Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy

"Steve."

Steve reached forward and shook the man’s hand.

"And this is my wife, Kim."

The old man nodded to the young woman and said, "A pleasure. My name’s Charlie Tatum. I’ll be taking y’all over to Portsmouth today."

"Excellent," Steve said.

"Here’s the thing. See my boat up there?"

He pointed to the thirty foot Island Hopper moored to a rotting beam, where a man with a bushy white beard was busy padding up water on the vinyl seats from last night’s thunderstorm.

"That’s my brother, Wally, and he’s fixin’ to take that motor apart. Old net got caught in the blades when we was coming back into the harbor our last trip out."

A family of four strolled by, headed for the end of the dock.

"Yeah, Wally’s gonna have to turn those folks down, but look I’m running a ferry from our dock on the sound out to Portsmouth. There’s two more spots if y’all want to go."

"Steve, maybe we should just—"

"Absolutely."

That family sat down on a bench at the end of the dock. Wally said something to them, inaudible from this distance.

"Well, if you’ll come with me, I’ve got my truck here, and we’ll get going. We’ve got another couple signed up, too, and since it’s just the four of you, we should be able to make a nice long day of it."

They followed the old man to his truck—a rusted, dinged relic of a vehicle that seemed to have as much a chance of starting up as its owner did of running a marathon.

Kim sat in the front seat, her husband in the back. As the truck cranked and gargled out onto Silver Lake Drive, she gazed down to the end of the dock, wondering why that family of four was boarding a boat with a busted motor.

# # #

Steve climbed out of the back of the truck and followed his wife and Charlie Tatum through a disheveled front yard of waist-high weeds, around the side of a large and crumbling stone house. From the backyard, the sound stretched out before them, unstirred to the point of appearing frozen in the mounting, windless heat.

The three of them strode down the gentle slope of weeds toward the water’s edge. A decaying dock reached out from the bank, and there were people milling about at the end.

Steve caught up with Kim. Because they were the same height, he put his arm around her waist and they stepped together onto the rickety dock. Charlie led them to the end, pointing out the boards that might not bear their weight.

A twenty-four foot Scout lounged in the calm water, and an exceptionally pale man with long black hair manned its cockpit. Steve nodded to him. The man looked away, set the Yamaha outboard gurgling.

Charlie offered Kim his gnarled hand. She took it and stepped down into the boat. Steve followed, and then the old man untied the rope from a gray timber and hopped with surprising spryness onto the deck that reeked faintly of mildew and the discarded sunspoiled viscera of fish.

Steve glanced at the couple who were already seated on the cushioned limegreen bench that ran along the inner sides of the boat. It occurred to him that they did not appear to be having a very good time, but he introduced himself anyway.

The man was bearded, with a tangle of gray-flecked brown hair and guarded eyes. They shook hands. Steve tried to introduce his wife, but Andy didn’t seem interested in meeting her, so he took a seat, a little embarrassed. Andy’s wife, a young woman scarcely older than Steve, wouldn’t even look at him. She just stared off into the sound, nervously brushing her shoulder-length blond hair behind her ears.

"Glad to have y’all aboard," Charlie addressed his four passengers. "It’ll be a thirty minute ride over to the island, so y’all just sit back and enjoy. That’s my son, Luther, at the controls, so don’t worry. We’re in capable hands."

"Should we pay now?" Steve asked, reaching for his wallet.

"Nah. We’ll settle up later."

The old man sat down in the jump seat beside his son. He whispered in his ear, and then the motor growled to life and the boat lurched forward. Steve leaned back into the cushioned seat and put his arm around Kim.

The water raced by as they sped parallel to shore. Steve turned and watched the great stone house dwindling away. That gothic residence looked as though it belonged on a dreary English moor, secreting a gloominess that seemed out of place in the wet sunshine of this August morning.

The tiny figure of an old woman stood in the overgrown backyard, a baby in her arms. She waved to the departing boat. Only Steve and Kim waved back.

The petite blonde sitting across from them lunged for the stern and emptied her guts in orange-green ropes into the wake.

Kim reached over and rubbed her back.

"You okay, honey?" she asked.

The blonde nodded but was sick again.

The old man glanced back from the cockpit, grinning.

"All right there, Miss?" he called out over the groaning motor.

"I’m fine."

The old man laughed and yelled something about "sea legs" that was lost in the wind. The blonde returned to her seat and leaned her head against her husband’s shoulder. Kim and Steve looked away, back toward Ocracoke, quickly fading into nothing but a green smudge on the horizon.

They crossed the inlet, whitecaps just a few hundred yards east where the ocean and sound ran together. Fifty yards off starboard, thousands of cormorants congregated on a temporary shoal. They scattered as the boat passed by, filling the sky, squawking, some divebombing fish in the shallows.

Now Portsmouth loomed. Steve squeezed his wife’s arm and pointed to the approaching island. Kim nodded blandly as the abandoned structures of Portsmouth Village

came into view amid the scrub pine.

The blueness of the sky had begun to wane, to drown in its own heat and fade into an indistinct whiteness that was neither cloud nor sky, but a veil of humidity that is the fate of most afternoons in a southern summer.

The boat continued shoreward, as would a passenger ferry bound for Haulover Point. But before they’d neared the dock, where tourists are unloaded for their ventures into the ghost village, Luther turned the boat and guided it around the soundside of the island.

They were close to shore now, and as Steve stared into the impenetrable thicket, Kim fell mesmerized by their fellow tourists. The man and his wife seemed oblivious to the island and the sound. They stared out across the water, listless and burdened. She started to speak to them, but the boat turned suddenly and headed up a creek into the interior of the island.

Pines crowded the banks. She could smell them.

The creek narrowed.

The boat slowed.

Drifting now, a sappy branch passed overhead, and she reached up and pinched off a cluster of pine needles.

The motor quit.

Only the soft liquid rip of the bow slicing through the water.

In the darkgreen distance, she saw where the creek ended. There was a small dock at the terminus, a rustic shack behind it.

She slapped the side of her neck, came away with a bloodsmeared palm.

The first mosquito had found her.

Kim glanced again at the woman on the opposite bench, curious as to why tears meandered down her face, and her hands had begun to tremble.

# # #

Rufus tied the boat to the moorings and stepped down onto the dock. He offered a hand to the young woman, helped her out of the boat, and then her husband.

"You two should go on ahead," he said. "There’s a slough back there."

He waved toward the dense foliage behind the shack.

"Straight through those trees. Tide’s out, so it’s dry now. You follow that a ways, and you’ll come out on a tidal flat. Trek across the flat for a mile and a half, scramble over the dunes, and you’ll find yourself on a deserted beach that’s just as pretty as a picture."

"You going to show us—"

"We’ll be right behind you, but you might as well get a head start. It’s quite a hike."

"What about the ghost village?" Steve asked. "We really want to—"

"We’ll take you there, too, so don’t you worry. It’ll be part of the loop we do."

The young couple set out down the dock, past the shack, and into the pines. We all watched them for a moment, making slow progress as they bushwhacked their way through the brush, glancing back now and then to see if we were coming. When they’d disappeared into the thicket, Rufus looked back into the boat at Vi and me. Grinning, he reached into his pocket and tossed me a key.

"Opens the shack," he said. "I think you remember it, Andy, but don’t worry—no grizzly trap this time. Just a pump-action Remington under the bunk bed and a box of shells on the table. On account of your limp, you might want to get a move on."

I struggled to my feet.

Vi was bawling again.

"Let’s go," I said.

She shook her head.

Grabbing her under the arm, I tried to muscle her to her feet, but she collapsed across the deck. I knelt beside her and whispered into her ear, "Vi, walk off this boat with me. Whatever you have to do to steel yourself up for this, now’s the time. They’ll kill your baby."

She wiped her eyes and looked up at me, then nodded, came to her feet.

We stood there, gazing at Rufus.

He said, "We’ll come help you carry them back when we hear the gunshots."

I started toward the dock, but Rufus held up his hand.

"Wait. Wanna tell you something. I’ve lived out on these barrier islands going on forty years now. Seen a few folks try to do what you’re about to do and fail. Let me tell you this. If you haven’t shattered those values, if you’re still seeing this world through good and evil glasses, it’s going to be hell out there. These are the Outer Banks. The fringe of America. Fringe of thought. Most people aren’t hard enough, pure enough to exist out here. It’s uncomfortable. They’d rather live inland. Safe from the sea. From themselves. But this is where the action is. I hope that isn’t lost on you."

Rufus stepped forward and gave us each a hand down onto the dock. We could hear the doomed couple thrashing about in the thicket.

I glanced at Luther. He stared at me, eyes black and smoldering.

I started limping along up the dock.

We reached the shack. I unlocked the door and stepped inside, told Vi to fetch the shotgun from under the bed. It was right where Rufus had said it would be, a twelve gauge with a twenty-eight inch barrel. She set it down on the table as I tore open the box of shells.

"Double-aught buckshot," she said. "My God, this is going to be messy."

I slid four shells into the chamber, the stench of gunpowder filling the shack.

"Ever handled a shotgun?" I asked.

"My daddy owned several. Taught me to shoot when I was fifteen."

I handed her the weapon.

"Part of me," she whispered, "wants to say fuck this whole business, head back down to the boat and just start blasting."

"We’d die and your child would die."

I glanced out the window.

Luther was perched on the bow, aiming a high-powered rifle with a scope at me through the glass.

"Look out there," I said. "We’d be dead the second we started for the boat."

Vi sat down in a chair, sighed long and deep. She sweated through her thin white T-shirt.

"Ever kill someone in the line of duty?" I asked.

"Never even had the occasion to draw my gun. I don’t know how to begin to do this."

I reached into the box, grabbed a handful of shells.

"We better get going," I said.

As we emerged from the shack, I looked back toward the boat. Rufus waved, grinning.

I led us into the thicket, following the trail of broken limbs, trodden weeds. The island was brimming with birds and the whine of mosquitoes. They swarmed us—a mild but constant stinging on every square inch of exposed skin.

In the unbearable humidity, we became drenched in sweat within five minutes, and crowded on all sides by curtains of varying green, I shunned the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in a sweltering, leafy cage. Little could be seen of the sky above. Only flinders of bleached blue through the ceiling of scrub pine.

We could hear the young couple blazing the trail ahead of us, the woman growing increasingly vocal in her complaints.

"Damn you for this, Steve!" I heard her cry out. From the way her voice carried, I estimated them to be just seventy-five to a hundred yards away.

As we mushed on, my thoughts turned to Orson’s cabin in the desert and that shed and the things I’d done there. My insides warmed with an old, familiar numbness. I wondered if Vi felt it, too. I hoped.

She stopped suddenly, said, "Listen."

The woods had gone quiet.

"They either stopped or reached the slough," I whispered. "Come on."

Several minutes later, sweaty, mosquito-bitten, scratched and bleeding from briar pricks, we emerged from the thicket onto the banks of the slough. Marsh grass grew up out of the desiccated swampbed, and a breeze swept over us from the east. I gazed up the slough—a quarter mile from where we stood, it opened into a sprawling tidal flat.

Two figures, scarcely visible, trekked across that coastal desert toward the sea.

Vi sat on the bank. I eased down beside her. As she lay the shotgun across her thighs, I put my arm around her and pulled her close. She let her head fall on my shoulder and wept.

"It doesn’t even feel real," she said. "We aren’t really going to do this. Are we?"

"They’re already dead. You have to think of it that way. They were dead the moment they stepped on that boat."

Despite the heat, Vi shivered.

I said, "You know how much they’d suffer if the Kites ever got them into that basement?"

"I know."

"We’ll do it right."

"I want it to be painless for them," she whispered, unable to find her voice.

"Absolutely. They won’t know what hit them."

"Oh my God."

"Look, I’ll do it if—"

"No. We’ll both do it. I can’t put this all on you."

Vi wiped her eyes and stood.

"There’s no other way, right?"

"This is it," I said.

"Tell me there’s no other way."

"Vi, there’s no other way."

She looked off into the distance and slowly shook her head. Then she lifted the shotgun and stepped down into the slough. I followed, a few steps behind. Vi could barely breathe she was crying so hard, but she walked fast toward the flat.

# # #

Kim and Steve stopped to rest in the middle of the salt flat, with the dunes just a faint khaki ridge on the eastern horizon, and the pines of Portsmouth, a green wall in the west. Eerie black plants rose out of the alkaline soil—salt-sculpted formations, otherworldly and demonic, like the remnants of some nuclear apocalypse.

"I’m so tired, Steve," Kim moaned again. "Please let’s just go back."

"Are you kidding? I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. I mean, it’s a desert out here."

"Well, you’re taking me out for a classy dinner tonight. Tell you that right now."

"Fair enough."

Steve wrapped his arms around Kim’s waist and drew her into him.

"Love you, angel," he said. "Thank you for letting me do this."

She kissed him.

"Maybe I’ll buy something slinky to wear to bed tonight. Something lacy and sheer."

"Buy something cheap."

"Why?"

"I want to tear it off of you."

They giggled and kissed again.

As they pulled away, Kim looked over Steve’s shoulder toward the interior of the island and glimpsed two figures moving toward them across the flat.

"Look," she said. "They’re coming."

Steve glanced back. "Want to wait for them?"

"No, I like it just the two of us."

Holding hands now, they continued on toward the dunes. But they hadn’t gone ten steps when distant shouting sounded across the flat.

Kim stopped and looked back.

One of those figures was waving at them.

"I think they want us to wait for them," she said.

Kim and Steve stood side-by-side watching the other couple move swiftly in their direction. When they were less than the distance of a football field away, Kim said, "I believe that woman’s carrying a gun."

"You know, I think you’re right."

"Could they be hunting?"

"That’s a shotgun she’s got there. Maybe so."

"What are they hunting out here?"

"Birds probably. Quail. Yeah, I bet that’s what it is."

The small blonde with the shotgun was now close enough for Kim to hear her breathless sobbing. A man with a severe limp trailed twenty yards behind.

"She’s crying," Steve said. "Something’s wrong."

The blonde’s footsteps became audible.

Inside of ten feet, she stopped, pumped the twelve gauge, and aimed at Steve.

His eyes went wide, and she blew him in half.

Kim shrieked, then stood frozen, watching her husband try to put back what was falling out of him.

The man with the limp arrived, took the shotgun from the blonde, and pumped it again. Then he stepped forward, trained the barrel on Kim’s chest.

Another cataclysmic boom, and she was flung back into the sand.

"They’re still alive, Andy. Come on."

The groans of the young couple were softer and more intimate than the murmurs of lovers. Witnessing someone die is more intensely private than watching them fuck or even masturbate—the ultimate moment of vulnerability.

The newlyweds’ eyes had glazed and they lie motionless when Andy rolled them over onto their backs and discharged into each of them another load of buckshot.

The reports died away across the tidal flat, and there was no sound other than their shirtsleeves flapping in the sea breeze.

# # #

I dropped the shotgun and looked over at Vi. She wasn’t crying. Instead, a sardonic smile spread her wind-burnt cheeks. She tilted back her head and let loose a hideous bellow.

"He’s right, Andy. Rufus is right. That," she pointed toward the slaughter, "is fucking meaningless! Isn’t it? Is that a fucking illusion?"

She sat down in the sand, laid her head on her knees, and wept.

"Vi," I said. "Vi, look at me." She refused. "You saved your son’s life. That’s all you did."

"And I took his."

"Yeah, and what was the alternative?"

"There was none."

"Ex—"

"That’s what’s so fucking wrong with this. There isn’t any alternative."

She stood up, wiped her swollen eyes.

"I protected mine," she said. "That’s all I did today."

"What else can you do?"

"I don’t know. Here come the monsters."

Rufus and Luther strolled toward us across the flat.

Vi picked up the gun, said, "Toss me two shells."

"You wanna get shot?"

Her eyes burning, she took the shotgun by the barrel and slung it. Then she came over, stood beside me.

"Tell Rufus what he wants to hear," I said, watching the old man and his son approach.

"What do you mean?"

"That value-breaking, good and evil bullshit."

"How are you so calm?" she asked.

"I just don’t feel anything."

She cried out suddenly, "Oh God!" and sank down on her knees into the sand.

# # #

The living carried the dead across the tidal flat. Thirty miles west, over the mainland, the sound country of North Carolina, thunderheads were assembling. Heat radiated off the sun-baked flat, thick and wet, updrafts from hell. When it rained here, the ground would steam, but that stormy relief was hours away if it came at all.

The smallest of the living fell and the body she bore crushed down on her. She screamed. There was hearty laughter. Then, lifting the body off of her, they all moved on again.

# # #

Vi and I sat across from one another as the boat traversed the inlet, the island of Ocracoke growing wider and more distinct, Portsmouth fading into a blurred-green suggestion of land in our wake.

The young couple lie sprawled across the deck at our feet, their skin beginning to assume a plastic, yellow pallor. Rufus had wrapped their torsos in gauze so they wouldn’t bleed on his boat.

Luther occupied the cockpit, his father beside him. They’d been conversing in whispers since leaving Portsmouth, and Rufus seemed to be growing increasingly agitated while Luther just piloted the boat and stared implacably into the distance.

As we neared the House of Kite, Rufus stepped back from his son and spoke so loudly we could hear him over the motor: "You should’ve sat in Horace’s lap when you burned him."

Then Rufus came over and took a seat beside Vi. It was the first time I’d ever seen him angry, though perhaps it wasn’t anger so much as fierce disappointment, the kind only a father can feel for his son.

# # #

We carried them through the back door into the house. Maxine toted little Max in an over-the-shoulder-baby-holder, and she smiled warmly at Vi as she held open the door to the basement.

Rufus and I reached the bottom first. We dropped Steve on the dirt floor and leaned against the cold stone to catch our breath.

Luther and Vi, following behind us, foundered halfway down the steps. Vi had nothing more to give, and she let the young woman’s head slide off her shoulder. The corpse tumbled down the staircase and would’ve knocked Rufus off his feet had the old man not stepped out of the way just in time.

Vi fell back on the steps, head against the wall, taking in large gulps of air.

When she could speak again, she called out, "I want my son!"

"Hold onto your horses just one minute there, young lady," Rufus said, bent over, utterly spent, palms on his knees, forehead slick with sweat. "You’re going to finish this."

"What are you talking about?"

"The ancient fuck means you still have to store them," Luther said.

# # #

Luther and I dragged the bodies behind the staircase, following Rufus into the labyrinth of lightless rooms and passageways. The old man wielded a lantern out in front of him, and I tried to keep track of our trajectory, but it proved impossible. The basement was quite a bit more extensive than I’d first thought, so much so that it seemed to extend beyond the dimensions of the house.

We turned a multitude of corners, passed through various small rooms, one with a low ceiling and empty wine racks on either side of us, another with an old chair and the remnants of a bed frame. There lingered a certain foreboding, a dread attending these rooms and tunnels. You could feel it. Awful things had happened here.

I had no idea where we were when Rufus stopped suddenly and faced us.

He pointed down the corridor, toward a flimsy wooden door at the end.

"You and Violet take these youngfolk through that door. You’ll understand what to do."

Rufus handed me the lantern and took a flashlight out of his pocket. Then he and Luther left us, disappearing around the corner. We stood there, listening to their footsteps trail away, watching the lanternlight and shadows play haunting games on the crumbling walls.

I set the lantern on the floor, lifted the young man’s hands, and dragged him to the end of the passageway. Vi was shaking, mumbling to herself when I returned, so I took the dead woman’s colder hands and dragged her over to her husband.

Vi picked up the lantern, brought it over.

"It’s going to be all right after this, isn’t it?" she said. "We did what they wanted. They’ll give Max back to me."

"I hope so."

As I pushed open the door, Vi’s lantern winked out.

The darkness was total.

"Oh, come on."

We stumbled into the room.

"God, it smells in here," she said. "What is that?"

"Fix it," I said. "Turn the flame back up."

"I don’t know how."

I groped for Vi’s shoulder, found it, and ran my hand down the length of her arm.

"Give it to me," I said. "Vi, give it here, don’t you feel my hand? I’m touching your—"

"No you’re not."

I jerked my hand back as though I’d accidentally touched a glowing burner.

"You fucking around, Vi?"

"No."

I stepped back, tripped, and fell into someone.

They moved and I shrieked, "Who’s there?"

"Andy, what’s wrong?"

"Turn on the lantern!"

"I can’t!"

Crawling around in the dirt now, disoriented, my head bumped into someone’s kneecap. I scrambled away and struggled to my feet, frantic, arms outstretched before me like a blind man.

When my hands palmed a pair of shoulders, I reached up and felt the face.

Mush and bones.

The lantern illuminated the room.

We gasped in unison.

There were probably a dozen of them, hanging by chains from the ceiling, in various stages of decay, their feet just inches off the floor, so they appeared to stand of their own volition.

The ones I’d bumbled into were still swinging as I pushed my way through them back out into the passageway.

The lantern shook in Vi’s hand. We both trembled now.

"This is hell," she said. "We’re in hell, Andy."

I thought I heard distant cackling somewhere in the basement.

"They want us to hang them up like the others?" she asked. "Is that it?"

"I think so."

"I can’t do it."

"Just come hold the lantern for me."

"Andy—"

"Vi, I’m about to lose it, too. Let’s just do this and get the fuck out of here."

I dragged the young woman into the room. In a far corner, a chain hung from the ceiling. Thank God she was small. Standing her up, I wrapped the chain under her arms and cinched it tight enough so she could dangle.

When I’d finished, I couldn’t help but glance at her nearest neighbor—scorched blacker than a roasted marshmallow, its eyes shone like boiled eggs.

Horace Boone was watching me.

I dragged Steve inside, but my skin crawled, and I’d lost the composure to hang him up. So I left him sitting in the corner behind his wife and rushed back out into the passageway.

I took the lantern from Vi and turned up the flame. We walked together back down the corridor, the way we’d come, Vi grasping my arm, still trembling. We turned a corner, and the passageway split. I couldn’t remember which way to go, so I took the corridor that branched right.

The lantern provided just enough illumination to see a few steps ahead. Beyond the ellipse of firelight, the darkness gaped with a silence that seemed to hum, though I knew that sound was only the blood between my ears.

The corridor abruptly terminated. I imagined some failed convert stumbling blindly into this wall, hearing Rufus or Luther, maybe even Maxine coming for them through the darkness.

Returning to the intersection with the wider corridor, we veered into the left-hand passageway, soon passing through the cramped room with the old chair and bed frame. I felt reasonably sure I could get us to the staircase now, but after a series of turns, we arrived at another dead end.

We wandered through the dark tunnels for another twenty minutes, growing increasingly unnerved at our inability to find our way out. At one point, we heard distant shouting, though I couldn’t tell if it came from upstairs or somewhere in the basement.

We were walking through a particularly narrow passageway when Vi stopped and pointed ahead.

"Light," she whispered.

The passageway ended, and we emerged from the labyrinth on the opposite side of the staircase from which we’d all entered just an hour ago. The screening room and those stone rooms where we’d agonized in pitch-black isolation loomed just ahead.

An ax leaned against the wall.

We swung around the staircase and there, perfectly still, stood the Kite family—Luther, Rufus, Maxine. The old woman held baby Max in her arms, his tiny head resting on her shoulder, snoozing.

"Thought we might have to come find you," Rufus said.

"Yeah, we got turned around in there," I said.

I glanced at Vi. She eyed her baby.

"How’d you kids like the trophy case?" Maxine asked.

None of them had moved.

"Charming little room," I answered, mustering a sarcastic smile.

"Heard y’all hollering," Maxine said. "Funny stuff."

As Luther stared a hole through me, Vi stepped forward. I pulled her back.

"What is it, young lady?" Rufus asked.

"Give him back to me."

Rufus sighed. "Violet, I’m afraid I’ve got a piece of bad news."

"What?"

"Have a seat against the wall. Max, give her the baby."

Maxine walked over and presented the baby to its mother. Vi sat down with him, crying now, and it was a full minute before she tore her eyes away from her sleeping son.

The old man and his wife towered over Vi. She gazed up at them, tears plowing through the dirt on her cheeks.

"Here’s the thing," Rufus said. "We think you were terrific today. Really. Hell, you drew first blood. Unflinching. Brutal. Lovely. But I think Andy has a lot more in the way of potential. He was icy out there. Calm. And he’s a thinker. More than I can say for my own son."

"I don’t understand," Vi said, stroking the nape of her son’s neck. "I don’t—"

"Andy needs our full attention, Violet. It’s just not fair to him to keep you around."

"But I did what you wanted."

"Kiss your son goodbye and hand him back to Maxine."

"You lied."

"Rufus, just a—"

"Andy, don’t make this worse."

Maxine reached down and grabbed little Max under his arms.

"No!" Vi screamed. "Get away from him!"

The baby awoke, emitting a tender cry.

"There, there," Maxine cooed. "Let’s not—"

Vi cocked her right arm and cracked the old woman’s jaw with the back of her fist.

Maxine roared and wrangled the baby away from its mother.

Vi started to rise, but Rufus stamped his boot into her chest and pinned her back against the wall.

"Now you’ve pissed her off," he said.

Maxine wiped blood from the corner of her mouth. Then she took hold of the baby’s ankles and held it upside down, little Max now screaming and flailing.

Vi wailed, too, as Maxine began to spin around, swinging the baby faster and faster.

"Now we start inching toward the wall!" she called out, her faded house dress twirling, her snowy hair whipping around like a shock of white cotton candy. "And after this, we’ll all play hide and seek! See, the fun never ends!"

I lunged for Maxine, but Rufus caught me on the chin with an elbow and my knees buckled.

I hit the ground, Vi screaming, the room spinning, expecting at any moment to hear the fracture of the tiny skull meeting the stone.

Luther caught the baby in his hands and snatched it away from his mother.

In shock, Maxine steadied herself, leveling her gaze on her son.

"Boy, are you loony?"

She grabbed Luther’s earlobe, so short she could only yank down.

"I dare you to hold onto that baby two more seconds," she seethed.

Rufus was in stitches.

As I struggled to my feet, Luther set the infant in the dirt.

When Maxine stooped for the baby, Luther lifted his mother off the ground and slammed her flush into the rock wall. There was a hollow pop when her head snapped back. Luther set her down on her feet, but her eyes rolled up in her head and she dropped.

Rufus charged his son, scooping him under the knees and driving him into the dirt floor. Vi sprang up, rushed over to Max, grabbed him, and scrambled up the staircase.

Rufus’s physical strength was staggering. In a matter of seconds, he’d straddled Luther, one hand on his neck, the other raining blows upon his pale face, laughing while he beat his son, laughing while I lifted the ax and limped toward them.

Luther’s loss of consciousness did nothing to detour his father’s hysterical rage.

Standing behind them now, I hoisted the ax.

It fell, the weight of the head propelling it earthward.

Rufus thought to glance back at me just as the blade clove his spine.

I jerked it back out as he convulsed, toppling backward into the dirt. When he stopped shivering, I thought he was dead, but his eyes blinked calmly, and he grinned at me, arms twitching, legs now and forever inert.

He said, "I can’t move my legs."

"Yeah, I got your spine."

"Beautiful?" he called out. He turned his head, saw Maxine sprawled motionless against the stone. I thought he might call out to her again, but instead he looked back at me, reached out, and grasped my hand.

"I still believe in you," he said. "I know you see past the illusions."

"Had a little regression of our own, didn’t we?"

He grinned and winced, the pain flooding in now.

"Rufus, I just want you to know…" I leaned in close to insure he heard every word. "I think you’re full of shit."

Rufus grunted, shook his head.

"No you don’t," he whispered, then smiled and closed his eyes, full of peace and joy, as though he were ascending into some invisible glory.

His fingers opened, he let go of my hand, and died.

# # #

I took the ax with me and limped up the rickety staircase. Vi was crouched on the top step with baby Max, shivering.

"It’s locked," she whispered as I neared them. "I can’t get it open."

"Scoot down a few steps."

With Vi safely beneath me, I buried the ax blade in the small door, heard it splinter, hinges creaking. On the fifth blow, it burst open. I stepped across the threshold into the foyer, glimpsed late afternoon sunlight streaming through the living room windows, gilding clouds of dust.

I turned and looked down at Vi.

"Come on up here and wait for me," I said, starting back down into the basement.

"Where are you going?"

"Luther."

She grabbed onto my leg, said, "He saved my son."

"He’s a psychopath, Vi. I let him off once. You saw how many people died. I’m not making that mistake again."

I tore my leg away and continued my descent.

As I approached the bottom, Luther stirred and sat up. Rufus had obliterated his face.

I raised the ax.

"Andrew, what are you doing?"

Two steps, and I was upon him.

I swung the ax at his neck, but he caught the helve an inch below the blade. Before I could jerk it away, he swept my feet out from under me. I hit the ground, and when I looked up, he was circling me with the ax.

"Roll over on your stomach."

"Why?"

He turned the blade on its blunt edge.

"I’m going to try not to smash your skull in. But no promises."

# # #

Vi stands in the foyer as Luther emerges from the basement, his black hair matted to the blood on his face.

"Did you kill him?"

"No."

Luther walks into the kitchen and takes the keys to the ancient pickup truck from a lopsided ceramic bowl on the breakfast table. The stench of raw flounder is overpowering, an association he will never be rid of.

He returns to the foyer.

The little blonde stares at him.

Luther stops to look at the infant, wanting to touch it.

Resisting.

Its mother says, "Thank you for what you did. But I don’t under—"

"I don’t understand it either."

Luther opens the massive front door.

The sun is gone.

Still a few miles offshore, storms race in from the sea, their oncoming thunder rattling the windows, the sky gone green, the air heavy, reeking of rain and ozone.

# # #

Vi prodded me back into consciousness, squeezing my hands, whispering my name. Before I even opened my eyes, I could feel the ache in my skull.

I sat up, foggy-brained, fingering the tender knot on the back of my head.

"Let’s go," Vi begged, her voice seeming to echo. "It’s getting dark out, and I despise this place."

My gaze fell on Maxine, slumped against the wall, then Rufus, lying in a calm black puddle. Painfully, I turned my head and stared into the dark tunnels leading into the innards of the basement, to the trophy case, and its standing dead.

"Where’s Luther?" I asked.

"Gone. He took the truck, but there’s another car out front. I found some keys in the kitchen. Cash, too. About a hundred and fifty dollars."

"Have you called anyone?" I asked.

"Andy, I just want to get off this island."

Vi helped me up, and then we climbed the steps and walked together out of that stone house into the storm-cooled evening, two exiles, stateless and bewildered.

# # #

We reach the north end of Ocracoke at dusk and board the ferry.

Vi stays in the Impala with Max, asleep in her arms.

I step out, walk to the bow.

A father and his six or seven-year-old son lean against the railing, wind disheveling their hair, a satisfied, end-of-day peace emanating from them.

The man looks over, nods.

"Fine night, eh?"

I watch the island diminish until nothing of it remains but the distant steady glow of the Ocracoke Light, twelve miles south. When it slips under the horizon, leaving only the black waters of Hatteras Inlet and the clear August sky, flushed with sunset, I pray I’ve seen the last I will ever see of that island.

# # #

I drive us north on Highway 12. The road is empty tonight, wind whisking sand from the dunes across the pavement.

West, beyond the sound, somewhere over the mainland, the last trace of warmth dies on the horizon.

Stars burn above the Outer Banks.

We pass through tiny beach communities, interspersed by stretches of lonely highway. The sea stays mostly hidden behind the wall of dunes that crowds the right side of the road.

Half a tank of gas remains. I never want to stop. I could drive like this for eons, putting mile after mile between us and that stone house on the sound and the things we did today on Portsmouth. I wonder if Vi feels like I do—like we’re the only two souls on the face of the Earth who’ve been told this awful truth.

# # #

Traversing the bridge over Oregon Inlet, the beam from the Bodie Island Lighthouse becomes visible, projecting its luminescence out to sea. My thoughts turn briefly to Karen.

# # #

The beach has been practically paved in Nags Head, and the dunes of Jockey’s Ridge, tallest on the East Coast, resemble snow hills in the moonlight.

I pull into the parking lot of a Motel 8.

"All right if we stay here tonight?" I ask, first words spoken since Ocracoke.

"Yeah."

I walk into the office and request a room with double beds.

There’s only one vacancy left. It has one king-size bed.

We’ll take it.

I park in front of our room and give Vi a keycard.

Light from a supermarket and a burger joint shines in full bloom across the street.

"I’ll go get us some dinner. What do you want?"

"Nothing."

"You’re a fuckin’ rail, Vi. I’m getting you something. Might as well tell me what."

# # #

I cross Highway 12 and walk into Wendy’s.

"Can I get for you there tonight, sir?" asks the plump and smiling cashier.

I don’t remember how to talk to these kind of people.

# # #

I carry the greasy white bags into Harris Teeter, not that I intend to buy anything. It’s a compulsion. I can’t think of anyplace more ordinary and safe than the mopped, generic brightness of a supermarket. We’re at home among things, items, products, goods for sale. I want elevator music and strangers squeezing produce and price checks over the intercom.

# # #

The magazine rack is riddled with important news I haven’t heard in nine months. Smug celebrities watch me browse. None of it means a goddamn thing anymore.

# # #

On the wine aisle, I walk by three young women stocking up on Andre’s champagne.

I eavesdrop.

There’s a bonfire somewhere on the beach tonight.

They’re going to get wasted.

Going to get fucked.

They smell like cigarettes and energy.

# # #

Vi is sitting in bed nursing Max when I walk into the room, a romantic-comedy on the television. I set the bags of food on the table.

"Can I bring you yours?" I ask.

"He’s almost done."

I sit down on the edge of the bed and stare at the TV screen.

She lays Max, gorged and sleepy, at the foot of the bed on a towel surrounded by pillows. I grab the white bags, and we have a fast-food feast on the bed.

When Vi finishes, she says, "I want to take a shower. Watch Max for me?"

"Sure."

She walks into the bathroom, closes the door. I turn off the television and move over to the window. Peeking through the curtains into the parking lot, I check on the car, see the dunes of Jockey’s Ridge State Park glowing more brilliantly than before.

Vi gasps in the bathroom.

I rush to the door.

"Everything okay?" I call out.

No answer, only sobs.

"I’m coming in, Vi. I’m coming in."

I open the door slowly, giving her a chance to cover up in case she’s naked.

She’s slumped over against the sink, jeans on, T-shirt and bra in a pile on the floor.

"Vi, what’s wrong?" She shakes her head. "Tell me."

She straightens up, faces me, forearms hiding her milk-swollen breasts, and taps her right shoulder, taps the purple-yellow bruise the shotgun made when it bucked against her nine hours ago.

I step into the bathroom, wrap my arms around her bare back.

"Why don’t you take a bath, huh? I’ll run some water."

"My clothes smell like that house."

"We’ll wash them in the bathtub later. Here, sit down."

As she takes a seat on the toilet, I kneel down, close the drain, and turn the hot water knob.

"How warm do you want it?"

"Very."

I crank the cold water knob, get the mix just right.

"Check on Max, will you?"

I crack the door. Corralled by pillows, the infant sleeps, a stuffed dolphin at his side.

"He’s fine. Call if you need anything."

"Stay with me, Andy."

"You sure?"

"Just close your eyes for a minute."

I turn my back, listening to her jeans unzip and slide down her thighs. She steps into the bathtub, eases down in the water.

"Okay, I’m in."

I take a seat on the toilet.

Vi sits close to the faucet, her legs drawn up into her chest, arms wrapped around her knees.

"This feels so good," she says. "I haven’t had a bath in…I don’t know how long."

She bats the running water into her chest.

Her legs glisten, unshaven for months.

"I’ll pour water on your back if you like."

"Be great."

I tear the wrapper off one of the plastic cups on the sink. Kneeling down on the floor beside the tub, I fill the cup and drizzle hot water over her back.

Her skin turns to gooseflesh.

I do this for awhile and then she lifts her hair off her back and says, "Would you pour some on my neck?"

Feels good to please her.

I ask why she hasn’t called her husband.

"Andy, I feel like I’ve just come home from war. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah."

I drop the cup in the water, run my fingers through her hair.

"And I’m not sure how to go back. All the drugs, the hypnosis, those terrible movies we watched—what if Rufus fucked me up?" She turns and looks at me. "How do you feel?"

"I feel nothing."

"You have somewhere to go?"

"Yeah. A long, long way from here."

"Tell me about it."

I smile at the picture my mind’s eye conjures of my cabin in the Yukon forest. I smell the tall firs. See the meadow at night. Think of lying in its cold, soft grass, beneath the quiet majesty of the northern lights. God, I’d love to see the aurora borealis again.

"It’s paradise," I say, pouring more water down her spine.

"You could go back, yeah?"

"Sure."

"Is it quiet there?"

"Very."

"Middle of nowhere, right?"

"Yes. And beautiful. So beautiful."

"No one bothers you."

"Not there they don’t. You live quietly, simply. It’s lonely, but a good kind of lonely."

"Part of me would like to go back with you."

"Just turn your back on everything?"

"It’s all bullshit anyway. What I did today—if I’m capable, anyone is. Except they don’t know it. They live under the illusion of decency, goodness."

"You, me, and Max, huh?"

"I could have a garden. Live off the land, you know. Never see anyone. You could write."

"Have to come up with a great pseudonym."

"Yeah, and you’d publish books again, Andy. Maybe even write about this."

"And one day, after twenty, thirty years, when everyone’s forgotten, we come back."

I sit down on the tile. Steam curls off the surface of the bathwater, the mirror fogged, walls sweating. Vi leans against the side of the tub and stares at me, not quite as pretty as when I first saw her that raw November afternoon in Howard’s Pub, her beauty now tinged with hardness.

"No," she says. "We never come back."

# # #

At some point during the night, Vi lifts Max from his place between us, and puts him to bed on his pallet on the floor. She climbs back under the covers and snuggles up beside me.

I’m awake. I don’t anticipate sleeping tonight.

"Will you hold me?" she asks.

I raise my arm and she rests her head on my shotgun-bruised shoulder. It’s cold in this room. Most of our clothes lie drying in the bathtub.

Vi drapes her leg over mine and whispers, "What are we going to do tomorrow?"

I cup her face in my hands.

Last two souls on the face of the Earth.

There are things I want to say to her—shards of comfort and warmth and nothing’s as bad as it seems and no you are not a bad person and yes we did the right thing today.

But they would be lies, and we are so far beyond that now.

# # #

I don’t sleep.

Before dawn, I slip out of the room and walk down to the beach. I sit in soft sand, watch the tide push in. The lights of a shrimp boat shine several miles out. No sound save the breakers.

A lean and tall older gentleman jogs past, northbound toward the five a.m. twinkling of Kill Devil Hills. As I watch him dwindling up the coast, it hits me—there are people who will live eighty-five years and never know a fraction of the horror I experienced yesterday.

Sure, they’ll mourn the passing of parents, a spouse, close friends.

They might suffer the depression of living a life of compromise.

Shit jobs. Marginalization. Termination. Resignation. Envy.

They’ll see wars on television—children pulled out from rubble in scorched, bullet-ridden rags, maimed and dead.

But they will not know gunning a young woman down on a tidal flat to save themselves. Won’t face the knowledge that they’re capable. How easily they’d do it. That the squalor of humanity, broadcast by grim robots on the evening news, abides also in them.

Their decency is a luxury, their violence sleeps for now, those whose monsters are car wrecks and cancer and the boredom of the suburbs, those who believe goodness is the prevailing station of our species. Their age of civilization and progress is a flicker in the dark eternity of violence.

Now light tinges the Outer Banks with a soft peach stain.

I watch a fisherman wade out into the warm surf.

Gulls are crying, Nags Head waking, that delicate hour of the morning gone as the Earth turns into the sun’s dominion, a cuticle of pink fire peeking over the edge of the sea.

# # #

I climb into bed and spoon Vi. She stirs. I stroke her yellow hair, still damp from last night’s bath, smelling faintly of that cheap motel conditioner.

"Oh, Max," she murmurs. "I want to…yeah."

She turns over. Smiling. At peace.

When her eyes open, they die.

"I was dreaming."

"It was a nice one."

"Yeah. You shaved. I like it."

She sits up, crawls to the end of the bed, and peers down at her son.

"Where’d you go this morning, Andy?"

"Down to the beach. Watched the sun come up."

"I didn’t think you were coming back. Thought that’s how you were going to do it. Just slip away, back to your paradise."

I hear the baby’s soft cry. Vi leans down, lifts him up.

"Are you hungry, little baby boy?" she coos.

Vi slides off the bed and comes to her feet, standing there in panties and undershirt, Max groping at her breasts.

"I’m ready, Andy," she says.

"Ready?"

"To go home."

# # #

I drive 64 west, over the long bridges that span the sounds of Roanoke and Croaton and the Alligator River. We rise and rise above the ocean. The flatness of the coastal plain gives way to rolling pasture and forest, the consistency of the soil turning from sand to rich red clay, those toothpick pines of the eastern swamps now crowded and lost among maple and hickory.

It feels strange to be inland. The farther from the sea we run, the Outer Banks seem more like afterimages of dreams. It would be so easy and comforting to find atonement in the remoteness and disorientation of our imprisonment. I glance at Vi, wondering if she’ll coax the last nine months and what she did on Portsmouth into donning the aura of a brutal fantasy, one more nightmare to repress.

At four o’clock, we skirt the south side of Raleigh and bore westward, across Jordan Lake, through Pittsboro, Siler City, and Ramseur. We enter the town of Lexington as the sun balances on the horizon, so blinding I can scarcely see the road.

"You hungry?" I ask, catching Vi’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

She sits in the back nursing Max.

"I could eat."

"Best barbeque joint on the planet is just ahead. How about we stop there? Besides, the car’s running hot."

"Fine. I need to change Max anyway."

I pull the Kites’ Impala into the crowded parking lot of Lexington Barbeque # 1.

We walk together, like a family, to the back of the line that snakes out of the front doors.

"Whole fuckin’ town’s here tonight," Vi says.

"Yeah, well, it’s what they call good eatin’."

The evening is muggy and clear, and the hickory-fueled fire inside the kitchen spits the sweetest-smelling smoke up the chimney and out into the cooling night, no greater tease in the world if you’re hungry.

As we inch toward the doors, I glance at the families who’ve come out for their Friday night dinner, innocuous and tame, a cheery hopeless bunch, moving orderly and herd-like toward the feeding trough. They talk of church and jobs and things they want to buy at Wal-Mart. They feel so ordinary and safe.

We finally make it inside, find a pair of vacant stools at the counter, and order two large plates. They come in a hurry—chopped pork shoulder, red slaw, hushpuppies, and tall Styrofoam cups of sweet tea. I haven’t had western-style North Carolina barbeque in ages, and it’s better than I remember it.

I finish long before Vi and ask for a piece of peach cobbler.

Max squirms in her lap, making it difficult for her to eat.

"Let me hold him for you," I offer, taking the infant under his arms and lifting him into my lap. I dandle Max on my leg and he smiles.

An older woman on her way to the cash register stops and makes silly faces at him.

The waitress brings my cobbler and a scoop of vanilla ice cream that has already begun to melt. As I stab my fork into a steaming peach slice, Vi says, "I’ve been thinking."

"Yeah?"

"About what I’m going to say happened. I mean, this is all I’ve thought about in the car today."

She glances over her shoulder and then continues, her voice lower, barely more than a whisper above the din of restaurant noise.

"I leave you in a motel in Davidson tonight. We have just enough cash left. Then I go home. I’m sure Max thinks I’m dead. Everyone’ll want to know what happened. It’ll be crazy. I’ll tell them most of the truth. About Rufus and Maxine. About Luther."

"About Portsmouth?"

"What good would that do? I’ll make you a hero, Andy. Say you saved our lives, but that I left you in Ocracoke. Took the car, got the hell out of there. No one will question me running after what I’ve been through. I dare them to.

"And tomorrow, I find a way to come to you. I’ll bring money. We have some savings, enough to get you home, back to your paradise."

"Vi—"

"Shut up, Andy. This’ll work. You’re innocent. I know that now. But to everyone else, you’re the Heart Surgeon. They don’t know about Orson. What he made you do. All they know is your face, the Washington Boxes, bodies dug up at your home on Lake Norman, the rumors, the—"

"You think I’m innocent, Vi? Think you are?"

Vi glares at me as if I’ve slapped her. She takes Max and storms out of the restaurant. I leave a twenty with the check under my ice-filled cup and follow her back to the car.

She’s sitting in the front passenger seat when I climb behind the wheel and close the door. We stare through the bug-splattered windshield at families lumbering toward the restaurant.

"Andy," she says, her voice holding at a whisper, as though volume might break it, "you tell me right now what else we were supposed to do."

"I don’t know."

"Well, I have to know that what I did to that poor boy—"

"There are no answers, Vi. All I’m saying is we aren’t innocent. Me especially. You had a son to protect. You did it for Max. I did it for me."

"But they’d have killed him if you didn’t—"

"I’m telling you, Vi, I did it for me."

She lifts Max up so that his tiny head rests on her shoulder. His eyes begin to glaze and close. He sleeps.

"Only way I’m gonna be able to go on, is if I know there was no other way. That I had to do it. That my son would’ve died if I didn’t."

"Then believe that. But I’ve had enough."

"What are you talking about?"

"I can’t go back to Haines Junction and pretend like none of this happened. Hide in the woods till I’m eighty. I’ve killed two people in my life, Vi. Because I was scared of dying. Orson and Rufus were right about me—"

"Andy—"

"No. They were. That’s the kind of man I am. I have murder in my heart. But so do you. So does that little girl walking between her parents. So does your sleeping baby boy."

"I don’t believe that."

"Fine. Believe whatever it takes so you can look yourself in the mirror and not shudder. I can’t anymore. That’s why I’m doing this."

Her voice quivers: "Doing what?"

I hand Vi the car keys.

"Surrendering. To you. Right now. I want you to take me to your precinct tonight. I’m done, Vi."

"Are you crazy?"

Her voice wakes Max. The baby emits a feeble cry.

"You want to go to prison?"

"Think that’s how it’ll end up?"

"Andy, it won’t be too difficult for them to pin murders on you you didn’t do, considering where they found some of those bodies."

"I don’t care. I’m going to tell them the truth. What they do with me is out of my control."

"You gonna tell them about Portsmouth?"

"I’m going to tell them the truth, Vi."

Crying now, "About me killing that boy?"

"I don’t know."

"Andy, please. Let me help you. You feel like this right now, but will you feel like this for the next fifteen years? Or the rest of your life? Do you honestly want to rot in prison?"

I sigh, lean back into the warm vinyl, the summer sky now fading into dusk. I can’t imagine next week. Can’t even see tomorrow. I could cry, but I don’t.

"Look, if I don’t do this, I won’t last. I’ll get up to the Yukon, kill myself. I’m close to it now. I want to. There’s comfort in the idea of it. Please do this for me, Vi. Please."

# # #

Vi guides us home—64 to Statesville, I-77 to Davidson. I sit in the passenger seat holding Max, asleep in my arms, watching rivers of carlight streaming south toward Charlotte.

As we cross Lake Norman, rimmed with the light of wealth, I think of my old home, glowing somewhere out there in a distant cove.

Vi reaches over, steadies my hands.

# # #

The knot in my stomach tightens when she veers onto Exit 30. I shut my eyes, feel the car come to rest at the stoplight. Ten seconds. Accelerating again. Turning left. Cruising through Davidson, the college close now. In the autumn, I’d take a manuscript and spread a blanket out on the grass of its lovely campus, surrounded by those tall, molting trees.

We make a right onto Jackson Street, my heart throbbing. After several blocks, we turn again. The car stops, Vi shifts into park, and the engine dies.

My eyes open. We’re parked in front of the Davidson Police Department.

It’s real now.

Vi says, "Sure you don’t want us to make a go of it up in Canada? Speak now or forever."

She’s kidding, but it sounds forced, her voice thick with tears. I look at her and see that she’s aching to be home. To forget.

"Better take him." I hand Max over, careful not to wake him. "Will you come in with me?"

"I need to go home, Andy. They’ll try to keep me here, and I want to see my husband before the madness starts."

I’ve gone short of breath.

"So just walk in there, huh?"

"Tell them who you are, that you’re turning yourself in."

I notice two men in plainclothes sitting on a bench near the entrance, having a good laugh. One of them gets up and staggers around, impersonating what can only be a bombed sobriety test.

"You’ll be all right, Vi?"

"Sure."

I open the door, step outside, and close it. The window is down. I peer back through it. Vi reaches out, squeezes my hand.

I walk toward the entrance. When I reach the sidewalk, I glance back, see Vi sitting in the Kites’ Impala, her pretty face lit by a streetlamp, crying.

I hear one of those men near the entrance say, "And this fuckwit didn’t even know he had the stop sign wrapped around his bumper. He’d been draggin’ the damn thing for two miles. I just followed the trail of sparks!"

The approach of my footsteps arrests their harsh laughter.

They exchange looks of fleeting embarrassment, caught in a moment of levity. Wiping their eyes, they regard me with the newfound scowls of lawmen, beefy blonds, clean-shaven, with hard, alert eyes and trimmed mustaches that blend into their pale faces.

I address the man who’s standing.

"You fellas police officers?"

"I am," he says.

The engine of the Impala roars to life.

"Could we have a word in private, please?"

# # #

The first thing Vi notices are the forsythia bushes. They were seedlings when she and Max planted them last September. In her absence, they’ve shot up nearly to the windows. She can’t bare to wonder what else has grown and changed and died.

She parks on the street and turns off the engine. Arcadia Acres twinkles in what she takes for eight p.m. silence, but as she gazes across the treeless subdivision at all the glowing houses, she detects a symphony.

Here are the instruments: whisper of lawn sprinklers, hammering, crickets, voices passing through thin walls, the mechanical tone of the nearby interstate. Suburban music. Fruit of a peaceful species. Vi basks in it. Lets it speak to her. Anesthetize her.

This is the norm. This is what is real.

She lifts Max from the passenger seat and opens the door.

As she walks around the car and onto the upward-sloping driveway, she notices that the garage door is open. A man kneels inside on the concrete, gently tapping a nail into a board. His back is to her, the shape of his body indistinct in the weak illumination of the overhead light bulb. Only when she stops, ten feet away, does she know with certainly that this man is her husband.

The tears begin to roll as she stands there, watching him start the nail. From the back, he seems to have lost his lean runner’s physique.

Max raises the hammer, strikes the nail with a concussive clack that startles Max Jr.

When the infant cries out, the man glances back.

A ghost stands in the driveway with a child in its arms.

# # #

In the late summer of twenty twenty-two, I was on the plains of west Kansas.

I was three days out from North Carolina, en route to Denver, to be interviewed by a reporter who had something I very much wanted back. She’d purchased an old manuscript of mine at auction for an embarrassing price. It had been taken from my cabin in Haines Junction, Yukon, many years ago when I was newly incarcerated. But instead of publishing it, she’d called me, informed me of her recent acquisition, and offered to return it on the condition that I agree to an exclusive interview, that would serve as the basis for my only authorized biography: Life of Darkness: The Andrew Thomas Story.

I quit the interstate two hours shy of the Colorado border and drove into the town of Voda, Kansas. I checked into the only motel in town, The Voda Inn, and walked three blocks to The Voda Restaurant, adjacent to Voda Pawn, and across the street from Voda Auto, Voda Video, and Voda Liquor.

The seeming inconsequence of the town was only amplified by its position on the immense prairie. It was just a black speck on my roadmap, the sort of place you pass through in wonderment that people actually live there. So isolated, so dwarfed by the expanse of land and sky, it seemed it should have all the permanence of a solitary raindrop in a desert, and yet it held on, defying evaporation.

It was near dusk as I strolled the sidewalk toward the restaurant.

Three boys skateboarded down the center of Voda Street. I sat down on a bench to rest my legs and watch them. You could see the prairie behind the motel, glowing bronze in the sun, going on forever.

The hideous lighting and putrid jazz endeared the Voda Restaurant to me immediately. I imagined this place was a hot reservation on prom night and Valentine’s Day. It was rural fancy, the cloth napkins and suited host undermined by the linoleum flooring and tire store light fixtures. I even detected a faint rubbery odor.

Marge, my sturdily-hefted waitress, seated me in a corner. As I browsed the menu, I heard voices slipping through a cracked door in the back wall. I thought it might be a waiter calling out rapid-fire orders to the chef, but considering there were only two other customers, that seemed unlikely.

Leaving my table, I walked over to the door and nudged it open.

"B-eleven."

"Hit."

I peered into a private room, roughly half the size of the main dining hall.

A crowd of thirty or forty sat transfixed by two men on a makeshift stage, absorbed in a fierce game of Battleship.

Marge came up behind me holding a pitcher of ice water.

"It’s a very important match," she whispered. "They’ve been having this tournament every Friday for the last few months. Tonight’s the championship."

I returned to my table and let Marge read the longest description of a special I’d ever endured—basically chicken-fried steak in three hundred words. She couldn’t stop smiling and brushing her ashen hair behind her ears.

When she finished her spiel, I decided to splurge—ordered the chicken-fried steak and a glass of Woodbridge from an unspecified vintage. I winked at Marge as she took my menu.

Applause issued from the banquet room, signifying what could only mean the end of one fleet admiral’s career. I leaned back and savored this transitory moment of contentment, old enough at last to know better than to analyze it, or embrace it longer than it meant to stay.

# # #

I limped back to the motel, a little drunk, a little tired, my bum leg aching from a day on the road. My room was on the second level, and it faced the prairie. I’d expected to see some sort of residential glow out there, but not a solitary porchlight disrupted the gaping darkness.

The Jacuzzi beckoned. A family of six had just vacated the pool area, and in the absence of screaming children, I could hear the humming jets and the turbulent churning of the lighted water. I hadn’t packed swimming trunks, so I donned my baggiest boxer shorts, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and headed down to the pool.

The night was dry and cool. I laid my towel on a chair and walked to the shallow end, the water dark and calm. I held onto the railing and waded in up to my waist, nipples hardening, skin turning to gooseflesh. I took a breath, went under, and came up gasping, like someone had punched me in the stomach, ready for the Jacuzzi now.

Scrambling out of the pool, wet feet slapping concrete, I limped quickly to the steaming spa. I nestled down into the luxurious warmth, a jet pounding the stiffness out of my neck, closed my eyes, let my legs float up toward the surface, and moaned with pleasure as those miles of driving melted out of my shoulders.

The bliss lasted thirty seconds.

Then came the patter of flip-flopped feet and small voices.

Three black-haired children surrounded the spa, gazing ravenously at the roiling blue water.

"I want in cuzzi," said the little girl, who couldn’t have been older than three.

One of the twin boys hoisted her up.

"No, Jason," boomed a voice from the second level of the motel. "You kids stay out of the water till we come down."

"Dad, I just wanna—"

"All of you. Go wait over there. Now."

The children obeyed. I watched them waddle away and sit poolside on the cooling concrete. One of the boys advised his little sister to be careful because she couldn’t swim, which in turn ignited a heated debate concerning who was and was not the boss of whom.

The parents came down shortly thereafter.

Roughhousing ensued.

The father tossed his sons screaming into the brisk water and dove in after them as the mother lifted her little girl and waded into the shallow end.

I closed my eyes and tried to block out everything but the hot, soothing fracas that massaged me. In prison, during the bad times, when Orson tormented me, there was a place I would run to—a field of soft grass that waved endlessly into the horizon like a green sea.

I was just managing to slip away when the sound of footsteps obliterated my mental oasis. My eyes opened. One of the boys was swinging his leg over the side of the spa.

"Jason!" his father yelled, treading water in the deep end of the pool, "Told you not to bother that gentleman."

Jason dipped his toes into the water and hollered.

"Boy!"

His father climbed out of the pool and marched over.

The boy bolted past him and cannonballed into the shallow end, drenching his mother and sister. The little girl screamed that she’d been blinded and began to cry. As Jason’s mother commenced to thoroughly dress him down, the boy’s father approached the Jacuzzi.

He had pure white hair, and the closer he came, the younger he looked, his face pale and without wrinkle, a hard and slender build.

He said, "Sir, I apologize for the disrupt—" The family man smiled, muttered, "Oh, my," and climbed in.

I didn’t understand until I looked him in the eyes. It was their black intensities that convinced me I was sharing this Jacuzzi with Luther Kite, his hair as white and cropped as it once was long and black, glistening with chlorinated water.

"Boy, it feels good in here," he said.

The woman in the shallow end called out, "Where’d Daddy go?"

Luther cocked his head back and said, "I’m in the Jacuzzi, Christie! Entertain the children please!"

Luther looked back at me, said, "So, old man, do you feel redeemed?"

I started to rise, felt Luther’s smooth legs wrap around my ankles.

"Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself," he said, extending his hand. "Bob Crider."

I just stared at him, and he withdrew his hand, unshaken.

"Please. I’m curious," he said. "You turned yourself in. Spilled your guts. Spent sixteen years in prison. Paying for your sins. I kept up. Read the articles. Your slobbering confession. Justice is served. Penance performed. Do you feel redeemed?"

"I don’t know. Look, I’m really tired. I should—"

"Whatever happened to that sweet little detective and her son?"

My throat tightened, as it always does when I think of Violet.

"She killed herself."

"How?"

"Shotgun under the chin."

"Hmm. Always thought that’s how you’d end up."

"Yeah, well, there’s still time."

"What? Being out, free again not what you thought it’d be?"

"When you’re on the inside, there’s always the outside to look forward to. But when you’re on the outside, and freedom and blue sky don’t do it for you, all you have to dream about is death."

"Why do you suppose that detective killed herself?"

"Guilt."

"Try loneliness."

"No, Violet had a husband. Lived near her family. She—"

"Not that kind. She was lonely like you’re lonely. Like I’m lonely. Like the few who understand that all this is an illusion, savagery’s mask. I mean, different as we are, Andrew, I feel a kinship sitting in this hot tub with you that I haven’t felt in years. The same truths have been revealed to us, no?"

"I guess."

"It’s devastating when you feel you’re the only one who knows this terrible secret. That’s the brand of loneliness that killed Violet."

I looked beyond Luther, at his family playing in the swimming pool.

"See you went and got yourself a family."

Luther grinned, glanced back at the pool.

"Beautiful, aren’t they?"

"They know what a psychopathic fuck Daddy is?"

"I’m not that way anymore."

"Really."

My boxer shorts ballooned. I lifted the waistband. Bubbles rushed to the surface.

"I’m a pastor now, Andrew."

I smiled, said, "Guess you’ve been redeemed."

"By the blood of Christ I have."

"You believe that."

"We all sin and fall short. Some more than others."

"Sure. Some cheat on their taxes. Some break children’s necks and hang women off of lighthouses."

"Sin is sin. I’ve repented."

"Paid for them how?"

"Christ paid for them."

"That’s convenient."

"That’s grace."

"What would your father think?"

"He’d be amused. Then he’d kill me."

We laughed. Luther’s dentures shone. Perfectly straight and creamy. His real teeth had gone the way of Rufus’s.

"You’re not a believer are you, Andrew?"

I slid under and came up again, brushed my gray hair out of my face.

"No."

"I could help you. I’d like to help you."

"I’ll pass."

One of the twins ran up and leaned over the edge beside his father.

"When are you coming, Dad? You promised."

Luther kissed Jason’s cheek.

"Give me a minute, son."

Jason sprinted back and yelled as he canonballed again into the pool.

I rose up out of the water, my skin steaming.

"What if it runs in the family, Luther?"

"Runs in everybody’s family."

I climbed out of the Jacuzzi and wrapped myself in a towel.

"Grace, Andrew. It’s free, and it’s the only shot at a happy ending you’ve got."

"Goodbye, Reverend Kite."

I unlatched the gate and started toward the stairwell. By the time I’d reached my door on the second level, Luther was back in the pool, chasing his boys and terrorizing them with the soundtrack to Jaws.

I leaned against the railing, shivering now, observing the family at play. After awhile, my eyes moved beyond them to the black sweep of grassland all around. Felt that tightness in my throat again, but it wasn’t Vi this time. Amid all that darkness and the stars falling through it on their absurd and fleeting vectors, the lighted pool area below and the ruckus of Luther’s family seemed all that was left of the world.

# # #

I took a shower to wash the chlorine out of my hair. As the water beat down on my face, I sensed a sleepy headache coming from the wine. Didn’t matter. My suitcase was packed. I would push on to Denver tonight.

I turned off the water and threw back the curtain.

Luther stood dripping in his swimming trunks, skin glistening with beads of water.

"It was Orson’s," he said, turning the ivory-hilted knife in his right hand, the blade shimmering as if newly-forged.

"Haven’t lost the taste, I see."

A tremor in my voice. Sound of fear. I tasted it, too—rust in the back of my throat.

"Never, Andrew. But afterwards, I’ll ask forgiveness, and I’ll mean it, and come tomorrow I’ll bathe in the light of grace."

His swiped at me.

Sheets of blood flooded warmly and fast down by chest. Luther set the knife on the sink. He put his hands on my shoulders, made me sit down in the tub.

"I’ll pray for your soul tonight," he said, then took a seat on the toilet to watch me flop.

# # #

Reverend Crider’s church stands beside a cemetery on the edge of a small Midwestern town. Though a predominately black church, the congregation is wild about its white preacher. Reverend Crider is charismatic. He insists on a lively band and choir. Sometimes he shouts. He has been known to cry and sweat profusely, which is to say that he is full of passion and love in the eyes of his flock.

The white chapel is packed this Sunday despite the belligerent rain that has ruined the weekend, the potpourri of perfume not quite as strong this morning, muted by the odor of must and wet wool.

Now the children are sent downstairs for Kiddy Church. The collection plates are passed forward, overflowing with dirty crumpled bills. The announcements have concluded, and as the praise band abandons their instruments, the reverend rises from the front pew and walks deliberately onto the stage, where he stands at last behind his pulpit.

He glances at the sermon notes he scrawled yesterday in the minivan while passing through east Kansas. The silence is total save for creaking pews and the tinkling of rain on stained glass windows.

Reverend Crider gazes out upon his congregation for a full minute.

Brethren.

His voice emerges low, brimming with gravitas and sadness.

He tells them he has returned from summer vacation with a burdened heart and that he stands before them today cloaked in great sorrow and shame. He alludes to things he has seen, transgressions committed that will render him quaking before the Almighty come Judgment Day. He says he’s a great sinner, unworthy to touch this pulpit.

A solitary tear wanders down the reverend’s cheek.

Are there any sinners in the house? His whisper fills the nave.

Yes, Brotha Crida.

Will the sinners join me on their knees?

Pews squeak as the congregation kneels.

There passes a moment of awesome silence.

The reverend makes a prayer. He admits to being a man of great selfishness and evil. He begs forgiveness for his sins. He asks the Lord to abolish his shame.

Then Reverend Crider stands. He accuses his flock of being creatures of vanity, lust, and murder. He assures them they’re capable of every kind of wickedness. He says they deserve hell, every last miserable one of them.

They are still kneeling when the musicians retake the stage.

A pipe organ warms the sanctuary and the choir begins to sway.

The reverend says he has one question. Have you been redeemed?

Yes, Brotha Crida.

Then get on your feet and praise your God.

And the choir sings. Hands clapping. Hands lifting. Here come the drums, the congregation on their feet now, electric, sweat trilling out of Reverend Crider’s thinning white hair, down the length of his bloodless face.

Saved a wretch like me.

As they sing, he paces the stage screaming blood and redemption.

He’s been saved, he says. He says he basks in grace.

Once was lost now am found.

And the church windows rattle and the crack of high heels on floorboards and the orgasms of the spiritfilled can be heard from four blocks away.

Was blind but now I see.

The instruments drop out, the choir now in full voice, a cappella, the reverend’s face wet with sweat and tears.

And they are still singing and he is still shouting.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years.

Screaming blood and grace.

Bright shining as the sun.

His black-haired children dancing maniacally on the pew.

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise.

Luther says he’s been redeemed, says he’ll live forever.

Than when we first begun.