Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

“You need a bath,” I said.

He blinked his small eyes in surprise.

“Lawd, you got a mouth on you,” he said admiringly, then hit me with incredibly hard open hands until I blacked out.

I think it was twice.

IWOKE UP in a cage, naked, outside.

It was morning. It was cold. My head hurt like it was sitting in a socket of cold, broken glass. A curious chicken just outside the iron bars cocked its head so it could see me with its preferred eye.

“Good morning,” I said to it.

I sat up, noticing first how white my legs looked and then that they had rust stains from the bottom of the cage. I had a very civilized and unnecessary urge to cover my private parts, but there was not so much as a handkerchief in the frigid cage. There was not enough room to stand, or to fully extend my legs.

I looked at the chicken again.

“Would you please tell management that I would like to be moved to a better room?”

It walked off disinterestedly.

“I’ll have your job,” I said.

I knew where I was, though I scarcely believed it.

I knew where I had to be.

Despite the murderous pain in my head, I looked around and took stock of my situation. A grey, ancient smokehouse sagged just to my left. Near it stood a sort of round wooden disk. The fact that everything was blurry informed me that my glasses were gone.

To my right, a low stone wall defined the limit of what appeared to be an overgrown garden. Past that were rows of dilapidated shacks, swarmed over by kudzu and impaled by young trees.

This was all somehow familiar to me.

When I turned around and looked behind me, I knew why.

I saw it.

La Boudeuse.

The plantation of Lucien Savoyard, my great-grandfather.

Of course.

I turned around and looked at that wooden disk again, noticing this time the leather straps and buckles. Yes. This was the wheel on which Savoyard’s slaves had been flogged and tortured and spun until they were witless. I noticed that it was not overgrown.

“He awake,” a voice I recognized said. The Negro from last night. Not the strong, bald one. Bad haircut. He came over with a chipped bowl and stood over my cage with it.

“Open your mouth.”

I was thirsty enough to oblige and I drank as best I could the cold water he poured through the bars. I was shivering.

“I think the man cold,” he yelled back at the house. He seemed genuinely amused by this.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I said.

He looked at me.

He said the next thing very slowly.

“Cause we know who you are. We smell who you are. But don’t worry none. We’s the forgivin type.”

He stooped for the chicken that had been eyeing me and snatched it up by the neck, taking it inside with him, unconcerned with its beating wings. It took a moment for that to sink in. How fast he was.

It rained.

I had been testing the lock to the cage, bracing myself as best I could and pushing with both feet, hoping something might give. Something did, but it wasn’t in the door. I hurt my back.

“Goddamnit!” I said. That’s when I felt the first drops. “Goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit.”

Soon it was pouring.

I hugged my knees, watching the rain splashing in the muddy yard, trying to focus on that instead of the cold that was creeping through my body and the dull, tight pain above my right hip.

I saw a white foot tread in a puddle, and I looked up the leg and at its owner. The woman with the curly hair. Curly and matted. Naked, like me, standing in the rain. There was dried blood near her ear.

She had killed Buster.

“You’re handsome,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

She just stood there.

A beautiful woman with a wide, abundant thatch of hair on her pubis.

Slightly deflated breasts with huge nipples and brown areolas.

Someone’s mother.

The house was behind her, with its cupola and its balconies and mad growths of ivy. One of the upstairs French windows was open.

Then I saw her.

Eudora.

Her pale figure perfectly framed in the darkness of the interior.

Holding a bedsheet wrapped around her.

She looked out at me for a moment. I couldn’t make out her expression. Then a black hand was on her shoulder and she turned under her own power, and she went out of sight.

“She’s Hector’s,” the woman said.

“I see.”

“Good,” she said, and opened my cage.

She crawled in with me, entwined her limbs with mine, with her animal stink and her wild, tangled hair.

At first I tried not to let her, but it was like she was carved from warm oak. Her grip was unbreakable, even working against the thumb. She kissed me with her full lips and her rotten, hot breath, and I kept my mouth closed against her until she used her hand to force my mouth open. I bit her lip so hard my canines touched through it, and she jerked away from me, ripping the soft tissue open so a little part of her lip hung; the wound bled onto her chin in the rain. She laughed softly, like we were kids hiding in a tree house with a dirty secret. Drops of her blood fell on my chest and mixed with rainwater. She licked at where I bit her, taking her blood back into herself, and soon the bite was gone.

“You tryin to make me bite you back, huh? You want me to turn you? I might, pretty man, ’cept he said not to. But I will do this.”

She broke my ring finger.

I think she would have broken my little finger, but I didn’t have one on that hand.

I was so numb and cold and crazy it didn’t really hurt.

It didn’t matter.

She started putting mud all over us. It was smooth and sticky, more like clay. She warmed it on her crotch, then used it to get me hard.

She stuck me in her dirty like that and rode me until I came.

Then she slept on me and I was glad to be warm.

It just didn’t matter.

IT GOT TO be near dark and Mustache brought me dinner and a horse blanket. I had the impression somebody had a powwow and decided I might die of cold, and, for whatever reason, I wasn’t wanted dead. Not quickly, anyway. Dinner was roasted chicken, no doubt my friend from the morning. The funny thing was, I was so exhausted and deranged that I felt emotional about it. Like the chicken had suffered despite its innocence. I cried and ate it crying. It was poorly cooked and red near the bone. It occurred to me that perhaps they weren’t used to cooking things here.

When it was full dark, Curly Woman came and got me.

“He wants to see you.”

I wrapped up in the blanket and went with her into the big, wrecked plantation house, noticing now the flaking paint and bullet holes and how there was no glass in most of the French doors. We came in through the dining room. Candles burned and spilled wax on a once-magnificent table where a carved peacock’s jeweled eyes had been knifed out, probably by Union soldiers. I noticed that the candleholders were rusted Civil War–era bayonets jammed into the wood. She removed a candle and used it to light my way past the stairs now; I noticed a depression where the steps had been stove in by a cannonball at the end of its momentum, then crudely replaced. A groove in the fine wood floor betrayed its trajectory, how it had skipped like a giant skee-ball. The Yankees who occupied La Boudeuse after the slave uprising had shelled it for sport when they left. This was like a temple to madness.

In the hallway, we walked past rotted tapestries and, because I looked at them, she graciously stopped and held the candle so I could see the motif. Eighteenth-century laborers hardly laboring at all. How different must have been the scene out the window that gave onto the fields; slaves toiling bent-backed in the sun, tearing their fingers on the rough plants while, inside, in dyed silk, French shepherds lolled on rocks under shade trees. The master at his desk, the mistress at her loom and the house nigger pulling on the fan cord.