I saw his little carpetbag on some stones near his horse, purchased from the Paynes Corner smithy, and I slipped the handles over the pommel of the saddle, slapped the horse’s rump, and sent him on his way. He would amble in at the smithy’s, I thought, and someone would reluctantly conclude that searching was a necessity. I did regret that decent men would have to suffer from the cold in such a futile hunt, and I was pleased that I could feel something like sorrow, even if only this distant cousin of the true emotion. I retrieved from our shed the new seat I had days before cut and darkened. Above him, where his body had turned, facedown, to float like the hugest of turds, I affixed the seat with new dowels.
I returned to the kitchen, hung up my coat, and sat again at the bowl of apples. I wiped my palms against my shirt, then set to.
“What was the matter, then, Billy?”
“I thought I heard a cry from far away in the woods.”
“Nothing, eh?”
“Not a thing.”
“And your uncle is off?”
“Seems long ago launched on his way.”
She slumped against the edge of the table. She had lost weight, and had been slender to begin with. Now she looked old; now I felt older. She would spend the winter, once I left to return to New Haven, in covering his body with her stool. That would trouble her if he was found. On the other hand, I thought, he might do us a mighty favor and decompose with rapidity, and she might never need to know and I might never need to be hanged for murdering my uncle in a stew of corruption. I did not wish to die of choking, or a broken neck, but — and I was interested to learn it — I did not, finally, care.
“What’s that,” she said, “that makes you smile?”
I said, “Pardon?”
M said, “What have you and our dusky Virgil in mind for us now?”
“Adam, can you stand to lead us on one more descent?” I asked.
In the flare of the streetlight, he looked ill. He softly clapped his hands and rubbed them together, as if preparing to lift a great weight.
“Then, the crib?”
He nodded again, and turned and walked away. “Poor fellow,” M said. “He is loyal and distraught and noble.”
“Tashtego,” Sam ventured, naming a character from the book about the whale.
“No, son, he was Indian, you’ll recall.”
It was not an alley we entered this time. It was a house, narrow and wooden, sandwiched between a piano manufactory and a dealer in scraps of metal and old machines. A dog as great as a small horse, with a blunt, smooth head, was tethered on a chain to the loading dock to guard the scraps of iron and pewter and steel inside the dull stone building. When we passed, many yards from him, and on the other side of a wrought iron fence, he stood absolutely still and fixed us with a glaring study. Sam made an affectionate, chucking sound to him, and he silently bared his fangs.
Adam spoke for us to someone at the door of the house, and we went in.
M asked of Adam, “What do they provide?”
Adam, looking sullen, said, “White girls. Brown boys. Blind men. Bleeding women. Egyptians. Bohunks. Niggers of every persuasion. Whatever you prefer.”
Sam said, with more than a little apprehension, “I thought we were here to observe.”
M tilted back his head, as if to swallow some of the darkness of the ocher-tinted vestibule with its single, small lamp, and he soundlessly laughed.
“So we are, Sam, I assure you,” I said. I said to Adam, “You feel divided in this.”
“I feel ashamed of myself,” he said.
M gripped Adam’s arm, then lay his own arm along the man’s broad shoulders. “This is a brotherhood of shame,” he said. “What pride can breathe in the airless coffin of this life? Except, perhaps, the pride in not dying when circumstances suggest that you must.”
“I don’t know about that,” Adam said. “I just hate it.”
A fat black woman in a maid’s starched apron, her lips pursed in distaste, came to beckon us in and to our left, up an unlighted stairway and through a broad door and down a bright hall all covered in a dark blue textured cloth. We entered what seemed to be a small bedroom, and I gave her the money. She moved a painting of a waterfall, not a very alluring or realistic one, I would suggest, and then she dimmed the two gas lamps until we were in shadows. She gestured at the wall, as if to welcome us to what we might see, and then, turning the latch very quietly, she left.
It was awkward, fitting my mask to the small hole cushioned with velvet. I saw what they would see and gestured M to approach. He leaned to the aperture and stood very still. I heard his breath whistle. He stood there, and then he moved back. Sam went next, and he stared and stared, and then I returned to look once more. I turned to Adam, but he had gone to the far end of the room to sit at the head of the bed, his thick arms folded across his broad chest, his head drooped in a semblance of ease.
Inside the neighboring chamber, its bed lit by a single ceiling fixture, the scene reflected on a mirror at the opposite end of the room, a little colored girl, younger than the one we had seen at the gambling hall, absolutely naked except for a leather collar at her neck, and seemingly drunk or drugged, lay upon the body of a tall white man who was equally naked. The little child administered to him below the waist while a small white child, wearing a metal tiara and a collar that matched the black child’s, sat upon his face as he sucked at her sex and spanked her black partner with a small black leather whip as she, her lips and cheeks straining, fellated the man.
The shadows at the end of their room moved and, coming first into the mirror and then into my view, I saw a black woman wearing what appeared to be leather underpants from which a long white object protruded, a carved kind of penis, I saw. As the black child ministered to the white man, the black woman seized her and spread her legs from behind. The child labored at the man, but drew her legs beneath her so that she might be mounted as she worked. The black woman seemed about to enter her, and I could look no further. M stepped to the aperture and watched for a few seconds, then stepped back in revulsion.
“I have been with dusky women in the Marquesas,” he whispered. His sibilants hissed and coiled in the darkened room in that house of such darkness. “I have known, you could say, some dusky women. I have seen my share of sights, but never such a sight as that. It calls down fire from the heavens. No god could exist who would permit those children—”
Adam walked to the door and leaned his head against the jamb.
“We might leave,” I said, “if you have seen enough.”
And downstairs, on the dark and momentarily silent street, he said, “I must away. Lizzie will worry. And it was a long day of scampering through vessels even before this Dantean excursion was begun. Now, Mr. Mordecai.”
“Sir.” And Sam stood to attention as I had seen him do in the War.
“You and I have bones to pick. You have invaded my life, and my dear Mal’s death, to write down your version of each.”
“Sir.”
“We may speak further on it. We may not. Mal would forgive you, for he was a fond and trusting child who never gave a fellow creature a difficult moment, and who bore no grudge. He’d have told you, ‘God bless you, Mr. Mordecai.’ ”