The White Road

That night, I awoke to a noise from downstairs. I left Rachel sleeping, pulled on a robe, and went down to find the front door slightly ajar. Outside, Angel sat on the porch seat, dressed in sweatpants and an old Doonesbury T-shirt, his bare feet stretched out before him. He had a glass of milk in his hand as he looked out over the moonlit marsh. From the west came the cry of a screech owl, rising and falling in pitch. There was a pair nesting in the Black Point Cemetery. Sometimes, at night, the headlights of the car would catch them ascending toward the treetops, a vole or mouse still struggling in their claws.

“Owls keeping you awake?”

He glanced over his shoulder at me, and there was a little of the old Angel in his smile. “The silence is keeping me awake. The hell do you sleep in all this quiet?”

“I can go beep my horn and swear in Arabic if you think it will help.”

“Gee, would you?”

Around us, mosquitoes danced, waiting for their chance to descend. I took some matches from the windowsill and lit a mosquito coil, then sat down beside him. He offered me his glass.

“Milk?”

“No thanks. I’m trying to give it up.”

“You’re right. That calcium’ll kill ya.”

He sipped his milk.

“You worried about her?”

“Who, Rachel?”

“Yeah, Rachel. Who’d you think I was asking about, Chelsea Clinton?”

“She’s fine. But I hear Chelsea’s doing well in college, so that’s good too.”

A smile fluttered at his lips, like the brief beating of butterfly wings.

“You know what I mean.”

“I know. Sometimes, yes, I’m afraid. I get so scared that I come out here in the darkness and I look down on the marsh and I pray. I pray that nothing happens to Rachel and our child. Frankly, I think I’ve done my share of suffering. We all have. I’m kind of hoping the book is closed for a while.”

“Place like this, on a night like tonight, maybe lets you believe that could happen,” he said. “It’s pretty here. Peaceful too.”

“You thinking of retiring here? If you are, I’ll have to move again.”

“Nah, I like the city too much. But this is kind of restful, for a change.”

“I have snakes in my woodshed.”

“Don’t we all? What are you going to do about them?”

“Leave them alone. Hope they go away, or that something else kills them for me.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then I’ll have to deal with them myself. You want to tell me why you’re out here?”

“My back hurts,” he said simply. “Places on my thighs where they took the skin from, they hurt too.”

In his eyes I could see the night shapes reflected so clearly that it was as if they were a part of him, the elements of a darker world that had somehow entered and colonized his soul.

“I still see them, you know, that fucking preacher and his son, holding me down while they cut away at me. He whispered to me, you know that? That fucking Pudd, he whispered to me, rubbed my brow, told me that it was all okay, while his old man cut me. Every time I stand or stretch, I feel that blade on my skin and I hear him whispering and it brings me back. And when that happens, the hate comes flooding back with it. I’ve never felt hate like it before.”

“It fades,” I said quietly.

“Does it?”

“Yes.”

“But it doesn’t go away?”

“No. It’s yours. You do with it what you have to do.”

“I want to kill someone.” He said it without feeling, in level tones, the way somebody might announce that they were going to take a cold shower on a warm day. Louis was the killer, I thought. It didn’t matter that he killed for motives that went beyond money or politics or power; that he was no longer morally neutral; that whatever he might have done in the past, those he now chose to destroy went largely unmourned. Louis had it in him to take a life and not lose a moment’s sleep over it.

Angel was different. When he’d been placed in situations where it was kill or be killed, then he had taken lives. It troubled him to do it, but better to be troubled above ground than to be untroubled below, and I had personal reasons to be thankful for his actions. Now Faulkner had destroyed something inside Angel, some small dam that he had constructed for himself behind which was contained all of his sorrow and hurt and rage at the things that had been done to him throughout his life. I knew only fragments of it—abuse, starvation, rejection, violence—but I was now beginning to realize the consequences of its release.

“But you still won’t testify against him, if they ask,” I said.

I knew the deputy DA was debating the wisdom of calling Angel for the trial, particularly given the fact that they would have to subpoena him to do it. Angel wasn’t one for making voluntary visits to courtrooms.

“I wouldn’t make such a great witness.”

This was true but I didn’t know how much I should tell him about the case against Faulkner, about how weak it was and how there were fears that it might collapse entirely without more hard evidence. As the newspaper report had pointed out, Faulkner was claiming that he had been a virtual prisoner of his son and daughter for four decades; that they alone were responsible for the deaths of his flock and a series of attacks against groups and individuals whose beliefs differed from their own; and that they had brought skin and bone from their victims to him and forced him to preserve them as relics. It was the classic defense of “The dead guys done it.”

“You know where Caina is?” asked Angel.

“Nope.”

“It’s in Georgia. Louis was born near there. On our way to South Carolina, we’re going to make a stop in Caina. Just so you know.”

There was something in his eyes as he spoke, a fierce burning. I recognized it instantly, for I had seen it in my own eyes in the past. He rose and turned his face from me to hide the evidence of the pain, then walked to the screen door.

“It won’t solve anything,” I said.

He paused.

“Who cares?”


The next morning Angel hardly spoke at breakfast, and the little that he did say was not directed at me. Our conversation on the porch had not brought us any closer. Instead, it had confirmed the existence of a growing divide between us, an estrangement acknowledged by Louis before they departed.

“You two talk last night?” he asked.

“A little.”

“He thinks you should have killed the preacher when you had the chance.”

We were watching Rachel talking quietly to Angel. Angel’s head was down, and he nodded occasionally, but I could feel the restlessness coming from him in waves. The time for talking, for reasoning, was gone.

“Does he blame me?”

“It ain’t that simple for him.”

“Do you?”

“No, I don’t. Angel would be dead twice over, you hadn’t done the things you done for him. There ain’t no quarrel between us, you and me. Angel, he’s just troubled.”

Angel leaned over and kissed Rachel gently but quickly on the cheek, then headed for their car. He looked over at us, nodded once to me, then climbed in.

“I’m going up there today,” I said.

Louis seemed to tighten beside me. “To the prison?”

“That’s right.”

“I ask why?”

“Faulkner requested my presence.”

“And you agreed to see him?”

“They need all the help they can get, and Faulkner is giving them nothing. They don’t think it can hurt.”

“They’re wrong.”

I didn’t respond.

“They may still subpoena Angel.”

“They have to find him first.”

“If he testifies, maybe he can help keep Faulkner behind bars until he dies.”

Louis was already moving away.

“Maybe we don’t want him behind bars,” he said. “Maybe we want him out in the open, where we can get at him.”

I watched their car as it drove down Black Point Road, across the bridge and onto Old County, until they were lost from sight. Rachel stood next to me, holding my hand.

“You know,” she said, “I wish you’d never heard from Elliot Norton. Ever since he called, nothing has felt the same.”

I squeezed her hand tightly, a gesture that seemed equal parts reassurance and agreement. She was right. Somehow, our lives had become tainted by events of which we had no part. Walking away from them wouldn’t help, not now.

And we stood there together, she and I, as, in a Carolina swamp, a man reached out to his darkness mirrored and was consumed by it.