Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite

  “Eat tonight,” Trevor said. He felt tears trying to start in his eyes. But he knew that if he cried, Daddy would keep picking on him. He hadn’t always been like that, but he was now. If Trev stood up to Daddy and answered back—even if the answer was giving in—Daddy might be ashamed and leave him alone.

  “OK, then, leave Didi alone.” Daddy made the car go faster. Trevor could tell Daddy hated the little town as much as he and Momma liked it. Didi, as usual, was lost in space.

  Daddy wouldn’t stop on purpose now, not for any reason. Trevor knew the car was going to break down soon; at least, Momma said so. If that was true, he wished it would go ahead and break down here. He thought a place like this might be good for Daddy if he would only give it a chance.

  “God DAMN!” Daddy was wrestling with the shift stick, slamming it with the heel of his hand. Something in the guts of the car banged and shuddered horribly; then greasy black smoke came streaming around the edges of the hood. The car coasted to a stop on the grassy shoulder of the road.

  Trevor felt like crying again. What if Daddy knew he had been wishing for the car to break down right that very second? What would Daddy do? Trevor looked down at his lap, noticed how tightly his fists were clenched against the knees of his jeans. Cautiously he opened one hand, then the other. His fingernails had made stinging red half-moons in the soft flesh of his palms.

  Daddy kicked the Rambler’s door open and flung himself out. They had already passed through downtown, and now the road was flanked by farmland, green and wet-smelling. Trevor saw a few patches of writhing vine dotted with tiny purple flowers that smelled like grape soda. They had been seeing this plant for miles. Momma called it kudzu, and said it only flowered once every seven years. Daddy snorted and said it was a goddamn crop-killing pest that wouldn’t even die if you burned it with gasoline.

  Daddy walked away from the car toward a cluster of trees not far from the road. He stopped and stood with his back to the Rambler, his hands clenched at his sides. Even from a distance Trevor could tell Daddy was shaking. Momma said Daddy was a bundle of nerves, wouldn’t even fix him coffee anymore because it just made him nervous. But sometimes Daddy was worse than nervous. When he got like this, Trevor could feel a blind red rage pulsing from him, hotter than the car’s engine, a rage that did not know words like wife and sons.

  It was because Daddy couldn’t draw anymore. But why was that? How could a thing you’d had all your life, the thing you loved to do most, suddenly just be gone?

  Momma’s door swung open. When Trevor glanced up, her long blue-jeaned legs were already out of the car, and she was looking at him over the back of the seat. “Please watch Didi for a few minutes,” she said. “Do some reading with him if you’re up to it.” The door slammed and she was striding across the green verge toward the taut, trembling figure of Daddy.

  Trevor watched them come together, watched Momma’s arms go around Daddy’s from behind. He knew her gentle, cool hands would be stroking Daddy’s chest, she would be whispering meaningless soothing words in her soft Southern voice, the way she did for Trevor or Didi when they woke from nightmares. His mind framed a still shot of his parents standing together under the trees, a picture he would remember for a long time: his father, Robert Fredric McGee, a smallish, sharp-featured man with black wraparound sunglasses and a wispy shock of ginger hair that stood straight up on top, the lines of his body tight as a violin string; his mother, Rosena Parks McGee, a slender woman dressed as becomingly as the fashions of the day would allow in faded, embroidered jeans and a loose green Indian shirt with tiny mirrors at the collar and sleeves, her long wavy hair twisted into a braid that hung halfway down her back, a thick cable shot through with wheat and corn silk and autumn gold.

  Trevor’s hair was the same color as his father’s. Didi’s was still the palest silk-spun blond, the color of the lightest hairs on Momma’s head, but Momma said Trev’s hair had been that color too and Didi’s would likely darken to ginger by the time he was Trevor’s age.

  Trevor wondered if Momma was out there soothing Daddy, convincing him that it didn’t matter if the car was broken, that this would be a good place to stay. He hoped so. Then he picked up the closest reading material at hand, a Robert Crumb comic, and slid across the seat to his brother. Didi didn’t understand all the things that happened in these stories—neither did Trevor, for that matter—but both boys loved the drawings and thought the girls with giant butts were funny.

  Back in Texas, Daddy used to joke that Momma had a classic Crumb butt, and Momma would smack him with a sofa pillow. There had been a big, comfortable green sofa in that house. Sometimes Trevor and Didi would join in the pillow fights too. If Momma and Daddy were really stoned, they’d wind up giggling so hard that they’d lose their breath, and Trevor and Didi could win.

  Daddy didn’t make jokes about Momma’s butt anymore. Daddy didn’t even read his Robert Crumb comics anymore; he’d given them all to Trevor. And Trev couldn’t remember the last time they had all had a pillow fight.

  He rolled the window down to let in the green-smelling air. Though it was still faintly rank with the odor of the frying engine, it was fresher than the inside of the car, which smelled of smoke and sour milk and Didi’s last accident. Then he started reading the comic aloud, pointing to each word as he spoke it, making Didi follow along after him. His brother kept trying to see what Momma and Daddy were doing. Trevor saw out of the corner of his eye that Daddy had pulled away from Momma and was taking long strides down the highway, away from the car, away from the town. Momma was hurrying after him, not quite running. Trevor pulled Didi against him and forced himself not to look, to concentrate on the words and pictures and the stories they formed.

  After a few panels it was easy: the comic was all about Mr. Natural, his favorite Crumb character. The sight of the clever old hippie-sage comforted him, made him forget Daddy’s anger and Momma’s pain, made him forget he was reading the words for Didi. The story took him away.

  Besides, he knew they would come back. They always did. Your parents couldn’t just walk away and leave you in the back seat, not when it would be dark soon, not when you were in a strange place and there was nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep and you were only five years old.

  Could they?

  Momma and Daddy were far down the road now, small gesturing shapes in the distance. But Trevor could see that they had stopped walking, that they were just standing there. Arguing, yes. Yelling, probably. Maybe crying. But not going away.

  Trevor looked down at the page and fell back into the story.

  * * *

  It turned out they couldn’t go anywhere. Daddy called a mechanic, an immensely tall, skinny young man who was still almost a teenager, with a face as long and pale and kindly as that of the Man in the Moon. Stitched in bright orange thread on the pocket of his greasy overalls was the improbable name Kinsey.

  Kinsey said the Rambler had thrown a rod that had probably been ready to go since New Orleans, and unless they were prepared to drop several hundred bucks into that tired old engine, they might as well push the car off the road and be glad they’d broken down close to a town. After all, Kinsey pointed out, they might be staying awhile.

  Daddy helped him roll the car forward a few feet so that it was completely off the blacktop. The body sagged on its tires, two-toned paint a faded turquoise above the dusty strip of chrome that ran along the side, dirty white below. Trevor thought the Rambler already looked dead. Daddy’s face was very pale, almost bluish, sheened with oily-looking sweat. When he took off his sunglasses, Trevor saw smudgy purple shadows in the hollows of his eyes.

  “How much do we owe you?” Daddy said. It was obvious from his voice that he dreaded the answer.

  Kinsey looked at Momma, at Trevor and Didi in the crooks of her arms, at their clothes and other belongings heaped in the back seat, the duffel bags bulging up from under the roped-down lid of the trunk, the three mattresses strapped to the roof. His quick blue eyes, as br
ight as Trevor’s and Daddy’s were pale, seemed to take in the situation at a glance. “For coming out? Nothing. My time isn’t that valuable, believe me.”

  He lowered his head a little to peer into Daddy’s face. Trevor thought suddenly of an inquisitive giraffe. “But don’t I know you? You wouldn’t be … no … not Robert McGee? ‘The cartoonist who blew the brainpan off the American underground’ in the words of Saint Crumb himself? … No, no, of course not. Not in Missing Mile. Silly of me, sorry.”

  He was already turning away, and Daddy wasn’t going to say anything. Trevor couldn’t stand it. He wanted to run to the tall young man, to yell up into that kind, curious face, Yes, it is him, it is Robert McGee and he’s everything you said and he’s MY DADDY TOO! In that moment Trevor felt he would burst with pride for his father.

  But Momma’s arm tightened around him, holding him back. One long, lacquered nail tapped a warning on his forearm. “Shh,” he heard her say softly.

  And Daddy, Robert McGee, Bobby McGee, creator of the crazed, sick, beautiful comic Birdland, whose work had appeared beside Crumb’s and Shelton’s, in Zap! and the L.A. Free Press and the East Village Other and everywhere in between, all across the country … who had received and refused offers from the same Hollywood he had once drawn as a giant blood-swollen tick still clinging to the rotten corpse of a dog labeled Art … who had once had a steady hand and a pure, scathing vision …

  Daddy only shook his head and looked away.

  Just past downtown Missing Mile, a road splits off to the left from Firehouse Street and meanders away into scrubby countryside. The fields out here are nearly barren, the soil gone infertile—most believe from overfarming and lack of crop rotation. Only the oldest residents of town still say these fields are cursed and were once sowed with salt. The good land is on the other side of town, the side toward Corinth, out where the abandoned rail yard and the deep woods are. Firehouse Street runs into State Highway 42. The road that splits off to the left soon becomes gravel, then dirt. This is the poorest part of Missing Mile, the place called Violin Road.

  Out here the best places to live are decrepit farmhouses, big rambling places with high ceilings and large cool rooms, most of which were abandoned or sold as the crops went bad. A step below these are the aluminum trailers and tarpaper shacks, their dirt yards choked with broken toys, rusting hulks of autos, and other trash, their peripheries negligently guarded by slat-sided, soporific hounds.

  Out here only the wild things are healthy, the old trees whose roots find sustenance far below the ill-used layer of topsoil, the occasional rosebush gone to green thicket and thorns, the unstoppable kudzu. It is as if they have decided to take back the land for their own.

  Trevor loved it. It was where he discovered that he could draw even if Daddy couldn’t.

  Momma talked to a real estate agent in town and figured out that they could afford to rent one of the dilapidated farmhouses for a month. By that time, she said, she would find a Job in Missing Mile and Daddy would be drawing. Sure enough, a few days after they moved their things into the house, a dress shop hired Momma as a salesgirl. The job was no fun—she couldn’t wear jeans to work, which left her with a choice of one Indian-print skirt and blouse or one patchwork dress—but she ate lunch at the diner in town and sometimes stopped for coffee after her shift. Soon she met some of the kids they’d seen going into the record store, and others like them.

  If she could drive to Raleigh or Chapel Hill, they told Momma, she could make good money modeling for university art classes. Momma talked to Kinsey at the garage, who let her set up a payment plan. A week later the Rambler had a brand-new engine, and Momma quit the dress shop and started driving to Raleigh several times a week.

  Daddy had his things set up in a tiny fourth bedroom at the back of the house, his untidy jumble of inks and brushes and his drawing table, the one piece of furniture they had brought from Austin. He went in there and shut the door every morning after Momma left, and he stayed in there most of the day. Trevor had no idea whether he was drawing or not.

  But Trevor was. He had found an old sketchbook of Daddy’s when Momma unpacked the car. Most of the pages had been torn out, but there were still a few blank sheets left. Trevor usually took Didi outside to play in the daytime—Momma had assured him that the Devil’s Tramping Ground was more than forty miles away, so he didn’t have to worry about accidentally coming upon the pacing, muttering demon.

  When Didi was napping—something he seemed to do more and more often these days—Trevor wandered through the house, looking at the bare floorboards and the water-stained walls, wondering if anyone had ever loved this house. One afternoon he found himself in the dim, shabby kitchen, perched on one of the rickety chairs that had come with the house, a felt-tip pen in his hand, the sketchbook on the table before him. He had no idea what he was going to draw. He had hardly ever thought about drawing before; that was what Daddy did. Trevor could remember scribbling with crayons on cheap newsprint when he was Didi’s age, making great round heads with stick arms and legs coming straight out of them, as small children do. This circle with five dots in it is Mommy, this one is Daddy, that one’s me. But he hadn’t drawn for at least a year—not since Daddy stopped.

  Daddy had told him once that the trick was not to think about it, not in your sketchbook anyway. You just had to find the path between your hand and your heart and your brain and see what came out. Trevor uncapped the pen and put its tip against the unblemished (though slightly yellowed) page of the sketchbook. The ink began to bleed into the paper, making a small spreading dot, a tiny black sun in a pale void. Then, slowly, Trevor’s hand began to move.

  He soon discovered he was drawing Skeletal Sammy, a character from Daddy’s comic book, Birdland. Sammy was all straight lines and sharp points: easy to draw. The half-leering, half-desperate face, the long black coat that hung on Sammy’s shoulders like a pair of broken wings, the spidery hands and the long, thin legs and the exaggerated bulge of Sammy’s kneecaps beneath his black stovepipe pants—all began to take shape.

  Trevor sat back and looked at the drawing. It was nowhere near as good as Daddy’s Sammy, of course; the lines weren’t straight, the black inking was more like scribbling. But it was no circle with five dots, either. It was immediately recognizable as Skeletal Sammy.

  Daddy recognized it as soon as he walked into the kitchen.

  He leaned over Trevor’s shoulder for several moments looking at the drawing. One hand rested lightly on Trev’s back; the other tapped the table nervously, fingers as long and thin as Sammy’s, faint lavender veins visible beneath the pale skin, silver wedding ring too loose on the third finger. For a moment Trevor feared Daddy might snatch the drawing, the whole sketchbook; he felt as if he had been caught doing something wrong.

  But Daddy only kissed the top of Trevor’s head. “You draw a mean junkie, kiddo,” he whispered into Trevor’s ginger hair. And he was gone from the kitchen silently, like a ghost, without getting the beer or glass of water or whatever he had come for, leaving his elder son half elated and half dreadfully, mysteriously shamed.

  The carefully drawn fingers of Sammy’s left hand were blurring. A drop of moisture on the page, making the ink bleed and furl. Trevor touched the wetness, then put his finger to his lips. Salty. A tear.

  Daddy’s, or his own?

  The worst thing happened the following week. It turned out Daddy had been drawing in his cramped little studio. Had finally finished a story, only a page long, and sent it off to one of his papers. Trevor couldn’t remember if it was the Barb or the Freep or maybe one of the others—he got them mixed up sometimes.

  The paper rejected the story. Daddy read the letter aloud in a hollow, mocking voice. It had been a difficult decision, the editor said, considering his reputation and the selling power of his name. However, he simply didn’t feel the story approached the quality of Daddy’s previous work, and he thought publishing it would be bad both for the paper and for Daddy’s career.
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  It was the kindest way the editor could find to say, This comic is a piece of shit.

  The next day, Daddy walked into town and called the publisher of Birdland. The stories for the fourth issue were already nearly a year overdue. Daddy told the publisher there would be no more stories, not now, not ever. Then he hung up the pay phone and walked a mile across town to the liquor store. By the time he got home, he had already cracked the seal on a gallon jug of bourbon.

  Momma had begun staying later and later in the city after her modeling jobs—having drinks with some of the other models one night, going to someone’s apartment to get stoned the next. Daddy didn’t like that, had even refused to smoke the joint she brought him as a present from her friends. She said they wanted to meet him and the kids, but Daddy wouldn’t go into Raleigh and told her not to invite them out.

  Trevor had gone into Raleigh with Momma one day. He brought his sketchbook and sat in a corner of the big airy studio that smelled of paint thinner and charcoal dust. Momma stood gracefully naked on a wooden podium at the front of the room, joking with the students when she took her breaks. Some of them laughed at him, bent over his sketchbook so quiet and serious. Their laughter faltered when they saw the likenesses he had produced of them during the class period: the stringy-haired girl whose granny glasses pinched her beaky nose like some torture device made of wire; the droopy-eyed boy whose patchy beard grew straight down into the collar of his black turtleneck because he had no chin.

  But on this day Trevor had stayed home. Daddy sat in the living room all evening, sprawled in a threadbare recliner that had come with the house, his feet tapping out a meaningless tattoo on the warped floorboards. He had the turntable hooked up and kept playing record after record, anything that his hand fell upon, Sarah Vaughan, Country Joe and the Fish, frenetic band music from the twenties that sounded like something skeletons might jitterbug to—it all ran together in one long musical cry of pain. Most of all Trevor remembered Daddy searching obsessively for a set of Charlie Parker records: Bird with Miles, Bird on Fifty-second Street, Bird at Birdland. He found them, slammed one onto the turntable. The saxophone spiraled through the old house, found the cracks in the walls, and spun out into the night, an exalted sound, terribly sad but somehow free. Free as a bird in Birdland.