The White Road

I raised my eyebrows in a poor imitation of hurt.

“Of course not,” I assured her. “I’m a man. Sex is what I want.”

I could taste her laughter on my tongue as we gently began the slow dance together.

In blackness I awoke. There was no car waiting, yet the road seemed newly empty.

I left the bedroom and walked softly down to the kitchen. I could no longer sleep. When I reached the final steps, I saw that Walt was sitting in the doorway to the living room. His ears were erect and his tail was beating slowly on the floor. He looked at me once, then returned his attention to the room beyond. When I scratched at his ear, he didn’t respond. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on a patch of darkness in the corner, denied light by the thick drapes but darker yet than it should have been, like a hole torn between worlds.

Something in that darkness had drawn the dog close to it.

I found the only weapon to hand-the letter opener on the coatstand-and palmed it, then stepped into the room, conscious of my nakedness.

“Who’s there?” I asked. At my feet, Walt let out a little whine, but it was more excitement than fear. I moved closer to the darkness.

And a hand emerged.

It was a woman’s hand, very white. Three horizontal wounds had been torn upon it so deeply that I could see the exposed bones in the fingers. The wounds were old, gray brown within, and the skin had hardened around them. There was no blood. The hand extended farther, palm facing out, fingers raised,

stop

and I knew that these wounds were only the first, that she had lifted up her hands against the blade but it had made its way to her face and her body despite them, and there were more cuts like this upon her, made unto death and beyond.

please

I stopped.

Who are you?

you’re looking for me

Cassie?

i felt you looking for me

Where are you?

lost

What can you see?

nothing

dark

Who did this to you? Who is he?

not one

many in one

Then I heard a whispering begin, and other voices joined with her own.

cassie let me speak let me talk to him cassie will he help us does he know cassie does he know my name cassie can he tell me my name cassie cassie can he take me away from here cassie i want to go home please i’m lost cassie please i want to go home

please

Cassie, who are they?

i don’t know

i can’t see them

but they’re all here

he put us all here

Then, from behind me, a hand touched my bare shoulder, and Rachel was beside me, her breasts against my back, the feel of the sheets cool against my skin. The voices were fading, barely audible, yet desperate and insistent.

please

And in her sleep, Rachel’s brow furrowed and she whispered softly:

“Please.”

8

I FLEW OUT of the Portland Jetport the next morning. It was early Sunday and the roads were still quiet when Rachel dropped me at the door of the terminal building. I had already called Wallace MacArthur to confirm that I was leaving and had passed on my cell phone and hotel numbers to him. Rachel had arranged a date for him with a friend of hers named Mary Mason, who lived out at Pine Point. Rachel knew her from the local Audubon Society and figured that she and Wallace would probably get along pretty well. Wallace had taken the trouble to check out her photo through the BMV and had professed himself pleased with his prospective mate.

“She looks good,” he told me.

“Yeah, well don’t get too cocky. She hasn’t seen you yet.”

“What’s not to love?”

“You have a pretty healthy self-image, Wallace. In anyone else it would come across as smugness, but you manage to pull it off.”

There was a noticeable pause before he asked:

“Seriously?”

Rachel leaned across and kissed me on the lips. I held her head close to mine.

“You take care of yourself,” she said.

“You too. You got your cell phone?”

She dutifully raised her phone from her bag.

“And you’re going to leave it on?”

She nodded.

“All the time?”

Pursed lips. Shrug. Reluctant nod.

“I’ll be calling to check.”

She punched me on the arm. “Go get on your plane. There are flight attendants waiting to be charmed.”

“Seriously?” I said, and instantly wondered if I had more in common with Wallace MacArthur than was really healthy.

She smiled. “Yep. You need all the practice you can get.”

Louis once told me that the New South was like the Old South, except everybody was ten pounds heavier. He was probably kind of bitter, and he certainly wasn’t a fan of South Carolina, often considered the most redneck state in the South after Mississippi and Alabama, although it had managed its racial affairs in a slightly more developed way. When Harvey Gantt became the first black student to go to Clemson College in South Carolina, the legislature, rather than opting for blockades and guns, grudgingly accepted that the time for change had come. Still, it was in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1968 that three black students were killed during demonstrations outside the whites-only All Star Bowling Alley; anyone over forty in South Carolina had probably gone to a segregated school; and there were still those who believed that the Confederate flag should fly over the state capitol in Columbia. Now they were naming lakes after Strom Thurmond, as if segregation had never happened.

I flew into Charleston International via Charlotte, which seemed to be a kind of clearinghouse for the runts of evolution and a dumping ground for the worst fashion excesses of the polyester industry. Fleetwood Mac was playing on the jukebox in the Taste of Carolina saloon, where overweight men in shorts and T-shirts drank light beers in a fog of cigarette smoke, the women beside them feeding quarters into the poker machines that stood on the polished wood of the bar. A man with a tattoo of a skull in joker’s regalia on his left arm gave me a hard look from where he sat, splay-legged, at a low table, the neck of his T-shirt soaked with sweat. I held his gaze until he belched and looked away with a studiedly bored expression on his face.

I checked the screens for my departure gate. There were planes flying out of Charlotte to places that nobody in his right mind would want to visit, the kind of places where the routes should have been strictly one-way, heading out of there to just about anywhere else, doesn’t matter, just get me a damn ticket. We boarded on time and I sat beside a big man with a Charleston Fire Department cap on his head. He leaned across me to look out at the military vehicles and aircraft on the Tarmac, and at a US Airways Express twin-prop that was taxiing toward the runway.

“Glad we’re on one of these here jets and not one of them little biddy planes,” he said.

I nodded as he took in the aircraft and the buildings of the main terminal. “I remember when Charlie was just a little old two-runway place,” he continued. “Hell, they was still building it. That was when I was in th’ army…”

I closed my eyes.

It was the longest short flight of my life.

Charleston International was near empty when we landed, the walkways and stores largely devoid of passengers. To the northwest, at Charleston AFB, gray green military aircraft stood in the afternoon sun, tensed like locusts prepared for flight.

They picked me up at the baggage claim, close by the car rental counters. There were two men, one of them fat and wearing a bright hemp shirt, the other older with slicked back dark hair, dressed in a T-shirt and vest beneath a black linen jacket. They watched me discreetly as I stood at the Hertz counter, then waited at the side door of the terminal building as I walked through the heat of the parking lot to the small marquee beneath which my rented Mustang was waiting. By the time I had the keys in my hand, they were sitting in a big Chevy Tahoe at the intersection with the main exit road and they stayed two cars behind me all the way to the interstate. I could have lost them, but there didn’t seem to be much point. I knew they were there, and that was what mattered.