by Jon Bassoff
Grady’s eyes narrowed, but otherwise his expression remained steely. His two brothers, meanwhile, sat still as idols, and if it wasn’t for the occasional blinking of eyes, they could’ve been mistaken for corpses. “Yeah, we know her,” Grady said. “She was one of the girls we paid a visit to. Her and that freak boyfriend of hers. I had an inkling, but I wanted to be sure.”
Barton chewed on his cigar, smoke trickling out between his teeth. “Mighty responsible of you. Pains me to say so, ’cause she’s been a good friend of mine on a number of occasions, if you know what I mean. But yeah, she’s the one who killed your brother. Shot him in cold blood. That’s a fact.”
And now, Kaz, his face bloated and red, his teeth rotted and black, spoke, his voice slow and slurred. “Scent Wallis. We’ll make the bitch pay. I could skin her alive, that’s what I could do.”
His twin brother, Vlad, waved his machete in the air, his lips and eyes twitching simultaneously. “Drain her blood, Sheriff. Sure as shit, we’ll drain her blood.”
“Easy, fellows,” Barton said. “You gotta get me my moonshine before you go out seeking revenge. A deal is a deal, ain’t it?”
“You’ll get your moonshine,” Grady muttered. “And then Scent Wallis is going to get a glimpse of what real meanness looks like.”
Chapter 23
“I’ve never known a boy like you,” Scent said and then she worked on getting his pants unzipped. It was dirty and sinful, but Durango had no desire to fight the devil anymore. “It’ll be something, lover, me and you in California. You’ll see me on the big screen, I bet. I look like Grace Kelly, that’s what a boy told me once, and I do believe you bear a striking resemblance to Jimmy Stewart.”
But when Scent took him in her mouth, Durango didn’t think about Grace Kelly or Jimmy Stewart, he thought about his own mother and the way her eyes must have looked as his father squeezed her throat, his hands trembling with rage…
It was all done in a minute or less and Scent licked her lips clean and smiled. A few minutes without conversation and then she started talking because she was afraid of silence. She told Durango all about her meeting with Dr. Freeman. She told him how Dr. Freeman was going to be coming by tomorrow, just to talk to the poor woman. But when she turned to the proper position, he would cover her mouth with sleeping medicine. Then the ice pick and the hammer!
It was a terrible thing to do, Durango knew this, but he didn’t argue much because he now knew that the world was a terrible place to live. “What if it doesn’t work?” he said. “I mean, what happened to my dad ain’t gonna happen to everybody. Confessing. Revealing. What if she doesn’t tell you where the money is?”
Scent’s face turned evil. “Then I’ll kill the bitch, and I’ll enjoy doing it.”
Durango clenched his jaw tightly, but then Scent’s expression relaxed and she giggled and said she was just joking. “You know me, Durango. I’m not the killing kind.”
Later, back at the campsite, Durango squatted in the dirt. Body and soul ached and salvation seemed so very far away. He stared at his father, his lobotomized father, and he felt the weight of every sin ever committed.
“Please, Dad, please. Tell me it was all a lie. I can’t live knowing you did what you said. Tell me it was a lie. Even if it wasn’t. I’m begging you.”
But Stanton only lay on the ground, face caked in mud, staring straight ahead, eyes already dead. When Durango spoke, his father’s lower lip trembled, but no words came out. Once again he’d become a mute. Or perhaps he’d never confessed in the first place. Perhaps Durango had imagined the whole thing. Lack of sleep, lack of food. His own senses were failing badly. A sensory cripple he’d soon be!
He leaned in closer, gripped his father’s hands and squeezed. Stanton’s eyes blinked a single time. There would be no more confessions. There would be no more words at all…
…but what happens when the night is too black, when the moon is crushed to pieces, when screams are the only sign of life?
Listen people, listen! Everyone’s the devil and God is surely dead.
A sudden burst of rage and Durango spat out words: “What did you think, Father? That if you created the Messiah, he would save your soul? It’s too late for that. Christ saves the souls of sinners, but not cold-blooded killers. And that’s what you are. A killer. I barely knew her. She would have loved me. I know she would have.”
And as he said these things, Durango felt his own skin warming, prepping itself for the fiery pits. There could be no more talking. Durango could barely stand looking at his father. Those hands, those hands! All he could think of were those hands stretching around his mother’s neck, then squeezing, squeezing, until her larynx was crushed, until she became starved for air, thrashing and kicking, thrashing and kicking, and then no more.
This much was certain: the old man deserved punishment! Durango could walk to town, tell the proper authorities. Tell them about the heinous act his father had committed. Trial by jury. Life in prison.
Or death. Yes, death. Throat for a throat. Right now. While the rage was palpable. He could squeeze his own father’s throat. Look at him. The old man wouldn’t fight back.
“His soul,” Durango muttered to the wind. “What happens to his soul when he dies? He was a sinner of the worst kind. He killed and then accepted Jesus because of it. Can his soul be saved?”
Too many questions without answers so he left his father and fled into the depths of the forest. The sky was a frightening silver, the wind trembling the branches. He walked without purpose, embracing the terror of the olden woods. He came upon a murder of crows plucking the eyes, peeling the skin, and picking the flesh from a deer’s corpse. Durango stopped and watched, the crows paying him no mind. There was no beauty in death, no beauty at all.
A few minutes and he left the crows and kept walking. He walked until his feet ached. He walked until he felt as exhausted as he did lost. Finally, he came to a clearing and collapsed beneath a dying oak tree. He closed his eyes and had awful visions of his own death—saw the same crows pecking at his skin, and then the maggots and insects licking his bones clean. He didn’t know if he was dreaming, because there were no such things as dreams when you were living a nightmare…
There had been a time when he could have lived a normal life. Grown up and gone to school. Played baseball and watched television. Instead, his father had taken that all away from him. Strangled his mother. Whored his soul to the world.
He pictured the old blind woman from the carnival. Pictured her cruel grin. Heard her voice again: Blind I have been, and blind I will stay! And his father’s expression of disapproval.
What did he expect? What the hell did he expect? That Durango would cure the sick and save the sinful? Is that what he believed?
And now the anger again. The rage. Kill him. Yes. Kill his own father. That’s what he’d do. That was the only thing left.
Through the labyrinths of cottonwoods and oaks he wandered, wind whipping, leaves scattering to the ground. Up above thunder groaned, but no rain. “With my own hands,” he whispered. “I can’t give life, but I can take it.”
Things were all mixed up. The calliope music from the carnival wouldn’t stop playing. Durango buried his hands in his pockets. He wished Scent were here. He was all alone, his soul chipping off piece by piece. The same trees and creeks kept appearing over and over again. He was walking in circles. What if he never found the campsite? What if he remained forever in the darkened forest trapped by the towering trees and false dirt roads?
But it wasn’t too long before he saw wisps of smoke twisting from their campfire, saw the green tent they’d been sleeping in. Durango slowed down his pace. He removed his hands from his pockets and stared at them. Badly calloused. Blood from an injury unknown smeared on his right index finger. “With these hands,” he whispered and then continued toward the campsite.
He didn’t think he could do it. He was too weak physically, too weak emotionally. Still, he tightened his fists and drew
on the rage that had been coursing through his veins. More steps and he pushed back the branch of a tree. He stood behind the campfire, the wood blackened. No fire, only smoke. He looked at the spot in the dirt where his father had lain. He was gone.
“Father!” called Durango. “Father, where are you?”
No answer. Where could he have gone? Certainly nowhere far. Durango kneeled down and studied the footprints adjacent to where he had been lying. He became overwhelmed with a strange sense of dread. Had the old man, even in his lobotomized state, sensed his son’s plans and tried to escape?
Head down and fingers trembling, Durango followed the footprints. Back in the forest the tracks went, although from the opposite direction that Durango had just come. But after Durango had walked no more than three minutes, the footprints became blurred, then vanished completely. No sign of the old man.
“Father!” Durango called again. “I have my own confessions. And they are even more terrible than yours!”
From the corner of his eye, Durango saw movement. Slowly, he rotated his head. He blinked once, twice, before slowly bending his knees.
His father was dangling from a rope tied to an oak tree. His eyes were open, his tongue lolling from his mouth. And from up above, the crows circled, a new corpse to peck at.
From his knees he fell to the forest floor. No tears, no words. But he stared at his hands and wondered if he would have used them.
Chapter 24
That night, as lightning flashed and the moon tore through the cloud cover, Durango Stanton climbed up the oak tree and used his pocketknife to cut through the rope. His father’s body collapsed to the ground, arms and legs splayed in grotesque angles.
Still no tears, and he straightened the old man’s body, closed his eyes with his thumbs. From deep in the forest he heard the sound of a coyote howling. Every time the crows tried landing, Durango chased them away with his own shrieking. But it wouldn’t be long, Durango knew, before his skin and flesh were gone and only bleach-white bones would remain scattered across the dirt.
He needed to give him a proper Christian burial with enough dirt to keep him protected from the crows and coyotes, and a wooden cross on top. He didn’t have a pine box and didn’t have the money to buy one. What good was a coffin when facing the likes of death? He needed to dig a hole deep enough, though. Six feet at least. He located his metal bowl and he used that as a shovel, digging into the hardened dirt, sweat wetting his messy hair.
But it was slow going. Close to an hour, and he’d barely made a dent. He leaned up against a tree, the very one the old man had hung himself from.
And now that voice whispered in his ear, and he wasn’t scared, not really. “He ask you to bury him in this matter?”
“It’s the Christian way,” Durango said. “I plan to dig the hole plenty deep. I plan to put a wooden cross in the dirt.”
It was the devil whispering in his ear, he knew that now. But the devil was not evil, the devil worked for God, covered in ruby, topaz, and emerald. He was blameless in his behavior from the day he was created…
“The hole is not getting any deeper,” the devil said with a laugh. “Even if you had a shovel, it would take you all day to get a hole deep enough. This I must tell you, and you will find it hard to disagree: the dead are a burden to the living.”
Durango again moved to the shallow hole. With renewed vigor, he jammed the metal bowl into the ground, overflowed it with dirt and tossed it aside.
“But don’t you remember what your father said?” And now the devil spoke in Stanton’s voice: “Promise me when I die, you will try to give me life.”
Durango shook his head, spat on the ground. “The old man wasn’t a prophet or a saint,” he said. “He was a lunatic and a murderer.” He kept digging.
“But can’t you forget about your father for a second? He was an imperfect messenger, I’ll admit, but you should focus on the message he provided. God only used your father to speak directly to you.”
Durango didn’t respond, just kept digging. A crow landed on Stanton’s chest and stood there for a moment before Durango rose to his feet and scared it away.
“Listen to me, boy. He told you that you were the Messiah. He told you that you could raise the dead. Why won’t you believe him? Is faith too arduous for you? Is that the problem? God has sent down so many messiahs, but none of them see it in themselves. Why is that?”
Durango stopped digging for a moment and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Because faith and lunacy seem to be identical, don’t you think?”
The devil was momentarily quiet. Durango shoved the bowl into the ground again and again and again. Exhausted, he tossed the bowl aside and returned to where his father lay.
Oh, terrible faith. How could he make himself believe?
The devil stood right next to him. “Do you want to know the secret, boy? The secret of faith?”
“No…”
“Listen to me, and listen good. You must pretend you believe before you can actually believe. You must trick yourself to trick God. Lies are the truth, boy. Do you hear me? Lies are the truth.”
Yes. Lies are the truth. He stared at his father’s corpse. Dead, forever dead. He didn’t have the power to change that. He closed his eyes. Lies are the truth. That’s right. He wouldn’t try to believe anymore because faith was beyond his capabilities. Faith was impossible for any sane person. But lies. He could lie. He grabbed his father’s hand, so cold. The devil watched him, a sly grin showing on his face.
“Listen to me,” Durango whispered, “for I speak lies! Every word out of my mouth, every thought in my head is a lie. And it is in this way that I believe in the power of God.”
“You are learning, boy. Keep going…”
“I believe God created the heavens and the earth in seven days. I believe he listens to every prayer ever spoken.”
“More lies, boy! Keep ’em coming!”
“He is loving and kind. He looks out for the meekest among us.”
“Yes, yes! Praise to God! Praise to Yahweh!”
Durango clenched his fists and raised them to the sky. His voice became louder, booming across the forest floor. “My lies are the truth! So listen to me, all you unbelievers. Listen to me, all you wretched souls. You should know me. My name is Durango Stanton and I am the resurrection and the life.”
“Very good, Durango! Very good!”
He placed his hand on his father’s chest. He closed his eyes, his lips trembling in forgotten prayer. Lightning from everywhere, thunder missing. “Father, Father,” he said. “I order you to rise. I order you to open your eyes. I order you to remove your grave clothes. For I am the Messiah and can transform the dead to the living!”
Chapter 25
Scent sat on the couch with her mother, stroking her iron-gray hair. Baby closed her eyes, a contented smile on her face.
“It’s okay, Mama. Everything’s gonna be okay now.”
Outside, the rain was falling hard and fast, reverberating against the tin roof. Baby’s wedding dress, recently scrubbed clean by Scent, looked more like a shroud covering her withered body.
“But why now, Scent? Why are you being so nice to me now?”
Scent looked down at her mother’s creased face and kissed her forehead. “I’ve made some realizations, Mama. I know I’ve been mean and I’ve been cruel. And it all had to do with the money.”
“Once he returns, I promise we’ll—”
“It doesn’t matter. None of it does. I let greed guide my heart. And my heart was shriveling into a raisin.”
“A good girl,” Baby said. “You’ve always been a good girl. Even through the troubles.”
Scent worked hard not to smirk. She ran a finger along her scar, still fresh.
Time passed, the rain on the tin roof becoming more and more urgent. Scent wondered if she’d ever loved her mother and decided she hadn’t. She wondered if she’d ever loved anybody and decided she hadn’t. Except for maybe Durango. Maybe…
> “Tell me about Dad,” Scent said, but Baby wasn’t ready for the question. For a long time she didn’t say a word, just sat there staring at the rain, at the darkness. Minutes passed, and she closed her eyes, and Scent thought maybe she’d fallen asleep. “Mama? You awake?”
A long sigh. “Yes, Scent. I’m awake.”
“Well?”
Baby sat up on the couch, tucked her legs beneath her, and gazed into Scent’s eyes. “Truth is, I wasn’t any older than you when I first met him. Maybe not as pretty, but just as young. And what you should know, Scent, is that I had a reputation as a girl that the boys wanted to know. Do you know what I mean by that?”
Scent laughed. She couldn’t help herself. “You? A hussy?”
And now Baby laughed too and it was the first time they’d laughed together in so many years.
“A hussy. That’s a funny term. I worked at a little tavern down on the west side of town. Plenty of boys took a liking to me. You might find that hard to believe looking at me now.”
As she studied her mother’s face, Scent’s grin slowly faded away. That’s who she’d become eventually. A dirty old hag.
“And that’s where you met Daddy? At the tavern?”
She nodded her head, eyes rolling back to another time, a time with more hope. “He was so handsome with his newsboy’s hat and thick mustache. He played pool and kept looking me up and down, and I had a good feeling about him right away. But there was this other fellow, name of Paul Trockner, and he was no good. He was eyeing me, too, only it wasn’t sweet like Henry. And when I came around the counter to give Paul a drink, he stuck his hand on my leg and rubbed up real quickly. I was too surprised to say a single word, and some of his friends began hooting and hollering. Paul was big, he musta weighed two hundred eighty pounds, and he got to his feet and reached for my tit, and there was this cruel look on his face. He wanted to do some things. I didn’t have enough sense to walk away. I didn’t have enough instinct to reach back and slap him. I just stood there, and he kept after me.
