The ground beyond the grass clearing became soft and dropped into a shallow black-water swamp. We trudged ankle-deep past cypress knees, over roots, sludge and God knows what as the sun dipped low and the woods darkened. Night birds whisked through the branches.
‘You know what lives in this swamp?’ I yelled. Once or twice a year, visiting northerners, men hunting without permit, or hikers found themselves deep in the wetlands and got bitten by a snake or something else invisible and poisonous, and the sheriff’s department airlifted them out – those who had cell phones. Those without cell phones crawled out themselves or didn’t.
Terrence kept going.
I stepped on something hard – a branch, a bone, something. Terrence disappeared in the shadows and reappeared.
‘We’ll die out here!’ I yelled.
Silently he arced to his left. For ten minutes he turned through the darkening woods before I realized he was taking us back to the clearing. A three-quarter moon was rising as we climbed, legs caked with swamp mud, back on to the grass. He crossed the clearing and sat facing me. I sat too. For a long time we stayed silent as the sky turned black and insects, frogs and birds began to make a low nocturnal hum. The moon cast a yellow light. Thirst and hunger gnawed at my throat and belly.
I said, ‘When your mother and I met we were just kids but I’d never seen anyone like her and I’ve never seen anyone like her since.’
He said nothing.
I said, ‘She had no limits. There was nothing she wouldn’t do. That’s how it seemed to me then. And that was freeing to me because until I met her I was … cautious. Overly. I grew because of her. I lived. Do you understand?’
For a while he was quiet. Then he said, ‘You screwed a girl when you were a teenager and you never got over it. That’s what I understand.’
‘It was love,’ I said.
‘It’s pathetic.’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘Between love and being pathetic? Yeah,’ he said. ‘There’s a big difference.’
‘I don’t think I want your opinion.’
‘You’re insane,’ he said.
I laughed at this man, whose blood I shared, who’d killed his own mother and trussed her and wrapped her in a plastic bag like she was supermarket meat. I laughed, surrounded by miles of forest, sitting across a grass clearing from him – this man who I wanted to kill and save.
When I stopped, we sat quietly again, eyes on each other in the moonlight. The sounds from the trees ebbed and flowed and the woods seemed to tighten on us. I was thirsty and hungry and felt a bone-deep fatigue. The moon cocked high in the sky and, although the night was clear for as far as I could see, distant thunder rumbled.
I wondered about Terrence. What if I hadn’t been his father? Would that make any difference? I’d told Charles that he was mine, that he needed to be, and I felt that the past few days had made this much true.
I called to him, ‘When I first met you, I didn’t recognize myself in you. I didn’t see it.’
He said nothing and we fell back into silence.
The heat, humidity and darkness clung to me. The moon shined, a single dull eye, three quarters open. It was nothing like the single eye of light on the approaching train engine on the last afternoon that Belinda and I spent together. She’d let her blouse fall between the railroad tracks. She’d unhooked her bra and let it fall too. I’d told her I loved her. She’d told me she loved me too. As the train had closed on us, its whistle blowing, she’d come, bucking like a terrible muscle. I’d ripped away and crawled down the embankment and she’d lain between the rails, her legs open, and waited for the train to take her. I’d opened my mouth to scream, and when it had seemed too late, when the train was yards or feet from her, she’d rolled off the tracks and on to the other embankment. Away from me. Away. With a freight train between us. Because – I knew then and still knew – there was no other way to divide from each other.
No other way. Terrence knew nothing about the past.
The night flaked away. The forest noises rose to a high pitch, then lowered as animals found mates or prey, and for a while all was silent except our breathing and our beating hearts. The moon hung overhead and began to descend to the west and sometime I drifted into an unpeaceful half-sleep in which the darkness and moonlight and the noise and silence blurred and left me in a spot between the world and unconsciousness.
Soft footsteps woke me. I opened my eyes and saw Terrence a few yards from me. The moonlight shined on his face. He held a heavy branch. I leaped up and he dropped the branch and ran back to his spot in the clearing. It happened, it seemed, without a sound.
I stood in the night. ‘You were going to kill me.’
He asked, ‘What did you expect?’
A good question. What did I expect? I still didn’t know what I would do to him when I got my hands on him. I’d chased him across the city and through the woods all afternoon and into the night. That was more than enough to make him think he needed to defend himself by crushing my head while I slept. But he’d run from me as soon as he’d seen me outside his burning house, and he’d already seemed to think that I was dangerous to him. He would’ve heard the stories about me beating the men who’d attacked the Honduran students and breaking the ribs of the man who was riding with a Garfield doll after the rape and killing of a six-year-old boy. But those were old stories and they hadn’t seemed to worry him when I’d first talked with him.
What had happened since then? Mainly, as far as he was concerned, I’d talked with Don Melchiori who’d all but told me that Terrence had murdered Belinda and the others – and then I’d talked to Godrell Graham who’d told me the same thing and then had warned me to keep my hands off Terrence and let everything play out. Would Melchiori or Graham tell Terrence that I was coming after him? If Graham was to be believed, he had no love of Terrence. But he might use him to punish the men and women who’d killed his daughter. Would Graham call Terrence to warn him about the conversation we’d had? If so, Terrence’s fear of me would make sense.
A phone call from Graham would also explain the house fire. If Terrence thought that I was coming after him, he might think the best way he could clean the house of evidence would be to burn it.
I called across the clearing, ‘Why did you light the house on fire?’
No response.
‘Did you burn your collection of pictures?’ I asked. ‘Or did you bury them in your backyard? I’m guessing you hid them. I’m guessing you couldn’t give them up.’
After a long silence, he said, ‘I see why my mom was afraid of you.’
The words hit me like a boot. ‘She wasn’t afraid of me.’
‘Did she call you when we moved back south?’
‘No,’ I admitted more to myself than him.
‘She didn’t tell you about me and when we moved back she didn’t let you know. I wonder why, unless she was afraid.’
‘I hurt her a long time ago,’ I said. ‘I let her down. She didn’t get over it. Neither of us did.’
‘That’s not all of it.’
‘You weren’t there,’ I said.
‘But she told me about it. I know what you did to your friend Christopher with the stone. Was he the first person you tried to kill? It took my mom a lot of years to forgive you for that.’
‘I did that for her.’
‘I know all about you,’ he said.
‘You’re confused, Terrence.’
‘Hell, I probably know more about you than you do,’ he said.
‘You know nothing.’
Hours passed. The moon set in the west and the sky turned black except for faint light from the stars. I couldn’t see Terrence across the clearing. But now and then he made a noise in the dark, and the trees and the swamp absorbed the sound. I couldn’t see my own feet or legs and felt myself dissolving into the dark as if by morning the swamp surrounding the grass clearing would suck in all that had ever been of me. I no longer felt I knew who I was, no longer felt it was important that I should know.
I stood in the darkness and went after Terrence, determined to kill him or die at his hands. The turf was soft under my feet. Swamp mud had dried on my pant legs and clung to my ankles like boots. I moved slowly and silently and smelled my own vinegary sweat and nerves. I crept closer, looking for a deeper darkness. Then I realized I was standing on a spot of trampled grass and Terrence was no longer there.
I spun.
He was swinging the branch at me. I raised my arms too late. The branch clubbed me below the ear and for a moment afterward the shadow of Terrence stood in front of me, panting. Then I fell through the dark.
I landed face down and waited for the club to drop again and crush my skull. I waited, powerless to get up, and I didn’t beg Terrence to spare me and didn’t pray to God to take me when I died. The idea of dying in a clearing of the woods gave me no peace and I waited for the inevitability of it.
But a killing blow never came. I listened. Terrence was splashing through the swamp. My eyes cleared. His branch lay by my side. I pushed myself to my hands and knees, got up and staggered, sick to my stomach. My head spun. I stumbled across the turf to the edge of the clearing, grabbed a tree and stumbled into the swamp after Terrence. My throat burning, I ran, following the sound of Terrence’s splashing footsteps. Branches raked across my arms, body and neck. Oily leaves pressed against my cheeks. There was life in the swamp that could poison me or tear me apart and I didn’t care.
Another night seemed to pass in the swamp before a gray dawn began to brighten the trees. Wisps of fog hung above the black water. Leaves and scum floated on the surface. The branches of sweet gum trees, cypress and loblolly pines dripped with dew. I stepped into a hole, tumbled forward and got back to my feet, slick and filthy. The fat waists of the swamp trees, blistered with lichen and pink fungus, funneled outward into the water. Terrence ran and stumbled as though the devil were after him.
The swamp became shallow and we crossed a muddy flat, dropped into knee-deep water and climbed a sandy bank. Terrence ran through the trees until he came to a chain-link fence, after which lay an RV park, a flea market and then the Interstate. He climbed the fence and as he jumped to the ground I caught up and we stared at each other for a moment with only inches of air and interlaced wire between us, and in his scratched, filthy face I knew I was looking at an image of my own. A small laugh escaped from my throat and seemed to scare him. He ran and I climbed the fence and went after him,
No one was outside in the RV park. We ran down a concrete aisle past quiet campers, bicycles, potted palms and plastic tables littered with beer bottles. At the end of the aisle a deteriorating sign said Welcome – Pecan Park Flea and Farmers’ Market. Three yellow-and-blue metal sheds, each a city block long, were closed, their metal garage doors pulled down, blue plastic tarps tied over the openings. When the market opened, J&J Blades would sell cane machetes and Samurai swords and other vendors would sell boiled peanuts, bootleg martial arts videos and automobile tires shined with Armor All until they gleamed like hot, wet asphalt. On weekends a Ukrainian immigrant would set up a table display of hollow-glass swans filled with colored water.
Terrence ran between the sheds and out on to a grass parking lot. Another chain-link fence stood between the lot and an embankment to the Interstate. He scrambled over the top and up to the highway shoulder.
Cars and semi-trailers shot past. To the east the sun was rising, orange and enormous. As I climbed over the fence and started up the embankment, Terrence tried to cross but a Landstar truck blasted its horn and he dodged back to the side. He ran toward the oncoming traffic, tried again and got to the median, where he climbed between the guard rails.
‘No more running,’ I yelled.
He climbed over the other rail.
‘You’ve got to face me sooner or later,’ I yelled.
A gap appeared in the traffic between us. I ran toward him. He stepped into the highway on the other side. A car blew its horn and shifted lanes to avoid hitting him. I cleared the first guard rail and he tried again. He got across the first lane and most of the second. Then a red convertible, its roof down, its headlights on as if to focus on a target, clipped him. He flew twenty or twenty-five feet and landed on the roadside gravel.
The convertible pulled to the side and other cars and trucks stopped. Terrence wasn’t moving. Men and women dressed for the workday surrounded him, two calling 911 on their cell phones, and I walked over and joined them. Terrence lay face down, his left arm stretched beside him, a broken bone sticking through the skin. I watched his back for breathing and saw none. My stomach turned.
Then he moved his good arm and the crowd gasped. He pushed himself on to his knees, the fabric of his pants torn and bloody, and rose unsteadily to his feet. The driver of the convertible, a blonde woman in her twenties, wearing beach shorts and a bikini top, cried and reached for him, and others moved close as though he were a hatchling who might need their help to stand, but he stumbled away from the circle until he reached a blue sedan that was idling on the roadside. He leaned against the trunk and everyone moved toward him but he stood on his own and stepped back into the highway. He went to the driver’s door and climbed in. The owner of the car seemed uncertain what to do and, by the time he decided Terrence didn’t belong in the car, Terrence had locked it, shifted into drive and hit the accelerator.
I looked around frantically for another car but none had been left running. ‘I need a car,’ I yelled, and everyone backed away from me as if I were the monster who’d made the morning bloody.
Some got in their cars and drove away. Others waited for the police. I sat on the highway shoulder and wept.