Black Blood

Black Blood

Andre put his hand on the trunk of the grey Chevy and pulled it back quickly, his “aiy-yie" breaking the sound of the quiet afternoon. He stuck the offended fingers quickly into his mouth and then withdrew them.

“S’hot,” he piped over to Dom.

Dom looked up at him and then back down to the weimeranner wriggling around his knees. Dom watched through the corner of his eye as Andre reached back toward the trunk and flipped it open with his thumb. The keys jangled as the trunk stopped its arc with a bounce. The tackle box left on the top of the trunk went flying to the ground, hooks, bobbers, weights, pliers scattering in the dust of the driveway.

Dom shook his head almost imperceptibly.
He looked at Andre, who was now on his knees, sorting through the debris, dusting off the tackle and replacing it into the tackle box.
Dom shook his head again.

Dom loved the boy, as much as a man could love his only son. And Dom knew that the boy loved him, not as a child loves his father, but as a child loves a favorite uncle.

Dom would tell him one day of the secret, of Dom’s love for Andre’s mother. Of Dom’s begging her to take the boy and run away with him. But she wouldn’t.

There were the other children, she said. And Dom said take them all. And she, born in the brutal poverty of a fisherman’s shack, would not chance a return to that. The fact that she was Catholic wouldn’t have stopped her, but it was one more reason not to step off the cliff.

And so Dom and Eva had made a pact. The boy would spend his summers with Dom. If Eva’s husband, Will, had any suspicions, he never voiced them.

It wasn’t too hard for Eva to convince Will to let the boy go. Andre was intelligent and sensitive. He would benefit from the exposure to other people and ideas.

Since Dom liked to travel to his beloved Texas and down into Mexico, had a boat and fished in the Gulf, it would be a perfect summer vacation for Andre.

So Will had agreed. From the time he was seven until today at fourteen, Andre had spent every summer with Dom.

Dom had taught the boy how to rig lines for trolling big fish in the Gulf of Mexico, to stalk big red drum in the Louisiana flats, to spot speckled trout flashing on the surface of the bays. They had sat on the balcony at Dom’s house and watched the waterspouts forming in the marshes.

They traveled to San Antonio, and Houston and Dallas, and Nuevo Laredo and deep into Mexico. They had camped and laughed and sung the “Yellow Rose of Texas” at the tops of their lungs.

But things had started to change in the last few years. Andre had begun to insist on attending Catholic mass every Sunday. Not that this would have mattered to Dom. Even his fiercely independent protestant philosophy and his deep belief in free thinking, and his 32nd degree Masonic ring couldn’t come between him and Andre.

It was something more intense coming from the boy that Dom had sensed. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but it troubled him.

He knew that he saw something different in the boy, a femininity perhaps, an unpredictable way of looking at things.

He wasn’t afraid that Andre might become one of “nature’s bachelors,” as men of gay bent were euphemistically referred to in the South. Dom’s own older brother was a “nature’s bachelor.”

Dom wouldn’t have been terribly disappointed if Andre was a “bachelor.” He had no illusions about the inclinations of men and women. Nor would he be disappointed if Andre never reproduced. It wasn’t something that was important to him. He worshiped the “now.” What was important was the boy’s laugh, the boy’s love and the time they spent together.

But Dom knew that there were forces other than love at work here. Although he loved Andre’s mother as much as a man could love, he knew that there was a duplicity, and a self-destructiveness that was inherent in her character.

The boy had finished repacking the tackle box and was carefully placing it in the trunk. They were headed to an old oxbow of the Mississippi, to fish for bream and sac-a-lait and bass. Andre had been talking about it for days, and Dom had chuckled at the boy’s excitement. But Dom noticed that there was something in the boy’s voice that whispered to Dom that it was not the fishing trip Andre was talking about.

Now it was time to go.

In a few minutes they were driving down a heat-shimmering road, passing the endless fields of cotton and soybeans. A few farmers were out in their fields, and an occasional pick up truck or tractor passed them.

Andre was very quiet, looking at the passing fields. Dom started to turn on the radio, just to pierce the silence, but he thought better of it.

“You looking forward to high school in the fall?” Dom asked.

Andre turned to Dom, and looked a little alarmed at the question. “Did Mom say anything about it?” Andre asked.

“Nope. You going to stay at St. Joseph’s for high school? Or the public school?”

“You didn’t ask me about the girls,” Andre said.
“Why, did you want me to?”

“Everyone asks me about girls. ‘Don’t you want to go to the public school? There are a lot of pretty girls there.’ Dad asked me, and my uncles asked me and everyone. You didn’t.”

Dom was silent.

“Actually,” Andre said, “I’m not going to either.”

“So you gonna quit school? You know you’re a smart young man. You can be whatever you want, but school’s important.”

“I’m not quitting school,” Andre said quietly. He looked up at Dom. “I have to tell you. But I don’t want to. I’m afraid you won’t like it.”

“Andre, I love you like my own son,” said Dom. What he wanted to say was “you are my son,” and at this moment the strain of not saying it was almost too much and he stifled the swelling in his throat.

Andre looked at him a long time.

“I, I’m going to the Catholic seminary, to study for the priesthood,” Andre blurted out.
Dom looked at him sharply, and then immediately regretted it. Tears were trickling down the boy’s cheek. Dom looked back at the road.

“I can tell you thought about it,” he said. “Is that what you really want to do?” he hoped he had kept judgment out of his voice.

“I thought about it a long time. It’s what Momma wants me to do. And it’s what I want to do, sort of.

“Sort of?” Dom asked.

“Well, I can get a good education there. We can’t afford anything else. And I’m different.”

“Here it comes,” Dom thought.

Then, out loud, “Different?”

“It’s hard to put it in words, Dom. I don’t like sports. I don’t like to do most things other boys do.”

Dom decided to chance the question, “What about girls? Boys your age are starting to look at girls, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, they do. But I don’t know how to act around girls. I don’t know what to say. The other boys do. And I think the girls think I’m a little strange too. It’s like, like a piece of me is missing. Something that I can’t replace. I don’t know. It’s stupid.”

“No, it’s not stupid,” said Dom. “But you can’t go through life ignoring half of the population.”
“I know. But being a priest seems different. I could be the same to everyone. I wouldn’t have to feel like I’m lying all the time. I wouldn’t have to play those stupid games, like boyfriend and girlfriend. Or do all that other stuff.”

Both were quiet for a moment. They passed a large pump, loudly chugging crystal water out of the ground and pouring it into a small canal. The water would be ice cold, Dom thought, and remembered the hot summers skinny dipping at such a place.

“I was afraid to tell you. But I knew I had to,” Andre said.

“Afraid? Why?”

“You know, cause you being a Mason and all.”

“What I believe is what I believe, Andre. It has nothing to do with what you believe. And if you want to be a priest, then be the best priest you can. I’m all for it,” Dom said, hoping he sounded genuine, although saying it took a lot out of him.

“You mean that?” Andre asked, looking up at Dom for reassurance, tears still streaking his cheeks.
Dom looked at the boy. “Yes, I mean that,’ he said gently.” Now let’s go fishing.”

They had reached the turnoff to the oxbow lake and Dom slowed the car, turning the steering wheel with one hand.

He looked over at Andre again. The boy looked up at him and smiled.

“Oh, the yellow rose of Texas is the only rose for me,” he sang, and Dom laughed and joined in.

The car rolled to a stop along the dirt road. Andre was out of the car and at the back of the trunk before Dom had turned the engine off. Dom got out and tossed the keys to Andre, half-expecting him to drop them. But Andre didn’t drop the keys. He quickly unlocked the trunk, and with his thumb, flipped up the lid.

“No burn this time,” Andre said with a grin at his small accomplishment.

He hauled the tackle box and the two rods out and walked with Dom toward the bank.

Dom looked out at the lake that had formed centuries ago when the restless Mississippi River changed its course one more time. Achingly green willows trailed their long sobbing branches into the lake, embracing the life beneath the water.

Some large oaks stood back from the water, overlooking the scene. Green grass grew right up the water’s edge.

There were no cars, no sound other than the chirp of crickets, cicadas making their whirring noises, and the occasional splash of a fish breaking the surface.

Andre was gently opening the tackle box, and even the flat clink of the metal top didn’t seem out of place. The boy silently held up a lure and looked at Dom. Dom nodded, and the boy threaded the line through the lure’s eye and tied a quick fisherman’s knot.

“He might be clumsy, but he can tie a knot,” Dom thought. He looked around the oxbow lake slowly.
A footbridge crossed the lake. On the other side of the was a tangle of briars, scrub and trees that extended around the bend and out of sight. Dom thought he could see the beginnings of a small trail at the other end of the bridge, but it quickly trailed out of sight.

Andre was already casting out into the lake.

“Try under those willows over there on your left,” Dom told him, and the boy cast, looking back at Dom for approval.

“Perfect,” said Dom.

As the boy reeled in and cast again, Dom looked back at the opposite bank. He thought he heard a voice somewhere in the tangled brush. Still tying his lure, he listened keenly. As he prepared his rig, he thought he heard something again, and this time he noticed that Andre was also looking across the bridge.

He heard the voice again. Now a few words were clear.

“Goddamn nigger,” then “blue-gum motherfucker.” A clacking sound as though two sticks were being slapped together. A long, high-pitched scream. A child's scream.

And he knew something bad was going on in that green tangle across the oxbow.

His next instinct was to look at Andre. The boy’s puzzled face was looking across the lake.

“God don’t let it go further than this,” Dom prayed. Dom had witnessed these things such at this before. When he was a boy, in central Texas, he had seen ranchers act this way toward the Mexicans. He had even seen a lynching once. But he hadn’t heard a voice so fearful, so terrifying, so enraged, in a very long time. Now his concern was Andre. The voices grew louder.

“Oh, my God,” Dom thought. "They’re killing someone out there.” He looked around for other people, another fisherman, perhaps, someone. But there was only himself and Andre. He looked at Andre, who appeared frozen. Dom was sure Andre had never heard or seen such a thing before.

“What do I do,” Dom asked himself.

And the answer came. Get Andre out! If there was a killing going on over there, then they wouldn’t want any witnesses. He wasn’t afraid for himself. But he had to get Andre away from here.
He called for the boy, but Andre was still frozen, hypnotized by the sound of the enraged voices.

Dom ran the hundred feet or so to where the boy was standing. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and with the experience that only comes from age and eyes that have seen many things, said in a low, unhurried voice, “Let’s go.”

The spell broken, Andre looked up at Dom. There was something strange in the boy’s eyes. It somehow frightened Dom. The boy turned and began walking with Dom toward the car.

Suddenly the sounds were closer. Screams of children. An old man yelling, “Run, boys, run. Don’t stop”

Dom stopped, started to turn, but thought better of it. He kept on walking toward the car, his face a mask of calm, his heart pounding with fear and apprehension.

But Andre had stopped. Out of the corner of his eye, Dom saw the boy slowly turn, the terrible look on his face.

He reached for Andre, to steer him back to the car. But Andre had dropped his rod and had begun walking back toward the bridge.

Dom turned. And he was instantly chilled to the bone. Two tiny black children were running across the bridge, screaming. The fright on their faces speared Dom’s heart.

Dom watched as the children reached the iron gate and stopped, looking back to the brush across the bridge, and screaming.They were screaming, and this time Dom noticed bright flecks of blood on their white t-shirts.

Before Dom could move, Andre was at the gate, trying to open it. A chain with a padlock held the gate fast.

Dom watched as Andre climbed over the gate and lifted the children, one by one, over it. The children had not stopped screaming. As they ran past Dom, he tried to stop them, but their tiny legs were guided and strengthened by fear, and they slipped out of his grasp. Dom watched them as they ran up the dirt road and over the levee.

He turned again toward Andre. Andre had still not come back across the gate but was looking at something at the other end of the bridge. Dom ran toward the bridge, his heart pumping wildly. Then he saw the specter that Andre was watching.

A man, a brown-black man, was crossing the bridge. He was dragging one leg behind him, and Dom could see there was something attached to his leg. He tried to yell at Andre. “Get out of there, now,” he wanted to shout, but no words came. He realized he was trembling.

Time slowed to a crawl for Dom. He watched the man get closer.A gaunt, almost skeletal old man with short-cropped white hair struggled toward the gate. Dom saw the sun glinting off the dark blood streaming down his sunken cheeks.

The man wore a ragged short-sleeved shirt. It was unbuttoned, and part of the shirttail flapped behind him. Part of it was plastered to his chest with blood. The right leg of his old khakis was ripped above the knee and trailed behind him, attached to the rest of the cloth only by the inseam. The part that trailed was almost black, with a coating of dust. Dom had seen that color before and knew it was blood.

Dom then saw the man was dragging more than the thin piece of khaki. Several long bamboo poles with a tangle of lines running from them to the old man’s leg made the old man stumble.

Dom suddenly realized it was the remnants of a trotline. And then Dom saw the hooks embedded in the man’s arms, chest, neck and legs.

Then another movement in the brush behind the old man jolted him.

Two white men emerged from the brush. Dom thought he recognized one of the men. Maybe he had seen him at the old bar on main street, or maybe at the farm co-op.

The one Dom thought he recognized was carrying a large club. The other man hung behind and was carrying the remnamts of a cane pole. Their skin was so pink, Dom thought. It would have been funny in different circumstances.

“You nigger muthafucka,” the one with the club yelled in rage. “ah’ll kill ya. An ah’ll kill those little cocksuckers of yours two. An then ah’m gonna kill that whore daughter of yours too.” The man’s voice trembled with rage as he started forward across the bridge, not running, but walking slowly and purposefully. He was about Dom’s height, but much heavier, and much younger.
The second man followed him.

The old man reached Andre and stopped, not seeing Andre, but looking up the road to where the children had run.

He tried to lift himself over the gate, but couldn’t. Three times he tried and failed.
Dom couldn’t speak. His arm was outstretched toward Andre but his feet were planted on the ground.

Then he saw Andre reach out and grab the old man by his waist and heave him over the gate.
The two men were quickly approaching the gate. Dom felt himself freed from paralysis. He lurched forward toward the gate and Andre.

“Oh, God. What have I gotten him into?” Dom prayed.

The old man had fallen on his knees on Dom’s side of the gate. Dom could see the hooks tied to the lines, and the lines tied to the poles that Andre was now throwing over the gate.

Dom reached the gate as the two men reached middle of the bridge.

“Andre! Andre!” Dom called in the loudest, most authoritative voice he could manage. Dom looked at the two men, who slowed their pace a little.
“Andre! Stop it. Get over here now!”

But Andre made no move to climb the gate. Instead, the boy turned to Dom.

The fierceness in the boy’s face startled Dom.
“Help him,” Andre said, nodding at the old man.
Dom looked questioningly at the boy.

“Help him.” This time the boy wasn’t asking. He was telling. Dom felt an extraordinary strength coming from this gentle boy.

The two men had stopped maybe twenty yards from the gate.

“You touch that black muthafucka an you’ll get the same thing,” said the man to Dom, completely ignoring Andre. Dom couldn't tell if he was recognized or not.

Andre looked at Dom again. There was no reasoning with the boy. Now, Dom wasn’t only frightened for the boy. He was frightened for both of them. But the strength of the boy’s eyes held Dom.

“This is personal. You touch him an you’re in more trouble than you can imagine,” the larger of the men told Dom. The man moved a step closer.

“Stop,” Andre said with such authority and strength that the man stopped cold.

Andre was standing at the gate, facing the two men. “Turn around and go back,” Andre said, his right arm outstretched, index finger pointing to the woods the men had just exited.

“You little niggerlovin shit. I’ll kick your ass and then I’ll kick that old bastard’s behind you and then ahm gonna beat that nigger to death.”

“No, you won’t,” Dom heard Andre say. Andre’s voice was quiet, and slow, a counterpoint to the man’s bellow.

Andre looked back at Dom. In the same quiet voice, this time nearly a whisper, “Help him.”
Andre again looked back at the two men. He didn’t flinch, or move. The larger man stared back, but there was hesitation in his eyes. He took a step back, nudging his companion.

Dom saw the man patting the club in his hand. "We'll get back to you later," the man said, pointing the club at Dom.

Both men backed up again a few steps. Andre kept looking at them. Dom watched as they turned and walked back toward the woods. At the edge of the woods, they stopped and looked back. Then they disappeared into the brush.

Slowly, Dom reached in his pocket and withdrew a small pair of pliers he always kept there. As the man came past him, he grabbed the man’s bloody arm.

“Hold on, old Tom,” he said. “I’ll cut you aloose.” The man stopped and stood still. He drew his body upright, held his head straight.

He knelt down next to the man, and began looking at the hooks protruding from the skin.
Some of the barbs had come all the way through. Dom was able to snip those off, and pull the remaining part of the hook backwards out of the meat of the man’s body. Several of the barbs were embedded in the man’s flesh. For these, Dom cut the lines from the hooks to the poles, intending then to push the barbs through the flesh and cut those off.

But the moment Dom had cut the last of the lines, the man started moving forward. Dom was trying to staunch the bleeding with his handkerchief, but couldn’t hold him, and the man moved quickly, disappearing over the levee.

Dom looked back at Andre, who was climbing back over the gate. Dom knew that the two men were watching from the wood. He could feel the rage from them.

“Let’s go,” he told Andre, and they both moved toward Dom’s car. He could feel the stares of the men on his back.

In the car, Dom turned the key to the ignition and the car started up. Dom realized his hands were trembling and sweating. Hell, his whole body was trembling. He put the car in gear and drove up the levee road. Even though the top of the levee afforded them a good vantage point, there was no sign of the old man, or of the children.

A couple of miles down the road, Dom pulled the car up to an old grocery. He went in and bought a half pint of Old Crow. He cracked the seal and opened it and drank half of it right there in the store. The old man behind the counter looked at him.

“You okay, mister?” the old man asked.

“Fine,” he said.

He put the half pint into his back pocket, grabbed a coke from the old Coke chest, paid the man, and walked back to the car. In the car, he handed the coke to Andre. Andre took it, without saying a word. Dom looked at the boy.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” André said. “You?”

“Fine,” he said as he started the car.

“What a strange kid,” Dom thought to himself as the gray Chevy moved along the blacktop.

“Does he know what’s going to happen next?” Dom wondered. Out here in the country, it probably wouldn't take long for the two men to find out who he was, or at least where he lived. He also knew that this probably wasn’t the end of the incident. There would be repercussions, and Dom knew it might be only a matter of time until things started to happen.

But he was so damn proud of the boy. Cool, and confident in the face of it all. The boy hadn’t flinched, hadn’t wavered. And Dom knew that no matter how dangerous the situation was, or how dangerous it could now become, the boy had done the right thing. And Dom was proud of that.

All his misgivings about Andre melted away. He looked over at the boy again.

Andre was looking out the window, sipping on the Coke. Cane and soybean fields zipped by.

“You did good, Son,” Dom said.

The boy looked at him. “You did good too,” he said, a grin on his face.

Already Dom was planning to take him home, not to Dom’s place, but back to his mother, hundreds of miles away. Maybe in the morning.

“Let’s keep this between ourselves,” Dom said.

“If you think so, “the boy said.

“Yeah, I think so,” Dom said.