Greg Iles - Blood Memory

This truck is nothing like the pickup in my dream. It’s high off the ground, with a fancy sound system, thick upholstery, and a roomy backseat. The truck in my dream is old and rusted, with round front fenders that make it look like a toy. A stick shift rises from the floor, and there’s no upholstery at all, not even on the roof.

“You related to Dr. Kirkland?” Henry asks, putting the truck in gear and easing onto the soft dirt of the causeway.

“He’s my grandfather.”

“Huh. How come I ain’t seen you down here before?”

“You probably have. It’s been ten years since I visited, though. Longer than that since I spent any real time here.”

“Well, it ain’t changed much. We got electricity about five years back. Used to have to use generators when we wanted power.”

“I remember. What about telephone service?”

Henry taps a cell phone on his belt. “These all we got, and they work about half the time. That’s why we keep two-way radios in the trucks.”

We hit a muddy patch, and the tail of the truck slides almost out from under us. I clench every muscle, but Henry just laughs as we straighten up again.

“You think you scared?” he booms. “My big ass goes into that water, it’s all over but the crying.”

“Why?”

“I can’t swim.”

Some people would laugh, but I can’t. It makes me sad. As we near the shore of the island, a few raindrops splatter on the windshield.

“Will the rain cover the bridge?” I ask.

“Probably not,” says Henry. “But I’ve seen it happen. Still, rain ain’t gonna come down hard for another hour yet.”

“How do you know?”

He looks at me and taps his nose. “The smell. They ought to put me on Channel Sixteen. I’m lots better than that weatherman they got.”

“You have TV out here now?”

“Satellite. No cable, though.”

Things have changed indeed. The last time I was here, DeSalle Island was as primitive as an Appalachian hollow. Two dozen shotgun shacks for the workers, my grandfather’s clinic, some cabins near the lake for visiting hunters, and various utility buildings. Most of the shacks had outdoor plumbing. The only buildings with “modern” conveniences were my grandfather’s hunting lodge-a plantation-style house built of cypress that overlooks the lake, designed by the noted Louisiana architect A. Hays Town-and the clinic.

“Almost there,” Henry says, giving the pickup a little gas.

As the wall of trees gets nearer, I catch sight of a small shed near the water, and a chill runs through me. Like almost every other building on DeSalle Island, the shed has a tin roof. As the chill subsides, my heart suddenly pounds against my sternum.

Parked beside the shed is the round-nosed pickup truck from my dream.

The moment Henry Washington’s truck rolls onto the gravel road that follows the eastern shore of the island, a strange thrumming starts in my body. It’s as though a mild current of electricity is sparking along my peripheral nerves, worsening the hand tremor that’s bothered me for the past three days.

The island looks the same as it always did, the perimeter skirted with cypress trees growing out of the shallow water near the shore, the interior forested with willow brakes and giant cottonwoods. The cypresses are on my right now; we’re driving north. I want to ask Henry about my grandfather’s old truck, but a tightness in my chest stops me. As it falls farther behind, I try to remember the layout of the island.

From the air, DeSalle Island looks like a foreshortened version of South America. It’s nearly bisected at the center by a horseshoe lake that was once a bend in the Mississippi River. Grandpapa’s hunting lodge stands on the north shore of the lake, the shacks of the workers on the south. West of the lake lie five hundred acres of rice fields. The northern end of the island is pastureland dotted with cattle and oil wells, and south of the lake lie the woods we’re passing now. Nestled among the trees at the lower edge of the woods are the cabins and utility buildings of the hunting camp, and below them-the Argentina of our island-low-lying sand dunes and muddy slews tail down to the confluence of the old channel and the Mississippi River.

“Jesse’s been on the north end chasing stray cows,” Henry says, shaking his head as though such labor requires a certain level of insanity. “He said something about doing some plumbing work at the hunting camp after that.”

In a few seconds the trees on my left will thin and reveal the lake and the cluster of shacks where the workers live.

“Didn’t we already pass the road to the camp?”

Henry laughs. “The closest road, we did. But I don’t take this truck into no slews. There’s a gravel road goes into the camp from the north now.”

I see the lake, dark green under the clouds, with small whitecaps whipped up by the wind. Henry turns left and follows a road that runs between the lake and the south edge of the woods. He waves broadly at a group of shotgun shacks by the lake. The sun has started to sink, and most of the porches have people on them, the old ones rocking slowly, the children scampering around in the dust with cats and dogs.

“Here we go,” Henry says, turning right onto a narrow gravel road through the trees.

“What’s Jesse like?” I ask.

“You don’t know him?”

“No.”

“Jesse’s a mystery. He used to be the most laid-back cat on this island. Loved to smoke and talk. But now he’s a hard-ass. I don’t know why, exactly. But he is.”

“Was it the war?”

Henry shrugs his big shoulders. “Who knows? Jesse don’t talk too much. He mostly work, or watch other people work.”

A minute passes in silence. The cabins of the hunting camp appear ahead. Unlike the shacks of the workers, many of which are made of tar paper or clapboard on brick stilts, the cabins are built of sturdy cypress, weathered gray and hard as steel. The roofs are corrugated tin that’s rusted to dark orange.

“There Jesse,” says Henry.

I don’t see a man, but I do see a brown horse tied to the porch rail of one of the cabins. Henry pulls up in front of the cabin and honks his horn three times.

Nothing happens.

“He’ll be here,” Henry says.

Sure enough, a wiry black man wearing no shirt crawls from beneath the cabin, stands, and brushes himself off. At first he looks like a hundred other black workmen I’ve seen. Then he turns, and I see the right side of his face. Blotches of bright pink skin stand out like splatters of paint from his right shoulder to his right temple, and his cheek is a mound of deformed scar tissue.

“He got burned over in Vietnam,” Henry says. “It looks bad, but we used to it now.”

Henry leans out his window and shouts, “Yo, Jesse! Got a lady in here wants to talk to you!”

Jesse walks over to the truck-my side, not Henry’s-and looks me in the eye. Henry uses his switch to roll down my window, which leaves only six inches of space between my face and Jesse Billups’s scars.

“What you want with me?” he says in an insolent voice.

“I want to talk to you about my father.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Luke Ferry.”

Jesse’s eyes widen, and then he snorts like a horse. “Goddamn. All this time, and now you come back? I met you when you was a little girl. I knew your mama pretty well. How’d you get down here?”

Henry says, “Her car’s parked on the other side of the bridge. I told her you’d take her back to it when she’s ready. You got her okay?”

Jesse studies me for a bit. “Yeah, I’ll take her back.”

He opens my door and helps me down from the high cab. Jesse must have a half inch of calluses on his hand. As Henry drives away with a blast of his horn, Jesse leads me to the next cabin down from the one where his horse is tied.