Three Rivers (3 page)

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She'd avoided Chris since that night, and she had no intention of talking to him now. She stepped into the road and flagged down a faded gray sedan. The setting sun turned the sky orange and obstructed her vision. She squinted but could not see inside the car. She decided a car full of rapists and ax murderers would be preferable to a confrontation with Chris. Thankfully, a woman with severe black hair poked her head out the passenger-side window and told Melody to hop in. The woman looked Pentecostal, which wasn't great, but she didn't look like a killer.

Melody slid into the backseat, her heart pounding. Sweat soaked her horrid blouse to her stomach. The driver, a man with the same dark hair as the woman, said, “Welcome, sister.”

“Hey there.” She plucked at the sleeves of her blouse, desperate to get some air between her skin and the god-awful fabric. “Thanks so much for stopping. I'm hoping to get to the train station.”

“Ah, a journey on the rails. Where are you heading on this fine summer evening, sister?” The man's voice, deep and musical, gave Melody the creeps.

The woman turned her head and beamed. “I'm Bernice and this is my husband, George Walter.”

Melody wasn't sure if the couple's last name was Walter or if the man used two names. “I'm Melody.”

“Melody,” George Walter said. “Melody. It's a beautiful name, sister. A musical name. Is your family musical?”

“Sort of,” Melody said. “Mama used to play the piano, sing a bit.” Her own musical career felt too freshly failed to mention.

“That's the saddest thing I've ever heard.” George Walter glanced at her in the rearview mirror. A milky film floated over the brown iris of his right eye, ghostly and ghoulish.

“Sad?”

“That she
used
to play. Once you find the music inside you, you have a duty to keep playing, keep singing. Music must be shared with the world, sister. Music is a gift that should never be squandered.”

Melody wished she could close her eyes and ignore this odd man, but he'd offered her a ride and she felt obligated to respond. “She had more important things to do. She had to drop out of college and take care of her mother. Her mother was very sick.”

“Ah,” Bernice said. “Family obligations. Your mother is a godly woman?”

“I don't know about that. She did what she had to do.”

“No one has to do anything in this world, sister.” George Walter slowed the car as they entered city traffic. The sun had faded and Melody felt bathed in the passing headlights and bright neon of Memphis on a Saturday night. The air was cooler now. “You make your choices and you live with them,” George Walter said. “Don't forget that. Everything is a choice, sister.”

“Don't mind George Walter,” Bernice said. “He has strong opinions.”

Who doesn't? Melody thought. What she said was, “It's okay. I appreciate the ride.”

“And where is your destination, sister?”

“White Forest, Mississippi. My father is sick.”

“Aha!” George Walter removed both hands from the wheel and raised them in the air. “The daughter becomes the mother. The mother becomes the daughter. One and the same. All of a package. The circle of life continues. History repeats.”

“No!” Melody shouted. Panic rose in her throat when George Walter compared her to her mother. “No. It isn't like that.”

“What is your music, sister?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“What are you leaving behind?” George Walter asked. Bernice smiled and hummed something tuneless.

Melody reached over to roll down a window, but there was no handle on the back doors. Maybe she'd misjudged this pair. The old couple with shoe polish hair might be killers, might be part of some strange cult that practiced blood ritual and handled snakes. “I'm not leaving anything,” she said. “I'm just taking a break.”

“You are your mother, sister. You are your mother.”

“No. No, I am not.” Melody clawed at the doors. She was desperate for fresh air, afraid she might faint. “Can we please just crack a window or something?”

Bernice reached back, patted her leg with a bone-white hand, fingernails chewed to the quick. Melody got a whiff of Bernice's perfume, a sickly combination of lavender and decay. “Relax, honey. George Walter doesn't mean anything by it. He has a bit of the gift, you understand. When it comes upon him, he feels compelled to use it.”

“I don't have a bit of the gift,” George Walter bellowed. “I have the gift. The whole package. I don't predict the future. I see the possibilities unfolding. I see the nature of your soul. I see the truth.”

Now, Melody was used to fervent preaching, and this was not the first time she'd met someone who claimed to have the gift of prophecy. Her own mother had once taken her to see a Native American woman who claimed the gift of sight and healing. No, it wasn't the foretelling that terrified her, it was George Walter's gleeful certainty and that awful milky eye.

“Be warned,” he said. “I have come into your life for a reason. No one crosses my path without purpose. You have choices to make. You must make different choices if you want to be spared the fate of your mother.”

“I am nothing like my mother. I assure you of that.”

George Walter chuckled, then rocked with laughter. Tears streamed down his face. The milky eye seemed to darken in the rearview mirror. Melody braced herself, waiting for the car to crash, waiting for George Walter to steer them into oncoming traffic or off the side of a bridge into the rushing river.

“Did you hear what she said?” George Walter choked with laughter.

“I heard her.” Bernice laughed, too, a high-pitched giggle.

“Nothing like her mother,” George Walter said.

“Nothing like her mother,” Bernice said.

Their laughter filled the car until Melody felt she would drown in it. “Stop.” Her voice was no louder than a whisper. “Please stop.”

The car slowed to a crawl. The lights of Central Station flickered in the windows. She was safe. These people were nuts, but they did not plan to kill her and feast on her liver. She pushed the door open before the car came to a complete stop and flung herself out onto the sidewalk. She pitched forward, caught her balance, and sprinted toward the front doors of the station. Safely inside the bustling building, she looked back and saw George Walter and Bernice still laughing together under the glowing streetlights.

 

Chapter Five

Obi dumped a handful of chopped carrots into the simmering stew. He tasted the rich broth, added a good stream of salt and black pepper. Liam ran in circles in the clearing near the water. His naked skin was the color of polished cedar. The freckles on his face were dark and his green eyes flashed like the eyes of a wildcat. His hair, a dark red tangle, flopped over his forehead and curled around his ears and neck. The boy's penis bounced between his legs. It was as big as Obi's thumb and Obi had large, strong hands. The red hair and freckles and green eyes were a gift from the boy's mother, but that was all she gave him. That, and his name.

“Liam,” Obi called. Obi had considered renaming the boy. He'd thought about naming him after one of his Chickasaw ancestors or using the boy's middle name, which was Land and at least sounded like a man's name. He'd called the boy Land for a while, but the child never responded. He smiled and toddled toward Obi only when he called for Liam. Now, at the age of five, Liam no longer toddled. He ran and jumped and skipped and walked with the long sure strides of a grown man.

For the first six months or so after Liam's mother left, Obi thought she would come back. Of course she could leave him, but how could a mother leave her son? Obi did not know how powerful the pull of alcohol was for some people, although his own family was full of men and women grown fat and lazy and perpetually drunk. His own father hadn't seen the world through clear eyes in all the years that Obi knew him, but his mother never touched the sweet brown liquor or smoked anything stronger than tobacco. She would not have abandoned him for anything on earth or beyond, and she protected him from his father's rages until Obi got old enough and big enough to protect himself.

In the months when Obi was waiting for Eileen to return, he lived in the little box they shared out at Chickasaw Mound, which some people call Memphis. He lived in the square, squat concrete box with curtains on the square windows to block out the sun and a poured concrete square out front for parking his truck. He slept underneath the square roof, which blocked out the moon and he fell asleep listening to the hum of the square appliances, which obscured the sound of the wind, the birds, the howl of the coyotes, the rustle of the trees. He went to work every day and welded sheets of iron and steel together, pounded nails into slabs of wood, measured, cut and leveled lumber to make more square boxes where people would live and work and die. As if the boxes weren't bad enough, the woman from Social Services kept harassing him. She dropped by unexpectedly and lectured Obi about the food in his cabinets, about sweeping and wiping down the counters and vacuuming the old gray carpet, as if he had loads of extra time for chores. He kept the house as neat as he could, but she found fault. She asked Liam questions, too, about whether he was ever hungry and if he was happy and if he felt safe. Liam was too young to understand that the woman might be dangerous, that the wrong answer could be devastating. The woman asked Obi about Eileen, where she'd gone and when she'd be back. Useless questions with no answer. She set up hearings at the courthouse and Obi had to take off work, fill out forms, and answer questions from the family court judge. No matter how hard he worked, it wasn't enough and the woman never let up. She said they could take Liam away, put him in a foster home. If he didn't follow their rules, he could lose his son.

One week, he took Liam camping out by Wolf River though he knew the woman would disapprove. It would be one more strike against them. For seven nights, they slept on the ground. When it rained, and it often did in the midafternoon, they took shelter in a small tent Obi pitched near a cluster of water ash trees. Obi hunted during the early morning while Liam slept, always staying within earshot of the campsite in case the boy cried out. They ate squirrel that Obi killed, skinned, and soaked in milk to tame the flavor of blood and wildness, or crappie he caught in the river, dredged in cornmeal and fried in a black skillet. With just milk and cornmeal, he stirred together hush puppies or corn cakes to serve alongside the meat or fish. For the first time in years, Obi felt free. Stars shone down on his son; the gentle trickle of the river lulled the boy to sleep. Obi noticed how Liam ate hungrily and asked for more. At home, where the boy lived on a steady diet of crackers and cereal, he grew lethargic and had to be coaxed to eat at every meal. Obi saw then that despite the freckles and red hair and green eyes, this boy was truly his son. He was not meant to live in a box, to eat things produced in factories halfway across the world, to spend his days in a sterile day care with other children who all dressed alike and looked alike and went home to their own boxes every night until they grew up and moved into boxes of their own and had children who looked just like them and just like everyone else around them, with no idea that there could be another way.

On the eighth day, Obi returned to his box and spent a day gathering things he thought they would need. He picked up his paycheck from the construction crew. His boss, a small, quiet man, told him he would be missed and to come back if he ever needed work. He was supposed to contact Social Services, but he could just imagine what the woman would think of his plan to live in a place where the floor wasn't just dirty, it was actually dirt.

He cashed the paycheck and emptied out his bank account and found that he had plenty of money. They would be able to live for a long time if they were careful and ate food they hunted or harvested from the wild berry bushes that grew along the river and from the gardens so carefully planted in neat rows behind people's homes. Obi knew he could find work when he needed money. People always needed a fence mended or a roof repaired.

Traveling with a small boy proved fortuitous. Women wanted to get their hands on the child, to make sure he was well fed and healthy. They wanted to hold the boy and coo at him, poke his round tummy, tickle his dancing feet, stroke his rust-colored hair, peer into his green marble eyes, kiss his freckled cheeks, and smell his wild child scent. Obi was happy to let the women hold Liam while he worked or talked with the men and figured out the best places to camp. The biggest problem he ran into were single women, who would offer Obi a bed for the night. It felt good to sleep with a woman and he could trade his freedom for one night or even a week in exchange for that pleasure. Soon, though, the women wanted him to stay.
Liam needs a mother,
they said,
a home, a schedule. What about school?
they asked. Obi wised up and turned away from the single women. He sometimes slept with other men's wives while the men were at work. The wives didn't want him to stay, and Obi, satisfied, could move on without guilt.

The money he carried with him plus the cash for odd jobs kept his truck filled with gas and allowed him to purchase the few items he couldn't capture or take. Every month he bought cornmeal, flour, powdered milk, a few canned goods, and a surprise for Liam. The surprises were small: a box of lemon cookies that made Liam's mouth pucker when he ate them, a bag of oranges, a loaf of fresh bread. Liam loved the treats. Once it was a package of bubble gum. Obi and Liam spent an entire afternoon chewing the gum and pushing their tongues through the rubbery sweetness to blow bubbles. Liam spat the first piece out onto the ground with his effort to create a bubble. His face screwed up and the corners of his mouth drooped; the gum was covered in dirt and twigs. Obi unwrapped another piece and popped it in Liam's mouth before he could cry.