help I’m drown
help I’m drown
blue-cap man say git me
blue-cap man say dassn’t let me ramble
help I’m drown
lost my berries they on the path
he holdin me
he face shimmer n look bad
lemme up lemme up 0 sweet Jesus lemme up
oxen free allee allee oxen free? PLEASE
OXEN FREE you go on and stop now ALLEE OXEN FREE
she scream my name
she scream it so LOUD
I bent forward in an utter panic, opened my mouth, and from my gaping, straining mouth there poured a cold flood of . . .
Nothing at all.
The horror of it passed and yet it didn’t pass. I still felt terribly sick to my stomach, as if I had eaten something to which my body had taken a violent offense, some kind of ant-powder or maybe a killer mushroom, the kind Jo’s fungi guides pictured inside red borders. I staggered forward half a dozen steps, gagging dryly from a throat which still believed it was wet. There was another birch where the bank dropped to the lake, arching its white belly gracefully over the water as if to see its reflection by evening’s flattering light. I grabbed it like a drunk grabbing a lamp-post.
The pressure in my chest began to ease, but it left an ache as real as rain. I hung against the tree, heart fluttering, and suddenly I became aware that something stank — an evil, polluted smell worse than a clogged septic pool which has simmered all summer under the blazing sun. With it was a sense of some hideous presence giving off that odor, something which should have been dead and wasn’t.
Oh stop, allee allee oxen free, I’ll do anything only stop, I tried to say, and still nothing came out.
Then it was gone. I could smell nothing but the lake and the woods . . . but I could see something: a boy in the lake, a little drowned dark boy lying on his back. His cheeks were puffed out. His mouth hung slackly open. His eyes were as white as the eyes of a statue.
My mouth filled with the unmerciful iron of the lake again. Help me, lemme up, help I’m drown.
I leaned out, screaming inside my head, screaming down at the dead face, and I realized I was looking up at myself, looking up through the rose-shimmer of sunset water at a white man in blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt holding onto a trembling, birch and trying to scream, his liquid face in motion, his eyes momentarily blotted out by the passage of a small perch coursing after a tasty bug, I was both the dark boy and the white man, drowned in the water and drowning in the air, is this right, is this what’s happening, tap once for yes twice for no.
I retched nothing but a single runner of spit, and, impossibly, a fish jumped at it. They’ll jump at almost anything at sunset; something in the dying light must make them crazy. The fish hit the water again about seven feet from the bank, spanking out a circular silver ripple, and it was gone —
the taste in my mouth, the horrible smell, the shimmering drowned face of the Negro child — a Negro, that was how he would have thought of himself whose name had almost surely been Tidwell.
I looked to my right and saw a gray forehead of rock poking out of the mulch. I thought, There, right there, and as if in confirmation, that horrible putrescent smell puffed at me again, seemingly from the ground.
I closed my eyes, still hanging onto the birch for dear life, feeling weak and sick and ill, and that was when Max Devore, that madman, spoke from behind me. ‘Say there, whoremaster, where’s your whore?’
I turned and there he was, with Rogette Whitmore by his side. It was the only time I ever met him, but once was enough. Believe me, once was more than enough.
His wheelchair hardly looked like a wheelchair at all. What it looked like was a motorcycle sidecar crossed with a lunar lander. Half a dozen chrome wheels ran along both sides. Bigger wheels —
four of them, I think — ran in a row across the back. None looked to be exactly on the same level, and I realized each was tied into its own suspension-bed. Devore would have a smooth ride over ground a lot rougher than The Street. Above the back wheels was an enclosed engine compartment.
Hiding Devore’s legs was a fiberglass nacelle, black with red pinstriping, that would not have looked out of place on a racing car. Implanted in the center of it was a gadget that looked like my DSS satellite dish . . . some sort of computerized avoidance system, I guessed. Maybe even an autopilot. The armrests were wide and covered with controls. Holstered on the left side of this machine was a green oxygen tank four feet long. A hose went to a clear plastic accordion tube; the accordion tube led to a mask which rested in Devore’s lap. It made me think of the old guy’s Stenomask. Coming on the heels of what had just happened, I might have considered this Tom Clancyish vehicle a hallucination, except for the bumper-sticker on the nacelle, below the dish. I BLEED DODGER BLUE, it said.
This evening the woman I had seen outside The Sunset Bar at Warrington’s was wearing a white blouse with long sleeves and black pants so tapered they made her legs look like sheathed swords.
Her narrow face and hollow cheeks made her resemble Edvard Munch’s screamer more than ever.
Her white hair hung around her face in a lank cowl. Her lips were painted so brightly red she seemed to be bleeding from the mouth.
She was old and she was ugly, but she was a prize compared to Mattie’s father-in-law. Scrawny, blue-lipped, the skin around his eyes and the corners of his mouth a dark exploded purple, he looked like something an archeologist might find in the burial room of a pyramid, surrounded by his stuffed wives and pets, bedizened with his favorite jewels. A few wisps of white hair still clung to his scaly skull; more tufts sprang from enormous ears which seemed to have melted like wax sculptures left out in the sun. He was wearing white cotton pants and a billowy blue shirt. Add a little black beret and he would have looked like a French artist from the nineteenth century at the end of a very long life.
Across his lap was a cane of some black wood. Snugged over the end was a bright red bicycle grip. The fingers grasping it looked powerful, but they were going as black as the cane itself. His circulation was failing, and I couldn’t imagine what his feet and his lower legs must look like.
‘Whore run off and left you, has she?’
I tried to say something. A croak came out of my mouth, nothing more. I was still holding the birch. I let go of it and tried to straighten up, but my legs were still weak and I had to grab it again.
He nudged a silver toggle switch and the chair came ten feet closer, halving the distance between us. The sound it made was a silky whisper; watching it was like watching an evil magic carpet. Its many wheels rose and fell independent of one another and flashed in the declining sun, which had begun to take on a reddish cast. And as he came closer, I felt the sense of the man. His body was rotting out from under him, but the force around him was undeniable and daunting, like an electrical storm. The woman paced beside him, regarding me with silent amusement. Her eyes were
pinkish. I assumed then that they were gray and had picked up a bit of the coming sunset, but I think now she was an albino.
‘I always liked a whore,’ he said. He drew the word out, making it horrrrrrr. ‘Didn’t I, Rogette?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘In their place.’
‘Sometimes their place was on my face!’ he cried with a kind of insane perkiness, as if she had contradicted him. ‘Where is she, young man? Whose face is she sitting on right now? I wonder.
That smart lawyer you found? Oh, I know all about him, right down to the Unsatisfactory Conduct he got in the third grade. I make it my business to know things. It’s the secret of my success.’
With an enormous effort, I straightened up. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Having a constitutional, same as you. And no law against it, is there?
The Street belongs to anyone who wants to use it. You haven’t been here long, young whoremaster, but surely you’ve been here long enough to know that. It’s our version of the town common, where good pups and vile dogs may walk side-by-side.’