Every Dead Thing

I figured that there must have been a fourth set of Joe Bones’s men who approached from the south and fired the first shots. At least three were down: the two killed by Rachel and me and a third who lay sprawled by the old cypress. Fontenot’s man had taken one of them out before he was hit himself.

I helped Rachel to her feet and moved her quickly to a grimy vault with a corroded gate. I struck at the lock with the butt of the M16 and it gave instantly. She slipped inside and I handed her my Smith & Wesson and told her to stay there until I came back for her. Then, gripping the M16, I ran east past the back of the Fontenot tomb, using the other vaults as cover. I didn’t know how many shots were left in the M16. The selector switch was set for three-round bursts. Depending on the magazine capacity, I might have anything between ten and twenty rounds left.

I had almost reached a monument topped by the figure of a sleeping child when something hit me on the back of the head and I stumbled forward, the M16 slipping from my grasp. Someone kicked me hard in the kidneys, the pain lancing through my body as far as the shoulder. I was kicked again in the stomach, which forced me on to my back. I looked up to see Ricky standing above me, the reptilian coils of his hair and his small stature at odds with the NOPD uniform. He had lost his hat and the side of his face was cut slightly where he had been hit by splinters of stone. The muzzle of his Steyr pointed at my chest.

I tried to swallow but my throat seemed to have constricted. I was conscious of the feel of the grass beneath my hands and the glorious pain in my side, sensations of life and existence and survival. Ricky raised the Steyr to point it at my head.

“Joe Bones says hello,” he said. His finger tightened on the trigger in the same instant as his head jerked back, his stomach thrusting forward and his back arching. A burst of fire from the Steyr raked the grass beside my head as Ricky fell to his knees and then toppled sideways, his body lying prone across my left leg. There was a jagged red hole in the back of his shirt.

Behind him, Lionel Fontenot stood in a marksman’s stance, the pistol in his hand slowly coming down. There was blood on his left hand and a bullet hole in the upper left arm of his suit. The two bodyguards who had stood beside him at the cemetery walked quickly from the direction of the Fontenot tomb. They glanced at me, then turned their attention back to Fontenot. I could hear the sound of sirens approaching from the west.

“One got away, Lionel,” said one. “The rest are dead.”

“What about our people?”

“Three dead, at least. More injured.”

Beside me, Ricky stirred slightly and his hand moved feebly. I could feel his body move against my leg. Lionel Fontenot walked over and stood above him for a moment before shooting him once in the back of the head. He looked at me curiously once more, then picked up the M16 and tossed it to one of his men.

“Now go help the wounded,” he said. He cradled his injured left arm with his right hand and walked back toward the Fontenot tomb.

My rib ached as I returned to where I had left Rachel, after kicking Ricky’s corpse from my leg. I approached carefully, conscious of the Smith & Wesson I had left with her. When I reached the tomb, Rachel was gone.

I found her about fifty yards away, crouching beside the body of a young girl who was barely beyond her teens. As I approached, Rachel reached for the gun by her side and spun toward me.

“Hey, it’s me. You okay?”

She nodded and returned the gun to its resting place. I noticed that she had kept her hand pressed on the young girl’s stomach for the entire exchange.

“How is she?” I asked, but as I looked over her shoulder, I knew the answer. The blood oozing from the gunshot wound was almost black. Liver shot. The girl, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth gritted in agony, was not going to live. Around us, mourners were emerging from hiding, some sobbing, some trembling with shock. I saw two of Lionel Fontenot’s men ru

“We have to go. We can’t afford to wait for the cops to arrive.”

“I’m staying. I’m not leaving her.”

“Rachel.” She looked at me. I held her gaze and we shared our knowledge of the girl’s impending death. “We can’t stay.”

The two Fontenots were beside us now. One of them, younger than the other, dropped to his knee beside the girl and took her hand. She gripped it tightly and he whispered her name. “Clara,” he said. “Hold on, Clara, hold on.”

“Please, Rachel,” I repeated.

She took the younger man’s hand and pressed it against Clara’s stomach. The girl cried out as the pressure was reapplied.

“Keep your hand there,” hissed Rachel. “Don’t take it away until the medics get here.”

She picked up the gun and handed it to me. I took it from her, slipped the safety, and put it back in my holster. We made our way from the focus of the mayhem, until the shouting had diminished, then I stopped and she reached out and held me tightly. I cradled her in my arms and kissed the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her. She squeezed me and I gasped as the pain in my ribs increased dramatically.

Rachel pulled back quickly. “Are you hurt?”

“I took a kick, nothing else.” I held her face in my hands. “You did all that you could for her.”

She nodded but her mouth trembled. The girl had an importance to her that went beyond the simple duty to save her life. “I killed that man,” she said.

“He would have killed us both. You had no choice. If you hadn’t done it, you’d be dead. Maybe I’d be dead too.” It was true, but it wasn’t enough, not yet. I held her tightly as she cried, the pain in my side inconsequential beside her own suffering.

40

I HAD NOT THOUGHT of Daddy Helms in many years, not until I spoke of him to Rachel the previous night and recalled the part he played in my absence during my mother’s lingering death.

Daddy Helms was the ugliest man I had ever seen. He ran most of Portland from the late sixties to the early eighties, building up a modest empire that had started with Daddy Helms boosting liquor warehouses and moved on to take in the sale of drugs over three states.

Daddy Helms weighed over three hundred pounds and suffered from a skin ailment that had left him with raised bumps all over his body, but most visible on his face and hands. They were a deep red color and formed a kind of scaly skin over his features, blurring them so that the observer always seemed to be seeing Daddy Helms through a red mist. He wore three-piece suits and Panama hats and always smoked Winston Churchill cigars, so you smelled Daddy Helms before you saw him. If you were smart enough, this usually gave you just enough time to be somewhere else before he arrived.

Daddy Helms was mean, but he was also a freak. If he had been less intelligent, less bitter, and less inclined toward violence, he would probably have ended up living in a little house in the woods of Maine and selling Christmas trees door-to-door to sympathetic citizens. Instead, his ugliness seemed to be an outward manifestation of some deeper spiritual and moral blight within himself, a corruption that made you think that Daddy Helms’s skin might not be the worst thing about him. There was a rage inside him, a fury at the world and its ways.

My grandfather, who had known Daddy Helms since he was a young boy and was generally a man who empathized with those around him, even the criminals he was forced to arrest when he served as a sheriff’s deputy, could see nothing but evil in Daddy Helms. “I used to think maybe it was his ugliness that made him what he is,” he said once, “that the way he behaves is because of the way he looks, that he’s finding a way to strike back at the world he sees around him.” He was sitting on the porch of the house that he shared with my grandmother, my mother, and me, the house in which we had all lived since my father’s death. My grandfather’s basset hound, Doc-named after the country singer Doc Watson for no reason other than that my grandfather liked his rendition of the song “ Alberta ”-lay curled at his feet, his ribs expanding in deep sleep and small yelps occasionally erupting from his jowls as he enjoyed dog dreams.