between the sodomy and him masturbating on her breasts, as he’d pressed her face into the fetid slime of the swamp and whispered how much he wanted to fuck her in the mouth but knew she’d bite his goddamn cock off, Loretta realized he was going to kill her before the night was through. She quit pleading for her life then, focused instead on watching for him to make a mistake.
He finally made one, but when she got his knife and cut him, he responded by beating her senseless, pounding her with his fists until she actually felt she was being driven into the ground like a Saturday morning cartoon character. When he kicked her in the face, she blacked out. She came to sometime later with the moon hanging just over the skeletal tree branches, cold mud wrapped like death about her, hands and feet bound, and him panting heavily as he worked up yet another erection.
