Twenty-Seven Bones

otherwise struggling. Phil had stretched her right arm out and was pinning it to the blanket with both hands. Emily guided Lewis around, positioned him, kneeling, just to the left of Angela’s head. He turned his Dolphins cap back to front.

Angela opened her eyes, looked past Lewis. Instead of closing her eyes again when Bennie raised the machete, she looked straight up at Lewis. Their eyes met; her eyes seemed to sink into their sockets. They melted, they morphed, and in the instant between the moment the machete began its swift descent and the moment it struck bone with a dull thwack (the sound having been absorbed by the soft ground beneath the blanket), he saw the ram’s eyes staring up at him from her face. He moaned and tried to pull away, but Emily was behind him, forcing his head down with one hand, shining the flashlight on the severed wrist with the other.

“Wait for it,” she said. She’d learned to anticipate the dying exhalation by timing the arterial spurt. “Wait… wait…”

The spurt of night black blood slowed to a dribble. “Now!” Emily pinched Angela’s nostrils shut. Lewis closed his eyes and covered Angela’s mouth with his. There was no death rattle; he felt a gentle pressure, a puff of moist coppery breath, which he sucked into his lungs as if it were a toke of rain forest chronic or freebase cocaine. When he opened his eyes, the eyes staring up at him from the dead whore’s face were those of the dead whore again. Angela. Angela Martin. From Montserrat.

And Lewis felt…nothing. The experience was nothing. The dying breath was only a breath. Emily was crazy. They were all crazy. Going around killing people, hacking off hands. For nothing. For a breath.

He took the flashlight from Emily and climbed to his feet. The knees of his white duck trousers were wet from the grass. He shined the flashlight around, looking for the bottle of Reserve he’d dropped. Emily stood up, swaying slightly. Her cheeks were flushed, her decollete bosom was heaving, and she was grinning crookedly, showing her chipped front tooth and looking for all the world like a woman who’s just had a screaming orgasm. Beyond her, Lewis saw the bottle winking in the grass, reflecting the flashlight beam. Lewis pushed past Emily, picked it up. Empty. He started to throw it across the field. Strong hands grabbed his arm, forced the bottle out of his hand.

“I have a swell idea,” said Phil, his voice dripping with irony. “As long as we’re in this together, what do you say we not leave behind a bottle with your fingerprints all over it.”

In this together, Lewis’s mind echoed dully, as Emily broke off an overhead branch and began sweeping her way backward, away from the blanket, obscuring their footprints. Together. Bennie finished wiping down the gun and the machete. Together. Phil and Bennie placed the former in the dead woman’s left hand and the latter in the dead man’s. Together. The four of them left the grove, circled back through the periphery and around to the road, climbed back into the black Land Rover. Together. They drove south along the dundo road until the stars appeared overhead again.

Chapter Eight 1

Monday morning rolled around again. Holly slapped the alarm clock into submission. “Kids!”

No answer.

“Schoolday. Wakey wakey.”

No answer. She furled the mosquito net, grabbed her bathrobe off the back of the chair, slipped it on, padded barefoot across the cabin, peered into the kids’ room. They were both in Marley’s bed. Holly wondered whether she should say anything to them about phasing out this same bed stuff. And at what age would it no longer be healthy for them even to continue sharing a bedroom? Her instinct told her puberty, which for Marley was still a couple years away. Her instinct’s track record told her she’d better start asking around, gathering opinions.

“Aroint, you varlets,” said Holly. That was how her father (a public school English teacher, and as secular as his father had been religious) used to wake up Holly and her sister. Someday, she promised herself, she was going to look up aroint in the dictionary, see what the hell it meant.

Marley seemed distracted all through breakfast. He played with his cereal, stirring swirls with a spoon held between his toes, blowing bubbles into his hot chocolate (he could manipulate a cup or glass with his feet if he had to, but preferred to drink through a straw). When it came time to leave for school, he needed to be reminded twice to take his book bag, and during the ride he was uncharacteristically quiet in the backseat. Holly asked him if anything was wrong.

He caught her eye in the mirror, jerked his head toward Dawn, in the front seat. “Ater-lay,” he said.

When they reached the school, Dawn hit the ground running and joined her friends, who’d chalked a hopscotch square on the sidewalk at the base of the front steps while they waited for the doors to open. Marley climbed into the front seat.

“So what’s going on?” inquired Holly, as she helped him hang his book bag crossways, around his neck and athwart his chest.

“I heard you talkin’ with Dawson about the Machete Man yesterday morning.”

Shit. “Did you tell Dawn?”

“No. But we got to get a gun. I tried Special Agent Pender’s last night, an’ I can do it, Auntie, I can shoot it.”

“I see.” Holly bent her forehead to his; they looked into each other’s eyes and breathed each other’s breath- this was the Honi, a ritual Hawaiian gesture she’d learned at Esalen. Marley had obviously failed to brush after breakfast-she could smell cereal and hot chocolate on his breath-but now didn’t seem like the right time to mention it. (Timing and forbearance: two niceties some parents, Holly’s own mother included, never learned.)

“I’ll ask around,” she said. “And in the meantime, I’m also going to ask around, see if anybody on the island teaches kickboxing. Just to tide you over.”

“You’re the best, Auntie.” He kissed her on the cheek, hopped out of the bus, executed a karate kick with one bare foot, then the other. “Pow,” he said. “Take dot, Machete Mon-right in the tessicals.”

GPM, thought Holly. Good Parenting Move. She told herself she was starting to get the hang of this thing. Of course, Marley hadn’t reached puberty yet. Tek pride was the St. Luke term: he ain’ tek pride yet. That’s when the going really got tough, everybody said. She could only hope she’d be ready when the time came.

2

It was snowing in Lewis’s dream. Gray snow. Thick gray snow falling silently from a darkened daytime sky. A voice called come inside before ya burn ya feet off. That’s when he realized it wasn’t snow, it was ash. The volcano had blown. He ran for the house, a wooden shack painted flesh pink, its roof already obscured. But he couldn’t make headway-the ashes were up to his shins. Skin sloughed from his feet, flesh melted from his calves…he could see white bone through the ash…he slogged toward the shack…peculiar how there was no pain…now he was teetering, tiptoeing on the stumps of his ankles like a ballerina en pointe…he wasn’t going to make it…the ash was high, higher, choking him….

“Mistah Lewis.”

He opened his eyes. He was in his own bedroom, on his own island. No volcano, no eruption. “Whazzit?”

“Dr. Vogler is waiting downstairs, sah.” Johnny shoved the bedroom door open with his hip, backed in holding a silver breakfast tray with a glass of rum-spiked tomato juice and a bottle of aspirin. Indispensable-the man was indispensable.

“What time is it?”

“Half past eleven.” Johnny set the tray down next to the bed.

“Fuck me,” Lewis moaned as he sat up. Valium and white rum: a potent combination.

“Looks like ya already took cyare a dot, Mistah Lewis,” said Johnny, stooping to pick something up from the