Forty-Five
Ava kept checking over her shoulder during their ride out of the city into the untamed bayou territory. Several cars followed them for a while, but all eventually turned off. They were totally alone by the time they reached Lew’s. Even the sneakiest of stalkers couldn’t keep up with the Dyna unless he was riding one of his own.
At the store, Mercy asked Lew if he had “a little something” he could borrow. Lew produced a twelve-gauge shotgun from behind the counter and a box of buckshot. Mercy saluted him with the box of shells and urged her toward the door. He wanted to get on the water, get lost out in the tangled estuaries and lose any chance of being followed.
The swamp in the middle of the afternoon shimmered with insects. The heat pressed low, like a fist coming down on top of the black water, pinching them tight until Ava couldn’t tell where her skin ended and the film of sweat on top of it began. There was no breeze. The moss hung in lifeless tatters from the cypress. Gators sunning themselves on the banks didn’t even lift their heads at the sound of the bateau motor.
She was fascinated by the hulking scaly shapes laid out on the stubbly grass. They were prehistoric and monstrous. And worlds larger than she’d ever imagined.
Mercy passed the hidden entrance to Saints Hollow, cruising forward at an even speed. When she turned to question him, hair whipping across her face, he didn’t seem to notice her, staring at the unfurling expanse of water ahead of them, expression withdrawn.
They startled three white egrets and two sunning turtles as they passed. They weaved around submerged logs that Ava was unable to see until they were beside them, and she shivered to think that someone who didn’t know what to look for – like her – could get a boat hung up, or even sunk, so easily. And then she’d be gator bait.
Finally, Mercy slowed and moved in close to the bank. By the time he’d killed the motor, Ava had spotted it: the house.
It was the tar paper house Mercy had grown up in, perched right on the edge of the water, a rickety dock jutting out from the bank, its boards loose and warped.
It broke her heart to see the place now, so different than it had been in the Lécuyer family photos. Its windows black and empty, half the glass shattered. A storm had put a tree limb through the roof, and the exposed plywood beneath the shingles was rotted and sagging. The tar paper had peeled, was speckled liberally with mildew and mold. The wild grasses had grown up to scale the walls. The porch was on the verge of collapse. Abandoned, unloved, forgotten. Past all hope of repair.
“The local kids say it’s haunted,” Mercy said behind her. “They’re right.”
She wanted to cry, looking at what had once been his home, and that was before she turned to look at him, and the naked pain in his eyes. The house wasn’t the only thing that was haunted. The boy that it had raised was full of ghosts too.
Ava wanted to reach for him, touch him, comfort him. But she felt the chasm of ignorance opening up between them. She didn’t know his ghosts; and she needed to know them if she ever hoped to exorcise them.
“Sometimes, the best thing you can do is wait,” Maggie had advised her once. “Everyone can talk. But waiting’s an art.”
So she waited.
Birds called in the tree tops. Dragonflies swooped low along the water. The midges and mosquitos teemed. Something plunked below the surface.
Mercy said, “Do you want to know about Oliver Landau?”
“Very much.”
“It’s not a nice story.”
“Most aren’t. I can handle it.”
He nodded. He took a deep breath, and in a haunted patch of swamp, while the sweat rolled down their bodies, he told her the tale of his life’s turning point. The journey that had led him to her.
**
Fourteen Years Ago
Mercy was nineteen when he met Bob Boudreaux. He and Daddy were at Lew’s, loading up on whole chickens and nylon rope, when the loud cursing of a man in a bateau drew Remy’s attention.
“Ha!” Remy whooped when he saw who it was. “Bob, don’t you know how to keep from flooding your engine? I guess you’ve only got the magic touch with bikes, huh?”
The man – standing at the stern of his small fiberglass boat – laughed and grimaced at the same time, shaking his head. “This fuckin’ thing,” he complained. “I belong on two wheels, not on the water.”
“Maybe we can help,” Remy offered. “My boy here can work wonders on motors.”
Bob was a tall, narrow man, deeply tan, obviously Cajun, his hair a shade of gold that glimmered in the sun. He wore black jeans and had a wallet chain. His Harley-Davidson t-shirt was stretched tight over the thick muscles in his arms. He regarded Mercy with open speculation. “Yeah?”
“You bet.” Remy slapped Mercy’s shoulder. “Run down there, Felix, and see what you can do with it.”
Mercy got the shiny Mercury outboard running again. Bob thanked him, shook his hand, and told him to come by “the clubhouse” if he was looking for work.
“We could always use a good mechanic around,” he said, before he waved goodbye to them and took off into the swamp.
Three days later, Remy told Felix to get his ass in the truck and they rode into town, to a corrugated steel, chain link-surrounded building on Iberville Street that looked more like a warehouse than any kind of house. The array of motorcycles had been dazzling. Bob Boudreaux had come out to meet them, shake their hands, show off the bikes to them.
Bob, Mercy was told, was the vice president of the Louisiana chapter of the Lean Dogs Motorcycle Club, and they were looking for some new hangarounds, with the hope they could then prospect some of them. Their ranks needed beefing up.
Homeschooled, largely sheltered from the more sinister elements of city living, Mercy was, after all, the son of a professional madam, and he’d understood what the Lean Dogs were. Real, one-percent outlaw bikers, the kind he’d learned about through National Geographic documentaries. Organized, law-breaking, impenetrable clubs like this one thrilled him. Frightened him, too, if he was honest.
At dinner that night, Remy encouraged him to try and join the club. “This,” he said, opening his arms to the shadowy kitchen around them, “is the best I can ever offer you. I think you could have a real chance for something better with them. And I want you to have better, Felix.”
That had been two years ago. Now he was a full-fledged, patched member of the Dogs, and he’d earned enough repairing bikes to buy one of his own, and he wore a leather cut full of patches over his usual t-shirts, and drivers and pedestrians alike gave him nervous, sidelong glances when he rode through the Quarter.
He didn’t wrestle gators anymore, or leave breakfast warming in the oven for Gram, or hear his Daddy singing in the dawn mist each morning.
He’d lost his virginity to a big-breasted club groupie named Janet who’d pulled him into a back room and urged his hands against her and worked his cock like she was riding a show pony. He hated those groupies, really, because they reminded him so much of Dee. But he couldn’t go without, and for a little while, it was nice to pretend that the girls who begged to have him inside them actually gave a damn, and weren’t just doing all this for a cheap thrill.
It was a Wednesday when Remy came by to see him at the clubhouse. Mercy was tinkering with his bike and waiting for his father to work around to whatever it was he really wanted to talk about, because the shape of the cloud overhead most certainly wasn’t it.
When the silent question became too heavy, Remy reached to scratch a splattered bug off the Dyna’s headlamp and said, “I had to borrow some money.”
Mercy’s hands stilled on the spokes of the front wheel. “From who?”
Remy looked embarrassed, not willing to meet Mercy’s gaze. “Your mother.”
“Shit.” Mercy felt the unhappy souring of his stomach that any mention of the woman inspired in him. “How much?”
“Not that much.” He winced. “Five grand.”
“Shit,” Mercy repeated. He stood, so he could read Remy’s face better. “Dad, why didn’t you come to me?”
“I knew you didn’t have–”
“I’ve got more money than you think, and nothing to spend it on but bike parts and liquor. Hell, if you wanted a loan, you coulda got one from the club.”
“I didn’t want to owe them and cause any trouble for you.”
“ ‘Course not. Now you just owe Dee, and that’s trouble for you. How’s that any better?”
“Well, what’s done is done. I borrowed the money and now I owe it. No sense crying over what I can’t change.”
Mercy sighed. Typical Daddy, trying to act prosaic, as if that made it any more palatable. “Lemme guess. She’s ready to collect, and you don’t have the money.”
“Not yet, but I will,” Remy said. “I just gotta check my lines tomorrow. I should have caught enough…”
But Mercy was shaking his head. “Nah. You know that’s not gonna work.”
Remy glanced across the parking lot, looking, for the first time in Mercy’s memory, like he was getting older. The flecks of silver in his black hair, the deep sun lines on his face. He was the dark and shadowed version of the Louis Lécuyer Mercy only knew from photographs.
“What did you need the money for?” he asked quietly.
Remy took a deep breath and looked sort of caved-in when he let it back out. “Your grandmother needed to have some tests run at the doctor.”
Mercy could have kicked himself. All this time he’d spent with his new brothers, the long runs, growing into his new big boots as a Lean Dog, and the family who’d raised him with such love had been languishing in the swamp, money so tight that Daddy had borrowed from The Bitch in order to pay for Gram’s medical tests.
What a failure at being a son and grandson, after they’d reared and educated him. Had the bikes and the big tits really been worth the trade?
“Daddy, I tell ya what.” He touched his father on the shoulder. “Don’t even worry about it. I’ll take some of what I got, borrow a little from Bob or Champ” – the reigning president – “and I’ll go pay Dee. I’ll take care of it.”
Remy’s face was pained. “I can’t let you do that.”
“Sure you can. That’s what kids are for, right? To return the favor.” He smiled. “Let me help. I’ll go see Dee today. And after, I’ll come out and have dinner with you and Gram. Hell, I’ll cook dinner.”
Remy’s half-smile was heavy with emotion. “Do I ever tell you how proud I am of you, Felix?”
“All the time.”
An hour later, pockets fat with cash, he left the clubhouse and went to his mother’s place on St. Ann. Originally purchased for her by a john, its payments had been paid over the years by boyfriends and clients alike. She liked to call herself a “woman of independent means,” which couldn’t have been further from the truth, but there was no convincing her of that. “When you have to keep sucking dick to pay your mortgage, you’re dependent on everyone but yourself,” Mercy had told her during their last meeting. That had been his birthday, if he remembered correctly.
He parked his bike on the curb and took the two steps across the sidewalk and up the stoop to ring the bell.
Barbara answered the door, in one of her usual cotton dresses and her slender flat shoes. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Felix.”
“You never see me more often than that,” he returned, stooping to kiss her cheek as he entered. “Is Dee here?”
“She’s entertaining.”
“That’s alright, I won’t be long.”
He went to the spare bedroom, because that was where she “entertained,” and because that’s where the sounds were coming from. He knocked hard on the door and called, “Dee!” in a voice that would have caught the attention of the hearing impaired.
A moment later, the door cracked, and his mother wedged herself into the small gap. She had on nightclub makeup, and too much hairspray. She wore a red silk robe open over a black bra and leather miniskirt. There was a riding crop sticking out of the top of one tall black boot.
She gave him a pinched, put-out look. “Where the hell are your manners, Felix? You can’t just come barging in here while I’m working.”
“Is that what you call it these days? Working?” He gave her his fakest, sweetest smile, then dropped it like it hurt his face. It did, actually. “I came to settle up Dad’s tab with you.” He fished the money from his cut pocket and flashed it under her nose. “That’s what he owes you, plus interest. Take it, and then leave him alone.”
She propped a hand on her hip. Behind her, the room was filled with grunting and gasping and whimpering. “How can I leave him alone when he’s the one who came around here bothering me?” she demanded with self-righteous satisfaction. “Maybe if he had a single friend in the world, he wouldn’t have to beg me for money.”
“He has–” Mercy bit back the retort. It was childish, and he’d be damned if he got sucked into talking schoolgirl circles with her. “Like I said. Here’s your money.”
But she didn’t take it. Her eyes skipped from the wad of cash up to his face and back again. Her smile was slow and catlike. “Where’d you get this?”
“None of your business.”
“Are you flush these days?” Her smile widened. “That biker club paying you well?” Her eyes glued to his face, she shoved the door wide and let it fall back on its hinges, giving him an unimpeded view of the room. “If you’re looking to spend it on something, I’m sure I know someone who could take you on.”
The room was empty save a king-sized bed and a scattering of wooden chairs against the walls. A girl lay spread-eagle on the bed, tied hand and foot to the posts with rope, naked. There was a man between her legs, hips thrusting violently as he fucked her, his body jackknifing. A second man knelt on the bed beside the girl, suckling her breasts, a hand clamped tight over her mouth. A third man watched from one of the chairs, his jeans unfastened.
Dee’s smile was evil. “Simone here is a real crowd pleaser. She can please you too, for the right price.”
Mercy had never wanted to hit a woman in his life, but in that moment, he wanted to punch his own mother full in the face.
He shoved the money toward her. “Take it,” he said through his teeth.
Dee took a step back. “No.”
“Why the hell not?”
Over on the bed, the second man had noticed the presence of a newcomer, and lifted his head from the girl’s breasts. “Dee, I thought you said it’d just be us three.”
She lifted a hand for his silence. To Mercy, she said, “Remy borrowed money from me; it’s Remy who’s gonna pay me back.”
“Why does it matter so long as you get what’s yours?” Mercy threw the bills down at her feet. “Take that. You take it, and you leave Dad alone, or I swear to God–”
“What’ll you do?” she taunted. “What would Remy’s son ever do besides go hide in the swamp and play with lizards?”
The man who’d been going at the girl finished with a grunt and then withdrew, climbing down off the bed, coming to stand beside Dee, not at all self-conscious. He reached into her robe pocket and withdrew a pack of smokes and a lighter. “Is there a problem?” he asked, giving Mercy a dark look.
It was Oliver Landau, Mercy recognized, his mother’s current boyfriend. A white trash thug who’d come into some money thanks to a workman’s comp claim. Average height, wiry, his arms a touch too long, his chest marked up with sloppily-done tribal tattoos that had no meaning, he had a low-browed face that was made for mug shots, and couldn’t hope to match wits with a cocker spaniel.
Mercy smiled down at him. “Yeah. Your girlfriend’s stupid. That’s the problem.” Over the man’s head, Mercy saw the second man move to take Oliver’s place at the girl’s sex. She arched and mewled when he entered her.
Oliver made an aggressive gesture that lifted his shoulders and puffed out his chest.
Dee patted his arm and said, “I tried to raise him better, but there’s just no hope. The boy’s got no manners. He was just leaving, though, weren’t you, Felix?”
Oliver scuffed his bare foot across the bills on the floor. “What’s this?”
“A debt settled,” Mercy said. “If you’re smart, you’ll tell her to accept it and move on. You’ve been paid back,” he said to Dee. “Do you hear me? You’ve been paid.”
She made an airy, careless gesture with one hand and turned her back to him, going to the man in the chair. “It wasn’t your debt to settle,” she called, flipping back her robe and straddling the man’s lap, hiking her leather skirt up around her hips in the process. Her hand went between her legs, under the skirt. She made a little face that indicated she’d aligned the two of them and now the man was inside her. Then she put her hands on his shoulders and began to roll her hips, while over her shoulder, the man watched the spectacle that unfolded on the bed. “Now run along,” Dee said, voice a little breathless now that she was busy. “I need to take care of my guests.”
Oliver gave him a stupid, hateful look. “Get lost, shithead.”
Mercy stared him down, until Oliver flinched and glanced away; only then did he turn his back on the hideous moment in the bedroom. As he walked for the door, he heard the girl, Simone, screaming.
There was some drama back at the clubhouse when he returned. The newest prospect had been caught with the sergeant’s old lady, and Mercy’s size had been needed to prevent a bloodbath right there in the parking lot. By the time the prospect had been voted out, stripped of his cut, and put on the bus headed back to Shreveport where he belonged, it was after five. He called to tell Remy he’d be running late for dinner, but got no answer. He could picture his father and grandmother out on the porch, watching the fish jump for the dragonflies, neither of them able to hear the phone ringing beside the fridge inside.
As he walked through the market, picking out pasta, a head of garlic, some tomatoes, the last of his anger began to fade. The scene at the clubhouse had helped chase away the immediate aftereffects of seeing his mother, and the idea of a family dinner was soothing away the rest.
The ride home always filled him with both nostalgia and regret. He knew the bend of each oak branch, the smell of each puddle, the call of each bird. It was easy to forget how savage this place was; sheltered by buildings and pavement, New Orleans seemed the height of civilization, a vital beating heart of the world of humans and twentieth-century problems. But just a few short miles sent him plunging back into the wilderness. Out here, the gator was king, everything that crawled and swam and flew a part of his court. The men who lived in the swamp were like deer, hushed, respectful, stepping carefully.
Each time he made this trip, Mercy was filled up with boyhood memories, barefoot and tan in the bateau while they hunted, or sprawled across the porch with a book, learning about nations thousands of miles away that he’d never see with his own eyes.
And then the guilt would get him, a tight knot in his gut, because he’d abandoned the people who’d raised him.
“We want this for you,” Remy always said. “Go do more than I ever did. See the world the way I never could.”
Becoming an outlaw biker wasn’t exactly the same as going to college or joining the Marines, but in Remy’s narrow world, it was a big step. One for which Mercy was grateful.
Off a badly paved road, Mercy turned the bike down the dirt drive, between the knotted branches of two squat oaks, and that was when it hit him. The sense that something was wrong.
Remy’s truck was parked in its usual spot, but there was evidence that other cars had been there, the grass flattened down where it normally stood tall.
He killed the engine and swung off his bike. The drone of cicadas flooded his ears, that hypnotic, ceaseless chattering. He stood very still in the driveway and strained, listening. There were no other sounds besides the insects. No whirring or humming or thumping or dull murmur of voices from the house. The air vibrated around him, that electric charge of utter silence, absolute quiet.
He pulled his shopping bag from its place bungeed onto the bitch seat and headed for the back door. He paused, something dark catching his attention down in the pale, powdery dirt of the driveway. It was tobacco juice, a big glob of it, spat there on the ground between boot prints.
Gram chewed some, used to, but had stopped on doctor’s orders. And Remy had never picked up the habit. He got his tobacco fix with cigarettes.
Mercy picked up the pace, making it to the door in three long strides. The knob turned against his hand and he pushed inside. “Dad? Gram?”
The smell almost knocked him down. Blood. The copper tang of wet, steaming-hot blood. The stench of gore.
The grocery sack fell out of his hand, tomatoes bouncing across the linoleum. The door eased shut with a groan.
Everywhere, the signs of struggle. Open cabinets, dishes shattered on the floor. Open drawers, pawed-through flatware jutting up like quills. Overturned chairs. Stippling on the table: stray buckshot. Powder burns. Acrid scent of a fired weapon, just under the blood. Footprints in the blood itself, tracking toward the living room.
He found Remy face-down alongside the sofa, his blood soaking into the carpet, his long, powerful frame lifeless, his usual rich coloring almost as white as the scars that crossed his arms and knuckles.
“Daddy,” Mercy breathed, going to his knees beside his father. His fingers found Remy’s throat. No pulse. He turned him over, and saw the gunshots in his chest and abdomen that had nearly cut him in half. How he’d made it this far from the kitchen, no one could know. Sheer strength and force of will.
He was dead.
Mercy cradled his father’s head in his hands, eyes moving over the dark marks where bruises had settled into his face, evidencing the fight he’d put up.
Then he remembered. “Gram!” He laid Remy gently back to the carpet and shot to his feet, tearing through the rest of the small house, calling to Nanette over and over.
He found her in the front yard, down by the water, her tiny frame crumpled like a dried-up flower. Her streaming white hair was full of blood, her skull soft and pulpy. She’d been bludgeoned to death. Her dress was ripped. There was blood on it, and on her legs. She’d been raped. His eighty-five-year-old grandmother had been raped before she was murdered.
The Cherokee girl Louis Lécuyer from Quebec had brought to New Orleans with a dream and a promise, and the son they’d made together, both dead.
It was a long moment before Mercy realized that the awful screaming that echoed through the swamp was his own, and that his throat was bleeding with the effort. He closed his mouth, and the silence reigned supreme again.
Save for the cicadas.
The plunk of fish.
Birds flapping through the canopy.
The sun beat down, unforgiving and insistent. Its blanketing heat was making the smell worse.
Not decomp, no. Too freshly dead for that. Just blood, fear, sweat, recent death. The stink of a body stopping, like it had run up against a wall and ceased to exist.
“Go to a place in your head,” Remy had told him once, when he was eleven, the first time they’d taken a gator home to dress and cook and tan themselves. All of the gators went to the depot, where the tags earned them cash. But this one had been small, and wily, hard to catch. “We’ll keep this one,” Daddy had said. He’d squeezed Mercy’s shoulder. “Don’t think about how bloody and messy it is. Just concentrate on what you need to do.”
So now, on his knees in the tall grass beside the water, staring at his brutalized grandmother, his throat raw from screaming, Mercy concentrated on what he needed to do. He had to take care of his family. That’s what a good son would do.
He gathered Nanette up – she weighed no more than a child – and took her in the house, laid her on the sofa. Then he went to the shed where Remy kept his hunting and fishing gear. He found a shovel and a pickaxe, and toting them over his shoulder, he walked up the slight rise into the trees until he found the spot he wanted, the little clearing between the oak roots, where the ground was soft and covered in a turf of pale green grass. There was honeysuckle, tangled among the briars, and spiked yucca fronds. There was a view between the tree trunks down to the water, with its paving of duckweed and purple blooming hyacinth.
A good spot. A pretty one.
It took him hours to dig the graves, side by side, deep enough that the foxes couldn’t dig them up. It was black dark by then, the moon shivering on the water the only light. His eyes had adjusted. Like the hellhound he wore on his cut, he could see well at night.
He carried Nanette up first, and laid her gently down in the bottom, covering her one shovelful at a time, until they were six feet separated, and the flat of the shovel tamped down the fresh earth on top.
Daddy was heavier, almost as tall as he was, strong and solid, despite the leanness, his weight crushing the air from Mercy’s lungs as he toted him up the rise. He eased him down into his bed of earth, and then realized he couldn’t let go. He cradled his father in his arms, as he lay on the upturned dirt, and pressed her forehead to Remy’s cold neck.
It was not a moment of danger that caused his life to flash before his eyes, but this final chance with the man he loved so much. Every morning, every hunt, every lesson, every book passage, every smile, every “I’m proud of you, Felix.”
“I want it to be me,” Mercy whispered, “who gets in that hole. I want it to be me.”
But finally, he relinquished Remy to his grave, and shoveled the dirt over him, until he was packed just as tightly and lovingly as his mother beside him.
He’d done it. He’d concentrated on what he had to do.
And then Mercy lay down on top of his father’s grave and the sobs tore him apart, until he finally lost consciousness.
The heat woke him. The oppressive weight of the sun beating down on his leather-clad back grew too heavy, and his eyes opened. He was sweating, as he laid there, palms pressed to the dirt, and his lungs were full of the smell of the ground, of green things, of the swamp. He thought he caught a whiff of Daddy’s aftershave, but that wasn’t possible. Because Daddy was dead.
Slowly, he pushed up onto his hands and knees, and he knew. He knew. There was an emotion building and boiling inside him, filling up every corner of him, down to his fingers and his toes. His face was stiff with dry tears, but he felt this new emotion burning that stiffness away.
Rage. It was rage. For the first time in his life, he knew what rage tasted like, and it was nothing like the petty shit people pretended it was. It was driven, it was burning, it was consuming. It was amazing.
And with that rage, came the knowing. Oliver Landau had killed his father, acting on Dee’s instructions to come for the money owed her.
Well, Oliver Landau was going to die today. And Mercy was going to enjoy every second of it.
**
“She’s with her gentlemen,” Barbara said when she answered the door.
“Good.”
Mercy didn’t care if it was locked or not – he didn’t check; it felt good to kick in the door to the guest bedroom. One of those little bursts of violence that fed the rage, made it stronger and more focused.
The girl, Simone was there, and his mother, and the three men from the day before. They were having a fucking orgy or something. He didn’t know. He didn’t register any of it. He saw Oliver’s stupid tattoos and went for him. Caught him around the throat and lifted him off his feet, his arms picking up the burden effortlessly. It was easy as breathing, to pick a man up and hold him by his windpipe.
Oliver clawed at his hands, and someone, probably Dee, slapped him in the back, the head, kicked at the backs of his knees.
Like flies landing on him, all of it.
“Don’t get comfortable,” he told the two cohorts, and then he left, dragging a naked Oliver Landau with him, his mother screaming behind him.
He’d brought Remy’s old Ford, and he tied Oliver with rope, gagged him with an old rag, and tossed him into the bed, beneath the cover of the camper shell. “You’re going to wish,” he said before he closed the tailgate, “that I’d put a bullet in you just now.”
“Please,” Oliver whispered. “God, please.”
“Please what?” Mercy asked.
The breath wheezed in and out of him. “Just…end it, already.”
“End it?” Mercy feigned ignorance. “Like…let you go?”
Oliver’s eyes closed tight, more tears sliding down his cheeks.
“Oh. You meant kill you, right?”
Slow, halting nod.
“Aw, come on now, don’t hurt my feelings, Ollie. I thought we were having fun.”
The first thing he’d done, once he’d dragged Oliver into the house, was pull one of Nanette’s old loose flannel nightgowns down over the man’s head. “So you can remember what she smelled like when she died,” he’d explained, as he was tying him in one of the kitchen chairs. He’d set everything up in the kitchen of the little tar paper house out in the swamp, his home. Where no one could see or hear them.
He’d started with a knife. “Those are the stupidest fucking tats,” he’d said. “Let’s see what you look like without them.”
At some point, as the ink had come off, Oliver had admitted everything. Dee had sent him after the money, he and the other two men she’d been entertaining. She’d wanted the money, or his head, Oliver had said. And she hadn’t been picky about which, according to him.
Oliver and his men had come with shotguns, intending to frighten the money out of Remy, maybe rough him up. They hadn’t counted on Remy’s size, or his willingness to launch himself at them. The fight had grown vicious. Even after Remy was shot Nanette refused to give up the money. They’d pursued her, punished her. It was Oliver himself who’d been the rapist, the other two only there to hold her down.
The story was told through tears and gasps of pain, but had been unembellished, bare facts without any slant. “If you try to make excuses, or act like you couldn’t help anything that happened, I’ll castrate you,” Mercy informed him. The words had come pouring out.
He’d castrated him anyway.
He’d worked through an entire toolbelt’s worth of implements, turning mundane household pliers and hammers and nails into the stuff of nightmares.
But it was time to stop. Oliver would be dead soon. He’d lost too much blood, and he was going into shock. Not long now.
“So, Oliver,” Mercy said, toweling the blood from his hands as he leaned back against the kitchen counter. He wasn’t sure where this conversational, upbeat rage machine had come from, but he was fast realizing that this wasn’t so much a new persona, but a warping of all the preexisting parts of himself. He was still Felix; he was the Felix who’d had his world shattered. How did it go? Don’t get mad, get even. Yes, even. As even as his own hands would allow. He was six-five, and he could haul a gator up into the boat by himself. No regular human man could stop him.
That was the day he realized his own physical power…and started using it.
“Oliver,” he said to his captive, as the man’s head sagged down onto his ruined chest. “What have you learned from all this? What’s your takeaway?”
Oliver muttered something indiscernible.
Mercy smacked him in the side of the head, earning an awful, high keening sound.
“I asked you a question.”
“I…I-I–”
“Yeah?”
“I learned…”
“Go on now. I’m listening. What did you learn?”
“…that you…you’re…Stronger than me.”
“Bingo. Good for you. You’re a smart guy, Ollie, you know that?” Mercy stood, and reached for the shotgun where it lay across the kitchen table.
Oliver was weak, but had enough strength left, it turned out, to begin crying quietly, choking sounds leaving his throat.
“Shh, it’s alright,” Mercy said as he racked the shotgun with a loud metallic sound. “It’s over now. You did real good.”
He pressed the muzzle to the mess that had once been the man’s chest, right over his heart.
“I just want you to feel, the very last thing, what my Daddy felt.”
“Okay,” Oliver whispered. “You’ll kill me now?”
“Yeah.”
“Merci beaucoup.”
He pulled the trigger.
Merci.
Merci.
Mercy.
He’d been born an infant as Felix Louis Lécuyer.
He was born a man as Mercy, among the club brothers who welcomed him with awe and a little bit of fear, after that afternoon in the bloody kitchen.
But before that, there had been the body to dispose of.
He wrapped Oliver in an old blue tarp and took him out in the boat, to the shaded pool that was Big Son’s favorite spot to haunt. Off came the tarp. In went the three rocks, splashing in the water. “Come get it, you big son of a bitch.” And he slid Oliver’s body down into the black water. Even if Son wasn’t at home, the swamp would take care of the corpse.
It was a week before Mercy managed to track down the two companions, but track them he did, and they went to the water, Big Son’s dinner table, just as their friend had.
Dee, too livid to speak, fuming and spitting and red in the face, threatened to sic the police on him.
Two days later, a black and white cruiser pulled onto the clubhouse lot. Mercy had hid in the walk-in freezer in the kitchen, shivering, hating the worry that he’d brought to his brothers. Bob took him aside, explained that they all loved him, but that he couldn’t stay. To keep himself and his chapter safe, he’d have to go north, to another chapter. Someone with his “skills” was needed in Tennessee, at the mother chapter, an arrangement that would benefit all of them.
Two days after that, he headed north and east, to Knoxville.
**
Present Day
“…And he took me into the chapel for the first time, and there was this little girl, hiding in the buffet cabinet.” Mercy managed a faint smile.
Ava recalled that moment in the chapel with crystalline detail; it had been preserved, like a pressed flower, in the part of her brain that held onto small, precious things.
She nodded, to show him she remembered, because her throat was too tight to speak. Her eyes filmed over and she blinked to clear them.
“Ah, shit,” Mercy said. “I didn’t tell you all that so you’d get blubbery on me.”
She shook her head and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. What did she say to him? How did she begin to comfort someone who’d lived through that trauma? How did she convey just how much she loved him still, no matter what he’d done, with any clarity?
Mercy glanced toward the house again, eyes shifting to the small rise behind it, where the trees were thickest. “I take flowers up there,” he said softly, swallowing. “When I’m in town.” He glanced at her with more of that desperation he’d fixed on her throughout the telling of his story. “Do you want to walk up with me?”
She nodded.
They ran the boat aground on the weedy bank and Ava had her sea legs by this point; she sprang from the bateau unassisted, taking Mercy’s hand once they were both standing, when he reached for her.
The heat was somehow worse on the ground, drifts of it collecting between the close trunks of the trees as the forest shifted from cypress to oak, years of dropped leaves sliding in damp clumps beneath their boots. It was a short walk, but Ava’s clothes were plastered to her by the time they reached the clearing. Mercy’s white t-shirt was translucent where it was glued to the triangular expanse of his back.
When they reached the small meadow, floored with soft grass, Mercy reached for her, despite the boiling heat. He tucked her into his side.
The graves had been covered over with flat slabs of stone, for protection. A small wooden cross, colorless from age, marked each, in place of formal headstones.
“Gram,” Mercy said, pointing to the grave on the left. “Daddy” – the one on the right – “y’all meet Ava Rose.” He cupped the back of her head in one large hand. “They would have loved you, fillette.”
Then he became very quiet, and very still, his pulse against her cheek the only evidence that he was a living, breathing man and not a statue.
Finally finding her voice, Ava said, “Thank you for telling me about them. I’m honored that you did.”
Then he moved, startling her at first. He lifted her up off her feet and held her against his chest like she was something small and precious to him, so he could press his face into her neck, his arms locked tight around her waist.
Ava hugged his neck, letting her head rest sideways against his.
He was silent, save the rough breathing that struck her throat.
“Tell me what to do for you,” she pleaded. “How can I help?”
He didn’t respond, and she felt her tears returning, the forest blurring.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Oh, Mercy, I’m so sorry, sweetheart. And I love you so much.”