The White Road

“He handed me a note from Louis and told me he was lactose intolerant. That was it. Note. Lactose intolerant. Nothing else. He’s coming to the reading with me. It was all I could do to get him to change his T-shirt. The new one reads ‘Black Death.’ I’m going to tell people it’s a rap band. Do you think it’s a rap band?”

I figured it was probably his occupation, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said the only thing I could think of to say.

“Maybe you’d better buy some soy milk.”

She hung up without saying good-bye.

Despite the earlier rain, it was still stiflingly warm when I left the hotel to grab a bite to eat, and I felt as if my clothes were soaked through before I’d walked more than a few blocks. I passed the site of the Confederate Museum, its exterior now surrounded by scaffolding, and headed into the residential district between East Bay and Meeting, admiring the big old houses, the lamps by their doors glowing softly. It was just after ten and the tourists had begun to throng the dive bars on East Bay that sold premixed cocktails in souvenir glasses. Young men and women cruised up and down Broad, rap and nu-metal grinding out insistent, competing beats. Fred Durst, record company vice president, proud father and multimillionaire, was telling the kids how their parents just didn’t understand his generation. There’s nothing sadder than a thirty-year-old man in short trousers rebelling against his mom and dad.

I was looking for somewhere to eat when I saw a familiar face at the window of Magnolia’s. Elliot was sitting across from a woman with jet-black hair and tight lips. He was eating, but the pained look on his face told me that he wasn’t enjoying his meal, maybe because the woman was clearly unhappy with him. She was leaning across the table, her palms flat upon the cloth, and her eyes were blazing. Elliot gave up trying to feed himself and spread out his hands in a “Be reasonable” gesture, the one that men use when they’re feeling put upon by a woman. It doesn’t work, mainly because there’s nothing guaranteed to add fuel to the fire of a male-female argument quicker than one party suggesting to the other that she’s being unreasonable. True to form, the woman stood up abruptly and walked determinedly from the restaurant. Elliot didn’t follow. He sat for a moment looking after her, then shrugged resignedly, picked up his knife and fork and resumed his meal. The woman, dressed entirely in black, got into an Explorer parked a couple of doors down from the restaurant and drove off into the night. She wasn’t crying but her anger lit up the interior of the SUV like a flare. Out of little more than habit I memorized the tag number. I briefly considered joining Elliot but I didn’t want him to think that I might have seen the argument and, anyway, I wanted some time alone.

I ended up on Queen Street and ate at Poogan’s Porch, a Cajun and Low Country restaurant that was rumored to be a favorite of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, although the celebrity count was zero that night. Poogan’s had flowered wallpaper and glass on the tables, and I pretty much had to take one of the staff hostage to keep the ice water coming fast enough to cool me down, but the Cajun duck looked good. Despite my hunger, I barely picked at my food when it arrived. A memory flashed: Faulkner spitting in my mouth, the taste of him on my tongue. I pushed the plate away.

“Is there something wrong with your food, sir?”

It was the waiter. I looked up at him but he was blurred, like a Batut photograph in which images of different individuals had been overlaid on one another to create a single composite.

“No,” I said. “It’s fine. I’ve just lost my appetite.”

I wanted him to go away. I couldn’t look at his face. It reminded me of slow decay. The cockroaches were clicking across the sidewalks when I left the restaurant, the remains of those that had not been quick enough to avoid human footfalls lying scattered in small dark piles, troops of ants already feeding hungrily upon them. I found myself walking down deserted streets watching the lights in the windows of the houses, catching shadow plays of the lives continuing behind the drapes. I missed Rachel and wished that she were with me. I wondered how she was getting along with the Klan Killer, now apparently aka Black Death. Trust Louis to send along the only guy who looked more conspicuous than he did, but at least I was no longer worrying as much about Rachel. I still wasn’t even sure how much help I could be to Elliot down here. True, I was curious about the jailhouse preacher who had given Atys Jones the T-bar knife, but it seemed to me that I was somehow adrift from all that was happening, that I had not yet found a way to break the surface and explore the depths beneath, and I still didn’t fully share Elliot’s faith in the ability of the old Gullah couple and their son to handle any situation that might arise. I found a public phone and checked in with the safe house. The old man answered and confirmed that all was well.

“Mek you duh worry so?” he said. “Dat po’ creetuh, ’e rest.”

I thanked him and was about to hang up when he spoke again.

“De boy suh ’e yent kill de gel, ’e meet de gel so.”

I had to ask him to repeat himself twice before I understood.

“He told you that he didn’t kill her? You’ve talked to him about it?”

“Uh-huh. Uh ax, ’en ’e mek ansuh suh ’e yent do’um.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“’E skay’d. ’E skay-to-det.”

“Scared of what?”

“De police. De ’ooman.”

“What woman?”

“De ole people b’leebe sperit walk de nighttime up de Congaree. Dat ’ooman alltime duh fludduh-fedduh.”

Again, I had to get him to repeat himself. Eventually, I managed to figure out that he was talking about spirits.

“You’re telling me that there is the ghost of a woman in the Congaree?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And this is the woman Atys saw?”

“Uh yent know puhzac’ly, but uh t’ink so.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“No, suh, I cahn spessify, bud ’e duh sleep tuh Gawd-acre.”

God-acre: the cemetery.

I asked him to try to get something more from Atys, because it still seemed to me that he knew more than he was telling. The old man promised to try, but said he wasn’t no “’tarrygater.”

By now I was in the French Quarter between Meeting and East Bay. I could hear the sounds of distant traffic, and sometimes raised voices as revelers moved through the night, but around me there was no life.

And then, as I passed by Unity Alley, I heard singing. The voice was a child’s, and very lovely. It was singing a version of an old Roba Stanley number, “Devilish Mary,” but it sounded as if the child didn’t know the whole song or else had just decided to sing her favorite part, which was the nursery-rhyme refrain at the end of each verse: A ring-tuma-ding-tuma dairy

A ring-tuma-ding-tuma dairy

Prettiest girl I ever saw

And her name was Devilish Mary.

The singing stopped, and the girl stepped from the murk of the alleyway to be illuminated by the lamps on the adjoining houses.

“Hey, mister,” she said. “You got a light?”

I stopped. She was thirteen or fourteen, and wore a short, tight black skirt with no stockings. Her bare legs were very white, and her midriff was exposed beneath a black, cut-off T-shirt. Her face, too, was pale, smudged dark with makeup around the eyes and wounded by a streak of too-red lipstick around her mouth. She wore high heels, but still stood no taller than five feet as she leaned against the brickwork. Her hair was brown and untidy, and partially obscured her face. The darkness seemed to move around her, as if she were standing beneath a moonlit tree, its branches moving slowly in an evening breeze. She seemed strangely familiar, in the way that a childhood photograph will contain traces of the woman that the child will become. I felt as though I had seen the woman first, and now was being allowed to see the child that she once was.

“I don’t smoke,” I said. “Sorry.”

I stared at her for a few seconds more, then began to move away. “Where you going?” she said.

“You want to have some fun? I got a place we can go.” She stepped forward and I saw that she was younger even than I had thought. This girl was barely into double figures, and yet there was something about her voice. It sounded older than it should have, far older. She opened her mouth and licked her lips. Her teeth were green where they met the gums.

“How old are you?” I asked her.

“How old would you like me to be?” She wiggled her hips in a kind of parody of lasciviousness, and the grating tone to her voice was clearer now. She gestured with her right hand toward the alleyway. “Come on, down here. I got a place we can go.” Slowly, she placed her hand on the hem of her skirt and began to lift. “Let me show you—”

I reached out to her and her smile broadened, then froze as I gripped her arm. “Maybe we should get you to the police,” I told her. “They’ll find someone who can help you.” But her arm felt wrong: not firm, but liquid, like a body in the process of putrefaction. There was heat there but it was extreme, and I was reminded of the preacher in his cell, burning up from within. The girl hissed and with a movement of surprising strength and agility wrenched herself from my grasp.

“Don’t touch me!” she hissed. “I’m not your daughter.”

For seconds, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even speak. Then she started to run down the alleyway and I followed her. I thought I would catch her easily, but suddenly she was ten feet ahead of me, then twenty, moving yet not moving, like a film from which somebody had removed crucial frames at regular intervals. She passed by McCrady’s Restaurant in a kind of blur, then paused as she neared East Bay.

The car appeared behind her as she stood waiting. It was a black Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with a battered front bumper and a star-shaped crack in the corner of the darkened windshield. The rear passenger door opened beside the girl and a kind of dark light spilled out, seeping like oil across the sidewalk.

“No!” I shouted. “Get away from the car.”

Her head turned and she stared into the interior, then looked back at me. She smiled, her features already blurring, the gums receding, the teeth like yellowed stones.

“Come on,” she said. “I got a place we can go.”

She climbed into the car and it pulled away from the curb, its brake lights glowing as it disappeared into the night.

But shapes had fallen from the interior of the car before the door had closed, dropping like small clods of dirt to the sidewalk. While I watched, they converged on a cockroach and began to crawl across its body, biting at its head and underside, trying to slow it down so that they could begin to consume it. I knelt and saw the distinctive violin-shaped mark on the back of one of the spiders.

Recluses. The cockroach was covered with recluses.

I felt something shudder through my system and a huge spasm wrenched at my gut. I collapsed back against the wall and wrapped my arms around myself as the nausea passed over me in waves. I could taste duck and rice in my mouth as my food threatened to come back up from my stomach. I took deep breaths and kept my head down. Then, when I could walk again, I hailed a cab on East Bay and returned to my hotel.

I drank some water in my room to try to cool myself down but my temperature was way up. I was feverish and ill. I tried to concentrate on the TV, but the colors hurt my eyes and I turned it off before the late night news bulletin came on with the first details of the killings of three men in a bar near Caina, Georgia. Instead, I lay down in bed and tried to sleep but the heat was too much, even with the a/c on full. I found myself drifting in and out of consciousness, unsure of whether I was awake or dreaming when I heard a knock at the door and saw, through the peephole, the figure of a little girl in black waiting at my door, her lipstick smeared hey mister, I got a place we can go and when I tried to open the door I found that I was holding the chrome of a Coupe de Ville. I smelled the stench of rotting meat as I heard the lock release with a click. And all was darkness within.