The Tangled Bridge (19 page)

She hadn't any plan. She should have been thinking of a plan!

But all she said was, “Francois?”

He took his hat off and shooed the boys away, then waved the hat at Patrice and Rosie. Gil and Trigger turned and splashed back toward shore.

“Where's he goin?” Marie-Rose asked.

Francois was using his walking stick to pole the raft through the channel. The dead man lay atop the wood in his dark cocoon. Already Francois was far enough that although she could hear him singing, Patrice couldn't make out the words.

Marie-Rose stared after them. “Is he really leavin us for good?”

“He's helped us more than he should have,” Patrice said. “Taking care of the stranger like that.”

Trigger said, “Aw, he'd take us the whole distance but he wants to die in peace.”

“Trigger!”

“Well it's so and I don't feel bad! Look at him. He ain't got another day left in him. I felt sad when he first went sick but now he's ready to lay on down and die. Dyin ain't nothin to be afraid of. Best thing a man can hope for is a good solid passing.”

“Oh, hush up,” Patrice said.

Trigger liked to shock. But the look on his face said he meant his words. It unnerved Patrice. And she hoped he was wrong about Francois wandering off to die like an old hound.

The boys sat down on the banks and let their muscles sag into the mud. They looked exhausted from hauling the raft and the stranger. The girls sat, too. All four watched Francois turning smaller and darker as he poled the raft further down the bend. Francois didn't look back at them.

“So quiet,” Gil said.

“You know what's so curious about that?” Trigger said.

No one indulged, but Trigger answered his own question anyway. “No river devils.”

Patrice tore her gaze from Francois and looked at her brother. It was true. Of the four children, not one of them had any devils hovering about at the present. Not so much as a whisper. She touched the scratch at the back of her neck and wondered.

Gil said, “All of us here on the shore like this, you know what it reminds me of?”

“That day,” Trigger said.

It was all he needed to say. They were all thinking of it: the day they'd banished their mother. It had been several months ago, when Mother had gathered them together to kill the boy with the blood-shined eye. Ferrar was his name. The children were all ready to do it, too. Drunk on their power, on the river magic. All those river devils siding with their mother, looking to spill that blood. That lumen blood. Ferrar was the opposite of what they were. Ferrar must have been touched by God. And they, they were touched by …

Patrice blinked. It didn't matter. God welcomed all souls. All souls.

On that awful day, Mother had seen to it that Ferrar was shot, but the bullet hadn't come from the children. They'd shaken free of evil at the last moment. Patrice had brought Ferrar back to Terrefleurs and nursed him back to health herself. Before today, it was the last time they'd seen their mother. They'd turned her own magic against her.

Patrice watched as Francois receded further. The dreary cadence he sang came only in drifts of intonation. She could no longer even recognize the tone as the same cadence he'd used to march Gil and Trig down the lane with their dead man load.

Francois disappeared around the bend. One last flash from the stick Trigger had carved for him And then he was gone.

 

twenty-two

NEW ORLEANS, NOW

ZENON AND JOSH WATCHED
through the briar as Esther pulled over to the side of the road. The car she drove was nothing special. An ageing silver Buick Century.

Josh said, “Ole Esther bought that thing a couple of years ago cuz it was the same age as her son Bo—an '04.”

“Isn't that cute,” Zenon said.

The car came to a halt at an awkward angle on the shoulder. Esther sat behind the steering wheel and didn't get out. Her gaze was leveled on the yellow stink hissing up from the hood.

Zenon admired Josh's handiwork on the Buick. River devils might be weak on pigeonry, but they were masters at throwing down the hard times. The messed-up car was particularly gratifying because that mooncalf Ethan Manderleigh had paid Esther a visit and put a new timing belt on the thing. He'd told her the car still had other problems, too, and that she should take it to a mechanic. And he'd told her all about how she needed to go on ahead and let Madeleine talk to her and help her out. Esther had agreed to think about it. But she hadn't called on Madeleine. Not yet. Zenon and Josh had been watching. Esther hadn't called because she'd gotten herself nice and paranoid, and that was good news for none-too-humble briar folk like Zenon. Esther wore her son's light. But paranoia dimmed it. So did fear.

Esther sat in that car looking like she wasn't sure what in the hell to do next.

Finally, she opened the door and stepped out. Traffic zipped by on Jefferson Highway.

Zenon curled his hand into a ball and spoke through it like it was a loudspeaker. “Call a tow truck!”

Josh laughed. “Yeah, call a tow truck, Esther!”

Esther sighed, and said aloud as if she'd heard them, “Ain't no money for no tow truck.”

Josh nodded at Zenon. “You see that? We finally got her attention.”

The more Zenon did this, the more he relished it. It was like he was the invisible man. He could see into other people's lives all he wanted. Pigeon them from the briar. That in itself was damn near intoxicating. But now he was pulling strings on the river devils, too, instead of the other way around. It made him feel godlike.

Josh put a hand on Esther's shoulder. “Aw, don't take it so hard now, Esther. But you're right. You pay for a tow truck, you pay for a mechanic, and you just throwin good money after bad. That car's had it.”

Esther was shaking her head, and Zenon knew that although she couldn't hear Josh directly, his thoughts were nesting inside her mind and masquerading as her own.

Esther had her own river devil, of course. Everyone did. You just had to have your feet real deep in the briar to see other people's devils. Esther's was a scraggly, underdeveloped thing called Lin who was stunted from years of lumen exposure. Lin was about the size of a ferret and looked like an old-growth wisteria vine that had gone wooden and bare. But if Lin were to be believed, she'd had her heyday when Esther was younger, before Bo was born. She'd told Josh and Zenon all about it in her papery, whispery, river devil's voice.

According to Lin, Esther had been an average kid and got on well with most people until about high school. That's when she'd gotten into trouble and went to an abortion clinic without her mama knowing. She and her mama had got to fighting a lot. Her daddy had drifted out of her life. Somewhere during those high school days, Lin got her foothold with Esther. Esther developed a nice shape and rotten habits. Lin helped her to learn how to smoke first, and then how to drink, then different kinds of smokes and a whole lot more drinking, and then Lin led her to things Esther put straight into her blood. Esther's grades fell off and then she fell off school altogether.

Her mother threatened to kick her out unless she got a job, so Esther got one putting groceries into plastic bags.

Lin let Esther believe she was in control. Told her she shouldn't let her mama rule her life, and the worst thing Esther could possibly do was end up just like her mama, working and going to church and never really making her mark on the world.

Then one day Esther agreed to meet a boy out back behind the Winn-Dixie where she worked. Esther had actually believed he'd just wanted to kiss her, ask her out. He did kiss her. And then he offered her a bag of weed for a blow job. And Lin had told her,
This is it. This makes you different from Mama. You can break this taboo. This is what real excitement feels like.
And Lin told her that since she liked the boy it wasn't prostitution.

Esther did it. Right there behind the cardboard-box crusher. Lin told her that she'd broken from her mother's grasp. Maybe Esther's body wouldn't someday cave in on itself like those cardboard boxes did, like her mother's did. She was alive and invulnerable. Esther listened to Lin's river devil whispers and wove them into her own thoughts and beliefs.

A year went by and Esther's habits had both intensified and grown harder to pay for. Her mother eventually kicked her out. Lin helped Esther to one-by-one let go of ideas about how a young lady ought to act: selling favors, selling party favors, taking what wasn't hers, taking beatings. Esther went through spells where she was never
not
high.

When Esther found out her mother had died of an aneurism, the first idea Lin breathed into Esther's mind was that she wouldn't have to duck her mama's calls anymore or look upon all that disappointment.

That little bug-eyed, twist tie of a devil, Lin. She'd had Esther in those days. She'd really had her.

When Esther became pregnant again, something changed. She didn't get an abortion this time around, which was fine. A mother with addictions held all kinds of possibilities for a river devil. And sure enough, Esther kept stealing, kept doing tricks, kept doing drugs. Right through the entire pregnancy. It seemed certain that she would give birth to an addicted baby, but she didn't. Instead she bore a lumen child.

That very day, Esther was stained with that lumen light.

She held that baby in her arms and later fell on her knees and prayed for forgiveness. Asked for the strength to do right by her son. Lin had actually laughed, knowing how easy it was to break those kinds of vows. But no matter what Lin did, no matter what accident she laid in Esther's path, no matter how nasty the withdrawals of the chemicals leaving Esther's system, Esther never budged. Never touched any booze or toke or anything stronger than a sweet tea after that.

And even later, when they'd removed Bo's eyes from his tiny, cancer-ridden infant body, Lin couldn't shake Esther. She'd whispered for Esther to indulge a little guilt. Esther ought to blame herself for her son's eyes, Lin had told her, because the cancer must have come from all the drugs Esther had pumped into her womb when she'd been carrying Bo. And Esther probably even believed that the guilt felt right in some way. But she let it go as quickly as Lin whispered it on her. Esther saw guilt as a conceit before God. She simply accepted what was, and the little baby Bo accepted, and that was that.

Esther reorganized her life little by little, finding respectable jobs and making a home for herself and Bo. Lin never stopped her whispers, but Esther had most certainly stopped listening.

Of course, Lin was just one river devil.

Zenon figured that any given human being might have a fifty-fifty chance against one lousy whisperer. But here were three, kind of. Two and a half: Lin, Josh, and Zenon. Zenon was not a river devil but nowadays he felt more briar than human. A river devil on growth hormone. Hell, he was more effective than a river devil.

They lingered there in that ditch on Jefferson Highway with Esther, and Zenon was feeling fine. He'd thought he'd never see the sun again, never walk the streets of the city. Look at him now. He had the sun but without the heat or bugs.

What Zenon saw here was an opportunity. The three of them could work on old Esther, and if they got to her that would not only leave the blind kid alone to fend for himself, it would prove a point: that Zenon could rally his own little organization within the briar.

Esther balled her fists and cried out, “I know what's happening!”

Zenon stopped and watched. Josh and Lin watched, too.

Esther turned in a slow circle and searched the very air around her. “I know there's a devil on my shoulder out here. I know it!”

Zenon and the others laughed. A devil. One devil.
Hell, little lady, you always got at least
one
devil.
Lin was a shriveled little thing that rode Esther's shadow like the hood on her jacket.

Esther put her fist to her forehead and squeezed her eyes, and she muttered, “My car just broke down, that's all. It's just finally pooped out like I knew it would do. This ain't the end of the world.”

A car pulled over. A blue Honda. Esther stepped back and regarded it as though it were the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

The passenger's side window rolled down and a man with glasses and a thin mustache peered out at Esther. “You got car trouble?”

Esther looked at her old Buick, which had stopped hissing but kept up the stink. She said nothing.

The driver said, “I'll give you a lift if you want.”

“No thank you,” Esther said.

“You sure? Or I can call—”

“I got it,” Esther said.

He shrugged, put the car in gear, and it started moving again. He rejoined traffic on Jefferson Highway without looking back at Esther or rolling up the passenger window. Zenon saw that as Esther watched him go she'd let a tear well over onto her cheek.

Josh said, “She thinks we'd have pigeoned that guy if he gave her a lift.”

“Well, she'd be right, we would've,” Zenon said.

He leered at Esther. “Aw, come on. You don't need that ole car. What do you use it for anyway?”

And Esther said aloud, “How'm I gonna get to work? How'm I gonna get Bo to the doctor? He has so many appointments.”

Hearing her engage with him like that! From the material world to the briar! The power of it sent a charge through Zenon's body. A week ago, he couldn't have pigeoned Esther to put an extra sugar packet in her tea. And here, now, she was talking to his spirit self as though he was physically walking right alongside her.

Another tear spilled over her cheek. “How'm I gonna take him to special needs programs and soccer practice? Little boy figured out how to play soccer when he can't even see the ball. Made the team! How'm I s'posed to tell him he can't do that because Mama can't take him to practice?”