“You’ve got your mother. You’ve got your family. No reason to count the blessings didn’t get afforded to you.”
He got up. His knees popped. Old football injury. He stretched out one shoulder.
We hugged. He clapped my back. I felt something essential tear loose, and I lost myself for a minute there. When I regained my composure, I stepped back and wiped at both my eyes.
My friend turned and walked away without saying goodbye. I don’t think he ever got good at that part of letting go. Me, I was born lonely. I sat and smoked as I listened to the plink of fake video poker machines just off the main room. I didn’t even wonder how I’d get back to Jacksonville, how I’d get back home.
For the time being, I didn’t even wonder where home was.
9
The girl from the rescue called me that night. I’d rented a bed just down the road from the truck stop and was busy peeking through the shades anyway, so she didn’t wake me.
At first, I was confused. Didn’t know how she got the number. I’d been shaking from the confrontation with Othello when I lent her a cigarette, so it could have been in that interim, but that didn’t matter. The phone was up to my ear, and she was crying into it.
Her voice quavered when she spoke, but I could tell it was her. She said, “He’s got us,” she said. “He’s killed La’Daina and Valentina already, and he says he’s going to kill one of us per hour until you show up. He says if you don’t come by the time he’s done with us, he’s going to hunt down and break apart your friend’s family like cordwood. That’s his words. That’s what he says.”
“Let me talk to him.”
A shuffle of fabric and then the clear breathing of someone on the other end.
This was it. My life had been a beer-soaked preamble to this moment. I didn’t need to hear the voice on the other end to know who it was.
I relished the space between my last word and his first. If only I could have lingered there for all eternity.
Then he spoke.
“She and the rest of the bitches will end up in pieces if you don’t bring your oversized buddy to the address I give you.”
“Why?”
“I like cutting people into little hunks of chum to feed to the gators. Gets my dick hard in a way no piece of consensual pussy ever did. How’s that sound. I’m texting you the address. Be there within an hour, or the underage snatch gets her sternum opened up.”
“Seems kind of dumb-fuck to plug your investments full of holes,” I said.
He breathed twice into the line, taking his time. “They’re ruined. You know, after slaving became illegal, the runners would chain all the bodies together — the cargo, you know — and if they thought they were going to get caught, they would just kick the cannon ball at the end of the chain overboard, and it would drag every one of those human widgets into the sea. They were just a commodity, and they were tainted. These are tainted goods, know what I’m saying, and plus I have to make a point here. Can’t have motherfuckers thinking I’m able to be intimidated.”
“I see.”
“It should have ended before now,” he said. “You both are shit at taking implied messages, you know that? I sent some of Renia’s hoods to take care of the family. That didn’t even slow you down.”
“You knew us,” I said, “knew where we were.”
“Man, we weren’t about killing no professional ballplayer,” he replied. “Our intentions were to…dissuade you.”
“And yet you went full-on after them.”
“I thought killing the old cocksucker in the chair would at least do some damage. Your friend is deranged; he just won’t admit it.”
“He’s as full of grief as one human being can be.”
“Oh, come on. Give me a break. You’ve got yourself convinced he’s a saint, and the two of you ain’t even fuckin’, although I suppose you probably should be.”
“You talk like a man with a substantial body count,” I said.
“I am a man with a substantial body count.”
“Then prepare to have to put one more notch in your belt,” I replied.
“Gladly.”
There was a scratchy sound on the other end, like someone rubbing the phone against stubble. “I know you want to hang up on me, get to the part where you kill me, but can I say something else?”
I let the silence tell him I wanted to hear more.
“The other part,” he said, “is that you surprised me. You know what it was like to see you step into that party? I heard there was somebody in town who favored me, and I thought, ‘No fucking way.’ I thought there was no way it could be so…fortuitous. At that point, I wanted to just watch from the sidelines and see what actually happened. I took it as a point of pride that you kicked the shit out of Othello’s goons, but I thought it would end after that. You’d made it into the scorpion’s lair. Thought, then, that you might try to contact me independent of all this shit, get close to me, but that was just a fantasy. It was a fantasy, wasn’t it — brother?”
That word sent my guts to tingling, like I’d stuck needles into my intestines. I sat heavily on a nearby chair, trying to catch my breath.
Here he was, the one link to my life that was, and he was a sick, deranged monster.
“I’ll meet you,” I managed, after some time. “I’ll meet you, just me and you. We can settle whatever needs to be settled. Catch up. Learn something about one another. But Deuce can stay out of it. He’s suffered enough.”
He seemed to linger on that idea for some time.
“Oh, no, he hasn’t,” he said, finally. “He has begun to suffer. He has begun to understand what losing a life is like. But he doesn’t know true loss.”
“Why not?”
“Because I. Am. Not. Done.”
“His uncle. His brother. What else needs to be done?”
At that point, he recited an address.
“I could have, at any time, walked into the front door of that location and bled out his mother like a virgin at sunrise at Tenochtitlan.”
“Why didn’t you?”
I could hear him smiling on the other end. “You’ll need to show up to find that out.”
The phone went dead in my ear.
A text appeared on my phone.
The location. I checked it. The abandoned house in the swamp.
I should have expected that, somehow.
I was alone. Deuce was gone. Deuce was out. Deuce wanted to get on with his life.
But if I went out to that swamp by myself, no one would walk out of there alive.
Not me.
Not the girls.
Maybe not my brother.
He didn’t answer the first time, so I called back until he picked up the phone.
“Miss me already?”
Bad joke. “Deuce, I know you’re out of the crime loop, but—”
“Don’t start.”
“I know. I know.”
“I’m sitting here with my mama, man.”
“Deuce—”
“You want to tell her what you’re trying to tell me?”
“I don’t even want to be telling you this.”
“There’s a way we can fix that.”
I took a deep breath. “The girls. The ones we helped out in the swamp. He’s got them.”
A pause on the other line.
“My brother, Deuce. He’s kidnapped them, and he says he’s going to kill them slow if we don’t show up.”
“Sounds like a family feud to me.”
I weighed my response. Considered what not to say. What would be the most chivalrous. Then I just blurted it out.
“Taj is dead. These girls, though. They didn’t do anything to be put where they are. They deserve another chance. I need your help.”
It was a low blow, but I thought it would work.
“Old friend.”
I heard him breathing on the other end.
“You can walk away right now,” I said, “and you can live the rest
of your life with your family. But when them girls’ bodies turn up on the news, you’ll have to live that life with them hanging over you.”
On the other end of the line, he made not a sound.
“Do you think that demon would let you forget it? Huh? And how are you sleeping?”
He blew out another of his deep breaths.
I waited.
“Meet me at the crib we kept when we dipped out of my mama’s house. I’ll be there in an hour. And Rol?”
I cleared my throat. I didn’t have the words to respond.
“This is it. This is the last time.”
I waited for the phone to click.
10
Deuce used a connection of his to procure as many guns as his depleted bank account would allow. He talked in rapid sentence as we drove toward the location. The final location, what it seemed to be to me.
The guy met us off a dirt road and tossed two shotguns and two pistols into the trunk, complete with several boxes of shells. They exchanged money and the guy said “forget my face” before disappearing into the darkness once again. I managed to catch the reflection of headlights before we crested a nearby hill and sped into the desolate blankness of the swamp.
Deuce was twitching.
“You all right, old man?”
He shrugged it off. “I’m twitching,” he said. “I don’t feel good.”
I let it go at that.
A few minutes down the road, he said, “You see that?”
I peered, looking for something distinct among the indistinctness. “I don’t, big guy.”
“Never mind. It’s — you sure you don't see that?”
“What do you see?”
“Men and women with skin dripping from their face like wax. Walking in droves from the swamp. Passing through objects around them. They’re talking to me, Rol. They’re talking to me, and I’ve got that feeling again, the one I got the night I nearly killed Renia.”
“Hold onto it, Deuce, at least for the time being. We might need it, once we see what’s at the end of this tunnel of light.”
“It’s a dark, dark light, Rol,” he said, “and the source of it is a bright red, spewing out in all directions.”
My heart sped up, but there was nothing in my field of vision.
I called Hunter, left a message. It was a last-ditch effort.
“Detective, this is the bramble bush talking. Figured you knew by the unknown number lighting up your cell phone.
“Listen, I’m not looking for absolution here. I’m not even looking for you to hook me up with freedom in any way, shape, or form.
“What I’m looking for, I guess, is for you to know the truth. No matter what the case file ends up saying, I’m not innocent of everything.
“I killed Limba Fitz. Shot him dead on the beaches of Savannah. He killed a friend of mine. Killed lots of people. Little girl’s father and all their AA friends. If you dig deep enough, you’ll find it out. I stopped him for good, and I don’t regret it.”
The phone beeped in my ear.
Message over.
I called Allison, and she didn’t answer, either. Goddamnedest thing, everybody being more connected than any point in history, and not being able to get them on the telephone. It was something else.
I listened all the way to the beep in her message before I hit the little red ‘END’ button. I considered returning the call, making sure I spoke with her one last time, but I couldn’t really think of anything to say, other than “Run as fucking far away from me as humanly possible.” I figured that would work, but I didn’t want that to be my last message to her.
I tossed the phone out the window.
Best to let the past be the past than to let the future ride up and catch you on the jaw.
“On down the road,” I said, and I leaned back in the seat to let the night air keep me breathless for the rest of the trip.
The place was an old, run-down junker of a house.
“Looks familiar,” Deuce said.
“Beware of the sounds of old blues music playing inside your head,” I responded.
“Not funny,” he said. “It’s been happening a lot more than I’d like to admit.”
“Has Taj tried to contact you?”
He clicked the blinker to activate the brights. “This curse is much different than the one you seem to have lived in.”
“Seems different for everybody. I just wondered—”
“I dream of killing you, Rolson. Sometimes I get that sixth sense that only the hacks on TV shows have. And maybe you. But anyway, you kept asking, and I kept on brushing it aside, but I guess now’s the time to let you in on the details of my possession.”
“Don’t put it so dramatically, Deuce,” I responded.
“Ain’t drama,” he said. “I slip under like I’ve been drugged, and I wake up in a bubble. Feels like water, burns like fire. You’re there, but you’ve got this faded red tint enveloping you, like we’re standing under a set of brake lights.”
“Sounds about right,” I responded.
“Only, Rol, I haven’t told you the entire truth.”
“Deuce, you’re trying to freak me out.”
“I don’t imagine what I have to say next will do anything to help our friendship, but I suppose I’ve got to say it.”
My hands turned greasy. I wiped an imaginary line of sweat from my forehead. “Yeah, man,” I responded. “We’ve only got a few miles down the road here. Might as well get out with it now.”
He paused, seemed to peer at some nondescript point in the distance. Then, he said, “Ever since we booked it out of the woods after burning down the sisters’ house, I’ve had some amount of…insight into your life.”
“The fuck you getting at?”
“You know the dreams you’ve been having?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t really been dreaming for a while.
He nodded his head. “That’s exactly what I mean,” I responded. “You don’t remember your dreams because I have been slipping into them like fish into a new tributary.”
“I — I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “So, I didn’t dream. So what?”
He smiled, and it came off more like a leer than his normal smirk. “See, you think you’ve been snoozing away in darkness, done with your psycho-psychic past, but that just ain’t the truth. While you slept, I slept, too, but it was a little different for me. When I went down for sleep and arose in the world of my dreams, I was not in my head, but yours.”
I had to admit, I felt a little sick at that.
“So you could walk around in the shoes of my head,” I said, trying to shrug it off. “I’ll say again: So what?”
“You been thinking about the past?”
“I’m always thinking about the past.”
“But specifically our past. Like, how we met and the kinds of shit we used to get into. That doesn’t ever pop into your head?”
I hesitated. “Yeah, sometimes, but we’ve been hanging out a lot recently, so—”
“Do you remember the time you got into a fight with those old white dads outside the game, defending my honor and shit?”
Of course I did. How could I not? It had stuck with me through twenty years of—
“Tell me something.”
“Shoot.”
“Who were those parents?”
“The ones I fought?”
“The ones you fought. Who were they?”
I named them off, and Deuce smiled. “Why don’t you see them around town anymore? I mean, back when you lived in the Junction?”
“Because they died.”
“Think a little bit harder.”
I went back to the night in question. My mind flashed. I was standing triumphantly over…nothing. Where the tobacco-spitting redneck had appeared before, there was only the darkened blacktop, and even that began to pixelate and disappear between my feet. The sound of helmets on helmets got the volume turned way down.
In
this world. In this reality, I was beginning to hyperventilate.
“I’m sorry, Rol,” he said. “That was me just messing around. I thought maybe I could tinker with it, kind of like messing around with a new computer program, and then put everything back like files in a cabinet. But I thought I could figure out how to close without saving, if you catch what I’m saying.”
I started to dig through my thoughts, picking them apart and wondering which of them were actually, really, truly real, and which of them had been a fabrication caused by my best friend.
I was taken back to a highly specific memory. It was after Aunt Birdie passed, at the funeral.
Only, the memory I had was a strange one. I wasn’t there. In my mind’s eye, I had an image of a casket, of the flowers and mourners, but when I scaled back and zoomed out, it wasn’t Aunt Birdie being laid to rest.
“I wasn’t there,” I said. “It was her funeral, and I wasn’t there.”
I approached the memory, meditated on it from a few different angles, and it all came out the same way. Aunt Birdie passed, felled by the cancer the doctors discovered far too late, and when she was laid to rest, she had no family there to say goodbye.
Me, I was off drinking with some good ole boys. Deadening the pain. Giving up on myself one beer at a time. Just trying to forget.
“Deuce. Why?”
His grip tightened on the steering wheel. “Memories ain’t what they used to be, huh,” he said. “You really don’t know, do you?”
I tried to remember a time when I remembered Aunt Birdie’s funeral. I couldn’t. The best I could come up with was a blankness. The vague taste of cheap beer. Shame and sadness and regret. Twenty years of the stuff all stacked up in a single moment.
My vision went blurry with the weight of my grief.
“Best I can tell,” he said, “when I dig around in your head, it must reprogram things. Before all of…this, you ruminated on the role of your Aunt Birdie in your life incessantly. And now?”
Dirt Merchant Page 49
