Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“Go on in,” she says, lifting her bike onto the narrow porch of the little house. “I’m right behind you.”

I walk through the flimsy front door into a room that serves as a combination kitchen, den, and dining area. The moment I enter, two things strike me with startling intensity. First is the sound of the rain hitting the tin roof above me. It’s my recurring dream made real, and the rattling almost takes my breath away. The second is the certainty that my father once lived here. On the mantel over a gas space heater is a sculpture of a woman. Though it’s of African rather than Asian derivation-a blank oval face over a long neck and a trunk with graceful limbs-one glance tells me it’s my father’s work. The woman is lying on her side, with one knee raised and one hand on her hip, the way a woman might lie in bed watching her lover across the room. This sculpture is easily worth more than Louise’s whole house.

The dining table, too, is my father’s work. Brushed steel with inset glass plates, and flecks of mica fused to the steel. There’s no bed in this room, but I’d bet anything that he built that, too.

“Luke wanted me to have my own place,” Louise says from behind me.

Suddenly I’m wavering on my feet. The heat in the house is stifling, as though the place has been shut up for days, and the rattle of the rain seems to grow louder by the second. But that’s only part of it. Today my father’s life has turned from a patchwork of happy memories to a house of mirrors.

“What is it?” cries Louise.

“I don’t know.”

She rushes to an air conditioner mounted in a window and flips a switch. The rumbling roar of the old window unit does much to drown the sound of the rain, but it’s too little too late.

“You’re going to faint!”

As my knees go out from under me, Louise catches me under the arms and steers my falling body toward a sofa.

“Drink this,” says Louise, holding a glass of iced tea under my chin. “The heat got you, that’s all. This place been shut up a couple of days, and it gets like an oven without the AC going.”

“It’s not the heat,” I tell her, taking the glass and drinking a sip of syrupy sweet tea.

“Was it seeing Luke’s things? I should have known that would upset you.”

“That’s not why I passed out.”

She studies me with her deep brown eyes. “You look scared, more than anything.”

I nod slowly. “It’s the rain.”

“The rain?”

“The sound of it. Rain hitting a tin roof.”

Louise looks confused. “You don’t like that?”

“It’s not a matter of liking it or not. I just can’t take it.”

“Really? I love that sound. It makes me lonely, but I still love it. I used to lie in bed with Luke on rainy afternoons and listen for hours. It’s like music.”

I try to smile, but my lips won’t do it.

“I’m sorry. You’re upset, and I’m just thinking back on good times. Did something bad happen to you in the rain?”

“I wish I knew. Lately I’ve been hearing that sound in my dreams, and even while I’m awake.”

“Sometimes that’s the way of it,” Louise says, walking to the sink. “I got a lot of things inside me I don’t understand.” She runs tap water into a carafe. “I got to make some coffee. It can be a hundred degrees outside, but I got to have my coffee. Addicted, I guess.”

“Louise, what can you tell me about the orange pickup truck by the bridge?”

She switches on the Mr. Coffee, then comes and sits in a Naugahyde recliner on my left. “That old rusted wreck by the shed?”

“Yes.”

“That was Dr. Kirkland’s truck back in the old days.”

“I know. But did my father ever drive it?”

She closes her eyes. “Yeah, Luke drove it some, when Dr. Kirkland wasn’t around. Dr. Kirkland used to brag all the time about how long that junker had been running. He said it had never quit on him and never would. Finally did, though. Why?”

“I think I saw something when I was in that truck. I have this dream where I’m riding in it with Grandpapa. We’re on the north end of the island, riding up a hill in the cow pasture, toward the pond.”

Louise nods. “I know where that is.”

“In the dream, we never get over the hill. We get closer and closer, but we never get over it. Lately, the closer we get, the more afraid I get.”

“How long you been having this dream?”

“A couple of weeks, maybe longer. Do you know of anything that happened up there? Something bad I might have seen?”

She leans back in her chair and looks at the porch window. The storm clouds have brought a premature darkness, and the wind rattles the glass in its frame.

“Gonna get worse before it gets better,” she predicts. “Lots of bad things happened on this old island over the years. But the pond…you think you saw somebody get beaten? Killed, maybe? Something like that?”

“I don’t know.” A different thought strikes me. “Did you and Daddy ever do anything at the pond? Sexually, I mean?”

A deep stillness comes over Louise. “We swam there sometimes. But not while you were on the island.”

“Did you ever make love when I was on the island?”

She averts her eyes. “We tried not to. But sometimes we did. I’m sorry if that upsets you, but I don’t want to lie.”

“No, I want the truth. And I know how it is when you love somebody.”

“Well…you could have seen us swimming naked in the pond. But I don’t think you did.”

Sensing discomfort in Louise, I change the subject. “Did Daddy ever talk to you about the war?”

“Not with words. But he let me see the pain in different ways.”

“What do you think happened to him over there?”

Her large eyes fix on me, an earnest passion in them. “He got poisoned. That’s what happened. Not in his body-in his soul.”

“Louise…I’ve been told that his unit committed war crimes. Atrocities. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She nods solemnly.

“They tortured people. Kidnapped women and raped them. Do you think Daddy could have done anything like that?” This is as close as I can bear to come to asking Louise if she thinks my father could have molested me.

She stands suddenly and goes to a drawer, then takes out a pack of Salem cigarettes and lights one with a kitchen match. Despite the passage of time, Louise still has a slim figure, with taut calves that a lot of women would kill for. I can only imagine what she must have looked like as a young woman.

“Luke had some problems, okay?” She exhales blue smoke. “When he and I first got together, he couldn’t make love.”

“You mean physically?” A strange excitement awakens in my chest. “He was impotent?”

She tilts her head as if unsure how to reply. “He was and he wasn’t.”

“What do you mean, he was and he wasn’t?”

Louise looks at me skeptically. “I don’t see a ring on your finger. You ever lived with a man?”

“A couple. Or they lived with me, rather. You don’t have to pull any punches with me, Louise. I know men.”

She chuckles softly. “You know how when a man wakes up, lots of times he’s hard down there from having to go to the bathroom?”

I nod, my curiosity making me grip the arm of the sofa.

“Well, Luke would be like that in the morning. But if I tried to make love with him, he couldn’t stay that way.”

“I see.”

“I knew something in the war had done that to him. Not his wound. Something in his head. It took more than a year to get him where he could be with me. Where he could trust me. I think that’s what it was, trust. But I’m no doctor. I don’t know. He may have done or seen things over there that made sex something terrible to him.”