A Density of Souls (31 page)

Jordan finally lifted his eyes to Meredith, poised in the doorway.

“Did you two have a nice time?” she asked in a sharp whisper.

“You can go now,” Jordan answered.

“You disgust me,” she said.

“Was he trying to kill me?” Stephen asked, calm.

“I don’t know,” Jordan managed. “But . . . Let me stay here for a while.” Now Meredith felt confused. She shook her head numbly.

“You think he’s going to come after me?”

Jordan just kept looking at him.

“Stay,” Stephen finally said.

Meredith turned and descended the stairs.

1 0

O
n the firstSundayinAugust,The Times-Picayune printed a front-page story detailing the findings of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the aftermath of the explosion that had leveled the Army of God’s alleged headquarters. ATF investigators informed the city of New Orleans that the explosion had been caused by human action, confirming the theory that it had been an attempt to destroy all evidence the two acres of land might have yielded. More important, the explosion provided a cover for the escape of a group member whose body was not discovered among the ruins—Brandon Charbonnet.

All three dead men were pictured with yearbook photos that ran down the left margin of the front page. Their criminal records were printed beneath the photos. Signs of “gunshot wounds prior to incinera-tion” on all three bodies suggested an internal fight among the soldiers.

Trish Ducote passed Meredith the article after she had read it herself, noticing that the article said very little about Brandon Charbonnet beyond a brief quote from the local FBI: reassuring readers that all law enforcement agencies were on the lookout for the suspect.

Later that day, Trish went to Meredith’s room to hand her the regis-tration forms and orientation packet that had arrived in the mail from Tulane. Classes started at the end of the month. Meredith took the pages in one hand without glancing up from what Trish now referred to as her “damn notebook”.

“What are you writing?” Trish asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

Trish swallowed her irritation, began again. “Do you think that maybe you should talk to the police considering that you . . .”

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“Don’t be an idiot, Mom,” Meredith said, scribbling.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me names like that,” Trish said as she left.

Meredith had left the newspaper on the kitchen counter. Trish scanned it again, then read a smaller article at the bottom of the page.

The small storm that had developed earlier off the coast of western Africa was now a tropical depression, unnamed, but on a determined course for the Caribbean. She thought about the four or five hurricanes that aimed for New Orleans during the past decade and the pointless panic they had caused. Every single one of them swung east-ward.

The second Monday in August, Jordan finally returned home to get some clothes. Roger met him at the door.

“I need some stuff,” Jordan said.

“Where have you been?”

“Stephen’s.”

“You might want to tell Monica to drop by for a visit. Maybe she can talk to Elise,” Roger suggested, coolly. Upstairs, Jordan gathered essentials into a duffel bag. He passed by his mother’s bedroom door without a word or a knock.

“My dad asked if you’d go see my mom,” Jordan said when he returned to the Conlin residence and found Monica in the front parlor restocking the bar. She nodded, lining the bottles of Bombay and Glenlevit on the cabinet’s top shelf. Jordan knew she would not go.

“How’s the thing going upstairs?” he asked her, with forced polite-ness.

“What thing?”

“The room on the third floor. I saw the boxes and stuff . . .”

“Fine,” Monica said shortly.

“I guess I don’t have to stay here if you don’t want me to,” Jordan blurted out. Monica stopped, turned from the liquor cabinet. She studied him long and hard, alert and seemingly sober.

“Just remember what I said,” she replied evenly.

Jordan nodded and climbed the stairs to find Stephen.

• • •

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Tropical Storm Brandy was one hundred miles from Cuba on the day a Bayou Terrace nurse saw Andrew Darby punch his wife. Although she had been on staff at Bayou Terrace for a mere three weeks, the nurse was already suspicious of the circumstances surrounding the strange internment in The Bordeaux Wing. She needed no further incentive to call Security than the sight of Andrew’s fist colliding with Angela’s jaw. A guard pulled him from the room as Angela Darby stammered the question that had provoked her husband. “Where’s Greg?”

Two guards dragged Andrew Darby down the corridor. As they passed Dr. Horne’s office, Andrew yelled his brother-in-law’s name.

On the other side of the door, Ernest pretended to peruse a file. Angela Darby had been dancing since the end of July, and he had not informed her husband.

Andrew Darby was furious by the time the guards got him to the front door. In his anger, he made the mistake of calling the black guard a nigger. The guard lunged to tackle him, a nightstick in one hand, but Andrew dove into his car and peeled out of the parking lot.

At home, Andrew made himself his first drink in five years.

Meredith had not talked to Stephen since the night he returned from the Gulf Coast. When she called, Jordan picked up. “You’re answering his phone now?” Meredith asked.

“Do you want to talk to him?” Jordan countered.

“Yes.”

“Hold on.”

Stephen came on the line. “Meredith?”

“How are you?”

“All right.” He sounded icy and remote.

“What’s up with you and Jordan?” she asked.

“He’s staying here. He doesn’t want to go home since . . . He had a fight with his parents.”

There was a heavy silence. “Are you two . . .?” she asked.

Stephen didn’t answer and she felt herself flush with embarrassment

“I don’t want to get too personal. I just think it’s kind of weird,” Meredith said quickly, annoyed by her own defensiveness.

“You’re right, it’s weird,” Stephen said dryly.

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“I want to see you soon, okay?”

“Can you come over?”

“I’ve got to register for classes today,” Meredith answered. Suddenly she didn’t feel up to the task of telling Stephen about her encounters with Jordan—nor did she have the will even to avoid the subject. She doubted Jordan had been open about it either.

“School. Fuck,” Stephen said.

“Yeah. We’ll be at the same school again,” she said, half-surprised by this realization.

“You’re right. We’ll . . . we’ll be at the same school again.”

Meredith heard the strain in his voice. A simple statement had knocked both of them askew.

“I’ll let you go,” she said, her voice thick.

“Bye-bye,” Stephen said. Bye-bye, like a boy. Not good-bye, like a boy trying to be a man.

“I love you,” she said before hanging up.

That evening Tropical Storm Brandy was upgraded to a hurricane as it pummeled the southeast corner of Cuba, its winds gusting to a hundred miles an hour.

Part Four

Heaven’s

Answer

And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire; and them that had gotten victory over the beast, and over his image, over his mark,

and over the number of his name, stand on a sea of glass, having the harps of God.

—Revelation 15:2

1

T
he mud was moving.

Warner Doutrie watched from the porch of his shack. He had built the house with his friend Earl, who’d been in his squadron in Viet-nam and seen the same boys blown in half, thrashing legless through rice fields, calling to gods they didn’t believe in. Warner and Earl had shared a desire to live far down pitted roads, away from civilization.

They were both Louisiana boys, from Lafourche Parish, south of New Orleans, assigned to the same platoon by coincidence. After the war, they had built the shack together. Earl had died two years earlier and until the day the strange half-naked body stumbled out of the swamp, Warner had lived alone.

“Boy, come looka this!” Warner exclaimed, as the mud quivered.

Warner called Brandon “the Boy” because Brandon had said nothing to him in the month they had lived together. Warner talked, his rusty vocal chords creaking into use again, and Brandon listened.

Warner had cleaned, fed, and praised him as if he were a swamp changeling come to keep him company.

The mud was shifting in folds emanating out from the inlet’s banks.

As Brandon walked onto the porch, a throng of red pinchers surfaced, masses of crawfish rising in sluggish tides of mollusk shells.

“Ain’t datta sight!” Warner hooted.

Brandon slumped against a post and watched. Greg had not appeared to him since the night he ran from the fire. But this sight was most assuredly a sign. The crawfish migrating out of the water, branch-ing around either side of the shack. Go forth from this place.

“Hoo yah, ’sgotta be sumtin wit da weatha I tell yah,” Warner whistled through his teeth.

Yes, Brandon thought, the weather. He’s speaking to me through 234

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the heavens now. This has been a necessary exile but the heavens will send an answer soon enough.

For several days after the fire, Brandon had wandered the stretch of swamp across the north shore. By the time he came across Warner Doutrie’s shack, he had eaten only a nutria and had had only two nights of fitful sleep. To chase away the demons he recited aloud the verse he lived by.

He’d been prepared to kill the old man fishing off the dock, but Warner Doutrie had greeted him with the frank expression of outcasts.

Brandon had passed out, and when he woke Warner had washed him in the swamp water and laid him out on the floor.

Warner’s incessant talk revived Brandon’s strength. Warner had spoken about wars, but Brandon did not share his own soldiering with Warner. He spent his days hiking the swamp, looking for Greg. When he inhaled the pungent scent of Warner frying catfish, he would head back to the shack, where the older man would already have a plate ready for him.

“Go forth from this place.

“Pestilence was born in Thibodaux,” Brandon whispered, his lips scratchy as sandpaper.

“Wat dat yoo say?” Warner asked.

“Pestilence was born in Thibodaux,” Brandon repeated, rapidly, like a child’s tongue twister. He moved across the porch. Warner looked frightened of him for the first time since he’d come out of the swamp.

Brandon sank down onto the porch next to him. He was shirtless and Warner saw a welter of scratches on his shoulders, signatures of brush.

Brandon balled a hand into a fist and held it out, as if he were about to release a butterfly. Warner stared at him before balling his own fist and touching it to Brandon’s, as if they were conversing in sign language.

“The world,” Brandon said. His dark eyes gleamed with reverence.

“God and the devil! God . . . one thing. The devil . . . many, legion . . .”

Warner nodded dumbly. What did this have to do with the crawfish?

“The devil is sprinkled. Peppered. Like God, see, he just took his great big hands and cast the devil down onto the earth, where it spread itself around. It’s in cracks and corners. It’s in people!”

Warner nodded emphatically. He’d met many men he thought were the devil.

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“It’s waiting, too. It can take lots of different people, but you see . . .

it’s never just one thing. You gotta root it out . . .”

He pinched the knuckles of his fist with the fingers of his other hand, grinding his teeth together to feign exertion as he rooted out the devil. Suddenly he went lax, sucked breath, exhausted by his revelation of pure truth.

Brandon gazed at the tide of mollusks passing beneath the boards of the porch. “How many men have been lost to their own desires because of pestilence?” he asked in a low, flat voice.

Warner gazed at Brandon in awe. “Pestilence,” he agreed.

Brandon could still see the rivulet of blood that had trickled from Greg’s nose five years ago. After he had slugged him, after Greg had leaned in and Brandon had reared his legs, wheeling kicks at Greg until he writhed out of the door of Brandon’s Cadillac. Forced Greg into the pestilence that awaited him.

“Stevie,” Brandon whispered.

Stephen, guardian of the bell tower. Who had filled its portico with his pestilence, lured Greg Darby in a moment of weakness, within.

“Who?” Warner asked.

Brandon looked at him. “I need to go soon,” he said tersely.

Warner nodded, looking disappointed to see the Boy leave so soon.

Brandon stood and went inside the shack. Warner could hear him mutter, mesmerized by his thoughts.

The old man regarded the crawfish. That morning, crawfish migrated across southern Louisiana, dogs bit and snapped at their chains, birds took to the air in strange formations. The pressure was falling.

The sky was thickening.

2

R
oger had helped Elise to the living room sofa and tucked a blanket across her shoulders. She slouched in front of the television set and watched The Young and the Restless as her husband packed their clothes into three suitcases.

She was staring blankly at the television screen when Jordan entered. A message scrolled across the bottom of the screen: “HURRICANE

BRANDY IS ON A DIRECT COURSE FOR SOUTHEASTERN LOUISIANA. MAYOR

MORRISON ASKS ALL NEW ORLEANS RESIDENTS TO EVACUATE OR SEEK

SHELTER.”

Upstairs, Jordan found Roger squatting on the floor next to a pile of suitcases. “Can you get the shutters for me?” Roger asked his son as he stuffed the clothes into the suitcase.

“I’m staying,” Jordan announced.

Roger shook his head, exasperated but not surprised. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen if it hits the mouth of the river?”

“I want to be here.” He smiled.

Roger snorted. “Can you close the shutters then? Make sure they’re locked. I put tape on all the windows. Move the living room furniture into the kitchen, just in case.”