Phantom Nights (26 page)

Cecily used her fingers to get Brendan off her nipple, which caused a sleepy fuss. "It's stifling in the basement in the summertime."

"Let him sweat then."

"He'll be going back to Nashville tomorrow or Wednesday. Meantime, I told you, just use our bathroom, and this topic is getting
old
, Mother. I'm taking Brendan upstairs now."

"Some of the talk that was reported back to me has been. Hem. Downright ugly."

"I'm not afraid of talk. Bobby is sheriff of Evening Shade, at least until Luther gets back from his wedding trip. Then the talk will just stop; people will find something else that outrages them. Mother, where did that red queen come from?"

"Winning is so much more fun than losing."

Cecily was halfway up the front stairs with Brendan on her shoulder when the cars came by fast on West Hatchie, no mufflers on a couple of them, and she heard the jeering voices just before something splattered the porch and screen door. She turned and walked back down the stairs and met her mother in the front hall. Bernice had a hand over her mouth, the whites of her eyes like small full moons.

"My
Lord
! Did you hear them? Were they screaming 'Nigger lovers'? And what is that
smell
?"

"It's shit, Mother. The little idiots emptied their bowels somewhere and then they threw their skit all over our porch. Take the baby."

Cecily was shaking as she handed Brendan off to Bernice.

"Oh, I'm going to become hysterical!" Bernie wailed.

"Like hell you are," Cecily snapped.

Bernice backed away in total confusion. Cecily talking to her in that forbidding voice.

"But—what will we do if they come again?"

"I'll call Dispatch right now to have a dep outside until Bobby gets home from night school. Then I'm going to scrub my porch and screen door with Lysol."

"Shouldn't Bobby see what they—"

Cecily swept tears off her cheeks with her fingertips.

"I don't want Dr. Valjean to see the porch dirty. Or to know it ever happened, if that's possible. Because he's a guest in my house. Anyone in this community who doesn't like it can shove a posthole digger straight up his ass."

F
ifteen exquisite ampules of morphine arranged like miniature candelabra on the oval table with its embossed cigarette burn in the front room of Mally's house. Cunning glass ornaments and their steely contents of surcease.
Like colorless hard candies
, he thinks, choosing another and holding it up to the light of the lamp with its painted metal shade, turning the ampule between dark thumb and forefinger. The syringe is in his other hand. Bulge of vein like an engorged worm below the elbow of his tied-off arm. A couple of beads of blood on his glistening flesh. It is warm and close in the room, but his sweat is cold. Three of his hoard of ampules already broken open, drained. Fourteen to go after the next injection; but he won't make it all the way through his pretty candelabrum: Permanent slumber free of pain and regret will take hold first. He is a doctor. He knows the limits of the organism's tolerance for the potent morphine. His will shut down half an hour ago; now there is creeping numbness near his heart. But the human heart is a powerful rebel. Always the last holdout in this scheme of things, dutifully conveying the refreshment of a narcotic turned poison in excess to that part of the brain that rules the heart.

His forearm is propped up on the arm of the bamboo sofa. The needle of the syringe wavers above the plump vein. The rest of Mally's house is unlighted, but he has heard that noise again. Curious. Can't place it. A popping sound. Like a lid coming off an airtight jar of preserved goods. Earlier he thought he heard the squeak of floorboards. In the kitchen? Looking for food? Furtiveness murks the atmosphere of this house like cobweb, like stealthy mice. But the prowler, should there be one, apparently has no more interest in Ramses Valjean than Ramses has in him. He will not rise to his feet again. The matter needs no investigation, and anyway his death is well advanced.

Raising his eyes once more (how many times already tonight?) to the picture wall and the camera's portrait of eight-year-old Mally in frock and bows obliviously smiling up at the unresponsive face of her father, unknowing at her innocent age that a man can be haunted by his future as well as his past. He murmurs, yet again,
Forgive me
, but what would be the point in waiting? Just to see her closed coffin committed to the grave? The only point worth considering now is the dulled point of the syringe with which he seeks to pierce the sacrificial vein.

The first Molotov cocktail, a Royal Crown bottle filled with gasoline and stuffed at the neck with burning cotton garage waste, bursts through one of the half-open windows of the front room, instantly setting a frilly curtain afire, leaving a siegelike fire trail on the pine plank floor as it rolls close to the bamboo sofa, also setting the sofa aflame very near Ramses's sprawled and nearly inert body.

His foot lashes out reflexively at the fulminating bottle, spinning it away but lavishing more flame on anything that can burn: the fringed skirt of another table, a few magazines saved in a coal scuttle. The effort of kicking the bottle causes Ramses to slide off the sofa to the floor. He loses the syringe but pulls himself to his knees in the swarm of heat and smoke to grasp a handful of the morphine ampules from the table, which he stuffs into a coat pocket.

Another cocktail is hurled onto the front porch through the opened screen door and this one explodes against the cast-iron drum of Mally's washing machine; instantly the entire porch and front wall of the house are engulfed. Inside, Ramses, on all fours and with his head lolling like a sick dog's, backs away in spite of his earlier resolve not to live another day. The threat of runaway fire almost in his face has shut down all brain activity except for the most primitive of responses to peril: Life must be preserved, nature's imperative in spite of what tragic melancholy may have dispossessed the soul.

He can't run. He can barely stand upright. Wobbling numbly this way and that, hands splayed in a doorframe, his knees about to buckle. Sensing rather than seeing behind him the orange flash of another cocktail, this one heaved into the hall from the back porch. Rolling smoke and crackling flames, old wood all but exploding as it burns in searing heat.

The boy grabs him from behind. Drags him backward into the kitchen across uneven linoleum. Drops Ramses while he tugs and wrenches at a section of linoleum and peels it up from the floor in front of the sink. Then he seizes an ax and chops into the boards, fury in his face, ducking low as more fire sails in through a window. All of the house ablaze now, a twisty tail of burning debris rising above the erupted roof midhouse, white-hot tracers sizzling through the pale boughs of surrounding trees. The boy slinging the ax blade down and down, chips flying as he averts his face. He drops the ax and kicks a hole in the chopped floor that he can shove Ramses into, worming down then on top of him in the crawl space and taking hold of a lapel of Ramses's coat, dragging him like a swimmer through loose dirt and a hot cloud of smoke out from under the house, there lifting and carrying Ramses with more strength than Ramses would have thought the boy's slender body possessed. Dropping him down with a heavy, exhausted cough in the safety of the pole bean and cabbage garden, remaining doubled over, hands clutching his filthy knees, retching, while behind them the house shimmers like a fiery mirage.

"Y
ou must be Alex," Ramses said when he could speak.

The boy looked at him with streaming eyes, holding his throat with one hand, still choking as he tried to breathe.

"Why, Alex? I really wasn't worth saving."

Alex stared down at Ramses in disbelief.

"What were you doing in Mally's house? What were you looking for?"

Alex looked around at the house, so much of it briskly consumed that at first light there would be only shoals of ash left around blackened islands of stove, washing machine, kitchen sink. He shook his head despondently, wiped a smeary cheek with the heel of one hand. His other hand, Ramses saw, was burned.

"You're hurt."

Alex grimaced, shaking his head again. No matter.

"I don't suppose you know . . . who is responsible."

No reply. But Alex took a quick look around, as if for suspects. Cars had stopped on the highway. People were getting out. Burning houses were an unbeatable crowd-pleaser.

"I apologize for my lack of gratitude. You risked your life for mine. Let me help you with that burn." Ramses made it up on one elbow, the arm that was still bound with rubber tubing. "But I can't. My medical bag was there in the house."

Voices from the road.
I don't know. Believe it were some nigger woman lived there
.

"Alex, if I had one of those bean poles to lean on, I think I could stand up now."

Alex wrenched a pole from the ground and offered his unburned hand to pull Ramses to his feet.

"I was going to kill myself," Ramses said, loosening the knotted tube above his elbow and discarding it like a pale noose. He looked at Alex, who had turned his back on him to kneel and run water from an irrigation pipe over his bums. "I have assumed another obligation. Unasked for, to be sure. Nevertheless an obligation. I may never redeem Mally's faith in me, but it's possible I can do something for you, Alex. Perhaps that would please her, if she knew."

Alex showed his face. Ramses was intrigued by the play of expression in the boy's eyes at the mention of Mally's name. Ramses touched his own throat with two fingers.

Alex shook his head sullenly, held it under the spigot for a few seconds, rinsed his parched mouth, spat, looked at Ramses again distrustfully.

"I will need to look at your medical history, of course, before I can make a recommendation."

Alex licked the back of his burned hand, shrugged, drew a forefinger across his own throat, a slashing gesture of finality,
Take your sense of obligation and shove it
. He got up from one knee and walked downhill toward the bicycle he had left in the yard. Ramses followed, leaning on his crooked bean pole, perplexed but feeling a perverse sense of happiness for one who so recently had renounced the remaining months of his life.

"There have been men grievously wounded in great battles, Alex, who survived worse injury than has been done to you! I devoted myself to many of them during the Great War. Turning your back on me settles nothing. I know about spiteful, runaway boys, Alex. I have been one all of my life, and I know better than to let you get away. You will fight that battle you've been avoiding!" Nearly out of breath, awkward, Ramses stumbled and almost fell. Alex pulled his bike off the ground and made a running mount, pedaling recklessly out to the highway. Ramses watched him go. His lips shaped his final words, but he barely heard himself.

"You'll fight it for both of us, Alex."

"T
hat house you were interested in? Thought I'd let you know it done burned to the ground tonight."

Past midnight and Leland Howard was alone in downtown Knoxville looking out at a rainy street, hunched feverishly over a telephone in semidarkness at a back-wall desk, getting the news from Jim Giles, a low point in his fortunes while his other persona, whom he was temporarily out of touch with, the exuberant vote-getter in an ice-cream suit, skin electric from storms of applause he'd generated at five different rallies during the day come rain or shine,
that
Leland Howard smilingly occupied all four walls of tacked-up election posters in his regional campaign headquarters.

Leland the jumpy fugitive (in his mind) was cleaning between his teeth with his gold toothpick, responding in grunts and extremely sensitive to what was being said long-distance, bored telephone operators at this time of night, and although his name had not been mentioned, he was wary of eavesdroppers. Anywhere, everywhere.

"Now that boy I'm sure was in the house by himself, don't know if he perished in the fire."

"Huh. Possibility he got out before it commenced to burning good?"

"When I drove by earlier on, his bicycle was a-lyin' in the yard. Next time I chanced to pass, the house was gone up in smoke. Bicycle wasn't there. Crowd of people just rubbernecking while the volunteer far department put out what still burned. Now, anybody could've picked up that good-looking bike and made off with it."

"How long before the, you know, investigators can tell for sure if—"

"There is a body, it will turn up once things cool off enough to have a look-see."

Leland poked the underside of his tongue with the toothpick and winced.

"So reckon I need to know," Jim Giles said, "are you still studyin' on my proposal?"

"I am. Now, if the . . . property we've been interested in is no longer in saleable condition, you might as well go on up to Nashville, wait for me there. But if he, I mean something, does come along that bears directly on my interests—"

"Get in touch?"

Leland stifled a sneeze—caught out in the open at the Jefferson County Fair in a sudden downpour—and tasted blood on the tip of his tongue. "No need for that. Handle it in your own fashion. You know as how I place a lot of confidence in your good judgment."