"Blood Memory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Iles Greg)

Chapter 27

The moment Henry Washington’s truck rolls onto the gravel road that follows the eastern shore of the island, a strange thrumming starts in my body. It’s as though a mild current of electricity is sparking along my peripheral nerves, worsening the hand tremor that’s bothered me for the past three days.

The island looks the same as it always did, the perimeter skirted with cypress trees growing out of the shallow water near the shore, the interior forested with willow brakes and giant cottonwoods. The cypresses are on my right now; we’re driving north. I want to ask Henry about my grandfather’s old truck, but a tightness in my chest stops me. As it falls farther behind, I try to remember the layout of the island.

From the air, DeSalle Island looks like a foreshortened version of South America. It’s nearly bisected at the center by a horseshoe lake that was once a bend in the Mississippi River. Grandpapa’s hunting lodge stands on the north shore of the lake, the shacks of the workers on the south. West of the lake lie five hundred acres of rice fields. The northern end of the island is pastureland dotted with cattle and oil wells, and south of the lake lie the woods we’re passing now. Nestled among the trees at the lower edge of the woods are the cabins and utility buildings of the hunting camp, and below them-the Argentina of our island-low-lying sand dunes and muddy slews tail down to the confluence of the old channel and the Mississippi River.

“Jesse’s been on the north end chasing stray cows,” Henry says, shaking his head as though such labor requires a certain level of insanity. “He said something about doing some plumbing work at the hunting camp after that.”

In a few seconds the trees on my left will thin and reveal the lake and the cluster of shacks where the workers live.

“Didn’t we already pass the road to the camp?”

Henry laughs. “The closest road, we did. But I don’t take this truck into no slews. There’s a gravel road goes into the camp from the north now.”

I see the lake, dark green under the clouds, with small whitecaps whipped up by the wind. Henry turns left and follows a road that runs between the lake and the south edge of the woods. He waves broadly at a group of shotgun shacks by the lake. The sun has started to sink, and most of the porches have people on them, the old ones rocking slowly, the children scampering around in the dust with cats and dogs.

“Here we go,” Henry says, turning right onto a narrow gravel road through the trees.

“What’s Jesse like?” I ask.

“You don’t know him?”

“No.”

“Jesse’s a mystery. He used to be the most laid-back cat on this island. Loved to smoke and talk. But now he’s a hard-ass. I don’t know why, exactly. But he is.”

“Was it the war?”

Henry shrugs his big shoulders. “Who knows? Jesse don’t talk too much. He mostly work, or watch other people work.”

A minute passes in silence. The cabins of the hunting camp appear ahead. Unlike the shacks of the workers, many of which are made of tar paper or clapboard on brick stilts, the cabins are built of sturdy cypress, weathered gray and hard as steel. The roofs are corrugated tin that’s rusted to dark orange.

“There Jesse,” says Henry.

I don’t see a man, but I do see a brown horse tied to the porch rail of one of the cabins. Henry pulls up in front of the cabin and honks his horn three times.

Nothing happens.

“He’ll be here,” Henry says.

Sure enough, a wiry black man wearing no shirt crawls from beneath the cabin, stands, and brushes himself off. At first he looks like a hundred other black workmen I’ve seen. Then he turns, and I see the right side of his face. Blotches of bright pink skin stand out like splatters of paint from his right shoulder to his right temple, and his cheek is a mound of deformed scar tissue.

“He got burned over in Vietnam,” Henry says. “It looks bad, but we used to it now.”

Henry leans out his window and shouts, “Yo, Jesse! Got a lady in here wants to talk to you!”

Jesse walks over to the truck-my side, not Henry’s-and looks me in the eye. Henry uses his switch to roll down my window, which leaves only six inches of space between my face and Jesse Billups’s scars.

“What you want with me?” he says in an insolent voice.

“I want to talk to you about my father.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Luke Ferry.”

Jesse’s eyes widen, and then he snorts like a horse. “Goddamn. All this time, and now you come back? I met you when you was a little girl. I knew your mama pretty well. How’d you get down here?”

Henry says, “Her car’s parked on the other side of the bridge. I told her you’d take her back to it when she’s ready. You got her okay?”

Jesse studies me for a bit. “Yeah, I’ll take her back.”

He opens my door and helps me down from the high cab. Jesse must have a half inch of calluses on his hand. As Henry drives away with a blast of his horn, Jesse leads me to the next cabin down from the one where his horse is tied.

“Hardass don’t like strangers,” he explains.

“You named your horse Hardass?”

“People call me hard-ass all the time behind my back, so I figured I’d let ’em know I know it.”

He climbs onto the porch and sits against the wall of the cabin. I sit on the top step and brace my back against the rail. There’s no doubt that Jesse Billups works hard for a living. He has to be fifty to have served in Vietnam, but his stomach is still as tight as a teenager’s. His arms don’t bulge, but the long muscles in them ripple with every movement. His face is another matter. It’s hard to get an impression of his looks; I can’t really see past the scars yet.

“Diesel fuel,” he says in a ragged voice.

“What?”

“This face I got. I was cleaning toilets at a firebase when Mr. Charlie dropped a few mortar rounds on us for Christmas. We used to burn our shit with diesel fuel. I was standing next to five burning drums when the round went off. Covered me with shit and burning diesel. Would have been funny except for the infection I got from it.”

“I’m sorry.”

He gives me a cynical wink, then takes a pack of Kool menthols from his back pocket. Lighting one with a silver lighter, he inhales deeply, then blows blue smoke away from the porch. He seems to be settling in for a long talk. After another deep drag on his cigarette, he turns his dark eyes on me.

“You here to ask about your daddy?”

“I heard you knew him pretty well.”

This seems to amuse Jesse. “I don’t know about all that. But me and Lukie hung together some, yeah. A long time ago.”

“I was hoping you could tell something about what happened to him in the war.”

“You know anything already?”

“Somebody told me he was a sniper. I didn’t know that. They also said he was part of a unit that was accused of war crimes. Do you know anything about that?”

Jesse snorts in derision. “War crimes? Shit. That the craziest expression I ever heard. War is a motherfucking crime, start to finish. It’s only people who don’t know that be talkin’ ’bout shit like war crimes.”

I’m not sure how to continue. “Well, there must have been some unusual events, at least, for the army to talk about prosecuting his unit.”

“Unusual?” Jesse barks a humorless laugh. “Yeah. That’s a good word.”

“Can you tell me anything?”

“Luke told me a little about that. He was a country boy, see? That’s what got him in trouble. He knew how to shoot. I’m a good shot, but that boy was something with a rifle. Like he was born holding one. Wouldn’t kill nothing after the war, though, not even deer for food. Anyway, the army made him a sniper. And he did that job for a couple months. Then they took him into this special unit called the White Tigers. Supposed to be a all-volunteer thing, but I think the CO pretty much volunteered anybody he wanted into it. That’s how old Lukie got stuck.”

“The White Tigers? What was the purpose of the unit?”

“They was put together for one reason. What they call incursion into enemy territory. Only this incursion wasn’t exactly legal. The Tigers went into Cambodia to try to hit the Cong where they hid from our bombers.”

“Do you know what happened there?”

“Same shit that happened a lot of other places, only worse. The Tigers went from village to village looking for weapons, VC, or VC sympathizers. Thing was, they didn’t operate like we did over in I Corps. In Cambodia, they didn’t wait around to get shot at. They went in there to scare the shit out the people, keep ’em from helping Mr. Charlie. To deny the enemy sanctuary and interdict lines of supply, MACV would have said. Double-talking motherfuckers. Anyway, they had some bad boys in this Tiger outfit. Hard cases from other platoons. So naturally, they did some bad shit.”

“What exactly falls into that category?”

Jesse stubs out his cigarette and immediately lights another. “Assassinated tribal chiefs and VC paymasters. Punished anybody known or suspected of helping the VC or the Khmer Rouge. Questioned people vigorously.” He laughs bitterly. “That means torture.”

“My father did some of this?”

He nods deliberately. “That was the job, you know? That shit happened down where I was, too. Especially shooting prisoners so you wouldn’t have to drag them around with you. But if the wrong officer saw you, you could get in bad trouble. Luke’s outfit was different. In the Tigers, it was the officers instigating the shit. Cutting off heads and leaving them on sticks to scare the Khmer Rouge. Taking girls from the villages and using them for recreation. Getting-”

“Wait a second,” I cut in. “You mean they kidnapped girls and raped them?”

Jesse nods like it’s no big deal. “Sure. That’s how the CO rewarded his men. When his boys did good, they could pick a girl from a village and keep her for a couple days.”

“What happened to the girl when they were done with her?”

Jesse raises his hand and makes a quick slicing motion across his throat. The deadness in his eyes makes me shiver. “I told you they done some bad shit.”

“How did my dad feel about that?”

Jesse shrugs. “He blamed the government. Shit, that’s who put him in the middle of it. He didn’t ask for that. And what could he do about it? Way out in the bushthe whole operation off the booksCO had the only radio. So Luke did what he had to do and got the hell out.”

“What about the war crimes investigation? Who started that?”

“Some rat in their unit, probably. Somebody looking to get his name in the papers.”

This doesn’t sound right to me. “Reporting that kind of thing seems like a good way to get dead. It must have been someone with a conscience who first went public.”

Jesse shakes his head. “All I know is, when the government questioned Luke, he didn’t tell ’em shit. The government dropped the investigation, end of story.”

Jesse takes a drag from his cigarette, inhaling so deeply that he seems to draw sustenance from the smoke. As I watch him, it strikes me that his lean frame is not the result of good health. It’s almost as if the fat that a normal human would accumulate is being consumed by a deep-banked anger.

“Well, do you think-”

“What you come down here for?” Jesse growls with sudden intensity. “You didn’t come here to talk about no Vietnam.”

“Yes, I did.”

He barks another laugh. “Maybe you think you did. But there’s something else behind these questions.”

I look away, hoping to hide the guilt I feel over what my grandfather told me today. Because that’s what I feel, I realize. Guilt. That’s why I’m asking these questions. If my father really did those things to me, something must have pushed him to it. And if it wasn’t the war, then what else could it have been but me? I’ve always craved attention, and I’ve always been very sexual-

“Hey,” says Jesse. “You look like you about to cry on me.”

I tilt back my head and blink away tears. “You’re right. I don’t know what I came here for exactly. I was hoping forsomething. I don’t know what.”

“You looking for some kind of explanation for the way Luke was? Hoping I’d tell you he was a saint or something, behind that closed-up face of his? He was just a dude, like me. We all got good and bad deep down inside.” He points a long-nailed finger at me. “But I ain’t telling you nothing you don’t already know. I can look in your eyes and see that. You Luke Ferry’s kid, I know you got both inside of you.”

Now the tears come, too many to blink away. “Why did my daddy spend so much time down here, Jesse? What was it that drew him?”

Jesse scowls and looks off into the trees.

“Was he growing dope down here?”

“He tried, but he wasn’t no good at it.”

“Did he ever deal? Drugs, I mean?”

The scarred head turns slowly left and right. “Shit, I had to get Luke’s weed for him.”

“What am I missing, then? How much time did he actually spend down here?”

“A lot. Specially in the winter. Summertime, your family was down here a lot. In deer season, Dr. Kirkland and his buddies would visit. But all the other times, Luke stayed down here.”

“What the hell did he do, if he didn’t hunt or fish?”

Jesse looks back at me, but the anger I sensed before seems to have leaked out of his pores. “He walked around a lot. Drew things in a notebook. Played a little music. Had him a guitar down here. I taught him some bottleneck stuff.”

I faintly remember a guitar in my father’s barn studio, but I don’t remember him playing it. “Was he any good?”

“He was all right, for a white boy. He could bend a note. Had some blues in him.”

“Well, did he-”

The ring of a cell phone stops me, but it’s not mine. Jesse takes a Nokia from his pocket and answers. He listens for a bit, then says he’ll get right on it and hangs up.

“I got to go,” he says.

“Right now?”

“Yep. Gotta get some supplies from the mainland in case the water covers the bridge. S’posed to rain a couple of days straight, all along the river. We better get moving.”

“But I have some more questions.”

“We can talk on the way.” He walks over to his horse, unties him, and leads him over to where I’m standing. Hardass flicks his tail at a buzzing horsefly. “I’m gonna get on, then pull you up behind me. You just stay clear of his hindquarters.”

“I will.”

Jesse puts a foot into the stirrup and expertly mounts the horse. Then he takes his foot out of the stirrup so I can get a foothold. When I do, he takes my left arm and pulls me effortlessly up behind his saddle. “You can talk, but hang on while you do.” He puts the horse into a canter on the grassy shoulder of the gravel road. His broad shoulders are wet with sweat, and pink scar tissue dots the back of his neck.

“You work for my grandfather, right?” I ask.

“That’s right.”

“What do you think about him?”

“He’s a tough old man.”

“Do you like him?”

“Dr. Kirkland pays my wages. Like got nothing to do with it.”

I have a feeling the relationship between Jesse Billups and my grandfather isn’t simple at all. “What are you not telling me, Jesse?”

I can almost feel him smile. “Dr. Kirkland beat me once when I was a boy. Beat me bad. But I’d have done the same thing in his place, so we’re square enough on that, I guess.”

I want to ask more about this, but before I can, I see a woman riding toward us on a bicycle. The gravel road makes her work difficult. She looks as if she might skid and fall at any moment.

“Mother fucker, ” mutters Jesse.

“Who’s that?”

“Don’t pay her no mind. She half-crazy.”

The woman slows as she nears us, but Jesse spurs his horse as though he means to pass her without a word.

“Wait!” cries the woman.

“Stop,” I tell Jesse.

He doesn’t.

“Goddamn you, Jesse Billups!” shouts the woman. “Don’t you run from me!”

I reach around Jesse and grab for the reins. “Stop this horse!”

He curses, then stops the horse on a dime. “You gonna wish we hadn’t.”

As agitated as the woman below me looks, I expect her to start shouting accusations of battery or paternity at Jesse Billups. But now that the horse has stopped, she acts as if Jesse doesn’t exist. She has eyes only for me.

“Are you Catherine Ferry?” she asks.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Louise Butler. I want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Your daddy.”

“Did you know him?”

“I surely did.”

Swinging my left leg over the horse’s flanks, I drop to the gravel beside Louise Butler. She’s about forty and very pretty, with the same milk-chocolate skin Pearlie has. She’s watching me with what looks like suspicion in her large eyes.

“If you stay here and jaw,” says Jesse, “you gonna have to get back to your car on your own. I gots to go.”

“I know where my car is. I can get back to it.”

Jesse kicks his horse and leaves us in a small cloud of dust.

I look at Louise and wait, expecting some explanation of her sudden appearance. But she only stares at the sky.

“Gonna rain soon,” she comments. “I got a place by the lake. We’d better start back that way.”

Without waiting for an answer, she turns her bike around and starts pushing it down the road. I watch her for a few seconds, noting her one-piece shift and Keds sneakers. Then I trot forward and fall in beside her, my feet scrunching the gravel as I walk.

“How did you know I was here?” I ask.

“Henry told me,” she says, not looking over at me.

“So you knew my father.”

Now she turns to me. “You might not like what I’m gonna say, Miss Catherine.”

“Please call me Cat.”

She laughs softly. “Kitty Cat.”

A chill goes through me. My father called me Kitty Cat when I was very small. He was the only one who did. “You did know him. Please tell me anything you can.”

“I don’t want to make you feel bad, honey.”

“You can’t make me feel any worse than I already do today.”

“Don’t be so sure. Did Jesse tell you anything bad about Luke?”

“Not really. He might have, but you came along.”

Louise wrinkles her nose. “You can’t trust Jesse. Not about Luke.”

“I thought they were friends.”

“They was for a while.”

“What happened?”

“Me.”

“You?”

She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “Darling, Luke was my man for seven years. From 1974 right up to the night he died. And a lot of people didn’t like that.”

I stop in my tracks. This woman can’t be more than ten years older than I. And she’s telling me she was my father’s lover?

Louise walks on, then realizes I’m no longer beside her. She stops and turns back. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings. I just wanted to talk to you about him, see if I could see him in you.”

“Can you?”

She smiles sadly. “He’s looking out of your eyes at me right now. Every line of your face got a shadow of him in it.”

“Louise, what-”

Before I can finish my sentence, the clouds open up. Fat raindrops slap the cream-colored dust on the shoulder of the road, making dark circles of mud. The circles multiply too fast to follow, and then Louise and I are running down the road like little girls, she pushing her bike at first, then jumping onto it and riding beside me.

“You’re in good shape!” she cries as the shacks of the little village come into sight. “My house ain’t far, but it’s past this bunch here.”

We race past the gray shacks, their porches empty now, and turn down a muddy path that parallels the lake.

“There it is!” Louise shouts.

I hold my hand over my eyes to shield them from the rain. In the distance I see a shack that’s not gray like the others, but bright blue, like a shack in the Caribbean. Now that I know where I’m going, I sprint ahead of the bike. My feet have better purchase in the mud than her bicycle, and I beat Louise to her porch.

Watching her ride the last few yards, I realize that I’m about to hear things about my father that he never meant for me to know. Does this beautiful stranger know things that might explain what Grandpapa told me today? Or at least confirm it?

“Go on in,” she says, lifting her bike onto the narrow porch of the little house. “I’m right behind you.”

I walk through the flimsy front door into a room that serves as a combination kitchen, den, and dining area. The moment I enter, two things strike me with startling intensity. First is the sound of the rain hitting the tin roof above me. It’s my recurring dream made real, and the rattling almost takes my breath away. The second is the certainty that my father once lived here. On the mantel over a gas space heater is a sculpture of a woman. Though it’s of African rather than Asian derivation-a blank oval face over a long neck and a trunk with graceful limbs-one glance tells me it’s my father’s work. The woman is lying on her side, with one knee raised and one hand on her hip, the way a woman might lie in bed watching her lover across the room. This sculpture is easily worth more than Louise’s whole house.

The dining table, too, is my father’s work. Brushed steel with inset glass plates, and flecks of mica fused to the steel. There’s no bed in this room, but I’d bet anything that he built that, too.

“Luke wanted me to have my own place,” Louise says from behind me.

Suddenly I’m wavering on my feet. The heat in the house is stifling, as though the place has been shut up for days, and the rattle of the rain seems to grow louder by the second. But that’s only part of it. Today my father’s life has turned from a patchwork of happy memories to a house of mirrors.

“What is it?” cries Louise.

“I don’t know.”

She rushes to an air conditioner mounted in a window and flips a switch. The rumbling roar of the old window unit does much to drown the sound of the rain, but it’s too little too late.

“You’re going to faint!”

As my knees go out from under me, Louise catches me under the arms and steers my falling body toward a sofa.