Darkness upon the Land
Chapter 23

“So do we want to think of what we’re going to tell Mѐre if she asks what we do when we head off alone together?” Alexia asked as they walked down the road away from the house.

Reuben turned his head to face her. “Smoking behind the barn?”

“I can believe that’d be your first answer.”

She figured that because it was Saturday and he was a Sabbath observer, hard-working Reuben saw today as a break from physical labor while keeping to their priority of preparing for the next attack. Yesterday he’d thrown himself into constructing a couple of “landing points” back in the recesses of the swamp should they need to flee the premises. Their necessity was dictated by the needs of a convalescent woman.

They intended to walk down the road just until they were out of sight from the house. This way she could work on her outbursts and they could stay aware of any activity on the only land route to home. Henry gleefully trotted ahead of them as though he never got to take off exploring any time he wanted.

Before they reached the bend in the driveway, they had to skirt around the front of the pickup truck parked almost crossways on the road. After Reuben siphoned the gas from its fuel tank yesterday, she helped him push it down here so that the truck funneled visitors to the side that could be seen from the house. Otherwise, invaders would have to slog through the swamp or crawl underneath the vehicle.

He had saved some of the fuel for use in the chainsaw, but they all agreed the gas he still needed to procure from the car – the only other available vehicle – could contribute to a different use. Obviously the lifeless hulk of the pickup wouldn’t stop anybody, but the truck was only the container that would provide an explosive deterrent they had planned.

“This should be good enough.” He came to a halt after they walked a few yards beyond the pickup. As of last night he finally became clean-shaven again, and even though he never had a heavy stubble, Alexia was surprised how the slow growth of his beard hardly elicited her attention, but its sudden disappearance took her a few minutes to get reacquainted with. Of course the rifle hung from his shoulder, and she had a water bottle slung across her chest. A plastic pouch generously filled with pemmican was stuffed into a back pocket of her pants.

“All right,” he continued as he stood in front of her. “I think it’d be best to start small. How’s your heart rate?”

“Exactly where it’s supposed to be.”

“Then let’s try a little biofeedback exercise. Speed it up.”

She frowned. “In order to accomplish what?”

“Emotions trigger certain autonomic responses. If you can produce the response before the actual emotion, you might be able to produce an outburst without waiting to get ticked off at me first.”

“Oh,” She smirked. “That’s why you want to work with me. You’re good at ticking me off.”

“Let’s just see if we can avoid heading down that path. Try raising your heart rate first. And when you’re there, try to release an outburst.” He grasped her left wrist with his left hand and pressed his fingertips against the pulse point.

“You sure you want to stand there?” She asked.

“Just remember your goal isn’t to knock me over, as tempting as that may be.”

She smiled as she turned away slightly so that he wouldn’t be directly in the “line of fire.” Her gaze became unfocused as she drew a few deep breaths first, and her concentration turned inward. She contemplated stirring up a state of excitement, and her breathing became shallow and more rapid. Yes, she could feel her pulse increasing. She allowed it to build until her heart thumped rapidly against her chest, and then she released her concentration suddenly, as though trying the cast the sensation away from her.

She opened her eyes, which she hadn’t realized were closed. Reuben was standing in the same spot and still clasping her wrist. He studied her contemplatively for a few seconds before speaking.

“That was it?”

She frowned. “Decided to just go ahead and tick me off?”

“Well, you obviously got your heart rate up, but I didn’t feel anything else change.” He released her wrist and stepped back directly in front of her. “Apparently just physical control isn’t sufficient to stir up the right chemical mix in your blood.”

“When I’m trying to suppress this thing, I do have to calm my mind as well as my breathing and heart rate.”

He released a slow exhale and regarded her pensively. “Your brain deviates mostly in the more primitive regions, thus the unique components in your biochemistry. And since emotion causes hormones to interact directly with the brain, you get a whole-body response. Maybe you need an emotional memory to get the right mix going. Think of something disturbing.”

“That shouldn’t be hard,” she muttered as several recent events flashed through her mind. The men who attacked them at Baton Rouge seemed particularly disturbing. She recalled how the pair ignored the warning. How Baldy went for Reuben first. And then he grabbed the front of her shirt.

Reuben took a step back that wasn’t quite casual. “That did something.”

Alexia realized she felt slightly shaken, but the outburst hadn’t been large enough to physically weaken her even though it was stronger than what it took to pop a light bulb.

“That’s no surprise,” she responded. “It’s always been emotionally linked.”

“Yes, but this time you produced an outburst at will, and that’s our first step in the right direction.” He smirked. “That was also faster. Now that we’ve verified you can produce it, you need to work on focusing it.”

“That’s going to be the hard part.”

“Yes, it is. But if you can channel that energy in a specific direction, it will have more force and there won’t be a bunch of it wasted in backsplash. Maybe you could try to concentrate it to one side or the other.” He stepped away and pulled out two lime green tennis balls, one from each pocket. “Ready to play ball?”

“Shouldn’t I start with something bigger? You know, easier to hit?”

“Good suggestion if we had more time. This is a crash course.” He set the balls on either side of the road a couple of yards away from them. “There. Since you’re right-handed, your left hemisphere is dominant. Even though your right hemisphere is more emotional, I think dominance will be the key factor. Try to move only the ball on your right.”

She thought how this was kind of like the blind leading the blind. Although he understood the principle of dominant hemispheres, he didn’t practice it very well. One of the peculiarities of his brain was the fact neither hemisphere ever shifted into permanent dominance, but rather seemed to keep trading off. This was manifested not only in his ambidexterity but was quite possibly also one of the components in his inability to read.

It was weird they knew so much about each other’s brains.

As he stood beside her, she drew another deep breath and recalled the discovery of the attack on her mother while she glared at the innocent tennis ball to her right.

Both balls rolled away slightly.

“Not bad,” Reuben murmured.

She didn’t try to rein in her annoyance this time. “Now you’re going to be patronizing?”

Both balls wobbled away a little more.

He grinned. “I might sabotage your efforts by saying this, but the first time you did manage to focus everything forward. I didn’t feel a thing while I stood here right next to you. Now the second time, when your attention shifted to me, I felt the vibration.”

She stared at him and immediately realized what he meant by his reference to sabotage.

She’d done it. Well, it wasn’t exactly what she’d meant to do, but she still accomplished more than she’d really expected. This abnormality of hers could be harnessed and put to use. It really didn’t have to be just a curse that crippled her in multiple ways.

Alexia’s smile was still more subdued than his grin. “Then stop distracting me.”

“Or maybe I should stand behind the ball to the right.”

She immediately refocused on the spherical target with renewed enthusiasm, but her next attempt produced no result. It figured. Her mood had been too elated. But she embraced the frustration of that failure and both balls trembled again.

She wanted to move only the one on the right, but every attempt affected the two. The frustration was a good thing, and she was able to get in several tries, but eventually the cumulative effects started to be felt. Alexia began to get light headed and a little weak in the knees.

“I need to quit for a while,” she gasped slightly. “Munch break.”

She took a few steps to the side of the road and pulled the bag of pemmican from her pocket. As she sat in the grass and pinched a generous fingertip full of the food into her mouth, Henry, who had been sniffing around nearby and couldn’t have cared less about the balls, immediately trotted over with his tail wagging.

“Oh no you don’t, you mooch.” Reuben stepped between them and sat beside her so he could pet the Brittany and keep him at bay.

“I’m surprised you said that in English,” she commented.

“It would take too long to say in Cherokee.”

She knew he used his mother’s “native tongue” when he talked to the animals because it helped to keep him fluent when there was nobody else to talk to in that language. Sometimes her mom resumed speaking to her only in Cajun for the same reason.

That suddenly gave her an idea.

“All three of us can speak Cajun,” Alexia said after she swallowed another bite. “Since so few other people in this area can, maybe, if others show up, if we need to tell each other something, we should all use Cajun.”

He cocked his head slightly and then a rather crooked grin curved his lips. “That’s a clever idea. If we really want to confuse them, we could throw in some Hebrew.”

She smirked. “The only Hebrew Mѐre and I have time to learn is oy!”

“Actually that’s Yiddish. But it’s a great word.”

She took another bite and reached for the water bottle hanging across her chest. “After you get the Latin down, are you going to learn another language?”

He shrugged. “I wait for inspiration to hit me.”

As she swallowed a few gulps of water, she noticed the grass was starting to feel a little itchy around her thighs since she was wearing shorts. Reuben wouldn’t have that problem because he was wearing the older, faded pair of jeans. The only shorts he probably had right now at their place were his swimming trunks, and she wasn’t sure he’d actually left them here over the winter. That got her thinking about something else.

“Too bad my stepfather wasn’t closer to your size,” she commented as she screwed the cap back on the bottle. “Otherwise you could wear his clothes. Not that he kept as many here.”

He seemed to study her as she took another bite of pemmican before he asked, “Do you ... miss him at all?”

The question caught her off guard. Alexia realized that her immediate answer was “no,” but that didn’t strike her as right. Sure, she was very accustomed to her stepfather not being around, and when he was she had very little interaction with him. And what interaction she did have usually bordered on the adversarial because he often seemed to tease her in ways that were generally insulting. Lately, especially, he’d started saying things that made her feel uncomfortable.

Reuben knew about everything except the lately stuff. They’d had discussions about her stepfather before. And although he’d always maintained neutrality during those conversations, she was pretty sure he … disliked … her stepfather. The handful of times that he went to Mass with them was on the evenings his only other option had been to stay around here while her stepfather was actually home.

Yet still, the realization that she didn’t miss him one bit tweaked at her conscience. Ben Castille was the only “father” she ever knew. He could be dead right now. And it seemed cold-hearted of her to not even care.

“I dunno,” she murmured. “I should, I suppose.”

He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the dog he was scratching around the ears. “That’s the same thing I wondered. That I should.”

She stared at him. “You barely knew him.”

“I knew enough. I knew what you thought of him.” He gazed across the murky water and into the trees. “I suppose we should always pray that he’ll change his ways, or that, if he’s become one of the dearly departed, he repented at the last minute. So I’ve finally decided that I can’t mourn Ben, but I can pity him. I can pity that he chose to make bad decisions. It seems to be the appropriate response.”

“You think that’s what I should do?”

“It’s just a suggestion.”

It occurred to her how much her stepfather would hate being pitied, especially by someone like Reuben, for whom he’d always expressed contempt. He’d considered the “half-breed hillbilly” to be a freak not only because of his unique neurobiology, but also because of his pathetic adherence to outdated, traditional principles. Her stepfather would frankly be insulted that working-class Reuben would be righteous enough to actually pity a man who had made millions of dollars and lived in a big, expensive house in New Orleans and did whatever he wanted because of his financial resources. Pity? He’d prefer to have Reuben spit on his grave.

She remembered something about a verse stating that showing kindness to one’s enemy was like heaping hot coals upon his head. Maybe in reality Reuben was up to one of his “ulterior motives.”

If nothing else, he’d dredged up memories of her stepfather, and she could feel long-buried discontent begin to rise. This time, instead of trying to suppress them, she allowed the irritation to simmer and grow. The combination of food, rest, and a new source of emotional turmoil made her feel ready to try again.

“Let’s see if I can do any better this time.” Alexia wiped her fingertips across the blades of grass before getting back on her feet.

“Yeah,” he grumbled as he also got up. “Let’s see if you can do any better.”

She knew what he was doing, but because he was trying to irritate her on purpose, it just wasn’t having the same effect.

“Maybe you should keep your mouth shut,” she growled as she tried to become annoyed that his efforts were hindering her instead.

“Maybe you should do something right for a change.” He stood at the side of the road. Henry, who had enjoyed the attention, sat at his feet and gazed up hopefully while wagging his tail.

“I said shut up.” It felt a little odd to talk to him that way, but she tried to add that drop of discomfort to her pent-up irritation that she focused upon the ball to her right.

But just before she released the energy, Reuben quipped, “Your mother wears army boots.”

That was entirely the wrong thing for him to say. She chortled, and her attempt fizzled to nothing. That he caused her to fail immediately stirred up frustration, but as she turned to face him she realized too late that she was still in “release mode” and didn’t check her response.

He suddenly stumbled back. “Not me!”

On his own, he might have been able to recover. But Henry yelped and blundered into his feet, causing him to trip. For a split second both man and dog were a frenzied entanglement of flailing arms and legs, and then Henry darted away a few yards as Reuben landed in the swamp with a splash.

Alexia gasped and guffawed at the same time. She clapped her hands over her mouth as she tried to stifle the laughter, and strode over to the side of the road. He made no effort to scramble back out, but remained sitting in water up to his waist and glared up at her.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to say between chuckling waves. “But you did want me to knock somebody off his feet.”

Too bad a frog didn’t pick that moment to land on his head. “I reiterate – not me!”

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