Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy (99 page)

"I don’t know."

"Please. I want to know his birthday."

Luther returned with a pair of scissors. He pushed by his father and told his mother to get out of the way.

"Boy, you let me—"

"I want to do it."

Maxine relinquished her place beside the young mother, and Luther knelt down.

"Turn him over," he said.

Vi held her son up under his arms, facing Luther. The infant and the monster stared at each other, the baby’s eyes rolling around in its head, Luther’s black orbs taking in this bloody little miracle.

"Be careful, please," Vi said.

Luther took hold of the umbilical cord and clipped it a half-inch from the bellybutton. Vi pulled her baby back into her breast.

"What’s its name?" Luther asked.

"Max," Vi said.

"After my mother?"

"After my husband. I need to nurse him now. Can I have some privacy please? Please."

Luther got up and walked out of the room. Maxine followed him and Rufus closed and locked the door behind them all.

Alone in the candlelight, Vi wept. She removed her T-shirt, wiped off the baby, and pushed back her blond hair that clung to her sweaty face. Then she took Max into her swollen breast and began to nurse.

The sucking of the infant produced the only sound in the cell.

Vi closed her eyes.

The soreness between her legs was nothing now compared to those contractions. Loneliness, joy, and horror came in equal measure. She looked down at her infant son, eyes open and shining, sucking away. She stroked his cheek, the firelight dancing across his face. All she wanted now was her husband, looking down on them. She was certain of it—Max would’ve cried.

Vi started to pray, but stopped herself. The fuck had He done for her? She should be grateful that He allowed her to give birth before an audience of psychopaths? Did He need to hear her say she wanted her child to live? How could He not
know
that?

Count your blessings. Look on the bright side. Fuck the bright side. This should’ve happened in a hospital with my husband. We missed sharing this together.

For the first time in her life, it occurred to her that she was all alone and always had been. She’d bought into the God of suburbia. Comfy, predictable, and manmade to revolve around man. The God of her Baptist upbringing was clearly unconcerned with her current predicament. He’d denigrated the birth of her son by allowing it to occur in a basement that she’d probably never leave.

Her God was fine on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings when all was hunky-dory. And it was even possible to write off the tragedies that befell others as "part of God’s plan." But hold that sentiment up to the flaming knowledge that your newborn child will never see his father, that he might die horribly before he’s even a week old, and see if it doesn’t burn.

When life turns into a real
horrorshow
, the God she knew was about as useful as a water gun in a war. She felt blasphemous for thinking it, but He was no comfort to her now. She was drowning. He was watching. Either impotent to deliver her, or unwilling. And especially if it were the latter, she had no use for such a god.

# # #

Luther’s room stands at the south end of the third floor, unchanged for more than twenty years. His toy chest still occupies the corner, filled with the playthings he treasured as a lonely child. Even his stuffed animal collection remains—hanging from the ceiling in a rusty wire fruit basket.
Dolphie
the dolphin, Birdie the blackbird, Polar Bear, and Clementine the barn owl were the major players.

Luther enters his bedroom and closes the door. He approaches the window. Across the sound, a line of late day thunderstorms clobbers the mainland. Zigzags of lightning strike the water a few miles offshore, but their thunder never reaches Ocracoke.

Luther glances back at the desk beside his bed. He’s written only half a page in that leather-bound journal, and it’s utter shit.

"You’re no different from the rest of them," his father told him last night. "Best figure out what you believe and why. Time’s a
wastin
’."

Luther feels very peculiar. He hasn’t encountered the emotion of fear since childhood, though it isn’t fear of his father and what he may do to him if Luther doesn’t write an exceptional treatise. He could give a remote shit about Rufus. Fuck Rufus. Fuck the goddamn old codger of a bastard. What Luther fears is his own expanding emptiness. He thinks of Baby Max, the moment the infant’s head broke free into the world, and acknowledges it for what it was: the most powerful thing he’d ever witnessed.

Luther lies down on his bed and stares up at the cracks in the ceiling as the storms pass over the island.

It’s dusk when he rises out of bed, takes
Dolphie
from the fruit basket, and walks downstairs. His mother and father are in the kitchen, flirting and cooking dinner for the guests. He smells wafts of browned hamburger meat and steamed broccoli. As he opens the small door under the staircase, he overhears Rufus say, "Why don’t you grab
holt
of my stick and see what you’re in for tonight, you old stinky woman."

The downstairs runs the length and breadth of the hundred and eighty-six year-old house, unique to the island as the vast majority of residences sit several feet above ground to protect them from the flooding nor’easters and the storm surges of hurricanes. Consequently, this basement has been underwater numerous times since its construction.

It served as slave quarters in the 1830’s. Servant quarters at the turn of the century. And one of the most extensive wine cellars in North Carolina in the 1920’s. Ten years ago, Rufus wired two of the rooms for electricity.

The rest are lit by candle or not at all.

The stone in one of the rooms is charred black all the way up to the ceiling.

In another, the rock is stained burgundy.

Though Luther has spent many hours down here, he’s still prone to losing his way, especially when he ventures beyond the cluster of rooms near the stairs. Two thirds of the basement lies behind the staircase, a maze of confusing passageways that were lined with wine racks eighty years ago. Broken glass and pieces of cork can still be found in some of the alcoves.

One of the Kites’ favorite pastimes is playing hide and seek with the failed converts. The game is started by turning the guest out of their cell and spotting them a two minute head start into the labyrinth. Then the entire Kite family sets out in search of them. Sometimes they play with headlamps or candles. Sometimes they play in the dark.

Because Rufus has never trusted a body of water to keep a body hidden, all of his failed experiments are stored down here.

It’s deathly silent as Luther arrives at Vi’s cell and unlocks the door. She sits naked against the wall, snoring, the baby asleep on her chest, wrapped in her T-shirt, the candles all but melted away.

He drops the stuffed animal on the floor.

Vi wakes, startled.

"I want to hold Max," Luther says.

"Why?"

"I just want to."

"He’s sleeping."

"I won’t hold him long, and I’ll be careful."

Luther steps forward, leans down, and lifts the baby out of her arms.

"Support his head," Vi says.

Luther cradles the baby’s head in the crux of his arm.

Vi takes the pillow from behind her back and hides her nakedness.

"What’s today," she asks.

"Why?"

"I want to know my son’s birthday."

"July twenty-ninth."

"Thank you."

Luther stands there for several moments, gazing into the face of the sleeping infant.

"You’re never going to let us leave, are you?" Vi says.

"That’s up to my father."

Luther bends down, hands Max back to Vi.

"That’s for him," he says, motioning to the stuffed dolphin on the dirt floor.

"What’s his name?"

"
Dolphie
."

"Thank you, Luther."

He nods, turns to leave.

"I saw what you did to that family in Davidson," Vi says. "And their two boys. Why are you nice to my baby?"

"I don’t know."

It is one of the rare truthful moments of Luther’s life, and he leaves, trembling.

# # #

On a humid summer night, just before bedtime, Rufus walked into the kitchen of his silent house and poured himself a glass of buttermilk. Then he strolled the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the foyer and unlocked the small door beneath the staircase. As he descended into the basement, sounds of retching and agony emanated from the inhabited cells. He took a seat on the bottom step, the dirt floor cool beneath his feet, and sipped his cold, thick milk.

That would be Andy groaning and Beth sobbing between bouts of nausea. Their heads probably felt like they were imploding. Nothing to do for them really but let them ride it out. They’d be good as new in a few days.

Rufus wiped his milk mustache.

Baby Max was screaming now, fighting mad at having been woken again.

Yesterday, the first of August, Rufus had stopped dispensing drugs. The haloperidol,
Ativan
, nitrous oxide—it all abruptly ended. Vi had been weaned off the narcotics during the summer leading up to her delivery, but Andy and Beth had, with brief exceptions, been very fucked-up since mid-November. Rufus had never kept anyone on the needle this long, and though he’d anticipated this brutal withdrawal, the payoff would be well worth the risk.

For the last nine months, he’d dedicated a minimum of six hours per day to working with his patients, and their sessions with the mind machine and drug-enhanced hypnosis had been wonderfully productive. In addition, they’d all watched countless hours of home movies, and with the aid of laughing gas, had begun to see the humor and innocuousness in violence.

Andy in particular seemed to be moving beyond the illusions that plagued him.

As Rufus climbed the stairs back up to his bedroom on the second floor, where his angel, Maxine, was already fast asleep, he realized he hadn’t been this excited and hopeful since Orson.

# # #

I woke to a gentle, rocking motion. There was light here, more warmth than that awful darkness. I detected the cry of gulls, slap of water falling back into itself, and the imperceptible whisper of wind moving through open space.

My eyes opened. I found myself sitting in the cramped cabin of a boat, Violet King across from me, a baby in her arms, Beth Lancing at my left.

Duct tape had been applied to our mouths.

Vi was awake, Beth still unconscious, her chin resting against her collarbone. I went to shake her awake but couldn’t move, my wrists, ankles, and torso having also been thoroughly duct-taped to the high-backed chair.

I looked across the table at Vi and raised my eyebrows. She responded with a headshake—she knew as little as I concerning where or why we were here.

We sat there, immobilized, confused, watching the time on the stove clock creep toward noon. Through an ovular window above, I could see the tinted blue of the sky. Sleeping bags and wrinkled clothing had been stowed in the V-berth.

Barely audible voices emanated from the deck.

I tried to think back, to claim some recent memory, but could not.

The cabin door opened. Luther ducked and stepped down inside.

"Gonna need a hand with them, Pop!"

One by one, we were lifted in our chairs and carried up onto the small deck.

The day was brilliant and hot.

Maxine Kite lounged in a beach chair, in unabashed oiled nakedness, her face hidden beneath the brim of a straw hat, so emaciated a breeze could’ve lifted her into the sky like a dandelion seed. She was engrossed in a book called
At Home in Mitford
and seemingly oblivious to our presence.

Our chairs were arranged three abreast and portside on the deck of the twenty-four foot Scout Abaco 242.