Swamp Foetus (3 page)

All at once they were upon Ghost, their faces sticky against his, their hands finding his heartbeat. Ghost managed to shove the guitar aside before they pushed him back onto the steps, his lips sticky with their bitter tears and sour-sweet spit. For a moment he hid behind the darkness of his eyelids and let it happen: the warmth of their soft peachflesh, the tangy soapy smell of their bodies, their music-driven passion.

But resentment and terror of outsiders stiffened their hands, made their fingers hard and sharp. Teeth found the hollow of Ghost’s throat and a bright, wet pain bloomed there.

Then their weight was gone from him and he was alone on the steps, only the neck of the guitar in his hands, only its cold smooth body pressed against his. A faint keening came from under the porch.

“Mister?” said a small worried voice. “The twins didn’t hurt you, did they? They wouldn’t hurt anybody, not on purpose.” Ghost looked up. The twins’ older brother had returned. Behind him stood Steve, oil-smudged and besweatted, his long muscles tensed, ready to kill anything that had assaulted Ghost.

“I’m not hurt,” Ghost told them, watching their faces.

“Your neck, Ghost,” said Steve quietly, “there in the V.” Ghost put his hand to his collarbone and drew it away sticky, violet with his blood.

II.
BROTHER

The twins were almost fifteen when the angel came and took them away.

No one else in the family ever really loved the twins.

And the twins didn’t love any of us either. Maybe that’s why they were so angry at having been cut apart.

The twins’ names were Michael and Samuel, good names, an archangel and a prophet. But nobody ever called them by those names, and if anybody did, the twins never answered. To us they were just the twins, more than one person, not quite two, separated at the shoulder the day after they were born and nearly bled to death. God’s will be done.

The day they came home from the hospital, Mama hung a picture of Jesus in their room and put them to sleep in their two little cribs. They yelled all day and all night and all of the next day. Mama thought Jesus’s eyes that glowed in the dark were scaring the twins, so she took the picture down, but the twins kept yelling until she put them in a crib together.

After that they had to sleep in the same bed all night, every night, forever—else they would scream just like they had as newborns. Mama took in the town’s mending and dressmaking, and the twins slept in her sewing room among heaps of fabric and crackling tissue patterns, their dreams zigzagged by the whine of the electric sewing machine.

The twins learned to crawl one-armed, a fast scuttle down the hall, over the cabbage rose rug that skinned their knees in the living room. They learned how to pull themselves up, hanging onto each other. If they leaned on each other, they could take a few steps. They wouldn’t come to Mama when she held out her arms, or to Daddy or me either. They hung onto each other and toddled in circles, holding each other up, pulling each other down when they fell.

The twins ate our food and slept in the bed we gave them and let us keep them clean, but we existed only in a tiny corner of their world, a corner reserved for such things as clothes and dinner and the hated baths. When I got old enough to discover the gift God had given me for fixing car engines, they would sometimes come out to the shed and watch me work on some neighbor’s junker. Mostly they ran free in the woods and lived under the porch, playing the games they made up inside their heads. They loved to dance in ritualistic patterns, stepping and bobbing and circling. At the end they would clutch each other tight as ticks, howling if anybody tried to pull them apart.

The twins wouldn’t talk until the summer they were five and I was eight. We prayed for them every Sunday in church. Mama even sent away for some holy oil. It came in little plastic packets like ketchup in a restaurant, and Mama rubbed the twins’ throats with it whenever she caught them sitting still, but they didn’t talk until they were good and ready.

The picture of that summer kitchen, ninety degrees by the Silks Motor Oil thermometer in the window, stays in my head as bright-colored and underwater still and clear as the 3-D scenes in the special Bible Mama got from TV. The twins were sitting at the kitchen table eating peanut butter out of the jar. The peanut butter was soft and caramel-runny around the edges of the jar, and the twins’ faces were smeared with warm tan goo. Mama was getting a can of potted ham out of the cabinet to make me a sandwich.

A fly crawled in through the hole at the bottom of the screen door, made electric loops around the kitchen, and landed on the rim of the peanut butter jar. The twins watched the fly for a second, until it got stuck in the melting peanut butter and began to struggle. Then one twin—Michael—turned around in his chair, looked right at Mama, and said, “What made you think we wanted to be cut apart, anyway?”

Mama’s fingers had just closed around the can of ham. Her hand jerked. I watched the can tumble down and thump from the countertop to the floor. It bounced once and rolled to rest against the side of the plastic trash can. Michael pulled the fly out of the peanut butter, wiped it in a smear of wings and legs and brown stickiness on the edge of the table, and picked up his spoon again.

“I don’t want them around me,” Mama said flatly, later, and the twins were moved out of Mama’s sewing room and into an upstairs guest room which they said was too cold and haunted, and finally into my room. They said they would not sing at night if I would take down the Bible pictures Mama had given me, and we lived in peace.

They were five then.

They were thirteen when Daddy found them in a puddle of blood on the floor of the garage shed. They had a package of razor blades and were huddled near the back wall, behind Daddy’s truck, their gashed shoulders pressed together, bleeding into each other. Between them they had to have thirty stitches. I pulled the blanket over my head that night and listened to them whispering in the next bed.

“I thought we’d grow back together,” said Michael. “I wasn’t going to tell them that.”

“Now it hurts,” mumbled Samuel, close to sleep.

“It always hurt,” said Michael. “That place where they cut us apart.”

III.
GHOST

Ghost dreamed this lifetime, asleep next to Steve in the cold upstairs guest room—a room which was haunted, Ghost knew, but only by the sad thin shade of a cat that had starved to death there fifty years ago, shut in and forgotten by a vacationing family.

The kid knew how to fix Steve’s T-bird, but could not do the work until sundown because it was a Sunday. By that time it was too late to hit the road, so the family allowed Steve and Ghost to stay for ten dollars in the upstairs guest room. Ghost lay awake late fingering the small clean bite mark on his throat and feeling the shade of the cat still roaming and listening to Steve’s even breathing, the breathing of a man at peace with himself and at truce with the world.

Then Ghost was asleep too. He found himself weaving through the milky thick clouds that often swathed him from the waist down in his dreams. In dreams he seldom saw his feet, though he felt that he was barefoot.

He was crossing the front lawn of the house. He passed the muddy hole in the ground, the hole the twins filled with coins and flowers and called a wishing well, and wondered what they wished for there. He skirted the edge of the woods and covered the thirty feet to the shed behind the house with the instantaneous effortlessness of dreams. He was in the garage. The walls bristled with tools. There was a red pickup truck, the old-fashioned kind whose shape always reminded Ghost of a loaf of bread, and a battered warhorse of a Chevrolet that the twins’ brother must work on during the aimless, melting days between the Sundays.

A thin river of blood trickled from between the rear wheels of the truck, cutting a path through the oil and grit on the floor, staining the concrete. The windows of the garage were opaque with moonlight. The windshields, the metal of the tools, glowed faintly blue. The moonlight turned the blood black.

Ghost saw the twins then, jammed together in the corner behind the pickup, naked, their feral faces and narrow chests and broomstick legs slicked with blue-white light, spattered with wet black blood. The raw weals of their shoulders, their scarred flat shoulders, were pressed together, their blood flowing into the gashes they had inflicted upon each other. Their faces were smooth and innocent and utterly blissful.

The slice of the razor. The black blood. The bliss.

“I know what they wish for!" Ghost screamed, waking himself up. Beside him Steve stirred and muttered and pulled all the blankets away, but did not wake. The scream had been only in Ghost’s mind, a dream-scream.

“I know what they wish for,” he whispered, and stared into the darkness for a long time before sitting up.

IV. BROTHER

The other one was just a kid like me, a little older, a little smarter. But the one called Ghost was an angel. I knew it by the wing of hair that fell like flax over his eyes, and by his skin that light shone through, and by the way his hands shaped the air. And I knew it by what I guess you’d call his aura.

Mrs. Carstairs in our church reads them; she can tell a lot about a person by the color of his aura. The twins, she says, share an aura. It is the purple-black of a bruise, and it surrounds them both, connecting them, no matter how far apart they are. I’ve never seen the twins’ aura, nor any other. But anybody could see the golden light surrounding this Ghost, as translucent and yet as heartbreakingly bright as sunlight sifting through pure dawn clouds on Easter morning.

Ghost had risen.

I couldn’t hear his padding feet in the hall, but I saw that golden light breaking across the darkness before he stepped into our room. He glanced at me and thought I was asleep, then bent over the twins’ bed. He was going to get bitten again, I thought. Worse—he was going to get
clawed
.

But the twins reached up to him as they had never reached for anybody but each other, and Ghost, who must have been stronger than he looked, hoisted a twin in each arm and turned to me. He knew I was awake after all. The twins leaned against him, their heads snuggled into his neck and their hands linked across his chest, murmuring sleepily. If anybody could save our twins, this angel could.

“God be with you,” I whispered.

Ghost smiled. His face, even in the dark, was radiant.

“Peace,” he said.

V.
GHOST

He stashed the twins in the back of the T-bird, told them to wait there until morning, and watched them sink back into the easy rhythm of child-sleep, wrapped in the excellent blanket Steve had swiped from some Holiday Inn. The rest of Ghost’s night was dark and dreamless.

At breakfast the next morning, the doughy mother asked where the twins were and the brother looked at Ghost and said, “They went out to the woods already.” Ghost could almost see the kid’s fingers crossing under the table, protecting himself against the lie. The lumpish father grunted. That was the extent of the breakfast conversation, except when Ghost, referring to the plaster decorations in the front hall, said, “Do you know cupids are pagan?” Steve glared at him. Ghost, oblivious, dipped a biscuit in the savory blandness of chicken gravy.

Ghost kindly offered to load up the car while Steve paid for their room and meal. He made the twins hide on the floor of the back seat under the blanket, where they huddled happily. They didn’t show themselves until noon, when Steve pulled into a truck stop for lunch and a dark head rose over the seat and said, “We’re hungry too.”

“You
are
crazy,” Steve said through a mouthful of coffee, his fifth cup. Enchanted, Ghost watched the twins picking apart a piece of pie, eating only the chunks of apple. “You’ve gone too far this time, man. They’ve got our descriptions. Even with that stupid disguise”— Ghost had draped long-sleeved shirts around the twins’ shoulders—“those kids stand out like a nun in a whorehouse. They probably have my fuckin’ license number. We’ll be in the county tank before this day is out, Ghost, you bet on it.”

“I know. We’ll swing for this. Hell, we’ll probably get the chair.” Ghost smiled, an easy, sweet smile, a smile that made Steve want to give him a bloody lip. “Only I don’t think so, Steve. I don’t think we’re being followed. Seems like you might trust me by now.”

Steve opened his mouth. Ghost said, “Who told you Ann would come back to you?” and Steve shut it again, frowned, shook his head. Finally he said, “Just tell me what the hell you want to do with them.”

“We’re taking them to the city,” Ghost said. “And we’re going to set them free.”

In the city—any city, Ghost had said, and so Steve chose the biggest, most anonymous one he could find—Ghost took the twins out one night and came back alone to their motel. His face was chalky and his eyes were red-rimmed, and he got into Steve’s bed and began to sob. Steve held him all night while Ghost dreamed of the ultimate consummation, the rejoining, the flesh melting back to oneness, the holy whole, the denied birthright.

“God be with you,” he whispered over and over into the darkness. “God be with you.”

VI. BROTHER

Mama and Daddy never reported the twins stolen. Said they had run off to play one day and never come back. The woods were searched and the ponds dragged; they found a lot of dead things, but no Michael, no Samuel. Mama didn’t seem to want the twins back. They had always hated going to church.

A few weeks later we got a letter from the city. The twins were dead, it said. Could we come.

In the city morgue, the twins were a vague blurry lump under a plastic blanket, a lump too large to be one person, too small to be two. I looked at their smooth faces and their bodies crusted with blood as the policeman tried to explain. A crackpot doctor, the kind that uses coathangers to tear babies out of women’s wombs in back alleys, had promised the twins he could carry out the operation they wanted. Yes, the doctor was in custody; no, the policeman had no idea where the twins had gotten the money. Angel’s money, I thought.