“Another one,” I said.
“So you can pour that one out, too?”
“That was for my friend,” I said. “Now, I want one for me.”
He shrugged and pulled another from the cooler. Tossed it my way. I snagged it from the air and snapped the top free on my belt buckle.
A long tug on the beer bottle, and I was left to contemplate the carnage that had just ripped apart the swamp.
Mostly, I pondered the fate of my best friend.
Dead Deuce. He was a collection of atoms and cells, rapidly deteriorating.
I was too broken and hollow to cry. I had been scooped out like the inside of a melon. Just a husk of humanity, but I felt that old sensation returning. I welcomed it. I hoped for it. I wished for it to breathe new life into me.
In seeking out this situation, I had condemned my brother. Not Edrick, the shadow version of myself. He was blood, but Deuce was my brother.
He had weathered the storm of my youth, seen me through to adulthood, all the while protecting me from the horrors of the outside world. In the end, he was the kind of man who wouldn’t even murder his brother’s killer. He’d come to Jacksonville with that as his intention, but it was dawning on me that he wasn’t capable.
Maybe the shade that inhabited him had something to do with that, with the violence which had taken over his life. The fact that he hadn’t been consumed by the anger that had engulfed me showed his strength and character.
And now it was all gone, buried face-down in a swamp in north Florida, never to see the light again. It was all storm clouds and cesspools from here on in, and part of me hoped that would be true for the both of us.
“Well,” he said, like a man on his way out of a meeting, “looks like it’s just the two of us now. ‘Cept maybe Tee over there.”
Over Edrick’s shoulder, a man groaned, a low, unsettling gurgle in the back of his throat. Judging by it, he wasn’t going to last awfully long.
I said, “Man’s got to face up to his past at some point, I reckon, and now’s my time.”
“Everybody feels that way, when they’ve got a fucking gun jammed in their face.”
I cogitated on it, tried to find a way to disagree but couldn’t.
“How you feel?” he asked.
“Reckon I feel pretty shitty,” I responded. “But I feel shitty most of the time anyway. I’ve had a lot of hurting put on me in the last few years. Hank said, ‘Hangovers hurt worse than they used to.’ But that applies to most things. It all hurts. All of it.”
“Nothing that didn’t seem…eventual.”
“You expected it to play out like this,” I said.
He glanced sidelong at his compatriots. “Not quite,” he responded. “I half expected a big shootout.”
“Not too far from what did happen,” I said.
“The other side of me hoped it would be like this,” he responded. “Fuck, man, I’ve got a spiked heart rate. You got a spiked heart rate? Course you do. You see the tunnel closing down around you, too? You’ve had a good run, and I, well, I just wish I could offer you a truce you could accept.”
“You could let me go,” I said, “and then I could chase you down and stomp your face through the back of your skull.”
He ignored me. “Don’t you feel it, though? There’s something, like” — he tapped his temple — “psychic going on between us. I’m starting to see things. You see things?”
I blinked, lingering behind the backs of my eyelids for a moment. “Nope.”
“I do. I see things.” He closed his eyes. I glanced around for the nearest gun. A pistol lay several yards away, and I thought maybe I could scramble for it, but when I looked up, he was grinning at me.
He skulked over and kicked the gun to where the water licked at the porch of this monstrous residence. It made a taunting plop as it disappeared.
“I see a little house somewhere off in the woods. I ain’t much of a scholar, like my brother — see what I did there — but I think I might be envisioning the house where you fucking grew up. Where you grew up. You know where I grew up?”
“At the corner of heartless and fucked-up avenues?”
“Is it all quick little jabs with you? You don’t have something meaningful to say about us being here tonight?”
“The fuck you want me to say?” I asked. “I know your life was a struggle. I spent six years in that house you think you see. Every day, my mother’s memory turns a little more like the reflection in still water when you touch the surface with your finger. But I was out of there pretty quick too. I didn’t live a life like the one I imagined. That make you happy?”
“It’s a start,” he responded. “Mind if I indulge myself in a few more questions?”
“I got much of a choice?”
He racked a slug into the chamber of his beast and held the gun aloft. “Not much of one, no. I don’t think you really do.”
“Then shoot. Metaphorically, of course.”
“Man, I might’ve been able to like you, given the time and distance. You’re crazy, unhappy. Clearly good at putting people in the dirt. You treat killing like it’s a business worth investing in.”
“I’ve only done what I had to,” I said.
“That’s the excuse everybody makes, and it’s just as true in everybody’s situation. I had to do what I had to do to survive. Doesn’t make me a monster.”
“It does,” I said.
He shrugged. “Maybe. Don’t know. Truth is, I probably would have — we probably would have — ended up right here no matter what path we had taken to get here. This is fate, writ large across the stars, and now it’s all coming to a head.”
“You didn’t have to kill those women.”
“There was a tipping point,” he said, “and them girls had reached it. One of them had already threatened to go to the cops, and so she had to be silenced.”
“That was Nikki.”
He shook his head. “Nikki was a co-conspirator. She was the one that tried to foment the revolution, and you see what happened to her.”
“You’re sick.”
“I’m a businessman. Them girls, they were looking at a life of despair, even if I hadn’t stepped in to help them. For a time. I helped them, and then I made them famous. The perverts who watch Nikki die and die again on-screen, they are the real sickness in this country.”
“You only gave the public what it wanted.”
“You’re catching on. I can’t say it was an entirely selfless gesture. I made money, yes, but there was also the inconvenient fact that Nikki had to die. She just had to.”
“Oh yeah? Didn’t seem to stop anything.”
“It’s a row of dominoes, for sure. But eventually, it stops. See, nobody cares about them girls. Nobody cared that they were alive. Nobody cares that they’re dead.”
“Taj did. Taj was trying to get Nikki out of that life.”
“That motherfucker, no, he didn’t. He was pussy-whipped. Same as you. The way you spend your time cowing to women, I fucking swear ‘fore God.”
He stopped, smiled. Waited for me to to respond. But I was done.
“Do what you’re going to do,” I said. “This isn’t a family reunion, so get it over with, before you make me make you get it over with.”
I was hoping, somehow, to drive him to make a mistake, but he had all the power. Surrounded by the unquiet dead. Acres of open swamp, and nowhere to run to.
I felt the strength of the old power returning, and I thought I caught a hint of my old friend’s presence in there, too. Might’ve been pure wishful thinking, but even I wasn’t inured to hope. Out of my lungs came an old taste, settling in my mouth like bile sliding back up the esophagus. It tasted like…the inside of the Boogie House. A flash of the place, of the body in the center, the spirit tied to it like a hot air balloon staked to the ground.
Oh, and the Savannah River, algae and blood and cigarette butts. Old beer and dirt and oil, all seeping openly from the corners of my mouth.
He stared until I looked down, and I saw that I actually was leaking. It was a briny, loose liquid sliding free of my lips and landing on my shirt. Could have been salt water. Could have been swamp water. Could have been the moisture strangled from the boards of the Boogie House.
In any case, I couldn’t stop it.
Words, too, came pouring out of my mouth, but they made less sense than the river of liquid I was secreting. Edrick only smiled and nodded, as if he understood I was never to be understood.
I tried to stall, tried to think of a way to keep this scene from playing out in the way I knew it was going to, but nothing would come to me. I was blank, a stick figure wiped off the whiteboard. If he killed me now, I’d have no excuse but to take it.
“Part of me wishes I had time to sit down with you and pick out all of the similarities you and I share. Part of me thinks that’d be real nice, what with the fact that we share some of the same genetic material.”
“My mother — our mother. She. She wasn’t broken by the world the way most people are.”
“You were six. When you’re six, your parents always seem perfect.”
“I can think of one half of that being bullshit. I had to live with him.”
“Wasn’t my father.”
“Wasn’t mine, either,” I said. “I tried to disown him in every way that made sense.”
“Kept his name. Kept his town. Tried to wedge your way into that shit-splat of a place, to save the name. Tell me you didn’t do that.”
I blinked.
“Sure you did. That’s a natural inclination. Get back on the horse. To self-preserve. Can’t say I wouldn’t do the same, given similar circumstances.”
“But you didn’t have that luxury.”
He doffed the pistol like an old Havana driving hat.
“That is not—”
“Don’t tell me it’s not your fault,” he said. “Normally, you’d be forgiven for saying that, now wouldn’t you? It’s natural. You were the fucked up orphan of a hellish situation.”
“You had to live like a child sent down the river.”
“I was raised by a doctor just wanted the best for me, even if he had no fucking idea how to raise a child, beyond clothe and feed it.”
“And you take that to mean that the world owes you something.”
“Somebody owes me something,” he said. “I went off and founded my own Rome, suckling at the tit of the criminal underground. In plenty of ways, I did better’n you, don’t you think?”
“Could say that, I guess.”
“I don’t have an APB hanging over my head. Don’t have a manhunt taking place. I’m as free as I ever was, which means that only a few people even know I exist, or at least why I exist, and I can’t decide in this moment which is more important to me. My privacy or my identity.”
“Give me that pistol, and I can help you with both,” I said.
He actually laughed. Looked kind of like an unhappy crocodile when he did that.
He paused, chewed on the thought.
“Well, let’s get on with this,” he said, struggling to his feet. “Tell mama hey for me.”
I thought maybe I could summon one last deflection, push the gun barrel out of the way, but the sense of my surroundings was weak, nothing like I expected it to be. All these dead bodies, all this loss, I figured I’d be primed up for something meaningful.
In the air of a moon partially blocked by trees, I heard whispers of past lives but received no real and usable connection. Maybe I was all used up, and they had nothing left to give me.
Didn’t stop me from silently begging for it, for something. It wasn’t supposed to end with me getting dumped headlong in a pit of gators.
He raised the pistol, his face blank but his eyes showing something more involuntary, more human, than I’d expected. I thought his hand was trembling, but that could have also been me wanting fate to intervene.
I locked my jaw and tensed up, throwing every ounce of mental force at the son-of-a-bitch.
The gun barrel tilted slightly away from me. That was all the other side could do for me. Either the signal was weak, or else I was. I saw the slight struggle in my brother’s grip, but it wasn’t enough to keep me out of the gun’s sights. Head or heart, I was in a bad fucking way.
He dropped the barrel, sniffed once, and then raised it again. I pulled my hands up, as if that would do anything, and began to think — no. I would have said it, given the opportunity, but there was no time.
Well, maybe some time.
A split second. In that moment, that fraction of a second — one thousandth of a second — I saw things. Not dead bodies, not really. Not the kind that got up and walked around. I didn’t glimpse The Great Beyond, nor did I manage to communicate with my dead mother or my monster of a father.
A sound and a flash, but no extra time. I focused all my remaining mojo on pushing the gun down, but it didn’t work. I was all out. It was reminiscent of the milliseconds between touching a hot stove and pulling your fingers away. I felt the impact, but only in an abstract way.
In that moment, though, I caught sight of something which had eluded me, something that I thought would have been in the earliest part of my investigation.
I saw a young man in flashes, in teeny tiny slivers of time, like the flickers of a bad light bulb.
Him lying sideways across his bed, a cell phone pressed against his ear, smiling and laughing as the ceiling fan whup-whup-whupped overhead.
Him chasing girls across several pages of the internet, viewing and then responding to their videos as a fan might in a similar situation.
Him sliding into the backseat of a car, hands already reaching for what lay beneath the hem of her dress, her features darkened by the shadows running up and down the alleyway.
Him picking up loads of dope and then delivering them, a forgotten and overlooked part of a highly specific process.
Him finding himself in a room full of hurt and frightened women, thinking of ways to keep up his end of the bargain without actually going through the act of pushing them to go to the truck parked out back.
Him holding down that first girl for a paycheck, feeling his humanity slide from him like rain through gutters.
Him holding down every girl after that.
Him and the alcohol and the drugs and the women and then—
And then, her.
His salvation. The one thing he couldn’t see coming. The fight to save her. Failing to save her. Finding that, just as she was being used for this most dark of purposes, that his life was over, too. Seeing them slip between the cars of a parking lot before latching their hands onto him.
The final image, which seemed to burn hotter than the rest, was him being forced into the trunk of an old hooptie, mouth wrapped in silvery tape, feet bound with old twine. Fighting, eyes wide, the sense of loss already spreading across his still-young features.
I saw all of this, and for some reason, I wasn’t saddened that the final flickering images in my brain were not from my own life. I had been dreaming of my own life, my own past, for the last thirty-plus years, living every moment twice. Feeling as though my life was twice as long as it should have been. What I didn’t see was the revelation that my life meant something. All there was in the space between my life and the hereafter was loss and the sad realization that I was no more than a harbinger of death.
The Red-Eyed Stranger wasn’t the devil here. It was me, and I was quickly fading into the nothingness that enveloped the world of the living.
It happens to everyone, eventually.
As the last still photographs firing off in my brain caught flame and burned out, darkness spread in all directions at once, colonizing the reality I had once known, leaving me far, far behind.
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Acknowledgments
This book would not be possible without the following necessary people: Bridget Lopez, Tom Bailey, Kate Braddy, Mary Coleman Palmer, Randy Cone, Nancy Keen Palmer, Jeremy Lopez, Joe Lopez, William T. Harvey, Buddy Blackmon, John Palmer, Amy Scruggs Adams, Johnny Anderson, Margaret Humbracht, and everyone who has joined the newsletter, attended a Parnassus event, or endured the many hours of annoying navel-gazing on my part.
About the Author
T. Blake Braddy is the author of the Rolson McKane Southern Mystery Series. You can find him online at tblakebraddy.com or meandering around Nashville, TN, if you look hard enough. He lives with his wife, two dogs, and cat. The fourth (and final) Rolson McKane novel, Six Feet South, is set to be released in early 2018.
For More Information
www.tblakebraddy.com
[email protected]
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