Chapter Nine

The air in Birdland was golden as slow syrup, green as the light that filtered through the kudzu, weighted with dampness and rot. The cool decaying scent of a house abandoned for decades, made up of many things: the black earth under the floor, the dry droppings of animals, the drifts of dead insects sifting to shards of iridescent chitin beneath shimmering tapestries of cobweb. In the random shafts of sunlight that fell through the lattice of roof and vegetation, dust motes slowly shifted, turned. Each one might represent a memory Trevor had of this house, a particle of the universe charged with the terrible energy of years.

He moved deeper in. Here was the living room, the husks of the ugly chair and old brown sofa that had come with the house moldering in a corner, reduced to skins of brittle colorless cloth stretched over skeletons of wood and wire. The rain had come in through the holes in the roof, and the room smelled of slow damp decay, of fungal secrets. Here were the remains of the stacked milk crates where the records had been stored. Most of the records were gone, probably stolen by kids who had made it this far in, though by the end of that summer the magical vinyl wheels would have been as warped as if they had spent two months in a slow oven.

A few fleeting images of album covers came to him: Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills with art by R. Crumb, the psychedelic hologram of the Rolling Stones' Satanic Majesties Request that could induce dizziness if he stared into it too long, a photograph of Sidney Bechet that had scared him a little to look at, because the muscles of the jazz saxophonist's cheeks and neck were so developed that his head appeared swollen, elephantine.

Here was the doorway leading into the hall, where Momma had died. Her blood had long since faded to a barely discernible pattern of streaks and spatters on the wall, not much darker than the shadow and grime around it. But here and there the wooden frame had been splintered by hammer blows that missed. And in two spots, one on either side of the door, Momma's fingers had dug into the wall hard enough to leave gouges in the plaster. That must have happened when Bobby didn't miss.

In the autopsy report was a list of substances found under her fingernails: wood, plaster, her husband's blood and her own. And little divots of Bobby's skin, strands of Bobby's hair. She had fought him off hard. She had died in intimate contact with him.

Cause of death: blunt trauma. Victim had fifteen separate wounds made by a claw hammer, five to the head, three to the chest area, seven to the arms and hands. Three of the head wounds and two of the chest wounds could in and of themselves have been fatal.

Had Momma died quietly? This was something Trevor had wondered about for a long time. She might have wrestled with Bobby in a desperate silence at first, not wanting to wake the boys and scare them with another fight. But once she realized that Bobby meant them harm, Trevor thought, she would have started screaming. She would have tried to hold Bobby off long enough to let them get out of the house.

And the injuries she had taken before her death: seven broken fingers, a splintered collarbone and a shattered tibia, three cracked ribs, a blow sunk so deeply into her chest that it penetrated the breastbone. Could she have remained silent through those?

Trevor didn't think so. He probably could have slept through anything that night. He remembered the bitter-tasting grapefruit juice Bobby had given him before bed, the dull loginess of his head the next morning when he woke. And a notation in his file at the Home said there had been Seconal in his blood when he was brought in.

Bobby had drugged him, which meant he had planned the murders. But had he planned to leave Trevor alive, and drugged him so he would sleep through it all? Or had he drugged both boys, planning to kill both, and changed his mind about Trevor for some reason?

And what about Didi? Trevor wondered if his brother had seen his death coming. He had found Didi curled on his belly, ruined head burrowed deep into the pillow, as if Bobby had killed him in his sleep. But unless Bobby had given him Seconal too, Trevor didn't think Didi could have slept through the sounds of his mother dying. Bobby could have killed him sitting up in bed-or cowering- and then arranged him back into the peaceful sleeping position as if trying to absolve himself.

Fredric D. McGee, Box 17, Violin Road, male Caucasian, 3 yrs, 2-6, 25 pounds, blond hair, brown eyes. Occupation: None. Cause of death: blunt trauma. Victim had approximately twenty-two separate wounds, all in head/neck area. Cranium and brain were completely destroyed. . .

Trevor imagined Didi's eyes as the hammer descended. He squeezed his own eyes shut and slammed the heel of his hand against the door frame. A rain of dust sifted down. The pain in his hand-his left hand, of course; he didn't hit things with his drawing hand-made the image of Didi fade. And, in a far corner of the living room, a crumpled sheet of newspaper suddenly rustled, then tore. The sound was nearly heart-stopping in the silent room.

Trevor turned away from the doorway, walked over to the corner and nudged the paper with his toe. He could see no mouse or insect, nothing that could have made it move, let alone tear. He picked it up and smoothed it, and the headline screamed off the page at him. “I HAD TO DO IT, ” SAYS KILLER. The word killer was ripped neatly in half.

Trevor examined the paper more closely and saw that it was a Raleigh News and Observer dated October 1986, years after he had left Missing Mile. The headline story was about a man in Corinth who had given his pregnant wife an abortion with a 30. 06, firing sixteen shells into her belly. Even in the womb children were not safe from their fathers. Trevor imagined the sizzle of hot lead tunneling into unformed fetal flesh, the raw, bloody reek edged with the firework smell of cordite. But Bobby hadn't been giving any interviews after murdering his family, not hi this world anyway.

Trevor pictured the front page of hell's daily, printed on asbestos but still singed at the edges, Bobby's huge-eyed, shell-shocked face in grainy black and white on the front page. And the headline would say-what? — ANOTHER FUCKED-UP GUY KILLS FAMILY, THEN SELF. ONE KID LEFT ALIVE; “WE'LL GET HIM LATER” SAYS DEVIL. Minor demons yawning over steaming mugs of bitter black coffee and brimstone, blearily scanning the news but not thinking much about it; this was business as usual in hell.

He felt the house drawing him in, filling his mind with images and icons till he overflowed like a pitcher of dark liquid. Caffeine sang in his veins. He dropped the newspaper, walked through the doorway stained with his mother's blood, past the kitchen on his left, and slowly down the hall, cocking his head and listening as he passed each room, trying to see through the half-closed doors.

On the right side of the hall was his parents' bedroom, then Bobby's studio. On the left was Didi's room, then Trevor's, then the tiny bathroom where Bobby had died. He remembered standing here before, looking at the afternoon light filtering in through the rooms, falling in golden slants across the hall floor, and wondering if he would ever be able to draw well enough to capture it.

He could do it now. But the light was subtly different, murkier, with a greener tinge to it. After a moment Trevor realized it must be because of the kudzu growing over the windows of the rooms, catching the sunlight and staining it.

He continued to the end of the hall, trailing his hand along the water-stained wall. On his right was the studio, on his left the bathroom. Bobby's hell and purgatory. Or was it the other way around? Trevor guessed that was one of the things he had come to find out.

He looked to his left and saw the faint gleam of light on dirty porcelain, the buckled shower curtain rod above the black chasm of the tub. How many hours was it now until the exact moment when Bobby had fastened the rope and stepped off the edge of the tub? How many hours until the twentieth anniversary of his neck snapping?

Trevor's eyes moved over the peeling walls, over the dark rectangle of the mirror, found the space between sink and toilet where he had curled his five-year-old body into the tightest possible ball. He wondered if he could fit there now. He wondered what he would see if he did.

Instead he turned and went into the studio. The two large windows were intact, and the room was dusty but otherwise clean. Trevor brushed off the tilted surface of Bobby's drawing table. He preferred to draw on a flat surface, having gotten used to his desk at the Home, but the folding table was one of the few things Bobby hadn't sold or thrown out when they left Austin. It had his stains and gouges, his razor slits and scars, his sweat grimed into its grain, maybe his tears too. Maybe his secrets. And maybe his nightmares.

Trevor sat on the sawed-off bar stool that Bobby had used as his drawing chair. It wobbled as it always had, but held. The light in here was good, even with the vines and tall grass covering the window, but some drawings tacked up on the wall were in shadow. He didn't want to see them now anyway; he had enough of Bobby here to suit him for a while.

Trevor got his own pencils and sketchbook out of his bag, arranged them on the table, and flipped to the story he had been working on at the graveyard. The story of how Bird and Walter Brown went to jail in Jackson, Mississippi, for talking on a screened porch one fine summer night.

Left arm curled around his sketchbook, head bent down far over the page, hair hanging like a pale curtain around his thin, determined face, Trevor drew for three hours. When he looked up, the room was veiled in blue shadows and he realized he had barely been able to see the page for ten minutes or more. He saw Bobby's old gooseneck lamp still clamped to the edge of the table, and without thinking he reached out and pushed the button that turned it on.

Stark electric light flooded the room, threw the spidery shadow of his fingers clutching the pencil onto the pitted tabletop.

Trevor's drawing trance broke. He shoved himself back from the table, nearly tipped the stool over. Only his fear made him keep his balance. He did not want to be on his back on the floor of this room just now. His gaze swept the corners, the ceiling, the darkening windows, came to rest on the brown cord snaking from the base of the lamp to the wall socket below. The thing was plugged in. But how could the wiring, the bulb, last twenty years? And as long as he was asking stupid questions, how could the fucking electricity be on?

He wondered if it might never have been turned off, if their delinquent bill might have been passed over by an idling computer or some such. He distrusted all engines and mechanical systems but especially computers, whose insides he pictured as like some silver, sinister, impossibly intricate painting by Giger.

But Trevor didn't think the power could have stayed on for two decades without someone at the switches noticing or the house catching fire. When you subtract the impossible, what's left? The improbable, the strange but true. The supernatural, or if you liked, the supernatural: outside the boundaries of most experience, but possible in a place where no boundaries are drawn.

Trevor settled back on the stool and glanced up at the wall, at the drawings tacked there, done on sketchbook paper now yellowed and curling at the edges. Most had sifted away to faint scratchings of ink or graphite, impossible to make out. But the one his eyes came to rest on was still clear enough.

It was Bobby's last drawing of Rosena, of whom he had done so many: facial studies framed in cascading hair, with tender mouth and large lustrous eyes; sinuous nude fantasies made flesh; long graceful hands like rapid sketches of birds in flight. But in this one Rosena sprawled in the hall doorway, head thrown back, face battered in. Except for slight differences in style-Bobby had a heavier hand with the shading, and a way of capturing the fall of light on hair that made it look nearly wet-it was identical to the drawing Trevor had done in his sketchbook on the Greyhound, on his way to Missing Mile.

Trevor stared at the faded picture, nodding ever so slightly, not even surprised anymore. Either Bobby had known how she would look in death before he killed her, as if he'd had some vision, or he had gotten out his sketchbook and drawn her broken body before he had gone into the bathroom to hang himself. Maybe somewhere around here was a sketch of Didi dead too. Trevor had done one this morning, barely awake, coming out of his dream of not-drawing.

But now he was here, on the very spot where he sat in the dream, and he could still draw.

His jaw was set, his eyes wary, a shade darker than before. Though he did not know it, he looked like a man who has taken blows but is now ready to deal some of his own.

He glanced down at his own sketchbook and for the first time really saw what he had just drawn, and all the hardness drained out of his face. His mouth fell open; his throat slammed shut; tears started in his eyes. Caffeine and adrenaline sizzled through his veins, made his heart carom against the walls of his chest. He could barely remember drawing this. It wasn't even how the story was supposed to go.

The cops were meant to show up with their nightsticks drawn, bash Bird and Brown around some, then haul them off to jail with bruises and bleeding scalps. That was what had really happened.

But in this version, the cops never stopped bashing.

There were closeups of hard wood connecting with skulls, skin splitting and curling back from the edges of wounds, a freshet of blood coursing from a nostril, an eye gone to pulp and swollen tissue, a spray of broken teeth on the ground like splinters of ivory scattered on dark velvet. Bird and Brown lay crumpled at the bottom of the final page like animals hunted down and killed for their pelts, adrift in a spreading pool of gore.

The gore was darkly shaded and looked slick, nearly wet. Trevor could not remember drawing it.

The house and whatever lived here had cast some nightmarish pall across his vision, hypnotized his hand, ruined his story.

Or had it?

The true story as Trevor had intended to tell it would have been strong and affecting in an understated way. Maybe this could be something splashier, stranger, and ultimately more memorable. He envisioned an ending for this version. The cops realize they've killed the musicians and sneak off, figuring they can blame the murders on niggers killing other niggers. But, as white men have failed to realize for too long, people aren't stupid just because they're poor. The black people of Jackson can read the death of their heroes like a bitter book whose pages are bound in dusky skin, writ large with blood spilled in hatred.

Jackson is not so far from New Orleans, cradle of dark religion and herbal wisdom from Africa, from Haiti, from the heart of the Louisiana swamp. And hoodoo knowledge has a way of traveling. . .

Trevor imagined the bodies of Bird and Brown rising back up, seeing dimly through smashed eyes, thinking dimly with smashed brains. They would be only shells, drained of music, of life. But like all good zombies they would be able to hone in on their killers. And they would have help. . .

In his mind he saw a full-page final frame. The cops crucified and burning on their own front lawns, nailed to crosses of blazing agony, their blackening, yawning forms silhouetted against the rich texture of the flames. It would have a crudely moralistic, E. G. Comics feel to it. But he wouldn't ink it or color it; he would do it entirely in pencil, meticulously shaded and hatched and stippled, and it would be beautiful.

And he would sell this fucker, sell it to a market that could afford to print it right. Raw maybe, or Taboo. He loved Taboo, an irregularly published anthology of beautifully rendered, lovingly produced, weird and twisted comics printed mostly in stark blacks and whites, shot through here and there with a few pages of color alternately subtle, vivid, and disturbing. Everything from Joe Coleman's mutilation paintings to the numerous intricate collaborations of Alan Moore had appeared in its pages, all printed on fine heavy paper.

Trevor's jaw was set again as he bent back over his sketchbook. But now the emotion in his face looked more like strength than hardness. If he did this right, it would be the best thing he had ever drawn.

He drew for four more hours in the harsh electric light, until his eyelids grew heavy and sandy, until his fingers could barely uncurl from the pencil. Then he folded his arms on the tabletop and cradled his head and went effortlessly to sleep.

Sometime later the gooseneck lamp clicked off, leaving him in darkness broken only by the trembling, shifting moonlight that came in the windows, filtered through kudzu and twenty years of dust.

Trevor did not dream that night.