The Quiet Parts Pt. 12
TENTH STORY
“Oolong tea.” In the living room she places two steaming mugs on the coffee table. She smiles slightly, trying to disguise her fear behind a pensive mask. Drew’s eyes look pretty, she notices again, soulful sienna with flecks the color of cooled magma. Another time she would have welcomed such a man in her presence. Of the many tasks she has undertaken in the last forty-eight hours, she imagines getting rid of him should take the least effort.
“I saw Andre two days ago,” she informs him, earnest and mature.
“What time?” Drew queries.
Since the night she buried Andre, no one has come in or out of the halls. Left to face this challenge alone, she meets his serious gaze with one of her own.
“Noon. He was really upset. I tried to talk to him but he kept saying he was scared,” she adds, and pauses, a lover worried for her impulsive mate. “Then he just ran out. I think he got in some kind of trouble.” Nervously grabbing at her hair completes the act. “I’ve tried calling him so many times. I was hoping you might know something.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t. I’m thinking of filing a missing person’s report.”
“I agree.” She resists her desire to laugh. Let Andre disappear into a case file forever. Sweetly she proposes, “I can help you put up flyers.”
The submissive shift in their body language tells her she has them convinced. Then Drew asks, “Can I check the bathrooms in case he might have left something?”
She wants to scream, “Get out of my house!” Reluctantly she leads them upstairs.
More pompous than his brother, more theatrical, he is pointlessly thorough investigating the tiny blue bathroom, looking in the medicine cabinet and under the tub, sniffing the burnt-out incense on the windowsill. Ten whole minutes of bathroom sleuthing before he joins her in the hall. “We should check downstairs, too,” he concludes.
“Sure. But after that, I have somewhere to be. Call me if you need any—”
He slams a hand over her mouth, and it fits her like a muzzle. Quietly he forces her into her bedroom, where he wrestles her down on the comforter with the grace of a ballroom dancer dipping his partner. His beastly eyes send her into a panic of muffled screams.
In the doorway, Sam looks terrified. “What is you doing?”
“Lock the door,” Drew growls.
The fat man hesitates. Leigh pleads to him with her gaze. All you have to do, she says, is pick up that lava lamp and knock him out. But he closes and locks the door.
Above, lightweight scarves hang from the ceiling in yellow, red, blue, and green shades. Some lost breeze through the crack in her window stirs them, even as she forces her body into obedient stasis beneath that of the monster holding her life in his jaws. Air comes thin and hot into her struggling lungs. Words crawl from his lips, a hellish cadence.
“When I take my hand off your mouth you say nothing. Just nod yes or no. Scream and I’ll kill you. Nod if you understand.” She nods. Slowly he lifts his fingers until his thumb remains, a reminder to hush. “I got location on Andre phone just like he got on mine. So you gone tell me the real reason his phone been in your house for two straight days. Did you do something to my brother?”
She shakes her head.
“Did one of your housemates?”
She nods.
“Hold her,” he tells Sam. As the fat man does so, Drew searches the room. Cruel fingers touch her paintings, her Dia de Los Muertos figurines. For a long moment he stares down on the nightstand at a ceramic crocodile, three feet long and cerulean. She made it herself among the fog, moss, and waterfalls in Muir Woods during a silent meditation arts education retreat—her favorite piece.
Drew shatters it beneath his boot.
“No—” she shrieks before Sam gags her with both hands.
Male bodies swap positions on top of her. Andre’s brother becomes her world. Trapped beneath him she cannot deny the eroticism in his brutality, his eyes a sibilant flame. Tinged with marijuana, his breath pulses on her cheeks like gigatons of solar heat boiling the ocean. Corals die. Fish go extinct. A clay shard rides the blue trail of her jugular.
“Now tell me what happened,” Drew murmurs in her ear.
“Jason did it,” she whimpers, afraid any strong movement of her jaw will cause the shard to slip and open her. “Andre was being aggressive with me—”
He stabs the comforter next to her cheek eleven times. Rips holes in it. “You tryin’a pull ‘he tried to rape me’ on a black man? Tell me what happened!”
She attempts to swallow, but spit clogs her esophagus. She rasps, “Jason found out Andre was selling drugs through one of the halls. They got in a fight and Andre bumped his head. I tried to stop them. I tried to help.”
Like embers, his tears burn her cheeks. His hand slides down her jaw to necklace her throat.
“I told him not to get on that damn website,” Drew sobs. “All he wanted was somebody to love him. He said, ‘I’m thirty-five and I’m all alone.’”
Softly she pleads, “I did love him. I feel your pain—”
“Yo.” Sam is speaking. Painfully she cranes her neck, seizes with terror because the fat bastard has gone through her closet. A bloody red dress dangles in his fist, and she curses herself for not throwing it away. No sooner does Drew see the evidence, he squeezes. Her bladder erupts with warm piss through her gown.
“I’ll kill you,” he moans. “I’ll kill you.”
“No!” she chokes out. “Turn me in to the cops.”
“You’ll get off. Bat them eyelashes, ain’t no judge in America gone convict you.”
“Please,” she begs. “I’m really scared.”
“I swear to Christ to if you start crying . . .”
“It’s hard not to cry when you’re holding my throat like this. Please. Hurt me and you’ll get the gas chamber.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” she says, squeezing tighter.
She manages to croak, “Make Sam . . . accessory.”
That gets him to relent, slightly. Time stands still as he pants, caution at war with anger. Chest to chest, the erratic ventilation through his lungs, his clamorous heartbeat weigh on her with the excess gravity of a planet she wishes never to visit. She says, “Please just let me g—”
“Sam,” Drew says flatly, never lifting his gaze from the cheetah-print comforter, “I’m sorry I brought you into this. I’ll never snitch. Hear me? You was never here.”
Leigh blurts, “I loved Andre—”
“I ain’t the fool my brother was. We can do this fast or slow. Now show me where you put him, bitch.”
Promptly he ties her wrists behind her back with electric cord. “Is this necessary?” she argues, but he marches her downstairs with the shard against her kidney. These misogynists probably get off on her humiliation, she thinks, helplessly watching him lift the keys off the ring. Treated no better than a sow, she is forced through the window into the main hall.
Stay sharp, she tells herself: like a bad bitch. Let them touch her, call her names. As always, her cunning will get her through.
“That’s the one,” she whimpers, nodding to the Wicker Park door. Drew holds the keyring to her face; she hopes he enjoys making her nudge the correct one with her nose. His satisfaction will turn to pain when he opens the door to find five tough, loyal, very well-rested older men ready to stomp his ass when they see her imperiled.
Sam opens Wicker Park, and, to her shock and disgust, the entrance has been hung with dusty coats, fur and tweed. Drew forces her to march. Pushing ahead of them, Sam curses the heavy, unwashed, odorous clothing. After handling these clowns, Leigh plans on giving her tenants a stern talk about hoarding.
Sometime later she hears . . . birdsong? Impossible, she thinks, then Sam remarks on it. The tweed on her cheeks begins to feel like . . . leaves? Her nose picks up a fetid stench of biological life.
“We should go back,” she warns, but the fool with the shard hurries her beneath low-hanging palm fronds.
Sunlight warms her face. Her breath catches in wonder.
Before them stretches a rolling plain of verdant grass growing tall as their waists. Weakening pressure against her kidneys tells her their new environs have Drew bespelled. The air bears an appealing bitter tinge, as of expensive spice, the sun a copper bauble nowhere as forceful as the apocalyptic titan she knows. When stones gouge her bare soles, she slips to her knees.
“Up!” Drew barks, and lifts her by her hair.
“Kill you,” she swears under her breath. “I’ll kill you like I killed your brother.”
By the time they emerge from the grass onto the cusp of a flat promontory made from a flint-like substance streaked in white, she has mud on her nightgown and bloody feet, her hands nerveless and swollen. She stares down at a city on a vast, iron-colored plain. Whoever built this desolate metropolis was fortunate to find the confluence of two rivers meeting in a great X, their sapphire waters extending splendorous to the eastern mountains, to the wooded western hills, to the barren northern fastness, and along their fruitful length abundantly gather thatch-roofed fishing villages. Invariably the city draws her eye: hemmed with rectilinear buildings carved from white stone of which she knows no terrestrial doppelgänger, streets radiate from the aquatic confluence like parterres of a wheel, populated with seeming hundreds of bustling citizens. Drew, who appears to have forgotten his captive, steps forward, shard in one hand and keyring in the other, mystified.
From her periphery she glimpses two horsemen not fifty paces away. Astride noble zebras, they wear dun-colored robes and hooded turbans around glistening brown faces, rifles over their shoulders, scimitars sashed at their waists. One places the mouth of a curved hunting horn to his lips to blow a long, baleful note.
At the sound, Drew spins to face them. Leigh grabs her chance and barrels into his ribs with her shoulder, determined to regain her keys, even if she has to lift them with her toes from his ebbing lifeblood. Together they crash to the stone, rolling, snarling. Luckily she catches his ear in her teeth, bites down. His howl of pain is better than any drug.
As her adversary writhes, she crouches and reaches behind her back to grasp the keyring, elated at the tickle of rusted iron as it slips down her fingertip and onto her knuckle.
Into the grass she flees from the horsemen who, moment by moment, she can hear gain ground. A frantic glance over her shoulder reveals Sam hard at her heels, huffing fast as he can over terrain his Jordans are not made for. Behind him Drew rises to try and fight the horsemen, or so it seems, one hand on the shard, the other pressed to his bleeding ear. Whatever legend he thinks will be told of his courage dies unsung; as one horseman uses the butt of his rifle to spar with Drew, the other wheels casually around to brain him with the pommel of his scimitar.
Leigh doubles her pace. A moment later there sounds an ominous screech. A cry of pain. Looking back, she sees Sam sprawled on the stone with bolas around his ankles.
Desperate adrenaline fuels her through grass, palms, and coats until she slams face first into the door, her momentum such she opens it against her forehead, oblivious to pain, a headlong dash that ends in collision with the door on the opposite side of the hall. Sprawled on her back and tasting blood, she stares up to see the Wicker Park door gaping open. Three rocks of her shoulder and she manages to roll across the width of the floor, braces her back to the wall and stands on legs that feel like torture devices. The first key she blindly fumbles into the lock turns. She screams in ghastly elation.
Time passes. Slumped against the wall in near catatonia, Leigh has cut the electric cord, yet to fully receive feeling in her hands again, terrified the slightest twitch of her swollen fingers, even with the door locked, would bring about the end of her already tremulous existence. What startles her to lucidity is the sound of an envelope slipping from under the Wicker Park door. Branded with a lion seal, it slides under her bruised, bloody heel. Steeling herself for more treachery, she mangles it open with her teeth. Inside she discovers a note written in virulent cursive:
White woman,
Yes, we remember you. We of the Democratic Republic of Sankofa have seceded from your racist slave colony and established a socialist society. We will not pay you or any European for the right to live on this land we have taken as reparations for four hundred years of kidnapping, enslavement, and oppression. Any efforts by you to interfere in our sovereignty will be taken as an act of war and result in grave consequences. The two Afrikan brothers who were with you are now citizens of Sankofa and will be delivered to the elders for reeducation. I reiterate, take no action against us.
Afrique Moonbeam, formerly known by the slave name Stephen Green
Lord High Sun-Ra of Sankofa