Cypress screamed, “Daddy, Daddy,” and a guard came chasing her. It was Idrina, laughing, her father still trapped in the roaring red glow. Cypress whimpered “Daddy . . . Daddy” through the black winding tunnels and caves lined with laughing Idrinas, Ariels jacking off, while the whole colony, alerted to a defector, prepared to capture and punish a felon.

Cypress woke up running; at least, it looked as if she’d been running. Her body hurt like long forced strides, her linen was tossed about like undergrowth round deserted towns. She was panting, she was sweating. She was crying, hugging herself. Rocking back and forth, shaking her head. No, that wasn’t real, there was no such place; that was a dream, everything’s all right, now. But everywhere she looked she saw her mother in the cave, giving birth over and over; her father in the electric popping cage, his arms behind his back . . . pain everywhere she turned . . . their faces made ugly for the first time, by something she had dreamed.

Usually she comforted Leroy, who had grabbed her arms from the depths of his sleep that night, trying not to see what he was seeing, yelling “He killed her. He killed her. Towbin’s wrong; doesn’t understand.” Cypress got him to keep talking. “He killed Mama ’cause of that bitch. He killed her.”

It had been so hard for Cypress to listen to the ugliness Leroy found in his parents, to reconstruct malignant romantic triangles; lies and longings he’d been trapped in as a boy.

Yeah, he was raised with the best of everything. If it hadn’t been for the rigors of any child’s life in East St. Louis, he would have been Little Lord Fauntleroy. It wasn’t talk about his father and that woman. That was no talk. That was the truth. The nights he spent keeping company with his mama, fixing one last cocktail, until they heard the hum of the Eldorado by the side of the house, confirmed for Leroy that his father had chosen some Guinea bitch young enough to be his daughter, over Eleanora and her geraniums by the picket fence.

Such indiscretions are resolved by little boys when they become men. But Leroy was a man whose dreams told him, “White folks killed your parents, murdered your folks. On account of a piece of ass some white folks murdered your mama. And your pop thought so much of you he let your mama die for his white bitch . . . so much for the niggers, huh . . . huh?” That’s when Leroy’s hands grabbed for Cypress in the night. That’s when Cypress rocked him back and forth, slipping her fingers through his braids, pushing out the nightmares, his tears on her thighs. Cypress fought to say, “Let go of that, Leroy. That’s over. Remember the nice things . . . ,” but she wanted to say, “Let’s get ’em. Let’s make somebody pay. Somebody has to pay for this.”