The Last Family (35 page)

“He’s not dead,” Martin had offered. “Gonna stick him in the other eye?”

“Reflexes prob’ly. Go in the house so you won’t mess up your good pj’s. Now, if anybody ever asks, you were asleep and never heard a sound or nothin’. And Daddy had been drinking somethin’ awful for days and crying about how he never did amount to mithin’. Give Mama a kiss.”

Martin kissed the cheek she offered. “Didn’t ’mount ta nuthin’,” Martin practiced. “Drunk all the time lately. Cryin’. An’ didn’t you warn him afore you stuck his eye out? You bet you did.”

“No, Martin, Now, listen to Mama. You forget the warning and stickin’ the eye part, because it didn’t happen. You say that, you’ll get us both electrocuted or
hanged and put in the cold ground where the worms will eat our faces off.”

“Turn us into old skeleton bones.”

“Exactly.”

Martin nodded to himself even as he had nodded to her that night. She had smiled at him, kissed his forehead, mussed his hair, and directed him by turning his shoulders facing toward the back door. “Go inside and say your prayers and get ready for bed. I’ll be in to tuck you in.” She pulled him to her and pressed his face against the furry place between her legs. He could recall the smell, a strangely comforting blend of musky perspiration and a hint of stale urine. Then she had pushed him off toward the house.

He had knelt on the braided rug, folded his hands, and begun his prayers as soon as he got inside. He always minded. He’d heard the blast, and it looked as though someone had fired a flashbulb outside. Before he was finished praying for all the things he had to keep up—now his father’s soul going to heaven had to be included—he heard his mother turn on the shower and pull the curtain. Then he finished with the Lord’s Prayer, climbed into bed, and listened to Eve singing her South Pacific song, which she usually did with the hi-fi on full blast.

“I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair … gonna wash that man right outta my hair … gonna wash that man straight on outta my hair … and send him on his wayyyyy!”

The next morning he had awakened and had gone out to see if he had imagined it all. There was what had once passed for his father, the first stiff he’d ever seen, with half of his head gone. The sight would always remind him of a ruined picture, with the pierced-eye side turned to one gaping hole—the skull all but empty. The remaining eye bulged out a full inch at the end of the optic nerve bundle. It fascinated Martin, and he had crouched for a better look while minding that he didn’t get any of the ick on him.

The shotgun had been placed so his father’s thumb was hooked inside the trigger guard. The bark on the tree behind him was deeply gouged and stained deep rusty brown. The drying brains were coated with crawling blowflies, and a trail of ants entered the pajama-pant leg and fanned out through the opened shirt collar across the face and inside.

“Life is competition,” his mother had told him, shocking him. “It’s eat or get et. And never let anyone do you bad less you pay ’em back fivefold.” He turned to find her standing on the steps with a cup of coffee in her hand and a cigarette pegged into the corner of her lips. She put a hand on his shoulder.

“Come, and I’ll fix you some eggs like you like ’em. Then I better call the cops and say I found him. Maybe I’ll say you found him and you can like stare at ’em with your mouth open and not answer their questions so you don’t let nothin’ slip out you shouldn’t. Seems like nobody reported the shot. The hell is wrong with people these days?”

The police hadn’t seemed all that interested, and the questions they asked had been met with Martin’s straight face.

“Boy might best see a psychiatrist,” one cop said. “This can turn a kid nuts. Turns grown men nuts.”

He remembered how he had slept with Eve in the years after that night. He wondered whether he had instigated the bedroom play or had merely understood her needs. He was twelve at the time, maybe thirteen when the sex started. He remembered that he had had pubic hair and his mother had taken that as a sign to start his education. The first step was to teach him how to touch her in that special way—how powerful it had made him feel to be able to create the orgasms in her—control her breathing with the pressure and motion in his fingers. He loved to watch her lose control and flail and make the noises she had made only for his father before. She had never discussed it, but she had shown him how wonderful an orgasm could feel. She had rubbed his erect penis with warm lotion until it had throbbed—hurt, but hurt in
a divine way, and had taken it in her hand like a bar of soap and rubbed her hands together vigorously until the thing erupted, squirting from his navel to his lips. It made him feel good—no, beyond wonderful. Martin felt blessed to have had such an understanding, giving, and strong mother.

Her love was an all-powerful and totally giving thing. It was instruction. A lesson for a better life. “This is what girls all want,” she’d say as he started rubbing at her. “For a big man like you to get them to a special place. The place where the cat goes in his mind when he purrs.”

He called up the memory of a black girl his mother had brought him for his pleasure. He had loved her skin, the ebony breasts with the hard purple nipples, the soft hair in her armpits, the narrow waist, the hard rounded buttocks, the muscular legs, the dark slippery-wet vagina that reminded him of an orchid. The smell of her breath, of her sex, their sweat and his semen. Eve called her their maid, but her real job was to please Martin sexually. His mother must have paid her well, because she was with them three days a week for a year or so. She told Martin that she liked fucking a lot better than doing housework—in fact, she loved to fuck. Any way Martin wanted it. Any way at all, and she was eager to teach him new ways to please her. Martin spent most of their sessions experimenting, keeping copious notes, and when she was away, he would dream of what they would do next time and write it down in detail. She seemed to love it. Not that it mattered to him. She, the person inside that sleek, black, seallike skin, meant no more to him than a squirrel playing in the oak trees outside the window. She was hardly more in his mind than a sock to toss off into.

After that girl came around, Eve’s own lessons in physical love had ended. He missed them, but growth is change, and change is good. But the spiritual love, the undying gratitude he felt for her support and comfort, had endured. From his mother there were no secrets, only shades of the truth for her consumption. She loved
Martin’s soul and he loved hers. They might be the only two people on earth with souls. He was truly content only when she held him against her and talked softly to him. No one could ever understand their love. No one.

Besides, he remembered her earliest admonition as she worked over his manhood with her oiled hands. “In nature a mother’s love is a pure thing—a real thing. After all, what’s a man but a tame animal? Animals in the wild do it with their mothers, so it’s natural as anything.”

A garbage truck blowing past interrupted his memories. He opened his eyes and glanced at his watch. He couldn’t get back into the moment for a while, but with concentration he was back there as though it had all happened a week earlier instead of over thirty years. The evening before, Martin had seen the Cadillac on the news as it had been pulled from the river like some great fish from the depths, the driver’s form a bloated shadow; his left arm caught in the rush of escaping water had waved like a flipper. PROMINENT LOCAL BUSINESSMAN SLAIN. Front-page banner. Even in a city as numbed to murder as New Orleans, it warranted celebrity handling. There were photos of Lallo Estevez with his young children, with the mayor, the present governor, who was the past governor as well. There was a shot of his chauffeur standing at attention while Lallo entered the limousine. The gangster with his extra smile who had been discovered by the towboat crew was buried in a lower column in section B. Martin had hoped that the car wouldn’t be discovered before he had finished in New Orleans. But it added an interesting addition to the mix, and he couldn’t have let that business lag or affect the mission he had devoted the last six years to. Add another variable into the complex equation. They would try to catch him with his mother in Florida—but had no idea of how slim the odds of their succeeding really were. He smiled at the thought of how he would make the DEA professionals look like what they were: dead clowns.

At two o’clock Erin walked through the school doors in the center of a wave of kids. She was barely able to contain
her excitement. She exchanged looks with Eric Garcia and was sure she was blushing. They had spent ten minutes formulating a plan at recess. He had all afternoon to spend as he saw fit. She didn’t, but hadn’t told him that. She had told him that her father had bodyguards watching her—that he was a DEA agent and worried excessively. If Eric had been reluctant to date the daughter of a federal agent who put watchdogs on his daughter’s tail, he didn’t give any indication of it. In fact, the challenge of seeing her under such circumstances seemed to excite him.

Erin saw Sean standing beneath a tree in the schoolyard with his hands in the pockets of his seersucker suit coat. He was wearing dark glasses, but she knew his eyes were locked on her. He wouldn’t approach her but would walk behind her all the way home. They had wanted to drive her from door to door, but she had refused flatly. Her mother had reluctantly taken her side, saying that they could cover her without embarrassing her in front of her friends. As she passed Sean, he started walking. She looked over her shoulder and saw Eric slide into his mother’s gray Mercedes.

Erin walked the two blocks to the streetcar stop. She turned to find Sean standing three feet behind her, surveying the people nearby. He met her stare.

“Hi,” she said.

He nodded. “Where’s your Mace?” he said.

“Haven’t got a refill yet. So where’s my ten bucks, and I can go over to K and B for one?”

He reached into his pocket and started going through his wallet. He handed her a ten.

“Okay, we’re even.” She put it into the zippered compartment on her backpack. “It
was
your fault, you know.”

“If you say so.”

“Okay, so let’s let bygones be bygones,” she said. She handed him her book bag. “Least you can do is carry my books. They’re heavy.”

Erin looked out of the corner of her eye as the streetcar approached. There were maybe a dozen kids and a
few adults waiting for the car. Sean took the bag with his left hand and placed the strap over his shoulder. The car pulled up, and the conductor opened the front and rear doors simultaneously. People started climbing in through the front while others exited through the rear doors. Sean and Erin were going to be last in.

“After you,” she said.

He smiled and started to climb in. Then he realized something was happening, and he turned to see her running for a nearby Mustang that had pulled up crowded with young girls. Before he could close the distance, Erin jumped over the door of the car, fell in among the other bodies, and the tires squealed as the vehicle pulled away from the curb, the laughter of girls filling the air. Sean cursed out loud as he ran after the car until it was obvious that he was never going to come within a hundred yards. He turned in time to see the streetcar pulling away, leaving him standing in the middle of St. Charles holding her book bag. He was filled with dread as he fished the cell phone from his breast pocket.

A battered Chevrolet Caprice honked at him, and he stepped to the curb, cursing and feeling very small. He heard the car’s driver laughing as it pulled by him, a loud barking that ricocheted around in the car’s interior. The big automobile roared off in the direction the Mustang had gone.

Seconds later the prowl car that had been providing additional cover wheeled up beside Sean, and he jumped into the backseat. They gave chase, but the next light changed before they got there, and a line of cars began moving across the intersection immediately. The policeman turned on his blue lights, and the cars moved grudgingly aside. Sean cursed out loud, but by the time the prowl car had cleared the intersection, the Mustang had several blocks on them.

38

W
OODY CARRIED THE SMALL NYLON BOOK SACK AS HE ESCORTED
Reb to the red Volvo 850 that he had parked by the front doors. Children were scattering as they passed out of the doors of the buildings. Reb’s bus was in the line, along with ten others waiting for their passengers.

“Why can’t I ride the bus?” Reb asked as they reached the car. “And you follow like always.”

“Not today.” Woody’s reply was flat, businesslike. Alton Vance, one of the agents who had spent the last few days watching over Reb’s school, was in the rear seat, waiting.

Woody scanned the line of cars and buses for anyone who might be out of place before he climbed into the Volvo. Reb looked at the agent in the backseat. “Hi,” he said. His eyes rested on the short black object beside the agent’s leg. “What’s that?” he said, barely able to mask the excitement.

“That’s my water gun,” the agent said, smiling.

“It’s an Uzi, isn’t it?”

“Belt in, Reb,” Woody said.

“Can I shoot it sometime?”

“Get your hands wet. It leaks something awful,” Alton Vance said.

Woody cut his eyes to the backseat, and the agent shifted uncomfortably. Then he looked at Reb. “Forget it,” he said. He reached over and belted Reb into the seat. As they were pulling out, the cell phone rang. Woody opened it and put it to his ear. “Yeah?”

The agent listened for a few seconds and then put the telephone in his lap. The car accelerated rapidly and kept gaining speed until the needle was passing eighty. Alton’s eyes met Woody’s in the rearview.

“All
right,”
Reb said, his eyes searching Woody and the speedometer. “Smoke it, baby!”

Alton’s eyes asked the question.

“Sean dropped the package on St. Charles,” Woody said.

Alton tensed and nodded.

Reb looked up at Woody. “That’s code. A package means a person. ‘Dropped’ means ‘killed’?
He killed somebody?”