Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“This must be what he was looking at in my dream.”

“What?” says Michael. “You didn’t say anything about a Playboy magazine.”

“It’s nothing. This is a good thing.”

“Why?”

“It’s normal. ”

“Oh. I get it.”

A miniature photo album for storing snapshots follows the magazine out, and my throat tightens a little. Then comes the sketchbook Louise told me about. Next, a small stack of envelopes held together with a yellow ribbon, followed by a sheaf of maps, some of them laminated. The top envelope in the stack of letters is addressed to Luke Ferry, and the return address is Malmaison. The canceled stamp is dated 1969. The bag feels empty now, but when I shake it hard, some rotten prunes strung together on a wire fall out on the floor. A shield-shaped patch falls beside them. The patch shows an eagle’s head, and above that, a scoped rifle with the word SNIPER monogrammed in yellow thread above it.

“Hundred and First Airborne,” says Michael.

“What?”

“That eagle. The Screaming Eagles, that’s what they call the Hundred and First. I saw that eagle emblem all the time on that HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. Was your dad in the Airborne?”

“Yeah. I just found out the other day.”

Michael flips through the Playboy as I go through the stack of letters. Most are from my mother to my father, some written from Natchez, but most from University, Mississippi, the post office of Ole Miss. My mother went to school there while my dad was in the army, but she didn’t even manage a full year before he was wounded.

“Like what you see?” I ask Michael, who’s still looking at the Playboy.

“It’s funny. So dated. The cameras and the cars.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what you’re looking at.”

“Well, Lola Falana doesn’t look too bad here, I must admit.”

“Lola Falana’s black, right?”

“Mm-hm.” He holds up the magazine. I see a short but well-shaped woman with an Afro riding a horse.

Tying the envelopes back together with the ribbon, I glance at the rotten prunes. Desiccated, wrinkled, and black, they look like something I might have brought home in my trick-or-treat bag in the days before Halloween candy was store-bought. The book of pictures seems the next logical choice, but I’m not ready for that yet. Passing over them, I rummage through the maps. The top one shows the Vietnamese-Cambodian border west of Saigon. The next shows something called the A Shau Valley. This map has handwritten names in English: Eagle’s Nest; Berchtesgaden; Currahee; Hamburger Hill. There are elevations scrawled beside some of the names: OBJ Perry-639; OBJ Hoptown-670; Eagle’s Nest-1,487. Below the English names are typed words in another language: Dong So; Ale Ninh; Rao Lao. I have a feeling a lot of American boys died at those places, and that maybe they weren’t supposed to be there. Sure enough, as I study the map some more, I realize I’m looking at the border area between Vietnam and Laos.

“My God,” Michael exclaims, holding up the Playboy. “An interview with Tiny Tim. And a story by Nelson Algren. This is bizarre. Maybe your dad did buy this for the articles.”

“You’re a big help.”

“Sorry. I didn’t think you’d want me looking at that stuff until you’d checked it out.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

I’m down to the sketchbook and the photo album. I’m about to start working through the photos when Michael speaks again, this time in a voice I barely recognize.

“Cat?”

When I look up, his face is pale. “What is it?”

He shakes his head, then passes the magazine to me. Stuck between two pages are three photographs. Each one shows a different child. Two are boys, aged about six or seven. The third photo shows a dark-haired girl of about five.

All of the children are naked.

“Is that you?” Michael asks.

My eyes are swimming in tears. “No.”

The boy in one photo looks oblivious to the camera, but the other boy looks scared. He’s holding his little penis as though he’s about to urinate, but I can almost see a man standing behind the camera, ordering him to touch himself.

My stomach is trying to come up. I want to stop it, but I can’t. Dropping the magazine on the floor, I get to my feet, run to a corner, and puke my guts out. As I come up for air, spitting and dry-heaving, something touches my arm.

I whirl and lash out, striking Michael hard across the face.

He blinks in surprise but doesn’t try to defend himself. I draw back my arm again and swing at his face with all my strength. Something clamps around my wrist and pins it in midair.

Michael’s hand.

“Cat?” he says softly. “It’s me. It’s Michael.”

A scream bursts from my throat with the force of an explosion. From deeper than my chest, really, deeper even than my diaphragm. The scream is what my fist would have been had it smashed into Michael’s face. A bolt of rage and humiliation and other things I can’t even name. When the scream finally dies, my hand still quivers an inch from his face.

“I think we should get out of here,” he says. “We can talk about this stuff at my house.”

I don’t respond.

“I’ll get the bag. We should take it with us.”

He pushes my fist down to my waist, then lets it go and kneels on the floor. He puts everything back into the bag, then leads me by the wrist back through the sculptures, toward the barn door.

I stop in my tracks.

Hanging from a rafter above me is a sculpture I didn’t see on my way in. It was shielded from view by the floor of the loft. But now I see it. It’s a hanged man. Stylized, but a hanged man all the same. Life-size, and ugly as death. The face has the anonymous oval shape that the statue in Louise’s house did, but the body is fuller. At first I think of suicide, but something about the sculpture has a more official look. As if the man was just hanged for some offense. The steel rope around his neck rises in a perfect line that terminates in a hook, which would allow it to be hung from almost anything.

“I’ve never seen that before. I thought I’d seen everything he ever did.”

No, says a voice in my head. You’d never seen the pieces in Louise’s house either.

“That’s different,” I say.

Is it? Apparently, your father did a lot of things you never knew about. Or never remembered…

“Cat?” says Michael. “Are you talking to me?”

“What?”

“Come on. That scream was loud.”

He drags me toward the door, but my eyes remain locked on the hanged man.

As Michael pulls me through the trees toward Brookwood, I keep thinking of my father walking on water in my dream. When I woke, I felt certain that he was trying to tell me something. To help me. To send me the secret truth of his life and mine. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was trying to apologize for something. Not literally, of course. I know he’s not communicating to me from the dead or anything like that. It’s my subconscious creating these images. And yet…

“I’m sorry I flipped out,” I say. “You don’t have to stay with me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Michael. “You have no business being alone right now.”

We’re never going to reach Brookwood. My legs feel full of sand, and the humidity hanging in the air makes it difficult to extract oxygen from it. “I need to talk to my mother.”

“Why?”

“She’s my father’s next of kin. I can’t see getting any kind of exhumation permit without her support.”

“Cat, you just looked at three Polaroids and a sculpture and you freaked out. Now you’re talking about looking at your father’s corpse? After it’s been decomposing for over twenty years?”