Suffocation

Fiction by Nick Young

He awoke, again fighting his way back to consciousness, up through the endless depths, the fetid water filling his nostrils and his open, howling mouth.  His head rolled from side to side as he struggled for air. He had kicked aside a threadbare bedsheet and lay, sweat-soaked, his flesh prickling as the night breeze washed in and susurrated over him. There came a snuffling from beneath the open bedroom window as a low creature rooted in the thick-choked weeds at the back wall of the house. Startled, he struggled up onto one elbow.

“Who is it? Godammit, who’s there?” he cried out, voice ragged with fear.  The animal, whatever it was, snorted in fright and bolted deep into the darkness of the thick woods a ways behind the house. “Chrissake,” he muttered. His mouth was cotton-dry and sour. He ran a calloused hand through what little remained of his matted hair, struggling to shake off the horror that he could feel was eating him from the inside out. Groping for the nightstand, he clutched a half-empty pint bottle of cheap rye, popped out the cork, and tipped the bottle to his mouth. The whiskey scalded the back of his throat, but as it coursed farther down, it brought numbness, and that he craved.

Sitting upright, he reclined against the bed frame, the feel of the unyielding iron a rough reassurance to him. It was the night of the new moon, so there was no light to aid him as his hand searched for the pack of cigarettes next to where the bottle had sat. He shook one of the smokes free, just enough to extract it the rest of the way with his chapped lips, used a cracked thumbnail to inch a book of matches out from between the cellophane wrapper and the paper of the pack, and struck up a flame. The flare revealed a face, haggard with stubble, marred by the stamp of pox, creased with weather and time, hazel eyes rheumy, sunken, and haunted. 

He smoked awhile, draining what liquor remained in the bottle. There were long hours left for him to hang on until the sun breached the horizon and the phantasms shrank back into the shadows. He smoked, listening to the night wind rising and the katydids’ drone and—somewhere within the ancient forest—the blood-baying of a band of coyotes running down their prey, and it cast him back in memory. For though he was not a man given to reflection, his capacity crippled by a stultifying upbringing devoid of anything but ignorance and cruelty, he could remember. And each night, the terrors had been growing, refusing to be exorcized. 

It had begun the week before when he agreed to go with a friend to a tent revival in the next parish. The night was dog days hot, sweltering. Still, not a whisper of air after the sun went down as they, and a few dozen other souls, sat upon wooden folding chairs that creaked in time with the hosannas of the faithful.

Why had he gone? He put no stock in redemption, in Hell and damnation. He scorned the preachers—what solace had they ever given him?  He went, as a favor, out of pity for his friend who was dying of cancer and suddenly fearful that he needed to get right with the Lord lest his name not be found inscribed in the Book of Life.

And so they had taken seats in the stifling confines of the tent, up front, under the glare of a string of bare bulbs dangling above a worn plank stage where, while his homely wife made to shake a tambourine for dramatic effect, the preacher prowled, inveighing against blasphemy, carnal lust, and Satan himself.

He sat, impassive, the revivalist’s fulminations ebbing in his consciousness, muddying to incoherence until a thunderbolt was hurled into their midst,

“Sinners! O, ye sinners!” the preacher shouted, eyes wide in his sweat-streaked face. He slapped hard the cover of the big Bible he held, flinging it open. “Heed the admonition of the Apostle John! Chapter eight! Verse forty-four! Heed ye now!”

‘You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your

 father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning,

 and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no

 truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own

 character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.’

“You are of your father! Liars! Blasphemers! Murderers!!”

At this, he snapped out of his somnolence and turned his eyes on the one brandishing the Scriptures.

You are of your father the devil—

The preacher was looking directly at him, into him.

Murderer!

He tried to avert his face but could not.

Murderer!  Murderer!

This he imagined, and at that moment he was seized with dread.

So shaken was he that when the revival came to a close, amid a cacophony of speaking in tongues, he quickly left his friend behind, returned home, and tried to settle himself with a drink. He persisted long into the night, exhausting one bottle of whiskey until, at last, beneath the shroud of heat, a dying cigarette clamped into the rough skin of his yellowed fingers, he slipped into unconsciousness and the visitation of ghosts. 

Now, on this night, it had become more vivid, more haunting than ever. 

He knew he dare not close his eyes again, but his will had been sapped by fatigue. And no sooner had he given in to his profound exhaustion that he was assailed by flickering, washed-out images in black-and-white, as if from a macabre, slow-motion newsreel. 

It was nighttime. A battered 1958 Plymouth, its front left tire shot out, fishtailed on the loose gravel of the old, unmarked road that snaked around the Little Tensas Bayou west of Belle River. The driver, youthful and bespectacled, sawed at the steering wheel, fighting to get control of the car. Two young passengers, a woman and a man struck with fear, had their mouths open, screaming. Then, under the full August moon that sifted through the scrims of Spanish moss draping the tall cypress, the car careened a final time, veered off the road, and plunged into the murky swamp. It rolled on the passenger side and began settling into the water. 

Rifle in hand, a figure ran forward, hearing the terrified screams from inside the car.  At the water’s edge, he stopped, watching as the driver’s window slowly opened, allowing the dark water to pour in but giving the driver just enough room to wriggle free. The shouts from within ceased, amid gasping and choking, as the young man flailed in deep water. When he reached the embankment, he turned his face, shimmering with swamp water and fear, upward.

At that spot, the man was waiting, looking down at the floundering youth, perhaps no older than his own eighteen years. Fighting for air, the young man spoke not a word; his eyes did the pleading. In reply. the figure sneered, hocked up a wad of phlegm, and spat into the water.

"Let’s see how many of ‘em you coon-lovers sign up to vote now.”

He planted the lug sole of his hunting boot squarely in the middle of the desperate youth’s face and pushed his head into the water, holding it there until the young man stopped floundering, leaving his body to float languorously amid the duckweed. And then all was as it had been—the moonlit night, the brackish crawl of the leaden swamp, the crescendo of the insects’ nocturnal chorus.

He had run that night and from that night, and he had kept running through all his days, burying and reburying and reburying his malignant act. He owned it as his alone, never whispered to another—not his family, whose ignorance and cruelty had spawned his own malevolence, nor the woman he had called his wife before she drank herself to death, nor any friend, such as they might have been. But now, after nearly sixty years he knew he could run no more nor rebury yet again.

You are of your father the Devil!

The face…that wet and anguished face.

Murderer!

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. The cracked linoleum felt cool to the touch on the soles of his feet. His hand found the bedside lamp, and he switched it on, squinting as the light shocked his eyes.  From inside the nightstand drawer, he withdrew a piece of folded newsprint, a scrap of notebook paper, and the stub of a pencil.  He wanted another cigarette, but he had smoked his last. He wanted another drink, but there was none to be had. Carefully, his old fingers unfolded the newsprint and smoothed it flat on the bed. It was a large story with three photos—two young men and a young woman—from the New Orleans Times-Picayune dated August 18, 1965. The headline dominated the front page:

STATE POLICE, FBI  COME UP EMPTY IN FREEDOM RIDERS DEATH PROBE

His eyes scanned the big print, lingering a moment on the youthful faces. He read no further; there was no need. All the years he had remained implacable, and so was he, still. Those three? To him, they continued to be nothing more than “do-gooders, hippies and goddamned Jews.” No, it was not remorse he felt, and though he placed no stock in divine retribution, he could not escape the tent preacher’s indictment:

“You are of your father . . .!”

But it was not Judgment Day that he feared. He knew that he could no longer elude the nightmares that had begun haunting him anew. The years had worn him down. Now, he had grown too old, too tired. The past had become the present and now loomed as his desolate future.

He took up the piece of notebook paper, smoothed out the creases with the back of his hand, and began writing with the blunt pencil in a child-like scrawl:

it was me i done it nobody else them three i kilt them

He finished and laid the paper and pencil on top of the newspaper.  He stood and listened. Night would be ending soon enough, but for him the window of time had closed. He looked around the bedroom, stopping on the closet door opposite his bed. The rifle was in there. It was loaded.

*Original version published in the Typeslash Review.

BIO: Nick Young is a retired award-winning CBS News Correspondent.  His writing has appeared in more than thirty publications including the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Garland Lake Review, The Remington Review, The San Antonio Review, The Best of CaféLit 11 and Vols. I and II of the Writer Shed Stories anthologies.  His first novel, "Deadline", was published in  September.  He lives outside Chicago.