Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

If anybody was to try shipping me anywhere, I was not gone just go along with it. If I had had a phone number for Ida Mae Oakes, I would have called her too. I needed somebody—if not Ida Mae, then Uncle Billy and Aunt Jude. The three of us cared more about Daddy than anybody else did. In my heart, I was convinced that the combined strength of our desire for his return would somehow make that wish come true. I cannot remember now if I had seen Peter Pan or not at that time, or even if Disney had released it yet, but to a certainty I had lived my going-on seven years among people who believed as a matter of faith beyond religion that if they wished or willed anything hard enough, it would have to be so.

Mamadee ordered Uncle Billy and Aunt Jude to go home and stay out of the way.

Much to Mamadee’s shock, Aunt Jude planted her splayed and knobby feet. Uncle Billy settled his shoulders and looked grim and immovable.

Lawyer Weems tried to bully them away too but he was no more successful than Mamadee.

“You stay,” Mama said abruptly to Uncle Billy and Aunt Jude.

I do not know if she really wanted them but maybe she thought she might need some allies against Mamadee and Lawyer Weems too. Maybe she just wanted to be contrary. She had Mr. Ree-shard find a cheap room for them and after that largely ignored them, except to send them on errands.

On the second day of Daddy’s disappearance, when the New Orleans police had been unable to find him in bar, brothel, hospital or morgue, Mama and Mamadee and Lawyer Weems agreed with the police that they must act as if the ransom note were real. Mr. Weems departed for Montgomery, to fetch the million dollars. He would return late on Monday with the cash, in small bills.

That was the day the FBI came into the case. By then I had determined the best listening post. The agents told Mama and Mamadee and Lawyer Weems, and Uncle Billy and Aunt Jude, that the signing of the note by “Judy” and “Janice” was just a subterfuge to make everybody think there were two female kidnappers. In the vast experience of the FBI, women occasionally kidnapped infants or small children, but they never, never kidnapped grown men. The agents assured Mama and Mamadee and the New Orleans police detectives (who seemed less than grateful for the vast expertise of the FBI) that, very definitely, the kidnappers, if there were kidnappers, were male. And just because two names were signed to the ransom note, the vast expertise of the FBI could assure all parties that that didn’t mean that there were two kidnappers—a gang of five had been operating in St. Louis the year before, for instance, or it might just be one man.

Mamadee had one question of the vastly expert FBI agents. “What do you mean, if ?”

“It may yet prove to be a hoax, ma’am,” said one agent. While another cleared his throat and added, “And sometimes what looks like a kidnapping is French leave.”

“What’s ‘French leave’?” I asked Ford later.

“Running away to Rio de Janeiro to start a new life, without getting a divorce or anything. Usually the person that leaves takes all the money, and maybe his secretary.”

The thought that Daddy might leave us willingly was more than I could imagine. The idea that he would take his secretary, Miz Twilley, with him, was incomprehensible. Why his secretary? Would she place the long-distance phone calls home to us for him? Take down the letters that he would write to us on her steno pad in the shorthanded, secret code she used? And why was it French leave? French was a busy word, attached to a number of oddly assorted objects and processes. For instance, I could throw a spitball to the French Quarter from the balcony of Penthouse B.

Something was making my eyes sting and water.

“You snivel, I am not telling you anything else!” Ford threatened.

“I am not sniveling! What else?”

“The other thing is, sometimes kidnapping is a disguise for murdering somebody.”

My throat tightened; my stomach felt kicked back to my backbone. Murder was a common enough threat in our house, but as on television, it was bloodlessly make-believe. True Sex Crimes and its kindred were as sub rosa as girly magazines. The idea that anybody real would kill some other real person was a genuine shock to me. At that moment, I felt foolish and, worse, that my foolishness might be lethal. I was old enough to grasp at least some of the wickedness of human beings. And it was my daddy who was at stake. I have never told anyone before, but I peed myself. It ran down my legs into my socks. My overalls hid it just long enough for me to escape Ford.

But first he asked a superior rhetorical question to which he, of course, did know the answer. “You know who the first suspect always is?”

I shook my head.

“The wife. Or the husband, if the wife is missing.”

“Mama?” I whispered.

Ford nodded. Something about the idea pleased him, or else he was just enjoying scaring me.

I gave him a violent shove and ran for my room.

In the meantime, Janice Hicks baked brioche in the hotel kitchen, and Judy DeLucca brought them up to our room every morning with Mama’s coffee.

JUDY DeLucca and Janice Hicks both got off work at two o’clock in the afternoon, when they went home and tortured Daddy.

Janice lived with her baby brother, Jerome, who also weighed more than three hundred pounds, in a house owned by an aunt and uncle no one had seen in years. Judy rented a room in the house next door to the Hicks. Judy’s landlady was eighty-two years and deaf, so she never heard Daddy’s screams.

Nobody knows why the two women were in the hotel at night, when Daddy was last seen, or how they got him out of the hotel without being noticed. Judy’s testimony was at best sketchy.

Judy said, “I hit him over the head and I pushed him into a taxi and I told the driver that he was my uncle who had a plate in his head since the war and sometimes he got dizzy and to take us to my house.”

Janice only said, “It was Judy got him to her house. I hardly had a thing to do with that part. I was out buying stuff.”

The stuff Janice Hicks bought was a sturdy metal footlocker, two bottles of rubbing alcohol, five rolls of bandages, a pair of cuticle scissors, and a new broom. She gave a colored man fifteen cents to carry the bulky footlocker to Judy’s.

The two women cut off all Daddy’s clothes. He must have been unconscious, because Judy patiently used the cuticle scissors—though there were other, much larger pairs of scissors in the house—and that must have taken a long time. With strips of the cloth of his trousers, jacket, and shirt—and employing intact his belt and his tie—they tied him to Judy’s bed.

“I poured the rubbing alcohol in his eyes,” Janice said, “but it didn’t make him blind.”

That was the first day.

The second day, when Judy and Janice came home from work, Judy’s landlady complained about a smell.

The smell was from Daddy, who had been tied to the bed all night and morning long with no provision for his bodily functions.

“I cleaned it up that time,” Judy said in court, “but Janice said to me, ‘Judy, we caint have no more of this,’ and I went downstairs and got the new broom and we pushed it up his”—Judy blushed with embarrassment—“his bottom,” she finally said. “And then we tied a string around his”—Judy paused again. “Prepuce,” the district attorney prompted, and Judy went on: “Peep ruse? My daddy called it his”—she told the district attorney in a stage whisper—“ his Pope’s hat . Anyway, I wasn’t having that man pee-pee in the bed again.”

On the third day, the force of Daddy’s bowels expelled the broom handle. His prepuce had ruptured with the pressure of urine. Because he called Judy and Janice very bad names—they never revealed what those names were—Judy stuck two fingers into Daddy’s mouth, grasped his tongue and pulled it out beyond his lips. Janice thrust a knife blade through his tongue perpendicularly, and left it there—Daddy’s pierced tongue protruding, and the blade and handle of the knife pressed against his face.