by Laird Barron
Curtis shook a Nat Sherman from a pack and lit up with the fanciest Zippo of them all. He smoked, taking a moment to examine the heel of his Gucci for horseshit.
“How you likin’ New York?”
“All these trees are freaking me. Can I bum one of those?”
He lit another and leaned way over to pass it to me. I quit cigarettes in my late twenties. On occasion, I had a drag for nostalgia’s sake. Meeting Family heavies definitely put me in a nostalgic mood.
“Mr. Deluca sends his regards.” That would be Eddy Deluca of the Albany Delucas. A big fish. “Alaska says you’re not on the job no more.”
Chicago and New York observe certain protocols when it comes to these matters. Etiquette keeps unnecessary bloodshed to a minimum. Apollo had informed Chicago of my relocation. Somebody in the Chicago office then casually mentioned this to New York lest they assume I’d come to do a contract, and here we were. Way, way back in the Capone days, the system was called the bush telegraph.
“I’m out to stud,” I said.
“Interestin’. Difficult to believe a man in his prime would up and quit. So, I ask: are you working?”
“You really think I’m in my prime? I’m flattered.”
“Yeah, you look good. But, I asked a question.”
I stared past Curtis at the goon. The goon stared back. Taller than me, a few pounds lighter. Still, a big boy. Long, luxurious blond hair and the physique of a gym rat or somebody who’d done hard time. Likely both, in his case. He paid too much attention to building his chest and not nearly enough to thickening his legs. A man’s strength comes from his thighs, his ass and hips. He also positioned his feet too close together.
“Charles, go wait in the car,” Curtis said.
Charles took his sweet time, but he left.
“Okay, he’s gone,” Curtis said.
“I know. This is so exciting. Dear Penthouse, I never thought it could happen to me . . .”
He smoked and glanced around the cabin, measuring everything.
“Couldn’t get you on the horn, so I decided to make the trip. You’re really in the sticks.”
“Yeah. No line to the casa. Sorry.”
“Ever heard a cell phones? They’re gettin’ big. No problem. Some country air, stretch my legs. Quiet out here. You notice how quiet it is? You like it, huh? Reminds you of the tundra.”
“Darned frogs raise a heck of a racket.”
“See, this setup confuses me. From what folks say, you’re a classy sort a guy. You appreciate the finer things. Long way from the opera house, ain’t it?”
“Let’s say I’ve gained an appreciation for Thoreau. The radio works fine, thanks.”
He took a business card from his breast pocket and slipped it under my pillow. The odor of his cologne wafted all the way over to me.
“Clive Christian?” I said.
“Clive Christian.” He pancaked on a ton of makeup to compensate for a bad complexion. Eye shadow too. He’d probably dusted more than one fool for mocking his appearance. His demeanor suggested that he’d enjoyed squeezing the trigger.
“I’d love a bottle of that for my birthday. It’s my favorite.”
“See what I can do.”
“Your mascara is running.” Call me the poker of bees’ nests.
He dabbed his face with a silk kerchief. The tiny monogram at the bottom no doubt said PRO KILLER.
“That the hotline to the Don’s red phone?” I indicated the pillow.
“Mr. Deluca don’t want to talk to you.”
“Whose is it, then?”
“Mine.”
“We’re already talking.”
Curtis stood and dropped his cigarette butt on the floor and made a production of grinding it underfoot. I got the association.
“No, Coleridge, we ain’t talkin’.” He went to the door and glanced outside and tsked. Rainfall magnified barnyard odors to the power of ten. “What do you need cologne for when it smells so sweet around here?”
“Have a swell drive back to the city.”
“Any plans for gettin’ on your feet? I’ll have an opening soon.” He gestured with his chin in the direction Charles had gone. “Nice kid, but a royal fuckup. Connected, is the problem. His uncle is Dino the Ax. It’s a mess.”
“Nobody truly appreciates how you middle management fellas suffer.”
“That a no?”
“I’d thought of starting a small business. Be my own man for a change.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yeah. Pony grooming. I’m a natural at braiding manes.”
He showed his teeth the way a shark does when it opens its maw to take a bite.
“Small-business taxes can be a bitch around here. Before you jump, call that number.”
“I’m not feeling froggy.” That might’ve been a lie. What was I if I wasn’t in the life? A man possessed of my temperament doesn’t hang up his guns and pitch hay forever. He gets buried with bandoliers across his chest.
“Call that fuckin’ number.” Curtis cocked his thumb and index finger and pointed at my head. He let the door swing shut behind him.
I checked the window and watched their taillights dwindle into the darkness. I inhaled smoke and reminded myself to peek under my truck for bombs every morning from now on.
Best damned cigarette I’d had in what felt like a hundred years. I finished it and fell into bed. Slept the sleep that only the guileless or the incorrigible can truly know.
ELEVEN
That comic philosopher Bill Hicks once said that life is just a ride. He said a mouthful.
The journey from birth to darkness has its share of plot twists, reversals, and triumphs. Nonetheless, one must never forget it’s into the dark that we’re hurtling. We all shake hands with King Pluto. Understand, I’m tough as nails. Even so, I’ve got my limits. You don’t need a mallet to take me apart. Let me stew in my own misery. Let me drown in what-ifs and maybes.
Maybe if I hadn’t contracted pneumonia, none of what happened next would’ve happened at all. If I’d been on my feet, it would’ve turned out different—or so the devil on my left shoulder whispers. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, as most of my labors haven’t mattered in the final analysis, but that doesn’t matter either. I like to torment myself. It’s what I do second best.
* * *
—
THE BELTANE FIRE CELEBRATION began an hour before dusk on the final evening in April under a cloudless purple sky. A stone’s throw past the Trapeze Club rose a steep ridge and on the other side spread a series of fallow pastures hemmed by a treeless drumlin hill where a pile of bonfire wood awaited the torch. These were the festival grounds. The rain had lasted several days and the grass glittered. Mist slithered through the surrounding underbrush as the temperature dropped. The moon lit the horizon with a yellow haze. Werewolf weather on the moors.
We attended as a group: the Walkers, with two mares draped in decorative blankets and flowery bridles; Reba, Lionel, and Gus, alongside to assist; and me, shambling in the wings like the lug I am.
The chaos was all very organized with ticket sellers stamping hands. Areas were cordoned off by flexible plastic fencing that comes on a spindle. Hundreds of guests congregated among a scattering of gaily striped pavilions. This event attracted people in Renaissance Fair costumes. Acres of motley and lederhosen and chicks in corsets and pinned-on swan wings. Every other reveler frolicked as a fox or a stag or a rabbit. The air seethed with clove and cinders, the musk of beer, and sweaty flesh. Speakers broadcast flute-and-drum concertos interspersed with public-service announcements.
Emmitt’s ancient Central Hudson truck parked in the grass near the front entrance. Somehow, the coot had finagled the cotton candy racket. It appeared to be a bull market. He unloaded it by the gross upon the teeming masses.
“Hell
o, Walkers and hangers-on!” He charged Virgil a five-spot for a sticky mass of blue cobwebs. He leered benevolently at Jade and Reba and handed each a bag, gratis. Reba rewarded him with a peck on his grimy cheek and he chortled in joyous embarrassment. Probably wouldn’t wash it for a week. Or ever, judging from the rest of him.
A throng of young women, pasted in yellow and blue ochre and nothing more, swept past. Their laughter eddied in accompaniment to the flutes. Fairies? Picts? Damned if I knew, but I was groggily intrigued.
Jade nailed me in my sore ribs with an elbow. She and Reba had chosen ensembles of oak-leaf circlets, linen shifts, and sandals. Lionel and I had stuck with button-up shirts and blue jeans. Lionel clapped on his Stetson and cowboy boots.
“Don’t lollygag,” Jade said. “Stumble around, all moon-eyed, and one of these pagan chicks will put a bit in your teeth and lead you into the woods.”
“That’s what happened to me!” Virgil said. He wore antlers and a hemp robe and made it look good. Obviously, his past included a stint of Shakespearean theater.
I wasn’t in any shape to chase naked pagan women. Toiling in the mud and the muck and the driving rain that previous week sapped me. I’d pushed my recovery too fast. A nasty cold had settled into my chest. High on cough syrup and a fever, I grinned and tried not to let on that I might be dying.
“I think Mongo’s sick,” Reba said. A clinical observation rather than a sympathetic one.
“Who let you anywhere near Blazing Saddles?”
“Virgil claims Mel Brooks is an essential part of a classical education.”
I wiped my brow with my sleeve. We’d bonded a bit earlier in the week. I captured Bacchus after his most recent Great Escape. A thunderstorm walloped Hawk Mountain—one of those epics with howling wind, sizzling strokes of lightning, and buckets of rain. I tracked the horse into the forest along a swollen stream. A handful of sugar cubes allowed me to get close and loop a rope around his neck. He followed me home, both of us muddy, drenched to the bone and shivering. My heroics earned a curt nod from foreman Coates and Reba’s amazed skepticism. Her look suggested I might not be completely useless. Downside was, I caught a cold that had progressively worsened since.
“Shee-it, dude,” Reba said. “Cleavon Little was the hotness.”
“Mind your language,” Jade said. “Besides, Gene Wilder is the hotness.”
“No fair coveting our white men,” Lionel said.
“Do I look like Mongo?” I said to no one in particular. “I’m way handsomer than Alex Karras.”
“If Mongo was a giant, sinister half Polynesian, half whatever you are—sure, there’s a resemblance,” Lionel said. “How do you feel about candy?” He’d gotten a running jump on the festivities by demolishing a sixer of Colt 45 before we left the yard. Why didn’t the Walkers bust his chops about boozing?
The Walkers headed toward the hillside drummers to join a mob that would soon organize itself into the procession of the May Queen. Lionel beelined for the beer garden and I followed and let him shove a plastic cup of bitter microbrew into my hand. We drifted apart after that. I wandered, boggling at the scene while searching for a place to rest my aching bones, found a likely stump and encamped there, head in my hands, watching drops of sweat patter onto the dirt between my shoes.
While I faded in and out, the universe kept moving pieces around the board.
I glanced up and beheld a ghost. The black-haired trapeze artist stood a few feet away amidst a clutch of her acrobat pals. She wore a simple wrap and was caked in white ochre. Her lovely small feet were bare. She eyed me sidelong while sipping from a bottle, so I raised my hand in greeting. Trapeze Girl seemed to glide an inch above the turf as she approached. I manfully resisted vertigo and said, “Hi, my name is—”
She cocked her head, hand on hip.
“You’re at the Walker place.”
“Meet the new stableboy.”
“I’m Meg.” A soft voice, kind of throaty. Assured.
“I thought you were a ghost.”
“That’s what I thought about you. Your color is terrible.”
“As a matter of fact, I feel terrible.”
“Shouldn’t you go home and crawl into bed?”
“Probably. Might not be safe to try it alone. What are you doing?”
“Staying out of trouble. Trying to stay out of trouble.”
I said in a whisper from behind my hand, “FYI, you’re blowing it talking to me.”
Meg laughed. A nice laugh. Her teeth were white and sharp. One of the guys she’d accompanied called to her and she waved him off. I took this as an excellent sign. She said she was in the procession and did a twirl so I could admire her costume.
I asked her about the procession and she said she was a White Warrior Woman, companion guard of the May Queen. She tapped the hilt of a ceremonial dagger, a paperweight, riding on her sash.
“Right on,” I said. “Ready to shiv the Green Man when he gets too fresh with Her Majesty?”
“I’ll be in on it.” She was really smiling now, full wattage, and the idea she might have a morbid streak made my heart go pitter-pat. O gods above and below, pretty please. The canned music shorted out and the announcer said something that made her put on her serious demeanor again.
“Duty calls?”
“Gotta go. Save the Queen from the Green Man, dance and make merry . . .”
“Gods save the Queen,” I said, weakly admiring her as she trotted away, fleet-footed as Atalanta. There I went mixing up mythologies again. My teeth chattered.
The walk back to the farm was a solid mile and that daunted me. I decided to skip the impending spectacle and curl into a ball in the bed of Virgil’s pickup. I grabbed my work jacket from the cab and rolled it into a pillow and lay on my back and regarded the gathering stars. Sleep followed within seconds.
Reba’s voice snapped me out of dreamland. Sharp and plaintive. An alarm. I sat up fast, vision swimming, thoughts flung far and wide. I’d only been under a few minutes. Dusk had settled in and the light was tricky. I dragged myself out of the pickup and swayed in place, trying to get my bearings, and spotted Reba and another guy slipping through a cluster of pavilions. From where I stood, it appeared he’d helped her along with a shove.
I went after them.
Cheers resounded from the crowd, and a high, thin horn blared to commence the procession. Drum circles boomed in discordant harmony. Everything moved in stop-motion, too fast, too slow. Fire crackled upon the hill as tinder burned and whooshed heavenward, mingling with the crimson sunset. Lights and shadows funneled around me. Fox heads and swan wings and Celtic war paint were grotesquely vivid. Leaping flames and shouts of exultation were the mind-bending special effects in a del Toro flick. The bonfire built into roiling pillar, and in my delirium I imagined sacrifices of squalling babes to Baal and Chemosh and all the jolly old death gods that got it in the neck after the New Testament. Figures rushed inward from the shadows and formed a ring at the base of the hill.
Wild, inchoate panic bloomed in my chest. Drums and horns and the tidal surge of many bodies pressed cheek by jowl conspired to unnerve me. I shouldered through revelers. Somebody cursed and a cup of warm beer splashed across my chest and I lowered my head and blundered forward past a tent, its gaping entrance illuminated by a fire barrel, and into a pasture gone to seed.
There I found her. We’d navigated a semicircle and come back to the road. A red Suburban idled with its lights on. Reba argued with two men I’d glimpsed at the farm—the punks Virgil had run off. One, dark-haired and -skinned, in a polo shirt and baggy shorts; the other, dirty-blond, in a wifebeater tee and jeans and with a chunk of bling hanging around his neck. A shadowy third figure sat behind the wheel. Not far, yet in my state it could’ve been a mile.
The argument reached its crescendo.
Reba slapped Polo Shirt right across his we
asel mug and it must’ve smarted, judging from his recoil. He shook himself and cocked his fist. The blow struck her in the body and she crumpled halfway to the ground before he jerked her up short by the hair. A real gentleman.
By then, I’d closed most of the gap. My legs were rubber, my throat raw from gasping for air. I bent and drew the .38 from its ankle holster, straightened, and shouted. Both men froze for a couple of beats to take in the wild-eyed bruiser lumbering onto the scene. Neither liked what he saw. The blond kid leaped into the rig. Polo Shirt kept his fistful of Reba’s hair and attempted to drag her in after him. He leaned forward for leverage. That saved his life.
My bullet zipped through the headrest instead of his skull. A window shattered on the opposite side. I blame the gloom, my double vision, and the fact it’s tough to aim on the run. Polo Shirt dropped her and slammed his door. The Suburban sprayed gravel as it peeled out.
Reba had sagged to her hands and knees. She pitched a rock at the receding taillights. I touched her shoulder and she snarled and slapped my hand aside. Under other circumstances, the cold fury in her glare might’ve hurt my feelings. I tried to come up with something reassuring to say, something to make it all better.
I threw up on my shoes instead.
TWELVE
Do everything right, or right enough, it should be a case of all’s well that ends well. Arrive on the scene in the nick of time, scatter the varmints, and save the day. Do a good deed for once and rescue the girl, surely the gods will smile upon you. Right? Unfortunately, some people won’t stay rescued. The gods? A bunch of capricious bastards.
The last time I saw Reba Walker before she disappeared, I lay partly in my bathtub and partly in the Land of the Dead. I was covered in ice and raving about wild boars and Mama. Doubtless, an alarming sight. Fever gripped me in its teeth of fire and I’d gone clean ’round the mountain to where Grandma lived in the darkest, deepest cave. The Cave of the Ancestors. You don’t want to go there unless the scoreboard timer reads all zeros.
