John Connolly CP 04 The White Road (com v4.0)

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Somehow, he had survived.
But Faulkner too was still alive, and that was simply too much for Angel to
bear.
For Angel to live, Faulkner had to die.
And what of this other man, the quiet, deliberate black male with the killer s
eyes?
Each time he watched his partner dress and undress, Louis s face remained
studiedly neutral, but he felt his gut clench as the tangled scars were
revealed on the back and thighs, as the other man paused to let the pain
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subside while pulling on a shirt or pants, sweat dotting his forehead. In the
beginning, in those first weeks after he returned from the clinic, Angel had
simply neglected to remove his clothes for days, preferring instead to lie,
fully clothed, on his stomach until it became necessary to change his
dressings. He rarely spoke of what had occurred on the preacher s island,
although it consumed his days and drew out his nights.
Louis knew a great deal more about Angel s past than his partner had learned
about his, Angel recognizing in his reticence a reluctance to reveal himself
that went beyond mere privacy. But Louis understood, at some minor level, the
sense of violation that Angel now felt. Violation, the infliction of pain upon
him by someone older and more powerful, should have been left behind long ago,
sealed away in a casket filled with hard hands and candy bars. Now, it was as
if the seal had been broken and the past was seeping out like foul gas,
polluting the present and the future.
Angel was right: Parker should have burned the preacher when he had the
chance. Instead, he had chosen some alternative, less certain path, placing
his faith in the force of law while a small part of him, the part of him that
had killed in the past and would, Louis felt certain, kill again in the
future, recognized that the law could never punish a man like Faulkner because
his actions went so far beyond anything that the law could comprehend,
impacting on worlds gone and worlds yet to exist.
Louis believed that he knew why Parker had acted in the way that he had, knew
that he had spared the unarmed preacher s life because he believed the
alternative was to reduce himself to the old man s level. He had chosen his
own first faltering steps toward some form of salvation over the wishes,
perhaps even the needs, of his friend, and Louis could not find it in him to
blame Parker for this. Even Angel did not blame him: he merely wished that it
were otherwise.
But Louis did not believe in salvation, or if he did, he lived his life
knowing that its light would not shine upon him. If Parker was a man tormented
by his past, then Louis was a man resigned to it, accepting the reality, if
not the necessity, of all that he had done and the requirement that,
inevitably, a reckoning would have to be endured. Occasionally, he would look
back over his life and try to determine the point at which the path had
fatally forked, the precise moment in time at which he had embraced the
incandescent beauty of brutality. He would picture himself, a slim boy in a
houseful of women, with their laughter, their sexual banter, their moments of
prayerfulness, of worship, of peace. And then the shadow would fall, and Deber
would appear, and the silence would descend.
He did not know how his mother had found such a man as Deber, still less how
she had endured his presence, however inconstant, for so long. Deber was small
and mean, his dark skin pitted about the cheeks, a relic of shotgun pellets
discharged close to his face when he was a boy. He carried a metal whistle on
a chain around his neck, and used it to call breaks for the Negro work crews
that he supervised. He used it also to impose discipline in the house, to draw
the family to supper, to call the boy for chores or punishment, or to summon
the boy s mother to his bed. And she would stop what she was doing and, head
low, follow the whistle, and the boy would close his ears to the sound of them
coming through the walls.
One day, after Deber had been absent for many weeks and a kind of peace had
descended upon the house, he came and took the boy s mother away, and they
never saw her alive again. The last time her son saw his mother s face, they
were closing the casket over her and the mortician s cosmetics were heavy on
the marks beside her eyes and behind her ears. A stranger had killed her, they
said, and Deber s friends had provided him with an alibi that could not be
shaken. Deber stood by the casket and accepted the condolences of those too
afraid not to show their faces.
But the boy knew, and the women knew. Yet Deber returned to them, a month
later, and he led the boy s aunt into a bedroom that night, and the boy lay
awake and listened to the moaning and swearing, the woman whimpering and,
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once, emitting a yell of pain that was muffled by a pillow to her mouth. And
when the moon was still full, dim-shining on the waters beyond the house, he
heard a door open and he stole to the window and watched as his aunt descended
to the waters then, hunched over, cleansed herself of the man who now lay
sleeping in the bedroom beyond, before she sank down in the still lake and
began to cry.
The next morning, when Deber was gone and the women were about their chores,
he saw the tangled sheets and the blood upon them, and he made his choice. He
was fifteen by then and he knew that the law was not written to protect poor
black women. There was an intelligence to him beyond his years and his
experience, but something else too, something that he thought Deber had begun
to sense because a duller, less sophisticated version of it dwelt within
himself. It was a potential for violence, the aptitude for lethality that,
many years later, would cause an old man at a gas station to lie for fear of
his life. The boy, despite his delicate good looks, represented a burgeoning
threat to Deber, and he would have to be dealt with. Sometimes, when Deber [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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