The Charlie Parker Collection 1

  ‘It fades,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it doesn’t go away.’

  ‘No. It’s yours. You do with it what you have to do.’

  ‘I want to kill someone.’ He said it without feeling, in level tones, the way somebody might announce that they were going to take a cold shower on a warm day.

  Louis was the killer, I thought. It didn’t matter that he killed for motives that went beyond money or politics or power; that he was no longer morally neutral; that whatever he might have done in the past, those he now chose to destroy went largely unmourned. Louis had it in him to take a life and not lose a moment’s sleep over it.

  Angel was different. When he’d been placed in situations where it was kill or be killed, then he had taken lives. It troubled him to do it, but better to be troubled above ground than to be untroubled below, and I had personal reasons to be thankful for his actions. Now Faulkner had destroyed something inside Angel, some small dam that he had constructed for himself behind which was contained all of his sorrow and hurt and rage at the things that had been done to him throughout his life. I knew only fragments of it – abuse, starvation, rejection, violence – but I was now beginning to realize the consequences of its release.

  ‘But you still won’t testify against him, if they ask,’ I said.

  I knew the deputy DA was debating the wisdom of calling Angel for the trial, particularly given the fact that they would have to subpoena him to do it. Angel wasn’t one for making voluntary visits to courtrooms.

  ‘I wouldn’t make such a great witness.’

  This was true but I didn’t know how much I should tell him about the case against Faulkner, about how weak it was and how there were fears that it might collapse entirely without more hard evidence. As the newspaper report had pointed out, Faulkner was claiming that he had been a virtual prisoner of his son and daughter for four decades; that they alone were responsible for the deaths of his flock and a series of attacks against groups and individuals whose beliefs differed from their own; and that they had brought skin and bone from their victims to him and forced him to preserve them as relics. It was the classic defense of ‘The dead guys done it’.

  ‘You know where Caina is?’ asked Angel.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘It’s in Georgia. Louis was born near there. On our way to South Carolina, we’re going to make a stop in Caina. Just so you know.’

  There was something in his eyes as he spoke, a fierce burning. I recognized it instantly, for I had seen it in my own eyes in the past. He rose and turned his face from me to hide the evidence of the pain, then walked to the screen door.

  ‘It won’t solve anything,’ I said.

  He paused.

  ‘Who cares?’

  The next morning Angel hardly spoke at breakfast, and the little that he did say was not directed at me. Our conversation on the porch had not brought us any closer. Instead, it had confirmed the existence of a growing divide between us, an estrangement acknowledged by Louis before they departed.

  ‘You two talk last night?’ he asked.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘He thinks you should have killed the preacher when you had the chance.’

  We were watching Rachel talking quietly to Angel. Angel’s head was down, and he nodded occasionally, but I could feel the restlessness coming from him in waves. The time for talking, for reasoning, was gone.

  ‘Does he blame me?’

  ‘It ain’t that simple for him.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Angel would be dead twice over, you hadn’t done the things you done for him. There ain’t no quarrel between us, you and me. Angel, he just troubled.’

  Angel leaned over and kissed Rachel gently but quickly on the cheek, then headed for their car. He looked over at us, nodded once to me, then climbed in.

  ‘I’m going up there today,’ I said.

  Louis seemed to tighten beside me. ‘To the prison?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I ask why?’

  ‘Faulkner requested my presence.’

  ‘And you agreed to see him?’

  ‘They need all the help they can get, and Faulkner is giving them nothing. They don’t think it can hurt.’

  ‘They wrong.’

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘They may still subpoena Angel.’

  ‘They have to find him first.’

  ‘If he testifies, maybe he can help keep Faulkner behind bars until he dies.’

  Louis was already moving away.

  ‘Maybe we don’t want him behind bars,’ he said. ‘Maybe we want him out in the open, where we can get at him.’

  I watched their car as it drove down Black Point Road, across the bridge and onto Old County, until they were lost from sight. Rachel stood next to me, holding my hand.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I wish you’d never heard from Elliot Norton. Ever since he called, nothing has felt the same.’

  I squeezed her hand tightly, a gesture that seemed equal parts reassurance and agreement. She was right. Somehow, our lives had become tainted by events of which we had no part. Walking away from them wouldn’t help, not now.

  And we stood there together, she and I, as, in a Carolina swamp, a man reached out to his darkness mirrored and was consumed by it.

  4

  The man named Landron Mobley stopped and listened, his finger resting outside the trigger guard of his hunting rifle. Above his head, rainwater dripped from the leaves of a cottonwood, staining the massive gray trunk of the tree. The deep, resonant calls of bullfrogs came from the undergrowth to his right while a reddish brown centipede worked its way around the toe of his left boot, hunting for spiders and insects, the pill bugs feeding nearby seemingly unaware of the approaching threat. For a few seconds Mobley followed its progress, watching in amusement as the centipede put on a sudden burst of speed, its legs and antennae little more than a blur, the pill bugs scattering or rolling themselves into gray, plated balls to protect themselves. The centipede curled itself around one of the little crustaceans and began working at the point where its head and metallic lower body now met, seeking a vulnerable spot into which to inject its venom. The struggle was short, ending fatally for the pill bug, and Mobley returned his full attention to the matter in hand.

  He shifted the walnut stock of the Voere against his shoulder, blinked once to clear the sweat from his eyes, then placed his right eye close to the aperture of the telescopic sight, the blued finish of the rifle gleaming dully in the late afternoon light. From his right, the rustling sound came again, followed by a shrill clee-clee-clee. He sighted, pivoting the gun slightly until it came to rest on a tangle of sweet gum, elm, and sycamore from which dead vines hung like the discarded skins of snakes. He took a single deep breath, then released it slowly just as the kite burst from cover, its long black tail forking behind it, its white underparts and head strangely ghostlike against the blackness of its wing tips, as if a dark shadow had fallen over the hunting bird, a foretelling of the death that was to come.

  Its breast exploded in a flurry of blood and feathers and the kite seemed to bounce in midair as the .308 slug tore through it, the bird tumbling to the ground seconds later and coming to rest in a clump of alder. Mobley eased the stock away from his shoulder and released the now-empty five-round magazine. With the kite added, that meant that his five bullets had accounted for a raccoon, a Virginia opossum, a song sparrow, and a snapping turtle, the latter beheaded with a single shot as it lay sunning itself on a log not twenty feet from where Mobley had been standing.

  He walked to the alders and poked around until the corpse of the bird was revealed, its beak slightly open and the hole at the center of its being gleaming black and red. He felt a satisfaction that had not come to him in the earlier kills, an almost sexual thrill bound up in the transgressive nature of the act he had just committed, the ending not merely of a small life but th
e removal of a little grace and beauty from the world it had inhabited. Mobley touched the bird with the muzzle of the rifle and its warm body yielded to the pressure, the feathers bending slightly in upon themselves as if they might somehow close up the wound, time running in reverse as the tissue fused, the blood flowed backward into the body, the breast, now sunken, suddenly became full again, and the kite soared back into the air, its body reconstituting itself as it rose until the moment of impact became an instant not of destruction but of creation.

  Mobley squatted down and carefully reloaded the magazine, then sat on the trunk of a fallen beech tree and removed a Miller High Life from his knapsack. He popped the cap, took a long pull, and belched once, his eyes fixed on the spot where the dead kite had come to rest as if he did indeed expect it to come to life, to ascend bloodied from the earth and take once again to the skies. In some dark place inside him, Landron Mobley secretly wished that the kite wasn’t dead but merely injured; that he had pushed back the leaves and found the bird thrashing on the ground, its wings beating vainly at the dirt, blood spreading from the hole in its underside. Then Mobley could have knelt down, placed his left hand against the bird’s neck, and inserted his finger into the bullet hole, twisting against the flesh while the creature struggled, feeling the warmth of it against him, the meat tearing as his finger probed, until finally it shuddered and died; Mobley, in his way, becoming almost like a bullet himself, exploring its body as both the instrument and the agent of the kite’s destruction.

  He opened his eyes.

  There was blood on his fingers. When he looked down, the kite had been ripped apart, the feathers scattered across the ground, the sightless eyes reflecting the movements of clouds in the skies above. Mobley absently touched his fingers to his lips and tasted the kite with his tongue, then blinked hard and wiped himself clean on his pants, both embarrassed yet aroused by this sudden conflation of act and desire. They came to him so quickly, these red moments, that they were often upon him before he could even register their approach and over before he could enjoy their consummation.

  For a time, he had found an outlet for his cravings in his work. He could take one of the women from her cell and let his fingers explore her flesh, his hand over her mouth as he forced her legs apart; but those days were gone. Landron Mobley was one of fifty-one guards and prison staff who had been fired that year by the South Carolina Corrections Department for having ‘improper relationships’ with inmates. Improper relationships: Mobley almost smiled. That was what the department told the media in an effort to cloud the reality of what took place. Sure, there were inmates who participated willingly, sometimes out of loneliness or pure horniness, or so they could get hold of a couple of packs of cigarettes, some pot, maybe even something a little stronger. It was whoring, nothing more than that, no matter what they told themselves, and Landron Mobley wasn’t above taking a little pussy as a thank-you for a good deed done, no sir. In fact, Landron Mobley wasn’t above taking pussy, period, and there were inmates at the Women’s Correctional Institution on Columbia’s Broad River Road who had reason to look at Landron Mobley with more than a little respect and, yes sir, fear after he had shown them what they could expect if they crossed good old Landron. Landron, with his bleak, empty eyes seeking to fill their void with the reflected emotions of another, her lips drawn back in pleasure or pain, Landron making no distinction between the two extremes, the feelings of the other inconsequential to him but his preference, truth be told, lying in resistance and struggle and forced surrender. Landron, roving from cell to cell, probing for weaknesses in the curled forms beneath the blankets. Landron, filled with venom, leaning over a slim, dark shape, working at the head, drawing it away from the woman’s chest, paralyzing her with his weight as he descended upon her. Landron, amid the water dropping from the leaves and the calling of the bullfrogs, the blood of the kite still warm upon his fingers, growing hard at the memory.

  Then one of the local rags revealed that a female inmate named Myrna Chitty had been assaulted while serving a six-month sentence for purse snatching, and an investigation had commenced. And damn if Myrna Chitty hadn’t told the investigators about Landron’s occasional visits to her cell and how Landron had forced her over her bunk and how she had heard the sound of his belt unbuckling and then the pain, oh Jesus, the pain. The next day Landron was off the payroll and the following week he was pink-slipped, but it wasn’t going to stop there. There was a hearing of the Corrections and Penology Committee scheduled for September 3 and there was talk of rape charges being pressed against Landron and a couple of other guards who might have let their enthusiasm get the better of them. It was a major embarrassment all round and Mobley knew that if they had their way, he was going to be hung out to dry.

  One thing was for certain: Myrna Chitty wouldn’t be testifying at no rape trial. He knew what happened to prison guards who ended up doing hard time, knew that what he had visited on the women in his charge would be returned one-hundredfold upon him, and Landron Mobley didn’t plan on pulling no train or sifting through his food for glass fragments. Myrna Chitty’s testimony, if it was heard in court, would be the passing of a virtual death sentence on Landron Mobley, one that would eventually be carried out with a shank or a broom handle. She was scheduled for release on September 5, her sentence reduced in return for her cooperation with the investigation, and Landron would be waiting for her when she got her white trash tail back to her shitty little house. Then Landron and Myrna were going to have a little talk, and maybe he would have to remind her of what she was missing now that she didn’t have old Landron to drop by her cell or take her down to the showers to search her for contraband. No, Myrna Chitty wouldn’t be putting her hand on no Bible and calling Landron Mobley a rapist. Myrna Chitty would learn to keep her mouth shut unless Landron told her otherwise, or else Myrna Chitty would be dead.

  He took another long drink and kicked at the dirt with the toe of his boot. Landron Mobley didn’t have too many friends. He was a mean drunk, although, to his credit, he was mean sober, so no one could claim that he’d misled them into a false sense of security. That had always been the way with him. He was an outsider, despised for his lack of education, for his taste for violence, and for the miasma of debased sexuality that hung around him like a polluted fog. Yet his capacities had drawn others to him, who recognized in Mobley a creature that might enable them to dabble in depravity without losing themselves to it totally, using Mobley’s absolute corruption as a means of indulging their own appetites without consequence.

  But there were always consequences, for Mobley was like a pitcher plant, attracting victims with the promise of sweet juices, then thriving as they slowly drowned in an abundance of that which they had sought. Mobley’s corruption could be passed on in a word, a gesture, a promise, exploiting weakness as water exploits a crack in concrete, widening it, extending itself deeper and deeper, until the structures were ruined beyond salvation.

  He had a wife once. Her name was Lynnette. She wasn’t beautiful, not even smart, but she was a wife nonetheless, and he’d worn her down as he’d worn down so many others over the years. One day, he came back from the prison and she was gone. She didn’t take much, apart from a suitcase of mangy old clothes and some cash that Landron kept in a cracked coffeepot for emergencies, but Landron could still recall the surge of anger that he’d felt, the sense of abandonment and betrayal as his voice echoed emptily around their tidy home.

  He’d found her, though. He’d warned her about what would happen if she ever tried to leave him, and Landron was a man of his word, when it counted. He’d tracked her down to a dingy motel room on the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, and then she and Landron, they’d had themselves a time. Least of all, Landron had had himself a time. He couldn’t speak for Lynnette. When he’d finished with her she couldn’t speak for herself either, and it would be a long time before a man looked at Lynnette Mobley and didn’t want to puke at the sight of her face.

  For a time, Lan
dron descended into his own private fantasy world: a world in which the Lynnettes knew their place and didn’t go running off when a man’s back was turned; a world in which he still wore his uniform and could still pick the weakest ones to take for his amusement; a world in which Myrna Chitty was trying to run from him and he was gaining, gaining, until at last he caught her and turned her to him, those brown eyes full of fear as she was forced down, down . . .

  Around him, the Congaree Swamp seemed to recede, blurring at the edges, becoming a haze of gray and black and green, with only the dripping of water and the calling of birds to distract him. Soon, even that was lost to Landron as he moved to his own, private rhythm in his own red world.

  But Landron Mobley had not left the Congaree.

  Landron Mobley would never leave the Congaree.

  The Congaree Swamp is old, very old. It was old when the prehistoric foragers hunted its reaches, old when Hernando de Soto passed through in 1540, old when the Congaree Indians were annihilated by smallpox in 1698. The English settlers used the inland waterways as part of their ferry system in the 1740s, but it wasn’t until 1786 that Isaac Huger began construction of a formal ferry system to cross the Congaree. At its northwestern and southwestern boundaries, the bodies of workers are buried beneath the mud and silt, left where they died during the construction of dikes by James Adams and others in the 1800s.

  At the end of that century, logging began on land owned by Francis Beidler’s Santee River Cypress Lumber Company, ceasing in 1915, only to recommence half a century later. In 1969, logging interest was renewed and clearcutting commenced in 1974, leading to the growth of a movement among local people to save the land, some of which had never been logged and represented the last significant old-growth of river-bottom hardwood forest in this part of the country. There were now close to 22,000 acres designated as a national monument, half of them old-growth hardwood forest, stretching from the junction of Myers Creek and the Old Bluff Road to the northwest, down to the borders of Richland and Calhoun Counties to the southeast, close by the railroad line. Only one small section of land, measuring about two miles by half a mile, remained in private hands. It was close to this tract that Landron Mobley now sat, lost in dreams of women’s tears. The Congaree was his place. The things he had done here in the past, among the trees and in the mud, never troubled him. Instead, he luxuriated in them, the memory of them enriching the poverty of his current existence. Here, time became meaningless and he lived once again in remembered pleasures. Landron Mobley was never closer to himself than he was in the Congaree.