Whispers in the Dark

4

“I have to talk wit’ you, Kai,” Chill Bent said three weeks after the social worker/nurse had been forced to reconsider the existence of God.

It was a cool autumn day. The Tickle River was swollen with waters from recent rains, and fish could be seen darting around in schools numbering in the hundreds.

“Yes, Mr. Bent?”

“I’m gonna have to go away for a few weeks.”

“Where?”

“Outta the country.”

“Oh.” The nurse frowned.

“I gotta get some money or they gonna take Popo away. My cousin Hazel been talkin’ to child welfare and the EEG. They wanna take Popo to Houston but I won’t let ’em.”

“But maybe it would be better,” Kai suggested hesitantly. “M-maybe if he was in Houston you could visit and he’d have all the best guidance and education.”

“Boy needs a family and a home,” Chill said. “I been in the state institution before. It ain’t no good.”

“But that was a detention center,” the short nurse argued.

“No different. He gonna be detained in the school too. He cain’t come home when he want to. You know his grandmama’ll die a week after he’s gone.”

Kai Lin didn’t argue that point. She watched the large man’s ebony face. He had aged in the two years since Kai met him. Deep furrows had appeared in his cheeks, and something was wrong with his knees. He was still very handsome, though Kai would have never said so out loud.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I cain’t say. But I want you to take care’a Popo. I want you to make sure that Hazel or Mr. Russell don’t get him.”

“They won’t.”

“’Cause I know you love that chile,” Chill said. “I seen how you are wit ’im. How you come over on your days off. And you know I’m right too. He learnin’ all he can right here, right here in this house.”

Tears sprouted from the ex-con’s eyes. They rolled down his face.

“I love that boy more than I love anything,” he said. “I will not let them take him. I will not let them white people and them people wanna be white turn him into some cash cow or bomb builder or prison maker. He will find his own way an’ make up his own mind god dammit.”

Kai reached out to touch the big man’s arm. He pulled her close, holding her forearms in a powerful grip. Kai winced but didn’t fight him.

“Maybe that’s what they’re afraid of,” she said. “Maybe they don’t want these children to use their minds and their spirits. Maybe if they did that the world would change.”

“I know you know,” Chill said. “They afraid Ptolemy would be their king if they didn’t brainwash ’im.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Kai said. “Sometimes I’m afraid when he talks. Sometimes I’m afraid of what he can see.”

“When I come back you an’ me gotta talk,” Chill said.

Kai did not ask about what.

Chill was gone for six weeks. The first couple of weeks he called every other day. Ptolemy traced the call on his illegal Internet connection and told Kai and Misty that he was in Panama City. After the third week, however, they received only one faxgram.

“Thill din’t write nuthin’ like that,” Misty Bent said after Kai had read it out loud to both her and Ptolemy.

“Sure didn’t,” Popo agreed. “Chilly never say no Ptolemy when he talkin’ t’me.”

“He must have had somebody write it for him. Maybe he dictated it over some kind of radio system,” Kai said to allay the family’s fears. She wasn’t worried that the faxgram came from Chill. What bothered her was how the high school dropout/ex-convict was making so much money in Panama.

The Vietnamese nurse had found a home in southern Mississippi. She loved the land and the people more than her native Hanoi and more than Princeton, where she’d spent so many years going to school. The people reminded her of the stories that her grandmother told. The great jungles and the wild forests. By 2010 Vietnam was divided into twelve highly developed corporate micro-states that produced technical and biological hardware for various Euro-corps. Gone were the farms and rice paddies. The back roads were paved with Duraplas, and the giant cobra was extinct. So Kai reveled in the heavy Mississippi air and the meandering back roads, the thick drawl on the English words and life that sprung from every tree and rock and stream.

And then there was the child who listened to God. Kai had only lived in Hazel’s house since Chill had been gone, sleeping on the Bents’ couch, but she had felt that house was her home since the day she’d crossed the threshold.

Six weeks after Chill had gone a private ambulance drove up the Bents’ dirt driveway. The attendants were from New Orleans, as was the van. The two white men rolled Chill into the house on the wheeled stretcher.

Chill was there under a thin sheet. His head was shaven and his eyes were covered with bandaged gauze. The form his legs made under the sheet was straight and motionless.

“Where should we bring ’im, ma’am?” one of the attendants asked Kai Lin.

“What’s happened to him?”

“Uncle Chilly!” Ptolemy screamed in dismay.

“Don’t know nuthin’ ’bout that, ma’am,” the second paramedic said. “We just picked him up from the airport with instructions to brang ’im here.”

“Am I in the livin’ room?” Chill asked.

“Yeah,” the paramedic replied.

“Chilly!” Ptolemy yelled again. He hid behind Kai Lin’s red silk dress, afraid of the white men, the chrome stretcher, and Chill’s decimated form.

“Then leave me here. Kai?”

“Yes?”

“Give these men fifty dollars each. I’ll pay you back later on.”

The white men were surprised at the generosity of the poor black paraplegic. They both thanked him, gave their apologies to Kai Lin, and left.

“There’s a clinic in the hills,” Chill was saying. They had wheeled him into his mother’s room and cranked his cot until he could sit up too.

“What have they done to my baby?” Misty cried. But when Chill smiled in a way that Misty hadn’t seen since he was a child, her tears subsided.

“...up there they cain’t be bothered and so they can operate with no problem. They wanted my eyes—”

“And you gave ’em up?” Misty said louder than she had spoken in years.

“That was one million seven hundred an’ fi’ty thousand,” Chill said. “My eyes were a perfect fit for a Swiss banker’s son who lost his in a ski accident. But when I was there they had a emergency. It was a Russian general needed the nerve in the spine where he could use his legs. They offered two million for that. I figgered that if I cain’t see then I really don’t need to walk. One thing led to another and I got outta there wit’ six million. They transferred the whole thing into my name ’fore I went under the knife.”

“Why you do that, Uncle Chilly?” Ptolemy asked.

Chill put his hands up in front of him and found his nephew’s face.

“I was worried that I couldn’t keep on payin’ for the house, baby boy. You know Mama’s social security an’ disability been payin’ for me so now my disability be payin’ for her.”

“Chill, no,” Misty cried.

“It’s okay, Mama. You know I been lost outside’a the house anyway. Any time I ain’t here I just wanna come back an’ hear you laughin’ or Popo readin’ an’ playin’ his radio. Don’t worry, Mama. Everything’s fine now.”