[david]
David Weiss woke up with a hand over his mouth and a gun in his side.
The dark swelled and mutated around him as his body started and his eyes flickered open. He tried to yell and bite the hand, but he was hit in the groin. A heavy, breathless clench around his intestines, like a hand pulling up a weed. He gasped and doubled up. The hand around his mouth was rough, calloused. The fingers thick and sturdy. It tasted salty. A jarred face above him, the plow of a mouth, seeded with teeth. The room juking and twisting. He was sweating. His hand groped for his wife, Ester, beside him in bed and he found her hand, cold and dusty. Her fingers curled like burnt match-heads around his. He could hear her cinched breathing. Tight, surfaced. He could see that someone had a gun to her, too.
Stay calm.
Godssakes, stay calm!
“Get up. Any dumb moves and we'll shoot your wife.”
David got up slowly, palms up. His stomach was still sick and his pajamas sucked up against his flypaper skin, sticky with sweat. His feet up against the warm floor. Hands still up. The gun in his side. He looked closer at the man holding it. James Phillips. He owned the drugstore on main street. David had known him for five years, ever since he had moved up from Galveston. His mouth creaked open, like an old, bent mailbox lid, and he said, “James. What the hell is going – ”
James sank the gun harder into his gut.
“Shut up, David. No dumb moves. Outside.”
“But the kids.”
“Shut the hell up, I said!” James kneed him in the back and he stumbled forward. He caught a glimpse of the man holding his wife – Bo Taylor, their neighbor's son. Ester's eyes wide and flitting. Delicate in the moonlight. Fragile and breakable. A hand around her juiced, candied lips.
His head was groggy and pounding.
The pale wedding train of the moon sluiced onto the floor of the hallway. Padding, sticky feet. David could hear people in the front yard. The bottleglass panes of the kitchen window were ruddy with distorted flame light, red and shifting, like sleepless eyes. He could see the body of a bonfire in his front yard. The arthritic popping of twig and trapped gas could be heard through the plaster walls. The kids. Where where the kids?
The teased trapeze of his thoughts.
The gun in his side – cold, cold.
And the downy breath of his wife.
Where in God's name were the kids?
They went through the front door. David and Ester were shoved off of the porch and onto the front lawn. Their faces bloody and slippery in the firelight. The crazy bayonet of flame and shadow. People stood all around. A slow murmur. They were his neighbors and his customers and the people he passed on the street. They stood defensively. Their bodies taut and scared and thin, iron black as weathervanes. David scrambled to his feet, looking wildly for his kids, his two boys, Toby and Levi.
He saw them.
Snot and tears on their faces, their expressions jumping off their faces in the light of the bonfire like clownish jack-in-the-boxes. Standing. Standing with two men holding guns to their heads. David opened his mouth. Closed it. Turned around. Eyes followed him. There were the skeletons of his furniture in the gut of the fire, looted from his living room. A couch, kitchen chairs, a TV, the lawn furniture. And books! His books. Blighted pages, curling like eyelashes.
James came up behind him.
He could hear his boys whimpering. His heart in his throat and his fingers longing to thumb away the tears on his boys' face. His fists curled. He turned again.
“What the hell is going on here?” he screamed.
The words were digested into the heavy, spoiled silence. The strut of the bonfire. Lazy sparks sprayed skyward, wriggling like sperm. James grabbed his shoulder.
“David...”
David grunted, spun around, and punched James as hard as he could. A split of knuckles. James's nose scrunched under his fist. Warm, crude blood. “What the hell is going on?” he screamed again. Shadows jumped and wheezed like crickets. David fell on James, his fists beating against him. Screaming, yelling. A pulsing molasses in his veins. People from all sides ran at him. Hands pulling, grabbing, tearing his nightshirt. His wife screaming. The wormy, eaten sky. Crackle, pop! Crying kids, howling kids. Punching the bastard over and over. The satisfaction of a snapped bone, broken tooth. James's body hot and squirming under him. Fingers scratching him like pitchfork prongs. The brawl of flame and limb. He felt himself dragged off of James. He could taste blood. He could taste it in the air.
The crowd cried:
“Lynch the bastard!”
“Let his kids watch him hang!”
He felt himself lifted off his feet. He was carried. Carried to the old, knot-skinned apple tree. There was a noose hanging from it's thickest, sturdiest limb. The tree held it humbly. Little rotten apples at its base, mushy and small underfoot. He struggled. His wife ran forward, shrill, eyes bulging like lugnuts, her mouth broken open. Someone hit her over the head with the butt of a gun. A graceless fall. Collapsed. Her pale, old thighs showing in the firelight. Men stripping her of her nightgown. Laughing, cheering. She was a wounded paper crane, unfolded wings. Toby and Levi screamed, screamed, screamed. James was up, pinching his nose with one hand and viciously beating at David's neck and face. Blood in his beard. Like water percolating on twisted, sucking roots.
They hoisted him up onto a big fruit crate under the apple tree. Under the noose.
They yelled and clamored. Four men holding him back. Biting their hands. Swearing, praying. God, God! What is this? James fired his gun in the air. The riot died slowly, like the last writhings of a broken insect.
He wiped his mouth and spat. He looked around and then up at David. “Man, the next time you pull a stunt like that, I'll kill Toby. I swear I will. I'll kill him right in front of you. So stop moving.”
“Bastard!” David screamed and kicked out at the nearest man. “Don't you dare touch my kid!”.
“Stop moving, David.”
“Burn in hell!”
James shrugged and walked to where Toby was being held, grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him against his belly. He pressed the gun against the boy's head. His translucent, fragile head, hairs whispering off of his scalp like the thinnest dandelion chutes. Shivering. Blue china eyes wide. He could hear the terror in his son's breath, even from ten feet away. And trembling, trembling. David swallowed. He felt himself collapsing a little bit, withering. He shook his head. “Don't do it, James. Godssakes, don't do it.”
James's lips were tight and pressed. He nodded at the men holding David. Ester was bruised and curdled in the light. Curled up like a catepillar. Hands around her swollen, bottlecap breasts. Crying on the dirt. They slipped the noose around David's head. It was heavy and bristly against his neck. Gentle, warm, like the touch of a woman. He was crying. He couldn't keep his eyes of his son. Hold still. The touch of the gun vicarious. Why? Why in God's name was this happening?
They pulled it tight.
A nestled, ugly fitting.
It could feel his pulse.
“James. Bo. Franky,” he looked around the crowd, voice hoarse. “Dill. Lewis. Guys – Listen, I've known half of you since you was kids. Why are you doing this? What the hell have I done to deserve this?”
The crinkling, boogying flames stole the silence.
James looked up at him.
“Listen. We got our kids to think about, okay? We got homes and famblies and we got our farms. Hell, man! You been down to my place recently? Huh? You felt the dirt in your hand? It's hard and dry. I could break my teeth on it. And then half the town dying. There are four bodies to be buried and we can't get a proper burial because one of the bodies is the Pastor, for God's sake! I can't barely think in this heat. I can't barely breath. It's God, David. It's God. It's gotta be. I can feel him. All over the place. We can feel his anger in that dust storm, the sun, in the land, in the sweat. Pastor Franklin's passing was just too bad, but Phoebe Winston was right, man. We've gotta cleanse. God's angry at somebody and it sure as hell ain't me. The whores, the niggers, the jews, the gamblers, and drinkers. They've got to go. You read the scriptures? Well, we gotta be clean. We gotta be pure, or, godssakes, we're all gonna burn!”
A yell from the crowd.
The nippled, dirty shadows, standing like skinny dogs.
David could almost feel the noose tightening around his neck. As the crowd stomped and jangled and shoveled forward, eyes bulging, mouths big and red, the blood on their lips like a promise, the bonfire struck up and twisted. Pale ash settled on the air. It was in his hair. Delicate and folded on his shoulders and on the eyelashes of his children before him like the wings of insects. His mouth was dry. He could barely talk. His jaw squeaked and cracked, lips parched like pages of ancient text, when he opened it and said,
“You're gonna hang me because I'm a Jew?”
The words fell with the ashes. A quieting. A slithering hush.
James said, “It's just not in our best interests to have you here anymore. You can't be too careful, can you? Cleansing, David. We've got to start all over.” They kept eye contact for a little while. James shrugged again. He turned away and looked up at the sky, black with fear and smoke. He was praying. His lips moved silently. David looked around again, weak. The eyes were miserly and hoarded, scrunched together and righteous. The people looked at him with sharp chins. The cast and articulation of the shadow on their cheekbones, making all their faces split and lengthen. His children cried. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Open, close. James turned around, put his hands in his pockets.
He nodded.
Someone kicked the crate from under his feet. The bend and slope of the apple branch, creaking like trick knee in bad weather. The tight grab of the rope, slinking around his neck, pulling tighter, tighter until his breath was squeezed out between his lips, eyes struggling against the black current that slipped around his vision. The ears popping, ringing. Ester and the kids screaming, he could still see them. His eyes so tight against their sockets, the pressure stripping drips of light across his vision, white and crooked little faults. The surge and crash of the crowd. Their faces ugly and purple, like the bellies of stormclouds. The ripe black. The rushrushrush of the blood, syrup in his head. The white lights weaving in and out like lanterns. Ester got close enough to grab his foot. Someone pulled her back. It was James. He put a gun to her head and yelled something and shot her. A thin spray of blood on his face, like the daintiest spritz of sweet perfume. It was the last thing on his tongue.
Screaming children. Struggling, squirming. The pitiful clicks and gasps from his mouth.
God.
God help us all.
The heat spun.
A/N: Only two or three more chapters left.
