Sea Glass (31 page)

  McDermott

“He shot a cop,” Ross is saying in the squalid kitchen. From the living room, McDermott hears Sexton Beecher grunting and then being quiet for a moment, and then yelling as if he weren’t quite right in the head.

“What happened?” McDermott asks.

“The asshole had a gun.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“He says he pawned a pair of earrings.”

“Jesus Christ,” McDermott says.

In the corner, a young girl is whimpering. The mother is in with Beecher. “I sent the kid’s brother for the quack,” Ross says. “Beecher’s lost a bathtub full of blood.”

There’s a smear of crimson along the wooden floor, as if someone had dragged a freshly killed deer through the kitchen and into the living room.

“Where were you?” Ross says.

“On our way back from Exeter,” McDermott says.

“I didn’t know a man had so much blood in him,” Ross says.

“Where was he shot?”

“In the leg. In the thigh. Isn’t there some great big artery there?”

“If it had hit an artery,” McDermott says, “he’d be dead by now.”

The screen door opens and slaps shut. Mironson and Tsomides enter the kitchen. The girl in the corner begins to cry louder, as if the men had come to shoot her in the leg too.

“I wish she’d shut the fuck up,” Ross says to McDermott. “She’s getting on my nerves.”

Mironson’s face is white, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He tugs off his tie and opens the first four buttons of his thin shirt as if he were asthmatic and short of air. “We need to get him out of here,” Mironson says. “He’s left a trail on the stairs a blind man could follow.”

“Where’s Alphonse?” McDermott asks, looking around.

“I sent him to get Honora,” Ross says.

McDermott brings his hand to his forehead. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “You didn’t.”

From the other room, Sexton Beecher roars his wife’s name.

A bucket in the sink is full of red water. The sole of McDermott’s shoe is sticky on the wooden floor. He glances around at the yellowing paper on the walls, the small white stove with a crusty pot on top of it, the cupboards that have no doors. “I’ve got to go,” McDermott says, brushing against Ross. “They shouldn’t come here. It’s too risky.”

But then a woman in a shimmery blue dress, her copper hair ablaze in a pool of sunlight, is standing on the porch behind the screen door. Alphonse sneaks around and under Vivian and opens the door. Honora, in her slippers, her blouse untucked from her skirt, her hair wild about her head, walks into the room.

McDermott knows that he will never again want anyone or anything as much as he wants this woman.

“Where is he?” she asks.

  Alphonse

He wishes someone would shut Marie-Thérèse up, because she is being very annoying and is not helping the situation one little bit. His house is crowded with men looking sick and hot and wishing they were somewhere else. His mother is holding a bloody towel, and inside the other room Mrs. Beecher is with her husband, who is just howling like an animal with its leg caught in a trap. Alphonse is standing with Miss Burton in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, and Miss Burton is being very calm and speaking to Mrs. Beecher and McDermott, and you can just see that in this kind of a situation women are much better than men.

Ross says, “Where’s Wing?” and Alphonse thinks maybe he should have been the one to go for the doctor instead of Gérard, and Mahon is telling Mironson, who looks as if he is going to throw up, to leave immediately, and it is then that Alphonse hears the cars in front of the house and the metal doors slamming, and the room goes absolutely quiet.

Oh, Jesus,
Ross says.

  Sexton

Someone is pressing an iron against his leg and it is just searing his flesh, burning his flesh, and he is trying to buck it off, but there are hands on his arms and he hears his wife’s voice saying his name over and over, and he tries to sit up, but she pushes her hands against him, and for the sake of almighty God, will someone just get this fucking iron off his goddamn leg? He can hear his wife calling for someone to help her and then there are stronger hands on his, and when he looks up he can see a man’s face, what is his name? he can’t remember, he should be able to remember, and the iron is pressed against his skin again, and he screams his wife’s name. He can hear her saying, “I am here, I am here,” but it is hard to pay attention because the pain is so great, and then he looks up at her and tells her he is sorry, although he is not completely sure what he is sorry about. But he knows that he is and that he has hurt her, and that she didn’t deserve to be hurt, and then there is a pressure on his chest. The girl, Vivian, is saying does Honora know that he has been hit twice, and Honora is leaning over him and telling him something he should be paying attention to and he tries to hang on so that he can make sure he has heard her right, but he is being carried away by a river and he really, really wants to let go. And then he hears the big guy, what’s his name? the hulking beast from a fairy tale, say
Oh, Jesus
from the kitchen.

  Vivian

“He’s been hit twice,” Vivian says to Honora, wondering if anyone has noticed that Sexton Beecher is bleeding from another wound just below the first one. It’s perfectly possible no one has discovered this because there is so much blood. She feels a small movement beside her, and Alphonse sneaks under her arm to take a peek into the living room.

“I don’t think you want to look at this,” Vivian says, turning the boy toward her body and enveloping him. He is just a boy, after all, and he shouldn’t be a part of this. As best she can make out, Sexton fired a shot at a wall of policemen, which seems like an extraordinarily stupid thing to do, and the police fired back, as well they might have. It is all unnerving, and she has to admit that even she started to tremble a bit when they drove into Ely Falls and saw all the rioting over by the mills and the fires that seemed to be popping up everywhere. But Alphonse just kept telling her, in that small, polite voice of his, to turn here, miss, and to turn there, miss, and then they were on Rose Street and climbing the stairs to the kitchen.

What a dreadful apartment,
Vivian thinks.

“Is he going to die?” Alphonse asks, looking up at her.

“No, Alphonse, he is not,” Vivian says emphatically, knowing that this is what one should tell a boy of twelve years old, though of course one cannot possibly know if a man is going to die or not, and frankly, from where she stands, it doesn’t look very good for Sexton Beecher. Her minds leaps ahead in time and she sees that she will want to take Honora back to her own house and make her stay there until the woman is on her feet again, which could be quite a while.

Vivian hears the footsteps on the wooden stairs outside and thinks, irrationally, that the police have come to solve their problem, to mop up the mess, as they do in gangster movies. But then she realizes, with some dismay, that this cannot possibly be the case, can it? Because in this particular movie, she and Louis and McDermott and Ross and Sexton (especially Sexton) and even Alphonse and Honora are the gangsters. And then she sees, through the screen at the kitchen door, the white hoods over the faces of the men and thinks,
Something is very wrong here,
because everyone knows that the Ku Klux Klan operates only in the south. Yet even then, and ever optimistic (for Vivian scarcely knows how to be anything else), she imagines that these men in their ridiculous white hoods with dark round circles for their eyes and noses will somehow explain themselves and restore order to this hideous and frightful situation.

But then the first man enters the kitchen, and Vivian understands at once that it is not going to be like that. It is not going to be like that at all.

  Honora

She bends over her husband and pins his arms. His face is mottled bright white and dark red, and this, even more than all the blood, frightens her. She calls out that she needs help. McDermott comes and then Alphonse’s mother, a small woman Honora has wanted to meet. She has wanted to tell this woman that Alphonse is a sweet boy, but of course his mother must already know this. Sexton is yelling Honora’s name and grabbing for his crotch, even though that is not exactly where he has been hit. He says
I’m sorry
over and over and over, and she keeps trying to shush him and calm him down. He grabs for his crotch again, and Alphonse’s mother looks over at her as if to say, Who knows what a man will get up to when he thinks he is dying?

McDermott is standing behind her now, and Honora knows that he is seeing this thing that Sexton is doing and hearing him say
I’m sorry
over and over.

“Sexton,” she says, putting her face close to his. “Don’t speak. Just rest. You’re going to be all right.”

She glances up at McDermott and then back down at Sexton, and for the first time since she entered the room she thinks that her husband might actually die. She bends close to him and says, “Hang on, Sexton,” but she can see, in an ominous relaxation of his features, that he is drifting into unconsciousness. And then an urgent question rises within her, and she knows that she has only seconds to answer it.

The life inside her body is as much Sexton’s as it is hers.

She looks at McDermott again and wishes that she could tell him that she is sorry, that if she had to do it over again, she would not have been afraid under the tree that sounded like water. She would have had no fear and would have let him love her, and if that one night was all they had together, well then, so be it, because, really, what honor was there in denying love?

Sexton jerks his body, as though, even semiconscious, he wanted her whole attention. She thinks,
I have to do this now.

She bends to her husband’s face. “Sexton, I’m pregnant,” she says.

She can see him struggling to comprehend, as if he didn’t quite catch all the words. His fingers scrabble against the wooden floorboards. And so she has to say it again. “Sexton, I’m pregnant. We are going to have a baby.”

With her hand on her husband’s leg, she turns to find McDermott’s face. And it is all there, she thinks; she has become as good at reading faces as he is. The shock of the news. The wave of comprehension. And then regret. Terrible regret.

“I didn’t know,” she says, reaching for his hand.

There are footsteps on the stairs. In the kitchen, Ross is saying,
Oh, Jesus.

Vivian, in the doorway, holds Alphonse to her breast. The men coming through the kitchen door have white hoods and guns.

Vivian executes a graceful dance step and slips behind a sofa with the boy.

In another life,
McDermott says and turns.

Honora yells the word
no!
but McDermott cannot hear her.

Through the doorway, Honora watches Louis vault into the air in a way he could never do on his own. Ross, as if he had been pushed, sits heavily on a chair that tips over onto the floor.

McDermott spins like a child’s top — already damaged, already broken.

A man with a hood is standing in the doorway. He raises the long gun in his hands and says, “This must be the guy.”

A second man, also in a white hood, pushes his way into the room. “He’s gone,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”

The first man, a faceless creature, holds his gun toward Honora for a long second, and then he lowers it to his side.

In the kitchen, a young girl is bleating like a sheep.

Honora moves on her knees to the place where McDermott has fallen. At first she cannot tell if he has been hit. He seems merely to be stunned, or even, oddly, to be sleeping. She puts her fingers to his face, calling his name. She cradles his head. And then she feels the blood, warm and sticky in his hair. She stares at her hand. The girl in the kitchen is making an inhuman sound.

Honora stands, bewildered. Her own blood drains from her head, and her vision begins to narrow. Strong hands catch the sides of her shoulders.

Wordlessly, Vivian leads her away from McDermott to a chair in the kitchen. Alphonse, white faced, appears in the doorway. Vivian shields his eyes from the carnage as she marches him through the kitchen to the porch. “Go for help,” she commands. “And don’t come back inside this room until I tell you to.”

Honora gazes around her. Alphonse’s sister is holding her arm and crying in a way that is frightening to listen to. It is the sound of pure fear — the pealing of a bell long after it has been struck.

Mironson is sitting on the floor, against a wall, a smear of blood behind him on the yellowing wallpaper.

Ross, in death, has the posture of a clown midprank — his bulk against the back of the tipped chair, his feet in the air.

Mahon seems no longer to have a face.

Tsomides is cradling his head, but his eyes are open and unmoving.

The worst, though — the very worst — is the unnatural way Alphonse’s mother is bent backward over the sink.

Honora counts.

Six dead.

A massacre,
she thinks.

She stands and moves back into the living room, where McDermott is on the floor. In the corner, Sexton calls for her. Honora kneels over McDermott’s body and puts a hand on his chest. She minds that she cannot see the color of McDermott’s eyes — that lovely turquoise blue. She lifts her face to a God she does not know very well, and a wail begins to rise inside her.