Sirens and the rule of law rang out from up over the hill. Couldn't be so divine as to bludgeon the heat of August nor smother the vengeful Despréaux fire, but the rain was a sudden blessing. All the lady angels in heaven, resplendent in their shimmering see-through gowns, must have been running through the sprinklers on God's lawn.
Mud squished between his toes and it felt good. Every time the thunder came creeping in over the sound of the bullhorn, it gave him some measure of satisfaction. Satisfaction that Nature could still muffle men, even if only for a moment or two.
He closed his eyes to the swiftly moving storm, imagining all that beauty and grace—fingers of cool water playing over their heavenly skin, stiffening those golden nipples and coursing down a pair of celestial thighs. And the sky opened wide every time one of those angels spread her legs to leap over His holy sprinkler. It fell from their fertile thatches into the Louisiana swamps and onto his sun reddened cheeks. Yes, it surely felt fine.
The girl was limp in his arms. Shaking her didn't help, she was despondent. He turned back and made his way to the dock, carrying her over the rotted pier that creaked and groaned with every step, protruding from the lake like the spine of a starving child. Heat and embers blew over the water and sizzled as they drowned. When she roused, he stopped and lay her down on the timber. The water below was in the midst of an emotional conversation with the rain that rushed down to meet it, and when her lips moved he could not hear what she'd tried to say.
His hand moved through her dark locks tearing hair that had become tangled from the rain. His fingers tightened and he drew her forward so that her face was mashed against his crotch. Her gaze was fixed skyward and she watched as his chest puffed out, the air oozing from his tight throat and coming forth on an elongated groan. The other hand clutched her wrist. She blinked back against the stinging raindrops, feeling only the water as it swam down 'round the place where she ended and he began. Voices echoed through the woods.
"I've found tracks!" came an agitated shout. "There isn't much time!" The girl's eyes went wide.
His legs shook involuntarily, his body shrank inward and the billowing coattails of his father's jacket spilled over the sides of the dock.
"Ah," he whispered. "Destiny." With that, he smiled down at her, and in a single deft gesture, shoved her over the edge into the water. In the same motion he had spun around, sweeping the coattails with a practiced flourish and presenting himself to those who had hunted him and now demanded their reward.
A booming voice announced its intent. Its rehearsed authority left no doubt of the fear it was meant to evoke. Yet, he felt no such thing. There may have been thirty guns leveled on him at that moment, but as he flicked the flint of his lighter and a small flame defied the onslaught from above, he suddenly understood his father's words.
Beneath the dock, she stared up fearfully at the figure barely visible between the cracks. And all those pistols went off at the same time. She clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes as tightly as she could.
**
Never had an idle gaze so thoroughly consumed a girl. The behemoth candy apple red Ferris wheel devoured the foreground and stole the last searing rays from the setting sun. His booth, by contrast, was hidden in its hulking shadow, where he busily turned cards and performed his magic for no one. His hair was wild, his gaunt features carving a splendid profile. But most striking was the heavy black trench coat draped over his frame. The bayou evening was anything and everything—ever mysterious—but cool, it was not.
She lingered to entertain fascinations about him. He was without question a student of his craft, whatever it wholly entailed. A few times he looked up to sweep eyes across the stubborn souls who lingered on the carnival grounds, refusing evacuation orders and ignoring the glow on the horizon.
There was scant emotion on his face but for the hunger that dwelt darkly beneath. Then the lids drooped, and his focus lit once more upon an upturned apple crate where he dealt a fresh hand. The cards were black, and they stuck to his fingertips. It reminded her of the way paving tar would melt under the relentless sun and grasp at the soles of her sneakers…of the way two bodies did much the same in the bedroom above hers most nights.
So it was when the carnival goers had thinned out to barely a trickle that he looked out over the gravel expanse, at last obliged to breathe her in. Her skin pricked from the heat, perfume stung her pores at the armpit. Night was rapidly shrugging off the sweaty stink of the day, and buried beneath her fevered nerves and a bludgeoned promise to be gone from town, was every notion to fulfill her desires by inhabiting the gypsy boy's evening. If not now, then certainly never.
Oh, but those best laid plans can be undone by time and plain old lustful impatience.
With no warning, he had folded up his station and disappeared within the shadows of a myriad patchwork tents and trucks, leaving her alone in the ash-swirling air at the edge of the carnival grounds. She heard clipped, rasping coughs, then nothing but gypsy silence—mosquito murmurs and the faintest whisper of an old French lullaby.
The weakly twinkling lights of carnival attractions flickered and went out one by one. Headlight beams shifted in and out of hillocks as straggling evacuees made their way down the highway.
Woefully disappointed with her hopeful conspirator—but mostly herself—she cast one last longing gaze up the alley between tents before turning to go. A lonely, oft-welded sucker rod reached some fifty feet into the black sky, its halogen torch piercing the night and bathing the cobbled parking lot in a bluish glow. Little more than a somber shuffle fed her feet as she zoned out to the crunch-crunch of gravel beneath her purple slippers. Her car, a foreign engineer's unrealized dream and discounted compromise, waited for her at the edge of the light, its backseat crammed full of her personals.
A few feet from the sedan the rhythmic crunch-crunch sound no longer matched her own footsteps. She inhaled sharply. Two snarling, drunken bursts of laughter—and then a footrace unfolded in the distance. Her eyes blurred and refocused.
Silly girl
, she heard her mind caution.
Don't run. Silly, silly. How incredibly
silly
it would be to run. Just some rabble-rousing delinquents.
A flash, and a figure cut the air beside her, whirled around and planted himself on the earth like a mountain. Safety lay beyond, so near that her keys jingled and tugged almost magnetically toward her tiny pea green sedan.
"Waitin' a long time for someone to give us a lift outta here," said a voice behind her. The intent was as ugly as the mouth from which it oozed. The vagrant blocking her way was an older mutt, hunched and grimy. She sidestepped twice. Would they not leave off their cruel sport? No, but they followed her lead pretty-as-you-please, as though she were merely a dance instructor, and not their prey.
The girl locked eyes with her mortal barricade when suddenly those dark pools of lust began to grow round and glow with exceptional radiance. Heat licked at her bare legs and her car reflected an odd orange aura. Had the sedan been able to speak, its twinkling headlights seemed likely to proclaim,
Wowwww!
before darkness once again settled.
The dirty mountain crumbled, ran off and got swallowed by the dark. A loud raspy cough rang out from the rear and she bolted to her car. The way she keyed the door, pried it open and started the ignition in a singular motion, God himself may have been guiding her hand. Perhaps not, for she slammed its engine into gear and promptly stalled out. When she hazarded a lightning quick glance out the window, she froze.
He was peering at her, standing motionless against the glowing horizon until a hand moved to wipe the blood from its owner's lips. Black coattails spilled out around him on the gravel, and beside him a body lay atop a charred patch of cobbled earth.
She eyed her savior once more, transfixed. He was a gothic figure cut from the shadows, a creature as hot as the night. She may have gone on staring, but quite suddenly, he staggered and collapsed.
She managed to get him folded into the passenger seat, to push the accelerator to the floor, and a moment later the girl and her stowaway were driving like a bayou bat out of the swamp mist.
"I'm all kinds of trouble for my folks," she said with a haughty, nervous laugh. "But this might do it for good. Daddy's liable—forget the shotgun, he'd like to spit buckshot second he sees you."
"Salt Mine Trail," he whispered.
"The fire," she said. "We gotta get out of town. I have to find you a hospital."
He made weak protest, but she wouldn't have it. The wipers worked to a fevered whine just to keep up with the ash that cascaded down upon her windshield. After five miles the highway markings were no longer visible, and the car's wheels were nearly silent on a blanket of burned bayou.
Suddenly, the man beside her sat up. "Slow down." So startled was she by his sudden power of speech that she turned her head to gawk at him. "There!" he shouted. The car came around a corner and she barely reacted in time, slamming on her breaks and coming to a halt just as tiny flaming embers speckled the hood of her car.
