“Do you know what Michael, God’s most beloved angel, told me?” she asks quietly, her back to me. “He told me I was to build an army for him. An army of tested, pure-race peoples to bring back the natural order of things. He revealed that Adam was named for the Hebrew word for the red clay of the earth, aw-dah-mawh,” she pronounces reverently. “The first man who walked the earth had red hair, and also the first woman, as she was made from his body. King David of the Bible had red hair as well. ‘For he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance.’ It was time for the flame-haired children of God to take preeminence once more.”
She brings the sandwich to me and presses it lovingly to my lips, as though it is a communion wafer. I take a bite and chew.
“Even the ancient pagans venerated red hair. There were two redheaded giants in the Iliad. Menelaus, the great king of Sparta, had red hair—”
I turn my head to the side, refusing another mouthful of chicken salad. “I want my medallion back,” I tell her.
“It’s in safekeeping,” she assures me, and I’m so relieved that it’s not lost that I let her ramble on.
“See,” she says, gesturing to the painting. “The Archangel Michael, the greatest of his kind, has scarlet hair. But there are so few of us left in the world. We’ve been subsumed by all the mud people.”
I think of the devil, who’s portrayed as a swarthy man in the picture, and wonder for how many centuries that piece of propaganda for racial supremacy has been trotted out. The painting Evangeline Roy took from a ruined church in Louisiana is one of many representations of Saint Michael I’ve seen in many different churches, and in several of them, God’s Most Beloved is a blond.
“So, let me get this straight,” I say, disbelieving. “You killed my partner and kidnapped me because I have red hair?”
She blinks a few times, as though waking from a stupor. “We need you for our family, Elizabeth. The archangel speaks to me and tells me this is so—”
“It’s Detective Rhyzyk,” I say forcefully, interrupting her.
I want to scream at her that no one had ever called me Elizabeth, not even my own mother, but I need to back off the verbal bruising. She had said “for our family,” not “in our family,” as though I were something to be used. The woman is full-blown gonzo, and I should tread carefully. But her wanting me alive is a definite advantage.
She holds up the sandwich, and I take another bite. She strokes my head tentatively with her other hand and tells me, “Your glorious hair was just one of the many signs that you could be one of us.”
Like a good girl, I finish the rest of the sandwich, and Evangeline returns the plate to the tray.
“When I saw you on TV,” she says excitedly, settling herself into the chair, “after the battle in Weatherford, striding down the halls of the hospital, proud, imperious, reveling in your win, I had hope. And then when I saw the Saint Michael’s medal around your neck, I knew that you had been sent to us.”
“I’m a cop. It’s my job. Saint Michael is the patron saint of police, and the medal was given to me by my mother. It’s not a biblical calling.”
“Oh, but I think for you it is a calling, and that’s why we brought you the head of the Mexican,” she says, her eyes shining with pious fervor as though she’s referred to the head of John the Baptist. “It was to help you send a message to his people. It was so simple finding him. Frankly, I was surprised with all your resources that you couldn’t.” She said the last in a mildly scolding manner, as though I’d dropped a ball during a Little League game.
“So you decided you’d just leave the severed head outside my door,” I say. “You terrified my girlfriend, my neighbors…” I stop and take a breath, ratcheting down the intensity of my voice. “One of your family killed a woman in your ex-husband’s house. She was tortured first, her ears cut off, and then her throat was slit from missing ear to missing ear. Was that part of your calling too?”
She tilts her head but says nothing.
“Was the killer one of your sons?” I press. “Are the men posing as the Jefferson cops Curtis and Tommy Roy?”
Mei’s voice is now in my head, calmly telling me that Lana’s murderer was a destroyer of women.
“The woman was the Mexican’s whore,” she says.
“As well as your ex-husband’s,” I add.
Her eyes narrow, her mouth puckering into a lemony, distasteful grimace. She knew the last bit of information, but it still rankles and I want to drive the sword in deeper.
“What did you do with the severed ears, by the way?” I ask. “Save them for stringing on the Christmas tree?”
She sits, hands clasped capably in her lap, the foggy, visionary mantle now gone. Evangeline Roy is all business, the CEO of a growing concern, sitting at the head of a conference table. “They were sent to the Juárez cartel, a warning to stay out of our territory. And, yes, the two men who took you are my sons. They are my sword and my shield. Something needed to be done. I didn’t ask them how they planned to accomplish it.”
She rearranges her features into a more kindly mask and tells me, “We are only doing what the Mexicans would have done to us. Will do to us, if they gain the upper hand. They aren’t satisfied polluting their own country. They have to come here, bringing their trash drugs and trash families with them.”
As she’s talking I’m thinking, But you’re selling meth to the people in your own country, you crazy fucking bitch, destroying lives and whole families. I could ask her how many hundreds of people were addicted to her meth right here in East Texas, and she’d probably know right down to the exact number and gram weight.
My mouth opens and before I can stop myself, I say, “I’ll bet you my red-haired snatch that most of the people buying your meth are good ol’ Walmart-shoppin’, fried-okra-eatin’ white people, some of them pure redneck gingers. How do you justify doing that?”
“Because we give them a choice and a way out,” she says, excitement in her voice, as though she’s only now getting to the meat of her message. “We only sell to those already deep in the throes of their addiction, and our product is far superior to what the Mexicans are peddling. Cleaner, safer. But we also come with a message of hope. Offer them an escape from their disease. And our family is growing daily with men and women who are given a purpose, a way to jettison their addiction and step up to their rightful place in the world. It takes time. For some it takes a long, long time. But we have money for treatment, and we have guns, so that when the fall happens, and it will come, we’ll have a self-sufficient force. Some of our family are in jail now. But some are judges, car mechanics, computer technicians, even police officers. Which is how we enticed you, and how we knew when and where you were coming.”
She gestures around the room. “What you see here is just a tiny staging area. A receiving room, if you will. We have manufacturing facilities all over East Texas and Louisiana. Some of them are underground, some of them are on houseboats or in abandoned warehouses. The current downturn in the economy has helped us in numerous ways.”
“Saint Michael’s army,” I tell her.
“Yes,” she affirms, her face beaming.
“A syringe in one hand, and a Bible in the other.”
The facial wattage dims somewhat. “If you want to put it in that crude way, yes.”
“Helter-skelter,” I say.
“What?” she asks.
“The end is nigh, the race riots, the fall of civilization, blah-blah-blah…just like the Charlie Manson Family.”
“He was a lunatic,” she says.
“Oh yeah,” I agree. “A manipulative, murdering, crazy little man with a big vision. The most dangerous kind.”
She leans heavily against the back of her chair. “Elizabeth,” she says sorrowfully. “I was hoping you would see our vision more clearly. I understand it’s going to take more time. But time is my gift to you.”
“They’re looking for me right now.”
“Yes,” she says. “But
they’ll look in all the wrong places. They would have to search every house, every barn, every granary in East Texas, and by that time, we’ll have what we want.”
Right—grandbabies. “Which of your psychopathic sons is to be the happy father?”
“The elder, Tommy.”
“Doesn’t appear like much of a rooster to me. Seems more interested in playing with knives, if you know what I mean.”
“It was Tommy that first brought you to my attention. I chose you because he chose you. It was he that left the offering on your bed. The one you share with the woman. At first I was dismayed that you were living that life. But in a way, it’s more fitting. You are technically still a virgin.”
“There is no virgin about this girl,” I say angrily. “How do you know I haven’t worked my way through the Swedish navy as well as the U.S. girls’ swim team?”
“You’d like to shock me,” she says, wagging one finger at me.
No, I’d like to kill you, I think. But what I say is “You have no possible way of knowing that I can give you what you want.”
Evangeline stands, straightening her posture. “Like I told you, Elizabeth, time will be my gift to you. You will reorient. And then you will be uplifted with the rest of us. The archangel has promised it.”
She said uplifted. Something about her tone causes a line of sweat to form across my forehead.
“You’ll come to love Tommy, as I do. But in the meanwhile, I hope you will understand that we’ll need to take certain measures to keep you close at hand. We can’t tie you to the bed every day.”
Uplifted. The reverential way she uttered the word makes my heart pound. I recall a room filled with gauzy sunlight, dead people lying stacked in bunk beds, the word Uplifted written in orange spray paint on the walls, a squalling infant lying on the floor.
“What did you say?” I croak, my throat closing with fear.
She moves toward me, smiling sympathetically, hands in both pockets of her skirt.
“Tommy has told me that you are a runner. That you’re very fast. Almost faster than he is, and he was a track star in college. We can’t have you outrunning our Tommy.”
She’s standing next to the chair and I remember now with startling clarity the crazy man in the Mets jersey chanting, “Ready for uplift,” the childishly rendered angels watching over his murdered flock.
Quickly, she pulls out of her pocket a needle and syringe and stabs me in the arm with it. I flinch hard, but the syringe is already emptied.
“I hope that you’ll come to understand what we had to do to keep you, to keep us all, safe,” she says softly, prayerfully.
“You fucking bitch,” I yelp. I look stupidly at my arm and then at her, the honeyed, familiar warmth rapidly moving up my chest, into my head.
Evangeline has stepped back, watching me closely. “We just can’t have you running away. I’m sorry.”
The fuzziness begins peripherally, tunneling my vision, matching everything to the blackness on the other side of the window. The futile straining against the chains and straps, the swelling terror against the last two words uttered, the woman staring dutifully at the painting of the beautiful, merciless angel.
31
My eyelids flutter, trying to open against the gummy film gluing my lashes together. I sense the bed beneath me is damp with sweat, or maybe with humidity, like it is at the oceanfront, where the sea air penetrates every porous surface.
Someone sits on the mattress. I feel a weighted depression close to my feet, a hand resting on my leg. It’s Jackie. It must be Jackie. I struggle to separate my eyelids again, letting in a bit of light and, in the middle of my line of sight, a shadowy human form. I try raising my head, but I’m just too sleepy, and I let it fall back onto the bed.
I smile, though, so that Jackie can see how comforting it is to have her close. I feel a whispery shifting of a sheet being taken away from my bare legs, feel her gently kneading the muscles in my right leg, the thigh, the knee, the muscle draped over the shinbone. I have a cramping in my calf muscle, as after punishing exercise, and her hand slips around the back of the leg and squeezes the knotted bulk gently.
My mouth is very dry, and I lick my lips, which are as cracked as alligator hide. I want to tell her how good it feels, but my voice is uncooperative. So I keep smiling, nodding my chin once so that she’ll keep massaging my leg.
I remember where we are: in Cape May, on the Jersey Shore, our first weekend trip together. Two nights in one of the many curlicued, porticoed Victorian B and Bs, our bedroom decorated with low-end bric-a-brac and faux antiques. A musty room with a pastel floral nightmare of a quilt, but with huge bay windows that open to the Atlantic Ocean breezes, which blow the chintz curtains back into the room like sails before a storm.
We go swimming, Jackie’s sunburned shoulders bobbing in the waves in front of me, her face in profile as she turns, taunting me, daring me to follow her into the deeper water. The flash of her delicate feet as she dives under a swell, her ankle bracelet flaring the light like a tiny lighthouse.
I follow her under a wall of water, surprised by the strength of the undertow. I have a momentary, primal fear of drowning below the press of unimaginable weight, then the popped cork feeling of abruptly rising again; I flail my hands until a connection is made with her seal-like skin. She grabs my wrist and pulls me with her to the surface, where we float on our backs, gasping and laughing, undulating together on the waves, my atavistic fear of swimming in the ocean temporarily forgotten.
We flop, rubbery and spent, onto the sand, the bracing wind drying our bodies. And I, with the careful attention of a spymaster at a crowded train station, lean across Jackie pretending to reach for a book but instead lick the salt from her neck.
In our room with the chintz curtains we lie in bed, folded into each other’s arms, and I whisper to Jackie that later, when the sun is lower and the temperatures cooler, I’ll take an eight-mile jog along the beach. Through the open windows we can hear the inrushing and outgoing waves, sounding like an endless, murmuring conversation.
She moves to sit at my feet and rubs my legs in preparation for the run, smiling at my pleasure in her touch.
She tells me, “You always look surprised whenever I do something nice for you that you didn’t ask for.”
“Astonished,” I say, my eyes closed, feeling her fingers discovering and unteasing every muscle fiber, like an electrician detangling a bundle of metal wires.
“What do you want, Betty?” she asks.
“You,” I answer. The pressure of her fingers is increasing, and I inhale slowly to inhibit the contractions against her probing touch.
“I know that,” she says, and I hear the laughter in her voice. “I mean what do you want out of life?”
I have a vision of my family, viewed through the heavy haze of smoke from my mother’s ever-present cigarettes, sitting at the dinner table in dangerous silence. All of us still, breathless, poised for flight. My brother’s tense face pointed in my direction, his eyes a luminous warning beacon. The sound of my father’s knife, scraping hard and slow at the bottom of his plate; a fresh beer, his fourth, sitting like an un-pinned hand grenade, close at hand. He’s just given me a tongue-lashing for some minor infraction.
Then my brother, without preamble and against all good sense, begins to sing a Madonna song—“‘Papa don’t preach, I’m in trouble deep’”—in a high, wavering falsetto. In my naive, girlish voice, I say, “I don’t get it.” My father’s black gaze falls first on me and then on Andrew, and then the miraculous happens. He drops his knife onto his plate and begins to laugh; hard, racking belly laughs. All at once, we’re laughing together, the nervous anxiety forcing our gaiety to a maniacal pitch, and we’re falling out of our chairs in shared, unexpected mirth.
The sun has made me feverish. I feel all at once chilled and hot, and I begin to shiver.
“Joyful noise,” I manage to say, answering her question. My teeth are clenched painfully, and I try to
open my eyes once more, reaching for the quilt to cover my exposed legs.
Jackie’s wearing her turquoise robe, but that can’t be right because she didn’t have a turquoise robe at Cape May, and the pressure of her hands on my leg is now painful, her fingers pinching forcefully behind my ankle at the midsection of the Achilles tendon. The pinching swells into a sharp pain, a puncturing sensation not on the surface of my leg but through it.
I begin to yell, to jerk my limb away from her touch, but I’m frozen in cement.
You’re hurting me, I want to yell, but I can’t open my jaw to utter the words. There is no moving any part of my body now.
Even so, my last frantic impulse is to run.
32
A cold, wet cloth rests over my forehead, water dripping down my temples and into my hairline. I’m on the single mattress in my prison, staring upward at the glass light fixture overhead. The bulb is on, reflecting muddily off the green walls.
My arms are outstretched, held fast by hospital-type restraining cuffs around my wrists. Turning my head to the right and then to the left, I see that there are ropes tying the cuffs to ringbolts screwed into the opposing walls.
Whatever drug they’ve given me is still strong in my system, making the room tilt wildly as I move, but by straining every neck muscle, I manage to pull my chin forward off the mattress. At the foot of the bed is a heavyset woman wearing a nurse’s uniform: scrub pants and a patterned tunic. The kind worn in a doctor’s office. She’s quietly talking to Evangeline Roy, and when they sense my movement, they both stop talking and turn to look at me.
“Untie me,” I say. My voice is hoarse, as though the vocal cords have been frayed.
Evangeline tells the woman to bring me water and she sits on the bed next to me. As soon as she disturbs the mattress, a shooting pain rockets through my right calf. I try to shift my position, but Evangeline puts a firm hand over my right thigh.