Filter House (22 page)

Authors: Nisi Shawl

Farmer hit her again, but it was the thin man’s unbelieving laughter that brought her back to her right mind.

The kidnappers were standing her on her feet. “So we believe you now about this one being your kid,” the thin man said. “Otherwise you would have taken us up on our offer. So let’s have the rest of it.”

Their test, and she’d passed it without knowing. “You gonna—”

“Tell us where the McGinniss heir is or we’ll shoot your son and throw him in the river.”

“Canada,” Leora said. “Ontario.”

“Windsor?”

“In the country. I can give you directions—”

“You’ll do better than that. Here you are, Farmer.” The thin man’s voice moved away. “Keep it trained on her. I’ll be back fast as I can. Try not to have too much fun.” The sound of his feet rising up the rungs. Then another noise: wood on wood, something dragging, scraping, then falling loudly on the ceiling, the floor above her head.

She was alone in the basement with a rapist and a helpless, tied up white boy.

Who she should have left to his fate. At least she should have tried to. When Farmer yanked him out of the car seat like that, she could have let him. And she would have, too, if only she’d been thinking instead of feeling. Using her brain, not her heart. If Kevin hadn’t looked so much like his brother. Carter.

She wasn’t going to cry. Leora had done enough of that already. Big Momma had taught her to be strong, to survive. Do whatever it took, even if it went against the Bible.

One more plan.

She struggled to remember the words to that lullabye. She had always known she’d need to use it someday, in the special way Big Momma had learned her. How did it go now?

“Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry;

Go to sleepy, little baby;

When you wake, you shall have—”

“Okay, turn around so I can take this thing off,” Farmer interrupted her thoughts, tugging at her blindfold. Which was when she realized her arms were untied again. Why? She hadn’t sung a note, and anyway, it wasn’t supposed to work like that.

Maybe she wouldn’t have to, after all.

The knots in her good scarf proved too tough for Farmer, too, and he sliced them apart with his knife. She heard him open it, felt the silk give way.

Her eyes hurt. They were in a cellar, big metal buckets over in one corner with a fat flashlight standing on one on its end. In another corner lay a short, lumpy shadow, white patches showing where Kevin’s skin contrasted with his clothes and the bandanas over his mouth and eyes.

No sign of the ladder they’d made her walk down.

She whirled quickly to find Farmer behind her but out of reach, and grinning like a natural-born idiot. He had the knife and the gun both, but the gun wasn’t aimed. “You want another fuck?” he asked. “I think there’s time before we head out.”

With a one-minute man like him there’d always be time, Leora figured. She didn’t say that, though, mindful of the weapons. She gave him her back and went to Kevin.

Farmer followed her, pushing her out of the way. He cut the line holding the boy’s legs, then his hands. Leora took them up in her own, kneeling beside him. They were cold, and mottled looking in the dim light. She rubbed them to start the blood moving. Farmer got rid of the boy’s blindfold; she saw when she looked up at his face.
Bees and butterflies, flutterin round his eyes….
Those same long lashes—

“Why you doin this?” she asked Farmer. “You lettin us out of here?” She might be wrong about the man, and he’d taken a fancy to her, after all.

“So I am, after a fashion.” He brought the knife up against Kevin’s neck. “We’ll be taking a drive over the border, and you’re less likely to stick in folks’ memories without the ropes and things. Think you can convince your kid to keep his mouth shut when we cross the bridge?” Dark eyes darted to hers and away in every direction, taking in the room. Leora couldn’t talk. She nodded yes. The knife moved up to the bandana’s edge and ripped its way through the stained fabric. Not the bruised, white skin.

Kevin couldn’t talk, either. He’d been gagged much longer than Leora. He needed water. When she had him sitting up she asked Farmer for something to drink and got a flask of what smelled like cheap whisky, the sort of thing the Purple Gang once smuggled in. She gave it to the poor child; better that than nothing. Then she made him walk a little. He stumbled like a baby. She held him by his arms, surreptitiously looking for the ladder or some other way out.

There were three rooms counting the main one, the one where Farmer took her earlier, and what amounted to a closet. Doorways opened between them without doors. None contained stairs or a ladder, and Leora suddenly recalled the sounds she’d heard as the thin man left, the scraping and bumping. Like a picture she saw it in her head: he had pulled the ladder up with him and put something over the hole he went out of to shut it.

No wonder the kidnappers weren’t worried about letting loose their hands.

After helping Kevin go the bathroom she sat down with him in the corner the furthest they could get from the stink. “Now what?” he whispered, the first words he’d spoken since the gag came out.

A hopeful sign. “We wait, I guess.”

“For what? What are they—”

“None of that, now! Speak so I can hear you, or else!” Farmer stood from the bucket where he sat and took a threatening step toward them, gun up.

“He just wants me to finish the story I was tellin,” Leora lied.

“Go on then. So I can hear.”

She hadn’t gotten far past the beginning before, she was pretty sure. “So this prince was sent to a foreign land—”

“What was his name?”

“Foster.”

“That’s a dumb name.” Sounding more like himself every second.

“Anyway, he was a prince, so you don’t have to feel sorry for him. And he lived on a farm with a kindly old couple who always let him have whatever he wanted.” Even if what he wanted killed him. “They had rules, but when he broke them, those old people would never raise not a hand against him.”

“No spankings?”

“Not a swat. He was a prince; hittin him was against the law. Now one day, the little boy got up early, before anybody was awake. And he went down to the kitchen and fixed a bowl of cereal, and then he went outside and walked off into the forest all by himself, although he had been told not to.” And told and told and told.

“Why wasn’t he supposed to go in the forest?”

“Because he wasn’t supposed to go anywheres. Remember, he was a prince in disguise. He couldn’t be runnin around where folks would see and recognize him.

“Then, of course, he went and got lost.” In the great Canadian wilderness, trees and rocks and marshes—miles and miles of loneliness— “Lost. And he was hungry and tired and miserable, and he wished he’d never, never left that kitchen table.

“But what he didn’t know was his momma—”

“The queen?”

“Yeah, that’s right, his momma the queen, she had lit a magic candle to proteck him.” Like Big Momma said to do. If only she had done it instead of worrying was conjure the devil’s work. Well, that wasn’t going to stop her now.

“The sun went down. Night was fallin. All of a sudden he seen a light.”

“The candle?”

“The candle! You such a smart boy!” Same as Carter. “That’s right, the prince seen the flame of his momma’s magic candle, and it led him straight home to the farm where he lived. The End.”

Kevin stayed quiet, thinking the way he usually did when she finished a story. She always knew he was thinking by the questions he would ask later, long after she’d forgot the things she said.

The candle she lit after the funeral had been for Carter. Not to protect him. Too late for that. It was to commemorate his spirit, Big Momma had said. And to be what she called a
conduit,
a way they could speak with one another.

Of course Leora had never attempted such a blasphemous thing.

Banging and a blast of cold air from the ceiling told her the thin man was back. The ladder slid down to rest its foot on the floor’s middle, and the thin man descended it, aiming his thin smile and a second gun through the rungs at them.

It took her till the sweatered man came down, too, to work out what was different. No masks.

It took her till they’d exchanged some talk she didn’t follow and herded her and Kevin between them up out of the cellar and into the black-and-purple sedan to understand why this made her sick to her stomach.

No mask to prevent her from seeing the thin man’s blonde moustache and the way his nose tipped up at the end and the squint lines radiating from the edges of his eyes. No mask to stop her noticing the sweatered man’s freckled forehead and the crease in his chin he didn’t look to bother shaving.

So what was to prevent her from describing them to the police when they set her and Kevin free?

But of course the kidnappers had never been going to do that, since there was nobody except Aunt Rutha and Uncle Donald at the cabin, no secret heir. No prince in disguise.

Only Leora knew that, though. She had thought.

She had thought she could wait till they got there, but no telling what these white men had in mind.

As soon as Farmer stopped driving, she’d have to sing.

The black-and-purple sedan’s motor made more noise than the Cadillac. Of course it was older. The island looked empty for a Friday night. Then they reached the mainland, and she saw all the traffic lights flashing yellow. No reds. That late. Or early; early Saturday morning.

And when would the kidnappers stop the car? Where? Would she even have time to open her mouth before they shot her?

Kevin snuggled up against her on her right, both arms wrapped around hers at the elbow. In the regular flare of streetlamps Leora saw him staring up at her, worry and trust tugging him back and forth in nervous twitches. If she saved his life he was truly hers. That’s what she’d heard the Hindoos would say.

The thin man had stuck a gun under her left ribs. On Kevin’s far side the sweatered man crowded against the fogged-up window, flicking some switch on the gun he held. Tense or bored? Both, she decided. Wait for a change in that, then.

The lights came less often. Fewer of them; they must be near the rail yards now. Maybe here—Leora discovered she’d been holding her breath and let it go. The sweatered man stopped fiddling with his gun, but only to light himself a cigarette.

“Put that thing out,” the thin man told him. “Filthy habit.” He reached past her and snatched it away to stub it in the ashtray. A sudden sharp left. Lights ahead, low and steady. “Get the toll ready, Farmer,” the thin man ordered. He jabbed the gun harder into Leora’s side, a silent reminder to keep quiet.

They sailed through the toll booth and onto the Ambassador Bridge almost without a pause. Golden lights hanging on either side swooped their shadows across her eyes. They passed under its two signs, the red letters first facing forward, then backward.

Slaves had crossed all along here. In winter the water froze, and they walked to freedom. In the darkness, on the ice, they ran over the river to the land they’d been so long dreaming of…. Leora loved that freedom, the kind that came only in your sleep.

And then they were in Canada. The gun switch clicked so fast it sounded like a bent fan blade hitting its frame. A low roof lit from beneath by blue-white fluorescents chopped the horizon in half. Customs check. Farmer pulled up to a booth. The man inside raised his eyes from his magazine, frowned, and waved them toward the parking lot.

The clicking stopped. “Shit,” swore the thin man.

“Should I go where he’s pointing at—or maybe I oughta make a run for it—”

“See those cop cars waiting up ahead? Think you can outrace them?”

The kidnappers continued to quarrel as Farmer veered off the road into a parking place. He left the engine idling, but they weren’t going anywhere for a while. Not before they got a thorough inspection.

She smiled down at the boy beside her. This would be her best bet. Big Momma had taught her, and it was not a sin—especially in self-defense. And if it worked she would light a second candle. She opened her mouth to sing the lullaby until they shut their eyes, every mother’s son.