The White Road

I didn’t know where the woman was. I knew only that she had left the house shortly before us.

“You didn’t kill Maria

I repeated the comment.

“What does it matter?” he replied.

“It matters to me. It probably mattered to Maria

“They say the boy killed her, and he ain’t about to contradict them now.”

I stopped rowing, and heard the click of the hammer cocking a moment later.

“Don’t make me shoot you, Mr. Parker.”

I rested the oars and raised my hands.

“She did it, didn’t she? Melia killed Maria

He regarded me silently for a time before he spoke.

“She knows this river,” he said. “Knows the swamps. She wanders in them. Sometimes, she likes to watch the folks drinkin’ and whorin’. I guess it reminds her of what she lost, of what they took away from her. It was just pure dumb luck that she saw Maria

“Dumb luck,” he intoned again. “That’s all it was.”

But it wasn’t, of course. The history of these two families, the Larousses and the Joneses, the blood spilled and lives destroyed, meant that it could never be anything as pure as luck or coincidence that drew them together. Over more than two centuries they had bound themselves, each to the other, in a pact of mutual destructiveness only partly acknowledged on either side, fueled by a past that allowed one man to own and abuse another and fa

“Did she know that the boy with Maria

“She didn’t see him until the girl was dead. I-”

He stopped.

“Like I said, I don’t know what she thinks, but she can read some. She saw the newspapers, and I think she used to watch the jailhouse some, late at night.”

“You could have saved him,” I said. “By coming forward with her, you could have saved Atys. No court would convict her of murder. She’s insane.”

“No, I couldn’t do that.”

He couldn’t do it because then he would not have been able to continue punishing the rapists and killers of the woman he had loved. Ultimately, he was prepared to sacrifice his own son for revenge.

“You killed the others?”

“We did, the two of us together.”

He had rescued her and kept her safe, then killed for her and the memory of her sister. In a way, he had given up his life for them.

“It was how it had to be,” he said, as if guessing the direction of my thoughts. “And that’s all I got to say.”

I started to row again, drawing deep arcs through the water, the droplets falling back to the river in what seemed like impossibly languid descents, as if somehow I were slowing down the passage of time, drawing each moment out, longer and longer again, until at last the world would stop, the oars frozen at the moment they broke the water, the birds trapped in midflight, the insects caught like motes of dust in a picture frame, and we would never have to go forward again, we would never have to find ourselves by the lip of that dark pit, with its smells of engine oil and effluent, and the memory of the burning marked with black tongues along the grooves of its stone.

“There’s just two left,” said Tereus at one point. “Just two more, and it will all be over.”

And I could not tell if he was talking to himself, or to me, or to some unseen other. I looked to the bank and half-expected to see her shadowing our progress, a figure consumed by pain. Or to see her sister, her jaw hanging loose, her head ruined but her eyes wild and bright, burning with a rage fierce as the flames that had engulfed her sister.

But there was only tree shade and the darkening sky, and waters glittering with the fragmented ghosts of early moonlight.

“This is where we get off,” he whispered.

I steered the boat toward the left bank. When it struck land I heard a soft splash behind me and saw that Tereus was already out of the boat. He gestured for me to move toward the trees, and I began to walk. My trousers were wet and swamp water squelched in my shoes. I was covered in bites; my face felt swollen from them, and the exposed skin of my back and chest itched furiously.

“How do you know that they’ll be here?” I asked.

“Oh, they’ll be here,” he said. “I promised them the two things they wanted the most: the answer to who killed Maria

“And?”

“And you, Mr. Parker. They’ve decided that you’ve outlived your usefulness. That Mr. Kittim, I reckon he’s go

I knew that it was true, that the part Kittim was to play represented the last act in the drama they had pla

“But you’re not going to hand Melia over to them,” I said.

“No, I’m going to kill them.”

“Alone.”

His white teeth gleamed.

“No,” he said. “I told you. Not alone. Never alone.”

It was still as Poveda had described it after all these years. There was the broken fence that I had skirted days earlier and the pock-marked NO TRESPASSING sign. I could see the sinkholes, some of them small and masked by vegetation, others so large that whole trees had fallen into them. We had walked for about five minutes when I smelled an acrid chemical stink in the air that at first was merely unpleasant but, as we drew closer to the hole, began to scorch the nostrils and cause the eyes to water. Discarded trash lay unmoving upon the ground without a breeze to stir it, and the skeletons of decayed trees, their trunks gray and lifeless, stretched thin shadows across the limestone. The hole itself was about twenty feet in circumference, and so deep that its base was lost in darkness. Roots and grasses overhung the verge, trailing down into the shadows.

Two men stood at the far side of the hole, looking down into its depths. One was Earl Jr. The second man was Kittim. He was without his trademark shades now that it was growing dark and he was the first to sense our approach. His face remained blank even as we stood and faced them across the expanse of the pit, Kittim’s eyes briefly resting on me before he gave his full attention to Tereus.