Pay the piper, p.25
Pay the Piper, page 25
The cottonmouth rose up.
Flat, diamond-shaped head. Barklike scales. Paired white spots. Steel-rivet eyes. A single second of affectless regard before the mouth sprung open a full forty-five degrees, the inner cheeks white enough to burn holes through the dark, its deep throat ever so barely pink, like a drop of cherry sauce mixed into a bowl of cream. The interior folds looked silky, nearly sexy, Miss Ward shedding her nightie outside the window, fanged and beckoning.
Pontiac tensed and made fists.
She never had a chance. The cottonmouth shot forward like a diving eagle. Its fangs sunk into Pontiac’s right arm above the wrist. Instantly, volcanically hot, the fangs like fork tines dipped in molten metal. Pontiac tried to scream but air only swept inward. She whipped her arm but the snake bore down like a second set a biceps, a brand-new limb with its own designs.
Pontiac thrashed her arm against the floor. The cottonmouth torqued but held fast. She felt the grotesque rubber of her wrist flesh yawning open as the fangs sickled deeper and poison pumped from salivary glands. The bite was so hot it went icy, freezing the radius and ulna, bones she’d learned about from Miss Ward.
Could be the poison, but Pontiac believed she saw eight blacklights flicker as the Chamber’s other creatures fought for freedom. It made no sense, really, that the Piper would let a cottonmouth alone serve as proxy. The Piper was the Gila monster, the Komodo dragon, the gators, the turtles, the snakes; it was Ayida, Chikangombe, Monyoha, and Ol’ Splitfoot. Even more upsetting was that customer faces reflected in terrarium glass might reveal that they were the Piper too—wronged, sorrowful, forgotten, and furious.
Daddy’s old warnings bubbled up along with blood. Soon the pain would go radiant. Pontiac would barf, go limp, start suffocating as the poison enflamed her tissues. She had seconds to act if she were going to have a ghost’s chance.
Her free arm swept an angel-wing pattern across the floor. Nothing to help till she bumped her own thigh, the dress Mère bought, the pocketed object. Pontiac’s hand knew what to do even if her mind didn’t. It weaseled into the pocket and uprooted Billy May Part II.
A baseball was built to survive a hell of a lotta hits.
Pontiac slammed the ball onto the cottonmouth’s head. The snake spasmed. Pontiac slammed again, again, hearing bones snap, hopefully the snake’s but she couldn’t be sure. The spatter of snake blood across the new log would write a more truthful account than her pencil ever could. Not a bad final entry, truth be told: defending not only herself but the town she loved. Pontiac kept smashing, even as she felt drops of poison bead along her nerves.
The cottonmouth’s head was wet gristle by the time Pontiac felt somebody toss aside the limp snake and start to lift her off the floor. Billy May Part II, nothing but a handful of bloody fabric and string now, plopped from her hand. Again she’d lost her best friend. This time, though, she felt a whole lot better about it.
They’d fought longside each another one last time.
Pontiac was off her feet and into the air. She felt as flimsy as the Oil Man papers Daddy had never signed. Daddy—she tried to coalesce her convulsive thoughts into a coherent goodbye but could only rake together a batch of the sneaky winks, surprised smiles, and proud nods he’d given her over the years. Mama’s crypt rose like the moon behind him, doors open, welcoming Pontiac home.
The Chamber’s blackout gave way to carnival’s kaleidoscope. All Feathers, No Meat—she’d escaped! If only Mère could see it! But the venom was altering Pontiac’s chemistry; she was greased in sweat, slipping through the arms that held her. But her bearer was strong and capable. The arms hitched her up and kept moving, away from Bob Fireman’s lights into darker, cooler pools. A sudden maniacal rain drove down on them like nails. It hurt, but cooled her too.
Pontiac tried to see who had her before she passed out. No red face, no black suit. That was all she could tell, and was grateful for it. In a few minutes, she’d die, and while it might not be in the arms of an angel, it sure wouldn’t be the arms of a demon. Laissez les bons temps rouler, non?
~ 56 ~
LA PIEUVRE SEEMED MESMERIZED BY Miss Ward, the wet, willowy human who dared stand before its abysmal power. The water tentacle rolled; it swayed; it angled its mirror-thing as if trying to decipher the teacher’s secrets. Pure speculation, of course. All Gerard knew for sure was that La Pieuvre was preoccupied.
He stood up. Tougher thing than he would have guessed. His clothes were so soaked it felt like he was deep in the quick. The store floor was slick with the laundry detergent, dish soap, window cleaner, mop solution, bleach, and other products that had exploded from their containers. It slopped underfoot as Gerard clambered over a shipwrecked candy rack.
The marbles, of course, were a crueler impediment. Over a hundred immies, steelies, corkscrews, clearies, and milkies seeded the Mercantile floor, old friends that had turned against him after spending thirty-eight years in the quag, the ultimate hardtogets. Now they rolled beneath his staggering feet, less angry at DeLoach for jettisoning them than they were at Gerard for failing to tear apart the swamp to find them. Should he have? Were they, and the friendship they represented, the gold he should have dug for?
Gerard searched for Doc. The coffee island was upended and the old man’s bony fingers were still clamped to it. Doc was coated in liquified issues of the Times-Picayune, the newsprint spotted red from bloody wounds. His eyes were half-closed. His ribcage ballooned and deflated. There was no telling the severity of Doc’s injuries.
Also no telling where Doc’s shotgun was.
Last thing Gerard recalled was arming himself with Miss Ward’s Bowie knife while Doc took the Remington 870. The shotgun must have been lost in the destruction, same as the knife. But it had to be close! Gerard crept eastward, where most of the Mercantile’s materials had flooded. He pushed aside a shelf of soaked scratch-tickets. No shotgun. He kicked past a bin of individually wrapped beef jerkies. No shotgun. He didn’t hear rain anymore, only a tribe of mad drummers beating hysterical patterns.
Added to that, gradually, was the sound of being watched.
City folk might not believe in such a sound. Swamp rats counted on it for survival. Gerard had looked directly at silent watchers on hundreds of different late-night muddles through the marsh. A nutria staring from a cattail fort. A gator’s golden cat-eyes visible just over a sticky tarn. A fellow drunkard collapsed on the trail, maybe harmless, but maybe plastered enough to stab the next passerby for grub money.
Gerard stood straight and began to turn around. He saw Doc, coughing blood, staring up high. He saw Miss Ward, frozen with fear, looking the same direction. Gerard clenched his teeth and finished his turn.
The tentacle had forgone Miss Ward. Now it hovered over Gerard, swaying as if giving him a doggie sniff. Gerard’s hands and feet prickled. His skin went cadaver cold. What he felt was less fear than surrender. There was no comprehending this entity.
A sound emitted from the tentacle. Or from the thing behind the tentacle. Or from the swamp behind the thing, La Pieuvre’s veins and vessels intertwined with every root, stem, axil, bud, and blade. A voice of multitudes purred through alligator weed, Virginia creeper, and buffalo grass, and creaked like the boughs of bald cypress, southern magnolia, and crepe myrtle. Undertones, those. The tenor and soprano were bullfrog, dragonfly, hawk, mosquito, crane, woodpecker, cricket, bobcat, rattlesnake, alligator, wren, beaver, parakeet, owl, and wolf, predator and prey aligned, all part of the same refrain of life, death, rebirth.
It asked a question.
WHAT ARE YOUR CONVICTIONS?
Gerard recoiled at thunder cannonades and squinted through rain. The tentacle dipped slightly, fifty feet closing to forty. La Pieuvre’s voice lowered.
NO CONVICTIONS IS WORSE THAN MALEVOLENCE.
“I don’t know de t’ings I supposed to say,” Gerard pleaded.
SO MANY DEAD—ON ACCOUNT OF THOSE LIKE YOU.
THE CONVICTION-LESS.
YOU HAVE HAD GENERATIONS TO ADMIT YOUR WRONGS.
TO ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR ILL-GOTTEN GAINS.
TO TOURNIQUET THE BLEED OF COMPOUNDING GRIEVANCE.
Gerard’s guts were empty of alcohol but caught fire anyway. He’d spent his life burbling to barfly buddies, wheezing weak lessons to Pontiac, weeping futilely at Janine’s grave. Here was his chance to stand the way Miss Ward had stood. If he went down shouting, maybe it would give Pontiac, wherever she was, the headstart to outrun this thing. He whipped his head upward with a sawblade of gray rainwater.
“I never hurt nobody! Nobody but my own self!”
THE DEAD NEVER HURT ANYONE EITHER.
AND YET THEY REMAIN DEAD.
IN THE WATERS THAT ARE MY HOME.
“I’m just one man! It ain’t my fault! None of dese deaths are my fault!”
YOU THINK THE FAULT LINES END.
THEY DO NOT EVER END.
THERE MUST BE OWNERSHIP. ATONEMENT. REDRESS.
“Empty my pockets, octopus! Tear down my shanty! You’ll see I don’t got nothin!”
YOU DROWNED YOUR SINS IN NASTY-SUGAR.
SO YOU NEVER HAD TO FEEL THEM.
THERE ARE OTHER WAYS TO PAY.
Gerard shook his head. Not if it meant taking Pontiac. Not if it meant taking any of the boys and girls who didn’t even know the wicked lineages they belonged to. In a lightning flash, Gerard was eleven again, lowering himself into a storm-frenzied lagoon, feeling around for lost marbles till a cottonmouth showed up. Gerard hadn’t backed down then.
The words flew from his mouth verbatim.
“Do it, snake! You hear?”
Did swamps have memories? The tentacle aped the cottonmouth of Gerard’s youth, tilting its erstwhile face and giant mirror like a dog tilted its head upon meeting an unexpectedly feisty varmint. Gerard kept shouting the shouts of his past.
“You t’ink dat scares me, snake? You t’ink you can take somet’in from me dat everybody else ain’t already took? Y’all ain’t shit, snake! Y’all ain’t shit!”
All the while, his hands did what they’d done thirty-eight years back, digging deep, not into lagoon moss and sweet grass, but his own pockets.
Shoot your shot, Doc had said.
What Gerard found in the lagoon back then, today he found in his pocket.
The Brothers of the Spear. Better than a Remington 870. Better than a Bowie knife or sugarcane machete. The loyal marble had saved him before. Saved a lot a folk, actually. Gerard held the marble in his right fist, cold as an ice chip. He pushed his thumb into that fist so it touched the glass. It was his thumb, after all, that had beaten German Rusnak’s hundred-to-one-odds and brought hope back to the blighted boys of Alligator Point, at least until harsher forms of nasty-sugar started sinking their still-breathing bodies.
Shoot your shot.
With Doc and Miss Ward looking on, somehow the whole Point looking on too, Gerard reared back and hurled the Brothers of the Spear.
~ 57 ~
FEW REVELERS NOTICED THE TENTACLE lording over Chickapee Basin. The jamboree of midway lights made the tentacle appear to be nothing but a ripple of cloud. Kids spent their allowance, played rigged games, bought greasy food, and cavorted between queues. It made Pete think of the Ceremony of the Pearls from Wake of the Red Witch. Festivity and frivolity, with ignorance of the tragedy waiting on deck.
“What we we do?” Pete asked dumbly, rain dribbling off his lips.
“Protect and serve,” Wilkes said.
The cop took off so fast rain flew from her in pennants. She went directly for the ill-lit slums of carnival trailers, maybe in the belief that Bob Fireman actually existed. No: she accosted a quintet of lounging carnies. She didn’t tell them about the tentacle, too hard to make out and too confounding to behold; Pete didn’t know what she told them. But the roustabouts perked up with the thrill of deputization. They sprinted off to five different destinations: the carousel, house of mirrors, bumper cars, Ferris wheel, Wombat Scrambler. Pete watched in wonder as the carnies tore apart queues on their ways to stop the rides.
Wilkes ran a slant across the carnival’s neck, some kind of crowd-control technique, hollering and making traffic-cop gestures away from the wall of rain. Back when the Point was a official town with an official payroll, Sheriff Pete often bewailed his lack of staff. Even if he’d had a full complement of colonels, majors, captains, and rank-and-filers, they could not have sheep-dogged this crowd better than Pat Wilkes. People saw her, paid heed, and began to drift northward.
“Standin here like a spot on a dog,” Pete scolded himself.
Who cared if he lacked Wilkes’s training? He’d always been more of the brawler anyhow, stomping through brackish waters sans galoshes or ripping apart leathery rush with his bare mitts, anything to get him closer to where he had to get. Too old a mutt now to learn new tricks.
He galloped to the nearest group he saw, four little girls.
“Get out of here! All y’all!’
“Hello, Sheriff,” Alice Chilcote said.
“Scat! You hear me? Thataway!”
“But the cotton candy’s that way,” Melissa Montagne said.
No time for respecting personal space. Pete wrapped his big arms around the quartet and bowling-balled them north. Corn dogs, soft drinks, and hair clips went flying.
“GET!”
They got. Pete bolted to the next group. A little boy, two parents: the Durbers. Same routine. Next the Beatty kids, the Tournier family, the Dauber twins, the Fontaine brats. All these faces he knew down to birthmarks and scars. Most of which had yet to fill out into the grown-ups they had every right to become, no matter the regrets and despair that were adulthood’s dowry.
Pete bellowed, and pulled, and pushed, and in one instance kicked. The carny deputies, meanwhile, had darkened half the midway booths and every ride except the Wombat Scrambler, a rollicking baton studded by hundreds of crimson lights, still making riderless circulations. These lights lit the tentacle from below as it dipped closer, the reflective face of its mirror going a blinding, catastrophic red.
The Red Witch, Pete thought. It’s come for me at last.
Half the attendees were still on the grounds, booing the ride blackout and only starting to notice the thing reaching over Chickapee Basin. Time had run out for Pete to inveigle them to skedaddle. He had to face up to the Red Witch, just like the Duke’s Captain Ralls had faced up to the wreck of the Red Witch ship. It had caused Captain Ralls’s death, but with his beloved Angelique already gone, what did it matter?
Pete had nobody left to live for.
Except Wilkes, he supposed. Pete realized he did want the big-city copper to know what a good backwater sheriff was capable of, even if it was the last thing he did.
With the nose of the tentacle craning downward over the Wombat Scrambler, Pete hooked his thumbs into his belt loops, stuck his chest out, and strode hips-first, just like John Wayne, to the center of the carny’s clearing. Only had one boot left, so Pete made it count, stomping it twice as hard. Each stomp into dry dirt sounded like a hard heartbeat.
Never in his whole stupid life had he been so scared.
He weren’t alone in that. Finally, screams from every direction, fleeing footfalls. Plenty of folk, though, especially little ones, looked immobilized. They crouched against vendor stands and game tables, waiting for somebody to save them.
The tentacle hovered fifty feet overhead. Made entirely of water. Broad as a blue whale. Of infinite length. Looped so it could hold the large, flat, reflective object. It had no face yet looked directly at Pete. A noise groaned up from its whirlpool depths, a billion tributary voices thundering into a single seething river.
WHAT ARE YOUR CONVICTIONS?
Pete winced through spatters of salt water. He glanced left and right, and failed to find a funhouse that might have broadcasted the shivery voice. He wiped his face and stared into the tentacle’s liquid cosmos.
It was an elegant question, but the Point weren’t a total stranger to eloquence. Hell, you get a few drinks into somebody like Gerard Pontiac, he’d sermonize you something gorgeous. That’d never been Pete’s way. If he had something to say, he said it short and direct.
Maybe that was the answer.
“I believe in telling it straight.” Pete scarcely recognized his frightened voice.
The water stirred, bubbled, fermented.
TELL IT TO THOSE WHO WERE DEAD BEFORE DYING.
Either Pete, or the world, or both, had gone mad. He accepted it.
“I … don’t know who you mean.”
THOSE HUMANS RIPPED OF THEIR HUMANITY.
“I keep the peace. That’s all I ever tried to do.”
THEY HAVE NEVER KNOWN PEACE.
THEIR BONES LIE DEEP IN MY WATERS.
ROLLING AND ROTTING IN CHAOS.
CONFESS. ATONE. REDRESS.
Pete tried to think through the curdling fear. What awful things had he done? Who had he wronged? Letting Jack O’Brien’s killer go was all he could think of, and he still believed that didn’t qualify. He tried to think beyond his own actions. The Red Witch felt ancient; might that mean the wrong was ancient too? Pete considered his mother, slashing her pimp’s throat. Neither Rose Roosevelt nor Gee Putnam was worth this being’s wrath. Further back, then. The settlers of Alligator Point, the Pirates Lafitte. Distinguished anti-heroes round these parts, though a parallel narrative scuttled about the edges. The Lafittes as slave traders, boating souls across the Styx of the Caribbean.
“You talkin about … slaves?”
CALL THEM BY THEIR PROPER NAMES.
“I don’t know … their names—”
COME LEARN THEM, THEN.
HERE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA.
PAIN WILL BE YOUR PENCIL.
KEEP TRACK OF THEM FOR ETERNITY.
Pete did not follow what the Red Witch was saying. Yet he felt yoked with guilt and shame. He opened his mouth. To confess? Atone? Redress? He didn’t know how. He felt he had to say something to start draining the pus from the infection of this putrid land. Unlike John Wayne, however, he didn’t have Hollywood’s finest writing his lines. Sure, he could go on borrowing them. Reap the Wild Wind had a juicy line he could imagine telling the Red Witch right now: You haven’t enough sand in your craw to stand in front of me alone.
Flat, diamond-shaped head. Barklike scales. Paired white spots. Steel-rivet eyes. A single second of affectless regard before the mouth sprung open a full forty-five degrees, the inner cheeks white enough to burn holes through the dark, its deep throat ever so barely pink, like a drop of cherry sauce mixed into a bowl of cream. The interior folds looked silky, nearly sexy, Miss Ward shedding her nightie outside the window, fanged and beckoning.
Pontiac tensed and made fists.
She never had a chance. The cottonmouth shot forward like a diving eagle. Its fangs sunk into Pontiac’s right arm above the wrist. Instantly, volcanically hot, the fangs like fork tines dipped in molten metal. Pontiac tried to scream but air only swept inward. She whipped her arm but the snake bore down like a second set a biceps, a brand-new limb with its own designs.
Pontiac thrashed her arm against the floor. The cottonmouth torqued but held fast. She felt the grotesque rubber of her wrist flesh yawning open as the fangs sickled deeper and poison pumped from salivary glands. The bite was so hot it went icy, freezing the radius and ulna, bones she’d learned about from Miss Ward.
Could be the poison, but Pontiac believed she saw eight blacklights flicker as the Chamber’s other creatures fought for freedom. It made no sense, really, that the Piper would let a cottonmouth alone serve as proxy. The Piper was the Gila monster, the Komodo dragon, the gators, the turtles, the snakes; it was Ayida, Chikangombe, Monyoha, and Ol’ Splitfoot. Even more upsetting was that customer faces reflected in terrarium glass might reveal that they were the Piper too—wronged, sorrowful, forgotten, and furious.
Daddy’s old warnings bubbled up along with blood. Soon the pain would go radiant. Pontiac would barf, go limp, start suffocating as the poison enflamed her tissues. She had seconds to act if she were going to have a ghost’s chance.
Her free arm swept an angel-wing pattern across the floor. Nothing to help till she bumped her own thigh, the dress Mère bought, the pocketed object. Pontiac’s hand knew what to do even if her mind didn’t. It weaseled into the pocket and uprooted Billy May Part II.
A baseball was built to survive a hell of a lotta hits.
Pontiac slammed the ball onto the cottonmouth’s head. The snake spasmed. Pontiac slammed again, again, hearing bones snap, hopefully the snake’s but she couldn’t be sure. The spatter of snake blood across the new log would write a more truthful account than her pencil ever could. Not a bad final entry, truth be told: defending not only herself but the town she loved. Pontiac kept smashing, even as she felt drops of poison bead along her nerves.
The cottonmouth’s head was wet gristle by the time Pontiac felt somebody toss aside the limp snake and start to lift her off the floor. Billy May Part II, nothing but a handful of bloody fabric and string now, plopped from her hand. Again she’d lost her best friend. This time, though, she felt a whole lot better about it.
They’d fought longside each another one last time.
Pontiac was off her feet and into the air. She felt as flimsy as the Oil Man papers Daddy had never signed. Daddy—she tried to coalesce her convulsive thoughts into a coherent goodbye but could only rake together a batch of the sneaky winks, surprised smiles, and proud nods he’d given her over the years. Mama’s crypt rose like the moon behind him, doors open, welcoming Pontiac home.
The Chamber’s blackout gave way to carnival’s kaleidoscope. All Feathers, No Meat—she’d escaped! If only Mère could see it! But the venom was altering Pontiac’s chemistry; she was greased in sweat, slipping through the arms that held her. But her bearer was strong and capable. The arms hitched her up and kept moving, away from Bob Fireman’s lights into darker, cooler pools. A sudden maniacal rain drove down on them like nails. It hurt, but cooled her too.
Pontiac tried to see who had her before she passed out. No red face, no black suit. That was all she could tell, and was grateful for it. In a few minutes, she’d die, and while it might not be in the arms of an angel, it sure wouldn’t be the arms of a demon. Laissez les bons temps rouler, non?
~ 56 ~
LA PIEUVRE SEEMED MESMERIZED BY Miss Ward, the wet, willowy human who dared stand before its abysmal power. The water tentacle rolled; it swayed; it angled its mirror-thing as if trying to decipher the teacher’s secrets. Pure speculation, of course. All Gerard knew for sure was that La Pieuvre was preoccupied.
He stood up. Tougher thing than he would have guessed. His clothes were so soaked it felt like he was deep in the quick. The store floor was slick with the laundry detergent, dish soap, window cleaner, mop solution, bleach, and other products that had exploded from their containers. It slopped underfoot as Gerard clambered over a shipwrecked candy rack.
The marbles, of course, were a crueler impediment. Over a hundred immies, steelies, corkscrews, clearies, and milkies seeded the Mercantile floor, old friends that had turned against him after spending thirty-eight years in the quag, the ultimate hardtogets. Now they rolled beneath his staggering feet, less angry at DeLoach for jettisoning them than they were at Gerard for failing to tear apart the swamp to find them. Should he have? Were they, and the friendship they represented, the gold he should have dug for?
Gerard searched for Doc. The coffee island was upended and the old man’s bony fingers were still clamped to it. Doc was coated in liquified issues of the Times-Picayune, the newsprint spotted red from bloody wounds. His eyes were half-closed. His ribcage ballooned and deflated. There was no telling the severity of Doc’s injuries.
Also no telling where Doc’s shotgun was.
Last thing Gerard recalled was arming himself with Miss Ward’s Bowie knife while Doc took the Remington 870. The shotgun must have been lost in the destruction, same as the knife. But it had to be close! Gerard crept eastward, where most of the Mercantile’s materials had flooded. He pushed aside a shelf of soaked scratch-tickets. No shotgun. He kicked past a bin of individually wrapped beef jerkies. No shotgun. He didn’t hear rain anymore, only a tribe of mad drummers beating hysterical patterns.
Added to that, gradually, was the sound of being watched.
City folk might not believe in such a sound. Swamp rats counted on it for survival. Gerard had looked directly at silent watchers on hundreds of different late-night muddles through the marsh. A nutria staring from a cattail fort. A gator’s golden cat-eyes visible just over a sticky tarn. A fellow drunkard collapsed on the trail, maybe harmless, but maybe plastered enough to stab the next passerby for grub money.
Gerard stood straight and began to turn around. He saw Doc, coughing blood, staring up high. He saw Miss Ward, frozen with fear, looking the same direction. Gerard clenched his teeth and finished his turn.
The tentacle had forgone Miss Ward. Now it hovered over Gerard, swaying as if giving him a doggie sniff. Gerard’s hands and feet prickled. His skin went cadaver cold. What he felt was less fear than surrender. There was no comprehending this entity.
A sound emitted from the tentacle. Or from the thing behind the tentacle. Or from the swamp behind the thing, La Pieuvre’s veins and vessels intertwined with every root, stem, axil, bud, and blade. A voice of multitudes purred through alligator weed, Virginia creeper, and buffalo grass, and creaked like the boughs of bald cypress, southern magnolia, and crepe myrtle. Undertones, those. The tenor and soprano were bullfrog, dragonfly, hawk, mosquito, crane, woodpecker, cricket, bobcat, rattlesnake, alligator, wren, beaver, parakeet, owl, and wolf, predator and prey aligned, all part of the same refrain of life, death, rebirth.
It asked a question.
WHAT ARE YOUR CONVICTIONS?
Gerard recoiled at thunder cannonades and squinted through rain. The tentacle dipped slightly, fifty feet closing to forty. La Pieuvre’s voice lowered.
NO CONVICTIONS IS WORSE THAN MALEVOLENCE.
“I don’t know de t’ings I supposed to say,” Gerard pleaded.
SO MANY DEAD—ON ACCOUNT OF THOSE LIKE YOU.
THE CONVICTION-LESS.
YOU HAVE HAD GENERATIONS TO ADMIT YOUR WRONGS.
TO ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR ILL-GOTTEN GAINS.
TO TOURNIQUET THE BLEED OF COMPOUNDING GRIEVANCE.
Gerard’s guts were empty of alcohol but caught fire anyway. He’d spent his life burbling to barfly buddies, wheezing weak lessons to Pontiac, weeping futilely at Janine’s grave. Here was his chance to stand the way Miss Ward had stood. If he went down shouting, maybe it would give Pontiac, wherever she was, the headstart to outrun this thing. He whipped his head upward with a sawblade of gray rainwater.
“I never hurt nobody! Nobody but my own self!”
THE DEAD NEVER HURT ANYONE EITHER.
AND YET THEY REMAIN DEAD.
IN THE WATERS THAT ARE MY HOME.
“I’m just one man! It ain’t my fault! None of dese deaths are my fault!”
YOU THINK THE FAULT LINES END.
THEY DO NOT EVER END.
THERE MUST BE OWNERSHIP. ATONEMENT. REDRESS.
“Empty my pockets, octopus! Tear down my shanty! You’ll see I don’t got nothin!”
YOU DROWNED YOUR SINS IN NASTY-SUGAR.
SO YOU NEVER HAD TO FEEL THEM.
THERE ARE OTHER WAYS TO PAY.
Gerard shook his head. Not if it meant taking Pontiac. Not if it meant taking any of the boys and girls who didn’t even know the wicked lineages they belonged to. In a lightning flash, Gerard was eleven again, lowering himself into a storm-frenzied lagoon, feeling around for lost marbles till a cottonmouth showed up. Gerard hadn’t backed down then.
The words flew from his mouth verbatim.
“Do it, snake! You hear?”
Did swamps have memories? The tentacle aped the cottonmouth of Gerard’s youth, tilting its erstwhile face and giant mirror like a dog tilted its head upon meeting an unexpectedly feisty varmint. Gerard kept shouting the shouts of his past.
“You t’ink dat scares me, snake? You t’ink you can take somet’in from me dat everybody else ain’t already took? Y’all ain’t shit, snake! Y’all ain’t shit!”
All the while, his hands did what they’d done thirty-eight years back, digging deep, not into lagoon moss and sweet grass, but his own pockets.
Shoot your shot, Doc had said.
What Gerard found in the lagoon back then, today he found in his pocket.
The Brothers of the Spear. Better than a Remington 870. Better than a Bowie knife or sugarcane machete. The loyal marble had saved him before. Saved a lot a folk, actually. Gerard held the marble in his right fist, cold as an ice chip. He pushed his thumb into that fist so it touched the glass. It was his thumb, after all, that had beaten German Rusnak’s hundred-to-one-odds and brought hope back to the blighted boys of Alligator Point, at least until harsher forms of nasty-sugar started sinking their still-breathing bodies.
Shoot your shot.
With Doc and Miss Ward looking on, somehow the whole Point looking on too, Gerard reared back and hurled the Brothers of the Spear.
~ 57 ~
FEW REVELERS NOTICED THE TENTACLE lording over Chickapee Basin. The jamboree of midway lights made the tentacle appear to be nothing but a ripple of cloud. Kids spent their allowance, played rigged games, bought greasy food, and cavorted between queues. It made Pete think of the Ceremony of the Pearls from Wake of the Red Witch. Festivity and frivolity, with ignorance of the tragedy waiting on deck.
“What we we do?” Pete asked dumbly, rain dribbling off his lips.
“Protect and serve,” Wilkes said.
The cop took off so fast rain flew from her in pennants. She went directly for the ill-lit slums of carnival trailers, maybe in the belief that Bob Fireman actually existed. No: she accosted a quintet of lounging carnies. She didn’t tell them about the tentacle, too hard to make out and too confounding to behold; Pete didn’t know what she told them. But the roustabouts perked up with the thrill of deputization. They sprinted off to five different destinations: the carousel, house of mirrors, bumper cars, Ferris wheel, Wombat Scrambler. Pete watched in wonder as the carnies tore apart queues on their ways to stop the rides.
Wilkes ran a slant across the carnival’s neck, some kind of crowd-control technique, hollering and making traffic-cop gestures away from the wall of rain. Back when the Point was a official town with an official payroll, Sheriff Pete often bewailed his lack of staff. Even if he’d had a full complement of colonels, majors, captains, and rank-and-filers, they could not have sheep-dogged this crowd better than Pat Wilkes. People saw her, paid heed, and began to drift northward.
“Standin here like a spot on a dog,” Pete scolded himself.
Who cared if he lacked Wilkes’s training? He’d always been more of the brawler anyhow, stomping through brackish waters sans galoshes or ripping apart leathery rush with his bare mitts, anything to get him closer to where he had to get. Too old a mutt now to learn new tricks.
He galloped to the nearest group he saw, four little girls.
“Get out of here! All y’all!’
“Hello, Sheriff,” Alice Chilcote said.
“Scat! You hear me? Thataway!”
“But the cotton candy’s that way,” Melissa Montagne said.
No time for respecting personal space. Pete wrapped his big arms around the quartet and bowling-balled them north. Corn dogs, soft drinks, and hair clips went flying.
“GET!”
They got. Pete bolted to the next group. A little boy, two parents: the Durbers. Same routine. Next the Beatty kids, the Tournier family, the Dauber twins, the Fontaine brats. All these faces he knew down to birthmarks and scars. Most of which had yet to fill out into the grown-ups they had every right to become, no matter the regrets and despair that were adulthood’s dowry.
Pete bellowed, and pulled, and pushed, and in one instance kicked. The carny deputies, meanwhile, had darkened half the midway booths and every ride except the Wombat Scrambler, a rollicking baton studded by hundreds of crimson lights, still making riderless circulations. These lights lit the tentacle from below as it dipped closer, the reflective face of its mirror going a blinding, catastrophic red.
The Red Witch, Pete thought. It’s come for me at last.
Half the attendees were still on the grounds, booing the ride blackout and only starting to notice the thing reaching over Chickapee Basin. Time had run out for Pete to inveigle them to skedaddle. He had to face up to the Red Witch, just like the Duke’s Captain Ralls had faced up to the wreck of the Red Witch ship. It had caused Captain Ralls’s death, but with his beloved Angelique already gone, what did it matter?
Pete had nobody left to live for.
Except Wilkes, he supposed. Pete realized he did want the big-city copper to know what a good backwater sheriff was capable of, even if it was the last thing he did.
With the nose of the tentacle craning downward over the Wombat Scrambler, Pete hooked his thumbs into his belt loops, stuck his chest out, and strode hips-first, just like John Wayne, to the center of the carny’s clearing. Only had one boot left, so Pete made it count, stomping it twice as hard. Each stomp into dry dirt sounded like a hard heartbeat.
Never in his whole stupid life had he been so scared.
He weren’t alone in that. Finally, screams from every direction, fleeing footfalls. Plenty of folk, though, especially little ones, looked immobilized. They crouched against vendor stands and game tables, waiting for somebody to save them.
The tentacle hovered fifty feet overhead. Made entirely of water. Broad as a blue whale. Of infinite length. Looped so it could hold the large, flat, reflective object. It had no face yet looked directly at Pete. A noise groaned up from its whirlpool depths, a billion tributary voices thundering into a single seething river.
WHAT ARE YOUR CONVICTIONS?
Pete winced through spatters of salt water. He glanced left and right, and failed to find a funhouse that might have broadcasted the shivery voice. He wiped his face and stared into the tentacle’s liquid cosmos.
It was an elegant question, but the Point weren’t a total stranger to eloquence. Hell, you get a few drinks into somebody like Gerard Pontiac, he’d sermonize you something gorgeous. That’d never been Pete’s way. If he had something to say, he said it short and direct.
Maybe that was the answer.
“I believe in telling it straight.” Pete scarcely recognized his frightened voice.
The water stirred, bubbled, fermented.
TELL IT TO THOSE WHO WERE DEAD BEFORE DYING.
Either Pete, or the world, or both, had gone mad. He accepted it.
“I … don’t know who you mean.”
THOSE HUMANS RIPPED OF THEIR HUMANITY.
“I keep the peace. That’s all I ever tried to do.”
THEY HAVE NEVER KNOWN PEACE.
THEIR BONES LIE DEEP IN MY WATERS.
ROLLING AND ROTTING IN CHAOS.
CONFESS. ATONE. REDRESS.
Pete tried to think through the curdling fear. What awful things had he done? Who had he wronged? Letting Jack O’Brien’s killer go was all he could think of, and he still believed that didn’t qualify. He tried to think beyond his own actions. The Red Witch felt ancient; might that mean the wrong was ancient too? Pete considered his mother, slashing her pimp’s throat. Neither Rose Roosevelt nor Gee Putnam was worth this being’s wrath. Further back, then. The settlers of Alligator Point, the Pirates Lafitte. Distinguished anti-heroes round these parts, though a parallel narrative scuttled about the edges. The Lafittes as slave traders, boating souls across the Styx of the Caribbean.
“You talkin about … slaves?”
CALL THEM BY THEIR PROPER NAMES.
“I don’t know … their names—”
COME LEARN THEM, THEN.
HERE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA.
PAIN WILL BE YOUR PENCIL.
KEEP TRACK OF THEM FOR ETERNITY.
Pete did not follow what the Red Witch was saying. Yet he felt yoked with guilt and shame. He opened his mouth. To confess? Atone? Redress? He didn’t know how. He felt he had to say something to start draining the pus from the infection of this putrid land. Unlike John Wayne, however, he didn’t have Hollywood’s finest writing his lines. Sure, he could go on borrowing them. Reap the Wild Wind had a juicy line he could imagine telling the Red Witch right now: You haven’t enough sand in your craw to stand in front of me alone.
