“I won’t either,” I said.
“We can change our lives,” said Riley. “Things can get better from now on. Especially after the storm, we can, like, invent ourselves. Be new inventions. Somebodies new.” Somebodies we didn’t know yet: Antoine Dupree, involuntary orphan of the storm, and Kiran Kesavan, nine-year-old murderer.
The shack on Calhoun was almost invisible. Its peeling yellow paint, and the general grime and garbage of its surroundings, rendered it unremarkable in that part of New Orleans. No one noticed two grubby children picking their way along the sidewalk toward it. In our time at Sister Olivia’s, Riley and I had showered only sporadically, combed our hair when we felt like it, and failed to do any laundry at all. But street urchins are common in that part of the world, and on that day — August 28, the Saturday before the storm, the day everyone in New Orleans was preoccupied with more important matters — we went unnoticed. I have only vague memories of it now. As Riley said, your brain can erase things, or perhaps just suppress them until they aren’t as terrifying to recall.
The door of the shack was locked.
“Let’s check the windows,” said Riley. “You’re smaller than me so you are gonna have to go in.”
I felt a stab of fear, but there was no use arguing with Riley when his jaw was clenched with resolve, when he was driven by demons. A small window at the rear of the shack was partially open. The backyard was an overgrown mass of weeds that grew taller than our heads and swarmed with shrill insects.
“This is good,” said Riley. “No one can see us get in. This is gonna work.” That was the first time I had heard emotion in his voice: It rose with excitement and cracked on the word work. When he looked at me, his eyes were gleaming. “I’ll give you a leg up,” he said. “You go on through and then open the front door for me.” He saw my face. “It’s a shotgun,” he said impatiently. “Like Sister Olivia’s. You just go straight through from the back to the front. Just go. He’s gotta be drunk out of his brains anyway. Just be quiet and try to hide.”
I stepped on his linked fingers and thrust my head through the window, which opened into a filthy bathroom that smelled of soap and sewage. Wriggling through was painful, but I could hold on to the sink to ease my descent. Alone in the house, I trembled, but I knew that Riley would be furious if I didn’t obey him. And I knew there was no other way out but to let Riley in.
Negotiating my way to the door was the most harrowing experience of my life. I have nightmares about it still. I tried to tread softly and lightly, but the floorboards were uneven and I stumbled across debris. As I made my way into the living room, I met the bloodshot gaze of Riley’s father.
The events that followed are a blur to me. I froze in my tracks, but although his eyes were on me, he did not seem to make any sense of me. He was drunk, I realized; he was so drunk he did not know what he was seeing. Riley was right again. Riley was always right, would always be right. Gathering courage, I walked to the door and opened it to my friend.
To this day, I don’t know where Riley got that wrench. Did it belong to Sister Olivia? Had he stolen it or found it in the debris outside the house? I had never seen one so big; it was thicker than Riley’s bony arm, and I wondered how he could lift it as high as he did, how he could bring it down with such force on his father’s head.
“I’m gonna fracture your skull,” he panted. “Fracture your skull. Now you know.”
I had not known how much blood there would be, had not known that Riley’s father would react, roaring, struggling against Riley, his bulk knocking the boy over so that for a moment it looked as though Riley and I would be the victims of this wretched plan of revenge. But Riley sprang up and his demons were suddenly in full power; he swung the wrench again and again, so that bits of bone and brain and blood went flying, covering him, splattering me. Long after his father lay on the floor, his head shattered and his body heavy in death, Riley kept swinging the wrench.
When at last he stopped, he was sobbing. The tears were streaming down his face and his thin chest was wracked with spasms. I wanted to put my arms around him. I did not. I stood silently watching him cry. I wanted to cry, too, but found I could not. Have not yet.
“Get me some clothes,” he said at last, without looking at me. “I can’t go out in these.”
I found a pair of shorts and a T-shirt on a bed in the back and brought them to him. The shirt almost swallowed him. The shorts were huge but had a drawstring that kept them up. The shirt had a Saints logo on it. He was wearing a Saints shirt on TV when I saw him, but it was a different one — I could tell because it fit him. I wondered later if he had chosen it on purpose, if it meant something, if it was perhaps a secret code for me.
“The car’s out by the curb,” he said. “Let’s go. We gotta lock the door behind us. My cousin George won’t be back. He works the night shift and the storm’s gonna hit before he can get here.”
Riley was right. Riley was always right, would always be right.
My mother and I drove out of the city the next day, hours before the storm came. She did as Riley told her; she was too dazed in her own sorrow and confusion to argue. Riley packed water and food for us.
“What about you?” I asked. “Come with us. We can take you, there’s room in the car.”
“Best if I don’t go,” he said. “Just in case. I can’t be in that car. I’ll head over to the Dome, that’s where you go if you ain’t got no way out. I’ll get over there before it hits.”
We looked at each other, and then unexpectedly Riley leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.
“You a good kid, Kiran,” he said. “And don’t worry. Everything’s good, everything’s gonna be okay.” He looked at me closely. “Your brain might erase this. But if it don’t, and if it don’t erase me, then you can’t ever tell. You can’t ever tell that you knew me, or what happened, or why we did it. You can’t, Kiran. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know,” I said.
“Swear on your mama’s life?”
“I swear, I swear.”
We drove out of the city in the rain. As the car crawled toward Baton Rouge, my mother’s mood lightened. She turned the radio on and we listened to the weather. She laughed for the first time I could remember in weeks.
“Looks like we’re going to get away, Kiran,” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed. The storm would come that day. The water would rise over the levee, just as Riley had said it would. The storm surge would wash down Calhoun Street and pour into the shack where Riley’s dad’s body lay. It would cover him up and cleanse away the blood and the bone fragments, the globules of brain. And then the sun would beat down for weeks so that when they found him, blackened and bloated, there would be no telling who he had been or how he had died, which is just what Riley had known would happen. They would mark an X on the door, with a 1 in the left corner — the body count. There would be no record of the savagery of that death, no way for anyone to know what we had done. Riley was right.
Riley would always be right.
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Girl From the Pleasure House
by Simon Levack
© 2008 by Simon Levack
Simon Levack’s Aztec sleuth Yaotl, hero of this new story and several others for EQMM, also appears in four full-length novels: Demon of the Air (winner of the CWA Debut Dagger Award), Shadow of the Lords, City of Spies, and the latest, Tribute of Death. PW praised the series for making “comprehensible a society that seems at first glance alien” and for matching “impressive period research with tight plotting.”