He couldn’t stop the volume from rising. He felt the wildness, a crazed energy, refusing to be contained. Another term for this is panic.
He reached the Nurses’ Residence. The building had no front door. He climbed the front steps as quickly as his quaking legs allowed.
“I am the god Apollo!” he shouted this time. “And I want my revenge!”
Apollo had been spotted as soon as he stepped out from the overgrown kudzu. Four women appeared in the courtyard. Each one carried a chair leg that had been fashioned into a weapon, a club. The clubs had a leather strap looped through the base and the other end looped around their wrists. The women wore green cloaks that covered their heads and upper bodies like a chador. This camouflaged them perfectly in the green world of North Brother Island. As they moved around Apollo, it looked as if the woods had surrounded him. He didn’t hear them approach, didn’t notice as their clubs raised high.
Those four women beat the dog shit out of Apollo Kagwa.
KNOCKING SOMEONE UNCONSCIOUS is incredibly difficult. Apollo wished it was easier. Instead he found himself battered for a two-minute period that felt like twenty years, and he never passed out. The women attacking him were very good at their job. They weren’t hitting him in the head because they didn’t want to knock him out. Instead they were battering his arms and legs so he’d be incapacitated quickly. They didn’t want him swinging wild or kicking at them, getting hold of a baton. If he’d brought a knife or a gun, he couldn’t use it if both arms were numb. They hit him so hard, his arms and legs seemed to freeze, go cold with shock. Before he understood he’d been attacked, he’d already been defeated. He went to the ground as if he’d been tasered.
On his back he saw nothing. His eyes didn’t work. He thought they might’ve beaten him until he’d gone blind. This confused him even more than the pain. He’d been beaten senseless. He was useless now, and the women knew it. He rolled off the stairs and down to the courtyard floor, where they left him on the ground like a rolled-up length of carpet.
The women set their clubs down on the ground. They brought the table legs together until they were in a rectangle shape, four right angles. The bottom of each leg slipped through the strap of the adjacent one until they formed a makeshift stretcher. They rolled Apollo over so he lay facedown on the stretcher. Then each woman grabbed the end of a chair leg, and with a collective grunt they lifted him. It was as if they were doing a fireman’s carry but using the chair legs in place of their arms.
The stretcher was just large enough to heft his torso. His arms and head dangled, and his legs dragged behind. The four-woman team took him away from the courtyard. All this took a minute and fifty seconds. They were a well-coordinated crew. The front windows of the Nurses’ Residence filled with children’s faces, and the Doctor’s Cottage showed women watching, too. A third building overlooked the courtyard, a two-story brick building known, plainly, as the School. Only one room was lit in the School, and its glow was supplied by electricity. A figure stood at the windowsill and saw Apollo being carried away. She watched for far longer than anyone else.
—
The smell of wet dirt; the sound of insects in the trees; footfalls of the four women carrying him through the underbrush; the taste of blood in his mouth. Before Apollo’s vision returned, his other senses helped him understand his situation.
“I’m here,” he mumbled.
“Well, don’t we know it?” one of the women answered. He couldn’t say which one.
“He’s here,” another said. “I think he expects us to applaud.”
How far had they come from the courtyard, from the little colony in the woods? The wild growth surrounded them, but the women walked him on a well-worn path. The kudzu and porcelain berry had been stamped down not cut.
“I’m here,” Apollo said again, “for my wife.”
“Are you here to apologize and beg forgiveness?” a third woman asked, sounding slightly winded and clearly sarcastic.
“Or did you mean to kill her?” asked the fourth, and when she said the words, his whole body tensed, and the women laughed together like people long hardened from a war.
“I want my revenge!” shouted the first.
“She took my child!” added the second.
“She made me suffer!” hissed the third.
“Her blood is owed to me!” came the fourth.
Now they didn’t laugh but clucked their tongues. They seemed so unsurprised. Apollo wondered how many times these four women had made the same journey with a man who’d appeared on the island. Maybe this was how the path beneath them had come to be beaten down so well; back and forth with the bodies of the men. And where would this path end?
He tried to throw himself off the stretcher. The wooden beams were digging into his chest and stomach. A new sound came to him, the splash of the women’s feet as they entered water. Cold water slapped his face and neck.
“Where are you taking me!” he shouted.
“We’re here,” one of them said matter-of-factly.
“Who was the last one?” another asked. “I forget.”
“Kauffman?” said another, but she didn’t sound entirely sure.
“Yeah. He’s at the bottom of the East River with General Slocum’s Gold.”
They laughed together, as if they were discussing an old friend.
Before Apollo could really piece together the change from wilderness to water’s edge, he felt his body being lowered, submerged; two hands on the back of his head pushed his face underwater, the cold another kind of attack. The water was even darker than the night sky had been. He felt the wooden clubs slip away, and his whole body went under. They were drowning him. He opened his mouth involuntarily and swallowed and, surprisingly, that saved his life.
His reaction to swallowing the water was so violent that it revitalized his entire body. He had no idea what he was doing, but he had the power of ten men with which to do it. Drowning someone is even tougher than knocking them out. He thrashed and flailed, and despite their best efforts, he struggled himself free. The pressure on the back of his head slipped away. He gasped and gasped. He shouted something, not words. He caught two breaths, and the women were on him again. They pushed him back under, but now he faced them, so he grabbed at two and dragged them down into the water as well. They surfaced, and he never let go. By saving themselves, they saved him. He didn’t fight them, not really, but he clung to them ferociously. Apollo got his feet under him, felt cool air on his head and rushed for land.
They tackled him before he’d made it three feet, but it didn’t matter. He’d made it far enough to grasp at gnarled roots in the dirt, and he wouldn’t let go. The women’s clothing had served as camouflage in the woods, but now the robes were wet and weighed the women down. Finally they just piled on top of him. Five people heaving and wheezing in the sand.