The meanest Flood

‘Do you believe in magic?’
    ‘There’s so much we can’t explain. I believe in sleight of hand and I believe in miracles. I know there are rhetoricians who can talk up a storm and moments and places that are charmed.’
    ‘And this man, Sam, this magician, do you think you can take him down?’
    ‘I never had any doubts about that,’ Sam said. ‘I only needed to know who he was.’
    ‘And do you know now?’
    ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But I’m beginning to get a picture.’
    Angeles sighed. She said. ‘Have you ever read Stephen Crane?’
    ‘Red Badge of Courage. I read that.’
    ‘He said that people were not nouns, but adverbs modifying a series of events.’
    Sam kissed her on the lips and slid down in the bed. He felt the tension in her arms around his back and couldn’t think of any place on earth he’d rather be. Couldn’t seem to concentrate on the adverb thing.
    Later, as they lay sleeping in a tangle of cotton sheets, the boy came back to Sam in a dream.
    And, yes, he had been called Danny. Sam couldn’t remember the woman’s name, even in the dream. Apart from the Madonna braids he couldn’t see what she looked like, either. But he could see the boy. The boy was clearly defined against a white background. He was hysterical, screaming and crying, and all of his anger was centred on Sam.
    The woman kept grabbing at the boy, trying to get him upstairs to his room, but he wasn’t having any. He was a tornado, howling, spitting and leaping around the room to evade her reach. Sam couldn’t hear the words but he could see and feel the single-minded vehemence as it crackled out of the child.
    Sam came awake and turned towards Angeles. She was sleeping with one arm covering her face, her breath coming and going with the softness of a feather. Sam turned away from her and looked back at the dream. Fifteen, twenty years had gone past since that time. He was aware of two different Sam Turners; the one he knew now, who viewed the image of the boy with a degree of compassion, and the one from the past who saw the boy as an irritation.
    That the dream corresponded to an actual event, he had no doubt, though his recollection of it was at best shaky. He couldn’t remember his conscious mind referring to it on one single occasion since it had happened. It was something he’d put aside, another one of those things he’d decided not to deal with.
    And there was another scene from around the same time but buried even deeper. Sam remembered Marie asking him if he’d ever hit a woman. He’d avoided the answer even though it was twenty years since the act. But he’d punched the woman with the Madonna braid in an argument about a bottle. Laid into her with both fists, blackened her eye and cut her lip, and this was part of who he was. The details were blurred, the memory only really kicked in at the point when his attack on her came to an end. He saw himself standing with his legs apart, looking down at his fists. The woman was huddled in a corner, her hands covering her face. Sam had been lost for a hundred years and he had suddenly found himself in a body and a mind-set he didn’t recognize.
    He didn’t know why he had beaten the woman and he didn’t know why he had stopped beating her. What had prevented him going on to kill her? Some residue of conscience? Some isolated, civilized remnant in his soul?
    He’d walked away. Found another bar to prop him up. And the woman with the Madonna braid and the broken face had gone home to her son.
    And all the while, as he grew into manhood, the boy had kept it as fresh as the day it happened, perhaps built upon it, elaborated its magnitude, until it had driven him to a frenzy of killings.
    But what had it meant to the child? Was it simple jealousy over the body of his mother? Or had he somehow contrived to see Sam Turner as the root of all his troubles? Was Sam the scapegoat for the loss of his father, the disappointment of his mother, or had the boy’s damaged mind invented something worse?
    Thinking on it all for the first time stimulated Sam’s memory. He recalled seeing the boy again. Some time later, after that first screaming fit, but this recollection was even dimmer than the first. The boy had not been screaming and yelling this time, he had been quiet and watchful. And he had not been in that house with his mother. He had been alone. Sam was with another woman, a blonde bimbo, they were on a park bench, drinking, planning how to score