The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

James Lee Burke Mist

From The Southern Review

Lisa Guillory’s dreams are indistinct and do not contain the images normally associated with nightmares. Nor do dawn and the early-morning mist in the trees come to her in either the form of release or expectation. Instead, her dreams seem to be without sharp edges, like the dull pain of an impacted tooth that takes up nightly residence in her sleep and denies her rest but does not terrify or cause her to wake with night sweats, as is the case with many people at the meetings she has started attending.

The meetings are held in a wood-frame Pentecostal church that is set back in a sugarcane field lined with long rows of cane stubble the farmers burn off at night. In the morning, as she drives to the meeting from the shotgun cabin in what is called the Loreauville “quarters,” where she now lives, the two-lane is thick with smoke from the stubble fires and the fog rolling off Bayou Teche. She can smell the ash and the burned soil and the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou inside the fog, but it is the fog itself that bothers her, not the odor, because in truth she does not want to leave it and the comfort it seems to provide her.

She pulls to the shoulder of the road and lights a cigarette, inhaling it deeply into her lungs, as though a cigarette can keep at bay the desires, no, the cravings, that build inside her throughout the day, until she imagines that a loop of piano wire has been fitted around her head and is being twisted into her scalp.

Lisa’s sponsor is Tookie Goula. She is waiting for Lisa like a gargoyle by the entrance to the clapboard church. Tookie takes one look at Lisa’s face and tells her she has to come clean in front of the group, that the time of silent participation has passed, that she has a serious illness and she has to get rid of shame and guilt and admit she is setting herself up for a relapse.

Lisa feigns indifference and boredom. She has heard it all before. “Talking at the meeting gonna get that knocking sound out of my head?”

“What’s the knocking sound mean, Lisa?”

“It means he was rocking around inside the coffin when they carried him to the graveyard. I heard it. Like rocks rolling ’round inside a barrel.”

Tookie is a thick-bodied Cajun woman with jailhouse tats and a stare like a slap. She is not only inured to financial hardship and worthless men but she did a stint as a prostitute in a chain of truck stops across the upper South. She wears no makeup, bites her nails when she is angry, and doesn’t hide the fact she probably likes women more than men. She is chewing on a nail now, her eyes hot as BBs. “Quit lying,” she says.

Lisa can feel the heat bloom in her chest. She tries to slip into the role of victim. “Why you want to hurt me like that?”

“’Cause you ain’t honest. ’Cause you ain’t gonna get well till you stop jerking yourself around,” Tookie replies.

“The army didn’t want me to see what he looked like. All of him wasn’t in the coffin. Maybe it wasn’t even him,” Lisa says.

“You like making yourself suffer?”

Lisa thinks she is going to break down. She wants to break her fists on Tookie’s face.

“You’re setting yourself up to use, girl,” Tookie says. “You’re gonna see Herman Stanga. I know your t’oughts before you have them.”

“Least I ain’t got to wear tattoos to hide the needle scars on my arms,” Lisa says. “Least I don’t wake up in the morning wondering what gender I am.”

During the meeting Tookie keeps raising her dark eyes to Lisa’s, biting on her nails, rubbing the powerful muscles in her forearms, breathing with a sound like sand sliding down a drainpipe. Lisa can’t take it anymore. “My husband got killed nort’ of Baghdad. I know I’m suppose to work on acceptance, but it’s hard,” she blurts out, without introducing herself by name or identifying herself as an alcoholic or an addict. “I got twenty-seven days now. But I start t’inking of Gerald and how he died and what he must have looked like before they shipped him home, and I start having real bad t’oughts. ’Bout scoring a li’l bit of rock, maybe, not much, just a taste. Like maybe I can still handle it. I’m saying these t’ings ’cause my sponsor says I got to get honest.”

She believed her statement about her loss would suck the air out of the room and fill her listeners with shock and sympathy and in the ensuing silence make Tookie regret her callousness. But the local National Guard unit lost five members in Iraq in one day alone and no one has a patent now on stories of wounded and maimed and dead GIs from South Louisiana. In fact, if anything, Lisa’s admission seems either to antagonize or bore those who are not staring out the window, trapped inside their own desperation and ennui. She realizes that in her self-absorption she has interrupted a woman who has recently been gang-raped in a crack house. Her cheeks burn with embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “My name is Lisa. I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.”

“Keep coming back, Lisa. Those first ninety days are a rough gig. Sometimes you got to fake it till you make it,” the chair of the meeting, a white man, says. Then he calls on someone else as though flipping a page in a book.

Fake it till you make it? Fake what? Being sick all the time?

After the meeting she heads straight for her car, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but Tookie inserts herself like an attack dog in her path. “What was that pity-pot stuff about?”

“I made a fool of myself. You ain’t got to tell me,” Lisa replies.

Tookie’s eyes try to peel the skin off Lisa’s face. “There’s something you ain’t owned up to,” she says.

“My husband got blown apart. What else I got to tell you?”

“That was eight months ago. What you hiding, you? What happened in New Orleans?”

The sunshine is cold and hard on the cane fields, the stubble still smoking, the fog billowing in white clouds off Bayou Teche. Lisa wants to walk inside the great pillows of white fog and stay there forever.

“I’m okay, Tookie. I’m ain’t gonna use. I promise,” she says.

“You know how you can tell when drunks and junkies are lying? Their lips are moving. Come to my house. I’ll fix breakfast.”

“I’m late for my appointment at the employment office.”

Tookie steps closer to her, her face suddenly feminine, tender, almost vulnerable. Her fingers rest on Lisa’s forearm, her thumb caressing Lisa’s skin for just a moment. “Herman will try to get you in the sack. But getting in your pants ain’t what it’s about. He wants you on the pipe and working his corner. I been there, Lisa. Herman Stanga is the devil.”

Tookie forms a circle with her index finger and thumb around Lisa’s wrist and squeezes, her mouth parting with her own undisguised need.

Herman Stanga is full of rebop and snap-crackle-and-pop and knows how to put some boom-boom in your bam-bam, baby. Or at least that is his self-generated mystique as he cruises from place to place in New Iberia’s old red-light district, a leather bag hanging from a strap on his shoulder, a pixie expression on his lean face, his mustache like a pair of tiny blackbird’s wings against his gold skin.

His girls are called rock queens, although a lot of them have shifted gears and are doing crystal now because it burns off their fat and keeps them competitive on the street corner where they hook. Herman prefers them white, because there are black dudes who will always pay top dollar for white bread, no matter what kind of package it comes in. But, as he is fond of saying, he is “an Affirmative Action employer. Ain’t nothing wrong with giving a country girl a crack at a downtown man.”

Lisa did not lie to Tookie about her appointment at the state employment office. The problem was the three hundred people ahead of her when she arrived and the piano wire that someone is now tightening around her head with a wood peg. She lasts forty-five minutes in the waiting room, vomits in the bathroom, then drives down Railroad Avenue to the first liquor store she can find. The short-dog she buys may smell like a mixture of hair tonic and kerosene, but it goes down with a rush that is one notch south of the orgasmic moment she experienced when she first shot up with brown skag.

She finishes the bottle under the shade of a spreading oak by a small grocery store. Gangbangers with black kerchiefs tied down on their heads are taking turns at a weight set under the tree, curling the bar in to their bare chests, their steroid-swollen muscles almost popping out of their skin. Lisa screws the cap on the empty bottle and stares vacantly into space, then takes her time getting out of the car and dropping the bottle in a trash barrel. She has no reason to remain under a lichen-encrusted tree, in New Iberia’s old brothel district, on a morning she should seek work, on a morning that somehow seems like a crossroads that has been set in her path. But the sun-spangled shade under the tree is a pleasant place to be, with her car door open to the wind, on a day that is both warm and cool at the same time, while the boys clank iron and leaves drift down on her windshield like gold coins.

She shuts her eyes and breathes the heavy odor of the fortified wine in and out of her lungs, and for just a moment, as though she is outside of her body, she sees Gerald kiss her cheek and place the flat of his hand on her belly.

Without invitation, a grinning man wearing a striped brown suit and an oxblood Stetson opens the passenger door and slides in beside her. He has two sweating cans of Budweiser balanced in his left palm and a fat package of warm boudin in the other. “Hey, darling, want to join me in a li’l snack?” he asks, already spreading the butcher paper open on the seat, filling the car with the delicious smell of ground sausage and spice and onions.

“I ain’t here to score, Herman,” she replies.

“I respect folks’ choices. When they get clean, I say more power to them. But that don’t mean I ain’t their friend no more.”

He peels the tab on one of the beer cans and lets the foam rise through the hole and well over the top and slide down the back of his hand. “Here you go, baby. Sip this while I cut you some boudin chunks. You found a job yet? All them evacuees is kind of messing up the labor market, ain’t they?”

She is an evacuee, flooded out of the Lower Ninth Ward in Orleans Parish by Hurricane Katrina, shuttled from the Superdome to a shelter in New Iberia’s City Park. In fact, she’d still be there or in a FEMA trailer camp if her aunt hadn’t given her the use of the shotgun cabin in the Loreauville quarters. But Herman already knows that. Herman knows how to flatter, to indicate his listener is different, special, not part of a categorical group whose presence is starting to be resented and feared.

“That Budweiser is good and cold, ain’t it?” he says. “Lookie here, drive me to my crib and let me make some calls. Can you do receptionist work, answer the phone, maybe seat people in a restaurant, stuff like that?”

“Sure, Herman.”

“Then let’s motivate on out of here, baby,” he says, lifting his chin, indicating she should start the engine and drive the two of them to his Victorian home on Bayou Teche.

Herman acquired the house from a black physician who, for unknown reasons, signed over the deed and left town. No one ever knew where the physician or his family went, nor were they ever heard from again. The wood columns are eaten by termites, the ventilated green shutters askew on their hinges, the second-story rain gutters bleeding rust down the walls. The oak and pecan trees are so thick that sunlight never enters the house and no grass grows in the yard.

But Herman is not concerned with historical preservation. The swimming pool in his backyard is a glittering blue teardrop, coated with steam, where his girls float on inflated latex cushions, where bougainvillea drips as brightly as drops of blood on his latticework, where potted lime and Hong Kong orchid trees bloom year-round and assure his guests the season is eternal.

“Sit here and relax while I call in a couple of favors from some business associates,” he says out on the terrace. “Have some of them veined shrimps. Ignore the ladies in the pool. They nice, but they ain’t in your league, know what I mean? Hey, if I get you on in a hostess position, it’s probably gonna be twelve or t’irteen dol’ars an hour. You all right wit’ that?”

Lisa sits in the coolness of the sunshine and tries to concentrate on what she is doing. It’s only noon and she has gone from the comfort of the fog at sunrise into the meeting at the church, then to the employment office and the liquor store and the shady oak tree where boys clanked iron and admired one another’s bodies as though anatomical perfection were a stay against mortality. Now she is at the home of Herman Stanga, watching women she doesn’t know swim in a sky-blue pool, while Herman paces back and forth behind the French doors, talking on the phone, undressing down to a thong, kicking his trousers in a rattle of change across the room.

The bayou is chocolate-brown, the sun a wobbling balloon of yellow flame trapped under its surface. The bayou conjures up images and memories she does not want to revisit. In her mind’s eye she sees people wading in chest-deep water, the surface iridescent with a chemical sheen, fecal clouds rising from the bottom, a stench crawling into her nostrils that makes her gag. Then the knocking sound starts in her head and she has to press both fists against her temples to make it stop.

Why has she come to Herman’s house? Does she really believe he wants to help her? What would Tookie say if she knew?

“I’m telling you, this is a nice lady, man,” she hears Herman saying. “No, she ain’t on welfare. No, she ain’t got no personal problems or bad habits. What she got is my recommendation. Don’t give me your trash, Rodney. I’m sending her over. You treat her right, nigger.”

Herman clicks off the phone and slips on a robe that hangs on his lithe frame like blue ice water. He motions Lisa inside and tells her to sit on a stool at a counter that separates the living room from the kitchen. “My cousin Rodney owns a couple of clubs in Lafayette and caters parties and banquets for rich people out at the Oil Center. All you got to do is supervise the buffet table and the punch bowl and make sure everybody getting the drinks they need. They want somebody know how to deal with the public. I told Rodney that’s you, baby.”

He’s talking too fast for her. Her ears are popping and she thinks she hears voices yelling and the downdraft of helicopter blades. She realizes Herman is staring at her, his face disjointed. “You gonna get crazy on me?” he says.

“The Coast Guard helicopter took me off the roof. The blades was so loud nobody could hear. I was shouting and nobody could hear.”

“Shouting what?” Herman asks. “What you talking about?”

“The Coast Guard man grabbed me around the chest and pulled me up on a cable. I couldn’t t’ink. I could see trash and bodies in the water all the way to where the levee was broke. I cain’t get that noise out of my head.”

“What noise?”

“The knocking.”

Herman brushes at a nostril with one knuckle and huffs air out his nose, his eyes flat, as though he’s studying thoughts of a kind no one would ever guess at. He begins to massage the tendons in her shoulders. “You’re tight as iron, Lisa. That ain’t good for you. Come upstairs.”

“No.”

For just an instant, in the time it takes to blink, she sees the light in his eyes harden. Then he bites his lip softly and smiles to himself. “I respect you, darling. Wouldn’t have our relationship no other way.”

Now he’s the pixie again, his tiny mustache flexing with his grin. He places a mirror on the corner, back side flat, and begins chopping up lines on it with a razor blade, shaping and sculpting each white row like an artwork. “I still got the best product in town. I don’t force it on nobody. They hurting, need some medicine, I hep them out. But I ain’t the captain of nobody else’s soul.”

“I don’t want any, Herman,” she says, the words catching like a wet bubble in her throat.

“If you can get by on a short-dog and a beer now and then, I say, ‘Rock on, girl.’ I say you a superwoman.”

He removes a hundred-dollar bill from the pocket of his robe, rolls it into a crisp tube, and snorts a line up each nostril, the soles of his slippers slapping on the floor. He grabs his thonged phallus inside his open robe and pulls on it. “Tell me them coca leaves wasn’t picked by Indian goddesses.”

“I got to go, Herman,” she says, because she is absolutely sure the knocking sound that has haunted her sleep and that sometimes comes aborning even in the midst of a conversation is about to begin again.

At the front door he presses the hundred-dollar bill into her palm and closes her fingers on it. “Get you some new threads. You fine-looking, Miss Lisa. Got the kind of class make a man’s eye wander.”

He lifts her hand, the one that holds the hundred-dollar bill, and kisses it. The cocaine residue on the paper seems to burn like a tiny ball of heat clenched inside her palm.

The party she helps cater that night is held in a refurbished icehouse across the street from a Jewish cemetery shrouded by live oaks. It’s raining outside, but the moon is full and visible through the clouds, and the shell parking lot is chained with rain puddles. A tin roof covers the old loading dock where years ago blocks of ice rushed down a chute into a wood box and once there were chopped into small pieces with ice picks by sweating black men. The roar of the rain on the tin roof is almost deafening and Lisa has a hard time concentrating on her work. She has another problem, too.

Rodney, the caterer, can’t keep his hands off her. When he tells her how to arrange and freshen the salad bar, he keeps his palm in the middle of her back. When he walks her the length of the serving table, he drapes an arm over her shoulder. When she separates from him, he lets his fingers trail off her rump.

“Herman tole me you growed up here’bouts,” he says, slipping his grasp around her triceps.

“My husband’s daddy worked at this icehouse. He chopped up ice out there on the dock, in that wood box there,” she replies.

He nods idly, as though processing her statement. “Your husband got killed in Iraq?”

She starts to answer, then realizes he isn’t listening, that he’s watching another worker pour a stainless-steel tray of okra gumbo into a warmer. His gaze breaks and his eyes come back on her. “Go ahead,” he says.

“Go ahead what?”

“Say what you was saying.”

“Can I get paid after work tonight? I got to hep my auntie wit’ her mortgage.”

“Don’t see nothing wrong wit’ that,” he says.

He squeezes by her on his way to the kitchen, the thick outline of his phallus sliding across her rump.

The party becomes more raucous, grows in intensity, the males-only crowd emboldened by their numbers and insularity. Four bare-breasted women in spangled G-strings and spiked heels are dancing on a stage, fishnet patterns of light and shadow shifting across their skin. Outside, the rain continues to fall and Lisa can see the black-green wetness of the oak trees surrounding the Jewish cemetery, the canopy swishing against the sky, and she wonders if it is true that the unbaptized are locked out of heaven.

Why is she thinking such strange thoughts? She tries to think about her life in New Orleans before the hurricane, before Gerald’s reserve unit was called up, before his Humvee was blown into scrap metal.

She had waited tables in a restaurant in Jackson Square, right across the street from the Café du Monde. There were jugglers and street musicians and unicyclists in the square, and crepe myrtle and banana trees grew along the piked fence where the sidewalk artists set up their easels. It was cool and breezy under the colonnades, and the courtyards and narrow passageways smelled of damp stone and spearmint and roses that bloomed in December. She liked to watch the people emerging from Mass at St. Louis Cathedral on Saturday evening and she liked bringing them the steaming trays of boiled crawfish, cob corn, and artichokes that were the restaurant’s specialty. In fact, she loved New Orleans and she loved Gerald and she loved their one-story tin-roofed home in the Lower Ninth Ward.

But these thoughts cause her scalp to constrict and she thinks she hears hail bouncing off the loading dock outside.

“You got seizures or something?” Rodney asks.

“What?”

“You just dropped the ladle in the gumbo,” he says.

She stares stupidly at the serving spoon sinking in the cauldron of okra and shrimp.

“Take a break,” Rodney says.

She tries to argue, then relents and waits in a small office by the kitchen while Rodney gets another girl to fill in for her. He closes the door behind him and studies Lisa with a worried expression, then sits in a chair across from her and lights a joint. He takes a hit, holding it deep in his lungs, offering it to her while he lets out his breath in increments. Her hand seems to reach out as though it has a will of its own. She bends over and touches the joint to her lips and feels the wetness of his saliva mix with her own. She can hear the cigarette paper superheat and crinkle as she draws in on the smoke.

“I got to pay you off, baby.”

“’Cause I dropped the ladle?”

“’Cause you was talking to yourself at the buffet table. ’Cause you in your own spaceship.”

Someone outside twists the door handle and flings the door back on its hinges. Tookie Goula steps inside, the strap of her handbag wrapped around her wrist, her arms pumped. “You put that joint in your mout’ again, I’m gonna break your arm, me. Then I’m gonna stuff this pimp here in a toilet bowl,” she says.

Moments later, in Lisa’s parked automobile, Tookie stares at Lisa with such intensity Lisa thinks she is about to hit her.

“Next time I’ll let you drown,” Tookie says.

Lisa looks at the Jewish cemetery and the oak trees thrashing against the sky and the rain puddles in the parking lot. The puddles are bladed with moonlight and she thinks of Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice, but she doesn’t know why.

“What do you know about drowning, Tookie?”

Tookie seems to reflect upon Lisa’s question, as though she, too, is bothered by the presumption and harshness in her own rhetoric. But the charitable impulse passes. “Get your head out of your ass. You want to fire me as your sponsor, do it now.”

Lisa still has the hundred-dollar bill Herman Stanga gave her, plus the money she was paid by his cousin Rodney. She can score some rock or crystal or brown skag in North Lafayette and stay high or go on an alcoholic bender for at least two days. All she has to do is thank Tookie for her help and drive away.

“Where you think Limbo is at?” she says.

“What?”

“The place people go when they ain’t baptized. Like all them Jews in that cemetery.”

Tookie stares wanly at the parking lot, her face marked with a sad knowledge about the nature of loss and human inadequacy that she will probably never admit, even to herself.

The next morning Lisa stands at the speaker’s podium at the A.A. meeting in the Pentecostal church, her eyes fixed on the back wall, and owns up to drinking, using, and jerking her sponsor around. She says she intends to work the steps and to live by the principles of the program. Both the brevity of her statement and the sincerity in her voice surprise her. She receives a twenty-four-hour sobriety chip, then watches it passed around the room so each person at the meeting can hold it in his palm and say a silent prayer over it. She lowers her head to hide the wetness in her eyes.

“Eat breakfast wit’ me. Up at the café,” Tookie says.

“I’d like that,” Lisa says.

“You gonna make it, you.”

Lisa believes her. All the way to 3:00 p.m., when Herman Stanga pulls up to her shotgun house in the Loreauville quarters and kills his engine by her gallery. His car hood ticks like a broken watch.

“You ain’t gonna unlatch the screen for me?” he says.

“I ain’t got no reason to talk wit’ you, Herman.”

“Got me all wrong, baby. I done a li’l research on your financial situation. You should have gotten at least a hundred t’ousand dol’ars when your husband was killed. The gov’ment ain’t paid you yet?”

She swallows and the tin rooftops and the narrow houses that are shaped like boxcars and the trees along the bayou go in and out of focus and shimmer in the winter sunlight.

“Gerald’s divorce hadn’t come t’rew yet,” she says.

“What you mean?”

“His mama and his first wife was the beneficiaries on the policy. He didn’t change the policy,” she says, her eyes shifting off of Herman’s, as though she were both confessing a sin and betraying Gerald.

Herman feeds a stick of gum into his mouth, smacks it in his jaw, and raises his eyebrows, as though trying to suppress his incredulity. “Tell me if I got this right. He’s putting the blocks to you, but he goes off to Iraq and fixes it so you ain’t gonna have no insurance money? That’s the guy you moping around about?”

He begins to chew his gum more rapidly and doesn’t wait for her to reply. “So what we gonna do about the eight-t’ousand-dol’ar tab you got? Also, what we gonna do about the twenty-t’ree hundred dol’ars you took out of Rodney’s cashbox last night?”

“Cashbox?”

His head bounces up and down ironically, like it’s connected to a rubber band. “Yeah, the cashbox, the one that was in the desk in the office where Rodney said to sit your neurotic ass down and wait for him. You t’ink you can rip off a man like Rodney and just do your nutcase routine and walk away?”

“I didn’t steal no money. I don’t owe you no eight t’ousand dol’ars, either.”

“’Cause you was so stoned out you got no memory of it.” Then he begins to mimic her. “‘Tie me off, Herman. Give me just one balloon, Herman. I’ll do anyt’ing, Herman. I’ll be good to you, Herman. I’ll pay you tomorrow, Herman.’”

How does he speak with such authority and confidence? Did she actually say those things? Is that who she really is?

“I ain’t stole no money out of no office.”

“Tell that to the sheriff when Rodney files charges. Open this goddamn door, bitch. You fixing to go on the installment plan.”

She attacks his face with her nails and he hits her with his fist harder than she ever believed a human being could be hit.

During the next six weeks Lisa comes to believe the person she thought was Lisa perhaps never existed. The new Lisa also learns that Hell is a place without geographical boundaries, that it can travel with an individual wherever she goes. She wakes to its presence at sunrise, aching and dehydrated, the sky like the watery, cherry-stained dregs in the bottom of a Collins glass. Whether picking up a brick of Afghan skunk in a Lafayette bus locker for Herman or tying off with one of his whores, sometimes using the same needle, Lisa moves from day into night without taking notice of clocks or calendars or the macabre transformation in the face that looks back at her from the mirror.

She attends meetings sometimes but either nods out or lies about the last time she drank or used. If pressed for the truth about where she has been or what she has done, she cannot objectively answer. Dreams and hallucinations and moments of heart-pounding clarity somehow meld together and become indistinguishable from one another. The irony is the knocking sound has finally stopped.

Sometimes Tookie Goula cooks for her, holds her hands, puts her in the shower when she is too sick to care for herself. Tookie has started to smoke again and some days looks haggard and hungover. At twilight on a spring evening they are in Lisa’s bedroom and the live oaks along the bayou are dark green and pulsing with birds against a lavender sky. Lisa has not used or gotten drunk in the last twenty-four hours. But she thinks she smells alcohol on Tookie’s breath.

“It’s codeine. For my cough,” Tookie says.

“It’s a drug just the same,” Lisa says. “You go back on the spike, you gonna die, Tookie.”

Tookie lies down next to Lisa, then turns on her side and places one arm across Lisa’s chest. Lisa doesn’t resist but neither does she respond.

“You want to move in wit’ me?” Tookie asks. “I’ll hep you get away from Herman. Maybe we’ll go to Houston or up nort’ somewhere, maybe open a café.”

But Lisa is not listening. She rubs the balls of her fingers along one of the tattoos on Tookie’s forearm.

“A mosquito bit me,” Tookie says.

“No, you’re back on the spike.”

She kisses Tookie on the mouth and presses Tookie’s head against her breast, something she has never done before. “You break my heart.”

“You’re wrong. I ain’t used in t’ree years, me.”

“Stop lying, stop lying, stop lying,” Lisa says, holding Tookie tighter against her breast, as though her arms can squeeze the sickness out of both their bodies.

It begins to rain and Lisa can smell fish spawning in the bayou and the odor of gas and wet leaves on the wind. She hears the blades of a helicopter thropping across the sky and sees lightning flicker on the tin roofs of her neighbors’ homes. As she closes her eyes, she feels herself drifting upward from her bed, through the ceiling, into the coolness and freedom of the evening. The clouds form a huge dome above her, like that of a cathedral, and she can see the vastness of creation: the rain-drenched land, a distant storm that looks like spun glass, a sea gone wine-dark with the setting of the sun.

Gerald loved me. We was gonna be married by a priest soon as his divorce come through, she says to Tookie.

I know that, Tookie says.

Down there, that’s where it happened.

What happened?

My sister was trying to hand up my l’il boy t’rew the hole in the roof and they fell back in the water. I could hear them knocking in there, but I couldn’t get them out. My baby never got baptized.

These t’ings ain’t your fault, Lisa. Ain’t nobody’s fault. That’s what makes it hard. You ain’t learned that, you?

Directly below, Lisa can see the submerged outline of the house where she and her family used to live. The sun is low on the western horizon now, dead-looking, like a piece of tin that gives no warmth. Beneath the water’s surface Lisa can see tiny lights that remind her of broken Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice or perhaps the souls of infants that have found one another and have been cupped and given safe harbor by an enormous hand. For reasons she cannot explain, that image and Tookie’s presence bring her a moment of solace she had not anticipated.