He was bent over, trying to determine where the fire had started, and had no awareness that I was standing immediately behind him. He kicked at the can of paint thinner. Then he saw me. Even in the poor light, I saw his mouth open and the blood go out of his face.
“Who are you?” he said.
&nb
sp; I stared at him and said nothing, as though he were the aberration and not I. His eyes dropped to the trade ax in my hand. “Maybe you don’t know I’m a detective with the Houston Police Department. If this has to do with the girl, she’s a runaway. I was trying to he’p her. That’s why you’re here? The girl?”
His face was glistening with rainwater, his hair splayed on his scalp, which was striped with welts where Rosita had scalded him. I saw him wet his lips and swallow. The holster of a small nickel-plated revolver was clipped on the left side of his belt.
“Let’s get the girl down here, if it’ll make you feel better. She’ll tell you everything is okay. You hearing me? You deaf or something? Maybe you got no voice box? Look, Flora’s coming now.”
It was a poor ruse, but one he probably used successfully before. Deceit, manipulation, guile, cruelty, and fear were the sum total of who and what he was. Back then we often sent his kind as our emissaries into black neighborhoods and later wondered why they hated us. I continued to hold my eyes on his, my fingers squeezing the hardwood handle of the ax.
I knew it was coming. What is “it”? “It” is that moment when the coward’s fear is so great, he has nowhere to put it except inside eternity, and that’s when he steps irrevocably across a line. His right hand reached for the butt of his revolver.
My first blow caught him across the side of the face, laying open a huge flap of skin, one of his eyes bulging like a marble. I hit him again, somewhere in the neck, then in the head. He was bent almost double, like a man with a violent stomachache. I could no longer see his right hand or determine if he had gotten his hand on his revolver. I knew only that I was hitting him, the blade of the ax rising and falling as though it had a will of its own. I knew that with each blow, he descended closer and closer to the floor, taking his evil with him. I knew, as Grandfather had said, that I was slinging his blood over every surface inside the shed. Let no man tell you our simian ancestor is not alive and well and waiting for his moment to come aborning again.
When I stopped, the only sounds I heard were a pinecone tinkling across the tin roof of the shed, a boat horn blowing on the river, an owl screeching in the trees. I backed out of the shed, unable to take my eyes off what I had done, the ax dripping in the dirt. When I turned around, the young girl from the trailer was staring at me, trembling in the cold, too frightened to speak.
“Don’t be afraid, Flora,” I said.
“How do you know my name?”
“He used it when he tried to trick me into looking behind me. You’re in no danger.”
“Is he dead?”
“I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. It’s over.”
She had a pug nose and freckles and chestnut hair that was cut short and curled on the ends; her shoulders and arms were prickled in the wind. The accent was East Texas. “I won’t tell. I promise,” she said.
“Did he harm you?”
She turned her cheek into the light from the trailer so I could see the bruise on it.
“What else?”
“What else what?”
“What else did he do to you?”
She began to breathe through her nose, her lips pressed tightly together.
I picked up Slakely’s revolver from the floor of the shed and threw it out the broken window into the mud. Then I removed his wallet from his back pocket. It held around sixty dollars. I could not tell if Slakely was alive or dead. His eyes were shut, his mouth open. A piece of tooth was on his lip. I took twenty dollars from my own wallet and gave it and Slakely’s money to the girl.
“I’m going to take this bandanna off. I’m going to do so because I don’t like frightening you. This man did great injury to people I love. One of those people is my wife. Because of this man, I may lose her. He also pulled a weapon on me, and I’m sure if he’d had the chance, he would have killed me. You can stay here or ride with me back to Houston. If you like, I can drop you at the train station or the bus depot.”
“You’d do that?”
I flung the trade ax end over end into a bog by the river’s edge. “Do you have a coat?”
“He took it from me.”
“Put this on,” I said. I draped my jacket across her shoulders. “I bet you have a lot of good things waiting for you down the road. I bet you’re a fine young woman. The bad things are behind you, the good things are in front of you. It’s that simple.”
I TRIED FOUR TIMES to see Rosita at the county hospital. I was told she couldn’t have visitors. She was “undergoing treatment and resting” and “being reclassified for possible release or transfer.” For a moment I felt a surge of hope in my chest, as though a terrible mistake were about to be corrected and I would discover that a conspiracy was not at work in our lives, that in effect the problem lay in my perception. Then the nurse looked again at the clipboard in her hand and knitted her brow. “Excuse me, I was wrong. The diagnosis has been completed, but no determination has been made regarding treatment,” she said. “You’ll have to come back later. She’s in good hands.”
“You listen to me—”