Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

She had become motionless, staring at Bill, and the fish shifted on the bed and said, “Don’t stop. I didn’t tell you to stop.”

Bill pulled a long slender object from his pocket, and as he approached the bed, the object caught the light and resolved itself into a folding shaver’s blade, which he opened gracefully in one fluid movement. He slipped it into Lucinda’s hand and closed her palm over the handle with both of his hands, and when she looked at it there was already blood drying on the blade.

Pushing Lucinda onto the bed, Bill leaned over her and whispered, “Do it. Prove to me you’ll do anything for me.”

The fish, startled by the sudden pressure on the bed, began to protest. Bill quickly removed the blindfold, and, seeing the intruder, the man began to scream.

Lucinda, crouching on the bed, looked at the blade, unable to move. Bill knelt behind her, reached around, and grasped her hand in his own with a crushing grip to guide her movements. He directed the blade at the fish’s throat and made a rapid, sweeping pass. The fish stopped screaming in that instant, his eyes wide in terror, and began thrashing violently, a thin wash of blood starting to seep through the shallow wound.

She could feel Bill’s breath in her ear and he said to her, “Look at him.”

But she closed her eyes, her hand still gripped tightly in Bill’s own, the bed bucking with the fish’s struggles, and he made another pass with the blade and she felt it catch and progress haltingly, as though it were cutting through something denser than flesh. She felt the warm wash of blood over her hands, but still she kept her eyes closed, heard Bill’s voice saying, “Look at him… look at him .”

The fish still hadn’t begun screaming again, but he thrashed weakly, his legs kicking for a surprisingly short time.

Her head fell back onto Bill’s chest, his work now done; their hands rested quietly together on his thighs, the movement of his chest deep and even and satisfied, as after their lovemaking.

When she finally opened her eyes, it was to stare up at the large canopy overhead, the parallel lines of the struts, intersected by cross supports, looking near perfect in their execution, and she soundlessly recited, If a transversal line cuts across parallel lines at right angles it is called a perpendicular transversal…

Her breathing calmed and she rested awhile in a vacant, cool place.

It had begun to rain in earnest, but the boy was where Nate had left him. They came to Canal Street, where the boy hailed a carriage with a whistle and Nate followed him into its dark swaying interior. Nate had never been in such a covered carriage before and he felt it undignified, the conveyance somehow feminine, and it sharpened rather than diminished his sense of exposure. But he was soon glad to be out of the rain, the trip being too far a distance to cover quickly on foot. The carriage moved down St. Charles Avenue, and once the boy pointed to a group of armed men just exiting a saloon.

“Duverje’s men, looking for you,” he said.

The carriage turned back towards the river on First Street but pulled over after a short distance when the boy leaned out the window and told the driver to stop. He instructed Nate to pay the fare and they stepped onto a street lined with gaslights and large houses tucked behind lush growths of still-green magnolia and live oak.

There were few walkers and even fewer carriages, and the boy moved without hesitation across the street to a two-story columned house. They stood beneath a dense stand of crape myrtles and the boy looked at Nate expectantly.

Nate scanned the second-floor balcony for any open doors but everything seemed closed tight, the windows shuttered and dark. The front of the house was elevated from the ground by a few shallow stairs and, though it was exposed to the street, Nate realized that there were no lights coming from the front windows either, leaving the narrow porch deeply shadowed. A steep brick wall encircled the back of the house, but enough trees grew alongside it to aid anyone wishing to scale the barrier.

He looked up and down the deserted street and whispered to the boy, “What’s your name?”

“Alger.”

“I need you to try and scale that wall, circle round to the back, and see if any doors are unlocked.” He grabbed Alger’s collar and brought the boy’s face up close to his own. “And Alger, you stay in the shadows. You see any movement, you take off, hear?”

The boy nodded and disappeared into the blackness along the side of the house, his bare feet making no sound on the soaked earth. He easily gained a toehold on a magnolia tree and climbed effortlessly up the lowest branches, then dropped to the far side of the wall.

Nate hunkered down, uncertain how and when McGill would approach the house. He had a good view of the street from both directions within the stand of trees, which were dense enough to keep him from being observed from anyone inside the house as well. The wall surrounding the back garden made it difficult for a man to get in unless the back gate had been left open or unlocked, but still, there was no guarantee that while he kept a vigil at the front of the house, McGill wouldn’t gain entry from the back.

The rain pelted first one side of the street and then the other, as though poured from a sweeping, celestial watering can, and the earth and the rotting leaves blanketing it had a keen, wasting odor, like coffee grounds boiled in fish oil, so unlike the astringent, metallic scent of the desert of West Texas or the peppery fragrance of the Big Thicket to the east. It was the smell of long unattended decay, of people living too near one another; the effluvia of extravagant wastefulness.

The minutes passed and the boy still did not reappear. The house remained silent and Nate shifted in restless anxiety with a feeling of worsening dread taking hold in his chest. He stood, determined to follow the boy over the wall, when a hazy figure on the porch caught his eye. The boy had emerged from the opposite side of the house. He paused once, as though listening for sounds, the cameo of his pale face contrasting sharply with the surrounding shadows. He crept to the door and pressed one ear to it before grabbing the knob and twisting it. The door opened easily, and, turning once to signal Nate to come on, he slipped inside.

“Shitfire,” Nate said. He yanked the Dance from his belt and ran, sliding in the mud, for the porch stairs. Quickly scanning the streets, he gained the porch in a few steps, and then stood to one side of the door frame. He took a breath and stepped into the entranceway, his shooting arm extended, the gun cocked. It was dark in the hallway but a lamp was lit to the far side, next to a curving staircase. Alger stood motionless within the halo of light, his back to Nate, looking at something on the floor.

Nate remained still for a moment, listening for any sounds that were not their own, and then toe-heeled his way towards the lamplight. He grabbed Alger around his chest, pushed the boy behind him, and saw what was on the ground. It was a woman seated against the wall, her arms at her sides, her legs sprawled and unbent, the toes of her red-and-white-stockinged feet turned out like a dancer’s. Her head was bowed, as though in prayer, and a solid sheet of drying blood had flowed down her bosom and around her body like a cape carelessly thrown.

Keeping an eye to the stairs, Nate uncocked the hammer on the Dance, knelt down, and pulled at the woman’s hair, tipping her head back and exposing the slit in her throat, which opened like a gaping mouth. There was no mole under the eye identifying her as Lucinda, and he guessed it was Hattie’s missing girl.