Flesh Wounds, page 3
“Absurdities,” I whisper to the night. “The four-eyed dog. The chanting from the ZendAvesta.” Rajah explained that the sacred verses not only ward off demons, but remind the mourners of the shortness of life.
And then the Nasasalars came to take the body and lead the procession to Malabar and its solemn towers. The vultures, as if they’d known for days, were already gathering. The bed where Karamiri had lain was disinfected with gomez, more of which was sprinkled behind the procession as it made its way through Bombay.
“Bull urine,” I laugh hollowly. “What kind of people clean with bull urine?”
But I’d found them noble in other ways. Proud and beautiful. With none so beautiful as the woman now cold in my arms.
The procession wound out of the city and up the hill to the garden at the top. The most beautiful garden in India. The most beautiful garden I have seen anywhere. Through the iron gates, past the tall green trees... to the Towers of Silence.
The Towers rise thirty feet high, measure almost three hundred feet in circumference. Squat round fortresses, they were built to protect the living from the dead. Atop the towers, the dead meet the vultures naked and alone. Whatever barriers of wealth or birth may have separated individuals in life, they face this last ordeal as equals. In three days time, the Nasasalars return to sweep the sun-bleached bones into the hollow center of the tower... where all becomes dust.
“When I die, and the vultures have consumed my body,” Kara explained when she first fell ill, “I will cross the Chinvat Bridge which arches over the blackest hell to the mountain of paradise.”
“Don’t be silly, Kara. You’re not going to die,” I told her. “So long as there are stars in the sky, you’re mine to hold. Remember?”
She smiled, but in her fawn-like eyes I saw that she knew I was lying.
I asked Rajah about the Chinvat Bridge.
“Wicked souls are met on the bridge by a freezing, foul wind and a hideous hag. The hag is their conscience made ugly by bad deeds done in life. For this person,” Rajah explained, “the Chinvat bridge becomes narrower and narrower until it’s as thin as a razor’s edge, whereupon the wicked soul falls shrieking into the pit of hell. The dogs that guard the bridge howl and howl, sending the spirit deeper into darkness, into the House of Lies.”
“And for the righteous soul?”
“They are met by a warm scented breeze and a beautiful young maiden. The dogs lead the righteous across a bridge that grows wider with every step until the soul steps into paradise.”
Handed down from ancient Persians, Zoroaster’s theology has become a part of the Parsee culture. In my research in Paris, I found the Persians to have a great fear of all burial grounds. They look upon the light of the sun and the purity of the air as a birthright from which, even in death, they refuse to be separated. The thought of walling up the body or placing it in the dark depths of the earth holds a special terror in their minds. They believe that, in death, the sun demands a return of the life-giving elements from each individual. What is decomposition, the Persian argues, save the natural process by which the material elements are given back to the sun from which comes all life? And the vulture, they believe, comes to bear the soul away to paradise.
“Her soul is mine!” I scream at the vultures. Those that have drawn near take to the air in a burst of black wings and startled cries. Briefly, they careen above the tower, settling in short order to their previous watch posts on the parapet, where they proceed to argue amongst themselves.
All but the lammergeier, which remains stoically silent. It’s in his nature to wait. When the others are sated he comes for the bones and their sweet marrow.
Vultures are not without their myths and legends: Prometheus was sentenced to have his liver torn out daily by a vulture; it was a lammergeier that dropped a tortoise on the head of the poet, Aeschylus; the Greeks claimed the feather of a vulture would ease childbirth, ward off snake bites, and cure blindness; the Incas of Peru believed the vulture to be a messenger from the sun-god, lifting the sun into the sky each day; the dried heart of the vulture cures epilepsy; the vulture’s eye, cooked and eaten, improves a man’s eyesight; drinking vulture blood prolongs life. There are hundreds more.
“But you’re just eaters of carrion,” I tell the lammergeier. He cocks his head at me, the mask of black bristles about his eyes and beak waving in the wind. “You eat, you digest, you defecate. There’s nothing spiritual about it. The Parsees think their towers beautiful, but I find them nothing more than foul rookeries coated in vulture dung and misery.
“With your eyesight—seven times keener than mine!—can you see where my Kara is going, lammergeier?”
The moon as it walks the southern hemisphere from east to west has caught a gleam in his eye, and it makes him look suddenly wise as he studies me across the tower. Of course I know where she’s going, those owl-like eyes say. She’s going where we all go in time. With our help, she’ll get there a little faster.
I see it in my mind. The griffons will strip every ounce of flesh from her bones once the sharper beaks of the blacks and white-backs have begun the task. The lammergeier will hold back; it’s the bones he craves. I’ve watched the merciless group strip a mountain goat in less than thirty minutes, leaving the lammergeier behind crunching bones.
I can’t let that happen to Kara.
My love has grown heavy in my arms. My legs have gone numb against the hard stone. Already it is past midnight and nothing has come to me. Though the parapet shields me from the sight of those below, what did I hope to accomplish by scaling the tower? I wanted to hold her just one more time, and now I’ve done that. I wanted to say goodbye without chanting priests smothering me in sandalwood smoke, but there are no goodbyes potent enough to ease this great emptiness in my heart. I wanted to be alone with her, but the birds have made that impossible.
The vultures stir, begin again to inch closer.
“Would that I could have loved you an eternity, my Karamiri, my Indian princess.” My tears fall and paint her face in opal moonlight.
I’ve but three days to love you. Three nights to share the stars and dream.
And then you’ll be gone.
But none shall take you across that bridge save me.
I’ll need help with the bones. I look to the lammergeier there at the tower’s rim. He is ready... waiting.
Wish One Knight
Jeremy closed his comic book when he heard the front door slam.
Such a telling sound, this slamming of the door. The ten-year old scrambled beneath his bed, taking the tattered comic with him. Familiar dustballs, a sock deprived of its mate, and a one-legged G.I. Joe welcomed him to his secret sanctuary.
“I’m home!”
Slurred words. Heavy, shambling feet.
Deke was drunk.
Again.
“Goddammit, where is everybody?”
Jeremy crawled further beneath the bed, its dark weight scant reassurance over his head. The room’s corner was as far as he could go, pressed there against the peeling wallpaper and moldy sheetrock.
“I’m in the kitchen.” Mother’s voice. Apprehensive. Tremulous.
“Bring me a cold beer on your way out, Becky. I’m sweating like a goddamn hog.” The worn sofa groaned beneath Big Deke Reynolds’ weight. Loading trucks the last three months, Deke had burned off most of the excess he’d put on during his out-of-work period, but he was still a big man: six two in his stocking feet, nearly two hundred and thirty pounds on the scales at the corner drug store. Except for a beer gut, his bulk was all muscle.
Jeremy opened his comic.
Page eleven of The Black Knight : The villainous Jules de Monteret has kidnapped the Lady Joan de Vac. With her draped rudely across his saddlebow, he rides through Dreadwood Forest to his dark castle by the sea. In the dungeons below Castle Torn, he chains her to a rack and prepares to torture from her the information he seeks.
“Dinner ready?”
Nothing from Mother.
The sofa groaned again as Deke leaned forward, preparing to head for the kitchen. “Did you hear me?”
“Twenty minutes,” came a wee voice from the kitchen.
“Didn’t I tell you I’d be home at five? I told you to have dinner ready at five. Can’t you at least have dinner ready when I get home? Is that too fucking much to ask?”
The questions were, of course, rhetorical. Becky Reynolds knew to keep quiet. She had come to fear this stranger in her house, this man she once loved. Yet more terrifying for her was the thought of where she’d be without him. Without so much as a high school education, with her first husband long since cold in the grave, dead of some unpronounceable disease that struck but one in a million, she had no value outside that of a mother and a wife. Housework was her sole profession, sex her occupational hazard, and Deke her unforgiving employer.
“Where’s that kid? Doesn’t he know how to greet his old man anymore?” The sofa groaned a third time, but it was just Deke settling back. A greeting from Jeremy hardly warranted getting up from the sofa. Of course, Deke wasn’t Jeremy’s real father. For the last four years Deke had been trying to replace a man Jeremy could only vaguely remember. Mostly good times, until Deke lost his job and the drinking started.
Jeremy settled in for the long haul, willing the drifting dustballs to lie still and quiet. There mustn’t be a single sign of his presence. That kid had gone to ground and would stay there until Deke’s snoring blended with the voice of the Late Night News.
Page Twelve of The Black Knight: The evil de Monteret’s questions are scoffed at by the lovely Lady Joan. “There was never a treasure,” she assures the villain. “You’ve been made the fool, Monsieur. You chase dreams. A peasant’s fantasy, nothing more.” De Monteret turns the rack and the Lady’s screams balloon across the colorful page.
Mother’s cautious footsteps as she left the kitchen came to Jeremy more as vibrations than true sound. Until he heard them, he didn’t realize he’d been listening for them. Awaiting the inevitable.
“The goddamn beer’s not even cold!”
“But I put it in the fridge more than an hour ago.”
Her whine ended with a sharp crack, the sound a pine knot makes exploding in a campfire. It was a sound Jeremy had heard all too often: the sound of Deke’s hand on Mother’s face.
“I asked for a cold beer. Cold beer! Can’t you even get that much right?”
A sob. “I said I put it in the—”
“Listen to me, woman. The beer. Isn’t. Cold.”
“The refrigerator... it’s old. You know—”
Another slap. Part of the ten-year old wanted to slip out from under the bed and go help Mother. But a greater part of him, that part which remembered the pain of Deke’s belt, fists, and boots, urged him to cower in his sanctuary.
Page thirteen of The Black Knight is an advertisement for Atlas Bodybuilding.
I’m a coward, Jeremy thought, not for the first time. Kick sand in my face, and I’ll crawl beneath my bed.
Slap! “Here I am working all fucking day with those stinking goddamn niggers loading trucks for that Jew bastard, Silverstein.” Crack! “All I ask is for my dinner to be waiting when I get home and for my fucking beer to be cold. Is that too much?” Smack!
Mother whimpered.
“Maybe you’d like to take your fat ass out on the street and try to support this family?”
“Please!”
“That’s about all you’re good for anymore. Just a piece of ass!”
Another slap.
“Here. I’ll show you, bitch!”
Page fourteen of The Black Knight: Lady Joan refuses to divulge the location of the treasure. Monteret leans close and whispers more despicable methods of torture to her. Her face goes pale. Her bottom lip quivers. Whatever debasement Monteret has threatened appears to have hit home. The fable has reached its bleakest hour, for Lady de Vac is about to break and the treasure will only allow Monteret to wreak more misery and injustice on the kingdom. Now is the time for a hero. Now is the time for page fifteen where the Black Knight arrives, thundering down the dungeon stairs on his midnight charger, scarlet cape billowing like storm clouds, a gleaming yard of steel bright as lightning in his fist.
Where is Mother’s knight? Who is there to save her?
“If not me myself,” Jeremy whispered to the dustballs, “then there is no one.”
“No! Please. What if Jeremy walks in?”
Jeremy believed in truths.
The truth that this wasn’t really his stepfather, but rather some urban demon crawled forth from the sewers to possess Deke. A demon with many, many names: unemployment, inflation, foreclosure, eviction, deficit, debt, urban renewal, welfare, food stamps, economic depression... and the collapse of the U.S. oil industry, that dreaded beast which put Deke out of work, out on the streets, and, later, in the bars.
The truth that this demon had destroyed the loving, caring Deke, the man who had taken him to Disney World two summers ago, the man who had read him, a little bit each night over the span of a year, Tolkien’s Hobbit.
The truth that this demon might also kill his mother.
Unless her Black Knight came forth to slay it.
Jeremy slid from under the bed, his comic rolled and clenched in his shaking fist. He went to the bedroom door, which opened, like every other room in the tiny apartment, on the living room. He opened it a crack and dared to put his eye to it.
The boy uttered a small, terrified gasp. His legs buckled, nearly dropping him to the floor.
Deke had Mother bent over the end of the sofa, one hand cruelly twisted in her short blond hair, the other holding her house dress up around her waist. Jeremy could see very little of his mother. Of Deke, he could see far too much. Deke’s bare and hairy ass moved back and forth in quivering thrusts at the forward apex of which Mother’s weeping climbed an octave. Between Deke’s widespread legs swung wrinkled brown sacks. Like counter-weights on an old grandfather clock, they were keeping time with the raggedly metronomic thrusting of his hips.
Jeremy had heard as much as any other ten-year old about sex. The scene in his living room did not match what he’d heard—unless rape was to be considered sex. Shaking uncontrollably, understanding that he had witnessed something vile, something that exceeded the hate and abuse levied daily on his mother in the form of beatings and curses, Jeremy closed his bedroom door. But he forgot to twist the doorknob, and the latch made a deafening click! as it slammed home in the frame.
“The little bastard’s watching us!”
A second later, Jeremy heard heavy footsteps. The boy dove for the bed and its comforting dark underbelly, but he was only half-hidden when the bedroom door burst inward to slam like thunder against the opposing wall.
“Come here, you little sonabitch!”
Deke’s growl sounded very much like a drunken lion. He reached for Jeremy’s exposed ankles, but his pants were still undone and they dropped down around his knees. He hauled them up, struggling to get them closed over his erection, then had to fight a stuck zipper and poorly sewn button. Under other circumstances, it might have been comical, but there was murder stretched like some rubber Halloween mask over Deke’s face and insane hatred glistened shark-like in his eyes.
By the time Deke got his pants secured, Jeremy was huddled in his corner beneath the bed, shivering amid the dustballs and broken toys, clutching the rolled-up comic to his pounding heart.
“Come out from under there!”
Tears started down the boy’s face.
“If I have to haul this goddamn bed outta the way, I’m gonna beat you so’s you can’t move for a month, boy! Now, get out here!”
Jeremy recognized the truth in Deke’s words. He knew he should crawl out from under the bed. To stay would only aggravate Deke more. But he couldn’t move.
“Fine. If that’s the way you want it...”
There was a great squeal of protest as the bed moved, the sound of old wood dragged across linoleum, only sightly less hair-raising than fingernails on slate. Jeremy’s dark sanctuary was invaded with light. A great beefy hand took him by the back of the neck and hauled him away from the moldy corner.
Held aloft by that one strong hand, Jeremy was turned to confront Deke’s twisted countenance. Deke’s grip was so tight, Jeremy feared his neck would surely snap.
“Did you like what you saw, you little pervert? Huh?” Deke reeked of beer and something worse. Something sickeningly sweet, like mildew or old urine. Jeremy instantly associated it with what Deke had been doing to Mother. “Answer me, boy!”
“Please,” Jeremy sobbed.
“I ever catch you spying on me again, you little shit, and I’ll—”
“Please don’t hurt Mommy.”
“What I do to your mother is my business. You understand me?” He shook the boy for emphasis, hard enough that Jeremy’s teeth rattled. The boy’s eyes were beginning to bug out and his face had turned crimson, suffused with so much blood he could taste it in the back of his throat. His lower lip was quivering and he’d bitten his tongue.
Where is Mother’s knight?
Jeremy’s previous thoughts taunted in a sing-song chorus through his mind, pounding in time to the beating of his heart and the racing of blood in his veins.
If not me myself, then there is no one.
“I won’t let you hurt her,” Jeremy croaked, trying to sound the way he knew the Black Knight must sound on page fifteen. His voice came out sounding more like the terrified squeak of a mouse caught between the paws of a cat, but it was enough to further anger Deke.
“Seems you’re getting a little too big for your goddamn britches. Time I taught you a lesson, boy!”
As Deke’s free hand drew back, Jeremy could see Mother’s blood sprinkled like new rust across the knuckles. Jeremy hardly realized what he was doing until it was too late and the rolled up comic book had smacked across the bridge of Deke’s nose.
The comic proved poor substitute for a broadsword.
Deke gasped in surprise and fury. His eyes swelled to twice their normal size. The drawn hand, held open for a slap, closed into an angry, knuckle-white fist. The fist seemed to scream as it catapulted forward. It was only after the blow, replaying the image of the plummeting fist in his mind, that Jeremy realized it was he who had screamed.
