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9: A Dousing

Jay-Jay pointed a fat, quivering finger toward the corroded building at the bottom of the clinic lawn. He shouted at his sister, "Git down ta red-legger cells and watch 'em. An' I don't care of they's sick ta dying, nobody else's making it ta hospital tonight. No one else's out less Dr. Scaramouch himself says so, and he'll be plenty piss-angry about the escape."

Lily, a female rendition of her rotund brother, sagged her pudgy face into scowl, letting him know he didn't need to use that tone of voice with her. She marched off to the holding cells, each side of her buttocks pumping up and down testily. "Ah didn't let no red-legger out, nah," she said into the night, as if to no one in particular.

Jay-Jay pushed angrily through the beaten-aluminum swing doors of the clinic. His breath was rapid and anxious now, growing into an audible whine. What a mess! A red-legger he had brought to the clinic had busted out. An orderly had run to Big Tom's compound to get the search started, and Jay-Jay couldn't find Dr. Scaramouch anywhere—not in his office at the other end of the hall, not in his private quarters adjacent to the office, not down drinking at Sanders's Shebeen, as one would expect this late.

Jay-Jay jiggled down the chipped linoleum hallway straight under its three bare lightbulbs. He glanced into each green-painted patient room, most of them empty, thinking the doctor might have decided to make a rare midnight round. Wheezing louder, the jailer stopped at the end of the hall next to the office and leaned against the wall, his sweaty back cool against the cinder block. He pulled a hand down his hammy face and wiped the perspiration on his shirt sleeve.

The cellar door, just there to his right, jogged his memory. It was so rarely entered, by orderlies or jailers anyway, that it had grown almost invisible in its disuse. But he remembered the doctor's odd hobby—the clicker box that makes pictures of things just as they are, better than the most meticulous brush painter. He recalled the doctor hunching behind his tripod up on the hillside of Crown Mountain, sour-smelling, wide-brimmed straw hat pulled low over his eyes, explaining in long-winded scientific terms how the photo box worked—the numerous lenses and celluloids and papers and chemicals imported, of course, from the inventor and manufacturer Cred Faiging.

Jay-Jay had shaken his head at the irony: Only during light of day is there proper sun to expose the photo film to take a picture; and only in the dark of night, in a sealed room, can the chemicals be employed to do their magic. And Dr. Scaramouch explained that he had set up such a dark room—a darkroom, he called it, running the words together and pronouncing it as if Jay-Jay should be familiar with such a thing—in the dirt-floor cellar of the hospital. He had boarded over the windows and caulked around them with shipyard resin just to ward off the moon and starlight. He even ran a water line down, for crissake.

Jay-Jay heaved himself off of the wall and tapped tentatively against the metal door. He called out, "Dr. Scaramouch!" and sensed immediately somehow that his voice had met no human ears.

He pushed, and the door fell open easily. The scant light fell down the wooden steps, illuminating another door at the bottom.

"Dr. Scaramouch!"

Again no answer.

Jay-Jay, extremely conscious of his weight now, put one foot onto the first step of the dubious stairway. It held rather steady, only a slight shiver. He grasped the handrail and paced delicately to the bottom, where he turned the doorknob and entered the black room. There was absolutely no light, save from the doorway, and of course that was the point of a darkroom, he told himself. Instinctively he felt for a light switch on the wall to his right but found only bare studs and cobwebs. He heard dripping water, and there was an acrid chemical scent to the air.

"Dr. Scaramouch?"

He stepped farther out onto the dirt floor—he could see nothing in front of him now—and paper crackled under his feet. A whispy something stroked at his face, and Jay-Jay squealed and wiped at his jaw, thinking of spiders, bats, who knows what. But when his nerves subsided and reason returned, he reached out for the string hanging from the ceiling and gave it a pull.

An amber-colored light blinked on amid the low rafters just above his head. And there at his feet lay the hulking Dr. Scaramouch twisted in the dirt, a stretch of electrical wire tight around his neck. His face was a dull blue, his eyes popped open, surprised. Paper and tipped chemical trays and four-inch-square celluloids were littered all about, the sign of a wild struggle. A twine strung with damp photographs had been yanked to the ground. Water dripped into a metal sink.

Jay-Jay fled up the trembling stairs to tell Big Tom's men how the escaped red-legger had buggered Dr. Scaramouch.

 

They were a fresh set of cuffs, sturdy quarter-inch steel darkly burnished. Hefty. For the arms and legs, both. The newly uncrated cuffs were the sort that only a high-volume trader of red-leggers would have in stock.

The shackles were bolted to the dock piling with the three-quarter-inch shafts that the ship-making wood whits called "deathdicks." Each bolt was topped with an octagonal nut, screwed into the wood with a whale wrench.

Quince was already sobbing the morning they clapped him in. Half a dozen of Captain Bull's naked musclers pressed his legs and arms into the metal cradles, slid the cuff covers into place and drove another set of bolts through the lock holes. The low tide was swirling at Quince's feet, and when he looked straight up, there was Big Tom leaning into his cane and staring down his beard at him from the dock. Quince shackled down in the rising water; Big Tom peering over his belly at the rebellious red-legger.

Big Tom coughed softly and spat, and the silvery bullet smacked into Quince's chest and sped down through the curly hair. The slaver was well versed in the mechanisms of hope, and it was he who had demanded that the monster bolts be used to secure the cuffs to the piling. Shackles that had been merely locked by key gave the captive a glint of hope, albeit unwarranted. This would not do—the terror must be total and unabated, and only the thick bolts driven home permanantly by a muscley bargeman would produce the proper level of shrieking despair.

Big Tom wanted Quince to see death now, to see it cruelly and inevitably, hours before it actually would come.

He stepped back from the edge of the dock, and his three guards, snub blasters at their sides, moved in unison in the same direction. They were the ones who had found Quince in front of Jersey Saple's ramshack. They were Big Tom's men, islanders, as attested by their leather boots to guard against shell fragments, the dungarees, and the high-collared blouses that kept the mosquitoes at bay. They were easily distinguishable from the slave bargemen who populated the docks while they were waiting to ship off for the mainland. Such bargemen had an aversion for garments, and wore them only against the most extreme sun or cold. This day the bargemen found perfect for swaggering about the docks and beach with their own snub shotguns—naked save for the occasional belt or calf strap bearing a hand shooter or knife. There was a grand amusement to be had today, the dousing of a Rafer.

 

His back and legs were bruised now, battered against the piling by the wave action, and his eyes stung from the salt and sand. Quince had begun to regard the wave action as an insidious evil, smooth and unrelenting, a bully smacking him into the wooden pillar, whop. . .whop. . .whop.

Quince had provided quite an entertainment for the bargemen and guards throughout the day. But now, with the sun dying, Big Tom had ordered them all away. Quince understood the extent of that cruelty—he was to die without hope or human contact, helpless, alone, strangled by the inevitability of surging nature. The only perceptible trace of mankind was the occasional burst of guffaws from the island's pub, upland a ways. The laughter provided no solace—he already was dead and forgotten, even in the minds of his tormentors.

The waves this evening were not breaking in the protected harbor. But they rose inexorably up the scribe's face now, shushing through his hair. Quince had hoped, at the very least, that the deadly tide would wash the sting of spit and urine from his hair. But it did not. The indignity still burned, and he would die now in the red-shimmering waves at sunset.

Quince sucked in long breaths between the waves, packing oxygen into his blood as he had been taught since childhood. He had the rhythm against that evil flow—immersion, breath, immersion, breath. The panic set in when he began to miss between waves—occasionally, even at its nadir, the lolling sea buried him. Quince strained his lips toward the red, blackening sky, pulling fiercely at the bolted cuffs, wrists bleeding down there.

And finally there was no more air. His Rafer lungs would last him half an hour at most, and already his heart was thrashing a grim tattoo up his spine and into his head—a-wump, a-wump, a-wump.

Quince knew his religion—better than most. Had taught it to the hundreds of youngsters for whom faith comes easily; was fluent in the scriptures of the god Rutherford Cross and well versed in the deeds of Cross's son Pec-Pec. He had always considered himself a religious man, with all of that knowledge framed out to perfection. But now, with the sea water gnawing at his bulging eyes, taunting his lips to open, Quince was surprised by a rush of calmness, a warmth and ease he could only attribute to his faith welling up in proportions he had never known.

Out in the darkening murk of shifting green water, Quince saw a large white body glide by. The scribe thought briefly, without fear, of the vile feeder beasts who owned the night waters, but as it passed again he saw it was not one of them. On the third pass he could see clearly the monster dragon fish, thick as five dock pilings, red, green and gold fins trailing yards behind. And mounted atop the glorious fish, precisely as described in the scriptures, was the dark-bearded Pec-Pec, the god-man son of Rutherford Cross. He wore a bemused expression as he wafted past on his sea-steed, unable to speak but clearly intending, My, how fortunate that I wandered by just in time.

Pec-Pec pulled the streaming dragon fish into a sharp turn and slowed to a hover by the manacled scribe. He thrupped his fingers across each of the bolts gripping Quince's limbs to the dock, and the black little shafts spun and backed out of the piling wood obediently. The manacle covers fell away. Quince mounted the grand dragon fish behind Pec-Pec, and together they swept into the black ocean.

 

In the morning, Big Tom ordered that Quince's body not be unshackled. Leave it there in the low tide muck. Let the fiddler crabs do their work.

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Framed